Once again, the Speculative Fiction Showcase is delighted to welcome our occasional regular, A.E. Williams. As always, all views are the writer's own.
Scroll down for details of an upcoming guest appearance by A.E. Williams at the Sacred Mushroom Summit - Sages of the Americas conference in September, in Gainesville, Florida.
WHAT
ON EARTH IS GOING ON?
The other morning, I was having a nice
warm cup of Brownian Motion,[1]
sitting on my deck in the back of the house, watching the thermometer inch up
towards 100 degrees Fahrenheit. That kind of temperature is kind of normal, in
this neck of the woods, for this season, Summer.
I learned as a wee lad[2]
that the planet Earth orbited the Sun, and not the other way around, despite
the best teachings of the Catholic Church and astrologers. I found out that
there were four seasons, here in the United States of America.[3]
They were Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring.[4] Of
the four of them, Summer was the hottest. Winter was the coldest. Spring was
wet, and flowery. Fall was Holiday time.
That was about it. No one worried about
‘global’ anything, except Salvation. There were conflicts across the world, of
course, but those were happening far away in countries whose names were funny,
and to people who were barely human, not having known Christ and all. Heck,
there wasn’t even any Holy Water™ in the Red Sea, and it was practically in
Jesus’ back yard![5]
With this fantastic education, I embarked
upon a worldview that took some severe hits over the decades.
Women as priests? Nuns without habits?
Priests who – well, enough about priests…
BIRTH CONTROL! Yeah, there’s something
that really is a hot-button issue, right? It’s not bad enough the world is
having tons of babies, like Nature intended. It’s wonderful! Wait, they aren’t
Catholic babies?
All those non-Catholic babies could be
brought into the fold, eventually, one supposes. Given enough Manifest Destiny…
But there was a terrible side-effect from
all that Natural procreation stuff – people.
Billions of people. Billions of people
who need to eat, defecate, fornicate, get sick, die, grow old, get injured,
fart, kill, maim, become politicians, soldiers, scientists, engineers and
liberal arts majors.[6]
And, naturally, all of these people need
places to grow food, shelter from storms, harsh weather, and the random drone
attack, vehicles to move their goods from one place to another, such as trains,
planes and buses[7],
educate their whelps offspring, get birth control and other medications
so they will live longer and have better quality of lives, communicate across
their towns, states, countries and eventually fuck up the entire planet and
solar system.
This has been regarded as a bad move, by
some closed-minded individuals (and organizations, actually). However, another
set of individuals have become immensely wealthy and powerful from all of this
activity.
And, in doing so, we are now being told, they
have doomed the rest of us to death by Climate Change®.
Now, I have always been an optimist, even
when I was cynical, sarcastic and damning lightly with praise. It’s my one true
strength – the ability to see the silver lining next to the lead one in the
burial vault.[8]
And, in the spirit of that, (and also not
wanting to continue getting those glaring looks of hatred from my supposedly
doomed whelps children), I offer to the world, free of cost, the SOLUTIONS to
all of these thorny issues.
With a CAVEAT:
Seeing the political climate we are operating under today, I want to state right out front that I do not see myself as any kind of technology Messiah. So, for the following few minutes of reading, I want you, the Reader, to pretend that I am an alien, from Alpha Centauri, or thereabouts.[9]
GLOBAL
VARIABLES, LOCAL FUNCTIONS
Insurance
companies have this policy to not pay out money from premiums for incidents
that are routinely classified as “Acts of God.”[10]
These include fires, floods, lightning, earthquakes and the like. [11]
So,
let’s take a look at some of these “Acts of God” and see if we can do anything
meaningful about them, how much it might cost, and how long it will take to get
results. (Let’s also ignore the obvious solution for much of these, which is
“Don’t build there,” or “Move.”)
WILDFIRES
I want
to state right now that fire is a beautiful thing. There is so much magic in
the infernal dances of bonfire flames, on a cool evening, with the Harvest Moon
in the sky, the odor of oak and pine smoke wafting around the forest, the
background noises of cicadas and dying prey providing an almost Beethoven-like
quality to the happenings. It is at times like this when - cheroot tucked into
the corner of your mouth, a nice adult beverage in hand and a
forty-five-caliber pistol strapped to your belt - you really feel One with Nature
and the Universe.
If only
that distant glow of wanton, Hellish destruction in the distance weren’t so
damned close to your property…
It
occurs to pretty much anyone that wildfires are complex things, with a
multitude of causes, ramifications for power distribution, local economies,
federal…
Wait.
NO,
THEY ARE NOT!
It’s
really simple – let forests grow for a long time, and branches and leaves and
stuff accumulate. If the weather is such that there is a dry season, the
conditions are as such that a tiny spark may create a fire, that can consume
this detritus and grow into a raging inferno.
Fuel
+ spark = conflagration.
See?
Simple.
Putting
out a fire is simple, too.
You
deprive it of oxygen. You drown it. You cover it in flame retardant chemicals.
Or dirt.
See?
Simple.
SOLUTION: Get Bill “The Vaccinator”
Gates to repurpose his Solar Smegma®™ Aircraft Fleet to run coordinated passes
over wildfires, dropping water to smother the flames. Nanobots are optional.
CASE CLOSED.
FLOODS
Floods
are caused by too much of a good thing – water. Water is essential to growing
food crops, bathing, sewer systems and many other public health concerns and
proper hydration during heat waves.
It is
ironic, then, that when it rains, it pours – onto the slopes of mountains and
hills, and flat parking spaces, and farms, and into rivers and oceans. All of
these places don’t need a LOT of water, right?
How
then to mitigate flooding?
Take a
lesson from our nearest neighbors – the Martians.
Canals.
SOLUTION: Elon Musk can use his Boring
Company to build a fleet of subterranean earth-movers. These will drill a vast
network of underground canals, acting as capillaries, draining the offensive
liquids off into a convenient place. Say, a desert. Or maybe, the Grand Canyon.
The
desert can serve three purposes:
1) Oasis
2) Location for hotels and casinos
3) Water storage
Basically,
Las Vegas meets Lake Tahoe.
CASE CLOSED.
HURRICANES
/ TORNADOES
While
it seems there are more powerful, stronger hurricanes, and many more of them,
today than in times past, I would point interested parties into looking into
the history of this planet.
During
its formation, there were planetary storms, that lasted centuries, if not
millennia. They flooded the Earth, scoured entire mountain ranges flat, dug
canyons with their immense water flow, and generally made life, as we know it
today, possible.
Closer
to our own era, devastating major named storms[12]
in the last century can be counted on one hand:
1) Camille
2) Andrew
3) Katrina
4) A bunch of others who weren’t as
notable. Seriously, ALL of the storms combined produced damages of around one
trillion dollars. That is less than the current infrastructure bill being
floated by President Joe Biden.
SOLUTION: Firstly, mandate the removal of
all kinds of insurance for ALL coastal construction in hurricane-prone areas.
If you want to take the risk to build, it should be all on YOU, not the
taxpayers of land-locked states.
Next,
if you do decide to build there, (and, you shouldn’t!) then build low-cost
buildings that can be easily cleaned up. Again, it’s your mess, so common sense
dictates you should make things that don’t cost much to demolish. Like, maybe
use fire?
Finally,
forget about trying to ‘control the weather.’
The US
Military already is doing that[13]…
CASE CLOSED.
STORMS
Ibid.
CASE CLOSED.
EARTHQUAKES
Ibid.[14]
CASE CLOSED.
GLOBAL ‘WARMING’
SOLUTION: I am a huge proponent of Space
Technology, as you well know.
Having
worked in that industry for two decades, and as a follower of the latest and
greatest Space Race, I am convinced that the easiest and most cost-effective
way of reducing global warming is to put some manner of shading device between
us and the Sun, which is THE major contributor to this problem.
Much as
a window curtain or vertical blind, (or the Moon) can shield us from the
harmful rays of the sun, these devices would be positioned in such a way as to
provide a barrier between us and Old Sol.
Made of
Kevlar, or perhaps another material (see below), these giant Space Curtains™ would
be lifted into space aboard a SpaceX Starship, optimally, or perhaps a ULA
Delta Heavy[15].
Placed
at Lagrange points, these could be outfitted with ion thrusters, allowing for
the intensity of the solar rays that impinge upon our atmosphere to be
regulated.
This
could also see some actual utility for Branson and Bezos rockets, in that they
could be used to man outgoing flights on a Musk Starship for servicing these
miracles. Lockheed and Boeing could build space stations that would act as
staging areas for assembly and repair.
It
would be a hugely profitable industry.
As to
gathering the needed materials for the Space Curtains™, we have a literal
mountain of raw materials at our fingertips – the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.[16]
Using a
consortium of naval ships from around the world (I’m looking at YOU, China!),
coupled with cruise ships, we could construct floating factories that gather
this detritus and treat it in such a way as to reclaim the plastics for use in
the Space Curtains™.
Think
of the economic benefits of this! We are cleaning up the oceans, (for
fish-farming, see below), and shooting that into space to protect us from
Global Warming!
It’s a
win-win-win, since this also will quicken the pace for humanity to become ONE
RACE.[17]
Some
other benefits of this technology are they can be made using current
manufacturing processes, they will be relatively cheap, and when they become
too damaged for further use, we can just drop them into the Sun.
And,
best of all, you won’t have fleets of Solar Smegma™® aircraft dropping nanobots
into the jet stream. Those will be preoccupied putting out forest fires.[18]
CASE CLOSED.
‘CLIMATE’
CHANGE
Well,
this one is tricky. One supposes we could also float giant Fresnel lenses or
space-borne lasers, or lunar bases that can shoot microwaves or particle beams
at Earth’s less-warm areas, to heat things up a bit.
One
unfortunate side effect of this would be the accidental sparking of wildfires.
Another
would be increasing the Brownian Motion of Lake Huron or the Mediterranean Sea
to a degree where the entire planet could enjoy Earl Grey for a few centuries.
To be
honest, my crystal ball powers here are a bit underwhelming.
SOLUTION: TBD
WAR
Another
unfortunate side effect of space-based space heaters is war.
Now, we
already are dealing with this, and a lot of it is because of the lack of proper
resource allocation, made even more difficult by political grand-standing, warlords
and a generally inferior education system across the board.
See,
education is merely indoctrination to the ‘Old Ways.’ Novel ideas, much like
the ones in this article, are poo-pooed or denigrated as being ‘too fantastic,’
‘unreasonable flights of fancy,’ or ‘insane.’
That’s
because critical thinking is a vastly underutilized skill. Everywhere.
Want
some examples?
·
Why do cities allow building in areas that are prone to flooding? Or
wildfires? Or earthquakes?
·
Why do ‘intelligent’ people keep electing the same old political hacks?
·
Why is high fructose corn syrup a thing?
·
Why doesn’t the United States elect Nevada to be the ‘Solar Power
Station’ for the entire country?
The
answers to these, and many other vexing questions, are obvious to a critical
thinker.[19]
SOLUTION: This one will take some
political will, grass roots activism, and the banishment of money as a concept
of wealth.[20]
If
people seriously want to live in peace, then warfare is something that cannot
be tolerated. The resources expended on killing ourselves would be far better
used in getting humanity to a state of existence that is cooperative, and
beneficial for all living creatures.
Think
about how much medicine advanced DUE to warfare.
Now think about how much further it could have advanced against something like COVID, if those funds expended in conducting war were instead used in research for curing the human condition.
CASE CLOSED.
FAMINE
SOLUTION: Here I am going to list a few
subcategories, because they are interrelated with food and eating.
·
CATTLE
– Where’s the beef?
Isolate it to a few areas where it is grown, and find humane methods for
harvesting the meat. Soylent Green Lab-grown meat is almost here!
·
ALLIGATORS
– These are so
unendangered that people are hunting them again. Figure out what they are good
for besides handbags and shoes, and limit their population accordingly. Put
them on farms, until we figure out if they like Mars better.
·
TILAPIA
– Feed them to the
gators.
·
ENDANGERED SPECIES
– Clone the ones we
think will be useful pets, and don’t bother with the ones that like to eat us.
·
INVASIVE SPECIES
– Send them back to
where their ‘normal’ habitat is located. Feed people who drop their ‘cute
little python’ into the swamp to the alligators.
·
EXTINCT SPECIES
– Same as endangered.
If we can farm chickens, we can farm the dodo.[21]
· DEER and OTHER WILD GAME
– Move everything to
Australia, or Kenya. Whatever survives, we clone.
· FISHING - Now, this one has a serious
component. We KNOW how to farm fishes. We also know we need to clean up the
trash in the oceans, rivers and lakes.
We need
to combine these two facts into some kind of easy to create solution, such as:
GENETICALLY
MODIFIED TUNA, and CATFISH (One for salt water, one for brackish)
Using
CRISPR, these wonders of modern biogenetic science could be manufactured to eat
all the trash, and poop out monofilament line, much like spiders can spin silk
for their webs.[22]
Some
care would need to be taken to collect the resulting excrement, otherwise submarines
might get snagged in them.
CASE CLOSED!
GEOPOLITICAL
UNREST
Well,
as I mentioned above, warfare and money are two things we need to dispense
with, if we desire to take advantage of all the wonders that Space Curtains™
will provide for us. That may take some doing.
SOLUTION: I propose we either decide on a
Benevolent Dictator, or a Theocracy.[23]
CASE CLOSED!
CIVIL
ISSUES
Ibid.
CASE CLOSED!
POLLUTION
SOLUTION: Follow Musk, et al, off-planet.
CASE CLOSED!
Now, you may be wondering, if you are still ‘stuck’ in the traditional paradigm of capitalism or other ‘isms’, one very important thing:
HOW THE F**** ARE WE SUPPOSED TO ‘PAY’ FOR ALL THIS, A.E.???
Man, my
windows just blew out from the collective screams of everyone bellowing at once
about cost, blah blah blah!
Why
do you think Billionaires exist?
BILLIONAIRE MAGIC CARPET RIDES
Realistically,
all the money in all the world would not be enough to do these projects. So,
why should we care?
Fleecing
the rich is obvious, but it denies the entire problem with we humans. We are
greedy little bastards, who are genetically programmed to survive. That means
we hunt, gather, procreate, fight, horde, kill, rape and murder other human
beings to get what we ‘want.’
It’s in
our nature. Human nature. You won’t really be able to breed it out of us for
centuries, if we are lucky, or thousands of years, if we let Nature take its
course.
SOLUTION: Nanobots.
Hear me
out!
What if
we could somehow inject nanobots into the bloodstream of the typical human?
We
could use them to program behaviors, using some manner of radio energy. Maybe
Wi-fi, or something… In any event, all we would have to do is come up with an
Artificial Intelligence engine. It would
have to be able to deduce how humans behave, from observation of billions of
us, over a long time period. Some manner of tracking device would need to be
carried by us, all of the time. So, maybe it could be functional, in a way that
ties it to the global economy. Like, maybe it is some kind of ‘smart’ device, that
allows us to make transactions easily. The public media could help us decide
what we need to buy, and consume, and maybe even some games could be put on
them, so that we are entertained, and engaged as much as possible.
Heck,
even our personal computers can have keyloggers or something, to allow the AI
to gather as much information and data as possible!
With
all of that, these nanobots can be deployed, and everyone can live in peace! No
one will suffer! No one will starve, or be lonely, frightened or poor!
Think
of the possibilities!
We
could get rid of cars, since everyone will just need to order using their
voice, or maybe the AI will SEND you what you need!
Yeah,
that’s it!
All we
need is some method to induce people to inject these nanobots into their
bodies, or maybe we can skip that altogether and just spray them into the
atmosphere. It probably would have some physical properties…maybe like snot? Or
smegma? Who knows?
So, we
can just dye the delivery solvent silver or maybe black? Then, we spray it into
the upper troposphere. Hey, I’ll bet it can help cool the Earth! Cool! Cool,
cool, cool!
You
know who we should enlist to help us do this?
Billionaires!
They
have ALL THAT MONEY! They must be SUPER smart!
Damned
geniuses, every one of them!
Someone
should get Bill Gates on the (smart) phone!
Stat!
CASE CLOSED, AI Master.
A.E. Williams
High Springs, Florida
July 25, 2021
[1] That’s what I call my particular blend of Earl Grey, sugar and the
thermodynamic miracle that is hot H2O.
[2] When I went to Catholic Parochial School, almost all of the
teachers were nuns, and about 98% of them were from Ireland. So, that’s what
they called us. ‘Wee’ whatevers… It’s also where I discovered Earl Grey tea,
the Holy Trinity, transubstantiation, the Eucharist, that Jesus died for our
sins, that masturbation is really bad, and the interesting concept called a
convent …but, I digress.
[3] You should remember that the doctrine to which I was indoctrinated
was very White Anglo-Saxon Protestant-centric, even though taught by the
Catholic Church. According to this, the United States of America was given to
us by God, by dint of superior firepower and Manifest Destiny, and not ‘white
supremacy,’ Christopher Columbus got here first, and not the Vikings. And, the
inhabitants already here were known collectively as ‘savages.’ Colonialism was
something taught to us at England’s knee, and empires lived forever, except
Rome, because they also killed Jesus. Ah, misspent youth…
[4] Some Yankees argued about a mythical fifth season, called “Autumn.”
They ‘autumn’ just call it ‘Fall,’ like all right-minded people.
[5] Forget about lakes of wine, even if He could walk all across each
and every one, right?
[6] I have it on good authority that Lawyers are of the Devil.
[7] Coming soon to a spaceport near you – Amazon Prime
Intraplanetary Express!
[8] The lead lining is to keep the radiation in; the silver lining is a
Faraday cage for better Wi-Fi reception.
[9] And, frankly, I am tired of defending all of that. I am, much like the Dean in ‘Community,’ complicated…
[10] Who says worshippers of Mammon aren’t biblical?
[11] “War” is its own category,
and drone strikes are typically not covered.
[13] Source: More
Wikipedia. Pay attention to the HAARP and Operation Popeye bits…
[14] Source: Still MORE Wikipedia. If you think this is ‘fictional’ you aren’t paying attention. Especially of late… Actually, I am throwing this one on Elon. Those Boring™ machines can be upscaled into Planet Tunnelers®, and used to relieve the stresses on the tectonic plates.
[15] I suppose Jeff Bezos ‘New
Glenn’ could be press-ganged into service, but I dread seeing a giant floating
AMAZON banner in the sky, 24/7.
[17] The HUMAN one, duh!
[18] Sorry, not sorry, Bill.
[19] Especially when he is sitting next to a bonfire on a cool, winter’s evening, under the Harvest Moon, drinking bourbon and classic Dr. Pepper, idly sighting his .45 at random noises, a smoldering cheroot in the corner of his mouth, and a satisfied grin on his face.
[20] I am not saying to remove money from our system. I am saying the accumulation of money as an arbiter of someone being ‘better’ than someone else is an idea whose time is far over. More money does not equal ‘smarter.’ I leave it to the industrious Reader to Google for examples.
[21] Of course, if everyone goes Vegan, we won’t need either. Just
Test-Tube Turducken™, baby!
[22] On a side note, I am totally AGAINST genetically modifying spiders,
in ANY fashion.
[23] Either one will work, but
the cost in human lives will understandably be enormous. Of course, this is
just Standard Operating Procedure, where I come from.
A.E. Williams will be a presenter at the Sacred Mushroom Summit - Sages of the Americas Conference in September, in Gainesville, Florida
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