3.18.21 - Thought Experiment #2

3/18/21

Watched a YouTube video in VR about exoplanets. Only regret is I did not find it sooner. Trappiste-1e, standing on the surface, looking at rocky stalactites that curve up out of the planet’s surface like teeth. Above, an emerald borealis, reaches up to the true depths of space. A red star, larger and closer than the moon, filled the valley with a ruby-hint of light. Other bright, colorful orbs passed around, like marbles swirling down a slow cosmic drain.

Forty light years away.

But, when describing how exoplanets are theoretically formed, one of them said something odd. “We aren’t really sure what determines whether or not two large asteroids, stick together or not when they collide.”

There was a graphic of a star casting a golden hue over a wide, glistening asteroid belt. Some larger rocks cast shadows on others, like skaters dancing across a spinning disc of ice. I thought about it. What if it is not random, but just the odds of certain conditions?

Two asteroids must be on a certain path, to collide right before they pass under the shadow of something else, like a more inner planet. Depending on the difference in temperature under the shadow, the asteroids might warm up under starlight, enough for their core materials to get ‘sticky,’ and then they collide under the shadow once they start to refreeze. Just the right time, and gentle enough difference in speed, they fuse together. Happens enough times you get ten kilometers wide rock, which I read was the minimum size required to create a gravity well. They pull in more rocks; over time it snowballs. Boom, protoplanet.

But I confess, my knowledge is limited. I just like looking at the stars. I will have to research further. God, why does that sound like fun?

If we could chart the debris path of some asteroids passing in the shadow of something, I wonder if it could be proven? Or at least predicted.

The plan, or part of it, this summer, is to spend the days reading, writing, and working out. Get back to my core. Reading list below looks good.

The VR video is below.

Take a Virtual Reality tour of six REAL exoplanets (4K, 360° VR experience) | We The Curious

2.20.21 - Perseverance and Pathogen

Jailed for preaching the gospel of Aristarchus
Galileo’s agnostic legacy tarnished as heresy
Digital bits mined from spilled blood of prophets
Gambling, not pot, legalized by Wall Street

Scientists gained control of Mars this week
In an alien lake, our machines dig deep
Ancient truths sleep, hidden far below
But, Republicans broke Texas with snow

Oil banks blamed a few windmills frozen
Snake-charmed by Don Quixote’s poison
Inoculated against scientific truth, prose, or
Earth’s omens- tempests, a decade before

Neil’s moon-dust Apollo boots exhumed
For blind Inquisition in evangelic Senate
What holy wars await behind golden doors
If NASA finds signs of ancient life on Mars

1.13.21 - On Consequence

A week later and we’re all still here 
Witness to ruin, result of abject fear 
Not of pillars and glass concrete domes 
But men, by their own actions, undone 

Lives splayed open, shame bared raw 
Hastily scribed epitaphs in digital scrawls 
Weep not for seditionists betrayed fall 
Accountability over divisiveness, for all

11.27.19

A kid told me about her thoughts
Sometimes they’re dark and scary
Days she didn’t want to keep going
Yet she found the bravery to tell her mother
She’s starting therapy and told me first
I’m a burned-out teacher but at least
That’s one thing I can find pride in
The one time I made a difference

11.22.19

I just wanted to make sure the parent I was emailing was the right contact
The kid gets in trouble because he literally will not shut up about some
Party over the weekend that apparently other preteens got drunk at
Separate problem all-together, but now he’s been asked five times
Focus on your work, stop talking, get to work, stop talking, turn around
So I move him and email his parent, but the last names don’t match up
Our database is slow and there’s eighty important things to get done
So I ask to make sure I’m getting the right person. Somehow that becomes
I asked who his real mother is, and he texts his mom and goes to an AP
I’m just trying to hold a kid accountable for being disruptive and so he twists it
So the mom will turn against me and get upset and not punish him
When she should be upset he’s failing multiple classes, cheating, sneaking in to
Girls houses and generally throwing away his chance at an education
This is why I’m going to quit teaching, this right here, what should be simple
Becomes an ordeal because kids lie, parents deny, and there’s no listening
To a man begging you to understand that shortcuts get you nowhere in the end.