today should be a short one. I am reading The Coming Race by Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, P.C., written in 1871. I am about a third of the way through, and he has begun to discuss the concept of vril. some believe it to be based partly on occult truths, with some esotericists thinking that vril, or something similar, is a real, fluid concept, & has led to breakthroughs in the past; most notably within Nazi Germany—popularised in media such as Wolfenstein and that film about Nazis on the moon—but that's not what I found interesting. in speaking of vril in a very 19th century mystic sort of way, Baron Lytton seems to stumble upon a perfect analogy for that tired subject—nuclear weapons. bear in mind he was writing more than twenty years before Mr & Mrs Curie began to poison themselves with radium, and more than forty years before H.G. Wells' The World Set Free.
the book describes a young adventurer who stumbles into a subterranean civilisation of peaceful, technologically superior beings which seem to have broken from the mainland at a time lost to history, during a geological shift. they toiled as the "barbarians" aboveground did for some time, until eventually discovering vril, which is a mysterious fluid-like energy which exists in everything and can be used for seemingly endless purposes, including weapons of mass destruction, motionless flight, empowering automata, & gently lighting their enormous underground domes the size of cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants. about a third of the way through, the history of their race is explained to the narrator, and they discuss vril:
As these effects became familiarly known and skilfully administered, war between the Vril-discoverers ceased, for they brought the art of destruction to such perfection as to annul all superiority in numbers, discipline, or military skill. The fire lodged in the hollow of a rod directed by the hand of a child could shatter the strongest fortress, or cleave its burning way from the van to the rear of an embattled host. If army met army, and both had command of this agency, it could be but to the annihilation of each. The age of war was therefore gone, but with the cessation of war other effects bearing upon the social state soon became apparent. Man was so completely at the mercy of man, each whom he encountered being able, if so willing, to slay him on the instant, that all notions of government by force gradually vanished from political systems and forms of war.
this is not only a near-perfect analogy for nuclear weapons, but even further than that, it provides a possible answer to the simulation hypothesis. generally stated, it exists thus:
one of three things are true:
1. there is something intrinsic in the journey towards creating the technology necessary for simulations that leads to the end of civilisation, or
2. there is something intrinsic in the journey towards creating the technology necessary for simulations that leads to a lack of interest in the creation of them (moral, &c.), or
3. we are in a simulation.
so Baron Lytton's vision for the future seems to fit into the first and second possibilities. if something like vril is discovered—& humanity develops the ability to potentially end civilisation—our morality will gradually change so that both: we are uninterested in ending civilisation, and we would not be interested in creating simulations.
this is fairly unintelligent rambling, but I thought it was interesting how these ideas crop up, likely because Baron Lytton—much like another hero Samuel Taylor Coleridge—was hopped up on one "potion" or another for much of his writing career.
earnestly, Elliot
