reimaginingsocieties-blog

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The Blue Java (also known as Ice Cream banana, Hawaiian banana, Ney Mannan, Krie, or Cenizo) is a hardy, cold tolerant banana cultivar known for its sweet aromatic fruit which is said to have an ice cream like consistency and flavor reminiscent of vanilla.

Blue Java bananas can grow to a height of 15 feet to 20 feet. They are cold tolerant and like tall bananas of the ABB Group, are wind resistant because of their strong pseudostems and root systems. The leaves are silvery green in color.

The fruit bunches are small, bearing seven to nine hands. The fruit are 7 to 9 inches in length and exhibit a characteristic silvery blue color when unripe. The fruit turn a pale yellow when ripe, with white creamy flesh. They bloom around 15 to 24 months after planting and can be harvested after 115 to 150 days.

Blue Java bananas are popular bananas that can be eaten fresh or cooked. They are known for their fragrant fruit which taste like vanilla custard. The fruit goes well with ice cream.

Did you know that banana is a berry? 

source:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Java_banana 

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Mystery Island

“the most alien looking place on earth”

Imagine waking up on the Socotra Island and taking a good look around you (let's say your buddies pulled a prank on you and delivered you there, and lets also assume that you don't have any hangover from abuse of any substances). After a yelp of disbelief, you'd be inclined to think you were transported to another planet - or traveled to another era of Earth's history. The second would be closer to the truth for this island, which is part of a group of 4 islands, has been geographically isolated from mainland Africa for the last 6 or 7 million years. Like the Galapagos Islands, this island is teeming with 700 extremely rare species of flora and fauna, a full 1/3 of which are endemic, i.e. found nowhere else on Earth.

The climate is harsh, hot and dry, and yet - the most amazing plant life thrives there. Situated in the Indian Ocean 250 km from Somalia and 340 km from Yemen, the wide sandy beaches rise to limestone plateaus full of caves (some 7 kilometers in length) and mountains up to 1525 meters high.

The name Socotra is derived from a Sanscrit name, meaning "The Island of Bliss"... Is it the beaches? The isolation and quiet? or the strange and crazy botanical allure?

Alien-looking plants: H. P. Lovecraft's secret inspiration? Was the famous Chtulhu myths creator aware of these forbidding mountains with their hauntingly weird flora (think of plant mutations from his "The Color out of Space") ? We almost tempted to call Socotra the other "Mountains of Madness" - the trees and plants of this island were preserved thru the long geological isolation, some varieties being 20 million years old... We begin with the dracena cinnibaris or Dragon's Blood Tree, the source of valuable resin for varnishes, dyes, and "cure-all" medicine; also (predictably) used in medieval ritual magic and alchemy

source: 

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/most-alien-looking-place-on-earth.html

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1. Geoglyphs on deforested land at the Fazenda Colorada site in the Amazon rainforest, Rio Branco area, Acre. Site dated c. AD 1283.

2. White Horse Hill, England (Courtesy English Heritage/Historic England) Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/five-planets-most-mysterious-geoglyphs-180962917/#7bVzV4vDmTh7LLBj.99

3. Paracas Candelabra, Peru (Wildnerdpix/iStock)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/five-planets-most-mysterious-geoglyphs-180962917/

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_radiation 

Hawaiian honeycreeper, yellow legged honeycreeper 

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the best food on earth

There are up to 3,000 varieties of potato in Peru (some shown right), which are harvested throughout the country (left). The potato originated in the Andes

The recognition of the value of indigenous and established foods, and their protection and defence, has meant that family farmers have regained a lost prestige, with the result that local economies are reviving. In 2010, leading Peruvian chefs and food writers took their commitment to defend national biodiversity further, and campaigned for a ten-year ban on the introduction of genetically modified crops. When the debate among legislators became open to public discussion, the Peruvian Association of Gastronomy pushed harder for the ban, which became law in 2011.

Peruvian food culture now is an astonishing rich mixture of food systems. These combine the ancient traditions of the original people with those that have come from Europe, Africa and Asia. It would be a mistake to think that what is happening in Peru is merely an attraction for rich people and tourists. The Peruvian food movement is truly national.

There are 45 native varieties of corn in Peru. The most praised variety is the giant white corn of Cuzco. Corn is a staple food, used in a vast variety of foods and dishes, such as breads, tamales, stews, soups, and hot and cold drinks, known as chichas. The humble cancha --roasted corn kernels – mostly ignored in big cities until the early 1980s, is now hugely popular everywhere.

Julio Hancco Mamani (above) feted in Peru as a 'general of biodiversity' grows 200 types of potato in his family plot 4,000 metres up in the Andes

Native knowledge

It is certain, in our opinion, that the native populations who settled what is now Peru around 10,000 years ago, developed a very good understanding of the nutritional qualities of their food systems and supplies, and of their dietary patterns. The fact that they knew nothing about nutrition in any modern sense may make us think that they were constantly prey to nutritional deficiencies. Of course it is true that in parts of the world where the climate or terrain is harsh, it is often hard for people who live in nature to be sure of getting a sufficient variety of food. But there is now good evidence to back common sense, that human ingenuity all over the world overcame barriers to food security and adequacy.

Furthermore, the lack of substances in food that we now know as micronutrients often becomes evident to communities living in nature. A clear example is vitamin A, lack of which first shows as loss of night vision. It is surely certain that prehistoric peoples became aware of this, and as a process of trial and error, discovered and then bred plants rich in carotenoids. As another example, the story that effective treatment for scurvy was discovered by an English naval officer in the 18th century is not correct. The anti-scorbutic properties of various plants were known to native North Americans since time immemorial.

The Incas did not have writing in any conventional sense, and with a few exceptions, their oral records were interpreted by Europeans with different value-systems. So what is stated here is technically speculative. We nevertheless hold to it. We believe there is still much to learn from the traditions and customs of the native Peruvians, historically and now.

source >> Journal of the World Public Health Nutrition Association Volume 3, Number 8, August 2012. http://www.wphna.org/htdocs/2012_aug_wn4_commentary_food_peru.htm 

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Mutualism: Symbiotic Relationships

Mutualism describes a type of mutually beneficial relationship between organisms of different species. It is a symbiotic relationship in which two different species interact with and in some cases, totally rely on one another for survival. Other types of symbiotic relationships include parasitism (one species benefits and the other is harmed) and commensalism (one species benefits without harming or helping the other). Organisms live in mutualistic relationships for a number of important reasons. Some of these reasons include for shelter, protection, nutrition, and for reproductive purposes.

Mutualistic relationships can be categorized as either obligate or facultative. In obligate mutualism, the survival of one or both of the organisms involved is dependent upon the relationship. In facultative mutualism, both organisms benefit from but are not dependent upon their relationship for survival.

Mutualism in Oxpeckers and Grazing Animals: Oxpeckers are birds that eat ticks, flies, and other insects from cattle and other grazing mammals. The oxpecker receives nourishment, and the animal that it grooms receives pest control.

Mutualism in Plants: Insects and animals play a vital role in the pollination of flowering plants. While the plant pollinator receives nectar or fruit from the plant, it also collects and transfers pollen in the process.

Mutualism in Clownfish and Sea anemones: Clownfish live within the protective tentacles of the sea anemone. In return, the sea anemone receives cleaning and protection.

Fungi & Their Roles as Decomposers and Recyclers

Fungi play a crucial role in the balance of ecosystems. They colonize most habitats on earth, preferring dark, moist conditions. They can thrive in seemingly-hostile environments, such as the tundra. However, most members of the Kingdom Fungi grow on the forest floor where the dark and damp environment is rich in decaying debris from plants and animals. In these environments, fungi play a major role as decomposers and recyclers, making it possible for members of the other kingdoms to be supplied with nutrients and to live.

The food web would be incomplete without organisms that decompose organic matter. Some elements, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, are required in large quantities by biological systems; yet, they are not abundant in the environment. The action of fungi releases these elements from decaying matter, making them available to other living organisms. Trace elements present in low amounts in many habitats are essential for growth, but would remain tied up in rotting organic matter if fungi and bacteria did not return them to the environment via their metabolic activity. 

Members of Kingdom Fungi form ecologically beneficial mutualistic relationships with cyanobateria, plants, and animals.

As saprobes, fungi help maintain a sustainable ecosystem for the animals and plants that share the same habitat. In addition to replenishing the environment with nutrients, fungi interact directly with other organisms in beneficial, but sometimes damaging, ways.

Bailey, Regina. "Mutualism: Symbiotic Relationships." ThoughtCo, Feb. 23, 2018, thoughtco.com/mutualism-symbiotic-relationships-4109634.

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-biology/chapter/ecology-of-fungi/

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Mobilize freedom research

What is freedom? How is freedom carried out in real life? To what extent is freedom attainable? What are historical ideas of freedom? What are modern day ideas of freedom? What conflicts are present due to a history of (different) perceptions of freedom?

What are the conditions of freedom? How is freedom limited in today’s world? To what extent is it limited and by whom? Who controls freedom? Who does freedom affect? 

How must the problems of freedom be approached? How can the conflicts be resolved? By whom must they be resolved? To what extent can freedom be (reimagined) ..?

Organic questions: open-ended, but solvable. Bridges to discussion.

Questions with holistic insight

Asking questions about a conflict that could be answered by social, economic, political, environmental, religious, scientific, philosophical, psychological, sociological or moral theories and experience. To derive new questions, conclusions, shaping the perception anew. 

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hidden civilizations

garze tibetan autonomous prefecture sichuan larung gar buddhist institute jigme phuntsok china 2013

Yak near Yamdrok lake, Tibet. 

It is a long-haired bovinae found throughout the Himalayan region of south Central Asia, the Tibetan Plateau and as far north as Mongolia and Russia. The Tibetan economy is dominated by subsistence agriculture. Due to limited arable land, the primary occupation of the Tibetan Plateau is raising livestock, such as sheep, cattle, goats, camels, yaks, dzo, and horses. The Tibetan yak is an integral part of Tibetan life. (Used in a small exhibition in Stockholm, at the World Water Week, rising awareness about climate change in the Himalayas. Original title was: "Tibet-5812")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_yak#/media/File:Bos_grunniens_at_Yundrok_Yumtso_Lake.jpg

Train of pack yaks at Litang monastery in Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_yak#/media/File:LitangMonastery.jpg 

Altaï - Mongolie

https://www.gngl.com/ps-mongolie/tp-circuit-accompagne/at-decouverte/mon021--fete-nauriz-aigliers-mongolie

Yaks and Yak Herders Camp At Dhampu Tibet 

In the mountainous far east of Bhutan, the hardy Brokpa tribe have herded yak for centuries. These are the last days of their isolated existence. Will the new road bring everything these communities hope, like better opportunities for their families, or will their unique identity be lost in the race to modernize?

The last decade has seen the Kingdom of Bhutan undergo a rapid transition. Transforming from a closed Buddhist Kingdom into a constitutional democracy, the country is now admired worldwide for its uncompromising pursuit of “Gross National Happiness.”

However, as Bhutan’s development accelerates, its government and people are engaged in a tireless struggle to simultaneously preserve their traditions and keep the country’s unique identity alive.

Traditional ways of living and cultural practices, particularly those in rural communities, are quickly disappearing in the quest for modernized lifestyles and less laborious job opportunities. In an attempt to combat this loss of culture that globalisation inevitably brings, the government has drafted a heritage bill, which they hope will protect the traditions of isolated communities like the Brokpa tribe, who have herded yak in the remote far eastern corner of Bhutan for centuries.

During the warmer summer months the Brokpa live a semi-nomadic life, as they search for fresh pasture land for their yak. Constantly on the move, each night the yak calfs are caught and tethered in a makeshift pen near the herders’ campsite, to protect them from attack by predators and to have the cows ready for milking in the morning.

Each year in May and June, the harvesting of yak hair takes place. Only the castrates and females will be sheared, while the breeding bull retains its coat, so that it will look more dominant in front of other bulls. The Brokpa still spin yak hair, using a drop spindle called a yoekpa, however, the use of traditional hand woven yak wool tents is declining rapidly, as plastic tarpaulins become more readily available.

They wear a singular style of dress, made famous by their distinctive yak felt hat, known as a tsipee cham, which has long twisted tufts, said to prevent the rain from running into their faces. A very hospitable people, drinking butter tea is a regular part of life and is always served to guests. Since yak butter is the main ingredient, it provides plenty of calories and the herders are often said to drink more than thirty cups a day.

Wealth within the Brokpa society is assessed on the heads of livestock. For example, a wealthy Brokpa may have 150 to 180 yaks, in addition to other animals such as horses and sheep. The middle class Brokpa may own 20 to 50 yaks, while the poorest may own as few as two or none.

Women command a high degree of respect from their husbands and children and often function as the head of the family. They are pivotal in deciding such matters as marriage of their children, when to migrate during the summer months, and in taking charge of the family finances.

For centuries, the only way to visit has been to complete a grueling multi-day trek, along river valleys and over a 4,300m pass. This is all about to change. Within the next few months the first road is due to be completed and the pressure to modernize will become exacerbated. The tranquil peace of the Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary is shattered by the sound of heavy machinery, as diggers cut the new road through the mountainside.

Like many developing countries, Bhutan is experiencing massive rural–urban migration, with thousands of people leaving the villages in search of better lives in the cities. Basic living standards, a lack of alternative job opportunities, and unhappiness are all important contributors to migration. This is particularly seen in the younger generations, whose departure results in the loss of community vitality and values.

There is some debate on whether these isolated communities have missed out on mainstream development, with some arguing that the government wanted to conserve these villages as ‘living museums’ to satisfy high-end tourists. International tourists can only visit Bhutan on an organized tour, which, alongside a daily visa fee to the government, can cost around $250 a day. Even so, at some local Tshechus (festivals), tourists are now almost outnumbering the locals. 

Within the last few years shops have started to appear, bringing with them the added issue of non bio-degradable packaging. As the road slowly encroaches on the village, more and more goods become readily available, which has a great impact on their lifestyle and diet.

Rubbish disposal is also a growing problem for the village, and non-biodegradable waste littering the hillside on the outskirt of the village. Bhutan banned plastic bags in 1999, but sadly this has not reduced the growing problem of waste or the harmful effect on the environment.

Today, with the road nearly completed, change for the Brokpa tribe is unavoidable, and reliance on their yak is bound to diminish over time. Many, like 45-year-old Tshewang Choden, are excited and expect that the new road will bring greater amenities and services to their village. Tshewang tells me, “The road makes me happy. It will greatly improve my family’s living conditions and make life easier.”

source >> https://matadornetwork.com/read/end-road-changing-lives-bhutans-yak-herders/ 

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DYSON'S BRAIN

STEWART BRAND TALKS to the deepest futurist alive - and the most trustworthy.

source: https://www.wired.com/1998/02/dyson/ 

Freeman Dyson is renowned in science circles not only for his rigor and insight, but for his science fiction imaginativeness and populist ethics. Though raised and educated in England, Dyson, a retired professor of physics, has spent the last 45 years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He's best known for his work in quantum electrodynamics, but his professional reach extends far beyond the academic community. Dyson's popular books, such as Disturbing the Universe, Infinite in All Directions, and, most recently, Imagined Worlds, are esteemed among scientists, technologists, and the public alike. In person he is soft-spoken and unassuming, and at 74 he's neither frail nor hesitant. During our three-plus hours together, we talked about his childhood and his daughter Esther, about some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in history, about why he thinks that PhDs and theology should be abolished - and we covered an array of cosmic ecology ideas he has for a better future.

The substance of what he said changed my mind on nearly every subject he addressed.

Brand: I was looking at your 1988 book, Infinite in All Directions, and remembering what it was that excited me about it. Ten years ago, most people I knew were in the depths of a kind of bad mood, harboring a pessimistic feeling that things were going to keep getting worse for the rest of their lives. But your book had this pragmatic and also rather cosmic optimism about it; it came as a complete counter to the cultural flow at that point. Did you perceive that at the time?

Dyson: Oh yes. It's partly a matter of what generation you came out of. I grew up in the '30s, which was a really black time. Having survived that, you can never really take pessimism seriously. World War I was the great tragic experience for England, so we grew up under its shadow. A tragic view of life was everywhere; there was nothing but tragic.

How were you feeling then?

I was a complete fatalist. I didn't expect to survive. When we saw World War II coming along, we thought it would be bacteriological, and we all expected to die of the plague. So in the meantime we had a good time. The war was so much more comfortable and manageable than we had ever imagined it could be.

What's your sense of cultural optimism right now?

Things are going amazingly well. Of course, there's all sorts of monstrous injustices in the world, but I look at my six kids and they're all doing fine; all of them have interesting lives. Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.

I wonder how this relates to pace, because you, more than anybody, like to think in the long term - in centuries. Whereas a lot of our behavior seems to respond to what we think at the year level or the next-week level. Is there more optimism in the longer view because you can better even out the ups and downs of daily life?

Yes, by and large.

Maybe there is a science fiction angle I can use to describe this sentiment. Science fiction has gone through periods of upexcitement: "Let's explore the universe; this is going to be fun." Followed by: "It's pretty dire out there; we're going to have a nuclear war." To, more recently: "It's going to be a tough, corporate, dog-eat-dog world, and all we can do is try to find our way in that." What's your sense of the flow of science fiction moods?

I haven't been following recent science fiction. The people I tend to read are my old friends, who are definitely not on the cutting edge. There's Bob Forward, who is old-style - what they call hard science fiction. It's good, but it's not very imaginative. Then there's Charles Sheffield and Paul Preuss, whom I like. I don't even know who the young people are.

Have you read Vernor Vinge?

No.

He has a proposal he calls the "technological singularity." It comes up in a couple of his novels, now collected in a book called Across Realtime. The supposition is that early 21st-century technology (with culture trying to stay apace) has accelerated so rapidly that everything is fundamentally changed. You can see this acceleration now with Moore's Law, or with the Web taking off because its value increases by the square of the number of people using it. These are basically self-enhancing technologies. You also have tremendous acceleration culturally and commercially as people are rewarded for being quick on the uptake and punished for being slow. All of these accelerations together create an event horizon over which you can't see the future anymore because of the pace of change. That's what makes it a singularity. Vinge says that we're rapidly approaching the point where the computer's ability to handle information equals the human brain's in terms of complexity, speed, and so forth. Does any of that resonate with you?

Not at all. The technical tricks these people are talking about are only a small part of the human experience. They vastly overestimate their own importance. I look at the world in a very different way. It's partly a matter of being old, but I look at the subway networks in cities, for instance. They also have the N-squared law. If you have a subway network with N routes, its value to the passenger is N squared. That's fine. But once you get to a certain number of routes, like 20 or so, there's very rapid growth, followed by saturation. This will also happen with chips. To some extent, it already has. It's true that the price per megaflop is going down according to Moore's Law, but what you can do with the processing power isn't increasing at the same rate.

I remember doing a study on the cost of nuclear power in the 1950s, when people thought it would be very cheap. We studied what the economic effect would be if the cost of electricity were zero. The answer is, "Not much." It costs far more to use electricity than it does to make it. There's about a 5 percent drop in the GNP if electricity is free. So cheap energy is all it takes. The same is true of computing power.

Is this a self-limiting revolution, then?

Yes. It won't completely choke itself off, but other things are much more important.

The top of the list being ...?

I've been propagating a view about a return to village culture that may be the subject of my next book. The really bad things going on now are mostly connected with megacities that are growing out of control - places like Cairo and Mexico City.

I wonder what the impact of the Teledesic project will be on these megacities. It appears that we'll get anticipatory effects in this decade and much stronger results in the next decade. We'll equalize every place on the planet in terms of cheap data access. It's an extraordinary technical jump for everyone all at once. Part of what cities offer is their information infrastructure. But with Teledesic, you get city-quality information infrastructure in the countryside. It becomes anybody's countryside - Mexico's, Egypt's, China's, any country in Africa. Is this the sort of shift you're talking about?

That's exactly what I had in mind. There are three items I cover in the new book. First, I didn't know Teledesic was going up, but I knew something like it was always within 10 years anyway. The second is solar energy, which is wonderfully world distributed. It's only a question of a factor of two to five between the cost of solar energy and the cost of oil. In the long run, oil will get more expensive and solar energy will take over. The third item is biotech, which is essential for using solar energy in crop plants designed to do all the industrial processes.

So you're not talking about solar electricity.

That's also part of the deal, but the more important thing is that you'll be able to make your gasoline locally. People will live in the villages and commute to work in the towns, and they'll produce gasoline on the local farms.

This is from biomass that you refine right there?

You don't even have to refine it. The plants produce it.

Isn't this a more complicated process?

True, we don't have the biotech yet. For that I'm talking maybe 50 years - when we really understand how DNA functions. However, there's no reason plants should be limited to 1 percent energy efficiency. We know photovoltaics can reach 10 percent quite easily. Plants are stuck at 1 percent because they use a particularly elegant process involving chlorophyll. But it's wasteful; it involves a long chain of chemical reactions. It's a historical relic that plants got stuck with. If you could design a plant from scratch, you'd probably use silicon films instead of chlorophyll to collect sunlight. Silicon is abundant, and you've simply got to have a plant that will process soil and extract silicon the same way that plants now process carbon dioxide into carbon.

Presumably, plant-food efficiency also goes up enormously with biotech. So you can get food anywhere and energy anywhere. And with Teledesic you can get bits anywhere.

That's the point. The example I like to talk about is the village in East Germany where my wife grew up. It's typical of what happens to villages. Under the communists, it was a very stable and prosperous farming village where they used 1910 technology. They sold their stuff to Russia at a fixed price, so everybody was guaranteed an income. The system offered complete security and a very comfortable, well-organized way of living.

The village also had a little zoo. A local communist decided it would be a good idea, and the party agreed. The zoo didn't even have to be profitable. There were a couple of professionals to take care of it, and most of the work was done by schoolchildren, which was marvelous for them. It was a very fine example of communism as it should work. Then came 1990. The village economy was swept away in one year after Germany was unified. You had to pay in West German marks to buy goods. The Russians couldn't afford to buy anything. Suddenly, the local people preferred to shop in the supermarket - stuff imported from France and Denmark. The global economy just wiped the place out. Most of the village was out of work, and the younger people simply moved to the cities in hopes of finding jobs, leaving behind those with pensions.

So your sense of how we might return to the villages ...

I haven't got there yet. This is a three-act play. Act II is the collapse, produced by the market economy. Of course, it's happened all over the world: villages destroyed by the global economy. They can't produce anything anybody wants to buy, so the people just move out. That's what produces this tremendous migration into the big cities, which doesn't solve anything. Act III is what's happening now. The village is reviving.

Your wife's village?

Yes. It's gentrifying. This is the way it has to go. Wealth is moving into the village. They are new people with money and Mercedes cars, and they have a love and respect for the beauties of nature.

Do they have any respect for the people who stayed there during Act II?

Oh, yes. It's a place that is starting to be friendly again, and there's a 1,000-year-old church in great need of repair. These new people are taking care of that, and they're widening the roads so their Mercedes can get in and out. It's a place for people to live who bring in the wealth from somewhere else. That's the way half of the villages in England are, too. They're beautiful, but the farming is mostly amateur farming.

Well, now, you're a futurist. This is Act III in a play with presumably more than three acts.

The point I'm building up to is that you can't do this in Mexico, because there isn't any wealth. The villages are too isolated; it's a much bigger problem. To make it worldwide, you've got to have a source of wealth in the villages to start with - tourism is not enough. That's where solar energy and biotech come in. Of course, it doesn't solve all the world's problems, of which population growth is Number One. But you have the feeling that once these places are gentrified, the birth rate will drop. It's happened everywhere else.

When the command economies broke, they broke fast, so the villages emptied out fast. Now we have a rampant market economy almost everywhere. It has enormous adaptive advantages, and many people are catching on to how self-organizing it is. But I suspect some are also beginning to encounter the extreme short-term thinking that goes with a market economy and its not-so-wonderful by-products.

Brian Eno says that the market economy is having trouble in places like Russia and Eastern Europe because they're moving straight to the rudest, crudest laissez-faire version, which looks a whole lot like crime. He says that the market economy doesn't work unless you have all the cultural framing that goes with it - things like trust, educational training, and going to college, which don't necessarily belong in a strict market economy.

As I've said before, I don't believe in the market economy. To me it's surprising it works as well as it does.

In your new book, Imagined Worlds, you say that Thomas Kuhn'saccount of paradigm shifts in science is only about concept-driven science. But you see science driven even more by tool revolutions. Can you give me some examples of that?

The Galileo revolution in astronomy was a prime example. The telescope was a tool that turned everything upside down. And X-ray crystallography turned biology upside down. The Crick-Watson discovery of the double helix was not a concept, it really was just the result of having a good tool to analyze the DNA molecule with. There's a chapter in my next book about John Randall, who was responsible more than any single person for the microbiological revolution. It's an interesting story. He was a third-rate physicist who had a very undistinguished career as a solid-state physicist in Birmingham. World War II had started and there was a desperate need for microwave transmitters. The English defense system was based on meter-wave radar, which was completely inadequate - and everybody knew it. If you wanted really good radar, you needed microwaves. So Randall was asked to invent a good microwave transmitter. It took him just two months. In November 1939 he invented the cavity magnetron. It absolutely revolutionized the whole state of the art. It was 1,000 times more powerful than any other microwave transmitter at that time. The device was the biggest contribution from Britain to the United States, given to them before the US even came into the war.

Is that what they were then working on at the Rad Lab at MIT? If so, they say it's what won the war.

Yes, the magnetron was actually invented in Birmingham, but they don't like to mention that. At the end of the war, Randall was a national hero. He was made Sir John and acclaimed as the savior of the country. After the war, he became a full professor at King's College London, with the prestige to do anything he liked. He decided solid-state physics was rather dull, and he wasn't very good at it anyway, so he decided to do X-ray crystallography with a view to applying it to biology.

In five years he built up this X-ray crystallography lab, where in 1950 Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin - the people who took the first images of DNA - produced pictures of X-ray diffraction in aligned fibers of DNA. It's what gave Crick and Watson their data. Nobody else in the world had that data.

Why wasn't Randall part of the Nobel Prize?

He organized the infrastructure. He wasn't the discoverer. That was fair. The question is, why didn't Rosalind Franklin get the Nobel Prize? Because Wilkins did. The real point I'm making is that it's rare for somebody to look that far ahead.

What are the next tool revolutions we need in science?

One is a DNA-sequence analyzer that sits on your table. There's a lot of hype about the Human Genome Project. Already we have about 100 identified genes associated with particular diseases, but it's all far too slow and expensive. It's ridiculous - you pay billions for one sequence, and it's not what the world needs. It's not sustainable. What you really want are thousands of sequences of all kinds of people with all kinds of diseases, and animals and plants. The goal is to sequence the whole biosphere. But the cost has to be reduced by a factor of 1,000 to make it worthwhile. The human sequence should be US$1 million or less - done on your desktop, about so big.

You're gesturing about a foot and a half square - it looks about the size of a scanning tunneling microscope.

It's the sort of device that will sequence the molecules one at a time so you don't have to do all this chemistry to multiply them and purify them. You simply take a single piece of a chromosome and sequence it as an individual molecule - using physics instead of chemistry.

Explain what you mean by "using physics instead of chemistry."

It's not a new idea to run a molecule of DNA through some device and physically chip off one base at a time. The four base types have different masses, so if you could detach them reliably, one by one, and run them through a mass spectrograph, it would take, maybe, a few microseconds to separate them cleanly.

It really is one molecule at a time. You're not talking reactions or anything here.

The present way of doing it is very ingenious, but it's wet chemistry - slow and extremely laborious.

If you could read DNA one base pair at a time, could you also manufacture it the same way using the same tool?

We don't know how to do that, but the synthesizers they have now are pretty good. Obviously, it would be nice if you could do it quicker. The lack of the analyzer is the bottleneck. No doubt synthesizers will keep on improving, but when you synthesize DNA, you want to synthesize fairly large quantities. Therefore, it automatically becomes chemistry.

What do we arrive at when we get that sort of reader?

We get the human genome for $1 million. We find out much more precisely the correlation between different medical conditions and different genes. We also find out much more precisely the evolutionary relations between humans and all kinds of creatures, all the way back. This whole business of genetic analysis is currently based on taking out little bits of DNA. If you had genomes of everything, it would be far more illuminating.

We could read history straight. We could date things.

It would be a tremendous breakthrough for both science and medicine.

The other tool, which is even more important, is a protein-structure analyzer. Most of the really important medical problems are concerned with proteins. The joke is that there are about 100,000 different proteins in each human cell - a minimum of what you want to know. But a few hundred thousand proteins is probably what we would like to have structures for to design drugs efficiently.

Presently we have done about 5,000 in 40 years or so. The first was identified by Max Perutz.

What was the protein?

Hemoglobin. Actually, myoglobin was done about a year sooner. Myoglobin was done by John Kendrew and hemoglobin by Perutz. They both won a Nobel Prize. It was a heroic effort. Since then, we've done about 5,000 more. Many labs are specializing in this area, but it's extremely laborious work. You have to crystallize the stuff before you can even start. And many of the important proteins are membrane proteins, which are noncrystallizable. They have very awkward shapes that are half inside the cell and half outside.

Reading structure must be different than reading base pairs.

Much harder. You're required to know the exact geometrical arrangement. The classical way to do this is by X-ray crystallography, and you can do a little with MRI ( magnetic resonance imaging ). Nowadays, most small proteins are done using MRI. But it doesn't work with the big proteins.

What's your sense of where other tools breakthroughs will happen?

One has already been invented by John Sidles at the University of Washington in Seattle. Sidles is a medical physicist. He works with the Department of Orthopaedics in the medical school, interpreting X rays and MRIs of shoulders and knees for a living.

In the evenings Sidles invents interesting devices for solving the problems of medicine. One of his inventions is called the magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM). There are two ways of looking at human tissues or molecules. One is magnetic resonance imaging, which has wonderful penetration. You can see everything inside your head but with very bad resolution. The other is the atomic force microscope, which is a very fine tip you scrape along the surface of a solid object to see individual atoms. You can measure the deflection of the tip with extraordinary precision; it's a wonderful device for looking at surfaces, but you can't see anything below. The point is to combine the resolution of the atomic force microscope with the penetration of the MRI.

John Sidles came up with a trick: instead of a mechanical tip, you use a tiny little speck of iron, a little ferromagnet suspended on this whisker of vibrating silicon that doesn't quite touch the surface. The iron speck creates a magnetic field that reaches into the interior of your sample. Under the surface you have atoms that experience magnetic moments. And you apply a radio field - in this case, an MRI machine - to flip the spins in the atoms up and down. These atomic spins then exert an up-and-down magnetic force on the iron tip. By matching the frequency of the magnetic force to that of the vibrating silicon whisker, you can then make the whisker vibrate enough to see the movement with a laser sensor. What you're seeing, then, is microscopy at the atomic scale. It looks very good to me. Of course, this is a prototype. The IBM Almaden Research Center in California built one and made it work. But it was only to demonstrate that the idea is OK.

What you've been talking about for the past 15 minutes sounds like nanotechnology , but you never use the term.

It's because I'm skeptical. Biotechnology has moved ahead so fast that it makes nanotechnology old hat. If we get to the point of building micromachines, it will probably be done by biotech.

At Global Business Network we're always looking for bifurcation points at which the world might go this way or that way because of some critical thing. One of the bifurcation points I've been proposing is the race between biotech and nanotech. Whichever gets "there" first affects everything else. If it's biotech, you have another couple decades of biology being the dominant metaphor for understanding the world. If it's nanotech, you have a more mechanical set of understandings. There is a kind of technological determinism to this. Once you've got a tool, it redefines the world, and you can't undo that.

I don't believe in technological determinism, especially not in biology and medicine. We have strong laws to keep doctors from monkeying around with humans that will remain in place. It's simply not true that everything that is technologically possible gets done.

Won't overseas labs that don't care about such matters show up soon and do all the forbidden things?

It's a question of how strongly the international community feels about it. On the whole, science remains amazingly international in spite of all sorts of wars and ideological disputes. We've never really had any communication breakdown.

You went to Biosphere 2 a couple of times. What's your sense of the value of that rather extravagant enterprise?

I was very enthusiastic about it. My first visit happened before they went in - when they were doing small-scale enclosure experiments, which I found more interesting than the big one. It would have been much more valuable to have had five or six small ones. You could find out what went wrong more rapidly and try out different approaches. Having just one is not good science.

As a work of art, it was great - the little rain forest, the lake, the farm, and various other ecological units. As a piece of science, it wasn't well designed. The second time I went, they were enclosed. All I could do was put my hands against the glass and exchange greetings on the telephone. But it seemed to be going quite well. Then they had a calamity, which was very satisfying to me - the fact that things turned out to behave in unexpected ways. The press castigated them because they ran out of air, but, to my mind, that meant it was good science because you found out something new.

Even the scientific press - until last year in Science magazine - said it was bad science, irrelevant, a blot on the escutcheon of science. You don't view it that way?

Biosphere 2 was much more than science; it was a human adventure. It was like the Apollo program, which wasn't really science either, but it had huge excitement attached to it and was a great sporting event. The science was simply an extra dividend.

Say something about failure in experiments or businesses or anything else. What's the value of failure?

You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works - it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential. The same is true of airplanes.

This brings up an interesting issue of where theory fits in. Presumably there was not a theory of planes before there were planes.

There was an attempt at a theory of airplanes, but it was completely misleading. The Wright brothers, in fact, did much better without it.

So you're saying just go ahead and try stuff and you'll sort out the right way.

That's what nature did. And it's almost always true in technology. That's why computers never really took off until they built them small.

Why is small good?

Because it's cheaper and faster, and you can make many more. Speed is the most important thing - to be able to try something out on a small scale quickly.

Fail fast.

Yes. These big projects are guaranteed to fail because you never have time to fix everything.

One of the things I got from Infinite in All Directions - it was a delight to me, and I've been quoting it ever since - is that you honor inventors as much as scientists.

It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.

Is it the scientists who are putting them down?

Yes. There is this snobbism among scientists, especially the academic types.

Are there other kinds?

There are scientists in industry who are a bit more broad minded. The academics look down on them, too.

Is that a weird British hangover?

It's even worse in Germany. Intellectual snobbery is a worldwide disease. It certainly was very bad in China and probably held back development there by 2,000 years.

How would you stop this intellectual snobbery?

I would abolish the PhD system. The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.

Are those getting PhDs rewarded in any other way than as an honor?

It's much more than an honor. It's a ticket to a job.

So is anybody buying this? Are PhDs being abolished or disregarded?

No. The stranglehold has gotten even tighter over the years. It's become essentially like the MD - with much less justification. It's simply a barrier you have to climb over before you can make a career, and it's being imposed on more and more jobs. At even the smallest liberal arts college, nowadays, they say with pride, "All of our faculty have PhDs." Many of the best teachers are thrown out because they don't have a PhD. It's a paper qualification that poisons the whole field.

What you're saying reminds me of a situation a couple of years ago when my colleague at GBN, Peter Schwartz, and I tried to do a book called Biofutures. When we started to research the future of biotechnology, we found an interesting contrast with the computer world. You can't get computer people to shut up about the future. They go on and on about it. In biotech we couldn't find anybody who would talk about the future.

There are a couple of interesting components to this. First is the government regulation you speak of, which has good reason for being in place because of the life-critical issues, deep cultural issues, and so on. The result is, of course, that when any of the researchers start talking out of school, saying, "Well, maybe we'll cure death," that's it - they don't get the money, because they're obviously "irresponsible."

The second component of this idea brings me on to your point about PhDs. Because of the whole realm of government permissions and grants surrounding biotech, it's attracting more PhD types and fewer amateur types, whereas computer technology tremendously enables amateurs.

What also strikes me is that the culture we see here [at the PC Forum, the annual computer conference run by Dyson's daughter Esther] is far friendlier to women than the academic world I come from; it's largely because you don't have to have a PhD. You don't even have to have an MBA to run a company. Many of these women, in fact, start young, own their own companies, and are doing well at the age of 25. They then have plenty of time to raise a family if they feel like it. It doesn't interfere with their careers.

In academic life, it is a terrible problem. Women are forced to go through this PhD rigmarole, which takes far too long. By the time they get the PhD, they're already middle aged, and then the problems of trying to combine a career with a family become really fierce. To me, that's the greatest evil - that women are discriminated against much more as a result of this. I love it when I come to these meetings of computer people. The women are really going ahead, and there's a higher fraction of them, and they're much less inhibited.

Especially your daughter. Esther has been a funny kind of pioneer: an observational and analytical pioneer in this field. She doesn't write code.

No, but she's typical in the sense that she got ahead without bothering to take an MBA.

Where did Esther go to college?

Harvard.

Did she try for any degrees after that?

No. This is one of the old chestnuts I'm always telling my friends about. I visited Estie at Harvard. I decided that I would just go and see what she was doing there. She was rather young, an undergraduate. I stayed for three or four days. She spent all of her time at The Harvard Crimson, the student paper she was writing for, and as far as I could see she never did any studying or went to classes. As I was about to go back to Princeton, I thought I would have a little talk with her and play the heavy father. So I said, "You know, I am paying tuition for you. And I find it a little bit surprising that you don't seem to do any studying."

She told me, "Oh, no, Daddy, you don't understand. You don't come to Harvard to study. You come to Harvard to get to know the right people." That's exactly the secret of her success, of course. That's why she can run these meetings. She knows everybody by sight, and that's not trivial. She really is interested in all those 500 conference people as individuals. It's also why she's good in the venture-capital business. She says, "To know whether a venture is worth supporting, you have to get to know the people - everything else is secondary." She's more interested in the people than in the technology - that's always been true.

Did she get decent grades at Harvard?

I don't know.

And clearly nobody cared. They didn't kick her out, at least.

Harvard was ideal for her because they don't care about the undergraduates. It's essentially a graduate school; the undergraduates are left to sink or swim.

There's a provocative sentence in Imagined Worlds: "The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible." What do you mean by that?

It's the numerical accidents that make life possible. I define an interesting universe as one that is friendly to life, and especially one that produces lots of variety.

What accidental numbers make that possible?

If you look at just the physical building blocks, there's a famous problem with producing carbon in stars. All the carbon necessary for life has to be produced in stars, and it's difficult to do. This process was discovered by Fred Hoyle. To make carbon, you've got to have three helium atoms collide in a triple collision. Helium has an atomic weight of 4, and carbon is 12, while beryllium, at 8, is unstable. Therefore, you can't go from helium to beryllium to carbon. You have to make helium into carbon in one jump; this means the three colliding together.

Which statistically is not so often.

No. But Hoyle came up with one of the most brilliant ideas in the whole of science. He said that in order to make carbon abundant as it should be, there must be an accidental, coincidental resonance. This means that there's a nuclear state in the carbon nucleus at precisely the right energy level for these three atoms to combine smoothly. The chances of having that resonance in the right place is maybe 1 in 1,000. Hoyle believed it must be there in order to produce the carbon. Of course, the nuclear physicists then looked for this resonance and found it!

There are other famous cases: the fact that the nuclear force is just strong enough to bind a proton and a neutron to make the heavy isotope hydrogen but not strong enough to bind two protons to make helium with an atomic weight of 2. Just two protons stuck together is a rather narrow range of strength. So the nuclear force is fine-tuned so that hydrogen doesn't burn to helium right away. If the two hydrogen nuclei did bind, all the hydrogen would burn to helium in the first five minutes. The universe would then be pure helium and a rather boring place. Whereas, if the force were a little bit weaker, so that the neutron and the proton didn't bind, you wouldn't get any heavy elements at all. You'd have nothing but hydrogen. Again, this would make for a boring universe. You can argue as to how significant these things are, but it looks as though the universe was intended to be as interesting as possible.

So this is what you mean by cosmic ecology. I can see why you're sympathetic toward the Gaia hypothesis of Jim Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.

It makes a great deal of sense.

Why has it got such a bad reputation among scientists?

It's this old hangover from the 19th century, when the biologists had to fight against the orthodox Christian beliefs.

Are they afraid it's mysticism? Or is it vitalism or one of those old bugaboos?

It goes against the dogmatic belief that biology has to be mechanistic. I'm surprised that biologists, on the whole, are so mechanistically inclined. It's very striking.

I was trained as a biologist, and there has been a sequence of interesting mistakes in biology. Vitalism may have been one. The ideas of climax and self-defending ecological communities had a sort of superorganismic quality to them, which turned out to be illusory. Then you have people like Richard Dawkins come along and say, "Well, it's not even the damned organism. It's gene by gene." So, in a sense, the reductionist, mechanist approach has been rewarded, and the holistic approach has been punished.

My cybernetics training came straight from reading Norbert Wiener, but these days, we're seeing a gradual return of what is now called not cybernetics, but complexity theory. It's coming back via the computer route because you can model things richly in computers, so it's OK to start thinking systematically again. For some reason, that hasn't made the jump to Gaia.

A lot of the prejudice against Gaia comes from the way it's been hyped. It's got a lot of unsavory associations that really are mystical.

Of the books you're reading, the stuff you're listening to, and the people you're paying attention to, what percentage are scientists and what percentage are from the humanities?

The great majority are scientists.

You know a lot of poetry and music also.

Yes, but I haven't been keeping up. Lately, I've become a tame scientist for the theologians. I get invited to a number of meetings on what they call "Science and Religion" or "Science and Theology," and I talk with theologians. I don't find it very helpful. I take my religion without theology.

What does that mean, you take your religion without theology?

Most religion in the world doesn't have theology. Theology is something very peculiar to Christianity. It didn't even come from Jesus. It was an accident. The Greek world was heavily philosophical at the time Christianity was developing, and so the Christians adopted all this jargon from Greek philosophy and incorporated it into their religion; that became theology. I've never found it essential to my religion or to other religions. Judaism has practically no theology, and Islam has very little - Buddhism, even less. It's given rise to this profession of theologians who would like to make the subject into a science, particularly John Templeton. He organizes these conferences I go to, and he has a strong belief that he can make theology scientific and make religion into a force for progress.

What is your religion?

Christianity, but of a very watered-down kind - essentially, what's left over after you get rid of the theology. The Church of Englandis pretty close to it.

You say in Imagined Worlds that the two human institutions that can think about long-term issues are science and religion. And you raise the question in the book - a little more than you answer it - of long-term ethics. It's an area that I'm acutely interested in. How might long-term ethics differ from ethics as we generally understand them?

If you mean balancing the permanent against the ephemeral, it's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Do you have a list of these principles?

No. You'll never get everybody to agree about any particular code of ethics.

But if they're going to be long-term ones, you'd better have some agreement. This is a cross-generational issue. It's caring for children, grandchildren. In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation - that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

I'm accustomed to living among very long-lived institutions in England, and I'm always surprised that the rest of the world is so different. At the beginning of Imagined Worlds, I mentioned the avenue of trees at Trinity College, Cambridge. It is an extremely wealthy foundation, founded by Henry VIII with the money he looted from the monasteries. He put his ill-gotten gains into education, much to our benefit. So we pray for his soul once a year. I went to the commemoration feast last March and duly prayed in appropriate Latin. Trinity is an astonishing place because it has been a fantastic producer of great science for 400 years and continues to be so. Beside Henry VIII, we were celebrating the 100th birthday of the electron, which was discovered there by J. J. Thomson. He was appointed professor at the age of 28.

Anyway, they planted an avenue of trees in the early 18th century, leading up from the river to the college. This avenue of trees grew very big and majestic in the course of 200 years. When I was a student there 50 years ago, the trees were growing a little dilapidated, though still very beautiful. The college decided that for the sake of the future, they would chop them down and plant new ones. Now, 50 years later, the new trees are half grown and already looking almost as beautiful as the old ones. That's the kind of thinking that comes naturally in such a place, where 100 years is nothing.

It must be harder to keep the science fresh than it is to keep the trees fresh.

Somehow they're able to do both. It's the habit of long-term thinking that has made this possible. It survives all over England. It's one reason the country has been so amazingly well cleaned up after the Industrial Revolution. The worst pollution in the world was in England.

I didn't know that.

When I was a boy, I went to London, and my clothes were filthy at the end of the day. The city was covered with soot and grime, and the rivers were very polluted; it's all been cleaned up in the past 50 years. You can always improve things as long as you're prepared to wait.

So it's patience.

Lots of patience. The famous story goes, "How do you make these beautiful British lawns?" and the answer is, "Oh, you just roll them for 200 years." They've never thought of things in terms of quick returns.

Now, science is all about change and intellectual revolutions. That's what keeps everyone excited about it. It's the real news. You have here in the US, and at Trinity College, scientific revolutions that are dependent on turning over the previous constructs of the universe, yet here's an entity - science - that has existed inside those buildings for a very long time and expects to be in those buildings for a very long time. How do you reconcile that match?

It goes naturally together. You need the space of continuity to have the confidence not to be afraid of revolutions.

So you can throw away some stuff because there's a lot of other stuff that will be there?

Yes. It's like having a life-support system. In scientific terms, it's what you'd call indirect development of embryos, now understood to be common in the evolution of the higher organisms. First you have an embryo, and this embryo sets aside a package of cells that become the adult - the rest of the embryo serves only as a life-support system for the adult as it grows. It's called indirect development because there's absolutely no connection in structure between the embryo and the adult.

Can you give me examples?

Primitive creatures like sea urchins and almost anything apart from vertebrates and insects. The adult can experiment with all sorts of marvelous new patterns of development, being assured of life support from the embryo. You might say it's a metaphor for Trinity College.

Speaking of academia, you've been at the Institute for Advanced Study for 45 years. It's interesting that you're in America and not at Trinity.

The institute has treated me very generously, and in many ways it is ideal for me.

Remind me a little of how it functions for most people at the institute.

It's a motel with stipends. We provide all the amenities, the most important being a nursery school, apartments for the families, a place to eat, an office and a computer terminal, and a stipend. People come from all over the world, and they stay a year or two and they do whatever they like. It's about half humanities and half science. The place is an international meeting ground. It's about the only place where somebody not fluent in English with a family even less fluent can feel comfortable, because we don't demand that they teach. It's not what they produce while they're at the institute. It's much more important that they get a chance to find out what's going on in the world and take it back home with them. They do the immortal work after they get back.

Related question: How do you know what to work on next?

It's always a gamble. The general rule I tell people is: "While you're young, work on the fashionable stuff - that's where you get ahead fast and make a reputation. When you're older, do the unfashionable things that, in the end, may be more important but that won't get you recognized right away."

For myself it's always rather opportunistic. I have a short attention span, so I tend to just look around for interesting puzzles and work on anything that strikes me as being amusing. In that way I'm different from Francis Crick, who always looked for the most important things to do.

How can you tell when something's interesting?

It's a matter of aesthetics. I was trained as a mathematician. My tools are mathematics, so if it's elegant mathematics, that's all I care about, and if it also happens to be useful, so much the better. I just published my collected technical works. There's an awful lot I've done that is not worth preserving. I never really went for the important things, but I'm not sorry about that. I still did enough that was interesting.

People who read Wired are young and optimistic, and they're probably aware of Dyson spheres in science fiction, and if they read your books they see there's a lot of off-planet activity in store. What should they be doing to get off-planet?

Biotechnology is what it takes - especially if we're talking about people getting off-planet, rather than just scientific exploration. I'm already thinking about my next book about freeze-dried fish and warm-blooded plants. That's the way to look for life on other planets. Look for what's detectable and not for what's probable. This has always worked in astronomy.

Examples?

The planets around a pulsar discovered by Alexander Wolszczan - a marvelous discovery. Everybody believed that there couldn't be planets around a neutron star, including Wolszczan. But that's the only place where a planet of Earth's mass is detectable - therefore, he discovered them.

It sounds like another case of the universe trying to be interesting.

Europa's ocean is interesting. It's most likely a liquid ocean, warm and very deep. Europa's the second satellite out from Jupiter. The inner satellite, Io, is blazing hot; it has volcanoes. The other satellites are frozen solid. In between there's Europa, which has a thin layer of cracked ice. If you want to find creatures living in Europa's ocean, you can do it the hard way - send a huge spacecraft carrying a submarine, dig through the ice, then launch the submarine to explore the ocean. Or you can do it the easy way. We know the other satellites have huge numbers of craters from being close to the asteroid belt. So what happens when Europa is hit with a huge asteroid? It will splash out immense quantities of water into space. If there are any fish present, they will be kicked out and freeze dried, and you'll find them orbiting around Jupiter. There is already a ring of debris orbiting Jupiter, but nobody has gone to see if there are any freeze-dried fish. It's a clever way to explore.

Similarly with Mars. What would you expect to find living on Mars? The conventional view is microbes. They live deep underground, where it's warm and wet. So, to find life, you have to send a huge drilling operation. But it's not the right way to do it, because underground microbes are hard to detect. Instead, look for something easy to detect, like warm-blooded plants. These are plants that grow their own greenhouses. They simply sit on the surface and grow small organic windows and lenses outside that focus sunlight in.

How do you find them? You just look at night for warm patches. If you don't find any warm-blooded plants already there, you grow them yourself and seed them on Mars or Europa or anywhere else - as long as there's a sun within an enormous distance. It could go way beyond Pluto.

Sounds great.

That's the future of human exploration in space. We've got to wait for the biotechnology. Anything you do with conventional spacecraft and space suits - all this living in tin cans - is uninteresting and far too expensive.

Have you read a book called The Case for Mars?

Yes.

What do you think of Zubrin's argument?

I'm not interested in anything that expensive.

Not even $5 billion.

My limit is $1 billion for projects of that kind. There will be lots of cheap propulsion systems.

Twenty years from now?

Probably longer. I don't find space travel interesting unless it's cheap. The whole point is to make it available to ordinary people. I give it a hundred years for large-scale emigration to be cheap enough. I'm not in a hurry. I think it's interesting that you can do it at all.

source >> https://www.wired.com/1998/02/dyson/

[reimaginingsocieties-blog]

Reimagining decision making

Normative critique

In many cases the concept of conveniency is an underlying reason for our actions and decision making, sometimes taking forms of critical thinking or problem solving, helping us to process outcomes faster and quicker. However, conveniency decision-making can be problematic in a number of ways. 

Based on circumstances and situational factors, I like to use Time as an example; making decisions based on convenience can be decently modest and logical. It may also take a strategic approach to reach a desired end-result. Think of transportation and logistics, taking the bus instead of going to work by bike due to poor weather conditions is a logical, convenience-based decision. Similarly, taking a shortcut to avoid traffic is also due to conveniency. Now think about who that decision impacts and how it has impact? (Mainly will provide a positive or negative impact on the decision maker by reaching an outcome).  

Convenience perspectives are constructed and conditionally defined, meaning that they are only effective and efficient to the extent of that exact subject’s involvement at that given point in time, and even so they are highly probabilistic calculations that may not at all be successful. This can be due to a number of external and technical reasons that are not easy to perceive or manage. Relating to traffic these can be explained by bad weather and other actors on the scene (other drivers). 

To elaborate further, addressing the problems with decisions made out of conveniency, such as the bus breaking down or closed-off roads due to construction--resulting in tardiness at work, requires more conscious and complex responses.

From a social perspective, convenience is a personal heuristic which does not include all members of society in its decision-making process. This an unchanging element. When one chooses to take the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, it may provide benefit for the subject in arriving on time, but ultimately this response adds no concrete value to the physical environment or to others. The same goes for when you are feeling thirsty and you pour yourself a drink. The impact is limited to 1 subject. 

Speaking on political matters, disproportionate decision making often stems from a need to protect and maintain the status quo. Decisions made based on convenience are often narrow, disproportionate, and sitting on a sense of entitlement. We can see convenience attributing to many self-fulfilling errors of bias and prejudgement. 

Conveniency takes a slightly hind sighted turn, because before conveniency occurs, there must always be one or more factors of inconvenience. Convenience always derives from its parent, inconvenience. 

When we loosely base decisions on conveniency we are disregarding a number of factors and in the following respects: (note that these are very raw normative assumptions)

1. Exclusion: (i.e. social groups, income, occupation and status). When what is convenient for some, may become inconvenient for others, may become a social cost with private benefits;

2. Inaccuracy: Results of convenience decision making only conditionally accurate, if not highly opinion-based musings, and can be difficult to measure and apply to society as a whole;

3. Short-sighted: Probabilistic calculation, sometimes irrationally or selfishly based, provides for uncertain, unpredictable or unstable outcomes;

4. Hind-sighted: Following the previous stage of inconvenience, a construct translated as a the lingering or intrusive effects of a social nuisance that ought to be “best be avoided” or suppressed, placing focus on minor concerns of society instead of giving proactive attention to critical and life-threatening problems;

5. Relevance or necessity: (see 4...) Any decision made out of convenience denotes the ability of choice, selection, and of prioritization. Ultimately, results of decisions based on conveniency are completely accountable to the decision maker, no matter how big or small. 

Through these theoretical definitions we can argue that convenience is not equal to critical life aspects such as safety, morals, or wellbeing. It is just a temporary, fluctuating cognitive state brought on by individual experiences contrasted with deep materialism. Some may even consider it as a branch of personal freedom.

However, it is not to be confused that convenience based decisions do not have any impact (positive or negative) on the external environment whatsoever. Some convenience based decisions have also had significant positive effects, such as improving street lighting and infrastructure to make neighborhoods ‘seem’ less criminally charged, which has given residents of a neighborhood the appearance of ‘feeling’ more safe. 

But from an individualistic point of view of decision making this is rarely the case. Walking on the right side of the street because it has better lighting from open shops instead of walking the left side where it is not well-lit has potentially 0 societal value, although it reduces a subject’s personal anxiety in walking alone, therefore resulting in a (minor) convenient experience, which from our understanding, is much better than an inconvenient one. 

It must be asserted that, decision making may benefit a larger part of society by the extent of the subject’s involvement of and interaction with other subjects in consideration to the decision made. Although, the decision needs to amplify a sequence of different subjects, impacts, reactions and outcomes rather than solely that of the decision maker. We need to readdress the conditions of conveniency in order to come to efficient, effective, and reliable conclusions and solutions to every day problems, which are worthy enough to be the main cause of decision making. 

(will continue this thread soon...)

~ Think while its still free..

[reimaginingsocieties-blog]

Unaccounted Power is Dragging Global Society Into An Orwellian Dystopia

By Dr. Nozomi Hayase. Article from http://www.theeventchronicle.com/study/unaccounted-power-dragging-global-society-orwellian-dystopia/#

“WikiLeaks dropped a bombshell on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named “Vault 7”, the whistleblowing site began releasing the largest publication of confidential documents, that have come from the top secret security network at the Cyber Intelligence Center.

Long before the Edward Snowden revelations, Julian Assange noted how “The Internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.” He decried the militarisation of the Internet with the penetration by the intelligence agencies like NSA and GCHQ, which created “a military occupation of civilian space”.

Now, WikiLeaks’ latest disclosures shed further light on this cyber-warfare, exposing the role of the CIA.

At a recent press conference from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange explainedhow the CIA developed its own cyber-weapons arsenal and lost it after storing it all in one place. What is alarming is that the CIA became aware of this loss and didn’t warn the public about it. As a result, this pervasive technology that was designed to hide all traces, can now be used by cyber-mafias, foreign agents, hackers and by anyone for malicious purposes.

Part one of this WikiLeaks publication dubbed “Year Zero”, revealed the CIA’s global hacking force from 2013 to 2016. The thousands of documents released contain visceral revelations of the CIA’s own version of an NSA. With an ability to hack any Android or iPhone, as well as Samsung TVs and even cars, they spy on citizens, bypassing encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram. The Vault 7 leaks that exposed the CIA’s excessive power is of great importance from a point of view of security for individual privacy. But it has larger significance tied to the mission of WikiLeaks.

Opening Government into the Deep State

Describing itself on its site as “a multi-national media organisation and associated library”, WikiLeaks aims to open governments in order to bring justice. In the speech at the SWSX conference in Texas, delivered via Skype in 2014, Assange described the particular environment that spawned the culture of disclosure this organisation helped to create.

He noted how “we were living in some fictitious representation of what we thought was the world” and that the “true history of the world” is “all obscured by some kind of fog”. This founder and editor in chief of innovative journalism explained how disclosures made though their publications break this fog.

The magnitude of this Vault 7 cache, which some say may be bigger than the Snowden revelations, perhaps lies in its effect of clearing the fog to let people around the world see the ground upon which the narratives of true history are written.

Since coming online in 2007, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million documents. Each groundbreaking disclosure got us closer to where the real power of the world resides. In 2010, WikiLeaks rose to prominence with the publication of the Collateral Murder video. With the release of documents concerning U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they hit on the nerves of the Pentagon —the central nervous system of the Military Industrial Complex. With the release of the U.S. Diplomatic Cables, they angered the State Department and came head to head with this global superpower.

Last year, this unprecedented publisher with its perfect record of document authentication, began to blow the cover off American democracy a step further to clear the fog. WikiLeaks played an important role in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The DNC leaks disrupted the prescribed script of corporate sponsored lesser of two evils charade politics. The publication of the Podesta emails that revealed internal workings of the Clinton campaign, gave the American people an opportunity to learn in real time about the function of the electoral arena as a mechanism of control.

With the demise of the Democratic Party, led by its own internal corruption, the cracks in this façade widened, unveiling the existence of a government within a government.

People are beginning to glimpse those who seek to control behind the scenes – anonymous unelected actors who exercise enduring power in Washington by manipulating public perception.

This unraveling that has been slowly unfolding, appeared to have reached a peak last month when Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn resigned. He was forced to do this on the grounds that leaked classified information revealed he was lying about his phone conversation discussing sanctions with the Russian Ambassador.

WikiLeaks now entered its 10th year. The momentum continues, bringing us to a new pinnacle of disclosure. At the end of last year, in anticipation of this new release, WikiLeaks tweeted, “If you thought 2016 was a big WikiLeaks year, 2017 will blow you away.” During the dramatic takedown of General Flynn, the media created a frenzy around unconfirmed claims that Russia was meddling with the U.S. election and Putin’s alleged ties with Trump, creating another fog of obfuscation. It was in this climate that WikiLeaks published documents showing CIA espionage in the last French presidential election.

History Awakening

The idea of a shadow government has been the focus of political activists, while it has also been a subject of ridicule as conspiracy theories. Now, WikiLeaks’ pristine documents provide irrefutable evidence about this hidden sector of society. The term ‘deep state’ that is referenced in the mainstream media, first hit the major airwaves in 2014, in Bill Moyers’ interview with Mike Lofgren. This former congressional staff member discussed his essay titled “Anatomy of the Deep State” and explained it as the congruence of power emerging as a “hybrid of corporate America and national security state”.

We are now watching a deep state sword-fight against the elected Caesar of American plutocracy in this gladiator ring, surrounded by the cheers of liberal intelligentsia, who are maddened with McCarthy era hysteria. As the Republic is falling with its crumbling infrastructure and anemic debt economy, far away from the coliseum, crazed with the out-of-tune national anthem, the silent pulse of hope begins to whisper.

WikiLeaks unlocked the vaults that had swallowed the stolen past. As the doors open into this hidden America, history awakens with dripping blood that runs deep inside the castle. As part of the release of this encrypted treasure-trove of documents, WikiLeaks posted on Twitter the following passphrase; “SplinterItIntoAThousandPiecesAndScatterItIntoTheWinds.” These were actually words spoken by President John F. Kennedy, a month before his assassination. His exact words were “I will splinter the CIA into a thousands pieces and scatter it into the wind” – which shows his attitude toward the CIA as an arm of the deep state and what many believe to be the real reason for his assassination.

The secret stream of history continues, taking control over every aspect of civil life and infecting the heart of democracy. The U.S. has long since lost its way. We have been living in a fictitious representation of the flag and the White House. It is not judicial boundaries drawn by the Constitution or even the enlightenment ideals that once inspired the founders of this country that now guide the course of our lives. Tyranny of the old world casts its shadow, binding Congress, the Supreme Court and the President into a rule of oligarchy. CIA documents revealed that the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt was used as a covert hacking base, while CIA officers work under the cover of the State Department to penetrate with these intelligence operations. The Wall Street Journal now reports that President Trump has given the CIA expanded authority to carry out drone attacks, which was power that prior to that had only been given to the Pentagon.

Decisions that radically alter the direction of our society are not made in a fair democratic election, a public hearing or the senate floor. They are made in the FISA Court and secret grand juries, bypassing judicial warrants and democratic accountability. This hidden network of power that exists above the law entangles legislators, judges and the press into a web of deception through dirty money and corrupt influence. It controls perception of the past, present and future.

The Internet Generation

As the deep state comes to the surface, we are able to see the real battle on the horizon. What is revealed here is a clash of values and two radically different visions of a future civilization. In his response to the Vault 7 publication, Michael Hayden, the former CIA director was quick to lay blame on the millennials. He said, “This group of millennials and related groups simply have different understandings of the words loyalty, secrecy and transparency than certainly my generation did”. To him, these young people are the problem, as if their different cultural approach and instincts must be tempered and indoctrinated into this hierarchical system, so they know who their masters are.

Who are these people that are treated as a plague on society? This is the Internet generation, immersed with the culture of the free-net, freedom of speech and association. They believe in privacy for individuals, while demanding transparency for those in power. Peter Ludlow, a philosopher who writes under the pseudonym Urizenus Sklar, shared his observation of a cultural shift that happened in 2011. He noted that WikiLeaks had become a catalyst for an underground subculture of hackers that burst into the mainstream as a vital political force.

Assange recognised this development in recent years as a “politicisation of the youth connected to Internet” and acknowledged it as “the most significant thing that happened in the world since the 1960s”.

This new generation ran into the deep state and those who confront it are met with intense hostility. Despite his promise of becoming the most transparent government, Obama engaged in unprecedented persecution of whistleblowers. Now this dark legacy seems to be continuing with the present administration. Vice president Mike Pence vowed to “use the full force of the law” to hunt down those who released the Intelligence Agency’s secret material.

As these conflicts heat up, resistance continues in the Internet that has now become a battleground. Despite crackdowns on truthtellers, these whistleblowers won’t go away. From Manning to Snowden, people inside institutions who have come to see subversion of government toward insidious control and want change, have shown extraordinary courage.

According to a statement given to WikiLeaks, the source behind the CIA documents is following the steps of these predecessors. They want this information to be publicly debated and for people to understand the fact that the CIA created its own NSA without any oversight. The CIA claims its mission is to “aggressively collect foreign intelligence overseas to protect America from terrorists, hostile nation states and other adversaries”. With these documents that have now been brought back to the historical archive, the public can examine whether this agency has itself lost control and whose interests they truly serve.

The Future of Civilisation

As the world’s first stateless 4th estate, WikiLeaks has opened up new territory where people can touch the ground of uncensored reality and claim creative power to participate in the history that is happening. In a press conference on Periscope, Assange made reference to a statement by the President of Microsoft, who called for the creation of a digital Geneva Convention to provide protection against nation-states and cyber-attacks. He then affirmed WikiLeaks’s role as a neutral digital Switzerland for people all over the world.

WikiLeaks is taking the first step toward this vision. After they carefully redacted the actual codes of CIA hacking tools, anonymised names and email addresses that were targeted, they announced that they will work with tech companies by giving them some exclusive access to the material. Assange explained that this could help them understand vulnerabilities and produce security fixes, to create a possible antidote to the CIA’s breach of security and offer countermeasures. WikiLeaks tweeted notifying the public that they now have contacted Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and MicroTik to help protect users against CIA malware.

The Internet unleashed the beast that grows its force in the dark. Unaccounted power is dragging global society down into an Orwellian dystopia. Yet, from this same Internet, a new force is arising. Courage of the common people is breaking through the firewall of secrecy, creating a fortress that becomes ever more resilient, as the network of people around the world fighting for freedom expands.

When democracy dies in darkness, it can be reborn in the light of transparency. The deep state stretches across borders, sucking people into an abyss of totalitarian control. At the same time, the epic publication of Vault 7 that has just begun, reminds us that the greatness in each of us can awaken to take back the power of emancipation and participate in this battle for democracy, the outcome of which could not only determine the future of the Internet, but of our civilisation.”

(Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D., a native of Japan, is a columnist, researcher, and the First Amendment advocate. She is member of The Indicter‘s Editorial Board and a former contributing writer to WL Central and has been covering issues of free speech, transparency and the vital role of whistleblowers in global society).

[reimaginingsocieties-blog]

Is Global Gold Supply Declining?

by Lawrence Thomas, Gold Telegraph. Article from https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-11/global-gold-supply-declining

“The demand for gold is increasing, yet new discoveries of the precious metal have not kept pace with the demand. Funds for exploration are historically high, $54.3 billion, up 60 percent over the past 18 years.

The increased spending, however, has not produced the equivalent in new gold discoveries. During the past decade, 41 discoveries have resulted in a mere 215.5 million ounces of the precious metal. Even counting recently discovered but unexplored mines, which may hold as-yet major discoveries, the total available amount of gold in these discoveries are not expected to surpass 363 million ounces over the next ten years.

Gold discoveries have followed a predictable pattern. 263 major gold discoveries have been made in the past 28 years, but half of those discoveries happened in the 1990s. This boom lasted until the turn of the century when the rate of discovery began to decline. Only 16 discoveries were reported from 2000 to 2002, which produced 108.3 ounces of gold. That amount was below the average finds of the 1990s. This decline has continued, with both new discoveries and the amount of gold mined decreasing steadily. By 2010, only 18.6 million ounces of gold was discovered, a severe drop from the 61.5 ounces found in 2009.

Old sectors are being depleted, while active exploration for new discoveries has been slow. The amount of available gold has not met expectation and remains far below the 2009 high.

The lack of new discoveries is not the result of funding. $54.3 billion has been allocated to exploration during the past decade. Part of the problem is that the time span between discovery and production is around 20 years. Unless significant new discoveries are made, the amount of available gold could decrease in the near future, raising the demand for the metal even further. Scarcity invariably results in higher prices, and the decline in global gold makes a price increase almost certain.

Continued gold exploration has become critical. In 2018, Colorado-based Newmont Mining Corp., one of the world largest gold explorers, has allocated $1.3 billion to expand its current projects, an increase of $300 million from the previous year.

Much of the available gold in Australia’s northern Goldfield has been depleted, and companies are drilling to unprecedented depths of 3 kilometers below the surface hoping for new discoveries as new finds are becoming rarer and more expensive to pursue.

According to Richard Schodde, managing director of MinEx, Australia gold mining output could decrease by 50 percent over the next eight years, with only four mines remaining open by 2057.

The need to drill deeper will make gold harder to find and more expensive to produce.”

(Repost)

[reimaginingsocieties-blog]

Orwellian dystopia

What are the Orwellian dystopias of the 21st century? Willmetts, S. (February 3, 2017) Article from https://theconversation.com/what-are-the-orwellian-dystopias-of-the-21st-century-72135

“Fictional metaphors matter, and in the battle to safeguard our civil liberties few metaphors matter more than George Orwell’s 1984. Although first published almost 70 years ago, the lasting salience of this most archetypal dystopia is undeniable.”

“In the week after Edward Snowden’s revelations of US government mass surveillance were first revealed, sales of the novel rocketed by 6,000%. A year later, in Thailand, 1984 became a symbol of resistance to government repression, and was promptly banned. And following Trump’s inauguration and the conspicuously Orwellian admission by one of his chief strategists, Kellyanne Conway, that his administration trades in “alternative facts”, 1984 once again leapt to the top of the bestseller list.”

“Orwell is ingrained in the West’s political lexicon. “Big Brother”, “Newspeak” and “DoubleThink” are now bywords for totalitarianism and political mendacity. But doesn’t every crystal ball have a shelf life, even the most prescient?”

“Orwell conceived his imaginary surveillance state of Oceania before personal computing, before the information revolution, before CCTV, before 24-hour news cycles, before reality television. As pointed out by John Broich, surveillance and political repression today is far more complex than in Orwell’s time, and far more technologically sophisticated.” …

Key takeaways

Orwellian dystopia

surveillance state

civil liberties

symbolic resistance

“alternative facts”

political repression

political lexicon

information revolution