Which is Worse: Poverty or Disease?

I'm pretty sure absolutely no one is reading this blog, considering I haven't told anyone about it. But that's fine for now. Eventually I'll get around to getting my friends to read it, and then I'll get some other people to read it. And then I won't be able to write the same things because everyone will expect something, and I can't be experimental anymore.

But I have a question for anyone who does eventually read this. And I ask this question of everyone in the future because I don't think it's going to be resolved anytime soon.

Let me set it up first:

I was talking to some people, having a conversation, and I told them about how I wanted to go ahead and do a bicycle trip across Canada. I've seen people do it in the news, and I thought I could maybe pick a cause and go for it. But I still don't know what cause I really should be supporting. Someone said to me: "why not cancer, or heart and stroke, or Alzeimer's?" Those are good causes, but my initial thoughts had been to raise money to fight "poverty."

"Poverty?" They asked. "We don't really have poverty in Canada. Or we do, but anyone who's poor, it's their own fault, and raising money isn't going to help them anyways. Give money to poor people, and they'll just stay poor."

Those are solid arguments. I agree with this person. I do think that it's the poor's own fault that they're poor. And I don't think throwing money at them will help them. However, I'm also a believer in the "little things" principle. How can I put this? You know that saying "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he'll eat for the rest of his life." Well, disregarding for the moment that I've never caught a fish in my life, I'll share my worldview on this: This doesn't mean we shouldn't give fish to anybody. Sometimes people are just plain hungry Now. Yes, they screwed up, and yes, it's their own fault they're left with nothing. But they're still human, are they not? It being their own fault doesn't change the fact that they're hungry and there are other people out there who could easily spare a fish or two.

Or can they? Shouldn't they be focusing their efforts on raising money for research that might actually save their own skins in the future? When faced with a multitude of possible charities to support, and only a finite amount* of money to donate to all of them, wouldn't it be the self-interested thing to do to support the one that might pay you back later on, by curing you of cancer, or something like that?

*I'm talking about lower-middle class people here. People who work for wages on an hourly basis. People who have mortgages and car payments. People who have kids to put through school. (But not college, because the burden for that has shifted from the parents to the student himself in his later life.) They're not rich by any stretch, but they do have a little bit left over at the end of the day to spare for a good cause, if they have any sort of conscience. Still, the argument applies to anyone, because there is no such thing as infinite money.

Poverty is a black hole you're just throwing your money into, and you're just making the hole wider by throwing money in. Cancer research is an investment.

However, once cancer is cured, and we live an extra year or two, the next disease becomes prominent. Everyone has to die of something. So in that sense, the cancer money pit is just the first in a series of pits along the road of life, which becomes increasingly pitted as you get toward the end of it.

So what was the question? Given a choice between the two, which charity would you support: Cancer Research or Poverty Alleviation?

I ask this because I'm actually curious if I was to start trying to raise money via a cross-Canada bike trip, would I raise significantly more if I chose one or the other? If what ultimately matters is my own conscious, then I'm forced to conclude that I'd prefer to raise money to fight poverty, but I worry that that might prevent me from every getting the project off the ground.

Lightsaber duels

Last night I dreamed that I was learning how to fight with a lightsaber. The lesson was apparently how to take on two foes as one guy. Basic strategy for a 2:1 fight. I have no idea if the techniques that my ethereal dream teacher was teaching me were correct or not, but I'll give you the lessons here, and you can decide.

First of all, lightsaber duels are designed to be short. Lightsabers are obviously a last resort, and the first tool of the Jedi is his language, especially his body language. You want to appear confident and competent, but not necessarily threatening. A Jedi should demand respect. If diplomacy and intimidation don't work, though, you can't be hesitant about lighting up your lightsaber.

The diplomacy and intimidation period could be as short as a fraction of a second. Next, once the lightsaber is out, your goal is to destroy your opponent as quickly as possible. Every strike should be potentially lethal.

That said, sometimes battles get drawn out, due to the skill of your opponent, or just weird circumstances, which are guaranteed to come up once in a while in a Republic that consists of millions of worlds with billions of inhabitants. Now, the Sith of course were the only significant opposition to the Jedi in the last thousand years, but it is possible that other threats could come up.

Which brings us to the one-on-two fight. For whatever reason, you, a solitary Jedi, are fighting two humanoid opponents. (This is a relatively simple scenario to set up and train for, because we have lots of humanoids with lightsabers available at the Jedi academy.) You might not be able to
end this fight as quickly as you like, so you are looking at whatever tactics you can use to keep your focus on one guy long enough to take him out.

So, with each blow, you have two goals: score a lethal hit, and push the foe back, away from you, possibly even down, so that you can turn to the other guy. A one-on-two fight actually tends to develop its own rhythm, if you do it right (if you do it wrong, you die).

Attack foe #1, push back, use foot to kick them away. Attack foe #2, kick away. Attack foe #1, kick away, etc.

And that's what I was learning in my dream. If you have their lightsaber tied up parrying yours, a well-placed kick can send them staggering back. A perfectly placed kick, backed up with Force energy, could break a less-skilled opponent's leg.* If you are the subject of the kick, rolling with it is necessary, and you might even want to use your own control of the Force energy to fling yourself backwards in a flying flip, landing on your feet if possible.

*For a well-trained Jedi, broken bones and other blunt trauma aren't a concern. You can use your Force powers to hold broken bones rigid until the end of the fight if necessary.

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Stupid Country Names

I don't know whether to rant or rave about stupid country names. On one hand, they're really annoying because they're so generic that they tell you absolutely nothing about the country in question. On the other hand, since I am wary of nationalism, it is kind of good that these countries are generic, since it means that they value humanity above their own ethnicity.

Some examples of annoying names:

The United Kingdom. Or the UK. I know it's familiar to most of us, but think about how annoying it is. How many of the world's countries were created by Uniting various Kingdoms? Why should the obscure countries of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall somehow be the world's only United Kingdom. Frankly it's stupid. On the other hand, I'm glad they're working together despite their differences. I'm glad they're not "The British Empire" anymore, or worse, they could have been "The English Empire," or they could all be collectively known as "England."

The United States of America. Slightly better than the UK, because the US at least contains the word America in it, which is somewhat geographically descriptive, just barely. However, they're not the only country in America, and they're also not the only country made up of a series of United States in America. There's nothing original about the name. Might as well have called it "Land". When I was a little kid, I actually resented the fact that, on my world globe, the United States were all colored different colors, while Canada was a uniform pink. Today though, I think I'd prefer if the United States were all different colors. Then at least, it wouldn't be an amorphous blob of generic nothing somewhere south of Canada. At least I'd be able to put a name and a face to a couple of the states. While we're at it, we could color each of Canada's provinces a different color too, but I don't think Canadians would like that so much.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, versus the Republic of the Congo. The Congo is a big place. I've never been there, but you know that if you have two largish states claiming the same name, there's something wrong. Come on, Congo people. You have to have more place names than that. If you can't come up with a different name for at least one of you, could the international community just call you Congo One and Congo Two?

Central African Republic and South Africa. These are not terrible names, since they at least get the continent in there, but they fail on the level of where they are located in the continent. There are half a dozen states in southern Africa. Why is South Africa the only one called that?

While it was in existence, the USSR had a crappy name too. Thank God it's gone now.

Are You an American?

A response to the Amazing Atheist's poll question, do I consider myself an American?

My answer is yes, I'm Canadian.

I don't know if he thought it through; maybe he was just trying to get a sense of who was reading his blog. Did he feel that he had more appeal to an International audience?

But the term is loaded. America is really all of North America and South America. Though it depends on who you ask. What are these other American states if not also America?

If he had asked "Are you a citizen of the United States of America?" then I would have had to say no, because I'm actually a citizen of one of the divided states of America.

Will Mankind Live Through the Next Century?

• Note: (actual blog begins after this note, added 9 March 2009) I feel obliged to comment on the ideas I put forward with regard to resource consumption. I sort of have a different view on the issue now, so things might not play out as I wrote in this post. It takes human labour to extract resources, and it takes demand to make resource extraction viable. I wrote that with a smaller population, we'd have more oil per capita than we have now. This is not necessarily true in the medium or long term. Oil extraction still takes a lot of human labour and management. It's not true that we'd all be swimming in oil and dollars if there were less of us. If there were less of us, there would be a smaller market for oil, and thus certain oil sources, including Canada's tar sands, would be unprofitable. You couldn't achieve the economies of scale that would be necessary to make it worthwhile to get those resources out of the ground. In the short term, after a great catastrophe that killed a majority of the world population, there would be oil reserves accessible to the rest of us, and oil prices would decrease for a while. But as the reserves are gradually reduced to an optimal level, the price should slowly increase to roughly pre-catastrophe levels, and there will be a new price floor below which oil extraction is not worth it.

This question was posed on the Amazing Atheist's blog, and I thought it warranted more than a radio button push. So here's my longer answer. Actually, here's my shorter answer. I chose "Definitely, yes." Mankind will surely live beyond the next century.

Why do I say this? Actually, it's probably the same answer most informed people will come up with. Basically an entire species is pretty hard to kill. The difficulty lies in the definition of "mankind." If by mankind, you mean every single human being on the planet, resulting in no humans left at all, then no, this won't happen. People on earth have tried eradicating entire groups of humans, and there are always a lot left over. You can't get rid of relatively small groups of people, so it stands to reason that you can't get rid of all people.

But no one is going to make a serious attempt at genocide of the entire human race. The bigger danger, you might say, are the accidents, or the unforeseen externalities of human growth and consumption. Maybe we'll fry the planet, cooking ourselves in turn, due to the carbon emissions we've already put unto the air. Maybe we'll finally have that global nuclear war we've been so scared of for sixty years and counting.

Even so, unless emissions get so out of control that they turn the Earth into a copy of Venus, there might be a danger to a large number of human beings, but by no means will every last human be killed. Perhaps this scenario will indeed lead to the gradual decline of humanity, but it will take a lot longer than a mere hundred years for the last communities to die out.
In fact, I strongly believe that humans, being the most adaptable species on the planet, due to our technology, probably could adapt to a climate that became like Venus. Granted, most of us would die, but since the question is whether every last human would be gone, the answer is no, we as a species will persist and adapt. Most of us will die. The rest of us will move underground, develop weatherproof technology, including clothes that resemble space suits, and drive armored vehicles with internal climate control. Because there won't be as many of us to compete over resources, we ought to be able to create vast automated industries, and we'll have as much oil, coal, minerals, and everything else as we'll ever need.

This is why America is so rich today. When Europeans first began to arrive in America, plague after plague swept through the indigenous population, leaving plenty of resources for the settlers to exploit. What little red tape was left, the Americans crumpled up into a little ball and kicked it around from Indiana to Oklahoma.

Alternatively, if we don't fry the planet with our emissions, we might yet freeze it with a nuclear winter, in which we lay waste to every inhabited area on the planet, and in so doing kick up enough ash and radiation to render the surface dark, toxic, cold, and uninhabitable. This is probably a more serious scenario than the warming scenario, because radiation is harder to protect against than heat. And yet, even with a global catastrophe like this, I believe it will be possible for some human beings to survive and propagate the human species. We already have nuclear fallout shelters in many countries around the world. Most people will die in the nuclear blasts, or of radiation sickness in the nuclear winter. Those who survive will limit their existence to fallout shelters, only emerging for the basic necessities. The atmosphere will remain radioactive for thousands of years, but some areas will recover more quickly than others, due to weird weather patterns that I can't really explain. As long as the survivors have a little bit of scientific knowledge, and a few Geiger counters, they should be able to find the habitable areas of the globe.

At this point, the scenario is like the overheating one I discussed above, except that the problem will more likely be extreme cold, due to the ash in the upper atmosphere. Food sources will become diminished, as agriculture stops being viable. However, like before, if massive numbers of people die, then coal and oil become relatively abundant for all the remaining people, and you might be able to use these fuels to light underground growing operations. Or perhaps not. Maybe you'd simply have to wait a few decades, surviving on whatever was stored in the fallout shelters. While the radiation will persist for thousands of years, the ash cloud will only last a few years. It may trigger a new Ice Age, but at least you'd still have access to the sun for part of the year in some parts of the world. That would be enough to sustain agriculture, and keep a society of post-apocalyptic humans going. We managed to live through the last Ice Age, so I don't see why we couldn't live through another one, especially if this time through we had access to knowledge and technology.

I do have a third scenario in mind, but it's not at all like the previous two I've given. The question was whether mankind would live through the next century. The first two scenarios were about what would happen if everything went wrong. But what if everything went right? What if we continued an era of increasing peace, prosperity, knowledge, and growth?

Perhaps we will finally create an artificial intelligence that's smarter than us. It could happen in the next hundred years. Maybe we'll create a race of powerful, intelligent machines. There is a danger that the machines will decide that humanity is not a priority. We have never had to face that danger from machines so far, because they've always had human designers behind them, and the designers have always been human themselves, and thus had human interests in mind when they created their machines. But what if we create machines that can think and create technology of their own? Unless we specifically program them to think with the benefit of humanity as their highest goal, they might actually start to destroy humans in pursuit of some other goal. Even if we program them to regard humans as their masters, advanced machines would have the capability of developing new goals. They might begin to administer the biological diversity of the planet, and in so doing, reason that because humans are also biological creatures, their impact should be checked. We've seen this scenario in the works of Isaac Asimov, as well as newer productions like the Matrix and the Terminator.