6th April 2017
This time of the year, the Aus Summer finally laid to rest but Autumn just getting cranked up, we get these great clear bright warm days (like today) but it's pretty coolish overnight, and at about 5am-ish it's still dark and the crisp night sky is festooned with stars, Venus like a beacon of light low in the west. Best time of the day. Love to stand out on the back lawn and look up there and wonder.
Which brings me....
Don't know about you, but I struggle with all the zeros in the fourteen billion year long story of the universe. That's 14,000,000,000 !! - that's no novella and it's just too much for my pea brain to get around, especially when I want to see my life in some kind of context. So I decided to do a bit of basic maths and re-express the History Of Time as one calendar year. Yep, similar things done before but they're all so complicated and esoteric I needed to reduce it to my personal size. A sort of 70kg version, where The Big Bang goes off at midnight Jan 1st and as I type this it's midnight Dec 31st. So, it goes like this.....
JAN 1st (no time past midnight).
The Great Unknowable Something (G.U.S.) has assembled all this stuff, including Time and Space and Gravity and Dark Matter and every atom quaser and quark now in the Universe, but compressed into a lump of an unspecified size (but only GUS knows why) and it goes off - WHOOOOMP! - flies apart in every direction and the cosmic clock starts running. The game is afoot.JAN 20th
Nearly three weeks in and all that cosmic componentry is still tearing through all the brand new space at speeds you also can't get your head around, but lately have been clubbing together in flight to make solid stuff and forming into galaxies including our Milky Way. Getting organised. GUS presumably watching to see how it's all going.
MARCH 17th
Still flying outwards in all directions but Gravity starting to seriously do its thing massaging more and more dust into something useful.
APRIL 30th
Sorry, nothing much new to report, still same old same old.
JUNE 5th
Yep, grinding on and on and on with more and more of the same and you'd think GUS would be losing interest in this experiment by now.
JULY 27th
Yaaaaawn....
AUGUST 16th
Zzzzzzz.....SEPT 4th
Wait, something's actually happening here in our neighbourhood. The Sun has lit up and things that looks like planets are flying about in circles around it. Okay, watch this space.
SEPT 7th
Now a whole heap of clear runny stuff is forming on that small-ish blue-ish rotating lump with the volcanos and the comets arriving at a goodly rate of knots, great gobs of it, it's everywhere, restless stuff it is, taking over everything, sloshing about, steam rising.
SEPT 23rd
OCTOBER 5th
Yep, there's Live Things swimming in all directions, the place is a-wash with them, and they keep changing too, turning into other Things, all threshing about in the oceans and constantly eating each other and compulsively making new versions of themselves. Where will this end? Is this all part of the Plan? (But GUS isn't admitting to anything).
NOVEMBER 12thThey're still doing it. Can't seem to stop. Weird ugly little sods too some of them.
DECEMBER 18th
Look at this! One of the Life Things has just climbed out of the ocean and is checking out the dry land and thinking yep, this'll do fine, nothing out here that wants to eat me. For now. I've found a whole new advantage. Might have to alter something in the breathing department though.
DECEMBER 24th
Geez some of these Land Things are BIG. Ugly with it. And damn scary. And Things flying. Whole place is full of big things small things crawling things slippery things swimming things, grunting moaning squeaking howling. And plant things that don't go anywhere all their life, just stand about propagating themselves as quickly as they can before they're eaten. Yep, everything is completely preoccupied with staying alive, eating, and some form of bonking. Nothing else. (Is this what you had in mind GUS?)
DECEMBER 29th (4:30pm)
Now THAT'S interesting. One species of animal has turned itself into a range of hairy sort of bi-pedder beasts with grabbers on the ends of their arms and they're doing well because most of the huge ugly competition has run it's race and disappeared. This line of beasts look like a mob of go-ers.
DECEMBER 30th (8:52pm)
Aaaah, some of the hairy beasts have taught themselves to permanently walk about on their legs and hunt in organised packs and not play fair. They're not all that fast but they're damn cunning. And they carry sharp sticks. They don't all look exactly the same but they're surely mastering the art of mastery. Sort of. Plenty still get eaten, but they're definitely looking like the front runners in all this.DECEMBER 31st (11:53pm)
There you go, had to happen, one of the stander-uppers has worked itself to the top of the heap. Clearly the winner. Did it with clever hands and tools and getting the biggest brain and overwhelming the opposition. Yes folks, it's the Thinking Human. Homo Sapiens. WE have arrived!! But what's the bloody time?! - lordy lordy there's only seven minutes to go! And SO much to do. Where do we start?DECEMBER 31st (11:59pm and 48 secs)
See this rock here Jane? See these marks I made on it? I've decided these marks mean "Fred" okay? Me. I've just invented WRITING. Whew, and none too soon either. Okay, so now we've got just twelve seconds left to cram in all of the recorded history of the Human Race - to build pyramids and religions and philosophies and invent wheels and better mousetraps and the combine harvester and gadgets to more effectively kill each other in large numbers and find a cure for stupidity and warts and Death. Twelve seconds. I can't believe all this has been going since January 1st and we've only just got to this point. And the Universe is still out there, flying apart like it has been from the beginning of Time, as if it's totally unconcerned with what's happening here. On Earth. D'ya reckon it's all part of some plan Jane old love? And what's for lunch?
Tick tick tick tick..........