Life may not need a planet. It may only need matter, persistent gradients of energy, memory, and enough time for (ie self-) organisation to become aware of itself.
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the oldest questions
Tag: space
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Philosophically Attractive
In dynamical systems, trajectories do not simply collapse into rest. They can (and tend to) drift endlessly, circling within strange attractors where motion never repeats yet never escapes. Turbulent fluids, weather patterns, ecological populations, and even networks of neurons exhibit this restless confinement. What seems chaotic is in fact structured wandering, an orbit that sustains […]
In topology, the concept of cobordism describes a seemingly simple idea: when two shapes can be seen as the boundary of a single, higher-dimensional surface, they are connected—not just spatially, but structurally. For instance, two separate circles may both sit on the edge of a cylinder. The circles are 1-dimensional, the cylinder is 2-dimensional, and […]
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Language is deep…
Do you agree with the Danish #philosopher and theologian, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)? Language mediates not only our experience of the #world but our very structure of experiencing. While #language moves us emotionally and affectively, this felt immediacy is itself a #product of deeper, patterned regularities—mathematical, logical architectures through which meaning is sustained and extended. In […]
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It is its own shadow.
A torus floating against a dark background. This torus is its own negative space. It is a singularly continuous topological surface that is unbroken but that also contains at its core an absence, a discontinuity and a recursive entanglement. The identity theorem (here) is that logical incompleteness precisely is the presence of an unbounded and […]
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Starlink Murmuration
Context: Will Musk’s Starlink satellites lead to Kessler syndrome? An eventual Kessler syndrome occurring is surely a matter of entropy and statistical inevitability, regardless that even Low Earth Orbit space is genuinely “big”. That is – there are exponentially many more disordered system states than ordered ones and so the accumulation of more components and […]
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Life in Space?
Context: First evidence of cell membrane molecules in space I wonder if we might stretch the boundaries of biological diversity far beyond the limited subset of observed (terrestrial) organic self-replication to encompass the possibility of space-based life, sentience and intelligence. Given the sheer vastness of all possible configurations of matter and energy as dynamically-reflexive environmental […]
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Technological Civilisation
Context: 94% of the universe’s galaxies are permanently beyond our reach The scale of the cosmos is astonishing. Some estimates infer 2 trillion galaxies and some variations of cosmological hyper-inflation (i.e. early expansion) require an infinite Universe. What is most astonishing of all, though and to anyone who stares into this abyss for longer than […]
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Technology as Displaced Entropy
Context: Australia installs first space laser optical ground station in southern hemisphere It is interesting to observe, and from a broader (integrated, technological) systems perspective, that the value acquired by iterating upon and through the technical ratchet of space-based communications solutions and innovations is a measure of displaced information (as much as material) entropy. Much […]
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Kessler Syndrome
The Kessler Syndrome is a clear and stark reminder of just how intransigently daft the militarisation of space might eventually prove itself to be. One idiot with a missile and LEO indefinitely inaccessible for everyone. No less painful than the consequences of even a limited exchange of nuclear weapons (anywhere) but, if you noticed, the […]
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Future of Humanity
Context: The Future of Life Institute The endemic and omnipresent enlightened self-interest of human psychology is generally such that, while we may already and for the most part possess the technical and cognitive or linguistic and technological tools necessary to architect our own freedom and a shared, peaceful and sustainable future – we are so […]
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There is only one Problem
There is really only one problem. It is the problem of Everything, all at once. Every different problem we seem to experience, every difficulty from broken door handle to Global pandemic or from from optimal social organisation to climate change – there is only one thing that we need to understand to solve them all […]
Daedelus Kite 