Friday, April 25, 2008

Tomorrow Started?



Has it happened before? -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I’m sitting in the North Park Starbucks on a Friday day off. Am amazed at the number of working age people (no students, no retirees) who are here. How do you join that elite group outside of being self-employed or unemployed? Earlier, an entire middle school class was herded into the AMC Theaters for some kind of Earth Day movie. My teachers never took me to a fun shopping mall for a field trip. I got to see an electricity plant and a computer parts factory – they suffer in the comparison to North Park which offers Abercrombie and Mrs. Fields Cookies.

None of this has to do with today’s title, “Tomorrow Started” -- a 1980’s new wave song title by the group Talk Talk that has always intrigued me. The album featuring that song, It’s My Life, has cover art that shows puzzle pieces with various animals falling out of the sky. What to make of all that? Maybe it does nothing other than provoke the thoughts of an over-caffeinated blog writer. 

Has tomorrow already started? Or does time flow relentlessly from past to future? There are some interesting aspects to the question. Some physicists claim that if you were incredibly small and could enter a black hole, you could go back in time. At 200 earth pounds, I’m too big for this earth scale much less that scale. According to Einsteinian physics, space and time are on some kind of continuum – perhaps manageable by some technological genius. 

A favorite argument against time travel is that we’d be seeing visitors from the future gallivanting around earth as tourists visiting the early 21st century. While here, you think they might also impart the cure to cancer, or an effective design for a nuclear –powered automobile. But nay, we only see our humdrum present with its humdrum possibilities. There is one loose thread here … the visitor might satisfy the above-mentioned criterion – small enough to enter a black hole. Thus it’s here, but so incredibly tiny that we fail to see it. For that matter it might need some incredible telescopic powers to see us.

Does intelligent complexity necessitate a particular size, scale or dimension? As anthro-centric humans, we fairly assume that an intelligent being would be made of organic molecules, be our scale of size and have a DNA blueprint. We are certainly an example where that’s the case, but are we proof that it’s always the case? I’ve never followed Star Trek episodes, but I know they must’ve covered this. 

I’m skipping the refill here at Starbucks. I’m too shaken up by the possibilities. There’s a chance, however small and beyond bizarre that Talk Talk is on to something…. Tomorrow Started. It might also mean that yesterday is approaching. Let’s try not to think about that too much, unless we can choose which yesterdays to relive.

© 2008 blogSpotter

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2 Comments:

Blogger Craig said...

I'll have one of what you're having!!

3:46 PM  
Blogger blogspotter said...

The irony is that coffee is the strongest thing I use anymore. People have said, "What are you on?" and I have nothing to tell them. :-)

7:50 AM  

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