One Nano-Second Before the Big Bang

    What happened one second before the big bang? This is probably one of the most perplexing questions ever asked. Answering it means solving the riddles about where we all came from and the meaning of life. Rather profound inquiries, indeed.

    There are no lack of ideas about that nebulous time before the big bang. What we lack is evidence.

    Before we embark upon this blog post, let’s get two things straight.

    First, I am not a theoretical physicist. So, all the ideas contained here are just my amateur speculation. Sometimes, I can barely balance my checkbook.

    Second, I have not gone woo-woo on you, even though I am going to talk about the universe and consciousness.

    Hope we have a deal. Moving on.

The Observer Effect

First we must talk about the observer effect. This is a scientific truism that says you can’t measure any system without factoring in the tool making the measurements. In other words, if you take a room’s temperature with a thermometer, some, at least a tiny portion, of the heat in the room is used to influence the thermometer. Meaning, you can’t really tell the true temperature of the room. You can get close, but you won’t know exactly because measuring the system impacts the results.

    If you were to build a model of that room’s heat distribution, you must include the thermometer in your model. Otherwise, it’s not an accurate representation.

    Our Instrument Brain

    People like to build models. It helps us understand operating systems and places that we cannot see in one glimpse. A model is basically a bird’s-eye view of any subject matter.

    It’s interesting that many of the functional models we build, such as the internet, big cities, and even the universe, all mimic our brain.

    A map of city sidewalks may really be a diagram of our brain. Let me explain.

    Imagine living a big city. With streets and light poles and people and cars and giant buildings reaching toward the clouds. You are a tiny person in this city. You walk around, you encounter people, some fascinate you, others repulse you, some teach you things you carry with you, and then a big city bus tries to plow you over while you’re on the crosswalk. You can stand on the top of buildings, and while looking down on the city, you observe that everything looks like tiny ants, all carrying out a job or task to make the city continue.

From atop that building, imagine every person below is a computer program, running through the circuitry of the streets, carrying out tasks, encountering other programs that want to join them, infect them, stop them, or assist them. Whatever.

Now, imagine that every one of those computer programs below are dendrites and neurons and electrical and chemical impulses rushing through your brain. Each neuron is seeking information, analyzing, calculating, digesting information and storing things in your biological hard drive.

    All of these aforementioned things, from the sidewalks to the brains that control our bodies to the city to the universe, seem to operate under similar principles. These are the same systems and methods used by your chemically dripping and electrically blipping brain.

    Evolution of the Human Mind

The universe began at a fixed point, exploded, then expanded outward at a very fast rate of speed.

    It’s interesting our brain origins are very similar indeed. Our brain began at a very fixed point at the end of a nerve stem. For milleniums, brains were reactionary, amphibian-like, and primitive. But then something happened. For unknown reasons, our ancestors began to think, reason, be creative, learn, and remember things.

About 200-thousand years ago, Homo Sapiens emerged following rapid brain growth in our genus. Homo Sapien brains are filled with all sorts of connections and dendrites and hemispheres. Just like models of the universe.

    I am in no way disputing the big bang theory. In fact, I’m celebrating the big bang.

    What I am saying is our models and maps of the universe seem to be really good at depicting our brain functions and evolution even better than depicting the wide expanse of space.

    Brain Blindness

    The universe and our brains both began at central points. They both expanded.

    If maps of the universe are really just maps of our brains, then seeing time before the big bang requires us to see past our brain stem.

How could we do that?

We would be forced to peer back into our long ancestry, through Australopithecus, and back into the pond and single-cellular existence.

This would require us to see back in time before the big bang of our consciousness. Essentially, we are brain blind.

    Recreating our brain system is the only way we understand the universe, or build cities, or design the internet. Because it may be the only path our brains are wired to understand.

    As long as our brain is an observational instrument in the system we are modeling, our brain is always going to be factored into the model, whether we realize it or not. Thus, models of the universe beginning with the Big Bang mirror our brain’s evolution.

    The Challenge

Is everything connected? Not at all. There are many divergent systems at work in our world. Can a laundromat wall calendar teach us things about flight patterns in China? Um, maybe. Maybe not. Everything is not connected.

I’m simply asking you to notice the models humans build, as if there are no other ways to build them, reflect our own brain’s creation and evolution.

Next time you are constructing a model of the Space Shuttle, or even using a road map to find a restaurant, try to find the similarities between your subject and your brain. The connections. The systems at work. You may be astounded at what you arrive upon.

So your next trip to P. F. Changs can become a journey of great food, and self-discovery.

Evolution Makes Us Really Bad Futurists. . . But Really Good At Painting Sad Pictures

Let’s travel back in time, let’s say, 100-thousand years. Give or take a few centuries. Your choice.

I know some of us would not be caught dead in the Middle Paleolithic Period. That’s okay. I understand. For all of you, just picture yourself in the Upper Paleolithic Period.

Back then, the world was filled with perils, most of them modern humans can’t imagine. Being stomped to death by wooly mammoths, eaten by saber-toothed tigers, or contracting some parasitic disease many millennia before vaccines, just to name a few.

In that world, it made a lot of sense for hominids to be shortsighted and reactionary. If you are being charged by a giant cat who outweighs you by two thousand pounds, chances are you didn’t have time to study up on the danger, check out some books from the library on big cats, and make a list of possible escape routes.

You just ran away as fast as your hairy, dirty feet could take you.

That ‘ancient’ world is where our brains evolved. The Paleolithic period basically helped create you and me. We are wired to respond to a world that no longer exists. Sure, there are still dangers, like being flattened by a city bus. But for the most part, if you have the technology to read this blog, your life is relatively cushy compared to our ancient cave-dwelling ancestors.

100-thousand years ago, it made sense to think about the present. In fact, that’s about all you had to think about. If you lived to 30, you were a really, really, old hominid. Now, many people live well into their 70s and 80s.

Evolution has been wonderful. It made us into creative, thinking humans with language skills and technology and art. These leaps in imagination gave us creative people like Pablo Picasso. During Picasso’s Blue Period in the early 1900s, he primarily painted with the color blue. His paintings were increasingly sorrowful and somber in tone and color. Kind of depressing, but beautiful.

Our brains formed in the ancient plains of Africa. We were very good at scanning the grass for predators that hungered for human flesh.

But the time has come to think beyond today, beyond the predator in the grass, beyond the sun set.

There are big questions facing humanity. Probably some of the largest conundrums we’ve ever struggled with. The big problem is making humanity realize the predator in the grass is not going to pounce us. It will slowly overtake us. It’s called climate change, or overpopulation, or peak oil, biological epidemic, or nuclear Armageddon. Only then will we evolve again.

And if we fail, humanity will be entering our very own blue period. But there may not be any more Picassos around to find the beauty in the chaos.

IVP Author Takes 2nd at Ignite Asheville 2013

*From the editor:

Congratulations to Jim MacKenzie, author of the Incredible Vanishing Paperweight!

Jim recently presented at Ignite Asheville 2013. His speech was entitled “Beam Me Up Ringo: The Fab Four’s Journey through Rock Music, the Jim Crow South, and Outer Space.”

According to Jim’s statement about the speech:

The Beatles are from the future. They changed the culture, they were civil rights advocates, and they were chosen to be Earth’s ambassadors to extraterrestrial life on NASA Spacecraft. I will speak about the Fab Four’s technique that enabled them to navigate tumultuous times. This is why their music and philosophies remain relevant today.

This year’s participants were chosen through an online vote. Jim was one of 12 speakers chosen for the event.

Jim placed second in the competition, again, as voted by the audience. Ignite Asheville 2013 was the second annual Ignite speaking competition to take place in Asheville, NC. Participants are given exactly five minutes and 20 slides that advance automatically, and must create a speech that fits that format.

To learn more about Ignite Asheville, click here. To see Jim’s speech, click below.

Shelled Reptiles and Our Shrinking Wall Calendars: A New Way to Perceive Time

During the 1830s, Charles Darwin, the father of modern-day evolutionary theory, visited the Galapagos Islands on a ship named The HMS Beagle. He researched much of the islands’ flora and fauna and wildlife as he was beginning to shape the ideas for his theory of natural selection, later used as a unifying force in all of biology.

Yes, Darwin changed the world and our understanding of it, and that’s all fine and good.

But one of the more extraordinary stories of Darwin’s visit to these islands involves a little reptile named Harriet. Harriet was a Galapagos Tortoise. To the layperson, this means a damn big turtle. They sometimes weigh over 800 pounds and grow to be six feet long. That’s a large animal.

Darwin later gave Harriet to the captain of The Beagle. The big reptile eventually came to live in an animal preserve in Australia.

Darwin collected Harriet in 1835. At that time, she was about 5 years old. A mere baby in tortoise years.

Here’s the amazing part.

Harriet, who in her own turtle way met Charles Darwin, didn’t die until 2006. She was approximately 175 years old when she passed.

This isn’t even exceptional. That’s pretty average. Many types of tortoises live to be 200 years old.

Harriet inspired me, in a world with a lot of talk (I’m guilty of this) of shrinking time and accelerated change.

I propose we start to think of the passing of time in 200-year-units called “Tortii.” They are twice as long as centuries. But that’s the point.

Imagine, in one Tortii, approximately the lifespan of one Galapagos turtle, you could go from the marriage of Napoleon Bonaparte to Archduchess Marie Louise, all the way to the advent of privatized space travel. That’s quite a leap, technologically speaking. Try to picture the world in one Tortii from today.

A Galapagos turtle born right now will live to see the colonization of Pluto. That’s pretty amazing stuff for a reptile.

Welcome to the 11th tortii of the common era.

Why Is This Helpful?

“What’s the point of a Tortii?” you may ask. “We already have days and years and decades. Isn’t that enough?”

Because it may help us re-imagine our existence in an era of shrinking time; to think for the the longer term instead of the very urgent, daily grind.

In other words, in a sped-up world, we tend to crunch time; feel our days closing in upon us. The Tortii is just a simple device that pushes against the encroaching walls and helps us think beyond our daily to-do lists, those little boxes on our wall calendar, and even our own temporal life spans.

And lastly, a tortii helps us remember that something born today, biologically, will be alive in the year 2200. Now that’s living in the future.

Is the Calendar Shrinking, or Am I Getting Taller?

Only a few things could account for this feeling that our lives are going by quicker than ever. It seems that once we get acclimated to the new mores and technologies, they’re already over.

Either our planet is spinning faster, or we are circling the sun at a higher clip, right?

Here’s how you can counter this feeling:

Visit a zoo in San Diego, or Philadelphia, or Australia.

You may see a newborn Galapagos tortoise that one day will also be seen by your great grandchildren.

Imagine the 200 years of rapid change that giant turtle will witness. That turtle might meld with technology, become the world’s first cy-turtle, grow super intelligent, and decide to venture past our solar system. Or it might just spend the next 200 years eating lichens and berries. Who knows?

The question this turtle should make us ask is not “What is urgent today?” but rather “When this newborn tortoise passes away in 200 years (if life forms still die in 200 years), what will the world look like that I helped create?”

User-Generated Content Before the Fall of Rome: Achieving Immortality By Creating

Nero was a first-century emperor of Rome. He is rumored to have executed his mother and poisoned his brother. His friends report that Nero liked to roast Christians in his courtyard at night for the special glow they gave off.

Others say Nero was an arsonist, maybe the most famous fire-starter of all time. He is accused of setting fire to Rome, in the year of our Lord 64 AD, to make more room for real estate he wanted to build.

Not a nice guy, if these things are true. I’ll let historians continue to debate the nuances of this man’s life.

What we do know is Nero had a hobby: playing the lyre, a stringed instrument many modern day people confuse with a fiddle.

Nero loved to play the lyre. And he wanted to be adored for his musical prowess. Sometimes, Nero would make thousands of Roman soldiers watch quietly as he plucked through a tune. And then he would expect them to stand and cheer loudly, feigning love for the beautiful music leaving the ruler’s strings.

But what if Nero had the internet? What if he could post his latest lyre tune on YouTube for not only thousands to see, but millions? Maybe he would want to cover “Street Fighting Man” by the Rolling Stones. No one has done a really cool lyre version of that song yet.
Would the real devotion of internet fans have calmed his despotism, saving the lives of countless Christians, and his own mother?

“Ruins with Arches” by Austrian artist A. Hitler

Come to think of it, Adolph Hitler, the notorious ruler of Germany in the early 20th century, only fell into the role as Der Fuhrer after he failed as an art student. What if Hitler could have sold and shared his paintings online? What if Adolph decided to devote himself to art? What would the world look like today?

Was Nero worse than Hitler? Am I forgetting Godwin’s Law, an internet truism saying the first person to state someone is worse than Hitler loses the argument? Am I saying that by providing an outlet for frustrated, creative types, the internet will relieve the world of all future totalitarian leaders?

Nope.

If Nero had YouTube, he would still be alive to us today. In digital form. Even though he has been dead for nearly two-thousand years.

Imagine if we were to watch a 2,000-year-old video today of Nero jamming on his lyre and then expecting praise and acknowledgment. Now imagine 2,000 years from now, some future anthropologist combing the depths of this thing we call the internet.  And she comes across your latest YouTube creation, or blog post, or social media picture. What is it that you are saying about our world today? Are you remembering that your internet audience is not just the people alive today, but the people alive forever?

The internet will outlive us. We should be creating for people today, and tomorrow, and forever.

Just like Nero on YouTube, imagine you are creating for people 2,000 years from now.

Dear People of the Future,
Here is me, a glimpse of your past.

Enjoy.

The Cult of the Nibblers

I’ve personally gotten so much out of blogging and interacting with the brilliant people of the internet. It has edified my life. I felt it was time for me to give back.

I invented a new job for the down economy, for the unemployed, or for the current college students who are studying something they don’t love and are wondering where they will be in a few years.

I call the job “Nibbling.”

A “nibble” is a seldom-used tech term that refers to a half byte of information. I am not a mathematician, but I guess that means two nibbles are a byte. And two thousand nibbles are a kilobyte and so on.

A nibble can also be a small taste of something. Food, the neck of your lover, but in this case, it means we are nibbling at our culture.

Information Overload or Entrepreneurial Gold?

Graph taken from here.

Some recent research numbers suggest the average American consumes about 12 hours of media per day. That’s about 34 gigabytes every 24 hours. That is almost a continuous stream of media every moment we are not working or sleeping. This includes television and movies, printed and written words, music, the internet, news, electronic correspondence, etc. . . .  It’s getting to be almost too much for the average person to keep up with. You need an entire other person to consume the daily-required media dose, just to have some free time in your life when you come home from the office.

Enter the Nibblers. The professional keeper-uppers for hire. People who will consume movies and print and culture for you, all at a half-a-byte at a time. All of your choosing.

Here’s how it could work. You enter your personal information into a database. Things like your age, work history, political persuasion, if you are family-oriented, a loner, your goals for the future and similar types of information. The computer connects you to a Nibbler similar to yourself in personality and disposition.

Whenever the need arises, you access the Nibbler [probably via text messaging for now], inquiring how you should feel about a certain film, or what your position should be on the current headlines. Within a moment, the answer comes back to you. And you can feel ‘loosely’ informed without the dissatisfaction of not participating. Living your life without sucking at the giant fire hose of megabytes.

This is the perfect antidote to our impending dystopia of drowning in information.

Image taken from here.

Please keep this in mind. Nibblers will be the human equivalent to a computer virus. The need for more information and data intake will only increase in the future. And sadly, humans will likely continue processing information the analog way, one word or picture or sound at a time, for the near future.

Thus, Nibblers will soon need their own Nibblers, who may someday require their own Nibblers, and so on, just to keep up.

It’s either a world filled with infinite Nibblers, or we unplug from the machines.

But that last scenario seems so crazy.

Calling All Preppers – The End Is Nigh

Happy end of the year, dear readers. How I adore all of you. Thank you so much for keeping me going. I keep dreaming up more posts for 2013, so stay tuned. And as always, if you have any questions, comments, diatribes against me, send me an email or post it on the blog. I always enjoy your feedback.
Briefly, let’s take a quick look back at 2012. I know, I know. Most of us are already living in the future anyway. Why look back?

There has been an emergence in recent years of a phenomenon I find a little frightening. It’s called “prepping.” It’s a hobby for people who honestly feel the world is on the brink of disaster. Any day now, the race wars/economic collapse/invasion/government takeover/asteroid collision will happen. So stock your shelves with food, build an unnecessary arsenal of high-caliber-high-capacity weapons, and wait for the worst.

Is the world ending? Well, maybe. I mean, we do have a terrifyingly large amount of nuclear and biological weapons floating about and we are ignoring that whole global warming thing.

Does it hurt to keep some non-perishable food in our cupboards? I doubt it.

Is the world ending? Maybe it’s ending sometime, for some reason, but who really knows?

The part I find disturbing is the amount of time and energy and excitement and belief that doom preppers spend thinking about the end of humanity.

Wouldn’t it be a more constructive use of time to work for a better world; to try to avert disaster?

Why do so many obsess over the end? Why does every generation think it’s unique, or the last line of humanity the world will see?

It’s a biological imperative in us to continue. To make babies and see that our DNA goes on without us. It’s hardwired into our brain. Just like the fear of death permeates from our amygdala, the most primitive – yet loud – portion of our brain.

These preppers are terrified their DNA strands will cease. That parts of the world may continue without their personal contribution.

Their genes must survive because they are unique, whether they are or not.

I’ll leave you with this thought. End of the world prepping is fear-based. It’s very easy to get people to act out of fear or anger. Those are some of our basic instincts. It doesn’t take much energy or thought-power to make people afraid.

In the title of this essay, I say the end is nigh. It is nigh. It’s the end of an outdated era.

Let’s start a new paradigm for prepping.

Instead of acting out of fear, let’s act out of enlightenment. Instead of stockpiling weapons, let’s stockpile books by great authors and philosophers. Instead of teaching ourselves hand-to-hand combat, let’s teach ourselves how to construct brilliant arguments that will sway people from darkness to compassion.

That is a world I can’t wait to live in. In fact, I’m prepping for it right now.