Truth vs Happiness pt2 of 2

This is the conclusion of the previous article.

Imagine if you will you are in Greece, during the fall of the Roman Empire in the 4^th century. You are a slave. You have not eaten in two days. You work day and night to please your master at your own expense. There is no hope for the future. You are uneducated and your lifespan is typically not going past thirty five years if you’re lucky. You don’t know if the earth is flat, if the earth is the center of the universe. You have no family. They were either sold off, dead, and even worse. You have no explanation of why you are here, let alone the constant threat of death. You stare up at the stars, the clear black skies and yearn for a reason for being.

You are told of Christianity, told you mean something, told there is a place for you after death. You are promised everything. Imagine you are in a world where nothing good happens and finally, something good happens. A man bearing a cross around his neck hands you a loaf of bread. Christianity seems to hold a lot more merit now. You give Jesus and god credit for these good deeds. You feel happier now in this place. You never once question it as just the will of those men. You never think that they get something out of it. So it was that Christianity won the hearts of the peasants that greatly outnumbered the elite and wealthy.

Christians like to point out all the good they do now. When in this time if you were as I am or if you were a pagan the argument was “Oh you don’t agree with me?” Then they kill you. The fact they do not have this power now, this means that one day even they will die out as superstition or as all the other false gods that rule us. I dream that one day man will not be so hubris to think him so special, a day that we rise up from the chains that we do shackle ourselves with.

I like Christopher Hitchens and many others think that some people have this desire to be controlled. To have the burden of choice removed, that there is a desire to have this. You have to completely think this through. A presence that is capable of reading every one of your thoughts, observing your actions, and interfering in your life. Then there is a question of how many of them are there and which is which? Questions like why would a god favor one race, why would he damn woman, homosexuals, and everyone else in this book written not by him but man. Why appear after roughly ninety thousand years. Why abandon everyone during the dark ages. Until you finally get to a point where all the evidence is pointing to there being no god. You hold on to shreds as if you lost them from your hands you would die.

Then a depression sets in as you realize that you have spent years of your life shouting at nothing. Your brain makes the illusion come alive, so the body may survive. You come to terms with the fact that the universe is ultimately vast beyond the measure of our brains. You come to live your life to its fullest. You give up your fear of death, thinking it didn’t bother me the fourteen billion years I was dead why would it bother me after? You figure out that matter can be made from nothing. You observe that science can explain these things much better than this first attempt. With all this in mind you are one of the many who have freed their mind. For man has fought a long time for this one idea.

Truth vs Happiness pt1(of2)

Hey everyone this article will be a little off the standard I seem to be using and talk about a clash all of us have to deal with in our life. I am talking about the clash between Happiness and Truth.

Throughout my life I have been highly skeptical of everything I am told that tends to be in any way superstition, such as religion, luck, and now karma. I was born in the politically far right Alabama. I have had to struggle to develop my own opinion of things. For instance you could say I was a closet case liberal atheist for nineteen years. (I am nineteen now.) Until a few months ago I had no real name to give my opinions no label. Before then, I would have classified myself as an agnostic republican. This was before when I couldn’t really verbalize my political beliefs. Now it seems everyone is born an atheist, raised Christian, then born again atheist.

I like to ask friends what it is exactly they believe in and the more educated the more inquisitive the individual the harder it is for them to conform to the natural or what use to be natural ideologies. I doubt I could walk into an American senior classroom today and ask is anyone one hundred percent certain there is a god, he’s the Christian one and not Thor, Allah, or Zeus, and you are republican. It seemed more like what is everyone else, where is the group at. I don’t want to be left out from the norm. They never took the issues and said “Well I think that there is nothing wrong with stem cell research” and realize they aren’t republican. They never look at the stories in the bible or the sheer number of religions and develop the opinion well “I cannot prove there is no god but I would say the probability is between zero and one.” So it seems more like in the absence of an opinion it is easier to just go with the group or family.

You should do this, take the list of issues. Pick out which stance you agree with. Tally it all up with Republican on the right and liberal on the left and moderate the middle and see which one has the most issues and that tends to be what you really are. You would be shocked or I should say you might be shocked, of what you really are. Not to mention the question is there a god? You should really research this. Watch Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennet, and Sam Harris. Then watch and read some of the mythologies of the other cultures and decide for yourself with a non-bias approach what you really are. I was literally shocked at myself what I really am.

One thing you should know is that when you are choosing between well should I just settle for the “Ignorance is bliss” and be happy where I am, or should I really just push for the truth. Should you reach deep into the depths of your personality to bring up what makes you who you are. When I discovered the size of the universe, how insignificant I was, at first of course I was sad. Then I finally was happy with that. I say this thinking of the Christian argument that well look how depressing non religion is. Most respond that we don’t use that in our decisions which one I am happy with.

If you don’t believe me, that the less questions people ask the more they just conform to the group there in, just look at the people around you ask them what they are and decide for yourself. I would actually prefer you to question everything I say.

I realize this week’s article is only a page. That’s because I am doing a two part of this, expect another one on Wednesday. I am going to be gone all weekend visiting a college.

The Abyss

This week’s article I will be focusing on black holes. It is the first day of spring and I felt like doing a fun one. 

“I admire our ancestors, whoever they were. I think the first self-conscious person must have shaken in his boots. Because as he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature. He sees himself against nature. He looks at the vastness of the universe and it looks hostile.” -John Shelby Spong

Many of you know what you are taught in schools when a star dies it either causes a super nova or some stars become so dense that they form what is known as a black hole. Sucking in everything and not even light can escape them. You are going to learn a whole lot more than that if you keep reading. 

Actually our galaxy the Milky Way has a super massive black hole at the center of it. Black holes form when a star that started off around 20 times bigger than our sun, has reached the end of its life. The star begins to form iron in its core. At this point a star has little time left. In matter of seconds, gravity starts to crash down on the now red giant. It either collapses into a super dense black hole or flings out all of its mass into an explosion known as a super nova.

We think that most galaxies have a black hole in the center and they are prevalent though out the universe. Some shoot out big streams of energy, some sling shot mass out from it.  They are like the packman of space they have to constantly gobble up mass if they do not they explode horrifically.

Super massive black holes in some theories have been given credit for heating up the early universe so that stars could form. All black holes like almost everything in space emit radiation so I wouldn’t plan on shooting off to one in a ship any time soon. There are some who even theorize that black holes don’t even let time escape them.

Another question many people ask is what is in a black hole? Well basically you have to imagine a fabric that you keep piling up things onto like gas and dust, eventually it gets so heavy that gravity causes it to form into a super dense point that typically explodes but if it has enough mass to hold without blowing up it becomes a black hole. As you know large objects in space attract things like moons, gas, and asteroids. A black hole is no different.

In terms of size, black holes are biblical. The smallest known black hole is about 15 miles in diameter and 3.8 times the mass of our sun. The biggest known black hole is m87(pictured right) a monster capable of gobbling up our entire galaxy. Containing 6.6 billion times the mass of our sun, which is 1.98892 × 10³⁰ kilograms. It is thought to lie about 50 million light years away thankfully. 1 light year is almost 6 trillion miles over the course of one earth year. 

I hope you enjoyed reading about this weeks topic. If you have any suggestions you know where to reach me.

 

Life

Life thrives almost everywhere on the planet. In this article, I will explore and describe the various forms of life, its definition, and if you could expect to find it on other planets.

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”

-Albert Einstein

Great words, from a great man. Most of the modern marvels we have today, you have nature to thank for. If it wasn’t from nature, then it was inspired by nature. Scientist have observed nature and all its feats and so far only tried to imitate it. One day we will learn how to surpass and even create it. Until that day comes we should preserve nature, and study it for the benefit of all.

The journey for life, has taken scientist to many unexpected places. Such as the Dead Sea, this was once thought to be “dead” due to the high salinity. Recently microbial life was found at its depth’s. The Dead Sea has no plant or animal life, because of the high volume of salt and minerals. It has become a shining example of how resilient life can be.

We have even found life in a poison to us, arsenic. When searching for life on other worlds, we used examples such as this to make a template for life. Predators will have eyes on the front of their head; herbivores tend to have them on the side to see predators coming. Arms and legs are a must for land based creatures, legs are useless for amphibians. Complex life has been known to exist in up to 150 degrees Fahrenheit and with low temperatures the less complex the creature tends to be. Pressure never seems to be an issue; we have found life 7 miles under the ocean in a place called the Challenger Deep.

Once we have collected all these rules to go by, we first look at the right star; the planet has to be in the goldilocks zone and all that is in place. The trouble with the goldilocks zone is that it moves from star type to star type based on a number of variables. Then we go there with robots to find out if were right. The hope is to finally once and for all solve the question of are we the only one of our kind. A lot of things have been made up, or even wild guesses thrown out in an attempt to answer this one question.  To some it may seem pointless, or a waste of money. To others we see the profit in knowledge in solving our own existence and even advancing our technology for the common man.

Some places we think there might be life or they was once life include but are not limited to, Mars(so many links to pick from), Titan, Europa, Gliese 581c, and various other locations. The fabled Alpha Centari though is likely to be a bone dry system due to no gas giant to cast comet’s to the inner solar system.

As for how we ended up on our rocky planet, we may never know. Thanks for reading

-Adam Boozer

Clean Energy

“We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.” - Jimmy Carter

In this week’s article I’ll be talking about clean, efficient, and cheaper forms of energy.

              

  Right now in the United States we buy most of our oil from the Middle East. The area itself is a dry dessert that was once a paradise, the decayed plant life developed into oil. These are a people who are almost in a constant state of war, very poor where electricity is a luxury and the wealthy prey on the ignorant. Every time the Middle East is thrown into disarray our oil prices go up and many lose their jobs because it. Saudi Arabia is where we buy most of our oil from. They have plenty of oil; we drill some from the gulf and off the coast of Alaska. We don’t drill further off the coast because of the environmental risk, made very clear with the Gulf spill.

 

Currently the United States has been pushing for cleaner forms of energy, mainly due to a liberal office. Our first step was to make use of Wind Energy. We utilize wind energy by putting up wind turbines. Wind turbine’s work a lot like the hydro turbines. Gases behave a lot like water and flowing currents. The air flows through the turbine spinning the blade; from there kinetic energy is then transferred into electric. 

 

We could also use solar power.  Calculators, some cars, and homes currently use solar power. They do not work at night; have a high price that pays for itself in the end. With recent advances we can put solar panels on water, around round objects, building windows, roof tops, and pretty much anywhere the imagination leads you too. If you generate enough power, you can actually sell it back to the electric company. Solar power, wind, and hydro, are all forms of energy we can have within 5-10 years. Bio fuels, fusion, and so on would take a long time to develop, which tends to be what oil companies like BP want.

After we have finally begun to compete with the big bunch in clean energy we will be doing much better. Without having to  worry about having enough fuel we can start worrying about helping the Middle East, rather than hurt them by being their crutch. I can only imagine how much better a place it would be if they started working on other industries rather than oil. Even if we do stop our reliance on them we could still have a use for it.