Notes
[Notebook: DB 560 Spotlights]
[Sunday 24 December 2006 - Saturday 30 December 2006]
Sunday 24 December 2006
Monday 25 December 2006
[page 56]
Tuesday 26 December 2006
Physical theology [a preface]. Physical theology.
Since, as a small child in the late 1940's I first learned of the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought my father home from the war, I have had an intense intellectual relationship with weapons and war. The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on the Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki This intensified through the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the steady background of lesser wars which have assaulted us, and gradually coalesced into an ambition to produce a noetic (mind) weapon which would show us how to manage our affairs without war.
This essay is an impressionistic outline of my latest results.
[page 57]
The Theory of Peace had its first outing in a series of ten programs broadcast through 2BOB Radio between June and August 1987. A Theory of Peace The Cold War fizzled out with a miraculous absence of bloodshed soon after. The first break in the Berlin Wall occurred on the evening of November 9, 1989. Fall of the Berlin Wall
Historians will discuss the Cold War for centuries to come, but I was happy to see that I had fingered some of the forces at work. Gaddis First accept that war is a natural phenomenon. It is ubiquitous in recorded history. It is the manifestation, on the human scale, of the conflict between the unlimited possibilities of the Universe and the limited resources available for their realization. As long as there is enough to go around, peace is possible, but as soon as population exceeds carrying capacity, someone has to go by violence or starvation. A prerequisite to peace, then, is to reduce demand or increase supply. We reduce demand by population control and reducing the amount of resources required per person. We increase supply by diverting more of the world's resources towards ourselves.
The conflict between possibilities and resources drives evolution by natural selection, of which we are a product. As a result of hard evolutionary discipline we and all other living organisms are extraordinarily efficient. I am a community of independent entities (atoms, molecules,
[page 58]
cells, etc) bound together by a layered network of [communication] whose ultimate bandwidth is defined by [my] power (100 Watts) and the quantum of action. . . .
By these standards current human technology is extremely wasteful and inefficient. The scope for reducing our demand on our environment by appropriate physical and social technology is almost unlimited. From an energy point of view, the sunlight falling on one square metre of the earth is sufficient to support one 100 Watt human. On the other hand, all material resources can be recycled, at a certain cost in energy.
Although these ultimate limits are unattainable in practice, we can go a long way toward them by playing our cards right. Here enters the noetic weapon, conceived as theology and implemented in religion. The key insight is that communication creates space. Ultimately the closed world of communism was prized open when the barriers to communication imposed by a totalitarian regime were broken by conversation, printing, radio, television and all the other means of human conversation.
Clear and present dangers overshadow vague and absent ones. The end of the Cold war revealed the multitude of smaller conflicts that circle the globe and underline the religious nature of war.
[page 59]
One may see the Cold War as a conflict between Christianity and Marxism in its incarnation as a state religion. From my point of view, both these organizations are reactionary, totalitarian, anti-democratic and repressive of human creativity. The end of the Cold war has also revealed conflict between the fundamentalist wings of Christianity and Islam.
Wednesday 27 December 2006
Thursday 28 December 2006
Friday 29 December 2006
Saturday 30 December 2006
