Dear Vladimir,
I got the impression that a more cosmologically and belief-oriented part of fqxi community favors rather mystical, illusory, and mathematical speculative answers to the question of how to steer humanity in contrast to the more practically oriented attitudes of you, Jonathan, and me.
Roger might have overlooked my hints because he can perhaps not accept that I am questioning absolutely infinite physically items. Well, I was one of very few nobodies until Hawking recently corrected himself and Jonathan got aware of related theoretical arguments by Kauffmann.
You certainly know that Roger called Einstein overestimated. I merely collected some less celebrated facts and leave the judgment to the readers. What about pacifists like Einstein and Bertrand Russell, I would like to tell that the latter suggested a preventive war against the territory occupied by the Soviet Army including Magdeburg, the city where I am living. That's why I prefer and quoted Otto von Bismarck who also prudently built (more than one hundred years ago) a bypass to the main stream of the river Elbe that up to now protected Magdeburg against flooding. Bismarck called a preventive war a suicide for fear to die. An tragic parallel was Goedel who deliberately starved and actually died for fear to get poisoned.
I would very much appreciate if you or someone else took issue concerning a fundamental question that I consider unresolved in current physics not just since and by Einstein; the past cannot be steered while the future is open and only partially predictable.
As a boy, I learned to pray in humility. Meanwhile I see religions often the problem rather than the solution. Suicide bombers were told getting rewarded by virgins in heaven. The bad ones are always the enemies, the non-believers.
Best,
Eckard
