Humanity

Today is my birthday. That puts me in a group that includes Elvis Presley and Stephen Hawking. It's nice to share this date with such talented and brilliant people. Elvis was fourteen years my elder. Stephen is 7 years older than me. What I have in common with both is music and science. I consider these two to be somewhat related.

Welcome to 2013 and our first headlines posting of the year. This week's stories include:

• Mars Rover Approaches Ninth Anniversary on the Planet and is Still Ticking
• Study Correlates Climate Change with Increased Episodes of Volcanism

We live on Lifeboat Earth. Our sea is the Universe. To be ignorant of this is to ignore the potential consequences of our bad behavior and its impact on the boat. We have to stop putting spikes in the bottom of it otherwise we will eventually sink. Instead we need to protect every square centimeter, husbanding all our on board resources and ensuring we survive the journey.

A large number of us don't have access to electricity. Those in the know put the number at 1.5 billion. That's more than the total population of China. Can you imagine an entire country the size of China being completely off the grid?

The indicators that 2012 was a troubled year are many and manifold. The following is a telling sample:

In previous postings on this blog site I have described the changing face of our world cities both in the Developed and Developing World. Much of human population growth is in urban centres. In the Developing World, A mass migration from rural to urban settings is creating a housing and infrastructure crisis that desparatelyneeds solutions. So when I read about Synergy Thrislington, and InstaBuild, a ultra-fast building technology, I was intrigued.

Everyone can see that North Korea is trapped in a tragic time-warp, a kind of living museum of 1950s style Cold War socialism. Its political bubble of unreality is likely to burst open with great force well before mid-century.