16
June 25, 2014 • Community News • www.mycnews.com
Over the Fence
By Joe Morice
It Boggles the Mind If you draw a line straight across a graph the length of a city block and then mark one inch of it at the end, it’s a good comparison of how long our civilization has been on Earth; one inch worth. Staggering, right? Try this: If we fit that one inch of time into the entire universe, it might compare to an atomic particle among all the uncountable numbers in our solar system. It boggles the mind. Given all this mind-boggling, I can’t understand what makes us underestimate the kazillion-to-one odds against the delicate, unimaginable process that took place to create our fragile planet and its consequent civilization.
www.seniorshelpingseniors.com/stlouiscentral
It’s said that five million, million (whatever that is) atoms can fit on the head of a pin. The number that makes up the human body would most likely consist of too many zeros to fit on this page. Yet all those kazillions of atoms came together to become a functional, incredibly complicated machine called a human being. In fact, billions of them were created. They can walk, talk, think and do just about anything including building extremely complicated machines to help them survive and advance society...or destroy it. Oddly, in the last 100 years or so, our society has advanced far more than the previous hundreds of centuries since man huddled in caves in fear of the night. Even more extraordinary, human beings are pound for pound, the weakest of all Earth’s creatures yet they are perhaps the most successful because they have the ability to reason. I said ‘perhaps’ because I once watched a Jerry Springer TV show for a few minutes. Human beings share many of the instincts of animals, such as the herd instinct, survival instinct and so on. But we’ve been gifted with the ability to reason that would overcome the base instincts of animals that would kill one another to control their groups, or kill other groups of similar species to steal their food or ter-
ritories. Of course, admittedly, some of our species doesn’t always overcome those base instincts as proven by Middle East terrorists and dictators most foul. There is another incredibly large number to consider; many scientists who study such things agree the odds against all of the aforementioned happening become greater as they advance their understanding of the process. It might compare to the odds against finding a needle in a haystack the size of Jupiter. The events that brought all this about are so complex, perhaps there really was a supreme being to bring it about as many believe...or as some of my more skeptical acquaintances believe, aliens from a different world made it all happen. Who knows? Perhaps Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock cruised by in the Starship Enterprise and seeded our planet. Yet this is the fun of it! It’s not knowing and searching for the truth with open minds. When I see a person or a group of people proclaiming their concept of life is the end all, be all of existence, I feel sorry for them. They’ve closed their minds to the great wonders of the world and often live in fear and intolerance of those who haven’t. By asking no questions and refusing their own curiosity, they’re missing all the fun. A small child who totters across a meadow and discovers a butterfly landing on a wildflower looks on in round-eyed curiosity. Our existence relies on this openminded curiosity and the ability to learn…and we’ve only just begun. “Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.” -Linus Pauling Joe Morice is Community News’s blue-collar philosopher. He was born and raised in Missouri and spent most of his childhood on a farm and adulthood operating big machines. He has no formal training as a writer, unless 60 years of writing about any and everything counts. The opinions expressed in this column are Joe Morice’s alone and do not reflect the opinion of the owners or staff of Community News.
www.stlcc.edu/StartHere