Putin has been posing as Russia’s defender against an allegedly aggressive West and redeemer of ethnic Russians and brother Slavs everywhere since he came to power.
A heroic Ukrainian defense that actually repels Russian forces remains militarily unlikely, but a Ukrainian victory would make all the above propaganda untenable.
He could not survive the defeat politically and knows it.
Therefore he won’t allow this scenario to happen.
Instead of withdrawing, he’ll follow one of three other paths.
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He could escalate the attack dramatically — but still with only conventional weapons. Basically, that means bombing Ukraine into submission. The loss of civilian and military lives would be horrendous, but Putin wouldn’t care. He would incorporate a seething and resentful Ukraine — either as a nominally independent puppet state or a subdivision of Greater Russia — and maybe add Belarus for good measure.
His empire would become a permanent pariah in the international community.
The world would have a new Iron Curtain.
Putin will therefore at least consider another — literally nuclear — option.
It’s the one he’s already hinted at.
Claiming that NATO and the EU are cornering him by supporting Ukraine with weapons and other wherewithal, he could launch one or more “limited” nuclear strikes with so-called tactical (here meaning low-yield) warheads.
Ukraine, like Japan in 1945, would have no choice but to surrender.
So what can be hope for?
A homegrown Russian revolution would be by far the best outcome.
The new regime in Moscow could blame the attack on Putin alone, which happens to be true. It could therefore withdraw without looking weak. The international community could welcome Russia back with open arms. The world, including Russia, would become a better place.
China could flex its economic mussel.
At the United Nations this week, 141 countries voted to deplore Putin’s aggression. China could have joined the four rogues (Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, and Syria) who voted with Russia against the resolution.
Instead, along with 34 other countries, it merely abstained.
As for ‘steroids.’ They are synthetic hormones, similar to testosterone, which have anabolic (bodybuilding) effects due to the fact they stimulate the growth of skeletal muscle. They also have androgenic (male) effects which enhance typical male characteristics. When you see a male bodybuilder, many will have been using steroids to create this appearance.
PERHAPS THIS IS WHY PUTIN HAS LOST THE PLOT.
In the long term, anabolic steroids affect the central nervous system of the human brain, directly on neurotransmitter systems.
After all, the best way to deal with a cornered rat is usually to let it escape before it does more harm.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
UKRAINE AT THE MOMENT IS A CONVENTIONAL BATTLEFIELD CONFLICT AND WE MUST HOPE THAT IT REMAINS SO.
There’s a lot of talk and coverage by the media about the rationality of actions when discussing nuclear deterrence. They are throwing the word nuclear around without any real understanding of what they are advocating in an all-out nuclear war.
It would extend well beyond the warring nations, change the climate, jeopardize billions of people in a nuclear winter.
Even a modest nuclear exchange let’s say a few hundred warheads would produce huge quantities of ozone-consuming chemicals creating an ice age.
As everything would lie in ruin there would be no governmental structures that could function in such a postwar climate.
There is no such thing as a limited nuclear war as a realistic possibility.
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Irresponsible media is the last thing anyone needs at the moment.
Unfortunately, it can’t resist, (somewhat understandable) turning the Para Olympics into a political platform, one of the last world forms representing world Peace.
Let us understand that advocating the use of a non-strategic nuclear weapon whether it is Nato or Russia, threatens humanity’s very existence. (A Soviet SS-18 missile has eight 1- megaton warheads.) They make up a tiny fraction of strategic nuclear weapons in the Russian arsenal.
HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI FALLOUT IS ONE WEAPON EFFECT WITH WHICH WE HAVE EXPERIENCED AND IT WAS ONLY AN ATOMIC BOMB.
IF NATO WERE TO LAUNCH LOW-YIELD TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS TO SIGNAL RUSSIA THAT IT HAS CROSSED A LINE IN AN ATTEMPT TO DE-ESCALATE THE SITUATION – THE CONSEQUENCES ARE UNIMAGINABLE.
Radioactive fallout is unique to nuclear weapons.
There is a near-universal agreement on the need to avoid a nuclear war.
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Could the war-shocked survivors meet the challenge?
This question is so big that it’s best left unanswered since only an all-out nuclear war could decide it definitively.
It might bring an abrupt end to the war, it will for certain bring an abrupt end to all life.
Therefore it is the duty of all media platforms to avoid speculation but to promote untarnished awareness of just what is a stake.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Up to now, we humans have tried everything to change the planet that we all live on – such as wipe out each other, political systems, cities, religious beliefs, weapons of mass destruction, world organizations without any global clout, financial institutions manipulating power, money, elections, corruption, all enhancing inequality.
All are devoid of any asperation for peace and sharing. In fact, we have designed a world around the mantra ” Pay as you go ” which includes all aspects of life even the privilege of paying for your own funeral.
In the meantime, Earth is never stationary it spins at 1000 miles per hour.
As Galileo Galilei said, “Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.”
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The “New Earth” that people envisioned never quite materialized as predicted.
With the dramatic worldwide impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and now a new war in Ukraine, one could not be blamed for thinking what next rather than where next.
I suppose that eventually, we will reach a tipping point, after which we will consider 4D/5D things “normal”.
Maybe in the distant future “enlightenment”, will be more about knowing yourself as the consciousness that is witnessing reality.
Creating one’s reality for life and the planet that we truly love in which we are fully conscious and in full control over everything that we experience in our subconscious reality. Even so, we will still not be in full control of what happens to us and the environment we are in, because of our collective inability to agree that we are all the same.
So where are we?
The most distinctive aspect of our approach is the lack of ‘long-term’ action.
Longterm is the idea that because such huge numbers of individuals might live in the long-run future, and because we think everyone’s interests matter equally, approaches to improving the world should be evaluated mainly in terms of their potential for long-term impact — over thousands, millions, or even billions of years.
In the 1950s, large-scale production of nuclear weapons meant that a few world leaders gained, for the first time, the ability to kill hundreds of millions of people.
This was a striking milestone in a robust trend: as technology improves and the world economy grows, it gets easier to cause destruction on an ever-larger scale.
This is where we are.
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When we look at the history of the human race, we see many examples of major moral problems that most people were completely oblivious to. These include slavery, the deplorable treatment of foreigners, the subjugation of women, the persecution of people who aren’t heterosexual, and the gross mistreatment of animals.
New transformative technologies may promise a radically better future, but also pose catastrophic risks, and mitigating these risks is presently all but totally ignored. Work on mitigating many risks remains remarkably neglected — in some cases receiving attention from only a handful of researchers.
With machine learning, the fate of humanity may come to depend more on the actions of machines than our own. This could lead to large, rapid improvements in human welfare, but there are good reasons to think that it could also lead to disastrous outcomes.
The problem of how one might design a highly intelligent machine to pursue realistic human goals safely is very poorly understood. You might think ‘why can’t we just turn it off?’, but of course, an intelligent system will give every indication of doing exactly what we want, until it is certain we won’t be able to turn it off.
Even if advanced machine intelligence does not get ‘out of control’, it is likely to be very socially disruptive and could be used as a destabilizing weapon of war.
There have been surprisingly few serious attempts to make such big-picture comparisons.
There are many global issues we haven’t yet seen investigated much at all. These are not always the biggest problems in the world — rather they are the issues that receive little attention compared to how important they are and how much can be done about them.
Different problems could be bigger if there are problems that humanity hasn’t even thought of yet. And it seems likely that we haven’t discovered all the serious global problems which exist.
You might think by now that world politicians won’t be motivated to act on the results of global priorities.
I would say that if anyone is looking at the state of the world our focus should be more on oneness and unconditional love for all existence with a distinct set of rules about what you can and cannot do.
So here is the good news.
Humanity’s superior intelligence is pretty much the sole reason that it is the dominant species on the planet.
The chance of great power conflict this century was around 45%, now it’s 100% and the chance of an extinction-level war was around 1% it is now with technology a lot more than doubters cannot dismiss.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
We are incapable of living in peace with each other as there will always be incentives for conflict.
Wars are inevitable because of the disposition of man and if we are unsuccessful in tackling climate change we will be seeing lots more of them so the answer to this question is that wars will be inevitable.
The plagues of wars these days seem more elusive than a cure for Covid/Climate change…No end to the carnage seems to be in sight. A lucrative arms trade ensures that the world’s armies—and guerrillas—will continue to be grimly effective.
More localized for the moment and ironically, this wholesale butchery is occurring during an age that has seen unparalleled efforts to outlaw war as a way of resolving disputes between nations.
The machine gun is no respecter of the fittest or boundaries, with the bomb annihilating the strong along with the weak.
Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “Mankind has grown great in an eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish. . . . The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker.”
Over 2,000 years ago, Plato said that “only the dead have seen the end of war.” Is his bleak assessment a bitter truth we must learn to accept?
If war were inevitable, there would be little point in trying to end it.
War is not something created by the heat of passion. It takes years of preparation and indoctrination, weapons production, and training.
This is why we must use more effective and less destructive tools to resolve conflicts and to achieve security. Militarism has made us less safe and continues to do so.
War long predates Capitalism/ Communism. War in human history up to this point has not correlated with population density or resource scarcity.
The idea that climate change and the resulting catastrophes will inevitably generate wars could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The looming climate crisis is a good reason for us to outgrow our culture of war.
Hunger in the world must be abolished, inequality must be irritated and profit for profit sake
Why?
Because weapons must be the arbiters of so many disputes.
There is an interrelation between different factors that lead to war?
All wars have some plausible situations in the eyes of the decision-makers such that the anticipated gains from a war in terms of resources, power, glory, territory, and so forth exceed the expected costs of conflict, including expected damages to property and life.
Thus, for war to occur with rational actors, at least one of the sides involved has to expect that the gains from the conflict will outweigh the costs incurred.
There has to be a failure in bargaining so that for some reason there is an inability to reach a mutually advantageous and enforceable agreement.
A lack of enforceable agreements is often one of the main ingredients leading to protracted wars.
Being faced by an armed rational or irrational foe leads a rational country to arm to some level. In turn, this now means that either a foe who is irrational or a foe who thinks that I might be irrational will be armed, even more, and this feedback continues to build.
So here we are after two world wars still unable to have any real understanding as to why we are witnessing the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine.
Now, Ukraine is the pawn.
America has bombed a sovereign country every day for the last twenty years, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Yet that is never part of the story we tell ourselves.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have used NATO to surround Russia.
Despite assurances, NATO would not expand to include former Soviet bloc countries, we have done just that. We weaponized Ukraine, minimized diplomatic solutions such as the Minsk Protocol, played a role in the 2014 coup that ousted the government there, and installed a pro-Western one.
But it does not seem to prevent our pro-Western government, our news media, our own selves from repeating the war myth it now becoming our bedtime story, one that seeds a nightmare.
The West as the good guys and everyone else as evil. We have arrived at this point of peril in Eastern Europe because we have lost the ability to see the world through the eyes of another.
It thus becomes impossible to comprehend the behavior of other nations, to understand their fears, their concerns. We know only our own created story, our own myth, we care only for our own concerns, and so are forever at war.
We become provocateurs rather than peacemakers.
Ukraine should not have to suffer invasion by Russia. And Russia should not have had its safety and security threatened by NATO expansion and weaponry.
A good portion of our overview of the causes of war is thus spent discussing a framework of different bargaining failures.
So how will this Russian/ Ukrainian war be ended?
The same as all wars a tragedy, creating the ground for the next war.
We seem to be caught somewhere in an unplanned downward trajectory slipping lower and lower, circling around and around toward some kind of catastrophe that is as yet unvisualised and unseen.
We are very close to passing some irreversibly turning point, after which we will not be able to go back.
Let’s see if maybe we can miss the huge disaster that now seems to be looming in our future. We need to turn our full attention to fixing our environment.
Are we truly incapable of resolving these concerns without slaughtering each other? Is our intellect that limited, our patience that short, our humanity so curdled that we must repeatedly reach for the sword? War is not genetically set in our bones, and these problems are not divinely created. We made them, and the myths surrounding them, and so we can unmake them.
We must believe this if we are to survive.
This is a long hard battle to be won. Let’s pick our own future.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
There has never been a period like this in the history of humanity.
The past 50 years of human activity caused massive losses in biodiversity, habitat, soil health, and air quality and the impacts are clear in every corner of the globe.
Overall, humans have now directly altered three-quarters of the globe and the rate of global extinction is estimated to be tens to hundreds of times higher now than at any prior moment in human history.
Life on earth is deteriorating fast.
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warns a million could be wiped out if humanity keeps delivering blows to nature. Even the status quo is untenable: an estimated 500,000 land species already don’t have sufficient habitat for long-term survival.
With the global population set to rise to 9 billion by 2050, conservation is about more than a touchy-feely walk in the vibes of the wood (though the report also shows enjoyment of nature is one of its undeniable benefits). It’s about ensuring everyone has enough to eat.
We have 12 years to drastically start drawing down emissions to prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius, but we cannot tackle nature deterioration separately from climate change and our social goals.
I don’t think we – the modern people – can even survive a day without having access to the internet. The problem is, most people are sheep sitting on the sidelines through no fault of their own doing what everyone else does, supporting the status quo, and not stepping out of line.
Because most of the decision-making power in the world now belongs to a relative handful of idiots who want to empower themselves and disempower everyone else, the evolution of the human race has been held back for hundreds of years.
Evolution is the purpose of life, and the purpose of all non-living matter in the universe is to create the conditions under which life can evolve.
We, it seems are so busy creating such a fucked up world that nobody cares any longer. When you hear politics speak they always mention stuff like health care, transportation, city infrastructure, human rights, free markets. Even though these things are of importance, they don’t set a path for others to follow in the long term.
The result is that Politics don’t have a clue what our future should look like. We all know what happens after the elections. The winning party hardly executes more than 30% of what they’ve promised.
For most people, the idea of long-term thinking is a luxury good with most of us finding it difficult these days to make both ends meet, thus we can’t afford to think about something pleasant in the future. Our idea about tomorrow narrows down to “what’s for dinner.”
Thanks to technology most of us are now living this hamster wheel life where we’re in constant pursuit of more things, but we never actually reach a state where we are truly satisfied.
Your desire to feel good now destroys each and every thought about a possible long-term project. Meaning, you scroll mindlessly on your phone where you see stuff you don’t have and you start wanting them. This loop becomes your ultimate habitat and your one purpose in life becomes feeling good all the time.
Unfortunately, there is no product or service that can make us happy all the time.
Up to recently, we live in a globalized world where everything seems possible then came Covid which has shown that nothing is possible without those things we take for granted.
Have we learned the Covid lesson? Not on your nelly. It has just made some Drug companies super-rich with I am all right jack syndrome countries.
I’d say that it’s not the world that’s fucked up, it’s people who are fucked up.
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In our hectic world where trivial content is spreading like a wildfire, we are preoccupied with trying not to drown in the vast ocean of poorly organized information corrupting our senses.
Not a future anyone wants but, unfortunately, everyone seems to have.
We’re not the only ones on this planet.
Is there any way to un fuck it? Of course, there is.
There is only one thing that has happened on planet Earth, and it is still the only thing happening here, just as it is the only thing that has ever happened, or will happen, in the entire universe, and that one thing is… evolution.
So what should we do?
Capitalism must be saved from its own excesses.
We should keep our technology but do away with the things that enslave us. We should enshrine common goals of what would be in the interest of the country in law.
A different yardstick than profits:
The capitalist vehicle in which humanity is progressing must be redesigned. It is putting too much pressure on the Earth’s resources. It is leaving too many people behind with inequality.
Different ownership:
Who owns the enterprise? The people at the bottom, or people at the top of the economy?
We need innovations in production models that provide more jobs so that business is not only for the people but by the people too.
We need to rethink the purpose of the corporation. Serve the people or profit. The idea of who owns the enterprise by taking a broader view of the benefits companies provide to societies, one may conclude that the private sector is not all good and that the public sector is not all bad.
Community-owned – genuinely ‘social enterprises’, with clear public purposes, with limitations on the returns their investors can get, and with transparency in their accounts to the public of the value they create for society, could be partners with governments in providing some public services.
The expansion of government to its present scale has politicalized virtually all economic life. The wages being paid most workers today are political wages, reflecting political pressures rather than anything that might be considered the normal working of supply and demand. The prices farmers receive are political prices. The profits business is earning are political profits. The savings people hold have become political savings, since their real value is subject to abrupt depreciation by political decisions.
We should remove private enterprises from making profits from the essentials of life – water – energy – transport – health – education
The entire “reason for being” for capitalist-based entities, is the maximization of profit for the ownership of the company or corporation.
With the result that many of us view life as simply a struggle for survival, and sadly, for many people, that’s all it is.
Technology:
We should ensure that technology does not enslave us.
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You can take this post however you’d like, not everyone thinks the same as I do, and I understand that. But, you can’t deny that this world is a tad bit messed up and it’s only getting worse.
Fortunately, there is a way out.
If you want to make a change, start caring more about others. No matter what you’re doing.
There is no reason that allowing all of us to invest in the future by issuing Green Bonds would not be a step in the right direction. ( See previous posts) It would allow us to address and finance the changes needs fairly, giving all of us a stake in the future.
Global cooperation towards a sustainable future.
Of course, the above is only words but the way we are going it would not surprise me to hear Donate a pound to save a Ukrainian.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
THIS POST IS FOR ALL THOSE CHINLESS WONDERS WHO BELIEVE IN PROFIT FOR THEMSELVES.
It’s no longer good enough to measure the overall wealth of a nation whilst glossing over inequality or consequential environmental degradation.
Why?
Because it is quite apparent that capitalism is stuck while the longer-term future has been transformed by the pandemic and climate change.
It has no answers to a host of problems, including disease, inequality, the digital divide, and, perhaps most blatantly, the environmental crisis the biggest problems of our time.
Rethinking the role of government nationally and in the international economy is now reaching critical a point – to put public purpose first and solve the problems that matter to people – are now the central questions for humanity.
It is imperative that responding to the climate and nature emergency is integrated across all economic activity, with an explicit commitment to moving to a more circular and resource-efficient economy.
The capacities and role of government within the economy and society, above all need to recover a sense of public purpose in order to reshape the economic development to invests in people and businesses drive prosperity, and reduce inequality.
Our economic well-being is without any doubt tied to our environmental, cultural, and social well-being.
One can say this till we are blue in the face but the Covid crisis has removed any doubt about the fundamental role of the foundational economy in the well-being of a nation. (This is the part of the economy which could not be shut down as it provides the infrastructure of everyday life)
So investing in social care, childcare, housing, energy, low carbon, and digital connectivity not only addresses the foundational needs of civilized life but can offer meaningful and rewarding careers and be harnessed for economic development.
A holistic approach to the economy, recognizing its potential for harm as well as good, demands a holistic way to measure progress.
None of the above is possible unless we find a way of committing to long-term projects that are both politically and financially sound.
Our problem is that governments are subjected to short electrical terms in office so long-term objectives are not a priority. While the electoral population pays ever-increasing taxes either to fund a project or rectify a mistake, (without any real commitment to the project in the first place) other than a general election and a new manifesto of verbal diarrhea can deserving projects be fulfilled to completion?
What if we were to introduce legal mission statements that could not be changed till achieved, ‘magnet projects’ funded not by taxation but by voluntary participation in the form of willing support in allowing citizens to support projects by buying sustainable green bonds with guaranteed returns and Loto style financial monthly prizes.
If we are to genuinely tackle the problems that we have created lets us genuinely participate by putting our money where our mouths are.
Too often overlooked in economic development.
You also might be led to believe that monetary activism is financial triage against world economic collapse but ask yourself what kind of political creatures are money printing spawning.
What we are seeing is the economy going online with businesses and organizations in receipt of public funding far from being totally transparent with online profit-seeking algorithms that are now driving a hidden non-paying tax economy.
The pandemic points forward to realizing that our economic models are not dealing with the growth of inequalities.
Money must be made to serve the people not the other way around social value
Imagine a society where everyone can have an equal say in the issues that concern them. Above all, a world, in which all the people own and share the wealth that we need in order to live. These would be enormously exciting times because, at long last, human society will have evolved to the position of being able to tackle effectively the challenges facing the modern world.
So here is your chance to contribute by suggesting your solutions or improving on the above suggestion of Mission Economics.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
This post is so the world remembers the Holocaust, its victims, and those of other attempted acts of genocide throughout history. The Holocaust was one of the most unimaginable crimes in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated six million Jewish people.
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I am of the mindset that there is more to this question than just debate itself. One has only to look at the state of the world to see that we have not and will not stop killing each other.
Since time memorial it has not changed nor will it.
Climate Change with all its pending consequences is going to lead to conflicts all over the world but it might allow us to develop an ” Objective hatred” in which the hate objects are not a human scapegoat but something impersonal like poverty, disease oppression, or natural disasters to turn our destructive energy to creative use.
It’s not if climate change is going to peel back the layers underlying so many contemporary issues in today’s society, science, and religion, and specifically, creation vs. evolution, ( that hovers very near the surface of the teaching of evolution)
Combined the consequences of climate change with profit-seeking technologies that are already fueling INEQUALITY beyond what we know now and we are looking at a world that no one wants to see.
Thanks to Hollywood, Smart TV, SmartPhone, and Social Media platforms all containing graphics pictures of killings we are evolving as desensitized humans.
If so, where are we going?
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The changes with technology unlike evolution will not be gradual.
“Exciting”, maybe or, indeed, even noticed.
Are we Evolving?
The short answer is “Yes,” we’re still evolving, in different directions but not in ways that excite most people.
Might we be on the verge of a different type of evolution, in which our technological prowess further integrates our biology with machine-like intelligence, processing, and mechanical capabilities?
We’re sick of hearing “Why are there still monkeys?”
Will evolution be a change in the frequency of genes in populations or will it be with personal genetic engineering?
Then we have another situation with a larger variety of different versions of our species, all still being enslaved by technology.
Our brain size might increase but it remains pretty useless in stopping wars.
Might the time be at hand in the next few centuries where we create our replacements altogether morphed by our technologies. Something along the lines of hard drives that expand our brains, connectivity to a hive mind, Borg-like capabilities, machine augmentation of our senses, and the like…so that our evolution shifts from natural forces in the environment to digitalized enhancement.
For many, the Darwinian view of life – a panorama of brutal struggle and constant change is the reason for all the killing.
When Darwin’s theory of evolution was first published in the late 1800s, it covered only biological evolution. What is profound is that the more complete scientific evolutionary story really only started to come together in the last 50 years!
You cannot change one factor without changing another.
Evolution and Creation are essentially creative processes they are no longer separate things in themselves.
Therefore in the first place, it would appear now, with gene editing augmentation and technological advances we will indeed survive only to morph into a digitalized species with all that is good and bad, still fighting each other.
“Nature has shrugged off countless species in the history of the earth, and she will shrug off Homo sapiens with no more concern than any of the rest.” –Louis B. Ziegler
It leaves us with the grand existential question of what meaning it all has for us.
Humans are killing the planet and all its inhabitants.
Why? For what purpose?
Will future population growth along with economic development will be humanity’s fatal flaws, bringing about “unprecedented levels of extinction risk?
The answer is that there is overwhelming evidence that habitat loss and fragmentation, over-exploitation of biological resources, pollution, species invasions, and climate change have increased rates of global species extinctions to levels that are much higher than those observed in the fossil record.
If humans are supposed to be conscious and loving, why do we cause and allow such hideous suffering to happen in our society, including the killing of other fellow humans?
If we are at least partially preprogrammed by evolution to kill our own, what can be done (if anything)?
Why do we kill each other at all?
The reasons are innumerable.
Beliefs, love, jealousy, pride, guilt, revenge, mercy killing, honor killing, drugs (altered states), delusion, self-defense, economic gain, suicide, justice, power, psychopathy, and sport… and all in the name of personal gain, nationality (war), religion, sect, caste, creed or gender.
We want something to change as a result of our actions.
Humans have evolved with a propensity to kill one another that is six times higher than the average mammal. (Maybe, we are beginning to recognize we can feel empathy and feel the urge to take action when the subjects of injustice are not human and need somebody to channel their survival urge.)
However, the level of lethal violence has changed through human history and can be associated with changes in the socio-political organization of human populations.
Most sane humans, if given the choice, will not kill their fellow man.
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In a world in profound transformation. We have to find alternative activities to give that sense of feeling alive of belonging and purpose.
The fact that so many societies throughout the world fail to offer equality makes our future prospects of peace look very bleak.
If these needs are unsatisfied and there is an obvious enemy or oppressor to direst them towards then warfare is almost inevitable.
Instead of focusing on abstract, boring, cold data projects such as The Ocean Cleanup show how huge multilateral issues no government wants to deal with, such as plastic polluting the oceans, can be tackled by building systems that accelerate inequality.
While society provides a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth the history of life on Earth is a history of extinction and ecological failures, but it is also a story of the formation of new forms.
The best we can hope for society at large is that the mass of unconscious individuals might develop a moral equivalent to war.
No prediction by any expert can tell us whether we will prosper or perish but at what cost do we purchase the assurance that we are heroic?
Expect no miracle cure.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
A shift of a single degree is barely perceptible to human skin, but it’s not human skin we’re talking about. It’s the planet, and an average increase of one degree across its entire surface means huge changes in climatic extremes.
Even if greenhouse emissions stopped overnight the concentrations already in the atmosphere would still mean a global rise of between 0.5 and 1C.
Air temperatures on Earth have been rising since the Industrial Revolution with the average global temperature on Earth having increased by at least 1.1° Celsius (1.9° Fahrenheit) since 1880. Keeping records began in 1880.
A one-degree global change is significant because it takes a vast amount of heat to warm all of the oceans. In the past, a one- to two-degree drop was all it took to plunge the Earth into the Little Ice Age.
The year 2021 had an above-average global tropical cyclone activity with a total of 94 named storms. Snow cover was 9.39 million square miles and the seventh-smallest annual snow cover extent in the 1967-2021 record, with the average temperature across global surfaces 1.51°F (0.84°C) above the 20th-century average.
2021, the sixth warmest year on record. Nine of the ten hottest years or records have occurred in the past decade.
The upper-ocean heat content, which addresses the amount of heat stored in the 0-2000 meters depth of the ocean, was a record high in 2021.
December 2021 also marked the 24th consecutive December with a below-average sea ice extent.
The year 2021 was South America’s sixth warmest year on record at 1.09°C (1.96°F) above average. The year 2021 also marks North America’s 25th consecutive year with temperatures, at least nominally, above average.
The year 2021 was Europe’s ninth warmest year on record at 1.28°C (2.30°F) above average.
Africa had its third-warmest year (tying with 2019) in the 112-year record.
Asia had its seventh warmest year on record.
Oceania had an above-average temperature.
It is irrefutable that we are now looking down the barrel of a Climate Gun.
Mountains are starting to come apart. Polar ice is melting. Greenland will tip into irreversible melt once global temperatures rise past a mere 1.2C.
At the current rate, the whole Greenland ice sheet would vanish within 140 years.
Miami would disappear, as would most of Manhattan. Central London would be flooded. Bangkok, Bombay, and Shanghai would lose most of their area. In all, half of humanity would have to move to higher ground.
Everywhere, ecosystems will unravel. By the time global temperatures reach two degrees of warming in 2050, more than a third of all living species will face extinction.
Beyond two degrees, however, preventing mass starvation will be as easy as halting the cycles of the moon. First millions, then billions, of people will face an increasingly tough battle to survive. In the two-degree hotter world, nobody will think of taking Mediterranean holidays.
In this kind of heat, the death of the Amazon is as inevitable as the melting of Greenland.
Once the veneer of civilization had been torn away a three-degree increase in global temperature the end of the world is nigh.
BETWEEN THREE AND FOUR DEGREES OF WARMING
It would throw the carbon cycle into reverse. Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, vegetation and soils start to release it. So much carbon pours into the atmosphere that it pumps up atmospheric concentrations by 250 parts per million by 2100.
The stream of refugees will now include those fleeing from coasts to safer interiors. Both poles are certain to melt, causing an eventual rise of 50 meters. Ice sheets have vanished.
We are looking now at an entirely different planet.
Globalism in the five-degree world will break down into something more like parochialism. Customers will have nothing to buy because producers will have nothing to sell. With no possibility of international aid, migrants will have to force their way into the few remaining habitable enclaves and fight for survival.
At the same time, as the ozone layer came under assault, we would feel the sun’s rays burning into our skin, and the first cell mutations would be triggering outbreaks of cancer among anyone who survived.
One more Degree.
It is not too difficult to imagine the ultimate nightmare, with oceanic methane eruptions near large population centers wiping out billions of people – perhaps in days. All the remaining forests burning, and the corpses of people, livestock, and wildlife piling up in every continent, the six-degree world would be a harsh penalty indeed for the mundane crime of burning fossil energy.
The maximum temperatures a human body can stand without dying or suffering severe consequences is 100 F (38 C) but surviving requires continuous fluid intake.
As we look forward to 2022, it’s clear that ambitious net-zero targets pose a myriad of difficulties. As it stands, emissions across the world are not declining.
We can’t afford to wait and hope that the world will stop using fossil fuels in time, it won’t. Because the fragility of our food systems and their dependency on fossil fuels is intrinsically linked with an increasing loss of biodiversity.
We need more than a polluter pays principle so that people who cause damage are financially responsible for their actions.
The reality is that no one wants to suffer the financial costs that affect the changes required to make a difference.
Here below is a suggestion to address this problem.
We all know that there is an invisible world and that today it is undeniably digital.
This invisible world is becoming both powerful and dangerous leading to digitalizing without a system of oversight of the way we operate in the world, resulting in not just hidden powers but a decoupling between human rights and democracy.
On one hand, digital democracy, or eDemocracy, uses the internet, social media, and technology to improve our democratic systems of governance.
On the other with our electronic overlords, ( Smartphones, Pads, Apple watches, TV, Web Services), this world of invisibility is been driven by non-accountable, non-transparent commerce, operating profit-seeking algorithms, with self-learning data collection codes, that no one comprehends.
As our day-to-day lives are increasingly immersed in technology, it is easy to lose perspective on things that matter.
The capitalist world of profit and power is disappearing underground.
New technologies – from social media and GPS systems to artificial intelligence and digital twins – make the planet we inhabit unrecognizable from even 20 years ago and it’s only going to get faster, changing how we live.
The rise of the sharing economy, online marketplaces, and digital platforms are shattering old barriers and reducing the distances between industries, societies, and places, all of which are without adequate regulations are vanishing from scrutiny and accountability.
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While it’s true that today, leaders need to deal with unprecedented changes and an unpredictable and challenging future due to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Climate change, and the covid pandemic they need to be more agile, to deal with sudden changes and challenges that any one of these will bring.
Why?
Because the status quo as the inertia of past success can be crippling for the future.
The paradox of leadership lies in staying focused on the present, while also visualizing the future and creating a roadmap to reach it.
This is a major problem requiring Statmanship on a global scale.
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Why is all of this happening now?
What’s interesting about this question is, there’s no answer to that question.
What I think is so true about that is, with technology even nonconformists are conforming.
Why?
Because these days it’s difficult to not see how real the invisible world is affecting our lives and the systems that govern life.
Today, with the covid pandemic’s we see it is very rare that you find someone that’s not influenced by anyone else.
You don’t have to be a digital native to behave like one.
It’s the invisible world we want to connect with in order to maintain the magic in life.
Why?
Because a world without emotions will be a sterile world.
Yes, the invisible world is real.
It is the limited life of a limited mind.
Increasingly, this limited value is delivered through new cross-sector, outcome-based propositions, rather than traditional sector-specific products and services.
We have all experienced trying to get to speak to a human to solve a problem with a service – press one press two – listen to music – you inquiry- will be answered – press 3 if – till you give up.
If you can spell it you can’t enter it. A society that is dependent on technology can create inequality.
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To stopthis invisible world people must take ownership of things as the digital world is not about technology, but people.
At a time when geopolitical tensions are on the rise are at their highest level this century. And this turbulence is escalating. Even nuclear non-proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.
At the same time, we see trade and technological conflicts that fracture world markets, undermine growth and widen inequalities.
And all the while, our planet is on fire. The climate crisis rages on.
With Climate Change, we are risking a ‘great fracture’ between world powers, each with their own internet and AI strategy, as well as dominant currency, trade, and financial rules, and contradictory geopolitical and military views.
With dwindling natural resources, an unstable world climate, viruses on the rampart, not to mention the effects of pandemics on world trade, inequality, the world does not need politicians that do not think of the next election but statesmen of the next generation.
It is crucial to ensuring a united world.
Those yet to be connected remain cut off from the benefits of this new era and remain further behind. People need money to access the internet and buy the latest devices.
By 2050 there will be 9 billion people to feed, clothe, transport, employ and educate.
Maybe that’s not really bad when you think of what’s coming next. You couldn’t call it a fully digital world yet. It’s not even close.
However, there’s room to dream about building the world we want, instead of the one we’re turning into.
As we pursue unlimited growth, our limitless consumption threatens to crowd out everything else on Earth. We are warming the climate, overspending our financial resources, requiring more fresh water than we have, increasing income inequality, diminishing other species, and triggering shockwaves whenever we can’t cope with a problem. Billions are committed to a growth-driven world economy.
Our world is full of screens. We keep them in our hands, purses, and pockets, next to our beds while we sleep, and surround ourselves with screens on our desks and countertops. Our TV sets are morphing into interactive screens as we put them online so they display everything for free.
What if that networked system brought everyone the world’s best services, resources, and knowledge-based on what we do, as a normal part of everyday life?
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The top-down approach is no longer sustainable in the Economic/ Power/ or Democracy Capital Accountability. Leadership needs to be vigilant and create a long-term sustainable value proposition for all stakeholders.
The same technologies are giving rise to new business models, with organizations using digital to create and monetize new forms of value. Disruptions in the digital world occur at a phenomenal rate.
They have the power to impact the way entire industries operate reshaping entire industries with profit-seeking algorithms.
Although giving up your data was once an afterthought when gaining access to the newest internet services such as Facebook there aren’t many great options available to limit what is seen and known about you online.
YOU BECOME A DIGITAL FORM OF YOURSELF IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD OF THE INTERNET.
How do we define what a digital human is?
Worthless, a form of entertainment to have conversations with yourself without being able to show emotion and behavior as a real human.
So, is the invisible world the real world?
Hard to say, but I think it’s what makes the visible world worth living in.
When someone dies, the essence of that being merely inhabited that form – the life within the form was always invisible.
Digital leaders will have the power to shape the future of our world.
When we want to believe, there is still time to interrupt the announced disappearances of so many plant and animal species which, if we are not careful, will lead to our own end.
This situation cannot go on. It is our common duty to avoid it.
While risks intersect and technologies develop quickly, too often our institutions for governing international security remain reactive and slow-moving.
ALL HUMAN COMMENTS ARE APPRECIATED. ALL LIKE CLICKS AND ABUSE CHUCKED IN THE BIN.
Here we are at the start of another year and we are truly living in a very unique time in the history of our civilization, facing several simultaneous challenges and converging crises:
A deteriorating environment, very unequal distribution of dwindling resources, widespread poverty, wars, climate change, oppression of many peoples, and dissatisfaction with life even in those countries with a surplus of material wealth.
For the most part, these crises we humans have brought upon ourselves over the course of many centuries by our attitudes towards each other and towards nature, and by the concepts, we have developed regarding who we are and the very purpose of our being here — in other words, Our worldview.
Who are we?
Where do we come from?
What is our purpose?
Where are we going?
All of these questions are fundamental to how we individually and collectively make meaning. As such they are questions asked by all spiritual traditions and since the very beginning of our species. Even the first cave paintings suggest that as soon as we were human, we started to ask these kinds of questions.
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The only evidence you have that you exist as a self-aware being is your conscious experience of thinking about your existence.
Beyond that, you’re on your own.
You cannot access anyone else’s conscious thoughts, so you will never know if they are self-aware. Nonexistence is the absence of existence, by definition. Therefore there is no such thing as nonexistence.
To say that something does not exist thus seems to be a fallacy since NOTHING does exist.
How are you?
By far the biggest constituent of you is emptiness are atoms, and since all atoms are 99.9% empty space, technically, you’re made of nothing.
We call ourselves humans. We think we behave intelligently but we humans are animals! defined less by rationality and more by stupidity.
At the basic level, you are made of just four types of particles, which have been around for the majority of the lifetime of the Universe.
Atoms make up your body, 12 kg of bones, 33 kg of muscles, and 15 kg of fat. More than half of those cells aren’t exactly your own. They’re bacterial cells that weigh around 2 kg. Your body contains at least 60 chemical elements. For the most part, it’s oxygen and hydrogen forming H2O or water. 99% of the mass of your body is made up of just 6 elements. Of that, 65% is oxygen.
If you wanted to be more poetic, you could say you are made of stardust. All the elements you’re made of were once cooked up in the stars.
By the way, in case you wondered, the uncoiled DNA from all the cells in your body would stretch from here to Pluto and back.
What are you?
Mentally, humanity was created as a rational, volitional agent.
According to the Bible, you are a god. ( God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness” (Genesis 1:26) but God does not have a body so your physical being is nowhere near a god.
Physiologically and anatomically you are an animal struggling for survival on the basis of evolution.
Within just the past 12,000 years, your species, Homo sapiens, made the transition to producing food and changing our surroundings. We have been so successful that we have inadvertently created a turning point in the history of life on Earth.
We have altered the world in ways that benefit us greatly. But this transformation has unintended consequences for other species as well as for ourselves, creating new survival challenges, with our megacity incubators of viruses such as the flu and now Covid.
Where are we going?
Will our species go extinct?
The short answer is yes, replaced by Artificial Intelligence, but not life.
Why?
Because mankind will control life through its varied reproductive activities manipulating life, whether it be by cloning, gene splicing, genetic breeding, etc.
Life in its simplest form, a single-celled organism, has microbial intelligence and can learn and adapt behavior to its environment. However, everything starts with something already alive. Only life begets life and intelligence doesn’t come from non-intelligent sources.
Even the most simple of life forms is beyond our ability to create from non-living sources.
Life is created and is not the result of abiogenesis it controls and regulates the physical processes within each cell.
So since there is no evidence or logical consideration to believe that life is the result of a physical process, we can dismiss the concept of Artificial life as impossible. It isn’t just a gap in our understanding it is a physical impossibility.
However, there may well be life, with or without consciousness, interfacing with the physical components that support life created by an outside intelligence.
This is probably the most pressing and interesting question for the future. How much of life will be controlled by AI?
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The current Covid pandemic is being fought against by a new form of vacation that instructs our immune systems to operate in a particular way rather than the immune system reacting. A step in evolutionary development towards part AI life.
Where is this interpretation of behavior taking place?
What part of the cell decides one food-foraging pattern is preferable to another?
Where is the information stored while it’s being coded into an arrangement of molecules and atoms?
The nucleus of a living cell is often referred to as the “brain” of the cell because it controls cellular processes and functions. However, the nucleus is not capable of conscious levels of intelligence. In fact, we can’t point to any cell part and say, that’s where the intelligence has to be coming from.
Signals received by cells must be transmitted effectively into the cell to ensure an appropriate response. This step is initiated by cell-surface receptors.
How do conscious levels of intelligence now suddenly originate or emerge from unconscious atoms and molecules?
We have to bear in mind that in an evolutionary sense, nothing can influence where we wind up biologically unless it affects individual success in passing along genes. When a new behavior is written to the DNA, the information has to be assigned to an arrangement of atoms that advocate that consciousness exists at the microbial level.
If so, that creates even greater problems, and without going into all of them, the chief problem is that survival sets a pretty low bar.
The question isn’t so much whether humans survive the next three or three hundred thousand years, but whether we can do more than just survive.
The current virus pandemic highlights this problem. The virus hasn’t yet committed to any direction.
However, it is as with all viruses an evolving entity, subject to the same processes of evolution.
With the new mRNA vaccines, we have a choice to make!
Why?
Because it is inevitable that Genome editing is going to be the future.
Because now being alive is not a prerequisite for experiencing, evolution.
We either move into a new phase in the evolution of consciousness and a new era of life on the planet, or we will witness the unraveling of the web of life and the immature end of our species and much of the community of life with us.
The time to make this choice is now!
It starts with a fundamental shift in our dominant worldview.
It is time to grow up! and for us to respect all life.
What is our purpose?
This is explained in the following story.
“In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”
“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”
The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”
The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”
The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”
The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover, if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery, there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”
The first replied “Mother? Do you actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”
The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her, this world would not and could not exist.”
Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”
To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”
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