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The deck that played ( or rather didn't play )my tv show died. The default was wrestling..

I wasn't cancelled, so life is good. I'm just getting ready to shoot this weeks show and I feel pretty good about it. This is a good change over the way I've been feeling. I can't explain why, but I've been feeling rather blasé about it all. Ahh well, I'm in an upswing now. I hope it lasts for a while.

I'm excited about the show again. It feels good.

So, last night I flip on the TV expecting to see my show and I'm watching wrestling.

I'm hoping that there was simply a programming error. I understand that that can happen. The scheduling programs for television equipment is really pretty crappy. A mistake could have easily been made. However, I also understand that people like to avoid conflict as often as possible. They may have cancelled me and left it to me to discover this on my own. If that's the case, I'm really pretty pissed. No phone call, no e-mail, no "go to hell", no nothing. I hate the not knowing part of it all. Grrr...

If I was cancelled, I have to make a decision.

Do I continue to produce the show and attempt to market it to other stations, or do I produce documentaries like I always wanted to do.

Hmmm...

a quandry.

The first chapter I studied in Anatomy and Physiology had to do with atoms. The textbook was vague and I felt left much to be desired as it raised many questions and made the concept of the size of atoms and molecular structure difficult to concieve. The size of atoms is something that a great many people have trouble grasping. Lets try to bring this into perspective that is easier to understand.

Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once stated that if you had to reduce scientific history into one important statement it would be "All things are made of atoms." They are everywhere and constitute everything.

The basic working arrangement of atoms is the molecule (latin for "little mass"). A molecule is simply two or more atoms working together in a more or less stable arrangement. Two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen and you have a molecule of water. Chemists tend to think in terms of molecules rather than elements in much the same way as writers tend to think in terms of words instead of letters, so it is molecules that they count, and these are numerous to say the least. At sea level, at a temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit, one cubic centimeter of air (roughly a space the size of a sugar cube) will contain 45 billion billion molecules. Imagine how many sugarcubes you can fit in the room you are in right now.

We've established that atoms are tiny, but lets bring it to a scale we can understand.

Lets start with a millimeter which is a line about this long: -

Lets divide that line into 1,000 equal parts. that is called a 'micron'. This is on scale with microorganisms.

A typical paramecium is about 2 microns wide or .002 millimeters.

If we just wanted to be able to see a paramecium swimming in a drop of water with our naked eye we would have to enlarge that drop of water until it was forty feet across. To view the atoms in that same drop of water we need to continue to enlarge that drop of water until it was fifteen miles across.

To get to the scale of atoms we will start with our millimeter which, again, is a line about this long: -

We again divide it into 1,000 equal parts (microns). Let us take one of those microns and divide it into 10,000 equal parts.

That is the scale of an atom. one ten-millionth of a millimeter.

The scale of an atom in relation to our millimeter line is about that of the width of a sheet of paper to the height of the Empire State Building.

I hope that helps put things into perspective on an atomic level.

Let's go the other way. Let's talk about space. We will narrow it down to our own solar system for now.

Everybody has seen a chart of our solar system with the planets in a nice evenly spaced orbit around 'Sol' (our sun).

Some of the charts even have the larger planets casting shadows on their neighbors. This is a necessary deceit to get them onto a single sheet of paper. Neptune in reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter. five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us. So far out that it only recieves only 3% as much sunlight as Jupiter. If we did a diagram to scale with the Earth the size of a pea, Jupiter would be over 1,000 feet away and Pluto (to scale would be the size of bacterium) would be over a mile and a half away. Staying with this same scale, our nearest neighboring star ( Proxima Centauri ) is about 10,000 miles away.

If we left Earth in a rocket that travelled at a speed of 35,000 mph (which is the fastest speed that we have attained) with the goal of simply reaching the edge of our solar system, it would take us 9 years to reach Uranus and another 3 to reach pluto's orbit. If you think we are close to the edge of our solar system at this point you would be mistaken. Our goal is the Oort cloud. This is a filled with comets and asteroids. That would be our solar system's boundry and it lies another 10,000 years away at our current speed.

Pluto's orbit is only 1/50,000th the way to our goal. As a side note.. to reach our nearest neighboring star ( Proxima Centauri ) would involve another 25,000 years of travel.

Let's really explore how large space is.

The average distance between each star is 20 million million miles.

There are between 100,000,000,000 and 400,000,000,000 stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.

There are about 140,000,000,000 galaxies in the visible universe.

( If galaxies were peas, you could fill the Royal Albert Hall. )

A trip to the center of the Milky Way would take far longer than we have existed as beings. I suppose it's possible aliens who are advanced enough to travel those distances would do so to create crop circles, mutilate cows, and scare lonely motorists.

So we have an amazing little planet in the middle of nowhere that survived and cultivated the spark of life.

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immortal to a favored evolutionary line on this planet, but you have been miraculously fortunate in your personal ancestry. Since the beginning every one of your forebears on both sides have been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficantly blessed by fate and circumstances to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from it's life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result in you.

Now tell me again how bad your life sucks and how unlucky you are.