Global Warming

I’ve been reading a lot about global warming and how it’s really becoming a problem.  I’m surprised that no one has already hit upon the solution.  It’s very easy and wouldn’t be too expensive to enact if enough people participated.  It just goes to show that even you have a PhD and a genius IQ you can overlook the obvious.

The solution?  During the summer, open your front door while the air conditioner is running.  So simple.

Fifty Years From Now

The Way We Will Be 50 Years from Today: 60 Of The World’s Greatest Minds Share Their Visions of the Next Half-Century: Mike Wallace: Books ISBN: 084990370X ISBN-13: 9780849903700

There’s a new book out called “The Way We Will Be 50 Years from Today” edited by Mike Wallace. It has essays by sixty of the world’s top minds (why was I not invited?) on what they think the world will be like in the year 2058.

I have a problem with books like these because they don’t seem to be right. We should all remember how predictions from the past

ended up by the year 2000. No flying cars, no moon bases, no “kitchen of the future” with dinner tables that washed dishes for you. The only predictions that seem correct are the ones that are vague, like “computers will be really powerful” and “we’ll have a presence in space.”

In most cases, these predictions seem more like what the author would like to see happen rather than what will probably happen.

I can come up with hundreds of predictions for fifty years from now.

Most of them are mutually-exclusive. I’ve already written about a few of them, but you’d probably have to search around a bit to find them.

Let’s have some fun.

1) New World Order

By the year 2058 the global economy collapsed. The world became re-united under a central leader, a global president. Each country, in turn, is ruled by a local “governor.” Problems arise when these governors can’t get along any better than they did when they were absolute rulers of their country. The global president is completely ineffective at keeping peace. For the world’s citizens, nothing much has changed other than having a central head figure for aliens from outer space to contact.

2) Citizen Tracking

In the coming years, the citizens of the United States will complete their castration of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. They will give up their rights of privacy in the interest of convenience. The government will sell them on various programs, such as a National ID card, because it will make their lives easier by having a card that carries their bank information, medical history, voter status, drivers license, and other such things that can be used anywhere. The fact that it tracks everything they do is a minor side-effect. People will gobble it up. RFID implants will be used to keep children safe from kidnappers, hikers safe from getting lost, and your senile grandma from ending up in the wrong house. All tasty foods will be outlawed, due to being unhealthy, and replaced by a nutritious paste sanctioned by the government. Paper and coin money will be phased out so all transactions can be monitored to prevent terrorism. Don’t even think of smoking a cigarette. Alcohol will be permitted so everyone will be happy.

3) Civil War

The events in #2 transpire which creates a rebellious faction. Civil war erupts. While the government won’t use nuclear weapons within the country, it will use other forms of bombardment and land engagements. Chaos ensues, turning the U.S.A into a veritable wasteland. The coastal areas will remain within control of the

government in case other countries decide to use the opportunity to stage an attack on the weakened country, but the interior will be a lot more chaotic and dangerous.

4) The Star Trek Holodeck will be created

Creating a real-world Holodeck will be one of the major changes in human kind history. If you don’t know what a Holodeck is, you’ll have to read about it because it’s too much for me to cover right now. But if everyone had a large closet space that could be turned (for all intents and purposes) into an unlimited amount of space with anything a person desired within then it would be pretty damn neat. Since the US only has information type jobs, all work can be done in a networked holodeck environment. You could phase out janitors and stuff. You could do just about anything you wanted to do without leaving your home. I wrote a whole big thing about it, but you’ll have to search for it. It was last year, sometime.

5) The Creation Of Nanobots

The Feynman/Drexler vision of nano technology will change the entire world in so many ways it would be hard to count. People could live forever, cars and other items could be self-repairing, food would be plentiful and made from garbage, similar to the way the food replicator works in Star Trek. Artists would become the highest caste in our society because the only thing separating what you could have versus what your neighbor could have would be the styling.

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology: Eric Drexler: Books ISBN: 0385199732 ISBN-13: 9780385199735

Okay, that’s five. I’m sure I could think of more, but I’m still tired and I’m still not feeling well. If I had some nano bots running through my system wiping out cold virus’ I’d be gold.

Sperm Powered Nano Bot

It’s been a while since I’ve written about nano technology.  Mostly this is because I haven’t seen very much happening.  I’m sure there’s stuff going on, it’s just not being reported on in general.

It’s also because I’m not seeing anything interesting happening yet.  Interesting, to me, does not include suntan lotion, cosmetics, or stain-resistant trousers.  Self-cleaning trousers, sure.  Molecule-sized robots that roam through the body removing cancer cells, definitely. 

At heart I am a fantasist, a dreamer, a romantic and a futurist.  I see a world shaped by K. Eric Drexler.  A world where you car is self-repairing, a new toaster is just a push of a button away, and life is extended because your cells are repaired and rebuilt as needed.

I wait for the Next Big Thing.

So I felt pretty good when I saw this article about scientists looking to sperm to figure out how to give locomotion to nanobots.  There is no better place to look for inspiration than nature.  And if nature can do it, then we should be able to do it, too.  It’s just a matter of figuring out how.

After all, a redwood tree doesn’t start as a small tree.  It starts as a seed and through molecular and cellular manipulation it grows into a tree.  A big tree.

Technorati Tags: nanobot, sperm

Coffin Nail

Something horrible may have happened.  Scientists may have shortened the life span of the universe, just by looking at it!  Once would have been bad enough, but you know how scientists are.

Scientist 1: Looks in scientific instrument, then does some calculations.  He looks ups up. Whoa! He looks into the instrument again and then does some more calculations.  [slapping a co-worker on the shoulder] Dude!  Check this out.

Scientist 2: What? He looks into the scientific instrument.
Scientist 1: Now finish these calculations.
Scientist 2: Scribbles a bit.  Whoa!  He repeats the process again.  Everytime we look at this stuff, the universe dies a little faster.  That’s awesome!
Scientist 1: Looks into the instrument and then away.  Hey, check it out, what am I? He keeps looking into and away from the instrument.  I’m a cigarette for the universe!
Scientist 1 & 2: Laughs
Scientist 2: Dude, we gotta tell Patty about this.  She’ll think it’s a gas.

So there’s no telling how long the universe has got now.  So, to fix it, I recommend doing the only logical thing:  Class action lawsuit.  Everybody in the world joins in and sues these scientists for… something.  Something big.  Then, if we’re patient, we all make a little bit of money.

I know this doesn’t make it right.  It certainly doesn’t fix anything.  But it does give us all a little bit of extra money, and I think that’s the American way.  Besides, think of your grandchildren and what kind of universe they’ll have to grow up in.

Frozen in Paris

When I read that Paris Hilton may have herself frozen when she dies, I immediatly thought of two things:

1) Why wait?

and

2) Idiocracy

I wonder what it would be like for scientists in the far flung future to thaw out Ms. Hilton.

Just a Couple of Things

The Department of Defense would like to beam electricity down from space. To me, this is good.

The sun has been pumping out energy since forever, and it will go on shooting energy out into space for a few million years more. Nearly all of that energy is wasted. So why not create some big solar collectors in space and beam all that sun-goodness down to Earth where we can convert it electricity? No more using fossil fuels to make the power plants work. And no more nuclear waste to worry about.

As usual, I don’t think they’re thinking big enough. I think we need a lot of them out there and beaming energy down so that everyone can use it. I, for one, would like to see my electric bill go down. If we’re using a nearly inexhaustible resource then all we have to pay for is the technology that keeps it working, and the initial launch and building.

George Lucas in creating a Star Wars based television show. I hope it’s better than the last three movies.

I noticed that if you search for “Jaime Paglia” on Google, I come up as the third or fourth item. Maybe it’s just because I’m doing the searches on laptops that I use all day (although I used one that I’m sure I haven’t touched yet). Either way, how useless. There are tons of other sites out there with better stuff than what I wrote (which was really nothing).

Musings

There is no doubt in my mind that I am a very intelligent person. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that I’m somewhere around the genius level, if I were given the correct test to measure such a thing. For all that, I don’t think I’m very smart.

If intelligence were horsepower, and smart were torque, I would be a car with a lot of horsepower, but without a lot of power to actually get rolling. In other words, I have the potential but not the means.

But just as a car can be modified to increase the horsepower and torque, so can my brain. Or anyone’s brain providing there isn’t some kind of damage.

When I had the opportunity to be around a group of people I always indulged in theoretical speak. When the movie, The Matrix, came out there was a lot of talk about how the characters were inside a virtual world. I had already had this idea before that movie came out and had given it quite a bit of thought, so I argued in favor of there being the possibility of being inside a computer system.

In my story the main character locked himself in a mountain cell in Tibet and spent all his time meditating on the spirit world. Eventually he broke down the physical world and woke up on a space ship. The Earth had collapsed and a colony ship was traveling to a new planet to colonize it. Since the trip would last a very long time, and to keep people sane, they were kept alive but their minds were active in a world created by a computer. The big problem was that nothing was created after the year that the ship left, so at a certain point the program would be reset and everything would start over again. People could be shifted about so that if you were poor in one life, in the next you would be wealthy. I explained away things like “deja vu” as things that actually happened, but in a different life time. It also solved the idea of karma.

To me, I don’t see any problems with everything around us being artificial, created for us. Other people did. For most of it I rationalized it as being created on the fly. If a few scientists worked it out that there should be a quantum particle named “paradox” that should be have in a certain way, then the computer system would change it’s rules around to allow a sub-atomic particle that behaved the way that “paradox” was theorized to behave.

The kicker is that we’d be programmed to rationalize it out. If you threw a ball and, after ten feet, it took a 90-degree turn downwards, you’d be able to work out the physics of why that happened and it would make sense.

After an evening of such musings, and others, I stated that I thought God had taken away my ability to do mathematics because I would be too dangerous. The truth is, I decided to not be good at math. I can’t point out an exact time, but I think it was when I was taking geometry in high school. Perhaps even earlier than that. I don’t know why I decided I was not going to be good at math, either. Right now, I don’t see why I couldn’t be if I didn’t make an effort to figure it out.

Maybe it’s just laziness. Maybe that’s why I have as many problems as I do. If I took the effort to expend some energy, perhaps my life would be better overall.

But I do like to think, and theorize. In the interests of creating plot devices I have figured out how a person could be invisible. How magic might work. How we could live inside of a computer. I don’t know that they would work, but it all seems reasonable to me.

I don’t like to think in terms of “can’t.” I will think in terms of “why not?” Why couldn’t there have been life on Mars before we evolved? Why couldn’t there have been actual gods walking the Earth in the times of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians?

We’ll come up with answers, too. Some are non-nonsensical and some seem pretty well thought out. But we’re limited. We’re limited by who we are and what we are. We’re good at figuring things out and creating rules and laws to help us figure things out, but we rarely ever know. We think we know. We’re pretty sure we know. But for many things we will never truly know.

We will never know how a star forms, or how our planet was formed, or what happened to the water on Mars. We may be able to look, and analyze, and make a really good guess – but that’s all it is, a guess. We don’t have the lifespan, or the ability to see in the past. We can take data and make assumptions. And what works in out little corner of the universe may not work somewhere else, but we’ll never know that, either.

If you told me you were a huge fan of Stephen King and that you had a book shelf in your room then I could reason out that you have a Stephen King book on your bookshelf. It’s a perfectly good rationale. But I could be wrong. And I would never know for sure unless I went to your house, your room, and looked at your bookshelf. That’s the only way that I could ever know for sure that you had a Stephen King book on your bookshelf in your room. If I never have the opportunity to go to your house, then the best I can ever have is a really good guess.

And that’s what we face as a race.

Lite-Brite

Well, this is interesting. Phillips has developed some clothing that has moving, colorful lights called “photonics” that looks pretty interesting. Imagine, if you will, a t-shirt that has an ad on it. But this ad moves and changes and lights up.

Just sitting here I can think of a billion uses for this. They mention on the site about the ability of using Bluetooth and wi-fi. Imagine paying a discount on the article of clothing (or backpack or whatever), but whenever you get close to a wi-fi hotspot you download ads. Ad subsidized clothing. How great would that be?

Somewhere in the FAQ section they also mention using touch sensors and other things.  If you were standing in line at an amusement park, you could play a game on the person’s back in front of you.  Or watch a movie.  How neat!

The porn industry must already be thinking of a bunch of stuff they could use all that for.

Build Your Own Bible

I sometimes wonder what would happen if I wrote my own bible.  If I wrote down parables and sayings and, perhaps, wrote a few hymns to a god (or gods) that don’t really exist.  If I kept it safe and it managed to survive the ages and many years hence was found.  Would it create a buzz in the archealogical world of the future?  Would it gain converts?

For that matter, will there be a far future generation that believes in the wisdom of, say, Harry Potter?  Will there be priests who tell their followers about the trials that Harry Potter went through, only to emerge victorious?  It was written down in antiquity, therefore it must be true.

Or will it be much different.  With the advent of the computer and digital media, will paper become rare and lost.  Will there be a huge gap in the human record because all of our information was lost when the power went out, when chips corroded, and magnatized media became inert?  Will this golden age of digital information be regarded as the dark ages when no records, from the point of view of far-future historians, were kept?

The Face on Mars

First things first, something you must understand. I’ve seen pictures of the Face on Mars and the surrounding areas. I’ve seen the old pictures and the new ones. This isn’t about the Face as much as it is about human reasoning. I don’t know if the Face is a face. I don’t know if it’s artificial or not. This makes me no different than anyone else on the planet Earth. And that’s the important thing to know.

I’m supposed to believe in quantum physics. I’m supposed to believe in the String Theory. I’m supposed to believe in multiple dimensions (other than the standard four). I’m supposed to believe in a lot of things that I can’t see, hear, or touch.

But I’m forbidden to believe in a older civilization that once existed on another planet in our solar system. Believing that all matter is made up of vibrating strings is OK; believing in an intelligent race that was on Mars is not. How does that work?

Because there’s no proof. Aside from some clever math, there’s no proof of the rest of the stuff either.

I have no problem with the idea that there may have been life in the solar system before us. I attribute this to my amazing ignorance of how everything started. I like it this way. It allows me to use my imagination.

It just seems wrong to me to summarily dismiss something without investigating it. The Face looks enough like a face to me to warrant looking into. We’ve got orbiters that can take a closer look anyway, what’s the harm? NASA’s reaction always seems suspicious to me, which tends to nudge me over to the fringe thinker’s side. In the same breath, it seems wrong to go whole hog and say the Face is artificial. Nobody knows. And we’re not going to know until we send people up there to have a look. And that, to me, is the most important thing of all. If NASA wants to go to Mars, what better way to drum up funding and get the nation whipped up about it if not to say they want to find out for sure if the Face is really a face, or just a trick of nature?

What makes me angry is when scientists here on Earth decide that something is natural without having a really good look at it. Nobody can tell from space if it is or not. News flash: If the Face is artificial, then it’s alien. That’s important, not just for the obvious reason, but because it’s something that’s totally out of our realm of experience. You cannot, without having further information, pass judgement on something that’s alien to Earth using Earth-bound experiences.

Let’s use a metaphor. There’s a scientist on Mars. He was born in a city like New York. He grew up there, among the high sky scrapers all his life. Cars and people everywhere. He went to a large university and got his credentials. He works for the Mars Space Agency. He’s given a series of photos, taken by a Martian satellite, of Earth. It’s a desert region and there’s nothing spectacular in them. Some vegetation. There’s a bunch of caves in rows on a mesa. He thinks that’s a little unusual, given the linear arrangement of caves but that’s about it. Obviously there’s no life there, but vegetation, so he tosses out the photos as normal. He’s a city dweller, he knows cities, and there’s no city in these photographs.

I would leave it there as an exercise for the reader to figure what’s wrong here. But I don’t have any so I’d be waiting for eternity. The photos this Martian scientist was given had a settlement of Hopi Indian pueblo’s. But he missed it because they look natural, and they’re out of his scope. He never lived in a cave, nor have Martians in general. He passed it on as a weird natural landscape. As humans who have been brought up in a closed environment on Earth, that’s what we face. We wouldn’t know a Martian city (deserted or otherwise) if it bit us on the ankle. We don’t know what a Martian city would look like. It might look like ours, it might not. If it’s buried in sand, it would be that much more difficult to figure out.

Why would an alien culture build a gigantic face on the plains of Mars? Damned if I know. Why would some old Egyptian build a gigantic pyramid? Beats the hell out of me. I can’t answer a human-oriented question, how can I even hope to answer a totally alien one? How can anyone? Nobody on Earth is a trained Xeno-culturalist, unless they know something we haven’t been told.

So do the right thing. Leave yourself open to possibilities, and work towards getting the question answered. Try and get humans on Mars to have a look at it and see what’s up. That’s my advice.