Will We Destroy Food - The Salmon?

The odd looking creature is one of the favorite foods of Salmon, and Salmon is one of our favorite fish foods.

A problem we are causing in our oceans is very likely to cost us dearly for generations to come:

The same things that make Alaska's marine waters among the most productive in the world may also make them the most vulnerable to ocean acidification.

According to new findings by a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist, Alaska's oceans are becoming increasingly acidic, which could damage Alaska's king crab and salmon fisheries.

(Science Daily). One of the crude and rude sayings of some environmentalists, when trying to get the point across to dullards who do not get this "pinko environmental conspiracy", is "don't sh*t where you eat", that is, don't crap where you eat.

We eat from the ocean in a sense, and therefore we should not crap there, is the lesson for dullards to take from the saying.

Related post: Will We Destroy Food - The Bees?

The Icy Stares Of The Ice Wars

It is astounding that there are those of the species, including some within government, who do not consider the import of the notion that the planet and the Sun must remain in a healthy condition for the species to survive.

The import of the effect of climate on economy is also sometimes missed even in a time where we have been focused on economy because it was devastated by the Bush II regime.

A recent report which looks at evidence and indicators going back hundreds of years indicates that ice is at a low in some telling areas of the globe:

By combining the curve of the climate with the actual historical records of the distribution of the ice, researchers have been able to reconstruct the extent of the sea ice all the way back to the 13th century. Even though the 13th century was a warm period, the calculations show that there has never been so little sea ice as in the 20th century.

...

"We see that the sea ice is shrinking to a level which has not been seen in more than 800 years", concludes Aslak Grinsted.

(Science Daily). I am sure that the meaning and significance of this study as well as any others that can be done, will not dissuade some from ideology and policy that is a danger to our planet and life on it.

Life According To Science

The Sun will eventually "burn out".

Before that happens the Sun will expand out to about the orbit of Mars, well beyond the Earth.

All planets within that orbit level are doomed and have a time limit upon them. All life on those planets is in jeopardy in the very long run:

Earth's fate is precarious. As a red giant, the Sun will have a maximum radius beyond the Earth's current orbit, 1 AU (1.5×1011 m), 250 times the present radius of the Sun. However, by the time it is an asymptotic giant branch star, the Sun will have lost roughly 30% of its present mass due to a stellar wind, so the orbits of the planets will move outward. If it were only for this, Earth would probably be spared, but new research suggests that Earth will be swallowed by the Sun owing to tidal interactions. Even if Earth would escape incineration in the Sun, still all its water will be boiled away and most of its atmosphere would escape into space.

(Tenet One Basics). The only way out for the human race, according to non-religious doctrine, is to learn space travel.

After that humanity must colonize other planets within the solar system first, then branch out to other solar systems in this galaxy.

In other words find another habitable planet before the Sun destroys us.

To do that the people of the earth are going to have to allow the earth to last perhaps one to two million years. Who knows, maybe more, because it depends on technology and its proper use.

But the earth can't be destroyed or the story is over. The human story will be over.

So the mission for humanity is to survive that long. At the current rates the earth will be destroyed by humanity well before that time. We are headed for that disaster if we don't care for the planet and for ourselves.

To survive we must learn to live together, eventually get rid of the weaponry that would destroy humanity if used. We must have a functioning world order where nations live together in peace like our states live together and let live here in the United States.

The petty, mindless, and doomed wars and fightings while thousands starve each day has got to go. Or humanity has to go.

Noam Chomsky says it is not clear that we will make it long enough to mature.

Perhaps it is natural for species, who cannot develop social skills, to perish.

It looks as if the solar expansion and collapse in the great distance of time is sort of a time limit or the test.

We are very, very, very far from that date ... yet we are considering human survival even now, because we seem to want to beat the Sun to utter human destruction.

That is to say we are underscoring the notion that perhaps we can't make it to that distant date under our current social means and methods. The critical skills are missing.

We need survival skills.

If we were to escape off into space beyond our solar system before we became cosmic, mature, and wise adults, we would only be spreading the disease to another location.

If we did solve our social problems before the solar problem gets us, and did develop the skill of space travel, then we would be spreading social wisdom out into the universe.

We have to decide which side we are on ... destruction of life or survival of life ... then work in that direction.

While browsing I found a David Ho painting that depicts (to me anyway) humanity's current efforts to find a new star. I found it at astropixie, a very interesting blog.

The Mother of All Memes

The graphic to the left shows The Mother of All Memes without her clothes on or with her clothes on, depending on which scientists you are prone to believe.

One would think that her children, poor little ole memes, could have a life of their own free from the tugs, pushes, and pulls of the gravity of scientific bloviation, hypothecation, and even pontification.

But not so, alas, all things are within the grasp of scientific thought-gravity so each and every lowly meme is pulled and tugged asunder, abroad, to, fro, ever looking for a home but always a captive somewhere somehow.

The tug of war begins between the competing camps concerning the likely mother of all memes, the mind and/or the brain.

That old tug of war started by the philosophers, but now pumped up with cosmic steroids by the quantum mechanics, those meme bags even Mr. Goodwrench bows down to.

In the beginning (cool meme huh?) there was dualism and monism gravity which pulled folks into the belief that mind is a non-physical component on the one hand, but pulled folks into the belief that mind is the result of purely material processes of the physical brain on the other hand:

Philosophy of mind is a branch of modern analytic philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body.

(Philosophy of Mind). Well now doesn't that make a meme a bit insecure, in as much as every meme has been told that it is:

a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena

(Wikipedia, Meme). One of the scientists, a meme maker of cosmic proportions in terms of causing gastric pains to the establishment scientists, one Roger Penrose, is constantly causing memetic gamma ray wars between factions within the 100 year meme war community.

He is a master at hiding from both sides of the meme grabbers, so he postulates that:

In my view the conscious brain does not act according to classical physics. It doesn’t even act according to conventional quantum mechanics. It acts according to a theory we don’t yet have.

(Discover, emphasis added). Oh my the man is saying we have had 100 years of psychotherapy but we do not know fundamentally what we are talking about?

The memes are shuddering. No, he is saying we work on faith in science some times. His new book deals with the faith of science and will ruffle feathers.

But he is saying we don't know how the mind works at the fundamental level, so we activate our science based upon what the mind does, not on what the mind is.

That is why this blog calls for a new approach based upon what the human species needs to do in order to survive, not what we need to do just to win silly arguments.

Shadow of Time Governs The Earth

Time is everywhere and there are different types of time.

Song writers mentioned that "time keeps on slipping slipping slipping into the future" in a popular song some time back.

The exclamation "just in time" indicates that only a portion of the vast amount of the totality of time is available for some efforts.

Time is another one of those invisible realms, like gravity, that governs the earth from "the shadows", that is, from the realm we cannot see even though we can see the effects of the unseen power at work.

Dredd Blog talks about a shadow that governs in the sense of a powerful unseen movement.

A movement that influences the national governments without there being any conspiracy involved.

And that is the sense of this post, a notion of vast unseen realms that govern the entire earth from the shadows.

That is, "govern" in the sense that no single nation can change what is going to happen globally to climate patterns.

(One example of that can be discerned in the discussion of the G8 Summit in a previous post on Dredd Blog.)

The graph above shows world population numbers increasing, thereby, adding to the problems the nations of the earth face; whether they want to face those problems or even can face those problems or not:

That's the simple idea at the heart of the warning from John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, of a possible crisis in 2030.

Specifically, he points to research indicating that by 2030 "a whole series of events come together":

* ... population will rise from 6bn to 8bn (33%)
* Demand for food will increase by 50%
* Demand for water will increase by 30%
* Demand for energy will increase by 50%

He foresees each problem combining to create a "perfect storm" in which the whole is bigger, and more serious, than the sum of its parts.

(BBC News). Everyone, from the Mayan date 2012 watchers to the scientist quoted above, calculates something happening at a particular point in time.

What is really being said is that there are powerful energies at work in the shadows which we cannot seem to govern.

Instead, they seem to govern us, so the best we can do is watch the effects which we think will converge to have tangible results at a particular time.

But, that has not proven to be a timely indicator, because, scientists are as surprised as politicians are from time to time.

This does not bode well for the hope that the human species will pass "The Test" of Ecocosmolgy by conforming to the governing requirements of the cosmos.

The next post in this series is here.

No Need To Shoot In The Dark

Life After People

Imagine a large city on a planet near a star. A star that will be called a nova in a hundred years or less.

The SETI institute and NASA through its Kepler Mission are looking for planets that are, or can be, inhabited. Which means that they are looking near stars.

Some of which will go nova, or destroy the planets near them in another way.

Under current scientific models the stars which have planets near them will destroy those planets at some time. Our star, the Sun, will do so by expanding in size to a point out near the orbit of Mars.

Since we know that, it seems obvious that we will try to leave this planet to find another star with habitable planets. It seems obvious because if we do not do that, we cease to exist as a species.

We can assume that any other intelligent life species that wanted to continue to exist would do the same. They would try to find another home world.

I offer a search technique for consideration, which could fine tune the search Kepler and SETI are doing.

Look for signals from solar systems where the star has gone catastrophic, that is, has gone nova, super-nova, or has expanded out to destroy the planets near it like the Sun is going to to us. If there was any life on any planets there, the looming catastrophe may have caused signal transmission from any intelligent life there, well before the solar destruction.

But when we do the looking, we should look at the record of events before the catastrophe, we should also look back as many years before the catastrophe as possible, in cases where we have those astronomical records in our grasp.

For those systems where there were species who could not develop a way to do space travel to another planet, we might detect a signal for help.

And in those cases where the species could and did develop space travel, did find another star with a habitable planet, then did thereafter travel to it, we would expect a different signal to find its way toward us.

But remember that, in any search of this type, any signal will in most cases be older than our species, since great distances of space are involved.

Which involves great spans of time for signals to travel through, even at the speed of light.

Any signals received will be very, very old.