Steven Spielberg loves to tangle with powers beyond our outstanding and he went full-out barking with Indiana Jones in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Even so, it still comes out at the end to the Powers Beyond Our Own and that's worth a dip. The movie is still kind of cool, even if completely deranged, and Cate Blanchett must have had a field day with that awful accent.
Powers Beyond Our Own doesn't have anything to do with traditional religion as the stories are usually set thousands of years before anyone heard of such traditions. The Powers Beyond Our Own in the Rockhouse context are Nature, nuclear radiation, etc.
This idea man controls everything is such supreme arrogance and yet they do it anyway. Oppenheimer wasn't sure if the first nuke would start an impossible chain reaction but he did it nevertheless.
(Ed: he was helping to end the war!)
He showed a singular lack of imagination in doing it. WWII was almost over anyway and the only question was how many lives would be lost finishing it. Assuming maybe a million lives, that was balanced against a global thermonuclear holocaust and the billions of lost lives in the future. Since the evidence of global war was right in front of him, failure to anticipate that eventuality was an exceptional effort. We look square at it right now due to some aggressively incompetent foreign policy.
That consequence comes now with the Pentagon and its paper generals killing the world if they ever start believing their own bullshit. That's dramatic but the same idea of control of Every Damn Thing is all over the place. People get pissed about off getting bitten by shark but what the fuck did they think would happen if they swim where sharks eat.
There's a whole lot of genome editing going on and Yale just announced a device / technique which permits modifying multiple genes at once. Gee, such convenience.
There's no particular ethical consideration of such things due to the general premise we can control whatever we like. The scientific community typically conducts its own ethical reviews sometimes but there doesn't appear to be any actual process and some of this research seems to run wild. It may be a good thing to run wild but but there seems more consideration 'what cool thing can we do' than of potential consequences as a result.
Note: we're not getting religious but we don't exclude religion from the ethical consideration. However, the only veto must come from reason and not from some implicit authority.
Powers Beyond Our Own doesn't have anything to do with traditional religion as the stories are usually set thousands of years before anyone heard of such traditions. The Powers Beyond Our Own in the Rockhouse context are Nature, nuclear radiation, etc.
This idea man controls everything is such supreme arrogance and yet they do it anyway. Oppenheimer wasn't sure if the first nuke would start an impossible chain reaction but he did it nevertheless.
(Ed: he was helping to end the war!)
He showed a singular lack of imagination in doing it. WWII was almost over anyway and the only question was how many lives would be lost finishing it. Assuming maybe a million lives, that was balanced against a global thermonuclear holocaust and the billions of lost lives in the future. Since the evidence of global war was right in front of him, failure to anticipate that eventuality was an exceptional effort. We look square at it right now due to some aggressively incompetent foreign policy.
That consequence comes now with the Pentagon and its paper generals killing the world if they ever start believing their own bullshit. That's dramatic but the same idea of control of Every Damn Thing is all over the place. People get pissed about off getting bitten by shark but what the fuck did they think would happen if they swim where sharks eat.
There's a whole lot of genome editing going on and Yale just announced a device / technique which permits modifying multiple genes at once. Gee, such convenience.
There's no particular ethical consideration of such things due to the general premise we can control whatever we like. The scientific community typically conducts its own ethical reviews sometimes but there doesn't appear to be any actual process and some of this research seems to run wild. It may be a good thing to run wild but but there seems more consideration 'what cool thing can we do' than of potential consequences as a result.
Note: we're not getting religious but we don't exclude religion from the ethical consideration. However, the only veto must come from reason and not from some implicit authority.
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