People are Great, Weird and Dangerous

by Jack

If you wished to live in interesting times, then your wish has certainly come true. Interesting probably isn’t a strong enough word to describe our times. It’s closer to a combination of words, like compelling, foreboding, enraging, stupefying, riveting, sad, frustrating, gripping, ominous and engaging. Never before have so many had so much information, so much opportunity, so much education and done so little with it! But, for those who have done something with it, well, they practically own the world! And the have- not types, they complain that they are being abused because the movers and shakers have so much! We (government) ought to shift away their wealth to the needy masses that do little or nothing.

Did you know we launched the first rocket with a payload that landed itself? The private spaceflight company Blue Origin just launched itself into the history books by successfully flying and landing a reusable rocket. And then there’s SpaceX, they developed another self landing rocket called the Grasshopper. This is a huge break thru for space exploration because these reusable rockets will slash the cost of launching important things into orbit.

Just yesterday radio telescopes picked up mystery radio signals from outside our galaxy. Five strange signals were detected at the Parkes radio telescope in Australia. They follow the same pattern as previously detected radio bursts with one exception — one flashed twice. Twin blasts separated by just 2.4 milliseconds came out of some sort of eruption that happened roughly 9 billion years ago in the constellation Octans, David Champion, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, and colleagues report. The fact we can even track this stuff is beyond the imagination of our great grandfathers.

And this just in, there’s new hope in the fight against cardiovascular disease. There’s been breakthrough research identifying a pigment in our bile which could protect us. The fluid is called bilirubin, its produced by the liver and stored in the gallbladder. Mildly elevated levels of bilirubin may provide natural protection from heart attacks and help to stave off cardiovascular disease.

I could fill pages with great discoveries that occurred in just the last decade. So, it makes me wonder why more of us are not benefiting? We sure could, because the information is out here! We have the freedom and intelligence to exploit so many creative and innovation things and pursue almost anything we want! So, can somebody explain to me why we are still wasting our time and precious resources on so many pointless endeavors, like war, terrorism, politics, crime, and other stupid things that get us nowhere? We are so brilliant and so stupid at the same time; its miraculous that we’ve made it this far! We exist with one foot in the modern world and the other in the 10th century. We are just plain weird, there’s no other way to explain it.