How come the dove gets to be the peace symbol? How about the pillow? It has more feathers than the dove, and it doesn’t have that dangerous beak.
How far does up go?
Humanity’s grip on civilization is incredibly tenuous. We in the west live in our cities and suburbs, but, terrorism notwithstanding, these are only temporary refuges from the danger the majority of the world lives in. Most of humanity is clinging on by a thread, and disaster can strike at any time: the Tibetans scratching a meagre living from the desert in the sky; the Vietnamese up to their waists in the paddies; earthquake victims living in the rubble of their destroyed communities; African villages walking miles just for water and dying of easily cured diseases. I can’t help thinking that the past few milennia of human development might be a brief interegnum in an otherwise volatile meteorological and seismic status quo.
Also, lolcats are cute.
In 1900 there were about 1.6 billion people on the earth. 99.9% of them cease to exsist anymore.
Currently there are about 6 billion people wandering the planet. In another 110 years 99.9% of them will be dead also. Completely wiped out. All of them.
If a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody there to hear it, do I need to eat more fibre?
It occurred to me, just yesterday, driving home in my much beloved Subaru: that here I am as a human being, zipping around in my trusty car, a little meat being encased in a go-to shell…
It occured to me that the human body is the same sort of shell for the kernel of Divine awareness; it’s just a transport mechanism, but the Driver is capable of way more than the vehicle, with the right training. Made some good sense.
This may blow your mind but there is still a Civil War soldier widow still alive or at least there was the last I heard. No, it wasn’t Alberta Martin of Alabama that died a few years ago and had a website that proclaimed herself as the last Civil War widow in glorious style to the world. After Alberta’s death, the news reached the family of Maudie Hopkins of Arkansas and they were terribly confused. Maudie is also the widow of a Civil War soldier and she never thought anything of it until the world made a big deal out of the similar story. They had no choice but to come forward and kill the record of Alberta Martin.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go1637/is_200406/ai_n6412799
While pondering some of the responses on this thread I started to think that at some point in the future people might no longer care about the Holocaust, that it might become a myth, too heinous to have ever been fully real. It’s only natural I suppose that things pass irrevocably into history and beyond but still it’s a thought that bothers me.
Life is hard by the yard but its a cinch by the inch.
Approximately 110 billion “people” have existed on earth in the last million years. That’s 11 * 10^10. Cite from 1987.
There are a calculated 8.4 * 10^18 habitable planets.
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](http://www.richarddawkins.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=991)
That means for each person (and/or homo sapiens precursor primate) who has lived in the last million years, there are 76 billion planets out there suitable for life. And that’s just what we can see from here.
Considering live evolved on our planet fairly early on (3.5 million years ago), just imagine all the life out there.
That blows my fucking mind.
! Rush hour interstate traffic becomes my metaphor for the path on the way home. All these people heading towards something safe, something sacred, something home; and I understand why they want to get there so quickly.
the famous chemist, amedeo avogadro gained renown through his hypothesis that equal volumes of different gases at the same temperature and pressure contain equal numbers of molecules. namely, in 22.4L of gas at standard temperature and pressure, there exists one mole of atoms/molecules/whatevers. the mole is equal to 6.022x10^23 particles.
most people believe the term ‘mole’ to be derived from the latin moles, meaning a ‘heap,’ or a ‘pile.’ in actuality, avogadro despised latin, and would never have allowed ‘his’ number to be associated with, as he called it, “a gory old dead language of wankers and stiffs.” the term ‘mole’ came about because avogadro was a huge mole enthusiast. after coining his ideal gas law, he devoted the rest of his life to the study of moles in their natural habitats. upon the death of his pet mole, avogadro dissected his former pet in what is still one of the most exacting autopsies ever recorded, and discovered that moles consist of 6.022x10^23 distinct parts, making the mole by far the part-iest mammal in existence.
humans, by comparison, have only 2000 parts. (cite, lever2000 soap commercials.)
avogadro’s pet mole’s name was lance.
love
yams!!
That cite is crap. I keep counting my parts over and over and I only come up with 1743. Am I missing something?
maybe you are a western reticulated chipmunk? western reticulated chipmunks generally have 1743 parts.
love
yams!!
(Holds up sign)WESTERN RETICULATED CHIPMUNK SEASON
Some nice responses so far by the way.
The Big Question in astrophysics has always been whether the universe is expanding fast enough to break free of its own gravitational pull, or whether it will eventually slow, stop, and collapse back in on itself. The thing to do, obviously, is to track the speed at which it’s expanding, and find out how much it’s slowing down.
So about ten years ago some scientist-types got to studying the rate of expansion, and found that it is accelerating.
My father-in-law’s grandfather was a veteran of the Civil War. My father-in-law is still alive (age 79).
My deep thought: the Civil War veteran and my son have the same name, and despite the nilhistic views in this thread, I can feel the history and legacy of my son’s great-great grandfather when I speak his name.
I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.
–FCOD
I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of microcosmos, and how atoms look just like miniature solar systems. Who knows how many tiny universes we each contain?
Time to go re-read Horton Hears a Who. Or watch the last scene of Men in Black.
Completely disjointed deep thoughts on pattern recognition in humans:
Electrons orbit nuclei
Planets orbit stars
Stars orbit galactic centers
Galaxies even orbit other galaxies
Why wouldn’t the pattern continue in both directions? At the subatomic level, bosons could orbit quarks or whatever. Universes could orbit other universes, or even could orbit some other thing we don’t even know exists.
Is the purpose of human life to observe and understand the universe?