Fac ut Vivas

alternate title: one more post before I get down again to serious scientific work (wink, wink)

In 1997, US Navy detected a mysterious ultra-low frequency underwater sound across the Pacific Ocean. Analysis of the sound (which when sped up, lasts more than a minute) indicates that it is a sound similar to a whale song (bloop). There were factors which made it difficult to assess the exact nature of the bloop.

(spectrogram of the bloop sound)

Among them, theories suggest that it was made by an underwater animal that is much bigger than the blue whale. Quite possibly, it could have been made made by a gigantic squid and it was detected near S50°, W 100°.

… where a fabled sunken city was supposed to rest, the city of R’lyeh where the great dreamer, Cthulhu slumbers, waiting for a time when stars are right again.

To some people, this ominous sound meant that the star-spawn Cthulhu "still lives … in that chasm of stone which has
shielded him since the sun was young … his ministers on
earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely
places"

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There is a story that relates how science is the ultimate blasphemy to the human ego. Before Copernicus re-popularized the solar notion, the Earth and man’s position in the universe was undisputed. The stars were the ultimate spectators: scattered and twinkling across a fixed dome, the sun and moon a gentle reminder of God’s separation of day and night. The world is fixed and flat and mankind walked as masters of the earth. There is nothing he could not conquer under heaven.

Here the details of the story diverges. One follow-up to this story goes like this: in time, great men and greater minds were born, the mysteries of the life and death started to unravel. the heavens that were once populated with gods and goddesses, heroes and villains, became an empty space, it’s inhabitants nothing more than residues of a cataclysm that happened some 14 billion years ago. But rather than raising our cosmic profile, we discover that the our carbon-based existence is almost an accident. We are stardust fashioned by electromagnetic reactions in an amino acid soup.

The beasts that fired the imaginations of our ancestors as they spread across on land and over the seas, were not gods in disguise. They were branches in an evolutionary tree that billions of years transforms into hairy upright bipeds. We are not special. We share in the nature of other lowly animals without any divine favor.

In other dark corners of the earth, the follow-up to the story is the same: Our place in the cosmos is even more nihilistic. This time, it was not science that struck down man from occupying a higher place in Grand scheme of the universe. 

Across the gulf of space, Old ones  have crossed the immense boundaries and brought their bizarre symbols and weird incantations to bear upon our young world.

"Those Old Ones
were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had
told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never
died. This … cult … had always existed and
always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world
until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty
city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath
his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult
would always be waiting to liberate him."

… and when they do, Cthulhu will sway the dreams of all men, "the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy."

This story hasn’t ended yet and like the narrator in the short story "Call of Cthulhu", we cannot help but ask "Who knows
the end?"

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http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/cthulhu.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Call_of_Cthulhu
http://www.gordon-fernandes.com/hp-lovecraft/