One day soon we will be swept into oblivion
By James Giago Davies
Native Sun News Today Columnist
nativesunnews.today
A funny thing happened back in the 1890’s—they thought they were living right on the sophisticated cutting edge of the modern world.
Everything that had passed before was crude and primitive, but not their world. It was full of ingenious invention and fascinating possibility.
There was electricity and indoor plumbing and towering buildings and horseless carriages. People even knew about germs, imagine that. Just a couple decades before if you had said that the planet was teeming with microscopic organisms, people would have laughed in your face.
Folks did not believe in what they could not see, except for monsters, and ghosts and Gods, then they’d believe just about any wild story people could cook up, especially if it was passed down orally by holy men, or written in ancient scrolls by superstitious, science-ignorant men thousands of years dead.
James Giago Davies. Photo
courtesy Native Sun News
Today
Well, that part hasn’t changed much, but the everyday reality of the 1890’s sure has. Horse power has been replaced by jet power, and radio is primitive technology to us, but was futuristic technology yet to be perfected in their time. The famous people of that time, mostly forgotten.
The most famous politician? William Jennings Bryan. The most famous man on earth? John L. Sullivan. H.G. Wells was writing incredible science fiction, War of the Worlds, the Time Machine. Most people figured the future was now, that they were reveling smack dab in the heart of it, because what was left to be discovered or understood?
They are all now 120 years dead, and we see their time as the primitive past. They did not see how much would change over the next half century, and the change was dramatic, from horse and buggy to the atomic bomb, from telegraph wires to television. What has changed over our last fifty years?
There is shockingly very little visual change from 1968. Pretty much the same buildings, cars, streets, greasy pizzas and soda pop. The real change has been computer technology. Even the most remote part of the reservation has somebody jabbering into a cell phone.
What would the next great change in our society look like, aside from obliterating our societies with thermonuclear warfare? That change is not being discussed in popular culture. If you try to bring it up, like I am now, they would rather discuss thermonuclear warfare.
No one wants to talk about the
Technological Singularity (TS). It will change our world, more deeply than all previous changes combined. We can’t process it by any education most of us have been offered, and even if educated, most are predisposed to rationalize it away because it threatens too many indoctrinated priorities and perceptions.
James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. He can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com
Copyright permission Native Sun News Today
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