From: Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@factory.net)
Date: Thu Aug 01 1996 - 00:05:41 MDT
At 10:50 PM 7/31/96, Lyle Burkhead wrote:
>But to be honest, the hard truth is that I really don't know what's
>going to happen. I have an increasing sense of unreality about all this.
>I don't know why people with frivolous goals won't survive.
I don't know why they won't survive, either, but that's because I happen to
think that they will survive.
>> I oppose the homogenization of culture; in the *long* term I think
>> it would be a disaster. However, I also recognize that the only
>> long-term solution to this problem is offplanet diaspora. And in the
>> post-diaspora future I'm fairly confident that purposes/values
>> will not only be diverse, but will proliferate and ramify far beyond
>> the scale of value pluralism that we see around us in the world today.
>
>I disagree. If you can't establish a private space on earth, you won't be
>able to do it offplanet, either. Offplanet colonies, like island colonies,
>submarine crews, colonies of scientists in Antarctica, or mining towns
>in Alaska, will carry human culture with them.
This is why I used asterisks when I said "long term". If we become a
cultural monocrop in the next century, I don't expect that we'll get well
past that condition until after the diaspora reaches its interstellar
stages. Geographic (well, cosmographic) separation leads to clading.
There's been talk of cosmic wormholes and "empires", but if a wormhole can
be created, it can be destroyed. Emigrants can close the doors behind them.
Hence, in the *long* term, we'll see clading and differentiation again,
sooner or later. Colonies will carry culture with them, but after a century
or two, the culture in the colonies of the Coal Sack region is not going to
look much like the culture in the colonies of the Ursa Major group.
And it's entirely possible that means of differentiation will be found that
can be used even within the narrow confines of the Solar System. Once you
take your stuff out of the ecliptic plane, it's pretty darn inaccessible
(or at least expensive to get to), thanks to the delta-vees.
Eric Watt Forste <arkuat@pobox.com> http://www.c2.org/~arkuat/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:35:42 MST