The meaning of life

For life it takes a few elements that make up DNA (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus).

It seems that some form of life will always survive, even after the disintegration of the Earth. The elements after the disintegration of the Earth disperse in space and could potentially be the source of new life.

For some reason, life (the cycle of creation-reproduction-decay) is created when there are favorable conditions for it. Evolution is a process of improvement and better adaptation to the prevailing conditions.

It may seem that the goal of humans is to survive and prepare for the worst scenarios. Ideally, if we reach a higher level of civilization (type III civilization on the Kardashev scale). 

But is it really so important for life to keep its most advanced form? We need it to be able to understand our universe. We need to preserve all information so we (future life forms) can extend it to absolute maximum and understand what's going on. But is this information so important? Maybe the process of learning and evolving is enough?

Elon Musk's mistakes?

Hero

Elon Musk is one of the most inspiring men in the world. He is an example of entrepreneur that doesn't think only about money. It's not his main goal. Money are just resource he needs to reach higher goals. He is a real super hero, surpassing all comic book ones.

As a big fan of him, I need to admit that not all of his ideas are rational for me. He makes bold statements which are usually avoided by scientists or domain experts. Usually it's a sign of ignorance 

SpaceX and Mars colonization

I've found interesting article that wraps up the idea and related problems How and why SpaceX will colonize Mars.
It seems that humans are designed to live on Earth - it took some time to evolve to our current form. Everything tells us that it's impossible to survive on other planet. Maybe designing new life and sending it to Mars and wait could work? Maybe by changing our DNA we could create improved version of human, basically a martian.

Electric cars

Are Toyota engineers stupid? In some case fuel cells seem to be more reasonable choice. There is no place for few different solutions?

For any enthusiast of clean energy, it should be desired to develop as many promising technologies as possible to increase chances of success.

(post written in 2016)

Religion

Heritage

When I was a kid I knew only one religion - the one of my parents. Because I was born in country which is religiously uniform, whole my childhood I believed there was only one religion and one god. I liked to read bible. I treated it as a history or adventure book. Jesus Christ was like a hero for me - with his super powers he was like Superman or Spiderman for kids today. God itself was for me wise old man with appearance similar to Santa Claus.

Doubts

Later, after few years of education, when my knowledge about world was increasing, I noticed that religion is in contradiction to science. The Bible is full of paranormal events, that can't be explained by science. My first suspicions were raised by The Book of Genesis and creation of the world and woman. Even with my primary education I knew enough to be sure it couldn't happened. I also found out that there were more religions - so I realized that it was a pure coincidence that I was brought up as a catholic. In other country I would be a child of other god!

Reasons

I can imagine that people invented God because they had to explain things that they couldn't explain in a rational way. It makes totally sense. At the beginning we used our whole knowledge which was derived from observations of other people and animals. So we created human-like gods who were responsible for all good and bad things. An interesting thing is how given religion or ideology gains new followers. Even nowadays, in Silicon Era new religions are created (like Scientology) and people still believe in complete nonsense and take it without any proof. Probably people need to belong to some group or community to feel some kind of support and understanding from other people.

Science, bitch!

Now, when we have enough knowledge and this knowledge is constantly growing, we can explain things ourselves, Science is the only way to get reliable answers. We see its proofs in everyday life.
It's distributed and verified every day, so it can't be faked by any evil scientist. We could go a little bit further and imagine that we create new form of life in the future. Then we will be gods for them. Will we ask them to pray and make churches for us?

but...

Beside all of absurdity of all religions, there are still some positive consequences of having them. As a codex with rules that should be respected by believers, it imposes some ethical norms. Bible is transforming very slowly so those rules are quite conservative. Which can be a good thing as evolutionary way of changing things is more predictable than revolutionary way. Some completely new secular law can make more damage to people than religious law used by hundreds of generations.

Evolution's next step?

Few days ago I watched The Miracle of Love with my wife - a documentary showing whole process of life creation. From single cell to a baby. It's very impressive how everything is precisely planned. Like in the best Chinese factory :) I think that the process of creation is more challenging and advanced than the final result. It's hard to believe it all started from a single "primitive" cell. By keeping few simple rules like do everything to survive it managed to evolve to organisms we know now.

It made me thinking about the current state of the evolution. Where are we now? Maybe we are like those simple cells which are used to build something more complex? Dinosaurs or our ancestors Proconsul (extinct genus of primates) were also most advanced animals in their times and they don't exist now. Now we feel like lords of the world, but does it mean we are the last element of evolutionary chain? Our body doesn't need to evolve much because we have brains and tools so we can create everything we need to survive, We could interfere in this natural process but it requires reverse engineering of evolutionary process (what we do) and is very difficult. Usually it's easier to create something new because we understand how it works. This makes the idea so exciting because we could be creators of new life form that could replace us in the future.

Machines with consciousness and intelligence superior to human intelligence could be the next step in evolution. Their improvements wouldn't base on evolution eventually, so they could advance faster. We would change a format of replicated data. We wouldn't give them our genetic data, but pure knowledge we have gathered for all those years. They would be immortal so travelling huge distances in space would be feasible for them. Or even they could find planet similar to the Earth and "plant" life there (if it would make sense for them).

The same day, but few hours later I watched a trailer of Chappie. This movie seems to send a similar message to  a spectator. I'm looking forward to it and I hope they didn't waste so interesting topic  ;)

Hello world!

Although English is not my native language, I've chosen it to practice it and allow more people to read this blog. I want to apologize all native English-speakers for this choice ;)

I've created this blog to write about things that make me think and float off into a reverie. I think that I'm at the age when I have enough experience and brain training to recognize patterns faster than ever, so it's good time to dump thoughts somewhere before I will forget them. Probably I'm on the top of the bell curve of mental performance, so it can be only worse later :)

Another good reason for writing own blog is this small probability that some internet archaeologist (or my descendant) will discover it in the future and find it useful. Or maybe even my personality will be recreated based on my internet/blog activity? After thinking about this idea few days ago, I found one episode of the British TV show Black Mirror, that was dedicated exactly to this concept. In this movie it was presented more as a threat than a godsend, but it's still an interesting possibility to think about. Actually I see a man as a data processor that recognizes patterns and reacts using other taught patterns. It seems quite feasible for future computers to simulate this behavior. But if machines will be so powerful then what will be the reason for them to do that?