Microbe-Bricks

from

Get Sand
Pour in Bacteria
Wait for a bit
= Bricks!!!

Tiny bugs cause calcite-precipitation in the sand – which sets, obviating the need for firing.

What could possibly go wrong? Apart from the bugs mutating and turning the entire Sahara into one giant skate-park.

Another thing that turned up recently was this…

Genetically engineered cell produces laser-light

Although I think you need mirrors and whatnot to get anything resembling a laser-beam. Still… if this gen-tech revolution that has been on the horizon for pretty much our entire lives, ever hits, it’s going to (as they say) change everything. A Golden Age. Maybe.

Nope. Because what it will do… what its promise is, is…

…dissolving scarcity… and the trouble with capitalism, is that it needs scarcity. People Not Having Enough is what capitalism lives on.

It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out… Craig Venter has done a $600M deal with the most evil corporation on the planet, Exxon Mobile… It’s not entirely impossible that in the next 20 years we’re going to see The Napster Of Food, The Napster Of Pharma, The Napster Of Energy… all from a bathtub of bugs that reinvent themselves for free. Expect Evil. Expect a lolly-scramble over “IP” in which only the bullies get anything. “Intellectual Property” is going to get uglier and uglier and uglier.

“Intellectual Property” is a fake constraint, designed to create a fake scarcity, set up so only the bullies win.

Kill the bullies, that’s my advice. If the deaths of the entire executive of every big pharma conglomerate can create the leverage to save hundreds of millions of lives, then it’s got to be done. It’s traveling sideways in time to kill Hitler. Hitler was only responsible for what? 60 Million? If a corporation tries to corner the water supply of an entire planet, then all bets are off – if it was a foreign occupying force, we’d go scrapping-mad with guns. Well it’s happening. We need to recognise that globalised corporate power is globalised baronialism, or facism or Romanism or whatever-evil-it-is-that-is-reinvented-in-every-age. We need to crush it down to a size where it is democratically accountable.

After that we can go skateboarding in the Sahara…

…if indeed we’ve turned it to concrete, which we probably haven’t. Becuz… we know humanity well enough now to know that trying to control change is almost always more dangerous than the change itself.

[Against The Plague: Exemption Of Pharmaceutical Patent Rights As A Biosecurity Strategy]

To be honest, I only read the title. Still… scary title… and you know… to the point.

Adendum 2: More perspective, listen to this Podcast. Forget that this isn’t happening in your village, or your city, or your country (although it probably is)… forget that this isn’t happening to you. It’s happening to us.

.