environment

Every now and then it needs to be injected into human society's stream of consciousness that we live on a planet. And while this planet is round and can seem infinite to our senses when we look around, it isn't. Science remedied that.

Yet, even with the knowledge that the Earth is not infinite, the perception remains. We live in what engineers would call a 'closed system'. Aside from our fledgling efforts in space, what needs to be understood is that what happens on Earth... stays on Earth.

That said, I won't say that mankind is completely at fault for climate change on Earth. What I will say is that we are, at the least, partly responsible. Saying that we are not responsible for how we treat the planet is akin to saying we are not responsible for anything. We claim the Earth as our own, do we not? If we claim ownership, perhaps we should take some more pride in the planet.

Perhaps we shouldn't be logging the Amazon. Perhaps we shouldn't be dumping fluoride and cyanide out of Aluminium smelters. Perhaps we shouldn't be dropping our litter all over the place. Perhaps we should be recycling. Perhaps automotive makers should quit screwing around and working on things that would certainly extend the length of their profitability (at least fail why trying!). Perhaps renewable energy sources should be given more use. Perhaps we could plant a few trees here and there. Perhaps we could take pollution in all its forms - from chemical to noise - seriously and be proactive in minimizing it.

Perhaps.

As Carl Sagan wrote:

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something.

We homo sapiens tend to think that our opposable thumbs give us dominion over the Earth - and honestly, the fact that we have the capacity to pass along vast quantities of information from generation to generation through written communication is extraordinary. Yet, if the living beings on planet Earth formed a democracy, there is no doubt in my mind that homo sapiens would be a minority. It's possible that the bacteria, viruses and insects might lobby for us - and they are powerful lobbies. Dead species can't vote, so we have it pretty easy there as well.

This is a first entry under 'scribbling'; it's where I'll start shoving incomplete (and sometimes unrelated)thoughts that I write on paper. They just haven't fleshed out into full entries yet.

Anarchy is the default state of democracy.

The only reason that we believe we are more enlightened than animals is because we have told ourselves that we are.

People don't buy art. They buy the stories that come with the art. This is why religious texts are full of stories. During periods of illiteracy, verbal stories are all that people had. And the love of these stories has resulted in bloodshed, charred flesh, eviscerations, beheadings and much more. Philosophy is so much more clean.

True democracy is socialism in disguise; if the masses are poor then the poor should have greater voice than the rich by virtue of democracy. That doesn't happen.

Chicken breasts aren't supposed to have bones in them. Those are ribs.

Code is not just Law, it is Intent.

We talk about the planet as if we're truly concerned, but it is really the survival of our species we're interested in. Maybe on the next planet we'll do better.

Last night, I was surrounded by a lot of people who want to make the world a better place. And they're all great people, a lot of fun - and this criticism isn't leveled at them by any stretch - I don't know some of them well enough to compliment, much less insult¹. I like the people I met. But they got me thinking about something I have had on a shelf within the kitchen cupboard of my mind. An old discussion.

"We want to save the world!"
"What for?"

There's a context to 'saving'. It seems to me that popular media, social or traditional, talks a lot about changing the world or saving the world but not really explaining the goal of the whole thing. And we need to explain that goal if we are to guide our own behaviors to assure the world we wish.

So what would we save the world for? One thought is for the children - the most interesting sexually transmitted disease of mankind where the parasite becomes a host for another parasite. Because of the nature of procreation², we manufacture these parasites at a fairly high rate: At the beginning of the 20th century, there were a little over 1 billion people. 100 years later, we're at 6.2 billion. So we're saving the world for the children. And the children get increasingly small (or decreasingly large) parts of the world in a perfectly fair world. This approach doesn't make sense because even if we save the world, our sheer numbers will work against it³ - unless we can decrease the carbon footprint per person at a rate greater than inversely proportional to global population increase. So we'll have to kick the kids out to other planets if we keep doing what's so fun⁴.