How will it turn out? Space

This is the second posting in my 2019 time capsule series, where I consider how the questions of the present will be viewed in 10 years time or afterwards. Today, I’m going to focus on space, and some of the big questions that may well have convincing answers within the next decade.

Dark Matter

We look into the skies and we try to understand why the universe acts as it does. Unfortunately some of our biggest questions don’t have good answers. We resort to placeholders such as “dark matter” and “dark energy” to explain why galaxies spin the way they do, why the universe seems to be expanding at an accelerating rate, and other conundrums that make little sense to us with our conventional models of the world. With the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider, it it possible that answers may be found and that our understanding of the world will need to be rewritten within the next 10 to 20 years. What progress will we have made by 2019?

Extraterrestrial Life

The Earth is the only place we know of that contains life. Our planet is saturated with living organisms: from the deepest undersea valleys to the highest mountaintops; the rims of the hottest volcanoes to the frozen wastes of Antarctica. Life came into being only a few hundred million years after the Earth itself formed and somehow managed to survive the hellishness of our world’s early existence. Life is pretty rugged. And yet, we know of no other place: no planet, no moon, no comet or asteroid, where life is present. But there are hints. Methane, water and microfossils on Mars, ice volcanos on Europa and Enceladus. Who knows what we may find? Probes are being developed as we speak. Will we discover, as some think, that life is not just confined to one small planet, but is virtually everywhere?

Tomorrow: Technology.

It was twenty years ago today..

via europa.eu

 

 1989. What a year.

Tiananmen Square. The Salman Rushdie affair. Exxon Valdez. Poll Tax in the UK. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Solidarity winning the Polish elections. The flight of people into the West from Hungary. The freeing of the Guildford Four. The end of the Berlin Wall. The Velvet Revolution. The fall of Ceaucescu.

In one mere year the world had changed utterly. 

It was like that in my life too. In 1989 I turned 21. I was in my last year in college, I got my driving license and I travelled to the USA for the first time, on a wonderful four-month work visa in Ohio. A year later and I had a major career decision made – one that influences what I do to this day. I would be in Belfast, doing some real work, gaining new friends, traveling to far flung places and looking upon life with a very different set of beliefs compared to the preceeding decades. 

What is truly odd is how recent it still feels to me. As if it were just yesterday. In a sense, I feel that little enough has changed about me since then. The things that enthused me then still occupy my mind now. I’m pretty sure that if I was blogging back then that I would be writing about much the same things as I write about now. If I were to write down my personal interests and fascinations, many of them would date back precisely to this period in my life. It’s as if a flowering took place then, and I have spent most of the rest of my life building upon its foundations. 

Of course I have changed in many ways. I know lots more. I understand myself better. I have much greater responsibilities. I know what love, loss and fatherhood means. I have had my setbacks, and I have learned to take them on the chin. There are a few more grey hairs, blotches and scars, but these are the inevitable external factors associated with the passing years. Deep down, I am essentially the same man who emerged from adolescence those twenty years ago. 

It’s scary. I strongly believe that  life is all about personal development and growth, and yet it’s stunning to observe how little my thinking has moved on since I first moved into adulthood. I’d like to feel that during the next 20 years (should I be lucky enough to experience them) that I can develop  myself in surprising and different ways. As I am learning however, this may be quite a formidable challenge.

Dodging the bullet

Some of you are aware that, these last few weeks, I have been going through a health-crisis that had the potential to change my life dramatically. One minute everything was plain sailing, the next minute I was plunged into a world of anxiety, where control over my future had been placed, quite literally, into the hands of other people.

I’m glad to report that I was given some good news over the weekend. Hopefully now, I can put these events behind me, even if it means that I need to face the future somewhat more tentatively than I did in the past.

I have been overwhelmed by the goodness in people who heard about what I was going through. Friends, family members, colleagues and Internet friends all conveyed their concern in different ways. Many people, I know, felt more worried than I did myself. They reacted to my news in a way that often surprised me. I could see in their faces, their tone of voice and the words they used, that it affected them on an emotional level that I haven’t quite managed to reach myself.

How did I get through it? Simple really. I didn’t get a chance to think about it. It all happened far too quickly. Over the coming days and weeks, maybe I’ll have more time on my hands to consider how this little soupçon of mortality has affected me. I’m beginning to appreciate that my time on this incredible planet, with all its fascinating fellow travellers and its sights, sounds and stories, is very brief indeed.

Never a dull moment

This is going to be a crazy week.

I am back in work in Dublin today, trying to compress a full week’s work into one day. Then I have an internal training conference to attend on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday I have to be down in Cork to meet my doctor (and hopefully get the thumbs up), and then I scoot back up to Dublin so that I can attend my graduation ceremony!

And all this could change in an instant..

Making excuses

The whole experience of my Masters results has taught me to be suspicious of reasons and justifications, even when they seem blindingly obvious.

Had things not gone well with my thesis, I would have been able to fall back on a some very plausible reasons as to why I did not succeed. People would have understood, sympathised and consoled. I would have had a convenient comfort-blanket at hand to justify my failure. No-one would have been any the wiser, including myself.

The thing is, though, that I succeeded despite these set-backs. The obstacles put in my way were not, in themselves, sufficient reasons for failure. Huge though they were, they didn’t stop me from getting such high honours.

What I have learned, therefore, is that it is sometimes possible to succeed despite external adversity. Blaming other people or the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is not always the most honest means of justifying failure. Often, perhaps, failure comes from within.

That’s a very good thing, too. Failure from within provides an opportunity to learn. While I can’t always do much about what happens around me, when it comes to me and my behaviour, change is possible.

I think I have learned more from this experience than just the subject I studied.