space@mit-mc (02/20/85)
From: Dale.Amon@CMU-RI-FAS I suspect there are very few topics that could be discussed here that someone would not consider trivial and unimportant. But sometimes the trivial can be a marvelous tool for the imagination. As we move into space to LIVE, then burial in space, guitars in space and all the other minutia that make up our daily lives and our social milieau will go with us. The change of environment will change social institutions, will require modification and sometimes reinvention of the minor and the major. As one who interested in space not as a research project but as a potential future home, I find ALL of it to be very important. I wonder at the new esthetics, the new art forms that will grow from the possibilities of tnew environments and the interaction of old forms with the new. Guitars in vacuum might be technically trivial, but who knows where art forms will go? Our imaginations start with the trivial, but who really knows where the ideas might lead? Life is really pretty drab without art, sculpture, dance, music and theater. They are all a very important part of what we are, and if we were to leave them behind us, it would make us something less than human.