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Occasionally, I day-trip from the borders of legitimate science and into the boundless holiday that is the esoteric. I don't know exactly why I take such pleasure in pseudo-science; perhaps it is to keep my work safe from those who might portend I am out of my league with the real stuff.

The lush, seemingly benign woods of the Pacific Northwest abound with myths, quasi-tragic histories, tucked-away lichen, hallucinogenic mushrooms, endangered animals, and wild men. They also set an unwitting and shadowy stage, perhaps appropriately, for one of the great dramas of the esoteric: Bigfoot.

With the appearance of a shaky 24 feet of filmstrip in 1967, Bigfoot stepped into the limelight, out from centuries of Native American myth, unsubstantiated yarns, and mysterious footprints. Ever since this footage -- the so-called "Patterson-Gimlin Film" -- the Bigfoot has fiercely entertained, spooked, and howled through popular consciousness, becoming as potent an icon of the region as the spotted owl -- or grunge music, for that matter.

There are those, however, who take the beast very seriously. They claim that until the Patterson-Gimlin film is satisfactorily debunked, or the hundreds of other sightings they have under their belts reasonably explained, then they're going to keep conducting the earnest field work that is the backbone of organizations such as the BFRO (Bigfoot Research Organization). To these people, the mainstream conception of the Sasquatch as being folklore or farce is a source of great and indignant offense, and it is their modus operandi to prove all the rest of us wrong with diligent scientific research of their golden calf of a cryptid, the Bigfoot.

To those who believe in him, the Bigfoot is a completely real, albeit elusive creature of unknown survival economy, native to the woods of Northern California, the Pacific Northwest, and Western Canada. He is six and a half to eight feet tall, covered in reddish-brown or black hair, with large, human-like feet and a significantly foul odor.

But this is not the beast I am interested in.

No, there exists a stranger, even more profoundly conspiracist conception of the Bigfoot: the psychic Sasquatch, a paranormal, inter-dimensional creature. As you might imagine, this causes a huge rift within the already fractured Bigfoot (BF) community. Those who support the thesis of a paranormal Bigfoot are profoundly marginalized, barred from discourse, and generally scorned in much the same way that the non-Bigfoot community -- i.e. the scientific mainstream, popular consciousness, you know, normal people -- scoffs at the very existence of a hairy woodland ape.

This begs the question, of course: can we imagine that an as-yet-unknown normality is scoffing at us? Above all, it's simply a question of perspective, of the tools and methodologies available to you. Can the normal be more normal? The crazy, crazier?

Before we delve too deeply into the philosophical nuances raised by this divided community, we should perhaps discuss the psychic Sasquatch. There are several models, of course, but they all share some central precepts: the Bigfoot is of greater-than-human intelligence and endowed with an acute psychic ability. He is elusive, not because of his scarcity or well-documented ability to hide away in the woods: he is elusive because he has the capacity to dematerialize, to pass through wormholes from this dimension to any other, parallel dimension. Furthermore, and perhaps most outrageously, he is in cahoots with friendly extraterrestrials, or UFOs. The UFOs serve as scouts, protecting the interdimensional Bigfoot from leering human eyes.

Furthermore, according to the telepathic field work conducted by one of the theory's most vocal proponents, Jack "Kewaunee" Lapseritis, the Bigfoot race was brought to Earth ("seeded") by their friends, the Star People, long before we ever came around. It's beyond amazing: to explain the belief in something as dubious and marginal as the Bigfoot, Lapseritis and his colleagues port in something even more highly-contested and generally laughed-off: UFOs.

The evidence for these claims? Telepathic communications, alleged hundreds of joint Bigfoot-UFO sightings going back over a hundred years, and, surprisingly, theoretical physics. According to paranormal Bigfoot researcher Jon-Erik Beckjord, perhaps the most colorful character in the history of the Internet, the work of respected physicists like Dr. Michio Kachu and Albert Einstein can be used quite convincingly to explain the Bigfoot's tendency to slip from one dimension to another, with or without the help of his extra-terrestrial buddies.

When scientists talk about the potential for long-distance space travel in our future, or when they discuss the remote possibility of alien life visiting Earth, they often throw around the concept of wormholes. A purely theoretical construct gleefully exploited in science-fiction films, a Schwarzschild wormhole, or Einstein-Rosen bridge, is a hypothetical connection between widely separated regions of space-time. It's complicated: in 1962, John A. Wheeler and Robert W. Fuller published a paper showing that this type of wormhole is unstable, and that it will pinch off instantly as soon as it forms, preventing even light from making it through. However, if we postulate that a Schwarzschild wormhole could be held open by a grip of exotic matter (another theoretical construct), then a traversable wormhole is possible, allowing faster-than-light travel through space-time. Theoretically, then, ships could cross great distances across universes in such a way. I hesitate to say UFOs because it instantly demotes me to a different level, but that's the idea.

So, quoth Beckjord, "If UFOs can do this, why not people, missing ships and planes, and hairy humanoids?" Taking the concept to town, Beckjord proposes that there are thousands, even millions, of wormholes "twisting and crackling all over the Earth, sending and receiving, taking and returning, over and over." In this worldview, wormholes shuffle Bigfoots from one continent to another (which explains the existence of the Yeti, Yowie, Bunyip, Skunk Ape, and the Chinese Yeren), shoot people through time and space, account for the lost sock phenomenon, and have something to do with both orgasms and the Satori, or Zen state.

I'm fascinated by how fervently the torch of "science" is burned by people whose position in relation to the scientific mainstream is way off the map. To people like Beckjord, particularly, science is an absolute, profound practice, one which is abused by those who wield its power most. It's incredible how even the most tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist will always return to the symbolic value of science, insisting that their ideas are scientifically proven, valid, theoretically plausible according to some incredibly advanced branch of physics of which they have no understanding. How did science garner this cultural position as the ultimate justifier of reality?

What if science and the "paranormal" could sit side by side in the pantheon of ideas? After all, that prefix, "para," which has come to designate objects derivative of that denoted by the base word (and hence abnormal or defective: parody, paranoia), originally denoted, too, a notion of side-by-sideness ("at or to one side of, beside, side by side") that we can still see in words like parallel and paragraph.

Perhaps cryptozoology.com's primer on the Sasquatch put it best: "If we hope for mainstream scientists to keep an open mind, we must lead by example, and not waste time and energy that would be better spent searching for evidence fighting amongst ourselves. "

When our futures become the past, what will they prove to have been like?

As mind-bending as this question is, it lies at the heart of every successful science fiction story. Good writers in this underappreciated genre can be so forward-thinking that instead of asking, "What will the future be like?" they are already devising an answer to, "How will the future become the past?"

It's with this understanding of the malleability of time that good science fiction (which I have trouble feeling isn't the only relevant kind of writing) also manages to deftly place its reader in a chronological context. It is immediately obvious that the reality of a sci-fi narrative takes place in the future of the reader's reality -- and, intrinsically, that the reader exists in the novel's past. Once you get absorbed in a story about the future, you become a character in its past, understanding how time can change states.

Definitely, it's a tricky way to write, and much of its power depends on how easily its readers can imagine that their present day could unfold into the brighter, more efficient, more futuristic, future that they are being presented.

The most common trope of science fiction, one that makes this imagination easier, is a depiction of the 'first generation' of Earthmen and women who move out to the stars. In Ray Bradbury's seminal science-fiction novel The Martian Chronicles (a novel I read in one breathless sitting in my basement when I was 12 years old), the first expeditions of Earthmen to venture to Mars are portrayed as brave, solitary colonists who quickly fall to the superior intellect of old Martian civilizations. Later generations of explorers refer to them as "the Lonely Ones," with the same respect and tenderness that we, culturally, reserve for our nation's "Founding Fathers."

This first generation, so common in the fictional history of future civilizations, creates a kind of time-bridge between the reader's reality and that of the novel. They are closer, chronologically, to us and our present-day -- that is to say, the Future's Past. The brave men and women who first colonize the barren planets make sense to us, because we have forefathers as well. Further, their first foray out into the stars allows us to understand how the present can bring a future worthy of dreaming about; hence they serve as an elegant gateway to the suspension of our disbelief.

Certainly, we all have varying conceptions of what the future will be like. Will it be rounded and comfortable, like movies from the 1960s? Will it be the same as the present day, only dirtier and more populated? Or will it be an angular dystopia mobbed with glitching androids and space warlords? Mark Von Schlegell, science-fiction novelist and critical theorist, once wrote to me that the undefined future might be "conical, both angular and circular." Still, does anyone doubt that the future will take place elsewhere in the cosmos?

I have begun to realize with great sadness that my generation will not be the first generation of the science-fiction stories I grew up on. The future, as far as I see it, is just out of our grasp. Recently, for example, astronomers have been using the Hubble Space Telescope to locate extra-solar planets at such a rapid rate that it seems straight out of a sci-fi novel. Apparently, over 6-billion Jupiter-sized planets exist in our galaxy alone, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that planets are as abundant elsewhere in the galaxy as they are in our Solar System. Alan P. Boss, a theorist at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, noted in a recent New York Times piece that, "we've learned now that planets are everywhere [and] we're beginning to be able to calculate how many Earths there are, how many planets are habitable, if not inhabited."

In the grand scheme of collective time, human exploration of the cosmos is very primitive. Sure, we've sent looking-glasses and little robots into space and managed to find planets by measuring the effect they have on the ether around them. Yet discoveries such as this one, that the number of extra-solar planets is probably infinite, are staggeringly humbling. They remind us that the future as we have always imagined it really will take place on an astral stage, but that we are still very deep in the past of the science-fiction story that will inevitably become our reality.

I heard recently on BBC World Service that the Malaysian space program, itself a weird offshot of a 900 million dollar defense deal Malaysia recently struck with the Russians, is beginning to take shape. The 854 applicants to the program have been narrowed down to four, two of which will start training for a journey to the Internation Space Station in Russia's Star City this summer.

A subject of debate is how these new cosmonauts, three of which are Muslims, will manage the daily rituals of Islam while in orbit. Worship, quite simple on Earth, is a huge inconvenience in outer space (like most accidentals of human life). Of course, this hasn't usually been much of an issue in the past -- "Western" astronauts, generally, have seperated their faith from their work. However, Islamic prayer necessitates a series of important observances. The Malaysian space program, Angkasa, is the first to grapple with the implications of ritual in space: a subject which will only become more relevant as we begin to broaden space programs internationally. The issues at hand, however, are perplexing. How can one face Mecca when Mecca is only a tiny point on a planet thousands of miles below? Further, prayer is determined by the movements of the Earth in relation to the sun -- one prays five times throughout the day including sunset, sundown -- yet in orbit, the sun rises and sets over a dozen times in the span of one "day." Do you pray 60 times?

I can't help but think of Yuri Gagarin, in 1961, returning from the first manned space mission and saying, "I looked and looked but I didn't see God." This statement represents the classic first foray into outer space theology. "I looked and didn't see God" is of course irrelevant if you believe, like the Catholic Church, that God exists in a realm outside of physics, of the physical world. However, If you define the Universe as the totality of all that exists, the totality of reality, then (by definition) if God exists, (S)He either is the Universe or is part of it. I'm no theologian -- my own spirituality is limited to severely dubious notions of New-Age connective crystal orgone meta-energies, or whatever -- but this notion, presented here (to me) by Frank J. Tipler, a cosmic eschatologist and mathematics professor at Tulane, might become pressing in a world where faith and science are perpetually butting heads.

Of course, Tipler takes it to a weird place. In his 500 page book, "The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead," which I read so that you don't have to, he posits that theology and physics become quite entangled when we begin to think about the ultimate fate of our Universe. Clearly, Tipler argues, our planet is not immortal -- the sun will destroy it sooner or later. If we are -- or rather, if life is -- to survive past this point, we/it must find a way to adapt itself to conditions outside of planet earth. This much is not particularly revolutionary. Tipler, like many left-field physicists before him, hyphothesizes a future scenario in which humans send self-replicating robot probes (known as Von Neumann probes) out into space, which would seed human life, plant colonies, and eventually engulf the entire Universe with life. However, if the Universe is finite (this is called the "Tipler Scenario," as opposed to the "Dyson Scenario" of an infinitely expanding Universe), then it will recollapse into a Big Crunch after a finite amount of time.

Life, which by this time will have completely abandonned Earth (or "Gaia" if you're a space-hippie), will be forced at this moment of critical mass to adapt and restructure itself to the imminent Big Crunch. Tipler suggests a whole series of insane things at this point:

1. Right before the Universe reaches its maximum size, life will have coalesced into a unified whole of undifferentiated artificial and human intelligence, called the "Omega Point," computationally powerful enough to control the differential collapse of the Universe. The Omega Point will be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, and, further, will use the Universe's collapsion as a source of energy.

2. If, while controlling the collapse, this unified whole of life-consciousness can use its energy to accelerate the speed its mental processes accordingly, it can experience a subjective infinite time during the last stages of the collapse -- which is to say, there will be (in some form) eternal life.

3. Since the computational capacity of life will be accelerating exponentially faster than time runs out (futurists call this the "singularity," which is epic), a massive and unified conscious computer could, hypothetically, run a simulation of the Universe including all human beings alive and dead forever, even though the actual Universe the computer is in lasts only a finite time. This all-powerful artificial intelligence will ("must," claims Tipler, if life is to survive) provide us with "virtual time." The Omega Point will be capable of running computer simulations of all intelligent life that has ever lived in the history of our Universe, effectively ressurecting the dead.

4. The Universe-Computer, run by the artificial intelligence that is the Omega Point, will be both personal and benevolent. It will be, or is, God.

Tipler (above), sort of summing it up: "the Earth itself must be transferred from what I shall call 'ulimate reality,' into a virtual reality, from real space into a cyberspace in the computer's memory. If this is not done before the Sun leaves the main sequence, not only will much of the Sun's total energy reserve be wasted, but the Earth will be completely destroyed by the expanding sun to no purpose. The Earth's annihilation in real space is certain."

Theories like Tipler's aren't, essentially, that much weirder than half of the shit I wholeheartedly believe in: Nikola Tesla being responsible for the Tunguska event, for example, or even String Theory. In fact, I sort of appreciate the Omega Point Theory because it is so destined to join the ranks of hundreds of other, great, fully marginal theories which made a similar attempt to find "scientific" justifications for matters of pure human subjectivity, such as religion. I'm thinking of Wilhelm Reich's theory of Orgone Energy, or the archaic (even occult) "noosphere" theory ofTeilhard de Chardin, who, incidentally, coined the phrase "Omega Point." Or Tesla. Or, you know, all the astronomers before Copernicus.

Whether any of these ideas ever held any ground or ever will is almost irrelevant; they come and go, their science always shaky and devastatingly earnest. What matters, it seems, is their pressing desire to remind us of the urgency of our cosmology, or lack thereof. Tipler is probably wrong, or at least partially wrong, but I admire physicists who have the courage to completely betray their discipline in favor of a much grander, more beautiful, worldview. The really tripper Web-pundit Anders Sandberg, a Swedish Ph.D of Computer Science, wrote of the primary failing of Tipler's theory that "Tipler has made the mistake of not only taking his theory seriously but also to believe in it. Belief in a theory tends to make us blind to all the assumptions which underlie it, and take them for granted, since the theory is 'obviously reasonable.'"

Sandberg is probably saying that physicists must be objective in their postulations (rarely the case) but I think he's also raising the point that belief, in all its ramifications, becomes complicated as soon as we leave the safety of our planet, which is so (obviously) central to our metaphysics. In any case, it makes trying to figure out how to do ritual Islamic ablutions while in zero-gravity with limited water supplies seem completely beside the point.

I am interested in the way scientific language changes with the passing of time. A sincere science* text, which is by nature written towards objectivity, has no more purpose when its objective ideals are proven to be incorrect. In its way, it becomes a kind of language poetry. Its uselessness becomes like the "uselessness" of literature.

You know what I mean: crazy 17th century biology books earnestly featuring seven-headed hydra, or charmingly innacurate old maps with dragon faces at their edges. Those are almost art pieces, or cultural monuments. “Popular Science” books from the 1950’s and 1960’s, are also good in this way, because they seem aware of themselves as both literary and educational objects. I think their charm is in how recently, comparatively speaking, they were written. They sound almost logical, but still brutishly, mawkishly, misinformed. Read now, these books are practically elegies for an era of scientific optimism and postwar American certainty that I find shattering. They are archaic and tender. Sometimes when you read real earnest Marine Biology texts by people like Rachel Carson, it's like meeting little curators and scientists puffing out their chests. You want to pat them on the head, in this one way.

Old science books also have a really interesting way of using to taxonomy to cathect "our" (ie, Humankind's) distance from the world into The Discipline We Call Science. The slime and dust of the world is notably absent, replaced by a sincere hammering-in of our role as guardsmen of a fallible world. As if we weren't part of it.

I think a similar gesture is made in most monster and horror movies from the same era as the American "Popular Science" boom: again, a cathexis or fetishization of our fear of nature into one incomprehensible beast. Be it a complex of academic jargon or a monster come from the depths, the fear is the same. King Kong is just a giant manifestation of our revulsion at the exotic. Godzilla is our guilt about nuclear warfare.

I like the way that these texts -- both the science books and the movies -- were so brazen in their time and seem so small now. Even the most seemingly well-founded scientific claims made in the 1950's, now proven wrong, are like unrequited love letters to a perfect and rational world which doesn't exist and probably never existed. Science books are love poetry books.

Yet, regardless, this kind of language's poetics are always unintentional, which puts a damper on my ribald aestheticization of it. And there are great limitations to objective prose. It only allows through the smallest of pores any mention of this illogical world. It cannot describe the grit of sand nor the breadth of emotional reaction to life. The problem lies in an inescapable tautology: to fully understand a scientific, taxonomic, objective conception of the natural world is to be so steeped in scientific idiom that poetics become impossible.

This is a loss, of course. At the same time, I think that there is a great joy in the destruction of the boundaries we're steeped in. It is evident to me that there is no boundary between ourselves and the world, because this boundary (long called Science) is as variable and flawed as the idea of boundaries themselves. Where does it end, you know?

* The words "science" and "sincere" are really damned close. Are my glasses broken or am I right?

Upon my father's recommendation, I have recently picked up C.P. Snow's essay "The Two Cultures," a mild-mannered examination of the growing chasm between scientific and literary intellectual communities. Despite the fact that Snow's evident bias towards the sciences betrays his claims of existing in the two spheres himself, and despite the unenlightened connections he makes between the Modernist movement's emphasis on alienation and the advent of 'imbecile expressions of non-social feeling," i.e. Nazism, (I find this very unfair considering the scientific community's involvement in say, the atomic bomb, etc), "The Two Cultures" raises some good points.

One, Literary intellectuals have inexplicably co-opted the term "intellectual" to refer only to them, as if there were no others. I will cede this point to Snow, for it is totally true. Literary intellectuals are also, historically, complete luddites about technology and mock the illiteracy of the scientific community without themselves even being able to recite the first law of thermodynamics. I will be the first to raise my hand and point to myself; I just figured out the keyboard shortcuts for copy/paste last week.

Two, If the two cultures cannot manage a way to communicate -- or at least respect -- one another, then the great findings of science and the great works of art will never get the discourse and celebration they deserve. Without a shared language, the great frameworks that intellectuals build onto the natural world on either side of the chasm will only serve to better whatever discipline they are part of, without adding to the whole. Totes.

This may be an illogical segue into this entry's featured internet finding, but bear with it. I just found out last night that there is a 24-hour online webcam on the South Pole. As an admitted member of the so-called world of literary intellectuals (or whatever), my only knowledge of the South Pole comes from a) Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and, b) the collected writings of Fridtjof Nansen. Because of these sources, I had long imagined the South Pole to be a giant crystalline castle full of hell of penguins, ice-forts, diamonds of ice, and sea birds still unafraid of the presence of men. Imagine my disappointment (sure, this is a running theme) when I looked at this webcam. You know what the South Pole looks like -- this unimaginable point, sought for centuries by explorers hungry to be the first to set foot there? It's like some weathervanes, a drab building, and like cars. Every once in a while a dude walks by. It is so ugly. It literally looks like the base camp at Mount Hood Ski Bowl.

Of course, I am talking in extremes. One pole of intellectual society is a world apart from the other; as the South Pole of my dreams has been squelched by the South Pole of reality. Snow writes, "that unscientific flavour [of literary people] is often, much more than we admit, on the point of turning anti-scientific. The feelings of one pole become the anti-feelings of the other." Granted, my hostility for the South Pole 24-hour webcam is unwarranted and is, precisely, the kind of anti-feeling Snow discusses.

However, what I mean to say is: it is not as if this new, ugly South Pole of scientific research has to negate my fantasies. They both exist, and mine can naively continue to be populated by diamond-coated polar creatures as the real one trudges along its ruined path. The important thing is that we all acknowledge the legitimacy of both conceptions -- that the real and the mythic are both acceptable expressions of the same concept. The lack of communication between the two worlds is probably rooted in an inability to see common ground. What better terrain than the Antarctic?

In one of the most important scenes of the original Godzilla movie, the old Professor character, a moral force throughout the film, becomes clearly upset about Godzilla's egg being sold to a corporation. Misunderstanding the older man's sadness, a cadet reporter asks the token girl character what the problem is. With all the forlorn sympathy in the world, the girl responds, "Oh, can't you see? The Professor is a Scientist." Her pithy statement completely elucidates to us, the viewership, that the ethical quandary faced by the Professor is deeply informed by his schooling in the objective and humanity-progessing discipline of Science. This is because Godzilla takes place in the 1960's, when these things still meant something.

Ever since queen and king times, human beings have been using taxonomy to enact their distance from and fear of the natural world into a discipline that we like to call "Science." I know the whole deal with "Science:" the Altruistic Pursuit of Knowledge, the Betterment of Dudekind, New Frontiers, Great Advances in Health. These things were definitely the case when we were still trying to figure out what shape our planet is, as well as in Isaac Newton-times -- they may even have been the case up until the early 1960's, in which people still believed that the moon came from a giant lava tide ripped from planet Earth.*

In modern times, however, something has gone awry. It seems that every news article I read in the Science section aims to outperform the last in terms of complete bullshit weirdness. A year or so ago, a friend of mine forwarded me an article about how Scientists had managed to get monkeys to send "telepathic" messages -- that is to say, had managed to transmit electromagnetic impulses from their brains -- over the internet, and into robotically reconstructed fake monkey hands across the country. This kind of news represents the confidence that Scientists have in the fact that we -- the laypeople -- have ceased to pay attention to their work. They're getting a kick out of the fact that once what they're doing bobs up in major newspapers, we are so complacent and out of touch that it completely freaks us out.

As much as I am in favor of tomfoolery in the Scientific community -- if I had an insane budget and fancy equipment, I'd be working towards simian telepathy, too -- it is our duty as enthusiasts of popular Science to remain vigilant. In the past, to be a scientist meant great moral and civic responsibility; now, however, this responsibility has befallen us. I present to you, friends, Universe, a blog for the Betterment of Dudekind.

*This is true.