Why most people dont like Classical Music

[mrfixit]

Originally posted by Amalie:
[B] Totally agree with you about the French Gurn, why do you think the English have always fought so many wars with them, and won!


[B]

Maybe the english channel had a lot to do with it? Also its really the failed invasion of 1812 that finished the french off i think if i rember the figgures right about over a quater of million men deid. If there was no channel the french could of simply marched into britian and crushed us. (same as in world war 2) I think that french where right to get rid of the monarchy (just did it in the wrong way a bit too extreme, and didnt replace it with the right system) The english monachy is a useless and pointless thing. Basicly it was only kept around to justify the class system.

[Chaszz]

Originally posted by Amalie:

"...if you want culture in the greatest sense, you have to accept pain, slavery and human suffering."

I don't accept this. I think also Beethoven would have soundly rejected any prescription for great culture that allowed slavery.

Here in the U.S. we have had at least one great artistic genius, Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked in times when there was no slavery. It may be only one, but this proves it can be done.

Slavery is one of the most odious human institutions, and might still exist if the industrial revolution had not made it more or less unnecessary. This is one of the good things that that revolution accomplished. Very few achievements, whether religion or monarchy or democracy or socialism or technological advancement, are not double-edged swords. We have brains and hearts to make choices with, and I believe we must. I think we should try to do good ourselves, and hope for the future. Those in the past who benefited the world often had to act out of hope when things looked very dark.

Chaszz

[Peter]

Originally posted by mrfixit:

If there was no channel the french could of simply marched into britian and crushed us.

They did in 1066 and greatly enriched our language and culture, leaving us with most of the fine castles and churches we still have today. I agree with you about the French Revolution, the ideas behind it were correct, only they lost sight of it and replaced tyranny with tyranny which is why I never advocate violence as a means of solving problems.

------------------
'Man know thyself'

[Peter]

Originally posted by Chaszz:

Slavery is one of the most odious human institutions, and might still exist if the industrial revolution had not made it more or less unnecessary. Chaszz

Slavery does still exist in many parts of the world - the figures I read not so long ago were frightening. Fortunately we abolished it in the UK in the early 19th century (after 2 centuries of exploitation) - I agree it is odious and there is nothing 'spiritual' about a society that tolerates it.

------------------
'Man know thyself'

[spaceray]

Originally posted by Gurn Blanston:
Space,
Perhaps then it is my sparkling personality which has won them over? ;-)) Or possibly my personal choice of "upbeat" music which even a rocker can love, given the proper impetus.

Gurn,
Yes clearly I failed to have the right CDS to hand as the battle of the workplace music waged,I had NO Beethoven ,no Mozart no Haydn to offer only William Byrd,Michael Praetorius and Henry Purcell.

"Or the fact that I outrank most of them so they are subordinate?"

Yes this is how I finally overcame the problem,my first task as manager was to remove the ghetto blaster!!

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Peter:
Without the enlightenment we would have had no 'Bill or Rights', no abolition of slavery, no true democracy (though I still don't think we really have, but at least it's better than the 18th century version) and a whole host of other benefits you dismiss very lightly. What about the music of the time? - the ideals of the enlightenment were personified by the freemasons - Mozart, Haydn Goethe and possibly Beethoven were Masons! The Magic flute contains all the humanitarian symbology of the time and the enlightenmnet's ideals are enshrined in Schiller's ode to Joy - Without the enlightenment, music and the arts would have been very different!
Beethoven was initially in favour of the 'loony French revolution' and even as late as 1810 he considered dedicating the Mass in C to Napoleon.

Your comments about Newton focus on one aspect of this great scientist's work -perhaps the Principia would be better to cite for without it the modern world as we know it wouldn't exist. I'm pleased we're not going down the Galileo path because I'd hate to discover you agree with his imprisonment and consider that the planets orbit the Earth!

Some interesting posts today, on our theme of culture, democracy, the past, versus the present etc. Not really time here to go in to all the points, but I can I just make a few comments.

1. The masons as a source of the enlightenment. Probably true, but that hardly fills the average citizen with a vast deal of confidence I would have thought. I don't wish to get anti-masonic, but they are an extremely bizzare cult, their objects remain very obscure and they are linked with all sorts of scandels and crimes from the time when they formed a bastard off shoot from the knights templers in the late middle ages.
Again we all know that the dollar bill contains on it masonic insignia which nobody as far as I am aware has ever satisfactorily explained nor has the masonic involvement in the founding of America. Why is the Pentagon called that?
If you are linking the masonic movement and the enlightenment, which I am sure you are correct in saying, unfortunately that only makes me even more suspicious of progessive thinking.
Mozart we all know was a mason and despite being a fantanstic genius was also cruel, immature, and self centered.

2. I am interested in the notion that slavery does not exist in the west. Really?
I would have thought there are millions in Europe and America eking out a bare existence on a few dollars an hour, who are really no better off if we are talking materially here than their predecessors in the much derided 18th century London.
In fact they are worse off. There is no escape today for most people from the ubiquitous presence of trash culture whether pornography, mass sport, alchohol and all the other trappings of our Brave New World. Noise pollution alone from those infernal machines, cars, are ever present, together with the racket of muzak, which mean that in the cities ordinary people get no respite from the daily deluge of high decibels. At least in the 18th century things were quieter in that respect, and large parts of London were in fact countryside and gardens where people could gain some rest, whereas today of course it is all built over with the sink housing estates, that breed crime and corruption.

3. Interesting you refer to Galileo.
Of course what the Liberals and Darwinians and sceptics still do not explain is that in a crucial sense, man is the centre of the universe, because with all the means of technology that are at our disposal, we have still not been able amongst the countless billions of stars, not on one of them to find even the most basic single cell living amoeba, whereas here we are on a supposedly insignificant planet which teems with life of every conceivable variety and has a creature in it, homo sapiens capable of the most dazzling intellectual feats. Oh, the scientists tell us, but the intelligents aliens are out there, and they will contact us. What utter nonesense. And only someone brainwashed pursuing another agenda could ignore the variety of life on earth and mans dominance over it and say that there are intelligent beings also elswhere.
It is very ironic I think, and sad and mischevious at least for scientists to ignore the evidence in front of there noses and our own explorations via hubble in deep space and say this is not really what it is like and that man is really nothing when he is, and it has not been disproved even today, when he is in fact the centre of the universe in terms of his intellectual and conscious development. So what a laugh, Galileo was in fact wrong in this sense!

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Amalie:
Some interesting posts today, on our theme of culture, democracy, the past, versus the present etc. Not really time here to go in to all the points, but I can I just make a few comments.

1. The masons as a source of the enlightenment. Probably true, but that hardly fills the average citizen with a vast deal of confidence I would have thought. I don't wish to get anti-masonic, but they are an extremely bizzare cult, their objects remain very obscure and they are linked with all sorts of scandels and crimes from the time when they formed a bastard off shoot from the knights templers in the late middle ages.
Again we all know that the dollar bill contains on it masonic insignia which nobody as far as I am aware has ever satisfactorily explained nor has the masonic involvement in the founding of America. Why is the Pentagon called that?
If you are linking the masonic movement and the enlightenment, which I am sure you are correct in saying, unfortunately that only makes me even more suspicious of progessive thinking.
Mozart we all know was a mason and despite being a fantanstic genius was also cruel, immature, and self centered.

2. I am interested in the notion that slavery does not exist in the west. Really?
I would have thought there are millions in Europe and America eking out a bare existence on a few dollars an hour, who are really no better off if we are talking materially here than their predecessors in the much derided 18th century London.
In fact they are worse off. There is no escape today for most people from the ubiquitous presence of trash culture whether pornography, mass sport, alchohol and all the other trappings of our Brave New World. Noise pollution alone from those infernal machines, cars, are ever present, together with the racket of muzak, which mean that in the cities ordinary people get no respite from the daily deluge of high decibels. At least in the 18th century things were quieter in that respect, and large parts of London were in fact countryside and gardens where people could gain some rest, whereas today of course it is all built over with the sink housing estates, that breed crime and corruption.

3. Interesting you refer to Galileo.
Of course what the Liberals and Darwinians and sceptics still do not explain is that in a crucial sense, man is the centre of the universe, because with all the means of technology that are at our disposal, we have still not been able amongst the countless billions of stars, not on one of them to find even the most basic single cell living amoeba, whereas here we are on a supposedly insignificant planet which teems with life of every conceivable variety and has a creature in it, homo sapiens capable of the most dazzling intellectual feats. Oh, the scientists tell us, but the intelligents aliens are out there, and they will contact us. What utter nonesense. And only someone brainwashed pursuing another agenda could ignore the variety of life on earth and mans dominance over it and say that there are intelligent beings also elswhere.
It is very ironic I think, and sad and mischevious at least for scientists to ignore the evidence in front of there noses and our own explorations via hubble in deep space and say this is not really what it is like and that man is really nothing when he is, and it has not been disproved even today, when he is in fact the centre of the universe in terms of his intellectual and conscious development. So what a laugh, Galileo was in fact wrong in this sense!

4. 1066 destroyed a vibrant and beautiful Anglo Saxon culture in England. The Normans were ruthless barbarians who having conquered the country then proceeded to cover it with what we call beautiful castles which were used to house the soldiery that massacered
tens of thousands of the indiginous population. Not very nice. Also, the ideas of the French revolution were not noble and inspiring when they were shouted into the ears of French men and women who were about to have their heads severed from their bodies and vile old crones in Paris carried on knitting and laughing whilst a tidal wave of blood and heads bedecked the Place de la Concorde and all this while their children were forced to watch by these unspeakable proponents of reason and the Brave New World of brotherhood .
Yes, we can all say, we know what the Soviet Union was like now, but many intellectuals were in slavish thrall to Stalin in the 30's including those great proponents of reason and enlightenment and science, H G. Wells, Shaw, and the Webbs, who lied and covered up for Stalin, whilst millions froze to death in the perma frost of arctic labour camps. Yes, all in the great cause of reason.

[Peter]

Originally posted by Amalie:
4. 1066 destroyed a vibrant and beautiful Anglo Saxon culture in England. The Normans were ruthless barbarians who having conquered the country then proceeded to cover it with what we call beautiful castles which were used to house the soldiery that massacered
tens of thousands of the indiginous population. Not very nice. Also, the ideas of the French revolution were not noble and inspiring when they were shouted into the ears of French men and women who were about to have their heads severed from their bodies and vile old crones in Paris carried on knitting and laughing whilst a tidal wave of blood and heads bedecked the Place de la Concorde and all this while their children were forced to watch by these unspeakable proponents of reason and the Brave New World of brotherhood .
Yes, we can all say, we know what the Soviet Union was like now, but many intellectuals were in slavish thrall to Stalin in the 30's including those great proponents of reason and enlightenment and science, H G. Wells, Shaw, and the Webbs, who lied and covered up for Stalin, whilst millions froze to death in the perma frost of arctic labour camps. Yes, all in the great cause of reason.

Yes the Normans were capable of barborous acts, so were the Vikings and the Romans - the Enlightenment I think we can agree has nothing to do with this! As for Galileo he was imprisoned for supporting the Copernicun view that the planets orbit the sun, not for the metaphorical interpretation you put on his views.

We're never going to agree on the enlightenment - you blame it for all the ills of today, whereas I see it as nothing but an influence for good - education over ignorance, tolerance over dogma and democracy over dictatorship. What I am interested in here is the Beethoven perspective - do you consider that he was against this movement and if so how do you explain works such as Fidelio, Egmont and the 9th in light of his admiration for 2 prominent enlightenment figures, Goethe and Schiller? On a broader musical level how do you feel about Haydn's Creation and Mozart's Magic Flute - 2 of the great works of the classical era that embody enlightenment ideals?

------------------
'Man know thyself'

[This message has been edited by Peter (edited September 30, 2003).]

[qsx85j4c]

Amalie wrote:

"I am not suggesting we cannot have a form of culture today, but it will not be high culture and never can be, according to Nietzsche's dictum. But then are you happy with the culture that we have got?

"Or perhaps you will think against all the evidence that it will improve in a true enlightenment fashion?"

Am I happy with culture today? Clearly there are many things wrong with it, but overall I'm fairly happy with it. Sure, noise and pollution and the potential to kill thousands of people at once through nuclear weapons and the like are terrible, but what if I had been born 200 years earlier? I'd not have received a good education at a well-regarded school, or a well-paying job and the means to enjoy things like Beethoven or Shakespeare (possibly I wouldn't have even been able to read!). I probably would have been married at 15 and have eight kids already, three of them dead, and I'd have to worry about starving during a drought or dying of the flu or something. I think I would have had much less time and energy to to devote to great personal achievements and spirituality because I would be too worried about simply trying to survive. When was the last time you worried about dying of malnutrition?

I think there will always be ills and inequalities, but people as a whole really are better off now than ever in the past. The Enlightenment produced the ideas of equality and basic human rights allow us to live in a freer society and science provides us the means to make people safer and healthier to enjoy those rights and allows us the leisure to pursue cultural activities. If we don't make things better for those around us and try to improve ourselves, we should not blame science and reason but our own shortcomings and laziness.

I want to say one more thing about the relation of suffering and great achievement. Why should society itself be the cause of suffering in the form of slavery or other inequalities? I think there is more than ample opportunity for personal pain if that is what is required to produce art. We mostly don't get what we want (or at least I never do) and we all die eventually, and that's not likely to change any time soon.

[mrfixit]

Basicly mankind is in a rut. People need to stop being brainwashed into being mindless consumers. Basicly a evil cancerous ideology called capitalism runs the world. Basicly we are just cunning apes except for our vaules. If we are taught to be selfish and degrade other human to only what they are worth or what you can exploit from them you really cant expect much from them.

[Chaszz]

Originally posted by Amalie:

"...I am interested in the notion that slavery does not exist in the west. Really?
I would have thought there are millions in Europe and America eking out a bare existence on a few dollars an hour, who are really no better off if we are talking materially here than their predecessors in the much derided 18th century London.
In fact they are worse off. There is no escape today for most people from the ubiquitous presence of trash culture whether pornography, mass sport, alchohol and all the other trappings of our Brave New World..."

Response: Life has many problems today, but
having to deal with modern life and its economy and etc. is fundamentally different from having no virtually life at all of one's own and being owned completely by another person as a piece of property. And having one's family torn away and sold in a distant place and never seeing them again.

As for the freer populace of earlier times, although it takes place in the Middle Ages and not the 18th century, I recommend "The Soul Thief" by Cecilia Holland as a novel with the strongest description I've ever read of the constant daily fact of hunger in common people's lives before modern times. Although workers today face many problems and challenges, they are surely better off without the twin spectres of starvation and deadly infectious diseases which dominated their lives in past ages.

Amalie: "...Interesting you refer to Galileo. Of course what the Liberals and Darwinians and sceptics still do not explain is that in a crucial sense, man is the centre of the universe, because with all the means of technology that are at our disposal, we have still not been able amongst the countless billions of stars, not on one of them to find even the most basic single cell living amoeba, whereas here we are on a supposedly insignificant planet which teems with life of every conceivable variety and has a creature in it, homo sapiens capable of the most dazzling intellectual feats. Oh, the scientists tell us, but the intelligents aliens are out there, and they will contact us. What utter nonesense. And only someone brainwashed pursuing another agenda could ignore the variety of life on earth and mans dominance over it and say that there are intelligent beings also elswhere.
It is very ironic I think, and sad and mischevious at least for scientists to ignore the evidence in front of there noses and our own explorations via hubble in deep space and say this is not really what it is like and that man is really nothing when he is, and it has not been disproved even today, when he is in fact the centre of the universe in terms of his intellectual and conscious development. So what a laugh, Galileo was in fact wrong in this sense!"

Response: Searching for life on other worlds has only just begun. Whether it is there or not, our attempts at finding it are of brief duration and only cursory. Our radio signals are only a hundred years old, so have penetrated only a distance of hundred light years with weakening signals in a galaxy that has a diameter of 100,000 light years, and is only a speck in a universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Likewise another civilization elsewhere searching for life such as us would have the same handicaps. The speeds of light and travel are finite and can't be breached. We cannot tell yet whether there is life or not on Jupiter's moons, let alone the planets of another star. To assume that there is no life out there is probably unrealistic and the same kind of human-centered bias which originally had the sun circling around the earth.

As for intelligent life, that may or may not be another thing. But what humanity, with its belief in its own greatness and singularity, its intelligence and with its dominion over the animals, has done to those animals, is no credit to it. All the injustices, including slavery and worse, that have been talked about here over the last few days, pale in comparison with what is done to only one class of animals, literally billions of meat animals the world over in one year. And tolerated and ignored by the vast majority. I can give many or a few concrete examples, if you like, and I'm not talking about mere slaughtering. So to me it is pure hypocrisy to claim any moral eminence or worth whatsoever for humans based on dominion over the animals. Sorry to be so rough, but as I say I can provide backing for this if you wish.

Chaszz



[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited September 30, 2003).]

[spaceray]

Originally posted by mrfixit:
Basicly mankind is in a rut. People need to stop being brainwashed into being mindless consumers. Basicly a evil cancerous ideology called capitalism runs the world. Basicly we are just cunning apes except for our vaules. If we are taught to be selfish and degrade other human to only what they are worth or what you can exploit from them you really cant expect much from them.

People are in a rut and they are all quite happy there,this is what surprises me.Folks I meet seem obsessed with popular culture,they love TV and have no other topic of conversation.They don't want a better life for their children in fact they don't even know that that there could be a better life for their children. They think their kids have it too good already.Mindless consumers is right.These parents feel the ultimate in freedom is to take the kids to MacDonalds saving them from the trouble of microwaving something for supper.Advertizing in the gospel people can feel comfortable with.

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Chaszz:
Originally posted by Amalie:

"...I am interested in the notion that slavery does not exist in the west. Really?
I would have thought there are millions in Europe and America eking out a bare existence on a few dollars an hour, who are really no better off if we are talking materially here than their predecessors in the much derided 18th century London.
In fact they are worse off. There is no escape today for most people from the ubiquitous presence of trash culture whether pornography, mass sport, alchohol and all the other trappings of our Brave New World..."

Response: Life has many problems today, but
having to deal with modern life and its economy and etc. is fundamentally different from having no virtually life at all of one's own and being owned completely by another person as a piece of property. And having one's family torn away and sold in a distant place and never seeing them again.

As for the freer populace of earlier times, although it takes place in the Middle Ages and not the 18th century, I recommend "The Soul Thief" by Cecilia Holland as a novel with the strongest description I've ever read of the constant daily fact of hunger in common people's lives before modern times. Although workers today face many problems and challenges, they are surely better off without the twin spectres of starvation and deadly infectious diseases which dominated their lives in past ages.

Amalie: "...Interesting you refer to Galileo. Of course what the Liberals and Darwinians and sceptics still do not explain is that in a crucial sense, man is the centre of the universe, because with all the means of technology that are at our disposal, we have still not been able amongst the countless billions of stars, not on one of them to find even the most basic single cell living amoeba, whereas here we are on a supposedly insignificant planet which teems with life of every conceivable variety and has a creature in it, homo sapiens capable of the most dazzling intellectual feats. Oh, the scientists tell us, but the intelligents aliens are out there, and they will contact us. What utter nonesense. And only someone brainwashed pursuing another agenda could ignore the variety of life on earth and mans dominance over it and say that there are intelligent beings also elswhere.
It is very ironic I think, and sad and mischevious at least for scientists to ignore the evidence in front of there noses and our own explorations via hubble in deep space and say this is not really what it is like and that man is really nothing when he is, and it has not been disproved even today, when he is in fact the centre of the universe in terms of his intellectual and conscious development. So what a laugh, Galileo was in fact wrong in this sense!"

Response: Searching for life on other worlds has only just begun. Whether it is there or not, our attempts at finding it are of brief duration and only cursory. Our radio signals are only a hundred years old, so have penetrated only a distance of hundred light years with weakening signals in a galaxy that has a diameter of 100,000 light years, and is only a speck in a universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Likewise another civilization elsewhere searching for life such as us would have the same handicaps. The speeds of light and travel are finite and can't be breached. We cannot tell yet whether there is life or not on Jupiter's moons, let alone the planets of another star. To assume that there is no life out there is probably unrealistic and the same kind of human-centered bias which originally had the sun circling around the earth.

As for intelligent life, that may or may not be another thing. But what humanity, with its belief in its own greatness and singularity, its intelligence and with its dominion over the animals, has done to those animals, is no credit to it. All the injustices, including slavery and worse, that have been talked about here over the last few days, pale in comparison with what is done to only one class of animals, literally billions of meat animals the world over in one year. And tolerated and ignored by the vast majority. I can give many or a few concrete examples, if you like, and I'm not talking about mere slaughtering. So to me it is pure hypocrisy to claim any moral eminence or worth whatsoever for humans based on dominion over the animals. Sorry to be so rough, but as I say I can provide backing for this if you wish.

Chaszz

[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited September 30, 2003).]

Yes Chaszz, of course we have made a mess of things on the planet, pollution, exhaustion of resources, etc. but what I am trying to say is that intellectually for all our faults we are light years away from the animal kingdom, though at times man behaves worse than animals. Look, this thing about the universe proves my point my point. You are looking at it from the human perspective which is reasonable enough, saying rightly that our exploration of space is really just started, but we need to turn that around and look at it from the non human or cosmic perspective if you like. Looked at in that light and bearing in mind the countless billions upon billions of stars, not one of them seems to have contacted us assuming they are of the same or of a higher intelligence, (unless you believe in UFO's which I do not, and think is a silly notion), and we must either conclude therefore logically that they are not interested in us, or as I believe they do not exist. I mean mathematically the odds are just too colossal and mind boggling that out of all of those billions of stars not one has ever contacted us. Now that strains credibility from the scientific and mathematical perspective surely. It is like Darwinianism, the odds on their being a benign mutation producing man from the apes is billions to one, and yet evolutionists ask us to believe this as an article of faith and they call us religious mystics!!
Darwinianism may apply in the animal kingdom but it is absurd in the human realm where anyway there has been no real evidence of the missing link unless Mr. Blair is it.
With regard to the other postings I quite agree about the awfulness of other peoples kids and the moronic parents that have nominal charge of them. I can assure you I see quite enough of it in Britian, and I am sure you have the same problem in America. I think all we can do is continually strive to do better in our own lives, make the best of what we have got and pass on the culture of people like Beethoven, to people who are receptive and open minded enough for it. We have to accept though do we not that there are untermensch and that will not change, and they are totally uninterested and indeed hostile to the products of the mind and the human spirit and just wish to wallow in the basest instincts and reproduce their kind and bring other unfortunates into the world who are mirror images of their own Caliban like characters.
By the way Chaszz, may I say husband and I are both vegetarians and detest cruelty to animals, and indeed to humans.

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Peter:
Yes the Normans were capable of barborous acts, so were the Vikings and the Romans - the Enlightenment I think we can agree has nothing to do with this!

We're never going to agree on the enlightenment - you blame it for all the ills of today, whereas I see it as nothing but an influence for good - education over ignorance, tolerance over dogma and democracy over dictatorship. What I am interested in here is the Beethoven perspective - do you consider that he was against this movement and if so how do you explain works such as Fidelio, Egmont and the 9th in light of his admiration for 2 prominent enlightenment figures, Goethe and Schiller? On a broader musical level how do you feel about Haydn's Creation and Mozart's Magic Flute - 2 of the great works of the classical era that embody enlightenment ideals?

Well Peter, I think the point here goes back to the postings that I made some months ago about the Romantic movement.

Whether or not Beethoven was a Romantic, we can argue either way I suppose, but surely what is indisputable is that Beethoven's works for all their great intellectual brilliance are marked surely by an overwhelming and in music terms quite novel, volcanic force of emotion and exhaulted feeling. The enlightenment thinkers were suspicious of feeling, were they not? what T.S.Eliot called, 'undisciplined squads of emotion' and preferred dispassionate and rather cold reasoning to hot passion, and I don't think on this analysis we can call Beethoven and enlightenment advocate, sure Fidelio is about freedom but it is all pretty undefined isn't it. Man gets out of prison, everything is ok. The enlightenment thinkers were passionate about political programmes and I think Beethoven was smart enough to realize that, a. this was not his forte,
b. it could be treacherous ground for a composer, I mean look at Wagner, started off as virtually an anarchist manning the baracades, wrote manifestos almost like Marx, and then became a Plutocrat, and fell in love with money and power, Beethoven was clever enough but perhaps also niave enough to keep his political yearnings, which even today we don't really know a true definition of to the vaguest of aspirations for human brotherhood, freedom etc.
An interesting question is what composer would be regarded as an enlightenment type of musician. Haydn? perhaps because there is always at least in the music of his that I have heard is subordination of the emotion to the rational working out of musical harmony, scale, tone, structure etc, the creation is fantastic!

[Chaszz]

Originally posted by Amalie:
...Look, this thing about the universe proves my point my point. You are looking at it from the human perspective which is reasonable enough, saying rightly that our exploration of space is really just started, but we need to turn that around and look at it from the non human or cosmic perspective if you like. Looked at in that light and bearing in mind the countless billions upon billions of stars, not one of them seems to have contacted us assuming they are of the same or of a higher intelligence, (unless you believe in UFO's which I do not, and think is a silly notion), and we must either conclude therefore logically that they are not interested in us, or as I believe they do not exist. I mean mathematically the odds are just too colossal and mind boggling that out of all of those billions of stars not one has ever contacted us. Now that strains credibility from the scientific and mathematical perspective surely....

Just to respond further on this one point, Amalie. If we assume for a moment, for the sake of argument, that a civilization that is of our level or higher exists in a far galaxy, how could it possibly contact us? Travel from one galaxy to another is not even imaginable when we are hard pressed to even think how to possibly travel from one star to another in our own galaxy. It could take light several billion years to get from this far-off galaxy to ours, and we know no way of travelling even at a meaningful fraction of the speed of light, because mass becomes greater as speed approaches that of light, and the energy required to keep accelerating is too great to be carried along or even to be conceived of generating. So it is more likely that two highly developed species separated by the gulfs of intergalactic space will pass their whole life spans without ever being aware of each other. This is even likely within our own galaxy because the distances are just too great.

Another point is that our sun is a 2nd generation star. First generation stars are made of hydrogen and produce helium. When they explode at the end of their lives in novas, the explosion fuses atoms of hydrogen and helium into more complex atoms of iron, carbon, etc. This creates a cloud which gradually collapses under the weight of its gravity into a new star, with a dust ring of the more complex elements around it. This dust ring collapses thru gravity into planets which can be solid and have these heavier elements for rocks, water, life, etc. What I'm getting at here is seven billion years of so the life of the universe had to go by before there were even any 2nd generation stars capable of supplying the elements for planets. So any other intelligent civilization may not be much older than ours and have no more power to reach us than we to reach them at this point in our joint development. In our case, it took seven billion years for a first-generation star to explode and then six billion years or so for our sun to form and for the planets to coalesce and for life to develop to our point. 13 billion years - almost the life of the universe, estimated at about 15 billion years. There is no reason to suppose any other civilization is much older than us.

[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited September 30, 2003).]