Details of first language may be lost forever
Your article on the history of European and other languages was interesting and informative. As Andrea Valentino reports, linguistic and genetic research in combination may push back our knowledge to 12,000 BC or even earlier, and this might tell us something about a possible language from which apparently unrelated linguistic groups (Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic and others) have descended(26 November, p 36).
However, the suggestion that we may, therefore, be coming closer to uncovering the “deep roots of language” and establishing the nature of the “mother tongue” that was the ancestor of all languages, is quite unrealistic.
Language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years. For around 90 per cent of human history, languages have developed, been displaced, split, displaced other languages and become extinct. Very nearly all the languages ever spoken have certainly disappeared without trace.
Even if there were a single ancestral “mother tongue” 鈥� and this isn’t certain, as language may have developed more than once in different populations 鈥� all we can know of its nature is that it shared the structural features that all languages must have in order to function. More specific information is, sadly, irrecoverable.
Reptile talk is no surprise to owners of pet turtles
You report on a study revealing that turtles vocalise. However, anyone who has had the privilege of a Testudinidae roommate won’t be surprised. They will probably remember approaching his or her bowl at dinner time, seeing a head rise up above the water, mouth open, and hearing a soft little peep(29 October, p 12).
Could this be the answer to cosmic constants puzzle?
In your interview with Roger Penrose, he points out that “nobody knows where the fundamental constants of nature come from”(19 November, p 46).
Neither an infinitely numerous multiverse nor an infinitely repeating cyclic universe seems to offer plausible or attractive answers to me. But perhaps there was some evolutionary process in the early universe, which we don’t yet understand, by which many of the possible combinations of constant values were tried out rapidly 鈥� since a lot of them would lead to immediate collapse 鈥� until a stable combination was arrived at, resulting in the universe we see. In other words, ours is the only possible universe.
How to get around the car recharging problem
After reading Kathryn Harkup’s vision for an electric vehicle future, I wonder if it isn’t too late to change direction in how we handle the problem of rapidly recharging electric transport. Perhaps we can return to an idea used on (26 November, p 25).
If there were a small number of standard conformations of car batteries, then, instead of long, frustrated queues of holiday traffic waiting for a half-hour session at a public recharging station, things could be easier. This is how I imagine it. A car pauses at the re-batt station. The type and position of its battery has been read, and the spent one is swiftly removed and then replaced robotically. The driver taps their bank card and they are on their way.
Large companies would be responsible for making, maintaining and recycling these batteries, which would be charged with surplus renewable energy.
For geothermal, the Tube offers a source of heat
I can’t help feeling that heating the UK with geothermal energy is just another misguided, silver-bullet solution. Your article reports there are (maybe) 100 years of energy that could be harvested. That doesn’t sound like that much(29 October, p 16).
After 100 years, we would have to tackle the ecological effects of geothermal energy 鈥� because there are bound to be some. Maybe a better use of geothermal technology would be to extract the heat that has been dumped into the ground over the past century by London’s Tube trains.
In praise of Chanda's stance on JWST name
Simon Robinson objects to Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s proposal that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) be renamed in honour of Harriet Tubman, writing: “Let us remember past scientists, technicians and engineers for their contributions to their fields, without seeking to judge them because they lived at a time when social attitudes were different(Letters, 12 November).”
But Webb wasn’t a scientist, technician or engineer: he was a career civil servant and head of NASA at the time of a federal policy of purging LGBT individuals from the agency’s workforce.
As Prescod-Weinstein has noted in her : “The time for lionizing leaders who acquiesced in a history of harm is over. We should name telescopes out of love for those who came before us and led the way to freedom 鈥� and out of love for those who are coming up after.”
Climate action will only come with mass suffering
Lloyd Timberlake accurately summarises why we “will not and cannot manage” the challenge of climate change: “We won’t make major sacrifices for future generations.” We continue, as with COP27, to pretend to act in earnest(Letters, 3 December).
Additionally, most of us in wealthier countries can still deceive ourselves by clinging to the comforts of the lives we have known. And, as is seen by the reaction of the UK government, any climate protests that cause inconvenience will be dealt with increasingly harshly. Also, different governments act in different ways, and some may be influenced by people who deny the reality of climate change.
The question remains: can we change? The only way, it seems to me, will be when suffering is so widespread that the populations of various countries insist on a different type of leader with much changed and more collaborative agendas.
The future seems bleak, but we must keep acknowledging the problem and demanding such change.