AdamSmith

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Robbins

Yet another Great Stride Forward in encouraging more participation here. You're right up there with the best motivational coaches.

Sorry, that engraving was actually by Blake. 'Dave, my mind is going.'

'REMOVE YOUR CLOTHES!'

They have been around quite a while now, and they haven't done this yet. Instead they have, time and again, grown by putting their capital into developing new markets. I think your view expressed here is captive to old-think, in a way that Bezos is not. By the considerable evidence available thus far.

Looks to me just like Gustav Dore's engraving of Dante's Gate to Hell that I posted yesterday in the Organ thread here.

You have given here, in terms kindly adopted for lay consumprion. an elegant intro to this highly technical topic of 1-, 2- and 3-point perspective. Thank you! Very clear and well done. I know it from many years behind the journalistic camera. And the vertical stat camera in the darkroom, etc. And then the digital-technology follow-ons. And of course just from being an art history whore. (Did I ever recount my personal story about Jasper Johns? A genius, and a truly dirty old man! Lovely, in every way.) Vasari (was it? God, the mind goes quick ) gave a great Googleable technical treatise on perspective.

Yeah, this. The only way to make life risk-free is to have the undertaker screw down that wooden lid. Risk mitigation is, as @BiBottomBoy notes, the way to go, and still live life.

All I can say is I know him personally and I think his larger ideas are long-term correct.

With respect, your post contains its own refutation. The commercial opportunity here discovered, largely, by Amazon has woken up a few, to date, of its strongest competitors to likewise get on the ball and do something in this arena: Microsoft Azure IBM Cloud Google Cloud Platform https://www.datamation.com/cloud-computing/public-cloud-providers.html This seems to me the normal business evolution of new-technology markets. Microsoft, Google, and even IBM although in its lately typical bumbling way (Monty-Python-'Convict Ginny Rommetty as a witch! a witch!' ) are catching up with AWS, and beginning to find ways to compete, very effectively. I am as lefty as they come, but I think regulatory intrusion here now -- no need to add, with the various present people in power -- would be worse than disastrous.

Very Fair & Balanced (so seems to me; but our @RA1 would be the authority here) comparison of Boeing vs Airbus design philosophies. But, on balance, reminds me yet again why (if one had one's druthers, which of course is hard to arrange): If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going. P.S. Being a consultant about engineering software, in such things as the above, I find myself more and more in line with Alfred North Whitehead: 'Seek simplicity, and distrust it.'

The only way to live! Full throttle.

Why a leading political theorist thinks civilization is overrated A new book challenges how we think about human progress. Updated by Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com Nov 22, 2017, 10:40am ET Is civilization good for us? Has it made us any happier? The takeaway from a new book by James Scott, a professor of political science and anthropology at Yale University, is that the answer to the first question is yes but it’s complicated, while the answer to the second question is, well, even more complicated. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Scott explores why human beings decided to shift from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more sedentary, agrarian lifestyle roughly 12,000 years ago. The accepted narrative is that humans abandoned hunting and gathering as soon they discovered agricultural technology, because it made life easier and safer. But Scott argues that this is not quite right. Humans, he says, spent thousands of years trying to preserve their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Sure, settling down in agrarian societies provided the basis for the modern state by allowing large numbers of people to live in one place for extended periods of time, but it also led to the spread of diseases and forced people to give up the freedom of an itinerant lifestyle for the affluence of a modern one. The story we tell ourselves about human history is one of linear progress, fueled in large part by moral and technological development. There is some truth to this, and on a long enough timeline it makes sense, but Scott says the sacrifices made along the way are rarely understood. I spoke to him recently about those sacrifices, and what we tend to get wrong about early civilizations. For Scott, the price of civilization — for the individual and the environment — has been higher than we think. Our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, follows. Sean Illing Has civilization been good for humanity? James Scott So much of what I thought I had understood about early civilizations and pre-modern men and women was just wrong. I’ve tried to offer something of a counternarrative that suggests the domestication of grains centuries ago did not lead directly to humans living in large groups in one place for long periods of time, as we now do. It turns out that the kind of agriculture that early humans practiced was onerous and involved a tremendous amount of work. The first civilizations were very hard and unhealthy places that gave us most of our first infectious diseases, many of which are still with us. They also produced the first coercive states that took slaves and oppressed large numbers of people. Now, that doesn't mean that the modern state since the French Revolution is not the ground of both our freedom and our oppression, but it does mean that the early states were by no means a simple advance in leisure, freedom, emancipation, or help. Sean Illing We can circle back to that last point about what we lost in terms of leisure and freedom, but first tell me what you initially got wrong about early civilizations — and presumably what a lot of us get wrong. James Scott A couple of things. One is that I think the standard narrative is that once we had domesticated plants, then we immediately shifted to an agricultural society so that we could stay in the same place. People also assume that before the agricultural revolution, humans had to wander around as foragers and hunter-gatherers. But that’s not quite right. Four thousand years passed between the first firm evidence of domesticated plants, cereals, and the beginning of truly agrarian communities that are living largely by agriculture. The other mistake, which I had never thought about, was this assumption that we couldn’t wait to settle down, that this was part of the inevitable progress of humanity. That’s not true at all, and it certainly could have gone another way. The truth is that staying in one place, which is what civilization more or less forced us to do, wasn’t all that healthy for us, and our human ancestors resisted [it] strongly for a very long time. Sean Illing So the birth of agriculture, which effectively laid the foundation for modern civilization, was not welcomed by most humans at the time. What were they resisting? What did they see? James Scott Well, you have to remember that in places like Mesopotamia, people lived in a kind of wetland paradise, with water levels much higher than they are today and with diverse migrations of mammals and birds and fish that created an extraordinarily rich set of ecosystems. Those early humans had a variety of plant and animal and fish sources of subsistence, and it actually required very little of the year for them to get all of their protein needs. “It’s important to understand that this was not a choice between hunting and gathering and foraging on the one hand and the Danish welfare state on the other” Sean Illing So the hunter-gatherers were healthier than those who switched over to the more sedentary agricultural lifestyle — at least initially. James Scott That’s right. Their diet was extremely varied, which is to say extremely healthy. So that when you find the bones of people who died at the same time and you want to know whether they were a part of an agrarian state or whether they were hunters and gatherers and foragers, you can tell because the hunter-gatherers’ skeletons are much larger because they had fewer interruptions in growth, and their bones show almost no signs of malnutrition, whereas the people in the agricultural civilizations are both shorter and their bones and teeth are less robust. You see evidence of growth interruptions that are mostly due to protein deficiency of one kind or another. It's clear that people outside these grain civilizations were healthier than the people inside. Sean Illing People tend to think of human history as a story of steady progress, which is largely true, but it’s also more complicated than that. James Scott Even today, there is this idea that life with civilization is easier and affords more leisure, but hunters and gatherers spend only about 50 percent of their time producing or searching for what they needed to survive. The idea that hunters and gatherers and foragers were living hand to mouth and one day away from starvation is nonsense, even for those in pretty marginal areas where there is less access to natural migrations of fish and animals and the fruiting seasons of trees and so on... Hunters and gatherers only spent half of their time working, and the rest was spent in play or leisure. By contrast, those early agrarian civilizations involved much more labor and drudgery. [They] also involved a narrower diet that turned out mostly carbohydrates. And that’s why people resisted this transition, and why many had to be forced into this change... Cont.: https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/11/22/16649038/civilization-progress-humanity-history-technology

Occurs that the radar operator in this scene was very possibly modeled on one Jacob Beser, the expert 24-year-old radar technician who flew on the Enola Gay mission to bomb Hiroshima, and then also on the Nagasaki run. To help record the effects of the bomb, but more importantly to try to detect, and counter, any possible use by the Japanese of radar that would interfere with, and possibly prematurely set off, the radar-based proximity-fusing mechanism of the atomic bomb. Over Hiroshima, Missing the Target by 500 Feet Was Kind of Academic By Bruce Goldfarb Jacob Beser Crewman at Hiroshima and Nagasaki Jacob Beser was a 24-year-old radar specialist aboard the Enola Gay on Aug. 6, 1945, when it dropped the "Little Boy" atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, Beser was aboard Bock's Car when "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki. He was the only person who crewed in the attack aircraft of both missions. His responsibility aboard the planes was to monitor the workings of a fuse-device that set off the bomb when radar beams bounced off the ground indicated that the weapon had fallen to a precise altitude for an air burst of maximum destructiveness. In Hiroshima, the altitude was 1,850 feet. His other job on the flight to the targets was to make sure that there were no enemy radars using the same frequency as the fuse -- which could have set off the bomb prematurely. Jacob Beser, November 1945 Little Boy produced an explosion equal to 12,000 tons of TNT and killed 78,150 of Hiroshima's population of 255,000. More than 25,000 people were injured and 13.425 people were never found. In Nagasaki, 35,000 were killed or never found and 40,000 were injured, out of a population of 195,000. Beser is a native of Baltimore. Prior to enlisting in the Air Force, he studied mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University and worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in the area of firing and fusing. After 27 years of service, Beser recently retired from Westinghouse, where most of his work was classified. This summer Beser plans to return to Japan for the first time since the war, and has been invited to attend memorial ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He lives with Sylvia Beser, his wife of 36 years, in Pikesville, Md., where he is active in Jewish organizations. The Besers have four sons and five grandchildren. [Jacob Beser died in 1992 at age 71] Q: Do you often think of August 1945? A: Yeah, I think of it because people like you and others don't let you forget it. It's not that I care to forget it, but there's always constant reminders. Q: Before you were aware of what the mission was, you requested a transfer to a combat unit. Were you pretty anxious to fight? A: I was quite anxious to get into it. I wanted to go to Europe. Classmates were there. I had family in Germany who had been chewed up already. I went up to Washington to see the adjutant general of the army, who theoretically could send you anywhere you wanted to go. He said, "I don't know why, but even I can't touch you. Your file has been flagged for some reason." Eventually I got transferred into the [Army Air Corps] 393rd [Heavy Bombardment Squadron, the one assigned to the Manhattan Project]. A month after that, orders came down from Washington freezing all the personnel in the 393rd. Nobody in, nobody out. And they were alerted for a temporary move to Wendover Air Force Base. They said take everything you own with you, which was quite unusual. All your trucks and your organizational equipment. Crew of Enola Gay before Hiroshima mission. Beser, standing far right We were at Wendover a couple of days and we got called together in the base auditorium to meet Paul Tibbets, our new group commander. He said we were going to form a new group, independent, able to operate anywhere in the world, the purpose of which was not to be told to us for a while. Don't ask questions, just trust me. It was secret. And everybody could go home on two weeks leave except Lt. Jacob Beser, please report to my office immediately. I was ushered into his office with two more army personnel, a naval officer and a civilian, Dr. Al Brode, who had just come off a college campus. A light came on in my head and I said, "Hey, this guy is a big wheel in physics." They wanted to know where I was from, how old I was, where I went to school and what my background and experience had been. Brode looked me straight in the eye and said, "How do you feel about flying combat?" "I have a pair of wings," I said. "That's what I was trained for. What's the problem?" He said, "Well, this job we want you to do, it’s not that we don't have people that can do it in our organization but they're too valuable to risk." I could see my life expectancy going down, my insurance rates going up. I was excused from the room and about 10 minutes later invited back and everybody shook my hand and congratulated me. I'd been hired. What for? Nobody was saying, but I was now part of the crowd. I didn't know what I was part of. Several days later we were told to be on the flight line at 7 the next morning and be packed for three or four days travel. I said, "Where are we going?" "You'll find out when we get there." That's interesting. "And do I take warm clothes or summer clothes or what?" "Take 'em both." They wouldn't give me the slightest clue. I crawled in the airplane. I didn't know the rest of these fellows too well. But I did know the pilot and I said, "Arthur, where are we going?" He said, "I don't know but when we get near we'll find out. All I know is I filed a clearance for a place called Y. The letter Y. I've never been there before." Pilot Col. Paul Tibbets before take-off for Hiroshima mission Q: And that turned out to be Los Alamos? A: Yeah. I was escorted there by Col. Tibbets and Navy Capt. Richard Ashworth. We went right to the office of Dr. Norman Ramsey, who was a young PhD from Columbia University. He ran the fusing and firing section. Q: Nobody ever said atomic in that briefing? A: No, no. No way. They just told me "a weapon." Ramsey said that they wanted this weapon to burst over the ground at a precise altitude and they had been working on the problem but they weren't nearly as far along as they should be. We would have lunch at the lodge and there were names like Nils Bohr bandied around, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe. It all began to add up. Then in conversations with Ramsey one day he pretty much filled me in without ever saying words like atomic bomb. He talked about fundamental forces of the universe. He hit all around it, and it spelled mother... http://brucegoldfarb.com/beser.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Beser http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/20/obituaries/jacob-beser-dies-at-71-flew-a-bomb-missions.html https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/jacob-besers-lecture https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/jacob-beser

Surprised by Sin The Reader in Paradise Lost, Second Edition with a New Preface “Thirty years after its original publication, Surprised by Sin remains the one indispensable book on Milton. This dazzling, high-stakes work of mind taught a generation of readers how to read anew. And, lest we thought its rigorous injunctions had been dulled or blandly assimilated by the intervening years, Fish dares us, in a formidable new preface, to think again.”—Linda Gregerson, University of Michigan “Thirty years ago, Surprised by Sin initiated the modern age in Milton criticism. Still the one book necessarily engaged by Milton scholars, it continues to provoke, irritate, and illuminate. Reissued now, with a substantial new preface, it clarifies in fascinating ways not only the course of Milton studies but also the continuing career of its controversial author.”—Marshall Grossman, University of Maryland at College Park “The first edition of Surprised by Sin revised the critical landscape of Milton studies more significantly and more influentially than any other analysis of Paradise Lost in modern history. The second edition contains a substantial preface, not only an apologia but also a brilliant critical manifesto in its own right. Fish thereby affirms the validity, preeminence, and timeliness of his ‘great argument,’ which will continue to inform critical debates unremittingly in the future.”—Albert C. Labriola, Duquesne University http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674857476&content=reviews

'Gate of Hell' -- William Blake http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/gallery02.html

“THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE CITY OF WOE, THROUGH ME THE WAY TO ETERNAL PAIN, THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST. JUSTICE MOVED MY MAKER ON HIGH. DIVINE POWER MADE ME, WISDOM SUPREME, AND PRIMAL LOVE. BEFORE ME NOTHING WAS BUT THINGS ETERNAL, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY. ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.” https://classicsincontext.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/canto-iii-per-me-si-va-ne-la-citta-dolente/

Inferno (Dante) Canto III: The Gate of Hell Per me si va ne la città dolente, per me si va ne l'etterno dolore, per me si va tra la perduta gente. Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore: fecemi la divina potestate, la somma sapienza e 'l primo amore. Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate. Through me you go to the grief-wracked city; Through me you go to everlasting pain; Through me you go a pass among lost souls. Justice inspired my exalted Creator: I am a creature of the Holiest Power, of Wisdom in the Highest and of Primal Love. Nothing till I was made was made, only eternal beings. And I endure eternally. Abandon all hope — Ye Who Enter Here. Variant translation: 'Through me the way to the suffering city; Through me the everlasting pain; Through me the way that runs among the Lost. Justice urged on my exalted Creator: Divine Power made me, The Supreme Wisdom and the Primal Love. Nothing was made before me but eternal things And I endure eternally. Abandon all hope - You Who Enter Here.' Variant Translation: 'I am the way into the city of woe. I am the way to a forsaken people. I am the way into eternal sorrow. Sacred justice moved my architect. I was raised here by divine omnipotence, primordial love and ultimate intellect. Only those elements time cannot wear are beyond me, and beyond time I stand. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.' https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante)#Canto_III:_The_Gate_of_Hell

Alien Encounter Fiction Childhood’s End fits neatly into that sub-genre known as “alien encounter fiction,” where the alien is an Other who is comparable though superior to human beings. The contrast between us and the Overlords is significant: Seeing ourselves through Karellen’s eyes, we are introduced afresh to all our problems as a species but also to our great creative powers (which, ironically, are dampened by the Overlords’ arrival). Karellen tells Rashaverak: “Human beings are remarkably ingenious and often very persistent. It is never safe to underrate them” (104). He is doubtlessly remembering Stormgren’s neat trick by which he found out the truth of Karellen’s appearance (We will never know if Karellen deliberately and affectionately rewarded his ingenuity with a glimpse, though Stormgren to his dying day believes so). Karellen sees in Jan Rodricks the same ingenuity, and so will we. The human race receives a collective pat on the back as even the far-superior alien realizes that there is some value to human beings. Though alien encounter fiction can involve mutants, alter egos, sentient computers, the most common encounter is with extraterrestrials. The problem is how to depict them: “A complaint about the depiction of extraterrestrials is that they are never really alien; for how can a writer create something that is truly Other? Absolute Otherness is an artistic impossibility. That which is completely Other would also be also completely incomprehensible to the reader.”(Carl Malmgren, Worlds Apart, 57) We need some sort of comparison to earthly beings or we could make no sense of what we were seeing and no writer could describe it. If you look carefully at the descriptions of Overlords you will see that they do not look human at all. When George Greggson meets Rashaverak in Rupert Boyce's library he feels: "There was nothing really anthropomorphic about Rashavaerak[....]The body was neither like that of a man nor that of any animal Earth had ever known."(82) They are giants, with wings, horns and tails. Still, they are analogously human -- they walk upright, have a head, a face, a body, two legs, two arms, two hands. They may talk and think too fast for us to understand, but they are an extrapolation from our own rationality and technical expertise, a model of what we might become with the appropriate passage of time. But who has sent them? We haven’t met all the aliens yet. Keep reading. Assignments for Week of Oct. 2: Finish reading Childhood's End. Paper 1 assignment available by Friday, Oct. 6; due Saturday, Oct. 21.

Utopia However, by ending war and other cruelties, the Overlords bring a true Utopia into being. Never mind that it could never have come about without their help. It seems that we are in need of a stern parent figure who can punish us if we go astray (Witness the fate of those attending the bull fight!). Is Clarke’s scenario, then, much better than what we have now? Sure it is. There is less suffering in the world, no poverty, war, or race hatred, no cruelty to animals, worldwide opportunities for pleasure, and not just for the rich. Everyone has enough. But there are losses, especially art and science, those two human accomplishments which spring from our creativity. And of course there are drawbacks: “No Utopia can every give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.” (90) Childhood’s End is not a prophecy of the future. It is a science fiction novel, and contains not only extrapolation and speculation about the future, but also the stuff of which novels are made –images, narrative voice, characters. As science fiction, it takes on one of the major challenges of the genre, the depiction of alien life. Imagery The 1953 "Prologue" immediately sets up a major contrast in the novel, the warm familiar life on earth contrasted to the indifference of the rest of the universe: on the supposed eve of America’s venture into space, Reinhold Hoffman (a German scientist now working for the US) contemplates the island Taratua from which the spaceship Columbus is to be launched: "It was quiet here beneath the palms, high up on the rocky spine of the island.” We are told that he “had grown fond of these clustered palms....It saddened him to think that they would be blasted to atoms” when the Columbus leaves earth for the stars (7)--“the aloof indifferent stars” which within minutes come to humankind as the Overlords’ ship sweeps down to earth (11). That this comforting living world has not always been so is implied in the first sentence of the novel: “The volcano that had reared Taratua up from the Pacific depths had been sleeping now for half a million years,” and this is followed by Reinhold’s thought that “Yet in a little while…the island would be bathed with fires fiercer than any that had attended its birth” as the Columbus “rose in flame and fury to the stars”(7). Humankind’s quest for the stars will be more destructive than the fiery birth of islands. Life on earth then is a brief period of calm surrounded by violent cataclysm whether natural or man-made. The space ship will never leave earth, but we will witness cataclysm again before the novel is over as certain “sleeping” human powers awaken. Characters The voice telling us this story is most similar to the voice narrating “The Star,” far off and distant with a similar godlike perspective, able at will to dip down into the lives of Reingold, Stormgren, Rupert Boyce, Jan Rodricks, Jean and George Greggson, characters who play their representative parts in the drama that is not focused on them and their development but on the development of one of the book’s major characters, the human race. The other major character is, of course, Karellen. In presenting the Overlords, Clarke is shrewd in building suspense about their appearance. Stormgren’s assistant constantly comes up with theories as to why Karellen does not reveal himself, theories reading like bad science fiction plots. The reader is swept along, wondering, like human beings in the novel do, first what the aliens look like and then why they are here. The revelation that they resemble demons explains why they have kept themselves hidden, but not why the memory has stayed so long in the myths of humankind. We -– and the characters--assume that the Overlords encountered human beings millions of years ago and it was not a happy meeting. Just after the ouija board reveals the name of the Overlord’s sun, for the first time, we see two of the aliens alone together, discussing the incident. Clarke is clever at circumventing the problem of describing their conversation--he admits that he can’t: “'This man Boyce,’ said Karellen. ‘Tell me all about him.’ “The Supervisor did not use those actual word, of course, and the thoughts he really expressed were far more subtle. A human listener would have heard a short burst of rapidly modulated sound"(101). In this way we are able to eavesdrop on members of a species whose language is to us unknowable because of their superiority, and it’s here that we begin to see concrete evidence that the Overlords' purpose on earth is not altruistic. In studying Rupert Boyce’s collection of psychic phenomena, Rashaverak has noted “eleven clear cases of partial breakthrough”(102) and designates Jean Morrell “too old to be a Prime Contact herself” and thus placed in “Category Purple.” She is “the most important human being alive”(103). We don’t know why yet, but we will.

270 CELecture 5 Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke AUDIO The Future Published over half a century ago, Childhood's End describes a future, some of which –such as birth control devices and DNA testing -- has come to pass. But no forecast is perfect --Clarke did not foresee the Internet, for instance, as a purveyor of information. Though the novel depicts an end to racism and sexism, that has not happened in spite of gains for minorities and women. Moreover, Clarke and many intellectuals of the time believed that reason and science would replace religion; the nation-state was on the way out; and soon there would be a world government. Instead we have seen tremendous backlashes of religious fundamentalism and nationalism. At the beginning of Childhood’s End, once again, we are back in the time of the Cold War. The United States and Russia are competing, in the year 1975, to see who will be the first to go into space. The destination is only specified as “the stars.” In reality, Sputnik, the first satellite, was launched by the USSR in 1957, while in l969 United States astronauts were the first to walk on the moon. However, in the future world created by Arthur C. Clarke, we never make it unaided off the planet. And instead of the grim scenario of “Casablanca,” we are saved from mutually assured destruction, as Karellen tells the human race later in the book, by outside intervention. Religion The launch of the space ship to the stars is forestalled by the appearance of aliens from a far superior culture. They are not the monsters of the human imagination (though they would have been perceived so had they revealed themselves right away). They are, instead, good aliens, come to save humankind. A 1951 film “The Day the Earth Stood Still” had a similar premise: a saintly alien comes to earth to stop human beings from destroying each other. Perhaps this is the Overlords’ motive as well. But like most outsiders, the Overlords are not immediately welcomed by everyone, for many understand that the conflict is between the Overlords and the gods of mankind. Karellen tells the UN Secretary General, Rikki Stormgren, that “[t]hey know that we represent reason and science, and [...] they fear that we will overthrow their gods”(23). Clarke sets up a dichotomy here between reason and science on one hand and the irrational and “unscientific” part of human nature, including religion, on the other. Reason and science win out. Or seem to. The instrument with which human beings can see the past and learn the truth about the origin of world religions wipes out these religions, a development seen by the narrator as a positive step on the way to maturity: “Humanity had lost its ancient gods: now it was old enough to have no need for new ones”(75). But working against this idea like a kind of unconscious undertow is even the name given to the aliens, “Overlords,” as well as echoes of biblical imagery used in their description: “And on the sixth day, Karellen, Supervisor for Earth, made himself known to the world”(18). Stormgren “ had faith in Karellen”(16) and his assistant admits that his real feeling toward Karellen is ”one of overwhelming awe” (37) at their “illimitable power” (42). The Overlords have a “passion for justice and order” (44). They bring peace and comfort to humankind like a good parent taking care of hitherto unruly children. The old gods may be dead, but it seems that new ones have taken their place, and it can be argued that humanity has not grown up at all, simply substituted one set of parental gods with another. The scenario is replete, moreover, with hints early in the narrative that all is not well: The ships pass overhead “like demon-driven clouds” (42). Also “[t]here is something in the future that [Karellen] seems to fear” (24), and he is careful to point out that he does not have absolute power(24), that his race has had its failures 64). There are ”unknown powers above him”(64). So there is clearly more to the Overlords’ visit to Earth than meets the eye. At first it seems as if the problem resides solely in their superiority: “The invaders had brought peace and prosperity to Earth -– but who knew what the cost may be? History was not reassuring; even the most peaceable of contacts between races at very different cultural levels had often resulted in the obliteration of the more backward society. Nations [...] could lose their spirit when confronted by a challenge which they could not meet” (29). This certainly seems to be true by the end of Chapter 9: not only has religion vanished but scientific investigation has ground to a halt since what’s the point of proceeding if the Overlords have already done all the work. https://sites.google.com/site/mboretz/lecture5