SUNDAY, FEBUARY 4, 2018

The Cosmic Heartbeat

Yet a few beats, and thee the all-beholding sun shall see no more

Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS

TOPICS: TEMPORAL BLINDNESS, FROM THE WIRES, THE BEAT GOES ON

Abstract: Temporal blindness is the norm. Few humans can actually think more than a decade ahead, or even formulate a five-year plan and follow it. Short-termism reigns within industrial society which is even posterity blind. Reframing cosmic time by mapping it onto a human lifetime may help. We need to minimally formulate a 500-year plan, a one minute nineteen second plan.

TUCSON (A-P) — If the universe is 75 cosmic years old:

So dinosaurs lived in the early days of the current year, hominids within the last month, Australopithecus within the last week, Homo neanderthalensis within the last day, complex society arose within the last hour, and industrial society, the Euro-Sino Empire, within the last minute. Those reading this have lived within the last 12 seconds of the lifetime, to date, of the comos. For humans, temporal blindness (lacking temporal causal cohesion) is the norm.

Life has evolved on Earth for 21 years. Ten thousand human years = 1,840 cosmic heartbeats or 26 cosmic minutes. The current empire has a few seconds left to avoid the fate of all (with the possible exception of the Tairona) prior civilizations. Or maybe some industrial humans could grow up and learn to live properly with the planet. Earth, if loved as Giving Parent, could provide for ecolate human needs for millions of years, as humans reckon them, which is the view of extreme cornucopian optimists who listen to Nature, as distinct from those, cornucopians or doomers, who do not. 'To think is to listen. Listen'.

 

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The time it takes for a car to crash: 0.2 seconds, or 200 milliseconds, or 200,000 microseconds, or 200,000,000 nanoseconds. There's plenty of time.

Humanity is colliding with Nature (over say a 200 years period), so 1 millisecond of car crash = 1 year of the HN collision. One year = 1/200th of the HN collision.

Human time scale, say 20 years (we may live longer, but few can think longer in practice), or 20/200, or 1/10 of HN collision.

So 1 year of thinkable life = 1/10/20 or 1/200th of HN collision.

So over a 20 year period (7,300 days) you watch a bit of the crash every day or 1//7,300th of the HN crash. You watch 300 frames per day for 10 seconds, while maybe thinking about the collision with Nature. Then you check your smartphone for messages. But each 10 seconds, with pretty much nothing moving, is like so boring. Each day is pretty much like the last 200 days. Yeah, the bumper is now bent in, the hood and fenders don't look so good, the radiator is starting to maybe leak a little, but the AC is still blowing cold, the radio is grooving, and you've still got rhythm, and REALLY!, nothing much is REALLY changing, so another day, another 10 seconds go by and where's that lattè I ordered?

 

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To him who in the love of nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language; for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty; and she glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy that steals away Their sharpness ere he is aware. When thoughts Of the last bitter hour come like a blight Over thy spirit, and sad images Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall, And breathless darkness, and the narrow house, Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;— Go forth, under the open sky, and list To Nature's teachings, while from all around— Earth and her waters, and the depths of air— Comes a still voice. Yet a few days, and thee The all-beholding sun shall see no more In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground, Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears, Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix forever with the elements, To be a brother to the insensible rock And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mold. Yet not to thine eternal resting-place Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down With patriarchs of the infant world — with kings, The powerful of the earth — the wise, the good, Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun, — the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods — rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,— Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man [organisms past]. The golden sun, The planets, all the infinite host of heaven, Are shining on the sad abodes of death Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread The globe are but a handful to the tribes That slumber in its bosom. — Take the wings Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness, Or lose thyself in the continuous woods Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound, Save his own dashings — yet the dead are there: And millions in those solitudes, since first The flight of years began, have laid them down In their last sleep — the dead reign there alone. So shalt thou rest — and what if thou withdraw In silence from the living, and no friend Take note of thy departure? All that breathe Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care Plod on, and each one as before will chase His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave Their mirth and their employments, and shall come And make their bed with thee. As the long train Of ages glides away, the sons of men— The youth in life's fresh spring, and he who goes In the full strength of years, matron and maid, The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man— Shall one by one be gathered to thy side, By those, who in their turn, shall follow them. So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

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So live, that when thy summons comes to join the fate of all phenotypic expressions, thou go not, like the wordsmiths of self-credited certitudes, to any envisioned end. There is no persistant thou, only genetic and memetic information that develop into forms most beautiful and most wonderful that have been and are being evolved. Thou art a whirl, a gyre, a drop that parts from the waterfall for a brief time to then reenters the stream as verily there are no separate nor permanent beings. Thou art such information as has worked, and thus selected for.

"Thou shall treasure thy heritage of information, and in the uniqueness of thy good works and complex roles will thy system reap that which is new and immortal in thee". —H.T. Odum

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Systems

"It is impossible to step into the same river twice.... wisdom consists in one thing, to know the principle by which all things are steered through all things." —Heraclitus

"We may therefore say that the Earth has a vital force of growth, and that its flesh is the soil, its bones are the successive strata of the rocks which form the mountains; its cartilage is the porous rock, its blood the veins of the waters". —Leonardo da Vinci

Morphology: "a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever." —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"From the Supreme Ultimate above, to a small thing like a blade of grass...we must understand them one by one... As more and more is accumulated, one will spontaneously be able to achieve a far and broad [systems] understanding." —Zhu Xi

"There is no holding nature still and looking at it. The real point is that the essential connectedness of things can never be safely omitted." —Alfred North Whitehead

"The whole is other than the sum of its parts." —Kurt Koffka

"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning" —Werner Heisenberg

"We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves." —Norbert Wiener

"Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" —Edward Lorenz

"Most of nature is very, very complicated. How could we describe a cloud? A cloud is not a sphere... It is like a ball but very irregular. A mountain? A mountain is not a cone... If you want to speak of clouds, of mountains, of rivers, of lightning, the geometric language of school is inadequate." —Benoit Mandelbrot

"There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work hard at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of Not Knowing. In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go [of belief-based paradigms to enter into not-knowing] and dancing with the system." —Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

 

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