0#
Loneliness has levels.
Eating alone.
Watching a movie alone.
Traveling alone.
You see magnificent scenery, capture decisive moments, the sunlight and children's laughter are just right, and you repeatedly examine them on the camera screen, unable to let go. You don't know who to send them to.
But actually, these things don't matter much.
1#
The frequency of whale calls is between 10-40Hz. They have their own language and communities. They even whisper to each other. In short, whales are intelligent creatures.
In 1989, American scientists captured the sound of a whale. Her name was Alice, and her frequency was 52Hz. Scientists tracked and observed her for 12 years and found that Alice's calls never received a response from any other whale.
Her voice was too high for other whales to hear.
2#
A plesiosaur unexpectedly survived and woke up in the abyss. It had been sleeping for who knows how long and finally woke up in the modern world. Its kind had long been extinct, and the Earth was no longer the same. Primates ruled the land, invented ships, built countless ports, and lighthouses around the ports.
The plesiosaur was attracted by the sound of a lighthouse horn, which sounded just like its former companions. The lighthouse blew its horn regularly, and the plesiosaur called out from the abyss, eagerly responding to its companions. It surfaced time and time again, but it never received a response, which made it frustrated and annoyed, wondering what it had done to offend its companion and be completely ignored.
Finally, one day, it painfully realized the truth. It crashed into the lighthouse, sank into the abyss, and never returned.
3#
Humans decay quickly.
A human's life is only a few decades, filled with birth, aging, illness, and death, seemingly an inescapable curse.
But decay is actually liberation. Just imagine, if you obtained eternal life, you would be born on the same day as history, witness the construction of the pyramids, witness the wars between states, witness enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, Jesus' crucifixion, the prophet's night journey, the conquest of Jerusalem, the fall of Constantinople, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the two World Wars, and nuclear bomb explosions...
And you would continue to live.
You would experience too much, but no one would understand you.
You would call out to the entire universe and receive no response.
4#
Regarding life and death, I like the system of the Mexican Day of the Dead.
After a person dies, they go to another world. Even though you are dead, you are still remembered by the living. They think of you, tell you about what's happening in the world, and burn paper iPhones for you.
As long as someone remembers you, you are alive. When everyone forgets you, you cease to exist forever.
This perfectly fixes the bug of heaven being too crowded.
5#
What is consciousness? Does the soul exist?
I think every thought we have creates ripples in the universe, perhaps very weak, but they still exist. Those who are attentive can hear them.
The world is the accumulation of all consciousness ripples.
All the so-called "values" in human society ultimately exist in human consciousness.
When the physical body dies, consciousness leaves the host and can no longer create new ripples.
But the ripples created in the past still exist, spreading layer by layer in the universe, overlapping with each other.
I think at this time, new ripples can still be received.
After that, the past ripples become increasingly faint, eventually dissipating into the void.
6#
I have always been deeply impressed by the story of the Tower of Babel.
It is a story in the Old Testament, which says that in the beginning, all humans spoke the same language. One day, humans decided to build a tower that could reach the heavens. God saw this and confused their language, making it so they could no longer understand each other, and scattered them all over the world. Since then, humans have been unable to build a tower to reach the heavens.
One day, I suddenly realized that the story of the Tower of Babel is actually a great metaphor.
We now have Google Translate, various machine learning and NLP technologies, and language is no longer a barrier. But humans are busy fighting each other, deceiving each other, and still unable to build a tower to reach the heavens.
Is language the obstacle? Clearly, it is not.
Through language and communication, what we say is not exactly what we think, and what others hear is not exactly what we say. With each layer of loss, information changes, misunderstandings and deception arise, and you can never be 100% understood.
You are always lonely.
7#
"I visited a planet where a red-faced gentleman lived. He had never smelled a flower. He had never seen a star. He had never loved anyone. Besides keeping accounts, he had never done anything. He always said, just like you, 'I have serious matters to attend to. I am a serious person.' This made him very conceited. He was not at all like a person. He was a mushroom."
"What is he?"
"He is a mushroom!"
8#
We all know that the universe is composed of elementary particles, atoms, electrons, and so on.
You often marvel at how there can be such a beautiful creation as Yui Aragaki in the world. God must have put a lot of effort into creating her.
But Yui Aragaki and your female colleague sitting across from you are actually made up of the exact same particles. In this sense, they are no different.
Although they are very different, the electrons that make them up are exactly the same.
So, bored physicists proposed the "single-electron universe hypothesis":
The entire universe actually only has one electron. It runs tirelessly along the timeline, appearing in various corners of space, making it appear as if there are many identical electrons. It tirelessly creates the universe, the galaxy, the solar system, the Earth. It forms all matter on Earth, it forms all humans, men and women, black, white, Asian, tall, short, fat, thin, flat-chested, and well-endowed.
Everything that happens in the universe is all orchestrated by this electron. You cry yourself to death because the girl in the next class rejected you, but in reality, you and her are the same electron. You are her, and she is you. You just rejected yourself.
We are trapped within this system, unable to observe ourselves from outside the system. The "single-electron universe hypothesis" cannot be disproven, just like how you can never prove that you are not a brain with electrodes immersed in a nutrient tank.
I don't want to disprove this theory, I just want to marvel at how damn lonely this electron is.
Andy Weir's novel "The Egg" has a similar idea.
In essence, it tells the story of a person who dies and discovers that they will be reborn as a peasant girl in China in the year 540 AD.
Yes, they are reincarnated into the past, where time has no meaning.
This cycle repeats countless times, and everyone who has ever existed on Earth is their past or future self.
You are me, and I am you.
9#
Lastly, let's talk about a romantic theory.
Light travels along the shortest path, but light doesn't have a brain, so how does it know which path is the shortest?
Light travels all possible routes. In order to reach you, it traverses every possible path, and the so-called shortest path is the result of the superposition of waves emitted by all the paths, countless ripples overlapping to create the strongest resonance, which is the shortest path.
It travels through the entire universe, just to reach you.
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2019/04/15 @Delhi