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Winter Thoughts 2018
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Winter Thoughts 2018 As I type this it is the middle of January 2018. Where I live on Long Island, New York, we have been experiencing unusually cold weather. When I was taking my usual short walk to the local supermarket last week, the very cold wind was blowing straight into my face in the early evening which I found to be extremely uncomfortable. It felt like my ears were about to freeze off. I was wearing a heavy winter coat and a black sunhat, but not a face mask or a hood, so my head was feeling very chilled to my great chagrin. Most of the time, I usually can't stand having to walk on the streets and roads in the winter months as the sidewalks are often covered with snow making them impassable and I have to resort to walking off the side of the road and then have to dodge the automobiles rapidly driving past me at 30 to 40 miles per hour. I always look forward to the beginning of the new year after the winter solstice when the days finally start getting longer and the sun's arc starts rising in the sky. Last week, I was looking at where the sun was in the sky around noon and saw it appeared to have declination of about 30 degrees above the horizon as I saw it through the hazy sky. I was thinking that at this time of the year, I am looking forward five months to the month of June, which is the beginning of summer and the sunniest month, when the sun's arc across the sky is very long, going by the zenith and the days are around 16 hours long. During the autumn of 2017, I was hooked on using two Photoshop software programs I had recently bought that year, Photo Explosion Deluxe and Adobe Photoshop Elements 15 on my Dell Inspiron desktop computer. I found that many of the photoshop ways to modify digital photographs were quite fascinating. I must have modified and merged over a 1,000 photographs and stored the results in the memory bank of the desktop computer and two flash drives. I usually also recorded black and white versions of the photographs. I started to think that in using photoshop, it actually qualifies as another art genre, akin to pencil drawing, charcoal, pastel, watercolor, oil painting, etc. In 1999, I first became interested in drafting, which then led to an interest in pencil drawing and other art genres. I also became interesting in studying art history going back to the stone age around 40,000 B.C.E. when the Cro-Magnon people would draw charcoal images of animals and other objects in the caves of France. In the summer of 1999, I regularly practiced pencil drawing using an 11" x 14" sketchbook drawing still lifes from photographs I found in magazines and catalogs. After several weeks, I developed a considerable level of skill in being able to accurately depict line drawings of furniture and model airplanes, etc. I did find that doing artwork like drawing actually is very hard work, much more difficult than taking pictures with a camera which is 's play by comparison. I find that in using photoshop software to modify photographs, you are in effect altering our perception of reality in viewing those modified photographs just like in looking at very interesting film photographs or artwork. Now in fact, humans are mostly visually oriented animals after all as we evolved originally from more primitive primates or monkeys which developed strong visual ability in order to navigate through tree foliage and look for food in the past 60 million years or so in Africa. So when you look at man made visual media including artwork, photography and movies, etc. you are in effect looking at a distorted version of reality. Among the significant news events of January 2018 were the offensive expletive language used by United States President Donald Trump he used to describe people from Haiti and Africa. I found that very appalling and I thought he seems to be in league with Adolf Hitler in his racist philosophy. Actually, when you look at it, all Americans except a small minority of Native Americans are all descended from immigrants that came to America mostly from Europe and Africa starting in the 16th century after the voyage of Columbus to the West Indies in 1492. His whole attitude seems to be completely inconsistent and ridiculous. I have read "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler which I took out from a local library and studied all about World War II and the Holocaust. I myself am half American English and half Mexican descent and I am most probably about 25% Native American descent. Another major news event I saw this week was about the missile scare over in Hawaii, I thought it was very similar to the "War of the Worlds" martian scare by Orson Welles in the 1930s, about a supposed invasion by Mars of Earth which I found it hard to understand why anyone would actually believe that nonsense. Of course in this case, that missile threat was much more credible as the North Korean regime could actually launch a ballistic missile warhead towards Hawaii. Another similar event was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, which took place when I was a 3 year old small and of course, I was too young to remember that. I have since seen some movies and documentaries about it as an adult since then. I vividly remember the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969 when I was a 9 year old . I am always thinking that I read a small sky observers guide which in the section about the moon, stated that the nearby moon is in fact, the only celestial body that humanity has ever visited until now and maybe in the future, the planet Mars and the moons of the giant planets may be visited by man in the future, but at present only the moon holds this distinction. In my basement room where I usually spend about 12 hours a night, I have three, one foot diameter globes of the Earth, Mars and the moon. Now, the surface area of the moon is about equal to the continent of Africa and that of Mars is about the entire continental land mass of the Earth. Now those are pretty big areas to explore and if any future astronauts ever do go back to the moon and then to Mars, a thorough reconnaissance will clearly occupy us for centuries. In the 1970s, when I was a , I looked with a small 2-inch refractor telescope at the the 4 large Galilean satellites of Jupiter and Saturn's moon, Titan. The two largest moons of Jupiter, Ganymede and Callisto are larger than the planet Mercury but not quite as heavy, as the planet Mercury is actually a heavy iron ball with an 80% iron core while Ganymede and Callisto are very much lighter in composition being composed mostly of ice and rock. I am always thinking that in future centuries, maybe the moon, the planet Mars and the larger moons of the gas giant planets maybe first reached by astronauts from Earth and then colonies may be settled on those worlds. Also, as the human race expands into the nearby solar system, new subspecies and species of the human race may start to evolve, which mirrors the situation that actually existed in Africa over the last 7 million years or so, when most of the time, there were several distinct species of competing early humans. The modern racial differences between modern humans are actually very superficial in comparison. There was a brief hint of that in the movie "Total Recall" (1990) where a race of human mutants that inhabit a future Martian colony a century from now was depicted. In the 1970s, as a , I was hooked on watching the original Star Trek on local television station reruns. I have since seen all the television spinoffs and movies. Now, when I've thought of it, the whole perception of the future some 3 to 4 centuries from now as depicted in those television shows is actually a very narrow and crude conception of what life in the future might actually be like. The whole thing is based on what our very limited contemporary minds are able to conceive of what is possible. Also, I find it very far fetched that advanced interstellar travel into the local region of the Milky Way galaxy could actually be possible in the 23rd and 24th century. Actually, most people on Earth have absolutely no conception at all at just how incredibly vast interstellar space is in comparison to our own solar system. I f you represent the Earth/Sun's 93 million mile gap or 1 astronomical unit (1 A.U.) by one inch, then Pluto would lie about 5 feet from the sun and the nearest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, would lie some 4 miles away at 4.3 light years distant or over 24 trillion miles distant. It is completely ridiculous to believe that mankind could actually achieve interstellar travel in so short a time scale. Another complete misconception that those Star Trek television shows will depict is that a few centuries from now, mankind from Earth is out there exploring the entire universe in advanced space vehicles, when in fact, they are actually just exploring our local region of the 100,000 light year diameter Milky Way galaxy which is actually just an extremely tiny portion of the entire observable universe. In "Star Trek: Voyager" the premise is that the Voyager starship is exploring the other side of the Milky Way galaxy , which is still very confined within our own galaxy.           |
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