I was fishing around the inter-web-tubes today and came across an old show detailing the swearing and start of punk, and more. A good listen and viewing, watching ourselves get older and older…. The guy at 1:11 is Tony Bulley, who led us (as the band Crawling Chaos) in a roundabout way into the welcoming (surely shome mishtake) arms of Tony Wilson and Factory Records.
Was it a good thing? Who knows? Could we have done better? Probably. But it is what it is, it is.
Google Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin
A poor boy from the steppes, Yuri Gagarin, simultaneously became the first man in space and the first man to leave Earth and orbit it completely. (This is something that took NASA several steps before John Glenn finally emulated the feat).
While of humble background (like Jesus), his father was a carpenter (like Jesus) and his mother read voraciously (as Jesus knew the scriptures). Obviously, Gagarin wasn’t Jesus, but he did die in his mid-thirties which parallels Jesus’s early death.
Gagarin Launch on Vostok 1
I was alive when Gagarin stunned the world by being shot into space. I remember very few photos of the man or the event. The West was naturally very embarrassed by being overshadowed by a dictator-led communist state. Most scientists were just astonished. Most politicians and the mainstream media were extremely alarmist in public (and fully actioned in private) because the inter-continental aspect of chucking a nuclear weapon sized piece of machinery aloft at the height of the cold war was paramount in their minds.
What struck me then and since was the fact that Gagarin always seemed to have a happy cheeriness about him. When we now see his pre-flight pictures, his confidence is astounding, because remember, before the voyage, mankind had conflicting ideas about the very survivability for a man in the entirely hostile and unforgiving environment of space. Some said that a man would die within half and hour from radiation….
Of course, the Soviet scientists had tested these theories with mammals (dogs & ape) and knew that even though the animals died on their space-flights (and were destined to die, by design), they knew that a man could survive the flight and if a return to Earth could be made, he’d live to see another day. They’d also done a small step-by-step approach to their rocketry so even though the rocket was made primarily as an ICBM, its designer was actually more interested in getting men into space and had designed accordingly. (see this article on Sergei Korolev and his space-flight dreams).
This, Gagarin duly did, by re-entering the atmosphere in his capsule and then, when the speed had sufficiently reduced, by opening his capsule and leaping from it to then descend on a conventional parachute.
Amazingly, this all worked, perfectly.
International Space Station
We now see the benefits of this early Soviet work because for the next few years, transport of people to the International Space Station (ISS) will be done by the Russian Soyuz spacecraft alone now that the NASA Space Shuttle is grounded for good.
The Soyuz is a direct descendant of Gagarin’s early capsule and the subsequent work and deaths of Soviet cosmonauts. Later joint work with NASA and their own accidents and astronaut deaths have made the Soyuz platform very reliable, in space flight terms. See this Wikipedia article for a full introduction to space-flight of all kinds.
Google, characteristically, have celebrated Gagarin’s achievement (and that it was, make no mistake, he was a very, very, brave man), with a decorated main page which I’ve copied for posterity above.
So it was 50 years ago today. An event that changed the world and our perception of it and ourselves in the universe.
It’s only people some years older than myself who actually remember the previous world where people remained fixed to the planet and could only dream and wonder about the reality beyond. For myself and folks younger than me, we can only to imagine what that world was like because we are part of the world that Gagarin’s bravery opened up for us..
When Armstrong said those words (except I missed out the ‘a’), it looked like men & women would be walking tall on all sorts of astronomical bodies in a continuation of the Apollo programme. As we no know, things didn’t quite work out like that though, and the Moon is still the only place we’ve been except our dear Earth – although unmanned and earth-based exploration continues in great leaps and bounds.
But although announced with a small fanfare, the news that CERN has made antimatter atoms in the form of anti-hydrogen last for getting on for half a second made me blink twice. See BBC News item here.
It’s my guess that this is the real “small leap for mankind” that will eventually lead to the real “giant leap”.
We are now talking the Star Trek language that everyone understands; antimatter, containment fields, annihilation. Soon we’ll have dilithium crystals and the stock market to sell them in!
But seriously, it’s one hell of a leap. The big puzzle is why matter (and thus ourselves because we are made of it), is here.
Why is there any of it, anyway?
… … because in every experiment that we’ve done, matter and antimatter cancel each other out! Exactly!
So the physical laws that we’ve invented or discovered, right back to the Big Bang, all say that we should not be here. Any of us.
Current physics says that our universe should only contain the energy from the mutual annihilation of matter & antimatter. But there is also matter, which is tightly rolled up bits of energy….
Self-evidently, we are here, which means that matter had a slight excess over anti-matter just after the Big Bang.
So I think that somewhere within the physics of our creation of antimatter, lies the answer to the matter/antimatter conundrum, of that I’m sure.
We’ve made a few atoms so far and watched them annihilate with matter on contact. The next steps will be to make and keep zillions indefinitely until they are needed. What for?
Starships perhaps?
Now suppose we make these starships. Our current selves are very destructive, both towards our environment and ourselves.
In short, though we may well have the technology and explorative urge for interstellar travel in the future, our present state of intense animality leaves us unsuited to such endeavours. It’s unlikely that any expedition would arrive at its destination intact. They’d self-destruct. It’s what people do.
We must change ourselves before we can aspire change our location in the universe, or else our present location (the Earth), will be a blackened desert. Un-departable.
Today is exactly the 80th anniversary of the Soka Gakkai.
It’s a Buddhist organisation with its philosophy wrapped up in its name of “Value Creation Society“.
Let us all use three words as tenets, a true mantra for a civilised survival on Earth for generations to come.
When the time arrives for the Earth’s ultimate destruction, if we haven’t made a “Value Creation Society” that would allow our escape, then we are quite simply, stuffed.
So join the millions of Soka Gakkai Buddhists today as they celebrate their inheritance from one man, then another and another.
Makiguchi was his name and he died for his principles in a Japanese gaol in 1944. He and his disciple Toda were hounded by the animality of the times and only Toda was left at the end of WW2.
From him, and then Ikeda, the Soka Gakkai owes its existence, and we all need such principles if the magic of antimatter creation and containment is to mean anything in the future. It’s a truly wonderful thing.
A. Those who practice Buddhism do so without any expectation of grace or favour. They do it for two reasons:
You don’t have to believe that they do this – after all, it could all be a big deception, couldn’t it?
But a true Buddha, revealing their Buddha nature and pointing out the iniquities and devilish qualities of the world, does believe this. Wholeheartedly.
This is why, in all the Buddhist schools, there is a phrase passed down from eons back.
Those who vex and trouble [the practitioners of the Law] will have their heads split into seven pieces.
It’s an allegory, that quite often is remarkably accurate…. I’ve seen it happen; where people have vexed and insinuated against someone that’s revealing their Buddha nature – and then come a cropper! You name it:
If Buddhism were just capable of punishing without change, then it’d be no good. It’d be just like Judgement Day, which it’s not. The principle of 3000 realms in a single moment [of life] means that everyone can be bad and good at the same time.
Really. That’s what it means. It’s the complete essence of Buddhism.
Therefore, even very bad people, who have “harmed or vexed” a Buddha, can reveal their good side and instantly become a Buddha – just like that!
Conversely, anyone can go over to the dark side of animality. At any time.
You don’t have to believe any of this, of course.
But I do.
Like I said, you don’t have to believe it – but I do, and so do millions of Buddhists. We know what will happen because we’ve seen it.
Why am I talking like this?
A. Because, as a practitioner of Buddhism, I’m being attacked for trying to protect people and to turn the attacker into something better;
And it’s my warning.
I don’t have to do anything – the universe will make it so, (as Captain Jean-Luc would say).
These are the instances when the famous Buddhist monk Nichiren talks about a “head being split into seven pieces” from his writings. As I say, you don’t have to believe it. All that matters is that I do.
For a clue to what this about, this is a neat definition of the term “scammer”, taken from The Urban Dictionary:
One who does everything in his/her power to steal from another, usually by means of trickery, deceit, and force. With the accesibility and anonymousity that the internet provides, scammers have become increasingly prevalent in modern times. Usually driven by personal greed or even outright amusement, they are unhindered by sympathy or morals and are the very face of human corruption.
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