I’m sure that Ken MacLeod must know all about Juan Posadas, but I didn’t, and this post at Crooked Timber has made me want to know more:
UFOs, predicts Posadas, will show a greater interest in us “at the moment of the collapse of the bourgeoisie and the General Strike.†Star Trek fans will recognise the similarity with the film First Contact, in which Vulcans passing Earth only show an interest in humans after they have developed warp drive.
Note the title of the post as well. Geekery abounds.
Some of Posada’s other ideas were stranger, apparently.
Well, since you ask, here it is.
Ken:
Thanks, I knew you’d be on top of it. 🙂
And yes, reading the output of the more loony parts of the extreme Left and Right is often a highlight of student politics.
Dan:
I presume you are talking about his passion for nuclear warfare. That was downright scary.
He had ideas stranger than that. More later. Meanwhile, a taste of utopian Charles Fourier:
Fourier also says that… humanity will acquire the capacity to live like fish in the water and to fly like birds in the air, and that, by then, humans will have reached a height of seven feet and have a life span of at least 144 years. Everyone, at that point, will be able to transform himself into an amphibian; the individual will have the power of opening or closing at will the valves connecting the chambers of the heart and so – without the blood having to pass through the lungs – bring it directly to the heart… Nature will evolve in such fashion, he maintains, that a time will come when orange trees blossom in Siberia, and the most dangerous animals will be replaced by their opposites. ANTI-LIONS and ANTI-WHALES… New stars will emerge to take the place of the moon, which, by then, will already have begun to rot.