Weekly Service Call Readings

Here are some readings we've used at our [[Weekly Service Calls]] ==== Lost (poem) ==== :''Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you'' :''Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,'' :''And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,'' :''Must ask permission to know it and be known.'' :''The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,'' :''I have made this place around you,'' :''If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.'' :''No two trees are the same to Raven.'' :''No two branches are the same to Wren.'' :''If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,'' :''You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows'' :''Where you are. You must let it find you.'' :: - David Wagoner ==== The Earth (poem) ==== :''Two-thirds water.'' :''One-third land.'' :''Valleys deep.'' :''Mountains grand.'' :''Sky of blue.'' :''Clouds of gray.'' :''Life here, too -- '' :''Think I’ll stay.'' ==== After the Gold Rush (third verse of a song) ==== :''Well, I dreamed I saw the silver'' :''Space ships flying'' (sic) :''In the yellow haze of the sun,'' :''There were children crying'' :''And colors flying'' :''All around the chosen ones.'' :''All in a dream, all in a dream'' :''The loading had begun.'' :''They were flying Mother Nature's'' :''Silver seed to a new home in the sun.'' :''Flying Mother Nature's'' :''Silver seed to a new home.'' :: — Neil Young ==== Beyond Infinity; Part IV A Mad God; Chapter 4 Continents Alive; a few paragraphs from pp. 362-3 ==== Sandwiched between layers of grit and grime, even those earliest life forms had found a way to make war. Why should matters be different now? Some microbe mat three billion years before had used sunlight to split water, liberating deadly oxygen. They had poisoned their rivals by excreting the gas. The battle had raged across borad beaches bordered by a brown, sluggish sea. The victorious mats had enjoyed their momentary triumph beneath a pink sky. But this fresh gaseous resource in turn allowed new, more complex life to begin and thrive. Their heirs eventually drove the algae mats nearly to extinction. So it had been with space. Planetary life had leaped into the new realm, first using simple machines, and later, deliberately engineered life forms. The dead machines had proved to be like the first algae. Instead of excreting oxygen, they brought life--inadvertently at first, then with deliberation. Compound forms arose. In time the space-dwelling gray machines, adapting solely through unliving self-evolution, retreated. They were driven into narrow enclaves, like the early algae mats. Out here, bordering the realm of ice, machines had finally wedded with plants to make anthology creatures. This desperate compromise had saved them. The alliance of the gray machine and the living green drove a cornucopia of new forms. Once allied with the virtues of dead mass, synthesis life seethed across the vast volumes with prodigious invention. Nothing could stop--though some tried--the creative destruction of Darwin from fashioning human designs into subtler instruments. For a billion years life had teemed and fought and learned amid harsh vacuum and sunlight's glare. This opera in the sky played out with little aid from the planets. Some time long ago, spaceborne life had begun to compete for materials with the planetary life zones. After all, most of the light elements in the solar system lay in the outer planets and cometary nuclei far beyond Pluto. In this competition the rocky worlds were hopelessly outclassed. From the perspective of space, planetary life looked like those ancient algae mats--flat, vulnerable, trapped in a thin wedge of air, unaware of the great stretching spaces beyond. And now the true ancient mats survived only in dark enclaves on Earth, cowering before the ravages of oxygen. Given a billion years, planetborne life had done better than the mats. Slowly the planetary biospheres forged connections to spaceborne life through great beasts like the Pinwheel, the Jonah, the Leviathan. But was this only a momentary pause, a temporary bargain struck before the planets became completely irrelevant? Or were they already? ::Gregory Benford ==== Disturbing the Universe; pages 227 and 235 ==== In everything we undertake, either on earth or in the sky, we have a choice of two styles, which I call the gray and the green. The distinction between gray and green is not sharp. Only at the extremes of the spectrum can we say without qualifications, this is green and that is gray. The difference between green and gray is better explained by examples than by definitions. Factories are gray, gardens are green. Physics is gray, biology is green. Plutonium Is gray, horse manure is green. Bureaucracy is gray, pioneer communities are green. Self-reproducing machines are gray, trees and children are green. Human technology is gray, God’s technology is green. Clones are gray, clades are green. Army field manuals are gray, poems are green. Man’s gray technology is also part of nature. It was, and will remain, essential for making the jump from earth into space. The gray technology was nature’s trick, invented to enable life to escape from earth. The green technology of genetic manipulation was another trick of nature, invented to enable life to adapt rapidly and purposefully rather than slowly and randomly to her new home, so that she could not only escape from earth but spread and diversify and run loose in the universe. All our skills are a part of nature’s plan and are used by her for her own purposes. ::Freeman Dyson ==== A Many Colored Glass; Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe; Chapter Five; Can Life Go on Foreever; Selected Paragraphs pp. 85 to 90 ==== Can Life Go on Forever ... I ... gave some lectures that were published in the Reviews of Modern Physics in 1979 ... I arrived at an optimistic conclusion, that the laws of nature do not make it impossible for life to survive forever ... And then, silence for fifteen years. ... A sudden change came ... Two scientists at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman, sent me a paper with the title "Life, the Universe, and Nothing" ... it says flatly that survival of life forever is impossible. ... In the years since I read their paper, Krauss and Starkman and I have been engaged in vigorous arguments, ... But we have stayed friends. ... ===== What Do We Mean By Life? ===== The arguments about survival only make sense if we take a very broad view of what life means. If we take a narrow view, supposing that life has to be made of flesh and blood, with cells full of chemicals disolved in water, then life certainly cannot survive forever. Life based on flesh and blood, the kind of life we know at first hand, can only exist at teperatures in the range above zero Celsius where water is liquid. It requires a constant input of free energy to keep it going. In a cold expanding universe, the available store of free energy in any region is finite, and life must ultimately run out of free energy if it keeps its temperature fixed. The secret of survival is to cool down your temperature as the universe cools. If you can stay alive while your temperature goes down, you can use energy more and more frugally. If you are frugal enough you can keep going forever on a finite store of free energy. But this requries that life and consciousness can transfer themselves from flesh and blood to some other medium. ... Another possible form of life is the Black Cloud described by Fred Hoyle in his famous science-fiction novel of that title. ... The Black Cloud lives in the vacuum of space and is composed of dust grains instead of cells. It derives its free energy from gravitation or starlight and acquires chemical nutrients from the naturally occurring interstellar dust. It is held together by electric and magnetic interactions between neighbouring grains. Instead of having a nervous system or a wiring system, it has a network of long-range electromagnetic signals that transmit information and coordinate its activities. Like silicon-based life and unlike water-based life, the Black Cloud can adapt to arbitrarily low temperatures. Its demand for free energy will diminish as the temperature goes down. ... ... The conclusion is that [Krauss and Starkman] are right, and life cannot survive forever, if life is digital, but I am right, and life may survive forever, if life is analog. This conclusion was unexpected. In the development of our human technology during the last fifty years, analog devices such as LP records and slide rules appear to be primitive and feeble, while digital devices such as CDs and personal computers are overwhelmingly more convenient and powerful. ... the laws of physics and information theory forbid the survival of digital life but allow the survival of analog life. Perhaps this implies that when the time comes for us to adapt oursevles to a cold universe and abandon our extravagant flesh-and-blood habits, we should upload ourselves into black clouds in space rather than download ourselves to silicon chips in a computer. If I had to make the choice, I would go for the black cloud. ::Freeman Dyson