My Life & Plans
Over the past 29 years, 5 months, 23 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 25 seconds…
I have learned only a little bit about the world in which we live… but I try to take a multidisciplinary approach to learning: I diversify my interests, explore them, refine what’s important, and repeat.
I try to take wisdom from wherever I can find it and in doing so, I’ve picked up snippets of knowledge from many areas that together synthesize a comprehensive world-view. From my perspective, we live in an incredibly beautiful, interconnected, and mechanistic universe. Because of this, it can be measured, predicted, and shaped.
Our understanding and application of knowledge is moving so fast… as soon as someone says “That’s impossible!”… someone else chimes in to interrupt them, while doing that impossibility.
Let us always hope to find ourselves in the second camp.
I’ve chosen three goals that others claim impossible, and I want to use my abilities to help solve them. First is government transparency. I’ve chosen it first because it is the parent to so many other problems. Second is fossil fuel dependency. Third is overpopulation.
These problems vary in importance and difficulty, but I think all of them have to be solved for humanity to have a long term vision for survival. Sounds a little sci-fi when you write it out, but if you look around.. these problems are encroaching. We need to frame them in the right context, and take them seriously.
Government Transparency: I am a proponent of democracy and free markets, but not monopolies. This is the simplest explanation of what is going on in the United States and elsewhere: If you learn all the loopholes, you can manipulate any system. The only solution to this corruption is to expose the loopholes. But to expose the loopholes correctly, you need stronger public and civic engagement. Many have proposed transparency through e-democracy.. and I agree. So, I want to help build a product for citizens to directly engage with politics in a completely novel approach: Base it around the issues we face, instead of partisanship!
We’ve got some big things in the works.
Fossil Fuel Dependency: The use of fossil fuels has enabled humanity to explode in technology and in population. Our surrogate food supplies are enabled by a sea of oil and mountains of coal that pollute our environment and inefficiently power our lifestyles. If we can reach grid parity with renewable energy sources, we are on our way to independence. But we need more than that. The technologies of late are only possible because we found this cheap source of fuel only a bit over a century ago. The more energy we can harvest from clean sources the better.
Overpopulation: The touchiest of all subjects, yet also the most critical. Like it or not, our planet has a set of rules that specify how populations are managed throughout biology. As humans, we are not exempt to these rules and we either balance ourselves or nature will. The solution to this problem seems to be education. In fact, the strongest corollary with a reduction in population growth is women’s education. Got any ideas?
That’s the game plan… and I know I can’t do it alone. However, I am not going to let the things I can’t do interfere with those that I can.
If you are passionate about changing the world for the better answer below or contact me.
I read my own mail, so please be considerate.
If you had unlimited resources and connectivity what would you do?
People Who’ve Influenced Me: My Dad, My Wife, Thomas Jefferson, Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin, Thomas Kuhn, Albert Einstein, Jeremy Bentham, Nikola Tesla, John Stuart Mill, Richard Feynmann, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Bertrand Russell, William of Ockham, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Paine, John Locke, David Hume, Christopher Hitchens, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, Robert Boyle, Issac Newton, John Maynard Keynes, Carl Linnaeus, Anaxagoras, Michelangelo Buonarroti, MC Escher, Napoleon Hill, Henry David Thoreau, Andrew Carnegie, Ayn Rand, Upton Sinclair, Gregor Mendel, Frank Lloyd Wright, Anders Angstrom, Henry Ford, David Ogilvy, Noam Chomsky, Alan Turing, Thomas Malthus, Robert Hooke, Gottfried Leibniz, Leonardo Fibonacci, Max Planck, Enrico Fermi, George Bernard Shaw, TS Eliot, Linus Pauling, Jacques Fresco, Milton Friedman, Desmond Morris, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Erwin Schrodinger, John Von Neumann, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Baruch Spinoza, Lao Tzu, Johann Goethe, Issac Asimov, Karl Marx, Werner Heisenberg, Mohandas Ghandi, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Benjamin Franklin, Dieter Rams, Steve Jobs, Nelson Mandela, Bruce Lee, Georg Hegel, Sun Tzu, Joan Goodall, Alfred Nobel, Hans Rosling, Seth Godin, Max Miedinger, Carol Twombly, Banksy, Marie Curie, Francis Bacon, Bob Marley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jared Diamond, Al Gore, Karl Popper, Auguste Comte, Jon Stewart, Elon Musk, Chris Anderson, Edward Wilson, Bill Bryson, Ivan Pavlov, Steven Pinker, Blaise Pascal, Douglas Adams, Sam Harris, Doug Waring, Mark Zrull, Michael Windelspecht, Julian Shull, Howard Neufeld, Niels Bohr, Daniel Dennett, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Siddhartha Guatama, Joel Salatin, Jimmy Wales.. so many more…
