Algemeen

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…

Life is an astonishingly emergent property of matter, full-blown in its complexity today, some billions of years after it started out in presumably some very simple form. The fundamental question is whether life as we know it – it’s astonishing chemical complexity – is a very improbable occurrence or a nearly inevitable evolution of dynamic off-equilibrium chemical matter. A question of almost miracles or the inevitability of laws of physics and chemistry. In spite of recent rapid development of biology, chemistry, Earth science and astronomy, the origin of life (abiogenesis) is still a mystery. The sources of Earth’s evolving chemical…

The new paradigm of sciences,  including fields such as cosmology, quantum physics, quantum field theory, complexity sciences and complex adaptive systems research, reveals that the universe exists and evolves as a unified entity through implicate orders of reality that literally in-form the emergence and evolution of life. This is best understood through the holographic principle in physics, which suggests that the appearance of our physical universe as a three-dimensional space (with the flows of time as the fourth dimension), originates from a two-dimensional holographic surface or boundary that is mathematically encoded at the smallest level of physical reality. This mathematical…

Let us take inspiration from Quantum Physics rather than classical Newtonian science. Both Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (which introduced the concept of space-time and how it can be warped by gravity) and Quantum Physics revealed that while Newtonian science is useful for the development of practical technologies, it is not universally valid and cannot explain the underlying connected nature of reality on a cosmic or quantum level. Classical science tries to logically break down everything into building blocks in order to increase understanding. But Relativity and Quantum Physics show that to understand the nature of the physical universe, we have…

Just as modern Homo sapiens distinguished themselves from their prehistoric ancestors through their expanded cognitive and physical abilities, humanity is in the process of taking another big leap forward in cognition and physiology. This leap, however, won’t be due to evolutionary biology but rather as a direct result of technological enhancement. This era of Homo Augmentus is not quite as distant as you think. By the time we reach the 6G era 10 years in the future, the level of hyperconnectivity we’re witnessing today will move beyond simply linking ‘things’ and extend directly to the human body and mind. These…

THE ART OF LIVING TOGETHER Life on Earth is complex and interactive, with organisms forming populations, which in turn form communities, or ecosystems, both locally and globally. The ecology is defined by the interactions between species and their composition within that system that drives natural selection, evolution, and genetic composition. The fitness for survival of an organism in any ecosystem is not dependent solely upon the species but includes the interactions of other organisms with that species. Symbiosis, the nature of the interactions between different organisms living in close physical association, is omnipresent and played an essential role in the…