Archive for June, 2026
Monday, June 29th, 2026
Some have speculated that humans are not the first intelligent life to form a civilization on Earth, that there might have been civilizations created by intelligent dinosaurs millions of years ago that have disappeared and because of the effects of time have left no obvious traces. The name of this ...
Posted in Cognitive Science, History | No Comments »
Sunday, June 28th, 2026
What are these ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (henceforth, IWK)? Let’s ignore the term ‘indigenous’ for the moment: we will see that it has its own problems. An unsystematic review of many of the official and semi-official resources available online is extremely confusing, since there seems to be no consistent distinction ...
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Sociology | No Comments »
Saturday, June 27th, 2026
Plato is not now generally thought of as being overly sympathetic to the mystical path to knowledge – the later position of the Academy notwithstanding – yet in the Phaedrus 244a-245c, 265b and Symposium 210e-211b, Plato makes claims that seem to amount to an acknowledgement that there are paths to ...
Posted in Philosophy, Religion | No Comments »
Friday, June 26th, 2026
Reading a longish entry (Automation, Space and Utopia: Making the Utopian Case for Space) in the 'Philosophical Disquisitions' blog on the subject of justifications for the effort to create a sustainable space-based culture. There were some interesting points, but many places where I thought the argument was lacking, so that ...
Posted in Space | No Comments »
Thursday, June 25th, 2026
Extract from the Brookings Report 182-4
The implications of a discovery of extraterrestrial life
Recent publicity given to efforts to detect extraterrestrial messages via radio telescope has popularized -- and legitimized -- speculations about the impact of such a discovery on human values. [33] It is conceivable that there is semi-intelligent ...
Posted in Interstellar, Politics | No Comments »
Thursday, June 25th, 2026
Powers aren’t Persons
The status of the Holy Spirit has often been a bone of contention amongst sectarians and is central to many of the heresies that the Church had had to fight off. it seems to have been a hypostatization of the Divine Presence or the Divine inspiration that ...
Posted in Philosophy, Religion | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026
Posted in History, Philosophy | No Comments »
Saturday, June 20th, 2026
It’s remarkable the amount of incoherence there is in this merely speculative cosmology. One that struck me in the first paragraphs is that the Neoplatonists do not succeed in supporting the consistency of their claims that ‘The One’ (το ‘εν) is absolutely united and singular and perfect and also that ...
Posted in Philosophy, Religion | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 17th, 2026
The hypothesized Bracewell ‘Lurker’ Probe monitors the development of an ETI until some point at which it judges it appropriate to initiate contact. Until that point the BP is supposed to follow a strict non-detection and non-contact policy. We accept as a matter of prudence that a probe will not ...
Posted in Interstellar | No Comments »
Saturday, June 6th, 2026
Consider the case that a VN-B Probe has determined from preflight observations that the target system falls under Cases 4, 5, or 6 and involves contact with known technological ETI
Mission Operations
Preflight (Continued)
Continue observing the ETI in order to
Gather data relevant to maximising the possibility of successful communication
Determine ...
Posted in Interstellar | No Comments »