Monday, September 14, 2015

1930s' Man marking his lonely territory by pissing out stone and metal monuments to his hubris ?

By the 1930s, two vital things were clear to all those with a even a halfway decent science education (architects and engineers for example).

(A) the observable Universe was 99.9% plasma (hot electrically and magnetically active gas).

(B) the heavier atoms that produced Humanity's familiar solid rocks and metals were a very small percentage of the .1% remaining.

The previous "Appeal to Nature" claim that 'Nature's Progress led inevitably to the domination of the big, the massive, the visible and the solid' was now shown to be totally totally wrong.

Instead, the biological world was clearly dominated, now as in the distant past, by the invisibly tiny microbes.

Similarly, the wider Universe was mostly swirling masses of hot plasma made from incredibly invisibly tiny ions.

Ions of hydrogen mostly, with bits of helium, together with microscopically tiny dust bunnies of the other elements, including a little rock and metal here and there and now and then.

The small little rock and metal planets like Earth were as rare in the Universe as hen's teeth : mere statistical 'noise' in the adding up of the Universe.

No space explorer could ever build a civilization on most of the Universe's celestial bodies, because it would be like trying to erect a heavy skyscraper on a spongy marshmallow.


God's cosmos is on the side, quite firmly, of the small battalions...


Unconsciously, I wonder did 1930s Man overcompensate for this dismal discovery that Cosmic Progress generally lead to the small not the big?

Overcompensate by marking out civilizations's tiny solid territory in a vast spongy Universe in the same way a dog would - by suddenly pissing out endless renditions of massive bridges, dams and skyscrapers, all made of those blindingly-rare-in-the-Universe-metals-and-rock ?

Something for all of us to think about....

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Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...

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