[Mind's Eye] Re: New planet discoveries might change our views

It's as if there are no arguments to me. There appears to be a huge
debt burden, yet essentially we owe each other and could do with a
jubilee. I can't take society as we have it, even really dropping out
of it to find some peace. I know enough to know space travel is very
hard, not least cosmic radiation in deep space. Nothing is really as
empty as we think, even before we think of vacuum as only
statistically empty.
The purposes I grew up with all look dire, very much idols of my
tribe. It may be that the time of my rugby league team (Warrington)
has come round again. We've won the cup for the last two years and
sit on top of the league. I feel the old stirrings when we dominate
another side, yet also how vapid all the effort is. It's more as
though we should step away from the old crap of war and rivalry.
I used to see education as the answer - that if enough of us really
knew stuff we'd find a critical social mass to move from the idiot
economics religion. One personal answer for me is living abroad,
where there is no 'news' to swamp me, none of the dreadful 'smalltalk
yakker' of soap operas and reality television. I watched a film
called Hotel Haribati some time ago, which was themed along the lines
of how western society takes away all that matters through its
pressures - but its ideal was in Syria.
I think we might be at the edge of understanding control in complex,
self-directed systems (though this is scarily called 'control theory')
- this might help us overcome economics and its perverse motivations.
But let's face it, we can't even trust people not to breed in excess,
given any opportunity.

On May 28, 3:26 am, twentyfirstcenturyslave <d...@colesart.ca> wrote:
> Seems we need to do some evolving first in order to comprehend a world
> in which we can all work together to achieve the kind of space travel
> required to reach distant planets.
> I think most people think we have stopped evolving, but since
> evolution takes such a long time, we won't realize it's happened until
> after the fact. I'm hopeful. Okay, call me a dreamer.
>
> On May 18, 2:58 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
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> > I'm not sure how accurate they can be in revealing planets enough like
> > ours to offer possibilities of a new promised land.  They claim there
> > is one 20 light years away, or 300,000 years at current space travel
> > speeds.  One can feel that this at least puts us somewhere near the
> > position of 'Columbus'.  Our current 'tin-foil' technology won't do,
> > but at this kind of distance we are talking about something other than
> > worm-holes, 'relativity flight' or the kind of physics in which
> > distance is an illusion.
>
> > For someone like me who can't take god-stories seriously and quite
> > likes the idea of a human future (or at least the idea of evolution
> > not just ending through catastrophe), there is an opportunity to
> > believe in something distant in time and a need for us to direct
> > ourselves towards it.  A time, perhaps in which a form of conscious
> > life can live very differently from now, and a project worth attaching
> > to - perhaps a reason for spirituality.  Comments on this or the
> > technology welcome.