Why are humans here on earth? ( Archived) (26)

Jun 20, 2021 10:07 AM CSTWhy are humans here on earth?
Jaavisst
JaavisstJaavisstLjusdal, Gavleborg, Sweden96 Threads 22 Polls 707 Posts

Why are humans here on earth?(Vote Below)

- (To Vote: select an option above, then press this button)
Some bacteria swam through radioactiv muck and voilà here we are an long evolution later.
5%
1 Votes
A space ship discarded their waste on a virgin planet.
9%
2 Votes
We come and go all the time due to reincarnation.
18%
4 Votes
I do not know.
9%
2 Votes
Something won the lottery and decided to invest in humans on its property.
0%
0 Votes
What humans we are monkeys!
5%
1 Votes
God created the heavens and the Earth and found it desolate and created human in his image to populate Earth.
27%
6 Votes
We live in a computer simulation.
5%
1 Votes
I do not care!
5%
1 Votes
Stupid poll!
18%
4 Votes
22 Total Votes
Feel free to vote and ad comment.
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Jun 20, 2021 11:14 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
galrads
galradsgalradsDublin, Ohio USA2,264 Threads 279 Polls 36,283 Posts
Besides myself, I thought the last human to live on earth was Greta Lovisa Gustafsson.
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Jun 20, 2021 11:18 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
Car54
Car54Car54Noneya, Luxembourg Belgium4 Threads 378 Posts
galrads: Besides myself, I thought the last human to live on earth was Greta Lovisa Gustafsson.
You ask "why" in the title but the poll answers are all about the "how"
Big difference.

How are we on earth: God fashioned Adam in His image and breathed life into him.

Why are we on earth: to worship the Creator and love one another.
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Jun 20, 2021 11:21 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
galrads
galradsgalradsDublin, Ohio USA2,264 Threads 279 Polls 36,283 Posts
Car54: You ask "why" in the title but the poll answers are all about the "how"
Big difference.

How are we on earth: God fashioned Adam in His image and breathed life into him.

Why are we on earth: to worship the Creator and love one another.
Not my poll bro. laugh
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Jun 20, 2021 11:23 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
Car54
Car54Car54Noneya, Luxembourg Belgium4 Threads 378 Posts
galrads: Not my poll bro.
laugh I noticed that too late. Oh well. O.P will know.
dancing
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Jun 24, 2021 2:39 PM CST Why are humans here on earth?
Orzzz
OrzzzOrzzzPortage, Wisconsin USA105 Threads 8 Polls 799 Posts
The power of the universe is able to do anything. So when bored....lets just see where this goes.dunno oops..doh
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Jun 24, 2021 5:23 PM CST Why are humans here on earth?
Condor009
Condor009Condor009Victoria, British Columbia Canada200 Posts
As an artist all I will say is that we are all pigments of our own imaginationsyawn wow
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Jun 26, 2021 12:49 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
Bohemund
BohemundBohemundMalabar, Florida USA3 Threads 118 Posts
Well, that's a very good question. Of course, the ones who were there at the beginning aren't talking. That said, every culture has their own creation myths or lore.

Perhaps a more useful question is whether we will still be here a century, perhaps even less, from now?

No civilization is more vulnerable to utter destruction that at its peak, where the reach of the obliterating capability of its weapons exceeds the grasp of the wisdom needed to control them.

According to some cultures, there have been many advanced civilizations before this one, utterly destroyed, and each time we had to begin again. Word has it, we are in the Kali Yuga, an age of decline.

For the moment, let's at least be grateful that we are here --- in the galactic sweet spot of 93 million miles from the Sun, and merely the slight axial tilt within that orbit means the difference between the barren blazing hot desert sand or the eternal subzero wastes of the Arctic or Antarctic.

It's truly a wonder.
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Jun 26, 2021 1:11 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
Car54
Car54Car54Noneya, Luxembourg Belgium4 Threads 378 Posts
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Jun 26, 2021 1:25 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
PeKaatje
PeKaatjePeKaatjeAnkeveen, North Holland Netherlands59 Threads 3 Polls 6,334 Posts
Some aliens put some people on the earth and later they will come back to take us to their homeplanet as a snack. They'll eat us all.
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Jun 26, 2021 1:25 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
ChesneyChrist
ChesneyChristChesneyChristManchester, Greater Manchester, England UK7,144 Posts
Section Four: Imperial Populism (1992-2022)

"Constitutions should be short and vague."
--Napoleon

Commentary
In the midst of any painful experience, there always comes a time when one first hopes that the worst is over. The dentist seems to be about to put away the drill, you suddenly reach a part of the cliff rich with handholds which seem to lead straight to the top. These expectations rarely turn out to be justified: the dentist has put down the drill to find a knife to cut the gum, the handholds are friable slate that lead to an overhang. Still, the delusion is a relief while it lasts, and in certain situations it may revive your enthusiasm sufficiently for you to make some real progress. In rather the same way, this period of history is characterized, not so much by the belief that all problems have been solved, but by the renewed hope that progress is possible. The world system is obviously still changing, indeed doing so at a faster rate than in the previous period. Still, it seems to be headed toward an acceptable condition, one that can be realized with no major disjunctures. Predictably, it is the very successes achieved under these misapprehensions which inspire the folly and carelessness that eventually require a later age of discipline.
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Jun 26, 2021 1:32 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
ChesneyChrist
ChesneyChristChesneyChristManchester, Greater Manchester, England UK7,144 Posts
Section Five: A Comedy of Errors (2022-2061)

"...All these schemes were debated without staff advice or consideration of detailed maps. There was no inquiry whether shipping was available, nor whether there were troops to spare...It was cheerfully assumed that great armadas could waft non-existent armies to the end of the earth in the twinkling of an eye."
--A.J.P. Taylor

Commentary
The three characteristics of this period are disorder at home and embarrassment abroad, climaxed by a season of rigor. Indeed, the end of this phase in a civilization's evolution is often marked by a period of what might be called "realistic Fascism." A hundred years before, the reformation of social life in the interests of the state was driven by romantic notions of world renewal, a blissful conviction that old standards did not apply. The intent is revolutionary. At the end of this period, outwardly similar measures are taken. They are enforced by various authorities throughout the advanced world. This time, however, the intent behind them is purely and consciously conservative. Thinking people come to believe (or at any rate say) there is no realistic alternative to the traditional forms of society and culture as they were believed to have existed in the past. It comes to be an age of faked antiques.
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Jun 26, 2021 1:49 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
ChesneyChrist
ChesneyChristChesneyChristManchester, Greater Manchester, England UK7,144 Posts
Second Transition: Final Agony (2061-2080)

"Modernism is over. Call the cops."
--Tom Wolfe

This is the epoch of the last world war. The victor is often regarded in later years as the most terrible man in history, or as the greatest hero who ever lived, the model for all future rulers. In the case of Western civilization, whose universal state came to include the whole human race and the whole planet, one or the other of these assessments was literally the truth.

This is the period when the final restraints are removed. The international system has been so damaged, partly by war and partly by the interdigitation of the societies which compose it, that it loses all resistance to consolidation. Domestic politics in all major powers have lost whatever restraint constitutional forms may once have provided. The extraordinary cynicism and viciousness of political life is ultimately debilitating. For a season, however, it provides a reservoir of available energy, of competent people willing to do literally anything which seems to suit their interests, which can be harnessed by the right man. Against this force, properly directed by a single will, there is nothing in the human world that can stand.
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Jun 26, 2021 1:56 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
ChesneyChrist
ChesneyChristChesneyChristManchester, Greater Manchester, England UK7,144 Posts
Part II: The Glorious Future (2080-2309)

"Lo, I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the things of the past shall not be remembered or come to mind.
"Instead there shall always be rejoicing and happiness in what I create; for I create Jerusalem to be a joy and its people to be a delight; I will rejoice in Jerusalem and exult in my people."
--Isaiah 65:17, 18

Some societies have greater hopes for the future than others. In Egypt, it appears that one might do no more than hope for a period of renewal after a time of troubles. A pharaoh who wished to take advantage of this notion might call his reign the "Era of the Repeating of Births," literally the Renaissance. The classical Greco-Roman world remembered, or thought it remembered, that history had begun with a Golden Age. Therefore, at the beginning of the imperial period, the early emperors were flattered with the declaration that under their rule the Golden Age had returned to the earth. In China, it was always believed that history moved in great cycles, and that in certain periods it was possible for the T'ai P'ing to be established, the age of highest peace. Islam looked forward to the end of world history with the final victory of the Jihad against the unbelievers, followed by the uninterrupted reign of God.

In the West, of course, the Future had been the receding goal line towards which humanity had been running since the dawn of modernity. The race had begun since before the beginning of modernity, indeed, since the Future was only the secularized Millennium. It was the Third Kingdom prophesied by Joachim of Fiore in the twelfth century, the era of a thousand years when the Saints rule everywhere under the sun. It is a time when all social and international problems are solved, when prosperity is assured and continuous, when success follows success with no end in sight.

The surprising thing for the West was that it actually caught up with the Future. It lived in that glorious epoch for over two centuries. Its every dream came true. Serious war was abolished, epidemic disease wiped out, hunger banished everywhere. Racial and religious prejudices were forgotten in a truly ecumenical polity. Permanent colonies were established on other worlds, the whole surface of the Earth was accessible to any reasonably prosperous human being for a few days wages. This is the period when a civilization is both fulfilled and exhausted.
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Jun 26, 2021 2:21 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
ChesneyChrist
ChesneyChristChesneyChristManchester, Greater Manchester, England UK7,144 Posts
Section One: At the Court of the Antichrist (2080-2098)

"We have compiled Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung in order to help the broad masses learn Mao Tse-tung's thought more effectively. In organizing their study, units should select passages that are relevant to the situation, their tasks, the current thinking of their personnel, and the state of their work."

--Lin Piao

Commentary
The examples for this stage come mostly from Rome and China, whose political lives together contain most of the elements characteristic of the West (that is, electoral democracy and a long-term multistate foreign policy, plus an ideological approach to statecraft). Another example, from a civilization not covered by the program, would be India in the time of Chandragupta Maurya in the late third century B.C. He is another "contemporary" of Caesar, one whose rule over a newly unified India was regarded as extraordinarily harsh.

In all these examples, the whole civilized world is subject for a few years to the will of a man with a plan. This plan is often designed to make the world exactly what right thinking people had been saying for generations that it should not be, a world ruled by a popular monarchy or a dirigiste bureaucratic authority, or even simply a secular military government. While in point of fact many aspects of this period last throughout the whole imperial age, the first tyrant is recalled in later times as an extremist, the exponent of a style of government too intense to last.

History suggests that being caught in a world all of which is ruled by someone with strong notions of how to make it different, indeed often with fixed ideas about how to make everyone happy and good, is at best very unnerving. The only way to get out is by fleeing beyond the limits of civilization, sometimes to barbarian states or sometimes to the wilderness. Of course, the imperial government is sometimes willing to facilitate this process by forcibly exiling those of its opponents it would be inconvenient to kill to places so remote as to be scarcely mapped. This is the classic era of concentration camps. Sometimes these are killing grounds and sometimes they are luxurious little cities where the former rulers of independent states can be kept in closely-observed idleness. Many are vast public works projects whose primary purpose is to keep political prisoners doing something of which the government approves. The Great Wall of China (actually, the Ch'in defense works at the site of the later Great Wall) is the largest terrestrial example of this sort of enterprise, though of course it also served a necessary military function. On a relative basis, however, the excavation for Luna City was the most expensive such project in human history.

Because so much of this activity was conducted by the government, the first tyrant's administration necessarily has a certain communist cast. In any event, the damage done by the terminal wars and the fundamentally capricious nature of the young imperial government do not provide an attractive environment for private investment. Infrastructure and capital-intensive manufacturing become near government monopolies for some decades. This class of communism, however, is quite different from the populist, levelling variety which may have excited the intellectuals of mid-modernity. Even the slogans are different.
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Jun 26, 2021 2:32 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
ChesneyChrist
ChesneyChristChesneyChristManchester, Greater Manchester, England UK7,144 Posts
Section Two: The Early Empire (2098-2203)

"There never was an 'early Roman Empire.' It was always a late afternoon kind of thing."
--R.A. Lafferty

Commentary
A universal polity cannot be established in a day. For some generations into the imperial period, the empire has still to determine just what its constitutional arrangements will be, how large it can become, just what form of the civilization's traditional culture is to be promoted and which suppressed. This first fifth or so of the empire's history is full of incident, indeed some of the most colorful things that ever occur in any civilization's lifetime. It is, on the whole, a fundamentally prosperous period. The economy is still vigorously expanding, many technical ideas from the modern era have yet to be exploited fully, population growth is slowing but continuing.

It is a great age for attempts to revive traditional forms of piety, indeed for traditional usages generally. Old liturgical languages come back, as do archaic forms of dress for official occasions and ancient honorific titles. There is often a somewhat fancy-dress atmosphere to these exercises, however. People do them, not because they believe the theology or political theory behind them, or because they believe, as their ancestors did, that they are the right thing to do. They do them because they believe that these customs contribute to social order, or they simply enjoy them as kitsch. In fact, few of these anachronisms develop any great vitality; they are faddish for a few years and then are abandoned again. In terms of entertainment value, after all, they have to compete with popular culture and an unofficial "serious" culture which are still quite lively and maintain many modern features.

Indeed, even when the cultural policy of the Empire is traditionalist in intent, it is likely to mutate in quite new ways, for the simple reason that historical styles are cultivated with more enthusiasm than understanding. Official Egyptian policy after the Hyskos period, for instance, was obviously directed at restoring the integrity of the civilization's cultural and political life. Even so, the art of the early imperial period developed realistic touches which were quite unsettling to those familiar with the classic styles of the Middle Kingdom. More to the point, in all civilizations, the art of this period tends to become simply bigger. Gigantic statuary, planned cities with sweeping vistas, buildings that test the limits of contemporary engineering, these sprout up all over the world. At the domestic level, art becomes more and more derivative, even among the wealthy. It can still be skillful, even moving, but technique becomes ever more frozen. It is, perhaps, in the fine arts that innovation first ceases because all questions have been answered.
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Jun 26, 2021 2:50 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
ChesneyChrist
ChesneyChristChesneyChristManchester, Greater Manchester, England UK7,144 Posts
Section Four: The Long Summer Afternoon (2244-2309)

"Although men be terrified by the signs appearing about the judgment day, yet before those signs begin to appear the wicked will think themselves to be in peace and security after the death of Antichrist and before the coming of Christ, seeing that the world is not at once destroyed as they thought hitherto."

--St. Thomas Aquinas

Commentary
One of the recurring features of history, as indeed of everyday life, is the disclosure that one or another institution which was thought to be immeasurably strong had in fact become an empty shell. The least call on its resources or flexibility, and it collapses like a tree whose core has long-since rotted away, but which put forth leaves to the last. At some point during the seventy-odd years of this period, the empire of the world begins to die. Throughout the period, it appears stronger than ever, indeed wiser and more humane that it ever had before. Then, at the very end of the age, some little mishap occurs, some project is undertaken which strains the resources of the imperial government, and generations of order collapse into chaos overnight. The prestige that is lost among the barbarians is never wholly regained. Neither is the morale of civilized society at home.

The two generations before these catastrophes, however, are often considered the happiest in history. As a rule, the imperial government has the leisure to concern itself with both order and justice. The law tends to become rigid, but in large part because it is no longer problematical. Again, it is a question of ancient questions being answered and the results being reduced to final form. As a rule, the empire is not in an expansionist state of mind during this period. Those that are, like Egypt, soon realize that further adventures do not pay and settle down for a long period of peace. Where external barbarians make a nuisance of themselves, they are dealt with using the minimum of force necessary to maintain imperial prestige. Wisdom in this period consists in doing only what you have to do.

This attitude is possible because society lacks the energy to generate serious disorder. Further, it is necessary because the resources available to the imperial government have begun to decline. This stage of a civilization's life is one of small ambitions, of people who look no higher than to conventional success in established social and administrative hierarchies. This is not a period for empire builders, or even for reformist enthusiasts. Whatever ethnic or income group conflicts may exist in society have become so muted that internal police actions rarely require more than a show of force. Perhaps more important, the imagination necessary to plot revolt, or even to launch significant new economic ventures, is not encouraged by imperial culture. Actually, all civilizations do provide some outlet for people with the frontier spirit, since there are always border lands to be settled. This process, however, has no repercussions on human culture as a whole; it simply keeps the people involved from becoming disruptive. In the nature of things, it is always the border areas of civilization which collapse first when conspicuous decline sets in.
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Jun 26, 2021 3:00 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
We are here

because we are not therelaugh
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Jun 26, 2021 3:02 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
ChesneyChrist
ChesneyChristChesneyChristManchester, Greater Manchester, England UK7,144 Posts
Third Transition: The World Begins to Crack (2309-2322)

"How very amusing! Actually attacking our camp! Most amusing."
--Remark of a responsible British officer
on the occasion of the Isandlwana
massacre in Zululand.
( 1879)

The Empire of the West in the twenty-fourth century, for its part, attempted by a sheer act of imperial will to return to the glory days of the Age of Discovery, to break new ground as in the miraculous decades from Columbus to Galileo. It became policy to create a New Man within human society and a far vaster colonial empire beyond the limits of Earth. The New Eugenics "party," as the bureaucratic clique anachronistically styled itself, supported both these initiatives.

Ironically, the immediate causes of their fall from public favor were the small scale reforms with which they concerned themselves. Not the least repugnant of these was a concerted effort at "standardization" of the ornament in public places throughout the world, inspired by the somewhat garish Baroque revival then popular among designers and art historians.

The actual eugenics project itself did succeed in creating a strain of large, highly intelligent, but singularly incurious post-human hominids. Called "The New People," some thousands of juveniles had been produced by the time the government fell. They were then simply put up for adoption like human children and left largely unregarded by later administrations, with the expectation that they would simply disappear into the world population. This policy was a mistake. The New People were not interfertile with human beings and never identified with human society. In fact, they manifested a disconcerting penchant for anthropophagy during times of social disorder, when consumer goods became rare and police supervision non-existent. In later years they posed a considerable police problem, finally becoming the last and most terrifying of history's "barbarians."
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Jun 26, 2021 3:10 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
ChesneyChrist
ChesneyChristChesneyChristManchester, Greater Manchester, England UK7,144 Posts
Part III: Decline and Fall (2322-2520)

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
--Rudyard Kipling

At the beginning of this period of roughly two centuries, the world is much as it has been since late modernity. It is near the peak of population, and the economy which supports it operates ecumenically. Society as a whole is generally prosperous. Though culture in all its forms has become increasingly formalized, a high level of technique is everywhere available and everywhere practiced. The world is essentially a single political unit, ruled by an absolute but distant monarchy, which in theory rules with pragmatic benevolence. Life for most people, most of the time, is predictable and generally tolerable.

At the end of the period, this world is literally in ruins. Except where neighboring or succeeding civilizations have extended their influence, urban life is in retreat. The arts and sciences of civilization are increasingly unavailable outside a dwindling number of ancient centers of culture. Much of the world, in fact, has collapsed into thinly populated barbarism. The imperial government is almost everywhere acknowledged as the only legitimate universal authority, and just as widely ignored. The central government can provide neither police nor military security. Different regions rule themselves, or go ungoverned. The apparatus of the state has largely disappeared beyond the capital and a few strongholds. The imperial office itself, while no longer routinely transferred by assassination and coup, is becoming increasingly ceremonial. Such affairs as the central government can still concern itself with have a ritualistic, even metaphysical cast.

This is the time after the Future, a period when most civilizations begin to seem more and more alike in their decay. Certainly they suffer from uncannily similar misfortunes. Every characteristic task which a civilization might have hoped to achieve was accomplished in previous epochs. In this period, every great civilized society, no matter its pretensions or its hopes, its goodwill or its actual accomplishments, must "join the majority." No matter the level of technology theoretically available, there has always been an appalling consistency to the lives of ordinary people in every settled society. This study of the fate of civilizations is about nothing more than an interruption in this common level of human existence, the passing season of fantasy and hubris which constitute civilization.

None of this lasts. Nothing has changed. The universe is holographic; every point of space subsumes every other point. Past, present and future are always accessible. Heaven and Hell are coincident. How could anything ever be different?

The people of this period, particularly the educated, developed concerns alien to those of their predecessors of even two generations before. Spengler called this the "Second Religiousness," the return of serious interest in the basic questions of existence, accompanied often by an appalling gullibility for religious charlatans and manufactured miracles. As we noted, the first stirrings of this phase of spiritual life began as early as the First Transition, and may even be traced back to latest modernity. However, the glory of the Empire tended to drown out the still, small voice. With the glory faded, the voice becomes more insistent.

This is the period when Buddhism was accepted in China, when Christianity, against the odds, supplanted the ancient ideology of the Roman state, when the cheerful land of Egypt became the grim kingdom of priestly hierarchy and dark wisdom known to later times. Even Islam, transfixed though it was by the fireworks of Western technological supremacy, began to cultivate an adamantine fundamentalism which came to fruition after the end of the universal state.
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Jun 26, 2021 3:29 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
ChesneyChrist
ChesneyChristChesneyChristManchester, Greater Manchester, England UK7,144 Posts
Section One: The Search for Order (2322-2376)

"You know the rent is in arrears;
the dog has not been fed in years;
it's even worse than it appears;
but it's all right."

--The Grateful Dead

Commentary
There is a certain relief in reaching this point in the tale of a civilization's life. The prior age was like a period in the life of an old family which became more proper and socially exacting as its underlying fortune declined. Finally, when bankruptcy comes and the old estate has to be sold, the crisis can be acknowledged. No one cares if you don't dress for dinner or if you leave a car on blocks in the yard. There is no need to keep up appearances, since there are far more interesting things to worry about.

Throughout the period of decline, civilization is prone to external attacks of various kinds which it is only barely competent to deal with. It is an old saw that an empire organizes its enemies to defeat it; the very existence of concentrated wealth and a non-combatant population attracts marginal peoples to the borders with an eye to trade and occasional plunder. These peoples have sometimes been called the "external proletariat." With time, they acquire many of the skills of civilized societies, creating a pale of loosely-organized barbarian states radiating from the civilized core areas. While in its heyday the empire can keep this gray region more or less policed, in its decline this is no longer possible. The barbarians often see that some region of the empire is undefended because the central government's attention is focussed on internal affairs.

Sometimes, these invaders are barely more than savages off the steppe, attracted by legends of the wealth of the settled lands. Sometimes, they are civilized societies in their own right with long-term strategic goals. This was the situation Islam faced. It is possible for the difference between an "external" and an "internal" proletariat to be largely theoretical, particularly when the empire contains large chunks of primitive alien societies which never became "developed" in the way that the core areas did. It is the regions of immemorial banditry, such as Central Asia and Anatolia, the Balkans and the American Southwest, which easily become regions where the emperor's writ does not run, and the only "public services" are reprisal raids from the central government.
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Jun 26, 2021 5:39 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
ChesneyChrist
ChesneyChristChesneyChristManchester, Greater Manchester, England UK7,144 Posts
Afterlife: (2520-2603)

"Do not expect too much of the end of the world."

---Stanislaw J. Lec

The latter days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it is said, were very merry. "The situation is hopeless but not serious" was the catchword as the Austrians munched their amazing pastries and plotted to occupy Serbia. The end of the universal states has always been accompanied by a mood different from this. It is everywhere a time of mourning and distress, of people who know that their societies are less than those of their grandfathers, and who know that their grandchildren will live in a world more degraded still. Much later historians are often inclined to point out the continuities between the period before the collapse and the period after. Universal states, indeed, governments of any description which control a wide area, are less common in history than we might think. The collapse can be looked on as a return to normality.

Maybe, but such a view is antihistorical, imposing the perceptions of later times onto the people of the past. For themselves, the Chinese and the Romans and the Turks knew that the world was going to Hell in a handbasket, dammit. What they valued in their world was not always what we value in it, but still they saw there was less and less to be proud of in their age. The date that is picked for "the end of the empire" is always somewhat arbitrary. It is generally a political marker for a transformation in demographics, the economy and the spiritual state of mankind which takes several decades to occur. Indeed, as skeleton civilizations, what Spengler called "fellah societies" (after the fellahin peasants of Egypt), universal states may go on indefinitely.

The Egyptian civilization never ended. At least another eight dynasties can be named from the histories of the region, until it became a province of the Roman Empire. Even then, Egypt never completely ceased to be Egypt, though language and even the ethnic makeup of the country changed more than once. However, after the phase under examination here, the dynasties are more and more of foreign origin. Even when natives ruled, they were interested in business rather than sovereignty, since Egypt soon became the great factory and breadbasket of the Mediterranean world. With few exceptions, these pharaohs were vassals of powerful empires to the east, and the indigenous culture the pharaohs promoted was a mummified replica of the art and architecture of the Old Kingdom. From this point, there was no special story in what was going on. To the extent that Egyptian history was meaningful thereafter, the meaning was provided by its relationship to still vital societies.

The Ottoman Empire was perhaps unique in precipitating its own end and primarily through the folly of its rulers. The Westernizing Young Turk clique was trying to do the impossible, to make a modern European nation of an ancient universal state. Themselves half-westerners, cultural hybrids of the sort who would do so much harm to the so-called "Third World" during the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries, they despised their own culture without having a particularly profound grasp of their acquired one. When put to the test in the First World War, the haphazardly-modernized empire flew into roughly the components from which it had been assembled five hundred years before. Unlike the case in other post-imperial periods, there was no particular nostalgia among the empire's former subjects for its return. Even to people living in the Magian heartlands, to Greeks and Jews and Armenians, the empire was always a Turkish affair, the possession of another people. This was the nature of Islamic statecraft, to maintain distinctions among nationalities. On the other hand, precisely because the Turks had kept themselves distinct, they were also unique among post-imperial peoples in achieving a new type of political cohesion on a more modest scale.
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Jun 26, 2021 5:49 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
ChesneyChrist
ChesneyChristChesneyChristManchester, Greater Manchester, England UK7,144 Posts
The regime in its final stages maintained a dozen or so "cities," really fortified schools and trading posts, constructed in the delicate Twilight Romanesque of the lattermost West. Except to the extent that it pursued the bands of terrible New People, created at the whim of the mad Emperor Friedrich in the twenty-fourth century, the government did not even attempt police functions beyond its own facilities.

Indeed, it appeared that, having lost the whole world, Earth's ostensible rulers were intent upon saving their own souls. The imperial government itself had lost its military character, since every conceivable organized enemy had ceased to exist. The leadership of mankind had become a purely ceremonial post. The Western emperors had in fact been powerless for almost a century. Latterly, the office had tended to devolve on some scholar or member of the imperial civil service, coincident with his retirement. The administrative apparatus developed a character like that of a religious order or a university faculty. Indeed, it eventfully did become largely clericalized: the fossil West had returned to the ancient image of politics as a dialogue between pope and emperor.

Partly because of the Joachite Wars, and partly because of the natural decrease in population, there were fewer than a quarter of a billion people on Earth by the year 2600. There were perhaps three hundred thousand in all the surviving planetary colonies put together. In this epoch, the population of Luna City, always essentially an appendage of terrestrial society, was evacuated to Earth. A scattering of human settlements around the ice mines of the lunar north elected to remain, despite the fact Earth's rapid loss of space technology would surely make the decision permanent. The almost purely scientific outposts on Mercury, and the troubled colonies in the treacherous environment of Mars, never had the option of returning.

The Last Emperor of the West, in active life a teacher of comparative mathematics and systematic theology at the University of Chicago, died in his sleep in the year 2601 A.D. The College of Electors gathered from the four corners of the world for the last time to consider the choice of a successor. They adjourned without taking action, sine die.
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Jun 26, 2021 6:07 AM CST Why are humans here on earth?
deedee123xo
deedee123xodeedee123xoLimerick, Ireland15 Threads 3,538 Posts
Coz we left it too late and all the other planet were booked out....dunno
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Jun 26, 2021 12:09 PM CST Why are humans here on earth?
Orzzz
OrzzzOrzzzPortage, Wisconsin USA105 Threads 8 Polls 799 Posts
Geeze buddy..do your own thread!frustrated
I wonder when nature will decide humans are a dead end and smuck us like the dinos?roll eyes
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Jun 26, 2021 12:12 PM CST Why are humans here on earth?
Pyrite
PyritePyriteCalifornia, USA347 Posts
Universe putting all the bad eggs in one basket.
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Jun 26, 2021 12:16 PM CST Why are humans here on earth?
Jaavisst
JaavisstJaavisstLjusdal, Gavleborg Sweden96 Threads 22 Polls 707 Posts
Pyrite: Universe putting all the bad eggs in one basket.
Really! Maybe it's black caviar on a cracker!
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22 Votes
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26 Comments
by Jaavisst (22 Polls)
Created: Jun 2021
Last Viewed: Mar 27
Last Commented: Jun 2021
Last Voted: Nov 2022

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