It just occurred to me that millions (billions?) of people may have the wrong idea about global warming and its repercussions.

Many people seem to associate global warming with the temperature outside at any given moment.  ”What’s the big deal?  It’s 70 degrees today and 90 degrees tomorrow.  I can handle 20 degrees just fine.  Why should I care if the Earth heats up two or three degrees?”

This is totally and completely wrong.

The Earth is like your body.  Your body operates at an average temperature of 98.6^o.  If your body temperature goes up a degree, you are sick, and if it goes up too much, even just a couple/few degrees, you will die.

The Earth is very similar, although it won’t be the Earth that dies, it will be thousands/millions/billions of humans and large percentages of species.

When environmentalists speak of the interconnectivity of all living things, they are not speaking metaphorically or spiritually.  That are speaking in reality.

Earth’s average daily temperature (the health temperature that we are used to living in), is 75 degrees.  That is the average temperature of every place on Earth combined for any given day.  Scientists say that the Earth has warmed 7/8s of 1 degree over the last one hundred years.

Basically, the Earth already has a light fever.  The predictions of climate scientist are coming true and are happening as scientists began saying they were going to happen 30 years ago.  Over the next century, depending on what those of us living do over the next decade, the global average temperature will increase anywhere from 2 to 11.5 degrees.

This is the equivalent of the kind of fever that would kill any particular individual.

Ultimately, over thousands/millions/billions of years, the Earth will be fine – it’s humanity and our way of life that is at stake.

The bottom line is that the Earth already has a light fever, and because of heat currently stored in the ocean, will have a fever for quite a long time…our only hope at this time is to mitigate the damage.

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As readers of DaddyHogwash.com know, I am simply a novice philosopher…sort of like a fantasy football player is an athlete; so, as I think of things, they are revelations to me, but may be well known to others.  This is probably the case with the following little bit on the existence of nothing….

All “things” that we think we know about “anything,” as well as the language used to describe those “things” is based on the observational senses that we believe we have.

Even the previous sentence, as well as this one – and all to follow – are only legible to a subsection of our species and is the result of thousands of years of the additive and cumulative collaboration of all “knowledge” “known” to humanity at this point in “time.”

Occasionally I write about the exploding Earth thought experiment.  Basically, imagine for a second that Earth exploded now and no living organism survived the explosion.  Based on the current limits of our knowledge, as far as we “know,” there are no living things anywhere else in the area that we call our universe.  (As they say in the movie Contact, the fact that we (meaning all life on Earth) are the only life in the universe seems like such an awful waste of space.  Nevertheless, that is all we know for now.)

The result of the exploding Earth thought experiment is that nothing would be left to observe in any way, shape, or form, the existence of everything, en essence, making everything…nothing.

The reverse of that idea is that the reason why anything exists at all is because we are here to observe it.

For some foundation, consider the following:

The universe exists in our minds.  Yes.  The universe exists in our reality as well, but only as we see it in our minds.  And what is our mind?  Our mind is essentially a biological data storage of all of our observations and our experiences.

Imagine for a moment that someone removed your brain from your head and sliced off the front 1/8 of the matter with a quick swipe of a blade and placed it back in your head…only 7/8s of its original mass.  Assuming your body continues to function, what is left is someone or something that is unrecognizable to anyone who previously knew you, and what is now your universe has changed drastically.  Your observations and experiences are forever altered, your ability to think rationally is likely destroyed, and all that is left is a biological mass of nonsensical data.  The universe, as it once was to you, no longer exists.  It is nothing.

Think for a moment from the perspective of a single instance of bacteria under your toenail.  The relevance of the “world” outside of your toenail to that instance of bacteria is as insignificant to it as the concept of what is outside of our universe is to us; or better yet, as what came before the conversion from energy to matter (what we think of classically as the big bang) is to us.

Now back to the exploding Earth and the elimination of all known life in what we define as our universe.  In order for something to exist, by our classical definition of existence, it has to be observed.  If the Earth were to explode, then no conscious being would be left to observe the universe, therefore rendering the universe into nothing.  To take this one step further, conscious life is how something is made out of nothing and how nothing is made out of something.

Collectively, all of the minds on Earth (think back to the 1/8th brain removal) would disappear in an instant.  All observable “knowledge” would disappear right along with it.

If Earth exploded, the rest of the Universe would disappear right along with it…in to a state of nothingness.

“One life; a glimpse of time between two realities.” – Thomas Carlyle

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As far as I know, it is not possible not to change.  By the very definition of space and time, change happens all of the time.  People get older.  Some fight it with cosmetic surgery and creams, but in the end, it is a battle that can not be won.  At some point, our state of existence will take a different form and convert itself in to different forms of energy, none of which will likely be the consciousness of who we think we are as individuals.

But back to Earth for a little bit.  The bits of energy that are sitting before a computer screen reading this at the moment (you,) are part of a local area, which is part of a larger entity, which is part of a larger entity, which is part of a larger entity, which is a part of the solar system, which is a part of the Milky Way, which is a part…yes, yes, back to Earth.

Anyway, so much has changed with society (the global society of which we all belong) on Earth in the last fifty years that requires a sort of 21st Century period of enlightenment.  While many have a feeling or a pretty good idea of how much is changing right before our lives, humanity, if we live through it, will look back on this period of our history with interest and amazement.  The sheer volume of change can not be understood by anyone alive at this moment because the world is changing so fast and in so many ways that we simply cannot keep up with this change as individuals.  It will take the 20/20 vision and understanding of these times from our descendants to look back and see just how much change is taking place.

However, here is what an individual living now can say for sure, “It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the way we are living as a society today will not suffice in the now, nor into the foreseeable future.  The way we once lived, and the things that worked for us in the past, in large part, has already begun to fail us.”

Yes, it is true that society, like all things, is in a constant state of change, but it is also true that throughout history, there are major advancements (or regressions) in society that can easily compartmentalized into an era.  For example; the Dark Ages, Ancient Greece, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Age, the Technological Revolution.

Who knows what this period in history will come to be known as, but I am pretty sure it has yet to be defined.  We are sitting on a precipice that feels unstable.  Very few people are comfortable in their current state of being and it seems as though most of the developed world is breaking up into two factions; 1. aggressive critical thinkers and 2. passive/status-quo denialists.  At some point, something is going to give between these two types of people alive in our world today and it is the side that tips the society scale in their favor that will define the future of humanity.

Unfortunately, the last 100 years have dictated which path we should follow, whether or not modern day humanity chooses that path or not is yet to be determined.  Our recent ancestors, and we ourselves, are in the midst of developing an untenable social and global environment for the well-being of all humanity, and space/time is running out…

RSA Animate is out with a new video that I believe summarizes this idea quite well.  Enjoy:

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I typically don’t think much of writing about my nonsensical dreams because they are, well…nonsense, but I just had a flashback to a dream I had last night.

Nothing amazing really except that I was standing next to someone (no idea who) and we were looking at a star in the sky that I “named” after my wife one year for a gift.  There were three stars in the vicinity.  Two brighter stars were on the left, and the star I named for my wife was dim and to the right.

I tried to explain to whoever it was standing next to me that the star to the right was named after my wife, “My Baby,” but that I couldn’t remember the scientific name.

“Oh, but wait!  Check this out!” I said excitedly.

I pulled out my Motorola Droid and loaded the Google Sky App and tried to explain to the person next to me as I lifted it to the sky that if I lined up the horizon line on the app with the actual horizon, we should be able to see the stars with their names.  As I pointed it up I could see the stars themselves on the app matching up with the sky, but there were no names.  ”Huh,” I heaved in disbelief.  ”It’s not showing the names.  I wonder what’s going on.”

I shook the phone a bit and put it back up in the sky, still no names.

One more time, voila!  Now my stars had names.  The screen was full of stars and names.  Names I appear to have completely made up on the spot in my brain.  ”See, this one is Olon.  This one here, next to my wife’s star is Aolon.  I still can’t see the scientific name of my wife’s star though.”

*Dream Over*

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Enjoy the latest installment of Mr. Deity…

YouTube – misterdeity’s Channel.

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The actual twitter feed can be found here: http://twitter.com/karlfrankjr

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As of late, the lunatic Glenn Beck has taken a liking to Thomas Paine, the American revolutionary who wrote Common Sense. Like most of our founding fathers, the revolutionaries were products of the Enlightenment.  The most famous of these founders were deist at least and atheist at most.  This includes James Madison, the father of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and Benjamin Franklin, the connector, maven, and salesman that made all of the pieces of our revolutionary spirit come together.

Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense which was the common language argument to the masses that persuaded the colonies that revolution was necessary.  Knowing the puritan heritage of the colonies, Paine, “structured the book like a sermon and relied on Biblical references to make the case to the people.” – Wikipedia

Biblical references were the necessary way of the day to frame the argument.  Enlightenment thinkers had no other way at the time to affect the masses in a way that was necessary to rally the revolutionary spirit.

Paine, however, was not a practicing Christian, although he was born in to a Quaker family, and later in his life finally “came out of the closet” with his book, Age of Reason.  According to Wikipedia, Paine took a stance in favor of deism, promoting reason and freethinking, while admonishing organized religion and Christianity.

In honor of Thomas Paine’s book, I intend to Tweet Age of Reason. Tweets from this book will start with TPAoR for Thomas Paine, Age of Reason.

You can follow my twitter feed here:

http://twitter.com/karlfrankjr

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Congress should think long and hard before tampering with this essential American principle embodied in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Approved by Congress in 1866 at the outset of Reconstruction and ratified two years later, the amendment establishes the principle of birthright citizenship. With minor exceptions, all persons born in this country are American citizens, whatever the status of their parents.

And for a special treat, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” live from 1985

via Born in the U.S.A. Is What Makes Someone American: Eric Foner – Bloomberg.

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Without us, a grasshopper just…is, content hopping from piece of grass to piece of grass.

What is a grasshopper compared to it’s contentment? What is a piece of grass?
What is a bug?
What is hopping?

These are all things that just mean something to us.

What are we compared to a grasshopper?

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