Life is the game of infinite choices. A field that you can wend your way through a billion times and still stumble across patches you’ve not seen before.

Every quick-running or slow-walking step alters your route through the field, through life. When you stop to smell the blooms of beauty, pause a while beneath the boughs of a tree or simply lift your head and eyes to the skies and smile, these experiences change who you are. They don’t change you but they affect your senses: you are born looking through eyes of pure clarity but with age comes fettered, foggy vision.

It’s not that the field is different. It just looks and feels different. The field itself changes very little, in ways that are predictable. The framework of existence brings periods of pestilence and death when the lush emerald greens of life all but vanish, but it also  brings new births, explosions of new energy. There are always seasons of bountiful growth when the booming burst of life seems to oust even the most die-hard spectres of dark pasts.

In the space between there is balance. It is among and between the spurts of life and rubble of death that we walk. It is right here and now, where we breathe and live and smile and survive that we make decisions about how we live our life; how best to cross that field, one step at a time.

What path should I choose? Will I let divine covenant or the winds of fortune guide me, knowing that every step I make will alter my ultimate destination?

If it helps, there are no wrong moves and only one rule, one obligation: I must make it to the end. I must survive the infinite game of life. How well I survive is only limited by my zeal and imagination.

Live life. Enjoy, relish and savour its tumultuous twists and turns: it’s meant to be fun!

What with all the excitement of my holiday on Monday I have to admit that I haven’t had a chance to sit down and write. Which is annoying because I really like writing! And I won’t get to write properly until after my trip. I hope I can survive (and satisfy you guys) with just lots and lots and lots of photos. Here’s hoping!

Anyway… I caught an episode of a fantastic series that’s airing in the UK on Channel 4 at the moment: Inside Nature’s Giants. The first episode featured an elephant (which I missed!) but this week they autopsied a massive Fin Whale (second only in size to the Blue Whale, the largest creature on the planet) — and as the Faroe Islands have lots of Fin Whales, I was obviously very interested! This poor girl had beached itself in Ireland and died — but not to waste such a golden opportunity, a crack team of biologists and veterinary scientists flew in to cut the beastie into little pieces –  in the name of science and commercial TV! (Here’s a video clip which I hope you can view outside the UK.)

I won’t lie: it was pretty damn grim to see the whale’s coroner knee-deep in whale bits (there’s no other word or words that can suitably describe the pink, wobbly mass she was wading through). ‘If I can just reach a little bit further up here into this cavity I can free its heart, but it’s tied down by all of these blood vessels…’ She’s hacking away with a machete! Chopping away at a dead whale!

The heart of this leviathan is a cubic meter! The main scientist (the one with the sharpest knife) held up a segment of its aorta (the main output artery of the heart) and it was about the size of your head! And its heart only beats three times a minute! (Which is how it stays underwater for so long.) The whole whale weighs 60 tons (55,000kg) and is 65 feet (20m) long! When feeding it swallows 70 cubic meters (18,000 gallons) of water and then spits it back out through its filters, capturing fish and crustaceans. It can empty and fill its 3000-litre lungs in one breath — which it only needs to do once every 40 minutes!

But the amazing bit? They’re mammals, just like you and I! They originally started off as dog-like creatures with hoofed feet. 53 million years ago these ‘pakicetids’ jumped into the water and never looked back. It took 15 million years for them to lose their legs and become fully marine. 8 million years more and they had learnt to echolocate (the ’sonar’ that they use to locate food and obstacles). 10 million years later they diversified into dolphins and porpoises — and that’s where we are today.

‘Just’ 53 million years to mutate from average-sized land-dwelling mammal to the largest species this planet has ever known — the Blue Whale (which are bigger than commercial jets, by the way). Their new-born children weigh 6,000lbs (2,700kg) and drink 400 litres of milk a day! But as weird and foreign and huge as they are, they’re still mammals. These monsters are genetically more similar to a mouse than a fish.

And that made me think about where we’d be in 53 million years.

Humans are incredibly young in the grand scale of things. We — Homo habilis, our very, very primitive ancestors — started using tools around 2.5 million years ago, which set us apart from our chimpanzee brethren. And look how far (or not?) we’ve come in just 2.5 million years! In another 51.5 million years what could we possibly evolve into?

I’ve talked a tiny bit about the future of the human race but hardly touched on the topic of evolution.Will we even live long enough to experience tangible evolution? And if we do evolve significantly, what form will it take? Looking at that little dorky dog-like creature above, and then at the Blue Whale it’s almost impossible to fathom what we might become if given enough time! What environmental condition or external stimulus will have the biggest impact on our evolution? Will we develop a 6th finger on each hand to help us type faster? Will evolution instead take the form of transhumanism: bionic arms and eyes, and cybernetic implants?

The problem is, evolution is slow. You can forget ruggedised skin to survive global warming (or impending ice age if you’re that way inclined). You can forget wings to fly around with (though that might happen if we move to a planet with less gravity!) In fact… I really have no idea what we might evolve into. It’s like being asked ‘what do you think the world will be like in 100 years?‘ but exponentially more difficult to answer.

Looking at history we’re actually more likely to wiped out by a meteor before we evolve into something new and exciting. With us obliterated, the whales might sneak back onto land and spend another 53 million years transforming back into dogs:  speaking dogs with opposable thumbs capable of using tools.

Hmmm…

My trip to the Faroe Islands was inspirational. It wasn’t a roller coaster of excitement. It wasn’t a sun-drenched getaway. I didn’t sleep a lot, nor did I feast on exotic fruits fed to me by sun-kissed maidens — in fact, all I ate was meat and potatoes. The Faroe Islands were educational. Eye-opening and and interesting.

The Faroe Islands are unique in that they’re the smallest Western nation in the world. 45,000 people spread out across an archipelago of 18 islands. They have three cities, the biggest of which has a population of 15,000 — the next, Klaksvik, has just 4,000.

Zoom in on that city. A village or small town by any other standard, Klaksvik is the capital of the Northern Isles and the hub of culture and commerce for 6 of the Faroes’ 18 islands. Once upon a time it would’ve been a village with a thriving marketplace, a civilisation whose only contact with the outside world was by boat. In fact its tunnel to the mainland was only finished in 2006!

But is it a backward, single-street village? Is Klaksvik a second-world shanty village reliant on good weather and safe waters for its survival? No. When the fog horns bellow do women run helter-skelter to the harbour hoping that food has finally arrived? No. Klaksvik and the Faroes themselves are actuallty one of the most developed nations in the world. In Klaksvik alone they have multiple deep-sea harbours and dry dock. A cinema and theatre. Two gymnasiums and a skate park! They even have a fully-featured hospital and – get this – a football stadium with more than enough seating for the entire town — city! I meant city! (Don’t call it a village. They really hate that. I did it a few times…)

They’re also planning an indoor football pitch for use during the dark and cold-rain winters that descend upon their city for two thirds of the year. An indoor sports arena for just 4,000 people; just 4,000 people utilise these awesome and ludicrous amenities. Four thousand happy little souls, living out their lives as humble fishermen and sheep farmers but with access to resources that would put most western nations to shame.

But how do they do it? How can economy on such a tiny scale work?

More importantly: why don’t all towns of similar size around the world have the same resources?

Now that I’ve painted an objective picture of Klaksvik, it’s necessary for me to tell you what it’s like to live there. What’s it like to live in a city where everyone literally knows everyone? What’s it like when the bank manager is both your uncle and the one signing your mortgage agreement? How about when the city’s star football player is also the same person that you regularly head into the Arctic Circle to trawl cod fish with? What’s it like to live in a place where it’s not unusual for teenagers to head out together for a 9-month stint as fishers in the Barents Sea off the coast of Russia?

But the weirdest thing about the small city of Klaksvik is this: nothing is locked. Car doors are left unlocked with their keys often on display. House doors are (usually) closed but never bolted. Boats and bikes are left running: nothing is chained down.

As a result, life in Klaksvik felt just as I expected: it’s like one big family. Because that’s what it is. We’re talking about a city that formed by the coalescence of nearby villages; from just 200 people a thousand years ago, there are now 4,000. You don’t need a piece of paper to work out just how closely related everyone is.

There was the possibility that I would be thought of as ‘the stranger’, the freak that would draw people to their windows. The other-world alien that would pull crowds of pointed fingers, furrowed glares and nervous giggles.

I thought I’d feel like an outcast, a tourist — or worse: a journalist — an outsider come to investigate and poke and ridicule their ancient form and customs.

Instead I was welcomed with open arms and hearts. And legs.

[Next part tomorrow... hopefully!]

Imagine for a moment a world where clueless people remain silent; where those without working knowledge shut up and listen. A society whose people, instead of making wild, uneducated stabs, feels compelled to investigate, question and probe. Consider a culture that actually cares about the damage caused by ignorance and prejudice, to friends and strangers alike.

* * *

Once upon a time there was authority. I don’t mean in the policing or juridical sense — Rome didn’t have police, you know? — I’m talking of intellectual authority. If you had a question about childbirth you went to see the wizened midwife that delivered both you and your mother into the world. If you were ill, your only hope was if the sawbones had seen a similar case, or had a beaten, weather-worn hand-me-down almanac that described how to use leeches effectively. Slowly though, over thousands of years, authority shifted to the written and printed word; the professionals remained masters, but they could not travel the world as quickly or as effusively as books. Information became available, accessible, free — and both culture and science surged forward as a result.

Society began to revere the written word. For some reason, ink impressed on paper in the shape of words and sentences have immense weight and meaning. What you read about giving birth is suddenly more true than the wizened midwife’s decades of experience. A book says the world is flat and, in your mind, in an instant, the world becomes flat. It’s magical just how much credence the written word is given — people will believe the craziest things if they’re written down.

Whoompf! Religion.

Blam! Newspapers.

Poof! The Internet!

Authority still exists — somewhere — but its voice is muffled, drowned out by a sea of disinformation; information that gets propagated as wisdom because we simply don’t know any better. That’s what old wives’ tales are incidentally: something your great, great grandmother once read, assimilated as truth and then forwarded it along through the generations. Does masturbation really give you hairy palms? Is thirteen actually unlucky? No.

And therein lies the problem: knowledge is power whether it is proven true or not. Fallacy, slander and gossip — it is all, from the (unfortunate) recipient’s point of view, working knowledge. You read some juicy little factoid about a famous celebrity and… it makes you feel good. Chances are it’s not true, or only partially so, but knowing that little nugget of knowledge somehow makes you feel enlightened, powerful. “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on” Winston Churchill famously said. There is a reason people peddle in lies and half-truths. There is a reason why newspaper editors ‘add one’ to death tallies or run with unnamed sources. And that’s the other, far more tricky problem: lies, if repeated enough by any kind of authority — a priest, a mother, a teacher — become truth. Cold hard truth that, within a generation, becomes wisdom.

We’re all walking around with a lot of data that we think is true. It’s a survival trait: our nurture is like gospel. And that’s bad when it overrides our nature, our experiences. We feel qualified to dispense these false truths to others.

‘You must have something wrong with your head’ we tell our friends and loved ones.

‘You shouldn’t do that, it’s wrong, it’s bad’ we say to our girlfriends and boyfriends.

‘How can you believe in that?’ we say to our friends with a differing faiths.

Anyone that’s mastered a field or subject will know that it feels a lot like peeling back layers of untruth — Oh, so that’s how it works! — that’s all real education is. It fills in gaps and rewrites what we’ve known and worked with for years. But it’s not easy. It’s no simple task to alter your entire vision of the world just because an encyclopaedia or wise man tells you to. How long did people hold onto the fact that the world was flat? That’s why false knowledge and data will continue to propagate through generations. We’re stubborn bastards.

Next time, before you pass along a piece of information, think about whether it’s actually true or not. If you’re not sure, go to the library and find out what the truth really is. At the very least you’ll be doing the next generation and tomorrow’s civilisation a huge favour.

* * *

Please excuse my use of the African American vernacular — dis, to disrespect –  but it was necessary. It’s altogether more punchy than ‘Don’t go insulting what you don’t know nothing about.’

This isn’t finished. Next I want to tie this into religion, prejudice and ignorance.

For as long as we’ve been human one resource has always been valued above all others: knowledge. The success and progression of civilisation is measured in just one way: the extent of our knowledge.

We pride ourselves on how developed we are. How much more more civil we are compared to our barbaric ancestors. We sure have come a long way from the grunting, cave-dwelling proto-human. Guns. Medicine. Democracy, equality, liberty; these concepts, these inventions are fine examples of our ever-expanding body of knowledge, our scientific research and the evolution of thought.

Civilisation is like a machine, with each and every one of us playing the role of cog or spring in the great, universal machine. It spans the complete evolution of humanity through time and space and, if we avoid extinction, it will be everlasting.

And that’s how we power this machine: knowledge. Knowledge goes in one end: ‘metal conducts electricity’ — and out the other end comes invention: ‘computers’. Grossly simplified but you get the idea. This machine needs to be fed constantly. It doesn’t differentiate between new data or rehashed, time-worn knowledge: that’s what makes it so devastating! It creates and destroys with ambivalence. Cultures, ideologies, religions; all have fallen or been cut down into their constituent parts only to be reabsorbed — reconstituted.

It seems to do OK with regurgitated, reabsorbed data as long as there’s something new being added from time to time. Imagine a big cauldron of soup — wouldn’t it get a little boring if you never added a new ingredient? The soup would probably dry out even. Our greatest gains definitely come from pouring new knowledge in.

And where to find the new knowledge? Exclusively within the domain of exploration. Pushing the boundaries is the greatest thing we can do to perpetuate the machine of civilisation, of humanity.

That’s the crazy thing: all of the knowledge we need to survive is already out there waiting to be discovered. It’s like turning over rocks and finding wriggly worms and millipedes. It’s like turning over a rock and finding data that solves an unknown — ah, so that’s the solution… Eureka! But these rocks might be at the top of the highest peaks or the trough of the lowest marine trenches. These figurative rocks might be in the petri dishes of science labs or on the whiteboards of a particle physicists.

Wherever they are, these rocks need to be turned. It doesn’t matter by who, ultimately, as it all becomes part of our great machine. The magic becomes mundane and the entirety of civilisation surges forward, simply by flipping a stone and reporting your findings.

Problems arise when people stop exploring, when we cease pushing against the boundary. The machine continues to churn — it can’t stop — but with a lack of new data errors begin to appear. Our world-view begins to stagnate. Data is re-analysed and new, erroneous, contrived conclusions are drawn. False progress, bureaucracy, fads and pseudo-science can grip society in a stranglehold.

Before our very eyes exploration has become the black sheep of governmental spending: Research, science, space travel and the like all shunted onto the back burner and the back of our mind. There is knowledge out there just waiting to be discovered and assimilated into our culture, knowledge that will propel our civilisation into the next era. But it’ll have to wait. We have more pressing issues at hand apparently.

[These 'thoughtful' posts are usually much more free-form and a-wandering than my other blog entries. You are more than welcome to jump in and finish a particular train of thought, or challenge something you think is false. This is as much about me getting my head around something as it is for you! You probably want to read yesterday's entry on 'Single-Player Immersion' before you read this.]

We know that our imagination is powerful — it is as powerful or more so than actual reality. Sure, it can’t physically take us places, but do people really claim that being scared by a horror film isn’t equivalent to being attacked by a knife-wielding maniac? (OK, don’t think about that one too much — just go with it!) And then there’s the matter of time-travel: our imagination can take us back in time! Through the media of books, films and games our infinitesimally short life-span can be expanded and extended to include different places and worlds from throughout history. Magical.

Why though must all of these virtual worlds exist outside the realm of reality? Can you imagine ‘losing yourself’ in the contemporary world — while reading the morning paper? No. You lose yourself while reading about the culture and creepy rites of Ancient Egypt. You readily find yourself escaping to alternate realities where vampires and undead exist, roaming and scheming under the cover of darkness. After that scene in The Matrix, did you stop to consider if it really is air that you’re breathing? I did.

Why can’t we be immersed in real life? Why can’t we attack and question our surroundings in real life with the same fervor?

A quick change of tack: yesterday, I mentioned how immersion can also occur to groups of people. The obvious examples here are table-top role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons and the like), Internet forums and online games. This ‘multi-player shared reality’ is nearly always cooperative, towards some common goal. They take the same form as real-life teams and groups, only… they are virtual. Or rather, their sphere of influence is virtual (though their real-world impact can be quite significant too — some people get married in a virtual world,  and later in real life too).  The inhabitants of these shared, imagined illusions are avatars, projections of one’s self upon the fundament of a virtual world.

This won’t make a lot of sense if you’ve never been part of such a shared reality, but take my word for it: community and social bonds form a lot more readily in virtual spaces. It’s like… necessity throws people together, and somehow… it sticks. Not entirely without conflict, but generally these communities stick it out. This might be stretching it a little, but it’s a little like arranged marriages: you are thrown together, perhaps against your will, but for a variety of external reasons, you are compelled to try your best. Without other choices available, you are forced to survive and succeed (not a bad thing, really?) Those of us in the West look on in disgust at these teenagers being married off without their consent. We think our system is so much better. But their system does seem to work, no?

Anyway…

My point is this: if you think you’ve been immersed in a book or film or game, it is nothing compared to group immersion. It is nothing compared to running around with other people that also think they’re vampires or piloting the same spaceship as you. It’s nothing compared to working together with hundreds or thousands of like-minded friends in an online virtual world.  By sharing the world with others, your imagination is being validated. By occupying the same world as someone else, it’s no longer ‘imaginary’ or ‘just in your head’, it’s actually — holy shit! — real.

So what about FarmVille? It’s a primitive game, sure, but it is a virtual world; a world full of rosy-cheeked, benevolent farmers that spend half their time harvesting, and the other half helping out other farmers. The level of immersion (or ‘gameness?) is limited at the moment, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the ability to group up with other farmers appeared soon. And that then is only one step away from building a town in the middle of a clutch of farms… and then cities and counties and…

Why can’t we be as immersed in real life? What stops us from enacting our imagination in reality? Is it just merely fear of failure? Or… something else?

I’m looking for a real-world analogy here, and again I’m thinking of the New World, America. A bunch of individuals lumped together in a new, harsh environment where the only way out of trouble (and death!)  is teamwork. Are we simply ’stuck’ here in the mundanity of real life because there is no necessity to try any harder?

I am just trying to work out why it feels so damn good to form a group in an online game and work together towards a common goal. I wonder why we so rarely do it in real life. Why is it every man for himself in London, while we readily cooperate in virtual worlds?

Historically, were we more immersed? When it was harder to survive and teamwork was a necessity, did we have to become more involved? I wonder if we need something dramatic like another war to force us back into our own lives, and our own world.

Yesterday I laid the ground rules for mysteries and why they have played such a huge role in the development of our society.

Note how I say ‘huge’ rather than important or vital.

Are these mysteries a good thing for survival? Better yet: is this incessant hunt for the unknowable a human-only trait? Did we evolve this love of mystery?

The general argument goes like this: we like to see patterns. We attribute cause to every effect. We like to believe that there’s something more to life than just 80 years of humdrum mundanity followed by death and burial and rigor mortis. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know if animals and plants feel the same way, but it’s often stated that only humans ponder the existence of an after-life (though who knows if this is true…) So it’s something in the brain — our brain — that sets us apart from the rest of them. We must’ve evolved that functionality, or been given it by our Creator — whatever, I’m not going to get into a theological discussion here.

The point is, at some point in time, we grew to love mystery. Like, seriously adore. You can look at certain times in history when almost everything in your day-to-day life was ritual. Wake up; pray. Hunt; pray. Eat; pray. Old wives’ tales. Turning three times widdershins before crossing a cursed threshold. Naming of children. Gods! Astrology! It’s all attributing cause to effect.

I sometimes wonder if people realise how feeble it is to be nothing but a pawn of the universe. You are merely the result of billions of random-chance-and-cause-unknown effects. Only, wait a second, the cause isn’t unknown! It’s the god of war! Of the hunt! Wine! The Israelites — God!

But, hang on, we’re not all mystery junkies. There are some people that hate the idea of mystery. They’re called ’scientists’.

And that’s the bit I don’t get. There are people that can only sleep at night knowing that God is looking over them, that Jesus makes their miserable, sinful life bearable — and then there are those that are the complete opposite. There are people that find the idea of spirituality or immortality repulsive: ‘that which can not be proven does not exist, so why give such concepts such credence?’

Are these scientists, these doubters-of-mysterious-coincidence, an evolutionary creation? Are they relatively new — the last few thousand years or so — or have there always been questioning, discerning doubters since the dawn of time? Was fire really stolen from the gods, or did Ug the Caveman create it through trial and error? Throughout history there have always been a few that question their surroundings. Rarely are their voices heard — usually only for a split, blood-curdling second before the guillotine drops or the tinder is lit. In fact, today and for the first time in history, scientists seem to finally have gained more respect and gravitas than theologians. Thank God.

The sad bit is that mystery, or at least those that ‘believe’ in mystery, far outweighs the truth, the cause-seeker, the scientists. The vast majority believe in the omnipresence and omnipotence of God or gods. On top of that there a lot of people that are apathetic to the discovery of knowledge and truth. It seems to me that ‘mystery junky’ is the dominant genetic trait. Maybe we can genetically engineer our DNA to remove such a trait…

The stagnancy of human culture and later, the formation of civilization, is staggering.

Think about it for a moment; think about just how far we’ve come since the dawn of art and culture 10,000 years ago. Or how far we’ve not come, as the case actually is. Sure, we have technology. Sure, we have philosophy. But are we actually any different? Is it the way we do something that defines us? The way we ‘think’ about something? Or is it deeper than that? Let’s go back to the beginning and have a look.

There is — and was — a split between the east and west. The split goes far beyond skin colour or hair type, but it is the very same environmental differences that caused the West/East genetic and cultural schism.

In the West, we hit things. We hit things so that we may survive a little longer but at the expense of others — other humans, other animals. We spend our entire life killing.

In the East, we cogitate. We cogitate until the tides of cosmos take us from the land of the living. We spend our entire life thinking.

And then occasionally, but on a fairly regular timer, as if it’s running to some kind of universal schedule, religion pops up.

The funny thing is, despite any misgivings you might have, religion is actually the injection of aesthetics. It’s as if killing or thinking can only take you so far down the track of social and cultural development — and ultimately modernity of civilization. Killing puts food on the table; you subside, day after day, year after year until you die — but at least you survive. It’s the same with the Eastern sitting-and-thinking: pondering stuff certainly doesn’t put food on the table, that’s for sure, but perhaps through sifting and thinking and thought permutation you come up with ways for future generations to put food on the table.

The West are in the now and the East are in the future and the past. But neither of them move — not by themselves, anyway. There’s no impetus. No driving force.

Then, after a long period of subsistence, something snaps and faith enters stage right: the Western gods of War and Famine and Wine; the Eastern gods of Creation, Knowledge and Maintenance. The singular, unified, vengeful God didn’t come into existence until much later, after plenty of intermingling and amalgamation of West and East — unsurprisingly, through the body of land we call the Middle East, though it is actually… the middle. Middle West-East doesn’t quite spill from the tongue so easy, eh.

Even with religion, we don’t stop with the killing or thinking though. Religion doesn’t stop us from our age-old rites and customs. It just gives us something to attribute our acts to. This is where the phrase ‘practising’ enters the equation. Are we killing an animal for food, or are we practising our religion and sacrificing an animal for Zeus? Are we raping and pillaging for gold and glory, or are we you cleansing the world of disbelievers for God?

Ultimately, we are still killing. We are still thinking.

We continue to seek solace and recompense and meaning for our actions in religion.

We are not moving. Just grinding our gears.

What we are today is the build-up of thousands of years of repetition, contagion, custom: mother to daughter, father to son. Our cultures might now change, given that the geographical division between West and East has been blown to pieces by technology. But it will take time, an awful lot of time. For now, we in the West are stuck with our incessant need to kill, to win.

I’ve been tackling the subject of authority (who or what you trust when seeking the answer to a question) and knowledge (a working, true data set) for a while now. I haven’t really gone into ethics because it’s a sticky one. I’m going to try it now, in a couple of articles.

* * *

I think it’s painfully apparent to everyone by now that technology itself is not a good thing.

Technology is merely a tool. Really, that’s all. Technology is a tool that can be used for good or bad. In the future, technology might gain sentience and become much more than a tool, but that’s outside the scope of this entry because… well… arguing something that may or may not come true is hard work. And I’m not a sci-fi author.

There’s an old, trite argument, but it illustrates my point: guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Technology is the same thing, but because inventions are new and shiny, people are mostly blind to its nefarious uses; it lacks the evil connotations of the gun that we’ve developed over hundreds of years. When the gun was first invented it wasn’t ‘bad’ either — just new, and very cool.

Technology — the idea of new inventions, modifications, enhancements – really is the same thing as the humble gun. I mean, if you want proof, a gun is technology. Weaponry is one of the longest chains of technological development in history! And it’s not abating either… it has a long way to go. I’m sure you’re aware of the tax money that goes into ‘defence’. Weapon technology has been the deciding factor of major wars and the continuation of empires and dynasties — having advanced weapons is (sadly?) probably the pinnacle of any given modern civilisation.

But because guns (and canons and muskets and rifles and…) have killed huge swathes of the population, does that make technology bad?

There are literally millions (billions?) of people that would say guns and weapons are Bad Things. They kill people, ergo… bad. Before guns, we had swords, spears, slings — were they also bad?

How about fire? Was Prometheus, the lad that stole fire from the Gods, the greatest war criminal of all time? Without fire, almost everything you see today wouldn’t exist. Chemical energy is the end of that technology chain, and we frickin’ worship chemical energy.

That’s the thing — without fire, that desk in front of you wouldn’t exist. That’s how technology works — it’s omnipotent and omnipresent. You can’t staunch the flow of one technology and expect to carry on living the life you live.

Without fire, we would have burnt out [hah -- frozen to death more likely] and gone extinct a long time ago. Without spears, we would’ve starved. Without guns we would’ve perished in wars.

You see how I keep using the word ‘we’? It’s a selfish thing, eh? Man makes fire because he doesn’t want to freeze. Selfish, selfish, selfish. Man fashions a spear because without it, he uses more energy hunting than he gains from the animal’s flesh. Man crafts a gun because it lets him kill — or threaten — at range, without putting himself at risk. SELFISH!

But what’s the other option? No technology? No fire? No human race? Just step to the side and make way for another master species? How on earth are we ever going to agree to that? No, we can’t stop progressing — that’s one thing we can’t do. We might nuke ourself in the process, like so many civilisations before us, but it’s better than standing still, stagnating, dying.

We can agree then that technology isn’t a good thing itself, but something so intrinsic to human survival that we can’t imagine life without it, without tools. But as always, when anything involves humans, it’s more complicated than that.

With technology we create both solutions and problems. One caveman uses fire to cook his food while another uses it to brand dissident villagers. You keep a gun in the house to dissuade burglars, I keep a gun to shoot Negroes. While one scientist is planning clean, sustained energy from nuclear fission, another is working under the duress of an evil mastermind that wants to nuke us to smithereens.

Thus there are some that think technology has lowered our quality of life — that technology is a bad thing — though that’s impossible if you take ‘technology’ to mean any and every tool we’ve ever fashioned. So they probably mean ‘recent technology’ — the atomic bomb, the Internet, sports cars, Facebook, etc.

And maybe they have a point. You’d never think of a telephone as a bad thing, right? But the Internet? Maybe. Fire’s a good thing — but weapons of mass destruction? Probably not. They’re both advancements on the same technological line

It’s too unknown. The rules are unknown, the lines are blurred. There have been failed technologies in the past

How better to celebrate the day after Valentine’s Day than with the discussion of WAR?

I’ll let you in on a little secret, something I’m rather ashamed of: my knowledge of history is really lacking. I blame it on my schooling: basically, we studied the Romans, the Tudors, some Jurassic/dinosaur stuff… and that’s it. Seriously, I left school not knowing a thing about World War 1 and 2, or any contemporary political history. Oh, I forgot: we also studied the Normans — so, millions of years ago — then a huge gap — 2000 (the Romans), 1000 (the Normans) and 500 (the Tudors). And that’s it.

Obviously my knowledge of history has improved now, but there’s still some huge gaps from the last 500 years or so — Napoleon? I know that ended in Waterloo… I think. And there was the Crimean, but I don’t know anything about that. World War 1 was started in Serbia or something… but Vietnam? I haven’t a frickin’ clue why there was a war in Vietnam — and Burma too?

There’s a huge block of wars that occurred in colonial times, between 1600 and 1900 — not least of all the War of Independence (which I only found out was America vs. Britain recently!) Britain has been at war with Spain, the Netherlands, France… in fact, I think the only power we haven’t been at war with is the Portuguese. The colonies (i.e. everywhere except Europe) have basically been in a constant state of flux for 500 years, until the relatively-calm period of the last 50 years.

You probably know that New York was originally New Amsterdam — it was handed over to the British Empire, as part of some peace treaty with the Dutch Empire. Did you know that, after the First World War, Iraq was part of the British Empire… for more than a decade! Ah, the Middle East… for more than 2,000 years it has been the most contested part of the world. First for religious reasons, then exploration and trade, and now energy (with a bit of religion).

That’s the bit I get a little bit hung up on. History is full of war. Peace can be described as ‘the time between two wars’. Is there really a difference between terrorism (the instilling of terror within a given populace), and war? ‘Terrorism’ is usually used to describe acts by small groups upon entire nations — paramilitary, guerillas, etc. Is it any better if you declare war beforehand, and then send five guys in a B-29 to kill 100,000 people in Hiroshima?

Then we have ‘the crusades’, a rather fancy term used to connote a religious war. Crusaders are, by definition, religiously sanctioned warriors — you are killing in the name of a god. A crusade, generically, is an attack on some kind of lifestyle or ideology. You can have a crusade against drugs, or drunken behaviour, or Islam. A crusade, in essence, is righteous — its instigators firmly believe that what they are doing is right.

And therein we have a problem, because I’ve just described every war, religious or otherwise. War, from the protagonist’s point of view, is right. You don’t march into another country for fun, you do it because you must. War is a necessity for long-term survival — it is rational in that sense. (Well, OK, war — after diplomatic means have been exhausted — is rational.)

This is quite a hard thought to get your head around, but hang in there. Islamic terrorists declared war on America for ideological reasons — as an American, you probably can’t comprehend their rationale, but the terrorists believe they are right. Seriously, just as the Nazis wanted a world without Jews, they want a world without Americans. Look at it from the opposite point of view: George Bush declared war on Iraq, because he thought it was right. It’s as simple as that. The calculations leading up to that decision might be infinitely more complex, but it ultimately boils down to ‘it’s us or them’ — our way of living, or theirs.

It’s kind of funny, but obviously very sad at the same time: war will always exist. Fortunately, with the world explored and colonialism out of the way, we don’t war over land — but it was never about land anyway; it was about resources (food, slaves, oil, etc.) And guess what… (those of you that know me will know what’s coming) — until we get off this planet of ours, until we reduce the strain on our natural resources, war will always exist. We can build upwards into the stratosphere and down to the Earth’s mantle, we can synthesize materials and use ‘greener’ manufacturing methods, but ultimately we’re going to run out of resources.

Imagine for a moment: we have space travel. We can jet around from star to star, planet to planet. Can you imagine a war occurring back on the home world? No. Try to visualize the extent of the universe and the trillions of planets that can support life. Do you think we would ever need to war again? No — at least not for a very, very long time.