Reply To: A new way of generating electricity

[Glenn Millam]

vansig wrote:
I think it’s accurate. “Fake fitness” being the key term.
— http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/why_we_havent_met_any_aliens/

As recent, general traffic on the forum site seems to be covering the AGW debate, and movies, and games, better than real progress toward exceeding unity, I’m finding myself suddenly deeply dissatisfied.

Read that article you linked. I think that it’s author is misguided. Look through history and you will find people lamenting the “current” state of people’s laziness and our impending failure. The author just fails to see that he is just another in a long line of doomsayers.

I see a situation quite opposite from him. He predicts a dying humanity which fails to procreate due to laziness and bad eating habits. I see a world that is still reproducing way too fast and is using up its resources without properly recycling them. He sees movies and games as idle entertainments that substitute for real exploration and growth, and I see these things as human expression and necessary for the exploration of truth.

Are we fit to explore the stars? We don’t even have the means. The first step in doing so would be to create a cornucopia energy technology, like focus fusion. Wasn’t this project an outgrowth of a spacecraft propulsion research project at NASA?

I also don’t like his assumptions about how human evolution could not prepare us for the world we have today. Yeah, we have junk food and porn. But this is not new. Just look at the Kama Sutra. People have always like to eat too much and have sex. They also have always liked to do a lot of things. We have also always liked to get to the point where we do whatever we like.

Humans will always be “lazy.” Why? Because laziness is the way to efficiency. Oddly enough, it is our urge to be lazy that pushes us to achievement, since we are willing to go through short-term effort for long term laziness.

http://twentytwowords.com/2008/07/16/how-laziness-breeds-efficiency/

The focus fusion project seeks to turn several years of research and development time into thousands of years worth of practically free energy, which will pay for “laziness” on a massive scale and allow for new forms of “laziness” as yet undreamt of. And we humans will work hard at it, trust me.