There were people who would sit in one place for years. Not the Saddhus of India who would sit in one place with a limb hanging emulating a god. These would sleep, eat, work and play in one box. Cooked food could be delivered to this box. They did not graze their animals or farm the land. They used artificial light instead of the sun. They used numbered devices to know when to begin and end a task. They did not leave their boxes to visit family and friends as they had machines to communicate over the air with their voice or by writing. Music and pictures were delivered into the boxes. Their minds would move from place to place but their bodies remained stationary.

Adapted from 'Lost Guides' http://www.turbulence.org

Perception of time

It is a common observation that our perception of time changes as we get older (and bigger). I have tried to show this in the graph. Time is plotted on a log scale against height in metres.

science = art

Here sizes below the time axis get smaller and smaller through the building-blocks of matter until we reach a size less than a quark. The vertical axis would have to extend a lot lower to include the theoretical sizes of loops according to string theory.

The future is plotted on a similar curious scale where we imagine what will happen about a second into the future.

We finally reach the limits of what is knowable.

More plastic = less greenhouse gas

Lord Stern pointed out that if we all changed to a vegetarian diet, it would make a major contribution to slow global warming since:

• more energy is used to produce meat and

• methane from animals is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide

Here are a 2 other less-obvious things we can do:

• Make more things out of wood - this locks up the carbon for a period - as long as we recycle and don't burn the wood afterwards.

• Make more durable things from plastic. (yes plastic!) - again this locks up the carbon in the fossil fuel instead of burning it.

On this logarithmic scale we can see our own lifespan and size in relation to the universe.

The universe has expanded to 10 to the power of 27 metres diameter in 14 bn years

You expanded from 0 to 2 metres in about 20 years.

Our sun began life as a cloud of gas 5 bn years ago and will end as a red giant in about 5 bn years’ time.

Your life will end in less than half a million hours.

When we were babies, before we learnt to use language, we lived in a world of pure perception and gratification. This wonderful world in which everything has equal meaning slowly dissolves as we learn to classify, communicate, exclude and discriminate. Sometimes we return to that world in our dreams.