Tough to measure

What is the baseline?

This is the first thing that you want to know in anything. A doctor needs a baseline to see what needs to be fixed in the patient. A coach needs a baseline to determine if a player is fit for the game. A teacher needs to have a baseline so they know where they should start their lessons. We have to have a normal.

What is the baseline for creation? Believe it or not, Darkness and cold. Light and Heat had to be added, and its influence is limited. With all the billions of galaxies and stars in our universe, why is the temperature only 2.7 degrees above above absolute 0? Well, could be the lack of matter to transmit or register the excitation of the molecules. They just wiggle until they run out of energy and then go back to sleep. Like teenagers.

Darkness rules space. There are pinpoints of light but it doesn’t illuminate your path. There was the episode of Star Trek where they were traveling through “the Void” and had no outside references as to direction or speed, in other words, no light, even tiny points of light, for a LONG time. The only things in the void are lost ships that prey on each other. They do not believe there is an exit from the void, so they go to their baseline. “We must survive, even at the cost of others.”

So if the normal for the universe is Cold and Dark, why is there light and heat? If the normal for the universe is lifelessness, why is there life? If the normal for the universe is chaos and entropy, how can something so complex and so ordered as a virus, a life form, or a star nursery arise? Why does gravity work? If all the atoms are spread throughout the universe, how is it they clump together to form amazingly complicated and diverse creations? Hydrogen becomes Helium, then a multitude of different elements, each with their own structure and rules. So order and detail and intricacy emerge out of randomness?

But Light and Heat do not balance Dark and Cold. There are not equal amounts. Light seems to pervade in its immediate vicinity, but dark is just on the back side of the planet or the moon. Heat comes from the excitation of the atoms close to a source (such as a star) and it is transmitted by proximity but is easily snuffed when the atoms are isolated. Light and Heat will never be the default. Yet, those are essential in producing and maintaining life.

How do you measure the effect these off-baseline phenomena against the “normal?” The fact that we exist, that we are highly complex, that we communicate at all, that we think thoughts, that we create, that we destroy, that we contemplate our existence goes against all the “normal” that exists in the universe. We shouldn’t exist…and yet, my son took a selfie with his girlfriend and thus proves that we do. You’re reading this blog and considering these words so that proves that the impossible happened. We are wonderfully and fearfully made.

Take a moment and just reflect on the world around you. Isn’t it amazing? It really is tough to measure.