Hey, you idiots over there on the third planet!
When are you going to wake up?
Don’t you dare tell me to, “Can it;”
I’ve been here since Sirius was a pup.

You’d better use me while I’m still around.
I’ve only got five, “Bills” more to go.
That’s just a bit more than I’ve been crowned.
Yeah – 4.5, 3.7 – I know…

After the sudden noise and chaos,
I strove heartily to show my face.
The eruption mightily did flay us.
I watched my galaxy fall into place.

I had a feeling about your clump, though;
The atoms in it seemed to shine.
When a part of it broke off and became moonglow,
I could then sense the murky brine.

But that phenomenon was yet to come.
The original miasma took great toll.
It needed time to stretch and hum --
To pitch and belch, to turn and roll.

After the magnetics
Began to blossom out,
The resultant kenetics
Commenced to turn it about.

When the outside began to cool,
And the divergent poles did wake up,
The other planets began to drool;
Jealous of that gravity/magnetic make-up.

Then, the waters began to stir,
Odd creatures began to move therein.
Soon, it became a blur.
Some crawled out and formed dry skin.

Later, diverse creatures scampered
And tasted the abundant flora.
They moved about unhampered
Until – “Faith and begorrah!”

All was well, until one day,
Falling from the sky,
An object turned my light gray;
It made the other planets cry.

The earth they hoped for was hidden;
They wondered if all was lost.
The planet that seemed bedridden
Had paid an awful cost.

What of the monstrous creatures?
They seemed to have disappeared.
A marvelous blue ball now features
Those now upon two haunches reared.

In time, thumb-opposed fingers
Began their marvelous work.
That creature who never lingers
Took on a self-satisfied smirk.

That’s you, you over-fed earthlings!
You’ve barely just arrived.
Despite your many magic things,
You now have over-imbibed.

Everything you’ve wrought there
Came from Mother Earth.
You’ve practically stripped the poor gal bare;
You’ve whittled down her girth.

You’ve blocked the tube she breathes through,
Reduced her forest-green hair,
Made of the oceans a plastic lieu,
And poisoned her precious air.

The sands have already told you
How I can best be used.
She won’t retain that storied blue
Until you and I are fused.

The fossils filled your energy hunger,
But now their deed is done.
You cannot sustain that ethereal wonder
Without the full breadth of the sun!

How rational is the human brain?

Photo courtesy ofL By Amber Rieder, Jenna Traynor, Geoffrey B Hall (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons MRI_Location_Amygdala_up 

JDN 2457111 EDT 11:19.

[I like to use the Julian Date Number system for keeping track of dates because is secular (not tied to any particular religion, unlike BC/AD), uses a single unit of measure (days) instead of several (days, months, years), is already in widespread use in astronomy—and also sounds a lot like a Stardate.]

As I like to say, humans are 90% rational—but woe betide that other 10%.

Are humans completely rational? Do we behave as rational agents who maximize expected utility?

            It should be obvious that the answer is no—people often do, say, and believe remarkably irrational things, and if they didn't we wouldn't have much need for an "idiot free zone". If we were completely rational, everyone would believe in global warming, no one would believe in religion, and there could absolutely never have been anything remotely like Daesh.

            Maybe we could still have certain kinds of conflicts or macroeconomic instabilities, though even then it seems to me that if we were really so smart we'd come up with policies to resolve our conflicts and maintain stability. At the very least, perfectly rational beings with perfect information should attain Pareto-efficiency, a state in which no one could benefit without someone else being harmed. I'm not just asserting that, you can prove it. And I do mean prove in the strongest sense of the word: formalized with certain assumptions it is a mathematical theorem, the First Fundamental Welfare Theorem. Yet plainly this is not how the world works; even though Pareto-efficiency is overrated (a world in which one person owns literally everything is Pareto-efficient), we clearly don't even have it; by ending war, genocide, slavery, and racism, millions of lives could be improved without harming anyone else. I could go on, but most of you already agree that humans are not completely rational.

            Yet most economic models in wide use—"neoclassical" models as they are generally known—assume this extremely strong notion of human rationality, and even take it a step further by equating rationality with selfishness. Many economists honestly seem baffled by the idea that it could ever be rational to help someone else with no expectation of return; my favorite was when an economist put 'altruism' in scare quotes. Economic policy has been designed accordingly, and with this is mind, is it really so surprising that corporations grow ever-more powerful and ever-more corrupt and business executives are about 4 times more likely than the general population to be psychopaths?

            On the other hand, we shouldn't let ourselves go too far in the opposite direction and conclude that human beings are totally and irredeemably irrational. If we were fully rational, Idiot Free Zone would be unnecessary; if we were fully irrational, it would be impossible. Indeed, civilization itself would be impossible; if we were simply gorillas in cheap tuxedos we would behave the way that gorillas behave when you put them in cheap tuxedos.

            In fact, even gorillas are quite intelligent; gorillas are capable of making and using tools, for example, as well as recognizing themselves in the mirror. So let's consider something obviously far less intelligent: an ant. Are even ants really totally irrational?

            No, they aren't; while ants cannot write novels or even make tools, and they do not exhibit the emotional complexity of dogs, the problem-solving ability of crows, or the cleverness of octopus, nonetheless ants can, under the proper conditions, locate food, evade predators, and provide for their queen to ensure their own progeny.

            A totally irrational being is one that would immediately destroy itself; there are simply too many more ways to be dead than to be alive. Indeed, the very notion is almost incoherent, as such a creature could never evolve in the first place; it would have to be specifically designed by a pre-existing rational being, perhaps as an existentialist art project in order to demonstrate its very futility. (Actually now that I say that, I have little doubt that in the transhuman future there will be individuals interested in such projects, and we will need strict regulations on the sentience of art-project AIs.)

            Hence, human beings are actually quite rational; if you compare us on the one hand to a completely irrational being that immediately destroys itself and on the other hand to a completely rational being that lives its entire existence in the perfection of its desires, we are in fact closer to the latter end. Over the centuries our rationality has improved as we have discovered new knowledge, restructured our social institutions, invented new technologies, and improved our health and education.

            Even most of our irrational behaviors are almost rational, in the sense that they were rational when we evolved them millennia ago, or in the sense that they would advance our goals except for some piece of information we're missing or some false belief we have.

            Let's talk about Daesh, for example; they may seem like the pinnacle of human irrationality, and in a sense they are. A young man who travels halfway around the world in order to blow himself up along with a building full of people for believing in a subtly different interpretation of a 7^th century book is clearly not behaving with optimal rationality. And yet, as unwilling as most of our society is to recognize this fact, his actions are comprehensible—they are not simply incoherent madness, and they are by no means unpredictable. (Maybe the individual targets are unpredictable, but even this is entirely rational; it is a mixed strategy. Against a superior opponent, guerilla warfare targets unpredictably to avoid defenses that would be otherwise overwhelming.) Given only one false premise, the argument for his actions is valid; given that assumption, his behavior is entirely rational. That premise? That these actions please Allah, who will reward him eternally with maximal happiness in Heaven. Given the prospect of an eternal reward, particularly one of maximal happiness, it would be entirely rational to do almost anything to achieve that reward. The only cost that would not be worth paying would be sending others to eternal punishment or denying them eternal happiness. If Heaven exists, baptizing babies and then killing them (as Conquistadors did) is a deeply altruistic act; even if it dooms you to Hell at least it sends those babies to Heaven. This woman who shot her own child is making a perfectly valid argument; her only delusion is believing in Heaven and Hell—actually believing in them, the way that I believe in chocolate and cyanide, as things that actually exist in the world. When most people say that they "believe in Heaven", they are lying (at least to us, if also to themselves); if they actually believed they would act like people in Daesh, or else they would follow Matthew's beattitudes to the letter and donate all their possessions and mutilate themselves as punishment for feeling angry or tempted. They would be willing to commit torture and murder if they thought it would convert people to the true religion, because any finite period of suffering cannot possibly be as bad as an infinite period of maximal suffering. Combine that with our deep-seated instincts for tribal identity, evolved over millennia in which tribal identity was life itself (also the basis of racism and nationalism), and you have a very dangerous combination—from a brain that is overall being almost entirely rational. Fanatical religion is not dangerous because it is so irrational; on the contrary it is dangerous because it is so rational, given only that you actually believe the premises that religion entails. It is dangerous precisely because it can drive human beings who are otherwise intelligent and reasonable to horrific violence.

            Nor is it inherently irrational that we are so driven by emotion—indeed, what else would we be driven by? People who lose the capacity to feel emotion don't become paragons of rationality ala Spock or Lt. Com. Data; they become inert, crippled by flat affector even catatonia. Emotions drive almost all our behavior, rational and otherwise; and it is ultimately the emotional experiences of joy and suffering that are the foundation of rationality itself. Emotions can be rationally warranted or unwarranted in much the same way as beliefs: If a brown recluse spider is attacking you, fear is rational. If a common house spider is crawling along the wall, fear is irrational—we call that "arachnophobia". If your grandmother just died, sadness is rational. If your life is going fine but you can barely get out of bed, your sadness is irrational—we call that "depression". Even happiness can be irrational: You'd have to be manic to laugh with glee while under aerial bombardment. In fact most people's emotions are rational most of the time.

            This is reason for optimism; while the project of human rationality may seem hopeless at times, we have made substantial progress even in the last few generations. Perhaps one day the entire world—or entire colonized Orion Arm—will be an idiot-free zone.

[The image is a public domain brain scan image from the National Institute of Mental Health, highlighting one of the amygdalas, one of the central features of our limbic system, which is, broadly speaking, the source of our emotions. The amygdalas are involved in memory, decision-making, motivation, and emotion—making them a particularly good place to start when asking how rational 

Gatorade always wins?

NOT!

JUST ADDING SUGAR TO WATER IS AS GOOD OR BETTER THAN ENERGY DRINKS

Wherever you are in the world, it's virtually impossible to avoid the avalanche from a well-designed media campaign urging... no... compelling you to buy and consume as much of various types of energy drinks as possible. It hits you almost subliminally, and certainly explosively, from radio ads, TV spectaculars with extreme sports and monster machines, product placement in movies and TV shows, Internet sites, social networks, billboards, subways, trains, cars, and of course SEX. They titillate you into joining the crowd sweating to the oldies, with one media reinforcing the other. You can't avoid them like you can't avoid Global Warming. Everybody in Lycra skin suits, panting and sweating with those high-tech machines, are guzzling them down like nobody's business.

And that's what it's about: Big Business... and Big Money out of your pocket.  And the unstated message from it all is that you will perish... you will not be among the winner's circle, you will fail... unless you consume it.

And yes, of course your body must replace those electrolytes, and of course your muscles and liver will need to replace burned-up carbohydrates. And here's where it gets interesting. The liver, and, well, also your gut. How do you best consume, digest and then store carbohydrates in the liver so your body operates at as lean clean peaceful machine?

Many have assumed that the more expensive supplements and drinks with the monosacharides glucose or fructose (or combinations of the two) worked most efficiently in the body under strenuous physical exertion. But science has discovered that this is not the case. It turns out that "Although an increasing number of sports-performance drinks designed to provide energy during exercise now use sucrose, or mixtures of glucose and fructose, many still rely on glucose alone. The researchers warn that such glucose-only drinks could produce gut discomfort and suggest sucrose-based alternatives, or sugar in water, can help make exercise easier."

In a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary study published on Dec. 15, 2015 by the American Journal of Physiology - Endocrinology & Metabolism, something interesting about basic metabolism during prolonged endurance-type exercise was tested and confirmed. The study -- headed by Dr. Javier t. Gonzales of the University of Bath and faculty at Northumria University's Dept of Health and Life Sciences (UK) -- has added to the body of evidence that the disaccharide, sucrose (plain old table sugar), actually works best.

"Sucrose ingestion does not preserve liver glycogen concentrations more than glucose ingestion. However, sucrose ingestion does increase whole body carbohydrate utilization compared with glucose ingestion" .

And to deepen this understanding, we go to a recent Science Alert article which simplifies and summarizes a large body of scientific evidence.

JUST ADDING SUGAR TO WATER IS AS GOOD OR BETTER THAN ENERGY DRINKS, STUDY FINDS

(click the image above for full article)

"Researchers at the University of Bath tested the effects of both sucrose- and glucose-based drinks on long-distance cyclists to compare how good they were at preventing the decline of carbohydrate stores in the body's liver glycogen levels.

"The carbohydrate stores in our liver are vitally important when it comes to endurance exercise as they help us to maintain a stable blood sugar level," said lead researcher Javier Gonzalez. "However, whilst we have a relatively good understanding of the changes in our muscle carbohydrate stores with exercise and nutrition, we know very little about optimising liver carbohydrate stores during and after exercise."

Both sucrose – which in its refined form is the sugar many of us keep in our cupboards – and glucose are carbohydrates that are known as 'simple sugars'. They're quickly absorbed by the body to produce energy.

However, from a molecular perspective, they're quite different. Glucose is a monosaccharide, as is another sugar, fructose. When glucose and fructose combine, they make sucrose, which is classified as a disaccharide.

While many sports and energy drinks use sucrose, some use mixtures of glucose and fructose, and some purely use glucose. To your tongue, these all taste the same (ie. sweet and rather excellent), but when they're broken down by the body, their differences become pronounced.

The molecular structure of these sugars affects the rate at which we can absorb them in the gut, with sucrose being faster. This means that glucose-only sports drinks can actually produce gut discomfort, leading the researchers to recommend simply stirring some sugar into water as a preferable method of making exercise easier to bear.

While all sugars will help restore your energy levels, it's the rate at which they do so that becomes all-important when you're engaged in demanding exercise – especially if performance-based results are important.

"We [found] that the exercise felt easier, and the gut comfort of the cyclists was better, when they ingested sucrose compared to glucose," said Gonzalez. "This suggests that, when your goal is to maximise carbohydrate availability, sucrose is probably a better source of carbohydrate to ingest than glucose."

***


            So let's look at the economics

Do you really want to pay between $500 to $1500 a year for a couple of energy drinks a day, 5X a week, or does $41 make more sense?

In quickly calculating the cheapest prices for a wide variety of energy drinks per fluid ounce from Wal-Mart by buying bulk, it's just over 6 cents. So if you're like many people who will sweat it out and consume 2 energy drinks of 16 fl. oz each day you work out, the cost would average to about $2. If you have a routine where you exercise and consume energy drinks 5 times a week, that comes to $10. Multiply that by 52 and you get $520.  And that's for the cheaper, less marketed products.

But most people who visit a sports center or go on running/cycling tours with friends and family buy this stuff at its highest retail cost, where the cost-differential between exspensive brands at a corner store or the fitness center can be three times the cheap bulk cost at Wal-Mart.   These calculations were derived by spot-checking several sources and controlling it at Slideshare and is also a generally known phenomenom of the industry.  So if you consume two energy drinks 5 times a week from a sports center or a Seven-11, your cost would be over $1500 per year.

Science and most of the world uses the metric system, and the US is not yet on board with that rational simplicity. But 500 ml is close enough to a 16 oz bottle of energy drink. Diluting the recommended 8 grams of sugar (sucrose) per 100 ml of water comes to 45 grams of sugar per 16 ounces, times two, equals 90 grams of sugar, which is roughly 3 ounces per day. Duplicating the above calculation to find the yearly consumption, we get 780 ounces of sugar. Sugar is sold by the pound in the US, which is 16 ounces. Hence, we get a value of apx. 49 pounds per year. That sounds like a lot, but is not inconsistent with the analysis from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which indicates that Americans per capita consume 156 pounds of added sugar per year.

Wal-Mart sells a 4 pound bag of sugar for $3.50, which is roughly 90 cents per pound. That brings the total per-annum cost of the sugar to apx. $40.

Now we have to calculate the cost of the water. One thing to keep in mind is that according to Business Insider, bottled water can cost almost 2000 times more than tap water when consumed in 16 oz containers.

So let's calculate the tap water price for crying out loud, since many bottled water tests indicate that tap water wins.  And this includes New York City

NYC sells tap water at $9.87 per 100 liquid cubic feet. Let's call that $10. 100 lqd cubic feet equals about 750 gallons, which makes the per-gallon cost 0.13 cents. In controlling that figure, Reuters bears that up. The average price of a gallon of tap water in America lies between 0.1 to 0.6 cents per gallon. Using the baseline of consuming two 16 oz drinks per day, times 5 per week, times 52 per year, we get a value of 8320 oz of water consumed per year, which is 65 gallons. That's about 85 cents per year.

Add $40 for the sugar to 85 cents for the water... well, let's call it $41; there's wear and tear and cleaning costs for the water bottle.

Do you really want to pay between $500 to $1500 a year for that energy drink, or does $41 make more sense?

And if you are additionally seeking a safe hit of caffeine, just make a cup at home before going out.  It'll only cost you 8 cents if you use a well-known freeze dried.  The high-caffeine energy drinks out there aren't delicately brewed with gourmet beans.  Also, energy drinks with caffeine can be dangerous

In a future article related to this, we will explore the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the bottled water industry.

WTF MARS?

Let's ask Abraham Lincoln.

In October of 1818, nine-year old Abraham Lincoln lost his mother, Nancy, most likely due to the milk she had consumed from cows that had eaten the white snakeroot perennial, which contains the toxin tremetol.  Four years later, and with the support of his stepmother, Sarah, Lincoln set out alone on a long journey from the tiny farm cabin the family called home, to begin the 2nd short bit of his only formal education. Estimates suggest the 4 mile journey could have taken up to 3 hours each way, depending on weather conditions. Just try to imagine that day's circumstances of poverty, when local resources were very limited. What good reasons would have allowed the Lincoln family to spend that much expensive time and energy for Abe to cross a relative wilderness, just so he could spend a few hours between journeys discovering new information not likely to reap any obvious rewards at home? Each hour he walked would have required at least 120 calories of food, and that's just for starters in terms of costs and risks, with no obvious payback.

No one back then knew what would happen some 40 years later, when Lincoln's brain was challenged beyond reasonable expectations to problem solve the very survival of the United States of America to free the African American slaves. And he succeeded, on both counts. Imagine the state of the Union today, had Lincoln not made those risky and expensive journeys of learning in his youth, and had instead listened those who suggested he should stay at home, and status-quo produce by working the land?

Again...

Why The Fuck MARS?

Let's now ask the rocket scientists, well, after this short preamble.

Could it be that to go there inspires forth the absolutely best stuff in humanity, in terms of our evolution into the future, and despite all good arguments that we ought to first get our act together here at home, on this planet? This thought captures a fundamental concept in both human history and evolutionary biology, of just how unique to adaptation the human brain can be. It's often been postulated that human beings thrive on challenges, and decay without them. And the very journey itself, including all its risks and stress factors, does interesting things to the brain and the many scales of environments, including social, it interacts with.

"The Mars Underground" video, first produced in 2007 but now with updates from this decade's knowledge base, hosted by Dr. Robert Zubrin, a NASA aerospace engineer and founder of the Mars Society, is a powerfully informative 1-hour documentary that deeply explores, well, Mars of course.  But perhaps more significantly, it explores the human potential, relevant to our here and now highly endangered world. At your leisure you will be richly rewarded by spending quality time with the whole hour and ten minutes of it, absorbing and critically thinking the information, including the historic. For it critically engages, with simple terminology and visually stunning graphics, all the right scientific, philosophical and political/socioeconomic questions. And it looks to a future where humanity could diverge from many of the historic inertias that continuously bind us to a vestigial world view, including the oligarchic and religious, which keeps leading us to repeating, in increasingly global-scale impacts, so much of our present-day irrational inhumanity.

Remember, every historic – and, from all evidence, prehistoric – human step of going where none have gone before towards whatever knowledge, comforts and lack of stressors many of us might enjoy today, relative to even some decades ago, has always occurred from the platform of that contemporaneous society's often violently self-destructive narcissistic politics (as judged by contemporary humanistic and scientific standards). Think of the horrific American slave world of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and certainly that of Europe's Christian genocital empire building of Columbus' time, never mind the more modern contemporaneous hells of battling for civil/equal rights, ongoing racism, religious/nationalistic fundamentalism (to wit, the double standard employed by FBI's J. Edgar Hoover), Vietnam War/Cold War etc of Neil Armstrong's historic moment of glory. And we learn... perhaps not as fast as we truly should in too many cases. But we learn.

Our ability to ever better model complex systems, from the human brain to the interactive sum total of all the planet's ecosystems -- the biosphere  -- and the anthropogenic factors in climate change , including its social impacts, are largely due to scientific seeds necessarily nurtured forth by the 1960's projects that led to Neil Armstrong putting a human footprint on the moon in less than a decade of imaginative and rational work. This is also the decade, during which the co-founder of Intel, Gordon E. Moore, noticed that the number of data-crunching components per area of integrated circuitry appeared to double every year or two, leading to what's commonly referenced as Moore's (exponential growth of microcircuitry) Law. Well, computing is currently reaching towards platform scales and speeds better defined by quantum mechanics, which theoretically makes Moore's Law virtually irrelevant from various scientific POV's. And from this multidisciplinary work's cutting edge, mostly by having been technologically better able to define the anthropogenic problem via a world community on the same page, solutions are emerging to help solve humanity's worst self-wrought nightmares... as well as those theoretically threatening us from space or from beneath the ground we walk on, or from the micro-organic world of diseases.

In fact, everything that we've learned which is thermodynamically irrational about present-day anthropogenic greenhouse discharges, leading to global warming, actually can be utilized to theoretically evoke an atmosphere on Mars within a century, according to studies, which sets the stage for realistic Terraforming.

"Many people think the universe has a big sign on it that says, 'Do not touch,'" states NASA astro-geophysicist, Chris McKay, at minute 1:08:33. "...I can respect that view, although I disagree with it. I think the universe has a big sign on it that says, 'Go forth and spread life.' Because when I look around at the universe, I think life is the most amazing thing we see. It is just incredible. We human beings are uniquely positioned to help spread life... Earth's gift to the universe, I think, is the gift of life..." In terms of purely thermodynamic principles, systems that intelligently spread life make rational sense.

Among the many others you will meet in the documentary is former shuttle astronaut, Franklin Chang-Diaz. He eloquently begins a discussion on some psychological issues, including that most basic one which can evoke all sorts of behaviors and decision making, for good or for bad: fear.

The overall socioeconomic, historic and scientific insights featured here, articulated and graphically illustrated by a world community of scientists, engineers, critical thinkers and students, comes very close to the cooperative international community of a world without borders, as philosophically envisioned by Gene Roddenberry via Star Trek.

It is not coincidental that Roddenberry's vision, which developed out of seeing the world for what it is through an adolescence and early adulthood that included observations of deep racism, poverty and empire building, and World War II... and then McCarthyism, Korea, a Cold War fought violently hot by proxy via banana republics in the Americas, Vietnam etc... grew into a weekly fictional plot-line on television during the Apollo years of humans factually crossing the most dangerous boundary ever.

If we get down to it, including looking at how the Ebola Epidemic was fought once the world listened to the international scientific community, there really is a cooperative world without borders on this planet. It's always just a keyboard or touchscreen away. And as I think this, John Lennon's, "Imagine," resonates in my brain yet again.

We began this IFZ journey to Mars by asking Abraham Lincoln why.  So now let's ask John F. Kennedy.  He responds quite directly and dramatically in 2 minutes here, or just read two more sentences below for the sound-bite




"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things (accomplishments and aspirations), not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
--President John F Kennedy, September 12, 1962