Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read
Nice article, interesting, fascinating. With all the hippie-like prattling (hey, I would have eaten that stuff up in 1970!) what comes through to this current skeptic are the following:
- Something major happens every single day. Such mind-blowing coincidences could have been constructed no matter what day, month and year a solar eclipse, or other major cosmological event occurs.
- Time itself is an artificial human construct to explain the Big Bang and all that has transpired since (see Stephen Hawking and before him, Einstein’s general theory of relativity). Measuring it with numbers corresponding to an arbitrary Roman Christian calendar and then finding deep meanings in the confluences, configurations, ebbs and flows of these numbers is unscientific and ethnocentric. Ancient civilizations, from the Chinese to the Hebrews to the Aztecs and Inca, used different methods to compute months, days and years and have all found their own “magical connections”. What makes the method we use so damn special?
- Stars and other celestial bodies are distributed randomly throughout the observable portion of space we call our universe based upon processes that occurred at least tens of billions of years ago (in the way we measure time) involving complex interactions of mass and energy that we are just beginning to fathom. Of course anyone who adheres to an organized religion would claim that these patterns of distribution in the night sky observed by humans are all deliberate and part of some so-called “intelligent design” by some inarticulate “Creator”. Such matters of faith are outside the realm of the scientific method and cannot be proven nor disproven empirically.
- Finally, efforts to link these processes and behaviors of possibly 20 billion years with the daily meanderings, political and otherwise, of a species that has existed for a mere millisecond, or even a nanosecond, in relative time is the height of foolish, self-important egocentrism. The first Woodstock festival in 1969 was supposed to have been a dawning of a grand new age of peace, love and understanding; yet we have murder, war and hate, over and over again, on into infinity or extinction. I humbly suggest we collectively get over ourselves as we strut and fret our way across the stage of existence (to paraphrase Shakespeare) and be content to have enjoyed the experience of viewing an incomparably spectacular cosmic show across the length and breadth of our continent.