Editor's pick: We must break the taboo of male infertility
Moya Sarner’s excellent article about male infertility highlights how little is still understood about this subject (18 November, p 28). Men suffer in silence as a consequence.
In my book Male Infertility 鈥� Men Talking, published in 1993, I interviewed 22 men who wanted to share their experiences of male infertility with me on the strict understanding that their identity mustn’t be revealed. It was very much a taboo subject.
Each story was unique, but there were some common threads: feeling marginalised and guilty, and standing on the sidelines looking on as their partner received treatment rather than themselves. The emphasis on the woman left them feeling uncertain about loss and what they felt about fatherhood.
They suffered in silence, not wanting to burden their partner with their anguish. The good news is that men today are starting to talk more openly about their experiences, support each other and question why they are being left on the sidelines.
Updated 11 December, 2017: When this article was first published, the author’s name was misspelled. This has now been corrected.
A little bit of delusion may be good for you
I'm surprised at two of the entries in the list of supposed delusions (18 November, p 40). At the risk of revealing my own delusions, the first is: “Do you ever feel as if some people are not what they seem to be?” Many people aren't what they seem to be, fraudsters and psychopaths being good examples. Not being sensitive to this possibility lays one open to all sorts of problems.
The second is: “Do you feel that you are a very special or unusual person?” Everyone is special and unusual – just like everyone else.
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Really tiny, or just really far away? John Kochen clarification on the small, strange galaxies spotted in Hubble's Ultra Deep Field
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I read through the list of delusions and honestly answered “No” to all 21 of them, giving me a score of zero. Does this mean that I genuinely have no delusions, or am I deluded in thinking that I'm not delusional?
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Do people ever try to actively justify a delusion? Lately, I learned that a relative is a “flat-Earther”. Has a group of them ever mounted an expedition to bring back proof of the world's edge?
No matter how you look at it, reality is real
The collapse of the wave function is a favourite theme in 快猫短视频 and again you have a whole article about our role as observers in shaping reality (11 November, p 28).
But are we not just part of the whole? If we lack free will, then we don't “decide” to observe or not. Everything, including us, is at the same level of “just happening”.
The moon is there whether we think of looking at it or not.
No matter how you look at it, reality is real
The thought experiment designed by Eugene Wigner describes a friend in a closed room who knows the state of a quantum particle, whereas the author doesn't. An analogous real-world experience is sending a letter to 快猫短视频, or some other equally august organ.
I know I've sent it off, and I get a reply to acknowledge receipt. But the wave function of whether my epistle is actually printed doesn't collapse (for me) until I open subsequent issues and see if it is indeed there.
Making a killing in the arms industry
The argument espoused by David Hambling, that having autonomous killer robots is no different to autonomous vehicles making life-and-death decisions, is completely flawed (11 November, p 22).
Civilian autonomous vehicles will operate under civil law and will have to be designed to follow regulations or they won't be allowed on the roads. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, arms manufacturers will supply whatever the customer wants – and the customers aren't the ones who will be adversely affected by the product.
International law requires landmines to be detectable after deployment. To comply with the letter of the law, manufacturers supply devices with metal bands, but these are easy to strip away before they are laid.
US gun manufacturers supply semi-automatic weapons that are trivially easy to convert to being fully automatic. Does anyone really think that arms firms aren't going to make it easy to turn off the “ethical governor” – if such software is even possible?
Making a killing in the arms industry
David Hambling asks whether autonomous armed drones could make better decisions than humans. They are maybe more fairly described as differently biased rather than less biased. This is similar to how a medical artificial intelligence might discharge poorer patients, making its own immoral choices from its amoral code base.
And the hope of there being less risk to soldiers could be more accurately put as “less risk to soldiers from rich countries”.
The importance of realising we all die
“When I read your leader on death, I thought, “OMG, someone actually read My First One Million Years, a book I wrote (11 November, p 5). I doubted anyone ever would.
Whether or not your writer did actually read it, they are nevertheless spot on. The first prehistoric realisation that we are going to die one day has become the driving force for everything humans have ever done and will ever do. This includes, but isn't limited to, inventing gods, religions and all that jazz, and must surely count as the single most important idea ever to have occurred. If you disagree, download the book and tell me I'm wrong.
A moon in the retrograde is worth two in the bush
Leah Crane mentions that the moon Triton was captured into a retrograde orbit, one going the opposite way to Neptune's spin (18 November, p 16).
A near miss with a pre-existing moonlet is more effective at producing capture than is actual collision – a larger prograde momentum (one in the direction of the planet's spin) is transferred to the captured moon. If that were the case with Triton, we wouldn't expect any crater and so there would be no strong size constraint on the moonlet.
A sizeable moon in retrograde orbit will, once captured, have a strong tidal effect on the primary (Neptune in this case) in such a way as to make the moon's orbit become both smaller and more nearly perpendicular to the primary's equator.
Since the tidal effect is strongest when the moon is closest to the primary, it also tends to make the orbit more circular. Capture of further small moons into prograde orbits becomes more probable in the presence of a large moon in retrograde orbit, so some of Neptune's outer moons may have been captured after Triton.
The long journey to Mars begins in near space
Leah Crane outlines some of the problems facing a Mars mission (28 October, p 10). Radiation and low gravity could make the long trip sufficiently damaging to the astronauts' health to rule it out on ethical grounds. So any spacecraft must be heavily shielded and spin to provide quasi-gravity.
With current technology, it couldn't take off from or land on Earth or Mars. So it would have to be built on the moon and land on Deimos. In preparation, robot ships would carry components for a base and landing shuttle to Deimos, where robots would prepare them for Mars transit and build the base. Only then would a crewed landing be feasible.
That could be a long way off. By then, robots may be sufficiently intelligent to make human exploration redundant.
The editor writes:
• Building in orbit offers many advantages, such as being able to mine asteroids for radiation-shielding clay ().
Oh what a wonderful dream to have
It was fascinating to read how Nikolai Koltsov developed the concepts of genetics during the upheaval of the Russian revolution (21 October, p 40). As he lay dying, he said: “How I wish that everybody would wake up. That everybody would wake up.”
Many of us must still be dreaming. In the same edition (p 24), Paul Marks writes that it was wrong to aim for Mars before we had managed to live on the moon. It is good to dream about having such a choice. When we wake up, we will realise that our technology should be used to put our home, Earth, in order first.
Did little green fingers sow life on Earth?
I was fascinated by the implications of Claudius Gros's idea of distributing the seeds of life throughout the galaxy (18 November, p 10).
The fact that this is being contemplated means it is very likely that any other intelligent life in our galaxy has done so too.
To me, this vastly increases the chances that life on Earth came from outside the solar system.
Robot truck convoys could be a heavy burden
David Cooper, London, UK
Proponents of electric truck convoys (25 November, p 22) should consider that their control systems must avoid collapsing the road bridges they cross, before they invest in a technology. As a bridge engineer myself, perhaps I should welcome the prospect of increased business?
For the record
• SSRI antidepressants work better than placebo in 1 in 5 people; but don't stop without consulting your qualified medical professional (25 November, p 28).