Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
If the world were truly random and accidental, without any intrinsic purpose, agency, or telos, then why were our physical laws fine-tuned with such precision? How did nature come to display what the physicist Paul Davies once called “a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rati
... See moreMeghan O'Gieblyn • God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
Holden Karnofsky • All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild
The Bay’s current fulfilled feminist Camille Paglia’s lament: “Human beings are not nature’s favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force.”
Caitlin Doughty • Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
But the planet didn’t come preset with a perfect environment. Life’s presence shapes the planet, too. Early life pumped the atmosphere with oxygen, which enabled the rise of more complex, energy-hungry beings. It’s a snowballing of habitability, life’s processes remaking the planet into a home. Everything about Earth seems tailor-made to Earth life
... See moreJaime Green • The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos
Tim Urban • A Game of Giants — Wait but Why
When intelligent life terraforms a new planet, that is the biosphere replicating, and because the planet will have different properties than the planet of origin, there will be replication with variation.