8. In The Long Run, Who Wins: Nature or the Handiwork of Humans?
George Carlin: “We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. ‘Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.’ And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet… The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed.” Carlin’s glib scenario is not unreasonable, but it will require time: perhaps 100,000 years (looking back 100,000 years, humans were newbies). Meanwhile, fossil fuels, deforestation, and other large-scale environmental interventions produce significant changes produce measurable, significant damage because our transportation system design is sloppy and short-sighted (and so on). Are we causing monster storms and extreme heat or cold, or is that nature’s own doing? Extinction is nature’s normal cycle, but we have devastated more than a few species by killing every last one of them (passenger pigeons, for example). And yet: human ingenuity could bring some extinct species back to life. We’re clever: we destroy, but we also solve problems in innovative ways. (This is where Malthus was wrong; he underestimated human ingenuity.) In the end, if a tree is fighting for survival against a reinforced concrete building, the smart money ought to be on the tree.
7. Eleven Billion People On Planet Earth!
According to the latest (2014) United Nations estimates, earth’s population will likely reach 9.6 billion by 2050, and up to 12 billion by 2100. The first billion humans arrived by 1800—tens of thousands of years after our debut. By 1930, we doubled our population to 2 billion, then doubled again in the mid-1970s. Nowadays, every month, seven million new humans join the seven billion of us already on earth. Every dozen years or so, we add a billion people. The growth is uneven: 9 of the 10 nations with the youngest populations are in Africa (the other country is Afghanistan); 9 of the 10 oldest nations are in Europe (the other, which leads the list, is Japan). The World Bank forecasts most of the increase in urban areas. Post-2050, according to the United Nations, population growth in Africa will dramatically accelerate. During the same period, the number of people over 60 will double, as well the number of people over 80 years old—and by 2100, some 80 percent of these seniors will live in underdeveloped nations. How will we feed and tend to the needs of so many people? How will they find productive work? How will the addition of so many people affect the daily life of the humans who are already feeling a little cramped? The answer seems to reside in thinking differently: we’ve done it before (examples: fertilizer, cross-breeding, intensification, improvements in soil management), but now, the pace is faster, the numbers are larger, and the places where change is required face enormous political, economic and social challenges.
6. Planet Earth
We can see into the sky, but we haven’t figured out how to look inside the earth. In fact, we haven’t been able to penetrate more than about half of one percent of the earth’s surface. Still, we’re reasonably certain that the iron core remains molten, even after nearly 5 billion years—volcanoes and earthquakes provide the occasional glimpse. The earth’s mantle—between the crust and core—is filled with rock, denser toward the middle, less so nearer the surface. The crust is about 20 miles thick, and it’s about 3.8 billion years old. Not longer after (about 300 million years, give or take), the surface cooled. Several million years of torrential rains created the oceans. Unlike the atmosphere of Venus (hot enough to boil lead, therefore enveloping a sterile planet), Earth’s atmosphere was “far enough from the sun for water vapor to liquefy, but close enough to prevent it all from freezing.” It’s a delicate balance, but not so delicate that human impact can destroy its design or function. In fact, only 29 percent of earth is land—half of it inhabitable (not desert, not ice), and half of that used for food production. Humans are most often clustered in urban centers where shared services and economic opportunities are most plentiful, but there aren’t enough of us to fill the land in Texas. As for the rest of life on earth, it’s scattered throughout the world: 10 million species or more today, with 99 percent of past species now extinct, probably because the earth’s climate is constantly evolving. (Mostly from Maps of Time by David Christian.)
5. Water
It’s the most popular beverage on earth—and it’s calorie-free! Water covers 71 percent of the earth, and fills about as much of every human body. Without water, there is no food, no plant growth, no animals, no functional human systems. We use water for so many purposes, it’s difficult to recall even the most common uses: washing, cooking, transportation, cooling, dental care, public health (wash your hands!), recreation, power generation, extinguishing fires, irrigation, the list is long. Water is also the key component of floods, tsunamis, blizzards, ice storms, and other disasters, responsible for thousands of deaths each year. Unlike most chemical compounds, water is stable as a solid, liquid or gas—entire industries have been built on the use of water in minute or massive quantities. Unfortunately, distribution of water is uneven: a billion people cannot access potable water. Too often, industry and agriculture treat water without proper respect, making it unclean, unsafe and poisonous. Although vital, fresh water is in very short supply: it’s just 2.5 percent of earth’s water; only about 1 percent of that amount isn’t frozen. Water is not evenly distributed, and that’s a cause for serious conflict because abundant access to clean water is, often, a matter of life or large-scale death. Measured by vital needs and by economic production, water may be the single most valuable substance on earth.
4. The Sky
Floating around in our corner of the universe, we refer to everything surrounding the earth as “the sky.” It’s an odd conception that incorporates clouds, flocks of birds, the weather, the sun the stars, the moon, and perhaps the International Space Station. Odder still because much of what we’re seeing, especially at night, existed hundreds of years in the past (we’re seeing the sun as it existed eight minutes ago, and Andromeda, our nearest galaxy, as it was eight million years ago). The part of the sky that affects our daily life is, mostly, up to about 30,000 feet above us (less at the poles, more at the equator). That’s about twice as high as our tallest mountains: in this “troposphere,” you’ll find our clouds and the precipitation that they produce, along with the necessary oxygen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen necessary to sustain life on earth. When our part of the earth faces the sun, our local star’s brightness obscures anything else in the “daytime” sky, but when we turn away from the sun, we can see much farther. Standing in an area without much light pollution, unaided by a telescope, we can see as far as Saturn, which is 900 million miles from earth, and we can see 9,000 stars. With the Hubble Telescope, which orbits the earth rather than observing through our atmosphere, the conversation shifts from physical distance to time: the Hubble sees and records images from millions of years ago, offering remarkable photographs of life at the far edge of the sky and allowing scientists to forecast the age of the universe (13.7 billion years).
3. Gambling, Probability & Statistics
We have always gambled. We love the thrill, the possibility of risking a small amount to gain a larger reward. The ancient Hindu poem, “The Mahabharata,” recalls the popularity of gambling. The Chinese raised funds from a game similar to Keno to build The Great Wall. Dostoyevsky gambled and wrote about the devastating impact of addiction. Encyclopaedia Britannica called gambling “one of mankind’s oldest activities, as evidenced by writings and equipment found in tombs and other places…” and noted, “By the beginning of the 21st century, approximately four out of five people in Western nations gambled at least occasionally.” Most U.S. states operate state lotteries, half allow racetracks, and twenty benefit from commercial casinos. About 1 in 3 of the world’s nations—half of the world’s population—operate or enable lotteries. Legislators love the income (the state takes its cut), ethicists ask serious questions, but history is hardly on the side of the conservative critics. Our doctors gamble, but in a different way: they assess factors and probabilities, then offer a diagnosis and a treatment. They assess probabilities, sometimes frustrated when the patient fails to disclose key information, or when they encounter an issue we have not yet learned to evaluate or comprehend. From Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: “…when facing a difficult choice with the most serious consequences, when we are scared, perplexed, and frustrated, when life is actually on the line, put your faith in the numbers. Try to gather as much information as you can and work through it with experts.”
2. Correlation, cause/effect and coincidence
“There are truly spurious correlations—odd pairings of facts that have no relationship to each other and no third factor x linking them. For example, we could plot the relationship between the global average temperature over the past four hundred years and the number of pirates in the world and conclude that the drop in the number of pirates is caused by global warming…You could spin an ad hoc theory—pirates can’t stand heat, and so, as the oceans became warmer, they sought other employment…“It is easy to confuse cause and effect when encountering correlations. There is often that third factor x that ties together correlative observations…It can be all too tempting to infer causation from correlational data, especially when controlled experiments can’t be done. When we can imagine a plausible, underlying mechanism, the temptation is even greater. ” —Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind
1. Are We Losing Our Ability To Read And Understand The Natural World?
“The initial impetus came from the tragic deaths of Sarah Aronoff and Mary Jagoda…The episode had a profound effect on me and drove me to learn navigational techniques without instruments.” There are many available techniques, but they must be learned, and used: dead reckoning; stars (“the earliest known star maps may be found in the Lascaux Cave in southwestern France, dating roughly from 18,000-15,000 BC.”); the sun and the moon (“the motion of the sun throughout the year is more complicated than the regular motion of the stars and presents more of a challenge for someone who uses it to navigate. The Moon is more complicated…”); latitude and longitude; reading wind and weather; reading the waves and tides; understanding the paths and behaviors of birds and other animals.” How little we know. How much we must relearn. —John Edward Huth, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way
Although humans sometimes believe that their power is vast and world-changing, it’s not. The real power still belongs to nature. One reminder: during the winter of 2014-15, as Boston’s humans attempting to invent new ideas at MIT and Harvard University, their fair city was covered by 100 feet of snow. We humans tend to think of ourselves as fairly bright, but we’re easily confused by physics, mathematics, chemistry, our own atmosphere, the stars in the sky. We don’t know much about the water we drink, the trees, the sky. We’re utterly mystified by weather and climate—are we in the midst of a perfectly natural shift in temperatures and storm patterns, or have we brought on a climatic apocalypse by driving cars too far and too often? There’s so much about the world that we don’t understand—scientific discovery is helping, but we’ve only been doing that with any serious results for about 500 years (maybe 1 percent of the time we’ve spent on earth—actually, we don’t know how long we’ve been on earth, either, but we’re learning to take better guesses). Human vs. nature? Not exactly the bout of the century, or the millennium…
4. Natural Forces