Art and Science

Pretty interesting discussion between Cormac McCarthy, Werner Herzog and Lawrence Krauss on the intersections of art and science, even if they all pretty much agree that humanity will wither and die and that that’s a fairly okay thing.

Anyway, I liked this. Typical Herzogian stocism:

Mr. HERZOG: It does, yes, because yes, because you have to imagine that only 73, 74 thousand years ago a gigantic volcanic explosion took place in Sumatra, which almost wiped out the entire human race. That was the so-called bottleneck, still disputed among scientists.

But the population, the number of human beings shrank to under 10,000, maybe only 2,000, started to recover, and then, of course, there was the Ice Age, you have to imagine 35,000 years ago. So almost all of Europe was covered by ice, the Alp mountains under 3,000 meters, which means 9,000 feet, of ice.

Further north, ice had bound so much water that you could walk as a hunter from Paris to London dry – because the level of the ocean was 100 meters lower. So you could walk across the British Islands.

And a completely, utterly different world, and yet this world, which was filled with wooly rhinos, mammoths, lions in southern France, all of a sudden shows us this is where we came from, where our spirit, our nature, modern humans all began.

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