Birds and the Nature of the Universe
Hi all,
The following post is a tough one, and takes some number crunching and "mind yoga", but hang in there - trust me. The reflections involved are hopefully worth the effort...
To start... Let's be blunt and simply face the question that rolls around in the back of so many people's minds... "What's the big deal about birds? Yeah, we feed 'em and then we go to work... Big, fat, hairy deal." Well, here's just one reason why birds matter... (Setting aside the little issues of the environment, decency, and beauty.)
Let's get started...
In 1967, producer Sherwood Schwartz (of Gilligan's Island fame) drizzled loose a hopelessly sappy sitcom, "It's About Time". The storyline was painfully awful - two astronauts somehow exceeded the speed of light, went back in time, and ended up interacting with cavemen and cavewomen... We're talking "crawl under the carpet and suck your thumb" insipid. The campy show's opening jingle tootled, "It's about time, it's about space..." Well, for all the series banal content, the creators did get one thing right... It is all about time and space. To understand the importance that birds (like the fellow below) play in the "Big Picture", we need to wrap our brains around both time and space... (Please bear with this tired old engineer... You've got my word that I'll blast past all the numbers and make sense of this whole thing in the end... But this is a huge three-piece puzzle.)
First of the pieces is the issue of time... Details follow...
But that would be ripping you off in the extreme. "Why all those stupid numbers and what's this business about time and space?" you might ask. Fair enough...
There's one more piece of the puzzle as to why birds are a big deal.
We need to look at how space and time interact as in the form of velocity - read that "miles per hour". Right now, our best rocket/shuttle can travel at apx. 25,000 mph. For the fun of it, let's just double that to 50,000 mph. (Hitting space dust or micro meteors at that speed would abrade a vehicle over long periods of time, but let's just use the number anyway.) Traveling at that speed, it would take us 250,000 years to reach the newly discovered earth-like planet Gliese 581, which is just a scant 20 light years away.
Long to short in an astronomical sense? (Here's the wrap up you've been waiting for.) We (and birds in particular) exist in a world that is likely only in the surreal unlikeliness of vast time and space... We've simply beaten the unimaginably long odds by being... But we're still just a cosmological blink in what is no doubt a twinkling universe of vastly separated lights flashing on and flashing off. And for our brief flash, birds, beautiful birds, are going to be with us every second of the way.
That's why birds (and life in general) are big fat hairy deals.
See you by those all important feeders,
CapeCodAlan
Many thanks to the following:
The following post is a tough one, and takes some number crunching and "mind yoga", but hang in there - trust me. The reflections involved are hopefully worth the effort...
To start... Let's be blunt and simply face the question that rolls around in the back of so many people's minds... "What's the big deal about birds? Yeah, we feed 'em and then we go to work... Big, fat, hairy deal." Well, here's just one reason why birds matter... (Setting aside the little issues of the environment, decency, and beauty.)
Let's get started...
In 1967, producer Sherwood Schwartz (of Gilligan's Island fame) drizzled loose a hopelessly sappy sitcom, "It's About Time". The storyline was painfully awful - two astronauts somehow exceeded the speed of light, went back in time, and ended up interacting with cavemen and cavewomen... We're talking "crawl under the carpet and suck your thumb" insipid. The campy show's opening jingle tootled, "It's about time, it's about space..." Well, for all the series banal content, the creators did get one thing right... It is all about time and space. To understand the importance that birds (like the fellow below) play in the "Big Picture", we need to wrap our brains around both time and space... (Please bear with this tired old engineer... You've got my word that I'll blast past all the numbers and make sense of this whole thing in the end... But this is a huge three-piece puzzle.)
First of the pieces is the issue of time... Details follow...
- The universe is somewhere around 10 - 14 billion years old. (Thank you Hubble Space Telescope.)
- The lifespan of our sun is probably 10 billion years... Currently, it's about 4 to 5 billion years old.
- Earth is apx. 4.5 billion years old.
- Life on earth started roughly 4 billion years ago. (That didn't take long - a measly 500,000,000 years in the making.)
- Birds came into existence around 150 million years ago. (Check out Archaeopteryx.)
- Physiologically speaking, the modern human species is about 100,000 years old. (Or 1/1,500ths that of birds.)
- Civilization (in all its forms) is roughly 10,000 years old, (or 1/15,000ths the history of birds).
- Given current environmental, political, resource-consumption, and religious trends, it will be astonishing if life on earth survives another 150,000 years. That might well hold true for any civilization - a quarter of a million years for any "higher-intelligence" life form is probably pushing the envelope.
- First we need to describe a measure of space on a cosmic level. Light (traveling at 186,000 miles per second) will leave the earth and reach the moon (240,000 miles away) in roughly 1.3 seconds, (or 1.3 light seconds away to use the vernacular). Our solar system (the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (sort of...)) is about 11 light hours (7,300,000,000 miles) across. But that ain't nothin'...
- Our dinky little solar system is but a tiny dot in the spiral Milky Way Galaxy, which consists of 200 to 400 billion stars and is 100,000 light years in size. (A single light year is about 6 billion miles in length.) But that ain't nothin'..
- The Milky Way is just one of 40 galaxies in what astronomers call the Local Group (apx. 4,000,000 light years in diameter). But that ain't nothin'...
- The Local Group is just one in the Local Supercluster of Galaxies which contains 100 groups and clusters of galaxies. The Local Supercluster of Galaxies is around 150,000,000 light years wide. But that ain't nothin'...
- Now we're reaching the "Big Daddy" - the entire universe itself. It consists of ~10 million superclusters, is a mind warping 40,000,000,000 - 100,000,000,000 light years wide, and some 700,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.
- But given all those stars, only about 30% (mostly gasses and suns) of the entire universe contains any sort of matter as we know it. The rest is dark matter and dark energy.
There's one more piece of the puzzle as to why birds are a big deal.
We need to look at how space and time interact as in the form of velocity - read that "miles per hour". Right now, our best rocket/shuttle can travel at apx. 25,000 mph. For the fun of it, let's just double that to 50,000 mph. (Hitting space dust or micro meteors at that speed would abrade a vehicle over long periods of time, but let's just use the number anyway.) Traveling at that speed, it would take us 250,000 years to reach the newly discovered earth-like planet Gliese 581, which is just a scant 20 light years away.
Long to short in an astronomical sense? (Here's the wrap up you've been waiting for.) We (and birds in particular) exist in a world that is likely only in the surreal unlikeliness of vast time and space... We've simply beaten the unimaginably long odds by being... But we're still just a cosmological blink in what is no doubt a twinkling universe of vastly separated lights flashing on and flashing off. And for our brief flash, birds, beautiful birds, are going to be with us every second of the way.
That's why birds (and life in general) are big fat hairy deals.
See you by those all important feeders,
CapeCodAlan
Many thanks to the following:
- NASA
- Wikipedia
- National Geographic Magazine
- A bunch of great teachers