Nightmares and Dreamscapes

My most recurring nightmare is being stranding submerged in the darkness of the deep ocean. I am terrified not because I cannot breath but because I am in a strange environment. I look around and can see deep into the nothingness, there is only a faint glow of bluish sunlight . That and one other thing is there with me, the shadows. Huge shadows roam about, slow and steady below me, below me and away from light. It paralyzes me with amazing fear. They are alien. Not ET alien, ET is a known, seen it a thousand times. No, it’s not a whale or even a menacing shark but it’s something else. All I can see are it’s huge eyes, dead and unblinking.
It gets closer.
Closer and I feel it against my feet. It’s skin is thick and rough. There is nowhere to go, and I try desperately to implode out of my skin. I want to leave. There is a real world out there, and it’s full of light and smiles, not dead eyes and darkness. It’s pulling me further down. The light is gone. It is completely black around me. The blackness of space and nothingness. I wish it was space but I know they are all around me. Another bumps into me, uncaringly, unknowingly.
And I wake up.
These are my subconscious fears and terrors. But what is it really? It’s fear of the unknown. But what is really known? Think of the cuttlefish. Cute name but completely and utterly alien.
The cuttlefish looks like Martian sea life. It even has greenish blue blood. This is because it uses copper to transport oxygen instead of iron like we do in our hemoglobin. It has three hearts, two pump blood to its two gills and another to the rest of the body. It’s eye is totally different from all vertebrates, pursuing its own independent line of evolution. It focuses not by reshaping the lens (like us) but reshaping the entire eye like the focus of a camera. They can change to almost any color, mimic any pattern (even dynamic ones) and imitate even texture. They are very intelligent (by product of the brain power needed to run the skin colors) and can learn from conditioning, even through observation.


Next month we go diving in the Caribbean waters off Belize. I am both excited and terrified. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Miracles

If you think about it, the most interesting place in the solar system is… Earth, hands down. It is home to to a level complexity and organization that is simply unfathonable. I mean compared to the deserts of Mars or the clouds of Jupiter, Earth is like finding a jumbo jet full of ipods in the middle of the Sahara. (Another amazing thing is is it got there because that’s just what sand does given enough time, but I’ll talk more about that later.)
That analogy doesn’t do it justice though, not in the slightest. Biolgical diversity and complexity is.. well it’s unreal. Your brain alone has… get this.. no you can’t, and neither can I but it’s 500 trillion connections. The number is higher at a younger age topping 1*10^15 or 1 quadrillion connections at age 3. This number is over 71 thousand times the age of the universe in years. And that’s the age of well, everything. And it’s more than the number of stars in our galaxy. 10,000 times the number of stars in our galaxy.
We are each a miracle in the truest sense of the word.

Science as ephiphany

Ok, I've decided to start posting to this blog again! I got a new iphone so I've been in a very social media kind of mood.

I'm a nerd and proud of it. I bought a DVD of a lecture by Richard Dawkins done in 1991. I saw the first hour of it this evening and it was very good. It's called Growing Up in the Universe and is part of an annual series of Oxford Christmas lectures given first by Faraday. He used the term growing up in the universe to refer both to humanity's evolution over millions of years and to our own personal understanding of science and nature. He does a great job in conveying the wonder of the natural world. He even starts out by using a surprisingly effective metaphor with what else but my favorite man made object... a space ship.
He says imagine stepping into a spaceship bound for some far off star system. You'd go into a freeze or sleep for millions of years and then step out onto the surface of an alien planet. But behold, the planet is brimming with life... countless plants and animals. Birds and fish and all types of extraordinary wildlife. Well, that's kind of like what has happened here, with us. We have been asleep for millions of years only to wake up to a beautiful world. It really is amazing and in all too short a time we have to close our eyes again. How lucky we are to see it, don't you think?