Cav's Place

In my previous personal post, I was saying I was waiting on NASA to post another update about Opportunity, because I wanted to write another brief post about the little rover as soon as that happened, yet they did that a few days ago and, though the excuse’s gone, the post’s still not here and it’ll continue not being here at least until Sunday. I’m hoping to write it then, however, especially since I now mean to launch into a rant about the future of space exploration as well and I wrote most of that already, albeit in a form that will require some changes before being posted.

That said, this post is obviously only here so I’ll have something written this week, in order for the one I hope to add Sunday to be the second. Seeing as I barely manage to struggle to add a paragraph of crap per day in my story and I still haven’t gone over the last two chapters, this seems fair enough, since if I could write any more I should probably do it there instead of here… Not that I’m too sure why I keep struggling with any of it, seeing as I obviously can’t do anything and trying only makes it worse.

Not playing anymore either, apparently, after entering a chaos spiral that ended with being repeatedly attacked by the chaos monster. Can’t seem to win against that thing, so didn’t even try anymore and was thinking of starting over, especially since I learned some more things that should make things better this time around, but obviously didn’t do that either and don’t particularly care to at this point… Just like I don’t care to keep trying to write a description for a game I remembered playing many years ago and which I meant to submit on MobyGames, after staring at the screen and not managing to put as much as one word in on a few different occasions.

Since it’s Sunday and I’m still waiting for another update about Opportunity to be posted, I guess I could mention that tomorrow Cassini will celebrate ten years of exploring Saturn and its system of moons and rings. During this time, it returned a huge amount of useful data and generated thousands of scientific reports, and it can be said to be more or less responsible for much of what we know about the Saturn system in general, and for most of our current understanding of Titan in particular.
It also appears that the name for what will unfortunately be the final phase of the mission, starting in late 2016 and ending the following year with the spacecraft being sent into the gas giant to be destroyed, should also be announced these days. Doubt the choice will be suitable, however, seeing as the moment will mark the end of our presence on or around any planet beyond Jupiter, and also be near enough to the end of our presence on or around any celestial body beyond Mars, with the Juno mission also set to end in 2017 and Dawn possibly as early as late 2015. Sure, we’ll still have the Voyagers, and New Horizons may continue to operate as well, but those will be speeding through the vastness of space…

While I’m at anniversaries, however, I’ll also mention the fact that Curiosity has completed the first Martian year since landing on the red planet this Tuesday. I can still honestly say I don’t exactly care about that thing, due to the fact that it uses nuclear power when Opportunity has proven solar panels to be sufficient on the surface of Mars and Juno is set to do the same while operating in orbit around Jupiter, but I guess that’s no reason not to mark the moment at least.

That’s a strange post title, ain’t it? But the thing is that I keep meaning to write another brief post about Opportunity right after an update will be posted, I somehow forgot to check for several days earlier this month, during which the one covering June 4 to 11 showed up, and since then I keep waiting for the next one and it doesn’t seem to be coming. If each update usually covers about a week, there should have been two more by now, but instead there is none.
That said, and seeing as I definitely don’t feel like struggling to post anything else either, I’ll just make use of this day with no matches to say that I did manage to get back to King of Dragon Pass well enough, so at least I’m still playing something, if little else. And not only that, but I also stumbled upon Akinator these days, apparently “only” several years late, and I currently mean to use it for at least 100 characters before I’ll rate it and consider it a game played. Had to add five out of the 40 characters I already tried, by the way, including one I definitely didn’t expect to be unknown to it, and it completely failed on two others, while on yet another I didn’t care to continue after two wrong guesses, but at the same time there are moments when it homes in shockingly quickly and there were even characters I picked thinking they’ll be difficult to guess that it identified on first try.
Otherwise, I’m close to finishing another chapter in my story, but I still can’t exactly count it or the last one, seeing as I can’t bring myself to even read them again, knowing they’re nothing but crap added only to be able to say I kept writing something. Also, as far as the blog is concerned, you may have noticed that I didn’t post anything about protests or related activities and events since the start of the month, which is in part because I doubt I’ll manage at the moment and in part because I’m not sure I care to even try anymore.

And now I’ve been sitting here for a while, wondering whether I should add anything else to this post and, if so, what. There are rants I could launch myself into, and have launched into over the past few days while exchanging messages with the few people who may still be talking to me, but not sure there’d be any point in adding any of that here as well and, even if there may be a point, I doubt I care to try. Let’s just say that I updated my idea of a dream home to a house built in a clearing deep inside a forest and surrounded by a high wall with no gate, the only access being through a tunnel that’d obviously also be used for all the necessary pipes and cables, which tunnel would have a solid locked gate at the other end and be permanently monitored by cameras and other security systems.

While I’m scheduling everything around World Cup matches these days, I also seem to manage to play Return to Krondor a fair amount. I don’t seem to be doing much before the first match of the day, but then I squeeze as much play time as I can, also putting in about an hour after the last match as well. That means writing’s going particularly poorly once again, as it gets relegated to the last hour before going to bed, but I haven’t been able to get anything that’s not pointless crap out in a long time and still haven’t gone over any of it, so at least I spend less time pointlessly struggling and getting frustrated.
Seeing as I just got to chapter seven last night and the game apparently has ten, I should be finishing it relatively soon if I keep this up, which means I may even get to five games finished this year, since this would be the third. Won’t be writing a review for it either, since I have nothing to add to the excellent one Oleg posted on MobyGames only a couple of months ago, so I may even try to carry some momentum into whatever I’ll decide to play next, assuming I’ll get to that point without getting back to my usual state of not feeling up for anything at all as long as certain impossible things don’t happen… Or as long as I don’t wake up to realize that all these years have been nothing more than a bad dream.

Otherwise, as the post’s title states, my body’s still quite unhappy and making sure I’m aware of it. A couple of things are better, but I’m noticing a couple of new issues as well, so these things don’t seem to care to go away on their own and at least some of them I quite clearly won’t be able to sort out on my own. I’m still trying to ignore what that means at the moment, and there have been times in the past when that somehow seemed to work, at least for a while, so we’ll see what happens.

At least today’s the Summer Solstice, so the days will start getting shorter. There’s a time, around the Winter Solstice, when it gets dark slightly too early even for me, but for most of the year the sunset comes far too late as far as I’m concerned, and around this time of year the sunrise is too early as well, around the time when I normally go to bed, so I keep wishing for darker days. Then again, lately it’s been cloudy and also rained a fair amount, so this month was mostly manageable, but I dread what the rest of the summer will bring, considering the forecasts I’ve heard.

But this was only meant to be a short post, pretty much only written so I’ll have a second one here this week, so I’ll stop here now that I got that out of the way while also avoiding the need for a second Sunday update this year. It’d have been hard to write anything tomorrow anyway, seeing as there’s the race as well and I’ll also need to go for a short walk, since I didn’t go outside at all this week.

According to a group called The Advocacy for Anti-Procreation, today is the International Anti-Procreation Day. Of course, it’s also the World Day to Combat Desertification, and this has been observed since 1995 and is recognized by the UN, so it’d normally take precedence over an event that somebody who created a Facebook page came up with last year. However, I can’t currently think of any other attempts to create international events meant to even celebrate the childfree, much less openly and directly combat natalism, so I will mark the day by at least writing another post on the topic of overpopulation.

Interestingly, it was recently announced that birth rates here in Romania have fallen to the lowest values seen after World War II, which can count as good news, especially since we’re talking about a country with one of the lowest, if not the lowest, fertility in Europe already. Of course, the numbers are still appallingly high compared to what would be needed and things look even worse when you pay attention to the details, such as the fact that a good three quarters of the roughly 15% population drop seen over the past 25 years is due to immigration, that many of those who immigrate end up having children in their new home countries and therefore still contribute to the global overpopulation problem, or that the remaining quarter is due in part to the wrong reasons, such as lower life expectancy and higher mortality than in more developed countries. However, although this is currently happening too slowly to be relevant, I have to take note of the fact that things are at least getting slightly better instead of worse.
Of course, the vast majority, including the authorities, don’t see it that way, and I just read a call to restart the national in vitro fertilization program, because “thanks” to it “350 children were brought into this world at a cost of only one million Euros”… Which is, of course, like saying that air pollution levels have dropped and therefore a program to expand coal power plants should be restarted because it can relatively cheaply generate more electricity, regardless of the fact that pollution is still way too high and we’re already producing more electricity than we need, the problem being to find export contracts for the surplus. But the fact that all but a tiny minority of people think with their gonads is nothing new, so the question is how can those of us who are actually capable and willing to put reason above the most basic instincts win this war, because that’s what it is, and give ourselves and all other species we share this planet with a real chance.

Returning to the global issue, I can only state once again that bringing the human population back down to a sustainable level is absolutely necessary if we are to have a chance to solve almost any of the environmental problems that plague this planet or the social problems that plague mankind. Of course, that alone is far from sufficient and many other measures need to be taken, but most of those measures can only be truly efficient after the world will no longer be overpopulated, as under the current circumstances they merely delay the inevitable at the cost of efforts and resources that could be better used either for real development or for fixing the damage already caused. In other words, until we’ll solve this problem we’ll just keep buying time at an ever increasing cost, and the worst part is that, while humans may perhaps continue to afford doing so for centuries to come, most of the species we share this planet with don’t have that luxury.
And while I’m restating the obvious, it should be clear to everyone that reducing population by killing people or by allowing them to unnecessarily die when they do not specifically wish for this to happen is to be avoided, while the option of moving most humans to other planets won’t exist in the foreseeable future, so the only solution we’re left with is greatly reducing the number of births by any means necessary, perhaps to the minimum needed to avoid a genetic bottleneck, until the population will drop to a sustainable level once again. Then, while we’re doing that, we should also bring evolution back into the game by selecting those few who’d still be allowed to have children according to resistance to disease and extraordinary talents and abilities that are truly worthy of being passed on, and of course also according to a slew of other criteria meant to preserve diversity as much as possible, because unless we do both of these things at once we’ll almost certainly dig ourselves into a deep hole.

As for that sustainable level I keep mentioning, it’s not seven billion, and it most definitely isn’t nine or ten or the even higher numbers studies currently say will be reached. What it actually is depends on lifestyle choices, consumption patterns, the amount of freedom allowed, the existing environmental damage and the number of people dedicating their lives to fixing it, so it’s impossible to give a clear value. I saw numbers as high as 18 billion, but only assuming a low standard of living and exploiting nearly every nook and cranny with no care for the other species, or as low as 100 million, assuming maintaining a reasonable environmental footprint while allowing for a particularly high standard of living and an equally high amount of freedom to choose one’s lifestyle and consumption patterns, with no new developments aimed to mitigate the negative consequences of such choices.
Still, several more serious studies that I remember seeing, which attempted to take multiple factors into account, arrived at values often ranging between one and one and a half billion, so at the moment we may assume that to be a reasonable range, with perhaps two billion as an upper limit made possible by future technological breakthroughs, if we aim for a decent standard of living for all humans while also giving the other species a fighting chance. As such, and also considering the current numbers and the methods I advocate, my personal target would be to reach three billion by the end of the century, with the rest of the reduction taking place in the 2100s.

But this was only meant to be a brief post and, either way, I’m not saying anything new, so I’ll now leave you to celebrate the International Anti-Procreation Day by doing things that won’t result in another human being brought into this world, most preferably including doing your best to ensure that others won’t worsen the overpopulation problem either. Sex is obviously allowed, and I’ll say even encouraged, but unless you or your partner, or both, are sterilized or definitely sterile, do make sure you’ll take all the necessary precautions!