Cosmic @ MindSay 
god
I thought we had switched to Daylight Savings Time last night! I must have been living in a cave the entire week! It turns out that it happens next weekend! Doh! The bloody calendar says it was this weekend! I missed the news!
I showed up to work ONE hour late!
THEN: the cosmic way turned in my favor! The chap who usually runs the 3 reports on Sunday had to leave on a family emergency...so I have to run the reports! WOW! I will more than make up for my lost hour!
WHEW!
the roses
the roses
are in bloom
i wanted to take you
to the roses
in the sum-
mer, when the roses grew
around the sundial
in the air,
hot and still
as a tomb.
it is not genius at all--
the place where they peer into the brume
the dust of stars and fall-
en saturns, planets, crawl-
ing comets and their funereal plumes
trailing into the none.
it is no genius.
there is no genius in the business
of distortion.
the flash and flumes
of moving pictures and the waterwall.
there is nothing but god's great gloom
brooding in blood
over the clocks and all,
red shadows and full-
fleshed buds.
prepare him room
o artists, all those who love
art and its hollows,
its flash and its flooding sorrows,
prepare him room
let him eat your heart
let him fill your rock gardens
with the roses
of the tomb.
possible words: observatory, planetarium, astral, science, institution, cosmic, nebula, big bang, other space words
i'm trying to say the same thing as this much better poem:
Sailing to Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
--YEATS
Whoa Dude...what if we're like some giant persons pets, and he torments us like caged rats!
Yes, what if. What if the universe is a giant fish-bowl of existence, contained by something else, run by something else, dictated by something else.
Actually, what I've always wondered if there was intelligent life anywhere in the neighboring cosmos, specifically in our arm of the Milky Way that we'd have any hope of ever contacting.
The odds are staggering both ways, and our ignorance helps ensure we cannot even begin to answer the question.
Think of it this way. In our solar system, we reside in a habitable zone around a fairly stable star. Get too close, and you end up like Venus - a ball of greenhouse gases under immense pressure and temperature. Get too far away, and you turn into a dry desert world like Mars.
Now did Mars or Venus ever have life? Probably - but most likely it was simple life. Neither planet remained in a zone that was conducive to continued development of that life. When you think about how long it took just for animals to appear on the planet, the numbers are staggering. Literally, for 3 billions years nothing more than simple bacteria and algae existed on this world.
3 billion years. A planet has to remain in a somewhat constant state of habitability for that long in order for complex life to develop.
Or so we think. One of the problems is we only have one Earth and one Solar System to go on when making assumptions.
But there are other factors as well - factors that have only recently come to light. For instance, the very make-up of planets in our solar system saves us from many catostrophic impact events. Jupiter sized worlds help "sweep-up" the solar system of destructive asteroids and comets.
And then there's the issue of plate tectonics, which seem to be more and more important to keeping a stable and habitable planet. Not only do plate movements (subduction, induction) help with the recycling of raw materials and the carbon-cycle on the world, but the cause of plate tectonics (our molten core) also leads to our protective magnetic field that helps deflect harmful flares from the sun.
Furthermore, our place in the galaxy is lucky as well. We're in an arm, not in too dense of an area, pretty safe from supernova and gamma-ray burts. Most likely, the center of a galaxy is not a good place for life to develop, given the density of stars and the tendancy for them to be big and unstable giants.
Now, the milky way is pretty huge - 500 BILLION stars. We could go through the whole Drake equation, but there are still too many unknowns. It's a safe bet though there are only about 10% of all stars in 10% of the entire galaxy that are conducive to life developing. Of course, there are billions of other galaxies, each islands of possibilities, but us even communicating with them is a moot point.
One other thing to think about is the unlikely-hood that 2 close civilizations would develop the means to communicate with each other at the same time. In the vast hitory of the cosmos, it is totally conceivable that a close civilization could have reached its' peak millions or billions of years ago, and now be totally extinct.
It's a big place out there, with lots of time, and oodles of uncertaintity.
Kinda sobering, isn't it?