We are all made of star-stuff

Humans evolved over the past 10 million years from our primate cousins into the upright walking, large brained animals they are today. The ability to recognize patterns and understand the future of those patterns, to predict the future outcome of a situation from experience, kept the human race one step ahead of extinction. 10,000 years ago, cave paintings expressed the patterns daily life of humans: hunting, living, and dying. Patterns among the stars were explained with stories and gods were assigned to the planets in the sky to explain the almost seemingly random cosmic phenomenon the heavenly bodies create. Pattern recognition is built into human's evolved brain to find patterns and assign meaning to them. In the past it was a matter of survival.

Today, pattern recognition by humans is the cosmos' way of beginning to understand itself. Humans, being part of the cosmos, appear to be the best way for the universe to begin to understand its own history. Humans are all part of a grand atomic reincarnation, breathing the same oxygen that dinosaurs breathed millions of years ago, wearing gold jewelry made of a heavy metal forged in the heart of stars long dead. Crazy stuff! And yet, even the smallest patterns follow rules, just as the patterns of the grand cosmos follow rules.


Everyday urbanism and its study "reveals a fabric of space and time defined by a complex realm of social practices - a conjuncture of accident, desire, and habit." How can an entire culture be defined? Something so large and complex, constantly changing, constantly moving, must be studied in snapshots. The urban fabric is an x-ray of society, showing in one snapshot every single piece of cultural human existence, from life to death. When urbanists intrude into the urban fabric and deploy their own ideas and designs, they risk creating a dark spot on that x-ray. Like a physician transplanting a new organ into a patient, the urbanist must totally understand the secrets of the city, lest the new transplant be rejected and die unused by the city. The secrets to the city lie in its patterns. Humans have evolved to identify and assign meaning to those patterns. But the scientific method, not philosophy, is the only way to truly understand those meanings. We are all the cosmos, and we are all subject to its laws and patterns, from the finite to the infinite.