Thursday, March 26, 2009

What's in a Name

Some people have asked how I come up with the name Extreme Gravity for my blog? Well let me explain my thoughts behind my choice. Gravity is something that always draws you in, it’s a part of everyday life. It affects everything and without it, life would cease to exist. Gravity is something that you can’t see, although you can see the effects of it. In the same way, God is a little like gravity, you can’t see Him but you can see the effects of Him all around, He is always there. Without Him we would cease to exist. He is something that is constantly drawing us into him. Without Him we would be floating aimlessly around in the atmosphere, with no direction.

This is a little exert that my friend Jason wrote, it adds well to what I am describing here. “Lets take gravity. Its a natural law; it operates everywhere in our explored universe, and thank God for that! True, we can't fly because of it, and it would be quite nice to fly. But he'd be a fool who calls gravity a curse for this limitation of freedom. For 2 reasons: Firstly, have you ever meditated on how utterly indispensable Gravity is to our very existence? Without gravity there'd be no eating, because there'd be no food, because there'd be no plants, because there'd be no soil, because it would all be space dust! Without gravity there'd be no drinking, because there'd be no water, because it would be space vapour. Without gravity we'd live at about -273degrees Celcius because there'd be no sun, because all stars including our splendid sun would dissipate into the vast abyss of gravity-less space rather than holding together and generating the heat that warms our lovely little planet. Without gravity you could not walk, drive, play rugby, or open the fridge. Ladies, i'm afraid long hair and skirts would have to go. I guess the same goes for some guys.

Secondly, and now let me flip your mind just a little: while gravity in one way limits our ability to fly, in quite another way it provides the only means by which we can fly at all! yip, i said it: gravity is the only reason we can fly. now of course i mean controlled flight; but i think you'll all agree that helplessly floating off into the endless cosmos would put a mild dampner on... well pretty much the rest of our life! Its controlled flight we want: the ability to control our trajectory through the air or space to go from point A to point B in a reasonably certain amount of time. flying is in some ways an experience, in other ways a means of fulfilling plans and purposes, but is always only desirable as an instrument of either pleasure or purpose. floating off helplessly into space would eliminate any choice whatsoever, devastating all our desires and purposes and taking over our entire experience of life, rendering us powerless to actually live life at all. The very freedom we sought would eliminate all freedom altogether. Now the only reason we can fly in the way we do (in 747's, for example) is because the downward force of gravity is counteracted by the upward lift created by the wings of an aircraft, and we are able to balance the two out to provide ourselves with controlled upward and downward movement. Without gravity, there would be no downward force. But there would also be no upward force! there would be no atmosphere, so there would be no air pressure, so there would be nothing to create "lift". You could have wings the size of texas and you wouldn't create a nano-Newton of upward thrust. And so there would be no controlled flight. Some might say we have space shuttles which quite happily enjoy controlled flight by using thrust. Well, i'd pay a lot of money to see you trying to build a space ship without gravity!”

So there you have it… Extreme Gravity, I wouldn’t live without it.

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