Une interview de Jack McDevitt

[jerome]

Jack McDevitt est en interview en anglais ici.

Extrait :
What inspired “The Cassandra Project”?
Jack McDevitt : SETI has been trying to pick up signs of technological civilizations for more than half a century. I can remember thinking when they first started that it wouldn’t take long. Too many stars out there. (And I’d read too much science fiction.) But here we are, a couple of generations later and we haven’t heard so much as a hiccup. Why not? One possibility is that technological civilizations don’t last long. Maybe anything that can handle a screwdriver eventually heads down the atomic road, from which there might be no turning back. Maybe it happens everywhere. Build a printing press and expect bigger bombs. At least, that was what it looked like for a while.

Now 1960 seems like a simpler time. Technology continues to move along at a good clip and we’re still here. But the world has become increasingly dangerous. Not only because we have more efficient weapons, but because even at its best, technology creates conditions that might inevitably lead to instability. E.g., who in 1960 would have believed that local thugs could gain a voice, organize with other local thugs, and produce a flash mob? Or that televised lunatics could be taken seriously by growing segments of American society? That a technology that theoretically should increase enlightenment could lead to militant ignorance? (Shouting matches and verbal attacks sell better than discussions.) Or that in the Middle East, a mother would proclaim herself proud of a child who’d just blown himself up, along with two dozen innocents?

The problem with increasing technology seems to be that maturity does not advance with it.