Flight from Death

"To have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self expression...and with all this...yet to die."

Being alive and self-aware, to be aware that at some point in the future you will cease to be, this is a tremendous burden. We don't talk about how difficult it is - we just go about with our lives, ignoring this enormous elephant in the room. Yes Virginia, one day even you will also die.

The presence of our mortality provokes anxiety in us, and that anxiety pushes us to isolate ourselves within our sociocultural groups, to become xenophobic, to maim and kill and war upon those we consider to be dangerous either physically or ideologically.



Yet the future is not entirely dark. For one thing, this documentary was made in the first place, so we are at least becoming aware of the problem! I see a great awakening of the understanding that WE are the ones who run our lives. We can choose compassion and empathy over fear and rejection. We are, indeed, in the midst of doing so on a grand collective scale.

Also watch "Flight from Death" commercial-free on Netflix streaming.

Gratitude

It's so important to be grateful.

What Is The Purpose Of Life?

This question has been debated by people throughout the ages, but here's a novel answer:

The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.

Say what? The chemical equation is a little complex, but in short: The atmosphere of the primeval earth had a LOT of carbon dioxide in it. The interior of the planet had (and still has) a lot of free hydrogen in it. These two molecules would "prefer" to get together as hydrocarbons (such as methane) because they would be in a state of higher entropy if they did so. This is kind of like saying that two marbles put in a bowl would prefer to roll together at the bottom of the bowl...but there's a catch. In order for CO2 and H2 to combine, they actually need a little boost of energy first - imagine that there's a little lip on the bowl, and one of the marbles is stuck in the groove of it, so that the bowl needs a little jostle for the marble to hop over and roll to the bottom to join its companion.

CO2 and H2 can combine inorganically via a geochemical process called serpentinization (producing a kind of rock known as serpentine) - but biological processes are MUCH more efficient. Witness: all the hydrocarbons we've been pumping out of the earth's crust and burning were once living organic matter. And the carbon dioxide crisis we're creating by burning oil and coal is, essentially, running the evolution of our planet's atmosphere in reverse. Way back at the beginning of life on this planet, the air was great for trees but not so hot for animals to breathe. Yet another reason to pay attention to how we play around with the chemical balance of our environment.

Read more here: How Life Arose on Earth, and How a Singularity Might Bring It Down via scientificamerican.com

Triassic Self-Portraits?

File this one under "just plain weird."

Seems that paleontologists have recently turned up some pretty strange fossils - bones of a kind of ichthyosaur called Shonisaurus popularis have been found in strange arrangements. Specifically, vertebrae from several different animals have been found fossilized into a linear pattern. What's going on here?

We don't know, but Mark McMenamin thinks he has a clue. Apparently, octopuses have been known to do the same thing with fish bones - they take the vertebrae and arrange them so that they look like octopus suckers. Are these fossils evidence of some ancient molluscan self-portrait? What do you think?

Read more here: Triassic 'Kraken' may have created self-portrait via tgdaily.com

Mindfulness Matters

A great deal of our everyday unhappiness arises from the perceived rift between "self" and "everything else." It is difficult to be self-aware and to experience yourself as separate from the universe. It can be lonely and confusing and even frightening. What is the purpose of all of this crazy stuff going on around me? What am I supposed to be doing here? Why me?

All of this chatter in our heads just contributes to the problem. The more you concentrate on something, the bigger part of your life it will take up - the snake bites its own tail, and voila, misery! We can break the cycle of self-obsession by taking up our time in different ways: we become busy, we eat or drink or smoke, or we meditate or pray. Among these coping skills, meditation and prayer are the most effective.

A series of studies have now shown exactly how effective "mindfulness work" (meditation, prayer, etc.) can be.


Read more here: Eat, Smoke, Meditate: Why Your Brain Cares How You Cope via Forbes.com

The Oldest People

New evidence indicates that humans have lived on the island of Australia for some 70,000 years now. That is a simply mind-boggling amount of time. The Australian aborigines' ancestors were the first humans to get the itch to travel - and they left Africa long before the rest of us did. They had boats, too. Australia was an island already by that time, and was not visible from the rest of Indonesia. Explorers would have to have inferred its presence by the patterns of weather and waves.

Read more here: Aboriginal DNA dates Australian arrival via ABC.net.au

There's No Such Thing As "Outside" Any More.

We have a natural handicap to our individual human thought processes: because we have individual bodies and we can draw a conceptual distinction between "self" and "everything else", we are burdened with this illusory notion of "outsideness." But when you throw something away, exactly where is "away"? On a small planet in the middle of a vast and chilly void, there is no such thing as "away."

And so, let's cheer the canny editors over at Discovery.com, who have collated a list of seven ways that poo will power the future. Even our excrement can't be thrown "away" any more. That's valuable biomass, and we should be putting it to good use! From park lights powered by a dog-poop methane reactor, to spaceborne fuel cells, there's more value in what we flush away than we think.

Read more here: 7 Places Poo Will Power the Future via news.discovery.com

Weather Wars

Feeling blue as the weather starts getting more wintery? The wider implications of long-term weather trends on human culture are startling. Scientists have recently performed statistical analyses that show correlation between periods of shifting climate and wars and other social upheavals. The premise is not startling - basically, the weather gets colder for a few years, the crops are not as bountiful or fail altogether, and human life becomes stressed. Stressed humans are grouchy, and they take out their upset on each other. Voila, war.

Read more here: Got War? Blame the Weather via news.sciencemag.org

The Long Slow Make

This is a very interesting video on the political implications of the Maker movement.

Your Genes Are What You Eat, Too.

Ribonucleic acid, or RNA, is a kind of molecule which is part of the DNA genetic system. DNA contains the code for creating every part of our bodies - it tells our cells how to divide, how to create proteins, how to grow and differentiate into the different tissues of our flesh, and how to metabolize. RNA is the molecule which reads these instructions and carries them out.

It's extremely interesting, then, that we have recently learned that some plant RNA can pass directly into the human bloodstream. Micro RNA (miRNA) from rice has been shown to pass into the blood of both mice and humans. We've always known the truth of "you are what you eat," but this research opens up another interesting line of inquiry: how are these organic molecules affecting the expression of our genes? Our food may be even more important than we thought.

Read more here: What You Eat Affects Your Genes: RNA from Rice Can Survive Digestion and Alter Gene Expression via Discovermagazine.com