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laodan

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laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA

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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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  • Zooming Out In Time

    Rated Oct 16 2006 • 4 reviews • history, reality • ucr.edu

    Zooming Out in Time
    via Nova Spivek Minding the Planet, by John Baez in The Long Now Foundation Online.
    How can we detect and understand oncoming crises in time to avert them? Sometimes we must "zoom out": expand our perspective and find similar situations in the distant past. A good example is climate change. What can a few degrees of warming do? To answer this, we need to know some history: how the Earth's climate has changed over the last 65 million years.

    URL: Zooming Out in Time, in The Long Now Foundation
    URL: Zooming Out in Time (32 pages PDF)


    When I mentioned the idealism of Alex Steffen's position in one of my last comments, I did not imagine that one of my next discoveries would be a reasoned argument about what I just had been describing as the "real reality". So thanks to randomness and chance this accidental discovery comes with real "a propos".
    Now, to make things clear, I don't reject "per se" the optimism of Steffen. I like the idea to imagine new ways that could solve the problem. What I object is Steffen's all-out optimism.
    In my eyes this does not seem to ring true, it seems to me that this attitude looks very much as if Steffen was refusing to accept realities. By accepting realities I mean this fundamental search for understanding what's going on in this reality we are such tiny particles of.
    This kind of uncritical optimism, it seems to me, leads directly into voluntarism, leads directly into trying to do anything to solve the problem at any cost and thus forgetting the big picture (see Zooming out of time). This is what led WorldChanging, the site where Steffen writes, to come out writing very positively about "terraforming" as the ultimate answer to climate change and other environmental problems.
    It is this kind of idiocy that I have in mind when critiquing Steffen's blind optimism... but in all honesty, I have to add that even Steffen opposed that strategy: Why Geo-Engineering is a Bad Fall-Back Strategy