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      What's up everybody SonOfTerra92 here, this is just a quick update for the weekend while I have the time.

     Last Wednesday I got the chance to witness what was literally a once in a lifetime occurrence that demonstrated the elegance and beauty of celestial mechanics (how things move in space). I'm referring to the event of the Venus transit across the same plane as the Earth and the sun. The phenomenon was extensively advertised on-line  weeks before the event and although I had actually planned on skipping it, the buzz on Twitter ended up making me change my mind.

     Unfortunately I was unable to cover the event in further detail, there was a well received gathering at the Malaysian National Planetarium, where I got to see the transit via telescope but unfortunately I did not vlog the moment, my apologies.

    What really surprised me the most (in a good way) was how how diverse the crowd at the gathering was. The people that had gathered to witness the dance of heavenly bodies varied in terms of age , gender , race and even religion (I should know because I was able to pick out a fellow free thinker from among the attendees of the day). This is where the ability of science and nature to inspire the human mind really shines, in its capacity to do little harm and to captivate different people from different walks of life. You have the curious young ones whose minds may or may not have been affected by indoctrination, you have adults who sincerely want to teach kids about science, you have tourists that have come from different parts of the country (some from out of the country), and you have me the free thinker trying to get by as an engineer. It really puts things in perspective as we come to realise how the endeavour of science and naturalistic inquiry is a very "human" thing. You can survey a plethora of species on Earth but in none among them will you find the desire to systematically figure things out, appreciate what they have figured out and and subsequently pass on that knowledge to their younglings.

      It is a rather beautiful and humble process if you ask me.

The Concept is the same, its basically a mini eclipse.

    Astronomy is a very descriptive physical science. Astronomers pride themselves in "calling them how they see them". So in this case we have what is known as a transit or a shift in position between point to point of one celestial body relative to the backdrop of another. Even if you have never witnessed a Venus transit in your life you will immediately find that this sounds kind of familiar. It is exactly what happens during a solar eclipse but instead of the moon passing in between the Sun and the Earth this time it is the planet Venus. You can work out the respective trajectory and path of the transit using Newton's Laws or if you really want an even more accurate description of reality try general relativity, I heard it works too LoLz.

     And on this note I would like to segway into my final thought for the day and that is the significance of how we look at reality and nature in general.

:I have a working relationship with reality: This picture does not look any less magnificent because of that ...

    When I tell people that I am a "nature freak" or "reality freak" they commonly associate me with hippie tree huggers or a person that goes around pondering poetry while trying to get high all day. While it is indeed true that I am always in search of a daily fix I think we as a species need to re-evaluate the way we appreciate the workings of the universe not just for the added survival value of the individual but for the survival value of the whole species. Theses occurrences such as the Venus transit or any other given eclipse aren't just pretty phenomenon for us to look at and subsequently be amazed by. These things happen in our Universe because we are a part of it, not like a spectator to a theatre play more like the actors on the stage. There are a great number of other phenomena that have equal if not greater impact to the survival of our species and our fleeting planetary domain. We may look in wonder to the eclipse, but are we aware of the Asteroid with our planet's name on it ? We may be captured by the beauty of stars shining at night, but do we understand the power of the Supernova ? Our ancestors looked to the sky as we do now but the main difference is that we know more than them. We now know that understanding nature down to its principle levels can aid our survival and that to me really goes beyond the whole "pretty picture" perspective.

The backbone of night,

    That's all from me, SonOfTerra92 signing off, see you in the next video ....

Peace,
6/9/2012

Free-thought and its importance.

Seen my latest video yet ?
check it out, down below ...

Now on to my rant ...

     We pride ourselves in this day and age with being a better society than those that came before. Modern society loves to embrace freedom and the pursuit of it, we think of it as another one of those intrinsic privileges earned from the struggle to liberate ourselves from  darker times. When you look at it we have indeed come a long way in terms of the freedom we have developed. Slavery is now a thing of the past and women are allowed to get an education and what not. Way to go human race, you're getting there but you're not done yet. There are still some freedoms that remain unrealized, prevented by fear and dogma from ever seeing the light of being embraced in a holistic society.

     I'm here to rant about a particular freedom that is sometimes unfortunately shunned and stigmatized in certain societies all over the world, a freedom that I feel is as equally important as other basic human rights such as that to an education and racial equality, I am referring to the right of free thought. Yes I am going to go there, not because I want to intentionally stir up some controversy writing this as a "Malay"sian  but simply because I think that free thought is an essential mechanism for the advancement of  science and human progress  and I would be damned as a communicator of science if I did not play my role in defending it.

     My first contention in the fight for free thought is that unlike the social values of equality and freedom of speech the right to free thought has actually been with us since birth, it is as natural as the curiosity that gets little children to explore the world by poking at it in any way they can. Unlike the obviously contrived Magna Carta , the Charter of Liberties or even the US Bill of Rights we never had to hammer out the workings of the limits of the thought process through stages of  intelligent design. No one ever had to die on the guillotine for free thought, not yet anyway. In a sense, we were all born into the world as free thinkers, dumb, deaf and, blind yes but curious nonetheless. I think that when we realize this we will find that the big and scary Universe is not as big and scary after all because it can be made knowable through the process of gradual investigation. This is the very foundation of the Scientific enterprise.

:Set your mind free: Trust me you'll feel better once you do.

     No one can  capitalize free thought unlike other more common civil liberties. At face value we find that certain liberties are associated with the various identities of their own ideologies, however it isn't as equally easy to associate the thought process with anything other than that of being uniquely a human quality. For example, if you are Malaysian then you live under the Malaysian constitution, likewise if you are Muslim / Christian / Hindu  or Buddhist then you eventually end up living by the principles of those respective world-views. There will always be some other collective entity at play, but I can't recall the last time the firing of neurons in the human mind became linked to any form of written document, agreement between parties or even historical accounts. I'm not sure who quoted it first but I can indeed agree with "An idea is a monument far greater than a cathedral". I stand behind this not because of my own world view as a free thinker but simply because a typical cathedral such as St.Peter's Basilica in Rome was a result of a Renaissance Era culture living on Renaissance Era ethics however the the capacity of building other progressively better monuments (and better ethics) to outstrip the beauty of St.Peter's and the culture that built it lies within the minds of  more than millions of humans around the globe.

     The ultimate of objective a building a society capable of accepting the values of free thought and inquiry is not to give birth to a generation of fact checkers and bookworms. I prefer to look at it as an effective method to inject  healthy doses of skepticism into society. This brings me to my final contention and that is the road to a more progressive and prevalent society. While I do admit there is a long way to go before we reach a any form of societal  Nirvana, there are a few important values that can be learned from thinking freely that anybody, even the devoutly religious would do well to take heed of. I am not trying to enforce the way I look at the world onto other people. What I am attempting to do is to support the idea that a better world would be a world where people are allowed to ask questions even when the notion of it is unpopular or even when it comes off as a rather dangerous act.  This can only come from the values provided by free thought.

Most of the world acknowledge its importance.

     At the end of the day: what good is free speech without free-thought

But what are we really fighting for ? The ability to raise an opinion or that to have one ?

     In conclusion, we live in a world where everything can be made to be lost and nothing is really all too certain. Freedom of mind is all that is  left once you take a good look at where we are and where we are going. Until the day that some mad engineer is able to invent a serum of nano-machines that can be injected into the brain to assume full control of another human being, free thought remains one the most important and intrinsic civil liberties that has ever existed. It's almost like a fine wine that everyone can drink except it's free. 

Peace,
SonOfTerra92,
6/6/2012

My two day escape.


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   I'm going to keep this short because as I am writing this I am losing any last vestiges of lucidity I have on the real world (It's late and I'm really sleepy). I've been missing from my usual line-up of activities of activities for the past few days because I got the chance to attend a leadership / training course hosted by the US embassy Kuala Lumpur, typical of these types of events I arrived at the doorstep of IIUM (International Islamic University of Malaysia) on the last day of April 2012 with a clear and open mind but a conscience not really tickled by any excitement. (I've been to quite a lot of these things in the past, I was thinking that one more couldn't really change my perspective on things) 


   The two day affair was supposed to teach its the participants how to utilize social media platforms to instigate change within a community. Most of the participants were IIUM students of which a majority of them were social sciences majors. Only a small fraction of us came from Science / Engineering majors so as the topics of discussion started to unfold, the content  put forth on the table started to reveal how passionate everyone was about doing something towards making positive change, that is in a sense one of the major things that I learned from the workshop of which I hope to carry into my following blogs and social activism projects.


    We all have dreams, we all have ambitions of making the world a better place. This was a quote by Frank Drake (video link below, listen to the last part) and I think it really nails home one of the fundamental aspects of existence whether you are religious or not ( I am content with keeping God out of the picture), at the end of the day we want there to be more people to miss us when we are gone rather than those that are glad we are when the time comes.  

     I think that I definitely learned quite a few new things at the Creative Vision Workshop Malaysia / Generation Change program I also managed to reinforce a lot of old ideas that had been partially shady world/societal views at best.


This is where I was : http://www.facebook.com/generationchange.hq


    Fisrt of all, I had never really jumped on the twitter / foursquare bandwagon seeing as how these technologies were mostly mobile gadget based (I'm rather the prude preferring a big and powerful desktop to a sleek and compact smartphone). But one of the things that the trainers quickly had us familiarize ourselves with (she was an MIT grad by the way) was that these technologies are nothing but tools, we can live with or without them but how they change our lives and the lives of those around you depends on what you do with them. So on that key principle I actually started becoming far more active on twitter since realizing the potential it had on outreaching to various groups of different people. The program actually encouraged its participants to tweet while the main sessions were going on as long as we remembered to use the tag #vpeace. I think this initiative was widely accepted as a very friendly approach by most of my fellow participants.

Happy Human is Happy

    Another interesting fact that I came about to realizing during the two days of training is that Thunderfoot was right about the human race being a social hierarchical entity. No one ever wins alone and winning is nothing if you aren't a part of something bigger than yourself. We were constantly bombarded by the incentive to follow our passions in-line with the phrase "let your mission guide you" and I guess that's true when I examine it in the context of what I'm trying to do with ScienceEpic. Its not about the personal glory or number of subscribers, its about the message and the people that I'm trying to reach out to. I guess what I have to remember that as I trudge on with ScienceEpic in the years to come is that Subs and views are nice, but the truth of the matter is I still have a better message than "baby, baby, baby ... ohhhhhhh ..."


ScienceEpic: http://bit.ly/IQINBi


    And finally the most important thing I learned is, There's absolutely no time like today to go out and give a helping hand to a community in need. I know I deal with this kind of stuff every month posting YouTube videos that communicate science but there's a completely different angle that I sometimes neglect and that angle is probably the one of the most important aspects of communication, and  that is the people that I'm trying to reach out to. Whether I'm communicating science or teaching people about some radical new concept, its all about the interpersonal bonds and lines of communication we build with our words and our ideas. If we can nail these concepts down correctly, only then will the whole "YouTube: The world is watching" concept truly set in as a powerful method to deliver ideas and start revolutions

Community: changing the world since 200,000 years ago

     All in all it was an enlightening experience, I think the workshop really equipped me with a fine set of skills that I can use to make some decent change in disenfranchised communities across the country (and that is what they are expecting of the participants with a 15,000 ringgit grant on the line). Sure, I made quite a few new Facebook friends and I learned the power and required responsibility (no pun intended) of using Twitter but I think the event can be mostly likened to that of a spark, and with it I can safely say that I can now spark the glimmer of hope for other people that have never been given that fire in the first place.


SonOfTerra92 signing off, see you next time.

Community and why it matters.

     This post has mostly nothing to do with science, but if you do want something more along those lines here's a chill video I did the other night.

     Introduction aside, I want to take this opportunity to talk about one of my favourite time honoured  hobbies and probably a time honoured hobby of anyone born after the  Cold War.

    I am referring to video games.

    I am a gamer, always have been, always will be. I am not  a legit hardcore gamer although I have sacrificed long hours into the night to pursuit nights to pursuit it. I consider myself a mainstream gamer.  While I occasionally dedicate long hours to building and destroying interstellar empires on Sins Of a Solar Empire or emerging planetary ones on Civ 4 my main pallet of gaming usually comes in the pursuit of the perfect killstreak on popular online PC shooters like Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3. Call me shallow and unsophisticated. The pacifist in opposition of Nuclear Proliferation SonOfTerra92 enjoys playing Call of Duty. Now that the cat is out of the bag I would even go as far as to say that I'm actually good at it depending on how many hours I put in per seasonal "binge" streak (I don't always play online shooters all the time but when I do I unlock time travelling capabilities)

    This article definitely has a Christmas morning miracle feel to it. I am trying to convey a generalization that recently dawned upon me from one of my latest gaming experiences. As to how a Modern Warfreak / Camperfield veteran can find some greater meaning of life from playing online shooters I don't know. Maybe it just stems out from a combination of being born into a generation that constantly seeks instant gratification and me naver having grown out of the "toy soldier" phase of childhood.

      My story begins late 2010, I had just gotten my hands on a community driven non steam version of Modern Warfare 2 called alterMW2. LAN aside the network functioned well enough to allow for stable night time gameplay. It was my first real online experience with gamers from across the globe. The game impressed me to great lengths (this was 2010 mind you) and I was hooked on the fast paced mechanics that the Call of Duty series has been known for, but somewhere deep within the recesses of my mind I wondered "Is this even legal?"




The way its meant to be played :Enough said...

      AlterIWnet or simply "Alter" was a community driven modding group that were every bit as passionate  about the Call Of Duty franchise as I was. The problem was that they mostly owned PC's and just couldn't accept the  hand that was dealt to them as PC gamers when MW2 hit store shelves late 2009. No dedicated servers meant no mod support which was at the very heart of communal PC gaming.

     The Alter project started around 2 years ago. I joined a little later after their launch. I did not at their genesis but farther along enough that I could get a lot of clean fun with minimal "aimbotters" and "wall hackers". That was 2010, fast forward to 2011 and we find alter growing into a multi game community with Alter-ops for COD Black Ops entering Beta and Alter - MW 3 going into Pre Alpha. Their main project that they had originally set out on was coming of age, AlterMW2 was seeing a revitalization in the form of  Alter IW4M2 and the availability of dedi's all the way here in Malaysia . In MALAYSIA !!! (sorry for the all caps, was just trying to hit a point). I could play on a  streamyx connection and have 60 fps gameplay with an average latency below 50. That's quite unprecedented especially when global triple A titles usually lean towards hosting servers in Singapore, which gives rise to other problems (I'm looking at you Battlefield 3)

      Going back to late 2011 I was sill on alterMW2. I must have clocked in at least one hundred man hours playing it, that far into the development cycle the game was as polished as a whistle, no hackers , no tubers , no laggers. It was pure competitive fun that you could choose to take seriously or not (of course I did take it seriously). The developers had taken a game that was bad on PC and turned it into a and playable gem of a title with a living and breathing support community.

I was that good, at one point of time.

     Which brings us to 2012, today . After finishing another semester I realised that I had a lot of computing power that went under-used after purchasing a new desktop the previous year so I bought an original retail copy of battlefield 3 and gave it a few runs on my new "beast-machine". The experience was impressive, offering nearly realistic combat and networking that worked well enough as long as you stayed within the bounds of Singapore and Hong Kong. Don't even bother with Japan if you're playing from Malaysia, you will end up getting kicked faster than a Pro Quickscope on COD. By that time I was also a involving myself with alpha testing alterMW3 whenever I was lucky enough connect.

     Here's where Activision really fucks me over. As a member of the alter community I had made quite friends and contacts from matches and forum threads on the inter web. Hell, I liked these people and enjoyed gaming with them. I looked forward to joining lobbies with them even-though I had never even met them face to face. Even during the occasional match when a "god amongst men" ( a really really good player) was in the lobby, I relished the challenge of engaging them as opponents even though in the end I would lose the match. It was what the gaming community calls a GG (good game). Most of my GG's in the history of my gaming career up to the release of this article came from alterMW.

    So when Activision decided to let loose their corporate hound dogs on the valiant modding community my initial reaction of  shock was masked with sombre tones of calmness. It was a during a semester so I didn't have much time to game let alone network contacts from games. I initially got the news in person from a friend that I had met from a game of alterMW2 who happens to go my university. When I got home only then did the sheer  magnitude of the news hit me. They were really going to shut down alter. A notice had appeared on the forum page regarding a cease and desist letter from Activision. It was really going to happen. Those bastards were going to shutdown people who legitimately made their game better. However, given the fact that I had gotten the game for free also contributed to their downfall. If anything Alter had accomplished to extend the franchise community and fanbase by leaps and bounds greater than the original publishers could ever have done.

    And as an industry isn't that what actually matters. I would have bought the game eventually ... eventually ;)

    Cliff Bleszinski  (Cliffy B for short) a notable figure in the gaming industry once said in an interview with g4TV "In the old days typical development cycle for a game would end at the game's release date. Nowadays the real challenge begins at release on day 1. You just cannot stop building on a community with strong content support". As much as I occasionally loathe cliffy B's ego of which is usually as inflated as that of Kanye West but I have to say that that man does have a point. A strong community is the lifeblood of any successful franchise. They are the people that buy your games or at the very least fall in love with the license and if that isn't a strong enough incentive on its own then the future of video-games as an art platform and as a social phenomenon is totally fucked.

Proprietary Engine or not: If you were gaming in the 90's you'll know what Quake DM felt like.

     Recently, as of a few days of writing this Modern Warfare 3  Activision's latest entry in the popular Call of Duty series went F2P for the weekend on Steam. As preoccupied as I was with upcoming programs and a final exam to boot I was actually ripe with excitement as I planned a weekend getaway where I could try  to"prestige" (The Modern Warfare equivalent of level capping.). I preloaded the game over night and by Friday morning on the 26th of April it was all ready to go. I logged on and altough I did not have the same online profile as I had with my pre alpha AlterMW3 set-up I was still excited to immerse myself in some fast paced COD gameplay but when I finally got around to playing it I felt as if the charm was missing. The networking was definitely more stable than that of alterMW3 and I could easily match-make for games faster than the Alter alpha but the game was full of hackers (Killed by an "aimbotter" on the 3rd match upon starting lol). This was a Steam release, I had thought all the problems would had been fixed for a retail tilte.

This was fun 3 months ago: now its just kind of drab. Even if it is free ...

      I ended up not binging the game for the weekend, in fact that Friday night I resorted to seeking "other" forms of entertainment (if you know what I mean) and I did not regretting it. At the time of this writing the F2P week is already over.

Cool marketing campaign: but will the real code live up to the hype ?

       I started the weekend with the clear intentions of a "Prestige"ious trip down memory lane. I ended up finding out that those memories weren't the same ones worth revisiting. Had it been with a bunch of people worth remembering then maybe the feeling would have lasted. Just maybe I would have walked the whole road home.

We're All Soldiers: Standing on the line, sometimes we lose what we fight so hard to live for...

     By the time you are reading this, more news on Black Ops 2 would have alread surfaced, probably a teaser or some gameplay footage. Its up to you what to make of it. Just because it has a futuristic setting dosent hide the giant money hungry puppeteers pulling the strings behind the scenes. That's the real root of why the industry is yet to be all that it can be.

    Maybe video-games just need their "Woodstock". Its "One good rock show to change the world"something truly unforgettable.

    SonOfTerra92 signing off.
    See you online.

On Richard Feynman and Pidi's  
(Pidi's are Partial Differential Equations)

     I want to make this quick blog post before the idea skips my mind  (partly due to the episode of Bite Me loading up on a separate tab)  , sitting in the library hall (apparently my new home since no longer living on campus) drowned in typical post lecture thoughts I begin to take my plunge ...

    For those of you who don't know yet my main pursuit on Youtube is science communication, subscribers of my channel (links down below) would know that I generally try to instill a sense of wonder and curiosity in my videos. 

     This endeavor usually involves absorbing my own fair share of inspiration from other similarly interesting if not much much more eloquently put content made by fellow Youtubers aimed at communicating science, that and reading / re-reading books by Sagan , Kaku and Dawkins all of which are excellent science communicators in their own right, their strengths being that they can appeal to a very broad audience given that it is an audience with an open enough mind. All of which I have a blast just absorbing information from. 

Bitch Please, "If you think you understand Quantum Theory ... Then you dont understand Quantum Theory" 

       
    
  

    

     
    Recently I've been filling this demand for inspiration with content from a much lesser known science communicator to most people of recent years (but a legend in the academic world). A Physicist by the name of Richard Feynman who won the Nobel Prize in 1965, known best for his works in the Quantum Theory and Quantum Electrodynamics, his pioneering lecture on Nano - Technology and for playing the Bongos. (probably more for playing the bongos if you've been watching CBS's The Big Bang Theory recently). Well anyway, don't let my words decide for you whether he was "half genius half buffoon" let the man's voice echoing through history tell you himself.

    Anyways , what does this have to do with the title of the blog and the so called "Pidi's". I had the idea to write this pretty much 20 minutes ago and i'm challenging myself to do it in less than an hour so let me take you back 45 minutes. I was nearing the end of a lecture on Partial Differential Equations. I'm trying to be quick here so forgive me if I don't write out the equations down below. While sitting down next to friend Ivan Tan, (bless his naive soul) as the lecture ended and the magnitude of all the equations  started to set in I suddenly remembered a line that Feynman had once said and at that moment just blurted it out to Ivan, The conversion although mostly a one sided one consisting of me telling him my opinion goes as follows

Me: You know there's this Physicist who won the Nobel Prize in               
     1965, his name was Richard Feynman who once said that             "nature is going to come out the way that shes going to come          out, so when  
     we're looking for the answers we shouldn't presuppose 
     anything , because whatever that we find is what it is, not what 
     we hope we want it to be", Its like when we're trying to   
     investigate nature and do science even if all the people in the  
     world believe that the answer to life is x + 2 no matter how 
     hard we all believe that the answer is x + 2, it wont change a   
     thing. We just have to accept what is as what we find                    and whatever it is we find. 

     <Both of us looked quizzically back at the board trying to 
     decipher some deeper meaning from the equations that had just  
     "skull fucked" us for two hours>

Ivan: Ok ... Just seems kinda long for something so trivial.

Me: Yeah, Yeah it is actually, sometimes I really dont get all of            it myself, but then again I cant really complain that this 
        is the best method we have of modelling reality, it is the way         it is so  its not really our fault that it came out like this, I               mean I figure there is probably a ton of other things that are           far more complex than this ...

        but at the end of the day the real world is only going to come         out the way it is, and that is real, and if this is the best way           of explaining it than I don't really have anything to argue               with.

Ivan: I dunno man just hope the exams are survivable

     The rest of the conversation is not really important, class ended and as I was packing my things, only then did the magnitude of it hit me , up until that point I had generally been a sponge of many of the ideas of the people that had contributed to the knowledge of mankind but only then did Feynman's words come to life in my mind.

At that particular moment It dawned on me what the true meaning "perception" was, it was sort of like a burst into a temporary state of intellectual Nirvana . Humbling yet incredibly satisfying despite the fact that there were a lot of things that I still didn't understand yet and probably will never understand the slightest bit about by the time that I die, but it was still ok.

    I felt completely fine.

    My only hope is to live in order to leave some of that feeling in others so that future generations can stand on the shoulders of giants ever taller than the ones that came before.

More than Stories, More than myth ... everything we know is what it is because we've seen it that way

     

Times are a changing.


     Now I was never alive at any time during the 60's,but I do believe I speak for a great number people when I say the following words that come from that era do hold quite a considerable meaning.


Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.


Heres a link to the song on YouTube ... Enjoy

     I was an upstart and impatient kid growing up in the 90's and I never really started listening to real music until the early on in the 2nd Millennia of the Common Era (Early 2000's were alive to the beats of bling rap and punk rock) so in all honest truth I only discovered Bob Dylan's music as a 17 year old watching the superhero movie The Watchmen. The first thing that came to minds was "Damn this shit is hippy". Remember that opening scene when they captured the transformation of  superhero life  in the midst of the arrival of the Cold War, this brief musing is played to roughly the same tune albeit with extra shades of optimism and equivalent spades of despair when it comes to where we are now.

     I recently watched a TEDtalks video that came out a few days ago on YouTube by "techno-preneur"  Peter Diamandis (linked to TEDtalksDirector below) and his idea on how the human race is moving into an age of abundance, the main idea of which is that all the problems , tribulations and shortcomings we have today can and will eventually be solved by the brute strength of reason and the power of innovation particularly technological innovation. First and foremost I would definitely applaud the MIT graduate for his rousing words of optimism for a better tomorrow and for speaking out against the corporate media anarchists at Fox News. His presentation was definitely one born from the hopes of every computer geek and utopian revolutionary of the 21st century, a world where technological penetration affects the lives of every single soul on Earth subsequently improving overall productivity. However, the talk wasn't just aimed at the rich and empowered  as a considerable part of the talk centred on the awakening of billions of new minds to   knowledge and information. Placed within the context of population control and the value of human capital I think that Peter Diamandis really does have a concrete set of plans on how to bring forth this so called age of abundance I approve !!!

     But wait, I'm a skeptic so there's gotta be a catch. There's always gotta be a catch...

     While I definitely agree that high technology will definitely extend the reach as well a the overall  lifespan of nearly all human beings towards the year 2050 I think there is an unaddressed problem with the speakers proposed solutions. When all is said and done I think Peter Diamandis had definitely neglected some crucial details regarding the challenges that we face in the process of realizing that ideal Utopia of tomorrow. 


     The presentation neglected the issue of resource management , although the speaker had stuck with the underlying idea that information technology will eventually become incredibly widespread he forgot to elaborate on the cost of building stable infrastructure to get that technology off the ground, sure hearing about Massai warriors with access to Google certainly elicits a feeling of quaint intrigue but what would it take to build a functioning cellular network across a continent with one of the poorest countries in the world?  What amount of resources would we need to call on ? It isn't just about availability its also about reliability. On top of that , the ease of which he said that these solutions will come about makes it look as if everyone will eventually be armed with the latest Apple products in the coming decade. In my opinion there are 3 different aspects to practical technological progress (Read up on John Brockman's version, this is just a spin off of it) You need intellectuals and tech-heads to build it, managers and economists to fund it and the average joe to pass judgement on it. While I would definitely agree that a future society would take and integrate many aspects of the presentation I am still pretty much hard pressed to believe that any one aspect of those three factors I had mentioned earlier would be the solution for any other two as laid out by the speaker (I could be interpreting his words wrongly but to me it did sound like he was proposing a one shot solution to everything). We still have quite a few rivers to cross before we find our way and we will certainly have to cross those rivers with all three aspects of that which influences progress acting hand in hand , not with one clearly over weighing or under weighing the other.

Doctor of Tomorrow in a world without doctors ???

     If what the speaker said truly is the depiction of how far and fast humanity is going then it would be safe to say that the world is a very different place compared to the 60's when Bob Dylan first penned down his music. In all their staunchest forms, human beings have not changed, personally I think it will take more than just half a century to get rid of "all" of our evolutionary baggage but we are getting there and although the Iron Curtain has since met its last call the world we live in today hangs  no less in the balance than it did back during the Cuban Missile crisis. Today we are faced with an array of environmental problems, global warming , depletion of the zone layer and planetary resources etc . All of this is made worse by the mismatch between our technology and our wisdom. A future of abundance wont be acquired completely by science and technology, however it will be shaped by human choice and insight into the knowledge we have gained from nature.    

Forward unto Dawn


    This brings into light the notion that as we move forward into the future distinct forces of order and progress will be forced to clash against forces that influence disorder in the world. On one hand it is becoming ever more clear that we are moving towards a multicultural, multi racial and tolerant social civilization. We've seen this in the rise of global socio-economic ventures such as NAFTA and the EU and even more so locally in my part of the world in ASEAN. Cooperation and compromise is at an all time high if you look back in time from our current vantage point. We have seen in this age international cooperation on scientific and even humanistic endeavours on a scale never encountered before, and the numbers are rising. It appears as if the more animalistic part within us all has slowly been tamed by the forces of intellect and empathy after all these the millennia.


     Just take a look at some of the more recent events coming from late 2011 and early 2012, everywhere you look you can find evidence for the emergence of this independent planetary mindset, represented in the march of various peoples against oppression to the democratization of dictatorships and even to the fight for the accessibility of internet technology. We also find a mutual desire for peace and negotiation. A clear example you can find is in what happened to the "hermit kingdom" of North Korea. In a mere 3 months since the death of the dictator Kim Jong Ill ( I hadn't even known he was ill badum tss), North Korea has since suspended its uranium enrichment program in exchange for humanitarian aid from the United States, although tensions still remain between both communist and capitalist countries this could be the beginning of non violent difusion of hostilities between the two states. Small steps but stops toward a solution non the less.


    On the other end of the spectrum we still find a reluctant few that resist the gradual change aimed at creating such a planetary society. Resistance to this change can be seen in fundamentalist ideologies  ranging from science denialists erecting creation museums to racial hatred groups on the internet. It is a personal thought of mine that the clash of these ideologies is a clash of civilizations, one side isn't necessarily guaranteed victory over the other.  Only time will tell which idea will surface as the lasting victor...


Awaking call on the other side of the world ???

     We aren't humans until we disagree, just look at our history. While Peter Diamandis was giving his presentation on possibility another similarly humanistic (yet clearly misunderstood in the comments section) speaker Paul Gilding author of "The great Disruption" was taking a reconciling the worlds crisis with a different angle of retrospect by taking a look at how environmental issues affect the global economy.I wont go in to too much detail as to the contents of his talk but I would like to take one line out of his train of thought that he had indeed gotten right ...


     "The crisis is now inevitable, the issue is how will we react."


     These two talks kind of compliment each other. So I suggest following one with the other when watching.

     So here we are, with all the problems in he world enroaching upon us, almost making the individual human being seem insignificant, but yet through the smoke and haze of possible collapse all the solutions to those problems are here too within every mother , father , hopeful child and member of society. The future depends on choice, your choice.
     

 O Brave New World  

     I would like to take some time to talk about what many would consider to be a fringe science science. If you're a natural philosophy hard-liner you would most likely consider the extent of the human understanding of nature encompassing knowledge from the apparent "holy trinity" that is physics , chemistry and biology all of which is held together by the language of mathematics (if you're a gamer then probably "Triforce of science" would be a more fitting metaphor). The subject in question is geology and the story we can tell by looking at the structured layers of rock beneath our feet. While on this quest through the depths of deep time and the long planetary history of our terrestrial abode I would also like to take some time to explore some of the impacts that homo sapiens affect on that world similar to what I did in my Home 2.0 video (links down below). Hopefully this journey will help to shed more light on the consequences of human actions on much longer time scales.

Home 2.0

http://bit.ly/xhSZZK

     First an introduction to a familiar but strange world (I'll be quick by jumping into the story at a little less than 65 million years ago as to not bore the reader). Just like our perception of our place in the grand scale of time and space our current understanding of nature is shaped by the evidence we have through investigation, each measurement taking us closer to the truth. So its no surprise that there will always be a number of people still discontent with what answers we have for some of the more perennial questions of life, I wouldn't blame them, it is within human nature to question and doubt, but still after hundreds of years of searching here's what we have, here's what we know...

      We begin the journey at the end of the Cretaceous Period, the last of the dinosaurs had just died out and the age of mammals is about to begin. Massive puzzle pieces that represent the ark of the continents are still not arranged the way they are today.  The Earth begins to cool, The first homo sapiens are still 61 million years away. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels fluctuate and global temperatures along with it, the Earth is punctuated by ice ages. A colourful procession of mammals and flowering plants begin to diversify and conquer the major land masses. The Quarternary Period, our Period begins.

     It is still 2.6 million years before the advent of humans, the new epoch is marked by the end of the last great ice ages. However, when the first primitive humans do arrive a major environmental catastrophe strikes that drives the hominids to near extinction*, with merely 10,000 humans left it appears as if the future rulers of the planet are bound to join the vast majority of species that have gone extinct, if not for the decision of a reckless few to seek more habitable climates. Later on as the descendants of that solitary band of survivors reconstruct their past they discover that they owe their very survival to that small band wanderers that decided to meander to cooler temperatures.

     Finally, after all of that wandering a species of mammalian primate of Genus Homo not more than 2000 centuries old changes the surface of an entire planet to the one seen below ...

*The great catastrophe is not made up, its true just look up Toba catastrophe theory and the evolutionary bottleneck of Early humans ...

That's what 7 Billion people breathing the same air as the dinosaurs look like

     It really is in my opinion one of the greatest stories that can ever be told. It has got everything a good story needs a challenger facing impossible odds, daring perseverance against adversity and a willingness to adapt, traits that characterize the human resilience ...


There is a story in the rocks

A million year old Epic discovered by humans in less than a century of investigation

     The phrase "Deep Time" is normally associated with the vast geological time scales that tell the story of our plant's long history. In order to truly appreciate the long time periods that have led up to today geologists have divided this "record of the rocks" (no pun intended) into several distinct phases categorically named eras, periods, ages and aeons etc, The further down you go into Earth's crust the farther back you go in time. (I wont go "too deep" (another pun if you know what I mean) into that because I'm not a geologist and that is not what I intend for the main point of this article to be). We currently live in the Quartenary Period of the Earth that started 2.6 Million years ago, long before any of our ancestors took their first crucial steps out of Africa in their quest to colonize the Earth.

     The more recent geological time spans defined as epochs include the  Pleistocene  , the Holocene and a newly coined term, one that we will take a more in depth look at exploring, the Anthropocene. The matter is still a very radical and debatable idea but its is commonly agreed upon by the scientific community that we currently inhabit the Anthropocene era of geological time.

     The Anthropocene "Anthropo" being the biggest give-away as to what the epoch is defined for is the latest in a series of geological epochs that date the history of the Earth through subtle observation of geological strata. In short it is the age of humans and the geological time span that will showcase many changes in the environment due to human actions. The Anthropocene takes its place in the geological records right after the previous epoch known as the Holocene.

Moving mountains and "intelligent design"

     Most religious texts and ideologies would paint the picture of our planet as immovable , static , almost eternal and that at the end of time the Earth will be destroyed as with the rest of the Universe. I am not here to criticize the anthropocentricism of these ideas only to observe them in the light of a more modern perspective. In many an eschatology particularly in the three Abrahamic religions the End Times will be marked with fire and destruction as all of human kind is brought to an end and civilization is left to die in order to usher in the next phase of existence. Talk about painting a very grim picture if you ask me. In most of these mythologies you find that in the end the very ground of which Humanity had arisen from will be torn asunder and the mountains themselves will be crumble to dust, not a very happy time to live in I assume.

     But what does this have to do with geology and the end of the introduction of a new epoch?

     Well as I mentioned earlier, we live in an epoch newly defined  but informally known as the anthropocene, a time of which the actions of modern day humans will depict an entirely new story written in the rocks, one that future geologists (human or otherwise) will be able to discern by looking at the layers of strata of the Earth's crust. One might wonder what will these future detectives find some hundreds of millions of years from now.

Believe it or not, that's gonna leave a mark.

     Just as the presence of a technological civilization can be discernible from orbit by observing the stunning lights that they display at night or by the sensors of vigilant spectrometers, human civilization will no doubt leave trace remnants of all its success and follies within the very ground it had built that civilization from. A species does not simply get away with having 7 billion members and not leave a trace of it behind. Some very obvious pieces of evidence that we will leave behind include mass extinctions and global climate change. The evidence will be very subtle. Future geologists and palaeontologists will discover a layer of rock where a great number of species cease to exist within the fossil record, their genetic lineage abruptly ended within a single epoch. Global warming resulting in the acidification of the world oceans will decrease the number of choral reefs, thus marking their disappearance from the geological record as well.

You have probably seen this chart a thousand times, luckily though growth is expected to cap as  resource reserves are limited.

     Even stranger still will be the evidence of our inventions , industries and the means we use to provide sustenance for own continued survival. Agriculture gave us our first surpluses, where there was once varied fields of wild flora, future geological records will read of massive plantations of crop bearing plants of similar type, representing widespread farmland and productivity. The multitudes of nuclear weapons detonated in an attempt to control Oppenheimer's now slumbering "destroyer of worlds" (who is to say that it would not awaken) will leave tell tale signs of an irradiated strata. Hiroshima , Chernobyl , The Marshall Islands will all become pieces of evidence to be uncovered millions years from now. There will no doubt be a geological signature of when humanity began to unlock the secrets of the atom.

Feeding Humans has always come at a price.

     In a way modern human beings have brought about change to their environment through their own form of "intelligent design", given enough time I wouldn't be surprised if this terraformation will lead to a planetary environment unlike any other we will ever come across save for those inhabited by a similarly intelligent species. It has been said time and again, you reap what you sew. but I ask you now, what are we really planning to reap ?

     So, returning to those iron age doctrines of the end times,of which always presupposes the notion that man can never be larger than life. I will submit to you that this contention does haves some merit to it, but here in I would like to raise an argument. Time has passed long enough for all of humanity to be idle and ignorant with respect to their actions as a civilization, So I will not accept it when someone blatantly says that  "It dosen't matter" or "Someone else is going to fix it" or "Its not like I can do a thing about it" , worst of all from some religious people that I have debated and believe me I have heard of this one used as a contention against an argument "Its all going to end someday anyway, why should I bother ..." Yes it has ended my friend, It has ended at the hand of man not due to divine intervention.

     There is no evidence that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

     We really are on a one shot thing here on planet Earth, sort of like a ticking time bomb with a short fuse, but what can we do about it?

The new age and "New Man"
     Carl Sagan once said that left to its own devices every society  on Earth would eventually discover Science. Lets take this idea and extrapolate it it for an emergent technological civilization, a species shaped by evolution to dominate an entire planet in its struggle for survival. Human beings. Could we comprehensively say that left to our designs we would have eventually made the same decisions that impacted the planet and the environment to such an unalterable extent.

A bi-product of convergent social evolution or just necessity ?

     This is were I would like to implore a different approach to solving the multitudes of global conundrums that we have accumulated over the years. We just cant solve the problems of Tomorrow with the solutions of Yesterday or even Today for that matter. If we are to survive the anthropocene we might just have to go beyond certain limits that humans today might consider impossible, sort of like a "transhumanist" approach if you will. In order to prosper we need to be proactive, not just inventive.

     "More than machinery we need humanity, more than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness."
                                                                                           -Charlie Chaplin from The Great  
                                                                                             Dictator

Given hundreds of thousands of years from now there will be no more humans, we would have either gone extinct or  evolved into something completely different but evidence of modern humans will persist in the artefacts we leave behind.

               
     It would definitely be within the best interests of all of humanity to learn from both our actions and inactions in dealing with the advent of our influence on the world we live in, if not for economic benefits and the preservation of precious resources then at the very least for the survival of our species. As the human race moves forward into an uneasy future where the forces of nature and civilization become intertwined, continued survival will not only depend on our intelligence at crafting machines but also wisdom at handling change. 

Where to next ? You decide ...

Start thinking and start living =)