Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context

This book is one of several on the societal impact of spaceflight in the NASA History Series, and is directly relevant to NASA s mandate to "provide for long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes." Much of NASA s work may be seen as filling in the gaps in our knowledge of cosmic evolution. Perhaps the largest gap is the still very much open question of whether humans are alone in the universe, and what this means for humanity. We hope this book will stimulate a more serious field of inquiry into how culture and cosmos relate based not only on how we understand our own cultural evolution, but on broader theoretical grounds as well. It is only a first tentative step toward the scientific study of the relationship between cosmic and cultural evolution, of placing the rapidly growing science of cultural evolution within a cosmic context, and urging a greater appreciation of the role that the cosmos should play in our culture. Topics covered include: Cosmic Evolution: State of the Science; Cosmic Evolution: History, Culture, and Human Destiny; Social Evolution: State of the Field; The Evolution of Culture; The Big Burp and the Multiplanetary Mandate; Evo Devo Universe?: A Framework for Speculations on Cosmic Culture; Dangerous Memes; or, What the Pandorans Let Loose; Cosmocultural Evolution: The Coevolution of Culture and Cosmos and the Creation of Cosmic Value; The Intelligent Universe; Life, Mind, and Culture as Fundamental Properties of the Universe; The Value of "L" and the Cosmic Bottleneck; Encoding Our Origins: Communicating the Evolutionary Epic in Interstellar Messages; History and Science after the Chronometric Revolution; Bringing Culture to Cosmos The Postbiological Universe; and Bringing Cosmos to Culture Harlow Shapley and the Uses of Cosmic Evolution.