A little response to Glenn Reynold’s piece yesterday. Essentially, if disaster does strike and our technological civilisation fall, climbing back up out of the pit will be easier next time round, as we know that it is actually possible.
TCS Column Up
2 responses
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Not to be a typical nerdling, but in the last episode of the latest sci-fi spinoff “Stargate: Atlantis” the plot revolves around a society that is destroyed (by typical sci-fi demons) every 150-200 years. They cope with this by enshrining their knowledge in large archives distributed across their planet so that they can get back as quickly as possible to solving the problem at hand (evil space monkeys destroying their civilization) as quickly as possible, each time perhaps amassing more and more knowledge and eventually succeding (which they do not in the episode…)
This is also touched upon in various apocalyptic sci-fi books, such as “Lucifer’s Hammer” or “Always Coming Home”, that you need archived information about how society was, and what science was, in order to build it all up again.
If you want to feel less useless, then create your own archive of sorts, and at the least it will allow you to broaden your mind now, since the likelihood of a planetary apocalypse is remote at best.
Good column! -
Lucifer’s Hammer I have read. Several have written to mention that, Canticle for Liebowitz and other such stories. Having been reminded of these things that I read some years ago I have a feeling that the baisc argument of the piece was sub-consciously derived from them.
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