Beta Earth

Star Quark Enterprises would like to announce that the new planet your world has "discovered" is in fact a water covered world and would be suitable for human habitation "in the near future". We have manufactured this planet for you and have placed it in an appropriate orbit for your future habitation. It is not quite ready because it is currently undergoing beta testing for life compatibility (orbit stability, atmospheric equilibrium and magnetic field density testing for low probability high energy cosmic ray protection).

SQE is happy to announce that the planet will be ready for your occupation at about the same time your civilisation develops the appropriate transport technology to get there in a meaningfully short period of time, in a couple of thousand years time. We are aware of your self destructive nature and have made provision for the set-backs your species is expected to experience before this threshold point is reached. We know that besides technology development it also includes personal development and emotional maturity as a species. We would like to wish you peace and prosperity for the next two millennium celebrations before we meet. We look forward to welcoming you to the greater galactic community then.

Best wishes,
Obsidian & Schrodinger

Universal Balance

Please teach me gently. Incremental change is less traumatic. Sometimes big lessons require big knocks or big shifts. This is the principle of proportionality and assumes that the universe is well balanced. If everything is interconnected then balance must come, eventually, and karma has a place.

We think the universe is well balanced. One of the things that amazes me is that during a total solar eclipse the apparent diameter of the moon perfectly matches that of the sun at the point of eclipse. Given that the moon is slowly receding away from us at just under 4cm per year, I find it intriguing that our civilisation has hit it's peak at the point (give or take a billion years) that the moon puts on this amazing little spectacle in apparent diameter alignment.

Most of what I was taught at school and university (in more fields of science than I care to remember) was all centered upon the equals sign in mathematics. Something was always equal to something else... it's all about balance... the universal law of existence. Water flows through a pipe at a rate that is in balanced between the pressure driving force and the pipe's resistance from friction. Stars burn nuclear fuel at a rate that is balanced between the gravitational force compressing the atoms together and the explosive force of atomic particals, electro-magnetic radiation and light pushing them apart. There are other theories about the rate of expansion in the early universe, which either require balance to have existed for the theory to work out, or show that balance must be implicit in our universe.

I found an e-book called A Well Balanced Universe, which I would like to set some time aside to read. If it's good I'll endorse it here but for now it remains on my to-do list and carries the risk of containing content I may not agree with.

Balance has implications. Finding balance and staying in it's flow seems to be a good way to be in harmony with the universe. So if obstacles come our way they are a natural form of resistence for the path we are on.

This is obviously a lesson that Ted will have to learn with Obsidian's help.