The dead.

Looking back on history we can see one thing that stands out, the inevitable decay, decline, and vengeance of death.  We see the extinction of earlier species, such as the dinosaurs, the decline of lost civilizations, and the loss of our ancestors.  Since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that it spawned, we have witnessed the raping of nature and the hunting of indigenous peoples.  In modern times, the world wars brought the dead on the battlefield.  We see today the decline of all true spiriuality and the decay of civilization. The internet has made possible a further raping of the past, and the atomic bomb leaving many dead in its trail promises to wipe out humanity. The possibility of space travel constitutes a further raping of other worlds.  The Russian philosoper Fedorov had a special reverence for the dead and the ghosts of civilization maintaining that all the dead and our ancestors still lived.  We can see this reverence in the Japanese cult of Shinto, other ancient forms of belief, and the Christian and Catholic cult of the saints. Even ancient man at the level of the Neanderthals incorporated spiritual reverence for the dead and honor of those who had gone before.  Our modern era under the vapidity of atheism and materialism refuses to honor the dead and the aged and those who have gone before.  But their spirits live on, all the dead of the earth even into this period of decadence and decline.