The most accurate simulation of the human brain ever has been carried out, but a single second’s worth of activity took one of the world’s largest supercomputers 40 minutes to calculate.
SO LET’S HAVE A LOOK AT WHAT WE HAVE ACHIEVED SINCE WE CAME DOWN OUT OF THE TREES AND STOOD UPRIGHT.
( I am sure there will be many gaps in what I write here so you will have plenty of ammunition to comment. Those of you who are shadow people lead by the like button feel free to press it. )
Right: On your marks we off.
At first we were of no significance till we discovered that we could walk up right, discovered fire, tools, and language. We became foragers/ hunters with no hierarchy spreading all over the world providing there was a land bridge developing new weapons and new clothing due to climate change and perhaps unfriendly rivals.
All that changed when we began to devote our efforts to manipulating the lives of animals and plants. The Farmer had arrived. More babies to be fed, so we burnt down forests and planted wheat thus becoming wheat slaves living in settled artificial enclaves dedicated to growing wheat.
Because of this we discovered writing and numbers, money and religion.
This lead to placing a material value not just on possession but on ourselves resulting in a conscious effort to create laws, customs, procedures, to run societies.
By this time with the human brain going into hibernation due to all the information that needed to be stored we are well on the way to creating religious gods, empires, armies, taxes, etc Thus the arrival of bureaucracy, rulers, social division, ruling classes, slaver, gun power, the wheel and sea worthy ships.
Of course building, pollution, masculine dominance and exploration were now in full swing and it’s not long before the world is dividing into Empires of different cultures, different languages, different belief, most still using their legs and horses with the odd set of wheels to get around.
The Roman empire broke up, the Mongol empire went to pieces, the Chines empire built a wall, America and Europe did not know each other existed. Alexander the Great conquered most of the known world.
90% of humans lived in a single mega world ; the world of Afro- Asia the rest lived in America, central America, the Andean world, the Australian world, islands of the Pacific.
They were all swallowed up by the Afro-Asian world.
Resources were plentiful. Till along came How Much is it. Money the foundation of Greed and cooperation between strangers drastically reducing diversity. The first step to we becoming US against the Rest.
The European Industrial Imperial steamroller gradually obliterated our uniqueness.
The Spanish quashed the Inca, Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigate the globe, Marco Polo gave the Vatican a Chines map of America, they sending Columbus off to discover it, while Queen Vic with the help of Darwin, Livingstone, Nelson, expanded the British Empire with ball and chain, cannon.
At this stage there is no evidence that history is working for the benefit of humans. Science, engineering, flight, medical advances, power, religious rightness, profit, wealth, corruption, greed and reckless plundering of the earths resources, ignorance, and credit now come into play.
Empirical observations are being put together with the help of mathematical tools.
All of this cost money and it did much more than just charting the universe, mapping the planet and cataloging the animals than did Galileo, Columbus and Darwin. If there had being no funds or these geniuses and they had not being born we would be still waiting on some others to do so.
Of course none of the above is in strict chronological order and I have left out, Michelangelo Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, William Shakespeare, Bach, Confucius, Aristotle, Newton, to mention a few but I hope you get the gist.
I grow sick and tired of all the same old lies
I might be a little young, so what’s wrong?
You don’t have to be old to be wise
— Judas Priest
Anyway it is suffice to say that European imperialism was entirely unlike all other imperial projects.
So here we are. WE CREATED THE WORLD THAT YOU SEE AROUND YOU.
After numerous wars and two million years of being marginal creatures, thirteen odd billion years after the big bang we have arrived at the Capitalist creed OF THE FREE MARKET and a belief that Science which is about 500 years old can solve all our problems.
The question is how many people want to live in a world that you see around you.
We need to ignite a second cognitive revolution. It is unclear whether bio engineering could really resurrect Neanderthals. Tinkering with our genes won’t necessarily kill us. But we might fiddle to such an extent that we would no longer be Homo sapiens.
In a previous post I asked what do we want to become. A human who stood on the moon and saw a dying world that could be so beautiful if we learned to share.
Paradise Lost or Found.
Unlike other animals, we humans need to create the means for our physical survival as well as our spiritual well-being. We need to figure out how to acquire food, build shelters, cure illnesses, build cities, travel to the Moon, and create everything that deserves the label “civilization.”
Take a moment to look around you. Reflect on your own achievements and take pride in them. Reflect on the virtues that have allowed you to achieve the things you value.
The potential for human achievement is endless, but only if we truly value achievement and appreciate that the achievements we create in our modern world are manifestations of the moral virtues we each create in our character. Not Twitter, not Face book, not the internet, or the web of everything, not Google, not Apple.
If there’s one thing that many science and reality-minded people tend to do quite a bit, it’s over analyze every little detail.
The answer is right in front of your eyes . Open them.
We must tap Greed by creating a World Aid Fund by placing 0.05% commission on all High Frequency Stock Exchange Transactions, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions over $20.000. on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisitions, on all new Drilling wells. ( See previous Posts)
Of all mankind’s ostensible insoluble problems, one has remain the most vexing, interesting and important, the problem of death itself.
The denial of death is one of humanity’s deepest motivations.
In the decades to come we may see, one universe, one humankind, one religion, that unites us all but in the end we all share the same destiny – that just as surely as we are alive, so we die.
Death reminds us of our human vulnerability in spite of all our technological advances.
It is an integral part of our lives that gives meaning to human existence.
All that you are, and all that you’ve done and been is culminated in your death.
But now it is turning into a technical problem?
In recent years, medical technology has advanced rapidly. It has been suggested that methods such as nanotechnology, cell rejuvenation, and gene therapy might result in a significant increase in the human lifespan.
In theory, with the help of medical technology, it could be possible to keep living for hundreds or thousands of years, even eternally.
The whole brain definition of death is an unwieldy, historical compromise which will unravel as 21st century technologies permit the repair, replacement and manipulation of body, and especially brain, tissue.
We would basically be left with suicide, illnesses, accidents, famine, and homicides. Another words the like hood of dying from some disease or virus will be highly unlikely.
Even if it seems a distant goal the quest of immortality is very much on the cards.
The (current) essence of being human is to be mortal, immortals would necessarily be a different type of being and therefore have a different identity.
To control human destiny, with the dream of conquering death would raise profound questions.
You are not obliged to entertain all thought experiments, no matter how implausible, but if technology will make our current ethical views inadequate within some finite, foreseeable period of time, we should adjust our thinking, and law, to a more solid footing.
Our current concepts of death don’t very well address the status of a person who might eventually be brought back to life.
When and if these remediative technologies come available, there will be tremendous material interests at stake. These technologies will develop just as the industrialized world shifts to increasing proportion of elderly.
Nanotechnology is developing a bionic immune system, and by the year 2050 we could reach a mortal state.
Research is also being conducted on the creation of computer chip matrices into which nerves can grow, and which could permit two-way communication between neurons and computers.
Such computer-brain interfaces raise the possibility that computer technology may also be developed to remediate neural capacities.
Already advances are being made in electronic prosthetics for sight and hearing, from cochlear implants to optic nerve interfaces.
Computer engineers are also developing biological computing and storage media3, and software that learns, suggesting a future convergence between organic computing, neural network software and neural-computer interfaces.
Personhood in a cybernetic medium is a common, but minority, position in the field of artificial intelligence and cognitive science.
Most cognitive scientists accept the materialist assertion that mind is an emergent phenomenon from complex matter, and that cybernetics may one day provide the same requisite level of complexity as a brain.
Of course, those who embrace the possibility of self-aware machine minds do not necessarily want to see them be developed, or grant them “human rights” once they do develop.
Another technology that may eventually challenge our death concepts is cryonic suspension, the freezing of heads, or whole bodies, for eventual reanimation.
Barring the end of civilization as we know it, technology will eventually develop the capacity to remediate severe brain injuries, and perhaps even translate human thought into alternative media.
So you are can begin to see that we will be forced to acknowledge that the destruction of the “integrative” functions of the body is an inadequate definition of death, since the social person will remain intact.
When we get to the point where neurological functions can be controlled, designed and turned on and off, the illusory sense of continuous self-identity will become more obvious.
Once we cast off this fundamental predicate of Enlightenment ethics, the existence of an autonomous individual, we are beyond the ethical frameworks of contemporary bioethics.
It might be necessary that old people had a duty to die.
We soon have to answer the question: Is there can only be one death.
There are ethical worldviews that do not have the autonomous individual at their core, from the Democracy to Communism.
By the time we have developed adequate frameworks based on our cherished liberal democratic values it will be too late.
After more than a century of looking for it, brain researchers have long since concluded that there is no conceivable place for such a self to be located in the physical brain, and that it simply doesn’t exist. Luckily if we wished to cure death, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that we might be able to do that even in the distant future.
But don’t be fooled. Have a look,
//youtu.be/u_Vpy3xs0cE
The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. “The Glorious Dead.”
Warfare has been the crucial defining element for Britain and its empire in the 20th century. There have been only two years since 1945 that a serving member of the armed forces has not been killed.
The Cenotaph (literally “empty tomb” in Greek) May they rest in Peace.
But what is the most powerful technology on Earth?
You may think of a B-2 bomber, or a nuclear reactor, or maybe even far-reaching social media platforms.
But there is only one technology known to man that can heal itself, adapt to its environment, sustain itself for decades, replicate, and evolve:
The living organism.
Biological systems have the ability to do things that no human-made machine or chemistry can begin to approach: the ability to replicate, to learn, to scale from one to billions, to adapt, and to evolve.
By gaining control over biological systems and their biochemical pathways — and designing new pathways by rewriting the DNA “software” in cells — synthetic biologists are ushering in the “Biological Age.”
Creating substances with not only superior electrical, optical, and mechanical properties, but with properties that we have never seen before in man-made materials: materials that can regenerate, that respond to the environment, that learn and evolve.
We’re “on the cusp of revolutionary change” coming much “sooner than you think.”
Sugar-fueled biological actuators for hybrid robotics are on the horizon, all grown in “living foundries.
You might think that this is science fiction but it is becoming tangible due to the rapid, simultaneous development of genome-scale engineering tools, enormous data sets of genome sequences, new imaging and analytical capabilities, and the convergence of advances in information science and engineering with biology..
While it’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict future consumer applications.
If we could harness the power of biology in a predictable manner, then we could create living materials that perform functions seamlessly, cheaply, and with very low energy requirements, like walking, talking, dancing, killing, Robots.
A goal along these lines, of course, raises a lot of questions:
Better for whom? Better in what way? For biological humans? For all conscious beings? If that is the case, who or what is conscious?
Evolutionary biological changes move every which way with no apparent direction.
Yet, we continue nonetheless to see a movement toward greater complexity and greater intelligence, indeed to evolution’s supreme achievement of evolving a neocortex capable of hierarchical thinking we are now on the verge of creating a “post human” stage of civilization.
This stage may be only a few decades away.
Unfortunately if all the AI systems decided to go on strike tomorrow, our civilization would be crippled: Primitive human societies might then remain on Earth indefinitely but not to worry we’ll be uploading our entire MINDS to computers by 2045 and our bodies will be replaced by machines within 90 years.
The simple act of connecting with someone via a text message, e-mail, or cell-phone call uses intelligent algorithms to route the information. (The number of people using Twitter and Facebook daily is around 1,138,000,000)
So a digital brain will need a human narrative of its own fictional story so that it can pretend to be a biological human.
I could at this stage give your brain a more ambitious goal, such as contributing to a better world which is badly needed considering that we are well on the way to extinction. However there is no justification for thinking that our own species will be especially privileged or protected from future technological disasters.
We tend to view the existence of our race as constituting a great ethical value when in fact our existence in a biology sense it is not worth the steam off our piss.
Why?
Because in the future almost every product we touch will be originally designed in a collaboration between human and artificial intelligence and then built-in automated factories.
Because we will continue to pollute our planet and the sky’s above to appease the Stock Exchange.
Because there will be many ways in which humanity could become extinct before reaching post humanity by wiping out what we should be rely on.
Perhaps the most natural interpretation of disaster is that we are likely to go extinct as a result of the development of some powerful but dangerous technology to combat climate change. We would do well to remember Robert Oppenheimer words when he first viewed an atomic explosion ” Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”
Extinction might be the best option.
It is not clear that creating a new human race is immoral.
As non biological brains become as capable as biological ones of effecting changes in the world—indeed, ultimately far more capable than unenhanced biological ones—we will need to consider their moral education.
The question is can they have any morals and if so what left of us will have to dumb itself down considerably. For any post human stage system that displayed the knowledge of Watson, (Watson is technology that works to understand us) for instance, would be quickly unmasked as non biological.
So what does the Future of Tech Robots.
The power of computing doubles, on average, every two years quoting the developments from genetic sequencing and 3D printing. Technological singularity is the development of ‘super intelligence’ brought about through the use of technology.
Itself imply that we are likely to go extinct soon, and we are unlikely to reach a post human stage.
What would be left of humanity would be zombies or “shadow-people” – humans simulated only at a level sufficient for the fully simulated people not to notice anything suspicious.
HOWEVER ALL IS NOT LOST
This possibility of a post human stage is compatible with us remaining at, or somewhat above, our current level of technological development for a long time before going extinct.
We are still lacking a “theory of everything”, but we cannot rule out the possibility that novel physical phenomena, not allowed for in current physical theories, may be utilized to transcend those constraints.
If we could create quantum computers, or learn to build computers out of nuclear matter or plasma, we could push closer to the theoretical limits. At our current stage of technological development, we have neither sufficiently powerful hardware nor the requisite software to create conscious minds in computers.
Simulating the entire universe down to the quantum level is obviously in feasible, unless radically new physics is discovered.
As we gain more experience with virtual reality, we will get a better grasp of the computational requirements for making new worlds appear realistic to their visitors.
These shortcomings will eventually be overcome.
At the moment the amount of computing power needed to emulate a human mind can be roughly estimated. Memory seems to be a no more stringent constraint than processing power.
Our current understanding impose theoretical limits on the information processing attainable in a given lump of matter. We can with much greater confidence establish lower bounds on post human computation, by assuming only mechanisms that are already understood.
One candidate is molecular nanotechnology, which in its mature stage would enable the construction of self-replicating nanobots capable of feeding on dirt and organic matter – a kind of mechanical bacteria. Such nanobots, designed for malicious ends, could cause the extinction of all life on our planet.
So we are able to gain an insight into how an apparently purposeless and directionless process can achieve an apparently purposeful result in one field (biological evolution) by looking at another field (thermodynamics).
In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between both.
As you cannot create energy or destroy it and energy can only move from a state of higher activity to one lower activity it stands to reason that biological evolution, simple put, is descent with modification.
To acknowledge that history is not deterministic is to acknowledge that it is just a coincidence that most of us believe in nationalism, capitalism, and human rights. There is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humans.
Now you might think that all of this is hog wash, but every point in history is a crossroads and sometimes history- or the people who make history – takes unexpected turns.
How we using and develop Technology will determine the forming any new Monotheism Global Society.
Are we heading towards ecological disaster or technological paradise? Both do not seem bound by any deterministic laws.
You may rest assured that when Cognitive computers and Quantum computers get together with Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality along with the Arms race, biochemical pathways will not enhance human well-being.
Because human brains suffer from minimal development.
Instead of concentrating on developing technologies beneficial to mankind we are developing autonomous weapons with no accountability to select, to kill, or destroy ( which means no deterrence of future crimes, no retribution for victims, no social condemnation, no meaningful human control)
Individual humans like me are far too ignorant and weak to influence the course of history to my own advantage. It for some mysterious reason like all of us follows one path then another like a gene that has no awareness, or consciously seek to survive.
The next effort of science will be to create a new body for the human being. It will have a perfect brain-machine interface to allow control and a human brain life support system so the brain can survive outside the body.
A computer environment into which human minds can be uploaded.
These are daunting challenges, to say the least.
Each will require the commitment and individual efforts of literally billions of our fellow humans, as well as many careful, specific programs put into effect by entire populations. But there is one action that we must take, individually and as a world, if any of the others are to be successful. It directly contradicts some of our deepest evolutionary programming, but if we are to survive as a species, we must stabilize or even reduce population size.
God forbid. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.
However it is conceivable to imagine history going on for generations upon generations while bypassing the Scientific Revolution as modern culture and science have to rely on religious and ideological beliefs to justify and finance its existence and scientific research.
So the below fellows might be the very thing to complete the Job. Rid the world of the very thing that is destroying it.
One last thought try not to join the shadow people by pressing the like button. Leave a comment. When you comment, you inspire, when you press the like button you expire.
Sorry for the over the top headline but Scientists have done the maths and according to their calculations, life on Earth has 1.75 to 3.25 billion years left to thrive.
Even short geologic time scales outrun our ability to project human history.
One common, frequently unconscious misconception is that history is linear, progressing toward an inevitable end point.
Our inability to see ourselves as part of a continuum of processes that will continue into the future is also directly linked to our shortsightedness in managing our environment. Human impacts already equal or surpass many natural processes. For example, human earth-moving processes exceed natural erosion in the volume of material moved (Hooke, 2000; Wilkinson, 2005).
Let’s peer into the future. The reasons for disaster are not hard to conjecture.
Technology might become so advanced that humans will no longer need to modify the natural environment extensively, but any attempt to predict technology far in advance is bound to be almost pure speculation.
Space Weather (which includes any and all conditions and events on the sun, in the solar wind, in near-Earth space and in our upper atmosphere) can affect space-borne and ground-based technological systems and through these, human life and endeavor. Not to mention Yellowstone National Park that could decide to erupt.
Even if humans avoid causing a mass extinction, many species will have become naturally extinct and new ones will have evolved.
The truth is we don’t have a particularly detailed idea of what is going on inside out own planet never mind on the surface.
When the Earth’s molten core eventually cools and hardens to the point that there is little or no slip-sliding of different substances, it more than likely its magnetic field will die out as well. The Earth is thought to have begun this cooling sometime in the last billion years.
That’s good, since one way or the other we certainly have a lot of time left; while a magnetic flip is largely meaningless, magnetic death certainly would not be.
In all likelihood, the Sun will swallow the Earth long before then, as it convulses and expands as a part of its natural death throes and that’s if a giant asteroid or a nuclear war doesn’t finish us off first.
However the 92.9 million miles between us and our host star will not be enough to keep us comfortable.
For those of you that need to use Google the Sun is a magnetic variable star at the center of our solar system that drives the space environment of the planets, including the Earth. The distance of the Sun from the Earth is approximately 93 million miles. At this distance, light travels from the Sun to Earth in about 8 minutes and 19 seconds. The Sun has a diameter of about 865,000 miles, about 109 times that of Earth. Its mass, about 330,000 times that of Earth, accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. About three-quarters of the Sun’s mass consists of hydrogen, while the rest is mostly helium. Less than 2% consists of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, iron, and others. The Sun is neither a solid nor a gas but is actually plasma. This plasma is tenuous and gaseous near the surface, but gets denser down towards the Sun’s fusion core.
Where was I? The earth will become inhospitable to humans long before the planet enters the hot zone ( Stars like our Sun shine for nine to ten billion years. The Sun is about 4.5 billion years old, judging by the age of moon rocks. Based on this information, current astrophysical theory predicts that the Sun will become a red giant in about five billion (5,000,000,000) years. So there is not much to worry about.
However I am pushing on in years and I often wonder how my generation will survive the impending climate crisis never mind the future of our planet. There is a tragic alienation between us and nature.
There’s not much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human extinction.” The destruction of the planet, on the other hand, is a good bet, because there is money in this, and as long as that’s the case, it is going to continue. The amount we consume each year already far outstrips what our planet can sustain, and the World Wildlife Fund estimates that by 2030 we will be consuming two planets’ worth of natural resources annually.
Over the course of this century, the relationship between the human world and the planet that sustains it has undergone a profound change. When the century began, neither human numbers nor technology had the power radically to alter planetary system.
We know that in two billion years or so, an expanding sun will boil away our oceans, leaving our home in the universe uninhabitable—unless, that is, we haven’t already been wiped out by the Andromeda galaxy, which is on a multi billion-year collision course with our Milky Way. Moreover, at least a third of the thousand mile-wide asteroids that hurtle across our orbital path will eventually crash into us, at a rate of about one every 300,000 years.
Perhaps Google is a good idea after all to prepare a copy of our civilization and move it into outer space and out of harm’s way—a backup of our cultural achievements and traditions.
There is hope on the horizon during my Nuclear Warheads reading ( See The Series of Posts) I learned that a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan could decrease global surface temperature by 1°C–2°C for 5–10 years and have major impacts on precipitation and solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface. No much help. We will hit the average of 400 ppm…within the next couple of years. Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon—an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 pentagrams of it (a pentagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons). That’s about half of all the estimated organic carbon stored in Earth’s soils.
In the short-term, we need to make it in the economic interests of people to do the right thing. The chances of that happening in a Capitalist world I will leave up to yourself to decide.
Here is what is happening.
The signs of a worsening climate crisis are all around us, whether we allow ourselves to see them or not.
Unintended changes are occurring in the atmosphere, in soils, in waters, among plants and animals, and in the relationships among all of these.
Life-threatening challenges of desertification, deforestation, and pollution, of toxic chemicals, toxic wastes, and acidification of carbon dioxide and of gases that react with the ozone layer, and from any future war fought with the nuclear arsenals including increasingly powerful floods, droughts, wildfires, heat waves, and storms are underway. Evacuations from low-lying South Pacific islands have already begun.
The onslaught of droughts, earthquakes, epic rains and floods over the past decade is triple the number from the 1980s and nearly 54 times that of 1901, when this data was first collected.
Yet we are aware that such a re-orientation on a continuing basis is simply beyond the reach of present decision-making structures and institutional arrangements, both national and international and endure most of the poverty associated with environmental degradation.
The rate of change is outstripping the ability of scientific disciplines and our current capabilities to access and advise. It is frustrating the attempts of political and economic institutions, which evolved in a different, more fragmented world, to adapt and cope.
This planet has not experienced an ice-free Arctic for at least the last three million years. Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural resources, and ecology at the University of Arizona ” the implications are truly dire and profound for our species and the rest of the living planet.”
We are currently in the midst of what scientists consider the sixth mass extinction in planetary history, with between 150 and 200 species going extinct daily, a pace 1,000 times greater than the “natural” or “background” extinction rate.
The ability of the human psyche to take in and grasp such information is being tested. And while that is happening, yet more data continues to pour in—and the news is not good.
Thanks to climate change oceans have already lost 40 percent of their phyto plankton, the base of the global oceanic food chain, because of climate-change-induced acidification and atmospheric temperature variations.
So you might well ask if some version of extinction or near-extinction will overcome humanity.
It deeply worries many people who are seeking ways to place those concerns on the political agendas.
Climate-change-related deaths are already estimated at five million annually,
We’ve still got plenty of time left to enjoy planet Earth but we need to know how to respond, to changes that are already happening—and to those coming in the near future. It’ll happen very fast.
It appears that there is not much hope for the future, nor for a governmental willingness to make anything close to the radical changes that would be necessary to quickly ease the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; nor can we expect the mainstream media to put much effort into reporting on all of this because we are all more interested in leaving a legacy of material wealth that will be totally worthless.
Climate change and other human influences are altering Earth’s living systems in big ways, such as changes in growing seasons and the spread of invasive species,”
The world-wide spread of extremely resource-intensive lifestyles and economic practices has become one of the most important challenges we face.
There is an increased awareness of human impact on the environment, however, the rate of environmental degradation is still on the rise.
Although many people are uncomfortable with the way things are, they are not motivated to act on their beliefs because they see no other way.
The environmental discourse is still confined to a relatively small minority
of elites and ‘experts’, and it remains incredibly top-down but there are no experts as we are all dancing on the edge of acceptable risk.
Is economic growth making us happier?
What type of change is possible?
By addressing things such as human well-being and the meeting of the needs in environmentally in a sound way, the discourse brings economy down to the grass root level of everyday life.
It enables us to ask questions such as:
How do we change the present day short-shortsightedness which is the source of most modern environmental and economic problems?
Messages of environmental risk should be effective in relaying seriousness and immediacy, but arguably, they are also in danger of breeding hopelessness and fatalism. Although many people are uncomfortable with the way things are, they are not motivated to act on their beliefs because they see no other way.
This is tragic because the way in which we perceive the future has a significant influence on the choices we make.
It affects our values, attitudes, coping mechanisms, expectations feelings, motivations and behaviors. The very act of articulating a future presents a tendency and inclination, which increases its likeliness of occurrence.
Could it therefore be possible to produce a set of different outcomes by providing engaging, lucid and optimistic alternative ecological future narratives?
I have posted many posts on the Subject but let’s try an other approach.
Suggest an inexpensive tool that could make a difference.
Sufficient living questions the connection made between growth and quality of life.
The last time climate change happened was approximately 55 million years ago and it took 1000 years to recover from the level of elevated carbon after the extinction of dinosaurs.
Imagine a world without pollution and waste: Products are made from materials that are beneficial for humans and their surroundings. Imagine a world where humans can be glad that their actions benefit those around them.
It seems that people are not good at providing (quasi) exact statements of the future, but they can be better in stating whether the past trend will change and in which direction.
Over a hundred species are still becoming extinct everyday. One and a half acres of rain forest is still disappearing every second.
These problems are link to a lack of ideas concerning how to deal with environmental problems and the future of our society.
It is always useful to conceive futures in a generational paradigm, because we find it easier to think of futures in terms of our children and grandchildren’s lifetimes. The decisions we make in the next 20 years will determine the fate of the earth and human civilization for centuries to come.
In this context, online news gives a quick overview on what is happening in the world and the use of the Internet as information source has become an inherent part of everyday life leading to a sort of “big brother feeling” of being observed.
Unfortunately, most of our ecological future narratives are ambiguous or inherently pessimistic.
For instance, one of the most popularized means of living within nature are ‘sustainable futures. However this vision lacks clarity or a consensus over what it means to live ‘sustainably’. Moreover, a proliferation of ‘sustainability’ definitions leave some to regard it as a landfill dump for everyone’s environmental and social wish list.
In a sense of powerlessness. people perceive the environment to be a single totalising entity that is ‘out there,’ enabling them to remain emotionally distant, despondent and in a state of resignation.
High levels of non-engagement are further exacerbated by the lack of faith in the institutions tasked with combating the problems. People are choosing not to dwell on ecological problems by using reflexive strategies of non-engagement with global issues including the future.
The apparent lack of desirable alternatives is highly dangerous.
Could it therefore be possible to produce a set of different outcomes by providing engaging, lucid and optimistic alternative ecological future narratives?
In other words, if governments continue to think in four-year election cycles, businesses work from one financial year to the next and stock markets re-start everyday there is no hope of achieving anything.
When imagining futures, we also need to invent time for change.
What is needed is long-term thinking that reconciles itself to a planet that is 4.6 billion years old?
We support in the capacity to imagine and articulate preferred outcomes, which in turn mobilise action and creates an opportunity for the visions to embed themselves as possibilities in reality. As opposed to the current approach of endlessly treating symptoms of a much deeper problem that is both out of sight and out of control.
Each and every individual needs to be actively (and creatively) involved by, possibly, visualising, spreading and implementing ideas of alternative societal models. We need a method that enables us to think beyond existing societal models.
While Industrial welfare state mainly defends business-as-usual change can only be achieved in the world to-day by what I call,
– An Universal Electronic Voice that demands change –
# UEV- Universal Electronic Voice.
When we want to enable consumers to execute truly effective change it is central to empower them to understand their role as important actors in the field.
This is beyond governments, and our present day world institutions.
Governments: Because before they can mend a road there is an other government. Institutions: Because they have turned into gossip shops with no funds, run by the market.
We need to re-define what it meant by people power.
A unified electronic voice will do just that resulting in a movement that unified our cohesive efforts. That will enable the ‘democratisation’ of modern environmentalism that are fixated on finding solutions to one that imagines entirely new possibilities
The debate over climate change and whether it is being influenced by man’s activity has ceased. The prevailing view is that climate change is real and that it is influenced by human activity. The link between rising consumption and climate change is becoming clear and opposition to consumerism is growing.
Images of the future in which the Universal E Voice should be used as tools for making images become part of reality, it can be used to direct actions and decision-making.
Of course none of the above has any hope of becoming a reality unless we tap into the world of greed.
This can only be done by a collective demand to place a world aid commission of 0.05% on all High Frequency trading, Sovereign wealth funds acquisitions and foreign exchange transactions over $20.000, creating a perpetual funded fund. ( see previous posts)
As such UEV(universal electronic voice) does not describe the actions needed to achieve the described future however it would be the first step in the right direction to be heard. We all know timescales are the best until after the critical period is over and we have the benefit of hindsight.
Now it the time to combine all of those how are Whining on the Internet and Social Media into one voice.
With the rather elusive and volatile character of the Internet creating a focus point for the over strain user of the Net when it comes to selecting individually important and relevant information to establish a collection pool offering one voice has many difficulties to over come.
Perhaps # UEV- Universal Electronic Voice might to the trick.
I am all ears to any suggestions.
The mere fact that more of these devices are constantly introduced to the market and the ways in which they are advertised show that yet again a different perception of the future.
This is only the top of the iceberg.
What more ecologically benign consumption and production patterns would mean in practice? is another question to be discussed.
And to what extent it is fruitful to talk about economy beyond the social? Is another in dire need of serious discussion.
This might be too ambitious a subject to tackle but it is certainly a subject that you can let the imagination go wild.
So to read this post you will have to have dispassionate intelligence.
When you ask for opinions about what future humans might look like, you typically get one of two answers.
Some people trot out the old science-fiction vision of a big-brained human with a high forehead and higher intellect. Others say humans are no longer evolving physically—that technology has put an end to the brutal logic of natural selection and that evolution is now purely cultural.
However if you look at present day DNA techniques, which probe genomes both present and past, they have unleashed a revolution in studying evolution.
Since man fell out of a tree and stood up with 99% OF CHIMPANZEE DNA we continue to show genetically induced changes to our physiology and perhaps to our behavior as well.
Until fairly recently in our history, human races in various parts of the world were becoming more rather than less distinct.
The difficulties of the present-day point to a one-lopsidedness in our culture that harms both men and women.
Which of course we being the first man have not quite got the nervous system that is capable of seen so.
Perhaps it is the very reason we have a race of lassitude which will be the one cause of its decay. The conflict between the intransigent loyalty to life and the embattled against death proves this point.
Humans have survived for thousands of years and will most like survive thousands of more but it is becoming hard to remember life before digital news. The two world wars and current conflicts display so tragically the incompetence of us the first man to control our own nature.
We find ourselves swimming in an electronic sea where we could eventually be devoured—or ignored as an unnecessary anachronism.
”Although the last survivor may proclaim himself universal Emperor, his reign will be brief and his subjects will all be corpses.”
Civilization as we know it could probably survive one more world war, provided it occurs fairly soon and does not last long. After which no individual will think, or even feel, for himself, but each will be contentedly a mere unit in the mass.
I am dealing mainly with the gloomy aspects of the present situation of mankind. It is necessary to do so, in order to persuade the world to adopt measures running counter to traditional habits of thought and ingrained prejudices.
If the danger of wars were removed, scientific technique could at last be used to promote human happiness. If wars no longer occupied men’s thoughts and energies, we could, within a generation, put an end to all serious poverty throughout the world.
Unless we can cope with the problem of abolishing war, there is no reason whatever to rejoice in labor saving technique, but quite the reverse.
Owing to the modern impossibility of successful rebellion this is only possible through the creation of a single armed force in control of the whole world that wars will stop.
If you look back across the aeons to the first man you can see that his faith is already woven through spiritual desolation into senility and mutual intolerance.
On the other hand he lived at one with nature and woman.
Future Last man will have to live with eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind all computerized. Even the mind will tie in organically with “know-it-all computer memory banks. Every one of the six organs will have disposable modules, likes cassettes, and will gain an electric boost. He will also have to have a lot of the opposite sex within him.
How many people would have believed you if five hundred years ago you had said, “In five hundred years, there will be airplanes, television, and radios?” Everyone would have considered you insane.
By the time human genes are grafted onto animal bodies and alter human genes with animals strains, this mutual genetic modification will produces a freakish, mutant, hybrid that resembles neither parent.
So will this be the Last human? It’s not really human. You say it’s an animal? It’s not exactly an animal either.
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