Conflicts
I'm going to throw this stream of consciousness in before my post on animal flight. Actually, I have been watching the PBS Eons series of short videos on Youtube. They are very well produced with soft background music from APM, beautiful illustrations of prehistoric biology, and charismatic hosts with enthusiasm for paleontology. Specifically, the series drew my attention because of a video in which Kallie Moore discusses insect flight. As I had begun writing about the topic, I watched intently to gain insights. Paleoentomology is nuts!
The series got me thinking: paleontology is such an old science but modern technology can glean more information from fossils than ever before. In the 19th century, paleontologists struggled to determine dinosaur posture from sets of bones, some of which were nearly complete. Today, fossils are scanned and rendered digitally, allowing flexibility in analysis. Just imagine rotating and zooming into a digital render of a T-Rex skull. This means that even partial fossils can offer insights into a prehistoric animal's physiology and behavior. Geologists and paleontologists are the world's experts at collecting information from the earth itself, and technology makes life easier. Or does it?
Why did we discover so many dinosaurs in the 19th and 20th centuries? Coal. As industrial countries ramped up manufacturing, they needed fossil fuels. As such, geological sciences advanced. Earth scientists studied rock formations, dating them to ancient epochs, all in search for ways to mine gold, figuratively and literally, from the earth. Of course, the fossilized behemoths captivated the public audience. After all, how the hell dinosaurs exist?! In any case, we learned a lot about dinosaurs at a time when we really cared about mining fossil fuels.
This brings me to my first conflict: history vs. modernity. This is actually a special case of the next one, but I will describe it first. Fossils are delicate artifacts. Usually, only partial remains of an ancient organism survive as fossils today, and they are extremely fragile. And the epochs bury them under layers and layers of sediment until the fossils are barely distinguishable from bedrock. Just as an oyster forms a pearl under just the right circumstances, fossils only form under the right conditions. Much of our natural history is completely inaccessible, either due to lack of complete fossils or due to lack of preserved rock formations. The tricky thing here is that most of this is beyond human control. We have no means of controlling which fossils form where and under what conditions. But we do have some control over where we can access rocks. And historically, we haven't exactly preserved rocks for the sake of preserving natural history. Today, even, most people don't care about rocks and fossils, but everyone cares about rock music and fossil fuels.
Technology has made different aspects of paleontology easier and harder. With growing urban communities all over the world, I wonder where and when we can find more clues into the earth's past. After all, we grind up rocks to make concrete. How many fossils have we destroyed in making our civilizations? What good are fossils to us without our civilization?
As I mentioned before, this is just a special case of a larger, more confusing conflict: nature vs. technology. In general, human technology advanced iteratively through a combination of experimentation and observation. Much of the early advances were inspired by nature, and some of the more recent advances are also. But as technology makes life easier for humans, it makes life difficult for many other species. We are living in a mass extinction event, of which we may be the root cause. Habitat loss, pesticides, non-degradable plastics, manufacturing pollution. These are all necessary for the convenience of modern life, but they pose serious threats to the ecosystem. This is ironic because technology also dramatically enhances our understanding and appreciation for nature. Silicon Valley executives might take a vacation in Costa Rica, participating in ecotourism to better appreciate nature, before returning to a six-figure salary paid in large part by investors who see value in an app that puts fake sunglasses on your selfie. Said executive probably has a domesticated animal as a pet, possibly a cat, which is itself a perfect illustration of this conflict. The cat is a predator crafted by human technology (selective breeding) which wreaks havoc on the natural environment. Domesticated cats are, all over the globe, eradicating species of birds, bugs, and rodents. The worst part is that these cats are always introduced species, meaning they hitched a ride with some humans only to find an international smorgasbord. And no predators, because by hanging around humans, housecats don't have to deal with snakes and wolves. Their innocence as small animals is cute to us humans, and it helps us overlook some of their fearsome killer instincts. Personally, living with a cat for a finite time helped me appreciate the animal as a natural being. Technology aids us in appreciating nature, but technology is the means by which and the motives for which we are destroying nature.
This talk of appreciation brings me to the final conflict I will discuss today: science vs. art. Like the double helix of DNA, science and art are intimately linked throughout human history. Often, progress in one area correlates with progress in the other. Any so-called Golden Age features an explosion of creative arts and scientific discovery. So why do we treat science and art like two totally orthogonal entities? Both rely upon tested methods, both require creativity and introspection, both connect audiences with the greater universe. Frankly, I don't understand art very well. After all, art is subjective. Still, I see no difference between the emotions evoked by a Hubble telescope image and by landscape from the Hudson River Valley school. Surely, scientific data can appeal to audiences in much the same way. So in terms of training and education, why would we separate arts and science? If anything, they somehow need to be integrated more completely. One way to do that is through computer-aided art, design, and manufacturing. This bridges the gap between a creative artisan and a scientist, allowing for more interplay between aesthetics and practicality. That sort of interplay can play out in many unpredictable ways. What I am most interested in is discovering new ways to capture imaginations while delivering facts, and I strongly believe I can achieve this by living in the middle of this conflict. Or rather, the edge of the coin upon which both faces appear opposites.
My conclusion is that we should think about these conflicts carefully and decide how we can resolve them. Modern life threatens nature, both ancient fossils and endangered living animals. Science threatens art, in a way I really have not explained in detail, mostly because I have no inclination to today. But you can imagine, and perhaps read more blogposts, that science and technology is gradually erasing our humanity. This means the arts and humanities will be more important than ever in the years to come. Throw in the fact that most of today's jobs will no longer exist in thirty years. Either we will have a full on socioeconomic collapse, or we may encounter a new Golden Age where people just have free time to ask questions and be creative without worrying about survival. That is the best scenario, and in my opinion, we can realize it.
The first step is to increase our awareness of these issues. The second step, I think, is to understand that none of these conflicts need to exist; rather, they form a dynamic ecosystem in flux. We humans can modify the environment, but we will never remove the environment. And life will persist on earth long after humans go extinct. With that in mind, I know that we will work hard to fix the planet's problems, all while starting new ones!
We can never be perfect but, like all evolving life forms, we're always making progress.