His Dark Prediction About The Future Has Become Our Present.

Have Humans Already Conquered The Threat Of Extinction?

The Great Filter theory suggests that all advanced civilizations eventually destroy themselves before acquiring the capacity to colonize space — a notion that could explain why we've never been visited by aliens. But there may be another reason for the celestial silence. Yes, the Great Filter exists, but we've already passed it. Here's what this would mean.

Students Hate Writing Papers. Professors Hate Grading Papers. Let

Everybody in college hates papers. Students hate writing them so much that they buy, borrow, or steal them instead. Plagiarism is now so commonplace that if we flunked every kid who did it, wed have a worse attrition rate than a MOOC. And on those rare occasions undergrads do deign...

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/an-open-letter-in-defense-of-rebecca-schuman/54301

https://www.change.org/petitions/scholars-writers-and-teachers-open-letter-in-defense-of-rebecca-schuman

Campaign Reform is the cornerstone of restoring our Republic

New Plugin Shows Exactly Where Your Congressperson's Money Comes From

We the People, and the Republic We Must Reclaim Lawrence Lessig TED Talk 2014

OpenSecrets.org AllAreGreen.us

SpaceX Just Landed a Rocket on a Drone Ship

This is #awesome!!

SpaceX Just Landed a Rocket on a Drone Ship

From the Snowden, Poitras, Greenwald AMA on reddit

SuddenlySnowden EDWARD SNOWDEN 3499 points 2 hours ago*

"What's the best way to make NSA spying an issue in the 2016 Presidential Election? It seems like while it was a big deal in 2013, ISIS and other events have put it on the back burner for now in the media and general public. What are your ideas for how to bring it back to the forefront?" (masondog13)

Snowden's reply:

"This is a good question, and there are some good traditional answers here. Organizing is important. Activism is important.

At the same time, we should remember that governments don't often reform themselves. One of the arguments in a book I read recently (Bruce Schneier, "Data and Goliath"), is that perfect enforcement of the law sounds like a good thing, but that may not always be the case. The end of crime sounds pretty compelling, right, so how can that be?

Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law. America was of course born out of a violent revolution that was an outrageous treason against the crown and established order of the day. History shows that the righting of historical wrongs is often born from acts of unrepentant criminality. Slavery. The protection of persecuted Jews.

But even on less extremist topics, we can find similar examples. How about the prohibition of alcohol? Gay marriage? Marijuana?

Where would we be today if the government, enjoying powers of perfect surveillance and enforcement, had -- entirely within the law -- rounded up, imprisoned, and shamed all of these lawbreakers?

Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determing thour futures.

How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens' discontent.

How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.

You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn't to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where -- if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen -- we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new -- and permanent -- basis.

Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it's entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.

We haven't had to think about that much in the last few decades because quality of life has been increasing across almost all measures in a significant way, and that has led to a comfortable complacency. But here and there throughout history, we'll occasionally come across these periods where governments think more about what they "can" do rather than what they "should" do, and what is lawful will become increasingly distinct from what is moral.

In such times, we'd do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn't defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends."

Ian Frazier: New York’s Homelessness Crisis

According to the Coalition for the Homeless, during Bloomberg’s twelve years in office the number of homeless families in New York went up by seventy-three per cent. One child out of every hundred children in the city is homeless. For baseball games, Yankee Stadium seats 50,287. If all the homeless people who now live in New York used the stadium for a gathering, several thousand of them would have to stand. There are now two hundred and thirty-six homeless shelters in the city.

Wealth & Inequality/Tech

Stephen Hawking’s replies to the questions that were submitted for an AMA on Reddit were just posted...  So many great comments, this one in particular caught my eye...

permalink

See also

My Flipboard on Wealth & Inequality

My Weebly page on Futurism

Click here to view the rest of the AMA

Scientists say this 191-year-old symphony could help your heart health.

I had previously posted the link to this article, but since I had posted it as a link I couldn’t update that post...  **note to self, use “text” instead of “link” when posting to tumblr... lol...  

Anyhow, I wanted to update it with a playlist of the tracks mentioned in the post...  since the links in the post were from soundcloud, I figured it would be easiest to create the playlist in soundcloud...  which meant... yes...  another social media account...  

Hearthealth playlist

What other classical pieces can I add to this list?

“The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.” -CS

Reading Stephen Hawking’s opinion piece in The Guardian today made me think again of Sagan...  Specifically, the Pale, Blue Dot and his last interview with Charlie Rose...  if you’re familiar with either then it will be no surprise why I had to choose a Carl Sagan quote as the title of this post...  

There’s a lot to unpack in Stephen Hawking’s opinion piece in The Guardian today...  his words tie together so many themes that you will find in my online collections and things I share...   

“This is the most dangerous time for our planet” 

Sounds pretty dire, huh?  But at the end of the day I agree that there’s hope... 

One Last Thought (via my page on space/perspective)

“I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.” — Michael Collins, Gemini 10 & Apollo 11 astronaut

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ps

Who is CS?  Carl Sagan of course...  I recently posted about him because it was Cal Sagan day a few weeks ago...  funny enough, he also came up today in a discussion at work in reference to the recent post about his course notes, course materials, and more being available in an online Library of Congress collection...  check out the links for more information and food for thought...  

Space Junk is Becoming a Serious Security Threat

Do some of the proposed technologies for removing space debris pose dual-use concerns?

The short answer is yes. In fact, pretty much any technology for removing debris could be used to take down a satellite under hostile circumstances. This is one of the reasons that many in the space community believe such activities will require a multilateral development approach and an international governance structure.