Whale Holes
When I was in college in 1969 – shortly after Apollo 10 took a picture of earth from 200,000 miles away showing earth as a small blue sphere floating in a black void – I used to picture all the people on that globe going about their daily business thinking their business was so important. Then in my mind I would back off from earth until it was a barely visible and think about those people. Then I would think that I could continue backing until the solar system and even the galaxy was indistinguishable in the universe. Why do we think our causes are so important? Why do we fear or destroy people who don’t share our beliefs? Why can’t we see how alone and dependent we are on each other? Why can’t we see the big picture and understand what is important?
A couple of things happened this week to bring my college thinking to mind. The first was an E-mail Kathy sent me about the size of earth compared to other planets and the sun and then went on to compare the sun with other stars until our sun was the size of 1 pixel on the screen when compared with other stars.
When I was in college in 1969 – shortly after Apollo 10 took a picture of earth from 200,000 miles away showing earth as a small blue sphere floating in a black void – I used to picture all the people on that globe going about their daily business thinking their business was so important. Then in my mind I would back off from earth until it was a barely visible and think about those people. Then I would think that I could continue backing until the solar system and even the galaxy was indistinguishable in the universe. Why do we think our causes are so important? Why do we fear or destroy people who don’t share our beliefs? Why can’t we see how alone and dependent we are on each other? Why can’t we see the big picture and understand what is important?
A couple of things happened this week to bring my college thinking to mind. The first was an E-mail Kathy sent me about the size of earth compared to other planets and the sun and then went on to compare the sun with other stars until our sun was the size of 1 pixel on the screen when compared with other stars.
Next I read a couple articles in an old National Geographic. They are related because they both are about intelligent life, distance and time. The whale hole story was sad. Apparently weather conditions in the arctic can cause all the openings in the ice to close in a short time span. In this instance only one small hole through the ice was available for these beluga whales to breath. The closest open water was 8 miles away, far too distant for the whales to reach. So the whales that found this hole were trapped in this location. The picture in the magazine showed a hole roughly 50 ft in diameter full of whales vying for air. I wondered how many whales never found a hole and suffocated. The whale hole was a bounty for polar bears. The bears feasted on the whales at will and had eaten so much that they could go for a full year with no food if necessary with the body fat they had stored. Still the bears continued to feast. The whales were stuck. This was the only place to get the air they needed.
The second story was about intelligent life in the universe and the vast distance that isolates us and eliminates any possibility of contact with other intelligent beings assuming they exist. If you use Carl Sagan’s estimate of 1 million technical civilizations in our galaxy alone then even if they could travel 10 million mph it would still take 300 yrs to reach us from the nearest star system. So like the whales we are all stuck here together.
We don’t have bears devouring us. We seem to do a good job of that all by ourselves.
The second story was about intelligent life in the universe and the vast distance that isolates us and eliminates any possibility of contact with other intelligent beings assuming they exist. If you use Carl Sagan’s estimate of 1 million technical civilizations in our galaxy alone then even if they could travel 10 million mph it would still take 300 yrs to reach us from the nearest star system. So like the whales we are all stuck here together.
We don’t have bears devouring us. We seem to do a good job of that all by ourselves.
Last night 60 minutes did a story about the genocide in Rwanda. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/30/60minutes/main2218371.shtml
We’ve had Conquerors, kings, inquisitions, jihads, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing and wars too numerous to mention. Like many back in 1969 I thought that the sight of the earth from space would be an epiphany for the world. We would see our beautiful, fragile, little blue planet and want to do whatever necessary to preserve and protect our planet and make everyone’s life better– even if it meant we had to get along with one another. I was young and more idealistic back then - and dead wrong.
We’ve had Conquerors, kings, inquisitions, jihads, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing and wars too numerous to mention. Like many back in 1969 I thought that the sight of the earth from space would be an epiphany for the world. We would see our beautiful, fragile, little blue planet and want to do whatever necessary to preserve and protect our planet and make everyone’s life better– even if it meant we had to get along with one another. I was young and more idealistic back then - and dead wrong.
So here we are stuck in our little “whale hole” hoping for a spring thaw.
No comments:
Post a Comment