Here is the prime condition of success: Concentrate your energy, thought and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged. Having begun on one line, resolve to fight it out on that line, to lead in it, adopt every improvement, have the best machinery, and know the most about it.
— - Andrew Carnegie
As you lie there feeling yourself hovering within this gravitational bond while peering down at the billions of stars drifting in the infinite chasm of space, you will have entered an experience of the universe that is not just human and not just biological. You will have entered a relationship from a galactic perspective, becoming for a moment a part of the Milky Way galaxy, experiencing what it is like to be the Milky Way galaxy.
— Brian Swimme. (Absolutely one of my favourite quotes. It’s ‘sticky’. With the right kind of eyes, you’ll find yourself looking up and feeling yourself looking down. Bigness wins)
This is great. You might find it easier to listen to it, but the nu-age guff in the background spoils its punch.
“Existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere. It doesn’t have a destination that it ought to arrive it. But it is best understood by analogy with music, because music, as an art form, is essentially playful. We say you play the piano, you don’t’ work the piano. Why? Music differs from, say, travel. When you travel you’re trying to get somewhere. And, of course, we, being a very compulsive and purposive culture, are busy getting everywhere faster and faster until we eliminate the distance between places…what happens as a result of that is the two ends of your journey became the same place. You eliminate the distance, you eliminate the journey. The fun of the journey is travel, not to obliterate travel. So then, in music, one doesn’t make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest and there would be composers who only wrote finales. People would go to a concert just to hear one crackling chord because that’s the end! Same way with dancing. You don’t aim at a particular spot in the room because that’s where you will arrive. The whole point of dancing is the dance. But we don’t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We have a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It’s all graded and what we do is put the child into the corridor of this grade system with a kind of, “Come on, kitty, kitty,” and you go to kindergarten and that’s a great thing because when you finish that you get into first grade…then you’ve got high school, and it’s revving up, the thing is coming, then you’re going to go to college…you go out to join the world, then you get into some racket where you’re selling insurance, and they’ve got that quota to make, and by god you’re going to make that, and all the time the thing is coming, it’s coming! It’s coming! That great thing. The success you’re working for. Then you wake up one day about 40 years old and you say, “My god, I’ve arrived. I’m there.” And you don’t feel very different from what you’ve always felt and there’s a slight letdown because you feel there’s a hoax. And there was a hoax! A dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything by expectation…we’ve cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”
Complexity hidden in simplicity - how nature creates such mind-boggling complexity was thought to be through, well, mind boggling complexity. Turns out that a new (ish) paradigm uproots the Newtonian/Gallilean maths and equations one, and instead we must now turn our telescopes towards programs. Simple ones.
It is here we find a little epiphany, without seeming triumphant we could call it the same sort Gallileo had. I know it’s bombastic - but listen:
Take ‘Rule 30’ for example. The first black sheep code that didn’t behave. Its rules for behaviour were set, starting from one single black cell, which has the code to determine the colours of those next to it. Easy. Predictable. Uh-uh! From rules rose chaos, unpredictability and strange patterns - and this made no sense.
It was as if there was another level of complexity that standard mathematics couldn’t encapsulate, a flash of light that illuminated a sprawling, creepy forest on our doorsteps that we didn’t know was there.
Here’s rule 30 in program format, and at the bottom you can see it occurring naturally - for thousands of years before we discovered it - in a common snail shell:
This new computational worldview of misbehaving outputs formed ‘Mathematica’ (a term coined by Steve Jobs), and its bigger, bolder little brother ‘Wolfram Alpha’ they’re what’s behind Siri - the seemingly sentient Iphone4 assistant. Building blocks of tiny pieces of code found to have an exponentially large function are stuck together to form massive potential for programming - with little input.
Its implications for the current paradigm aren’t a deal breaker, they just show a real eye for detail - detail we thought would just be more of the same, binary, bits, molecules, smaller pieces of the same stuff. These creatures have hidden extras.
He says that more mining of these programs for suitable projects will create glorious oxymorons as ‘mass customisation’ or ‘technology with imagination’; simplicity reveals massive layers of complexity in the universe.
Plus, Stephen Wolfram is a fascinating subversive, charlatan sort of guy of the highest order; considered a brilliant naughty-boy at Eton he never graduated from Oxford, considering it “awful” he was awarded his doctorate at 20. I’d call him a maverick, but I really hate that word.
He’s watching and learning from the living breathing world that is programming, and he’s finding out how to uncover different sorts of ‘truths’ from the computational universe. I hesitate to use the word ‘truths’, because what lies beneath is always another paradigm shift - but it’s fascinating to consider from whence this complexity comes.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
— Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow
Making Worlds and Exobiology
The Drake Equation calculates (with some omission, admittedly) the mathematical likelihood of intelligent life in the Milky Way.
Ok so, being thoroughly kerflused by that, it turns out the most reasonable view of late is 202.31 civilisations exist, and of them 2.31 are actively trying to communicate.
Sure, several of the terms are based on conjecture, but it’s better than saying ‘maybe’.
While I’m at it, I’d quite like a go at this game, too. ‘Spore’ Creating worlds from a cell to a galaxy. Get God.
Lastly, here’s some research which provides an interesting anatomical/structural cause for a person’s inability to discern between what actually happened and what they imagined happened - oh, and 50% of the population have it.
Think you’ve been visited by one of those 2.31 alien civilisations? Happen you haven’t, then.
The sun has come.
The mist has gone.
We see in the distance our long way home.
I was always yours to have, and you were always mine.
We have loved each other in and out of time.
When the first stone looked up at the blazing sun and the first tree struggled up from the forest floor, I had always loved you more.
You freed your braids, gave your hair to the breeze.
It hummed like a hive of honey bees.
I reached in the mass for the sweet honeycomb there….
Mmm… God, how I love your hair…
You saw me bludgeoned by circumstance, lost, injured, hurt by chance.
I screamed to the heavens, loudly screamed, trying to change our nightmares into dreams…
The sun has come.
The mist has gone.
We see in the distance our long way home.
I was always yours to have, and you were always mine.
We have loved each other in and out, in and out, in and out of time.
— Maya Angelou
The NASA Voyager 2 tweets from where nothing has flown before.
I love these tweets. Lonely and surreal ‘messages’ from the NASA Voyager 2, talking about how far it is from us (currently 13 hours 27 minutes of light-travel time from earth). Its a bit like an omniscient eeyore. Pretty cute, if that’s possible: http://twitter.com/#!/NASAVoyager2
“Although an octopus can taste with all of its skin, in the suckers both taste and touch are exquisitely developed. Athena was tasting me and feeling me at once, knowing my skin, and possibly the blood and bone beneath, in a way I could never fathom.”
IRIS
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
— Carl Sagan, was an American astronomer and author. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
