Editor's Pick: Everything put together falls apart, unless we have a vision (1)
As a scientifically curious artist I was interested to read Laura Spinney's article on the possible collapse of Western civilisation as we know it (20 January, p 28). But what would earlier writers have made of it all? Well, the writer Rudyard Kipling : “Cities and Thrones and Powers / Stand in Time's eye, / Almost as long as flowers, / Which daily die.”
On our inability to deal with our own personal contribution to impending doom, he : “We had a kettle: we let it leak: / Our not repairing it made it worse. / Now we haven't had any tea for a week… / The bottom is out of the Universe.”
But the last word goes to another poet and lyricist, Paul Simon, summing up all human history in his song .
Editor's Pick: Everything put together falls apart, unless we have a vision (2)
Spinney's article and your Leader (20 January, p 5) provide a useful underpinning for thoughts that must be haunting many of us who have paid attention to world news in the last decade. What they omit, however, is a vision or ideas that might inspire a great majority of humanity toward a long-term consensus.
Though Marxism, for example, has manifestly failed – arguably through its divisiveness – its early spread did show the possibility of inspirational ideas having powerful and widespread influence. Surely, now, attempts should be made to counter pessimism by trying to work out and promulgate some inspirational vision of humanity's future to which most governments, organisations and populations might be able and willing to subscribe.
It won't be easy to find common ground between authoritarian and democratic governments, nor across sectarian and other divides – but that just indicates how far-seeing such a vision would need to be.
We corrected the county in which Chichester lies.
Several ways we could handle the heat (1)
John Pickrell suggests ways to stay cool in heatwaves (20 January, p 36). Before Saddam Hussein came to power, I lived in Basra in southern Iraq. It was said to be the hottest major city on the planet, with both high humidity and 40°C summer temperatures.
The modern city of cement and brick with asphalt boulevards was almost uninhabitable in summer without air conditioning. The old city was better, with closely packed light wooden structures in narrow alleys. But the prize belonged to the people of the Mesopotamian marshes to the north, who probably knew more than anyone about natural climate amelioration. They had lived in buildings adapted to the climate since Babylonian times. These were made of bundles of reeds that didn't absorb heat, with open entrances that ensured a flow of air. They were delightful to sit in.
Is it possible to envisage a post-anthropogenic climate change architecture that learns from the experts of the past?
Several ways we could handle the heat (2)
More ways to keep cool in our increasingly hot climate include building houses on stumps 2 metres high to allow cooling air to circulate underneath. This, along with high ceilings that allow hot air to rise away from the occupants, is how old Queensland houses were built.
Chimneys can also help by sucking warm air out of a structure by Bernoulli's principle. Finally, recessing the house into the ground can keep it cool – or even burying it all, as in the town of in South Australia.
Several ways we could handle the heat (3)
What about solar-powered air conditioning? It is impossible for any form of air conditioning to reduce net global warming, but solar power would surely be an improvement on the fossil fuel status quo, especially in sunny places with dispersed populations such as Pickrell's own Australia.
It would be interesting to see a quantification of just how great this improvement might be. Clearly the energy required for manufacture, installation and eventual dismantling and recycling of the units would have to be taken into account, although much of that might come from renewable sources. Even if the benefit to the global energy balance is smaller than we hope, the immediate, local benefits of zero running costs and immunity to grid outages would surely make such systems attractive.
Several ways we could handle the heat (4)
Pickrell writes: “The creation of air-conditioned public refuges is another option that was discussed widely during last summer's heatwave here in Australia.” But they already exist, are numerous and nobody is more than a short drive from one. They are called shopping malls and are very widely used for just that purpose, not least in this summer's extreme heatwave. Thousands of square metres of air-conditioned space, interesting shops, play areas for children, food outlets, cinemas… What government refuge could possibly compare with that?
First class post – 17 February 2018
It depends on the expectation of what is ‘comfortable’, doesn't it? Gemma Pearce that it is impossible to live comfortably without trashing Earth (10 February, p 10)
Quantify the economy in physical terms, please
Bryn Glover is undoubtedly correct that money has absolutely no intrinsic value (Letters, 16 December). It was this that led us at the University of Edinburgh to look at the economy and the numerous interactions within it using not money, but a physical unit of account: the energy embodied in goods and services as they are brought to the market. We summarised our findings in the book .
Our aim wasn't to dislodge conventional economic ways of thinking, but rather to identify the physical boundaries within which economies are constrained to operate: even economists cannot escape thermodynamic limits. Not surprisingly, the approach was received unenthusiastically by traditionalists; it attracted considerable interest otherwise.
If we fall down, here's how to get up again
Joan Zealey writes of her mother's failure to get up again after falling (Letters, 27 January). I worked as a specialist physiotherapist for people who had had a leg amputated. One of the criteria for discharge from hospital was that everybody was shown how to get up from a fall.
This involved lying still for a while to get over the shock of the fall, then rolling onto their side and pushing up into a sitting position. Once sitting, they were shown how to “bum shuffle” backwards using their hands for support and the remaining leg for propulsion. If they had stairs, they bum shuffled to the bottom of the stairs and raised themselves backwards, step by step, until they could use the bannisters to pull themselves into standing.
Surprisingly, even the very old or weak seemed to manage this very well, in spite of having only one leg for propulsion!
Don't deny me pain relief for others' problems
I do understand that, as Andrew Kolodny says, there is a problem with the over-prescription of opioids and that many people could manage their pain with less powerful versions (13 January, p 35). Even a mild pain gets very wearing and hampering if it never goes away. And if it does persist, as with the chronic arthritis I have, becoming addicted to painkillers is more or less irrelevant, since I continue to need relief anyway.
Though Kolodny doesn't want to ban painkillers, anyone with chronic pain will understand the fear of being denied relief because of other people's problems. The pain is real, it may never go away, and nor will the need for effective drugs. Perhaps research into safer but equally effective pain treatments might be the best cure for the addiction crisis. And controlling the drug companies, of course. They have been allowed to over-sell into the ludicrously commercial US medical system.
Are we alone in the universe or not? (2)
We currently have little idea how even simple life could have evolved from inert chemicals, so we must not get ahead of ourselves when discussing types of life that could exist elsewhere in the universe. It seems to me that a universe with a single occurrence of life is almost infinitely more probable than a more ordered universe in which life is slightly more commonplace. Rest assured, we are alone.
Are we alone in the universe or not? (1)
Dirk Schulze-Makuch and William Bains make a very good case for expecting life, even complex life, to have evolved and proliferated across the galaxy (13 January, p 22). But they argue that failure so far to find evidence of extraterrestrial technology suggests the evolution of technological civilisations may prove a real stumbling block.
There is another possibility. Our own galaxy has been around for over 10 billion years, more than twice as long as the solar system. There is plenty of time for advanced civilisations to have evolved elsewhere. Assuming a random distribution across time of many evolutions, most would be millions of years ahead of us.
Such super-beings wouldn't have sat around waiting to be discovered by earthlings. They would have discovered us a long time ago. I think they would find a way of subtly hinting to us that Earth's civilisation wasn't as unique as we thought.
A most interesting thing about earwax
Christie Wilcox, describing the secrets of earwax, didn't mention a most interesting thing about our ears and earwax that helps to explain many of the issues discussed (23/30 December 2017, p 67). This is the fac+t that the skin in the ear canal grows outwards, just as our fingernails do, and at a similar rate. This carries the wax outwards to be eventually cleared, and results in the waxy historical record Wilcox refers to.
For the record – 17 February 2018
• The inconstant moon: its orbit is inclined 5 degrees to the ecliptic, the plane of Earth's orbit around the sun (28 November 2015, p 13).