Climate Distruptions — I want to do what I can to address this.
We face many challenges on the impending Climate Catastrophe front and I will just briefly highlight the most important element that looms over us.
Trillions of cubic feet of Methane Hydrates have been deposited over hundreds of thousands of years along the continental shelves in the northern hemisphere. All it takes is for the mean temperature of the ocean to rise 3° Centigrade and all that Methane goes into the atmosphere. Methane is twenty times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide and the release of that Methane will lead to a rapid spike in global temperature.
This has happened in the past which led to a 5-8° centigrade rise in global temperature 55.5 million years ago during the PETM event. This suggests that the temperature of the Earth is far more more dependent of the chemical composition of the atmosphere than it is dependent on the obliquity of it's orbit around the sun, or it's angle of rotation relative to the plane of it's orbit around the sun or the precession of the axis of it's rotation. This strongly implies that loading the atmosphere with the amount of Carbon Dioxide that industrial society is currently emitting can lead us to a tipping point when the ocean's temperature rises just 3° Centigrade. We have to transition to a carbon free technology very quickly to avoid this catastrophe.
Environmental Degradataion — I would like to be part of getting this mess regulated
We are rapidly destroying our ability to feed ourselves. The ecosystems of our oceans are at the brink of collapse and if we don't do something immediately, we will see what was once a cornucopia of food for the world, vanish over night.. We have seen too much in the media of hundreds of whales washing up on shore dead, or green turtles with plastic straws stuck up their noses. While that is horrible enough, that is only the tip of the iceberg of what is happening in the oceans. If we don't quickly put on the brakes we will see entire populations of fish, mollusks, crustaceans, vanish, seemingly disappear over night. We just can't let this happen.
The rain forests of the world are aggressively being decimated at a rate that will see them disappear in a decade if we don't act to stop this. The rain forests are our lungs. You see, what many people don't know, but take for granted that it will always exist, is the fact that 20% of our atmosphere is oxygen. Oxygen, however, is a very reactive substance and if it isn't constantly being produced through photosynthesis it quickly reacts out of the atmosphere forming substances like iron oxide, otherwise known as rust. The planet Mars has no oxygen in the atmosphere because there isn't any plant life on Mars. The color of Mars is reddish because all of the oxygen on Mars is locked up in the soil as iron oxide, which gives Mars it's characteristic reddish color.
The only way that human or mammalian life can exist on any planet is if there is plant life first, forests, trees, grasses and shrubs. And we can tell if life may exist on any distance planet simply by detecting the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere, because it shouldn't be there, unless some life process is producing it. That is why we need so desperately to protect our rain forests, because without them we suffocate.
The same goes for the arboreal forests in the northern Hemisphere. We need to protect them for the simple reason that we need to breathe in order to survive.
We Pay Dearly For Fossil Fuels — I Would Like to See the Real Costs Assessed.
The fossil fuel industry is making a huge profit off of fossil fuels, much more than they should be making if externalities were charged to their coists of production.
What are externalities you ask? Externalities are the value of the land destroyeed by strip mining, the drinking water contanimated by hydro-fraking, the loss of agriculture, destruction of propperty caused by excess carbon dioxide in the astmosphere, and the damage to people's health as as a result of toxins relkease into the aIr when coal and oil are refined and burned.
That is right, these are real costs, because someone down the road is going to have to pay to clean up the mess and pay for the doctor's and hospital's bills when people fall sick.
The way we have been taught that capitalism should work has always been all wrong. All costs need to be assessed against producers of goods to ensure that we don't end up in the situation we find ourselves in today with collpasing econ systems and run away global warming,
$0 raised, $20,000 to go
Endles War on Terror — I would like to see the "Endless War on Terror" framed in the proper context.
The cost of the "Endless War on Terror" that began in response to the 9/11 attacks, now stands at $6,000,000,000,000 dollars. Think about what that would have meant if that money was instead spent to develop alternatives to fossil fuel. We would have seen the construction of hydrogen fusion power plants, like the one being constructed in Cadrace France called ITER, and solar energy would now make up the majority of our domestic energy consumption. In short we would be a long way down the road toward curbing Global Warming and a long way down the road toward avoiding the Climate Catastrophe we are now facing.
Instead of destroyed cities across the Middle East, those cities would have instead have been transitioning to solar power and countries like Iran would probably be looking at constructing it's first hydrogen fusion power plant; yes wouldn't that be terrible, if Iran would convert all of it's nuclear power plants to fusion power plants they wouldn't have the capacity to make Plutonium for bombs any more and Israel wouldn't have any more reason to invade them. What is the point in destroying those cities. Is there a plan to rebuild those old cities using modern construction methods. There was a large middle class in Iraq before the "War on Terror" began, now there is only rubble and poverty. At a time in our history when we needed all hands on deck to to deal with the impending climate catastrophe, we instead spent 6 trillion dollars blowing people's houses to bits.
The entire "Endless War on Terror" was predicated on the false premise that Muslim terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, over 18 years ago, which we now know was false, and that war rages on with no end in sight. Can we call this insanity? Shouldn't we stop doing this?
I want to do what I can to make sure that the world is able to put this insanity into the proper context so that we might begin to build a new road that is routed through the fields of sanity so that this world, we all call home, can begin to heal.
Artificial Intelligence – This industry needs to be regulated
The boundary between computer science and neuroscience is completely blurring. Artificial General Intelligence is also moving forward at light speed at the same time that Quantum Computing is beginning to come out of the lab. The conjunction of Artificial Intelligence through the emergence of Spiking Neural Networks and Quantum Computing will lead to systems that are cognitive in every sense of the meaning that we are cognitive, only this system will be able to process billions of times more information per second than we can. As far as I can tell Artificial General Intelligence is already here, it is just a matter of roll out. Psychlab Heralds Dawn of Artificial General Intelligence
However, the person considered the godfather of AI, Stuart Russell, won't say when we will arrive at Artificial General Intelligence, but hinted that it may be at least ten years away. In any event the time to rollout is short and we can afford to squander any time between now and then. See: Stuart Russell on Artificial Intelligence: What if we succeed?
There is still no regulation on this industry. I listened to Tom Wheeler say that we shouldn't regulate this industry because it would stifle innovation. This industry needs to be regulated now. Just like AT&T did in 1934 with the passage of the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1934. We need a comprehensive Act like that to be passed today by our legislatures. Amazon is attempting to write it's own legislation regarding facial recognition software. Jeff Bezos and Amazon needs to be regulated they should not be parading araound as regulators; talk about the fox gaurding the hen house.
The 5G network is also being rolled out incrementally, and what that does is allow the AGI system to acquire data 100 times faster than with the 4G network. That means that the AGI systems will be able to learn one hundred times faster than they would have been able to learn on the 4G network. 5G doesn't really benefit us so much, as it benifits AGI. That is because humans can't process 100 mega-bits of data per second, but the AGI systems can. Also 5G operates in the 2 micron wavelength range and 2 micron is ionizing radiation that causes cancer. See: 5G Radiation Dangers – The Definitive Guide
The picture I'm getting is that though AGI, and 5G will provide for many more conveniences, it will also be harming populations because the technology required for inputing data into the system produces ionizing radiation in the environment that is harmful to all life forms. It is therefore my sense that this technology isn't for improving the lot of the average person, or enhancing life, but rather is for monitoring and controlling the average person..
I should observe here, that AI systems are now better at recognizing people than people are. So once an AI system identifies someone, it will be able to spot them anywhere in the world, pick them out of a crowd of millions. Because of advances in memory technology, AI systems also never, I mean never forget a face.
It has been further observed that one of the ways that Saudi Intelligence could determine that Jamal Khashoggi would arrive at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul at a particular time was the result of effective AI in action. Many of Khashoggi's associates' iPhones were compromised which were feeding information into an AI system which allowed Saudi intelligence to know when and where to be to pull off their dastardly deed.