Author: m1k3y

UNESCO describes Palmyra as a heritage site of ‘outstanding universal value’.

The ancient city stood on a caravan route at the crossroads of several civilisations and its 1st and 2nd century temples and colonnaded streets mark a unique blend of Graeco-Roman and Persian influences.

Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said the city was ‘under threat’ as fierce fighting and shelling continued on its eastern edges amid a regime counter-offensive.

The jihadist advance on the well-preserved remains came as an international conference was under way in Cairo to address destruction already wreaked by IS on the ancient sites of Nimrud and Hatra in Iraq. 

Foreign affairs and antiquities officials from 11 Arab countries gathered in Egypt to condemn the jihadists’ demolition of Iraq’s heritage with sledgehammers, bulldozers and high explosives.

Abdulkarim said Syria’s antiquities officials would try to ensure the safety of artefacts found in Palmyra’s archaeological digs over the years and now housed in an adjacent museum.

‘We can protect the statues and artefacts, but we cannot protect the architecture, the temples,’ he said.

‘IS will just destroy it from the outside.’

Abdulkarim said he had no doubt that if Palmyra fell to the jihadists, it would suffer a similar fate to ancient Nimrud, which they blew up earlier this year.

‘If IS enters Palmyra, it will spell its destruction… It will be a repetition of the barbarism and savagery which we saw in Nimrud, Hatra and Mosul.’

The ancient city that has stood for 2,000 years but now faces destruction at the hands of ISIS: Fears for Palmyra, the archaeological jewel of the Middle East Islamists want to reduce to rubble – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3081310/IS-jihadists-threaten-Syrias-ancient-Palmyra.html
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Though it’s often called a novel, Noon: 22nd Century is really a collection of stories, bound together by shared characters and settings. In this future, humanity has colonized the moon, Mars, and Venus, and explorers have ventured beyond the solar system to planets like Pandora, a densely forested world whose life-forms are not fully understood. (The Strugatskys’ jungle-planet was a possible inspiration for James Cameron’s Avatar.) Although contact with intelligent alien life hasn’t yet been made, its existence is confirmed thanks to abandoned satellites and other artifacts of an advanced civilization. Most significant, the Noon Universe, as it came to be known, is a world in which socialism has won out over other forms of economic and political organization, leading to universal equality and material wellbeing.

Yet Noon: 22nd Century is more than just an optimistic projection of a forty-something five-year plan. Despite its projection of socialist victory over capitalism, the book isn’t propaganda for the Soviet Union but a set of compassionate stories about characters struggling for scientific and personal fulfillment. As in the Star Trek universe, which the Noon Universe somewhat resembles, humanity has survived its internal crises, but still has discoveries to make and problems to solve. Conflict in the Noon Universe takes place “between the good and the better,” instead of between good and evil forces. Rather than being a stiff work of agitprop, Noon: 22nd Century is a hopeful reminder of why the Soviet promise was so attractive to begin with.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/05/11/give-me-that-old-time-socialist-utopia/
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Haven’t you ever noticed how much more interesting the unknown is than the known?” Snevar asks. “The unknown makes us think—it makes our blood run a little quicker and gives rise to various delightful trains of thought. It beckons, it promises. It’s like a fire flickering in the depths of the night.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/05/11/give-me-that-old-time-socialist-utopia/
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The Visit: An Alien Encounter trailer

I think that the greatest event for mankind to ever experience would be extraterrestrial life—to meet life from elsewhere. I think that would question everything that we hold to be true about ourselves and our particular place in the universe. In that respect, I think this is a unique scenario by which to explore something about human understanding and human self-perception and also, of course, ideally create a kind of a mirror. That’s what I’ve been trying to do with The Visit.

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I’m interested in using this outside perspective of a creature coming from elsewhere, outside of human understanding, outside of human self-evidence about everything in this world that we inhabit. I assume that a kind of a task force would be formed in such an event—what sort of things would they be asking about? What would they be explaining about human beings? What’s important to understand about human beings? These are the things that I’m interested in. You can also say that I’m trying to create a kind of philosophical launch within the audience, in terms of these questions.

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And the question is—this is something that I was very interested in exploring with the experts—to which extent are we able to perceive something that is not like ourselves? How can we see something that is fundamentally different? And this is also of course what is being discussed in terms of lifeforms and so on. But how do we actually detect life that’s not like life on earth? With it comes other minds, other feelings, other emotions, other types of memory, other perceptual faculties, it’s just exponentially more difficult. But, of course, there is also something infinitely wondrous about this. What if somebody comes here and has a completely different experience of reality and we could learn something from that and could of course expand our own world?

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I think this is connected to something deeply human and perhaps the whole thing why we do look to the stars and ponder if there is life out there. Because there is a very interesting longing toward space and what’s out there. I think it has to do with this hope or idea or longing towards being seen by something other. By being seen, also by something superior, you actually gain existence, because you’re recognized as something.I think if somebody came here and left again without a word, more or less, without any [idea of] why they [came] and so on, I think, yes, that would plunge us into a collective depression, because we would get the idea that we were nothing. We weren’t worth wasting more time on. It was just like they just stopped by on the road and there was nothing to see and then they just drove on in a way. That would give us a kind of inferiority complex, which we might already have.

Let the record state that my mission statement has long included  “positioning myself on the Rolodex of Humanity, to be called upon in the event of First Contact” 🙂

Dark Mystic Astrobiology Team, ASSEMBLE!

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PLANET / DESERTIFICATION // new york by HJALTI GUDLAUGSSON / 3M mask by MISSING ORIGINAL SOURCE /logistics system vehicle by 2ND US MARINE LOGISTICS GROUP

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