From: Mike Cowar. (mikec@jax.gulfnet.com)
Date: Thu Jan 30 1997 - 04:19:33 MST
>Extropians! I have lurked on the Extropian list and then took a hiatus
>and am back lurking again. I am just coming off a SAVE THE WORLD
>mailing list devoted to the works of Daniel Quinn who wrote ISHMAEL,
>STORY OF B etc. Daniel Quinn has a theory that the human race went
>wrong about 10,000 years ago when it turned to totalitarian agriculture.
> Totalitarian agriculture eliminates all biological competitors in the
>production of human food. Now Quinn views the Salvationist religions
>which developed out of this agricultural revolution as being a major
>part of the ecological crisis. He sees humanity overpopulating the
>earth and destroying the biological community of which it is a part and
>cannot exist without. He talks about the Great Forgetting of 3 million
>years of human existence living in tribes on this planet. Daniel Quinn
>wants humanity to have a new mythology to enact which would allow the
>biological community to continue to evolve and exist. It is not clear
>to me if the Extropians have this perception of an ecological crisis or
>the view that man must exist within a biological community.
Humans make many changes to Earth that threaten my survival.
Assuming by biological community you mean carbon based life forms,
I hope I am not limited by that.
I do not like limitations.
Man must exist as man does.
Who says man must remain man?
I would rather be better than man.
How about you?
In
>INFO-PSYCHOLOGY Dr. Timothy Leary wrote that "Ecology is the seductive
>dinosaur science that will lead most of the post-human species to
>conform to terrestrial conditions, become reasonably comfortable,
>passive, robot-conditioned cyborg innsectoids directed by centralized
>broadcasting systems. " He goes on talking about adapting to a cyborg
>existence. Elsewhere, Tim Leary wrote that planet Earth is not suitable
>for an ever expanding technological civilization and Industry must
>migrate to the asteroids and other planets citing G. Harry Stine's book
>THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. Daniel Quinn views this outmigration
>of humans as sorcery,
Sorcery: a good word to use if you want mundanes to hate some thing.
>thinking that humans cannot exist outside of the
>biological community. The current Industrial Society is rapidly
>changing the face of the Earth. I just got a report from a friend in
>Germany on how the Autobahn is adding additional lanes and in his words
>"das ganze Land wird zur Strasse" the whole countryside is being paved
>over with highways. Hearing the refrain from Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow
>Taxi song " They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, you don't
>know what you got till it's gone, took all the trees and put them in a
>tree musuem, and charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see
>them". That song seems more and more relevant. Putting all my Internet
>exposure and voracious reading together gives me an information overload
>that is hard to deal with. The Extropians seem to me to be like the
>futuristic intellectual province envisioned in Hermann Hesse's GLASS
>BEAD GAME of the 24th century. Lurker Ed Maciocha
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:44:06 MST