How We Saved an Alien Species: The Untold Story

July 13, 2022 RilalyLeave a comment

“It was a fact-finding mission,” Ty Tabor told a Congressional Committee devoted to finding out what happened during supposed alien invasion. “We were never on the brink of war or in the midst of an invasion,” Tabor added with a condescending tone. “It was a desperate mission, on their part, to see how we reacted to combat. I mean no disrespect for those who lost their lives in the combat that erupted, but these were brief skirmishes that resulted in some unfortunate death for both humans and aliens. They could’ve annihilated us with their advanced weaponry, and the genetics they designed specially for battle, but they didn’t. With all due respect to you and Congress, we should devote the rest of these hearings on why they didn’t wipe out the human race when they could’ve.“

As Tabor suggested, Earth wasn’t the first planet the aliens visited, and it wasn’t the last, but as we will detail in due course it turned out to be the most informative for them. They used one little nugget they discovered in their battles with Earthlings to save their small, resource-rich planet from constant war and possible extinction.

They proved to us that they’re generations ahead of us in gene manipulation, because the constant invasions they experienced over the the course of generations forced them to use their advancements in science and math to build the ultimate warriors that we witnessed on the battlefield. They sorted out their gene code to make their warriors run faster, and their hands operate faster and quicker. They’re now genetically designed to think quicker on the battlefield, and their methods of destruction are far more creative and devastating. The scientists from their species messed around with their gene code until they created more intelligent mathematicians and engineers to help their species create better weapons, and they monkeyed around with genetics, until they created beings who could go longer stretches without food and water.

War became a way of life for them, as the other alien species set down upon their planet for its resources. The young warriors we witnessed, and most of their species knew nothing but war for the whole of their lives. War and population replacement were their two primary concerns for so long that the only evidence of peace on their planet existed in their history books.

The moment after they developed a genetic superiority of some form, the invaders would capture a carcass and copy their genetic manipulations. Before long, the battles between alien species involved one genetically altered warrior against another, and the results of these battles ended up a 50/50 proposition, or what we might call a coin flip.

When they sent envoys to Earth, they found that we were largely inferior on the battlefield. When they stole our carcasses for study, they also found our genetic codes inferior. As we all know, not all of their battles on Earth were successful. We won some, but they won a whole lot more. When their alien counsel questioned their scientists and engineers, the scientists and engineers theorized that total annihilation of the human population would prove difficult if not impossible? Again, this wasn’t their primary directive, but the alien council wanted to know how the scientists and engineers came to this conclusion.

“It has nothing to do with any form of inferiority on our part,” one scientist theorized. “We are superior to them in every way that we can determine, save for one. Perhaps. If you want to call it that.” The alien council pressed the scientist on this topic. “I want to stress that this is but a theory, and I do not know if it is a superiority or an inferiority, but we found that humans have a greater desire to live than our superior warriors do. They do not do what is necessary to win a battle, most of the time, but their crafty solutions on the battlefield were informed by their desperation to keep living. Our warriors, again superior in every other way, did their jobs, but we found that most of them didn’t do what was necessary to survive. That difference proved to be the humans only advantage on the battlefield.”

“Why?” an alien council member asked.

“We’ve asked ourselves this many times,” the scientist said. “In preparation for my testimony today, my teams and I developed a number of complex answers that we thought our warriors could use against our enemies, but for every answer, we developed about ten more questions. The one answer we developed, which arrived as a recurring theme that no one noticed until someone did, might be the simplest answer but the most complex one for us to implement is that humans just seem to enjoy elements of life, and life in general, more than we do.”

The alien council was not satisfied with that answer and most of them rejected it for the record, and one even wanted it stricken from the record. After the scientist left the boardroom, one member of the alien council said, “The idea that we don’t want to consider what our esteemed scientists found should make it the one idea we consider most.”

The council brought in a number of the surviving warriors who saw action on Earth. The council wanted to focus on those who weren’t as successful to find out why. Most of them were so embarrassed by their failures that they wouldn’t admit, or didn’t know, why they were not completely successful. Their answers were so situational that they did not prove useful to the council.

The council finally brought in their most successful commander who won over 90% of his battles, yet they wanted to know why the commander thought his troops weren’t 100% successful.

In their interrogation, the council was careful to avoid any questions that might embarrass the commander, and they did not want to influence his answers with any of the answers they received prior to him taking to the floor. They wanted honest appraisals of the human beings to use for future manipulations of their species’ gene codes.

The commander started out situational, explaining why he thought they were successful in some locations and unsuccessful in others, but he mentioned that he thought some people in a very specific location had a greater will to survive than others did in other locations. When he concluded, a council member focused in on that idea of their greater will to survive, an idea the commander only mentioned in passing.

“They do have a will to live that surpasses any species we’ve encountered,” the commander said in an unprompted repetition of what the scientist said. “As opposed to most of the captured combatants I have witnessed throughout my career, most humans gave up whatever we wanted to know when we tortured them. We regarded this as a weakness at first, but we came to appreciate how much they wanted to survive.

“When we asked them why they wanted to survive so badly, some spoke of wanting to see their offspring grow to be adult humans, others spoke about enjoying their freedom, and some spoke of enjoying their lives in some sort of philosophical fashion.”

The alien council found those answers so esoteric that they struggled to understand how could use them. They brought in another commander who echoed many of the answers of the first, but he added:

“We captured one male who called himself Ty Gabor. Ty Gabor refused to give up any secrets that he knew,” the second commander said. “We killed Ty Gabor over twenty times in the most painful ways we’ve developed. We removed his limbs and his sensitive reproductive parts, and we damaged and repaired his mind so many times that we thought he would give up, but this man wouldn’t give up any information. In our after-torture interrogations, we found that he was willing to withstand this torture if he thought it meant that his nation and his world would live for one more day. We suspected, based on our precedents, that the primary reason he was holding out was for his offspring. So, we located his daughter and his son, and we killed them in front of him in one of the procedures he knew firsthand, he told us everything we needed to know with the hope that we would bring them back to life, as we did him. When we asked him why he held out so long, he talked about those offspring, but he also mentioned silly things, such as wanting to see a painting one more time, he said something about wanting to taste an animal called a ribeye one more time, and he said he missed hearing music after such a long incarceration.”

“What is a ribeye?” one of the council members asked.

“It is a species that they feed and maintain specifically to eat,” the second commander said. The commander then went down other roads, discussing some of the tactical maneuvers the humans used to thwart total annihilation that the council might be able to use in future battles, but one of the council members cut him off.

“Describe for us why you think eating this ribeye is something he enjoyed so much that that he wanted to continue life.”

“To be quite honest we did not expect the council to focus on this so much,” the commander said, rifling through his notes, “but Ty Gabor said, oh, here it is, he said that he enjoyed eating this animal so much that he experienced what he called euphoria, which he basically described a heightened emotional reaction. Our interrogator noted that he got so emotional about the ribeye that he cried, but it should be noted how long he spent in isolation, how many times we tortured and killed him, and how many times his mind was altered and repaired.

“We did notice,” the second commander continued, reading from the notes of various other interrogators, “that when we killed our captives’ children, took their limbs and ruined their minds so much that we thought we took away their will to live, our analysis showed that their minds switched to the smaller things, like the paintings, the music and the ribeye. One of them hoped that we might set him free so he could run in an open field with flowers in it. Some of them talked about doing a sporting event again, creating something artistic, and experiencing a heightened level of fondness that they have with another they call love.

“The human beings are not strong in mental or physical ways,” the commander concluded, “but they do not give up hope, and that does prove to be a strength in its own regard.”

Going forward, the alien council focused the rest of their interviews on the idea of this ribeye in conjunction with the human’s unusual propensity to desperately want to live. The problem the council had with the humans’ desire for freedom, and their desire to continue living for their offspring was that the aliens genetically altered those codes out of their warriors. It would take them a generation to correct that error, and they might lose many battles, or their planet, in the interim. They decided they might use all of the information long term, but they needed a quick fix too, and they decided that the ribeyes might provide them this.

“Humans need food to sustain life,” one of the council leaders suggested after the interviews were done, and they discussed the data their people found, “but we do too. The difference is that humans appear to enjoy eating food so much that it adds to their quality of life. Is it possible that we might give our warriors a small edge by giving them a quality of food that is better than our adversary’s and that their desire to eat more of it might lead them to want to live longer and thus increase their win percentage in battle?”

“We have survived this long by focusing on the larger ideas,” one of the other council members added at the tail end of the meeting. “We have better knowledge and technology, but we basically built robots to protect us. We erased the genetic codes that promote emotion. Now, I am not saying that was wrong, because we would not be here if our warriors knew fear and were overcome by feelings of pain, but by erasing their emotions we might have accidentally erased many of the details that drive the humans to some success in battle. The humans from Earth taught us a great deal about values and principles and desire and all of the messy details of existence that we worked so hard to erase. We can give our current warriors ribeyes, but we should probably reset some of the genetic codes that promote feelings about genetic offspring, spouses, and the general sense of family, their nations, and our world to give them something to fight for and survive for, as the humans have.”

The simple experiment of allowing their warriors to eat ribeye proved so successful for the aliens in the short term, because their warriors reacted in the manner they hoped, but even more than that, their adversaries couldn’t figure out how these aliens were winning such a high percentage of their battles. The adversaries studied the alien carcasses and scanned for the modifications of their genes. They couldn’t find anything of course, and they sought complex answers that drove them away from the simple answer the aliens derived from their skirmishes with the humans. The problem for the alien council was that there were a limited number of ribeyes on Earth that they found humans called cows, and that the ribeye was but a piece of that cow. They decided that they wouldn’t steal all of the humans’ cows, so they began capturing select bulls and cows to create their own. The next problem that arose was that the warriors suggested that the reward of eating ribeye diminished over time. The aliens sent more enjoys down to Earth to study the human digestive tract for other dietary choices they could offer their warriors. By probing the anuses of the humans, the aliens found that some humans enjoyed eating an animal called pork more than the cow, and others enjoyed eating a bird called chicken. They implemented these animals into their warriors’ diets, and they added all of the various plants they found in the humans’ digestive tracts. The surprising results suggested that not only did the warriors want to survive their battles more often, but their overall health improved, and their life expectancy increased.

The alien council’s suggestions proved so successful for so long that their adversaries simply gave up trying to conquer their planet, and this resulted in an unprecedented level and length of peace and prosperity on their planet. This peace and prosperity lasted so long that the generations of aliens who followed only knew war through history books. This presented the alien species with new problems, as they found that when their citizens weren’t living every day in fear of war, they focused their unhappiness on other things, and for this future alien councils found that they could not turn to Earthlings for answers.

We’re Doomed! Long Live the Gloom!

June 21, 2022November 8, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“The planet’s not in trouble,” a comedian said onstage. “It has survived countless threats, tragedies, and catastrophes. The planet will be just fine. Human beings, however, we’re screwed.”

We’re doomed, and we love it! If ratings, proceeds, and ratings mean anything, doom and gloom is big business.

We want it in the all-too-near future, “Ten years from now…” Ten years is one of our favorite time frames. Twenty years is too far away and five years is too close. We want urgency, we need it now, but not too close. We might deem it hysterical if it’s too close, and we might not worry about it if it’s too far away, so we’ve deemed ten years the Goldilocks, sweet spot for dystopian rants. I think I can top them. I think future street corner bell ringers might want to narrow their hysterical rants for greater appeal among consumers. If you know anything about grocery store pricing, you know that consumers find round numbers too stark, too pricey, and generally unappealing. Their psychologist advisors have informed them that consumers find $9.99 more appealing than $10.00. It’s a penny right, what’s the difference? These psychologists say it’s everything to consumers, so we now see their items listed accordingly on all shelves, car salesmen do it, and everyone who wants to appeal to this mindset we all have. The chicken littles of our future might want to recalibrate accordingly and say, “Nine years and nine-nine days from now…”

Ten years also seems like enough time for human ingenuity to develop a solution. If we’re facing a true cataclysm that will end the human population, we have to think it would become the sole focus of more than a few of our brightest stars in science, engineering, and just about every other focus we have to attempt to counter the sure-to-come devastation of life on the planet?

How many times has human life faced extinction only to have some genius come along and devise an ingenious way of saving life? This time it’s different, of course. This time, no one can save us. We’re helpless. How exciting!

We’ve all been here before, in theoretical forecasts, but this is the future. We’re here to report that the ten years in the future that we’ve forecast for the last seventy years is now here. It is ten years in the future, and a moment, not the moment, but a moment we’ve feared for at least seventy years is here, and we don’t know what to do about it.

The reporters investigated and attempted to locate and expose a human culprit. They hopscotch between various narratives to find a bad guy before it’s too late. They join forces with the scientific community to narrow the focus of their study on human involvement. Regardless whether they’re wrong or right, they have the best intentions.

There are no high-profile news agents ten years in the future. They’ve been exposed in one way or another, and relatively few read, watch, or listen to them anymore. In their wake, citizen journalists rose up on the internet and developed reputations for telling the truth in the years preceding the looming tragedy. Some of the more prominent citizen journalists provided a contrarian belief that certain scientists developed by studying the looming tragedy through various angles that focus on the math and science of the universe. These contrarian scientists eventually proved incorrect, and those with no knowledge of science rained fire upon them.

“It’s you job to figure this out!” a reporter screamed at a contrarian scientist, as he walked to his car. This confrontation went viral and social media launched “It’s your job!” meme at scientists, and the citizen journalists who supported them.

The contrarian, non-human theories were rejected so often, and so publicly, that most become afraid to voice their concerns with their neighbors, lest they be called a denier. “There’s nothing we can do!” becomes the credo of the day. “The scientific consensus suggests there’s nothing we can do.”

Teams of scientists hear this, of course, and they’re scared, but some of them brave the cynical firestorm to push this theory that the new, unforeseen, looming, and disastrous event involves a detailed and complicated natural occurrence that has nothing to do human beings.

“It is,” they write, “an event that occurs throughout the universe on a relatively infrequent basis, and it is going to occur near Earth, unless we are able to do something about it.”

Numerous scientists attempt to disprove their theory, as is their role, and most of them suggest that their findings are inconclusive. Some of those scientists who unsuccessfully attempt to disprove the theory, decide to pursue the theory in purely hypothetical mathematical and scientific forms. “If true,” they write, “then we could use an end around to avert the looming disaster.” Other scientists join in and posit theories around this new end around theory.

“It’s time to say it, Science has failed us!” a major online news publication, that no one reads anymore, states in the title of an article they publish in a desperate attempt to remain popular. The article proves popular, of course, as a crude attempt to develop “if it bleeds, it leads” style click-bait articles that feed into the gloom and or doom themes. “As time continues to tick down,” the article states, “our most brilliant minds continue to fail to find a solution.”

Scientists develop other theories, and other scientists disprove them. The lack of understanding of science, leads to mayhem all over the world as citizens the world over begin to panic over the delays. In the midst of that panic, as time ticks precariously closer, a scientific hypothesis emerges.

High profile scientists immediately reject the hypothesis, with no evidence, and popular sentiment follows suit. Prominent leaders of the world join the popular sentiment. With the lack of any government endorsements, and more importantly government funding, these teams of scientists desperately seek private donors to help them pursue the hypothesis that no scientist has been able to concretely disprove. The theory does not please anyone and everyone is torn, until it works. The event from the far reaches of the universe is thwarted, and the little dots in the universe, we call human beings, avoid extinction. Most of us feel weirdly disappointed when we realize that we get to live at least a little bit longer.

Science does not experience a popular upgrade in the aftermath, since so much of it failed, so often, when people were really scared. The citizen journalists do not experience more popularity, as the historical record suggests they backed the wrong horse more often than not. One citizen journalist, in defense of his record, and the record, suggests that this is the nature of science. “Most of science is as wrong, flawed, and incompetent as the humans who develop it. Scientists develop theories and other scientists disprove them, until the various teams compile a deeper knowledge of the harmony of math and science in the universe.” He continues, “Scientists are flawed human beings who aren’t large enough to qualify as a speck in the universe. Our/their knowledge and understanding of how universe the works wouldn’t qualify as a speck either. The failure of these brilliant minds only reinforces how little we are, and we can know what we know and still be wrong an overwhelming number of times, until some congealed form of human ingenuity, based entirely on observations, wrong educated guesses, and the infighting we now all know about leads, inevitably and almost accidentally, trip on a truth.”

The politicians who said the end around theory would never work, because they wanted us to follow the theory that they supported, now attempt to embrace the end around theory as one they supported all along. The reporters and social media outlets who rejected and condemned anyone who believed in the theory move onto other, click-bait stories of the next looming disaster.

When Tuesday rolls around, everyone forgets how close we actually came to extinction on Monday, as few appreciate a tragedy that never happens. The various teams of scientists who developed, pursued, and helped execute the end around theory are vilified by the scientific community, the politicians eventually join in the condemnation for those who saved the world, and the media seeks numerous angles to further vilify them. A major, online publication produces a series of pictures depicting the team of scientists most responsible for saving the world in mug shots. “They saved the world,” the title of the feature article says. “Why it’s not okay to like them.”

Some of the scientists who braved the negative forces primed against them to save the world, quit their jobs, others finish out their career anonymously, because their names were never attached to the chains that led to the theories that saved the world, and one unfortunate scientist commits suicide. “Leave my family alone!” was the first sentence of his suicide note.

“He joined a team that wound end up saving the human race from annihilation,” the suicide victim’s friend said in the eulogy, “and they destroyed him for it.”

It is the future, it is the past, and it is the present.

Mutually Assured Destruction

“He was the worst human being on the planet,” we now hear. “What he did was indefensible!” The definition of defensible involves flowcharts. Who is the alleged perpetrator? “Who are his victims?” What was the nature of his crime? “Was he well-intentioned or just awful?” It’s impossible to know, and we might never know. We base our conjecture on what team we’re on.

If we’re on his team, we qualify with excuses. We have so many excuses. Why? We don’t really know what happened, so why do we care so much about the accused that we’re willing to put our reputation on the line to see our guy go free or be penalized as little as possible? “What if he’s guilty?” What if he’s innocent? “All right, but what if?” We have no serious, vested interest. We’re just watching it on TV.

They don’t believe him. We know they’re on a certain team. If they believe him. We know they’re on the other team. The bad team. We know they’re capable of anything. We don’t know the truth, but we know if they pound the table harder than the other guy, they can sway popular opinion.

“What is the truth?” No one would openly say that the truth doesn’t matter anymore, “but someone has to be right,” and someone has to be wrong. Do we crush the importance of truth under the weight of what’s right? “I don’t know and you don’t know,” but let’s not study that subtle distinction. “Right.” We know that they’re wrong, and no one will be able to convince us otherwise. Our guys aren’t capable of wrongdoing, because like us, they come from better stock. “They would never do that.” We like our side, because they make us feel like a major component.

When we debate the other team’s proponents, we fear they might know something we don’t. We know our stuff, but we don’t have that haymaker to silence all debate. Everyone is searching for the person, place or thing that provides the haymaker. Yet, we don’t even bring it up, thinking that they might know something we don’t, or they could be offended. Saying our guy could be innocent might offend their sensibilities, and our friends might not be our friends in the aftermath.

We can find the truth, as always, nestled somewhere in between. The lawyers in every industry define a truth. Not the truth. They manage information and disinformation so well that they push us further away from the truth through whatever means necessary. It’s called a quality defense, and we’re willing to pay buku bucks for it. Everyone is afraid of lawsuits, so we don’t question their version of the truth.

There are those who report a truth based on how they see it. Are they right? Who cares? We dismantle truth seekers based on past behavior to destroy them, so no one believes their version of truth. The truth seeker goes on defense, and our assumption of guilt and innocence depends on how much they defend themselves. The more they defend themselves, the guiltier they are. We think we’re onto something. As far as we know, they reported their side’s version of truth. Is their side’s version of the truth true? Who cares, destroy them before they destroy us in a pact of mutually assured destruction.

This might sound cynical, but how could anyone paying attention avoid some semblance of cynicism? Cynicism is the safe place for those seeking foolproof status. You can’t fool me, and neither can they, but while no one can call me a fool, I can’t say I know anything about the spaces in between.

The Mystery of the History of Zero

April 4, 2022March 14, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

Zero has always meant nothing to us. It lurks in the shadows of something. It’s a number, but it kind of isn’t in some confusing, “I don’t want to think that much” way. It has its own identity, and it doesn’t. It’s complicated, and it’s not. It’s an odd number, but it’s not odd. It’s not even even, but it is and it isn’t. We don’t consider it prime or composite. It’s not positive or negative, as it separates the negative from the positive. It’s a number but it also represents the absence of a number. It’s so confusing to us that we have to wonder if teachers should even teach its advanced concepts, and if they do, at what age? We were taught the basic facts of how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide zero, but when we reached advanced mathematical concepts, we learned that certain mathematical answers cannot be answered. They’re undefined, which led us to say, “What do you mean undefined? It’s zero.” At this point, the mathematician explains that if we try to divide twelve groups of people into zero groups, it cannot be done. It’s undefined. It’s complicated, and it’s not.

As Andreas Nieder writes in a 2016 paper, “For a brain that has evolved to process sensory stimuli (something), conceiving of empty sets (nothing) as a meaningful category requires high-level abstraction. It requires the ability to represent a concept beyond what is perceived.”

“We’ve now reached a point in our history where we have to describe nothing,” someone, with some sort of twisted brilliance, said at various points in human history to try to advance the cause of what we now call zero. “How can we properly appreciate the concept of something, without a concrete grasp of nothing?” “But there’s always something,” his counterpart probably argued. “Is there nothing in the vast expanse of a desert? There’s sand, over one septillion of tiny grains of sand, and how many molecules litter the water of the vast quantities of nothingness in the ocean? Even in the vast expanses of space, there’s always something.” Zero is not substantial when compared to the other numbers, and it’s not tangible, but how many of our current creations, and measurements for those creations, would be almost inconceivable without it? It’s been there for so long now that we take it for granted. Yet, it went through a long, slow, debated, and debatable gestation cycle. Even in the relatively limited historical record of ancient civilizations, such as those in Babylon, India, and the Mayan civilization, zero, or some semblance of zero, appears. We don’t know why it made an appearance numerous times in different civilizations. Its birth remains a mystery to us, because its purpose wasn’t defined. They invented the concept of zero, but there is no evidence to suggest that they developed it in a substantial manner. As with most theories, they appear to have failed to apply the concept of it to real world constructs, but we have to give them credit for developing the theory of it. Bottom line, their theory was probably as difficult for them to grasp as it was to explain, because there’s always something. Even if we laid four avocados on the ground and then removed them, there would still be the millions of granules of dirt beneath it, trees, leaves, and the micro organisms that feed on them. There’s always something. Scholars believe zero began its life as something to fill columns when humans advanced their attempts to count. When those who invented, developed, and applied a method of counting, they encountered a void after nine. Their question, how do we get past nine, and all the other nines that lead to ninety-nine without something to carry us to the next number. How do we get to eleven, twenty-one, and one hundred and one? India’s positional numeral system needed a zero to scale past 9, and their trade demanded it. They needed a placeholder, or something to fill the void. They didn’t start counting numbers with zero, but they wrote a placeholder in the tens, the hundreds, and the thousands to fill columns when necessary.

In a Scientific American article, Charles Seife, author of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Viking, 2000), says “Filling columns is not a full zero. A full zero is a number on its own; it’s the average of –1 and 1.” “The Number Zero began to take shape as a number, rather than a punctuation mark between numbers, in India, in the fifth century A.D.,” says Robert Kaplan, author of The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (Oxford University Press, 2000). “It isn’t until then, and not even fully then, that zero gets full citizenship in the republic of numbers,” Kaplan says. Some cultures were slow to accept the idea of zero, which for many carried darkly magical connotations. But Seife is not certain that even a placeholder zero was in use so early in history. “I’m not entirely convinced,” he says, “but it just shows it’s not a clear-cut answer.” He notes that the history of zero is too nebulous to clearly identify a lone progenitor. “In all the references I’ve read, there’s always kind of an assumption that zero is already there,” Seife says. “They’re delving into it a little bit and maybe explaining the properties of this number, but they never claim to say, ‘This is a concept that I’m bringing forth.’” Kaplan’s exploration of zero’s genesis turned up a similarly blurred web of discovery and improvement. “I think there’s no question that one can’t claim it had a single origin,” Kaplan says. “Wherever you’re going to get placeholder notation, it’s inevitable that you’re going to need some way to denote absence of a number.”

**The Revolutionary, Ancient Indian Dot**

So, if the Babylonians developed a placeholder (a wedge) by 300 BCE, not a “full zero.” India’s leap—likely pre-Brahmagupta, with the Bakhshali manuscript (3rd-7th century AD)—was making zero a standalone number, and the Maya did it too, independently, by the 4th century AD, we might suggest that there is a well-defined trail but no clear-cut discoverer, inventor, or even a well-defined point of origin, of the number zero, as it was always just kind of there, but its functionality wasn’t even as clear to early users as the functionality of negative numbers appears to have been. If it was always kind of been there, but rarely used as a number, how did zero make the leap as a concept? Why did the powers of the zero contain “darkly magical connotations?” As with all cultures, modern and otherwise, the unknown is beyond current capabilities to explain, so we assigned mystical, dark, and forbidden connotations to explanations of what we otherwise cannot. With that in mind, why did someone brave the “here, there be dragons” designation to further the concept, and what was the reaction among their peers? What twisted, weird, and just plain different theoretician(s) sat in a bathtub and dreamed up ways to further the concept of nothing and zero. If he eventually managed to successfully sway his peers to accept the premise of this proposed furtherance, how did he answer their “And then what?” questions. Okay, we’ll accept the premise of your newfound importance of a zero, but what do we do with it? Theory is one thing, application is quite another. How do you propose we use it? What purpose will it serve? When we’re building a house, diagramming a structure, or figuring out how to use water in our fields, what purpose does a concrete explanation of nothing serve? Your point of reaching a greater understanding of something through nothing is a provocative one for pointy-headed intellectuals to consider in their philosophy caves, but how do we apply it to real world concerns? In my uninformed and admittedly limited search, I found no timeline specifically breaking down a concretized life cycle of the zero. Various points on the timeline state that it was discovered here, mysteriously listed there, and it appeared here, there, and elsewhere in the historical timeline, but in terms of some form of functionality it mirrors the resume of the misspent life of a cousin who did nothing in life. He was always there, but he never did anything noteworthy. No one knows how it happened, nor can they answer the when, where or why questions, but he became the star of the family one day. The most interesting elements to the timeline of the zero are not the who and when, though they are interesting, but the philosophical push of how zero made its way into the halls of Physics, Calculus, Engineering, Geometry, relativity and quantum mechanics, and a large part of finance and economics to, in many cases, eventually lead the way to numerous modern advancements in these areas. If dealing with natural numbers, i.e. 1,2,3 …, is dealing with tangible things and events, the zero provided more of an abstract idea for mathematicians. This provided mathematicians greater freedom from real world constructs and representational qualities into high-level abstraction. The eventual inclusion of the properties of the number zero was such that the advancements of modern mathematics would not be possible without it. Imagine being a renowned “genius” in one of the fields listed above, and you have a problem that has plagued you for much of your life. This genius has put this problem to a group of peers and his students for decades, and no one can solve it. The genius eventually labels this problem unsolvable, a 0̷, or no solution, until some egghead walked up to him in the town square, while he sipped on his brew and said, “Try putting a zero on it.” The renowned expert probably sent this egghead away with a “Yeah, great, Montenegro, now go home to your flock of sheep and your basket weaving, and leave me alone.” Until, the expert went home, and they hell’d it, and put that zero into his mind-boggling equation. Did the genius use the zero to solve the problem, or did he approach it in a way that he never considered before? Was the genius’ problem of solving for something only solvable by introducing the concept of nothing? It’s impossible to know if a representation of nothing had an epiphany affect on any one person soon after it was incorporated into theoretical or actual problems, but we have to imagine that the effects and affects were cumulative until we finally arrived at a collective epiphany that led us to fully incorporate it over time.

A very brief and succinct description of our favorite number/non-number zero is that it flickered in ancient Babylon as a placeholder wedge by 300 BC, but India’s Bakhshali manuscript (3rd-7th century AD) and Brahmagupta’s 7th-century rules made it a real number. The Maya mirrored this leap by the 4th century, while Al-Khwarizmi carried it to the Islamic world in 825 AD. Europe, stubbornly resisted until Fibonacci’s 1202 Liber Abaci, finally caught on—linking India, the Middle East, and the West in a slow, vibrant chain. The research suggests that if Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta, Al-Khwarizmi, and Fibonacci, and the other brave souls hadn’t weathered the storms to bring zero to absolute indoctrination, the progress we know today, “the opening of the universe,” wouldn’t have been possible. Zero defines nothing and everything at the same time. It can be used as a point of origin, in positive and negative ways, and some suggest that those brave souls ended up furthering knowledge to advance Physics, Calculus, Engineering, Geometry, relativity and quantum mechanics, and a large part of finance and economics. The very idea that the “nothing is something and something is nothing” complex identity of zero ended up playing a starring role in science. In Calculus, for example, zero provides a tease of limits, where functions flirt with the abyss as values approach it. In relativity, zero-point energy keeps the universe buzzing even at absolute rest, and in binary code, 0 as “off” teams with 1’s “on” to whisper digital secrets to us. Mr. Zero, as we should now address his highness, or lowness, depending on how we choose to view him, transformed computers from clunky gear-spinners to sleek bit-flippers, while revolutionizing physics and engineering. Without zero, we might have to work with Roman numeral guesswork to form the precise calculations necessary to build bridges and figure out planetary orbits. If the geniuses listed here hadn’t developed a theoretical counterpoint to something, in these fields and others, we might have to leave such matters to vague speculation and our imaginations. Imagine that! Zero is also one of the primary languages of the computer. We’ve all heard the phrase ones and zeroes. Zeroes are needed to create code and messages that the computer requires for functionality. If the properties of zero were never invented, discovered, and advanced, is it possible we wouldn’t have the knowledge or the technology necessary for the computer? Even after everything it’s been through and everything it has accomplished for us, we still have no love for zero. The full zero, standing on it’s own, and the average between -1 and 1, represents absolute failure in the classroom, a complete condemnation of athletic ability on a scoreboard, and desperation when it appears alone in our bank accounts (zero involves some desperation, but not the total devastation the negative numbers create in our equations). We considered calling someone an absolute zero to be worst insult we could say about a person, until Billy Corgan came along and reminded us of its positive, negative and abstract qualities. We also thought we had a firm grasp on the traits of nothing, until the writers of Seinfeld redefined it and showed us how brilliant nothing could be. Now imagine going back to a time before zero to explain to the most brilliant minds in math and science how zero and its resulting revolutionary concepts have reshaped our world. “Achieving something is just as important in our time as it is yours,” we might say, “but the most brilliant minds of the civilizations, since your time, couldn’t have achieved half of what they did without fully developing and realizing the properties and possibilities of nothing.”