User:Humanist Wikitopian

About Me
Humanist Wikitopian is a 33 year old British freelance writer, blogger, scientist, armchair philosopher, theoretician,  futurist, skeptic, free-thinker, activist, campaigner and  internet entrepreneur. He gained a BSc honours degree in 'Physics with Space Science & Technology' in 2001 from the University of Leicester. The University is world renowned for its scientific research groups, particularly in the areas of astrophysics, biochemistry and genetics. The techniques used in Genetic fingerprinting were invented and developed at Leicester in 1985 by Sir Alec Jeffreys. Leicester also houses Europe's biggest academic centre for space research, in which space probes have been built, most notably the Mars Lander Beagle 2. A Leicester built instrument has been operating in space every year since 1967, and Leicester physicists were critical in proving a fundamental law of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity - that black holes exist and are common in the universe. The university is also a founding partner of the £52 million British National Space Centre.

Notably, Humanist Wikitopian has also been previously employed as a Defence Analyst and Scientific Consultant with the UK Ministry of Defence. He has also published several peer-reviewed articles in academic journals.

Areas of Interest
Science, Technology, Philosophy, Epistemology, Ontology, Metaphysics, Metaphysical Naturalism,  Objectivism,  Philosophical Realism, Philosophy of Science, Verificationism, Scientific Method, Logic, Reason, Mathematics, Mathematical Physics, Natural Science, Physics, Astronomy, Cosmology, Space Science, Astrophysics, Theoretical Physics, Quantum Theory, Theory of Relativity, Hyperspace theory, Quantum Gravity, Chemistry, Earth Science, Geology, Paleontology, Panspermia, Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Environmental Science, Ecology, Nature, Geography, Environmentalism, Animal Rights, Humanism, Memetics, Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, Behavioral Ecology, Perception, Cognition, Cognitive Science, Functionalism (philosophy of mind), Reality, Neuroscience, Synaesthesia, Savant Syndrome, Artificial Intelligence, Strong AI, Computer Science, Engineering, Futurism, Futurology, Space Tourism, Moore's Law, Technological Singularity, Nanotechnology, Transhumanism, Science Fiction, Rationalism, Existentialism, Anthropic Principle, Synchronicity, Collective Unconscious, Karma, Lucid Dreaming, Spirituality, Theology, Secularism, Brights Movement, Anthropology, Linguistics, Sociology, Utilitarianism, Politics, Democracy, Socialism, Libertarianism, Anarcho-syndicalism, Sociocracy, Self-sufficiency, Permaculture, Human Rights, Equality, Law, Economics, Political Science, Geopolitics,  Current Affairs,  International Relations, Citizen Media,  Investigative Journalism, Activism, Conspiracy Theories,  Paranormal Investigation, Ufology, Abduction Phenomenon, History, Archaeology, Literature, Film, Travel, Genealogy, Web Development, Entrepreneurship, Social Media, Web 2.0, Virtual Reality, Virtual Worlds, MMORPGs,  Virtual Economies, Emergence, Chaos Theory,  Collective Intelligence, Determinism, Ethics, Moral Philosophy

People of Interest
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Nostradamus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin, Issac Newton, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Karl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Nicola Tesla, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman, Wernher von Braun, Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, Marvin Minsky, Kyle Chatbot, Raymond Kurzweil, Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, David Deutsch, Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Marcus du Sautoy, David Attenborough, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, PZ Myers, Stephen Jay Gould, Michio Kaku, Steve Weinberg, Lawrence Krauss, Simon Singh, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Stanton T. Friedman, Carl Sagan, Nick Bostrom, Ben Goertzel, Aubrey de Grey, James Randi, Penn Jillette, Bill Maher, Timothy Good, Nick Pope, John E. Mack, Uri Gellar, Kim Peek, Daniel Tammet, Terrence McKenna, Derren Brown, David Icke,  Alex Jones,  James Whale, George Galloway, Christopher Hitchens, David Shayler, Richard Tomlinson, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Lewis Carol, Issac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Douglas Adams, J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, John Locke, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, Peter Diamandis, Dean Kamen, James Dyson, Craig Venter, Norman Borlaug, Peter Singer, Hans Rosling, Ray Mears, Bruce Parry, Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kevin McCloud,  Mike Reynolds, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Oprah Winfrey, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Simon Cowell, Mary Portas, Bill Hicks, Chris Crudelli, Stephen Fry, Sacha Baron Cohen, Peter Tatchell, Bob Dylan, John Lennon

Quotes & Food for Thought
  This is my current home, Planet Earth. I am its citizen. It's the only home I have. I have no blind loyalty to any singular Nation State.

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." - Jimbo Wales

"Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty." - Albert Einstein

"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest." - Benjamin Franklin

"The real problem is not Wikipedia, but reporters who fail to check their facts." – Joseph Wilson

"As a general rule, if you want to get at the truth — hear both sides and believe neither." – Josh Billings

“In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue, but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.” – Mark Twain

“Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.” – Albert Einstein

"Always consider a cock-up before a conspiracy." - Unknown

"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does the truth become error because nobody will see it.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“Even if you are in a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.” – Mahatma Gandhi

"Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see." - Mark Twain

"A lie told often enough becomes the truth." — Vladimir Lenin

"There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true." - Winston Churchill

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." — Mark Twain

"History is written by the victors." - Winston Churchill

"Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft." - Winston Churchill

"The road to hell is often paved with good intentions." - Unknown

"If you have the capacity to tremble with indignation every time that an injustice is committed in the world, then we are comrades." - Che Guevara

"As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole, and by now that means the global community." - Noam Chomsky

"Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither." - Benjamin Franklin

"It may affront the military-minded person to suggest a regime that does not maintain any military secrets." - Albert Einstein

"If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." - George Orwell

"I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - Voltaire

"All great things are simple, and many can be expressed in single words: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." - Winston Churchill

"The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way." - Arundhati Roy

"A corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level -- there's a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy." - Noam Chomsky

"Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms." - Albert Einstein

"Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. Imagine all the people, living life in peace... You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one." - John Lennon

"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." - Albert Einstein

"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax." - Albert Einstein

"There can be no real freedom or democracy until the men who do the work in a business also control its management." - Bertrand Russell

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." - Albert Einstein

"Some men see things as they are and say 'Why?' I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'" - George Bernard Shaw

"When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong." - Richard Dawkins

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." - Albert Einstein

"The pioneers of a warless world are the young men (and women) who refuse military service." - Albert Einstein

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein

"If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged." - Noam Chomsky

"The most important issue that faces us is the survival of the planet's ecology. If that struggle fails, then everything else we do will be nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." - Michael Parenti

"They express a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation." - Richard Dawkins

"Facts are not ethical principles, but they tend to form or revise our moral ideas by making it harder to believe nonsense." - Bertrand Russell

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence." - Richard Dawkins

"The more I see the less I know for sure." - John Lennon

"When a young person loses faith in his religion because he begins to study science and its methodology, it isn't that through the obtaining of real knowledge that he knows it all, but he suddenly realizes that he doesn't know it all." – Richard Feynman

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

"There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out." - Richard Dawkins

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully when they do it from religious conviction." - Blaise Pascal

"Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it." - Richard Dawkins

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." - Albert Einstein

"If you read the Bible, say, you find that it is one of the most genocidal texts in our literature." - Noam Chomsky

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." - Albert Einstein

"I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong." - John Lennon

"The Church says the Earth is flat. But I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the moon. And I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church." - Ferdinand Magellan

"No myth of miraculous creation is so marvellous as the face of man's evolution." - Robert Briffault

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." - Albert Einstein

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” – Mahatma Gandhi

"Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground." - Unknown

"Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong." - Winston Churchill

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein

"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." - Albert Einstein

"Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun." - Richard Dawkins

"If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction." - Judith Hayes

"For my part I would as soon be descended from a baboon...as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies...treats his wives like slaves...and is haunted by the grossest superstitions." - Charles Darwin

"Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in bodies that die young or without reproducing." - Richard Dawkins

"No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Ancestors just don't die young!" - Richard Dawkins

"But it is we that choose to divide animals up into discontinuous species. On the evolutionary view of life there must have been intermediates, even though, conveniently for our naming rituals, they are usually extinct" - Richard Dawkins

"We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes -- the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans." - Richard Dawkins

"One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop. Marijuana can be grown almost anywhere, with little difficulty. It might not be easily marketable by major corporations. Tobacco is quite another story." - Noam Chomsky

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. "Which road do I take?" she asked. "Where do you want to go?" was his response. "I don't know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter." - Lewis Carroll

"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"If atheism is a religion, then health is a disease." - Clark Adams

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." - Seneca the Younger

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality." - George Bernard Shaw

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" - Douglas Adams

"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." - Isaac Asimov

"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned." - Unknown

"Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one." - Richard Dawkins

Videos Worth Watching
Catastrophe Ep #1 - Birth of the planet

Catastrophe Ep #2 - Snowball Earth

Catastrophe Ep #3 - Planet of Fire

Catastrophe Ep #4 - Asteroid Strike

How Earth Made Us: Deep Earth

How Earth Made Us: Water

How Earth Made Us: Wind

How Earth Made Us: Fire

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life

The Genius of Charles Darwin

The Incredible Human Journey - EP1: Out of Africa

The Incredible Human Journey - EP2: Into Asia

The Incredible Human Journey - EP3: Into Europe

The Incredible Human Journey - EP4: Into Australia

The Incredible Human Journey - EP5: Into the Americas

Root of All Evil - Episode 1

Root of All Evil - Episode 2

Enemies of Reason Ep.1

Enemies of Reason Ep.2

Humanist Wikitopian's YouTube Channel
Humanist Wikitopian's YouTube Channel