scholarly journals Radical First Contact: Bridging Astrobiology and SETI

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Oman-Reagan
Keyword(s):  
No Value ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Extraterrestrial Intelligence ◽  
Multispecies Ethnography ◽  
Anthropological Theory ◽  
Decolonizing Methodologies ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
First Contact ◽  
The Universe

Abstract for SOCIA 2018: Accepted October 2017The astrobiological search for life in the universe is rarely discussed in terms of communicative first contact, a concept often reserved for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). What are the implications for astrobiology of inheriting historical conclusions that there is no value in attempting communication with seemingly non-intelligent life on Earth? By imagining a radical first contact protocol, to bridge work in astrobiology and SETI, this paper challenges the assumption that certain forms of life elsewhere (those we might categorize as like microbial, plant, insect, computer, geologic, or other non-human forms and systems) can be eliminated in advance from attempts at communicative or cultural first contact. A radical first contact protocol asks that we push the limits of both our astrobiological and anthropological imaginations beyond the traditional scope of anthropological subjects and functional SETI-focused definitions of intelligence. By drawing on anthropological theory, ontological anthropology, multispecies ethnography, decolonizing methodologies, speculative fiction, as well as from fieldwork with astrobiologists and SETI scientists (Wright and Oman-Reagan 2017), this paper proposes how and why a radical first contact protocol might approach any potential life, broadly defined, as though it is also a potential intelligence, culture, or agent inviting communicative contact and moral consideration. By drawing on expansions of contemporary anthropology along with other theory and practice this project also aims to help scientists “step out of our brains” (Cabrol 2016) to build methods and insights which successfully bridge key aspects of first contact and the search for life in astrobiology and SETI.Keywords: first contact, ontology, multispecies ethnography, decolonizing, astrobiology, SETI, anthropology

Multisensory Anthropology

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Howes
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Not Given ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Multispecies Ethnography ◽  
Sensory Ethnography ◽  
Anthropological Theory ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Senses

The senses are made, not given. Multisensory anthropology focuses on the variable boundaries, differential elaboration, and many different ways of combining the senses across (and within) cultures. Its methodology is grounded in “participant sensation,” or sensing—and making sense—along with others, also known as sensory ethnography. This review article traces the sensualization of anthropological theory and practice since the early 1990s, showing how the concept of sensory mediation has steadily supplanted the prior concern with representation. It concludes with a discussion of how the senses are engaged in filmmaking, multispecies ethnography, and material culture studies as well as in achieving social justice.

scholarly journals Conceptualizing Difference in SETI: Xenoanthropological Theory and Methods

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Oman-Reagan
Keyword(s):  
White Paper ◽  
Extraterrestrial Intelligence ◽  
Multispecies Ethnography ◽  
Anthropological Theory ◽  
Intelligent Life

Anthropological theory and methods offer new ways to help us “step out of our brains” and overcome the tendency to search “for other versions of ourselves” in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). This white paper proposes SETI researchers draw on anthropological theory, ontology, and multispecies ethnography to imagine “how intelligent life interacts with its environment and communicates information” (Cabrol, Alien Mindscapes, 2016). Please cite as: Oman-Reagan, Michael P. 2018. “Conceptualizing Difference in SETI: Xenoanthropological Theory and Methods.” Paper presented for "Decoding Alien Intelligence,” SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA. 15 March.

PHILOSOPHY AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

Think ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (60) ◽  
pp. 33-49
Author(s):  
William Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Evolution Of The Universe ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
The Universe

The author sets out to respond to the student complaint that ‘Philosophy did not answer “the big questions”’, in particular the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ The response first outlines and evaluates the most common religious answer, that human life is given a meaning by God who created us and informs us that this life is just the pilgrim way to the next eternal life in heaven. He then discusses the response that, from the point of view of post-Darwinian science and the evolution of the universe and all that is in it, human life on Earth must be afforded no more meaning than the meaning we would give to a microscopic planaria or to some creature on another planet in a distant universe. All things including human creatures on Planet Earth just exist for a time and that is that. There is no plan or purpose. In the last sections the author outlines the view that it is we humans ourselves who give meaning to our lives by our choices of values or things that are worth pursuing and through our resulting sense of achievement or the opposite. Nevertheless the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ can mean quite different things in different contexts, and so merit different if related answers. From one point of view one answer may lie in terms of the love of one human for another.

scholarly journals If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare

2021 ◽  
Vol 922 (2) ◽  
pp. 182
Author(s):  
Robin Hanson ◽  
Daniel Martin ◽  
Calvin McCarter ◽  
Jonathan Paulson
Keyword(s):  
Star Formation ◽  
Power Law ◽  
Rate Change ◽  
Bad News ◽  
Extraterrestrial Intelligence ◽  
Lifetime Distributions ◽  
Circular Arcs ◽  
Expansion Speed ◽  
Life On Earth

Abstract If life on Earth had to achieve n “hard steps“ to reach humanity's level, then the chance of this event rose as time to the nth power. Integrating this over habitable star formation and planet lifetime distributions predicts >99% of advanced life appears after today, unless n < 3 and max planet duration <50 Gyr. That is, we seem early. We offer this explanation: a deadline is set by loud aliens who are born according to a hard steps power law, expand at a common rate, change their volume appearances, and prevent advanced life like us from appearing in their volumes. Quiet aliens, in contrast, are much harder to see. We fit this three-parameter model of loud aliens to data: (1) birth power from the number of hard steps seen in Earth’s history, (2) birth constant by assuming a inform distribution over our rank among loud alien birth dates, and (3) expansion speed from our not seeing alien volumes in our sky. We estimate that loud alien civilizations now control 40%–50% of universe volume, each will later control ∼ 105–3 × 107 galaxies, and we could meet them in ∼200 Myr–2 Gyr. If loud aliens arise from quiet ones, a depressingly low transition chance (<∼10−4 ) is required to expect that even one other quiet alien civilization has ever been active in our galaxy. Which seems to be bad news for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But perhaps alien volume appearances are subtle, and their expansion speed lower, in which case we predict many long circular arcs to find in our sky.

scholarly journals Earth protection

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (01) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashmi Singh
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Sustainable Development ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Developed Country ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
Generational Equity ◽  
Nationally Determined Contributions ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Life On Earth

In the race to become a developed country, we are over utilizing as well as exploiting our natural resources, as a result we are facing problems like global warming, pollution, depletion of resources and so on. Now the time has come that we pay attention to these problems and protect life on earth, otherwise we will suffer serious consequences. Inter-generational equity and intra-generational equity are key aspects for sustainable development. For sustainable development, protection of environment is essential. Likewise, for protection of environment the adoption of policy of sustainable development is essential. At the 70th United Nations General Assembly session, sustainable development goals were adopted. In December 2015, at Paris there was a historical climate change agreement. Paris Agreement is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC]. The Paris deal is the world’s first comprehensive climate agreement. India presented its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions [INDC] in October 2015. These are important steps towards protection of our beautiful earth.

scholarly journals The Meta-Dynamic Nature of Consciousness

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Barnden
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Formulation ◽  
Physical Universe ◽  
Time Flow ◽  
Non Local ◽  
Physical Interactions ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Physical Laws ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Non Locality ◽  
Do So

How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for its systematic regularities is actually itself a physical constituent of the universe, along with more familiar entities. Indeed, it proposes that instances of dynamism can themselves take part in physical interactions with other entities, this interaction then being &ldquo;meta-dynamism&rdquo; (a type of meta-causation). Secondly, the theory is radical, and unique, in arguing that consciousness is necessarily partly constituted of meta-dynamic auto-sensitivity, in other words it must react via meta-dynamism to its own dynamism, and also in conjecturing that some specific form of this sensitivity is sufficient for and indeed constitutive of consciousness. The article proposes a way for physical laws to be modified to accommodate meta-dynamism, via the radical step of including elements that explicitly refer to dynamism itself. Additionally, laws become, explicitly, temporally non-local in referring directly to quantity values holding at times prior to a given instant of application of the law. The approach therefore implicitly brings in considerations about what information determines states. Because of the temporal non-locality, and also because of the deep connections between dynamism and time-flow, the approach also implicitly connects to the topic of entropy insofar as this is related to time.

scholarly journals Energy, genes and evolution: introduction to an evolutionary synthesis

2013 ◽  
Vol 368 (1622) ◽  
pp. 20120253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Lane ◽  
William F. Martin ◽  
John A. Raven ◽  
John F. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Evolutionary Synthesis ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Major Transitions ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Energy Harnessing ◽  
Emergence Of Life ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Planetary Habitability ◽  
Origin Of Eukaryotes

Life is the harnessing of chemical energy in such a way that the energy-harnessing device makes a copy of itself. No energy, no evolution. The ‘modern synthesis’ of the past century explained evolution in terms of genes, but this is only part of the story. While the mechanisms of natural selection are correct, and increasingly well understood, they do little to explain the actual trajectories taken by life on Earth. From a cosmic perspective—what is the probability of life elsewhere in the Universe, and what are its probable traits?—a gene-based view of evolution says almost nothing. Irresistible geological and environmental changes affected eukaryotes and prokaryotes in very different ways, ones that do not relate to specific genes or niches. Questions such as the early emergence of life, the morphological and genomic constraints on prokaryotes, the singular origin of eukaryotes, and the unique and perplexing traits shared by all eukaryotes but not found in any prokaryote, are instead illuminated by bioenergetics. If nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of energetics. This Special Issue of Philosophical Transactions examines the interplay between energy transduction and genome function in the major transitions of evolution, with implications ranging from planetary habitability to human health. We hope that these papers will contribute to a new evolutionary synthesis of energetics and genetics.

scholarly journals From cosmos to intelligent life: the four ages of astrobiology

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 345-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Gleiser
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Elements ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
First Stars ◽  
History Of ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
The Big Bang ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Intelligent Life

AbstractThe history of life on Earth and in other potential life-bearing planetary platforms is deeply linked to the history of the Universe. Since life, as we know, relies on chemical elements forged in dying heavy stars, the Universe needs to be old enough for stars to form and evolve. The current cosmological theory indicates that the Universe is 13.7 ± 0.13 billion years old and that the first stars formed hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. At least some stars formed with stable planetary systems wherein a set of biochemical reactions leading to life could have taken place. In this paper, I argue that we can divide cosmological history into four ages, from the Big Bang to intelligent life. The physical age describes the origin of the Universe, of matter, of cosmic nucleosynthesis, as well as the formation of the first stars and Galaxies. The chemical age began when heavy stars provided the raw ingredients for life through stellar nucleosynthesis and describes how heavier chemical elements collected in nascent planets and Moons gave rise to prebiotic biomolecules. The biological age describes the origin of early life, its evolution through Darwinian natural selection and the emergence of complex multicellular life forms. Finally, the cognitive age describes how complex life evolved into intelligent life capable of self-awareness and of developing technology through the directed manipulation of energy and materials. I conclude discussing whether we are the rule or the exception.

INTERPRETATION OF SPACE AND TIME IN ONTOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY NAVOI

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-87
Author(s):  
Toji Omonovich Norov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Human Intelligence ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Holy Book

The universe, the space that make up their basis planets in it, their creation, the main essence of their creation, form, composition, meaning, movements, interactions, their influence on human life and activities, the role of man in the universe and in life on Earth, life, the criteria of activity and processes occurring in time and space have long been of interest to humanity. One of the main problems in the history of philosophy is the question of space and time. This problem was defined in different ways in the great schools of thought by thinkers of different periods. One of these great thinkers is Alisher Navoi. Navoi's works, along with other socio-philosophical themes, uniquely express and analyze the problems of the firmament and time. Its main feature is that it is based on the divine (pantheistic) religion, Islam, its holy book, the Koran and other theological sources, as well as on the secrets of nature and the Universe, the main miracle of Allah - human intelligence, the power of enlightenment, they are the key revealing all these secrets.

The Observer Effect: The Artistic Image as a Metaphor for Scientific Interpretations of the Natural World

Leonardo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-78
Author(s):  
Elena Gubanova
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Observer Effect ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Artistic Images ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Artistic Image ◽  
The Universe

In this article, the author presents some of her artworks in which she created artistic images and interpretations of time, space and light that define human life on Earth. In her multimedia installations of the last 10 years, her interest in the scientific study of the universe has been interwoven with her experience as the daughter of an astronomer. The author and her husband collaborate to express their thoughts on science and philosophy through a combination of art and engineering solutions and technologies.

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