Survival

Colin Austin © 15 November 2023 This document it published under the creative commons system which means it can be freely copied and distributed without further permissions. The only restriction is that the source Colin Austin at gbiota.com should be acknowledged.

The news

I like to know what is going on in the world so I am a bit of an avid news watcher but when I see all the horror that is happening – wars across the globe, the Middle East, Africa, Myanmar and the one we have forgotten about Ukraine I get real upset.

I see young mums being killed, their children being crippled – how can people do that to other people?

Do regular people in Israel really hate the Palestinians that much, do the regular people in Russia really hate the Ukrainians that much?

I think not. Just look at my home country, Australia – it is a total mix of people from all over the world yet we all seem to get along – true we do terrible things to some people but that is not the people it is prejudices in small cavities within our Governments.

Candy’s future

I have just attended Candy’s, my grand daughter, graduation from high school in Brisbane. She was so happy and cheerful but I could not help thinking about what sort of world I was helping to create for her.

It should be absolutely glorious, engineers and innovators like me have been creating stunning improvements in the way we can manufacture goods and grow food yet when I take a walk along the Brisbane river there are homeless people living under the bridges and in tents.

Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, thanks to an educated work force, a stable Government (at least compared with other countries), plenty of natural resources, land and sunshine , we may be a bit short of water but that is manageable.

 

The myth of the golden era

Compared to my life, Candy should have a wonderful future. I was brought up in the war, my earliest memory is being taken down to the air raid shelter in the air raids. I remember it clearly – I thought the flashing lights were actually pretty but I dropped my teddy and they would not go back for it – hopefully that has not scared me mentally for life.

Then there was the cold war when people were really scared of an atomic holocaust. I remember when a news flash came over that President Kennedy had been killed, they shut down the radio and TV, (which was singularly stupid) and I remeber going outside to see if there were mushroom clouds in the sky.

The fact that we have survived for so many years without an atomic holocaust has given people the confidence that humans really cannot be that stupid.

I don’t worry about the holocaust – I don’t think it will happen and if it does, at least it will be quick.

The creeping disaster

I worry about the creeping disaster. In my life time the world’s population has tripled, which is just the start of the problem. In the affluent industrialised countries we are putting a far greater load per person on the planet.

But the industrialised countries used to be a small percentage of the population.

Now there is hardly a country on the globe which is not going through the major process of becoming modern industrialised states.

It is really difficult to appreciate the extra load we are placing on the earth and that boils down to one simple issue – food.

We all have to eat – but not just any old food but food that will keep us healthy.

If we all understood the issues and cooperated together, we have the technology to resolve even that problem.

In my life I have been lucky enough to overcome the trauma of loosing my teddy in the air raids and use my capacity as an engineer and innovator to develop the financial resources so I can conduct independent research on how to tackle the food crisis.

Misinformation

The real trouble is that people are not generally aware of the issue. In the age of the internet, (probably one of the most important technologies that humans have developed), it could be used to inform and implement solutions to this major problem.

But it is not being used as a source of real information, it is used to misinform people and motivate people to inflict immense harm on other people for no ones benefit other than a handful of people in a position of power.

Internet advertising agencies

That may be the world as it is but I have spent many years experimenting on how to grow food that will keep people healthy and think that I may have the solution.

But having the technology is no good by itself so I have to get that message out to the people – lots of people so – the natural thing for me to do is to go along to internet advertising companies who do this sort of thing.

Now I am not really into social media so I have to listen to what they say and they tell me that in this internet age people don’t wont long complex messages – it has to be short and simple videos.

If it is a complex issue we have to break it up into multiple videos so they are fed the message in slow and incremental steps.

Now as I say this is not my scene but it seems to me that trying so explain how to save the global food crisis in a few thirty seconds videos is a bit of an ask.

So I think to myself there must be people out there with a greater attention span than a butterfly and I should try and convince them of the importance of this technology and hope that thy can convince enough people for this to take off.

So what is this message that the advertising people are telling me is so difficult to convey.

The message

The message starts by saying that every creature has a control system which regulated how their bodies work.

In a jelly fish that is pretty simple – just keep on puffing around and hope enough food comes your way.

In humans it is much more complicated, in fact so complicated that we don’t fully understand but it is pretty remarkable – for instance our control system regulates our body temperature to a fraction of a degree – pretty amazing considering the different loads and condition we expose our bodies to.

The control system is split between our head brain and our gut brain. Our gut brain has trillions of cells which communicate with each other to work just like a super computer with real intelligence.

One of the important jobs our gut brain does is to control our appetite so we eat the right amount of the right sort of food.

Food has three jobs

The first job is fuel – and like an old fashioned steam engine can run on anything from coal to old chairs and for us it is just energy food – chicken wings and chips is fine as an energy food.

Then there is food to replace our body parts as they age and wear which is a pretty complex job.

And finally there is food to feed our gut brain which is not human and not adapted to eating chicken wings and chips.

Now there are two problems – if we don’t eat the right sort of food with the needed minerals our gut brain makes us hungry so we just keep on eating until it gets the right food – and even worse if we don’t feed our gut brain the gut brain food it needs it gets all cranky and makes us overeat like mad.

We may try real hard to stick to a diet and eat the right amount of food but the reality is that this is pretty well impossible when our gut brain is sending our message – eat more, this is urgent and you are real hungry and are just craving that chicken wing and chips.

If you are in a supermarket and wonder why there are so many fat people and people with a foot missing that is because they are not feeding their gut brain.

The problem is that all this extra food we are eating ends up as the wrong sort of fat in the wrong place.

If it is fat in our muscles it makes us insulin resistant, not good but the body is smart and will just make more insulin.

But if fat gets into the pancreas it cannot make more insulin and we have full blown diabetes, our feet turn black and the doctor says we need to amputate our food to prevent sepsis.

Or it may be fattish stuff in our arteries so we drop dead from a heart attack or may be fattish stuff in our brain which lead to dementia so we stop being who were were and end up one stage above the jelly fish.

If all this sounds pretty awful that is because it is, but the solution is simple – just feed your gut brain which is real easy – just eat plants that have been grown in soil full of beneficial microbes and nutrients – so easy.

It is easy to breed beneficial microbes, given the right conditions they breed like crazy.

The Gbiota technology is simply solving the engineering problem of creating the right conditions so the good microbes breed up and the harmful microbes are out bred.

The good news is that this is a relatively simple process, any one can do it and as the raw material is organic waste it is actually cheaper than buying food from the supermarket.

But in life if something seems too good to be true it usually is, and  I am not in the business of marketing bullshit so I have to tell you the snag.

Microbes may breed like crazy but they have a short life, one hour for a microbe is about the same as a year for us.

So with our modern food system there is not many microbes in the soil anyway (our chemicals kill them off) but any microbes that were there in the first place will have died of long before they reach the supermarket shelves let alone our gut.

The solution is actually easy, grow the microbes yourself – it is easy and virtually anyone can do it.

But here is the snag – this means a change in behaviour and getting people to change their behaviour, even if it means avoiding having a leg chopped off from diabetes, is pretty difficult.

The real snag is that the internet is so full of marketing bullshit that people have just stopped believing anything they see on the internet.

Finding ambassadors

The simple fact is that I don’t have the resources (marketing or money) or skills to conduct such a massive pubic education program.

But what I can do is to seek out people who are actually thinking about the problems of the world and the oncoming crisis and have a longer attention span than a butterfly and convince them of the importance of eating fresh gut brain food.

The sit back and hope that they will have that spirit of pubic duty and go out and tell their friends and contacts – real or virtual. People may have stopped believing what they read on the internet but they will trust a friend.

Colin Austin