Addendum: nature of the universe

So this Thursday Thoughts deal is meant to be a preliminary brainstorm exercise; a way to start assembling first-draft material for the book I have tried several times to begin writing before becoming a little overwhelmed by the bloody expanse of the thing. The term first draft almost feels over-reaching. I almost want to say pre-draft! After all, these pieces, per Wikipedia-speak, are really just stems.

I'm putting them into the blog for several reasons: It's the right material for the ultimate purpose I want this blog to take on, as well as for those readers I would ultimately regard the target market. Also this blog needs more material frankly. I'd like to hit the point where people know I'm posting daily and it's safe to drop in, and maybe even get to know the themes for certain days of the week and therefor know which days to personally visit or on the other hand, to skip!

I'd also like the possibility of comments being generated as I begin percolating this stuff. I'm certainly open to help!

I do hesitate though, to post these pieces because for now they can seem like little but introductions to topics. The purpose of these earliest chapters is generally to assemble basic presumptions for later use in drawing conclusions. On their own they can seem rather pointless maybe?

Right now I am finding the discipline to do this particular work as part of a greater structure where I have some accountability and this operates on a specific timetable. As a result, I ran out of time last week and so I must add a few words now on the topic of the nature of the universe: The matter of life versus death.

The only life we know of for sure is here on Earth. It's looking fairly evident we're not going to find it on the other planets of this system, and the lack of interaction with intelligent extra-terrestrials also supports the view that life is critically rare in the universe. The incredibly short duration of life for every living organism on Earth also supports its rarity in a universe billions of years old. And saying its billions of years old is a fairly safe assumption (a useful idea and not certain truth technically) because the science community; a reliable community by any human standard, are consolidated in their support for this observation, whether astronomers or paleontologists etcetera.

Claims of UFO sightings, abductions, Area 51 artifacts etcetera, in their current volume and level of evidentiary support, seem logically right where they should be in a world where none of them are valid, given the volume of misunderstandings, delusions, dreams, mental illness and outright scams that a seven-billion population of human beings are capable of producing and concocting.

If the outer space community was nearly as busy as this accumulation of stories would suggest, would the evidence not be overwhelming? And if only a fraction of the stories are true, suggesting that alien interaction is a rare commodity, then this also supports my understanding of life in the universe: that it is rare. So intensely rare it can be thought of as miraculous. Sort of like winning the lottery is miraculous; it being so unlikely. So I propose that the natural state of the universe... is dead. And life is an exception.

So there. Have I made a point, and given this little piece justification? I'm gonna hit the Publish button!