The sound of wind on another planet gives me shivers. The emptiness makes me uneasy. It sounds so desolate. So dark and gloomy. So poetic. I love it. Having said that, there could very well be a tiny little alien jerking off right behind the camera.
Space
Remember us
Whenever I see a religious statue pop up on a busy street, I feel like we’ve failed as an “intelligent” species, but then again, there exists, a gigantic, Titanium statue of Yuri Gagarin (the first human to travel to outer space), and that thing looks killer! The only difference between the two is that one’s a little less unnecessary than the other. Plus, now we know where to go when the aliens strike. Yuri is going to burst out of that Titanium armour and do some Avengers-style shit.
Best things I’ve heard this week
- “How come we can put a rover on Mars but I can’t get decent Wi-Fi on a Delta flight?”-Sean Evans
- “The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”– Neil DeGrasse Tyson
- “There’s a reason why you get the best burgers from local fast-food joints and not from big fast-food chains. -Curiosity
I wish I had said the last one during a meeting or something, to prove a point. Hell, I would have got a standing ovation for that. But no, I came up with that while eating a burger. Dammit.
The meaning of life
My aunt is the youngest of five children. I’ve heard my mom say that she was a little ‘different’ right from the beginning. She was a curious, open minded, no-bull-shit, type of person. She had a progressive outlook towards everything. Most importantly, she always got me the coolest presents for Christmas. She worked hard and settled down in the United States of America. She would come visit us every now and then. I used to enjoy talking to her about the cultural differences, education system, religion and society in general. The last time she came to visit, she brought up the topic of race. It appeared as though she was having trouble with a certain ‘race’ of people. She said,” I am a firm believer in equality but something definitely needs to be done about ‘these’ people”. It was at this moment that the voice in my head went, “Uh-oh, this bitch racist”. But with love. I gave it a lot of thought. How could someone like my aunt be racist? How can such a caring, open-minded and forward-thinking person be so fucked up? Most importantly, how do I make her realize her mistake while still maintaining the influx of Christmas presents?
Imagine you have the ability to fly. You decide to go for a ride. You go straight up through the roof of your house. When you look down, at first, you will see your house, maybe some familiar faces, trees, mountains, etc. As you go higher, you will start to see not-so-familiar places, familiar shapes of countries, continents until suddenly, poof! After a few layers of clouds, everything you have ever seen will fit into a tiny blue ball called Earth. Make sure you don’t fly away like Sandra Bullock in Gravity. Speaking of Sandra Bullock, damn! she’s attractive. According to the great Carl Sagan, the Earth, when viewed from so far away, makes one think about how insignificant we are in the awesomeness that is the universe. The time frame of our very existence on the planet shows us how irrelevant we are in the history of Earth itself. It makes you wonder. What’s the point of all this anger, envy and hate? When the camera zooms out and shows the Earth shrink into nothing but a pale blue dot, you suddenly realize that we are one big family.
Now, the problem with viewing everything from outer space is that everything you’ve ever known starts to drop in value! One would wonder what’s the point of anything. Who knows? Maybe in a billion years our whole galaxy will cease to exist. Then what’s the point? Even if that were the case, I wouldn’t want to die a bad person. I want to be good to everyone. People often say “don’t you want to be remembered for doing something great?” Honestly I don’t give a fuck if people don’t remember me. What really matters is that I want to die with a feeling of accomplishment, a feeling of happiness. And being nice to people is the way to do it. Let me explain by taking it a step further.
Lets imagine you make an effort to help better someone’s life. It could be a friend, a neighbour or even a total stranger. By helping them out you might actually end up changing their life. Who knows? They might do the same thing for someone else. This cycle might continue even after your death. In short, your good gesture might transcend the boundaries of space and time. Isn’t that mind-blowing? I’ve heard scientists say that gravity can ‘travel’ through space and time(this is the cue for all the interstellar nerds to start jizzing their pants). So, is an act of kindness as powerful as an elemental force of nature, like gravity? If each one of us wields such awesome power, then why don’t we just create meaning for our lives instead of so desperately trying to find it?
Brace yourselves. They’re here.
The BBC uploaded a UFO sighting video on YouTube today. I was surprised to see that it was only the 35th one in the list of trending videos. I guess people are more concerned about important Earthly matters. I get it. Even I was concerned about why Green Lantern wasn’t in the new Justice League movie. I really felt let down.
Usually people go crazy about UFO sightings when its caught on a shitty camera and uploaded by someone named “UFO hunter 32”. Now we have legit footage and no one gives a shit.
I had a funny thought. Suppose the UFO was actually identified as a extra-terrestrial vehicle, I don’t think people would still give a shit unless it affects them directly. Don’t get me wrong. I am not a big fan of UFO conspiracies. According to ma man Neil deGrasse Tyson, the “U” in UFO stands for “unidentified”. That’s where your discussion should stop. It would be wrong to say “I just saw a UFO. I think it was aliens”(which is exactly what they say at the end of the video. Pretty ironic).
So they say the event took place in 2004, there was a government body investigating such events, it could be countries spying on each other, the UFO seen in the video was manoeuvring itself with such ease while conventional aircraft would find it difficult to do so under such high wind speeds, blah blah blah. I am just like everyone else. Deep down, I would be really excited if there was evidence to prove that some of these are actually visitors from outer space. I have so many questions for them.
First of all, where do you come from?
Do you know who/what made us?
Our planet is dying. Can you help us?
Is it weird that I wish to watch climate change deniers get struck by gigantic bolts of lightning?
What happens after one dies? Is it nothingness or is there something more?
What is your opinion about the Marvel/DC universe?
At the same time, the whole idea also scares the hell outta me. Because obviously one would wonder if they come in peace or ready-to-fuck. If they have the capability to make the inter-planetary trip, they have got to be much more technologically advanced than us. However, in all honesty, do you know what’s much more scarier than all of this? Unemployment.
The Power of Thoughts
Adaptive biological reprogramming, a.k.a. “evolution”(I made that up) gave us the power to think. No one asked for it. It was gifted to us by ourselves. Despite wielding the awesome power of thought, we still do not know where we come from. It shows how complex nature really is. Pictures of Earth taken from outer space have shown us how insignificant we are in the awesomeness that is the universe. The time frame of our very existence shows us how irrelevant we are in the history of Earth itself. It makes you wonder. What’s the point of all this anger, envy and hate? When the camera zooms out and shows the Earth shrink into nothing but a pale blue dot, you suddenly realize that we are but one big family. In the process, we also learn another surprising truth: WE ARE NOT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE. Literally!
The fact that we have begun to understand our place in the universe leads me to believe that we might not be that dumb after all! We may not be “special” but we are participants of a great cosmic journey. In the words of Carl Sagan, “We are all made of ‘star stuff’ “. The ingredients that make up the stars are the very same ones found in our body. We are part of the universe. I think that is super cool. We are not perfect. We find cures for disease yet fail to realize that we are the cause of many of them. But we are curious wanderers. We sent our kind into space. We reverse engineered from the present and found clues that lead back to the beginning of the unverse a.k.a wait for it… The Big Bang! We study our own behaviour! We help each other. We do not need a “meaning” for life, we create it for ourselves. Through the universe, we realize that it is not always about “me” but it is about “us”. I think we are awesome. Hi five yourself.
The day I left Earth
I woke up to find myself lying on a lawn in front of someone’s house. I got up to leave but upon seeing something, I suddenly I lost the ability to move my body. You see, a shiny block of metal gently flew down from the sky. It levitated above the lawn. It was about my size and rectangular in shape. No sound. Just the wind, a few birds and leaves. I touched it. It felt cold. I stepped on it. It wobbled a bit. I stood on top of it to see if it was stable. Surprisingly, it was!. It started to rise. I didn’t feel scared though. I didn’t try to get down. It went up slowly. As soon as the trees started to look small I grew scared and stopped looking down. I saw the clouds pass by. It rained a little bit. The floor became slippery. The wind grew stronger and the block started to wobble. So I lay face down and grabbed the sides tightly. Now what could possibly happen that could be worse than the current situation? Things started to get a little worse when the block all of a sudden decided to flip upside down. So now I am desperately trying to hang on while having a panic attack. It felt like all of this was a big mistake. I wanted to go back. I wanted to see my mom.
Somehow I managed to climb back on top of the frikking block. I was so tired that I lay there for a few minutes. Only then did I notice that it had turned dark and I could see the stars. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel scared anymore. I felt eager to see what was outside this world. I wanted to see the gigantic stars up lose. So I lay there waiting. But the block kept going and going. I started to get impatient. I looked back down. I did not like what I saw. I was so caught up in the excitement that I had entirely forgot the fact that I was leaving behind my world. My home was gone. It had faded away into the darkness. I’ll be honest. At this point I really really wanted to go back to my apartment, watch a nice movie and go to bed. I didn’t care if I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t care if I wasn’t getting a raise. I didn’t care if I was stuck in a shitty part of the world. I wanted my boring life back. I just wanted to go home.
I fell asleep but woke up soon after to find that the block had stopped moving. The stars still looked like they were far away. I was so sad that I tried to reach out to them. To my surprise, they began to move. Like dust in the air, they moved with a wave of my hand. I could almost touch them but they were too light. They kept slipping out of my hand. They had shrunk to the size of tiny grains of sand. I found myself enveloped in darkness and in my hand were tiny stars. I thought to myself,
“WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? SOMEONE WAKE ME UP! WAKE ME UP!”
What’s the next step?
Let me first make one thing clear. I love space. I am fascinated by it and I can’t stop thinking about it. Maybe its because I feel like I don’t belong here. Any way… in spite of my fascination with the unknown, I don’t know anything about it! I haven’t read any books about it nor have I tried to study it. All the information I’ve gathered is from watching scientists talk on YouTube.
What intrigues me is the general public’s disinterest in space and space exploration. If you go up to a person on the road and ask him what he thinks about space and the importance of space exploration, this is probably the answer you would get-“There’s a sun and planets revolve around it. We have a moon going around us too. No one really knows for sure what goes on out there. We’ve got more problems here on Earth to deal with”. And I totally agree with this. We’ve got a hell of a lot problems here. There is suffering, pain, injustice, torture, climate change, overpopulation, poverty, unemployment, crime, disease, etc. They are all very worrisome. A normal person would ask why the hell should we spend money and put in effort for space exploration if it has no guaranteed results? Instead, why don’t we solve the problems here on Earth that might have practical solutions?
I’ve asked myself these questions several times. There are fundamental questions that each and every one of us have in our minds. Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? From what I understand, the answers to these questions lie out there in space. I don’t think meditation is going to give us the answer! The amazing thing is that we make discoveries all along the way. Necessity is the mother of all inventions. You will be amazed to see how space exploration has indirectly affected our lives. Most of the technology that we use on a daily basis have been developed based on the research undertaken for space exploration. Read about it here.
It is said that life began in water. Then it moved onto land. It started to crawl, walk , hell! it even began to fly! That’s all good. Here’s what’s bothers me though. What if the fish never left the water? What if the aquatic animals decided to better their living conditions rather than trying to move into land? How different would the world be? Are we still fish in a pond and just don’t realize it yet? What if the next step in evolution is out there in space?
We’ve been told in science class that we live on a planet that revolves around the sun. We’ve also been told that planets, stars and other celestial bodies are “moving” in space. I accepted all these things because I was child. But I never stopped thinking about it. Just “floating” in space wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to know how and why. What surprises me is that everyone else in my class was fine with this vague explanation. Not me. I don’t understand how people can just blindly believe what they are taught in class and not want to know more about it. How can one not be curious about the cosmos?
This is why I admire travellers. I think they follow the gut instinct without any hesitation. They work hard to experience the unknown. They have no boundaries. They are the real explorers. Can you believe that there are people willing to take one-way trips to outer space? Curiosity has no limits. Curiosity rules!
Wander on my lonely friend
Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977. Part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System, Voyager 1 launched 16 days after its twin, Voyager 2. Having operated for 38 years, 11 months and 23 days, the spacecraft still communicates with the Deep Space Network to receive routine commands and return data. At a distance of 135 AU (2.02×1010 km) from the Sun as of June 2016, it is the farthest spacecraft from Earth. NASA says that “The Voyagers are destined—perhaps eternally—to wander the Milky Way.”
Source: Wikipedia
The Voyager spaceprobe is currently on the greatest journeys ever known to man. Yet I feel sad to see it go. I feel sad because it is never coming back. It is also kind of frightening. I imagine a man-made robot drifting in space, moving constantly in a direction opposite to home. How would you feel if you were travelling away from home knowing its a one-way ticket? How frightened would you be?
The thought of this lone traveller fascinates me. Being someone who is afraid to swim in a pool alone, the very thought of this piece of human creation floating alone out there gives me the shivers. Yet, it must have witnessed amazing things during its journey. Things words cannot describe. Who knows? It might see planets that contain life someday!
Random Thought Beam 