Links: Human Evolution and the Colonization of Space (Plus Fast and Furious)

There are several current events I considered writing about in this entry to my blog: the elections in Greece, the presidential run-off election in Egypt against the backdrop of power grabs by the military, the questionable impeachment of Paraguay's president, the terrible Supreme Court decision overturning the Montana law restricting corporate spending (and thus upholding their likewise terrible Citizens United decision), the much better though still imperfect Supreme Court decision overturning most of Arizona's draconian anti-immigrant law, or President Obama's excellent but overly delayed executive order halting deportation of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children (Time had an excellent article on young undocumented immigrants in a recent issue, but it's not available online). But instead of writing anything about things going on now, I'm just providing a link to a long but fascinating article on how humans may evolve when we colonize space. It has a number of serious typos that lead me to suspect it was scanned and transferred to the Internet by a computer, but otherwise it is highly readable and quite thought-provoking. Of course most of it is pure speculation, dealing as it does with things that will happen far in the future if they happen at all, but since we may start seeing the first truly permanent human settlements away from Earth in the next few decades or at least during this century, it seems reasonable to start thinking about it. Coincidentally, I just finished a book that deals with some of the same issues, a science fiction novel by John Varley called Steel Beach, which I hope to briefly discuss in a future post along with other recent reads.

I was going to limit this post to that one link, but yesterday I happened to read an article on the Fast and Furious operation, a story that I hadn't been following closely but which has gotten a lot of attention in the US, particularly in Washington. The irony of Republicans, who along with the NRA bear a lot of the responsibility for the sheer volume of absurdly powerful guns that are sold in the US, using the controversy around the operation to attack the Obama administration was apparent to me, but I accepted the standard view that the original operation was at the very best incompetently run. This article, however, provides an entirely different view. Whether its version of events is the correct one I can't say, but it certainly sounds plausible and seems to be backed up by considerable evidence, though there is naturally a substantial "he said, she said" element in the testimony of the agents involved. In any case, it provides an interesting alternative perspective.