While daydreaming this morning, I came across the number for the speed of light. Light travels at 186000 miles per second. The odometer on my car just rolled over to that number. Hmmm, I wondered how many hours have I spent driving that many miles. A quick division by 18 years and the miles per year have been 10,333 per year. Assuming I drove at an average speed of forty miles per hour I spent 4650 hours driving, or 193.75 days.
To put that mileage in perspective, it is equal to 7.44 times around the world. The problem as I see it is I never got further than Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Another way to put it into perspective is it is three-quarters of the way to the moon.
Think, if we could travel at the speed of light Mars is only 4 minutes away. At that rate exploring Mars may be a reasonable thing to do.
Traveling to Neptune, one of the farthermost planets in our solar system would take us about four hours. I can wrap my head around traveling at the speed of light, but I can’t fathom man-made global warming will melt all the ice on Earth. The limit to traveling that fast in a spaceship is the amount of fuel it takes to keep the engines going. I can see us finding a way to propel a ship in space because we are resourceful people. It won’t happen in this century but it could happen in the next.
Rings of Saturn
What an amazing life we would have traversing the Milky Way from planet to planet on our vacations. Or, driving to a Spa in the rings of Saturn, only a seventy-minute drive away from Earth. Or driving two and a half hours to Uranus for Jet Skiing on the Methane seas. If heat is your thing, take a short two-minute and twenty-second jaunt to Venus, or a five-minute ride to Mercury, but be sure to take a bath in sunscreen before leaving.
Uranus
Once we can travel that fast, the genius population on Earth will invent the products we will need to take advantage of the solar system’s recreational opportunities.
The push to electrify the world is based on the premise that we are causing global warming by burning fossil fuels, which produce carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide in the air makes the air get hotter than what is normal. This warming is then causing the polar ice caps to melt and the oceans to rise. A lot of ice is stored around the planet in glaciers, ice mountains in Antarctica, and just plain ice in and around the north and south poles. One day soon, I will attempt to calculate the volume of ice that has to melt and determine how much the oceans rise to cover seventy percent of Earth. That is a lot of water. My logic urges me to believe there must be some warehouse full of ice that we don’t know about.
Anyway, I’ll get to my point. I believe that we should change our way of thinking a little bit. A scientist would say we should shift the paradigm. Let us assume that global warming is taking place. For the moment, forget about the BS that you are causing the warming by driving to the grocery store. Assume, instead, that in addition to your hot drive to get groceries, the Earth is in one of its normal warming cycles when the sun is flaring extra heavy, the Earth’s orbit is just a fraction smaller, bringing the planet an inch or two closer to the sun. At the same time, our planet begins spewing lava from its core in places like Yellowstone Park, the ring of fire encircling the Pacific Ocean, our fiftieth state, Hawaii, and all the other volcanoes scattered about the planet in places too numerous to enumerate. All of them spewing molten lava at temperatures between 1300 to 2400 degrees Fahrenheit. Compare that to our hot cars emitting carbon dioxide at a measly 400 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists have yet to measure any atmospheric temperature of more than 0.000001 degrees, which is well within the measurement error. In other words, they have yet to see a measurable change. I point out that volcanoes have a much larger effect on global warming than cars.
Okay, we will assume that global warming will melt the ice caps, and the water level will rise by 230 feet. Not all the land people live on will be affected by that much water rise. True, the amount of land above water will be reduced, but there will be sufficient land above water to provide a home for Earthlings. Some scientists predict it will take five thousand years of regular global warming to melt all the ice on Earth. I, for one, will not see that happen, nor will any of my kids. But for those worried about that happening, what are you doing about the problem? For one, you are making radical changes that don’t make sense to change the temperature by some immeasurable fraction of a degree to slow it down. If this is a regular warming cycle, we don’t have a Chinaman’s chance in hell to change things. The world has been covered in ice many times before and uncovered in periods long before the internal combustion engine was invented. It will take something more drastic than changing the world to electric cars to make a noticeable change.
A Mechanical Sea Wall in the NetherlandsA Sea Wall Separating the North Sea From and Inland Lake
Here are some things we could be doing:
1. Build sea walls in places where it is feasible. The country of Holland has had a sea wall retaining the North Sea for centuries. Learn from the city of Venice, which deals with tidal sea rises in their city seasonally.
2. Plan new cities into which major populations can move.
3. Build new roads into these new cities.
4. Innovate new boat cities that will survive, and thrive in the flooded areas.
5. Learn how to survive with dikes and sea walls from the Netherlands.
6. Build seawalls to keep the coastline from invading the shore.
7. Build desalinization plants that can bring fresh water to desert areas.
8. Learn to grow food in less space than we use now.
9. Provide housing with smaller footprints to house more people in the same space.
10. Finally, learn that electricity and water don’t mix.
Instead of trying to make a common sense practical plan, we are wasting money and effort on stupid plans to electrify our transportation system and to transport everyone (most likely the elite among us) to Mars to escape the rising water. We have 5000 years to make it happen so if you are really worried get it started today!
Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) with cubs in the Wapusk National Park, Churchill, Manitoba, Canada
The government will have to be involved in any plan this big, so I recommend we stop wasting our time trying to keep Donald Trump from becoming president. Instead, we should abolish Black Lives Matter, because all lives matter. Abandon “Defund the Police, because we need to recognize that our society needs to be secure from the crazies among us. Recognize that being “Woke” only means we treat people of all races equally. Write to your Congressman to ask AI to give us the solution. Put all uber-liberal communists to work building the wall. In fact, I think it might be wise to put all of Congress to work building the seawall around the Capital to protect Washington, D.C., from being overwhelmed by the Potomac River. (Most likely, this seawall will be the first built; God forbid our government should be exposed to a life-threatening situation).
Lastly, write to your Congressman to ask what he plans to do about the sea rising from global warming.
Finally, I finished reading the book on Artificial Intelligence. Throughout the book, the author kept me enthralled, mostly by how it works, and by predicting the future of mankind’s job prospects. Jobs are in jeopardy for sure. The problem, as I see it, is that only jobs that can be easily automated will be affected. The author, an accomplished AI expert, is overselling the power of this technology, and assuming that the world will be able to automate just as fast and as easily as they will implement AI.
The most obvious places I see AI implemented today are using chatbots to solve problems dealing with banking statements and at McDonald’s, where an order kiosk will reduce the need for an order taker at the front desk. Behind the kiosk, McDonald’s uses humans to flip the burgers and package the fries. this week, I had my experience with AI involving my bank, which froze when I told a friend to send me money using Zelle. I registered with Zelle, to set up an account, then had to do a similar thing with my bank account. My grandson assured me that this process worked for him in a few minutes, and he has used it for several years without incident. He walked me through the setup. It went very quickly, and I was pleased. That is, until I tried to use it. It didn’t work. It was late in the evening, and I was not in the mood to tackle a problem, I put it off until morning.
The next morning, I put off having breakfast to get in line with my bank (BMO). When I often want to ask them something, I phone them and wait for the next operator. In some cases, I waited for forty minutes. I was too impatient this time, and after listening to the bank’s bullshit message to use the website too many times, I decided to try it. Getting connected to the website went easy. I took my time reading through all the services they offered through the many buttons on the web page. I found one that might help. I asked a question. but it was too complicated for the bot to understand. I simplified the question, it happened again. Finally, after several attempts to get an answer or a direction, the bot replied with a phone number to call for help. It was the same number I was on before. Another line to wait in. Since my plan for the day was to solve this problem, I stayed on the line and waited while listening to music and reading emails on my desktop. The recording kept updating me with messages like If you don’t want to wait, push one, followed by the pound key, and we will call you back when your turn comes up. Good! I pushed one and the pound key. Then I had to give them my phone number. At least now I could do something else like play solitaire while waiting. Two hours later, my cell phone rings. I answered, and nothing. The line is dead. They lied, or else their AI isn’t very intelligent.
I started and called again, waiting for a real live operator to pick up. When it does, I go into mild shock and ask if the voice belongs to a real live person. The answer was yes. To make this long story shorter, it took this patient troubleshooter an hour and nine minutes to find the gremlin that was out of line. I will not yet concede that artificial intelligence is better than real human intelligence, nor will it in my lifetime.
The story didn’t end there. The next problem was verifying that it was me who signed up with the email address, and not some mindless bot.
The world seems to. be rushing into the AI scheme to save us from ourselves, just like they are doing with global warming and converting us to electric cars. The electric car rush is on the wane as our unintelligent humans are finally beginning to realize that if everyone trades in their gas-powered car today for an electric one, there is not enough electricity to go around.
