Ad Astera Per Aspera = Mastery Of Negentropic Centripetence

alkimist  |  In the Tabula Smaragdina, the oldest of Arian Writs, we find the following significant words cut in the emerald: "Combine the heavenly with the earthly in accordance with the Laws of Nature, and health and happiness shall be yours as long as you  live." Only the finest elements should be mated and blended if one wishes to obtain each time a finer and higher product. To mate, means to unite and to stimulate two opposites, the positive and the negative. The negative attracts the positive and the latter is drawn to the negative. Sunlight, which is positive, fertilizes the negative grain seed in the womb of the
earth. A constant exchange of emissions between the positive atmosphere and the negative geosphere brings the seed to life. In this case it can be truly said: "She partly drew him down, he partly let himself sink." (Goethe: The Ballad of the Fisherman)

Union between the offspring of the earth and the descedants of the sun gives rise to life in the physical realm which is directed by the Etheric forces. The latter, on the other hand, have their own higher counterpart. The negative offspring of the earth capture the positive descendants of the sun and this pro-
duces a constant automatic movement. In the spring of the year, when the temperature and light conditions are relatively favorable, the positive rays of the sun (light) induce germination in the negative grains or seed. Therefore, to combine, means to stimulate and produce various gradients of potential. This in turn produces movement which is the very basis of life, so that everything is in constant flux (panta rhei).

Although the world is animated by a single universal force, this force can be divided into two contrasting elements — the pressure component, and the suction component. In this case, Nature's dipolarity expresses itself in the form of two different exit types of motion. Each of these types manifests itself through certain specific phenomena and represents one of the two components of the force which animates and activates the whole universe. The secret of the normal and good life con-
sists of achieving the proper balance or blend of these two components. (see "Tabula Smaragdina". This is pure Cabala.

All occult science, East and West, bases itself on this principle, Chokmah and Bina, Osiris and Isis, Orpheus and Eurydice. 

The whirling Hooked Cross, the Swastika, is the symbol. Revolving counter-clockwise, centrifugal, it is negative. Revolving clockwise, centripetal, it is positive.)

USE CENTRIPETENCE TO OVERCOME GRAVITY
The pressure component leads to Centrifugence, friction, increased heat and gravitation; while the suction compoment leads to Centripetence, cooling, absence of friction and levitation -- which makes it possible to overcome gravity. While friction may produce even white heat, fire. Centripetence pro-
duces a temperature drop which may reach what is known as the State of Anomaly which, in the case of water, +4° Centigrade.

However, this is possible only if one Uses Schauberger's suction spiral, a device which, on the whole, is still unknown. Each living entity has its specific and characteristic point of Anomaly. This should be understood as the temperature or fever-less condition, that is, the optimum degree of warmth required by its species to develop and proliferate. Until now technology has recognized only one type of motion,
the type which raises the temperature through friction and pressure. Even ancient tribes knew that fire could be produced by rubbing together wood or stones; but it took Viktor Schauberger to discover a new type of motion producing not heat, but a temperature drop, reaching at times the point of Anomaly. 

This can be accomplished by tightly winding or coiling either air or water through a spiral curved channel of special design.  In this process the medium — air or water — is drawn almost without friction toward a central point, condensed in a special manner and at the same time cooled. A biological vacuum (negative pressure) is created which, on its part, augments the suction acting on air or water. Until now this possibility has been overlooked in technology, and yet it offers totally new perspectives in regard to energy production. Friction creates in a machine conditions comparable to fever, conditions
which cannot be normal, since they tax materials excessively and burn them out. People and animals do not develop fever because of work. They may get hot but their blood temperature remains relatively
constant. Normal conditions in machinery can be achieved by or through implosion and impansion with the best possible results in regard to the preservation of materials. It would seem obvious that man's duty is not to waste and squander as quickly as he can the resources of the earth, but to preserve and conserve them. Machinery design, therefore, should avoid all material waste and should ensure at the same time durability. Our unscrupulous modern technology and ceonomy, unfortunately, have
been moving in the opposite direction.

THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO GO
The two types of motion which nature employs give rise to the following phenomena: 

(a) "Centrifugence" - resistance to friction pressure
temperature rise
biological deterioration
(b) "Centripetence" - absence of friction suction
temperature drop
biological improvement

"Centrifugence", which is a scattering of force, is slowed down by natural causes, because the resistance it encounters grows as the square of its velocity, following the well known formula W=MV2. 

Were it not for this fact, matter would risk being destroyed, or would be in danger of being broken up into atoms. The opposite is true of "Centripetence". Its effective force undergoes no deceleration, since there is virtually no friction, and grows, instead, as the square of its velocity. 

Centripetence contracts, conserves, condenses and thereforebenefits life. It attracts and absorbs without producing pressure. It is obvious therefore that as a result of the natural laws the effective power of centrifugal motion is never as great as that of centripetal motion, the first being destructive, the
second constructive. Were the destructive force more powerful than the constructive force the universe would not exist. (The Christ is Centripetence. The Anti-Christ is Centrifugence.) 

Unfortunately our whole technology has committed the error of choosing the destructive force as a means to its own ends, and this tragic choice of the mode of propulsion and motivation, having completely disrupted the ratios and balance of nature, has brought it to a blind alley. Instead of applying by preference, as nature does, centripetence which permits producing energy almost at no cost, it has done the opposite. This has resulted in an over consumption of raw materials, in an explosion and exploitation of natural resources, until now the very destruction of atoms has been reached. 

Centrifugence increases pressure and heat. Centripetence has a cooling effect and generates condensing reactive forces. It never cools beyond the point of anomaly.

In 2018 Saletan Watched Watson Die On The Race And IQ Hill And Chose The Better Part Of Valor

Slate |  The race-and-IQ debate is back. The latest round started a few weeks ago when Harvard geneticist David Reich wrote a New York Times op-ed in defense of race as a biological fact. The piece resurfaced Sam Harris’ year-old Waking Up podcast interview with Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, and launched a Twitter debate between Harris and Vox’s Ezra Klein. Klein then responded to Harris and Reich in Vox, Harris fired back, and Andrew Sullivan went after Klein. Two weeks ago, Klein and Harris released a two-hour podcast in which they fruitlessly continued their dispute.

I’ve watched this debate for more than a decade. It’s the same wreck, over and over. A person with a taste for puncturing taboos learns about racial gaps in IQ scores and the idea that they might be genetic. He writes or speaks about it, credulously or unreflectively. Every part of his argument is attacked: the validity of IQ, the claim that it’s substantially heritable, and the idea that races can be biologically distinguished. The offender is denounced as racist when he thinks he’s just defending science against political correctness.

I know what it’s like to be this person because, 11 years ago, I was that person. I saw a comment from Nobel laureate James Watson about the black-white IQ gap, read some journal articles about it, and bought in. That was a mistake. Having made that mistake, I’m in no position to throw stones at Sullivan, Harris, or anyone else. But I am in a position to speak to these people as someone who understands where they’re coming from. I believe I can change their thinking, because I’ve changed mine, and I’m here to make that case to them. And I hope those of you who find this whole subject vile will bear with me as I do.

Here’s my advice: You can talk about the genetics of race. You can talk about the genetics of intelligence. But stop implying they’re the same thing. Connecting intelligence to race adds nothing useful. It overextends the science you’re defending, and it engulfs the whole debate in moral flames.

I’m not asking anyone to deny science. What I’m asking for is clarity. The genetics of race and the genetics of intelligence are two different fields of research. In his piece in the Times, Reich wrote about prostate cancer risk, a context in which there’s clear evidence of a genetic pattern related to ancestry. (Black men with African ancestry in a specific DNA region have a higher prostate cancer risk than do black men with European ancestry in that region.) Reich steered around intelligence where, despite racial and ethnic gaps in test scores, no such pattern has been established.

It’s also fine to discuss the genetics of IQ—there’s a serious line of scientific inquiry around that subject—and whether intelligence, in any population, is an inherited social advantage. We tend to worry that talk of heritability will lead to eugenics. But it’s also worth noting that, to the extent that IQ, like wealth, is inherited and concentrated through assortative mating, it can stratify society and undermine cohesion. That’s what much of The Bell Curve was about.

The trouble starts when people who write or talk about the heritability of intelligence extend this idea to comparisons between racial and ethnic groups. Some people do this maliciously; others don’t. You can call the latter group naïve, credulous, or obtuse to prejudice. But they might be open to persuasion, and that’s my aim here. For them, the chain of thought might go something like this: Intelligence is partly genetic, and race is partly genetic. So maybe racial differences on intelligence tests can be explained, in part, by genetics.

Ancient Anatolia: Meetings With The Ancient Teachers Of Mankind

arkeonews  |  “Our findings change the perception, still seen in schoolbooks across the world, that settled life resulted from farming and animal husbandry,” he said at a September presentation of the site. “This shows that it begins when humans were still hunter-gatherers and that agriculture is not a cause, but the effect, of settled life.”

The region of these settlements is named “Taş Tepeler,” literally meaning Stone Hills. Covering an area of 200 kilometers from one end to the other, Taş Tepeler is an Anatolian and Upper Mesopotamian territory that hosted the earliest settled communities.

As far as we know, Taş Tepeler is the first example of sedentism and social union on earth. Sacred and secular spaces were built simultaneously at Karahantepe, where humans dwelled year-round for about 1,500 years, and no remnants of farmed vegetation have been found.

Göbekli Tepe, which was previously thought to be the only place where nomadic people came to worship, is now considered a part of simultaneous settlements. Recent work has also revealed domestic structures at Göbekli Tepe. “In this region, we encounter monumental structures for the first time in the oldest villages of the world,” Karul says.

Scientists have long assumed that the domestication of plants and animals approximately 10,000 years ago pushed people to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and that the increase in food production enabled them to establish complex communities and build the groundwork for civilization. However, emerging evidence that Stone Age people erected permanent buildings for spiritual, rather than technically necessary, activities are challenging the conventional wisdom that they lacked a large-scale civilization with the division of labor and common ceremonial themes.

The Neolithic era, which coincided with the end of the Ice Age, symbolizes humanity’s tremendous transition from foraging to farming.

“It will take time for the scientific community to digest and accept this game-changing research,” says Mehmet Özdoğan, the professor emeritus of archaeology at Istanbul University.

“We must now rethink what we knew—that civilization emerged from a horizontal society that began raising wheat because people were hungry—and assess this period with its multi-faceted society. The foundations for today’s civilization, from family law to inheritance to the state and bureaucracy, were all struck in the Neolithic period,” Özdoğan says.

In Taş Tepeler, which is thought to be the beginning of the process where the shelter turned into a dwelling and real villages emerged 12 thousand years ago, there are finds on humanity’s first use of pottery and the ability to carry out basic trade initiatives. The monumental structures in the region are believed to be communal spaces where people come together.

Karahantepe rises within Şanlıurfa’s interesting limestone authentic land structure. These limestone rocks are the main material of the finds.

 

Random Mutation And Natural Selection Have Minimal Explanatory Usefulness

theguardian  |  Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection.

You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce. And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or owls.

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.

For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ. And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”

There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact – and whether other forces might also be at work – has become the subject of bitter dispute. “If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we must find new ways of explaining.”

In 2014, eight scientists took up this challenge, publishing an article in the leading journal Nature that asked “Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?” Their answer was: “Yes, urgently.” Each of the authors came from cutting-edge scientific subfields, from the study of the way organisms alter their environment in order to reduce the normal pressure of natural selection – think of beavers building dams – to new research showing that chemical modifications added to DNA during our lifetimes can be passed on to our offspring. The authors called for a new understanding of evolution that could make room for such discoveries. The name they gave this new framework was rather bland – the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) – but their proposals were, to many fellow scientists, incendiary.

 

The Quantum Future Of Biology

royalsocietypublishing |  Biological systems are dynamical, constantly exchanging energy and matter with the environment in order to maintain the non-equilibrium state synonymous with living. Developments in observational techniques have allowed us to study biological dynamics on increasingly small scales. Such studies have revealed evidence of quantum mechanical effects, which cannot be accounted for by classical physics, in a range of biological processes. Quantum biology is the study of such processes, and here we provide an outline of the current state of the field, as well as insights into future directions.

1. Introduction

Quantum mechanics is the fundamental theory that describes the properties of subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, molecular assemblies and possibly beyond. Quantum mechanics operates on the nanometre and sub-nanometre scales and is at the basis of fundamental life processes such as photosynthesis, respiration and vision. In quantum mechanics, all objects have wave-like properties, and when they interact, quantum coherence describes the correlations between the physical quantities describing such objects due to this wave-like nature.

In photosynthesis, respiration and vision, the models that have been developed in the past are fundamentally quantum mechanical. They describe energy transfer and electron transfer in a framework based on surface hopping. The dynamics described by these models are often ‘exponential’ and follow from the application of Fermi’s Golden Rule [1,2]. As a consequence of averaging the rate of transfer over a large and quasi-continuous distribution of final states the calculated dynamics no longer display coherences and interference phenomena. In photosynthetic reaction centres and light-harvesting complexes, oscillatory phenomena were observed in numerous studies performed in the 1990s and were typically ascribed to the formation of vibrational or mixed electronic–vibrational wavepackets. The reported detection of the remarkably long-lived (660 fs and longer) electronic quantum coherence during excitation energy transfer in a photosynthetic system revived interest in the role of ‘non-trivial’ quantum mechanics to explain the fundamental life processes of living organisms [3]. However, the idea that quantum phenomena—like coherence—may play a functional role in macroscopic living systems is not new. In 1932, 10 years after quantum physicist Niels Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on the atomic structure, he delivered a lecture entitled ‘Light and Life’ at the International Congress on Light Therapy in Copenhagen [4]. This raised the question of whether quantum theory could contribute to a scientific understanding of living systems. In attendance was an intrigued Max Delbrück, a young physicist who later helped to establish the field of molecular biology and won a Nobel Prize in 1969 for his discoveries in genetics [5].

All living systems are made up of molecules, and fundamentally all molecules are described by quantum mechanics. Traditionally, however, the vast separation of scales between systems described by quantum mechanics and those studied in biology, as well as the seemingly different properties of inanimate and animate matter, has maintained some separation between the two bodies of knowledge. Recently, developments in experimental techniques such as ultrafast spectroscopy [6], single molecule spectroscopy [7–11], time-resolved microscopy [12–14] and single particle imaging [15–18] have enabled us to study biological dynamics on increasingly small length and time scales, revealing a variety of processes necessary for the function of the living system that depend on a delicate interplay between quantum and classical physical effects.

Quantum biology is the application of quantum theory to aspects of biology for which classical physics fails to give an accurate description. In spite of this simple definition, there remains debate over the aims and role of the field in the scientific community. This article offers a perspective on where quantum biology stands today, and identifies potential avenues for further progress in the field.

2. What is quantum biology?

Biology, in its current paradigm, has had wide success in applying classical models to living systems. In most cases, subtle quantum effects on (inter)molecular scales do not play a determining role in overall biological function. Here, ‘function’ is a broad concept. For example: How do vision and photosynthesis work on a molecular level and on an ultrafast time scale? How does DNA, with stacked nucleotides separated by about 0.3 nm, deal with UV photons? How does an enzyme catalyse an essential biochemical reaction? How does our brain with neurons organized on a sub-nanometre scale deal with such an amazing amount of information? How do DNA replication and expression work? All these biological functions should, of course, be considered in the context of evolutionary fitness. The differences between a classical approximation and a quantum-mechanical model are generally thought to be negligible in these cases, even though at the basis every process is entirely governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. What happens at the ill-defined border between the quantum and classical regimes? More importantly, are there essential biological functions that ‘appear’ classical but in reality are not? The role of quantum biology is precisely to expose and unravel this connection.

Fundamentally, all matter—animate or inanimate—is quantum mechanical, being constituted of ions, atoms and/or molecules whose equilibrium properties are accurately determined by quantum theory. As a result, it could be claimed that all of biology is quantum mechanical. However, this definition does not address the dynamical nature of biological processes, or the fact that a classical description of intermolecular dynamics seems often sufficient. Quantum biology should, therefore, be defined in terms of the physical ‘correctness’ of the models used and the consistency in the explanatory capabilities of classical versus quantum mechanical models of a particular biological process.

As we investigate biological systems on nanoscales and larger, we find that there exist processes in biological organisms, detailed in this article, for which it is currently thought that a quantum mechanical description is necessary to fully characterize the behaviour of the relevant subsystem. While quantum effects are difficult to observe on macroscopic time and length scales, processes necessary for the overall function and therefore survival of the organism seem to rely on dynamical quantum-mechanical effects at the intermolecular scale. It is precisely the interplay between these time and length scales that quantum biology investigates with the aim to build a consistent physical picture.

Grand hopes for quantum biology may include a contribution to a definition and understanding of life, or to an understanding of the brain and consciousness. However, these problems are as old as science itself, and a better approach is to ask whether quantum biology can contribute to a framework in which we can repose these questions in such a way as to get new answers. The study of biological processes operating efficiently at the boundary between the realms of quantum and classical physics is already contributing to improved physical descriptions of this quantum-to-classical transition.

More immediately, quantum biology promises to give rise to design principles for biologically inspired quantum nanotechnologies, with the ability to perform efficiently at a fundamental level in noisy environments at room temperature and even make use of these ‘noisy environments’ to preserve or even enhance the quantum properties [19,20]. Through engineering such systems, it may be possible to test and quantify the extent to which quantum effects can enhance processes and functions found in biology, and ultimately answer whether these quantum effects may have been purposefully selected in the design of the systems. Importantly, however, quantum bioinspired technologies can also be intrinsically useful independently from the organisms that inspired them.

Reality Is Holographic Associative Memory - Perception Is A Simulation

medium |  In the late 1940’s and early 50’s, Karl Pribram, a neuroscientist, performed defining neuro-behavioural experiments that established the underlying structure of the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system.

In essence, the neural architectures of thought and feeling.

Additionally, he discovered that the sensory-specific association cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, where associations are made between the body’s senses in real-time, “operate to organize the choices we make among sensory stimuli, and not the sensing of the stimuli themselves.”

But what Pribram is best known for is holonomic brain theory, which describes human cognition by modeling the brain as a holographic storage network, with consciousness being shaped by the quantum effects occurring within and between brain cells.

In 1975, Pribram was inspired by the work of Bohm who had noted that the universe would look like a hologram to us if we did not have the use of lenses.

Building on this insight, Pribram concluded that our view of the world would be a hologram — a diffuse scattering of the interference patterns of electromagnetic waves — if not for the lenses of our eyes.

And that the neural processes of perception are formed by several stages of transformation, each stage having its roots in quantum mechanics.

In a famous collaboration with Bohm that followed, Pribram laid the foundation for a quantum theory of consciousness, connecting Bohm’s theory of holomovment with the mathematics of holography and neuroscience.

Pribram hypothesized that memory takes the form of interference patterns similar to those of holograms produced by a laser.

Pribram suggested that cognition involved electrical oscillations in the delicate fibers of the dendritic web, which are different from the more commonly known action potentials of axons and synapses.

In other words, the space between the neurons — and not the neurons themselves —was responsible for consciousness.

Pribram hypothesized that the fluctuations of brainwaves riding on gray matter, glial cells, and the synapto-dendritic web “create interference patterns in which memory is encoded naturally, and the waves may be analyzed by a Fourier transform.”

And remember, with a hologram, any part of it with sufficient size contains the whole of the stored information.

In this theory, a piece of a long-term memory is similarly distributed over a dendritic arbor so that each part of the dendritic network contains all the information stored over the entire network.

This structuring of the brain provides the capability of responding to stimuli without specialized and constrained paths of nerve conduction.

Instead, the brain operates as a general purpose computer with built-in redundancy, each part receiving information about the whole and performing a specific computation on it — at all scales.

Like many structures found in nature, the brain’s architecture is fractal. And perhaps it follows that the algorithm is as well. Consciousness itself.

In this model, consciousness is expressed by a Fourier transform between the frequency and space-time domains of reality. It’s what reveals the available degrees of freedom with respect to the past and the future —in essence, it’s a function to decide what to pay attention to.

But ultimately, consciousness is really the platform for making a choice. A multi-dimensional awareness of and response to the environment. The basis for an informed decision, at any scale.

Perception, then, is the re-construction of the hologram, a momentary collapse of the wave-function into an explicate order. The filtering and focusing of attention predicated on the past and future.

Perception is the simulation.

The electrical signals of the nervous system are the read-write interface to the hologram. And consciousness is what illuminates the choices available now, in the present — focusing our attention — distorted and myopic as it may be.

Holographic Associative Memory

In the typical operation of holograms, we shine a reference beam on a holographic film to re-construct the visual image of the object beam, thereby observing a virtual image in the reflected light.

And in theory, we can also reverse the procedure, using the object beam to illuminate the hologram, re-creating the original reference beam.

The light itself.

In this dual mode of operation, a holographic associative memory —HAM, for short— is a form of data storage where information from the object beam and reference beam can be saved and retrieved by associating them with one another in interference patterns. Each part of the pattern contains them both, and each can be used to retrieve the other.

Experimental setup for a 3D holographic storage network

In other words, a hologram with a read-write interface.

HAM is part of the family of analog, correlation-based, associative, stimulus-response memories, where information is mapped onto the phase orientation of complex numbers operating on a Riemann surface.

It can be considered as a complex valued artificial neural network.

The HAM also exhibits some remarkable characteristics, as it has been shown to be effective for associative memory tasks, generalization, and pattern recognition with changeable attention.

And the ability of dynamic search localization is central to natural memory. For example, in visual perception, humans always tend to focus on some specific objects in a pattern. Humans can effortlessly change the focus from object to object without requiring relearning.

HAM provides a computational model which can mimic this ability by creating a representation for focus

Principles of Operation

Link

1. Stimulus-response associations are both learned and expressed in one non-iterative transformation. No backpropagation of error terms or iterative processing required.
2. The method forms a non-connectionist model in which the ability to superimpose a very large number of stimulus-response patterns or complex associations may be superimposed or “enfolded” on a single neural element.
3. The generated phase angle communicates response information, and magnitude communicates a measure of recognition (or confidence in the result).
4. The process permits a capability with neural system to establish dominance profile of stored information, thus exhibiting a memory profile of any range — from short-term to long-term memory.
5. The process follows the non-disturbance rule, that is prior stimulus-response associations are minimally influenced by subsequent learning.
6. The information is presented in abstract form by a complex vector which may be expressed directly by a waveform possessing frequency and magnitude. This waveform is analogous to electro-chemical impulses believed to transmit information between biological neuron cells.

To the point, the universe is a HAM and the brain is it’s tuner.

Have You Discovered The Beginning So That You Can Look For The End?

dtic.mil |  The natural evolution of Man is finished now, within the lifetime of the average reader. The fifth stage of planetary evolution of life is the final stage of evolution by natural selection. Thus, any "next step" in evolution must be taken technologically by the species itself if it is to be taken at all. Any such step to a sixth stage of evolution must paradoxically involve the reimposition of a sort of positive internal control, somehow without giving up genetic deprogramming.

The fact that rigid and foolproof control must be established to eliminate destructive competition, while at the same time genetic control must remain relinquished if intelligence is to be retained, is the precise, contradictory, solitary human problem. It is this hard nut that all systems, organizations, governments, societies, sciences, theorists, religious leaders, meglomaniacs, dictators, portificators, and well-meaning but ignorant visionaries and humanitarians have failed to chew and swallow since time immemorial. The usual solution advanced is this. "If everyone would just be a perfect citizen, behave ideally, and love and help everyone else always, then the problem would be solved."

Any fool will agree with that; the proposition is incredibly naive and a tautology. The question is, "How, pray tell, can one get all persons to be perfect?" Law, logic, philosophy, creed, religion, practice, love, sacrifice, money, the ballot, and the bullet -- all of these have empirically proven that they cannot solve the human problem for all humanity. Since none of the solutions advanced to date can solve the problem, we must discard them all and search for a new approach. And a Teilhardian solution indeed emerges if one ponders diligently. The solution can be synthesized into two parts: each individual human must possess an internal mechanism for generating appropriate limits to personal behavior, and there must exist a totally reliable external process to implant or induce the internal mechanism. And one would also hope for the "maximum individual freedom within the constraints of minimum essential inter-individual control."

The only viable solution is to link the brains of all men into one giant superbraln. it is the entire species which has been developing, and it is the entire species which now must be linked into one superbeing. Jung's collective unconscious must acquire a single integrated consciousness, instead of the fragmented billions it now possesses. Each mancell must function individually within its own sphere, but in intermancell harmony under the control of a single linked-species nervous system.

This linkage must b6 accomplizhed technologically by creating and installing a system of direct communication links between all men's individual brains. A most curious phenomenon occurs whenever two nervous system brains are directly linked together so that each can perceive no temporal delay between the two; the engs, egos, and personalities o: the two brains integrate and merge into one being, one ego, and one personality. Thus linkage admirably ends the destructive competition between the formerly separated brains.

E.g., suppose you and I have linked our brains. If I am you and you are me, then "we" shall find it impossible to disadvantage "each other" since "we" and "each other" no longer exist. I.e., only one "I" remains in the two linked brains, integrated in both of them. So the "one" cannot kill the "other" because no "other" any longer separately exists.

In fact, absolute proof of the "single-being" identity of two linked brains unequivocally exists. The human brain (cerebrum) is composed of left and right hemispheres, completely separated except for a thick connecting cable of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. Essentially the left cerebral hemisphere controls the right side of the body and the right cerebral hemisphere controls the left side of the body. With two brains in charge, one half (usually the left) almost always dominates, and each of the two halves specializes. However, signals from one half are immediately transmitted to the second half, preventing the second half from detecting any difference or time delay between itself and the primary half. I.e., the second half gets an immediate "wiggle" and perceives that it, the second half, originated the wiggle,

When consciousness can perceive no difference, identity results, just as separate movie frames appear continuous (each two appear one) when flashed at 22 framres per second. Thus in one's own body, two brains are integrated into one functional brain and one perceptual personaliLy. There is no conscious separation of the two brain hemispherical perceptions, and one consciously is aware of only one being or continuity, himself. In humans whose corpus callosums have been severed, the two brains exhibit separate consciousnesses and separate "personalities."

Solution Of The Fundamental Problem Of Quantum Mechanics

The photon interaction, however, constitutes a time-differentiating operation imposed upon 4-dimensional Minkowskian reality (which is unperceived reality), producing three-dimensional, objective, determined, past reality. 

Photon absorption constitutes dimensional differentiation of reality, while photon emission constitutes dimensional integration. Objective concepts have been developed in correspondence to the photon interaction.

In the two-slit experiment, the electron is 4-dimensional, not 3-dimensional. When shielded against the photon interaction, it remains four-dimensional,  possessing its time dimension, and capable of interacting in a time-like manner. By wavelength one refers inversely to a time interval. 

Synchronization of time intervals between slit dimensions and electron wavelength results in time interaction between the electron’s time dimension and the time dimension of the two slits . Thus the electron interacts with both slits if shielded against the photon interaction, and time waves are propagated forward from both slits. If the slits are made much larger, time synchronization is destroyed and the classical effect reappears . If the photon interaction is imposed upon the electron, it is time-differentiated and becomes a classical object , having lost its time dimension.

When the electron encounters the screen, it meets a region of randomly varying time oscillations of the orbital electrons around the individual atoms comprising the screen . Thus the exact location of the orbital electron in the screen which will first precisely time-synchronize with the electron wavelength reciprocally is a random choice , and the “place” where the electron hits the screen is randomly selected along the screen, when the electron is four dimensional. The time pattern of the 4-d electron , however, had a distribution induced by its previous time interaction with the two slits . The pattern of this time distribution is wavelike, and is recovered when the distribution of the number of electron hits per screen length (which involves cumulation over time) is plotted .

Thus the two-slit experiment can be explained once the fourth law of logic is comprehended , and once the dimensionality of the electron and other parts of the experimental apparatus are taken into account.

The author points out that ordinary instruments and devices can be made to process entities in the unseparated state (multi-ocular state) , as demonstrated by the two-slit apparatus itself . Some consequences of this fact are mentioned, and the author refers to a basic mechanism he has proposed for the deliberate and controlled violation of objective reality .

A Global Philanthrocapitalist Cartel And Lil'Fauci's Role In It

Unz  |  Focusing on Dr Anthony Fauci as the fulcrum of the biggest story of the 21^st century allows RFK Jr to paint a complex canvas of planned militarization and, especially, monetization of medicine, a toxic process managed by Big Pharma, Big Tech and the military/intel complex – and dutifully promoted by mainstream media.

By now everyone knows that the big winners have been Big Finance, Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Data, with a special niche for Silicon Valley behemoths.

Why Fauci? RFK Jr argues that for five decades, he has been essentially a Big Pharma agent, nurturing “a complex web of financial entanglements among pharmaceutical companies and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and its employees that have transformed NIAID into a seamless subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry. Fauci unabashedly promotes his sweetheart relationship with Pharma as a ‘public-private partnership.’”

Arguably the full contours of this very convoluted story have never before been examined along these lines, extensively documented and with a wealth of links. Fauci may not be a household name outside of the US and especially across the Global South. And yet it’s this global audience that should be particularly interested in his story.

RFK Jr accuses Fauci of having pursued nefarious strategies since the onset of Covid-19 – from falsifying science to suppressing and sabotaging competitive products that bring lower profit margins.

Kennedy’s verdict is stark: “Tony Fauci does not do public health; he is a businessman, who has used his office to enrich his pharmaceutical partners and expand the reach of influence that has made him the most powerful – and despotic – doctor in human history.” This is a very serious accusation. It’s up to readers to examine the facts of the case and decide whether Fauci is some kind of medical Dr Strangelove.

No Vitamin D?

Pride of place goes to the Fauci-privileged modeling that overestimated Covid deaths by 525%, cooked up by fabricator Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College in London and duly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is the model, later debunked, that justified lockdown hysteria all across the planet.

Kennedy attributes to Canadian vaccine researcher Dr Jessica Rose the charge that Fauci was at the frontline of erasing the notion of natural immunity even as throughout 2020 the CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) admitted that people with healthy immune systems bear minimal risk of dying from Covid.

Dr Pierre Kory, president of Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, was among those who denounced Fauci’s modus operandi of privileging the development of tech vaccines while allowing no space for repurposed medications effective against Covid: “It is absolutely shocking that he recommended no outpatient care, not even Vitamin D.”

Clinical cardiologist Peter McCullough and his team of frontline doctors tested prophylactic protocols using, for instance, ivermectin – “we had terrific data from medical teams in Bangladesh” – and added other medications such as azithromycin, zinc, Vitamin D and IV Vitamin C. And all this while across Asia there was widespread use of saline nasal lavages.

By July 1, 2020, McCullough and his team submitted their first, ground-breaking protocol to the American Journal of Medicine, which was widely downloaded.

McCullough complained last year that Fauci had never, to date, published anything on how to treat a Covid patient. He additionally alleged without corroborating evidence: “Anyone who tries to publish a new treatment protocol will find themselves airtight blocked by the journals that are all under Fauci’s control.”

200 Highly Skilled People Are Literally Transforming Human Life On Earth And Beyond

wired |  I think I felt a visceral resistance at times to the notion that we could edit the human genome, especially in ways that would be inheritable. But that changed both for me and for Doudna as we met more and more people who are themselves afflicted by horrible genetic problems, or who have children who are suffering from them. And when our species got slammed by a deadly virus, it made me more open to the idea that we should use whatever talents we have in order to thrive and be healthy. So I’m now even more open to gene editing done for medical purposes, whether that’s sickle cell anemia, or Huntington’s, or Tay-Sachs, or even to increase our resistance to viruses and other pathogens and to cancer.

I still have worries. One is I don’t want gene editing to be something only the rich can afford and it leads to encoding inequalities into our societies. And, secondly, I want to make sure we don’t reduce the wonderful diversity that exists within the human species.

Do you have any ideas for how to do that?

I spend the last few chapters of my book wrestling with that question. And I hope not to preach, but to allow the reader to go hand in hand with me and Jennifer Doudna and figure out on their own what their hopes and fears are about this so-called brave new world we’re all stepping into together. I once had a mentor say there are two types of people who come out of Louisiana: preachers and storytellers. He said, “For heaven's sake, be a storyteller, because the world’s got too many preachers.”

So by telling the tale of Crispr in all its scientific triumphs and rivalries and excitement, I hope to turn people on to the science. But I also want to make them more qualified to wrestle with one of the most important questions we’re going to face as a society over the next couple of decades: When we can program molecules the way we program microchips, what is it we want to do with this fire that we’ve snatched from the gods?

---

 

"Privacy" Isn't What's Really At Stake...,

NewYorker  |  The question about national security and personal convenience is always: At what price? What do we have to give up? On the criminal-justice side, law enforcement is in an arms race with lawbreakers. Timothy Carpenter was allegedly able to orchestrate an armed-robbery gang in two states because he had a cell phone; the law makes it difficult for police to learn how he used it. Thanks to lobbying by the National Rifle Association, federal law prohibits the National Tracing Center from using a searchable database to identify the owners of guns seized at crime scenes. Whose privacy is being protected there?

Most citizens feel glad for privacy protections like the one in Griswold, but are less invested in protections like the one in Katz. In “Habeas Data,” Farivar analyzes ten Fourth Amendment cases; all ten of the plaintiffs were criminals. We want their rights to be observed, but we also want them locked up.

On the commercial side, are the trade-offs equivalent? The market-theory expectation is that if there is demand for greater privacy then competition will arise to offer it. Services like Signal and WhatsApp already do this. Consumers will, of course, have to balance privacy with convenience. The question is: Can they really? The General Data Protection Regulation went into effect on May 25th, and privacy-advocacy groups in Europe are already filing lawsuits claiming that the policy updates circulated by companies like Facebook and Google are not in compliance. How can you ever be sure who is eating your cookies?

Possibly the discussion is using the wrong vocabulary. “Privacy” is an odd name for the good that is being threatened by commercial exploitation and state surveillance. Privacy implies “It’s nobody’s business,” and that is not really what Roe v. Wade is about, or what the E.U. regulations are about, or even what Katz and Carpenter are about. The real issue is the one that Pollak and Martin, in their suit against the District of Columbia in the Muzak case, said it was: liberty. This means the freedom to choose what to do with your body, or who can see your personal information, or who can monitor your movements and record your calls—who gets to surveil your life and on what grounds.

As we are learning, the danger of data collection by online companies is not that they will use it to try to sell you stuff. The danger is that that information can so easily fall into the hands of parties whose motives are much less benign. A government, for example. A typical reaction to worries about the police listening to your phone conversations is the one Gary Hart had when it was suggested that reporters might tail him to see if he was having affairs: “You’d be bored.” They were not, as it turned out. We all may underestimate our susceptibility to persecution. “We were just talking about hardwood floors!” we say. But authorities who feel emboldened by the promise of a Presidential pardon or by a Justice Department that looks the other way may feel less inhibited about invading the spaces of people who belong to groups that the government has singled out as unpatriotic or undesirable. And we now have a government that does that. 

Did Autistic Attention To Detail And Collaborative Morality Drive Human Evolution?

tandfonline |  Selection pressures to better understand others’ thoughts and feelings are seen as a primary driving force in human cognitive evolution. Yet might the evolution of social cognition be more complex than we assume, with more than one strategy towards social understanding and developing a positive pro-social reputation? Here we argue that social buffering of vulnerabilities through the emergence of collaborative morality will have opened new niches for adaptive cognitive strategies and widened personality variation. Such strategies include those that that do not depend on astute social perception or abilities to think recursively about others’ thoughts and feelings. We particularly consider how a perceptual style based on logic and detail, bringing certain enhanced technical and social abilities which compensate for deficits in complex social understanding could be advantageous at low levels in certain ecological and cultural contexts. ‘Traits of autism’ may have promoted innovation in archaeological material culture during the late Palaeolithic in the context of the mutual interdependence of different social strategies, which in turn contributed to the rise of innovation and large scale social networks.

physorg | The ability to focus on detail, a common trait among people with autism, allowed realism to flourish in Ice Age art, according to researchers at the University of York. 

Around 30,000 years ago realistic art suddenly flourished in Europe. Extremely accurate depictions of bears, bison, horses and lions decorate the walls of Ice Age archaeological sites such as Chauvet Cave in southern France.

Why our ice age ancestors created exceptionally realistic art rather than the very simple or stylised art of earlier modern humans has long perplexed researchers.

Many have argued that psychotropic drugs were behind the detailed illustrations. The popular idea that drugs might make people better at art led to a number of ethically-dubious studies in the 60s where participants were given art materials and LSD.

The authors of the new study discount that theory, arguing instead that individuals with "detail focus", a trait linked to autism, kicked off an artistic movement that led to the proliferation of realistic cave drawings across Europe.

The ability to focus on detail, a common trait among people with autism, allowed realism to flourish in Ice Age art, according to researchers at the University of York.
Around 30,000 years ago realistic art suddenly flourished in Europe. Extremely accurate depictions of bears, bison, horses and lions decorate the walls of Ice Age archaeological sites such as Chauvet Cave in southern France.
Why our ice age ancestors created exceptionally realistic art rather than the very simple or stylised art of earlier modern humans has long perplexed researchers.
Many have argued that psychotropic drugs were behind the detailed illustrations. The popular idea that drugs might make people better at art led to a number of ethically-dubious studies in the 60s where participants were given art materials and LSD.
The authors of the new study discount that theory, arguing instead that individuals with "detail focus", a trait linked to autism, kicked off an artistic movement that led to the proliferation of realistic cave drawings across Europe.

Speaking Softly As Always, Valodya Ended U.S. Superpower

straightlinelogic |  During his State of the Nation address on March 1, Russian president Vladimir Putin claimed that Russia had developed six new weapons. For Putin’s descriptions of the weapons and more details about them, please read the above-linked article by Alexander Mercouris, which was posted on SLL.

Four of the six weapons Putin mentioned are, if Putin is to be believed, already developed: the Sarmat heavy Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), a nuclear powered cruise missile, a nuclear powered underwater drone, and an aircraft launched Kinzhai hypersonic missile. They are breathtaking for their speed, range, maneuverability, undetectability, and miniaturization of nuclear reactor technology. The other two, the Avangard hypersonic projectile and laser weapons (which Putin only cryptically mentioned), are believed to be still under development.

Hypersonic means a minimum of at least 5 times the speed of sound (Mach 1 or 741 mph, Mach 5 is 3705 mph). Putin claimed the Kinzhai hypersonic missile travels at Mach 10 (7410 mph). The Avangard hypersonic projectile may hit Mach 20 (14020 mph). Intercepting missiles traveling at supersonic speeds (Mach 1 to Mach 5) has proven difficult enough. Even in the limited, controlled tests that have been conducted, present technology has not been 100 percent effective. Presumably, in real world situations they would be even less effective. The difficulties of intercepting weapons traveling at hypersonic speeds are obvious and daunting.

Compounding those difficulties are the weapons’ range and maneuverability. The Sarmat ICBM is believed to have range of at least 10,500 miles (Putin said it has “practically no range restrictions”) and can attack targets via either the North or South Pole (US missile defenses are oriented towards the North Pole). It is able to constantly maneuver at a speed of what is believed to be Mach 5 or Mach 6, and to carry 15 warheads with yields estimated at 150 to 300 kilotons (the Nagasaki atomic bomb had a yield of 23 kilotons).

Powering cruise missiles and underwater drones (both of which can carry nuclear warheads) with miniature nuclear reactors gives them virtually unlimited range. Putin claimed the Kinzhai missile, “can also manoeuvre at all phases of its flight trajectory, which also allows it to overcome all existing and, I think, prospective anti-aircraft and anti-missile defence systems.”

Narrative State of the #NeverTrump Coup Today

theconservativetreehouse |  Unauthorized FISA-702(16)(17) results were passed on to Christopher Steele, likely by Nellie Ohr. Steele would then wash the intelligence product, repackage it into what became known as his “Dossier”, and pass it back to the FBI ‘small group’ as evidence for use in their counterintelligence operation which began in July 2016 [ intentionally without congressional oversight {Go Deep}].

Evidence of this laundry process is found in a significant “search query” result that was actually a mistake. The faulty intelligence mistake was the travel history of Michael Cohen, a long-time Trump lawyer. The FISA search turned up a Michael Cohen traveling to Prague. It was the wrong Michael Cohen. However, that mistaken result was passed on to Chris Steele and it made its way into the dossier. Absent of a FISA search, there’s no other way Christopher Steele could identify a random “Michael Cohen” traveling to Prague.

The Cohen mistake created a trail from Chris Steele to the FISA database.  {Go Deep}

All of the unauthorized FISA-702 search queries, “To From”(16) and/or “About”(17), of the NSA/FBI database were returning results. Those results were “raw intelligence”.

That raw intelligence needed “unmasking”, that’s where the Department of State (DoS) comes in. The U.N. Ambassador is part of the DoS. Samantha Power stated she wasn’t doing the daily “unmasking” identified by the House Intelligence Committee investigation {Go Deep}. Someone, or a group of people, within the State Department, were doing unmasking requests – presumably using Ms. Power’s authority.

The collaborative process by officials within the State Department, as outlined and supported by Senator Chuck Grassley and his investigation, explains why those officials were also communicating with Christopher Steele. {Go Deep}

The assembled but highly compartmentalized reports from the DOJ-NSD, FBI-Counterintelligence, Department of State, Office of National Intelligence (Clapper) and CIA (Brennan), was then constructed to become part of President Obama’s Daily Intelligence Briefing. That’s where National Security Adviser Susan Rice comes in and her frequent unmasking of the assembled intelligence product. {Go Deep}

The Obama PDB was then redistributed internally to more than three dozen administration officials who POTUS Obama allowed to access his PDB.  This includes the heads of DOJ, DOJ-NSD, FBI, FBI-counterintel, CIA, DoS, ODNI, NSA and Pentagon.

The distribution of the PDB was how each disparate member of the administration, the larger intelligence apparatus, knew of the ongoing big picture without having to assemble together for direct discussion therein. That’s Lisa Monaco and “Operation Latitude”:

Future Genomics: Don't Edit A Rough Copy When You Can Print A Fresh New One

technologyreview  |  It took Boeke and his team eight years before they were able to publish their first fully artificial yeast chromosome. The project has since accelerated. Last March, the next five synthetic yeast chromosomes were described in a suite of papers in Science, and Boeke says that all 16 chromosomes are now at least 80 percent done. These efforts represent the largest amount of genetic material ever synthesized and then joined together.

It helps that the yeast genome has proved remarkably resilient to the team’s visions and revisions. “Probably the biggest headline here is that you can torture the genome in a multitude of different ways, and the yeast just laughs,” says Boeke.

Boeke and his colleagues aren’t simply replacing the natural yeast genome with a synthetic one (“Just making a copy of it would be a stunt,” says Church). Throughout the organism’s DNA they have also placed molecular openings, like the invisible breaks in a magician’s steel rings. These let them reshuffle the yeast chromosomes “like a deck of cards,” as Cai puts it. The system is known as SCRaMbLE, for “synthetic chromosome recombination and modification by LoxP-mediated evolution.”

The result is high-speed, human-driven evolution: millions of new yeast strains with different properties can be tested in the lab for fitness and function in applications like, eventually, medicine and industry. Mitchell predicts that in time, Sc2.0 will displace all the ordinary yeast in scientific labs.

The ultimate legacy of Boeke’s project could be decided by what genome gets synthesized next. The GP-write group originally imagined that making a synthetic human genome would have the appeal of a “grand challenge.” Some bioethicists disagreed and sharply criticized the plan. Boeke emphasizes that the group will “not do a project aimed at making a human with a synthetic genome.” That means no designer people.

Ethical considerations aside, synthesizing a full human genome—which is over 250 times larger than the yeast genome—is impractical with current methods. The effort to advance the technology also lacks funding. Boeke’s yeast work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and by academic institutions, including partners in China, but the larger GP-write initiative has not attracted major support, other than a $250,000 initial donation from the computer design company Autodesk. Compare that with the Human Genome Project, which enjoyed more than $3 billion in US funding.

What is Life?

scribd |  Schrodinger unleashed modern molecular biology with his “What Is Life?”.[1] The order in biology must be due, not to statistical processes attributable to statistical mechanics, but due to the stability of the chemical bond. In one brilliant intuition, he said, “It will not be a periodic crystal, for these are dull. “Genes” will be an aperiodic crystal containing a microcode for the organism.” (my quotes around “genes”.) He was brilliantly right, but insufficient. 

The structure of DNA followed, the code and genes turning one another on and off in some vast genetic regulatory network. Later work, including my own,[2] showed that such networks could behave with sufficient order for ontogeny or be enormously chaotic and no life could survive that chaos.

We biologists continue to think largely in terms of classical physics and chemistry, even about the origins of life, and life itself, despite Schrodinger’s clear message that life depends upon quantum mechanics.

 

In this short article, I wish to explore current “classical physics” ideas about the origin of life then introduce the blossoming field of quantum biology and within a newly discovered state of matter, The Poised Realm, hovering reversibly between quantum and “classical” worlds that may be fundamental to life. Life may be lived in the Poised Realm, with wide implications.

The widest implications are a hope for a union of the objective and subjective poles; the latter lost since Descartes’ Res cogitans failed and Newton triumphed with classical physics and Descartes’ Res extensa. What I shall say here is highly speculative.

2 Classical Physics and Chemistry Ideas about the Origin of Life

There are four broad views about the origin of life:

1) The RNA world view, dominant in the USA.

2) The spontaneous emergence of “collectively autocatalytic set”, which might be RNA, peptides, both, or other molecular species.

3) Budding liposomes or other self-reproducing vesicles.

4) Metabolism first, with linked sets of chemical reaction cycles, which are autocatalytic in the sense that each produces an extra copy of at least one product per cycle. 

Almost all workers agree that however molecular reproduction may have occurred, it is plausibly the case that housing such a system in a liposome or similar vesicle is one way to confine reactants. Recent work suggests that a dividing liposome and reproducing molecular system will synchronize divisions, so could form a protocell, hopefully able to evolve to some extent.[3]

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us

ecosophia |  Let’s start with the concept of the division of labor. One of the great distinctions between a modern industrial society and other modes of human social organization is that in the former, very few activities are taken from beginning to end by the same person. A woman in a hunter-gatherer community, as she is getting ready for the autumn tuber-digging season, chooses a piece of wood, cuts it, shapes it into a digging stick, carefully hardens the business end in hot coals, and then puts it to work getting tubers out of the ground. Once she carries the tubers back to camp, what’s more, she’s far more likely than not to take part in cleaning them, roasting them, and sharing them out to the members of the band.

A woman in a modern industrial society who wants to have potatoes for dinner, by contrast, may do no more of the total labor involved in that process than sticking a package in the microwave. Even if she has potatoes growing in a container garden out back, say, and serves up potatoes she grew, harvested, and cooked herself, odds are she didn’t make the gardening tools, the cookware, or the stove she uses. That’s division of labor: the social process by which most members of an industrial society specialize in one or another narrow economic niche, and use the money they earn from their work in that niche to buy the products of other economic niches.

Let’s say it up front: there are huge advantages to the division of labor.  It’s more efficient in almost every sense, whether you’re measuring efficiency in terms of output per person per hour, skill level per dollar invested in education, or what have you. What’s more, when it’s combined with a social structure that isn’t too rigidly deterministic, it’s at least possible for people to find their way to occupational specialties for which they’re actually suited, and in which they will be more productive than otherwise. Yet it bears recalling that every good thing has its downsides, especially when it’s pushed to extremes, and the division of labor is no exception.

Crackpot realism is one of the downsides of the division of labor. It emerges reliably whenever two conditions are in effect. The first condition is that the task of choosing goals for an activity is assigned to one group of people and the task of finding means to achieve those goals is left to a different group of people. The second condition is that the first group needs to be enough higher in social status than the second group that members of the first group need pay no attention to the concerns of the second group.

Consider, as an example, the plight of a team of engineers tasked with designing a flying car.  People have been trying to do this for more than a century now, and the results are in: it’s a really dumb idea. It so happens that a great many of the engineering features that make a good car make a bad aircraft, and vice versa; for instance, an auto engine needs to be optimized for torque rather than speed, while an aircraft engine needs to be optimized for speed rather than torque. Thus every flying car ever built—and there have been plenty of them—performed just as poorly as a car as it did as a plane, and cost so much that for the same price you could buy a good car, a good airplane, and enough fuel to keep both of them running for a good long time.

Engineers know this. Still, if you’re an engineer and you’ve been hired by some clueless tech-industry godzillionaire who wants a flying car, you probably don’t have the option of telling your employer the truth about his pet project—that is, that no matter how much of his money he plows into the project, he’s going to get a clunker of a vehicle that won’t be any good at either of its two incompatible roles—because he’ll simply fire you and hire someone who will tell him what he wants to hear. Nor do you have the option of sitting him down and getting him to face what’s behind his own unexamined desires and expectations, so that he might notice that his fixation on having a flying car is an emotionally charged hangover from age eight, when he daydreamed about having one to help him cope with the miserable, bully-ridden public school system in which he was trapped for so many wretched years. So you devote your working hours to finding the most rational, scientific, and utilitarian means to accomplish a pointless, useless, and self-defeating end. That’s crackpot realism.

You can make a great party game out of identifying crackpot realism—try it sometime—but I’ll leave that to my more enterprising readers. What I want to talk about right now is one of the most glaring examples of crackpot realism in contemporary industrial society. Yes, we’re going to talk about space travel again.