Its the silly season for journalism so I will not be bogging anything too serious this month.

I have spent sometime thinking about the blog and how to make it more interesting and specifically how to get more people to come to the site and comment on the blog posts. I have been using twitter and I see some additional activity when I tweet and mention www.theaxion.com but I am not sure how to get more followers on twitter, after all, I am not famous. Anyway I will continue to look for ways to drive traffic to the site as only when I get enough people engaged and commenting will the site really take off.

Talking of twitter, I was wondering what would happen if in the future social media sites became so popular and essential that everyone on the planet was using them. Then disruption to these sites could cause serious civil disturbance and mayhem. The reason is that without knowing who was responsible for the disruption people may turn on their governments or feel that a foreign power was responsible and this could start a war. Only recently we have seen issues arise and finger pointing in South Korea and the US where hackers, apparently based in foreign countries, have disrupted internet services. At times of heightened international tension these cyber attacks and finger pointing could be used politically to justify retaliation.

Last week twitter and a number of other sites were taken down by a denial of service (DOS) attack which supposedly was mounted by Russian hackers (or the Russian state?) against a single blogger who was pro Georgian.

Whilst clearly not the end of the world it was inconvenient for many and I have noticed that businesses and governments are increasingly using these sites as a means of communication with the public and employees. In the event of a crisis these sites also allow vital information and sometimes misinformation to spread rapidly. I see, for example, that the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) has a twitter account and use it to tell people of emerging serious health issues around the world and the UK government is encouraging party members and civil servants to tweet daily, to spread pro government propaganda.

Iran is a case in point. Twitter was used by reformist protesters to get information about the governments crackdown out to the western world and to some extent attempts by the Iranian authorities to block Internet and SMS messaging succeeded but tweets and youtube content still get out.

I am sure that many governments are now are keen to gain control of their populations Internet use and especially twitter, not least of course the UK government. Unfortunately, it seems that Internet and telecommunications equipment manufactures are making this control possible by including interception and monitoring hardware and software as part of their products. In a way these companies are responsible for suppression and even the possible detention of protesters who unwittingly used the services not knowing that their every phone call, SMS, tweet and Internet browse were being watched and traced back to them.

Obviously governments will say that this monitoring facility is essential to enable them to track and prevent terrorism but where it is clear that repressive regimes are concerned I think the UN should ban the export of this technology to these regimes in a similar way as they do for arms that could be used to suppress and torture the citizens.

Personally, even in western democracies, I fail to see why the internet and phone calls should be intercepted by the state en-mass in the vague hope that a terrorist communication will be uncovered. They do it because the technology allows it and makes it easy whereas if we had only written letters sent by post the government would have to steam open all the letters to read them and find a way to know who sent a letter and from where and where it was going. If they did this it would cause an uproar but for some reason we don’t complain when they do it to our phone calls, SMS, browsing and emails. We should.

Four months on from my last post and war has not yet started but many things have happened and I feel confident that a major war will start by the end of the year.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the world and perhaps there were green shoots of an economic recovery the world has been hit by a pandemic 2009 H1N1 swine flu. This was one of the 20 or so potentially catastrophic world events that we know are overdue and could hit us at any time.  So far however, this pandemic is no where near as deadly as the one predicted and presents a mortality rate of perhaps less than 0.1% in developed countries. This is the first wave however and for the northern hemisphere it is summer, a traditionally low incidence of flu period. The autumn and winter 2009/2010 flu season and a possible second wave more deadly than the first has a lot of people worried. Even with a week off work for 30% of the world population who may catch the flu the impact on the worlds economies will be huge and may push many from recession into depression. Developing countries will be hardest hit in the second wave, especially for the young who may not recieve a vaccine in time if at all.

We have Anti-virals like Tamiflu, the ability to make vaccines and advanced medical care but still people die from flu. We have had nearly 100 years since the 1918 pandemic that killed up to 50 million people to understand and defeat a pandemic flu…I think we have been dragging our feet.

We should, I hope, learn a lot from this flu and how to prepare and protect ourselves from other emerging viruses. If we don’t then with the next one we may not be so lucky. SARS had a mortality of 10 to 20% that’s 100 to 200 times more deadly than 2009 H1N1. We got lucky with SARS too. An easy transmissible emerging virus or flu for which we have no immunity would likely kill in excess of 360,000,000 people worldwide assuming 30% became infected in a pandemic before the virus ran out of stream. There is much work to be done and little time. For more information on Swine Flu check out New Scientist magazine on-line at http://www.newscientist.com

Back to war. It seems highly likely that there will be a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities before the end of the year. This can only escalate. Iran is not Iraq and will not just roll over and accept it.. Iran is close to having “The Bomb”.

North Korea is itching for a fight and has “The Bomb”

Russia is playing a game, only it knows the rules and the game plan. It has “The Bomb”

Pakistan may become a failed state. It has “The Bomb”

America, China, UK, France, India, Israel and other countries will defend themselves and some may help each other and they all have “The Bomb”

America is stretched militarily and has a reputation problem and a public aversion to getting involved in any more conflicts. It wont be able to stop a runaway incident turning into a regional war that consumes those around it until it becomes a fight for survival for the world.  World War III.  If I have time (if any of us has time!) I will predict the period after the war and what it means for the survivors.

Anyway there are always positives and there is no need to worry until it happens and even when it does happen we wont have much time to worry about it.

So to lighten up Theaxion blog a bit I will be opening up categories for positive views of the future and many interesting topics will be discussed such as; future gaming and entertainment, virtual worlds, robotics, AI, future weapons, space exploration and cosmology, body part replacements and bionics, implants, nano technology applications, bio-engineering and genetics including artificial life forms, future alien encounters, UFO’s and the paranormal oddities.

For fun I may also add “Theaxion Horoscope” a monthly reading of the stars by yours truly. I have invented some new astrological techniques as I believe the old ones are no longer credible having been mostly debunked by our modern understandings of Astrophysics.

I will also be giving reviews of other futurologists publications and views, Scifi books and films and recommending ones that really spark my imagination and hopefully will also spark yours.

Monthly I will review the latest gadgets and predict their success or failure.  A thread will attempt to create the ultimate future gadget, a sort of gadget designed by committee, I hope however that it doesn’t come out looking like a camel !  I am all for function but I believe that form is equally important. 

To understand what Theaxion is all about and what I hope to achieve with the blog, go to the About page tab and remember to subscribe to the blog to get updates as I post them. Follow me on Twitter, why not ? It’s free and I’m funny (most days).

Posted by Theaxion Sat, March 28, 2009 17:20:32

Three months on and war has not started but the signs are still there. It’s coming.

Russia has decided to re-arm its forces with modern weapons and just today announced the commissioning of six new nuclear submarines and will also start patrolling the Arctic regions to protect its interests there. A report from America says that China is spending more and more on arms and its Military build up. Iran has reportedly enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb and North Korea has a long range missile sitting on the launch pad ready to test in a few days or as they claim put a satellite into orbit. Pakistan seems out of control and Militants in the form of the Taliban are gaining foot holds in some northern parts. Conflict and stress is building up all over the world…a pressure cooker that will explode.

The UK government seem convinced that one way or another extremists will get their hands on WMD of some sort in the near future and try to hit the UK with them. I’m not sure however that this fear justifies the 360 degree 24 by 7 survailance society that they have implimented. A significant terrorist attack or a world war would cement these measures and in the UK at least we would find ourselfs living in George Orwell’s “1984″.

This all sounds rather bleak.

To make matters worse the world economic situation seems to be stumbling from crisis to crisis and a number of countries have seen violent demonstrations against their governments handling of it. I would expect that to increase and spread in 2009 and of course demonstation against your government would now be viewed in many countries as an act of terrorism.

I see no reason yet to change any of my more extreme predictions from past blog posts.

And where in all this turmoil is the global warming issue?

A recent international meeting of scientists left us all confused as daily sound bites came from the conference. Many of these uttering were contradictory and it left political leaders not knowing what will happen in the future or with any convincing ammunition to sell uncomfortable changes of policy to their voters back home, especially in these times of economic strife.

It seems to me that we are accelerating to a tipping point in global warming where temperatures are rising unevenly around the globe and will cause the release of even more potent green house gasses like methane from deposits trapped in permafrost and under the sea.

The consequences are potentially catastrophic for humanity and much of the planets wild life but scientists are just so bad at getting the message across that in fact there is a backlash now from people who think it’s all some big confidence trick.

Distrust of government is so bad after the war in Iraq and the collapse of the financial system that many of the public just don’t believe that there is a global warming crisis…it’s all just scaremongering they say and scientists trying to justify their research grants. I can’t blame them for being cynical but I wish they were not, especially for their children.

Developing countries are also desperate to keep their growth going and can’t take on reducing carbon emissions right now.

Ironically the global recession may also reduce carbon emissions temporarily as businesses go under but when the recession ends it will be back to full throttle CO2 dumping into the atmosphere.

We seem also vulnerable to other external potential catastrophes such as global warming induced extreme weather events and extraterrestrial threats.

I don’t mean Aliens from outer space…well I don’t have any convincing evidence for that, what I’m talking about are space originating threats such as asteroids and solar flares.

An unexpected asteroid impact or a spell of bad solar weather with a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) thrown directly at us could well and truly finish us off. We are over due for these type of natural events and our population density and dependence on a rickety power grid infrastructure means that either event would force us back to the stone age, if we survived at all that is.

The question is this…would a World War wipe out a large proportion of humanity? Would extreme weather or shifting climate patterns like the monsoons wipe out a large number of people? Would an asteroid or CME devastate our civilisation?

What if all these things happened in the next 100 years? How many humans would be left on the planet in 2109?

Blog will be updated shortly