CDXL – What Year Is It (2)

Alternate Title: A Nightmare Vision of the Future

I’m telling you, folks, this futurist’s substack has been great for my blog.

The question this futurist asked yesterday is “What science fiction technologies do you wish were real?”

Lots of predictable stuff. I even chimed in to suggest a space elevator or gravity manipulation, mostly because those are macguffins I use in my science fiction.

One comment presented a case for time travel that was alarming. I reproduce the comment in full:

Time travel so I could bring a bunch of climate scientists, activists and storytellers back for a redo on resisting fossil fuel companies. We’d send some to the 1870’s and some to each decade thereafter in a coordinated effort to short circuit the birth of the modern PR movement and paint fossils [sic] as the filthy planet-destroyers they are. That’s just for a start.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

First and foremost, the idea of using time travel for political activism is deeply disturbing. It never occurred to me, and I have thought about and written time travel based fiction. Politicizing time itself. Just wow.

The three privileged groups to earn their ticket to the past to save the future are Scientists, Activists, and Storytellers. Scientists willing to go back in time to push an agenda just are activists. Activists just are story tellers because they are trying to tell a convincing story, a persuasive story, about some thing being more bad than we think it is. So what our commenter is saying here is that three kinds of story tellers will be telling three different kinds of politically aligned stories. The scientists will tell stories that are based on numbers for academic audiences; the activists will tell stories based on people for political audiences; the storytellers will tell scary stories to the wider public. Psychological warfare across time and space, my friends, that is what we are talking about here!

Of course, there’s no alternatives. We built modernity on cheap, efficient, power. That’s why they claim the world is wrecked. They love modernity but the original sin was building modernity on dinosaur squeezings. We don’t get an empire state building, iPhone, etc without good cheap black gold.

I don’t know why the commenter chose the 1870’s. Why not the 1800’s? Why not 1700’s? Coal has been available for all time, only in the industrial revolution did it start getting used for good cheap easy power.

So problems we are dealing with: 1- Time Terrorism. I just can’t even believe that climate change somehow justifies that. Staggering. 2- No alternative for fossil fuels, so get used to wooden ships and whalebone skirts. 3- Law of unintended consequences. If the whole world discovered the wonderful power density of Oil and chose not to exploit it, then one group gets competitive advantage by exploiting it, and they conquer the world in tanks because everyone else’s green-energy trebuchet’s are useless against them.

Time terrorism. Just amazing. I can’t believe it.

AMDG

CDVI – Aeviternity Recap

I’ve written a lot about Aeviternity and it’s stretched out over a long period of time so I need to do a recap so I can keep my thoughts straight and make sure I still understand it.

Here are links, if you would like to review yourself:

1- Understanding Aeviternity
2- More on Aeviternity
3- Afterthought on Aeviternity
4- Becoming
5- Aeviternity and the Resurrection
6- Playing forever in a theater near you
7- Inglorious Resurrection

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What is the experience of Aeviternity?

Aeviternity exists outside of time, but below true Eternity. Time is a measure of change, but because the Aeviternal order is not fallen the way our temporal order is, that makes me think that the Aeviternal order operates in some kind of Agency-space, rather than space-time. This is because Angels can make choices, can move around, can carry out their jobs–and these things are flexions of Agency. So time for Angels ticks based on the choices they make and not by the inexorable changing nature of space. I have described this as “Zero-entropy Agency-space”–the Zero-entropy part describes the fact that the aeviternal order is not fallen, so simply existing–standing there and doing nothing–doesn’t cause boredom or exhaustion, they have infinite energy because entropy is Zero.

It is possible that the “energy” that fuels Aeviternity is more directly the grace of God, because both the existence and the operation of all things rely directly on God anyway–in Aeviternity it will be made more clear.

How does this affect our understanding of Hell?

If Aeviternity is zero-entropy, how does eternal torment work? We can imagine the horrors of hell by the fact that those in hell will understand perfectly that God exists and they chose wrong. Another possible source is the fact that an imperfect soul will be reunited with a perfected body, and the dissonance there, I could imagine, would be extremely painful. The perfected body can still be subject to torture and privation–it is a body, after all–so if we can simply exist and not spend any energy we can also suffer eternally without ever losing energy for suffering.

How does this affect our understanding of the Resurrection?

In Eden, our perfected bodies will be reunited with our perfected souls. In the outer darkness, perfected bodies will be reunited with imperfected souls. Because in Eden both soul and body are perfected, it does not mean we are a creation again–it means the soul has been completed, and is perfectly conformed to God; it means the body is completed, and perfectly conformed to God; it means that any action contrary to God while still free agents will be impossible because we will be perfectly united to Him. It is impossible to perfected souls the way cheating on ones wife is impossible to a husband. Imagine making such a commitment with perfect resolve. He would have the freedom to cheat but it would be unthinkable to him.

How does this affect our understanding of ourselves?

Everything that is true in Aeviternity must be true here as well. A wise man is a man who has made many decisions, just like how in Aeviternity “time” is measured by the operation of Agency.

We get to live our lives as an act of creation, making the choice that Angels get to make the moment they are created: For God or against God. Being an “Act of Creation” means that we get to form our souls, it is a way we share in the image of God. When we die, if by the grace of God we get to join God in Heaven, our souls will be perfected and then we will be “completed”–no longer “becoming” but complete. Our souls are complete at the moment of death, and purgation removes imperfections the way firing clay makes it keep it’s final shape.

How does this affect our understanding of Eternity?

Eternity–God’s point of view–see’s every moment with perfect clarity, is the author and designer of everything. He know’s what the final movie will look like, He knows how each scene goes. Aeviternity is like the writers room. There’s things going on there to help make the movie better but it’s not part of the movie. Temporal reality is the movie.

I hope this summary is helpful–I was losing track of everything.

AMDG