This post may be a bit long-winded, but the theme is that of the title: "why neoleodavinci?"
The world has changed inordinately since the beginning of the 20th century. In the year 1900, the president of the United States was William McKinley, and he and William Jennings Bryan argued about issues like the gold standard, the Spanish-American War, and the interests of farmers versus the interests of city dwellers. In other news, the British labour party was founded. Since then, the arguably most successful labour party prime ministers have been Tony Blair and Clement Attlee, who were prime minister around the 1990s and 1940s respectively. I would pay attention to the Far East (China, Japan, and others), as well as the Near East (The Ottoman Empire, etc.) and South America, but it would make this more loquacious and detract from the point.
A century later, the president of the United States was George Walker Bush, and he debated Al Gore on issues of abortion, campaign finance, and use of the military. Farmers had become a tiny segment of the population, though urban voters still favored one party while rural favored the other. Tony Blair headed the UK's ruling labour party, and has since been named one of the UK's best prime ministers (source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/7923790/Gordon-Brown-third-worst-PM-since-1945-poll-of-historians-finds.html). In other news, the microprocessor, personal computer, and internet had been invented, and the U.S. had sent manned missions to the moon. Nuclear weapons had been created (mostly to the credit of John Robert Oppenheimer), proliferated, and used twice to end a World War which killed around 60 million people. WWII was, incidentally, one of the first wars where intended casualties exceeded deaths due to disease. Let's give a morbid "hooray" for medicine. The world's population exploded from approximately 1,600,000,000 to 6,100,000,000 people. For those of you arguing "the numbers didn't change much" are foolishly mistaken. Each zero represents an order of ten times the people. The increase is almost 300%.
You may now be asking "why did this guy spit a huge history lesson at me?". Well, the world's changed exponentially more than it ever did in a single century before. Those who lived and died include Albert Einstein, Adolt Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, Marie Curie, Bill Gates, Mao Zedong, and many, many more. I acknowledge my Western bias.
Yet have our outlooks changed? Did human genes change more in the past hundred years than in an average century? We face larger problems than ever, as a species. Yet we are largely the same.
So...why neoleodavinci? Well, Leonardo Da Vinci was a polymath and imagined flying machines (which we now have), submarines (which we now have), the Mona Lisa, and many other marvels. He reinvented his world, or at least paved the way for other inventors in the near and far future.
I hope to do the same. Yes, I know that's incredibly modest.
This world needs reinventing.
It needs thought to shift. Please keep reading this blog, and let me know if there are any cool ideas you have about how to rethink the world's problems.
2024 edit: Let's jump to a solution first:
Black Swan resistant living, isolated from global supply chains and dependence, like the Kibbutzes in Israel, Amish and Mennonites in the USA, and the monks of Tibet. Read Taleb, particularly "The Black Swan", (but the others in his Incerto have been highly lauded as well). For more detail. I'm sure the post-apocalyptic survival guides and novels would also be helpful. I am less familiar with the literature there, but we should start with residual grain stores, printed and/or stone carved tablets with manufacturing instructions, solar power tractors and ethanol / other similar generators, perhaps even horses, and backups of Wikipedia and as many in depth technical manuals as possible.
A modest list of problems to tackle, in approximate order of importance:
Global warming
World peace. (Nuclear war being the issue to resolve)
An AI-led Armageddon
Global access to clean water, healthy food,
Feeding an ever-growing population
Public education (with over 338,000,000 U.S. citizens and 8,187,390,000 worldwide)
Spreading understanding of personal finance, AI, computers and computer science to the masses, rich and poor
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