2004.12.22 Christmas Rant 2004
Christmas Rant 2004
or
How Perspective Messes With Everything
I am me. You probably know something about me, or else you wouldn't be here. On the other hand there's also probably quite a lot that you don't know about me, however trivial some of it might be. Regardless of how well you know me, let me assure you that I am a real person. I am a human being, or Homo sapien, with thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears and all that other stuff that makes each one of us who and what we are.
I am sitting in my office chair. It's one of those faux-leather swivel jobbies on wheels. It's made in Canada (I left that tag attached on principle), and a gift from some of my former room mates. It's also quite comfy, provided there's only one of you in it at a time. Still, I must admit that its total level of comfort is only partially due to its physical fit to my butt, but rather more because of its sentimental connection to my friends and to my country.
My chair is parked in front of my big computer up in my loft. The loft is my personal nest of safety and solitude, only occasionally influenced by others. It's where I keep most of my favourite stuff, including all the LEGO and my AIF stuff.
My loft is a raised portion of my condominium. I lightheartedly refer to this place as The RoosT. It's the first real estate I've ever owned, or rather had a mortgage for. It represents a considerable amount of reliance on my current employment, trust in the work visa process, and perhaps my first glimmering of financial responsibility. Living at the RoosT with me are S and Rita. One of them is a beautiful young woman that I hope to marry, and the other is an overweight cross-eyed furball. They agree to live here with me to help assuage my feelings of concern about them, and to let me bask in their affection.
The RoosT is situated in the city of Lake Oswego. Lake Oswego is a fairly nice place that happens to be a rather convenient commute (comparatively) to where I work. About 35,000 people live in Lake Oswego, and the majority of these people are rich bastards. Not necessarily yacht-with-helicopter owning bastards, but rich enough to make do with a fraction of what they currently have and still be counted among the wealthiest 10% of humanity. I know about 5 people in Lake Oswego, not counting S or Rita, and I think that's probably about enough.
Lake Oswego is really just a suburb of Portland. Portland is a thriving city of a couple million people, and has some fairly diverse industries including a truck manufacturing branch of DaimlerChrysler who happens to give me all my money. If you explore Portland at all, it can be really quite charming. There's interesting sights and things to do. It can also be quite sickening, especially if you have to be going the same direction that an unpleasantly large number of other people intend to go. The juxtaposition, of incredible wealth driving by in Ferraris past homeless beggars on street corners hustling for enough change to find release in some chemical oblivion, actually numbs you after a while until you don't really appreciate how dramatic it is any more.
Portland is nestled in the state of Oregon. Oregon borders on the Pacific Ocean, between California and Washington. It's got mountains, and trees, and even some arid stuff. There's currently almost 4 million humans living in Oregon. This is quite a lot more than there were when Lewis and Clark made their historic treck that culminated here at the mouth of the Columbia River. Back then, about 200 years ago, there was probably just a few thousand humans living in what is now called Oregon. They were a flourishing if somewhat simple people descended from humans that walked to this continent thousands of years ago, but who were all but wiped out by the European settlers that followed Lewis and Clark.
Oregon is a state in the United States of America. The USA is the most militarily powerful country on the planet, and has almost 300 million people - a tiny majority of which are stupid jackasses that have really weird ideas about "values". The USA has the oldest functioning constitution in the world, and is considered by many (mostly Americans) to be a benchmark for democracy (even though it appears to be ruled by an oligarchy). It's also a pretty great place to live, comparatively speaking. Especially if you're a Caucasian male, aged 25-40, earning more than 50 thousand a year.
The USA is a region artificially marked out on the continent of North America. Over 450 million humans live in North America, and most of them have recent ancestors that lived on different continents.
North America is a continent, or really big island, on a planet called Earth. There are over 6.5 billion humans on Earth. Of all the humans that have ever lived, from the time that humans first gave up hunting and gathering as their primary mode of survival, over 90% of those humans are alive right now. Every second, there are approximately 3 more humans born than die. In 1945, during World War II, including the atomic bombs dropped in Japan and the Holocaust of the Jews, the Earth's total population did not go down. Earth is the only planet known to harbour life of any kind. So, it's also a pretty great place to live, comparatively speaking. The Earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old, and harboured life for about 3.7 billion, and humans for perhaps 0.00002 billion years.
The Earth is a member of a system around a star we call Sol. Sol is a G2 class star, and represents approximately 99.8% of the total mass in the solar system, or about 333,000 times the size of Earth. The surface temperature of the sun is 5,800 Kelvin, and a theoretical core temperature of 15,600,000 Kelvin. 70% of all matter in the solar by mass is Hydrogen, and 28% Helium. Everything else combined is 2%.
The Sol is just one of hundreds of billions of stars in an Sbc type spiral galaxy we call the Milky Way (or First Galaxy). The total mass of the Milky way is estimated to be between 750 billion and one Trillion times that of Sol, and is about 100,000 light years across.
The Milky Way is one of possibly a hundred billion galaxies that exist in the universe. The universe is estimated to be about 15 billion years old, plus or minus a few billion. Other than the arrays of infinitesimal sparks that are stars, the universe is mostly empty. The average temperature of that nothingness is just 4 degrees Kelvin above Absolute Zero. The total known population of somewhat-sentient beings in the entire universe is around 6.5 billion.