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Dignity of Life

8 Apr
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Reverence for Life…

17 Mar
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Ultimate Reality?

17 Mar
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Absolute Truth?

17 Mar
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The Organism…

17 Mar
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Ecology…

16 Mar
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Reality is merely an Illusion…

16 Mar
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All Living Things: One Interdependent Organism

23 Feb

The Age of the universe

23 Feb

The Age of the universe is estimated at 26.7 billion years. According to the study’s author, Rajendra Gupta, a physics professor at the University of Ottawa, their newly-devised model indicates that the universe is 26.7 billion years old, older than the previous estimate of 13.7 billion years.

And yet, In a few billion years, our sun will become a red giant so large that it will engulf our planet. But the Earth will become uninhabitable much sooner than that. After about a billion years the sun will become hot enough to boil our oceans.

The sun is currently classified as a “main sequence” star. This means that it is in the most stable part of its life, converting the hydrogen present in its core into helium. For a star the size of ours, this phase lasts a little over 8 billion years. Our solar system is just over 4.5 billion years old, so the sun is slightly more than halfway through its stable lifetime.

And life on earth has of course a much briefer existence…It is standard for every organism to burn out. The lifespan of a living organism is considered the period between its birth and death. While a few die just under 24 hours, some can outlive many generations. The biological ageing of animals involves the decline of a diverse range of bodily functions. Lifespan is marked by several conditions – one of the most prominent ones being heredity. While the upper age limit of an animal can be affected by its environmental conditions, species cannot age beyond a specific age, even under the most permissible conditions.

For example,

  • There are almost 8 billion (8*109) people with an average lifespan of 70 years.
  • There are about 130 billion (130*109) mammals in the world, with average lifespans from ~5 days (rodents) to ~200 years (whales).
  • There’s about 3 trillion (3*1012) trees in the world with lifespans from 50 years to several thousand years.
  • There are an estimated 10 quintillion (10*1018) insects in the world, with most lifespans shorter than a year.
  • There are an estimated five million trillion trillion (5*1030) bacteria in the world, with an average lifespan of less than a day.

We can look at these numbers based on their orders of magnitude alone, since the numbers are so large. Since there are overwhelmingly more bacteria on the planet than any other type of organism, the global lifespan average will get skewed towards the average lifespan of a bacteria, which is short.

So two things should be borne in mind. First, that all the cycles of creation since the beginning of time exhibit the same recurring pattern, so that it can make no difference whether you watch the identical spectacle for a hundred years, or for two hundred, or forever. Secondly, when the longest-and the shortest-lived of us come to die, their loss is precisely equal. For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his. Marcus Aurelius

Carl Sagan: Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality

23 Feb

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light?years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.–

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark