SUICIDAL CIVILIZATION?

"Pentcho Valev" wrote in message
ups.com...
Recently titles like "Physics in Terminal Decline", "A Farewell to
Physics", "Physics in Crisis" have become commonplace. Science
authorities are upset by the declining number of students that may
result in a declining number of professors. So authorities will try to
increase the number at the expense of students' quality. The main
slogan of the movement remains unchanged:

(snip)


Pentcho Valev

Historically nothing new and wonderous and great came -- or could come --
out of either Roman Emperial Bureaucratic Establishment science or Chinese
Emperial Bureaucratic Establishment science....and nothing new is coming out
World Socialism's Joint Bureaucratic Establishment science today. Thus a
growing implosion across the board of Man's ability and capability to do
great things -- other than war. If no individual man or woman can freely --
dynamically -- think and do independently of the collective, no collective
whatsoever of men and women can dynamically think and do at all. A state of
mass mindlessness is in being. Thus ever growing implosion and abortion of
the world's latest frontier 'Space Age' aborning. Thus implosion and
abortion of dynamic civilization proceeding apace from within. Thus the
growing Decline and Fall of Civilization. Thus a century long darkness of
new dark ages still darkening our days ever more.

GLB

G. L. Bradford wrote:
"Pentcho Valev" wrote in message
ups.com...
Recently titles like "Physics in Terminal Decline", "A Farewell to
Physics", "Physics in Crisis" have become commonplace. Science
authorities are upset by the declining number of students that may
result in a declining number of professors. So authorities will try to
increase the number at the expense of students' quality. The main
slogan of the movement remains unchanged:

(snip)


Pentcho Valev

Historically nothing new and wonderous and great came -- or could come --
out of either Roman Emperial Bureaucratic Establishment science or Chinese
Emperial Bureaucratic Establishment science....and nothing new is coming out
World Socialism's Joint Bureaucratic Establishment science today. Thus a
growing implosion across the board of Man's ability and capability to do
great things -- other than war. If no individual man or woman can freely --
dynamically -- think and do independently of the collective, no collective
whatsoever of men and women can dynamically think and do at all. A state of
mass mindlessness is in being. Thus ever growing implosion and abortion of
the world's latest frontier 'Space Age' aborning. Thus implosion and
abortion of dynamic civilization proceeding apace from within. Thus the
growing Decline and Fall of Civilization. Thus a century long darkness of
new dark ages still darkening our days ever more.

GLB

You sound like an apocalytic christian fascist to me.

"Pentcho Valev" wrote in message
oups.com...

This is relevant:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/high...851445,00.html
"Fewer students may be studying physics at university but the real
threat of extinction faces chemistry and materials-related sciences, a
study warns today."

Pentcho Valev

"The love of letters, almost inseparable from peace and refinement, was
fashionable among the subjects of Hadrian and the Antonines, who were
themselves men of learning and curiosity. It was diffused over the whole
extent of their empire; the most northern tribes of Britons had acquired a
taste for rhetoric; Homer as well as Virgil were transcribed and studied on
the banks of the Rhine and Danube; and the most liberal rewards sought out
the faintest glimmerings of literary merit. The sciences of physic and
astronomy were successfully cultivated by the Greeks; the observations of
Ptolemy and the writings of Galen are studied by those who have improved
their discoveries and corrected their errors; but if we except the
inimitable Lucian, this age of indolence passed away without having produced
a single writer of original genius, or who excelled in the arts of elegant
composition. The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus,
still reigned in the schools; and their systems, transmitted with blind
deference from one generation of disciples to another, precluded every
generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the human
mind. The beauties of the poets and orators, instead of kindling a fire like
their own, inspired only cold and servile imitations: or if any ventured to
deviate from those models, they deviated at the same time from good sense
and propriety. On the revival of letters, the youthful vigour of the
imagination, after a long repose, national emulation, a new religion, new
languages, and a new world, called forth the genius of Europe. But the
provincials of Rome, trained by a uniform artificial foreign education, were
engaged in a very unequal competition with those bold ancients, who, by
expressing their genuine feelings in their native tongue, had already
occupied every place of honour. The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that
of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of
commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was
soon followed by the corruption of taste.
"The sublime Longinus, who in a somewhat later period, and in the court of
a Syrian queen, preserved the spirit of ancient Athens, observes and laments
this degeneracy of his contemporaries, which debased their sentiments,
enervated their courage, and depressed their talents. 'In the same manner,'
says he 'as some children always remain pygmies, whose infant limbs have
been too closely confined; thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices
and habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves, or to
attain that well proportioned greatness which we admire in the ancients; who
living under a popular government, wrote with the same freedom as they
acted.' This diminutive stature of mankind, if we pursue the metaphor, was
daily sinking below the old standard, and the Roman world was indeed peopled
by a race of pygmies; when the fierce giants of the north broke in and
mended the puny breed. They restored a manly spirit of freedom; and after
the revolution of ten centuries, freedom became the happy parent of taste
and science." -- Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire (first published, 1776).

The Arab Caliphic while conquering distant empire (essentially, new space
frontiers) internally expanded and grew in learning, and when it stopped, it
stopped. Will Durant claimed rightly that the European Renaissance began in
Europe with the Crusades to the East, dipped in the 1400s, then exploded in
supernova with the Portuguese tracking around the Cape of Good Hope to the
East and the Spanish advances in the Americas. Each Chinese internal revival
of vigor and vitality -- fertility -- was tied to revival in conquest of
outer frontiers. In outer or external expansionism was internal growth of
energies, genius and advancement. When the one stopped dead, the other
stopped dead. Today we run faster and ever faster, monotonously, in a circle
of just one world, spinning our wheels faster and ever faster, monotonously,
in a place of just one world...and want to believe we are going somewhere --
doing something besides mindlessly digging energy's grave. Eyes wide shut.
History repeating itself once more. Retrench. Retrench. Retrench.

GLB

G. L. Bradford wrote:
In outer or external expansionism was internal growth of
energies, genius and advancement. When the one stopped dead, the other
stopped dead. Today we run faster and ever faster, monotonously, in a circle
of just one world, spinning our wheels faster and ever faster, monotonously,
in a place of just one world...and want to believe we are going somewhere --
doing something besides mindlessly digging energy's grave.

That is true enough, although I see from sci.physics.cond-matter that
the Pentcho Vaclev who you are quoting is hoping to revive physics with
"original thinking" like overthrowing relativity and building
perpetual-motion machines.

Arthur C. Clarke said it, back in "Rocket to the Renaissance"; a
frontier brings a renewal of spirit. On Earth, though, frontiers often
come by means of aggression, and this is true more so today as the
world is overcrowded. Space seems to be the answer.

From where in space could a start be made, from a colony on Mars, or a
base on the Moon constructing O'Neill-style colonies, to a colonization
of space? Which one has the lowest start-up costs?

I define start-up costs simply enough - the cost of the launches from
Earth needed to establish a small community of people, away from the
Earth, with the ability to derive everything they need to survive,
grow, and engage in industrial activity (on a limited scale to begin
with, of course) without additional resupply from Earth.

This is a question that ought to have an answer.

John Savard

wrote in message
oups.com...
G. L. Bradford wrote:
In outer or external expansionism was internal growth of
energies, genius and advancement. When the one stopped dead, the other
stopped dead. Today we run faster and ever faster, monotonously, in a
circle
of just one world, spinning our wheels faster and ever faster,
monotonously,
in a place of just one world...and want to believe we are going
somewhere --
doing something besides mindlessly digging energy's grave.

That is true enough, although I see from sci.physics.cond-matter that
the Pentcho Vaclev who you are quoting is hoping to revive physics with
"original thinking" like overthrowing relativity and building
perpetual-motion machines.

Arthur C. Clarke said it, back in "Rocket to the Renaissance"; a
frontier brings a renewal of spirit. On Earth, though, frontiers often
come by means of aggression, and this is true more so today as the
world is overcrowded. Space seems to be the answer.

From where in space could a start be made, from a colony on Mars, or a
base on the Moon constructing O'Neill-style colonies, to a colonization
of space? Which one has the lowest start-up costs?

I define start-up costs simply enough - the cost of the launches from
Earth needed to establish a small community of people, away from the
Earth, with the ability to derive everything they need to survive,
grow, and engage in industrial activity (on a limited scale to begin
with, of course) without additional resupply from Earth.

This is a question that ought to have an answer.

John Savard

The answer has already been put forth but not believed by most that cannot
see the bigger picture, that of the space frontier. The answer is the
in-space Stanford Torus and the in-space industrial / commercial /
shipbuilding and shipping complex. The history is the sea -- Tyre
(Phoenicia), Aden, Zanzibar, Athens, Carthage, Constantinople, London,
Genoa, Venice, Lisbon, Antwerp, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Havana, Boston, New
Amsterdam / New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charlestown (Charleston), St.
Petersburg (Russia), Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong......

[On the deep sea] on Earth is [in deep space] in the Space Frontier, not
deep INLAND in any narrowing gravity well (narrowing, shallowing, all
potential dimensionality instead of expanding it).

There is no sustaining -- even for the short term -- the costs of a Moon
base, much less a base on Mars, without a going PERMANENT [in deep space]
expansionist city-state colony complex. There is no steady state crossing of
deep seas before you are firmly established on the deep sea (Tyre, Aden,
Zanzibar, Athens, Carthage......). (There is no steady state crossing of
deep space before you are firmly established in deep space.)

"Ask of me anything but time!" -- Napoleon.

GLB