SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO

It was suggested recently that, in order to improve my happiness quotient, I should give myself something good to look forward to. A holiday, a day out, a visit to a test match or, at least, something that might be considered to be something enjoyable to do. It was a very good suggestion and I was very pleased that someone thought enough about my well-being to suggest it, and, if I ever do feel like I’m likely to get a moment in my life to consider getting away from it all for a little while, I might even very well consider such a thing.

But how can I…?

You might very well suggest that I need to get a sense of proportion over this, and, in all honesty, I’m likely to agree with you, but, in six billion years, this rock we’re all sitting on will probably just be dead world floating in space around a feeble sun, and nothing any of us have ever done ever will really matter very much. Granted, six billion years is a very long time, and I’m not really at all likely to be still around to worry about it, but, just occasionally, when you start to think about the bigger picture and suchlike, it really does make you wonder what we’re all doing with our lives when nothing we ever do can possibly ever matter or make any real difference to anything.

Whether that’s something that should affect any of those little daily decisions we all make is of course debateable. One of the things that we should all try as we flit through our lives in the blink of an eye is to try at the very least to do no harm and try to make the experiences of those who share this planet with us at the same time as us as pleasant as it is possible for us to do. That and, oh, I don’t know, maybe find some time to enjoy ourselves every once in a while. So, while we all give some thought as to quite how we’re all going to do that, here are a few other things to think about.

As human beings we do like to think that we’ve made our mark on things, but we really do struggle with our geological timescales. In pretty much the whole history of mankind, most of our landscape, barring the odd earthquake and volcano, has seemed to be fairly constant and laughably even considered to be “steady as a rock”. We know an awful lot now about plate tectonics and continental drift and how the world is constantly changing, but for all of  recorded human history, our world and our maps to move around within that world have appeared to be essentially much the same.

However, in geological terms we will all one day be gone and totally forgotten, without making hardly a mark, unseen and unknown of by a cold, cold, universe, and with all our understanding of it gone with us. What is there of the human world that we currently occupy that we can say with any real certainty will still exist in a million or a billion years time? None of our engineering or architecture, none of our records or technology, maybe not even any of our bones will survive the crushing turmoil of the planet as it smashes and recreates its own crust. Maybe the odd sliver of rock somewhere folded in all the various strata will give a faint clue that mankind was once here, maybe the faintest of traces of an excess of carbon in one thin line in the stones will be all that will tell the universe that there was ever something approaching a civilisation here.

It makes you think, doesn’t it? It puts a lot of our daily little struggles and worries in some sort of perspective. Perhaps that’s one of the problems with having a sense of proportion. The vast bulk of time against our individual little flickers of existence seems awfully big in comparison.

While we’re all thinking about that rather humbling bigger picture, I should also point out that I’m still struggling with the notion of the directionality of deep time. If I can look far enough in one direction to see light that is from the residue of the big bang, what if I look the other way…? Surely I could see the deep future…? If I can look far enough to see the big bang, and that bang went in all directions at once, what’s to be seen on the other side of it? I know that these thoughts of mine are all probably nonsense, by the way, due to our relative position constantly being in a state of flux, but it’s just the kind of thing that keeps me awake at nights.

I know, I know, why don’t I just worry about how to pay the bills…? Well, I do that as well, of course, and I’m still trying to come up with a unified theory that might convince the gas and electricity companies that, as I was essentially formed from the same stuff as the products that they try to sell to me, and I inhabit the same universe as it, surely it already belongs to me and therefore they shouldn’t be able to sell me what is essentially already mine and trying to make fiscal gain out of selling me back my own kin seems somehow ghoulish.

I have yet to convince them.

Behold!
The second law
of thermodynamics!
Again.

Then, of course, there’s that constant niggling worry that if universal descent into nothingness is inevitable, due to entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, what is the point of getting up in the morning? Entropy’s going to get you in the end, that’s apparently mathematically inevitable, so everything else in the universe can seem pretty pointless from time to time (whatever that is…). Granted it’s one hell of a long way into the far future, but then, if past, present and future can all be seen simultaneously, then it could be as soon as teatime today. Relatively speaking, of course. I’m not advocating that you should eat everything in the cupboards now just to stop it from going to waste.

As well as all that, there’s the lightspeed constant to think about. If some light is going one way at the speed of light, and another beam heads off in precisely the opposite direction at the speed of light, then as far as that individual particle is concerned, it’s particle pal is running away from it at a relative speed of twice the speed of light which is of course impossible, which is when the mathematics of slow-time comes into play and my mind, which is pretty uneducated in these matters, explodes in its own kind of big bang. Crikey! When you’re lying awake thinking about this kind of stuff, the morning seems a heck of a long way away, and the faster you try to think, the further away it will seem. Or is that nearer…? That one always confuses me…

I still think that it’s interesting to keep on pondering about pseudo-scientific stuff. Even if my knowledge of it is fairly uneducated, half-learned and ill-informed, I still get a lot of satisfaction out of thinking about these matters. All that misunderstanding, it really does help to keep me awake at nights. Perhaps, instead of just lying there and worrying, I should just get up and read a book about it all to get everything straight in my mind, although, I suspect that really would give me something to worry about.

Perhaps I do need a holiday after all…