Flying Lobsters

Somewhere in Austin, Texas is a company, Aspire Food Group, founded by three MBA graduates from McGill University who parlayed their $1 million Hult Prize for social good to a food production business. Robots and modern methods are used to raise by the millions what is described as a six-legged livestock that could very well be crucial to solving the future world food crisis.

"Food is the burning question in animal society, and the whole structure and activities of the community are dependent upon questions of food-supply".       ------ Charles Elton

In less than a century from today, our concerns for world peace, climate change, and every disaster we can think of will all pale by comparison to global food shortage and the ensuing famine that will follow. We can worry about energy supply and debate clean alternatives to fossil and nuclear plants but hardly do we hear much about food production. Food is the ultimate energy source because what good is anything if our survival is threatened by the shortage of it.

That company in Austin is raising crickets as a source of food - for human consumption. Please suppress your squeamishness temporarily and read on. Our future depends on it. But first, some terminology housekeeping.

Crickets and grasshoppers are related. They both belong to the insect order "Orthoptera", which means "straight wings". They both produce sounds, called stridulation, by rubbing their body parts. We're familiar with sounds made by crickets. They rub their wings together. Grasshoppers rub their long hind legs, albeit not quite as acoustically impressive as those produced by crickets. Grasshoppers, when they multiply rapidly and swarm to ravage agriculture, are called locusts. The word locust is actually Latin for crustacean and more specifically - lobster. These species of insects are therefore flying lobsters. My description. You will not find them being described as such anywhere else. It is also a way to catch the reader's attention.

Almost a third of the world's population, about two billion people, eat insects regularly. Insects by weight, not just by sheer numbers mind you, outweigh the entire human population several times over. Termites alone weigh more than the entire human population of 7 billion people. A huge part of survival training for military pilots is knowing how to find and eat bugs. Chimpanzees that are typically vegetarian supplement their diet with protein by eating termites or ants. Bears have similar inclination except that they're more omnivorous. And so are we. 

Many years ago, the island I grew up in suffered intermittent locust infestation of its rice fields and grasslands. Millions of the insects would be netted and collected, fried, roasted and smoked and end up in market stalls all over the area. On several occasions I tasted the delicacy in fried and smoked versions. They were actually very tasty. It is still a delicacy in many parts of the world today although it is not always readily available in huge quantity because locust swarms are after all rare these days, hence a delicacy in many parts of the world, but probably a staple in some areas of Africa and Asia. I will have you know also that there are four varieties of locusts that are considered kosher under the Jewish laws of kashrut. John the Baptist, from The New Testament account, ate locusts while in the wilderness.

Here is a quote from the July/August issue of Discover Magazine:

"Pound for pound, crickets and other edible insects offer the most bang for the planet's resources. Crickets pack more protein than beef, more calcium than milk, more iron than spinach and as many fatty acids from salmon".

Crickets and locusts are fast growers so it would only take 2 pounds of feed to produce one pound of edible food while it would take 25 pounds of feed to produce a pound of beef.

World population will increase by the billions in a matter of 7-10 decades so food production may not only be crucial, it will be direly critical for survival.

Those who remember the 1973 movie, "Soylent Green", saw a fictional preview of the world to come. A lot of science fiction stories when they were written depicted periods we have already lived and the predictions never came about.  Take the novel-turned-into-a-movie, "1984". We've all gone past that year a long time ago and it never happened. But think about it now. A few things in that movie seem to be here today.  Big Brother is very much in play these days. Not quite the 1984 Big Brother but do you ever wonder why after just barely leaving Home Depot or some restaurant you get pinged by Google asking you to rate the establishment?  Or, have you Googled your street address lately and find out your neighbor four houses down has a new swimming pool? Back to "Soylent Green". Without spoiling the ending for those who haven't watch the movie, the fictional year was 2022 - just four years away! It won't be so. But many decades from today or maybe at the turn of this century, "Soylent Green" could be it.

Food. That is the final frontier. Just to be overly dramatic. Or, is it? That final frontier for food would look bland, tube-encased, dehydrated-add-water-varieties from Styrofoam boxes.  Talk to astronauts and all future spacefarers. The food they eat at the space station today are clearly not the kind we have at our earthbound dining tables, as far as texture, presentation and perhaps even taste are concerned. But food is food, isn't it? We need food for energy, growth and maintenance of our body parts. Carbohydrates and anything that can be converted into sugar (our main fuel) and protein for growth are the two basic food classifications.  Insects, as it turned out, when broken down into their nutritional values are just as nutritious, if not more so than fish, fowl or meat. They may not be as appetizing to us because we've been raised to like certain foods of a particular texture and taste  but tell that to the mockingbird, the flycatcher, the gecko and other insect-devouring creatures. They've been around a long time and they had been taking advantage of a food resource that had existed since the time of the dinosaurs. Insects are the least likely to become extinct and scientists think insects are the guaranteed inheritors of the planet if and when catastrophic events wipe out much of all living things.  Everyday we hear, read about mosquitoes, flies and harmful beetles, we are reminded of how difficult it is to eradicate even just a fraction of the insect population. I will try to make a point here.

Well, the Austin company could be on to something. The problem of course is cultural adjustments in the West. The company is not into serving the insects as is but as ground up ingredients into flour and perhaps into milkshakes. I can see it now - the alliterative phrase, "insect shakes". 

Let's look at the proverbial links of the food chain, shall we. 

Plants - from succulents to tubers to vegetables to fruit trees and kelp from the oceans - are the ultimate synthesizers of the energy from the sun, hence photosynthesis. By harnessing the energy of sunlight and extracting nutrients from the soil, plants are in effect food factories that no machines can ever replicate. Not even close. But it makes them the bottom of the food chain, where algae is the prime green carpet. Just barely above in the food chain are worms, aphids, crawlers and then flying or hopping insects. Fish that eat algae get eaten by bigger fishes. Insects get eaten by other insects or by birds and lizards, etc. But bigger mammals, prey and farm animals also dine on grasses, hay, leaves and fruit. Lest we forget all of these and then some are all food factories themselves. It is one of nature's marvels that a cow that eats nothing but grass can produce milk and rib eye steaks. Think about how vitamin D from the sun and calcium and iron and other minerals from the soil were all synthesized in just three to four steps to reach the top of the food chain. Us. By classification we can be lumped, together with the big cats and wolves, into the genera of predators. We, together with all the predators, have successfully short-circuited the processes from harnessing the sun's energy to synthesizing nutrients from the soil and water by simply dining on prey.

Dining on insects, next to eating veggies and fruit, is probably the shortest route we can think of to harness what is from the earth and the sun.

Now, aside from convincing your grand children that hamburger meat and hot dogs at one time belonged to living animals, let them be aware that being at the top of the food chain also means that anything below is fair game. That is putting it bluntly, of course.

First notice this one truism in nature. The ratio of predators to prey is such that for the ecology to work, prey should outnumber predators. World population growth is about to disturb that ratio. Earlier concern was the clearing of lands for agriculture. Today, we are also clearing them so we can build homes for the burgeoning population. The prospect is getting dire at every acre or hectare conversion around the world.

Is that innovative company in Austin, TX going to be one of the solutions? Is it the one to ensure Soylent Green doesn't happen?

Time Value

"Time is Money"      - Benjamin Franklin

It was in 1748 when he said that in an essay, "Advice to a Young Tradesman".

In 2006, Ian Walker of Warwick University, in England, apparently intrigued by the Ben Franklin quote, derived a formula for calculating the value of time. According to his calculation, "three minutes of brushing one's teeth worked out to the equivalent of 45 cents". After taxes and Social Security, of course. That was supposed to be, at that time, what every Briton gave up by not working. In fact, if he or she spent half an hour washing the car, that effort was worth $4.50.

That was then. In today's dollar, after inflation, those values are naturally far higher. We don't know what that is but I'm sure somewhere, someone had figured that out. Meanwhile, if you work where time sheets (clocking in and out) rule your work day, or if you're paid by actual productivity, as in being paid by the pieces of work turned in or task completed, then the science of calculating what your time is worth is an exact one.

There lies just one of the many ways time, with its very nature much a part of it, is one of humanity's most debated, most enigmatic, most mysterious phenomenon. Time - untouchable and invisible - defies a single explanation yet affects everything and everyone in the universe. We cannot feel it the way an invisible wind does, or how we are able to smell the wafting of perfume or the enticing aroma of a cooked dish. It is not something that our basic senses can detect yet we are aware of its passing, or so we think.  Of course, of all the attributes of time that we had ever thought of so far, because who knows what else we may yet discover someday, the flow of time is the most perplexing of all. More specifically, the unique and seemingly one-way direction of time. Time simply goes from yesterday to today to tomorrow in that and the only order. The arrow of time is set for all eternity and throughout the universe, where there are only three sign posts - the past, present and future.


However, does it really flow like water does? If we sit still, does time flow by us anyway, like the passing current off a river bank? Can we or any inanimate object for that matter sitting unmoved - not a muscle flexing or any part of an object stirring - experience time the same way as someone racing on a Lamborghini around the race track or a meteor hurtling through space? Does time flow, if it flows at all, at the same rate for everyone? Wherever everyone is? If it does, why?  If it doesn't, the question is still - why?  When we turn our face away from the moon, we know the moon is still there, whether we're watching it , or not. We know too that time had elapsed after some indeterminable moments even when we were not looking at our watch but did it actually flow, tick by tick, at the same rate if we were looking at our watch? Would you believe that that is actually not such a slam dunk as we might think it is?

Staying with the basketball metaphor, let's say two fans are watching on TV the last 10 seconds of a game where one team is leading by one point but possession of the ball was with the team lagging behind. Suppose one of the two fans was rooting for one team and the other for the opposing team. The fan rooting for the leading team will sense the ten seconds as too slow while the other fan will think ten seconds was too fast. And there is that about time that makes us feel it differently depending on our personal circumstances. 

That led Einstein to say,  “When you sit with a pretty girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours". That’s relativity.” That was actually Old Albert's attempt at explaining relativity to every layperson willing to try to comprehend it. In reality the scientist made life more complicated in his desire to simplify. This leads both scientists and philosophers to believe - some of them anyway - that time is an illusion. Time is in the mind of the beholder.

But it can't be! We see a plant grow from seed, a toddler to adolescence, we see wrinkles on our faces, and clearly our year book reminds us we were very young and lean and smooth-skinned once in high school and we know how little we knew then than now. Yet, now we are still denied the understanding of time.

We now know too that the clock on a GPS satellite runs at a different rate from a similar clock on the ground. In fact, identical clocks on the surface of Jupiter or on a massive neutron star and here on earth will all run at rates varying from mere seconds to years.

Let us leave anymore insights into that to scientists and philosophers to argue; or, perhaps, someday for them to explain at last, without any doubt or obfuscation, what time really is. Meanwhile, it does not stop us from lightly ruminating about it. That, by the way, is a sign not to take things too seriously because of the oxymoron the phrase connotes. Because to ruminate actually means to think deeply about a subject so that lightly doing it is well ...

Anyway, somebody won the Mega million lottery last night. They advertise it as a 1.6 billion dollar payout but cash option reduces it by a lot. Aside from the fact that the first guaranteed winner, long before a single penny is doled out, is the IRS, the advertised amount which is good for a three decade payout, falls victim to time.  The present value of $1.6 B is $904 M, and when taxes are taken out the winner receives a cash payout of between $490 M to $570 M, depending on how clever his or her accountant or financial adviser is. Still a lot of money, mind you, although the point here is what role time plays in everything.

Stories of when bread was ten cents a loaf are real and even truer is that we will never get back to that point in history. If we transport ourselves to that time we will have been talking about the present value of ten cents as worth a future value of $3.99 in 2018. The time value of money is the reason. And there lies the conundrum. How is  a gold eagle dollar coin in 1900, something anyone held valuable then, something to touch, feel, see and even taste, be affected by something invisible, tasteless and free of detection by any of our senses? That something was and is and will always be time.  So much power and such inevitable impact.

But time, we're told by some, is an illusion. Its effect may be real but not to everyone or every circumstance. The value it created may not be real. To a castaway on a deserted island, a gold eagle coin in his possession is valued at equal  to nothing, while a loaf of bread may be ten times its weight in gold; the same gold sitting in a vault in an office of a Manhattan precious metals trader, who will value bread with chopped corned beef and all the trimmings as a cheap quick lunch on a busy day.

Here lies time and the true meaning of life in a day. The most valuable commodity we possess at the beginning of each day, if it is a commodity at all, is time. We lose it at the end of each day but the wealth of all wealth is to have it come back the following morning - its value the same for all and for everyone. And the biggest win of all wins is to wake up the following morning and get to claim time, one more time. Each morning we get up to live another day has a present value worth a future value many times over on that one future morning we get up after ten thousand tomorrows from today.


We're told to value the time of day, of every day, because we will never get its value back. This prompted the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, to say:

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”

 

Deep But Not Profound

Many, many years ago when the kids were still in high school I was a willing victim of their word-prank they called, "Deep but not Profound". The cleverness of it was that I participated in the whole thing oblivious to their plot that appeared to have all the innocence of playing among themselves to which I was lured into joining. It started with one of them saying, within earshot of course, "Deep but not profound". Then followed by another who said, "School but not playground". Everyone chimed in with approval of the pairing to say, "that's good". Then, "Steel but not iron". After listening to a few more of those word-pairs, I figured what they were doing, or so I thought. I said, "okay, I got it". I said, "Stool but not chair". Nope, that was not it. I came up with more only to be rejected with laughter over a joke only they understood. I came up with many different pairings of words that I knew for sure were in the same logical mold as "Deep but not Profound" only to be discounted again. How did the pairing like "Cheese but not syrup" made sense to them while everything I said with apparently similar connections and even cleverer alliterations did not? Then I blurted out, "Stool but not sofa" and they all burst into laughter because I got it right. But the joke was still on me because they knew it was a lucky guess since the rest of what I thought were equally clever successions of word-pairs did not make the cut. The more frustrated I was the funnier it was to them.

Do you get the connection from those examples? Why "Creek but not river" makes sense but "Pond but not lake" does not. I will pause here to see if you got it.

You'll find out at the end of this musing.

In ordinary every day conversations 99% of what we talk about are far from deep and even less likelier to be profound. Deep and profound subjects take a lot of effort to promote  in a conversation, and much too hard to sustain.

"There are three great things in the world: There is religion, there is science, and there is gossip."     ----------Robert Frost

It is understandable that during the time when the famous poet said that, he probably never thought politics was, or will ever be as pivotal as it is today. Granted, not every one is into it. But a good slice of the population does engage in it with confident punditry. Today we cannot ignore that politics plays a role in people's lives because running the government stems from political power, where politics determine who gets to wield that power. Be that as it may, all four - after we include a fourth to Robert Frost's three - have a potential to evoke deep sentiments and emotions and can have profound impact on society. And, yes, gossip, which is usually relegated to the shallowest part of the intellectual pond, can no longer be shushed because social media can easily fill that pond with  clear water and as easily with mud. So, it is best to stay clear of politics and gossip. I already had my say on religion in my earlier blog, "Everything Happens for a Reason" at:

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2018/02/everything-happens-for-reason.html

That leaves us with science which many may consider a deep subject but not necessarily always profound. For example, it takes deep understanding to fully know the physics of how water turns into ice and vice versa but hardly does the average person think profoundly about it. But I dare say that science is employed often by folks to promote an argument or push an agenda. And here I begin to argue the profundity of it. What does that mean? Well, science might be deep to English or history majors but it is sometimes profoundly lost to those who use it to advance a political argument as in, shall I dare to say, climate change.

Surprisingly, to those who remember one or two positions I have on climate change, this will not be to argue against but to agree with the popular notion. I will even go as far as to accommodate what ever is the latest alteration, that is, where it used to be global warming to what is most popular today - climate change.

We can even say we are in the midst of global warming. The debate, however, had always been about whether it is man-caused or nature doing its thing. We can also avoid having to do that. After all, it would require a very deep discussion into all the different models used to project temperature increases based on all the different scenarios that will have the most profound effect on climate, whether it is because of our activities or not.

Of course, the whole debate is about how bleak our future is going to be if we do not change what we do today and by our actions or lack thereof from hereon in. We will not even debate about how much had been done to mitigate a lot of the bad things done to our environment during the past several decades. There is even some serious projections that as early as ten years from today, there will be so much unimaginable devastation never seen before. We will not touch that either. Let us just say that future events are debatable but we will not even determine, for now anyway, who is right or has the right to absolute certainty.

Science is a unique human achievement that took centuries to accumulate, fathered by countless brilliant individuals from histories past, from not too long ago, and from the present day, and certainly from the infinite future to come. The sciences are either settled by rigorous experiments and collaborated by many, or conjectures with very solid arguments behind them, or projections based on presently known facts. Science had also been known to be revised when new methods of observation brought new or differing results. 

Sciences that look back at history, at this point in time, after all the corrections and examination of data, have established a pretty good baseline with evidence that are still around today. The science of geology has given us layers upon layers of evidence about what earth was like thousands and millions of years ago. For example, along the walls of the Grand Canyon and many similar formations around the world are layers of stratified evidence that, on average, represents several hundred  or up to a thousand years each.

Today, plate tectonics still continue to play an active role in continuing to reshape the continents. Earthquakes occur with regularity, volcanoes erupt in diverse places and mountains continue to rise. Mount Everest is still growing. Climate will continue to change as it had done thousands of times in the past. Montana and Minnesota were once tropical forests and so were France and Belgium and Equatorial Guinea and Sumatra were  temperate locales comparable to the Mediterranean today. Of course, all of the aforementioned places were not shaped the way they are today. Actually, these locations as we know them today are merely place holders on top of  very dynamic moving, almost malleable, plates over the  earth's crust that is being manipulated by a smoldering, super hot mantle.

If that were not enough to make us totally helpless, the earth had switched its magnetic poles a few times before - North and South Poles reversing their locations. The earth's tilt changes or wobbles a couple or so degrees from its axis affecting geographic temperatures  as sun exposure varies. But even that little bit of variation is enough to dramatically alter climate. The sun itself is not exactly a model of consistency on how much sunlight and heat it puts out over a calendar period measured in millennia. Every eleven years it goes through a tantrum by ejecting more solar material, increasing solar radiation, changing the severity and frequency of solar flares and sunspots, etc.  

Lastly, ice ages and warming of the earth had occurred several times in earth's recent history. And we're talking just thousands of years, not millions. So, the last ice age was 14,000 years ago. Obviously, we're not in that now and, in fact, agreeing with almost everybody, we are in the midst of a changing climate that is warming. The warming of the planet is not something we are experiencing just recently.  Tell that to the woolly mammoth, mastodons and saber tooth tigers. They're no longer here but they were around during the last ice age.  Let's see and transport ourselves back to that time. Canada did not exist because its verdant fields and tree covered hills were under ice two miles thick, its mountain peaks today were hilltops above an ice sheet. There were no Great Lakes in North America. Iceland is unidentifiable and animals - those that were suited to arctic weather - could have walked or migrated back and forth over all the places we know today to be Denmark, Sweden, Norway, including Iceland. etc. Since much of the water was in the form of ice mostly at the poles, Japan, The Philippines and other island-nations detached from Mainland Asia presently were all within land migration routes. Animals and people went back and forth along land bridges. I can keep going but let's not do that.

To sum it up, if not for global warming, much of the countries we know today will not exist. Island nations that are now beach and vacation destinations were not as enticing then. We are likely to be covered with fur, or at least we will have fur for apparel, except those at or very near the equator. Siberia would not have become The Gulag because, well, The Soviet Union may not have been the country it was in late 19th to early 20th century. It would have been all ice from one to three miles thick. But then, without Russia we would not have had ballet, vodka and Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 or The 1812 Overture.

Am I making lemonade out of lemons? Maybe. Suffice it to say, we are presently humanity's latest reincarnation - a successful survivor of climate change, of global warming. And the good news is that we still have in us the genes of Neanderthals and Cro Magnon and other ancestral cave dwellers to prepare us for the next ice age, as it is bound to re-occur again. Given that, our ability to adapt had a very good track record. Let me digress for a bit. The macaque monkeys are a species common in Africa, Asia and Gibraltar. During the ice age some of them migrated to Japan and those that survived up in the cold mountains have evolved to become the Japanese snow  monkeys. They have much thicker fur and are highly successful in a snowy habitat on the highlands of northern Japan. All human races have pretty much shed the thick fur of their ancestors but have evolved by adapting  to suit their environment by modifying their skin pigments. The darker skin is able to block much of the harmful rays from the sun but absorbing the proper amount of vitamin D, while those who live in temperate zones where the sun's rays are inclined away from the vertical, hence less intense, developed paler skins so they can absorb the much needed vitamin D. The brown skin adapted well within the halfway range since their habitat is between the equatorial ring and the temperate zone. It took thousands of years but the adaptation is nature's gift to all living things. For most of us it is The Creator's Gift.

Was that too deep but not quite profound to be meaningful today? It is not because  if we are looking at a hundred thousand years condensed to a calendar year, we are worrying today about a mere minute of it.   

Now, about that word-prank. It will take  two or more conspirators and a hapless victim for it to  work. Notice that deep but not profound are two seemingly connected words where the first, ,deep, has double vowels like "ee", and it is one syllable. Profound is two syllables but no double vowels. That is why "stool but not chair" did not work for me but "stool but not sofa" did (both pairs seem properly connected). It is silly but  not so when you are the only one who does not know what is going on. That is why we have to be careful when we confront subjects like my favorite - global warming. We cannot be too deep but we must find profound ways to advance our argument.

A Case for the Limitless Minds

We will always wonder whether there is a limit to what our minds can do. While it is difficult to imagine a limitless mind, one that is defined by the capacity to solve all problems or the ability to accumulate all knowledge or one that has the ability of total recall, it is also hard to imagine what could possibly limit it.

Unfortunately, imagining, thinking and contemplating are all components of the mental processes which makes measuring an impossibility when the measuring rod itself is unknowable. Back to this later.

Today's technology is of course trying everything to enhance the capability of computing, or get over the threshold of the limits of computers by providing users with the help coming from somewhere almost magical. We can now store data, stash photos, records, or convert hard copies of documents electronically, and depositing them into the ethereal vault and filing cabinets and folders in an  imaginary repository located somewhere else, yet instantaneously accessible with just a few keystrokes. To make this innocuous offering so enticing, service providers had come up with one equally innocuous, very reassuring, location for users to stash personal data -  by calling it "the cloud". While it is mostly free, or with a fee so negligibly small, we know there is some other cost we indirectly incur. It is either because we, the users, have become the merchandise peddled by the very infrastructure that provides the services, or we pay with the erosion of our privacy.

Artificial intelligence has become the proverbial definition of everything humanity had always wished for - the god-like source for answers and super human mental abilities - from computing with the speed of a magic wand, making predictions or at least attain the capability to predict certain future events with algorithms every self respecting soothsayer, oracles and clairvoyants  would like to have. Artificial intelligence and robotics have paved the way for physical abilities to make Hercules an envious weakling or give new meaning to herculean achievements that transcend beyond mere strength and speed by doing tasks repeatedly and accurately with untiring enthusiasm and free of the human workers' proclivity to boredom.

But what price we may have to pay or already have? Breaches into private data, hacking into computer systems, simple mischief that used to be the young hacker's idea of Jack climbing up the beanstalk to venture into the clouds have now turned into a criminal enterprise. How did we get to this point? Is it the price of progress? Is it the insatiable quest for expanding the limits of our capabilities because we can, or have we given up so easily to the new task master - technology. We have latched on to the idea that machines will free up much of our thinking or do away with the difficult processes of thought so we can enjoy more of what we believe to be more pleasurable to the mind? The quick but incomplete answer is that progress is the unstoppable force that can pierce through the soft tissues of human nature. We should accept it because technology paves the shortest distance between each stage of development of any civilization. Progress is the overlord of a malleable society, technology is what propels it to go where it wants to go because we have become the reluctant passengers only too willing to acquiesce.

However, we should not easily give up on the human mind. We gave up and gave in so easily and so quickly. We can say that this 3-pound mass of tissue encased in our cranium has its limits. The question is and always had been about whether those limits had been reached. It is not an easy question, likely impossible to answer. 

Actually, the more we use technology to do the thinking for us the less likely future generations will ever find out the limits of the human mind. Or, the less likely they will have an appreciation for what the mind is capable of. Within just a handful of decades we have outsourced tasks that the mind used to do with the idea that perhaps we can then focus our attention away from the mundane. In actuality, the more the machines do much of the work, the more our world had become mundane. In the process we have carved out large slices of time in our everyday life only to squander them in social media, much to the delight of Facebook and Instagram and other providers.  We know now that much of social media providers are a marketplace where the users are themselves both the merchandise and the consumer. It is a vicious loop so cleverly contrived.

Now, let's inject the 1999 scifi, "Matrix", into the mix. It came out in 1999, a time long before we heard much about artificial intelligence. The film was about a world two centuries later from that year - 2199. As improbable as the plot was, writers and producers had a basis for their bold scenario. After all, a mere 60+ years elapsed between the first rudimentary flight of 120 feet to landing on the moon. Who knows what could happen in 200 years.

In 2199, AI, machines whose artificial intelligence humans had come to rely on, had won the battle between man and machine. By that time, what remained as a source of energy was bio-electricity produced by the human body. Enslaved humans were held in perpetual captivity for as long as they were alive, hooked up to electrodes gathering body-produced electrical energy to power the machines. AI knows the importance of the human mind so it had devised a way to entertain the mind with continuous but passive stimulation by a software program that simulated a virtual reality. The machines knew that the brain, a mere 2% of the total body weight, could consume 20-25% of the energy, so a passive stimulation rather than deep thought was all the brain was allowed to do so more of its bio-electrical energy is "harvested". 

If there was a redeeming value to the story, it was the acknowledgement by the machines that the human mind is much too powerful than any artificial intelligence can ever muster to duplicate.

That takes us back to the second paragraph above. How are we to measure the limits of the human mind? We are faced with the idea of a measuring rod that is the human mind to measure itself or one other mind. IQ tests and psycho analysis are limited exactly by that paradox. These tests may approach but will never reach proximity to or even be near a modicum of certainty to be reliable.

So, why was Albert Einstein so smart or Thomas Edison a prolific inventor, or why was Nicola Tesla able to conceive new insights into electricity? Why are idiot savants capable of performing tasks none of us ordinary humans can, yet be so socially inept or mentally incapable of other things we can so easily do?

This is just a theory. In the case of idiot savants, their minds are so unsaturated with stuff that average folks must contend with and accumulate in their brains in the course of normal development. Unsaturated minds can have a very narrow focus with laser-like dedication to just that one task done at the very highest level, while failing in almost everything else. Can we then assume that each brain may have the potential  to multiply multiple digits by another multiple digits without fail or blurt out the day of the week September 21, 1872 was? Is the reason the average person can't is because we somehow have a saturation of data and other things to occupy our mind to excel in just one task? It is the proverbial constraint that universally proves, "there is no such thing as a free lunch".

Einstein's thought experiments made it possible for him to contemplate what it was like to ride the tip of a light beam. It allowed him to imagine what the rest of the world looked like or behave relative to himself on a streaming vehicle at 186,000 miles per second. How can someone formulate two theories that transformed the world, to redefine Newton's standard theories, yet was forgetful of day-to-day activities, failed calculus at one time, or needed help from other mathematicians with calculations, or socially awkward, even neglectful of family obligations at times? Many of these folks have somehow managed to free up space in their brains as to accommodate only the things that mattered most to them. They have unsaturated compartments in their minds or have outsourced much of the stuff that they considered unimportant. Or, is it?

This takes us back to freeing up space in our personal computers by dumping data to the "cloud" or transferring them to USB drives or other external storage.

There lies the quandary of the human mind. Yes, we can perhaps fulfill a mass ejection of memory to free up space in our brain but we do not have the luxury of a retrieval system, let alone know for sure if we have actually completely ejected them. However, how do we know we need to get rid of stuff from our mind if we do not know for sure if we need to? You see, unlike computers where we can look in to find out how much memory storage space remain unused, we do not, or cannot, know what our mind has left available. Even more interesting, as studies have shown, is that in some instances the brain is shown to learn new things in individuals whose advanced age were previously known to be incapable of  knowing or how to do new stuff.

This is the message folks of my generation ought to deliver to those poised to inherit the world we are about to leave in their care. Keeping our minds sharp to the extent of proving to them that we still can is a way to show that our minds are not quite that saturated but that the storage capacity of the human mind shall remain a bottomless well, able to continue to absorb and remain an invaluable source of information and wisdom. We should not succumb to the temptation of dumping data to free up space because what memories we have are there for permanent companionship and a wealth of knowledge free to anyone who wants or needs them.

The wisdom of the aged are after all the ultimate free lunch for the youth.


Similar suggested musings:

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2017/10/gehirn-geist-verstand.html
 
The Age Old Phenomenon of Aging:

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-age-old-phenomenon-of-aging.html