Clean up your Act

“To start to obey certain laws or generally accepted standards of behaviour”, read the statement again and hundreds of question pop up. The fact is laws and standards all vary from region to region. These unwritten rules are written based on the socio-economic status and the geographical position of a location. Yet there deep down inside us, all believe that there must be a common behaviour that everyone on this planet must follow.  The generally accepted standard of behaviour is our attitude towards our home. Home not in the structure that offers a roof over your head; Home as in this entire planet.

Since the past two billion years life has existed on this planet, for the first one billion years single celled creatures dominated the scene. Evolution kicked into high gear for some reasons that are still debated about and we have millions of species. There has always been a balance all this while between what nature offers and what the inhabitants took and offered back. For example, Trees absorbed carbon dioxide from air and gave back oxygen. Animals used oxygen and consumed the fruits and flowers of the trees helping in pollination and disbursal of seeds. The animal body eventually dies and it returns nutrients back to the soil for the trees to grow. In fact all the oxygen we breathe on Earth (21%) is from the trees and single celled algae in the oceans. It once so happened that the entire atmosphere was so oxygen rich that the scales tipped and life found it harder to evolve. Due to some natural process billions of hectares of trees got buried under and they stopped producing excessive oxygen and the carbon in the trees got put away for good. Equilibrium was maintained. It was never supposed to make a come back by the laws of nature; until humans has anything to do with it. Till then none of the life forms were intelligent enough to take more and they always took just what they needed.

The last five hundred years have made a monumental impact on this balance. The human species gained more intelligence. The knowledge to use metals, minerals and fossil fuels has not only accelerated the quality of life but also increased the average life expectancy of a human. Five hundred years ago Earth had a total human population of just around one billion and today it’s brimming at seven billion. This mind boggling numbers are fantastic achievement for the human civilisation. If we are able to live happily, a very comfortable life with all our loved ones around then it’s all thanks for the scientific inclination of man. The discovery of the fossil fuel in the early eighteen hundreds meant more than just transport and energy, but also lead to the creation of almost all of the industries that we have taken for granted. Dyes, Plastics, Fertilizers, Medicine and so on…

All these frenzied activities come at a cost. You pay for the food once we have had it, for those who did not check on the price before they had their food, the bill that follows will be a shocker. But it has to be coughed up. That’s exactly how we have all been behaving. Since the past two hundred years our voracious appetite for anything that nature has, without realising the consequence of our acts will prove to be costly.

The price may not be paid by those who used up the resources wastefully, but by their future generations.

We being one of the most emotional creatures, it hurts us more when our off springs are hurt half as much as we could tolerate. That being the nature of things its time that we all collectively sit up, take notice and start making changes.

            The oil that was put away by mother earth was dug up from its grave, no matter if it was in the hottest of the deserts or deep beneath the abyss of the oceans. This liquid gold has powered the entire human race this long. The lay man who can read prices can figure out that when the prices are going up, it can mean only two things. Either the demand is going up or there is short fall in the commodity being sold. With countries like India and China on a growth spree demand is definitely up, but some times we notice even if the demand goes down the prices looms high. We have reached the peak oil output capacity. None of the oil producing nations can produce more of the black gold any more than they can produce now.

At this point in time if we juxtapose the histories of all the nations, Oil which is a natural resource to all has been used up the developed nations more than the nations that are still developing. The reason the developed nations are doing well with infrastructure and economy is because they used up this resource more. But now the other countries who are trying to catch up are finding it expensive to afford this resource because of the lack of it. To settle this discrepancy there are various arrangements being made by the UN, one of them being carbon credit, but none to make a decisive impact to our future. For example countries using up more natural resource than the allocated quota should pay up companies that are using lesser than their quota in developing nations. This is to put a cap on the carbon emissions and let the emerging nations grow, but what it is set out to achieve is a one degree drop in the global temperature rise by 2050. Just one Degree! That is too much effort and resources wasted for a very small impact.

The old men who have one foot in the grave cannot tell the current generation what needs to be done. The new generation cannot be told how to fix their future. Its time to Clean up our Act. The internet has set the stage. Next generation kids are communicating with each other at unprecedented speed and veracity. Geographical barriers and language stop no one from getting the message across. Starting a movement is as easy as logging on to twitter and posting a tweet. A single message out there with enough conviction and greater cause can muster enough support in a matter of few hours. I am not suggesting anyone to scuttle around right now to make hand outs, pluck cards and banners and cause in convenience to several others to gather attention and force your thoughts and opinion on them.

Change can be subtle, yet effective. Profitable yet environment friendly. Unpopular yet necessary. The propositions below need not be agreeable but definitely is worth a few minutes of thought. If it can provoke to take a tangent action still towards the objective of restoring equilibrium for mother earth then it’s fruitful.

Get yourself a bicycle. There are times when we need to go places near by which is not close enough to walk nor far enough to  drive. A bicycle will not only get you there free of cost but improve your health. As you get fitter you can go further. Every time saving up money at the expense of getting fitter and causing lesser traffic congestion. If you can’t cycle use the public transport.

Grow your own vegetables. One tomato from our own garden tastes much better then the most expensive tomato you can buy at the super store.  The cost is not only of the tomato, there are other costs that we don’t pay. What about the cost of the damage to the soil where artificial fertiliser was used. What about the cost of the truck exhaust that carried the tomatoes from the farm to the store. What about the cost of recycling the plastic bag that the tomatoes came in. The 5 $ Burger at McDonalds actually cost 128$ if all the other environmental cost are added to its price. A single tomato from your own garden can be consumed with clean conscious.

Take a pee in your garden once a while. One pays for ammonium sulphates and nitrates at the plant store which has its origin from crude oil while wasting away the ones we have for free in the toilets. There is no harm to the plant and the soil gets replenished the natural way. You save money on fertiliser and your plants look greener. This goes for the dog poo the one scoops and puts it away in a plastic bag to be thrown in a bin. Throw the same in the garden and you might see a flower bloom over it in a few days.

Buy food at the stores at the clearance section. Food waste is one of the most atrocious ways of misusing resources. Tonnes of food are being dumped just because its expiry date is to close. You can save money on the groceries and you have done justice to the food and environment.

Switch to energy efficient lamps and timers on heaters. The irony is even if every single incandescent light bulb in U.S.A is changed to CFL bulbs it will be one tenth that the energy wasted in Russia using outdated electricity transmission technology. In fact the energy wasted is enough to power entire UK. Having said this, there needs to be a start. Even smarter architecture can use more natural light and better insulation can save a lot. Solar water heaters and Photovoltaic cells do more good in the long run.

• Recycle to the next level. Every man made object if viewed from a slightly different angle can serve more than one purpose. An Empty bucket of chocolates can be a pot for a plant. An empty plastic pet bottle can be cut and shaped to make a broom. The complex polymer compounds in plastics are not natural and on average take 99 years to decompose. Make the most and if you cannot, make sure it’s put in the recycle bin.
• Buy less of goods and make most of what you have. It’s easy to spend some money at the shopping store because most of us get a kick out of it. Unpacking the new gizmo from the box can be exciting, but the cost of getting rid of the package and the older product that is being replaced is generally ignored. Electronic goods turn poisonous to soil and recycling it is harder and even more dangerous to the people who recycle them.

All we have is one home and if leave behind a messy home, our children has to live in it and they, who are not responsible for it will end up paying for it. All can start by being optimistic about our future and do our little bit. There will be day when the kids of future will look at a piece of plastic on the road side with aghast like how we treat a road kill and the kids of the future will treat a road kill with enough respect to treat is as a part of nature.

 Because one day for us all its Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust,

 In the meantime to preserve this plant, endeavour we must

The Drama in the sky

We all have evolved with a sight that looks at what is in front. It has a definite purpose and has kept us all alive for the past two hundred thousand years. Naturally so, many of us do not take a moment to lookup into the sky and wonder what is going on up there in the grand Theatre at the expense of a pain in the neck.

The fact is seven billion of us with all the other billions of species in this bio-sphere inhabit, what can be termed as only “a speck of dust” in the cosmos. We, the audience are so involved in the daily chores and mundane activities that we tend to ignore the forces and its size and scale that exist out there. To top that, what we can see and observe contributes to only four percent of this universe, the rest ninety six percent is all unknown and un-answered to us.

To get a sense of the size of space the easiest way is to reverse engineer. The creation of the universe was thirteen and a half billion years ago and so the farthest object from which we will receive light will be thirteen and a half billion light years away and hence deduce that, the width of this universe is thirteen and a half billion light years. But that is not the truth. Einstein’s theory has proved that space is not a constant vector and space can expand, hence with the distribution of all the mass since Big Bang, space between individual elements has expanded as well. Now it’s closer to ninety one billion light years across! (1 light year = 9.46 X 10¹² kilometre) Every time we look out into the darkness of space we are witnessing just a tiny corner of this cosmic stage.

Understanding what started the genesis of this universe is a subject matter on to itself, but trying to comprehend what this space is filled up with, is a mighty challenge. The reason why it’s believed to be made of something is because of the remnant from the start, the Big Bang. The Cosmic Microwave background (CMB); which is all pervasive has created one of the most beautiful pictures of our universe which shows that the entire space is not just cold and desolate but has an average temperature of four degree above absolute zero everywhere. This accidental discovery by two radio astronomers who mistook this reading for interference by pigeon-poo in the antennae changed our understanding of the cosmic stage and how it was all set up.

Looking at the objects that we can observe with our naked eye also does not reveal the full story. All the stars that we see are from our own galaxy called the Milky Way galaxy. There are hundred billion stars in our Galaxy! Some of the dots of light that we do observe are actually not stars but they are other distant galaxies and each one of them has the same number of stars as our galaxy has. There are hundred billion such Galaxies! Just multiplying the numbers will test the calculator. But this is just a count of the stars, if each star has an average of five planets and each planet has an average of two moons then numbers grow exponentially. Other than stars, planets and moons there are other heavenly bodies like neutron stars, black holes, Pulsars, Brown dwarfs and many more that are not accounted for. Each of these characters has their own little role to play which is as dynamic as it can ever get.

Each of these objects has a different origin and is at different stages in their life cycle. The Nebulas are the stellar nurseries where massive gas clouds of Hydrogen leads to the birth of tiny stars. Star creation is a constant process all across the universe. When the accretion of gas reaches a critical mass enough to support a nuclear reaction, the birth of a star takes place with a bang, powerful enough to disperse the gas clouds nearby to allow other stars to form. Like all good things that has to come to an end, our good old Sun did begin to shine four and a half billion years ago. The Sun, in spite of just spending four percent of its total Hydrogen fuel all these years has reached its middle age. In another five billion years the Sun would have spent all the Hydrogen in the core and the Hydrogen in the outer core will begin to fuse making the star bloat in size. In this Red Giant phase our beloved life supporter and God in every religion; it will swallow all its children. It’s a tragic end but it’s inevitable.

Some of the valiant stars like our Sun might exit the stage in a subtle gesture, but some larger stars make their exit known. Just like how the saying goes, the larger you are, the harder you fall; same goes for enormous stars. They die a spectacular death giving out enough energy as all the stars in the galaxy put together. It’s only in these stars are elements greater then Iron in the periodic table are forged. The ring on your finger was made by these super explosions, aptly called Super Nova. Our humble solar system was born in the cradle of the residue of such an explosion. If not for such destruction, none of us would be around.

The plot of the whole universe is that every violent, cataclysmic destruction will always lead to the creation of some thing new. But that cannot be said about what the villain of the play has to do. Black holes are one such mystic creations of the natural world that defies all laws of physics. The effects of being around or close to one of these have been explained but at the centre of a Black Hole fundamental physics looses ground.

Try to imagine this scenario of a person being close enough to the Black hole where the choice of return is no more. This is the event horizon. The evil monster pulls in hard on any of the approaching prey which includes light. (Hence black). The person gets pulled more at his feet then his head because the force of gravity is that high as we get closer to the object. The person gets elongated. This is called spaghettification; yes, it’s a technical word. The distant observer can see this person being stretched, but the victim would feel everything is normal. Gravity is directly related to space and with increasing gravity space compresses. Time is related to space and hence a minute on the victims’ watch would be hours for the observer. These are phenomenon that the lay man cannot understand but it’s real at the same time.

One of the characters, like in all tales tries hard to grab attention. It lets everyone in the universe know where they are. These small stars are remnant core of a star that exploded. They are so extremely dense that a tea spoon full of matter from the star will weigh as much as the entire humanity, but more so these stars have gained a massive angular momentum that they being the size of our planet spin tens of times every second. As they spin, from the poles a focussed high energy radio beam shoots out sending out a repetitive pulse. Some of them are so accurate that it would beat an atomic clock. These pulsating stars are called ‘Pulsars’.

In this epic saga there are a few roles that we all as a human race are yearning to see. Many have been trying since decades to find them and many more are being very hopeful that they will show up one day or the other. Planetary search around other stars has been fruitful in the recent years and several hundreds have been discovered. Some exotic ones, where the entire planet is one big ball of Diamond, a miner’s paradise and some that sound synonymous to Hell. Massive gas giants orbiting very close to the host star, so close that its upper atmosphere is getting blown away. But amidst all these extremities, there are hopes of finding a sanctuary for life just like how the earth has been. The planets in the goldilocks zone are those that are not too far and not too close to the host star just enough to keep water in liquid form on its rocky surface. Not so long ago such an exoplanet has been discovered where the entire surface is covered by water. Discovery of even the simplest form of alien life will change the perception of humanity about them selves. It might question the foundation of a few of the religions that our race has followed since centuries. A good shake up once a while is always for the good.

For all of us, who are just mere spectators, who have not seen the beginning of the play nor will ever get to see the curtain fall; The one small momentary scene that we get to see in this tiny life time of ours on the “pale blue dot, suspended in a ray of light” as Carl Segan once said, is the drama. If we are the only intelligent beings, then it proves how significant we are to this vast Universe and on the contrary, if there are multitudes of life spread across the depths of space, it might prove that our existence was just another accident.

Either way a wish full climax to before we are asked to get off our front row seats will be if another spectator of the same drama from another part of this universe just makes a conversation with us to ask “How is the show from there?”

Religion of Science or Science of Religion

My upbringing has been with strong religious fundamentals but at the same time I was given the title as the future scientist (though I did not turn out to be one) in my school. Religion and Science never caused any conflict in my mind because for me one is water and the other oil. But as I grew up my education towards IT engineering kept me on a steady science path but my values and morals were always firmly religious. Against the normal belief that as one steps into adulthood the curiosity to know more dies, I contradict. I wanted to get all the questions answered. It dawned to me that the reason my nature has been as it now is, is because of a question that has always lingered in my mind and my inability of putting my finger on it all these years. This is what actually keeps the spirit in me alive. This is that “question”.

This is not the topic that has hardly been debated; in fact it’s the discussion that people from all classes of society have been having about over centuries. Some times its lightly spoken off over a cup of tea and shrugged off within a few seconds even before the cup dries up or it has been expressed with such conviction that few were ready to get convicted. The daring people who try hard to find the line and are brave to face the consequence what so ever are the ones who are adorned with grand titles by one team, while at the same time considered as outcasts or villains by the other. Galileo is an exemplary example. It’s because of these fantastic heroes of Science that humanity has achieved what we see all around us today. In the two hundred thousand years of human existence it’s only in the last few hundred years that such courageous people have changed the course of history.

I wonder sometimes is science the religion of the intellect class who have got all the questions that has troubled them, answered to satisfaction. Or is Science the white knight which is fighting the darkness of religion where the lesser intelligent mortals resort to as the final abode for their unanswered question.

Perhaps the craving inside of me to affirm which club I belong to at a subconscious level always has kept me thirsty to find the answers.

This physical world has always offered us unconditionally so much that almost all of it is taken for granted. Few of these gifts like the Sun, Moon and volcanoes were so beyond normal understanding and comprehension that folks from the religious clubs associated it with mysterious powers and gods. The science club members put their lives at stake to know what these are and why they all exist. The one remarkable difference between the two clubs is, when the scientist has the answers for one of the mysteries the folks from the “other” school of though have chased them with pitch forks and knives while the reverse has hardly ever happened.

A simple exercise to realise how little we know is to simply prefix a ‘why’ word to an existing fact. The answer to that must again follow the same process. At each step feel free to cross question the earlier answers. For example,

Q: Why is the Sun shining?  A: Nuclear reaction in the core.

Q: Why a nuclear reaction? A: There is enough mass which produced enough gravity, pressure and heat to start a chain reaction.

Q: Why was there enough mass? A: Before Sun came to life there was star which was much larger which exploded and gave off enough gasses which all accreted to form the critical mass.

Q: Why did the bigger star explode? A: Because it was too big and too hot.

Q: Will our Sun explode as well? …. And so on.

All these questions at just one heavily body, when one tries to apply this same methodology to every observable thing all around all the time then the number of questions that we do not know the answer to grow exponentially. That is the point when one decides which school of thought one should join. That can be the dawn of a new way to think about life, our purpose and how we fit in the grand scheme of things in this Universe. My belief is everyone has a role to play

The pace at which technology is racing ahead is unprecedented. In the four and a half billion years of Earth’s existence out of which two billion years it hosted life, only in the past two hundred thousand years have humans walked the grounds. In that duration it’s only in the last one hundred and fifty years human population has grown from just over a billion to seven billion. That’s all because of technology. If you spread this duration on a clock, it’s only in the penultimate two minutes did humans evolve and in the final few milliseconds has the entire demographics of species changed drastically. All thanks to our understanding of science.

On the other hand evolution is a constant process but is slow to catch up. In the past few thousand years of civilized existence of mankind, religion and belief in the Divine has played a significant role. The Rules of Darwinian theory does make room for such spiritual belief to make biological impact in the way our brain operates. Just like how the hatch-ling of a king cobra immediately devours the other eggs as its first instinct since birth. With such an evolutionary trajectory of human kind is the entire human race ready to make a sudden jump from faith to facts?

            Diving to the deep end to find answers to most of the questions might not result in success. It is a fact that in spite of intensive research by many scholarly scientists many of the questions still remains unanswered. Astronomers and Physicists have been enthusiastic in finding the details of the thirteen billion year history of this universe but what was before that, no one knows. Many theories are being speculated, but all if that is a “likely story”. Even a simple question as to why does few particles have mass has attracted the minds of genius physicists all over the world enough to spend millions in building the largest and the most expensive science experiment ( LHC). Surprisingly during the many days it took to write down these thoughts is when the news of the illusive particle that establishes the existence of a Higgs field is made known to the world, yet this hard core science fact has got a an ironic connection to Religion; “God Particle”

            In spite of all this multi billion dollar research, it still partially answers about the four percent of the observable mass in the universe where the rest twenty three percent of Dark matter and the Seventy three percent of Dark energy has still not been explained. The survivability of the faith in Religion depends on this void. Noticing the current generation whose inclination is gently moving away from Divine beliefs, in a couple of decades the transition will be complete.

Earlier this year I registered myself to a course; “Certification of Planetary Science and Astronomy” with Open University of UK. It is one year course and the first six months has been challenging with assignments that kept me awake till four A.M on weekends and exams for which I woke up at four A.M for a month to prepare. The word Hectic would be an understatement, but it has not squashed my yearning to know more. Now the decision has been made with my consciousness to go beyond and understand the natural Science ground up.

Given the progression of science will there be a point in future where religion ceases to exist? Which also sparks of the question that once the last ray of religion is wiped off from humanity will sanity and emotions survive in our hearts? I might be reading too far into the future where a one degree inaccuracy in reading now will vastly change the predictions and expectations in the future. But all I am can do now is gather knowledge that is available for free and assimilate that. Make sense of it all and help my next generation with the simple questions like why the moon is hanging up in the sky? Or who is god? , Might be that is my purpose of existence or is there anything else? Does God know what it is or will science provide me with the answer?