It is not yet 5 a.m. under a clear dark sky and I have made the decision to write this note rather than to do some star-gazing ( I have one of Al Nagler's "Televue Ranger" at my disposal here with a few of his lenses well-suited to it.)
I would like to defend the thesis that the extinguishing of intelligent life on the only planet with such intelligence in the only galaxy with such life forms would result in the demise of Cepheid variables as instances of a type but not variable stars as instances of a type. Nor would it have the consequence that there had, in fact, never been Cepheid variables. What is not clear to me is how to defend the claim that those variable stars would remain a suitable means to measure intergalactic distances in light-years or in AU ( astronomical units ) or in parsecs.
The need to defend the Hubble metric stars is in the interest of a far more important claim, to wit, that the quasars remain whatever they are or were, that magnetars remain a poor location for the re-emergence of intelligent life forms and that dark energy remains whatever it is.
The anecdotal side of this is my reading of the poetry of Alain Grandbois. His "étoiles" were not the stars of Galileo in much the same sense that Heidegger was arguing about with Husserl at about the same time and which was later repeated by Arendt late in her book, "The Human Condition".
Husserl began in astronomy, but by the time of Hubble's discoveries, Heidegger had him convinced that the Galilean viewpoint somehow perverted our relation to the heavens above ... perhaps not during daylight hours or when under heavy cloud, but certainly during clear moonless nights.
Not too long after Husserl's death, a Black Brandt rocket was sent aloft to determine a direction of a stellar x-ray source. Consider the possibility that this experiment and subsequent orbital parallax studies had revealed an unstable near-by star, that, say, Antares were in fact smaller than Betelgeuse and closer than Sirius. Suppose, further, that we were able to surmise that a minor cosmic event, a routine supernova, was about to wipe out this small home planet of intelligent life but that unbeknownst to us, it would also be wiping out not only the only such life in this galaxy, but also such life in any galaxy including any location since the Big Bang itself and, further, that due to a quirk of Dark Energy and cosmic expansion, that magnetars were about to become FAR more common, reducing any prospect for subsequent rational beings to evolve anywhere in this universe.
One motivation that I have for this line of musing is the thought that Strong AI has not brought philosophers to shift their view of theory makers closer to that of their view of computing machines, but rather it has helped to shift their view of us to one in which we are seen as closer to other mammalian species (specifically, cetacean and primate) and led us to puzzle over crows and octopi.
The theory of evolution and the new evidence for ubiquitous planets and a far higher number of brown dwarfs should motivate investigation by way of thought experiments as to why solving puzzles about ones more global, as-it-were, "wide" environment, suggests the rationality of theorizing for problem-solving beings.
The Japanese, prior to enforced contact with the Western powers, were content with their "River of Stars". Fording rivers in flood and bridging rivers were both major concerns in Japan, as was boating uneventfully across rivers. The star-river, our Milky Way, the "galaxy" of the Greeks, is a trope of sorts in a great deal of extant Japanese poetry. Given to poetry competitions, the Japanese thinker was not without problems to solve concerning the mention of stars in either linked verse or witty verse. Rules abound and these rules themselves made the tasks of poesis problematic. Each time the practice became merely formulaic, something of a revolution occurred, and the very possibilities of the poetic praxis were re-thought through the emergence of a new poetic product, the last cycle, perhaps, having been that of the haiku of Shiki.
In my own work as a writer, I am beset with a scenario in which a cloud-bedecked planet is inhabited by those who do not know why sometimes the normally red fundament above glows strangely orange and why they perish of such truly horrible diseases although there are myths of happier ends in former times. These beings, we would say, would be inhabiting a planet in orbit about a centre of mass in common with a nearby red dwarf that, in turn, is in an orbital dance with a very unstable red giant that is about to shed its first outer layers in what we know to be a very common pattern in this universe.
[ to be continued ]
