Pick your worries

There must be dozens of worries from which to choose. Perhaps start with some of the big ones: A failing democracy, the collapse of religion, war with China, Trump becomes President, Social Security gets chopped, housing for normal Americans gets worse, Health industry collapses, public schools can’t educate anymore.

Mariner opts for the war with Mother Earth – global warming/climate change. The time is approaching when all the other worries will disappear because of extreme disruption to global economics, agriculture, viable living zones and human migration on a scale that has never been experienced. Governments will not be able to pay for wars, although groups of rebels around the world will cause as much destruction. Plutocracy will worsen then collapse as The US runs short on funding.

ProPublica, a much awarded and exceptional news company, published a report titled, “Climate Crisis Is on Track to Push One-Third of Humanity Out of Its Most Livable Environment”. One paragraph is presented below:

“The notion of a climate niche is based on work the researchers first published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, which established that for the past 6,000 years humans have gravitated toward a narrow range of temperatures and precipitation levels that supported agriculture and, later, economic growth. That study warned that warming would make those conditions elusive for growing segments of humankind and found that while just 1% of the earth’s surface is now intolerably hot, nearly 20% could be by 2070.”

 Add to that thought rising oceans wiping out the viability of dozens of nations, even making large areas of land become flooded or submerged. Current tax structures will be changed dramatically as the United States begins to feel social and economic pressures that remind us of World War II America. In the 1930s and 40s, the tax philosophy was to tax the rich so the poor would not have to underwrite government expenses. FDR, for example, put a 100 percent tax on income over $25,000 (about $500,000 today).

One wonders whether the new facemask telephones will matter even though they are one step closer to Matrix reality. The world’s environment is up in arms and that will dictate our pleasures. Can Alexa and Siri keep up?

Ancient Mariner

Mother Earth and humans

When mariner worked as a project manager, he learned that certain individuals made it difficult to run the project. For many reasons related to power insecurity, bad personality, uncontrolled desire to change objectives and other distracting behaviors, these individuals were overhead that was not helping.

As a necessity to survive and complete the project, he developed a technique that avoided confrontation but indirectly suppressed the person’s interference. He calls it “taking away cards”. Here is a simple example:

You have a chain-smoking relative who prefers not to drive the car so they always ask you to buy cigarettes for them. You are concerned about their heavy smoking. You take away their control card by saying, “I don’t have time right now; I must do something else right now. Why don’t you buy your cigarettes?” Either the relative goes without or must resolve their distaste to drive. You, however, have avoided a face-to-face shout down. With luck, you may have altered a pattern of behavior.

Mother Earth is using this technique with humans. Some examples:

  • If you continue to pollute the air, I’ll stop enforcing dependable weather patterns.
  • If you continue to trash the environment and killing thousands of creatures, I’ll take away your clean water.
  • If you continue to make matters worse, I’ll melt all the ice at the poles and release methane from deep permafrost.
  • If you don’t learn to live within the constraints of your habitat, I’ll remove the habitat.

These are not future threats; they’ve been growing for decades if not centuries. Mother Earth is about to take away our control cards. Someone tell the fossil fuel industry.

Ancient Mariner

Are humans and the biosphere still in the Pleistocene?

Traces of Homo genes have been found that existed more than 600,000 years ago but the variation that represents the beginning of humans as we would define them today (Homo sapiens) appeared about 300,000 years ago.

Here is a picture of our Great Grandfather:

Homo heidelbergensis

 

 

 

300,000 years ago is before the Industrial Revolution. It is before the invention of the wheel. It is before the idea of government. It is before rafts. It is before American slavery. It is before George Washington. It is before Texas and New York. It is even so far back that Henry Louis Gates Junior can’t trace ancestors on his “Finding Your Roots” show.

The point is this: We are 99.9 percent the same creature that walked around buck naked in the Pleistocene. The .1 percent that continued to evolve was the ability to have abstract thoughts – thoughts and imaginings that weren’t real. To this day our limbic system is confused and can’t tell what is real. There is no physiological chemistry designed to respond to railroad trains.

How did Homo sapiens relate to the environment? It’s a difficult question to answer. For a long time, Pleistocene folks were classified as herbivores who survived primarily by eating roots and grasses that are still around today. However, recent discoveries at one site showed plenty of bones. Most of the animal bones came from gazelles. Among the other remains were hartebeests, wildebeests, zebras, buffalo, porcupines, hares, tortoises, freshwater mollusks, snakes and ostrich eggshells.

It is unlikely that early man kept gazelles and buffalo in body-sized cages as modern man does. Our ancestors had to chase them down. That is why the limbic system is confused by railroad trains. An interesting footnote to this paragraph is that only 20 percent of water-sourced food remains from averages posted just 50 years ago. Something is happening that is different from the last 300,000 years. Further, arable land is disappearing due to many things from population to industrial consumption to climate change.

Speaking of climate change, it is not coincidental that Homo sapiens has been able to populate the planet in the blink of an eye – given evolutionary timelines. Generally speaking, the planet has been tough on life since the beginning. Consider an ice age that lasted millions of years and in modern times can run 200,000 years without blinking an eye. Volcanic eruptions are another phenomenon that raises its disturbances every so many thousand years. But fortunately, scientists have noted a very still, cooperative and generous period for the last 300,000 years.

But now there is foreboding activity. It is true that modern Pleistocene man has trashed the climate, biosphere and has driven the animal kingdom to extinction – that’s the result of abstract thinking. But Homo is not the only driver of change. Most of the methane comes from deep in the Earth, from a time before rafts were invented. Further, volcanoes seemed disturbed by an unbalanced spinning of the Earth’s core. Scientists already have proven that the planet has entered a stage where the polarity will switch – something that happens over many years but can be disruptive. Will polar bears and penguins have to switch places?

Let’s not add any significance to Donald but doesn’t he look like an old Homo heidelbergensis? Then, so does mariner’s Great Aunt Denise.

Good Luck Zees!

Ancient Mariner

Part 2 math –

Mariner forgot to include his own example of quantum physics versus Einsteinian physics, which he believes describes more clearly the difference in definition between the two than Schrodinger’s cat:

You are driving on an interstate highway. The highway is not busy. For the moment, you are the only car you see on the entire visible highway – in front or in back and none on the other side.

Question one: At the moment, are you the fastest car or the slowest? Yes.

Finally, a car appears down the road in front of you. Are you fastest or slowest?

Second question: About this sudden event where a car becomes part of your reality, it appeared on your highway as a definable car, at the same clock time and the same measurable distance (Einstein).

However, Quantum says, “No, not so fast”. The car just didn’t assemble itself out of nothing the moment you saw it; what events caused the car to appear at that moment?

For example, did the car turn on the highway just over the hill or has it been on the road for two days coming from New Jersey? How did the driver come to be in the car at that moment? Why is it a Subaru? Why is it on that highway? What time did it depart so that you would experience it at that moment?

Quantum’s point being that nothing exists in an absolute state, in a precisely definable moment or at an absolute distance. In other words, mass, time, and space are not finite.

The closest human realization that mariner can conjure is when you suddenly meet an old friend at a surprising place. You say “Can you imagine the odds of us meeting?” Quantum can.

Ancient Mariner

A bit of mathematics

Most phenomena lay beyond the existential reasoning of the mind. Those who want to explore this other world must learn the magic of mathematics. Here are a few samples that reveal logical conclusions beyond subconscious reasoning:

1 – Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Mathematical probability: Before any doors are opened you have a 1 in 3 chance of winning [ P= 1/3 ]. After the host opens door 3 which has a goat, the chance for winning the car with your current choice still is 1/3 because although the goat is revealed – the number of doors has not changed. The probability that the car is behind the chosen door still is 1/3 but the unopened door now has a 2/3 chance of winning because door three is known. The solution is that switching has a 2/3 chance of winning – so switch.

2 – Albert Einstein is famous for defining the universe as a relationship between mass, time and space. To the human mind, this still seems adequate (frankly it is) but the mathematics of quantum physics say space does not exist, solid subatomic particles do not exist as little billiard balls of energy and more abstractly, all subatomic activity occurs simultaneously regardless of ‘space’ – even 1 billion light-years away.

An experiment was performed a few years ago where the photons from two different stars were aimed at a device which needed two in-place photons to interact simultaneously. Using the star energy, the device acted as expected. This is tantamount to a magician letting you pull a card from his deck and it is matched simultaneously by a deck on the Sun.

The famous layman’s example is Shrodinger’s cat: A closed box is presented to you with a cat inside. Is the cat dead or alive? The answer is yes. This is kept simple by recognizing that whatever led to the state of the cat, time, space or distance, it is irrelevant to your instant experience. A time-distant event will appear instantly when the box is opened. If the cat is dead, did it die recently or a long time ago? Doesn’t matter to you; as far as you’re concerned the fact that it died happened when you opened the box because otherwise it would have been alive.

Don’t ask for the equations. Dozens of books laden with formulas have been written.

3 – This mathematical exercise will provide some relevant information for your real-time brain. Since 2018, 111 children have been murdered in the United States. Population has questionable stability in many nations including the United States. Will killing 111 children affect the future population of the US?

Yes. Using Bayesian probabilities, in 2060, there will be approximately 308 less people in the United States than if no children were murdered. [formulas in ‘the signal and the noise’ by Nate Silver, 2012 Penguin Press] basic formula:

The formulas have several sources on the internet if you want to play with them.

Ancient Mariner

New signs

Bottom up power: [Politico] “The country’s 900 or so rural electric cooperatives serve remote rural customers and are member-driven, -owned and -controlled. Their nonprofit status has made it hard to make investments in low-carbon energy; unlike investor-owned utilities, they can’t go into debt or sell shares to pay for a solar farm. But getting them off of fossil fuels is essential to meeting climate goals.

Already five co-ops have either left or announced they will leave a major G&T (generation and transmission) called Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which covers parts of four Western states.”

This tendency is happening in Europe as well. Despite all the ‘effort’ to stop using fossil fuel, oil companies are making record profits. Even Biden is allowing a new oil-drilling operation in Alaska – talk about plutocracy!

Mariner often writes about collective cultures. Collectivism includes concepts like extended families, local government, local cooperatives, community rules for equality of life, etc. To one degree or another, terms for collectives include cooperative, clan, communist, commune, tribe and many other terms denoting a localized group. The image below captures the general spirit:

Just being a small group does not automatically grant goodness. There are many small groups bent on anything but sharing and survival of all – NIMBY is one of countless examples that demonstrate the conflict between collectivism and the imposing needs of a much larger population.

Having learned from many sources over many years, mariner knows Homo sapiens is a tribal species, along with most of its primate ancestors. In past posts, he has cited authors who said things like “The maximum number of individuals that can be familiar to a human is 150”, “The further a person gets from a direct relationship with the environment, the more abusive the relationship becomes” and recently, “I’m first if its fair for everyone”.

When he studies the development of western nations, and the unimaginable wealth that suddenly appeared on the American continents, mariner is reminded of a group of hoodlums during a riot who break into a store and steal all its goods. Such tactics work for the hoodlums if there is plenty to go around. Western Capitalism is the fastest way to reorganize wealth.

Today, however, there is not enough to go around. Capitalism has an idiosyncrasy that doesn’t work anymore: Grow or die.

Because the West has achieved such wonders and accomplishments – especially when the achievements provide convenience, collective terminology is not popular and its advantages often are discounted. It is this resistance that makes it good news to mariner that there is a breakaway of self-owned electric companies from large conglomerates. There are other appropriate concepts of management that will work better in these challenging times. Bigger may not be better.

There are many more sociological points of interest but mariner can become boring.

Ancient Mariner

Is Big Better?

The news from every quarter, whether conservative, liberal, science, democracy or dictatorship, it is the same: There isn’t enough to go around. An increasing number of nations are participating in or pontificating war as a path to sustain order. In both the East and the West, social mores are collapsing. The economies of wealthy nations are vulnerable. Hoarding behavior within plutocracies, corporatocracies, oligarchies and martial command nations prevail in global policy making. Yet the global number of homeless, starving and abused people is rising; small historical cultures are disappearing and conflict with the Earth’s biosphere grows more volatile.

Since 1980, the rate at which poor nations are collapsing has doubled, largely from the burden of climate change and the hoarding philosophy prevalent among all nations which in turn minimizes assistance.

The most frequent causes cited by public sources are unrealistic tax formulas, cultural abuse (woke, racism, Uyghurs, Moslems, on and on . . .), national cultures ignoring the needs of large populations, and antiquated judicial practices. A new one is artificial intelligence with its self-interest in managing public behavior for profit.

It occurs to mariner that the common denominator to all these dysfunctions is that they are controlled top-down. A simple contradiction would be democracy, a government that is managed by the individual citizen through local, state and federal elections – clearly a bottom-up philosophy today being managed by a plutocracy – a top-down philosophy that makes it so expensive for a local candidate to campaign that only national deep pockets can dictate who can run in local elections.

If one were to examine Earth’s evolution of every plant and animal, compressed into the instinct of every cell is a behavior that would be survival by bottom-up practices. In other words, survival of the fittest at SUSTAINING THE SPECIES. Opossums can only behave in a way that would be good for any opossum. Even the large flocks of birds, herds of cattle and swarms of fish all live in an equal but very personal state of survival: me first but only if it’s fair for the others. Of course, these creatures don’t reason this conclusion, it is in their genes.

Originally, sustaining the species was in the genes of the primates and likely still is but the thorn is the ability to reason, to perceive reality not bound by direct reality – not bound by a balance between the biosphere and physical dependence. Should we curse the first primate that conceived a tool not provided by nature? Of course not. However, should we curse the first primate who discovered how to grow more wheat than was needed and hoarded it? Perhaps, that was not an act to sustain the species.

It may be that the last structured society to sustain the evolutionary rule, ‘me first if it’s fair’, was the Chinese culture which existed around the beginning of the fifth century BCE. The period was before empire-building. It was a society of self-sufficient towns of about 250-1,000 people, likely all related in extended families. The economy was based on a collective style where everyone had a role in sustainability and no one went without.

The idea of a collective economy arose in Europe, if only briefly, with Anabaptist communism; there are remnants today in The United States and Europe but the overwhelming presence of modern commerce is too much to sustain pockets of collectivism. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were numerous attempts at collectivism, the most notable being the Commune movement in the 1960s. A few sympathizers maintain that white man forced native Americans into an independent collective economy; recent news articles have addressed the invasion of commercial interests into Indian sources of locally sourced food, e.g., salmon.

֎ If, indeed, ‘top-down’ management is the issue, could we ever return to bottom-up? Not likely. It is very difficult to imagine what world order will look like in 100-150 years. There are so many substantive forces changing at the moment that it is easy to imagine an Armageddon catastrophe. Short of that, there are many presumably unmanageable situations that politics may not be able to manage. For example:

Population. Simply said, there are far too many humans on Earth to be supported by a natural ratio to Earth’s biosphere nor by any industrial or technological solution. The following quote is from the Smithsonian:

One can speculate that, at least in the United States and Europe, the worker rebellions are the beginning of a new politic.

Uncontrolled corporatism. The last time the Federal Government knew enough to tell corporations what to do was the generation in 1982 that forced Bell to split its empire into smaller independent companies. Before that, in 1911 Standard Oil was forced to split into 34 companies. Given the political power of Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc., not to mention weaponized Plutocratic political parties, it may not be possible to restore bottom-up economy.

Instant global communication. It is a marvel for anyone to log on to the internet and instantly acquire knowledge, news and ideas from around the globe. The nature of this instantaneousness is that there is no need to stop at a national border to show a visa; there is no need to have independent corporations operating in diverse nations of the world; there is no need for anyone to be loyal (AKA collective) to local markets when one can instantaneously purchase cheaper goods in Asia – no Silk Road needed. The most common evidence of this at the local level is the demise of storefronts. A nation’s borders may not mean much as commerce becomes global and can skirt or otherwise dominate national politics.

Global Warming. This is the big change. With the flick of her weather finger, Mother Earth can cause billions of dollars in property damage, increase homelessness, and disrupt government budgets. Further, she has demonstrated how easy it is to change agriculture to desert or a pleasant valley to a lava flow. Politics are irrelevant – no nation can own her or avoid her. Ask Pakistan.

Will there be Armageddon? You’ll have to prove it to mariner.

Ancient Mariner.

 

Climate Change w/o politics

Many of us have taken note of the population shift away from industrial, high populated areas and a move toward more rural areas especially in the southern states, e.g., Texas and Florida. These shifts are understandable for dozens of economic reasons and the lifestyle freedom of working from home. Even a dislike for freezing temperatures is enough motivation.

This migration involves serious personal investment to purchase homes, change careers and adapt to new social norms. Considering this investment in light of serious climate change by 2050 has made mariner curious about the actual details of climate change and whether this present migration is wise. This post is based on the projections provided by sources like NOAA, NASA, ProPublica, Climate.gov and several journals that cover this subject.

Most sources agree that 2050 is a significant year to witness disruptive changes in weather that will affect half the agricultural capacity in the U.S. and draw a clear line across the nation where life below the line will be difficult and above the line will be habitable with minimal stress. That line, without much deviation, is 40°N – a line through Philadelphia, Columbus, Burlington ( Iowa), Denver and Sacramento. Today in 2023, that line, with significant deviation in latitude, travels along the borders of North Carolina/South Carolina, southern Tennessee, drops into north Texas and encompasses the entire southwest until the coast of southern California. By 2100, the 40° line will have moved to the US/Canadian border.

Looking below the fortieth parallel it is true that high temperature is an obvious cause of discomfort for both creatures and plants and by 2050 daily temperatures will be in the nineties for much of the year. But the real disruption is caused by a combination of heat and humidity. At 95° with 100% humidity, human life cannot be sustained. Today, there are very few places where this is the case; we are accustomed to much lower humidity in the nation’s hot spots.

The science behind the unsustainability is the dysfunction of the lungs combined with heat stroke. If mariner moved to Mississippi today, bought a house and other amenities like solar panels, by 2050, 27 years from now he would have to move again. What about a young family with 30-year old parents and 3 children? The climate won’t wait until 2050 and then Boom! everything will change. The fact is the weather already is changing – rapidly.

All politics aside and ignoring other aspects of global warming, perhaps the migration to the south should give it further thought.

Ancient Mariner

Paranthropus

Mariner often wondered where his uncle Frank got his good looks . . .

Copied from Science Magazine

 

A recent discovery covered in Science Magazine revealed that a distant Homo ancestor was more intelligent than tradition had supposed and used tools. The tools, dated to about 2.8 million years ago, are the oldest known examples of the Oldowan[1] toolkit. They also hint that Paranthropus, often seen as an also-ran in the story of human evolution, might have made or at least used tools. Is Paranthropus the one who planted the first seed that led to the Industrial Revolution?

Interestingly, to this day no one can prove the paleolithic ancestry of Paranthropus. There were three variations in the species but linking characteristics to other major lines of Homo, e.g., Australopithecus africanus, cannot be proven beyond doubt.

Providing intellectual information similar to this is a new tax dodge mariner has created. It is similar to Trump University.

Ancient Mariner

[1] Oldowan refers to tools made by chipping flakes to achieve sharp edges for scraping, chopping and smashing. Until the find referenced in this article, it was believed that oldowan tools were first used 2.6 million years ago.

It is over.

The battle to sustain individuality and Homo sapiens authenticity has been won by AI. Watch the following clip then read on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s11k0yAA8ZQ

Already AI is good enough to write novels, essays, legal briefs and singlehandedly manage most trades on the stock exchange. The ability for anyone to write any style of entertainment is just one database away.

With the invention of the gene splitter Crispr, AI will be able to pool all human variations into a massive database so parents can pick any child they want. Who wants a Donald Trump lookalike? How about triplets that are the Kingston Trio?

But then AI will perceive that it is much simpler to have one version of humans; just think how efficient that would be for politics, medicine, and one would need only one football team.

Perhaps it will be less expensive if humans had no need to travel.

Welcome to Matrix.

Goodbye.

Ancient Mariner