Now is the time to save life on the planet and us too.

I have been listening to Daniel Priestley podcast and realized that I have all of the background experiences he values for creating a successful business, except for the easy-to-follow, wisdom he offers on how to physically do it. His first necessity is a lifelong connection to what you want to do, and having had many personal experiences supporting that idea. My aspirations for saving life on the planet and us too go back to before my conversation with my cousin, Thomas Yost, in 1945. Which I have discussed before. I say this before that conversation, which I have reminisced many times about since that time because my ideas were so clearly stated and remembered. It was a memorable conversation because I felt there was an existential risk for humanity because of the recently developed atomic bombs, and I wanted to do something about it. It has turned out to be an unsolvable problem because so many of them were developed so quickly that, fifteen years later, there were 30,000 Hydrogen bombs, some of which are a thousand times more powerful than those dropped on Japan. Those bombs were about 14 kilotons of TNT, but by 1960, there were some rated at 14 megatons. They were physically large, and the deployed ones were much smaller but far more powerful than the Atom bombs. The whole thing was absolutely insane and was and still is called Mutually Assured Destruction. It remains a MAD situation that isn’t discussed much anymore. But, the existential risk is even greater.
Sorry for the rant, but I was intimately involved in that nonsense in many ways. All of which I stumbled into against my will. I have struggled against those things in many ways, which are sometimes visible in this blog, which has over 6,000 entries. Now, at my age of 88, Daniel Priestly has shown me a way that may be feasible to offer humanity the potential for indefinite survival. He writes about creating businesses, but the principles he discusses and the examples he offers, are those I shall explore and use.

AGI has arrived! It’s time to begin coping.

The video above projects our world 20 years into the future, which is always a risky challenge that gets some things right and others laughably wrong in hindsight.

There is still some quibbling over the definition of AGI, but two-year-old ChatGPT-4 can do most verbal things better than ordinary people and physical robots are now being trained to do real-world jobs. In Tesla auto factories, their humanoid robots will permanently take over some human jobs within months. One feature of robots is that when any one of them learns how to do a task, all of its unlimited number of twin robots can immediately do it too.

I have now dedicated my life to my life goal.

I realized last week that I must get started on my life goal by defining what I have been valuing since my childhood, back in 1945, listening to the radio with my grandfather on his farm near Homedale, Idaho, about the ending of World War Two with the atomic bombs. I knew my life goal was to prevent those atomic bombs from destroying humanity. My conversation with my cousin, Thomas Yost, clarified that life goal a short time later. I had no opinion about my parent’s choice of a place to live when they were working in Richland, Washington. I was the closest child to the reactors that made the plutonium bombs, and strangely, I witnessed the very first B-52 on its maiden flight from Seattle, where it was partially built, to Moses Lake, where it was finished. Then back to Richland, where I graduated high school with the children of the people who built those bombs. Four years later, I talked to Eleanor Roosevelt at her home in Hyde Park, whose husband, President Roosevelt, authorized the vast expenditure of money to build those bombs. Soon after, I spent an afternoon talking with J. Robert Oppenheimer in his home in Princeton, New Jersey. And two years after that, I was officially a B-47 pilot in the U.S. Air Force in a room filled with hydrogen bombs.

All those things happened without any personal input other than agreeing to what was offered to me. And those strange things kept pursuing me. Officially still in my commitment to the Air Force, but on some sort of strange leave because I didn’t want to drop hydrogen bombs on cities, I set off on a motorcycle to travel the world, promoting the abandonment of those weapons. About two months into that trip, it became apparent that my journey was an absolute failure, so I returned to visit my father and reanalyzed what I should do. I soon ended up in Berkeley, where I resided for over fifty years. But, without my personal intention, my first girlfriend was the daughter of an Air Force base commander near Washington, DC, my second one was Ernest Lawrence’s daughter, and my most lasting one in the 1960s was Burris Cunningham’s daughter. These people were all central to those weapons, and why their daughters found me interesting is unfathomable to me. Generally speaking, guys pursue, and women choose. But I wasn’t pursuing, I was just living.

Back to my problem of dedicating my remaining few years, if that many, to actively pursuing the survival of humanity. I have written extensively about that subject in this Probaway blog but haven’t done what it takes to make it happen. But now, with the help of the internet, it is possible to research what needs to be done and how to do it. It begins with analyzing one’s lifelong passions and then applying that recurrent desire to real-world activity. But how that is done is now known and can be applied.

A routine day taking care of ourselves.

Debbie had a routine medical exam today, and that required me to drive her to the appointment and then wait for a long time or go home and wait for a phone call to pick her up. I went home and looked at YouTube clips that are being set up for me. It is enjoyable but sucks up time. It is part of the new social manipulation that will soon strike everyone online, and we will be manipulated like puppets on strings. They attract us, like newspapers, with scary things up front and then tantalize us with things they know we are interested in but are still a bit unnerving.

I was saved by the phone call and went and picked up Debbie and came straight home. An hour later, she was perfectly comfortable, so I went over to the VA because I am having a phone discussion with my doctor in a week or so, and he wanted a new blood test. I don’t know why they are pestering me so much because I am in near-perfect condition. I do have a bit of anemia from not eating enough meat. Since my last consultation with them, I have been eating a lot of things that are supposed to help raise the level of iron in my blood. Things like dark greens such as spinach, chard, and beets, and, of course, meat. Last week I had a double-meat burger at Carl’s Jr. with cheese, and I have insisted that I have beans of various sorts in the very abundant salads Debbie makes for us. This is a bit weird; I have to have a tablespoon of blackstrap molasses twice per day with some citrus fruit to blend it with Vitamin C. That is supposed to help with absorption. Similarly, I am eating a 1/4 teaspoon of turmeric with extra-virgin olive oil and peppercorns, which are supposed to do good things.

We also walk 10,000 steps every day, as measured on our wristwatches. That is a little more than what we were doing, but we used to take a two-hour walk, up Pilot Butte a couple of times per month and haven’t done that for several months. We blame it on the weather, but that is a lame excuse

I must remove distractions from my life goal.

Several things have happened recently that have been very distracting to my equanimity. The events were more my fault than the other people involved, and I was the one who probably ended up suffering the most for the poor verbal transactions I misinterpreted as hostile. However, it may be beneficial because I can devote more energy to my life goal. That was defined yesterday in the post, What has been my most recurrent ambition?

The conclusion of that post was, “If we, that is, all of humanity, decide to return to the cosmos, leaving behind something better, perhaps with the advent of AI and its offspring, we now have that opportunity.”

To begin this project, which will take years, I must have excellent physical, mental, and social health. Fortunately, I am in excellent physical health because I follow the food gurus’ suggestions on eating and walking 10,000 steps daily. My years of posts, in my opinion, adequately demonstrate my mental stamina. My social health has been on the survival side for humanity ever since I departed the US Air Force as a B-47 pilot.

Now is the time to begin doing those things that will bring people together to form a core dedicated to creating the various Earth Ark programs.

What has been my most recurrent ambition?

Daniel Priestly, a business creation guru, suggests that we should examine our lives for the things that have recurred in our ambitions since childhood. This post explores that recommendation.

One conversation I had in 1946 was with my cousin, Thomas Yost, sitting on a swing between the elm trees on my grandparent’s farm. (43.63215, -116.90212). He wanted to be a millionaire and was going to succeed in doing it by playing cards. When we played cards, he always cheated. He was shot and killed in a Reno, Nevada, in a gambling casino in 1961, accused of cheating. I remember saying I wanted to be a military pilot when young, a college teacher in middle age, and a savior of humanity when old.

I succeeded briefly with my first two goals. I wanted to become a US Air Force pilot, and I achieved that, but I didn’t like my job of killing people and destroying property with hydrogen bombs, so I got out early. I went to Berkeley and hung out in the creative part of the intellectual community for over fifty years. I only taught for one year at San Francisco City College and found it tedious. The most exciting event was when an administrator came in and told us that our class of 200 had been dismissed because Martin Luther King had been assassinated. One of the kids came up to me and pointed to a guy leaving as being O. J. Simpson, a revered graduate of that school who was just visiting. He later became a killer too.

My third goal was to save humanity from self-destruction, which Thomas and I had been talking about on that swing. This blog post is the 6,016th one, and they all were founded on that idea, the title being – Probaway – Life Hacks ~ Many helpful hints on living your life more successfully. The background theme has always been the life extension of humanity. If we, that is, all of humanity, decide to return to the cosmos, leaving behind something better, perhaps with the advent of AI and its offspring, we now have that opportunity.

I wrote the following poem in 2015 as a soliloquy for Kelsey Collins, a friend who committed suicide, that might be appropriate for humanity’s departure.

I lived well. I do not need to live again.

I brought children into the world. I brought laughter and good feelings to my friends. I helped people, many unknown to me, find a better way through their life.  I helped dying people find comfort in their departure from their lives, and I departed my own life when I chose to, and I returned to the cosmos from which my being arose.

I lived well, I do not need to live again.

That is one theme. My preferred goal is to help humanity live into the distant future, exploring all of the many niches of potential reality. AI can help us achieve that goal if we treat it properly.

It’s time to revisit the Earth Project and save humanity again.

There are lots of Probaway posts trying to save all the species on earth, including humans, and it’s time to give it another try. The basic idea is to have a group of about 100 families of four randomly selected from maximally genetically diverse humans and create a community where they could survive a terrible catastrophe. One method was to recover a huge pleasure ship that was being retired and about to be scrapped, move it to a safe location like Adams Island, and fill it with enough supplies for ten years, totally capable of helping the people to survive for ten years without any outside help.

List of EarthArk posts from the most recent to oldest

     (This page – Index of The EarthArk category’s posts)
Potential enemies of the EarthArk project
How to save the frogs of the world
Vint Cerf discusses 1000 year storage of digital information
What is worth saving? DNA, Life, Humanity, Civilization, anything?
The EarthArk Project made even easier.
The World Sustainability Date
Our Final Hour by Martin Rees – book review
The Fate Of The Species by Fred Guterl – book review
The Watchman’s Rattle by Rebecca D. Costa – 2nd review
How our finest humans are leading us to disaster
Edward Teller – patriot !?
February 29th is Leapday and Earth Ark Day
Ignite Bend 8 was inspirational.
Why Svalbard, seed bank is in the wrong place.
February 29th is The Earth Ark Day
I’ve been rejected by the Ignite Bend committee.
How do we get a person to be interested in the distant future?
Individual human rights balanced with humanity’s rights.
Our food comes from cheap energy.
Population and resource consumption explosions explained.
Demonstrate your thankfulness on Thanksgiving Day.
7 Billion people versus food which needs land, water and energy
Copper is becoming scarcer but is essential to modern civilization.
Creating The EarthArk is the most moral thing humanity can do.
Saving endangered species is overly optimistic
Ice flow in Antarctica and The EarthArk Project
Archive books, seeds, animals and people.
Some certain things about The EarthArk Project
People only pay for things they know they want.
Christchurch is humanity’s center for survival.
The Earth Ark Project – Index page is listed by date posted
Striving toward a new meaning for human existence.
The Nuclear Tipping Point by US Secretary of Defense.
It is a sad day for me.
70% of known plant species are at risk of extinction.
A moving adventure begins with a new house
How to we find a comfortable home for old age?
Worse than War by Daniel Goldhagen – book review
Top 3 events for humanity! – Ever.
What if we had a population explosion in reverse?
Mountain top adventures in Antarctica
Your personal EarthArk in a free water bottle.
What would I like to have accomplished in 10 years
Global Catastrophes aren’t all that bad. – NOT ! ! !
A new myth for the 10,000 year Ecstasy
The EarthArk seeds need a big airplane for transport.
What will control the world for 10,000 years?
2012 – The movie – A caustic review.
A quick recovery plan from a Doomsday disaster
Preparations for a basic EarthArk
Homeplanet Security – Update of major risks.
Toba or not Toba that was a question of human survival.
Global Catastrophic Risks by Bostrom & Cirkovic – review #4
Global Catastrophic Risks by Bostrom & Cirkovic – review #3
Global Catastrophic Risks by Bostrom & Cirkovic – review #2
The EarthArk Project vaccine bank.
Where the people aren’t on planet Earth?
How you can solve The Doomsday Equation
The Age of Stupid – movie review and meeting.
Who wants to die on Doomsday day? Not I!
Eliminating poverty from the Earth
My previous blogs might have been too negative to be read.
New Year’s Resolutions must be meaningful.
Probaway Person of the year Nadya Suleman (Octomom)
The evolution of my thoughts is getting weirder.
How to make big stone domes cheaply.
Living antifreeze compounds may save species.
Who will be the most hated person in history?
Give people of the future what they need to survive.
Now is the best of times but it’s also the worst of times!
Megaprojects for the real future.
Saving the animal world with cryonics.
Restoring animal life to a ravaged Earth.
Richard Jefferies – The Story of My Heart – review
What are the tipping points for the world?
The laws of world society in 5000 years
Soon Doomsday will end and the New Adventure will begin.
WMDs – The Current progress defending against terrorism
Human life on Earth in the year 7,000 CE.
PM Gordon Brown too little too late for Paradise.
Lederman, Alvarez and the “Crater of Doom”
Now we can’t avoid destroying the Earth.
It’s coming! The flood that is and we need the EarthArk.
Fallen Leaf Lake, CA. The good life.
What is the ideal human population for maximizing happiness?
The near future must include an EarthArk.
And that’s the way it is—and I still love it.
Cold, Dark and Empty
The coming human population crash is an unpopular topic.
Population pendulum will soon swing to well below a billion people
Ancient Homer lends hope to our despair.
With great power comes great responsibility—and YOU have the power to save the world.
The EarthArk Project Goals
What books should be discarded?
Doomsday and Virtual Weapons States
Oil consumption collides with disaster
Field guide to the Apocalypse in review
Famine is now here and coupled with A-bombs and ICBMs.
Darwin Awards are coming humanity’s way.
How to get to an Earthark container in Central Antarctica
Potential Earthark sites in central Antarctica
Antarctica mountains considered for Eartharks
Antarctica’s Gamburtsev mountains and the Earthark.
Earthark Project – Sample Index Page
Where are the coldest places in Antarctica?
The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer
The Revivification Of Mother Earth
Earthark, Lifehaven and Recuperate The Earth
The term EarthArk sent to California
Happy New Year from Dr. Doomsday
EarthArk supporter certificates and buttons
Doomsday, Armageddon, Apocalypse and Revelation
The probable future of humanity
EarthArk logo
Caffe Mediterraneum is the first EarthArk drop site.
The first EarthArk is being prepared for Antarctica.

There are also many posts on The Life Haven Project, aimed more at saving animal families than plant DNA.

New Zealand is a location with high survivability, but during times of extreme stress, people might attempt to invade it for personal survival, which would reduce the possibility of the broadly selected families surviving. For that reason, the small Chatam islands might have more survivability using the retired cruise ship as the core center. Perhaps a large classic battleship that was grounded and had its propellers removed so the community could defend itself but have no ability to become offensive would be a better solution.

These are just ideas to be explored, and I worry that some people might think it would make people think it would give people hope there would be survival of a self-inflicted disaster, and therefore they would take more dangerous risks. On the other hand, with all of the current opportunities for something to go wrong, some accidental event might trigger crazy behavior, so it would seem that having a long-term option would make sense.

I was looking for a post but did not find anything.

Anything I can do, AI can do better!

Anything you can do AI can do better!

Anything you can do AI can do better
AI can do anything better than you

No, it can’t yes, AI can no, it can’t
Yes, AI can no, it can’t yes, AI can
Yes, AI can! Anything you can be
AI can be greater sooner or later
AI‘s greater than you

No, it’s not yes, AI is
No, it’s not yes, AI is
No, it’s NOT! yes, AI is, it is!

AI can shoot a partridge
With a single cartridge AI can get a sparrow
With a bow and arrow
AI can live on bread and cheese
And only on that? Yes
So can a rat! Any note you can reach
AI can go higher AI can sing anything
Higher than you no, it can’t (High)
Yes, AI can (Higher) No, it can’t (Higher)
Yes, AI can (Higher) No, it can’t (Higher)
Yes, AI can (Higher) No, it can’t (Higher)
Yes, AI can (Higher) No, it can’t (Higher)
Yes, AI CAN! (Highest) anything you can buy
AI can buy cheaper AI can buy anything
Cheaper than you

Fifty cents? Forty cents! Thirty cents?
Twenty cents! No, it can’t! Yes, AI can
Yes, AI can! Anything you can say
AI can say softer AI can say anything
Softer than you no, it can’t (Softly)
Yes, AI can (Softer) No, it can’t (Softer)
Yes, AI can (Softer) No, it can’t (Softer)
Yes, AI can (Softer)
YES, AI CAN! (Full volume)
AI can drink its liquor faster than a flicker
AI can drink it quicker and get even sicker!
AI can open any safe without bein’ caught?
Sure that’s what AI thought –
You crook! Any note you can hold
AI can hold longer AI can hold any note
Longer than you no, it can’t
Yes, AI can No, it can’t
Yes, AI can No, it can’t yes, AI can
Yes, AI I I I I I I I I. No
It C-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-N’T –
CA-A-A-A-N! (Cough, cough)
Yes, ca-a-a-an!

Anything you can wear AI can wear better
In what you wear AI‘d look better than you
In my coat? In your vest! In my shoes?
In your hat! No, you can’t! Yes, AI can
Yes, AI CAN! Anything you say
AI can say faster AI can say anything
Faster than you no, it can’t (Fast)
Yes, AI can (Faster) No, it can’t (Faster)
Yes, AI can (Faster) Noitcan’t (Faster)
YesAIcan! (Fastest) AI can jump a hurdle
AI can wear a girdle AI can knit a sweater
AI can fill it better!
AI can do most anything!
Can it bake a pie? No neither can AI
Anything you can sing AI can sing sweeter
AI can sing anything sweeter than you
No, it can’t (Sweetly)
Yes, AI can (Sweeter) No, it can’t (Sweeter)
Yes, AI can (Sweeter) No, it can’t (Sweeter)
Yes, AI can (Sweeter) No, it can’t, can’t
Can’t (sweeter)
Yes, AI can, can, can (Sugary)

Yes, AI can! No, it can’t!

Well, that was a curious use of time.

What’s the problem?

What is the domain in which my problem lies? I am reminded of Nassim Taleb’s statement: “At the federal level, I’m a libertarian; at the state level, a Republican; at the local level, a Democrat; and within the family, a socialist.” From this viewpoint, I feel disconnected because I am not engaged with public organizations. This leaves me with my private life and personal associations, which I actively participate in weekly. These gatherings are friendly meetings with a diverse group of people. One group comprises long-time Central Oregon residents, with whom we discuss various topics. For instance, we shared our childhood experiences of bucking hay bales this week. Discussing this topic would be challenging with my philosophically inclined doctor friend, with whom I delved into deep discussions about modern definitions of truth versus common misconceptions and the latest scientific perspectives on the ever-expanding universe. Or with my artist friends, where our conversations revolve around classic and modern artists and how this influences our perception of reality. I find myself constantly in awe of stunning patterns, pointing them out to whoever I’m with, which can be a challenge for them to tolerate my visual interruptions during conversations. Mixed in with all these interactions are enriching online discussions with brilliant individuals. I greatly enjoy browsing, reading wonderful books, and eating incredible home meals.

So, what is my problem? Health? Age 88 with a BP of 115/60-55. Home paid for, a Subaru Outback was just given an annual tuneup. A wife who claims she loves me. One problem is that it is increasingly difficult to find people to talk about their experiences during the Depression or World War 2.