These reflections on the philosophical implications of the defeat of fictional villains were prompted by at last reading about the destruction of that recurring fictional villain of the 1960s, Thrush. See recent posts on the Personal and Literary Reflections blog, e.g., here.
Here is another philosophical issue. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, founder and director of Thrush's literary predecessor, SPECTRE:
"...had decided that fast and accurate communication lay, in a contracting world, at the very heart of power. Knowledge of the truth before the next man, in peace or war, lay, he thought, behind every correct decision in history and was the source of all great reputations."
-Ian Fleming, Thunderball (London, 1961), 5, pp. 39-40.
That is why Thrush pioneered information technology and was eventually coordinated by three Ultimate Computers and why one of its surviving members reflects that the value in the Hierarchy was information which can be lost for a while but generated anew. Historical knowledge can be lost irretrievably but practicable information can be generated anew until entropy ends everything. But how did the energy that runs downhill get up the hill? Apparently, energy and virtual particles are created in a vacuum so is there a technologically accessible source of endlessly renewable energy as at the end of Poul Anderson's The Avatar?
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Interesting, meaning that the ultimate cosmological question is this: HOW did energy come to exist at all in the first place? I can easily see how that slides over to include philosophical and theological questions.
Sean
Historical information can also be retrieved, when new means become available.
Ancient DNA, for example, now that we can recover it in bulk, provides detailed information on population movements that previously had to be inferred, rather shakily, from things like potsherds. We now know that the people who built Stonehenge were almost entirely supplanted by new migrants not long after its completion.
Or there's dendrochronology, which can allow precise dating-- down to the season of an absolute-chronology year -- of many ancient artifacts. "Seahenge" and the "2nd Circle", for example, were quickly dated to the summer of 2049 BCE, something impossible before that technique was perfected.
One can credibly expect that new techniques will recover more information previously thought lost to entropy.
Poul speculated on these lines -- for example, in "Maurai & Kith" there's a scene where in the very far future nanobots penetrate to and analyze the layers of inhabitation in a city, all the way back to "ancient Chicago".
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Very fascinating, what you said, esp. about dendochronology. But I don't think everything which has been "lost" can recovered. Such as written works. The example I've thought of being the lost works of the Emperor Claudius.
And the scene you mentioned as being in MAURAI & KITH was in STARFARERS. Where future scholars about 10,000 years from now investigated the site of ancient Chicago to recover knowledge of English.
Sean
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