Angry at Mother Earth

Women or men who didn’t or don’t get along with their mothers are generally enraged, but also spend their lives looking for replacements. That may be one way of describing mankind’s relationship with mother earth. Those who cotton to the notion of the Adamic fall will account for the fact that 5000 years of recorded history have been a story of unremitting war. The more science minded may see human strife as devolving from the fact of man as chimera, an animal whose attendant consciousness creates an inner battlefield manifesting itself in the inability to live  peacefully with others. But the real truth is that human beings have a love/hate relationship with the singularity which begot them. Earth gave birth to man and yet the creature she fostered rarely expressed gratitude for his or her condition. Instead he or she would eventually take their rage out by trying to explode the planet, through pollution and nuclear weapons rendering it uninhabitable, or seeking a substitute. The latter may account for at least part of man’s fascination with the prospect of life in outer space. The fact is that the rage with the mother will never pass. Even after the earth is hit by a comet or becomes subsumed by its dying sun, mankind will still harbor a grudge. Despite advances which will enable humans to explore the furthest reaches of outer space, for example planets orbiting Kepler 62, which occupy the so called Goldilocks zone of temperatures amenable to life, the angry orphaned race will never find the perfect substitute or ideal image it's looking for.

Worming My Way Back to You Babe

Can you imagine a day when wormholes become so commonplace, they’re like Interstates? The E-ZPass will truly live up to its name since this toll will be predicated on a chink in time that bypasses the usual limitations of interplanetary travel. Christopher Nolan's  Interstellar envisions a time where travel through wormholes in search of a viable home for beleaguered mankind would be a central part of any space program’s mission. If what scientists tell us about global warming is true then wormholes are going to be the only way to go. “Two Promising Places to Live, 1,200 Light Years From Earth,” was the title of a piece in The Times (4/13/13), about a couple of planets scientists have called Kepler 62e and f orbiting the star Kepler-62 of the constellation Lyra, in the so-called “Goldilocks" zone, which provides temperatures hospitable to human life. However, at those distances one never knows. It’d be a shame to create a literal spaceship earth, a Noah’s ark of future civilizations who passed the baton on one after the other, only to find that the Promised Land was not all that it was cracked up to be. Being able to travel to far away places by way of wormhole is tantamount to being able to study computer listings on Craig’s List as opposed to trudging door to door in search of an apartment in Manhattan. So here’s how it would work. You input your requirements into NASA’s Kepler spacecraft which would now be owned by one of the major real estate firm, like Sotheby’s, that handled stellar and interstellar transactions (“if you’re looking for space in outer space, we got it” might be the Kepler’s mantra), you hear back about some possibilities and then pop into a wormhole to psyche them out, all the while making use of your E-ZPass, of course. By this time in history people would be getting as excited about planets as they once were about apartments and if it looks right they’d be ready to begin packing up for the trip. Wormhole or no wormhole, it’s still going to be a schlepp, but even if you have to circumvent a black hole it won’t be long before you see the light.

The Stars Our Destination II

The Times ran a front page story about “the most Earth-like worlds yet known in the outer cosmos, a pair of planets that appear capable of supporting life and that orbit a star 1200 light-years from here, in the northern constellation Lyra” (“Two Promising Places to Live, 1200 Light-Years From Earth,” NYT, 4/18/13). Naturally, perennially “space" conscious New Yorkers, with little experience of trying to locate space in outer space, will wonder if there is rent stabilization (before they even consider how stable the orbits of the bodies question are)? According to the Times both planets circle a star called Kepler 62  named "after NASA's Kepler 62 spacecraft, which discovered them” and are both “in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone of lukewarm temperatures suitable for liquid water, the crucial ingredient for Life as We Know It.” The prospect of affordable space and the citation of Goldilocks make the whole extraterrestrial discovery seem like a rather far flung fairy tale. Indeed getting back to life on earth, hardened Manhattanites would find it more improbable to come across an inexpensive rental than they would to achieve the near speed of light velocities necessary for a rocket ship to get there. But who knows what the future for space travel will hold. No one really understands what space is either in terms of the dark matter that holds things together, nor the dark energy the force which constantly causes things to expand. In studying the Higgs Boson, a basic component of matter, in the Large Hadron Collider scientists are only beginning to understand what happened in the milliseconds following the explosion which created life as we know it today. Did something come out of nothing? Or is there another explanation that still eludes us? When we begin to understand the highways and byways of space in the context of a unified theory which takes into context both the microcosm and macrocosm, will we discover the wormholes that we read about in sci fi and that will allow travellers to make quantum leaps through space/time?