Singularly “kooky”

Not the first kooky religion heralding the end of times as we’ve known them, but maybe the most bankrolled… “The desire for growth is a general feature of much of capitalism. But the idea of a big future filled with virtually unlimited growth, a future of the specific sort longtermism proffers, has held a great deal of currency in Silicon Valley for decades. 36 The most salient example of this is the concept of a technological singularity, usually referred to as the Singularity. Believers in the Singularity claim that technological progress has been accelerating and will continue to do so, leading to a singular point where so much change happens so rapidly that the fundamental nature of daily human life will transform beyond all imagination or comprehension. Superintelligent AI and human-machine hybrids will usher in a utopia, end scarcity, and make biomedical discoveries that will allow us to live forever or nearly so. Bounded only by the laws of physics, there will be no practical limit to what a post-Singularity civilization can achieve. According to Ray Kurzweil, the most prominent exponent of the Singularity, the current rate of technological change strongly suggests that the Singularity is coming very soon indeed—no later than twenty years from now, in 2045. “Ultimately, it will affect everything,” he claims. “We’re going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans. We’re going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value.” 37 There’s little scientific basis for the idea of a Singularity and all the attendant miracles it will supposedly perform. Nonetheless, the idea is astonishingly common in Silicon Valley and across the entire tech industry. Kurzweil isn’t some kind of marginal figure. He is a director of engineering at Google, and his books on the Singularity have been bestsellers. “The Singularity is a new religion—and a particularly kooky one at that,” said computer scientist and artist Jaron Lanier. “The Singularity is the coming of the Messiah, heaven on Earth, the Armageddon, the end of times. And fanatics always think that the end of time comes in their own lifetime.”” — More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker

Gaia

“In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, bacteria were largely portrayed as infectious and unhealthy. (The idea that you should aspire to and can achieve a germ-free body and environment is still mobilized to sell products from shirts to soaps.) Lynn Margulis saw it differently, and, after viewing the TV show Star Trek, commented acerbically that she “was struck by its silliness. The lack of plants, the machinate landscape, and in the starship, the lack of all nonhuman life-forms seemed bizarre. Humans, if someday they trek in giant spaceships to other planets, will not be alone. In space as on earth, the elements of life, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus and a few others, must recycle. This recycling is no suburban luxury; it is a principle of life from which no technology can deliver us.” Having contributed hugely to how we would understand life in its smallest unit, the cell, she went on to theorize life in its largest expression, collaborating with James Lovelock on the Gaia hypothesis that the planet Earth can be understood as a single self-regulating system. Lovelock, she writes in her book Symbiotic Planet, “pointed out that our planetary environment is homeostatic. Just as our bodies, like those of all mammals, maintain a relatively stable internal temperature despite changing conditions, the earth system keeps its temperature and atmospheric composition stable.” That is, the earth is a grand self-regulating system that modulates the gases in the atmosphere to stabilize temperatures—until human beings in the industrial age emitted so much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that we destabilized the climate. Because of some of Lovelock’s early language and his use of the earth goddess Gaia’s name, his theory was sometimes disparaged on the grounds he’d said the planet was alive. What he had really said was that it was a system sustained and stabilized by the whole of living organisms and inorganic systems. The stories we tell about what nature is are the stories we tell about who we are or should be. Nature is treated as a touchstone for what is genuine; natural used as a term for what is authentic, legitimate, proper. This is often twisted…” — The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit https://a.co/00o1T4TN

Earthrise, earthset...

 Apollo 8, '68

Artemis '26

Earth rise 1968

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010851813/in-1968-they-saw-earth-from-the-moon-for-the-first-time.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Happy chance

By happy chance, Earth Day coincides with the birthdays of four of America’s greatest nature writers: William Bartram, John Muir, John James Audubon, and Frederick Law Olmsted. Explore classics of the environmental imagination in the LOA series: http://loa.org/books/topics/20-nature-environmental-writing/

Earth Day, Kant’s bday

Today is Earth Day. It was first observed in 1970, but its roots go back to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s landmark book exposing the effects of pesticides and other chemical pollution on the environment. Troubled by the lack of attention pollution was receiving on the national stage, Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson began going on speaking tours, trying to educate people and politicians about environmental issues, and while the public was concerned, the politicians didn’t pay much attention.

During the late 1960s, Senator Nelson had the idea to harness the energy and methods of the student protests against the Vietnam War to organize a grassroots conservation movement. At a press conference in 1969, he announced plans for a nationwide demonstration, to take place the following spring. It was a gamble that paid off, and the public’s response was enthusiastic. Gladwin Hill wrote in The New York Times, “Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation’s campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam.” Twenty million people nationwide participated in the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, and the government finally took notice, forming the Environmental Protection Agency and passing the Clean Air, the Clean Water, and the Endangered Species Acts.

According to the Earth Day Network, Earth Day is celebrated by a billion people, making it the world’s largest secular holiday.

It’s the birthday of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, born in Königsberg, Prussia in 1724. His father was a saddle maker. He studied theology, physics, mathematics, and philosophy at university, and worked for a time as a private tutor; he made very little money, but it gave him plenty of time for his own work. He lectured at the University of Königsberg for 15 years until he was eventually given a tenured position as professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. Though he enjoyed hearing travel stories, he never ventured more than 50 miles from his hometown, believing that travel was not necessary to solve the problems of philosophy.

In his most influential work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he argued against Empiricism, which held that the mind was a blank slate to be filled with observations of the physical world, and Rationalism, which held that it was possible to experience the world objectively without the interference of the mind; instead, he synthesized the two schools of thought, added that the conscious mind must process and organize our perceptions, and made a distinction between the natural world as we observe it and the natural world as it really is. He viewed morality as something that arises from human reason, and maintained that an action’s morality is determined not by the outcome of the action, but by the motive behind it. He is also famous for his single moral obligation, the “Categorical Imperative”: namely, that we should judge our actions by whether or not we would want everyone else to act the same way.

He wrote, “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe […] the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

…

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-april-22-2026/

HENRY DAVID THOREAU TO AIR ON PBS MARCH 2026

HENRY DAVID THOREAU TO AIR ON PBS MARCH 2026

Source: About PBS - Main
https://share.google/1hsIbj4ladm6L9CHF

I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-phil-oliver/

Censoring environmental history

Source: CBS News
https://share.google/OBCQA5ROrFojeo7Rd

How iNaturalist app users have fun while aiding science - CBS News

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-inaturalist-app-users-have-fun-while-aiding-science/

“choose a direction and keep on walking”

"…you do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking—though that metaphor makes it sound as though it already exists, if at a distance, rather than that the process itself creates it and covers the distance between the idea and the actuality."

— The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Save the game

"I think the meaning of life is to keep the remarkable game of being human going forward. In the past this meant reproducing above all. But now it means, above all, preserving the board on which we play this game. And since we’re now setting that board on fire, it’s our job to put that fire out. In our time, that’s the most important task we can undertake, since all depends on it. The best thing about the human game is that it, potentially, can stretch far out into the future – but only if we act now."
Bill McKibben

"The Meaning of Life: Answers to Life's Biggest Questions from the World's Most Extraordinary People" by James Bailey: https://a.co/07B86YNb

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Read on the go for free – download Kindle for Android, iOS, PC, Mac and more
http://amzn.to/1r0LubW

Hell

"John Gray is an unreconstructed pessimist, particularly on environmental issues... He thinks that we are going to hell in a handcart and there is nothing that we can do about it."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/mark-lynas-on-the-environment/

“strange in-between creatures”

"Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth, hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost."
— Arundhati Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers; Field Notes on Democracy, 2009

Place

"Going back to the same place as it changes through the seasons and physically linking myself to the land in some sort of way could be more rewarding and I could gain a deeper understanding of the place, and myself."
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/amy-liptrot-nature-writing/