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RowKiwi t1_j8omv45 wrote

Here is a great quote from C S Lewis about fear of annihilation

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>“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways.
We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances… and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
― C.S. Lewis

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JVM_ t1_j8os8zs wrote

Gorgon - Tony Hoagland

Now that you need your prescription glasses to see the stars

and now that the telemarketers know your preference to sexual positions

Now that corporations run the government

and move over land like giant cloud formations

Now that the human family has turned out to be a conspiracy against the planet

Now that it’s hard to cast stones

without hitting a cell phone tower that will show up later on your bill

Now that you know you are neither innocent, nor powerful,

not a charter in a book;

You have arrived at the edge of the world

where the information wind howls incessantly

and you stand in your armor made of irony

with your sward of good intentions raised—

The world is a Gorgon.

It holds up its thousand ugly heads with their thousand writhing visages

Death or madness to look at too long

but your job is not to conquer it;

not to provide entertaining repartee,

not to revile yourself in shame.

Your job is to stay calm

Your job is to watch and take notes

To go on looking

Your job is to not be turned into stone.

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RowKiwi t1_j8p0qyl wrote

>Gorgon - Tony Hoagland

Wow that's appropriate. Poetry for the end times.

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wastedtime32 OP t1_j8p1l7f wrote

The last sentence tells me Lewis would be against a utopic AI world. “Praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music.” These are all things which, following the principles which led us to this point in humanity, are inefficient, and wouldn’t exist with the singularity.

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heavy_metal t1_j8s71d8 wrote

as someone who grew up thinking about the bomb, thank you for posting this.

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