Why Patriotism doesn't make sense

Imagine you are one in a group of young students who are going on a field trip across the country in a plane. This is first time on a plane for most of you and everyone is eager to get the window seat to see how the world looks from high up in the sky. As the seating arrangement in a typical plane goes, some seats are in the middle which obviously can't offer the beautiful view that the window seats can. The teacher is going to make seat assignments and her decision is perfectly arbitrary. It is clear to everyone that, if you get the window seat you will get a magnificent view and if you get to sit in the middle row all you will see is the back of the seat before you.

Being unconditionally proud of the country of your birth means getting the seat in the middle row and claiming that it has the most spectacular view that anyone in the entire plane has.

Which country you are born in is as arbitrary as an unbiased teacher allocating seats on the plane. In that case, if you are born in a country that is not good at something, but you decide to stand up for it just because you were born there then you are fooling no one but yourself.

One should glorify or villify one's country based upon the logical/ethical/moral reasoning and not because one was born or not born in that country.

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Here are some great quotes on the subject:

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it - George Bernard Shaw

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours - William Ralph Inge

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars - Arthur C Clarke

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him? - Blaise Pascal

Prometheus

Prometheus in IMAX 3D was a great experience. Some of the scenes were mind blowing. Only regret is there weren't more of them.

The IMAX 3D experience is worth for some initial scenes - ones right after the opening titles - the sprawling and calm lake, roaring waterfalls of murky water. The most breath taking scene is watching the Prometheus ship hung in the middle of space and some time later watching it in the backdrop of the planet and its rings. I would like to watch it again and again. Too bad it only lasts 5-10 seconds in the movie. Also the scenes where the humans and human-made objects are shown besides the gigantic alien structures are also awe-inspiring.

These things are worth a trip to the theatre. But besides that, the story is lame. Characters and actors are good, but their motives and actions could have used more thought. A work of fiction is more appealing if it can be easily extrapolated from the reality we know.

Why sea steading is important to pursue?

For decades now, people have feared that the explosion of global population is going to harm the planet because we won't have enough space for all of them to live and not enough food to feed them. The population of the planet is now about 7 billion (A number that some scifi authors foresaw to happen when we inhabited entire galaxy). Yet there is enough food and enough space for everyone to live - on land itself. The only problem is that, the food and space is not distributed evenly. The problem is not about producing enough food, but to empower all individuals of the planet to earn their fair share of it. The problem of growing population has less to do with technology, and more to do with social sciences.

We do not need sea-steading because we are running out of space on land. We need sea-steading because there is no space left on land to do experiments that will build a better society.

In any scientific field, when we want to test our theories about new inventions, we do experiments. If you have an idea for a radical drug that will cure cancer then you won't be able to test it on real patients right away. Because there are laws that restrain you from doing tests of unproven drugs on humans. Instead, you first try it on rats and if things prove promising then after several years of research the refined drug is sanctioned for human testing. If you have an idea for self driving car, then you don't let your prototype loose on crowded streets. You take your prototypes in deserts for experiments. Only after years of testing in deserts, can someone drive a semi-autonomous Prius on streets of Mountain View under manual supervision. For testing radical world-changing ideas we need a test environment. This is as true for socio-economic experiments as it is for technological ones.

For successfully tackling the exploding population of the world, we need to do radical social and economic experiments. At present we try to find the solutions only in the framework that is allowed by the laws of Governments. Governments are democratically elected entities. They enforce the policies that only masses can approve. Radical and world-changing ideas are by definition not agreeable by consensus. Therefore if you have some social policy - like free health care to everyone, social security based on carbon footprint, or a variant of capitalist economy that won't lead to Wall Street - you cannot try it.

In 1947, India became an independent nation. At the time, it didn't have a clue what kind of economic policy it wanted to execute. The world had two strong economic philosophies - Socialism and Capitalism. Both of them were unproven at the time. India implemented a mixed policy - allowing private sector industries, but keeping the Government stake in major infrastructure projects. In 1980s, with the fall of Soviet Union, it became clear a Socialist economic policy with total Government control is doomed. Therefore in the 90s, India (among other countries) opened its policies gradually. Letting private sector and multinational investments in major infrastructure projects. Countries learn from each other for creating their social and economic policies. If one country can execute a social experiment and prove that it works, other Governments will be able to convince their population that it works and eventually adopt the policies themselves. Better solutions can only be found if one can experiment.

Now that populations are growing and are connecting more closely, they enforce the consensus more effectively. In many obvious cases of social welfare, it works greatly. But due to massive public opinion, even the greatest leaders in the Office think twice before implementing a radical change in nation's policies.

If we want to develop better policies, we have to be able to start from scratch. We need petri dishes to test our experiments. There remains no land to create these petri dishes, so we need to go on water. We need to build cities and towns on water where we can implement new laws and rules. Not all of them will be successful, but they will give the terrestrial nations a data point to correct their policies.