Review: The Origin and Evolution of Earth: From the Big Bang to the Future of Human Existence

You probably hadn't thought about mineralogy in a while. Maybe in forever. Surely the only things you remember are the three types of rocks -igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary. But there is so, so, so much more to the origin and evolution of Earth. 

The planet we are on was only habitable for a brief percentage of its lifespan. Taking a time machine back more than 1 billion years will have you die a quick, painful death by asphyxiation. Imagine you step out of the machine to a barren beach with jagged rocks behind you and black sand in front of you-- and you immediately begin choking.

A few hundred million years later you're able to breathe, but maybe the earth is scorching hot and you succumb to heat exhaustion in minutes. Maybe you're at the equator with the sun directly overhead, but you freeze as the wind sweeps over an endless slushy sea.

Maybe it is temperate. You can breathe. Your body can regulate its temperature. But the only thing to eat is a green slime that activates your gag reflex. You can survive, but there aren't any trees. The rocks that provide shade are hard and jagged and too far away from the coastal green to make a good shelter.... Within hours your body turns red and purple from the UV rays piercing through the ozoneless sky. You can survive for weeks, maybe months, but it will be a painful, boring, and joyless existence.

The Earth wasn't made for us. Life made it ours. We should learn its history before we fuck that up.

Review: Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution

People get the cosmic calendar wrong: The universe is not old. It is not old and wise and dirty. We tell that story to wrench dogmatic minds into realizing how small they are. Neil deGrasse Tyson does this a lot because it's an important mission.

But a lot of people who read and know their science know the analogy: The Universe's life made into a cosmic year has the stars forming in January, heavy elements forming in February, the sun forming in July, the Earth in August, life in September, the Dinosaurs dying two days ago and human civilization forming a second ago.

I propose that that is backward, and then whenever you look into the origins of the universe the most prescient question always becomes, "Ok, what now?"

The answer comes, "Everything".

If the Universe is compared to a human life, where the Big Bang is birth and the last star to form is its death, then we can shrink 100 trillion years to 80 years. Where are we in that cosmic life?

We're four days in.
On the first day, the universe was empty.
On the second day, the milky way developed.
On the third day, our sun was a protostar and the protoearth was swinging around it.
On the 4th day, at little bit in the morning, we were born.

We still have 79 years and 361 days to go before all the stars stop forming-- and we have some time after that.

We know our origins! It is time to write the future

Review: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

Back in 2003, it was cool to rag on theists. You see, back then people were literally talking about a giant religious war between Christians and Muslims. People were talking about civilization-scale warfare. Any thinking person was like, "I think I remember a John Lennon song about that?" That's when Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennet wrote their classical New Atheism books. At the time they were necessary! The Bible Belt was screaming about religious terror, forgetting that they were still instigating terror at home.

"Oh, you want to destroy our buildings, rewrite our history, live off planet-poisoning oil and create a country based on the religious law from a time when everybody on the planet wore sandals? Well, we do everything better and bigger over here in Texas."

Again, in 2003 it was probably a necessary reminder "HEY GOD ISN'T REAL GUYS".

But by 2012 nobody was super concerned about that shit. We were concerned about whether or not healthcare was a right (it is) and if the government should force you to buy healthcare (it does).

So why the fuck did Krauss spend 1/5th of his book ragging on theologians, philosophers and religious folk? I came to read about the "Origin of the Universe" as part of my "read a bunch of history books from Big Bang to Twitter" project, and instead I got a bunch of poorly executed anti-religious dunking.

The scientific content of the book, when it is there, is pretty good: We discovered the universe was expanding, and then we discovered the Cosmic Background Radiation. We probed that and then found the Universe is as close to "flat" as it possibly can be (Pythagorean's Theorem works!) This is pretty special because it means the Universe won't collapse into itself, and when you pair it with quantum gravity you have a nice hypothesis for *why* it is flat: rapid inflation in space-time made what would otherwise be a curve into a flat line. Great theory!

The book, however, doesn't answer its subtitle "Why there is Something Rather Than Nothing" and another 1/5 of the book is spent railing about how people keep changing the definition of "Nothing".

They don't. Krauss is/was just drumming up controversy for this(/his next) book.

1/5 Anti-Theologizing.
1/5 Anti-Philosophizing.
3/5s Science.

3/5 Stars.

Review: Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

This is a good book and I recommend it. If you’ve read Sapiens, you’ll recognize the style: when you zoom out of the trivial century-to-century history, where we think that tweets determine what’s going to happen to our civilization, then you’ll see a picture that’s more deterministic, stable and inexorable: Entropy rages against all things, from suns to sons, and all things rage back, from light to life.

Take Sagan’s cosmic calendar and expand it to a chronological book and you’ll have this book. That’s a good thing. It’s important to meditate on how you literally are the center of the universe, how you are made of starstuff, and how you represent a sampling of the most complex things in the universe.

What Sagan and other scientists often fail to mention, however, is that we have a lot of life yet to live in this universe. If you lived ten times our universe’s live- 130 billion years- then you would still have another 1000 lives to go. Everything- inflation, the formation of stars and galaxies, of life, humans, civilization... you.

EVERYTHING so far is just a prelude. This book is just a prologue worth reading.

Review: Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

Jordan Peterson is obviously not an idiot. But he continuously repeats himself like one. He doesn't need as many words as he uses. People seem intimidated by the length of the book, and literally say, "It can't be summarized". Here's a summary:

Humans are animals, and animals have systems that help them navigate the world. Humans create a model of the world. Things that go according to the model are considered good or at least not terrifying. Things that don't go according to the model are the fucking worst. Why? Because everything that can go wrong will go wrong is baked into our brains. This creates the primordial bifurcation of "Order" and "Chaos".

Humans, being the most advanced animal, has to integrate these models between people spatially and overtime in order to survive. They have to filter out a great deal of noise, too. This creates culture. All cultures are fundamentally constrained and shaped by the model of the mind above. What's the evidence for this? Cultures keep saying the same damn thing over and over again, or at least given enough time a culture will say the same thing as another culture.

Now, culture, by connecting humans spatially and temporally, promises peace and the fulfillment of goals of the individuals within the culture. This is great until something threatens the culture- outsiders, new or antithetical value systems, for example. When these threats arrive, people will do anything they can to protect the culture. Hence the Nazis.

Literally, hence the Nazis. That's the entire point of the book. "Why did the Nazis do what they did?" Because of these traits that trace themselves back to the basic nature of humanity.

There's also a bunch of crazy shit in here copped from Jung and then expanded on. Also Campbell. Also the Bible.

Anyways, the book never is like, "What if I'm wrong?" It purely postulates things and does not try to defend itself against any critiques.

Honestly, this is a waste of time to read. I think Peterson will probably get a book deal in the next five years and he'll get a graduate student or assistant to just make a more concise sensical version of this. Hell, there's probably a Lobster-hat wearing Canadian writing up a shorter, 100-200 page version of it right now.

Read that one.

Review: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Good book. Data is consistent. Sometimes strawmans the pessimistic attitude. No steelmanning the pessimistic attitude whatsoever. Will probably not convince people who are pessimistic, but will remind optimists/moderates about what is going on.

Review: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

12 Rules for Life is a good book, and ultimately, I think that Jordan Peterson wants to be a good person. I think that he has lots of good advice about how to be a good person. He makes a strong case for how societies actually work and how humans work at a biological level. But he also sometimes delves into political realities, and when he does he usually straw man's his opposition. It's funny that he does this, because Peterson is only famous because he publicly shamed the host that straw manned him. This is disappointing. I worry that Peterson will retreat into his political beliefs at the expense of his psychological, philosophical and cultural findings simply because the culture wars will force him to pick a side. The alt-right already champions him, but he hasn't championed them. This book is worth reading.

Review: The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

"It won't really impact me," says the rich yuppie making, or expecting to make, six figures. He looks out from his sixth floor apartment where the snow piles up. The snow is spit down in gusts by a bomb cyclone, which itself is energized by the jet stream, which itself is weakened by the warmest Arctic ever recorded in human history.

Of course, he says this in 2018, a few days after the most costly year in human history when it comes to natural disasters. Entire cities were swamped and entire territories of the US have been destroyed. The climate is killing people, "but not me."

The Water Will Come is about a very specific part of climate change: rising seas. This is probably the least questionable part of climate change: the land ice in Greenland and the Antarctic is melting faster than it is growing. As long as the climate continues to gain more energy, they will melt.

The book doesn't question it. I don't even recall it trying to go into the physics too deeply -if you're reading, well, you know. Instead, Goodell is trying to answer the question, "What are we going to do about it?" The question has a lot of answers:

*in Miami they'll raise the city
*in New York they'll build a seawall around lower Manhattan.
*in Venice they'll build a "Mercedes on the seafloor"
*In Lagos they'll build an island for the super-rich
*And so on...

The one consistent response to this is, "So will it survive climate change? Will it survive 3 feet? Will it survive 6ft? 8ft?"

The answer is almost always, "No, we're just buying time." They can survive one feet. Maybe two feet. But when solar power fails to take over the world? When wind power stalls out? When fracking expands to every corner of the world and oil is economically king? Venice's lagoon will be destroyed and Miami will be an underwater scrapyard. The third rail in the New York subway will be encrusted by salt.

How can I blame the yuppie, then? If American society refuses to even believe in climate change, and cripples itself so as to fail simple tests of resiliency, how can I blame somebody whose answer to resiliency is, "I will be too rich or too dead to care"? At least they have an answer.