A quarter of the northern sky reveals 4.4 million galaxies. We still can’t find dark matter, but we may have been looking in the wrong place all along, but the thing we think dark matter might be made of may not exist anyway. That said, establishing what we know we do not know is always a good start. Let’s face it: according to the first story there, we haven’t even gotten good at looking up yet. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” said Stewart Brand. And it turns out there’s a film about Stewart Brand, whom I met very briefly once about 22 years ago (same day I met Thomas Dolby), entitled WE ARE AS GODS.
And what we do with our godlike powers is to get an AI-generated Andy Warhol to narrate a tv documentary about his life. Not actually a first, mind you: AI was used to generate a few lines-worth of Anthony Bourdain’s voice last year. That said, if there were any Cosmists left, they would be delighted at anything that looked like a first step towards bringing total planetary calculation ability towards their goal of bringing our ancestors back from the dead.
I personally feel like the Cosmists would have loved Hilma af Klint:
And this piece at Artsy showcases the work of nine female artists celebrating her legacy. I discovered Agnes Pelton and Megan Rooney through this piece, and so today is a good day.
So now I’m going to make another coffee and go back to reading How to Destroy the Universe: And 34 other really interesting uses of physics by Paul Parsons (UK) (US) because we only get good at stuff by practising.