Vapymid

These are very good questions... What is civilisation (= humanity) and what is its place vis-a-vis the rest of the nature on Earth? What is sustainability and whether it is a good or a bad thing? I cannot really answer any of these questions, however, I can try to hypothesise on the basis of my personal (rather limited) knowledge and experience. I am puzzled why "man-against-nature" attitude is still so widespread in the world. Even the "gaians", while attributing almost divine characteristics to the planet itself, still assume that man is some kind of foreign object, a vermin, whose activity is at best neutral and most likely detrimental to Earth. It's like people painting by numbers, who can't conceive that you are supposed to also connect the first number with the last... To me, it's more logical to assume that human civilisation is but another tool of evolution of life in the Solar system and the vector of this evolution is simple - expand and grow. Our purpose is to ensure that the type of life which has developed here on Earth spreads out as widely as possible and then competes against other rival life in the Universe if there is any. Rather than looking at Earth as some kind of self-sufficient semi-sentient organism infected by human parasites, it seems more reasonable to me to think of it as fruit, some kind of apple, where humans perform the role of seeds (and seeds delivery). The whole star system can then be both the tree and the garden. The role of the fruit-Earth is then to develop the seeds and to store enough resources for the seeds to germinate until they can sprout to other places. We then have other rocks nearby - Mars (where all we need to do is to come and turn on the lights, basically), Venus (a bit more difficult but with great potential because of proximity to Sun) - rocks, which we can colonise and "get the roots planted". Finally, we have huge fuel reservoirs in the gas giants, which we can use to expand beyond the system (and all the reaction mass in the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt). I have a suspicion, that if and when we find other star systems which have developed life they will be organised in similar way (a star, 1 or more rocky planets in the Goldilock zone, gas giants and broken stuff on the outside). To me, if I look at life from this angle, "sustainability" is not a good thing. Sustainability means you can be forever happy where you are, you don't feel any pressure to do something new, to go somewhere else. If our role it to promote expansion of the Earth life - that's the ultimate failure. And we can't stop now - not when we've already "unsealed" and spent a great deal of the resources. If we stop and fall back now, it will make it so much more difficult for future generations to restart the race. Again, like a germinating seed, once the process started it must continue until its roots take hold or it dies. You can store a seed for very long time in the right conditions, but when the process starts it must proceed... So, none of the above has any scientific substance to it - just my personal thoughts and observations influenced by snippets of science remembered from my student days. But in my eyes it makes more sense than I hear from other sources, so I will stick to it until persuaded otherwise Regards

No it won't. Hydrogen has just 1 proton as its nucleus - can't fission that. As Alphabetagamma has already explained, maximum energy you can release from a given mass is E=mc^^2 You get that by annihilating matter with antimatter. If you split heavy antimatter before annihilating it, all you will achieve is to release a small portion of E when the atoms split, then release the rest of E when the bomb fragments hit the normal matter. The total energy released will still be E. You can get the same result by just dropping a pile of antimatter bricks into normal matter atmosphere. In other words, splitting antimatter atoms as a weapon against normal matter targets is like setting TNT in your artillery shells on fire before shooting them - difficult and dangerous but largely pointless. Regards

I should have said "... any of the following serious ..." Anyway, I used "serious" for want of a better word because, as you say - the list does not cover just one particular style. What I meant was, for instance, you may have a list in a post here ranging from AC/DC and Iron Maiden to Zeppelin to Dire Straits to Frank Sinatra and REM. Covers pretty much everything from metal to pop but the bands from my list are conspicuous by their absence. So, I was genuinely wondering - is it because nobody likes that kind of music or is it because it is not widely known anymore? Regards

Yep. From Russia, originally. Now live and work in the UK. Of course I agree - trade is not a bad thing as such. In fact, quite the opposite. But if you consistently have to buy grain for years, then change your economic system and become a major net exporter of the same grain that, I think, put things in perspective... Regards

Sorry, you didn't miss my introduction - I haven't made any. I checked the forum rules and they did not seem to require new members to post in the introduction thread... As for "regards" that's my habit - I sign most of my emails like that + name. But on the 'net I don't use my name. So it implies I'm writing "Regards, Vapymid". Regards

Interesting that there are no mentions of any "serious" rock artists Genesis Jethro Tull King Crimson Yes Van Der Graaf Generator The Strawbs Traffic The Doors Jefferson Airplane/Starship Deep Purple Uriah Heep Camel ... I wonder if that's because noone on this board likes these bands or purely because people haven't heard them (or about them)? If that's the latter, then I'm sure that some of those who posted here might like some or all of these groups... Regards

Wow! Isn't this an amusing discussion? Both religion and state exist to control (govern) the population and to acquire control over people you need to control things that are essential to them as living beings - air, food, sex. The air is too abundant on Earth to be controlled effectively so we pass on that... Food was controlled by some religions quite effectively - halal, kosher, various fasts etc. And, of course, sex. The instrument for control over sex was always the marriage. You are only allowed to have sex if it is approved by your religious or civil authorities. To make this effective the disobedience must have been punished - either in this life or the next (as applicable). The Bible is basically an early attempt to codify various rules and regulations which were required for governing the population and, of course, it contains appropriate provisions for food and sex. But that is just one aspect of things - it's not all just some subjective nonsense conceived by evil megalomaniacs to take control over (the then known) world. There were objective reasons and pressures which made this necessary and acceptable to a certain extent. Most obvious examples are principles of food hygiene which form the basis for kosher and halal rules - clearly, in the hot climate of the Middle East and with very basic medical knowledge existing at the time the things like avoiding shellfish and keeping milk and meat separate really do make sense. Equally, the potential social problems and frictions created by unwanted conceptions, questionable paternity and competition for multiple sexual partners would have been very damaging to society when you have no appreciable social mobility, no contraception, no way of preventing STD epidemics etc. The thing is that as the civilization develops and we find ways to solve or avoid such potential problems the need to continue strict enforcement of these rigid rules disappears. Not only people want to live more liberally (they always wanted to, of course) but they can afford it now. Of course, the old institutions are always reactionary to one degree and another and it takes time for them to adapt to new social norms... Having said this, the other aspect of extramarital sex is trust and breach thereof. But Axeldeath has summed it up perfectly already Regards P.S. Sorry for the rant

Certainly for the population it did. But structurally it was the time when exports of minerals (especially oil during the 70s crises) generated enough revenue to support foreign trade and cover domestic military spending. But even towards the end of 70s I began to notice things starting to disappear from grocery shop shelves... USSR was a major importer of grain, meat and poultry. Largely due to the distortions in agriculture introduced by Khruschev but also because of the general low efficiency of collective farming. Actually, I think a lot has changed but things are far from over... It will take probably a decade or two for Russia and Ukraine (and other ex-USSR countries) to complete their transformation and find their new place in the world. Regards

Sorry to disappoint you but the system clearly did NOT work. The USSR has only lasted as long as it did because it could trade resources against products with other countries. On its own the USSR could not even feed its own population. The basic problem was that the economy did not have feedback from consumption to production as its signals were hopelessly distorted and blocked by extremely invasive (in the market sense) system of redistribution of wealth and intermingling of political and economic governance. Innovation in any areas was suppressed because it disrupted the attempts to correlate plans with economic output in the absence of market signals. Lack of segregation of powers led to absence of checks and balances in making investment decisions ranging from industrial to social to scientific aspects. As the result, products which were needed were not produced, unneeded products were overproduced. Research in areas vital for future development and growth was blocked in favour of wild goose chases initiated on personal whims of the oligarchic elite. Only the ability to exchange raw materials for technology, ideas and state-of-the-art products with the rest of the world kept USSR going for so long after the world war II. The "socialist" regime was needed to kick Russia out of its backward social and economic state into the 20th century. Without it Russia would never have survived WWII. But then the system quickly outlived its use-by date... Communism is impossible, period. Even Marx realised that. The formula "from each - according to his abilities, to each - according to his needs" implies infinite supply of resources (of all kinds) because the combined needs of all will always exceed the total product (there is more to it than that but that's the main principle). What is considered "communism" today has nothing to do with the actual principle - it's just a term used to refer to a certain kind of authoritarian socio-economic state existing in some countries. Regards

There already is a machinima series about precisely that: http://lambdageneration.com/posts/vae-victis-machinima-series/ Regards