The Lost World
Journalist Ed Malone is looking for an adventure, and that's exactly what he finds when he meets the eccentric Professor Challenger - an adventure that leads Malone and his three companions deep into the Amazon jungle, to a lost world where dinosaurs roam free.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
6people
2015–2024years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
- Read Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World with this fairy incident in mind and the character of Professor Challenger will make a lot of sense. tl;dr: man mocked by the scientific majority gets completely vindicated.
- I actually just finished watching The Great Mouse Detective with my wife - first time for her and the first time for me reliving that element of my childhood in more than twenty years – I was terrified it wouldn't live up to my memory, but was surprised at how good it was. I'm pretty sure it was my first exposure to the world of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (and I do recommend it heartily to anyone who hasn't watched it!).
Of Doyle's non-Sherlock works, The Lost World is the first that comes to my mind. Great fast read, also highly recommend! (Though nothing beats the full and complete collection of Sherlock Holmes, see [1] for the PDF and [2] for the actual book).
1: https://maggiemcneill.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/the-comple...
- I do think that money has been extremely corrosive to Internet culture, but it has also been a huge motivator.
It’s kind of like, in the Nineteenth Century, large parts of the world were still unexplored, so authors like H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle, could write books like King Solomon’s Mines, or The Lost World, and people could sort of believe “it could happen.”
These days, we know our world much better. We can call up satellite views of Base Camp, on Mt. Everest.
But we are now looking much farther for “it could happen.”
- This is the premise of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Dinosaurs and other ancient beasts kept isolated in the crater of an ancient volcano, the slopes of which are almost impossible to get over.
- Alternatively, if your faith includes the concept of a soul, imagine a soul being irrevocably destroyed; it didn't go anywhere, it was just lost.
Yes, I'm trying to imagine that, and I don't see why it's such a big issue. This seems so contradictory to what people claim their philosophies to be. It's like the environment. People cry about how we're destroying the earth, but they're not actually worried about the earth. They're worried about themselves. It's like how Ian Malcolm comments derisively in The Lost World that humans may not survive, but the earth would be just find. Somewhere some microbes would survive underneath all the dirt blasted everywhere in the apocalypse, and life would start again. I can understand the concept of ceasing to exist. I have not had anyone be able to explain to me why that makes that person so afraid, other than the fact that it just does.
And if you can't imagine an eternity of life interacting with other people in happiness, how exactly do you envision an afterlife?
Hehe, well, I think that's the key point, isn't it? You're talking about interacting with other people in happiness for eternity. I specifically said "forever on this earth", not "forever, period". I don't think you can achieve what you're talking about on this earth. We've had centuries of modern civilization to figure out how to stop both large-scale wars and petty relationship spats, and it's debatable whether we'll reach a level that has no pain. Yes, we've gotten better, especially if you read some of the literature on the topic, but age-old problems remain and I find no reason to think that they'll one day disappear.
Living forever doesn't mean becoming increasingly decrepit. The same processes that create a hard stop at 120 are what make a 100-year-old systematically less healthy than a 25-year-old, and they require the same fixes. Anything that would successfully keep you alive forever must necessarily keep you free of age-related health complications forever.
I actually deal with my worries about this issue in a comment below. I think people go about this subject very selfishly without thinking of the greater consequences.
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