Baja related story (I used the Baja in the Story)
Trouble with Google
What did we do before Google? I have a Tormont/Webster’s Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary, a World Atlas and a dog-eared 1994 Rand McNally Road
Atlas. When I was still in the states (til 1995) I had a computer I didn’t know how to use and a handy library. Down here, in Baja Sur, where there
are few libraries, we now can arrange to get “The Signal” and with it, Good Old Google.
No use preaching to the choir master about what search engines can bring us but are we really prepared to use the information? Google’s name should
tell us that some of us are not prepared at all. A Google is the name attached to a one followed by an unlimited number of zeros. The person who
coined the word did so because he posits we cannot fully grasp the concept of infinity without some help. Robby Kneivel jumps his bikes over school
buses for the same reason. He could just measure the width of a school bus, string up some tape and let us envision the enormous distance, the
inherent danger but we get more, better effect with the buses.
Visual aids help to a point – the 3 football fields, couple of miles, ten swimming pools full of, longer than the height of the Statue of Liberty, the
Washington Monument, etc. etc. but that all begins to unravel when we study space, the universe, the planet Earth, the Sun, physics, religion and a
lot more.
Failed me just yesterday when I was watching a very informative TV show titled How The Earth Began. The narrator said that for 85 % of the 3.5 billion
first years of the planet, the only living things were one-celled animals. It’s a real big ball but the animals --- I don’t have a giant problem
imagining them. Seen one, seen em all. Then it’s just a matter of replicating that image to an infinite number (while they continue to die off and
reproduce). What they didn’t even bother to try to help me with is the time thing.
I know that a billion somethings is a thousand million somethings. I can just about imagine a million somethings – when I get them all together it’s a
little more stressful to stack them up a thousand layers or find the room to go end to end. I can’t actually see all of them in that configuration but
I am able to see a lot of them, extrapolate appropriately. That works for things but not for unseen things like galaxies, protons, degrees and, the
biggee, time.
Humans (Except for Steven Hawking) have trouble with the time thing I think because we personalize everything, bring it down to our level, measure
time the way we measure our lives. We don’t have any trouble with time up to about 70 or 80 years because we can easily equate that with how long we
live. We get into real trouble when we try to imagine hundreds, thousands, millions of years.
If we try, we discover there are several kinds of human time. No matter which kind of time we use the exercise is likely to be unnerving. Take ten
generations – at about thirty years each just try to think about putting up with your uncle Earl for three hundred years. Can you imagine sitting in
the doctor’s waiting room for a thousand years? How about watching the one-celled animals mate, make a replica, then die off for a million years?
Piano lessons for fifteen hundred years? Six hundred thousand years of the eighth grade?
How about distance? A light year is tough for me. How about walking a parsec (thirty trillion kilometers)?
I still want to say thanks to Google and all the others – I’m a little embarrassed at just being able to use the tiniest layer of what they’ve got but
I guess I’ll go to my grave only able to count up the things they’ve found for me on maybe seven or eight thousand fingers and toes. That’s as far as
I go.
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