We, And Our Pandora Boxes, Are The Dark Side… That’s What Gods Do! Smile!

ARE CLIMATE CHANGE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PANDORA BOXES? OF COURSE. SO WHAT?

Humanity’s most fundamental production has always been Pandora’s boxes: curiosity, disobedience, and unforeseen consequences guaranteed [1]. Pandora, the first woman, driven by curiosity and disobedience, is our business model, humanity’s true Joan of Arc.

Humanity has been shaping Earth for 5 million years. Bipedal locomotion freed our arms and hands, turning them into tools and weapons platforms. Dogs wish they had hands, but they don’t. Raccoons have hands, but their arms can’t swing. Bipedalism also made fast and far locomotion possible out of the ancestral forests chimpanzees are never free of. Exploiting the savannah brought combat to dath with formidable predators, such as giant baboons…ruthless business rivals who were eliminated a million years ago, or so.

Humanity has always opened pandora boxes, that’s what we do, as we progress, and how we progress: Nous sommes une force qui va (V. Hugo redux). God-like powers have come with the Dark Side of extermination and climate change: all the planet’s megafauna was exterminated, tamed, or driven to near extinction… And this process started a long time ago. Example: the Mayas probably collapsed the climate of Yucatan… by destroying the primary forest which kept it moist (and they had known this should be avoided, for a long time, and had a preliminary collpase into drought… However hybris, blossoming demography and war changed this in the Seventh Century…)

10,000 years ago, much of the megafauna’s mass was made of… lions. Lions can eat rabbits, but also elephants. Humans couldn’t milk lions, so they replaced them with methane belching and farting cattle… Cattle became the largest megafauna in mass, producing a lot of methane, which probably changed the climate, prevented another oscillation into another glacial advance (climate models seem to indicate).

Much of the Northern Hemisphere is permafrosted, real deep (up to a mile!). This is going to melt, expelling gigatons of CO2 and CH4, presenting both disaster and opportunity….

CHAT AI, another pandora box, is an immense opportunity. All it does is connect pieces of disparate, often obscure, knowledge and relate them with logic. This is going to enable tremendous scientific advances, and a democratization and tremendous expansion of knowledge.

Applying CHAT AI to permafrost melt will show to the aghast multitudes that there is a danger of world hypoxia (lowering of oxygen level). The writings and the detailed logic (from yours truly) exist, they have been ignored, CHAT AI will find them.   

We, and our pandora boxes, are the dark side… that’s what gods do! Smile! We may as well, when in doubt… L’univers sourit aux audacieux…

Patrice Ayme

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Pandora’s Box containing all the evils and troubles of the world was part of Zeus’ devious schemes: 

Zeus created Pandora, the first woman, as a punishment for Prometheus, who had stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans. (So you see, humans were initially male…) Titan Prometheus was a champion of humans who taught them many important skills, such as agriculture, animal husbandry, metalworking, mathematics, and writing.

Pandora was given the box as a gift but was told never to open it. However, her curiosity got the better of her, and she opened the box, releasing all the negative forces into the world.

Pandora’s Box represents the concept of unleashing chaos, destruction, and suffering by indulging in curiosity, and disobedience. The myth claims that once such negative forces are unleashed, they cannot be put back.

Metaphorically, Pandora’s Box refers to situations where someone does something seemingly innocuous but ends up causing a lot of damage or problems. It’s a reminder that our actions have consequences, and we should be mindful of the potential repercussions before we act.

North American Arctodus Primus, the huge “short face bear”, could run at 40mph (65 kmh) on its long legs, and was mostly predatory. The idea has been suggested that it long blocked penetration by humans…probably until more advanced hunting techniques such as very fast, efficient poison arrows were invented… Ye spoisoned arrows were another pandora box, but they got rid of most of the dangerous megafaune…. Another North American denizen was Homotherium, a giant saber tooth cat.

In North America, Homotherium first appeared during the Irvingtonian stage, about 1.8 million years ago, and persisted until the end of the Pleistocene, around 10,000 years ago. They were among the largest predators of their time, with an estimated body mass of up to 400 kg (880 lbs). They likely hunted large herbivores such as bison, horses, and camels, and may have also scavenged on the remains of other predators’ kills.

Homotherium is known from numerous fossils found throughout North America. It was clearly eliminated, with most of its prey, which inculded American elephants, by Homo Sapiens…

Progress From Prowess: Flying Boats Fear UFOs

Nowadays, some boats fly out of the ocean. And they fly faster than the first planes did, a bit more than a century ago. Foils located below the boats lift them out of the water, and that, in turn reduce friction considerably. Water is one thousand times denser than air. Kinetic energy is ½ mvv, so the energy imparted by an underwater foil, creating lift, will do so with a much smaller surface than a wing [1].  A drastic problem, though, is UFOs. Flying boats go really fast, they can cruise at twenty meters per second (seventy feet). When they encounter an Unidentified Floating Object, it doesn’t work too well. This problem should be fixed for a variety of reasons, from moral to technological, to economic, to, one should say, spiritual.

Technological progress is important: it is the essence of humanity and gave birth to it through a process of artificially natural self-selection. In particular present humanity, with 7.8 billion individuals, using the technologies it had to use to get to its present situation, has put spaceship Earth on an unsustainable course. 

There are two ways out of this: either a spectacular regression, through war, famine and collapse, or a spectacular progress into new technologies which will make our integration with the biosphere sustainable again. 

Around the World Record Holder: 40 days, 23 hours and 30 minutes. In 2017 [2]. It is presently equipped in 2020 with new foils which enables it to stand more outside of the ocean, just skim the water, and went already half way around the world in less than 20 days

The first around the world sailing record for circumnavigation of the world was the Basque Juan Sebastián Elcano and the remaining members of Ferdinand Magellan‘s crew who completed their journey in 1522…. After nearly three years of navigation (and only one ship left out of five; 35 circumnavigators survived out of an initial 270… Let it not be said that the global world we now enjoy was obtained cheaply. And as far as “colonialism” is concerned… Magellan died because it took part in a local war in the Philippines; the main aim of Magellan’s expedition was to prove one could circumnavigate, and thus obtain spices such as pepper and cloves from the Maluku Islands more cheaply…)

Sailing while flying from and out of water could be a technology of the future even for the most massive transport of goods and people. The technology uses computers, because electronics is faster than neurology. High flying kites dragging a boat could help too…

Trading goods is a global, essential activity that creates much of the world’s pollution as it is, and it is therefore essential to reduce said pollution, without killing trading (We trade your brawn against our brains!)

Some have whined that boats going at 25 meters per second through the ocean could collide with sea mammals, and fast sailing was, therefore, an unethical activity. Actually the problem of UFOs, unidentified Floating Objects is dramatic for flying sail boats. In the present Vendee Globe, several boats were damaged by impacts with UFOs, and had to hobble into port (not necessarily from damage to just the foils: the boats go so fast that they can be damaged anywhere). In early November a catamaran hit a UFO in the Atlantic, and capsized, killing the pilot (others below deck survived). Many of these UFOs are… containers dropped from giant cargo ships.

The impact on and with sea mammals could probably be reduced precisely because the foils make noise, from cavitation, the formation of bubbles, and should warn sea creatures. Maybe studies could be made to generate a clearer warning, or maybe collisions are mostly with man-made oceanic debris, and that, per se, should be an important object of study leading to diminution thereof. A French company is making devices which scan the sea ahead of the boats. Flying maxi trimarans have also to steer around icebergs (from satellite data), and growlers…(by looking out!) 

Other ships collide with sea creatures, but nobody cares as the ships are too large to be affected by the collisions. Hence the high speed collisions of flying maxi-trimarans with UFOs attract attention to this problem, which has been so far ignored. Efforts to avoid collisions, necessary for the maxi flying trimarans, and other flying boats, could then lead to reducing collisions and pollutants in the high seas, both laudable objectives. Thus sailboat flying is morally correct.

So let’s celebrate the efforts to fly on boats around the world in less than 40 days! Such efforts are not just technological and even scientific prowess, but also economic and moral prowess!

Meanwhile Elon Musk’s SpaceX flew its astounding Spaceship, SN8, eight of the name. It landed hard, from low pressure in the “header tank”… and exploded, but the test was nevertheless wildly successful. It demonstrated all sorts of capabilities, including aerosurfaces precision control and the ability to flip the huge vehicle upright just before landing. All this is key to the possibility to use rocketry in all sorts of ways, including going around the world in less than an hour… And we will take off from Mars, after fueling there, because it is apparently possible to make oxygen and methane on the Red Planet, from large quantities of briny water, therein. Why to go there? Will whine the losers… Why to go anywhere?

Some will whine that all these technological prowess, from SpaceX or French flying sailboats, is fundamentally inhuman. Far from it. It is those who condemn technological prowess as both exploit and solution, who have understood nothing to human nature, and are fundamentally inhuman.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Why planes fly is not very clear(!) There are many effects to consider. Same thing for boats, thus flying boats have many types of foils/wings. 

My own guess is that what is most important is the deflection of energy, in which direction the 1/2mvv can be sent. That explains why under water foils can be so small: if just the Bernoulli Principle applied, foils would have to be as large as 1/1,000 as wings. Besides, the Bernoulli Principle, long considered, I think erroneously, as the main reason why the wings of planes provide lift, does not, cannot apply to sailboat foils; because water is not compressible… (Or, at least, not significantly so!)  , 

Actually the world record holder for going around the world, IDEC Sport, a pretty old boat from 2006, established its record in 2017. Then IDEC was fitted with new, more advanced foils, and immediately beat the record of Tea Route, Hong Kong to London. With its new foils, the main part of IDEC just skims on top of the water, it does not outright lift out of the water as more recent boats do. But that is obviously enough to reduce friction considerably. IDEC can cover more than a thousand miles in 24 hours.  

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2018/11/16/those-flying-boats-fight-the-co2-catastrophe/

No improved technology, no progress… What those who don’t want to go back to the Moon forget…

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[2] This boat changed names, not just technologies, a few times, as its (French) sponsors changed. It was known initially as Groupama 3, and had been made for a particular skipper, frank Cammas.

After two abortive attempts ending in 2008 and 2009, Groupama 3 finally took the Jules Verne Trophy in 2010 with a time of 48 days, 7 hours 44 minutes and 52 seconds. Ten years after her record-breaking Transatlantic dash, and now named Idec Sport, the boat again holds the Jules Verne Trophy after Francis Joyon and his crew took her non-stop around the world in 40 days 23 hours, 30 minutes and 30 seconds.

Colonization All Over. So Why So Bad?

It goes without saying that colonization was a terrible thing, whine those who want to look good to themselves and other whiners. Colonization was a crime, they insist. At least that’s what PC people howl on every roof, as part of their unwitting campaign of rage against civilization. Because civilization, which was not civilized, caused colonization, this evil of evils, they crowe. Right.

We the descendants of the colonized shall howl from every roof what victims we are.

We the descendants of the colonizers, shall howl on every roof what criminals we are.

We the bipolar paranoid schizophrenic stand as accused, and may as well be mowed down by Islam driving SUVs, trucks, jumbo jets, and non sense, all over us.

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Indeed, ladies and gentlemen, who does not descend from colonialists and colonizers?

All the Americas were colonized.

All of Oceania was colonized (twice at least).

Was the colonization of Australia by aborigines (who are part Denisovans), 50,000 years ago, a bad thing? It killed a lot of marsupials!

Sénégal: Organized, unified, but never really colonized! A very rare case!

Japan was colonized (twice at least). Japanese civilization started for real, when the archipelago was colonized. By the Chinese.

Some will say China was never colonized. Well, there used to be 100 nations with 100 languages in China, as recently as three centuries ago (the emperor himself recognized then, in a very sophisticated intellectual exchange with the Jesuits; and he expressed both his will to respect that, and his incapacity to do otherwise). However, nowadays, Mandarin (just one language) is taking over, all over. And all Chinese are forced to assimilate with the Borg in Beijing. That’s colonization therein. Is it bad? My daughter is learning Chinese, or, more exactly, Mandarin. She will be able to talk all over.

Madagascar was colonized (thrice; from Indonesia, Africa, France). Even Greenland was conquered by the Inuits, who pushed away the Vikings… (On their way, the Inuits had annihilated previous denizens in the northern Canada archipelago…)

Most of Africa was colonized multiple times. By descendants of Neanderthals (!), Bantus, Phoenicians, Greco-Romans, Arabs, etc.

All of Russia is a huge colony, all the way to Kamchatka. “Russ” initially means Eastern Swedes.  The Eastern Swedes, Viking style, invaded the huge placid rivers of Eastern Europe, all the way down to the Black Sea (where they could trade with the Romans). In the Tenth Century, Vladimir of Kiev conquered Crimea from the local Khan (Mongols who had themselves conquered centuries earlier the Greeks, who had conquered a millennium prior, etc.)  

Even China was momentarily (a few centuries here and there) conquered by Buddhists, Tibetans, Mongols, Mandchous…

Arabia was greatly colonized by Persia, much later Turkey (Ottomans) for centuries.

Europe?

Europe, shortly before Rome rose, was invaded by the Celto-Germans, who covered up the entire continent, all the way to Anatolia. When Caesar invaded, Gaul (“Gallia”) was made of 60 nation-states.

Much of India was invaded, colonized by white men coming from the north, central Asia, four thousand years ago, or more. That’s why India and Europe enjoy the same Indo-European language family.

Egypt was invaded by the Arabs, more exactly by Caliph Omar’s army. Never recovered (whereas Egypt had recovered from colonization by Black Pharaohs, Nubians, Sea People, Libyans, Greeks and Romans). Egyptians themselves had to decolonize the Sahara desert and concentrate on the Nile Valley and adjoining oases.

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A real question is: which places in the world were not colonized?

Paradoxically, much of West Africa is one of the most pristine, uncolonized places.

West Africa is generally viewed as having been a French, British, Portuguese colony, and that’s superficially true.

West Africa also exported a lot of slaves (to the Americas).

However, West Africa was one of the much untouched places. (Contrarily to whiny repute!)

Not like Europe: all old European languages were wiped out by the Indo-European, Celto-German invasion (or close to it: Basque is a tiny remnant of what once was.)

And don’t brandish southern Europeans as old stock: the Middle Easterners came from the Fertile Crescent, with their futuristic crops (wheat, etc.) and their genes, 9,000 years ago. Another invasion to run over the many Sapiens invasions all over Europe, in the last 100,000 years. Neanderthals made it to North Africa, big time, and their genes to South Africa, but apparently not to West Africa.

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A real question: when is colonization good, when is it bad?

From the point of view of the invaded, one will guess that colonization is often bad. Yes, but not always. The invasion of Gallia by Caesar would end up creating the strongest part of the Roman empire, Francia, and the Birth of the West. Viewed that way, it was a good thing. And it sure is a good thing if there was no other way to get that good thing. Was it? We don’t know. Was Caesar innocent of the invasion? We don’t really know.

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“Colonization” in West Africa was mostly a joke, or more exactly, civilizing: ten French officers ordered around 5,000 Senegalese soldiers who, truly, conquered Sénégal. So, in truth, Senegal conquered Senegal under French management. In truth, there were basically no colons in Senegal: the land stayed property of the Senegalese (compare with the USA, where Indian lands were nearly completely distributed by the colonial government in Washington to the European colons!)

A big argument for the “colonization” of Africa was the eradication of slavery, which was endemic, pandemic, chronic, extensive and ubiquitous in Africa (the globalization of African slavery to the Americas, escaping the long arm of European law, has not been properly characterized…)

Here are the national languages of Senegal:

Balanta-Ganja Hassaniya Arabic Jola-Fonyi Mandinka Mandjak Mankanya Noon Pulaar Serer Soninke Wolof

Some of these languages are tonal, some are not (making them a different as latin and Chinese!) It goes without saying that packing such different nations in so tight a space (less than 200,000 square kilometers), result in mayhem, just to keep the population stable. So Senegal has, rightly so, just one national language.

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Colonization is good when it brings lots of progress, and less mayhem:

This should go without saying. However, the usual interpretation of (hard) multiculturalism is that all cultures are equally worth of respect. This thesis implies that progress does not exist. So we may as well regress, and have plutocracy.

So we see who these proponents of hard multiculturalism were trying to seduce: the powers that be.

By refusing to see when, how colonization has been, and could be, good, they refuse to bring reason to judge destiny. A silly attitude, considering how fast destiny moves these days.

But of course fundamentally hypocritical.

At least, nobody can accuse me to be a hypocrite. I don’t under (hypo) criticize. It’s much more fun, to over-criticize… And criticize all over… Colonization: assess, but don’t deny, its crimes, just as its merits. And remember the fine lines between colonization and immigration.

Patrice Ayme’

How Did EUROPE Become So SUPERIOR?

MGRA: Make Great Reason Again!

Europe is an emerging phenomenon, now towering over the entire planet, from her possessions, colonies (Africa, Americas, Oceania, much of Eurasia), culture and mental grip (world culture, United Nations, etc.) Hey, don’t flaunt European colonization of the entire planet too loud, that’s not PC! Instead watch with glee the Islamists being crushed in Iraq and Syria by European proxies…

Europe was initially named from a Phoenician princess. (That, per se, is revealing: Europe came from the Middle Earth!) Europe, as a cultural phenomenon articulated by progress, is thousands of years old.

The Romans had long been technology dependent upon the Celts for metallic military equipment (a domination which was to last 3,000 years). When Caesar invaded “Long Haired Gaul”, and reached the Atlantic, he was stunned by the thousands of tall, ocean-going warships that the combined Celtic Navy had mustered (Roman ingenuity devised a specific device, the Corvus to turn the superiority of Celtic tall ships into a way to defeat them). 

Circus Maximus, 20 centuries ago. Still the World’s Largest Stadium, More than 600 meters long. On the left side, the Imperial palace on the Palatine Hill (significantly larger than all the palaces of all present Western leaders combined!)

Contrarily to the usual myth, European superiority did not start with English superiority in the 1700s (that was mostly the fruit of English and Dutch conspiracies which turned out well, while the female Prime Minister of France overturned all the alliances, insuring French defeat in a seven-year world war!)

But Europe did not emerge by accident, but from culturally inherited moods, thus epigenetics, more than 100,000 years old. Yes, the climate, and the geography played a role, lighted the fire, and keep re-lighting it, from Enlightenment to Enlightenment. The fire of progress.

Unsurprisingly, regressive potentates put into question “Occidental values”, suggesting they are yesterday’s intrinsic evil. Sergey Lavrov, the powerful, long-standing Russian foreign minister declared in February 2017, that the time had come for a “post-Occidental world order”. According to Lavrov, one should wipe up all international institutions and replace them, Trump-like, by negotiations, state to state (as Russia is by far the world’s largest state, with the largest nuclear force, one can see how it would profit from it! The same holds for the USA.) This cannot end well. Russia is fundamentally a European colony (as the USA is). It should not forget how Europe got so rich. It happened through the universalization of advanced values.

Ah yes, because Europe is rich: In territory, Europe, through its (“ex”) colonies, owns much of the world: the Americas, Oceania, and all of North Eurasia are European colonies. Civilizationally, legislatively, Europe owns the world, with the possible exception of North Korea, and the irritant of a few (partly) Muslim Fundamentalist states.

Let me rephrase this, lest it gets misunderstood: the United Nations Charter is basically an improved rewriting of the Declaration des Droits de l’Homme of 1789. In turn, the French Revolution basic constitution was a writing of practiced established by the Franks, a full millennium earlier (including the outlawing of slavery, mandatory education, and the subservience of religion to state).

How did this happen? How did Europe achieve supremacy?

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Did the “Protestant Ethics” Make Europe Rich?

This is an opinion Anglo-Saxon supremacists love to claim. It’s mostly BS. First, the “Protestants” introduced only a minority of the inventions which made Europe strong and innovative.

Second, the presence of the easiest to exploit, richest coal beds in the world surfacing in England and North West Germany have nothing to do with “Protestant ethics”, but everything to do with steam-powered industrialization.

Third, one would have to define “Protestant”. Hint: it’s a French word. The “Protestant” movement started shortly after the fascist Christian church tried an encore with the First Crusade (after having nearly collapsed civilization in the Fourth Century already). Thus, the Protestant attitude and ethics is very old, and a reaction to Roman and Christian fascism… but not at all what Anglo-Saxon superiority maniacs have in mind.

The Greco-Romans were number one in trade and work ethics. 10,000 cargo ships plied the waves of the Mediterranean, every day. Later Italian and Alpine republics under the protective umbrella of the Frankish Roman empire invented most of the present “capitalist” set-up, complete with state bonds to finance Florentine armies, etc.  

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Did Colonialism and Slavery Made Civilization Rich As The Haters Of Progress Claim?

The traditional Politically Correct, Europhobic, European hating point of view is that slavery and colonialism made Europe rich: This is, erroneous, even ridiculous, on the face of it: the region of the world, Europe,  which outlawed slavery within, 13 centuries ago, would have been made rich from slavery.

However, in energy usage, per capita, Europe was the richest in the world, by 1000 CE. Actually some of the richest parts of Europe had no contact whatsoever with slavery and colonialism, for example, Switzerland (and many parts of France, Germany, italy).

The truth is much simpler, much more human: the exponential of understanding in Europe, and its subsequent mastery of nature, was the engine of European wealth. Europe succeeded better, because it was the part of the world where the essence of humanity, understanding and mastering nature, was able to express itself better.

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EUROPE BECAME RICHER IN THE LAST MILLENNIUM, BECAUSE EUROPE WAS SMARTER. Institutionally. Spiritually. Thus, Epigenetically:

It started with smarter laws, and the mentality of respecting them (“Dura Lex, Sed Lex” said the Romans; Law Hard, But [it’s the] Law). So institutions and moods were in place for European supremacy, 25 centuries ago. Those characters were the direct cause of the astonishing ascent of the Roman Republic.  

Rome got blocked in its eastward expansion by the Greco-Persian empire in the Iranian plateau. Factors in Rome’s failure to conquer Persia: Caesar was killed, the Republic caged (by Augustus and the plutocracy he headed). More importantly, Persia was part of the West, in the deepest sense. Babylonian kings (Hammurabi!) had imposed the notion of universal (republican) law, a full millennium before Roma became a village. Also Mesopotamia had invented and used much of the fundamental alphabet, science and mathematics, which spread westward.  

Rome itself was a baby fed, and educated by colonialists: the Etruscans, who had last come from present-day Syria, and the Greeks, who had colonized south Italy, including Naples (a deformation of the term New Town in Greek: Neo-Polis).

Not that all of the inventive mentality of the Occident started only around the Mediterranean, its Fertile Crescent and Egypt: the Indo-European colonizations started from Central Asia, targeting both Europe and India. The Amazons, a most anti-sexist civilization, was part of it, way back (more than 4,000 years ago), and we inherited some of this anti-sexist mentality (which may well have influenced anti-sexist Crete, as Crete was in trade with the Northern Black Sea region, where the Amazons thrived.

India played the crucial role in inventing the modern numeration system. Meanwhile, in the West, the drive to ever more powerful technology had ruled for at least 100,000 years: Neanderthals and Denisovans could only survive in north Eurasia through extensive technology. So they invented pants, dogs, and the usage of fossil fuels (already 80,000 years ago).

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European Progress Mentality Is At Least 100,000 Years Old:

Cro Magnon men lived in present day France, then a tundra which was fully surrounded by enormous glaciers, and the icy sea. Cro Magnons survived in the same way Neanderthals and Denisovans did before: using the maximal high-tech they could develop. They may have inherited few Neanderthal genes, but they inherited in full the mentality of the Neanderthals.

This is an important point: mentalities, even culture, can pass down the generations, even when genes do not. In particular, the importance given to culture, progress, understanding can live in a landscape, partly from the landscape itself.

The mentality of progress, with the advent of agriculture, became ever more crucial, as the ecologies got ruined, and new ones had to be manufactured.

It is the gigantic scale of severe, yet profligate Eurasia, a demanding, yet technologically rewarding environment, which made the evolution of superlative ideas possible, more than anywhere else, by constant interbreeding of exotic facts and logics.   

It is western Eurasia, North Africa, and the Middle Earth (all the way to India) which provided the best, largest incubator. Therein the Occident, but it is nothing without the mood of progress at nearly any cost.

That mood barely survived Christian fascism. Yet, the Franks were able to found civilization again, on a better basis, within two centuries of the Roman collapse, using superior ideas (no slavery, mandatory education, the church as a tool of the state, elections, etc.)

This was the first Enlightenment, post-Greco-Romans. That superior institutional set-up made the “West’ by the year 1,000 CE, not only richer than Rome, but richer in energy use by inhabitant, than any other place in the world. By then European technology and science was leading (even the invention of “black powder” was a complicated story, where Mongols and Europeans, not just the Chinese, played a role). As Europe became ever more technology dependent, the urge to understand things for sure (“science”) became ever more important.

A succession of “Enlightenments” went on… to this day. The acceleration after 1500 CE was just part of the singularity of understanding we all share into today. in many ways, it just repeated, and re-imposed, constitutional reforms which were made first in the Seventh and Eighth centuries, by the Imperium Francorum (soon to be relabelled “Renovatio Imperium Romanum”).

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PC Is The Perfect Con Against Humanity:

Right now the core of the machinery of what made civilization progress and be ever more superior is threatened. Friends have told me Trump threatened “reason”. Well, their reason (they tend to be in the 1% or serving the 1%, those “friends” of mine). There are many facts and possible logics to animate them, out there.

Consider Brexit logic: it is sheer madness, the madness of rage unbound. As in Trumphobia, Europhobia is motivated by a deep pain which arose from earlier events. (Clinton fanatics hate Trump because of the pain Clinton, Bill, Bush, and Obama, inflicted on them.)

An Arabic scholar wrote to me, saying there was no reason for progress (yes there is, just as on a bicycle). A Jewish (real) friend pointed out that many of the attacks against Europe also stealthily promoted the annihilation of Israel (correct).

The rabid, hateful, anti-European logics out there have doubled as outright attacks against honorable reason. Accusations of racism have been hurled, just to avoid debates (both Trump and your truly were subjected to this; many attacks against me were made snapchat way: erasing the fighting words full of hatred within minutes, after they were widely distributed, a method to practice defamation… without being able to prove it).

All we need to know is that never before in the history of the biosphere has the potential be greater for extreme catastrophe. Or extreme progress towards more mastery of nature by life. In any case, superior reason will adjudicate.

Patrice Ayme’

No Philosophy, No Progress, No Civilization

Progress is necessary: all ecologies, and thus technologies, get exhausted, or exhausting. Civilization rides a bicycle, and cannot long stop anywhere.

Progress does not happen out of the blue. It is instigated by the love of wisdom (philosophy). The progress of humanity is propelled by exerting a mind, one mind, at the highest level, first, and find a new idea, or emotion. And then to make that new wisdom blossom, and propagate throughout society. How exactly this happened can help figure out how it may happen again.

The explosion of philosophy in Ancient Greece was not sparked by Socrates (contrarily to legend). The reason for the veneration of the trio constituted by Socrates, his student Plato, and  Aristotle, student of the latter, is rather sinister. Socrates launched a weasel denunciation of Direct Democracy. demolishing it because of technicalities. That turned into the Politically Correct justification of more than 20 centuries of fascism (“monarchies”) from Eire to India.

Thus Socrates was a sort of famous counter-revolutionary. He helped demolish what he profited from, Athenian civilization (Aristotle did much worse, he demolished democratic civilization itself, promoting instead a fascist plutocracy led by his most intimate friends). The ascent of wisdom and progress was fully evident by the age of Pericles, decades before. Pericles’ top advisers, including his wife, were top philosophers. They promoted the concept of “Open Society“ (lauded in Pericles’ Funeral Oration). Arguably, the concept of Open Society, and the progress of mind it brought, was important than the entire work of Socrates.

But to understand the rise of wisdom in Greece, one has to go much earlier than Pericles’ generation. The great legislator Solon, a bit more than a century before Pericles, replaced the draconian Draco style of legislation with the opposite orientation. 

On The Left, Representation Of Solon In The US House Of Representatives. On the right, a statue of Solon.

Solon was born around 638 BCE. He was also a poet and war leader (he secured to Athens the possession of the island of Salamis through battle and Sparta’s arbitrage). Solon replaced systematic execution for any crime, by subtle and appropriate laws. More controversially, he erased debts (the ones in the know, his friends, profited from it).

Solon launched Athens into that Open Society managed around ideas and progress. Solon was a great traveller, and left Athens for more than a decade. Even earlier, Homer played an important role, with his tales of how the deepest emotions mess up with the world, or lift it beyond heavens. 

So why was Greece so wise? Because that’s how it rose to prominence. 

Similarly, the renewed rise of wisdom in the European Middle Ages did not happen just in the famed “renaissance” around 1450 CE. It had started much earlier. A full millennium earlier, when the Franks founded their civilization on tolerance. By 650 CE, the Merovingian Franks, by then the great power of Europe, thanks to their control of Gallia and Germania, outlawed slavery (under Bathilde, the slave who became queen). That was followed by nationalization of the Catholic church, fighting off three massive Islamist invasions, mandatory education, total religious tolerance, and a “renovation of the Roman empire”. By then all religious establishment had to teach everybody secularly, founding the university system. 

The Economist wrote a critique of “The Dream of Enlightenment” (by Anthony Gottlieb) “on some of the great Enlightenment thinkers, including Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau and Voltaire…

They were freelance philosophers working independently of the universities, criticising mainstream views and liberating thought from its academic straitjacket and neo-Aristotelian dogmatism. They were dangerous thinkers all, one publication away from exile, imprisonment or worse for their radical views on religion, politics and morality. Spinoza was the subject of a cherem, the equivalent of excommunication from the Amsterdam Sephardic synagogue; Locke disguised his authorship… spent a number of years in self-imposed exile; Hume chose to publish his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” posthumously; and Rousseau fled to England when persecuted in mainland Europe”. 

One cannot underestimate the terror generating new thinking brings. Most of the top thinkers where on the run, or in terrible trouble, fleeing here and there, from Giordano Bruno to Kepler, Galileo,  to Descartes, Hobbes, etc. In “What is Enlightenment?” (1784), Immanuel Kant used the motto Sapere aude (“Dare to know”) 

This all started five centuries earlier. By 1100 CE, the great philosopher, lover and songwriter Abelard was called “our Aristotle” by Peter the Venerable, head of Cluny (the largest religious establishment). Abelard fought Saint Bernard. Cathars and later Vaudois appeared in short order. Abelard got excommunicated, then readmitted to the Church (?), etc. 

It was even worse under Islam. A bit after the war between Abelard and Saint Bernard, the famous Ibn Rushd (“Averroes” in Western historiography), an Islamist judge, philosopher and doctor to Caliph (of Spain) was banned, and his books destroyed for writing “The Incoherence of the Incoherence” against a religious fanatic who had attacked philosophy in The Incoherence of the Philosophers  (Ibn Rushd got rehabilitated, shortly before his death, after a great victory of Caliph Al Mansour). 

In the next five centuries, many thinkers would be legally executed. Executed for offenses such as printing books; the Sultan Francois Premier of France (soon imitated by the Sultan of Turkey) outlawed printing for a while, under the penalty of death, some of Rabelais’s friends and printers were burned alive; Rabelais himself, a well-connected top doctor, was not touched, but implicitly threatened. This courage is what the Enlightenment was built on.

Bringing people together on yesterday’s consensus is easy. Politicians love to do that. Philosophers, the real ones, do the opposite: they bring people asunder, down to the bottom of their souls, to establish tomorrow’s consensus, with superior, yet unborn ideas. The greatest leaders were definitively either advised by philosophers (for example, Charlemagne, and the US Founding Fathers) or philosophers themselves (Cicero, Caesar, Clovis, Solon, Pericles, Queen Bathilde, etc.)

We are the thinking species. Yet thinking means creation, anew. And creation means destruction, at least neurologically speaking. Loving is giving, yet the gift of really truly new thinking, is a gift of destruction. This is definitively a paradox, common people have a hard time embracing the concept and the mood behind it, as they rather embrace the mood that being a sheep in the flock is much safer.

No wonder humanity is ambivalent about real philosophers, except when they are safely dead already. 

Patrice Ayme’

FREE TRADE FALLACY

We have just one civilization today: everybody, among common folks know what everybody else thinks. Yet, as resources previously used, such as fossil fuels, falter, civilization and the understanding of the universe which makes it possible in its present state, have to progress (not enough scientific and technological progress as needed, was the proximal cause of Rome’s failure). So it is crucial that really new, and correct, ideas be introduced (and not just in science).

If Those Are Best Friends Who, What Is The Enemy? Cockroaches? Those Among We The People Who Are Viewed As Cockroaches?

Yes even countries such as Saudi Arabia are part of this global civilization. And Saudi Arabia is fully part of the debate of what civilization means, and what it will have to consist of, looking forward. Watch France give the Legion d’Honneur to the heir of Saudi Arabia, and its Interior Minister, arguably the principal ideologue of the hardening of the Saudi line, inside out. So, in other words, while France fights the Islamist State (“Daesh”), France gives the nod to the hardening of the Wahhabist doctrine of Saudi Arabia (which, historically, was very minor in Islam), the ideology of ISIL. The results are increasingly strange: Salafist/Wahhabist terrorists attacked police and soldiers in Tunisia today. The security forces fought back. The coordinated assaults were shown, live, on the Internet. One could see young passersbys applauding the security forces in full combat (at least 28 terrorists got killed, plus seventeen fighting police and civilians who applauded the police).

Such contradictions are rife, all over the world. Look at “free trade”.

Globalization Of Trade Without Globalization Of Law Results In Plutocratization. This Is Exactly What Happened To The Roman Republic, & Why It Faltered

Free trade, well done, is indeed excellent. However, the West has been exporting science, technology and know-how, while not investing in a way commensurate to making this sort of export sustainable.

In other words, here is civilization’s problem: the learning, teaching, and research functions have been starved, relative to what the (critical) situation requires.

The result has been a collapse of manufacturing and related high worth employment in the countries who recently led progress in science and understanding (with the result that, like Republican Rome, the knowledge and wisdom of the most advanced countries is increasing faltering relatively to the flow of new ideas which civilization need to survive).

To make matters worse, said “free trade” has happened in the shadows. So-called high-tech companies have made fortunes, while paying no taxes: France just hit Google with a 1.6 billion Euro tax bill. Such companies and their principal owners had found ways to escape most taxes, thus starving the governments, hence the fundamental research their trade rests on.

So free trade can work, but only if it’s fair. As it is, most money flows are hidden (in so-called “Dark Money” and “Dark Pools”), and the owners are also hidden (thus escaping taxation and corruption charges, not just against them, but also against the politicians they influence).

Last week European Commissioners were caught promising ExxonMobil that the Transatlantic Trade Pact under negotiation with Obama would allow companies such as ExxonMobil to escape local legislation, including labor, taxation and pollution laws.

So the Republicans may be lunatics. But, in a world already ruled by lunatics, they are no doubt welcome.

Fair, just, and profitable  international trade requires a registry of all ownership and detailed trading activity, worldwide. Otherwise the sort of Republic we enjoy worldwide (as institutionalized by the United Nations) will know the same fate as the Roman Republic: an increasing sinking in the turbid waters of mindless will to power and tyranny.

Patrice Ayme’

[P/S: A shorter, trade only version of the preceding essay was selected as a New York Times’ “Pick”. Since I have complained stridently about NYT’s censorship, I have to be fair and to recognize appreciation too!]

Solar Roads

Solar Roads Versus Objection Mars:

Long ago, when the sun had not set yet on the will of the West to progress, a poet was visiting my home. He read some of his poetry. Humanity had just reached the Moon. The poet loftily declared that we did not need the Moon, we needed to fight hunger.

Later, the malaria parasite mutated, becoming resistant to standard treatment. Now it kills more than 1.2 million people a year. A typical objection to colonizing the Solar System is this:

“as I see it – Scott’s movie (even if I’m a sci-fi fan and I love some movies of him as well: Blade Runner is definitely a masterpiece) is a mere conservative propaganda aiming for people to agree that these extremely expensive missions to Mars are more important than saving African children from ebola, helping Syrian refugees, letting Europe be democratic yet or supporting laws against free guns in the US … Save the “american” astronaut, guys!” The answer is crushing, it holds in one picture:

French Truck On Solar Photo-Voltaic Road: the Future Has Arrived

There is nothing “conservative” about missions to Mars. Quite the opposite: such missions are fully progressive. They force humanity to progress.

Disease in Africa has to do with lack of governance. Lack of hospital has to do with lack of governance. In the Ebola epidemic, the countries that were struck were struck from lack of organized health care.

Senegal got one, just one, imported Ebola case. The patient got cured, and that was it. Even Mali, with better governance, in spite of a Jihadist invasion, was able to contain a few imported cases. Meanwhile, several countries next door, which are intrinsically much richer (Sierra Leone, Guinea. Liberia) saw thousands of deaths, and containment came from the efforts of NGOs, France and the USA (mostly).

When France pulled out of Africa, some particularly smart critic told a senior French government minister that the argument of “freeing” Africa from alleged colonialism made no humanitarian sense: there was no “colonialism” to speak of, and who was going to pay for one hospital every 100 kilometers in the world’s second largest continent? The minister smiled, and said: “this is precisely the point, we will not incur that expense anymore.”

Two capabilities save children in general: a) good governance. b) science.

When considering a Mars mission in this connection, one has to answer if the Mars mission will improve governance and science. Governance itself is a science. A mission to Mars is “expensive”. How much? 100 million dollars? 200 millions? How much would a Mars colonization program cost to launch? Two trillion dollars?

According to the International Monetary Fund, subsidies for fossil fuels are more than 5.5 trillion dollars a year. Enough to set-up a village on Mars, with existing technology.

Now going to Mars would force drastic progress in, say, fuel cells. The technology of fuel cells was invented for the Moon mission. After Obama became president, the research funding on this field was yanked out (probably to send money to businessmen such as Elon Musk).

Mars colonization would force enormously innovative research in energy technology, for example fuel cells, and nuclear energy (both fission and fusion).

Nothing else will.

Syrian refugees? Mars will not save Syrians? Nothing is more removed from the truth. Mars, the god of war, is what is needed in Syria, fighting for Goodness, instead of having Mars fight in the name of the devil Assad, as was mostly done so far.

The 300,000 dead in Syria, the eleven million refugees, have been caused by the rule of a single, cornered man, Assad, son of Assad, and the clique surrounding him. To solve the Syrian refugees crisis, Assad’s rule ought to be terminated, so that he could be replaced by generals open to enough democracy to keep Syrians in Syria.

Unfortunately the Franco-American decapitation strike against Assad was called off by Obama, for reasons so far unexplained. So the massacre keeps on going, with forces under the orders of Assad killing at least ten times as much what the Islamist State kills.

Fossil fuels consumption, should it go on for a few more decades, will bring the global temperature up five degrees Celsius, and massacre the biosphere. It has to stop, but can be stopped only with plentiful, cheap, new energy sources.

That, or massive war (killing billions).

How? Science to the rescue. Without evoking the spectrum of nuclear energy (fission and fusion), Solar Photo-Voltaic (SPV) is here. Normal solar panels were developed for space missions. Without space colonization, they would not have been developed. Yet, solar panels are fragile. Or, more exactly, were fragile until now.

A giant French construction company (Bouygues) deposed patents to cover-up solar cells with various materials to make them tough. Glass can be made as hard as steel. Then Bouygues engineers drove more than a million vehicles above the toughened-up panels in a few test cities (Chambery, Grenoble). Now the first solar road is under construction. Four meters of said road can satisfy a house’s needs. 100 square meters (twenty meters of the linear road depicted) are enough to drive 100,000 kilometers with an electric vehicle. If 25% of French roads were covered, 100% of French electric needs would be covered.

The future, the good future, is here: it’s enough to let science roll. But science needs challenges. Such as Mars colonization. If (very serious) scientists and mathematicians need bananas, such as the Fields Medal and the Nobel Prize, certainly humanity needs bigger motivation, and bigger prizes than that!

You want morality? More morality? Then you need a bigger science. And the way to get a better science is by setting higher objectives, greater passions, more exacting thoughts. Progress, the Will to Progress, is a mood. It cannot be confined to moral progress, because the universe juggles with evil. Moral progress means technological progress.  Mars colonization is no moral objection. Objective Mars is a moral imperative.

Patrice Ayme’

Science, Mars, Or Moral Bust

In the first democratic debate, Hillary Clinton said she was “a progressive who likes to get things done.” Let’s hope they will be less plutocratic than the “things” done by her husband. Meanwhile the question came up from others that going to Mars, or similar colossal techno-scientific progress had no humanitarian value. Before a more organized rebuttal, here goes my poetical opinion:

***

Science, Mars, Or Moral Bust

Many are the passions

Many are the tragedies

Against tragedies goodness,

All too often contend in vain.

Lest emotions move men and fate

Out of complacency, indifference,

Careers, self-admiring seriousness,

And obey the call of love for mind, sentience..

Yet, even when passions move us,

Towards the noblest goals, with the best intentions

All too often we find there is nothing

We can do at all, against pain and suffering:

When our magic, our science, come short..

To feel right and think right,

Does not mean we can do right.

For enabling goodness we need the powers,

The very powers which feed from,

By, and with, the Dark Side.

Power itself is dark.

Yet noble, and fundamentally us.

So yes, by any means,

Go to Mars.

It will nurture new emotions,

Wealth of transcendent emotions,

Not just lofty and intricate thoughts,

Humanity define.

We have always gone to Mars,

Ever since we left leafy trees.

We will stop,

Only when our fundamental lust,

What defines us,

Progress,

Dies with us.

 

Wingsuit Philosophy: 400 Million Years Strong

 

If Life is Quantum, why do Quantum assemblies jump off cliffs and peaks in wingsuits, with a high probability to be blown to bits? (See flying off the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey, Mont Blanc Range.)

Is it the love of danger? What else? Indeed, most of these ladies and gentlemen, when interviewed, insist that they love life. And most of them, indeed, seem to enjoy life, and are extremely lively.

Flier Jumped Off Peuterey (Peak on the Right)

Wingsuit flying is an extreme form of extreme sport. It entangles extreme neurological control, extreme speed, and extreme terror. Plus extreme contempt for probabilities. In other words, all what makes man tick where it counts most, in what counts most, in battle.

The film concludes with a list of more than two dozen wingsuit fliers known to have died in 2013, while practicing their passion.

The first attempted wingsuit flight, more than a century ago, was off the Eiffel Tower (then the world’s tallest structure). The gentleman long hesitated before jumping. He received a significant hole in his head. However, an autopsy revealed that he had died of a heart attack during the flight (so great was his fright?). Frenchmen invented the modern suits in the 1990s. Tubes inflated by air pressure rigidify them. The explicit aim was to land with them (to do this, I believe a 6 meter wing span is needed, thus further, hard, but imaginable, progress in material science).

Wingsuited Corliss Popping Balloons Before Zooming Into A Gorge

So why is danger lovable? Danger is not just lovable, it is adaptative, in the evolutionary sense of the term. That means that, for human beings, to love danger present greater advantage that the alternative. Can I prove it? Well, wingsuit flying and all sorts of behaviors potentially lethal to those who indulge in them, are only explainable by the thrill of danger. If this thrill is perceived as more valuable than life, it’s that life cannot do without it.

As Sherlock Holmes noticed, when one has eliminated all other explanations, what’s left is what is going on.

The usual suspects, the loud vegetarians, mosquito lovers, peaceniks, Dalai Lama worshippers, partisans of the intrinsic goodness of man in general, and of the extreme placidity and sanctity of themselves in particular, will meekly bleat that from such violence comes the undoing of man. Assuredly, they will reckon, loving danger leads to war, mayhem, and horror of horror, violence, to put it in one hated word.

Yet, what is man if not the creature of ultimate force? Violence is how man was built, one mutation at a time.

After these vigorous considerations, I went running more than twenty miles in the mountains, some of it above 8,000 feet. Never mind a little snow and ice: the greenhouse presents advantages in late November. At some point I met some mountain bikers: ”What are you doing, so far from anywhere?” I did not tell them I was philosophying, as I already looked crazy enough with my skimpy outfit (running is higher metabolism than biking).

Back in the land of computers, I stumbled on an interview of Jeb Corliss, an expert of “proximity flying” (see above). He reached pretty much the same conclusions as yours truly, in an interesting article with a stupid title:

“Courting popularity has never been a priority for Corliss. “Listen,” he tells me, “I talk about the deaths. I talk about the disasters.”

“And if you die?”

“If I die, I want that footage on TV the next day.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because this is not chess. This is not backgammon. This is not . . . ” (Corliss racks his brain for a yet-more-contemptible pastime, and finds one) “golf. This is dangerous. I believe that footage of fatalities is way more important than film of some guy flying across a beautiful meadow. What we are doing here is very important. I believe that flying is what evolution is about. Think of the squirrels.”

“OK.”

“At the beginning, there were probably only a very few squirrels that even contemplated flying from tree to tree. The other squirrels thought they were crazy. I imagine hundreds of them died in the attempt. But then, in the end, one of them managed it. Now that, to me, is evolution. And now we are evolving, through technology and through skill. I liken what we’re doing in proximity flying to the first animals that left the water. We are evolving and growing. And becoming stronger. What else,” he asks, “is the purpose of life?”

The usual suspects, if they have time to stop grazing their pastures, will call the preceding Nietzschean, or Hitlerian, and condemn it. But that would be wrong on both counts: Nietzsche hated evolution, and Hitler loved regression. Corliss’ philosophy wants progress. That philosophy, which has been mine, ever since I reflected in the wastes of Africa, is very close to Lamarck, and… Sade.

400 million years ago, during the Devonian Period, the earliest tetrapods derived from the lobe-finned fishes.

It is an important point that, although plants did not need brains to conquer the land, brainy animals, having brains, had to decide to conquer land.

Strict “Darwinists” speak as if they cannot understand this, and brains are just what genes do (see in particular Dawkins). Does that mean they never decide anything, except what class and genes gave them? (Lord Matt Ridley, one of the most strident advocates of total gene control, and of plundering the planet, is a major and most propagandizing plutocrat; believing “genes” control all means class controls all).

Yet, that’s obviously wrong: if all and any fish had been so terrified of land that they had not tried to crawl on it, all the mutations in the world would not have made the vertebrates conquer land.

For 400 million years, our brainy ancestors took great chances, and very few of those who took the greatest chances, that is, the most lethal chances, could reproduce. They died early, they died hard, but they tried something crazy, to give some mutation a chance… And, as we will see in a companion essay, a chance for this mutation to appear!

Without the will to progress, there would have been no progress. There would be only plants, bacteria, viruses.

Patrice Ayme’

(Thermo)Nuclear Base Load Energy Soon?

As you unwittingly wait to board Ebola Air, let me distract you with a more palatable, albeit philosophically related, subject.

Sustainable energy means wind and PV (Photo Voltaic). Other possibilities don’t work enough to make a global dent. (At least not yet, by a long shot.)

Except maybe for tidal and current power, used in Europe since the Middle Ages (exploitation of sea currents is tested on a grand scale in Europe presently; a related possibility would be to use thermal differences in the ocean; but barnacles are a problem).

Solar thermal is controversial: it occupies so much space, zap birds, insects, etc.. Its one advantage is that the energy, heat, can be stored overnight. Geothermal works only in very few, small places (elsewhere it generates earthquakes for reasons similar to fracking).

Hydroelectric is sustainable only in conjunction with nuclear (to refill the reservoirs… Although don’t tell that to California’s empty dams).

The riddle of wind and PV, is that they work only occasionally: one needs base load power. When the sky is black grey with little wind, and it’s very cold, and it lasts for weeks, in a typical Euro weather in winter, a marais barometrique, one needs power. This is the so called “base power” (it’s supposed to be around 40% of peak demand).

Dishonest pseudo-ecologists have, in practice, pushed for fossil fuels base power (because they hate “nuclear energy”… not that they know what it is). All too many (pseudo) ecologists claim one can fight the CO2 built-up catastrophe, while having a fossil fuel base load.

That cannot work: any fossil fuel infrastructure added to the grid cost a fortune, billions of Euros and, or Dollars, for just one plant (typically with a cost around 3 billion). So one cannot add such a plant to not use it. Once built, it will be used (especially if a third of the grid capacity is made of them!)

And there is no, nor can there be, for theoretical reasons, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). CCS is another lie. Herds of noisy pseudo-ecologists have been lying about the coming of CCS. (CCS works only in half a dozen very special places: it’s typically re-injected right away where it came from, a gas field.)

Real ecologists such as yours truly, know that there is just one ecologically correct possibility for base load energy that can be imagined at this point: nuclear power, new nuclear power. That’s what has to be developed to replace fossil fuel base energy. As I said many times, second (or the identical third) generation nuclear power plants were, are, military in disguise (they produce Plutonium, crucial for bombs). So, just on non-military-nuclear-proliferation grounds, they should be shut down.

There are plenty of fission techs that could be made safe and fruitful (including some burning nuclear waste).

And then there is thermonuclear fusion.

In nuclear fusion, light atoms combine into stable forms (mostly Helium 4) and release excess energy. There no nasty waste (as this comes from heavy nuclei). However 80% of the power is as a neutron flux. In the 1920s, it was guessed that fusion generated the power of stars.

In the 1950s, tricks were found to use the X ray light of a plutonium bomb to compress thermonuclear fuel, and heat it up to get a short, but mighty fusion: the H bomb. The first one was much more powerful than expected.

The old joke is that controlled, sustainable thermonuclear fusion has always been, and always will be, the energy of the future. However, we generate roughly 10,000 times more fusion (per unit of fuel) as we did in the 1950s (this is roughly as good a progress as the famous “Moore Law” of the doubling of the power of computer chips, every two years, but at a tiny fraction of the cost: it cost trillions to develop computer chips).

Table top sustainable thermonuclear reactors are for sale. Nuclei are accelerated, using electric attraction, collide, and fuse. Those reactors generate neutrons (neutron beams can be used for all sorts of application, including medical). At this point the efficiency of these reactors is insufficient for gainful power generation (but it’s imaginable that tweaks  to this tech could generate much more energy than it uses).

Numerous fusion concepts are being developed (although not enough). The giant ITER uses the safest technology, where a thermonuclear fuel plasma is confined by exterior magnetism. But numerous alternatives are studied.

The University of Washington, and others, claim to have made a breakthrough: computers studies would show that one can tweak the geometry of the thermonuclear fuel plasma chamber in such a way that the plasma itself would generate the magnetic field bottling it away from the walls.

That does not mean that ITER is useless. Just the opposite: ITER is developing new materials to resist the mighty thermonuclear fire… which all thermonuclear reactors will have to use.

Even the famous Skunk Works of Lockheed Martin is working in the aptly named “Revolutionary Technology Programs unit” on what it calls the compact fusion reactor (CFR). At this point, it’s a containment vessel the size of a business-jet engine.

Lockheed believes it will be small and practical enough for interplanetary spaceships, transoceanic ships and city power stations… Or even fusion power aircraft (fission nuclear-powered aircraft were tested 50 years ago). It speaks of a very quick development program, with a new proto-reactor type every year.

The world economy is faltering, in great part because the global Return On Investment (ROI) of fossil fuels is quickly getting worse.

The subsidies for fossil fuels are enormous: up to a trillion dollars, worldwide, each year.

Ecologists should push to have a small fraction of this directed towards clean, safe nuclear energy. There is no doubt that a crash program on Thorium could give efficient plants within ten years (China will have a plant next year; the problem with Thorium is not whether it can work, but simply a question of regulation and ROI; understandably private industry is leery to launch itself without governmental support).

It increasingly looks that thermonuclear fusion is a plausible alternative for base load energy, sooner than one expected even six months ago.

And now please immediately board Ebola Air. Although it does not look like it, the same mindset that will help fix Ebola, is the exact same one which calls for thermonuclear fusion. The virus, indeed, has probably mutated, to become more easily transmissible. That is pure selection of the fittest (virus) at work.

In the matter of Ebola, as in all the big issues regarding civilization, there is only one optimal way out, the same as for the European Union construction: think, solve, progress, up, up and away!

Patrice Ayme’