Page 9 of 9
More Photos of Darwin
Australasia
Darwin after Europe - More Photos of Darwin
- Details
- Written by: Richard_McKie
- Parent Category: Travel
- Category: Australasia
- Hits: 42099
We have 58 guests and no members online
At the end of February 2016 Wendy and I took a package deal to visit Bali. These days almost everyone knows that Bali is a smallish island off the east tip of Java in the Southern Indonesian archipelago, just south of the equator. Longitudinally it's just to the west of Perth, not a huge distance from Darwin. The whole Island chain is highly actively volcanic with regular eruptions that quite frequently disrupt air traffic. Bali is well watered, volcanic, fertile and very warm year round, with seasons defined by the amount of rain.
Regular readers will know that I have an artificial heart valve. Indeed many people have implanted prosthesis, from metal joints or tooth fillings to heart pacemakers and implanted cochlear hearing aides, or just eye glasses or dentures. Some are kept alive by drugs. All of these are ways in which our individual survival has become progressively more dependent on technology. So that should it fail many would suffer. Indeed some today feel bereft without their mobile phone that now substitutes for skills, like simple mathematics, that people once had to have themselves. But while we may be increasingly transformed by tools and implants, the underlying genes, conferred by reproduction, remain human.
The possibility of accelerated genetic evolution through technology was brought nearer last week when, on 28 November 2018, a young scientist, He Jiankui, announced, at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong, that he had successfully used the powerful gene-editing tool CRISPR to edit a gene in several children.
I have reached a point in my life when the death of a valued colleague seems to be a monthly occurrence. I remember my parents saying the same thing.
We go thought phases. First it is the arrival of adulthood when all one's friends are reaching 21 or 18, as the case may be. Then they are all getting married. Then the babies arrive. Then it is our children's turn and we see them entering the same cycle. And now the Grim Reaper appears regularly.
As I have repeatedly affirmed elsewhere on this website, each of us has a profound impact on the future. Often without our awareness or deliberate choice, we are by commission or omission, continuously taking actions that change our life's path and therefore the lives of others. Thus our every decision has an impact on the very existence of those yet to be born.