Talk With Your Dog

I was beginning to think that I wasn't going to write this week. First thing this early Sunday I poured a cup of coffee and automatically sat here and pulled up the posting screen, so why let all that effort go to waste? It is not that I am blase' about posting, it is that I have nothing to say and when I read other posts that begin with "I have nothing to say", I immediately sigh and lose interest in what they are not saying. So now that I have lost your interest I figure that I can say just about anything. That leaves me with what some call 'stream of conscious writing', but it is what I call surfing my synapses.

It begins with last night. He walked up to me while I was watching TV and said, "Please pause the TV. I need to talk to you." I did. I fingered the pause button stopping the lady coroner in Body of Proof in mid-speech and gave him my resigned attention.

Hutch

"I know there is homemade stew in the kitchen," he emphatically stated. "And I want some. In fact, I want some now!" I knew that is what he said and my wife knew that is what he said and she smirked as I got up and dragged myself to the kitchen and spooned out some stew into a bowl, and then spooned out some more stew for our other dog. It was not just a desire to fulfill his wish, but it was sort of a pleasant reward for such perfect inner-species communication that Hutch achieved. His words to me weren't just an intent stare, but a vocal crooning and jerk of his head toward the kitchen and then back to staring me in the eyes as he crooned more. His intent was 100% clear and anyone in the room would have understood it. Communication between species.

Which leads me to thoughts of the cosmos. There may be species out there that we may have to communicate with. I know you have seen those visualizations where you -- well, not you exactly, but a person -- is photographed from on high. Then the camera retreats and we see the block you are standing in, then retreats again to show the city, then the state, then the country, then the earth....and keeps zooming out and you see our solar system and then our galaxy where our sun shrinks to a tiny dot and then it disappears with a view of the cosmos where our sun disappears, then the camera backs up to show a mass of stars... It shows that we are a tiny, tiny part of something huge that we simply can't comprehend.

So many, many suns in the cosmos and a bunch of them have planets, and planets are where there could be species. So with so many invisible planets -- gazillions of them -- logic tells us there must be populations of species out there. Actually, I'm not so sure if it is logic, but more like wishful thinking. Why? Look at the alternative. If there are not, then we would be the only species amongst billions and billions of planets -- and that is almost unacceptable. It is just too lonely a feeling. Deep inside we don't want to be alone.

Of course, there is the fact the we don't know. This gnaws at us. We can't stand not knowing. Even if someone reverently spouts that we can't know the unknowable, inside we find that answer unacceptable. We thirst for information. That is why we gossip, argue and plead, we have to understand what is going on.

Hubble Image of Stuff Out There

So we turn to science for clear cut, simple answers and we get quarks and string theory and quantum mechanics in response, which is another way of saying that they don't know either. Have you seen the pictures taken by the Hubble telescope? They are beautiful and strange and just plain weird. They show things that are 'out there' and we never can quite understand that we are somehow part of it. Then they say things like, "This is a photo of a star system 214,000 light years away...we are seeing history 214,000 years old." Wrap your heads around that. We can only take pictures of history.

If I take a picture of you, the image I get is a historical image because I can only photograph an image after it has hit the lens and it took time for the image of you to travel from you to the lens...the speed of light. We don't realize or pay attention to it because it does so in a billionth of a second, 'cause light travels pretty fast. But we notice it when we see Hubble pictures. What we see is an image after light from the image has traveled a long, long way. Since light travels 186,000 miles per second, the distance that light travels in one year is a Light Year. So when they say that something is 214,000 light years away, we are seeing an image 214,000 years old. It may not even exist now. All we can see is history. (If you really are nerdy enough to want to translate a light year into plain old miles you can do some multiplication: 188,000 x Number of Seconds in a Year = the Mileage Equivalent of a Light Year.)

This takes the fun out of it. It makes things strange and confusing. Now they are talking about building a bigger and better telescope than Hubble that will be able to see the Beginning of Time. This is enough to make you want to turn to making stew. Stew -- you can touch and smell and taste it and it is right there. It is just hard to comprehend that a telescope is a time machine. It sees history. A bigger telescope can travel further and further in the past. (They haven't figured out how to make a telescope see into the future, but I'm sure they are working on it.)

Big Bang?

So now they say they will be able to see The Beginning. The prevalent theory is that it all started with the Big Bang. Why? All the evidence seems to point that way. Stars and galaxies are moving outward from a seemingly central point. They can even measure how fast they are moving. So they must be moving outward for some reason -- they are being pushed away. From what? An explosion. That is the theory. The problem, at least in my feeble mind, is that theoretically there was nothing before the Big Bang. I haven't figured out any way to create something out of nothing....especially wealth.

In other words, we don't know.

With all that stuff out there, stuff involving zillions of light years and zillions of suns and billions of planets, I'm banking on the fact that we are not alone. There are other species out there.

Talking with your Dog

So, where does that leave us. Simple. Talk and listen to your dog. Develop that inner-species communication. So when we find out that those UFOs are real and they come to talk to us, you will be prepared. Because you pay attention to your dog.