In the morning a client called and it was crystal clear from his tone that he is totally into bossing people around (he was making his secretary talk to me). He was trying to tell me how much he was going pay and when.

I politely asked his secretary to tell him that as a policy (so please don’t take this personally) I don’t alow my clients to dictate terms and it’s I who decides how much a client needs to pay and when. Deciding who decides my payment terms is not the main issue. The issue is, how a person thinks of himself or herself when he or she thinks that earning more means you are more powerful than the other person.

Power depends on lots of factors; of course money is one of them, but it is not the only factor that makes you powerful. Your power is gauged by the degree of influence you weild in this world.

Influence, and also independence. How powerful you are also is reflected by how independent you are. Suppose you think that you are powerful because you own an Audi? Then you sense of power depends on the fact that you own an expensive car or you have the means to own it.

A person who cannot afforf an Audi and doesn’t need an expensive car to feel powerful is much more powerful than you. I know this is rhetorical, because having money didn’t just mean owning an expensive car; it also means you can provide worldclass opportunities to your family in terms of education, medical care (when needed) and general quality of life. Just random thinking.

Just an hour ago my wife and I had an argument over our neighbor and I cut her short telling her I wasn’t interested in these types of inanities (I know, I know, telling this to your wife can be disastrous).  We’re still not talking but I found this engaging essay on "Why we exist" and I couldn’t help wondering, "Exactly what happened during the Big Bang that led us to this argument?"

Whenever life throws at me existential perplexities I usually think about my place in the universe and why things happen the way they do.  I am not referring to cause and effect.  As the essay says billions of things exactly had to be the way they were in order to enable us to exist.

Even setting aside the issue of being here and now, the probability of random physical laws and events leading to this point is less than 1 out of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, equivalent to winning every lottery there ever was.

Personally I believe our perception of the universe and the life as it exists is based on our current knowledge.  There was a time when people thought the earth is flat and the sun goes around the earth. This perception existed for thousands of years until scientists discovered, over a period of some centuries, that the earth is not flat and the sun does not go around the earth.  The essay says if the chain reaction that happened during the Big Bang had even slightly altered life wouldn’t have existed.

I think we very easily believe that there is just one big bang in the history of the known universe and there were no other big bangs.  For all you know big bangs are happening all the time in the universe.

And life must also be different in different cases and we may not be even able to define or recognize different definitions of life.  It is all about perception.  Right now we believe life is all about thinking, feeling and understanding things around us or beyond our consciousness. Life may hold altogether a different meaning in another part of the universe.  Maybe intelligence doesn’t even need a body to exist or to feel.  Maybe there are big globules of intelligence floating around the sizes of suns and stars in various parts of the universe.

Coming back to why we exist and why things happen the way they do.  It will certainly take us a while to understand this if at all we understand one day.  I don’t believe that the history of our perception begins with the Big Bang because lots of stuff must have happened in order to trigger the mother of all the bangs (according to history of the bangs we know). It may not usually be a scientific question.  Intelligence and human emotions are beyond science.

There is another realm we are unaware of.

Recently I stumbled upon a scientific link (unfortunately I lost it) that talked about certain regions in the universe where time travels backwards and even both ways sometimes.  Can it really happen?

I personally feel time is a human concept.  It goes in one direction because we age more and not less and therefore we see everything else around us with that perception.  Of course we come from matter and then go back to matter and this can be something like going back in time but it’s not like you can go back 2 weeks and take care of chores you missed. My limited knowledge of science doesn’t let me see time as a physical entity.  It is there, we are all aware of it, we have clocks to track it but we cannot actually see it or feel it.  So it is hypothetical and it is primarily used to organize and synchronize our activities.

Why scientists think that time can travel backwards is because right now our universe is expanding.  From a center it is going away so time is moving in a particular direction. Once our universe has expended enough it will start contracting (something like yo-yo) and this will how the time will start moving backward.  It doesn’t make sense.  Whether our earth moves from left to right or from right to left (in relation to the sun) and provided no disaster occurs how is it going to affect the way we grow old or build bridges or destroy forests?  If the earth changes direction the bridges are not going to disappear all of a sudden and children are not going to enter the wombs.

Or maybe I don’t understand the concept of time properly and somewhere I’m confusing it with present, past and future.  Maybe present, past and future have got nothing to do with time.  Any ideas?

Stephen Hawking thinks according to laws of physics the universe could have happened on its own and we don’t need a god to create it. According to him and many other scientists there is a theory that can explain every existing law of physics and if we are able to understand that theory we have understood the mind of God.

I think all the scientists jump the gun when they denounce the existence of some unknown power that we often prefer to term as “God” at the drop of a hat. You cannot say things just happened. I know, I may have a limited knowledge of time and I may not be aware of the true concept of what is beginning and what is end and in what direction moves what, the commonsense says there has to be something or someone eventually. You may not like to call it God but whatever triggered the current universe must have some kind of origin. It’s like, although you can say that a marble will roll down a slope automatically, someone puts that marble at that place from where it can roll down. So there is some force that somewhere initiated something that resulted in the kind of universe that we currently have.

Scientists perhaps get mixed up with that original “God” with mythical and prophetic worldly gods. For instance, Christians say that God created this world in “n” days, Muslims say something else and Hindus have their own idea of creation and destruction. These gods may be just works of fiction or delusion but it doesn’t mean that there is no ultimate power. It may not be human or something we can relate to. It can be a complex blob of intelligence that just floats around creating universes, or anything.

With our limited understanding it won’t be humanly possible to go to the beginning of things because if you actually think there can be no beginning because there is always something before the beginning. Something like, before you were born there were your parents and before they were born there were their parents and before our ancestors were born there were apes and monkeys and before apes and monkeys were born there were other forms of lives and before those other forms of lives came into existence there were some chemical reactions and before those chemical reactions there were some chemicals that caused some other reactions, so on and so forth. It doesn’t seem to end and I don’t think it can ever end because before everything there is something else. This seems so bizarre that even before God there has to be some super God that gave rise to the god that created the universe.

Maybe that’s why we come up with simple explanations and routine denials because once you start thinking about that literally, there is no end to it. That’s why we talk of the origin of the universe or the big bang theory and were normally don’t talk about what was there before that.

When we lived in Nauroji Nagar (it is a small government-servants colony between Safdarjang Enclave and Sarojini Nagar, New Delhi) there used to live a family of one brother and three sisters. The last time when I saw them (more than 12 years ago) all three of them were in their early 50s. Something I was reading today reminded me of them. None of them got married. I don’t know what was their story or why they chose to live together like this.

Today I was just wondering what if they had sexual needs? Of course they could easily have had sexual relationships with other people and continued living with each other, but what if they had a physical relationship with each other? I am not talking in terms of having kids because that could lead to genetic problems in the kids. What if they indulged in sexual activities making sure that none of the sisters conceived?

Our society has moral problems with brothers and sisters having sex but more than moral it is a medical problem. If this problem is taken care of is it alright for brothers and sisters in such conditions to have sex with each other? I remember all three of them lived very isolated lives (but I’m not sure about that, maybe they were very happy and my social condition made me think that they were not) and if they were really isolated and lonely wouldn’t it be okay to find comfort in sex (sex can definitely provide lots of comfort) with each other if they made sure no kids would be born? When I talk of making sure that no kids would be born I mean that all the medical conditions are removed that give rise to conception. I know this is a taboo subject and very few would like to discuss it.

Would you? I mean, assume there’s a person — a stranger — in the room who you know is going to die soon and before dying there is a 100% chance he or she is not going to see anybody else or talk to anybody. I don’t mean you specifically shed your clothes in front of that person…you just don’t mind entering the room after bath with nothing on, or changing your clothes or simply taking your clothes off on a very hot and humid summer day.

This is a hypothetical question and of course you may come up with oh this can’t happen or that can’t happen or why would I be in a room with a stranger who is about to die, etc. Valid questions, but I’m just interested in the part: would you feel OK to be naked in front of a person who will die without telling anybody that he or she saw you naked?

Here’s an interesting take on how the earth will look after 5000 years, but the article actually talks about what will we become after 5000 year if we don’t destroy ourselves by then.

In 5000 years we won’t require our bodies to live. If mortality and immortality are biological concepts, does this mean we’ll become an immortal race? But why no body?

With advances in technology we’ll be using our bodies less and less. See this video for example:

And this is a very small example of how very rapidly we’re reducing the amount of work our bodies have to do. If we can do this in say, 100 years, imagine what we can do in another 300 years. Although evolution takes its own time, in 500-600 years, and even earlier, we’ll figure out how to live without depending upon body, and even without depending upon machines. The above article says that there will come a stage when we’ll derive energy from the nearby galaxies and control the surrounding solar systems. I don’t think by that time we’ll need to get energy. Our consciousness will produce (I know it defies the first law of thermodynamics but I’m not talking in that sense) on its own.

So what about sensory experiences? Two partners can already enjoy sex with each other (remember that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie?) by simply wiring their brains together even while sitting (or lying, or standing, on in the padmasan position) half way across the globe. So if sex can be enjoyed this way, I’m sure other sensations can be experienced too.

While reading this Stephen Hawkins article on time travel I came across a term called the “grandfather paradox” that’s quite interesting.

Suppose a time traveler goes in the past and murders his grandfather before the grandfather can meet his future wife and give birth to one of the traveler’s parents, and this means the traveler cannot be born, and this further means that since he cannot be born he cannot go back in the past to kill his grandfather and this means the grandfather doesn’t die so the traveler gets to be born and then he can go back in the past to murder his grandfather…and so on. The opponents of the time travel theory often use such paradoxes to refute the concept of time travel.

Coming to the concept of time travel…do I believe in it? I think time travel is possible if we don’t take it as a singular occurrence. In the above-mentioned article Hawkins talks about a wormhole, miniscule crevices in time that in future will be enlarged so that bigger objects, and if possible, even humans will be able to enter one entrance and exit from another. But due to the laws of physics these wormholes will collapse upon enlargement. Then he talks about traveling in great speed. Einstein’s theory of relativity says the faster you travel, the slower time gets. This has been proven by the facts that time on earth travels faster than on satellites and everyday the clocks need to be adjusted, and this happens because due to earth’s gravity and mass time travels slow. Read the article to properly understand the concept, but the whole idea again stands on the concept that the timeline is singular.

I believe, since we have an infinite universes around us, there are infinite instances of us happening everywhere, triggering different timelines. Being infinite is a big advantage, because it means every object, living or dead, can have its own timeline and every object in these infinite timelines can have their own timeslines and this goes on indefinitely. So the paradox doesn’t have to take place. Even if the traveler kills his own grandfather, he won’t be eliminating himself, but his replica existing in that timeline. And since there can be infinite timelines associated with this particular traveler there can be countless instances of his circumstances.

So in order to travel in time without causing chaos, we have to find a way to hop around different timelines. We don’t need a linear concept. We need bridges. We need tunnels that connect different timelines.

But then you may say, what happens to your own history? This is no timetravel. Timetravel would really mean an ability to go to ones own past, not the replica’s past. So if you go to your past, you’ll be experiencing it as a spectator, and not as the timetraveler. Valid question.

I’m not an expert on timetravel – neither scientifically nor philosophically – so it’s just a vocal thinking. What happens if you hop through various timelines? I mean, what if you become a serial timeline hopper, disturbing multiple timelines? According to the infinite concept it doesn’t really matter if a few timeslines, even if a few hundred timelines, get disturbed, because for infinite timelines there are infinite realities. We are only conscious of this timeline. I’m writing this blog post, then I’ll publish it, and at this moment you are reading it (oh, so you have read till now! Great :-) ) … we all belong to a particular timeline. If I go to another timeline I may disturb that timeline and the world existing in that timeline, and I may even alter this particular timeline with my absence, and then after a while, come back and resume my normal activities. People do disappear and then come back, without causing much havoc in the current timeline.

You might have done things in your life – whether good or bad – that you normally wouldn’t do. All of a sudden people turn into saints and normal citizens turn into mass murders and psychopaths. People fall sick without reason and the sick get better with no medical explanation. Why does the behavior of some people get altered without warning? Maybe someone crosses over from another timeline and completely changes the character of his or her replica in our world. Sometimes people come back to their normal selves and sometimes they don’t. Maybe that’s how we see ghosts too. Suppose a man dies and then his existence from another timeline comes over and now is totally clueless because in this timelines he’s dead and now the neighbor from another timeline simply is unable to go back.

This all seems hypothetical but if we want timetravel without murdering grandfathers and consequently, ourselves, we’ll need to think beyond linear timelines.