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Futurologists Have Been Multiplying Like Flies Since The Day Herman Kahn Made Cassandra's Profession "scientific," Yet Somehow Not One Of Them Has Come Out With The Clear Statement That We Have Wholly Abandoned Ourselves To The Mercy Of Technological Progress. The Roles Are Now Reversed: Humanity Becomes, For Technology, A Means, An Instrument For Achieving A Goal Unknown And Unknowable.

-Stanislaw Lem

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Futurologists Have Been Multiplying

Stanislaw Lem

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Futurologists Have Been Multiplying Like Flies Since The Day Herman Kahn Made Cassandra's Profession "scientific," Yet Somehow Not One Of Them Has Come Out With The Clear Statement That We Have Wholly Abandoned Ourselves To The Mercy Of Technological Progress. The Roles Are Now Reversed: Humanity Becomes, For Technology, A Means, An Instrument For Achieving A Goal Unknown And Unknowable.

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Really, One Of Us Ought To Have The Courage To Call The Experiment Off And Shoulder The Responsibility For The Decision, But The Majority Reckons That That Kind Of Courage Would Be A Sign Of Cowardice, And The First Step In A Retreat. They Think It Would Mean An Undignified Surrender For Mankind As If There Was Any Dignity In Floundering And Drowning In What We Don't Understand And Never Will.

Each Civilization May Choose One Of Two Roads To Travel, That Is, Either Fret Itself To Death, Or Pet Itself To Death. And In The Course Of Doing One Or The Other, It Eats Its Way Into The Universe, Turning Cinders And Flinders Of Stars Into Toilet Seats, Pegs, Gears, Cigarette Holders And Pillowcases, And It Does This Because, Unable To Fathom The Universe, It Seeks To Change That Fathomlessness Into Something Fathomable.

Psychoanalysis Provides Truth In An Infantile, That Is, A Schoolboy Fashion: We Learn From It, Roughly And Hurriedly, Things That Scandalize Us And Thereby Command Our Attention. It Sometimes Happens, And Such Is The Case Here, That A Simplification Touching Upon The Truth, But Cheaply, Is Of No More Value Than A Lie. Once Again We Are Shown The Demon And The Angel, The Beast And The God Locked In Manichean Embrace, And Once Again Man Has Been Pronounced, By Himself, Not Culpable.

Not Far From Here, By A White Sun, Behind A Green Star, Lived The Steelypips, Illustrious, Industrious, And They Hadn't A Care: No Spats In Their Vats, No Rules, No Schools, No Gloom, No Evil Influence Of The Moon, No Trouble From Matter Or Antimatter - For They Had A Machine, A Dream Of A Machine, With Springs And Gears And Perfect In Every Respect. And They Lived With It, And On It, And Under It, And Inside It, For It Was All They Had - First They Saved Up All Their Atoms, Then They Put Them All Together, And If One Didn't Fit, Why They Chipped At It A Bit, And Everything Was Just Fine.

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We Didn't Know Each Other Well. I Never Had The Time. Now I See That It Doesn't Make Any Difference. The Ones Who Hurry And The Ones Who Take Their Time All End Up In The Same Place. Just Don't Have Any Regrets. No Regrets.

Even A Fool Could See That One Didn't Need A War, Nuclear Or Otherwise, To Destroy Oneself; The Rising Cost Of Weaponry Could Do That Quite Nicely.

For Some Time There Was A Widely Held Notion (zealously Fostered By The Daily Press) To The Effect That The 'thinking Ocean' Of Solaris Was A Gigantic Brain, Prodigiously Well-developed And Several Million Years In Advance Of Our Own Civilization, A Sort Of 'cosmic Yogi', A Sage, A Symbol Of Omniscience, Which Had Long Ago Understood The Vanity Of All Action And For This Reason Had Retreated Into An Unbreakable Silence.

The Twentieth Century Had Dispensed With The Formal Declaration Of War And Introduced The Fifth Column, Sabotage, Cold War, And War By Proxy, But That Was Only The Begining. Summit Meetings For Disarmament Pursued Mutual Understanding And A Balance Of Power But Were Also Held To Learn The Strengths And Weaknesses Of The Enemy. The World Of The War-or-peace Alternative Became A World In Which War Was Peace And Peace War.

Solaristics, Wrote Muntius, Is A Substitute For Religion In The Space Age. It Is Faith Wrapped In The Cloak Of Science; Contact, The Goal For Which We Are Striving, Is As Vague And Obscure As Communion With The Saints Or The Coming Of The Messiah.

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