End of days?

No, I'm not talking about the appearance of the antiChrist or anything like that. I'm talking about a feeling that people must have felt just before Genghiz Khan's or Alexander's army rode into town on their horses and burned everything to the ground.

This time instead of swords and arrows, a lot of people are about to be put down by a weapon many times worse.

That weapon is called greed.

Why do I say its worse? Because with a sword or arrow, its all over in a few seconds but with greed, death lingers, sometimes for years. The torture caused by greed, such as losing everything you had through scams like Madoff's, I think, is a fate many times worse than death.

Its kinda depressing but I just felt the need to lay it out, just to remind myself of certain things.

If humans are set up for a target practice, then it looks to me that we are being shot at from at least 3 directions.

First, the greed of man that led us to this economic and environmental crisis. Its been said many times, our planet can support our needs but it can't support our greed. But like many cool slogans, that's as far as it gets. A slogan.

You see, greed is not only confined to people who read ads. Everyone's greedy. The poor grabs everything to climb out of their poverty. When they wreck the environment in the process, we say you have to understand, they're poor so its okay. Once out, they grab some more to climb up to middle class. Once there, they grab some more to become rich. Once rich, they grab some more to become super rich. And so on. Along that journey lies a million broken hearts and broken dreams, plus a climate that's wrecked beyond repair. But we just can't help ourselves, because we all want a piece of the pie.

Second, the greed of man that leads him to crave dominance over his fellow man, turning lands of intelligent people into banana republics and banana republics into dens of pirates and murderers. Instead of becoming more global, earth's communities are becoming more insular, each convinced of its own superiority. The world has gotten a lot less friendly in the last half century I'm told. Barriers are coming up everywhere and you are being tracked in cities and on networks. More and more of our decisions are based on social status, our ability to commit violence, our race and creed. We need to feel superior and the way to do it is to dominate those we perceive as inferior.

Third, the greed of man that leads him to a craving for conformity so intense he's willing to kill in its name, even die for it if required. This leads to the scourge of extremism marked by waves of genocide and killings of innocents, the lust to spill blood for no other reason than the fear of diversity and differences in opinion. As the world modernizes, intolerance spreads, exported to all corners of the globe by the tools of modernity.

So tell me, with guns trained at you from 3 different directions, even if you ran as fast as you could, what are the chances of you dodging all the bullets?

Oh the planet will survive all right. I'm just not sure about its inhabitants.

Tuth be told, there's been times when I wished I could be Superman so I could set things right. And then I woke up. I realized that even the greedy wished they could be Supermen too so they could set things right - their way. Perhaps I have to accept that no force in the universe can tame the hearts of men. Not even kryptonite.

Clock's ticking. Its only a matter of time.

Pangea Begalia and the Illusion of Ownership

Another TV program I watched last night, courtesy of a lousy social life, is one by National Geographic about the continental drift.

Geologists forecast that eventually, because of tectonic movements, all the land masses on the planet will converge into a single humongous land mass characterized by extreme weather. Super hot and dry in certain parts, very wet and stormy in others, and cold and icy at the fringes.

Central Europe will crash into Africa, Australia with Asia, the Americas with Western Europe and Russia. Computer simulations reveal there will likely be a hole in the middle, sort of an inland sea, surrounded by new land, new mountains, new deserts. It will look like a bagel run over by a truck. Meanwhile, all the oceans will surround this land mass as one huge combined mass of water.

It reminds me very much of the world of Avatar Aang, the Airbender, where the world is a single land mass divided into four nations - the Air Kingdom, Earth Kingdom, Water Kingdom and Fire Nation, minus the outlying islands you see on this map of Avatar World.


The big crunch is slated to happen hundreds of millions of years from now as the planet evolves. Its doubtful if any humans will be around, which makes me wonder.

People in our age love to go to war over land borders. This land is "ours", not "yours". We'll fight to the death to reclaim what is "ours." We insist on documents to step over an imaginary border. We build fences - physical and mental, and make a big deal about "this side" and "that side."

So why do we do all that knowing that in time to come, the concept of "your land" and "my land" is meaningless because it is either swallowed up by the sea, subducted by earthquakes or destroyed by raging volcanos?

Why do we build up so much greed, hatred and fear over something we know will cease to exist?

Sure it makes sense if all you're thinking about is what's for dinner tonight and what movie's on this weekend. But in the larger scheme of things, does what we feel so strongly about today really matter if it makes not the slightest difference as far as the physical world is concerned?

We live in a matrix.

And the matrix is rooted not in the physical but in a vapor world that is both imaginary and fleeting, hence labeled as unreal by some.

I learn new things about the matrix every day.

An out of body experience

I can't remember the article but recently, it was reported that a scientist found that its possible to separate the brain from the human body and keep it alive.

Not only that. He also suggested that the isolated brain could, for all intents and purposes, experience sight, sound, smell, taste and touch if suitably wired.

Logically I guess its doable, albeit it being frankensteinish. After all our eyes don't really "see" anything. They translate light into electrical impulses that are dispatched to the brain who does the work of recognizing an image. So strictly speaking, it is the brain that "sees," not the eye. The eye is just a light sensor, and not a very good one at that.

If you are able to mimic the kind of faint electrical signals the eye sends, you can swap it with something else, say a device that senses not just light but also gamma rays, x-rays and infra-red, giving the brain the ability to "see" far beyond what it could when it was attached to human eyes. It'll have night vision and see things you and I can never see. You could even give it telescopic and microscopic sight abilities. Cool.

You could do the same with the ears, nose and so on.

The applications are plenty. You could use it to find a way to give eyesight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, for example.

But it also highlights the thing I've always had to contend with - that popular refrain of skeptics: "I'll only believe it when I see it."

The thing is, even at our peak, we humans can't see, hear or smell very well. But being on top of the food chain does have its advantages. We can't resist taking an authoritative view on things and defining "reality" as something outlined by our narrow-field sense organs. This limited vision has led us to impose many chauvanistic and sometimes cruel practices against one another. The ghosts of Copernicus, Galileo and others would recall how they were persecuted for seeing things that ordinary folk couldn't.

Luckily we have another sense in addition to sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Its sense #6 - also known as the mind. The mind lets us "see" things that the other 5 can't, like a black hole in space. The most powerful telescope in the world can't see a black hole so how can the mind see it? Through mathematical deductions. The mind, via calculations in relativity theory or quantum theory, also "sees" other things like dark energy, dark matter and anti-matter.

Predictably, people react to these realities the same way common folk did during Copernicus's time. If you see it, then you've had one too many, they insist. Or for some, you're the instrument of the devil.

Times haven't really changed that much.

The point I'm trying to make is, while "seeing is believing" is a good rule of thumb for spotting a good bargain, its actually a poor guage of reality. Its worsened by the fact that sometimes you see or hear things that aren't there. You only have to stay home alone on a dark windy night to appreciate how deceptive our senses can be.

In my opinion, the best thing to have when handling info of doubtful truth value is an open mind. Evaluate all ideas with a critical yet logical mind. Don't discount something simply because you've never seen it or because it sounds too "preposterous" from your point of view. Don't accept an idea simply because everyone else does. And never forget the fact that all of human knowledge is a mere drop in a vast ocean.

An ordinary person thinks he knows everything. A wise person knows that he doesn't.