The Coming Second Copernican Revolution

H

Hume

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adam-frank-2

(Adam Frank is a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Rochester)

Across 15,000 generations, human beings have looked out at the sentinel stars and felt the pressing weight of myriad existential questions: Are we alone? Are there other planets also orbiting distant suns? If so, have any of these other worlds also birthed life, or is the drama of our Earth a singular cosmic accident? And what about other minds and civilizations? Have others in the universe, through their success as tool-builders and world-makers, also brought themselves to the brink of collapse?


Remarkably, the first answers to these questions are beginning to arrive. Just as Copernicus reimagined the architecture of our solar system five centuries ago, we are once again in a revolution that pivots on planets. A new science called astrobiology has changed the night sky.

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The Coming Second Copernican Revolution | NOEMA

Astrobiology is rewiring our understanding of the intimate connection between life and planets as they appear in the universe.
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"It soon became clear that the Newtonian science supporting this celestial rearrangement could also be a driver for gaining material wealth and power. That was how new science became the imaginative foundation for a new world system.

This new world was, however, dead. It was a universe that was entirely materialist, mechanistic and reductionistic. Life was reduced to “nothing but” molecular machinery. The enduring strangeness of living systems and their capacity for agency, autonomy and even sentience (i.e. experience) became just an epiphenomenon of sub-atomic particle motions. Life, in and of itself, was secondary. Compared with atoms or space-time, life was not of fundamental importance in the hierarchies of this mechanistic scientific ontology.
 
Would be more interesting except for all the times scientists have told us "This is how it is, we are sure" only to a few years latter admit that they were completely wrong, and that they never had good evidence for the original claims.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
Would be more interesting except for all the times scientists have told us "This is how it is, we are sure" only to a few years latter admit that they were completely wrong, and that they never had good evidence for the original claims.
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Science made your computer.
 
Hume said:
"It soon became clear that the Newtonian science supporting this celestial rearrangement could also be a driver for gaining material wealth and power. That was how new science became the imaginative foundation for a new world system.

This new world was, however, dead. It was a universe that was entirely materialist, mechanistic and reductionistic. Life was reduced to “nothing but” molecular machinery. The enduring strangeness of living systems and their capacity for agency, autonomy and even sentience (i.e. experience) became just an epiphenomenon of sub-atomic particle motions. Life, in and of itself, was secondary. Compared with atoms or space-time, life was not of fundamental importance in the hierarchies of this mechanistic scientific ontology.
Click to expand...
As soon as modern science ditched the teleology of Aristotle, it stopped asking questions about purpose and meaning.

No one knows what gravity ultimately means or why there is a universal law of gravitation. But modern science was brilliant at predicting motion, mass, and energy.
 
Cypress said:
As soon as modern science ditched the teleology of Aristotle, it stopped answering questions about purpose and meaning.

No one knows what gravity ultimately means or why there is a universal law of gravitation. But modern science was brilliant at predicting motion and energy.
Click to expand...
Reading up on this guy. Really like what he is saying.
 
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