New Atlantis (published posthumously in 1626), by Francis Bacon, is considered one of the earliest science fiction novels. As the Father of Salomen’s House says: https://www.gradesaver.com/new-atlantis/study-guide/quotes Oh, wow, the scientific method starting to make its way out of the ether. You can almost imagine Bacon trying to disentangle scientific pursuit from superstition. He’s saying - Let’s not blindly accept what we are told, let’s investigate. He believed scientific thought led to a utopia.
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” ― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
Thanks again for another great video. “It’s alive!” A great call to all of us! I liked their mention of the two great mysteries of creation – life and death. That anything is alive seems a miracle, but it’s a temporary situation, and death awaits all who live. And the focus on - when does life end? You know me as a materialist, so my answer to that is – when the chemistry working to keep our cells alive ceases to function – we are dead. An electrical boost won’t change that. We can’t change death. So may as well live while we are here.
I have read On the Origin of Species and this sums up much of it pretty well. The thing that depressed me when I read it was the observation that when a species is successful in adaptation so that its population grows it soon puts strains on its environment that it must adapt to, or be able to spread and adapt to other environments. Evolution has produced in us the ability to adapt the environment to ourselves to the extent that we have filled nearly every environment on the earth. Our population continues to grow. We have nowhere to go. We could possibly colonize Mars, but not in sufficient numbers to relieve population pressures here. We would have to create an environment there, which would forever depend on technology. The gravity on mars is insufficient to hold an atmospheric pressure we could breath short of it being pure oxygen. The stars will forever be beyond our reach.
I disagree with your final statement. Homo Sapiens as a species are resilient. We already create artificial environments for ourselves in the short term. Submarines and space stations demonstrate this fact. As tool users, we need to develop the improvements to our tools to make those artificial environments sustainable for the long term, to progress. Both Science fiction and theoretical physics already have the ideas and concepts to allow interstellar travel. When population becomes to great a pressure it won't matter if we have solved the problem of FTL travel. the concept for generational ships has been around for coming up on a hundred years. What is holding that back currently is the question of where to send the ship, and the final pieces of technology to sustain a voyage of that duration.
Significant portions of both the Netherlands and Manhattan are below sea level and artificially reclaimed. In the Netherlands it's a system of dykes that holds back the sea, and much of Lower Manhattan is built on landfill, artificially raising it above sea level. And I believe Las Vegas is the opposite—artificially reclaimed from dry desert through a system of aqueducts without which it would wither and die.
Good points, that I hadn't considered. My thoughts were more along the lines of the biosphere in Arizona where the experiment is creating a completely artificial environment that is self sustaining. Those examples and the recent Chinese artificial island projects are fragile, and near the limits of our current technology. But at the same time they are teaching us how to create environments, and where our technology falls short.
See also the Tao te Ching: "Heaven and earth aren't humane/To them the ten thousand things are straw dogs." This is from the Ursula K. Le Guin translation, Ch. 5, and she adds this note: "The 'inhumanity' . . . doesn't mean cruelty. Cruelty is a human characteristic. Heaven and earth -- that is, 'Nature' and its Way -- are not humane because they are not human. They are not kind; they are not cruel: those are human attributes. You can only be kind or cruel if you have, and cherish, a self."
Who woulda thunk it? Magicians are more in touch with reality. From Neuroscience News: Magicians Defy Creative Mental Health Trends
Creativity generally comes with a high degree of Openness (meaning openness to experience), and also unfortunately of Neuroticism in the Big 5 psychological traits, which can be remembered by the mnemonic OCEAN: Openness Conscientiousness Extroversion Agreeableness Neuroticism Big 5 Personality Traits Understanding the Psychology of Creativity (in relation to the Big 5) I don't know how good those articles, are, I just grabbed the first ones that came up. Anybody who's interested, you might have to dig a little to find the good info (as usual).
The precision and high-stakes nature of magic performances contribute to the unique characteristics of magicians in relation to their mental health. Probably because, unlike many creative endeavors, there's only one way to do it right, or maybe a very narrow range, but there are countless ways to do it wrong. And if you do it wrong, you fail. That makes it far more practical, like engineering or math. Of course the more realistic an artist's work is, the closer it gets to that metric. Magicians are distinct in that they both create and perform their own magic tricks, setting them apart from other creative professions. I'd say not unique—magicians and musicians, at least the ones who write their own material. The same could be said for many standup comedians and other kinds of performance artists who originate their own material. Maybe writers, though we're not generally performing live in front of an audience, unless it's some kind of publicity show or something. But I suppose storytellers who write their own material qualify. EDIT—I read a little farther, and I see my inital ideas are wrong. Next hypothesis—maybe being a magician is qualitatively different from being a truly creative artist. I might almost classify it more as a craft than a real art. The range of things they do is pretty limited, and really, they're mostly just riffing on the classic tricks. Maybe today they make the moon disappear rather than a rabbit, but it's still the same basic idea. The equivalent would be a writer who doesn't originate his own material, but just keeps coming up with variations on old classics, with just a few changes to update them. These of course are just the first ideas off the top of my head, and probably wrong, but it's fun to conjecture on things like this.
Have we put too much emphasis on Darwin's evolution and survival of the fittest? A very interesting video: If you go to 3:30, you get something remarkably similar to Lovercraft's Elder Things: Makes me wonder if he based them on this book... or maybe...
Fascinating video. Thanks for sharing it. Thompson’s book (30 years in the making) is quite an impressive accomplishment – applying math to the structure of living organisms – especially when he was self-taught in mathematics. And while we can accept that physical forces do act on the development of organisms, it does not follow that all forms and structures will have equal fitness. Whatever forms do evolve will still be subject to environmental pressures, and some forms will enjoy evolutionary advantage. They are better adapted and will survive. So I wouldn’t make the conclusion that the theory of natural selection should be de-emphasized. It is still the force that determines ultimate survival. Structure alone does not account for the wondrous capacities of a living organism. Function must be taken into account. Physical effects alone do not determine which forms and structures survive. The action of genes (the chemical effect) is well established. Of course, Thompson lacked this scientific knowledge. And the video says in some of his ideas he was just plain wrong. It seems he looked at simple organisms, or a small part of a more complex animal, like horns or bones. What of the human brain? Or human fingers and toes? Or bipedal walking?
Well those aren't purely physical structures. That seems to be what he was focusing on. Is that really natural selection, or simply that due to physical pressures and growth patterns, things made of certain materials will tend to take certain forms? I don't think it's that some survived while others didn't, but simply that only certain forms came into being at all. But then all I know about it is what I picked up from the video.
The theory of natural selection is our best explanation for the diversity of life that we see on this planet. That particles exhibit certain predictable behaviors takes nothing away from that theory. On the other hand, there's that old axiom - Biology is explained by chemistry, chemistry is explained by physics, physics is explained by mathematics, so the ultimate explanation for it all is math.
Lol, so is that why these days, instead of asking "what's your sign" at singles bars, people just ask "What's your number?"
And there go my chances of understanding life, the universe, and everything. 42 is good enough for me.
Sure sure, generation ships. There have been quite a few stories about that. Two of note are Universe by R.A. Heinlein, about a generation ship that has fallen into anarchy. Another is Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle about aliens who arrive in a generation ship and invade the earth. Another possibility is to approach the speed of light close enough to exploit time dilation to reach a near star in a human lifetime. The near stars, including Alpha Centauri are part of the same cluster our Sol belongs to and are similar in size and age, thereby having higher odds of having proper conditions for habitable planets. The novel Tau Zero by Poul Anderson uses this device and the plot includes the discovery of a potentially habitable planet around A-C. No spoilers but I remember enjoying it all the way to the fantastical end. These are great tales. I do not give good odds for any of it actually happening. Even if we were able to do these things the crisis on earth will not be solved by it.
Interstellar expansion is not likely in the needed time frame. But expansion into orbit, while expensive, could be done currently. The real question is does humanity as a whole have the will to do so.
From the mists of time…. Paranthropus is a genus of extinct hominin that lived between 2.9 and 1.2 million years ago. They were ape-like humans, with robust skulls and short stature; omnivores and bipeds. They used bone tools and are contested as the earlies users of fire. But what I want to know is—what did they dream about?
