Doom

a few thoughts on the subject

Vivian, a sophomore psychology student at Cal I met at the Berkeley musical drama about a female buddha, "The fourth messenger", said she learned (in high school) that humanity is doomed because of human nature, as described by 5 psychological studies, which I found online at this site:

http://www.cracked.com/article_16239_5-psychological-experiments-that-prove-humanity-doomed.html

Which brought up the video game, Doom, and first person shooter games in general, in the context of the recent Adam Lanza shooting.  I mentioned how the military actually has video games of their own, as simulations to train their personnel.  And how I thought I read somewhere about videogames actually being cathartic and therapeutic, and therefore less likely to cause violence.  She told me how friends of hers said that, actually, these games get them worked up, amped, and stressed, more than relaxed.   Hmm.

I thought the conformity experiment had implications for democracy.
And it also made me think of 'memes'.

Anyway,
We ARE doomed, of course.  The sun will expand and engulf the earth, probably in the distant future.   Maybe mankind will have figured out space travel and which exoplanet to engineer a habitable environment on,  by then.  'terraform' is the word I was looking for.

Also, I just read about the 'God particle', which a poorly (in my opinion) written yahoo article reported that scientists who plugged in the new data provided by the (LHC? large hadron collider?) on the Higgs boson (measuring it's mass in electron-volts, because mass is energy, e=mc2) indicated that the results show the entire universe is doomed, (!)  This particle is said to impart mass to everything else, I think.
-but we don't have to worry, because "it is coming at us at the speed of light."  I wish I knew specifically what they are talking about.  I mentioned to Vivian that I read a book by physicist Leonard Susskind, who threw out a line in passing, that he thinks we live in a "holographic universe", which I guess makes sense if we think of all mass as energy as light, which I suppose a physicist thinking abstractly might do to understand the big U.  But I'm not sure he's right.

Anyway, I read about space aliens, and there seems to be evidence they can teleport, which maybe lends credence to the holographic universe concept.  And some Russian scientists, explaining the recent meteorite event that coincided with the near-miss of another meteoroid (am I getting the terminology correct?), proffered the view that a spaceship prevented a much worse impact by getting involved and saving the earth/humanity.   I think I like this explanation.   Someone out there is looking out for us?   Maybe we aren't doomed.  Or not for awhile yet, anyway.