Meta-Meta Blogging

Somewhere in the universe, teenagers are answering this prompt with one of two trite answers – firstly, that they’re writing this blog, or that the universe is expanding and nuclear fusion is occurring. It’s actually not hard to understand why this prompt is being answered this way at this time.

It’s very probable that this blog is being answered on Sunday, April 1^st, 2012, at around 9:00. This is because the blog’s due date is 12:00 AM on the 2^nd. Teenagers are usually procrastinators, so it is likely that as the time approaches 12:00 AM, the number of students working on or finished with the blog will increase, and the rate of students working on it will increase as time draws ever closer. Also, a notification sent via Facebook may prompt several teenagers that their blog is due. Therefore, it can be assumed that there is a student working on this very blog at 9:00 PM on the 1^st of April.

The bulk of these blog posts are about writing the blog post or the happenings of the cosmos for very obvious reasons. Most people are lazy, and don’t want to think about a creative way to address the prompt, so they either take it quite literally or try to circumvent the whole purpose of the prompt.

People are writing about the cosmos because many of the physics classes have had a recent unit on cosmology – they’re taking the word “universe”, connecting it to what they’ve learned about physics, and writing about nuclear fusion, the birth and death of stars, and all stages of matter in the universe. All of this stuff is probably happening all across the universe, trillions of times simultaneously, so whatever generic thing they write about speculatively is probably right somewhere. Hey, that’s the prompt, right? Somewhere, anywhere, in the whole universe, something is going on. Too bad the prompt didn’t include the infinitely many possible different multiverses, where anything can happen – from the laws of physics being completely different, to everything being absolutely the same, except for one infinitesimally small thing.

From personal experience, I’ve observed that many teenagers who are currently in the process of writing this blog assignment try to skimp out on the work by writing about whatever’s easiest, and adding unnecessary details that add to the word count, or rambling on for the same effect. (Hey, I never said that I didn’t do it! I’m just saying that people do that kind of stuff. For all I know, I could be doing it right now!) Smugly, they continue to write, stopping right at 150 or slightly higher to look like they’ve done something worthwhile.

There’s one thing that people tend to forget. Most of the time, in the universe, at this very moment, absolutely nothing is going on. Almost everything is empty space – all the matter in the universe essentially takes up absolutely nothing in terms of the actual space there is in the universe. Heck, most atoms are empty space.

That’s enough rambling for one blog post.