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The next objective, one I think sadly lacking in our society, is health care.
● Develop health care to expand our life spans and make us healthier longer
Sure we are finding things out all the time but how little progress we are making and yet we know so much about our bodies and how they work.
I see this working in four ways. First of all I see us developing cures for many diseases. Basic cures. Let’s invest some money in this and let’s attack each hurdle in turn until they are all down. Pretty much as we are doing now but simply more of.
The second way is to cure genetic issues. Imagine that no matter what your child is born with they can live a normal life with a normal lifespan. Some children need care all their lives and thus there are several lives improved by this. We are already working on some of these.
The third way is actually keeping us active. Developing new limbs where the old ones are severed. New hips, fingers etc. Attaching new bits to replace worn out body parts. How is it that we can get a cancer in a lung and it kills us? We know how oxygen is transferred into our body and we must be able to artificially do this in a compact and portable manner. Either via cloning or via technology.
The fourth way is enhancing our bodies. Even grafting our brains into robotic bodies when we can get to that stage. Brain goes into a sphere. Sphere has standard interfaces that integrate into anything you want. Human looking robotic bodies means being able to walk on Mars just like you walk on Earth and you don’t have to worry about wearing a suit or actually being integrated into a machine to explore other planets which would crush you otherwise. Working as a builder? Have a body made up as a JCB with all the attachments while you are working. All this of course is based on my belief that you are your brain and no other part of your body is required. Plug and Play interfaces allow you to integrate with any body you build or machine you control. The benefits are endless although I bet many people won’t see that as a step forward today. There are some ethical issues to be considered here but as we progress we can deal with them as they happen.
From what I can see we are discovering things all the time. Personally I see nano robots being the cure for most of these ills. Little robots that will analyse your body daily and fix anything it comes across be it physical damage as in a cut or break or medical damage as in cancer or high cholesterol.
There are many bright people out there. The only ones getting funding now are for global warming or weapons. We need to point these people in new directions.
The next short term objective, a key component, is Power.
● Develop power generation facilities that are safe and efficient
We need it to power the replicators for food and to run all our computers as well as the million and one gadgets we have to make life easier in the home. We need it to do this in the background where we don’t need to think about it all nor do we want it to be a concern for us. Of course anything that generates enough power will be a concern but we want the risk minimised and contingency plans in place for any realistic events.
So where are we going to get all this safe clear power?
Well, it I won’t bore you with the math (basically because it is too complicated for me and my calculator won’t handle it) but if you consider that the sun emits heat radiation out in all directions and how small our planet is in comparison. Think of how much energy is wasted. Simply blasted into space. Yet consider that the small percentage that hits us generates a massive amount of heat especially at the equator. Remember that even small amounts of sunlight can be converted to power even with our inefficient systems. Imagine what we can do several generations of solar panels from now. Now I do see the sun as the source for all our power. Everything we have stems from it yet I do not see it being collected viably via solar panels on roofs and out in the desert as we propose at the moment. However, the future is a different matter.
Now how about a sun farm in space. Wouldn’t that be something. Millions of miles of radiation collected and routed to Earth. Not sure how that would work but as our power requirements grew we could just add some more square miles in the vastness of empty space in our solar system. Worth thinking about. Nice clean power and virtually inexhaustible. However, in the short term I see some of these new reactors see example. Strategically placed to ensure coverage and ability to handle increased loads.
Until we all have our little power plants the size of AA batteries but mini reactors which are enough to run anything an individual could possible want.
Well lets very quickly look at each of the short term objectives which I think we are in a position to work on now. These are all projects that we can do and our ingenuity could cause giant leaps forward. These all link together and between them will alleviate most of the ills in our society.
Let’s start with food. Something we all need to survive.
● Develop a food source that uses less land space to give us room to grow.
The current problem with our food supply is everything takes so much land space and water to grow. Progress throughout history has meant that we make much more efficient use of these resources but inevitably in the end we will reach a limit with our current crops and livestock and as our numbers will continue to increase we will need more land and water to keep everyone fed. Obviously this too has a limit.
So thinking outside the box. How about some Star Trek like replicators for foodstuff? Mmmm. A bit beyond us at the moment but that is clearly the next stage. So where are we now? What is it we need?
Well where we are now is eating vegetable and animal matter to provide us with the necessary nutrients, proteins, etc. However when we look at it after the taste and texture of eating it all ends up as an unrecognisable mush in the stomach where it is digested. So we have a two fold process. One where we are eating, the pleasure bit and the second where we are extracting the nutrients. Only one being critical.
I’m sure that we can already catalogued the nutrients that we need for healthy life. There are so many vitamin pills around that everything must be covered. We must be close to creating a food pill which covers all our needs. What exactly is it that is given to coma patients that keeps them alive for years and can be fed directly into the stomach through tubes? No chewing necessary and I’m sure it is not prime steak.
One popular suggestion is for CHON factories, mentioned in Frederik Pohl’s Gateway series where asteroids are mined for the basic elements and used to create food in automated factories.
The eating part is going to be the most difficult to get over. We like to eat. It is genetic and we have evolved to like it. We like to taste, smell and feel the texture of our food in order to enjoy it. That’s why we like a good steak so much. It hits all the right buttons. We will need to replicate this in some way artificially. I would imagine nowadays taste and smells can easily be replicated to fool those senses but what about texture and looks. Soya products seem to be getting better and that is a start. However in the end it comes down to personal taste and if you really want real steak then you can pay for it and eventually it will be indistinguishable. Our real food requirements will be significantly cheaper and many of us don’t really have the time to savour our food anyway.
I’m sure there will be a way. The culture change will come later and in the meantime we can improve our land/water to food ration. Can’t wait for the replicators to arrive though. ‘Tea. Earl Grey hot’ but in the end I see us not eating at all and all our requirements being supplied by a little box inside our body feeding nutrients as required and our stomachs etc. being as superfluous as our appendix and a politicians balls.
I know that you are saying ‘What is this guy going on about?’ ‘Universe is 93 billion light years across. So what?’ and I understand why you say so. All I am doing is putting a few base facts on the table which I will refer to later but in my mind all I am saying is that we are very likely not unique, the earth is not going to shrivel up and wither out no matter what we do and whatever happens to the human race is up to us. The Universe does not care, time does not care and the odds are stacked against us. We need to sort our own lives out and not leave anything to chance.
The base facts very basically being;
- We are in a single place, the Earth, and for the foreseeable future all our resources must come from here.
- Whilst here we must make sure we do not make it uninhabitable as we have nowhere else to go.
- We are basically animals and forcing us to go against our nature is going to generate unintended consequences.
- We are easily manipulated. Usually through the money for nothing route but the fear route works just as well.
- Men and women are wired differently.
- Everyone has a sliding scale and it all depends on where the pointer stops. However, we are all generally in agreement about what is best.
- Everything we do is for short term benefit. Sometimes by necessity but usually because of human generated events beyond our control. No one is looking at the big picture for our species.
So IMO, the main short term objectives we should be looking at are;
- Develop a food source that uses less land space to give us room to grow.
- Develop power generation facilities that are safe and efficient.
- Develop health care to expand our life spans and make us healthier longer.
- Look at our transport facilities.
- Look at our use of land space.
- Sort out our social system.
- Develop robots to do our menial tasks.
- Introduce true leadership using technology and get rid of professional politicians.
- Look at the impact on our society of changes such as fewer menial jobs.
As longer term objectives we need to invest in the research for;
- Developing Faster Than Light travel and get out there.
- Developing habitats for deep space, either our solar system or beyond.
- Immortality.
To be honest I believe we can do the initial stages for all the short term objectives now. It’s just nobody is really investing the money. Ironic really as in the medium term money won’t be an issue.
Over the next few days I’m going to look at each of these in turn and add a few more. Then I’m going to get down at looking at what is going on now and see where we can go. Beyond that I’m not sure. Maybe get back to looking in disgust at what is going on and commenting on each and every one. Where will I get the time?
The way I tend to look at things, both here and in my RL, is that I look at where we are now. Define, as much as I can, where we want to end up. Then work out a plan from moving to there. Too many people believe that by starting again they can get Utopia but it generally causes too many problems. Move on from where we are. Little, clearly defined steps until we get to where we want to be and then do the same for the next stage and so on. This is a long term project for the human species and needs to be treated as such.
Our species is complicated. It has evolved from another species that we share so many characteristics with it is easy to state that even after the 500 thousand years of separation that we are not that different. Social animals with a very complicated hierarchical structure to our society. We are omnivores with certain in built functions that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years like our fight or flight and the easy way we can simply take another life.
Lately of course we have evolved our mental state where we believe that we can change these in built mental functions by simple legislation. It has lead to the slaughter of millions as our animal instructs refuse to be overcome so easy. Of course there is the way we are working on now. Start indoctrinating the children. Make them all fit in the square holes we are creating for our round bodies. Those that fail to meet this standard end up in our legal system and in jail or dead where those genes are being wiped out while genes that need to be nurtured because they are unnatural, in nature’s terms, are being deliberately kept alive whilst in the wild they could not survive.
Perhaps this is the way to go. Genes that we need to be the best survivors are no longer required. Somehow I think not. Do we really want a planet full of people who have no ideas or passion and simply get on with whatever work is allocated to them. Whilst we are stuck on this planet we need people who are going to stretch the boundaries, people to get in the ships and try and go faster than the speed of light. We need a Chuck Yeager of the space age. We need scientists who will work on the theory of warp bubbles and creating artificial wormholes so we can progress in space travel. We also need the Einstein’s etc. working on new power generation technologies as well as people expanding the horizons on health and a million other areas. We don’t want clones with a few bright Alphas at the helm and no progress. In addition it is built in to us to climb trees, enquire about things, go looking for adventure and we want the chemicals generated by our bodies when we do it. The adrenaline rush when we climb a tree or drive at ludicrous speeds is addictive. The dopamine high we get when we play games and solve puzzles just as much so. We just can’t change millions of years of evolution in a few years by legislation no matter how much politicians think they can.
Our current society was created by people who increased their knowledge, developed new technologies and advanced our species for their own personal gain. All built on previous developers and scientists. The first ones that developed explosives to kill, then used by others to clear land and then used by others to travel in space. All progressed from what started off as savages and each one growing in intelligence to when we were 30 years ago. In the beginning it was power and wealth and lately just wealth. Power being usurped by politicians who do not add anything to society at all.
Think over the last 100 years or so to the advances we have made. The car, the plane, satellites, the phone, electrickery production, medicines, media, computers. I’m sure you can think of more. Most of these have been developed by private individuals making their way in the world. Now look at where these were developed. The USSR, China, the Middle East? Don’t make me laugh. Nope, all in good old capitalist countries where you had an idea you could make money from it. Why bother in the Middle East when it could get you a very short haircut or in the USSR where it would be subverted for the good of the people.
Now look at the situation. How many advances have we made over the last thirty years? No private person can buy any of the ingredients you need to do any science nowadays. No chemicals, certain equipment is banned and you can expect a visit from plod if you try to get any. Too dangerous for us but OK for anyone up to 30 years ago. Even the government thinks we are too thick yet if you are a corporation you can have it all. Of course this way once they start they don’t have any real competition to develop so it comes out as a basic model and then slowly develops. We want most of our development in leaps and bound not namby pamby baby steps and drip fed for maximum profit. Of course when baby steps are required we should take care but those are few and far between.
As well as the rules and regulation that have strangled our innovation and progress we are also faced with the situation when our governments now control the way our companies progress. All over the free world our socialist governments now own controlling interest in the banks and other key corporates even if those interests are less than 50%. You take governments money you are beholden to it. We can be sure that with the government feeding money into car manufacturers then gone are the days of the muscle car no matter what the demand as tighter emissions and control and monitoring systems are introduced and model development stagnates. Lack of competition and all doing the same lead to that. However it is with the banks that our government will get the biggest bang for its buck. A corporate after a loan. ‘What’s your policy on hiring minorities and what is the percentage of minorities in your workplace?’ will become relevant questions on if a successful corporate gets a loan or not. Private individuals will be asked for an id card and what they are doing for global warming whilst the reason for the loan will be checked for where it fits in with helpful guidelines on environment policy and its creation of CO2. Say goodbye to goods that don’t fit our government view as they won’t be banned per se but you will not be able to get a loan to make them or a loan to buy one even if someone makes one with their own money and why would anyone risk their own money on something nowadays. Much better sticking to making a small but steady profit in something that gives steady income for little risk at the moment. The alternative is to set up a company with a mandatory partner who invests no money. Takes 40% of the take and sets all the rules you have to follow. Out of your portion of the funding of course. No wonder small companies are disappearing at the moment and we are not innovating any more. It’s all about getting the most our of previous innovators. Tweaks to existing products but nothing new.
We are now at the stage where the only development going on is development for our government funded by the government for its ends. Usually on new systems to monitor and oppress it’s subjects. Stalin would be proud that his children have become so successful that nowhere in the world is there anywhere to be truly free today.
I’m personally convinced that the IQ of our society is going down. We are receiving poor education, indocrinated and emasculated to fit an ideal which in the short term will stall human progress.
To end on a positive note. Socialist societies cannot survive long term. They can be created and they can destroy millions of lives. This time it will be billions I am sure but inevitably they will fall. Our species does not support them and people rebel. Usually not openly but eventually it builds until they do. The first die by being pitted against a highly trained army or police force but then more and more join then the few traitors who stand against their own people cannot stand against the masses. Why do you think it takes 20 plod to take down one drug dealer, one suspected terrorist. They need overwhelming force to frighten the rest of us. That is one advantage the American people have over us. Their second amendment means there are millions of guns out there but even there as New Orleansshows they don’t need to be prised from cold dead hands when plod comes to collect them but if they ever rose up en masse. Governments would fall. Pity we don’t have such a law.
Anyway, we are still a social species, people get on with each other and we happily barter and trade make friends and progress on our merry way through life. Nothing much interferes with our wish to live our lives and leave others to live theirs. That is where the politicians get involved of course. And screw it up for all.
I just want to point out something that we need to put on the table as a hurdle in our progress and by hurdle I mean a doozie. It is where we fit in the cosmos and the hurdles we must overcome for our species survival in my opinion.
Just to show where we fit in the universe. We can start with our earth. It is approximately 8 thousand miles in diameter. To put this in perspective we can look at this article where the earth is represented by a peppercorn. Read here. (It will open in a popup which you can close to return here)
I won’t copy it but you must read the article in full to get an idea of the scale of the solar system and the issues we have. The rest of the this article refers to data from that article.
Now we have done that at the scale we are working on for the Earth at a peppercorn the nearest star to our sun is Proxima Centauri at 4.2 such light-years and would be 4000 miles away at that scale. Our nearest star. 4000 real miles at that scale. Unbelievable distances. This is just our local part of our own galaxy, our back garden so to speak. Then we have our street, the Orion Arm (5000 light years and contains 600 million stars) followed by our town, The Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way itself is 50 thousand light years across and contains 200 billion stars. It is just one galaxy of so many we can’t count them.
In our *cough* local group, within approx 5 million light years we have two additional galaxies, Andromeda and Triangulum. And as we move out this expands until we see that the visible universe is 14 billion light years across. It contains 350 billion large galaxies, 7 trillion dwarf galaxies and those have 30 billion trillion (3×10²²) stars. Read more here if you are interested. The size of the whole universe is estimated at 93 billion light years across and is growing all the time. It too is evolving, changing as new galaxies are created and old ones destroyed, stars created long before our sun have died and collapsed and black holes are swallowing up anything they touch. It’s all happening so slow and so far away that to us looking out nothing is happening.
The sheer size of the place and where we fit in makes you wonder about what is out there that our puny minds can’t even imagine.
Not sure exactly where this part fits in with a deity. Maybe the cosmos is just decoration on the wall where the deity keeps its Petri dish and it’s just an illusion or it could very well be that the deity is just so busy with more interesting species. 93 billion light years is a bit of a trek.
So here we are. Pure mathematics says that we are not alone in the universe. It is unlikely in the extreme that we are unique and thus we are insignificant, our petty squabbles, even if we were to destroy ourselves and this world it means nothing to the cosmos. If life evolved here in a trillion to one chance then life can evolve somewhere else where there is 30 billion such chances in the visible universe alone. Whether we would ever meet anyone is an entirely different thing. We don’t seem to be on a local bus route but we may be within reach of some redneck backwater if all the UFO spotters are right.
Currently we are stuck on this planet. Everything needs room to grow and the earth cannot contain our biological need to grow and live. We need to find a way to do that. Sci-Fi points us to several options that science has identified but so far we have made no move along that path since the US travelled to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s although there is talk about sending someone to Mars. It’s still a small step as we can see from above in our scale model it’s 2.4 inches from the earth to the moon, and 14 yards from the earth to Mars while it is 4000 miles to the nearest star. However, although it is a small step it is a significant one. Every journey starts with a single step. We need more steps and more people working on making those steps longer and with less time between them.
In my opinion this is the single most important long term project that we have as a species and yet we are doing virtually nothing in this field. Everything is handled short term and thus we don’t really look at going into space beyond our solar system while we know for certain that one planet exists there that supports life and we are already on it.
Now before we get started on current day issues I just want to point out something’s that we need to put on the table as long term issues and by long term I mean long term.
Personally, I no longer see our society lasting for another thousand years. We are too selfish and have weapons that we are all too willing to use for virtually no reason and with no care for the future. Many no longer care for their children and simply use them as pawns in their own games with the children’s trust and naivety being used against them. How does a society that kills and mistreats its children have a future? It makes me despair.
However, let’s work under the assumption it does.
The universe is 14 billion years old and roughly 4.6 billion years ago, give or take a few weeks, our solar system was formed under a very complicated mechanical and chemical process which pulled interstellar dust into a huge ball which compressed it until it ignited under the pressure to forge the basic elements we need for life to exist. This process is explained in a lot more detail here and is still continuing. The moon continues to be ejected from the Earth after its impact, rogue asteroids are encountering us and the orbits of the planets are in the process of changing. We are in the middle of the lifetime of an evolving solar system.
Anyway, the planets we know were created from our exploding star and about 4 billion years ago simple life evolved. Nobody is certain if it evolved on earth or was carried from somewhere else. For more details on life on earth get the excellent BBC series Life on Earth. You can buy it here.
So after 3.9 billion years and after a significant reign by the dinosaurs of 160 million years our ancestors appeared. Estimates are we separated from the chimpanzees 7 million years ago but our earliest recognisable descendants were 500 thousand years ago. An insignificant portion of the life of our planet and our sun yet our society only has really done anything over the last 5 thousand years. The timeline can be found here.
To put it in perspective (let me know if my math is wrong) if you were to have a toilet roll 1 kilometre long which represented the timescale for life on our planet. Only the last 10cm would reflect the time from our earliest descendants with the last 0.1, that’s 0 point 1, 1 millimetre for the last 5 thousand years. Dinosaurs take up a 34 metre area and you know where we would be if we didn’t have an asteroid to thank. If we moved back to view the whole roll at once we wouldn’t even be able to see the 10cm never mind the 0.1cm. Even the dinosaur section would be barely visible.
On the other hand an omnipotent deity made us all up in a week or so.
It’s taken a long long time and a lot of luck for us to get where we are but we still have a long way to go. We are stuck on this planet with no workable way off at the moment. It is inevitable that its resources will run out and we can handle that, assuming we survive ourselves. A big assumption and one I have my doubts over. It is likely that our species will die out long before the sun inevitably expands and takes the Earth back. Of course that is in about 4 billion years and well after our species will be dead or gone.
As we know during the history of our planet there have been many other species that had the title dominant species on Earth. Perhaps we are just the current holders a bit like world records for running or jumping. Eventually someone, or something rather, will take over that title when we falter. Now life is seeded here unless we destroy the planet itself other creatures will quickly evolve to take over regardless of what we do. Perhaps something that actually will evolve to what we aspire to.
One thing is certain. In the scheme of things we are insignificant. Just a very small footnote in history at the moment and one that will not be missed.
The future of our species is in our hands and with a bit of luck and a lot of work from us we can make it the utopia we desire but we need to be clear. It will take work. From all of us and that work is not happening at the moment.
After a few years of reading blog posts and making my own comments on the number one issue our society is facing, our political situation, I was forced to the unpalatable conclusion that I was wasting my time. I was unable to convince these whingy whiney socialists and liberals that the facts they were so conveniently ignoring or twisting actually were powerful statements on the way things were. To be honest I’m not that good a debater. I like to point out facts, finish with a conclusion which utilises the facts and then discuss any facts that don’t fit that conclusion. Sometimes I’ve even found I’ve changed my own stance on something when a fact is presented to me I didn’t know. My stance on gun control was changed that way several years back.
So off I went reading books on debating, winning arguments and practising with like minded people until I had my debating skills sharpened so much that any minute is expected my tongue to be subject to a license from HMG. Yet back in the world of politics it appears that nothing has changed. It is more of a religion than anything else. Hardened political supporters care nothing for facts and even when presented with a smoking gun they say ‘Well, Yes. But our party is the party for the people and the others are much worse.’ People were still ignoring the facts because of their beliefs and, anyway, their father has always voted that way. He would turn in his grave if I voted for them. The other side.
Driven away to my remote retreat, a Shaolin temple in the ass end of nowhere and miles from civilisation just outside Kilmarnock, I proceeded to spend several months meditating and searching for the way forward on political discussion, How to use my brain and intellect to enable others to see the truth and justice. Months passed and nothing made sense. The news coming in is that the whole world is going mad. The EU politicians tighten their grip, the USSR seems to be getting back on its feet and reversing the gains made since the 80s and the US seems to be following in the EUs footsteps. Thank God for people wanting power and rivalries with each pig wanting its place in the trough.
Anyway suddenly it hit me. We as a species are too stupid to be allowed to vote. We are driven by envy and greed. We vote for those that will take from those better off than us and give it to us. We do not realise that in most of these cases we are the better off just because we are working. We think it is someone richer who it will impact the most and we are too thick to realise that the politicians have been playing us again. To put things in perspective we live in the top 10% of people on this planet. The bulk of the people on this planet are a lot worse off than anyone in the West. Nobody starves here daily. No one is without recourse to the law for protection. etc. Yet when we talk about helping those worse off we always think of ourselves as we look at the top 10% of our bit with envy. We want to be there or bring them down via the law. We love it when the high and mighty fall. Of course when we get into that 10%, now 1% of the planet, we look at the top 10% there with envy. Little caring for those other 99%. So when we starting talking about making society fairer we see it as the 10% we look at with envy being forced to give us something to make us better off. Let’s help the poor the politicians cry and the top 10% of the West see themselves as poor. Screw the rest of the world. No wonder we are so hated.
More importantly, we make no plans for the future. It is inevitable that at some stage the earth will be hit by an asteroid or something. It is inevitable we will run out of resources, water, food and living space yet we do nothing and don’t even consider options available to us at the moment to prepare.
So what I’m going to do here is put a few things in perspective. Point out injustice and try and define a way forward. Maybe not for us because we are clearly too thick but maybe someday. Of course if I can ever find a safe way, for me anyway, to become dictator of this backward planet then I’ll do so and force my views on others. It’s only fair, it’s been happening to me for years. Of course I’ll reintroduce democracy in a few years anyway, when the people are bright enough. I may even let women vote if I can forgive them for voting Blair in.
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