" The question for me is how we escape our mundane thinking and habits ... "
Well, Neil, you just need to spend 2 days with me on - the - road in the Himalayas ... ! And you would never have to ' escape ' anything ever more. On May 8, 12:32 pm, archytas <[email protected]> wrote: > We had an election night comedy alternative to the business as usual > coverage. The physicist Brian Cox was wheeled on to shoot the breeze > on catastrophe, as we voted for a hung Parliament, leading to all > sorts of guff about 'national interest' as the parties jockey for > their own under this banner. > > Cox came up with 'super volcanoes', pointing to the disaster in > Indonesia 74,000 years ago that covered India with ash and reduced the > human breeding population to about 1000 couples. Later he mentioned > asteroids, pointing to a couple that will travel between us and some > of our weather satellites in the next few years. Plague of some kind > may also be on the cards. He was dismissive of CERN blackholes > swallowing us up. There was much he didn't mention, like WMD > terrorism possibilities and economic madness, the latter a point made > many times by Jared Diamond (the point being what we are doing now > that resembles past ecocides). > > I have reached a point where I really should just opt out of society > because it makes me frustrated, depressed and inclined to the insane. > One can find personal peace, yet this always seems at the cost of > hunkering down into ignoring what is likely to happen to 'us' and > letting oneself be subsumed to trust in evolution and giving up on a > wide, consensual society that is interested in being as prepared as it > can to shape destiny. Cox was somewhat irreverent, leaving us only > with the idea that Bruce Willis will be too old to save us. > > I'm struck in the British context that we have had our 'new hung > Parliament' before and the pundit blather is much the same. This > politics is too boring to contemplate, but I wonder if we have any > ideas on the broader context of what we know about catastrophe in > history and how we might shape ourselves to evade or at least be > prepared for its inevitability in the future. > > The question for me is how we escape our mundane thinking and habits > and what we would need to try to move on. I can't properly express > this question and am looking for help.
