Climate Change Denier

I was just accused of being a "Climate Change Denier." I'm not. I acknowledge that the climate is changing (how could it not?). I acknowledge that human activity is quite likely driving this change, and driving it at a very dangerous rate. In fact, I'm not denying anything, other than that changing to florescent light-bulbs will make any difference. I know we're in trouble, but unlike my accusers, I've actually thought about the problem.

When I hear people prattle on about what we should do to reverse global warming, I think to myself "there goes another population denier." These people prattle on with nonsense like "we just have to reduce our carbon footprint by 20% and everything will be fine." These people need a remedial math course. Yes, global CO2 emissions must reduce, 20% is a great start, but that's 'global' emissions. These people conveniently forget that the population will double in 50 years, so 'per-capita' emissions don't need to go down by 20%, it's 40%. Oh, and then they need to factor in that most people on earth can't lower their carbon footprint because they already use about 1/4oth of our western amount, but they want more. They want to drive cars, and own refrigerators and TVs. So, their emissions are only going up, not down. Thus, our 40% now starts to get even higher, maybe even 80% or more. In my Canadian city, I keep hearing "every little bit counts." Well, not really. Really, wiping the entire population of Canada off the map, reducing our carbon footprint 100%, would, at best, make a momentary blip in the global trajectory.

This trajectory towards increased carbon emissions is not going to reverse, not without some serious changes. With current technology, the only way to reduce global CO2 emissions is to either kill billions of people or force them into a carbon-neutral lifestyle through some brutal and repressive government. A government that would make the Burmese Junta seem positively caring. Pro-democracy is, at this point, pro-climate change. After all, if people are free to chose, they will expect to be treated fairly. To expect otherwise is absurd. If one person has 10 and another 90, do you really expect the person at 10 to be happy with 20? No, only 50 is fair. Now, this is okay, until you realise that there are not one of each, the ration is more 10:1, soon to be 20:1. A fair distribution is not 50 for all, it is 15. Well, it's not 15 because we need to reduce from where we are, so it's 11 or 12. Do you think the people at 90 will be happy with 11? Let's rephrase that: do you think people at 90 will drop down to 11 without a fight? I don't think so.

Thus, I think climate change is inevitable. However, I don't see global warming as the issue, I see global cooling. I say this because we already have the technology to cool the planet; actually, we have several mechanisms. First, we could go the old-fashioned route, a small nuclear war. It would only take a few nukes to throw up enough dust to cool the planet down. Remember nuclear winter, that thing we were all told to be afraid of before terrorism and global warming came along? If it came right down to it, do you think the Chinese government would let millions of it's citizens drown or starve when all they would have to do is pick a fight with someone and just blast them? It wouldn't even have to be a war, just a series of above-ground tests. Now, this is pretty extreme but there are other technological solutions being proposed for cooling the planet down, ones that don't involve overt nuclear war. Some of these are so low-tech that relatively small nations, say Indonesia, could attempt them. Of course all of this deliberate meddling in the Earth's climate would cause problems of their own.

The biggest problem, besides our lousy track record when it comes to meddling in natural systems, is that "somebody" would have to decide just how much to cool things down. The problem with this is that there are places right now that are too hot, and I expect they would like things to be cooler than they are. So, do we decide to cool to 2009 levels, or maybe we should go a few degrees cooler, say back when the Middle East really was the Fertile Crescent instead of a desert. Who decides? Given that the majority of humanity currently lives in areas generally considered to be too hot already, I don't give northern countries much hope. Should the moral arguments against deliberate meddling in the Earth's climate be overruled, and I expect they will at some point, who will stop China, or even Indonesia, from continuing to cool below current levels. How could we stop them? War? Nothing can stop them; it's easier to cool the planet than warm it.

Thus, the real challenge for us northerners is to support the moral arguments against deliberate meddling in the Earth's climate. Doing so involves reducing our carbon footprint drastically, not a little bit, and quickly, not slowly. Of course, this still won't be enough. What we really need to do is bet on technology, a technology that might yet spare us from our current Malthusian dilemma, like it has so many times in the past. We need to find an abundant and practical carbon-free energy source that the world can use. Something like biodiesel from algae ponds. If we could convert our river deltas, currently polluted with high-nitrate farm runoff, into a source of biodiesel capable of supplying all of our energy needs, then we could help the world reduce the total carbon footprint to acceptable levels. Then, we might be able to successfully argue against deliberate meddling in the climate. To do this, we need a massive research effort, an effort best made in the Northern countries. As odd as it may seem, the people in colder places have the most to lose from runaway global warming.

We will not experience runaway global warming. The sea levels will not rise 20m. We will not be deluged with climate refugees from the equator. I say this not as a climate change denier, but as a realist. Long before we get to this point, those people, rather than being drowned, starved, and pushed from their homelands will do something about it, whether we want them to or not. Low-tech or high-tech, subtly or with brute force, the people holding the shitty end of the global warming stick will eventually take climate change into their own hands. They will shut down and reverse global warming. In the north, our only hope is to intercede through technology development, to make this deliberate climate meddling unnecessary. It's time to get off our butts and make that happen.

Canada's Military - The Right Choice

I often hear people lament the "dark years" of the Canadian military, the '80s and '90s where the budgets were slashed. The budgets were actually slashed around 27% in order to eliminate the federal budget deficit and even pay down the balance. The military budgets were slashed far in excess of most other government programs. The Conservatives slashed, the Liberals slashed, and the NDP would have slashed too, had they been given the chance.

This was really, really hard on the military. Manpower was cut significantly and procurement was put off, as was infrastructure upkeep. Even the pay was kept from growing, up until the government was embarrassed by reports of active soldiers using food-banks to get by. Even worse, the military was reduced from staunch defender of freedom, as a committed partner in NATO, to Blue-Beret Peace-keepers that could only meet NATO requirements on paper. Military institutions run on reputation, and the Canadian reputation was taking a beating among soldiers.

Among Canadian civilians, there was still much pride to be had in the UN Peace-keeping operations, but even that took a kicking with the Somalia cover-up. It got so bad that the battle with Serbian forces in the Medak Pocket, a battle all Canadians should rightly feel proud of, was buried lest Canadians be reminded that they still had a military. Dark times indeed.

Times have changed, and the Canadian military is once again taking its rightful place as an honoured institution. Canadians generally feel proud of their soldiers; the fallen are rightfully remembered. While none envy the casualties it represents, the "Highway of Heroes" is often commended by other nation's soldiers wondering why their citizens don't show the same respect. Most politicians agree that military spending should be increased and that long-delayed projects should go ahead. The Canadian military has come a long way back; the times are not so dark now.

However, just because politicians are re-funding the Canadian military, it does not follow that slashing the budget originally was the wrong choice. The military may be a storied institution with a rich history and important tasks, but it is still a political tool. The military serves the needs of the times, and in the '80s, the times had changed. The mighty Soviet Union had collapsed, and the threat of European invasion along with it. People were talking about "Peace Dividends" and politicians were happy to oblige, especially the Canadians. The politicians in Canada were fearful of running up huge and unmanageable deficits, not the Soviets, and they were looking to cut anywhere they could get away with. In the late '80s, it looked like they could get away with a lot. The Canadian military reputation went from "meaningful deterrent" to "well trained and good at making do."

Many people, military and civilian alike, made quite some noise about Canada not being able to meet our NATO obligations, about not being able to support our allies in times of need. However, those times of need didn't happen. The Canadian politicians gambled that they would not need a strong and capable military, that they could get away with horribly slashing military spending, and they were right. Canada got away with it; we survived the "dark years" without a strong military. Instead, we put our financial house in order and are now the envy of the industrialised world, the most capable of weathering the current financial storm. It was a risky move, and it could have turned out bad, but it didn't. Be it luck or foresight, the Canadian politicians picked the right battle, and they won.

Times have changed again. We are approaching a period of instability brought on from a host of factors including climate change, food scarcity, energy depletion, and American aggression. Most Canadian politicians acknowledge this and are supporting a more-robust military. Budgets are up and this is starting to repair the damage from the dark years. The Canadian military has participated in Afghanistan, combat-hardening its soldiers, and will stand ready to deal with the potential troubles ahead. Who knows, maybe in another decade or two, the politicians will be able to declare another Peace Dividend and slash military spending again. It's just not something I'd bet on right now.

We Are Alone

Update: It appears that this argument is, in actuality, a subset of the Fermi Paradox. I just came up with it on my own from a different direction. I'll leave it here, with a few modifications, for posterity.

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SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a neat idea, except that it's pointless. If you think about it, then it becomes pretty obvious that we're the first to actually look for intelligent life, anywhere, and we're not going to find it.

There is something called the Drake Equation that shows how likely intelligent life in the universe is, but I'm going to present the argument in a slightly different form. The basic gist of it is that if intelligent life other than humans exists in our universe, it would already be here, and we would not. It's pretty obvious when you look at it.

If faster than light travel is actually possible, then, eventually, some species with expansionist attitudes will start settling the galaxy. How long would they take to settle everywhere? Well, if you look at how far we've come technologically in the last while, then you realise that the time between "evolved for basic tool use to settle the entire galaxy" is not that long. If there were another intelligent species out there that did have faster than light capabilities, then they would have been here and settled the place long before we started bashing rocks together. If we're the first, then we'll invent the faster than light drive and we'll be everywhere before any other species gets to the "bash the rocks" phase. The odds of the very first species evolving intelligence and interstellar travel did so at nearly exactly the same time as another species is too low to consider, unless you go one step further and buy into the whole "we were seeded by an advanced civilisation and we have long-lost cousins out there" story.

If you agree that faster than light is out of the question, then the whole thing just gets slowed down a little, but not really enough to make a difference. We will eventually either make ourselves immortal or replace ourselves with intelligent self-replicating machines. We, or these machines will then be capable of interstellar travel because they aren't going to care if it takes 50,000 years to get anywhere. It's still within their 'lifetime'. In other words, eventually, some species will evolve to the point where they will eventually go everywhere in the galaxy. If it has already happened, then they would already be here. Even with transit times that exceed tens of thousands of years, the odds of them existing, but not being here yet, isn't even worth considering. If they are here, then we get into a whole other story about them not being particularly concerned about intelligent pond-scum like us. Unless, of course, they are studying us as "machine evolution" in action. But, that's pretty unlikely too.

So, by the basic argument of "they're not here and we are," it seems pretty likely that we're the first, at least in our galaxy. So, you should feel special. It may turn out that our descendants, either flesh or mechanical, may happen upon some species, flesh or mechanical, that does not have any desire to expand into the galaxy. That is a possibility, but we're still first to expand, and I suppose we'll crush them into non-existence fairly quickly. We are, after all, quite expansionist by nature, must be all that rat ancestry. If this argument seems a little harsh, you just have to realise that we're the only intelligent habitual tool users on earth because we evolved to use tools first. We won the evolutionary race to this niche. If whales or monkeys started using tools enough to compete with us, we would eat them. Any environment will only have one species in the "intelligent" niche. If you think about it, given sufficient time, the galaxy is one environment. Only one species, flesh or mechanical, will win the race. We exist, so we're in the lead, so long as we don't blow it.

You may think that the galaxy is such a large place that two intelligent species would have lots of time to evolve and begin expanding. Thus, we may run into other species out there. But, you have to factor in exponential expansion. If we settled two extra-solar planets, as we or our descendants eventually will, then those planets will eventually each settle two planets, and each of those settle two planets... Well, it doesn't take long to settle trillions of planets when they're being settled on an exponential curve. Even if it took a few million years from the first colony ship to the last - which is more than long enough to settle the entire galaxy, even without faster than light drive - you have to factor in that we've only been human for 40,000 years. A blink of an eye on the 14.5 billion year galactic time-scale. What are the odds that the first two species are evolving at the exact same time? If they evolved a million years or so before us, they would already be here. If they evolve a million years from now, we will already be there.

The Drake equation, with commonly accepted guesses for various factors, suggests that at least a couple of species exist in the "interstellar communication" stage at any given time. Thus, SETI. The problem with this is that the equation assumes interstellar travel doesn't happen, that species destroy themselves before they start. Maybe, but it doesn't seem likely. If we ignore world-destroying solar flares and the like, then it seems most likely that man-made destruction would encourage, rather than restrict, interstellar travel. After all, if we destroyed the earth, that's a good reason to start sending colony ships to other planets. It would be highly unlikely that something we did actually killed every human being, that destroyed our ability to breed. Total war, nuclear winter, even biological contamination, any imaginable man-made destruction, will still leave some people in protected places. Humanity will continue; we will colonise other planets. The same goes for other species on the same technological curve.

When you look at the reality of the situation, there are some pretty long odds on SETI finding anything out there. If we are the first to evolve past the point of bashing rocks together, then there is no one else to talk to. If we are not the first, then that species is already here and watching us, and they clearly don't want to talk. No, SETI makes the assumption that interstellar travel is not possible, and we know that's not true. Even if it takes 20,000 years to travel to the next star, we'll be there within 25,000 years, and then the next star, and the next, until there are no stars left unexplored in our galaxy.

The Un-caused Cause

In basic philosophy there is a standard argument that goes like this: Every effect has a cause, and every cause is an effect of a prior cause, and so on and so on and so on. Therefore, there are two possibilities: 1) either the universe is a cycle that has always existed, or 2) if you go back far enough, you will find the original "un-caused" cause, the prime mover, God.

Well, as it turns out, modern science has something to say about this. First, we know, for a fact, as much as any fact can be known, that the universe isn't some great cycle. The big bang is not going to end in the big crunch. The universe had a beginning and it's going to keep going and going and going, until there's no fuel left to make stars. After that, it will still keep going, filling up with dark energy as it goes, but no one is going to be around to notice. So, that rules out option #1. So, is option #2 a possibility?

Well, as it turns out, modern science has something to say about that too, though it's not proven by observation like the accelerating expansion of the universe. There is a theory called "eternal inflation." This theory says, and I'm loosely paraphrasing here, that the universe is not infinite, it has an actual size even though it is expanding, and that this universe is contained within something called eternal inflation. Further, it states that our universe popped out of this eternal inflation and went bang. Now, you have to realise that we're talking about something outside of 3D-space and before time began, so the language is a little imprecise, to say the least. Human language and reasoning doesn't really work well when we get beyond the world that we can experience. But still, the wording is good enough for our purpose here.

Now, eternal inflation is some seriously strange stuff. Basically, the rule there is that it inflates, there's more of whatever it is, and then more, and more, and more... eternally. No cause needed, just effect, lots and lots of effect. Randomly, some of this inflation doesn't inflate as per usuall and a universe pops into existence. And, here's the gotcha, the universe is a place where this inflation doesn't happen. It can't happen. The universe is a bubble of "no effect without cause" inside this eternal inflation. We exist because eternal inflation isn't happening within our universe.

Eternal inflation, effect without cause, has to stop so that space can exist, so that time can start, so that energy can cool down enough to become matter, so that gravity can clump some of this matter together, so that stars can form, so that heavy matter can fuse together, so that planets can form, so that organic chemistry can start replicating, so that life can start, so that intelligence can evolve, so that we can ask "how did this all start?" We exist because we live in a bubble, our universe, where all effects must have a cause. So, the question isn't "what was the first un-caused cause?" It's "why did the un-caused effects stop so that we can exist?"

The Evolution of Death

The process of natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. Individuals that are somehow less fit to breed are less likely to have their genetics represented in future populations. However, as with life in general, things are not quite that simple. For example, if individuals didn't die then they could represent their own genetics in the future. Why have children at all? Well, one reason is that habitat is limited and there are usually several different species competing for that habitat. Selection not only works within a species, it works between them. With limited habitat, evolution can become a race between species. This race is why we die. Death, like sex, speeds the rate of evolution.

Habitat is finite; populations only have so much space to exist in. When new habitat becomes available, life will fill it very quickly. New habitat can appear either through changes in the environment or in the way a species can use an environment. There are the obvious environmental changes like variations in climate and corresponding sea levels. There are less obvious changes as well. For example, when a species goes extinct, it changes the environment that other species operate in. If one predator in a given environment goes extinct, then there is an evolutionary niche for other predators to evolve into. New environments can also open up when a species evolves ways to utilise resources it could not before. For example, being able to eat a new food, or survive in a different temperature. A salt-water fish that could live in a lower salinity environment would have river estuaries open up to them. Another way a new environment can open up for a species is when barriers to migration are removed. Sea levels could drop enough to allow an island population access to the mainland, or vice-versa. A species could be transported to a new habitat through various means. Whenever new habitat opens up, in whatever way, a competition between species often results. Existing species may be out-competed by a new invading species, or several new species may vie for niches after existing species go extinct. This competition between species makes evolution a race.

An unoccupied environmental niche is easy for a species to evolve into. Even a slight improvement in an individual's ability to exploit this niche provides an advantage that natural selection can favour. With succeeding generations, further slight improvements would also be selected on. However, once a niche is filled by a species, another species would have to evolve a correspondingly better utilisation of the niche. This is very difficult to do when the intermediary steps provide no benefit to be selected for. Species that evolve into a niche first can maintain a permanent advantage. Thus, species that evolve quicker are more likely to expand into new niches and whole new habitats when they open up. The earth is populated by species that won this evolutionary race.

Selection in evolution is either by the individual or by the group. While it is easy to assume group selection is at work, individual selection dominates evolution. The unit of information in genetic evolution is, after all, the gene. However, just as genes work together and share the same fate in an individual, individuals do exist in species and share the fate of the whole. After all, an individual's genetic fitness is moot if there's no one to mate with. When a species goes extinct, by definition, all its individual members are dead. Thus, species are more likely to survive when individuals do things that benefit the species as a whole. Individual genetic lines that do nothing to benefit the species are more likely to go extinct.

Individuals don't evolve, populations do. Each individual's genetic make-up is fixed at conception and this make-up is what is passed to offspring. If an individual has a mutation after conception, positive or not, it is unlikely to be passed onto the next generation. Thus, the variation side of evolution happens at conception. This basic point, that evolution happens at conception, coupled with a limited habitat and inter-species competition to fill said habitat is the reason most life on earth evolved to die. A simple thought-experiment will show why this is.

If we imagine two simplified habitats, each populated by a different species, then the advantages of death become apparent. Each habitat holds a fixed number of individuals; if a new individual is born, it will die unless there is a vacant spot for it to live in. In one habitat, individuals live until they die of accident; in the other habitat, individuals live for a fixed period of time before dying. With the eternal species, creating offspring is risky as death is more likely during pregnancy. When this happens, both the parent and child die while a new space opens up for another individual's child to live in. Thus, having the time to wait for the opportunity to open up, evolution would favour those individuals that held off having children. Reproduction in this environment would be very slow; this slow reproduction means that mutations, and thus evolution, would have limited opportunities to happen. However, in the habitat where individuals die after a fixed period of time, each individual could have offspring with a reasonable chance of living. There would likely be space as other individuals die. The slight chance of dying during pregnancy would be more than offset by the certainty of dying in the end. Thus, the birthrate in each habitat would evolve to match the death rate. However, in the habitat where individuals die at a fixed term, the birthrate would be much, much higher.

The higher the birthrate, the more variations through mutation will occur for natural selection to act on. The same higher birthrate will also allow those positive variations to spread through the population via sex. These factors, combined, will make evolution happen at a faster rate. Eventually, a mutation will come along that allows an individual great benefit. For example, the ability to live in half the space, thus allowing a doubling of population, and a doubling of the rate of evolution. Eventually, a mutation will come along that allows this species to bridge the gap between habitats resulting in inter-species competition. With one species evolving much faster than the other, the slower one will likely be out-competed and eventually go extinct. Over time, species that live forever will be replaced by species that have evolved a mechanism to die.

From this thought experiment, it is clear that there are advantages at the species level when individuals die after a reasonable period of time. Death allows faster reproduction in a fixed habitat. The higher the reproduction, the higher the chance of positive mutations for natural selection to favour. The more selectable mutations that happen within a given period of time, the faster a species will evolve. The faster a species evolves, the better it will be able to compete against other species for habitat. Species that are less able to compete for habitat are more likely to go extinct. Individual genetic lines in an extinct species are dead. Thus, limited habitat and inter-species competition work together to provide an evolutionary advantage where death will evolve over time.

Death evolved because it allows us to have children. These children benefit our species by helping it adapt to new environmental niches. Our species, and thus our genetic line, continues because of this adaptability. In the great evolutionary race, adaptable children beat eternal life. We are what we are because we die.

Arguments From Ignorance

Philosophy categorizes several different types of arguments: one argument type is of logical necessity, arguing from experience is another, as is arguing from authority. Most arguments are pretty easy to identify. "This person is an expert in the field and she says X, so X must be true" is an argument from authority. The expert may have a different argument: "Under these circumstances, I've seen X and only X happen," which is an argument from experience. Unfortunately, there is another type of argument that people like to use, an argument from ignorance.

I'll start with a non-religious example. In a magazine article that shall remain nameless, an expert in materials engineering who also happened to be an Egypt buff wrote about his research into obelisk carving. He found a written record stating that a particular obelisk was being carved for a period of time but then the obelisk cracked and the project was abandoned. He then located this abandoned obelisk and noted how much of it had already been carved. Using his considerable skills in materials engineering and after conducting field-tests on rate-of-removal speeds with the tools ancient Egyptians were known to use, he determined that there was no way they could have removed the amount of rock they did in the available time. It was impossible. Thus, he concludes, aliens must have helped the Egyptians.

On the surface, this appears to be an argument from authority, but it is really an argument from ignorance. One other little story may help show this. A person I know grew up in a family that worked with rock. He was learning how to build rock walls, and the like, from his father, who learned from his father, and so on for generations. On the job-site, he watched as workers pounded away on rocks for hours, trying to get them into the right shape for the job at hand, while his father would pick up a rock, look at it, whack it once or twice, and the rock would split apart leaving the necessary shape behind. Because of this skill, his father could do the work of several other men on the job. There are many, many books on geology and working with stone, but the skills his father had to understand rock and work with its internal fault-lines is not something that's in a book. Even if it were written down, it's not something a person could learn by reading. It takes years and years of experience.

So, back to the Egypt example, we have an expert faced with two possibilities: 1) Ancient Egyptian craftsmen, being at the hight of stone-age culture that spanned all the way back to Homo-Habilis, might have known something about working with rock that he doesn't. Or, 2) Aliens came to earth, made contact with the ancient Egyptians, and instead of helping them with medicine, mathematics, or even weapons, they helped them carve big chunks of rock, which they screwed-up while doing such that the obelisk cracked and they had to start over. Given these two options, our expert chose the latter.

This is a typical argument from ignorance. X is impossible, so - insert favourite theory here - must be true; the Egyptians couldn't remove that much stone in the given time, so aliens must have helped. Not only is this type of argument incredibly arrogant, in stating categorically that something is impossible just because we don't know how, it is also incredibly weak as far as arguments go. Anyone wanting to counter this argument merely has to, in an argument from experience, list off the thousands of examples where ignorant people had concluded that gods were doing something, only to be proven wrong by science. There are flashes of lights and booming sounds coming from the sky; I don't know how that happens so the gods must be angry. I don't know why the sun disappeared in the middle of the day, so the gods must be giving us an omen. I don't know why it rains, so the gods must make it rain. The list is very, very long. Experience shows that while we may not know how something happens, it is a bad bet to assume that gods or aliens did it. It is far better to just say: we don't know how X happens, yet, but we'll probably figure it out at some point down the road.

Science often makes mistakes but it is also a self-correcting endeavor. When faced with one of these arguments from ignorance, a scientist will attempt to come up with alternative solutions. Things don't fall down because a god pulls them down, they fall down because of a predictable force called gravity. When one of these hypothesis gains widespread approval, it becomes a theory and, being the most likely solution, is the one taught to new students of science and used for explaining things to non-scientists. However, if enough proof comes along that the theory is incorrect, or incomplete, then it can change. The original theory of gravity has been somewhat replaced or augmented with the theory of relativity, which is being augmented even today. The theory of relativity also happens to be one of the most tested theories in all of science. Yet, someday, it too may be replaced with something better. As such, there are always competing hypothesis that are trying to replace accepted theories. That's how science works.

The evolution of species is a widely-accepted theory. It is what is taught in science class and is what is used to explain things to non-scientists. Life is a very complicated thing and this theory is not a complete explanation; there are things that remain unknown. Further, there are many competing hypothesis covering a myriad different aspects of the overall theory. Some scientists maintain RNA based origins to life while others suggest a more simple chemical synthesis route, for example. However, this ignorance does not mean that God did it; dissent within the scientific community does not mean that we know nothing.

People make arguments along the lines of: X is the mainstream scientific theory to explain Y. Scientists have shown an element of X to be impossible. Thus, X is impossible, so God did Y. By now, you should be able to recognise this as a classic argument from ignorance. While an element of X may bring its validity into question and leave us in a more ignorant position on Y, that just means that we simply don't know everything yet. Experience shows us that arguments from ignorance are useless; just because we don't know how something happens, it does not follow that gods of aliens did it. It just proves that we don't know everything yet.

Free Will

People have been arguing about gods and religions for a long time. Science, when it evolved from natural philosophy, added a new wrinkle to these age-old arguments, a new possibility, no gods at all. Those early natural philosophers weren't looking to do this; they were looking to see how their gods ran the world, they were looking for God. But, if you think about the modern God, then you will realise that we can never really find God in nature. Doing so would destroy free-will.

If you strip most modern religions to their essence, it basically comes down to: freely choose to worship God and you will receive salvation in the afterlife. The hows and whys of worship and the nature of salvation may vary, but the underlying message is about the same. People have to make the choice to worship. For most of human existence, this has been a choice between gods. Now, with the advent of science, it is a choice between God and a godless natural existence. And yet, so many people are still trying to prove that God exists, even though that proof would then destroy people's ability to chose. After all, if you knew for a fact that God existed, and that failure to worship would result in damnation, then your choice is going to be very biased. It would not be impossible to chose to not worship, and I've made an argument for it here, but it would be a hard choice. Because of this, if God wanted to maintain free choice, He has every reason to make proof of His existence impossible to get.

How would God ensure that there was never any proof of His existence? Well, there are two possibilities: create nature such that all things come into being through natural means, or create natural means along-side all creations. The first method would be the ultimate in a philosopher's God, a God that created the path for all things at the moment of original creation. It would be a single burst of creation where everything follows on its own path without any further meddling. The second method would involve, with each act of creation, creating a second natural path where that creation could also happen without intervention. Some may think this deceitful but it really isn't. God merely creates two alternatives, both worthy of belief: created by God or created by nature. This choice allows free will to happen. While the first possibility, that of a philosopher's God, is more rational, the second does allow for people that maintain the literal truth of holy scripture or traditions.

Thus, we reach a point where science is in the business of discovering the natural processes that led to the world as we observe it. Science attempts to describe nature, without God. Now, for this to happen, it does not matter if we exist in a godless universe, or if God created a universe that operates without further meddling, or if God creates natural processes alongside each act of creation. The result is the same; science is attempting to discover these natural processes. Discovering these natural processes will say nothing about the existence of God; if God exists, He would have created these processes along with everything else.

Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead. In actuality, it was the birth of true free-will. Humans finally reached a point where they could reasonably consider a world without God. Before, choice was limited to this god or that god. After, the choice became God or no God. Science has given us this choice; it has given us true free-will.

There can be no proof of God's existence; there can be no proof that God does not exist. If scientists look hard enough, they will discover natural processes for every observable phenomenon. We, as individuals, will have to decide if we are going to worship God or not; we will have to make this decision without any proof. Worshiping God takes a leap of faith, an act of free will. How could it be otherwise?

Mars, a Sad Story

Today, 2008-05-26, the Phoenix Probe began sending pictures back from Mars. Yup, more rocks and dust. So continues the search for extraterrestrial life.

You know, Mars started out as a GOD for us. An angry red god moving through the heavens. Then, we figured out it was a planet, just like ours. We saw great canals built by grand civilisations. Then, we realised that Mars didn't have canals, and that it was really dry and cold. So, we sent probes to see what it was like on the surface. What did we see: rocks and dust. So, we sent more probes to drive around. What did they find: rocks, dust, and signs that water was around in the past. So, we sent another probe, this time to dig into what we think is buried ice. What will we see? Maybe, best case, chemistry that indicates microbial life exists. Probably, given Mar's history, we'll find out that there was once enough liquid water, that hung around long enough, so that life might have had a chance to evolve.

So, we've gone from God, to civilisations, to visible life, to microbial life, to past microbial life, to the conditions where microbial life might have once possibly evolved. When the Viking probes landed, we were wondering if some Martian dog would walk by and piss on the lander's leg. Now, we're hoping to see chemistry that indicates microscopic fossils. It's pretty sad when you think about it. Sure, there's enough interesting stuff to keep an uber-geek scientist excited, but for the rest of us? For most of us, the probes are the most interesting stuff on Mars. Imagine what Columbus would have thought if he came to the new world and found nothing but rocks and dust?

No wonder humans have gone from massive programs to budget exploration. The return on investment just isn't there anymore. I don't expect Mars will really be interesting again until we have the technology to lift massive amounts of material into orbit on the cheap. Then, colonising Mars will be possible; then, there will be something interesting on it... Us.

But, for now, you have to admit, the probes are pretty cool.

Steel Motorcycle Footpegs

Here's a simple little steel fabrication project.

I wanted some steel foot pegs for my KLR650. So, rather than paying $100 or so, I rummaged through my scrap bin and came up with this.

This is iteration #2. The first design left pockets where rocky mud could collect - and that's a problem when riding in the dirt. This design was too wide. I thought the extra width would give better support, and it does, but it also makes shifting difficult. The third try, like this but of stock width, is mounted on my bike now. They work well.

Overall, it's a simple project that doesn't require much in the way of time, skills or tools.

The design details are HERE

David...