…and Rousseau was wrong about war.
Rousseau was wrong about pretty much everything, and following his flawed philosophy has led to the suffering and death of hundreds of millions since.
10 thoughts on “Hobbes Was Right”
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…and Rousseau was wrong about war.
Rousseau was wrong about pretty much everything, and following his flawed philosophy has led to the suffering and death of hundreds of millions since.
Comments are closed.
And yet the lib dems, GIGO* Jims, Admiral Gerribs, and other befuddled humans kneel and pray to Rousseau.
GIGO – Garbage In; Garbage Out
Not surprising, chimp warfare has been known for a while, and the “noble savage” of the new world was a classic case of twisting facts to fit a theory, or in this case, a philosophy that is attractive.
But I suspect this is also the explanation of Fermi’s Paradox. Namely that the movie “Independence Day” and the Robert Heinlein/Spider Robinson “Variable Star” were right, its a rough universe out there.
ET civilizations that make themselves visible are probably wiped out fairly quickly by more advanced ones that don’t want competition. The ones that still exist are the ones that have successfully maintained “radio silence” (or perhaps “spectrum silence” would be a better term?). Given our primitive systems its unlikely we will locate any ET civilization except a one too naive to hide like ours.
And the fact that we are still here discussing it simply means the advanced civilizations have not reached us yet to wipe us out. Hopefully they still don’t know we exist.
Given that one wonders if SETI shouldn’t be moved to the military instead of being left at the whims of scientists, some of who are even naive enough to want to broadcast our location to the universe.
It also makes you wonder if we shouldn’t be looking for ways to achieve more “spectrum silence”. Yes, radio waves from the early years have moved about 110 light years out, but my understanding is that they would be lost in the clutter of radio noise after only a few light years. Any insights from the radio experts here?
Hopefully in a hundred years or so we will have dozens of Asimov Habitats roaming the Oort Cloud, lost in the clutter out there and so be more resistant to extinction by ET. Hmm, could make a good science fiction series…
You need look no further than the hit series Meerkat manor to see organized war on a wide scale in the animal kingdom…
I would go with Occam’s Razor, the explanation requiring the fewest number of assumptions is the likely correct one. For the Fermi Paradox, I would say we don’t detect their (ET’s) presence because there not there to detect. Believe that planets are obviously fairly abundant, life (at least single celled or simple multicellular), perhaps reasonably common, but complex multicellular life rare, and intelligent technological civilizations very rare. Maybe 0-10 active at any one time in our part of the galaxy
Unfortunately even one ETI would be one too many if they are hostile and are more advanced than humanity. With luck any other ET are a long way away…
If they exist, they probably have hunter-killers in every planetary system in the galaxy. Even with nuclear propulsion, they could cover the entire galaxy in less than ten million years, and if they can launch some nanotech assembler at the speed of light which can build hunter-killers when it arrives, they could cover the entire galaxy in a hundred thousand years.
Which defaults back to my Occam’s razor assertion that they likely don’t exist or are extremely rare. Which means if we survive long term the galaxy (or most of it) likely belongs to us and our progeny.
Well, maybe we will be the ones to eventually spread across the entire galaxy. Sometimes I’ve poked at liberal evangelical atheists by pointing out that if we do, and assuming our civilizations rise and fall and records are lost, each of those hundreds of thousands of worlds will have a geological record that will show a single clear creation event where flowering plants, fish, reptile, amphibians, birds, mammals, and man seem to have showed up in about seven days, and it will be science. Such wildly incorrect but apparently scientific assumptions might hold throughout the universe. If the records of colony foundation get lost as a general rule, I wouldn’t be surprised if each colony independently concludes that they were created, then eventually hooks back up with other colonies to conclude that they were all made by the same god, or at least the same advanced race of progenitors. It’s probably been a feature of many science fiction stories that I haven’t read.
The takeaway quote from the piece is this:
‘As Locke declared: “In the beginning, all the world was America.” ‘
I can rebut Rousseau with one word: “schoolyard.”