Some time ago I was on a little roadtrip with my friends. They was talked 'bout something, and I've been sitting and silently 've been looking at the window all the way. That was some kind of depression, maybe... Don't know. So, one of my friends asked another: -How do ya think, what is the main engine of human progress ? -The war and greed, dude. Try to think a little 'bout examples in human history. Think 'bout the all way of science thru the times (and, mostly, he was right). I've waked up: -If it is so, better be NO progress at all . Dudes, and how do ya all think? The progress or the Peace?
Originally, the MAIN engine of Progress was NEED. We needed a certain something, and it didn't exist yet. I wouldn't mind a way to maybe "Shotgun" certain women in other places with a bowl hit. That doesn't exist. (YET.) As for do we need Progress as of August 14th, 2004? I don't think so. I could be just as happy, as a pioneer in the American PLAINS States. Minesotta, etc... Build myself a cabin out in the woods, Live off the land. (I'd have a rifle of course to put Meat on my table.) But, you get the idea...
Progress has been got from releasing energy. First we learnt how to make fire. It gave us cooking and a way of making simple early tools. Then we learnt how to use animals. They pulled our plows and help us cultivate the land. Then we learnt how to use Windmills and Water Wheels to turn things for ealry engineering. Then we learnt to use Coal for our early Steam engines that powered us into the Industrial era. From there we have gone on to Oil and Gas as they are cheaper to extract and easier to use. Wars are usually for Resources/Land or Religion. Resources of course help with progress but they cannot be used without energy. The more energy, the faster the progress. (see the Peak Oil thread) We are about to get a lot less energy. You could do well with your Hut in the Plains.
Sometimes I think it would be pretty righteous to live in simpler times...I would personally be at bliss living in a cabin by a lake with nothing more than hunting/fishing equipment, and ganj.
there are a LOT of things CALLED 'progress' that we seriously do NOT need. and the list IS a rather long one. conventional wood fraim construction, the private passinger automobile, the diseconomies of excessive and inappropriate scale, not to mention such trivialities as cell phones and credit cards. but there are somethings, that at current population levels, would cause widespread famine and worse, were they suddenly to dissappear. refrigeration, and the infrastructures of mechanical transportation, energy distribution and long distance communication. that doesn't mean that no one would survive their loss, nor that the planet itself wouldn't be better of without the burden of excessive human population their loss would resault in the removal of. but we're talking about a majority of the population here, and that means statisticly the odds are, you and me are as or more likely to be among those to literaly and physicaly starve to death. yes nature could and would, has and will support appropriate and balanced levels of human population. unfortunately there currently just happens to be about 20 times that many of us. progress is both a mythical god to those who worship and expect panacea of it and a straw dog to those who would scapegoat our hammers and screw drivers for all the ills that befall us. how tecnology is used and the directions in which it evolves resault from the incentives created colletively by what we individualy value and prioritise personaly. that is what people need to think about every time they consider using credit, putting gas in a car or determining consturction tecnologies to be utilized in a new building or repair and maintainence of an existing one. it is what we need to think about before deciding how many children we want to bring into this world. or even what beliefs, idiologies, or economic theories we allow ourselves to become emotionaly attatched to. it is also a matter of what our collective policies encourage and promote or oppose. we could in fact be getting all of the energy we really need without burning a single drop of oil or lump of coal. with existing and proven tecnologies. and the same applies to transportation and any other essential infrastructure. and we would NOT have to give up living in ways comfortable, convenient and dignified, though we would and sooner or later WILL have to acheive this if we are to do so at all, in ways that are perhapse not yet universaly familiar to us. and THAT is not a matter of if, but when. we know we are consuming fossle fuels at a rate zillions of times that at which nature produces them. not to mention the observably detrimental consiquences of doing so. so we KNOW that they ARE going to for all practical purposes 'run out', even if none of us can say with absolute certainty exactly when. i think there is such a thing as progress, but not that it moves in a streight line nor that so many of the things we've been told to measure it by are measures of it at all. reall progress is growing out of emotional attatchment to the aggressiveness of arbitrary assumptions, in other words what i would call true civilization, though i suppose some might call that utopian or ecotopian. of a certainty this international hedgemony of fossle fuel and economic interests is not progress by any measure but the exact opposite and reverse of it. as is the reversion to war and barbarism to enforce it. =^^= .../\...
