ISBN 9780954483197 Gravity Publishing, UK;
Published:
2020; Hardback; 156mm x 234mm; 500 pages; B&W illustrations; subject: Cosmology and
Astronomy; Physics and Philosophy; Mind;
Future; General Readership.
Bookshops please click here
RRP £25 Buy the hardback here at discounted web price of £18.00
+ postage and packing
An
introduction to the Chronolith Project and the first stage of a
remarkable new investigation into the nature of humans and their
interstellar future
Six years in the writing, The Cosmology of People
was born out of a critical journey through the physics of the Human
condition to see whether and how Humans might travel to the stars.This story began back in 1997 when the author submitted a proposal to the Millennium Commission to set up the very first installation of the Chronolith Observatory. Although the installation was not built then the project remained a collaboration between a small number of interested parties who are working to realise the second phase of the project, the installation of Chronolith Observatories around the world, and for which the general public is invited to register their interest by use of the registration form included with the book. There have been two introductory talks to the concepts in London, and now the publication of this book is the culmination of his project's first phase, marking out a description of the broader issues that unite the daily human narrative with the physics of the quantum world.
In this book the reader will find intriguing ideas about what we might know about reality if we truly lived in a simulation, and how lies, truth, good and evil work in a multiverse, about the origins of our universe and those characteristics of human existence that travel back and forth in time. The book proposes solutions to the problems of the origins of languages, of dreams and the reality we share, of consciousness and the coincidence factor of our universe, about particles and probabilities, about space and the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligences coming to our aid.
The wide ranging narrative moves from the theory of the quantum observation to the training of pilots of an interstellar voyage; from the origins of the universe to the life of an Amazonian tribe; from the banality of repetition in English to the density of meaning of the characters of Chinese; from a scale model of the solar system on a golf course to the the creation of a probability particle; from the start of the industrial age to the significance of a coincidental meeting; from the Anthropic principle origins of our universe to the circularity of time paradoxes; from the telling of a short story twice to Boltzmann Brains.
The story that this book unveils is a new interpretation of life and its coincidental connections, of mind and its unique occupation of three-dimensional space, to support an original and significant social experiment (www.chronolith.net) that will help us understand the future that is coming for the Humans of Earth and to find the people and the creativity required to survive it.
| REVIEWS Absolutely Original In The Cosmology of People and the Time Travel Solution, Kennedy projects the widest of visions in putting forth a proposal of future and past time connectedness mediated by consciousness, as a way to guide a path away from a planet under the threat of exhaustion. Much like in his 2009 book Essential Personalities, the deftness of his touch in building his argument is on full display, and both books are treats for those who enjoy bold, original thinking. Don’t expect to plod through footnotes and dense, defensive explanations attempting to fortify arguments; this book is intelligent conjecture, bolstered by suggestions and hints from the most diverse of sources and here the book is at its most enjoyable and impressive. Having said this, the exploration of aspects of quantum physics and conceptions of the multiverse requires perseverance, and I was reminded first of Terrance Mallick’s film the Tree of Life, whose appreciation requires much from the viewer, and then, in the most challenging parts, of Gore Vidal's comment on the entropy involved in reading Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: “The writer’s text is ablaze with the heat /energy that his readers have lost to him”. Others, more at ease in these areas, will surely find the road smoother. Yet this reader then came out the other side of this section well-prepared to take in the author’s most daring assertions on the relationship between time and human consciousness, as well as well as the roles of coincidence and dreams. The result is more than just a restoration of the balance of energy expended but instead becomes something both intriguing and enriching that has lingered with me in moments far removed from the actual reading of the book. M. Larroca Reality check This is not a book we would normally review in SpaceFlight. It deals with a wide range of speculative concepts, not least the quest for determining whether or not we live in a simulation, exist within a complex of limitless multiverses or can experience the backward as well as forward motion of time. Each issue is a legitimate consideration in a philosophical quest for reality, truth, logic and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But it is not for the feint-hearted. And yes, I do mean “feint” hearted, for its very ethos is to ask whether reality exists within a deception – but a deception of our own making, as we seek to constrain the known universe by human laws and the so called “principles” of cosmology and human consciousness. Principles that give us self-assurance through their simplistic naivety which limit the unthinkable as implausible and the unknowns as impossible – but we only believe that because those unknowns fail to fit our idealistic models and are therefore rejected before consideration... The author ranges far and wide across a broad tapestry of interwoven connections from quantum observations to how pilots of interstellar spaceships might be trained, from the limitations of occidental language to those of the orient. The reader is asked to embrace the origin of the universe and the life of Amazonian tribes, bridging the probabilities of particle structure with the circularity of the time paradox. Kennedy asks us to consider the forward movement of time as a prequel to the past, from the unalterable future to changeable origins. It is that contradiction in terms which, says Kennedy, is the fault of our language rather than our perceptions. In that, the book is a rambling discourse in what, to many, is an unthinkable hypothesis in itself. But Kennedy draws on many examples of both “knowns” and “unknowns” to dissect a conundrum formed by a misinterpretation of reality, which he believes has brought us to confusion because we are asking for the wrong answers to find the right questions. He believes that only by stripping constraints and demolishing walls can we truly understand how limited is our understanding and how potentially illuminating could be our awareness of the consciousness of all things, physical and non-physical. The book is to be recommended if only because the philosophy of science can only be truly appreciated if we turn assumption on its head and begin with the awareness of reality and not the “truth” we build to accommodate our expectations. Your reviewer began reading this book by thinking the writer was flawed in both his rationales and his derivations – now he is not so sure... David Baker, Spaceflight October 2020 Amazon Top review from United Kingdom Scaramouche 5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended portrayal of the history, future and potential for space travel Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 July 2020 This insightful and visionary book starts with a comprehensive review of human engagement with space travel, analysing the economic and political considerations involved. It then proceeds to consider the meaning and role of coincidence in imaginative proposals for the future of space /time travel. |
|||
 | |||
"...We
have already found thousands of planets circulating stars in our galaxy
as well as lone planet-like objects unattached to stars, more are added
almost daily, so it looks as if planets are more commonplace than once
thought. There might be planets of some sort attached to every star we
see now. A recent estimate by Erik Zackrisson and his team modelling
the evolution of the universe on computers suggests something like 700
quintillion (1018) planets might be in it.
While supporters of the principle of mediocrity (that we are completely average and live in an average universe with an average number of civilisations of average lifetimes) find this possibility comforting, it can be read the other way. Other intelligent life in the Universe is beginning to seem a lot less probable than it once did given that there are so many sites on which it could have arisen but apparently didn’t or didn’t make it to interstellar communicating. (The systems we have seen also serve to highlight what many planetary scientists now believe that our solar system is rather exceptional, with small rocky planets close to the sun, gas rich planets further out, in stable nearly circular orbits and with relatively slow orbital velocity, sweeping up asteroids and comets that could cause endless trouble for the inner planets. In other systems, gas giants are observed much closer in to the star, and in others, rocky planets are tidally locked to the star.)
On the other hand, if intelligent life is common but only up to a point then life on Earth has not yet reached that point, but presumably it will soon, since in several hundred years from now, Humans themselves will be properly established in galactic space. If intelligences had started to get going pretty much all around the galaxy in the centuries before our ascent, then what spooky thing happened to all of them to make them fail, and will happen to us? This Rare Earth hypothesis is voiced in two ways: either rare, because of the immense number of improbable things that need to happen for life to get beyond microbes (as in Ward and Brownlee’s book from 2003, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe), or rare, because of the immense number of ways in which life can be extinguished not just from our own activity but from the nature of the universe we are in.
The first way of looking at life’s rarity is concerned with probabilities that can only be guessed since we have just one example of life to go on. The second, however, is more informative because it is a matter of observation. It may not matter how likely life is to arise or how intelligent you are if space is fundamentally hostile to life spreading, and only coincidences can protect it from the many extinction threats to its expansion into space (we will come back to this idea of coincidence in life)..."
"...Coincidence numbers apply throughout the universe, so we should expect unusual correlations at every level of magnification, in groups of galaxies, within and around galaxies, in groups of stars, within and around individual stars, within and on planetary bodies and so on down to molecules and subatomic particles. Consider Hydrogen oxide – water. If it were not for the 'accidental' hydrogen bonding between molecules which enables it to be water rather than a gas and which gives it the bonding structure to dissolve a range of other molecules it would not have the useful properties it has to enable life to develop. Another example of such coincidental effects is the way phosphorous is used in living systems. Phosphorous is not very abundant, is mostly stored in rocks and is difficult to extract for use. Yet life chose phosphorous as its key element for reproduction (as well as energy production in cells). The strands of DNA use the electrostatic possibilities of Phosphate to make the DNA strand because two oxygen atoms link in a linear way to sugars to make the backbone on which the nucleotide 'rungs' are attached, while the third provides extra charge to keep the DNA static in solution so that reactions can take place in a regular way.
But consider too, as the universe expands, then the scope for coincidence at larger magnifications increases..."
"...Recall our discussion about coincidences and the difference between a type 1 and type 2 coincidence. Type 2 connections are how awareness drives evolution more quickly than one might expect, because evolution supports organisms that learn to profit from accident, to use their pre-loading (alleles, for example) to become more successful (this is not quite the same thing as learning through experience). It is easy to trace successful tactics from bacteria to humans in the way organisms learn to be less rigid in their programming. There is, in fact, a point where this use of accident becomes the accelerating engine of the evolution of life. Channels of development appear because the pre-loading is the equivalent of information appearing in the mind before it makes a decision. It is where memory is the anticipated truth...
It is the cosmologies of people that are involved in the realisation and even the actual selection of the kinds of event for which probability does not help bring about. Our cosmologies are the reason why at least some events at the human narrative level occur. So while the type 2 coincidences may be just a higher level emergent phenomenon, there is no doubt that they can reach down into the bottom layer, as it were, of probability and produce outcomes not predicted in that bottom layer, that would never emerge out of it. Since consciousness is a continual evolution of its history, it finds meaning in observations precisely because they connect backwards and forwards in time...
Going back to my bringing coffee cups from the future into my room. If the universe is split by this action into coffee cup and coffee cup-less room universes (in Gödel’s solution) there is still the problem of how to explain the coffee cup in the split off universe; it has precisely the same antecedents as yours. Time-line separation as a result of actions from the future does not solve the problem of where the influence comes from for at least one of the universes. If it did there would be no reason for the split. An explanation must be found further back in the past – the same past, in fact, for each universe. (Another reason to expect the continual realignment of probabilities in the past.)..."
The Cosmology of People and the time travel solution: An Astrobiogical Solution
While supporters of the principle of mediocrity (that we are completely average and live in an average universe with an average number of civilisations of average lifetimes) find this possibility comforting, it can be read the other way. Other intelligent life in the Universe is beginning to seem a lot less probable than it once did given that there are so many sites on which it could have arisen but apparently didn’t or didn’t make it to interstellar communicating. (The systems we have seen also serve to highlight what many planetary scientists now believe that our solar system is rather exceptional, with small rocky planets close to the sun, gas rich planets further out, in stable nearly circular orbits and with relatively slow orbital velocity, sweeping up asteroids and comets that could cause endless trouble for the inner planets. In other systems, gas giants are observed much closer in to the star, and in others, rocky planets are tidally locked to the star.)
On the other hand, if intelligent life is common but only up to a point then life on Earth has not yet reached that point, but presumably it will soon, since in several hundred years from now, Humans themselves will be properly established in galactic space. If intelligences had started to get going pretty much all around the galaxy in the centuries before our ascent, then what spooky thing happened to all of them to make them fail, and will happen to us? This Rare Earth hypothesis is voiced in two ways: either rare, because of the immense number of improbable things that need to happen for life to get beyond microbes (as in Ward and Brownlee’s book from 2003, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe), or rare, because of the immense number of ways in which life can be extinguished not just from our own activity but from the nature of the universe we are in.
The first way of looking at life’s rarity is concerned with probabilities that can only be guessed since we have just one example of life to go on. The second, however, is more informative because it is a matter of observation. It may not matter how likely life is to arise or how intelligent you are if space is fundamentally hostile to life spreading, and only coincidences can protect it from the many extinction threats to its expansion into space (we will come back to this idea of coincidence in life)..."
"...Coincidence numbers apply throughout the universe, so we should expect unusual correlations at every level of magnification, in groups of galaxies, within and around galaxies, in groups of stars, within and around individual stars, within and on planetary bodies and so on down to molecules and subatomic particles. Consider Hydrogen oxide – water. If it were not for the 'accidental' hydrogen bonding between molecules which enables it to be water rather than a gas and which gives it the bonding structure to dissolve a range of other molecules it would not have the useful properties it has to enable life to develop. Another example of such coincidental effects is the way phosphorous is used in living systems. Phosphorous is not very abundant, is mostly stored in rocks and is difficult to extract for use. Yet life chose phosphorous as its key element for reproduction (as well as energy production in cells). The strands of DNA use the electrostatic possibilities of Phosphate to make the DNA strand because two oxygen atoms link in a linear way to sugars to make the backbone on which the nucleotide 'rungs' are attached, while the third provides extra charge to keep the DNA static in solution so that reactions can take place in a regular way.
But consider too, as the universe expands, then the scope for coincidence at larger magnifications increases..."
"...Recall our discussion about coincidences and the difference between a type 1 and type 2 coincidence. Type 2 connections are how awareness drives evolution more quickly than one might expect, because evolution supports organisms that learn to profit from accident, to use their pre-loading (alleles, for example) to become more successful (this is not quite the same thing as learning through experience). It is easy to trace successful tactics from bacteria to humans in the way organisms learn to be less rigid in their programming. There is, in fact, a point where this use of accident becomes the accelerating engine of the evolution of life. Channels of development appear because the pre-loading is the equivalent of information appearing in the mind before it makes a decision. It is where memory is the anticipated truth...
It is the cosmologies of people that are involved in the realisation and even the actual selection of the kinds of event for which probability does not help bring about. Our cosmologies are the reason why at least some events at the human narrative level occur. So while the type 2 coincidences may be just a higher level emergent phenomenon, there is no doubt that they can reach down into the bottom layer, as it were, of probability and produce outcomes not predicted in that bottom layer, that would never emerge out of it. Since consciousness is a continual evolution of its history, it finds meaning in observations precisely because they connect backwards and forwards in time...
Going back to my bringing coffee cups from the future into my room. If the universe is split by this action into coffee cup and coffee cup-less room universes (in Gödel’s solution) there is still the problem of how to explain the coffee cup in the split off universe; it has precisely the same antecedents as yours. Time-line separation as a result of actions from the future does not solve the problem of where the influence comes from for at least one of the universes. If it did there would be no reason for the split. An explanation must be found further back in the past – the same past, in fact, for each universe. (Another reason to expect the continual realignment of probabilities in the past.)..."
The Cosmology of People and the time travel solution: An Astrobiogical Solution
For more information on the project please click here
Andrew
Kennedy is an independent researcher into consciousness and the
philosophy of science, the founder of the Chronolith Project and
originator of the Chronolith experiment (to which the Cosmology of
People refers). He studied Chemistry at Edinburgh University and later
studied Chinese, Daoism and Daoist medicine, translated two Chinese
philosophy classics and wrote an original tract on the evolution of
human personality types, published in 2009 (Essential Personalities),
and currently writes about the prospects of interplanetary travel.
He also designed games and held a patent in a switching device. He is a Fellow of the BIS and a member of the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology (SSoCIA).
He also designed games and held a patent in a switching device. He is a Fellow of the BIS and a member of the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology (SSoCIA).
©2020
Briefing Leaders