1930s' Man marking his lonely territory by pissing out stone and metal monuments to his hubris ?

By the 1930s, two vital things were clear to all those with a even a halfway decent science education (architects and engineers for example).

(A) the observable Universe was 99.9% plasma (hot electrically and magnetically active gas).

(B) the heavier atoms that produced Humanity's familiar solid rocks and metals were a very small percentage of the .1% remaining.

The previous "Appeal to Nature" claim that 'Nature's Progress led inevitably to the domination of the big, the massive, the visible and the solid' was now shown to be totally totally wrong.

Instead, the biological world was clearly dominated, now as in the distant past, by the invisibly tiny microbes.

Similarly, the wider Universe was mostly swirling masses of hot plasma made from incredibly invisibly tiny ions.

Ions of hydrogen mostly, with bits of helium, together with microscopically tiny dust bunnies of the other elements, including a little rock and metal here and there and now and then.

The small little rock and metal planets like Earth were as rare in the Universe as hen's teeth : mere statistical 'noise' in the adding up of the Universe.

No space explorer could ever build a civilization on most of the Universe's celestial bodies, because it would be like trying to erect a heavy skyscraper on a spongy marshmallow.

God's cosmos is on the side, quite firmly, of the small battalions...

Unconsciously, I wonder did 1930s Man overcompensate for this dismal discovery that Cosmic Progress generally lead to the small not the big?

Overcompensate by marking out civilizations's tiny solid territory in a vast spongy Universe in the same way a dog would - by suddenly pissing out endless renditions of massive bridges, dams and skyscrapers, all made of those blindingly-rare-in-the-Universe-metals-and-rock ?

Something for all of us to think about....

Technological Man exalts the Big same time Science says Universe dominated by the small

In the 1930s peer-reviewed science increasingly revealed that solid (metal atom-oriented) planets like Earth actually represented a blindingly small slice of one percent of even the visible Universe, a visible universe that mostly consisted of tiny bits of  non-solid non metallic vapourware (plasma gas).

But at the exact same moment in time, popular science and technology media culture was at its apogee of exalting all the biggest, fastest, tallest etc examples of the (solid) (metallic) Man-made world.

And the public couldn't get enough of it.

Coincidence ?


As readers of this blog well know, I don't ever believe in coincidence.

All this sudden interest in building and then admiring the biggest, fastest, tallest, heaviest, most stiff and hard and solid objects that technological Man could produce probably represented an unconscious protest.

A protest by the Hubris of Man against all these recent highly inconvenient facts coming out of the scientific journals that exalted the significance of the small and the non-solid in a vast empty universe....