Couple of thoughts as we start the year 21...

Exciting times since this century has started it's adolescence age - where-in as 'humanity' you start getting more mature, each century carries a dearth of new research & inventions which become critical to the definition of that century. I am a bit glad to say with space exploration being the focus of this century, we have finally started walking in that direction from taking baby-steps. Now some of you might question why 'walking' - we have been 'running' from a couple of years. Well, not really and let's talk about it a bit more 'why'. 

Earth & human's beings as species are still at level 1 (on the scale of 0 to 5, 0 being lowest) of the species development, level 0 being where they are just co-existing with their environment without the ability to intelligently start harnessing it massively for a purpose & have no ability to communicate across species. The next level to reach is level 3 but a lot is required in order to get to that level. This is when we are in a position to completely control the environmental changes and be a multi planetary species. 

For this to happen a lot of changes need to happen - let's take few examples -

1. Firstly, capacity to understand the spatial environment to 95% capacity - if you need to know what affects you - you need to go out there (sitting at home will not do any good) - we have heard this many times when we are young, the same applies to human exploration in context of the universe, unless you reach there faster & quicker you will not start to understand better - let's take an example what we are talking about here - research to get the human tissue samples stem cells and organ 3d printing has given enough tools to put on the low earth micro-gravity environments to collect data which can be used to understand the 'why's' of cause and effect better (similar to the fact - we learn more from our failures than success - why human cells age, how can we stop aging, how can we build better medications, how the RNA sequence changes for human cells when they are subjected to micro-gravity) - we are still at the 'how' here on lower-earth orbits, still at data gathering stage, we didn't even reach geostationary or geo-synchronous, forget about the no gravity or vacuum environments to reach another planet. So it's too slow already.... and has a vast area & potential for innovation - but we need to come out of our boxes and start 'thinking' first. For this to happen, space needs to be looked on as another avenue and it goes for a lot of things there - most of the control and monitoring happens nowadays from space, imagine a solar flare hitting the earth - few seconds and we are all dumped into losses worth trillions of dollars, economy function is completely lost. We can consider ourselves probably fortunate that nothing like this happened in past but having said that - there are cycles in astronomical terms and some are fortunate moments to start working on these avenues and the time is right now. Plus, there is hardly any competition here - only one or two vendors are making space communication priority so it's dependent on their progress, some giants are not even making the push which is again something you don't want to see in a human evolutionary time period. It's still like - 'oh, we are doing this & excited about it rather than we did this and we got here and we will be doing a, b, c & reaching our common goal for multi planetary existence in this time. Some targets are not realistic - astronomically next 10-15 years might be the honeymoon period for this kind of research but has that been taken into consideration?

2. Second, we should be in a capacity to control any kind of negativity say for example a biological warfare where you have a mutated strain of virus or bacteria inducted to cause a worldwide impact. Flexibility to understand & adapt quickly is essential & it cannot rest on stuff going through an existent process which might be manual and takes a lot of time. 

The solution needs to be quick and flexible so that : 

a) containment zones are quickly identified & sealed off 

b) economic models are adjusted to quickly adapt and provide avenues to continue the business without any disruption and look ahead at long term yields.

c) economic models should be able to hand-off to subsequent systems to be able to adjust their supply chains to deliver what is needed to keep everyone going. This is essential as nobody wants to get sealed off in containment zones for a long time - which can go off in a different direction and have more long term negative effects. 

d) the last but most important point here is understanding that there is a problem and it needs to be dealt with and resolved quickly.

3. The litigation system needs to be more in line with digital trends in place - let me take an example here.

There is a very popular messaging app which allows people to share stuff but then doesn't provide them with a notification when someone tries to view the share (don't want to go into the litigation premise jargon as that premise itself is questionable - should have been long evolved with time). 

Now let's put this example in a real world sharing scenario - you 'allow' the person to come in and look into your house, they come in and check out stuff and you know what they are checking out because you can see them, once they are gone you can tell others too about it, so even if a person has a negative intention of stealing or planting, using your house - you know who they can be as you allowed them to view it or at least you know when they viewed it. Now come back to apps, via a loop hole you can conveniently go to a person's profile and view stuff and disable tracking. Legally this can be looked upon as sniffing and can result into a direct or indirect crime - still no litigation conveniently stops this from happening in the digital world. These kind of issues are more unnoticed and easily result in negative crimes plus with monopoly and not sufficient competition customers are locked into a particular messaging app which controls their behavior - isn't that 'funny' - well it used to be earlier now it's not.

 Above are just few things but we need to start thinking about them sooner than later and that doesn't mean we don't think about other stuff like going green, reducing carbon footprint and evolving optimizing existing systems to better suite purpose. Well before ending, I do want to stress on one point - when we are in our existing fields and drive innovation which drives return & economically shapes the future is a better scenario than money driving innovation because that always creates that gap where the dumb go dumber & the intelligent degrade gradually, eventually to the point where they believe 1+1 = 3 because they found it on a search engine as a result rather than adding 1+1, only to believe that result was changed to 3 long time back, this is a cost which might be too high to pay in future.

Wishing everyone a healthy, happy, safe & prosperous 2021! 

Keep it rocking as always..