It is pretty overwhelming watching humanity destroy itself; allowing whole systems to collapse, rather than change course. Cultures rise, and they fall. At the limit of global expansion, we now confront ourselves, squarely. Do humans have a limit of irrationality
Giant methane lakes a half mile under the ocean? Water samples blowing up? Calls for MORE deep ocean drilling? If this wasn’t reality, I’d think I was losing my mind in a Twilight Zone episode. If we humans have a future, the immediate one looks rocky, and the anxiety in the chip body is palpable.
Time to unplug and get outside!
So I’m walking around my little town and I decide to stop in the Shoe Repair and check in with Mark, with whom I had had a wonderful conversation a while ago when I had dropped off a pair of shoes for maintenance. In the course of our transaction, I discovered that he was born in Greece, and, he collected ancient coins. When he was a kid growing up in the Mediterranean, they could find ancient coins on their beaches regularly just as they played around!?
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Well, I am an ancient coin lover, and as a student of media, I’ve learned the relationship of the phonetic alphabet and the beginning of science and math in ancient Greece. This alphabet effect is also reflected in their coinage. (Indeed, coinage itself is an effect of the alphabet.) Earlier pieces are classified as Archaic, and are raw, wild, abstract symbols juxtaposed, while later coins from the Classical period show a refined character, with increasing perspective and realism throughout the design.
The coins pictured above are the ancient coins of Athens, called owls. The obverse shows Athena, the patron goddess of Athens. The reverse, not shown, has an owl, which Athena often appeared as. Of course Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, is the origin of the word palladium, by way of the asteroid, that is!
Well, I don’t know about you, but the thought of having something from 400BC in my pocket when I’m walking around just puts an extra spring in my step and I just happen to have my Athena with me on this jaunt, my original destination being our local Antique and Coin Shop. I’d go show my pal Mark the piece first, knowing he’d totally dig it.
Now before you start crying that this is a Cold Fusion Now blog, and not a personal diary for an ancient coin lover, let me beg your patience, as all will be revealed.
I roll in the Shoe Repair and show him my Athena (mine’s the one in the middle of the pictures above). Mark isn’t busy, and he loves the Owl, so we start in on a little conversation, in the course of which, I lay a Cold Fusion Now sticker on him, and show him the copy of Fire from Ice I’m draggin around with me. Yes, I start ministering the CF.
He reacts astounded and says, “My son and daughter both worked at the fusion center!” And he runs to the back of the shop, and when he comes back, he shows me his jacket with the National Ignition Facility stitched logo on the front! One of his kids had been at Lawrence Livermore at some point as well. I am just like “Whaaaatt?”, aghast to find someone who even knows what I’m talking about, let alone whose kids have fusion research experience, albeit the other kind!
Well, I began to describe some of the differences between laser fusion, and cold fusion.. Turns out he had heard about it in 1989, but then heard it turned out to be a “fraud”. Thus the conversation continued.
He was interested in hearing about the story of CF and I ended up giving him my hardback copy of Fire from Ice, the very copy I’d gotten in 2004 after learning about CF myself (again, from Bob). He didn’t want to take it, and we went back and forth until he relented. He had to have it, and I know he’ll read it.
That’s it, that’s the story. It just goes to show, you never know who’ll you’ll meet. And everywhere you go, you got to keep talking about cold fusion. Sometimes the conversation slides your way, and a light is turned on. It really brought my spirits up.
Arthur C. Clarke said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Before the alphabet, words had magic. Just saying something evoked power. Isn’t it funny when the most important thing we can do for our future is to keep talking?
Keep talking cold fusion. Keep typing cold fusion. The words are cloned over and over the more say it, the more we add to the critical mass, and then, at some point, awareness will bifurcate, and instantly, our world is changed.