Is Nature indifferent to us? And is that a good part of why it can be so frightening?

I am currently reading one of Michael Crichton's more recent books, "Micro." It's a decent read and I do recommend it.

This is a story about nano tech taken to an astonishing extreme; the shrinking of not only machines, but people, down to very small sizes. The purpose here is so that a given section of Hawaiian rain forest can be cataloged to the minutest level of soil and plant biota. Every creature down to the very microbes in precisely collected trays of soil.

The why of course is that nature has already spent millions of years cooking up drugs we haven't even imagined yet. If you could sift out a comprehensive database of what was there, as well as what each living thing could synthesize naturally, you would undoubtedly be sitting on a gold mine.

Which is also why the usual greed, and cast of psychopathic, sociopathic, and just plain evil, characters come into play so as to fulfill their dreams of power, and ego gratification.

The story does present, though, an interesting juxtaposition of minute mechanization, the vast array of living activity at small scales, and the contrast of how small we are in comparison to nature, even when we aren't shrunk down to the size of a thumb nail.

There is, in particular, one paragraph of dialogue spoken by one of the male characters that really got me to thinking:

"...What is it about nature that is so terrifying to the modern mind? Why is it so intolerable? Because nature is fundamentally indifferent. It’s unforgiving, uninterested. If you live or die, succeed or fail, feel pleasure or pain, it doesn’t care. That’s intolerable to us. How can we live in a world so indifferent to us. So we redefine nature. We call it  Mother Nature when it’s not a parent in any real sense of the term. We put gods in trees and air and the ocean, we put them in our households to protect us. We need these human gods for many things, luck, health, freedom, but one thing above all—one reason stands out—we need the gods to protect us from loneliness..."

Certainly nature is a process after all. And it stands to reason that a process can't have any real inclinations as we might consider them. Any proclivity towards hope, or favoritism towards one species or another, let alone one individual or another within a species.

It is a process that simply works to create ever more complex arrangements of interaction. Interaction whose flows can become self sustaining so that information can be retained, built upon, and, through experience association, have ever greater layers of abstracted meaning that can be accumulated.

That this ultimately results in something that can not only contemplate the factors for future choices, but the implications of its own existence, as well as the wonder of awareness, imagination, or intuition in the first place, ought to make us pause for a moment.

This gets especially more important when you start considering that a meaning processor (as singular meaning reference point), such as any sentient being is, might be quite fundamental to the ability to have a reality (the arrow of sequence and arbitrary moment where anything can interact and associate to begin with) at all.

This sort of thing is why I wonder if realities are the strings in string theory; only experienced from a different dimentional scale. They say that one of the main characteristics of such strings is that they vibrate, to provide a host of quantum fundamentals. You have to wonder then at what form of harmonic modulation would be at work to make this vibration go. Could it perhaps be the sum total of all of the life interaction energies, and all of the celestial bodies moving, as well as the collective thoughts and emotions of those sentients living inside? Could there be a tone there, or perhaps even a melody, that is meant to resonate with a good deal more than mere indifference? I, for one, would like to think so. It is certainly why I ponder things under the heading of a philosophy.

The fate of the universe?

Not even "pray all you want, but just keep on rowing" will save us from this monster.

Talk about creative thinking!

The following post was prompted by the YouTube video linked below.

There should be a new Nobel prize for the artistic expression of works that utilize knowledge spanning  across more than one discipline. and Gilberto Esparza should be on the short list for the first recipient of this prize.

I love this kind of creative thinking

The following post was prompted by the Motherboard article linked below.

Inflatable aircraft delivered to Venus as an upper atmospheric probe. What a cool idea, and wouldn't you just love to have an airship big enough to live in while you floated around in that environment. One wonders if something similar will be done with Jupiter as well. I certainly hope so.

The Inflatable Plane That Would Float Like a Leaf Through Venus’s Atmosphere

Another Comic Genius passing

Anne Meara, in combination with her husband Jerry Stiller, were, in their own way, the equal of George Burns and Gracie Allen. Different time periods, and different approaches, but the same caliber of genius.

My heart goes out to the Stiller family. This lovely, funny lady will be missed.

Anne Meara passing

Where it takes place is not as important as the creative thinking we bring to bear on alternatives

The following post was prompted by the Atlantic article linked below.

This is an interesting take on creative alternatives to food production. It serves to suggest as well the need for more integrated control of the entire food production process.

Doing this kind of thing, however, and keeping with a profit motivated mind set won't wash at all in the long run. Which is nothing more than to say that a creative new alternative needs to be found in our economic operating system as well.



Farming in the Sky

New magnetic material

The following post was prompted by the gizmag.com article linked below.

Non-Joulian magnets! Remember that designation. It refers to a new class of magnetic material that, unlike what was originally discovered by James Prescott Joule, don't change in shape, but change in volume. A feature that, apparently, makes them prone to much lower heat profiles, able to be made of non-rare earth metals, and able to provide magnetic affect at much smaller sizes. Talk about impressive!.

This sort of thing gets me to thinking again on what the possibility might be of making magnetic lattice materials, such as wire bundles, that could provide significantly magnified tensile strength with the application of a current. Perhaps such strength far surpassing what even carbon nanotubes alone might ultimately be able to provide.

A time will come when this will be important for things other than, say, space elevators. In order to delve into the world of relativistic mass we are going to have to come up with a way to create mass accelerator rings that will need to withstand quite extraordinary centrifugal forces. Perhaps this new magnetic material will provide important options in that regard.



New class of "non-Joulian magnets" have potential to revolutionize electronics