Endtimes #01
Fellow travelers, I have been, for the lack of a better term, “obsessed” with the rapidly shifting future of our world. Despite being a techno-optimist since the start of 2000s, I’ve now come to think that the algorithms that dominate our social feeds do not reflect what is relevant in today’s world; and as a valiant last stand against our oppressors, I have now stepped in to tell you what is good for you ^^.
We need a forum/physical space/zine/solidarity and more activism, but until then read this digest in the comfort of your homes. Send it to your likeminded friends, we need critical mass.
Empty half the Earth of its humans. It's the only way to save the planet | Cities | The Guardian
There are nearly eight billion humans alive on the planet now, and that’s a big number: more than twice as many as were alive 50 years ago. It’s an accidental experiment with enormous stakes, as it isn’t clear that the Earth’s biosphere can supply that many people’s needs – or absorb that many wastes and poisons – on a renewable and sustainable basis over the long haul. We’ll only find out by trying it.
What If We Really Are Alone in the Universe?
James Gray’s Ad Astra is one of the first films to explicitly consider the terror of Clarke’s second possibility. What if there are no aliens? What if, in the end, it’s just us?
Neural network reconstructs human thoughts from brain waves in real time
Researchers from Russian corporation Neurobotics and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology have found a way to visualize a person’s brain activity as actual images mimicking what they observe in real time.
Intermission
Ana Roxanne – ~~~
The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense Of Time
The 2000s were a bad decade, full of terrorism, financial ruin, and war. The 2010s were different, somehow more disorienting, full of molten anxiety, racism, and moral horror shows. Maybe this is a reason for the disorientation: Life had run on a certain rhythm of time and logic, and then at a hundred different entry points, that rhythm and that logic shifted a little, sped up, slowed down, or disappeared, until you could barely remember what time it was.
Even the slightest possibility of a proven plant intelligence would have massive scientific and existential implications. If plants can “learn” and “remember,” as Gagliano believes, then humans may have been misunderstanding plants, and ourselves, for all of history. The common understanding of “intelligence” would have to be reimagined; and we’d have missed an entire universe of thought happening all around us.
Lawns Are an Ecological Disaster
“Continual amputation is a critical part of lawn care. Cutting grass regularly—preventing it from reaching up and flowering — forces it to sprout still more blades, more rhizomes, more roots, to become an ever more impenetrable mat until it is what its owner has worked so hard or paid so much to have: the perfect lawn, the perfect sealant through which nothing else can grow—and the perfect antithesis of an ecological system.”
Going entirely organic could mean food emissions up 70% in England and Wales
If all the people in the England and Wales switched to buying organic food, they could not grow enough to feed even their own countries. They would need to import more food from overseas, which means more emissions from boats, lorries and planes, while in another unintended consequence, grasslands that store carbon would be converted to grow crops, effectively causing further emissions.
They estimate feeding England and Wales alone would require more than 7m hectares of land overseas, nearly five times the area currently used. Under medium land-use conversion scenarios this could lead to 70% more greenhouse gas emissions from people all eating organic food compared to conventional.