Sad Case of Dr. Dolittle and the End of Life on the Earth as We Know It
by ken winston caine
Dr. Dolittle was very busy.
He was busy trying to decide things.
He was trying to decide: Should he do this? Or should he do that?
And if he did this, should he do it tomorrow or the day after?
And then, should he do it in yellow, or should he do it in blue? And would that be sky blue — as if the sky is still blue anywhere.
Dr. Dolittle decided to consult the internet.
Is there anywhere where the sky is still truly blue? And exactly what shade of blue is sky blue anyway? Does it have, for instance, a PMS number — one of the numbers that printers and designers consult on a chart as they mix pigments in order to assure consistency in colors from job to job and across the industry?
Or, Dr. Dolittle wondered, with computer graphics the standard now, do printers still use PMS numbers?
He decided to consult the internet.
Dr. Dolittle is very, very busy.
Dr. Dolittle fired up his computer.
He planned to Google whether printers still use PMS numbers. Whether he should do this or that.
Whether tomorrow or the day after.
Whether in blue, or yellow, if the day after.
But first, he thought as the computer came to life, I should check my email.
And that caused him to recall six or seven emails that earlier in the morning he had been thinking that he needed to send.
A couple were especially urgent. And a couple were to respond to people who had emailed but to whom he had not responded for several days. One he hadn’t replied to for more than a week. Better do it now, before he forgets, he thought.
Otherwise those people will think that he is impolite. Or doesn’t like them any more. Or is incompetent.
Or dead.
One absolutely must respond to emails.
He began re-composing in his mind a couple of the of the emails that earlier in the morning he had been thinking that he should send.
But it had been too early then. The computer was not on. And he had not had his tea. Or his breakfast.
He had not brushed his teeth.
One should never send an email before one has brushed their teeth.
Nor had he caught the top of the hour news on Morning Edition. And now, top of the hour NPR News was only five minutes away. He turned on the radio so he would not forget and miss it.
He was in the midst of preparing a breakfast smoothie of homemade yogurt kefir and whey protein and blueberries and stevia and ice when he realized:
If I turn on the blender to grind the ice, I will not be able to hear the radio and will not know when the news has come on and might miss the top stories.
And so he faced a dilemma.
Should he begin blending his breakfast drink now, at two before eight and risk missing the top story on the top of the hour news, or should he let the ice and the homemade yogurt-kefir and whey and stevia rest in the blender until the news is over at about 8:07?
He did not need to consult the internet on this.
He simply consulted the clock.
It now was one before eight. To blend his smoothie acceptably smooth would take about three minutes of loud whining, grinding, whirring, growling, crunching construction-site noises.
The kind of noises that drown out the radio and make it impossible to distinguish whether Korva Coleman said that someone had accused the President of being impudent or impotent.
And one needs to know which it is.
He listened to the news.
He heard that people are unhappy in many places about many things. That political leaders are insisting the proposals of their counterparts will drive us into a hopeless state from which it is unlikely we would ever recover.
Dr. Dolittle certainly hoped that the political leaders were wrong. And he wondered:
Is it OK to hope that we don’t become hopeless? Not only is it OK, he wondered, but is it productive to hold hope against hopelessness? Or does hopelessness require a stronger drug?
And then he realized that while he was pondering that, he had missed the details recounted in the obituary for a beloved veteran motion picture star and exactly which deplorable crimes against humanity some dictator was committing; and which vital planetary life-support systems modern industrial humankind had now succeeded in damaging or extinguishing to the extent of extreme malfunction beyond the repair capabilities of current human understanding, according the latest scientific reports.
Our planet’s nature, Dr. Dolittle thought, is such a wondrous thing:
Self-balanced, self-regulating, self-cleaning, self-sustaining, self-regenerating, self-evolving.
Self, self, self, his ex used to say. Is that all you think of?
No, Dr. Dolittle thought. He didn’t want to go there.
He returned his attention to a living, glowing, self-contained blue planet — an elliptical ball — perpetually spinning at between 700 and 1,038 miles-per-hour, depending upon where one stands on its surface to take the measurements.
He found the basis for those numbers at an authoritative physics site on the internet. {1}
He did some more checking and, with a hand-held calculator converted some more figures from kilometers-per-second to miles-per-hour.
This wondrous self-sustaining planet whirls on its axis at close to 1,000 miles-per-hour while soaring at 67,000 miles-per-hour around the Sun in a 582,800,000-mile arc. {2} And while it’s busy shuttling around the Sun, our local solar system is orbiting the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at 491,040 miles-per-hour. {3} And the Milky Way Galaxy itself is careening across the Universe at 1,406,160 miles-per-hour. {4}
Where is the galaxy going in such a hurry, Dr. Dolittle wonders. Nobody really knows. Maybe it will send back a colorful picture postcard when it gets there.
He recalls that Buckminster Fuller said something like, This planet is an experiment in sustaining life aboard a spaceship: the Spaceship Earth.
So much we don’t know, so much we don’t understand, thinks Dr. Dolittle.
For instance, What is the spark of life? What keeps the earth alive? How come planets and moons and stars dance around each other in perfect arcs without ever slamming into one another like bumper cars? What causes gravity? What holds this Universal ball of wax together? What keeps it going?
Round and round and round it goes. And how and why nobody knows.
But what perfectly harmonious, balanced, self-sustaining systems.
Too bad humans haven’t learned more from the nature of the Universe and from the nature of the planet, thinks Dr. Dolittle.
Too bad that in just a bit more than a century, in a mad suicidal rush humankind has gassed, poisoned, burned, killed, depleted, extinguished, damaged, altered, eaten, removed, subdued, paved over and re-channeled so many of those delicate natural life-sustaining systems whose workings we do not understand.
And we continue to do so, even as the skies turn murkier, the oceans die and rise, and the rainforests turn to deserts and the deserts turn to who knows what?
Well, Dr. Dolittle thought, nature will do just fine without us. In fact, he thought, it will do better.
Yes, he thought, that’s a more positive note.
Or maybe not, he puzzled. What a depressing and pressing proposition.
He should write, and teach and lecture about this, Dr. Dolittle thought. He should devote his life to this. He should make this his religion. He should try to convert others.
He’s thought that thought before. Many times, over several decades.
And has made some meaningful jabs in that direction.
It’s obvious, he thinks. The innate perfection and self-regenerating quality of nature is so superior to anything yet conceived and devised by man. How can man proclaim anything else to be more sacred?
He caught himself. Now he was standing at the blender filled with melting ice cubes and curds and whey separating.
The top of the hour news was long over, he realized. Morning Edition had ended some time ago. And for maybe an hour now, the soundtrack had been a multifarious variety of folk musicians and brilliant songwriters. Greg Brown. {5} Tom Waits singing “Hold On.” {6}
Nice, he thought.
And he vaguely recalled that Morning Edition had relayed other stories of death, destruction, disingenuousness and dissent. And a couple pieces containing hints of humor and hope. But he had been busy and hadn’t paid real attention to any of the detail.
He turned off the radio and returned to the blender.
As if victimized by global warming, he thought, the ice cubes were a fraction of their former size. He added a few from a fresh tray and loosed the blender to howl and grind and protest as it smashed and chopped and broke and blended cubes of ice and fermented milk and blueberries and stevia and a sprinkle of organic sea salt into a smooth, creamy, cool concoction full of protein and immune-stimulating compounds and anti-oxidants that tasted a bit like Creamsicle (r) and which pleased him immensely.
Yes, he thought, I must get to the emails.
Dr. Dolittle was a busy man.
He had forgotten that he must decide whether to do this or that. And whether to do which of those tomorrow or the next day.
And whether to do them in color or black and white.
He did remember that he didn’t know if PMS colors were still state of the art, so he Googled PMS.
That returned 18,300,000 results. {7} Entries one through 10 described Premenstrual Syndrome.
He tried again. This time he searched for “pms color.”
Only 144,000 results. {8}
And the first 10 looked relevant. They referred to the Pantone Matching System (r).
He read in a Wikipedia entry that “Pantone asserts that their lists of color numbers and pigment values are the intellectual property of Pantone and free use of the list is not allowed.[10] This is frequently held as a reason why Pantone colors cannot be supported in Open Source software such as GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) and are not often found in low-cost software.[11]” {9}
He learned much more about Pantone. It was bought in 2007 by X-Rite, Inc. It has since developed a color matching system called GOES, which stands for nothing, and which is considered more elegant and efficient than the original PMS.
Dr. Dolittle recalled that he needed to send some emails. But first, he thought, he should check his and see what has come in overnight that could be urgent.
Out of curiosity, he checked his Gmail spam folder. It had 105,474 emails sitting in it from the past 30 days, of which 1,087 had come in since midnight. Those older than 30 days were automatically deleted. He decided not to sort through the emails in the folder and selected, “Delete all,” while praying to Google that nothing important had been misdirected there.
It’s rare that anything is, he believed. Gmail, he thought, is an amazingingly efficient, self-cleaning system. Self-sustaining, too, apparently, since Google is able to provide the service at no charge.
He wondered to what extent Google’s initiatives intentionally model principles of nature?
That, he decides, is something to consider on another day.
References:
{1} http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_fast_does_the_earth_spin_on_its_axis
{2} http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970401c.html
{3} Recalculated from the 220 km/s cited here, http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=96
{4} Converted from 640 km/s cited here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_way
{6} Tom Waits, “Hold On” video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knII3S0MZtY
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