Researchers - not data - change

The historical ("primary") documents that fuel this blog don't change - can't change - frozen in time from the Manhattan of 75 years ago.

But my contemporary understanding of them continues to change, evolve, regress, whatever.

For a long time I saw today's bad climate change deniers as the best single contemporary example of the once widespread pre-war belief that denied any limits to Man's ability to control Mother Nature.

But these sort of deniers were actually the weak case.

They were the negative option : these deniers weren't actually actively claiming to control Nature, merely weakly claiming that they were sure another Manhattan nuclear Project, done by others, could quickly clear up any weather issues arising from normal human activity.

It all starts with an unrealistic faith in Synthetic Autarky

But all this fitted uneasily with my main contentions - that the overwhelming pre-war faith in "synthetic autarky" lead to "plenticidal indifference" and hence ethnicities and species extinction.

I eventually realized that nucleosynthesis ("fusion power"), geo-engineering/terra-forming and the active efforts to start human society again on a sterile Mars were the more active contemporary expressions of this pre-war fantasy.

And that the horrific fallout from our tolerance of all these bizarre efforts was a collective plenticidal indifference that has led us to today's runaway (Sixth) Mass Extinctions.

I am not sure there are even a handful of "Extinction Denier" bloggers lurking about  --- rather there are about seven billion of us Extinction Tolerators reading about another beetle species gone extinct, sighing for a moment then resuming our daily lives.

After all, pace J B S Haldane , who - besides God - really wants 150,000 distinctly odd species of beetles anyway ???/