I enjoyed the last few posts, don't see them as stupid, mine are too often that, but not all of the responses. From what I've been able to understand about physics, every electron or photon are identical, the only differences are wavelength, direction and lifetime, otherwise they are the same. I've read a article about the one-electron universe postulate which was interesting too. From these, one could look at all of matter being composed of the same thing, or identical duplicates of one another and in that way, we are all living parallel lives or another way of looking at it, we are all the same thing living separate lives, the separateness an illusion, if we are at our base cloned particles, electrons, or what ever.
I used to have a difficult time accepting death, I found one way of thinking about it which helped me accept it. Although for the body, as a system, death is a destruction of the individual, it is a purely natural process, nothing is really going wrong, matter is following normal physics, no laws are being broken, the matter isn't destroyed and there is also the possibility that what ever has existed, continues to exist, in the past, as we move forward. Of course, there is nothing to substantiate this that I know of, the possibility of time travel might, though. To me, my thoughts about the death and decomposition of the body being a purely nature process and that the matter we are made of continues to exist is somewhat of a cousin of the way you viewed your dead cat, or still do today. Although, I didn't think of the angle that the matter our bodies are composed of continues through the uptake by other forms of life. I suppose I wouldn't consider such when I already view all of life the same life living lives in parallel though many diversified forms, past, present and future included.
As far as the reincarnation thing I flippantly threw out there, I've seen what I believe to be enough evidence that one can think it possible, I don't deny the possibility. On the other hand, I also view every human being, for that matter, all life, as being one and that we are all living our lives in parallel from the past through the present and into the future. I don't mean to insult any ones sense of stature when I write such a thing, many do not want to be one with earth worms or other creatures they consider far below them, it doesn't bother me to think that way, but some reject it out of hand thinking themselves above other life forms. The human race is "above" simple life forms in body and capability in so many ways, yet composed of the same elements, at our base, not much difference, if you go deep enough down the matter rabbit hole, no differences at the atomic level.
From the perspective of scale, we as human beings and or animals do live our lives in a middle place above the finite structures of matter and the infinity of space, right smack dab in the middle between macro and micro, so from our point of view, that is where it counts. I wish I could find it now, but last year I read an article which showed the scale from micro through macro and it just happens that we are actually in the exact middle of the two extremes, when it comes to pure scale.
OK, to leap a large distance to another direction but still on the subject of scale:
New Hubble space telescope findings show galaxies which are much further away than prior discoveries, pushing the new distance for the observable universe out to as far as 46 billion light years away, more than three times further than previously observed. Also, considering we can see 46 billion light years in the opposite direction too, that makes the new diameter of the observable universe to be close to 92 billion light years but according to new theory, this is is nothing compared to the possible size of the real universe which is ten billion trillion times larger than that.
That's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger and thus the complete universe is to the observable universe as the observable universe is to an atom. Now that's some awesome scaling.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaX4...fc&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_586138
