It is always fun reading the sunday papers. First we have Ken Livingstone proposing that we should put all the cash into railways instead of airports and motoroways, because he fears millions will die because of global warming. Maybe they will, but it will be because of such idiotic environmental policy. Traditional railways are not the solution. We need to ge rid of traisn and replace them with smaller automatically driven vehicles that go on both road and rail, then we can increase capacity dramatically and reduce congestion. Only by leaving the past behind and moving towards advanced technology do we have a hope in hell of solving climate change. Environmentalists who want to take us back to Victorian transport solutions are one of the biggest environmental threats we face. The best thing Ken can do to help the environment is to retire, along with other poloticians who pander to environmental dogma rather than daring to offer leadership via radical technology based change.
A couple of pages later, I read about a lunar ark, where human knowledge could be deposited in case of earthly catastrophe such as nuclear war. As a member of the Lifeboat Foundation, I agree entirely with the principle, but it needs to go further away if it is to give us safety. The solution proposed, of a lunar transmitter that can send data to earth via protected receiver stations, and a deposit of DNA from important organisms, is great. But I think it would be better still if as well as that, we also make a backup on an asteroid or comet. The reason being that some of the threats we face would extend to the moon too, such as solar storms. Electronic devices on both the earth and moon could be destroyed by the same solar eruption. If we also have a backup on an asteroid or comet, it is likely that it will be well clear of the same eruption, so would still function happily even if all the electronics on earth and its moon was destroyed.
And girls are catching up on the net too. The net started off as a tool for scientists to exchange knowledge, then became a business tool, a games platform, a shopping street, and now it is finally maturing into what it was always going to become, a general purpose communication network, letting people do what people most like to do, to communicate with each other. The only reason it has taken this long is the technology development took a while and it took society even longer to understand what the net is and for the tools and techniques to become simple enough for ordinary people to bother with. From now on, it will stay a communications platform, and gradually become enriched as every part of our human culture adopts it.
I have lectured frequently now on how women will take the lead in coming years as the economy becomes more about human emotional skills than intellect. As girls sharpen their networking in chat rooms while boys sharpen their reflexes and strategy on games sites, the polarisation that results will see men focused on areas that will be automated while women focus on areas that won’t.
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