Asher Nation

I work hard, but Elon Musk works harder. As I trudge through terabytes and terabytes of environmental felonies and galactic terror, I have come to one conclusion: This man won’t be stopping anytime soon. So, to make up for my lack of published content, I have decided to release some short and uncut commentary pieces that have managed to bleed through the cracks of my extremely tedious and exhausting schedule. Consider it a (late) Christmas gift! Grab a glass of hot chocolate and cozy up around a fire, because things are about to get weird. 

These pieces are speculative, philosophical, and exploratory in nature – written to provoke, not prove. 

    The Heliocentric Model: Do you know where you are? 

Ah, yes. The beautiful heliocentric model of the solar system. You see it plastered on preschool walls and on the covers of National Geographic magazines. Go ahead, Google it. You have seen it before, I promise. Let’s dig into why it is “problematic”. 

The heliocentric model depicts our beautiful eight planets orbiting the sun. Pretty standard stuff, if you are interested in destroying your sense of spatial awareness that is… You see, this crude caricature of our solar system is to blame for all of the dumb “Why can’t we throw our trash into outer space?” questions. The average person believes that our solar system is one lonely abyss of darkness – that we are floating aimlessly to our doom. That, however, could not be further from the truth. What the heliocentric model fails to teach is that our solar system has about 294 moons (two of which are larger than Mercury), two major asteroid belts, and five dwarf planets. The significance of this discrepancy lies in its use to manipulate you. Yes, you heard that right. Let’s draw back to that question I posed earlier: why can’t we throw trash into space? It’s pretty simple. Contrary to popular belief, our solar system is not empty. All of those comets and asteroids you see don’t just disappear into thin air when they pass by – they break, they crash, and they burn. That debris? That debris will float around for eternity, bound to whichever gravity it gets sucked into first. Saturn’s rings are a prime example of this phenomenon. In fact, some of Saturn’s moons are actually located in these bands of ice and dust. Their surfaces have eroded over thousands of years due to the accumulation of dust and the increased collisions caused by said ice. Now, let’s go back to earth. Can you imagine if we had those rings? Surprise! Scientists believe that we had a ring system around 466 million years ago. One that formed from a massive Mars-sized object named Thea. Those bits and pieces are speculated to be what formed our moon. 

You may be asking now…just what is the damn significance of all of this? Well… Earth does have rings—man-made rings – 11,700 satellites to be exact. When you count all man-made objects and debris, that number jumps to around 45,000. The moment any object reaches orbit, it requires intense maneuvering and constant tracking to prevent collisions. In other words, we damn polluted our magnetosphere to the point that leaving is becoming a distant dream of the past! Can you imagine how bad it will be as technology advances and more and more people around the world demand high-speed internet and contact services? 

Kessler syndrome: “A theoretical scenario where the density of objects in low Earth orbit becomes so high that the probability of collisions increases exponentially, leading to a cascade of collisions that makes the orbit unusable for an extended period.”

If we were to throw trash into space, it wouldn’t get very far. Earth would be suffocated from the lack of sunlight alone, and we would not be able to flee. And if you’re wondering who’s to blame for the majority of space junk in our orbit… You would be correct to assume ELON MUSK! But that’s a topic for another time. 

The heliocentric model contributes to the rise in space junk because when you have a population that believes space is empty and grand, you can throw whatever the hell you want out there without consequence. Those beloved Hubble telescope pictures you see now and again? 4.3% of them were photobombed by Starlink satellites from 2018 to 2021. Simulations predict a 40% increase in satellite streaks in the coming years, with planned future telescopes estimating it could reach 96%. The next time you see a technology company bragging about their internet and service speed, take a moment to sit back and think just what had to be done for that to be accomplished. 

Space is not empty. Space is beautiful and complex, and it deserves the same respect we give our oceans and forests. Space is a wilderness. It has ecosystems – gravitational, chemical, radiative – and we are treating it like a lawless dumpster. Environmentalists often forget to include galactic terrorism in their activism, and that is precisely what they want as we trudge through the new age of technology.  It may not sound like a huge problem right now, but in 30 years, when all of those satellites come crashing down and burn up into aluminum oxide, you won’t be able to catch your breath fast enough to cry for change. We complain about light pollution because we can’t see the stars anymore, but why isn’t anyone complaining about the fact that we can’t even get a clear picture of a planet now?

Why You Can’t See God, But You Can Feel Him

One of the most abundant particles in the universe is the neutrino. It has no electric charge and barely any mass. Despite being a fundamental glue in our surroundings, it is difficult to detect because it does not react with other matter. It can only interact with weak nuclear forces or gravity, which means it can pass through planets, stars, and even you. If you are reading this, that means hundreds of trillions of neutrinos have already passed through your body. Interesting, right? It’s often called a “ghost particle” for its elusive nature. They mostly come from nuclear fusions in the Sun’s core, but they also appear from supernovas, radioactive decay, cosmic rays, and a bunch of other things I don’t have the patience to write. 

To brighten your day, I’ll tell you one way we can detect them – and it’s pretty funny. Basically, a bunch of guys built a gigantic cylinder of ice and water and just waited for a neutrino to interact with it accidentally. When a neutrino accidentally collides with an atom (a rare event), it produces a tiny flash of light, known as Cherenkov radiation. We are then able to determine where it came from, which direction it was heading, its energy level, and even which neutrino it was. 

What’s even more fascinating about them is that they allow us to look inside violent cosmic events in real time. When they escape a supernova, they are expelled rapidly, whereas the photons that get trapped can bounce around us for billions of years. They are our universe’s cosmic messengers. Angels, you could say. They influence galaxy formation, cool exploding stars, and change nuclear reactions inside stars. They are relics from the Big Bang, drifting anywhere and everywhere. There are more neutrinos in the universe than there are atoms – let that sink in. 

On June 5th, 1998, researchers in Japan were able to capture a picture of the sun using only neutrinos. The image is quite stark and somewhat reminiscent of the pixels in an 8-bit video game. It was created over a 500-day period by…get this…looking THROUGH the earth. 

The very nature of this particle challenges almost every societal belief we have known and accepted. One in particular is the supernatural. Whether you believe ghosts are trapped souls or a ficitive of our imagination, neutrinos might explain some of the strange phenomena we observe. One of the most common sightings of the paranormal is tiny orbs of light – they are brief and random. Our nervous system has evolved to detect photons, pressure waves, infrared heat, electromagnetic fields, and chemical signals. It has not, however, to our understanding, developed the ability to detect neutrinos, dark matter, vacuum energy, gravitational waves, or even quantum fields. While neutrinos do not emit light themselves, they could be interacting with a piece of matter we have yet to discover – a reaction that our senses can pick up on. 

Supernatural occurrences aside, let’s talk about God. A great pillar of String Theory is the Holographic Principle. In short, it’s based on the premise that all information is encoded on a 2-D plane, which is then projected into the 3-D world we know and love. The caveat with this lies between the two planes. We often speak of “glitches in the matrix,” and perhaps… It’s just an outside force passing through and interacting with our projection, causing the discrepancy between what we see and what we know. A common trend in divine sightings usually involves a person moving a hairline’s distance away from an oncoming accident, seemingly without awareness of the events unfolding around him. Or better yet, that gut feeling that comes out of nowhere and, oddly enough, turns out to be correct. We already discussed that neutrinos are the messengers of the universe, but did you know that they can also traverse spacetime without losing their quantum phase information? We sometimes act before rational sensory input; this is documented as pre-conscious processing, but it is not fully explained. A giant theoretical leap would be to assume consciousness could have partial access to non-local informational fields. But is the jump really too steep to imagine when compared to the existence of neutrinos? 

In the context of the holographic realm, it is implied that future information also exists on the two-dimensional plane. That being said, those gut feelings you have might not be too wild after all. If a messenger, such as a neutrino capable of storing information across dimensional planes, were to possess future information and happen to interact with your consciousness at the right place and time, you would get precisely what we see on those grainy CCV videos – a person moving before their untimely demise. It mirrors the way our hand moves when we touch a hot surface. Our body knows what to do before we can even logically process it.  

Neutrinos show us that massive particles can be anywhere; we can be permeated by them constantly, we have no awareness of their passage, they preserve information phase space, and they can interact with dark matter candidates. Even if neutrinos aren’t responsible for anything mentioned above, they show us that something like them could be. Maybe the inability to see God is not a failure of His existence, but a limitation of our sensory bandwidth. 

The Mystification of Ancient Societies 

When we think of ancient societies, we almost always arrive at the big three: the Great Egyptian Empire, the Aztec Empire, and the Mayan Civilization. They all have quite a few things in common. The most fascinating examples include astonishing astronomical knowledge, temple engineering aligned with equinoxes and solstices, complex cosmologies, ritual mathematical calendars, a metaphysics of cyclical time, and a deep spiritual integration with nature and the stars. This alone creates a crude contrast to modern society, which is technologically advanced but spiritually and cosmologically disconnected.

Before we romanticize the past too much, it is worth remembering that these societies weren’t lucky guesses or primitive superstitions. Their observations were built into agriculture, harvest cycles, ocean tides, construction, timekeeping, navigation, and medicine. The Mayans predicted eclipses centuries in advance. The Egyptians aligned entire temple complexes with seasonal light patterns using nothing but stone, shadow, and patient human observation. 

So now I must pose a question that will make some of you raise your eyebrows: what if those ancient enlightenment periods were not merely cultural, but cosmological – occurring during epochs when there was more raw informational energy left over from the Big Bang?

After the Big Bang, the universe was a vibrant playground of neutrinos, cosmic rays, particles, and quantum background fields. Matter clashed and sorted itself into the elements we see today on our beloved periodic table. As the universe expanded, that early energetic density slowly thinned out. In our current understanding, the universe is still expanding. So no matter how small the difference, ancient minds existed in a slightly richer informational environment than we do today. In physics, information is not just knowledge; it is a physical property of the universe. When I talk about “an informational environment,” I am referring to the density and variety of signals, fields, and quantum states surrounding everything that exists. To put it more simply: long ago, the universe was smaller, hotter, and less entropic. As expansion continues, dispersion is inevitable. Eventually, this leads to the so-called Heat Death. Which, if you are interested in learning more about, I highly recommend you visit my previous essay, “Cosmic Solidarity” 😉 

Before I continue, I feel it would be unethical not to clarify that the energetic difference between us and ancient civilizations would not be dramatic. If all events in cosmic history were compressed into a one-year timeline, Earth’s landmass would not appear until September. Humans would only arrive at 11:59 P.M. on December 31st. The few thousand years separating us from the Egyptians and Mayans would be just seconds. So no, ancient people didn’t live in a radically different universe.

But the way energy is experienced today is completely different from how it once was. Modern society funnels its energy into machines, infrastructure, digital networks, and artificial environments instead of into biology, ritual, agriculture, or community. We flood soil with plastics that will take millions of years to decompose, and we bury bodies preserved with enough formaldehyde to kill someone three times over. We treat soil, water, and food as if they are nuisances instead of living systems. And the greatest redirection of all is technological: energy still circulates, but far less of it passes through human experience.

Energy can’t be created or destroyed, but it can be trapped or redirected. Modern civilization releases stored geological energy violently and traps solar heat in the atmosphere. The result is not more energy, it’s more damn heat, more stress on ecological systems, and less vitality for life forms that evolved under slow, stable cycles. As forests disappear, nutrient cycles break down. As artificial environments replace natural ones, animals, including humans, lose access to conditions our biology expects.

What if our societal “de-evolution” describes nothing more than increasing distance from the Big Bang? Our sluggishness, depression, short attention spans, addiction, and rise in chronic disease – what if they are symptoms of energetic displacement? This is not as wild as it sounds. We have seen something similar in the fossil record. During the Cretaceous Period, ecosystems were lush. Elevated carbon dioxide and oxygen supported explosive plant growth and large animals with enormous metabolic demands. Life thrived through self-reinforcing loops: abundant food created abundant vitality.

We don’t have that same kind of loop today. As the global population increases, forests shrink, soils are depleted, and nutrient cycles unravel. Modern food is physically larger but nutritionally weaker. Vegetables are watered down, livestock is fattier, and soil minerals are depleted. Human health has increased survival but lost vitality. More children survive birth, but more people live with chronic conditions, burnout, mental illness, metabolic disorders, and attention collapse.

No doubt about it, humans are the most profound example of evolution. But in recent years, that legacy has been overshadowed by artificial intelligence. Our tools become smarter while our senses become duller. That isn’t because intelligence vanished -it is because energetic experience no longer flows through ritual, environment, community, and cosmology the way it used to. A machine can process data, but it cannot live inside meaning. The modern mind has traded depth for acceleration, and acceleration is not the same as vitality.

Maybe ancient societies weren’t magical. Maybe they were simply closer to the creation of our cosmos, by seconds, not miles, and lived inside conditions where energy, time, nature, and consciousness weren’t as fragmented as they are today. Their architecture, agriculture, religion, and astronomy formed a single system, not separate academic disciplines. Modernity broke that unity. Today, energy still flows, but much of it bypasses the body, the soil, the seasons, and the shared symbolic world that once held entire civilizations together.

Modern society may not collapse tomorrow, but energetically, biologically, and psychologically, the symptoms are already here.

Is it ethical to use quantum mechanics to treat neurological disorders despite our lack of understanding of quantum particles? 

Quantum mechanics has been used in medicine for a long time. In fact, our most common diagnostic tools – MRIs, X-rays, and PET scans- have all been used in practice for several decades now. Though as we edge closer to a deeper understanding of the sciences surrounding them, we have found ourselves in a gray area of ethics. You see, the furthest integration of quantum mechanics into medicine has been to detect abnormalities. But now, we might just be able to correct abnormalities with quantum particles, particularly within the nervous system, where our biology becomes the most intricate and complex. This possibility has raised eyebrows in both the medical and science communities due to its potential for disaster. Correcting abnormalities means physically manipulating the very atoms that make you, you. Since little is still known about the nature of subatomic particles and the importance they play in concepts such as “consciousness”, the ethics of even testing these treatments remain vague. 

“We are made of stardust.” 

Why is the statement, “we are made of stardust,” seen as a hopeful and socially accepted quote, when its synonymous phrase, “we are what we eat”, is seen as a crude generalization of an insult? 

I could begin this answer by describing humanity’s deeply rooted tendency to avoid certainty and responsibility, but that, too, would be a crude generalization. Since the dawn of time, humans have blamed chance, fate, supernatural deities, and, most abundantly, God. For what, you may ask? That’s a loaded question. Sin. Love. Droughts. Miracles. Illness. Hope. Fires. Happiness. Hunger. War. There has not been a single thing in today’s society that has not been built on avoidance. Humans seem to find comfort in believing our actions are not our own, regardless of how appealing the results may be. That “may” is the problem. We are escapists at heart, from the very first second we swam up onto land. 

The first statement allows us to bask in the inevitability of our glory. The latter forces us to confront our conscious habits that dictate our future results. The mistake I often see pointed out when dissecting these phrases lies in the latter usage of the word “you”. Though picking that word apart would mean the first phrase crumbles. For the first statement to be true, you must directly insert yourself into the life cycle of a star; to argue that there was no choice or “consciousness” in those stars ‘decisions’ would be a juxtaposition, let alone just ignorant. 

If we are able to make conscious decisions, and we are made from the very same elements that once ruled the cosmos (and nothing else), there are only two plausible trains of reason. 

1. Stars and other forms of matter do and have experienced what WE deem consciousness 

2. Stars and other forms of matter did not possess any, or the same type of consciousness that we experience. 

To elaborate on the second point, we must understand consciousness at the atomic level. It is a vibrational frequency that dances with others. If we size that conclusion up, it looks like attraction: to a favorite food, a person, or an interest. Or revulsion: to a food, a person, or an interest. There is also the gray area of neutrality – doing things just because. There would be no change in these reactions. An electron is attracted to the nucleus, but it will NEVER fall into it. An easier way to understand this would be to think about carbon – it’s in everything around us, but not everything is the same! There is not one atom that leads to a single definitive thing. They bind, they decay, they transform. This concept mirrors that of the life cycle. 

We already discussed why “you are what you eat” is considered derogatory, but why is it true when compared with “we are made from stardust”? If you want to generalize our chemical makeup to the point where you go back 13.8 billion years, then you also need to learn that what you ate an hour ago has also metabolized into the flesh you lather with cupcake body butter everynight. Everything around us has been recycled, and it will continue to do so until there is no energy left to move. 

What you put into yourself matters. Fast food and bad people will always make you groggy. We all contain a piece of eachother one way or another. But just as stars may not have had the same molecular model to reproduce what we deem as consciousness, it does not mean they did not have the capacity to. A few more complex elements, and they might have burned as bright as we do. The next time there is room for change in your life, be wary of what you let in. Stars created us, but they also made black holes. Embrace your attractions and repulsions, but remember they aren’t verdicts. What feels right may be radioactive. What feels wrong might be elementally transformative.