Sunday, July 8, 2012

newest kids on the block: EARTHLINGS

500 years of Skygods
Skygods have been around for 500 years, if not thousands of years, miners of the Earth, its cut 'n' run artists.

But Earthlings are genuinely new - growing gradually in numbers since the end of WWII, with three prominent growth bumps in 1945, 1955 and 1965.

V-2 ballastic rockets and the A-Bomb convinced America's leading Air Force commander Hap Arnold that under Modernity, war had changed profoundly.

1945: 36 Hour War
This in turn led Life Magazine, in the Fall of 1945, to do a special feature on a 36 hour war totally destroying New York, based on nuclear tipped rockets launched from Africa. No hemisphere was any longer free from the horrors of total war.

Combine this with the revealed horrors of Modernity's Eugenics at Auschwitz, and we see the ushering-in of the beginnings of our post-hegemonic age: Modernity no longer had the uncontested support of  middle class humanity.

1955: Fallout from Operation Castle Bravo
It was the world's first true H-Bomb test and its most famous: fallout from this American test in a remote Pacific atoll first killed a Japanese fisherman a 1000 km from the site, then mixed into the atmosphere to fall onto food all over the world.

Our bodies prefer to take up fallout's deadly Strontium 90 atoms, over those of  life-giving calcium.

 Once permanently installed in our bones, they ignited (the then always fatal) childhood leukemia.

Like the plagues brought to us by Modernity's rapid new international jet travel breaking glacial national quarantines, it once again reminded us that no spot on Earth was remote enough to be safe from events in any other part of it.

1965: No Life - Ever - on Mars or Venus : This is Life's only Lifeboat
In 1965, we began getting accurate scientific measurements from the atmospheres and surfaces of Mars and Venus - our only likely alternative homes to Earth.

 Hard Science Fiction, the porn of Modernity, had fed us delusions for 100 years that we could ruin Earth and then move easily to Earth 2.0 on Mars or Venus. No more: both were revealed as cold and hot versions of  'Hell On Wheels' .

The hippie, alternative, counter-culture, green, environmental , global-commensalist movement began in earnest : EARTHLINGS....

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