At last, survival of the kindest is centre stage
Congratulations on “The last human”, a superb article on the increasing evidence that human survival through harsh times was a result of our skill at working together (27 November, p 38). It is timely, both post-COP26 and in this centenary year of the death of Russian scientist Peter Kropotkin, who argued that evolution was driven by mutual aid within a species.
This could be a good time to revisit his conclusions and the mass of evidence he gathered in support of them.
Fundamental problems are at the core of poor diets
Richard Sebes stating that no health-conscious vegan would live on junk food misses the point of the original article (Letters, 20 November 30 October, p 38). As a meat eater, I share the view that no health-conscious carnivore would live on junk food either, but a very large proportion of the population does.
The problem is that many parts of the world have had decades of policy that says food must be cheap, exacerbated by the fact that at least two generations haven’t been taught to cook. This has given the food industry the chance to process more and more of our food.
If we are going to improve our health, reduce food waste and move to sustainable ingredients, we need to tackle such problems.
We must be pragmatic about climate pledges
The pledge by many nations to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 is intended to address global heating, but the most we should expect from this is for raised temperatures to perpetuate for decades thereafter, due to inevitable lags between causes and effects (13 November, p 8).
We should honestly acknowledge that our objectives are constrained by realpolitik. The best we can aim for is to prolong our current human civilisation, to minimise present-day disruption and to protect future generations as far as we can by spreading out in time the adaptations required to survive in a hotter, harsher and more challenging world.
That isn’t an ignoble aim. It appears to me to be the de facto objective of the actions taken so far by world governments, but it falls some way short of saving the planet.
The great unanswerable question about alien life
Abigail Beall says that it seems unlikely that there are no aliens, given the huge number of planets in the cosmos (20 November, p 36). But we have no idea how life gets started, so even if there are zillions of planets, we can’t say that it is likely that there is life.
On the other hand, although she cites SETI pioneer Jill Tarter as saying that we haven’t listened for long enough or looked hard enough for signals from intelligent extraterrestrials or for signs of them to be able to say that there are no aliens, the fact is that we will never be able to say that there are none.
If we find that there are aliens, then we could answer the question in the affirmative (though I doubt we will), but we can never answer the question in the negative.
Rise in air conditioning use seems inevitable
Fred White exhibits a very British attitude to the decadent air conditioning, though many of us have come to love it in our cars (Letters, 16 October).
He is obviously well aware that cooling in general already accounts for 10 per cent of global emissions, a figure set to soar as billions more air con units are brought into use worldwide in the coming decades. No amount of clever passive design, shading, planting and venting will save us when a 45 to 50掳C heat dome settles over north-west Europe.
I am peripherally involved in upgrading the heating in our village hall. We are looking at air-to-air cabinet-style heat pumps, and if possible I will make sure they can work in reverse to cool, powered when needed by solar panels on the roof. I can foresee a time when people will seek out the village hall to cool off.
We are still building homes unsuitable for heat pumps
There is more and more hype regarding the push for air source heat pumps (23 October, p 9). On the edge of our small town, 300 houses are being built, all with gas boiler heating and standard insulation levels.
To retrofit these with heat pumps and have the recommended air circulation space of a metre on all sides of the pump would mean the occupants giving up almost half of their small gardens, leaving them with barely enough space for a washing line.
As all the houses have wooden panel fencing, there would be insufficient air flow around the gardens on cold, still nights, reducing heat pump performance at a time when heat is needed.
Unintended consequences of our renewable future
Graham Lawton’s article on the scaling up of mineral extraction for renewable technologies reinforced my fears that wholesale conversion to electric vehicles would generate its own problems, and that these may have been underestimated (13 November, p 38).
I may not live to see the day, but lorries, aircraft and possibly cars could be powered by green hydrogen, with their fuel made from seawater using surplus electricity. To this end, we need to maximise electricity generation.
We should learn a lesson from industrialisation that plundering natural resources for coal, oil, gas and now moving on to zinc, copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and rare earth elements has had 鈥� and will continue to have 鈥� unfortunate environmental and political consequences.
Let's deploy AI on other great problems in science
Harking back to your coverage of the achievements of DeepMind’s AI approach to protein folding, I wondered if the long-standing problems of creating a suitable material for a room-temperature superconductor and of practical fusion power might be good subjects for this technique (31 July, p 14).
Breakthroughs in these issues would certainly contribute a great deal to the current threat of global warming.