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An Appeal to Academia.
Despite the advances that are being made
in amassing of knowledge by humankind, not enough of this knowledge
is being used to improve the overall quality of life on Earth, even
though, arguably, there is enough knowledge available that would
enable humankind to improve the living conditions of all life on
Earth considerably.
That humankind's knowledge is not fully applied to improving the
quality of Life on Earth might be mainly due to the fact that the
application of knowledge to the what-so-ever various problems that
might exist on Earth rests in the hands of people whose power and
wisdom to apply knowledge to solving of our problems is limited at
most times.
This creates a situation where on one hand individuals who
specialize in creating and enhancing of humankind's knowledge are
free to create and enhance as much knowledge as they can and want,
only to see, on the other hand, this knowledge not being applied to
its full potential extend.
Humankind's knowledge has become very specialized--it is impossible
for anyone to know enough on most subjects in any of the fields of
knowledge. This situation limits our ability to plan our future
effectively--it is difficult to achieve an agreement on what
the ideal future should be since we don't understand each
other well enough to communicate effectively.
This situation might be helped by creating of a model that would
that would act as a sort of a "sandbox" in which all the diverse
ideas on the subject of what the ideal state of affairs on Earth
should be would be tested, vetted for doability, for being in
accord with all that we know of earth and social processes, in
which any and all knowledge available would be applied to
portraying of an ideal Earth. Creating of such a model would permit
a vast co-operation across all the fields of all sciences--the
closest thing to unification of sciences there might ever happen.
The model would be based on the best reason for the existence of
science: an actual application of knowledge for the benefit of life
on Earth.
Creating of such a model would permit a vast co-operation across
all the fields of all sciences--the closest thing to unification of
sciences there might ever happen. The model would be based on the
best reason for the existence of science: an actual application of
knowledge for the benefit of life on Earth.
The on-going creation of such a model would eventually start
presenting a picture of life on Earth progressively approaching
better and better the ideal.
The model would be an "ombudsman" without any executive powers,
however one that would be powerful by the strength of presenting a
model of for life on Earth optimal conditions based on all the
knowledge available, to whose opinions the
powers-that-there-might-be could gradually be attuned and
subsequently sufficiently educated to apply their powers
appropriately to the real needs of life on Earth.
No situation, or a research objective modeled could be too small,
nor too large in scale, nor would anyone be prevented from trying
to improve on any instance modeled, since the model would be
ideally accessible by anyone on Earth. Any solutions to any
problems would have to be, beside being consistent with the
knowledge available in the database, open to anyone's critique and
to anyone's improvements.
Learning how to participate in the ongoing creation of the model
would be the best possible education ever obtainable, because one
would have to learn knowledge that would be pertinent to a
successful co-existence of all of life forms on Earth.
All the components necessary for the creation of such a model are
readily available--potentially all the PC's in the world linked
together by, perhaps, using "distributed computing" (which would
enable the model to exist without requiring any particular physical
location) and the existing data-bases at all the institutions of
learning there are. The labor necessary for running of the model
could be gotten by diverting of the effort that goes into research
that is being done already on solutions vital to humanity into
conducting research within the model, thus reducing unnecessary
redundancy and improving the quality of research by enabling more
researchers from many more fields of science than is currently
possible to work on those research problems together, and so vastly
enhance the quality of any such research.
On a local community level, where everyone knows everyone and also
knows what everyone's function within the society is, a computer
would not even be necessary since a model of an ideal community
would be easy to contain within the community's commonly shared
consciousness within which everybody's opinions pertaining to what
the community's ideal existence ought to be are known to all.
The Earth has only one possible future, a future that is the result
of all the individual actions that are meant to improve the lives
of all the individual actors and their progeny. By resolving
conflicts that are a natural consequence of carrying out the
individual actors' wishes for better conditions of their lives in a
model, rather than in real life, a great amount of, mostly
unnecessary, suffering could be avoided.
Thank you, Mr. Jan Hearthstone.
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