Same Faith - Different Philosophy
Many like to use logic and science to argue the non-existence of God. I argue that God exists by paradox and intuition. Many of the things people consider anti-Christian I think are more consistent with Christianity than the former.
I am a born again Christian but almost every other view I have is contrary to what most Christians believe in America. There is more than one way to live life and still be a Bible believing Christian.
My Solution Overview
Past success does not determine future success. Many people think the information revolution will work out well as they believe the industrial revolution worked out well for them.
You cannot just stay in the industrial technology revolution and then not have it evolve into the information revolution just as you cannot stay with one kind of political, social or economic situation and not have it evolve into another. You cannot pick and choose what parts of your ideology people will adopt and what they will adopt from competing ideologies.
If we want to improve the morality of the world, we can't continue to have modern civilization. We cannot innovate our way out or continue to consume without the present global situation. There will always be a scarcity of resources and you getting more means someone else will get less.
What we consider evil today is beyond what anyone would imagine in previous eras. This increase in evil is the direct result of having more than we need and in result others having less. Until we change our society from being consumers to being producers, focus more on work than entertainment, and give up trying to move up the ladder; we will continue to suffer more greatly than we need to.
Economic and Political Solutions
Our society's biggest problems are its complexity and it brittleness. We need to hold back technology until we as a society can understand it well enough to make rational decisions on it based on knowledge not ignorance. We need to have a group that regulates the creation of new technologies.
Also we need to get disentangled with Saudi Arabia and China at any possible cost, but it will take a long time to get to the point where we can do that and it will likely mean giving up electricity, modern plumbing, modern medicine, and computers. In the meantime it is not wise to anger them. We got ourselves into this mess to make our leaders richer, but we must sacrifice to fix the problem as you cannot just move society back in history just because you want to.
We need to start planning as a society on scales of at least generations if not hundreds of years. We need to study other cultures, histories, and languages to be aware of what is going on in the world, not fight constant wars. We need to actually create a culture that is worth preserving and value intellectual achievement outside Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. This is what we should be using computers for.
For people so concerned with fraud and waste, the military and large corporations are the biggest sources of that. One of the reasons why you don't see the waste in the military is that it is classified. Corporations waste potential use of their vaste resources because of their unwillingness to invest in anything new or continue to stay with something new long enough until it is profitable.
The infantry across services that actually wins wars is actually relatively cheap. Even Army helicopters and tanks, which are the best in the world by far, are much less expensive than most Navy or Air Force machines of war. The big costs are in the big hardware that the Navy and the Air Force have. Much of this is necessary only because we want to control all trade throughout the world and constantly fight small wars all over the world.
Energy Situation
Oh and it would be a good idea to finally fix our physical infrastructure like roads and bridges. We also need to keep rolling out faster Internet connections or convince people to stop using so much video and convince companies to make efficient websites and applications. It would help our society tremendously if people stopped driving huge SUVs and stopped all non-essential travel via cars, but that isn't going to be accepted.
It is sad that the research into alternatives to coal and oil were cut off after President Carter left office. If the government spent even a tiny amount of money from then until now on that we would know if alternative energies can be made efficient enough. What we now know is that coal and oil are not cheaper than alternative energies and the efficiency is increasing very fast. Most of the objections about lack of viability are being overcome or never were a problem.
Also natural gas is only as natural and good for the environment as coal and nuclear is so expensive that it is no longer viable. Besides even with the best safety records of anyone in the world including Japan or the US statistically a major meltdown would happen every couple years if we rolled out enough nuclear power to power America. There is also the waste problem and trying to find not only a geologically stable enough location but also one with nothing of value that people will attempt to mine in the future. Also mining for nuclear material has destroyed parts of West Africa and a Navajo Native American reservation in the US.
We are finally seeing some of the early signs of the scale of suffering being unleashed by our greed when the weather starts getting out of control first in Pakistan and India. Most scientists now agree we need to find ways to pull the carbon dioxide and methane back out of the atmosphere as well as reduce our coal and oil consumption. This is when things are likely to get real bad when we end up trying to remove the green house gases and end up causing a bigger problem for ourselves.
Ridiculous Solutions
Some people want to solve our problems by going to other planets but this is ridiculous from at least an ethical, psychological, economic, social, and political point of view. You can do almost anything for a price, but the question is what problem does it solve and what price do we have to pay for it? It is ironic that those who do not believe in global warming think science will save us if we just go to another planet. Most people have no clue how far away even the moon is, how many resources even one person uses and how dangerous anything outside earth is.
Manned travel outside our orbit or mining from moons or other planets would bankrupt us to do it somewhat safely, it would always be dependent on earth and never economically or energy positive, people would not be able to get along or form stable societies, we would never be able to move large numbers of people there, and it would deepen the political divide in America. It is much cheaper and easier to fix the problems on earth than to use the energy to go to other planets. Even the earth like planets are much worse to live on than the worst case scenario for global warming.
Going to near earth orbit got us some useful things but going to the moon got us very little for its cost. Going to the moon was one of the things that helped put us into such deep debt we are in now. The difference between sending an unmanned drone vs a human flight is exponentially different in complexity and cost.
Many also suffered greatly throughout the space program. At first, they just strapped people and animals to nuclear rockets in place of the warheads. And most our modern technologies, especially for anything space related came directly from NAZI research. Some of those who should have been sentenced for wars crimes were essential for at least the early US space programs.
And advances in computers do not solve the problem of travelling through space or surviving in a hostile environment. Ironically people would laugh if you talked about colonizing the bottom of the ocean or Antarctica but these would be much more feasible. Working in the arctic and Siberia is extremely expensive, slow, and difficult, but nothing compared to trying to survive in space or another planet or moon.
Future Directions
We need to focus on the boring routine stuff and get that figured out before we go onto the flashy fun stuff. The people who know the most about technology today are some of those with the least confidence in what it can actually do. This speaks volumes.
We are going to find in the near future that many things are just not physically possible to do that we want to do or else the robots will become sentient and we will be their slaves if they don't just annihilate us all. Humans after all are the problem and advanced human societies use genocide frequently especially in the last 200 years.
We have to begin to treat large scale evil (often financially driven crimes and corruption) as seriously as we do blue collar violent crime against one person.