Archive for the ‘Environmental’ Category

1989-02-18

Saturday, February 18th, 1989

Why is it that our stories of the future
and our heros (sometimes)
represent a sane future
while we, here, cannot wakeup
and make it so.

gallagher
18 feb 89

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1989-08-09

Wednesday, August 9th, 1989
                 Smart people need to get control of power
                 or stop inventing the things they are capable of.

                                         9 Aug 89

                - after seeing the Oppenheimer story on PBS.

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

2006-02-24 – Transcendence

Friday, February 24th, 2006


There are so many things wrong in this world that man has made
   that the urge to oppose them rises easily.
Here, in the U.S., we now use torture as a means to defend ourselves.
And, among the Islamic Fundamentalists
   as well as within the Christian Conservative Right,
      reason has fallen away before the meme of blind faith.
There are no easy solutions for those
   who would oppose the gathering darkness.

The fundamental underpinnings of how man has organized his civilizations
   contains the deep flaws that beget all the rest.
Nothing less than a rethinking of how we govern ourselves and
   how our economic systems are organized,
what the explicit purposes of our intentional structures are
   and a valid conception of what we think our long-term purposes are,
      as we consider our species' future, will be required.

And all of this requires an advance far greater than any we've achieved so far,
   despite how impressed we are with ourselves.
It requires that we intentionally transcend our inherent biological imperatives
   and replace them with new intentions based on that
      which is in our own and the biosphere's best interests
         into the indefinite future.

Given how few of us rise to transcendence of our personal biological imperatives,
   the outlook seems bleak.
Those structures and systems we have implemented to this point in time,
   are simply the high level derivatives of those same biological imperatives.
      Capitalism and all forms of the gathering of power being prime examples.

We are coming to an end time quite different from that envisioned in the Bible.
   It is one wherein the consequences of our biological imperatives and their derivatives,
unleashed by the power of our generalized intelligence and
   unrestrained by a clear perception of our own best long-term interests
and deeply blinded by the fairy tales of our prescientific religious beliefs,
   will lead us inevitably into a tragic collision with the inability
      of this global cradle, this precious biosphere, to support such folly.

gallagher
24 Feb 2006

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —