Today's muse, someone must have written about this, but I've not seen it. A species equivalent of the Doppler effect, the idea of sound or light "squashing up" as it moves towards and observer, and "stretching out" as it moves away from an observer. Or to put it another way, the relationship of the event to the observer can allow the observer to calculate both speed and direction of the phenomena as it relates to the observer.
Let's say, that the observer is not a person, but a species, let's use the human species as an example, and assume that the species is in some kind of evolutionary motion. Due to its scale, and that fact that we are observing from within, we probably, maybe even definitionally, can't see our own motion, but we might be able to see a difference in evolutionary speed, between ourselves and other species, what would that look like? First off, is there species based evolutionary motion? If so, is evolutionary motion different between species? If so, can that difference in speed be measured? If so, will it have attributes of a Doppler type effect? If so, could we intuit the direction of the human species?
Last night I watch, not for the first time, the eleventh and last episode of the famous 10 hour BBC series, Planet Earth, the episode called "Ocean Deep". The closing shot of the entire series was a close up of a great whale cruising alone in the ocean, and the shot pulled back, and back, and back, eventually showing the great whale from a distance of 30 or 40 miles away, and a few miles high, still barely visible as a speck in the great ocean. Perhaps there is an evolutionary consciousness, that is protected in times of crisis, and resides in dolphins or whales. Perhaps millions of years ago consciousness walked this earth, and had to retreat into one of these forms.
Let's say, that the observer is not a person, but a species, let's use the human species as an example, and assume that the species is in some kind of evolutionary motion. Due to its scale, and that fact that we are observing from within, we probably, maybe even definitionally, can't see our own motion, but we might be able to see a difference in evolutionary speed, between ourselves and other species, what would that look like? First off, is there species based evolutionary motion? If so, is evolutionary motion different between species? If so, can that difference in speed be measured? If so, will it have attributes of a Doppler type effect? If so, could we intuit the direction of the human species?
Last night I watch, not for the first time, the eleventh and last episode of the famous 10 hour BBC series, Planet Earth, the episode called "Ocean Deep". The closing shot of the entire series was a close up of a great whale cruising alone in the ocean, and the shot pulled back, and back, and back, eventually showing the great whale from a distance of 30 or 40 miles away, and a few miles high, still barely visible as a speck in the great ocean. Perhaps there is an evolutionary consciousness, that is protected in times of crisis, and resides in dolphins or whales. Perhaps millions of years ago consciousness walked this earth, and had to retreat into one of these forms.
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