Sense of Scale
I was thinking about "Scale" on the way to work this morning.
Humans tend to think of things in terms of the scale of humanity, both size and time. It might be argued that much of the history of human intellectual development has consisted of, or been driven by a recognition of or discovery that there are other scales operating in the Cosmos.
Early human spiritual realizations appear to have been driven by observations of natural cycles: day and night, birth and death, the cycles of the seasons, the repeating patterns in the sky.
Over time and with increasing precision of observation and record keeping it was possible to recognize larger and larger scales that evolved over long periods.
Technological advances allowed that to be pushed even further, and then into smaller and smaller scales as well.
Through all this there remained a tendency to observe living organisms at the same time scale as humans. Until relatively recently the advent of time-lapse photography has allowed us to observe "simpler" slower-paced creatures (plants, starfish, slime-molds) in a greatly accelerated fashion.
Much to everyone's surprise, this reveals a whole new world of previously unsuspected, seemingly purposeful behavior that wasn't apparent at everyday human time scale.
The thought I had on the way to work was this: If we could observe, or model, cosmic processes and interactions in sufficient detail and accuracy; and the speed up the activity of , say, a few billion years into a few minutes; might we not also observe "purposeful" seeming behavior?
I speculate that the birth and death of stars, the evolution of a galaxy over time, might resemble somewhat the activity of a complex culture in a petri dish.
Humans tend to think of things in terms of the scale of humanity, both size and time. It might be argued that much of the history of human intellectual development has consisted of, or been driven by a recognition of or discovery that there are other scales operating in the Cosmos.
Early human spiritual realizations appear to have been driven by observations of natural cycles: day and night, birth and death, the cycles of the seasons, the repeating patterns in the sky.
Over time and with increasing precision of observation and record keeping it was possible to recognize larger and larger scales that evolved over long periods.
Technological advances allowed that to be pushed even further, and then into smaller and smaller scales as well.
Through all this there remained a tendency to observe living organisms at the same time scale as humans. Until relatively recently the advent of time-lapse photography has allowed us to observe "simpler" slower-paced creatures (plants, starfish, slime-molds) in a greatly accelerated fashion.
Much to everyone's surprise, this reveals a whole new world of previously unsuspected, seemingly purposeful behavior that wasn't apparent at everyday human time scale.
The thought I had on the way to work was this: If we could observe, or model, cosmic processes and interactions in sufficient detail and accuracy; and the speed up the activity of , say, a few billion years into a few minutes; might we not also observe "purposeful" seeming behavior?
I speculate that the birth and death of stars, the evolution of a galaxy over time, might resemble somewhat the activity of a complex culture in a petri dish.
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