Full rehearsal for the Tom's Tap performance today. This will involve piano, synth and sound player so for me, apart from remembering all of the music, it's a matter of working out what to activate when to smoothly flow form one sound and track to the next. A few solo piano piece will be there including only my second ever live performance of Cycles I. It amazes me that I recorded that in 2017 yet my piano playing is a lot better than back then, a whole two years ago. In anything, improvements are small and slow, growing bit by bit over time. The pressure of small consistent changes far outweighs any attempt to push hard.
This reminds me that my brother is in the newspapers for protesting in London as part of Extinction Rebellion. To me this seems to be a panic-driven, apocalyptic doom cult, of the sort that has appeared every so often since at least the mid 19th century. These protests might or might not influence climate policy (I expect they'll have some small effect, although the similar C.N.D. protests achieved nothing), but I think such Biblical organisations are primarily there to calm the nerves of the organisation members and will cause unnecessary distress and anxiety to vulnerable onlookers, or will annoy those who have no opinion with negative responses and consequences. All of this can easily harm the important environmental cause more than it helps.
Of course, I care about the environment. Many animals and valuable environments like rainforests are being hunted and destroyed without care or punishment, which is abysmal behaviour, and governments need to be held to account, and leaders need to remain pressured to do the best thing. I'm sure that moderate reason will be more effective at convincing governments than radical action, but perhaps more-so making personal choices ourselves to treat the world in the best way, and understanding the consequences of each of our own actions. It is clear that governments, always and necessarily slow, are reacting to change. 200 years ago, the world was considered an Eden that was ours to exploit. National Parks and reserves began 100 years ago. The environmental movement is only about 50 years old, yet has achieved a lot of good things in this mere blink of time.
Life is a self-sustaining, self-protective system that has existed for 4.5 billion years. Bad actions are not rewarded, and good actions are. Animals are no better for the environment than people; a planet of rats, or algae, would exploit their domain in the same way as humans. Capitalism, at its ideal, exactly reflects human behaviour, substituting wealth for emotional debt, so is the best economic system. I'm certain that life will still exist here in 4.5 billion years time (assuming no solar-systemic-level disasters occur), irrespective of Bible-inspired predictions of doom. Apocalypsism is one of the worst aspects of Christianity; has it helped any aspect of the last 2000 years?
A final quick point on extinction itself. I consider life to be a data storage and organisation system. All life takes chaos from the universe and orders it; birds build nests, bees build hives, bacteria builds mats. Computers do this too and our machines have replaced many animal functions, from obvious things like motorcycles replacing horses, to the internet replacing a community of knowledge. Humans have, therefore, created a lot of new 'species' recently. Perhaps the environment moving to one more suitable for machines is a natural symbiotic response, rather than anything unnatural or to be feared.
Machines will never surpass biology, or dominate humanity as in so many anti-machine sci-fi stories, because biology is so very complex. I doubt a robot could even simulate a single cell; one cell, complete with its ability to replicate and evolve. Expecting a robot to simulate the thousands of cells in a body is far fetched and probably impossible, or at least, the most efficient way to do this is to use real cells; bodies, after all operate on an atomic and molecular level.
All of this reminds me that I must make some sort of video to my song Two Kinds of Animals, which explores some of these issues. It is a warning about the need to take care of animals because we are, after all, animals too. If we had masters, how would we want them to react?
