Space rush
The private-sector space race is gathering momentum at an exceptional rate (2 March 2013, p 8). A decade ago there was nothing but government agencies. Now it seems that every month there’s a new private entrant to launch services, orbital services or off-world mining.
This is good for ambition, private determination and the development of advanced economies, but it would be great if we avoided a rerun of earlier centuries, in which terrestrial exploration was followed by rivalry and rampant exploitation. As the planets, asteroids and other resources of the solar system are the common wealth of all, what we need is far-sighted leadership.
The future must not become a free-for-all with the rich getting richer, and new divisions and conflicts based on who got where first. It requires a global body that regulates activity with a light touch. A small fraction of revenue and profit from the exploitation of off-world mineral wealth should be used to support less fortunate countries.
Mars mission
If multimillionaire Dennis Tito and his team are going to all the trouble of sending a married couple on a fly-by around Mars in 2018, and the next fuel-efficient planetary alignment is not until 2031 (9 March, p 6), why not load up with some extra fuel for a slowdown and go into Mars orbit? A capsule sent on ahead could be waiting to replenish some supplies via docking.
Get some other countries involved as well. We might not have much of a civilisation left by 2031, the way things are going.
With climate change threatening the very future of humanity, wouldn’t one expect and hope that Tito could find a more meritorious use of his millions than trying to send people to Mars and back.
One might even apply the same thinking to the billions being spent on the Large Hadron Collider. Neither of these projects is going to contribute to the most pressing need of all, namely to save our grandchildren from condemnation to hell on Earth.
King’s Somborne, Hampshire, UK
Save our coffee
In Stephanie Pain’s article on the perils posed to coffee crops by climate change, the problem was clearly stated and some of the possible solutions discussed (5 January, p 32).
However, to control the coffee berry borer that was mentioned and a similar damaging pest 鈥� the white stem borer 鈥� the best hope is genetic transformation of the coffee plants with genes that code for anti-insect proteins.
Needs must if the devil drives the tune, and insect pests are the very devil, especially in tropical and sub-tropical areas.
Pi in the sky
Events to mark pi day on 14 March (16 March, p 4) rekindled thoughts of using pi in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth. Techniques for trying to establish contact include encoding the value of pi in the frequency of messages beamed into space in the hope that this will prove our intelligence.
Might a better way be to transmit the constant with an obvious error? ET gets to feel superior, and the irresistible urge to correct a mistake means a response is more likely.
Pedal power
Your article on using solar power to recharge cellphones in Uganda states that “a 60-watt solar panel charges a battery that is taken to the village on the back of a bicycle” (9 March, p 24). Why not just charge up the battery, or even the cellphone directly, using a bicycle-based generator?
This is already done at outdoor festivals in the UK using a conventional bicycle that “sits” on the generator and generates up to 80 watts. It works at night too!
Hot stink ahead
In his opinion piece, Erle C. Ellis could not imagine a viable reason why Earth might be approaching an irreversible tipping point due to the global warming that he acknowledged is happening (9 March, p 30).
But a story in the same issue on Japan’s efforts to harvest methane from enormous reserves of clathrates 鈥� frozen stores of methane 鈥� on ocean floors (p 12) points to one possibility: the so-called clathrate gun hypothesis.
We know that as Earth warms, methane eruptions from melting clathrates become more likely, particularly in shallower waters in the Arctic. Such eruptions could put our planet irreversibly on course to a warmer state with sea levels tens of metres higher than today.
Antibiotic crisis
The UK’s chief medical officer Sally Davies is among those leading medical authorities highlighting the void in antibiotic discovery (16 March, p 6). This problem has been widely reported over the past decade, and she is now calling for politicians to take it seriously. My colleagues and I applaud the activities and awareness-raising that Davies is undertaking.
There is a growing number of infections for which there are virtually no therapeutic options, and we desperately need new discovery, research and development. The UK is very well placed for basic discovery and research in this field.
, a global initiative established by the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, has been campaigning on this since November 2011. We ask everyone to to raise awareness of this impending medical crisis.
The International Space Station cost around 100 billion dollars and was funded by multiple countries, which begs the question: why can’t we form an internationally funded medical agency to research and develop new pharmaceuticals to combat drug-resistant pathogens?
If such R&D was controlled by a public agency it could focus on public health needs, rather than solely on the potential for corporate profits.
Bakersfield, California, US
Give bees a chance
I am sorry to say that the European Union did not vote to suspend the use of neonicotinoid insecticides, a proposed ban that you reported on last year (7 April 2012, p 18).
The panel of independent experts at the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) spent six months studying all the evidence before concluding that current use of this chemical poses an unacceptable risk to bees. There is now a clear and consistent body of evidence showing that bumblebees feeding on treated crops suffer significant harm.
The EFSA and almost everybody else apart from the manufacturers agree that this class of pesticides was not adequately evaluated in the first place. Yet politicians chose to ignore all of this.
Presumably their opinions were swayed by the claims that restricting use of these insecticides will cause vast economic losses to farming; claims that, by contrast, are not supported by evidence.
Revolting chimps
You reported the rare killing of an alpha male chimpanzee in Tanzania by his underlings (9 March, p 16). Perhaps they had simply had a gutful of the nasty brute, and made a collective decision to get rid of him once and for all. Plenty of tyrants have gone the same way.
No waste in space
Nigel Henbest, in his review of Are We Being Watched? (9 March, p 53), wonders where is the rubbish left behind as evidence of alien visits.
Elsewhere in the same edition, you report plans for a crewed trip to Mars that requires the recycling of pretty much everything, including bodily waste (p 6). For any significant inter-planetary expedition a high degree of recycling is required, since the only resources available to astronauts are those on their spaceship. Alien visitors would probably face the same problem, hence no waste.
No joke
The quip “Say goodbye to Ctrl+Alt+Del” on the cover of 快猫短视频 (16 February) related to your story about a computer that never crashes (p 21). But Ctrl+Alt+Del is used when a program stops, but the operating system is still running. When an OS crashes, this key combination no longer works.
The only option is to follow the advice of the most repeated joke on TV comedy show The IT Crowd: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
Asimov's future
You regularly report on the vast swathes of data collected on each of us online, including our “likes” on Facebook (16 March, p 22). Such information is increasingly being used for predictions, such as the likely location of flu epidemics, election results and so on.
Perhaps we are seeing the birth of psychohistory, as conceived by sci-fi author Isaac Asimov in his Foundation series. Psychohistory uses history, sociology and statistics to make general predictions about the behaviour of large groups of people.
The dark side
Stephen Battersby states that 95.5 per cent of the energy density of our universe is missing (2 March p 40). I wonder whether in another dimension of space-time there exist dark-matter/energy astronomers who are agonising over where the missing 4.5 per cent of their universe is?
For the record
鈥� We accidentally aged Katrina van Grouw in our review of her book The Unfeathered Bird (9 March, p 54). She worked at London’s Natural History Museum for seven years, not 30.