Stewart Brand: observation

Transcript context

…I see a very serious puzzle that our military and CIA cannot figure out at all. I suppose I think there’s a modest chance it’s an actual alien drone probe. Probably not a very interesting drone probe, just sent out to follow us and then run away. I’ve given that 5 percent or 10 percent in my estimations, but I find it very puzzling. It forces me to think about our world a lot, that we could have multiple sensory sources of data measuring an object that moves very quickly, and we simply cannot figure out what it is. It dates back to at least 2004, possibly much longer. To simply say it’s the Chinese or it’s laser-induced plasma — a lot of explanations just don’t quite seem to cut it. Good. It keeps some mystery in your life. There are things like that that I just shrug and adopt a two-minded approach. It might be true. Is it something I can do anything about? Is it something that’s going to affect me? If not, I’ll just stay open to further news, but in the meantime shrug at it because one of the things you probably notice as you get older is you’ve seen a lot of illusions come and go. I’ve seen a lot of the-world-is-doomed illusions come and go. Y2K — when we got all the computers are going to stop because they don’t know how to handle the year 2000. Stuff like that, on and on — the peak oil, and one thing after another. I’ve become a . . . trying to encourage a certain sense of perspective and realism when people say that the world is going to end because of this, that, or the other thing. Humanity’s been around for a long time now. The world’s been around for a long time now. Biology is incredibly resilient and robust, and I think the world-ending trope is just a waste of mind. When you put out the Whole Earth Catalog, how much did you think about the font and style of the early editions?…

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