Author: tim

I would like this blog to be informative.

Wales will fit into Queensland 82.961308950914341 times… not including Queensland’s islands.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1066484

http://www.ga.gov.au/education/geoscience-basics/dimensions/area-aus-states-territories.jsp

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_area_of_Wales

All part of the service.

I have heard it suggested that those who would have us stop using fossil fuels have, as part of their agenda, the destruction of “our way of life”. By “our way of life” they meant Western, free market, Capitalist economies. It is currently common practice for those of us in the echosphere to cherry pick the lunatic fringe to find references to back up the implication that the world is full of extremists. I can’t be bothered. I can make my point and ignore them.

It does not follow that winding down the use of fossil fuels as fast as we can means that we want to destroy the current system. Bear in mind that they are not an infinite resource in any case. We are going to have to tackle this eventually. If the evidence suggests that they are doing harm, and I consider that self-evident (be careful of your car exhaust), why not tackle the problem before we are at the crisis point?

A more positive, optimistic outlook is to recognise the inevitable and realise that the people who get a jump on solving the problem will have something to sell to those who are slower to move. That’s right; the free market will solve this eventually but there are things that can be done to encourage this to be sooner rather than later.

There is a lot on the net written by experts addressing this so I should leave it to them.

My point though is that it is not disloyal, treacherous, traitorous, Luddite, anti-freedom, Communist, Socialist, protectionist or stupid to suggest that we start changing the energy sources of our economy as soon as possible. It does not mean that there is a “hidden agenda” or that an “intended consequence” is that our current society should be destroyed.

Finally, I firmly believe that it is not naive to believe that we can succeed in changing. History shows many such major changes. It also shows that they are usually accompanied by people who cannot imagine a different future could possibly be better and who rail that the “end is nigh”.

Change is coming. Help or get out of the way.

Tony Robinson on Time Team in reference to “Dark Age”, Anglo-Saxon archeology:

“The Thinking Man’s Dungeons and Dragons.”

There are a lot of estimates being tossed about and it is hard to get a grip on the implications. One went like this:

“one Exxon Valdez every two and a half to five days. And we’re on day 50.”

Very disturbing. There is a precedent for this sort of thing in the Gulf of Mexico but we seem to be moving beyond it.

All the crude oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico was going to be cracked and then burned and end up in the air as various gases; 12,000 to 100,000 barrels a day apparently.

It is a reminder of the rate at which we are converting the carbon that was sequestered underground over the millions of years of the Carboniferous back into gases in the atmosphere. I must find out whether the nature of the global environment at the beginning of the Carboniferous has been determined, as we are in the process of recreating it. What are the chances that it was not significantly different from what we had at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution?

For roughly 190,000 years as we spread ourselves across the planet, the elements of our diet that were difficult to come by were sugars, salt and fats.  When we did find them it was important to take maximum advantage of the opportunity. These days we can provide ourselves with endless amounts of these but we have not lost our “hard wired” instinct to take maximum advantage of the opportunity to consume them when we have the chance.

Indeed the craving for these things has a much longer history than just the span of Homo sapiens so it is no surprise that we find it very difficult to restrict our consumption of these things…

I feel like some chocolate… Since I prefer the very dark chocolate with next to no sugar (I haven’t checked) I presume that would be the fats coming into play.

Predicting the future is an amusing diversion with a long tradition. It can also be a bit frustrating because certain things which you would like to see, are going to happen after you have ceased investing in your own biological maintenance.

A very important trick is not to bother giving a time frame to the vision. I know it robs the game of a lot of the fun but it also gets in the way of contemplating the vision itself.

Some random thoughts on the matter…

Cars: Sitting in the car at the traffic lights, listening to the roar of the engines as the cars take their turns you realise that, at some point, we are going to have the cars, but not the roar. Electric motors are either silent or perhaps they whine a little, but they don’t roar. The dominant sound will become the road noise – the sound of the flexing of rubber and its impact with the tarmac.

Roads: Much further in the future , surely we will fly rather than hop in the car. We were “promised” flying cars when I was a child but the energy and control required were much greater than were appreciated at the time. Still, eventually I expect us to get there. The thing that intrigues me is the implications for the road system. There is a huge amount of real estate lying beneath tarmac. When it is all converted into green space it will be a Good Thing.

Mars: I’d like us to go to Mars. The radiation is a problem though. It is not an original thought but, what about caves? Mars is not short of cliff faces. Can’t we start out by putting our accommodation where there are many metres of rock overhead?

Food: Homo sapiens is constructed as an omnivore. That is unquestionably the natural way of things. I think though that if you offered folks something that was indistinguishable from beef (for instance) but had never been part of a functioning cow, they would take it with some relief. Tissue culture should eventually be capable of giving us this option. The sooner the better.

This blog, like most, does not cite references and there is no review process. So, like most blogs, it is almost useless blather. Almost. It’s only functions are that it just might contain a point of view that you haven’t encountered before or that it might be written in an entertaining style. There is not a lot of point in reading only material which is perfectly aligned with your current point of view. It gives a feeling of security and belonging but it reduces your mental agility and adaptability. I am about to tell you where my politics lie. This will immediately categorise me for those of haven’t already worked them out and anything I might have to say will be filtered through their opinion of those politics… That is an interesting phenomenon. All I can say is that good ideas have often sprung from people whose other ideas were without value. You never know what you might think of if you press on. If anything I say stimulates an interest, then you can chase up people who actually know what they are talking about on the subject. For example, I was going to write something on the “right to bear arms” at one point, but I went to Wikipedia and saw my points all covered in much greater detail by experts. I won’t make that mistake again; everything I discuss will be in the same boat so research will simply remove the desire to write at all. Best to keep the mind untrammelled by confusing wisdom.

I have spoken earlier about our ancestors and their habits. An entire field of biology addresses the nature of selection as it acts in such groups. This is the root of politics. We are all acting in the best interests of our own DNA, but sometimes its best interest lie in what is best for our group. This is the foundation of our political balance between left wing and right wing. The right wing inclining towards the individual, the left towards the group. A billion years or so of evolution equips most individuals with the inclination to act in their own interests. At least 200,000 years or so of natural selection acting on individuals acting as part of a group, encourages the individual to consider whether their best interests may be served by taking the interests of others into account. To me the result is obvious, the centre is the place to be. You act in your own interests all the time, a billion years will not be denied; but from time to time you take actions which will benefit the group so as to benefit yourself in due course. We exist in a society. If we watch it collapse then we will “be standing alone and naked in the middle of the plains of Africa”. Not a reassuring place to be.

To be plain then, many of my political positions would label me as a right winger. But before they claim me I can lay out many others which would have me shunned as a foul socialist…

I am a swinging voter.

I pay my taxes reasonably happily in the full knowledge that some will be wasted and that the war against this wastage is perpetual.

I know a portion of my taxes are spent on supporting some people who simply do not have the willpower to support themselves but could. I see this as a tragedy in their lives but I will not cut off that money and see others, who cannot support themselves but would if they could, suffer. I expect some of my money to be spent encouraging those who could support themselves to do so. That too is perpetual.

I am frequently appalled by what I consider to be the foolishness of the extreme right and the extreme left. I consider that they both have the same failing, neither understand people and their fundamental motivations. (Of course, my piece of arrogance is that I fancy I know better than they do.) If our basic nature springs from our hunter-gatherer forebears, then the rest is nurture. For the first few years of their lives children absorb the reality that surrounds them like a sponge – without filtering. It is very difficult for people to transcend the things that are learnt at that time.

It is very difficult to reason someone out of something that they weren’t reasoned into in the first place. (That comment’s not original. Swift apparently. Damn, and I was determined not to do any research)

What follows is my opinion of why people are the way they are and my technique for understanding how they might react to a situation. I have found that it makes a great many otherwise incomprehensible human reactions seem unsurprising.

Homo sapiens appeared about 200,000 years ago. For the following 190,000 years we pursued a certain strategy for survival. We are here because that strategy worked and it is deeply wired into our brains. If territorial spread and raw numbers are defined as success, then we are very successful. Our DNA must be very satisfied. We evolved in Africa and in our ancestral home there are many forces at work which restrict our numbers. Once we left Africa, we left behind those forces and, like most “weeds”, we had the potential to grow in numbers without restraint. For 190,000 years our strategy looked like this.

A group of 10 to 30 people move into an uninhabited area, frequently following shorelines, and exploit the resources. The wildlife have never seen Homo sapiens and are easy prey. When the group finally has to wander further afield for prey, they decide to move to the area where prey is still plentiful. As soon as anyone in the group disagrees with the chosen site, the group splits.

That’s it. The implications of that lifestyle make us what we are today. Using that as the model, many insights can be gleaned about the behaviour of Homo sapiens. As our current style of living is only a very recent adaptation, I believe that only very small changes have occurred in the way we operate. Our instincts are those that served us well for those 190,000 years. Our instincts are the patterns of behaviour that were most likely to lead to successful passing on of our genes for the vast sweep of time until about 10,000 years ago.

Here’s an example. We are all familiar with the suggestion that it is in our nature to explore. Few would dispute this, but why is it so? For 190,000 years, exploration brought great rewards. Most importantly, there would be fresh game unfamiliar with humans and their nature. We don’t look like most other predators. They could leave behind the competition from the growing bands of Homo sapiens in their wake. They could leave behind any pollution they had created by their own presence and any disease they may have encountered. They could leave behind any disease that had entered their own group. So a great many problems could be addressed by simply picking up and moving on. The advantages were so great that they became instinctive. That is, anyone who had the inclination to “move on”, to explore, was much more likely to survive.

Why did I say the groups were 10 to 30? Well, I just pulled those numbers out of my head. But let’s chew them over. Imagine it is 100,000 years ago and you are standing naked and alone on a plain in Africa. You would be quite vulnerable. Among the most vulnerable mammals standing on the plain in fact. Tasty. Now imagine you are standing with your tribe of 10, 20 or 30 people and that the tribe has the usual profile of such groups. Some are hunters with spears and simple axes. Your group is now the most dangerous thing on the plain. A pride of lions or pack of hunting dogs would think long and hard before attacking. It is in the nature of Homo sapiens to be capable of vindictiveness. If a pride took one of our young we just might decide to say, make killing an adult lion a rite of passage to adulthood (it’s been done), or simply decide that the entire pride has to go and hunt down every last one. It is an aspect of self-defense. Rage and vindictiveness are our “motivation”. We are very dangerous.

So why not groups of 1,000? We were hunter-gatherers. If 1,000 hunter-gatherers move into a valley, they’d be falling over one another immediately. We can readily imagine that such a group would break up rapidly and disperse over more territory. Only when agriculture appeared did these rules begin to change.

There is another aspect to this. If we were discussing another species, it would not be valid to opine in the absence of data. But, while emphasising that these are just my opinions, it is “us” we are talking about. Not another species. How big does a group have to get before you know that you are disconnected from some of them? At what point do friends become acquaintances? We are wired to cope with a society of a certain size, and that size is the size of a group best adapted for exploiting fresh terrain as hunter-gatherers. For most people, special coping techniques are required to deal with communicating with groups above a certain size. Some folks simply close their eyes. Some address “the front row” or “the back row”. These techniques are designed to reduce the size of the group that the mind has to cope with to a natural size.

If you use this model to analyse human behaviour, it leads to an obvious line of thought. Does the belief that a certain behaviour is instinctive make it ok? Well, no. We are not living in those societies any more. Adaptations must be made. The more our circumstances diverge from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the more our intellect must override our instincts to keep society functioning. The more our laws can allow people to obey their natural instincts though, the more successful those laws are likely to be.