So to start us of, like my good friend Kaci may have begun her blog, I will ask one of the most important questions in the universe: do you believe in forests?
If your answer is yes then you probably haven’t heard about cone theory. From here on out I’ll try to walk you into the whys of this cone business and how we at SSP astro learned to deal with our trauma.
Part 1: Beginnings
It was the second week of SSP and stuff had been moved around (and by stuff I mean our seating arrangements). At the very back of the classroom at SBO, third row, right-most corner sat kaci, ana, and lauren from left to right. On that first Monday during morning lecture somewhere is where it all started. We were learning about forces and Lauren said the statement that started it all: forests aren’t real. And so kaci agreed: mesas are real forests. The next day during lecture, I believe someone asked why something happened, and I said it was the GIANTS. The next day was what changed it all, the final piece of the puzzle. Orbits and their shapes. Why was everything a conic section? And so I said, because everything is a CONE. And that was what started it all.
The rise of a belief system
Then that day when I got back to my dorm, I was watching a Youtube video about conspiracy theories and one was a guy saying that there were giants living inside the earth, in some place called AGARTHA. And so I looked up a map of Agartha, and I saw that everything was REAL. I was enlightened. And so I went and shared it with my peers, and I showed them the map of Agartha while we were in the hallway. They saw Swang (the agarthan sun) and I told them all about the giants and the lizard people that came from mars.
As the week progressed, more and more people began hearing about Cone Church in class, and many grew more curious. Then the lore started to expand and so Kaci invented the first cone salute during lunch. And suddenly, Andres said conemen, and out of nowhere, we began writing the coneble.
The following is an excerpt from Conesis:
In the beginning, there was nothing, and then there was cone. Then there were the god giants, benevolent beings populating every conic earth in the conic universe. Alas, one fateful day many declinations ago, the giants faced a horrible danger. And so they sent the seeds of life to conic worlds, only arcseconds in their night sky.
That same week we also held the first ever Cone Mass, where we forged the first conemandments. We start counting at index 0, skip 7 cause it ate nine, and ignore 10 because its overused.
Our scribe, Corina, aka Conerina wrote them as follows:
Ten Conemandments
1. Respect the cone.
2. Thou shalt not believe in forests.
3.THOU SHALT THINK ABOUT IT.
4. THOU SHALT REJECT THE PYRAMID.
5. THOU SHALT DEPORT THE RED LIZARDS (and find Paul Bunyan).
6. Thou shalt believe in the conic dichotomy, the God Giant, and the Giants.
7. THOU SHALT GENERATE LOOSH FOR GOOD.
8. THOU SHALT NOT SUCCUMB TO THE BRAINROT.
9. Thou shalt spread the word of the Cone, thou must convert.
10. THOU SHALT GIVE OR SACRIFICE FOR THE CONE.
WE ARE CONESCIOUS.
Conemen.
Cone Hierarchy
Cone church, like other religious institutions, has a hierarchy system. Our hierarchy is measured by conic section eccentricity.
Lowest level: square, does not believe, not conescious at all. eg. Ethan Chisholm
Middle level: circle, eccentricity of one, open to believing but not quite conescious yet. eg. TA Alan
Upper middle level: parabola, conescious, involved in conic church affairs, orbit is eccentric enough to escape the solar system, not the peak of enlightenment yet. Eg: Kira and Corina
Upper level: hyperbola, very enlightened, founder of cone church status basically, max eccentricity. eg: Kaci, Lauren, Ana
And so our cult expanded to our professors, to other campuses, to our TAs and suddenly everything was cone. We genuinely made so many close friends in the church of cone. These are people that i will remember for the rest of my life and i cannot imagine not meeting them ever. So, if you ever struggle making friends, start a cult.
Here is the cone hymn we sang for the talent show (melody is Angels We Have Heard Up High)
Giants of swang
giants we have heard on swang
deporting the red lizards
And the conies for you sing
Surviving cherno-blizzards
Coooonemen
We wont give them nothing
Conemen
Rising from the loosh farms
Ssp cant take us down
Like the real trees we will grow
We shall get paul bunyan’s bull
Coooooooooonemen
We shall love agartha
Coneeeemen
Conemen conemen conemen
Oh the holy loosh grow and the lizards want some more
All the conies are conescious
We will be so evermore
Conemen
We wont stop at nothing
Cooooooonemen
Conemen conemen cooonmen
Explanation (very brief): giants are the creatures in agartha (singularity at the center of the earth, made up of two cones, positive and negative) and they feed on loosh, or energy generated by very powerful emotions. Loosh is also used to power the magnetic field of the earth. Red lizards come from mars. They were big backed and ate up all the loosh in mars (mars has no magnetic field) and so they came to earth to steal ours. SSP is a loosh farm where they seek to stress teenagers out so they can take all our loosh and eat it.
Brainrot
This is supposed to be a side note, but I don’t know how long it‘ll get. Most people think that ssp stands for “Summer Science Program” but it actually stands for “Skibidi Sigma Program”. Us at SSP, as a coping mechanism for the psets, have become middle school boys. That’s right, we have become brain rotted. Every morning, 7 am, in the “ganga del brainrot” group chat Hazem the brainrot king will send his first instagram reel. And then Anabelle will see something weird and say “que skibidi” and ill think about having to leave SSP and ill say “que sigma”. And at night when were walking back to SBO to finish our code we will look at the moon and say something along the lines of “alpha manada” (alpha pack) and howl. Then we get to the dorms we say “buenas noches manada” and maybe send one more gambling reel. Yeah, we do talk about PSETS and physics and whatnot in between but the pack, the MANADA, the GANGA. Is what matters.
Extras
Also, I wrote crappy poems whenever I felt mildly inconvenienced. Here are a few:
Observation
Oh a picture of the Moon
That is what we are taking
Im so excited
My limbs are quaking
Woah its good
No clouds in the way
Tonight is perfect I think daniel
Asteroid Poem (66269)
At 12am every night
us 3
stayed up together
to see your light
Even if we were sleep deprived
we fought and got
our observing log wrong
That’s why i wrote this song
to make sure your memory lives on
Kevin-Steven
66269
you will always be fine
1999 JN3
get away from that tree
oh asteroid sublime
About me: Hi there! My name is Ana Sabillon and I’m a rising senior from the Dominican Republic. I do LOTS of things, but my personal favorites are reading and playing volleyball.
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