Interesting.. the reverse for me.

I wasn't raised to be religious and was so interested in science that I adopted a kind of default atheism. I saw religion as one of many strange things some people in my community did. To later find out how varied and yet concordant in their cores the religions are, of people long-separated.. it's reminiscent of multiple experiments that support the same hypothesis. But what was the hypothesis? Then, I started reading.. Houston Smith's The World's Religions first, and then trying original texts from each. I ended up reading the Old Testament and found it a great source of enlightenment on the human condition. Then again with Greek Mythologies, ancient mystery religions. The Eastern tradition the same. I find it impossible to separate the study of psychology and history from a deep appreciation of the religions. The whole situation recurses with prehistorical religions and cultures and the mentality our ancestors had.. here I found Ken Wilber's Up From Eden essential for framing.

To call religions right or wrong is to me a categorical mistake. They were pragmatic and serviceable for their day and they are part of our history. They are in conflict just like we are in conflict. The existence of two cultures in and out of conflict and peace with each other is not a demonstration of their non-existence or non-relevance, but the opposite.

FTFY

The magnetic fields goes out of the atmosphere.. if the spider for some reason can't control its ascent, I'd guess it goes all the way up? Sounds like a new micro-satellite technology!

very cool to see more empirical work on this!

I used the basic resonance model to figure this out for humans.. seems to work well:

    https://sites.google.com/site/pablomayrgundter/mind

Cheers,
Pablo

I'm guessing that's simply a function of limited technology, i.e., "today" that's just too much data to store. But in keeping with technologies amazing storage capacity growth, it's only a matter of time before the content is also recorded and archived. It's just too tempting not to.

Compare to Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature, which: "meticulously traces the emergence of this special causal capacity from simple thermodynamics to self-organizing dynamics to living and mental dynamics" (Amazon).

(Deacon's book is good, though has been criticized as drawing heavily from prior work: "This work has attracted controversy, as reviewers[2] have suggested that many of the ideas in it were first published by Alicia Juarrero in Dynamics of Action (1999, MIT Press) and by Evan Thompson in Mind in Life (2007, Belknap Press and Harvard University Press) yet these works were not cited or referenced by Deacon." (Wikipedia))

Or compare to Stuart Kauffman's Origins of Order, which Deacon cites (and it seems the two are in communication). Kauffman's notion is that there are implicit geometries to energetic forms which in the situation of excess total energy can locally channel a system towards structure and shape that bias, and perhaps belie, the notions of random variation and natural selection being the primary drivers for the creation of structures in living beings.

Neat to see this coming to the east coast/MIT.

Article says predecessors may have evolved around the predecessor star to our Sun, but given the time spans involved why just our sun? If early bacteria were ejected into space by vulcanism, solar wind would accelerate them outwards to ~400km/s, or about .1% speed of light. At that speed, you could cross the galaxy in a scant 100 million years.

Depends on what happens to low-weight particles at the heliopause though, especially if they've become ionized during travel.