03 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Humanity has Reached the Hatching Point
To begin our position-fixing
aboard our Spaceship Earth we must first acknowledge that the
abundance of immediately consumable, obviously desirable or
utterly essential resources have been sufficient until now to allow us
to carry on despite our ignorance. Being eventually exhaustible and
spoilable, they have been adequate only up to this critical moment.
This cushion-for-error of humanity's survival and growth up to now
was apparently provided just as a bird inside of the egg is provided
wi...Thinking of our Earth as an egg, we have been living on the yolk so far. We are reaching the point, by burning our fossile fuels off and exceeding the production capacity of our agriculture, where our intellect must launch us into the stars.
20 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
The Boundary of Life
The harder we look at the border between life and non-life, the
more elusive does the distinction become. Life, the animate, was supposed to have some sort of
vibrant, throbbing quality, some vital essence - made to sound yet more mysterious when dropped
into French: elan vital. Life, it seemed, was made of a special living substance, a witch's brew
called 'protoplasm'. Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger, a fictional character even more
preposterous than Sherlock Holmes, discovered that the ...Different attempts to define it over the years.