Category Archives: Biosphere

Faster than a speeding genome

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Evolution has left the human body.

First Aboriginals in Australia. Using a diverse database of DNA from ancient and contemporary Aboriginal people throughout Oceania, researchers have determined that people began to settle northern Australia  60,000 years ago

America’s big robotaxi rollout. As of November 2025, robotaxis are operating in 5 markets: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta and Austin, Texas. They are coming to 10 markets in 2026, mostly in the South, and 5 markets some time in the future. Once the stuff of science fiction, robotaxis are now regularly plying the streets of Atlanta, Austin, L.A., Phoenix and San Francisco, and will be coming soon to at least a dozen more cities. Brought to mind is the lightning fast change in the life experience of the Homo sapiens – from using reins to steer to passing time communicating with Alexi or Roblox while the ‘team’ decides which way to go.

The telegraph. The Morse system was adopted as the international standard in 1865, using a modified Morse code developed in Germany in 1848. Before that time, humans could not speak to any human beyond the human voice range or line.of sight. it was a noticeable, rapid shift in human activities and lifestyle. Even more mental restructuring occurrs when the entire string of telegraphic inventions is included: telephone, radio, television, internet with social media, and now, suddenly, other electronic things even do our thinking and communicating for us – whether we authorized it or not.

The next step is to not need the planet environment at all. As soon as Mark Zuckerberg gets his artificial reality working, we will have arrived at  the world of Matrix.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

 

Measuring the fog

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Readers are aware of mariner’s concerns about the future. Specifically, there are four global phenomena that are trying to make serious changes to the status quo of human life and to the planet.

The first to be measured is population. It was estimated by the United Nations to have exceeded eight billion in mid-November 2022. It took around 300,000 years of human prehistory and history for the human population to reach one billion and only 218 more years from there to reach 8 billion.

The global population is still increasing, but there is significant uncertainty about its long-term trajectory due to changing fertility and mortality rates.The United Nations projects between 9 and 10 billion people by 2050 and gives an 80% confidence interval of 10–12 billion by the end of the 21st century with a growth rate by then of zero.

This pattern of accelerated birth rates hits a point of psychosomatic collapse where the population begins to fall. This behavior also was proven in population studies with mice back in the 1960s. Those mouse studies also showed a societal collapse into two classes: a few very stable families where some family members served as border guards and, by mouse cage standards, were very wealthy. The other class being subject to mob violence, constant fighting, killing and an indifference toward newborns.

If population were an isolated phenomenon, it would be comparatively simple to manage. However, it becomes part of today’s fog because population is related to economics, habitat and behavior of the planet – as each of the four are integrated with the other three.

Hence the fog. Will the planet ignore human viability and destroy the balance of the surface with heat, storms and mass extinction or will the planet be influenced by dollars because there aren’t enough worldly resources to sustain modern economics as we have known it? The relationship between habitat and population is close.

Have humans made it too expensive to be the only creature who needs a fancy toilet, a water tower and septic system along side piped in fresh water just to pee? The industrial/technical age has created large economies at great expense to the habitat. It used to be instead of consuming millions of acres for grazing giant herds of beef, transportation and factory processing at local populations, that a person could buy fresh beef, lamb and chicken from a local butcher shop requiring only a dozen or so workers from farmer to customer.

Which causes are hurt the most of the four – economy, habitat or over population? Mariner hasn’t mentioned global warming.

Climate change is big in the news today because in just a few years, big cities, massive industrial centers and land itself will be destroyed.

So which should humans fix first? It looks like AI will tell the remaining pseudo humans the answers.

It’s all a big fog.

Ancient Mariner

How long since you foraged?

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If one isn’t sure that evolution is at play in the way Homo sapiens is evolving, consider foraging.

Many of us are familiar with the nomadic model of foraging. Most kinds of animals forage today. In parts of Africa, animals with hooves must migrate hundreds of miles to accommodate seasonal shifts in drought. “Cave man” lived on what it could catch and kill along with a surprising cuisine of indigenous plants. “Going to the store” meant scrounging in the woods or spending most of a day (sometimes more) hunting smaller animals or collaborating with other Cave Men to catch some protein.

Many thousands of years later Homo learned to grow his own food. Even in the nineteenth century, a significant percentage of Homos grew their own sustenance. However, rather quickly in the last two centuries, Homo has left foot-bound self-sufficiency behind. Homo learned to use a horse – not the first interdependent relationship between species.

Moving along quickly, the horse, then the train, then automobiles, then airplanes, then cruise ships – all had an impact on human foraging. It wasn’t long before foraging meant hunting for a grocery store and even special sharing (like leopards do) in restaurants.

Restaurants have been a mainstay for quite a while but evolution never stops. Homo foraging is pushing restaurants out of business by replacing an in-house meal with food orders delivered by organizations like Grubhub. A common effect on evolution is disease; COVID really pushed delivery services even to include foraging for grocery stores.

Already evolving in delivery services is a humanoid that looks like a minion. This likely will send restaurants the way of shopping malls and storefronts. Just let Alexa know and she’ll do the foraging for you.

It is a common speculation that future phases of evolution will allow the ancestors of Cave Man to sit or lie about while humanoids assume the responsibility for evolution in general, including work, leisure, foraging and social dependency. Perhaps a regenerative physicianoid will discover a drug that prevents bedsores.

Does anyone remember having to forage for a gopher for dinner? Among the greenery on the side of the road, which plants are okay to eat and which plants will poison you?

At least Homos know they will join the other 16,000 extinct creatures that have passed during the Anthropocene Epoch.

Ancient Mariner

 

There’s a weed in the garden

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If the reader has ever had a garden, they know the real trouble spot is weeds. Weeds sneak into the lawn or garden as tiny, well behaved plants; they may even have flowers. But gardeners know very quickly the nice little plant becomes boisterous, obnoxious and quickly trashes the garden, replacing it with something akin to messy unraveled hair and hides the garden plants beneath a flood of growth.

It’s too bad but AI is a new weed. Today AI has some appealing functions, especially as a source of entertainment and has new toys to play with on the computer – like writing all your letters to your mother. A cute little weed but beware: AI can take over the Amazon Forest while the reader is on a cruise!

Today, AI has been identified as a weed that will take over our understanding of how the world operates. It is just a conversational item now but in five years it will devastate the labor and white collar job market. An early indicator: Amazon is about to lay off 16,000 workers; the ‘weed’ is spreading.

The arts, that is, visual arts like painting and acting and writing, already show signs of abuse by the pushy weed. Even learning how to write with pen and paper may disappear from the school curriculum. To the other extreme, if the reader’s computer has kept up with system updates, they can read and write in any language. That is the weed offering some false greenery to hide the influence it is gaining in the garden.

Exactly like Creeping Charlie, AI literally overnight can take control of the garden. AI decides where it will grow, how rambunctious it will be and never consults the gardener.

At the moment, there is no nation in the world that has enough weed killer to control AI – especially the United States which has no operating federal government. AI will continue to grow, even competing with global warming as the largest disruption in the Anthropocene Epoch.

If the reader needs advice, consult Alexa.

Ancient Mariner

 

Whither we goest?

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This post shares some of mariner’s concerns for the future of Homo sapiens. In order to take a full measure, the first item is about Homos the way they were bred to be – properly balanced with requirements provided by creature evolution and constraints provided by planetary evolution.

֎ He cites an article recently published in the science journal IFLScience:

“According to a paper titled ‘Uncontacted Indigenous Peoples: at the edge of survival’, there are 196 uncontacted indigenous groups around the world, and 95 per cent of them are located in the Amazon rainforest. Meanwhile, the rest are located throughout Asia and the Pacific.”

The full article is worth reading at https://www.unilad.com/news/world-news/experts-warning-survival-uncontacted-indigenous-peoples-threat-667525-20251028

These groups are now coming under attack from multiple angles, the report argues. They found that 96 percent of them today face threats from resource extraction, both legal and illegal. Around 65 percent of these isolated peoples are threatened by logging, the single most pervasive danger and often the first step toward deeper exploitation. Mining menaces over 40 percent, while nearly a third face violence or displacement from criminal gangs. 

More dangers are evolving in the 21st century. The report also highlights several “rising threats,” including social media “influencers” who seek to make contact with uncontacted peoples to create monetized content, as well as missionaries, funded by multi-million-dollar evangelical organizations, who attempt to convert these isolated communities to Christianity.

So these remaining 196 tribes are all that’s left of real, unsynthesized Homos. They are the real thing! Too bad. Today, dollars are the source of survival – the difference being that dollars are a form of borrowing from Mother Nature and not paying back.

֎  Home beds with ‘smart care’. These beds are equipped with a myriad of sensors and monitors that enable real-time monitoring of a patient’s vital signs, including heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, body temperature, etc. A person could be treated, maintained, fed and otherwise kept in a sustained state of health. The only piece missing is living a full life.

֎  Enter Mark Zuckerberg, inventor of Facebook and Meta. Using the internet to communicate, Facebook enables a person to remain a part of an active and ongoing replacement to society without have to do anything. Meta is Zuckerberg’s online reality that imitates and replaces any life experience a Homo might have.

Mariner doesn’t care that many readers poo-poo his belief that Homo will end up being a live example of Matrix. Hell, we’re three quarters of the way there!

Mariner has come close to marketing a recliner that can fold back to level. it is designed to have a tight fitting lid that can be connected to it so the deceased body can be taken directly to the graveyard. Now a bed has been invented that will allow TV watchers to watch for much longer. He is exploring a copyright for a lid to go with the smart-care bed.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

 

More about self containment

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Mariner felt good reading the AXIOS piece about analog bags referenced in the last post. In his own romantic naturalist mind, he can see a correlation between a mindset focused on self survival in an AI world and the same mindset focused on chopping enough firewood to keep warm overnight in a world without electricity. Is this mindset Homo’s way of dealing with Nature’s rule about survival of the fittest?

No one can deny the violent change happening today. Mariner did a test watch of broadcast news on television yesterday – something he has refrained from doing for some time. It was frightening! The world’s governments falter under the planet’s total disruption; unbridled consumption of the planet’s resources increases every day; economic transition into a computer-owned financial world wanders aimlessly without regard for social ethics; violence grows in every corner of the world.

It is time to assure ourselves that we are practicing survival skills.

Given the unbridled power of intelligent computing, Homo may suffer greatly as a species unless they develop survival skills that keep AI contained.  Governments and corporations are not focused on human survival or even individual rights. Each of us must develop skills that offset the humongous waves of invasion by AI. One way is to detach daily behavior from social media and Internet-driven guidance on personal matters. The analog bag is an important example although a tiny one.

Perhaps more committed behavior to community activity or an active hobby that distracts one from global travesty at least momentarily is a survival skill. Perhaps taking an educational course may switch on an independently thinking mind. The objective is to use one’s own brain to evaluate survival as much as possible – given the disorganized world is everywhere.

Who knows, when it’s all over one survival skill may be chopping wood to keep warm.

Ancient Mariner

 

A deeper interpretation

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Pondering here could balloon into an uncontrollable pile of useless words. Nevertheless, mariner will take a shot at a large question he has that has interpretive references going all the way back to the Assyrians 4,000 years before Jesus. The question:

Where did Donald Trump come from? How has Donald Trump dominated world politics? Why has the nation tolerated Donald Trump? Why is he here?

To save words and wandering, mariner takes broadly based interpretations of history, some concepts from sociology and economics and some perspectives on the human species.

The historically continuous cycle of change. If anything moves, the situation has changed. It could be a galaxy or a molecule; it could be the weather or a meteor; it could be the collapse of an economy or the lack of potable water; it could be anxiety about the security of humans or the desire for personal independence; it could be a rapid 100-year sprint from horse drawn vehicles to space ships and intelligent robots. Two points can be made: First, any change disturbs the balance of resources – there will be losers and winners. Second, any change redefines reality; the rules will change or possibly rules won’t exist at all. Some quick analogies:

  •  industrial Revolution created opportunity for massive population increase
  • discovery of the American continents created opportunity to experiment with worldwide economies and launched the Western Alliance that dominates world politics today
  • emergence of medicine doubled the lifespan of humans
  • discovery of electricity permitted family-based cultures to pursue independent subcultures
  • internal combustion provoked massive expansion of commerce
  • electronic communication introduced political power without a need to be directly associated with citizens
  • human-like computer functions that can replace humans
  • nuclear weapons established permanent and credible threat to the human race

Every change has its winners and losers. So there have been many wars and cultural disruptions in all these examples. In fact, the 19th century has a nickname : the century of war.

The biological circumstances required by all living species is ‘survival of the fittest’. It is nature’s way. Famously, and quite accurately, Lord Acton in 1887 said: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” ABBA has a song called ‘The Winner Takes it All’ The words are romantically motivated but romance can be easily removed to see selfishness as the driver. Let’s face it: the economic philosophy of change is to be lucky enough to have the winning lottery ticket. Think Julius Caesar, Bill Gates, John Deere, Google and the multi-million-dollar class. Only the lucky move on. Remember Euprimate? The little mouse-like fellow was the first primate. But at some point it didn’t have a winning ticket so one doesn’t see Euprimate around anymore. How long will sapiens/neanderthal have a winning ticket?

The Human Species. Anything or any event that can create human wealth seems to be a winning ticket as the world changes. The losers are the extra people the planet can’t support and the biosphere that is over-consumed to create wealth.

So there is danger afoot: any change that can be more efficient than humans has a good chance of holding the winning ticket for the species. As far as Donald and others like him, they lucked into wealth. Many of these ‘lucky’ folks don’t understand the economics of change and continue to consume the resources that are short in supply and that likely will expedite further change. The wealthy are trying to modify wealth to protect against future change. The change has nothing to do with money. They have bought suntan lotion to protect against hurricanes.

Ancient Mariner

 

The deep side of knots

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As mariner is wont to do, he fills empty time exploring the world of abstruse subjects. If one wants to get lost in a giant maze with no exit, check out quantum mechanics; or perhaps the process by which ions chase each other around to manage human bodies – all the pictures look like my granddaughter’s bead bracelets. In mathematics, there is a popular puzzle that asks for the shortest path to visit all the stops in an extended trip. Don’t try it, you’ll miss your flight.

A recent article about knot mathematics stirred his interest. He didn’t know a person had to know equations to tie knots. He was a Boy Scout and remembers learning to tie a dozen or so knots that made using knots a handy tool. He ties his shoes and dress ties – except bow ties; he uses the well known square knot and its petulant brother the granny knot for just about everything else. The bowline knot is supposed to never slip. The only use he had for it was as an emergency dog leash. Mariner remembers his grandmother tying a magic knot on a piece of thread just by rubbing two fingers together – voila! a sturdy knot to sew buttons.

It turns out that ‘knot theory’ is an important part of the science of topology – how stuff aggregates and disseminates. For example, when looking at a knot, is it just another example of that same knot somewhere else or is it truly a genuine one-of-a-kind knot? Knot tying is important to the study of things like DNA, chemical reactions and astronomic physics.

Mariner is in knots trying to figure out how to end this post so the reader can finish it at:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-knot-theory-discovery-overturns-long-held-mathematical-assumption/?_kx=HnWBlzyruBWdZk8zZJGqG9mGrSNMZd2cfq-kdkdOWgOqhVgSL-mWKHsx1HZSrrCW.WEer5A

Ancient Mariner

Jobs threatened by AI

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On the CBS website, mariner found a detailed analysis of what types of jobs may be most threatened by automation. An easy way to understand the impact is to consider how the Internet has changed the reader’s shopping habits – what ever happened to malls?

Impact from GPT4 [Pre-trained software capable of dialogue and creative writing – including songs]

Customer services representatives
Accountants and auditors
Software developers
Secretaries and administrative assistants

Overall

Computer programmers
Financial managers
Accountants and auditors
Sales representatives (wholesale and manufacturing)

Automation

General and operations managers
Accountants and auditors
Receptionists and information clerks

Augmentation

Chief Executives
Maintenance and repair workers
Registered Nurses
Computer Systems managers

Mariner would offer an outlook if he could – no one can. We are in a fog without a map and must confront dysfunctional government, unbridled corporate behavior, tendency toward war as a solution and a dissatisfied planet..

Armageddon proceeds

Ancient Mariner

A genuine news ‘capsule’

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Greetings readers, noting a change in weather patterns in the Midwest. In this morning’s email, mariner found an unusually brief but profound news wrap up from the Associated Press:

“In the news today: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization – led by Russia, China, and India – could emerge as a challenge to America’s global leadership; a major landslide has become one of the deadliest natural disasters in Sudan’s history; and the legal impacts of President Donald Trump sending National Guard troops into US cities. Also, scientists are helping a red-legged frog return to Southern California.”¹

It would be difficult to describe as briefly as written so many global issues of such great importance and diversity. Even a little known frog species speaks of the massive extinction occurring around the planet

• The SCO meeting of the Eastern World speaks to an evolution-like rotation of global dominance. The West’s supremacy began to emerge in the Victorian Era starting in the mid 1800s and emerged a century later as the leading political, philosophical, economic and social leaders of the world . It took an age of colonial economics, two world wars and the wealth that only a rich country sitting on the richest continent in the world could provide to finalize the shift from the eastern nations to the Western Alliance.

The winds of change suggest the next evolution is beginning. As with every other evolution, it is accelerated as new technology, new economics and shifting global issues have come together.

• The disaster in Sudan is only the latest example in a long list of planetary effects caused by multiple-century movement of the Solar System, especially expedited by global warming. There are disappearing ice shelves at both poles, platonic shifts loosened by a warming planet and severe undercutting of commercial farming and availability of potable water as a warmer atmosphere begins to reshape global weather patterns. Add in the effects on global economy caused by rising oceans.

• Then there is Donald. The American citizen has proven that something isn’t right with the nation because he was, in fact, elected by them. It is noteworthy that a terrible, dictatorial leader is part of the evolutionary shifts in world power from Ivan the Terrible (1547-1584) to Adolf Hitler to Putin to Donald – plus a dozen or so in smaller nations. Their job is to destroy the old system so transformations can begin anew in the new age of electronics, diminishing wealth, overpopulation and international difficulties – after the dictators disappear.

• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” by Elizabeth Kolbert, was published in 2014. Through detailed research of current and recent disappearances of every kind of creature driven into extinction by a changing world shaped almost single handed by humans, 16,000 species have disappeared. Very important but hardly noticed is that the rate of extinction is increasing.

Historians and scientists have the audacity to create their own age: the Anthropocene Age. Is this world situation something to be proud of?

Ancient Mariner