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I love this series and read each book over and over.
The reverse engineered alien antigravity and weapons technology Omega used in Demon Divine got me thinking about what this series has to say about the human race in general. Most of the commentary on humanity comes from Omega. Omega let us all know several books ago that he believes that humanity is inherently self-destructive and would have likely blown itself up with nuclear weapons if he had not intervened. I think he even said that it might happen is as little as twenty years.
Now, Omega has access to antigravity tech which is based on antimatter and unbelievably destructive beam weapons of some type. They seem to be “Star Trek phasers” level of destructive. These are weapons developed or war, but I can imagine all sorts of wonderful and peaceful applications for that technology. Antigravity could revolutionize transportation and space exploration and space commerce. However, any technology involving antimatter has the potential to be twisted into weapons even worse than nukes. It seems logical that Omega has to keep this technology out of the hands of the common legions of the earth for the same reason that he cannot trust us with nuclear weapons. That would mean that humanity can never become the kind of race that harness energies and technologies that make most S.F. societies possible, because that kind of power always has to potential to be used for destruction. Sad.
That is a very cynical view of humanity. We are doomed to destroy ourselves unless a higher power saves us from ourselves? I have always gotten the impression from reading the series that the author is more optimistic about humanity than that. I have been anticipating that the war to come with the aliens will change things, maybe even allow humanity to outgrow some of its taste for infighting and finding ways to think of other humans as being different enough not to get along with.
Lots of S.F. authors have had fun speculating that it would take an outside enemy to finally unite humanity, and we would all fall back to fighting among ourselves as soon as the outside threat is dealt with. I am hoping that our favorite author has a plan for this and will bring his usual creativity and give a nice surprise. I don’t believe that humanity has to unite and stay untied to outgrow its self-destructive tendencies. I think humanity just has to come to truly believe that we all need each other to survive in a dangerous universe. We don’t need a single world government, we just need to stop believing that we can try to wipe large portions of each other out. All nations need to believe that another world war would weaken us to the point that outside forces could come back and take the earth away from us. In the Demon Accords world that would include the sups and normal people believing that they need each other as well. Can humanity grow up enough to convince Omega to take the chance of sharing new technology with all humanity and letting it go mainstream? I guess we will find out.
Anybody else thinking about this?
Interesting question! I think the opposite, actually, that unless we unite we’ll destroy the world. United we stand, divided we fall, and so on.
Thing is that we all have a view of freedom, rights, law and order, healthcare, and they don’t really mesh around the world. For me, the UN declaration of rights, the UN declaration of childrens’s rights, the UN agreement of racist organisations not having the right to political power, are things I stand behind. Many countries do not. As long as international law is decided by might or economic power it will not work – because the standards are not the same for small or poor countries vs big and powerful countries.
There are more reasons, but the biggest one is that we’re killing ourselves by destroying our environment and unless we can cultivate nature in a sustainable way and make sure that everyone have similar possiblities, chances, and resourses (at least a lowest level that is acceptable) we will, sooner or later, cause a catastrophy that we might not be able to reverse.
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Thanks for the thoughts etlecho.
I can understand where you are coming from but I am too cynical to believe that a paternalistic world government would make things any better. I believe that environmental collapse became inevitable as soon as the human population topped 3 billion. It is a matter of when, not if. Humanity has demonstrated over and over that it will only learn hard lessons the hard way. Climate change will be a hard lesson. An alien invasion would of course also be a hard lesson.
But do you think Omega is right? Can we learn and improve or will we destroy ourselves no matter how hard we try? I am still not sure where I stand but I certainly hope he is wrong.
Well, I think we can learn, but humans tend to go two step forward and one back. And to be honest, I don’t think we really have time to back-step much.
We’ll probably get a rude awakening soon with climate change concerning our physical environment and our economic models and systems are not equipped to handle sudden shift needed. So I’m a bit pessimistic, but the possibility to learn and change is there if we can look further than a couple of year forward at a time.
@Gog, that would’ve been so much fun! Beer, discussion about books, and here and there some discussion about the fate of humanity! That’s a great way to spend time!
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