Brave New World

Today is September 5th. the start of school for most places. It used to be that school didn't start till the week after Labor Day but that was the old days. For many kids it will be a brave new world, for instance kindergartners, or going into middle school, or entering as Freshmen in High School or College. This younger generation has its oddities, of course. For one thing, so the experts tell us, winning and losing don't mean that much. It's important to message everyone's feelings and to get effusive praise for even a small accomplishment that would have been ignored in my day. Of course this is the cell phone generation. It's "The most watched over generation in history". Today's kids never experiance the sort of freedom my generation had as kids. They're always over-scheduled and checked up on by parents. If we believe some sources the homework this generation is saddled with is much worse. Doing homework over summer vacation would have been considered totally bogus in my day, but today's teachers get away with assigning it. I don't see how because once a class term is ended it would seem a teacher had no power over you.

Many of the things we predicted just months ago in "President Hillary" are pretty much realities already. Smoking is already banned even in your own car if there are kids in the car. Now there is talk of extending car seats to age six or something. Of course TV as we know it will soon become a thing of the past. In February 2009 the VHS analog stations will go off the air and the bands will be reclaimed by other more vital use. (perhaps national security) We have gone from the 3 by 4 aspect TV picture to the 9 by 16 aspect picture, broadcast at 720 lines progressive. This higher quality will soon become standard. Now they have HD digital radio. Your VHS tapes and your casette tapes are fast becomming a thing of the past, even though I regard these both as perfectly respectful mediums. Now they are saying even the CD is becomming a thing of the past as downloads take over. My question is, "Whatever happened to album art?" I guess that went the way of the TV theme song. Now we are all waiting for Vista to come out and those in the know say that early versions of it should be out next month, and they claim a lot of changes will be in it. If history is any guide, being a new version of an opperating system, it will probably be so bug laiden that numerous "fixes" will have to be offered. Of course the smallness of today's electronic devices is getting rediculous. Now they are referring to blackberry users who have to do it as "Crack berries".

By the year 2020 today's kindergartners will be in college. Lord knows what they'll be studying by them. There are so many bogus classes now. But by then according to Leo Le Port they will have computers that are as smart as human beings. According to Leo and according to some guy in the 1940's the test of whether a computer is as smart as a human is if in analizing text answers to questions, an expert cannot tell which answers were generated by humans and which were generated by machine. At that time, according to Leo, computers will be writing their own software. It seems that programmers, as smart as they are now, are incapable of writing software programs beyond a certain level of complexity, but they hope to "teach" this concept to the computers and have them write the software that will be necessary to run tomorrow's programs. Of course one of the end of the world scanarios is that an intelligent computer will cease control of the nation's defence system. They will no longer be entering launch codes and having a team of people in the holes turning keys to launch missiles, computers will do it. Of course already they have computers which anticipate the needs of human beings and "guess" what you will want or guess what you intend to do next. Leo also says there will be increasing links between human beings and computers with computerized prosthetic devices that hook into your neuro system and respond to your brain impulses. So as we said before, the line between biological life forms and cyber life forms will be blurred untill we come to what Leo referrs to as "singularity". This idea of a half human half computer walking around is still a little too Sci Fi for me. I guess in the year 2025 things will be different, but sometimes predicting the exact nature of the cultural changes so far into the future is difficult.

Back in 1986 they predicted all sorts of things for the turn of the century that didn't come to pass. Among these were that bathrooms would be called "entertainment centers" and every one would have a jacuzzi. They predicted we'd have vaccines for any kind of cancer by then. In reality as of now, 2006 they are working on gene therapy taking the body's own imune cells and especially treating them so that they attack cancerous cells in the body, and apparently they have had success with this procedure. If this turns out to be so it will mark a major breakthrough in cancer research. Nowdays we are fighting off aging every day. There will be people living to the year 2020 whom we never guessed would last that long. Now of course besides all the hair treatments and botox and lyfosuction and cosmetic surgery, we have things like taking hormones to stay young looking. Some people think this is horrible, I don't see why. I think they should make testosterone available to anybody who wants it- - because no other single substance could be more expediant to restoring lost youth. But people say sex hormones are dangerous because they encolurage cancer growth. But now they've got a cure for that so that eliminates that reason for not taking them. Other substances people take are human growth hormone and also steroids such as cortozone, which the body makes naturally anyhow, and is already a standard treatment for certail ailments. Personally, I think this whole athlets on steroids thing is way overblown. I don't see why "professionals" those who are paid to put out - - can't take whatever best enhances their performance, since that's what they get paid for. People don't pay to see "a fair contest"; people pay to see record breaking performance. The Olympics is one thing- - I can see the reasoning there- - -but I don't see why people in professional sports can't take cortozone or steroids, since these are substances the body produces naturally anyhow, and they can sure retard the onset of old age.

Of course we might not make it to the future if any number of flooky, freaky events overtakes us that they talked about on ABC last week. We could cross paths with a Black Hole. We may know the date of our deaths and unable to stop it. But before you fear being sucked into thirty-two pieces, keep in mind that way before that happens the mile high tides on planet earth will about wipe everyone out. Another unlikely event is a supernova of a neighboring star. They say the clossest star where this could happen is one eight thousand lightyears away. When that happens there will be two suns in the sky. First all the ozone will be burned off. Then with the ozone gone, the massive amount of gamma rays will kill every living thing right down to the cellular level. Another possability is that an asteroid could do us in. This would leave a five mile long crater in the ground and plunge us into sort of a permanent night blocking the sun. This is what killed the dinasaurs. Of course more likely than any of these are biological weapons or else global warming. We know all about that. But even the pessimists are saying it will be ten thousand years before one of these things does us in. Untill then we should see a lot of scientific progress. If the Star Trek people are right, we should isolate the "graviton" particle and invent the warp drive in just over fifty years. If and when that occurrs, it will revolutionize space travel. "String" theory and study of subatomic particles should be an upcoming field. On a recent earthlink mailing they had "Fourteen facts about Space you probably don't know". I recomment everyone download it and read it.