Borealism V: Laws of Nature Series
EP.3: Supernovas and Death Rays | The Aesthetics of Existence
Iron cores of irony
Like moths to flame, we’re entranced by all that is unknown.
There’s a certain beauty in the things we don’t understand, one that we chase fervently as we try to fulfil our incessant need to decipher reality.
Our cosmic vulnerability, a particularly unnerving circumstance of immeasurable helplessness, is one such unknown that we’re obsessively enamored with.
Because, at any given moment and in any given way, we can be erased.
However we spin it, there’s an end point: a determined asteroid on the wrong trajectory; a grumbling super volcano, a pre-ordained tectonic slip, a mutating biochemical event — maybe it’s a hundred years out, maybe several thousand.
But nothing else quite threatens our continued existence on a daily basis like the waves of radiation that’re blasting our way at every given moment, from cosmic parts both known and unknown.
A fatal source of such radiation can be that of an exploding star — a supernova. These aren’t too uncommon. In 1604, Kepler’s Supernova exploded in the milky way, in the constellation of Ophiuchus. Despite being 20,000 light years away (about double the safe distance), the event was visible to the naked eye, during daytime, for several weeks.
Alpha Centauri, only 4.3 lightyears away, is our closest stellar neighbour; if it were to blow (chances of which are virtually nil), it would ignite shimmering auroras that would fill our whole sky before eventually vaporizing our planet.
But nothing may be more practically dangerous than the more subtle hazardry of our own sun, which rains down trillions of neutrinos that pierce through us incessantly without our knowing; out of sight, out of mind.
Our accustomed assurance on such matters is thanks to the molten metals sloshing around the innards of our planet, which shouldn’t have too much pull in such a conversation but — all things considered — they sure do.
These metals generate our planetary magnetosphere — one of the many unspoken heroes behind our continued day by day, civilization by civilization existence.
Creator and destroyer
Apart from shielding us from the deadly blows of our own sun, our magnetic field also blocks the curtains of cosmic radiation that cascade onto us from the infinitudes of space beyond which, as Dr. Viera once detailed to me, are already able to bypass parts of the interplanetary magnetic fields anyway.
“This is not sci-fi and fiction, this is quite real. Although it seems our bodies and everything around us are made of strong and real matter, all of this condensed ‘matter’ is made of atoms that are pure energy with particular frequencies. Our studies have found that our physiology and behavior are highly sensitive to exposures to natural solar activity-driven magnetic and electromagnetic radiation.”
Her findings out of Brazil, specifically with relation to mortality rates from 1951 to 2012, seem to reveal an “energy transfer of GCR-muons and neutrons to biological tissues, causing muon-induced cell mutations through direct DNA damage and/or more likely by indirectly generating oxidative radicals (such as the hydroxyl radical OH∙ or the oxygen radicals O2∙/HO2∙) that can induce DNA damage.”
In other words, we’re being killed slowly and surely by the very environment that gives us life.
Herein lies one of the sources of such ironic beauty.
That we manage to evolve and innovate atop a tiny blue speck in the midst of all of this commotion is quite unbelievable — almost as unbelievable as the fact that we manage to let ourselves get hung up on little things that mean nothing in comparison.
But there’s something to be admired in both our vulnerability and in our willful ignorance of the whole situation at play.
We’re a self-conflicted organism caught in the ripples of cosmic chaos, riding atop an expulsion of particles that afford us, for some semi-inexplicable rhyme or reason, the ability to somehow sense and experience a subjective journey through an unknowable reality.
Our earth flies through space at a rate of 67,000mph; our solar system at 514,000mph and our galaxy at 1.3 million miles per hour. And we’re here, trying to keep things under 100 on the tedious freeways and scenic byways of our nanoscopic existence.
But it’s our ability to drive in the first place — to steer and to brake and to go, or to just look out the window — that means everything.
Our ability to [try to] understand (and revere) the evolving miracle of our existence; our ability to practice anti-fragility despite being such a fragile organism; our ability to chase perfection despite being anything but.
Our ability to live and enjoy living despite being surrounded by and approached by death.
It’s kind of crazy, all things considered, but eerily beautiful nonetheless.
