Hic Sunt Deos

Here Be Gods

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Thoughts on Mortality

May 1, 2017 / / 0 Comments

There is an underlying need in the human psychosis to feel needed or important. Unlike the animals we cohabitate this planet with, we as conscious beings need a motivation to exist beyond those provided by base instinct.

Let me take a moment as an aside to address the inevitable criticism of my classifying animals as non-conscious beings. Find me an animal that actually commits suicide, outside of staged Disney nature films, and I will believe that it is possible for animals to be as self aware as humans.

In fact, this driving need to be self important, or at least necessary, is the underlying reason why most suicide exists, or rather when this is lacking in the humans that then subsequently engage in the act. Despair sets in when true perspective as to our respective place and function in the universe is realized. The easiest way to crush a child’s hopes and dreams is to make that child aware of how little in the end those dreams matter and how little hope they have of ever achieving them.

This is the crux upon which all religions exist. These spiritual mythos were specifically invented to give a grander unified dream, and thus motivating force to mankind in this otherwise harsh and meaningless reality. If my actions and life’s work in the end mean nothing in the grand scope of emotionless galactic balls of gas and fire, which even in their fantastical scope are finite and without grander meaning, then why should I embark on any of them? What point does the common man have of conducting his life beyond the satiating of his own baser desires and instincts if his entire being is for not when he dies?

This leads to a quest for immortality, an extension by action or genetic legacy which will impart some manner of grander meaning upon the mediocre occurrence that he is. Even this is attacked by the knowledge that in the future this world, the solar system, and even the universe itself will eventually cease to exist, giving a finality of futility to everything that ever was and ever will be. This particular dose of practicality is a hard one to accept even for the most pragmatic, much less the rest of humanity. Thus it is, when such contemplations overwhelm many, they adopt a nihilistic rather than humanistic viewpoint and rightly deduce that if nothing ever matters then their own selfish death will be one more thing that does not really matter at all.

Personally, I would rather embark on a quixotic quest for actual immortality, or the closest I can achieve, in my own person than abandon this innately interesting life. While I may not succeed in staving off death indefinitely, I will nonetheless attempt just that until I am dragged kicking and screaming into oblivion, or whatever the unknown that is death actually holds.

A Brief History of Thought – A Short Story

April 30, 2017 / / 0 Comments

When the world first asked, “Why?”, it was barely in its inception, newly wrought from the flames of creation. Yet even then men stood up and inquired amongst them, “For what purpose are we here? If all eventually fades, why do we be?” It was from this first thought that myriad lines of questioning arose to confound each other and divide mankind into many divergent camps, all despite the driving central question being the same throughout. It was not enough for any that they had found an answer they believed in, they felt it necessary to prove the others wrong, or at least vulnerable to steel.

Into this maelstrom of bickering ideologies, a few attempted to extricate themselves of the issue entirely by asking “How did we come into being? The why will be answered by the how, surely.” These dedicated themselves to observation and reasoning, and yet even these, once they had reached conclusions in their varied methodologies, decided that the others were wholly inept and had to be ridiculed or even persecuted for this. The argument was born, which in turn spawned more than enough stupidity to reverse all of the previously achieved observations and reasoning.

From this stupidity, many emerged wondering, “When and Where are we then? Surely these must be relevant to the other questions!” Which of course, they were not. The less said of these people the better.

Finally, from the chaos of human reasoning arose those who finally realized the central question of their existence. These chose finally to question, “What are we? What makes us able to ask these other confrontational and unsolvable questions? What are we that we can make war on each other over concepts and theories?” These did much thinking and pondering on this subject. There was, of course, only one probable conclusion that they could come to, and this in itself answered the other questions entirely, if not entirely satisfactorily for the others. The answer, you see, was “We are an anomaly.”

With that, the others set upon the ‘What’s and committed many a justifiable anomaly.

Chai – A Short Story

April 28, 2017 / / 0 Comments

I was sipping on some tea when I woke up to realize that I was not in the time I imagined I was. That is to say, I realized there was the distinct possibility that I had already woken up at least once already that day, or would in the very near future, at the very least. It was with this rather disturbing, if familiar, realization that I woke up and began searching for the beginning of this most troubling day.

It all started with some chai. Now chai is a particular invention that comes in as many variations as you can tolerate imagining, and appeals to almost as many people for exactly those reasons. I like it because it is, or so I have been told by those who have bothered to notice.

This particular chai was angry. What it was upset about I still have yet to fully understand, but it was indeed perturbed, and was doing its best to make my stomach of the same mind. Needless to say, an angry stomach can ruin the best of days, and I was in no mood to experience such, so I blinked and decided not to drink the chai in the first place. Then I blinked because I had not yet drunk the chai, and was understandably confused as to why, seeing as my stomach had just protested my having done so.

It was at this point that the chai unmade itself and I lost track of what I had done at any exact point of time. So I woke up. Except, I had not yet gone to sleep, or rather had, but was still sleeping, all at the same time.

Incidentally, at some point, I managed to write a working program. Normally this would be of no relevant interest in an increasingly bizarre and interesting day, except that this program survived the experience and is currently working quite well. Nothing else did.

Anyway, it was around the time I woke up for the infinite plus first time when I decided that this was no way to spend my day, and so I woke up again and set about finding a way to reestablish some semblance of order to the events I was experiencing. I settled on a plan of action and woke up again to discover that I had not yet set about creating my plan yet. I am not certain, but I believe I uttered some rather nasty things about time’s mother at this point. When no response presented itself, I assumed that time or its mother had to have heard me and contented myself with this knowledge as I woke up again.

I finally realized my problems maintaining any temporal frame of reference first began with my upset stomach and my wish that I had not imbibed my morning chai. And so I woke up again and set about making my chai.

After the infinite minus first attempt, I was finally able to drink my beverage, and suddenly, it was night, the day had passed, I had a working program, and my stomach was angry at me. I ignored it.

John J. Johnson – A Short Story

July 28, 2015 / / 1 Comment

John J. Johnson was asleep. He floated peacefully in his sleep-harness as his ship hummed around him methodically, hurtling through the near void of space ever so sedately. He had just spent the better part of an earth day attempting to repair a puncture on the exterior bulkhead. While it was not at all critical to his voyage that the repair be effected before he arrived at his destination, he nonetheless had decided the day before that he should endeavor to finish the repair before his arrival at Europa. This determination was a combination of both an attempt to prove to himself his own capabilities in the matter as well as a venture to stave off the otherwise overwhelming boredom that these trips always inevitably entailed. Sure, there were a myriad of mental activities that he could have just as easily enjoyed, but there are only so many movies in a row that one can watch without getting a distinct urge to get up and do something, which on a spacecraft, is a potentially dangerous affliction. Many a tale has been passed around many a tavern across the Sol system of ‘spacers who get bored get dead’.

So it was that when the inch and a half asteroid skipped across the exterior of his craft at a couple of thousands of miles an hour, the wound it inflicted became an omnipresent temptation to get out and do something productive. Giving into his cabin fever had been the easiest part of the enterprise, as suiting up was an ever laborious task that no space-farer gets all the way through without some exhaustion and much frustration. After that, he had to patiently wait for the large empty cargo bay to cycle out the air ever so slowly. His mind had gone over the procedure he had been about to undertake over and over at least a dozen times as the lethargic whine of the aged air pump had grown gradually fainter.

After it had disappeared entirely and the indicator light had finally shown the all clear, John J. Johnson had scrambled out far too eagerly into the vast emptiness of space, showing an almost immature recklessness that was more characteristic of men far less experienced in space than him. It had taken almost fifteen hours of struggling and consternation to get the patch plate bolted into place properly. By the end of the ordeal, John J. Johnson had been cured entirely of his cabin fever, his energy, and his alertness. In such a state he had made his way, only half conscious, back into the cargo bay, waiting interminably for the air to return and pressurize to the proper level. Afterward, the removal of the suit had felt a million times more arduous than normal, and the long crawl to his bunkroom had felt like a marathon. Finally, he had struggled into the sleep-harness and had gratefully passed out.

In doing so, he had entirely missed, in his bleary fatigue, the urgently blinking text on his control console. The hum of his ship was uninterrupted by the standard array of loud warning klaxons that routinely would have gone off, had he not long ago disabled them out of irritation at their agitating volume. Nor was he jolted awake by the auto piloting system making an emergency course adjustment, having never trusted the damn computer to steer the ship, and thus having disengaged it. So it was that John J. Johnson was sound asleep when another asteroid struck his vessel at a couple of thousands of miles an hour. However, as this particular asteroid was over a mile wide and his ship was far less than a mile wide, the asteroid more accurately continued to fly through space virtually unaffected as a smallish collapsible particle impacted its forward facing surface.

How Far Can You Fall and Survive…. On Pluto?!

July 20, 2015 / / 0 Comments

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As we celebrate our newfound imagery (and accompanying scientific data) of Pluto, our quaintly controversial distant solar neighbor, we need to make certain we do not forget to ask the most important of questions. Namely, if you were to fall on Pluto, how high up would you have to be to die on impact?

Sure, Pluto only has 0.063 g (6.3% of the gravity of Earth) to attract you to its surface, but any amount of gravity can accelerate you to an unwanted demise given enough distance on which to act. Without even the aide of an atmosphere of any significance to break your acceleration, it is simply a matter of calculating the velocity of your body when it ‘lands’ on that heavenly body. Well, it is not quite that simple.

You see, the issue at hand is not Pluto, its gravity, or the improbability of your ever being under the influence of the gravity of Pluto. The issue is you. At what height, and thus relative velocity, can you survive a fall here on Earth? There are some astounding records of accidental falls from tremendous heights that some individuals have survived. There are are also plenty of records showing other individuals expiring from incredibly short falls (though mostly these latter are dependent on if they fell on their head or if they are so fragile that any fall of any kind from any height would result in some form of injury).

If we were to go with the more extreme heights possible, you could theoretically fall from very great heights indeed. On Earth. Due to terminal velocity (the atmosphere breaking our fall), our fall from a thousand feet is more or less identical to our fall at ten thousand feet. This does have a limit, however. If you were to fall from Near Earth Orbit, you would accelerate to speeds far in excess of what most people recognize as Terminal Velocity, as the thinner atmosphere at that height would offer far less resistance, and you could then puncture through the thicker gasses at lower elevations like a bullet. This is, of course, irrelevant to the current question, especially since you would likely burn up from the friction of the thicker lower atmosphere long before you hit the earth.

Assuming you are not space jumping, or surfing, into Earth’s gravity well, we can safely state that your maximum velocity upon ‘landing’ would be Terminal Velocity as it is understood in popular culture. Which at 54 m/s (177.165 ft/s or 120.795 mph) is sufficient to render most humans ex-humans, with only the rarest of exceptions. To reach that velocity on low gravity Pluto, you would need to jump from a height of 2500 m (8,202.1 ft or 1.55 miles). That is a long way down. Problem is, it is highly unlikely that you would defy statistics and survive a landing of that velocity, on Earth or Pluto.

Okay then, how do we determine the correct height? We cannot. There are too many factors, such as the softness of the ground, what position your body is in and thus what part of it impacts, if you are relaxed (or unconscious), etc… So I will use this quoted height of 10 m where you will survive with ‘very serious injuries’. At a 10 m drop, your velocity will be 14 m/s (45.95 ft/s or 31 mph). The Plutonian equivalent height you could fall from is 168.1 m (551.5 ft or one tenth of a mile). That is slightly less than the Washington Monument’s height. Or 42 elephants stacked on top of each other, or whatever other silly height equivalent you prefer to measure large numbers in.

So, in conclusion, if you find yourself suddenly ejected into raw space above the surface of Pluto, and assuming you have the basic needs of an enclosed suit with enough air to survive that locality, you had better hope you are only 551.5 feet from the surface, else you are unlikely to live. How you get emergency services to assist you upon your successful, if still likely traumatic, landing is up to you.

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