We should think again about our definition of what progress is because we might be having a simplistic view of things. Today we speak of progress in terms of economic growth, advances in science and technology but do these aspects of our existence define progress in its entirety or are they just discrete parts of it?

The inhabitants of the ancient city of Jericho, about six thousand years ago, enjoyed a life expectancy of just 25 years. This is known thanks to skeletal remains found in many different tombs and burial sites of the region: In almost all cases, the bones belonged to people of about that age.

Today the life expectancy of most human beings is well above that and for the most part, increases every year; we have clearly improved in that department as well as others, but we still drag along our existence other problems that were already know for the inhabitants of that city and in some cases, things got worse oddly thanks to our technology simply because we can do more harm when we do harm with our more efficient tools: the negative environmental impact of many human activities has increased due to advances in technology, an increase in life expectancy and also an exponential growth in the overall population.

War is another example: The weapons of today are immensely more capable of inflicting damage than those of the ancients. We still wage war, and for quite similar reasons, so we cannot say that we have advanced significantly in that area. In fact, we could have fared far better, considering that thousands of years have elapsed since.

The treatment that we dispense to animals should also make us think a little: if we apply the same methods that the Assyrians or the Holy Inquisition used to obtain confessions from prisoners to experiment with animals, then we are the same. Arguments in favour of such experimentation are as believable to those supporting them as the loyalty to the king or the love of God was to both the Assyrians and the inquisitors. Many of them truly believed in their duties and thought that they were actually doing good things instead of evil ones. Now, scientists, corporate leaders, military leaders and politicians who support such experiments also believe that they are doing what is necessary and that there is no other way. Well… part of what progress is should be to try to find other ways.

If such justifications were valid, we would still have slavery instead of machinery because there was no way to replace human labour with mechanical devices prior to the industrial revolution, but machines finally came, so abolition wasn't in the end an impossibility or a catastrophic proposition.

It is true to say that in our society, as it stands today, we cannot simply let the animals go because we still need them for food and other necessities, but we have to make a difference between what is necessary by nature - i.e. eating the indispensable - from what is superfluous like cosmetics, sports hunting and even gourmet food and what shouldn't be done, plain and simple, including experiments with weapons suing animals as test subjects or targets. The way in which we treat animals is the way in which we really are because we do what we do without inhibitions.

A few months after the financial crisis that infected the world during 2008 and 2009, new talk about economic growth and economic recovery is appearing in the news, but only taking into account the numbers offered by the same governments and financial institutions that were in fact the collective cause of the problem. Individuals and families that lost their homes because of due payments are scantly better and many lives have been shattered because our society followed a path of tolerating mortgage and real estate speculation up to a point in which people had to sell themselves in virtual slavery to pay unrealistic amounts. Some decades ago people could buy or build their homes without any sort of mortgage, so having the populace drowning in debt now in order to get just the same as before is not exactly progress, right? At the time in which our grandparents liven, debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars - or now, euros - belonged to the realm of serious gambling addicts. Could we say that having almost every citizen in a country entangled in debts as heavy as those suffered by addicts meant that our world is better now?

Real progress is something more vast than increasing the size of our economy, having new consumer electronic gadgets or antibiotics. Those things are fine, but too much of a good thing is also bad, so the first and foremost thing that we need to improve in order to attain real progress is our sense of proportion for the things we do and imagine.

Source: Pablo Edronkin, Andinia.com

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A new collection of selected Landsat earth images worldwide, Global Land Survey 2005 (GLS2005), is now available for free download to any user around the globe.

Under a long-term partnership, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) periodically select and process thousands of the best-available Landsat satellite images, or "scenes," into a Global Land Survey, recording baseline conditions across the Earth's land surface such as forest cover, urban sprawl, cropland areas, glacier size, regional snow cover, drought status, wildfire scars, and coastal features. User demand for GLS data has been increasing steadily, with many scientists claiming these data sets are invaluable for global-change and climate-change research.

Nearly 10,000 satellite images, each covering approximately 100 X 100 miles, are now available from the recently completed 2005 data set. Previous sets include GLS1975, GLS1990, and GLS2000. All GLS images can be previewed and downloaded for free at either of two USGS web sites: Glovis or Earth Explorer.

The earliest GLS data sets, GLS1975 and GLS1990, were drawn from U.S. and international partner receiving-station archives of images captured by earlier Landsat satellites that could image regions all over the world but did not have the capacity to record full global coverage and return it to the U.S. archive. Due to this limitation, plus persistent cloud cover in some parts of the world, these GLS data sets include images from years on either side of their nominal date.

Landsat 7, launched in 1999, was the first satellite capable of recording and returning entire seasonal data collections on a global scale, which enabled creation of the GLS2000 data set from a single satellite over a relatively short time period. However, due to a technical malfunction in 2003, wherein 22% of the pixels in each Landsat 7 image are lost, plus the availability of excellent data from two other Landsat sensors, the GLS2005 collection includes: Landsat 7 scenes with missing pixels filled in from images captured over the same site shortly before or after the selected GLS scene; Landsat 5 images of some areas; and images of islands and reefs captured by the Landsat-prototype sensor onboard NASA's Earth Observing 1 (EO-1) satellite.

Fuller descriptions of the GLS data sets can be found at the web sites mentioned above. Other questions or comments can be directed to custserv@usgs.gov.

Source: USGS

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Is the development of agriculture a valid marker to be used along with Kardashev's scale to measure the progress of any civilisation?

The Kardashev scale is based on the usage of energy; it could be argued that agriculture provides food and that is energy for survival. In this way, we could say that agriculture is a way to obtain energy but does the fact that it has worked as such for civilisations on Earth could mean the same on any inhabited exoplanet?

According to the scale's own principles, we can assume that any civilisation would develop incrementally better methods designed to obtain energy from the environment. Getting food - energy - by cultivation came, in our case, as a development posterior to hunting, fishing and gathering. Thus, we could say that at least in our own case agriculture was the fourth method of getting energy by humankind after gathering, hunting, and fishing. Of course, the chain does not necessarily stops there, and so fifth, sixth, seventh methods, and of course, many more, could also be developed over time. It would probably be rather difficult to establish which one of the three other methods was developed firstly by our ancestors as a rational endeavour, but surely enough, we can say that there is an order in which energy-fetching methods are developed. The characteristics of each method within that order will probably depend on environmental conditions in each planet, but indeed, an order will be there.

Of course, these methods have to be the result of intelligence, and not just instinct; animals do hunt, fish and gather, but the difference between doing so instinctively or intelligently resides in the use of tools: A basket or bag for gathering, spears, bows and arrows for hunting, etc. The use of apparent strategies might or might not indicate intelligence, for animals that do show an apparently strategic thinking are, as far as we know, incapable of reasoning, like certain spiders that instead of producing a regular web produce nets that they use to actually catch their prey. They even make collimation marks on the ground using their own faeces, and the whole thing, seen superficially, resembles quite an intelligent behaviour, but it isn't. However, other animals like dolphins that catch sardines in the coast of Namibia, do show true strategic thinking, and some sharks found in the area also seem to actually learn from the dolphins. So, strategies might or might not indicate intelligence, but the use of tools certainly does.

So, it would be very imprudent to say that exactly the same succession of methods would take place in the case of a budding civilisation in an exoplanet. Here on Earth we can fish because we have fish, but that might or might not be the case elsewhere. Neither fish nor anything with a similar niche in an exotic ecosystem absolutely needs to exist. Perhaps rocks are fished in other planets, or perhaps nothing. What we do know is that there is a succession of methods there, and that these methods are characterised by an increased efficiency. Their development is fuelled by some sort of technological progress, and not just evolutionary adaptations in a strictly biological sense.

But maybe there is an exception and one of the forms of manipulation of energy is truly universal or at least very common: controlling fire. The odds of survival of any species with an incipient development of intelligence increase enormously just by learning how to manipulate fire, not just because it will help them survive against certain environmental factors like cold weather, a likely scenario in most Earth-like planets located around stars, in their habitable zones, but for industrial reasons: Controlling fire is a likely method to develop a basic metallurgic capability.

Source: Andinia.com

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