Earth Calling

The little acrobat scratches its head — it isn’t for the faint of heart.  Running back and forth through the Universe helps build its stamina. On the celestial bridge, it listens to the sounds of the Earth and the swishing stars. From its vantage point, its heart unites with kindred spirits everywhere who gaze at passing comets and flickering northern lights. Whether it is made of early or late dark energy, the little acrobat can't let go of its balloon. 

Feeling antsy, it moves around like a yo-yo, reflecting on what stirs the information to flow through its multidimensional body from the threshold of what has yet to exist. It may be that information travels, in replay patterns, from upper level concepts to lower material parts. Motion refers to a dichotomy that may be seen as a before-after relationship. Motion does the expressing while communication does the channeling of information, for instance locally, with human concepts such as gravity, entropy, energy, beauty, and melody, and through figures, numbers, and equations.

The little acrobat proceeds to go through the notes written over the past six years by the Questioner. It is not getting lost on her that her makeshift diagram of collapsing circles does a much better job of leading the story. It pursues the journey while she is left with picking up the ontological pieces of entropy — that is, in a nutshell, the degree of randomness unmoved by what the choices are only by the freedom to make them. With her evanescent shadow by its side, the little acrobat follows the waterline from north to south, along streams, around lakes, through rivers and canals, into the bay and the ocean as if they were trails of a distant star-forming galaxy. 

From the hills of Poughkeepsie to the shores of Nantucket, she finally gets what it meant by an ‘intimate sense of belonging.’ Whether seagulls squeal, herons squeak and hawks screech, they all dive headfirst into the rippling water, as if burying their heads in the sand, to catch wiggling fish under the sun. The sighting of a non-periodic comet is a time-stamped occurrence beyond past and future knowledge. While it is a unique event, it may last days or weeks, as with Comet Mitchell (C/1847 T1), observed over roughly two months in 1847. A comet that does not come back to the vicinity of the sun mirrors the life of a tree or a person. Time flows. It runs like yarn through power looms, endlessly forming all things, small and big, swift and slow, weaving every individual story.  

Tinkering around all things, the little acrobat hopes to get all its ducks in a row and find words to encapsulate a theory of everything, considering all the alternatives and how it feels like to hold within foreign states of mind. The theory of everything would not just be mere information about information, but information about existence in itself and by itself, prompting the little acrobat to question its own raison d'être. It climbs up and down mountains, peering through telescopes to observe ice-rich planetesimals that span over an undefined period of time. 

The Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, MA, is responsible for identifying, designating, and maintaining the master files of observations and orbits. As of November 13th, this year alone, the MPC reports the discovery of 2,482 near-objects including the mini-moon  2024 PT5, 17197 minor planets, 54 comets (such as C/2024 S1 ATLAS), and over 30.7 million observations. 

Motion and communication involve the collection and transformation of dust aggregates, the effects of thermal processing. Paired with communication, motion provides a visual and acoustic reading of Oort Cloud comets. The length, shape, and orientation of their dust tails, their position in the sky, and their nucleus composition cannot however offer certainty as for the calculation of their period. 

C/2023 A3 (紫金山–ATLAS) was initially detected by the Near-Earth Object telescope in Xuyi 盱眙, Purple Mountain 紫金山 Observatory (Jiangsu, China). A few weeks later, it was ‘rediscovered’  by the Sutherland facility in the Karoo (South African Astronomical Observatory) as part of the ATLAS project, which includes two Hawaiian telescopes — at Mauna Loa Observatory and on Haleakala (alongside PAN-STARRS  on the same site) — and the El Sauce Observatory in Chile.

Chess pieces are few,  and the positions in which they may be placed,  numerous as they are,  have a limit. These are the rules that apply to their movement. In the infinite game, however, cosmic circumstances such as the path of a planetesimal weave a never-ending story that tells, only a little at best, of individual movement and whereabouts. A throw of dice will never abolish chance.

Planetesimals unbound to a star are unsung heroes. Cast out from star-forming regions, they develop a ‘mind’ of their own, a unique ‘individuality’.Their evolution through time and space, shaped by an array of cosmic circumstances, raises the fundamental question of how, by a ghost of a chance, some accretion processes prevail from dust particles to planetesimals to planets and the life that inhabits them, and so weaving invisible threads of memory. They contribute unknowingly to the big picture through the dissemination of their material into cores of objects far beyond the interstellar  — and even intergalactic — medium. As with most things, retracing their steps isn’t easy. While the chance of a planetesimal originating from another galaxy is slim, it may have been carried forward through previous galactic mergers. 

Like the Turritopsis jellyfish, planetesimals would span forever if not for a chance encounter along their paths, caused by the gravitational tug and pull of other objects. And when shattered, their pieces, like the vertical and horizontal movement of genes, may swing back. The thing about chance, though, is that it brings out freedom in the mix of limitations and limitation in the abundance of freedom. As chance manifests itself, limitation is inferred in existence.

Hyperbolic comets, with their water-ice sublimation and recombination of radicals at great heliocentric distances, hint at processes leading perhaps to their fragmentation and disintegration that would forbid them to ever achieve an immortal existence. A gravitational slingshot mechanism expels objects and debris into interstellar space. Comets and asteroids drift through the interstellar medium where free-floating planets, occasionally, wander. Confined in distant reservoirs, they could remain on relatively stable orbits for timescales of billion years. 

On their inbound path, planetesimals reenter star systems like a boomerang, a ball on a pool table, or a shuffleboard disk. Communication sometimes implies the redundancy of a message about returning objects whose properties become more refined. In and out of human view, they appear and reappear as reimagined pieces of a puzzle. Whether they begin as centaurs or arise from the Oort Cloud, comets are more likely remnants of our own planetary formation rather than interstellar objects from a nearby star system, as Oumuamua is claimed to be. Was it a dark comet exhibiting non-gravitational accelerations inconsistent with radiative effects?  Could its flattened shape be the result of gravitational collapse and gradual erosion by stellar winds? 

If motion is a way of communicating, the movement of the solar system within the spiral arms of the Milky Way is not only linked to where and how it was impacted by asteroids and comets’ debris but also to how and where the first planetesimals came to bear the signature of their parent cores. The layers of the Earth’s crust, the configuration of its natural features, and its mineral content might hold clues of past encounters. Some rocky bodies may have kept and passed on the remanence of a magnetic field dating back to the pre-accretionary nebula field, thus broadening the concept of spatial-temporal identity.

The dialogue between Consciousness and the Universe continues in a roundabout way. Seeking answers from the Earth, the little acrobat puts in good use its newly-found attributes and mumbles with its LUCA mouth, “Along the trails, my eyes — LBCA and LACA — have watched ducks bathing in the river, cows, horses and llamas in the fields, a seagull resting on the lakeside and cormorants perched on a line seemingly chatting over snowy bed of fluttering milkweed seeds. Are they all evidence of motion and communication?” 

The Earth replies: “The Universe is filled with pitter-patters of a transcendental nature. Information isn’t primarily what binds me together with the sun, the Milky Way, and everything else, feeling is. The ‘I’ — as overwhelming as it is — will never dispel the haunting presence of all that was, is, and will be. From the horn of plenty where the sun sets to the flower of the trumpet vine where the sun rises, earthly forms move and communicate, mirroring all other forms of the Universe. Although they are spacetime-dependent, they aren’t mere limitations for they share the inner ability to transcend and shape into pluridimensional components. That which moves communicates through echoes and resonances, rippling outward across the Boundary, from what feels on the inside to what is felt on the outside. Outgassing in comets, for instance, hints at their inner activity. The inflows and outflows of galactic formation and the devolatilization of comets mirror processes like inhalation and exhalation as if a pulsing heart beats within. While these cosmic rhythms are non-intentional expressions, they display a deliberate act of communication, saying in substance: “‘I’ exist in the midst of it all.” The Universe driven by the emotion of time reveals itself by expressing itself. While all objects — even I — eventually jump off the train of existence, the Universe through each bit of feeling comes to grips with the process of motion and communication by which information gives rise to consciousness. This is the nature of the Dialogue between the Universe and Consciousness.”