American Cosmic
Hi everyone! This will be the first meeting I attend, and I'm especially excited for this one. When I read American Cosmic two years ago I was fascinated by the idea of interpreting UAPs from a "religious" point of view, similar to how some people have proposed technological readings of certain events in the Bible (particularly when angels appear in the Old Testament). Not because one interpretation feels more likely than the other, but because either scenario suggests to me that we are deeply biased toward seeing religion and technology as fundamentally incompatible, not just culturally, but also aesthetically. I think part of the book’s "weirdness" comes from this blurring of narrative genres that shows up in many of the situations Diana describes. The fact that this thematic ambivalence feels disorienting is exactly what I find so compelling.
The realization that this dichotomy is merely conventional made me think of Arthur C. Clarke's third law: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This implicitly values technology as real, and magic as fiction. But one could just as well reverse the sentence: magic is indistinguishable from advanced technology. That is: what if technology is not as "natural" as we assume it to be? And even if it is natural: why couldn't it also be magic?
We take technology not only for granted, but as a sign of progress. And from that standpoint, we filter everything else: our own past, and the (alleged) Phenomenon itself. We talk of crafts, of hyperadvanced technological capabilities. But what would it mean for our sense of progress if those things weren’t technological at all?
She is wonderful speaker