Weren't there some rather bad consequences afterwards? Fruit not ripening, that sort of thing?
>Nonetheless I dislike this revisionism that all the bad deeds of the
>God Learners are somehow done by people who were not good guys. Were
>the people who worked on the Manhatten project _evil_?
That was not my intent. Most of the bad deeds of the God Learners were done by people who thought they were doing the right thing. Its just that I think the God Learners themselves were far from agreeing on the wisdom of all their various projects, so you would find many individual God Learners who deplored the Zistor project, for example, yet enthusiastically created shrines to Tanian. The God Learners (taken to mean the group of people capable of God Learner magic) were far from unified, politically or intellectually.
But the vast majority of them thought that THEY were doing the right thing.
The Manhattan Project is actually a perfect example of what I think went on a lot - it seemed very important at the time, and many people (including some of both those directly involved and others of their nation) later thought it had been a very idea. I like the idea that the God Learners had a few Oppenheimers, deploring the uses to which their theory was put, after devoting their life to its creation.
Cheers
David
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