LifeItself

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and others have been touting the multitudinous advantages of colonizing the Moon and Mars. The scientific idiocies of these proclamations are so outlandish that I will not bother commenting on them. But, at the same time, Stephen Hawking's name has come up in the context of Mars colonization. Dr. Nate Hagens uses Hawking's ideas about Mars colonization in his Reality 101 course at the University of Minnesota to illustrate the point that human society is composed of tiny islands of high competence floating in a vast sea of narratives. Let me start from quoting a recent email by JDW on the subject of human escape to outer space: "Without a synthesis which shows how different narratives relate to one another, people are free to use “verbal logic” to create properly-constructed sentences which don’t correspond to possible realities. “Verbal logic” is nearly an oxymoron, because there’s not much in the way of error-correction built into it. Anyth...

Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a blog, The Bird of Dawn , full of hope for the indomitable human spirit which can transcend and erode all repression, whether religious or political. A year ago, in The Way We Were , I connected the liberal Western Civilization, where my soul and body reside, to its ancient Greek roots. Both pieces have been wildly popular with the readers around the world, because they spelled out hope for humanity and its future. Today we are in Cefalù in Sicily, immersed again in a simpler world of the past, the world which graces us only occasionally when we leave our thoroughly modern, connected academic cocoon, powered by a high-rate throughput of fossil fuels that appear mostly as research funding, electricity, computers, and airplane tickets. Compared with Cefalù’s Arab fortress of 1063, and the Norman cathedral with the magnificent twelfth century mosaics our world is truly ephemeral. It cannot last for longer than a few more decades. Yet, this...

Almost as a direct challenge to my March 26th  post, I got this lovely comment on my recent article in the Austin Statesman: Most important message Re: April 10 article "Deep drilling reflects era's decline, Texas expert says." The article by professor Tad Patzek about the planet's declining oil reserves contains the most important message your paper can publish this year. As he points out so clearly and simply that anyone who reads it must understand, our species is driving heedlessly toward a very messy extinction unless we change both our driving habits and our reliance on fossil fuels. Any rational Austinite who reads and faces up to the facts stated in this article will become an ardent supporter of local light rail as well as a carbon tax. And he/she will advise his/her children and grandchildren to move closer to downtown, near a rail line and a farmer's market, or else become self-sufficient farmers themselves unless they can somehow acqui...

Our little cat, Kicka, all bundled up, is lying semi-conscious and half-paralyzed on top of Joanna, who in turn fell asleep on a sofa. So I have time to reflect on this year and dream about the next one. Recently, I was asked to predict the most important events in 2011, and found it impossible. Instead, I have attempted to be wildly optimistic and skip the usual "peak-everything" stuff. Here is the result: The Happy New Year 2011 will see a thorough public discussion of what needs to be done to make the U.S. a more resilient society and economy. Federal government, Congress and Senate will start working together on the development of a massive national electrified railroad system to transport goods and people. We will come off the high horse and stop hallucinating about building bullet train tracks in a railroad system that is decidedly mid-twentieth century or older. Many cities across the U.S., will embark on the crash investment in light rail and other alternative...