Saturday, 6 August 2016

Kardashev Scale and Our Imminent Doom II

Aliens are already on a course to visiting humanity. What, in all likelihood, are they going to discover? Will it really be humanity in all its senses? Or will it be a specie so much dependent on science, still so much in-cognizant of it? Won't they laugh on a specie so advanced to have got to those Mass-Energy equations, yet so asleep to have nuclear weapons aimed at themselves!

Our very civilization is going through a very mordacious, or let us say, chancy transition. We're making and alteration from a level-0 to level-1 civilization. We've already come through this scaling in a recent post. It is often conceived as a stage where most of civilizations destroy themselves through nuclear war. Perhaps, this might be the reason why we're still out of glimpses of aliens. Our civilization is like a child in its primary years of maturity. Nuclear weapons are like toys in her hands only way too dangerous. Yet all nations are in a race of increasing their stock of nuclear armory! Any world war can subvert us back at the start of civilization.

However sooner or later, there is yet another problem our civilization is going to face. It is that of increasing population. The human population is increasing at an ever faster rate. A rate high enough for the resources to contend with. In fact, there might soon come a time when when the exhausting resources will collide with the flourishing human population. At this point of time we'll have to realize the importance of interstellar travel. The Earth is off course our home, it is the cradle for humanity, however we're not supposed to stay in the cradle forever. As said "We're pioneers not caretakers". We'll be doomed by a world wide catastrophe, when the rising demands will crush everything. We have to be prepared before this event even occurs. And the only way we can substantiate our situation is through interstellar travel. We have to explore potentially habitable worlds to save humanity from the collapse. We must leave our planet as explorers and not in fragments as mere survivors of a likely catastrophe. 


Friday, 29 July 2016

The Scope of Science

This is something I've wanted to talk about for a long time.

I must confess: the first time I hear about any breakthrough in science, the first thought that comes to mind is - okay, what next?

This approach to anything new is ambiguous. Because you can take that to mean one of two things -

  1. This new discovery that has been made has answered one question, but opened up many ten other questions that now need to be answered.
  2. How can I or the community benefit from this discovery? What is its scope? 
The first one of these is fine. Explore away. Satiate your curiosity. Nothing wrong with that. The second one is a bit problematic.

See, when you ask about the "scope" of any scientific breakthrough, the answer at first is a wee bit unclear. Heck, sometimes there isn't even an answer at all. It's just something the rolling tide brought in. And it's too valuable to undo (not to mention it could be someone else's lifelong goal).

The thing is, just because something doesn't have any short-term benefits doesn't mean it's useless. A very good example is the quantum theory. It is at the base of this Digital Age. It has allowed the existence of smartphones, tablets, this new research called "Li-Fi" - making our lives what they are today. But when you sit to study it, it's mumbo-jumbo. There's no better way to put it. In fact, as one famous scientist said, "If you haven't been fundamentally baffled by quantum mechanics, you haven't understood it." (I'm paraphrasing, of course.)

Something as elegant the quantum theory rules our lives. But we didn't know that in the 1920's, when work first started on it. And it certainly doesn't seem like it when you're in your chemistry class and it's your first time learning about this.

Where I'm going with this is that scientific research shouldn't be stopped because you can't see what will come out of it. Humans are curious creatures. It is our curiosity and our ability to satisfy our curiosity that distinguishes us from the rest of the kingdoms. It has allowd us to practically rule the world, even though we are less in number than even the insects. The insects, who came before us.

A lot of the things we take for granted today have long story being discovered and being put to use. So the second question isn't even a valid one. It'll come to us, eventually. It is one bad habit I have to work to eradicate.