Oort Cloud

I’ve always known that the Kuiper belt and Oort Cloud are the outermost part of the Solar System, but I never had a sense of scale between the two. Kuiper belt objects, including Pluto and other dwarf planets, orbit at ~55 AU (0.001 light years). Compare to the Oort Cloud, a 50,000 AU (~1 light year) sphere containing billions of comets at the boundary of the Solar System’s gravitation.

We have hardly begun to explore the outer Solar System and Kuiper Belt, and have searched next to nothing of the Oort Cloud–analogous to only inspecting your garden box in a 100 acre plot of land. If extraterrestrials are observing us from the Oort Cloud, we have absolutely zero chance of knowing they’re here.

Psychedelics and the Soul

I came across this passage examining our culture’s attitude toward drug use, which I think extends beyond recreational psychedelic drugs to include drugs as a treatment for mental disorders. Physical substances that affect our mind and consciousness may lead us to a materialistic spirituality, in contrast with the dominant dualistic interpretation that asserts a non-physical mind or soul.

Deep-seated cultural biases explain why the Western mind turns suddenly anxious and repressive on contemplating drugs. Substance-induced changes in consciousness dramatically reveal that our mental life has physical foundations. Psychoactive drugs thus challenge the Christian assumption of the inviolability and special ontological status of the soul. Similarly, they challenge the modern idea of the ego and its inviolability and controls structures. In short, encounters with psychedelic plants throw into question the entire world view of the dominator culture.

From Food of the Gods (McKenna, 1992)

Venusian Catastrophe

Venus today is far too hot to sustain surface liquid water or any biology requiring it, but did Venusian life exist in the past? Nearly all remains of past life would have been destroyed by now, but it is plausable–and perhaps likely–that Venus once boasted Earth-like oceans. This possibility exists because the sun may not have been as bright in the past.

Models of stellar evolution predict that a star brightens by about 30% over it’s main sequence lifetime due to core contraction as the star fuses hydrogen into helium. The inference of warmer-than-present temperatures for the early Earth despite the reduction in solar luminosity is known as the faint young sun paradox (one of my research interests). Earth seems to have sustained both liquid water and life for nearly 4 billion years, continually maintaining habitable temperatures.

So what happened to Venus? Eventually the surface received enough energy to evaporate the oceans and enter a positive feedback known as a runaway greenhouse. Today, we see a cloudy world with sulfuric acid rain and a surface hot enough to melt lead. But 4 billion years ago life could have arisen in the Venusian oceans and perhaps even lasted long enough to develop intelligence.

I can imagine a Venusian scientist carefully working out models of stellar evolution–only to find that their parent star was slowly and steadily brightening! We look back in time and find a faint young sun paradox, but the Venusians would have a contemporary warming sun catastrophe! The greatest climate disaster in the history of our solar system may well have been when Venus entered its runaway greenhouse state to become uninhabitable.

Bohemians on Acid

Lester Grinspoon gives an interesting insight describing the hippie movement of the 1960’s in terms of earlier bohemian cultures with the added component of LSD–a psychedelic experience once limited to a select few in a larger community.

The hippie movement constituted the mass following of the psychedelic ideology. It began to gather force around 1965 and reached its height between 1967 and 1969. Although the matter was often obscured for tactical reasons, there is no doubt that the initiating element, the sacrament, the symbolic center, the source of group identity in hippie lives was the psychedelic drug trip. To drop out, you had to turn on. It was not a question of how often the drugs were used; sometimes once was enough, and many people experienced a kind of cultural contact high without taking drugs at all.

Earlier bohemians had their unconventional dress, sexual and work habits, hairstyles and political attitudes; what distinguished hippiedom and expanded its population far beyond that of genuine literary and artistic bohemias was simply the extra ingredient of LSD. By democratizing visionary experiences, LSD made a mass phenomenon of attitudes and ideas that had been the property of solitary mystics, esoteric religions, eccentric cults, or literary cliques. Every teenager who had taken 500 micrograms of LSD could convince himself, with the help of teachers like Timothy Leary, that he was in some sense an equal of the Buddha or Einstein.

From Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered (Grinspoon, 1979)

Carl on Cannabis

I recently discovered the book Marihuana Reconsidered written by physician Lester Grinspoon, father of astrobiologist David Grinspoon. Included in the book is an essay by Carl Sagan (who wrote under the pseudonym “Mr. X”) describing his experiences and opinions on the use and legal status of the drug.

I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life–a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences.
…
I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I’ve had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor.

Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feeling for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word ‘crazy’ to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely places in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtly perhaps, occurs here: ‘Did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.’ When high on cannabis I discovered that there’s somebody inside in those people we call mad.

Sagan contends that his appreciation for art and music is enhanced while high, and he also admits that on occasion a cannabis high contributed to his new insights in both the social and physical sciences. Scientist that he is, Sagan took careful steps to ensure that his thoughts and experiences while high were not delusional, such as recording detailed taped messages for himself in the morning. His experiments seemed to convince him that insights while high are still valid.

I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expressions, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it’s as if two people are reading each other’s minds.

Finally, Sagan suggests (what I consider) a reasonable measure for the safety of psychedelic substances:

I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I’ve never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of the parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn’t too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, and impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.