10^-40,000

A poem by Kathe L. Palka, used with permission, from her book “Miracle of the Wine”. Her website is https://kathepalka.com/

~ Fred Hoyle’s calculation of the probability of the spontaneous origin of the 2000 proteins of 200 amino acids needed for the creation of life.

for Joe

But here we are, there’s no denying it —
the spontaneous or willed act
of a mysterial universe set in motion ages past
then watched or tweaked along
by small miracles pushing probabilities — humans,
the end of a string of not so random events.

Imagine life’s beginnings — enzymes, proteins —
genes sequencing like so many pairs
of star-crossed lovers who miss each other endlessly
at some enormous dance where the band plays on and on
under the twinkling spheres and hope springs eternal
until each pair meets, brought together by
the omnipotent band leader tirelessly nudging things along.

Think of all the pairings needed after the creation
of that primordial soup, before our pairing,
just 20 years ago. But here we are,
while our children sleep inside the house,
still dancing by starlight on the lawn in the lilac-scented air,
here amid the world’s wondrous improbabilities,
nothing less than stardust ourselves —
all of this, all of us, brought together by love.

For years the antinuclear movement has been saying to the general
public: pay attention to this information because this bad thing is
going to happen. And now, the really bad thing has happened. What have
we to say to the world now?

I think the current situation calls for a kind of tragic heroism, of the
sort expressed by Winston Churchill when it looked like Britain was
losing World War II. He gave a famous speech in which he said that the
British would never surrender. They would fight in the fields, they
would fight in the hedges, they would fight on the river banks, they
would fight to the last man, but they would never surrender.

Applied to the radioactive poisoning of the Pacific Ocean, I think our
attitude needs to be something like, “save as many species as you can,
you are not going to save them all. Protect as many people as you can,
you are not going to be able to protect them all, but never stop.”

In my mind I hear myself rewriting Churchill speech for the
post-Fukushima era. “We will never stop caring about life, no matter how
bad things get. We will never stop believing in life, no matter how much
of life is destroyed. We will never stop reaching out to care for other
people, and protect them as much as we can, even if we glow in the dark
from radiation, and keel over from leukemia. We will never give up.”

From: nonukes.org/
 

This NASA photo made me realize I’d never considered what an eclipse looks like from space. Here is a beautiful photo of Mother Earth’s experience of the eclipse. It might be hard to notice at first, but look for the shadow over the Libya-Chad area of the top part of Africa, west of the Nile  River.

The image above shows the total solar eclipse of March 29, 2006 as observed from the MSG satellite, in geostationary orbit 22,369 mi (36,000 km) above the equator.

Note that the eclipsed area, where the shadow of the full Moon reached the Earth’s surface, lies over the cloudless, east central Sahara Desert.

The region that experienced a total solar eclipse at the time this image was acquired (10:00 UTC) is located at the center of the deeply shadowed region (umbra). This region has a diameter of about 112 mi (180 km). The dark region (penumbra) just outside the deepest shadow experienced a partial solar eclipse.

Image provided by: Maximilian Reuter; Maximilian’s website
Summary Author: Maximilian Reuter; Susanne Pfeifer; Jim Foster

epod.usra.edu/blog/2011/08/total-solar-eclipse-from-the-perspective-of-space.html