Like All of Nature, Humans Will Go to Extreme Lengths to Stay in the Light

We often like to think of ourselves as above nature, separate from it—our technology and our tools have divorced us from the food chain, from geographic limits on survival, from everything except death. But beneath it all, we humans follow some very basic instincts, like a desire to stay in the light. In his video, Heliotropes, above, Michael Langan shows us how like birds we are as we muster our technological might to migrate into the sun.

“By pairing a series of beautiful images with just a few lines of poetry, Heliotropes shows how patterns repeat themselves at different levels of nature, whether we know it or not,” says Aeon.

The daily ebb-and-flow of flight paths, noted in Langan's video, has actually been the focus for a number of other pretty visualizations, such as this one by Aaron Koblin, seen via the Atlantic Cities.

Colin Schultz | | READ MORE

Colin Schultz is a freelance science writer and editor based in Toronto, Canada. He blogs for Smart News and contributes to the American Geophysical Union. He has a B.Sc. in physical science and philosophy, and a M.A. in journalism.