Musings

I read in the Prague Daily Monitor that: “ Jihlava, South Moravia, Sept 23 (CTK) - A US commissioner from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) emerged unharmed after falling into a water tank at the Dukovany nuclear power plant on Friday.
The daily Mlada fronta Dnes reported Friday that commissioners training at the facility were moving around the plant in a group. One of them, however, left the group and fell into the tank. The water in the tank was not radioactive.”

Now, the IAEA are those guys with the tinfoil hats that go around inspecting people’s nuclear plants and programs. I closed my eyes and imagined these bumbling Inspector Cleausos’ careening around the nuclear reactor and managing to fall into a pool of water, all while being attacked by a mysterious Japanese Ninja.

I’ve had my eye on this bunch ever since France was so blatantly allowed to pollute vast reaches of the South Pacific with radiation effect devices and sink a few Greenpeace ships in the process. These are the boys who couldn’t find Saddam’s stash, and have never quite got the goods on Iran. And they squealed like little boys poking a snake with a stick when they first found evidence (after much prodding by the USA) of nuclear weapons research in North Korea.

These are the guys that were snoozing at the wheel when the evil Dr. Kahn emerged with his bag of tricks from Pakistan. Right under their noses, he set up the biggest, most elaborate nuclear weapons black market that the world has ever seen, all devoted to giving the Arabic countries nuclear parity.

Oh, well…..I had planned on writing another monograph in the series I started, when I realized that the dilemma in the world of Theoretical Physics must be resolved before we can really embrace science as the replacement philosophy for centuries of religious thought and revelation.

The dilemma I am referring to is that of the lack of an adequate theory of Quantum Gravity, and the lack of any coherent body of equations unique to String Theory and its many subsets. Its hypothesis is untestable with current physics, and offers no predictions relative to the ‘Real World’. If you can live with this level of uncertainty, then we can press on with our philosophical construct of a value system for the 21st Century.

The great paradigm shift will be from a God and Goddess-centric universe to one that is Life and Nature-centric.

In preceding monographs we have identified humanity as not the ‘Jewel of Creation’ but as a subset of one of the many branches of the tree of life that seems to be unique to Planet Earth. What does seem to be unique to Humans, however, is our ability as technologists to take control of the processes formerly the domain of ‘Nature’, for our own purposes. Whether we choose to do so is our 2nd moral choice; the first being the choice to value ‘Life’, above all, of which we are a part.

We have also shown that if we chose to exercise our technological prowess as a species, we must do it in a non-invasive manner relative to life-as-a-whole on Planet Earth. Otherwise, we must abandon our technical civilization and the miracles of modern medicine and immerse ourselves once again in the full processes of ‘Nature’. In doing so, we also must submit to the fact that the human position in the food chain is not necessarily at the top.

By choosing to forge onward with a technical civilization, we must do so with a minimal impact on the over-all processes of life on earth. We must calculate the planetary load for every human allowed to reside on the planet, and insure that the conduct of our lives is within prescribed limits for gross number of inhabitants and consumption patterns and limits.

To live life unbounded as ‘Humans’, we need to do so off of, or mostly below, the planet’s surface. We must remove ourselves as consumers from the ‘Natural’ food chain. Human food stocks must be confined to those portions of the earth’s habitats set aside for human use and residence, and the needs of life on earth as a whole take precedence over human needs.

Next, I think it will be appropriate to examine cultural issues in this new setting. I’ll save it for another post.