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1. Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Dec-2024 17:29:30 JST Jonathan Schofield

   #climateDiary

   TIL that in July, Tom Murphy began posting a series of 18 videos, with the 18th posted about a month ago.

   The series is called Metastatic Modernity and the videos range in length from 6 to 15 minutes long.

   The entire series is presented and embedded on his blog page: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/metastatic-modernity-video-series/

   Being familiar with Tom’s work and having heard him talk about why he’s done it, I strongly recommend listening to it in sequence as I am now doing. Don’t be tempted to jump ahead!

   • Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Dec-2024 17:29:28 JST Jonathan Schofield

     in reply to

     …“We’ve basically forgotten who we are and where we come from. We pay no heed to our most ancient ancestors, without whom we are *nothing*”, and Tom invites us to have awe, respect, humility and admiration for the genius of what life figured out in the first 3.5 billion years.

     By way of example, he points out that we share about a third of our genome with that of amoeba, explaining that that’s because of all that they figured out, without which we don’t exist…

   • Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Dec-2024 17:29:29 JST Jonathan Schofield

     in reply to

     …Take a chickpea and a human hair, the latter on a piece of tape for ease of holding onto.

     Hold the tape about a metre away from the chickpea and you have a rough scale model of:

     – the diameter of the sun (the ~1cm chickpea)
     - the proportional diameter of the Earth (the thickness of the hair)
     - the distance between the two.

     In the same model, Jupiter is a ~1mm grain of sand 5 metres away from the chickpea.

     And the outer solar system are microscopic particles of dust a football field away…

   • Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Dec-2024 17:29:29 JST Jonathan Schofield

     in reply to

     …and now, a bit more challenging…

     Take a second chickpea, leave your first chickpea and the human hair and the grain of sand where you placed them, get on a train, travel 300km – e.g. London to Sheffield – and now your second chickpea is proportionately as far away from your first chickpea as the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.

     But remember, there’s mostly nothing in between

   • Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Dec-2024 17:29:29 JST Jonathan Schofield

     in reply to

     …If you’ve watched Tom on cosmology (link above), you’ll understand that we are orbiting an unexceptional star in an unexceptional galaxy in an unexceptional region of the known universe, which may perhaps also be an unexceptional universe.

     The universe is *not about us*.

     Tom’s next video walks us through early life on Earth. He places major landmarks in the evolution of life on a 12-hour clock and shows humans arriving just before midnight.

     And the important takeaway is…

     Aral Balkan repeated this.
   • Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Dec-2024 17:29:30 JST Jonathan Schofield

     in reply to

     …Here’s how Tom frames the series:

     “The name ‘Metastatic Modernity’ conjures a grave cancer diagnosis—terminal, in fact. This intentional association captures my sense that modernity is fated to self-terminate, like any cancer.

     But…

     because modernity is just one of many possible ways for humans to arrange their lives, a failure of modernity does *not* translate to a failure of humanity.”

     https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/07/metastatic-modernity-launch/

   • Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Dec-2024 17:29:30 JST Jonathan Schofield

     in reply to

     …Tom is all about our context: the wide view we need to take in to understand where we are – assuming we *want* understanding, as opposed to living in delusion.

     He’s a physicist. He begins with our cosmology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjNAzwU3lKg

     And an analogy with a chickpea and a human hair…