Scratch Pad – Theory of Default

Why some things are the way they are! I call it Theory of Default. This theory is not limited to any particular field of study. It is a general notion of acceptance of all the events that happen in our daily life as they happen.

I do not want to counter the belief of questioning “why” because if we do not question we will not “learn” and consequently we will not “improve”.

I was recently reading a news that scientist have discovered a planet far distant to our galaxy but it is found to be rotating a star. Then there was another statement stating that scientist believes its atmosphere has gas. The important question that remains to be answered is whether the planet has life, and if it has what kind of life, single cell microbes (the most basic of life form), or more complex ones. Now there seems to be billions of possibilities of the life-form on that planet. So how do we get to trickle down on may be thousands of possibilities as compared to billions. Let me share some understanding of our solar system. The temperature on the sun’s surface is around 6000C (refererence 1). The earth is at the right distance from the sun to sustain life. Any closer or farther, I wouldn’t have been here to write all this (there would be no life on earth). Every day there are some 4 billion meteors striking earth(reference 2). But it has the gaseous atmosphere to completely burn away almost all of them before they could reach the surface. Also it had the right composition of the gases in the atmosphere to sustain life. I have just listed few, there could be many more threats to life on earth. But all I want to say is if after all there numerous odds life exists on earth, then should be the only way life could exists any where. Hence, only in this form, the life (on earth) was able to counter every threat from outside universe. So here comes the theory of default, that if there the life should exists in the complete universe it should be exactly the same as it is on earth, the only difference we could observe is that it would either be less developed or more developed than us. So in other words it would be either the past or the future of our own existence.

I can see it in day-to-day life also. For e.g. a very small company (organization) seems to be working with best efficiency (I am talking of the internal functions executed by the HR and Administration dept.). But as they grow in size, the same employee star complaining about the bureaucratic nature of the same internal functions. We fail to consider the fact that this way of working may not be the most efficient but still the big companies across the globe follow the same structure. If there would have been something fundamentally wrong in this structure then this kind of structure could have been outdated till now. Though the processes and structure keep changing day by day, and time will show us whether this bureaucratic structure is the best, but for the time being I will just end the draft by assuming that this is what a big organization was supposed to function by default!

The only way we could improve upon the things(as they are currently) is by adapting in the right manner towards them. Now this “adapting” and “right” are again very subjective so I leave it to you :).

1. http://solar-center.stanford.edu/compare/comparison.html
2. http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/space/solarsystem/meteors/meteors.html