Quote of the Day #1

According to a blog comment - Teilhard de Chardin, from Future of Mankind(1955): 


"The more we ponder these matters of the future the more must we realize that, scientifically speaking, the real difficulty presented by Man is not the problem of whether he is a center of constant progress: it is far more the question of how long this progress can continue, at the speed at which it is going, without Life blowing up upon itself or causing the earth on which it was horn [born?] to explode. Our modern world was created in less than 10,000 years, and in the past 200 years it has changed more than in all the preceding millennia. Have we ever thought of what our planet may be like, psychologically, in a million years’ time? It is finally the Utopians, not the ‘realists’, who make scientific sense. They at least, though their flights of fancy may cause us to smile, have a feeling for the true dimensions of the phenomenon of Man.

void/void/void

infinite universe

remorseless waltz

void/void/void

loose from system’s

sun/sun/sun

Ideas for Code Poems

[to be written as a program in a high-level language, and displayed in descending order with its translation into increasingly lower levels until the poem is represented in binary form]

flame
reduce me to ashes

OR.....something like (pseudocode follows)

Print “entropic heat”

Print “reduce me to ashes”

--
here the descent is implied, and actually ends in the waste heat from the voltage jumps, which are the ultimate low-level translation of any computer code



-------------------------
title: degradation to pidgin

convert to leetspeak poem exactly 140 char for tweet
-
It may be contaminated, jargonized, disrupted language, but it is not a new language, not (yet) evidence for the invasion of an empire of machinic colonizers whose demands of trade and interaction require the creation of a pidgin by economically and linguistically disempowered human users.
-
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/literal
-

draft
--
!7 m4 8 (n7mn7d, j29n1zd, dsrupted lngu4g, but 1t 1s not 4 nu l4ngu4g, not (yet) evdence 4 d4 1nv4sn of 4 mpire of m4chinic colonizrs whos dm4nds of tr8d n intr4ctn rqire d4 cre4tn of 4 p!j1n by ecnm1cly n lngu!stcly d!smpwrd hmn usrs

Oh, Ahab Swearers (draft)

time flies

and old soldiers never die

if babies still cry

politicians still lie

ruined cities lie still

with the ghosts

dragged out of their flesh

on accounts of merchants

diamond rings flashing

plucking the heartstrings

wet eyes like sailors, chasing spectacular bling

----

oh, Ahab swearers, my Kurtzian forebears

briefcase bearers and web--meme declarers

you Atlases of the super--structure

had to scratch an itch, so

you had to shrug your shoulders

----

passing trinkets to the dinks, snatching material aspects

surveying the planet

stealing magic. man is thought--less

centered in the profit web

silk threads hang out his ass

don’t ask

----

the mind’s turning

an eternal task

yet no one hoped for this

Sisyphus, I’ll take my pistol

and put it to

your temple

depress my firing stud, destroy

you bitch

execution style, as

my index twitch hear the

button click see

the beam squeal bright

and hot across the sky

through your drying eye

see your boulder rumbling down

squishing caterpillars

flowers and bugs

----

oh, Ahab swearers, my Kurtzian forebears

briefcase bearers and web--meme declarers

you Atlases of the super--structure

had to scratch an itch, so

you had to shrug your shoulders

----

dialectic of the day

what can be put in the page

can be put in the years

and days of my decline

from grace, from the power

always shimmering before our eyes

like an oasis - a mirage

there is nothing to put in the page

except for what's suffered in the day

and years are an accumulation

of small defiances

against the quick day

if there is only decline

there is no decline

i am wrong

to fight my decline, my time

this delicious friction

is just another wave of desert heat

appearing in the page

Inspired by dogs

Aliens aren't really such a big deal. Humanity only has to worry about encountering 'less intelligent' (let us say, really a stand-in for 'less powerful') aliens than ourselves, and then the concern is ethical - what harm would we do to ourselves in their exploitation?

What I'm taking as a cue here is the symbiotic relationship between humanity and dogs.

'More intelligent' aliens, well, we'll be the dogs - we will be at their mercy. That after all, is the ultimate implication buried within 'more intelligent'. Yet, dogs are not entirely at the mercy of man - the relationship is too deep, too broad, and holds too entirely different points of view (dog and man) for such a pithy summation to be inadequate. Aliens of 'equal intelligence' (equal power) can't be a greater risk than ourselves - humanity is already at risk of wiping itself out of existence, I don't see how a coequal alien race could really create a scenario that much more terrifying than the Cuban Missile Crisis. If nothing else, maybe by then humanity would have world leaders who stayed clean. And like with dogs or the many other less-powerful species we've eradicated, the only risk a 'less-intelligent' alien species poses is a moral one. Would humanity add xenocide to its list of confirmed crimes?