Indice dei contenuti per Issue 31 - February/April 2021 in New Philosopher

Humans, curious creatures that we are, can’t help but explore. After millennia of mapping and crossing and occupying Earth, last century we turned our attention to space. The final frontier. For many, there was hope that we might find another habitable planet – somewhere we could move when we had exhausted poor planet Earth.To date, there is just one possible contender: the Red Planet, a water-free wasteland that boasts no life, an average temperature of -60°C, and less than one per cent of the atmospheric pressure on Earth. Undeterred, several bored billionaires have plans to colonise Mars, despite the many and varied challenges, not least of which is the fact that “we are not going to survive in deep space in our current biological form”, according to neurophilosopher and geostrategist…

There is a black hole four million times the size of the Sun at the centre of the Milky Way. It is estimated that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth. 199,212 kg of artificial objects are on the Moon, from the Luna 2 (intentionally crashed in 1959 by the Soviet Union) to the Chang’e 5 descent stage (China’s operational lunar explorer). Uranus was the first planet to be discovered with a telescope, by William Herschel in 1781. The Milky Way speeds along a galactic orbit at an average speed of 825,000 km/h. The International Space Station has been visited by 214 individuals from 19 countries. Currently in Earth’s orbit there are approximately 4,987 satellites and around 128 million pieces of debris. NASA’s Kepler…

The stars are in constant motion. To the human eye this movement – known as proper motion – is imperceptible, but ESA’s star-mapping satellite Gaia is measuring it with more and more precision. The trails on the image above show how 40,000 stars, all located within 100 parsecs (326 light-years) of the solar system, will move across the sky in the next 400,000 years. Source: ESA…

noun: 1. Continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied; 2. A blank between printed, typed, or written words, characters, numbers, etc.; 3. [Music] Each of the four gaps between the five lines of a stave; 4. The dimensions of height, depth, and width within which all things exist and move; 5. The physical universe beyond Earth’s atmosphere; 6. The near-vacuum extending between the planets and stars, containing small amounts of gas and dust; 7. An interval of time (often used to suggest that the time is short considering what has happened or been achieved in it); 8. The portion of a text or document available or needed to write about a subject; 9. Capacity for storage of data in a computer or other digital device; 10. The…

Zan Boag: As a space scientist, you’ve been gazing deeply into space. You’ve been living and breathing the idea of ‘space’. The universe has been your playground. What is space? How far does it extend? Is it limitless? Günther Hasinger: It is a little bit like the overview effect that the astronauts get when they leave the Earth and then they see the Earth as a small blue dot in a big surrounding universe. But as an astrophysicist, a space scientist, I actually have a perspective which is even larger. So, basically, our whole solar system is just one out of many. Our whole galaxy is one out of many, and so in principle you could imagine that space, as such, is infinite. It is very likely not infinite, but…

On one of the planets that orbits the star named Sirius there lived a spirited young man. He was called Micromegas, a fitting name for anyone so great. He was eight leagues tall, or 24,000 geometric paces of five feet each. He took to voyaging from planet to planet in order to develop his heart and mind, as the saying goes. Micromegas, after having toured around, arrived at the planet Saturn; the citizens of this country are dwarfs, no more than 6,000 feet tall. He built a strong friendship with the secretary of the academy of Saturn, a spirited man who had not invented anything, to tell the truth, but who understood the inventions of others very well. After his excellency laid himself down to rest the secretary approached him.…

Solaris Stanislaw Lem In quest of a planet We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don’t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned that reality is revealed to us. Cosmicomics Italo Calvino Isolated corpuscles And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed,…

Rendering the Moon Maria Clara Eimmart was an 18th century German astronomer and illustrator who created remarkable depictions of the Moon, as seen through a telescope. Eimmart was tutored in art, languages, mathematics, and astronomy by her father. Her father ran a successful business in Nuremburg as an artist and engraver, but had a strong interest in astronomy. He even built a private observatory on the city wall. Eimmart became a skilled artist, and she became especially good at representing the Moon seen telescopically. She produced over 300 renderings of the Moon while she was in her late teens and early twenties. vofoundation.org/blog/artobservations-maria-clara-eimmartjohann-georg-locher/ Devil’s dictionary OBSERVATORY, n. A place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of their predecessors. The universe as seen by the Ancient Greeks The Histories by Herodotus…

Homo sapiens have always been on the move. About 80,000 years ago, it was the great migration out of what is today called Africa. From there, Homo sapiens colonised the world, extinguishing rivals like the Neanderthals and Homo erectus along the way. In the millennia that followed, humanity – or at least, select portions of humanity – continued on these colonising migrations. The aim was always the same: to get more. More space, more minerals, more trade, more spices. This process was turbocharged when European advances in technology were matched by an ideology that saw the world as the rightful domain of Christian monarchs – setting off a rapacious cycle in which European economies, gorged on the riches of the colonies, required new ‘outsides’ through which they could continue to…

When it comes to measuring the vastness of outer space, you need to talk about time in order to talk about distance. Watching the night sky with my children, I tell them that the starlight now reaching our eyes is ancient. Some of it originated when dinosaurs stood where we are now standing; some of it before life even existed on Earth. I’m using a little poetic licence when I say this. Technically, the oldest light our unaided eyes can see is no more than 2.5 million years old and comes from the nearby Andromeda galaxy (and it has to be a clear, moonless night for that to show up). But given that our aided eyes can peruse, via my mobile phone, maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation left…

Zan Boag: As we gaze up into the night sky and look into this vastness, this darkness, we see sparkles of light from another place. When we think of everything that exists, all of space, it is very difficult for us to fathom. What is space? Is it limitless? Professor Nayef Al-Rodhan: The short answer to that is we have no clue. What I think we will require, and I think there’s a lot of debates in the literature about that, is that we require new laws of physics to be able to understand these very complex ideas. I think the known universe is daunting, and the exact nature of the unknown universe is beyond our current comprehension. It is probably limitless. A lot of theories talk about space expanding…

There’s nothing more intuitive, more obvious, more self-evident than the fact that we exist in three-dimensional space. We’re born into it. We move around in it. No one has to teach us how to see it. Look and it’s just there. While there are many things we need to learn in our lives, the existence of up/down, left/right, forward/ back isn’t one of them. But there’s a problem with our naive understanding of space. It turns out that as soon as we stop looking at space and start thinking about it, our intuition breaks. The Greek philosopher, Zeno of Elea – a staunch follower of Pythagoras – pointed out a little over 2,500 years ago that it’s intuitively obvious that the space between two points ought to be divisible. So…

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DBC Pierre DBC Pierre won the Booker Prize for his debut novel Vernon God Little, which was also awarded the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003 – the first time the two awards had been granted to the same book. Pierre is also the author of Ludmilla’s Broken English, Lights out in Wonderland, a book of short stories, and a novella, Breakfast with the Borgias. He was awarded the James Joyce Award from the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin. Nigel Warburton Nigel Warburton is a freelance philosopher, podcaster, writer, and the Editor-at-large of New Philosopher. Described as “one of the most-read popular philosophers of our time”, his books include A Little History of Philosophy, Thinking from A to Z, and Philosophy: The Classics. The interviewer for the…

In Jo Lennan’s short story Day Zero, journalist Sebastian lives up among the stars in a frontier community in space. It’s a whole new world. And yet Sebastian faces the same worries he would at home: a receding hairline; issues with his stoic but distant girlfriend; stories being spiked by editors. Not to mention the slow-burning conflict at space’s outer fringes and, finally, a devastating cancer diagnosis. As in Day Zero, space colonisation remains the stuff of science fiction – confined to the pages of books and movies. Proponents, however, say we are getting closer. Leading the charge are entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who plans to send the first humans to Mars by 2026 via his company SpaceX – with the goal, eventually, of creating long-term settlements on the Red…

At the end of October 1957, Dr Vladimir Yazdovsky took home a three-year-old mongrel stray to play with his children. She was a placid mixed breed who had been found on the streets of Moscow, and Yazdovsky had been tasked with preparing her for specialist work, along with two other female strays. Strays were supposedly chosen for their hardiness, females because they didn’t cock their legs, which would’ve been a drag in the environment they would work in. Yazdovsky later said of his decision to bring her home: “I wanted to do something nice for the dog.”Her name was Kudryavka (Little Curly) until, according to some, she went on a Russian radio show and barked. After that everyone called her Laika (Barker). She was said to be quiet and charming.…

When we think of space, we usually think of something extending to infinity. Space is where the planets and stars are. Space is the final frontier. We stare into space, scarcely able to take in its magnitude. It seems to go on forever – even though that is almost unthinkable (just as unthinkable as the idea that it is less than infinite). It contains everything that there is. It is vast. Silent.The ultimate isolation would be to be cast free in space, drifting away from everything that we value. Space is what is out there. Yet much of the time we inhabit something much more down to earth: enclosed space. We are within rooms, hallways, cars, trains, or, for the first nine months, wombs. At birth we leave one enclosed…

In the blue light emanating from the screen that holds my teenager captive of an evening, his face is illuminated in a painterly manner. Light and shadow play over his impassive features in a dramatic chiaroscuro, worthy of Caravaggio. Lit up like this, his body draped languidly over an armchair, the scene gives off an aura of complete concentration, even as I know that, in truth, he is merely surfing the shallows. He scrolls, swipes, and scrolls again, betraying a twitch of a smile here, a hint of a frown there. Then he types, waits, and types some more. It’s as though he’s been sucked, bodily, into a virtual world to inhabit a planet of his own, while the real world falls away soundlessly. If we ever manage to tear…

The Astronomer Vera Rubin 1928 – 2016 Made of star stuff “I insisted on working on problems outside the mainstream of astronomy so that I could work at my own pace and not be pressured by bandwagons. I do not offer this as an example for you, but only to show that there can be diverse approaches to science. There must be. I hope some of you will be able to devise your own paths through the complex sociology of science. Science is competitive, aggressive, demanding. It is also imaginative, inspiring, uplifting. You can do it, too. … Each one of you can change the world, for you are made of star stuff, and you are connected to the universe.” The Philosopher Plato 429 – 347 BCE Nature…

Nigel Warburton: You’ve spent a huge amount of your life looking at space. There’s a very famous quotation from Immanuel Kant, that’s even on his gravestone. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” It strikes me that he’s right about the first one; though I’m not sure about the second. There is something awe-inspiring about the starry heavens. For lay people like me, I love looking at the night sky and I’m fascinated by it, but I’m not sure what it is exactly that I’m seeing, what’s out there. I’m also not sure whether in a short life looking out that far away from…

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that at this moment in history – when the frightening uncertainty of the world gets thrust in our faces every day – there has been a surge in popularity of an activity one might previously have dismissed as rather dull: tidying up. The Japanese queen of decluttering, Marie Kondo, led the way, emphasising the importance of making your domestic space a joyful one. Then came Jordan Peterson, bringing a mythic solemnity (and plenty of controversy) to the topic, but focusing nonetheless on some distinctly Kondo-esque advice: he urged readers to clean their bedrooms – that is, to impose a little order on the space immediately before them, instead of impotently chasing notions of “changing the world”. Make Your Bed, a book by retired US…