He is a brilliant young economist, regarded as one of the best of his generation--- educated at Berlin and Bonn and at the London School of Economics, given a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford and Columbia University, where he is hired as a lecturer.
He also has real world experience as an international investment banker.
No wonder then that this wunderkind's PhD, "Small is Beautiful", is quickly published in 1938 upon his graduation at age 27, and soon climbs the bestseller lists and is translated into many languages and is regarded as a timeless classic and an epoch-making book.
Because most historians credit it for ending the then real possibility of a world-wide European War.
But alas, it is not to be : E F Schumacher had to wait 30 years and his retirement to begin writing the essays that made his 1973 publication the Bible of our Green Age.
His book or any book* like it, simply won't have become a bestseller in the 1930s.
(* Scott Nearing's "Must We Starve?" written from a back-to-the-land farm in northern New England in 1932, might be an example of a similar book, published in the 1930s that was largely un-read in the 1930s.)
The ordinary middle class members of the world of the 1930s (the grandparents and parents of the people who did eventually buy it) were simply opposed to the main ideas of "Small Is Beautiful".
Simply knew - in their heart of hearts - that while Schumacher's ideas were well intentioned, they were also quite simply, naturally wrong --- proven wrong by Nature.
Science had proved it so : sorry, end of story.
The origins of WWII come down, in the end, to the fact that the general public's belief in the "Progress is inevitably Bigger and Better" meta-ideology was just as strong as that of Stalin and FDR and Hitler.
Only the public's achingly slow post-war assessment of the sad lessons of WWII (when that meta-ideology was given its wings to fly) led them to the position where they could come to see the value of "Small Is Beautiful" .....
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Must Progress inevitably get mightier and wiser ?
During the truly horrible and nasty 1930s and early 1940s, at the apogee of Reductionist Modernity, this idea was the overall global "meta-ideology".
So powerful a meta-ideology that it actually dominated all the ideologies we then took to be widely apart in their worldviews.
Minor variant ideologies we still call fascist/nazi style nationalism , communism, and mixed socialist/capitalist liberal democracy.
Hydro dams and buildings of all sorts, from all ideology zones, got bigger, wider, taller, heavier --- planes and ships and land vehicles got steadily bigger, faster, longer, more long-lunged : mightier.
Streamlined, smooth,sleek, aerodynamic : more athlete-like, more bullet-like.
Fit, very fit.
Business, government and military bureaucracies, from all ideology zones, got bigger and more complex with a lot more specialized and professional subsections : wiser.
During the Great Depression, the idea that Big is Good and Bigger is even Better temporarily replaced even the claim that Greed is Good.
Was this true ?
At least one prominent scientist didn't think so and wrote a popular-styled essay to demonstrate the limits to the idea that bigger was always and inevitably better.
Google "haldane" and "size" and there it pops up, as truly profound and as eye-opening as ever : a still-useful essay on science that was written more than 85 years ago !
This, despite the best possible definition of a professional scientist being 'someone who wouldn't be caught dead reading a science article in their field that is more than eight and half months old' .
Nevertheless, you and I are not science "pros" and we'll read anything useful : J B S Haldane , "On Being The Right Size".
If you are worried at all that our globe is hurling towards an environmental disaster that will make WWII look like pikers, then please, please read this essay.
You'll need it as you fight the DENIERS, who deny there are any limits on the size of a problem that Man's mental powers can beat.....
So powerful a meta-ideology that it actually dominated all the ideologies we then took to be widely apart in their worldviews.
Minor variant ideologies we still call fascist/nazi style nationalism , communism, and mixed socialist/capitalist liberal democracy.
Hydro dams and buildings of all sorts, from all ideology zones, got bigger, wider, taller, heavier --- planes and ships and land vehicles got steadily bigger, faster, longer, more long-lunged : mightier.
Streamlined, smooth,sleek, aerodynamic : more athlete-like, more bullet-like.
Fit, very fit.
Business, government and military bureaucracies, from all ideology zones, got bigger and more complex with a lot more specialized and professional subsections : wiser.
During the Great Depression, the idea that Big is Good and Bigger is even Better temporarily replaced even the claim that Greed is Good.
Was this true ?
At least one prominent scientist didn't think so and wrote a popular-styled essay to demonstrate the limits to the idea that bigger was always and inevitably better.
Google "haldane" and "size" and there it pops up, as truly profound and as eye-opening as ever : a still-useful essay on science that was written more than 85 years ago !
This, despite the best possible definition of a professional scientist being 'someone who wouldn't be caught dead reading a science article in their field that is more than eight and half months old' .
Nevertheless, you and I are not science "pros" and we'll read anything useful : J B S Haldane , "On Being The Right Size".
If you are worried at all that our globe is hurling towards an environmental disaster that will make WWII look like pikers, then please, please read this essay.
You'll need it as you fight the DENIERS, who deny there are any limits on the size of a problem that Man's mental powers can beat.....
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Islands and WWII : did anything else important happen (yawn) ?
For hundreds of millions of avid newspaper readers during WWII, an atlas was essential to follow the conflict's global course.
Never more so because of the fact that most of the battles - yes, most of the battles - took place over, around and on islands - with some of the most heavily fought-over islands being almost incredibly tiny.
(The battle for Tarawa Atoll saw almost 10,000 casualties spread over its meagre 500 acres.)
An atlas (and a magnifying glass) was essential to make sense of it all.
Admittedly, the Eastern Front can be understood completely without once referencing a single island but no other major war front can say the same.
Consider, just for one example, why bombers were based in Yorkshire to bomb Hamburg.
It was because this maximized the amount of "Flak-free" water between the bomber base on the island of Britain and its target on the coastline of the mainland.
So, a war decided by actions involving hundreds of strategic but tiny islands scattered all over the globe in the most unlikely of places.
That isn't something easy to blend with the popular view of WWII was holds it was all about the clash of a few Titans going at it, head to head.
Only a commensal history of 1939-1945 can blend the story of the Great Powers with the stories of the tiniest of powers, to make a truly coherent account of those years.....
Never more so because of the fact that most of the battles - yes, most of the battles - took place over, around and on islands - with some of the most heavily fought-over islands being almost incredibly tiny.
(The battle for Tarawa Atoll saw almost 10,000 casualties spread over its meagre 500 acres.)
An atlas (and a magnifying glass) was essential to make sense of it all.
Admittedly, the Eastern Front can be understood completely without once referencing a single island but no other major war front can say the same.
Consider, just for one example, why bombers were based in Yorkshire to bomb Hamburg.
It was because this maximized the amount of "Flak-free" water between the bomber base on the island of Britain and its target on the coastline of the mainland.
So, a war decided by actions involving hundreds of strategic but tiny islands scattered all over the globe in the most unlikely of places.
That isn't something easy to blend with the popular view of WWII was holds it was all about the clash of a few Titans going at it, head to head.
Only a commensal history of 1939-1945 can blend the story of the Great Powers with the stories of the tiniest of powers, to make a truly coherent account of those years.....
a Commensal history of WWII includes the small and the great, the hubristic and the nimble
To render the sprawling activities of WWII palatable to digestion (because even the most devoted of readers have their limits) the tendency of authors is to show the war as seen through the eyes of the Great Powers and the Great Men.
And as seen through the eyes of those wisest of Wise Men, the scientists.
A commensal history of 1939-1945 should also start with a war between a handful of Great Men and Great Powers, because that is the way it all began.
But, to be fully accurate, it should also end in a confused co-mingling of the actions of the decisive small as well as those of the chastened great.
It should end, in other words, as a salient shock to the majority of the world who, in 1939 , were reluctantly convinced it was simple a natural fact that Bigger was always Better and that Might was always ultimately Right.
It should even shock at least some of the youngest of the scientists, those not yet set in their ways , to look again at the supposed science behind the claim Bigger is Better....
And as seen through the eyes of those wisest of Wise Men, the scientists.
A commensal history of 1939-1945 should also start with a war between a handful of Great Men and Great Powers, because that is the way it all began.
But, to be fully accurate, it should also end in a confused co-mingling of the actions of the decisive small as well as those of the chastened great.
It should end, in other words, as a salient shock to the majority of the world who, in 1939 , were reluctantly convinced it was simple a natural fact that Bigger was always Better and that Might was always ultimately Right.
It should even shock at least some of the youngest of the scientists, those not yet set in their ways , to look again at the supposed science behind the claim Bigger is Better....
Monday, May 27, 2013
Coalitions, not Combat, lost and won WWII
England and pre-1937 Germany definitely started and then attempted to direct World War Two throughout , but they certainly didn't win or lose this truly world-wide war, not all on their tiny , tiny own.
Instead, two vast world-sized coalitions under their nominal direction - one truly commensal and the other just national imperialism by another name - won and lost the war.
Germany and Japan built far, far, far better fighting machines but lost out totally to the Anglo-led nations, simply because of the Axis inability to form genuine working partnerships with all the people worldwide who were initially willing to back Fascism back in 1939-1940.
In the beginning Japan and Germany seemed to have had 'Science' on their side : most of the educated world resignedly believed that Nature and Darwin had revealed that in the long run, bigger was always better, always beating down the small and the weak.
In other words, they had a baldly naive and a highly hubris-inflated sense of what the Science of Size actually told us.
If you don't know that there actually is a well founded Science of Size, then you won't be prepared for the upcoming mega-sized re-match of WWII, when popular Hubris again collides with unpopular Reality, this time over the question of climate.
Back in the Science-obsessed Thirties, the age-old and realistically grounded moral sense that it was right and proper to come to the aid of the babies of perfect strangers melted away, melted away before this mistaken 'book' fact that "Bigger is Better".
The Japanese and Germans had seemingly appeared to be the next new 'coming thing' , a view their early surprisingly fast and cheap victories only enforced.
But 'scaling up' their early victories proved impossible, as the real Science of Size revealed that their earlier logistics were bound to fail over the vast new regions that they planned to conquer and then hold.
Small and weak peoples, already conquered and defeated, had proven to have more life in them than anyone expected.
They successfully logistically harassed the German and Japanese until they reduced these over-extended Great Powers to the point where their eventual military collapse before the forces of the Allied coalition became relatively easy.
Meanwhile the Allied coalition had many members, either nominally still neutral or nominally actual co-belligerents, who gave only a few leases on a little of of their land for others to make into vital military bases or provided scarce strategic natural resources, both provided at very good prices to themselves.
But at least none of them needed to be occupied to keep them on side.
Occupied by hundreds of thousands of scarce combat troops to hold each of them and to keep their Resistance partisans at bay , as was the case for everyone of the nations inside the Axis 'coalition of the conquered and subjugated'.
Others in the Allied coalition - the 'Free' armed forces - were the small but very committed volunteers forces of the many governments-in-exile from countries under Axis rule, small forces who provided far more fighting energy than their mere numbers would indicate.
The UK, USA and USSR dominated the Allied coalition, but try to imagine how successfully they would have been if everything had been reversed.
Try to imagine if if the Axis coalition had been as successful as the Allied commensal coalition of the big and the small became, with even China teaming up with Japan in a war against the white powers.
And then try to imagine if the UK had to do without her empire and commonwealth, if the Americans had to do without their banana republics of the Americas, and the USSR had had all of the many nations on its non-western borders in hostile action against her.
Who would have won WWII then ?
Instead, two vast world-sized coalitions under their nominal direction - one truly commensal and the other just national imperialism by another name - won and lost the war.
Germany and Japan built far, far, far better fighting machines but lost out totally to the Anglo-led nations, simply because of the Axis inability to form genuine working partnerships with all the people worldwide who were initially willing to back Fascism back in 1939-1940.
In the beginning Japan and Germany seemed to have had 'Science' on their side : most of the educated world resignedly believed that Nature and Darwin had revealed that in the long run, bigger was always better, always beating down the small and the weak.
In other words, they had a baldly naive and a highly hubris-inflated sense of what the Science of Size actually told us.
If you don't know that there actually is a well founded Science of Size, then you won't be prepared for the upcoming mega-sized re-match of WWII, when popular Hubris again collides with unpopular Reality, this time over the question of climate.
Back in the Science-obsessed Thirties, the age-old and realistically grounded moral sense that it was right and proper to come to the aid of the babies of perfect strangers melted away, melted away before this mistaken 'book' fact that "Bigger is Better".
The Japanese and Germans had seemingly appeared to be the next new 'coming thing' , a view their early surprisingly fast and cheap victories only enforced.
But 'scaling up' their early victories proved impossible, as the real Science of Size revealed that their earlier logistics were bound to fail over the vast new regions that they planned to conquer and then hold.
Small and weak peoples, already conquered and defeated, had proven to have more life in them than anyone expected.
They successfully logistically harassed the German and Japanese until they reduced these over-extended Great Powers to the point where their eventual military collapse before the forces of the Allied coalition became relatively easy.
Meanwhile the Allied coalition had many members, either nominally still neutral or nominally actual co-belligerents, who gave only a few leases on a little of of their land for others to make into vital military bases or provided scarce strategic natural resources, both provided at very good prices to themselves.
But at least none of them needed to be occupied to keep them on side.
Occupied by hundreds of thousands of scarce combat troops to hold each of them and to keep their Resistance partisans at bay , as was the case for everyone of the nations inside the Axis 'coalition of the conquered and subjugated'.
Others in the Allied coalition - the 'Free' armed forces - were the small but very committed volunteers forces of the many governments-in-exile from countries under Axis rule, small forces who provided far more fighting energy than their mere numbers would indicate.
The UK, USA and USSR dominated the Allied coalition, but try to imagine how successfully they would have been if everything had been reversed.
Try to imagine if if the Axis coalition had been as successful as the Allied commensal coalition of the big and the small became, with even China teaming up with Japan in a war against the white powers.
And then try to imagine if the UK had to do without her empire and commonwealth, if the Americans had to do without their banana republics of the Americas, and the USSR had had all of the many nations on its non-western borders in hostile action against her.
Who would have won WWII then ?
Friday, May 24, 2013
WWII's the Mighty and the Wise "confounded" by bacteria and bazooka Resistance Movements
It is clear now that WWII's twin defeats of Sulfa drugs and Armoured tanks by the bacterial and bazooka "Resistance Movements" spelt the beginning of the end for prewar Reductionist cum Constructionist Modernity.
(Martin) Henry Dawson could publish endless articles on the commensality of reality till the end of time ,but they cut no ice with the Mighty and the Wise compared to the short sharp lessons they learned at the great university of real life that was WWII.
Sir Edward Mellanby , mentor of Dawson's rival Sir Howard Florey and head of Britain's agenda-setting MRC (Medical Research Council) from 1933 to 1949, famously claimed in the late 1930s that the synthesis of the sulfa drugs meant we could soon close all our infectious hospitals and kiss infection deaths goodbye.
But by 1943, Bacterial Resistance rendered the sulfa drugs almost useless and allowed penicillin's vast family of antibiotics to become the first port of call for the never ending new strains of bacterial death , though we are still racing very hard to produce new antibiotics to match ever new bacterial resistance.
And always will : that is the way of Commensality Modernity , the way of real reality.
The armoured tank, immune to mere infantry weapons and the indirect fire of artillery, was widely proclaimed as the major reason why the Great Powers would always quickly and easily overrun small powers, particularly those small powers without natural barriers to easy tank passage.
But by 1943 the Bazooka Resistance, today represented by the soviet-era RPG 7 anti-tank rocket propelled grenade seen in every revolution and insurrection, transformed that certitude.
The light, man-carriable , easily concealed bazooka-style anti-tank weapons ensures that an invading Great Power would now have a very tough time invading and successfully occupying a small power.
Tanks would now have a tough time evading the lethal bazooka --- particularly in rocky hilly mountain valley roads, in muddy swamps and while making their way along narrow forests and jungle trails.
Above all the tank was now incredibly vulnerable to hand-held anti-tank weapons while threading their way through the built-up urban areas found in even the flattest, smallest and barest of small powers.
Reductionist/Constructionist Modernity held that effectively reality was binary, with Particle Physicists at one end and Plasma Particles at the other, and everything else in between being basically useless mouths or useless molecules.
But the medium sized stuff in between had proved unwilling to just go away and had gummed up the works of both the Axis and Allied great powers during WWII, again and again.
I rather doubt that commensal expert and infantry veteran Henry Dawson was truly surprised.....
(Martin) Henry Dawson could publish endless articles on the commensality of reality till the end of time ,but they cut no ice with the Mighty and the Wise compared to the short sharp lessons they learned at the great university of real life that was WWII.
Sir Edward Mellanby , mentor of Dawson's rival Sir Howard Florey and head of Britain's agenda-setting MRC (Medical Research Council) from 1933 to 1949, famously claimed in the late 1930s that the synthesis of the sulfa drugs meant we could soon close all our infectious hospitals and kiss infection deaths goodbye.
But by 1943, Bacterial Resistance rendered the sulfa drugs almost useless and allowed penicillin's vast family of antibiotics to become the first port of call for the never ending new strains of bacterial death , though we are still racing very hard to produce new antibiotics to match ever new bacterial resistance.
And always will : that is the way of Commensality Modernity , the way of real reality.
The armoured tank, immune to mere infantry weapons and the indirect fire of artillery, was widely proclaimed as the major reason why the Great Powers would always quickly and easily overrun small powers, particularly those small powers without natural barriers to easy tank passage.
But by 1943 the Bazooka Resistance, today represented by the soviet-era RPG 7 anti-tank rocket propelled grenade seen in every revolution and insurrection, transformed that certitude.
The light, man-carriable , easily concealed bazooka-style anti-tank weapons ensures that an invading Great Power would now have a very tough time invading and successfully occupying a small power.
Tanks would now have a tough time evading the lethal bazooka --- particularly in rocky hilly mountain valley roads, in muddy swamps and while making their way along narrow forests and jungle trails.
Above all the tank was now incredibly vulnerable to hand-held anti-tank weapons while threading their way through the built-up urban areas found in even the flattest, smallest and barest of small powers.
Reductionist/Constructionist Modernity held that effectively reality was binary, with Particle Physicists at one end and Plasma Particles at the other, and everything else in between being basically useless mouths or useless molecules.
But the medium sized stuff in between had proved unwilling to just go away and had gummed up the works of both the Axis and Allied great powers during WWII, again and again.
I rather doubt that commensal expert and infantry veteran Henry Dawson was truly surprised.....
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
WWII : Constructionists vs Commensalists
Reductionism, still the philosophy of today's Popular Science, has admittedly had a lot of glass-half-filled success in the last few centuries.
It has totally succeeded in burrowing down below the surface of reality to the tiny objects at the base of all energy and matter ; reducing big macro objects that we can directly see and touch down to zillions of incredibly tiny objects we can only assume exists by way of indirect evidence.
But while Reductionism can explain how these tiny objects interact, more or less, it has totally failed to fulfill the real purpose behind all of its efforts : to construct new , better-built, versions of macro reality based on what we have learned about the tiny building blocks that make it up.
It turns out, to use today's Net jargon, that the so called laws of physics do not actually 'scale up' ( or 'scale down') all that well.
What we know about tiny quarks does not help us at all to account for the unexpected behavior of slightly bigger objects like the atoms in various phases of condensed matter, such as in solids and liquids for example.
To use a life-sized example of another scientific failure to scale up, this one from WWII logistics, we need only to look at the total failure of the German fuel truck on the Russian Front, after doing so well in Poland and France.
A sturdy army truck like the famous American deuce and a half can go pretty well everywhere a railway can't and so is the best means to get fuel to a fast moving invading armoured army.
But it burns a whole lot of fuel itself to get its few tons of fuel to the front.
But over distances of about one hundred miles from end of rail, it still is the best single way to get fuel to tracked armoured vehicles well out ahead of the slower ,wider, line of rail-supported advance.
But move the distance required to be travelled up to 800 miles out (and remember 800 more miles back in to get more tank and truck fuel) and the truck is a flop and a disaster.
Any truck trying to move up behind an aggressively invading armoured army that has been fighting an equally determined enemy , one who leaves nothing but scorched earth behind, is sure to be travelling over miles of badly damaged, badly overcrowded, muddy or dusty potholed roads and bridges.
The truck's gas and oil consumption soars as its miles per hour slows to a crawl. It can expect major damages from bad roads at least a few times on its 800 mile trek out and back - requiring the services of equally gas-guzzling repair vehicles.
Effectively, the truck is soon consuming more petro products on its two way trek than it can deliver to the tanks. (Remember, it must haul all of its own fuel and oil on itself, for the trip out and back, leaving ever less room for tank fuel.)
This wouldn't happen in peacetime, where the roads between Berlin and Moscow would be in excellent, fuel efficient, shape and where fuel and oil can be picked up at filling stations on route as required.
Once the cargo was delivered to Moscow, a return cargo is picked up to take back, to cover costs.
But war trucks 'dead-head' back, unless they can be used to safely carry lightly wounded men back to rear base hospitals.
Hitler's gambit to take over the world failed in 1941 when his physics of truck transport failed to 'scale up' to the world of real life.
Similarly the fact that chemistry had constructed totally new molecules of dyes and plastics out of little atoms didn't mean human chemists could construct molecules of penicillin just because the fungi could do so naturally.
Penicillin's formula was not the formula for nylon, 'scaled up'.
In biology, the ham-fisted efforts of human-sized geneticists to construct genes they wanted by massive doses of x-rays failed to work as well as the elegant way the tiny bacteria transformed each other with tiny but efficient HGT (horizontal gene transfers).
I am not dismissing the value of human railways and human chemical plants nor do I expect to see skyscrapers made by bacteria : I just insist along with (Martin) Henry Dawson, that there is a niche for everyone and we all are best at activities scaled to our own size and niche.
Reality can not be reduced to tenured human particle physicists at the top and quarks at the bottom (Reality reduced to Professors and Plasma), with all of the rest of the stuff in between just useless feeders, not wanted on the voyage, yesterday's booster stages, enroute in Man's journey to the stars.....
It has totally succeeded in burrowing down below the surface of reality to the tiny objects at the base of all energy and matter ; reducing big macro objects that we can directly see and touch down to zillions of incredibly tiny objects we can only assume exists by way of indirect evidence.
But while Reductionism can explain how these tiny objects interact, more or less, it has totally failed to fulfill the real purpose behind all of its efforts : to construct new , better-built, versions of macro reality based on what we have learned about the tiny building blocks that make it up.
It turns out, to use today's Net jargon, that the so called laws of physics do not actually 'scale up' ( or 'scale down') all that well.
What we know about tiny quarks does not help us at all to account for the unexpected behavior of slightly bigger objects like the atoms in various phases of condensed matter, such as in solids and liquids for example.
To use a life-sized example of another scientific failure to scale up, this one from WWII logistics, we need only to look at the total failure of the German fuel truck on the Russian Front, after doing so well in Poland and France.
A sturdy army truck like the famous American deuce and a half can go pretty well everywhere a railway can't and so is the best means to get fuel to a fast moving invading armoured army.
But it burns a whole lot of fuel itself to get its few tons of fuel to the front.
But over distances of about one hundred miles from end of rail, it still is the best single way to get fuel to tracked armoured vehicles well out ahead of the slower ,wider, line of rail-supported advance.
But move the distance required to be travelled up to 800 miles out (and remember 800 more miles back in to get more tank and truck fuel) and the truck is a flop and a disaster.
Any truck trying to move up behind an aggressively invading armoured army that has been fighting an equally determined enemy , one who leaves nothing but scorched earth behind, is sure to be travelling over miles of badly damaged, badly overcrowded, muddy or dusty potholed roads and bridges.
The truck's gas and oil consumption soars as its miles per hour slows to a crawl. It can expect major damages from bad roads at least a few times on its 800 mile trek out and back - requiring the services of equally gas-guzzling repair vehicles.
Effectively, the truck is soon consuming more petro products on its two way trek than it can deliver to the tanks. (Remember, it must haul all of its own fuel and oil on itself, for the trip out and back, leaving ever less room for tank fuel.)
This wouldn't happen in peacetime, where the roads between Berlin and Moscow would be in excellent, fuel efficient, shape and where fuel and oil can be picked up at filling stations on route as required.
Once the cargo was delivered to Moscow, a return cargo is picked up to take back, to cover costs.
But war trucks 'dead-head' back, unless they can be used to safely carry lightly wounded men back to rear base hospitals.
Hitler's gambit to take over the world failed in 1941 when his physics of truck transport failed to 'scale up' to the world of real life.
Similarly the fact that chemistry had constructed totally new molecules of dyes and plastics out of little atoms didn't mean human chemists could construct molecules of penicillin just because the fungi could do so naturally.
Penicillin's formula was not the formula for nylon, 'scaled up'.
In biology, the ham-fisted efforts of human-sized geneticists to construct genes they wanted by massive doses of x-rays failed to work as well as the elegant way the tiny bacteria transformed each other with tiny but efficient HGT (horizontal gene transfers).
I am not dismissing the value of human railways and human chemical plants nor do I expect to see skyscrapers made by bacteria : I just insist along with (Martin) Henry Dawson, that there is a niche for everyone and we all are best at activities scaled to our own size and niche.
Reality can not be reduced to tenured human particle physicists at the top and quarks at the bottom (Reality reduced to Professors and Plasma), with all of the rest of the stuff in between just useless feeders, not wanted on the voyage, yesterday's booster stages, enroute in Man's journey to the stars.....
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