So widely spaced are the stars in our neighborhood that the four spacecraft that already left the Solar System or are about to leave it, won’t enter another star system for 10^20 years. Think about that: A trillion is only 10^12, not even close to 10^20. Let me write it out: 10^20 years = 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Such is the space in Space. However, Coryn Bailer-Jones and Davide Farnocchia have determined that the two Pioneers and two Voyagers will, over the next million years, come “relatively” close to ten stars—if one considers two parsecs close (a parsec is 3.26 light years, or 19 trillion miles).* Pioneer 10 will pass within 0.231 parsecs (4.389 trillion miles—less than one LY) of the star HIP 117795 in the constellation Cassiopeia in about 90,000 years.**
 
What’s new here? Anyone aware of just basic astronomy knows that the galaxy is big and the universe even bigger (waaaay bigger, to use the technical term). That volume of space in Space does provide us with a choice about how we view ourselves: 1) We are insignificant. That’s how tiny we are. And our insignificance is demonstrated by our isolation in the Waaaay Big. 2) We are significant because, in all we know, together we are the only representative of the universe’s matter and energy that is conscious of itself. Everything “out there” in the space of Space of the Waaaay Big is meaningless wasteland.
 
Those two views, in turn, provide us with two attitudes: 1) Nothing really matters; life on Earth, however meaningful it appears to be for conscious entities like us, is essentially just a brief unplanned experiment in a temporary cooperation engendered by molecules, a manifestation of a Sartrean dream. 2) Everything really matters, given the complexity of arrangements that produced us in 13.8 billion years of cosmic history and 4.5 billion years of Earth history. This is the most significant time in the history of Everything only because we can say it is the most significant time in the history of Everything. We might be tiny and isolated, but because we know we are tiny and isolated, we give meaning to All There Is. Other life-forms with varying levels of consciousness can’t do what we do, that is, to think in terms of what isn’t, in terms of comparison, or in terms of a place in Space. Here in this place, this planet you call home, there is meaning. And if you decide to travel to Mars, you will carry meaning and significance with you.
 
Having been born on a tiny rocky planet in this galaxy might, for some, seem to be a simple matter of fate. Those who think so would grant powers to the stars to say, using the stars as representatives of Determinism, that we owe what we are to the stars. And any problems we have—diseases like cancer and behaviors like war—are the product of a deterministic world that once positioned us in time and space, imposed destiny forever. The fault, they, like novelist John Green, would say lies in our stars in a universe determined at its outset. We could argue thus that we are fated to be what we are.
 
But consider what we’ve become in light of what our cousin species didn’t become.*** Consider all that we have accomplished in just a few hundred thousand years, but essentially and most spectacularly in just the last 6,000 years, a period not even close to the time it will take for one of those spacecraft to actually “fall into” the gravitational well of another solar system. While the Pioneeers and the Voyagers wander about in meaningless emptiness, we will continue to do what we do better than any other entity in the Cosmos: Fill in all the spaces in all the places in this little rocky ball with meaning that we can discover or invent and then impose upon the future, just as our recent ancestors have imposed meaning upon us while our planet traveled through the galaxy hitched to the chariot we call the Sun.
 
If Fate played any role in our lives in addition to a chance heritage of genetic composition and a biological affinity for health or illness and relative abilities, it was in providing us with the ability to question Destiny and arguably change it. Did the Fates, the Stars, conspire to imbue us with an ability to make the meaningless meaningful and to make them meaningful only to the degree that we wish them to be so? Even if we differ only in degree and not in kind from our extinct hominin cousins, there is little to compare in their quite-by-chance limited “accomplishments” and our planned alterations to the planet and our conscious alterations to the meaning of meaning itself.
 
“But what if HIP 117795 is teeming with consciousness?” one might ask. Is it possible that in the Grand Scheme we are not alone in struggling with a definition of or a meaning for existence? Sure. With hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way and possibly a couple trillion galaxies each with millions to billions to trillions of planets, we might not live on the only place where the universe is conscious of itself and wondering, “Who or what am I?”
 
From what Bailer-Jones and Farnocchia tell about the chances of encountering any similar consciousness, we can conclude that we are, in fact and for all practical purposes, a solitary intelligence and the sole consciousness that can discover whether or not we are insignificant or significant. Our apparent isolation makes a good argument for significance by uniqueness, at least for the next 10^20 years when those four spacecraft have their chance encounters with another solar system. Unfortunately, in “only” 5 X 10^9 years, the Sun and Earth will no longer exist as they do now, the former turning to red giant and the latter to a cinder in the giant’s outermost layer or to a charred missile blasted into the space in Space, chasing after the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, the Earth itself doomed to wander through the Milky Way on its own for 10^20 lonely years. In that physical destiny we can, in fact, find fault in our stars.  
 
The stars haven’t conspired to make us what we are beyond basic intelligence. We conspire to make the meaningless stars meaningful. Even in myth, we make meaning. Take that “W” of stars in the sky, the location of HIP 117795. Regardless of there being no actual connection among the points of light that make up the constellation Cassiopeia, the ancient Greeks imposed a connection and meaning upon them. And today, we still accept their connection as a guidepost to find other stars, such as HIP 117795, the destined location toward which Pioneer 10 is headed.
 
Until we entered the Waaaay Big, it was void of meaning. Maybe it was in our stars to be by chance individually more or less healthy, more or less talented, more or less long lived, or more or less capable of understanding, but in one respect we all share a unifying significance in our consciousness and our ability to impose meaning on what would otherwise be a meaningless Cosmos.   
 
*Yirka, Bob. 27 Dec 2019. Calculating the time it will take spacecraft to find their way to other star systems. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2019-12-spacecraft-star.html
Accessed December 28, 2019. Coryn A. L. Bailer-Jones and Davide Farnocchia Published 2019 April 5 • © 2019. The American Astronomical Society.
Research Notes of the AAS, Volume 3, Number 4

**For comparison consider the dwarf planet Pluto recently photographed by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. As it travels its orbit, it ranges from 2.6 to 4.6 billion miles from Earth, and New Horizon, which left Earth in 2006, didn’t get there until 2015. A trillion is a thousand billion. So, HIP 117795’s gravity won’t capture the spacecraft as it goes by. No Cassiopeians will see the tiny spacecraft in their telescopes. “Hey, is that a UFO?” Anyway, the star is too faint to see from Earth without a telescope; but if you want to look toward the “W-shaped” constellation on some clear night, the star can be located at the coordinates of Declination +59d 56` 42.1 and Right Ascension 23h 53m 19.75. It’s a reddish orange star within, but not part of, the constellation.
 
***See my essay for 12/27/2019 entitled “Ngandong.”

Is there any lesson that extinct hominin species can teach us?
 
The species Homo erectus started to walk Earth about two million years ago. It persisted over a rather large geography until 400,000 years ago, and then began to die out with the exception, according to those who specialize in such matters, of a group that survived on Java, particularly at a site called Ngandong. There Homo erectus survived until sometime between 117,000 and 108,000 years ago. What knocked them out of the contest for dominance of our planet? Climate change, according to those who specialize in such matters. Java was grassland upon their arrival 1.6 million years ago, but gradually changed 130,000 years ago to tropical rainforest. The species that arose on African wide-open plains didn’t adapt, at least according to those who specialize in such matters.*
 
Of course, we can speculate that those who specialize might be wrong. As island-dwelling hominins, the last members of Homo erectus could have been wiped out by some disease or tsunami, especially in a region known for its violent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Those natural phenomena are not exclusive to our times. But let’s go with climate change. Already decimated as a species over their almost two-million-year run on the planet, that last known group on Java didn’t stand much of a chance, even if climate change had not affected their environment. And unlike our species, Homo erectus was only slowly mobile, its emigration from Africa was not enhanced by trains, planes, ships, and automobiles, and its emigration from Java might have been blocked by rising seas during an interglacial period that appears to have coincided with their final period of demise.
 
Their competition for space on Earth was great. Homo heidelbergensis, rudolfensis, habilis, floresiensis, neanderthalensis, and sapiens all lived more or less contemporaneously, though some died out in the early history of erectus and others arose while they flourished or during their decline. Maybe some other hominin group, in addition to climate change, contributed to erectus’ demise—such is the apparent innate violent nature of all hominin species.
 
If we think of our own short reign as the dominant hominin species that began less than 350,000 years ago, we realize we haven’t as a species lived more than about a fifth or maybe even as little as an eighth (depending on our date of origin) of the time erectus occupied the planet. But unlike erectus on Java, we haven’t been wiped out by climate change. We’ve survived in almost every climate, flourishing almost everywhere, save until modern times on Antarctica and the peaks of the highest mountains, both during glacial advances and interglacial warm periods. The Inuit have done all right in the cold North, haven’t they? And the Nepalese and Tibetans have survived in high altitudes. Australian aboriginals and Tierra del Fuegians also demonstrated our robust survivability in the face of challenging ecologies.
 
Think now of the period during which those who specialize in such matters say that Java’s last surviving members of Homo erectus died out: 117,000 to 108,000 years ago. That’s a range of nine millennia. Sumer dates to about six millennia ago. The Pyramid of Djoser dates to about 4.5 millennia ago. As the “civilized” hominin species, we haven’t been around very long compared just to the period of erectus’ slow demise on Java. Nine thousand years. And that’s for a species ill equipped, supposedly, to handle climate change on a single island.
 
Unless we blow ourselves up in some nuclear holocaust, we have a long way to go before we meet the fates of the other hominin species. Sure, you or your descendants might have to consider migrating northward or southward, eastward or westward, depending upon the particular effects of changing climates, changing governments, or changing volcanic activity. Maybe the wheat and corn belts will move into Canada. Maybe northern geographies will become fruit-growing regions—Siberian peaches, anyone? Adaptation will not have to be immediate in either case. You can probably think of staying put, even if you live in a coastal city. But just as climate change occurred on Java from 130,000 years ago to 100,000 years ago, so climates will change everywhere as they always have. We’ll probably adapt better than most species, just as those who drank wine before the Little Ice Age turned to beer with colder weather that prohibited grapes from growing.  
 
There’s really no lesson that the other hominin species can teach us. As far as we can tell, their weaknesses were built in, and one of those was a lack of a penchant for invention, technology and insight. Sure, caves and rock shelters protected them from predators and elements, and they knew enough to enter and claim them as their own. But in all those many millennia, did no one among them, no individual erectus, ever think to plant a seed or build a stone house simply by stacking rocks? (“What the heck are we supposed to do with all these rocks lying around?”) Sure, they had survival skills. Their presence over hundreds of thousands of years attests to survivability. But it was survivability of the same order; few or no innovations. Look around right now. If you see one thing that defines us, it’s innovation. Granted, it took us a long time to exceed the innovations of the ancients: Some elixirs, stone buildings, aquifers, primitive clocks, trebuchets, and ochre art in Blombos Cave…. From the time of Galileo to the present, however, we’ve been about innovating: Medicines, machines, purified water supplies for enormous populations, rockets, and computer graphics….
 
That we are related to our cousin species is evident from our genetics, shapes, behaviors, if not our technology. We’ve seen enough of human competition and can guess enough about cousin species’ and primates’ competition to know that a shortage of any commodity or perceived necessity drives groups into panic mode and mob activity. Primitive savagery? Look at people pressing to get into a store on Black Friday. Look what happens to the shelves in grocery stores when a large snowstorm is about to hit—even when everyone actually knows that snow melts and plows clear it, usually before the food runs out.
 
Is there a behavioral similarity between us and those extinct cousin species like Homo erectus? Did the last members of erectus panic because they had fewer and fewer resources on an island, maybe foreshadowing the fate of the Rapa Nui on Easter Island? Apparently, erectus experienced its version of a “snowstorm” in the gradual change to tropical rainforests? The growth those forests on Java after 130,000 years ago would not have resulted in shortages of food, just in shortages of food on which erectus depended for sustenance in the absence of innovation and adaptation. Surrounded by foods of all kinds in a rainforest, erectus seems to have had no culinary experts to say, “Hey, have you tasted this? It’s actually delicious, especially when I mix it with these grubs.”
 
It isn’t that technology has made us better in a moral sense that will prevent our collapse. It hasn’t. As much as technology has allowed many to survive in the most extreme environments mammals can enter, it has also allowed the most depraved of us to kill one another in greater numbers than any of our predecessors, sapiens or other. If we did inherit something from our cousin species, it was the willingness to harm our own kind as well as other kinds. We share with those cousins the moral utilitarianism that groups us by various needs. If it behooves those in a city to get along peacefully, they are peaceful; it is a morality of usefulness though it can be enhanced by a morality of empathy and inculcation. I know, this sounds pessimistic in the sense of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a novel centered on man’s innate inhumanity. Of course, we know evil because we also know good. Maybe there is an inner Buddha or Christ in everyone, even in those individuals crowding to get past others to grab sale items on Black Friday or to get the best seats at a rock concert. Maybe those who attended gladiatorial fights and those who now attend UFC cage fighting are not entirely driven by bloodlust and vicarious blood-letting. But that we do find “entertainment” in brutality bespeaks a self-destructive nature and an unwise sapiens. In other words, regardless of our apparent better survivability than Homo erectus, we can envision our species’ end in a cage-match writ large in fission and fusion reactions we unleash upon ourselves.
 
Okay, we might bomb ourselves out of existence, leaving no hominins to take our places. The others are gone, erectus having left our world about 100 millennia ago and neanderthalensis having left it 30 or 40 millennia ago. And all our other primate cousins, such as the chimps and great apes, though they seem to share some emotions and communication skills, are probably destined to live as all those cousin hominin species did for hundreds of thousands to millions of years: A life without innovation and technology and a life with utilitarian morality driven by territoriality and basic needs. There will probably be no “La Planète des singes” as
Pierre Boulle imagined. Our current cousins are a rather dull lot by comparison with us sapiens.
 
Strangely, if no other hominin species has the wherewithal to develop archaeological skills, upon our demise, we will leave a largely unconscious Earth, and definitely a mostly un-self-conscious Earth. Our Ngandongs will have no excavations for the sake of discovery: Discovery for discovery’s sake doesn’t seem to be the motto of other organisms even though dogs, cats, and chimps seem to “curiously” examine something with which they have no previous experience. Those who inherit Earth from us will do no digging with a purpose other than to find tubers and grubs.
 
  
 
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fossils-some-last-homo-erectus-hint-end-long-lived-species-180973816/

Making little discoveries is the lot for most of us. We can’t all be Darwins, Newtons, or Einsteins. And King Tut’s tomb has already been found; thank you, Howard Carter. No, for most of us, small discoveries about Nature and humanity tend to punctuate our lives, usually coming upon us unexpectedly and most often as tiny insights. Our individual finds might not affect any other lives except through our own applications of them—so, maybe indirectly, we can change the lives of others with our discoveries. Anyway, one small discovery occurred when a colleague and friend tossed a little book my way, saying he found it on a bookstore sale table and thought I might enjoy the read. I thanked him for buying me a copy of Universes by John Leslie, a Canadian philosopher at the U. of Guelph (it’s in Ontario, if you want to know).*
 
Little discoveries. How about little facts? Leslie, in recounting various justifications for accepting an anthropic principle on the origin of the universe, lays out some bits of information about the strengths of the four fundamental forces that you—like me—can find thought-provoking. For example, Leslie writes, “Gravity…needs fine tuning for stars and planets to form, and for stars to burn stably over billions of years. It is roughly 10^39 times weaker than electromagnetism. Had it been only 10^33 times weaker, stars would be a billion times less massive and would burn a million times faster” (5). I won’t burden you with all the other bits of information like that save for this, “If the neutron-proton mass difference—about one part in a thousand—had not been almost exactly twice the electron’s mass then all neutrons would have decayed into protons or else all protons would have changed irreversibly into neutrons. Either way, there would not be the couple of hundred stable types of atom on which chemistry and biology are based.”
 
There it is. Tiny changes in the relative strengths of fundamental forces and sizes in elementary particles would make the universe as you know it incapable of existing. Although nuclear and quantum physicists are probably well aware of the delicate balances that underlie the cosmos, for most of us, the information can be a personal discovery. And to the above I can add Leslie’s note that just a one percent strengthening of electromagnetism might have doubled the years needed for intelligent life to form by making chemical reactions more difficult. That anthropic principle of a universe fine-tuned for life can’t be dismissed out of hand for the reason elucidated in Leslie’s relatively famous parable: That if a man stood before a firing squad of fifty marksmen, escaping being shot would be either a matter of intention or a matter of extreme luck—the possibility of everyone’s missing the target being rare. Are you here because of intention or luck? Is the universe itself in existence because of intention or luck?
 
If you ask any atheist, you will probably get the answer “luck” or "deterministic luck." Any believer will respond,  “intention.” Experience (the experiment of life) and knowledge (acquired through others’ efforts) suggest that the chance of those marksmen mentioned by Leslie all missing the target isn’t just slim, it’s extremely slim, on the order of extreme improbability. The point is, getting a universe perfectly fine-tuned for life is like those marksmen missing the target if luck is in control. Of course, those on the side of “luck” could just as easily argue that if there is an infinite possibility for universes, then this is the one with consciousness that recognizes itself. We are, as components of the universe, the thinking part, the cosmos conscious of itself and simply because we are conscious, we impose "intention."
 
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow also make a point about the delicate balance of forces when they write, “The one thing that is certain is that if the value of the cosmological constant were much larger than it is, our universe would have blown itself apart before galaxies could form and…life as we know it would be impossible…our universe and its laws appear to have a design that both is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration. That is not easily explained, and raises the natural question of why it is that way” (102).** Hawking and Mlodinow go on to explain that the “origin of the universe was a quantum event” (131). Then, using Feynman’s “sum over histories,” they write, “In this view, the universe appeared spontaneously, starting off in every possible way” (136). As a result, “We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe” (139). Luck?
 
Maybe just because of my background, I favor “intention” over “luck.” I’m unconvinced by Hawking and Mlodinow that since the vacuum of space breeds virtual particles that come into and go out of existence, that the vacuum is, in itself, “nothing” that produces something. If the vacuum is part of the universe, it isn’t necessarily a “creator” of what is. And as for those virtual particles that “fill” the void and arrive from and go back to “nowhere,” I would ask how they form the energy and matter of that which exists on a more permanent basis. Are virtual particles real particles? But, let’s say we know without question that the “vacuum” produces something (everything?), we still don’t know why. In this matter we merely describe.
 
Now, I know from Feynman’s description of QED, that photons seem to act with intention. As teleological as that sounds, there’s very little way to explain how they do what they do when they encounter glass. As Feynman explains, firing photons at glass results in a certain percentage being reflected while others pass through. The percentage changes with increasing layers of glass, and then returns to the original percentage. How do the photons know when to increase in number passing through or being reflected? It can’t be luck. It can’t be chance; the pattern repeats itself regardless of the numbers of glass layers. We know a great deal about how the universe works. We can even describe its workings or model them. But we don’t know why they do what they do. Yet, strangely, the forces and particles of the universe all seem to have consistently followed a set of rules or laws seemingly preset at the outset. Random? Intentional?
 
And all of this brings me to two considerations, one general and the other specific: 1) Am I (are you) the product of intention or luck? 2) What ever-so-slight intentional or fortuitous variation would have shaped my (your) life differently?***
 
Think in parts per some unit or in percentages. Had you done something differently by, say, 10%, would your life have been appreciably different? Had some choice been different in one part per hundred, what might have been the consequence? Ever-so-slight changes can produce very large consequences. Look back on your life to see, in Robert Frost’s words, “the road not taken” or, the corollary: The roads taken.
 
*Leslie, John. 1989. Universes. London. Routledge.
 
**Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. 2010. The Grand Design. New York. Bantam Books.
 
***Let’s say you are in a relationship. Any relationship involves sundry other relationships. Had the first meeting between you and your significant other not occurred in a world of more than seven billion, what would that non-event have meant for your ensuing lifestyle? And you and I could go on with what-ifs, seeing in them either consciousness (intention) or mere randomness. Is it true that randomness plays a key role in our lives? Of course. Which two haploid gametes fused? Did they fuse because from its beginning (or from before its beginning) the universe operated in a manner that your existence was inevitable? If you are an atheist, you will probably argue that you are, in fact, a product of randomness. If you are a believer, you will argue intention and possibly the anthropic principle.
     But is there a compromise? Could you see some validity in an argument that has intention forming a universe of indefinite (if not infinite) possibilities, one of which is you? No doubt deists would side with that argument, their “watchmaker God” having made the watch and then wound it to run as it must according to the interactions of mechanisms put in place at the outset. Definitely, even two centuries after the Deists, such determinism appealed to the likes of Einstein and Hawking. But it isn’t just an argument made by the scientific community. It’s a variation of this kind of argument that enabled Pope Pius XII to declare the Church has no argument with either physical or biological evolution. It is, in fact, an old argument dating to the fourth century, one made by St. Augustine of Hippo: God created the cosmos of infinite possibility and allowed it to unfold according to its inherent rules. Arguing from the perspective of Neoplatonism, Augustine would say that God created the possibility of forms to exist, making the continuous evolving of forms the nature of life as well as the nature of Nature.  

As the original Star Wars saga comes to its end with The Rise of Skywalker, I’m reminded of the subtitle of the first film: Episode IV--A New Hope. As the storyline evolved, the series enveloped many ideas contemporary with each film’s release, and “hope” rode an oscilloscope’s crests and troughs. Incorporating popular culture is probably natural: We want to see what we believe to be our own perspectives reflected from big screens. So, political or social problems and trends du jour that occupied the minds of “Mainstream Culture” worked their way into plots and dialogue. Of course, even in the absence of such plots and verbiage, audiences carried their own interpretations into theaters, making the point that in this galaxy, confirmation bias is universal.
 
In the December 22, 2019, Spectator, USA, posting entitled “We’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously,” the author, Matt Ridley, could well have subtitled his work “A New Hope.” Ridley recounts, for example, the bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich that “a basket of five metals…would cost less in 1990 than in 1980,” a bet the former won, and then Ridley writes, “To this day none of those metals has significantly risen in price or fallen in volume of reserves, let alone run out...[in general, a prediction of doom by Ehrlich]. After recounting the strides we’ve made toward “getting more from less,” Ridley predicts: “By the end of [this decade], we will see less poverty, less child mortality, less land devoted to agriculture…There will be more tigers, whales, forests, and nature reserves. Britons will be richer, and each of us will use fewer resources.” Ridley concludes that even if political futures are uncertain, “the environmental and technological trends are pretty clear—and pointing in the right direction.”* In short, “a new hope.”
 
Ridley, in forecasting a brighter future than doomsayers broadcast through sundry mouthpieces, writes that over the first 17 years of this century, “The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third…from 13.7 tons to 9.4 tons. That’s a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources consumed overall.” That’s a hopeful sign, isn’t it? Do you have LED Christmas tree lights? A phone that replaces in one piece of technology a camera, radio, torch (flashlight), compass, map, calendar, watch, newspaper, and, representing games, a pack of cards? In short, “a new hope.”
 
Of interest to me was Ehrlich-like predictions I heard when I was a child growing up in Pennsylvania’s coal country. One of my teachers told our seventh-grade class that we would, in fact, start running out of coal, oil, and natural gas by the 1970s and be out of those resources by the 2000s. Ridley points to the modern-day version of that teacher in people like renowned environmentalist Sir David Attenborough, who said, “Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is either a madman or an economist.” Ridley then says, “But what if economic growth means using less stuff, not more?”
 
Now, there’s no denying that there’s always environmental destruction. A recent report on Brazil’s rainforest, which I documented in a previous blog, gives evidence that humans are still ravaging the planet in many ways. The oceans are filling up with plastic and becoming, if the science is correct, more acidic, and the atmosphere is gaining carbon. An eventual set of bigger problems? Of course. But in spite of the constant warring and exploiting, Ridley’s point is worth considering. You just lived through arguably one of the best decades in the last 300,000 years. And don’t believe the doom saying hype. You don’t have, as little Time-Magazine-Person-of-the-Year Greta Thunberg declares, just nine years left—though, yes, individually, each of us can kick the proverbial bucket at any time.
 
Worried about tropical diseases in Oslo because of global warming? Or, are you worried that the next solar minimum is upon us as NASA predicts, throwing us into a cold spell to compete with the Little Ice Age?** How about this, instead? Try looking at the enhancements to living that the 2010s gave the world. Try considering that we might just be, in spite of all the prophets of doom, still headed in hope toward an even better future.
 
Maybe that’s not enough of a Happy New Year for you. But could it be enough for a Happy New Decade to begin in 2021? Wouldn’t it be comforting to note that Janus a year from now will face a past of the “best decade in human history” and a potential future of an even better decade?
 
*To read Ridley’s essay, go to https://spectator.us/just-best-decade-human-history-seriously/  Accessed December 23, 2019.
 
**Dobler, Sacha. The next Grand Solar Minimum has (very likely) begun: NASA predicts lowest solar cycle in 200 years. Abrupt Earth Changes, 23 Dec 2019. Online at https://abruptearthchanges.com/2019/06/14/the-next-grand-solar-minimum-has-very-likely-begun-nasa-predicts-lowest-solar-cycle-in-200-years/  Accessed December 23, 2019. The peak of Solar Cycle 24 appears, in NASA’s prediction for 2025, to approximate that of Solar Cycle 5, the so-called Dalton Minimum of 1817—not quite as low as the Maunder Minimum of the Little Ice Age (1600-1750). So, while we pump carbon into the atmosphere, we might for some time to come actually be offsetting a plunge in global temperatures caused by diminished solar activity.  

Faux pas par excellence, “How much do you weigh?” isn’t the question one asks a stranger in polite society, but, really, don’t we all want to know? Without a quantity, we have to imagine. So, to avoid the socially unacceptable question about weight, maybe we should ask, “What’s your mass?” Weight, after all, is just the measurement of your acceleration toward the planet’s center of gravity, less on the moon, more on Jupiter; but mass, now there’s a true definer. Or maybe, we should ask about density.
 
We can guess weight because we’re familiar with our own. Mass isn’t how we think of the total stuff that makes up a human body. Nor do we think in terms of someone’s density, that is, mass per unit volume. Volume? Well, that’s easy when we think of a closet we overstuff with clothes or a refrigerator we overstock with food. More stuff jammed into the same volume increases density.  
 
The density of many celestial objects is unimaginable, even when we assign numbers. Take, for example, the density of PSR J0030+0451, a “millisecond pulsar” about 1,174 LY away. Its mass has recently been pinned down to something between 1.3 and 1.4 times that of the Sun but in a diameter between 25.4 km and 26 km (15.8 mi and 16.2 mi).* I’m just roughly guessing here, but that’s probably nearly 100 million tons of stuff squeezed into the size of a sugar cube (maybe greater than 10^14 g cm^-3 ). That is 100 million tons (a weight designation) in Earth’s gravity; a very heavy “sugar cube indeed.”**
 
We meet at a party. You’re thin. You’re fat (I’m sorry, can I say “fat” without being vilified in social media while you run to a “safe space”?) Anyway, you are whatever you are. And as we chat, I wonder, “How much does this person weigh?” Having been around other humans, I have some experience, and I’ve stepped on scales, so I know a little about human weights. With the experience of seeing so many humans, I have a comparative scale from which I can assign some approximate numbers. And you, my new acquaintance, are probably thinking, “This guy should lay off the bread and run some stadium bleachers. I wonder how dense he is—physically, that is, not mentally.” I notice that you seemed to be weighed down by concerns.
 
Here’s the actual imagined conversation (actual imagined?).
 
I start: “I just read about the size and density of a pulsar. Yes, I do sometimes dabble in things astronomical. It’s just wonderful that after all the myths about celestial objects told over all the millennia, we finally know what’s out there for the most part. We finally understand what stars and nebulae are, the nature of galaxies, and, of course, pulsars and black holes—especially now that we’ve actually imaged a black hole.”
 
You answer: “Never really been too interested in that stuff. I’m more a down-to-Earth, practical person concerned with bread, milk, and eggs, the stock market, and life’s finer things—though I do indulge in imagining a little feng shui and practicing a little geomancy when I enter any room. I think astrology is just downright silly since the perspective we have of constellations isn’t the perspective from, say, Betelgeuse. We’ll never go to the stars, so I don’t bother with them. Besides, we don’t even see stars in the city because of all the light pollution. I’m guessing there are urban children who only know about stars because of some classroom poster or visit to a planetarium. But with respect to my practical life, I have a plate piled high with concerns, a room stuffed with problems I have to solve. ”
 
I respond: “I didn’t say I dabbled in astrology. I said ‘astronomy.’ I understand, however, your attitude toward both astrology and astronomy. The former is, as you say, silly. Signs of the Zodiac aren’t more than imagined connections of dots. And with respect to the latter, astronomy doesn’t’ offer anything applicable to daily life with facts about pulsars, neutron stars, and the Chandrasekar limit. But practicality aside, I escape briefly from concerns about resupplying the house with bread, milk, and eggs, the vicissitudes of the market, or New Age mental snake oils. Sure, we most likely will never reach the stars. But the numbers associated with them are useful in one sense. They make the goings on down here on little Earth seem strangely insignificant in the Big Scheme. The density of that pulsar makes for an interesting comparison. Physically, we’re used to things less dense than a distant pulsar, but from the stress problems give us, we seem to think were squished by too many concerns packed into each day. Some of us must think we’re on the bottom of a pile of elephants. In reality, of course, much of what we spend our time troubling over is so much fluff that the following generation never considers it to have the density of importance worth any attention.
 
“Just knowing that something out there like a pulsar is squeezed together beyond my imagination makes me think that the density of concerns over which we daily mull is not very great. We really do fuss over lots of stuff with very little mass: Fashion, for example, or New Age stuff, or, dare I say it, the opinions of some self-described Elitists, family and neighborhood ‘problems.’ Sure, there’s more weighty stuff for our concerns. Surely, we can’t be so empty of mass, so amorphous that, were it not for the gravity imposed by social norms, we would float away.”
 
You say: “So, you think the value in astronomy is that it shows us how little we are physically and how ‘weighty’ our problems aren’t.”
 
I admit: “Yes. In our throbbing, pulsating lives, we are nowhere near being squished like the stuff in a pulsar, neutron star, or black hole. There’s really a lot of emptiness between our weighty concerns, the mass of our lives isn’t as dense as we make ourselves believe. There’s room to breathe. There’s space between problems. Most people aren’t as squished as they believe they are.”
 
 
 
*SCINEWS. Astronomers Measure Size and Mass of Nearby Pulsar, Create Map of Its Surface Hot Spots. 17 Dec 2019. http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/pulsar-size-mass-map-surface-hot-spots-07921.html   Accessed December 18, 2019
See also: T.E. Riley et al. 2019. A NICER View of PSR J0030+0451: Millisecond Pulsar Parameter Estimation. ApJL 887, L21; doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab481c
 
**Big numbers: 100,000,000 tons equals 200,000,000,000 pounds. Elephants can weigh 7 to 8 tons or 14,000-16,000 pounds. Let’s go on the heavy side. That “sugar cube” of pulsar matter would be equivalent to 12,500,000 elephants, far too heavy for your tea cup. (Do people nowadays still use sugar cubes?)

Ever get bothered by conflicting statements or ideas? I do on occasion, and this is one of them. Here are two article titles I just saw on Phys.org, an ordinarily wonderful source of science news. Actually, the two titles make sense on their own, but juxtaposed on the same page, they appear contradictory. The first title is “Degraded Soils Mean Tropical Forests May [might?] Never Fully Recover from Logging.”* The second is “Hard as a Rock? Maybe not, Say Bacteria That Help Form Soil.”** Huh? Remember that first title: “May [properly “might,” no permission required] Never Fully Recover.” Now, if you aren’t a farmer, gardener, or agronomist, you might question the relevance of either article to your life. So, here’s a bit of a background before I make a rather obvious point.
 
Soils can be very complex and layered aggregations of bits of mineral matter, decaying organic matter, water, gases, and living organisms. They were not contemporaneous with the earliest Earth. They formed over time. And then they were destroyed, and formed again, and were destroyed again, and then formed again…. You get the picture. Since the Great Bombardment of Bolides ended about 3.8 billion years ago, Earth’s surface has undergone a cycle of soil formation and destruction (or burial and lithification).  
 
Here’s a sentence from the second article. “Research published this week by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists shows how bacteria can degrade solid bedrock, jump-starting a long process of alteration that creates the mineral portion of soil.”* So, it seems that as long as Earth has rock at its surface and bacteria, soils will, in fact, recover. And shortly after life took hold on this planet—maybe contemporaneously with that cessation of major meteorite bombardment—this planet has belonged to bacteria. They’ve been discovered as deep in the crust as the gabbroic layer below the seafloor of the Atlantic Massif.*** They live in the depths of the Mariana Trench, as well.**** And they live all over and throughout your body. Earth is the Bacteria Planet, and you, like its water and rock, are a mere repository, a condo for microbes.
 
Soil recovery is a slow process, however, too slow for a particular farmer or forest to await its completion. That means with respect to humans currently alive, depleted tropical rainforest soils will not naturally recover, so the premise of the first title above is, practically considered, correct. But the processes that form and destroy soils are, in fact, ongoing. Mechanical and chemical weathering, coupled with biochemical weathering by lichens and in conjunction with bacteria and burrowing organisms like mammals, insects, and worms continuously work to keep segments of Earth’s surface covered by that thin veneer of ever-renewing soil.
 
If you don’t eat, you might ask, “Who cares?” but you probably do eat. We’d be hard pressed to grow food—though it is hydroponically possible on a small scale—without soils. With more than seven billion people currently alive, soils are indispensable for humanity’s survival. Our lives depend on soils—and on bacteria. And that brings me to this: That which we take for granted or ignore can play a role in our very survival. We are all supported by processes, materials, and even people in ways we might not recognize.
 
Look around.
 
*https://phys.org/news/2019-12-degraded-soils-tropical-forests-fully.html
  
 
** https://phys.org/news/2019-12-hard-bacteria-soil.html  Accessed December 16, 2019. Original article: Stephanie A. Napieralski et al., Microbial chemolithotrophy mediates oxidative weathering of granitic bedrock, PNAS (2019) www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1909970117
 
***Mason, Olivia U. (2010). First investigation of the microbiology of the deepest layer of ocean crust. PLOS/ONE. 5 Nov 2010. Online at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0015399   Accessed December 18, 2019.
 
**** https://www.newser.com/story/203185/earths-deepest-spot-is-alive-with-unexpected-bacteria.html

Everyone knows the story—a dubious claim in this age of superabundant access to knowledge and a superabundance of the woefully uninformed—of David and Goliath. The latter was that UFC heavyweight of his time who approached the sling-carrying bantam weight brash kid. As the story goes, Goliath lost in short order, one of those record-setting first-round knockouts that elicit cries of “Fixed!” from the disappointed high-paying crowd who, in shepherd’s words, got fleeced.
 
Goliath was a Philistine. The Philistines had settled on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean a little north of the Nile Delta, basically, in today’s Gaza strip. There they built some towns (cities?). That they did build permanent settlements seems to counter claims that they were—what should I say?—Philistines. You know, uncultured brutes, Troglodytes of the lowest order, fighters for fighting’s sake, an invasive people whom the Egyptians and Israelis had to fight off to keep them from overrunning their lands—Samson and David come to mind (all this occurring about 3,000 years ago). Eventually, they became less cohesive, mixing in, I would guess, with the various other groups that settled or conquered Palestine.
 
But maybe they weren’t brutish. The people who dig up stuff for a living (Mom, when I grow up, I want to excavate old buildings and stuff, maybe find some pottery and bones, and, if I’m lucky, make some astonishing find of a treasure) have discovered Mycenaean style pottery at Philistine sites in Ashdod, Ekron, and Tel Qasile. One town, Tell es-Safi (a “tell” is a mound), might have been Goliath’s hometown of Gath (or Gat, or Geth). You can just picture little Goli running around its streets as a child, playing with a sword-stick when he should have been at school learning how to use a slingshot. Anyway, the Philistines, for all their supposed brutishness, were an Aegean people who migrated just as we see Mediterranean-Middle East migrations today. Maybe they were pushed form their original Aegean homes on some island like Crete—who knows? But in moving and invading, they did carry a culture and a now-lost language with them. So, they weren’t completely philistine even though they were Philistines.
 
How did the name of an entire people become associated with deficiency in culture? According to the etymological dictionary, Thomas Carlyle and then Matthew Arnold popularized the term in English, though it had been in use more or less from Shakespeare’s time. And the dictionary further tells us that German students used the word to describe “townies” in that now long-standing tradition that pits those in the university society from those in the local town society, the educated derisively condescending upon the uneducated locals. The town-gown (for those academic robes) problem persists, but today, somehow, it has been adopted by a self-proclaimed famous elite against any they deem to be “philistine.” What comes to mind as an example is the recent claim by a congresswoman with an undergraduate sociology degree who called a former neurosurgeon-turned-HUD Director “too stupid to run HUD” and an extremely popular rock star and member of the Beatles suggesting about a decade ago that a previous President who had an Ivy League MBA and who had successfully run a large sports franchise was one unfamiliar with a library—even though that President was a voracious consumer of books and his wife was a former librarian. Typically, the Left-leaning wealthy (even those without more than a HS diploma) who self-proclaim their elitism describe as bumbling the uninformed “red-neck” Right-leaning, regardless of the latter’s level of education or reasons for adopting various political positions or social philosophies.
 
In other words, calling people “philistine” doesn’t make them so. No doubt the actual historical Philistines probably had their share of Philistines, but they also had their ship builders (how else did they sail to a new land), their armor-makers, their builders, city-planners (someone had to figure out where a bunch of people poop in Gath), military leaders (though equipping soldiers with slings didn’t cross their minds), and their potters.
 
People have always used ad hominem and ad populum arguments to protect their own intellectual weaknesses. It’s easy just to dismiss by calling someone a Philistine. It’s easy to be condescending. But with the advent of social media, an almost unified Press, and control of the entertainment industry, labeling someone or some group “philistine” has become not just easier, but easier to broadcast. What seems interesting to me is that only mental Philistines would readily accept the argument that someone else is philistine.   

What if I said, “Well, look at me”? What if you said the same?
 
Having written more than 1,250 little essays for this website, I might think, “Well, look at me; I’m doing all right. Isn’t that an accomplishment? More than a thousand! Nearly one-a-day, an average 27.8 per month—and that doesn’t include about thirty I started, completed, and junked because I didn’t think you would like them or would think they were grossly flawed. I can remember writing the first just a few years ago.”
 
But, instead of “Look at me,” I think, “What? Just some essays? What else did I do? Certainly, that body of work pales by comparison to that of the great novelists, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, to that of prolific playwrights like Shaw, and to that of the great essayists like Mencken. It’s time to be a bit underwhelmed by my work both online, in some textbooks, and in reports for government and business. And I had the advantage of modern word processing, something that none of them had to expedite their writing. Now, it’s true that since the first essay, I also helped proofread a few books and essays for others, wrote letters, helped teach some grandkids, did all the usual family stuff, traveled, and spent time on whatever, but still, by comparison with those greats, I greatly underwhelm, to use an oxymoron.”
 
Take Vladimir (Nabokov, that is) for example. The guy wrote nine novels in Russian and then wrote Lolita, Pale Fire, and more books in English, works too numerous to mention here. But he wasn’t just a novelist who sat jotting notes on index cards or pecking letters on a typewriter. He was also an expert lepidopterist, a translator, and Holy Cow! just about a zillion other things, including poet, lecturer, political philosopher…I’m overwhelmed, and that means he would certainly label my work “underwhelming” unless he were charitable which, I’ve heard tell, he wasn’t much of. I won’t go into more details of his productive life, but I want to mention that having seen what Communism did to Russia and Nazism did to Germany, he anticipated the threat that the New Left of Marcuse imposes on democratic freedom, a Left-leaning that in our current times has been translated into a drive toward “democratic” socialism that so seems to inspire the uninformed young. But back to underwhelming.
 
It’s not just some writers that would be underwhelmed by my work. Look at people like General George Patton and General George Marshall, both capable of organizing people and materials and expediting projects on enormous scales. Imagine Patton. He was put in charge of forming a tank core from virtually nothing and did so in months. An Olympic pentathlete, bilingual military historian with interest in the arts, Patton did much to turn the tide of war against the Nazis. And Marshall? Well, the Europeans who survived WWII owe him an enduring debt for the kick start he gave to their recovery. In 1953 he became a Nobel laureate, and after his military service, he became both a Secretary of State and a Secretary of Defense. I can’t fill this page with his accomplishments in both peacetime and war. In short, two overwhelming military guys would be underwhelmed by some essays.
 
So, in retrospect, 1,252 entries here with about a million words don’t make an opus that competes with that of the notable people I’ve named. It’s a lesson in humility for me and maybe for you. Pride is, in my estimation, the “root sin.” In the biblical tale of Adam and Eve, it’s pride that drives them to decide they can defy God and be “like” God. It isn’t some desire to eat some fruit that is sinful; it’s assuming one is the center of the universe. It’s pride that drives any of us to pretentiousness, a fault I found during my career to be chief among academics sealed in the safety of their ivy-covered towers. It’s pride that the Ego supports.
 
And when we look at those whom the crowds of adoring have elevated to heights of fame and power even in the absence of overwhelming accomplishments like those of Nabokov, Patton, and Marshall, we see how hubris can overwhelm them as they succumb to the fawning hype and constant attention. One need only look at those who need Red Carpet parades, adoring fans, and sycophants to see that in humanity’s history few such “overwhelming” people compare with the prodigiously productive. Sure, maybe those people I do mention here as examples of “overwhelming” individuals suffered from pride and an overly inflated sense of self-worth, but their accomplishments required grueling and incessant hard work, a bit of innate brilliance, and relentless persistence. They weren’t born “overwhelming.”
 
As long as I can write, I’ll continue to produce little essays, but I will keep reminding myself that in the eyes of the great and few who overwhelm, I’m truly underwhelming.   

Overwhelmed? It’s not an uncommon experience, and it has two points of origin: One external and the other internal.
 
First, an anecdote. Called to Harrisburg in the early 2000s by a young state representative, I was asked to update some research I had previously done for the Commonwealth. The nature of the research is irrelevant here, but the story of the meeting isn’t. I found myself in the office of an energetic young man enthused to make a difference in his state, if not the world. He told me that he went into public office with a desire to change the status quo of inordinate waste and inefficiency. What he found, however, was a system so large and so out of control, that any efforts he made to reduce wasteful spending was offset by an in-place tradition that gave representatives carte blanche to spend as they desired, particularly to spend as they desired to influence their voters. In short, he was overwhelmed by a system that dampened his effectiveness if not his spirit. Nevertheless, in the face of the realities imposed by a long tradition, he maintained his personal enthusiasm and his willingness to tilt at the windmill grinding tax money into favors for votes.
 
Second a broadcast report: The Learning Channel interviewed the Eisenbergs of Indiana, Pennsylvania. I saw the bit as I waited for the coffee to brew. Normally, I would have switched past such a story, but I was caught by the OVERWHELMING number of Santas the family had collected inside their small home. I missed the number, but I’m guessing thousands, stuffed and ceramic, mechanical and electric. As the cameraman swept the scenes, I saw little room for human habitation, their house reduced to mere passageways. If someone had made a stuffed or ceramic statue, the Eisenbergs were sure to have a copy. What caught my eye was the opening scene I observed, not probably the beginning of the piece, with the Eisenbergs walking with a contractor across their lawn to show him a chimney they wanted widened. They were intent on displaying a big Santa on the outside of their house, and they were willing, it seems, to go to great expense to add construction costs. Their obsession—which they freely admit to on camera—reminded me of Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs (Les Chaises), a play in the genre Theatre of the Absurd. Briefly put, in Ionesco’s drama, two elderly people await an audience for their message to future generations. Instead of an audience only chairs begin to fill the stage, and the one person, an interlocuter, they depend upon to convey their significant discovery about life to posterity has aphasia. In other words, no message gets passed on in a world of overwhelming materialism. A deaf-mute interlocuter delivers no coherent message to the imagined audience filling the actually empty chairs.
 
Is there any lesson for some interlocuter to pass on about a young state representative overwhelmed by the rampant spending of taxes over which he apparently had no control and a couple overwhelmed by Santa Clauses over which they had control? Is it a lesson in folly? In materialism? In affluence gone wrong? Is it a lesson about the modern world specifically or the human world as it has always been, one in which human practices overwhelm other humans or one in which humans overwhelm themselves by practices they can, in fact, control?
 
I’m not too much different from the Eisenbergs, and maybe you aren’t either. Nor am I different from the spending machine of government giddy on tax wealth and free from accountability. Want a simple example? Look at your smartphone photos. No, not just some of them, but the hundreds and thousands you have taken. Then look at those old photo collections stored somewhere, attic, basement, closet, den. Look at all of them. I won’t even mention (a sure sign that I’m about to) any objects on mantels, shelves, or walls, all collected bit by bit like the grains of eroded mountains deposited in nearby repository basins, the houses in which sediments lithify.
 
Then ask yourself: Do I have a message I want posterity to hear?

Just when I was getting a taste for nitrogen-infused coffee that reminds me of Bailey’s Irish Cream, the Dutch decide to make me feel guilty about my new pleasure with an anti-nitrogen court ruling.* I mean, come on, most (78%) of what we breathe is nitrogen. It’s as common as, well, air.
 
But I can understand the reasons that some would impose restrictions on nitrogen compounds. Put enough of them into the environment, and algae can take over the planet. Dutch farmers, of course, oppose policies that would restrict their pig, dairy, and poultry farms, no small restriction in that ABN AMRO bank estimates that a recent high court decision against ammonia and nitrogen oxides emitted from the rear ends of animals and exhaust pipes of machines will put the kibosh on 14 billion euros-worth of new development.
 
But, hey, that’s the Netherlands; from my location at 1,000 feet above sea level, I can’t imagine what would happen if rising seas suddenly inundated all that manure. I suppose what drives me to comment, however, isn’t the plight of a low-lying country, but that we really never know when we might turn a positive into a negative.
 
Sure, I could cut back on my once-a-year pulled-pork sandwich, eat fewer hamburgers, and even visit Chic-fil-a less often than my thrice-annual visits, staving off hunger with a spicy chicken sandwich when I'm on a long road trip. In the process of my personal self-denial, I might save the country, or maybe the whole world, from being buried in a bunch of pig, cow, and chicken manure. I guess the environment would win. Or, would it? Those algae that will never bloom under excessive nutrient influxes, won’t capture sunlight to produce more oxygen. Am I better off—is the world better off—with the current oxygen content of the atmosphere and only a faint whiff of ammonia? Or, do we need a better distribution system, moving manure from places overwhelmed by it to places underwhelmed, that is, to places where soils depleted by over-farming need an influx of fertilizers? Could we solve the Dutch problem by importing their manure for farms in the Midwest?
 
Almost everything we do has some consequence for the environment. I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll cut back on stuff if you will. But then, the pig, dairy, and chicken farmers will suffer economically. All those workers at restaurants serving bacon, cheese, and chicken will find their jobs in jeopardy. Now, does either of us want that? Sorry, there’s a Chic-fil-a up ahead, and I haven’t had a spicy chicken sandwich for months.
 
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/nitrogen-crisis-jam-packed-livestock-operations-has-paralyzed-dutch-economy  Accessed December 7, 2019.