[freebeard]

Start with Universe

Our ancestors observed patterns in nature that profoundly influenced their beliefs and behaviors, enabling them to anticipate and synchronize with the cycles of life. By paying close attention to the world around them, countless generations developed reciprocal relationships with environments that enabled them to survive and thrive.

Today, modern technologies enable us to manipulate our surroundings in extraordinary ways. Yet they also isolate us, encouraging us to take the life-sustaining systems of our home planet for granted as endlessly exploitable resources and economic externalities. As specialized sciences increasingly seek to reduce existence to its component parts, the universe has seemingly been diminished to little more than physical properties, isolated interactions, and mathematical laws.

This materialist cosmology has effectively separated facts from value, imparting the overwhelming sense that Earth is a mediocre pale blue dot aimlessly wandering around within the infinite void of space. Though the interconnected challenges facing humanity are growing ever more complex and urgent, there seems to be little guidance or meaning to be found by paying attention to this larger context.

Buckminster Fuller challenged this limited perspective over fifty years ago, asserting that it is both incomplete and obsolete. He insisted that the sense of separation from nature is a dangerous illusion resulting from reductionism and overspecialization, and that humanity's evolutionary success is dependent on our willingness to learn from the emergent behaviors of whole systems. This led him to question how we envision the context of our existence, re-imagining a big picture in which our species is situated within the full continuum of creation. In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth he asks...

So you start with Universe and discard irrelevancies. To that end here's Anton Petrov today: We Just Took The First Ever Picture of the Cosmic Web

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkaHsHRiULA

It all flows downhill, in more ways than one. We don't see this in the night sky the same way fish don't see water.