Good Use Of Airdancers

A New Use For Tube Dancers

The tyre, car, and tile sales places along the roadsides will be stripped bare by rampaging berry growers, you mark my words! 😸

This on Linked-In that I found and reposted is interesting. I like that the ag robots are being used to the max, there's no point having these little tractors sitting in the shed for 75% of the year, after all. And I'm also a bit annoyed that I missed this point in the LI article, so I'm going to expand on that here. 

Agbots are more and more becoming a thing - they drag harvest trailers from the orchard / field to the processing and packing shed, some are in use for controlling weeds between the rows, and I'm sure they have more functions that I'm not aware of. 

So on that basis, adding an airdancer as a scarecrow makes sense, but it'll also increase the number of agbots being manufactured. On that, I do rest a case, that being that we're using more and more of the planet's scarce - and definitely not bountifully endless - resources. And we'll be doing it so everyone can have blueberries all year round, not for some profound planet-saving reason . . .

Sad CrAIyon art says "bai healthy soil."

I say this on a day not long after the day of this year the number of resources we're taking from the planet has exceeded the capacity of the planet to supply them for this year, for about the 50th year running. We're in effect living on overdraft, consuming what tomorrow's generation will need - and won't have. In fact, we are that generation. And the next one will be even worse off if we don't slow down and leave a bit more for them. 

Technology To The Rescue?

Technology is one of the reasons we're in the situation we're in now. But our survival imperative is the reason for the technology. Bear that in mind. And in a way we can actually blame our DNA. 

"DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music."

– Richard Dawkins

If DNA could find a way to just mingle, mutate, and multiply without a corresponding life-form, it would. Our survival imperative is put there by DNA to ensure it's survival imperative. But. . . What we do with that imperative is how we master the DNA. 

The first neolithic male hominid that picked up a stick to beat another male hominid up in order to get to the female, was obeying DNA's survival imperative: "Spread my genes out into the world! Make ME the One And Only DNA on the planet!" In the process, that protohuman also invented technology, in this case a technology of conflict and war. 

But the female, heavily gravid and needing more nourishment, became the dependant of Grog The Stick-Wielder, and when his Stick failed to bring down any birds no matter how fast he swung it, she probably clucked her tongue, grabbed the stick from him, and used it to dig up a few yams or onions, thus inventing a peaceful use for the technology. 

But competition drove both inventions, because Grog and Georgina were also competing with many other hominids for the resources they could easily reach, to ensure that their combined DNA would survive. (This raises the question, is DNA's Ultimate Purpose to just keep breeding variations, stabilise on just ONE genome, or become something else entirely?)

"Once DNA acquires the ability to persist forever, the carriers become disposable. Essentially, our bodies are designed to last long enough to reproduce."

- S. Jay Olshansky

As well, let's not limit the competition between DNAs to just humans. After all, the bit of the DNA that makes humans, humans, is tiny - somewhere between 1% and 7% depending whom you believe.

Maybe the ultimate aim of the game is to be the last DNA sequence on the planet, but without a host? Whatever. But DNA created family. And villages, clans, countries, religions, politics, love, hatred, fear. 

That suited when we had little communication around the world, little travel between countries. We had to protect "our own." And now, we can speak to another person anywhere on the globe. We can go there and be with a person we're attracted to. We can see the damage we're doing to the planet, and as a result we're also becoming less rapacious and greedy for all the resources. 

We could say that DNA is becoming aware, but that's not quite true. The intelligence that DNA has given us has become aware, and so - slowly - our approach to our use of the resources is changing. Birthrates are down due to infertility we've caused to ourselves with microplastics and chemicals rendering us less fertile. But there's a double whammy in effect here, with more and more people choosing not to have children. 

More and more people are choosing not to consume meat. People are becoming environmentally conscious. Imagine this: three to two centuries ago we got agriculture to the point where we could comfortably feed our population at that time - but didn't. Instead we chose to industrialise and mechanise so that a chosen few could benefit from a surfeit of food, housing, consumer goods, automobiles, and entertainment.

Even among 'ourselves' we established a strict hierarchy of paucity and surfeit, workers and exploiters. In order to, you know, get just ONE genetic string ahead of the rest of the field. But finding compatible partners (and remember that it's basically been our DNA that predisposes us to identify and want a compatible DNA mix) across race and geopolitical boundaries has changed things. 

While it seems that violence is on the rise, I think that perhaps our perception of it has become more acute, and is driving a trend towards less violence. Our population has doubled in fifty years, but I wonder if violence has doubled, or if we've just enabled violence by technology to do more damage? 

Technology is making it possible for us to see more of the violence around the world. 300 - 200 years ago the situation in Ukraine would have come to us a month behind, with a grainy lithograph or photograph and a few paragraphs of text. Today we can see the destruction in realtime. 

We can (and many do) go there and see it first hand, and send images and video back to the rest of our friends. We can help out by donating a drone or chipping in to a fund for that purpose. Should we desire and have the skillset, we can even pilot that drone. These are things technology can do. Also, make rapid advances in cleaning up the planet, removing some of our pollution, recycling what would otherwise be wasted resources, growing more food, distributing it faster a further. 

And it gives us a truly global awareness of the planet and what we've done to it. I only hope that this awareness will sweep across the world faster than the attempts of the remaining throwbacks to take advantage of the confusion. 

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