Requiem to the dinosaurs

Today is Columbus Day, sort of.  It is October 11th and a Monday,
so it is more convenient to have a 3 day weekend, and set the
"holiday" on the wrong day.  Columbus Day is the 12th of October.
In case anyone bothered to notice.  Note that I used scare quotes
on the word holiday because Columbus Day is not exactly a holiday
in some quarters these days.

Tomorrow is the real Columbus Day, but does anyone remember what
happened 10 years ago?  The USS Cole was attacked and nearly sunk
on that day by terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda.  It was probably
no accident that the terrorists chose this date.  In their worldview, that
day was the day that Western Civilization was on the ropes and managed
to get off the ropes.  Not only that, Columbus Day was the day that
Western Civilization began its ascent to dominance.  And their world
began its own descent into near irrelevance.

Columbus Day amongst our multiculturalist liberals is also a dark day,
a day that the noble savages had their paradise taken away from them.
To them, it is an ignoble celebration of American triumphalism.  It
was the beginning of the destruction of the environment.  It meant
slavery, colononialism, and world subjection to Western Civilization.
To them celebrating Columbus Day is approval of racism, bigotry, and
chauvinism.

But that almost didn't happen.  The Vikings were in the New World.
Some Polynesians got pretty close.  In Mining the Sky, John S. Lewis points
out a that not long before Columbus set sail in 1492, the Chinese explorers
were on the move.  But the Chinese suddenly stopped their explorations, and
Columbus got his chance.  But Columbus was a failure.  He wasn't trying
to find the New World, he was just looking for a shortcut to China.  If
you look at it that way, Columbus just got lucky.  What's so triumphant
about that?

Was there anything good about the discovery of the New World?  Or is it
bad because of who did it?  Or is it bad because of why it was done?

If you honestly look at it at all angles, you have to believe it is more
good in it than bad.  And therefore, it is worth celebrating.  The New World
wasn't a Paradise.  The Chinese are more triumphalist than Western Europe
ever thought about being.  Finally, if Columbus didn't discover the New
World, Islam would have conquered Western Europe.  Does anyone believe
that Western Civilization is really worse than the rest?  Only those who
are just as triumphalist themselves would have such a notion.

Rather than being triumphalist, why not celebrate the progress that was
achieved?  But there are those who don't believe that there has been any
progress.  Those would be the radical environmentalists amongst others.
They would have us living like the horse cultures of the American plains.
In harmony with nature.  Except the horses didn't arrive until the Spanish
arrived.  And the noble savages weren't so noble as we are led to believe.

Even if you don't think it is progress, then what about just staying alive?
If we try to go back to the past, a lot of people would have to die.  The
world just won't support this many people unless we have the technology.
If the technology is bad, and is rejected, the world will sink into a new
dark age.  But would there be a new Renaisance?  We may not get the chance.
This is a theme of Tsiolkovsky's Imperative.  We must go forward with space
exploration.  The alternative that awaits us could be the fate of the
dinosaurs.  An asteroidal collision wouldn't just be the end of Western
Civilization, it could be the end of life on this planet.