Author Archives: tmurphy

Biosphere Theatrics

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Photograph by John de Dios (Wikimedia Commons)

I recently watched a documentary from 2020 called Spaceship Earth about the Biosphere 2 project in Oracle, Arizona. I had picked up bits and pieces about Biosphere 2 over the years, but found the film to be effective in expanding my sense of the endeavor.

Biosphere 2 was an effort motivated by obvious ecological peril together with the crazed space-age notion that we’d be living on other solar system bodies in a few generations. So, we’d better get our butts in gear and learn how to create our own sealed ecosystems. To clear up a point of confusion, Biosphere 2 was not the second attempt at an artificial environment, but was so-named to honor Earth as the original biosphere.

Here, I offer a few reflections spurred by the documentary.

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Tangents with Chris Ryan

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I hit the jackpot this summer in terms of good books to read, Chris Ryan’s Civilized to Death among them. Chris offered to become better acquainted via a recorded conversation for his podcast, Tangentially Speaking.

Schedules aligned for us to record a conversation on September 25, and shortly after our “hour” together, we decided to do a second round two days later. The day between was so packed for me that it felt like a week transpired in between. On that day, I biked about 20 miles, got on a ferry, sailed to Canada to meet icon Rex Weyler (fantastic guy and conversation), then reversed my route, biking back home late that evening in pitch blackness on a narrow forest trail. Memorably, my face collided with a flying bat! I’m sure it was as shocked as I was, but I suspect it was unhurt, like me. I just laughed, holding on to the sensation of warmth, fur, and leathery wing on my cheek. Anyway, in the second conversation with Chris my confusion on how long it had been is apparent. Also, having covered some similar ground with Rex it was harder than it ought to have been to keep track of what Chris and I had discussed in the first conversation (apologies for a few repeated sentiments).

Anyway, the two episodes can be accessed via any of these formats:

The audio versions include introductions by Chris as well as some musical selection. The videos are just the conversation, auto-edited to remove pauses and “ums.” I look forward to future dialog with Chris. It’s great to have conversations with wise and well-aligned individuals.

Views: 866

2025: A Space Absurdity

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Space is sillier. Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum (from this site).

I recently connected faith in space colonization to Flat Earth belief, even though these might seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum—as Flat-Earthers contend that NASA is a hoax and that artificial satellites are not real (wait: because they’re artificial?). What connects these groups is a belief in something that’s not actually real: based more on imagination than fact, and working backwards from what they wish to be true. I’m not saying the groups are equivalent by any stretch, but that they do share something in common, at core.

Anyway, this observation sparked a few conversations that prompted me to resurrect old arguments (see Why Not Space and chapter 4 of my textbook), but also add some new ones. Here, I share some of these new perspectives and related calculations.

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Views: 1847

Systems Mindset

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World3 model (from Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth, 1972)

Our culture suffers an epidemic of disconnected narrow analyses. Almost every single news article, opinion piece, insight from pundits, bestseller book, or internet screed fails to absorb a broad-enough view to fully contextualize this moment in time. What remains can be effectively useless or invalidated by a more complete and enveloping context.

A small but growing cadre of folks promote “systems thinking,” broadening the boundaries to acknowledge complex relationships “external” to the considerations of typical works. Whether those broader elements involve biophysical, planetary, anthropological, ecological, or more-than-human considerations, the effect can dramatically change conclusions and prescriptions.

So, systems thinking can make positive contributions. But it has a dark side as well. Novice engagement in this heady practice can serve to amplify a nasty human habit of deluding ourselves into believing that we can master it all—that our crude maps are essentially-complete captures of all relevant aspects of the territory. Encouraged by climbing atop a “big-boy” horse without falling off, one might be tempted to think they can gallop their way into a more perfect system for humanity on Earth. I’ll make the argument that the horse of hubris is inherently unrideable, and that the best lesson from systems thinking is that systems tend to be far too complex for our meat-brains to master. We’re not going to think our way to paradise. Any place deserving the name “paradise” has never been constructed by humans, but by a Community of Life over deep time.

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Views: 2026

Were You Happy?

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Close enough. By Tdorante10 (Wikipedia Commons)

As I learn more about the way humans used to live before agriculture (and a few still do today), I am often reminded of an experience I had in my youth that contains parallels to the situation Indigenous groups find themselves in today. Things were going pretty well for them before their lifeways were destroyed: they had life figured out.

Aside from a brief coda, I’ll let parallels speak for themselves. My small tribe will play the part of displaced people, and the Western “authority” figure will be obvious. In making this parallel, in no way do I mean to imply that my momentary discomfort has even the slightest equivalency. That said, the experience still offers a window, even if a very grubby one.

Oh—and if the story comes off as boring, I do apologize, but that’s only because it hasn’t been embellished.

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Views: 1941

A Theory Gone Flat

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Flat Earth and spotlight sun, by Towarzysz Przewodniczący (Wikimedia Commons)

Am I really going to do this? Am I going to spend time on a topic so far from legitimacy as Flat Earth? Doing so risks affording a tiny bit of credibility to an idea that hasn’t earned it, as if I doth protest too much.

Reasons to bother: 1) illustrate direct observation in action; 2) emphasize the power of listening to what the universe tells us rather than insisting on insufficient mental models as “truth”; 3) provide examples of how mental models go wrong; and 4) I made some graphics worth sharing. While a bit of a tangent from my usual “serious” topics, I figure I can have a little fun once in a while.

The focus will be on conspicuous observations anyone can confirm, personally, without too much effort—even from memory, in fact. I’ll skip the literally dozens of ways I have personally measured and confirmed the spherical Earth, which would make for boring reading. Lots of things break in Flat-Earth scenarios, including GPS navigation (no satellites; broken math), gravity (would crumple a disk-Earth into a sphere in no time; plumb bobs would point more north the farther south one went), and what we’ll focus on here: sunsets. No more sunsets, folks—and any sunsets (or sunrises) you might believe yourself to have seen aren’t what you made them out to be, according to Flat-Earthers.

Rather than denigrating the people who subscribe to Flat-Earth beliefs, I’ll focus on observation. I’m not aiming to convince Flat-Earthers; nothing I say (as an obvious shill for the mega-conspiracy) can replace the sense of community and unconditional support they receive from their FE-family. Any of us might go to extremes of twisted and easily-refuted logic to preserve what’s most important to us. Modernity fails humans in countless ways—loss of intimate tribe being among them. We can forgive those seeking to recapture what’s been lost.

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Views: 2102

8 Billion Will Die!

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By Michael Dornbierer from Wikimedia Commons

Whenever I suggest that humans might be better off living in a mode much closer to our original ecological context as small-band immediate-return hunter-gatherers, some heads inevitably explode, inviting a torrent of pushback. I have learned from my own head-exploding experiences that the phenomenon traces to a condition of multiple immediate reactions stumbling over each other as they vie for expression at the same time. The neurological traffic jam leaves us speechless—or stammering—as our brain sorts out who goes first.

One of the most common reactions is that abandoning agriculture is tantamount to committing many billions of people to death, since the planet can’t support billions of hunter-gatherers—especially given the dire toll on ecological health already accumulated.

Such a reaction definitely contains elements of truth, but also a few unexamined assumptions. The outcome need not be reprehensible for several reasons.

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Is the 6ME Hyperbole?

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Unrealistic image from Easy-Peasy.

Many of the stark conclusions I offer on Do the Math and in conversations with others rest on the equally stark premise that we have initiated a sixth mass extinction (6ME). Other self-defeating factors also loom large in establishing modernity as a temporary stunt, including resource depletion, aquifer exhaustion, desertification and salination of agricultural fields, climate change, microplastics, waste streams, “forever” toxins, and plenty more. People do call it a poly-crisis, after all (I prefer meta-crisis as most symptoms trace to the same root mindset of separateness and conquest).

Yet, towering over these concerns is a sixth mass extinction. Mass extinctions are defined as brief periods during which over 75% of species go extinct. I take it as given that large, hungry, high-maintenance mammals like humans won’t be among the lucky survivors—who are more likely to hail from families like microbes, mollusks, arthropods, or otherwise small, scrappy critters. In any case, it’s bad…very bad.

Invocation of the 6ME serves as a final nail in the coffin…end of story…to be avoided at all costs. All the aspects we like about modernity lose appeal when held up against the 6ME as a direct consequence. Even though the other challenges listed above can carry the argument as well, they generally must do so as a set, and we’re not so talented at apprehending parallel concerns—imagining each to be surmountable in isolation (pointlessly; it’s whack-a-mole). The 6ME delivers a single, inarguable, fatal blow to modernity, which is why I have taken to invoking it as a heavy-handed “nuclear option” straight away. No point playing around. While it may seem extreme, extreme circumstances justify extreme responses.

But is the threat real, or rhetorical? Basing arguments against modernity largely—though not entirely—on the 6ME could amount to overblown doomerism. In this post, I challenge myself on the veracity of 6ME claims. Have I fallen into a false sense of the urgency of this moment? Do I really believe a 6ME is going to play out?

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Views: 4647

Animistic Physics

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Murmuration by Mostafameraji (Wikinedia Commons).

It might seem that animistic beliefs—which prevailed prior to agriculture—would be about as far away from modern physics as possible. Yet, I find them to be rather compatible in a number of foundational ways. Allow me to elaborate. And don’t worry: it’s not about quantum mumbo-jumbo.

What is animism? While not a formal belief system, animists tend to view nearly everything in the world as being animated by spirits or forces beyond our capacity to fully comprehend. We can call these animating agents spirits or “the gods.” Animists live in the hands of the gods along with all other Life: not particularly special. These spirits not only move animals and plants, but also weather, landscapes, oceans, rivers, mountains, rocks, and soil.

Modern languages (reflecting a non-animistic worldview) objectify the world by being noun-dominated—which deeply affects how we think about the world. Animist languages, by contrast, are often verb-dominated (verbal people!), so that verbs are used to connote mountains, rivers, bays, trees, etc.—reflecting the sense that such beings are always in a state of motion and change. What we call a sand bar is “verbalized” as “to be a sand bar”—it is acting as a living, changing, life-interacting entity, or being. Note that the noun “being” itself carries an echo of animism, embodying this state of verbiness, as a variant of “be.” It’s a nounified verb.

An important tip-off as to how animism relates to physics is provided by Daniel Quinn in The Story of B, on page 136.

Animism looks for truth in the universe, not in books, revelations, and authorities. Science is the same. Though animism and science read the universe in different ways, both have complete confidence in its truthfulness.

Below, I outline five (connected) ways that animism meshes well with physics, mirroring a conversation I had with Derrick Jensen that you can listen to here. While very few scientists would volunteer that they have animistic leanings, these connections might make it easier to identify as such.

As an aside, I “privilege” physics here not only because that’s my own background, but because all other sciences appear to rest on (abide by) a physics foundation, often characterized by complexity that eludes first-principles formulations in the style of physics. One might say that chemistry is applied physics, biology is applied chemistry, etc. The word “science” may easily be substituted for “physics” in what follows.

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Views: 3112

Anthropological Summer

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Image by G.C. from Pixabay

A while back, I shared an arc of discovery involving key books that had significant influence on my perspectives. This post serves as an update, mainly covering six books I read (and/or listened to) over the summer. Loosely speaking, the theme revolved around gaining a better anthropological sense of who we really are as a species.

I’ll first offer a few preliminaries. As is obvious from previous posts, I benefitted greatly from Daniel Quinn’s writings, reflected in my recent summaries of Ishmael, The Story of B, and My Ishmael. I also found value in Quinn’s Providence (the story behind Ishmael), Tales of Adam, and Beyond Civilization. I should clarify that being appreciative of key insights is not the same as being an unwavering adherent or disciple.

Next, I’ll repeat admiration for The Master and His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist, which still exerts a substantial influence on how I perceive cognition in its various forms (and especially its limitations). I may dedicate a post to this book at some future time.

Finally, I should acknowledge The Dawn of Everything for its formative role in much the same way that my parents were formative influences: their example taught me how not to be, in many respects. My net-negative review of DoE tells this story well enough.

Now onto the Summer Six…

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