Category Archives: Extinction

Are food prices really going up?

Posted on by
1

There was an informative chart from NPR. The chart pointed out that a frequent pattern was the reduction in package size as a means of not raising prices. Mariner’s local supermarket also reduced options among items by taking more expensive brands off the shelf. Interestingly, the manufacturing sector distributed their goods to fewer but larger retailers. For example, mariner can no longer find Lipton decaffeinated instant tea in his county but it is still available online at Walmart.

Now he can no longer find Planters Honey Roasted mixed nuts. Mariner often has expressed concern about the future of storefront economy. He described in his home town the disappearance of a dozen stores, some were large corporations,  – thereby reducing town domestic product to virtually nothing. Grocery stores are gone, pharmacies are gone, 5&10 store is gone, numerous restaurants are gone, hardware store is gone, car dealerships are gone. One is lucky to have a job less than 20 miles away.

Converts will say, “Poo!” It’s easier to call Walmart or Amazon with our smartphone. Thinking of smartphones, how many old timers realized the precedent that was set when a simple telephone allowed a person to speak to an artificial human being instead of having an interpersonal experience that sustained community society? “Well, it’s easier than harnessing the horse!” Today, that “human voice” can’t be guaranteed to be real – even if you see them on a screen.

Tribes, extended families, individual skills, community-based cultures soon will no longer exist unless they match Google’s data bank of common values – which is an oxymoron.

Perhaps mariner is old fashioned.

Armageddon progresses.

Ancient Mariner

The Old Bunch

Posted on by
Reply

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

The other side

Posted on by
Reply

Mariner has had 38 distinct jobs in his life. Everything from delivering newspapers to a contract in Taiwan building a computer system for the nation’s first fighter aircraft. He can avow that jobs shape one’s ethic and one’s place in the culture. He has had luxury dinners with CEOs and generals; he has seen a dead dog in the basement of a row house with an unused kitchen and a destitute family. He could go on about a 90-year-old woman offering sex for 75⊄, confrontations with guard dogs, a bull and an armed woman – to say nothing about belligerent executives.

But this post isn’t about bar stool stories. Of the 38 distinct jobs in his life, four have had a profound impact on his ethic, philosophy of life and his role in society. In chronological sequence they are gas & electric meter reader, Methodist preacher, parole officer and coding supervisor for an insurance company.

During 4½ years as a meter reader, he visited the homes of the very, very poor, the laborer, the white collar worker, the wealthy and many homes that were converted to small businesses and one-nite motels. These visits provided a belief that the separation of economic classes is severe, unfair and ignored by society. Each culture has its own style of community interaction, behavioral mores and even its own dress code.

As a Methodist preacher, he learned that religion is a specialized form of politics. The Christian theology is not a mainstay; the vast majority of church goers accept a parochial set of beliefs born out of tradition rather than faith. The socializing effect of belonging to a community is a positive trait but the church building is more important. Few attendees abide by the Second Great Commandment.

Mariner was a parole officer for three years. The job exposed him to the more complex side of human experience. Life is made up of many stresses that present emotional injury, loneliness, passive/aggressive behavior, debt, health and stressed relationships due to mental disorder and abuse. He learned that the personal side of life has its own mores, taboos and rituals. As with economic classes, home life is given little importance by community or by society in general.

This last job is cited because of its similarity to today’s Trumpian world of work. Mariner worked as a supervisor in the data processing department of a large insurance company. Like every other business of its time, the computer language was COBOL. Suddenly, thanks to IBM and Microsoft and Apple, COBOL was dropped in favor of new technologies and coding methods. In the blink of an eye, mariner was laid off. All the other large companies had simultaneous layoffs for the same reason. Locally, he was left without a career. It took a long time to rebuild a career in another field. His learned ethic is that corporations are politically independent and feel no need to incorporate themselves into the worlds of workers. Just profit, profit, profit.

Humans are intelligent and very much a caring species. It seems to mariner that humans, like 3-year-olds, have no sense of decorum and make life difficult just because they can. Given overpopulation, environmental abuse and provoking Mother Nature, perhaps humans should clean out the pantry and start over again.

Ancient Mariner

 

Change

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
4

 

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

About Era shifting

Posted on by
Reply

Greetings, Readers

It has been pleasant, if not rewarding, avoiding television news. Watching headlines is a lot like taking slaps to the face over and over. Mariner does keep track generally through his own news email services and a number of trustworthy magazines. Television still has its saving grace through shows like NOVA (PBS) and documentaries on Netflix.

Just the other night PBS ran a show about Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two early presidents who had different perceptions about the structure and role of the emerging United States. They fought tooth and nail and were brutal politically. Honestly, there were as many dirty tricks as one witnesses with politics today. An important difference was that back then, each political battle added to the Constitution with the intent of strengthening the nation whereas today it is petty payback and disassembling the Constitution without a plan to improve it.

The general observation mariner took from the show was that moving from one era to another, whether presidents, migrating fowl or coral reefs, it is grotesquely disruptive to normal expectations. There is abuse at the individual level. New rules are yet to be known.

So it was with those early days when Europe, Russia and The United States (and indigenous natives) had several wars to determine how the new world would be split among nations.

Similarly, today a new economic future that has little to do with contemporary practices has led to a global scramble to acquire a dominant position in the ‘new world’. What frightens mariner is that the planet has its own Trumpian plan to force human life to pay for the ‘borrowing’ of too much of nature’s resources – including global warming, overpopulation and gross extinction of the planet’s biomass.

Under the circumstances, the best one can do is to love family, share with the community and be careful about insecure assets and income.

Armageddon progresses.

Ancient Mariner

Homo’s predetermined job for Planet Earth history

Posted on by
Reply

It was just yesterday in Earth years that the first placental primate emerged, about 87 million years ago. It was the beginning of the Mammalian Age. Over those centuries,  mammals took many paths to become all the warmblooded, childbearing creatures that are around today; for example, mice, gorillas, reindeer, panthers, lions, beavers, monkeys, cattle, squirrels, bears, horses, gophers, whales, rabbits, sheep, wolves, warthogs, etc.

Dendropithecus turned up 13 million years ago, an early ancestor to a new line called Apes. Gibbons diverged from the line of great apes some 18–12 million years ago and that of orangutans (subfamily Ponginae) diverged from other great apes at about 14 million years ago.

African hominids diverged from orangutans about 12 million years ago. Hominins (including precursors of humans and the  Australopithecine and Panina subtribes) parted from the Gorllini tribe (gorillas) between 8 and 9 million years ago; Australopithecine (including the extinct biped ancestors of humans) separated from the Pan genus (containing chimpanzees and bonobos) 4–7 million years ago. The Homo genus emerged as H. habilis over 2 million years ago. To cut ancestry short, 300,000 years ago, the early relatives of Homo sapiens arrived.

The point is this: Homo sapiens and all its fellow mammals, some plant eaters, some scavengers, some herding, some predators, are in this Mammalian Age together. In an era that began 87 million years ago, it has become clear that humans have a predetermined role that in just 300,000 years mammals are disappearing at increasing rates. 10,000 years ago, wild mammals represented 99% – today only1% represent wild mammals. The rest have been scavenged big time by Homo who represents 32% of mammals along with 67% represented by homo-owned mammalian livestock.

Are humans just a pawn in the planet’s galactic history? Are we  another version of the giant dinosaurs who were bringing the Pleistocene Age to a close when the asteroid struck? The planet has few rules life forms must follow; one of them is ‘survival of the fittest’ Twice in the far distant past the planet wiped out all life with ice and with volcanic reorganization of the earth itself.

After an unusually long period of stable, supportive weather, the planet has begun to respond to another Homo behavior, carbonization, to begin raising the surface temperature of the planet. Further, Earth’s molten core is becoming active. Does Earth have plans to begin reorganizing the continents? It is predicted that Earth will undergo a global ice age in 200,000 years.

What does the future look like? Homo will have to wait to see what future versions of AI and chatGPT have to tell us. Is AI part of the next age sans mammals?

Ancient Mariner

The Fourth horseman of the Apocalypse

Posted on by
Reply

In a recent post, mariner mentioned four forces of nature that would determine the future of Homo sapiens. They were global warming, population, disappearing resources and AI. This post offers resources that help understand why AI may not be the blessing of other advances like the automobile, airplanes, can openers, electric lights, etc.

Often mentioned is the movie Matrix which has become a movie series. It is about the battle a few independent humans have against an AI brain that totally controls the human race; humans are kept alive in caskets so central AI intelligence can use them as batteries; These humans are fed a fake reality that makes them believe they are living a normal life.

Another frequently mentioned source is a PBS documentary ‘Hacking the Brain’ about the powers of AI and how, if controlled, AI can be useful but the documentary also displays the dangers of AI in its ability to manipulate humans even as they think they are living normal lives.

One source mariner hasn’t mentioned in a while is ‘The Social Dilemma’ available on Netflix. Largely, it is an interview of AI experts and managers who have left the AI corporations because of the immoral and intensely capitalistic policies exercised by corporations collectively known as Silicon Valley and which generate all the social media content with ulterior motives.

As to mariner’s prediction of Armageddon, AI is not a tool for making life better. There is an element of improvement reflected in better health care, resource management and supply chain efficiency but the AI technology is not controlled by anyone but the corporations themselves.

As it stands, social media can start wars, erroneously destroy careers, turn gossip into national policy, etc. – and does this without government restraint, without individual control of personal information, without total control of AI intrusion into economic sectors, and without due diligence to protect against hackers and international political abuse.

It is an area of the future which has yet to show its true colors. We will just have to wait and see how things turn out.

Shades of Matrix.

Ancient Mariner

 

Scary

Posted on by
Reply

Mariner stopped by to visit with Nosey Mole yesterday. He discovered that Nosey had blocked all his tunnel entrances. Then mariner read the headline on one of his news headline emails: The republicans in Congress have submitted a bill that would allow only republicans as eligible to vote for the Speaker of the House.

Will Donald really become our first dictator? He has said a time or two that if he won, there wouldn’t be any more elections.

The next vote for Congressman is two years away. It may be the citizen’s last chance for sustaining a democracy.

Ancient Mariner

Nothing Personal

Posted on by
Reply

Mariner has lamented the present along with many of us, and the political collapses, the cultural stress brought on by modern travel, the plight of social media. But it is the big four {global warming, population, biomass and artificial intelligence) that will shape Homo sapiens’ long term future. While provoked by human history, they are no longer dependent on obnoxious human behavior. The big four now are on their own history track regardless of the misfortunes of politics, war and obsessive invention.

A snapshot of human wellbeing in the year 2125 will be in the hands of the Big Four:

⊕ GLOBAL WARMING. Even as scientists have begun to pursue new technologies to deal with carbon in the atmosphere, other perspectives may not be as ‘easily’ cured. Climate change, in terms of global weather patterns, does not dance only with carbon excess. Volcanoes and earthquakes play along more slowly, the Earth’s core is out of rotational sync enough that a magnetic polar reverse has begun and the Sun will join in every 11 years or so. Further, humans are playing carnival games but the earth is not a game. Earth is a large planet capable of Solar System behavior on its own terms (Humans must remember that in reality they own nothing; it all belongs to Mother Earth).

When it comes to natural resources versus population, there is a correlation:

⊕ POPULATION and BIOMASS. From National Geographic:

“The global population is currently about 7.3 billion. The UN estimates that by 2050, that number will grow to 9.7 billion. By 2100, 11.2 billion people will have to cram together on the Earth’s surface. These estimates outstrip last year’s projections by around 150 million people.”

From UN: “Biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution, deforestation, water and food shortage—these are all exacerbated by our huge and ever-increasing numbers. Our impact on the environment is a product of our consumption and our numbers.”

The impact of population and natural resources together has altered nature in many different ways. Take one very small example – vertebrates:

Ten Thousand years ago was just yesterday: Agricultural communities developed approximately 10,000 years ago when humans began to domesticate plants and animals. By domesticating species, many groups of people were able to build settled communities and transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle dependent on foraging and hunting for survival. [National Geographic]

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. There is a recent documentary on Netflix featuring an interview with Bill Gates (What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates) where in the long term he cedes (without using words) that Homo sapiens will lose out to artificial intelligence.

Mariner is at a loss to predict the future. It is obvious that Homo is as susceptible to the forces of nature as any known collection of molecules, neutrons, atoms and electrons. Who knows, perhaps the rumors of space aliens traveling the universe is our future.

Do spaceships have recliners or battery chargers?

Ancient Mariner