The current terrorist threat
imposed upon us by the Islamic fanatic group known
as ISIS intends us to wear 7th century robes and
sandals, to kiss the grubby ground while facing east,
and apparently to commit any atrocity we please so
long as we say,
Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar
while doing so.
Rabka Uhalla, Rabka Uhalla!
And, the Rosetta spacecraft, equipped with an outstreched photo-voltaic cell, packed with modern electronics, 500 million kilometers away, slowly maneouvering its way to land on a strange object—a comet—coming from the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt, so unimaginably huge compared to us, and yet so small compared to the wider cosmos. Allahu Akbar on our Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot?
Rabka Uhalla!
Imagine our (hopefully) inevitable future evolution.
The boundaries between our organic selves and our digital
selves are gone. Our intelligence and insights are far
superior to what they once were, albeit artificial.
Our artificial selves are travelling to the stars, held
in digital suspension for the duration of the long trips.
And our living electronic substrates allow us to build
very small ultra-fast spacecrafts to get there.
A connected global consciousness prevails. Significantly, our egos are no longer singular. Digital teleporting of consciousnesses is commonplace, making physical travel largely redundant. Our emergent attributes, such as our minds, are not subject to aging and decay of the physical and organic parts on which they are built.
All our social systems have changed. Our past legal and religous systems rendered largely irrelevant. Strife and loneliness as we once understood and experienced them are gone. The need for conquest of neighbour and environment has given way to a need for coherence and sympathy. Am I looking forward to such a future? You bet!
Rabka Uhalla!
But I don't think we'll get there if we as human persons continue to think and live like we are the centre of everything. That we are important and special. That God made the universe just for us and me, or for us to worship it, or it us, or us him. That out of the many religious world views, both past and present, amazingly, mine happens to be the correct one. And that we can continue to allow subjective and equivocal belief to trump objective observation and rational thought.
Am I looking forward to a future where the predominant preoccupation of conscioussness is to sympathetically and objectively observe reality, and be it, without wanting to exploit or subjugate it, but rather to celebrate a deep connectedness with it? Yes, I am looking forward to it… but not enough to terrorise others for it.
So sorry, no Allahu Akbar
on our Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot
.
Rabka Uhalla, Rabka Uhalla!
Download PDF rabka-uhalla.pdf (394 KB)
