The following is from an email to a well-known scholar of Heidegger’s thinking, which I now realize could be a preface for earlier postings here, given that people face blog listings in reverse chronological order.
Astrobiology is realizing more and more (not less and less) that life begins easily, and our solar system is relatively young. Intelligent life becomes recursively evolutionary because that's what Our post-natural "second-nature" (Nobelist Gerald Edelman) intelligence does; and it has been there (somewhere) for thousands of millennia. Humans became minimally technical 50 millennia ago, technological merely one millennium ago, hyper-tech 0.05 millennium ago, i.e., middle of the last century. Earthly capability a millennium forward is inconceivable. A thousand millennia: a planetary Singularity that became post-biological long ago?
