Fractals anyone? Can you imagine being an Ant in a Micro-World?

Please Note: This is an old blog post that I relocated here from a website of mine that I recently deleted. The original date of this post is September 10th, 2012.

I suppose that I could expound upon this subject in great detail, be overly elaborate and anything but terse, but since we are all little ants stuck in this micro-world of an infinite pattern, I feel that the readers should help fill in the blanks (in due time) within the comment field.

On the other hand, I will briefly provide a little teasing verbiage and a couple cool videos, to get the ball rolling……

There are plenty of size/proportion concepts out there, and just by using our solar system alone, we start to feel small. It never stops there, as if we go up, into a larger scale like our galaxy, things seem to dwarf us even more. Oh, forget about the galaxies, as they are tiny, so let's move into the great wide open and call it the universe. Yikes! Can I go back? Sure, you can! Okay, let's go back to Earth…

Before I start talking about being an Ant living in a Micro-World, I must ask: Have you ever heard of fractals?

Most people relate such things to mathematics, as a fractal is a mathematical set that has a fractal dimension that usually exceeds its topological dimension and may fall between the integers. Fractals are typically “the same from near as from far,” and they may be exactly the same at every scale and/or different scales. The definition of fractal goes beyond such petty affairs and into a detailed pattern that constantly repeats itself.

All of this mumbo jumbo reminds me of when I used to say, while proclaiming a theory of unity, that everything is split among the endless dividends of one. This is one of those subjects that you can analyze downward as much as you can upward, if that makes any sense…

I’m going to pick out a couple random (quick) videos about fractals, albeit you must watch them before commenting on this post. I would like for you, for the ones who haven’t thought much about this subject, to get an elementary idea of what I mean by proportion. First up, will be a rather basic video, called “Understanding Fractals,” and you can find it below:

Fractal Art? Oh, why should I go there? It is awesome, to say the least… This post is mainly about proportion and an ongoing pattern, so I’ll skip through the art aspects (although I’m currently a dormant artist) and provide a fairly nifty video of fractals, below:

Why am I talking about being an Ant in a micro-world?

Hell, your guess is as good as mine, but I thought that the ant would best represent an organized insect, one who often fights and engages in wars like us humanoids, all while being oblivious to the higher scales of life.

Can you imagine being shrunk down to the size of an ant, and viewing this very same planet through that perspective? What we deem as a “micro-world” is just as much a “world” as any other. People who often chant foolish rhetoric while talking about the galaxies and the universe, often forget about their very own piece of the pie, which is right here on Earth. It is all the same, really, just different levels. We may never find the funnels that truly create during this lifetime, but we can only hope to eventually find the divine pattern. From microscopic organisms to the gargantuan Dinosaurs of the past, from tiny planets to large suns, from galaxies to the universe and above, what does all this mean? Is it really important to understand the universal proportion or should we simply ignore it and concentrate on our individual portion?

We are like ants, when you think about it, if you back up a few thousand feet. Does it mean that we are insignificant? Of course not, because we are rather unique. Well, I shouldn’t get all poetic, or else I’ll ruin the train of thought. Anyway…

This post reminds me of a couple movies that demonstrate what proportions really mean. One, was a family movie called “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.” The other flick that quickly comes to mind, was an old science fiction film called “Fantastic Voyage,” which they later remade into a more modern movie entitled “Innerspace.”

At any less than insane rate, what is your thoughts about fractals, human proportion with the cosmos, and anything else that relates to being an ant stuck in a micro-world?

---Side Note: You may want to further your reading by searching online for Fractal Dimensions, which is a ratio providing a statistical index of complexity comparing how detail in a pattern (fractal pattern) changes with the scale at which it is measured. It has also been characterized as a measure of the space-filling capacity of a pattern that tells how a fractal scales differently than the space it is embedded in; a fractal dimension does not have to be an integer.

In addition to that, especially if you enjoy digital/computer art, you may also want to search online for Fractal Art. You’ll most likely find some pretty wicked images, to say the least…

Image Credit: perpendicularity.org/blog/ [link is no longer active]

—End of Post "Fractals anyone? Can you imagine being an Ant in a Micro-World?"