Need some perspective? Try being a "citizen of the universe", with David Deutsch and Charles and Ray Eames

In the midst of our political grind, two soul-saving and mind-cleansing cosmic perspectives. Above is a recent TED presentation from the Oxford physicist David Deutsch, who claims that “after billions of years of monotony, the universe is waking up - to our creativity”.

The “great monotony” is caused by the fact that “nothing very new can happen to things that remain simple” (like the physical universe before the emergence of life).,

But as Deutsch explains in the transcript:

At some point during the great monotony, there was an event—inconsequential at the time, and even billions of years later, it had affected nothing beyond its home planet—yet eventually, it could cause cosmically momentous novelty. That event was the origin of life: creating the first genetic knowledge, coding for biological adaptations, coding for novelty. 

On Earth, it utterly transformed the surface. Genes in the DNA of single-celled organisms put oxygen in the air, extracted CO2, put chalk and iron ore into the ground, hardly a cubic inch of the surface to some depth has remained unaffected by those genes. The Earth became, if not a novel place on the cosmic scale, certainly a weird one. 

Just as an example, beyond Earth, only a few hundred different chemical substances have been detected. Presumably, there are some more in lifeless locations, but on Earth, evolution created billions of different chemicals. And then the first plants, animals, and then, in some ancestor species of ours, explanatory knowledge. For the first time in the universe, for all we know. 

Explanatory knowledge is the defining adaptation of our species. It differs from the nonexplanatory knowledge in DNA, for instance, by being universal. That is to say, whatever can be understood, can be understood through explanatory knowledge. And more, any physical process can be controlled by such knowledge, limited only by the laws of physics. 

And so, explanatory knowledge, too, has begun to transform the Earth's surface. And soon, the Earth will become the only known object in the universe that turns aside incoming asteroids instead of attracting them. 

…If one can speak of a cosmic war, it's not the one portrayed in those pessimistic stories [of mythology]. It's a war between monotony and novelty, between stasis and creativity. And in this war, our side is not destined to lose. If we choose to apply our unique capacity to create explanatory knowledge, we could win.

We would recommend reading the comments to the TED video - reminding Deutsch that there’s been precious little creativity in ethics and behaviour, compared to the massively transforming (and deforming) powers of markets, science and technology. But still it’s good to look from the perspective of Bucky Fuller’s Spaceship Earth, at times.

And we couldn’t leave the topic without posting and pasting the great 70s information film Powers of Ten, made by the industrial designers Charles and Ray Eames. As the endlessly fascinating site Short of the Week explains:

Powers of Ten embarks on an adventure in magnitudes, as we travel from a lakeside picnic in Chicago to the furthest reaches of the cosmos, until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others.

Described in its opening as ‘a film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effects of adding another zero’, Powers of Ten has not only become an important entry into the short film arena, but also an essential tool for teaching and understanding the importance of scale.

Groundbreaking for its time (Powers of Ten was created almost 40-years ago in 1977), the short’s archetypal aesthetic is one that has now been replicated many times in the world of filmmaking (the film has even been reimagined by 40 innovative artists from around the world – including SotW favourites Max Hattler & Zumbakamera) and it’s now hard to look at the film without thinking of Google’s now quintessential Maps/Earth projects

An adaptation of the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, director Paul Schrader perfectly summarises Powers of Ten as a film that enables an audience member to “think of himself a citizen of the universe” and it’s this timely reminder of mankind’s tiny importance in the history of the universe, that makes (and will always make) this groundbreaking film from Charles and Ray Eames such an important watch.