Worth focusing your eyes!

Well well, seem like the more you think about it the more you find topics for a blog. Anyway, I went last weekend with my pregnant wife to see this movie called "Earth" (Planettaamme Maa for the Finnish readers), taken from the BBC Wolrdwide and Green Light Media production series of the same name that has had a great success especially in the U.S. through the Discovery Channel and now presented to the World by Disneynature in the form of a movie/documentary. Following track of different species around the World during the lapse of 4 years.

We had been planning to go and see this movie for a while and we finally made it, just in time as apparently they are not showing it here in Finland anymore. Anyway, it was worth every single second i spent on that theater, seriously, if you missed it, you definitely have to rent it or something!

I usually don't cry when I see movies, not that I am not a sensitive person but you know, someone has to

be the tough guy....näh not really, I just think by having studied acting doesn't help me and my credibility with

movies that much...but the thing is, I couldn't help it with this one, if you don't give a shit about nature, which I really doubt, then just watch it for the sake of the photography, i

t is just astonishing!! My favorite one, and it was really hard to pick one particular tak

e, was of a great white shark jumping it's way out of the ocean with a

pray on its mouth

and in a very slow motion, what a shot of this incredible creature!!

It all starts with a female polar bear and her two little cubs, you cannot help but feel touched by the incredible beauty of this animal, most likely doomed to a near extinction unless something really dramatic happens soon!! The movie takes you then all the way through desserts, rain forests, tundra, sabana and oceans to the south pole, and after a couple of no less dramatically beautiful southern light takes, all the way back to the beautiful white nordic characters.

The way the series has been condensed into one movie is a piece of art itself, the narration is extraordinary and as I said before, the photography of the movie is definitely worth the Oscar of the decade, plus the sequence and the

way it was all organized is equally marvelous. It's a real eye-opener to realize how easily we humans go through life, compared with how much struggle different species have to experience in order to survive. Of course getting to this point has taken a lot of effort within the evolution cycle, which we never realize.

We want to believe that we have the edge, as evolution has given us the advantage of more complex brains that allow us to create and use different and extremely complex tools that have made hunting and finishing only spare time activities instead of survival necessities.

But I think our problem is our arrogance as we believe so blindly that we are the best adapted for survival, therefore, why to care about the rest of the organisms? Well we are actually not. Mammals haven't really been here for that long, just about 200 million years, and of that, humans have been around for about 2.5 million years, that is a ridiculously small amount of time compared with the 4.6 billion years of the Earth, and we are by far in the group of the most fragile ones. So being a big multicellular and complex organism doesn't actually give us any particular edge, as a matter of fact, bacteria will probably be still here long after we are gone as it has been here l

ong before we came.

My point is, we are just instruments, experiments of evolution, just a transitional specie, we are not here to stay forever, nor is any of the other species, we will all have to evolve or die, just as natural selection dictates while, so far, colonizing other planets still seems as science fiction, and even if we do, we are still bounded by staying within our solar system due to the restrictions that the loooong distances in the universe and the laws of physics represent.

In about 50 million years, our planet will be extremely harsh for multicellular organisms to exist, and in about 5 billion years, our sun will make it absolutely inhabitable making

it look more like Venus, and that is of course, without considering the fact that we will crash with Andromeda in about 2 billion years. So then again, in geological times, we really don't have to much time.

Now I don't mean you shouldn't care about life, on the contrary, realizing this has helped me understand how fortunate we really are right now and how much beauty we still find in almost every single corner of our planet. Whether or not life itself has a particular purpose (most likely it doesn't) it has gone through so much struggle to get to where it is right now, and just for the sake of that I think we should learn to respect it and to assume the evolutional role that has been given to us, and as long as the Earth supports life, what right do we have to screw it up?

As I will become a father soon, I want my daughter to understand this and to think twice before smashing a spider with her foot. To realize all the time-investment, trial and error and huge struggle of adaptation that has resulted in the beautiful complexity of that particular organism so that she can think which rights does she posses to decide whether or not that small wonder of nature should live or not. To respect life for what it has been, what it is and what it will be for as long as this planet allows it.

That is my moral side towards nature, using my brain, respecting what has taken so much effort and endless combinations and errors to be created, instead of taking the approach of fearing of a powerful and arbitrary magician that created everything within a blink of an eye. I'm sure we all have smashed a spider at some point, even those who believe in an absolute creator, yet we are all here, without any particular punishment, so basing my morality in that assumption doesn't really give me strong arguments. It took me a lot of effort to understand it, but I am glad I did and can really use this small period of geological time that was given to me by a mere combination of almost improbable probabilities called life. And so I think this movie is a tribute to that extraordinary quest, definitely worth checking it out!

Why am I doing this??

Hello everyone (that is if there is anyone at all reading this),

Anyway, this one is intended to be a blog promoting skepticism and critical thinking. It was very hard to decide how to start this thing, so I just decided to start right from the beginning, so no big science nor fancy terms for this first one, or at least I will try to stick with it.

Anyway, perhaps it’s a good idea to start explaining what I actually intend to to get out of this and how I actually got into this idea. I would like to start clarifying what I mean by being skeptical and a critical thinker. Well, this is not a term I made up nor use to impress people around me, at least not to impress them about my persona, but rather by the wonders and unlimited possibilities science and critical thinking can put in front of us.

Being a skeptic doesn’t mean you are going to start having doubts about everything around you, like the world itself, at least not in terms of its’ existence, but rather it means that person is going to go through a process of critical thinking and evaluation before drawing any conclusions instead of doing the opposite and just relying of what other people told you to be truth without any testable, reliable data supporting it. I don’t see anything fancy nor the need to be a scientist in order to do this, in fact I think that’s the real way of starting using our brains and make the real difference between us and the rest of the animalia.

I actually still feel amazed by people who get offended just by considering the idea that humans are part of that animal kingdom, but I’m getting off topic now. So going back to it, I was always a kid who loved everything about science, I actually memorized (and still remember thoroughly) the periodic table of elements, so yeah, you could say I was on the nerd pack, that is if we took mathematics out of the question, which is why I would have a hard time making it into the scientific field. Nevertheless, I was always too lazy to read, and to my surprise I discovered not a while ago that I actually knew (and still do) very little about many things of our Universe.

I was introduced to the term skeptic by a fellow colleague named Markus Lenhard not too long ago, and from there on my concept of everything surrounding my existence made a full twist, for that I will always be grateful to him. The more I get into it the more addicted I become. Somebody tried to make a point once in a discussion that science and religion are pretty much the same, they both look for the same answer he said, which is basically the origin of everything we know, he went on saying that at the end they are both so right and at the same time so wrong, based on pure theories.

I strongly disagree with this position, in fact I think they lay in totally opposite poles, but the statements this person made could seem valid at a first glance, that is without making critical thinking, without being skeptic and falling into a biased opinion. I am not going to discuss now why these two approaches are so different because is not the point of this particular entry but rather I will tackle it on my next one, so there you go, we already have a starting point.

The reason why I am doing this is not to get more clicks out of my webpage, nor to get more friends nor appear as the Mexican prodigy in Helsinki, I might actually get more people disagreeing with me which would be fantastic, but rather because I am a true lover of science and contrary to what some people believe, that has helped me appreciate and love my life and the things around me more than ever, it just feels so good to base your life on real, tested and well supported evidence rather than fairy tail sounding stories…so much that I feel it fair to share it. If anyone feels I am wrong with whatever I say and proves me with reliable and valid evidence and arguments to be so, I will eagerly recognize my mistake/s, you have to start from yourself to be a truth skeptic, and my believes are not bounded by emotions, I haven’t even come up with the great majority of them on the first place, so why should I be offended by anybody challenging them then?

I have a good amount of information, sources, podcasts, etc, I would be more than willing to share if anybody is interested. In my opinion, they are a real slap to the brain, sometimes not so easy to swallow, especially if you are emotionally attached to your believes, which would make the process of letting them go even harder. But hey, I hope at least one of the persons who read this receives the same lesson and reality shake that I got, and truly starts realizing how incredibly amazing our universe is when we start dissecting and analyzing each part of it, breaking our brains to get to a reasonable and valid conclusion instead of taking the easy, lazy shortcuts we have all encountered at many crossroads of our lives. I don’t know if I made any fucking sense here but I guess it will get better as I write more entries. For now I found this quote from Voltaire very appropriate to close this blog:

“As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities” – Francois-Marie Arouet-

Carl Sagan was one the greatest scientists and skeptics of our time, I found this explanation about the human brain very interesting, especially coming from him, check it out:

"What distinguishes our species (from animals) is thought"- C. Sagan

So that’s for now, like they used to say on the MTV’s celebrity death match series, good fight, good night!!

Rode