yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

People Are a Force of Nature


2m read
·Nov 3, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

What does the transforming is knowledge? We can take some raw material that had no particular use, and within that raw material, we might find uranium nuclei, which then can be used in a nuclear reactor to create energy or bombs. We can find within something that for almost the entire geological existence of the Earth sat there inert and would have done nothing absent people.

People are the entities within the universe that create explanations. They're able to explain what raw materials might be transformed into. Now, what are they transforming these raw materials into? Civilization. People creating knowledge end up becoming literally a force of nature.

If we seek to explain something like the shape of a galaxy or the shape of a star, any astrophysicist will give you a story based upon the known laws of physics about how gravity will pull things into spheres, how the laws of thermodynamics will cause certain kinds of gas to heat up and expand. All of the known laws of physics are sufficient to explain what we see out there in the cosmos.

But the laws of physics alone will not be able to explain the appearance of Manhattan. You have to invoke things other than merely the fundamental laws of physics. You need to invoke the existence of people and their capacity to explain the world scientifically, philosophically, politically, because it's all of those things that will come together to explain why we have certain structures like skyscrapers in Manhattan.

This is a profound idea. That's an idea that seems to have been overlooked by scientists, many of whom have a reductionist idea about how to explain what we see in our environment. They will seek to explain only the natural phenomena that are in our environment. Of course, everyone wants to know how the laws of nature work.

But if we want to understand how the universe, from this point onwards—whether it's locally on our own planet, eventually the solar system, eventually the galaxy—is going to evolve over time, we're going to have to talk about the knowledge that people create and the choices that they're going to make into the future. This is a different vision of the place of people in the universe.

Thank you to Eight Sleep for supporting the Naval Podcast. All of the sponsorship revenue goes to our guests to support their work. Eight Sleep makes a heating and cooling smart mattress, which they tell us gets you to sleep 32 percent faster with 40 percent fewer sleep interruptions. Go to eightsleep.com/infinity for a discount. I'll put a link in the show notes.

More Articles

View All
What it's ACTUALLY like to be a Millionaire in your 20's
It becomes a lot easier to tap into that part of the mind that was always there but just lays dormant because everything else supersedes that in the form of stress, in the form of working a job you really don’t like, in the form of worrying about what bil…
Run-ons and comma splices | Syntax | Khan Academy
Hello Grim, Marians. Hello Rosie. Hi David, how are you? Good, how are you? Good. Today we are going to talk about run-ons and comma splices. A run-on sentence is what happens when two independent clauses are put together in one sentence without any punc…
Life Below the Ocean Surface | StarTalk
So you know that’s a fish. Oh, that’s cool. He’s cute, or she. You can’t even tell. But what is that fish thinking? Is it like— is it nostalgia? Is it rage? Maybe I’m just projecting. But you can’t really tell what it’s thinking. It’s a mystery. It’s an e…
How To Measure The Tiniest Forces In The Universe
This is 10 micrograms. You think that I might be able to see? I think you might be able to. Oh boy. It’s an arrow right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This flashlight will help. I feel like I need to get video of this. [Dr. Shaw] I don’t know how. (Dr. Shaw la…
We Did The Math - You Are Dead!
Absolutely everything you think about yourself and the universe could be an illusion. As far as you know, you are real and exist in a universe that was born 14 billion years ago and that gave rise to galaxies, stars, the Earth, and finally you. Except, ma…
Meta's Moment of Truth (Facebook's Ad Problem Explained)
Mark Zuckerberg is dark in the door of Capitol Hill. Facebook is scrambling to contain the fallout; it’s facing a real threat to its cultural relevance. Do you think, in the wake of all these revelations, Facebook’s gonna make any changes? It is an extra…