Latest edition of my Adventure Fix newsletter just went out, featuring stories about kayaking the awesome Tsangpo River and the disappearance of Steve Fossett, a photo remembrance of Pearl Harbor, and some amazing videos. Including this one of jetman Yves Rossy flying in formation with some real jets:
Author: timzimmermann
Clone Wars
So it’s come to this: an argument that instead of going to the trouble of preventing species’ extinction we are better off just preserving DNA for future cloning. Check it:
Our planet benefits from biodiversity, and there can be a large “option value” to helping an endangered species live another generation. We can change our minds at some later date and no longer try to prevent a species’ extinction. But it would seem impossible to change our minds in the other direction — once a species is gone, it would seem too late to decide that we wish we had protected it.
But technology may be changing the option-value calculation, because scientists are learning how to clone extinct animals. The time will come when scientists will produce living versions of previously extinct animals. With enough time, they would probably be able to do so cheaply.
To the extent that cloning will someday be possible, the option value of preserving an endangered species is a lot less. In some cases, it may be cheaper to save some DNA, and let a future, richer and perhaps more enthusiastic generation make its own copy of the species.
The arrogance, anthropocentricity, and shortsightedness combined in this argument is simply staggering.
Google’s Self-Driving Car
In my Washingtonian piece about traffic gridlock, I mentioned that automatic cars that do the driving instead of easily-distracted humans could reduce congestion, and that Google is developing one.
Well, Sebastian Thrun is working on that Google car, and here he explains what it is all about:
At Google, I am working with a world-class team of engineers to turn science fiction into reality.
Google’s vast computing resources are crucial to our technology. Our cars memorize the road infrastructure in minute detail. They use computerized maps to determine where to drive, and to anticipate road signs, traffic lights and roadblocks long before they are visible to the human eye.
Our cars use specialized lasers, radar and cameras to analyze traffic at a speed faster than the human brain can process. And they leverage the cloud to share information at blazing speed.
Our self-driving cars have now traveled nearly 200,000 miles on public highways in California and Nevada, 100 percent safely. They have driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles and around Lake Tahoe, and have even descended crooked Lombard Street in San Francisco. They drive anywhere a car can legally drive.
I’d love to take a ride in one. And know more about how many glitches, incidents, and outright crashes the prototypes have experienced. But Thrun is right about the promise such cars offer, and lays out a few I hadn’t thought of:
Take today’s cities. They are full of parked cars. I estimate that the average car is immobile 96 percent of its lifetime. This situation leads to a world full of underused cars and occupied parking spaces.
Self-driving cars will enable car sharing even in spread-out suburbs. A car will come to you just when you need it. And when you are done with it, the car will just drive away, so you won’t even have to look for parking.
Self-driving cars can also change the way we use our highways. The European Union has recently started a program to develop technologies for vehicle platoons on public highways. “Platooning” is technical lingo for self-driving cars that drive so closely together that they behave more like trains than individual cars. Research at the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that the fuel consumption of trucks can be reduced by up to 21 percent simply by drafting behind other trucks. And it is easy to imagine that our highways can bear more cars, if cars drive closer together.
Last but not least, self-driving cars will be good news for the millions of Americans who are blind or have brain injury, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. Tens of millions of Americans are denied the privilege of operating motor vehicles today because of issues related to health or age.
I like the idea of a car just showing up when you need it, and leaving when you hop out. And reducing traffic and parking congestion would be nice. But I also think it’s critical that we do more to get out of cars, and learn to walk and bike more, as well as use mass transit.
If a Google car simply extends the Era Of The Automobile rather than serving as one key piece in the radical transformation of our transportation culture, then I don’t think Google is doing us that big a favor. But it is an excellent example of how technology, if developed and applied with wisdom, holds out hope that we can at least ameliorate some of the worst problems that humanity has managed to inflict on itself and the planet.
Here’s the car in action:
And here’s Thrun giving a TED Talk about it:
Tour (and Trash) The Titanic
Is there no tragedy, no anniversary, that is beyond the human capacity for commercialization? Probably not.
Latest case in point: 100 year anniversary tours of the Titanic by deep submersible, yours for only $60,000.
Quite apart from whatever you might think about bankers and other 1-percenters throwing down a fee equal to a year’s salary for most people, the key point is that the steady accumulation of Titanic tours, from both above and under the sea, is taking a toll:
Scientists and scholars worry about new damage to the famous ship and new dishonor to a gravesite strewn with the shoes and other belongings of so many drowned people. However, they see the centennial as not only a potential threat but also an opportunity to lobby for a global accord that would establish rules for the Titanic’s protection.
“We need a basic agreement,” said James P. Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors the wreck.
Already, the site is quite littered. Passing cruise ships dump beer cans and garbage bags. On the seabed, the mini-submarines have set up memorial plaques with artificial flowers. At times, the subs have also accidentally bumped into the increasingly fragile wreck.
“It could get real crowded out there,” Dr. Delgado said of the centennial rush. Despite the legitimacy of wide public interest, he added, “there are some things that shouldn’t happen,” like dumping trash and leaving behind equipment.
Gawking at an underwater gravesite is creepy enough. Slowly destroying it as you do so is beyond the pale.
Plus, you can take the tour right here, for free (yes, this footage is shot by a submersible, but it has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people; in contrast to a submersible tour that shows the wreck to, um, exactly two wealthy tourists per voyage).
Listening To Whales
I guess today is natural history day. Because here is a very cool story on NPR about killer whale and pilot whale dialects (thanks to Michael for sharing). Check it:
And if you are interested, or think you have a good ear for “whale,” you can be help scientists sort out whale dialects at the Whale Song Project.
Killer Whale: An Apex Predator Earns Its Apexness
There’s nothing more mesmerizing or suspenseful than watching a killer whale display the full range of its cunning, intelligence, and power to make a hefty meal of a fatally lackadaisical elephant seal. From the BBC, the apex broadcaster when it comes to nature. (Thanks to Jeff for sharing)…
Have We Reached “Peak Stuff”?
Journalist Fred Pearce thinks maybe:
Take Britain. A new study finds that the country that invented the industrial revolution two centuries ago reached “peak stuff” between 2001 and 2003. In the past decade, Britain has been consuming less water, building materials, paper, food (especially meat), cars, textiles, fertilizers and much else. Travel is down; so is energy production. The country produces less waste, too.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that Brits still consume about 30 tons of stuff every year, which only takes them back to the consumption levels of 1989. And the US, well the US is still consuming away. The point here is that even if advanced industrial societies, particularly those in Europe (kudos), are starting to streamline consumption through less waste and greater efficiency, it’s still nowhere near enough to alter the trajectory of depletion and degradation human culture is inflicting on the planet. So we need to think about consumption in much more radical terms.
I say that having just read this excerpt from Carl Safina’s “The View From Lazy Point.” Talk about a hard slap to the face. Thank-you, sir, can we have another?
The first century of the Industrial Revolution, the 1800s, was powered by coal, whale oil, and slaves. The 20th was the century of petroleum (though 40 percent of U.S. train freight is still coal). World electricity generation is still two-thirds combustion (40 percent coal, 20 percent natural gas, six percent oil); plus 15 percent nuclear, 16 percent hydropower, and 2 percent other renewables. That’s how we get energy.
Here’s a taste of how we waste it: In the U.S., where tap water is safe, bottled water costs about 1,000 times as much as tap water and consumes tens of millions of barrels of oil a year (I’ve seen estimates from about 17 to 50 million barrels); it’s been likened to having each bottle of water one-quarter full of oil. It takes three times as much water to make the plastic bottle as the bottle contains. America’s refrigerators use twice the electricity of the European average, and four times as much as the most efficient refrigerators already available. Using the most efficient appliances, worldwide, would eliminate the need to build the 1,400 coal-fired power-plants that are projected to be needed by 2020.
Cars. With nearly the least-miles-per-gallon and nearly the most-miles-driven-per-vehicle, U.S. drivers—with more than a quarter of the world’s cars—burn more gasoline than the next twenty countries combined, including Japan, Germany, China, Russia, plus Brazil—. If average fuel efficiency merely equaled some of the better cars now on the market (40 miles per gallon–5.9 l/100 km), Americans would halve their gasoline use. Just like that. Going to plug-in hybrids would drop driving costs to the equivalent of one dollar per gallon (from the current $3.70/gallon average); gasoline use would drop by 80 percent—without reducing the number of cars or miles driven. This isn’t sacrifice; we’re already sacrificing efficiency. Eventually, the electricity powering plug-in cars could come from wind or solar. Those are some opportunities we’re missing.
Henry Ford reputedly said that if he’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said ‘a faster horse.’ What else might we be missing? Every hour, enough sunlight strikes Earth to power our world economy for a year. The upper six miles (10 km) of Earth’s crust (people have drilled 7 miles–11 km) holds something like 50,000 times as much energy (in the form of geothermal) as all the oil and gas. With an investment equaling the cost of one coal plant (about a billion dollars) the U.S. could by 2050 generate geothermal energy equal to 250 coal-burning plants. North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas have enough wind to supply not just all the U.S.’s electricity, but all its energy. (Denmark and parts of Germany already get 20 to 30 percent of their electricity from mere moving air.) On one windy quarter-acre, a farmer can grow $300 worth of corn, or allow a company to put up a wind turbine capable of generating $300,000 worth of electricity a year. If the company pays only one percent in royalties, the farmer still makes ten times as much by farming wind.
When ethanol made from corn puts people who need to eat in a bidding war with people who want to drive, drivers win. But some non-edible plants also produce oil. The seeds of Jatropha curcas are about one-third oil. Some algae yields up to 30 times more fuel than other energy crops. Airlines are already testing algae-based jet fuels. “The airplane performed perfectly,” one test-pilot said. “It was textbook.”
These aren’t even all the options. Compared to the possible oceans of improvements, humanity is still dog-paddling in the shallow end of the kiddie pool. Sometimes we seem determined to drown there just because we won’t stand up.
Annals Of Excellent Ideas: Buy Nothing Day
#BuyNothingDay. Well, it didn’t really work since Black Friday and Monday turned into an orgy of consumerism (is there no marketing gimmick Americans can resist?).
But it is a great concept, and part of a growing #OccupyXmas movement (you can imagine what a feast that will be for Bill O’Reilly and his “War On Christmas” meme). Here’s the #OccupyXmas pitch:
This years’ Black Friday was a resounding success. Fifty-five billion dollars chimed through cash registers across the USA. Two hundred and fifty-thousand people went into the malls and spent on average 400 hundred dollars each, the biggest shopping day ever. Some notable purchases included ten limited edition Ferraris with matching luggage from Neiman Marcus’s exclusive holiday catalogue, $395,000 each, gobbled up in under an hour.
We in the 99%, alongside our sympathetic friends in the 1%, need to challenge this “normal” way of doing Xmas and come up with a new normal. The holidays need another paradigm.
So what are we occupiers going to do different this season? For starters, we’re going to take the personal plunge and move our money. We’re going to take it away from the big banks and put it into our local credit unions. And that will be the one great first step in breaking beyond the encampments and into the new Xmas imagination.
Ok, that’s not the most compelling pitch ever. Move our money? But it’s a start. And the underlying message against consumerism is absolutely critical. You don’t need to buy more crap just because it is Xmas. You can give the money you would otherwise spend to a worthy cause. You can try cutting the number of gifts you give to your kids and family in half or more (and explain that Christmas and the holidays really aren’t about buying things).
Part of reinventing our economy and culture is to change our idea of what we really need (or want), and abandon the idea that our economy and future depends on consumers buying more and more stuff. There is another way. Buy less. A lot less.
Photo Of The Week: Polar Bear Pathos
This is an extraordinary image (thanks to Trina for sharing): Polar bear confronts an icebreaker. And depending on your feelings about the collision between man and his technology and the natural world, it is profoundly sad.
Naturally, it cries out for a caption contest. Let me know what your caption would be. I’m going with:
“Will you just stop already!?”
Or maybe: “Back it up, Dude.”
(click image for full size)
Morgan Meets Skyla
My personal opinion was that a chance to return to life in the wild (with all its uncertainties) was very much the right ethical choice over a life as an entertainer and breeder at Loro Parque.
But I also think that this (so far):
Is better than this:
The Earthist Chronicles 