Galactic Center Two

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Slusser
Keyword(s):  
Galactic Center ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Machine Intelligence ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Organic Life

This chapter examines Nigel Walmsley's space odyssey in In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns, which span the dates from 1999 to 2061. By the end of the first novel, Nigel has discovered a cosmic struggle between machine intelligence and organic life that will soon engulf Earth. Through several contacts with alien artifacts and entities that had come to Earth in both prehistoric and recent times, he predicts the coming of the machines. In Across the Sea of Suns, Nigel does battle with the machines with the help of organic life forms he finds on the moon of a planet in distant Epsilon Eridani. In the process, he reaffirms what he had earlier discovered on Earth: that, in the evolutionary sense, the boundary between machine and organism is not clear cut. The stamp of Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey is clearly on both In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns. The chapter analyzes the two novels in order to understand how Gregory Benford launched his space epic.

The Biography of the Earth

2021 ◽  
pp. 163-180
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Ervin-Blankenheim
Keyword(s):  
Early Life ◽  
Plate Tectonics ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Snowball Earth ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Geologic Time ◽  
Earth Systems ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Geologic Record

The way the planet has changed through geologic time, and life on it, the account of the Earth, is the topic of this and the next three chapters, starting in this chapter with the Precambrian Supereon. The overarching principles of geologic time, plate tectonics, and evolution worked dynamically to create the biography of the planet. This chapter traces back to the recesses of the geologic record and early Earth, from its birth and the formation of the Moon through seven-eighths of its existence, a huge span of time. Early life forms emerged during this supereon in the Archean Eon and had a profound influence on other Earth systems. Life interacted and changed the chemistry of the atmosphere through photosynthesis, so much so that the changes are thought to have sent planetary systems over an edge into multiple “Snowball Earth” episodes when most of the planet froze over. In addition to the beginning of organic life and climate, the emergence and configuration of the continents during the Precambrian are covered. Events of this supereon set the stage for the burgeoning of life forms in the next eon, the Phanerozoic.

Forget the Bat

2020 ◽  
Vol 07 (01) ◽  
pp. 83-93
Author(s):  
Owen Holland
Keyword(s):  
Life Forms ◽  
Physical Systems ◽  
Machine Consciousness ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The Status ◽  
Virtual System

The philosophical legacy of the idea that there must be something it is like to be a conscious organism, together with an inclination to regard organic life forms as having qualities fundamentally distinct from other physical systems, have adversely affected the development of the nascent discipline of machine consciousness. This paper highlights some of the factors involved, and as a corrective proposes a reframing of machine consciousness within a thoroughgoing engineering context. This is shown to offer some significant avenues for progress, while bringing with it some theoretical problems requiring further consideration such as the status of the possible consciousness of a wholly virtual system.

scholarly journals „Perspektywy gwiazdarskie”. Lunety w literaturze i piśmiennictwie naukowym polskiego baroku

2018 ◽  
pp. 213-251
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Raubo
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Popularization Of Science ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The World ◽  
Celestial Bodies ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Universe

The telescope played a crucial role in the modern scientific revolution and occupied a significant place in Baroque culture. Interest in the telescope has been confirmed by Polish literary sources and writings, including scientific treatises and compendia of knowledge. Telescopes are the subject of works on the popularization of science written in the scientia curiosa convention. Reflections on the telescope appear in the context of deliberations on the world system, on the possibility of the existence of life forms on the Moon and other celestial bodies, and in the context of polemic against Aristotelian cosmology. The telescope is an element of religious deliberations concerning eschatology and those focused on astronomy, whose aspiration to get to know the universe is motivated by secular curiosity. The matter of conducting observations of the sky with the use of the telescope has turned into a comedy show, in a satirical way relating to the practice of astrology.

scholarly journals Materialism new and old

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles T. Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
Cut Set ◽  
The Way

New materialism is not a clear-cut set of theses, or a firmly unified school of thought. It crosses discourses and theoretical commitments, but, as its name indicates, seems consistently to oppose ‘new’ materialism to an older form, or perhaps several older forms of this doctrine. The latter are typically associated with ‘mechanistic’ standpoints, with ‘reductionism’, with the denial of life, agency, embodiment, meaning, value … What happens when a historian of materialism confronts such claims? In what follows, I reflect on the historical problems which affect such theoretical positionings. It is not that there is no need to distinguish passive from active forms of materialism, or single out a focus on organic life. But that a distinction between ‘new and old’ might not be the way to capture such crucial theoretical and historical features.

Faulkner’s Biopolitical Fable of Modernity

2019 ◽  
pp. 289-310
Author(s):  
Jay Watson
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Great War ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The One ◽  
The Great War

A Fable returns to the Great War to reframe it as the scene of a different modernity than the one diagnosed in Faulkner’s early fiction. A Fable concerns itself less with the modernization of death than with the modernization of life, the management of biological being by emergent biopolitical state formations that the Great War presented with a crucial opportunity to tighten their grip on living populations. Thus the defining conflict of A Fable is not between war and peace, nor between death and life, but between life and life, the struggle of autonomous life to rise above life regulated and instrumentalized, life surveilled, administered, and subordinated to the interests of industry, army, media, state: the global consortium that puts all organic life forms at risk. In A Fable, the conceit of world war finds its resonance in this opposition between global cabal and planetary, interspecies collectivity.

Morphology of Apollo 11 and 12 Soil Samples and the Quest for Biogenic Forms

1970 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 16-17
Author(s):  
Delbert E. Philpott ◽  
Charles Turnbill
Keyword(s):  
Electron Microscopy ◽  
Lunar Surface ◽  
Past History ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
High Vacuum ◽  
Lunar Soil ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Carbonaceous Chondrites ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Similar Treatment

The Apollo 11 and 12 missions to the moon returned valuable samples for scientific study. The morphology of the loose sediment and breccia from Apollo 11 have been studied extensively in our laboratory using light microscopy, electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and the electron probe. The Apollo 12 sample is now undergoing similar treatment.Even though conditions on the moon, especially on the surface, are known to be extremely hostile to life as we know it, an extensive search was carried out for evidence of past life. Since numerous reports exist purporting evidence of life forms in carbonaceous chondrites coming to the Earth from outer space, such material would also be expected to be embedded in the lunar surface. Enders calculates about 2% carbonaceous chondrites on the lunar surface and Keil had measured nickel iron meteoritic ratios in his sample as about 1%. Thus influx to the surface and undetermined past history add interest to the search. However, an estimated turnover rate of 120 million years for a few inches of lunar soil does mean long exposure of this material to radiation, severe temperature changes, high vacuum, etc.

Bringing Levinas Down to Earth

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-316
Author(s):  
Joe Larios ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Hans Jonas ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship

This paper adds to the critical work on the relationship between Hans Jonas and Emmanuel Levinas by arguing that the experience of the face of the other can be made compatible with Jonas’s understanding of metabolism thus allowing for an extension of who counts as an other to include all organic life forms. Although this extension will allow for a broadening of ethical patients on one side, we will see that a corresponding broadening of ethical agents on the other side will prove to be more difficult owing to the exceptionality of the human being that they both maintain and believe is expressed through the experience of responsibility.

The Common Fossils of the British Rocks

The Geologist ◽  
1859 ◽  
Vol 2 (10) ◽  
pp. 381-388
Author(s):  
S. J. Mackie
Keyword(s):  
Life Forms ◽  
Animal Life ◽  
Animal Kingdom ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
Vegetable Kingdom ◽  
The Common

For the Vegetable Kingdom it is impossible to give any list composed with the same degree of elaboration as has been attained in the classification of animals. Modern plants are, it is true, as well known and as correctly grouped as modern animal life-forms; but our knowledge of fossil botany is not at all equal to our knowledge of fossil animals. The most minute divisions as well as the most important of botanical classifications are dependent upon the more fully developed and most perishable parts of vegetable organisms—the flowers and the fruits or seeds. Of these the former, the most essential of all, have rarely indeed, if ever, been preserved. One or two doubtful instances have been stated; but these have been by others disputed as being only incipient buds or leaflets, or as accidental appearances, and the investigator of the extinct forms of the vegetable creations of past geological ages has, at the best, to infer from the remains of leaves, branches, or stems, usually more or less decayed, the probable class to which the originals—often, indeed generally, of very different structures and organic characters from his existing types—belong. Not uncommonly, indeed, his only guides are vague and indefinite resemblances of form. Still, however, if it be essential for the attainment of a knowledge of the exact concatenation of past events in the succession of organic life on our planet, it is equally as important to note whether plants have been progressive in their development, as to determine this point in relation to the animal-kingdom.

The motion of a lunar orbiter

1966 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 373
Author(s):  
Y. Kozai
Keyword(s):  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Artificial Satellite ◽  
Equations Of Motion ◽  
Triaxial Ellipsoid ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Secular Motion ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Close Satellite ◽  
The Mean

The motion of an artificial satellite around the Moon is much more complicated than that around the Earth, since the shape of the Moon is a triaxial ellipsoid and the effect of the Earth on the motion is very important even for a very close satellite.The differential equations of motion of the satellite are written in canonical form of three degrees of freedom with time depending Hamiltonian. By eliminating short-periodic terms depending on the mean longitude of the satellite and by assuming that the Earth is moving on the lunar equator, however, the equations are reduced to those of two degrees of freedom with an energy integral.Since the mean motion of the Earth around the Moon is more rapid than the secular motion of the argument of pericentre of the satellite by a factor of one order, the terms depending on the longitude of the Earth can be eliminated, and the degree of freedom is reduced to one.Then the motion can be discussed by drawing equi-energy curves in two-dimensional space. According to these figures satellites with high inclination have large possibilities of falling down to the lunar surface even if the initial eccentricities are very small.The principal properties of the motion are not changed even if plausible values ofJ3andJ4of the Moon are included.This paper has been published in Publ. astr. Soc.Japan15, 301, 1963.

Laboratory Simulation of Lunar Luminescence

1962 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 441-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. Geake ◽  
H. Lipson ◽  
M. D. Lumb
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology ◽  
Laboratory Simulation ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Physics Department ◽  
Luminescent Spectrum

Work has recently begun in the Physics Department of the Manchester College of Science and Technology on an attempt to simulate lunar luminescence in the laboratory. This programme is running parallel with that of our colleagues in the Manchester University Astronomy Department, who are making observations of the luminescent spectrum of the Moon itself. Our instruments are as yet only partly completed, but we will describe briefly what they are to consist of, in the hope that we may benefit from the comments of others in the same field, and arrange to co-ordinate our work with theirs.

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