quotEnsemble #16

“The question of how and when humans are going to expand into the universe, the space travel question, is, in my view, almost rendered obsolete by this growth of a digitally-coded biology, because those digital organisms—maybe they don’t exist now, but as long as the system keeps going, they’re inevitable—can travel at the speed of light. They can propagate. They’re going to be so immeasurably far ahead that maybe humans will be dragged along with it.

But while our digital footprint is propagating at the speed of light, we’re having very big trouble even getting to the eleven kilometers per second it takes to get into lower earth orbit. The digital world is clearly winning on that front. And that’s for the distant future. But it changes the game of launching things, if you no longer have to launch physical objects, in order to transmit life.”

A Universe Of Self-Replicating Code by George Dyson
ᔥEdge

“It used to be that we called upon the tribal shamans to converse with their spirits, to ask favors, for our ills, for our happiness and sometimes to see that which is far. In the age before geography was a science, we travelled via the shaman’s spirit technology to places of wonder and imagination.
Not very accurate, and probably not very connected to any reality we could appreciate, we left the shamans behind, and developed our own technologies to perform the same magic. Maybe not the same exactly, since modern technology allows us a glimpse of the remote to a level of description and visualization rivaling ‘being there’. If in fact our new ‘remote viewing’ technologies are truly experiences of that which we have not experienced in the flesh with our bare feet, are we not becoming techno-shamans?
Though still in its embryonic stages, technologies of virtual sightseeing are already with us to a degree that is both surprising and thrilling. No need for passports, no need to move from our desk or comfy armchair, the world in all its strangeness now comes to us.”

in “Bringing remoteness to immediacy - We are all techno-shamans”
ᔥA Momentary Flow

“In short, there is a growing agreement among researchers of this mysterious phenomenon that the imaginal is no longer confined to the after-life realm, but has spilled over into the seeming solidity of our sticks-and-stones world. No longer confined to the visions of shamans, the old gods have sailed their celestial barks right up to the doorstep of the computer generation, only instead of dragon-headed ships their vessels are spaceships, and they have traded in their blue-jay heads for space helmets.”

Michael Talbot in “The Holographic Universe”—Traveling in the Superhologram