"The earth is going to die in 500 million years!" exclaimed my eight-year-old today. And I had to illustrate to her how this is well beyond the span of our existence. Sort of a deanthropocentric exercise in reverse.
But what of it? Fundamentally, we don't like to think that there's nothing left of us - ever. But does that need to be the case? Yes, the sun is growing hotter, but we have hundreds of millions of years of technological advancement before the Earth becomes uninhabitable. And think where we've come in just one hundred years.
Last week, I was talking through a thought experiment with Mark on this topic.
Space is prohibitively large; commuting is not really an option. Even at the speed of light, the nearest star system to our own, Alpha Centauri, would take four years' travel. And it's questionable whether there's anything habitable there. It's a binary (plus) system, and the gravitational flux of two nearby suns may not foster stability.
Further, our bodies evolved in gravity, and it's not clear we'd survive for extended periods in minimal gravity environments.
In Rendezvous With Rama, Arthur C Clarke posited a mammoth cylindrical body 50 kms long, with habitation on the inside. That's an overwhelming construction endeavour. I think there are easier options.
My suggestion is that to travel beyond the Solar System would take far more massive an environment than we could possibly build ourselves. It would be simpler to grab an existing body, and power that away somehow. As Mark pointed out, this is the Space: 1999 scenario, a science fiction series where the moon was torn away from Earth.
Possibilities include using something large from the asteroid belt, a moon from Jupiter or Saturn (such as Ganymede), or maybe something far out, such as that erstwhile planet Pluto.
Issues include heat, propulsion, gravity, retention of atmosphere, and other life-sustaining variables. By the time it's worthwhile thinking about it, I'd say we'd have the technology to allow us a few options.
This is the stuff of science fiction, certainly; plenty of options have already been canvassed in that milieu. Burrowing underground would provide sturdy shelter, although digging enough habitable space would be Herculean. Other options include domes on the surface - or terraforming.
Ah, terraforming. Rather what happened to our own planet. Microbial life has built up our current atmosphere and environment; we're just the evolutionary outcomes that could adjust to it. It took hundreds of millions of years to develop, but I think it's reasonable to anticipate we'll be able to engineer biological solutions that work faster.
However, out beyond the easy reaches of the sun, everything freezes. There would need to be both sufficient gravity to hold an atmosphere (or to be able to continually regenerate it), and heat sources sufficient to prevent that freezing. The latter would be most feasible through nuclear fusion sources - we haven't succeeded at this yet, but I can see no reason it won't come. It's what the sun uses.
Gravity is a matter of using a large enough body. Life on Earth is, of course, evolved for our specific gravity, and much more research is needed to understand how or whether current life forms could adapt to lower gravity, or whether we'd need to engineer alterations that would allow various forms to survive in a somewhat different environment.
Because we would want to take with us as much of the existing variety of life as we could. This could involve storing samples at the DNA level, for later development/unpacking using either technological or substitute development (incubation) methods. In any case, plants and animal life should be considered an essential part of our environment - our being - and taking that with us would not be at issue. Bacteria and viruses too, surprisingly enough. Bacteria are our microbial engineers, a fundamental tool of life. Viruses have helped us become what we are today, though infiltrating our germ lines, they have imparted in us the resilince - and functionality - that we possess today.
The Earth's variety of life evolved specifically because the amount of solar radiation both protects us from other stellar sources, and generates mutation by occasionally knocking around with DNA. Outside Earth's orbit, mutation would happen at a different rate, which we would have to account for. Lesser rates would not be an issue: we are now at the point of engineering our environment to overcome the 'need' for adaptive outcomes of mutation. Greater rates of mutation would necessitate careful screening to optimise outcomes.
Yet that begs the question: outside the Earth's specific environmental womb, would it be more beneficial to engineer adaption in ourselves, so that future generations can make the move more readily? The biggest barrier is ourselves: the fact that we are rather wedded to our current form, no matter how ill-adapted to space journeying. I suspect we would be more willing to put extra effort into optimising our environment, than to force evolutionary change on our own grandchildren.
I have great optimism that we will survive in the long run. Even if, to paraphrase Steve Kilbey, we end up as digital memory*.
None of this is a substitute for getting our own planet in order. But if we can succeed in that, we'll probably be well placed to survive past the use-by date of our planet.
*The Church: Fog, (1992 B-side to Ripple)
It hurts to think that in a hundred years
We'll all just be microfiche
Our names and the names of our songs
Cataloged and filed away
- however, compared to the fate of most of our ancestors, I'd be happy to survive in digital form.
Showing posts with label The Church. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Church. Show all posts
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Favourite songs and comparing apples with oranges
JJJ's recent listeners poll of all-time favourite songs yielded the usual suspects, such as Stairway To Heaven, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Smells Like Teen Spirit. Of course, subjectivity aside it begs the question what is a great song?
Should it stir the heart more than the intellect? How much do the words matter? - does their appeal have to have direct, or viscereal? How do you compare anguish with joy? How much does one infuse accepted wisdom and deem a song great simply because others do? And what about a great groove?
A poll will conflate all these issues. I can attempt to separate some of them in a set of personal lists, but one overarching list is too much.
I find the songs that appeal to me on a lasting basis are those that move me emotionally, whatever the reason and whatever the emotion. Sometimes it's an especially strong, expressive peak that captivates me (Pagliacci, Forbi, Sarajevo); sometimes it's multiple peaks (Unforgettable fire, Last goodbye); sometimes it's the overall effect (Ship song)
So here's 10 songs that move me. Sometimes because of the sentiment expressed, sometimes the stirring music, and sometimes the impressionistic value of the whole. It's hard to say they're well ordered, because again it's scarcely comparing like with like.
I will likely alter/add to this list. Other songs make it to different lists for other reasons, such as raw power (No love lost), groove (Hot love to To the river), or guitar-as-meditation (Theresa's sound world - and much by Sonic Youth, Duane Allman, Neil Young, Clean, Durutti Column).
Should it stir the heart more than the intellect? How much do the words matter? - does their appeal have to have direct, or viscereal? How do you compare anguish with joy? How much does one infuse accepted wisdom and deem a song great simply because others do? And what about a great groove?
A poll will conflate all these issues. I can attempt to separate some of them in a set of personal lists, but one overarching list is too much.
I find the songs that appeal to me on a lasting basis are those that move me emotionally, whatever the reason and whatever the emotion. Sometimes it's an especially strong, expressive peak that captivates me (Pagliacci, Forbi, Sarajevo); sometimes it's multiple peaks (Unforgettable fire, Last goodbye); sometimes it's the overall effect (Ship song)
So here's 10 songs that move me. Sometimes because of the sentiment expressed, sometimes the stirring music, and sometimes the impressionistic value of the whole. It's hard to say they're well ordered, because again it's scarcely comparing like with like.
- Jeff Buckley - The last goodbye [from Grace]- dripping with emotion, words, melody and vocal expression are all indispensible
- Pavarotti - No, Pagliaccio non son (from Leoncavello's Pagliacci) - a song that by turns is anger and anguish; it's in my list for a peak: where he sings, "go, you are not worth my grief...". No other version of this song can compare.
- U2/Pavarotti - Miss Sarajevo [from Passengers' Original Soundtracks] - again, it's here for a high point: Pavarotti's part is made the greater by contrast with Bono's singing, peaks at "love will come..."
- Jessi Bjorling - Forbi Forbi (Lensky's aria fromTchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, sung in Swedish)
- U2 - The unforgettable fire - it's about the Hiroshima/Nagasaki victims, although you wouldn't know from the words
- Sundays - Here's where the story ends [from Reading, Writing, Arithmetic] - the best from the album: wistful, with a voice laden with beauty and expression. I pretend their other albums are laudible, but they're not the same
- Four Tops - Baby I need your loving
- Art Garfunkel - Travelling boy [Angel Clare]
- House Of Love - Call me [Audience with the mind]
- Nick Cave - Ship song [The good son] (albeit Cave has a number of stirring songs in his catalogue - as does U2)
- Jack Frost - Cousin/Angel [Snow Job] (and the day jobs of collaborators Kilbey and McLennan - The Church and Go-Betweens - produced much of beauty too)
- This Mortal Coil - Tarantula [Filigree and Shadow]
I will likely alter/add to this list. Other songs make it to different lists for other reasons, such as raw power (No love lost), groove (Hot love to To the river), or guitar-as-meditation (Theresa's sound world - and much by Sonic Youth, Duane Allman, Neil Young, Clean, Durutti Column).
Friday, February 13, 2009
My Morning Jacket and the different sound sydrome
I located another track by My Morning Jacket amongst my CDs.
They were the band that rapidly won me over as support for Neil Young in Sydney recently. Wonderful singing and wonderful guitar work - and I'm saying this as one who could easily be jaded by a lifetime of guitar music.
The two tracks are both from the 2005 album Z; Anytime, and Gideon, the latter of which was played at the gig. But the recorded music gives scant clues to the live feel of the music: uplifting and transfixing. Something that can't easily be squeezed out of a CD.
Honestly, a live band presents an altogether different music experience to a recording. Sometimes both work; sometimes only one does. Take Solomon Burke. His concert was a wonderful communal experience of secular gospel; neither the early or recent music of his that I've heard gives a clue to this. Sonic Youth's recordings give some indication of their live sound, but not the holistic experience. The Church have different virtues live and recorded, some of which certainly overlap; but the best of each are rather different experiences from each other.
There's a song by Shayne Carter (from Straightjacket Fits) and Peter Jeffries called Randolph's going home. In some ways it sounds so rough that you wonder how it could have taken drummer Jeffries ten hours to perfect his work. But in other ways it is a sublime work, a yearning, soaring paean to a dead friend of Carter's. It may have been wonderful live - if it had ever been performed - but it could equally have come out somewhat flat. It's so often hard to tell.
Ideally, the purity of good opera is something that can transcend the medium. But rock music is not the same. You have to take it as it comes, and enjoy the transcendent experiences wherever you find them.
They were the band that rapidly won me over as support for Neil Young in Sydney recently. Wonderful singing and wonderful guitar work - and I'm saying this as one who could easily be jaded by a lifetime of guitar music.
The two tracks are both from the 2005 album Z; Anytime, and Gideon, the latter of which was played at the gig. But the recorded music gives scant clues to the live feel of the music: uplifting and transfixing. Something that can't easily be squeezed out of a CD.
Honestly, a live band presents an altogether different music experience to a recording. Sometimes both work; sometimes only one does. Take Solomon Burke. His concert was a wonderful communal experience of secular gospel; neither the early or recent music of his that I've heard gives a clue to this. Sonic Youth's recordings give some indication of their live sound, but not the holistic experience. The Church have different virtues live and recorded, some of which certainly overlap; but the best of each are rather different experiences from each other.
There's a song by Shayne Carter (from Straightjacket Fits) and Peter Jeffries called Randolph's going home. In some ways it sounds so rough that you wonder how it could have taken drummer Jeffries ten hours to perfect his work. But in other ways it is a sublime work, a yearning, soaring paean to a dead friend of Carter's. It may have been wonderful live - if it had ever been performed - but it could equally have come out somewhat flat. It's so often hard to tell.
Ideally, the purity of good opera is something that can transcend the medium. But rock music is not the same. You have to take it as it comes, and enjoy the transcendent experiences wherever you find them.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Taking a much, much longer look.
Popular understanding of evolution is deeply flawed for a couple of reasons. First, the concepts are often subtle, and open to antithetical interpretations when reduced to one-liners. Second, we're understandably anthropocentric, and it's hard to think fully outside our own context.
I was once just as guilty as anyone of misconstruing why giraffes have long necks (due to the best mutations surviving in an environmental niche, not a lifetime of stretching!)
If I take a much longer view of time and the Earth, my conclusions are mixed, but on the whole positive.
In terms of Earth's history, we are in the Holocene epoch (for the past 11,500 years) of the Neogene period (the past 23 million years), within the Cenezoic era. That era is only 65 million years old, yet the Earth's geological history lasts 4,500 million years. The start of the Cenezoic era is marked by the meteor that caused the last main extinction event (K-T), which eliminated non-avian dinosaurs and gave mammals the opportunity to fill in the environmental niches left void.
And, of course, we're now in the middle of another major extinction event. And we are the cause of it.
The event will be marked by fossils in the geological record when this epoch and period is gone. As well as fossils the rock record will also show human artifacts.
By that time, we will have gone through some trauma. We will have changed the global environment; the only question is how far we have to go before we can band together sufficiently to stop the slide. We will need a new word for suffering, because the current global refugee situation is nothing compared with what we will face.
On the plus side, we will probably have forced our way out of the cycle of ice ages and interglacial periods that has characterised the planet for most of the Cenezoic era.
I also expect we'll have genetic technology largely under wraps. This means the ability to revive extinct species, but a species is just one aspect of an integrated environmental niche, and recovering them would be much more complex.
And, to paraphrase an old Church song (Fog), in a thousand years, we will all be digitised computer memory. That is the sole fate for most of us, although it's a more visible fate than most of those who died a thousand years ago.
I'd expect that ultimate survival will be due to our ability to conquer the tyrannical distances of space. If, for example, those who embark on the journey are those best suited for that vastly different evironment (whether involving cryogenics or not), there will be some genetic selection. That will be our only form of future evolution: that which we mark on ourselves.
[Or, in isolated environments, those left behind will change the natural way. However, evolution is a simple equation of the speed of adaptable mutations versus the speed of environment change. Evolving naturally would be, as it always has been anyway, a gamble.]
And now that we have digitised the past for the future's benefit, I have confidence there will always be music to lift the spirit.
I was once just as guilty as anyone of misconstruing why giraffes have long necks (due to the best mutations surviving in an environmental niche, not a lifetime of stretching!)
If I take a much longer view of time and the Earth, my conclusions are mixed, but on the whole positive.
In terms of Earth's history, we are in the Holocene epoch (for the past 11,500 years) of the Neogene period (the past 23 million years), within the Cenezoic era. That era is only 65 million years old, yet the Earth's geological history lasts 4,500 million years. The start of the Cenezoic era is marked by the meteor that caused the last main extinction event (K-T), which eliminated non-avian dinosaurs and gave mammals the opportunity to fill in the environmental niches left void.
And, of course, we're now in the middle of another major extinction event. And we are the cause of it.
The event will be marked by fossils in the geological record when this epoch and period is gone. As well as fossils the rock record will also show human artifacts.
By that time, we will have gone through some trauma. We will have changed the global environment; the only question is how far we have to go before we can band together sufficiently to stop the slide. We will need a new word for suffering, because the current global refugee situation is nothing compared with what we will face.
On the plus side, we will probably have forced our way out of the cycle of ice ages and interglacial periods that has characterised the planet for most of the Cenezoic era.
I also expect we'll have genetic technology largely under wraps. This means the ability to revive extinct species, but a species is just one aspect of an integrated environmental niche, and recovering them would be much more complex.
And, to paraphrase an old Church song (Fog), in a thousand years, we will all be digitised computer memory. That is the sole fate for most of us, although it's a more visible fate than most of those who died a thousand years ago.
I'd expect that ultimate survival will be due to our ability to conquer the tyrannical distances of space. If, for example, those who embark on the journey are those best suited for that vastly different evironment (whether involving cryogenics or not), there will be some genetic selection. That will be our only form of future evolution: that which we mark on ourselves.
[Or, in isolated environments, those left behind will change the natural way. However, evolution is a simple equation of the speed of adaptable mutations versus the speed of environment change. Evolving naturally would be, as it always has been anyway, a gamble.]
And now that we have digitised the past for the future's benefit, I have confidence there will always be music to lift the spirit.
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
World: The music dies again: Jack Frost caught out by Grant McLennan’s death
Sad to hear that Grant McLennan died suddenly over the weekend, not even reaching the wrong side of 50.
Of course, McLennan is best known as a singer and songwriter for the Go-Betweens, a seminal Queensland band whose heyday was in the 80s, yet found fresh musical beauty when they reformed a few years ago.
Two things I didn’t know about him: he was active in protests during the repressive Bjelke-Petersen regime in the 70s; and music was an accidental career, when fellow Go-Betweens founder Robert Forster encouraged the budding poet to join him in a band – and learn a musical instrument.
This latter is quite a surprise, given his evocative melodic contributions to the Go-Betweens catalogue with such songs as Cattle And Cane, Bye Bye Pride, and Streets Of Your Town.
Yet I came not to praise him in the Go-Betweens, but to bury him in glory for his achievements with a side project, Jack Frost.
A collaboration between McLennan and Steve Kilbey of The Church, Jack Frost recorded a scant two albums, of which the latter, Snow Job, is an undervalued masterpiece in the Australian musical lexicon.
The songwriting voices of McLennan and Kilbey meshed particularly well on this album. The voices blended well, too, and they were by turns world-weary, bitter, yet powerful, magical, soaring. Anyone who knows well Kilbey’s music from The Church (visit this rich fan site) will recognise this bipolar description, yet Snow Job’s uniqueness was in the depth two accomplished musicians brought to each other, making the earlier eponymous Jack Frost album something of a pre-gig warmup. The egos took a backseat to the songwriting, the music, and the sublime harmonies. They rocked hard and well on Jack Frost Blues, a whimsical look at the persistence of a filmmaker (the wigs got wet so “we shaved our heads, that was the better bet”) – for which they both must have drawn upon their indefatiguable musical experiences. Yet the music and harmonies are in incandescent flight for the most part; at a zenith on Cousin/Angel, Empire and Angela Carter (yes that writer: “she lives in her own world” is the refrain).
I’ll dabble some more in the Go-Betweens; there’s gems to be found, particularly in the later of their nine albums. I’ll even try once more to discover the spirit in McLennan’s solo effort Fire Boy. By way of consolation for Jack Frost’s future denied.
Of course, McLennan is best known as a singer and songwriter for the Go-Betweens, a seminal Queensland band whose heyday was in the 80s, yet found fresh musical beauty when they reformed a few years ago.
Two things I didn’t know about him: he was active in protests during the repressive Bjelke-Petersen regime in the 70s; and music was an accidental career, when fellow Go-Betweens founder Robert Forster encouraged the budding poet to join him in a band – and learn a musical instrument.
This latter is quite a surprise, given his evocative melodic contributions to the Go-Betweens catalogue with such songs as Cattle And Cane, Bye Bye Pride, and Streets Of Your Town.
Yet I came not to praise him in the Go-Betweens, but to bury him in glory for his achievements with a side project, Jack Frost.
A collaboration between McLennan and Steve Kilbey of The Church, Jack Frost recorded a scant two albums, of which the latter, Snow Job, is an undervalued masterpiece in the Australian musical lexicon.
The songwriting voices of McLennan and Kilbey meshed particularly well on this album. The voices blended well, too, and they were by turns world-weary, bitter, yet powerful, magical, soaring. Anyone who knows well Kilbey’s music from The Church (visit this rich fan site) will recognise this bipolar description, yet Snow Job’s uniqueness was in the depth two accomplished musicians brought to each other, making the earlier eponymous Jack Frost album something of a pre-gig warmup. The egos took a backseat to the songwriting, the music, and the sublime harmonies. They rocked hard and well on Jack Frost Blues, a whimsical look at the persistence of a filmmaker (the wigs got wet so “we shaved our heads, that was the better bet”) – for which they both must have drawn upon their indefatiguable musical experiences. Yet the music and harmonies are in incandescent flight for the most part; at a zenith on Cousin/Angel, Empire and Angela Carter (yes that writer: “she lives in her own world” is the refrain).
I’ll dabble some more in the Go-Betweens; there’s gems to be found, particularly in the later of their nine albums. I’ll even try once more to discover the spirit in McLennan’s solo effort Fire Boy. By way of consolation for Jack Frost’s future denied.
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