Sara Imari Walker

Nothing looks the same except for we still have the same maid outfits and vacuums, and we recognize those.

And that was predicted 100 years ago, right?

So it's weird, our conception of things and how much change there is.

And of course, our brains are tuned to look out for the things that are dangerous and changing in our environment, and so we're always hypersensitive to the things that are changing.

are changing without like recognizing how much is still the same.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I love talking with historians, especially like the ideas I work on.

Right.

So like one of the sort of fundamental ideas in assembly theory, which is really radical in some sense from a perspective of physics, but just generally is that history is actually embedded in objects.

So I actually think like any evolved structure has a physical size, like it might be sitting on the desk, but it also has a size in time.

And this is actually like a fundamental feature of the physics of life that that living objects, the things that life creates are large in time.

And this kind of idea has been sitting around humanity for millennia that like.

contingency history might still be alive in the present, but we don't really think about that in a fundamental way.

So, you know, like I was talking with Thomas Moynihan, who's a historian.

He was just saying that there's so many threads through history that kind of point to this idea being like, you know, super interesting and very relevant.

And so when you think about like the future history, are they going to be like, oh, they finally realized these kind of things were true?

And I think about this with the history of physics.

It's kind of crazy at what generation we started realizing certain things.