Warp Driving Modernity through an ever-expanding Universe

John W CAMPBELL saved Modernity, the bastard.

Modernity is the idea that humans can realistically hope to control the entire Universe ; Postmodernity says we are resigned to learning a fair bit about the small parts we can actually touch and a lot less about the parts we can only very indirectly observe.

Modernity thus took a major hit in the 1920s as it suddenly became accepted science that (A) the Universe was trillions of times bigger than we had thought and that (B) mass, ie humans, can never hope to travel anywhere near light speed because the energy required approaches infinity levels.

But where production-science-on-its-way-to-becoming-impact-science failed, science fiction, hard science fiction, leaped in to save the modernist dream.

Yes, said John W Campbell , pioneering editor-writer-guru of the emerging the Sci Fi world in 1931.

So true, our spaceships can’t move fast enough through the time-space continuum, according to the saintly Einstein.

So we will have the space-continuum warped past our space ships at mega-light speed to get us to distant galaxies in.... tens of thousands of years.

That detail is usually lost in all the modernity-promoting gush.

But Campbell’s warp drive theory took over both the science fiction and science a bit less fictional communities.

Star Wars and Star trek couldn't exist without it and NASA still considers it a distant but promising reality.

Most importantly - most tragically - Modernity itself couldnt continue to exist in the minds of a loud one third of our global population without warp drives as a mental safety valve.

Warp speed warp drives are what allows this one third to blissfully ignore the fact that the threatened life on this little green dot is all the life that us earthlings will ever know, so we best get cracking on saving it...