Rime per le masse

Il nostro nuovo disco è gratis e potete scaricarlo qui, mentre qui sotto trovate i video dei singoli.

Perché è gratis?
Perché dopo tutte queste disavventure sentivamo necessario dare via tutto e ricominciare da capo.
Perché la musica, se nessuno la ascolta, rimane cosa inerte.
Perché ci amate e ci seguite da anni.
Perché continuate a farlo.
Perché ve lo meritate.
Perché l'Hip Hop non muore mai.

Il vero stato della ricchezza in Italia AKA siamo nella merda

Grazie al sempre informatissimo ByoBlu, che ha il vizio di controllare le sue fonti e farsi due conti.
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La Banca d’Italia dice che nel 2009 tutte le famiglie possedevano più o meno 350 mila euro in beni di vario tipo. E’ la vecchia storia dei morti sulle autostrade. Se ogni anno ci sono mille viaggiatori e cinquecento morti, significa che siamo tutti mezzi morti.
Invece la vita insegna che c’è chi muore e chi se la spassa. Nella fattispecie, delle 24.905.042 famiglie italiane [al 31 dicembre 2009, fonte Istat], ce ne sono 2 milioni, 490 mila e 504 che se la spassano, possedendo oltre il 45% dei 9 miliardi e mezzo di euro cui assomma la ricchezza lorda di tutte le famiglie messe insieme, e oltre 12 milioni (12.452.521) che se la vedono male, dovendo spartirsi un misero 10%.
In parole povere, col cavolo che la ricchezza di ogni famiglia assomma a 350 mila euro: ci sono 10 famiglie su 100 che hanno in media un milione e mezzo di euro a testa e 50 famiglie su 100 che non arrivano a 70 mila. Di più, queste ultime hanno un reddito medio familiare annuo di 8.019,30€ contro i quasi 200 mila euro delle 10 famiglie vip.
Tanto per schiarirvi le idee, se la torta intera fosse la ricchezza disponibile, e ogni smiley fossero 2 milioni e mezzo di famiglie, la situazione del nostro paese a tutto il 2009 sarebbe più o meno questa.
10 famiglie su 100 hanno uno spazio vitale degno di un imperatore, 40 si accontentano di un modesto giardinetto privato (sono quelle che fanno la settimana bianca) e 50 vivono accatastate le une sulle altre come e peggio delle galline in un moderno allevamento di polli, dove la luce del sole è un miraggio e se vai di corpo fai lo shampoo a quello di sotto. La storia tristemente insegna che prima o poi le 50 faccine rosse, livide di rabbia, invadono i giardini fioriti delle 10 faccine sorridenti, che smettono di sorridere.
Buon senso vorrebbe invece che, sulla torta, ciascuno avesse più o meno lo stesso spazio, ma ciò che alcuni chiamano ragionevole, altri lo chiamano comunismo. Punti di vista.
Intendiamoci: una distribuzione di risorse e di ricchezze perfettamente equa è utopica e forse contraria alla natura competitiva dell’essere umano, ma anche un sistema sociale nel quale il divario in termini di benessere sia tanto esasperato da suonare offensivo è insostenibile.
Nel loro “Study for the World Institute for Development Economics Research” [2001], Giovanni Andrea Cornia e Julius Court mettono in guardia da un egualitarismo eccessivo nella distribuzione della ricchezza, in quanto porterebbe a incentivi-trappola, speculazione, grandi costi di operazione e corruzione nel sistema di redistribuzione. Il risultato influirebbe sul potenziale di crescita del Paese allo stesso modo in cui inciderebbe un’iniquità estrema, che distruggerebbe la coesione sociale, aumentando il malcontento pubblico, alimentando il conflitto sociale e causando incertezze riguardo ai diritti di proprietà.
La politica pubblica insomma deve avere come obbiettivo un intervallo di inegualità efficiente. Come si fa allora a incentivare il merito senza creare buchi neri sociali che si accrescono indefinitamente?
In statistica, per misurare il grado di concentrazione di una risorsa si usa il coefficiente di Gini. Corrado Gini, statistico, economista e sociologo italiano morto nel 1965, mise a punto un metodo di calcolo della disuguaglianza dei redditi chiamato indice di concentrazione di Gini, che si basa sulla curva di Lorenz.
In soldoni, funziona così: sull’asse delle x metti le percentuali delle famiglie in ordine crescente. Ovvero: il 10% delle famiglie, il 20%, il 30% e così via. Sull’asse delle y metti invece, ad esempio, le percentuali di reddito che le stesse famiglie si accaparrano. Un punto sul grafico (x,y) dice che quella certa percentuale di famiglie x ha a disposizione quella certa percentuale sul reddito totale y.
Non bisogna essere laureati in matematica per capire che la perfetta equità si ottiene per tutti i punti del grafico che hanno la coordinata x uguale alla coordinata y. In parole povere, sono tutti i punti ideali che rappresentano un paese dove il 20% delle famiglie ha il 20% del reddito totale, il 30% ne ha il 30%, il 40% ne ha il 40% e così via fino al 100%. Abbiamo cioè appena disegnato una linea retta, la linea di perfetta uguaglianza.

Di contro, all’opposto della situazione ideale c’è la linea di totale inequità, ovvero quella condizione nella quale il 10% delle famiglie ha lo 0% della ricchezza totale, così come non ha nulla il 20% delle famiglie, il 30% e via discorrendo fino al 99,9%, perché esiste una unica famiglia che si accaparra tutta la ricchezza disponibile, ragion per cui quando la linea di totale inequità raggiunge il 100%, fa un balzo repentino e discontinuo al 100% della ricchezza.
Le situazioni reali, cioè quelle intermedie tra la linea di perfetta eguaglianza e la linea di totale inequità, sono quelle descritte dalla curva di Lorenz.
Ecco, l’indice di Gini misura quanto la curva di Lorenz si discosti dalla linea di perfetta eguaglianza, in rapporto alla linea di totale inequità, e si calcola dividendo l’aera racchiusa tra la curva di Lorenz e la linea di perfetta eguaglianza per l’area totale sotto alla linea di perfetta eguaglianza. Il coefficiente di Gini, insomma, è un rapporto che intuitivamente varia tra 0 (quando, in una situazione di distribuzione della ricchezza totalmente uniforme, la curva di Lorenz coincide con la linea di perfetta eguaglianza e dunque l’aera è nulla) e 1 (la curva di Lorenz coincide con la linea di totale inequità, e dunque l’area che delimita con la linea di perfetta eguaglianza e l’area totale sotto la linea retta coincidono, dunque il rapporto vale 1). Più il rapporto si avvicina allo zero, più avremo equità di distribuzione; più al contrario viaggia verso l’1, più avremo condizioni di forte disuguaglianza reddituale.

L’intervallo di inegualità efficiente, quello nel quale la ricchezza ha una distribuzione tale da consentire lo sviluppo dell’economia, è compreso tra 0,25 e 0,40. Secondo il World Factobook 2009, questa è la rappresentazione del coefficiente di Gini rispetto alla distribuzione del reddito nei vari paesi del mondo.

I paesi più virtuosi sono quelli scandinavi, mentre il Sudafrica, con un coefficiente maggiore di 0,6, appare come uno stato con un divario reddituale fortemente esasperato. A titolo di nota metodologica, per i paesi molto estesi il coefficiente di Gini può non essere preciso, quindi i valori degli Stati Uniti e della Cina sono da leggersi con cautela.
Se poi andassimo a verificare qual è la distribuzione della ricchezza a livello mondiale, scopriremmo che il 60% delle famiglie italiane ha una ricchezza netta superiore a quella del 90% delle famiglie di tutto il mondo, con una quota sulla ricchezza netta mondiale del 5,7%. Calcolando che il nostro PIL si attesta sul 3% e che rappresentiamo numericamente meno dell’1% della popolazione mondiale, il risultato è sorprendente. Del resto se volete gloriarvi dell’appartenenza a una casta di privilegiati basta che facciate un semplice test, disponibile su Global Rich List. Selezionate euro come valuta di riferimento e inserite il vostro reddito annuo. Alcuni scopriranno senza difficoltà di appartenere allo 0,98% più ricco del pianeta. Poi, certo, bisognerebbe misurare anche il potere d’acquisto del vile danaro e non dimenticare che esistono beni che non si possono depositare in banca, come la possibilità di vivere e respirare aria pulita sotto a cieli azzurri, o di passeggiare in mezzo a foreste incontaminate traforate dai raggi di un sole che illumina milioni di granellini dorati in sospensione sotto a un tetto di foglie. Per molti di quello 0,98%, le immagini appena evocate non sono altro che reminiscenze lontane di un atavico ancestrale inconscio collettivo, da rievocare collettivamente celebrando il rito della memoria su Discovery Channel o al più su Nat Geo.
Ma è a pagina 29 del documento di Banca d’Italia che troviamo un dato a dir poco sconfortante. L’indice di Gini applicato alla ricchezza netta delle famiglie italiane, calcolato per il 2008, è pari a 0,613. La ricchezza è cioè fortemente concentrata nelle mani di poche famiglie, lasciando alle altre le briciole. La situazione è ancora peggiore, ma questo era prevedibile, per quanto riguarda la concentrazione delle attività finanziarie che, attestandosi allo 0,763, testimoniano come maneggiare titoli e azioni non sia proprio alla portata di tutti, mentre le passività finanziarie, ovvero i debiti (mutui e prestiti personali) sono quasi esclusivamente a carico di pochissimi fortunati, essendo caratterizzati da un coefficiente di Gini pari a 0,907, delineando così una curva di Lorenz che accarezza molto da vicino la linea di totale inequità.
Ricchezza e debiti per due ristrette élite, insomma, le une che fanno da contraltare alle altre.

Ma per comprendere appieno di cosa stiamo parlando, forse è il caso di scoprire le carte e mostrare in maniera inequivocabile il significato della parola inequità sociale. Tenetevi forte.
Mentre la maggior parte degli italiani può ritenersi fortunata se ha uno stipendio di 1800€ al mese, visto che lo stesso documento della Banca d’Italia fotografa un rapporto ricchezza netta / reddito disponibile di 8,2 (p.27, tavola 2A) - il che per 12 milioni di famiglie significherebbe un reddito annuo di poco più di 8 mila € - ci sono membri di quelle 10 fortunate famiglie che hanno redditi personali da multinazionale.
Il signor Carlo Puri Negri, ex vicepresidente esecutivo di Pirelli Real Estate, guadagna circa 38 mila €. Al mese? No: al giorno! Il che fa qualcosa come 14 milioni di euro all’anno. Claudio De Conto, che di Pirelli era solo direttore generale, doveva accontentarsi di 7 milioni e 200 mila euro all’anno. Il tronchetto della felicità, come lo chiama Grillo, al secolo Marco Tronchetti Provera, guadagna circa 15 mila euro al giorno, caffè più caffè meno: 5.600.000 euro all’anno. Luca Cordero di Montezemolo si fa 5.177.000 euro l’anno, Sergio Marchionne 4.782.000, più o meno come l’ad di Finmeccanica, Pier Francesco Guarguaglini. Alessandro Profumo (Unicredit) e Paolo Scaroni (Eni) viaggiano sui 4 milioni e rotti a testa, senza contare stock option e cumuli di cariche.
Per par condicio, due idoli del calcio come Eto’o e Ronaldino non si allenano se ogni giorno non ricevono rispettivamente 37.410 € e 71.942 €. Parliamo di 780 mila euro al mese per il primo e di 1 milione e mezzo di euro al mese per Ronaldino (9 e 18 milioni di euro all’anno). Con questi ingaggi, si capisce perché possano permettersi di fare un anno bene e altri tre a cazzeggiare.
Steven Spielberg, invece, guadagna 287.770 € al giorno! Ovvero 6 milioni al mese, 72 all’anno. George Lucas fa meglio: 489 mila euro al giorno (10 milioni al mese). Tom Cruise vivacchia con 16 milioni all’anno.  Johnny Depp fa lo scemo per 216 mila euro al giorno, ovvero 4 milioni e mezzo al mese (53 all’anno). Adam Sandler fa l’innamorato impacciato per la modica cifra di 115 mila euro al giorno, Roland Emmerich grida ciak per 50 milioni di euro all’anno e Ben Stiller si esibisce in lineamenti ed espressioni intelligenti per non meno di 105 mila euro al giorno (38 milioni all’anno).
Ma c’è anche chi, come un certo Carlos Slim (amministratore delegato di Telmex, di Telcel e di America Movil) vede il proprio conto in banca gonfiarsi al ritmo di 53 milioni 237 mila e 410 euro al giorno, poco più di un miliardo di euro al mese, che fanno 13 miliardi all’anno. Alla quarta settimana, lo si può vedere rubare le briciole ai piccioni in piazza San Marco. [fonte: il tuo salario]
Intanto, il debito di quelle famiglie italiane che un coefficiente di Gini pari a 0,907 condanna al rimborso perpetuo di rate inestinguibili sale costantemente. Dal 1995 al 2009 è passato da 255 a oltre 860 miliardi di euro.

Quanto tempo passerà, prima che i 31 milioni di italiani ammassati nella fetta rossa della torta decidano che è venuto il momento di dare una risistematina alla spartizione del benessere?

Sopravvivere al futuro 1/6 - Pianificare nel lungo periodo

 

Quel che voglio dire richiede accuratezza perché sia pienamente compreso. 
Estrema attenzione.

È particolarmente complicato. Mi ci è voluto un po’ per capirlo.

Raccontare correttamente ciò che vorrei richiederebbe grafici, tabelle, diagrammi e foto, perché quel che sto per dire è possibile e ha solide basi nel reale, ma necessita di prove per essere creduto. Ce ne sono moltissime, ma non qui. Ho pensato all’argomento per anni e questa è solo la parte finale di un processo di ragionamento il più possibile informato, prolungato e di intensità stabile nel tempo: ci vorrebbe un saggio che non ho le capacità e le conoscenze di scrivere ma, oh, quanto vorrei. Non posso aspettare oltre. Voglio parlarne a qualcuno perché penso di aver realizzato a un livello di dettaglio soddisfacente qualcosa di incredibilmente importante, almeno per me.

Surviving the future 6 - Farming the Universe

First part here.
Second part here.
Third part here.
Fourth part here. 

Fifth part here.
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Not only stars die.

Everything dies.

Our galaxy will eventually be swallowed by the black hole in its center, like most other galaxies, and that will probably disappear too. Recently a group of Italian physicists has claimed to have observed just that, something Stephen Hawking predicted in 1974: the evaporation of a black hole. It has to be verified, but even protons are thought to be unstable in the very long haul. Matter itself, given enough time, could degrade into nothingness.

Our universe contains only a finite quantity of energy for intelligent life to exploit.

If you've followed me to this point you already know what I'm about to say: we should plan ahead. We should envision ways to tap that energy. We can start small, as always, from Sol. As of now nearly all of its radiation is wasted in space. We could build a Dyson sphere (or a Ringworld) dismantling what remains of the planets in our star system, trapping the Sun inside and using all of its energy. We could live on the inner surface, at various degrees of gravitational pull. We can go further on and begin to farm the Galaxy. If we will able to gain control over gravity we will perform wonders. Once a star is used up we could gather still young ones and arrange them in schemes, each one with orbiting planets of our choice. We could even cause new bursts of stars formation modifying the concentration of interstellar gas. We could exploit the energy released by evaporating black holes, harnessing their x-ray emissions.

We could leave behind our bodies.

We could learn to live as coherent information finely embedded in the fabric of spacetime itself. Freeman Dyson envisioned something like that.

And then?

After that, I really don't know.

It's hard to imagine how we will appear many thousands billion of years from now. We will be alien. We will be utterly incomprehensible to a modern human being. We will be creatures of energy. I don't know.

One thing, though, I do know: we should start working on our survival now.

None of this will be feasible if we don't set our mind to it.

We have the capability, the technology, the infrastructure, the economical potential to build it all. We could lose it in a matter of a few years, a few centuries at best.

Still, we don't try. We're not at it. Not even remotely.

We're limited, but we demonstrated time and again that we are able to overcome our limitations by means of our ingenuity and intelligence. We can do it if we really learn to cooperate, if we give proof that we are mentally sane as a species. If not, then we deserve extinction.

The choice is ours.

What do you want to do?

Surviving the future 5 - Harnessing evolution

First part here.
Second part here.
Third part here.
Fourth part here.
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There are other solutions, too, to circumvent the limits imposed by c.

For example, crafting Von Neumann machines is not beyond our technological grasp.

Those are machines able to build, primarily, copies of themselves, secondarily other machines or structures, using materials taken from the surrounding environment. A self-replicating probe could be sent to another star system at sub-luminal speed. Once there, no matter how much time it takes, the probe will start mining out raw materials from the available asteroids, moons, gas giants and whatnot, to create replicas of itself. These replicas would then fly off that system toward other stars while the original probe could stay and start not only analyzing the athmosphere and the soil, but also building a full-fledged colony complete with factories, recycling plants (air and water, if necessary), power plants (geothermal, solar, nuclear), habitats and so on.

This initial probe would be followed at a distance of several years by a manned ship in which the crew is either conscious of unconscious. The former would be a generation ship of the aforementioned kind, the latter is feasible if we discover a way to suspend indefinitely our metabolism, i.e. “cryostasis”. Upon its arrival the crew will have only to disembark, check that everything's working and start living off the land.

In substitution for a manned starship we can envision a cheaper one, one in which a full life-support system is not even required. We could build a much smaller and crude hull full of frozen embryos – of animals and human beings alike. I'm aware that this is much more speculative but, given the technology, the machines themselves will thaw the embryos and educate the persons they will become.

They will be different from us, even radically so. Another kind of human beings.

Change is a fundamental part of our history, of evolution and adaptation themselves, and adapt we must if we want to survive indefinitely. Unless we discover how to reach and surpass c our travels in outer space will be a slow process, painstakingly slow, and this is another reason why we must learn to plan ahead.

We must accept that expansion in space will change us. Other values of gravity, sunlight with a different spectrum, differences in soil and air chemistry... all this will modify our body and mind. The voyages themselves will require us to be open to the necessary adjustments. Changes in our environment, existent or generated by us, will change our species just like it has already happened before. The meaning of the word “humanity” will shift to include something we cannot envision today. New creatures, separated by many generations from us apes evolved in Earth's savannah, as different from us as the first mammals from modern man, will bring on the history of our species. They will not be human in the sense we intend today. Our definition of a human being will not be valid anymore, as it is nonsense now when referred to our lemurid ancestors. This may be hard to accept, but it is inevitable if we are to survive the span of thousands of millennia or millions of years.

This is not even a novelty. We have already modified our own evolutionary process. We created an environment suited to our needs, we changed the conditions in which we live, so we transformed the influences this environment has on us.

We have already taken evolution in our hands. I propose that we do so openly and consciously. Genetic engineering is a promising field we don't yet fully understand, but it holds great possibilities and will be more than useful: it'll be fundamental to support our evolution toward new forms. We can adapt ourselves to microgravity, or let the space itself do that for us along the next millions of years. We could adapt our bodies to face every foreseen situation, like the colonization of a new planet with its chemistry and its biota.

We will become spacefarers, star-dwellers.

And then, only then, we will really be able to make far-sighted plans.

(to be continued... )

Surviving the future 4 - Reaching the stars

First part here.
Second part here.
Third part here.
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There's also another reason why it doesn't matter whether we destroy our solar system or not: it'll be utterly annihilated anyway, so every harm we will do in the process of expanding will be erased from existence in the long haul. Considering this fact and claiming that we need to think now about strategies to cope with it could sound awkward but, again, it's just a matter of facing reality and planning ahead. A matter of perspective. We are tiny, our species is not: it transcends us, it'll go on without us. What's wrong with taking necessary actions to prevent a disaster that surely, not probably, will happen in the future to our descendants? In this regard, I think that our short attention span is a critical problem and we should tackle it with all our strength, the sooner the better. Our lives are short and, having always been unable to effectively control our population, often brutal and miserable. Only a little percentage of individuals in the whole history of humankind has been able to engage in something more intellectually challenging than mere survival. The number of such people has never been so high, but this is because we are nearly 7 billion (and we spend nearly all our free time on FaceBook, but that's another story). The percentage is still low. They are still only a tiny fraction of the living. We need to prolong everyone's lifespan considerably, keeping growth in check in the meantime, if wte want to have a chance to grant the survival of the species.

Why?

Because Sol is dying, like any other star. It's happening in this very moment. Given sufficient time every single, fierce atomic furnace in the galaxy will become a dense pebble a few kilometers wide or a black hole, depending on its mass, and will be eventually swallowed whole by the swirling monster at the center of the Milky Way. It's an imperceptible process, but we know for sure that in 5 billion years Sol will change dramatically: the hydrogen feeding its fusion process will have been nearly all converted to helium. The energy generated by hydrogen fusion, pushing Sol's surface outward, will drop low enough to succumb to the strong gravitational pull of the Sun's mass. The nucleus of our star will rapidly shrink. The shrinking will concentrate helium and generate friction and heat, until the reaction is ignited again by sheer pressure. Helium will transform into carbon and Sol will become a red giant with a burst of expansion. It'll swallow Mercury and Venus, vaporizing them. Maybe Earth will not be completely destroyed, but its oceans will evaporate and its atmosphere blasted away by intense heat. If we don't get out of here that will be the end not only of humanity, but of all life on Earth. We know it'll happen. Why aren't we studying a way to escape?

And where will we go from there?

There are, once more, many choices.

The nearest star to Sol is Proxima Centauri. It's a red dwarf about 4.2 light-years from here, in the constellation of Centaurus, and it's part of a system with two other, much more massive stars, Alpha Centauri A and B. We still don't know for sure if there are planets orbiting this complex triple system, but we surely should take a closer look. Other suitable targets for interstellar travel are, in order of distance from the Sun, Barnard's Star, Sirius, Epsilon Eridani, Tau Ceti and Gliese 581. The latter is particularly promising because it has planets in the so-called “habitable zone”, at the right distance from the star to receive roughly the same amount of energy Earth receives from Sol. Liquid water could be almost certainly available there.

The problem is that even the shortest travel would require 4.2 years at the speed of light (from now on I'll refer to it using “c”). To give you an idea of the distances I'm talking of, the unmanned probe Voyager 1 – launched on September 5, 1977 – is about 17 billion kilometers away from Sol, that is... only 0.002 of a light-year. Not so far, uh? Well, it's the most distant (and still active!) man-made object. In four to six years from now Voyager 1 is expected to cross beyond the helioshere, the outer layer of the bubble around our solar system that is composed of ionized atoms streaming outward from our sun. Once beyond our heliosphere, Voyager will venture into the interstellar medium, which fills the space between stars, thus becoming humankind's first interstellar spaceship. It will come in proximity of the first star on its path (missing it “only” by 1.6 light-years) in 38,000 years.

You surely realize that the engineering challenge is staggering. We just can't imagine now a feasible way to travel fast enough to make similar voyages practical. There are theoretical workarounds such as the ones often used in science fiction novels, like wormholes or the Alcubierre drive (that is maybe more feasible than the former and could reach velocities much greater than c), but building a ship able to reach and maintain such speed is beyond our actual capabilities.

Fortunately we can do with only a fraction of that speed, if we get smart and plan our voyage right.

Using only available technology, a ship equipped with nuclear pulse propulsion could reach a cruising speed of 8%-10% c (it was a serious project: this is BBC's "To Mars by A-bomb" documentary, or click here to take a quixk look to some working models of the spacecraft). The same stands for propulsion based on a magnetic sail powered by a massive laser residing in our home system: such a ship could potentially reach even greater speeds, because it would not need to carry its own reaction mass.

If we can get good enough in building closed-cycle life support systems and we find a way to prolong our lifespan and we develop a permaculture, we'll be able to build generation starships with a real chance of success. We will not see our new home among the stars, but our descendants will. Once again the problems are huge... but this is the very reason why we ought to start working on them now.

(to be continued... )

Surviving the future 3 - Mining the sky

First part here.
Second part here.
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Why restrict ourselves to planets?

There are better places out there if you are looking for raw materials. Not many people is aware that we are literally surrounded by flying mountains of raw ores there for the taking: an asteroid belt, with pieces of all kinds and sizes in great concentration, floats just beyond the orbit of Mars. Sure, reaching one of them and towing it in Earth's orbit for dismantling would cost a lot of money. So what? The whole mass of one carefully selected chunk of rock will be mainly made of cobalt, platinum, manganese, molybdenum, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium, carbon, iron, nickel, silicates of various kinds and water ice too. A lot of crystal-clear, pure water for our thirsty world. All this elements are essential for economic and technological progress as we know it, and one – one! – single asteroid could change forever and for good the face of our global economy. A comparatively small metallic asteroid with a mean diameter of 1 km could contain more than two billion tons of iron-nickel ore, that is two to three times Earth's annual production. Bigger ones could supply the world production requirement for several million years. Those buggers are fat and they can help us getting out of our cradle.

Wonderful as it could appear, mining the sky is only the beginning.

We can hollow out one or more of those big rocks and build space habitats. The carving out of an asteroid will leave us with a lot of room and an additional reserve of hydrogen, hydrogen peroxide and nitrous oxide... that is, rocket fuel that we can use to propel our expansion toward the outer system. Imagine traveling cheaply from planet to planet without even abandoning our actual space technology: when you're not held on the ground by a strong gravitational field flying rockets gets a lot easier. We can go on using chemical boosters for short-range voyages because resources will not be an issue anymore.

With these comparatively poor technologies we could colonize the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, mine them and the gas giants for their most valuable ores and isotopes, then use those resources to start the terraforming of Venus and Mars, if it's not already under way. Our ingenuity and imagination will provide new ways to tackle the engineering challenges ahead. Why, we can imagine most of those technologies now, it's only a matter of finding out how to realize them in detail. Our mind will be, and is now, our most valuable asset, the key to the future of mankind. This is why I burn in rage when I think about our approach to science and education... and the role faith plays in it.

Many say that we shouldn't expand to other planets. They say that we have destroyed one already.

I usually answer: “So, what?”

Try to think for a moment about the scale of the things involved. Earth is a planet of respectable size, the biggest rocky world in our solar system. We walk on it and it seems infinite to our eye, but it's not. It's not even so big, compared to other planets like the gas giants. Jupiter has a surface area 121 times that of Earth and its mass is nearly 318 Earth's masses. But this is nothing: compared to Sol Jupiter is a puny puff of gas. The Sun holds 99.8 percent of the solar system's mass. The quantity of matter outside the Sun is insignificant.. it means something to us just because we are a tiny chunk of it that's sentient. We are less than dust and stand on a mote

But Sol is only one of the stars in our galaxy, and not even a particularly important or impressive one. It lays 26.000 light years away from the galactic core in a peripheral region of a lesser arm of the spiral, the one called “Orion”. The galaxy itself is 100.000 light years wide and contains from 200 to 400 billions of stars, with a huge black hole right in the center of it all.

Many of the stars have planets of their own, of every kind and size, many earthlike.

So, why shouldn't we export our civilization to our neighborhood? We are not likely to “ruin” it, and even if this is bound to happen it will not matter in the galactic scale. It will not matter at all, because by the time this solar system is used up we'll be elsewhere. We need to buy ourselves time to develop new behavioral strategies, new technologies, to cope with our nonsensical population growth rate, to learn new ways to care for the planetary and interplanetary environment. The only way to do this is starting to colonize our little patch of land. Trial and error. On the long run we will learn or die. So why shy away from trying? We can do, at most, very limited damage to our immediate surrounding before we go extinct. So... try we shall, in my opinion.

(to be continued... )

Surviving the future 2 - Out of this world

First part here.

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One of the best bets to fly cheaply off Earth is a space elevator, but there are many proposed designs not involving impractical rockets: skyhooks, theters, launch loops, fountains (these are, I think, particularly promising if coupled with efficient and clean energy sources, because we can realize them with the technology available now) and even orbital rings. For some of them we don't have yet discovered suitable building materials or techniques, but others lack only political and financial commitment.
Why don't we start thinking seriously about these technologies? Why are we not interested in the enormous, life-changing possibilities laying outside the thin layer of gases above our heads? The world economic potential is and will be immense while its resources are not yet depleted, and could be put to good use instead of being wasted on territorial squabbles for small change, that benefit only an insignificant fraction of the population. There is profit to be made in space, a lot of it.

This is one of the things that really baffle me: capitalism is always looking out for profit, isn't it? It's what it does, it's what it is. So how comes that it has not yet risen to the challenge? Political opposition to huge project without visible immediate benefits is strong, but I think that's not the issue. Politics never stopped a businessman running toward the money: twisting viciously the arm of a government of choice behind its back is the daily morning warmup for any serious international corporation.
Maybe they still don't realize what's out there.

Take Luna as an example. We've already been there. It's easy to reach, it requires only three days. It has an area of a quarter of all Earth's landmasses, a little smaller than the Asian continent. That's a lot of space to build colonies, labs, research facilities, factories, even sealed farms. Maybe we could live off the land, if we get good enough at engineering. But even without that, with regular support from Earth we could turn Luna into a second world to inhabit. It presents a lot of advantages. Its reduced mass means a shallower gravity well, so we could launch spacecrafts to the outer planets from there. It could be useful to produce materials not achievable on Earth.
Luna is not a rich world, because without tectonic activity it's quite hard to form ore deposits, but up there we can still find hydrogen, ammonia, methane, mercury, sodium, silver and even water, if only we find an economically viable way to extract them.

Mars is a better candidate. More massive, farther, but immeasurably more valuable for colonists. We should think about ways to terraform it, to make it suitable for human life. Many methods have been conceived to reach this goal. We can add water and change the content of its atmosphere (and its spin or tilt, if we want it) by slamming cometary bodies on it. We can seed martian soil with genetically engineered lichens and plants to help the building up of oxygen, we can induce a greenhouse effect to increase temperature. We managed to do the latter on our planet, in only 100 years and without realizing it: why not on Mars, willingly? It could really be a place to live on, and once a significant chunk of Earth's population is transferred there (or once Mars citizens start having children) we won't have all our eggs in one basket anymore. We will be able to draw a deep breath... and go on.
Humankind will eventually be relatively safe from accidents and the wondrous thing is that this is not our only chance. We have a variety of choices, of intermediate steps to take.

(to be continued... )

Surviving the future 1 - Planning ahead

Questa è la prima parte di un lungo, lungo post che sto scrivendo da giorni. Tradurrò tutto in italiano, prometto. Ma sento che la lingua più appropriata, ora come ora, è l'inglese. Spiego sotto il perché. A presto col resto ^_______^

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What I want to say here requires accuracy to be fully understood. Extreme care.
It's quite complicated. It took me a while to figure it out.
That is one of the reasons why I’m not writing in Italian, my mother tongue, and I apologize in advance for every mistake I'll make. I feel that writing in a language not “natural” to me, that I acquired later in life, applies some necessary constrains on the way I express my thoughts. It forces me to choose accurately every word to be sure I'm conveying the intended meaning, to pay scrupulous attention to the relationship between what’s on my mind and the physical, transmissible manifestation of that content. Another reason is a peculiar characteristic of English: its concision. It’s a neat, streamlined language, fairly simple to use but deep enough to serve well in complex explanations, a tool to articulate broad concepts with a few, simple words. It works particularly well, I think, when you’re talking science, so it’s perfect for this.

Ok, I can imagine your puzzlement… “Yeah, so what? Why are you chatting away on language? What’s the point?” You’re right, but let me indulge a moment, then I’ll cut to the chase.
Properly telling what I want to would require graphs, charts, diagrams and photo, because what I'm going to say is real but requires proofs to be believed. There are aplenty, but not here. I have been thinking about it for years and this is only the end of a steady, informed, prolonged reasoning process: it would require an essay I don't have the time to write. But I can't wait anymore. I just want to tell someone because I think I realized in detail something amazingly important, at least for me.

I want to talk about the future. I want to talk about what I see when I close my eyes and think about the potential of our mind. I think of a time I won't see, because I'll be as dead as a rock, but it doesn’t matter. I think of us people, all of us. The whole human race.
That is a particularly comprehensive “we”. Only a few persons really realize that we truly are all one and the same. We are the only conscious minds we are aware of on this or other planets. We are the only living species in the Homo genus of the Hominidae, the great ape family. We out-competed or simply wiped out by outright genocide every other species of Homo until we remained alone. We are very young, especially compared to the timescale of Earth, which is 4,5 billion years old. Anatomically modern humans originated in Africa only about 200,000 years ago, and we started leaving signs of culture only around 50,000 years ago. Recorded history began only 7,000 years ago.
We are latecomers. Brats, and spoiled ones at that. We are separated in groups and nations, often at war with one another, frantically scrubbing from the surface of the world what we need to be sure to be alive tomorrow morning. We can't see that our divisions are mainly caused by our short, insignificant lifespan. This triggers all the other problems we usually have when facing our everyday challenges. We wouldn't be striving blindly for personal advantage in spite of the consequences inflicted on the whole species, or even on our close neighborhood, knowing that we will be there to face them three hundred (or more) years later. Nowadays it is increasingly easier to see ourselves as a global community, to understand that the world will go on after our death, but we are still far from a deep awareness of this concept. Thanks to communication technology we have developed all the intellectual tools to cooperate as a whole. But we don't use them.
We usually choose to fight each other instead.
Whole nations, rallied up by propaganda studied to obtain a visceral response, try to grant themselves more profit through conflict, using the gullibility of individuals, exploiting faith and its blind willingness to be deceived, avoiding with every possible mean the development of rational inquiry unless it's enslaved to the powers that be – unless it’s not rational at all.
Our goals, as individuals and societies alike, are limited by our short-sightedness.
Our capacity to foresee what the outcome of our actions will be and act accordingly is obfuscated by the childish lie that it doesn't matter, because we won't be there in the flesh. The oil peak, the climate change... it's like we all believe in the reassuring tale that our descendants will take care of them, someone else, someone responsible, someone that's not us.

Well, we are that responsible someone. We are, very literally, stewards of the land, and this is a fact, not a fancy spiritual supposition. But we are terrible stewards indeed.
We ought to make plans, real ones, and we're not doing it. Not in the least. We squabble for air like chickens in a rapidly shrinking cage instead of thinking of a way to get out. We seem to be really, really stupid.
It concerns me.
I can't see why we shouldn't be planning our future for a span of at least a few centuries, better millennia. 5 or 6 hundred years could be the bare minimum to program short- and mid-term policies, set out a political, sociological, scheme, give birth through trial and error to a “permaculture” (the term is from Stephen Baxter's “Manifold” series, a much needed neologism that I thank him for) we can rely on. This is to say, a culture that will remain stable for an undefined period of time. This does not mean stagnation, because such a culture needs to accept diversity and the possibility of change just to avoid imploding on itself, but also to guarantee innovation, creation, development of new scientific fields and ideas. Many arrangements are possible, the really important thing is that none of them should lead to the destruction of the civilization it serves. We need to learn true reciprocity to reach peace and stability, because the old maxim “one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself“ is a good, rational way to preserve both the species and the individuals. This kind of culture is the starting point needed to set up a permanent state of cooperation. Building it will be our mental sanity test. If we are able to do this by consensus, without the need for and burden of authoritarianism, we have what it takes to go on and maintain it. Complete unanimity is obviously really hard to obtain, if not impossible. We should be particularly cautious not to impose on the unwilling and, at the same time, be sure that everyone understands what we are doing and does not try to stop us, whatever they feel about it. They need to see the evidence. We need to work for a way of thinking, feeling, organizing ourselves, to emerge from the common awareness that we have to. Maybe for the first time in human history, we have the means to deliberately create a fair, if not just, way of living, one that could be achieved only if we see, not beyond doubt but beyond any reasonable (and I mean “rational” too) doubt - that we must if we want to survive. An entire species engaged in a project of social engineering on itself. We can finally become responsible for ourselves, for our actions, for our uninterrupted existence in the future. Some things are far too fundamental to be left to our irrationality, to faith, to dumb choices done by individuals unable to see the damage they're doing to themselves. This could be the first collective step into a self-consciousness that only a handful have experimented before.
With a tool like this, we could put up an honest fight for our survival or, why not, for our thriving among the stars.

We can get there even before reaching the permaculture. I said we should be planning on the long term. But how long is “long”? 5 hundred years is only a start, the minimum. We have to plan ahead, hundreds of thousands of years ahead, especially when considering economics and resources. That will be the foundation of a much wider and deeper round of planning.
We could, and I think we should, be on Mars by now, or have a permanent base on Luna.
We really should, because we are like the crew of a generation starship... that is, a slower-than-light spaceship, traveling to nearby stars, in which the original occupants grow old and die, leaving their descendants to go on with the voyage.
Think about it.
We live our lives off in a closed, self-sustaining environment we have to maintain if we want to remain alive. We run on limited fuel, have limited resources and space. We transmit our culture to the next generation, in order to keep the society functioning, the crew healthy... but usually we don't pay much attention to the ship. We haven't realized yet that we are confined here. We can't see the hull, or the roof, just because they're not made of steel or concrete. Our atmosphere is our cage and shield, and a flimsy one at that: only about 10 km thick. The phrase “sky's the limit” it's quite claustrophobic, when you think about it.
Well, we can take brief strolls outside our planet-sized starship by sending out shuttles, but we are trapped in a gravity well that forces us to use crude, expensive, controlled explosions to lift insignificant masses from the ground and hurl them into space. It's not easy and it's not cheap.
Finding a way to launch in orbit great masses at a fraction of the price is the starting point of human expansion in the solar system. And expansion we need, for we are countless. Until we don't settle our growth rate to maintain a stable population we're doomed to look for new land to inhabit. That is possible and, I think, a viable temporary solution until we learn to control our birth rate by social means.

(to be continued... )