december 2022

Life is really weird. Life is unlike any other phenomenon in physics. Stars, electrons, and black holes are all amazing in their own ways. Life is self-organizing chemistry which reproduces itself and passes on its evolved characteristics, encoded in DNA. In thermodynamics terms, it has the ability to reduce local entropy or disorganization, thus locally contravening the law of thermodynamics. In more biological terms; life is the  arrangement of molecules with qualities of self-sustenance and self-replication. It’s a bit more … only life invents, and the first thing life invents is itself. Life must be described in terms of its…

‘Man is destined by his reason to live in a society with men and in it to cultivate himself, to civilize himself, and to make himself moral by the arts and sciences. No matter how strong his animal tendency to yield passively to the attractions of comfort and well-being, which he calls happiness, he is still destined to make himself worthy of humanity by actively struggling with the obstacle that cling to him because of the crudity of his nature.’ – Immanuel Kant Humans are biophysically connected to the biosphere through the flows of materials and energy appropriated from ecosystems….

‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. But if I wish to explain it to him who asks the question, I do not know.’ – Saint Augustine, ca. 399 CE. Another year past, it seems as if time is speeding up. I’ve always been fascinated with time and the concept of time’s passage. Time seems commonplace, but it is perhaps the Universe’s greatest mystery. Throughout the history of philosophy (paradigmatically, in the work of Aristotle) time is a measure or dimension of change. If there are physical processes, it seems there is temporality….

Our world is at a turning point, humanity is at a crossroads. We can choose to live self-servingly, by which we try to command and control the biological and cultural heritage of the biosphere solely for our self-serving benefit. Or, we can co-create symbiotic systems through which we relate to and work with our living world and one another in life-affirming ways. Given the increasing characteristics of complex interconnection we face moving forward in our global context, it is only through the cultivation of a symbiotic approach to life and living that humanity can hope to evolve with the rest…

Earth, an ancient, extremely complex, multiple, all-planetary, thermodynamically open, self-controling system of living and non-living matter which accumulates and redistributes immense resources and energy and determines the composition and dynamics of the Earth’s biosphere, lithosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere and the nonlinear interactions and feedback loops between and within them. These components can be also regarded as self-regulating systems in their own right, and further broken down into more specialized subsystems. The sources of Earth’s evolving chemical complexity are the energies of solar diurnal disequilibria and the energies of physicochemical gradients at hot hydrothermal vents. The diurnal disequilibria arise naturally…