Fermi Versus Trumbull

Trumbull? Who is 'Trumbull?'

One of our readers here has suggested the Fermi Paradox extension theorem about intelligent civilizations 'by nature' self-destructing over time - and that this could be the reason the world is presently in the state that it is in, compared with only say fifty or a hundred years ago, when it was very clear there were abundant examples of superior intellectuals and abundant examples of very sophisticated art and culture.

It's pretty hard to put the band 'Prodigy' on quite the same plane as Borodin or Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky, or Bach or Jerome Kern. Frankly it's not quite so hard to make a rough equivalency case for John Lydon with these other luminaries, but then, there's the point, the media quite deliberately suppressed Lydon and the Sex Pistols and developed their own 'punk' narrative and body of work and pushed these into the public's mind, and which bore little actual relationship with what Malcolm McLaren and John Lydon had started. Certainly not in terms of the underlying philosophy of making what you could creatively from what you had materially-speaking and admitting that what you had was very little.

Fermi's most famous accessible idea was that there seemed to be a paradox between the statistical likelihood there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the Universe, and the fact there was no non-conjectural evidence of them at all.

I mean there is plenty of 'evidence' but almost none of it is objectively and widely agreed upon to be solid enough to draw fact-based positive conclusions.

So. Trumbull.

I refer to Douglas Trumbull, the more or less discarded genius innovator who was most directly responsible apart from Kubrick himself, for the visual 'feel' and realism of the movie '2001, a Space Odyssey.'

So 'retro-futurism' that it is just plain retro now!!

Trumbull worked on just about everything else in sci-fi of any substantial note: Blade Runner, Brainstorm with Natalie Wood who died during the making of the movie, Star Trek, close Encounters... ...need I say more. He was pre-committed to other projects during Star Wars.

Now here's the thing I find odd about the human race - but now it's not quite fair though, to include Fermi in this aspect of it all, because he was both a theoretical as well as an industrial, practical mathematician and engineer - however, the odd thing is that people rush to scientists to find aliens and to consider ways of 'capturing' them or proving they exist, but they never consult people like Trumbull, who is more responsible than possibly anyone else in this era for the public's pre-conceptions about what aliens must be like. Trumbull is himself an amazing practical engineer, who is acknowledged as an expert on vacuum hydraulics and water dynamics and various other dynamic energy and kinetic systems. As was Fermi, certainly.

Human beings tend to assume that out present state of science (and therefore our scientific mind) is even close to that of advanced intelligent species - and therefore 'scientists' must occupy the pre-eminent place worthy of respect vis-a-vis who gets to communicate with aliens.

LOL

'Intelligent' species must destroy themselves by nature, but not so that nothing is left afterwards - the highest point of any sentient biological group must be above and beyond 'intelligence' which must become redundant at the point of sophonce; or let's say 'hyperturing sophonce.' At the point of hyperturing sophonce all things are known, all calculations made; there is no requirement for 'clever guessing based on likelihoods (intelligence)...