From Alex Knapp in Forbes:
I am very excited to learn that starting in July, Netflix will have every Star Trek episode from every series available for instant streaming. And since I’ve been alluding to Star Trek quite a bit when touching on issues of artificial intelligence, I thought I’d give a rundown of what I think are the ten finest episodes of Star Trek dealing with issues around artificial intelligence, the singularity, transhumanism, and the post-scarcity society, along with a few honorable mentions that deal with the same themes as the ten best.Talli Nauman brings a report on the recent Meade County commission meeting. Here is an excerpt from her piece at Native Sun News via indianz.com:
At a June 8 hearing on the matter, commissioners stopped short of approving a lawsuit. Instead, they voted unanimously to send a letter to state regulators, disputing the decision to hold oil drilling to five wells, instead of 24 initially permitted near the prayer site sacred to dozens of Native American tribes. The South Dakota Board of Minerals and Environment decided on May 18 to reduce Nakota Energy LLC’s 2010 permit for oil drilling in the sacred butte area from 24 to five initial wells, after three public comment periods revealed substantial opposition on religious grounds. “People are tired of coming in here. A lot of people don’t want to talk anymore,” United Urban Warrior Society organizer James Swan testified to county commissioners at their most recent meeting. “They just want to take over the mountain.” Mato Paha, as the mountain is called in Lakota, was noted and reserved as a traditional council site in the 1851 and 1868 Ft. Laramie treaties with the U.S. government.
3 comments:
In my opinion, the Earth has consciousness, but it goes beyond our direct comprehension.
An amoeba's consciousnes is to human consciousness, as human consciousness is to the Earth's consciousness.
Beyond that, I enjoy believing that the Solar System has consciousness still greater than that of the earth; then the Galaxy, then the entire Cosmos.
Each exists as a cell in its host.
Makes you feel small, Yet somehow omnipotent, connected to the whole, integral to the whole. Powerlessness equals liberation.
Sounds like complete nonsense to me. Earth's consciousness is silly even if it is part of age old gaia myths.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_%28mythology%29
Pandering to geographic sacredness does not seem to be a proper mode of thought in a modern society.
Living rock, limestone, for instance, the stuff from which bone is grown. Dirt is alive, an amalgam of organisms living in community.
The Earth has a nucleus, a core generating untold power that creates a magnetic field not unlike our own bipolar bio-batteries driving our heartbeats and brain signals singing in B flat, the noise of the universe.
"modern society" is a product of the forbidden fruit--agriculture. Cain, the farmer, slew Abel, the hunter-gatherer and, yes: humans' collective knowledge is pushing us home to the stars whose dust make us who we are.
Reproduction is the reason, food is the fuel. Humans are merely Terran tools to go forth and find more...unless or until we kill it before it kills us for taking more than our share.
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