Holiday Wipe Out
Embrace the Season
Hi Friends,
The holiday season always (maybe not always) makes my mind turn to … horror? Among the Hallmark and traditional holiday movies, there are always those scary yule time movies, such as Gremlins, Krampus, Santa Jaws, etc.
This year, though, I've felt inundated with real-life horror scenarios. For example, solar storms causing demonic tractors to run amok. Not sure if you all realize it, but we are approaching the height of the Sun's maximum phase in its 11-year solar cycle.
Even though our favorite star's recent activities have given us amazing auroras this year, strong solar storms can also mess with devices that rely on magnetism and electronics to function, such as our GPS satellites.
Our lives have become dependent on technology that can go haywire at a moment's notice. For instance, the robotic farm equipment that works the fields, guided by GPS data. And, so when a Sun burst causes a hiccup in our global positioning network, all types of large computer driven field machinery need to figure out how to work without any instructions, creeping around like a run-away Roomba after an earthquake.
An earthquake setting the world's robotic vacuums free! Talk about a horror movie.
More and more, we seem to be on the cusp of an apocalypse—even Sir Paul McCartney is concerned. AI is going to destroy music.
And, the very people we depend upon to solve our problems, scientists, can also be the source of our demise. One recent article describes the right-handedness of DNA and the left-handedness of proteins. Apparently, this condition is important for life to thrive on Earth.
The famous DNA double helix is considered right-handed, meaning its spiral strands — a sugar-phosphate backbone — twist to the right. (To picture this, make a thumbs-up with your right hand; your thumb is the vertical axis and your curled-up fingers represent the direction of the spiral.) On the other hand, proteins, the building block of cells, are left-handed.
-https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-horrified-mirror-life
Well, whoop-de-doo. Who cares? It turns out we should, because some curious sciencey folks believe that if we make mirror life—left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins, we might be able to perform some medical magic and cure some very stubborn diseases. But, other biologists believe that the result of introducing mirror life into our world would be so unpredictable that it could extinguish all existing life on this planet (including us).
Quite a claim, but sometimes hyperbole isn't wrong.
This research feels a lot like the ethics around cloning—just because we can do it, should we? As with most technological exploration, the moral and social implications follow way behind our abilities and understanding to do the science. Some believe we have a responsibility to investigate everything to further our knowledge of the universe.
Personally, I believe, above all, we have a responsibility to be responsible. Or, like I say to my cat when it's playing with a baby snake in the garden, "Just leave the thing alone."
Yet, by far the most horrifying story I came across this week is called the Big Slurp. It has to do with how the universe will end. Most alternative scenarios, such as the Big Freeze, Heat Death, or the Big Crunch, are scheduled for many billions of years in the future. So far away they are simple amusements.
But, the Big Slurp could happen any time. In fact, many are confused as to why it hasn't happened yet. About a decade ago, the folks at the Large Hadron Collider discovered what they had been calling the God Particle—the Higgs boson.
It's a little speck of matter that they predicted should exist (given the maths) but hadn't yet been observed. Then, when they smashed some stuff together in just the right way, they saw it. Just as predicted.
This is significant because its existence fills a gap in the Standard Model of physics that’s been bothering people for a long time.
After all the champagne had been drunk and the hang-overs cleared, those folks did some more math:
…scientists found a worrying problem with the Higgs boson: the particle’s mass appears to be perilously close to giving it an inherent instability. An instability that just might be the thing that spells the end of the Universe.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-the-universe-will-end
Inherent instability? Yikes!
Basically, thanks to the quirkiness of the quantum world, under the right circumstances, "[t]he Universe would collapse into an entirely new state, destroying and recreating itself in a puff of energy."
Not in billions of years, but at any time... So, Carpe diem!?!
This holiday season, when given the chance, make a concerted effort to appreciate your life and the people (and pets) in it. Of course, we don't need the end of the world to remind us to do that.
Slurp! And, I wish you a wonderful holiday season!
Happy reading, writing, and celebrating,
David