Whose New Year Is It, Anyway?

by Madeleine Kando

Since my mother died, two days shy of her 104th birthday, I have thought a lot about the passing of time. 
But why do I think of time as ‘passing’? Is it like a train passing by as I stand on a platform? That’s not possible since I am on the train.

And why does the train only go in one direction? According to experts, the reason for the arrow of time is the second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy). There was only one way my mother existed and putting her back together again would violate the second law of thermodynamics. That’s why she no longer exists as my mother.

Nobody really knows what time is, but it doesn’t prevent us from experiencing it. According to Aristotle, this is interlinked with our capacity to perceive change. If I were sitting in a dark room for a week without outside references, how would I know a week had passed? 

But what constitutes ‘change’?

Environmentalist Bill McKibben points out that our inability to respond to climate change is because we perceive change on a ‘human’ level, but cannot perceive change in the sphere of nature. We are ‘fatally confused’ about the nature of time. (Fatally Confused: Telling the Time in the Midst of Ecological Crises, by Michelle Bastian). Our notion of time is specific to our species, for better of for worse.

If you were a mayfly, you wouldn’t be celebrating New Year’s Eve. You wouldn’t even celebrate New Day’s Eve because mayflies in their adult form, don’t live more than one day. They spend two years as larvae immersed in water, but then their one-day clock starts ticking. They swarm to find a mate, fly around a bit, lay their eggs on the surface of ponds and then die, all in a 24 hour span of time. They don’t even have time to eat, which is just as well, since mayflies don’t have a mouth. Does that mean mayflies appreciate their time more than we do? After all, we live about 30,000 times longer!

A fruit fly could potentially celebrate New Week’s Eve, since they live for two weeks. They still have to spend their precious time laying eggs, eat as much rotten fruit as possible and hope they don’t get squashed before their number is up.

A housefly lives a generous two months, which is four times longer than a fruit fly and sixty times longer than a mayfly. It’s like a one year old mayfly meeting a senior citizen housefly.

Mammals are guaranteed a much longer life span than insects. And the bigger a mammal you are, the longer you live. Field mice live about a year or two. They could potentially celebrate New Year’s Eve and make a resolution to eat less cheese, but what’s the point of losing weight when you don’t live to see the benefits?

Elephants live up to 60 years, bowhead whales live 200 years and the Greenland shark can live up 400 years. They should celebrate New Century’s Eve, but remembering a resolution you made a hundred years ago might not be so easy.

One of the longest living beings on earth is the ‘Ming clam’. It can live up to 500 years. Can you imagine having 500 years to live? When a Ming clam is a mere 8 years old, we already spent most of our useful life, at age 48. At the height of the Ming clam’s puberty, we are all long dead and buried. And to vaunt its superiority, the lucky devil keeps on living for another 485 years! 

Who cares about time, when you have so much of it? You can cruise along, violate the minimum speed limit, with not a care in the world. Did you forget about your best friend’s birthday? No harm done, there will be so many more. A Ming clam lives 200,000 times longer than a mayfly. But do they appreciate all that extra time, or do they take it for granted? Unfortunately, the last surviving Ming clam was killed by scientists trying to work out how old he was.

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Cosmic Symphony

by Madeleine Kando


I am obsessed with the stars. Really obsessed. It’s not healthy. How can you love something that doesn’t love you back? Not just that, but stars don’t even know about my existence. It’s like being obsessed with the air, the ocean, the Siberian Tundra. That’s what we do, us humans: we become infatuated with things like that because it makes us feel more important than we are. If Jupiter and Mars are out there for us to see, doesn’t that mean that we somehow are part of it? Part of the vastness of space?

That obsession led to a conversation with my nine-year old grandson, Marshall. I told him that black holes sing. Not only do they sing, but they sing in B flat. It’s true. Go here, if you don’t believe me. Marshall and I had to first figure out what B flat sounded like. It sounds like this.

Black holes can generate enormous sound waves. They spew out vast amounts of material traveling at close to the speed of light. When that material slams into the hot gas that pervades the galaxy it is in, they beat a 'galactic drum'. The jet acts as the "stick," whereas the surface of the gas is the "drum”.

The problem is, that a black hole sings 52 octaves below middle C, or one million, billion times lower than the lowest sound audible to the human ear! But even if there were such a super-duper baritone-detecting creature, it would have to wait 10 million years between each sound wave (tone) to reach it. It would be a very slow symphony in B flat. (For a better explanation, see: Strange but True: Black Holes Sing).

We are so used to looking up at the night sky and marvel at the magic of it all. It is amazing how far our eyes can see. We see the moon at 239,000 miles. We have no trouble seeing the sun, at 93 million miles. Saturn, at 746 million miles, is visible in the night sky, and we can even see the entire Andromeda Galaxy, which is 2.5 million light-years away.

The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) image taken by the Hubble Telescope, shows galaxies so far away, that it allows us to travel back in time. It shows us the universe the way it was in the very beginning. Still, Hubble needs assistance to transpose those parts of the light spectrum that our naked eye can not detect, to give us a full picture of these stellar objects. Even the visual images we see, are always rendered in full color—converted from invisible X-rays or radio waves to visible light so we can see the universe in all its splendor. They might be a lot more boring if we limited ourselves to the visible range. Read more...

The God Particle

by Madeleine Kando

In the Middle Ages people weren’t very interested in things that didn’t affect their daily lives. If religion didn’t have an explanation for something, it meant that it wasn’t important. End of story.

Today, people are interested in things that don’t directly affect their daily life, but up to a point. How many of us are truly interested in finding out about quantum mechanics, dark matter, the uncertainty principle and other esoteric concepts that only a fraction of humanity truly understands? Even famous physicist Richard Feinman said: ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t understand quantum mechanics’.

I belong to the category of humans that suffers from what is called “The Dunning-Kruger Effect”, which means that the stupider you are, the smarter you think you are, (and vice versa). I think I understand something only because I am too stupid to realize that I don’t understand it.

Do particle physicists tackle the problems of world hunger or poverty? Do they make the world a better place? Or is it all a gigantic waste of human capital and resources? Why should we care if a sub-atomic particle has a half spin or a whole spin, why it decays in a billionth of a second? Whether it is a Fermion, a Gluon or a Boson?

Well, I’ll tell you why. Because without quantum mechanics, we wouldn’t have smart phones, x-ray machines or laser surgery, just to name a few. Without particle physics, we wouldn’t have discovered the Higgs field and without the Higgs field, an energy field that permeates all of space, I wouldn’t be sitting here, trying to write about something that is way beyond my pay grade.

Once you embark on the road to the infinetisimally small, you enter a realm that borders on the incomprehensible and in my case, it has turned into an addiction. How can it not, when you read headlines like ‘Science discovers the God Particle’, or ‘the Particle at the End of the Universe’. Read more...

What is the Mind, What is Consciousness?

Tom Kando 

Introduction: 

1. What is Consciousness? Nagel 

2. Reductionist Materialism vs. Phenomenology 

3. The Hard problem of Consciousness 

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

5. Zombies 

6. The Self 

7. Free Will and Agency 

8. Humanity’s Future 

PAR TWO: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ZOMBIES 

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Consciousness Chapter 10 in Harris’ book “Complexity and Stupidity,” is an interview with David Krakauer, a mathematical biologist. Harris and his guest stress that intelligence must not be confused with consciousness. 
Humans have managed to build highly intelligent machines. However, throughout the book, Harris repeatedly warns against the potential danger of creating machines that are more intelligent than us, and then they get out of control - sort of a Frankenstein monster. 
In chapter two, titled “Finding Our Way,” where Harris interviews David Deutsch, the Oxford University quantum physicist, he expresses his misgivings about this possibility (misgivings which Deutsch does not share). 
For one thing, Harris argues, once machines become more intelligent than humans, they may take over even if they do not have consciousness. This might then be the end of consciousness. These future machines could be incredibly intelligent, they would be able to do just about everything, but without consciousness they would be zombies. “The lights would not be on.” They would not have experiences. 

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What is the Mind, What is Consciousness?

by Tom Kando

 This three -part article is a “magnum opus.” I struggled writing it, and you will probably struggle reading it, but it is well worth it. 

Introduction: 1. What is Consciousness? Nagel 2. Reductionist Materialism vs. Phenomenology 3. The Hard problem of Consciousness 4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

5. Zombies 

6. The Self 

7. Free Will and Agency 

8. Humanity’s Future 
PART ONE: WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? 
I just read a fascinating book: Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity by Sam Harris (2020). 

 

Harris is a widely published neuroscientist and philosopher. In his podcast and this book, he interviews eleven eminent scientific experts. Most of the interviews are about consciousness, the mind, the self and morality. His guests are high-powered neuroscientists and philosophers (David Chalmers, Anil Seth, Thomas Metzinger and Robert Sapolsky), quantum and theoretical physicists (David Deutsch, Nick Bostrom, and Max Tegmark), and biological and behavioral scientists (Timothy Snyder, Glenn Loury, Daniel Kahneman and David Krakauer). The group includes Nobel laureates. All these people have rich interdisciplinary backgrounds and experiences. So you are in a select company when you read this book. 

The main themes of the book are: (1) What is consciousness, what is the mind, is there something unique about us humans? (2) Artificial Intelligence; (3) Morality, politics and history; (4) Humanity’s future; (5) Knowledge; (6) Racism and the criminal justice system. 
My focus in this article will be primarily on the first one of these topics. I want to share with you some of the fascinating insights provided by Harris and his luminary guests regarding Consciousness - with forays into topics #2 (Artificial Intelligence) and #4 (Humanity’s Future). . 
1. What is Consciousness? Nagel Harris’ first chapter is a conversation with David Chalmers, an Australian-born cognitive scientist/philosopher. It is titled “The Light of the Mind.” The central question which the two scholars address is: What is consciousness? They agree that the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous formulation is still the most “attractive.” Nagel first offered it in 1974 in a now widely quoted paper titled “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?”  Read more...

Politicize This

by Tom Kando 

As the covid-19 pandemic was starting to affect the US half a year ago, the idiots on the right began to politicize the issue right away. Responding to my  article  Mother Nature?  (March 23, 2020), an anonymous reader wrote the following:

“Tom, following your penchant for statistics, Coronavirus deaths per million population: - Italy 206 - Spain 194 - Belgium 71 - Netherlands 68, France 54 - Switzerland 53 - UK 35 - Sweden 24 - Denmark 18 - Austria 16 - Ireland 14 - USA 12

Thank you President Trump for acting rapidly in blocking European flights!”

He added: “Contrary to your assertion, the death stats show that Western Europe remains the epicenter of the Coronavirus, every other stat is just a question of who measures the most. Besides, when our summer becomes the southern hemisphere’s winter, the southern hemisphere will become the epicenter. While I recognize we all have a problem, my previous point was to show statistically that we have more competent executive branch leadership (reacting faster and minimizing loss) than the other European democracies, and that I personally am grateful that Trump is president rather than the senile idiot the democrats are about to nominate. I would also point out that while Italy by far appears to be the most incompetent and ill prepared of the European nations, at the same time New York which has almost 50% of our Corona cases is ironically led by two Italians named Cuomo and DeBlasio!"   

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How Speaking Can Spread the Virus

by Madeleine Kando

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about the benefits of wearing face masks to stop the spread of the Coronavirus, he said that “they are helpful in that they protect others from you “breathing or speaking moistly on them.”

The word ‘moistly’ caused a universal uproar. Comedians had a field day as usual, but Trudeau was actually giving an appropriate and descriptive name to one of the major avenues of infection, which is our own speech.

One of the reasons COVID-19 spreads so quickly is that it is transmitted from people who are asymptomatic. But if they don’t sneeze or cough on you, how are they actually infecting you?

Research is now showing that coughing and sneezing are small potatoes compared to the amount of aerosols people emit while they speak. Coughing and sneezing are like brief but potent rain showers, whereas speaking is a day long drizzle, with smaller drop sizes that can penetrate deeper into the lungs of the unfortunate recipient. They also remain airborne longer, since they are smaller.

It is not just speaking that releases more particles than coughing or sneezing. A person who decides to declare their love by bursting into a serenade, is actually emitting 6 times more airborne droplets than if they were merely reciting a poem.

If things weren’t bad enough, it turns out that people with loud voices emit an inordinate amount of particles. Not only are they a danger to your ear drums but they actually are equivalent to the fire breathers of yore.

Although the louder you speak the more particles you emit, the study also found that certain units of speech generate more aerosols than others. For example, the "E" sound in "need" produces more particles than the "A" in "saw." Read more...

Science Fiction Becomes Rality

by Tom Kando

It finally happened. Armageddon has arrived. For over a century, we have been treated to various forms of science fiction. A large portion of this genre’s books and movies has always been apocalyptic - presenting one scenario or another about the end of the world, or at least the end of humanity.

I grew up devouring the works of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip Dick, Robert Heinlein, H.G. Wells and many others.

Wells’ The War of the Worlds came out as a radio adaptation in 1938 and as a classic film in 1953. Other classics that mesmerized me as a child include The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Television added a flood of Science Fiction, including Star Trek (the original series, 1965-1969, still my favorite, followed by multiple subsequent “generations”).

Meanwhile, by the end of the 20th century, Hollywood was inundating the market with mega productions of questionable quality - such films as Independence Day (1996), Mars Attacks (1996), Armageddon (1998), Deep Impact (1998) and many others.

Even I tried my hand at the genre: (See my Humanity’s Future: The Next 25,000 Years). At least, my book is not apocalyptic. It goes more along the optimistic prognoses found in many episodes of Star Trek - predicting humanity’s progress rather than downfall.
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“Mother Nature”?

by Tom Kando

Let me try this: A good word to describe the coronavirus crisis is “biblical.”

Now I don’t want you to misunderstand: I don’t believe in God. A biblical interpretation of this crisis goes against everything my rationalist mind and education have taught me.

But the paradigm, or the metaphor, seems so apt. This is Sodom and Gomorrah all over again. God’s revenge, punishment for our sins, for our descent into greed and selfishness, for raping the planet, for excessive hedonism and materialism, for Wall Street, etc.

Okay, convert the term “God” into “Nature.” Then, the metaphor works better already: We are destroying the planet. Even so, a near unanimity of economists - left and right - still agrees that the solution to poverty, inequality and all other economic problems is GROWTH. It is almost universally agreed that a 1% growth rate is bad (that’s often Europe’s rate), a 3% rate is pretty good (something the US achieves occasionally) and that 6% to 10% annual growth, which China has often achieved in recent decades, is the envy of the world. Read more...

Spontaneous Generation: Can Non-Life Create Life?

by Tom Kando

I was listening to Science Friday, the excellent NPR program hosted by Ira Flatow. He was interviewing the historian James Strick about the debunked theory of spontaneous generation.

You may recall that this theory was destroyed by Louis Pasteur in the 19th century. It is the idea that living organisms can spring into existence from non-living matter. This had been the general belief ever since Aristotle. Only in the 17th century did the Church begin to oppose this theory. At that point, scientific materialism was on the rise, and the theory of spontaneous generation seemed to suggest that natural chemistry was sufficient to produce life (combined with solar radiation and what have you), thereby cutting God out of creation.

In the middle of the 19th century, the debate about spontaneous generation - essentially, whether life can spring from non-life or not - was raging. French biologists Felix Fouchet and Louis Pasteur were at loggerheads over the question. In 1859, Pasteur conducted a famous experiment which settled the issue, proving that life CANNOT arise spontaneously from inanimate matter. The French academy of science declared Pasteur the winner of the controversy, and his position has been the generally accepted standard in all biology textbooks since. Read more...

Toxic Masculinity: A Confusing Term

by Madeleine Kando

In ‘My Cousin was my Hero, until the Day he Tried to Kill me’, a fascinating article about the toxic aspects of male identity, author Wil S. Hylton describes how his cousin and best childhood friend beat him up so badly that he had to be hospitalized.

There is a lot of talk about ‘toxic masculinity’ these days, especially since sexual harassment and abuse scandals have dominated the news. But what is meant by ‘toxic masculinity’? According to the ‘Good Men Project’, a..., ‘toxic masculinity is a narrow and repressive description of manhood, defined by violence, sex, status and aggression and showing emotions is considered a weakness.’

But doesn’t the word ‘toxic’ mean ‘poisoning’? It mostly affects the one that is exposed to the toxic substance directly. Which are men. If the term 'toxic masculinity' is to be taken seriously, we should be focusing on men, not women.

What is meant by masculinity?
Your biological sex and your gender are not the same thing. Being borne a male does not predetermine gender identity — one’s sense of being male, female or another gender. So if you are born a male, you are not necessarily masculine.

The image of Neanderthal man with his club fighting saber toothed tigers while his woman is cooking dinner leads one to the conclusion that gender distinction between male and female is a natural state of affairs. But in fact, a new scientific study, headed by anthropologist Mark Dyble, shows that hunter-gatherer tribes were much more egalitarian and the social inequality between the sexes came later with the advent of agriculture. In other words, we ‘invented’ a version of masculinity that does not necessarily reflect what’s going on in nature.* Read more...

The World's 150 Mega-Cities

by Tom Kando

It was recently announced in the news that the world’s population is now over 50% urban. To be sure, we may have already reached this milestone a few years ago, depending on how urbanism is measured. Be that as it may, I now want to play with this idea a bit. I used to teach urban sociology, which I find a fascinating  subject. Also, I have lived in or visited several dozen of these mega-cities, and I love large cities.

I consulted a number of  sources to examine  the  current  ranking of the world’s 150 largest metropolises. (World’s Largest Cities;  The 150 Largest Cities of the World;  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_populationList of MSAs).

Much has changed since I was young.  When I disembarked from the boat  in America as a Hungarian refugee  in Hoboken, New jersey, staring  in awe at the magic New York skyline, that city was the world’s largest, as was its harbor. In subsequent decades, its harbor was overtaken first by Rotterdam, and then by Shanghai. As to population, New York is now the 10^th largest city in the world.

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Kando's Dogma - Part Two

by Tom Kando

 About a year ago, I posted a piece called. Kando’s Dogma. I now add some further beliefs which I hold to be true:

1. All people are created equal (Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson). There are no inherent differences in intellectual aptitude between the races and between the genders. The science of psychology has not discovered any. Differences in wealth are the result, to a small extent, of aptitude and effort, but much more the result of social class, family wealth and above all: luck.

2. There is no (anthropomorphic) deity, no super-brain which decided at some point in the past to create a world. The universe is a physical reality in which life and mental processes develop. In other words, the universe becomes aware of itself. It is a psycho-physical reality.

3. The nature and processes of the universe are best discovered and understood through science.

4. Science distinguishes between truth and error, and through it, knowledge increases. Humans progress by increasing their knowledge. The total amount of knowledge is infinite.

5. In addition to science, there is philosophy and there is religion (Auguste Comte’s three stages). Philosophy discusses metaphysical questions. These are questions beyond those pertaining to the physical world. Positivist science cannot answer them. Answers to such questions cannot be proved or disproved empirically. Read more...

To Cut or not to Cut: the Circumcision Debate

by Madeleine Kando

Thank God I am not a man, especially a Jewish man. And thank God I wasn’t born in the United States as a man, or I would have joined the millions who have undergone a medical procedure that irreversibly alters the body for the rest of one’s life, without personal consent. It’s called circumcision.

A few days ago a friend told me about a researcher at Harvard University who was fired as a result of a show he performed called Sex; Circumcision: An American Love Story. It is a gripping, 2 hour long explosion of anger by a young American male who went under the knife as an infant. Eric Clopper is Jewish, but that doesn’t mean much in a country where as recently as 2010, 77% of baby boys were routinely circumcised as part of the delivery process.

Since then I haven’t done much else with my time than learn about circumcision and what it really is. What is it’s history? Why is it so prevalent in America and not in Europe?

I have to admit that I now know more about male genitalia than I do about my own equipment, so at the risk of sounding presumptuous, I will share with you what I have learnt.

The word ‘circumcision’ comes from the Latin circumcisus, past participle of circumcidere "to cut round, to cut off". What exactly gets cut off, you may ask, when circumcising an infant in America in 2018?
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The Nobel Prize:The Great Intellectual Flight from the Old World to the New

by Tom Kando
         

1. INTRODUCTION:

The Nobel Prize has existed for 117 years. In that time, a total of 916 prizes have been awarded to individuals and organizations, with some receiving the Nobel Prize more than once.

In this article I  examine the national, ethnic and gender  composition of the laureates. I examine TRENDS over time,  and I show how the allocation of  Nobel awards  reflects the history and the evolution of the world over the past 117 years.

This article is not an exercise in nationalism or chauvinism. To the contrary, you’ll see that there is probably no more international population on the planet than the  body of Nobel laureates. But to demonstrate this, it is necessary to identify each laureate’s background. This is the first objective of this article. A second, and related, objective is to demonstrate the changing composition of this population and to show that the trends over time   reflect the world’s geopolitical  and cultural evolution.

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For Happier and Healthier Human Beings

by Tom Kando

 My sister Madeleine wrote a very intelligent piece about the “dangers of spirituality.” In her review of Kramer and Alstad’s book The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power, the failure of Buddhism and Hinduism is explained. Many good points are made by the book’s authors and by Madeleine.

I have wanted to write an alternative piece related to the same topic. First, I had to spend three weeks in Hawaii, so I am only now getting around to this.

Since I know little about Buddhism and Hinduism, I dot not intend to defend those perspectives here, or other Eastern spiritual philosophies in the “Zen” tradition, or other “New Age” trends.

However, it is important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is today a convergence among many strands of modern psychology towards certain principles. Following these principles may help humans to become happier and psychologically healthier. And in my view, they appear to be empirically true.

The common thread I see in the emerging paradigm includes the following elements:

1. Humans experience life through interpretation. The world is not given to us. We make the world in which we live.
2. Thus, we experience life “from within to without,” not the other way around, as is claimed for example by Behaviorism (“we respond to stimuli”).
3. We have minds, we think, and we have consciousness.
4. All human experience occurs in the present - NOW. No one has ever experienced anything in the past or in the future. We can only THINK about the past and the future. We cannot live in those realms.
5. Thinking tends to be verbal.
6. Thoughts produce feelings.
7. We are the totality of our thoughts and our feelings. Read more...

The Worlds Universities, Ranked and Located

by Tom Kando

Preface: Once in a while, I take a look at the University of Shanghai’s Annual Ranking of the World's 800 Major Universities.

You  may find this an empty exercise. However, I enjoy lists, and I have spent my life in  academe. The Shanghai rankings have good credibility. The criteria are the usual ones - the quality of education, research output, Nobel laureates, etc There is of course always room for improvement. For now, I present to you some of the interesting factoids I came across. I hope you enjoy perusing these. I’ll focus on the top 100, then 200, and (briefly) 500 universities listed.

Countries and Regions:
Of the top 200 universities, 77 are located in North America. That is almost 39%.   Actually, North American preponderance is even more notable among the top 100 universities, of which over half of  are in the US and Canada. The United States has 70, or 35%,  of the top 200 universities, and 48 of the top one hundred.

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How Big is the Universe and How many Stars and Planets are there?

by Tom Kando
With assistance from Dr. Gene Barnes


1. So far, the most distant body we know of in the universe is GN-z11, a galaxy about 13.4 billion light years away. In other words, what we see of GN-z11 today left that body 13.4 billion years ago, which is not long after the birth of the universe, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago (see: The Most Distant Objects; The Farthest Reaches; The Age of the Universe).

 2. Time: If the universe were 1 year old today, the sun and earth would have formed about three months ago; life on earth would have begun about two months ago; dinosaurs would have roamed around the world for about one hour yesterday, then disappeared; the first hominoids would have appeared an hour ago, Cro Magnon man one minute ago; Columbus would have crossed the Atlantic a second ago.

3. Distances: One light year is about 9.5 trillion kilometers. So GN-z11 is located at 13.4 billion x 9.5 trillion kilometers from us. This is 127,300,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers = One hundred and twenty-seven sextillion kilometers (1,273 x 10 to the twentieth power).
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Humanity's Future: The Next 25,000 Years

by Tom Kando

Hi Folks:

About a month ago I let you know about my new book with the above title. At that time, I provided you with a link which enables you to purchase a POD (Print on Demand) copy from Amazon for $9.99. Now, I want you to know that you can also get an electronic version of my book for a mere $2.99 by clicking on the following link: Kindle Store; Humanity’s Future

As I wrote last month, this book is an experiment. Like most people, I grew up on Star Trek in its many generations, Star Wars, and innumerable other science fiction materials, from optimistic classics such as Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 to a variety of apocalyptic prognoses.
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Humanity's Future: the Next 25,000 years

by Tom Kando

 Dear People: This is to let you know that I have just published a new book, with the above title.

Here is part of the preface:
This book is an experiment. Like most people, I grew up on Star Trek in its many generations, Star Wars, and innumerable other science fiction materials, from optimistic classics such as Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 to a variety of apocalyptic prognoses. All of these are fairly specific.

What I have always wanted to do is write a general, comprehensive (pseudo-)history of the entire future, a total extrapolation of what we, humans, have been doing so far. I also wanted to give the story a positive twist, one that places us, humans, at the center, and which relies on US to be the solution rather than the problem. So this is it. An experiment, an attempt to describe the WHOLE picture. Ambitious, I’m sure. But pretty unique and provocative, I hope.

The story evolves from mundane, early 21st century contemporary politics to a cosmic apotheosis. The first chapters examine the struggles of current nation states, with a special focus on the United States. Presidential successions, immigration, the economy, the energy crisis, the war on terrorism, etc.
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