We must protect our past
Charlie English’s article regarding the heroic efforts to save the ancient manuscripts of Timbuktu is further proof – if any were needed – that history and culture matter (19 May).
Attempts to rewrite history and to delete cultural identity have only one purpose: to deny the truth. While people have rights to their different opinions, no one ought to have the right to retrospectively turn truth into lies. Because when that happens, people are invariably deprived of their rights, their identity and their place in history.
It was essential that the world realised that the destruction and desecration of ancient monuments constituted a crime against humanity. But it still appears that it takes individuals with courage and determination to protect our past.
Rewriting the past is simply not a possibility. It may be denied but the past is always the past. It cannot be destroyed.
To know our past is essential to understanding our present. Respecting it is like respecting our elders: an essential component of a civilised society.
Lavinia Moore
Aldgate, South Australia
Beware the machine
Your reportage and editorial on the latest cybercrime threat that saw widespread disruptions to essential services across the globe is a reminder of our increasing dependence on computers to run society for us (19 May).
Yes, as your editorial suggests, collective action is needed to protect us “unarmed peasants” against the robber barons in cyberspace wanting to exploit our weaknesses in what amounts to a kind of feudal system in the cybersphere. But it is even more urgent than that.
Some of us will remember reading a short story by EM Forster called The Machine Stops. It’s about a society that has become so dependent on technology – in the story “the machine” – that when the machine fails civilisation comes to an end.
That story, published in 1909, was remarkably prescient in its day, and remains even more so today.
So beware, fellow citizens of the world. We are in grave danger from a terminal dependence upon computers – the machine of our age – and of our civilisation failing if that machine stops working for some reason – perhaps next time a catastrophic ransomware-like attack on the computers upon which the very maintenance of our society depends.
Terry Hewton
Adelaide, South Australia
Alchemy of the computer age
It is still a prediction, not a certainty, that with the help of technology we will become both godlike and immortal, as suggested by such movements as transhumanism (12 May). Biotechnology, nanotechnology, the physics of immortality, and freezing bodies and brains at death can all be considered attempts by computer-age alchemists to create incorruptible, immortal living beings who think and feel.
But just as religious feeling is based on the unproven, driven by hope, the promise of technology to redeem us and allow us to live for ever in perfect harmony may be similarly based on faith, similarly unproven and at this point in our evolution, no less far-fetched.
Richard Orlando
Westmount, Quebec, Canada
• I found Meghan O’Gieblyn’s article deeply disturbing. I am 85 years old and I know my body will not last much longer. But I feel that I am my body, and that my consciousness is the total of my sensory input and the memories and knowledge stored in my brain. There is no other “me” that could be housed in some transhuman receptacle, nor would I want there to be.
We are all part of Gaia, this wonderful living planet, and deeply integrated with its other forms of life. Humanity, with its technology, and dreams of eternal life, constitutes the greatest threat to this wonderful system of being, which is dying because of us. We would be nothing on another planet, or in a non-biological body. What would life be for?
Religion and technology are becoming a lethal mix. Technology has made our lives better in some ways, but it is becoming a menace.
Let us seek happiness in the natural world, where we belong.
Jenny Carter
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
Expats losing right to vote
Up to 3 million Britons living overseas are to be denied a vote in the general election (28 April). A restriction on the length of time an expat Brit is entitled to vote in UK elections is not new. It seems that the majority of British expats have only become interested in their voting rights since their status abroad could be threatened by Brexit.
Prior to 1985, expats were not permitted to vote. In that year, Margaret Thatcher enabled expats to register for five years. She extended this to 20 years in 1989, obviously thinking that most British expats were well-off Tory voters. When Tony Blair took office in 1997 he reduced the limit to 15 years, presumably for the same reason.
Felicity Oliver
Ostermundigen, Switzerland
Briefly
• Santosh Mathew (5 May) speculates about how the religions of Earth might cope theologically with the discovery of life on other words. I wonder how intelligent aliens would cope with our religions, but perhaps they are already doing so: they’ve so far avoided contact with us because they don’t want Earth’s missionaries knocking on their doors.
John Gee
Singapore
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