Further to my review of A.D. After Disclosure, by Bryce Zabel and Richard Dolan, here are a couple of photos I took the other day whilst walking through Westwood, in Los Angeles, just a couple of blocks from UCLA.
Meanwhile, this lady was busily searching for some spare change to feed the meter where she had parked her Lexus, before she realized that she could use one of her credit cards - all while talking on her mobile phone.
A society that celebrates and rewards such conspicuous consumption, at the same time as it ignores abject poverty and human misery, is nowhere near ready for contact with an advanced non-human intelligence.
As Charles Bukowski wrote:
As Charles Bukowski wrote:
We are like roses that have never bothered to
bloom when we should have bloomed and
it is as if
the sun has become disgusted with
waiting.
If such an advanced non-human intelligence exists, I'm pretty sure it agrees.
Paul Kimball
6 comments:
You are adorable Paul!
Thanks... I think.
Agreed. But in the case of America if you suggest social solutions that in the end simply cost (too much) money people start yelling "communist" or the sort. That's how messed up it really is. I joined a movement that advocates applying science for social concern and you wont believe the labels (especially Americans) stick on you. You're right, ETs should stay away from lifeforms that don't care about their own.
Hi Ed,
An American ufologist once called me a socialist. I just smiled and said, "Take a look around, Don - the question isn't why I'm a socialist... the question that any sane person would ask is, 'why isn't everyone?'"
Paul
I looked at your photographs and asked myself, whose children are these? Each one of them has value beyond counting. You are reaching the heart of these matters, beyond the desires that some possess that drive a messianic wish, perhaps selfish at that, toward extraterrestrial life, like a cargo cult, akin to a spoiled juvenile. We are surrounded by non human life as well, and our stewardship toward it needs no comment. It is that awful and your photographs attest that suffering caused by denial, as if life itself were a arms length transaction, has many faces. Your post is humbling and I thank you for it. There are never too may reminders of this. Perhaps too few.
Hi Bruce,
Glad it resonated. LA is a great city if you want to see the human condition in its starkest relief. Two blocks away from where I took the picture, on the UCLA campus, was the Ronald Reagan Medical Center, which I found ironic. Of course, our political (i.e. tribal) divisions and fights would no doubt seem beyond petty to an advanced non-human intelligence, which is why I'm convinced that should such an intelligence exist, it contacts us as individuals, and only then to those people who have the ability, i.e. the willingness to hear, what it might have to "say".
Paul
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