Reaching escape velocity
10 April 2025
Countless times I’ve looked up at the night sky, wondering if we are alone? In Biology, when learning about what constitutes cells in our body, I had a thought, what if earth was just a small component of a cell of a larger organism. ‘As above so below’. As infinitely small as we are, is as infinitely large we are, to the components of the cells that constitute us. But this is a discussion for another day.
Yesterday, travelling up from Ljungbyhed to Stockholm, I’ve started realizing, that there is a correlation between listening to gratitude affirmations before bed, tend to have a positive affect the next day. So last night, I fell asleep to affirmations.
The result this morning. The first three people I spoke to this morning:
The first was my Airbnb host, who’s parents are from Ghana, but he from the UK. The second person I chatted to was Charlotte Runberg, from RI.SE, the Research Institute of Sweden. I’m not going to say too much, but more about RI.SE another time. The 3rd person I met was someone that I’ve been wanting to meet in real life for at least a year an a half. I actually spoke to him via video presentation he gave at the annual Swedish Space Researchers Collaborative Group (SRS). (How I ended up there is another story). Swedish Astronaut, Marcus Wandt!!!
This time I was not so star-struck, so was able to ask some coherent questions about space, his outlook on life, being a Gripen Test pilot as well as Chief Innovation Officer for SAAB. His positive attitude was every infections, making me think of how our own negativity keeps us back.
There exits a ‘gravity’ that our old negative, self-limiting thoughts have on us. Just as a space rocket requires tremendous amounts of energy to break free of that field, so to do we have to make a conscious effort to escape our old thoughts of what we perceive as being possible, and break free of it.
The rest of the day was spent meeting top researchers in their field, specifically in applied AI. This got my imagination going…