The Real Problem.

Then the rain poured down, dropping endlessly from the balloon up in the sky?

As global temperature rise and the amount of sunlight reaching Earth increases, scientists and engineers alike are looking for a way to solve this problem.

Volcanoes have always been a source of protection for planet Earth, albeit a violent source, but protective nonetheless.  When a volcano erupts it's gases are released into the atmosphere, creating a barrier between the sun's burning rays and the life here on Earth.  What if we were to simulate the process that make the volcano so beneficial to Earth?  What if human kind manufactured artificial volcanoes?

That is the concept that scientists have been developing for some time now, and there will be tests taking place at a Norfolk airfield next month.  The idea is that a gigantic pipe is being suspended in the air by balloons the size of ball stadiums, and chemicals, water in the first test, will be pumped up the pipe and into the atmosphere, to create a layer between the sun's rays and the Earth.

While even I can appreciate that this is a marvelous idea, it makes me question what we are doing with the advanced technology that we now have.  This scenario makes it look like we are trying to treat the symptoms without addressing the real problem.  I am a big advocate of green technology, and putting back into the environment.  But this seems to be going around the problem.  Now, I am no expert, but it sure looks to me like if people would be conscious about the impact that they had on the world around them that we wouldn't need to artificially stimulate the atmosphere around our planet.  This concept is like something out of a science fiction novel, a planet that is being maintained through the genius of a few people.  That is not how that is supposed to work, nature has been doing it's own thing for a very long time and now that we are getting involved in natural processes things just keep getting more and more messed up and complicated.

I believe that if we would work with nature instead of trying so desperately hard to control every aspect of it then we would be much more successful in our adventures.

The Human Chip

For a long time people have dreamt about creating robots and other technologies that could behave as humans.  This was always a far off, extremely hypothetical idea, at least as far as the general population thought.

That may not be the case anymore.  Recently IBM has been working on a computer chip that is supposed to work more like the human brain than anything the technological world has seen before.  What does that mean, for technology, and for the human population?  Are we slowly going to be overrun by robots that have become more and more like us?  Will this technology be used in wars? Espionage? How are we going to make use of a computer this powerful?

All of these options seem to be totally possible, at least if you have any imagination at all, but in reality this computer chip, though one of the smallest we've seen, uses the most energy we have seen.  The human brain uses about 20 watts of energy whereas this genius piece of technology consumes about a kilowatt of energy to do the same amount of work.

Now, I'm all about conserving some energy, so to me hearing that is not promising, but it maybe that a technological revolution is about to take place.  One in which there are not separate programs for everything that software can do.  This would mean that many of our current technologies would become obsolete, that they can be replaced by these "human like" chips that consolidate the amount of software, programming, hardware, and therefore energy actually needed.  That idea is very appealing to me, that we could simply replace older technology with this more advanced technology and it would get rid of a lot of the excess energy that we consume.

We'll see what happens... how will we use this great advance in technology to further society?