Friday, April 8, 2011

To the Seventh Generation

I think I first ran across this concept while studying Cultural Anthropology in College. I thought it was a really great idea, even if it isn't accepted at all in today's modern world.

This is the basic idea. Much like in "The Gods Must Be Crazy": The Movie when the coke bottle was set in the middle of the Pigmy tribe in Africa for everyone to meditate on it, the concept of "To the 7th generation" is a way of the elders of a tribe thinking about any new invention and a group of them just meditating and thinking about how this new invention will help or hurt all tribal members for the next 7 generations. (a generation is either 20 or 25 years depending upon which you choose to use) or how long before a child grow up to have children and so on. So 7 generations would be either 140 years or
175 years. So, if any invention could be foreseen to hurt the tribe within that time period it could never be used ever.

For example: in western societies if we had done this there would be no nuclear weapons, no machine guns, no dynamite, no nuclear power, no computers or robots.

So, let us take one of these things that you and I are using right now.  You might say to me that Computers are a good thing.

I would say to you that they are both a good and a bad thing for all mankind and for all life on earth. In fact, in the end they might even be the death of human individuality, human physical social gatherings, and in the end might one day even result in humans being forced back into the stone age if we have a big enough solar flare to disrupt enough power sources on earth to lose most electromagnetic stored software. Even though anything on non-magnetic media (like CDs and DVDs)  aren't affected at all by Solar Flares or EMPs (Electromagnetic pulses), it would be likely that a lot of software and a whole lot of data worldwide would never be recovered that was stored in magnetic media. The hard drive to your computer and your camera chip are usually magnetic media.

And this is just one aspect of this. Now take, Robotics, Nuclear weapons, machine guns, bullets, etc.
For example, today I heard about a successful US Navy test of a laser weapon that was effective for miles. Now wouldn't that change land and sea warfare if all you had to do was to literally put a light on any tank or soldier or ship or plane for them to burst into flame or be cut in two?

So, the idea of putting ANY invention (whatever it is) to the full scrutiny of the public and what its effects would be for 7 generations would change all life on earth and maybe even protect our unborn children for thousands of years to come.

Note: Here is a video of the US Navy setting a boat on fire at a distance with a laser.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/04/video-navy-laser-sets-ship-on-fire/

Here is also a quote from the same page that the video is on. Begin quote.

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Video: Navy Laser Sets Ship on Fire

With clouds overhead in the salty air, irritable Pacific waves swelled to up to four feet. Perfect conditions, in other words, for the Navy to fry a small boat with a laser beam — a major step toward its futuristic arsenal of ray guns.
Researchers mounted the Maritime Laser Demonstrator, a solid-state laser, aboard the USS Paul Foster, a decommissioned destroyer. Off the central California coast near San Nicholas Island on Wednesday, the laser fired a 15-kilowatt beam at an inflatable motorboat a mile away as both ships moved through the sea. As the above video shows, there was a flash on the boat’s outboard engines, igniting both of them in seconds, and leaving the ship dead in the choppy waters.
All previous tests of the laser have come on land — steady, steady land — aside from an October test of the targeting systems. But for the first time, the Office of Naval Research has proven that its laser can operate in a “no-kidding maritime environment,” says its proud director, Rear Adm. Nevin Carr.

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