$100 Toilet Paper Bills

There are many issues that peeve me in today's chaotic world, but the recent wave of economic disasters have gone far beyond the minor worries of yesteryear. There are bail outs for the super-rich, bail outs for the banks, bail outs for the crooks who spent our tax dollars on lavish bouts of prostitutes and murderous rampages (otherwise known as the War on Terror), and bail outs for everyone except the people who work for a living and generate the taxes.

And none of these bail outs will really work. Why? Because the problem isn't like a boat that is taking on a little water, where bailing out the water will keep the boat from sinking. These bail outs are like pumping gasoline into a fire, expecting to put out the flames. Or spraying the crops with herbicide to kill the weeds, but killing all the crops along with them.

We are spending money that isn't real, wasn't real and never will be real. It is fake money, made by printing presses, with fancy lettering and counterfeit-proofing and the signatures of government officials. But it is no more real than Monopoly money. It is just a certificate of value, but is based on nothing but promises. The same promises that politicians repeat to get elected, but never keep. The same promises that party boys use to get into the pants of young ladies.

But there are real things in the world -- food, medicine, houses, cars, computers and lots of other things. Those things have real value, but only relative to each other. Let me trade so many potatoes for a bottle of blood pressure pills. This computer that I'm typing this on must be worth at least as much as a set of tires for my car. And my car is worth at least a years rent in an average apartment.

But in terms of dollar bills? I have no idea what this computer is worth. Someone might pay $100, someone might pay $500. I don't really know what it is really worth in dollars, because I don't know what a dollar is worth. It keeps changing. It might be that today's dollars are about the value of a dime when I was a child. Maybe only a nickel. I don't even use pennies anymore -- they are a nuisance when shopping. I suppose if you saved enough of them they might be worth their weight in watermelons.

Yet, a penny is really worth more than a dollar bill. That is because I can pound a penny into some shape, like a strip or a wire, and it will conduct electricity. I can use the zinc or copper in the penny for some chemical purpose. About the only thing I could do with the dollar bill (or even a hundred dollar bill) would be to roll it up into a tube and snort something with it. Or I could burn it and keep my hands warm for about 10 seconds.

But, just recently, there was a wall street guy who admitted that he was a crook, and that his $50 Billion business was only a Ponzi scheme. Just a pyramid ripoff. The only good thing about that is that mostly rich assholes were burned by that guy. I certainly don't make enough with my software jobs to invest in that kind of stuff. Lucky for me. I may be poor, relative to those jokers, but if you got nothing, you can't lose much. Imagine losing like $7 Billion, or "only" $100 million. What does that feel like?

I will die soon enough -- I'll live another a decade or two at the very most. But my grandchildren will probably die of old age before our debts (created by the rich assholes that are stealing us blind today) are ever paid off. They may never be paid off. But even if they are paid, someday, it will only be in those worthless scraps of paper anyway. Go ahead, roll off another billion sheets of those hundreds, guys. And pay off the Saudis and Chinese with that stuff.

Those Darn Terrorists

This is the age of terror. No doubt about it.

Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski was the "unabomber" and he considered that technology was basically the bane of mankind. His writings, in the form of a manifesto (which was written sometime within the 1980 to 1995 range), described a future world where terrorists use high technology. That is a great problem, of course, and the governments of the world would use any and all high technology of their own to counteract it.

Of course, this technology would give police states ever increasing policing ability, thereby able to relieve man of all freedom, permanently. The unabomber manifesto was extremely detailed and seemed to ramble or rant, at least in my opinion. It was not inaccurate, in fact it seemed pretty much on target so far as the world of bad guys is concerned.

But the manifesto was definitely the work of somebody with a personality disorder, not to mention being exceptionally critical of capitalism and authoritarianism (although that was not his madness, only his politics.) Certainly, he was paranoid, at least in the street meaning of the word. Supposedly he does have real disorders of the mind, but anyone who feels like murdering other people on some whim of a manifesto must be implicitly irrational.

I don't want the terrorists to win - nobody wants that except them. People that murder other people indiscriminately can't be allowed to keep doing that, no matter what. In Texas they might say, "they need killing" - obviously the terrorists need to be terminated. Yet, anyone who could terminate all the terrorists would surely be able to terminate anyone at all, at whim. Those who did such things would become terrorists by definition.

If someone was fighting a war in our back yards, and if our children were harmed in any way, it seems that just about any technique that can "get those guys" would be acceptable. Yet, any actual success would probably result in a similar number of their children being harmed. The cycle of revenge would thereby repeat indefinitely.

The war is actually in our front yards, where the WTC stood and the damaged but repaired Pentagon still stands. It is something we cannot ignore. It is a real danger to our survival. The only fly in the ointment is that we have to only fight a war that wins, not a war that kills everything on the planet. Nor do we wish to live in a world similar to THX1138, where all aspects of emotion and mind are controlled by biochemical and cybernetic means.

If wars can be won without shooting, such as by countering their logistics or confounding their communications, and so forth, then that must be tried as far as it will work. It can at least minimize the amount of shooting necessary.

In terms of bullet cost alone, it would be cheaper to kill only those terrorists who are actually guilty of terrorism. The problem with that is that it may be extremely costly to put the one bullet to use, needing extremely difficult pinpoint locating techniques. In that case the solution tends toward using larger, less accurate bombs.

So we cannot win a war with an unremitting enemy, who will not fear death nor be deflected by rational argument, unless we become as unremitting and free of deflection. We must always become as terrible as our enemy or we will be defeated by them, one or the other.

If we must be defeated, but merely serve as the vanquished and not be tortured (perhaps we treated the Japanese as such after WWII) then defeat would not be so important. The Japanese have not suffered so badly at our hands. They have thrived. It would be better than death, at least, even in the spirit of Samurai.

The more likely result from defeat at the hands of Islamic extremists would be a bloodbath, with mass beheadings, etc. And all in the name of some weird sect of Islam that doesn't make any sense to the rational mind, and indeed pours gasoline on all fires.

Religions can be good or bad (from a certain frame of mind) but they cannot be rational. Anything that demands belief without some degree of proof seems to be sheer folly and cannot be rational.

If one wishes to believe in invisible pink bunnies then that's OK, but believing that Allah wants my head on a stick is not OK. To me it is a very clearly defined problem. I already have problems dealing with modern religions, which, though irrational, usually have found ways to live with each other peacefully. I can never live with an irrational AND violent religion.

The modern, peaceful religions are usually merely argumentative, however, not prone to hack off my head at the hint of disbelief in their particular view of Allah. I am not so afraid that Lutherans will bomb my house if I express some doubt in the views of Luther.

We will not win using religion, such as Baptists vs Sunnis. That has never worked. They will use any technology as a weapon, believing that Allah has blessed any and all weapons, however demented, against us. So we must use even greater technology as a shield, to protect us from such irrational extremists. But where the best or only shield might only be an even more demented weapon, then the irrational extremists will ensure that we must use it against them.

That is suicidal of them, no doubt. Ours is a choice then, between the bodies being either us or them. We may or may not be deserving of victory, but I think we must make sure that the bodies will be theirs. Hopefully I am wrong, and that rationality might prevail - no need to light up the nukes.

The Soul

There are myriad stories in history about the Gods, hints of forces of nature that cause all events big and small, plain or mysterious, for pauper or king.

At some point, perhaps in Sumeria or Babylon or somewhere else in the ancient birthplaces of civilization and language, there became the concept of the "soul".

Many definitions of the soul involve a kind of separate being than our physical body, that lives inside it, or borrows it for at time. Others merely suggest that it is the motive spirit, that which makes our body move and feel and want to do things.

Yet, as a container of "holy spirit", such as in the Bible, the soul has been elevated to some divine place, where one's life after death will be lived, whether in eternal damnation or in eternal bliss. This seems a bit excessive, both in scope and content. I do not personally think of myself as being divine in any way. I have no connection to God that isn't shared by trees, insects and galaxies.

Spirit is an abstraction, so the soul is nonsubstantial. It was once "weighed" in the sense of having some mass, which upon death, was lost. Of course, simply expelling one's last breath would also expel some mass of water vapor which could account for this "soul" mass.

People are so attached to their ideas about the soul. It is an insult to suggest that it is just the same stuff that you feel in your brain somewhere, much like vision and sound. There is no physical "mind", only the temporary states of atomic interactions, the chemical soup of the brain as it is orchestrated by the fibers of nerves and neurons.

Upon death, one's soul may be lost forever, not to be missed by the previous owner, because there would be no consciousness to feel the loss. Otherwise, the soul may be passed on to the next generation, or just live in Heaven or Hell or some other place, in between, in a Purgatory.

But I do not believe anything. I only know that I am alive right now, and my "soul" exists as my mind and feelings right now. Whatever happens after death has never been proven to me, one way or the other. And I am patient. I will find out soon enough.

Bonfires of The Universe

On the surface of the planet Earth, in the 5 billionth year of the existence of its parent star, the Sun, on the edge of a continent near a vast ocean of saltwater, in a little house upon a hill, a man sits in a little room rattling the keys on a computer. In this man's head are trillions of little fibers, little organic wires, that interconnect all the billions of neurons and myriad worker cells. Collectively, these fibers and cells are called the brain. The man does not concern himself so much for this brain, except that it provides for his experience of life.

Inside the computer he clatters upon are thousands of little parts, and within the parts are thousands of other parts, and thousands more within those, until there are billions of little bits of dirty sand which bounce quadrillions of electrons back and forth to create the illusion of mathematical precision required to induce the colored surface before his eyes to display an image. That image is the picture of these very words.

Within the man's brain, somehow encoded by all those trillions of tiny fibers, there is also an illusion upon which the display of imagination is played. That illusion is the same whether the man is asleep or awake, and it is sometimes difficult to know whether the dream is real or reality is real, or if neither is real. The fleeting bits of light in our imagination combine into a picture of the world so realistic as to compete with the actual world itself for the label of reality.

Only a few fleeting lifetimes before his, there was no knowledge of this thing called the brain. Certainly it was known to be connected to life somehow, and in some ways it was thought to be a place where devils might reside, whispering evil deeds to the witless owner. Conversely, it was a place where God might whisper holy commands to counter the evil spells. Yet, more weight was given to the heart as the seat of consciousness, of life, of emotion and thought.

In truth, there can be no life without both the heart and brain. And even with both intact, life can be hard to maintain – there must also be blood and stomachs and all manner of bones and complicated devices, all working in concert to provide for our lives. Life is the unification of all the cells and mineral deposits within our bodies, and all the electrical signals which operate them, and all the conceptualizations we perceive in our spirits. There are only very tiny differences between the body of a healthy conscious man and that of a dying man in a coma.

Although many wish to deny the fact, we are a kind of animal. The concept of animal is often limited to beasts, such as dogs or cows. No one likes to think of themselves as a kind of ape. But there is no denying that we share nearly every aspect of our lives, our bodies and our minds, in one manner or another, with the other animals on this planet. We have blood, we have cells, we have molecules of DNA, we have pains and pleasures, we have hunger and fear. We share all those things and more with the other living creatures, and moreover we share many of them with plants and even microbes.

Then, to dispel the unpleasant concept that we are merely animals, we try to distinguish ourselves by the differences. Primarily, above all else, it is said, we have souls. Animals do not. We alone in the world gathered our souls around bonfires to celebrate and wonder of the mysterious facets of life.

I cannot prove whether or not other living things have souls. But, to avoid needless argument, I will just concede that a soul is unique to mankind. Surely there are qualitatively superior methods to our survival that no other living things seem to master. We can build cities and machines, alter the climate, repair our bodies with medicine and surgery. We certainly are a clever kind of animal, no doubt. The vast complexity inherent in being a human is certainly beyond casual comprehension. We seemed blessed by God, indeed.

But termites and ants can build cities. They, as well as mere microbes and plants, alter the climate. Our bodies and theirs have always been able to repair themselves within limits, or to supplement themselves with herbs and minerals to aid in healing. The main difference is that we can be aware that we are doing those things, rather than just accidentally doing them as a result of the trial and error of cellular evolution over billions of years. Instead, we can pass our observations directly to our children in the form of codes and signals, such as the words in this document.

That mere collisions of quadrillions of quadrillions of atoms accidentally clumped into something like ourselves is difficult for some to grasp. However, we are quick to attribute that effect to bacteria or viruses – mainly because we can watch it happen. It is too slow to watch it happen in more complex creatures. Yet, there is no line which absolutely, neatly divides the continuum from organic molecules to astronauts. The line seems to exist between living things and machines, although machines are merely an extension of our human bodies, like our bones and muscles are extensions of our nerves and organs.

Still, no other animal other than mankind (and whatever little critters hitchhiked with us,) has been able to travel across the deadly radiation and void of space to the moon and back, alive. That is something, certainly, that widely separates us from the other animals and plants of Earth. It is a grand accomplishment that no dinosaur or whale or tree had ever done in the billions of years of ever changing lifeforms before us.

Yet, with all our intelligence and curiosity, perhaps unique amongst the vast expanses of our galaxy, (or perhaps not,) we might be snuffed out in an instant by the random passage of some leftover rock careening about the local star system. Or we might snuff ourselves out in millions of degrees gamma ray bursts with our nuclear weapons. Or we might just starve to death by poisoning the world with garbage. I hope not, of course.

Beyond those possibilities, every day another star snuffs out somewhere amongst the heavens. Perhaps another is born from the vast clouds and ashes of other snuffed out stars to take its place. But whatever lifeforms, similar to ourselves or not, which may have called that dead star their Home, will have been snuffed out as well. All their art and history and cities will have vanished, completely erased from reality, just as mysteriously and completely as before they were ever created.

Unless we can reach into the heavens, and spread our fragile thread of life amongst the galaxies, amongst the life-giving and life-destroying bonfires of the Universe, our future in life is doomed as certainly as the day turns to night. This may be God's will or not, I don't know. Yet so far, though it seems very, very difficult, God has not prevented us from at least trying.

Stock Markets and Pigs in Pokes

The American people never cease to amaze me. After centuries of the patricians shitting on the plebians, they sit there and wait for more. 

I am not a Democrat, only an Independent. However, I think there has been a definite negative impact on America -- not only by terrorists, not only by Wall Street thieves and stingy tax avoiders and religious nut flakes. But by the entire populace of every place in America that makes up the Republican base. 

There has been a take over by the stupid. The pigs have taken over the farmer's house. There are lunatics in power, voted there by even stupider lunatics that have no common sense, no ability to imagine the future, and no ability to learn from the past.

They have been sold a pig in a poke. And they want to blame someone, anyone, but themselves.

Well, I won't be voting for a single, solitary Republican -- not even  a local yokel with no one else on the ticket.  This time I am an extremely angry voter, but I will not let my anger color my thinking -- and I know who was in power for the last decade, and who could have run the country in a far better way. I will vote out all the boogers.

9/11 To Me

Today is the 8th 9-11 counting that fateful day.

I have been affected deeply by the event, almost as if I had been there, yet I lived almost as far from NYC as possible in the US, in northern San Diego. I did not see the early stages of the events of that day, live. However, I woke up around 8 or so, and by habit I turned on CNN to help wake me up for the day. I can't remember the exact times of anything, only that from that moment on my life was changed.

I turned on the TV just in time to see one of the towers coming down. I was still blinking and trying to wake up, not quite understanding what I was seeing. I didn't realize that it really was the WTC, or even that it was NYC, only that it was some building coming down in a cloud of debris as if it had been demolished by explosives. I didn't realize, at first, that it was because of jet airliners ramming the buildings.

But as my consciousness took in the sight and I realized what I was looking at I began to fear that I might have a heart attack. My heart was pounding as if a bear was attacking me. But it was only just the sight of this event on TV. And it was not until the news reporters tried to explain what was going on that I realized we were being attacked by terrorists. The same, raving lunatic terrorists that do every despicable act -- mad men.

Of course, what followed, the 2nd tower coming down, the wrenching agonized faces of people who crawled through the rubble covered with powdered concrete, steel, carpets, furniture and people -- this nightmarish scene burned itself into my soul. It has never left, and probably never will.

The sight of people jumping to their deaths a thousand feet below was horrifying beyond description. To have to make this choice -- burn to death or jump to death -- utterly horrible.

I knew immediately that it was Arabs. I didn't know who, I didn't yet know about the Pentagon, or about Flight 93, and didn't know that much about Osama Bin Laden or his terrorist organization. But I knew immediately, from the choice of weapon, who it was. It was Arabs. Only they, of all the people on the Earth, would do something like this, to kill innocent people for their stupid, fucking Islam religion.

I wanted an immediate response. This was war. I was in the US Navy during Vietnam and knew what war was all about. I wanted more than that -- not just a few bombs falling on Hanoi, or in the jungles of Vietnam. I wanted Mecca to be melted into a glass pool. I wanted a nuclear weapon to destroy their entire worthless "civilization", if you could call primitive morons such a thing.

All my humanity had left me. There was nothing called mercy, nothing called understanding, nothing. There was nothing but the need to wipe out the assholes that did this. I didn't care if it left a hole the size of the moon in Mecca, I wanted those sick assholes to die at the hands of the USA, using our most powerful weapons. Maybe this is what the idiots expected. Maybe it was in their plan. I don't know. But, to this day, I am sorry we did not do it.

We are in 2 wars. We haven't got but a handful of the cockroaches that did this. We haven't gotten Osama Bin Laden, and we killed Saddam instead, who was not part of the plot. Maybe he needed to go, too. I don't know. But that is not what I wanted. I wanted Osama Bin Laden's head on a stick. We have nearly bankrupted our country. We have idiots running our government, wasting the lives of our military personnel. And they will spend whatever deep pocket money they gotta spend to get re-elected, so they can keep on fucking this thing up.

Yes, I am angry today. I was reminded of the events of that day and I am fucking angry. No doubt about it. Tomorrow I may calm down again. The next day I may just do my work like every other day. But today I am fucking angry. I want the Islamic bastards that did this -- disemboweled with their heads on sticks -- at Ground Zero.

Why Blog?

A few years ago, as an out branching of technical capability and enormous increases in storage and processing capacity, the “blog” was developed.

"Web logging" or "blogging" is merely writing things down on a web page in a more or less regular fashion and perhaps linking to other sites that seem relevant or interesting.

My blog(s) are not all that interesting. I know this is true. I could purposely make them more interesting, certainly, such as by filling them with slander and obscenities, or posting gruesome images, or simply telling lies. I could write stories, post pictures of horribly mutilated bodies, or just babble on about programming futuristic computers, or write something else that would attract a specific category of person to this website.

But I am not a journalist, nor a novelist, nor a teenage boy filled with angst or a need to express gutter talk or whatever jargon of the hideous is in vogue. I am not looking for love, nor looking for hate – I really don't care all that much for emotional tripe and drama. I'm too old to get into flame wars and too young to just stop all this writing to just watch the grass grow.

I am a scientist, but I reserve true scientific journaling to another set of documents, or inside computer software, or recordings of the drawings on white boards, that sort of thing. I don't want to take the painstaking care to write symbols and taxonomies and attributions in such intricate detail when I write in a blog. Whatever readers this blog might have are most likely not very interested in such pedantic detail, although I can't ever be completely certain.

I still like to write about scientific things, or at least about technical things. I don't want to just lie about stuff, so I never claim to invent things I never invented. At the same time I don't want to simply give away the things I really have invented, so I won't write so much about such things in this blog.

But I would write about things in which simple opinion might be more fitting than pedantic obsessions. Such things as Global Warming fit that bill, of which I have some interest but have no academic degrees in those specific branches of study. So far as the climate is concerned, I don't think there is any question that pollution is a problem, and that mankind has done a terrible thing to our home planet.

Some may argue whether CO2 or Methane will accumulate to a catastrophic level, or whether simply driving too many gasoline engine vehicles is causing global warming, or any kind of change in the weather. Perhaps the central star in our system is the “guilty party” if the climate changes, or perhaps the climate just changes all the time for myriad complicated reasons having nothing to do with mankind. Certainly, the climate has changed many, many times before, and without humans to blame.

But arguing about those things is merely politics. Republicans tend to believe that oil is good and CO2 is not a problem. Democrats tend to believe the opposite. After all, the Bible does not talk about oil, or the climate, so it must not be important.

Politics, whichever side you are on, is the most certain evil. It creates bad blood and hostility between groups of people. That is what is certain and what is deadly, and no one can deny it.

It is also true that pollution is bad and that mankind is polluting everything in a destructive, suicidal manner -- regardless of its effect on the climate. It doesn't matter what happens to the weather, hot or cold, if we poison the entire world, kill all the fish, burn all the forests, reduce everything to a mass of decomposing goop – all in the name of rampant consumer capitalism and rich oil companies.

Communism is really no better than capitalism. Socialism (a more generic form of Communism) is no better than Tribalism or Militarism. All these belief systems do is temporarily change the behavior of vast numbers of people, and then return to the old habits that humans have always had, regardless of the good or the bad.

When we were just small tribes it was OK to burn stuff and move on, since we were too few to hurt the whole world. But even small tribes, over time, could kill off all the mastodons and woolly mammoths -- therefore we have always altered the world in some way. The problem is not a philosophy of good or bad – it is about survival. It is evolution, and about whether or not our species, or any species at all, can keep surviving.

Many people have been murdered in the name of one "ism" or another. Religion is famously guilty of hypocrisy, and many wars, executions, tortures and imprisonments have been performed in the name of some mental concept that really has no bearing on physical survival. When the whim of a sadistic king or the ravings of a maniacal holy man can result in the disemboweling of young children, then there are problems the the setup.

Making sense out of the world is a very difficult exercise. Elephants and lions and crocodiles also have to make some sense out of their respective points of view, and man is merely another sort of animal. Man does have a far more complex point of view, however, given the recursive effects of technology upon our impact on the world, so there is no pretending that we can just live our lives with the same disregard as sparrows and be able to survive fat and sassy. For that matter, even sparrows must obey the rules of flight and select just the right objects to eat, or they will not survive, either. They must also figure out how to adapt to a world that we have altered.

But the world is so incredibly complex that it seems to disobey the laws of entropy. Entropy does cause things to become disordered, or mixed together in hopelessly inseparable jumbles. So in that sense, entropy causes complexity. Yet this kind of complexity is mostly useless (but not entirely, as I will write of...), since the usual value in something, say gold, is because it has been refined and concentrated. I can give you an ounce of gold by giving you billions of gallons of seawater, but you would not be happy with that gold (and nearly every other element) since it is hopelessly mixed together with useless salts and slag and huge amounts of H20.

How could a machine sort gold from seawater? The act of sorting is a non-entropy function. The goal is to create order out of disorder. Not to mention the desire and mechanical intelligence humans have to sit there and sort things, it takes energy to sort things.

Heat can be used to melt things, and thereby separate heavier, denser materials like gold from lighter things like water, salts and other grime. The water would evaporate when hot enough to melt gold, so that problem would be easy – the vapor floats up into the clouds. Other things, like salts, might not melt easily, although they might be washed away with hot water, but not so much with gold.

So nature already has such means to separate gold from seawater. The underground geothermal cauldron mixes hot magma with wet sea floor and produces all kinds of metal precipitants, as well as minerals and other valuable materials, in addition to gold. However, there are also other complexities involved, such as the way volcanoes form, the releases of gases at different temperatures and pressures, and from the way solid rock cracks and fissures from the forces of tectonics.

Man is able to mechanically re-create these forces in miniature, sometimes, and thereby synthesize the formation of gold. Yet, even today, there is much more cost involved to chemically process huge masses of seawater compared to just digging a hole and finding solid lumps and veins of gold. Similarly, it is much simpler for me to just walk by the sea shore and pickup various seashells and stones than it would be for me to re-create such things with machines.

As time goes on, however, and all the easy places to find gold are completely panned out, then it may indeed be easier to chemically process seawater to obtain gold.

Food is considerably more valuable than gold. It is sometimes hard to believe, since any given weight of food is probably worth less than the same weight in gold, that is only an economic issue. An animal could be surrounded by pure gold and starve to death, so the animal sees no value whatsoever in gold.

Copper is another metal that is easier to get than gold, as well as being more common in seawater and other mixtures. For one thing, copper is able to recombine with other elements to form other chemicals and minerals. Gold is not so easily combined. Gold does have oxides, but the chemical bonds are so weak that the oxygen can be sucked away by static in the air. Conversely, copper sulfate is so tightly bound as copper and sulfur that only great effort and energy would be able to unbind them (yet, not so difficult as separating silicon and oxygen.)

Gold is better than copper for many reasons. Gold is heavier, it is less corrosive, it carries an electrical current with much less resistance and it is generally a prettier color (to human eyes.) Yet, so far as history is concerned, copper – in the form of bronze – was a more useful tool than gold. Many arrow heads, knives, swords, spears, shields and machine parts were constructed using the copper and tin mixtures called bronze.

Gold is also better than steel or even silver and most of the same things. Steel can be made as an alloy that is “stainless” similar to gold, however the main element iron is found almost everywhere on earth in large quantities, and almost no gold can be found by comparison. Iron is in our blood, in many stones, in dust and soil, and is mostly known as rust or reddish colored soil.

Iron is also at the heart of our planet in the form of a massive molten core (or at least very very hot, but at the pressure found there it may be nearly solid). Iron gives us the magnetic fields and protection from certain amounts of radiation. Yet, the radiation at the center of the Earth is probably very high too, in the form of nuclear fission by uranium and other radioactive elements. This radioactive stuff is thought to be running down, leaving our planet both somewhat cooler and without a protective radiation shield at some point in the relatively near future. Don't count on that to save us from “global warming”.

Yet, there will always be some convection currents of melted rock mixed with molten iron around the core for millions of years to come, so I think the effects will be very gradual, and probable that the sun will have come to a bad state before then. We will be dead long before then, though. Extinction of all life will eventually come, like a battery that runs down, without able to be recharged, no matter what we do.