A Contemplative Note About The Universe- and Trees
Ever think about just how ridiculously complex and complicated everything is just to exist? I had a profound moment today where I considered the depth to every conceivable thing, and it was honestly somewhat overwhelming. There is absolutely nothing that is simple, and everything that seems to be only seems that way becasue of other complicated processes making it possible.
Allow me to introduce yourself:
This is you.
Inside that oh-so-important skull of yours is the culmination of your entire being. An incredibly complex system of firing neurons and pattern recognition; A naturally occurring, biological computer. I don’t know how similar an individual’s mind is naturally formed to another’s- but it doesn’t matter. As soon as you become conscious you start to experience everything in an absolutely unique perspective that will never be replicated or even fully understood by others. Of course there’s a similar template to all of them, but only on a basic level- and even then people’s thought processes are still inheirently different from each other’s in a vast variety of ways. But I digress.
Your brain is your every thought, feeling, sight, smell, touch, and sound. Time is completely dependent on your perception of it and the speed of your thoughts at any given moment. Otherwise it’s just a conceptualization of measurement between relative movement of numerous sources (more on that another time). Scientifically speaking there is nothing about you that would continue should it cease to function.
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Think of your body as a big mech suit. And your brain is Heero Yuy.
So there you are, doing whatever it is that you do. And you are one of billions of these biological computers being supported by incredibly complex systems that serve functions all across both macro and microscopic scales. One incredibly complex organism that just happened to defeat all other odds just to exist among the other billions that also just barely managed to be brought into existence.
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BILLIONS.
We live on a planet that just happens to have everything we need. A HUGE organized mess of interweaving checks and balances. Mosquitos, ants, beavers, H2O, oxygen, salt, volcanoes, fire, clouds, storms- everything that you can think of has a direct impact on constantly overlapping status-quos, and it always comes about through constant one-in-a-million chance. Let’s take the forest, full of all sorts creatures that keep our balanced ecosystem so nice and ecosystem-y. Of course the most prominent part is the trees.
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Trees. They’re kind of simple, right?
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Well, I guess that is fairly complicated…
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The inside of a leaf.
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Microscopic wood photograph.
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So now lets’s zoom out real fast. That single tree, full of individual leaves, each flawlessly doing a job that makes it possible for itself and other things to exist. It’s one out of approximately 39,386,4182,497 trees in the world.
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There are estimated to be 60 trees per person. That’s nearly forty TRILLION!
Now let’s zoom out more:
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Further.
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Bingo.
Of course it doesn’t even end there.
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We’re still zooming out.
And then it gets to be a whole lot of this. Forever.
Now let’s try it the other way, starting with people. Remember:
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BILLIONS.
So let’s learn about what makes you work:
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This is a cross section of a temporal lobe in the brain.
This is what the inside of your cerebral cortex looks like on a microscopic scale.
And finally:
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This is a single neuron.
That is a single neuron. One of countless that are constantly firing in your brain, working through the synapsis like an uber complex binary code system (but conceivably exponentially more complicated).
Of course we all know when we think about these individual things that they are all constructed of exacting systems, always with the ability to examine deeper. But how often have you associated all of it with each other at the same time?
As I’ve said before, it can be somewhat overwhelming. At least I begin to feel that way when I begin to seriously contemplate it- not that I don’t enjoy it. Alas, I am tired. I hope if you’ve read this that you at least found it interesting, I’m sure I’ll be touching back up on the subject again some day soon…
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Phoenix Godwin
3-21-2011
