Blurring The Lines

Jason Koger is one of the first people to have two complete bionic hands. After losing both his hands, using technology he now has the capability to grasp things as small as jelly beans. Advances like this one support the idea that technology is rapidly integrating directly with us as opposed to being simply an auxiliary source of information or capability.

As technology becomes more advanced something very apparent rises to the surface. What we consider to be advanced technology is simply us catching up with nature. The primary difference between technology and traditional nature is that we have far more control over technology. As advanced as we often think we are, all our technology really does is replicate things in nature. Let’s use a car for example. While a car may not have any organic material present besides oil, a car functions very similar to the human body. It takes in food (gasoline) and then converts this food into energy which is utilized to execute its primary function of movement. While engaging in this process it does other similar things to us as well, for instance a car has filters and this is the same function our liver serves.

Soon we are going to start running into issues between what our technology can accomplish and our ideals. For instance, we all want to protect trees (for the most part) but trees are highly inefficient at clearing the atmosphere of pollutants; we require a significant amount of trees. What if with technology we can create a better tree? What if this new tree was almost indistinguishable from current trees?

The answer to this question is that humanity should come first, but we should make sure we are not jeopardizing ourselves by implementing brand new technology too quickly. With anything brand new there is always the potential for problems. We can mitigate this risk by not implementing new technology too fast. That said, we should never dismiss technology for the sole reason that it is in conflict with our existing ideals because our ideals can always change.

Manifest Reality

There are two types of fear, the first is the fear created by personal survival. The second is the fear of change. We will throw out success and run away from things that are good for us to avoid change. We think we know and understand fear such as the serial killer, the nuclear bomb, or global warming. Our most common fears regarding survival are easy to understand because we can formulate solutions even if they would never work.

I can almost certainly assure you that in the next one hundred years you will long for the days when nuclear war seemed like a legitimate fear. Technology is moving off the screens and into our bodies and this is going to have profound implications. What will you do when you are told that all your accumulated experiences are irrelevant because in seconds you can become anything you want? You might think this is amazing but think of the implications. If you can become anything, who are you? If you choose not to act, you could find yourself scraping the bottom unable to compete with genetically improved humans. What if you were offered the ability to lose the capability to commit evil, would you accept it? If you accept it, would you still be you?

What we call science fiction is starting to fall behind what we are actually accomplishing. The biggest challenge we will have in the future will not be about weather or murderers, it will be about existence. We will try to escape it by chasing media and digital worlds but the gleam will wear off. When the gleam runs out you will be left to make very serious decisions that will have dramatic effects on your life over very short time frames.

Now, more than ever, we need to become architects of the future. We must face the coming challenges now, not once they arrive.

All “Natural”

There is a very popular trend right now that is revolving around the keyword “natural” and this is a good demonstration of our tug of war with existing nature. Our existing environment provides for us but it is also our biggest limitation as I discussed here. The strife can split humanity into two ideological spheres, one that believes we can progress without supporting existing nature and another group that will aggressively defend it. In practice what we actually have done is a messy hybrid of both. We will build cities and then line the streets with trees. Presently the use of trees is not just for aesthetics, it is required for oxygen. So while we try to accelerate full speed ahead we are forced to bring some of the vestiges of our past along with us.

As we progress forward you will always have entities that try to hold humanity back. This is not a bad thing because it is important to make sure that changes we make are the correct ones or as correct as they can be. However, as a race, we can get caught up in things that really don’t matter as much as we think they do.

There are a lot of people making money from telling us what we should or shouldn’t be doing in order to live longer. While there is no denying that things we eat and do could affect the length of our life, what these gurus will usually fail to mention is that they can’t actually save you. The biggest threat to the human immune system and our life is not fluoride in water, genetically altered food, or even smoking, it is aging. Aging is the single biggest human killer. It doesn’t matter how healthy you eat or how much you exercise, you cannot prevent aging.

This is not to say you should not try to exercise or eat healthy but you should not get caught up in the obsessions of people who believe that there is some natural state of humanity we need to conform to in order to live forever. With all the things that are apparently poisoning us and killing us from genetically altered food to processed sugar, we have incredibly long life spans compared to our ancestors because of modern medicine. We don’t need miracle healers to fix leprosy anymore because we can do that ourselves.

There is no “natural” state of man. We stopped being natural the moment we started using fire. We fly through the air in mechanical contraptions and talk to each other across the globe. Even “organic” agriculture is an unnatural process designed to benefit the growth and progress of the human race. If you get caught up in all the things that may kill you, what will kill you is that obsession because you will have stopped living.

The future is Solar. Period.

I once worked with a developer who said something interesting, “I find it so funny, everyone is talking about building fusion reactors. We already have a giant fusion reactor, it is called the sun.”

What I am about to discuss might sound unrealistic, but it is already happening. In 20 years there will be very little conversations about coal, oil, and nuclear. Right now solar energy is doubling in efficiency every two years and its cost is dropping by about 50% each year. This article on Bloomberg outlines this for the last year. Even 13 year olds are making solar power more efficient.

An expert in the field of technology acceleration, Ray Kurzweil predicted many things using the idea of an exponential curve. Solar Energy is going through the same process computers went through when they went from filling a room to being in your pocket, check out this video below.

All energy sources on the planet, with the exception of geothermal, is caused by the sun. Fossil fuels are the remains of living organisms which could only exist because of the sun. Even wind is caused by the temperature in variance created by the sun heating the planet.

If you’re an investor, solar energy is where you would want to put your money. For the average person, it may be possible to finally move past the energy conversation and move on to more pressing issues.

The Decentralization of Power

When people start talking about Solar, they think that once it gets efficient enough, the government will just plug in a couple large fields of solar panels and hook them up to the grid. I have an alternate theory based on what is actually going on now.

Right now, all over the world, people are starting to get off the grid. An investment in solar can pay itself off in 10-15 years but every year the price drops the amount of years it takes for it to pay itself off will also decline. As this happens more people will get off the grid. It is highly probable that in 8 years time a significant amount of  the population around the world will have homes powered by solar.

By the time the 16 year mark rolls around the government may need to do very little because people will already be off the grid. It is much cheaper to have a decentralized power system then to have a centralized one. Not only that, a decentralized system is more resilient to catastrophes. In the same way personal computers spread to everyone’s houses as they got cheaper so will solar power generators.

Fighting Nature

Ants, my favorite insect, have been known to build very large and impressive nests. Hypothetically, if ants could get to the point where they could regularly build sky scrapers, would we look at ants and call them unnatural? Only with humans do you have such a level of arrogance that we believe the things we make are outside the scope of nature. Some humans go to great lengths to defend primitive nature, sometimes even going as far as putting their own lives on the line to do so, but not only is this wrong, but the value of what people call “natural” is relative to where we are at as a human race.

If we as humans don’t make ourselves the #1 priority there is no value to the universe and every creature that has died, or will die, in the process we have identified as evolution has died in vain.

Nature doesn’t exist to exist in some kind of harmonious nonfluctuating state, it also doesn’t exist to support us in particular and we don’t exist to support it either. Nature exists for one reason and this is to promote evolution and progression. If it wasn’t meant to do this, simply put, we would not exist. Cities are are our forest. While I am aware that my views of this will not be popular with many, there are some very important delusions I must point out regarding nature.

1.  Nature is Peaceful
When strolling through man made parks we get a skewed view of what nature is actually like. If you believe that humanity is so bad with our murders, you haven’t seen murder on a larger scale until you enter a rain forest. If you’re any creature in a rain forest (heck even if you’re a human) you’re death by murder is around 50%+, so that means you will likely be killed for food or defense by another creature if you’re living there.

2. Nature is Efficient
Trees while the best mechanism we have right now for cleaning the air, and creating oxygen (and really one of the primary reasons we want to defend primitive nature) are horribly horribly inefficient. If they were actually good at their jobs, we wouldn’t need a ton of them, and Global warming wouldn’t be an issue. Tree’s weren’t designed to support us, instead they were designed to feed off us. In fact, using technology we are coming up with better and more efficient ways to not only clean the air but also create oxygen. However, that said, clear cutting down forests wouldn’t be suggested since we don’t have such systems implemented yet.

3. Humans are “unnatural”
We are completely natural, everything we do and all of our inventions are made in this universe. To believe our cities are doing some kind of disservice to the world is an illusion of arrogance; that we are some how outside the scope of reality. Imagine for a moment that you are an ultra advanced entity that is living in an ecosystem that we can barely fathom right now and you looked at the human race. Not only would you see a mix of forests and cities, but you also wouldn’t point to one and say that forest is nature and that city is not. In the same way we wouldn’t point at an ant nest and say that’s no longer nature.

Conclusion
Protecting primitive nature is important because it provides us a significant amount of resources, however, trying to create sustainable solutions that some how have to work with primitive creatures and plants is a waste of time if we can create our own ecological systems that are sustainable and benefit us directly. We should not focus on trying to make things work with what is already here if it is too difficult. If tomorrow all the humans died off because of a nuclear war, nature would come back, because that is nature. There is no guarantee that any of those creatures that come back will have any form of compassion at all, or ever even have the possibility of exploring space or creating universes like we currently do.

If we as humans don’t make ourselves the #1 priority there is no value to the universe and every creature that has died, or will die, in the process we have identified as evolution has died in vain.