Rumi Nations

Are we alone in the universe? The one question that fascinates me more than any other. And my perspectives are these. The sheer complexity of biological forms makes me think that the evolution of intelligent life forms (such as humans) is likely to be a rather sparse occurrence. There will be many Earth-like planets … perhaps at least millions in the outer arms of the Milky Way revolving around stars like the Sun that the Earth revolves around. But the temperatures have to be just right for water to be plentiful in all three states. What were the stuff available in the early Earth that created the conditions that led to the emergence of primitive life forms? A planet with a lot of volcanic activity, lot of carbon-based complex organic molecules, a planet with continental plates slowly drifting, pushing, merging, separating, rising, and falling, lots of lightning, etc. How many planets will have all these enablers? Reduces the candidate planets to perhaps thousands. Then on pl...

A spectacular opening to the series by Sagan as he provides a historical perspective about ourselves. Clearly, he is doing a conscious job of not presenting a Western-centric worldview or looking at the world as merely comprising of Westerners. Sagan's knowledge of history would seem to suggest that he is a historian and not a scientist as he tours the Library of Alexandria and mourns the loss suffered as the result of the destruction of that temple of knowledge. There's a message there for those who wish to understand it. The Library was the glory of the ancient world for seven long centuries. Yes! How many monuments of the modern world can claim to have lived for that long. All that we would be able to think of as great have been built perhaps in the last one hundred years. I can think of everything from the great skyscrapers to the great bridges to the space vehicles and the great cities. But which of these will remain great seven centuries hence ... and therein lies the str...

A came across this wonderful quote via a colleague: Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions. -Joyce Carol Oates That led me to reflect ... Humans are so much more than other species on the planet … ‘Symbol shifters’ is a phrase I remember Carl Sagan using to describe humans. Language is indeed one of those defining characteristics that separates us from other species. We have managed to learn so much about the structure and evolution of the universe and managed to store that knowledge for future generations using the power of language. And so each succeeding generation is able to profit from the accumulated knowledge base of its predecessors. We are literally ‘star stuff’ as well … another phrase I remember from Sagan. Humans tend to confound me when they choose to give equal importance to man-made things such as cultural stuff (traditions, rituals) as they do to laws of nature (gravitation, how...

The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. -Henry Beston. Wonderful and lyrical ... Seems similar to Loren Eiseley … Man is an animal as well … All animals have reached where they have through evolution spanning millions of years … I think of the planet as it would have been in the age of the dinosaurs … a reptilian world. Go back a hundred thousand years in time and the planet was lush with greenery and mammals would have been roaming all over the North American and South American and African plains … wildebeests and zebras and bisons and lions and tigers and wild horses perhaps … not many humans around. Today, humans have com...