Friday 18 November 2022 — This past Saturday I gave my online presentation on space ethics during the Space Education Symposium (SES) and it was perhaps better than my presentation to Forming and Exploring Habitable Worlds in terms of the quality of my performance. For one thing, I didn’t have to be so concerned with…

Friday 11 November 2022 — There is something strangely tiring about sitting in an auditorium listening to others talk for eight or ten hours. Superficially, it ought to be the easiest way to spend a day, but I think that it would be “easier” in a non-physical sense to spend a day cutting wood than…

Friday 04 November 2022 — Today I am headed back to Edinburgh to attend the inaugural Forming and Exploring Habitable Worlds conference, which will run the entire week of November 07 to 11. I think I have significantly improved the presentation I gave last August in St. Andrews, and I am seeing more ways to…

Friday 28 October 2022 — In a PS to last week’s newsletter I mentioned having watched the Ken Burns documentary on the life of Benjamin Franklin. Oddly, what stands out in my mind in the light of that documentary (and without any supplemental reading that might alter my interpretation of events), is how Franklin stayed…

Friday 21 October 2022 — I have been reading one of my notebooks from a dozen years ago, and I was interested to see that I made some comments about civilization at that time, when my conception of civilization was essentially inchoate, and, looking back from the present, I would not have thought I…

Friday 14 October 2022 — In last week’s newsletter I mentioned the intelligence niche, also called the cognitive niche, and in the past week I have been digging around more in an attempt to find the source of the idea and its history of discussion. I haven’t (yet) found the smoking gun, or what…

Friday 07 October 2022 — How can we describe the ecological role of human beings in the biosphere? There are many ways to approach this question. One could come at it as William H. McNeill did in Plagues and Peoples, where he distinguished between micro-parasites and macro-parasites, with the latter being human beings that live…

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History — Today is the 235th anniversary of the birth of François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (04 October 1787–12 September 1874), who was born on this date in 1787, and who went on to hold many of the highest political offices in France. In Robert Flint’s History of the Philosophy of History (1893)…

Friday 30 September 2022 — The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first use of “exobiology” as 1960, with a couple of citations. In 1960 Joshua Lederberg, whose work I have cited in other contexts (Lederberg was an early origins of life researcher), wrote an article that was published in Science, “Exobiology: Approaches to Life Beyond…