The Edges of Infinity

The Edges of Infinity

I once read a book in college in the 1990s called Infinite in All Directions by Freeman Dyson, a relatively accomplished cosmologist who describes the intricasy and idiosyncrasies of the universe in a pretty interesting way.

While I do not remember a ton of the specific information that he imparts in the book, I came away more enlightened about the cosmos and physics. Before and since I have always been a student and fan of geography [stopped there]

 

Another old one to finish off and publish over five years later...

 

I was going places with this. Drafted 1/24/2015, I guess. 

Infinity is easy to express, mathematically or verbally, but really hard to fathom.

So much of us as people and animals is finite, limited.

But the thoughts and proofs of infinity are here, out there.

We are but specks, in many senses.

5 years. 50 years. 500 years. 5,000 years.

50,000 years. 500, 000 thousand years.

5 million years.

50 million years.

500 million years.

I should stop there. That is a lot.

Does time go on eternally? We guess so. Do we? We hope so.

But now, we live for the here and now.

Or the things within our life times: Our memories, our belongings, our money accounts, our families, communities, nations, books, words, music, foods...

Fifty years ago I was born. Half a century comes and goes. I watched a basketball game with Oscar Robertson yesterday, broadcast from March of 1970. My mom was about to become or was pregnant with me then. The Big O was playing for the Cincinnati Royals; before he joined a tall player named Lou Alcindor with the Milwaukee Lakers. Two teams that have both gone to California since, now in Sacramento and L.A.

 

I also watched part of a Ken Burns documentary of baseball, when the Giants of New York City (Manhattan) and the Dodgers of Brooklyn left for California, in 1956 and 1957. Things change, many of us re-locate to California.

 

And then come back.

 

Come back to Earth.

 

Back back to our solar system, or the galaxy.

 

A guy at work takes interstellar or cosmic pictures, frames them and gives them to others, maybe sells a few. Pictures of stars or constellations, some of which came from a million years ago.

 

500 years ago were in the 1500s when William Shakespeare was in the creation, and would become the best of all time, according to Harold Bloom, who passed away in 2019 at age 80,  and early in life (around the 1940s?) became a precocious and prodigious reader, and later a Yale literature guru and critic, and when he died I checked out five of his books and read a lot of them, not all of them, and got a feel for his takes and feels, where the Bard of Avon, or whatever we call Billy Shakes affectionately, was the ultimate, or paragon of high culture, haute couture, or the best of whatever the human thinker has crafted as poetry, art, thought.

 

500 years ago the Bard was helping cement England and the English culture, economy, presence as the elite of the elites. It lead to the United States, which brings us full circle. The first to alight upon the nearby moon. The forgers of rockets and missiles.

 

One could argue that if we put more rocket science and money into interplanetary exploration and development than weapons of awful destruction that we could or would be much further now. Perhaps Mars instead of bombs being dropped all over the Middle East and elsewhere. Nuclear powered submarines with their own payloads of Weapons of Mass Destruction (more nukes!) traversing our greats reservoirs of oceans, heating up and letting the ice glaciers melt from Greenland and Antarctica.

 

Yeah, we got this.

 

5,000 years ago was closer to Noah than Abraham, according to the Holy Bible. That is a lot of human history ago. 5 millennia ago predates most of India, certainly Siddhartha Gautama, and most of ancient China and Egypt, all those emperors and pharaohs and their tombs and crypts, sarcophagi, if you will.

5,000 years ago, people were shorter, lived longer, perhaps did not speak as many languages. Maybe all that was before the Tower of Babel, found in present day Iraq south of Baghdad. I have a buddy from Babil Province. Nice guy. Small world. Finite.

 

50,000 years ago us humans were not as human as we would think, maybe. Words were harder to come by: maybe signs and grunts were more the norm. Cro-magnon or neanderthal, we ("we") were probably leaner and meaner, could run faster, or certainly climb better. 48,000 B.C. Where would you check? South central Africa, the Harappan Valley of Pakistan, or the Yellow River of China? Maybe parts of Mesoamerica, or down in Peru? Us hominids were wandering around a few places, perhaps. Maybe not Australia, but then again check the skeletal records....

500, 000 years ago. I forget if this counts as Cenozoic, pre-Cambrian, or whatever the scientific community says it was. We must have been more like apes, or whatever the version of us was. Mammals, those that drink milk, have hair, a four chambered heart, and another thing: live births instead of eggs. We were never snakes or reptiles, right? No, we were meant be more like God, for sure. Mammalian.

5,000,000 (million) years ago. The earth was a crazy place that had some forms of life? I think the solar system was as it is now, give or take. Because the planets and our sun go back a few billion, they calculate. 5 million years is pretty small potatoes for the ages of our local celestial orbs. More water back then, maybe? More sea life than above ground, right?

50,000,000 years ago. Oh, that is stretching the brain. Before or after other dinosaurs?

500,000,000 million years ago. Wow. There was life, I believe. Right? Fossils indicate plants and animals? That is the carbon-based oil we burn up today?

5 billion years ago: our local sun, the smaller-medium star, formed. Give or take a billion years. Somehow planets cropped up around it. And then the moons?

Yeah, 50 billion years is a long, long time, really hard to conceptualize.

Almost infinite, with so many zeros to go.

When I brought up Freeman Dyson five (short) years ago, I think that I was thinking about more space and geography than time. But, they kind of work together. Space ends up being about time -- the distance between all things.

Thanks Freeman, and BYU Honors class. Stephen Hawking: you're next. I own the book, A Brief History of Time.

Isn't it all about time? Yes, it's about time.

Blog it.

2015 does not seem as long ago. Now. What is now? Now is now then... Or then, then?