Category Archives: Biosphere

Mother Earth ups the ante

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Mariner has harangued his readers about the Armageddon consisting of excessive population, disappearing natural resources, global warming and uncontrolled AI. But Mother Earth has just started to get involved.

In a report from Nature Geoscience –

“North America’s geological core has persisted for billions of years—it’s what scientists call a craton, a massive block of continental rock that withstands the natural recycling system of plate tectonics. Typically, scientists think of cratons as unchanging, nigh on eternal. But new research published on March 28 in Nature Geoscience suggests that a long-lost geological plate may be siphoning rock from the bottom of the North American craton, eroding it from below, right under our feet.

Such a scenario would not be unprecedented—scientists have evidence that the North China craton thinned dramatically millions of years ago—but it would certainly be surprising and intriguing to study in real time. “Cratons are the oldest cores of continents, so they have been sitting near the Earth’s surface for billions of years,” says Claire Currie, a geophysicist at the University of Alberta, who was not involved in the new research. “They’ve persisted through time, so this is quite unusual.”

Mariner could find no projected dates for these events but at some point in the future, the next tectonic shift may turn the Mississippi River into the Mississippi Sea or conversely, The Mississippi Mountains.

Mother Earth’s stash seems unending. Much of Florida and much of the Gulf-facing land in the US will disappear under rising seas; Global warming will disrupt political, economic and environmental conditions that may cause even more famine and unrest among human populations.

Mother Earth wants everyone to know that AI isn’t the only player in the future of us Homos.

Ancient Mariner

Trekking amid Armageddon

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In these days, attempting to live a stable life is like being an empty trashcan in a tornado. All the headlines focus on what “Wanna be a dictator” is doing to the fabric of government; there are large situations like global warming, rational health care, personal civil rights, what schoolchildren will not be taught, the emerging isolationism of each state in the Union, and the precarious ripping apart of economic relationships between democratic nations.

That’s just one whirlwind in the storm. Another whirlwind swirls around the corporate freedom to dissemble independent human behavior and replace it with computerized corporate manipulations of behavior and intervene the interface between humans and genuine reality.

Having one’s own private perspective on how to engage in the community has been diminished and largely replaced by the new town square, Facebook – which is a behavior similar to smartphones, which requires no social intervention at all.

Corporations have automated out of existence places and activities where ‘community’ could be felt and engaged in – places like small storefront businesses, shopping malls, and computerized food services that have a negative effect on restaurants.

Slowly, humanity (in the wealthy nations only, there is no life to be had in poor ones) is being corralled into the world of one of mariner’s benchmark icons, the movie Matrix. The model is identical but Matrix says humans were put into wired coffins, their brains filled with artificial life experience and their bodies were used as batteries for the great “system”

In this reality it is the same model but for different reasons. Smartphones replace the coffins, social control replaces batteries. Remember Zuckerberg’s fantasy about everyone having their own online town? Sort of like the false life of humans in Matrix.

But the Armageddon swirl is closing in. Everyone must now store their personal computer backups on the ‘cloud’. Metaphorically, your smartphone provides verbs, your computer provides nouns. Your computer is no more than a data entry keyboard – sort of like a typewriter but wired to the corporate database.

Mother Nature will step in big time in a few years. Not that it will necessarily make things better; Mother owns the largest corporation – the planet.

Mariner is inclined to go looking for his two ponies and a cart. He has no smartphone, will not store his data in the ‘system’ database and continually searches for ways to shop face-to-face with other humans and to spend cash for purchases. He is a Homo sappien approaching extinction.

Ancient Mariner

More info for peripheral view

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Everyone, around the world in fact, is inundated with the Trump phenomenon. Everyone around the world is troubled that their economics are so vulnerable to disruption. This vulnerability has a broader, peripheral circumstance that can explain this vulnerability: environmental resources are running out – whether they are elements, minerals, biomass, space or the effects of global warming.

As the population post cited, in all of human history, the population reached 1 billion. Then from 1800 to 1987, the population grew by 4 billion. What grew as well was the rate of consumption. Human laissez-faire about consumption is reflected in human treatment of the resources available: The world generates nearly two billion tons of municipal solid waste each year (MSW).  MSW includes trash from companies, buildings, houses, yards, and small businesses. The United States and China lead the way.

Mariner’s wife, a librarian, has a program where she reads stories to preschool children. She brought home a book which, with astounding clarity, demonstrated human disregard for environmental resources. The book is ‘One Little Bag – An Amazing Journey’ by Henry Cole.  All pages are drawings showing a small boy’s affection for his paper bag by always having it at hand for whatever purpose; it is the tale of a little boy who carried his one original lunch bag to school for over 700 lunches even using it to offer a wedding ring to his girlfriend. The pages also show all the industrial steps required to make a paper bag from chopping down the tree to paper manufacture, delivery, etc. One cannot read this simple story without realizing how trashy humans are. What is important is this trashy behavior does not show concern for the more important issue: disappearing resources.

Wastefulness is not limited to MSW. About four or five years ago, mariner watched a TV interview with a Federal Department head (mariner apologizes for forgetting the name). He was an advocate for expanding our ability to sustain natural resources in order to offset the impact of increasing consumption caused by rapid population growth. He addressed many industrial practices and the careless lack of concern by humans who consume large, irreplaceable areas of the environment just for profit or pleasure.

The Department Head went so far as to challenge lawns. “We need the space to grow food! Every bit of space around the home should be dedicated to self sufficiency, to help ease the pressure caused by disappearing food sources.”

It isn’t just food. Trickling through the news today is the concern for how much electricity and water the new computer age consumes. Computers alone have a special shortage in several minerals including Lithium, Cobalt and Zinc. Microsoft has just contracted the use of a nuclear power plant.

Mariner has a personal example: He and his wife maintain bird feeders. Many who offer this service find it invaded by squirrels. Mariner disregards this complaint knowing that he and his fellow Homos have leveled the natural environment of the squirrel to build huge, clunky houses, streets, tennis courts and businesses. The least we Homos can do is to be sympathetic to the shortage of food for the squirrel and any other wildlife that may still live here. It is interesting that only Homos need 1,200 square feet for a nest, plus lumber, steel, plastic, electricity, heating fuel, TV, a phone, a garage and two stories. Meanwhile, tigers and elephants are disappearing and wolves can’t live in the Midwest which is their natural environment because Homos will shoot them.

This peripheral information may shed light on why economies are not robust, why food and energy prices continue to rise and why every planet resource is at risk.

Ancient Mariner

 

Info for the reader’s peripheral vision

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The chart above illustrates how world population has changed throughout history.

At the dawn of agriculture, about 8000 B.C., the population of the world was approximately 5 million. Over the 8,000-year period up to 1 A.D. it grew to 200 million (some estimate 300 million or even 600, suggesting how imprecise population estimates of early historical periods can be), with a growth rate of under 0.05% per year.

A tremendous change occurred with the industrial revolution: whereas it had taken all of human history until around 1800 for world population to reach one billion, the second billion was achieved in only 130 years (1930), the third billion in 30 years (1960), the fourth billion in 15 years (1974), and the fifth billion in only 13 years (1987).

  • During the 20th century alone, the population in the world has grown from 1.65 billion to 6 billion.
  • In 1970, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now.
  • Because of declining growth rates, it will now take over 200 years to double again.

A necessary part of this post is to read the post ‘Population’ added on October 9, 2023. (Use the search box at the top, hit ‘enter’ After search, if the date is wrong, scroll down) It is a scientific report on rat and mouse population studies, which may be more significant today because of the dip at the top of the chart above. Briefly, as the population became excessive, the mouse society behaved just as humans do today with intensely and brutally defined classes from the untouched ‘wealthy’ mice to the militants, and to the deprived and brutalized underclass.

Information that comes from the planet’s side of things may offer collateral proof of the invasion of Homo sapiens:

• According to a new report from the World Wide Fund For Nature (formerly the World Wildlife Fund), there has been an average 60 percent decline in vertebrate animal species population — you know, like mammals, fish, birds, etc. — between 1970 and 2014. “Earth is losing biodiversity at a rate seen only during mass extinctions,” the report reads. The cause? “Exploding human consumption.” [BBC]

• Today, given the vast prairie between the Mississippi River and Eastern Colorado that existed before Europeans visited, only 1% exists today. Further, as a percentage of all living creatures, only 1% is wildlife.

There are just a few stable nation ‘herds’ left – and none have large populations.

Perhaps many of our political concerns may be influenced by this peripheral view of population. Will the new culture be socialistic? corporately controlled? controlled by survival of the fittest? Or, shudder, will humans fix the population issue by tossing about a few nuclear bombs? The mice in the study didn’t have nuclear bombs so there are no statistics about survival.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

Peripheral vision is important

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The Atlantic magazine had a piece about what’s behind Trump irritating Greenland. The bigger perspective is what is important rather than Trump’s shenanigans about “buying” Greenland at any cost. From the magazine:

“As polar ice melts away, superpowers are vying for newly open shipping routes in the Arctic Ocean and largely unexplored mineral and fossil-fuel reserves. Arctic warming could pose a direct threat to America’s security interests too: Alaska could have new vulnerabilities to both China and Russia; changes in ocean salinity and temperature might interfere with submarine detection systems; the extremes of climate change, including permafrost thaw in Russia, could drive economic instability, social unrest, and territorial claims.

During the Biden administration, the U.S. military and NATO had both started to treat global warming in the Arctic as a matter of real military concern. Whether that will continue under Trump is an open question. Even as the president has tried to erase U.S.-government action on climate change, when he talks about Greenland, he’s tacitly acknowledging that rising temperatures are rapidly changing that part of the world—and U.S. interests there.”

This is an example of peripheral vision because it encompasses four large issues: global warming and international economics as the world economy suffers under the changes brought by AI and the changes brought by natural resource shortages. One could spend days talking about each issue independently but in this case, the four together add clarity to every issue.

Another example is the increasing frequency of earthquakes and volcanoes, two terrible human experiences that can wipe out small nations. The two peripheral issues are global warming and the Earth’s behavior as a planet in the Solar System. On the one hand, global warming is having a chemical effect on the planet. Subterranean gases like Methane have begun to escape into the atmosphere or explode underground and can be the fuse to begin an eruption; warm oceans affect temperatures of the floor under them. This is caused largely by global warming. Geologists have mentioned that the largest volcano in the world, located in Antarctica, is rumbling.

On the other hand, the Earth’s rotation is becoming an issue because the molten core is spinning faster than the surface. Mariner has written earlier about this circumstance which will increase earthquakes and volcanoes and in the future will cause a compass reversal at the poles – something that already can be evidenced in the Baltic Sea and the South Atlantic where reports of compass irregularities have been reported.

Many issues in life that are not in the news may be dealt with more efficiently if one looks peripherally at the issue. Odds are more than one condition may make an issue perplexing. Further, using peripheral vision also exercises one’s comprehension of life in general.

Ancient Mariner

New things

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This is very personal information about your body. Your body has 800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cells. If the reader doesn’t know how to say 26 zeroes, it is eight hundred million billion billion. Interestingly, the vast majority of these cells are self directed and do not need independent information from outside the cell.

This post is about changes in the world of science. It also is because mariner doesn’t watch television much except for science documentaries and has more time to spend searching the internet to find answers to useless questions like ‘how many cells are in the human body?’

All the fields of science are changing procedures to leverage AI except mathematics itself which already is procedural except for the old theoretical issues. For example, the Rieman theory about prime numbers which was first asked in the middle 1800s.

Astrophysicists have become troubled about basic theories of the universe. For example, the gravitational role of black matter doesn’t seem to be correct given new AI technology.

In economics, the moneyed class is all agog about cryptocurrency as an investment because it is identical to dollar bills which are owned by the Federal Government, thereby reducing the risk of investment. In principal, cryptocurrency is an electronic paper dollar. At this point, although they are popular, corporate organizations like Bitcoin are not proven for safety. A bit of interesting information from a February 2020 post: … “the citizens of Kenya in 2007 became the first country to launch ‘mobile money’ transfer service through a cell phone provider that plays the role of a money exchange. Swapped phone to phone, no bank is necessary.”

Mariner already has commented on the use of minions to counsel small children and the return of in-home doctor visits (not really, the doctor is a Meta deepfake connected to a Google database).

In a lengthy diatribe he has predicted the end of democracy because AI is all about singular authority over broad expanses of human life from economics to interpersonal skills.

In the field of chemistry mariner watched a PBS documentary about how scientists already have mastered methods to manufacture RNA (RiboNucleic Acid) for any specific purpose – picking a future child’s hair color, height and nose type for example. Farmers already use an especially made RNA that duplicates the sexual perfume of a female butterfly. It is sprayed over an entire field of corn so that the male butterfly cannot determine the proximity of a female butterfly. If the reader ever eats an ear of corn and feels the urge to have sex with a butterfly, this is why.

The smartphone is the RNA of AI. Its functions are creeping into everything from automobiles to watches to whom one should marry, what to wear today and which cookie to buy – all of which are based on which sponsor is supporting the website. The other side of this behavior is what the reader doesn’t hear about, like other brands of cookies and dating partners who have been screened out because they don’t match the types of partners the database thinks the reader should like.

Donald who? Mariner has other things to think about: how long will it be before humans are warmblooded minions?

Is Harris’ first name really Pamela?

Ancient Mariner

 

How the brain would prefer to read written text

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This topic is one of those ‘Where did this come from?’ out-of-the-blue subjects no one ever thinks about but, as is his wont, mariner became interested in the process.

As this post is read, is the reader reciting most of the words in their head? If you must recite each and every word in your head – called subvocalizing – you are a slow reader, about 200 words per minute. The average novel has about 100,000 words so it would take the reader just over 8½ hours without stopping, to read an average-sized novel.

Many people who read regularly, whether at work or for pleasure, subvocalize only key words in a sentence, often overlooking tense, adverbs or secondary phrases. Those who read in this style can raise their speed to about 850 words per minute cutting the novel to about 1¾ hours to be read.

Decades ago mariner took a class called “Evelyn Woods Speed Reading Class”. The objective was to learn how to read without any subvocalization at all – which is difficult to acquire. He was able to reach 1,500 words per minute which means he could read that novel in just under an hour. Amazingly, the best students reached around 8,000 words per minute. They could read that novel in 10 minutes. The trouble is that avoiding subvocalization is difficult and the average reader like mariner soon lost his speed down to about 1,000 words per minute.

These numbers sound fictitious but they are true. What brought this speed reading class back from memory is that he realized that if the brain could only use the eye part of the senses and forego all the mental imprints the ear and mouth have endured to learn to read, write and speak, it would be a lot more efficient. As mentioned in a recent post, the reasoning part of the brain is in a different section from the sense-support part of the brain.

This led mariner to marvel at how fast creatures who don’t use organized language must process reality only with the eyes. It is similar to dogs in a way because a dog’s eyesight isn’t that good but the dog’s reality is interpreted through its smell which is 1,000 times more sensitive than a human. [For this reason mariner always sneaks a bite of supper to the dog who is well aware of all the odors of the meal.]

But the real phenomenon is how fast the brain is. AI is a slowpoke. Whatever the creature, using only the eyes to garner information about reality and to resolve circumstances real time is magical. He suspects even the eyes are modified to see a broader visual reality.

Ancient Mariner

The Old Bunch

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Picked this article from AOL news:

“This Brain Disease Is Set To Double Worldwide By 2050. Are We Prepared? What Scientists Say.

While a lot of new scientific studies are focused on better understanding and treating the most common neurodegenerative disorder, Alzheimer’s disease, diagnoses in the second-most common one, Parkinson’s disease, are steadily increasing. In fact, new research suggests that Parkinson’s cases may actually double by 2050, which raises a lot of questions about why this might be happening and how you can lower your risk. ” 

An article worth reading, including links. The statistics haven’t changed; it’s really the millennial boom that’s changing the charts

Mariner’s advice is to make an appointment with Colossal Biosciences as soon as possible to get an evolutionary DNA fix. While mariner is there he’s going to get a hair job. (see post ‘Mariner warned about this, March 4).

Ancient Mariner

Change

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Change can be good when it is needed. Changing underwear for example or cleaning the attic or buying another car. Every once in a while governments need to change, too. The issues are who (who changes one’s underwear), how (who decides which antiquities in the attic are kept or not kept) and why (when one already has three cars).

Change seems to be an authentic phenomenon. Often, change comes later than it should. Then change becomes difficult, even disastrous. Suppose one didn’t change their underwear until they were on the bus riding to work. Mariner decided to visit Guru to talk about the validity of change. He took a trip to Guru’s remote mountain retreat.

Mariner began their conversation by citing the broad dissatisfaction that exists in the world today, the turmoil of war and authoritarianism, and the fading confidence toward economics.

“Change”, Guru replied, “is an absolute part of existence. There is not one ion in the universe that exists without being the product of change in the  state of its energy. Where there is energy, there is change. Otherwise there would be no universe.”

“But must change be so disruptive?”, mariner asked.

“At the level of living creatures here on Earth, change is always disruptive but in smaller scales of change, it sometimes can pass without being obvious. When a newborn has a different shade of hair, it is noticed but doesn’t seem disruptive. However, the level of DNA involved in that change that forced a modification in a sequence of otherwise ‘happy’ cells was significant.”

“But humans are so proud of their mastery of so many of Earth’s processes. Why can’t they manage change better?” mariner replied. He submitted a Wiley calendar subject to make his point:

“Your cartoon reflects the difficulty and disruption caused by change”, Guru replied. “Nothing, not an ion, a sea nettle, a crow or a human makes changes until they are forced upon them. Some changes are incremental and even greatly beneficial but these are not large changes. Change becomes disruptive when entire concepts and procedures must undergo total change in a short amount of time – that is, not as slow as evolution.”

Guru continued, “The cartoon also demonstrates that change must relate to genuine pressures that are hurting life’s processes. Making changes for ulterior or irrelevant reasons only adds to the cacophony.”

Mariner thanked Guru for his insights and headed home. Mariner’s assumption is that humans aren’t as smart as they should be about managing themselves. AI can’t do it, either – because AI is a human invention.

Ancient Mariner

 

Mariner warned about this

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The biotech company Colossal Biosciences has long aspired to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth, which roamed the Northern Hemisphere thousands of years ago  during the last ice age. But for now, as a step along the way, the company has come up with something decidedly less mammoth: meet the woolly mouse.

What was the purpose of this feat of genetic engineering? Colossal’s pitch is that, with biodiversity going the way of the dodo (which the company also hopes to resurrect), saving existing species will require tweaking their DNA to make them more resilient.

In other words, Colossal has decided to fire the planet’s ecosystem and take charge of the planet’s evolution process. Ain’t the mouse cute? Just think, your great grand children will be able to go to Walmart to pick from a menu what their children will look like – sort of like buying a puppy.

Well, mariner could use some hair . . .

Ancient Mariner