Re: Starving people refuse to eat food aid
netcat
> ObSF: I consider this almost as irrational as the end stage of
> American society depicted in Olaf Stapledon's _Last and First Men_,
> in which you're not allowed to breed unless you can pilot a plane,
> and your babies aren't allowed to live unless they can hang onto
> the outside of a plane in flight.
Well, if they cannot, the problem should take care of itself.
rgds,
netcat
Keith F. Lynch
> k...@KeithLynch.net says...
>> ObSF: I consider this almost as irrational as the end stage of
>> American society depicted in Olaf Stapledon's _Last and First Men_,
>> in which you're not allowed to breed unless you can pilot a plane,
>> and your babies aren't allowed to live unless they can hang onto
>> the outside of a plane in flight.
> Well, if they cannot, the problem should take care of itself.
Yes, that was the whole point.
The author clearly viewed that society as deeply deranged. It
eventually collapsed, and there was a dark age that lasted tens
of thousands of years.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
Michael Stemper
>netcat <net...@devnull.eridani.eol.ee> wrote:
>> k...@KeithLynch.net says...
>>> American society depicted in Olaf Stapledon's _Last and First Men_,
>>> in which you're not allowed to breed unless you can pilot a plane,
>>> and your babies aren't allowed to live unless they can hang onto
>>> the outside of a plane in flight.
>
>> Well, if they cannot, the problem should take care of itself.
>
>Yes, that was the whole point.
>
>The author clearly viewed that society as deeply deranged. It
>eventually collapsed, and there was a dark age that lasted tens
>of thousands of years.
It's too bad that they couldn't have set up a place, say on Neptune,
where trained scholars could have collected and published a
compendium of knowledge. They might have been able to cut that
period to a single millenium.
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
Nostalgia just ain't what it used to be.
Cryptoengineer
wrote:
> In article <hg9kp5$lo...@reader1.panix.com>, "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> writes:
>
> >netcat <net...@devnull.eridani.eol.ee> wrote:
> >> k...@KeithLynch.net says...
> >>> American society depicted in Olaf Stapledon's _Last and First Men_,
> >>> in which you're not allowed to breed unless you can pilot a plane,
> >>> and your babies aren't allowed to live unless they can hang onto
> >>> the outside of a plane in flight.
>
> >> Well, if they cannot, the problem should take care of itself.
>
> >Yes, that was the whole point.
>
> >The author clearly viewed that society as deeply deranged. It
> >eventually collapsed, and there was a dark age that lasted tens
> >of thousands of years.
>
> It's too bad that they couldn't have set up a place, say on Neptune,
> where trained scholars could have collected and published a
> compendium of knowledge. They might have been able to cut that
> period to a single millenium.
Stapledon's "First and Last Men", and later "Star Maker" were the
first books that made me think about 'Deep Time'. Unlike a lot of
books which had events taking place in a fairly tight period a long
time from now, he covers enough intervening events, with changes
drastic enough, that you get a real feel for the passage of aeons, and
each generation's tiny span within it.
pt
Keith F. Lynch
> mste...@walkabout.empros.com (Michael Stemper) wrote:
>> "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>>> The author clearly viewed that society as deeply deranged. �It
>>> eventually collapsed, and there was a dark age that lasted tens
>>> of thousands of years.
>> It's too bad that they couldn't have set up a place, say on
>> Neptune, where trained scholars could have collected and published
>> a compendium of knowledge. They might have been able to cut that
>> period to a single millenium.
As you presumably know, the far future men on Neptune were (will be?)
able to view all of the inhabited past in great detail. They were
also able to influence it to a small extent. The conceit of the novel
was that it was a true account of the future dictated to the author by
one of these future men.
However, it's also claimed that the past is absolutely fixed. They
can't alter it in the slightest way. They can influence it only in
the exact ways that it already had been influenced. If that makes
any sense.
> Stapledon's "First and Last Men", and later "Star Maker" were the
> first books that made me think about 'Deep Time'. Unlike a lot of
> books which had events taking place in a fairly tight period a long
> time from now, he covers enough intervening events, with changes
> drastic enough, that you get a real feel for the passage of aeons,
> and each generation's tiny span within it.
Indeed. He's not the only author to depict billions of years, but
he's one of very few to make them *feel* like billions of years, not
like a long weekend.
He got some things right about the future: He said that a British
princess would die in an accident at the hands of the French at about
the time the last WWI veterans were dying of old age.
Other things he got very wrong: There is nothing remotely like WWII,
computers, or the Internet. Nuclear power wasn't discovered until
thousands of years in the future, and its sole discoverer committed
suicide rather than let it fall into the hands of an unready world
-- and it wasn't rediscovered for tens of thousands of years. Space
travel wasn't invented until millions of years from now.
But LAFM still one of my favorite novels, just because of the grand
vision and the unique and slightly old-fashioned prose style.
There is another sequel besides _Star Maker_: _Last Men In London_.
I was searching for it for years before I found a copy.
Speaking of deep time, earlier this evening when searching for cable
ties, I instead found some Ordovician fossils I had misplaced years
ago. I've had them for about 40 years. The time since the Ordovician
is to 40 years about what 40 years is to two minutes. So it's a very
long time ago, but not an unimaginably long time ago. LAFM extends
about five times further into the future than the Ordovician was in
the past.
Not many current authors have attempted anything remotely like LAFM.
Stephen Baxter's _Evolution_ comes closest. It covers a span of time
from about 150 million years ago to about 500 million years from now,
and describes the lives of creatures then living. Most of them were
not anything like what we'd consider human, however.
Charles Wm. Dimmick
Children. You have just begun to dip your big toe into deep time. We
geologists are so immersed in deep time that it has completely warped
our ways of thinking and of looking at the world. Any event which has
occurred within the last 10,000 [radiocarbon] years is "Recent". Any
life which has existed within the last 50 million years is "Recent Life"
[Cenozoic].
charles
Keith F. Lynch
> Cryptoengineer wrote:
>> Stapledon's "First and Last Men", and later "Star Maker" were the
>> first books that made me think about 'Deep Time'. Unlike a lot of
>> books which had events taking place in a fairly tight period a long
>> time from now, he covers enough intervening events, with changes
>> drastic enough, that you get a real feel for the passage of aeons,
>> and each generation's tiny span within it.
> Children. You have just begun to dip your big toe into deep time.
> We geologists are so immersed in deep time that it has completely
> warped our ways of thinking and of looking at the world. Any event
> which has occurred within the last 10,000 [radiocarbon] years is
> "Recent". Any life which has existed within the last 50 million
> years is "Recent Life" [Cenozoic].
You haven't read those novels, have you? _Last and First Men_ covers
a span several times longer than whole of the Phanerozoic. I think a
few mineral grains have been found that are from about as far in our
past as the end of that novel is in our future.
And _Star Maker_ takes a longer view. A *much* longer view.
William December Starr
"Charles Wm. Dimmick" <cdim...@snet.net> said:
> Children. You have just begun to dip your big toe into deep
> time. We geologists are so immersed in deep time that it has
> completely warped our ways of thinking and of looking at the
> world. Any event which has occurred within the last 10,000
> [radiocarbon] years is "Recent". Any life which has existed within
> the last 50 million years is "Recent Life" [Cenozoic].
What's the difference between a regular year and a [radiocarbon] year?
-- wds
Charles Wm. Dimmick
Richard Casady
Starr) wrote:
>What's the difference between a regular year and a [radiocarbon] year?
Calender years are exact. Carbon dates have uncertainty, more the
older they are.
Casady