There are more ways to profit from going green
While I agree with your leader about the political response to global warming, I believe that you are too pessimistic when you say that “dealing with climate change comes with a cost”. (25 May, p 5)
On the contrary, making the transition to renewable energy is a natural investment. As the price of energy storage comes down, the marginal cost of renewable energy generation is falling to zero, since wind, sun and waves are free resources. This is in sharp contrast to hydrocarbon fuels that must be extracted at great cost.
Countries that continue to invest in hydrocarbon resources are saddling themselves with technology that will soon be obsolete and unable to compete directly with renewable energy. Those that lead the way with renewables will enjoy a competitive advantage in global markets. For once, greed is good!
How long till we reach peak population?
I am not sure why Graham Lawton thinks population growth is a taboo subject (25 May, p 24). I have recently read three books that discuss it and it would seem overpopulation is a battle that is mostly won.
A great deal of the world already has a fertility rate at, or below, replacement level. Even in those parts of the world where birth rates are higher, graphs of fertility over the past 30 to 50 years show a sharp decline.
Industrialisation, urbanisation and especially education are drivers of population decline and there is no reason to suppose those declines won't continue.
Hans Rosling at the Gapminder Foundation thought the year of “peak child” was 2000. In Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism and progress, Steven Pinker examines how the fertility decline that took Europe 200 years was reached by the developing world in just two generations. In Empty Planet: The shock of global population decline, authors Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson make a strong case that the human population will peak at around 9 billion in 20 to 30 years, then decline.
It may be that the fear of too many people will soon be replaced (as it already has been in Japan and Singapore) with a fear of too few: not enough tax payers to support a greying population and not enough young consumers to drive an economy.
Age is just a number, unless you're giving blood
Ruby Prosser Scully continues a story that has rumbled through the pages of 快猫短视频 for the past couple of years, lending hope that ageing could be delayed by transfusions of young blood (8 June, p 7). Having been a regular blood donor for 45 years, I observe that the majority of donors are, like myself, older. The likelihood is that the donated blood will find its way into a younger recipient, presumably having the opposite effect to young blood. Has this been thought through? Should donated blood be “age stamped”?
Weighty theories on the matchbox illusion (1)
You report an illusion whereby three matchboxes together appear to be lighter than the heaviest box on its own (25 May, p 13). I believe this error occurs because we are comparing the weight of the heaviest box not to the total weight of all three, but to the average weight of them.
We can't compare grouped items directly. Instead, we must identify differences by comparing individual items with the group average. For example, we identify the heaviest of the boxes because it is the one that feels heavier than the average of the three, not because we compare the weights of the individual boxes.
Similarly, suppose you look at a black square that is beside a white square. The black square appears darker than the white one, not because you are comparing the two squares, but because the black square is darker than the average of the two, which is grey.
Weighty theories on the matchbox illusion (2)
I have a couple of observations following your article on the matchbox illusion. First, an item of flat pack furniture seems to be far less heavy once assembled. Second, when the head of a pint of Guinness settles, it appears to have gained weight.
Could an object’s density fool our perception of its weight?
Which countries take part in nuclear inspections?
I commend Debora MacKenzie's article about Iran's nuclear programme, which points out the unintended consequences of US president Donald Trump's withdrawal from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement (18 May, p 11).
However, I was surprised at the line: “the standard inspections the IAEA does in all countries with nuclear plants”. I thought that the IAEA had been refused access to nuclear facilities in Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea?
The editor writes:
• Perhaps strictly we should have said: “in all member countries with nuclear plants”. The countries mentioned aren't members of the IAEA and haven't signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, or have signed and left in the case of North Korea. The general inspections obligation applies to all states that have signed the treaty apart from the recognised nuclear weapons states (the P5), although the P5 have agreements with the IAEA whereby their civil nuclear plants are inspected as a courtesy.
Carbon tax must come with carbon dividends
I commend your article on the European Parliamentary elections for flagging up the fear of higher environmental taxes, which could only make life disproportionately harder for poorer people (25 May, p 23). It may fuel populism and encourage the idea that environmentalists are part of an elite.
The carbon fee and dividend scheme championed by climate scientist James Hansen accounts for this, and, indeed, inverts it: all levies raised from extraction or import are divided equally between citizens. The dividend for someone on a low income would easily outweigh the price increases to their weekly shop. A high earner who overconsumes would be penalised and hopefully given incentive to adapt. Hard for a populist to argue against a scheme that makes those who are profiting less from society richer.
A world without rubber might not be so bad
I just read your feature about Earth's rubber supply (18 May, p 44). As someone with allergies to latex and the accelerators used in rubber production (carba mix and thiuram mix), the prospect of a world without rubber seems fantastic. I think this should serve as a wake-up call that we have, yet again, become too dependent on a finite resource and alternatives should be considered. My view may be biased, but I don't think it is unjust. The rubber particles end up in our atmosphere and it could be contributing to the rise in allergies. Pollution is never a good thing.
We have to change if we want to make it in space
Your leader about the new space age made me think back to all the starry-eyed dreams of space travel I had as a child, watching space missions and sci-fi programmes on TV (18 May, p 5). Where is the vacation on the moon that I was promised? Where is the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey that I should be using and fearing? We have great gadgets, to be sure, but they are about as sentient as a toaster.
Crewed space travel has turned out to be far more expensive and dangerous than I imagined as a child. Is it necessary? Wouldn't it be great if robots could do the dangerous work instead? I hope to see the day when humans won't need to go down mine shafts to extract minerals, likewise for the worst bits of space travel.
Then again, venturing into space will eventually become vital. Mother Nature has placed us in a trap: a presently fertile world that will eventually be rendered uninhabitable by a bloated red giant star. If we are to make the transition, we will have to alter our genome to cope, creating Homo spatialis, able to handle radiation and microgravity without collapsing into a heap.
AI's countless failings foretold in fiction
So Deepmind's artificial intelligence can't add up (13 April, p 12). That reminds me of the late, great Stanislaw Lem, who foresaw this more than 50 years ago in his short story Trurl's Machine. The eponymous inventor creates an eight-storey thinking machine that, when asked to calculate two plus two, thinks for a while and replies “seven”. At least Deepmind's AI didn't try to kill its creators – unlike Trurl's machine.
Free will is complicated, let's leave it at that (1)
I would like to challenge the view of mathematics presented in Peter Bennett's letter on the topic of free will (Letters, 25 May). He seems to think that mathematics can only deal with problems that can be described in either a simplistic deterministic way or as the result of entirely random events. He is therefore incapable of describing phenomena where hysteresis is involved, a feature that would seem essential if free will implies that different outcomes can occur for ostensibly the same inputs.
The final output of a mind that creates the actions of a “free agent” may be expected to have a complex relationship to the prior states and external stimuli that produced it. Indeed, it is probable that elements of the end state act through feedback mechanisms on their prior states, before coalescing into their final form.
The complexity of such a highly nonlinear process in the brain may be almost impossible to model comprehensively, but it can be represented by mathematics, even if the state information and details of the interactions will always elude us.
Free will is complicated, let's leave it at that (2)
Continuing the debate on free will that regularly features in 快猫短视频 these days, I am concerned that the scientific costs of this discourse are rising exponentially as more scientists pick a side.
I realise that doing science also requires discussion, so that we might progress by such means as well as through experiment and empirical observation. None of these methods can check free will via the scientific method.
The costs of discussing an unprovable conjecture like the existence of free will are wasted “science”. If one can’t present serious evidence beyond the work of the mind alone, then one can’t prove the speculation, no matter how long the discussion lasts.
快猫短视频s need to consider how much research time they are wasting on this topic, then get on with properly testable science and leave free will to the philosophers.
Different verbs for different celestial bodies
I read your headline “Chinese rover unearths moon's deeper secrets”, and I suspect we are being trolled (25 May, p 16). Surely the proper verb would be “unmoons”.