The Important Things

These days I find that it's hard to keep perspective on what's really important in the life of the average consumer. On one hand, we have a lot more stuff than I ever thought we would at this point in history, and a lot of it is pretty useful... and pretty cool! The Internet delivers communication and entertainment services, cell phones are amazing, Amazon delivers products for incredibly cheap prices and helpfully recommends knockoffs that are even cheaper. As consumers, we have access to more stuff of higher quality than we ever would have in the pre-Internet era. At the same time, we're losing some important things, including community, opportunity and privacy. The opportunity to go into business for yourself in your own local community may be closing, as large businesses gradually solve the problem of how to most efficiently extract money from communities on a global scale, leveraging economies of scale and subsidies from large investors. As we keep trading away more of our freedom, it's starting to become more apparent that this is a dubious bargain. You have to wonder what's going to be left when the next generation comes along, and whether they will even understand what they've missed.

Masks

I'm not letting the October go by without taking the opportunity to wear some spooky Haloween masks. I ordered a set from Amazon. Assuming we're still in quaranteen in November and beyond, I guess I'll just be 'that guy'.

We don't need any more Gs

Let's face it, we have too many Gs in our world these days. Wifi comes in 2G,5G and now 6G, which all refer to GHz. Phones come in 3G, 4G and now 5G, which refer to 'Generation'. If you work in the world of Genomics like me, then you end up dealing with Gigabases and, often, Gigabytes, which are yet more Gs. I think that IEEE needs to impose a worldwide moratorium on the use of Gs in technology names. It's getting to be a bit much. 

On a serious note, it's hard to find a legitimate need for 5G in the consumer market of 2021. Typical demonstrations feature a tech blogger standing next to a telephone pole, downloading a movie in just 1 minute over 5G. It's impressive and also pointless. I have never had a problem streaming movies over Netflix on my phone directly using 5MBPS of bandwidth. On the rare occasion that I actually need to download a movie or show to my phone because I anticipate some sort of (ironic) gap in the global blanket of Internet connectivity while I'm traveling, etc., I have no problem taking the 2 minutes+ required to do so. For more legitimate scenarios like conference calls, I also have no problem with using 4G or just dialing in using my good old fashion voice connection for audio. If someone like me has no need for 5G then why on earth would anyone else need it?

Why, also, would cell phone companies want to foist 5G on naive consumers, convincing them that they really need gigabit data connections on their phones (when most of us don't even have this at home)? I think the answer to this, as with most new technologies these days, probably has to do with consumer data collection. To greatly simplify things, 5G adoption will basically flatten the consumer Internet topology, which is currently complicated by the widespread use of things like WIFI access points, often employing NAT routing and causing consumers to annoyingly change their IP from time to time, making it more difficult for companies to continuously track them over time. In the future, there will be no need for such technologies as each one of our devices will be capable of directly connecting to the gigabit-delivering 5G access point on our corner, leaving a single, traceable identifier for each consumer device. We will gradually find our new TVs, tablets, laptops and phones bypassing our home networks entirely, routing traffic straight to our ISP, who will helpfully monitor our browsing habits through the uninterrupted high-resolution click stream from each of our devices to deliver the content (and, more importantly, ads) which we have shown ourselves to be interested in. This is the real value of 5G technology.

Let's stick around for a while

Recently the private space race has been filling the news cycle, as it seems one gazillionaire after another gets the idea that finding new ways to send people into space is the key to fortune, fame and the glory of saving the human race. Popular science fiction would lead us to believe that mars is a paradise awaiting the application of our terra-forming technology, just a short space voyage away for those brave enough to make the voyage on one of the already-made space ships. We can, therefore, stop worrying about all these pesky problems like global warming, paying them no more mind than we should worry about the mess left behind in our hotel suite after checkout. Unfortunately, reality may be a little harder to bear.

On a global scale, rockets are inherently inefficient; the sheer amount of energy used in a single launch could be enough to absolve even the most frequent flyer of any guilty feelings that they might be feeling after so much frequent flying (at least by comparison). Once we get to space, leaving the Earth's magnetic field would expose any interstellar astronauts to various forms of radiation, including heavy ion, which we really just haven't spent that much time studying, but we're pretty sure that it's terrible for human health. We really don't have any feasible way of shielding it either, since it would be kinda tough to build a huge lead shield around a spaceship (or water shield, or whatever). Mars would be an interesting place to visit, but without having any water or life forms of any kind (yes, I'm afraid it's true) it would be like staring a colony in the middle of the Sahara desert, which makes one wonder, why go all the way to Mars when we have perfectly good deserts right here on Earth which would be much easier to get to and transform into habitable environments?