Time Out of Mind: Revisited

 Avicenna remarked that he was not of the Ismaili sect as has been claimed. It is also stated by the narrator Cide Hamete Benengeli of Don Quixote that Avicenna said however that the whole world is mad.

The so called Union of Concerned Scientists has recently moved their doomsday clock a tick closer to midnight. Perhaps the fuse will be lit in some unexpected corner of our interconnected globe. 

We suspect that humanity has been in control of fire for perhaps 400,000 years now. (This has been updated to 670,000 years ago!) I hope to live a vigorous age of near 100 years by 2050 AD or so. My grandparents were born in the latter part of the 1800s. So that more or less covers the span in three generations of some 200 years. So we need a mere two thousand (3.35 thousand, updated) of those units of time to arrive at the point that mankind first used fire. Before that, really, you can't call anybody hardly human.

Now, we know it takes the earth some 200 million years to circle the milky way. That's about that a thousand times longer again from when we became, in a sense, truly human by cooking our food. In about ten million years from now our planet will be bobbing along the Milky Way's spiral arm closer to the Virgo Cluster of galaxies and receiving a huge dose of radiation from the shockwave of cosmic rays. 

Our human minds, our consciousness are able to conceive of the vast spectrum of time that clusters of galaxies like the milky way produce such shockwaves that impinge upon us. We can view these shockwaves as relics of radio waves and estimate in several billion light years when the merger of these clusters caused these shockwaves. 

Now we are told by theoreticians of quantum physics that in the act of viewing the probabilistic  "wave function" associated with the very smallest particles of matter causes that wave function to collapse. But the human mind was produced by the vast scope of the unfolding of and in time of the universe. This is a paradox that has been caused by viewing the mathematics of probability as reality. 

The solution is to know that the potential of collapse of human society can be averted, but that it requires us to realize and act to change our assumptions about reality. There is no final fate of this wonderful universe as we might imagine from the limited perspective of mere deterministic mathematics. Humanity has vital missions ahead of us. 

One is to utilize what we have so far grasped scientifically to eradicate poverty and more effectively combat disease among us. Another is to move off this planet and conquer the limits of dwelling in "outer space." The lessons we learn about the power of shockwaves in the immense vastness of time and space for accelerating matter and anti-matter will propel us to worlds we know not where but may only imagine. 

First we must conquer the tyranny, the madness that chains us to a failed system of beliefs. For we are not hapless animals merely here for the ride as victims of fate. The time since we conquered the power of fire is hardly an instant in the face of the long arc of cosmic time as we know it now. The future is determined by our willful choices. Time is what we make of it, not of what it makes of us.