Will Musk become the first emperor of Mars?
Reader views on the colonisation of Mars, varied as they have been, have missed the most important point of all. Historically, colonisation was driven by a search for opportunities to trade and get rich. Perhaps, with Elon Musk as one of the chief proponents, we are missing the elephant in the room. Rather than debating the technical dangers and difficulties, would it not be better to speculate about what wild ideas Musk has tucked away in the back of his mind(Letters, 18 January)?
Let us start with the working assumption that a man who is already approaching 10 times the wealth Bill Gates accumulated has a good business plan for his colony. But what will it be? That is the question I invite fellow readers to ponder. It may not be pretty, and Musk may well see himself as the de facto future emperor of Mars. One way or another, I am confident there is money to be made, and anyone who doubts that hasn’t looked far enough into the future.
We need to burst another quantum bubble, too
“Bursting the bubble”, about quantum ideas that could do away with the multiverse, was excellent, but it is troubling that theorists still consider Schr枚dinger’s cat and Wigner’s friend to be valid thought experiments. They assume that a human observer is required for quantum collapse, which is absurd (11 January, p 32).
How did the universe get along without us for 13 billion years?
Quantum superpositions are so fragile that designers of qubits for quantum computers must go to great extremes to isolate them, yet still they collapse in milliseconds as a result of stray interactions.
Schr枚dinger and Wigner (and friend) are simply ignorant of the collapse until they peek.
Bananas might boost plants in another way
James Wong’s verdict on the poor efficacy of banana skins as plant fertiliser was spot on. However, it is likely that the widely reported benefits attributed to banana skins for gardeners are down to their polyphenol content (11 January, p 44).
It has been shown that an application of polyphenols can act as an antioxidant and increase protein functionality in most plant species. They aren’t fertilisers, but work more like catalysts, enhancing certain metabolic activities.
Multiverse worries are multiplying
If quantum computers are accessing the multiverse, as Hartmut Neven suggests, then we must assume that aliens in parallel universes could also have quantum computers. They must also be aware of their making use of other universes’ quantum computers. Could this make us lab rats for their experiments(4 January, p 40)?
You can tell a good actor by the way they blink
The report that blinking gives your brain a break by taking pauses while reading reminds me of the views of Hollywood film editor Walter Murch in his 1992 book In the Blink of an Eye (11 January, p 17).
He says the difference between a good actor and a bad one is in the timing of a blink. A good actor will blink at the point where their character understands what has been said, usually coinciding with the end of a sentence, whereas a poor actor will blink randomly.
There are easier ways to mop up carbon dioxide
As an energy/carbon engineer for over 35 years, I fully support the “defossilisation” of production of goods. However, why the fixation on capturing carbon from the flue gas of blast furnaces or other hot and highly polluted sources(4 January, p 22)?
In my career, I have encountered many manufacturing processes, including acid neutralisation and fermentation, which emit streams of inherently clean carbon dioxide at low temperatures, making them much easier to handle. Surely all such sources should be prioritised before we start on more difficult CO2 capture. The environmental benefit is identical, cost per tonne is lower and therefore the chance of overall success is much higher.
Pessimism can be a valid strategy too
Name/address withheld on request
When it comes to optimism, I am a glass-half-empty person and know why. I now recognise that my mother experienced extreme anxiety, particularly in relation to travel. As a child, holidays and trips would be planned, only to be cancelled at the last moment. I learned to temper my excited anticipation. A desire to avoid those negative feelings led me to develop a pessimistic strategy, which I still use: if I expect the worst, then I am not disappointed if it is so, and I experience a great deal of joy and pleasure if things go to plan. This has served me well. It isn’t clear to me why I would wish to be an optimist (4 January, p 32).
On the heat problem of computation
As I understand it, “Backwards computing” asserted that the bulk of heat emitted by computers arises from changes to information in the process of doing calculations. Does this apply to other media? How about a sheet of paper on which difficult sums had been written(28 December 2024, p 38)?
All-seeing Santa needs to keep a closer eye
You ask if Santa’s festive surveillance brings about an improvement in children’s behaviour. A 6-year-old granddaughter was being encouraged to behave particularly well in the run-up to Christmas because Santa is all-seeing. When she encountered actual Santa in his grotto, he, not having been properly briefed, made the mistake of asking her whether or not she had been good. “You should know!” she told him (14/21 December 2024, p 10).
For the record
Gremlins got into our bumper word search grid (14/21 December 2024, p 37), with Cetus, gray, Puppis, Crux, Lynx, lux, stratus and naledi affected.
In computing, AND gates are logic gates that output the product of their inputs (28 December 2024, p 38).