Thoughts like about the Occupy Wall St. protests. My heart is with them, but I don't think they'll bring about any change. My feeling is that the fundamental flaw with modern Western capitalism is that it's driven by greed and a wealth incentive, and that the benchmark for success is perpetual growth. Only if an economy is constantly growing and growing is it considered to be healthy and successful.
On its face, that is not sustainable. It's not even taking sustainability into consideration; just growth, growth, growth. This kind of economic growth requires the population to continue growing to maintain a consumer and labor base. And the population is growing, but this constant population growth also means all these people need to be fed and supply chains need to be maintained and the waste they create needs to be managed on greater and greater scales. I just don't see how it's sustainable.
And when I hear about the growing and looming economic crisis in Europe and the U.S. and the solutions being put forth to solve it, the solutions are just to shore up the unsustainable status quo. Very few people are thinking that the entire way of thinking needs to be re-thought.
Thoughts like how Obama really dropped the ball and it looks like he may become a one-term president. He hasn't been the agent for change he proclaimed to be and at every turn he has just maintained the status quo.
I thought the bailouts of the auto and financial industries were mistakes. If they were businesses that were failing, there were reasons why they were failing, and as capitalism dictates business that don't have the wherewithal to succeed should be allowed to fail. The whole idea of businesses that are "too big to fail" excuse for bailing them out was a betrayal of capitalism and it applied socialism, if not selective communism, to the big corporations who least deserved it.
The hard part about analyzing that is the auto industry looks like it's being responsible with the bailout and getting themselves back on their feet and paying back the loan. But the same can't be said about the finance industry who took the bailout money and treated themselves to lavish retreats, and I don't think they ever thought it necessary to pay the loan back. For them, it was "woohoo, money, let's spend it".
In retrospect, those two different behaviors do make sense. The auto industry has a tangible product they're putting out and the companies themselves are something the corporate boards are invested in. They cared about the survival of their companies and realized what they'd be losing if they failed. The financial industry on the other hand, all they see is the money they are getting. They don't care about the companies or the industry. If they fail they just go find a job somewhere else.
So what? Do I think those companies should have failed bringing on the possible collapse of capitalism? Well, I don't think bailing those corporations out will prevent the fall of capitalism, and from the crisis happening in Europe and looming over the U.S. I don't think it's out of the question that capitalism may collapse. When Soviet communism collapsed, I remember some short-sighted commentator declaring it was the "end of history". Capitalism triumphs. At the time I remember thinking how arrogant and stupid that comment was and that capitalism could also fall, but I had no idea what it would look like or what would replace it.
Now with the debt crisis looming, I can see what capitalism collapsing looks like. Just look at Greece 2011 and apply it to everywhere. There's just no more money after years of partying on credit. Capitalism was a fairy tale that was maintained on a collective imagination that wealth will constantly grow and grow, sustainability be damned. But when everyone realizes there is no money, there's just no where to go but in debt, and I don't know what opposite of growth there is other than in debt.
Thoughts about cosmology that I haven't written about in a long time because I realized that there is a lot wanting in such a theoretical field where scientists push forward their findings as facts, but where many cosmological studies are based on our limited observational abilities from our one tiny perspective in the vastness of the universe and can't be directly experimented on and subjected to the scientific method. True, a lot can be verified. Einstein's theory of relativity has been verified through space missions and predictions and observational confirmation. The Large Hadron Collider will also no doubt make inroads into the veracity of more areas of quantum mechanics.
But other fundamental theories that are generally accepted such as the Big Bang and Inflation theories, I don't know anymore. Cosmic acceleration has also been generally accepted just years after observational findings but I want to question the observational methodology. Might we be misreading the data? Five hundred years from now, the Big Bang, inflation, cosmic acceleration are all theories that may fall by the wayside, just as many ideas from five hundred years ago have now been disproven. We can't go somewhere and test those theories scientifically. We can only read the observational data and our readings may be chauvinistic and wrong. At the core of our error might be our human chauvinism. As humans, we have our senses to observe the universe, but our human senses are limited. They are not the only way to view the universe. Our senses evolved for survival on this planet, in this environment.
In a universal environment – the environment of the entire universe – what is ultimately, objectively "perceivable", or what is there, is not necessarily what can be perceived by us. We need special instruments to observe things in different electromagnetic wavelengths and that may just be the tip of the iceberg. There are things beyond our senses that we can build instruments to detect, but there also may be things completely beyond our understanding or conception. I've read theories about how there may be areas of the universe where the physics is completely different from ours in a multiverse within one "universe" and there's no way to prove or disprove these theories. And that's the point.
Science is currently unable to detect anything that may be considered "spiritual".
The scientific method is terrific for what can be subjected to it, but a lot of cosmology and astrophysics can't be subjected to it. We can't go to these far off places and observe the strange phenomena and definitively say it's scientific fact. We can only report what we observe from countless light years away and propose our best guess to explain what we observe. There's always the possibility that we're misreading the data and in centuries to come a better understanding with better proof will emerge.
In a universal environment – the environment of the entire universe – what is ultimately, objectively "perceivable", or what is there, is not necessarily what can be perceived by us. We need special instruments to observe things in different electromagnetic wavelengths and that may just be the tip of the iceberg. There are things beyond our senses that we can build instruments to detect, but there also may be things completely beyond our understanding or conception. I've read theories about how there may be areas of the universe where the physics is completely different from ours in a multiverse within one "universe" and there's no way to prove or disprove these theories. And that's the point.
Science is currently unable to detect anything that may be considered "spiritual".
The scientific method is terrific for what can be subjected to it, but a lot of cosmology and astrophysics can't be subjected to it. We can't go to these far off places and observe the strange phenomena and definitively say it's scientific fact. We can only report what we observe from countless light years away and propose our best guess to explain what we observe. There's always the possibility that we're misreading the data and in centuries to come a better understanding with better proof will emerge.
