[ExI] Carl Sagan once conjectured that, if things had gone right, we'd be flying to the stars today

Tue Aug 3 12:22:49 UTC 2010

John Grigg wrote:

> Who is really to blame for what
appeared to Carl Sagan, to be at least
> 500 years of lost time and
opportunity in the development of human
> science and technology?

Excellent questions, John. I have read Contact five or six times, and I don't remember that passage. Sounds like Ellie speaking.

> My question is, to what extent
should we really portion out blame to
> the Greeks, Romans, Christians,
Jews, Muslims, and Medieval Europe for
> what happened? And where could
things have gone very right? And why
> did they not?

Have you read Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West? Besides being one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read, he tackles these questions in two thick volumes. He divides the
development of the west into three periods -- Apollonian (Greek), Magian
(Middle Ages) and Faustian (Modern from Baroque onwards.) With plenty of
examples from science, art, politics and philosophy from each period to back
his argument, he proposes that the way these cultures thought were radically
different from each other. The Greeks, for example, were primarily concerned
with form and structure and shape, from Praxiteles to Euclid. They never
tackled the question of infinity, for it was meaningless to them. And they left
it up to the Arabs to conceive of zero. That would have mean meaningless also
to a culture obsessed with tangible form.

He says that Faustian or modern society is concerned with largely with space. Our science, architecture, politics, and art reflect this. It may be that many useful ideas languished in old libraries
because, though some individuals touched on them, we just weren't thinking in a
way that allowed them to root in our collective consciousness.

>The permanence of the stars was
questioned, the justice of
> slavery was not.

In his Politics, Aristotle makes excellent arguments for good government, preferring a polity over democracy or oligarchy. Yet he makes an argument in defense of slavery and claims that
virtue and ethics are innate qualities that a person is born with and cannot
develop. Anti-abolitionists used his arguments in the public debate prior to
the Civil War, just as some fascist governments have held up a translated copy
of Plato's Republic to defend restrictive social policy. After reading about Leo
Strauss (thanks to this list) I was able to determine that Strauss read the Republic
too literally. The Greeks likely saw it for what it was: a search for objective
and immutable concepts of justice, love, peace, and utopia rather than a
literal blueprint for structuring society.

In summation, I believe we were just incapable of implementing these ideas even though some of them were there for the taking. Ancient intellects were not inferior or incurious or even defiant
or anti-science. They were just programmed differently. Archimedes proposed the earth was round circa 250 BC and even set out to prove it by measuring the length of a shadow cast by a stick shoved vertically in the ground at different times during the day (read Heinrich Van Loon's The History of Mankind.) Yet the idea of a flat earth persisted in the west for more than a thousand years after this because it fit a certain cultural schema. A schema that was not necessarily determined by conscious prejudice against a round earth, but one that was literally incapable of taking it seriously.

Darren

----------------------------------------
> Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2010 03:04:01 -0700
> From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com
> To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> Subject: [ExI] Carl Sagan once conjectured that, if things had gone right, we'd be flying to the stars today
>
> Who is really to blame for what appeared to Carl Sagan, to be at least
> 500 years of lost time and opportunity in the development of human
> science and technology?
>
>>From Wikiquotes, quoting COSMOS:
> Imagine how different our world would be if those discoveries had been
> explained and used for the benefit of everyone, if the humane
> perspective of Eratosthenes had been widely adopted and applied. But
> this was not to be. Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world
> had ever seen. People from all nations came here to live to trade to
> learn, on a given day these harbours were thronged with merchants and
> scholars and tourists, it's probably here that the word Cosmopolitan
> realised its true meaning of a citizen not just of a nation but of the
> Cosmos, to be a citizen of the Cosmos.
>
> Here were clearly the seeds of our modern world, but why didn't they
> take root and flourish why instead did the Western world slumber
> through a 1000 years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and
> their contemporaries rediscovered the work done here? I cannot give
> you a simple answer but I do know this, there is no record in the
> entire history of the library that any of the illustrious scholars and
> scientists who worked here ever seriously challenged a single
> political or economic or religious assumption of the society in which
> they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned, the justice of
> slavery was not.
>>>>
>
> I remember Sagan stating how a small steam engine developed by a
> Greek was seen as a mere entertaining toy by his countrymen, and the
> great potential of it totally eluded them. And this was probably in
> large part due to their slave based economy. And Sagan painfully (at
> least for me) lamented that if not for lost opportunities due to the
> Greeks (I would also add the Romans), and the following darkness of
> the Middle Ages, we would have starships returning to Earth from
> expeditions to Alpha Centauri right now! And so in other words, we
> would be at least *500 years* more technologically advanced than we
> are now!!!
>
> My question is, to what extent should we really portion out blame to
> the Greeks, Romans, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Medieval Europe for
> what happened? And where could things have gone very right? And why
> did they not?
>
> Correspondingly, what caused The Enlightment to germinate and bring
> forth an on-going transformation that eluded the lofty Greeks and
> Medieval Europe?
>
> A part of me thinks that an immature and violent 15th century Europe
> (or a Greek world that never fell) with nukes would be a recipe for
> the permanent end of civilization! lol Perhaps things actually did
> work out for the best, because as it is, we as a race were just barely
> capable of handling the awful responsibilities that come with weapons
> of mass destruction.
>
> What do you think?
>
> John : )
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