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

Tue Aug 3 14:27:02 UTC 2010

> Carl Sagan from COSMOS:
> It's a lovely fantasy to explore those other worlds that never were.
> If you had H.G. Wells' time machine, maybe you could understand how
> history really works if an apparently pivotal person had never lived:
> Paul the Apostle, or Peter the Great, or Pythagoras. How different
> would the world really be? What if the scientific tradition of the
> ancient Ionian Greeks had prospered and flourished?
>
> It would have required many social factors of the time to have been
> different, including the common feeling that slavery was right and
> natural. But what if that light that had dawned on the eastern
> Mediterranean some 2,500 years ago had not flickered out? What if the
> scientific method and experiment had been vigorously pursued 2,000
> years before the industrial revolution, our industrial revolution?
> What if the power of this new mode of thought, the scientific method,
> had been generally appreciated? I think we might have saved ten or
> twenty centuries. Perhaps the contribution that Leonardo made would
> have been made a thousand years earlier and the contribution of
> Einstein 500 years ago. Not that it would have been those people who
> would have made those contributions, because they live only in our
> timeline.
>
> If the Ionians had won, we might be now, I think, be going to the
> stars. We might at this moment have the first survey ships returning
> with astonishing results from Alpha Centauri and Barnard Star, Sirius
> and (Ta Siti?) There would now be great fleets of interstellar
> transports being constructed in earth orbit, small unmanned survey
> ships, liners for immigrants, perhaps, great trading ships to ply the
> spaces between the stars. On all of these ships there would be symbols
> and inscriptions on the side. The inscriptions, if we look closely,
> would be written in Greek. The symbol, perhaps, would be the
> dodecahedron, and the inscription on the sides to the ships to the
> stars something like Starship Theodorus of the planet earth.
>>>>
>
> If only...

It's a beautiful dream, and if the dream
stays alive, its realization will eventually follow. Sagan was a great man,
 not least because he recognized the importance of unbridled imagination and
a sense of wonder as an essential catalyst for scientific inquiry.

D.

----------------------------------------
> Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2010 06:19:47 -0700
> From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com
> To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Carl Sagan once conjectured that, if things had gone right, we'd be flying to the stars today
>
> An excerpt from episode eight of COSMOS, that shows Sagan discussing
> the subject of "what might have been..."
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2geS8JtS4PY
>
> The written text...
>
> Carl Sagan from COSMOS:
> It's a lovely fantasy to explore those other worlds that never were.
> If you had H.G. Wells' time machine, maybe you could understand how
> history really works if an apparently pivotal person had never lived:
> Paul the Apostle, or Peter the Great, or Pythagoras. How different
> would the world really be? What if the scientific tradition of the
> ancient Ionian Greeks had prospered and flourished?
>
> It would have required many social factors of the time to have been
> different, including the common feeling that slavery was right and
> natural. But what if that light that had dawned on the eastern
> Mediterranean some 2,500 years ago had not flickered out? What if the
> scientific method and experiment had been vigorously pursued 2,000
> years before the industrial revolution, our industrial revolution?
> What if the power of this new mode of thought, the scientific method,
> had been generally appreciated? I think we might have saved ten or
> twenty centuries. Perhaps the contribution that Leonardo made would
> have been made a thousand years earlier and the contribution of
> Einstein 500 years ago. Not that it would have been those people who
> would have made those contributions, because they live only in our
> timeline.
>
> If the Ionians had won, we might be now, I think, be going to the
> stars. We might at this moment have the first survey ships returning
> with astonishing results from Alpha Centauri and Barnard Star, Sirius
> and (Ta Siti?) There would now be great fleets of interstellar
> transports being constructed in earth orbit, small unmanned survey
> ships, liners for immigrants, perhaps, great trading ships to ply the
> spaces between the stars. On all of these ships there would be symbols
> and inscriptions on the side. The inscriptions, if we look closely,
> would be written in Greek. The symbol, perhaps, would be the
> dodecahedron, and the inscription on the sides to the ships to the
> stars something like Starship Theodorus of the planet earth.
>>>>
>
> If only...
>
> John : )
>
>
> On 8/3/10, darren shawn greer  wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 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 : )
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> extropy-chat mailing list
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> extropy-chat mailing list
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat