The weekend edition of the “Planet Earth Report” provides a descriptive link to headline news by a leading science journalist about an extraordinary discovery, technology, person, or event changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
Today’s “Insomnia File” episode offers two stories of cosmic insight. The first is about ”An Accident More Complex than the Universe” from former astrophysicist and hard science-fiction author Alastair Reynolds, who’s epiphany is found in his novel , Blue Remembered Earth — first of a trilogy which follows humanity’s development over many centuries and Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine.
Perhaps in 10,000 years, or perhaps tomorrow, the inhabitants of Earth will wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit, writes China’s preeminent ‘hard’ science-fiction author and philosopher of alien contact, Liu Cixin, described as China’s Arthur. C. Clarke. Liu warns that the universe is a “dark forest” and a possible and terrifying reason behind the Fermi Paradox.
“At one time,” writes science-fiction author Dennis E. Taylor in We Are Legion (We Are Bob), “we thought that the way life came together was almost completely random, only needing an energy gradient to get going. But as we’ve moved into the information age, we’ve come to realize that life is more about information than energy. Fire has most of the characteristics of life. It eats, it grows, it reproduces. But fire retains no information. It doesn’t learn; it doesn’t adapt. The five millionth fire started by lightning will behave just like the first. But the five hundredth bacterial division will not be like the first one, especially if there is environmental pressure. That’s DNA. And RNA. That’s life.”
Before his death in 2018, Icelandic director and composer Johann Jóhannsson –director of Arrival and The Theory of Everything–adapted Last and First Men, a “future history” by British science-fiction author Olaf Stapledon –a “film that straddles the border of fiction and documentary. It is a meditation on memory and failed utopia.” The story –a channeled text from the last human species–describes the history of humanity from the present across two billion years and eighteen distinct human species, of which our own is the first.
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