I was in Texas in July of 2005, and I had stopped with my father in a town called Round Top. I read this article that I thought would be interesting to pass on to others.
SPACED OUT!
A Message from a Real Space Cadet
By Chris Travis
Editor of
Round Top Register of Round Top, Texas
Everyone I know says I am spaced out. My wife tells me I’m distracted and self absorbed. She says I have no sense of time, lose things constantly, and cannot be trusted with appliances and says these things are evidence of my dysfunction. According to her, I fade in and out of reality all the time… but she doesn’t know the half of it. The truth is … I am a real space cadet.
My friends think I’m a pie-in-the-sky dreamer too, a guy who spends most of his time in La La land. They’re too nice to say it, but half the time they think I act like I’m from another planet. I try to tell them what I have discovered about the inner workings of the universe, but their eyes just roll back in their heads like the reels in a slot machine. It happens so often I have taken to cupping my hands under their mouths on the hopes I will hit the jackpot. So far the only payoff I’ve gotten is a spray of spittle when they burst into laughter.
I know I am hoist on my own petard. It’s my own fault that people question my credibility. Part of my problem comes from publishing this little newspaper. In the past, I must admit I have written a few things that stretch the truth. Many people doubt my in-depth interviews with Santa Claus and Bigfoot are the real deal. I understand that some folks question whether the Register is really locked in a vicious print war with the New York Times; that our columnist is really over two hundred years old; or that Round Tops’s Town Marshall is really 6’9” tall and rides tornadoes.
These are reasonable doubts, and I cannot deny that I might have played loose with the facts a time or two for the sake of art. But in all fairness, anyone who studies physics will find what most of us think of as “the real world” doesn’t even exist. One of the founders of quantum physics, Erwin Schrodinger, points out that at the atomic level, all matter performs in a “completely disorderly heat motion, which opposes itself to their orderly behavior and does not allow the events that happen between a small number of atoms to enroll themselves according to any recognizable physical laws.”
That means that if you look closely at the building blocks of the universe from which everything is made-your car, your kids, your dinner, your new pair of shoes-you won’t find anything that looks anything like “facts or reality.”
Reality is just a story humans tell one another so we won’t be utterly overwhelmed by the immensity and utter complexity of the world we live in everyday. The universe is incomprehensibly vast. Life is unfathomably complex. Few of us have the slightest idea what is going on around us, and for the most part, we don’t want to know. Understanding the truth is a real blow to the ego, so who wants to face it?
The fact that everyone makes up their own reality is just one of the basic truths that even the most backward of the galaxy’s species takes for granted, but here on the old home planet we are still having a hard time getting the message. People on our planet often think there is some “real objective” world that is the same for everyone. This kind of provincialism is very embarrassing for a space ranger like myself. Put yourself in my shoes, you are at a cocktail party at a penthouse in an upscale tourist colony orbiting a gas giant in the Betelgeuse system, and your host, who looks like a six foot tall oyster with chrome hood ornaments suddenly shouts “Humans believe what?” and the whole party breaks up in a riotous laughter.
This kind of thing makes is very hard to act cool. Belonging to what many interstellar beings consider “one of the goofiest looking species in the universe” is hard enough, but being an intellectual laughing stock just adds insult to injury.
That is one of the reasons I have decided to come clean about my secret life and try to explain what is really going on in the universe to the rest of humanity.
Sugar Crystals on a StringMy Strange situation began a long time ago when I first became a space cadet.
It began innocently enough. I had a big imagination as a child and was fascinated with the workings of the world – why sugar crystals appeared on a string suspended in salt water; why the program in your hand shivers and quakes in a concert hall when the strings crescendo at certain notes; why snow flakes are all unique, and other amazing mysteries of science.
When I was a kid, the world was a source of wonder for me, and that wondering set me to wandering in my mind…and the next thing you know I was a space cadet.
It all started when I met Tom Corbette and the Space Rangers. Tom was an all-American boy, tried and true, and a fellow cadet at the Interplanetary Space Academy. He and I teamed up with tow other young cadets. Roger, who was a real wise guy but a crack navigator, and Astro, our massive but good-natured engineer. The four of us rocketed all over the solar system before I was out of the sixth grade.
In the summer after I graduated from elementary school, I discovered a book called Glory Road, and found myself hopping from one dimension to the next.
That was where all the trouble started. It was fun, flitting from one alternate universe to another battling impossible odds, but there are serious consequences when you defy the laws of physics, and before long I was paying the piper.
I first began to notice strange things happening when I was in the seventh grade. That school year I lost three watches and four coats. My mother assumed I was simply careless, but as far as I could tell those personal items just disappeared. Right away I realized they had slipped into another time /space continuum but it was hard to prove to my mom.
Sadly, a little known effect of such quantum phenomena is that there is a corresponding perturbation in the electro-chemical energies passing through the synapses of the brain when they occur…which means you can’t actually remember the alternate universe events when they happen to you.
I knew those watches including the one with Roy Rogers and Trigger on the dial must lie half buried beneath the purple sands of a distant world.
They were probably being crushed under the twelve armored feet of a methane-breathing three-headed desert beast rather than lost in my school locker.
But no matter how articulate my argument, I couldn’t convince my unimaginative mother.
When I came home from school without my coat for the third time, she grounded me. That’s when I realized my life as starfarer was better kept a secret.
Now all these years later, I realize that I am not alone. There are other people like me out there in the world, lonely and lost, never seeming to fit in, observing a universe that their friends and neighbors can’t seem to perceive.
They are normal people except for a few unusual quirks. They tend to lose anything not chained to their belts. They are constantly looking for their keys, their cell phones, their screw drivers and their wallets. Important papers vaporize on their desks at work.
They have no sense of time. They have a hard time remembering names and phone numbers and never read directions. They leave lights on all over the house and can’t be trusted with toaster ovens.
They spend a lot of time lost in thought, staring off into space with wistful expressions on their faces. Sometimes they become fixated on watching a cloud, or a crawling bug, or the reflection of light on water, and you have to shake them to get their attention.
In other words, they have the attention span of a four-year-old.
If there is anyone in your life like this, I ask you to be patient and forgiving. They may be annoying and hard to live with, but they’re behavior is an unfortunate side effect of an important mission.
They’re secretly defending the earth against invasion by the forces of galactic evil. So give them a break. It easy to get a little distracted when you’re standing alone against the death rays of the machine-beings from the Crab Nebula. Facing such responsibility, anyone could forget a birthday or two.
These people disserve your respect because they are performing a valuable public service. Defending the planet earth from total annihilation is a thankless job, but someone’s got to do it.
Dimensional Schizophrenia To my clients, friends and neighbors, I am a regular guy who happens to be a little eccentric. They assume that I lose things and can’t remember people’s names because I simply don’t pay attention, or because my brain was damaged in the 1960’s by recreational drugs.
Actually, I am constantly cycling from one dimension of space to another. I’ll be in Round Top talking on the cell phone or sitting at the drafting board designing someone’s country home…and then all of a sudden I’m taking four G’s as my spacecraft leaves the atmosphere of the fifth planet out from Alpha Centauri in pursuit of insectoid aliens bent on galactic domination.
Needless to say, these circumstances make it difficult for me to maintain my professional composure in my architecture firm. It’s hard to explain what is really going on, so I find it necessary to preserve the charade that I am simply a garden variety ditz. This guise has long worked to my advantage.
You learn a few things about the behavior of sentient life forms when you hang out with aliens from all over the galaxy. I’ve seen it over and over in fifty different star systems.
When some species find out you are different – and Homo Sapiens are among them – it makes them afraid, and organisms that are afraid have a tendency to get nasty.
It’s long been my opinion that it’s better to take a little lip, than to have your lip busted.
As a result, I have lived a double life up to now. But, I am throwing caution to the wind. I’m going to tell everybody what I have found out in my travels about what is really going on here on the planet earth.
I have to run to the house because I forgot to turn off the coffee percolator and the Queen is afraid I am going to burn the house down. I’ll clue you in as soon as I get back.
The Ultimate Truths
of Life on Earth Whew! That was close. The bottom of the coffee pot was starting to look like a black hole. Being dimensionally challenged is really irritating sometimes
Now back to the facts about life on earth. There are a lot of facts that earthlings don’t really understand of course, more than I have time to share. After all we are a primitive race from a backwater planet in the rural areas of a minor galaxy. So in order to simplify this, I am going to focus on the top seven.
Important Truth IThe Aliens are getting restless.
For the last million years or so, most of galactic society has ignored human beings. I mean, there have been a few good sitcoms based on human beings, mostly comedies similar to Bedtime for Bonzo, but for the most part no one really cared. Human beings were just funny monkeys scratching themselves. Alien societies felt safe from the various types of violent madness we are so good at cooking up because we were stuck on the surface of our own planet and couldn’t get at them.
But then Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, and that changed everything. Those of us who were alive when that happened experienced a very rare event. Life on earth is roughly 300 million years old. Each of us lives an average of about 70 years. That means the odds that any individual organism would be alive when a representative of life on earth actually set foot on another world is 4,285,714,286 to one.
It’s not just the Beatles that make us a unique generation, and this fact is not lost on folks who live in neighboring star systems. They are especially paranoid because things are happening awfully fast. Our seed is spreading. Voyager I is now about 8.7 billion miles from earth and moving towards them at 46,000 miles an hour. They watch the History Channel. They know what nutcases we are and it is making them nervous.
Now what you need to understand is that most of our neighbors in the galaxy are pretty nice folks. They tend to be forgive and forget types.
But there are races out there that view us the same way we view a venereal disease, and if they decide we need a dose of antibiotics, we are toast.
That’s the main reason I have decided to speak up. We need to get our act together in the next couple of generations, or our communal butts are going to be in a sling.
Important Truth IIYou live in your own little world.
Each of us makes up our individual reality. I mean really. I’m not saying the material world doesn’t exist. There is a world out there, but each of us perceives it differently in significant ways.
Throughout the galaxy, every different organism has its own “real world.”
Highly social species like us can coordinate our behavior by talking and mimicking each other, and by building a common living space to channel our actions, but those are just tricks our brains have evolved so we can get more food and make more babies than the other animals we compete with for survival.
Bottom line, you have to guess about what the other guy is thinking.
After millions of years of evolution, our brains have gotten very good at guessing, but you don’t have the slightest idea what is going on in the minds of your wife, your husband, or your kids….let alone behind the fevered brows of Osama Bin Laden or Tom Delay.
There is no point in worrying about what other people think.
There is no point in talking to other people about what they think other people think.
There is no point to watching television shows or reading books about what other people think. You’ll never really know.
So just relax and pay attention, because the only way you are ever going to get any idea what a person thinks is by listening to them and watching their behavior.
On advanced worlds, listening and observing are competitive sports. You can get a Ph.D. in them. In many societies, talking is seen as an unpleasant but necessary metabolic process, something like urination or defecation. The smartest people never say a darn thing!
Important Truth IIIYou are never alone. You just think you are.
You are really just a cell in a bigger organism.
Every advanced society in the galaxy understands this.
I know you think paying your own bills and having your own body makes you all grown up and independent, but the truth is that you and every other living thing is just a piece of the living earth.
All the incredibly diverse species that cover our planet are just specialized cells like those in your body. Some are liver cells. Some are stomach lining. Some are neurons.
I know this is a blow to your ego, but it is time to grow up and face the music. You aren’t really all that important in the grand scheme of things. Even humanity as a whole is not all that big a deal. Our living planet was growing and evolving just fine for hundreds of millions of years before anyone invented a BMW.
It may seem like the American Idol results show, or your hangover is the center of the universe, but it really isn’t.
The reason you think you are an individual is because all living systems are built of small pieces that must be distinct from one another if they are to work. Identity is necessary for their functioning, just as an individual cell is important to the functioning of your pancreas.
What a liver cell thinks about the liver makes no difference. All that matters is whether it secretes bile. The same is true for you. I know this is hard to swallow, but time is running out so I can’t afford to break it to you gently.
Important Truth IVEverything in the universe is always running down.
Human scientists call this fact the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or entropy. Most physicists consider it the most general law of nature.
When the energy in any system – a star or a living organism – runs down to the point that it becomes a dead, inert lump of matter, it reaches a state that a physicist calls thermodynamic equilibrium, or maximum entropy. It can also be described as “greater order” as significant change in its form stops for all practical purposes.
Most substances degrade relatively rapidly from the relative disorder caused by heat to a more “stable order” as they cool to absolute zero, but the march towards maximum entropy exhibits itself in many other ways. When two solutions are mixed - for instance a jar of sugar water and a jar of plain water - the sugar has a “goal” of becoming equally distributed throughout the liquid water. When it reaches that state, maximum entropy is achieved.
Such effects occur throughout nature.
For instance, Americans degrade the complex organisms we refer to as cattle at a mind-boggling rate. In the year 2000, somewhere around thirty-eight million of those highly organized and brilliantly functional organic systems, each capable of independently maintaining its energy level for a considerable number of years, were “degraded” to the more stable state we refer to as sewage by the process of our consumption.
That sewage is then consumed and degraded by specialized microorganisms even closer to thermodynamic equilibrium.
In that same year, each American converted an average of 195 pounds of red meat, poultry and fish into simpler forms. Every year of our lives, we convert more than our weight of other “higher life forms” into energy and protein which we use to battle the relentless march of entropy.
Each individual organism on earth is an efficient processing plant that is remarkably effective at making other organisms in the world around them - and even inorganic compounds - more “stable.”
Eating and finding food are so basic to the function of living things that in almost all organisms the brain is located near the entrance to the gut. There are several families of genes that govern both brain and gut development, which reflects the ancient relationship between the gut and the brain.
It is humbling to consider while pushing our carts through the grocery store that we may be utilizing the first and foremost purpose of our minds, but those are the facts. Like every other animal, our primary business in life is to find food that can be converted to energy to support the functioning of our bodies. What we do not use, we excre
