Opus 2026-516: Who Would Have Imagined?

If I keep listening to discussions on Joe Rogan I may never need to read science fiction again.  Science fiction originally was people projecting their imagination onto the future and trying to build a story around it.  You had two trains of imagination.  One was the hard science.  Einstein was on his pedestal.  Faster than light travel was impossible.  You built your drama around that.  The other was based on ignoring Einstein and believing the faster than light travel was possible.  Remember that people once believe that we would never break the sound barrier.  The stories that the talking heads come up with are along the second train.

I heard about all the civilizations that existed before our historical records.  The evidence?  New technology looking under the pyramids.  Sound exciting.  Of course, just like Solomon’s mines, they cannot access them because they are under the lake formed by the Aswan dam and the Egyptian government will not cooperate.  How convenient.  I think they had been reading Chariots of the Gods.

The polio epidemic was caused by DDT spraying according to the podcast.  Interesting.  My father had polio so I have an interest.  The problem is that the statistical data before the perversion of modern research does not go with that.  DDT was outlawed in the US in 1972.  Pull up a chart of cases of polio.  It peaked in 1952.  In 1957 it had dropped from 58,879 cases a year to 5,485.  Notice that is 15 years before DDT was banned.  By 1963 it was down to 396.  The story we have always heard was it weakened the shells of certain birds.  Suddenly, 54 years later we discover a whole new body of information.  Could it be part of the trend in science to ignore obvious reality and search your imagination to come up with a clever theory that no one can disprove.  Global warming anyone?

It gets boring when you are a sceptic.  If the writer tells a good story you can ignore what I call the Star Wars Effect.  That was demonstrated by the X-wing fighters banking and rolling like it was World War I, in a vacuum.  Eventually they started inserting an explanation but since I liked the action it did not change anything.  If it is something that is important then I let my scepticism loose and point out conflicts and lies.  It gets harder to find good fiction but I keep looking.  One of the benefits of getting older and having a memory that is questionable is I can start reading the old stuff again.

homo unius libri