What if We Evolved in Space?
UP.
Incense: Aromatic obviously. Otherwise, what’s the point? Oh! Yes. There is another point. Incense wafts upward toward the heavens, defying gravity, leaving what we know as our Earth-bound, gravitational home.
And those touchdown, goal, and homer salutes by players pointing skyward: UP.
UP is an important concept, isn’t it? Must have been so from the beginning. Look at where we place most deities. Look at the signs of the Zodiac. Think Heaven and note its position relative to Hell.
UP^. Redefining it got Copernicus’ book banned and Galileo into house arrest. Redefining it got Giordano Bruno burned at the stake. The Authority conditioned by centuries of Ptolemaic geocentric thinking just couldn’t tolerate any confusion about UP. God was up; Satan, below. UP was sacred; UP was Heaven: Olympus, Mount Kailash, Mount Meru, and many other sacred mountaintops, also.
The whole UP-thing seems understandable in light of our gravitational setting. We have always lived in the well of gravity. For us, UP is any direction that points away from Earth’s center, directions opposite on opposite sides of the sphere. That center is the center for all Earth dwellers. But what if we had evolved freely floating in space. Then what? No UP, of course. No preferred direction to point to after a touchdown, goal, or homer—if we could participate in such or in similar sport in an Up-less world. *
Humans without an UP would be different, wouldn’t they?** Think of having no preferred direction. It isn’t just that we evolved in a gravity well, it’s that we evolved with spatial preferences because of that well. We seem to demand a clear spatial orientation, and we superimpose it on other concepts, such as how one should orient a flat map of the world and orient a life.
What if there had also been no electromagnetic control on our evolution and cultural development? What would we do if we couldn’t orient ourselves to the field’s poles? Could we have evolved without physical orientation in the complete freedom of space emptied of direction provided by gravitational and electromagnetic fields? Would our thinking have been radically different from what it is today? Obviously.
In a directionless world, would we all think we lie “within the deity”? Would we encompass the deity? Or, given a finite body, even one freely floating without a physical orientation, would we still futilely seek a direction—or a charismatic leader.
Are all of our orientations, even those centered on affinities for one kind of thinking or another, extensions of our need to find a preferred direction in a world of vectors? And, one more, is our motive “to rise” innate because “down” always encounters a barrier composed of matter that warps into a well the space around it? UP, by contrast, offers limitless freedom, or in the words of John Lennon, “above us only sky.”
In the absence of “up” and “down” would we still direct ourselves toward goals? Having evolved in a cosmos of vectors, are humans innately inclined to follow those who “point the way”? Would we still follow charismatic leaders? Is true individualism difficult because physical forces in the cosmos demand that we follow?
* Earth’s equatorial marker is defined only by the planet’s spinning about a pole.
**Our bodies might be spherical or blob-like (Fashion would be simple, and catwalks of dieting models unnecessary) and our phylum more like a brainless, gutless xenoturbillida than a vertebrate.
UP.
Incense: Aromatic obviously. Otherwise, what’s the point? Oh! Yes. There is another point. Incense wafts upward toward the heavens, defying gravity, leaving what we know as our Earth-bound, gravitational home.
And those touchdown, goal, and homer salutes by players pointing skyward: UP.
UP is an important concept, isn’t it? Must have been so from the beginning. Look at where we place most deities. Look at the signs of the Zodiac. Think Heaven and note its position relative to Hell.
UP^. Redefining it got Copernicus’ book banned and Galileo into house arrest. Redefining it got Giordano Bruno burned at the stake. The Authority conditioned by centuries of Ptolemaic geocentric thinking just couldn’t tolerate any confusion about UP. God was up; Satan, below. UP was sacred; UP was Heaven: Olympus, Mount Kailash, Mount Meru, and many other sacred mountaintops, also.
The whole UP-thing seems understandable in light of our gravitational setting. We have always lived in the well of gravity. For us, UP is any direction that points away from Earth’s center, directions opposite on opposite sides of the sphere. That center is the center for all Earth dwellers. But what if we had evolved freely floating in space. Then what? No UP, of course. No preferred direction to point to after a touchdown, goal, or homer—if we could participate in such or in similar sport in an Up-less world. *
Humans without an UP would be different, wouldn’t they?** Think of having no preferred direction. It isn’t just that we evolved in a gravity well, it’s that we evolved with spatial preferences because of that well. We seem to demand a clear spatial orientation, and we superimpose it on other concepts, such as how one should orient a flat map of the world and orient a life.
What if there had also been no electromagnetic control on our evolution and cultural development? What would we do if we couldn’t orient ourselves to the field’s poles? Could we have evolved without physical orientation in the complete freedom of space emptied of direction provided by gravitational and electromagnetic fields? Would our thinking have been radically different from what it is today? Obviously.
In a directionless world, would we all think we lie “within the deity”? Would we encompass the deity? Or, given a finite body, even one freely floating without a physical orientation, would we still futilely seek a direction—or a charismatic leader.
Are all of our orientations, even those centered on affinities for one kind of thinking or another, extensions of our need to find a preferred direction in a world of vectors? And, one more, is our motive “to rise” innate because “down” always encounters a barrier composed of matter that warps into a well the space around it? UP, by contrast, offers limitless freedom, or in the words of John Lennon, “above us only sky.”
In the absence of “up” and “down” would we still direct ourselves toward goals? Having evolved in a cosmos of vectors, are humans innately inclined to follow those who “point the way”? Would we still follow charismatic leaders? Is true individualism difficult because physical forces in the cosmos demand that we follow?
* Earth’s equatorial marker is defined only by the planet’s spinning about a pole.
**Our bodies might be spherical or blob-like (Fashion would be simple, and catwalks of dieting models unnecessary) and our phylum more like a brainless, gutless xenoturbillida than a vertebrate.
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