“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
― Carl Sagan

In October of 2017, humanity initiated a project called ‘Sonar Calling GJ 273b’, sending music and other information through deep space towards a red dwarf star — Luyten’s star — located about a dozen light-years away.

Named after Willem Luyten, the star is one quarter of the mass of the Sun and has roughly a third of its radius. More importantly, the star hosts two exoplanets with some rather promising characteristics for containing life.

One of the two planets, a ‘super earth’, is almost three times the Earth’s mass and situated comfortably in the habitable zone with a potential for water on its surface; the other, almost the same mass of Earth, orbits much closer to its parent star with its orbital period lasting less than a week. …

We’re all nuclei. We’re all at the center of our own little universes, all being orbited and all orbiting, all moving atomically, pulsating with the rhythms of the world around us.

While we’re no different from each other, we’re immensely unique.

And while we’re no different from nature, we’re really one and the same.

In fact, we’re weaved into our surrounding reality in such an intricately intimate way that we can’t even seem to comprehend all of the interrelated elements and mediums and quarks of this symbiotic existence.

Many religions and ideologies have coined innumerable terms to describe this all-encompassing sense of our existence, all the while admitting that the lexicons of our understanding fail to adequately grasp the notion of experiencing reality in its pure form of suchness —of its (and our own) quintessential being. …

“But the man who knows the relation between the forces of Nature and actions, sees how some forces of Nature work upon other forces of Nature, and becomes not their slave”

— Fritjof Capra

Just Hydrogen Dioxide

There’s nothing quite like huddling under a dense pine canopy next to a frozen lake during a spell of precipitation whereby nature doesn’t know whether to rain or to snow, so it does both.

Steam, because it’s still early in the winter, emanates from the forest floor and permeates through the surrounding canopies, coalescing into mists and wisps which irresistibly join the busy clouds overhead.

Rain and snow incessantly fizzes atop everything, like an electrostatic hum that vivifies the senses as much as it deafens and desensitizes them almost entirely. …

From Metaphysics to Betaphysics

Philosophers have often equated the study of our physical reality with the study of our very existence. It had been as common in Ancient Greece, when Aristotle lectured on matter and our fundamental essence, as it had been in Europe not more than two centuries ago when electromagnetism had been discovered and its findings passionately applied to our human nature.

Today, things are becoming a bit more zoomed-in, leaving the correspondence of natural law to human nature in the hands of those with specialized equipment — microscopes, telescopes, hadron colliders. …

[Can’t say they didn’t warn us]

In 1994, elementary school students of Ariel School in South Africa had hosted an alien visitation that would eventually become classified as one of the most well-documented instances of extraterrestrial contact in history.

Leaving documentary film-makers and paranormal researches salivating to report on the event, little attention had been paid to the apparent message as opposed to the medium — reasonably so given the many lightyears that must have been travelled and the curious-looking nature of the prototypical messengers.

The aliens, drenched in perceptions of good intention, had a warning message for the future generations of planet Earth:

“I think they want people to know that we’re actually making harm on this world and we mustn’t get too technologed [sic].”- “Eleven year-old…

“If speaking is silver, then listening is gold.”

― Turkish Proverb

I’m going to do something that I wish more exemplary ‘investors’ would do.

It’s a small gesture — if that — but it can prove especially impactful in this noisy world of market advice that has evolved from the self-serving corners of the investing world.

It’s all too easy to come across stock advice that, in every instance, is inherently tied to (and produced from) an intention for individualized profit or exposure for an affiliated business.

No one is simply looking to give advice for free, unfortunately.

It’s a numbers game — and, fiscally, it makes sense (pun intended). The most profitable way to gain exposure as a connoisseur of all things investing is to dole out advice to those who are all to eager to skip the actual experience-building needed from an investing standpoint. …

“The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe — even a positivist one — remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.”

― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Personally, I’m not really a fan of the term ‘singularity’. It seems to be a cop out for trying to describe a point of indescribable progress. It’s lazy. Especially when thrown into discussions surrounding A.I. …

In 1863, an Italian Catholic priest by the name of Angelo Secchi began collecting and cataloging the spectra of stars from his home in the Vatican observatory.

A Jesuit priest and astrophysicist, Secchi had been the first to classify stars according to their spectral type, cultivating new insights into stellar spectroscopy, terrestrial magnetism, and meteorology.

Building on the work of Galileo, a self-proclaimed natural philosopher who shattered paradigms by convincing the world of heliocentrism, Secchi’s findings would go on to be expanded and proven invaluable to the scientific world, well beyond the specific parameters of astronomy.

It’s hard to imagine that, just over a century and a half ago, a priest could have produced such an impact on the scientific world which, albeit, remained stitched to theology to a considerable degree. …