[lbo-talk] Death by bland

[Eubulides]

Chuck Grimes wrote:
> This is just a note and some thanks. Mike Perelman posted a short news
> item on Lawrence Livermore's laser containment beam experiment on
> nucleosynthesis. The fusion of hydrogen into helium. Of course it has
> military applications. But the potential for something like this kind
> of fusion is so great that I'd be willing to forget the military
> application, just for the possibility of a peace time break
> through.
> What's at stake is a virtual science fiction world of the future where
> interstellar travel and colonization of new planets are made possible
> in a way that no other merely technological path makes available. If
> we could actually do fusion in sustained and controllable ways it
> would be one of the giant steps to go along with walking, talking, and
> thinking.
>
[snip]
>
> I suppose I shouldn't go over the top, but the ability to control
> nucleosynthesis is a very, very big deal. In the grandest scale, it
> means you can create another universe within this one. The way I want
> to look at it, comes from Jose Clemente Orozco, Man of Fire, the
> fresco dome in the Guadalajara orphanage. Promethesus Unchained.
>
> I don't have the stuff. But I know others do, giants, guys like
> Oppenheimer, Bohr, Einstein, Dirac, de Broglie or the mathematicians
> like Minkowski, Hilbert, Poincare, Weyl, von Neumann would have seen
> it in a flash, and would have died to work there... Their greed to get
> the answers would have driven them into spectacular heights and
> unimagined flights. It would have been beauty beyond conception. Or a
> darkness so profound, we mortals would rue the day we ever give it
> utterance. Whatever. The one thing it wouldn't be was bland. Death of
> the bland. Well, were we are at the moment.
>
> CG
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4Tyyz3oVck

[at about 1 minute in....]