Cognition Switch #5

By Ed Simon, Michael Strauss, Raja Halwani and 9 more

Cognition Switch: An Artefact for the Transmission of New Ideas
Issue #5: April 2019

Featuring Ideas by: Michael Strauss, Ed Simon, Raja Halwani, Robert Noggle, Archie Brown, Michael Robertson, Nancy Weiss Malkiel, Peter Levine, Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Julian Baggini, Christopher Kavanagh, and Johanna Hanink

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cognition Switch
• Release date: Apr 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9788829597840

Book preview

COGNITION SWITCH #5

Featuring Ideas by:

Michael Strauss, Ed Simon, Raja Halwani, Robert Noggle, Archie Brown, Michael Robertson, Nancy Weiss Malkiel, Peter Levine, Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Julian Baggini, Christopher Kavanagh, and Johanna Hanink

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Originally published by Aeon

Published 2019 by Cognition Switch

ISBN: 9788829597840

Thank you for your purchase. If you enjoyed this work, please leave us a comment.

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CONTENTS

I. Our Universe is too vast for even the most imaginative sci-fi

II. ‘Cycle and Epicycle, Orb in Orb’: the science of Paradise Lost

III. Why sexual desire is objectifying – and hence morally wrong

IV. How to tell the difference between persuasion and manipulation

V. We must stop worshipping the false god of the strong leader

VI. All woman: the utopian feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

VII. Coeducation at university was – and is – no triumph of feminism

VIII. The lack of diversity in philosophy is blocking its progress

IX. Unconscious ‘sleep-eating’ might be a hidden cause of obesity

X. Life-and-death thought experiments are correctly unsolvable

XI. Did Easter Island culture collapse? The answer is not simple

XII. Even the ancient Greeks thought their best days were history

I. Our Universe is too vast for even the most imaginative sci-fi

Michael Strauss is a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University in New Jersey. He is the author of Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour (2016), co-written with Neil deGrasse Tyson and J Richard Gott.

https://aeon.co/ideas/our-universe-is-too-vast-for-even-the-most-imaginative-sci-fi

As an astrophysicist, I am always struck by the fact that even the wildest science-fiction stories tend to be distinctly human in character. No matter how exotic the locale or how unusual the scientific concepts, most science fiction ends up being about quintessentially human (or human-like) interactions, problems, foibles and challenges. This is what we respond to; it is what we can best understand. In practice, this means that most science fiction takes place in relatively relatable settings, on a planet or spacecraft. The real challenge is to tie the story to human emotions, and human sizes and timescales, while still capturing the enormous scales of the Universe itself.

Just how large the Universe actually is never fails to boggle the mind. We say that the observable Universe extends for tens of billions of light years, but the only way to really comprehend this, as humans, is to break matters down into a series of steps, starting with our visceral understanding of the size of the Earth. A non-stop flight from Dubai to San Francisco covers a distance of about 8,000 miles – roughly equal to the diameter of the Earth. The Sun is much bigger; its diameter is just over 100 times Earth’s. And the distance between the Earth and the Sun is about 100 times larger than that, close to 100 million miles. This distance, the radius of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, is a fundamental measure in astronomy; the Astronomical Unit, or AU. The spacecraft Voyager 1, for example, launched in 1977 and, travelling at 11 miles per second, is now 137 AU from the Sun.

But the stars are far more distant than this. The nearest, Proxima Centauri, is about 270,000 AU, or 4.25 light years away. You would have to line up 30 million Suns to span the gap between the Sun and Proxima Centauri. The Vogons in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) are shocked that humans have not travelled to the Proxima Centauri system to see the Earth’s demolition notice; the joke is just how impossibly large the distance is.

Four light years turns out to be about the average distance between stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, of which the Sun is a member. That is a lot of empty space! The Milky Way contains about 300 billion stars, in a vast structure roughly 100,000 light years in diameter. One of the truly exciting discoveries of the past two decades is that our Sun is far from