Learning from Nature

In a recent article from New Scientist, scientists try to emulate the processes in plants that breakdown CO2, and synthesize it into more useful chemicals.

This made me think again about the Virgin Earth Challenge, and how if scaled up, this idea could be a worthy entry.

Except of course that it does not address the issues of Global Dimming, which are potentially catastrophic if they were not balanced out by Global Warming from greenhouse gases like CO2.

Actually the whole issue of scaling up any laboratory process for addressing the current climatic crisis is a bit of a concern: what works small scale in the lab, with well-defined, well-controlled and well-understood starting conditions, may well have unforseeable consequences when scaled up and applied to the less well-controlled or understood climate of the Earth.

The issue being that there can be no scaled-up trial of the winner of the Virgin Earth Challenge to prove its effectiveness, and investigate any side-effects when applied to Earth as a whole: if and when a winner is found, and implemented, it will actually be the final stage of a huge experiment, rather than a well-understood and "safe" solution.

Essentially it will be a big lottery as to whether or not any so-called solution will make things better, or simply change the problem into a different, and potentially more difficult one to fix.

And that is slightly bizarre, as my first posting about the Virgin Earth Challenge also mentioned a lottery, albeit a different one.

Weird Timing

So on Tuesday I publish a post on the need to start acting in harmony to save the Earth from man-made or natural catastrophes, and on Friday Sir Richard Branson announces the Virgin Earth Challenge: a $20M prize for the inventor of a device / technology that can counter-act global warming.

Now, ignoring how bizarre the timing of this is, I also noticed on Friday a tabloid headline claiming a £250M global lotto was being planned. The Times published this article on it today.

So the prize for saving the Earth is $20M, but the prize for buying a lotto ticket is £250M. I find this difference very telling, if slightly amusing in a "how perverted our value system has become" kind of way.

Anyway, when I first heard of the Virgin Earth Challenge, two things struck me:

1. Global warming is a symptom of a bigger issue, so any "solution" cannot be just about scrubbing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, but must include something to address the cause: basically a major planet-wide socio-political change, with a program of education aimed at multiple levels (governments, multi-national conglomerates, small/medium businesses, Joe public, children etc.) spanning many years, possibly even generations, until a more balanced and harmonious (co-)existence with our planet has become part of the collective psyche of our species.
2. The man-made planet-wide climate disruption is not just due to global warming. There is also Global Dimming to be taken into account. Basically this is an effect where small particles in the atmosphere reflect sunlight back into space, and surprise-surprise is increasing due to pollution. The really worrying aspect of this is that it is masking the full effects of Global Warming, and vice versa: reducing one without the other is likely to have a very profound and damaging effect on the planet. So the real challenge is not just to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, but to detox the atmosphere itself, and return it to the kind of composition it had prior to the Industrial Age. This is a much more complex task.

I have to admit, I was very pleased to read in the full article about the Virgin Earth Challenge that Sir Crispin Tickell, a member of the overseeing committee said:

"We should not think that technology will be the only solution. We need to realise that this is a societal problem. This is the beginning of a period of transition and we can't expect it to happen tomorrow. We need to start thinking differently as a society."

Well said!!!

He also called the Virgin Earth Challenge "a symbolic gesture".

Wouldn't it be great if this symbolic gesture spurred other multi-millionaires/billionaires or multi-billion dollar organisations to sponsor similar planet-saving Challenges?

Who will be the first to sponsor a greater understanding of super-volcanism (e.g. the super volcano that is Yellowstone Nation Park), a thorough survey of the skies for Near Earth Objects, etc etc.

Who knows?!

Maybe, given the weird timing of things recently, I will wake up one day next week to hear that Bill Gates is donating $1B to the formation of a Centre for World Peace and Harmony: a place for cross-cultural education, a place for research into solutions for planet-wide problems, a place for diplomacy.

Sounds an awful lot like the Season 1 opening sequence of Babylon 5:

It was the dawn of the third age of mankind, ten years after the
Earth-Minbari war. The Babylon project was dream given form.

It's goal: To prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call; home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanders. Humans and aliens wrapped in two million five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night.

It can be a dangerous place, but it's our last best hope for peace.

This is the story of last of the Babylon stations.

The year is 2258. The name of the place is Babylon 5.

I can't help thinking that we are the planet's current last best hope for survival, and that we need a last best hope for our own survival.

The End is Nigh

You could be forgiven for believing that if you listened to the media hysteria about yesterday's weather.

We had some snow.

London's transport infrastructure was severely disrupted for most of the morning.
The media were advising people to take extreme care getting to work/school, and some radio stations were advising people to stay at home.

In my corner of SW Greater London, we had 3-4 inches of snow. I admit that the 10 yards from my front door to the car was somewhat treacherous: my shoes got a bit wet, and shock-horror, I had to don a pair of Wellington boots.

Equally the 200 yards to the main road was rather scary: I had to keep at an ever-so-sensible 5mph, and wheel-spinning, tyre-smoking speed-starts and hand-brake turns were completely off my driving menu.

But the main roads (all of them) were clear of snow, thanks to gritting through out the night. Even the traffic was lighter than usual, but that could have been because I left 30 minutes earlier than usual.

So what was the panic about? It's not like we don't get snow in the UK.

How is it that a few inches of snow in the UK is enough to induce such an extreme reaction in the media, and such distruption to the capital's transport infrastructure, while North America, Canada, and Central and Northen Europe deal with several feet of snow without such hysterics?

OK so maybe other countries are geared-up for regular major snowfalls. Is it really so hard / expensive for the UK to be ready for a few inches of snow every so often?

Or is it more a kind of nation-wide denial that is at fault: we don't get heavy snow every year, so we'll just deny that we get any snow ever, and then panic when we do.

After all by elevating a moderately light snow-fall to the realms of some kind of minor natural disaster, the population is distracted from thinking about the man-made problems that we are failing to deal with.

Point of no return (revisited)

In the "Bodies..." posting of his Great Adventure, the Maltese Donkey said:

And no doubt with the population requirements, and export, they have to increase efficiency of agriculture like everybody else, which can lead to pollution runoff.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we are creating an artificial environment around us, which is too brittle to sustain the continued growth and evolution of our own society / species.

The above quote is a perfect example of this short-sightedness, which will result in the self-stablising evolutionary principle leading to humanity's extinction.

The Point of No Return is upon us, yet as a species we are doing too little too late to avert this.

Where ever you look today you see adverts for Personal Growth courses, Lifestyle Changing seminars, the latest set of DVDs from Life Coach gurus such as Tony Robbins etc.
It would seem that despite our success as a species, our lives have become hollow and meaningless, and we are searching for something with which to connect, to feel whole again.

Again this is evidenced by the growing number of fringe religious movements, and the rise of "pop" spirituality that is so fashionable these days.

While some of these have a valid place (and some are dangerous or misleading "instant fixes"), the problem is more fundamental than that: it is not a "personal" loss of the individuals that comprise the species that is at the heart of this, but a species-wide loss of connection / understanding of our unity with our environment, our origins, and our purpose.

In essence, the species as a whole needs a Lifestyle Change, to allow us to reconnect with Nature and our Role on this planet.

Humanity as a species, has a singular position on this planet, in that we are the only species to combine industry, intelligence and creativity to such a degree that we can either destroy most life on this planet, or save it.

We are unique amongst the millions of species with which we co-habit, in that we are reaching out to the stars, and exploring beyond the confines of our Earthly abode.

Make no mistake, there will be a mass-extinction event soon, in cosmological timescales, either of our own making, or otherwise. The evidence suggests these are regular phenomena, and part of the natural process of evolution, and that we may be on the cusp of one now.

However, currently, Humanity is this planet's last best hope to minimise the effect of these, or to avert them.

But only if we step up to the challenge, by putting aside out petty tribal, xenophobic differences, and act in harmony, in our and the planet's best long-term interests.

It may seem a bizarre segue, but the 90's SciFi series Babylon 5 (probably my all-time favourite SciFi series) dealt with this. Though it only became apparent in the last two series, you can see the seeds of it right from the start. It's a masterpiece rivalled only by The Matrix, in terms of having layers upon layers of hidden meanings and interpretations.

The bottom line is: If we don't step up to the challenge, we are already extinct, and are merely fertilizer for the next species to achieve a similarly unique position during the next round of evolution.

And with us goes the vast richness of our culture and heritage: Mozart, Bach, Van Gogh, Turner, Da Vinci, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Dickens etc etc all gone. Forever.
And obviously other species will be wiped out too.

Surely we owe it not only to them, but also to our own ancestors, and for the sake of that which is good and that which we value of our Human culture and heritage to rise up and grasp the Destiny that is offered to us, and protect this fragile Earth for as long as we can?

Point of no return?

I've always been fascinated by the evolution of societies and cultures.

In particular I find it intriguing that no complex society seems to survive for more than a few thousand years at most, before it decays or is overthrown and replaced by a younger society / culture, with a huge loss of the body of knowledge and cultural beliefs and drivers of the original society.

You see this pattern repeated from pre-history through to today: Mayans, Incas, Ancient Greeks, Roman, Ancient Egyptians, Native American Indians, various Chinese Dynasties, etc etc.

The parallel between that and evolution of species, emergence of a dominant species or class of species, followed by mass extinction events is also interesting... it's like evolution follows a pattern, whether it is genetic evolution, or social / cultural evolution.

My personal belief is that classical Darwinian evolution is just a facet of an overall evolutionary pattern that manifests at a number of different levels, not just genetic, but also at a more macro level (e.g. evolution of cosmic structures such as galaxies, solar systems, stars etc), and also at a more micro level (e.g. evolution of colonies of animals, societies, cultures), and even at a more individual level (e.g. the learning process and "evolution" of an individual's experience and psyche).
There seem to be common patterns that all of these follow. But I am letting myself get distracted, that is a subject for a future posting.

In terms of social and cultural evolution, I have long wondered if there is a crucial point where a society becomes so dependant on the artefacts of its success that it is no longer able to survive without those artefacts.
i.e. A point of no return, where it has created a “virtual” environment around itself, which so cocoons it from the real environment that it can no longer survive in the real environment; and further, that this virtual environment is itself so brittle that:

a) it cannot support continued growth, expansion and evolution of the society that developed it, and

b) it cannot tolerate significant changes to the real environment without the virtual environment breaking down, resulting in the collapse of the society that depends on it.

Let me explain... or rather let me explain (b), as I think (a) is too complex and worthy of a future posting.

Take Stone Age Man. If you were to remove all stone tools, shelters and other artefacts of Stone Age Man's success away from him, would Stone Age Man die out? Almost certainly not... he would simply craft some more from the raw materials around him, and be back in business before you knew it.

Iron Age Man? Bronze Age Man? Same thing, just it would take them a bit longer to recover.

In fact I suspect that until the middle of the Industrial Age or maybe a little bit later, if you removed all (man-made) artefacts of our existence from the planet, humans could have recovered and returned to the previous level of existence within a few years, maybe one generation at most.

If you look at modern (Western) society though, could the same claim be made?
Definitely not. Chances are that the ensuing chaos would be so great, that we would not survive even one generation- but there could be many factors that cause that.

What if you took a representative cross-section of society, provided them with a library / knowledge base that represented and detailed all of man's discoveries, inventions and understanding of the world, and used them to colonise a new planet?
And let's make it easy, let's say this planet was hospitable and had an abundance of natural resources.

Would they survive? Almost certainly.

Would they rebuild a society of equal sophistication and complexity to the parent society from which they were transplanted?
I would argue not. Or at least not within one generation. And if they don't do so within one generation, then I believe the motivation to rebuild the parent society would be lost, and the new society would eventually develop independently from the parent society.
Eventually, I believe, even the body of knowledge from the parent society would be lost, or become part of some mythical / legendary cultural background of the new society.

Some years back I wrote a short story on this called Re-Genesis. Don't look for it, I never tried to get it published, and it resides somewhere in the pile of other short stories I've written for my own amusement. In any event, it was set in the far future, and was more of a classic Sci-Fi short story than an exploration of the socio-philosophical phenomenon itself, and the last time I came across it, I decided it was way too superficial, and more akin to a collection of hooks for plot-arcs to be expanded in some larger epic story, if I ever get the time.

The odd thing is, we see exactly this kind of situation occurring in human societies today: the Renaissance was perceived as a rediscovery of the wisdom and culture of the ancient pre-Christian and early-Christian societies. There are also those that believe in the existence of advanced civilisations that pre-date early Egyptian culture. It can even be seen in the theories of benign extra-terrestrial visitations since pre-historic times.

Why is this of concern to me?

Well, for one thing, I enjoy this kind of philosophising!

More importantly, we are clearly seeing signs of environmental change, and I wonder whether the virtual environment we have built around ourselves is going to withstand that, or whether it is so brittle that it will collapse and take the human species with it. And more importantly whether there are measures we can take to maximise the chances of our survival.

And finally assuming humanity survives the short- and mid- term threats to its existence, longer term we WILL need to start colonising the rest of the solar system, and beyond. Exploring the dynamics and issues associated with such colonisation efforts will be necessary to its success.