What happens the morning after money becomes meaningless? Do we all go back to our jobs the week after the aliens land?
The past constantly tricks us into thinking in the wrong terms. For instance: how huge does a systemic shock have to be to actually puncture the consensus reality trance? Answer: we'll find out. Again and again. The question of how humanity would proceed after our first open contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence is fascinating. Even more interesting is how we would handle the second round of contact...you know, when the other aliens show up.
What kind of social effects would widespread telepathy have on human culture? So much of our everyday interaction is based on deception that access to functional psychic abilities would be problematic. At least. Would you even want unfiltered, direct access to the thoughts of people around you? Is that a superpower or a catastrophic mental illness?
Supposing it was possible to unfold almost limitless energy from the quantum vacuum level -- would this be a Good Thing for the human species and their Earth? What would we really do with infinite power? Would being given a billion dollars really change your life and solve your problems? Everywhere you go, there you are. People can successfully break out of prison, but not the psychology that got them there. Behold, The Secret Name: Khazzoom-Brookes.
Our future will be shaped by what we cannot change -- most of all, ourselves. Technocracy porn aside, there is no escaping what English-speaking despair artists often call The Human Condition. Here we tread the line between cheerful fatalism and an honest assessment of our basic limitations. Really: are human beings ready for the super-powerful technology of tomorrow? It's not like we handled hydrogen bombs very well.
Or LSD, for that matter.
What if the headlines tomorrow were about a group of top scientists holding a press conference to shamefully admit that cold fusion was real? What if you could get a toaster-sized appliance for a couple hundred bucks that put out continuous electrical current -- and never stopped? Could there be a benevolent agenda behind the black budget ecosystem of classified technology? LOL SURE!!! Matthew 7:16
How can we break habits that are over 10,000 years old? Can we fix our own heads? How can we scale up Dunbar's Number using nothing but factory parts and aftermarket drugs? Is there an epigenetic switch available to tune out the circular drone of my confirmation biases? Bonus Round: philosophize: what does it mean for concepts of "free will" and "destiny" if you can dilate your perception of time to perceive multiple events simultaneously?
"Time is a fractal, or has a fractal structure. All times, moments, months and millennia, have a pattern; the same pattern. This pattern is the structure within which, upon which, events "undergo the formality of actually occurring," as Whitehead used to say. The pattern recurs on every level. A love affair, the fall of an empire, the death agony of a protozoan, all occur within the context of this always the same but ever different pattern. All events are resonances of other events, in other parts of time, and at other scales of time." -- McKenna
"Thanks to telegraphs and modern communications, commanders are flooded with a tsunami of almost meaningless facts."
Clear thinking requires constantly updated information. Myths like empty space and closed systems and Cartesian grids hinder understanding. We exist on a living spacecraft, swimming through invisible energy exploding from our Sun at every second, hurtling through a completely unknown area of the Milky Way galaxy...simple facts can be hard to come by. Embracing uncertainty should be the strategic imperative for the Kali Yuga, because things will only get weirder from here.
This century will be dominated and shaped by cities -- the new human organism, the largest and most voracious carnivore known to Earth. With over half the planet's population living in a city, artists need to confront the question of reclaiming public space and creating livable communities. How can we make our cities more beautiful, even as they metastasize and go supernova into the 22nd century? Maximize the dominion of nature and banish the demons of Retail Space at every possible turn. Resistance has nothing to do with branding, image, manifestos or politics...create in four dimensions. PEACE IS CONTAGIOUS.
"I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man’s destiny — if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image — tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I’ve tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes." -- McLuhan
Can you imagine being completely conscious all the time? Can you imagine living past 200? Can you imagine language viruses that cause mass outbreaks of violent insanity? We have serious problems on the horizon that are not being prepared for, and this is not something we want to be right about. Still, we wonder: is DHS allocating resources to keep up with science's ongoing War on Reality?
"My observation of the Universe convinces me that there are beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive of as human; that they are not necessarily based on the cerebral and nervous structures that we know, and that the one and only chance for mankind to advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with such beings." - Crowley
Paul Davies speculates that a space-faring civilization could use nanotechnology to build miniature probes to explore the galaxy, perhaps no bigger than your palm. Davies says, “The tiny probes I’m talking about will be so inconspicuous that it’s no surprise that we haven’t come across one. It’s not the sort of thing that you’re going to trip over in your back yard. So if that is the way technology develops, namely, smaller, faster, cheaper and if other civilizations have gone this route, then we could be surrounded by surveillance devices.”
"So, I appeared to be in a fifth dimensional fluid, an information space that I could say was maybe kinda bluish, extending out infinitely. These things swam through it and interacted with it and they told me that what the universe was, was a larval form of what they are, which is fifth-dimensional entities. And the only way to grow a fifth-dimensional entity is to plant it in time, henceforth our universe." -- Morrison
How do we unpack the lessons of mysticism into something tactically useful for self defense? Through the power of language, the language of science, and 10,000 other simultaneous fronts. Get in where you fit in. We have pagans in Hollywood, bankers in Boston, and operatives in every home: hands are full but life is good. Bob Dobbs teaches that Too Much Is Always Better Than Not Enough and we hold that truth to be self-evident. There is no other road to clarity available in the Kali Yuga. High ambient weirdness levels, synchronicity epidemics, and intolerable breaches of your comfort zone: those aren't problems, they're healthy symptoms...good signs on the road to Communion.
If time travel ever happens, then time travel has already happened. Much like the (unresolved) question of ET intelligence, the binary solution to chronophysical travel defines the parameters of our entire Universe. Either way, focus on what the Answer means to you, because that's where the real meat is. Big Change is gonna come and we need to be ready to move. We've already started building the future.
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