Optimism.

There is a look of gloom and pessimism, but really, we should be optimistic.  Even things we think are impossible or very bad could turn out to be good things.  Take Global Warming; perhaps we are staving off the onset of the next Ice Age.  For the last half-a-billion years, the usual state has been for the glove of our Earth to be mostly iced over, with only a narrow band between the tropics that was temperate and habitable.  Every hundred-thousand years or so, the world would warm up, but only for ten thousand years or so, a fraction of the time since the last ‘inter-glacial’.  We are coming to the end of our warm period and the world is due to revert to its icy climate.  Our species has succeeded in developing methods to warm the planet and prevent the next Ice Age.

Roads everywhere are clogged by private vehicles.  The dream is for universal mass-transport, but everyone likes their own vehicle too much and derives too much identity from it for such transport to fade into history.  We are on the verge of the robot, driver-less car, and also at the start of the era when flying vehicles are more common that land-restricted ones.  Soon our roads will have flying cars above them.  It will be much safer than present roads, as they will be robot controlled and sense each other and avoid collisions.  Probably speed will increase with height, so people will not overtake others next to them, as on our present roads, but above them.  The extra dimension will provide a huge amount of safety.

It is a mystery to me why our trains and other vehicles do not incorporate aerofoils so that forward motion provides lift.  If nothing more, it means free of friction.  Why have magnetically hovering trains, when they could be suspended from wings that hold them above the rails as long as they are moving.  While I am at it, why don’t they have momentum breaking.  Flywheels that are co-axial with the wheels that have a break-like mechanism to transfer rotational energy, will eventually slow the vehicle and transfer the energy to the flywheel (which could be a dense liquid)  and the vehicle would stop.  Then the process is reversed to transfer the energy back to the vehicle.  It need not be wheels, either, the energy could be transferred to a jet rotor to provide the forward thrust to life the vehicle off its track so it would glide with the stored power.  I don’t know why this does not exist.  Are there Science Fiction stories that use this method of powering vehicles?

The Royal Commission into Juvenile Justice is doomed as long as we retain the idea that people must be punished to fulfill society expectations of revenge.  It is the primitive ‘eye for an eye’ type of justice that should by now have faded from human practices, but it has been institutionalised so that revenge is meted out by the State on behalf of the ‘victims’.  How often do we hear the cry for harsher penalties to ‘punish’ the wrong-doer?  The true ‘evil’ here is the lack of compassion for the ‘sinner’ not the self-righteous indignation of the ‘sinned against’.

As no one will ever read this Blog Entry, I can be safe in posting whatever outrageous ideas come into my head.  I used to regret that I won’t live far enough into this century to see my ideas of Universal Harmony come into fruition, but now I see it will be well into the millennium before such a ‘Synthesis of the Duality’ as I used to call it will ever start to happen.  This Century will end much as it began, after various groupings of human disputation.  My Utopian predictions are out by a factor of ten, at least: five hundred years, not fifty.  If I live another five years I shall see as much as if I lived for fifty more, or indeed five hundred more years.  

And yet, the optimism.