We live in a world where turning on the news every day means getting updated on the latest tragedy and not just finding out what the weather will be like tomorrow.
2017 is a year of unrelenting misery and fear. We live in a world where people feel more afraid of someone with a gun than protected.
We live in a world where text messages surpass face to face conversations.
We live in a world run by Algorithms. In a world where if you didn’t snap chat it or post it to Facebook, “it didn’t happen”.
We live in a world that has so many people without the words, “thank you” in their vocabulary.
We live in a world where people would rather sit in the comfort of their anguish and anxiety than take a small step to a better life.
What happened to the world where everyone minded their own damn business?
What happened to the world where people actually knew their neighbors, and didn’t fear them? What happened to the world where people got together and lost track of time because they didn’t have their phone attached to their hip?
What happened to the world where people could voice their opinion without getting hate mail? What happened to the world as one nation?
We live in a world where our self-esteem is managed by the amount of “likes” on our selfies and statuses.
I don’t need to tell you world news is pretty grim right now – if you use social media, it’s nigh on impossible to avoid articles about bubbling permafrost, drug-resistant gonorrhoea, and deadly obesity treatments.
And that’s just the science headlines.
We live in a world with rampant inequality due to capitalist greed, void of any common values.
We live in a world with global environmental changes locked into our future, with hidden threats to sustainability,not just because of migration that is just beginning due to lack of fresh water.
Stop, take a step back and think.
Isn’t it absurd that we, 7 billion of us living in the same planet, have grown further apart from each other? What sense does it make to turn your back on the thousands, maybe millions, of people living around you.
If we want wars we have all the ingredients.
We live in a world where our i pads and cell phones get thinner and our bodies get thicker.
We live in a world where people pass each other on the street and can’t even smile back.
We live in a world where people dish hatred out on a serving platter.
We live in a world where our world organisation called the United nations s just a gossip shop that has to beg for funds. Unable to cuts through the rhetoric because of
We live in a world where people take more than they give. We live in a world where people have completely forgotten what they were given knees for.
What happened to our world?
Most of us haven’t quite realized there is something extraordinary happening. I want to see it through a child’s eyes again.
Why is the world-changing?
We live in a world where because we are too afraid of hurting kid’s feelings instead of teaching them the value of hard work. You get a participation trophy for merely showing up.
We live in a world of lip service.
We are reaching our limits. It’s time for people to switch on the blender, stirring events in the non-human part of the world into their everyday lives, and see what happens.
Google might knows our names but it knows Sweet Fanny Adam about the natural world. The rest of the living world can get along without us, but we can’t get along without them.
Perhaps all living things comprise one biological entity, one large functioning ecosystem (life-force) with planet Earth as skeleton if so we had better learn quick that a skeleton earth whether it is due to Climate change, Nuclear war, or Algorithms will be worthless.
We are not isolated from the world around us by the boundaries of our bodies. Modern science has blurred the lines of the individual by shedding light on how interdependent life is. We are dependent on microbes. In essence, all life is connected to other life because we all exist in the same space. If you don’t like bacteria, you’re on the wrong planet.”
When it comes to making sense of the incomprehensible we can only place our trust in tales of the imagination.
The problem is that no one is will to bear the cost not even earth so why not make Greed pay. ( See previous Posts)
All comments appreciated all like clicks chucked in the bin.
No one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it.
The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.
For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuron scientists and other experts on human behavior have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.
However the state of our understanding today of an integrated plan of brain function remains incomplete. The brain consists of at least several hundred distinct cell types whose complete classification is still at present elusive.
Ever since man walked out of Africa, developed different cultures and different languages we have being using his brains to kill.
To date we have burnt more neurons on self-destruction than survival.
Step back and view our species objectively from the outside, the way a zoologist would carefully observe any other animal, or see us the way every other creature perceives human beings. The brutal reality could not be more evident or more horrifying.
We are the most relentless yet oblivious killers on Earth.
Our violence operates far outside the bounds of any other species. Human beings kill anything. Slaughter is a defining behavior of our species. We kill all other creatures, and we kill our own. We kill strangers. We kill people who are different from us, in appearance, beliefs, race, and social status. We kill ourselves in suicide. We kill for advantage and for revenge, we kill for entertainment:
I would venture to say that there has not been one day — not one single day — since the beginning of recorded history when one human being has not killed another. And I don’t mean by accident. I mean deliberately. With purposeful intent.
Not one.
Single.
Day.
…in thousand and thousands of years.
So is violence in our genes. As Mr Darwin put it; Survival of the Fittest. Evolution requires a struggle to survive, so killing is a must.
Just look at the twentieth century, numerous people were killed in the Armenian Genocide in Turkey, the Jews suffered in the II World War, Ethnic massacres happened in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia.
Today, several Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS and Boko Haram are butchering people in the name of Islam, while thousands of Rohingya Muslims flee Myanmar due to ethnic cleansing the shadow of a nuclear war ( that will bring equality to all, save us all from climate change and mass migration, ) can be summed up in one word: BRAINLESS.
Yet there’s no reason to assume that our empty brains will be adequate vessels for the voyage towards that answer.
Humanity has been trying to figure out how to bring an end to war since living beings evolved into self-consciousness on this planet. This effort now involves thousands of researchers, consumes billions of dollars in funding, and has generated a vast literature consisting of both technical and mainstream articles and books.
This latest up tick in the hostilities between these parties is almost irrelevant at this stage. Each side, of course, insists that it is only defending itself. And it is. Seen from each side’s point of view, all each side is doing is defending itself. Aggression is always called defense. Unfortunately every religion thinks it is the right one.
All that matters today is what it would take to end the killing, to end the aggression and counter-aggression that is threatening to embroil a whole region — and even, conceivably, the entire world at some level, if not directly — in a war that could prove unspeakably tragic for the entire human race, turning anyone that survives into an atheist, as there will be no invisible means of support as everything will glow.
But if there is a biological explanation for something, it is impossible to hold someone responsible for it. This is simply untrue.
This is a question that has been asked for many centuries. The Greeks philosopher Plato explained violent behavior by the fact that humans had a dual character because of their greedy nature. The Church always blamed the devil for possessing violent people.
Branding behaviors as incurable is hogwash fortuitously most humans are endowed with a sense of disgust but our kinship is often exploited by nations and religions, not surprisingly they are two institutions that are responsible for most, if not all, wars.
There is no satisfying answer to the question of why we go to war other than it feels good to protect our kinship.
All behavior is the product of the brain, and the brain is a product of genetics and the environment. Genes change at a glacial pace. But territory and society shift constantly and they are molded by man.
So here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever. We never did, never will.
We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers.
The idea that memories are stored in individual neurons is preposterous:
Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?
Now here is the good or bad news.
Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not. Computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.
Uncontrolled Algorithms will kill us. Now more people have mobile phones than have toilets.
Everything we know about the universe tells us that reality consists only of physical things: atoms and their component particles, busily colliding and combining.
If a smartphone could be conscious, and were it to ultimately prove that the one thing the human mind is incapable of comprehending is itself.
Since anything at all that matters, in life, only does so as a consequence of its impact on conscious brains, could you ever know that it was true?
Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight.
The future of the brain and the implications on ethics and human behavior is now in the hands of Algorithms.
Speculating about the ‘algorithms’ of the brain, how the brain ‘processes data’, and even how it superficially resembles integrated circuits in its structure is now all the rage.
In 2013 the European Commission awarded neuron scientist Henry Markram $1.3 billion to pursue an audacious goal: building a simulation of the human brain. It is now in disarray. There’s a fly in the ointment. Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion.
It is the ultimate empty-caloried brain candy.
Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.
We are sacrificing efficiency and deep concentration. Each time we check a Twitter feed or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird, impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones.
It is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: texting, email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction to brainless thought.
Because it is limited in characters, it discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail. Texting discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail, and its addictive problems are compounded by its hyper-immediacy.
Faulty conclusion: All entities that are capable of behaving intelligently are information processors.
It is safe to say that we aren’t completely doomed to continue killing each other, as the advancement of culture appears not to be having a civilizing effect on us.
The enormous industry of print and broadcast journalism serves predominantly to document our killing.
You know who to write to. Write to them. You know whom to contact. Contact them. Right now.Our world’s leaders need someone to lead them. We thought they were going to lead us, but they can’t. Or won’t. So we need to lead them.
With the amount and duration of wars happening right now in 2017, it’s hard not to get desensitized to death and violence. It really is. That means we have to work harder to stay informed.
Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organism are algorithms a, and life is data processing. Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.
Every day we absorb countless data bits.
This relentless flow of data gives rise to new inventions, disruptions that nobody plans, controls or fully comprehends.
For instance no one knows where global politics is heading, or how the global economy functions or what the climate is doing.
For all intensive purpose we don’t give a fuck providing we don’t pick up a virus, and even then our wireless brains want to remain in the flow of data.
Algorithms are constantly watching us, monitoring our thoughts,and feelings to such an extent that the meaning of life is disappearing into the invisible hand of Dataisim called Google, Face Book. Twitter and their disciples.
Experiences are valueless if not shared with an Algorithm on a smart phone.
No wonder we are all busy converting our experiences into data.
Your Dog or Cat or Fridge, might soon have a Facebook or Twitter account.
By equating the human experience with data patterns it is undermining the main source of authority, meaning of life, and this shift will not be just a philosophical revolution, it will be a practical revolution.
After a few hundred years of data flow your feelings which were once your best algorithms will have being replaced by a filtered personal platform or platforms all attached to the Cloud for an annual fee.
Its good-by democracy, elections. Have you had your DNA sequenced, are you wearing a biometric device that is connected to your smart phone.
The personal cloud god algorithm will tell you who to marry, what career to follow, what to put in your fridge.
All of this begs the question are we humans developing a seed algorithm that when it combines with machine learning will develop its own path, going where no human has gone before or can follow.
We have no idea whether it will develop consciousness and subjective experience.
Before we are reduced to non- conscious algorithms would it not be prudent to establish a New World organisation that vets all technology against our core values as humans. ( See previous posts)
What prevents us from collaborating in a global effort to solve climate change, or any other problem is probable the same reason why we are being exploited by Social media. Humans are deeply divided by nationalism and sectarian beliefs.. However with knowledge comes responsibility. So this failure is a global moral failure, as well as a failure of political will.
The world is changing faster than ever before with us relinquishing authority to crowd wisdom/data in the form of social media that is being mining by capitalist organisations which is governed by algorithms.
While inequality on all fronts grows and our world organisations become irrelevant we are flowed with irrelevant information.
The answer is bleakly simple: We cannot get these issues on our political radar screens without a huge prolong popular uprising. It looks likehumanity will soon be a ripple within the cosmic data flow.
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≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAYS: THE COMPETITIVE DRIVE THAT PUSHES HUMANITY’S EVOLUTION IS WANING.
( A twelve minute read)
The world is in a crisis—Humanity has exhausted its ego and doesn’t know what to do.
I could write and I have written about why we are in such a mess but in this piece I want to highlight what Social Media is doing.
Social Media is driven by technology that are in themselves governed by un-vetted algorithms, is a competition organised to make you feel better at the expense of other people. It’s not about sharing the critical elements of your life, it’s about curating a fantasy world you can convince other people to believe.
It is producing an abundance of useless data which monopolies exploit to market our souls for advertising dollar’s: Google +, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and their like are in the business of presenting the world by proxy for profit. In guessing the direction of technology it is wise to ask who is in the best position to profit.The knack of arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it, has already had serious consequences: The Arab Spring, The birth of ISIS and the most pathetic World leader ever to be elected in Donald Trump.
If we do not faced up to the reality of our own self-worth it will consume us.
Never has so much knowledge been so easily consumed by the whole of humanity but instead of exploiting this opportunity we are creating a technological divide that will cause wars.
Modern society is a product of the day’s available technology. An inordinate volume of early resources have been consumed by the most frivolous pursuit imaginable.
The worlds most talented engineers no longer work on crafts to explore the stars they work on algorithms to take advantage of our preferences in the hope of taking our money.
When investment is focused on the creation of monolithic tech giants whose only goal is to not be evil the hopes of society fade with each search or posting on Facebook.
Attention is money and if you can maintain it you can exploit eyeballs. That is all that life has become on social media.
Technology has enforced upon society the conditions whereby everybody requires instantaneous gratification. We want acknowledgement of everything we do all the time and we seek to maintain the attention of a large populous of strangers and acquaintances we couldn’t really care about but depend upon to feel good about ourselves. We outsource our self-esteem to the interweb and define our worth from the currency we are able to attain on social networks.
We no longer measure the quality of our lives by the kindness we gift to the world or the positive impact we have on other people’s lives but by the proliferation of our social media footprint.
Technology is detrimentally effecting a whole new generation.
It is infecting their lives and conquering our minds. We no longer experience the present we find ways to capture it to disseminate it to the world in order to gain credibility and approval.
We live in a world where money can make more money faster than virtually any other means. A spherically shaped speck of sand inhabited by 7 billion sentient beings who call a world the world.
Day by day new technologies and inventions are showing up while deforestation,global warming,water scarcity, and widening inequality etc are avoided completely not just by the common people, but also by unsustainable consumerism, cloaked in the economic mantra of growth at all costs.
The world is becoming a collection of a billion minds, trying to achieve a common objective, with selfish thoughts in them.
Are we at a precipice, environmentally, interpersonally, and industrially and the decisions made today will greatly affect the future generations and the future of the planet.
The common goal is to live life for a fruitful cause, to benefit the civilization as a whole is disappearing on the flat screens of smartphones, I pads, Smart TVs, and social media.
The problem is that people don’t know that their development advances in accordance with the program embedded in nature. No one sees the big picture, everyone’s busy satisfying their own needs.
We don’t know how to develop further because egoism exhausted itself and ceased to encourage us to develop. There is no competition that existed before.
The young generation doesn’t want to live the way their predecessors did. All the previous generations throughout the entire thousands-year-long history of humanity developed due to the fact that they wanted more and more.
Values are changing, but it’s hard to define them. The sense of purpose that people used to have is no longer there.
Trump is indicative of this personal entitlement. We see that everyone else is in it for themselves so we act accordingly. If you don’t you are an idiot. Nationalism is derided but personalism isn’t?
Today, it isn’t so; the young generation isn’t attracted to the values that their parents honored. They spend most of their time glued to their cell phones, absorbed in things like social media—all of this is a subconscious attempt to avoid asking questions about life, and the pain that comes from a lack of meaning.
Moreover, social media networks are making it impossible for them to find lasting fulfillment, and soon rather than later with Algorithms driven robots there will be no meaningful jobs for all of them.
In short, the world has reached an impasse.
Sooner than later some tipping point will arrive, and we all know where that leads us, we’ve been there. We were given a huge piece of land and all we could do was divide it into territories. This ‘division’ then crept into other things, and here we are. The low hanging fruits of life have been picked. The only people who care about what happens to each individual is themselves. You see a flat lining of the standard of living and a swelling of government debt married to a population which is aging and you understand why it has happened.
The only solution is unity because unity is the general law of nature. We can make a choice—either we fall in line with Nature’s plan and unite according to its laws, or nature will force us to through all kinds of external means.
We won’t have to suffer because of our lack of compatibility with nature; rather we can reach the next stage of evolution quickly and comfortably and in that, find eternal and lasting fulfilment.
The world is looking.
But it is useless to look for new things at the old level.
The problem with modern society is that it rewards those who can keep our attention. Irrespective of whether you are a force for good or tremendous damage society has become immune to the difference.
The advent of a world connected by networks will be marked by the transition away from geographic, religious, and cultural groupings into aggregations of people unified by self selected criteria; chaos and volatility will paradoxically increase while the world is homogenized to the new normal.
Humanity has always been one which has followed examples and precedent gratefully — we desperately need an alternative which is less depressing in order to thrive. Entitlement is hard but it is perhaps the only string which ties the people of the modern world to the path — it is the only thing that gives us purpose in our daily lives.
This feeling of entitlement is a major issue that will turn and bite us in the near future. Even in a fully mechanized world some one needs to fill the tank and turn the key.
The world is beginning to understand it is in a global problem and it would be naive to make technology the scapegoat of our shortcomings as man’s blindness, cruelty, greed, immaturity, and pride are contributing as always.
Modern democracy cannot value only the voice of majority, but it respects the voice of minority as well. But this can only be achieved if democracy re attaches its self to the capitalist world of economics. There can not be two strands of Democracy one political and the other Economic.
In the bakelite house of the future, the dishes might not break, but the heart can.
The problem of loneliness enveloping the modern world is related to the inner emptiness of man. And even when a person wants to rid himself of this state, he has no idea how to do it.
We are the past.
All comments appreciated. Al like clicks chucked in the bin.
Climate change is real and so are its effects, despite what Trump and his 22 Republican senators might stubbornly, short-sighted and nonsensical choose to believe.
Indeed, that climate change is real and caused by human activity is no longer an issue up for debate. That time has long passed.
It’s true that the train may be out of the station when it comes to avoiding climate change altogether, but we can still attempt to mitigate and alleviate the worst of the effects.
The fact that an agreement was achieved was a breakthrough. Never before have 195 countries agreed to some form of emissions reductions, even if they aren’t exactly binding.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced he was pulling United States out of the agreement, which means the US would join Syria and Nicaragua as the only nations that did not agree to the pact. Even Palestine and North Korea signed it.
In that context, Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement, the most promising global initiative addressing climate change, seems like a big deal. And it is, but not because his decision to withdraw will catapult us toward assured and quick global demise.
It is perhaps the best thing that could happen for the future of the agreement and, by side effect, the planet. After all, the accord is largely a voluntary gentleman’s agreement.
Trump’s decision might actually have a positive effect on the future of climate negotiations, freeing world leaders to pull together a stronger agreement that forces greater action.
It sends the message that the agreement is more about symbolism than action. Despite all of the fanfare that went on at the time, it seems that there are currently only 3 European Union countries pursuing climate policies that put them in line with the agreements made at the Paris Climate Change Talks.
The great majority of countries want to rig the law with loopholes so they can continue business as usual.
Some of the primary loopholes in question, are the use of higher baselines for measuring CO2 emissions reductions and a greater use of forestry credits (tree planting as an offset). Also, 9 member states “want to exploit the ETS’s huge surplus of 100 million allowances, worth an expected €2 billion, to help them meet their emissions obligations on paper.”
In effect, the U.S. risks becoming an unreliable country run by an administration that explicitly prioritizes corporate greed, short-termism, isolationism and nepotism over science, reason, growth and global sustainable prosperity.
The response to such a senseless act by the Trump administration should be a renewed and strengthened international commitment to combat climate change and the maintenance of a global climate governance regime that will be effective in keeping global warming below the critical 2 degrees Celsius.
This will never be achieved.
Why ?
Because man down through the age has demonstrated that he is incapable of cooperate with each other in large groups.
The modern deal offers power provided we renounce our belief in a great cosmic plan that gives meaning to life. On an individual level we are inspired to constantly increase our income and our standard of living. Greed comes easily to humans.
Don’t worry, The ecological meltdown is going to be great.
God like technology has it downside, like how or what is going to control these structures as traditional political structures can no longer process the data fast enough to produce meaningful visions.
We live in a world full of small interest groups and ruthless billionaires, we becoming chips enabled and manipulated by algorithms.
An international fund to help countries transition to green economies and cope with climate change will have an expected $100 billion US dollars per year. So far, only $62 billion US dollars has been gathered.
The whole thing will end in gridlock.
The climate change narrative is beginning to change.
There is only one way to stop climate change and that is to place a world aid commission of 0.05% on all transactions that exploit us and the world for profit sake.
For Example: High Frequency Trading, Sovereign Wealth Fund Acquisitions, Foreign Exchange Transactions over 50,000$, World Lotteries etc.
This will create a perpetual funded world aid fund to address climate change and the inequality that drives it.
Failure to act—or worse, acting to exacerbate—climate change could have lasting implications for the entire planet. The world has already burned more than two-thirds of the carbon that is expected to raise global temperatures by 2 degrees celsius (the previous target)–a catastrophic threshold.
If developing nations followed similar development trajectories as the US, for instance, then there would be no possibility for keeping climate change under control.
Emissions targets will never be legally binding, but report cards and updated promises are binding. No penalties will be given out for countries who fail to meet targets.
It’s easy to pick the dominant environmental issue of the last decade. It has been the issue of climate change and what—if anything—the countries of the world can do to limit, or reduce, carbon dioxide emissions.
It took hundreds of millions of years to create the world’s oil reserves.
It took less than a century before oil became the commodity on which world power turned and it was little more than a century before fears were raised that we would run out of oil.
Day in, day out, human beings are dependent upon it more than any other resource—and yet most rarely think about it.
For instance, most plastics are derived from oil. The medications taken by millions of people requires oil to produce.
Today, producing, distributing, refining and retailing oil is the single largest industry, in terms of value, on earth! Yet, like most, you probably give little if any thought to the black liquid.
So the world needs to come to a common understanding that:
The alternative energy is not mature enough to replace fossil sources any time soon.
Energy security means a diversified and balanced portfolio inclusive of every bit of resource, fossil as well as renewables, just to meet the projected demand. No single form of energy will be able to entirely replace it.
Real “green” energy is easier said than done.
Gold and Oil are the commodities most heavily invested in by Hedge Funds.
Now consider.
Oil is a nonrenewable, finite resource.
What if there were no more oil?
What if the lifeblood of modern civilization stopped flowing?
The global economy would collapse in a heap of ruin—and fast! Life as we know it would come to an end. All the everyday items made from oil would no longer be produced. Virtually all transport would stop, and so would nearly all manufacturing. Scores of millions would be unemployed. Millions in colder climates would freeze. Food production would come to a grinding halt. Scores of millions would starve to death because 99.99…% of people don’t have the faintest grasp of the historical technology required to revert to a pre-oil era.
So where there used to be a strong link between economic growth and the increasing demand for oil, is that link now being broken by alternative energy sources.
Many are touting a number of alternative forms of energy as potential replacements to oil.
The key rationale for reducing petroleum consumption lies in the fact that the market price does not account for its full social cost: the negative externalities or consequences associated with petroleum use-such as greenhouse gas emissions and national security issues-are not incorporated in the market prices.
But is all of this true.
Biofuels: Corn-based ethanol.
A biofuel-gasoline mixture is already being used in many automobiles. Making biofuels requires large amounts of land. If these fuels were to become the “new oil,” nations would face a choice between growing crops for food and growing crops for fuel, as there is not enough cultivable land on earth to satisfy man’s need for both.
More carbon dioxide is actually released through biofuels than gasoline.
Hydrogen is a non-polluting alternative fuel. Hydrogen fuel cells directly convert the chemical energy in hydrogen to electricity and release water and useful heat as by-products. Hydrogen fuel cells are pollution-free and have greater efficiency than traditional combustion technology.
The most abundant element in the universe but, it does not occur naturally as a gas in the Earth it is quite expensive to produce.
The systems used for delivering gasoline from refineries to gasoline stations cannot be used for hydrogen.
NASA is the primary user of hydrogen resources for its space program.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are currently very expensive than conventional vehicles or any hybrids.
Is efficient and clean, but the more reactors that are in use around the world, the more likely a nuclear disaster will occur.
Nuclear fusion:
Is an atomic reaction in which multiple atoms combine to create a single, more massive atom. The long allure of nuclear fusion is simple: clean, safe, limitless energy for a world that will soon house 10bn energy-hungry citizens. But despite 60 years of research and billions of dollars, the results to date are also simple: it has not delivered.
The world record for fusion power – 16MW – was set in 1997 at the JET reactor in the UK. The longest fusion run – six minutes and 30 seconds – was achieved at France’s Tore Supra in 2003.
The world needs to know if this technology is available or not.
Solar and wind power:
Are unlikely to produce enough energy to match that of oil.
New motor technologies:
Electric or Fuel cell cars to expensive.
So where are with energy.
Here’s the bottom line:
Renewables will remain niche players in the global energy mix for decades to come. The past—and the foreseeable future—still belong to hydrocarbons. And we can expect natural gas, the cleanest of the hydrocarbons, to garner a bigger share of the global energy pie in the near term and in the long-term.
Most alternative technologies rely on rare earths for efficiency.
However, the radioactive waste produced by rare earths mining process makes oil sands look like a green energy. This overlooked (or ignored) fact just now received some attention due to the sudden shortage caused by China’s embargo and export quotas on rare earths.
It Will Take 131 Years To Replace Oil, And We’ve Only Got 10.
Carbon dioxide emissions will continue rising because hundreds of millions of people are transitioning to a modern lifestyle, complete with cars, TVs, and other manufactured goods.
Renewable sources like wind and solar have their virtues, but they cannot compare with hydrocarbons when it comes to economics. If renewable sources of energy were dramatically cheaper than hydrocarbons, then perhaps we could be more optimistic about their ability to capture a larger part of the global energy mix. But even if that were true, a wholesale change in our energy mix will take a long time.
There is one thing all energy transitions have in common: they are prolonged affairs that take decades to accomplish.
If petroleum didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. Nothing else comes close to oil when it comes to energy density, ease of handling, flexibility, convenience, cost, or scale. Electric vehicles may be the celebrity car du jour, but modern batteries are only slightly better than the ones that Thomas Edison developed. Gasoline has 80 times the energy density of the best lithium-ion batteries.
The entire global economic foundation is still built upon oil.
However China and India are among those facing major problems with urban air pollution.
We can talk about wind, solar, geothermal, hydrogen, and lots of other forms of energy production. But the question that too few people are willing to ask is this one: Where, how, will we find the energy equivalent of 25 Saudi Arabia’s and have it all be carbon-free?
The hard reality is that we won’t.
We need a simpler measure for global energy use, which now totals about 241 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. That sum is almost impossible to comprehend, but try thinking of it this way: It’s approximately equal to the total daily oil output of 29 Saudi Arabia’s.
Furthermore, over the past decade alone, global energy consumption has increased by about 27 percent, or six Saudi Arabia’s. Nearly all of that new energy came from hydrocarbons.
Scientists and policymakers can claim that carbon dioxide is bad but here is no urgency for an accelerated shift to a non-fossil fuel world: The supply of fossil fuels is adequate for generations to come; new energies are not qualitatively superior; and their production will not be substantially cheaper.
The supply chain required to run a modern society is oil.
The inability to lubricate moving parts to have no power the Internet and most technological development based on it (the “Internet of Things”) would cease to exist.
Most world currencies would collapse. Over 90% of
U.S. dollars exist electronically;
with no electricity to power the computers that track
these financial transactions and balances, most
records of ownership would be unavailable for the
foreseeable future.
Within a couple of weeks all the food in the cities would
be exhausted. Mass unemployment,
all the trees will probably be chopped down to
make coal to make energy.
Energy is too important for its development to continue in such a random manner. Thus society seems to be caught in a dilemma unlike anything experienced in the last few centuries.
Despite many claims to the contrary—from oil and gas advocates on the one hand and solar advocates on the other—THERE IS no easy solution to these issues.
If any resolution to these problems is possible it is probable that it would have to come at least as much from an adjustment of society’s aspirations for increased material affluence and an increase in willingness to share as from technology.
Unfortunately recent political events do not leave us with great optimism that such changes in societal values will be forthcoming. With Donald Trump the debate over whether climate change is for real, and why it might be happening, has not gone away.
It’s less clear than ever how much oil is left but thanks to technology and changing climate change which is pushing car manufacturers towards more hybrid and electric cars, is seen as less of a threat than even ten years ago.
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Planet Earth is dying all around us on a scale not seen since the annihilation of the dinosaurs thanks to one species and flat screens
It is a story that is both a world away and yet deeply personal because of our flat screens
Humanity could soon be living on a planet stripped of much of its biodiversity — and that’s not even considering the potentially devastating effects of global climate change, which has only recently started to really kick into gear.
Our Screens provide shocking proof that we humans have to change our behaviour.
You would think irrevelent of our different belief, political and religiously, we would all recognise the value of our planet. Instead we are preoccupied with satisfying our short-term greed or power to fuel a world of globalisation that is reflected in the stock exchanges which are run by Artificial Intelligence that also runs our flat screens.
Nothing is real, it’s all entertainment.
It strikes me even if (when) we fall prey to artificial intelligence, nuclear war, GMO viruses, climate change, or an array of other disasters, that we might be better off using our massive resources, technology, and brain power to save the planet we’ve already got rather than trying to colonize others.
Science may well have the power to redeem and inspire, and indeed with the power of flat screens we are sharing the wonder of science, exploration and adventure but it is an antidote, in some small measure, to suffering and destruction going on about us.
There will be around 6.1B Smartphone Users Globally By 2020. Those 6.1 billion smart phone users works out to some 70 percent of the world’s population using smartphones in five years’ time.
In the USA there are 14,728 full power radio stations: 1,774 full power TV stations: with unofficial global figure of approximately 15,000 channels. earning around 400 billion in revenue.
We are now on the breaking tip of a sixth great wave of extinction.
It is the kind of bad news that makes historical catastrophes like World War II or the Black Death look like picnics.
If the currently elevated extinction pace is allowed to continue, humans will soon (in as little as three human lifetimes) be deprived of many biodiversity benefits.
The principle culprits are human “reproduction, consumption in general and especially agriculture, leading to habitat destruction, burning of fossil fuels [and] spreading of toxic chemicals.” The world economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the planet’s environment with us being a byproduct.
The Zoological Society of London, has found that the number of vertebrates – mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish – on earth has fallen by more than half since 1970. In all, the report concludes, there are 52 per cent fewer vertebrates alive on Earth than there were when someone now in their forties was born.
It is the number of animals in an ecosystem that decides its health and functionality. 6.5 percent of all people ever born are alive today. Preventing a sixth great dying requires a rapid return to equilibrium.
The number of insects worldwide had fallen by 45 per cent since the Seventies, while human populations had almost doubled.
But how long does it have, and what will it take to sterilise the entire planet? There’s no shortage of potential apocalypses.
Which of them will finally render the Earth barren?
Researchers can hypothesise almost no end of threats to life on Earth.
Today we worry about the destructive power of Super Volcanoes like Yellowstone. Asteroid that could wipe out all life on Earth, the Earth’s core mysteriously stopping to rotate, the Earth’s magnetic field deflecting ionising particles from the sun, intense waves of radiation called gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), genetically engineered viruses, artificial intelligence and robots could be the end of us all, the Sun exploding in 6.5 billion years time or the arrival of an Alien life form.
All of which would be very unlikely to wipe out all life except the Sun.
Forty per cent of the planet’s forests, for example, have been felled since the 18th century, while 60 per cent of the globe’s “ecosystem services” have been degraded in the past half century alone.
In fact, the take-home message from all of this is that there isn’t a plausible catastrophic agent from outside the solar system that could wipe out life on Earth within the next few billion years.
Life’s biggest threat will come from within.
The sun is getting hotter as it ages, and as a consequence the Earth will warm up. That means the chemical reaction between rocks and atmospheric carbon dioxide will speed up – a process that’s accelerated even more by the action of plant roots.
Eventually, so much carbon dioxide will have been removed from the air that plants can no longer perform photosynthesis. All plants will die, and animal life won’t be far behind. This could happen surprisingly soon, perhaps in just 500 million years.
Beginning around 5 billion years from now, the Sun will expand, becoming a swollen star called a red giant. By 7.5 billion years in the future, its surface will be past where Earth’s orbit is now. So the expanding Sun will engulf, and destroy, the Earth.
If that’s true, the only hope lies with us. If any humans are still around, they might have the technology to move the Earth to safety. Otherwise, life on Earth has a maximum life expectancy of 7.5 billion years.
Alien forensic scientists might well conclude that life on Earth had a hand in its own demise.
But we also can have a hand in stopping what is destroying our planet. That does not mean living less well, only less wastefully.
WE COULD DEMAND THAT GREED AND PROFIT BE MADE TO PAY 0,05% ON ALL HIGH FREQUENCY TRADING, ON ALL FOREIGN EXCHANGE TRANSACTIONS OVER $ 50,000, ON ALL SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUNDS ACQUISITIONS. CREATING A PERPETUAL FUND TO TACKLE INEQUALITY THE DRIVING FORCE THAT LEADS TO DEFORESTATION, POACHING, POLLUTION, WARS ETC. (See previous posts)
WE COULD REPLACE THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT WITH FAIR TRADE.
WE COULD REPLACE THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT WITH FAIR TRADE.
WE COULD ASK OUR GOVERNMENTS TO BAN FLIGHTS ONE DAY A MONTH LIKE WISE PRIVATE CARS.
WE COULD GET EVERY WEATHER FORECAST TO INCLUDE A CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT ONCE A MONTH.
WE COULD LOVE OUR PLANET NOT DESTROY IT.
WE COULD DEMAND THAT EVERY FLAT SCREEN TELLS THE TRUTH.
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IN A WORLD THAT IS LOSING ITS GRIP THE TROUBLE IS KNOWING WHAT TO GET A GRIP OF.
There is nothing new about this, other than the manner and the pace it is happening at where facts are deemed less important than beliefs.
For Example: In an age of Post – truth politics we now have a President of the USA that appears not to care whether his words bear any relation to reality.
The declining societal respect for facts, the rise of deceptive partisan media outlets are creating an echo chamber effect in public discussion.
If people only knew the truth, we wouldn’t have the problems of global warming, economic recession, poverty, War, any Famine.
Most people now get their news about the world around them pre-digested and customised by social media. They do not get the breadth of information supplied by an even moderately impartial news source.
Material is allotted them not by whether it is true but by whether they might like it.
Which is institutionally biased, and more vulnerable to the dissemination of lies.
Something must be surely be done about this.
Our post-truth era, in short, need not be an obstacle to taking common action.
Feelings trump facts and the power of truth as a tool to solve problems is being diluted by False News. For example the EU is now in danger of breaking up due to a campaign of blatant misinformation.
The lost of truth has many roots, and indeed it is a human failing not to seek it out. Life at this juncture is practically unimaginable without the technology we enjoy today.
A large amount of social media feeds on getting strangers to follow each other’s random thoughts or tracking our idle page visits to target advertising, and as a society we seem more than happy to provide.
If you OK-ed the latest update for your Facebook app on your phone, you’ve given Facebook permission to read your text messages?
Everybody knows Google has questionable privacy rules, but Gmail is a really good email provider, and most people don’t tend to make their Twitter private.
Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. Unorganized knowledge is the king, driving Climate Change, down to the survival of the cutest.
The continued societal focus on economic growth, both personally and as a society driven by algorithms for profit are all forcing a consumer society.
With the continued societal focus on economic growth, privacy is now arguably subject to consumerism. Critical thinking is sacrificed in favour of having feelings, reinforced by soundbite.
The problem is that Facebook (which has somewhere in the region of 2 billion users) and other so-called net works do not see themselves as media companies and are for the most part run by algorithms that have put artificial intelligence in charge of spreading False News.
As capitalism really gaining a grip on everyday life technology is a society constant. The majority of the Facebook users tend to share every mundane detail of their lives.
The inverted distinction between public and private.
What can we do about it?
We’ve built an awesome, sprawling web of technology with a astonishing bit rates entering the human mind and emotions through eyes, ears and even noses, all creating an accelerating escalation of intensity which is now out of control.
In a world increasingly devoid of person to person contact we are becoming more and more attached to morally ambiguous technologies. Given such biases it is no wonder we are unable to even agree on facts.
Precious little is said about the human, societal and environmental impact of such intense and increasing post-truth politics.
Are we more or are we less?
What is happening to our relationships, to our sensitivities, to our abilities to be moved, to our abilities to perceive?
Content is no longer a fixed format so there is no provenance as to what is true or false. With countervailing views filtered it is no wonder we get like clicks or news to boost hits.
Most of us now get our news on social media with anyone becoming a publisher. This information revolution can now play havoc with political falsehood.
So when Trump says we need to go to war now. We won’t know if he’s telling the truth.
What then?
We might even see this proliferation of belief systems and worldviews as an opportunity for human development. We can agree to disagree and still engage in pragmatic action in the world.
Modern democracy is not indeed flawless, but so far it is the most advanced political system the human kind could come up with. However the features of modern democracy for which we consider it as the most ‘human’ form of governance now comes with shortcomings.
These shortcomings like poor access to institutions, low-level of participation, rising level of elitism, ossification of state authorities, etc., are often the root of discontent among the public. Such reasons are making the discontent more than just and as a matter of fact.
But without opposition and discontent, there can be no democracy.
We as an audience must take into account the nature of media and subsequently different sources before making any assumptions on the content itself. Things like lack of critical thinking, an absence of fact-checking before accepting statements, inability to put things perspective and so on, provide opportunities for the rise of unpleasantly phenomena like post-truth and post-truth politics.
The concept of ‘post-truth’ has reached a point of saturation in present-day popular discourse and media punditry. Driven by digitally mediatized representations of reality and social interaction. Resulting in many of our world organisation becoming irrelevant.
Democracy requires a citizenship that meets, deliberates and interacts without fear and hatred. It requires organisations that give people a “voice” and a feeling that they have a stake and some influence in the system.
The pervasiveness of presumed causal linkages between environmental degradation, violent conflict and human mobility has been utilized by policy makers and pundits to shape public opinion.
Democracy now needs online innovation.
When Microsoft created Windows, it created the possibility of multiple lenses or views of any issue. Why not build on that? Before we all become Twit’s.
The problem which remains is purely one of logic.
The world is populated by other people who aren’t you. This is one of the major tools of democracy.
What does post-truth tell us about the current and future state of democratic engagement and of democracy itself?
Truth must no longer legitimize the politics of Brexit and Trump. No matter how democratic it is, the rug must be pulled out from under Post – truth politics. We have lost our power to them; we cannot lose our truth too.
The pervasiveness of presumed causal linkages between environmental degradation, violent conflict and human mobility has been utilized by policy makers and pundits to shape public opinion about the predicament we are now in.
What can be done?
“Take back control”
The least we can do to make the United Nations a place where minds, hearts and nations connect for the sake of so many people all over the world.
Obviously, don’t vote for fibbers.
Bombard social media platforms to remove filters.
Create an Online Political platform for the Truth.
Remember that knowledge is power.
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We all know or at least we should all be aware that our world is becoming less and less transparent thanks to what we call Artificial Intelligence.
The challenge there is:
The false promise of the Internet was that it can connect people from different backgrounds, with different beliefs and across disparate locations.
The trend toward personalization by AI is impeding the fulfillment of that promise?
What is becoming more and more apparent is that while most personalization on the web is algorithmically driven, aren’t we implicitly, informing the algorithms based on the choices we’ve previously made interacting with content?
Couldn’t you then, in theory, manipulate the filter so you see what you want to see or are there too many factors beyond our control?
Consider:
Even if you’re completely logged out of Google, on a new computer, the company can track 57 signals about you — from what kind of laptop you’re using to what your IP address is to what the font size in your browser is. Already, that gives a lot of important clues about age, income and demographics.
It’s ironic — the promise of personalization is that it gives us our own personal view of the world.
But the challenge is that a lot of the time, it’s actually pushing us toward a stereotyped, simplified version of ourselves: “This person is male, so we’ll show him more gadget and car news.”
So let me ask you.
Many of the major social, discovery and media sites on the Internet now implement some type of personalization. Do you feel these sites have a responsibility to educate consumers about how their information is being filtered? Do you think users should be able to opt out of personalization?
I would say Yes, on both counts.
In an increasingly complex and vast media landscape it is crucial that me maintain our private lives.
Why?
Because: Algorithms of all shapes and sizes are monitoring, analyzing, making
decisions, dictating our credit scores etc. They are shaping our lives and economies, our future, so shouldn’t we know what code and mathematical equations, or deep learning go into making them work.
However Transparency alone won’t help.
Algorithms are complicated so exposing the code behind them won’t make them more understandable. Knowing how an algorithm is coded is useless without knowing the data that has being fed into it in the first place.
There is only one solution and that is the:
The Creation of a New World Organisation that is totally transparent, and self financing: To vet all Technology. To ensure that they comply with the core world gold standard of human values.
(See previous Posts)
Let me ask you two further questions.
Can some level of personalization be useful?
What are we missing that we need to see?
Some amount of algorithmic personalization is necessary — there’s just too much stuff to sort through for humans to do it all. However you don’t know who Google thinks you are or on what basis it’s editing your results, and therefore you don’t know what you’re missing.
A lot of the personalization that exists today just serves up information junk food, but a growing portion is being curated by robots — computer algorithms that are filtering content and deciding what we get to see.
It may be delicious, but it doesn’t feed the soul.
Now it’s possible to live in a bubble where that stuff doesn’t ever show up — you’d never know it’s happening.
Take the Facebook “Like” button — the main way that information gets spread on Facebook. “Like” isn’t a neutral word — it’s easy to Like “I just finished a marathon,” and hard to Like “cell phones may cause cancer.”
So some kinds of information get through, and others don’t, and when that’s happening in the Facebook News Feed, where an increasing number of folks get their news, it’s a real problem.
Most people aren’t aware that their Google search results, Yahoo News links, or Facebook feed is being tailored in this way.
Filters can provide relevance and combat information overload, but with so much riding on automated decisions to ensure algorithms deal with humans fairly is now more relevant than ever.
I recently read that in five-year your smartphone could be reading your mind.
Brain- computer interface.
Personalization couldn’t exist without the massive dossiers of personal data being collected by big companies online these days. And it’s a problem because consumers don’t have much control over that.
The current laws around personal data just don’t contemplate a world in which a click on one website changes what you see on an entirely different one.
Almost all popular websites, from search engines to social networks to media outlets, are now utilizing filters in some way to personalize content for visitors.
When websites show us only what we like, we get cut off from the diverse points of view that can enrich our understanding of the world.
We get Donald Trumps.
Privacy is about controlling what the world is allowed to know about you. This is about controlling what you’re able to see of the world — what your filters let through and what they don’t.
Its time to wake up.
We can lose sight of our common problems, but they don’t lose sight of us.
It’s only a matter of time before our Fidelity/ Loyalty cards are linked up to our personal data held by banks, e-commerce sites and social media. If not already.
We will then be looking at citizen character score, which will bring credit scores to a whole new level, turning them more into to life scores, by tracking anything and everything we do. The scary bit is what is tracked and by who.
I hear you saying that this will never be accepted.
It is already on the cards for people living in China and Singapore. Humans and robot algorithms, living in peaceful harmony. Where you go, what you buy, who you know, how many points are on your driving licence, how your friends rate you.
The scores will serve not just to indicate an individual’s credit risk, but could be used in a vast array of applications and organisations such as Governments, Benefits, Hospital Operations, Visa, Education, down to all fields that makes Society including prison sentences, landlords, employers, and even romantic partners to gauge an individual’s character.
All stored in the Cloud. Which comes in many different models forms.
Ubiquitous access to the network: Self-service and on-demand access to computing capabilities. This service will most often be performed by the service provider automatically without the need for human interaction.
Cloud Computers is not the easiest of terms to define, or explain what it all actually means. Owned by Google, Twitter, Gmail and Facebook the Cloud is elusive as grabbing a cloud itself.
Perhaps we can blame it all on Leonhard Euler one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, and also a prolific inventor of canonical notation.
( An Euler path is a path that uses every edge of a graph exactly once.)
One way or the other to use a Trumpetism: It’s ain’t going to be great unless we build algorithms that have a sense of civic purpose embedded in them, giving us both entertainment and the information we really need, not profit.
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O sorry about the line spacing in this post just cannot figure out how to correct it.
These question have plagued mankind down the ages.
While some may consider such a discussion a waste of time, more and more people are coming to the conclusion that preparations of some sort are warranted in our current troubled environment — on many fronts.
What exactly are the “existential risks” that threaten the future of our species;
How do we measure them; and what can we do to prevent them?
Or to put it another way: In a world of multiple fears, what precisely should we be most terrified of?
Any single event or combination of events could cause terrible and debilitating circumstances for a short or long period of time: but what is the one to most likely to wipe us out?
The Philosophical answer is:
For the most part that mankind itself is the by far the most threatening threat to our existence we creating two more in the last blink of evolution. A cursory glance around the world reveals that, given the enormous problems facing our planet, it would be surprising if climate change did not crack a list of the top 10 immediate concerns.
Perhaps threat is not climate change, nor pandemic, nor nuclear winter; it is the possibly imminent creation of a general machine intelligence greater than our own.
However the rise of the machines isn’t the biggest threat to humanity.
It’s climate change, extreme weather and other environmental factors.
To be sure, the machines, rise of illiberalism, income inequality and a raft of other problems all could disrupt the global order, but they will not destroy it.
Here is my list:
The single biggest threat facing humanity is Climate Change > in terms of water crises, fresh air, food shortages, constrained economic growth, weaker societal cohesion and increased security risks resulting in large-scale involuntary migration.
The impacts of climate change are becoming clearer with each passing day as we continue to pour carbon pollution into our atmosphere at an unprecedented pace.
What are we doing about it?
Little or nothing. We appear to be passing the problem on to Technology.
Next: We have Technology. Not in itself but the unregulated software called Algorithms
What are we doing about it?
Nothing. We are in a hype cycle with expectations far beyond the technical reality.
Happy to hand our future to the black box of machine learning systems. Plug and play while we allow algorithms exploit the world for profit creating technological black holes around the globe.
Sophisticated algorithms can complete tasks we once thought impossible. Whether they decide to pulp us into human meat paste, or simply make our work completely unnecessary we will have to wait and see. ( See previous post re: A new world Organisation to vet all Technology to ensure it abides by our core human values)
Next: The terrifying rise of multi-drug resistant bacteria, as well as the ever-present threat of deadly viruses going pandemic, such as influenza and MERS.
What are we doing about it. Creating genetically modified crops, fiddling with DNA. Antibiotics do not create resistance per se.The rate of development of new antimicrobial agents has failed to keep pace with the “ingenuity” of bacteria to mutate and become resistant to antibiotics. When we should be minimize antibiotic usage and sneezing into our elbows.
Next: Nuclear proliferation, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction.
What are we doing about it. Not much. Nuclear warfare is not necessary to cause a breakdown of our society.Our society is so fragile, so dependent on the interworking of things to provide us with the goods and services that you don’t $1.25 r warfare to fragment us anymore than the Romans needed it to cause their eventual downfall. What is more likely is a coordinated cyber-attack. Money becomes worthless. We should ban all countries that sell arms from Trade deals.
Next: Poverty. One of the $1.25 realizations you see firsthand as you travel extensively worldwide is the extreme wealth, extreme poverty, and extreme corruption that exists in all of its world flavors. About 1.3 billion people don’t have electricity never mind food.
What are we doing about it.
We turn a blind eye to High frequency trading, and Sovereign wealth funds that are blundering the earth resources.
We raise the poverty line from $1.25 to $1.90. Just over 900 million people globally lived under this line in 2012 (based on the latest available data), and the project that in 2015, just over 700 million are living in extreme poverty. According to the most recent estimates, in 2013, 10.7 percent of the world’s population lived on less than US$1.90 a day, compared to 12.4 percent in 2012. That’s down from 35 percent in 1990. This means that, in 2013, 767 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day, down from 881 million in 2012 and 1.85 billion in 1990. Moreover, for those who have been able to move out of poverty, progress is often temporary: economic shocks, food insecurity and climate change threaten to rob them of their hard-won gains and force them back into poverty. It will be critical to find ways to tackle these issues as we make progress.
Next: Global financial panic. Derivative, debt crisis, economic collapse and/or bond implosion will cause currencies to implode and governments to topple.
What are we doing about it. We are propping up Finical Institution with quantitative easing while subjecting the rest of us to Austerity.
Next: Problems with the exploration, deliver
y, or production of oil, the lifeblood of modern economies is coming to an end.
What can we do about it. Nothing, except to go back to bartering.
Next: Religion Beliefs.
What can we do about it. Adopted Dave Allen saying, “goodnight, thank you and may your God go with you”
Next: Asteroid Impact or an Electromagnetic pulse event.
What can we do about it: Get rid of all our nuclear weapons in an attempt to destroy or deflect the Asteroid. Electromagnetic pulse event. Nothing.
Last: The Sun.
What can we do about it. Sweet Fanny Adam, other than have left earth as transhuman.
With any of these scenarios listed above (and there is a host of others I have probably not even thought about), you could have localized, national, or global unrest and even war for an indefinite period of time depending on the scope and duration of the event(s).
The world in general seems afflicted on so many different fronts.
When you look at the list above, any rational person could easily see one or more of these scenarios occur within their lifetime. Aside from the geophysical things that seem to be going haywire, and could be explained simply as the planet’s cycles, there are plenty of man-made catastrophes that loom on the horizon…
Take your pick.
Never has the planet had as many people as it does now. With increased population numbers, there is increased pressure for resources, like water for example. As a result we are beginning to see the rise of extreme political parties as a consequence of the total and utter desperation of the populace.
However the main event is staring us in the face, and the whole of the world has front-row seats. Climate Change.
If things unravel at the core we can kiss our arse good-bye, Donal Trump nor religion will preserve life.
So I will sign off this post with this thought.
These events are never properly covered by the news media, Social media, (what a surprise!) my intent is to at least get you thinkingabout the most important things.
Individuals can still hope for the best (that things can and will eventually work out), but what good is your prosperity going to do if you don’t have anything to eat or a safe place to hang out for an extended period of time?
Risks appeared to be rising. After the shit hits the fan people will not behave normally. There’s no place like home. Most risks are rising. It’s a riskier world right now.
No matter how you slice it, things worldwide are getting very strange very quickly.
Ayn Rand: “Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival.”
USE IT.
Otherwise, robots may end up owning the world after all.
Feel free to add to the list. All comments appreciated and needed. All like clicks chucked din the bin.
By the way this is what home looks like from 1.5 billion kilometers away complements of Cassini.
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