Migrated my blog

I migrated my blog from livejournal to here (hence, no comments). Hopefully I'll be posting some new entries here soon.

Cosmic lullaby

The lunar module failed to lift off - all of the fuel has leaked out. He knew he was doomed - the orbiting shuttle will have no choice but to leave back for Earth, and no rescue mission would get to him in time. He had about 15 minutes of oxygen left. He looked up and saw the beautiful moonscape before him... craters stretching out as far as the eye can see, basking in a calm yellow hue. Moon dust untouched for millions of years, set against a backdrop of a myriad of bright stars suspended in the dark of space. He marvelled at this serene and truly other-worldly beauty for a few seconds, and then started walking towards the horizon. He reached a large rock and lied down on the ground, using the boulder as a pillow for his helmet.

He saw stars stretching forever unto infinity, and a blue planet that he left behind not far in the distance. He thought about death...this particular death that will meet him in 10 minutes. Why should he be scared or disappointed? If he had stayed on Earth, he would have 20, maybe 25 more years to live. Oh sure, he'd get a nice burial and have a headstone erected for him. He'd even be put in the history books of NASA. And of course he'd be remembered fondly by his many loved ones he would have left behind. But for a finite length of time. Five hundred or a thousand years from then, who would remember his name? Who would remember details about his life, or what he looked like or what he represented? Perhaps someone would. But what about 10,000 years...what about 100,000 years into the future? Surely, no trace of him would be preserved. But here I am, he thought, the first to die on the moon. I am separated from all the worldly troubles. And who knows, maybe hundreds of millions of years from now when the Earth will no longer exist, I will still be lying here, perched against this rock. My body perfectly preserved, just as it looks now. I might be the last and only reminder of the human race...no, biological life! in the universe. It is I who will represent humanity in the presence of the universe's future. Perhaps millions of years from now some non-organic intelligent life form in a remote corner of space will find a piece of lunar debris floating near their place of habitation. And on it they will find me, in a spacesuit, still staring into space...

The oxygen gauge intersected zero and he took one last breath.

What do we know about people?

Well, it has been awhile since my last update, but I've been swept up by the winds of life.

So during Leil Shavuos I was learning with someone and we starting talking, eventually digressing into the land of philosophy. Among the topics that came up was this:

Each person is created with a certain predisposition. Some are nice and kind by nature - it's in their genes. For them it's easy to do chesed and to be well liked by people. Others have a different genetic makeup, one that makes it a great challenge to go out of their way for someone else. Call it introvert/extrovert, call it happy/depressed, call it demanding/giving, it doesn't matter - this is all part of one's personality and most probably it is not a learned behavior but one that's dictated by chemicals in the brain. If so, why do we bestow honor on people we see as being righteous? And why do we shame and distance ourselves from those who are usually not acting in the best fashion? For it could easily be that the big baal chesed in the community spends virtually no effort doing all his good deeds - it comes to him naturally. And that suspicious looking guy in shul who always keeps to himself and is unapproachable... maybe for him to do a single act of kindness takes more effort (on some global objective scale) than all the efforts of the aforementioned baal chesed combined, during his entire life! The point is that if the true value of one's actions is to be measured only in terms of how much effort is put into them, then we are utterly clueless about the structure of the merit hierarchy.

Movie plot

Last week while vacationing in the Carribbean, I sat outside my hotel room balcony one night and looked at the stars. (There are many more visible there than in NY, of course, though not as much as I saw in the French alps). The light of the brightest star was white and strong - a window into a world millions of light years away. Looking at it I wondered what it would be like to go there? Suspended animation is all good in the movies, but it's highly questionable whether it will ever be realized in practice.

There is no other choice: humans would have to board a spaceship and live there for thousands of generations before they reach the star. The first generation will have still seen Earth..their children will only hear about it from their parents.. and relate it in turn to their own children in bedtime stories. After a 100 generations, what would life be like on this spaceship? One's entire world would be the ship - he would not know anything else. Trees and grass, forests and mountains, lakes and oceans, cities and sunset - all would be concepts only in his imagination, merely a mental picture formed from ancient tales. The common goal and purpose in life would be preached to him from birth: stay alive, give rise to the next generation, so that they may do the same, repeating until that final moment in the distant future. The sacred 'end game', the stuff of legends. The arrival.

The moment comes and they land on a planet near the destination star. They colonize the land, build cities, multiply and establish a civilization. The memory of Earth is by this point but a far away memory, as bleak to these people as the light of the Earth's Sun. In time, no one will know where they came from. Except for a select few, perhaps, who will form an elite society of possessors of 'the knowledge'. The secret would be strictly guarded and passed down the line. Of course, the day will come when survival will no long be a constant question on the minds of the new civilization. They will probe deep into their history and discover the truth. The next step is only natural - "We must return to our origin. We will finally complete the circle and see the source with our own eyes." [If we discovered that we are an ancient colony of a distant planet, wouldn't we strive to do the same?] And so, a spaceship takes off once again. Another few hundred thousand years pass, and the distant descendants of the people who sent them arrive back on Earth.

What will they see? Will anyone be welcoming them back...or even remember of their existence? Or perhaps what they will see will be a barren landscape - not a life form in sight? They will dig far below the numerous layers of dust accumulated over the millenia and find a pillar with this message etched in stone: "Welcome back. We waited for you all along. As you can tell, we are all dead. Please recolonize. Thank you, management."

Once in a while, usually during my free time or on vacation, I get ideas about possible movie scripts. I wonder if there are 2 hours of plot here...

First entry

First entry.

Not sure who's gonna be reading this, or how many people, or when. Time will tell, as it does for all things.