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person of the year, TIME person of the year, Where are we going?, Where did we come from?, Why are we here?
On January 1, 2020, the Probaway Person of the Year will be declared. Unlike other short-term popularity contests, the effort is to project my mind 500 years into the future with a mental filter gleaning what those people will remember as significant. Columbus, Einstein, and Armstrong are people who did things so unique and so fundamental they will live in human memory as long as there are people to remember.
I watch all year for events with those qualities and none have grabbed me. Granted lots of important things have happened, but compare them to the memorability of those three.
David Deamer has been attempting to create life from wild natural processes for several years, and if he succeeds it would qualify for 500-year memorability. He has succeeded in growing long organic chains, sandwiched between tiny cycling floods of organic molecules and of drying sheets of other materials. Those can ooze out the sides and form bubbles of contained long chains. These little bubbles are almost like living things, but the problem is that they aren’t living, they are not reproducing themselves. That ability to reproduce may come about only randomly, and it may require an ocean-size glob of these bubbles to randomly get one that works. It could work very poorly by our living standards because there wouldn’t be any competition, but it must move up to the level of natural selection where what works gets reproduced. Without competition this first living creature would soon cover the world.
When I look at TIME magazine’s Person of the Year since 1927 I see many of the people who politically made the twentieth century. But they missed the real history makers. They didn’t credit Neil Armstrong for taking the first step on the Moon, but instead chose the Apollo team that flew around it. They didn’t see Mao as significant, nor Xi either, so far. But, from a distant view, those two will be seen as founders of a new Chinese Dynasty, the most powerful entity in the world.
An even bigger question is marginally philosophical, “Where did we come from?” The list of ancestors grows longer, with recent additions of Homo luzonensis, Denisovans, A. anamensis and A. afarensis. Moving on to Science News‘s list and Science Daily‘s list, one article perked my interest at Science Daily, “A new gene therapy strategy, courtesy of nature.”
We are now entering the Novacene of computers largely displacing human beings, so the next Persons of the Year may be wholly self-regulating non-organic beings. Even in retrospect, it may be time to answer the question…
Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?
Probaway - Life Hacks 
Did the spinning looms replace the workers who hand spun yarn or did it free workers to make garments from cheaper yarn. Why do students of history conclude that our tools will somehow replace the people who can advance their standard of living by using the tools. A computer (even an AI computer) is just a tool for the mind. Why do people presume that we will not utilize computers and even AI’s as new productivity tools? Computers will no more replace humans than a hammer can replace a carpenter. It is the use of the tool to increase human capabilities that changes. Those who adapt to the change, will do well by increasing their productivity, those who cannot or will not adapt will still be needed to service and clean the machines that took their old obsolete jobs. Though I expect many will be like the yarn spinning Dutch workers who threw their wooden shoes into the looms in a futile attempt to stop progress. The name for their wooden shoes was sabot from which the modern word sabotage is derived. Those who try to sabotage progress always fail.
Intelligence, rationality, objectivism and wisdom are all independent qualities of the mind and do not necessarily exist within every individual.
As for 500 year ages we are at the beginning of the age of knowledge with the greatest change coming in financial education, accounting, and monetary systems that will create millions of private currencies via the blockchain technology. In America, the champion of Capitalism and the free enterprise system, financial education is purposefully ignored in our primary education system to insure a steady supply of minimum wage slaves who do not even understand basic personal finance which would otherwise allow anyone to become wealthy in any nation with personal and economic freedoms. Read ‘Free to Choose’ by Friedman to begin to understand or visit fee.org to begin to learn why economic liberty is just as important as civil liberty.