Galactic Time

Posted on 2026-06-16 by tmurphy

How old is your dog in galactic years? I mean, we have dog years and cat years for expressing time in the context of human lifetimes. Why not go big?

Many of our time units derive from astronomical cycles. The day is based on Earth rotation. The month hails from the lunar orbit (loosely…forcing an integer number into a year). The year, of course, clocks an orbit around the sun. After that, our ten-finger fetish creates decades, centuries, and millennia. Isn’t it interesting that no such convenient names are available for timescales longer than written human history? If that isn’t diagnostic of myopia, I’m not sure what is! Deep time is obsolete, to the modern. It’s like saying only the thin film of oil on top of the ocean holds any interest.

But back to the main thread, two other prominent astronomical timescales relevant to Earth arise once peering deeper into time. The first is precession. The Earth’s axis is tilted approximately 23.5° to the orbital plane, currently pointing darned close to Polaris (will be even closer in 2100, within half-a-degree). But the axis itself rotates around the line perpendicular to the orbital plane, tracing a loop on the starry sky with a period of about 26,000 years. Half-a-cycle from now, Vega will be the “north star,” albeit not nearly as close as Polaris gets (enjoy this golden age in the north!).

The other natural scale is the period of the solar system’s orbit around the galactic center, as the stars comprising the galaxy swirl under the grip of gravity. The period is about 225 million years.

Let’s cast significant developments in terms of these longer astronomical periods. It isn’t the first time I’ve made temporal analogs, and the reason I come back to it now is that it’s super-important to attain a grip on timescales that really matter. Otherwise, our culture’s extreme emphasis on the recent imposes a hyper-hyper-hyper myopia on us, keeping us utterly ignorant on the ecological front.

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A Lawful Anarchist

Posted on 2026-06-09 by tmurphy

You know me: I’ll go after almost any aspect of modernity, including technology, agriculture, or even written language. Let’s now take a big swipe at “The Law.” But first, we’ll need to get a few common reactions out of the way.

When I suggest that a rigid, codified legal system is an abomination that humans are better off not suffering, strong objections instantly arise on the basis that a lawless modernity would be a chaotic nightmare for all sorts of reasons.

I totally agree: modernity absolutely needs a legal system in place. So, sure: anarchy is no way to run modernity, but here’s the catch: modernity is no way to run humanity, or life on Earth more generally. Modernity, it appears, initiates a sixth mass extinction, and is thus effectively synonymous, just as unsustainable is synonymous with failure. Modernity has no deep-time ecological vetting, and is a transient offshoot that has—in a relative eye-blink—caused tremendous disruption to the prospects for a happy life for countless members of the Community of Life, including, of course, future humans.

So, ask not what modernity needs, because doing so is basically asking what the sixth mass extinction needs. As far as anyone knows, and certainly as the actual evidence reveals, the two are inseparably part of the same phenomenon. So, let’s get over prioritizing what modernity needs. Laws are among those “necessities” of the sixth mass extinction—a.k.a. modernity.

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Cerebral Disconnect

Posted on 2026-06-02 by tmurphy

Cerebral contents pale in complexity and significance within the greater ecological universe.

Why are worldviews so drastically different? Why is it that obvious truths to one person can seem like unhinged insanity to another? The incongruity can be especially pronounced when pertaining to divergences among people who are clearly smart and well-educated.

The last month or so has been dedicated to posts airing the moderated conversation I had with Dave Murphy about whether technology saves modernity or the whole enterprise lacks viability. The net result is probably best described as an impasse: neither of us seemed to move very far from discordant starting positions.

This post contains a bit of musing about the foundations underpinning the disconnect. Because it comes out of my meat-brain, it’s likely all wrong—but it’s the best I can come up with. Maybe the general principle advanced here applies to other disconnects we encounter with others, to some degree. In a sense, it’s all in our heads.

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Two Murphys, Part 5

Posted on 2026-05-26 by tmurphy

This kitten’s pre-analytic vision for what the unicorn can do is likely to come up short. Vroom!

Resilience.org is running a series of posts capturing a conversation between myself and energy transition advocate Dave Murphy—moderated by Ben McCall. The entire conversation (from back in 2023–2024) involved eight exchanges. I echo the conversation on Do the Math, with additional commentary. The first six rounds were presented in Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 while this installment covers the final two rounds (also appeared on Resilience on May 26).

The relevant portion of the original content is replicated below, followed by additional comments from me that are not addressed in the exchange itself. Within the text, links within [square brackets] point to content further down the page. At the end of each addition, another link returns to the paragraph of origin (or use browser “back” navigation). If preferring not to interrupt the flow, those additional comments are always waiting at the bottom to scoop up any time.

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Two Murphys, Part 4

Posted on 2026-05-19 by tmurphy

Resilience.org is running a series of posts capturing a conversation between myself and energy transition advocate Dave Murphy—moderated by Ben McCall. The entire conversation (from back in 2023–2024) involved eight exchanges. I echo the conversation on Do the Math, with additional commentary. The first five rounds were presented in Parts 1, 2, and 3, while this installment covers the sixth round (also appeared on Resilience on May 19).

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Two Murphys, Part 3

Posted on 2026-05-08 by tmurphy

Resilience.org is running a series of posts capturing a conversation between myself and energy transition advocate Dave Murphy—moderated by Ben McCall. The entire conversation (from back in 2023–2024) involved eight exchanges. I echo the conversation on Do the Math, with additional commentary. The first three rounds were presented in Part 1 and Part 2, while this installment covers the fourth and fifth rounds (appeared on Resilience on May 6).

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Two Murphys, Part 2

Posted on 2026-05-05 by tmurphy

Rapture predictions keep failing (by Robert Course-Baker on Pxhere).

Resilience.org is running a series of posts capturing a conversation between myself and energy transition advocate Dave Murphy—moderated by Ben McCall. The entire conversation (from back in 2023–2024) involved eight exchanges—the first two of which were presented in Part 1, while this installment covers the third exchange (appeared on Resilience on April 27).

The original content is replicated below, followed by additional comments from me that are not addressed in the exchange itself. Within the text, links within [square brackets] point to content further down the page. At the end of each addition, another link returns to the paragraph of origin (or use browser “back” navigation). If preferring not to interrupt the flow, those additional comments are always waiting at the bottom to scoop up any time.

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Two Murphys, Part 1

Posted on 2026-04-28 by tmurphy

This graphic could either represent insulin or the two Murphys. Do these curls make me look fat? (By AtikaAtikawa on Wikimedia Commons.)

Reslience.org is publishing a series of posts capturing a conversation between me and Dave Murphy facilitated by Ben McCall (three of the five co-founders of the Planetary Limits Academic Network). Here, I repeat the original content, and provide additional commentary [linked within the document inside brackets] on points that I did not fully address in the dialog. Clicking on the [additional content] links will send you further down this same post, where you’ll also find a link to return to the paragraph of origin (or use “back” navigation on your browser). Thus, you have the option to read commentary as you go, or save for later once reading the captured exchange. Either way works. Okay: here we go!

A Tale of Two Murphys: an interview, conducted in 2023–2024, by Ben McCall of two founders of the Planetary Limits Academic Network (PLAN): Dave Murphy, a prominent scholar of the energy transition movement, and Tom Murphy, a physicist who focuses on how fundamental principles can be applied to the Earth system as a whole. In this interview, we explore the continuum of perspectives within PLAN along a spectrum that might be labeled “doomer” on one end and “techno-utopian” on the other. Neither of the conversation’s participants could be labeled as either of these extremes, although it will be clear that they each lean more toward one side than the other.

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Levels of Faith

Posted on 2026-04-21 by tmurphy

From Detroit institute of Arts (Wikimedia Commons)

Scanning the comments on the YouTube posting of my conversation with Nate Hagens and DJ White on the subject of space fantasies, one finds some familiar reactions. For the most part, comments expressed appreciation for the refreshing push-back against prevalent space hype. But a few, predictably, intoned that it is we naysayers who are delusional: of course we’re going to space, and those like myself saying otherwise will join the embarrassing heap of vision-challenged fossils littering history.

This post offers a framework for evaluating levels of faith in future projections. A tremendous asymmetry enters, which merits some awareness.

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Dumb Geniuses

Posted on 2026-04-14 by tmurphy

From Archives New Zealand (Wikimedia Commons).

A new video from Ze Frank is out, this time about Geckos. True to form, Frank masterfully illustrates ze genius of other life forms. One amazingly-intricate evolutionary adaptation after another leaves us grasping to make sense of the various superpowers manifesting in the living world. If Ze Frank’s videos don’t leave your mouth agape, there might be something wrong with your jawe (the anatomical feature best suited for expressing awe). I admire his skilled and unabashed use of anthropomorphism to imbue these characters with personality and desire. He’s not wrong, and our culture could use a great deal more appreciation for the shared engagement of all Life.

Now, it does pain me to see the torture that animals are subjected to in laboratory environments just so that we might attempt a deeper understanding. Admittedly, part of my sense of amazement is enhanced by partial scientific understanding of the phenomena. Yet, it would still be possible to put superpowers on display without the clinical Nazi part. As is true for so many things in modernity, the act of scraping some veneer of “good stuff” leaves devastation in its wake. It’s seldom worth it, in the full analysis.

But the main point of this post is to reconcile the genius of microbes, fungi, plants and animals (of which we are part) with their obvious “dumb” qualities as well. To wit: a spider can weave an elaborate web I’d have no hope of replicating, yet when stuck in a sink will repeatedly try—and fail—to climb the steepest wall. Clinging to spider webs for a moment (they’re like that), birds also weave nests using spider webs and other bits of fluff, moss, twigs, spit, and many other seemingly random elements. I know I couldn’t pull it off, even allowed unlimited spit. But a bird in a garage with the door wide-open can exhaust himself trying to fly into the ceiling, never realizing he can fly right out the enormous opening. A honeybee has many jobs in her lifetime: rearing; feeding; storing food; cleaning and maintaining the hive; patrolling and defending; foraging and finding new nest sites—communicating by both dances and chemicals. Yet trying to escape a house, she will bump into a window until she dies—never “getting” the whole glass concept. In the opposite direction, ants innovate in their foraging strategies so that they find ways into (and back out of) a house that would never occur to us—often repeatedly outwitting us as we try to block one route or anther. But their brains are tiny, and they’re not even on social media.

I could go on, of course, but the idea should be clear enough. What I want to briefly explore is this contrast between genius and dumb-as-a-brick (a recent post explored human dumbness). How are both true at once, and how might we, as humans, be both different and basically the same?

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