We live in a smart society! This smartness has been increasing for a few decades even if there is no evidence of a sudden and strange evolutionary upturn in human intelligence. Instead, our machines are becoming ‘smarter’, or at least, meriting the ‘smart’ label more frequently. In the ‘old’ days…

The recent energetic and climatic woes around the world have our top experts scrambling for more ‘clean’ energy sources -one more chapter in their continuous race towards an ideal source with no emissions and high sustainability. This race is so full of pitfalls that any outside objective viewer –possibly an…

The Universe is an entity that transforms energy into a less useful type. Every energy transaction has a portion that can do work, while the rest dissipates, unable to do any work. Let’s take our brilliant sun, a star like many others that uses hydrogen to produce helium in the…

In our current world, philanthropy is perceived as an empathetic action by the super-rich to improve human welfare. The original word in Greek means “loving humanity” so the term had been historically used to denote any benevolent action without necessarily involving money. …

The Darwin award recognizes individuals who contribute to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool. This award is given to individuals but the human-provoked climate disaster we are experiencing merits a modification of this definition to include a whole species. …

The crisis in Ukraine has brought to the limelight the plight of refugees. As soon as the conflict started, Western governments quickly announced their plans to accept refugees while Presidents staged photo ops hugging perfectly healthy and well-dressed young refugees. People around the world showed their empathy by putting Ukrainian…

Recently many industrialized countries and world institutions have announced bright green new deals to tackle climate change and the environmental crisis we are facing. The US has joined the chorus by announcing a variety of proposals that go from the Green New Deal to the climate part of the Build…

Our present culture values private property without questioning and sees it as part of the natural order of things. We take this Western view of ownership for granted while remaining unaware of other possibilities that have existed in the long history of Homo sapiens. The current sacredness of property has…

Kakistocracy is not a very common word in our present lexicon but it is very useful to assess the quality of those in power. The word was coined for the first time during the English civil war by Paul Gosnold in 1644 to describe the supporters of Charles I of…