From the President of the United States

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

This is from the President’s Message to Congress on December 3rd and of course it is very current and apropos of our current situation of exhaustion of natural resources. This same subject is being ballyhooed by President Obama at the Copenhagen Conference in his declarations of United States support of decreasing green house gasses and stopping global warming, sea level rise and in general making the world better for our children.

There is one tiny little comment I would like to make about that statement. The world population at the time it was first made was 1.7 billion and it is now 6.8 billion. There are now 5.1 billion more people on the planet now, which is enough more people to repopulate the total United States of that time (80 million) about 63 times over. For our President to make that same statement about our national policy toward long-term world stability and sustainability now would mean that in the same amount of time into the future there would be enough new Americans to import into our country 63 times 308 million or 19,404 billion. That’s crazy mathematics but it shows the absurdity of the above statement then and now. Clearly something different is going to happen in the next one hundred years than happened in the last one.

Oh yes, I neglected to mention, on purpose for added effect, that the quotation above was from Theodore Roosevelt’s message to congress delivered on December 3, 1907. This is 102 year anniversary of the message that President Barack Obama will be delivering to the world in Copenhagen. It is all nonsense, not because the words are wrong but because they won’t be implemented. They won’t be because they can’t be. They can’t be because it goes against the most primitive of all life forms, not just humans, basic instincts – survive at all cost and reproduce maximally. There is no controlling world population so long as there is food to feed people and there are groups of people with the right to produce as many children as they possibly can. At the moment we have an abundance of food, as proven by the fact that the population is expanding by 75 million people per year and there is no possibility of limiting the reproductive urge as proven by the fact that the population is expanding by 75 million people per year.

This problem of world population being brought to some number which the Earth can support in a stable way is politically impossible to attain because it is more like 100 million people. In fact it is impossible to even discuss population control as an abstract idea because it conflicts with basic animal urges. These urges have been built into our social systems and are now considered as fundamental rights. That is all well and good but it makes a rational solution to the problem impossible to achieve and the only way it can work itself out is through Natural Processes. That being the case population will expand to some totally unsustainable condition and then the beautiful world we presently enjoy will collapse. It won’t be our fault, though, and we won’t be responsible it is just nature’s way of regaining balance. It probably can not be prevented and so when faced with an impossible problem we moral humans are relieved of our responsibility to act morally relative to that situation. Our morally condemning the inevitable population collapse and fighting it is like condemning gravity and fighting its effects. 

What will be the Earth’s maximum population?

Darwin Awards are coming humanity’s way. 

The coming human population crash is an unpopular topic. 

The coming global disaster is in full speed ahead mode.

All we can do as individuals is to support the EarthArk and hope for a better future after the burst.

The world of wine is a strange one and probably a lot more is know about wine that is kept secret than in any other common occupation. There must be millions of people involved in the wine industry and it has a very long record too going back for at least three thousand years and probably much longer. Perhaps the reason there is so much secrecy about wine is because the patent laws can’t be made to cover the various ways that must have been discovered over the millenia on how to make better wine. It is only by trade secrets that a vintner can maintain their advantage and high price. The available information on wine seems to the outsider to be a lot of technical names which are obviously gobbledegooked and intended to flummox the parvenu public.

One obvious example of this is the term nose. It appears to refer to the portion of the wine drinking experience which uses the nose for its source of inspiration. But even a superficial observation of this nosing event has the taster experiencing the wine from different portals to sensation. The first nose is the one on the front of the face and this is used for sniffing the wine while it is still in the glass. Sometime this is done with a bit of ceremony such as swishing the wine around in the glass, while perhaps warming it a bit with the hands held under the bowl of the container. The connoisseur then pokes his nose deep into the opening and inhales the fragrance. This first checks for vinegar or other unpleasantness which it is best to avoid but then supposedly it, if the wine is good gives considerable pleasure to the aficionado of these things. Personally I haven’t enough experience with wine for this to give me the exciting anticipatory surge of pleasure which the more experience affect to claim.

There is a second end of the nose which is actually much more important for enjoying the wine and that is the entrance to the sinus from the back of the mouth called the nasopharynx (nasal part of the pharynx). I am not sure if this term refers to the hole or the flesh around the hole. The patent office refuses to recognize holes and in that venue one must always phrase their terminology to write about the material around the holes. In any case it is through this hole which should have a common name through which most of the bouquet comes from drinking wine. And herein lies the problem, if something so simple and rudimentary as this opening to the chief sense organ for tasting wine doesn’t even have a commly used name we are off to a very rocky start for talking intelligently about the subject.

Generally, after one has some wine in their mouth the best procedure is to partially open the back of the mouth and start exhaling through the front nose while raising and lowering the jaw. That procedure brings air across the wine in the mouth and up through this unknown opening (the back nose) and across the odor sensing organs. In the several seconds while this air is blowing across the wine and then across those sinus sensors the wine warms a bit, with body heat, and releases its volatile odors.

I did some blind taste-tests with some friends while on vacation last month, keeping all the bottles of wine in numbered brown paper bags and pouring small amounts of the various wines out into small glasses which were sitting in a pan of water. By controlling the temperature in the water I was able to control the temperature of the wine which was measured with an accurate photo developing thermometer. The various people’s verbal responses were quite varied but everyone basically agreed that wine at 40° F was cold and refreshing but if you drank it quickly didn’t have much flavor. At that temperature you couldn’t drink very much quickly without it being unpleasant from the cold sensation. Wine at 60° F was pleasant to drink but tasted better if it was allowed to warm up for several seconds before swallowing. Wine at 75° F could be downed quickly but unless you let it sit in the mouth for a few seconds the pleasure didn’t last very long. Warmer than that and it started to have unpleasant odors of excess alcohol. So … the starting point for drinking wine is to get it to 70° F sip some into the mouth and slosh it around there for several seconds and exhale and inhale through the front nose time or two while chomping the jaw before swallowing, all the while paying close attention to the mouth flavors and the nose bouquets.

Good drinking and may the farce be with you.

What will be necessary to maintain human life in the year 7000 CE?

In the post called, Humanity’s “Laws of stability” in the year 7,000 CE, it is postulated that there will be 100 million people living on Earth at that time. In the future, after 5000 years, nearly all of the natural mineral resources which current high technology society depends will be gone and people will be relying on renewable sources of energy and carefully recycled materials. Because human society will have been in balance with what the resources the Earth provides for over a thousand years what is needed will be known with precision and appropriate adjustments made. At present it is only possible to speculate, but some things are obviously going to be required for a high tech society. However, if society reverts to a hunter gather type then the population will be forced to fall to a much lower number, probably below 1 million. The Earth’s resources will have been greatly degraded from the time 10,000 years ago when humans first developed the ways to move out of hunting and gathering lifestyle. Then there were about 3 million humans living. If the EarthArk is implemented then there might be more people able to survive in either a high tech society or a low tech one because the environmet may be more fully restored.

How can food be moved from where it is created to where it’s needed?

An absolute necessity which must be fulfilled under all conditions is food for the people. With so large a population as 100 million there will be cities which must have food transported to them. At this distant future time with no gas, oil, coal and limited mineral sources the energy for the power to create food and transport it to the cities must come from the sun. This energy will probably come from electric solar cells, surface wind farms and wind kite farms. On land this electric energy would be moved to where it is needed with high voltage power lines which could power the farm equipment, electric trains and the cities.

How can material and people be moved in a sustainable way?

 The trains could be relatively low-speed for transporting materials and food but the high-speed trains would be used for human transportation. As fuel for airplanes would have to be created from raw materials by electrolysis their use would be limited to moving only the most time critical items. Land based communication between cities would be done with high-speed electric trains not much different from current ones but linking the whole planet. Ocean crossings would be powered with wind, solar energy and stored electric energy and would be quite slow compared to the trains. There would need to be trans polar train routes from Europe to America and China for faster travel. North America and South America would have a train link across the isthmus of Panama. At some of the difficult places like the Bering Straights, and the straights from Singapore to Australia  there would still be ferries and some floating bridges. Water travel is much slower than train travel so the various ferries connections would be as short as possible.

What are the long term problems with an all-electric society?

On average of a year or more sunlight is very constant and over a ten year  period the wind is also constant. In a society so dependent upon electricity there would be a critical need for the maintainance of the conductors of electricity from where it happens to be abundant at a give time to where it is needed. Such movement of electricity over long distance requires metals such as copper, aluminium and some rare ones like silver, bismith and yttrium. It is possible that some forms of carbon may be used. Perhaps for the long power grid connections there might be super-conductors but even these will probably require these metals. So they might become the limiting factor on maximum population size when everything requires them. Not just energy relocation needs metals, the electric motors will also require these things.

Food is the limiting factor for population but food creation may be limited by the power available.

Whose theory is evolution anyway?.

It’s not Darwin’s or Wallace’s Theory, which was just brought to my attention, is a web site by Milton Wainwright BSc, PhD Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, University of Sheffield, England, where he discusses the many precursors to Charles Darwin’s book Origin of Species. This is a great site, worth clicking and reading, with an abundance of quotes from authors of the pre “Darwinian” era. Darwin, Wallace and Matthew were thinking outside of the intellectual box of their era but only a little. They were the growing edge of the box—they were pushing it out just a little. If Adam Smith back with his Wealth of Nations more than a half a century earlier had only expanded his concepts to include living forms the modern term for evolution might not be Darwinism but Smithism. A couple of paragraphs would have done it. He already was using the concept of survival of the fittest. The fundamental ideas are so obvious, after being clearly stated, that when Patrick Matthew published them he didn’t bother to pursue them but only state them, and quite clearly. It was only when a person of connections and stature stated them in a large and difficult to read book with a title that captured the public’s imagination that the idea caught on. It is the person who makes an idea acceptable to the public that gets all the credit with the public. The public might be asked, “Wasn’t it Forrest Gump who landed on the moon and saved all the astronauts on Apollo 13?” We might be surprised with the public’s answers to that question. An exception is Gregor Mendel who got credit for something he published years earlier. It would have been as easy to ignore his work as it was Patrick Matthew’s published works. They too were quite obscure and might not have been discovered for a long time.

Jumping from one idea to another.

One problem the scientists seem to have trouble with is the idea of jumps in evolution  (sometimes called saltations). Did evolution proceed smoothly by slow gradual changes or did it happen by sudden and massive shifts? That harkens back to the Catastrophists and the idea of God flooding the world and it was only Noah’s foresight to build an Ark that saved us and many other creatures from extinction. No modern scientist wants to go back to that theory but there might still be some energy in the sudden shift idea. It seems that it is a question rather similar to many other ideas where everything has some validity depending upon the flow of the previous assumptions.

Timing is everything so set the clock carefully.

A fundamental question for an evolutionist is the markings on his clock. If he is measuring evolutionary change with a second hand, evolution is very slow and smooth but if his unit of time is a million years then some evolution is more saltatious. If the extreme is taken and the unit of time is a billion years or more, then all evolution is virtually instantaneous.

What and when is a species?

Darwin consumed a huge portion of his Origin trying to define the word species but it is a question similar to that of the time scale, define it loosely enough and it includes everything which sprung from that first successful spark of life which managed to take over the world. Define species tightly enough and it can be limited to a single individual, living or long dead. Being such a protean word it becomes necessary to define its limits virtually every time it is used.

Evolution is a field of dead bones—many of them evolutionists’ dead bones.

Laughing turns off the brain or so it seems to me because when I am laughing even silently it seems to be more difficult to follow the next sentence of the comedy unless there has been time for a mental reset. The commedian Jay Leno knows this intellectually or perhaps he learned it while standing in front of audiences for many years but he almost always tells a joke, quite often the punch line twice, and then pauses, walks around a bit chuckling and mugging the audience with the emotion he wishes them to feel. Perhaps this works so well because he knows it is impossible to think while one is laughing or perhaps when feeling any emotion very strongly. His timing ability, along with others, makes him funny and has made him famous. He gives people time to recover their thinking ability.

Another public place where the brain function can be observed being turned off and manipulated by events is on TV, during football games. In that situation when some big play is happening and immediately afterward the crowd is feeling a great emotion and their minds are turned off and certinally it isn’t thinking. Immediately after the play the TV camera will frequently zoom in of faces in the crowd where oblivion of thought is obvious and then sometimes onto the face of the coach. Those coaches faces are very different in their appreciation of the events. The faces in the crowd are filled with all sorts of emotions, usually the camera moves into the joyous ones and their emotional glows of momentary victory but the coaches faces are quite different and after a second of reactive emotion to a specific play you can see them thinking, calculating, planning, commanding and controlling. They watch the event carefully like everyone else but then they shake off any emotion and start thinking. They generally take on a gruff slightly puckered face expression while looking at the ground a few steps in front of them and usually pace about. Also, no one ever speaks to them but they speak briefly and directively to the subcoaches and to a few of the players.

It appears that what many people have learned is that under those conditions which cause emotions to rise and interfeare with reasonable judgement that it is best to intentionally flatten the emotions. When the emotions are non-existent then it is possible to analyse the problems better and thus make decissions which are better in the long run. The ability to dissociate the emotions from the objective reality that might be felt by a normal person when present danger is upon them is essential to maximize the likelyhood of successful accomplishment of the task. Very few occupations require that ability but if they do it is essential. That ability can only be discovered by exposure and response.

Feeling emotions and permitting the body to express emotions must be suppressed sometimes.

I have been reading Richard Jefferies (1848 – 1887) The Story of My Heart today on The Gutenburg Project web site. He is a bit over colorful with too much purple prose for modern taste but I like his world view. I have been searching for one which is amenable to a nature based religion which would give ultimate meaning to life without having to resort to unprovable assertions requiring blind faith. The currently popular book Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe by Greg M. Epstine as reported in the Washington Post is too flat in tone to be really popular even though the title claims a sixth of the world already believes this world view.

Jefferies has a high toned afflatus: Give me fullness of life like to the sea and the sun; give me fullness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their fullness; give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things; give me my inexpressible desire. (Chapter VI)

In my abundant world of New Adventure in the year 7000 CE there will be abundance: The world works only for today, as the world worked twelve thousand years ago, and our children’s children will still have to toil and slave for the bare necessities of life. (Chapter X)

When technology is high and population is low there will be abundance of necessities and plenty of leisure: I hope succeeding generations will be able to be idle. I hope that nine-tenths of their time will be leisure time; that they may enjoy their days, and the earth, and the beauty of this beautiful world; that they may rest by the sea and dream; that they may dance and sing, and eat and drink. (Chapter XI)

My hope is expressed in the post: Contentment is yours because the Universe is you.

There have been several posts on this Probaway blog about what to watch for as possible tipping points for the world slipping over into a Doomsday event.  

——  WMDs – The Current progress defending against terrorism   

——  Predicting the unknown unknowns of Doomsday 

——  How bad are the 15 Homeland Security Disasters?   

——  Measuring disasters on a scale permits rational comparisons. and many more.

Today, in an attempt to understand tipping points better, I attended a lecture on tipping points. It was focused on various economic factors affecting the consumption of consumer goods related to online purchases. These were simple mathematical models which are very limited in scope but are legitimate attempts to ferret out the primary factors which trigger human decision-making. The analysis was mathematically simple but probably as accurate as any computational model of human behavior is ever likely to achieve. What did I come away with? — The problem of tipping point precursors for my interests in predicting the Doomsday events is that the relevant factors are too complex and emotionally charged for any mathematical projection to be of much help. Also there are so many variables in the minds of the great number of people who can have an impact on these decisions that any prediction is very nebulous. Basically, what has saved humanity for the last sixty years has been the thought in the minds of the people responsible for the super-weapons that it would be too terrible to contemplate their actual use, so it is not considered. If it happens it’s game over, so why worry about it. It is similar to the morality question when — if you can have no effect on the outcome you have no moral obligations.

There is one major problem now arising in the real world and that is that because there are so many different individuals with limited responsibility for their actions who possess knowledge of WMDs that they might try to use the ambiguity of actual responsibility to use WMDs. The fault would fall on someone else. Of the hundreds of sovereign states and vastly larger numbers of organized groups there might arise some individual who will have the hope of getting away with provoking their enemies into fighting each other. This malefactor could watch for some naturally arising hostility between these other states and when that is at full tension the malefactor could in quick succession set off a series of conventional bombs and counter bombs at sensitive targets for each of these two states. Both of them would be tempted to believe that their obvious enemy was responsible and both would be tempted to launch an all out attack upon the other one. Both of them would be innocent of the provocative acts but both would become victims of the more massive war which arose between them. I once observed two cats growling at each other and a parrot perched in a tree above them started repeating the cat calls at them which triggered a cat fight.

It is possible that Doomsday could be triggered not by some true accident caused by simple honest miscalculations between superpowers but by some relatively small and relatively powerless group seeking some relatively small gain, performing some act which could trigger a massive retaliation with WMDs. The war of retaliation is caused by the two powers reacting to stresses intentionally created by misinformation of a third party.

Tipping points are usually thought of as a sudden reaction to a gradual build up of forces like a mouse trap suddenly snapping when a tiny bit too much pressure has been applied to the trigger. With so many stressors growing in the world, it seems likely that one of them is going to trip a trigger and when one trap is sprung it will affect some others and when several of those are sprung the effect is to set off every one of them which is cocked and ready to go. Perhaps, even potential traps which are not on alert will be quickly brought into operational status and the Doomsday will be even worse than a simple explosion of all the ready materials.

I have no special information and am only looking at the obvious and my perception is that the world is very healthy at the moment but it is headed for a catastrophe. The timing of the Doomsday event is any moment from right now to sometime in the not too distant future.  Actually the potential of H-bomb induced Doomsday has existed since about 1958. A guess for the risk would be about four percent per year but that’s a perfectly silly guess by a marginally crazy person. No one knows the risk beforehand and even after the events no one will know what was the risk. It was just greater than zero.

We need a back up plan for the Earth. We need an EarthArk. We need an EarthArk now.

Human brain disease is a subject that piqued my interest, as I am self diagnosed with strange abilities and given the superhero name of Apophenio. That self absorption, to my way of thinking, means the ability to see things which other people do not see and to hear, feel and comprehend things which others don’t. Since I have given the supername to myself which implies I have some sort of mental disorder, for me, a lecture by one of the world’s foremost researchers on brain pathology was not to be missed.

Katherine Rankin from UCSF gave a talk entitled, Is there a Neuroanatomic Basis for Personality?: New Insights from Neurodegenerative Disease. This was a wonderful fact filled lecture with an abundance of slides of various brain scans of degenerate human brains associated with detailed descriptions of the personality anomalies associated with the particular problem areas in their brains. Because of time constraints, the lecture was limited to an “academic hour” but more complex words, pictures and movies were packed into that hour than any outsider to brain pathology, such as myself, could possibly comprehend. I wasn’t watching for it but there didn’t seem to be a single filler word like, uh, you know and like, in the blizzard of rapid-fire five syllable words strung into long sentences. I loved it. Words seen in the title like neuroanatomic and neurodegenerative would be the easy ones. I can’t remember any of the juicy ones to repeat or spell but most scientific words are to some degree self-explanatory so the lecture was easy to follow if you have a mind willing to be nimble and just let some of the obviously good stuff slide by.

After the lecture there was a luncheon which had more sandwiches than attendees so they didn’t seem to mind my sitting in on their graduate seminar and eating one. I tried to ask a few good questions when the ball came rolling round to me and I guess they were good ones because Dr. Rankin said they were very appropriate to her research. One question dealt with a comment she made during the lecture, that when someone holds a pen in their mouth it interferes with that person’s ability to feel certain emotions. I mentioned my experience with Bell’s palsy and the fact that when I smiled my internally perceived feeling was that of hypocrisy and not pleasure because only one side of my face smiled and the other side was totally slack. Then I asked if there were similar effects when a person’s upper face eye-expressions were mechanically constrained as they were with the mouth constraints in her example and in my Bell’s palsy. Although she was widely read on this subject and there were several others present who were also graduate level psychologists no one mentioned knowing of any research of that type.

This evening while writing this blog I have gone to the mirror and tried to do some experiments with my own face. It is a little difficult to do effectively — but by stretching the muscles out with the fingers and then an expression which would contract them is attempted it feels as if the emotion which should be felt isn’t being felt as strongly. For example when I pull my eyebrows up and back with my fingers and then try to express the emotion of a scrunched-face-anger it doesn’t feel very compelling but when I release my finger grip and let my face contract into the angry expression my internal emotional state feels angrier.  When, at the same time, I use my thumbs to hold my mouth up and back into a more smile like expression there is even less feeling of anger and releasing my grip produced an even more pronounced effect as my face assumed the angry expression.

This reminds me of the Charles Darwin experiments reported in his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals which I read in the 1960s, where he placed some electrodes on the face of a subject and with applied voltage forced the man to grimace. The new experiment presented by me here is essentially the opposite of that one. Here the muscles are prevented from contracting rather than being forced to contract. If the brain is hooked to the face muscles in such a way that there is a feedback between the two then it would seem reasonable that any type of direct influence upon the face muscles or upon the equivalent brain cells would effect its correlated opposite. A more controlled experiment could be done with temporary muscle inhibiting chemicals. Perhaps a less invasive experiment would be to give people about to have Botox injections various personality assessment tests and then retesting a week later, after they were adapted to their new facial condition, to see if they are having a personality response to not being able to perform certain expressions.

I have commented in the past, on this blog I think, that when I go to bed at night, if I place my face on the pillow in such a way that it is stretched into a smiling expression that I feel happier and more comfortable as I doze off to sleep.

What is a stable society in the year 7000 CE going to find best for a religion? What are going to be the most stable concepts to be held by a whole planet full of people for a long-term stable society? As was discussed in The Laws of World Society in 5000 years the two problems which must be absolutely controlled are population stability and the knowledge of Weapons of Extermination (WOEs). Obviously things change and even religion must change with changing times but in a long-term stable society it would have to be some form of basic belief which librates about some central concepts.

People need things to hope for and some of the world’s religions have filled that hope with a promise of a better life in the hereafter. Unfortunately, because those promises conflict with testable reality the people in charge of that religion will always be suspected of fraud. A more real world philosophy and religion is needed like that underlying the Happiness Scale. Unfortunately that philosophy will not supply the needs of all humanity because it requires a lifetime of maturation to achieve the higher levels and those more sophisticated levels will not even be accessible until later in life. And even then that form of Happiness at its highest levels of attainment will not satisfy the basic need for an Ultimate Purpose for living. People will need something that can be understood and believed in from infancy and on through adolescence, adulthood, maturity and beyond into sagehood. This new religion might be the same ideas, couched in the same words and mean the same thing to everyone, infant and sage alike—something like: We live to please God and our reward is to enter into a blissful state and be forever contented. That basic set of concepts has worked for thousands of years and yet it isn’t totally satisfying because there is so much that is unknown and unknowable in all of those simple words. Because that statement is so protean and can be twisted about to mean almost anything what-so-ever the ultimate believer is forced into a state of blind unquestioning faith by whatever is the motivating force. That isn’t satisfactory because there is always a pitiful desire for certainty when it comes to the meaning of life—the purpose of it all—the reason we should be good, and if there is some blind faith to be required, that certainty is always going to be weak and threatened and worst of all subject to fraud.

Because we have arisen from the dust and water of the Universe and shall soon return to those elemental substances we must learn to take our comfort from that source. At first blush, it might seem empty to place our highest hope and praise in the most elemental forces of nature which themselves have no sentience, no feeling and no caring for us at all. And yet when those are acknowledged it gives a great warmth of feeling part of something much bigger than our sentient selves. We can look at another person, animal, insect, plant, cloud and even a distant star and know—that as part of me. That is I. I am That. That most distant star, that most minute atom of dust on my fingertip is part of me and I am part of it. Some of it was here long before any identifiable part of I existed and some of it will remain long after I, and all I am familiar with, has ceased to exist but still I will be part of it and it will be part of me.

When you look at the Sun or Sirius in the sky you may think, that is part of me and I am part of it. When you look at an annoying person on the street you may think, they are part of me and I am part of them. These thoughts are easy and comforting and they have the wonderful advantage over other religions of being true. They are understandable to a child and to a sage. These are beliefs upon which you can depend to always be true because you can easily observe them and test their verity every instant of your life. A distant star may shine its light down upon you and have not the slightest caring for your well-being but when you realize it is part of you and you are part of it you can have comfort in your knowledge and a caring for it. Love is in the possessor not in the possessed.

Contentment is the feeling that a hoped for state actually exists — it does exist and it is you.

How soon will the current technology bubble burst? Nothing lasts forever and like everything else this had a beginning and it will have an ending. What will be the precursors to that ending? Let’s give a little historical perspective on this subject. Remember that not long ago, in 1975, IBM typewriters had a white ribbon that permitted the typist to correct mistyped letters by typing over them with the previously wrong letter and thus be able to retype the correct one in that now whitened place. That was considered quite impressive at the time. Then only ten years later, 25 years ago in 1985, computer based word processors were just emerging on home computers such as the Commodore 64 and the Apple II with little more capacity. They were able to edit a few short lines of text by pushing text over a little and slowly but it permitted a real improvement in the final printed text to become available. After about ten years more of development, vastly more powerful home computers and better word processors became available. The WordPerfect word processor of 1995 had many sophisticated capabilities such as spell checking and greatly modifying the appearance of the printed document. Another ten years and by 2005 the computers had far more potential and word processors became bloated, as they had so many bells and whistles it became a waste of time to even try and figure them out let alone use them. Now, five years later I rarely use my computer based word processor and use the online WordPress which keeps only the essentials of word processing but permits easy online linking to whatever is available in the whole world. This makes a simply made typed document into an in-depth constantly upgraded self improving research tool just by linking highlighted parts of the document to self improving sites like Google, Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube etc.. Searches, information, photos and movies can be simply dragged and dropped from any internet source onto one’s own document. This word processing technology is still going through transformations that are hardly imaginable as a simple typed document.

What’s next? There has been a clear progression toward easier access to better information in a more accessible form. But, how much further can this trend continue when so very much information is currently available and there are now filters so one can find the best information? That still requires some improvement but things are improving. The current world has some billion people online so it may soon be possible to access someone who knows exactly what you are seeking to know and to some extent you can contact them directly now through sites like Twitter and Facebook. Local computer clubs twenty years ago had lists of members who were willing to answer questions about particular subjects. That faded away when one could just Google your question, usually computer problems, and find a workable solution. Nowadays, those types of problems are usually resolved online and we are moving into a new world — but what are the qualities of this new world? Isn’t it now almost possible to get any information known to anyone anywhere in the world in any language and have it automatically translated into one’s own language? This has a down side because there is lots of information which everyone really doesn’t need to know. Also, there is now a feeling among many perhaps most that they have a right to all of this information instantly. There has been a progression from collecting facts, to obtaining organized information, to accessing experiential wisdom, so we are all becoming smarter with facts, more accurate with better information and more effective with greater wisdom.

The New World will be spectacular and probably even more spectacular than the last 25 years because so many people are working on the things which will make it spectacular.