Grappling with imminent prospect of scary warming (1)
Even with 1.5掳C of warming on the very near horizon, the vast majority of humanity seems to be in denial of climate change and is failing to act. Perhaps calling it climate change is part of the problem. I suggest always calling it human-induced warming or fossil fuel-induced warming, so the cause is clear (10 June, p 32).
I would also like it more clearly stated that 1.5掳C of global warming is the average of the oceans and the land. The oceans warm more slowly, which means average land warming is .
Grappling with imminent prospect of scary warming (2)
We are at more than 424 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and rising. With no reference to temperatures, the chemist James Lovelock 鈥� who proposed the Gaia hypothesis 鈥� considered approaching 450 ppm to be reckless; by then, damaging, irreversible positive feedbacks would start locking into place.
Unlike speculating about temperatures, CO2 levels have the politically inconvenient property of clearly quantifying the carbon quota remaining for nations over the next 10 years before reaching Lovelock’s point of no return.
Grappling with imminent prospect of scary warming (3)
You say that carbon cuts alone won’t be enough to reverse catastrophic climate change. I agree. Measures introduced so far will have very little effect. Emissions continue to rise, even accelerating. This is doomsday unless something drastic is done.
Fiddling with carbon capture is never going to hack it. We don’t have time for such tinkering, even if it would have any effect, which I doubt. To get the temperature down, there is only one practical method and that is to shade the planet, sending enough solar radiation back into space.
One clever method has been proposed by Stephen Salter at the University of Edinburgh. His “marine cloud brightening” makes use of Earth’s own cloud system by creating brighter, more reflective clouds over oceans. This would be deployed first, and perhaps only, in the Arctic to refreeze the ocean there. That may be enough to halt global warming and even bring the global temperature down.
We can talk to the animals, so chat with ET is possible (1)
Chris Impey doubts the prospects of communicating with aliens, saying that despite sharing 99 per cent of our DNA with chimps, we can’t communicate with them. However, humans have been making themselves understood by chimps for 50 years. We have been communicating with other animals, and they with us, for thousands of years (27 May, p 27).
Communication isn’t about sharing a language, but understanding what another living creature’s message is. I am sure Impey would be able to understand and respond to a rattlesnake’s rattle.
We can talk to the animals, so chat with ET is possible (2)
Impey doesn’t mention another reason for caution in contacting aliens, even if they are assumed to be benevolent. They might freely make technologies available to us that are far more advanced than our own, thinking that they could only help us. They may assume that we don’t suffer from the dysfunction and conflicts that plague our (so-called) civilisation and that we wouldn’t put such technologies to destructive uses.
We can talk to the animals, so chat with ET is possible (3)
The reason we can’t communicate with chimps is because they aren’t sufficiently intelligent, but this has no bearing whatsoever on whether we could communicate with an alien species clever enough to detect our messages.
AI in movies will be theatre's gain
Regarding negotiations between actors in the US and the film industry over the use of artificial intelligence to mimic performers on screen, it seems to me that if this technology takes over film, TV and online drama, then there will be a huge boost for live theatre. Seeing real actors on stage will be everybody’s dream (3 June, p 16).
Growing brains in a dish does raise many issues
Michael Le Page says that brain organoids grown in labs are nothing like real brains, that they are “bunches of brain cells just a few millimetres across that are nowhere near even a simple animal brain” (10 June, p 21).
Even so, that is a lot bigger than many animal brains. The whole nervous system of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans only contains about 300 neurons.
If consciousness arises out of brains, then we should stop these experiments. If it doesn’t, then we should reject materialistic theories of consciousness.
Changing stance is heartbreaking to see
Though it is great to see animal issues covered in 快猫短视频, it is heartbreaking to see Peter Singer, who was once a great voice for animals, even contemplating the idea that their farming and humane slaughter might be considered ethical (3 June, p 43). Can you imagine Gloria Steinem discussing types of sexism that she now thinks might be ethical?
Don't just freeze your head, but faeces too
While not wishing to promote the freezing of heads more than sense dictates, it did occur to me that a severed head isn’t just missing the rest of its natural form, but also its microbiome 鈥� increasingly recognised as an additional dimension of health and personality. To partially compensate for this, perhaps a frozen head should be accompanied by a personal stool sample to allow for a more complete future recombination (4 March, p 35).
Pack it in please, supermarkets
I do believe a basic bag-filling algorithm, of the sort
described by Peter Rowlett as “a simple rule a computer program can mindlessly apply”, is already being used by the supermarkets that deliver to my home. Considering no factor other than filling space, sliced bread is routinely squashed out of all recognition by bottles, jars and cans and has to be rejected (10 June, p 44).