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Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics


Friday, May 3, 2024

What It Would Be Like If Science Fiction Was Not the Servile Handmaid of Materialism

Every religion has its art forms. For example, Islam has given us what are probably the world's most impressive examples of non-representational art, found in structures such as mosques. You will not find any better non-representational art than you will see by doing a Google image search for "mosque ceiling art." Christianity has given us countless great examples of art, including the masterpieces in the Vatican museum, glorious musical works such as Handel's Messiah, and peerless works of sculpture such as Berlini's The Ecstasy of St. Theresa. If we consider Darwinist materialism as a kind of stealth religion (and there are good reasons for doing so, as I explain here), then we can say that such a religion has produced much art.  The main art form produced by Darwinist materialism is science fiction. 

Science fiction tends to relentlessly promote the erroneous ideas of materialism. Below are some examples:

(1) The original Star Trek television series advanced the idea that a person can be transported from outer space to a planet by the use of a device (called the transporter) that disassembled the person's atoms and then reassembled them at another location. The series thereby promoted the idea that you are merely an assembly of atoms, nothing more. 

(2) The Jurassic Park series of movies has promoted one of the biggest lies of Darwinism, the idea that there is some blueprint for constructing an organism in the DNA of the organism. In the first movie in the series, we had an animated cartoon telling us that scientists had got a preserved drop of dinosaur blood because some insect had bitten a dinosaur, and because that insect had got trapped in amber that preserved the insect.  The imagined scheme never would have worked, both because DNA only contains low-level chemical information and does not contain instructions on how to make cells or anatomical structures, and also because large living organisms are so complex that no technology could ever construct them, even if DNA had instructions for building organisms. 

(3) The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey had an introductory sequence entitled "The Dawn of Man." We see some ape-like creatures. One of them learns how to use a bone as a club, and this trick spreads to the others in his group. The underlying message is: humans are just apes that know how to use tools.  The idea was absurd.  Humans are beings vastly more than apes in many different ways, one of them being that humans make use of symbols and language, and apes do not.  So we would not ever have had "The Dawn of Man" when ape-like creatures started to use tools. The tendency to deceive us by depicting humans as little more than apes has long been a prominent tendency of modern materialism.

(4) Various movies such as the "Planet of the Apes" series have served to promote deceptive materialist claims that there are only small differences between apes and humans.

(5) Various movies and TV programs with humanoid robots act to promote false materialist ideas that human minds are simple, simple enough to be reproduced mechanically. 

What would it be like if science fiction was not such a handmaid of materialist ideology? We might see scenes like the ones below. 

The "Star Trek" Scene You'll Never See

Mister Sulu: We have reached stable orbit around the planet, Captain.

Captain Kirk: Spock, what do your sensor surveys show?

Spock: There is a vast liquid ocean on the planet, one that has existed for billions of years. But our sensors show it it quite sterile. There seems to be no life on this planet.

Captain Kirk: But how could that be? There has been so much time for life to evolve here. 

Spock: We should not be surprised. Let us remember that even the simplest living thing is a state of vast organization requiring more than a hundred different types of proteins, each of which requires a very special arrangement of thousands of atoms. We should not expect so great an organization of matter to arise in a sterile ocean, even given billions of years. Similarly, if there were billions of years of ink splashes all over the surface of a planet, we should not expect that even one of them would ever produce a readable paragraph. 

The "Mind Uploading" Scene You'll Never See

Old Billionaire: Okay, guys, I've given you five years and 10,000,000,000 dollars to implement mind-uploading, so you'd damn well better have some good news to report, or I'm going to be  doing a lot of firing today. 

Project leader: I'm sorry, sir. We spent all your money, but we still have not been able to produce mind uploading.  

Old Billionaire: $!*&#*&!!!  Why were you not able to succeed?

Project leader: We hoped we could first find some brain states that would correspond to a person's personality, his beliefs, his knowledge and his memories. We hoped that we could transfer such brain states to rather equivalent states in a computer. But we were never able to find any brain states that  corresponded to a person's personality, his beliefs, his knowledge and his memories. It's strange -- we could not find the slightest speck of learned knowledge anywhere in a brain, even when we scanned brain tissue with electron telescopes and other similar technologies.  We couldn't even find something as simple as "cats have four legs" stored anywhere in any brain.  You shouldn't be surprised. No one had found anything like that when the project began in 2024.

The "Hyperspace Leap" Scene You'll Never See

Star Mission Executive: Why was there no answer from the Leap King 3 starship after it returned to our solar system?  The "Hyperspace leap" test seemed to succeed.  The idea was to send the starship to make an instant voyage to Alpha Centauri, by means of a leap through hyperspace. The ship soon returned to our solar system, as planned. But there was no answer from the crew. 

Star Mission Investigator: We entered the ship, and found the answer. Everyone on the ship died.  It apparently happened as soon as the leap through hyperspace was made. 

Star Mission Executive: How could that have happened? It's so unexpected. 

Star Mission Investigator: Well, not really.  When you think of it, the human body is an incredible marvel of sensitive biochemistry. There are so many things going on it that we just take for granted. Everywhere within the body there is the most fantastically complicated fine-tuned biochemistry that has to operate just right for all of us to exist.  The chemical choreography within the human body is more impressive than the choreography in all the Broadway shows that will be performed tonight. And the physical organization and functional complexity of the human body is more impressive than the machinery of any spaceship ever built. So why should we be surprised that some radical leap through hyperspace would throw things off, and cause everyone on the starship to die? 

Star Mission Executive: Execute an emergency operation to scan their brains, and move their memories and personalities into robots, so they can continue to live as androids.   

Star Mission Investigator: No one has ever been able to get anything like that to work. They scanned brains at the highest resolution of one angstrom, but we could never find any memories in it. No could ever find brain states corresponding to memories or beliefs or personalities or selves. 

science fiction of the future
Science fiction of the mid-21st century

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