Happy Earth Day everyone. Like Black History Month before it, today is one of those commemorative episodes that reminds you that complexity cannot be stuffed into 24 hours alone. Or a month, or a year, or a millennium while we're at it. Because Earth and the universe it is a part of are insanely complex, and no invented superhero or God could create it in a day or whatever. Evidently, it takes a supermassive black hole to do that, a subject that kicks off my celebratory nugget for our third rock from the sun.
Black Hole Cloud. Won't You Come? And Build Us a Universe.
Not to resurrect Nietszche or anything, but God might still be dead. The Astrophysical Journal recently reported the discovery of a plasma cloud six freakin' million light years wide that could have been generated by supermassive black holes. Space.com reported study leader Philipp Kronberg of Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico as querying "What kind of mechanism could create a cloud of such enormous dimensions that does not coincide with any single galaxy or galaxy cluster?" I'll tell you. One that probably doesn't wear sandals and deny you the joy of sex before you are married. Speaking of...
Clinton: God + Lab = Earth
Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both took the time to bow down, Ice Cube-style, to Mother Earth. Both, according to the AP, took different approaches to the opportunity to bring up the crap news about global warming. Obama, always the populist, stuck as close to the truth as he could: "It's not going to happen just because of some presidential candidate or because some bills are introduced in Congress. It's going to happen because the American people mobilize around the issue." In other words, even if he becomes president, he can't force you to change your bulbs unless you want to. Clinton meanwhile took the time to remind us that supermassive black holes aren't shit compared to Jesus. "Today is Earth Day, and I personally believe every day should be Earth Day. We have a duty to protect God's creation and we have a responsibility to repair the damage that we do as we go on in life." Evidently, Clinton still believes that the latter clause in her sentence has nothing to do with the first one. Doesn't she read Astrophysical Journal?
Run Like Hell! Earth's Altered States
Finally, a shameless plug for my own Earth-related rant, a mash of the IPCC report, Children of Men and the Bush plan to combat climate crisis by launching, no lie, smoke and mirrors into space. Truth, especially when it comes to extinction events, is still stranger than fiction. By a light year.
