1. The sport of science
[This is an old draft]
In case of peace … what do we do? bore ourselves silly? pick any new quarrel to survive that?
My suggestion is science.
Like cricketand not like an encyclopedia or a dishwasher for instance. See First, lets get things straight More, science is something we humans can practice together, and for us to do so, it doesn’t require of us to have a particular problem or conflict at hand to resolve.
But is it a fun sport?
Well yes but I think the best way to answer that is by showing how it’s practiced in the field. That’s what project In case of Peace is about: building an infrastructure to ease access to the field and to the game itself for amateur and expert players and spectators.
And is it not like American football, only fun for a restricted portion of the population?
No, it’s more like caber toss. You might not want to do it all the time, you might want to leave the heavy lifting to someone trained for that, but chances are you’ll find something in it for you to be captivated by for a (short) while. Some things like science and throwing stuff around, appreciating the life in your mind and appreciating the life in your body are just natural.
In case of peace, why bother with science then, why not live on caber toss?
Like everything I know except science, thinking, and communing and interacting with the world, caber toss doesn’t durably rid us of the threat of boredom. At some point, we have got to get bored with caber toss.
And science no?
No. Science is as old as wrestling.and as humanity - give or take a few (hundreds of) millenaries depending on how you define science, wrestling and humanity. More Humanity has spend so much time on it, it would have long gotten over it by now if it could. Ok, not everyone wrestles on a regular basis. But one way or the other, we all do very regularly scuffle. Similarly we don’t all practice science on a regular basis but we all do conform our thinking to the human world out there in order to make things that we envision out of pieces of the world we get to own. Some form of wrestling and some form of science are fundamental human needsI'm not saying that science has to be made. It just so happens that it is. Humans can't help it: they keep having the thirst for consistency among their views, and they keep being invigorated by the distinctions they manage to make. More.
As it turns out, some “forms” of science are never enough. Science per se is bound to be made. I can explain this. In another post.