At Conference on the Risks to Earth, Few Are Optimistic

Perpetual Freedumb Toward a Devastatingly Lethal Climax - or a Return to Freedom, Life, Liberty, Health, with Limitless, Unbounded Potential for all, in a world of exploding human population, with its myriad needs, wants and desires?

IS THERE HOPE? IS THERE COURAGE AND RESPONSIBILITY FOR FREEDOM TO SUPPORT: "Dr. Zichichi's goal is to foster what he calls “a science without secrets and without borders,” mixing disciplines and cultures, and to laud veterans and emerging talents in hopes of propelling breakthroughs"?



Science & Technology had the capacity to promise us the latter back in the late 1940's- Life, Liberty, Health, Unbounded Potential for all - with the revolutionary advanced definitions of Space, Time, Mass, Matter, Energy, Gravity (StarSteps) springing forth from an extended view of E=MC2 embracing the Radius of Curvature of All Natural Law.

The Deadly Dangers of a Mis-informed, Dis-informed & Un-informed Population, Ultimately to Itself, History Provides Ample Evidence.

The Solution: The Promise of New Energy Systems & Beyond Oil

Evaporates the Problem: The ill designed "Corporism: The Systemic Disease that Destroys Civilization." when lacking a Bill of Rights for Human Life

As common sense in science is lost with the continued stagnation of our energy base and deep troubling theoretical foundational issues in physics, so too, Civilization's Survival Parameters fly out of sight, out of mind, along with the values and morals inherent within new scientific understanding which new energy systems would reveal. Scientific Stagnation bodes an ill wind to evolution, sustainability, and survival as "cycles of humiliation, dumbing us down, violence, and Unrestrained Corporate Greed prompting resource wars with nuclear finality" join hands with global warming and ecological imbalance to precipitate the historical "rise and fall of civilization" - a Tsunami accelerating toward us with a far more spectacular event than the legends and myths of 'Atlantis and Lemuria"........ had more people known that Energy from Corn (or going backwards to a dimwitted concept of radioactive nuclear power application ) sounded a wee bit kindergartenish and senile for the twenty first century......the Future may have had a chance.



NYT August 24, 2008
At Conference on the Risks to Earth, Few Are Optimistic
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
ERICE, Sicily — This ancient hilltop town, rife with Roman, Greek, Norman and other influences, is hosting a very modern gathering: a conference on global risks like cyberterrorism, climate change, nuclear weapons and the world’s lagging energy supply.
More than 120 scientists, engineers, analysts and economists from 30 countries were hunkered down here for the 40th annual conference on “planetary emergencies.” The term was coined by Dr. Antonino Zichichi, a native son and a theoretical physicist who has made Erice a hub for experts to discuss persistent, and potentially catastrophic, global challenges.
The participants were not particularly optimistic. They presented data showing that the boom in biofuels was depleting Southeast Asian rain forests, that “bot herders” — computer hackers for hire — were hijacking millions of computers, and that the lack of progress over handling nuclear waste was both hampering the revival of nuclear energy and adding to terrorism risks.
The meetings, which end Sunday, were sponsored by the Erice-based Ettore Majorana Foundation and Center for Scientific Culture and by the World Federation of Scientists in Geneva. Both organizations are led by Dr. Zichichi with what the physicist Dr. Richard L. Garwin, a longtime Erice conference participant and expert on nuclear weapons, affectionately called “imperious” zeal.
Dr. Zichichi, 78, controls every aspect of the sessions, including the seating in the seminars and the wine selections at the nightly dinners.
His goal is to foster what he calls “a science without secrets and without borders,” mixing disciplines and cultures, and to laud veterans and emerging talents in hopes of propelling breakthroughs.
He said past successes included focusing attention on the need to reduce nuclear stockpiles and developing the first detailed analysis of flood risks along the Yellow River in China.
The threat of cyberattacks was also a focus of this year’s meeting. In a session on information security, Hamadoun I. Touré, the secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, warned that pervasive computer use, while offering the prospect of a global “knowledge society,” also made billions of individuals into potential superpowers.
“Every single brain on earth is equal and can trigger an attack,” he said.
Jody R. Westby, the chief executive of Global Cyber Risk, a Washington-based consulting company, warned that governments were not doing enough to anticipate attacks. She said that the United States, while investing heavily in classified work on communications networks, had only one small program doing advanced research on the vulnerabilities in the private networks that handle the brunt of government communications and information management.
In a workshop on the northward spread of mosquito-borne ailments, participants discussed the growing gap between wealthier and poorer nations in dealing with health risks.
After presentations on recent outbreaks of the tropical chikungunya virus in Italy, Baldwyn Torto of the International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi, Kenya, suggested that too much of the discussion was focused on girding Europe against further outbreaks. A better approach, he said, would be to attack such diseases in the tropical spots where they originate.
At a final gathering on Saturday, Bill Fulkerson of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, said that meetings in the next several years would likely concentrate on the technological and scientific needs of developing countries that are trying to expand their economies without diminishing resources.
The daunting nature of the problems did not seem to blunt the experts’ determination to look for answers.
“What option do I have?” said Richard Wilson, 82, a Harvard physicist and an expert on nuclear power and environmental risk. “I could go down to Hilton Head and take a little club and knock a ball around the course, but I don’t find that a very attractive thought.”