panshen saturday yulean
Cilinia Looker
BibGuru offers more than 8,000 citation styles including popular styles such as AMA, ASA, APSA, CSE, IEEE, Harvard, Turabian, and Vancouver, as well as journal and university specific styles. Give it a try now: Cite The cosmic perspective now!
Yet the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the Moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth.
When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.
Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: a broken toy, a scraped knee, a schoolyard bully. Adults know that kids have no clue what constitutes a genuine problem, because inexperience greatly limits their childhood perspective.
Back in February 2000, the newly rebuilt Hayden Planetarium featured a space show called Passport to the Universe, which took visitors on a virtual zoom from New York City to the edge of the cosmos. En route the audience saw Earth, then the solar system, then the 100 billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy shrink to barely visible dots on the planetarium dome.
Within a month of opening day, I received a letter from an Ivy League professor of psychology whose expertise was things that make people feel insignificant. I never knew one could specialize in such a field. The guy wanted to administer a before-and-after questionnaire to visitors, assessing the depth of their depression after viewing the show. Passport to the Universe, he wrote, elicited the most dramatic feelings of smallness he had ever experienced.
From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly 4 billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth.
Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.
Yes, we are stardust. But we may not be of this Earth. Several separate lines of research, when considered together, have forced investigators to reassess who we think we are and where we think we came from.
Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe.
Today, how easy it is to presume that one universe is all there is. Yet emerging theories of modern cosmology, as well as the continually reaffirmed improbability that anything is unique, require that we remain open to the latest assault on our plea for distinctiveness: multiple universes, otherwise known as the multiverse, in which ours is just one of countless bubbles bursting forth from the fabric of the cosmos.
At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.
Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.
In this episode we engage with renowned physicist Sara Walker on topics of life's origin, artificial intelligence, and our cosmic future. We delve into Walker's career journey, which starts from her fascination with physics at a community college and leads her to question the origin of life as a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University.
Walker talks about how understanding life's origins is an open frontier that could potentially reshape our perspective of ourselves and our future, the role of AI in comprehending life's structure and origins, and its planetary-scale implications for humanity.
Sara Imari Walker is an American theoretical physicist and astrobiologist with research interests in the origins of life, astrobiology, physics of life, emergence, complex and dynamical systems, and artificial life.
Philipp Lenssen from Germany has been exploring between technology and art for all his life. He developed sandbox universes Manyland and wrote a technology blog for 7 years. He's currently working on new daily pictures at Instagram.com/PhilippLenssen.
Sara Walker: I am currently based at Arizona State University, but I have affiliations with a couple of other places, which is fun to diversify what you think about. I guess in my earlier days, I got really romanticized by physics, which is maybe a little odd. I went to community college when I started university, and I took a physics course. I just thought physics was the most amazing topic that we could understand the universe at such a deep, fundamental level. I was kind of dead set at that stage that I would become a theoretical physicist, although I did not really know what that meant because I thought it meant studying cosmology and particle physics and things that physics had been historically good at. However, the real reason I was attracted to physics in the first place was because of this idea of deep explanations that actually drive humanity forward and really allow us to explain more, but from those explanations emerge new technology and new ideas.
So when I really started to realize that that was sort of like my core interest was already after I was a PhD student and I had started working on the problem of the origin of life. The origin of life is a really interesting problem because it's one of those open scientific questions, where it's so hard that I'm not even sure that we've framed the question right yet, which is one of the reasons it's hard to get to an answer. So for me, that was incredibly exciting because it was like this open frontier, where it seems so obvious that we should know what life is, yet we realize we do not when we try to get to these deep explanations. So if we could really come to understand what we are, that would open a potentially entirely new vision for what the future looks like. I think those are the things that really excite me about focusing on the origin of life problem, and why I think it's one of the most important problems of our time.
Sara Walker: I am amazed! Yeah, he really inspired me a lot. I love his approach to thinking about how explanations transform the future, so I think about that a lot when I think about what theories are.
Allison Duettmann: It is relatively meta, you know? I think it is kind of percolated throughout every part of your existence, whether it is a scientific domain or, frankly, your personal one. Okay, wonderful. If someone else was coming into the field, and I know that you have taught, mentored, and instructed a bunch of young folks, what would you tell them? What are your research questions that you address? What is an explanation of the space you are in if someone else came new to the table?
Sara Walker: Yeah, I mean, I think the easiest way to think about it is really that there is only one question I'm really interested in answering, and that is: What is life? Part of my motivation for that is really because I want to understand the origin of life and the transition from the universe without life to a universe with life, and that seems like a pretty radical transformation. However, because that question is so broad and so deep, it touches a lot of areas. My research group is actually fairly eclectic; I have a lot of Ph.D. students that come in with seem like totally different interests. For instance, one of my Ph.D. students is interested in whether there are laws that govern civilizations and their long-term future and how they get off planet. Another one is really interested in artificial general intelligence, and how do we build intelligent machines. Another one has a geochemist background and really interested in the geochemical underpinnings of ecosystems.
While you get this sort of like very eclectic mix of people from exoplanets to AI to everything else, the core unifying theme is understanding that life manifests in a lot of different things that we study. If we can actually develop a deeper understanding across those different domains, we might actually solve this really hard problem. On the surface, it looks like it is a lot of different stuff, but for me, it is actually really this one question. Also, if you look at the history of physics, it is very true that when we like sort of tunnel through and make these new explanations that are very expansive, they unify and compress a whole bunch of stuff that we thought was totally different before we really came up with that kind of explanation. So I guess we're trying to be as open-minded as possible as to what the explanation of life is, and trying to just study that problem in as many domains as possible to try to figure out what is actually common across all these different ways of asking the question.
Sara Walker: And find the origin of life and chemistry. Everything pretty much subsequent to the origin of life transition on this planet is life. It is pretty interesting. In some ways, you might think about what is happening with our technology as being the origin of life recapitulating at a different scale. You know, think about planetary-scale technology. If you think about the origin of life as a planetary scale transformation in geochemistry that happened 3.8 billion years ago and has elaborated ever since, you start to see these sort of recurring structures across scales, and technology seems to be doing something interesting now. It's a fun time to be an origin of life scientist and look for patterns across these different systems.
c01484d022