Saturday, March 24, 2012

Humans, Facebook and the Universe

What Matters Most…………………..Commentary by Jim High

The Internet is the most amazing phenomenon to come on the scene in my life time and Facebook is by far the most interesting result.  Google and Wikipedia are probably the most useful, but Facebook is now approaching one billion users worldwide.  Think about that for just a minute and you realize the power it has to connect people, get the word out about anything that’s going on, and to effect real change in our global society.  Never before in the history of humans have we had something as powerful as Facebook, and it’s only just getting started.

As of this week I have just over 900 friends on Facebook.  Some are what we call “FacebookFriends” - meaning we know them only on Facebook and nowhere else.  I have both friends and “Facebook Friends” in foreign countries, and we communicate and message one another from time to time.  People post all kinds of things on Facebook making it the world’s largest conversation.  Some of those conversations turn into debates, and folks seem to be more likely to say things on Facebook that they wouldn’tsay in a regular face to face conversation.

If you pay attention to the posts from others you can learn a lot.  Recently a “Facebook Friend” who likes to post photos from deep space taken by the Hubble telescope posted a color photo of Centaurus A, a galaxy that’s being wracked from within by a massive Black Hole.  On a galactic scale distances are almost irrelevant with galaxies being from 150,000 to 1 million light years across and so far away that it boggles our human perception.  Centaurus A is only 12 million light years away which is practically next door in our observable universe.

But looking at this photo on Facebook got me to thinking, so I posted this comment.  “And we humans think we know everything?  But scientists tell us that 96% of everything in the entire universe is unknown to us.  We can’t see it, but their math says it must be present although they have no idea what it is.  So we know, can see and measure only 4% of the known universe, the rest of it is called Dark Energy and Dark Matter, dark meaning unknown.  But the really big question is that self-conscious human life has evolved only over the last 3 to 6 million years out of the 4 billion years since the formation of planet earth.  And evolution never stops, so we humans are not the end result that most people think we are.  The question then becomes where is evolution taking us, or will the Life Force of the Universe just cast us aside and move on without us?”

Well as you might imagine that comment got the conversation started.  Some thought that we humans didn’t matter at all.  One  person compared our importance in the grand scheme of things to mushrooms that grow on the forest floor.  Someone said we’re just another dust bunny under the sofa that is the universe.  But some felt that we did matter, if only to our world and to our immediate surroundings, friends and loved ones.

To keep the conversation going, I asked, “Is mankind a distraction or an improvement in the process of evolution?”  And I answered my own question by saying that only we humans have the power to decide if we are a distraction or an improvement.  The real question is what will we decide?  Will we destroy our world with nuclear war, or ruin our environment by using up all its resources, or cause global warming that will make earth uninhabitable in another 500 years,or so?

Ancient man wondered what the lights in the night sky were.  Modern man knows what they are, how big other stars and galaxies are, and how far away, but today we wonder why they are there and what it all means.  And in our short lifetimes that average much less than 100 years, does it matter at all why the universe is out there?  I wonder.

What Matters Most……..is that I only know one thing for sure.  The universe does not seem to care about us here on the third rock from the Sun, but at the same time the Laws of the Universe are such that we all get the same treatment and have the same potential.  What we do with that treatment whether it’s good or bad, and with our potential as humans is entirely up to us.  That’s why our individual lives are so important.

© 2012 #6  JimHigh can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467