modernism and post-modernism

[Eric the Green]

Captain Genet Wrote: Wrote:

(05-26-2021, 10:48 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Wrote:Just a reminder: the most important event in human history since World War II is the independence of India (and with it Pakistan, Burma, and Sri Lanka). Size and scale dwarf all other secessions from colonial rule. Communist takeover of China? It is still China, and Communist rule did abandon economic Marxism and might even collapse at some point (what follows will still be China, much as much of the Soviet Union is still Russia) or morph into something else.

The most important events from the millennial saeculum are the Apollo program and development of personal computers. In 3000, noone will remember about counterculture, Bolshevism (both Russian and Chinese) will be a vague memory somewhat like that of the Teutonic Knights or Khazar Kaganate. But these two are technological breakthroughs comparable to development of writing and agriculture. I can forgive the saeculum its cultural crudeness since it brought these achievements.

Independence of India certainly was important since it marked the end of the British Empire, so if you want to discuss only political events, I agree that it is very important. India is now the world's largest democracy.

I guess we'll soon see if India is still a democracy, if the creep nationalist Modi can be voted out.

Myself, I can forgive the millennial seaculum for its tech obsession since it brought a new counter culture (as well as cultural crudeness) 

The space program and personal computers are just more old-hat modernism, while the counter culture launched a potential new age (if it still is potential). But I guess cultural crudeness is the price of greater rule of society by the common people and by commerce instead of by aristocrats, kings, queens, popes and priests.

I guess space fans can look forward to terraforming a few asteroids and moons. To me that sounds daunting and pointless. The only way space travel can ever be meaningful is if we contact ETs and learn the ways of wormholes, quantum entanglement and/or interdimensional travel between life on Earth and The Other Side, and thus really go somewhere. But that sounds more like the counter-culture. Even then, most livable planets in the galaxy are probably already inhabited, and terraforming the available ones would be even more technically-daunting given their distance from us. I guess mutual immigration, as contemplated in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1978, might be possible, at least if it's not of the kind envisioned by The Twilight Zone in the early 1960s ("it's a cook book!"). But again that depends more on ET-informed space travel than of the kind begun by Apollo.