I discover with abject horror that NASA’s Largest Library To Permanently Close On Jan 2.

NASA’s largest library at the Goddard Space Flight Center will close permanently on Jan 2 under the Trump administration’s reorganisation plans. The closure of the 100,000 volume library is part of the Donald Trump administration’s reorganisation drive, under which 13 buildings and over 100 science and engineering laboratories will be shut down on the 1.270-acre campus by March 2026

I’m lead to think back on 1984 - George Orwell:

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."

Nostradamus wrote riddles that require faith to decode. George Orwell wrote a warning that requires courage to read. Orwell wasn’t trying to tell us what would happen; he was desperate to show us what could happen if we stopped paying attention.

In that sense, he is the most effective prophet we’ve ever had. He didn’t want to be right. He wanted us to prove him wrong. We are experiencing a “perpetual crisis” or the forever war. Newspeak and fake news dominate our shrinking media. News feeds are tailored to confirm our biases through the algorithm, creating separate realities for different demographics. We see history rewritten or context scrubbed in real-time. We see the denial of visible reality in favor of party-line loyalty. We carry the Telescreen in our pockets. We wear it on our wrists. LLMs have become our “smart” assistants.

Nostradamus relied on poetic ambiguity allowing readers to project whatever they want onto the text. A sham!

The reason Orwell reads like a prophet today is not because he had supernatural vision. It is because he was a sociologist of the worst-case scenario. We are truly living in interesting times.

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