New Horizons by Max Roy

                 Israel’s American Friend The U.S is facing an election which will determine the face of the most powerful country in the world. It is a very different country from the one it was when Dwight Eisenhower was president declared victory in 1945. That America dreamed that they had fought the war to end all wars. That country set out to ensure that objective was going to be realized. America and its allies built world institutions that it was hoped would help realize that objective. American leaders backed up that dream by expending billions in U.S. dollars, and the blood of thousands of its citizens, in the hope of making that dream a reality. Part of that dream was free international trade where the lowest cost solution was king and the poorest countries would get the jobs. Since that time for America we have had the Viet Nam war, the Afghanistan occupation, and 9/11. That dream has turned into a nightmare, with a resurgent of Russia and China, the North Korea aberra

      Living Longer: The State Of The Art We know we will never know all the answers, but it’s not for want of trying. We still have Ebola, we have COVID, new viruses appear all the time. We still have some resurgent measles because some people won’t vaccinate their kids. We still have Cancer, so complex with many avenues to explore. Illnesses can rebound on us because these plagues learn to develop resistances to the tools we have discovered to fight them. We may always face that.   Although we don’t have all the answers, our wise and devoted researchers, examining the very nature of what makes for life within us, are learning to change our individual insides, down to the level of our DNA, to give us the answers we seek to defeat disease and even ageing. And AI is helping us speed up getting some answers. Part of the answer has been our increasing capacity to process quantities of data that we could never have handled in the past. This increased computing capacity is enabling us

      The Happy Accident of Our Universe I am going to try and tell you a story. I say try, because I don’t fully understand what I’m writing to you about. I label it as happy because the reality we face may be a rarity, maybe the only one, which may have permitted our evolution, that is, human evolution, to come into being. I will not touch on the question of why. I have been reading about the theorizing of Albert Einstein and his ilk, cosmologists and astrophysicists, telling me so many things, a great deal of which I find very difficult to understand. They tell us that about 14 billion years ago our universe came into being when a hot, fiery, point of matter exploded and began to expand with intense and increasing speed into the space around it. For some reason, the rate of expansion slowed enough, to allow some of the energy being released to coalesce into the billions of galaxies we are aware of, made up of billions and billions of stars. Ours was among them, created some t

     Hit The “Back Space” Button! Have you ever thought about time? Did you ever watch the movie “Back To The Future!”*. I did, watched   more than once, at the movies, and on television. Did you ever wish time was malleable? I bet you did without even thinking it through. Didn’t you wish you could go back and change the way things happened so you could live out a happier result than the one fate had left you with. I did, many times. There were a lot of things I would have changed, many of them that had nothing to do with me personally. We are able to do that with lots of things in our lives, and we do it without thinking. If I make a mistake in something I have written on my computer, I just hit the back space button, make the correction and go on with what I have been doing. Many times in our lives when we have made a mistake in something important in our lives, we sometimes do our best to correct it, either physically, or by speaking to the person involved. We often pay attentio

               What We Know What we know , in all its almost incredible detail and complexity, is such a tiny fraction of what we think we know, and an infinitesimal part of what we are yet struggling to find out. I am reading a book by John Gribbin entitled, The Origin Of The Future . I was horrified to find it was published in 2006, and I am just learning about some things our scientists thought they knew then. Studying the mind-boggling elements of an atom, they were then pondering pieces of its structure beyond a nucleus encircled by electrons. They are contemplating six or eight other elements or pieces, to this simple picture, (I am too confused to be more precise,) and asking us to contemplate a mini-universe in at least ten dimensions. (If I am confusing you, join the club!) Consider again that this book was written more than twenty years ago… What else have they learned since that time? Considering the chaos of the world we live in, it doesn’t hold a candle to what is go

                                                LEAVIING SOMETHING BEHIND I have always been mystified by the reality that being a living creature presents. Existence brings with itself so many questions, the chief of which is “why”?   I accept that we arrive among strangers that often become central to our lives. We inherit the advances our species has made that have placed us on the top rung of the world order on this planet. We have no idea whether we are the only higher order creatures in the universe. We don’t know for sure whether we are the higher order, only that we are running the show on this tiny galactic spot. Yet, in spite of this vast panorama of which we are only a tiny part, most of us will spend most of our lives focused on the tiny space we ourselves occupy. The family group we inherit often becomes the focus of our efforts, that and the personal one that we graduate into to form for ourselves. If we don’t get those relationships with the individual strangers we e