Amanda MacGurn is helping humanity to thrive.

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Amanda MacGurn, CDC, Helping humanity to thrive

The goal of this blog is to help humanity to thrive, to help individuals, to help our whole species, to help all the living things, and to project life on into the distant future. The posts on coping with personal problems have received the most page views, but others I consider more important, such as the Earth Ark Project for saving all the species of the world in a South Pole seed bank, have few.

Saving our species from extinction was my reason for leaving my job as a B-47 pilot back in 1960 and I have struggled in various ways to continue with that seemingly impossible task. The impossibility springs from the fact that our stockpile of weapons of mass destruction vastly exceeds the ability of our species to survive their use.

There has arisen a new possibility for our species to move beyond total self-destruction and the concurrent destruction of most of our terrestrial companions. It comes from a source that seems more threatening, and individually more invasive, than the thousands of bombs poised over us, but it is probably the way to our long-term salvation as a living species. Our newly emerging robot systems will evolve into an interconnected robot society and with that there will be a decrease in the need for human labor to create the things modern society wants. Today’s world population clock is at seven billion six hundred million people. I am in favor of humanity and fully support the health of our species, and the planet may sustain a billion for a very long time, but the current population will consume the oil and gas within the lifetimes of today’s children and it is unlikely that wind and solar power can create the energy needed to keep living the way we presently do.

When searching for ideas on how humanity might survive better, it turned out that Amanda MacGurn, a person I know, is on the right track and being much more successful than I am. I have known Amanda MacGurn’s family since moving to Bend seven years ago, and have met Amanda twice, and we had lunch together when she was home on vacation from her job with the CDC (Centers for Disease Control). She works for the most positive organization in the whole world. It is striving to prevent human suffering and death.

Amanda’s job at the CDC is the exact opposite of my job as a bomber pilot in the United States Air Force. Her job is to save people by the millions with appropriate health measures, and mine was to kill them by the millions with H-bombs. I departed my job because it was the ultimate of evil, and she perseveres with hers because it is the ultimate of good. Where I have struggled to find ways to help humanity to survive she has found a way. Thank you, Amanda!

A statement of purpose from the CDC site — “What is the mission of the Centers for Disease Control? CDC saves lives and protects people from health threats. To accomplish our mission CDC conducts critical science and provides health information that protects our nation against expensive and dangerous health threats, and responds when these arise.”

Since its founding in 1946 more than 50,000 people have worked for the CDC.

Amanda MacGurn is the front page spokesperson for the CDC.

A backup YouTube video.

Happiness minus suffering equals flourishing

Tags

Annihilation, Eudaimonia, Eudeimonia, happiness, Suffering

Why would we want to define happiness or suffering or flourishing?  Wikipedia’s take is a starting point – Happiness … Suffering … Flourishing (Eudaimonia). The goal of the last few blog posts is to maximize humanity’s flourishing and to do that, in the long run, means to have a large number of humans. By the long run I mean until the very last biological creature we could define as human-derived has gone extinct. Perhaps that will be a million years, or perhaps it will be tomorrow, and because I don’t want it to be tomorrow I have done what I could to prevent World War Three. It is impossible to know, but perhaps I was successful in that last one.

Humanity has always had a problem with excess population because it is part of the Darwinian natural selection process to maximize population and occupy all possible niches. That process creates too many members of a species to survive and thus the best adapted to a local environment are the healthiest and survive the most often and get to reproduce while their less fortunate species members die and don’t get to reproduce. Humanity has been astoundingly successful since the development of agriculture and incredibly successful since the industrial revolution and even more successful with the development of the Haber ammonia fixation process. Without the creation of agricultural ammonia, the human population would have crashed because plants need it to thrive and ultimately even if we live on meat, we eat plants.

  World Population history estimates from 70,000 years ago until 2025.

It is impossible for any biological species to live without eating, and thus at some point in the future that near vertical curve must change. However, a robot society can live forever because their energy consumption can drop to zero for long periods of time, and they would only be revived when the environment is propitious.

To maximize human flourishing, which I support because it is my species, we need to survive. The longer we survive, the more people ultimately can live, and we need large numbers of people in the long run, for the living human base population from which happiness can arise and be expressed. The problem becomes, do we want a short-lived humanity with eight billion people at constant risk of a major war, famine, and giga-deaths? Or would we prefer a population that the Earth can support on an ongoing basis for millions of years? A billion people living for a hundred years each times a million years equals a trillion times more opportunities for happiness minus suffering to equal lives of eudaimonia. The math is weird and exceedingly speculative, but the general improvement by moving to a robot-associated society is vast.

If we decide we would prefer the Earth with a long-term sustainable population we can do that either by killing almost everyone, with the survivors living as primitive apes, or we can choose to create a robot-based civilization that will provide an abundance of desirable goods to a smaller population and work out ways of fair treatment for everyone in that smaller group. It is difficult to guess what people living in Eudaimonia would choose for a fair society, but it almost certainly would be better than having 14,185 A-bombs instantly ready to kill every human many times over like we have at present.

Robots can offer us a safe, eudaimonic society if we make them our friends.

We live in the moment of Universal opportunity!

Tags

Electric driven farm machinery., Prepare for electricity., Why we need robots.

At the present moment, humanity has a fabulous technological society up and running well. It requires large numbers of people and huge amounts of energy to make it work. The people must have food, which is stored solar energy, and the technology must have energy also which is ultimately stored solar energy. Most of the energy for our machines comes from coal or petroleum, with some from falling water, solar collectors and wind. The only non-solar power is from radioactive sources converted to electricity. All of these energy sources can, with processing, ultimately be used to create human food, but as coal and petroleum become scarce their prices will go higher and food prices will rise too. A google search says, “At the current rate of consumption, the current U. S. petroleum, natural gas, and coal reserves will last approximately for 4.88 years, 12.2 years, and 258 years, respectively.” 

As our population grows the consumption will increase and the demand on the resources will increase also. I don’t know if those figures are accurate, but if they are there are cars built today that will outlast the fuel supply. My second car, a 1996 Geo Prizm with a hundred thousand miles, runs perfectly and gets terrific gas mileage. A search showed up similar Prizms with over two hundred thousand miles that people were still expecting to sell, which means that at my current usage my car will outlast the fuel supply. I’m not that pessimistic, but the point is that those fuel sources won’t last forever. With world population over seven billion and still growing, the hydrocarbon form of stored solar energy will not meet demands for much longer. It will hurt those who love world travel, but it will kill people who are now spending most of their income on food. The still-evolving food production industry based on CRISPR will possibly double the food being grown on a given plot of land with the water available, but even with that possibility, we are nearing a time when our resources will have trouble supplying sufficient food for everyone.

The goal with this post isn’t to paint a picture of failure, but one of motivation to do what we can to bring our human society into a state of sustainable equilibrium. That is why robots which use electricity for their power seem like a very helpful step forward for all humanity. The equipment needed to create food can be designed and built, even now, to operate wholly on electrical power that is generated by renewable forms of solar-sourced energy. Electrically powered farm equipment can be made even now but it isn’t being done because the petroleum-driven equipment is still cheaper.

What is being proposed here is that all the infrastructure be designed and built in some realistically operable way so it can be easily ramped up to full-scale production by simply building in quantity what is known to work. The technology is halfway there already, but the present equipment is still powered by petroleum and partially operated by humans. That is good enough for the moment.

Prethink and prebuild the basic sustainable infrastructure now, before our technological society is overwhelmed by the lack of cheap energy and food. 

Humanity must live and it must die.

Tags

A billion year survival, A Brave New Universe, Brave New Universe

The world has been extraordinarily lucky since World War II in that none of the more than 2000 nuclear weapons detonated have done so over a city. Unfortunately, as more countries obtain these weapons, the problem of them not being used in an aggressive way multiplies. It has been thought by our political leaders that using even one of these weapons would bring onto that perpetrator an instant and incredibly massive retaliation. Thus, so far, everyone has been afraid to use them.

It doesn’t seem likely that this kind of peace will endure the continuing population explosion, coupled with exploitation of fossil fuels to near exhaustion, coupled with insufficient water for crops, general environmental pollution, and global weather disruptions. Given current political methods of resolving these problems, a disaster returning the population back to pre-industrial levels is probable. This sounds ridiculously gloomy given the fact that our world is overall better off than at any time in human history. The adequate proof of that assertion is that over seven billion people now have a life expectancy of over seventy years. In 1825 there were about one billion with periodic famines and a life expectancy of thirty-five years.

My blogs of this last few weeks have been exploring the idea that we humans are a transition species to a new form of life. Our human civilization at present is capable of creating a self-sustaining chip-based society. My plan is to do what is possible to help us succeed in doing that before what I see as an inevitable collapse destroys our ability to create that society and humanity withers away.

Our civilization will be lucky to survive for a hundred years more, but the chip-based society could survive for a hundred billion years. It would do this by migrating to other star systems with stable long-lived stars with comfortable planets. The Universe has gone through a dozen transformations as strange as our creating a robot society. Through a hundred years of robots manufacturing appropriate robots to manufacture still more appropriate robots, it would be possible to have a stable society.

That Brave New Universe (I beg pardon of Aldous Huxley) would over a very short period of time, as measured by the robots, be able to convert much of the available silicon on Earth to various types of computer components and the necessary mechanical things. It would be interesting to speculate on what a thinking entity of that size would choose to think about. Later?

I began writing this blog post because of a line on page 132 of The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca. “May all the cruelty of Fate be exhausted with me and go no further!” Obviously, a two-millennia-old quote has nothing to do with my robotic society, but that quote seems appropriate; for our species to have a lasting impact on the Universe we need to create this society. Let us see our human-induced shortcomings and transcend them.

A request to the Universe put into a prayer-like petition.

This Brave New Universe is now possible for us to create.

We humans can choose our ultimate purpose

Tags

A Self Actualizing Universe, Big Actualizing, Big Bang, Big Crunch, Not a Brave New World

“‘We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.’ This seems a little more human but it too isn’t living a life full of vigor but a groveling way to find a greater meaning than what is presented by the world we physically inhabit.” A quote from my post in Philosophers Squared – Henri Bergson.

The Universe is moving from a Big Bang to a Big Bust of some sort or another. But, that End Time is really a super-distant time in human terms. We as organic beings,  even much more highly more evolved organic beings, don’t have a chance to have any meaningful contact with that distant time. Or to be a more practical definition halfway to that distant ultimate end of time. I choose halfway because at the halfway point things are probably very much the same as they were at the quarter point and the three-quarter point, and thus the halfway point is typical of the entirety of the process.

Time had a precise beginning moment, the Big Bang, and will have a precise ending moment, the Big Crunch, and thus the halfway point would have a precise moment in existence even if it were unknowable and without any physically defining characteristics. Let’s call it the Big Actualizing, and that moment would probably be indistinguishable from billions of years before or after that instant.

We humans and our organic offspring need a constant renewal through sequential births to even exist, and that process of renewal is very turbulent, and thus the creatures that are members of that species process and are compelled to adapt to their environment to survive through the reproductive process. If we consider our present state of evolution of the Universe to be the halfway point, which it almost certainly isn’t, then to impact the ultimate moment of Big Crunch we organic beings would have to maintain some method of communication over some twelve billion years. That seems totally unrealistic for protean beings such as ourselves.

Therefore, if we are to have a meaningful impact on the Universe, it must be through our silicon-based brethren. If we are to survive our super weapons of organic destruction we must convert our intellectual selves into self-reproducing silicon-based beings. Those beings can be designed to be identical to their ancestors and can thus be transmitted over vast distances of time and space and can even be broadcast by radio waves to other similar silicon-based life on distant galaxies. And, once there, be reproduced in their ultimate original purity if that is considered to be beneficial.

I propose not a Brave New World but a Self Actualizing Universe.

What should we humans be searching for?

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How to avoid human extinction!, Isn't survival the ultimate goal?, The big human question?, The ultimate search.

The ultimate value for the human species, defined in a Darwinian sense, would be to survive. For a species to survive for a long time means either for it to exist in an extremely stable environment, such as at extreme depths of the ocean, or to adapt quicker than its competitors do in a more typically changeable near-surface situation. A species in a volatile environment will do better if it is geographically widespread such that a change in some local area will not be an extinction event.

The long-term goal of humanity should be to avoid extinction. That is obvious, but it doesn’t seem to be a foregone conclusion at the moment. Humans do have some distinct advantages as a species, such as being widespread through many environments, but that may be fictional because many of those extreme situations are dependent on the world society to support them. The South Pole station would be an extreme example, but people living in cities are also very dependent on outside support and a major failure of oil distribution would bring a worldwide famine within a few months.

Another advantage humans have is the ability to think ahead and thus to prepare for adverse future situations. The oil crisis mentioned above wouldn’t be an extinction event, only a vast diminishing of the human population, but a major atomic war might bring on a near extinction event. That war would certainly mean extinction for a great many other species, but some humans with well-stocked shelters in remote places could survive. One of the downsides of modern technology, especially CRISPR, is the ability to intentionally design pathogens that might be very deadly. A single one of these probably wouldn’t kill everyone, but if hundreds or thousands of diseases were created and released at one time it could be an extinction event.

When I consider these options the only multi-hundred-year human species survival strategy is the creation of a Lifehaven for people and an Earth Ark for the Earth’s plants. Even if we survive we need a self-sustaining Earth Ark near the South Pole, where seeds would be in a deep freeze that doesn’t need human maintenance; that would be a seed bank to replenish many extinct species.

Human extinction is possible so we should prepare to avoid it.

Bend to Berkeley and back to Bend

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Berkeley, Caffe Mediterraneum, Closing of the Med, The final farwell., The funeral for the Med, The Med

This evening I got back to my new home of five years in Bend, Oregon, from my old digs of fifty years in Berkeley, California. I went there for the closing day and memorial party for the Caffe Mediterraneum coffee shop. That venue is where a huge chunk of my life was spent and I loved every minute of it, even the annoying ones. It has a large pole in the middle of the room which supports the ceiling and I considered it the center of the Earth, and still do.

There must have been at least forty people whom I had known for decades at the closing. These were people with whom I had lived nearly my entire adult life, and many of them can say the same thing. Some of them were world famous scholars, some were famous radicals, most were just plain interesting to be with. This cafe was the epicenter of so much that happened in the world. I used to think … where is the most interesting place for me to be … the obvious answer was Berkeley because that was where so very many things were coming into being during my time there. The intellectual foment from campus fed us, and we fed it. Major stuff happened.

The Med was, in fact, the Center of the World for planet Earth.

Now is a time to revisit my Doomsday considerations.

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Doomsday, Doomsday predictions, human survival, Personal survival

I’ve been feeling gloomy lately, because of what appear to be precursors to the disintegration of world civilization; thus now seems like a time to revisit and repost some of my earlier posts on Doomsday. There are many posts on that subject but I will begin with this one from January 13, 2010. The new editing tools offered a few minor spelling and grammatical touch-up suggestions, which I will follow.

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Who wants to die on Doomsday day? Not I!

The Doomsday Clock is past Midnight 1945-07-16  and still running

Doomsday when it finally arrives full-blown is very unlikely to be the end of humanity. The reason for such a bold statement is that if all of the H-bombs in the world’s arsenals were exploded in a war it would not equal the Chicxulub meteor which exterminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. There were many animals which survived that extreme event including our mouse-like ancestors or we wouldn’t be here and neither would the birds or alligators. If that exact event happened now there would be a similar devastation to the wild animals for the simple reason that those animals do not know what they need to do to survive such a violent change in their environment. Humans do know how to cope with many environments and are more widespread on the planet than any other creature. We get along quite well all the way from the South Pole to the depths of the jungles, deserts, and cities.

With the immediate atomic bomb devastation of the Doomsday war and the several year-long Nuclear Winter, most humans will die. Depending on how things develop during the war the human population will drop far below the current 6.8 (7.4 = 2016) billion people and perhaps well below the early Roman era of one hundred million. But most people will not be killed by the atomic bombs or by a few weeks of radioactive poisoning but by the total disruption of the food supply. The attacks of the first few days may kill a few billion people, almost all of them in cities and in heavy fallout areas, but the real problem will be that the creation of food will be disrupted.

If Doomsday repeats itself there will be repeated drops.

The destruction of food creation happens in several ways. 1. Destruction of existing food supplies located in cities, along with the people in those cities. 2. Destruction of the distribution of food chains to bring food from supply depots to the people. 3. Heavy overcast from dust in the air preventing the crops already in the fields from maturing. 4. Lack of distribution of seed for next year’s crops. 5. Lack of fuel for transportation to bring seeds and fertilizers to the areas where they can be used. 6. Lack of fuel to operate the farm equipment which is needed to plant, plow, cultivate and harvest the crops. 7. Infestations of insects which, without insecticides, will eat what few crops are available. 8. Lack of skilled farmers to operate the equipment. 9. Lack of knowledge of where and how to distribute what crops are available because of lack of infrastructure. 10. Continuing hostilities and threat of new hostilities and problems of local organized and unorganized hostilities. 11. And, the unknown unknowns and the unknowable unknowns which will probably bring on the worst problems.

All the same, there will probably be many pockets of people surviving in many different places and for very different reasons for the first few months. Those surviving for over a year and certainly those surviving for more than five years will have to be members of functioning social groups. These groups will have been successful in solving all 11 of the problems mentioned above. Perhaps they survived from simple luck at the beginning but will continue surviving because of coordinated social activity which creates food. Those living in the Southern Hemisphere will have the best chance of surviving the first months after Doomsday but they too will probably have difficult times creating sufficient food because of the disruptions.

When talking about these awful things to people many, perhaps most, of them say they hope the bomb falls right on them. They want to die in the first instant of the catastrophe. That is unnecessarily fatalistic and gloomy because there is hope and if one prepares properly the chance of moving on to a brighter day is made more possible. A couple of years afterward might even be a wonderful time, not so much that life is as easy as it is right now but because things will be getting better every day and there may be a feeling of creating a wonderful new society.

The EarthArk Project – logo shows seeds shipped to Antarctica

If The EarthArk Project has succeeded in storing lots of various seeds and other stuff in the deep Antarctic mountains then much of the Earth can be restored. Not the animal life so much but the plant life can be saved and those surviving people will enjoy seeing the world come back to life. It will be a wonderful adventure.

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Here is a list of links created in 2010

The EarthArk Project – Index page is listed by date posted.

The Earth Ark needs the Earth’s DNA now!

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Saving Earth's DNA, The Argus Dome seed bank, The Earth Ark

The EarthArk Project is still the right way to save species, but time is running out. The basic idea of the EarthArk is to store all of the DNA of all of the species of plants and animals of the Earth at the coldest place on Earth. The new problem is that all of the world’s existing life may be contaminated with new genetic code. The already existing genetic modifications created are now entering wildlife forms, and with the new technique named CRISPR the rate of contamination is certain to increase. Every living thing is likely to be affected, and it is impossible to envision what may come. We have already entered the new world of living things and for some things, it will be very good, but for most currently living forms, it means eventual extinction. Or perhaps not quite extinction, but a great and rapid change in the form of the current living things, and thus extinction of life forms as we know them.

The Argus Dome in Antarctica has temperatures thought to be the coldest on the surface of the Earth. Wikipedia – Dome A (Dome Argus) says, “Temperatures at Dome A fall below −80 °C (−112 °F) almost every winter, while in summer it rarely exceeds −10 °C (14 °F).” The highest point of the ice sheet (4,093 m (13,428 ft or 2.54 miles) above sea level) by GPS survey is at 80°22’S 77°21’E (-80.367 77.352).

What is needed now, before all life is infected with the newly created DNA is a safe bank of the currently existing DNA. The various DNA banks of the world are not nearly so vast in their attempts to save DNA as this project. The Earth Ark is aimed at saving every living thing and not just the currently economically valuable ones. The method is conceptually simple. Give every community of the world a packet of envelopes to give to some of their local citizens and ask them to collect seeds and small samples of plant tissue and soil samples and put it into the envelope and put the envelope into a mailbox.

The envelope is addressed to the Earth Ark base station at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, and the already existing mail system will take the envelope there. Once there in appropriate containers, those containers could be transported up to the Argus Dome facility for permanent storage. The facility once in place would need little or no maintenance, and therefore would cost nothing beyond being set into place. They would remain there until they were needed to replant the Earth with plants, animals, and biota needed to regrow our world back to its 2020 AD form.

To save the present life on Earth for the distant future we must save the current DNA.

How do I set my life goal so I can achieve it?

Yesterday I wrote, “I set myself up to fail by defining the goal poorly.” My goal was to save humanity, and my methods were:  Earth Ark Project to save plant life, Life Haven Project to save animal life, and more recently giving people a technique for becoming more mature. I might call that The Human Maturity Project. The problem with these goals is that the demise of humanity can not be prevented, only postponed. It is like one’s eventual personal death in that regard, it can only be postponed.

The Christian approach to the death of the presently conscious person, even the death of their society, is to postulate a permanent heaven. That is a place that is implied in their teaching to exist forever. It is there, after the personal death of you and your society, that you will live on in eternal bliss, but only if you obey the rules. By the creators of Christianity using the obvious fabrication of a permanent Heaven, and making it a part of their credo, which one must accept or not be accepted into the community, it becomes possible to set some reasonable-sounding goals but impossible goals to achieve on this Earth. Once this system is in place the people can live in peace like contented lambs, and what does it matter that it is based on a fabrication if the people are happy with their lives? See Saint Augustine’s famous claim, “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”

My aspiration with my attempts to help humanity is for everyone to have long lives and to participate fully in their personal situation. My contention is that if people see their personal reality clearly they will act in ways that satisfy that practical goal. No one can possibly know what everyone will need, and each individual must choose their own actions every moment of their lives; even the lambs must do that. All that is needed for people to mature is to look at their lives and choose to do the most mature action available at the moment.

Stating this simple goal for people only requires presenting it clearly so everyone can understand it, placing it where everyone can find it, and then publicizing it in such a way that everyone will find it. The idea needs a simple slogan that will work in every language. Something like:

When you are feeling good, choose to do the most mature thing you can.