THE PRISONERS A short story Leo inserted a placeholder at the final chapter of A Brief History of Technology and looked up to see it was time to shut his bookshop for the day. Not for the first time did he feel thankful for the renaissance of the physical book. It almost made him want to put a vinyl disk on the turntable, but in fact he preferred the slightly-less-retro CD option. The Brief History’s final chapter was a rushed addition to the 2nd Edition, necessitated, of course, because THEY interceded. Rather than start on that chapter right away, Leo poured himself a drink, a spiritual muse for his reverie. Looking back on it, Leo had to admire THEIR wisdom. But he didn’t mean the physics savvy of figuring out how to evade the maddening limitation of the speed of light. Rather, THEIR deep achievement was in realms psychological and cultural: to “show” us THEMselves, and to insinuate the stars into a possible future for humanity, without us going into an existential crisis. In his optimistic moments, setting aside the usual crazies and their conspiracy theory nightmares, Leo dreamed this sanity might persist … … and indeed one could argue that while human history shows a jagged path of progress and regress, when viewed over centuries and millennia that journey has taken us from folly to less folly. Leo had a long fascination with this history – our struggles, cruelties, stupidities and absurdities, but also our achievements in aesthetics, science, literature and (oh so rarely!) politics. But what now? Now that the blinkers are gone, now that we have THEM? He poured a refill and wondered where he had put his BlueRay of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He had a lot of discs of old movies. Leo had one foot in the past, and the other in the future. Outside, above the striking edifice of Table Mountain, bright Venus was the harbinger of night and its ornaments: not a celestial sphere, but an almost infinite 4d spacetime. Leo reflected on what a cruel joke that infinite sky was before THEY spoke. Let’s remember what we knew. Our Hubble sphere, the observable universe, is about 14 billion light years in radius, the maximum distance light or any signal has travelled since the big bang. About what may exist beyond the Hubble horizon we can only speculate. And that radius is drawn from us, planet Earth, not because we are the centre of the universe, but merely because that is our only vantage point. Planet Earth. Milky Way galaxy. One infinitesimal planet, one insignificant galaxy in the immensity of the observable universe, a universe filled with stupendous numbers of galaxies and planets and neutron stars and black holes and so much more. We can see a lot of that! With our instruments we have studied the light created only 300,000 years after the big bang, light that was free to propagate after the universe became transparent as neutral atoms first formed. We see distant quasars, gigantic black holes swallowing matter. We can see the smudges of the first galaxies to coalesce out of the featureless primordial stuff of the early universe. We can see these things, we can study them,
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