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

>>So what is it about Homo Sap that lead some to hesitate in installing this technology throughout the world?<<

How about Chernobyl and Fukushima? Fission causes pollution that lasts centuries and, if something goes wrong, people half a continent away have to start worrying.

>> How about Chernobyl and Fukushima? <<

Chernobyl was gross incompetence at various levels while Fukushima, apart from a poor location argument, was a combination of neglect and an unwillingness to spend money.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/05/fukushima-meltdown-manmade-disaster
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/15/fukushima-disaster-avoided-nuclear-plant

My issue is that the technology is there ... but maybe there is something about Homo Sap that needs to be also discovered, recognised.

Ok you've convinced me. I happily trust my government not to site nuclear power plans in poor locations, for them to spend adequate sums of money to keep the plans maintained and safe, and for the operators to be entirely competent.

"Plant", that should read, not "plan".

Icy: Where does you lack of trust etc come from? The thing with new discoveries / technologies as well as old discoveries / technologies is that it will always be in the hands of Homo Sap. So maybe we need to consider the issues associated with Homo Sap before we go searching for further discoveries / technologies ... cos clearly most peoples concerns appear to lie with Homo Sap and whether it can be "trusted" etc.

I'm looking forward to true "Babelfish" quality simultaneous machine translation.

When I'm feeling good, I worry that I won't live long enough to read all the great books, listen to all the great music, and see all the great places that the human race has come up with. When I travel to foreign countries, I tend to want to replicate all the great foods that I enjoyed there. After I got back from Italy in 2007, I spent every Saturday cooking a multi-course Italian meal. I filled two notebooks with recipes. After I got back from Taiwan in 1989, I tried making those steamed dumplings that tasted so good there. I also made hot and sour soup and a few other things. They weren't as good as they were in Taiwan, but I tried.

Travel to another planet? I would want to replicate their recipes after I got back to earth, and this would be hard because the ingredients would probably not be available.

It can't be too long now before we find the first Martian fossils.

I can't wait to discover if anyone I like survives A Song of Ice and Fire. They probably won't.

>> I worry that I won't live long enough to read all the great books <<

I assume you mean novels ... in which case there is said to be only seven basic plots: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, Rebirth.

Hmmm.


I was thinking the bible covered all those but is there any comedy in the bible?

... that's a bit unfair but ...

There's also one in which someone new comes to town.

Here's an interesting discovery ... the British Government likely in cohorts with the US spied on other G8 members in the 2010 G8 meeting in London. MI5 set up a fake internet café then tracked emails etc:

erratum G20 meeting in 2009: here is the link
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22938073

so it would have been the Gordon Brown Government ... but politicians can't help but be politicians.

Governments that spy on other governments are probably quite common. Maybe they *all* spy on each other. The general public is not affected by this, and probably isn't all that interested in knowing about it, except when it's made into a feature-length movie performed by A-List actors.

But when a government spies on its own citizens, there's a very unsymmetrical situation: the citizens can't spy back. I knew a man who was spied on by the FBI for many years. To some extent this was because his son had done things in Cuba that the U.S. government didn't condone.
The father was pretty left of center himself. I remember reading that when legislation was passed allowing people to see the dossiers kept on them, some were amused by what they read. Leonard Bernstein laughed and laughed when he saw his own file.

Might as well make it worth there while writing about you...

Go on do something outrageous

...reminds me of a pep talk by a retired CIA man I used to work for in a surveillance/oversight position, in civilian life.

He said, "Everybody watches everybody all the time!"

I've no problems about that, given prosocial (as distinct from antisocial) motivation and high standards of professionalism and professional ethics.

Its only good sense.

If you don't keep a close eye on the antisocials (psychos, in ordinary and everyday language) all the time, they will misbehave, given means and opportunity.

Then there are people suffering merely from emotive and/or emotional immaturity...