24 April, 2009

Some fundamental concepts do not change over revolution nor technological advance

Few people without creativity nor knowing the true sense of nature would say things have been changed or humans are different from animals. They want to separate themselves from the natural instincts and try to categorize themselves as something new or different. Indeed, that is the problem of how human minds are conditioned to think in one way. I got my sense back when I was playing with the class system of OO programing. Then I realized the programming can add another insight to my thinking. Seriously the class system is better way to understand the matter organized from the conceptual view and functions. I could go on with C# notations, but it is just a supplemental part, and I keep my story short with the English sentences.

Say, people evolve from animal level entity, but humans have basic instincts inherited functions that are shared in the animal level.

class animals
{
life HP; // derived from "life" - HP means hit points
int age; // these two can be stored as interface and can be derived
// for "creature" that would be which is the parent of "animals" class

eat() {/*code here*/ }
sleep() {}
communicate(){}
reproduction(){}
..........
}

class human : animals
{
string FirstName, LastName, MiddleName;

// more functions and variables added
..................
}

Then, I thought about how much the fundamental form of human life is derived from animal level. If we think about "hunters-gatherers" society which is the earliest and the basic level of human living. I thought the same traits are shared by some animals.

Here is the original picture of hunters. (The picture is liked from this site)


And the picture of the animal gatherers. (The picture is from this site)

Is hunting and gathering is what animals share as their functions? Agriculture surely something that animals do not share with humans. However, it makes me to think if an animal, like the squirrels learn to cultivate crops from what they put the grains under earth, will it makes them to be able to evolve closer to humans? I think that "what-if" was something similar to the story in Orwell's Animal Farm.

Another example, the invention of the steam engine to the nuclear plants. Can you believe the way both technology work in a simple mechanism that is created in 17th century?

Steam-generated electricity is the backbone of civilization. In the United States, more than 88 percent of all electricity is produced by steam turbines, according to the National Energy Information Center. Most non-nuclear steam plants are fired by fossil fuels, that is, coal, oil and natural gas. What all of these fuels have in common is that they contain carbon. During combustion, carbon in these fuels combines with oxygen in the air to produce carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas that plants love but environmentalists love to hate. And with good reason. Carbon dioxide appears transparent, but it blocks the passage of infrared-frequency energy. This, in turn, creates the well-known greenhouse effect, linked to global warming.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/1282106.html


If someone can design an engine using something different from just fire and water, it would be a revolutionary technology like the invention of agriculture. And I think the knowledge of how to create a steam engine is something people must taught to every child like basic math and reading skills. Without the proper knowledge of what made human life improved from the past, humans cannot keep the level of knowledge in case of epidemics. Someone can just list up the necessary knowledge to keep the modern human life like agriculture, printing, steam engine, etc. Such knowledge should be kept available for each city or town level. I am sure such effort is worth to save human life just as a bible in a motel room.

I understand that the use of animal's natural body temperature as a source of energy and the artificial life form can be used as the source of heat to replace the steam engine mechanism with burning resources. But this won't go anywhere without violating human or animal rights. Such technology would reduce the CO2 production though.

By the way, I figured out NetBeans is a powerful tool if it comes with some add-ons. The Visual Studio came in one pack, so I did not get how to use NetBeans or how to check API descriptions from where. Now, I have an environment comfortable to play with Java.

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