Plasma Dragonfly

My last post about Stone Mountain triggered someone so here’s another.

The Winchcombe meteorite fell to Earth in February 2021 after exploding mid-air over Gloucestershire in England, and in the days that followed, multiple fragments were retrieved from the surrounding fields and properties, the first in a driveway just 12 hours after the fireball was seen.

Still, that short amount of time was enough for changes to occur in the rock’s chemistry. An analysis showed significant and extensive contamination from the terrestrial atmosphere and ground, with salts and minerals that had to have developed within the sample after its arrival at our home planet.

Specifically, researchers found halite, and calcite and calcium sulfate minerals, that formed after the meteorite broke apart in Earth’s atmosphere. This contamination is something that scientists will need to take into consideration when studying meteorite fragments in the future.

In January, an underwater volcano known as Hunga Tonga erupted near the remote Pacific nation of Tonga, sending plumes of gas and ash thousands of feet into the atmosphere. The explosion was so powerful it was captured by numerous weather satellites and sent a four-foot tsunami wave into the capital city of Nuku’alofa. Here we see two images: one in the days leading up to the eruption (Jan. 12) and after with the center on the volcanic island blown away (Jan. 15).

Follow along as we continue to recap key events from 2022 from the Overview perspective.

-20.536000°, -175.382000°

Yuval Noah Harari, historian, futurist, and World Economic Forum (WEF) adviser, said, “We just don’t need the vast majority of the population” in the early 21st century given modern technologies’ rendering human labor economically and militarily “redundant.”

Harari’s remarks were made in an interview with Chris Anderson, the head of TED, published on Tuesday.

He assessed widespread contemporary disillusionment among “common people” as being rooted in a fear of being “left behind” in a future run by “smart people.”

Such fears are justified, he added, given his projection that emerging technologies will displace economic needs to many categories of existing work:

A lot of people sense that they are being left behind and left out of the story, even if their material conditions are still relatively good. In the 20th century, what was common to all the stories — the liberal, the fascist, the communist — is that the big heroes of the story were the common people, not necessarily all people, but if you lived, say, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, life was very grim, but when you looked at the propaganda posters on the walls that depicted the glorious future, you were there. You looked at the posters which showed steel workers and farmers in heroic poses, and it was obvious that this is the future.

Now, when people look at the posters on the walls, or listen to TED talks, they hear a lot of these these big ideas and big words about machine learning and genetic engineering and blockchain and globalization, and they are not there. They are no longer part of the story of the future, and I think that — again, this is a hypothesis — if I try to understand and to connect to the deep resentment of people, in many places around the world, part of what might be going there is people realize — and they’re correct in thinking that — that, ‘The future doesn’t need me. You have all these smart people in California and in New York and in Beijing, and they are planning this amazing future with artificial intelligence and bio-engineering and in global connectivity and whatnot, and they don’t need me. Maybe if they are nice, they will throw some crumbs my way like universal basic income,’ but it’s much worse psychologically to feel that you are useless than to feel that you are exploited.

Harari contrasted the 20th century with the 21st while forecasting what he said is the current century’s and future economies progressively diminishing need for human beings. He said:

If you go back to the middle of the 20th century — and it doesn’t matter if you’re in the United States with Roosevelt, or if you’re in Germany with Hitler, or even in the USSR with Stalin — and you think about building the future, then your building materials are those millions of people who are working hard in the factories, in the farms, the soldiers. You need them. You don’t have any kind of future without them.

“Now, fast forward to the early 21st century when we just don’t need the vast majority of the population,”

he concluded,

“because because the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like artificial intelligence [and] bioengineering.

Most people don’t contribute anything to that, except perhaps for their data, and whatever people are still doing which is useful, these technologies increasingly will make redundant and will make it possible to replace the people.”