explosions!

[mnaz]

The rock has never seen anything like it! The hills are alive with the sound of music. We’ll max out this place with our doomsday buttons, widgets, prayers and raw funk. We have light beams colliding. We have lists upon lists crushing themselves into synthetic gravity sufficient to taint our anti-gravity spirit. Man we have a lot of lists. We have explosions—of us, for us, about us. Half of the world's seven billion people arrived on earth since about 1968. We have a crush of consciousness, a crush of senses, eyes and ears, minds, tongues speaking in themselves, kittens and warm wooly mittens. These are a few of my favorite things.

We should mine the rock harder, suck more energy out of it. We got needs. Except so many drillers and miners have tunneled, gouged, blasted, pricked and picked over the crust, raked the obvious wealth long ago, that you wonder how long it could go on. Yet we’re only getting started. We’re poised to wage large-scale war on Mother! I realize technology will ease the strain, but techno marches erratically, prone to politics and power plays. And techno is playing catch up on saving the rock, like consciousness is playing catch up on the techno explosion. Techno and its parent, science, are fine assets, although dependent on mind. Out of mind flows techno, and back. Mind processes the results.

There is no good reason to outlaw war. Well, except the place is pretty well filled in now and the weapons are much more apocalyptic. When war is outlawed, only outlaws will wage war! The more I consider the array of mounting problems and circular loops of logic and troops, the more I’m convinced most of it was never necessary. But then, I’m a bit of a complainer and not much of a warrior. Our logarithmic needs and raw math of explosion seem to suggest even the most “civilized” among us will be sent to prosecute misunderstood, far-flung resource wars, perhaps less covert and more overt as we go, cloaked in buzz word ideology of course, driven by state-run media. Orwell was all over this stuff. Try not to rape and shoot the innocents when you get there. The Vikings ran a long time ago, and they were hopped up on toadstools anyway.

The world has seen its share of mighty militaries, and sooner or later they all lose. Rise and fall. Nietzsche held a “will to power” as the key to life—“master morality” over “slave morality.” Well yes, active self-determination is fine, but individual must fit with a greater whole as well. If the greater whole withers, individual power concerns suffer. Seems Nietzsche wore his shoes a little too tight, or he was messing with us. It’s odd how many ways his ideas stretch. Fascist militarists used them to justify aggression and mass murder. Leftists at one time used them to refute conscripted fascism’s slave morality. Nietzsche famously declared God dead several times, like countless adolescent suburban goth death metal thrashers since then. How the hell did he know if God is dead?

Edgy thinkers like Nietzsche emerged in greater numbers a couple hundred years back (with a handful of ancient empires excepted), at the beginning of our biggest explosions, still ongoing. Analysis and philosophy challenged dogma and rigid belief like never before, but that doesn’t mean the new thinkers weren’t talking out the side of their ass at times. Yet there is such a thing as breakthrough insight. Some insights run deep, warts and all, and it seems they’ll continue to multiply, even if one man’s visionary is another’s idiot.

Explosions. Two-hundred years ago, not even a billion lived on earth. Now we’re pushing seven-billion, roughly half of which arrived only since about 1968, along with mind-boggling technological advances. Half the world’s population arrived in the last forty years or so! No wonder this place is such a mess. No wonder the genocide and famine. No wonder we’re constantly fighting and clinging to cultural artifacts and superstitions. No wonder the explosion in altered states. Explosions! Seems it can’t keep going like that. Something will have to give.

[constantine]

it's crunch time in so many ways. i don't like the odds - not one bit. it would be in most everybody's interest to stop the millstone and inscribe it with "do not go this route anymore." that would be worth any price we have to pay.

[mnaz]

thanks dino. not sure why I'm posting these quasi-philosophical rumblings. maybe just wanted to jot down more of my ideas while I'm in a writing mood. I'll probably take the nietzsche stuff out, maybe put it elsewhere. when he said "god is dead," he meant the god confined to our personification, of course. I knew that!

I knew there had been a sharp spike in world population, but I didn't realize how sharp until I looked up the numbers. the population was 2.8 billion when I was born, and it's grown by 4 billion in my lifetime so far! egad! we'll need to pull as many resources (cleanly) from above ground as we can (solar, wind, etc.) to go with those pulled out of the earth. I wish we could start building houses with solar panels as standard. I hear the price of panels has really come down.

[saw]

I worry about the world's children that have no say in the matter, how can anyone make a rational argument against birth control readily available to the masses.....the sex is going to go on one way or the other......as ramblings go, mnaz......a wake-up call !