Launch Defense Mechanism

One-word Prompt: Launch

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/launch/

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Gaming addiction

“A word made flesh is seldom”

Flesh on paper — Saved

Only a Planet

One-Word Daily Prompt: Planet

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/planet/

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I’m egocentric. The only planet that matters to me is earth despite the fact that an infinite number of planets may exist.

In my high school days, ecology became the darling of the media and school discussions. Save the planet before we kill it.  “The Population Bomb” was our bible. Earth Day celebrations began and recycling was the buzzword.

My recycling center accepts only clear glass. And I often wonder how many resources recycling actually preserves after factoring in the recycling process. Trucks must haul the used glass, it must be cleaned and remade into another item. Is there a net benefit after all?

The plant hardiness zone of my metropolitan area changed from a cooler 5 to a warmer zone 6. The climate warmed due to  a greater cluster  of people living together; more people, cars, concrete, and steaming piles of garbage.

“The Population Bomb” preached the dangers of the exponential growth of the human population on the planet. The human population still grows every year, but it has slowed down since the highest point in the 1960’s when the book was published.

Today a massive increase of machines/technology shows no sign of slowing down. Computers increase in numbers at astounding rates along with their voracious appetite for fuel.

It is hard to believe that electrically powered machinery did not exist 150 years ago. The instinctive reach for a light switch is as natural to us as breathing.

Machines/technology create better sanitation, crop yields, medical care, making life easier so we love it. Machines require fuel and pollute the planet, making the planet exposed to more toxic waste so we hate it. Machines replace the labor of humans, making life more economically difficult, less meaningful and, coming full circle, making life harder.

Logically the only way to save the planet is by moving backwards. We would have much less including less people, less machines, less stuff. But the planet will probably move on as it has been until machines and people eat up all our natural resources. Feed life or machines. Or will that be one and the same thing? Maybe the planet will just shoo us pesky life forms off the surface.

Hidden in the Cloud

One-word prompt: Hidden

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/hidden/

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The cloud holds the photos and documents of my life. After I’m dead, I will still reside within the cloud. A sort of computer-designed eternity.

The cloud implies the ethereal, a soft, marshmallowy goodness. A benevolent spirit in the sky. Only the most fortunate travel upward to hang out in that rare air. Even the most atheistic among us may feel a slight regressive spiritual tug when contemplating clouds.

Our ancestors in the not so distant past, unconditionally believed in a spiritual afterlife. For the most part, modern man keeps throwing off the spiritual as mythology.

Yet an Apple store employee described the cloud as magic. Better magic than try to explain to an old, non-tech person what the hell this cloud is all about. He sold me a deception.

In reality the cloud it is just a huge warehouse in North Carolina filled with fossil-fuel guzzling, pollution-emitting machines. Multiply the cloud many times over and see that it occupies scores of factories around the world.

More computers, less paper, less waste. Not quite. Computer technology consumes more energy than most other products we use daily. Wireless comes with strings attached.

Every piece of network hardware has an identifying Internet Protocol (IP) address. Due to the dramatic increase in computerized machines, the number of IP addresses were in danger of being exhausted and the creation of new addresses were necessary to meet future needs. The newly created IP addresses were increased to permit an address to be assigned to every atom on the planet and to allow for some leftovers. That’s a lot of computer-driven devices.

Computers consume at least 10% of the world’s electricity. Since the future foretells dramatic increases in the ways computers will infiltrate every surface of our environment, the energy needed to feed these machines can become massive.

My mother-in-law loved her cats. My husband says, and not in a completely joking manner, that if she had to choose between feeding the cats or him, she might have chosen the cats. So just how important is your smartphone?

Infinity dwells within the cloud. Every 10 minutes people create as much informations as humans did in the first 10,000 generations of human existence. Infinite information and infinite capacity to store it.

Imagination no longer fuels our contemplation of clouds. Now fuel maintains endless bits of information with seemingly no unifying goal. Ceaseless chatter takes over our imagination.

Can the real harbinger of climate change doom be the cloud? Will the cloud consume more energy than our gas-loving cars or our penchant for K-cups?

To change our evil ways we must vastly decrease the number of machines we keep building and the people that love them. But Pandora unlatched the box, the cat’s out of the bag. To curtail technology will bring about Chaos. Ah, right back to the Beginning again.

I fret, yet I feed my machines.