Preparation for the future

This blog has been mostly an elaboration of ideas and issues related to my book The Big Bang to Now.  I am now writing a follow-up – The Big Bang to Now to the Future.

I am planning on posting it here as it evolves, but I am finding there is a certain gestation phase which is too disorganized to be  coherent to anyone looking in from the outside.  It’s a little like walking into the middle of a room that is being re-decorated:  at a certain point of upheaval it looks like a hopeless havoc.

And so I am taking a blog break.  I hope to return in the fall to begin to post the book as it evolves.

In the meantime, the website All of Time on Line, will continue to function.

Yes we can! but it’s harder than we thought

I have just found what I think might be the most brilliant book on climate change on the market for people who care about the environment but might not be physicists, climatologists, or politicians.

The book is Sustainable Energy and is available in paperback or to download for free on-line.   There is also a downloadable ten-page synopsis which provides an introduction or summary for those without time to read more.

Why is it so fantastic?  Well, first of all, the author, David MacKay, is a physicist at Cambridge University in England, and he knows what he’s talking about.  But he talks in everyday English, English that non-professionals can understand.  He realizes that the huge numbers involved in so many discussions about alternative energy are so big as to be meaningless to many of us.

His second great contribution is that he is seriously trying to evaluate our options.  He didn’t make up his mind before learning the facts that a green or nuclear or change-of-lifestyle is the solution to our environmental challenge.  

He evaluates whether we can save the planet if we all do little things like turning off our tv stand bys, computer monitors and phone chargers when we’re not using them.  (No, it’s not enough.  It would be rather like trying to bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon.)

He evaluates whether Britain, which has a population of 60 million, or about 1/5th of that of the US, could meet its energy need through its renewable potential wind, wave, and solar resources.   (No, not unless we are willing to cover 5-10% of the country with solar panels, and fill the sea with ten million acres of offshore wind farms.)

He evaluates in a rational comparison whether hybrid or electric cars are more environmentally friendly.  (Electric cars win hands down.)

Overall, McKay’s conclusion is that if we want to ween ourselves from our excessive use of fossil-fuels, we will have to radically reduce our energy consumption as well as find significant alternative energy sources along with ways of reducing our carbon footprints. It is possible.  But it probably won’t be easy.

What is so refreshing about MacKay’s approach is the lack of hot air and unsubstantiated claims.  It calmly makes the nature and size of our choices clear.  It makes rational decisions by all of us and by our politicians possible.

Which, in its own way, is a little terrifying.

Do read the book.

The world’s floating garbage bins

Garbage is a big problem around the world.  Landfills are getting filled, and many are beginning to leak into household water supplies or infiltrate the air of the factories and houses which are built on them.

But the garbage is not just collecting in thousands of landfills.  Swirling in the Pacific Ocean are two giant expanses of perhaps a quarter of a trillion pieces of plastic trash and other debris from our affluent life styles, about 40 pieces of plastic for every living person on the planet.  These patches are mammoth, covering 1.4 million square kilometers of ocean surface.  One is twice as big as the state of Texas.

It’s a huge problem and getting bigger every year.

Is anybody doing anything about it?

Next month Project Kaisel begins with a flotilla of vessels setting out from San Francisco to investigate the potential of cleaning up these disastrous sea-faring garbage tips.  They hope to collect perhaps 40 tonnes of it to recycle as diesel fuel.

But this effort is a mere drop in the bucket.  Plastic bags, packaging, furniture, toys, various utensils and attachments float together.   Disbursing the garbage that’s already afloat could take centuries.

Clearly the flow of debris must also be stopped at source.  Almost 85 million plastic bottles alone are discarded every three minutes in the world. 

Do we as individuals and do our governments have the discipline and courage to prevent more plastic from being dumped into our oceans?

Too hot for comfort

Another government report (the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) thinks there is a serious possibility that the climate could heat up more than 5 degrees Celsius (about 10 degrees Farhenheit) by the end of this century if our greenhouse emissions are not reduced.

The last time the world was that warm was between 35 and 55 million years ago, about ten million years after the dinosaurs became extinct.  It was warm enough for alligators to live close to the North Pole.

What is worrisome is not that humans could not survive in a climate like this, but how many of us would not survive the transition from today’s climate.  With only a 4 degree change, billions of people would be flooded out of the lands where we live now and where our food is grown.  Deserts would expand and water shortages would multiply. 

And so we would inevitably start fighting to the death not over oil but over things as basic as land to live on, water to drink, and food to eat.

Hard as it is, it looks like it would be a lot easier to cut down on our greenhouse emissions and at least slow down climate change, giving us time to adapt to having alligators prowling around northern Canada.

Greater consolation

If you have a pet – dog, cat, bird, rabbit, guinea pig, even a gold fish – you may have already discovered that they do a lot more communicating than you might think was possible without actually being able to talk.

Now people have seen chimpanzees hugging and consoling each other after a fight.  They have shown that it actually reduces the stress that they usually feel after a conflict. 

It seems that chaimpanzees feel empathy for each other – an ability to put themselves in another’s place and have some idea how they feel.  We used to think this was a trait unique to us.  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4710629.ece 

Rock of the ages

The oldest rocks anywhere in the world may have been found on the shore of Hudson Bay in Canada.  They have been dated to be 4.28 billion years old, and must have been among the very first rocks formed on Earth’s crust as our planet spun into existence 4.56 billion years ago.  One of the exciting and even astonishing things about the rocks is that they may contain evidence of some early life, surviving against what we would think are all the odds in the first firey stage of the planet.

The rocks are called by the possibly non-memoral name of Nuvvuagittuq greenstone.  You wouldn’t know just by looking at them just how extraordinary they are.  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/science/26rock.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

Yes we can! but it won’t be easy. Or simple

A comment on the last post offers the view that we are both creators and created, and with that dual role comes our responsibility for our ill Earth.  Yes.  If we don’t take care of it, Earth will not be taken care of.

In the context of what we as individuals can do, I have found some good news and some bad news.

First the good news.  An absolutely essential wedge of the solution to halting environmental destruction lies in individuals using less energy and using it more responsibly.  The encouraging fact is that this can make a huge difference, and take us a long way down the road to success.  So the argument “I can’t really do much in the face of such a vast problem” really must be faced down.  If all the “I’s” in the world decide that somebody else has to solve the problem, it won’t be solved.  All the “I’s” in the world, though can make a mega-difference.

Now for the bad news.  It’s not always easy, it’s not always simple, and quite often, it’s not inexpensive.  It’s not always easy to walk or bike when possible instead of getting in the car.  Or to recycle, to turn off lights and the stand-bys on our electronic devices, to use rainwater caught in our waterbutts, to turn down our thermostats in winter or up in the summer.  Etc.

To make matter worse, it’s not always simple to know what is best.  Eating organic food seems best until you look at the figures and see that millions of people will starve if we all go organic.  Bio-fuels seem like a brilliant idea until you start doing the sums and realize that if it’s not done very carefully, we are faced with a choice between food and fuel.  (It’s one of the things that already is raising the price of food.)  Eating food grown close to home seems more environmentally friendly that importing  from another continent.  But food-miles for food grown in ones home country are often higher than they are on imported foods.  Etc.

And reducing energy use does not always mean it will save money.  It generally takes years to recoup the cost of house insulation or the installation of solar panels.  Wind turbines on individual homes are unlikely to recoup their cost in the lifetime of the family that installs the turbine.  If you install a new energy-efficient boiler and then sell your house, you will probably lose money.   Etc.

Is it still worth doing?  I think it is if it’s worth trying to save the planet. 

No we can’t! The celebration of Pi

Pi is the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter.  Roughly speaking, that’s always about 3.14.  In American-speak, that’s today.  So today (I’m writing this on March 14th) is Pi day.

What I like about pi is that it is an example of the absolutely insolvable.  Pi isn’t exactly 3.14.  It’s 3.14 followed by an infinite stream of numbers.  Literally infinite.  So we can’t ever know exactly what it is.  It’s a prime example of the state of human knowledge.  Probably the inevitable, inescapable state of human knowledge:  we know a lot about it and can always learn more by generating as many more numbers after .14 as we have time and energy.

But we can never know it absolutely.  We can only know it “up to a point.”  There will always be more we can learn, and we will never reach the final Absolute Perfect Truth.

Could we survive the trip to another planet?

There is third obstacle we would have to surmount if humans like us were to colonize another planet even after we’d found it.  That’s the problem of getting there in the first place.  To put this in perspective, it was a mere four centuries ago that Europeans began sailing across the Atlantic to what we now call the Americas.  It was a perilous journey that thousands did not survive.  Many ships were lost at sea, and illness killed many more on the journey.  Nor was survival assured once they hit land.  Even though it was already inhabited by earlier arrivals, many newly founded colonies died out, killed by starvation and disease. 

How much more challenging would be a trek to another planet?  How much more treacherous surviving once the space ship touched down?

First of all the trip itself.  We don’t know how far the nearest habitable planet we might find is, but the best candidate so far is more than 20 light years away.  A light year is the distance light travels in a year which is 186,282 miles a second.  Multiplied by 60 is the distance in a minute, multiplied by 60 again is the distance in an hour;  multiplied by 24 is the distance in a day;  and multiplying that by 365 is the distance in miles light travels in a year.  That’s 5,874,589,152,000 miles.

The fastest astronauts have ever travelled so far is 7 miles a second.  That means it would take more than 26 thousand years for us to travel the distance of a light year.  The good news is that optimistic scientists think we could eventually multiply the speed of human space travel by 100, so that it would take only 260 years to travel the distance of a light year.

The bad news is that the nearest scientists think an inhabitable planet might be is 10 light years away, and the nearest planet scientists have at this point actually found that might be potentially inhabitable is 20 light years away.  So optimistically, we would have to assume that it would take between 2,600 and 5,000 years for us to reach the nearest inhabitable planet.

So the trip itself poses gigantic obstacles.

First, we would need volunteers to go into space where they would spend the rest of their lives, with no expectation that they or any of their offspring for thousands of years would reach land.  Space stations that we set up along the way might help break up the journey, but it would also slow it down.  And space stations themselves as permanent support stops are not yet feasible.

Second, we would have to solve the problems associated with the fact that humans have evolved to live in a world with certain levels of gravity and pressure.  Without it, our bones tend to disintegrate.  So far, we haven’t any idea of how the human body would cope with living from birth to death in an atmosphere without gravity.  The question of whether new human life could be conceived and nurtured successfully in a space ship is an obvious one that would need to be solved.  So would questions of disease, and the inevitable friction that would develop when a small group of people are living permanently in a cramped space – not even able to get out for a walk.

Of greatest concern would be one of genetic diversity.  Would the original humans take along a large gene pool so that the pioneers would not eventually become a small incestuous group highly vulnerable to disease?

Then, of course, we would have to build a space ship that could fuel itself for 5,000 years and provide food for its passengers.

When I think about it, I think it might be easier to save this planet.  Because the problems don’t stop with getting to a new planet.  More thoughts about that in the next post. 

Environmental concerns: emerging world shortages

The question seems so big, and yet scientists, and now all the nations in the United Nations, say the issue of our changing environment is urgent.  Very urgent.

We might be forgiven for thinking that the environmental problem would more or less be solved if we used less fossil fuels or found a clean-energy alternative, and recycled more of our garbage.  But the problem seems to be a little more complex than this.

It is not in dispute that the world’s human population has increased by more than a third in the last twenty years.  We are running out of land to grow enough food to feed everyone, and enough of the clean water we need to meet our daily needs for cooking, washing, and brushing our teeth.  If everyone lived to the standard of the developed world, at current rates we need one third more land than we have.

The good news is that the average farmer increased output by 40%, so we are getting a lot more food per acre than we used to.  But the bad news is that much of our land use is causing erosion, degradation and contamination.  Fertilizers and irrigation are reducing the quantity and quality of the water in our rivers.  We have less usable water, and more deserts and droughts.

The destruction of hedges, forests, and wild land is destroying the diversity that supports a variety of different species on land, and overfishing and water pollution are destroying marine life on a dangerous scale.  The pollution often destroys the smallest forms of marine life, which means that the food source for larger fish and mammals disappears.  So the larger fish and mammals are under threat too, even if they are not fished out.  On land, 25 species of primates are facing the threat of extinction.  Gorillas, lemurs and orang-utans, those wonderful entertaining, ingenious, socializing companions, are at the top of the at-risk list.

Are these problems solvable?  Yes. 

Will we solve them?  It depends.  I think it does depend on us.