Balls and Arms

This is an experiment in thought. I ask you not to question the validity of what I say, but to think about what I have said.

To start, say I am holding a ball. To be plain and simple, the ball is a tennis ball with nothing special about it. Say I were to raise the ball to a height of two meters, using my hand of course. If I were to then drop this ball, every one of you can tell me what happens.

No this is not a trick question. Like clockwork, when I let go of the ball it falls to the ground and bounces a few times before coming to a stop. If there is one word I can emphasize it’s clockwork.

I used my hand to wind the gears of the clock and once I let go; it carried out it’s purpose.

Now say I were to hold my hand straight out in front of me. Tell me what it is going to do next. If my arm were clockwork, it would just drop. With my fist possibly hitting my thigh. But as you all know, humans are not clockwork. Not yet or not anymore, so I swing my arm to the right.

If you want to know why my arm just swung to the right, it was because I chose to. Life is special, because we are not clockwork, we create the clockwork.

If you see the universe as it is currently accepted to be, there was a bang at the beginning and it exploded out under the rules that were established, gravity, particles energy, everything. Then the universe expanded out like clockwork. Planets orbiting suns, moons orbiting planets. Things exploding and things imploding. Black holes eating and suns creating.

Now I must compare the ball and the big bang. The scale of comparison is almost ridiculous, I am fully aware. But never the less, the ball and the bang are the same. It’s gears began to move and they kept moving (will keep moving) until something brings them to a stop.

Which puts life in a peculiar position. We are not wound up like everything else, or at the very least we don’t think we are. We can move right when there is no particular reason to move right, we can move left when there is no particular reason to move left. We can create clockwork, although not on the scale of the universe.

But think about this. If we were to drop that ball, if on a small enough scale, entire civilizations could pop up and be destroyed by the time it hit the ground, we would not notice, but we would have been the ones to cause it. I’m definitely not suggesting that this is the case.

But I ask you to think about it, think about the difference between clockwork, and life. Between balls and arms. Is our universe just a ball dropping, and when it hit’s the ground will everything stop? Will we ever be strong enough, advanced enough, or live long enough to re-wind the universe, to prevent it from hitting the ground and stopping? I don’t know but whoever reads this should think about it, because thought is what separates us from the rocks and the universe.