Thursday, November 28, 2024

Little Universe

 

“We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm - a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.”

Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)

"The Universe is nothing but an infinite and complex mechanism. Its complexity is so great that it borders on willfulness, suddenness, and randomness; it gives the illusion of free will possessed by conscious beings."

-  Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky (1857 - 1935)

“The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime… Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a single vast body that is life on Earth. From this point of view, the passing of human generations, in peace or turmoil, is nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.”

- Neil Theise
Notes on Complexity

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