Tag Archive for 'radiation'

Dreaming about saving Iceland

I had a dream that I took a plane to Iceland. When I got there the country was in a perpetual twilight, the sky an interesting pale red. There was a huge army surplus store right outside the airport so all the idiot tourists, who hadn’t realised that “Ice Land” would be cold, could buy warm clothes. The owners of the surplus store thought every visitor to Iceland was an idiot, including me, but were very pleased about it as they made a tidy profit from them. The dream was set in the near future and there were no children around - some kind of atomic accident had rendered all the people infertile, no new people had been born for over twenty years in Reykjavik and only a few fools, mostly old people, and fearless explorers ever visited the country.

Anyway, back in the army surplus store, the shopkeepers became interested in me when they noticed I wasn’t looking at the woolly clothing like all the others but checking out some curious little devices they’d always assumed no one had any use for. They were nothing too special, pen torches, flares and glow sticks mostly, but I needed them as the final components for a larger device I’d made to rid Iceland of radiation poisoning. I’m not quite sure how it came about, but by the end of the dream I had hundreds of followers waving me off as I set out across the snow to plant my device somewhere on high and transmit some kind of cleansing signals that would cure everyone of their infertility.

After walking for a while I recognized that my progress stopped; I couldn’t move anymore. However hard I tried, I couldn’t make a step. Suddenly I started to hear some strange repetative noise coming out from somewhere. I realized it was my snoring, and as soon as I realized it, I heard these words: “When you are snoring, you are not dreaming”. I tried to approach the source of the voice, but couldn’t. “You have to be able to animate ALL the bones in your foot before you can use it”, - said the voice. And suddenly I could move. I went in the voice’s direction and there was a man. I asked him: “Who are you? What are you doing here?”, and he claimed to be my teacher. I thought about that for a moment, and then realized that he wasn’t somebody I know. So I told him: “I AM dreaming!”. He said “Congratulations” in a calm voice, fell backwards and disinegrated. Then I woke up.

flyingsquirrel

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Requiem for a dream, or Quantum future of Humankind in Infinite Universe

Right, I know it’s not exactly a memory. It’s not even a dream, but rather a requiem for one. I used to think that we live in infinite Universe. I do not have any scientific background to come up with theories or statements, but as a human being I reserve my rights for beliefs. Be it belief in Jesus Christ the Savour, spirit of improvisation, Santa Claus, infinity of space and time, or belief in myself, belief is an integral part of any sentient self-reflecting being.

This belief in infinite Universe was simply based on the fact that we can’t measure it.

Of course, we have data that our Universe is 13,73 billion years old (as of the last week :) ). So we can imagine a ball 13,73 billion years in radius (given the speed of light 299 792 458 m/s and length of 1 year as 31 556 926 seconds it will give us approx. radius of 13 730 000 000 x 299 792 458 x 31 556 926 = 129893055103132202840000000 meters… so you know). But, as it took me about 2 min. to come up with this calculation, this radius became roughly 3597509496 m bigger.

We reached the point there I got bored myself. The numbers are just too big too mean anything. If you go shopping and see something cost 3 pounds 99 pence you’ll think it’s 4 pounds, right? This is what called approximation. So 129893055103132202840000000 + 3597509496 and counting… is a number I can’t imagine. It’s something like Bill Gate’s fortune, numbers beyond my grasp. I think that approximation of 129893055103132202840000000 + 3597509496 is infinity. There’s no need for me to operate with such numbers. I remember reading some anthropological reports about some aboriginal tribes in Papua New Guinea. They had numbers 1 to 5, and then groups: 1 to 5 too, so everything could be shown on 2 hands.

20 would be 4 times 5; 25 - 5 times 5 . Everything that was over 25 was “many-many”, uncountable, infinity.

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