from Terrance Lindall's Milton in Outer Space, project under development

John Milton had spent the last two months learning how to use the computer that had been provided by John Dugdale Bradley. What an instrument that could reach out to the world and provide moving pictures so what was happening anywhere at the every moment could be viewed!!! He read the news articles and explored the history of the world since he had died in 1674. He was fascinated and, even more, he as horrified at how humanity had devolved over the period. He thought to himself, quoting Khan in the Star Trek episode Space Seed,  “I am surprised how little improvement there has been in human evolution. Oh, there has been technical advancement, but, how little man himself has changed.“ Essentially the progress of man since the Greeks up to England of the 17^th century was the same, technical advancement, yet hatred, war, greed and the all of rest of human generated misery endured.  Empires had risen and fallen, man had invented machines and new sciences, but still man suffered, to quote Gibbon from his Rise and fall of the Roman Empire: “from vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.” Also from Gibbon, Milton viewed mans journey as “…a long period of distress and anarchy, in which empire, and arts, and riches, had migrated from the banks of the Tiber, [but] man was incapable of restoring or adorning.” And further,  the human condition Gibbon noted “…and, as all that is human must retrograde if it do not advance, [so] every successive age must have hastened the ruin of…” what great achievements of thought that had gone before.

                                                              --Terrance Lindall

The implication of the title is a comparison of the computer to what Lindall calls "Satan's Canon".

To learn more about the Milton in Outer Space project, please click HERE.