Sarah Walker
speaker
510 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Sarah Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And so the original life is happening again right now on this planet in the technosphere with the way that our planet is undergoing another transition, just like at the original life when geochemistry transitioned to biology, which is the global. For me, it was a planetary scale transition. It was a multi-scale thing that happened from the scale of chemistry all the way to planetary cycles.
It's happening now all the way from individual humans to the internet, which is a global technology and all the other things. Like there's this multi-scale process that's happening and transitioning us globally. And it is really like, it's a dramatic transition. It's happening really fast. And we're living in it.
I hope so. I think so.
I don't really like the Kardashev scale. And it goes back to like, I don't like a lot of the narratives about life because they're very like, you know, survival of the fittest, energy consuming, this, that, and the other thing. It's very like, I don't know, sort of old world, you know, like conqueror mentality.
I mean, I think it does require life to use new energy sources in order to expand the way it is. So that part's accurate. But I think this sort of process of life being the mechanism that the universe creatively expresses itself, generates novelty, explores the space of the possible, is really the thing that's most deeply intrinsic to life.
And so, you know, these sort of energy-consuming scales of technology I think is missing the sort of actual feature that's most prominent about any alien life that we might find, which is that it's literally… our universe, our reality, trying to creatively express itself and trying to find out what can exist and trying to make it exist.
Yes.
But this is why I'm okay with having a finite lifetime. And, you know, one of the reasons I'm okay with that, actually, goes back to this issue of the fact that we're resource-bound. We live in a... You know, like, we have a finite amount of material, whatever way you want to define material. I think, like, for me, you know, material is time. Material is information.
But we have a finite amount of material. If time is a generating mechanism, it's always going to be finite because... The universe is, you know, like it's a resource that's getting generated, but it has a size, which means that all the things that could exist don't exist. And in fact, most of them never will.
So death is a way to make room in the universe for other things to exist that wouldn't be able to exist otherwise. So if the universe over its entire temporal history wants to maximize the number of things, wants is a hard word, maximize is a hard word, all these things are approximate, but It wants to maximize the number of things that can exist.
The best way to do it is to make recursively embedded stacked objects like us that have a lot of structure and a small volume of space and to have those things turn over rapidly so you can create as many of them as possible.
Hopefully. Hopefully our universe is teeming with life.
I think we're in our 20s. 20% of the 20s? No, like age-wise, let's say. We're in our 20s, but the lifespan is going to keep getting longer.
You know why I use that, though? I'll tell you why. Why my brain went there is because anybody that gets an education in physics has this sort of trope about how all the great physicists did their best work in their 20s. And then you don't do any good work after that. And I always thought it was kind of funny because for me, physics is not complete.
It's not nearly complete, but most physicists think that we understand most of the structure of reality. And so I think I actually, I think I put this in the book somewhere, but like this idea to me that societies would discover everything while they're young is very consistent with the way we talk about physics right now. But I don't think that's actually the way that things are going to go.
And you're finding that people that are making major discoveries are getting older in some sense than they were. And our lifespan is also increasing. So I think there is something about age and your ability to learn and how much of the world you can see that that's really important over a human lifespan, but also over the lifespan of societies. And so I don't know how big the frontier is.
I don't actually think it has a limit. I don't believe in infinity as a physical thing, but I think as a receding horizon, I think because the universe is getting bigger, you can never know all of it.
That number had to come from somewhere.
But you think the book has a finite size.
And I don't. I mean, not that I believe in infinities, but I don't, I think the size of the book is growing.
Showing 441–460 of 510 · page 23 of 26
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