We really need to talk about the Axis of Evil.
Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy? Nope.
Iran, North Korea, Syria? Nope.
OK, itās I, not we, and I want to talk about it a bit. Itās WAY off topic for this Substack, but itās mine and Iāll go off brand where and when I feel like it.
Attention Conservation Notice:
If you read and enjoyed We Are Not Alone, this is for you. Thereās only a tenuous connection to conflict stuff in the conclusion section.
The Axis Of Evil:
One of the things I spend a good bit of time on, but about which I rarely write, is cosmology. My cumulative physics grade was an A- but my mathematical skills are discrete, not continuous, so I never went into the deep water.
One of my favorite YouTube science educators is black hole researcher Dr. Becky Smithers. Gingers being my Kryptonite got me to watch the first one, of course, but the hundred plus hours since then are because the topic fascinates me.
And this in particular I keep coming back to ā¦ why do the quadrapole and octopole of oldest light in the universe align with our insignificant little solar system? This light was eight billion years old when our solar system formed. Any proposed solution to the problem unleashes other problems. We just donāt know at this point.
The Crisis In Cosmology:
Another big problem is that the two ways we have to measure the Hubble constant are growing apart. The universe is expanding, this is why that ancient light has been stretched to microwave wavelengths, and why we parked a $10 billion infrared telescope behind the Moon in order to get a better look at the beginning. As our measurements have gotten better, instead of converging on one number, which would validate the theories, the two methods are steadily diverging.
Dr. Becky has a whole playlist on this particular issue ā¦
Latest News:
New Nasa data hints we could be living inside a black hole
Humans experience one temporal and three spatial domains, but depending on which flavor of more complex explanation you like, there are six or seven other dimensions that got squished in the Big Bang. If you read We Are Not Alone, you know my take on things. The observations of multiple pilots, in multiple planes, with our very best sensors not only make āwe are not aloneā the simplest explanation, the nature of the evidence doesnāt indicate that the visitors are interstellar. The manner in which the observed objects move is simply not possible with the physics we know.
So itās not such a strange thing to imagine that our universe, which is only just beginning to open up via our patient observations, might be one little pinprick of a singularity in a vastly more complex environment.
Conclusion:
A big part of the reason I was attracted to Buddhism was that it did not require me to turn off my brain on a weekly basis. I try not to interfere with the path of others. There are no Buddhist missionaries, weāre limited to explaining our understanding of things to others only when they are in great distress over the beliefs of their ancestors.
But now the judiciary of the government that put that telescope behind the moon has been taken over by a religion that put the father of astronomy on house arrest for his discoveries. The executive branch of the government is in the hands of a ketamine addict who is burning our collective assets to the ground in an attempt to reach some utopia he read about in a science fiction authorās universe.
I donāt see either sort of Accelerationist Faction being good for current/future generations and the planet on which we all must live. Iām reminded of the Antonio Gramsci quote in Surfing Our Kondratiev Wave.
āThe old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.ā