Slavery in Rome - The Monday Morning Memo

“At one pole is the slave as property and nothing else; at the other pole, the perfectly free man, all of whose acts are freely and voluntarily performed. Neither has ever existed. There have been individual slaves who had the bad luck to be treated by their owners as nothing but a possession, but I know of no society in which the slave population as a whole were looked upon in that simple way. At the other end, every man except Robinson Crusoe has his freedom limited in one way or another in consequence of living in society. Absolute freedom is an idle dream (and it would be psychologically intolerable anyway.)”
– Moses Israel Finley,
“Ancient Economy” p. 67
(Finley was knighted by
Queen Elizabeth in 1979)

“I’m one of those who’s a little worried when we give our return address, broadcast out into space, because you don’t give your email to strangers in the street. Yet we’re giving the coordinates of Earth broadcast out into the gaps of interstellar space.

So I’m a little worried about that.

But then I think about it, and I say, ‘Nearly every portrayal of an alien in Hollywood is evil.’ Going right on back to War of the Worlds with HG Wells.

And I’m thinking, ‘Why? Do we have any insights that aliens would be evil? Or is it really a mirror to ourselves?’

It’s not imagined knowledge of how aliens would behave. It’s actual knowledge of how we have behaved. Because an alien coming to Earth has a greater technology than we do.

So how has it gone on earth?

Any time a civilization with higher technology encounters one with lesser technology, it has never boded well for the society with lesser technology. They’ve been enslaved, killed.

So I think we fear aliens because, in fact, we fear ourselves.”

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

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