Martian holiday
In your look at how to build a colony on Mars (18 May, p 8), it was suggested that finding a resource to trade with Earth would be essential for its survival. Yet Mars is unlikely to supply unique goods, so any colony should concentrate on tourism instead. Some people would pay any amount for six-star accommodation, while backpackers could work as cabin crew en route, and then in the proposed greenhouses picking lettuces.
Of course, Mars would be in competition with the moon, which could offer much shorter 鈥� and cheaper 鈥� holidays, but Mars would have more interesting weather.
To my knowledge, all this talk of colonising Mars has never touched on one very possible downside: war. Here on Earth, even neighbouring countries with the same ethnic and religious mix will take up arms against one another. How much more likely would it be for populations separated by millions of kilometres to come to look upon each other as foreign devils?
Very likely, especially if the colony became self-sustaining, with its population swelled by Mars-born generations wanting independence from their imperial masters. Any emerging independent Martian government would seek military superiority over its only known neighbour: Earth.
Crime network
A system that uses random strangers sourced from the twittersphere to deliver parcels in relays (18 May, p 17) sounds like a dream for terrorists and drug smugglers. It won’t catch on.
Nuclear needs
Jochen Flasbarth’s article outlining a future free of nuclear power (18 May, p 24) was as hubristic about Germany’s energy future as environmentalists are hysterical about global warming. Germany has far from proved it can do without nuclear power. We shall only know if it can when (and if) its government kills the industry stone dead, as is slated to occur in 2022, and we see how much nuclear energy Germany then imports from its neighbours.
My understanding is that German industry is, to say the least, worried about the security of its electricity supply as the nation increasingly relies on wind and solar power. The cost of power is also a concern, and companies are reportedly planning to relocate to the US. German energy policy, like that of other European nations, could serve only to de-industrialise the continent.
Red alert
Your editorial suggests it would be better to rebuild damaged ecosystems to incorporate human activity, rather than rewind them to how they were before we started meddling (18 May, p 3). But we shouldn’t yet throw in the towel for most seabed ecosystems.
Many are close to their natural state and those that are exploited are not manipulated by humans to the same degree as terrestrial ecosystems. Many will rebound if damaging pressures are removed.
For those that are damaged or threatened, I fear we will end up with a few well-studied ones in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s proposed Red List of Ecosystems, while most will fall into the “data deficient” dustbin. As with the Red List for species, policy advisors and politicians will only pay attention to ecosystems on the list and not to those without the requisite quantitative information on rarity or decline.
Cosmic compendium
Your recent look at string theory addressed its potential to overcome the problem of Boltzmann brains 鈥� spontaneous conscious entities that physicists predict could form by chance in our universe given a vast amount of time (25 May, p 12). But if the universe is destined to fill up with something that the laws of physics don’t rule out, it could be anything, not just space brains.
I expect to see much less complex (and so more probable) things sooner, such as Penny Black postage stamps or rubber chickens. Or trillions of monkeys with typewriters who will produce not only the complete works of Shakespeare, but a much fuller version, featuring all the plays and sonnets that Shakespeare didn’t have time to write.
Dark thoughts
Sometimes I wonder what’s in a name. Doesn’t the fact that there is so much talk about dark energy and dark matter (11 May, p 32) imply that we have no idea what is going on in the universe?
Maybe one answer will come from gravitational tests with antihydrogen atoms at CERN near Geneva in Switzerland (). If they prove that matter and antimatter repulse each other, then we may finally have a plausible explanation for the accelerated expansion of our universe that doesn’t actually require dark energy.
Stephen Battersby said that one thing we know about dark energy is that it “pushes” (11 May, p 32). But couldn’t it simply be that dark energy is the result of an attractive force acting on our observable universe?
Smart money
In his letter on corporate responsibility, Ian Hill asks: “what qualifications… do the people at the top have?” (18 May, p 29). The main one is cleverness. In the financial sector, unfortunately, it is the kind of cleverness that gives it a bad name, having been used to con the rest of us into believing that moving our money about is both profoundly important and worthy of absurd rewards.
Like astrologers, they think the future is foreseeable, and like alchemists, they search for a philosopher’s stone 鈥� ever more complex software 鈥� that will turn the leaden present into a golden future. Clever indeed to finagle us all with two dead “sciences”.
Paranoid android?
One thing I felt was missing from your look at consciousness was the role of emotion and empathy (18 May, p 30). A “zombie” eats when it is hungry and puts on extra clothes when it is cold, but it is not aware. A human is happy after eating and knows that when hungry in the future, eating is likely to bring happiness. This leads to planning, one of the functions of consciousness.
What’s more, a human also knows that others are likely to do what makes them feel happy. Empathy is an extremely important part of consciousness, and there can be no empathy without emotion.
Consciousness is unlikely to develop in isolation 鈥� why would it? It has developed to enable us to interact with others. So it is unlikely we will ever make a conscious machine without including emotion.
Torture ray
The point about the Active Denial “pain ray” weapon, which, when fired causes pain in the victim without leaving a mark, is that it is not designed to subdue, as claimed in your article (11 May, p 44). In this it differs from tasers, water cannon and projectiles. Potential victims would do anything to avoid the pain, which in crowded situations could lead to injury in others fighting to get away, or even a stampede. Similarly, if fired at close quarters, the wielder of the weapon would be at risk from defensive violence, rendering its use in prison disturbances unwise.
If, however, one was going to design the perfect method of torture, this would come close. The psychological damage would be greatly compounded by the complete lack of physical evidence. Survivors would be unable to successfully seek asylum in countries where even gross physical signs are often discounted as self-inflicted.
If these weapons become available they will inevitably be used to torture, which is why they must not be made.
Sign this way
Your article on gestural control of computers talks about a number of possible systems (25 May, p 40), but sign language is not mentioned. Surely this is well recognised and, if adopted, could be a useful extra communication tool for deaf people.
I'll think about it
We have been told that when a person imagines they are playing tennis, the parts of the brain associated with actually playing the game “light up”. We are also told that when a person makes a decision, the part of the brain associated with the decision “lights up” before the person is conscious of making the decision (18 May, p 37).
Surely this is to be expected? An important part of the decision-making process is to mentally rehearse the consequences. Thus the part of the brain involved is active before the decision is made. Are we not observing the decision-making process rather than the actual decision?
Cosmic verse
I was interested in your editorial extolling the poetic lament for NASA’s Kepler satellite (25 May, p 3). Another scientist who turned to poetry is the 18th-century polymath Erasmus Darwin, member of the Birmingham Lunar Society and Charles’s grandfather, after whom my place of work 鈥� Erasmus Darwin Academy 鈥� is named.
Among other topics, his verses feature a proto-theory of evolution, which doubtless would have influenced his grandson. Even more prescient was his suggestion of something not unlike the big bang theory (albeit preceded by a big crunch) in his short poem To the Stars.
For the record
鈥� Our look at attempts to put a figure on potential sea level rise due to climate change (25 May, p 26) should have said there is less than a 1 in 20 chance that the melting of ice sheets will contribute more than 84 centimetres to sea level rise by 2100.
鈥� Leap Motion’s box that can track ultra-fine hand and finger movements will cost $80, not $70 as we reported (25 May, p 40).