Welcome to Thoughts. It's about all kinds of things. We hope to get you thinking, maybe about things that don't usually cross your mind. Have a look around, and see what we are thinking about at the moment.
More thoughts...
The
Space Pen; A time travel experiment; The nature of life;
We were there : disaster in New York
Recent thoughts
Too much safety
Interrogation (not) in America
Blaming God
A strange way to run a country
Looking for aliens
Drugs is not a country
Post-human
If it is truly our destiny to go to the stars, it can't be in these bodies. They are too fragile, and wear out too fast, and have too many needs. We will need better ones. At the moment this is beyond our reach, but not far beyond. Already we have mapped the human genome. Soon we will map the human brain, and eventually we will learn how to hack into the human operating system. Only when we can download ourselves into bodies that can withstand a little radiation and several centuries of journey time will we even begin to be ready.
But will we still be human? We spend more than 70% of our time catering to our body's needs, feeding, cleaning, sleeping, surfing on the highs it can produce. A being shorn of all that might achieve much, but would surely soon see things differently to an ape that wants to eat, drink, sleep and have sex, pretty much all of the time.
It won't be easy, but if we manage not to kill ourselves off in the next century or so, someone will become post-human. Just because they can. After that, things get very weird. For example, a human downloaded into better hardware could become almost infinitely intelligent, just keep adding more processing. Who can predict where that might lead? They might even figure out what it's all for, if it's for anything.
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Out there, there should be entities so much more advanced than us that we would have to call them gods. We can't be the only thinking entities in a billion billion galaxies, after billions of years. Yet we can't see or hear them. Could they be hiding from us? It seems unlikely. Why would they?
Perhaps it's really all about an afterlife, after all, and we're going down the wrong track. But I don't see how we can find out until we get a lot further down it, and either meet gods, or become them.
In the News
Did you know that at the same time that the British Ministry of Defence is sacking service people and cutting back savagely on military equipment, desperate to save money, a senior MoD civil servant, already on £200,000 a year and a chauffeur-driven limousine, received an annual "performance" bonus of more than £85,000, on top of his bloated salary? The bonus alone is worth two or three servicemen's jobs. What can he possibly have done to be worth that? Especially as he works in a Ministry whose incompetence is legendary.
Last year, more than two thirds of all core Civil Service staff received bonuses supposedly awarded only for exceptional performance. I wouldn't mind them being well-paid if they actually were the elite organisation they fancy themselves to be, but they are manifestly not. Just in the last few years we've had Border Agency staff driving a coach and horses through all the rules they are supposed to follow; HMRC getting literally millions of tax bills wrong; the MoD ordering aircraft carriers without planes that can fly off them; the Home Office Immigration unit delieberately "losing" cases to clear backlogs, and even at one point being run by an illegal immigrant; and that's just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. They are truly hopeless at managing any kind of IT project, invariably wasting millions and delivering nothing useable, eg the failed NHS patients records database. And they are so out of touch with the modern world that it is quicker for a minister to find out what is going on by asking his driver, who has a smartphone and a radio, than his civil servants, who think television is vulgar, and don't even know what a smartphone is.
There are some very good ones of course, but as they never fire anybody, there are also an awful lot of bad ones. The only thing they are really good at is hiding more and more civil servants in quangos and local government, so they can keep their ever-growing numbers out of sight, while actually consisting of more than half of all jobs in the UK economy, and strangling the life out of business with an endless torrent of new regulations.
No wonder the country is broke. Incoming governments always say they are going to do something about it. But they never do, because the only way a minister has to do anything is to tell a civil servant to do it...
Agree? Disagree?
Send your thoughts to thoughts at jonstorm.com.
Joe versus the climate
Most scientists now agree that climate change is real, we are indeed causing it, and it is going to wreak havoc. But unfortunately, we aren't really doing anything about it. The kind of measures being enacted so far are a bit like trying to stop an avalanche with a woolly scarf. Trading licenses to limit the amount of CO2 emissions won't do it, nor will carbon offsetting.
In a democracy, you can only make the kind of sweeping changes that are needed if you can persuade Joe Public to support them. But Joe wants his car, and his cheap flight to the sun every year, and his patio heater, and will vote out anyone who dares to suggest that those things are not sustainable and must be taken away. If you can somehow persuade Joe Public not to demand those things, perhaps something could be done.
Good luck with persuading Joe, though.
Just a thought...
To the rest of the world, it is a mystery and a considerable source of unease that so many Americans vote Republican, when to us it is so obviously a) a far right party, and b) only interested in the "rights" of the very rich to make lots of money, and to hell with everyone else. But it seems that in America, many turkeys really _do_ vote for Christmas.