Cemeteries are usually places of sadness, but they do not need to be as it is very easy to liven them up.
Cemeteries are meeting places for the dead and the living they left behind. It is a place where time can stand still for a fleeting moment to allow infinity to show her face and to beckon us to contemplate about death, life and the universe; its past and its future. Cemeteries offer us space and time. They can be easily used to promote many things that get outdated too quickly and end up being discarded and forgotten too soon in this quick paced modern world. A thousand years to many people is a time span too long to comprehend.
But 1000 years in the life of our universe is like a blink of an eye that lasts about a tenth of a second, too fast to see, except when it is a wink directed at you by the opposite sex. Such a wink is clearly perceived and its memory can persist a lifetime.
Cemeteries showcase gravestones that offer brief descriptions of lives gone by. Unfortunately, most gravestones get discarded. Once the families who have paid for them forget their dead ancestors and stop paying for their graves or the cemetery runs out of space, the church has no other choice than to have the gravestones and the graves removed and reused. We all have relatives that we know, even if only a mother and perhaps a father. We all have as well 4 grandparents that we know of.
The number of our grandparents double in number with each generation. If we go back in time long enough, we all find cousins, even if they are distant cousins we have not known about. The further we dig into our ancestry the more relatives we uncover.
If we dig deep enough, we discover that the whitest European, the yellowest Chinese and the blackest African are all distant cousins. It is estimated that there were about 100 billion people born since modern man made his presence 50,000 years ago. The few people who were present at the beginning of mankind had multiplied and increased to 7 billion people over about 2,000 generations. We can plot this on a curve, rising from a few on the bottom to the 7 billion at the top. We can also plot for each and every one of us on the top a similar curve going downward showing our ancestors increasing exponentially in number. The point where the number of our ancestors equals the world population is the demarcation showing the point where we share our most distant ancestor with all people alive today as well as all the 100 billion that have been born. Studies have used computer modeling to estimate that the most recent common ancestor called MRCA of modern humans lived between 2,000 to 5,000 years ago.
There is a limit to growth where the population stops and starts to decline. Riggisberg is expected to grow over the 1,000 years as it grows from a small town into a big city. Additional churches with their cemeteries will be built, leaving the present cemetery with its present size. But death will continue and will increase as the population increases. At present, the death rate for the cemetery is about 20 people per year. This accumulates to 20,000 over 1,000 years.
Only 1,000 gravestones can be placed around the 300 m cemetery periphery before additional space is required in about 50 years.
Proposed pillars 2.5m high contain 90 gravestones each. For the projected 20,000 deaths, about 200 pillars are needed.
33 pillars can be stacked forming a 25 m high structure that can be built at the 3 corners of the cemetery. With the will and support of the community, from politicians, school boards, church congregations and citizens, the cemeteries and their gravestones can be given a life. The beautiful carved gravestones can be used to build walls, pillars and even buildings on the church ground.
The various stones made of granite, limestone and marble usually polished on the front side and left natural on the back side can be used as examples of rocks that can be touched and closely inspected. This is not possible with samples found locked up in glass cages in museums.
In addition, cemeteries can be used as the starting point for timeline and planetary walks demonstrating the grand vastness of our universe in its age and size.
The size of our sun is over a million times greater than the size of our planet Earth. It is about 150,000,000 km away and light from it takes over 8 minutes to reach us. Our solar system is even bigger. Light from the sun takes 4 hours to reach Neptune located at its outer edge. The closest star in our galaxy is so far away that light takes over 4 years to reach it. And for light to reach the closest galaxy to our milky way, it takes 2,500,000 years.
Atom walk:
The size of atoms are as small as the size of our solar system is big. We are in the middle of it all. A piece of dust is exactly halfway between the size of the Earth and an atom.
An atom is mostly empty space. If an atom was represented by a 100m diameter sphere, then its nucleus in the center would be a 1mm diameter ball.
There are as many atoms in a human cell as there are cells in a human body or stars in a galaxy. There are as many galaxies in the universe as cells in a human. There are 400 billion atoms in a typical human cell, 400 billion cells in a typical brain, 400 billion stars in a typical galaxy and 400 billion galaxies in the universe.
Planetary walk:
If the sun was 10cm in diameter, earth would be a 1mm sphere 10m away. The moon would be 3.5cm away from that, and Saturn would be 100m away.
Galaxy walk:
Galaxy walk:
If milky way galaxy was 100m diameter, the solar system would be 0.1mm diameter and nearest star would me 2mm away.
Universe walk:
Universe walk:
If our universe was 100m diameter, the milky way galaxy would be 0.1mm diameter and the nearest galaxy would be 2mm away.
Just like we find ourselves in the middle of the wide range of sizes from atoms to galaxies, the time intervals we experience are in the middle of the time scale of atoms and galaxies. Atoms rotate thousands of trillion times each second and galaxies take thousand of trillion of seconds to rotate once.
Just like we find ourselves in the middle of the wide range of sizes from atoms to galaxies, the time intervals we experience are in the middle of the time scale of atoms and galaxies. Atoms rotate thousands of trillion times each second and galaxies take thousand of trillion of seconds to rotate once.
Cells can only divide a certain number of times before they become unusable, like the fading copies of copies. They have a life span of months.
Normally larger and slower animals live longer than smaller and faster ones.
A fly lives only a few weeks while
a whale can live to be 200 years old.
Many plants in lush fast growing jungles live only 1 year, while giant trees can be 5,000 years old. The oldest living thing found is a creosote bush in the Mojave Desert which is more than 11,000 years old. The amount of time you live is largely determined by how well you are taken care of when you are young. If you survive to be an adult, then your life span is largely determined by your lifestyle. If you eat right, stay light, don't fight and play safe, then you can expect to live about 70 years. But once you die, even in the safety of a coffin, you will be only bones after a few years.
Normally larger and slower animals live longer than smaller and faster ones.
A fly lives only a few weeks while
a whale can live to be 200 years old.
Many plants in lush fast growing jungles live only 1 year, while giant trees can be 5,000 years old. The oldest living thing found is a creosote bush in the Mojave Desert which is more than 11,000 years old. The amount of time you live is largely determined by how well you are taken care of when you are young. If you survive to be an adult, then your life span is largely determined by your lifestyle. If you eat right, stay light, don't fight and play safe, then you can expect to live about 70 years. But once you die, even in the safety of a coffin, you will be only bones after a few years.
Timeline walk:
From the cemetery in Riggisberg, Switzerland, the timeline starts at the church. The church marks the beginning of the universe 14 billion years ago as well as the present. This is done by scaling it so that the 14 billion years is laid out over 40,000 km allowing the trail to go all the way around the earth. This as well allows the 14 billion years to be compared to one day. With this scaling, 1,000 years corresponds to 2.8 m or to 6ms of a day.
The Solar system formed 24,000km east or 16,000km west of the church. Life formed 14,000km west of the church, relatively late in the universe's lifetime. If the universe was born on midnight of an imaginary 24 hour day, and if the present time right now was midnight at the end of that day, life would have formed about 7 hours ago. It formed and developed and evolved very slowly and gradually.
Fishes, plants and fungi appeared about 50 minutes ago, and insects, 30 minutes ago. Dinosaurs roamed the earth 25 minutes ago for about 17 minutes. Flowers started to bloom and birds started to fly around 15 minutes ago and the bees joined them 3 minutes later. Man popped up and showed his head a third of a second ago to try to tame them all.
We can often learn from the past and be able to see better ahead to our future.
In 1 million years, Technetium 99, the waste byproduct of the present nuclear power plants which poses a danger when inhaled will have decayed and will have ceased to be a threat. Several kilometer-sized asteroids and comets on collision courses with Earth however will become a new and even greater threat to man's well being - if he is still here to be threatened.
Continents keep moving and it is not possible to change their momentum and direction. Africa continues its slide over and onto Europe and in 10 million years the Mediterranean sea will have dried up.
In a 100 million years, the continents we are so familiar with will be unrecognizable. Everything eventually dies and comes to an end to be born again.
In 1 billion years, as if to celebrate the evolution of fish, plants and fungi from the sponges a billion years ago, the sun will have become too hot for life of any kind. It will evaporate the oceans and man will be forced to leave Earth and look for new solar systems to exploit. The last one to leave will have no need to turn off the lights.
THE END
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