Îl vor înţelege cu adevărat poate doar o mână de oameni, alţii vor crede că l-au înţeles iar alţii se vor preface că l-au înţeles. Şi chiar dacă va fi ambalat frumos, cu comparaţii ilustrative tot inaccesibil ne va fi unora. Un exemplu.

Poate juniorii de azi şi de mâine vor fi mai pregătiţi.

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely-make that miraculously-fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result-eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you.

In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements—principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.

Astronomers these days can do the most amazing things. If someone struck a match on the Moon, they could spot the flare. From the tiniest throbs and wobbles of distant stars they can infer the size and character and even potential habitability of planets much too remote to be seen—planets so distant that it would take us half a million years in a spaceship to get there. With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is “less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground,” in the words of Carl Sagan.

They are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.)So we are all reincarnations—though short-lived ones. When we die our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere—as part of a leaf or other human being or drop of dew. Atoms, however, go on practically forever. Nobody actually knows how long an atom can survive, but according to Martin Rees it is probably about 1035years—a number so big that even I am happy to express it in notation.

In the 1960s, in an attempt to bring just a little simplicity to matters, the Caltech physicist Murray Gell-Mann invented a new class of particles, essentially, in the words of Steven Weinberg, “to restore some economy to the multitude of hadrons”—a collective term used by physicists for protons, neutrons, and other particles governed by the strong nuclear force. Gell-Mann’s theory was that all hadrons were made up of still smaller, even more fundamental particles. His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons, as in Dolly, but was overruled. Instead they became known as quarks.

On another occasion, while poisoning himself with elevated levels of oxygen, Haldane had a fit so severe that he crushed several vertebrae. Collapsed lungs were a routine hazard. Perforated eardrums were quite common, but, as Haldane reassuringly noted in one of his essays, “the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.”

The physicist Richard Feynman used to make a joke about a posteriori conclusions, as they are called. “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight,” he would say. “I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!” His point, of course, was that it is easy to make any banal situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful.

In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can’t conceive. If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains—about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of skin you shed every day, plus all the tasty oils and fortifying minerals that seep out from every pore and fissure. You are for them the ultimate food court, with the convenience of warmth and constant mobility thrown in. By way of thanks, they give you B.O.

…there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

Punctul acela alb, acolo suntem noi cu totii

“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, ever king and peasant, every young couple in love, every moth 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.”

“You might imagine an uncharitable extraterrestrial observer looking down on our species over all that time—with us excitedly chattering, “The Universe is created for us! We’re at the center! Everything pays homage to us!”—and concluding that our pretensions are amusing, our aspirations pathetic, that this must be the planet of the idiots.”

“In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed”? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.”

“Voyager cost each American less than a penny a year from launch to Neptune encounter.”

“In all Romance languages, such as French, Spanish, and Italian, the connection is still more obvious, because they 4 derive from ancient Latin, in which the days of the week were named (in order, beginning with Sunday) after the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. (The Sun’s day became the Lord’s day.)”
(N.A. Luni – Luna, Marti – Marte, Miercuri – Mercur, Joi – Jovian/Jupiter, Vineri – Venus, Sambata – Saturn, Duminica – (ziua lui) Dumnezeu.)

“In five billion years, all humans will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms. Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyager s, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.”

“I’m struck again by the irony that spaceflight—conceived in tile cauldron of nationalist rivalries and hatreds—brings with it a stunning transnational vision. You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply engrained nationalisms begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum.”

Hello Dave!

“On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle. An ancient experiment was about to reach its climax. Those who had begun that experiment, so long ago, had not been men – or even remotely human. But they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deeps of space, they bad felt awe, and wonder, and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they set forth for the stars. In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night. And because, in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed. [...]
The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic. In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships. But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter. Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust. Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea. And they still watched over the experiments their ancestors had started, so long ago.”

“But let me remind you of Haldane’s famous remark: The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine – but stranger than we can imagine.’

“With the historic abolition of long-distance charges on 31 December 2000, every telephone call became a local one, and the human race greeted the new millennium by transforming itself into one huge, gossiping family.”

“My field of interest is the psychopathology known as Religion.’
‘Psychopathology? That’s a harsh judgment.’
‘Amply justified by history. Imagine that you’re an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species which has divided itself into thousands – no by now millions – of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there’s a ninety-nine per cent overlap, the remaining one per cent is enough to set them killing and torturing each other, over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders.’ ‘How to account for such irrational behaviour? Lucretius hit it on the nail when he said that religion was the by-product of fear – a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe. For much of human prehistory, it may have been a necessary evil – but why was it so much more evil than necessary – and why did it survive when it was no longer necessary? ‘I said evil – and I mean it, because fear leads to cruelty. The slightest knowledge of the Inquisition makes one ashamed to belong to the human species… One of the most revolting books ever published was the Hammer of Witches, written by a couple of sadistic perverts and describing the tortures the Church authorized – encouraged! – to extract “confessions” from thousands of harmless old women, before it burned them alive… The Pope himself wrote an approving foreword!’ ‘But most of the other religions, with a few honourable exceptions, were just as bad as Christianity… Even in your century, little boys were kept chained and whipped until they’d memorized whole volumes of pious gibberish, and robbed of their childhood and manhood to become monks…’ ‘Perhaps the most baffling aspect of the whole affair is how obvious madmen, century after century, would proclaim that they – and they alone! – had received messages from God. If all the messages had agreed, that would have settled the matter. But of course they were wildly discordant – which never prevented selfstyled messiahs from gathering hundreds – sometimes millions – of adherents, who would fight to the death against equally deluded believers of a microscopically differing faith.’”

Vă daţi seama cât de tare trebuia să fi fost Sorin ăsta? Pentru o secunda mi l-am şi închipuit în faţa spânzurătorii vorbindu-i ceva osânditului, apoi pe cel din urmă râzând.  Normal că un om precum Sorin e la mare căutare.

Care esti Sorine ?

Probleme cu pieile de foca. Putin prea scurte.

Spre surprinderea noastră a fost zăpadă multă pe Gurghiu, undeva pe la 50-70 de cm. Marcajul l-am cam rătăcit din cauza zăpezii dar poate şi din cauza faptului că nu ne-a prea păsat de traseul oficial, aveam vârful în GPS-ul din dotare.

Drumul a fost destul de uşor, pe alocuri am fost ajutaţi şi de urmele snowmobilelor care au mai trecut pe acolo. Pantele (sau rampele?) destul de lejere, cu câteva mici excepţii nu ne-au pus probleme pieilor de foca de pe schiuri. De fapt au fost mai problematice coborârile, frânările le-am executat destul de des cu, şi anume, “şezutul”.

Vârful este denumit Seaca Mare probabil din cauză că nu are izvoare prin preajma, cu toate acestea pare un loc excelent pentru campat şi vizionat Perseidele.

Îmi tot propun să ţin minte cât de grea e o tură de schi şi cât de obositoare, pentru ca data viitoare să refuz politicos. Întotdeauna uit însă lucrurile acestea, rămân după două săptămâni doar amintirile plăcute, aroma de brad şi fotografiile.

Aici e traseul, pentru cei care vor să-l scoată pentru GPS.

Pauza intre brazi

Spre Seaca Mare

Cucerind reduta

Doi copaci iubareti

Pe Seaca Mare

Nu e monociclu, desi pare

Cu puţin ajutor de la DubFX: