modernism and post-modernism

[Eric the Green]

(07-04-2021, 09:21 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-01-2021, 11:20 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

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.

The question is when we get contact with intelligent life forms (or quasi-life such as the artificial-intelligence life forms that those life-forms create and send off into space). We have enough questions about ourselves, such as whether we will make a catastrophic mess of this planet. AGW could give Humanity stresses far worse than those that led to the Second World War, Stalinism, and the Holocaust. Whether we will grow out of the fetish for technological solutions to every question in life is itself a big question. The disappearance of material scarcity will take away one of the driving forces in innovation (but also far worse tendencies in human nature, including the ever-present desire of some people to get command over near-slave labor). 

Most ominous of the hazards of visits from extraterrestrial high intelligence will be some barbarous interstellar power that chooses to reshape the Earth for its own questionable purposes. Surely you have encountered Independence Day, in which the great revelation is that the invaders seek to take over our planet (as they have others) and exploit it for its resources to leave an unlivable or impoverished husk behind. (That says much about certain parts of human nature, does it not?). I could imagine some interstellar power trying to make our planet resemble theirs to make it compatible for them but intolerable for us. 

Before we discuss intelligent life on other planets, we need ask ourselves how well we do with other intelligent life right on Good Old Planet Earth. Some people poach elephants....

That's right, and it sort of implies that, most likely, the ET aliens had to learn that lesson before they were even able to contact or visit us. The invaders in Independence Day and programs like that are our own imaginings based on our own immaturity and our own inability to behave in harmony with other beings on our own home planet. Most likely the intelligent life forms on other planets are not even allowed by the rules of the galactic federation to visit or contact us until they themselves are mature enough. Maybe they are not even able to visit us, because their technology will be more than what we know as technology, but will have recombined science and tech with wisdom and mysticism and art-- even to be able to develop a technology that can break the light barrier-- probably by being able to transit back and forth between The Other Side and here, as envisioned in the Insights in The Celestine Prophecy and The Tenth Insight, and first demonstrated in The West by Jesus the Christ. Or at least to further develop a technology which we are only beginning to understand in the notion of entanglement, which at the very least requires a notion that reality and all beings are connected and not dis-connected as common sense and our modernist economic rulers now convince us to believe.