guns and information (or the future that never was)

We can push it at twice the speed, get 10 times the data.

"And when do you think you will find some new particles?"

There's a good chance that in three years we will. What still troubles us is that we can't explain 95% of what's out there.

~~

95?! You just blew it, bro'.

Space 1999 was this dark and mysterious programme, back from the old days, the old country, when we could still think about the future and ask ourselves the quintessential question: how old will we be when the future comes.

Of course, it never did come. That is the subject of Graeber's brilliant chapter in his latest book (and earlier online article, 'Declining Profit').

What was so mysterious wasn't the special effects -which always numb modern sensibilities and stifle the imagination- but the idea that human beings were these fragile creatures surrounded by vast and impenetrable oceans of darkness (and there was always the more than significant lurking fear that it was really the darkness within that mattered).

You got to outer space, to the limits, and there was no God there. There, there. We should have know that: when you get to Oakland...or: draw back the curtain and see OZ is really just a fake. All that excitement about escaping earth and what? Dark matter. 

What was it all about? The frontier spirit..going where no man has gone before (but, of course, the reality in the 'wild west' or Israel was that there were men and women there all along!). We wanted to imagine a wilderness then, escape from ourselves. Virtual reality, second life.

A cathedral to man's endless endeavour to pursue useless things. How do you live? Forget that, and dig the hole.

Solaris: he looks in the mirror and asks or is asked: do you know who you are?

"As much as anyone"

Kelvin. Cool. Zero degrees.

~~

So, why the fuss? Well, what else are you going to get enthusiastic about? Science, the road..don't know where it will lead us, but at least it's a road, right? We convince ourselves that if at least we're not the rational animals that can be set apart from all the other dud animals then at least it's our creativity, our boundlessness, our free-floating imagination ("weightlessness") that marks us out (down?up?. A donkey with angel's wings..the blue-eyed ones, not giving a jot about the law, the rhythms of terrestrial life...in the end, finding a way out of time itself. Science and abstraction, like a religious impulse to the timeless.

~~

Higgs-B. What do you hope to learn, then, Professor Higgins?

"Well, you know, how it all began, life, universe, everything"

42 you mean?

Yeah.

Then what's the question? Didn't see that, did you? But, no, tell me: how will it end?

~~

CERN wouldn't work in rat-infested London. Plus, there would be delays due to falling leaves or the wrong kind of snow on the tracks. There would be strikes, or concerns that immigrants were trying to sneak their way into the country through the tunnels. Terrorists would be thinking about it. The Americans might use it as a dark site. Homeless people would want a share. There would be buskers playing "Hey Jude" on an out of tune guitar. It would be closed for repairs for much of the year. Elvis, Diana, Osama B, they'd all be down there, kept in some silent chamber. All the mad people, too, since there was no more money to house them.

The mad, the irrational have always been kept on the outskirts. Taking the place of the lepers or the untouchables in other societies, other times. the dreamers, the barbarians, the refuseniks, the nomads against the order of society, the rationally intelligible cosmos.

But of course, it was the excesses and extravagances of reason that produced the most horrific acts of violence..wasn't that the 20th century, the ordered chaos? The sleep of reason..which, on one interpretation is not the lack of reason but the dreams of reason..reason imagining it can control everything: pure extension, dumb animals, women and Jews.

~~