by Roberto
From Life at the Edge of Sight by Scott Chimileski & Roberto Kolter
Some years ago, during our writing of Life at the Edge of Sight, Scott Chimileski and I wanted to present two images that displayed emergent properties of organisms expressing collective behavior. We came up with this pair of photographs, whose scales differ by seven orders of magnitude. I have always found that pondering upon the small and the large brings both solace and perspective.
On the top, in an image spanning half a centimeter, you see a fraction of a plasmodial network of the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, in its search for food. Within a single cell, thousands of nuclei work in concert with the cytoskeleton to build a dynamic network capable of efficiently searching for food, while also keeping track of terrain already searched. A remarkable emergent property of this organism's developmental cycle.
On the bottom, in an image spanning fifty kilometers, is nighttime Boston as seen from the International Space Station. This network, built by human collective behavior that began nearly four hundred years ago and that persists to this day, follows fundamental principles just like those that guide the movements of P. polycephalum as it searches for food. Cities are a remarkable emergent property of humans working together.
Let your attention rest on these images and let your imagination take you wherever it may. What do you think? How do you feel?
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