The burden of intellect
As the eloi prepare to vote Humanity’s last stand out of existence, we have to look hard at the things we want to save. Sure, it’d be great to be able to wake up every day secure in the knowledge that our leaders will tell us all the right things to do, and save us from our own stupidity, right up to the moment where they throw us in the ovens. And IQ is not intellect, as Newt and others prove every day.
The people who wake up every morning knowing what a world of shit we’re in and despair for the next generation are the ones who have intellect, the ability to regularly come to an accurate conclusion by observation and considered thought.
I have hopes that we will oneday leave this planet. With the (hopeful) upcoming age of private space travel, I hope that one day people will pack up their shit and make a perilous journey to other planets. I hope they take freedom with them, as once our forebears did. They will need a plan. The one our ancestors developed has proved too easily corrupted.
What do we save? What precious wisdom do we encapsulate for that future generation that escapes this our last hope on this planet? When we build that time capsule, what will it contain?
What if we are the only life in the universe, utterly alone, and the intellect that is the single most precious gift from our Creator fades and dies with the last of us, as the eloi eat and breed and absorb the planet?
14 comments Og | Uncategorized
“The one our ancestors developed has proved too easily corrupted.”
http://www.sobran.com/reluctant.shtml
“As Hoppe argues, this is the flaw in thinking the state can be controlled by a constitution. Once granted, state power naturally becomes absolute. Obedience is a one-way street. Notionally, “We the People†create a government and specify the powers it is allowed to exercise over us; our rulers swear before God that they will respect the limits we impose on them; but when they trample down those limits, our duty to obey them remains.”
Nailed it.
I have often thought, if we added a few things to the constitution we might improve it.
1: Make it illegal to profit from public service
2: Remove legal protection from elected officials and appointed bureaucrats during their tenure; if it was perfectly legal to shoot one for being a dick, they might be more thoughtful and nice.
It seems that, increasingly, the only balance to government over-reach is the Peoples’ right to revolution. Revolution is one huge can of worms. We were lucky the first time, I’m not optimistic about a second time.
Indeed, Mike. I know people who have lived during such conflict, and it’s not nice.
Og, re #2, my classic cite is always http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20121/20121-h/20121-h.htm
At the least, change it to NO pension for members of Congress or the President; it’s not supposed to be a fucking career.
One of my nightmares on the subject of space? We wind up with the UN taking control, like in the Man/Kzin Wars novels.
Firehand: that’s a good and legitimate concern.
I hope that the Chinese get their hands on it, because if they do you’ll be able to buy an interplanetary device at walmart, and it will cost less than a used car.At that point nobody will be able to regulate it. yes, the chinese crap will fail 18% of the time, but so did early ship voyages.
Never vote for an incumbent congressman or senator. Ever.
I have hopes that we will oneday leave this planet.
Og, with apologies to Heinlein, I seriously think that this will never happen. It is a sci-fi pipe dream, loving encouraged by science (sweet zone planets) to obtain stolen tax dollars. I think the human race’s only opportunity for liberty and freedom is right here and right now.
Sobran’s piece, linked by libsarenavelint, has the right ideas encapsulated within it. If the mindset of the masses is not changed in respect to the reality of what the state actually represents (enslavement) right here and right now, they will only drag the enslaving state with them out to another world, with or without cheap Chinese interplanetary traveling devices.
“Og, with apologies to Heinlein, I seriously think that this will never happen.”
Don’t apologize to Heinlein, apologize to Nasa. it has been proven that this is possible. Man has set foot on another planet. Only the forced government involvement has stopped space travel from being as cheap as it could be. ENIAC cost half a million bucks, and could do almost nothing. By comparison the $100 phone in my pocket is almost sentient. The technology only needs the application of free market capitalism to become cheap, and while the laws of physics cannot be bent to suit us, we can at least use them to our advantage.
To say this is a pipe dream is to say Apollo didn’t happen; and of course it did.
“If the mindset of the masses is not changed”
Now who is engaging in pipe dreams? It is statistically far more likely that I will develop a bean variety that will allow me to travel into deep space on my farts alone, than the “masses” will ever wise up.
it has been proven that this is possible. Man has set foot on another planet.
This is true, Og, though technically, and scientifically, speaking the moon is not a planet.
I also agree that space travel can indeed be accomplished much less expensively than NASA has accomplished it.
With that said, the logisticis of deep space travel, though intensely studied and theorized over, are far from being realized. Nothing I am familiar with in this realm of study leads me to think that the challenges to such an endeavor are any closer than the light years required to be journeyed to reach some remotely possible habitable planet beyond even our solar system.
It is statistically far more likely that I will develop a bean variety that will allow me to travel into deep space on my farts alone, than the “masses†will ever wise up.
I’m not so certain about that Og, but if you do develop such a bean variety I’d be interested.
“This is true, Og, though technically, and scientifically, speaking the moon is not a planet.”
Only by virtue of the fact that it is a satellite of the earth and not the sun. Were the moon in it’s own orbit it would be a planet. That’s just semantics, not facts.
“With that said, the logisticis of deep space travel”
Reading comprehension fail. Please reread where I said “With the (hopeful) upcoming age of private space travel, I hope that one day people will pack up their shit and make a perilous journey to other planets” Note that I do not say “other solar systems” or “other galaxies”, just “other planets”. Mars might be nice. Even a colony on the moon would be awesome. If you want to have this discussion, you need to read the whole post, and understand what it says.
“I’m not so certain about that Og”
Whereas I most certainly am. The original point was that my hybridization of such a legume is more possible than the likelihood of what you term “The Masses” ever getting their act together and figuring out we’re in a world of shit, and being able to vote our way clear of it. I do in fact like to play around with varieties of legumes, often deliberately cross pollinating them to change things, and so the accidental outcome I posit, though highly unlikely, is still statistically more possible than the morons that surround us will ever get smart, and in arriving at their new intellect, be permitted to change the very system that made them marching morons in the first place.
But please, do try to prove me wrong. You’ll probably drive yourself batshit crazy in the attempt, because you’ll be reasoning with people who are by definition incapable of reason.
But please, do try to prove me wrong.
Regardless of my reading comprehension fail, Og, I’m not attempting to prove you wrong. I am only attempting to explore the possibility you posit from a viewpoint of currently known technology as compared to theorized technology which possibly could bring to fruition the possibility of colonizing another planet.
Demonstrably, the technology required to colonize another planet (or moon, to fit with your semantics) does exist. Any reasonably clever person could figure it out.
the technology to alert morons to their own stupidity does not, and never will. What is there to explore?