One thing that struck me when listening to the podcast is how Russian Cosmism illuminates the "religious" aspect of the Western Idea of Progress, since Cosmism in some peculiar fashion is both religion, science (or at least science fiction) and politics at the same time. There are still Cosmists in Russia and they seem to be just another New Religious Movement!
Since I´m a kind of "moderate Faustian" (for lack of a better word - or is it realistic high modernist? Or low modernist perhaps?), I´m all for the idea that a dualism between Faustian and non-Faustian, or between dualism and monism, is...unproductive. Perhaps the Faustian impulse could be harnessed to expand technologies that may actually help people here on Earth in their day-to-day activities, rather than all those dreams about space conquest and what not? (The latest is that NASA wants to build a nuclear power plant on the Moon and then on Mars!)
As a child and teenager, and later too, I simply took it for granted that *of course* we must have space conquest because how else could we leave Earth when the sun becomes a red giant? Your essays "The Next Ten Billion Years" and "An Afternoon in Early Autumn" made me *really* understand deep time and how religious (in the most negative sense of the term) that red giant stuff really is. Even ten million years (an insanely long time) is less than a single day on the Great Year proposed in the latter essay. Whoa! It´s also a very long time for humans to actually come up with technology that really could "build back better"...
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branchandroot
Cosmism etc
Date: 2021-11-20 03:28 pm (UTC)Since I´m a kind of "moderate Faustian" (for lack of a better word - or is it realistic high modernist? Or low modernist perhaps?), I´m all for the idea that a dualism between Faustian and non-Faustian, or between dualism and monism, is...unproductive. Perhaps the Faustian impulse could be harnessed to expand technologies that may actually help people here on Earth in their day-to-day activities, rather than all those dreams about space conquest and what not? (The latest is that NASA wants to build a nuclear power plant on the Moon and then on Mars!)
As a child and teenager, and later too, I simply took it for granted that *of course* we must have space conquest because how else could we leave Earth when the sun becomes a red giant? Your essays "The Next Ten Billion Years" and "An Afternoon in Early Autumn" made me *really* understand deep time and how religious (in the most negative sense of the term) that red giant stuff really is. Even ten million years (an insanely long time) is less than a single day on the Great Year proposed in the latter essay. Whoa! It´s also a very long time for humans to actually come up with technology that really could "build back better"...
Some links about Cosmism.
https://ashtarbookblog.blogspot.com/2021/05/knocking-on-door-of-progress.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m9_3eB2tdI&t=769s
The second link is to the documentary mentioned in the blog post. I know you don´t do videos, but somebody else might perhaps be interested.
Tidlösa, Sweden