Everything around us is chemistry – water, air, the ground we walk on, and our biological bodies are a miracle of balanced chemical reactions. As babies we experiment with our five senses to explore the useful nature and functions of materials. What is soft and hard, hot and cold, malleable and brittle. Parents get horrified at their kids’ taste tests, but it only takes once to determine what tastes good and bad.
We soon sublimate the miracles of everyday chemistry and take them as given – panting after exertion is increased oxygen intake, shivering is flesh doing work on a nanometer scale to generate heat, hunger is a need for more carbon-hydrogen bonds to fuel combustion for maintenance and mobilizing myriad body functions. We don’t need to test every step we take because we learn to link observations with a huge file of molecular characteristics. If the path looks slippery then we take care.
Having learned and subsumed these libraries of chemical facts (when water boils and freezes
, what food rots and what metals rust, and the strengths of materials) we go about our daily business with no need to fact check. Our body functions, millions of them, are basically self-correcting, though we acknowledge unquestioningly the need for rest and maintenance, and some people are particular about the chemistry of what we eat.
And so a person gets up in the morning and starts the day. There are more intricate moving parts than on an aircraft carrier (we can build aircraft carriers but not people). So what does a person do? Part routine – breakfast and dress, and part conscious mission, a hierarchy of priorities based on importance, timing and relationship compatibility and synergy. Breathing, drinking and eating are crucial but usually below the horizon of our planning.
Most actions done are not discussed in terms of chemistry, but in abstract shortcuts to identify the goal. The more abstract and long term the goal, the less relevant the chemical reactions involved seem to be. “Getting married and having a family” is a noble cause embraced by a majority of people, and the chemistry involved, over 3 or 4 decades, does not seem to warrant detailed attention. We think at higher levels of abstraction unless something goes wrong with health.
Only occasionally can our long term goals be characterized in chemistry terms – gold, diamonds, scarce compounds, athletic performance, dieting. Elaborately transformed manufactures are the result of complex series of chemical processes, often of rare materials in an organized way. We fail to admire the chemistry in a smartphone, but it is a miracle maze of atomic structure of silicon, copper and other metals and materials. Expert chemists worked together to make it look simple.
Here is a heady, complex concept: the history of the Earth is a series of chemical reactions, and right now the number of atoms that make up the planet are either in stable relationships or are reacting to form new compounds. The bulk are fixed – rock, and the second large category are in cycles, with carbon, oxygen and water as main reactants and products. Birth, and life, and death have a chemistry basis.
From animal kingdoms where individuals or groups forage for food and sustain life, and the chemistry is fairly basic, humans evolved from similar patterns to complex societies with value chains. Originally production was in primary industries through to now where the major sector of an economy is services. The more profound the value chains and more intricate the skills and history of learning that goes into final goods and services, the less traceable is the chemistry at work. If you don’t get half a kilogram of carbohydrate a day, that is a huge problem, and it is a challenge for a billion people. But for the majority of 7 billion people where the next meal is coming from is not a mystery. There is more thought given to a ton of metal in a car, or the bricks, mortar and timber in a house.
The big abstraction occurs when material goods and services are equated to a price, which then tends to skip over any chemical processes to reach what consumers see as the final delivery. While individuals facing markets may still have a feel for chemistry behind production, stimulus packages and smoke-and-mirror financial products have diluted reality till wellbeing is a one dimensional dollar number. Chemistry is more than that and does not lie. Chemistry can nourish and warm and provide protection. Of course it can harm in the wrong hands too. We all need a feel for the chemistry of all around us.
We are very complex marvelous robots, all born roughly the same as babies. We are remotely controlled and there is some soul somewhere that is working with that remote control pad figuring out how to move your parts and how to manage the messages coming into your five kinds of sensors, and after about a year that soul has learnt how to walk you and then the achievements including language come quickly.
We cannot hope to explain the soul
, except there is one with a remote control pad for each human. We don’t know “where” they are because it is not of the dimensions we understand. They may be inside your brain or heart but probably not. We don’t know what the soul’s purpose is, if it is a game, or a competition, or some exercise completely beyond our comprehension. It could be a test for that soul to get to some Heaven.
One important feature could be that through the actions of the human (a fancy robot) the values and characteristics of the soul (the operator) become manifest. Are they a good operator? Can they handle malfunctions? Can they manage conflict with other robots operated by other souls?
An interesting conclusion would be that the human body is just like a remote controlled robot with mechanisms having an average life of 70 years. The soul has as much affinity to the robot as a kid has to a remote controlled toy. One day it will be broken beyond repair. No big deal, the toy is discarded and what happens to the soul would be beyond comprehension or even concern to the toy.
But do we (our consciousness) have a connection to the operator – the soul? I think we do and I hear people talk about “body, mind and soul” as 3 parts of one person. The explanation I am guessing is that soul in not just “part”, certainly not just an extra part of our consciousness. If we, our conscious self, as a body (very complex mechanism) and a brain (central processing unit for incoming and outgoing signals) can come to grips with imaging that we are operated by some ethereal soul (not of this world, certainly not visible), then that would explain a lot.
It is almost like us complex robots are now evolving an artificial intelligence that is piecing together the story of our existence. It is almost like this primitive stirring of realization leads us to have a vested interest in the future of the soul after our physical bodies burn out. I would like my operator to be successful whatever that means, and hope I can function effectively.
The concept of living a truly green lifestyle is beyond comprehension to most city folks, and even those who understand it and yearn for it may enjoy it only for brief periods. My friend has an important job in the city, surrounded by tar and cement and millions of cars. The city tries hard to supply some greenery, and the city’s vegetables are trucked in each morning so life is not too bad. But every Friday afternoon the outlets to the hills and countryside are jammed with traffic and they have to come back to city life for Monday. The feel and smell and taste, and even a glimpse of true green lifestyle is beyond reach, beyond the senses, and, in its true essence, beyond imagination.
But my friend comes from a rural community where green lifestyle is the only way of life. He goes back there when he can. Recently he took me. Some of the details he pointed out are why city folk can only slap green paint over their polluted, polluting lifestyle. His dad planted the lychee tree 60 years ago. The chickens and ducks supply just enough eggs and meat for the family of 6 live there. The grain comes from 6 mu of fertile land that does not use artificial pesticides. The vegetables on the table are home grown. The air and water are clean. How many dollar millionaires can enjoy this green lifestyle
, and how often and for how long?
The miracle of greenery is that it traps electromagnetic forces from the sun and from the chemical bonds in water, and stores them within carbohydrates that we then eat, releasing these forces for the our body to be maintained, to grow and to move about. We can quantify human actions by estimating how many times a carbon atom in food breaks oxygen molecules that we breathe. The number for an average person for a day in the number 1 followed by 25 zeroes. The basic fact that typically an average person has about half a kilogram of food a day consisting mostly of carbohydrates can be understood as the need for 200 grams of carbon atoms to unleash the required bond forces from oxygen.
Measuring human activity by the number of oxygen molecules broken by carbon is a very useful analytic tool. It can serve as an objective universal currency. The phenomenon is ubiquitous, from breathing, living, moving, to lighting fire, to all factory processes and global industry. Atoms are incomprehensibly small and the coulombic attractions between positive proton and negative electrons are even more of a mystery – invisible, wavelike and untrackable. Yet in a set of units that are anachronistic and of dubious justification, the numbers comparing bond strengths actually show the force released. The number for a bond strength between two oxygen atoms in the air is 118 and when carbon locks in on oxygen the bond is 191. The difference is a force dissipated in all directions, but because they are in the trillions of trillions, given the right circumstances, able to be harnessed and used. That force is what makes up human activity.
Green lifestyle of Du An Village Man is sustainable breaking 10 trillion,trillion oxygen molecules per day. Han Dan City Man uses fossil carbon to break 12 thousand trillion trillion oxygen molecules per day.
Rather than call the difference 73 calories, we can just count one bond exchange as a single unit and measure them in tranches of some huge multitude – maybe trillion trillion (ie 1018) and make each tranche some money name, in the same vein as penny or dollar. We can call them “oxycarbs” (氧碳) referring to the oxygen’s bond with oxygen trading up to stronger bond with carbon. The exciting fact is this currency is not made up by governments, but is true reflection of reality. All lifestyle was green until it was found that the trade in swapping oxygen with carbon which led to a profitable force release could not only be sourced from live vegetation, but the carbon in fossil fuels. The exchange was not only for eating and living, not just for fires to warm and cook, but to enter into complex processes that burgeoned to be the Industrial Revolution. The combustion in furnaces in one year became next year’s capital equipment, at first ploughs, then steam engines and then billions of tons of new products.
Europeans began in about 1750 exploiting the fact that carbon in fossil fuels could also release the bond force in oxygen. Within fifty years the leafy sprawling towns of north west England transformed cottage industries into acres of blackened foundries and metal mills, pocked by coal mines. The per capita oxygen bond break count went up a thousand times. Instead of an annual carbon cycle and oxygen break-and-remake limited to above ground greenery, a once-only extraction of fossil fuels– about 70% carbon atoms – began and spread around the world.
The dream and desire for a “green lifestyle” can be traced to when societies started to have black lifestyles. “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.
A simple sketch shows the vast difference between green lifestyle and modern fossil-dependent existence. Based on studies of idyllic green lifestyle in a village in Guangxi, Du An Yao County 1989, and the unsustainable fossil-dependent case of Hebei, Han Dan City 2015, the daily per capita trade up from oxygen-oxygen to oxygen-carbon bonds was 1 x 1025 for Du An Man and 1.2 x 1028 for Han Dan Man. The ecological footprint of the former is small and above ground, while the latter is a thousand times greater. Every day that amount of carbon is brought to the surface and emitted into the air, already stifling after decades of abuse.
Contemplating the true meaning of a green lifestyle leads to two conclusions which should change what economists and policy advisors are saying.
- Any financial solution is unhinged from reality. The chemical bonds exchanged between carbon and oxygen may be tiny and invisible but they cannot be made up. If plans were made beginning with chemical accounting of the bonds available, borrowing would be a very sobering experience.
- Secondly, the mantra of growth stridently promoted now without challenge would be silenced if where growth was to take place was penciled into this simple sketch. We are already overgrown and bloated, choking on what we are doing to our surroundings. Pubescent growth is admirable. Maturity leads to enjoyment on a plane of what has been achieved in basic material benefits. When economists gloat with glee over growth in the health care sector, be sure that society is very sick.
Current “growth” policies planned in how much money is spent and “made” are taking us further way from any return to a green lifestyle. Counting the oxygen bonds broken is an accounting method that reveals the nakedness of the proponents of financial growth models.
The concept of living a truly green lifestyle is beyond comprehension to most city folks, and even those who understand it and yearn for it may enjoy it only for brief periods. My friend has an important job in the city, surrounded by tar and cement and millions of cars. The city tries hard to supply some greenery, and the city’s vegetables are trucked in each morning so life is not too bad. But every Friday afternoon the outlets to the hills and countryside are jammed with traffic and they have to come back to city life for Monday. The feel and smell and taste, and even a glimpse of true green lifestyle is beyond reach, beyond the senses, and, in its true essence, beyond imagination.
But my friend comes from a rural community where green lifestyle is the only way of life. He goes back there when he can. Recently he took me. Some of the details he pointed out are why city folk can only slap green paint over their polluted, polluting lifestyle. His dad planted the lychee tree 60 years ago. The chickens and ducks supply just enough eggs and meat for the family of 6 live there. The grain comes from 6 mu of fertile land that does not use artificial pesticides. The vegetables on the table are home grown. The air and water are clean. How many dollar millionaires can enjoy this green lifestyle, and how often and for how long?
The miracle of greenery is that it traps electromagnetic forces from the sun and from the chemical bonds in water, and stores them within carbohydrates that we then eat, releasing these forces for the our body to be maintained, to grow and to move about. We can quantify human actions by estimating how many times a carbon atom in food breaks oxygen molecules that we breathe. The number for an average person for a day in the number 1 followed by 25 zeroes. The basic fact that typically an average person has about half a kilogram of food a day consisting mostly of carbohydrates can be understood as the need for 200 grams of carbon atoms to unleash the required bond forces from oxygen.
Measuring human activity by the number of oxygen molecules broken by carbon is a very useful analytic tool. It can serve as an objective universal currency. The phenomenon is ubiquitous, from breathing, living, moving, to lighting fire, to all factory processes and global industry. Atoms are incomprehensibly small and the coulombic attractions between positive proton and negative electrons are even more of a mystery – invisible, wavelike and untrackable. Yet in a set of units that are anachronistic and of dubious justification, the numbers comparing bond strengths actually show the force released. The number for a bond strength between two oxygen atoms in the air is 118 and when carbon locks in on oxygen the bond is 191. The difference is a force dissipated in all directions, but because they are in the trillions of trillions, given the right circumstances, able to be harnessed and used. That force is what makes up human activity.
Green lifestyle of Du An Village Man is sustainable breaking 10 trillion,trillion oxygen molecules per day. Han Dan City Man uses fossil carbon to break 12 thousand trillion trillion oxygen molecules per day.
Rather than call the difference 73 calories, we can just count one bond exchange as a single unit and measure them in tranches of some huge multitude – maybe trillion trillion (ie 1018) and make each tranche some money name, in the same vein as penny or dollar. We can call them “oxycarbs” (氧碳) referring to the oxygen’s bond with oxygen trading up to stronger bond with carbon. The exciting fact is this currency is not made up by governments, but is true reflection of reality. All lifestyle was green until it was found that the trade in swapping oxygen with carbon which led to a profitable force release could not only be sourced from live vegetation, but the carbon in fossil fuels. The exchange was not only for eating and living, not just for fires to warm and cook, but to enter into complex processes that burgeoned to be the Industrial Revolution. The combustion in furnaces in one year became next year’s capital equipment, at first ploughs, then steam engines and then billions of tons of new products.
Europeans began in about 1750 exploiting the fact that carbon in fossil fuels could also release the bond force in oxygen. Within fifty years the leafy sprawling towns of north west England transformed cottage industries into acres of blackened foundries and metal mills, pocked by coal mines. The per capita oxygen bond break count went up a thousand times. Instead of an annual carbon cycle and oxygen break-and-remake limited to above ground greenery, a once-only extraction of fossil fuels– about 70% carbon atoms – began and spread around the world.
The dream and desire for a “green lifestyle” can be traced to when societies started to have black lifestyles. “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.
A simple sketch shows the vast difference between green lifestyle and modern fossil-dependent existence. Based on studies of idyllic green lifestyle in a village in Guangxi, Du An Yao County 1989, and the unsustainable fossil-dependent case of Hebei, Han Dan City 2015, the daily per capita trade up from oxygen-oxygen to oxygen-carbon bonds was 1 x 1025 for Du An Man and 1.2 x 1028 for Han Dan Man. The ecological footprint of the former is small and above ground, while the latter is a thousand times greater. Every day that amount of carbon is brought to the surface and emitted into the air, already stifling after decades of abuse.
Contemplating the true meaning of a green lifestyle leads to two conclusions which should change what economists and policy advisors are saying.
- Any financial solution is unhinged from reality. The chemical bonds exchanged between carbon and oxygen may be tiny and invisible but they cannot be made up. If plans were made beginning with chemical accounting of the bonds available, borrowing would be a very sobering experience.
- Secondly, the mantra of growth stridently promoted now without challenge would be silenced if where growth was to take place was penciled into this simple sketch. We are already overgrown and bloated, choking on what we are doing to our surroundings. Pubescent growth is admirable. Maturity leads to enjoyment on a plane of what has been achieved in basic material benefits. When economists gloat with glee over growth in the health care sector, be sure that society is very sick.
Current “growth” policies planned in how much money is spent and “made” are taking us further way from any return to a green lifestyle. Counting the oxygen bonds broken is an accounting method that reveals the nakedness of the proponents of financial growth models.
The concept of living a truly green lifestyle is beyond comprehension to most city folks, and even those who understand it and yearn for it may enjoy it only for brief periods. My friend has an important job in the city, surrounded by tar and cement and millions of cars. The city tries hard to supply some greenery, and the city’s vegetables are trucked in each morning so life is not too bad. But every Friday afternoon the outlets to the hills and countryside are jammed with traffic and they have to come back to city life for Monday. The feel and smell and taste, and even a glimpse of true green lifestyle is beyond reach, beyond the senses, and, in its true essence, beyond imagination.
But my friend comes from a rural community where green lifestyle is the only way of life. He goes back there when he can. Recently he took me. Some of the details he pointed out are why city folk can only slap green paint over their polluted, polluting lifestyle. His dad planted the lychee tree 60 years ago. The chickens and ducks supply just enough eggs and meat for the family of 6 live there. The grain comes from 6 mu of fertile land that does not use artificial pesticides. The vegetables on the table are home grown. The air and water are clean. How many dollar millionaires can enjoy this green lifestyle, and how often and for how long?
The miracle of greenery is that it traps electromagnetic forces from the sun and from the chemical bonds in water, and stores them within carbohydrates that we then eat, releasing these forces for the our body to be maintained, to grow and to move about. We can quantify human actions by estimating how many times a carbon atom in food breaks oxygen molecules that we breathe. The number for an average person for a day in the number 1 followed by 25 zeroes. The basic fact that typically an average person has about half a kilogram of food a day consisting mostly of carbohydrates can be understood as the need for 200 grams of carbon atoms to unleash the required bond forces from oxygen.
Measuring human activity by the number of oxygen molecules broken by carbon is a very useful analytic tool. It can serve as an objective universal currency. The phenomenon is ubiquitous, from breathing, living, moving, to lighting fire, to all factory processes and global industry. Atoms are incomprehensibly small and the coulombic attractions between positive proton and negative electrons are even more of a mystery – invisible, wavelike and untrackable. Yet in a set of units that are anachronistic and of dubious justification, the numbers comparing bond strengths actually show the force released. The number for a bond strength between two oxygen atoms in the air is 118 and when carbon locks in on oxygen the bond is 191. The difference is a force dissipated in all directions, but because they are in the trillions of trillions, given the right circumstances, able to be harnessed and used. That force is what makes up human activity.
Green lifestyle of Du An Village Man is sustainable breaking 10 trillion,trillion oxygen molecules per day. Han Dan City Man uses fossil carbon to break 12 thousand trillion trillion oxygen molecules per day.
Rather than call the difference 73 calories, we can just count one bond exchange as a single unit and measure them in tranches of some huge multitude – maybe trillion trillion (ie 1018) and make each tranche some money name, in the same vein as penny or dollar. We can call them “oxycarbs” (氧碳) referring to the oxygen’s bond with oxygen trading up to stronger bond with carbon. The exciting fact is this currency is not made up by governments, but is true reflection of reality. All lifestyle was green until it was found that the trade in swapping oxygen with carbon which led to a profitable force release could not only be sourced from live vegetation, but the carbon in fossil fuels. The exchange was not only for eating and living, not just for fires to warm and cook, but to enter into complex processes that burgeoned to be the Industrial Revolution. The combustion in furnaces in one year became next year’s capital equipment, at first ploughs, then steam engines and then billions of tons of new products.
Europeans began in about 1750 exploiting the fact that carbon in fossil fuels could also release the bond force in oxygen. Within fifty years the leafy sprawling towns of north west England transformed cottage industries into acres of blackened foundries and metal mills, pocked by coal mines. The per capita oxygen bond break count went up a thousand times. Instead of an annual carbon cycle and oxygen break-and-remake limited to above ground greenery, a once-only extraction of fossil fuels– about 70% carbon atoms – began and spread around the world.
The dream and desire for a “green lifestyle” can be traced to when societies started to have black lifestyles. “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.
A simple sketch shows the vast difference between green lifestyle and modern fossil-dependent existence. Based on studies of idyllic green lifestyle in a village in Guangxi, Du An Yao County 1989, and the unsustainable fossil-dependent case of Hebei, Han Dan City 2015, the daily per capita trade up from oxygen-oxygen to oxygen-carbon bonds was 1 x 1025 for Du An Man and 1.2 x 1028 for Han Dan Man. The ecological footprint of the former is small and above ground, while the latter is a thousand times greater. Every day that amount of carbon is brought to the surface and emitted into the air, already stifling after decades of abuse.
Contemplating the true meaning of a green lifestyle leads to two conclusions which should change what economists and policy advisors are saying.
- Any financial solution is unhinged from reality. The chemical bonds exchanged between carbon and oxygen may be tiny and invisible but they cannot be made up. If plans were made beginning with chemical accounting of the bonds available, borrowing would be a very sobering experience.
- Secondly, the mantra of growth stridently promoted now without challenge would be silenced if where growth was to take place was penciled into this simple sketch. We are already overgrown and bloated, choking on what we are doing to our surroundings. Pubescent growth is admirable. Maturity leads to enjoyment on a plane of what has been achieved in basic material benefits. When economists gloat with glee over growth in the health care sector, be sure that society is very sick.
Current “growth” policies planned in how much money is spent and “made” are taking us further way from any return to a green lifestyle. Counting the oxygen bonds broken is an accounting method that reveals the nakedness of the proponents of financial growth models.
Imagine a huge floor that stretched as far as the eye could see. On it are radio controlled cars milling about, partially in chaos, but also with some pattern. Some seem to be following others, forming flows. Others are doing their thing individually, racing, spinning, showing off. The expanse of activity is too wide to grasp so focusing on one scene is all that can be considered at one time. It doesn’t make much sense at first but gradually it becomes apparent that some seem to be dancing, coordinated, and others are purposively knocking others. Fascinating.
But each single car is operated separately by some invisible person, and for them it is not fascinating but a real challenge. A challenge to see how well they drive and how long they can last. Because yes each has a battery life. It doesn’t matter driven hard or slow
, the battery will stop after some very long time. The real challenge, that most sense and some dismiss, is that how they drive is being watched. By other’s controlling other cars, yes, but there is an overseer who makes judgement. Critical yes/no judgement.
That’s life.
I can make God happy It seems silly to praise God, telling Him how great he is. He knows that. We don’t go round saying and repeating, like they’re stupid they didn’t hear the first time, that our mum or coach is great. But if you do the right thing, God gets happy. He put you on Earth to see if you could, and if you can, which ain’t always easy, He is chuffed.
If you are gonna say your mum or coach is great, don’t tell them. Tell others. If you do do something right that God or mum or coach was hoping you could do, Bingo! That is when you can acknowledge, quietly, that is wasn’t just you that got it right.
The hymn Amazing Grace is powerful and I play it for peace going to sleep, but one verse riles me .
- When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun.
Oh yeah. Infinity is a long time. Got that bit right. 10,000 years is nothing. Correct. We are gonna be singing God’s praise for the first 10,000 years, and that is the start? Is there another option? Wouldn’t God be happy if we were surfing or something? Mix up the good times a bit?
I live near Toohey Forest, Brisbane and often walk through there, enjoying nature. There are some city folk take advantage of the natural bushland – we are so lucky to enjoy city and bush. But yesterday news a man on his bike with his dog reported missing 11 pm when he didnt return home. Searchers found his body today 4 pm, with his dog by his side. As a virtual neighbor my head spun.
I visited his facebook.
Now I understand.
He loved mountain bike riding.
He had just bought Gopro to record riding.
He tried recording a boy racing in the forest.
Was it his son?
His facebook expressed hurt for kids in broken marriage.
He had many posts loving nature.
He supported the mayor building a BMX track
He was a neighbor kind of and I never knew.
Decent guy.
God gives good students an early mark.