The supreme irony of our planetary age is that the nightmare of the first phase - the nuclear winter - is the exact opposite of the nightmare of the second phase - runaway heating. And we have mostly forgotten the fears and rituals of the cold war: no more emergency sirens and drills, no hiding in the basement. Much of the infrastructure of fear has gone underground, reappearing as the surveillance state on occasion.
Very interesting post, dear Rajesh. Especially the connection between insights such as the Gaia Hypothesis and the current (and past) issues, and their reduced versions (global heating, nuclear winter).
The only part I seriously take issue with is your description of advances in the past half-century. While it is true that biology and information sciences saw enormous revolutions, and it is also true that physics saw its own revolution in the first half of the century, I disagree (deeply) with your glueing together mathematics and physics in that sentence. Mathematics had some revolutions in the first half of the century, true... but mathematics does not quite work by the revolution cycle. And I would daresay that the past half century has seen much deeper advance in mathematics than even those revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century. Those advances are incredibly mysterious (here, I would say the advances in biology and information science, while enormous, pale in comparison with the real deep changes we are still witnessing in mathematics). In many ways, the «blurring», the brutal «trans» aspect of current mathematics (trans-ferring ideas in very strange ways from one domain to the other) are of a nature similar (and perhaps deeply related to) the blurrings you mention in biology. But mathematics is unfolding in very surprising ways, and has not stopped doing so for the past decades!
Very interesting post, dear Rajesh. Especially the connection between insights such as the Gaia Hypothesis and the current (and past) issues, and their reduced versions (global heating, nuclear winter).
The only part I seriously take issue with is your description of advances in the past half-century. While it is true that biology and information sciences saw enormous revolutions, and it is also true that physics saw its own revolution in the first half of the century, I disagree (deeply) with your glueing together mathematics and physics in that sentence. Mathematics had some revolutions in the first half of the century, true... but mathematics does not quite work by the revolution cycle. And I would daresay that the past half century has seen much deeper advance in mathematics than even those revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century. Those advances are incredibly mysterious (here, I would say the advances in biology and information science, while enormous, pale in comparison with the real deep changes we are still witnessing in mathematics). In many ways, the «blurring», the brutal «trans» aspect of current mathematics (trans-ferring ideas in very strange ways from one domain to the other) are of a nature similar (and perhaps deeply related to) the blurrings you mention in biology. But mathematics is unfolding in very surprising ways, and has not stopped doing so for the past decades!