A Horror of Great Darkness
And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him. And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance.
-- Genesis 15
Monday finds you like a bomb
That's been left ticking there too long
You're bleeding
Somedays there's nothing left to learn
From the point of no return
You're leaving
-- Eurythmics, "I Saved The World Today"
Sustainability workshop today at work.
The Shorter Millennium Ecosystem Assesment: We're all screwed.
Five years ago, we had ten years to save the Earth. Assuming we had the political and economic will to even begin to try to do what is necessary - and assuming we agreed in the first place on just what *is* necessary - none of which we have.
Now it's 2009, we haven't fixed any of the big problems, we didn't succeed in stopping the war in Iraq, electing Obama didn't drawdown the military in Afghanistan, Peak Oil is upon us, we've heard two clicks from the Russian Roulette revolver of pandemic flu and we're still spinning the barrel, and deep ocean fish stocks are still being depleted. We're *really* screwed.
And I'm personally, physically and emotionally, exhausted just from trying to do the tiny, ineffectual things I've tried to do for the past two decades to try to fight this planetary death machine - or at least even just to acknowledge its existence and stay sane.
The magnitudes of the global problems we seem by any reasonable interpretation of science to face here at the dawn of the 21st century are so huge that it's really hard to even fit them into my brain. Except as a series of Dante-esque images: mass extinction, mass starvation, a world reduced to smoking desert. The drought in Australia feels like the harbinger of the dragon's breath, coming ever closer.
Visiting Brazil in January-February brought the depression further home. How the rest of the world lives is intolerable by Western standards, and yet still over the carrying capacity of the Earth by ecological standards.
The equations are simple. The world has a finite amount of stuff. The human race is on an exponential growth curve. Something has to give. We might be able to change, but it's probably too late and things have already broken beyond repair in the basement. We're locked into the internal combustion engine, into fossil fuels, sprawling suburbia, electric grids, fertiliser and pesticide dependent farming, strip mining and deforestation, a global food transport grid.
Compared with the ecological crisis, nuclear war seems trivial. At least to stop that we just had to get two superpowers to agree to not pull the trigger. To stop the death of the planet... we have to change our way of life. We have to choose to destroy everything we've spent the last century building. In the face of an economic system which rewards cutthroat competition and mercilessly slaughters anyone who achieves less than total productivity. At the same time as the entire Third World is climbing aboard, and we're trying to get off, but we don't want to lose our place in the sun either.
Common sense says it can't be done. We've built a death machine. What is there left except to decide the manner of our planet's burial?
How can you build any kind of movement on the assumption that our civilisation and probably our whole biosphere is already doomed and all we can do is accept our fate?
And yet. Against this is the spiritual view which says 'this world is actually only a shadow of a much more real world in which there is no limitation'.
How do these two apparent irreducible truths - the absoluteness of finite planetary resources, and the reality of an unlimited dimension of mind and spirit - go together?
How can we possibly fix things when we still don't agree as a society that they're broken? But if we do agree that they're broken - how do we bear the guilt, pain and anger?
How can I get up and go to work in the morning knowing that just by living, I'm bringing the Apocalypse one step closer?
How do you un-fuck a planet?
Mini-Brains
And here is one of the coming hard problems in spirituality and human identity, which would have been science fiction a few years ago but now is shoved right in our faces:
TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese researchers said Thursday they had created functioning human brain tissues from stem cells, a world first that has raised new hopes for the treatment of disease.
Stem cells taken from human embryos have been used to form tissues of the cerebral cortex, the supreme control tower of the brain, according to researchers at the government-backed research institute Riken.
The tissues self-organised into four distinct zones very similar to the structure seen in human foetuses, and conducted neuro-activity such as transmitting electrical signals, the institute said.
Embryonic stem cells are harvested by destroying a viable embryo, a process that some people find unacceptable.
Riken said cortex tissues were also obtained from "induced pluripotent stem cells," which are similar to embryonic stem cells but artificially induced, typically from adult cells such as skin cells.
The tissues can also be selectively induced to different cortex types controlling memories, visual sensation and other tasks.
Is a human foetus human? Does it have a soul?
What about a 'mini foetus brain' grown from stem cells?
If you don't believe in such a thing as a soul -- if you have the current standard consensus scientific-materialist framework -- the first question may well have an answer based on ethics, but the second is a nonsense and can only be answered in the negative: 'of course not, souls are abstractions, not realities'.
But evidence from evaluation of ESP, afterlife research, psi and mystical writings seems to be converging back toward the premodern religious paradigm again. That yes, there is such a thing as a soul -- some kind of meta-dimensional reality structure which *causes* physical effects or information ordering in biological systems, though there are what seem like paradoxes associated with the concept, such as that souls seem not to be entirely 'separate' from each other. One of the clearest elaborations of this idea seems to be in Mary Baker Eddy's works: there is one substance, but where consensus modern materialism would say 'the one substance is matter', it seems like it might solve more practical problems in explaining ESP and psi and 'miracles' and afterlife experiences to say 'the one substance is mind' and work back from there.
So far so good. But given this idea, suddenly the story above starts getting complicated.
Does a human embryo 'have' a soul, or does a soul somehow 'inhabit' or attach to the embryo during pregnancy - in the same way that a human player might 'log in' to a character in a 3D virtual world and start receiving sense impressions from it?
Does a blood cell have a soul? Does a brain cell have a soul?
Does a cluster of brain cells grown from cultured adult-skin-cell-derived genetically engineered stem cells have a soul?
If it doesn't have a soul, yet it behaves functionally identically with a similar cluster of neurons in a standard living-human, soul-inhabited brain, and processes memories -- where does that leave us as humans?
Frankly I think it's pretty darn creepy that we're playing with human brain tissue in such a way without having anything like a philosophical framework to answer these questions (other than 'no humans are alive unless they can speak', which seems scary dangerous to me).
But we are, and questions from Star Trek, tacky vinyl eyebrows and all, are now staring right at us. It's like one of those horrible nightmares where you get asked impossibly ridiculous questions for your final exam, and you're naked, and the thesis examiners are circus clowns. We can't be being asked this bizarre kind of ethics rule -- and yet, there it is.
Stem-cell human mini-brains.
We could build computers out of them, or stick them in missiles. We probably will. We possibly are already. These aren't computer circuits. They have human DNA. They might have the potential to be human. They might literally have *souls*. They might be children of God.
Fully grown *humans* are children of God too, and yet we enslaved them, and still do. Some cultures ate them. Might still do. Ancient Rome had infanticide; in the civilised West today we routinely abort foetuses with beating hearts and functioning brains and destroy them like medical waste, and the practice (and the definition of human life which it entails) is defended vociferously by the triumphant, progressive Left, and anyone questioning it is knee-jerk slammed as a Neanderthal hater of women.
The Right deserved to lose the US elections, Bush was a moral disaster, Palin freaks me out, and the Obama phenomenon is a historic and staggering victory for grassroots democracy -- but that doesn't mean the Evangelicals are wrong on abortion or that Markos Moulitsas is right. There are philosophical twists here with daggers in them.
Stem-cell human mini-brains.
These things might be tasty-delicious little medical tools, clones grown for spare parts, or organic computing machines. They'll probably be patented, and sold in packs in corner drugstores like disposable razors. Killed without mercy. We'd like to think they're not us, not a possible vehicle for our souls, not part of our reality... but they *are* literally our flesh and blood, and there *are* such things as souls.
The science fiction writer Bruce Sterling wrote some chilling words in his essay Cyberpunk in the ’90s:
We’re just not much good any more at refusing things because they don’t seem proper. As a society, we can’t even manage to turn our backs on abysmal threats like heroin and the hydrogen bomb. As a culture, we love to play with fire, just for the sake of its allure; and if there happens to be money in it, there are no holds barred. Jumpstarting Mary Shelley’s corpses is the least of our problems; something much along that line happens in intensive-care wards every day.
Human thought itself, in its unprecedented guise as computer software, is becoming something to be crystallized, replicated, made a commodity. Even the insides of our brains aren’t sacred; on the contrary, the human brain is a primary target of increasingly successful research, ontological and spiritual questions be damned. The idea that, under these circumstances, Human Nature is somehow destined to prevail against the Great Machine, is simply silly; it seems weirdly beside the point. It’s as if a rodent philosopher in a lab-cage, about to have his brain bored and wired for the edification of Big Science, were to piously declare that in the end Rodent Nature must triumph.
Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it’s the truth. It won’t go away because we cover our eyes.
The Dali clock is melting and the angry clown with Spock ears wants our thesis. How do we answer? What philosophy will give us the resources to answer sanely?
Because The World Is Round
Hmm, it's been a while since I posted.
The Internet makes me smile.
First this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgA2aqGYnt4
Then this:
(though you probably have to have read most of the xkcd archive; sorry, it's geek humour)
http://xkcd.com/442/
And this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY
And finally some Morcheeba:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdxyQo3IvRc
It occurs to me that we are now actually in a new wave of spiritual revival, actually and not just wishful-thinkingly. I think I'll pick the sudden appearance of the TV show 'Sensing Murder' here in NZ this last two years as a marker. It's the first time I think I've ever seen credible non-fictional psychics doing readings on mainstream TV, repeatedly, pragmatically and with a minimum of fuss. There's still a 'woo woo' showbiz aura to the whole proceedings, but it doesn't come from the psychics themselves; they're the practical ones. We've moved from the paranormal paranoia of the X-Files '90s onto the doorstep of a quietly mindblowing sense of at-home-with-the-paranormal normality and we've not yet quite stepped over the threshold, and that first step is going to be a doozy. But we're actually there. We've somehow moved from denial to awareness-with-fear to acceptance-with-trust and the next steps are understanding and exploration and practice. It's a moment I never thought I'd see (and more importantly, didn't think I *wanted* to see for a long time). It's a small moment, but it's the start of a wind shift. Hang onto your socks. It's going to be a big one.
This revival is going to be real, it's going to be permanent, it's going to be an actual paradigm shift and not just a set of words, and it's going to overturn a lot of our expectations about what is and is not physically and cognitively possible. When the world stops shifting it is going to be something we can't yet imagine. And it's going to be *good*.
And how we are going to navigate the transition is not going to be clear-cut at all, but somehow I think we'll get through okay.
There's a reason why so many people are looking back at the steampunk era with nostalgia. I'm thinking particularly of the 'psychic boom years' from say 1850-1930, but also of the UFO and free energy hackers and the remote viewers and the many homebrewed alternative 'ether theories' of physics which are slowly looming out of the murk on the 'net, and the recent sudden flurry of books on ESP, 'The Field', peace, social justice, compassion, kindness, whole-systems views, environmental awareness, altruism, community, responsibility, 'Oneness', and most especially all the ones of a mystical character, and most most especially all the *practical* mystics.
There's like this vortex drawing our eyes back to the 1960s, the 1950s, even the 1930s and beyond back to the nineteenth century. All at once, not picking a single era to focus on, but just a general sense of 'look around, look back, think again, end of the line, this is the wrong way, there is another future, perhaps you can think differently and cross over to it'. A sense of lost things, rediscovery, old surprising treasures.
When a wave of retro happens I think it's because there's something there in the past that we have forgotten and that we need; but the reason we realise we need it is that we're *already* looking in that direction again.
This isn't just retro and it isn't just nostalgia. It's pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which have been lost for nearly a century starting to come together and slide around and go *click*. New fundamental ideas about human cognition and the nature of basic physics. The potential for absolutely exhilarating, unprecedented new discoveries, not just tweaking the current status quo. Science and religion giving birth to experimental theology.
And no, I'm not talking about religion as a retreat from knowledge into a new dark age. That's religion's bad cousin who you're right to have a creepy feeling about when he comes round. I'm talking about religion as an understanding of where old pre-modern concepts like 'God' and 'the soul' fit into the total map of human knowledge, and things long held to be inexpressible mysteries or really silly freshman logic mistakes suddenly starting to make sense and turn out to be tangible and actually just kind of ordinary.
Like if you've lived all your life believing the sun to be a myth, and suddenly the sky opens and above the grey fluffy mass of Heaven there appears this weird blue thing and a white ball that stabs and burns you in the eyes. So the ancient legends were true! It isn't really yellow and made of crayon and doesn't really have little lines coming down from it and a smiley face, but you can see that you're looking at the original of the crumpled drawing you had that was handed down. Your ancestors *did* know something you've never seen and they *were* telling the truth as far as they could convey it, and here it is right in front of you.
And that impossible sun rises and you realise that other than that now you can see a lot better, life goes on much as before. There are struggles and confusions and cheques to be paid and sometimes it still hurts really bad. But you still remember the years of darkness and every time you see that big ball of fire steaming over the horizon you just have to giggle inside.
Because it's there, and you thought it was lost forever, and it's all true.
There *is* a way to gain the world without losing anyone's soul in the process.
We didn't think it was possible, all our equations told us that misery+happiness == zero. That the cosmic scales had to balance and the wages of carbon-based life were eternal death.
But the universe isn't zero-sum after all. The vacuum is alive. It's made of mind. It likes us. That's a whole lot more than we were counting on.
What's going to happen next is anyone's guess, but whatever it is, it's *already* happening.
Phoenix
The NASA Phoenix Mars lander, aiming for a polar landing with probably the best chance so far of detecting Martian life, is about to hit reentry in the next half hour. I'm watching live on NASA TV.
I love living in the future.
Edit: And it landed just fine.
Big Dog
And here's another science-fiction image brought to life: Boston Dynamics' Big Dog. Watching this thing move is like the Imperial Probot from Empire Strikes Back mixed with a bit of The Fly.
What I fail to understand is why 100% of the world's residents *aren't* science fiction fans, given that we live in a science fiction world. Or is it that we simply make an artificial distinction between 'news' and 'fiction', between 'reporting', 'research', 'extrapolation', and 'speculation', between 'absolutely impossible' and 'not yet observed'? But they're all points on the same curve: we observe, we imagine, we predict, we experiment, we adjust our sense of reality. One blends into the other; if you try to artificially separate them, you lose sight of the terrifying intensity of the changes we're living through right now.
And that's just from a materialist perspective, before you even start to factor in the 'impossible' things which have been happening for millenia in the realms of the psychic, spiritual, or religious, and which our science for the most part has yet to digest.
(Both this and the Audeo via this article in the Boston Phoenix.)
Audeo
As a science fiction fan, one of the reasons I get deeply frustrated with people asking 'why do you care about that weird stuff?' is that the line between fiction and reality gets thinner each day.
Take the Audeo, for instance. According to this New Scientist article, and video, it's the first functioning piece of subliminal voice recognition hardware.
That is, if this tech isn't just vaporware, a computer can now scan your nerves, detect a signal for words you want to say without actually saying them, translate it into sound, and speak it for you.
It's not qualitatively a huge jump - we've had nerve-induction technology for decades, we've had voice recognition for almost as long, we've had voice-synthesis boxes for the disabled like Stephen Hawking's device, and they've been slowly getting better - and who knows what experimental stuff the US military has had access to - but seeing this happening in real-time in what could be a high-end consumer device... that's impressive, to me.
Of course, science fiction isn't about answering the question 'what will the future be like', because the future is made by human choice and we're too complicated to predict. What SF is good for is asking the question 'what do we WANT the future to be like?' Because often, until we can imagine that a technology like this MIGHT exist, and what its implications might suggest, we don't even understand how to go about deciding whether or not we like it.
Squid, Boundary, Saucer, Ploughshares
Te Papa's Colossal Squid is now defrosted and pickling in formalin. I've been watching the webcast intermittently, but the photos on their blog are probably more interesting.
(Edit: Video clip from National Geographic.)
Via the TT Brown forum, the Boundary Institute has a very interesting collection of papers on logic- and computer-science approaches to a view of physics which would include psi.
Also via TT Brown, Wilbert Smith is a key figure in the Canadian UFO scene who deserves more attention, particularly on the intersection of the 'contactee' phenomenon and psychic phenomena.
And finally: yay to the Ploughshares team who deflated one of the Waihopai domes.
Pop!
Defying Gravity: The Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown
A new biography of Thomas Townsend Brown (that patron saint of antigravity and weird science), finished in 2005 and which I came across while it was being written, but which I have not yet read now that it's done.
It's a fun story, and looks like an intriguing read for fans like me of the UFO and antigravity mythos.
At the very least the man invented air ionisers. And maybe impossible things - or maybe not.
Edit: It's now Wednesday, and I've finished reading the book, and um, wow. It wasn't finished in 2005, it was finished a month ago, and the conversation's still ongoing. And those last two dreams seem pretty much predictive in retrospect.
Darkness, pt 1: Standard Model Blues
If then the light that is in you is darkness,
how great is the darkness!
-- Jesus, Gospel of Matthew
I'm no Jedi.
I'm just a guy with a lightsaber and a few questions.
-- Kyle Katarn, Jedi Outcast videogame (Raven/Lucasarts, 2002)
If you accept the reality of psychic (or any kind of fringe) phenomena - and there's more than enough evidence for me to make it apparent that something very interesting is going on with channelling, near death experiences and remote viewing / anomalous cognition -- then it becomes obvious that the fundamental physical models on which our best mainstream science is currently based are wrong.
At least, they're wrong to the extent to which they consider whole classes of demonstrated phenomena (such as those involving faster-than-lightspeed transmission of information) to be 'impossible'. And that seems a pretty hard thing to accept. Aren't general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of Particle Physics all hugely well-attested theories with terabytes of data in their support? Wouldn't accepting that 'thoughts can influence matter' or 'some people can see the future' or 'life can exist beyond physical death' require completely abandoning all science, because science is based on the discrimination between 'what can exist' and 'what can't possibly exist'? Isn't, therefore, belief in psychic phenomena, UFOs, antigravity, God, Bigfoot, etc, all just part of a public rejection of Knowledge, and if Knowledge is the ultimate good, then isn't belief in the paranormal or supernatural actually wilful rejection of reality for insanity - in other words, a form of ultimate evil?
That's the approach that the CSICOP/CSI people - and the likes of Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins - take. It's probably valid, from a certain point of view that doesn't accept data points that I do.
Thing is, though, if you look at the data - and not even the fun fringe stuff, just the mainstream history of science and physics in the 20th century - the layperson might well start to wonder just what the point of high-energy physics research has been since WW2. The crude form of the question is so where the heck are my flying antigravity cars?, but even put more subtly it seems confusing at best. I am not a particle physicist, but as far as I can piece together the story goes roughly like this:
1. There appear to currently be two fundamental physical paradigms: General Relativity (Einstein, 1916) describing gravity, and Quantum Mechanics (various dates, but let's say 1928, when Paul Dirac described the electron).
2. Since then lots of particle-smashing at ever higher energies has led to a whole rather dishearteningly hairy particle zoo, captured in a formal theory called the Standard Model of Particle Physics (kicked off say from 1964 when quarks were proposed by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, and pretty much assembled by 1974 when it was described in a single report by John Iliopoulos), but still being tinkered with by researchers; the Top Quark wasn't found until 1995 (but its mass was way bigger than predicted) and the Tau Neutrino until 2000, and when the Large Hadron Collider fires up this May this year (2008) it hopes to find the elusive Higgs Boson, the last predicted particle. Or not. Not finding the Higgs would be interesting indeed, since the Higgs basically mediates mass itself and without it - perhaps - the whole Model falls apart. Or not. The Standard Model looks so ugly that by all rights it should have fallen apart decades ago, but still there it is.
3. The Standard Model is particle-centric and based on experimental evidence: it incorporates Quantum Mechanics and is compatible with General Relativity as far as it goes, but it doesn't really 'do' gravity. It describes all fields as being carried by particles except gravity - the so-called 'graviton' isn't part of the Standard Model.
Whoops. That's kinda a big hole to leave out. Of course, gravity is actually a weak, long-range force, so though it's a big deal to us macro-sized creatures, at the kind of high energies and tiny scales flung around inside a particle accelerator, gravity doesn't really affect the outcome much.
But still. No gravity in the real world of macroscopic distances == YOU FAIL IT. So we have to augment the Standard Model with good ol' Mark II General Relativity, unchanged from 1916.
Think about that. It's 2008, we've had a century of stunning advances in uber-tiny-scale physics, quarks and gluons and pi-mesons and stuff sprawling all over the place, and we're still using a model of gravity nearly a century old. From practically before there was widespread electrical lighting. A theory of fundamental physics from the middle of World War I, when there was still an Ottoman Empire and a Prussia and Russia was a monarchy with serfs.
Isn't that kinda weird, when you stop and look at it? Why did gravity get frozen in time while the whole subatomic world got invented, overthrown, and consolidated into a whole new dogma?
General Relativity has outlasted both the rise and fall of Soviet Communism. But when you look at that, is that a good thing?
What's so special about gravity, that it gets a free ride while everything else burns?
5. Because the Standard Model doesn't do gravity, and gravity lives off in its own secluded micro-theory, a general assumption has grown up that there can't possibly be any linkage between gravity and the other forces (except through astronomical-scale masses and energies), and that anyone who suggests any kind of theory allowing for 'room temperature antigravity' is by definition an insane crank.
This isn't said out loud, though, not as such. What's actually said (when the mainstream science journals have to actually respond to such a distasteful obviously-insane subject as antigravity, thankfully a rare occurrence) is something along the lines of 'Sorry, that's not replicable (ahem, and never will be). Also, the Standard Model, and Einstein... We'd like to not have to say outright that you're a fraud, so please withdraw your claims quietly. Remember Cold Fusion. Irrational exuberance, and all that.' And then a bit of public-spirited hand-wringing about how poor the state of science education is that such outlandish ideas are even imaginable, and How to Fix That.
5. But there's not actually a conspiracy of mainstream physicists against new science. Nobody actually *likes* the Standard Model. It's ugly and inelegant and from a mathematical point of view, quite obviously wrong (or at best woefully incomplete).
The problem is that it fits the data, and all the other theories so far are worse.
6. It's now fashionable to hate on string theory (the previous best rival for the Standard Model's crown) for not making any useful predictions.
But for all its data-fitting, the Standard Model hasn't actually done much worthwhile to justify itself in over thirty years. Except provide reasons to build ever-larger particle accelerators, which are justified purely because they provide opportunities to tune the Model.
The Large Hadron Collider is twenty-six kilometers long and spans the border of France and Switzerland.
Where are the actual spin-offs? The technologies?
What are quarks for?
Stand back, look at the long view of the bare data with a layman's eye, and think.
If quarks were proposed in 1964 and the Standard Model was formulated in 1974:
The United States built fission bombs in the 1940s and fusion bombs in the 1950s without the Standard Model.
The United States put people on the Moon in 1969 without the Standard Model. They didn't even need nuclear to do that: chemistry, astronomy and electronics.
The Internet doesn't use the Standard Model (unless there are very exotic transistors out there.)
The Global Positioning System, started in 1978 and finished in 1995, needs relativity (or at least Lorentz transformations) to do its maths, but it doesn't need the Standard Model.
We have electron-based technologies. We have atom-based technologies. We have a whole shed full of photon-based technologies.
What quark-based technologies have even been proposed in a lab?
What does learning this new stuff let us actually do, rather than fill in blanks on a bingo card?
Spintronics, maybe? Quantum computing? Something with Bose-Einstein condensates? Those seem cool. But the general vibe one gets from mainstream physics right now is a cautious 'Don't get your hopes up, there are fundamental limits and we long since reached them. No faster-than-light for you. No teleportation. Quantum encryption, maybe, but no FTL communication. No gravity control. No cosmic radiant energy. No time travel. Tiny black holes, hardly likely. Fusion, still twenty years to ignition (the world will melt first). The best we can do is make silicon chips smaller and atomic fission slightly less toxic (but not really).'
So far the most interesting thing for the everyday person that CERN has created has been the World Wide Web: a spinoff, yes, but not of particle research.
So why are we firing up the LHC? In the hopes that this time, the dry well will finally spring a gusher?
Is it a wonder that the best minds of the 1980s went into banking, and in the 1990s and 2000s into Google and Facebook? At least in computing there's still actual frontiers.
Or: you could opt for the increasingly-popular paranoid layman's view that 'of course they found all sorts of cool applications for quarks and gluons: but the US government classified it for military uses'. Hyperdrive, aliens, mind-control deathrays, secret bases on the Moon: it's all there for the dreaming, if you can bring yourself to believe that evil is triumphant, that reality is a disposable farce, and that nothing the common person can do is worthwhile.
I'm not quite ready to go there yet. I think our history is mostly true, as far as it goes. But I think there are some huge blind spots.
7. This huge lack of imagination in physics is coming to a head in the Mundane Science Fiction movement: the problem (from the artistic side) is described quite well in this article The Science Fiction Event Horizon (found via the intriguing blog Spooky Paradigm).
In a nutshell: science fiction used to be a mix of fantasy and scientific extrapolation. Now it's just fantasy, because we've run out of imagination. In direct contrast to the early years of the 20th century, the best science available now tells us that the universe is vastly less full of wonders than we imagine, on any scale accessible to us. The most interesting thing we'll ever know is Earth's biosphere, and we're killing that as fast as we can, in fact it's half gone already: we're well into in the Sixth Extinction and it seems even money that it will be our own.
The best hard science available tells us that our time here is up, we're pretty much doomed as a species, and there's really nothing more to find and nowhere else to go. No God, no Heaven. No fairies, no Klingons. Just some dead particles, dead moons, dead stars, and lots and lots and lots of hard vacuum. And then oblivion.
That's not a story we want to hear, it doesn't make a good movie so we don't publicise it often, it's a story that if you take it into your bones will drive you stark staring mad, but it's the Higgs Boson's honest truth.
If you believe the Standard Model (plus Einstein) is all there is.
8. This is the darkness we live in.
This is the darkness we struggle against, even as we accept it.
This is the best science available to us, the light of truth as we know it, and it is toxic to our souls, radioactive ash in our mouth.
It kills us to believe it, but we feel we have no choice. The data has spoken. There is no there there. There never was a living Spirit in anything but our imagination. We must bow to harsh reality. To dream is but to dream; to wake, desolation.
We are in the greatest Age of Light the world has ever seen, and how great is the darkness.
Astrospies
More on the semi-secret history of the USAF's acknowledged MOL and Blue Gemini programs: a PBS documentary airing this week, Astrospies.
Edit: More commentary on Slashdot.
Edit: It also wasn't an X-20 DynaSoar in Marooned, it was an 'XRV lifting body' based on the X-24A. So many ships that never were.
