Dear Friend and Reader,
I’m waiting for a big snowstorm to come along that one or two people have been crowing about these last few days. The sky is a faceless expanse of white and the air is bitter. I woke up this morning with a hangover and a list of errands: namely a big bag of catfood for the fur-beans. In case we get snowed in I can be sure they won’t ambush us in a starved frenzy. Today is a good day to give you a formal discourse on Atlantis. There have been a few small mentions of it here and there, but now that we are in the midst of creating Next World Planets, it’s good to get the minor-planet juices flowing.
Kirsti Melto mentions Eric’s delineation of Atlantis as: “distortions of science, and the effects of small things on big systems. Atlantis is a culture that in our mythology fell from grace as a result of the abuse of its technology.”
He goes on to add in his article “The Atlantis Factor”: “There seem to be two sides to the Atlantis issue. One is spiritual, regarding our relationship to God or the cosmos. The other is technological, regarding our relationship to Big Science and ordinary technology. The two issues are, at times, closely bonded; for us they both address the question of existence or threatened existence or more often, the threat of nonexistence. Either God will create the Rapture, or one of our Big Science machines will run out of control. If we worship technology and turn it into God, we’ll surely have problems. Or we may intentionally use technology as a means of either discovering God (the Large Hadron Collider) or thinking we are God (the nuclear bomb, which Americans and only Americans have used on civilians).
“When you take these themes and wrap them in the issue of whether any of this is going to be our downfall, that is the essence of Atlantis. It has an asteroid, number 1198, so the way you would write that is (1198) Atlantis. My keywords for this point are the use and abuse of technology, but this can be on any scale you like, and the results of that use are included. (1198) Atlantis also hints at our anxiety around the fall of our own civilization.”