(Mini Assignment #2, Week 4)
Welcome to a new segment called “Converso Reverso” where we interview a special guest and showcase a post that they wrote on some predetermined topic given before the interview. This week I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing the revered and may I say – dashing – Mr Buzz Lightyear! This space ranger is a household name, exciting the souls of all adventurous NASA-laden and ground-dwelling young folk alike! Join us as we discuss his latest Biopic, historical Tikana Prime, the saying that started it all, and of course, evil Emporer Zurg. Stick around after the interview to get an exclusive read of Mr Lightyear’s guest post on, just what is infinity.
Cat: “Welcome Mr Lightyear! Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to meet with me. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance!”
Mr Lightyear: “It’s a pleasure to be here. Please, call me Buzz.”
Cat: “Buzz! Wonderful. How was the flight from Morph?”
Buzz: “Everyone knows that the jump from Gamma Quadrant of Sector 4 to the Milky way has its problems, but with my Star Command team by my side, we confidently navigated the asteroid fields with precision and perseverance!”
Cat: “Our readers would expect no less from the amazing rangers and cadets at Star Command. I understand that your time here is limited as you have a mission to complete here on Earth before heading back to Morph, so, in the vein let’s jump right into what else our readers expect.”
Buzz: “Roger that.”
Cat: “Great. Your last biopic ‘Lightyear’ showed all of us fans an insight into your life and many famous names that helped sculpt the infamous planet Tikana Prime. For those of you reading that have somehow missed it, I will try my best not to spoil anything about the masterpiece. Buzz, how closely would you say the events that transpired in the film compared to what really happened?”
Buzz: “I worked very closely with Angus MacLane to ensure that every scene was shot with integrity, truth, and grit.”
Cat: “Wow! It’s hard to wrap your head around how you must have felt in some of the situations that transpired. When you found out the identity of Zurg, to me the film portrayed you to have a look of betrayal, hope, wonder, and disillusion all at once. What did that moment really mean to you? How did it feel?”
Buzz: *Holding back tears* “Whew, sorry, that was a rough moment. The pain I felt, the shock I felt. I have seen many things over my intergalactic travels and all the fighting, loss, and discovery I faced… Nothing could have prepared me for that moment. I am both ashamed and extremely proud of the efforts those rookies made when the going got tough.”
Cat: “Thank you so much for sharing that with us here at, What The Cat Said. Unfortunately, that’s all we have for today as Buzz’s time is in demand. Stick around to read a guest post from Mr Lightyear himself, the topic of which lives in a saying that’s arguably more famous than the man who coined it! Take care!”
Buzz: “To infinity.”
What is infinity anyway?
By, Mr Buzz Lightyear
Hello Earthlings, greetings from Morph, my home planet. Many of you know me to be a man of leadership, daring, courage, and strength. While it takes all that and more to be a commander and ranger of the Star Command, humbly, I am first a curious individual. My affinity for infinity came from my many years gazing up at the stars as a rookie cadet. At night I often tried to release my anxiety from the mess-ups of the day’s mission by counting the never-ending stars from the window beside my bunk. “One, two, three,…, ten thousand six hundred and fifty-seven, ten thousand six hundred and fifty-eight.” All of them. There was one night in particular that I will never forget. That night I had laid in bed going over and over the day’s events. My commander had saved me from a near-death experience at the cost of her losing a pinky toe. I could not sleep from the shame and the guilt of my own inadequacy, so in a desperate effort to forget it all and fall asleep, I counted, and I counted, and I counted. At some point, the brilliant dark blue of the starry sky was replaced with the soft coral pink of Morph’s duelling suns. I had counted all night, and although I became aware of time passed, I couldn’t stop, I kept repeating, “infinity, infinity, infinity.” I guess I had run out of numbers and later that morning I promptly fell asleep in my cereal. I woke up sometime later in the day in my bunk, with no one around. All the other rookies were out on their missions. I contemplated joining them, but I couldn’t shed the guilt at what I had done the day prior. In between the guilt, my brain continued to nag me, “infinity, infinity, infinity.” I succumbed to the overbearing chanting and took to the station’s library to understand this word better. I thought, perhaps if I could understand what it was, it would go away. This is what I found…
Infinity is both a number and a concept. A number that can be used to represent a value or quantify something. A concept because it encompasses all and is without bound.
As a young cadet, I remember scratching my head at what this all really meant. I thought, what lay beyond infinity?
I won’t bore you with math proofs, but further research showed that there could be infinite infinities and infinities within infinities. This was astounding to me. If you had infinite apples and added just one more apple to that infinite set of apples, how many apples would you have? Infinity is the concept of being all-encompassing and countable, but infinity plus one is not infinity plus one, you would just count it as infinity! The added apple is negligible in the concept of infinity as infinity by definition is that it encompasses all without bound. If you looked at a ruler and tried to dissect the closest millimetre before the 10 centimetres mark into smaller and smaller sections, you could continue to section into infinitely smaller and smaller pieces, with infinite sections being dissected between those as you approached quantum levels (theoretically)!
Learning all of this blew my mind, but the gained knowledge also gave me the courage to continue. I thought that if I could learn I could become better. This thought gave me the strength to overcome the anxiety of accidentally getting my commander’s pinky toe sliced off by a Blorgon. I swear that day changed me and even though “to infinity and beyond” was coined later in my life, the intellectual curiosity I gained from that one day, perpetuated through the rest of my training, my day-to-day life, and beyond.
P.S. I have been advised by my cat, “Sox” that Earthlings enjoy a form of entertainment called YouTube. He has unearthed some media that can explain infinity far better than I can. Please enjoy, and remember, it’s never too late to make me proud and fight against intergalactic evil by joining the Academy.
Until next time,
Buzz.
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