I live in Baton Rouge and decided to stay in the city for hurricane Gustav. Now it was an annoying hurricane for sure, but it wasn't really that bad in terms of catastrophes. The hurricane proper isn't the subject of this post anyway. The day before the hurricane, while it was still offshore, the sky was completely cloudless. At one point in the day, I noticed that a layer of fast-moving clouds as far as the eye could see had covered half of the sky. It was the outer bands of Gustav. I had never seen the edge of a hurricane before. I had Sarah take a few pictures of it, but I don't know how they came out. If they are decent, I will post them.
Anyhow, I noticed how peaceful and orderly the clouds were, despite the fact that they moved faster than normal clouds. They were very light, bright and had some gaps between them. In short, they seemed like friendly clouds not like hurricane clouds. I thought to myself that these were just the outer clouds orbiting the violent center. The spiral shape of the hurricane immediately made me draw an analogy to the galaxy in which we live. I thought about how the calm outer bands are like the calm part of the galaxy where we live, and that the violent center of the hurricane was like the star-cluster in the center of the galaxy. Even the empty center of the hurricane seems analogous to the theorized giant black hole in the center of the galaxy.
But if the hurricane were really like our galaxy, then it might have little intelligent beings occupying a droplet on one of these outer bands that I was watching go by. I thought, maybe these beings don't know that they are hovering over a planet with other intelligent beings. Maybe they don't know that their existence (which, admittedly is only a week or so), depends on the existence of a large destruction machine that brings misery to those without the financial means to overcome it. I wondered how they would feel about living in a universe whose very existence necessarily causes other people misery. Then I thought that maybe we are those little people. Maybe, we are three-dimensional beings in a three-dimensional galaxy which is really just a storm of a four-dimensional world, causing those four-dimensional people anguish (but at a much higher energy level).
Now, I know this analogy doesn't work perfectly. Hurricanes are three-dimensional objects, just like galaxies, so relying on alternate dimensions for the analogy is a little implausible. Not to mention the fact that modern science treats the world as a four-dimensional entity. If the analogy were perfect, it would not tell us very much about the world: we would just be comparing a thing to itself. What is really interesting about a good analogy is the ways in which the two things are not alike.
-Priam's Pride
Anyhow, I noticed how peaceful and orderly the clouds were, despite the fact that they moved faster than normal clouds. They were very light, bright and had some gaps between them. In short, they seemed like friendly clouds not like hurricane clouds. I thought to myself that these were just the outer clouds orbiting the violent center. The spiral shape of the hurricane immediately made me draw an analogy to the galaxy in which we live. I thought about how the calm outer bands are like the calm part of the galaxy where we live, and that the violent center of the hurricane was like the star-cluster in the center of the galaxy. Even the empty center of the hurricane seems analogous to the theorized giant black hole in the center of the galaxy.
But if the hurricane were really like our galaxy, then it might have little intelligent beings occupying a droplet on one of these outer bands that I was watching go by. I thought, maybe these beings don't know that they are hovering over a planet with other intelligent beings. Maybe they don't know that their existence (which, admittedly is only a week or so), depends on the existence of a large destruction machine that brings misery to those without the financial means to overcome it. I wondered how they would feel about living in a universe whose very existence necessarily causes other people misery. Then I thought that maybe we are those little people. Maybe, we are three-dimensional beings in a three-dimensional galaxy which is really just a storm of a four-dimensional world, causing those four-dimensional people anguish (but at a much higher energy level).
Now, I know this analogy doesn't work perfectly. Hurricanes are three-dimensional objects, just like galaxies, so relying on alternate dimensions for the analogy is a little implausible. Not to mention the fact that modern science treats the world as a four-dimensional entity. If the analogy were perfect, it would not tell us very much about the world: we would just be comparing a thing to itself. What is really interesting about a good analogy is the ways in which the two things are not alike.
-Priam's Pride
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