Chapter 1 - Do we need to worry about Survival
Human race has made great progress in the last 500 years. A review of the significant events of last 500 years will reveal how the challenges of human survival have changed. We have gone from "finding food" as the primary goal of life to today's lifestyle, where we are worried about global warming, extinction of specis and improving the quality of life. Even though I want to put down some key achievement here, but my thoughts are running faster than I can type. [Place Holder#1 - Link major human life changing events / links here]
Historians have worked hard to discover the history of humans and we know a lot more about history now than we did 100 years ago. I don't think anyone will dispute that there are still a lot of unknown and we all wish we knew more about our history. While the efforts to discover more of our history needs to continue, it is time to start thinking about our future as well. With today's technology a lot more is possible. We are creating a lot more information for the future generations to use. In addition to finding what is available on the internet today, the knowledge of all the books, private information in databases and a lot of other sources that I don't know about will be available to future generation. I wake up at nights wondering, are we doing enough? Can we do more? With the technology available today, we can do more.
I think we are cheating the furture generation if we don't create a way of documenting the life of each and every human being on this earth. What do I mean by documenting? Means collecting all the facts: from genetic information, to education, professional life, social life, medical history and ....., I think you get the idea. Social networking sites are doing some of it, Google health is doing some of it, online retailers are also doing it. Today we have the technology to track, store and search large amounts of information, but we only do it to make money or do research or do whatever else. We are not organizing it as history for future generations. I can think of a lot of reasons why the future generations will need detailed information about all humans beings that have lived before them. Even today we can use this information to improve medical research, provide education, feed the hungry etc.
Documenting the detailed history of our lives is a monumental task and even though we have the basic technologies to track, save and search this information, we are lacking the organization that will make it happen. Who should take this goliath effort. Is it the UN, or the government of each country or a private enterprise like google or facebook or yahoo? Or will it need a new kind of entity that we still have created. I will leave this as open questions for readers to chime in. I do intend to find out, I just don't know how at this point. What I do know is that team work will play an important role.
Everyone knows that a team can accomplish a lot more than an individual. As we evolve, one of the skills that has to improve is the ability to build bigger teams that accomplish more than the current teams. Every large company, or the millions of governments are example of big teams today. Some have formal rules and structures and others are more nimble. In my opinion we can build the teams much more efficiently than we do today. In future the teams will be built online, based on a large amount of detail information and capable of producing results very quickly. With new online collaboration tools, the process of building teams to working as a team will be revolutionized.
I will write in detail about more of the topics discussed above.
Chapter 2 - History so far
Chapter 3 - Building the ultimate human information database
Chapter 4 - Technology and tools needed for human information databases
Chapter 5 - Teamwork
Chapter 6 - Can private enterprise build the Human Information database
Chapter 7 - Re-directing the role of governments
Awesome... great write up..
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