What Helps Human Survival ? Biology? Science? Sociology? Phylosophy?

What helps human survival for another 100 or 1000 or 10,000 or a Million or more years?

1. First, take help of Biology. Just reproduce in vast numbers ;)

2. And, with help of Science and Technology, increase chances of survival against epidemics, and even possibly against natural catastrophes. And, of course, de-risk from 1-planet, i.e., expand our civilization to nearby or faraway planets/stars.

3. Meanwhile, there is danger of self-destruction. Here, Sociology may help, to create love, sharing, patience, discipline, order etc. This also means, to keep limits on reproduction rates :)

4. After all, why this Survival? What are we Waiting for? A state of boredom will creep in, after some evolution and sophistication from Biology, Science/Technology, Sociology. May be Philosophy helps here.

Looks like these are interlinked, and needs coordination and hand-in-hand growth. Too much of Biology leads to problems in Sociology. Some directions of Philosophy may stagnate Science and Technology. Society may not be mature enough to absorb too fast growth in Science and Technology, which may increase chances of misuse, leading to self destruction.

Photo Synthesis - From Natural to Artificial

Recently, I had a chance to listen to keynote address "The Future of Energy" by Prof. Daniel Nocera, Chemistry prof at MIT... "has successfully used solar light to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Recently, they have realized artificial photosynthesis by the solar splitting of water under benign conditions. In doing so, the Nocera group can now provide solar energy/storage and clean water to the poor and those of the non-legacy world".

After the session, I asked him one question... something like this "The leaf of plant, which harvests Sun's energy... the evolution of leaf has settled at energy utilization efficiency at approx 3%... they ignore the rest of energy instead of utilizing it for their betterment... that means there is some other important need or convenience which took priority in plants' evolution... may be you are ignoring that convenience (which may be of interest to us) in the quest for achieving efficiency of 75% and beyond..."...
His answer was - yes... their important duty was to live... may be 2%-3% was enough... they didn't know they have to store sun's energy for utilization by humans :)

I had some other thoughts going on... (may be similar to millions of humans over thousands of years)... that photo-synthesis efficiency in leaves is 2%-3%... not same in all plants... not same in all regions... for example, in parts of earth where there is enough sunlight through out the year, like India, plants don't need to worry much... but, there are some places on earth where not much sunlight is available for months together... here, plants have to store more energy, to save for days/months where they don't get sunlight... meaning their efficiency has to be higher... now the point... it may be possible that the chemical composition of the leaves in these two areas is different ? if we know that, and artificially/genetically engineer leaves towards maximizing their storage efficiency, we can benefit? basically we create plants that harvest ~50% or more energy... basically they become the future fuels... energy industry shifts from factories to farms... wow!

In the same conference, in some other context, some one was saying "our airplanes don't fly by flapping wings like birds"... basically, meaning we don't necessarily need to make nature imitating machines to serve our needs... may be right.

May be, Prof. Nocera's method is the good forward step for human societies energy needs, in his terms, "the energy industry/economy will be decentralized".

Watson - A machine from IBM, playing Jeopardy!

Watson - A machine from IBM, playing Jeopardy!
http://www-943.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/

I wonder what implications this have to human society... IBM is planning to deploy this for Research and a Smarter Planet.

On Science-Fiction side, you can think more...
http://chandra-superman.blogspot.com/2009/06/when-robots-doubt-humans.html
Now, Waston is a step towards this ... Wow!

I remember Mr. Chitti (in Rajnikant's Robo movie) reading books in seconds... again, Watson is a step towards Chitti.