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Top-level
@chu That's quite a story, and I feel for you for having to go through that with your friend. The veneer of civilization is really thin, and most people don't realize just how thin it is. I think about the Asimov short story "Nightfall" a lot. What happens when all the lights go out everywhere? People find things to burn. 10 comments
 @CoolBlenderKitten @quadrivial Nightfall is such a good analogy. I think more people need to read sci-fi. I wonder if these things are obvious because of how much I read as a kid or because of my education as an engineer. I don't know. But I'm just bewildered. "How do you think things will go down??!?!" @chu @CoolBlenderKitten @quadrivial things will go simultaneously far better and far worse than we can imagine. Technology and civilization will survive, in places. At the same time it will be impossible to overstate the amount of suffering that humanity will endure. @chu @CoolBlenderKitten I think it requires a certain background to genuinely understand how interconnected our tech is and how fragile. Or at least it requires a certain level of curiosity about the way the world works. And these both seem lacking in many Americans.  I think you're absolutely right about curiosity, but also important is a sort of meta-knowledge about knowledge. Far more people have heard the expression that "knowledge is power" than believe it. You don't have to have curiosity for its own sake (though it helps), if you at least understand the value of finding out how things work - of trying to understand how the world around you works. Americans, culturally, are a deeply incurious people, not just because they lack innate curiosity but because they do not see the value in having knowledge. The flip side of "I don't need to learn that because I can always just go look it up" is... never going to look it up, whatever it is. My fellow Americans strike me as blithely unconcerned with the potential dangers of not knowing what they don't know. So the science fiction that keeps coming to my mind is "The Cold Equations". |
Gregory's Server
@quadrivial @chu
I love that story so much, glad sometime else has read it and got it. 💕👍🥰