Fifty Shades of Ignorance

New York City 2015 (Part 1)

For my dear friend and fellow astrophile, Cliff Moise…

I am aware my followers are always looking forward to hilarious rantings on my foolery. However, I’m compelled to take a detour on this particular post. I came across the image at the top of my post on a billboard in Manhattan while strolling through town on my day off training from my new job. It is a real image of Earth taken through the rings of Saturn from Voyager. My life recently went from 0 to 100 in 30 seconds and it is suddenly very different than it was mere weeks ago. This image hit me and led me to researching the image. It was a welcomed detour of all I’ve had to think about in life lately. To compensate for my disturbingly severe losses from my unwise collegiate investments, I developed a knack for overstudying random subjects as a way to decompress. This blog is inspired by that geeked-out New York moment on speed. Try to read all the way through. I promise it isn’t as random as it may seem at first…

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Color & Words.

I doubt anyone would disagree with me when I say language affects the way we all view the world. Benjamin Whorf, an early 20^th Century linguist, coined a term I am very fond of: linguistic relativity. Many people often share that Eskimos have fifty words for snow to teach young people the importance of semantics. Today people are throwing around the term “Fifty Shades of Grey” as if there are fifty different ways of describing the color. It is more than likely due to the recent phenomenon, the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy by E. L. James. I won’t go into my opinion of the material. (May I suggest reading “Dumbing Down America” by James Delisle?)

Despite the variant spellings of the word, the most current and widely used definition of “grey” is along the lines of “an achromatic color between black and white.” Before it got to that point, however, it was defined as shine, glow, ash, to watch or look at, gloom, aging, a penny with a tail on both sides for cheating, slang for confederate soldiers during the American Civil War, an international unit for measuring radiation absorbed by the human body, and the original word for an evil race of short extraterrestrial beings (eat your heart out E.T.)…just to name a few.

When it comes to the word being used for describing a color, on one side of the planet it was, for a millennia, the original word for describing “purple” – on the other side, it was the blue and green of the sea. The Egyptians were the first to use the original use of the word when naming the color “blue” when they began making the first dyes and paints of the color.

Like snow, in reality, there are far more words for snow and far more uses of the word grey. Yet somehow, the modern human insists on one word for snow and grey being a metaphor for the blurred lines of truth. Snow is what it is, regardless if it has a name or not, and absolute Truth is not measurable, yet alone put it on a scale of shades. (Grey can’t have shades and also be achromatic. Seems like something that can be played with in a Saturday Night Live skit, “Discuss.”)

Many people struggle with separating belief from Truth just like they do opinion from fact. Just because we all “believe” something to be True doesn’t make it so and just because we think someone is unintelligent for not believing the same thing doesn’t mean they are unintelligent. Most people don’t understand the concept of ultimate Truth. It is something that we as humans long for, like eternal life, but are incapable of ever achieving. Human life, all life for that matter, has its boundaries – just like its ability to fathom Truth. Allow me to break my point down for you by the numbers…

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Words & Stars.

Words are like stars. Since humans began communicating, from their patterned grunts to elaborate lengthy prose of today, we have created an uncountable number of words. Today, there are more than 6500 languages spoken and roughly 665 languages that have become extinct- that we have records of. The estimated total of words in dictionaries (most slang not included) for the top 11 spoken languages of the world is about 3,166,476 words. The average number of different meanings for each word is 3.587. If we use the average of the top 11 languages (300,000) and apply it to the other estimated 6489 languages spoken today, that is 1,946,700,000 words and 6,982,989,864.47 meanings. If we include the KNOWN extinct languages, still using the average (keep in mind older languages generally have more words and even more meanings), it is an additional 199,500,000 words and 715,624,635.52 meanings. That being an estimated total of 2,149,366,476 words and 7,709,972,937.25 meanings. (See The Anthropology of Language by Harriet Ottenheimer.)

In comparison, scientists estimate there are roughly 200-400 billion stars in our galaxy, The Milky Way. They have also calculated an average of more than 100-200 billion galaxies in the OBSERVABLE universe (that being as far as we can view given our current resources). There are three different ways that NASA counts stars:

1) They can measure the total light from a galaxy in watts, then divide by the average wattage of a single star.

2) They can count up the total number of stars in a very small region of a galaxy to get the number of stars per cubic light year, then multiply by the total volume of the galaxy.

3) They can ‘weigh’ a galaxy by calculating its total mass, then divide this number by the average mass of a single star.

Using their complex methods, it is estimated then that there are roughly 2E+22 to 8E+22 stars within our visual reach. That’s 20 to 80 septillion if you were wondering. (See “Counting the Stars in the Milky Way” by Dr. Sten Odenwald of the National Institute of Aerospace.)

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Stars & God.

So, with ALL of that being said, roughly estimating, humans have created nearly 8 Billion known ways to say something. God, divine intelligence, nature, whatever you want to call it, roughly generated 80 septillion. With nearly 8 billion humans living today with their endless ways of communicating, we still can not find a way to understand each other or truly understand what one is thinking. So, how on earth (pun intended) do humans manage to assume we know anything about God, divine intelligence, or nature – yet alone what it is thinking? Somehow we manage to reach beyond the 8 billion tools within our grasp to understand and communicate with each other toward the 80 septillion tools of God, divine intelligence, and nature to give us intellectual dominion over one another. And somehow we have managed to give the power to these individuals – allowing others to easily believe these people who hold invisible tools in their hands that they can never possibly grasp to wield the power to manipulate the world into perceived peace and inevitable disaster.

So many different words and so many different meanings (please don’t ask me to find a way of calculating context) somehow leave us grappling for significance for our species, our culture, our community, and ultimately ourselves.

Although it seems like I just flew on a tangent concord, the philosophical debates on words, colors, shades, and stars are really all related. John Newton in 1672 published his findings on the color spectrum. Although that was a few hundred years ago, it was incredibly recent given the human history of observing color. He referred to it as “the celebrated phenomenon of colors.” Essentially, color is not a thing but the way humans perceive the appearance of things depending on how it absorbs or reflects light. This discovery led to the understanding of the colors and twinkling of stars related to their distance, composition of pieces of elements and gases, and how long it takes for us to see them. Stars are like truth in that we see a twinkle of them, most of which have not reached us yet, most of which we will never see in our life times. We only have hints as to how far away some fragments are and what pieces of truth they contain. And only recently have we come to understand they can be quite violent and frightening.

Regarding the old adage of faith, if you can’t see it, does it exist? Yes, you know SOMETHING is there. When it comes to these absolute Truths, all science, fiction, and science fiction aside, we simply don’t and can’t know exactly what.

Anthropologist argue that many colors came into existence over time due to climate changes and the evolution of our own eyes and brains while many also argue that it was the evolution of our minds that allowed us to perceive them. These same anthropologists teamed up with archeologists and have hypothesized through thousands of years of writing and other recorded history that the color blue was the last color to be perceived and described by human beings. (See “Through the Language Glass” by Guy Deutscher.) It’s a bit like Truth. We are slowly evolving to perceiving it but our species, as we are now, will never see the full picture, just like our ancestors didn’t perceive the color blue for many generations.

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God & Ourselves.

Just as we can not understand ourselves unless we look from the outside in, we couldn’t view our world for what she really is without doing the same thing. We had no idea what our world truly looked like until our first astronauts went out and showed us what we really are: small, frail, and not as mighty as we always thought we were.

Take a look at this picture on the right. It is known famously as “the pale blue dot.” Launched before I was born, The Voyager Space Craft took this picture of our earth from Saturn some 6 billion KM away on February 14, 1990, the year that my 6th grade girlfriend was trying to have me beaten up for not making out with her in the choir room closet. (And to think that was the most important thing in the world on that day.) Look closely …Earth appears as a tiny dot – the blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band on the right.

Just because we can hear language and have the capability to hear billions of words, it is still very difficult to really understand each other even when we speak the same language as they do. Just because we can see the sky and have the capability to see sextillions of stars, it is still very difficult to really understand the universe and the gods even when they see the same things we do. Cradled within the darkness of space, we are small. Very small. However, there is absolutely no need to feel insignificant. We are a member of a very large universal family with one thing in common: atoms. As the old story says, man was made of clay and woman from his rib. Regardless of the Truth behind those stories, all living things (clay or ribs) are comprised of what we currently understand to be atoms. Regardless of what or who we believe made atoms, stars, and color, some Truths we are certain of: all three of those things exist. And so, after a hell of a lot of unnecessary math and 2300 rambling words that seem like a “Dear Abby” on existential crisis, I am struck with only one Truth: we are made of the sameness of stars.

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“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space