Chris Kempes
speaker
209 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Chris Kempes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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um, got us thinking again about just how far we could take these, these physical constraints, um, and the optimizations of those to understand what, what organisms are doing. Um, and then we moved into the single cells in lots of different ways. Um, but yeah, mammals have, uh, it's a different set of physics, you know, it's the physics of, uh, fluid flow through vessels.
It's the physics of mechanical buckling, um, under gravity, um, And it's a very different sort of thing, but it still leads to predictions for how their metabolism should change with their overall body mass and what the structure of these vascular systems should look like and how fast they should reproduce and how long they should live.
And so there is a pretty well worked out sort of systematic theory there as well. It's just slightly different physics.
Please.
So first is, you know, first is there have been many cases in the past where radical changes to the environment have led to these huge mass extinctions. And then following those mass extinctions, you get what's called a re-radiation or radiation of different organisms that then discover these new innovations and Um, we're one such thing, right.
As mammals that were small and in low abundance in the time of dinosaurs and, um, certain physiology allowed us to make it through this mass extinction and then to expand and become the organisms we are. Um, so that's one side. I think that's totally a separate question from, uh, the ethics and considerations of mass extinctions from a responsibility perspective for humans.
And it's also not guaranteed. So I think lots of mass extinctions don't get followed by a recovery. It's not clear that we always would have come out of snowball Earth. It's possible that you find really interesting planets for a long time that then get into this snowball phase.
the dynamicists, the planetary dynamicists will tell you that alternative steady state, having two steady states, one of which is a snowball, is common for planets that likely can harbor life. And so I think all the time you could get into a snowball and never recover, right? So major transitions to planets, major shifts in planets may cause extinctions and be non-recoverable, right?
So that's definitely another possibility that doesn't always get mentioned with the extinctions lead to, uh, innovation and these new radiations and lots of cool new stuff. Extinction sometimes just lead to the end of everything. Um, and that's, that's really important to, to note.
Um, and then I think we're already in the midst of just an amazing time for, uh, and I mean, amazing with neither good nor bad, but really in the sense of amazement time for evolutionary transitions. So, um, you know, many of us would say that, uh, Cities represent a new type of organism, a new type of major evolutionary transition.
It's certainly one of the major evolutionary transitions originally outlined in the first book on the subject. And along with human social groups, you know, we've been able to look at the growth of companies using the same sort of models that we use for organisms. And so we're pretty comfortable talking about companies as entities, as a new sort of entity that's on the planet.
And I think, you know, different types of AI also represent a major evolutionary transition, if not the Internet itself. Right. In all of these cases, we're taking lower level components and combining them into new architectures, right? So cities combine humans in new ways, inside new architectures.
The internet combines all sorts of things in new ways and new architectures, as do LLMs, as do human organizations. And so I think we're in the midst of many new types of individuals showing up on the planet, which is really interesting. And then finally, I would say that also just how humans are changing the selective dynamic of the planet is also apparent.
Ron Milo has some really nice work over a few papers showing how much of the planet's biomass is associated with humans, either our own biomass or our crops or the animals that humans tend to eat. And it's an amazing fraction, and it doesn't look at all like any other ecology we've seen in the past over the course of the history of our Earth.
And so I think that's already a case where the human technology, our ability to organize our environment and plan ahead and construct our own niche has led to this really radically different ecology, really radically different selective forces.
I mean, who looking at the cow and chicken would predict these two are, these two organisms are going to grow to, um, completely surprising biomass densities, uh, 10,000 years from now, right? No, no, no normal ecology would predict that. Um, and why cows and not other, you know, mammals at the same size is, is a totally contingent story that is based on human preference and human technology.
So I think we are in this really interesting place where, um, We've created totally new selective pressures for our ecologies and where we're creating totally new types of entities. And it's where that all goes. I don't think we have theory for. I think it's we're all figuring out as we go sort of thing.
And there's lots of reasons to be concerned about all sorts of different dimensions of the future. It's a very interesting time in the long evolution of this planet.
Yeah, I think maybe from a efficiency perspective, just to say if you start to really understand one organism well, then you select on it and you pick it. I think there has, in general, and people have written about this, there is a trend towards humans eating less and less diverse things in time.
And so, I mean, if you take, say, an original natural environment and how many different types of things we ate, You move to agriculture. You move to industrialized agriculture. Each of those steps, you're sort of eating less and less objects. So if you think about in the United States, the fraction of the diet that is corn is large. So that's targeting one species, one crop.
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