Exurb1a – 10,000 More Years of the Scientific Method

Exurb1a – 10,000 More Years of the Scientific Method Lyrics

Artist: Exurb1a
Song: 10,000 More Years of the Scientific Method

〈intro〉
It’s funny, isn’t it?
We’ve got all of this technology
We’ve got all of these clever machines

But if anyone actually asks, like “how does any of it work at all?”
Often the best reply you’ll generally get is
“err… yeah, well, probably someone built a box…
And a wizard spluffed in it…

And now it’s magic… and that’s how technology works…
Everything’s just made of wizard jizz”
And that’s cool, that’s cool
But yeah, i just want to put a bit of an alternate answer out there like…

Yeah, technology is really complex and the world is really complex
But ovеrall, as it happens… actually…
〈chorus〉
The world isn’t wizard jizz

Technology’s not magic, it’s just
Sciеntists on acid or applied mathematics
And every piece of technology from satellites to shoes
Strated in someone’s f#cking head, for example

Segways: not magic
Fizzy cola: not magic
Spacy science place: not magic
Magic marker: not magic

It all just relies on foundational physical principles
Which we’ll briefly discuss… now
Hey, this sure keeps time good, right?
Is it clockwork or what?

Is it just tiny dragons all tapping their talons to edm?
No, it’s quartz
And we know if you electrify quartz, it puts out regular vibrations
And we know 32,768 of these vibrations is a second

So if you build a circuit that counts those vibrations, you can keep accurate time
And you just multiply these together until you get hours, days, and years
All thanks to little white crystals that aren’t magic
Hey, not all that shabby

Is this some kind of wizardry?
Nope, just good f#cking science and piezoelectricity
Or… er… yeah, computers, that has to be magic right?
No

Get sand, purify sand, make silicon ingot, make them wafer thin, do some fancy ion sh#t, then etching, electroplating, layering and stuff
And now what you’ve got is a little slab of silicon, packed with transistors, which are really just tiny little electricity gates
And you put them all together in such a way that they form an electronic mind
Consisting usually of: stuff what goes in, control thing, thinking thing, stuff what remembers sh#t and stuff what comes out

A computer is just a little prison for electrons, where we train them to solve problems really quickly
And this all relies on the principles of subatomic physics
Meaning that most common use of quantum mechanics in the 21st century
Is undeniably, most likely, demonstrably

p#rnography
You might also likehow does thatt fly? it’s simple, right?
Air under wings makes a wing glide, right?
Throw in a big f#cking spinning thing, right?

And if not, maybe some wizardry?
No, flight’s a result of a difference in pressure above the wing versus below the wing
And the cool thing is that if you make sure the pressure is higher below the wing than above…
Then lo yo, that’s flight, right?

Yeah, also what the hell is an engine?
Well, internal combustion is essentially the process of turning fuel into motion, using f#cking explosions
In a four stroke engine, gas and air go into the engine
And the gas and air is squeezed into an itty-bitty space

A little spark strarts a little explosion, forcing the piston to move
Then the excess gas is released
And that energy is turned into rotational motion using a crankshaft
And this is generally thanks to gasoline

Which is in turn thanks to dead plants, from swamps millions of years ago (not dinosaurs)
Further illustrating that… like…
〈chorus〉
The world isn’t wizard jizz

Just weird and prohibitive
And really, technology is just nature we taught to do cool tricks
And to be honest, can you imagine how utterly miserable life was before we got around to using the scientific method?
“what’s the meaning of life? and hey, why does my butt hurt?”

“just shut up, invent fire and get the f#ck in the hut burt”
Then die prematurely from and easily curable infection
Got a problem? tough luck, baby! natural selection 🙁
Complex is not a synonym for magic

Everything works somehow
Like a radio, what kind of harry potter sh#t is that?
Well first of all, just imagine the universe is made of interactions
’cause it is

And one of them is electromagnetism
And what radio is, is a certain wavelength of that
And if you vary electric current through a wire you can create vibrations in the electromagnetic field
And if you have something that can pick it up on the other end, and turn those waves back into sound, well that’s that

And those are just physical technologies, what about language?
Well currently there’s about 7000 spoken languages in the world
Some of them use grammatical gender, some don’t
Some are alphabetic, some are pictographic

But the one thing they all have in common is that if you learn one
You can read people’s f#cking minds
And this technology took thousands of years to build
And it’s basically the reason we have modern civilization

And it’s not magic
Most language processing takes place in the cerebral cortex, we think
Adult native speakers usually know about 20,000-35,000 words
But there’s plenty of people who speak multiple languages, so closer to 60,000 words or more

And did we find language at the top of a mountain, or a drawer or some shit?
Oh no, clever dead people gave it to us
And talking of dead people…
The difference between our ancestors, and us?

Well, mainly reason and rationality
Look, there’s a good story about descartes
He was one of the fathers of the scientific method, basically
And one night he had a bunch of whacky dreams

“the conquest of nature
Is to be achieved
Through number
And measure”

And that, surely, has to be one of, if not the most powerfull ideas we’ve ever had
Scientific objectivity
Nature can be understood using mathematics, then controlled using technology
And as long as we remember that the world isn’t in our heads

That the universe has a character…
Well then there may be no limit to what we’ll one day be capable of with technology
Rationality is absurdly powerful
It’s the reason we’re not sitting around in our own excrement

It’s the reason the average high-schooler knows more about the world than the smartest human did not a few hundred years ago
It’s the reason lots of us are living better than every emperor in history
And jesus christ, look at what we’ve done already…
Antibiotics, or mouldy bread in essence, has probably saved about 200,000,000 lives since it was discovered

Your phone has more computing power than all of the computers that nasa used to send humans to the moon
And scientists are now using lasers to listen to black hole collisions billions of years ago via distortions they left in the very fabric of f#cking spacetime itself
Wizards and witches do exist
And they cast spells called ‘research’ usually abusing a magic potion called ‘coffee’

And if we don’t know everything yet, well better to have questions that you can’t answer than answers you can’t question
Don’t you think?
And furthermore, man, i don’t know if we mentioned this… but err…
〈chorus〉

The world isn’t wizard jizz
And maths is where nature lives
Hey, who got us to the moon?
Was it witched or physicists?

And if we met
Well hey, that’d be salient
But they’d still use technology
Science and astronomy

We most likely weren’t dreamt up by zeus in his chariot
We started out as slime and a f#cking prokaryote
The world is complex but when you really look into it
Even biology isn’t magic, not really…

〈abrupt ending so we can lead into the next musical section〉
You know, it’s weird…
We used to build mainly to stay alive and to make other people stop being alive
But then we started building stuff to stop from getting bored

And then we started building stuff to work out how things work
And that is the kicker, because the more you know about how stuff works
The more you can build even more clever toys
And we’re getting really good at that now

And my giddy aunt, are strange times ahead
〈outro〉
I don’t know if you were taking notes last century
But we started it not knowing how to fly and we ended it with moon landings, and nukes, and the net

Can you imagine if this century is anywhere near as insane?
Can you imagine the godlike technologies we’ll soon be wielding, good and bad?
How about affordable rocket trips, or getting everyone in the world online, or a neuroscientific explanation of consciousness, or halfway successful nuclear fusion or fully, truly immersive vr, or the birth of an actual science to combat ageing, or the death of disease, or convincing ai companions, or mass scale automation of labour and administration, or proper spaceships that ride light?
The universe is a chess board

Technology works because we’ve started learning the moves are that we can make on the board
And we’re getting better and better at that game all the time
And there’s no sign of it slowing down
And i mean, can you imagine?

Give us another 100 years of scientific research and see where we are
Give us another 1000, не, give us 10,000
Give us 10,000 more good years of the scientific method
Of careful research and clever application and intelligence

And mate, we’re going to be gods
We’re going to clothe ourselves in immense power
We’re going to kick cancer, and alzheimer’s, and ms right in the dick
We’re going to invent new diseases just to cure them for fun

We’re going to build gargantuan starships
We’re going to occupy entire galaxies
We’re going to step outside of history
We’re going to pilot destiny

We’re going to burp plasma
We’re going to eat lightning
We’re going to sh#t algebra
We’re going to build dyson spheres on our lunch breaks

We’re going to fold space and tame chaos
We’re going to reverse entropy
We’re going to travel through time
We’re going to cultivate perfect wisdom

We’re going to solve the riddle of being
We’re going to have entire weeks when no one’s unhappy, anywhere
We’re going to befriend the fourth dimension
It is going to be brock lesnar sh#t

It’s goint to be the rubicon all over again
It – is – going – to – be – f#cking – biblical
But even then, even then it still won’t be magic or witchcraft
Just really, really advanced manipulation of the fundamental physical laws of nature, made possible by the scientific method

By the acknowledgement that naure is bigger than us, and that hers is the only game in town
The scientific method might not be much good for telling us who to marry, or how to live a good life
But god damn, it’s pretty much got everything else on its to-do list
I mean… how else to put this…

Like
If two people were trying to build a rocket, and one guy tried to run his on liquid oxygen and the laws of motion, and the other filled his with dragon piss and good intentions, who do you think would be sipping a cold one on the moon about three days from now?
The world isn’t wizard jizz
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Exurb1a Lyrics – 10,000 More Years of the Scientific Method

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Release Year: 2007