George Bush may well be the most thoughtless President in American history. Under his Administration, all of America has fallen apart. It is without any sort of reflection that he may well also put an end to this idea of American history, et al. At the G8 Summit, our President, the “leader of the free world”, whose known for sharp wit, powerful wielding of the English language, and infinite charm and savvy, went ahead and showed exactly how concerned he is about the environment; he joked about it. So, to all my friends out there who voted for Mr. Bush: thanks.

I want to tip my hat to you (in that now almost Daily-Show-famous, ‘drunken-presidential’ way) and say with all the sarcasm in my black little heart “Ahahahaha, Yes! Lets Wreck the Planet… So We Along With All Other Life Can Die A Horrifyingly Slow, Painful, Human-Engineered Death… Wheeee!!!!” Now, isn’t that something wonderful to laugh about?

Bush thought so; Goodbye, from the world’s biggest polluter!

His art has been linked here always as a staple on the sites blog roll. In this video though, Chris Jordan, is in his own words able to bring new life to his work (from TED, Chris Jordan: Picturing excess).

As any writer worth his salt might reflect, we each are characters in a plot-line too big to comprehend. Or, put another way, we are each unique snowflakes thrown across the stormy sky. However you put it, this reality can sometimes make seeing change difficult. This aspect of human life while enjoyable, dynamic and mysterious also means, the actions we take are what make our environment; a place that might be as different without us as that storm without snowflakes.

Voltaire spoke in these exact terms only about people, noticing one way that the impossibly tiny connected with the impossibly massive. For people especially, and maybe with all things, this specific domain where an intersection of scale seems to take place ought to be referred to as the Scale of Truth. When Voltaire pinned down this Scale he did so saying, “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”

There is a hidden truth revealed in personifying snowflakes this way — perhaps only about people and societies, perhaps about all of nature. It is this: small things make big things; small things happening make big things happening; at least one very small event (like a molecule of air interacting with a molecule of water of a snowflake) must occur as the “responsible” cause of much more massive events (like a whole snowflake moving and causing an avalanche) or else no such larger events are ever able to take place. We call this logical ordering of things, causal thought — for humans it seems it has to due mostly with frame of reference and blame.

Remarkably unlike most, Voltaire, was not pointing out frame of reference, nor looking to blame. That’s probably because Voltaire possessed different knowledge, having realized much earlier than most, how rarely it is about who done it in nature’s court, instead how it was done. This idea of the responsible snowflake in an avalanche, points out how people do not view their own impact when that impact involves big, landscape-changing events. Voltaire observed how human beings over-quantify the fairness of their own assessment — I sense therefore must be correct, as it were; how we inflate ourselves as individuals, yet underestimate ourselves, dismissing the impact we have as groups. In short, on the Scale of Truth, what Voltaire found was, humans have a kind of blind-spot. They are only so considerate or aware (?) of those other people and things happening around them. As Al Gore pointed out, we have all the sense of a frog slowly set to boil.

Using this view of our individual impact, I can provide some realization about technologies or changes which already exists that have solved nearly impossible problems: a) Change must always occur first on the smallest of scales to ever be evident on larger ones and there it may look different (a realizaion that lead to Quantum Mechanics) b) Every change no matter how seemingly insignificant in any particular frame of reference resonates throughout all scales and all frames of reference (a realization called the Butterfly Effect). This suggests we need even newer forms of technology though. Technology not unlike the Internet which capitalizes on this problem within human design to create new ways to communicate on larger scales, decreasing the blind-spot.

If we go on though, each a little at a time, unable, unaware or simply discounting each other as we go, than we are that thing, that avalanche of change, and we are responsible for its consequences. In fact, if we continue to treat the world as we have, all the generations that come to follow us will have no such thing and not understand a snowflake in order to relate such ideas. Imagine, Voltaire’s wisdom will, along with all other wisdom, fall back into the abyss.

I’ve written about this topic before. And though I type on it, stare at a laptop screen framed of it, and am utterly surrounded by it, the idea is still provocative even to me, that plastic (an innovation so subtle yet ubiquitous) is also at the core of a potential threat to life on Earth. I took a real interest in this idea because it seemed obviously urgent, but because one particular aspect seemed totally, and a bit ironically neglected. The irony I find is, so many people fall back on the topic of the weather. Evidently, not so much when it counts. To help myself and others understand my somewhat radical thoughts about the environment, and to discuss such ironically neglected aspects, I present as preface three very real, very relevant facts about our planet and life, followed by obvious speculation about how these phenomena might be inter-connected and in such a way as to to change life as we know it.

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In August of 2007, scientists found a one billion light-year sized hole in the universe. Left to my unending curiosity, I’ve done a bit of thinking. And now, I’d like to offer the few ideas I had about the discovery. Ponder what intrigues, enjoy what silliness entertains.

Theory #1 - The Hole — the cold spot — is the area associated with the events of the Big Bang.

Not unlike a crater on some surface, this cold spot could represent an area where billions of years ago, the event we commonly refer to as The Big Bang, took place. While over time space itself (we believe) has expanded, one would expect most everything was expelled outward from that point at extremely high temperatures (leaving the most immediate area entirely barren). Everything was “vaporized” or more accurately put, transitioned to highly energetic plasma and gas. The CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) tells how just how it was distributed. Does this “hole” give us an indicate from where?

Theory #2 - The Hole is Aliens!

By creating electromagnetic fields many linear detection methods can be deflected or subverted. It makes sense, at least depending on how you look at projects like SETI. And, of course these aliens would need to know the ole’ saying: out of sight — out of mind.

Theory #3 - The Hole represents the discovery of new physics

Last, the most likely: this region of space contains unknown properties or material with unknown properties to physics. This would lead to our inability to make accurate detections and potentially offer us a region of space that seemed to lack all features. We’ve only narrowly escaped our home venue of Earth. While it may seem a radical idea to accept, there is no evidence that our observations from Earth aren’t dramatically limited to a subset of realities describable by our derived physics only.