The Kepler Telescope found and tracked more than a thousand planets in the first few months of operation as it monitors 156,000 stars - about .0001 percent of the stars within our galaxy. Kepler scientists estimate that there are at least 200 Billion planets in, 30 percent of which are Earth-sized. That’s at least 60 Billion Earth-sized planets. A yet unknown percentage of these are in the life-fomenting “sweet spot” where temperature and elemental composition are similar to our own. Even more notable, we now understand that there are planets of considerably different size than earth, say Neptune-sized that are not as gas-heavy as our large planets and could if in the sweet-spot of a solar system, also support life. 

So what, Jonny? What does this have to do with your music?

A major recurring theme throughout many of my songs is the cosmic unimportance of human life and pretty much anything humans do, think, feel, love, hate, read, watch, and whatever else. Humans as individuals and as a species are not cosmically important. We are an ultra-tiny spec so terribly small that our brains can barely fathom (if at all) our relative place. One way to start is to think about the relative significance of a single atom in your body. Not only are there 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a human body but you will shed billions of atoms every second. A single atom in you is almost too inconsequential to fathom. Well, now try to imagine that single atom’s importance to the entire human race. If you can do that, you’re still just scratching the surface of what it means (or rather how little it means) to be a human in our universe.

Our existence, while it feels very complex and rich with struggle, growth, achievement, relationship, discovery, art, and everything else on which we project importance is actually humorously simple if you really think about it. We have made immense achievements in technology and communication, yet we primarily use these channels to acquire wealth, wage war, and gossip. We landed on the moon, which cost us about 25 billion dollars. We spent 500 billion on Defense in 2010. We care way more about financial security and preservation of our social and government system than we do about exploration.

As the cliche goes, so much seems to have changed upon one glance but on another is remarkably the same.

So, Jonny … what am I to do with this information? Why is this important if nothing else is?

That’s just it. It isn’t. I am just sharing some thoughts on my art. I am unavoidably part of the system I critique. Having knowledge and being able to do something with it are very different things. This knowledge and some other understanding has formed my world-view and belief structure. Religion and the idea of any sort of deity was out the door a long time ago. Also thrown out is the concept of Truth - good and bad, right and wrong; all just projections, reflections, and refractions of natural biological and physical processes that would manifest in all sorts of other ways if we weren’t here to try to name and predict them.

Do with this information what you want. I am proverbially, “just saying”. And to accent this little article, I’ll attach a LowHero.DLL song that I think sums it all up pretty well.