Saturn and Jupiter once appeared as distant tyrants.
Capricious gods -- bringing chaos among us:
Now they are places we visit.
The power of creative, unbound mind
Is the greatest force in the universe --
In knowing, conquers wayward time's flight.
Eratosthenes first measured the circumference of the earth from the shadows cast by the sun. Today, humanity's fitness to survive will be measured by our ability to conquer that same thermonuclear fusion that casts those shadows. Thus, Prometheus will truly be unbound.
Saturn and Jupiter once appeared as distant tyrants.
Capricious gods -- bringing chaos among us:
Now they are places we visit.
The power of creative, unbound mind
Is the greatest force in the universe --
In knowing, conquers wayward time's flight.
According to a quick search on the Internet there are currently 195 nations on this planet. As of this writing, there are some 7,117 spoken languages, in flux, known as of this time according to the website Ethnologue. This planet will hopefully not continue to be the only home of humanity as we emerge into a new age of space colonization.
The problem, however, is that due to a shared psychotic worldview among supposed intellectual elites, the current trajectory of humanity is doomed to extinction. This is the stark reality facing us. How can we be sure that this is the case?
There is a concept that is much abused known as the carrying capacity of the earth. The notion is quite simple, however as the old saw goes, the devil is in the details. The organization, of which I was formerly an active member, associated with LaRouche, had a a definition called "relative population potential." Much like the number of languages this metric is also constantly in flux and is not a simple quantity.
However, it is easily understandable that it may be a possibility that if humanity were to fall below a tipping point there might be no return. We might not be wiped out via global war in a "nuclear winter" but instead by disease in an unstoppable pandemic or perhaps a series of pandemics.
The mission of producing the science required to prevent this must be the lightning rod that brings humanity out of the paranoid worldview of geopolitics. There must be instead a concert of sovereign nations that establish the economic framework for truly ending poverty once and for all on this planet. There is no other viable alternative.
Since the mission of combating disease and aging are anchoring research to reality in biophysics much progress is being made as a result, despite limitations of investigative methods adherence to philosophical biases. The difference with the Quixotic quest for an unverifiable unified field theory of everything in physics is stark in contrast.
I contend that much of the brilliant hypothesizing that created the non Euclidean, Riemannian spacetime manifold geometry is just as applicable, if not more so, to biophysics. In the broadest overview within the domain of the biosphere we encounter nested sequences of functional dynamic orderings. To seek to bring these into coherence we must locate the progression of evolutionary sequences in capability of nonlinear improvements in energy flux density of negentropy. The biosphere itself is bounded by the inorganic and human noetic power analogous to Dirichlet's principle in least action bounding dynamics for topology.
Within that biosphere we can investigate how the divisions of life types adhere to the intake and transformation of useful energy. It is the interaction with the inorganic domain that limits the development of both. For example, the organic carbohydrates that comprise the biosphere require for their dynamic life sustaining elements to be incorporated to resolve their ability to reproduce. Thereby the uptake of phosphorus by mitochondria as catalytic in providing energy reduction by the enzymatic framework of ATP was evolved for the different branches of cellular life.
One intriguing direction would be developing a rigorous geometrical framework for the protein "interactome." There exist multiply connected functions within that interactome and there are coherent classes of cases of proteins acting as singularities that bridge them. For example, the scaffolding functions of actin and myosin might be bridged in some cases by multifunctional proteins interacting with signaling entities like sonic hedgehog. There appears to be a scale of closer integrated cellular functions enmeshed with these multifunctional proteins with some that are referred to as moonlighting seemingly unrelated such functions. Topologically, these disparate states might be thought as Riemannian non deformable surfaces of higher ordered connectedness.
However within such extended topologies there also exist the equivalence of multi sheeted polarities whereby the multifunctional proteins exhibit the characteristic of operating as branch points. This physical geometric framework was supplied toward the end of 19th century by Riemann and Abel among others. The problem is that the further development of this physical geometry was vitiated by the usage of the statistics of entropy as a fundamental principle for scientific research.
It should have been apparent that a negentropic higher ordering principle contradicted the materialist assumptions of limited resources. This proceeds from the top down via human creative breakthroughs that reorganize and redefine what constitutes resources for economic survival of society. That principle of moving beyond the relatively fixed limits of reproduction within that economic topology is equivalent to the emergence of life from the fixed limits of the inorganic domain. It is representative of a higher harmonic class of ordering.
In that context, I came across a rather startling bit of brilliant research bearing upon morphogenesis yesterday evening. The apparent random process of cellular reproduction are controlled by "morphogens" that admit self organization in embryogenesis. It is my contention that such agents of self organization apply as a limiting principle to the entirety of the domain of biophysical interactions. Thus we see cohesin and topoisomerase functions operating upon the mitotic DNA reproductive process, for instance. This represents a principle of self similar harmonic ordering that "closes" the boundaries of structure of the biophysical domain that Dirichlet provided for compact manifolds.