MPJ

I remember reading an article in the Guardian last year with title "Our galaxy may contain billions of planets with the same mass as Earth". Surely, it is valid scientific guess as it is but if it is really true, my first thought would be that intelligent life as we know it (assuming we are intelligent species) is as rare as we can imagine. If they are not, the big question is why we are still not able to detect any single proof of their existence or still not eaten by some violent alien species? The only logical answer that we are first one walks on the edge of impossibility to me. Most likely we are missing something important, a discovery as important as fire was.


While this statement is still accurate and generally speaking plausible, let's think a little more about it. So to start with the original statement, is there really that many planets with Earth like properties in our galaxy? Ever since I read the Drake equation for the first time (shown above), I couldn't get rid of the feeling that nothing spectacular I could conclude from it. Come on, really, this is just another scientific speculation at best, as we simply don't have any valuable information about star systems other than our own. Not until recent year we didn't have any observations of local star cluster related to potential planets. The only scientific data coming in this regard is the one from Kepler mission and after two and a half years it still didn't find a single hint of the Earth like planet. Yes, this is just the beginning and Kepler spacecraft only searches for changes in brightness of the nearby stars looking for planets, but still there is nothing so far. Just giant Jupiter-size or super massive rocky planets. I wanted to sound optimistically, but I would expect at least one stable candidate in this 2,5 years of Kepler's. Maybe it is there in scientific data still waiting to be revealed or maybe those giant planets harbor Pandora's like satellite? Or nothing's there? Future will tell.

Next, there is a common interpretation that life supportive planets exist in large numbers, but intelligent life is rare or we are by some rare possibility the first one. As this sounds plausible on the first glance, it is not. We simply have this one time experience with Earth where one singe cell needed almost one billion years to evolve, and almost three billions for first multicellular creatures to arrive, not to mention that first plant evolved only half a billion years ago. So, a life supporting planet or satellite requires many billions of years of evolution not many times interrupted with cataclysmic events. If we take this for granted then it seems that complex life, as we are, needs small amount of time, astronomically speaking, comparing to less-complex ones like trees or grass. Therefore, again astronomically speaking, if we find greenish environment on some planet, the chances to find intelligent life on that planet in some sort of existence statistically are pretty big.


Ok, what's next? Oh yes, intelligent life.. Is that what we are? Are this Hawking famous sayings right: "Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth". If you ask me it is only half right, I'd say if primitive life is common then complex life could be common as well, but the second statement is pretty much accurate. I don't want to sound pathetically or semi-scientifically or too philosophically here, but there is simple fact that what differs humans from animals is that big rational brain of ours. On the other end, what is pretty much similar to the animal life is that still hyper active emotional or reptilian part of our inner head. I am not sure what next centuries will bring to us, but it will be either further development of rational brain in expense of emotional one, or the vice versa.

I am not saying that we must completely suppress emotions like Vulcans or try to augment people to reach this goal, but I am 100% sure that all human misbehavior today, like wars, global crisis, hunger there and overfilled bellies here, cultural or religion based animosity between people, relatives or neighbors is simply caused by reptilian complex deeply hidden in the center of human brain. Of course, I really can't imagine living a life without emotions at all but simply put, this part of human beings should not be in charge over reason. It's proven too dangerous for so many times.


So, in the nutshell, as soon as this part of the brain evolve down under the border of no return, I guess we should not call ourselves intelligent species. Until then, it is unwise for some interstellar species to give us technology to leave the Earth - chances that we would use it for star wars are bigger than we would go the next level and use it for peaceful exploration of solar system and beyond.

The last and probably the most important from my original statement last year was the hint that we were missing something important, like fire-like breakthrough discovery. Is that what we are missing, some space technology or warp drive? Sure, this is the necessity, we definitely can't populate other planets or go interstellar with nowadays rockets, but in today's spirit, it seems that it is definitely something that will help our rational brain to become the real boss in our heads. Only then we could step further and say that intelligent life finally emerged on Earth. Only then we could say that our railguns are only made for mining the asteroids and not for killing people because they look different.

Is this possible?

Sure, if we are spared by some major cataclysmic event within next couple of centuries or if we don't create one ourselves. I have all my hopes in evolutionary process but also little doubts as well. But, when the day is bright and cheerful, I also have all my hopes that tomorrow humanity will overpass this current stage of evolution and head for something more.

Image credits:
http://eugenius330.deviantart.com/art/Message-413092189

Search for habitable planets:
http://kepler.nasa.gov/

Refs:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/28/galaxy-planets-mass-earth-life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolution
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sumer_anunnaki/reptiles/reptiles14.htm
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/stephen-hawking-no-biological-life.html
http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/seti/drake_equation.html

Olivia Wilde & Garrett Hedlund in 'Tron: Legacy'*

Start/Stop

Generation counter: 0

Clear/Reset

Red Pill or Blue Pill?***

Reconstruction of a late Cycladic Ship (© 7reasons, Michael Klein)*

Reconstruction of the Akrotiri Supervolcano (© 7reasons, Michael Klein)*

I have a small challenge for you in a form of a quick quiz question: You must use just one word in order to describe following paragraph:

"You sleep in small rooms with other people usually on bank-beds and everyday you must get up and be out of bed exactly at 5 hundred hours and go outside to do physical exercises where you are usually forced to sing songs with no significant meanings. Three times a day you wait in line in order to eat or you don't get any food. You have to wear the same clothing like all others, take weekly showers in large mutual bathrooms and in other parts of the day you have to work on assigned jobs or learn how to survive fight with other people similar to you."


So what is it? I am sure there are several words with different meanings that easily fits the description but in relation to what I am going to write in this post the chosen word is: The Army. In this particular case, there is no room for accidental similarity with other words you might use. Simply, military service is created to be cruel where you must fit your position without thinking. There is no democracy here, you either obey orders or you are out. Along with others you have mutual name - The Troops. There is no individuality here other than your number on a metal plate you wear under the uniform. I have to add that I am not targeting any particular military service in this post, just wanted to write generally about worldwide armies in relation to what it means to our pure survival on this planet. I will also try not to sound pathetic and cry for Lennon's kind of slogans like "make love, not war" and stand an equally non-sensed and opposite position of the stick.

Instead, let's speak throughout the facts of a cruel world order as it is today as a result of couple of millenniums of human rapid evolution creamed with different religiosity, various animosities, cultural differences and different level of development monitoring in technology superior time comparing to previous centuries. If we look all our mutual aggressiveness and violent history the question is why aren't we doomed and wiped out with our own differences already? The answer is simple really and this is maybe predicted by Nikola Tesla long ago. Today the leading countries are in possession of a technology to hit a target as small as square meter from a distance measurable by hundreds of kilometers. Tesla once had this obsession of making a long distance weapon based on a electrical energy flashing throughout air capable of destroying the enemy located on different continent. He said that when all armies got in possession of such weapon any war would become meaningless as there would be no winner, only two losers and collateral damages in between.


Nowadays, with all currently existing military technology, it looks like we are heading toward the planetary society like in this Tesla's vision. But, we are not there yet, surely there are more technology superior countries today than in the middle of previous century who polarized the world in a so called "Cold War", but still the same dangerous animosities of the past are still there. I remember when I listened a podcast about a book "The Omega Scroll" in the interview with author Adrian d'Hagé, former Australian brigadier and security officer. He shared his thoughts about current situations in the world of the time after 9/11 event and the open war against recognized terrorists in relation of religious dogma. Both sides often used a sentence "in the name of the god" while their active military campaigns performed outside their main countries or habitat if you will. Adrian d'Hagé is now a novelist and author of great adventurous novels in regards to military threats especially in terrorism and bioterrorism and I loved his glimpse on religious property of all violent "encounters" between Christianity, Islam and Judaism. These three religions seem to be the the major cause of all big warfare and conflicts in past two millenniums. Ironically, their dogmatic religious beliefs are connected to the same divine super being and the world would definitively be the better place if history of world's three major religions was more peaceful back then when it all started.

But to get back from the cause to the effect, worldwide armies nowadays are pretty different, depending on country, ideology and long term goals. Some of them depends on the state of the art armory and up to the date electronics in all aspects of military units with professionals hired and paid for their services just like in any other regular jobs while others depend on participating all people within their mandatory active service and also as in reserve or veteran units.


Also, some armies are trained for any kind of war everywhere on the planet while others specialize in their own territories only. Regardless of all the differences one thing is very much common for all worldwide armies. With small exceptions they all share the largest budget cuts comparing to all other annual expenses in their countries. Globally military spending on weapons are measurable by almost 2 trillion of US dollars. The more transparent numbers you can find on the net is about budget spending in USA where last year they spent $317 billions compared to only $12.8 for NASA. More or less the same story is everywhere else. Nobody is questioning the numbers though but every now and again I hear the same justification where people state importance of military research and inventions that first appeared or invented for army purposes and then spread to the civilians like airplanes, microwave ovens, mobile communications, digital photography, internet, gps, radar, medicine tools, etc. However this is false dilemma and direct result of giant budget and lots of money reserved for military institutions. All those things would have been invented anyways if the Army/Nasa budget cut ratio is reversed. Not just invented the same but also with much better properties and quality considering they would be targeting wider civilian usage. Additionally, imagine those trillions of dollars redirected into space exploration just for couple of years - we would probably have artificial gravity already in production by now along with the fleet of interplanetary space crafts mining the asteroid belt and outer planets.

To get back to the title and it's embedded question - is Military really a sidetrack of the humanity? To me it definitively is, but also it is not created intentionally, it is just a reflection of current world order. It is just a matter of cause and effect, a kind of natural defense created by ultimate fear of simple survival. The ultimate fight of inner head's rational with emotional brain cells. The conclusion in this post is the same as the wisdom in the post I wrote last year by the name Intelligent Life. I'll just repeat the metaphorical conclusion: "It is unwise from some interstellar species to give us technology to leave the Earth, chances that we would use it for star wars are bigger than it could be used for peaceful exploration of solar system and beyond.".

Simply, the reptilian complex in our brains is still strong, evolutionary speaking. There is nothing we can do but wait for it's further influence degradation and fight it with reason more effectively.

Russia and China boost arms spending, US cuts back
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2012/04/18/2003530615

Wait, how big is NASA’s budget again?
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/02/16/wait-how-big-is-nasas-budget-again/

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
http://milexdata.sipri.org/

I am not sure where to start this post or to better say, which point in history of time I'd choose when something extraordinary happened for the first time and started the domination of humans over all other species competing on Earth. Was it the discovery of fire and learning how to start it? Maybe it was rather the discovery of tools to make everyday life easier and made us the ultimate predator? Even though these two can definitively be classified as breakthrough discoveries, if you ask me, what was more important back in that period of prehistoric era was the point in evolution of human brain when we started to dream. The time when brain cells evolved to the point when we started to use imagination and to think outside the boundaries of simple survival. That point in history of mankind is maybe the most important of them all. It was the time when first images appeared on the cave walls, first simple houses and camps started to exist. We started to bury and mourn the dead and to live in families. Yes, that was the first breakthrough discovery, the first giant leap into evolution of humans and ever since this will stay the biggest one making us the real citizens of the planet. The earthlings.

While we are still waiting for something similar to happen in order to ascend humans into citizens of Solar system, or the next breakthrough discovery of the same size, lots of time has passed since the first one. After many millenniums from that point in time, many other breakthrough discoveries and inventions happened and while their importance is not that great as the first one, they are really responsible for the human evolution and progress to the present day. Every one of them represented one step toward the future destination and changed the humans irretrievably. I am sure the following list will be questionable for many of you, but nevertheless I will try to count them all out of the head hopefully without much editing this post in the future.


Instead of chronological ordering I will try to group them differently. Let's start with food, hygiene and medicine as I think this must had come next after socializing the humanity into tribes, cities, countries, etc. What was inevitable next step after eating berries, collecting wild fruits and after hunting for meat, invention of various tools opened the door for farming, agriculture and domesticating wild animals. Sophisticated tools and floating devices brought a fish on the menu and it seems that eating fish started rapid evolution of brain. There is ongoing debate among evolutionary scientists what exactly caused rapid evolution of human brain and culture about 50000 years ago and if you ask me I blame the fish. So if you want to be smart eat fish a lot, especially during childhood. After that, it all started to develop pretty fast. Century after century brought more brain cells to the average human. In common effort, humans populated the whole planet, started to recognize the healing plants, to understand how body works and in all years to the date, invented toilet and soap, clothing, drugs, antibiotics, vaccination, anesthetics, surgery and created a world of self-awareness ultimately resulting in considerably prolonging human life over time. Life expectancy variation over time according to Britannica almost doubled since prehistoric times. This is maybe the best proof that humans constantly learn about themselves directly influencing their own evolution. Maybe the next major invention will be nano-technology applications, similar what electronics brought to medicine, just imagine a futuristic nano-robot delivering a drug directly to the body part in need killing the cancer cells right in their neighborhood.

When we learned to live healthy and to repair ourselves what was next is industrialization of our communities. That all started with discovery of the wheel. This piece of ingenuity started as an transportation tool, but over time it ended into many other industrial machines and tools, clocks, steam and internal combustion engines, generators, sewing and printing press machines, the list is endless. Maybe the only breakthrough of this size in this area of industrialization was discovery of electricity and its own endless applications starting with light bulb, telephone, radio and television, computers, medicine etc. Combined, the wheel and electronics created the wonderful world of bicycles, cars, tracks, buses, trains, zeppelins, submarines, boats, ships, helicopters and airplanes, satellites, shuttles and rockets, all kind of transportation devices that truly allowed us to rule the planet to its most hidden corner.


Next and maybe the area with same importance is art and communication, starting with written language, numbers and calculations, expressing thoughts in different ways and orientation in space. While above described discoveries were first made in past and now we are only perfecting the inventions dated centuries ago, here within communication and modern art the most breakthrough discoveries came only recently. The most biggest invention is of course the internet and computerizing the home and human interaction. We are just very near to the discovery of universal translation device and wearing a mobile computer equipped with various sensory applications, similar to wrist watches in their pick of popularity. Thanks to computerizing the movie industry in latest years, movies made in recent years are tremendously different to the ones made only two decades ago. Lastly, and also very important discovery in human history is sport. My previous post was about sport, this is something that truly changed the people, the post was somewhat entertaining as well, so if you are willing to read it is here: Sports. The conclusion in this article is perfectly suitable for this article too: "I really think that international sport is responsible for less amount of wars today. If you compare middle age, up to the middle of last century, with modern era today, it seems that people sometimes back in dark ages organized wars in a fashion of a today's sport competitions. If they had sports back then to compete with their 'enemies', they would probably used baseball bats instead of spears, large swords or cannons."

Generally speaking, maybe the major milestone was the birth of science and scientific thought. This is maybe the only part of the humanity that was developing slowly from the beginning. It all started with watching the nightly sky and understanding the heavens. Today, we can surely say that science is responsible for majority, if not of them all, of breakthrough discoveries since the beginning of humans, with exception of imagination that is maybe the origin point of humans as we know. Along with industrialization of the world, science evolved rapidly in past couple of centuries and today we are experiencing its next level of existence. The time when one individual inventor or scientist could be the father of the breakthrough invention that is capable for changing the world is inevitably gone. Time of master minds like Aristotle, Archimedes, Galileo, Einstein, Tesla, Edison, Bohr, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Kepler, Planck, Mendeleev and hundreds more are changed in a way that single scientist is no longer enough to produce something extraordinary and new. 21st century is a time of science institutes and scientific commuting. Breakthrough discoveries moved from garage laboratories into expensive international experiments lead by teams of scientists and logistic backgrounds.


No doubt that next milestone of the milestones will happen in the future and it will be developed in scientific laboratory in the Earth orbit. In order to truly become Type II and III civilization according to Kardashev scale several severe breakthroughs in space engineering are required. You don't have to be a super smart to conclude that living in harsh environment as space requires tremendous amount of energy and building a space cities is the challenge almost impossible if we are looking it from today's perspective. Technology of the space future must be built on breakthroughs solving artificial gravity, creating super speed engines pushing the space ship or city in half a speed of light or faster and managing active radiation protection capable to transform micro meteorites or solar particles into usable energy. Many science fiction stories and movies already addressed all kind of technological solutions of the future, but whether or not humans will be able to handle antimatter, negative energy, Alcubierre's warp drive, wormholes or giant sailing ships, future will tell. However, by knowing how much negative energy or antimatter is required for a small warp bubble it seems impossible right now. But crossing the Atlantic was similar impossible mission in the past and look it now - it is just another piece of cake. Well, who knows, maybe what we only need is to find a small micro black hole and build a star ship around it and it will might be the only thing we need. I am sure the solution is there waiting for discovery.

Looking it from the pessimistic (realistic?) point of view, it is almost impossible that all mankind evolution in the past went smoothly. We are simple beings after all and lots of obstacles were on the road posted by nature and ourselves. The major one is probably the religiosity and our need to create the divine simply because of the fear of unknown and the things we are not capable to comprehend. I guess this is the nus-product of our imagination and directly created by first breakthrough discovery. To be honest, while the various religions in the past and present days are also responsible for many good things, like making tight connection between people in essence, and this is my opinion only, religiosity after all is just one sidetrack of our road to the future. As soon as we evolve into beings with no fear for the unknown and yet undiscovered realm the better. I had one post earlier discussing this and if you are eager to read its titled: Science of God


One more downside of the human imagination and emotional "reasoning" is, no doubt, violent human history. If you are looking for opposite words for inventions and breakthrough discovery take a pick from these: wars, hatred, conflicts, political sidetracks, dictatorships, hostilities, global resistance for change in general, old democracy system, corruption, too big dependence for current economic system, worshiping the power and money. I once wrote about democracy improvement that might deal with most of these, find the article here: Real Democracy System.

Hmm, maybe the best way to conclude this post is to list some inventions that can't be titled as extraordinary as lightning the fire but nevertheless they are also important for mankind. There are plenty of lists on the net and these links below are the one I stumbled upon while writing this post.

Image ref:
* http://www.milanzivic.com/2014/11/warfare-then-and-now.html

Refs:
http://www.adherents.com/people/100_scientists.html
http://science.discovery.com/convergence/100discoveries/big100/big100.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
http://shareranks.com/155,Greatest-Inventions-of-All-Time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101018051705AAbc99q
http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-human-inventions-of-all-time.php
http://www.helium.com/knowledge/5223-top-ten-greatest-inventions-of-all-time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution