[from James Bowery at MR]

Civilization Takedown: Obsoleting the Campsite

Start watching at 15 minutes and 10 seconds into this video:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxjxFdFEBsw&feature=player_embedded"]System Design for the 21st Century - YouTube[/ame]

You will see something that matters.

Neocon Zionists starting WW III by inciting the US to attack Syria thence Iran doesn’t matter.

This does.

National Instruments is a company that every scientist and technologist in the world knows and respects.

In that video the president of National Instruments is, in the most highly visible role he takes, essentially accusing the physics establishment of institutional incompetence. The physics establishment has been, since WW II, the most politically powerful aspect of the entire scientific establishment.

That is noteworthy in itself.

That it is over a matter of suppression of clean energy technology is even more noteworthy, but it doesn’t, in itself, hold a “candle” so to speak, to the threat of nuclear Armageddon posed by the neocon Zionists.

So what’s the big deal?

I mean, if solving civilization’s energy problems isn’t such a big deal, why does this really matter?

Here’s why…

My nemesis, as some may have come to recognize from my recent emphasis on his book, “The Social Conquest of Earth” is E. O. Wilson.

This is not because he is, in these the last years of his life, doing an about-face and attacking kin selection and inclusive fitness—a major theme not only of MajorityRights.com but of the entire New Right. I happen to agree with much of what he has to say about phony “altruism” being, in actuality, simply various forms of parasitic castration (although he doesn’t come out and use that phrase because of his intellectual handicaps as a parasitic castrati of sorts). I don’t consider the areas of significant disagreement with him over kin selection and inclusive fitness to be important enough to go into here.

It is because he makes the strongest possible case for eusociality—an inevitable consequence of group selection—being an essential aspect of the human condition. My position is that, on the contrary, while it is true eusociality is an aspect of the human condition and may have been crucial in the development of what is essential in Man, it is now an encumbrance that endangers that development and indeed, all life.

So now you might see what can hold a candle to nuclear Armageddon; and not because nuclear Armageddon would endanger what is essential in Man nor would endanger all life (it would do neither). It is precisely because nuclear Armageddon would do neither that anything that strikes at the roots of the eusocial condition of humanity would so overshadow nuclear Armageddon in its import.

Here’s what E. O. Wilson has to say about a key aspect of the evolution of human eusociality:

Fire carried about from one place to another was a resource, like meat, fruit and weapons. Tree limbs and bundles of twigs can smolder for hours. With meat, fire and cooking, campsites lasting more than a few days at a time, and thus persistent enough to be guarded as a refuge, marked the next vital step. Such a nest, as it can also be called, has been the precursor to the attainment of eusociality by all other known animals. There is evidence of fossil campsites and their accouterments as far back as Homo erectus, the ancestral species intermediate in brain size between Homo habilis and modern Homo sapiens.

Along with fireside campsites came division of labor. It was spring-loaded: an existing predisposition within groups to self-organize dominance hierarchies already existed. There were, in addition earlier differences between males and females and between young and old. Further, within each subgroup there existed variations in leadership ability, as well as in the proneness to remain at the campsite. The inevitable result emerging quickly out of all these preadaptations was a complex division of labor.

By the time of Homo erectus, all of the steps that led this species to eusociality, save the use of controlled fire, had also been followed by modern chimpanzees and bonobos. Thanks to our unique preadaptations, we were ready to leave these distant cousins far behind. The stage was now set for the biggest-brained of African primates to make the truly defining leap to their ultimate potential.

“The Social Conquest of Earth”, chapter “Threading the Evolutionary Maze” by E. O Wilson, p47-48

So here’s the big deal:

The kind of cold fusion being demonstrated at National Instruments’ exposition is based on a ubiquitous metal: Nickel. The devices are small in scale—potentially and quite probably even small enough to carry as one might a sword. The metallurgy of producing nickel from country rock can be mastered by anyone worthy of the category “Man” by the age of procreation.

This energy source has the potential to obsolete not only centralized forms of industrial energy, but even of centralized forms of warmth as ancient as the campfire. Disintermediation can extend to the very root of pre-human eusociality: the campfire.

PS: In case anyone wants to get the truth about the cold fusion episode, I recommend they listen to this lecture given at MIT by Charles Beaudette, author of the book “Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed”.

One particularly pithy quip appears at 40:50 into the lecture:

“If Pons and Fleischmann would be so cooperative today as to conveniently die, tomorrow, I suspect, the most prominent critics would say, ‘Well, maybe its time now to give the field a second look.’”

Fleischmann died a few days ago.

Posted by James Bowery on Wednesday, August 8, 2012 at 06:52 PM in

http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/civilization_takedown_obsoleting_the_campsite#comments