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...

We live in the Big Country Ranch neighborhood, south of the Austin City boundary, and five miles from a major road. It is safe to say that we live in the middle of nowhere.  The southwest side of our 15-acre property touches at least 500 acres of undamaged ("undeveloped") land that is one of the last refuges of wild life in this part of Texas.  We can hear coyotes, many coyotes, howling in the evening next to our home, and we get visits from the numerous wild turkeys, quails, armadillos, racoons, deer, lizards, tarantulas, scorpions, and snakes.  In fact, an armadillo family lives in a small cave next to our house, and a family of six or so racoons lives in the attic of a small utility house nearby. The smart racoons scoured a 7 inch round hole in the siding under the roof and adopted the attic as their family residence. We hear about sightings of mountain lions. I own three guns: a handgun, a hunting rifle, and a pump shotgun.  I bought the handgun after my house ...