I use technology to keep me warm, fed, free from disease, and to earn a living. Without it, I would die of cold, poverty, illness or hunger.

Does this make me a cyborg?

Just as termites have evolved to build complex mounds in which to live, so humans have developed a range of technologies that allow them to colonise areas of the Earth that would otherwise be inhospitable, such as the UK in winter.

As a 40 year old Western male, I would have a hard time existing in the wild with no recourse to technology of any kind. I’m too slow to catch a rabbit with my bare hands. I’m not hairy enough to survive a freezing night in the open. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that without some sort of technology, I’d be dead in a few days. Maybe even a few hours.

Without fire, spears and the wheel, our forefathers would have been confined to the plains of Africa. Only the development of tools allowed us to venture forth into Europe and Asia.

Today, our Western society survives solely because of the logistical technologies that allow food to be distributed and sewage to be carted away. Without these, we would quickly starve and succumb to disease. We live in northerly lands with winter climates that can easily kill a naked human adult.  Just like astronauts on the surface of Mars, we are dependent on our innovations to survive.

Dentistry, medicine, computing, clothing, internal combustion, agriculture, optical correction, wheelchairs, artificial fibres, central heating, law enforcement, innoculation, telecommunications, water purification, electricity, refrigeration, animal husbandry, shoes… All these are vital to maintaining our way of life. Therefore, my argument is that humans and their technology are already inter-dependent to the point that neither can exist without the other.

And we are all cyborgs.

Is there such a thing as a native European, or are we all aliens here?

Consider this: now that winter’s approaching, how many of you fancy sleeping outside? How about sleeping outside naked?

The simple fact is, the human animal is not suited to surviving a Northern European winter. Without technologies such as hunting, fire and agriculture, our ancestors would have died out centuries ago.

Continue reading “You Are An Alien”

As well as making for a great headline, this story also happens to be true. According to the BBC News website, scientists have been using satellite photos to locate penguins in the Antarctic – but as the penguins themselves are too small to spot, the boffins have been locating them using the brown stains produced by the birds’ accumulated guano.

Full story here: Link to BBC Science & Environment News.

My mind was stretched this morning by the following passage from an article in h+ magazine:

“They were trying to establish exactly how organic photosynthesis approaches 95% efficiency, whereas the most sophisticated human solar cells operate at only half that. What they discovered is nothing short of remarkable. Using femtosecond lasers to follow the movement of light energy through a photosynthetic bacterial cell, Engel et al. observed the energy traveling along every possible direction at the same time. Instead of following a single trajectory like the electrons on a silicon chip, the energy in photosynthesis explores all of its options and collapses the quantum process only after the fact, retroactively “deciding” upon the most efficient pathway”

From Slashdot: a group of car enthusiasts find a stolen car, then use Facebook and Google Maps to locate the driver.

Full story: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/12/1712258&from=rss

This is simultaneously cool and creepy: http://cubo.cc/

As reported by Futurismic and New Scientist, researchers from New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed artificial intelligence software that appears to possess a rudimentary “theory of mind” comparable to that held by a four or five year old child.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency has released the first HDTV images of the surface of the Moon, taken by its KAGUYA probe from an altitude of 100 kilometres.

In this speech transcript, Charles Stross turns his attention to the way technology’s going to affect our lives over the next twenty years.

According to the BBC, UK engineers are saying that tiny “smart” devices that can be borne on the wind like dust particles could soon be used to explore other planets.