It’s life Jim, but not as we know it.

Just been listening to Brian Cox saying that water is a prerequisite for life on other planets. But what if life created and sustained by H2O developed into an advanced AGI that used sunlight (or light at least as source of power ) as its fundamental life force? Just saying.

Why assume that what creates and sustains us is required for them? It’s a bit like the assumption that alien life is six foot high and bipedal. Why?

PS- Excuse my ignorance, but I really don’t undrstand how biological life on Earth can emerge from a chemical process and if it can why haven’t we recreated this process?

Excuse me…?

New category on my blog – hypocrisy watch. No, it’s not a new $40,000 eco-watch by Gucci, although it could well be. Example number one is a charity run by David Milliband that pays the former foreign secretary £700,000 per year, but somehow canl’ pay it’s full-time interns anything at all. Example number two, from the Sunday Times Luxx magazine, a feature on sustainable pensions followed, two pages later ,by a feature on handhags costing £6,015.

The magazine goes on to feature a hotelier that says “I hope we’ve made a kinder, softer place that makes people more conscious of their surroundings” , which is then followed by a feature on swimming pools with rollerskaing floors and wave machines and 30m yachts with glass hulls to watch the fish.

I have no issue with any of these things in isolation. It’s the combinations that bother me.

Is Time Circular?

Sitting on an uncomfortable train going to Cambridge. I’m supposed to be thinking about waves of disruption, but instead I’m reading about gardening. The line in the piece below that grabs me is that in a garden, time is circular, not chronological. It’s certainly not wholly linear, although, to some extent, it is ultimately about birth, decay and then death. Then the cycle repeats. Strangely, for me, that’s not a depressing thought. Quite the opposite in fact.

Gardening as an act of resistance by Maria Popova.