Like many other landmarks in Australia, Hanging Rock had been a sacred ceremonial site for Aboriginals, and thus it carried with it a theme of mysticism. Australian author Joan Lindsay was inspired by the place, and particularly by the juxtaposition of ancient spiritualism and modern colonial immigrants. Using this theme, she invented and wrote a novel, in only a single month, in which sophisticated upper class Europeans became trapped in a fanciful world in which they were, both literally and metaphorically, swallowed up by the ancient Earth. Yes, Picnic at Hanging Rock and the story that it tells are now, and have been ever since they were written, complete fiction. Our task today is to understand how and why a fictional story came to be perceived as fact.

here and here

La especie humana se las apañará. Nadie piensa que vaya a desaparecer, ¿pero la civilización? No se sabe lo que es una Tierra a seis u ocho grados, no lo hemos conocido. Hay que remontarse centenares de millones de años. El problema no se abordaba con la misma urgencia cuando escribí el libro en 1999, se hablaba aún de las generaciones futuras. Ahora hablamos de nuestros hijos. No hay una sola empresa que haga un cálculo más allá de 2050, es el horizonte más corto que ha habido nunca. La mutación de la historia es increíblemente rápida. Ahora se trata de acontecimientos naturales, mucho más rápidos que los humanos. Es inimaginable para la gente formada en el siglo XX, una novedad total.

Bruno Latour en El País.

Somnium (Latin for “The Dream”) is a fantasy written between 1620 and 1630, in Latin, by Johannes Kepler. In the narrative, a student of  TychoBrahe is transported to the Moon by occult forces. It presents a detailed imaginative description of how the earth might look when viewed from the moon, and is considered the first serious scientific treatise on lunar astronomy.

More, here

As a result, metaphysical problems are revealed always to have been genuine problems, since they do admit of a solution. But their resolution depends on one precise and highly constraining condition- that we begin to understand that in reply to those metaphysical questions that ask why the world is thus and not otherwise, the response “for no reason” is a genuine answer. Instead of laughing or smiling at questions like “Where de we come from?”, “Why do we exist?, we should ponder instead the remarkable fact that the replies “From nothing” really are answers, thereby realizing that these really were questions- and excellent ones at that. There is no longer a mystery, not because there is no longer a problem, but because there is no longer a reason.

 Quentin Meillasoux, After finitude, An essay on the Necessity of contingency.

“Through the intuition of the meaningless sign, I leave the physical world, where everything seems to have a cause, to penetrate the pure semiotic world – where nothing has a reason to be, where nothing has meaning – and where everything, in consequence, breathes eternity.”

- Quentin Meillassoux, Berlin Lecture

Los grandes mapas celestes que se obtendrán “dibujan también la historia del cosmos, como una auténtica máquina del tiempo”, señala Enrique Gaztañaga, investigador del CSIC en el ICE. “Podremos comparar el ritmo y la historia de la expansión del universo con el ritmo de crecimiento de sus estructuras, lo que nos permitirá confirmar o refutar el modelo que tenemos sobre el origen del universo y sus leyes fundamentales”, apunta este científico.

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