John Hopkins on Sun, 25 Apr 2021 20:38:20 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> deep humanities initiative 

Hey Keith -

Planetary survival? How about the temporary (fleeting!) dominance of a messy
species with brains that allow it to apprehend what it is doing, but seemingly
w/o the ability to overcome evolutionary mandates to stop its consumption of
available energies. With a (solar) system life-time of perhaps an additional 10
billion years, there is ample time to have many more tectonic cycles that will
wipe the slate clean and provide all new hydrocarbon resources for the next
big-brained species to consume at some point. Though it seems overwhelming to us
in our anthropocentric hubris -- that which humans have wrought -- Gaia is a
far, far more deep and wide phenomena than those tiny short-term fluctuations.
Our understanding of deep time requires science, which is only one way of
mapping the nature of reality, but one could accept that the metaphor is based
in scientific facts that require deep study and imagination to comprehend the
scales of the geophysical realities that rule us.

In the sense that stratigraphy is the accumulation and lithification of crustal
detritus, but that is driven by the forces of gravity and Light about which we
know very little, and is only one minor mechanism in the cycling of energy and
matter in the cosmos, yes, that would put 'our' history in it's proper minor
place in a schema that is clearly and profoundly beyond our comprehension: we are detritus, earth to earth, ashes to ashes. 

etc.

JH

On 25/Apr/21 09:53, Keith Sanborn wrote:> Interesting that at a time when
planetary survival is in jeopardy, analysts

shd return to a geological metaphor. Does history then equal stratigraphy?

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