Today I’m feeling pis*ed off with Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, The X-men and a whole host of other idiots too numerous to mention!
I’ve just been working my way through “Brief answers to Big Questions” by the aforementioned Mr Hawking. His opinion carries a lot of weight world-wide.
I follow Mr Musk on Twitter, and see him yelping and whooping when another space engineering milestone is passed.
I don’t really care for Mr Branson, but he get’s lumped in here with the others, due to his space travel intentions.
I get it when Hawkin says “It’s like being on a desert Island and NOT looking for a way off” when he talks about Space travel. I too am a child of the Space Race era, and remember watching the first moon landing, but most vividly, the first landing in “colour”
It was an amazing time to be alive, so much hope flooded our world.
Lately, it’s really been down-hill.
As Mr Hawking points out, we have brought ourselves to the edge of destruction with Nuclear Weapons, not solved starvation, created a climate crisis, destroyed so much of the world’s natural resources, and ended the existence of many species of animals, clearly, our stewardship of this planet has NOT had a good track record thus far.
The issue in my opinion is “Science” – I don’t want to join the queue of people “bashing” scientists, as seems so popular these days, but I also don’t want to go back to the dark ages of religion.
(Science has basically been a way to describe everything in fact, that we were asked to take in faith previously..)
But it does seem that some of the most powerful people on Earth, are now scientists.
They have been given the job of solving our problems, by the people less intelligent than them, but with more money.
This is essentially how it goes then.
We have finite resources on this planet, and an ever burgeoning number of people.
We are going to need more resources and more room.
If we can develop the technology, we can mine other planets for their minerals, and we can start colonies for humans to overspill into.
Mining for minerals, and colonising places. How has that done for the human race so far?
These are the VERY strategies that have brought us to our knees in the first place, this is the same aggressive greedy thinking that we have always used.
As one of our greatest thinkers put it “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein – and yet, that is PRECISELY what our top scientists are proposing to do.
Let me just drag in another piece of sh*t here Bill Gates.
One of the world’s richest men.
His latest business wheeze seems to be that if you can sell a single item to every person on the planet, you can become titanically rich. (I’m really preying that his plans finally hit a massive iceberg.)
He has “Invested” $10 Bn into vaccinations, and is forecasting that it should return him $200 Bn in the next 10 years. For him, pumping chemicals into every child is the way to go.
We are built with the most exceptionally perfectly balanced Immune systems, that if looked after correctly can deal with anything. Sadly, this model reaps no profit. Essentially what would be required would be an end to Poverty (and an end to the evil empire of The World Health Organisation – who knew such a great sounding organisation was filled with mad scientists, with VERY dark agendas?)
Here we have the same problem repeated again.
If you are a Scientist, you can’t see ANYTHING but science as the answer
It’s like Donald Trump saying “The Chinese know what they are doing, let’s let them fix everything!”
NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!
If you work in genetic engineering all your life, are you really going to shy away from genetically adjusting humans, just because people call it “playing God?”
We see it in every Bond movie. The “Bad” scientists are funded by the bad guys to do whatever they want. I don’t want to be nasty to North Korea, or Iran who are currently cast as our pantomime villains (Don’t worry, somebody new will be along shortly to take your places..)
But these are exactly the places I’d be looking for a science lab, if I’d been told that I couldn’t experiment on humans in Oxford! It’s just BOUND to happen.
Will our scientists create a whole new generation of X-men, to save the planet – or destroy it? (It’s just another bomb waiting to go off.)
If you have spent a lifetime working on Robots in an AI lab, and somebody comes to you and says “I’ll give you a billion dollars to turn that into a weapon for me” – how many people will say no, or will just ONE say yes.. I know where my money is.
Clearly, I’m already too late for this story. Labs all over the world are working on exactly this. It may look like they are making the next lovely robot who will keep you company and serve you tea, in your dotage. Don’t get me wrong, the same robot will be able to pull your head off, at the click of a keystroke!
As they say, “if a tile falls off your roof, don’t call a plumber.” We are becoming ever more specialised in our work, and NOBODY want’s their work to mean nothing in the end.
Nobody questions if they are in the right field. “I have spent 30 years in Genetics, but it’s looking a bit scary now, so I’ll become a landscape gardener instead!” – It never happens!
We all believe, and are told, that what we are doing could save the world!
The problem is the “Scientific Picture” of what saving the world looks like.
(Use more resources or get them from another planet, burn more energy, plough ever more people into the work, it should be possible to fix it!)
Have you ever heard of colony collapse? We usually use it to refer to bee populations dying out.
Would it be unfair to use it with reference to The Greek Empire, The Roman Empire, The Aztecs, The Mayans, The Vikings, The British empires..?
Colonies, in nature, grow to a sustainable size. They feed off other colonies around them. They find a balance point where they can live harmoniously, with the right numbers of offspring so as to not destroy their environment. If they thrive too much, they die back to a level that works.
Nature understands this – humans don’t
The Chinese Communist Government gave this a shot a while back, bringing their One Child policy to a halt a few years ago, when they realised that every “tribe” has preferred the male over the female from hunter-gather times to now. A foolish path, because you run out of females to reproduce! Something that country will be suffering from for many years to come.
Without balance, NOTHING works!
Science is NOT the answer, it’s part of the answer, but kept unchecked by common sense, it’s just as likely to destroy us with the next super-virus as it is to solve our problems.
The issue is a colony that’s being propped up artificially.
The problem is fearing death.
If you work all of your life trying to find ways to avoid the inevitable, using wonderful scientific techniques, you have missed the joy and purpose of this life.
Imagine a life in a lab experimenting on making cells live longer, an entry on Wikipedia and a stone in a grave yard. Is this a life REALLY lived?
I contend that there’s a better way.
Some of you will have read my essay’s and will be familiar with a guy called Dr Pang Ming.
(For my taste, he’s probably as closed to an Enlightened being as I’m every likely to get close to.)
He’s about to turn 80 this autumn.
He’s a writer and philosopher, living and working in China.
He invented Zhineng Qigong about 50 years ago, started his Medicineless hospital with great success, where he helped over quarter of a million people heal themselves from all sorts of life threatening chronic diseases.
He has a bigger picture, which he set in motion before the turn of the century.
It was the view that if we work on ourselves, if we really work HARD to find balance inside ourselves, we will naturally find a way to harmonise with the world around us. (If you are truly at peace with yourself, destroying Rain forests, killing other people, overpopulating the world heedlessly, or burning all our resources would never occur to you.)
This is just about changing the frame of reference of humanity, it’s a simple educational programme that would take two generations to root.
It’s a simple adjustment to our schools, make children practice self-discovery, and health building exercises for a couple of hours a day, not to the exclusion of Maths and Science, but in harmony with them.
I genuinely believe that we would see an astonishing outbreaking of peace and happiness. I honestly believe that we could draw ourselves back from the brink of disaster.
We don’t have to burn this planet to the ground, and go looking for a new one to pillage, like mindless pirates, we can fix what we have in a few generations.
Anybody have the political willpower to give me a shot at this, anybody got the money and clout to help me to put this on the political agenda? Or are you already investing your billions into escaping this “sh*t hole and finding myself a new planet to destroy!”
Jeremy is a Zhineng Qigong teacher and healer, with 30 years of Qigong experience, and the belief that we can still find balance. He has NOT bought a ticket to outer space yet.