We have pushed our species (and many others) to the brink of extinction by misguided actions informed by a limited point of view. This epistemological blind-spot created by an exclusively quantities-focused science informed a technologically driven civilization measuring success through inadequate economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) while externalizing the qualitative damage to human communities, ecosystems and the biosphere from the balance sheets. There is an international consensus that our generation is facing a convergence of multiple crises and that the same mindset that has created this convergence is incapable of solving it. Paradigms evolve and shift when the prevailing frameworks are unable…

In physics that which is called a complex system is the one that exhibits a large range of spatial scales, and modelled as exhibiting non-linear chaotic response dynamics, turbulence, and power-scaling laws. Complex systems have characteristic emergent properties that cannot be predicted and therefore are impossible to control. They are novel characteristics of the system that emerge out of interactions and relationships which are governed by non-linear, iterative processes that drive the behavior of complex systems; the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems. In general, complex systems, man-made or…

The history of the Earth system is a story of change. Some changes are gradual and benign, but others, especially those associated with catastrophic mass extinction, are relatively abrupt and destructive. It is generally agreed that the Earth system is complex and that this complex character must be appreciated when modelling it and taking decisions that may influence its evolution. The Earth’s complexity resides in its causal organization, which is self-referential. The road to demonstrating that the Earth qualifies as a complex system thus passes through a consideration of the Gaia hypothesis: that the Earth is an instance of life…

We are all on a lifelong journey to improve ourselves, spiritually, mentally and physically. Unfortunately, the lifelong part of that statement can sound like an awfully long process for many, especially for those born into rough circumstances or with a mental or physical disability. However, through using the developing biotech advances that will become mainstream over the next few decades, it will become possible to quickly and fundamentally remake yourself. Whether you want to become part machine. Whether you want to become superhuman. Or whether you want to become an entirely new species of human. The human body is about…

WE ALL KNOW IT. THIS IS THE DECISIVE DECADE. SUSTAINABILITY 3.0: REGENERATION Humanity has pushed our species (and many others) to the brink of extinction by misguided actions informed by a limited point of view. This epistemological blind-spot created by an exclusively quantities-focused science informed a technologically driven civilization measuring success through inadequate economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) while externalizing the qualitative damage to human communities, ecosystems and the biosphere from the balance sheets. Traditionally organized around an extraction-based production system, based on hierarchical, centralized control and distribution of scarce resources. This system has come with a set of beliefs about the…

The Earth is increasingly a product of human engineering and up until very recently, however, this has occurred without conscious recognition. A myriad of economic, social, political, technological decisions,  taken and evaluated as if independent, are in reality tightly coupled both to each other and to underlying dynamic natural Earth systems. It reflects the (frequently unintended and unconscious, but nonetheless real) design of a single species. Disconcerting as it is: the Earth, as it now exists, has become a human artifact. In the geological era of the Anthropocene, our planet is changing at paces never observed before. Pollution, natural resources…

We are all on a lifelong journey to improve ourselves, spiritually, mentally and physically. Unfortunately, the lifelong part of that statement can sound like an awfully long process for many, especially for those born into rough circumstances or with a mental or physical disability. However, through using the developing biotech advances that will become mainstream over the next few decades, it will become possible to quickly and fundamentally remake yourself. Whether you want to become part machine. Whether you want to become superhuman. Or whether you want to become an entirely new species of human. The human body is about…

We have pushed our species (and many others) to the brink of extinction by misguided actions informed by a limited point of view. This epistemological blind-spot created by an exclusively quantities-focused science informed a technologically driven civilization measuring success through inadequate economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) while externalizing the qualitative damage to human communities, ecosystems and the biosphere from the balance sheets. Humanity is transgressing various planetary boundaries and has destabilized global climate patterns. Awareness is spreading that we are on course for civilizational collapse or might already be in the middle of it. We have created an anthropogenic global climate and ecological emergency….

Humans are starting to be recognized as an overwhelming forcing factor modulating biosphere dynamics. In this view, the Earth system can be interpreted as entering in a geological era that can be called the Anthropocene, the Technocene or even Capitalocene, depending on the conceptual stance adopted. Human modification of the Earth system has created new dynamics and connections that are causing local ecosystems to behave in new ways, while also having an impact on distant people and places. At the advent of the Anthropocene, life is being pushed to its limits the world over; we are currently living through the…

What are the origins of life on Earth?  The study of the origin of life on Earth or, more specifically, how life on Earth began from inanimate matter, is technically known as abiogenesis (as opposed to biogenesis, which is the process of lifeforms producing other lifeforms, and as opposed to evolution, which is the study of how living things have changed over time since life first arose). The tension between Darwin’s ‘…some one primordial form into which life was first breathed’ and Pasteur’s ‘all life from life’ defines one of the least understood natural phenomena – the emergence of living states of matter. Scientists have probed it since the 1920s, when…