Extraterrestrial intelligence is extremely unlikely to help us. Not because its existence is impossible, but because if any such intelligence were already here, and in any sense benevolent, it would have intervened long before our crises reached the planetary scale they clearly have. Short of the darker possibility that it is they, rather than rogue […]
Honesty or extinction. That’s the choice. Climate change isn’t a crisis outside us—it’s the mirror of everything we’ve built. Our systems, proud and precise, are designed to defend their own definitions. Governments, universities, corporations—all fluent in continuity, allergic to contradiction. They confuse repetition with stability, and stability with survival. But the planet doesn’t care for […]
I spend a lot of time considering abstract, complex and the many aspirationally “real” systems that exist between our ears and upon the surface of our planet. My acquired suspicion in this context is that neither “growth” nor “degrowth” represent sufficiently sophisticated concepts with which to effectively engage this vast and multidimensional problem we are […]
The concept of cascading complexity in matters of Global Existential Threat is quite substantially and far beyond any contemporary regulatory aptitude or ideology and party-agnostic political will to engage it with requisite urgency and at required scale. It is simultaneously not at all political and yet suffers from an endless adversarial bickering as the articulation […]
Observing the President of COP26 stifling emotion as he apologised for the shortfalls of the limited agreement obtained at this critically important conference, I find myself reflecting on the words being variously wielded and warped on such a Global stage. There are two primary games of symbolic communication (i.e. language) at work in these large […]
Science seeks underlying patterns and abbreviated logical explanations (as equation, model and approximation or general framework) to describe and manipulate nature but this is always at an inadvertent and inverse cost of generating precisely the same quantity of unmanageable complexity and disorder as that control and value or utility it brings. There exists a general […]
There is a deepening feeling of doom (and gloom) as coronavirus begins to take hold across our community. We see the numbers growing daily; accelerating, exponentiating. At some point this will no longer be “someone else’s” illness, it will be upon us; a tidal surge of trillions of sinister nano-scale biological robots, wicked ribonucleic algorithms […]
Zeitgeist.
It is a little hard not to feel somewhat dispossessed and saddened by the arc of catastrophe that human history traces in time. There is some essential adversarial turn in psychology and nature that provides and requires the entropy from which new forms of thought and life are able to emerge. We come to depend […]
A holistic logic is discontinuous, non-linear, enigmatic and – in the face climate change – mandatory.
The catastrophic entropy of a currently most-probable future is not the only available solution in the possibility-space of all emergent and adaptive human planetary civilisations.
Humanity spends far too much time bickering and fighting over how we will collectively move forward to ever actually get on with the very serious business of actually ensuring our own continuity, survival and ongoing tenure on this planet.
Daedelus Kite 