07 NOV 2014 by ideonexus

 Bandwidth Explains Fermi's Paradox

"We uploaded via the router," Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. "There's a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I'm not so sure now. I think it's something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity – they're bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve E...
Folksonomies: speculation futurism
Folksonomies: speculation futurism
  1  notes
 
22 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 Science and Poetry are Like Binary Stars

I would liken science and poetry in their natural independence to those binary stars, often different in colour, which Herschel's telescope discovered to revolve round each other. 'There is one light of the sun,' says St. Paul, 'and another of the moon, and another of the stars: star differeth from star in glory.' It is so here. That star or sun, for it is both, with its cold, clear, white light, is SCIENCE: that other, with its gorgeous and ever-shifting hues and magnificent blaze, is POETRY...
Folksonomies: science metaphor poetry
Folksonomies: science metaphor poetry
  1  notes

They exchange ideas and inspire one another.

21 SEP 2011 by ideonexus

 Seeing How Species Arise is Similar to Understanding Star...

The way we discovered how species arise resembles the way astronomers discovered how stars “evolve” over time. Both processes occur too slowly for us to see them happening over our lifetime. But we can still understand how they work by finding snapshots of the process at different evolutionary stages and putting these snapshots together into a conceptual movie. For stars, astronomers saw dispersed clouds of matter (“star nurseries”) in galaxies. Elsewhere they saw those clouds condens...
  1  notes

Just as astronomers search the skies for stars in varying stages of life, biologists look for species in varying degrees development.