Chapter Two
A FRAGMENTARY HISTORY OF TERRAN CULTURE
BY NOEL RODGERS
What follows in this volume are the lecture notes I gave to the residents of Lunar Colony Seven in the first season after our connection with Earth was severed. My intentions at the time were to create a space for us to come together to celebrate Earth culture, to calm our frittered nerves, in the hopes that we would be connected again to our mother planet soon. That day has not yet come. It may never come. The fate of Earthbound humans may not be known for some time, perhaps ever. It may be up to future generations to find a way to return to Earth. The Moon is our home now, and that has to be good enough.
Many of you know I remain a committed student to Earth’s history, and the contributions my corporations made to advancing human knowledge on Earth, beneath its oceans and on other planets, is something I have dedicated my life to. Our lunar arrays, and the work many of you have advanced, has deepened our understanding of the universe, provided a clear view of the vastness of space, unencumbered by the atmospheric disturbances of Earth. Our vision from the lunar array could not be clearer, and we persist still to look deeper into the unknown, to answer the questions that persist. It is our evolutionary mandate to continue to explore and learn about our universe. In the case of space exploration, I was not content merely to be the CEO of my companies, but the captain of a colony. That decision has proven to be the wisest one I ever made.
I share the original notes in this volume, as much a lecture on scientific inquiry and the history of discovery, as a reflection of my thoughts and desires during that early period of great tumult. Please be sure to include the lecture slides when you play back this volume, for a more complete immersion into the original talk.
Yours faithfully,
Noel Rodgers, Captain, Lunar Colony Seven
Shackleton Crater, Lunar South Pole
EY 2095/LY 59
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Hosts, Phantasms, and Phantasia.
Good evening, lunar colonists, and welcome to tonight’s talk. I begin this lecture with the word: host. As in the host that holds the virus, the holy host, or one who hosts his guests for an exploration of Earth histories. As in hostage, someone held against their will as currency in an exchange with one’s enemies. Hosts held hostage, but to whom? In Latin, hostis. Means both friend and enemy. Hostile even. Tricky business, you see?
As the host tonight, I welcome you into my home. As the host of a would-be virus, I would certainly not welcome such an uninvited guest. Have our people on Earth hosted an uninvited guest into their corporeal bodies? Hostile takeover? Next slide please.
Phantasms. Ghost hosts.
Friend or enemy depends on the context. I see some pregnant mothers in the front row. Surely they could share some wisdom on this host business. The antithesis of a virus hosted inside our bodies would be a woman’s right to bear children, to host the species across time, into the future. But let us expand beyond the body, the social network of bodies, and go big, to the expanse of the universe. Next slide please.
Ptolemy created a geocentric theory of the universe perhaps the greatest anthropocentric idea in the history of humankind. Every man is the center of his own universe, and this image was projected outward. Ptolemy’s theory lacks elegance and must be continually revised to account for the planets’ strange trajectories around the Earth. Unholy hosts. Looking back to our ancestral species, this evolutionary flaw comes to be known as Ptolemy’s curse—man’s inability to see his own folly. Next slide please.
Copernican Mind Spasms.
In 1543 Copernicus’s heliocentric theory places the sun at the center of the universe, with the planets revolving around it. Some say this is the beginning of modern astronomy, and of the scientific revolution. Next slide please.
Invisible Adversaries.
Ninety-nine per cent of light and the electromagnetic spectrum is invisible to the human eye. For our species to progress, we needed instruments that could render the invisible visible. Next slide please.
Mapping Time.
The Soviet filmmaker, Dziga Vertov, calls the cinema the microscope and telescope of time. He was among the first philosophers to explore the archeopsychic realm, to truly understand the power of the cinema to cross grand time scales into the past and future. To enter our minds through the conscious hallucinations that the cinema brought to bear. Proto-feed was born. Next slide please.
Sensorial Overload.
Aristotle places phantasia between sensory perception and reason: “thinking is carried out by means of images, and the images have to be provided by the imagination”. Imagination becomes the engine of thought, a means of lubricating the harsh contact points between external sensorium and inner vision. “Imagination alone contains poetry,” and, “Imagination is the most scientific of the faculties”. For Baudelaire, imagination is what makes both synthesis and analysis possible. Next slide please.
Universe Man.
Ah, a man after my own heart: Giordano Bruno, philosopher, poet, magician, mathematician, astronomer. Believing magic was the result of phantasmic images, he dreamed the feed before it was born. Extended the conceptual theories of the Copernican model of cosmology. Giordano was among the first to claim the universe was infinite. He was burned alive at the stake for his heretical views, for which he was unapologetic to the end, even as the flames consumed his mortal core. Next slide please.
“It is not surprising that man, burdened with obsolete ‘knowledge’—his spontaneous reflexing conditioned only by past experience, and as of yet unable to realize himself as being already a world man—fails to comprehend and cope logically with the birth of Universe Man.” R Buckminster Fuller, Utopia of Oblivion, 1969. Big year for mankind! Next slide please.
Time Travels through the Light Machine.
Edwin Hubble works in total darkness to adjust his eyes to the starlight. He fixes his gaze on the Andromeda Galaxy and three candidate novae, one being a Cepheid—a star that pulsates. The length of the pulse betrays its actual luminance, and its visible luminance when measured against its actual luminance betrays the star’s distance from Earth. Tonight the most significant photograph in the history of humankind will be taken.
It is October 4, 1923. Next slide please.
Documenting Terran Bio Destruction.
Many of Earth’s thinkers recognized the destructive nature of their species, and a form of salvage biology was conducted by its most radical thinkers. In 1843, botanist Anna Atkins published a collection of images, documenting Terran plants and algae. In less than two hundred Earth years, all of these species were functionally extinct. Some exist on Mars and here on the Moon but no longer live freely on Earth. It should be noted that Atkins’s work was funded by her husband’s business in the English slave trade. These tradeoffs of human suffering versus human knowledge form the bedrock of our great gains, I might add. Sometimes referred to as the Dusky Seaside Sparrow Paradox. Landing on the Moon must have been a hard pill to swallow if you were among the last of the coastal Florida sparrows. Something has to suffer for something else to gain, or the engines of progress stall. Next slide please.
Next slide please.
One solves mysteries of the universe through the trinity of observation, theoretical development, laboratory experiment.
Next slide please.
Moth Light Flame Terrain.
If splitting the atom invoked darkness, evolutionary biology would have prevented the threat of mutual destruction, nuclear holocaust, gamma radiation, unstable elements invading our bodies, the destruction of Earth systems’ ability to sustain human life. The paradox of light: mothlight. The movies, the internet, and the feed prepared industrialized society for nuclear holocaust, like the scientists who desired detonations at night. The feed prepared us for the spectacle of light against the dark, for anything is possible. Sunrise promises warmth, ruptures night, offers another chance at survival. Mastering the sun satisfies the primal evolutionary need for light, warmth, clear lines of sight, like crosshairs in a mirror! Are you with me, people? Next slide please.
Failure to Adequately Map Time.
Old-timey corporate thought patterns structured time on quarterly profits. Wrong! Profits should be structured on the hour! Time is our most valuable asset, why wait? As the Peruvian folklorists say, there is more time than life! The Soviets invented the five-year plan. Wrong! The concept of thinking seven generations ahead is said to have originated from the Great Law of the Iroquois. Okay, I concede the wisdom of this, but that is as anti-profit as it gets.
Most Terrans tended to think on the human timescale, a lifespan, no more. The failure to think on grander timescales while also extracting profits by the second, geologic-time-real-time paradox indicates the poverty of thought that led to the destruction of the Terran noosphere, the planetary doom that was to overtake Mother Planet. Let’s not forget there’s a reason we’re living on the Moon people, and it’s not just the amazing views! Okay, let’s wrap here. I’m getting hungry. Duck Confit Crostinis with parsnips and figs, anyone?
