About the miraculous history of Earth; an interview with E.O. Wilson; about SF authors addressing scientific challenges; and about whether science, and the arts, are stuck.
Saw this on Fb recently, though it’s an article first published back in 2018.
The Atlantic, Peter Brannen, 15 March 2018: Why Earth’s History Appears So Miraculous, subtitled, “The strange, cosmic reason our evolutionary path will look ever luckier the longer we survive.”
Begins the the familiar anecdote about World War II bombers, the “observer selection effect.” They were only seeing the planes that returned, not those that crashed.
It’s something of a miracle that life on our planet has been left to evolve without fatal interruption for billions of years. Such a long unbroken chain of survival, however unlikely, is necessary for bags of mud and water like ourselves to eventually sit up, and just recently, to wonder how we got here. And like the bullet-riddled—but safe—planes, our planet has survived countless near-fatal blows. There have been volcanic apocalypses, body blows from supersonic space rocks the size of Mount Everest, and ice ages that might have frozen the planet almost to the tropics. Had any of these catastrophes been worse, we wouldn’t be here. But they couldn’t have been worse for precisely that reason.
And how this applies to the Fermi Paradox. Worth revisiting in detail when considering humanity’s long term future.
“Maybe the universe is super dangerous and Earth-like planets are destroyed at a very high rate,” Sandberg says. “But if the universe is big enough, then when observers do show up on some very, very rare planets, they’ll look at the record of meteor impacts and disasters and say, ‘The universe looks pretty safe!’ But the problem is, of course, that their existence depends on them being very, very lucky. They’re actually living in an unsafe universe and next Tuesday they might get a very nasty surprise.”
\\
Vox, Benji Jones, 2 Dec 2021: This legendary 92-year-old biologist has some advice for saving Earth, subtitled, “E.O. Wilson, who’s considered a modern-day Darwin, wants you to go out and look for new species.”
I keep being surprised that Wilson keeps writing books at his age; his latest, last year, is Tales from the Ant World. And famous biographer Richard Rhodes has just published a book about Wilson.
Benji Jones
I can’t help but think that decades of efforts to save nature haven’t accomplished much. Do you think conservation has worked?E.O. Wilson
We have had many successes — a rainforest here, the protection of a savanna or tropical grassland there, and so on. But the sum of it all is inadequate. We don’t have a generally recognized, universally accepted moonshot effort to combine all the activity directed toward conservation into a unified, fundamentally accepted ethic of conservation. We have many victories in a losing war.
\\
Here is the third of the three SF links I mentioned several posts ago. It’s also about science. But like the second of those, I wouldn’t have linked it if I’d read it through first.
Tor.com, Julie Nováková, 23 Nov 2021: Sci-Fi vs Science: How Authors View the Greatest Scientific Challenges of Our Time
(I squint skeptically by any use of the abbreviation in the title; it undermines the article’s authority. Does not the author, and does not the publisher, realize this?)
Ever since Mary Shelley’s seminal Frankenstein, science fiction has been responding to modern science, reflecting its progress and challenges and raising questions about its social impacts. Sci-fi has always been quick to follow the zeitgeist, seemingly predicting various discoveries and their societal consequences, asking important questions before policy-makers do, and addressing scientific challenges. What are the scientific challenges perceived by current SF authors, and do they see a way of overcoming them—with or without the help of science fiction?
(Of course this begs and question about Mary Shelley, again.)
The writer of this piece reminds us that she edited an anthology called Life Beyond Us. Which turns out to be what this article is about. It goes on with discussion of Kim Stanley Robinson and the subgenres of solarpunk and cli-fi, but then turns… to her anthology, and how the contributors to that dealt with their themes. Peter Watts, Tessa Fisher, G. David Nordley, Eric Choi, Rich Larson, and others. Interesting enough, but the piece is basically a promo for the writer’s anthology.
\\
Salon, Michael Bhaskar, 26 Nov 2021: Is science stuck? The “Great Stagnation Debate,” explained, subtitled, “All the low-hanging fruit has been picked, so it seems — a principle that applies to art and invention, too”
This is an excerpt from a recent book by the writer, Michael Bhaskar, called The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking from MIT address, which is in fact one of those 2 or 3 books that I notice each week, as described in previous post, in this case via Facebook ads from MIT Press, but which I have not ordered.
The subtitle of the article gives the game away: it’s a familiar issue. I’ve heard about it before. All the easy stuff has been discovered. The frontiers of science, in any field, depend on detecting evidence that is more and more difficult to find. This is turn leads to the so-called “replication crisis,” especially in social science fields (where the data is more difficult to define and collect than in the physical sciences), in which marginally-likely discoveries are difficult to replicate. (The book summary I just posted today, about the SKEPTICS’ GUIDE, has a chapter about this concerning “P-hacking.”) This doesn’t mean science doesn’t work; it means at the fringes it’s more difficult to be sure science is working.
The writer states the issue thus:
That we pick the low-hanging fruit first is a truism. But its impact is enormous and almost wholly overlooked in policy, business and intellectual life, even among many who engage with the Great Stagnation Debate. Not only do we pick them first, but the world is unidirectional; save for extreme calamities like the collapse of the Roman Empire, once a discovery has been made, a technique implemented or a thing invented, it stays made, implemented or invented. That is to say, big ideas happen and are achieved once. They might have long histories, numerous tweaks and subsequent revisions, but this doesn’t hide the fact that once a big idea has been conceived, executed and found purchase, doing the same cannot rival it. The frontier has already moved. This fact alone explains much of the present’s mixed track record. And it is part of why the future contains such daunting challenges.
He sees similar issues in the arts, which recalls the idea I mentioned a few posts ago about suppression of books and whether a true genius might be inhibited from expressing his ideas given the weight of the history of his art.
The nature of ideas means we must ascend rungs of difficulty and obscurity – and will keep on doing so. Despite being frequently dismissed, the low-hanging fruit phenomenon is ingrained. Science, technology, human civilization – unlike archaeology, these may be boundless territories. But we reach – and have reached – the more navigable destinations first. The corollary is clear. All things being equal, future destinations will be harder.
Endpiece
Once I get to this point in my daily blog post it’s past 5:30pm and I’m in a rush to finish so that Y does not get too upset.
Today: finished a long book notes post here. Which always takes longer than expected — with notes from a book in the 1000s of words — and I have several more, of even more important books, by Coyne, Dawkins, Pinker, and others.
Drizzly here today. Did my cardiac therapy; the same stretches, the same machines. They always want you to work a bit harder, each time. My legs are sore.
House cleaners here. They come here after they do the Silverbergs (from whom we got the reference).
My living room is still covered with boxes, including many of those little yellow boxes, of slides. For weeks now, I tell the the housecleaners to omit this room.
I am beginning my Christmas shopping, online. Fortunately I don’t have that much to do.
