Living in the Anthropocene Age

[escott]

About three years ago I traveled to Indonesia for my work. I had to go to the Paiton Power Station ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paiton_Power_Station ), the largest power station in Indonesia. When I was down inside of the plant standing right under the coal pulverizers I got a sense of the massive scale at which we are burning this planet up. This place was huge and it is just one of the thousands of coal burning plants in the world. I asked my hosts where the coal was coming from, since Java Island is formed by volcanoes I wondered where the coal was coming from. They said, "Borneo". If you do some research on coal mining in Borneo you'll read a tale of destruction and pollution. I grew up living in the Upper Ohio Valley of West Virginia. My father and neighbors worked in the chemical plants, coal mines, and power plants. I played in the remains of an abandoned coal mine complex as a child. I think about what the land was like before industrialization when the Native Americans were the only humans on the land. I dream about how they could drink and eat fish from the Ohio River. You can't do that now unless you want to chance getting sick.

 

I think we have passed the tipping point. There is no going back to nature. The environment is too polluted and the world is too populated. Only by even further industrialization will humanity survive. As for other species, they will not survive. The planet is already one big city and industrial complex. Any nature that still exists is because we've allowed it to remain, but we will bulldoze it in an instant if it is profitable. We all seem complicit in this so that we can feed ourselves and our families today. We will worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes.

 

While climate change is on the tip of everyone's lips I think there are more immediate issues. Fresh water scarcity is happening now. Water and air pollution is happening now. The forecast is that more and more people will live in cities, but people (especially children) are already getting sick from breathing the air. This is obviously not sustainable.

 

I think our future is looking very much like the one portrayed in the movie Soylent Green (minus processing people for food). In the movie the world was hot, environmentally devastated, and the rich were protected while the rest lived in squalor.

 

I would really like to hear what other Dao Bums think on this topic - The Anthropocene Age.

[rideforever]

I don't know, if nuclear fusion is organised in 50 years or so, then the energy problems are solved.   As for nuclear waste, deep borehole storage and vitrification should sort things out easily and cheaply.  At least for tens of thousands of years.

Plastic waste will come to an end at some point.

Climate change will come to be ... not very much in the end.

There will always be more insects bacteria and viruses then humans, we occupy something like 0.003% of the total biomass on Earth, and it will recover quite quickly after we're gone ... quickly meaning half a million years or so.

I think the future will be something like idiocracy meets the matrix; plus people will be taking drug concotions every day to stay alive.

 

But ... anyway ... does anyone care ?  Will anyone notice ?
Once all these changes happen, the history books will be re-written to say it was always this way, and that blue whales were just a myth, and that people in the past were all stupid.

 

If you think the body is what you are ... then for sure you will be terrified.

 

One good thing is that there are very few enlightened masters here.   

They have gone somewhere else.

That indicates that if you make it you don't come back here.

Nothing is for free.

Everything is open to anyone who wishes it.

 

Jesus says that in the new world you will simply not even remember the past.

We do not truly see this world, we have many worries and concerns and plans and images; but we do not see this world.

What good is it to worry ... the concerned should make rapid forward progress.

 

[escott]

I'm glad you mentioned Fusion. We should be spending way more on Fusion research.

 

But, I don't agree with the "Devil could care attitude" about the environment. Intellectually I get that I am not truly the body. But, nonetheless I am experiencing life as a human and so are my children and so is everybody else.  When Nisargadatta was asked, "What is sin?" His response was, "doing that which causes suffering."

 

With that said, though, I'm not about to take my family off the grid to minimize my carbon footprint only to watch the world burn anyway.

Edited June 25, 2019 by escott

[Starjumper]

This thread gets in to some detail about such things

 

 

Edited June 25, 2019 by Starjumper

[Pavel Karavaev]

18 hours ago, escott said:

Only by even further industrialization will humanity survive

 

I think this is true.
Those who pursue big profits will never stop this process on their own. There is many processes in their hands, and most likely they will go until the end, and will not stop. It is necessary to get change the consciousness of many people , then the value system has changed, new people should be carried away for their ideas got the masses, and then it will be possible to rebuild the world. But this seems to me almost impossible.
 

Usually big changes occur after major disasters, when the old is destroyed to the ground and appear the possibility to build a new one.
 

It seems to me that the most realistic scenario for the return of humanity to nature is a huge planetary catastrophe. After which everything will be destroyed, and the land will be devastated. Nature will slowly recover and the surviving people will be able to start building a new world. Humanity will be forced to return to nature.
 

Perhaps we, as humanity, are going back to nature in such a paradoxical way - bringing the world closer to a catastrophe, bringing everything to the limit, beyond which there will be drastic changes and everything will turn 180 degrees!
 

After all, according to Taoism, this is the law of our world - the limit of yang gives rise to yin and vice versa. 

Spoiler

 

 

Edited June 26, 2019 by Pavel Karavaev

[escott]

5 hours ago, Pavel Karavaev said:

Those who pursue big profits will never stop this process on their own. There is many processes in their hands, and most likely they will go to the end? and will not stop. It is necessary to get change the consciousness of many people , then the value system has changed

 

That exactly why we've reached the tipping point and it becomes a fight fire with fire scenario. There needs to be a change in values, as you said. We need to value clean air and clean water above all else. But, this only happens when people's bellies are full. On the African continent that's the challenge. That's where there is so much poverty, population growth, cities growing but with no services like electricity, sewage, it garbage collection. They are heading for catastrophe.

 

Politics aside, Israel is leading the way as an example of how industrial technology can move the world forward. They are showing how to do agriculture with scarce water and also implement water reuse in addition to desalination.

[rideforever]

Are African people really poor and starving, I don't think so.   That is the white man's dream, they go and be missionaries in Africa whilst in Germany they proudly declare they are "free" and "modern" because young German women can open their legs for money and it's all legalised and assisted by the Government.

The number of sane people on the planet is quite small, I'm afraid : figure that into your plans.

Another thing is people have terrible suffering and die; nobody is rushing down to stop it happening; figure that into your plans.

So ... 

Unfortunately things are even worse than that.

Judging by fossilised human skulls, the human brain has reduced in size by about 15% since CroMagnon period ... what this indicates is our bodies seem to be adjusted according to the era, the direction of evolution, the environment and nutrients available.   And so, if the particulars of your era are not so good, you will be born into a time of reducing intelligence.   This I believe is what the "fall" means.  It's nobody's fault, just a matter of chance.

Small brain size, smaller consciousness, and so on.

Spirituality we still rely on work from thousands of years ago ... that's not a good sign.

 

Next thing is the confusion of identities.   When people are overly concerned with the world what this means is that they are living in a shared "world mind" rather than having their own mind.   Which means they are degenerating.   Urbanisation / globalisation are dramatically increasing this, as the individual intelligence grows from contact with nature and the environment, working with your hands and so on.  Instead today both the problems and solutions are just a movie you watch on the screen, as a bystander.  Even doing maths is too much, so people use a calculator.

 

And eagle is not concerned about "the world".  He just does his job, which is to be himself.   He works, he is sharp, he breathes, he flies, he dies.   He doesn't have time to play those games.

And so, he lives well, and contributes to the maximum for life, existence and the planet.

 

In the cafe today, two guys at different tables plugged into the internet, cans on their head ... they weren't even in the cafe.   

An interesting thing is that people who are part of this world mind, actively seek out and destroy any shoot of consciousness near them, by taking revenge against whoever they can blame for their unhappiness.  
In fact many global movements by activists are simply a way for unconscious people to destroy all alternative opinions and thereby destroy anyone who is conscious, until everyone thinks the same.

 

"He is stagnant in his nest of comfort, and miserable because of it.   This misery does not render him inactive, on the contrary it compels him to seek victims in the world who ... embody individual values ... and so he innocuously supports the complete de-individualisation of every person in the name of "equality". "    

 

- Nietzsche wrote that 100 years ago, and today all we hear is "equality" and de-nationalisation and de-familialisation, so that we can all be the same, globalised and facebook.   And if you have a different view you will be disqualified from Wikipedia, the Government, fired at work, and not published.   This de-humanisation is well underway.   Even having a gender is no longer considered valid.

 

 

Edited June 26, 2019 by rideforever

[rideforever]

Brain Size vs IQ

Very interested article, with some nice details for instance cab drivers become more intelligent through study of routes.

Of course if we factor in CroMagnon having 15-20% higher (just checked) brain size than today, that's not very nice for us !!!

 

https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/brain-size2.htm

[rideforever]

Brain Size Decline = The "Fall" ?

It's the best explanation I have heard.

 

Bailey and Geary found population density did indeed track closely with brain size, but in a surprising way. When population numbers were low, as was the case for most of our evolution, the cranium kept getting bigger. But as population went from sparse to dense in a given area, cranial size declined, highlighted by a sudden 3 to 4 percent drop in EQ starting around 15,000 to 10,000 years ago. “We saw that trend in Europe, China, Africa, Malaysia—everywhere we looked,” Geary says.

 

The observation led the researchers to a radical conclusion: As complex societies emerged, the brain became smaller because people did not have to be as smart to stay alive. As Geary explains, individuals who would not have been able to survive by their wits alone could scrape by with the help of others—supported, as it were, by the first social safety nets.

 

Geary is not implying that our beetle-browed forebears would have towered over us intellectually. But if Cro-Magnons had been raised with techno-toys and the benefits of a modern education, he ventures, “I’m sure we would get good results. Don’t forget, these guys were responsible for the ‘cultural explosion’”—a revolution in thinking that led to such startling new forms of expression as cave paintings, specialized tools, and bones carved into the first flutes. In terms of raw innate smarts, he believes, they probably were as “bright as today’s brightest” and might even have surpassed us.

 

Still, Geary hesitates to use words like genius or brilliant in describing them. “Practically speaking,” he explains, “our ancestors were not our intellectual or creative equals because they lacked the same kind of cultural support. The rise of agriculture and modern cities based on economic specialization has allowed the very brightest people to focus their efforts in the sciences, the arts, and other fields. Their ancient counterparts didn’t have that infrastructure to support them. It took all their efforts just to get through life.”

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking

 

 

And so this leads to a certain course of action to reverse the pattern, within oneself.

 

[escott]

Head size is no indicator of intelligence. I'm living proof of that. When I played football they had a hard time finding a helmet that would fit my little head. The coach called me "pinhead" one year on the day they were handing out helmets. As a student I was in the gifted program. My IQ is 133. I grew up running through the woods, not in an urban environment. There was another group that equated head size with intelligence:

 

https://www.inverse.com/article/33193-nazi-device-artifacts-secret-room

 

Can we get back on topic, please?

 

For instance, let's talk about solutions to water scarcity.

[escott]

Here is an ancient method for dealing with water scarcity that seems to enhance the landscape instead of scar it. There are some nice pictures of Peru, too. I've been thinking that if the whole world goes to shit that people who love in the Andes mountains will be one of the few groups to survive.

 

https://www.voanews.com/science-health/ancient-peruvian-water-harvesting-system-could-lessen-modern-water-shortages

 

[rideforever]

On 27/06/2019 at 2:12 PM, escott said:

Head size is no indicator of intelligence. I'm living proof of that

 

Unfortunately it is.

Human beings have lost 15-20% of their brain size in the last 20,000 years, that is a disaster.

Now the configuration for a blue whale may be that it has a different brain size, but if a blue whale lost 20% of it's brain size that would be a disaster for it.

As it says in the articles above biologists use brain size as a key rule of thumb of intelligence.

 

But beyond all that, there is further smoking gun intelligence, which is quite simple.

If you don't use it you lose it.

What happened 20,000 years ago ?
It was the beginning of human domestication, also known as society and agriculture.

All of which provided comfort at the expensive of sharp skills required in an open nomadic existence.

What happens to animals, dogs and cats etc..., when they are domesticated ?
How do they differ from their wild cousins ?
How ... their brain size vastly reduces.

Go look it up.

qed.

 

In my opinion such a degeneration also coincides with the idea of a fall, a loss of spiritual understanding.

So yes, Soylent Green or something will occur, probably civilization collapse is more likely, humans are quite nuts, I don't think they could be held by military law any more.

 

But, the beauty and real hope of the above understanding is that to develop a healthy spiritual and sane society, we need to become intelligent again ... through challenges and being more wild and less domestic.

That makes people intelligent, and wise ... and that is actually do-able.

 

 

Edited July 1, 2019 by rideforever

[escott]

@rideforever How about we just blame it on "The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind" 😄

[rideforever]

38 minutes ago, escott said:

@rideforever How about we just blame it on "The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind" 😄

 

Consider the evidence, it seems pretty clear cut.

As for the bicameral mind theory; in fact the subconscious voice in the head is indeed a dialogue between two parties, but they are not left and right hemispheres, they are the subconscious and the proto-conscious.

 

[escott]

Do you think, as King Thamus did, that writing has made us less intelligent?

 

http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/filecabinet/PlatoOnWriting.html

 

[thelerner]

3 hours ago, escott said:

Do you think, as King Thamus did, that writing has made us less intelligent?

 

http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/filecabinet/PlatoOnWriting.html

 

Socrates was too, and he lived (469-399 BCE). Tools like reading writing, computers, phones, axes.. are good, they expand out abilities- good and bad  The trick is learning to use them well and with discipline.  Blame the user, not the tool. And be aware that Luddites (anti-tech societies) tend to be at the mercy of there tech brethren. 

 

Cro-magnon, Neanderthals may have had big brains but we have wheels, metal and credit cards.. plus we're not extinct, so in my book, another win for homo sapiens.

 

 

 

[rideforever]

All true, nevertheless I think brain size reduction and domestication is fundamentally significant.

I often hear people talk about the glory of our western medicine and science.

But the problem with that is that it is not "our".  In our technological and academic repository we have all that knowledge which is great, but as individuals we have become weak and domesticated.   And the real strength and power of a society is based upon what each individual can do, on his own.

Society has made new structures and there are many things happening, from time to time like during the Enlightenment there were people who had a new thirst for learning and doing things and they grew as individuals.   At the beginning of the British Empire one of the causes of its success was due to the wooden ships that made people strong working on them, later on when the technology of shipbuilding changes, it was noticed.  "When the ships were made of wood the men were like iron; but when the ships were made of iron the men became like wood."

 

Become a Renaissance Man ... that's what we need to do basically.

The more we talk about our great technology, we are allowing ourselves to continue being domesticated pointing to some great repository of information, but it is not ours.   That's the problem.

 

There is something else that is somewhat esoteric, but due to the reduction in skull size various chakras are not easily accessible anymore.   They can be activated but they are now outside of the physical skull and so directed work needs to happen to activate them.   When the skull was larger they were inside the physical skull and so people would naturally have some connection to them.

Strange, but it seems it's true.

So we are at the mercy of many different forces in life.

 

[rideforever]

The Anthropocene.

People are concerned with the damage they wreck on the planet.

But what of the damage they wreck on themselves ?   
What about their lack of self-understanding, self-control, self-actualization ?

What of that.

They don't even have the right questions.

Mankind individually needs to wake the f*** up, in a huge way, a tsunami of waking the f*** up to themselves.

Stop trying to save the world.
Just wake up, and be you, for a change.

Trying to please others, or please this world, or be good, or whatever .... it's a disease of not being myself.

That is mankind's disease, not being himself.

 

And then this is called "selfish".

Because people don't have the braincells to see the difference between the a self-centered person wasting money on endless bags-of-happiness ... and someone who takes care of him-self, in a healthy way.

These are not the same kind of selfish-ness.

And in fear of being "selfish", humans torture themselves to follow other peoples values and ideas, to be "good".

And the result is a planet of 8,000,000,000 terrified humans all not being who they are.

It's a f******* tragedy.
It's a f******* disaster.

 

Edited July 3, 2019 by rideforever

[escott]

Modern people don't seem to understand that they ARE the Earth. It is highly unlikely that humans that exist in the current form that we are in now could ever live for long periods of time on a moon base or other planet. Even if we could travel to another planet it's very unlikely that we could find one with water and air that we could drink and breathe. So this is it. This is all we are ever going to have. We need to take care of it. Don't piss in the pool...

 

Where it's gets interesting is that we are currently at a world population of around 7.7 billion. The UN model predicts 11.8 in 2100. How on Earth is this planet going to support all of those people? It's not going to happen with organic farming and catching rainwater off of your roof...

[rideforever]

True, although Venus is a good probability in 150 years for a colony, not for a replacement.

But the state of the Earth is not the problem, it is the state of us.

[escott]

Have you ever seen images of the tar sands in Canada? Have you ever zoomed around on Google satellite and seen the distribution of gas well pads North of Edmonton? I can pick them out, because I'm in the heart of Marcellus Shale activity. Have you ever seen Fort McMurray in Alberta Canada? You can zoom way out and see the scar on the planet.  I just got put on a project to supply equipment to LNG Canada. Imagine if Canada was building that same kind of infrastructure to export fresh water, instead. But that's not what we value. That's not where the money is.

Edited July 3, 2019 by escott

[gendao]

On 6/26/2019 at 8:57 AM, rideforever said:

Are African people really poor and starving, I don't think so.   That is the white man's dream, they go and be missionaries in Africa

Exactly.  The entire aboriginal world culture was doing just sustainably dandy before Christian Anglo-Colonialism "saved" them all by decimating them into oblivion.

Quote

The Hadza have been living peacefully, happily and sustainably in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa for at least 100,000 years. Their home, around Lake Eyasi, in Tanzania, has been called “the cradle of mankind.”
The consequences of allowing civilization to crowd the Hadza – and the handful of other hunter-gatherer tribes remaining on the planet – out of existence
After the British took control of the area in 1917, there was no more hiding.

The British colonial government tried to make the Hadza settle down and adopt farming in the 1930s, as did the independent Tanzanian government and foreign missionaries in 60’s and 90’s.

Of around 1000 surviving Hadza, about 300 still have a diet of 100-percent foraged food. The majority of their calories come from gathering roots, fruits, nuts, berries and honey, but they are also very reliant on hunting local wildlife, such as gazelle, kudus and monkeys, which are becoming scarce due to the influx of cattle.

Members of the civilized world who’ve observed and studied the Hadza note time and again how happy they seem and how much free time they have.

“What struck me very much was how little time they really had to spend hunting and digging [for roots],” said Peter Matthiessen, author of The Tree Where Man Was Born. “They really had a lot of leisure.”

The Hadza are very egalitarian. They have no chiefs and no hierarchy.

They are organized into bands of 20 to 30 people. Conflict is resolved by one of the parties voluntarily moving to another camp.

There is gender equality as “men’s” and “women’s” work is seen as equally important. They share everything.
Children are not punished and their genitals are not mutilated, as they are in surrounding agricultural tribes.
The Hadza do not keep track of time. They have no words for the days of the week, or months of the year. Because they don’t plant or harvest, they have no use for calendars or keeping track of the seasons. Their sense of time depends only on the wandering animals and the shifting patterns of their flowering plants.

Disease is rare and herbs are used as medicine. It is estimated most of Hadza live into their 70s and 80s.

“They are very dignified. They have a beautiful life and they know it, but as soon as you bring them into civilization, they are the bottom of the pile and everybody preys on them,”

The number of Hadza able to survive by gathering and hunting alone is decreasing along with the size of their ancestral territory. They’ve lost more than 90 percent of their land in the last 100 years.
“The Hadza have a very peaceful culture,” said Harvard Anthropologist Richard Wrangham. “They do not try to fight back.”
“Life is totally different when I’m working in the town,” says one young Hadza man in the film. “You must pay rent to sleep in a house and buy all your food. You have to use money for everything, even water.”
“I want to live here until I’m an old man,” one of the boys said. “Because in town, there is no Hadza food – no kongolobei berries, noguilabei berries, no baobab fruit.”

“The Hadza don’t recognize land rights. To them, you share the earth with the animals and plants that are on it.”

The Hadza see themselves as protectors of the land. “That’s why we stay here, to protect the place and the animals. So we are patient. We watch the animals and their movements in the area. If we leave this place, others will come in and cultivate,” a Hadza man said. “This land is our true home. We can move a few meters, but we can’t leave. There is no other place we could go.”

 

[rideforever]

Well being English I am not a fan of the deriding of the British Empire, it's an easy target.

Life changes, it would be impossible for the native aboriginal tribes to continue as they were and there are as many myths about the glory of them, then there are about the bad things about the British Empire.

We all have to grow and grow continuously.

And I for one don't mind seeing the cross of Christianity on that building, the resplendent love of Jesus is a beautiful thing.

Or at least was once.

Anyway, humanity is mad, what can you do.

 

[gendao]

27 minutes ago, rideforever said:

Well being English I am not a fan of the deriding of the British Empire, it's an easy target.

Life changes, it would be impossible for the native aboriginal tribes to continue as they were and there are as many myths about the glory of them, then there are about the bad things about the British Empire.

We all have to grow and grow continuously.

And I for one don't mind seeing the cross of Christianity on that building, the resplendent love of Jesus is a beautiful thing.

Or at least was once.

Anyway, humanity is mad, what can you do.

And there's a great reason for that, lol!

Lmao no, Christianity provided the ideology for colonialism, and its missionaries were not only Trojan horses for their invading "scorched Earth" stormtroopers, but were absolutely brutal in systematically destroying all the aboriginal cultures and their ancient wisdom...  Christian "Salvation" = Orwellian Doublespeak for Utter Destruction.

Quote

Wherever they arrived, the pattern was much the same, forced conversion, destruction, torture and murder.

This is the land promised by the Eternal Father to the Faithful, since we are commanded by God in the Holy Scriptures to take it from them, being idolaters, and, by reason of their idolatry and sin, to put them all to the knife, leaving no living thing save maidens and children, their cities robbed and sacked, their walls and houses levelled to the earth.

Quote

1822: Government decree eliminated acupuncture from the curriculum of the Imperial Medical College. During this period a great number of medical missionaries entered China to 'teach, heal and preach'. The medicine they practiced in the early part of the nineteenth century had little similarity to the Western medicine of today, as there were no anaesthetics, antibiotics or sepsis. The concept that bacteria caused disease was only disseminated in the 1860's and 1870's, and therefore the missionaries had very little real medical skill to offer.

You have to remember that religion was literally a BIG LIFE OR DEATH DEAL in Europe up through the Middle Ages - and millions of Pagans were tortured and killed by Christians.  This extremist attitude at home then got exported all over the world with colonialist terrorism.

 

It's not like today, where Christians will no longer kill you if you don't convert...  Back then, being a "heathen" was literally worth the Biblical death penalty!  Just imagine that - where a non-Christian neighbor could get outed and then burned at the stake at your local park!

Edited July 4, 2019 by gendao

[rideforever]

Yes today Christianity has been destroyed.

And ... just look at the planet.

Good is it ?

Everything fixed is it !!!!

That's good !!!!

 

As for the Inquisition and the burning of pagans and all that .... well I don't know the exact details.   

People are always killing someone.

But what I do know is that in Spain the Inquisition was actually done by the lawyers of that era, who were quite well aware how stupid it was to talk to hungry farmers who were busy staying about such things; and that the Inquisition prisons which were run by the church were so comfortable that ordinary prisoners in the state jails were desperate to be moved to the church prisons.   

Because in the ordinary prisons 40 people were dying every week.

And as for the torturing, apparently it would last 15 mins on average and was almost never done more than once.

But there is this nasty little book of instructions for how to torture and burn witches .... but I understand that to be a forgery.

You see ... the forgeries and the agendas on this planet are always much bigger than the actual situation.

So, it becomes very hard to know who is the good man in the end.

 

Right this moment there is a fashion of British bashing ... and all the fools are just repeating it, reading off the autocue.

Don't repeat.

Think for yourself.