Fusion and The Future

Tom: This story caught my eye earlier today.

Maybe this means I’m an optimist. Or even a sucker; a fool. All I know is that when I meet Moses, the 60-year-old scientist who runs this place, and he shows me a tiny pellet, about the size of the multivitamin I take every morning, and swears it will provide an endless supply of safe, clean energy, I want to believe him.

Personally, I believe the next major step in technological evolution lies in fusion power. As the non-renewable energy sources of our planet begin to dwindle, people are already looking at greener ways of making electricity. Not only can fusion provide energy with little to no carbon footprint, it produces it at a scale that could provide for our ever expanding population and allow us to achieve things like inter-planetary travel. Isaac Asimov explained that the next level of technology  after constructing flying machines is to take control of our own primary. Fusion would achieve this by replicating the forces that power the sun, ushering humanity into a new age of science and technology. Or maybe I just read too much science fiction.

Some Things You Might Have Missed

Tom: While getting news has certainly been made easier with the advent of computers and whatnot, there’s a lot of stuff happening all the time. So much, in fact, that it’s obviously impossible to try and keep tabs on everything. So even though it’s past midnight and most people won’t be reading this until tomorrow, here are a few bits of today’s news you might have missed.

With the ratification of the Libson treaty, the Pirate Party now have a second seat in European Parliament and at 22, Amelia Andersdotter will become the Parliaments youngest member.

My political ambitions include a thorough revision and change of the copyright legislation, a complete removal of the patent system and a more balanced approach to security, safety and the market versus privacy, where the latter in particular needs to be taken much more into consideration. I believe in strong civil rights, even in a digital environment. (source)

Meanwhile, down in South Africa, fish stocks are dwindling and great white pelicans have turned to eating live gannet chicks. While certainly a neat trick for the pelicans, entire gannet colonies are in danger of being destroyed. With food scarce in the water, cape gannets (same bird family as pelicans) are spending extra time away from their nests hunting, leaving plenty of time for opportunistic pelicans to nab a quick meal. While this behaviour is a great example of adaptablity, cape gannets (who can live up to 25 years) are getting scarcer and scarcer.

That’s all for now as I am quite sleepy.

Hello Again

Tom: Kudos to Aaron for posting all week. I’m always interested in ways of forcing yourself to do things and I might even try something similar at some point. For now, I just thought I’d give you a little insight into what’s going on in my life/head.

This Saturday is my 18th birthday. Down here in Australia that means I will legally be able to drink, gamble and be charged as an adult. Yay! My only regret is I forgot to break a bunch of laws while I still could, but that’s ok, I’ll just have to do my wrong-doing internationally.

While I’m sure not much will actually change once I’m 18, I’m looking forward to being able to go to 18+ events like concerts. The timing is pretty good as concert season is coming up (actually, it could be a lot better. I could have turned 18 before concert season). But 18 or not, I still don’t have any money. To rectify that, I recently quit my job as a waiter at Sizzler and got myself two new jobs. The first is at the patisserie across the road from my house (so freaking convenient). The second is working for CBH, a company that handles most of the grainharvest in WA. The job is a few hours away so I’ll be staying with a friend’s family for a month. The job itself will be mostly labour but the pay is great and I’m thinking the time away will give me time to write. Or not. Either way, I get lots of money.

In other news, a hobby I’ve always meant to get into is photography. With my birthday on the way, I figured now was the perfect time and I enlisted some relatives to band together and buy me a camera. The result:

After consulting the the internet, I decided on the Nikon D40. Not only is it one of the cheapest DSLRs around, it’s apparently very beginner friendly. You can expect amateur photos to start popping up on this blog as soon as it arrives in the post.

That’s all for now but before I go, I suggest you have a read into the news of what happened to Professor David Nutt in the UK. Regardless of what your opinions are on the safety of drugs like ecstacy and cannabis, the way the government has written off his and the rest of the drug safety board’s scientific opinion in favour of a political agenda has scientists resigning like dominoes.

We are not special

Tom: Some see it as a rather bleak look at humanity, but the truth is that human beings are made up of the same stuff that everything else is; matter. We’re an evolved member of a species, just like all the others. Some people refuse to accept this, with many attributing our uniqueness to some form of ‘soul’. There is however, a simple reason why do this; We feel special. Not only are we top of the food chain but we do all these fancy things like art and science and philosophy. If we’re just animals, why do we write music? Fall in love? Reflect on metaphysics? Obviously, there has to be more to humanity than flesh, blood, neurons and nerves, right? Nope. The emotions we feel and the things we’ve achieved make us feel special but the truth is the ‘mind’ is nothing but a collection of sensory inputs and outputs. What makes us able to feel emotions and achieve things we deem beyond the realm of animals is it’s enormous complexity.

Darwin once said; “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind”. What he means is that as advanced as the cognitive abilities of humans are, most (if not all) of the peculiar human qualities we demonstrate can be seen in primitive form among other species. It’s only the tremendous difference in degree that makes us appear unique.

Now, this is of course only the tip of the iceberg (you can be sure I’ll bring this subject up again), but for now I’ll leave you with another Darwin quote (which I’m also sure won’t be the last):

“Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.”