h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm not going to write an essay this time. I shall just say that I agree.

And I suppose I was thinking of continental philosophy, but I don't know much about philosophy and the different types of philosophy myself. I would be interested to know an example of what you're studying for philosophy; it sounds impressive.

To get back to planetary political systems though, it does sound logical from your argument that only global co-operation is necessary. But hasn't the EU already proved that international integration is one of the best ways to achieve this co-operation? After all, the Euro currency is working quite well and we are agreeing on a number of shared European policies that are - theoretically - making it easier to travel between nations freely.

I still believe in the goal of obtaining more energy though, for the reasons I outlined above, which I still think warrants some sort of planetary political and economical co-operation and/or integration. If not for the survival reason of escaping the Earth's destruction but for meeting the needs of an industrial revolution, which I think will occur soon enough when silicon chips can no longer be made to make processors go faster and we have to turn speedily to quantum computation (see my entry at A1136350).

But as I say, I won't write an essay this time.

Neither shall I.

It's nice to learn that I've contrived to sound impressive. As a first year undergraduate I'm studying fairly broad modules; next year I get to specialise more. The modules in question are: Introduction to Logic (the analytic formalisations and proofs I referred to earlier: there's a brief Guide entry on propositional logic at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A336999 , but the once-talked-of entry on predicate logic, which as the name suggests has rules for dealing with predicates in addition to the propositional rules, seems never to have maerialised); Knowledge and Reality (metaphysics, epistemology, truth theories and the philosophy of mind: esentially, what exists, how and whether we can know about it, and what we are anyway); Ethics and Values (the main ethical theories and what they say about various ethical questions); Reading Philosophy (analysis of three philosophical texts with a linked theme: attitudes to religious belief in Plato's 'Euthyphro', Hume's 'Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion' and Kierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling'); and two free electives, which in my case are History of Science (for some reason taught by the Philosophy Department) and Early Greek (i.e. pre-Socratic) Philosophy (taught by the Classics Department, and having actually finished apart from the exam because the lecturer has left the country for the rest of the year, and consequently compressed the module into a single term).

Regarding the E.U., not everyone would agree that it's working particularly well -- but supposing it to be the case that the current level of integration is working well, that doesn't mean that complete integration would work well, and it could in fact be cited in support of co-operation _instead of_ unification. It is certainly not a given that an integrational bureaucracy is necessarily the optimal means of co-operation.