BACKWARD THINKING Put your thinking cap on, relax, have a glass of wine, or a beer, and follow my thoughts

for a bit. Where are we going? Trust in the lyrics of the cartoon song sung by Bugs Bunny, You never know where youre going till you get there. (Borrowed by Warner Brothers from the 1946 musical film Cinderella Jones.) The contemporary, majority, cosmological view is that we humans, the earth we live on, our solar system, our galaxy and all the rest of whats out there, what we generally collectively refer to as the universe, allegedly emanated from something that went boom, some 12 to 14 billion years ago. I use the term allegedly advisedly, because no one ever actually witnessed the Big Bang as it is called it is a theory, based on our earthling observations, and competes with other scientific and non-scientific notions that run the gamut from instantaneous creationism to an oscillating universe and multiple universes, all of which too are theories, as no one yet has complete proof of anything. Although the notion of an expanding universe, inclusive of an early inflationary period, was actually modeled and published in 1917 by Willem de Sitter, as an offshoot of Einsteins 1916 announcement of his theory of general relativity, the key empirical observation in support of the Big Bang was first made in 1929 by astronomer Edwin Hubble, that the galaxies in our universe are moving away from each other, in all directions, at proportionally greater velocities as their distance from us increases. Until Hubble, it was more or less generally accepted that the universe was always out there, at least from whenever God or the gods, take your pick, decided to put it up on the board (and for true non-believers, was just always out there.) Hubbles reward was having a very cool telescope named after him that has been shooting back exquisite pictures of the universe since its launch in 1990. The Big Bang picked up further support in 1964 when the horn antenna being used by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Laboratories detected what is called the cosmic microwave background radiation. They initially thought it was static, caused by bird poop on the antenna, but after a number of good scrubbings, and other fine tuning, they learned that a group of theorists at Princeton had predicted such microwave background radiation to be there, as an after-effect of the Big Bang. Penzias and Wilson were rewarded with a Nobel Prize in 1978 for their efforts. Turned backwards in time, Hubbles observation of an expanding universe suggests mightily that if you go back far enough, it (the universe) all crunched down into an infinitesimally small point, a singularity in cosmological parlance, because the laws of physics, as we purport to know them presently, no longer apply to something that dense. Having grown up in the 50's and 60's, when numbers were a lot smaller, I am open mouthed impressed by some of the notions that jump into my head when reflecting on this alleged phenomenon. First we have to talk a bit about numbers. As regards my assertion that numbers were smaller in the 50's and 60's I am simply noting that, relatively speaking, it meant something different back then to be a millionaire than it does today. Today, you can be a millionaire by

owning a home, car and a decent 401(k) plan back then, you could have an estate on the North Shore of Long Island, a Fifth Avenue townhouse, live-in servants in both, a chauffeured limousine and enough money in the bank to keep you and several generations of your progeny living in a lifetime of comfort with a million dollars. Today, to be noticed, financially, you have to be a billionaire. I note that the term billion refers to different quantities in American and British parlance. Here in the States, a billion refers to a thousand million, which is a one followed by nine zeros if written out. The Brits call that a thousand million and call a billion what we call a trillion, a one followed by twelve zeros if written out. Most of us dont have a billion dollars, and none of us, as yet, has a trillion. Regardless of whether you use American or British vernacular, presently, we seem to toss around words like billion and trillion as if we actually comprehend the magnitude of such numbers, which I tend to doubt we actually do. Im not dissing anybody by saying so, but simply pointing out the sheer magnitude of these numbers is perhaps bigger than what you might think. Some examples may show you what I mean. How much is a million? Well, a million seconds ago was 12 days back you could probably remember what you did that far back. What were you doing a million minutes ago? That was only 1 year, 329 days, 10 hours and 40 minutes ago, and you cant remember what you were doing with any degree of precision, can you? Most of us would love to live a million hours, as it would give us a little over 114 years to wander about on this planet. I think most of us can comprehend, in our minds eye, a million of something, whether its measured in dollars, units of time or marbles (which would fill five boxcars.) So then, how much is a billion? A billion seconds is a little over 31 years. A billion minutes ago was just after the time of Jesus Christ. A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age. But, a billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our elected officials in Washington spent it, pre-Obama it may be less presently, go figure. How much is a trillion? A trillion seconds is 31,688 years. See the progression in seconds? 12 days (million) 31 years (billion) 31 millennia (trillion). Lets do dollars. If you were a millionaire, and your wealth was in the form of nice, crisp, previously unused, $1,000 bills, it would make a stack of a mere 4 inches in height. If, instead, you were a billionaire, your stack would be an impressive 358 feet in height. But if you were a trillionaire, your stack would be 67.9 miles in height, and you would need a space suit to look down from the top of it! In basic units, our government has managed to become indebted for more money than the age of the universe in years by a factor of 1000 the National Debt sat at $13 trillion, on June 1, 2010 according to the Treasury Department, versus the mere, average estimate of 13 billion years of age and did so in only 191 years (if you start counting from the adoption of the Articles of Confederation in 1791) or, if it makes you feel better, in only 224 years (if you start counting from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.) You do the math. If a trillion seconds is 31,688 years, and we paid back the National Debt at the rate of $1 per second, without interest, how long would it take to pay it all back? Thats right only 411,944 years! At a payback rate of one thousand dollars a second, it would still take more than twice as long to pay it back as it took to run it up. For those of you out there with an eye for detail, theres roughly $58.95 trillion of unfunded debt for future medicare, medicaid and social security payments to be

made, pre-Obama Care, which the Treasury Department doesnt count in determining the National Debt, but I digress. Oddly enough, this diatribe is not about money or politics, I just used some money examples to give you some perspective on really large numbers, because when you talk about the universe, its all about incredibly large numbers, and the only human institution that presently can deal with numbers of that magnitude is apparently the Congress of the United States, which is unsettling to me. Why? Because the salary of a rank and file member of the U.S. Congress is a whopping $174,000 per year, but in the 2010 elections, the 30 incumbent Senators up for reelection raised an average of $11.244 million in campaign funds. Why would you raise 100 times the annual salary for a six year seat? There must be some perks were not hearing about oops, I digressed again. We are talking about the universe. Lets give it some non-political numerological perspective. Planet Earth is the third planet in our solar system, which, since the degradation of Pluto to a dwarf planet, contains seven others, two inside our orbit about the Sun Venus and Mercury and five outside, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. Our Earth has a diameter of roughly 7,926 miles, measured at the equator measured through the poles, it is slightly less, roughly 7,901 miles, rendering it slightly bulged about the middle, as I am, but lets not quibble. The diameter of our Sun is roughly 856,000 miles, and, yes, that means it is roughly 109 times as large as the Earth. But thats just diameter, measured along just one dimension. If you were to compare volume, which takes into account all three physical dimensions, you could fit roughly 1.3 million Earths into the Sun and still have some leg room. Want to talk about mass? The Sun accounts for 99.8% of all the mass in our solar system. In brief, our beloved Earth is a mere bedbug on an elephant when compared to the Sun, but its home. Now lets talk distance. The Earth is roughly 93 million miles from the Sun. To put that into perspective, if you were to drive there, from here, in a straight line, at 60 miles an hour, it would take you roughly 177 years to get there, if you could afford the gas. Light travels at the rate of roughly 186,282 miles a second, in a vacuum, so it still takes more than 8 minutes for the light from the Sun to hit the Earth. Moving our way to the edge of solar system, Mars is roughly 141 million miles from the Sun, and it takes over twelve and a half minutes for the light from the Sun to hit Mars. Jupiter is roughly 483 million miles from the Sun, and it takes over 43 minutes for the light from the Sun to hit Jupiter. Saturn? Roughly 886 million miles distant and 1 hour and 19 minutes for light to get there. Uranus? Roughly 1,782 million miles distant (thats 1.782 billion) and 2.66 hours for light to get there. Neptune? Roughly 2,794 million miles distant and 4.17 hours for light to get there. Pluto may have been downgraded in planetary status, but I like it. Roughly 3,666 million miles distant and 5.47 hours for light to get there. We are still in our own solar system, and have only just begun to get to big numbers. Our Sun is a star. The next closest star to our Sun is Proxima Centauri, a mere 4.3 light years away. A light year? How big is that in miles? Multiply 186,282 miles a second by 60 seconds in a minute, then by 60 minutes in an hour, then by 24 hours in a day, then by 365 days in a year which works out to be roughly 5,874 trillion miles, which is a number too big for most scientific brains to imagine, so they use the term 4.3 light years instead. We could say it was 5.874 quadrillion

miles away, but what have we gained? Not a lot. But that is our closest neighboring star, which makes me feel a little isolated. But are we? Not if you count numbers, not distances. Our Sun and Proxima Centauri are but two stars in a larger conglomeration of stars which are bound together by gravity to form our galaxy, which is called the Milky Way, not because it resembles a candy bar, but because when viewed through our telescopes, (or more accurately, when gazed upon by ancient Greeks, sans telescopes) it appears as a hazy white band stretching across the celestial sphere. The Milky Way is estimated, by those who purport to be able to calculate these things, to have between 200 billion and 400 billion stars in it. We cant count them all by sight, because it would take too long, and because we cant see them all, due to dust and conglomerations of gasses that obstruct our view of the galaxy. The Milky Way is not a giant amongst galaxies either. The next closest galaxy to ours is the Andromeda Galaxy, which is estimated to contain one trillion stars but I am getting ahead of myself. The Milky Way is estimated to be 100,000 light years across its stellar disc. We could do that in miles, but what is the point? Does saying it is 587 quintillion miles across give you a better perspective on its size? I doubt it. We are still in our own galaxy and made to feel somewhat minuscule, no? If our Earth were a bedbug on an elephant in comparison to our Sun, what is it in comparison to 200 billion or 400 billion other suns? A mere cell in the bedbug, no? Our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda is a mere 2.5 million light years from Earth. We are far from alone, galactically speaking. Those who purport to know, estimate there are more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe, each galaxy containing between 10 million (dwarf galaxies) to over 100 trillion (giant galaxies) individual stars. I suppose if you get bored, you could put those numbers into a calculator or on a spreadsheet and put a number on how much that might work out to be, but what would it mean? That we are now an atom in the cell of the bedbug on the elephant? Sounds too large to me, if that is possible. Maybe we are now an electron in an atom on the bedbug on the elephant. Thats better! That term I used, observable universe, has a meaning too. Thanks to Albert Einstein, and his theories on relativity, the observable universe may be smaller than the actual universe. What? Do the math. If, as Albert postulated, nothing can go faster than the speed of light, and it travels a cool 186,282 miles a second in the mostly vacuum that is space, and if you multiply out that the universe is roughly 13 billion years old, the most we can observe presently is light that traveled that amount of time in our direction at that speed. But who said that was the edge of the universe? There could be more universe farther out, the light from which couldnt hit us because there hasnt been enough time for it to get to us. Nobody can say definitively one way or another, because nobody can actually see the actual edge of the universe, only the edge of the observable universe. We might be older than we think, as a universe, and bigger too, but we cant really comprehend what weve already got so why worry? Those who espouse the Big Bang as the genesis of the universe allege that if you roll the clock back, the roughly 13 billion or so years that all Ive described was out there, it would get closer and closer together, until it was all scrunched up into a single, minuscule point, the singularity. There is no definitive explanation from the Big Bang enthusiasts as to what made

the singularity go bang, or why. The problem is all scrunched up in the perceived need to separate science from religion. Sans empirical proof of a divine hand making the singularity go poof many scientists are unable or unwilling to admit to the existence of the hand. I say, good! In my head, one of the essential elements of any religious belief worth having is that of faith. Well, duh! If we could empirically prove (or disprove) the existence of God (or gods) we would no longer need faith. Affirmative proof would eliminate an entirely wonderful set of leaps. Depending upon what the proof showed, we night also need an impressive number of tribunals to deal with the fallout of such a discovery. Negative proof would be equally disturbing. All historical acts of heroism, charity and intellectual pursuit would be rendered rather meaningless, no? With nothing to look forward to in the afterlife, why break your ass being good or productive in this one? Its too simplistic to say there are rewards for such model behavior in this life to warrant it. In my mind, those rewards are out there because while the masses are not necessarily church, temple or mosque goers, there are more believers in something than in nothing, and cumulatively their beliefs affect how we allocate our resources. Consider this. Im only guessing, but I believe your basic ant doesnt spend any appreciable time pondering the mysteries of life or any afterlife. Actually, I dont believe they ponder anything. Any given ants lot in life is determined by its birth. If born royally, without the benefit of a pre-k, grammar and high school and college education, they grow to adulthood, carefully preened by their minions, they fly off to start a new nest (if queens) or to impregnate a new queen and get eaten (if princes.) If low born, they work, either inside or outside the nest, and die. Ive never read an account of a low born ant deciding it was actually a prince and setting off on its own to form its own colony. Ant colonies go to war with one another, but it appears such hostilities are for the purpose of securing food or territory, which equates to new food sources. In such battles, Im thinking the ants on the front lines are fighting out of instinct, rather than any sense of honor, or belief that their sacrifice for the colony will be amply rewarded in ant heaven. Thus, in my perhaps overly simplistic mind, an ant colony is pretty descriptive of what a human colony would behave like, sans faith. Call me crazy, but dogs have faith. Not the church going kind, but the generic leaping kind. Having long ago traded their feral instincts for domestication, dogs develop faith in their masters that they will feed them, walk them and pet them. In return, they develop a sense of territoriality about the home in which they live (okay, sometimes scented with their urine to keep their bearings) and bark when an intruder presents him or herself at the threshold. You can train a dog (or a rat) to do tricks or perform some simple task, in return for food, and they will repeat the trick on faith of getting the reward. If you cheat the dog too often out of the treat, psychologists say you have extinguished the behavior. I say the dog now has lost its faith in getting the treat. Regardless, when my dog looks to the heavens, Im relatively certain it is not to ponder the Big Bang theory, what lies ahead in doggy heaven or the nature of God. To the best of my knowledge and belief, as the alpha male in our family, our dog ponders god when gazing upon me. The koi in my pond in the yard do likewise when I approach, as Im the one who usually tosses in the

food pellets. Before I go to human faith, lets go back and get some numerical perspective. We have the Big Bang set at roughly 13 billion years ago. The Earth and the rest of our solar system formed roughly 5 billion years ago. We can date the earliest fossils of bacteria back to roughly 3.5 billion years ago and the earliest animal fossils to roughly 600 million years ago. The earliest fossils of the Homo genus of mankind date back to roughly 2.5 million years and the demise of all other versions of humans, other than our present species, to roughly 30 thousand years ago. Got that? Modern man has been in control of Earth for roughly .6 billionths of the time our planet has been around. Writing is a mere 55 hundred years old and general relativity is not yet a centenarian. Farming is roughly 10 thousand years old, law and engineering roughly half that and the first perception that the universe might be constructed of atoms half that again. Being humans, although Aristarchus postulated that the sun was the center of the universe in roughly 280 BC, when Galileo turned his telescope to the stars in the 1600's to confirm the century earlier Copernican theory that the sun was the center of the solar system, not the universe, about which the Earth revolved, the Catholic church tried him for heresy, thus underscoring the tension between science and religion. Need I point out here the countless millions, whom, over time, have been executed or imprisoned over holding the wrong political views? We humans are wildly conflicted about our beliefs and apparently prepared to go to extremes over them. Much of history is an object lesson in the need to discern between fact and opinion with the former often turning out to be merely the latter, on closer scrutiny or better experimentation. What was most remarkable about the American Revolution was not its ultimate success, but the fact that it was thought of and acted on at all. Theretofore, although kings and governments were periodically overthrown, and replaced, no collection of humans ever thought to actually declare themselves independent of their entire political union and form their own. When the Revolutionaries did so, they attributed their right to do so to natural law stating most eloquently, ...When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.... The Revolutionaries didnt stop there they then set forth perhaps the most important statement on human rights ever written, ...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.... The philosopher, Santayana is known for the saying, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. With that notion in mind, I offer some additional historical context then my observations to the American Revolution and its aftermath.

Why were the Revolutionaries revolting? In a word, taxes. Sound familiar? It should. The kick was, inter alia, that the Colonies were being taxed without having their own elected representatives in British Parliament. The perceived abuses went beyond taxation to be sure, as it extended to forced quartering of soldiers, denial of trial by jury and an entire litany of complaints, all centered on the lack of an actual voice in the government by those who were being governed and iterated in great detail in the Declaration itself. Very un-ant-like. My question is, What would have happened of old King George III had relented and given the Colonists a few seats in Parliament? By contemporary standards, in my opinion, the newly elected representatives would have raised more money than the seat paid, to get elected, sailed off to England, taken their seats, gotten bribed by the lobbyists for whatever groups were handing out bribes at the time and wed have missed, inter alia, the best exposition on human relations ever written and a perfect Revolution. Did I digress? I cant tell anymore. We hear a lot today about the conflict on the Supreme Court (and all affected by their decisions) between the so called strict constructionists, who believe the Constitution should be construed strictly according to its express terms, and those who believe the Constitution to be a living document capable of reinterpretation over time. I side with the strict constructionists, because those who set it all up did two intellectually good things that favor strictness in construction. First, by setting up a government that had three separate, distinct and co-equal branches, a system of checks and balances as it is described, at a time when the Revolution itself was commenced to escape from tyrannical governmental administration, the Framers clearly feared having any one branch over-power any of the others. A judiciary able to not only nullify what a legislature and executive had made into law, but also free to invent new law (rights, powers, etc.) through reinterpretation of the Constitution, would give it too much power. My second basis is because the Constitution is amendable and has successfully been amended 27 times, with an additional 6 unsuccessful attempts. That it has been amended, and in doing so added a number of new rights and protections for the electorate, tells me the mechanism the Framers set up works fine. Those who oppose that notion are, in my opinion, either impatient, or confident that whatever amendment they would have made, would be voted down by the electorate either of which would be further reasons the Framers would favor strictness in construction. While we of late bend over backwards as a society to accommodate all kinds of minority rights and freedom of expression, I believe we are still a society within which the majority rules. That the Framers were all white, male and wealthy land-owners or businessmen at the time of the adoption of the Declaration and the Constitution is not perceived by me as a basis for rejecting or loosely construing either document. Instead, it is rather proof of its vitality and ability to be improved upon over time. There simply was no human society in existence at the time in which both were adopted in which women or blacks were enfranchised to vote, and slavery was still in existence in Europe and elsewhere as well. The Constitution was amended to abolish slavery in 1865, after a bloody civil war was fought to repatriate the 11 southern slave states that

attempted to secede from the Union. Black males were enfranchised by a Constitutional Amendment adopted in 1868 and women likewise by one adopted in 1919. In my mind it is more important that we got there, using the framework established to get us there, than that it took longer to get there than had any individual branch decided to do so.