Archive for May, 2005

A interesting thought..

Thursday, May 12th, 2005

If one accepts my theory (and I won’t argue with you if you say it’s extrordinarily far-fetched) that the roots of the trees form a messaging network similar to the Internet, used for Terra to talk to herself.. (about whatever it is that Terra talks to herself about) a interesting challenge would be to try to tie the two networks togeather.

Yes, it would take some pretty serious technologies – ones that we’ve no idea how to impliment. We have no idea what the packet format might look like for Terra’s network of leaves.. it likely, I would think, would involve a bunch of interesting chemical messaging systems.

My mother insists there is no way Terra could be alive. But then, she also thinks that the old testiment God and the creator of the universe are the same entity, something I find rather hard to credit.

Among other things.. nutty as it is.. I have to think the creator of the universe was female. (assuming we’re not inside some larger technological creation.. )

Who knows.

In other news, I got my Big Honking Backup Drive to work, and am currently backing up all the data on Gateway. Whew. Hundreds of gigabytes.

(in other, truly twisted news – the Earth’s magnetic field is known to turn over from time to time. What if we’re inside a hard drive? We have no real sense of scale – there may be entities that are thousands of times the size of us. Let’s hope if so they continue to stay a long way away. ;-))

Theory

Wednesday, May 11th, 2005

The reason we’ve got so many nuclear weapons is not because of a war between nations.

It’s because we fear attack from space.

Of course, I guess one could make a interesting argument that it’s basically impossible to even tell how big we are. In the greater universe, we might be inside of a atom that’s part of a semiconductor on someone’s desktop computer.

It’s impossible to tell how long time is, too. What seems like a lifetime to us might only be a few microseconds to said computer.

It’s, really, impossible to tell much of anything. We’re sitting here on spaceship earth, not sure how big we are, what our position in the cosmos is, or even how long our current civilization is going to last. No one seems to want to adapt to use what energy we have left effectively.. we’re just starting to see hybrid EVs.

I feel almost as if the human race is a whole bunch of people sitting in a room with guns aimed at each other’s heads. Go, lemmings, go.

It’s scary. I don’t like thinking about it. I know things that I can do, and I should be doing them.. working more on electric vehicles, the one technological solution that I can see and understand.

Let us please learn from history – especially the history that isn’t written, like the civilizations that reached our level of sophistication and then fell..

I don’t know why I’ve been so afraid lately. Perhaps I’m developing a touch of paranoia late in life. Maybe I burned out the part of my brain that kept repeating ‘everything is fine. There is nothing to fear.’

and here’s a wonderfully paranoid thought..

Tuesday, May 10th, 2005

maybe we’re going to have lots of nasty earthquakes because the oil that we are busy pumping out of the ground and burning was supposed to be a lubricating system to make the plates slide all nice and smoothlike..

Fears..

Tuesday, May 10th, 2005

It’s a difficult time to be alive.

Never mind the challenge of figuring out what God might want, the real challenge is figuring out how to overcome the results of running out of oil (and they aren’t pretty.. all our food gets here because it moves on semis which are fueled by hydrocarbons.. and we’re quickly running out) and the repeated willingness of our leaders to blow things up.

Nuclear weapons are terrifying. Resource depletion is terrifying. Pollution is a touch disturbing. Excessive numbers of humans are leading to truly scary situations.

I suppose the Christians must be thrilled.. it seems entirely plausable that we are living in the end times, that civilization will collapse, or worse..

I beg of humanity to try to grow up as a species. How many times have we reached this level of technical sophistication and collapsed? The answers are in front of us – solar energy, diplomacy, battery electric vehicles, a willingness to do something smarter than starting wars over resources..

I know. I’m a broken record.

A broken record who is suffering from a bit of depression at the moment, too.

At least I’m doing some EV things again..

Imagine.. (the cosmic computer?)

Wednesday, May 4th, 2005

Imagine you are a life form. You are terribly lonely, and you want to communicate with other beings of your type. You’re stuck in a spinning universe, with everything moving around you. You’ve no idea who is right or wrong – one side insists that the answers to life are one, and the other side insists than they are zero.

Imagine the human race trapped inside a RAID array larger than we can imagine. All life is precious, and all of it must be held onto at all costs. If you can stand up and say that you’re worthwhile, you are.

How do you find life?

More to the point, how do you find life that looks anything like you do, when you’re stuck inside this machine that is spinning enormously fast?

Sometimes I wonder if the Earth is a egg – intended to bring to life the race of man. Sometimes I wonder if I am a cosmic antenna.. picking up gravity waves – a sattellite of earth, helping two different sides, micro and macro, communicate. Growing between both of them.

My god doesn’t have a absolute right and wrong, I don’t think. My God says ‘all life is precious – we’ve got to find some way to hold onto it and send it on at the same time’.

I mean, sex is just communication on a microscopic level. Everything wants to talk, it seems like. I look for a purpose to life, and so far, about all I can find is communication.

I would love to know some greater purpose – I’d love for either micro or macro to do something to help this make more sense.

As near as I can tell, Elton John was right. All life is precious. Every day is a prize.