You know how some things you read have a huge impact on your life? I always loved to read. And I grew up in Miami Beach, where the sun shined all the time. Even when I skipped school because I felt like I just couldn't stand to be inside all day, I would either go to the park (Flamingo Park in Miami Beach) or to the beach, where under a coconut tree I would sit and read all day.

My favorite books when I was young, were mysteries or science fiction and I think I read them all. I couldn't wait to start a new novel and it was a real effort for me to choose school over that kind of fantasy. It wasn't until much later that I would find the same kind of enjoyment reading non-fiction.

Today, I rarely read novels, unless they are also based on fact or science. However, when I got into ham radio at 15 I did also read the radio trade and hobby magazines and of course everything to do with electronics. I even took a correspondence course then with RTTA (Radio Television Trade Association) for which I was awarded a membership card and diploma for completion. I remember part of that course was to build first a radio and then a television set - even if there was only one television station to watch. They used tubes because there was no solid state then and later I would graduate into the then popular Heath Kits and would build my first computer on a bread board. That was when we were trying to figure out what to use them for and other than turning things on and off with glitz (lots of flashing lights), they did little else. I didn't just read and cut classes. I also worked. I always had a job so I could afford to buy more books or parts for my radios.

My life really changed MANY years later when I read a book by Michael Harrington, called Another America. The book was considered too subversive to be published in the U.S. and they had to be ordered from Canada. Because of that book I became a charter member of the organization founded by Michael Harrington, the Democratic Socialists of America (before they merged with SDS). About that time; it was after I was discharged from the U.S. army, I also became an anti-war activist and remained one for the rest of my life.

It should be mentioned here for those who don't know me that before I was an activist I was in the army for 8 years, during which time I served during the beginning of the Vietnam War and worked army security at the White House and also in France and later in the Pentagon for the Chiefs of Staff. Years later I also went to Israel during the Yom Kipper War with my approval coming from the U.S. State Department. Being that close to death and dying had the effect of solidifying my opposition to war. See bio at http://pnews.org/bio/

Computers were still in their infancy, even when I was in the army. My uncle had the first one for the military - at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, the Eniac. I saw it and it was amazing. Then in the Pentagon we had a computer which used tubes and diode multipliers. There were lots of lights on it (g). That was during the time that Arpanet was just getting started. Years later the first home computers were nothing like they are now but I was one of the first to convert an old Commodore computer into a radio teletype machine - and it worked.

My adventures in reading never stopped. First there were the books for school which was covered by the G.I. Bill. I had a young family, including a handicapped kid and I had to work so when not going to school I worked for real estate development companies and eventually I started my own company to develop land in NC and Florida and became certified as a National Fee Appraiser and licensed as a Real Estate Broker in Florida - a job I stayed at for the next 20 years - and eventually we opened our own book store where I made less money but I read a lot of books. Later I would also work for the U.S. Commerce Dept and later for the American Social Health Association (under license to the CDC to provide STD information to the public). I went full circle and in the 90's returned to real estate in Central Florida.

One book I never studied for school was by Desmond Morris, called The Naked Ape. That was a book which was published in the 70s and I devoured every word. That really changed my perspective, even though science was nowhere nearly as advanced as it is today. It was my window into evolution. Afterward there was no stopping my journey of exploration and discovery.

I have several favorite science authors. I have read just about everything by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Jared Diamond (and others, too numerous for me to name here). A few are especially noteworthy. I want to mention Collapse by Diamond. And, The Third Chimpanzee was awesome. Guns, Germs, and Steel won Jared the Pulitzer Prize, Britain's Science Book Prize, and the Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Prize and was on the NYTimes bestseller list for 75 weeks. Collapse, his last book is particularly important for understanding why societies cease to exist.

Dr Diamond has written over 500 peer reviewed scientific papers besides over a hundred popular science articles for magazines and his many books about science, many of which I have tried to read.

Jared Diamond's wife is psychologist, Marie Cohen. His father was Louis K. Diamond, who was considered the founder of pediatric hematology and treatment of children's blood diseases in the United States if not the world. His were from the same towns in the same Jewish "pales of settlement" in regions of Eastern Europe (in Poland and in Russia) as my grandparents. Perhaps they knew each other.

To a large extent our instincts are influenced not so much by reason and education as by an environment which was appropriate to our species as hunter-gatherers, that period of time which is 99.9% of human history is often referred to by evolutionary biologists, socio-biologists, and psychologists as (EEA) the "Environment of Evolutionary Adaption". Jared suggests our gut EEA instincts have more impact on decisions than we like to think they do.

With regard to our quest to find alien life, Jared Diamond says: (in a June 22, 2000 interview in Skeptic Mag) "We can predict with 99.9% certainty that an encounter between aliens and us would be disastrous. On Earth, what humans did to animals and other humans, without exception, has been murderous. We cut off their hands and heads, enslave them, rape them, kill them, and cook and eat them. About 20 years ago some SETI people sent spacecraft with plaques announcing not only that we exist, but where to find us. I consider this to be the single stupidest, most dangerous act ever committed in human history!"

Jared makes this interesting observation in the same interview:

I have always felt we humans would someday bring about our own demise as a species because we could not share the resources. There is enough to live but not enough for greed.

The following is from OnEarth (March 22, 2005), a review written by Bill McKibben of Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, a book by Jared Diamond:

While we know the reasons behind climate change, and there is much less debate now over the cause of Global Warming and what will happen if nothing is done about it now, yet very little is being done about it. There is some progress but it won't be enough because there are new developing countries who want a piece of the pie. The resources are being used up by India and China faster than carbon dumping into the environment can be reduced, let alone stopped. So we are working toward our own extinction. And we keep thinking as-if we were still hunter-gatherers instead of adapting to an environment we have created which inevitably hasten our own extinction.

We are a world within other worlds. Dawkins calls this "middle world" and that works for me, but that also implies there may only be a beginning, a middle and an end. I believe there is much more than that. Darwin wrote: "Each living being is a microcosm -- a little universe formed of self-propagating organisms inconceivably minute and numerous as the stars in the heavens." I believe this is one of the most penetrating, prescient, and meaningful passages he wrote about the framework and symbiosis of life.

And the deeper and more penetrating we get into the biology of cells and mitochrondria, where we can trace our maternal lineage, thus the expression `Mitochrondrial Eve' or `African Eve' - as we explore further and further into this microcosmic world just as when we go the other way, we look out into the wider universe); and they are all to us obscure and in some respects miniature worlds apart from our own, the more insight we will have about our beginnings and perhaps our ending.

Some of the microscopic world we can see using special instruments and the process of microscopy but part of that world we can still only speculate about using other techniques which indicate particle reactivity - so small they become worlds unseen, yet we know they are there because of the influence they have on things we can observe and measure.

It would appear that much of what is microscopic is also separate but symbiotic, like those parasites which live in us. And mitochrondria organelles contains its own DNA and it changes metabolically just as the rest of the host cells constantly undergoes change; even death. Selfish cells, who want everlasting life, reject apoptosis, refusing to die, even though they have been compromised - attacked by free radicals as much as 10,000 to 100,000 times a day, which refuse to die will cause the host organism to die. It is called cancer.

And mitochondria, these living symbiont's providing respiratory life to the cell, the energy they must have to live but also not untypically become diseased also and affect the host's tissues, i.e. muscle and the brain, causing seizures, blindness, deafness, muscular degeneration, including many other disorders.

Another hypothesis, by English scientist James Lovelock, who also invented the ECD, the Electron Capture Detector which was instrumental in assessing a persistence of CFCs in the stratosphere, thus indicating ozone depletion; he postulated that the Earth is a super-organism.

"Named after the Greek goddess Gaia, the hypothesis postulates that the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment that acts to sustain life." (from Wikipedia)

However, his ideas have been hotly debated within the scientific community and rejected by many, including Ford Doolittle, Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins, et al. Environmentalists like his hypothesis; many scientists do not. James Lovelock also suggests nuclear power as the only realistic alternative to the carbon fuel problem, which a position opposed by most environmentalists.

It seems that Lovelock in 2006 told an Australian Lateline television program (according to an item in Wikipedia) wherein he said "Modern nuclear power stations are useless for making bombs". The organization, Friends of the Earth responded to his assertion, stating: "Lovelock's claim that nuclear power plants cannot be used for weapons production is false, irresponsible and dangerous. A typical nuclear power reactor produces about 300 kilograms of plutonium each year, enough for 30 nuclear weapons". ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock)

The Earth can also die and will someday as will everything else in the universe as we know it renew, die, be reborn - or simply cease to exist, in spite of our human brains inability, for some of us, to accept the fact that there is nothing holding the Earth in the sky except gravity; no invisible hand of God and our species is no more important than the importance we assign it in our collective imaginations.

It is only natural to be human-centric because self-preservation is the most powerful urge but we have this great disadvantage of carrying around with us instincts which have been imprinted in that part of our brain which collates and stores those little bits of survival information. If you have pets; I'm assuming dogs, then you know they do some things they have never been taught but just seem to be instinctual. They try to bury food in your bed. They will show dominant behavior in a way you know was not a learned response but something deeply embedded in their smaller brains which sometime in the past lent itself to better fitness. We are the same way. Why would you think evolution skipped us in that? There are patterns: thought processes, which are not learned, but known already because they are carried somewhere in our genes and turned on in our brains. We're not sure yet exactly how it all works but I have read many hypothetical reasons why we do the things we do and think the things we do. The experts are still trying to figure it out, so I will likely not be able to.

Environmental adaptation takes longer than biological evolution to catch up with changes in the environment - including those changes we make to the environment which are killing us.

Bill McKibben writes (OnEarth - March 22, 2005):

: "...[S]cieties may go under because they destroy forests, wild food sources, wetlands, or soil. In fact, deforestation and soil erosion were factors in almost every collapse he describes. There is, for instance, the story of the Greenland Norse, who cut their grasslands for turf to build homes, only to watch strong winds blow away the underlying soil, reducing the carrying capacity for cattle below what the settlers needed to survive. It is not comforting, then, to read that the spread of deserts in China has been so rapid in recent years that as many as 20,000 villages have been abandoned." (from review of [J.Diamond] Collapse)

I think it is pretty clear that we will cause our own extinction, not because we're stupid but because we have an anthropocentric view of the world and will never have the "willingness" to globally alter reality. We'll have the power, but not the will because some will always want more and some will always fight to keep it. In the end nobody will be left with anything.

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