Podcasts made nonfiction books, pimped with some specially written parts, rule
The Greens know how to make science rock I knew the Green brothers from Podcasts made nonfiction books, pimped with some specially written parts, rule
The Greens know how to make science rock I knew the Green brothers from the youtube channel sci-show and crash course and expected nothing more than a great infotainment, edutainment overkill. And boy, how they delivered. I´m now even thinking about listening to the podcast to see how much it differs from the written version.
A bit of everything, never too complicated, understandable, and perfectly portioned to fit into every readers´ memory. This is how science education should be done, no matter how dry or theoretical a theme might seem, Green understands how to make it funny, memorable, and easy to retell to always have a good science pun in the backhand if one is into social interaction. As always, there is the lurking question of why this kind of knowledge transfer still hasn´t really reached many schools and universities, but sociocultural, epigenetic evolution just seems to take its time.
The perfect mix thanks to the unique duo of Greens´ expertise as both a successful and highly acclaimed, bestselling nonfiction writer and science education veteran. I guess that this ingenious combination will make it one of the most mindboggling nonfiction books ever, because his huge fan community from youtube, social media, and his books combined alone are more readers than an average nonfiction author could wish for in his wettest dreams.
And the works´ quality is as high as expected, the biggest nonfiction problem of not knowing how to tell a story and have an emotional impact is a never seen problem in this, also a bit personal, collection of narrative pearls. And it´s not just STEMy stuff, there are also philosophical and sociological soft science vibes in the knowledge house, baby. Also, the emotional impact doesn´t pollute the meta, big history Green keeps clean from too subjective, emotional tones, while fully embracing them in the personal and more story and kind of character focused parts.
Antrophocenic main plotline The red line is how the current and coming impact of our 8 billion bunch of naked ape population will form the world we live in and some of the ways of illustrating it shows the expertise the Greens have reached in finding creative, unconventional ways to clothe the old topics in shiny, new bling hot word couture. There could be, for instance, my, much darker and depressing perspectives on the future, but a positive, knowledge based way is always a great alternative to pessimistic misanthropy.
More youtube and podcast adaptions, please! It´s a pity that there may be no further parts, at least Green said so, but maybe the success of this work may change his mind. Even if not, so many other youtube and podcast pearls should be made books and audiobooks, there are so amazing, groundbreaking ideas, theories, criticism, wit, and simple unique ways of teaching science and spreading knowledge that it would be a shame to let them be limited to the audiovisual level and not make them true, pure brain candy.
Nonfiction books that are based on answering questions in unconventional ways, giving different answers to one question like in John Brockman´s seriesNonfiction books that are based on answering questions in unconventional ways, giving different answers to one question like in John Brockman´s series, extrapolating ideas and general taking the boooooring out of science, are a great way to get everyone fascinated.
This book has some crazy, but well explained and profound ideas for more or less daily problems and gets one interested in the technology and physics of many ignored details of life. Mind games, creativity techniques, free associations and simple experimentation are keystones of both science education and real, practiced science.
Outgoing from the ideas of this book, one could go outside inside a complex building, nature, a social machinery, virtual (worlds)ly everywhere and simply try some unconventional approach to functioning systems. Once with a focus on maximal productivity, another time on the highest grade of silliness. Both is great for getting fresh ideas, solving problems, improving functioning systems and so on.
It´s a pity that the audience hasn´t been included to choose the questions as in Munroe´s first book, which would have given the whole thing even more quality. Probably I am a bit biased regarding this deep connection to the audience, but especially when this collective intelligence is connected with a voting system to enable all users to filter out the trash and find the best, most creative, probably even unique questions, the whole potential is unleashed. Hopefully, his next book will go back to the roots.
Another problem is that "What if" was a unique masterpiece and the author has the insolvable problem of fulfilling those expectations. Because especially deep wit and weirdality take much time to produce it, as it can´t be just written down like an average article but has to be uniquely created. Also, some of the technical and theoretical aspects could have been more broken down to a better understandable level.
All in all, as I tend to say far too often, another good example of modern science education and probably the reason for why I will try to forget my concerns about building a lava pool when I visit a volcano the next time, because I am well prepared now.
An excessive and lengthy study of the subject can raise doubts about the nature of reality.
GTA is a term. Moreover, only a game, right? Suppose you weAn excessive and lengthy study of the subject can raise doubts about the nature of reality.
GTA is a term. Moreover, only a game, right? Suppose you were the character. When the figure is in a place, the place begins to exist. When you move your head, reality appears in real-time. The other characters of the other players develop in parallel and follow their daily routine. Everything is photorealistic and as real. However, only polygons covered, empty shells, even without a real ghost. Effects such as fire and ice are programmed to produce an impact on nearby surfaces and when an object is destroyed, its parts, properties and complex mechanics are created at the moment it is opened. The processes in collisions, movements, interactions, etc. are automatically calculated.
Back to reality. How do we know that something is behind us now? That the reality does not reload? The other people, family, friends, and work colleagues exist when we interact with them, but what evidence is there that they live when we are alone? The monitor we are looking at while reading this review has technology built into it. When we open it, we see it. However, as long as it is closed, a projection onto an empty shell could produce the same effect.
We are a pretty primitive culture. Let's imagine to put the clock forward a million years. A computer game should then have a significantly better graphic and be impossible to differentiate from reality. Our consciousness would be playing in a world that does not provide any indication of its artificial origin. We, as our ego, are instead in a fictive environment than in the body. The Alter ego controls and manipulates the world with hands just as in reality. How could we, lying in a floating tank and equipped with various VR headsets, projections, holograms, suits and implants, distinguish between the real world and the computer game?
Even the photorealism in current games makes it difficult to distinguish between animation and photo and graphic cards do already billions to trillions of operations per second and have hardware built in the nanoscale. Imagine what there will be possible in centuries and what an alien race that has evolved hundred of million years before us may have reached.
Suppose nanobots do not run amok and turn space into grey goo. However, they spread out, transforming planets into computers so that simulations can be played there, replicate and move on. This creates simulations in the simulations based on older simulations, etc. After eons, you have billions of simulations that differ in their slightly different evolutionary history. Therefore, there are anomalies and differences between the simulations. Instead of simulations, one can also speak of the universe or the multiverse.
Our not understood consciousness is currently in a fleshy shell. Experiments have shown that it can partly be transformed into an avatar rather quickly. That the brain adapts to the new conditions and forgets the old body. Thus, the personality and other illusions are transformable or alternatively, even part of the simulation.
Which proof can we use against this assumption? That we are not living in an incredibly advanced simulation of tens of millions of years further developed civilization? What invalidates this theory? Nothing at all. On the contrary, the theory combines many unsolved problems in itself and solves or explains them.
A profane reason could be the sheer boredom of galactic civilizations that have reached Type III of the Kardashew scale. Once a civilization has explored all dimensions and galaxies, it gets bored. So it uses the energy of a few suns and bundles them to run a simulation. Maybe it is just a cakewalk for their kids. Also, as they wish, parameters can be changed, the level of difficulty can be varied, and development can be accelerated or throttled. They may intentionally incorporate errors, such as quantum phenomena, space anomalies, etc. into the simulation so that they can be recognized as such by advanced technology. To laugh at how avatars puzzle over what the anomaly might be. Alternatively, a civilization plays its own story as a simulation in infinite variations and we are one of them.
As Elon Musk and others argue, almost all open hypotheses, anomalies, and errors in astronomy, physics, quantum theory and so on can be explained in this way. There is no other, so a well-recognized model that has no logic error. A new theory of everything.
One of the most reliable indices is the behavior of quanta and other tiny parts. These act differently when observed by machines or people. Such as in the double-slit experiment and quantum teleportation. To put it more precisely: the smallest, entirely not understood, manipulated by unknown forces, acting against the laws of physics parts of reality are timid. They respond to attention and recordings differently than when they feel and are unobserved. Like the code of a computer game that defines the parameters for the representation of the reality of the protagonist.
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real-life outside books:
The aspects are so manifold that some are not even included in the prognostics and Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planeta... shows, how vast and coThe aspects are so manifold that some are not even included in the prognostics and Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planeta... shows, how vast and complex the possibilities of doom are.
Simple heat is something that can lead to inhospitality after a very short time. Like in space, where heat is a great problem for manned space flight, it is very difficult to cool a system down again as soon as it has reached a certain point. So how can humanity heat up as quick as possible?
Actually we do it with ocean acidification, land consumption and overuse and exploitation of fields, forest destruction, melting of the polar ice caps, wildfires, biodiversity loss, thawing permafrost, methane released from the warming deep sea, sea level rising, poisoning of all ecosystems and ourselves and, of course, Co2 emissions. Not just that those actions bring suffering to millions and soon billions of people whose weather and climate become more and more hostile and extreme, it could definitively endanger the ability of the human species to live in large areas of the planet without underground bunkers.
When freshwater and safe regions to live become rarer and rarer, streams of hundreds of millions of refugees will flee to the left, mostly wealthy states. Because the gruesome irony of history lets those who already suffered from colonialization, slavery and neocolonialism suffer even more by making their countries uninhabitable. This will lead to real climate wars and economic collapse, not to mention the plagues that could appear if all places on earth get tropical or subtropical climates.
Another aspect is food security, if the main cultivation areas are eradicated and just rich states can grow enough food in glasshouses or underground. Shipping and flying might get difficult to impossible if permanent storms with unseen waves make many main trade routes impassable. The geopolitical and military consequences are unforeseeable and states might not invade any more because of greed or political agitation, but because of the pure need to survive, to save the own population from starving to death. Think tanks and war games are certainly already dealing with the coming possibilities and how to use the development as efficient as possible. To protect the borders from myriads of desperate climate refugees will be a point of their agenda and although the potential for brute force by better and better fully automated robotic and drone warfare is certainly there, they can´t go so far as to butcher some percent of the world population in front of theses fictional red lines drawn on country maps, so they ought search alternatives.
There are so many unknown factors, once natural and second human-made. Natural are all kinds of not understood cycles, climate, atmosphere, weather, albedo, ocean current, the activity of earth´s magnetic field, core and mantle, permafrost, solar flares and sun activity, tectonic activity, global wind systems such as jets, etc. That is not even including disasters like earthquakes, volcanos and tsunamis. I mention earthquakes and tsunamis cause they may, with bad luck, appear in areas where there is much industry so that the destruction and thereby exposition of many harmful substances may cause not just regional, but global long term consequences. Especially if gases or other volatile chemicals are included, like HCFCs and CFCs or simply immense amounts of burning chemicals and fuels.
The influences by the mentioned, harmful substances that are normally just given to nature in moderate, but permanent doses, are unknown too and more and more in development, just nanomaterials. Nobody knows how those, on land, in sea and air may cause new interdependencies. What happens to all those microorganisms and the food chain and biodiversity is the smallest problem here. Manipulating or destroying those ecosystems brings a few super bioinvaders to the top that change the whole chemical composition of water or soil and thus the physical cycles.
Technology will save us? Not in this case and not so soon, because the processes are so mighty that even if we used all our resources for repairing the climate instead of building more tanks, it would be pretty useless. Simply not enough power, no matter what wonder technology might appear during the 21 century.
The normal weather is a nice example, because it tends to be cyclic and to a certain degree, predictable. Just change the seasons, thunderstorms and normal weather with periods of long-lasting superstorms, be it hurricanes, cyclons or thunderstorm supercells that are beyond each category because they will peel the surface of the grounds, combined with extreme floods and droughts. It wouldn´t even make sense to rebuild something, cause the new wave of destruction is already rolling.
Even if we would care and start researching like mad with huge budgets, there are so many black swans, probabilities and unknown factors that we would just get too much data, maybe with different ways to the solution that are contradictory to another so that nothing can be done with certainty. That´s Russian roulette with a loaded colt, with, let's say, 5 to 6 bullets while drinking covfefe as if everything was fine.
There are plenty of alternative future timelines, live on the telescopes, in our solar system and further away. Permanent snowballs, fiery hells like venus, rocks with or without atmosphere or water like Mars. Just choose one and imagine living there or how impossible it seems and actually still is to make such a nightmare a functioning ecosystem. Again.
A green new deal, immediately change to a sustainable economic system and a drastic reduction of CO2 emissions are the only options to probably stop this already initiated progress with the hope that it isn´t already too late. I, personally, think so because : Pandoras Box is opened "too little, too less, too late" the point of no return has already been passed etc. and we all will pay the price or just leave earth to destroy other planets far, far away by simply boiling them to death as soon as we have arrived and restart the cycle of stupidity again instead of using fancy Sci-Fi superweapons. Or, we create a fairer world and try to deal with the inevitable as good and as soon as possible with all the energy of an united humanity under the goal to keep the still only home planet livable.
Mario the lone bookwolf
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