Listening to TED talks used to be a regular habit of mine. So periodically, I publish some of those notes. It’s both a personal refresher and a chance to share valuable knowledge with readers. Here’s the complete list of TED notes.
This week we have talks from Jill Tarter on the search for alien life and Noah Feldman on Islam as a technology.
Jill Tarter: Why the search for alien intelligence matters
- “we live on a fragile island of life”
- “if we’re alone…incredible waste of space”
- discovering other cultured civilizations could strengthen humanity’s bonds with each other
- “we’re a billion year lineage of wandering stardust”
- SETI began 50 years ago, it’s the archaeology of the future (given speed of light)
- our sun is one of 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and the Milky Way is only one of 100 billion other galaxies (!)
- the more we learn the wider our “livable space” becomes (e.g., the more stars, the more species in extreme environments we’ve discovered just on Earth)
- on Earth life happened quickly. the majority of time (90+%) has been spent developing and evolving life, not waiting for it to arise
- Copernican revolution changed our thinking in many areas (astronomy, physics, theology). Finding alien life would be comparable
- Drake conducted the first SETI observation of distant stars
- Paul Allen and Nathan Myrhvold are generous supporters
- “we all belong to one tribe, Earthlings”
Noah Feldman: Politics and religion are technologies
- politics and religion are analyzable as technologies, via conceptual design
- democracy is a technology to channel power from many into the hands of a few
- Islam is a means of construing the universe as way to bring salvation to its followers and to achieve goals such as peace, justice, equality as viewed within its doctrine
- “because they’re technologies, they’re manipulable”
- democracy and Islam are portrayed as incompatible, but technologies are more malleable than that
- an Egyptian group of activists were blocked from forming a party which presented as combination of democracy and Islam
Here’s the full list of TED notes!