Chapter 3 (Cont.)
I wasn't born then, my father wasn't either, not either grandfather maybe. The world used to be Old World. There was a war. On a scale so far beyond any that humanity has ever seen. From my reading of historical physics, I learned that there used to be a physicist, Oppenheimer, who had developed the first nuclear weapon. Shortly after, the old world had seen its drastic consequences not very long time after. Those involved were devastated, even those who were on the offensive side. Soon after the end of that war, it was called World War II, global political leaders took painstaking measures to avoid the use of nuclear weapons by any means necessary. Notwithstanding my skepticism in the feasibility of collective understandings remaining firm indefinitely, that's a beautiful step. But it's not always mutual corrosion of understanding that's the culprit, sometime a misfire from just one node in the mesh can undo it whole. World War III, the global conflict that had ended the Old World, was before anything else, the clockwork of one man, a so-called rebel. Ask me why I have no faith in revolution?... That rebel, and his whole clockwork was faulty. Clockwork operates on mechanics and thus it must be mathematical. The clumsiness of the rebel had started the downfall of first, his native society, slowly, the entire globe. The clockwork went out of time and set the time of present anchor to be corroded, as if tasting the bites of piranha-projecting acid, and the globe had fallen to the pity of the tumult of ocean. And from that ocean, already contaminated by the humane pollutants and the radioactive residues of nuclear warfare, arose multiple formations, accumulatée of remains: the newly formed continents. I was being metaphorical but massive nuclear war indeed made the vast majority of Earth's landmass into barren wastelands that cannot sustain life. The whole world would have been like this, and would funnily, solve the human question therein. T. S. Eliot had said: "but our lot crawls between dry ribs, to keep our metaphysics warm?" Touché, there's no need for metaphysics now. But the whole world did not become like this due to a new, groundbreaking technology that was being rapidly developed in the midst of the paranoia of the impending doom of WWIII. It seemed when it was being implemented the masses had to be utterly compliant, even the most liberal governments across the world had become authoritarian, the already authoritarianism-practising ones might had regressed back to medieval era brutality altogether... The medieval era was a time from the old world... And during the final moments of the Old World, something... had changed in several regions all over the world. Mysteriously, these packets, although rather miniscule compared to the massive stretches of land previously called countries, were the last bastions of humanity. One thing that was a major threat of WWIII, aside from population damage, was the extinction of all that humanity has learned. Knowledge is knowing, but building a succession of knowledge both to advance technology and to cater to the insatiable curiosity that burdens humanity, is entirely different thing. No amount of intellectual prowess could be sufficient to salvage the knowledge of the old world when it's been reduced to debris. Let's suppose: 1.57% of humanity has survived, now what are the chances of a visionary physicist being among them? Oh lovely! By some miracle, there's two of them surviving, with seventeen promising mini-visionaries. Let's look at how many in other fields survived, how discouraging... We can just look to be pragmatic, look at what we have now. They show promise, but by some ill dissent, 34% of them have already entered the geriatric ranch... Whether that saviour technology that had ensured the survival of both humanity and its knowledge had allowed it to bath in nurture once again or granted it more trials in the rites of pride and vengeance, remains to be seen.
Funtitled #11
In memoriam Jonas Bergqvist III / Dekadens