Greetings from Space

When I first went to Abu Dhabi in 2006 for an assignment in multinational company it was evident to my household that I wont be returning home for the next six months. Watching my weird face on the web camera my mother wondered if it was me. Going away(seven seas! Although if could be just one!!) and staying in a foreign country far off was and still is regarded out of the world. Separation and longing bring remorse and melancholy. Later you overcome the feelings gradually and become ready to greet in exuberance.

Man is dreaming to make settlements on the moon and mars and take intergalactic voyages into deep space and exploit the possibility of shifting one day permanently to another planet when the resources on earth would either be exhausted or the globe faces extinction in the future of time. It would be difficult to assess a mindset over a long period of time but we can understand and apply logic to the immediate possible future. We are thinking of how life be emotionally and practically applied to ways of living as new life emerges with technological developments and we move towards more robotised lifestyles.

We have seen pictures of how the earth looks from the ISS or from the moon but as you eventually go into deep space the physical aspects wane and you remain only radio connected. Oppose this with leaving in a foreign country on earth where you will breathe the same air and see humans of different colour culture and race and yet are rooted to the soil below even if it is black cotton soil in India or the vast sands of a desert in Abu Dhabi or firm terra firma of New York city. You still belong.

Once you leave the confines of this earth there could be a disconnect? One day hordes and hordes of people will travel in flying saucer like objects and it would be an everyday event but there needs a lot of water to flow beneath the bridge. You may then send Christmas greetings from a planet called Xayez.

Longevity

In the days of the Mahabharat and Ramayana (4000-5000 years before) people lived long lingering lives raised on elixir doses of somras and amrut. These were preparations from hitherto unknown plants and herbs now forgotten and prepared only from the waters of the river Saraswati now dried up or lost in the space of time. They lived to over 200 years of a lifetime. They were brought up in forests staying in ashrams to study and came back to find quarrels at home or an emotional frenzy of melodramas which separated the brothers. Then they fought long drawn wars with strategies and preparations lasting years and came back to their kingdoms to find it mangled and dishevelled and took more years to untangle the maze of complex relationships. In all their long lives there were not much health issues due to the extraordinary detoxifying qualities of somras. The kshatriyas (warring community) had larger than life frames and strong muscular bodies. There was a medical field however but the diseases were not as ghastly as in the modern times.

Today we have frail bodies smitten by all sorts of diseases driven by a hectic lifestyle that has no time to ponder and look at ourselves. And biological sciences are busy analysing the make up and build of the various organs in our body and the DNA and the tissues they are composed of. There are production houses that are manufacturing plastic goods and textiles. There are ways to produce agriculture and deliver power to your doorsteps. But how about a device to manufacture organs! Like assembling an electronic gadget and selling in a store. You have liver problem buy it from an outlet get rid of the old one and implant a new onet in your body in a super speciality hospital. Days are not far away when you could predict the condition of your kidneys or heart or pancreas (Oh! This horrible disease called diabetes can be forgotten forever!!) at an earlier stage itself and buy one and replace. Cosmetic specialists have already extracted tissues from other parts and improved the aesthetics of our face and given shape to haywire outgrown fats.

Longevity seems to be approaching fast and the time has come for us to live to 200 years. No problem.

Living in the clouds

Isn’t it strange to think of settlements on clouds where there is no firmament and the initial feeling would be to fall down. There are gaseous planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune where we hav’nt much thought about settlement due to the hugh gravity (probably you would be not able to move much) or the combination of gases thriving there. Scientists have always wanted alternatives locations of migrating(since the Earth would one day be depleted of its sources) to space and settling on clouds too are being given their due. Fantasies are the source of realities. PK the recent Hindi movie shows a spaceship embedded in a cloud swirling in the sky and settling on a Rajastani desert from where emerges the hero from the thin mist of clouds. Bespin life zone in the movie Empire Strikes Back has a cloud city below layers of metallic gas where Humans and Ugnaughts live. Tyche nickname was given to a hypothetical gas giant located in the solar system Oort clouds. Now NASA’s HAVOC (High Altitude Venus Operational Concept) will explore to make a living on the cloud cover of Venus which very much resembles the Earth’s gravity, pressure and a more powerful solar light. Google cloud save has started saving data. Living in the clouds may one day not be a dreamers dream but a reality.

Cravings

My favourite food channel anchors blared into my ears ‘Cravings my dear is what when one has to have to eat with the vigour and zest.....’ Craving to eat is absolutely understood! It is embedded in mythology and the guts yell when you feel the tremors of emanating aromas from the food that is being fried or the wok that is being fed with the spices. Yet in these modern ages we have developed a wide vista of cravings. Some of them are extremely irritable to an observer trying to strike a conversation of more dear subjects than the other following and forwarding ‘stupid’ jokes on WhatsApp. People have stopped liking basic instincts like discussing family matters or office gossips over priority to follow a soap in which headless people are making insipid moves to create openings on how the serial could last years with followers glued to the allotted timing. I remember well when on wednesday evenings in the yester- years hindi song program Binaca Geetmala on Radio Ceylon was a craving of such magnitude you couldn’t forget the program for the rest of the week. The presenter, Amin Sayani, was the first iconic radio jockey. Video gaming in unearthly hours, spirit consuming habit, compulsory vicious exercising are misdoings that can rob your mind of rationale and unsettle your nerves and end up wasting precious productive time and aggravate health issues.

Creation, God and Science

Was it all Created at some point or did the Big Bang begin it scientifically. At some point in the past (about 13.7 billion years in time according to astronomers) there was nothing. What triggered this universe! Did God create it and if so why? Did it happen as some scientific development in which the nothingness took the shape of this cosmos. In any case if God or Science was wanting to create this Earth (a very very rare occurrence in this cosmic set up which could have gone haywire even if it were for a degree or two of its position or tilt or its location ...and many more such factors)and to habitat the human being why was such a colossal cosmos constituting billions of galaxies necessary (the Milky Way being just a grain in the vast desert is the common comparison made) and why did the creator or science conceive a human being with such shortfalls like life and death or emotions and sensibilities and make it to grind through such uncertainties like a life full of the past or the future and the existing and the non existing the material or the spiritual or the God or Science!! If it was God he may have probably conceived us out of boredom so that he required entertainment (Wow! Such a huge stage and how paradoxical that we humans visit theaters to entertain ourselves) or it could have been some magic he wanted to revel in. Scientifically there is little for explanation as all the knowledge we have gained over the past 200 years seems to be only improving all the time.

One day we may create a rocket or travel through a wormhole like object and travel beyond 13.7 billion years to see who did this?

God, Space and the Beginning of the Cosmos

Look at this! Sometimes you feel as if these (great) astrophysicists are sitting in an easy chair in a dark room with their legs stretched and heads warmly resting on puffed pillows with eyes closed and allowing bright pictures to pass through time and space in their minds and gathering sterile videos. What could you say about the start of the cosmos and the various theories including the big bang. If we recall the big bang‘s aftermath to be an elongated funnel shaped cosmos in which objects created keep increasing in size with time(like expansion of galaxies) as they stretch out into the outer echelons of the funnel. The fact is that there still remains a lot of empty space around it. Now an astrophysicist proposes why time should move only in one direction and proposes time also moving in the opposite side of the funnel an absolute mirror image of it. Although this mirror image would be difficult to see it would be important to note that this suggests that time may also move backwards that is in the past. Along with parallel universes this is another amazing proposal.

DREAM, INSPIRATION, TRUST, HARD WORK

Space missions have become monotonous and they need paradigm shift in approach in construction of spaceshipss, in launching and executing the mission and in improvisation of soft landings. With this in mind Google Lunar launches an XPrice competition worldwide and some stunning designs are proposed and one shortlisted is an Indian team lead by Rahul Narayan. Such a project requires realistic dreams for it requires people from diverse technological and scientific fields to follow you and the most important being the financial one. It would take a visionary investor to put in money in such a project. And to bring everything together and make the project successful in a given time frame is what success capsulation means.

In spite of the fact that we are into space seriously we still don’t have the background or the awareness or the financial institutions to trigger such projects. We are in a nascent stage. NASA has not only landed spaceships and robots on the moon it has also successfully carried out human missions as we know. They have knowhow spread across a wide spectrum of scientific community and contractors who can design and invest and come up with solutions. But there has been a sort of a bottleneck in finding solutions to making a habitat a colony which NASA wishes to achieve by 2020 not a very easy task.

KUDOS to our team of ‘Team Indus’ and let us wish them all success.

New Horizons has woken up

In spite of following movements of spaceships in the planetary system I tended to forget the New Horizons launched by NASA nine years ago to a mission beyond Pluto. It switched off from my memory on and off and sometimes I thought it may have gone lost somewhere because there were years of gaps as no news spewed out and as if it had been not a part of us. Travelling at the rate of about 60000kms per hour and having travelled 4.8 billion kms it has now reached Pluto and NASA’s team has it woken up from its slumber to take up the several planned tests . In the mean time I myself may have travelled a few thousand kms and seen the vista of a few countries and the cultures of a few lands. But whats amazing is it takes 4 hours and 25 minutes for radio waves travelling at the speed of light to travel from Pluto to earth. This puts us in severe quandary about time travel and worm holes seem to be the only solution. Poor Pluto was a planet until nine years ago (when new horizons had just left the earth) until astronomers realised that it was far too different from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and that it belonged to the icy Kuiper belt world where there were many such objects. Since then it was rechristened as a Dwarf Planet. New Horizons is designed to still travel further into the far echelons of the solar system into the Oort clouds and it could be the first to go beyond the solar system if all goes well. In the nine years it has taken to travel to Pluto the humans have undergone lots of development in electronics, software and lifestyle. What changes we undergo in the years to come as New Horizons travels further is a mystery. For now we may call it very slow.

Saffron clad Sadhavi That she should step down as minister of food processing for her arrogant remarks. The opposition cornering the ruling party on Sadhavis remarks and the ruling defending her as new to the political arena etc are simple procedures both parties follow whether in the opposition or in the ruling for a billion to be fooled each time anyone amongst an MP or an MLA or a party worker indulges in some stupidity. Some said apology was enough and some others said we need not be tolerating such language. This is democracy and we have the right to speech and no one cares the extent of foul language one can use. We are yet to learn the Laxmanresha of what limits to follow and whether this country of such diversity in thought and actions will be able to achieve such restrictions as are aimed to hurt others feelings. We just express our thoughts as if we are gossiping or having a conversation on a street corner. As casual as it can be! The solution is to just neglect and let them make a fool of themselves and let us be happy with generous thoughts. I was always scared of wearing the saffron. It is not for wide mouthed (how could you tell kathas without opening one). It is for restful souls who are bent inwards who are at peace and not at loggerheads and having spiritual leanings (not political) and who have the moral authority not to arouse its own (read human) clan. We are having more important issues of bloodshed of terrorism and the whole nation under a threat. Let us concentrate on our survival first.

Brain in GPS mode

  This years Noble Price for medicine has gone to the Moser’s and O’Keefe for work on the brain which has a GPS like function (Surprisingly it is the brain which created the GPS-vice versa). There are ‘place cells’ and ‘grid cells’ and the way these function to memorise the place where you parked your car or how we find our way each time we visit a city.

  It is a matter of nerve cells in your brain which get activated as soon as you are in a place (place cells) and these are interconnected through ‘grid cells’. There are a billion nerve cells in your brain and the way they establish links is a matter of this study. Thus we can recall how your teacher punished you in the seventh standard (the classroom situated on the first floor next to the staircase) for a particular activity or the emotional stress or trauma you underwent on the death of your beloved one.

  You can remember the umpteen travels you made in your lifetime and the maps your brain has created and stored in the number of data bases. I can relate this to the number of travels I made between Mumbai and Raigarh(in CG) with various stations as place cells and the distances between them as grid cells and I can recall the turns my rail engine takes, through my window, on some of these places and i know that to reach Manmad from Nashik the train has to take a deep right and to take me to Chhatisgarh from Nagpur it has to take a deep left.

  Long back i had read how these nerve cells need to be tended to through a Mahesh Yogi lecture and the best way to keep maintaining the bridges between these nerve cells activated is to meditate for long periods of time. Bad lifestyle and habits may lead to mistaken metabolism and disease further leading to dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Brain in GPS mode

Brain in GPS mode

  This years Noble Price for medicine has gone to the Moser’s and O’Keefe for work on the brain which has a GPS like function (Surprisingly it is the brain which created the GPS-vice versa). There are ‘place cells’ and ‘grid cells’ and the way these function to memorise the place where you parked your car or how we find our way each time we visit a city.

  It is a matter of nerve cells in your brain which get activated as soon as you are in a place (place cells) and these are interconnected through ‘grid cells’. There are a billion nerve cells in your brain and the way they establish links is a matter of this study. Thus we can recall how your teacher punished you in the seventh standard (the classroom situated on the first floor next to the staircase) for a particular activity or the emotional stress or trauma you underwent on the death of your beloved one.

  You can remember the umpteen travels you made in your lifetime and the maps your brain has created and stored in the number of data bases. I can relate this to the number of travels I made between Mumbai and Raigarh(in CG) with various stations as place cells and the distances between them as grid cells and I can recall the turns my rail engine takes, through my window, on some of these places and i know that to reach Manmad from Nashik the train has to take a deep right and to take me to Chhatisgarh from Nagpur it has to take a deep left.

  Long back i had read how these nerve cells need to be tended to through a Mahesh Yogi lecture and the best way to keep maintaining the bridges between these nerve cells activated is to meditate for long periods of time. Bad lifestyle and habits may lead to mistaken metabolism and disease further leading to dementia and Alzheimer’s.