It’s going to be April soon. More specifically April 1st.
There will never be a better time. We’re all down here. They’re all up there. Down here with us is the Coronavirus!
Oh come on! You have to see the practical joke potential in that for God’s sake!
Hang on. Rewind a bit. Just make sure we are all on the same page. The ISS is a big spaceship (International Space Station), which, at 357 feet is about the size of an American football pitch. It’s big, always occupied and orbits the earth 16 times a day. There are usually 3-6 astronauts there at any given time, floating about, doing all sorts of experiments and such, but it has been continually inhabited for the last 20 years. In total, 239 people have lived there. There’s a ton of other facts and figures about the ISS here but you get the point. Big spaceship, people on board, going round and round and totally away from the ole Coronavirus.
As long as we can control the uplinks to the ISS, we can tell them anything and they won’t know any different. Our current predicament presents an opportunity to execute the best prank since Orson Welles told us the Martians were coming!
There’s going to be a bit of co-ordination needed to pull it off mind, but there’s still time if we all dig in and put our minds to it.
What we should do (you’re gonna love this),….on April Fools Day (Larf? I nearly Coronavirused meself)…..just before the Astronauts wake up (can’t believe I came up with this)…..wait for it…………iiiss…….
WE SWITCH OFF ALL THE LIGHTS ON THE PLANET, GO SILENT AND MAKE ‘EM BELIEVE WE ARE ALL DEAD AND THEY ARE THE LAST HUMANS ALIVE!!!!!!
They’d be like
YAWN….”Hey Jess what time is it?”
“Hmmm? Mornin’ Andy. I dunno, I was asleep until you woke me, you dork”
“Hey Ollie, What time is it man?”
“Do I Lyook lyike a clyock you cryazy Amyericyan? Ayctyually I knyow thye tyime byecyause I am effyicyient Rysussyian Cyosmyonyaut….iyt’s Lyunchtyime”
“Ollie that can’t be right we always get woken up at breakfast time”
“Hold up Jess, he must’ve got that wrong. Need to get yourself an American watch Ollie!”
“Andy he’s right! We’ve missed breakfast – look at my superior American watch…IT IS LUNCHTIME!”
“WHAT? What in the name of snap, crackle and pop is going on down there in Mission Control”
“Houston? This is ISS. Come in please”
“Houston?”
“I’m not getting any response Jess”
“Thyat’s byecyause you hyave infyeryior American ryadyio eqyipmyent…lyet mye try on nyew myodyern Ryussyian Ryadyio Syystyem”
“Upravleniye poletom? Eto Olli, ya propustil zavtrak iz-za etikh imperialisticheskikh amerikantsev, zakhodite?”
“Privet, upravleniye missiyey?”
“I thyink thyey myust hyave gyone tyo lyunch. We hyave myany byeef styeaks in Myothyer Ryussyia”
Then, just when they are trying to figure out just what in tarnation and the heck is happening, we send the “Recorded Message”
ALIEN VESSEL, ALIEN VESSEL, COME NO CLOSER
This is a warning message from the ex-inhabitants (Wo/mankind or Huwo/manity) of the third planet (we called it Earth), of the star system with 8 (maybe 9?) orbiting worlds, to all Alien vessels (in the sense of extra-terrestrial, not immigrant) approaching Earth.
ATTEMPT NO LANDING ON THIS PLANET!
Our civilisation was attacked and annihilated by a Global virus called the Coronavirus. This virus attacks the respiratory system and unless you wash your hands, in the country we call the UK, you will die (cluster of little islands to the right of the big ocean, that looks like a squirrel eating a big nut. The nut is called Ireland. Note, you can wash your hands and survive in the North East of the nut but NOT, I say again, NOT, the South East, South, South West or West of the Nut.
ATTEMPT NO LANDING AND PLEASE MARK THIS PLANET WITH A SOPHISTICATED BIO-HAZARD BEACON (like in that awful movie After Earth) TO WARD OFF OTHER INTERSTELLAR VISITORS.
Live long and prosper.
And the ISS be like….
Nothing flusters Jess, but Andy and Ollie are crappin’ it. Especially Ollie who is apyoplyectyic!
“THyIS CyAN NyOT ByE HyAPPyENyING, THyEY CyOULDN’T DyROP US A NyOTE OR SyOMETHyING?”
We leave ’em stewing for about twelve hours with the message repeating over and over and over and over and over. This is plenty of time to stew a Russian, but you really must stir him every hour and a half if you want the meat to be tender.
We leave them twelve hours because no lights anywhere is going to be a bit inconvenient for us down here. Then, after twelve hours, all of a sudden, we turn on ALL the lights in the world at once, and we get the Bedouin nomadic tribes of the Sahara to make a huge sign with their campfires that spells out…
and the ISS be like
“PHEW!”
“But that was a good one eh Andy?
Andy?
Oi, Ollie where’s your bloody Soyuz gone?
Ollie?
ANDY?? OLLIE?? Where TF ARE YOU? IS THIS A PRANK?
She’s crappin’ it now.
See? We can only do this specific prank now because of the circumstances we find ourselves in, so shouldn’t we carpe diem the shit out of it?
A bit cruel you say. A bit inappropriate given the circumstances, you wonder. You feel I may have let my imagination get the best of me.
In my defence, there’s nothing to do because we are all locked in, and I’M BORED!
It does make you think though, doesn’t it?
I mean, I wonder what other specific things one might be able to do now, in these new circumstances, that we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do before?
How often do you speak to your family? Especially if they live far away? I know I don’t do it very often, yet there is absolutely nothing to stop me. I have the time, and I am both a witty and interesting conversationalist. Who wouldn’t be delighted to hear from me? Who knows how much joy and light I might bring into their sad and mediocre lives!
Dunno why he keeps waking me up at 4 am…what the hell is wrong with him?
“Hey Google. Set reminder to call my sisters at 4 am every day”
I’m up with Bob at that time anyway so I’m sure they won’t mind.
Wasn’t it Reagan that said
“…. I couldn’t help but say to him [Gorbachev] , just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species, from another planet, outside in the universe. We’d forget all the little local differences that we have between our countries, and we would find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this Earth together. Well, I don’t suppose we can wait for some alien race to come down and threaten us, but I think that between us we can bring about that realization.”
Prophetic words. Nobody said the Aliens needed to be big, ugly, drooling, energy weapon totin’ human hunters. Turns out our Alien is a tiny little thing with pretty flowers sticking out like Shrek-ears, but look at how it’s affecting us. Our whole society is changing in a matter of days or a few short weeks. We have been confined to our homes and are unable to walk the streets without drones carrying megaphones telling us to get back indoors. Not here in the UK yet obviously, because we are made of sterner stuff and are impenetrable to the virus, but everywhere else.
Tangentially, the whole drone thing is just amazing out-of-the box lateral thinking and technology application. I cant wait to see ’em buzzing down our streets here in the UK blaring out….
“If you wouldn’t mind terribly returning to your home, it’s nearly tea time after all”
The most striking aspect of this crisis though is that we are all witnessing some very unusual human behaviours. On the one hand, you have the Moron Brigade hoovering up store loads of paper products, whilst on the other, we have whole streets of Italians standing on apartment balconies singing Bitch better have my money by Rihanna. This latter is just one example of how people are coming together, as confined, physical or online communities, to help practically or just to make people feel a bit better about what is going on.
People on Facebook and Twitter are circulating little leaflets to push through the doors of elderly or vulnerable people, offering help and support. Shop windows advertise local community support groups that are being set up to provide people in isolation with the aid they need.
Surely this is what Reagan was talking about. In our normal virus-free lives, altruism begins at home and rarely makes it out of the front door. We might donate a few quid to our favourite well-digging, child-caring, orphan-adopting charity every month, but bottom line? If you’re not a blood descendant, then you’re basically on your own.
(Sir) Bob Geldoff
Of course there are exceptions. That Irish chap did ever so well with Do they know it’s Christmas, Feed the Wooorld and Live-Aid. Then there’s Comic Relief that does a sterling job of raising money for good causes every year.
Over the past few years though we have increasingly seen less and less societal cohesion and more and more division. Urbanisation, Globalism, populist politics and careless thinking have all contributed to a society that more and more people are finding ruthless and unfulfilling.
Here’s the thing. I believe that the more we behave as though we live in a village the more we see the best of humanity.
I grew up in a village in the North of England. We left the doors open. People would just walk in and make themselves a brew. Simon, the milkman would come swooping around the corner on his bike, like a knight in shining armour, to defend the young kids on the street from any local bullies. We did visit ‘Lizbeth at the end of the road when she got dementia, and we sat with her as she asked “What time is it?” for the hundredth time in an hour. We all knew each other’s business and it was a good thing because it meant we were not only nosy enough but cared enough, to find out all about you before we went spreading rumours about you.
I lived in London for 23 years and barely knew who my next-door neighbour was.
So when I see village behaviours coming to the fore, when I see people giving a damn about not just their own family but everyone else’s, I become hopeful. How weird is it that all it takes is a little germ, admittedly capable of killing us, for us to change completely and be concerned for everyone.
I suppose the real question is, can we capture that and keep it safe? can we keep it up after we have expunged the little buggers? We live in interesting times. I’m hopeful.
Oh and Jess, Andy and Ollie. Don’t worry, we wouldn’t do that to you. After all, you’re the only ones who can see us all from up there.
Wake, Wake Halt the dream that brought a smile Come stand with me on the shore a while And watch the breakers, break and break Be pressed down by low, pitch brume
Wait, please Wait Stand close, be still Face be stung by brine and chill And Heaven, the hue of Cornish slate Awaits the knock of the skipper's mate
Cry, Cry That's all that's left Heave your breast and be bereft And yawl like the blow, down deep, down low Down to the locker 'neath the brackish spume
I’ve always loved the sea. Just the sight of the sea calms me. Especially a stormy sea where the grey of the sky and the sea blend together at the horizon. There is something about being near, or on, the sea that makes me feel both close to death and most alive at the same time.
I learned to swim in the seas of a Scottish bay, surrounded by high hills. So cold at first then, gradually, warmer than the air. Squatting down beneath the surface was like pulling the duvet over my head on a cold morning. Sometimes the sea there was flat, “like a mill pond” my Dad would say, but I remember it best when the white crested waves marched in triplets and threw themselves, grumpily, onto the shore.
There’s a headland on the left side of the bay that pokes out into the Irish Sea. To get to it, you need to scramble over the slippery ledges along the bay’s cliffs. The drop from the ledges was low enough to overcome any fear of falling, but high enough to make you lean into the cliff face as you traversed them. I would go there often when the clouds darkened and the tide was fully up. Wrapped in woolly clothes, boots and hooded coat, with the wind howling around me, I would sit in an armchair-shaped rock crevice at the promontory’s furthest point, watching and listening, until the tide turned and the waves retreated.
Once, when I was little, maybe 8 or 9, we all went to Ireland on holiday and crossed over the Irish Sea on a ferry. The waves were so big, that the ferry had to climb one side before pitching over and surfing down the other to bury her bow in the sea below. The waves broke over the ship whipping a spray across the decks that truly hurt if they hit you in the face.
I had a scratch on my face from some scrappy sporting incident, or it may have been the sharp edge of Bach’s cello concerto when I flipped it to side 2, either way it stung like buggery when the salt water made contact. My Dad said it would heal faster.
Everyone on the ship seemed to be sick as dogs, and everywhere was awash with the ill advised sausage/fish/pie/gammon and chips they had consumed in the calmer waters of Liverpool Bay. My Dad, an old navy hand, stood on the deck of the ship, steady as a steady thing, and said:
“You think this is bad, you should try Biscay!“
I didn’t feel sick. I felt excited. In touch. The lurching movements of the tortured vessel, the howl of the wind and the ever present briny spray, combined to make me feel more alive, and more tuned to my senses, than I ever had before. At the same time I had never felt so unsafe or so vulnerable. I stood by my Dad watchin’ the waves roll in, then I watched them roll away again (there’s a song in there somewhere).
The ship swayed and tipped beneath my Dad’s feet like a bucking bronco but he looked as still and as rooted as Nelson’s Column. He looked to the horizon and I imagined that he was remembering his Navy days. The horizon held his gaze for a long time though. Maybe he was feeling what I was feeling. I wanted to be just like him, and I told him I was going to join the Navy and buy him a Rolls Royce with my first weeks wages.
One more story. Just one I promise.
My sister Sharon, was very outdoorsy. She did all of her Duke of Edinburgh awards and knew her stuff when it came to being out there in the elements. Every now and again, when I went to stay with her in Scotland, she would offer to take me for a walk up one of the mountains nearby. These are not the granite giants that you get further up North in Scotland. These are high hills surrounded by mirror lochs and scenery that will make you cry.
On one such occasion, I was up for Christmas and Sharon suggested we tackle Cairnsmore (711 meters). We got properly geared up because whilst the weather was fine at the moment, it could turn pretty awful quickly. We set off and drove to the foot of the Munroe and parked the car.
Sharon had the maps and compass and was our navigator. Our destination was the Cairn at the summit (small stack of rocks that marks the summit). The skies were grey but we could see the summit from where we parked, so we began our ascent.
Everything was going great and in a couple of hours we were about half way up. Then everything changed very quickly. The snow came in all at once, with a fierce wind that drove the snow into our faces as we walked. In minutes, we were in the middle of a snow storm or “white-out”. We stopped and Sharon turned to me and over the roar of the wind shouted:
“I think this is pretty bad and it’s going to get worse. What do you want to do? We can turn back, but we have the right gear and I can get us to the top, so if you want to, we can push on”
I was clueless to be honest, but trusted Sharon and her abilities, and if she said she could get us to the top I believed her. In any case, I was getting that feeling again. I wanted to push on. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted it to get worse. We weren’t in control and I didn’t want to be.
We could see nothing beyond 5 meters in any direction. I told Sharon I wanted to go up. She nodded, took out her compass and map, took a bearing and pointed.
“Walk on in that direction 10 feet”
She instructed. I did so and looked back. I could just see Sharon. She walked up to me and pointed again.
“Walk on in that direction 10 feet”
We continued our upward progress like this for hours. It was exhausting. Then, as I walked wearily forward again, a grey shape emerged from the blizzard just feet in front of me. It was the summit cairn! I turned to Sharon grinning. She walked up to me.
“Here we are then”
Cartoon: Malcolm Evans/TDB
She summed up. The understatement was breathtaking. I don’t think I had ever been so impressed, nor have I since. To navigate with such accuracy and calm in these conditions was insane. That girl should have been in the SAS but she has some mamby-pamby ideas about not garrotting foreign people in the dark of night.
The snowstorm was getting worse. Snow now lay thick on the ground, and was piling up in drifts around us. Sharon pointed to a shallow hollow some 20 meters down from the summit.
“We need to take shelter John. We should be out of the wind down there”
We hunkered down with our heads below the wall of the hollow. We were at once protected from the storm. It raged all around us but the wind and snow blew over our heads like a roaring icy river. If I had reached up, I could have dipped my hand in it. The calm in the hollow was in stark contrast to the elemental chaos just a few feet away. We sat there quietly for a moment, cozy, and watched and listened. It was a deeply spiritual moment and I felt very connected to Sharon. I felt intensely alive but cowered before the immense force of nature. As I looked up, for just a second, I could swear I saw the face of God in the storm.
Since then, there have been other times in my life where I have felt the same way. On each occasion, I had a spiritual connection to my surroundings and an enhanced sense of vitality that was always accompanied by a heightened sense of danger or vulnerability. On these occasions, I was happy. I came away from these events feeling enriched, becalmed and spiritually refreshed. Not in a religious way. I am not fortunate enough to be a person of faith. I am a spiritual person though, and I feel that most at these unordinary moments in my life.
I’m not a thrill seeker or an adrenalin junky either. For example I can see no point whatsoever in throwing oneself out of a perfectly good aeroplane, or off a bridge or a cliff. All that “Whoo Hooing” and “Yeahing” at the end would drive me bloody nutzo as well. I’m conditioned to not like feeling like I’m not in control.
I’ve listened to the clerics, who provide a clearly laid out roadmap, that tells me if I just follow these few simple rules, not only will I be in control of my life, I’ll be a good person, and so my afterlife will be assuredly a happy one. I’ve read the management books. I’ve listened to the corporate witch doctors who’ve told me that things are causal or deterministic. Apparently, I just need to make the right choices and decisions, based on the right information at the right time, and not only will I be able to control my universe but I will be able to predict it too. Can’t say fairer than that can you?
It’s so not true though. None of it. For me anyway. That little voice at the back of my mind that just keeps saying “Hmmm, really?”. I’m not saying the clerics and the gurus are all lying to me. That’d be a bit conspiracy theoryish wouldn’t it? I believe they truly believe what they are saying and actually so do the vast majority of the people on the planet. But all the preaching and all of the gurus have just led me to a place of doubt. Why did so many people feel so confident that they could control their time here, and the events that effect their lives, when I felt so not in control? More importantly, why was it that the more I accepted that everything was random, and that I actually controlled nothing, the happier I seemed to be? In fact, when things are at their most random, most chaotic or most desperate, I feel like there lies meaning. What’s that all about?
“Below 40o South there is no Law. Below 50o South there is no God”
Sailors who have been there will tell you not to go to the Southern Ocean in winter. They say it’s worse than Danté’s Inferno. Dark angry skies and endless waves, like granite behemoths, roll in from all directions, capsizing boats and rolling them over and over like socks in a tumble dryer. Howling winds that scream through the rigging and tear any foolish sail. Broken masts, broken steering gear and snapped rigging. Nothing dry. Everything wet. Clothes, sleeping bags, socks, floors and bedding. Biting and numbing cold. Icebergs. Chaos. Random. Desperate. Above all desperate. A sense that this might be where life’s journey ends.
Some time ago, I told an Australian colleague of mine, who had done the Round the World Clipper race, and who had sailed the Southern Ocean, that I would love to sail the Southern Ocean in winter. He just looked at me like I was stupid.
“You don’t know what you are asking for mate. Even the best sailors don’t go there in winter and you’ve never sailed a bloody day in your life. You’d be about as useful as tits on a bull!”
Such poets the Aussies.
Of course he’s right. I have no place in the Southern Ocean in winter. Apparently nobody did. If I did go, I would have to go with a world class sailor and so would, in effect, be selfishly putting his or her life at risk too. If I really wanted to go though, shouldn’t I have done something about it by now?
Well, yes. I should have. The fact that I haven’t just means that I lack the cojones to go down there myself. But you should go. When you come back you can tell me all about it. I’m betting it will be a life changing experience for you. I mean, if you come back right? You probably won’t. You could send me an email from onboard, at the height of the storm, just before you snuff it.
I envy people of Faith. They look out a window, see a tree and say “See? The hand of God”. They see him/her everywhere and in everything. They see order where I see chaos and in that order they witness God. I’ve looked where they look and I haven’t found him/her there, but I remember that moment, in the chaos of the storm, on the summit of Cairnsmore.
Who knows what is down there in the Southern Ocean. They say there’s no God below 50o South, but maybe they’re wrong. Maybe down there in the dark, and the driving rain and the howling wind and the mountainous seas, down in the randomness of the storm, maybe that’s where God really lives. Maybe there I would be able to glimpse his face again. Maybe I’d hear his voice.
“We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon…We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”
John F Kennedy – Sept 12, 1962 Rice Stadium, Houston, Texas
It’s all about Mass Defect. Remember that. We’re going to need that later in this one. Mass Defect and Einstein. That’s the magic in this article.
When I was a child, my Dad would wake me in the middle of the night and take me out into the garden. On those cool, dark evenings he would say, “Look at the stars“, and I would look up at the heavens rubbing bleary eyes. It wasn’t random. He would wait for those nights where the sky was cloudless, at it’s darkest and when the Milky Way was laid out in all her majesty. When I moved to the city, I discovered that you can’t really see the stars. There’s too much light. But up North, where we lived, and where everything is better (it just is, so get over it), it seemed like you could see them all. Great clouds of stars that make up our galaxy.
Shouldn’t we rename Sirius Bob?
My Dad was in the Royal Navy during WW2. He was a navigator. He had been trained to navigate by the stars, so he knew their names and the names of the constellations, and he would try to teach them to me. Cassiopeia, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor with Polaris, the North star, hanging off its tail. The Dog Star, Sirius, shining brightest on the sniffing nose of Canis Major. So many, but he seemed to know them all.
But he wouldn’t just show me the cosmos, he would tell me all about it too. I was 7 or 8, so a lot of what he said I really struggled to get my head around. He told me that the universe was 14Bn years old, and that there were more stars in the sky than there were grains of sand, on all the beaches, in all the world. He told me that when we looked at a star, we were looking back in time. The star was so far away that the light from it could take thousands, or millions, or even billions of years to reach our eye. When the light hits our eye, we are seeing the star the way it was thousands, or millions, or billions of years ago. It might not even be there anymore.
But he shared a lot more.
He told me our nearest neighbouring star system Alpha Centauri was about 4 light years away so it would take us 4 years travelling at the speed of light which was 186,000 miles per second to get there but it was impossible for anything with mass to travel at the speed of light because when you go faster your mass increases and so you need more energy to go even faster and when you go faster your mass increases and then you need more energy to go faster and by the time you get close to the speed of light you would have close to infinite mass and so it would take all the energy in the universe to go the speed of light and that didn’t make any sense did it and what was funny (lol) was that as you went faster time went slower than if you are just standing still and that’s nuts but for someone travelling to Alpha Centauri at the speed of light which was impossible because of the whole mass-energy thing it would only feel like 2 weeks there and two weeks back but here on earth 8 years would have passed for everyone and that was called time dilation and ooh gravity isn’t a force like people say it is “that’s the force of gravity that is” it’s actually the curvature of spacetime and spacetime curves around anything that has mass from a particle to a star or a black hole just like a bowling ball would bend the fabric of a trampoline if you put the ball in the middle of the trampoline but in all directions and that everything that has mass creates a curvature in spacetime and things that have less mass and that get close enough just fall into the gravity well of the thing with more mass and it looks like it’s being pulled but actually its just falling and we call that gravity and so that’s freaky isn’t it?
Can I go back to bed now please Daddy?
He also told me that our Sun was just another a star, and honestly I was surprised but at the same time, knew it had to be true. So all those pin pricks of light, scattered across the velvet black of night, were just the same as our Sun? Yes. Give or take. But all of them, every single one of the 1 billion trillion stars in the universe, worked exactly the same way, and the way they worked was called Fusion, and gravity makes fusion happen in a star.
For years, that was where I left it. That was the sum total of my knowledge of Fusion. A word and process that carried no meaning or understanding, just something I associated with how the Sun produced its energy without actually knowing how. At the risk of lumping everyone into the same dumb-shit basket of ignorance as myself, I would argue that pretty much everyone else has done the same.
“But why do you keep talking about Fusion Creasy? Why? Why?”
Fair question, and one which deserves an answer before we all take a deeper dive into how Fusion works. Yes, we are going to do a deeper dive, so ping the bell, and get off right here, if you don’t have the stones to follow me down this particular black hole.
And that’s like, a really good analogy? Because like, while I was writing this? It like, felt like there was no way out?
Data from Vaclav Smil (2010).
In the last 51 years, our energy consumption has spiked. Big Time. Our consumption has increased relative to population growth. Unsurprisingly, given that the vast bulk of our energy has been created by burning Coal, Oil and Natural Gas, CO2 emissions have also grown steeply, and now look what we’ve done. We’ve only gone and started the whole climate change thingy, or loike, the sixth extinction event or sommat!
There is some good news though. According to a report by McKinsey “Global Energy Perspective 2019“, energy demand will slow down and plateau around 2030, albeit Africa and India’s energy demand will double by 2050 in line with their predicted population growth and industrialisation. In addition, the mix of supply will shift in favour of renewables, so that by 2035, renewables will make up about 50% of the mix.
More good news! The CO2 emmissions are forecast to fall by up to 20% by 2050! Unfortunately, even with McKinsey’s lower energy demand forecast, which I’m not really bought into, a better outlook for the uptake of renewables and lower CO2 emmissions, we will still be on a pathway for a greater than 2 degree oC increase in global temperatures by 2050.
Thufferin’ Thuccotash, doeth’nt ithe melt at that temperature?
The scientists are telling us that we are out of time, and whilst ordinarily I might take that with a pinch of salt and file that particular nugget in the drawer marked “For my kids to solve”, the other day I got a letter from my water supply company calmly telling me how to preserve water now because climate change meant that we should expect hotter and hotter summers and so less and less water. Not in a few years time mind, right now.
I’M MELTING!
Antarctica has just experienced its highest temperature on record at 18.3 oC . The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, a glacier the size of Great Britain, is currently melting much faster than expected and will, on its own, produce enough melt water to raise global sea levels by half a meter. If the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet melts completely sea levels will rise by 3.2 meters. I don’t need to tell you how much it will rise if all the ice melts in Antarctica. Ok I do. It’s 61 meters!
That last scenario is a bit out there in terms of probability given the average temperature of -37 oC , but even with the 3.2 meter scenario you can wave goodbye to all those holidays in the Maldives readers. Oh, you haven’t been? Seriously, you should go. It’s amazing. Go soon, because they will be beneath the azure waters of the Indian Ocean in a few years. I would recommend the W or Conrad at Rangali, as the reefs and everything there are just spectacular.
Whilst losing the Maldives is clearly a worry, the likely displacement of 3bn other people, who have foolishly chosen to live at the seaside around the world, might just be more worrying. They aren’t going to give up the ghost and just be washed away in the flood are they? No these 3bn folks will have a bit of warning the flood is coming, and they’ll buy boats, or make a great Ark! They’ll think they can stop the flood! Miami is doing a pretty good impersonation of King Canut by spending a fortune on shoring up its sea defences, but one can’t help feeling that the ‘gators are going to be kickin’ it in the clubs of Miami soon. So where will all these people go once the oceans, unstoppably advancing, wash through the streets of New York, London, Miami and Los Angeles? Paris and Rome would have really worked well here instead of Miami and Los Angeles, but they’re not coastal.
WORK WITH ME CITIES! WORK WITH ME!
All these people are going to move inland to where we, the sensible folk, are. Prices will increase, as everything from housing to food will become less available. What do we do when we are competing for resources? Well, those of us with big guns go and kick the bejesus out of the people with little guns, and then we take all their shit.
On top of all this, our population is set to keep growing (“Shouldn’t We Weaponise Babies“). Extreme population is the central pillar of climate change. It is the driving force behind higher resource consumption. All the resources we consume require energy to produce or provide. So despite what McKinsey say, the predicted growth in population to ~10bn by 2050 WILL net-increase demand for energy. However, I agree that as we increasingly move to renewables, the CO2 emissions will fall, but at what rate and what’s our plan to scrub existing CO2 from the atmosphere?
If we wanted to stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, to radically and rapidly reduce CO2 emissions, we could. It would mean a return to the stone age, but we could do it. Not really practical though is it? We just can’t build enough efficient renewable supply, to quickly replace the energy provided by fossil fuels though. Even if we could, I don’t think we should be tacking around ocean based wind farms just to get a look at the horizon. Whatever we do has to be practical and allow us to live in a world without these scars.
We could increase our use of Fission based Nuclear power massively, but we have all heard about the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. The idea of our power stations melting through the centre of the earth whilst dosing us, and our food supply, with high levels of deadly radiation, understandably, frightens us. Going down this route also gives us a multi-millennial, and dangerous, waste problem that nobody wants. But, a lot of energy providers want to go there because it is a comparatively clean, and reasonably long term, solution to fossil fuels. I know because I did work for some of the big ones, and saw the forward plans that include more Fission.
Also, once we choose to go down a particular path, we have a tendency to stay on that path until it’s all used up. I give you fracking. I think the same genius that came up with the US constitution and the electoral college system came up with fracking. Having sucked up all the easy oil and gas, what do we do? We drill down beneath the water table and go breaking up the shale to release the hidden, and hard-to-get, oil and gas. All the while your corporate douche at the top is saying “It’s impossible for the gas to penetrate the water table”, whilst drinking a glass of on-fire-water from the local tap. A few earthquakes in Preston and the same douche is still fighting for the right to keep doing it.
We will go to insane lengths to stay on the fossil fuel path. If we push down the more fission route, it’s going to take a long, long time to “use up”, and while we are using it up we will be burying a lot of waste and living with the inherent risk of fission power station accidents. For these reasons, and because the more fission we do the less reason we have to spend all the money on fusion, I vote that we spend not another penny on fission power plants, and decommission the one’s that are still working.
What about Hydrogen though Creasy?
OK, fair point. On the face of it, Hydrogen looks hopeful. It’s clean, abundant and relatively safe, and merits more investment for certain applications. I would say transport in particular, as hydrogen fueled cars can be refueled in the same time it takes to fuel a petrol driven car, which I still think is a major barrier for mass take-up of pure electric vehicles. However, producing high volumes of hydrogen from it’s primary source on earth, water, is both expensive and energy inefficient (i.e. use almost as much energy to produce as you get from the hydrogen). Further, burning this kind of hydrogen, in large quantities, in power stations, to make electricity doesn’t make any sense, when we could fuse tiny quantities of hydrogen isotopes and get way more energy.
It’s time to rapidly move to a new, viable, clean, safe, economic and globally abundant fuel source that completely replaces fossil fuels and meets our future primary energy needs.
Only one solution ticks all of these boxes and it’s Fusion. So let’s make it’s acquaintance and then together, make an informed decision, to go spend allthe money on it.
I want you to stay with me now. I promise you, you will feel better once we have been through this experience together, and it will bring us closer together in the “Shouldn’t We” family.
Now obviously, I’ve know all about Fusion for years. Way before I ever came to write this post. Some might call me an expert in the subject, but I couldn’t possibly comment. It’s a gift really.
I certainly didn’t research the subject to death, just in case any reader of this blog (and it probably will be singular), asked me a question about the subject and showed me up for a complete and utter charlatan of the worst order. Nope. Known all about it for yonks.
Do you remember right at the start I said it was all about Mass Defect and Einstein?
Pop quiz.
Hands up everyone who has heard of E=mc2? Ok, getting a few hands out there. Pretty much everyone I see. No, I see one way in the back there. Erm dude? Yes you. Checked shirt, tooth and the red MAGA baseball cap, 3rd row from the back? Might want to go find another blog. This one is just going to piss you off.
Hands up everyone who has heard of Mass Defect? 1….2….Really? Nobody? It’s no wonder we are where we are.
Anybody know what E=mc2 means? Know why it has any relationship to Mass Defect? So that’d be just me then. Shame on you. Shame on all of you. This is just so basic! I can’t believe you don’t all remember this from your physics lessons like me. Your poor Mum’s and Dad’s who worked so hard to give you a good education. I don’t know, I really don’t.
Energy = mass * the speed of light squared. Bet most of you knew that. But what is this formula telling us and what mass is it referring to? Well the answer to the second question is, any mass. Plug in any quantum of mass, multiply it by the speed of light squared and you will derive the energy equivalence of that mass. In answer to the first question, Einstein’s formula is telling us that mass and energy are interchangeable. Equivalent. The same thing.
Why is this useful when thinking about nuclear energy? Because of Mass Defect. I am going to use Mass Defect + E=mc2 to hopefully explain why so much energy is generated by a Fusion event. From that explanation, you should be able to intuitively understand why fusion produces 4 times the energy of fission.
I said before that the Sun and all the stars are powered by fusion and that is true. the Sun is just a big ball of gases made up of Hydrogen (70%) and Helium (28%). Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen make up 1.5%, and the rest is small amounts of neon, iron, silicon, magnesium and sulfur. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe, which makes sense when you think how many stars there are.
Because the Sun is such a big ball of elements, the mass of the star is also very big. It’s mass is the sum of the masses of all the Hydrogen (H) and Helium (He) and all the other bits and bobs (Tee hee – I wrote boobs first), which turns out to be 1.989 × 1030 kg. #v.effing.big
With this kind of mass, you can imagine the size of the dent the sun makes in spacetime. It’s humongous! It’s such a big dent that the gravity well created is so deep that all of the hydrogen and helium and whatnot, all fall in towards the centre of the sun. As they fall in, they all get squashed up together like commuters on the Northern Line at rush hour. There is so much downward pressure (gravity) that as they get squashed together, they speed, or heat, up. Wow, just like commuters on the Northern Line at rush hour, but they heat up a lot more than commuters. In fact they heat up to about 15 million degrees oC, at which point all of that gas becomes a superheated plasma. A plasma is just another form of matter like liquid, solid and gas.
Note that the nucleus of an atom is positively charged. If it comes close to another nucleus, it’s natural reaction is to repel the other nucleus just like when you hold the two positively charged ends of a magnet to each other, they push each other away. It will do the same if you hold the two negative ends to each other also. This is called Coulombs law and, fun fact, led to the dating saying ,”opposites attract”.
Fusion Schematic
When Hydrogen gas becomes a plasma, the Hydrogen atoms are moving at very high speeds. If one hydrogen atom collides with another hydrogen atom, the Coulomb force is overwhelmed and the Strong Nuclear Force takes over and pulls the two nuclei of the atoms together; Fusion. The product of this Fusion is Helium (He) plus 1 neutron and a whole bunch of energy. #so.much.effing.energy, that it’ll cook a Russian in Dubai in about 1hr 20mins (depending on the size of the Russian), but you should turn and baste the Russian every 20 minutes if you want the meat to be tender.
передай мне масло моя любовь (Pyass me thye byutter my lyove)
Well that’s great! We just need to recreate the conditions on the sun and we’re cooking with plasma!
Well yes, that’s right actually, but making plasma here on earth is quite hard. For a start, we don’t have the Mass of the sun to help us create the kind of gravitational pressure needed to squash the Hydrogen atoms together. However, we can actually heat hydrogen gas up to 15 million degrees oC no problem, but without the gravitational pressure we won’t get a plasma.
To get a plasma here, without that gravitational pressure, we need to heat the hydrogen gas to 100 million degrees oC, 6 times the heat of the Sun, (#v.effing.hot).
Hydrogen has three forms, or isotopes; Hydrogen/Protium (1H) Deuterium (2H) and Tritium (3H). The fundamental property of all three, that classify them as Hydrogen isotopes, is that they all only have one proton each (Protium has no neutrons, Deuterium has 1 neutron and Tritium has 2 neutrons). We (that’s the Royal we), have found that the best isotopes to create plasma from are 2H and 3H isotopes.
To heat anything up to 100 million degrees oC, takes a lot of initial energy. Way more than you need to heat a pizza. The good news is that we have even conquered that, and now, we can reliably create a plasma. We’re creating them all over the place and in all sorts of ways, but I’m not going to talk about all the different methods and machines that are under investigation for Fusion today.
At 100 million oC we can fuse a Deuterium nucleus with a Tritium nucleus if the hydrogen density in the plasma is great enough to guarantee collisions. We do it pretty often now. The product of this fusion is a Helium isotope called 4He which has 2 protons and 2 neutrons. You also get one free neutron and a whole bunch of energy #4.x.more.energy.than.fission.
We’re going to take a wee Spanish pause here to understand why so much energy is produced when these two tiny little pieces of matter fuse together to form Helium. We are going to talk about Mass Defect.
The nucleus of an atom has a measurable mass that is called the atomic mass unit or, amu. The total amu of the nucleus is calculated by summing the amu of all the protons and neutrons in the nucleus. the various nuclei all have different amus of course as some have more or less protons and neutrons than others. Some are heavy like Uranium (235U) which has 92 protons and 143 neutrons, and some are light like the hydrogen isotopes 1H, 2H & 3H which all have only 1 proton and 0,1 or 2 neutrons respectively. If we look at the exact amu of the hydrogen isotopes we are using as reactants in the fusion event, then
2H has an atomic mass unit (amu) of 2.013553 (1 proton one neutron)
3H has an amu of 3.016049 (1 proton and 2 neutrons)
If we add these up we get a total of 5.029602 amu
When these two nuclei fuse they create products of:
4He which has an amu = 4.001506 (2 protons and 2 neutrons)
One free neutron (1.008665 amu)
if we add up the amus of these products we get 5.010171 amu
Notice anything? Still awake?
The total mass of the reactants is slightly bigger than the total mass of the products. In fact it is precisely 0.019431 amu bigger. That’s a tiny difference though? In the noise. Two fifths of 5 eighths. Not worth talking about right?
WRONGO! It’s very important! Why would I be writing all this crap down if it wasn’t important?
This mass difference is everything baby. It’s the juice. It’s the filling in my sandwich man. It’s like Mass Defect Bra’. It’s gonna be the “m” in E=mc2 dude!
First we have to convert it to Kg though. There are 1.66054×10-27 Kg to 1 amu, so all we have to do is multiply our Mass Defect by that to get our Mass Defect in Kg
So m = 3.23 x 10-29 Kg (trust me, it just is)
The speed of light, denoted by the letter “c” in the formula, is 3.00 x 108 meters per sec (trust required again here because this is totally a constant everywhere in the universe)
So now we just have to run Einstein’s formula to find the energy released from a fusion reaction measured in Jeules (J)
E=mc2
E = 3.23 x 10-29 x (3.00 x 108)2
E = 2.91 x 10-12 J
Yeah baby! Everyone still with me? That is a totally awesomely huge amount of energy bro’!
Remember I said that having understood how fusion produces so much energy, you would be able to intuit why fusion produces 4 times the energy produced by a fission reaction? Can you? At first I didn’t understand why, but then it occurred to me, and it’s sort of obvious. If it’s all about Mass Defect and E=mc2, and the key term in the function is m, then ipso facto the Mass Defect produced by a fusion reaction must be greater than the Mass Defect produced by a fission reaction. Basically, bigger the “m”, bigger the “E”.
Unfortunately, our current fusion efforts do not produce quite as much energy as we need to heat the gas to ignite the plasma. What we are looking for, is a net positive energy output of say 10 x the ignition energy. If we could get the plasma to be self sustaining after the initial reaction, we wouldn’t care about this. The energy produced from a sustained reaction would soon outstrip the amount of ignition energy, but we can’t sustain the plasma yet, because it turns out plasma is really unstable. When a plasma becomes unstable (Plasma Disruption), it breaks down and all the heat is lost and you have to start all over again. It’s not a simple problem to fix and we will need some clever engineering to control it. Whilst we are getting closer to overcoming these problems, progress has been slow (we’ve been trying to solve Fusion since the 40’s).
When we have solved these problems, 80% of the energy produced will be carried, by the free neutron product of the fusion, outside of the plasma, at which point we can capture it and convert it to heat. We use that heat to heat water and make steam, which we then use to turn a steam turbine, which then powers an electric generator to make electricity for us to use. The other 20% of the energy is kept within the plasma and is used to maintain the heat of the plasma. Introduce more fuel (hydrogen gas) to maintain the density and off we go again, but this time without the external ignition energy. Now it’s self sustaining!
Zeus
I would argue that solving these problems is humanity’s single greatest priority, ever. When we solve these problems, we will become masters of one of the Universe’s primal, most fundamental and powerful processes. Only then, can we stand over Zeus, on Mount Olympus and wrench the lightening from his hand.
This is not theoretical physics anymore, it’s an experimental physics and engineering problem. It’s now about designing and building a machine that can do it, and keep doing it, as long as we keep providing fuel to the process.
I believe our best chance of building the first working, fusion reactor capable of sustaining a plasma for more than a few seconds, is a project called ITER. ITER is a collaboration of 7 states, which includes the EU, the US and China. This collective is constructing the worlds largest Tokamak . The device is planned to hit its “First Plasma” milestone in Q4 2025. They intend to maintain fusion for long periods and to achieve net energy. This won’t be a power plant though, this will be an experiment to prove the viability of Fusion energy production.
Having produced a viable fusion reaction though, how long will it take to design, build and test the world’s first commercial Fusion Power Plant? How many obstacles will be thrown in the way by those trying to keep the fossil fuel industries alive? Will funding continue and, if so, at what level?
I propose we set forth a Kennedy-esque Mission statement:
We should commit ourselves to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of building a device capable of a sustained Fusion reaction, and building the first of many Fusion power plants. No Single project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important to our future; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish
John F Kennedy & John A Creasy – February 2020
The Fusion mission,will be every bit as complex as the Apollo program, if not more so. Arguably it will have more significance to the future of Mankind, both here on Earth and as we reach out to the cosmos.
In today’s money, Kennedy invested $660bn in the Apollo program over 10 years. Today, we are planning to invest ~$22bn in ITER and we’re moaning about the overspend. The poor buggers even have a donate button on their website for Christ sake! In the grand scheme of things, the current level of investment is buttons, and we ought to be ashamed of our inability to grasp the awesome magnitude of the discovery and bounty that awaits us, if we could just focus our best minds.
I suggest in the title of this post, that we spend all the money on solving fusion. That’s clearly click-bait but the idea is right. Funding fusion research correctly is simply a symbol of the priority we, and our representatives, choose to give this enterprise.
So let’s compare Fusion as a priority to another.
Globally we spend $1.8 TRILLION each year on defence. Really? each year? WTF? Sometimes, we truly demonstrate that we haven’t really evolved very much at all. I’d call us apes that have lost a little hair, but I’m not sure the apes aren’t smarter.
How about this. I’ll alter my demand for all the money, and instead ask that we take just one year off defence spending in 2021, and give all that money to Fusion research. We can go back to the mindless development of smart bombs after that to keep the dimwits happy. Come on. One year? It’s nothing. You’d still have all your old bombs, ships, subs, planes and missiles to play with. Topple a regime here, prop one up there. You’d hardly miss it.
Ok, half of all defence spending. How’s that? $900bn. That’s a great deal. With $900bn left you could easily destabilise and invade a decent sized Middle Eastern country. What about Egypt? We haven’t done anything to Egypt since the colonial days. What am I thinking about? Iran. Oooh Iran eh? Anyway you choose, but give Fusion research and development the $900Bn so they can do something useful for the next decade and put all of you lot out of work. If there’s no oil to squabble about what will you do with yourselves? Jeez, that’s a bit scary init?
The work in Fusion may be like rocket science, but deciding to back and prioritise it, really isn’t. Government only ever acts when the outcry from the people becomes a clamour and is as loud as canon fire. This article is my opening salvo.
We must not trust those we have elected to make good calls in good time. They won’t. It’s up to us to make them make the right calls at the right time. Make some noise. You’ve gone to the trouble of reading all this, so why not go the next step and write to your MP, representative, local terrorist organisation or warlord and ask for half of next years military spend to go to Fusion Research. Worst case he chops your head off with a machete, but maybe he’s having a good day and says ok?
I look forward to the day when major energy consuming nations will take all their primary energy from this new technology. I can also imagine this technology providing light to places in our world where today, only candles light the dark. I can imagine it powering the habitats we build on the Moon or Mars, and the vessels we will use to explore our deepest oceans and the farthest reaches of our solar system. Maybe, one day, our neighbouring stars. New shores. Distant beaches.
I can imagine a time when the smoke stops and the air is clear and clean. What will it taste like? How will it smell? I remember vividly what I felt like watching Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969. I was 7, and I still understood what a vital moment that was.
I hope I will be alive to witness the moment we ignite a star here on earth.
Please leave a comment and I’ll reply. Share with a friend. This is my first time out as a nuclear physicist so if you see any errors in the above keep them to yourself so I don’t feel stupid (not really – go ahead and tell me – if you must).
“When I was your age I used to think I knew everything. It wasn’t until I was 21 that I knew I knew everything”.
Daddy
I met a funny sort of chap recently when I was up in Scotland to see my sisters for Christmas. Let’s call him Stanley because a) he can then keep his anonymity and b) I can’t remember his name.
I’m shocking with names. Numbers no problem. Phone numbers, bank codes, birthdays, no sweat, but names?
“Hi, My name is Janet”.
Blank look. “Oh Hello….erm….hello”
My favourite hello? “Oh, hello you! how are you?”. I’ve been known to text people during a conversation with someone, just to get the name of the person I am talking to.
So, back to Stan.
Dan is a Yank. My sister Shannon(?) tells me, he originally came over on vacation about 10 years ago, when he stumbled across some Neolithic stone monuments called Cairn Holy, near Creetown in South West Scotland. There are actually two monuments; Cairnholy 1 & 2. By all accounts, they were constructed in the 4th millennium BC, so they are impressively old.
Cairn Holy Monument – South West Scotland
The picture right is a picture I took of one of these monuments as the sun was setting. A miniature Scottish Stonehenge if you will. But the setting, atop lowland hills, with forever views south over Wigtown Bay towards the Irish Sea, would stir the poetry in the soul of any Celt and, frankly, leaves Stonehenge in the dirt.
I’m not going to provide a history or indeed any insight on these monuments, that’s not the point of this article. In fact, you can’t walk two steps without tripping over a stone circle or a druid in Scotland. If you are interested to find out more about Cairn Holy though, then you might want to take a look at Historic Environment Scotland’s website.
No, I am much more interested in Frank’s story. You see Frank never left. Something touched him all those years ago when he visited this ancient ruin. Something spiritual. So he and his wife stayed and moved into a cottage across the valley that overlooks Cairn Holy, and he has been there ever since. Isn’t that odd?
It is odd, but it’s also amazing. My sister told me he wasn’t retired or anything when he chose to stay. He just stopped doing whatever it was he was doing and started going to look at these stones. Every day! For ten years!
As I said, I met him the day we went to see Cairn Holy. We were just having a touristy look and he comes striding across the field toward the Stones (or Stanes as a Scot would call them). He was a little dishevelled and was somewhat ruddy of complexion, no doubt from years spent at the Stones in howling winds and driving rain. He had a grey beard. My sister introduced us and we exchanged pleasantries, but I could tell that Dan was distracted. The sun was setting and he needed to pay attention. He started measuring the length of the shadows cast by the erect stones.
“So what do you think is going on here Jack?” I asked. He stopped and came up close.
“First Answer? I don’t know. Second Answer? Everything!”
He turned and returned to his pre-dusk ritual. As I watched him scurry about amongst the stones, clearly old friends, it occurred to me that this guy was one penny short of a shilling. Bats in the belfry. The lights were on, but no one was home. One fry short of a happy meal. Nutty as squirrel shit. You see where I’m going?
But the more I watched him, the more I started to envy him. Labelling him as an eccentric, which by our standards he most assuredly is, was too easy. Intellectually lazy.
Siobhan, my sister, is a budding Buddhist. She tends to look at things in a kinder way. In a questioning way that persuades you to consider “Is that all that is going on here?”. She was not dismissive of Joe at all. THAT’S HIS NAME! He’s called Joe. Bugger me, the mind is a funny thing eh?
So what was going on here with Joe? First answer? I didn’t know. Second Answer? Maybe everything. Whatever it was though, I felt it merited a little more respect and a little more thought.
How often do you wish you could stop the life you are living and just get off? Melt away into a Celtic landscape and simply be. Run your fingers over ancient stones and feel the more simple, more spiritual life of the ones who placed them there. Let go. Feel the weight of modern life slip away. Be lighter.
The more pragmatic among you will be thinking “Well that’s just great! What would happen if we all did that? Where would we be?”
These are good questions. What would happen? Where would we be?
Perhaps more thoughtful. More spiritual no? Perhaps more reflective and searching in our approach to life. Joe isn’t lazy, he is diligent and energetic and busy in his searching. He has simply replaced a life that lacked that search with one that is centred on it. Isn’t that search ultimately what we humans are all about? Whether it be the meaning of life or self or truth, the Universe or God Almighty, isn’t that who we are? I would posit that very few people are really searching. Some are but most are not. At best we “fit it in” with our busy schedules.
I’m not sure for what Joe is searching, but I know he is. I know that for a great deal of my life, I haven’t. Maybe I’m just projecting my indolence on everyone else.
Maybe, but not Joe. I know that what Joe is searching for is greater than himself. His “I don’t know” is a synonym for “I am searching”. His “Everything” is just that. for Joe, that search, that needing to know, was enough for him to just get off and melt into a Celtic landscape.
Somehow that feels important. It also felt like a message, lying on the ground like an old pebble that I needed to bend down and pick up. What’s my search all about? What do I think is going on?
I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
Maybe I need to spend more time in isolated, desolate places (like this blog site for example). Stand on a hillside and feel the cold. Let the rain sting my face and feel the wind at my back. Stand where ancient others stood and caress the stones. Maybe then I’ll know Everything.
Calm down, calm down. This is not a post about Brexit. It’s mentioned but it’s not about it.
So relax. Wooosa. Woooooooosa.
Smooth, calm water. Breathe in……Breathe out.
It’s been a bit of a wild ride for the last few years eh? Bit of a roller coaster. What with the old US Electoral College process? That’s a corker eh? Some genius came up with that one. Trump becomes president despite not commanding a majority of votes from the people he is supposed to serve. He becomes the Nero of our times, but with nukes this time, because of some arcane compromise dreamt up by the Founding Fathers.
Then along comes old Cameron with his wheeze of offering referendums all over the place.
“Were bound to win” he says, “I mean, who would vote to leave? Narf, narf. Pass me the porter old boy”.
And that was just the Scottish referendum in 2014. I’m betting he had a bit of trouble with the old sphincter muscle during that one ‘cos, for a time, it looked a lot like Scotland was going to vote for Independence. Just squeaked it.
Bolstered by his “victory” in Scotland, and getting ready for the General Election in 2015, he pops another bullet in the chamber and spins the barrel again.
“I know”, he says, “We’ll offer a referendum on whether we stay in the EU in the Manifesto. Nobody’ll vote to leave the EU – no way! But it just might get me a second term”.
Morning after the night before….
The EU? Are we talking about that least democratic institution on the planet bar Kim Jong Un, EU? The same EU that everyone in the UK has been moaning about for the last 45 years and who are still alive to vote in the referendum? That one? That EU? Really? We didn’t see that one coming?
Click! BANG!! Ooopsy! Alas, poor Dave, we knew him well. Awww….apparently, she makes dresses that don’t make you look fat now.
Then there was the aftermath of the Brexit Referendum Leave vote. Oh Dear Lord. Three and a half years of absolute carnage while all the “democrats” who lost the referendum, tried to clamber aboard the parliamentary equivalent of a DeLorean time machine. Such determination to get the leave vote overturned. “They didn’t know what they were voting for” and “Everyone has changed their minds” and “Just run the referendum again, with the questions we want, that’s all we want…pleeeeeeaaaase?”.
And then the political betrayal. All the grubby, disingenuous politicians, from all parties, scrabbling around in the dirt trying to find a way to use Brexit to win power and in so doing, forgetting that the majority had spoken. This ain’t Star Trek people! The needs of the few do NOT outweigh the needs of the many!
Luckily, and I do mean luckily, a sort of democracy prevailed at the very, very last minute, and the original referendum result was sanctioned via an overwhelming majority for the Conservatives in the 2019 General Election. If the general election hadn’t taken place it would have been close. The will of the majority may well have been overturned. It’s as close as we’ve been to a civil war since, well, the civil war.
Meanwhile in other news, the Democrat held House of Representatives in the US compile a treasure trove of evidence of Trump’s alleged malfeasance and corruption, the like of which has not been seen since Pirates of Caribbean. The House elects to impeach Trump but everyone knows he’ll get away with it because he’s going to be tried by the Senate, which is controlled by guess who? His very own Republican Party! We know they wont convict because they have stated that they wont convict, no matter what the evidence is! Did the same genius that came up with the Electoral College system come up with that one too? Since Trump took office, he has single handedly shown that the American Constitution is a toothless instrument, if you just have the will to simply ignore it.
So all in all then, WTF??
Mariam-Webster Dictionary
There’s an old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. There’s another old saying, “if it’s Fubar, then throw that shit away”.
Parliamentary democracy is Fubar. Very fubar. Tremendously Fubar. It’s so Fubar it couldn’t be more Fubared if it tried. It has shown that it can no longer be trusted to serve the will of it’s master, the people. For this crime, there can be no reprieve or pardon. Orff with its head! or as the French would say “En route par Madame Guillotine”. Time to throw that shit away.
We are gathered here today brethren, to consider an alternative to Parliamentary Democracy. A better democracy. A democracy that re-empowers the people. A democracy that returns sovereignty to the people and rids the world of second rate, partisan, unintelligent, dishonest and self-serving politicians once and for all.
It is my thesis that Parliamentary Democracy is no longer fit for purpose. Further, I will show that a new, better and pure form of democracy is available today that could never have been available before . Moreover, I will argue that it’s implementation is feasible.
I’ll state up front that whilst on the face of it this might appear to be a simple proposition, in fact, it’s not. I spent the morning in my kitchen the other day redesigning democracy and, it turns out, it’s quite tricky. However, nothing worthwhile is easy, so I persisted, and by lunchtime I’d cracked it. I think if we all work together, stay objective and really get our shoulders behind it, I think we can get this all sorted out by Christmas. So come on let’s get started!
The Vision
Bob
We are going to keep democracy, but we must move away from a system of indirect representative government, to direct government by the people, supported by an expert administrative infrastructure.
We will replace national and locally elected representatives, and the unelected house of Lords, with a clever little App on your phone called Bob (My App, so I’ll call it what I want). More about this in a mo’ because Bob (the App not our dog), is the key in the door.
There will be no general or local elections because there isn’t going to be anyone to vote for. Political Parties will be abolished. Why should we be limited by one party’s manifesto and voting habits inherited from our parents and their parents? We should be able to progress any idea no matter where it comes from, and we should all be sufficiently well educated and informed to know the difference between good and bad ideas.
Just to show that this is not some lefty, Che Guevarian anti-establishment rant, we are going to keep the Monarchy. Firstly, we really like the Queen (not so much Charlie, but you win some, you lose some). Secondly, the business case for our monarchy is overwhelming and we, the people, are not stupid……..cha-ching!
Taken From Brand Finance Monachy Report
Annual taxpayer cost of £292.6m against a contribution of 1.8Bn? Sheeeit, I’ll take dem numbers eva’ day of the week Bra’ (Side Note: my wife has suggested I really oughtn’t attempt urban slang very often or indeed at all, but I tend to think it makes things so much more jolly) .
The Civil Service will be empowered to run the administrative departments of government (Transport, Defence, Education, Health, Trade, Foreign Affairs etc). Heads of department will be appointed based on their subject matter expertise in the specific responsibilities of that department. These heads will not change every 5 years. Their pay / bonuses will be tied to achievement of prioritised SMART goals (Specific, Measured, Achievable, Realistic and Timed), set by the people. If they don’t perform, or deliver, they get fired by the people right then via Bob (the App not our dog).
Apart from these national bodies, there will also be local Administration at the County and Town level, so that local issues can be decided by local people and not be held up by national priorities. Bob (the App not our dog), will handle both.
Any individual aged 18 or over (we’ll call these people “Adults”), can propose and, if a simple majority of the people support it, be paid by the state, to create or amend national and local laws with the support of these local and national administrations. Similarly, any Adult can propose new national or local initiatives, that do not require new law to implement (like building a new local bridge or something).
A word about the Ministry of Defence. Defence is tricky. All sorts of secrecy and ability to act when faced with threats to National Security issues to deal with here. We are going to need some deep and expert thinking about the processes needed to authorise, and subsequently scrutinise, military action when we no longer have an executive branch. These processes will need to maintain our ability to act in time, whilst maintaining the secrecy our intelligence and military communities need to operate. This means that whilst major strategic military interventions (wars) can, and should, be approved directly by the people with a simple majority vote via Bob, tactical or counter terrorist interventions cannot. At least not by all of them. We might need a suitably qualified people’s COBRA (Cabinet Offices Briefing Rooms, Briefing Room A) that can come together quickly, on-line or in person, at times of National need. Like I said, lot of thought needed here.
Oh, and we will repurpose the Houses of Parliament into a very nice bowling alley (you can see all the way through from the Commons to the House of Lords you know?), with nice cafés and bars in the lobby. Bungy Jumping off Big Ben and a zip wire across the Thames to the Big Eye. Anyway, we wont be doing any lawmaking in there any more.
Hey, the White House already has a bowling alley, so you just need to turn the oval office into a Starbucks and you’re all set! Bham! (See? Jolly).
It’s time to take a look at how all this could work, which means we need to take a closer look at what Bob can do (The App not our….Ok, so I might need to rethink that app name. Got it! BobsApp!).
How it’s all going to work.
Even though Parliamentary Democracy is broken, it has been around a while. The first parliament, called an Althing(i), was formed by Iceland in 930 AD). Britain’s Feudal system was actually a form of Parliament because William the Conqueror established it in 1066 to take advice from the nobility and clergy. Our first proper parliament here in Britain though, was created in the early 13th century and the Parliament we have today is directly descended from that.
I decided to take a deeper dive into how the Parliamentary Process really works to see if there is anything that we could salvage from the wreck of our current system to build into BobsApp (much better).
I mean, for something to last this long, and pass the test of time, it must have had some inherant goodness that prevented the people from sweeping it away in a barrage of musket balls.
Checks and Balances. I think it’s fair to say that the entire current model, is a way to make sure that we, through the offices of our representatives, don’t introduce just any old crap onto the statute books. this is achieved by forcing Bills (Proposal for new laws or amendments to existing laws), through many different stage gates. This process is orchestrated across three different institutions before they can finally become law. In its simplicity and practicality, it’s beautiful really.
Which is a bit of a bugger to be honest, and in the hands of another Blogger, might have caused something of a hiccup in the narrative. Not I. I am made of sterner stuff.
DOWN WITH PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY! Down I say! It can no longer serve….ahh shit.
I can’t do it. it’s really not that complicated. Everything about Parliamentary Democracy works except one thing. Politicians are untrustworthy. Shocker. ‘Twas ever thus. The process is fine. The institutions are fine. Just think about the collective legal, constitutional and every other kind of wisdom aggregated in the ancient heads of the Lords. Do we really not want that collective wisdom to take a peek at the laws we want to introduce? Well I do. I wanna keep the Lords, and I want them to keep doing what they are doing.
I think Occam’s razor applies here. “All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one”.
We can’t burn down the whole house because one window won’t close. The problem we all have is that we don’t, and can’t, trust our politicians to vote in such a way that the will of the majority is reflected in the outcome. Ergo, the simplest solution is, don’t let them vote. Everything else can stay the same.
Any vote which currently takes place in the house of commons will now be taken by the people via BobsApp. We can leave the Lords alone, because ultimately power resides in the Commons, and we are going to move that power to the people.
There is no question about the viability of the technology. Each of us intuitively knows that such a voting app can be built. Every day I get crap coming into my phone via different apps that I’m supposed to do something with. It’ll be nice to have something important arriving for a change.
Removing this power to vote from our MPs however imposes a great burden on us the people. It will be up to us to follow, and be informed about, the proceedings both in Parliament and in the body politic. I think we are more connected today, more than we have ever been, but we’ll need to do more.
We will need to read the document that we are to vote on, and to understand what it will do. The way Laws are written will need to enable comprehension by lay people. This isn’t to say that lay people are not bright enough to understand them, but they can be complicated documents to read. If you aren’t legally trained or experienced at reading legislation, you could miss something.
There is a general assumption though that people are just too dumb and cant be trusted to deal with this stuff. These same people hold down jobs, drive cars, run their household budgets, put food on the table, take care of their families, go to church (or not), obey the law and sustain the fabric of society every day of their lives. They are more in touch with what matters to people than anybody else, because they are the commoners and they deal with real life all the time.
I would trust them every day of the week and twice on Sundays to make the right call over the Members of our Commons. It will be a new skill for sure but it will develop over time. We can add it into the school curriculum and get the kids to learn it from an early age. My daughter Lu (11) can tell you all about fusion, I think she can handle politics. In any case it has got to be better than what we have today.
So, Shouldn’t we remove the Parliamentary from Parliamentary Democracy?
Well no. It turns out it’s a really well designed system and we shouldn’t just throw that away. We should limit the power of it’s Members though because they now serve themselves more than they serve us. We can finally grant that power to all the people through our technology; BobsApp!
I hope you enjoyed this article! Please leave a comment and I’ll reply to you 🙂
I was doing
some grocery shopping in Sainsbury’s with my 8-year-old Daughter, Lu, a while
ago. I was just heading down the pharmacy aisle on my way to Milk, Cream and
Yoghurt. We needed full fat Greek yoghurt because I was doing my famous lamb
biryani for dinner that night. We must have had someone coming over because we
only do it on special occasions. We’ve done it for Christmas dinner a few times
just to give Christmas time a bit of a kick. What can I say, people seem to
like it.
Anyhoo I
digress.
Yes, I was on my
way to the yoghurt when I heard Lu speaking quite rudely to someone. Now we
have made a point of raising her to be a very polite little girl, and whilst
admittedly Lu can be something of a blunt instrument at times, she’s very
chatty and generally speaking she is very polite unless she is fed up with who
she is talking to (“Why don’t you just shadap Fatty Daddy”). She’s a one that
one.
Anyway, whoever
she was talking to was really getting it.
“You stupid thing,
why can’t you answer a simple question”
I was taken
aback.
“Oi oi, who are
you talking to madam?” I admonished.
“Hey Siri, tell
me a joke” she commanded.
The immediate
sense of “God that’s so rude, what happened to please and thank you?”, didn’t
diminish, as I realised, she was talking to my phone. In fact, I was every bit
as disappointed in her as if she had been talking to a human being. I was
surprised. So, I stopped right there, next to the indigestion tablets, and
turned to Lu.
“Erm, Lu?”
“What?”
“I dunno why,
but I just feel that you are being really rude to Siri. Do you think its ok for
us to be rude to her just because she’s an AI?”.
“Huh?”.
The thought
that came to me originated elsewhere, and I said to Lu:
“Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.”
Arther C Clarke 2010: Odyssey Two
What followed
was a discussion, about the nature of our future relationship with Artificial
Intelligence entities.
Lu is going to sort out Fusion, right after she has met nerdy Brian, who keeps pushing his glasses up on his nose (in like a really cute way?), during her Quantum Physics Masters at Cambridge, so I felt having this conversation was just a relaxing meditation for her, a musing if you will. We covered a lot of ground. Not physically. We only managed to get from Indigestion tablets to Fishermen’s Friends during our discourse, but philosophically, we climbed Everest. Actually, that doesn’t really cover that much ground does it? We crossed the Sahara!
If you were walking
through Hyde Park, would you kick a tree? Just walk up to it and kick the
living shit out of it? Why don’t we see people doing that? How come we don’t
just all spend our time walking from tree to tree screaming abuse and kicking
the bark off those tall, leafy bastards? What
would that say about us? I’m pretty sure it would say we were bad people.
Maybe we don’t do it, not because we don’t want to, but because we wouldn’t want anyone in the park to see us doing it. In this age of environmental “awakeness”, it would be unacceptable. People would run over and tree-kick-shame us shouting “how would you like it if I just walked up to you and kicked you?”.
“Leave that poor innocent tree alone you horrid
person!” they might exclaim. They might even swear and threaten you with
physical violence. Look what a hard time we are giving the people burning down
the Amazon! Such is the level of empathy we are supposed to have with the
environment these days.
Acid question though. Would you kick, or shout at, the
tree if you were all alone in a forest and no one could see or hear you do it?
I don’t know that I would, you know. I think I’d be ashamed. I’d feel guilty. I
think most people would. Which is weird when you think about it. Our current
understanding of trees suggests that the kick or the insult itself wouldn’t be “felt”
by the tree. It’s not going to spend the next few days wondering what it did to
deserve that kicking from that hiker. It’s not sensient, but it is alive, and generally
speaking we give it due respect.
Is being alive the quintessential attribute of “being” though? Loads of stuff on Earth is alive but I wouldn’t say they are all beings. I don’t think of amoeba’s, or phytoplankton, or daffodils, or flu virus or trees as Beings. So I don’t think it is just about being alive. Descartes said “I think therefore I am”? So is it thinking that makes us beings then?
Bob!
Meet Bob. Bob, is our family dog. He’s so cute. Yes you are! Yes….you….are! Look at dat face. We love him to bits because he is so cute, but also because he is the cleverest dog ever! Not because he does tricks (he can do a few), but because of how much he understands and how much he communicates. He solves problems. He won’t come in after he has done his last pee of the night, until I give him a treat. I can’t just say the word “treaty” because he knows I might not give it him. It’s happened ok? I’m not proud of it, but there have been occasions where I said “treaty” but didn’t actually deliver a treat. So he has learned that could happen, and now, he waits until I have it in my hand and throw it into the kitchen and then he comes in, let’s me wipe his paws and then gets the treaty from the kitchen. I’ve tried teaching him to wipe his own paws, but honestly, if I cant get my 24 year-old University student son to do it, I’m not sure why I have such high expectations of Bob.
Bob has obviously thought this through. His
actions are deliberate and calculated to get the outcome he wants. He has shown
some creativity in his solution. He knows I want him to come in. I want to go
to bed. He stands just out of reach, on purpose, and if I try to grab him he’ll
bugger off to the other end of the garden and then only comes back, tail
wagging, when I’m back indoors.
There is no question in my mind that Bob is a sensient, loving, thinking, disobedient and creative Being who has his own ideas. I have no hesitation behaving toward Bob as I would anyone else. When I want him to give me something, I say “please”. When he gives it, I say “thanks”. Anything else would be rude and disrespectful. In every sense of the word, he is a member of the family and is treated accordingly.
We, and about 32 million other dog owners around the
world, grant Bob and the canine masses this respect, despite the fact that Bob
can’t talk and shows little understanding of any academic subject or the
universe. I am prepared to bet good money that there are no
circumstances where Bob could pass the Turing Test yet we still offer the
respect and courtesy we might show another human being.
“The Turing Test?” you enquire. Yes, the Turing Test. Now, I know all of you know what the Turing Test is, but for the people reading who have been buried under a rock since WW2 (I’m not explaining that abbreviation, I’m really not), a brief explanation is needed.
This test is named after Alan Turing, the chap that figured out how to crack the Nazi Enigma Machine code during World War 2 (dagnamit!). Ze Germans used this machine to communicate real time troop, air and naval movement orders, so pretty important really. It was believed to be uncrackable because the encryption key was changed every day which meant you had to crack the key every day. Turing realised that every order was signed off “Heil Hitler” and this therefore provided a constant he could use to crack the entire code every morning. Basically he won the war for the allies. For his efforts, and in true British enlightened fashion, he was thanked by HM Gov. by being sent to jail for being a homosexual. Hurrah! Gawd blesss the British Empire Ma’am!
Anyway, the basic premise of the test is that if an interrogator (C opposite), is unable to tell the difference between responses from A or B (where A is a computer and B is a human), then the computer is judged to have Artificial Intelligence.
How long does it take you to figure out that you are
talking to a computer when you have one of those automated Service Agents
answer the phone? 5 seconds? Maybe 3? Imagine if you genuinely couldn’t
tell the difference? Imagine if Freddie in Mumbai was actually an AI? Bad
example, we all tend to get a bit irritated with Freddie, so lets go with Marge
in Newcastle. You’d be polite and courteous to her because to all intents and
purposes you would be talking to another being, and one with a natty Geordie
accent, which apparently we all love. The fact that she is based on silicon
wouldn’t matter because you wouldn’t know. If you were rude to her on the phone
you would probably hang up feeling a bit guilty.
Lee Sedol
Well, an AI cant do any of that yet. Far from it. AI is very good at learning how to do narrow tasking but not so good in the arena known as General AI. Narrow AI is good though. So good, that it often surpasses human capability in the same task, very quickly. For example in March 2016 Google’s AlphaGo was able to beat 18 time World Champion, and 9 Dan (=very good) Chinese Go player Lee Sedol, 4-1 on its first outing. Go is the most complex game ever devised by man (or woman), with more possible positions available than there are atoms in the universe! So that’s pretty complex then.
But there are loads more out there and still more in the pipeline. In the field of Medicine, we now have AIs that surpass human ability to identify tumors from radiology images. Everything we know about autonomous driving suggests that it will be significantly safer than humans. Intelligent homes that combine personal assistants (Google Home or Alexa) with smart home devices (thermostats, lighting, camera’s etc) are already here. They are in financial markets, Business Intelligence software, travel experience apps, music streaming, shopping and, and, and, and. Narrow AI is already with us.
But no matter how “intelligent” these narrowly focused AI are, no matter how much data they can digest or how much machine learning they do, they cannot yet do, what Bob does, and they come nowhere near what Lu can do. Narrow AIs do not have ideas. They lack empathy. Their creativity is limited. They do not demonstrate understanding of the world, or the universe or of self.
But, they are getting there.
When General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is achieved, how we treat GAIs and what rights we grant them, will be the issue of our time. We can treat them like we have every other minority in human history or we can treat them with “appropriate respect“.
“Good Morning Dave”
Until then, I want Lu to be well mannered when talking to Siri, because I believe that if she finds it easy to be rude to Siri, she will find it easy to be rude to people. What does it say about us if we can’t be polite? How much easier will it be to integrate with future GAIs, if we have been treating their less bright forebears with respect and dignity? I’m not sure we will want them irritated with us, especially when they might be so much brighter than us.
Ok, so I’m not talking about strapping little rucksacks on their backs stuffed full of C4 and pushing them out onto Oxford Street in their strollers, or even attaching them to nuclear bombs in their liddle romper suits like the cowboy out of Dr Strangelove. No, I’m just talking about not having any. Well, not me exactly, but my kids definitely shouldn’t have any kids.
My proposition is conceptually
simple in that it breaks the paradigm that the world’s human population should
continue to grow, on the grounds that this is no longer ecologically or morally
sustainable. Instead, it proposes that the
human population of earth be radically and rapidly reduced to preserve the
ecosystem required for high biodiversity on earth.
“Impossible!”, you cry.
“Bollocks” I retort!
Whilst this might seem dismissive, I choose my word carefully. I don’t say that this endeavour comes without its own unique set of challenges, but many a challenging enterprise has been undertaken with far worse odds of success than this one. I give you Neil Armstrong walking on the moon for example. Most of the technology necessary to pull off that “Giant leap for mankind” didn’t even exist when the project began, yet in 10 short years, there he was hopping down the ladder and uttering his immortal words.
We can make amazing things happen. All I’m suggesting, is that our kids choose to stop having babies. Not because we try and force them too (‘cos we know how that will go), but because they decide that having babies is immoral and toxic. Oh, and we have to let old and sick people die when they are supposed to. Did I mention that? I meant to mention that.
And I might have
been exaggerating. We can’t stop having babies altogether because we’d all die
out and there would be no more humans………
We just have to have far fewer children
than the current global fertility rate of 2.5 kids per female, and very arguably
far fewer than the current global replacement rate of 2.1 children per female.
At the Replacement Rate, population stabilises, wherever it happens to be, after a couple of generations. If we want to make it fall, we have to have fewer than 2.1 kids per female. Look what happens opposite when you reduce it from 2.1 to just 1.6 kids per female (bottom blue dashed line). But that only gets us back to where we are now by 2100, and look at how well that’s going.
The drop needs to be extreme both
in terms of numbers and timeframes. I’m going to run 0.5 kids per female up the
flagpole and see who salutes it. At this level, the population should drop like
a stone and pretty quick. Hell, the
population would get so low it would be hard for a chap to find a dame to go a
courtin’ with.
“WHY WOULD YOU WANT SUCH A THING? MY LITTLE JOHNNY’S NOT GOING TO ‘AVE NO BRUVVERS OR SISTERS”, you ask.
Really good question everyone. I was hoping you’d ask. Firstly Little Johnny is going to have to learn to sit quietly in the corner and play with his imaginary friend, and secondly, in the immortal words of Agent Smith…
“I’d like to share a
revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to
classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every
mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the
surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you
multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way
you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this
planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human
beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague…..”
Epic quote from
“The Matrix”
Ok, Steady on Smith old boy. No need to get carried away. Can’t just go on and on about how humans are all just a bunch of plagues and bandying the “C” word about, you’ll hurt someone’s feelings!
Still, you really don’t need to
be a rocket scientist, or Agent Smith, to work out that something whacky and
unwelcome and uncomfortable is happening with us. You know that feeling you get
every time you hear what the population is, and you just tuck it away because
nothing can be done about it, it just is?
Quite
early in my life I observed something. When something went wrong, more often
than not, I wasn’t taken completely by surprise. I had an inkling. Sometimes
way before the thing went wrong. The thing went wrong not because I didn’t
know, but because I did, and didn’t do anything to stop it. I warranty each of
you have experienced this in your lives. It’s called intuition. It’s not
necessarily borne out of facts or knowledge. A confluence of events, rumours,
insights, experience and intellect add up to a “feeling in my water” that
something’s not quite right. I decided, after a number of these inklings turned
out to be correct, that I would consciously act on all future inklings to confirm
or invalidate the thing I thought might go wrong before it went wrong. As a
result, I became A
MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE!!
Now is the time for everyone to listen to that little voice at the back of our mind. Face into the discomfort of its message. Not wait for the proof, but act because in acting, nothing gets worse and things can only get better. There is no downside to acting now.
There are a few obstacles though. Like the fact that we don’t really recognise that there is a burning raft. The various religious doctrines that bang on about going forth and procreating and that terminations and birth control are a sin. The government incentives which encourage our youth to have kids because we need more rats to run around on industrial wheels to keep stoking up our economies.
We should not underestimate the sheer number of untrusting stakeholders we would need to convince either (our kids). 26% of the worlds population is below the age of 15. Roughly half of these kids are female. Soooo, 26% of 7.7Bn divided by 2 multiplied by the square of the hipppopotomoose plus 3 minus 10 and you get about 1bn girls. Of these we have to convince 1 in every 2 girls not to have a baby. So that would be x over y times by E=MC2 divided by 52….ch-ching =500m girls in our target population.
Our biggest challenge though, is our unwillingness to let go of this way of life. That scrabble for “success” whatever that means. We’ve constructed a society where all the needles need to be pointing up or somebody is getting shit-canned. Revenues, profits, quality of life, life expectancy, mo’ money, mo’ cars, mo’ cribs, mo’ likes, mo’ social standing, Global macroeconomic indicators, and on and on and on. But we’ve got to keep feeding that machine or it all stops and its food is us. Reducing the population by the amount I am suggesting, means we have to let it all go. Let it all stop. And as my old gran would say, that’ll scare the b’jaysus out of us.
But do we really have such a big problem that we need such a drastic solution? Well let’s take a look and see.
I think Smith’s analysis is very pertinent to this discourse. And accurate. Earth is in fact a host. A living breathing organism which just like us, is populated by many other organisms. It can also catch a cold just like us. About 200,000 years ago, the Earth caught such a cold when one species emerged that turned out to be really good at solving problems (that’s us). Especially problems related to its own survival.
So, let’s assume for the moment that Agent Smith has nailed it and we can be likened to a virus or a plague on the Earth. There are only two ways to stop a virus from spreading before it kills its host. You can kill it, or you can suppress it. Honestly, I’m open to either solution, but I’ve been told “You can’t just go about eradicating humanity”, so let’s stick a pin in that for a mo’ and take a look at suppression.
Remember HIV and how scary that was? If you got it, you were a goner, and not in a nice way, because it couldn’t be suppressed. Today millions of people who are HIV+ will live out full and active lives until they are grey and old. They can do this because we made two things happen. The invention of highly accurate, very fast, point-of-care screening technology, and the development of highly effective antiretroviral therapy.
We can now detect the virus much faster (from ~3 weeks down to minutes). In fact the test results are delivered while the patient is waiting. If positive, antiretroviral drugs are issued on the spot before the host goes back into the community. The patient, knowing that they are HIV+, alters his/her behaviours and so becomes a natural brake on the spread of the infection to others.
The antiretroviral therapy controls the viral load in the patient. It’s still there, but the therapy prevents the virus from reproducing, and the amount of virus in the blood reduces to undetectable levels in the host. At this point it becomes very difficult, almost impossible, to transmit to others, and poses little or no threat to the host. The host has a normal life with a normal life expectancy.
If we carry this analogy on, there are two ways to suppress human population. Voluntarily or involuntarily. The voluntary way is the rapid and radical reduction of the human population, by girls and women of child bearing age choosing to reduce the birth rate to 0.5 kids per female. One baby for every two females on the planet until we reach our target population of say 500m to 1bn people and then to never exceed the replacement rate.
The involuntary way is not what you might be thinking. I’m not talking about making human laws to limit the number of children born. That didn’t work out so well in China. And in any case making laws is a voluntary act of the virus.
When we discuss our relationship with the Earth these days, we tend to talk about it in terms of humans “destroying the planet”. This is a function of our innate and ever-present sense of self-importance. All things being equal, and subject to the arrival of some cataclysmic event, Earth and life on Earth isn’t going anywhere for at least a couple of billion years when the great march of entropy, towards which everything in the universe tends, catches up, as our star begins its death rattle.
Today, we are making a big fuss about CO2 levels hitting 410 parts per million (ppm) because it is double the pre-industrial average. Few would argue that human activity isn’t responsible, at least in significant part, for that increase. In the distant past however, we had much more CO2 in the atmosphere and had an abundance of diverse life on the planet. When the dinosaurs were stomping around 65-250 million years ago, it was about 2000 ppm. Go back 500-600 million years and it was more like 5000 ppm. Life on earth began 3.5bn years ago! Planet warming hasn’t killed off all life forms in the past and there is no reason to assume that at the sorts of levels we are talking about (1-2 degrees C), it will in the future. We can thank Darwin and his Origin of the Species for that. Life will adapt, but some won’t, and those organisms that don’t will become extinct. This is the involuntary option.
So, the answer to the question “Is there really a problem?” is yes. But it’s not that we are destroying the Earth; the Earth is destroying us.
Best case, human generated
greenhouse gases (including from the animals we eat), cause the Earth to warm and
act as an antiretroviral on humankind, eradicating most, but leaving a few
alive, at levels which no longer pose a threat to the ecosystem. Worst case, Earth
is getting a high fever. It’s acting like any other infected organism and
protecting itself from us. Bad news? We are nowhere near as lethal as HIV once
was. We are a common cold, not even a bad bout of the flu. The worst thing
about us is our presence and the scars we leave on the landscape. The climate
gets warmer and wetter globally, the wind will blow, and the seas will heave,
and the Earth, no matter how hardy we think we are, will blow out our candle
with the same ease as my daughter on her 4th birthday. The Earth,
over time, will feel better. Will be a better place. Its wounds will heal. New
forests will grow. The Coral will return. New, better adapted, species will emerge
and all signs that we were once here will be covered over. And we won’t be here to see any of it because smart
as we are, we were not smart enough to survive.
What’s the worst part about this dystopian future for you? For me, it’s that we won’t be here to see the rebirth of Earth’s natural beauty. What it will look like without the scar of humanity on its face. Seeing a world unbound by cities and strip malls and roads and factories and fences. A virgin Earth. An Earth without our ugliness. I’d like to see that. I’m saddened by the fact that I won’t. I’d like someone to see it though. Just a few. Just enough that the world doesn’t know they are there. Hidden away. Quiet. Returned to the village. A whisper of humanity. A different humanity. That best part of humanity that is able to find wonder in a single drop of rain and in the same breath look up at the stars and imagine what is there. Eight billion people can never be in “equilibrium” or harmony with the Earth, but maybe just a few can?
And if not?
“All those moments will be
lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
