My first post here...

noting that, at the front door to the Wheather Report, it reads:
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As professional futurists, our studies have convinced us that the near term is going to include extraordinary, rapid global change...

In similar junctures like this in its past evolution, humanity has produced exceptional, breakthrough capabilities just when they were necessary for the continued survival and development of the species....

In the face of this looming threat of large-scale change, we believe that such a unique, extraordinary capability for sensing large, disruptive events has resurfaced. We believe that this technology could again underpin a fundamental revolution in the human story.
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well, i'm just an amateur futurist and amateur historian, but have this free blog space to shoot my mouth off in.

observing that, historically, it has been a material advantaging technology which has invariably come along in a timely way which has saved our collective geese from the proverbial frying pan.

noting also that, historically, any such material advantaging technology has also invariably been subsequently followed by a dramatic increase in human population. no matter where, when, or what culture.

while such population growth historically has sometimes leveled off, sometimes not, the present degree of technologically advantaged population growth does not appear to have yet peaked. from what i hear, there are presently more people alive on the face of the earth than the sum total of all previous human populations.

what has seemed our salvation in the past, what has saved us from the frying pan appears, in the long run, to be landing us in the fire. experiencing a sense of déjà vu as i write this.

i have a friend who is a nuclear engineer. he's concerned about our future. he's working on a pB11 fusion system. a "small" one at first - capable of generating some energy and a plasma beam - a beam capable of separating CO2 into its component elements. running at 10,000ºF, only two years away from being able to actualize, he says.

i'm concerned about our future also. i don't know how anyone with children could not be at this point. much as i like and admire him, my engineer friend scares me. to my thinking, the last thing we need at this juncture is for an inexpensive, abundant new energy source to emerge...

my friend the engineer envisions a future in which we recycle 100% of what we use and live exclusively off of that - a closed materials cycle. what i know of humans, historically, with abundant evidence, is that we are highly exploitative creatures. i have a very difficult time envisioning the development of a new inexpensive energy source in any way leading to a gleeful spontaneous acceptance of a closed materials cycle.

we've gotten very clever. invent such things as the wheel. in all this time, we've not really gotten much smarter. as William McDonough observed, it took us over 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage. and that to view our present circumstances as a design problem is significantly more challenging. this issue actually seems more significant than what is presently listed here as "the world's biggest problems - confusing "clever" with "intelligent".

i'm not foreseeing any slowing of technological 'advances'. quantum computers appear to be less than five years away now - central processors and hard drives go away i see, bunch of little parts about as expensive to make as leds - the little light bulbs - are, but smaller. distributed processing, data stored in quantum states... i can almost draw you a schematic, the first ones closely resemble conventional notebook computers, cute, i see they've 'cut some corners'. relatively simple, very inexpensive to make, but initially take a post doc. to program. we're accustomed to pushing a button and getting a specific result. very different process here, much more like negotiating than issuing commands. while it won't make us any smarter, it most certainly will change dramatically the character and pattern of how we think on a very fundamental way (we've not gotten very good yet at making machines that imitate humans, but we humans are quite adept at mimicking machines). there's a whole wave of stuff follows this. it gets creepy. but it will be another 150 years before the precursor wave augmentation technology arrives, stuff starts seeming psychic - anticipating your input. leads to some interesting 'urban legends' involving temporal paradoxes...

that's providing they aren't terribly mistaken about the rapid decay of the little 'black holes' they wish to make with the Large Hadron Collider (wasn't that supposed to come on line in may? i've not heard anything...), and one goes escaping containment, drops through the earth like it wasn't there, ping-pongs back and forth through the gravity field, starts accreting mass...

Nov. 07, 2012: "honey? i've never seen such a low tide... come look at this!"

wild turkey outside's making such a racket, i'm going to have to close for now.

buckle up.

© matt kolasinski, 2008
not that "©" means much any more, i'm just a little old fashioned.