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Original Message
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Sometimes, in the course of history, we seem to be somehow ‘off track’ and when this happens it usually takes a quantum leap in technology to get us back to where we seemingly should have been. The nature of invention is not linear. We know more, learn more, and put the new sets of facts together and come up with something entirely new. It is rare, but it happens.
Right now, I think we (as a society) are in a techno rut
Think about it.
1894 The “Horseless Carriage” is invented. The auto industry is begun.
1903 Wilber & Orville fly a few feet.
1945 Jet fighters are a decisive factor in WWII
1946 The first atom bombs are dropped and end the war in the Pacific
1954 The first Private Jets cross the Atlantic with paying passengers.
Now fast forward to summer/fall of 2007:
We are still flying the same damned jet planes (same technology – fancier and better controls. No more wires. It all operates on Fiber Optics strung throughout the plane) and/or even our current cars. That renders the possibility of magnetic interference nil.
Propulsion systems? We are still burning fossil fuels… like Kerosene or Gasoline or Diesel in all of our various engines.
You mean to tell me in a bit shy of 100 years, we cannot do better in terms of a propulsion system, drive, etc.? What is wrong with this picture?
Our communications take place digitally today. The simplest voice call may be bounced off satellites orbiting and no one cares where. The call drops down in a huge digital data stream, is decoded and routed to your nearest Central Office where it connects with and rings your phone. Viola – you are connected to anyone anywhere.
The internet that was NOT even dreamed of several years ago is now almost universal in it’s availability and popularity. The data circuit I use for High Speed data at home today is something that was science fiction fifteen or twenty years ago. The thought that Fiber would run to my door, and carry Phone, TV, VOIP, and a myriad of other things is nothing short of amazing. 20 meg/sec download and almost as fast uploading? I live with it daily and the cost is not much more than my old cable modem! There was a time when the cheapest T-1 cost in the five thousand per month range. That same circuit today is less than 300 month in most of the US and it’s dropping fast!
Medicine – we easily perform procedures and install new organs. We can give you a new heart, liver, kidneys, joints, valves, spinal column (partially now and fully later in maybe 4 years.) The miracles of science are astounding. The old quip about “take good care of yourself – you might have to live in that body for five hundred years or so, suddenly has a whole new meaning!
People with AIDS who once died within two years are now living well past 30 years with the disease and for the most part are still doing quite well, thank you very much. The antivirals (the cocktail) that does this of course extracts a price for doing so – but it maybe a fair trade-off. Where there is life there is hope.
But I wonder about the obvious lack of progress?
Rubber tires? About the same since Steel Belted Radials were intro’d in the 60’s. Gas Engines have remained largely the same through the last 30 years, too. Oh, they run cleaner and are better and 7500 miles between oil changes is a reality now. But it’s still the same gas guzzling engines and still struggling to remain clean enough to be allowed to be registered in CA and NY.
The whole point of the above is to ask the question – why are we not further along? The reality of teleportation, wormhole travel, etc., should be around the corner.. But it’s been around the corner for 30 years now!
Space travel? Do we have it or not? Was the moon landing a hoax? Do we know how to get out of our own atmosphere and to the planets or do we not? Life extension? What about our damned lifespan that’s been increased to over 79 years but the last ten years of it is in a nursing home drooling on ourselves and needing someone to wipe our asses? Some progress, IMHO.
AGING? Who needs it? I can have a facelift, some lipo, and maybe some fat transfers to my face to fake the illusion of being young for a few more decades. A deep phenol peel left me looking like a lobster for month, but the skin looks like it was that of a 20 year olds again. I am really almost 60 and look like I’m about 40 or 45. No BS. I work out, eat right, keep active, and above all, read constantly to make sure my brain is exposed to and processes new info daily. Honestly, I run for a plastic surgeon every time I see one more God-damned wrinkle. I’ve been lifted, nipped and tucked a half dozen times in the past 20 years. Every time they put in the last suture or staple, the time clock starts running again. We can set it back. We cannot stop it! The skin on my tummy was loose and saggy and even though I do have a sixpack underneath the loose skin – it took a little modified tummy tuck to let it show again. The teeth are still mostly mine. A few bridges and implants round out that ‘perfect Hollywood smile’ I’m so fond of.
ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH! The real bitch of life, as I see it, is that it takes so long to become proficient at any given skill set. This time around I studied medicine. But what about law? Music? The arts? Painting? What about acting? The theatre? All things I would have loved to do. But I don’t have the friggin’ time! My education cost grandma a quarter of a million back in the 70’s. The cost of putting my kid through college, and then medical school is going to hit 1/2 million dollars. I’m well paid for what I do – but if I didn’t have inherited money, I could NOT afford to put her through school at those cost levels. As it is, I can just barely do so, but in doing so, I’ll leave precious little for my grandchildren. Oh well. . their mother can worry about that! <grin>
HEAVEN CAN WAIT? Maybe???
I’ve often wondered if I were to use my connections in the medical and scientific community and ferreted out the best in life extension therapy, and if, given a little luck, I could buy myself an additional five or ten years here and there by the earliest application of the latest treatment modalities and drug therapies. Would doing that get me far enough along for a breakthrough to take place that would allow me another 100 years? But a 100 years of good to excellent health. Not the nursing home routine and on friggin’ life support while praying for death to end my misery and boredom. A USEFUL PRODUCTIVE ACTIVE 100 years! And in that 100 years of extra life – could there be another breakthrough that would allow me to get to 400 or 500 years? I think it’s quite likely given what science is doing today - and that’s just the stuff that’s being talked about. What about the small labs, funded by billionaires that have the same goals I do? Guys who have so much money, power, etc., that they couldn’t possibly spend or loose all their cash. They are understandably unhappy about the prospect of making the money just in time to die and leave it to a heard of squabbling relatives! They – like me – want to stick around and enjoy the fruit of their labor for an additional one hundred or four hundred or more years!
The downside to doing all this? That’s easy. What if we do prolong our lives for an extra fifty or hundred or four or five hundred years (or more.) Eventually we get tired, and we get bored. There will be a time when we’ve done all we can wish for in this world. And at that time, perhaps death will no longer be a feared enemy but will instead be a welcomed friend. What we call “death” over here may be called “birth” somewhere else! Who knows? What if we do all the life extension stuff, and do it successfully and then find that heaven - had we been there a few hundred years sooner - is so great that we wonder why we were so foolish to spend our time, money and efforts staying on this earth in that old body (which has by that time been rejuvenated many many times.)
SCIENCE and other LIES!
I started this with a question about why are we not further along than is readily known or admitted? The gaps in our knowledge are glaringly obvious. Space travel should be, given the progress from the Wright Bros., to the latest mega-plane offerings from BOEING and AIRBUS, a reality of our time. But according to NASA and the governments of the world, we have barely scratched the surface. Barely at all! There is more! MUCH MORE>
The computer that I’m writing this on is more powerful than the first mainframes that cost millions of dollars and required trained techs to run them and/or make them do anything useful. Only huge insurance companies, the Federal Government, and a handful of fortune 100’s could afford this technology in 1960. Today I buy a terabyte hard drive and it is small enough to fit in a briefcase with plenty of room left over. A friggin’ terabyte is one thousand GIGABYTES of disk storage space. The cost? About $350 dollars. Maybe a little more if I bought a really fine one.
Right now, we’re building a home. The land was purchased years ago and the idea was to build for my retirement. We’ll I’m nowhere near retiring and probably never will be… but I want a home that is designed to my tastes and my specs. So we’re doing it.
The builder is amazed that I’m insisting on Adobe or Rammed Earth Construction. My return air ducts for the AC are all buried four feet under the foundation. It is much cooler down there. The hearting is supplied by radiant in floor tubing and that is heated by a super-efficient boiler. I have my main boiler powered by natural gas but I also have an electric boiler installed (same capacity) for back-up and switch-over in case natural gas becomes outrageously expensive or not available at all. The same boiler also supplies all the domestic hot water I the winter at almost no charge. When I specified a ground source heat pump for my AC in the house, my contractors went nuts! I held out for what I wanted. The cost of running it is bout 1/10th that of conventional air-cooled refrigeration.
The solar panels on the roof are some 10 times more productive/efficient than they were ten years ago. For an investment of about $150k, we will never have a utility bill for electricity again. In fact since we over-engineered the system we’re estimating that I’ll earn about 140 to 250 per month from selling my excess energy back into the grid! (Don’t laugh. It will pay the property tax bill.) However, I can throw a switch and take us off grid for an indefinite period. The batteries I ordered were state of the art at the time. Now there are much better and I’m fortunate in that my supplier handles both types. Upgrading before delivery should be easy. (As you can tell, I’m acting as our own GC to save money which we spend on having a ‘name’ architect do the design and plans for us. I got the energy system design put together by calling the best in the US and asking them to do a custom design for me. They were really excited about the project when they learned that I would be spending money on efficiency and not on fluff. I even found that Miele is testing a MICROWAVE POWERED ELECTRIC CLOTHES DRYER! It’s due for release in a couple of years but I wrote and told them of our project and they’re giving me a pair of their new dryers to see if I like it as well and if it works as well as a traditional resistance heat type dryer. It is supposed to use less than 1/20th the electricity of a conventional dryer for drying a load of clothes! Sounds like a great idea. Now if it just doesn’t microwave my jeans into oblivion!
It seems to me that the tech to do all these things above for the house has been around for well over 50 years. Why is it – when we are almost unable to afford gasoline – that suddenly these things are being touted and brought to market? Is there a Government conspiracy to withhold info from us? Yes, it does seem like that is the case.
In doing the energy calculations for the house from the floor plans and the energy factors we believe we have built in, we have come up with an estimated operating costs for gas, electricity, water, sewer, etc. The house is slightly over 4300 square feet with a four car garage and a guest apartment over the garage. It has a lap pool and a Jacuzzi (outdoor) and both are heated to a bathtub temp. Not this “just knock the chill of the pool stuff – for me!) The Total estimated operating costs for Gas, electricity, etc., year round average is going to be under 400 per YEAR. Not per month. PER YEAR! If those numbers are anywhere near accurate I’ll be amazed but that is what the estimated costs of operation work out to.
To wind up this diatribe – why are all these things converging now? Is it some need to get though what is about to happen? Is PX heading our way (or is another polar shift eminent?)
Will the world survive another 100 years without self-destruction of our people?
Can we figure out a way to feed those who have no food? Can we stop selling the best weapons systems on the planet as one of our major exports? Can the Military/Governmental/Industrial complex be dissmanteled? Could we metaphorically beat our spears into plows? Could we grow food for the world, instead of building the weapons to destroy it and the people on the planet, too?
Finally, why in hell do I feel compelled to build this absurdly over-engineered house, at this point in time? There is, for me, a feeling that I really want to get this thing completed and soon. It is almost an instinctive drive nearly a compulsion somewhere in me and I do not know where it’s coming from. Maybe it is just the world’s situation at present and the feeling of unrest that seems to abound today.
Your thoughts, comments, questions if any, are welcomed . Thanks for listening/reading.
MI in NYC (currently in LA as I’m writing this)
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