Double Standards are a Pain to Deal with

I think it is interesting that Luke Skywalker is allowed to become a Jedi even though he has the feelings of a Sith but the heart of a Jedi. In Star Wars I-III, one is refused apprenticeship when there are dark and negative thoughts clouding his or her mind, which is why Yoda and Mace Windu refuse apprenticeship to child Anakin. However Luke, son of Anakin, becomes a Jedi by Obi Wan Kenobi's blessing. In the confrontation of the Emperor--also known as Chancellor Palpatine in the first three episodes--Luke uses his sorrow and hatred of the situation that happened to his father, aunt, and uncle to get adrenaline-based strength to stand up to the Emperor. The ghosts of Obi Wan and Yoda could intervene and prevent Luke from using anymore of the Force, but they know that Luke only used his negativity to defeat his foe.
However, In Episode III, Anakin finds his mother tortured and holds her as she dies. he took it upon himself to avenger her by killing all of the Sand People, which is a plague to all travelers. The Jedi Council disapproves of this and gives the order to have Anakin removed from Jedi ranks--which is similar to the process of being made Tranquil in Dragon Age, a role playing game, where the mage's ability to use magic is permanently removed--but Anakin stays under the radar and goes under Chancellor Palpatine's apprenticeship.
Double standards have a continuous existence in today's society. We allow ourselves or friends to act and speak one way, but we disapprove of anyone else that acts and speaks the same way. There are such things as loopholes, but they do not contain double meanings for two or more parties. Double standards are a big part of politics, and figuring out which candidate is using the "correct" and "moral" standard usually comes out on top. Double standards also cause fights among close friends and it has ruined many of my relationships with friends, family, and colleagues.

Blog #11

Write a short (250-300 word) review of the film Star Wars: A New Hope. Treat this as a free write--you can reflect on any aspect of the film that you found compelling.

Peace on Mars

If I could live on another planet I would want it to have lots of other people on it. But, I would want it to be peaceful. I would want everyone to get along no matter what people looked like and no matter who they loved. I would want there to be no war, no sickness, no cancer, no disease, and no hatred. I would want everyone to be happy and healthy and everyone could do as they pleased as long as it wouldn't harm anyone else. Everyone would have as much money as they wanted and could buy whatever their hearts desired. People would not be boastful or judgmental and everyone would feel good about themselves. No one would be sad and everyone would be supportive of one another.

If I could live on another planet I would want it to smell wonderful. There would be no skunks or anything else that smells gross on it. I would want all of the water to be so blue you could see through it. The grass would be so soft you could lay on it and it would feel like memory foam. There would be lots of animals of all kinds on the planet. And no one would have to have space suits on because it would have it's own air and it would have gravity so you didn't drift away. If I could live on another planet I would want it to be different to Earth in the way of the way people are but it would be similar in the way of some of the looks of the other planet.

The main thing I would want though is for people to be kind to one another. I am so tired of people judging other people and being rude to each other. Being rude and judging someone is a choice. It is much easier to just be mad I get that. But if everyone tried to be nice instead I feel like the quality of life would be better. So that would be the main thing if I lived on another planet. I guess I wouldn't really care how the planet looked I would mainly care how the people on it acted and how they acted towards each other.

Orbiting The Solar System Of Thoughts

If I could live on any planet in the universe, I would hope this new population would take advantage of the fresh start it is given. I would wish that this population would throw out a lot of the morals that are ruining us and take notice of those that prove strong in our current society. The people who make up our society are so judgmental that we are able to categorize it: racism, homophobia, ableism, and the list goes on. This would not exist in the ideal life on another planet. People on this planet would focus on the things that mattered, such as love, hobbies, helping others, and personal growth, rather than what seems to be everyone's focus: making enough money to occupy themselves. Research-heavy fields would be funded only as much as art-based fields. There would be an absence of a lot of the current social issues that exist in modern United States, such as same-sex marriage, gender, race, and able inequality, and confusion related to individuals who identify as LGBTQIA+, just to name a few. Hunger and poverty would be minimal, because the people on this planet would have too much compassion to let these issues grow uncontrollably as we do here on Earth. All of these situations can exist on Earth, and it is unfortunate that they don't. I believe that a fresh start is a beautiful thing to take an advantage of and that is what I would hope for in a new planet.

Life on Mars?

It is hard to believe that someday there will be life on Mars. I don’t think that it could happen in our lifetime but there are some scientists that believe there is a possibility there will be life on Mars by 2050! Transporting people to Mars will be really expensive alone. So, will only wealthy people be able to move to Mars then? Also, the cost to transport food and supplies to even start a society would be astronomical. Life itself is dependent on water for life and growth so I’m not sure how Mars will function due to its lacking of water. Mars is known for is constant and drastic changes in temperature daily. In the morning it goes from freezing weather to blazing hot temperatures in the day times. It seems as though people will be restricted to living outside but will be forced to be in a controlled temperature building. Also people will need to use astronaut suits in order to breathe on Mars. This would be very uncomfortable to wear these all day long. Because Earth has a higher gravitational pull than Mars does, people would need to constantly workout to maintain their muscles. I feel earth was made for humans and life in general. Nowhere else that we know has the characteristics that Earth does and that we cannot live anywhere else harm-free. 

Living So Far Away

On almost a daily basis I say to those around me, "I wish I could just go live in the woods".  I tend to get very annoyed by most of my college peers, customers, bad drivers, irresponsible parents...the list goes on...For most of us, deep in the mountains and forests is the furthest from civilization we can imagine.  And to be honest, that is the furthest I think we'll ever reach.  The episode about colonizing Mars was a bit far-fetched for me.  For as long as I can remember the rover being on Mars, all I have heard is: "There COULD have been water here at some point." or "If the atmosphere changes in these ways, we MIGHT have sustainable oxygen levels.".  All of these assumptions about how some day, if things changed just perfectly, and we all wished really hard, we could maybe live there some day.  Sorry for the absurd amount of sarcasm...The researchers and scientists in this episode did not convince me in any way that it would be worth the time and money to settle on the red planet.  I believe what makes me most bitter about the subject is the fact that most of the reason we are looking to settle elsewhere is because we have nearly drained this planet and are looking for the next thing to suck dry.  Don't get me wrong, I am no tree-hugger, but there is no practical reason for living on another planet.  Can you imagine the prices of anything if we were to live on Mars?  Everything would have to be made synthetically or shipped from Earth.  There are too many factors dragging this theory down in my opinion.

Travelling to Mars

While the whole concept of possibly finding another planet to live in is most certainly a interesting thing to think about but I do not believe Mars is that answer at all. I think this episode was definitely the most controversial because the experts in the video seemed really optimistic about actually being able to live on it when in reality I don't think this will ever be possible. First off Nobody knows for sure what exactly Mars all contains this alone suggests that we have no idea what we are getting ourselves into if we seriously start considering moving there. There shouldn't even be such a debate when we live on a perfectly good planet in the first place. We can't deny that earth would be far better off if we actually gave an effort towards benefiting it.  However, now our planet is dying and we look to another planet as our alternative, but for real mars? While I am not against the research and looking into other planets I just think that we have a lot farther to go before we even consider this and I honestly think mars is a poor solution.

No Place Like Home

Dusty red sky, dirt for miles and miles, cold, barren, and alone. That is how I feel it would be to live in another galaxy. When I imagine what it would be like to live on another planet, or in another galaxy, my heart aches. Tragic silence, lonely days filled with conversations to one’s self. Slowly drifting into a world of insanity; this is what it would be like for me to leave this planet.

The appeal to travel the universe and explore the unknown is not, and has never been one of my aspirations. The old Wizard of OZ saying, “there is no place like home” completely applies for me and my relationship with my beautiful home, planet Earth. When I think about what it would be like to live in another galaxy or parallel universe, I become very overwhelmed.

I couldn’t imagine waking up every day and not looking out my window to see the majestic trees shading the sun, cascading in from the unknown. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like not to be able to skip rocks on the shores of the wondrous oceans and lakes that span the globe. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like not to hear the birds chirping songs of glory, or the crickets on a sultry summer’s eve.

Overall, travel or inhabitation of another galaxy or parallel universe would be nothing but a nightmare for me. I treasure this home, there is simply no place like it.  

Parallel Universe

It was hard for me to believe the Space Travel episode from the Universe. It mentioned the creation of particles, and that a certain one can only go faster than the speed of light, never slower.  They also talked about bending time or space, like warping the path, which seemed a bit like time travel but also teleportation. They have ideas about traveling somewhere, but instead you bring ‘somewhere’ to you. These abstract ideas are just so hard for me to imagine. I understand technological advancements and how humans and everything else reacts in different environments. I feel like they are making up impossible ‘what if’ ideas, like what if we could do this or that, but it actually can’t happen. Isn’t time a concept we created? I don’t see how they could go further faster in any other way than making faster transportation. I can’t imagine how they would bend space, or make a parallel universe. It is scary to think about and I can’t imagine how they would even try to make that happen.

Life on Mars

I honestly couldn't imagine living on another planet. The life that is Mars to me is no life at all, you might as well live in a bubble. They have a chance of running out of supply's, and then what are you going to do? I love being able to walk outside and not have to have a space suit on. I wake up every morning knowing we have enough supply's here, food, water, plenty of oxygen, etc. While living on Mars you see the same people everyday, I mean yes for the most part I see the same people where I live, but knowing I can change that by picking up and just moving across town or to another state is awesome. There are so many options here on Earth. My parents use to watch Star Trek, so I have seen some of that and even though it was just a show, it showed to me that life in space wouldn't be all that exciting. If I had a chance to live in space, I wouldn't do it. I don't even know if I would want to just go for how ever long the astronauts go for at a time, I would go crazy. I need to be able to do different things everyday. Yeah the PA weather sucks at times but if I didn't get all four season it would be weird to me. PRobably because that is I grew up the past twenty three years here in PA and when I graduate I do plan on moving and I love warm weather but I don't think I could live where it's warm all the time. Waking up on Christmas to 75 degree weather just doesn't sound fun. Home is where th heart is, and Earth is it. We have so much we can do on this planet and I wouldn't live anywhere else.

Rule 63

         Science major: could actually accept every episode even if I disagreed with it because they backed (most) of their ideas up with evidence. So this means I’m free-writing! For this, it was tricky to choose either a different galaxy or a parallel universe to write about since they are similar in a few ways. A galaxy, in general, is like where there are altogether different life forms but a parallel universe is where there are still humans and such. But a parallel universe can have loads of differences such as magic. Also, in a parallel universe, not everyone is different. When I think about parallel universes, most of the people that I would be exposed to would be no different because in a parallel universe, only a few things differ from our own one.

            I’m going to basically talk about a parallel universe where I, and a perhaps 25% of the overall world population, have been affected by Rule 63. Rule 63 is the Gender-Bending rule, where males become females and females become males. I sometimes wonder how different my life would be if I were the opposite sex. If I were the opposite sex, I don’t really think my personality would be that different. My parents would still be the same sex as they are here, and so would my brother. So much of personality comes from outside influences that were not put upon me by my parents and sibling. I think, as the opposite sex, I still would have taken dance classes from the age of 5 and would continue to dance even in college. My opposite sex self would still have been as energetic as I was when I was in preschool. It was that teacher who recommended my Dance Studio to my mom due to that amount of energy (and the fact that I danced around all the time). As the opposite gender, I feel like my sexual orientation wouldn’t change either because I have such a strong dislike for my own sex (though I don’t want to change it in this world!), and that has nothing to do with any one person’s influence, it was a fact that I realized early own from observing the world around me (which again would still be 75% the same in this universe). I could go on and on, since I’ve given this weird idea a lot of thought over the past few years, but I won’t since I’m already over 400 words.

Life Without Life

To be quite honest I had issues with almost all of these episodes.  But the main one was Living in the Universe.  I think the idea that life is too precious to have all of our "eggs in one basket" by only having life on Earth is kind of jaded.  Life is precious but we love the life we live mostly because of the planet we live on.  Our planet is beautiful.  We walk outside with no space suits on, we enjoy nature, plants, animals, and the environment our planet provides.  Mars is the planet that resembles Earth the most but even then the environment for the "space pioneers" is harsh.  Mars has no ozone layer exposing the planet to extremely high radiation, razor thin air, and freezing temperatures.  To withstand this there needs to be a bio dome for people to maintain life on Mars.  The problem with that is Bio domes have been tested on earth and problems came about that had to be fixed by injecting fresh air into the dome; On Mars that solution would not be possible so everything has to be perfect in the set up.  The people who choose to live on Mars have to live knowing that there's a constant threat of starvation if they are unable to grow their food in growth chambers and if they don't properly take care of the plants which provides them with oxygen.  When they got outside in their space suits there are chances of micro meteor showers which would puncture a suit and lead to a painful death.  To me this doesn't sound like life.  Yes there are people there but what they are doing is not life.  It would be torture to not breath fresh air, walk outside with no suit on, and to be confined to a tight space. 

Reality

After watching the episode colonizing space I thought it would be a really interesting and awesome thing for us to be able to do decades from now. There were so many things that needed to happen and for them to go right. But after thinking about it more and more I really don’t think that it is quite possible to happen. One of the biggest things that I saw being a struggle of converting the atmosphere in mars to be able to allow for humans to live on. In theory there idea of just polluting the air should work. But there are many unknowns for us given that it is another planet. What if this causes the mars to react in a completely different way? Also this is something that people will highly not like us polluting on purpose just so that we are able to move somewhere else. People are saying why we should go to another planet and then ruin that one.  Another issue would just be getting things up there and the amount of time that it takes to get there. When earth is the closest to the moon it is still a six month travel. For this to be a feasible thing to me I believe that this time needs to be cut down significantly. Due to the fact that it will take many trips for us to be able to get anything significant in size to mars, because the rockets can only hold a certain amount of weight therefore limiting the amount of stuff per trip. 

Bubbles in Beer

The episode of The Universe that I selected was “God and the Universe.”  In this episode, scientists discuss the universe and the search for God.  They come to the conclusion that there is no Divine Creator.  There is a scientific or mathematical reason behind the creation of the Universe, Earth, and all life that inhabits our planet including human beings.  We are simply the result of stars exploding.  The scientists claim that human beings are thinking, feeling, conscious beings because of the Law of Statistics and the way matter grouped together.  The scientists likened human beings to bubbles in a mug of beer.

I am not a brilliant physicist.  I am a simple human being.  But, I am more than a clump of matter.  I don’t believe that our human ability to think, feel emotion, make choices, communicate with high level language, laugh and cry is the result of some random force of nature.  I believe that we as human beings have a soul and each of us is a unique creation created by God and deserving of respect.  We are more than bubbles in a mug of beer.

I find the theories of the scientists to be sad.  It seems that in their quest to answer the eternal questions of why we are here and who created us, they rely solely on what they can prove scientifically.  In their view, our short life spans are all that there is.  We exist and then we don’t.  The episode ends with the scientific theory of Multiple Universes.  This theory can’t be tested or proven but they believe it.  I wonder, then, why they have such a hard time believing in God? 

No Place Like Home

For me it is very difficult to imagine living anywhere else but Earth.  Especially when every planet we know of can't sustain any kind of life, this is a deal breaker for me.  I live in Pennsylvania where I have a hard enough time dealing with a bad winter, having to put layers of clothes on just to go outside.  On Mars I'd have to put on a full space suit just to survive on the dusty red planet. One issue that I don't think they addressed in the video that I wondered about.  Everyone that lived on Mars would be in a self sustaining environment that is dome shaped and the air inside the dome would be circulating, would illness be even more of a problem? I feel that if someone or a group of people were to become ill that the chances of contamination to the rest of the population would likely happen. There are so many endless reasons why I feel that living on Mars just can't happen.  I truly believe that our best option is to take care of the planet we live on now. It is much easier to try an better our lives here on Earth then creating a whole new life on a different planet where the dangers are endless.  It is amazing however that scientist really thing it can be an option some day to go to Mars and live.  With that kind of thinking an the technology we have to be able to create a livable environment somewhere else we could defiantly us that kind of thinking to solve many of our issues here. Like pollution, overpopulation, loss of natural resources, etc.  Earth is home to so many different species I couldn't imagine living in a world without everything thing we are lucky to have here. 

Mars is a Bad Idea

My blog from last week kind of answered the blog this week. To me, space is a scary thing. I do not really understand why we would want to try to create life on a different planet. There is a reason why people are not already living on other planets and trying to create life on other planets is just asking for trouble. Just think of all the problems that could come about. We say in Sex in Space that reproduction is a HUGE problem. The mice they used to test reproduction in space had many defects. Not only were the offspring messed up, but the mice that were reproducing were messed up and had problems when they got back to Earth. If humans go to space and begin living and reproducing on another planet, we are going to encounter so many problems. Some problems we might not be able to handle.If the offspring born in space all have mutations, it is just going to be passed down from generation to generation. I personally think trying to live on Mars is a waste of money. I understand why we would want to use resources from Mars, but are the problems that could potentially arise from living there going to outweigh the new resources?

Take It Or Leave It...

Traveling to other planets has always been a mystery to me. I could never understand why people always need more than what they have. It seems a little ridiculous to think that we aren’t satisfied destroying one planet; that now we are going to change another just for our own selfish reasons. The human population is over abundant as is and spreading to a new planet would only make that worse. How does anyone think that it will be a good idea to place people on two different planets when the world is so out of control already? I think that it would be great to travel to outer space and explore what the universe has to offer. But on the other hand I wouldn’t want to destroy any of the magnificent creations. The universe is something in my opinion that can’t be captured or tamed. It is the whole to life as we know it and needs to keep the mysteries of wonder. That’s why I disagree with colonizing on Mars. Even though it would be a great experience and we can learn a lot, I don’t think that it’s necessary. Think of all the things that can be fixed or helped here in our own backyard on Earth. Everyone sees that the world could be better but we don’t all try and save it. Instead we make plans to ditch the old and start new. The problem is what happens when this planet goes down too. Where would we all go then?