Astral Codex Ten

Earth

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Earth

Article

Earth is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 30, 2021 and March 27, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Mann names each chapter after one of the four elements: Earth (food)”; “It measured that the Earth was not moving relative to the ether”; “EARTH: You have two minutes. Anyone who wants out needs to get out now”. It most often appears alongside EA, RCTs, XKCD.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: April 30, 2021
  • Last seen: March 27, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
The big shift Vogt makes to his contemporaries’ flavor of environmentalism is to turn from the specifics of racism, classism, and eugenics to generalized misanthropy. His subsequent writings – a report on the guano-producing bird population in Peru, surveys of ecology across South America, and especially his best-selling book Road to Survival – borrow from his predecessors’ racist-tinged doom-heralding and expand on it by chastising all humans, rich and poor, white and non-white alike. According to Mann, Vogt argues that "consumption driven by capitalism and rising human numbers is the ultimate cause of most of the world’s ecological problems, and only dramatic reductions in human fertility and economic activity will prevent a worldwide calamity." Crucial to this is the concept of "carrying capacity" – the idea that the earth has a fixed capacity to support human and animal life.
When I was in elementary school in Seattle, my fourth-grade class was gifted a fishtank of salmon eggs to incubate and eventually return upstream, to teach us about the salmon life-cycle. The tank was packed with eggs, and once they hatched, it looked like salmon pandemonium in there, with barely enough room for the fry to move around without bumping into each other. In Vogt’s zero-sum view, the earth is like that salmon tank on a planetary scale; you can’t add new fish without displacing existing ones or diminishing their quality of life. Since Vogt sees the mid-twentieth century earth as being on the precipice of surpassing, if not already having surpassed, that capacity, he views everything being done to increase the numbers and consumption power of humans as a threat to this fragile ecosystem.
Borlaug’s section, in contrast, begins not in the rarefied world of middle-class New York, but on the unforgiving prairie of Saude, Iowa, which his poor Norwegian immigrant family tries to farm. He comes of age at roughly the same time as Vogt, but his early life may as well be mid-1800s Little House on the Prairie: Borlaug and his siblings literally have to walk three miles in the snow to get to their one-room schoolhouse. Fortunately, he is freed from a life of subsistence farming and given the chance to go to high school and college by his family’s purchase of a Ford tractor, which nicely sets up his lifelong optimism about the ability of technology to improve lives. While attending college in Minneapolis at the height of the Great Depression, Borlaug sees a crowd of striking dairy farmers being beaten by police and National Guardsmen for protesting the drop in the price of milk by surrounding a scab-driven milk truck. "Not all of the shouting men were farmers, Borlaug realized," Mann writes. "Some of them were just hungry – famished men, women, and children, almost maddened by want." Where Vogt might have curled his lip in distaste and gone home to write a pamphlet about this scene as an illustration of humanity’s taxing the earth’s carrying capacity and reaping the consequences, for Borlaug this was the catalyst for homing in on solving the problem of hunger. Mann: "Something must be done, he thought. Those famished people were ready to tear apart the world, and who could blame them? Here began, or so he said afterward, the work that would make him the original Wizard."
Highlights From The Comments On Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism
July 28, 2022 · Original source
There were other experimental problems too. The Michelson-Morley experiment was supposed how fast the Earth was moving relative to the ether. It measured that the Earth was not moving relative to the ether at all. At the very least, the experiment should have been able to see Earth's orbital motion, which points in a different direction at different times of the year.
Turing Test
March 27, 2023 · Original source
The year is 2028, and this is Turing Test!, the game show that separates man from machine! Our star tonight is Dr. Andrea Mann, a generative linguist at University of California, Berkeley. She’ll face five hidden contestants, code-named Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Spirit. One will be a human telling the truth about their humanity. One will be a human pretending to be an AI. One will be an AI telling the truth about their artificiality. One will be an AI pretending to be human. And one will be a total wild card. Dr. Mann, you have one hour, starting now.
MANN: My first question is for Earth. Tell me about yourself.
EARTH: My name is Maria Kolorova. I’m a 29 year old mother of two, living in Schenectady, New York. In my spare time, I like to cook and play RPGs.