People ask a lot of questions, don’t they?
Some are simple to answer, but people who have missed their opportunity to be broadly educated sometimes can’t separate the simple queries from the hard. I’m in that group, more times than not.
I rummaged through an old safe the other day. I found its key tucked away and forgotten in the back of a drawer in an antique desk. I asked myself: what might be in that old safe? Why not take a look? What harm could there be in searching a dusty safe for forgotten objects?
I found old papers and school reports. I found Christmas and birthday greetings and expired credit cards. I found a rectangular tin-foil-wrapped object pressed flat and smooth and a quarter-inch thick — a pamphlet of some kind, perhaps.
I would unwrap it later.
I reviewed a report card from the seventh grade. It held up well during the past 58 years. My geography teacher wrote a comment that caught me by surprise. “Billy Lee is a thinker,” he wrote next to the “A” he gave me.
I remembered back. Mr. Holden drove a taxi-cab nights to make ends meet. Memories flooded in.
He complained that teachers weren’t paid enough. Between taxi fares, he read books. He recited titles and authors, but I knew I would never read them. The writers’ names were unfamiliar — foreign, some of them, which I couldn’t remember or pronounce; the titles? — incomprehensible.
How could anyone read books whose content was unconnected to anything they knew or were able to understand? I couldn’t. I was sure of it.
I found a letter from a girl I once loved. She explained why we could no longer be together. Despite all my wonderful qualities, I was needy, she explained. I needed to turn my needs into wants by finding others to fill in the gaps she couldn’t.
It was odd, I thought. I didn’t realize how technically expert was her craft the first time I read her note. Who knows? Maybe today she is a famous author who writes under a pen-name. Stranger things have happened in the history of literature, right?
The writer of Jane Eyre comes to mind. Charlotte Brontë published her novel under the name of Currer Bell. I always thought a writer of her depth might have come up with a better name. I did, and I’m not half the writer Charlotte was. People have to admit, Billy Lee has a nice ring, no?
Lately, I’ve been writing answers to questions on Quora to which no one can possibly know the answers. I call them mystery questions.
Many of the questions remind me of the sailor’s dilemma where a seaman finds himself stranded and adrift on a raft in a vast ocean of swells during a raging monsoon. The man clings to a few pieces of wood and prays to God for deliverance.
He asks God why was he born when it is clear that his life is going to end in terror, alone on a raft in a bottomless sea with no chance of rescue. If God by some miracle answers his prayer; if God saves him and the storm clears, the sun will bake him alive; eventually the sharks will eat him.
Why? Why? Why?
What sin did he commit that drove him to his fate? What decisions did he make that were ill-advised and unwise?
What might he have done differently to avoid the horrid end he knows will befall him in the few moments that remain before his strength is sapped and he loses his grip on the last piece of wood, which will disintegrate once he’s sucked beneath the churn.
Well, one answer that comes to mind is this: he didn’t plan for his birth; once born he didn’t plan for his death. He never really believed that he was doomed to a lonely, fearful death — the destiny of all living creatures; humans are no exception.
The answer to his cry for answers is that there are no answers. No one avoids losing everything they love. It is every person’s fate. No scheme, no matter how cleverly constructed, avoids it.
And yet the sailor begs God. He shakes his fist and screams against the gale: God, why did you forget me? Why my pointless life? Why did I suffer to the very end?
Amen.
Here are six mysteries I will struggle to explain.
Mystery 1 — What caused or initiated the Big Bang, if there was nothing before it?
95% of the mass and energy of the universe that theories and observations say must be “out there”, no one has been able to find, right?
Does anyone anywhere know anything at all about what the universe is or how it works?
The big bang is a verbal “analogy” used to help folks visualize what a few theorists have worked out mathematically to explain a lot of observations that otherwise make no sense.
Here is the hard part: the mathematics is also an analogy; it isn’t real; it’s just numbers. Mathematics cannot make a model that reflects fundamental realities without simplifying a lot of important stuff — and no one as yet knows what the missing stuff is that human speculation and observation is overlooking.
We all know it’s true.
Mathematics is a way of reasoning — like language but minus its ambiguities and textures. An argument can be made that mathematics and language are not adequate to the challenge of describing reality.
Humans seem to be lost in a mystery of existence from which they will never be rescued. They lack certain fundamental tools that they must someday discover and develop to give them any chance at all to climb out of a very dark hole of ignorance.
It might be possible to understand the cosmos — if the secrets of consciousness are unraveled. Consciousness is the magic-water in the desert of ignorance which — when found, understood, and imbibed — could quench the thirst-to-know that every thinking person suffers. That is my hope, anyway.
Consciousness might be fundamental and foundational. Most people won’t accept it, but almost every brilliant person who has thought the problem through seems to have written that it must be so.
Start with this: Why Something, Not Nothing?
Then this:
Then this:
Mystery 2 — Assuming we can completely separate religion and faith from pure science and fact, then speaking from a purely scientific point-of-view, what form would life after death take?
The consciousness that people experience today is the consciousness they will experience after death if consciousness is the fundamental foundation of all reality.
Conscious life-forms plug into universal consciousness like televisions plug into the cable network. TVs come and go, but the cable network is forever broadcasting. The conscious experience it creates appears in the televisions that are connected to it and can be observed on their screens by independent observers.
The reality of television comes from its fundamental foundation, which is a broadcasting system — in this analogy. As long as a television is plugged in and turned on somewhere, the reality of the cable network will continue.
Consciousness does not belong to the TV, but is experienced by it. When the TV “dies”, this consciousness will continue to be experienced by other TVs. The unplugged television will never miss it, and the consciousness it shared with other televisions will never die.
This view of reality has been described in analogous ways by Erwin Schrödinger, John Von Neumann, John Archibald Wheeler, and other brilliant physicists.
Mystery 3 — How is DNA a natural code?
DNA is a reservoir of bases that RNA draws from to build sequences that are processed in RNA-built structures called ribosomes. From them polypeptide “necklaces” are fashioned which are folded by Golgi structures into proteins. Proteins become the tissues of the body and the catalysts of cell metabolism, right?
In humans, 10% of DNA is used to make the templates of proteins (2%) and catalysts called polymerases (8%). The rest (90%) is not used as far as anyone knows today.
A lot of extraneous chemical structures play at the edges of DNA to influence what is expressed and what is suppressed. It’s called epigenetics and is an active field of research.
DNA is neither a code nor a cipher. It’s not that simple. A lot more is going on that scientists know about and which scientists know nothing about. For example, proteins exist in the body for which no DNA sequencing has been found in the genome. It’s called dark DNA.
Mystery 4 — If the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, won’t it reach infinite speeds? What does an expanding universe mean after the heat death of the universe?
The universe is expanding like a balloon that is being inflated by the force of something that exists inside it, which no one understands. I’ve heard mainstream physicists say that they believe this expansion is uniform and accelerating; it will lead to a “Big Rip.”
The Big Rip will tear apart everything — including atoms and parts of atoms. Energy will dissipate and the universe will flat-line and disappear. It will be as if the universe never existed when the process is complete. Space, time, energy, and matter ripped to shreds will leave nothing behind.
I’ve always thought that the accelerated expansion of the universe is caused by the gravitational tug of trillions of parallel universes that surround our own like a swarm of fireflies. Accelerated expansion is evidence for massive parallel universes, it seems to me.
As seductive as this idea is, no one is proposing it as a serious explanation for the observations of expansion. I don’t know why, but suspect that many of the smartest people don’t think the parallel worlds model clears up enough of the mysteries in the cosmos to be worth pursuing.
Neither does the Big Rip model. It can be argued that the “rip” model explains nothing. It describes what happens when everything is driven apart by an unknown force to its logical conclusion. Somehow, the description doesn’t seem helpful. It doesn’t answer the biggest question of all: how did everything start in the first place?
How did we get here? Where are we? Is anyone in charge? Will the universe live and die without the benefit of any living thing — any conscious life, including itself — understanding the why and how of it all?
How can something on the scale of a universe exist and then cease to exist whose mysteries were forever out of reach — impossible for conscious-life to grasp or comprehend?
Mystery 5 — How could the precursors to the origin of life move or assemble with intent? At what point would this intent become actual life?
Anyone who says they understand how the precursors of life assemble is telling fibs, because no one has any idea how life started. I’ve heard convoluted conjectures about how clays, for example, might have got life started, but they are unconvincing and not reproducible, at least to my way of thinking.
Based on evidence in ancient rocks it seems more likely that comets and asteroids carried prokaryotic cells to Earth. These cells are thousands of times smaller than the eukaryotic cells that are the building blocks of all animals and plants.
Because these cells are small and are, internally, a disorganized mess (no organelles, no nuclei, tiny amounts of RNA & DNA mixed together like scrambled eggs along with everything else they contain), it seems reasonable that prokaryotes could be abundant in the universe and have existed since the first generation of stars and planets.
These cell types were firmly established on Earth (a third generation star) by Earth-Year one-billion. Oxygen didn’t exist, nor did oceans. Some geologists believe Earth was bone-dry at its start.
Now comes the really hard part to understand. It took two-billion years for these tiny cells to branch-off into the much larger and more tightly organized cells called eukaryotes. During that time an onslaught of ice-balls from the outer reaches of the solar-system created a deluge of water on both Mars and Earth.
Earth — having 2.65 times the gravity of Mars and a magnetosphere (which Mars lost when its iron-nickel core froze) — was able to hold onto both its atmosphere and its oceans.
Oceans are probably the incubators where highly unlikely events occurred that made humans possible. Cells grew in size and complexity. Some engulfed prokaryotic granules that became the mitochondria that every eukaryotic cell uses like mechanical batteries to add the energy necessary for big cells to survive.
Somehow these big cells learned how to use sunlight for power. Photosynthesis released oxygen, which poisoned almost every other kind of living cell on the planet. The survivors, the remnant, took another billion-and-a-half years to become space-exploring civilizations of highly intelligent animals who call themselves humans.
It’s a process that, because of its duration and a number of sporadic near-extinctions, seems unlikely to have happened at all, but here everyone is on Earth to prove that the impossible is possible.
Although I agree with Freeman Dyson that prokaryotic life is going to be found to be pervasive in the hundreds-of-thousands of methane-and-water ice-balls in the outer reaches of the solar system (called the Kuiper Belt), it seems unlikely that the much larger eukaryotic cells (or the animals and plants that evolved from them) will ever be found anywhere else but on mother Earth.
It’s possible that intelligent life has evolved in some other place, but the odds are small enough that by the time humans suffer their inevitable extinction it seems unlikely that they will have found and identified beyond Earth any non-prokaryotic life at all.
And now, at last, the final mystery. Mystery number six.
Who forgot what it is?
Remember the foil wrapped object found in the old safe? What was inside, anyway?
Any guesses?
I took the shiny object to my wife, Bevy Mae, and we carefully peeled away the foil to reveal the contents within.
And of course, dear reader, you guessed right. A stack of money is a wonder to behold. It makes living feel real good, at least for a while. A sufficiently large amount provides the freedom to buy any old thing at all.
Will we buy a sailboat and take our thrills from a roiling ocean?
We don’t know.
Billy Lee
