Martin L. W. Hall writes: We also need to realize that achieving a Planetary Consciousness is something that does not happen overnight. We need to think far into the future and try to put into place meaningful steps that can take us along this path. …  A majority of the world’s population does not have the minimum amount of food to eat. One of the imperative steps is that a majority of the planet must have the basic needs for survival met. While this maybe quick, we need to do this with in 2 generations. This is a tall order but one that really needs to be done if we are to have any hope of seeing ourselves as one planet rather than several nation-states. The development of human consciousness requires that the minimum elements of survival be met. If these are not met then engaging in even the most basic human interaction is difficult if not impossible. How can you be in a position to demand a minimum change for the better if you are constantly scrambling just to stay alive. Assuming for the moment that we have the capability and the capacity to deliver food, warmth and shelter to those that want and require all over the globe? What would it take to create an environment where this was not just desired by most but a moral requirement. What we are talking about is installing a world-wide meaning system. With subtle shifts in global cultural priorities, this can be achieved. Some places it may be easier than others.  (05/31/02)

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Computers are becoming more powerful at an accelerating rate, but will they ever become conscious? In the forthcoming book Are We Spiritual Machines? — a debate with leading critics of “strong artificial intelligence” — Ray Kurzweil says that nonbiological intelligence will become indistinguishable from conscious entities such as humans — at least from the observer’s perspective. He explains how we will “reverse engineer” our software (our minds) and “upgrade” our hardware (our bodies) to indefinitely extend human life — before the dawn of the 22nd century. Kurzweil says accelerating growth of computer power will result in machine intelligence exceeding human intelligence early in this century.  (05/31/02)
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Win Wenger writes: The northern end of the Bay of Bengal shallows in such a way that any major storm pushes a massive storm-surge of floodwaters over the low-lying, heavily populated, adjacent areas of Bangla-Desh and India. Every year or so, a tropical cyclone comes into the bay at just the right angle to push a surge over these areas, killing thousands of human beings. From time to time, the toll is in the millions instead. There is no good way to prevent the millions of desperately poor and starving human beings from going right back into the flood-ravaged areas hoping to scratch some sort of living for themselves and their families. The land is fertile, their desperation is extreme, and no physical or societal infrastructure to speak of exists to give them escape mobility or to improve their desperate conditions. This brief tells how to prevent these disasters — material and human — from happening. It also tells how to turn the greatest region of dire poverty on Earth into productive prosperity. You can help greatly with little effort, simply by talking the idea of this project over with one or two other people and so helping the idea to get into circulation where it might stand a chance of gaining consideration on its merits.  (05/30/02)
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What is complexity, asks author-journalist George Johnson in a recent “Science Times,” the science section of The New York Times (May 5, 1997)? Below the headline, “Researchers on Complexity Ponder What It’s All About,” Johnson reports that there is still no agreed-upon definition, much less a theoretically-rigorous formalization, despite the fact that complexity is currently a “hot” research topic. Many books and innumerable scholarly papers have been published on the subject in the past few years, and there is even a new journal, Complexity, devoted to this nascent science. Johnson quotes Dan Stein, chairman of the physics department at the University of Arizona: “Everybody talks about it. [But] in the absence of a good definition, complexity is pretty much in the eye of the beholder.”…  Perhaps we need to go back to the semantic drawing-board. Complexity is, after all, a word — a verbal construct, a mental image. Like the words “electron” or “snow” or “blue” or “tree”, complexity is a shorthand tool for thinking and communicating about various aspects of the phenomenal world. Some words may be very narrow in scope. (Presumably all electrons are alike in their basic properties, although their behavior can vary greatly.) However, many other words may hold a potful of meaning. We often use the word “snow” in conversation without taking the trouble to differentiate among the many different kinds of snow, as serious skiers (and Inuit eskimos) routinely do. Similarly, the English word “blue” refers to a broad band of hues in the color spectrum, and we must drape the word with various qualifiers, from navy blue to royal blue to robin’s egg blue (and many more), to denote the subtle differences among them. So it is also, I believe, with the word “complexity”; it is used in many different ways and encompasses a great variety of phenomena. (Indeed, it seems that many theorists, to suit their own purposes, prefer not to define complexity too precisely.)   (05/30/02)
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Considering available resources according to this division, we arrive at an ecological benchmark figure of 1.7 ha. of land per capita for comparing ecological footprints; it is to this figure that human use of biologically-productive space must be reduced. … A comparison of deficits and surpluses shows an average ecological footprint of 2.3, more than 35% larger than current available space.  (05/29/02)
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Peter A. Corning writes: Some universal Darwinists, Daniel Dennett, Gary Cziko and, most notably, psychologist Susan Blackmore in her new book The Meme Machine (1999), see this reductionist evolutionary dynamic at work in human societies as well. In cultural evolution, Blackmore claims, the replicators are hypothetical entities called memes, a term coined by Dawkins as a cultural analogue for genes. Dawkins intended it as a metaphor, but Blackmore (and others) argue that memes are real physical entities, like genes (DNA). Moreover, memes have a mind of their own; they compete among themselves “for their own sake” [Blackmore's emphasis]. Just as Dawkins characterized organisms as “machines” for making more genes, so every human is “a machine for making more memes….We are meme machines,” Blackmore tells us. … The trouble is, memes don’t really exist as a distinct causal agency in evolution, and saying they do won’t make it so; I predict that they will prove to be more elusive than the Higgs boson. As a metaphor for various forms of learned cultural “information”, the term might be quite useful. It has the advantage of being more generic than such familiar terms as “ideas”, “inventions”, “behaviors”, “artifacts”, etc., and it is certainly preferable to such clumsy neologisms as Edward Wilson’s “culturgens”. But as a shaper of cultural evolution independently of the motivations, goals, purposes, compulsions and judgments — in short the minds — of human actors, memes rank right up there with the fiery phogiston and the heavenly aether.  (05/29/02)
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NewScientist.com – A minimum of three million people would be killed and 1.5 million seriously injured if even a “limited” nuclear war broke out between India and Pakistan, warns a new study uncovered by New Scientist. The estimates are comprised of the immediate casualty list from blast, fire and radiation if only a tenth of both countries’ nuclear weapons were exploded above 10 of their largest cities. It does not take account of the inevitable suffering that would result from the loss of homes, hospitals, water and energy supplies, or the cancers that could develop in future years. (05/29/02)
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New York Times — CASSODAY, Kan. — A roadside sign proclaims this town the Prairie Chicken Capital of the World. But the prairie chicken is experiencing a catastrophic decline here in the Flint Hills, the core of its range. … The greater prairie chicken has suffered serious declines over its range, from North Dakota and Minnesota to Missouri and Oklahoma. Attwater’s prairie chicken (Tympanuchus cupido attwateri), a subspecies that once occupied what is now the intensively farmed land of southern Texas, has been reduced to 22 males in 2001 from a million or more in the early 1900′s. A close relative, the easternmost form of the greater prairie chicken, a subspecies known as the heath hen (Tympanuchus cupido cupido) is extinct. The last one, a male, was seen in 1932 on Martha’s Vineyard.  (05/28/02)
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New York Times – Japan, home to the world’s largest remaining whale hunt, is losing the younger generation. …  Among people in their 20′s, almost 60 percent opposed a resumption of commercial whaling, though resumption is a cause dear to the hearts of Japanese officials. “Ultimately, whaling’s demise may have little to do with how majestic, smart or endangered the mammals are, but simple economics,” Asahi Shimbun wrote last month. “A growing number of Japanese don’t want to eat whale meat. And if they won’t eat it, they won’t buy it, and if they won’t buy it, say goodbye to Japanese whaling.”  (05/28/02)
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John Robb writes:  The Internet isn’t an extension of the past.  It is a new thing.  It leverages individuals in ways that go beyond old models.  It creates a new order of things where individuals, and not companies, can expect to control all the benefits of economic gains. … How did individuals pull this off?  Control of the information flow.  Individuals within and outside of corporations have used their control of the information flow to make the markets for products, services, and labor increasingly competitive.  People have more providers to buy from (on a global scale) and more organizations to work for (the monster.com effect) than ever before.  Corporations are caught in a vice between competitive pricing and higher labor costs. In cruel turn of events (not from my perspective of course ;->, but from a corporate one), individuals are also starting to wake up to the excesses of corporate America.  They know too much (Adam Curry says that there are no secrets, and this is what he means).  Companies that have been able to hide behind copyrights (excessive in length) and patents (excessive in breadth) in order to charge excessive prices, are being challenged.  (05/28/02)
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While we Americans went to the movies this weekend to celebrate our dead heros, elsewhere … LONDON — India and Pakistan are on the verge of a catastrophic war over Kashmir: 1.4 million troops from the two nations are poised for battle from the Tibet border to the Arabian Sea. The two old foes are trading artillery barrages along the Kashmir ceasefire line. Pakistan’s and India’s nuclear arsenals are on hair-trigger alert, as political leaders and generals on both sides play nuclear chicken over divided Kashmir. The 750,000 troops India now has massed in Kashmir have proven unable to suppress the 13-year-old uprising by Kashmir’s Muslim majority against Indian rule. India insists the dirty guerrilla war in Kashmir, in which 60,000 people have died, is entirely the work of Pakistan. In fact, India faces a genuine popular uprising by the Muslim majority. Pakistan aids some of the rebel groups, though not all. Now, Delhi is threatening to unleash its army, either to stage limited attacks against insurgent bases inside Pakistani Kashmir, or in a general offensive against Pakistan proper, a massive operation that could quickly escalate into nuclear war. … Remember on a small planet like Earth everybody is downwind/water of each other.  (05/28/02)
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OTEC, or ocean thermal energy conversion, is an energy technology that converts solar radiation to electric power. OTEC systems use the ocean’s natural thermal gradient—the fact that the ocean’s layers of water have different temperatures—to drive a power-producing cycle. … This potential is estimated to be about 1013 watts of baseload power generation, according to some experts. The cold, deep seawater used in the OTEC process is also rich in nutrients, and it can be used to culture both marine organisms and plant life near the shore or on land.  (05/28/02)
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