J.Z. Colby's Blog: NEBADOR News, Youth Futures, and Deep Learning Notes

J.Z. Colby will be speaking on Sophia Temperilli's internet radio show The Ghost Host on June 2nd at noon (Pacific time), 3:00pm (Eastern time), 20:00 GMT. Sophia is 13, is an experienced ghost hunter, and has intimate knowledge of the ghosts of the RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach, California where she lives. The show is co-hosted by Sophia's father Gian, also a ghost hunter and the psychic Peter James' co-author. Information at LiveParanormal.com

The Nebador cover artist, Rachael Hedges, is preparing to release the cover art pieces as a series of limited edition, hand-signed prints. The first, from Book One, will be released this summer. Pre-orders get low numbers and other special treatment by the artist. http://www.nebador.com/Prints.html

J.Z. Colby's first non-fiction book, "Standing on Your Own Two Feet: Young Adults Surviving 2012 and Beyond," is available without charge to (or for) any young adult at http://www.nebador.com/TwoFeet.html

Much of it was drafted in blog posts on GoodReads during 2010 and 2011, and in conversations in the Dumbledore's Army group during 2011. Cover art and illustrations by professional artist Rachael Hedges (who also did the Nebador book covers) bring the book to life, and short 2-page chapters make it easy to read for nearly anyone.

NEBADOR Book Five: Back to the Stars has been published! The Medium Print edition is available, and the Large Print, Global Paperback edition, Hardcover, and Deep Learning Notes will be out very soon. Kindle and ePub will follow in December.

[I'm back from my travels, but will only be doing Youth Futures blog posts very occasionally as I'm concentrating on preparing my first book on the subject, probably entitled Standing on Your Own Two Feet: Young Adults Surviving 2012 and Beyond.]

I have written before in the Youth Futures blog (and many other good writers have done so also) that the "Myth of Progress" we have believed for the past 300 years may be joining many other myths that have served their purposes, but are no longer useful.

The "Myth of Progress" was unique to the last 300 years because that was the period of cheap and plentiful energy (mostly coal, oil, and uranium). It has only happened before on much smaller sales, like when a civilization grabbed (through war) a forest with lots of trees, and for a while they had plenty of firewood.

But the "Myth of Progress" may be just one example of something that happens to all civilizations. There seems to be a set of predicaments that all civilizations get into. A "predicament" is different than a "problem" because it doesn't have a solution. Problems have solutions.

We could simplify the "Myth of Progress" predicament like this: when we get something, we use it like there's no tomorrow, then, when tomorrow comes, we wonder where it all went.

If that sounds like the way a child would think ... well, gosh, children ARE just slightly younger people! And there are other habits we have that always seem to limit our civilizations.

Everyone remember the biblical story of The Tower of Babel? It has a couple of different themes, both of which appear to be firmly-rooted parts of human nature. 1. We like to aim high, do huge projects that impress everyone (even God!) 2. We are surprised when those huge projects turn out to be so difficult and complex that we run into communication problems that totally ruin the project.

Another is the dreaded population predicament. We are not alone, as all other creatures on Earth do the same thing. We like to think we are better than those other creatures, but at least in this way, we are not. All creatures maximize their populations, at all times, within the resources available. This means that whenever we raise our "standard of living" in any way, we will eventually have enough babies to "soak up" the extra, leaving us right back where we were.

Another example, a little more complicated. Right now, most countries in the world are running out of money to pay for things they have promised their people. Take away those promised things, and the people vote you out of office (if they don't burn down your office first). The only thing our leaders can do, it appears, is to "print" more money and hand it out to keep the people happy. (Today we don't "print" money, we just change the numbers in computers.) "Printing" more money causes the money to be worth less and less until it's useless. It's happened many times before. Before there was paper money, the government would put less and less silver or gold into the coins, until there was none, just cheap metals that no one wanted. It's another civilization-limiting predicament that we repeat over and over again.

These, and many other human predicaments, pop up again and again all through history. We don't seem to be able to out-grow them. They are "hard-wired" into our nature, presumably through the genetic information he pass down from generation to generation.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is to someday accept these things about ourselves so that they cease to surprise us. But unfortunately, another one of our civilization-limiting predicaments is out tendency to forget lessons we don't really want to learn.

I'll be traveling for the next 3 or 4 weeks, so I'll get caught up on questions, teacher and library book requests, and everything else, when I get back. The Youth Futures blog will also be on vacations, of course.

About 150 years ago, 200 in some places, our civilization was starting to feel so rich that it decided to try to educate everyone. That's never been done before in history. It went pretty well until 2 or 3 decades ago, then money started tightening up. That's about when our energy supplies began to show signs of not lasting forever (1972 in the USA).

Public education limped along for a few more decades, with budgets tightening more and more almost every year. The tightening process switched into high gear about three years ago with the financial crisis of 2008. Today, states and counties all over the USA are running out of ways to make ends meet. Schools are not our lowest priority, but they're not our highest either. If it comes to a choice between police protection and education, schools will probably lose.

Education won't go away completely for a while. Classes will get bigger and bigger, and teachers (already low-paid) will lose benefits, and have to provide all their own materials. Private schools will remain for rich people, of course.

Hard to imagine, isn't it?

It's actually not a huge problem. Public education began at a time when most adults were not educated in even basic skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today most adults, in most countries, are. Almost any community can easily find the people to teach the basics, and most communities can even scrape up teachers for trigonometry, foreign languages, art history, and other less-common subjects. Even most young adults would make perfectly good teachers for children in the basic subjects.

So why is it so hard to imagine?

It's been drilled into us that education must take place in big, ugly buildings by professional teachers. It's even illegal, in most countries, to do your own educating. We have chosen to empower our governments to decide who and what will be taught, by whom, and to pay for it with our tax money.

It appears that all that is about to change. As public education begins to fail, there will be a period of confusion, but the solution is simple and obvious. Any family, neighborhood, or community who wants to educate its young people, is completely capable of doing so. They may be acting "illegally" at first, but eventually those laws will be changed, or just forgotten.

Educating hundreds or thousands of youth in one place requires big buildings with security and alarm systems, offices, janitors, repairmen, and gardeners. Educating a half dozen kids in a local neighborhood requires a kid-proofed room in a house.

Managing a class of 30 or 40 kids, few of whom want to be there, requires a professional teacher who has studied disciplinary techniques and structured learning programs. Teaching 3 or 4 kids to read just needs a literate thirteen-year-old and a shelf of good story books.

Of course, if public education fails, the subjects we will need to teach our young people will probably change a little. They will need more do-it-yourself skills like auto mechanics, sewing, and carpentry. Gardening, animal husbandry, and food preservation will become very important if prices in our grocery stores keep going up. Public schools are not, in most places, ready to teach these things. The community is.

As our economy fails because it needs cheap energy, and our governments shrink because they can no longer tax, borrow, or print money, we will begin a process called "re-localization." Education will be one of the easiest things to re-localize. We already have everything we need.

Can you imagine it now?

There are many things we don't understand about our universe, so we make myths, stories we tell ourselves and our children to make sense of it all. One of those is The Myth of Progress. It says that our lives will keep getting better and better, richer and richer, more and more comfortable. Always. Guaranteed.

The only problem is that The Myth of Progress was invented to explain a very temporary situation. Starting in about the year 1700, we found coal and started using it. About 1860, oil joined the party, much easier to use. Finally in 1950, uranium promised to be clean and "too cheap to meter."

Then geological reality set in. In 1972, oil wells in the USA started declining. In 2005, it now appears, the world's oil supply peaked, and the stuff will never again be cheap. And we're wondering if we dare keep on using nuclear energy. All of the alternatives, so far, have a serious problem or two.

We learned The Myth of Progress at the same time as we learned to walk and go potty by ourselves. Things learned that early are difficult to question, which is why so many people deny that the climate is changing, the economy isn't growing anymore, and our energy supplies are getting tight.

People from almost any time in the past (before 1700) would have laughed at the idea that the future will always be better than the past. They knew from experience that it probably wasn't true. Their lives were limited by the sunshine and water that grew their food, human and animal muscle, and the little bit of stored energy in firewood. The only way to live at a higher standard was to enslave other people, or steal from them.

Myths have great power ... over us. They don't have much effect on the geology of the planet. Whenever there's a conflict between myths and hard, cold reality, reality wins. We usually see this as a struggle between Man and Mother Nature. She wins, every time.

Each of us has a choice to make. We can walk into the 21st century with blinders on because we believe what we're told. In every society, there's a class or political party that's skilled at telling people what will keep them happy so they won't notice where all the money and power is going. Hitler's Nazi Party was one of those. He promised continual progress too.

Or we can look at the evidence and think for ourselves.

The evidence for The Myth of Progress is very slim, with just a few items like hope, faith, pride, wishful thinking, and the deeply-felt belief that "we're different from everyone in the past."

Every civilization of the past has believed the same thing, that they would continue on into a glorious future. And yet, every one of those civilizations came to an end. The people didn't disappear, just the civilizations. The people of the Roman Empire, when it collapsed in the 400s, continued living, had children, and became today's Italians.

The evidence against The Myth of Progress includes the facts of geology, the laws of physics, the rules of economics, the lessons of history, and everything we know about human nature.

It's natural to think we're better than people of the past. There is even a sense in which that's true, as knowledge does slowly build, over the centuries, as long as it's carefully preserved. But The Myth of Progress only worked while energy was cheap and plentiful.

That just ended.

This is an expanded version of a recent post I made on the Dumbledore's Army group.

Young adults usually have little power, little money, and few resources. So knowledge of what's going on in the world just might save your life. Even though you have little to work with, if everyone else (including most adults) have their heads in the sand, you might find you can prepare for "stuff" better than most people. Also, knowledge gives you extra time. It takes time to get over denial, decide what to do, gather your resources, and put your plan into action.

Most of you have probably heard about the huge national debt, banks closing, bail-outs, toxic assets, and many other things that are hard to understand. They are hard for me to understand too, even though I study them an hour or two every day. They're all about money. It's sick, and might be dying.

Most people will pooh-pooh that idea. The great US dollar, the noble British Pound, and the strong Euro could never die! Fact: no civilization in the history of the world has ever piled up huge debts, like we have now, without destroying their money.

What can we do???

First, we need to get past denial. We need to get used to the idea that money can die. It only has value right now because we all agree it does. It can die slowly through "inflation" (prices going up slowly) or quickly through "hyper-inflation" (prices going up so fast that no one can do business any more). Imagine $100 bills or 50 pound notes being good for nothing but lighting fires or wiping your ...

Next, while money still has some value, we can put some of our wealth into other things, things that WON'T lose their value. They are called, as a group, "commodities." They include food, tools, fuel, and metals.

What will you do if you can't buy any food? Maybe there is none to buy, or maybe a loaf of bread costs 2 wheel-barrows full of money, and you only have one wheel-barrow full. (That happened in Germany in 1923.) If things come to that point, it'll be too late to do anything. Look around your kitchen. How long will the food last if you can't get any more? The time to go from a "shallow pantry" to a "deep pantry" is now, while food is still in the stores and money still has some value. Non-perishible food, of course.

Also, you can do something about the possibility of money becoming worthless. One of those commodities is "metals," and one of those metals is just right for young adults.

Silver. In the USA, dimes and quarters from 1964 or earlier, and real silver dollars (old or new). You can't find them in pocket change, you have to go to a coin shop. Right now, dimes will cost you $3-$4, quarters $7-$11, and silver dollars are $45-50. Ask for "junk" or "bullion" value coins, not "numismatic" (rare) coins.

Susan B. Anthony dollars are NOT silver, and Sacajawea dollars are NOT gold. They're just like paper money, and their value can die. Don't be fooled.

The price of silver is going up most of the time. That means that if you buy some now, it'll probably be worth more next year. But more importantly: if money dies, your silver dimes, quarters, and dollars will be worth SOMETHING.

If you have SOMETHING of value at a time when most people have nothing, you will be in good shape. If we get hyper-inflation, people are lined up at the grocery store with wheel-barrows full of paper money, and you show up with a silver dime, YOU will get some food. I hope you bring some big, strong friends along (for body guards).

Suggested plan for a young adult with $10 a week: $5 in canned or dried food (with promises from the rest of your family to not touch it except in an emergency) and one silver dime from a coin ship (hidden away in a secret place). In a year, you'll have a nice, deep pantry, and a tube of silver dimes that is probably growing in value, and someday could save your life.

Have you ever gotten used to a favorite set of clothes ... they've been washed several times are very comfortable, just the right size, your favorite colors, and in every way they are just YOU?

Then one day, they come out of the washing machine or dryer and have fallen apart some place that you just CAN'T let others see?

That what's happening to our civilization.

300 years ago we had to collect firewood to heat our homes. The young adults in the family usually got to do that. And we made some candles from animal fat, or burned a little whale oil in a smoky lamp.

Then someone started digging up coal, and it was sooo much easier than firewood. And besides, there was hardly a stick of firewood left in most places.

And one day someone punched a hole in the ground and oil came out, and they separated it into light and heavy oils, and one of them, kerosene, was just right for our lamps at night and a LOT cheaper than whale oil. And the lighter oils would run engines so we didn't have to walk or ride horses anymore!

And finally, someone figured out how to make electricity from atoms! They said it was the energy of the future, and it would be "too cheap to meter"!

Those were the comfortable clothes our civilization put on. The best thing about them: they allowed everything to be bigger and better almost every year! More food to eat, faster ways to get around, more machines, more toys, even computers and video games! And, of course, we could have all the babies we wanted!

The best part of all: we could have it all RIGHT WHEN we wanted it! Food-on-demand. Toys-on-demand. Energy-on-demand.

We were having so much fun that we started forgetting. Our great great grand ... someone ... had to collect firewood, but his memories got lost in the mists of time. Our great grand ... someone ... read books by a kerosene lantern, but the ink in her journal faded and her story was lost.

Then came 2005, a year to remember. For the very first time, we wanted more oil and things made from oil, but the oil companies couldn't pump out enough. So the price of it started going up, up, up. That's what prices do when people want more but there isn't enough.

We're not "out" of coal, oil, and uranium, we just can't find it fast enough any more.

Our "comfortable clothes" just came out of the washing machine "shredded," and we're sad, but "mom and dad" (our governments) are saying, "It's okay, don't worry, no problem, we'll find more ..."

Scientists have known, for hundreds of years, that we would someday run out of things like coal, oil, and uranium. But people don't like to listen to scientists. In fact, entire political parties choose to believe the exact opposite of what scientists tell us.

How did scientists know? They looked at the planet we live on: it doesn't go on forever. If we take something OUT of it that has a limited supply, like oil, then someday we will RUN OUT. If we put more and more people ONTO it every year, then someday we'll will RUN OUT of space.

No one knew exactly when we would start running out of oil. One scientist (M. King Hubbert) guessed the year 2000. He was closer (in 1956) than anyone else.

Now there are too many people to heat with firewood and light with whale oil. And it looks like the supplies of coal, oil, and uranium are going to slowly get smaller and smaller.

Someday, in maybe 50 or 100 years, we'll really run out, or at least you'd have to be very rich to get some coal, oil, uranium, or the things they make. But we still have a big problem TODAY.

Over the last 300 years, the leaders of our world have figured out how to run things so that almost everyone can have a job. But it only works as long as everything is getting bigger and bigger all the time. We didn't realize it until recently, but THAT only happens when energy (coal, oil, and uranium) is plentiful and cheap.

And now it's not, and looks like it won't be ever again. See the problem?