Saturday 26 January 2019

Why we hate humans so much

I grew up on a farm with a few hectares of land, along with some cows and sheep that needed tending. Together with my two brothers we would spend much of each day outside when the weather was nice, whether by ourselves, or with friends from the village, though during winter some work still needed to be done on the farm to get everything winter-ready. In our village it was quite normal to live on a farm and have this amount of space.

Not everyone in the village lived on a farm, of course, and they would have less space than us farmers did. Still, everyone had their own house, a garden and especially in the original village section (not the new construction), people tended to know just about anything about each other. For much of my life I grew up not really knowing or caring who of the people in the village were or weren't family members. We'd share everything anyway and be there when anyone needed help.

That all dramatically changed when my parents divorced and I moved together with my mother into a house in the nearby city. That was the beginning of what has now been more than a decade of city life. It has convinced me that there are virtually no redeeming qualities to living in a city.



It's not just me, either. Report after report shows that cities are polluted death traps which shorten lifespans [1][2][3], in addition to causing severe stress- and disrupted sleeping pattern-related health issues. Living in a city, or raising children in a city is pretty much one of the worst things that we humans have inflicted upon ourselves over the past thousand years.

Another massive problem that cities perpetuate is that of poverty [4], with those children being born in poor neighbourhoods generally being out of luck unless they can somehow escape from those environments.


All of this does raise the question of why we hate ourselves and our fellow humans so much. Why do we lie to ourselves about what is obviously a massive health issue? Why do we dream of moving up in society while simultaneously trampling others down as we try to move upwards? Why this rat race?

The general way of thinking is that a single human being simply has to do with less. Nobody needs an apartment that's more than about twenty square meters or so. They'd go by just fine. Just cram lots of sub sixty square meter apartments into a few massively tall blocks and stuff them full with people.

Which is exactly what we have been doing with livestock over the past decades, with battery cages for chickens, cramming pigs into cages just barely enough to hold them, turkeys and other poultry on the floors of massive halls with no room to move.

They figured out at some point that dimming the light to about 10 lux caused chickens in battery cages to not inflict as much physical harm on themselves, as these low light levels would trigger resting behaviour. As pigs that got crammed together in small spaces would start resorting to cannibalism - eating the ears, tails and other parts of their fellow pigs - their tails and ears would be preemptively removed, along with some of their teeth.


To me the way humans and livestock are being treated kind of blurs together. The whole bio-industry with their industrial levels of animal cruelty exists because the old ways of raising livestock was too expensive and inefficient. So they optimised those inefficiencies away without any consideration for animal well-being.  But cruelty-free/reduced cruelty meat, poultry and eggs cost more, so it'll likely always remain a thing.

Similarly, one points at how inefficient the average human being is. When not at an office doing useful work, or otherwise participating in the economy, they are just a drain on resources, filling space that could be filled with more humans. There's nothing to be gained by making it affordable for the average person to buy a house with a garden, and allow their children to grow up surrounded by nature instead of inside glass, concrete, stone and asphalt-lined cages. That's just not productive.


On our farm, our cows and sheep would spend time outside as much as possible, to eat the fresh grass and otherwise do their thing. We'd bring the cows in only for milking and during the night. Of course, we were painfully aware of this not being efficient. Other farmers had already begun to stop letting their cattle graze outside as much as we did, instead keeping them in the stables and feeding them either dried grass or cattle feed.

These days there's more of a market for meat, poultry and eggs that comes from animals who actually have seen some daylight during their lives, so it's more realistic to farm that way again. For humans there's no such hope, however. Most farmers have already quit their business and sold their farms to mega farms that are run by large companies.

Unless one is rich, this means that one will have to accept that the future for themselves and those around them means less living space, smaller apartments with more restrictions, more stress and more concrete and only a miserable patch of half-dead and dying plants surrounded by muddy grass (commonly referred to as a 'public park') to serve as a way to 'escape the city'.


Makes one wonder whether dimming the light inside cities to 10 lux might be a solution, along with the removal of any appendages which its inhabitants do not need to carry out their jobs anyway. Could solve all crime and violence issues in one stroke, while increasing productivity many fold

Maybe this is the perfect time to consider a career in being livestock..


Maya


[1] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/health-impacts-of-living-in-a-city/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/13/warning-living-city-seriously-damage-health
[3] https://www.who.int/sustainable-development/cities/health-risks/en/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4570570/

Saturday 19 January 2019

Trying to make the world a better place, even as it wants me dead

Over the past months, a big focus of me alongside working on my upcoming book [1][2] and of course trying to find a new full-time job, has been setting up a new website to host the range of projects that I have started last year. These include a variety of hardware projects, involving the design of PCBs in KiCad for things ranging from building monitoring and control to the controlling of LED-based room lighting, and writing the firmware to drive these boards.

The website, Nyantronics.com [3], also features the biggest project of all: Internet of Plants (soon to be renamed Greentropia). This project focuses on high-density indoor farming solutions, as a way to solve the issue of food production in today's world, and the massive pollution and habitat destructions that this causes.

By having all vegetables and fruit grown in environments that are isolated from the environment, and by having many floors of this, it solves not only the problem of habitat destruction, but also removes the need for pesticides and herbicides to be used. Further it reduces the need to transport food across the globe, as well as plastic packaging.

Our focus is on moving to hydroponics and fogponics, so as to remove the need for soil and to optimise plant growth. A big part of making indoor farming like this work is to make it as energy-efficient as possible. So far we have been researching various grow LED options and of course hydroponics, fogponics and related to reduce the amount of energy required to produce fruit and vegetables, as well as look at making staple foods such as rice and soy beans work in this setting.

Looking at comparable efforts, such as the big EDEN ISS [4] project, we can see the potential here, and slowly we're bringing others into the project as well. It's a multi-disciplinary project, bringing together botany, biology, electronics, physics, anthropology, software development, mechanical engineering and many more fields. This makes it into an incredibly challenging but also incredibly fun project.


And yet, when I woke up this morning, I felt horrible. All I could see was this young child inside of me with adults yelling at it and generally being complete and utter jerks. The latter being mostly the people who are trying to kick me out of the apartment where I'm currently staying, merely on account of disliking me. Add to this the pressure of still being unemployed and having nowhere to go if I want to keep my unemployment benefits and health insurance.

Some days I'm not sure how things got this way. When you always tried to do things properly and always be nice and friendly to people, it's the worst kind of feeling when you aren't merely met with indifference, but with outright hostility. To know that you're not even a stain in the eyes of some people, but something far less.

And there's always that young child in the dark room. Terrified of adults. Never daring to trust adults again after what those adults did to her 5-year old self. The me today who is trying to get past those experiences, but who just keeps being reminded that adults are never to be trusted, not ever again.


I'm still hoping that I won't get kicked out of the apartment next month now that a date to have it forcibly cleared has been set. It's going to cost me a lot more money on lawyers and related adult fun to try and avoid this.

I'm still hoping that I will get that new job, get to move to a new place and that just for once these horrible things stop happening to me. I'm still trying. Still hoping.

I finally want that five-year old me to feel safe for the very first time. To move on and focus on these projects that can transform the world and the future of humanity. Not keep being stuck dealing with the same horrible types of people and revisiting the same old traumas over and over again.

Instead I want that fascinating future, working on cool projects that enrich me and humanity as a whole. To get this world away from this eternal darkness that threatens to swallow everything because there are certain adults who insist on living at the cost of others.


Maya


[1] https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/hands-embedded-programming-c17
[2] https://amzn.to/2Vl79wP
[3] http://www.nyantronics.com/index.php
[4] https://eden-iss.net/