Editor's pick:聽You simply couldn't build enough nuclear reactors
Paul Dorfman, , UK; Tom Burke, ; Steve Thomas, ; Jonathan Porritt, ; and David Lowry, , Cambridge, Massachusetts, US
Reporting the decline of nuclear power generation, you quote Michael Shellenberger’s view that nuclear power is necessary to prevent climate change (8 February, p 20). This view is truly dangerous.
Climate change poses a number of unique challenges to humanity. One of the most difficult is that the world not only needs to get to a specific place 鈥� a carbon-neutral global energy system 鈥� but also must get there by a specific time 鈥� the middle of the century. Otherwise the policy fails.
You simply couldn’t build enough nuclear reactors fast enough, even to replace the existing reactors that will reach the end of their life by 2050, let alone to replace fossil fuels in the existing electricity system or in the more electricity-intensive global economy we are currently building.
This would be true even if we were willing and able to overcome all the other unsolved problems that nuclear reactors face. These include their affordability, accidents, waste management, nuclear weapons proliferation, the scarcity of talent and system inflexibility.
Some reasons not to take up alphabetic writing (1)
Colin Barras reports that official scribes seem not to have taken up a phonetic alphabet (8 February, p 34). The reason for this may be that dialect speakers may not recognise the phonetic writing of speakers of other dialects. The greater the empire you administer, the more serious this problem is. China kept a multi-lingual country together using an ideographic script.
Some reasons not to take up alphabetic writing (2)
Systems with one symbol per word can, in principle, be used without knowing the language for which they were originally developed. This enables all the members of a community, whatever language they speak, to use the same written script, as in China today.
Something like this is happening now. Digital messages are used by speakers of thousands of languages, who are developing a universal collection of emojis, the only significant hieroglyphic system invented for thousands of years.
Law is needed to manage the new industrial frontier
You report that legal action could be used to stop Starlink satellites affecting telescope images (8 February, p 14). Two dead satellites 鈥� the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, launched in 1983, and GGSE-4, an experimental US Air Force satellite launched in 1967 鈥� in late January. This emphasises the need for greater international oversight of the space above Earth.
You have reported on the risks of satellite collisions (30 March 2019, p 26) and calls for rules of the road in space (14 September 2019, p 15). I recall little discussion of the responsibility of the owners of objects orbiting our planet.
With abandoned oil wells, mines and manufacturing plants, the cost of cleaning up has eventually fallen on taxpayers.
Governments have adopted legislation on legal responsibility for disposal of manufactured goods, such as the US and EU directives implementing . They need to apply the same principles to commercialisation and industrialisation of space.
Had the two objects actually collided in January and the resulting debris caused significant damage or harm, who would be liable? The space above us is becoming so crowded that, eventually, there will be a collision that will either directly cause significant harm or will result in a pin-balling of damaged objects. Astronomers, geophysicists and others in related disciplines need to become more vocal in demanding the development of appropriate global policies.
The evolution of sexuality and the blind date model (1)
Andrew Barron mentions a study that showed that same-sex attraction could be a polygenic trait rather than a monogenic one (8 February, p 23). Either way, as identical twins share the same genes they should have the same sexual orientation if the trait is entirely genetic. But it is known that if one brother is gay, there is only about a 50 per cent chance that his identical twin is.
So genes alone cannot fully explain same-sex attraction. Might it have an epigenetic aspect?
In f, Nessa Carey concludes there are two conditions for a phenomenon to be considered epigenetic: that two things are genetically identical but phenotypically variable; or an organism is influenced long after an initiating event has occurred.
Sexual attraction to men or to women is often discovered in adolescence and continues for the lifetime of the individual. Identical twins with opposite orientations meet both Carey’s conditions.
The evolution of sexuality and the blind date model (2)
Barron considers why same-sex attraction isn’t a paradox. His explanation of the evolution of sexuality shares one thing with all other explanations I have seen: it is far too complicated.
Sexual reproduction works for species that don’t distinguish between mating with their own or the other sex. As long as they sometimes mate with the opposite sex they will reproduce.
There will, however, be a selection advantage for preferring the opposite gender, so such a preference is likely to evolve. The mechanism for this preference probably won’t always prevail and will sometimes result in a preference for the same gender. No other explanation is necessary.
The editor writes:
Julia Monk of Yale University and colleagues recently advanced just such a hypothesis: Nature Ecology & Evolution, .
The economics of staring into a simulated universe (1)
Donna Lu’s account of the suggestion that we may be living in a simulation made me think (1 February, p 42). If we were, it is possible that time would appear to run slower close to large and complex objects, as the computer we are running on struggles to process all the myriad interactions before being able to move from one state to another. This will sound familiar to those acquainted with relativity.
And if I were programming this simulation, I’d deal only with the interactions that mattered 鈥� those that were being “observed” by my simulated beings. All the rest I’d leave in an indeterminate state.
For the record – 29 February 2020
鈥� An AI trained at Stanford University in California can predict who is most likely to respond to an antidepressant from measurements of brain activity (15 February, p 19).
Some reasons not to take up alphabetic writing (3)
Your article on the invention of the alphabet brings to mind a modern conundrum. Why do we still teach the Latin alphabet as “A, B, C, D…”?
This series isn’t particularly useful. We could consider changing the teaching order to “Q, W, E, R, T, Y…” This at least has relevance for children learning to type rather than write by hand.
The economics of staring into a simulated universe (2)
Lu reports the concern of philosopher Preston Greene that our present reality might be switched off if we were in danger of discovering that we live in a simulation. This shouldn’t be our greatest worry. We should be more anxious lest our simulator overlords find that their research budget has been cancelled, as the experiment has been deemed to have little commercial value.
The economics of staring into a simulated universe (3)
It seems as though a quote from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is relevant here: If you stare long enough into the void, the void stares back at you.