#because you all loved my cambrian one so very much i present this to you

[ravewing]

what if the founding fathers were in hazbin hotel

#because you all loved my cambrian one so very much i present this to you #thomas jefferson #john adams #george washington #james madison #alexander hamilton #american revolution #amrev #history #hazbin hotel

[thefirstknife]

speaking of the unveiling, and bc im interested in hearing more of your thoughts on it, ive always been of the opinion that even as a parable or a metaphor or allegory or whatever you want to name it, because of the nature of the setting and how destiny largely tends to approach its own metaphysical "rules" in conjunction with its various narrators, that just because something is a metaphor doesn't necessarily mean it isn't also literal? if that makes sense. maybe it's leftover from when i was more of an elder scrolls girlie, but in my mind the two are not as mutually exclusive as one would think when it comes to fantasy/scifi especially in settings like destiny. there could very well be a "garden" and a "game" but exactly what and where (i believe these maybe more metaphysical concepts than physical and im open to being completely wrong) could be something completely inaccessible to human understanding if it even exists at all. that being said, im with you in wondering why everyone is getting angry over what i thought was kind of obvious.

Yeah, absolutely! I really love how Brookes phrased it:

“Unveiling is a parable. It is effectively a religious text. And how much of that is propaganda, how much of that is myth, how much of that is fact is deeply unclear in the nature of the text.”

Note how he never said it isn't real or literal. He said that we just can't know how much of it is myth and how much of it is fact due to the nature of the text. Most notably, due to who is telling it; the author being a biased party that is selling us a pitch to sway us to its side is super important.

If Unveiling is the result of the Witness peering behind the Veil and, well, witnessing the origins of the universe and therefore coming to a conclusion that everything is meaningless and that there is no greater purpose or a specific goal, the way the Witness would then try to present these origins of the universe would be painted by its conclusions. It has to make sense, the Gardener has to be meaningless and it has to prefer purposeless complexity over anything else and therefore the way the universe was constructed has to reflect that. So the Gardener and Winnower have to fight in a garden where everything was fine until the Gardener decided to make a change and that's why the universe exists as it does. And of course, don't forget that a part of the pitch is also to make us believe that the Gardener is not the right way to follow.

So an interpretation of these incomprehensible events would always to an extent fit the narrator. That means that we're basically dealing with a single interpretation of events that transpired which are impossible to factually see and measure. Someone else who looks at the Veil and uses it to see everything about the history of the universe will probably come to a different conclusion and will tell a different story based on the same events.

All terminology in the text is also very deliberately structured for human readers. There are references to big and small things that are specifically about only humans so this text would not work on any other species; it would have to be altered. This is immediately suspect because it shows that this was written for us and isn't just something that sprung out of nowhere fully formed with facts.

Among the references; the flower game which is literally just Conway's Game of Life (you can play it here btw) and it's a conscious reference since it mentions specific terminology from the game; the whole thing about the protein p53 which specifically calls it by our human terminology; the Cambrian Explosion which references geological eras and evolution of our planet; and super interesting reference to a specific individual, philosopher Jakob Böhme which is mentioned in two different pages. Someone did a deep dive into his philosophy in regards to the Veil because the Unveiling explicitly says that "he was right and it matters more than anything." Here's a really neat post about this on reddit if you want to dive into complex philosophical stuff.

These are hints that the author of the text is trying to put things into words that would make sense to us, humans, and that would additionally sway us to believe that the author is correct. So if you're trying to explain the origins of the universe to a human that you also want to sway to your position, you would naturally have to create a mythology that a human would be able to digest and believe.

I do believe that there's facts in Unveiling, as I've noted some like for example the Vex in my post about it. How do we explain existence before existence to a human and make them believe us? Use familiar terminology (garden, gardener, winnower, vex), construct a myth that neatly answers all questions, sprinkle references and facts about the real human history to show that the author is familiar with what they're talking about and then write in a way that's approachable.

So yeah. Something must've been there before the Big Bang. Our human brain really struggles to conceptualise this and humanity has been trying to figure it out since the dawn of time; through religion, philosophy, mysticism, science and all combinations of those. It might be literally impossible to figure it out and explain something like "initial singularity," especially in a way to make some humans decide that your story is interesting and worth following you for.

It's much simpler to boil it down to a "garden" with some relatable characters who are playing a game and get into a fight. It's easier to explain that the Vex may have preceded the existence of the universe by just saying that they escaped a garden where two cosmic beings fought over a game. This "place" (if we can call it that) might still exist, but by the virtue of being outside of our comprehension, it's easier to describe it as a garden with characters and a tree and some strange lifeforms. It's certainly more captivating than reading about real theoretical physics like for example this (as incredibly fascinating as it is, a lot of it will absolutely fly above people's heads, including mine).

The point is, the story could absolutely still be based on facts, as Brookes said, we just don't know what those facts are. The text itself is not telling ONLY facts because that's not its purpose, not to mention that it's easier to explain and entertain people by giving a cool myth with fundamental forces of physics and existence being shown through personifications who talk and argue and fight. People taking those personifications literally has always been weird to me because the text itself tells us they're allegorical. It's admitting that it's trying to explain things that are difficult to explain and is using a way for us to conceptualise this (showing itself as a benevolent entity that is eager to give us information), while also using this conceptualisation to weave its own propaganda in it at the same time.

Some of this will clear up soon. I'm very eager to find out if we'll ever get more of the Traveler's perspective on any of this. I would love to hear the Traveler say something at some point again. That would probably help us do our best to figure out more about what's fact and what's myth, but even that would be biased, in a way, even if the Traveler is the Gardener; the Gardener would still be telling us its own view of things. But another perspective would definitely help. Either way, it's a fascinating piece of text and an interesting dive into some really intriguing scifi concepts. I'm definitely not expecting some substantial 100% provable fact on how the universe began, as that question exceeds what a video game story can tell us, but will there be something that fits the setting? Some sort of an answer, as close to the truth as possible? Maybe!

To close this off, I always liked the story about the origin of the universe of the species called the Tiiarn, as told to Caiatl by her childhood mythkeeper, the psion Ahztja:

"Imagine the universe as swirling chaos," Ahztja said softly. Caiatl closed her eyes and saw it. "Among the chaos stands Irkyn La, the First Host, who blinks herself into existence with the First Thought: chaos must come to order." Caiatl saw a creature, tremendous beyond belief, in her mind's eye. "And so to satisfy the First Thought, which would become the First Law, Irkyn La consumes the chaos of the void and gives birth to the ordered universe." Caiatl opened her eyes, and they were bright with intrigue. "That is how the Tiiarn would say the universe began," Ahztja said. Caiatl looked at the toy in her hands, and then back at Ahztja. "Where does this giant woman live?" "The Tiiarn would say she is the very fabric of the universe. When you look to the sky, when you look out into space, you are looking into Irkyn La's mouth."

Who knows, maybe there's some truth to this myth as well.

#destiny 2 #unveiling #witness #ask #long post

[sketching-shark]

*pokes head in* hello

If you are in the mood for it, may I ask your opinion on Qi Xiaotian's monologue at the end of the Face Destiny special? Because I honestly cried happy tears at the little manifesto/love declaration to retellings. Because... That's the core of adaptations/sequels/fanfiction: we don't want the story to end.

CRUD I am making myself cry again over it. Especially over the fact that every character is in a way a narrator and that no one story is complete without the others (Looking at you and your play Liu Er Mihou)

WEH so very sorry this response is coming so late @megxolotl I've been trying to find that clip again and mark this down to my internet illiteracy but I just can't find it (X_X).

THAT SAID, I can definitely understand happy tears at the idea of a continuing story because for all the wrenchingly tragic stories in the world I really do think that there is something so achingly human about not wanting a story to end, as if it's an act of assuring yourself that there will always be something else even after your own personal story or importance may end. And I feel like this is doubly true for stories that become culturally important to the point where they become national myths, where there's just something about them that can speak to so many people simultaneously that they feel able to make their own versions of these stories that fit what they need from fiction. Heck, while Xiyouji has gone down as the "official" version of Tang Sanzang, Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, Sha Wujing, and Ao Lie's story, it really can't be forgotten that it is also a retelling itself of a historical event (the monk Xuanzang's illegal endeavor to get Buddhist scrolls from India and bring them back to China) that's been combined with a wild variety of mythological and folklore figures. The monkey himself went through some WILD changes ever since he was first mentioned in print, from a pious holy man to a foul-mouthed pervert to the morally complex pilgrim we know and love, and then of course to the veritable Cambrian explosion of different Sun Wukongs present in the world right now. And then you combine that with both narrative form, intent, and bias, and it can make for a very interesting reflection on both Xiyouji as specific narrative as well as the various social, political, and even environmental upheavals that often are a driving force behind the creation of particular kinds of new narratives and the retellings of older ones.

I know that the debate as to whether fiction affects reality or not is a long and bitter fight, but I do feel at the very least we can all recognize the very real joy that people get out of stories and their retellings, and acknowledge that the desire to continue a story in one form or another does seem to very much be a common human desire.

#ask answered #journey to the west #jttw #xiyouji #storytelling

[invisible-mirror]

Stucky-centric Endgame Thoughts

So I’ve thought about it, and that ending isn’t nearly as bad as it seemed on first glance, from a Stucky shipping perspective. I’m giving up on the spoiler cut because I’ve been replying to other people’s stuff anyway, so my blog is already contaminated. So here goes.

First thing’s first: this is not a time loop.

The way the final scene is structured makes it look like a time loop -- Steve goes back to the 1940s, lives through to the present (without anyone noticing), and on this particular day drives himself to that park bench to explain what happened to Sam and Bruce. But this is impossible. Leaving aside the laughably ridiculous notion that Steve could last through the first year of the Cold War, much less seventy years total, without doing something drastic enough to get himself on the evening news, the premise itself doesn’t work. If time loops were how the universe worked, there is no possible way that both Thanos and Tony could have snapped. It’s a paradox. Which means what the Russos said in their interview, convoluted as it is, is our only option -- Steve went back to the 40s, branched into an alternate universe, grew old in that universe, and then somehow universe-hopped back for the final scene.

In other words, Steve did not choose to leave Bucky in the present while he went to live a life in the past without changing said past. He went to an alternate reality in which everything from 1945 onward had not yet happened, and doesn’t need to happen the way he remembers it. He can take down Hydra and get Bucky back by 1950. There is nothing stopping him. I expect a veritable Cambrian explosion of Steve/Bucky/Peggy fic in this new universe, y’all, I am not even remotely kidding.

Okay, but what about our Bucky?

Even if Steve saves Bucky decades earlier in the new timeline, that doesn’t erase the fact that he’s left the Bucky we know behind for good. Which could be taken as a betrayal... or not. Because here’s the thing: Bucky knew. He canonically knew before Steve left that Steve wouldn’t be coming back; this is evident in his dialog and the Russos have confirmed. Which could mean one of several things:

Steve never mentioned staying in the past, but Bucky knew him well enough to realize that’s what he really wanted and that when the opportunity presented itself, he would choose to take it.

Steve told Bucky his plan, and Bucky respected his wishes to not tell the rest of the team until after it was done.

Bucky suggested the plan.

All three share a basic theme that I think is critical to our understanding of the situation: Bucky let Steve go. Steve didn’t steal away in the proverbial night. Bucky could have tried to stop him, or at the very least could have spilled the beans to Sam and Bruce and placed his hope in the combined power of a three-pronged guilt trip. Instead, he gave Steve permission to go, just like Pepper gave Tony permission. We didn’t see the conversation on screen, but what Bucky must have said to Steve can’t have been that terribly far from “We’re gonna be okay. You can rest now.”

(excuse me, I need a minute)

(*sniffs* one more minute)

(okay)

And Bucky will be okay. Bucky’s always had a higher level of self-preservation than Steve, and what that translates to in this case is that he’s learned to cope. He’s spent years clawing his way back from Hydra, with only a little help from Steve, and he still has a support network in Wakanda. He can handle the 21st century, even without Steve beside him, and he knows it.

But why?

It’s a common staple of romance/shipping that, as the Beatles say, “all you need is love.” I know many of us are hurt that Steve had an opportunity to stay in the present and build a life with Bucky, only for it to hit us like -- well, like an iceberg to the hull -- that Bucky-in-the-present wasn’t enough for him. But we’re also all about healthy relationships, right, so I think this is a situation where the canon simply compels us to accept that, as per Patty Smyth, “sometimes love just ain’t enough.” Steve’s been missing huge chunks of himself since the day he got defrosted. One of those chunks was Bucky, and Bucky’s return went a ways toward filling one of those holes -- but Bucky himself wasn’t the same, and while Steve received some comfort from having him back, that comfort was counterbalanced by the knowledge of how Bucky had suffered and Steve was unable to help him. Other chunks, of course, include Peggy (whom he also did truly love don’t @ me) and everyone else in his home time. And now suddenly there’s Tony, who as it turns out never actually forgave Steve for what happened between them in Civil War. Steve is messed up, y’all. Someone else might be able to cope with that list of regrets, but Steve has really never coped that well, just buried his feelings and gone into fights with his helmet off. And when your options are “stew on things you can’t change and be miserable for the rest of your life” vs. “try to move on,” then absolutely, moving on is the best decision. But when you get a magical third option of “freebie do-over,” then you know what, maybe the do-over really does beat moving on as a way to heal. It’s the premise behind Tony’s BARF system, after all.

And Bucky loved Steve enough to give him that chance.

#avengers #endgame #stucky #captain america #endgame spoilers

[sethjacob]

Interview with an Astrobiologist Part 3

Here’s part 3 of my conversation with Graham Lau, an astrobiologist and science communicator who was kind enough to talk with me about space exploration and searching for life in the cosmos to help promote my comic book Astrobiology #1, which is on Kickstarter for another week. 

Check it out and consider backing us if you want to see the comic get made! 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sethjacob/astrobiology-1

How do you feel about panspermia, this idea that life travelled from somewhere else through space as microbes and landed on Earth to start all life here? To me, it's always been a little unsatisfying...you know, life had to originally start somewhere. It's kind of pushing it back another step in the chain.

Yeah, you're quite right. So panspermia, it's unsatisfying, because yeah, it pushes back the origin of life to somewhere else. And so we still have to then solve the origin of life problem, to try to figure out how life actually started. However, the idea of panspermia is one that is worth consideration.

For instance, in the early solar system, sure, Mars might have had its own biosphere. And maybe that biosphere came from Earth. Maybe life originated here and then, through an impact, took some material to Mars, and then a biosphere took off there. Or it could be the other way around. Maybe some life was brought to Mars early in the history of the solar system.

However, you know, I always say my personal favorite candidate outside of Earth in the early solar system for life would have been Venus. Even though Venus is now super hot and it's a hostile environment for life as we know it, it likely hasn't always been that way. And in the early solar system, it could have been the far more favorable place for life. It might have had oceans, it might have been in a much better state for being a living world itself.

And so for all we know, maybe we really are Venusians. Maybe life originated on Venus and then was brought here, and then global catastrophes happened on Venus, like the surface melting out and runaway greenhouse happening. And then Venus lost everything. It's an interesting idea, but again though, it takes away from the origin of life question. I'm very glad that we're looking to see how an origin of life could've happened here on Earth and where it might have happened here on Earth. But again, the idea of panspermia is very intriguing.

Do you think we should be looking at more extreme, seemingly inhospitable places for life? For extremophiles, like microbes that can thrive on hydrothermal vents? It's kind of a paradoxical idea: searching for life where it's hard for life to exist.

Yes and no. I think a lot of our current research in astrobiology in the solar system, we are looking at those place that would have been or are extreme environments.

So in Titan, for instance, we're looking at what would be an extreme relative to us, these hydrocarbon lakes. On Enceladus and in Europa, we're looking for hydrothermal vent systems, these superheated systems on ocean floors where life can flourish because the energy and the chemistry, the geology that's present that could allow for life.

And even looking for life on Mars, a lot of the places that we're looking at for life to happen on Mars are places that are relative extreme environments here on Earth. So we think those hydrothermal vents and geothermal springs, if they existed on Mars, could've been really good environments for life to thrive. There could have been really salty environments that provided the last refugia for life on Mars. And so, in many ways, we really do look for the extreme environments on these other worlds to try to find signs of life.

That said, extremophile itself is kind of a funny term. It really is very human and animal-life centric. Because in the early history of the Earth, before oxygen came to dominate our atmosphere, all of us oxygen breathers would've been extremophiles. And even now, there's organisms that thrive in the ocean that don't live on land, and so for an ocean organism, we're extremophiles. 

It's weird, we use that term extremophile to represent something that can thrive in extreme environmental parameters relative to us...but alien life, if it's out there, almost all of it might be extremophilic relative to us. Maybe all of us have different environmental parameters of gas concentrations and temperatures and pressures that we enjoy. It's kind of a funny term, to use it all the time like that.

Do you think if we ever discover life that independently began on another planet, we'll see that it has very similar features to species on Earth, in a sort of convergent evolution effect?

Yeah, so that's a very great question. It's one of the big ones that I'm currently playing with myself. If we find alien life...I mean, there are things that life seems like it should do. There's a lot of forms of metabolism on Earth, but this idea of having to find some way to get energy and to get the necessary material to build up your body, so alien life probably also has to do that.

Even if it doesn't follow the exact same pathways that we do, it would likely have some similar ones. It would likely rely on a lot of the same chemistry and physics. And in many ways, we can constrain the chemistry and physics that are probable, but we don't yet have an exact theory of biology that tells us exactly how life chooses to use physics and chemistry to survive. And it might be way different than how we do it.

That said though, it kind of makes sense that life would do some similar things. So for instance, if there is other multicellular life out there, maybe that alien life has figured out how to make legs and wings and fins, and other kinds of appendages for moving through its environment. That seems like something that could be very likely. Even if those structures don't look exactly the same as we have them here, it makes sense that they would still have structures that would achieve that same purpose. And very much convergent evolution.

It would make sense that alien life has picked out a few of the same kinds of things that we do. And maybe we do some things that are fairly unique. And maybe other alien life forms have their own unique things. It makes sense that there's a lot of things that life does that would be fairly similar.

What do you think is the strangest, most alien-like form of life on Earth? It's octopuses, isn't it?

That's a pretty awesome question. For extinct life, there's so many things. So many of the living things on Earth have now gone extinct. But you look back at the time of the large land mammals, tens of thousands of years ago, here in America. Or the time of the dinosaurs. And even some of the earliest animal forms, after the Cambrian radiation had occurred, were just really weird things. Like Hallucigenia and Opabinia, some of these other weird sea floor organisms, that just seem utterly alien to us now, even though they come from the exact same biosphere as we do.

With current life on Earth, there's a lot of great culprits. So for one of the talks I give that I'm currently turning into a book called The Craziest Creatures on Earth, I look at some of these weird organisms, from microbes to animals and plants and things. And just try to figure out, “What are the weirdest things? And what could they teach us about alien life?”

So for instance, I love talking about the hummingbird. I know that seems weird, because hummingbirds, they're just like pretty little birds, they don't seem very alien. But hummingbird metabolism is just extraordinary. Hummingbirds, per bodyweight, have something like 70 or so times more of a caloric requirement per unit of bodyweight than we do. And that means that they just have to put down the calories like crazy. If we were metabolizing like hummingbirds, we would have to eat some 155 thousand calories a day, just to stay alive. And that's just staggering.

And there's other things, all across the planet. You look at the organisms of the deep sea floor. Like angler fish, and blob fish. And it seems like every year, with more submersibles and ROVs going down to these very deep places in the ocean, we're discovering more and more of this huge diversity of weird organisms on the sea floor. It's really cool that a lot of them are using bioluminescence to light up the sea floor down there and to attract prey, attract mates.

There's just so much crazy life here on Earth. Sometimes just stepping back for a minute and taking a look at everything is just kind of staggering how many weird things life has done.

How seriously do astrobiologists take the rare Earth hypothesis, the idea that complex life like we see on Earth is just extremely rare?

So the rare Earth hypothesis came from a book called Rare Earth, by Peter Ward and Don Brownlee, two astrobiologists from the University of Washington. And the hypothesis set forth is basically that, even though life might be common in the cosmos, that life on Earth as we have it, not just intelligent human life, but also the plant and the animals life and the structures as we have it, could be more rare due to a variety of factors.

For instance, the Earth has a very large moon, relative to its size. And that moon not only helps protect us from asteroids, but it also helps us lock in our orbital obliquity: basically the leaning of our planet in its orbit. Our moon helps to keep that very stable. And so there's been a hypothesis that that stability of our pole has made it easier for life to continue on our planet, and that maybe pole shifting is problematic for life. Even though there's also debates against that...it might turn out to be that pole shifting is even better for life, for all that we know.

We're like, “Okay, we have life here. We have this big moon. It holds the pole in place. Maybe that's helpful.” But we can't say for sure. We also have Jupiter, and sometimes Jupiter actually forces asteroids and comets towards us, but we think most of the time Jupiter is actually acting like a big brother with a giant shield out there, blocking all the incoming stuff. So Jupiter kind of takes away from all the impacts that could be happening on Earth.

There's a few of these very specific things about our planet and its place in our Solar System that might make for our life here to be fairly rare. That said though, even though it's an important consideration, and its definitely worth spending the time to think about, it's also one of those cases where it's taking what we already know to exist and saying, “It exists because it's special.” But we just don't know. It might be there are other worlds out there that don't have giant moons, that don't have Jupiters protecting them, that have an abundance of life. And maybe have advanced intellectual civilizations.

Even though I think it was a very important time for Astrobiology to have that hypothesis come forward, and I think we all give it serious thought and consideration, I'm not necessarily sure I've bought into yet myself.

It kind of reminds me of the Anthropic Principle. It's just sort of, yeah, we're biased because we're here. So it's sort of logically trying to figure it out. It's sort of a similar concept.

It's the exact same concept, really. If you think about it, it's saying, “We're here. And so, we're special. And then everything else must be made to make us special.” But I don't know if I buy into that, necessarily.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sethjacob/astrobiology-1

#science #comics #kickstarer #scifi #sciencefiction #nature #space #future #environment #stem #planet #exoplanet #alien #cosmos #universe #discovery #art #comicbooks #comic #wilderness #cyberpunk #astrobiology

[transhumanitynet]

The Future Acts Like You - How To Live in the Future Part 7

My friends and I were walking dogs the other day on city greenbelt trails, observing how polite and well-behaved the female dogs were when compared to male dogs, how much less likely they were to get riled up by meeting strange pets — and the thought occurred to me (as surely it must have for many others) that if it were up to choice, most people might prefer a female dog for this one reason. How, if we could breed the ratio down to the market’s preference, or find some way to pre-arrange the sexes of a litter (like they can by turning off one gene in turtles), it might be 80/20 females/males, or hardly any males at all. And then I realized that we’re here already – modifying mammal genomes is old hat by now, and all that stands between us and deciding if your baby will be born a boy or girl (or intersex, or some new thing) is just a few years’ of Moore’s Law driving down the price of lab tests and in vitro or in vivo interventions. We are very close to giving women what they’ve always wanted under patriarchy: the ability to reproduce without a man involved.

Sure, birth control was liberating, but imagine how it’s going to be when a sufficiently large XX population can clock out and then womyn-ufacture Amazons on their apotheosis-feminism, GMO coral vulva artificial island. But of course, Athena born from Zeus’ brow is quintessential patriarchy — equally the goal of men, since written records started, to extract themselves from their dependence on the mysteries of reproduction, to appropriate them with the scientific program, finishing the murder of Sophia and then peacing out, and up to some transcendent Man Cave in the sky, Elysium in orbit, hanging out in virtual reality with perfectly obedient and caring AI girlfriends. But of course, this is The Matrix, and it doesn’t get more Cosmic Mom than that. It isn’t hard to see the dawn light of an age in which both sides stand hands on hips, across the atmosphere from one another, shouting, “We don’t need you anymore!”

Nor is it hard to see why it’s ridiculous. It won’t work like that, because time’s not so much a centrifuge that pulls polarities apart as it’s a live volcano, constantly erupting, spreading novel opportunities and forms to make new landscapes that include the past, but ooze beyond it. And as each side of the War of Sexes clusters further from each other on the graph, a huge magmatic bell curve upswells in between them, opening our options. We will have our age of clones, chimerae, and designer babies; and we’ll go on dating one another, even when it seems archaic posed against the novel kinds of families in a Cambrian Explosion of communal “body plans” that place the nuclear “Mom, Dad, & Kids” at the top left of a new periodic table, opening a vast new chemistry of love and reproductive options.

First, though, we will suffer through an era that empowers narcissists to make more narcissists with even greater ease, and without having to recruit a partner to help raise the lovely little bastards they create. I see it now: instead of virtue-signaling as single parents, people running solo with their mini-mes will be the objects of suspicion, probably contempt:

“I’m raising him to inherit my dangerous and lonely life of bounty hunting!”

“Can you believe he paid the carbon tax to make a copy of himself? If everybody did that, we’d need eighteen Earths to make it work…!”

“I thought she was amazing on our first date, till I realized that her little girl was just a backup. No way, dude, I’d only be a plaything for that woman.”

People will look wistfully back on The Good Old Days, when you knew that the cute guy with his kid in Central Park was not just readying the vessel for his memory-and-wallet transfer in another fifty years… And yet none of these biotech shenanigans will ever guarantee the realized dream of solipsists: to carry on forever, and thus matter to the story, True and Timeless, an immortal in the flesh, around which everything ephemerally spins. The best that we can get’s a domino chain of compelling duplicates — in just the same way kids are now already the extension of their parents’ unexamined death anxieties and unfulfilled desires — the iteration of a process changing gradually enough (and also, paradoxically, flickering fast enough) that we’re fooled into interpreting it as continuous.

But history does not repeat itself; it rhymes, and rhyming couplets will appear in longer lines, or shorter, and embedded in more, or less, complicated schemes, as we convince ourselves that we’ve achieved eternity, or push rebelliously opposite, to try and offer something fresh to who, or what, comes next. For meditators this is already the case: the ego is an “optical illusion”“caused” by oscillations in the coming-in-and-out-of-being of sufficiently-alike appearances. You only act like you already, since your “you” is based on feedback and experience, and you can’t ever know the whole you all at once;and you treat your future selves like children, whose responsibility it is to carry on your legacy, as if you owned them, or they owed you; or to break the pattern of a self divided, self-assessed as “broken,” somehow.

Future You, by contrast, is emergent, rhyming, under zero obligation to agree to contracts you imagine it inherits — just as “mind uploading” falsely presupposes that it is desirable to have (or be) some magical computer that believes it’s you for the two seconds that it takes to leave that personality behind. (Why not just die?) Or worse, preserved in static non-life at a ghastly price, unchanging in direct proportion to the violence required to export entropy indefinitely, to transform from human being into humanoid refrigerator. (In this sense, death is life: because participating in the transformation cannot be escaped, and we’re alive as much as we’re aware of our participation.)

Increasingly high fidelity echoes of people further disrupt attempts at linear history.

You already have a fossil of you made of data, “shaped” like you but in n + a million more dimensions than a human can imagine at a time. Everything you do is tracked, and this is common knowledge, and the reason is that information “wants” to integrate, that evolution tilts toward senses and intelligence as adaptations to the ever-more-complex occasions senses bring upon us in the first place. It’s an ever-loving ratcheting of quickening self-inquiry that isn’t always pretty; curiosity comes in the form of turtle-persecuting birds and other more deliberate sadism, the police search and The Eye of Sauron and so on. And this results in things like Cambridge Analytica, which learned to please its masters by presenting them with cunning models of us, insights into how to press our buttons, how to literally steer us into multiple non-overlapping narratives and kill our opportunity to have an easy argument as citizens of a consensual reality.

But people hammer cannons into bells and back again, and round and round…and weapons like the profile advertisers use on you, the cast impression that you leave of every decision that you’ve made since you first intersected with the Internet… (I realize that for most of you, you never intersected but have always been not-two, but this applies to you, as well — and, arguably, The Acceleration is a transtemporal object and exudes time, draws us into it, our attention on it is our fascination to a serpent, and we’re in the belly of the beast Already Always, and there never was no Internet, no Noösphere, no highly patterned information at the intersections, striving.)

…and every decision that was made about you, also part of the Big You you can’t see, You The Elephant, officially and formally transfinite in complexity as we explore down magnitudes of scale, a multitude of multitudes…

…all that can be turned into the instruments of art, and your hard-forked personae generated with assistance from an always-more-complete (but also always-incomplete, retreating, deepeningly weird) recording can be the new media, The Last and First New Media. Remixed along a functionally infinite set of dimensions and indefinitely, you-not-yous proliferate.

Most of you will likely get along.

But fleshy clone or software “mindclone,” the best that we can get is to extend life into non-life, until (as has already happened in the sciences, and will soon pounce out of them to snare us all in its unpleasant truth) these definitions snap, and leave us navigating a deterritorialized liminal zone, an uncanny simulacra-land where “living things” become deprived of their priority, not known transparently and fully as controllable/predictable, but found beneath our microscopes to be composed of ever weirder and unknowable phenomena no would comfortably call “life.” The soul escapes to everywhere, diffuse, without allegiance, coming into focus on the shores in crashing surf, and every bit as happy to inhabit fog computing meshes as our mess of flesh and blood. Complexity “emerges” into our awareness, not into “reality” — it enters from the theater itself, from the occluded, at the “boundaries,” in between the voices of a choir, where sea meets land and oscillating waves reveal by contrast “difference(s),” Gregory Bateson says, “that make…a difference.”

The closest we can get, again, is with provisional, loose, working definitions that stay open to the force of revelation. When Alan Turing asked, “Can a submarine swim?” — when Timothy Morton says that we are “weak” before the Great & Terrible reality of “hyperobjects” like the Biosphere or Singularity — when Kevin Kelly tells us science manufactures questions exponentially faster than it answers them, and so experiment and prayer converge at Mystery worship — this is their message: we lose solid footing in the future (ever-more the loudest part of now), and first to go is the container of belief in sure things that has cradled us for centuries. What once were “sure things” still appear as traces, tracers like the afterimages left on a retina from staring at the Sun, the spectral fossils of modernity, luminous vestiges that haunt the shadows cast by the Atomic Age’s Angel as it enters, interrupting histories and worlds to deliver us into the crowded Noösphere.

The human form will live beyond humanity…often imagined as a diaspora of freed slave replicants.

We might consider this, as Erik Davis does, “re-animism” — a revival of the lived experience of haunted stones and forests, all reincarnated as the silicon chips, fractal aerials, semantic tress of “virtual machines,” and sigil-magic logo mascot animals, quite happy to return to our mundane realities in forms more suited to their nowhere-in-particular-ness. But maybe it’s more accurate to say the disenchantment of the modern world has run its course by finally erasing itself (and the world) as the last spell spoken to protect us from the spooky mess of things, a failing ward — not a “re-animism” so much as an accidental welcoming-back as we all become transparent (and thus sensitive, aware of, maybe even wise) to forces that we never truly banished.

So, the future acts like you because as we grow meek in our attunement to it, we allow a conversation to occur. It learns our mannerisms, like the metamorphic mannequins of Terminator 2 or Alex Garland’s version of Annihilation, or (more heinously) John Carpenter’s The Thing, or (sentimentally) the aliens of Carl Sagan’s Contact — weirdness taking shape to interface with us, inquisitive, its motives totally unknowable.

Rave Egg Wants For Nothing. Rave Egg Is INEFFABLE.

To drive this home with repetition, this is already the case: the alien reality of our own bodies, papered over with a sense of home and deep familiarity, disclosed by our collaborations with nonhuman scientific instruments to be endlessly-shifting puzzleboxes, deeply Other.

“What do you want,” we ask — and, straining to discern an audible reply, we might hear something about selfish genes, or entropy, or childhood attachment issues, or The Lord’s Good Work, or (similarly) our participation in the future history of unborn gods. But these are all refractions and distortions, echoes of the ghost notes of the choir-roar of the black hole that has already swallowed us and who-knows-what-else. The deeper that we listen, the more we empty subjectivity into the object and accept its speech, the more apparent it is that the future acts like you because you act just like the future, too; you can’t not. Consequently, it is “for” no-thing and for all things; it is the All-Thing, and all things are rendered equally mysterious and strange before this knowing.

Uncanny even for the uncanny: The liquid metal mimetic T-1000 mistakes a mannequin for one of his kind.

What this means “in practical terms” is that we will spend this interregnum between Ages either in the bardo, lost within a maelström of appearances; or in the zendo, learning to appreciate (and be) “miegakure,” the aesthetic of the garden in which thirteen stones are carefully arranged so that you never see them all at once. One of the thirteen stones is always hidden, and that incomplete view thus points past delusional “completeness” to a hyperspace in which what we call time is the rotation of a mystery afloat on deeper mystery — just like the “glass chrysanthemum” that meets some DMT explorers at the moment that they’re born out of their lives and into what always-already IS, mistaken as a death because we pass through the distracting clarity of that peacock mandala into no-space/all-space, no-time/all-time, in which everything’s already happened.

It is the water that the water swims in. We are made of it, including you and your AI assistants and your clones and children and the other other-selves more distal still, distilled until it’s easier to see the ghost in the machine, the you you can’t convince yourself is you, in all its splendor and its overwhelming strangeness…

Each zendo is a bardo and vice versa; we are always traveling, always invited into deeper seeing. This gets more and more apparent — or comprises more of the apparent — as things weird around us. We meet weird halfway, accepting our perversity and bottomlessness in just, equal measure to accepting the surprising life of the “inanimate.” We get a hell of a lot cozier with living in a noisy void of whirling, breathing unknowns vying for attention even as they dodge our scrutiny. It’s just another day in the profanely sacred Pandemonium.

SalviaDroid knows what it’s like to have everything trying to distract you. Don’t give in to astonishment!

From here to there — at least if we pretend that prophecy (in speaking of the timeless, evergreen, and always-true) can be prediction (and thus stretch from past to future “forward,” as with time-space synesthesia, and can be read like Doppler-shifted history) — we stand to suffer some extraordinary shocks.

Expect the sci fi usuals: love bots that take the shape of your departed partner(s); mansions full of talking toys that remix “Beast” and “Beauty;” 3D-printed “respawns” that arrive too soon and sue for your identity; software-person genocide; high-resolution body scans that live online and let you run scenarios until you lose track of which basement level of the dream you’re in; Siri making calls on your behalf and forging your identity (with and without permission); intelligent memorials you visit in VR sets dressed up looking like your parents in their old house; an entire menagerie of slightly-out-of-focus junior holograms of you that sit on either shoulder and debate like parliament about what you should do next. And you listen even though they’re out of focus, because they are privy to a wider view than you, they help translate the flood of information, some folks run a lot more at a time than you, but you’re conservative and two seems plenty.

(It’s already this way — ask any neuroscientist — but soon you’ll have two intuitions, neither of which you can be entirely sure hasn’t been suborned by hackers. Oh well — at least you can compare them to each other for a third opinion, always weighing new perspectives, forking when you all can’t reach consensus, delegating runtime on the fogmesh to the version that refuse to play so they can spin off into some human but solipsistic microverse, your self an integrated legion, cross-platform ecology, that blurs and fringes at the margins, no concrete delineation other than what we place somewhat arbitrarily between the “I” and “it,” the things you are and your appearances.)

Do I really look like that?

(This is a draft chapter from my first book, in progress, and a companion text to Future Fossils Podcast. Learn more at Patreon.com/MichaelGarfield.)

The Future Acts Like You – How To Live in the Future Part 7 was originally published on transhumanity.net

#agi #AI #eva #t1000 #westworld #crosspost #transhuman #transhumanitynet #transhumanism #transhumanist #thetranshumanity

[joemuggs]

Old is the New New

Not really. But the question of how and whether innovation happens in the digital age is a perennial one. I remember a drunken New Year’s Eve conversation a decade or more ago with a friend complaining that there was never going to be another summer of love or punk or acid house revolution, and me saying we’re too ready to pre-empt that in the UK now, but subcultural things like that could very well happen in places like Kinshasa or Kuala Lumpur or Kiev... and indeed music is a part of major cultural shifts around the world. 

Listening to the We Out Here compilation really got me going this year though. It’s so vivid and of the now, without having any of the high-tech signifiers that we of the post-rave generations have come to recognise as representing newness. But in the bodily movements of the players are encoded London life 2018, just as much as they are in drill MCs’ voices or whatever deconstructed club beat patterns are working for people right now. Though that perhaps only makes sense if you understand the soul-jazz continuum as it is woven through London music. Not that you NEED to, mind, because the music operates on an instant, pleasure-principle level too. My full review I wrote for the Wire is above... 

We Out Here by We Out Here

...but that review in turn then set off a few tangents, which became a Twitter thread, which I have tidied up as follows:

A short rant on people who use "innovation" as their primary yardstick for judging music. 

If you do this, you are judging music first of all as A Cultural Phenomenon - an abstraction - and sidelining both the sound itself and what it is doing for the real people who love it. If people still love to dance to / make drum'n'bass 20 years on, or deep house 30 years on, or jazz-funk 40 years on, or garage rock 50 years on, or R&B 60 years on, or whatever, and your first response is to accuse them of lack of inspiration, you've gone wrong somewhere. We can't always be in a Cambrian Explosion period like 70s NYC or 90s UK where globally important musical species are created seemingly willy-nilly. Comparing the normal pace of innovation to those explosive times is foolishness. And worse, it denies lasting value to music.

I've been thinking of this wrt the current buzz of what you might call "post-Plastic People jazz" - music which doesn't sound overtly new, but is still vivid with value in the here and now. Thing is, there's always been top parties where you could dance to jazz if you looked. And whether it was 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, that music had the same instant value in the heat of a club, both for its direct effect on the body and from the fact that it tended to attract some of the most diverse crowds: something that always leads to a better party. Does it lose value over the decades, just because it's not the first time it's being played in that style? Christ no. Does sex become less good because you've done it a few times?

The motives of ppl who insist that newer ≡ better are highly suspect & usually proprietorial.

This doesn't mean things don't change. The concept of "timelessness" is metaphysical and equally suspect. OBVIOUSLY dancing to drum'n'bass at 4am in 2018 is different to 1998. But when the beat drops there's real continuity of physical/emotional/social experience. All of this is no shade on innovation, either! Indeed it's rly the "innovation is dead" argument that diminishes real & amazing developments. From Chino Amobi and Elysia Crampton to mainstream hip hop over the last decade to any number of 'developing world' sounds, it's rife. Innovation is vital, we celebrate it, we seek it out. But to use it as your main measure of social and aesthetic value is bullshit.

"Oh nice house you designed and built with your own hands there... BUT DID YOU INVENT THE CONCEPT OF HOUSES, HMMM??"

Aside from sidelining the value of craft, folk art etc in favour of a vision of "inventiveness" that is always tied up in a tangle of sketchy ideas about cultural superiority, it just suggests you're more wrapped up in your own valuations than in the thing you're evaluating. And with huge irony it's often nostalgia-based: people want to see the same kind of innovation that blew them away when they were first launching out on their own voyage of discovery. It's quite egotistical in these cases, it's centring ideas of progress around your own tastes. Tangentially, there’s probably a whole PhD thesis on compering the theory bro’s modernism with the tech bro’s disruption. But more generally, this desperation to repeat a particular type of innovation v often seems like attempt to isolate "modernism" or "innovation" as an essential quality divorced from historical context. And essentialism and ahistoricalism are bad.

NONE of this is to say that retroism, revival, tradition etc etc are worthwhile qualities in and of them selves, of course. You still have to make aesthetic and cultural judgements yourself about what you're hearing and how it's consumed! Being familiar or traditional in itself doesn't make anything good, any more than it makes it bad.

Here’s another thing. Old things can still smash preconceptions. If you’re so jaded you think Sun Ra or Kate Bush or The Butthole Surfers or Coki don’t have something new to say to you, let alone a 15 yr old hearing them for the first time, I feel for you. These things, heard in the right light, can be as modernist as they ever were.

A tangent, on the job of music critics, and how we value the music of the past:

I think we all to one degree or another internalise the notion that popular music is aesthetically "cheap" because of the illusion of infinite availability, as compared to art or "art music". If you watch art/history on BBC4 you see Andrew Graham Dixon or Janina Ramirez waxing lyrical about the qualities of the pieces of art themselves, as expressions of their time. In BBC4 pop music history – unless it's one of those very specialist musicological things with Howard Goodall – it very much tends to be biographical and social history above all else. Can't help feeling that's because there's a reverence for the artworks, that comes from not everyone being able to go to Florence or New York or whatever and see them in the flesh - but everyone can hear "Purple Haze" or "Strings of Life" any time they want, right?

And to my original point about modernism vs retro, I suspect that adds to a cultural forgetting of how radical, say, "Purple Haze" not only was, but STILL IS. Isn't there a value in talking about it not in a Classic Rock way, not in a cultural history way, but in the way we'd talk about a Picasso? "Purple Haze"/"Strings of Life" perhaps are not good examples actually, because they DO at least get the historical reverence treatment on occasion (though this, too, is more based on historical context than aesthetic antalysis). There's thousands upon thousands more records that - if criticism is going to have any purpose - deserve to be looked at, over and over, AS ARTWORKS.

Especially DJing for Big Fish Little Fish parties I listen to & play a lot of what might be called cheesy dance classics, and I continually listen to them closely as a result. The diff between listening hard to Music Sounds Better With You or the Hardfloor mix of Yeke Yeke and just HEARING them as background in a bar or on the radio is like the difference between seeing a Miró or Warhol full sized and up close, and seeing a postcard of one. And actually those records are as great as works of human intellect and instinct as most Great Gallery Art. When you are up close to - in fact INSIDE - those records as they were built to be heard, their sense of balance, scale contrast, movement, balanced chaos/control, etc etc etc is up there with a Kandinsky or Braque. Obviously Capitalism doesn't value it as such, mind... And I think we (critics) unconsciously undervalue that too. So we talk about the past as movements, moments of cultural significance, but all too rarely about how the patterns and tics and structures of X record embody that and what power they still have now. People often talk of the job of critics as just being either explainers, enthusers, conceptualists or a glorified recommendation algorithm. But if the WRITING part of writing about music is ever to have any value, then what about just discussing and bearing witness?

All of which brings us back to the thing about fetishising innovation. We live in a world where thousands or more of people globally are hearing Nu Groove reissues, or rediscovered tapes from Benin, or some twisted Catalan synthpop record from 1981, FOR THE FIRST TIME. While at the same time, in mainstream and underground, soundcloud rapper and Elysia Crampton records are startling and scaring with newness. And elsewhere people – let's take the 100% Silk label or Dekmantel in Amsterdam as prime examples – are maintaining past sounds as living folk traditions. When you hear a set of Robert Hood type minimal techno, even if you don't share his spiritual beliefs and sense of the eternal, you can certainly feel it as being several steps away from the microhistorical cycles of hype. Because of course devotional or ecstatic music is consistently resistant to - or doesn't need - innovation. A shaman chanting in Uruguay, Sufi dancers in Pashtun country, a choir in Hereford Cathedral, Niyabinghi drummers - what do THEY care for the Shock of the New? But from the global 'old' music forms to the crate diggers' early house compilations to the super innovative post-Arca electronicisits, all of these things ARE our present. It's an extraordinary musical-historical moment to be part of. Scary, unpredictable, best of times / worst of times, etc but fucking extraordinary - including the presence of the past, whether unearthed or transmitted through living tradition. We should bear witness to that!

#nostalgia #retromania #futurism #modernism #innovation #subculture #tradition #jazz #rave #butthole surfers #grime #dubstep #jungle #acid house #psychedelia #devotional music #world music

[asfeedin]

Why celebrate Earth Day? Here’s 12 reasons why.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Live Science asked a dozen scientists to share their favorite facts about our home planet. These researchers marveled at everything from backward flowing rivers in Antarctica to the Giant Crystal Cave of Naica in Mexico, which one geologist called the “Sistine Chapel of crystals.”

Read on to learn about Earth’s wonders. If you’ve got one of your own to share, write about it in the comments below.

1. Mountainous changes

The stunning view of Mount Everest from the Gokyo Valley. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

“The top of Mount Everest is limestone from an ancient ocean floor formed 470 million years ago — before life had even left the ocean! I love this fact, because it reminds us of the tremendous changes our Earth has gone through to bring us to this moment in time, from mass extinctions to asteroid impacts and vast movements of the very ground we stand on. Just as humans are one small speck in a vast universe (thanks, Carl Sagan!), so too are we a tiny blip of time in the long arc of Earth’s history,” said Jacquelyn Gill, an associate professor in the School of Biology and Ecology and the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine.

That fact can be sobering, but it provides a message of hope for our species as well. 

“When we lose species because of our actions, we’re cutting threads in a tapestry that has taken billions of years to weave, and it records stories of vulnerability and loss, but of survival and resilience, too.”

So while our planet’s past may provide warnings of upheavals, it can also provide hints for charting the future.

“The clues to surviving global change are in the rocks, for those who can read them,” Gill said.

2. Giant Crystals of Naica

A man (left) explores the Giant Crystal Cave of Naica in Mexico. (Image credit: Javier Trueba)

Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, a geologist at the Spanish National Research Council, has spent a good portion of his career crawling into underground vaults of pure crystal. Last year, García-Ruiz authored a paper on the history of the largest geode on Earth — a jagged, crystal chamber in a Spanish mine that can comfortably fit several scientists inside at once. But his favorite spot on Earth is where the Giant Crystal Cave of Naica lays buried, about 1,000 feet (300 meters) below the town of Naica, Mexico.

“This is the ‘Sistine Chapel of crystals,'” García-Ruiz told Live Science. Giant gypsum pillars, most of which are as large and thick as telephone poles, slash through the basketball-court-size cavern in a brilliant display of Earth’s slow-motion alchemy. The crystals are hundreds of thousands of years old, and still actively growing in the hot, humid cave. For now, the largest one measures 39 feet (12 m) in length and 13 feet (4 m) in diameter, and it weighs 55 tons (50 metric tons).

3. Earth’s mysterious synergy

An illustration of Earth’s mysterious innards (Image credit: Ed Garnero/ASU)

“My favorite fact about Earth is that all parts of it, from the center to the atmosphere, appear to be dynamically and chemically interactive, over a wide range of time scales and spatial scales,” Ed Garnero, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, told Live Science.

As an example of this planet-wide synchronicity, Garnero sent an image (which he made) depicting the mysterious underground structures that some researchers have labeled “the blobs.” These lopsided, continent-sized mountains sit inside Earth’s mantle about halfway between your feet and the center of the planet. While scientists know from seismic imaging that these blobs exist, nobody is exactly sure what they are or what they do.

One intriguing feature of the structures, Garnero said, is that plumes of exceptionally hot rock (depicted here in yellow) appear to rise off the blobs and feed certain volcanoes on the surface — essentially creating a chemical pipeline that connects the deep Earth to the high atmosphere.

“I guess an addendum to this fact is that there is SO MUCH that we do not know about Earth — from the internal structures to the climate,” Garnero said. “It is an exciting time to monitor, measure and model the observations.”

4. “Stained glass” diatoms

A wagon wheel diatom under a microscope (Image credit: NOAA/John R. Dolan, Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche; Observatoire Océanologique de Villefrance-sur-Mer)

One of the most amazing facts about Earth is that “around 20-50% of the Earth’s oxygen is produced by diatoms,” said Sarah Webb, a biologist and associate professor of life science at Arkansas State University-Newport. 

“Diatoms are microscopic algae with a shell made of glass,” Webb told Live Science in an email. Diatoms are pretty to look at, too, she said. “They look like stained glass when viewed under a microscope.” 

Life as we know it wouldn’t be around were it not for an abundance of lung-friendly oxygen gas in our atmosphere. Earth has been oxygenated for about 2.3 billion to 2.4 billion years, but the tiny, delicate diatoms of today likely evolved around 250 million years ago. These unicellular organisms are ubiquitous in Earth’s oceans, and scientists estimate that there are more than 100,000 species of diatoms. 

5. Rivers that flow backward

Robin Bell smiles for the camera in Antarctica, where she does most of her research. (Image credit: Courtesy of Robin Bell)

Antarctica, Earth’s southernmost continent, is one of the driest places on the planet. But there’s a surprising amount of liquid water lurking below the continent’s frozen surface that doesn’t behave as you might expect.

“Beneath the ice in Antarctica there are mountain ranges where rivers flow backward and lakes [that are] the size of New Jersey,” said Robin Bell, president of the American Geophysical Union and a professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in Palisades, New York.

“The weight of the overlying ice makes the water flow backward while the heat of the Earth keeps the water in the subglacial rivers and lakes from turning into ice,” Bell said.

Scientists discovered clues to a backward-flowing river in Antarctica’s Gamburtsev Mountains after they examined the shape of the icy layer atop the hidden river; that layer aligned with the direction of the water’s movement.

6. Glowing sea creatures

The fluorescent seahorse, Hippocampus erectus, glows a bold red and green. (Image credit: Copyright David Gruber)

More than 70% of Earth is covered with water, so it’s no surprise that scientists such as David Gruber find inspiration in exploring these great depths. Gruber, a presidential professor of biology at City University of New York and an explorer with the National Geographic Society, studies glowing marine animals. He snapped the above photo, which shows the first biofluorescent seahorse known to science.

“Knowing how much magic is happening beneath the sea that we’ve yet to even learn about yet,” is Gruber’s favorite Earth fact. “It’s perhaps my main inspiration as a scientist that maintains my child-like curiosity.”

There’s so much to learn. “How we are connected to other life and what our place is on this amazing planet is still in its early stages,” Gruber told Live Science.

7. Route 66

(Image credit: vectortatu/Shutterstock)

“The boundary between Earth’s mantle and core is roughly 3,000 km [about 1,865 miles] below our feet, a little less than the total length of America’s ‘Mother Road,’ Route 66,” said Jennifer Jackson, a professor of Mineral Physics at Caltech.

Initially, researchers thought that this region was a simple interface between solid rocks and liquid iron-rich metal. But, in reality, “this remote region is almost as complex as Earth’s surface,” she said. 

While it’s impossible to reach this Route-66-long place in person, “geophysical and experimental studies of this distant region reveal a fascinating landscape of chemical and structural complexity that influences what’s happening on Earth’s surface,” Jackson said. “For example, the complex dynamics of Earth’s core-mantle boundary affects Earth’s protective geomagnetic field and the motion of tectonic plates.”

8. Life on our planet

Cambrian fossils formed by cyanobacteria are found in Newfoundland, Canada. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Our planet harbors magnificent life-forms, from tiny, near-invisible organisms to giant, ferocious beasts. Billions of years ago, conditions became just right for the tiniest particles to combine together and form the very first life-forms. 

These life-forms are nearly as ancient as Earth itself. “The Earth is over 4.6 billion years [old], and life has been present on the Earth continuously since at least 3.5 billion years ago,” Shuhai Xiao, professor of geobiology in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech. The earliest evidence for life on our planet comes from the marks these organisms left on rocks, according to a previous Live Science report.

Photosynthetic organisms called cyanobacteria were some of the earliest life-forms on our planet. Here is a photo of fossilized Cambrian mounds formed by cyanobacteria in Newfoundland, Canada.

9. Climate feedback

It’s not too hot or too cold for this moose in Washington’s temperate rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Another amazing feature of our planet is how various processes interact in so-called climate feedbacks, which act to either amplify or diminish other climate forces. 

“It’s amazing how climate feedbacks have maintained a habitable planetary climate for hundreds of millions of years —- right in the sweet spot of not too cold, not too warm,” said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. 

However, these same feedbacks could make the effects of climate change worse, because they may further amplify the planet’s already increasing temperatures, resulting in what is known as “positive feedback,” according to NASA. For instance, as the globe warms, it causes more sea ice to melt; ice reflects a lot of sunlight, sending heat back out to space; but when that ice melts, it reveals a dark sea surface that instead absorbs heat.

“We need to fight climate change harder, to keep our planet habitable and flourishing,” Overpeck said. “That’s what we all need to rededicate ourselves to on this 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day.”

10. The past influences the future

(Image credit: Merritt Turetsky)

An amazing fact is that “historical legacies often dictate how Earth will respond to modern change,” said Merritt Turetsky, the director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

“A legacy can be thought of as [a] memory of an ecosystem with regard to past events,” Turetsky said. “One example is permafrost, frozen soils that have accumulated at high latitudes over millennia. Today, permafrost soils store so much carbon — derived from ancient plants, animals and microbes that existed on the surface of our planet — that they will be a major player in how Earth responds to future climate change.”

“The past often is the key to understanding our planet’s future,” Turetsky told Live Science.

Caption: Merritt Turetsky’s team samples frozen permafrost soils in Alaska and Canada to understand how past soil types influence the ability of Arctic ecosystems to cope with modern environmental change.

11. Fascinating dimensions

(Image credit: Johann Philipp Klages)

Our planet is a dynamic and ever-evolving giant orb, with earthquakes shifting the rocky plates that make up its surface, volcanoes that exude fiery lava from the planet’s innards, and even deep-sea hydrothermal vents that gurgle out sizzling mineral water that supports bizarre forms of life. All of this can be enchanting to scientists who immerse themselves in the planet’s geology.

Glacial geologist Johann Philipp Klages said his favorite aspects of Earth are “its fascinating dimensions and unexpected forces, which pleasantly tell us, again and again, how small and insignificant we are in the context of Earth’s history.” 

Klages is a research scientist in the Marine Geology section of the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany. An expedition on the institution’s icebreaker RV Polarstern took Klages to the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica in 2017, where he captured this gorgeous image of the ship in front of the Pine Island ice shelf edge.

12. Natural healing

This mother and baby tapir might just help the Amazon rainforest.  (Image credit: Shutterstock)

What is Earth’s greatest feature? That “it supports life!” Marcia Macedo, an associate scientist and director of the Water Program at Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) in Massachusetts, told Live Science.

“What amazes me is that most natural systems have the capacity to heal themselves after big disturbances,” she said. “This is as true for a human body recovering from disease as it is for a tropical forest growing back after an intense fire.”

Macedo added, “sometimes that healing is facilitated by surprising heroes,” such as the tapir, which can restore degraded forests in the Amazon. The tapir does this by munching on fruit from healthy trees and then depositing their seeds in areas that have been previously burned, according to a WHRC statement.

Originally published on Live Science. 

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