MPJ

It is definitely not easy to answer this simple question with a word or sentence. Perhaps the best and only answer I could think of is that "it would make perfect sense" for the imminent future of humanity in 21st century and beyond. However within current world order we are living in today, it is far from being applicable for one 'teeny-tiny' reason - it would require canceling of what is well rooted today. The political system of Nation-State governmental polity that in one form or another exist almost everywhere on the planet. To cease that from existence is one of those Sisyphean tasks that is almost unimaginable to achieve. In simple words, in order to make City-State the only governmental polity we would have to nullify countries and to erase borders from the maps. Not only that, it also means the politics and politicians would have to reduce its influence and their numbers significantly which is also a task comparable to the impossible efforts from the mythical...

Do you know how big is our Solar system? I can't be sure of course, but there's a strong possibility that common knowledge about our planetary neighborhood ends with enumerating most of the planets, one dwarf planet and couple of named moons, asteroids and comets. Amazingly, the truth is far, far beyond that and believe it or not, if we include Oort cloud, the Solar system, with us representing its only living residents, is approximately 3 light years in diameter. This is, more or less, equal to 3e+13 kilometers or 30.000.000.000.000 km. The distance about 100 million times bigger than the distance to the Moon. It is tremendously huge and just about one and a half light years shorter than the distance from our Sun to the nearest star! The layout of the solar system*

It's simple really. Nothing is wrong with it. Society, like anything else created by our social behavior, is following human evolution ever since we started living together within small and functionally organized communities. In the beginning there was a simple need for this - it was impossible for just one man to hunt down one, for example, mammoth or to defend a family from the herd of prehistoric saber-tooth tigers and the only solution was to get together and organize a little for the mutual benefit. Not to mention everlasting need for prolonging the species which also required, sort of, well, socializing with a member of opposite gender. Mammoth hunt and prehistoric society* We can only wish that things are as simple as it was millenniums before. If we disregard the fact that socializing in order to save the species didn't change much from the times where humans shared the habitat with mammoths, all other aspects of one human society, due to the thousands of years...

Just like a single ant who's lost in the large expanse of Brazilian Casino Beach ( Praia do Cassino , 250km in length, considered to be the largest beach on Earth), and felt as small as possible in surrounding space, we humans are experiencing similar sensation when it comes to space and especially time. But, contrary to ants, we have the ultimate tool, called science, that is allowing us to see beyond the horizon. If we could place ourselves in ant's shoes, we would find clues and evidence all around us and, metaphorically speaking, no matter of large quantities of sand grains, we would know that we were on the beach. And with time, when it comes to history of life, all the clues lie in fossil records of coral reefs. The main study, performed by J.E.N. Veron in his publication " A Reef in Time ", identified five periods in Earth's history with major extinction of corals that built reefs. In all five periods, fossil records of the reefs needed millions of ...

There will come one day in the future. Relatively and astronomically speaking, it might come sooner than we think. It could happen way before we realize that there is no turning back. The day when mother Earth will simply say - sorry guys, I have no more energy to sustain this kind of life anymore and when most of biodiversity cocoons on Earth will reach the ultimate hazard and start imploding back into themselves. Air and water pollution will help a lot and not even planet's regular motions will be able to take us into another interglacial cycle. It is as much inevitable as what we are going to do next. We will take a long look toward the stars and say: "Well, we have to do this sooner or later. It's time to leave the Earth. Time to jump into Christopher Columbus's shoes again. And find the new home." But we will not get far. There will be no warp drives, "phasers on stun", robots, AIs or artificial gravity like in Sci-Fi blockbusters and there will b...

Do you ever wonder why we work like we work? Why working time lasts those eight hours and why takes the best part of the day? Who made it this way? And why? It all started with industrial revolution in early 19th century which culminated into real nightmare for most of workers, especially in large factories, where long working hours were mandatory and kept people outside their homes all day long. The working day was 10 to 16 hours, six days a week and not only for adults. Use of children was cheap and preferable. Deaths and illnesses from exhaustion were common and it was cruel and inhuman. Eventually, the nightmare spread from workers toward capitalists as well, in form of rise of social movement with Robert Owen's famous slogan " Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest ". Well, today, almost two centuries later, we now live, more or less, in Owen's vision, work around eight hours per day and enjoy our lives during the work or after. Or bot...

Do you remember United Nations? The worldwide organisation created just after the sunset of World War Two with mainly one goal - to prevent global warfare in the future and to deal with our planet outside the boundaries of it's members? United Nations Security Council* Yes, it still exists, somewhere on the island of Manhattan, with its powerless debates and Security Council decisions without much responsibilities for those who signed them as well as for those affected in any way. Sadly, the power of global government never actually made to UN, despite all the good efforts throughout the years and it always staid with those in individual countries, or groups of them, either politically or geographically or ideologically divided. The truth is that there was no big decision in the history of the mankind, either good or bad, that is made by some mutual organisation of any kind. Those are all made by either one man alone in some sort of dictatorship, or by a small group of li...

What do you think is THE fastest thing on Earth and beyond? I am sure if you first thought of a heavy rocket capable of taking astronauts to the orbit in less than 2 minutes or the fastest spacecraft we ever built with its speed of almost 90000 miles per hour, the answer would easily be NO. Comparing to what I am referring to right now, all those great man made machines are traveling only little faster than snails. Not even the motion of a planet or a star is even close to the speed of .... one little thing traveling as fast as human thought ... and simply called ... TIME. The time is the only thing that travels so fast that sometimes it seems that some memorable event engraved in our memory banks years ago, looks so vivid in the present like it happened only yesterday. If we look our children and how rapidly they grow, or ourselves, for that matter, caught on some picture in the past we simply can't get rid of the feeling and obvious question of how on Earth, time passed that ...

It was May 20th of the 1883rd year of AD when people living in Dutch East Indies, back then in 19th century, started to feel more intense earthquakes and to spot first steam venting out of one of three volcanic cones, just above the powerful caldera in today's Indonesian archipelago of Krakatoa. In the following days of May eruptions started from the one of volcano peaks and after a week or so calmed down only to issue a warning for what would come in following months. What started happening on June 16th and culminating in August 27th is now well known as the most massive and powerful volcano eruption in the documented history of mankind. William Ascroft's pastel sky-sketches* The eruptions were so powerful that the most intense explosion was heard all the way down in Perth, Australia, which is almost 3000km south of Krakatoa. On the west, across the Indian ocean, people located almost 5000km on the islands not far away from Madagascar thought it was cannon fire from n...

Couple of months ago, in the middle of December last year, just before "Mayan doomsday" on 21st, my favorite text editor asked me to approve its regular update. I clicked the link to see what's in new package and it immediately redirected me to the page describing new features and fixes. My fellow, software developer of great Notepad++, Don Ho*, conveniently named the update "New release (v6.2.3) - End of the World Edition". It brought series of chuckles to my face that simultaneously morphed into big smile when I read description below the title. Referring to Mayans prophecy, he wrote exactly this "Even though I don't believe this bullshit, I'm not against to reset our shitty world". Well, I don't know what exactly he meant with the word "reset", but certainly there are days when I can completely agree with him and describe our world exactly the same way. Viktor and his 6th Earth Day Anyway, today is another edition of ...