The Edge

We live at the edge. In other installments I have written about this. Now I want to comment on Dr. Edgar Altamirano's radio program here at the University of Guerrero.

Dr. Altamirano reminds us that students are ahead of teachers, and bored.

What are adults going to do?

In a very general way, some of us will do nothing. We hold the strings to the purse. The kids will come to us when they need money. That is mean though, that we can take advantage of the situation. If we do that we may suffer the consequences. The mullahs in Iran now will live in shame because of a kid, posting through Twitter the video of a dying young girl. Whoever is willing to kill their children doesn't deserve to hold the strings of the purse.

Grow up people.

What edge am I talking about here?

Every million years or so, a big rock is supposed to hit us in the head, and take away our grandeur airs.

I had a poll last week about the likelihood of getting that rock on top of our planet, and of the three respondents only one knew about this possibility. I guess that is not the most reassuring thought to bring along inside our heads. The issue is if it is true or not? According to Stephen Hawking and other scientists, that possibility is likely. So much so, that since dinosaurs dissappeared sixty five million years ago, we should've been hit sixty five times already. Maybe that is why there is intelligent life, to the extent there is, in our nook in the woods.

Humans appeared two and a half million years ago. We have been left, more or less alone, all this time to evolve our intelligence.

We can go either way each passing hour, day, week, month, and year. That I call living on the edge.

We are in a state of Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD state. This is the edge, now human made, between existence and non-existence. With Russia and the US nuclear stockpile we can kill everybody we know. That is MAD.

We have to listen to the kids, they don't want to die, we owe it to them, to give them all the tools, as Prof. Altamirano suggests, necessary to save intelligence in the universe as we know it.