Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: Time for Inspiration

Well perhaps the Egyptians could have paid some sl...

2005-10-22T18:49:21.626-04:00

Well perhaps the Egyptians could have paid some slaves instead of building Grand pyramids, but that would have left natural history somewhere different to where it is today. Thank goodness they didn't.

Its a great project. Perhaps sad people need reminding, but that is not the fault of the project.

It is an inspiring idea, one I first read about on...

2005-10-21T01:10:50.166-04:00

It is an inspiring idea, one I first read about on Edge.org (here and here). If you're not reading Edge then you should be - it's where lots of top people from all fields of science talk about what they do and discuss things that are relevant outside of pure science. If you are reading Edge then that's great, because that's what you should be doing.

Like Mike B., sometimes it strikes me as disheartening that people need these kinds of grand gestures to think beyond their narrow little place and time. At other times, though, it strikes me as wonderful that people are ever able to extend their imaginings to such distances, so that even people who will not be born for ten thousand years seem real to them. No other creature, as far as I know, is capable of approaching such a feat.

Having read the article, I see how irresistable th...

2005-10-20T18:35:57.623-04:00

Having read the article, I see how irresistable the concept is, and how easy it is to share the guy's zest and foresight and god-like perversity, and to salivate over his contraption, with all its precision and massed metallic detail. Nevertheless, I can't help thinking, firstly, of how expensive the whole thing must be, and how much more noble it might be for Hillis's sponsors to express their compassion in donations to a worthwhile charity, rather than in the realisation of a bizarre technological fantasy; and secondly, of how odd it is that people need such a colossal enterprise to remind them of their place in eternity, when anyone with an imagination can appreciate this, at no cost at all, by watching a present-day spider do its fleeting silk-work in the brief quiet of a Friday morning, as it and other spiders have done on every brief morning since brief mornings began, and in the same sun that shone on all the spiders that were breifly alive before them, and in the same very old sun that looks a bit newer every day, and which makes each new web flash briefly in a new place, every time it comes down and hits it with a new light; or by reading a book written by a dead author; or by doing any other such thing with thought and sensitivity. It is a shame if people need a piece of engineering to tell them these things.

PS: Apologies for my grammar in the first comment.

"Widen our circle of compassion": I presume this ...

2005-10-20T17:47:08.650-04:00

"Widen our circle of compassion": I presume this means the same thing as "stengthining our moral torches", or "expand our spheres of moral light."

"Now I think about people who will live 10,000 years from now as real people." - hopefully we can think of people who lived 100 years *ago* as real people as well.