The Potter

I recently posted this to a friend's blog, decided I wanted to more thoroughly own it, and so have reworked it here:

I’ve become a TED fan, see wonders sublime and profane (just kidding) there, intend serious consideration of a reduced-thing-set living (a word-play on RISC, reduced-instruction-set computing CPUs) based upon http://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_less_stuff_more_happiness.html. Howver, another two lectures that hit much closer to where I live, inside my skin, come from "Wrongologist" Kathryn Schulz:

• http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html
• http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_don_t_regret_regret.html

I see Variations on a Theme:

• Captain Kirk (Star Trek V The Final Frontier) proclaims that his memories make him who he is, that he _needs_ the pain.
• Dr. Katherine Pulaski (ST:TNG Elementary, Dear Data) advises that "Failure is the great teacher".
• (a real person, not just Star Trek philosophy) Kathryn Schulz advises on the value of being wrong, and of regretting.

These all seem to say the same thing to me, that we may make choices based upon imperfect information, but that then the results of those choices become our experiences; they shape us. We choose the potter (the nature of life is that we MUST choose), and then the potter shapes us the clay.

Straight south of Deneb Kaitos

(_aka_ Diphda) and almost into the trees was my first target of the night, NGC 253. In my Odyssey 8 it's a faint, diffuse, and slender cigar of light, nothing like professional photographs. I'd seen it decades ago in a 12_in "Clark" reflector at the University of California, Davis, but this view was better; "fast" rich-field Dobsonians are just better at brightening faint objects.

Later, SSE from Mirach I was able to locate M33 as a faint, diffuse, and fat oval. Both of these were "first views" outside of the UCD "peek", and I was quite pleased. I have a bigger 10_in scope that I purchased several years ago, but it's proven problematic, so the smaller 8_in, legacy of a now-departed friend from the 1980's, has been my workhorse, has shown me the wonders of the universe.

NGC 253, M33, (old familiar) M31, and others are all spiral galaxies, "island universes" (term that dates back to Immanuel Kant in 1755, long before any true conception of the cosmos), "fluids of stars" (Carl Sagan), but most importantly, places. That they're a long ways off doesn't diminish their basic nature, not as pretty pictures but as stages immense for plays numberless.

That got me to thinking of Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, a powerful indictment of slavery; only here I'm instead focusing on the title itself. We're all citizens of Earth, all members of humanity (all others please announce yourselves...), but perhaps those two characterizations need not always be equivalent. As I've said in previous blogs, we need to be out there among the stars, to indeed be Citizens of the Milky Way, if for no other reason than that Bad Things can happen to planets. Spreading ourselves around increases the chances that we'll be around for the Long Haul.

And can we ever be Citizens of the Local Group (of galaxies, includes M31 & M33)? That seems unlikely. Just spreading to the far edges of our own fluid of stars will take so long that it seems to me most unlikely that we'll still be "human". Science fiction is full of variations on this theme; I have my favorites, anyone who reads the genre will have theirs. Given a "colonization speed" of 1% of the speed of light means we might reach the far border of the Milky Way in only seven or so million years. By contrast, there were no humans seven million years ago. A mere seven hundred thousand years ago there were, and we can reasonably conjecture that they were just as smart as we are. But they were incredibly staid; progress was just not in their gestalt. What to us seem obvious improvements (why did pre-colonial residents of the Andes never develop the wheel???) took them tens of thousands of years.

By contrast, UCSD professor Vernor Vinge defined the term "Singularity" in 1993 to describe an asymptotic curve of progress for us (see HTML or text for the paper); and before him Alvin Toffler in 1970 wrote Future Shock. Think about that last one. We're now living in Toffler's future. Progress is insatiable. If you own it, it's obsolete. If it's software, there's undoubtedly an update for it right now. Tomorrow will bring new ideas. "News" is a twenty-four-hour thing, and not something that you wait for, something that's printed on dead trees.

All this tells me that progress as concept, as reality, will be with us for the foreseeable future. And how much can we progress in seven million years? Would we of today even recognize those who reach the far edge of the galaxy, and look hungrily onward?

OK, shrink back to the here & now. What does this mean for us? The term "manifest destiny" has meant the subjugation of native peoples, destruction of irreplaceable ecosystems, and other Bad Things. But when there are no natives, no ecosystems, what then? In the absence of Anybody Else, it seems blatantly obvious to me that we humans (well, so far anyway) should be taking the galaxy, that it's our manifest destiny, as a species and as an intelligence.

And what do the "we" of today need to do for this? Survive. Exercise prudent stewardship of our own planet so that we can survive long enough to spread elsewhere. We're doing a (insert expletive of your choice here) poor job so far, in the process of pushing the cultural reset button right now. Some humans will probably survive the next few centuries, but our global culture and technology just won't do well with a multi-degree rise in temperate. We're not doing a good job here, gang.

Think about it. We're bright, we're ambitious. We could go far. But the manifest destiny of galactic stewardship is by no means inevitable. Most terrestrial (the only kind we know of) species that ever lived are extinct. It could happen to us.

Addendum: I've struggled over just two words in my entire BLOG for years.  I can't seem to find a better pair for my belief that life, and in particular humanity & its descendents, will do its best to fill the unoccupied spaces, and that's a good thing.  But "manifest destiny", the phrase is so overloaded.  It's the language of the conqueror, of the subjugator, it's ugly.  It simultaneously expresses my expansionist beliefs, and offends my egalitarian ones.  { Sigh } As Mark Twain put it, "the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug", and this is definitely a small insect of a phrase.

Carbon Taxis (Tax is) The Way to Go

Taxis, as in the free movement of an organism toward or away from a stimulus. Or perhaps the not-quite-fitting pun....

This afternoon I played a recent PBS airing, Lester Brown's "Plan B: Mobilizing To Save Civilization.  Already I see Al Gore ("I am Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States of America") & Thomas L Freedman (author of countless New York Times articles, and two books I own, _The World Is Flat_, in my job I see that every work-day, and _Hot, Flat, and Crowded_) as prophets crying in the wilderness, trying to warn us of the future that our global civilization is striding into, that we really, really aren't going to like. And now I'm going to add Lester Brown to this, a Triumverate of Doom.


Note that there are several points I want to draw:

• We the Living, aren't going to be living long enough to feel the full impact of our actions. The fruits of our stewardship of the planet will go to the unborn, who will never know our world except vicariously, perhaps longingly.
• And the Earth..., is in no danger. Our planet has suffered far worse than anything humanity can do. There have been a number of mass extinctions already (by any reasonable definition, we're in the midst of a mass extinction right now, only this one's "home-made", the fault of us humans). The planet, and sufficient life to totally restock, no issue there.
• What's at stake is our presence here, on this globe. And forget about emigration to another world. I already said "We already and only live on the best of all possible worlds." (previous post "Three hundred better men than himself").

Mars looks terraformable, but over millenia, not even centuries. Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy posited enhancing the water supply by dumping Khyber Belt snowballs onto the Mars equator (an added benefit is control of angular momentum, easy to increase or decrease the length of the day). That may require a solar-system-wide technology, but certainly looks doable, in millenia.

Europa is cold. And it's a long ways away.

O'Neill-style space habitation may be the more immediate "life raft", but planets are a lot more reliable. Solar flares threaten our communications satelllites, but not our bodies; that's because we have core-generated magnetic fields, and a thick atmosphere. A "can in space" won't have either, will be highly vulnerable.

By the time we can terraform even one other planet, we may discover it's easier to rewrite ourselves to fit other environments. And that's certainly a goal of centuries for a technologically advanced civilization. So to move out into space, we need to last for those centuries and millenia, with a high-tech civilization, and that brings us back to Problem One, how to sustainably live right here.


So we've circled back to Macbeth & Banquo (you and me), their three witches, and the prophesy. What I especially liked about Brown's arguments was that his Plan B was simple, and glorious. But it wasn't easy. Here's my take, from memory:

• Cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2020.
• Constrain global population to eight billion.
• Eliminate poverty (I remember education as being the primary tool)
• Restore Earth's natural ecologies (possible only if we don't expand indefinitely, don't eat everything as if the Earth belonged to us, personally).

Everything there is possible if we break population growth. We could make a heaven of this earth, for all humans. How many would be ideal? Do we really need even eight billion minds at the same time? Perhaps one billion could live much, much better. Once we learn to control our population, then the collective wisdom of all, through individual actions, will lead to an optimal choice (no dictators, no "population councils" needed, this is democracy at its most basic level).


However, we may not have the time to stabilize population if we "choke up, heat up and smoke up this planet" first (Friedman's quotation). So the immediate goal is a drastic reduction in planetary greenhouse gas emissions. And primarily, for now, that's CO2. That's where my ambiguous title comes from.


The burning of carbon is a great draw for us all. The stored solar energy from hundreds of millions of years ago is in your tank, just step on the accelerator. But if it were possible to burn up all of the fossil fuels that we can lay our hands on, we'd boost the CO2 to the levels of hundreds of millions of years ago, and we'd have their climate too. "Hot and muggy" doesn't even come close. We'd be gone, headed for fossilization ourselves, archaeological puzzles for our distant successors to ponder.


So it's going to be the first of several great wrenchings of lifestyle to accommodate lowered CO2. Like many, I don't know how we are going to manage it. But I know how we'll try.


Those who think that mere carbon trading will suffice are fools. That's an arcane system that's easy to manipulate, easy for businesses to "back-door" their way into the chambers of government, and "get by". Don't we already see that happening in our govenment? Remember Mark Twain's "the best congress money can buy" (also attributed to Will Rogers).


That's why I see that a carbon tax is the infinitely better choice. "Fudging" that will be more open to public scrutiny (I hope, yes, I'm being optomistic here). But what will really make a difference, is the more radical solution I've seen proposed by others:

• Eliminate income tax. Completely. And eliminate the sales tax as well.
• Raise the money instead with a carbon tax.
• Make it big enough to cover the larger of the money formerly collected in tax, or the calculated value of the true cost of all that CO2 (think of the health costs to dirty air, or the lost water for Asian populations, drinking and crops, that no longer flows from tropical glaciers to the oceans, or any number of other "hits" to the economy).
• And do it now.

Think about how you'd reconsider your lifestyle if all of the money you currently pay in taxes were instead in your wallet, and fossil fuels and their derivatives (think "plastics", think "food", think of things that indirectly connect) all cost like blazes. You'd quickly reconsider how you live your life, accommodate new rules, and without doing anything except acting in your own self-interest, you'd bring down CO2.


Self-interest is very powerful, it just needs to be harnessed.


One final piece to this thread, then I'll move on. Several paragraphs back I referred to greenhouse gases, and said "for now, that's CO2". The phrase "tipping point" gets thrown around like so much verbal judo, has come to mean little because it means anything; perhaps there's soon be a local restaurant with that name. But there's a true tipping point that scares me, an unrecoverable state that we don't know how close we're to forcing.


Methane (CH4) is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and there's literally tons of it in hydrates on the oceanic continental shelves, and in the (now potentially misnamed) permafrost. We heat these up enough with CO2, get a significant release of CH4, and what's released will heat up and release even more CH4, a positive feedback loop with truly ugly implications.


So can we a a global civilization turn around CO2, dramatically reduce its release by 2020? Brown's "Plan B" had a nice analogy to President Roosevelt's turning around of the USA economy at the start of WWII. There was no compromise. He didn't say "guns and some butter too". It was war machinery all, tanks, planes, whatever, and no other industry. It took a strong leader, and a direct threat to our (USA) way of life, and suddenly we were off in a new direction, no looking back.


In the summer of 1970 my Twin Cities Love, her sister, perhaps others I don't remember, and I were hiking Isle Royale. It's a long and narrow island in Lake Superior that has steep ridges with correspondingly plunging valleys; they all run parallel to the major axis, and we were traversing the middle, from SE to NW. So we were climbing to the heights and plunging to the depths, over and over. Further, the day was hot and muggy.

I had a significant lead over the others when I reached the highest ridge. I also had a significant bead of sweat, and that heavy pack on my back. Suddenly the world opened from dusty trail into a 180_degree panorama with a channel of Lake Superior in the foreground, and Canada to the horizon. And there was a wind ahead of me. So I hurried to the edge in order to fully take in this heavenly state.

Late in this excursion I discovered that I was on the edge of a ledge, a deadly drop right before me. Worse, it wasn't a right-angle edge I was on, but a curving surface going from horizontal to vertical in a very few feet (certainly not as much as a meter, we're talking _close_). And much worse, this was crumbly rock, I could hear sand-grain-sized stuff under my boots.

I couldn't just *STOP*, that would have pitched me forward, The Big Goodbye. I'm not sure that I've ever thought as fast as I did there, not in words but in momentum calculations, in muscle control, bringing myself to tip-toe verticality with zero margin left. And I backed away from death.

My fellow climbers joined me on the ledge, and no one even knew, only I was the infinitely wiser.

That...,  is what I mean by suddenly taking a dramatic new direction, Roosevelt's example and mine. One day you're driving out to the beach for fun, the next day you understand the true cost of gasoline because you're paying it all at the pump, and you are finding a new way of life, new ways to have "fun".

Me? Much of my fun is in my friends. Many are virtual, text on screen or noises coming out of my phones. But the love, that's real. It's a whole lot "real-er" than having a big car, or jetting to Europe on vacation. You don't have to have a big carbon footprint in order to have fun.

And the planet, it will be just fine regardless, it's in no danger. Perhaps our descendants will still be here also, and not extinct, not headed for fossildom; perhaps they'll remember us as a "Greatest Generation" like we think of the WWII cohort, and for similar reasons. We can make a difference. And isn't that what counts, what all of us want?

The Inner Light

I've been watching Japan's multiple-horrorshow unfolding itself with agonizing slowness, have had much time to reflect.

Where I live, the north-western coast of the USA, is due for something similar (Google for [ cascadia seismic fault ]), except that we have no nuclear plants on the Washington State coast (the only two such that cable TV advises me of are instead in southern California). When (not "if") the fault "unzips" the entire coastline from northern California into British Columbia will be devastated; those two reactors will not be in the direct line-of-fire, but will surely receive some tsunami action.

And where I live, the house, is a tsunami-proof hundred vertical meters up-slope from salt water. Further, it's very strongly constructed, an accident of choice of wall paneling and cheapness of plywood at that stage of construction in 2008. There are many seismic faults running everywhere underneath the Olympics and the Puget Sound, some discovered only this year; indeed, there's one directly core-ward from me. So this over-constructed house would most likely slide off its foundations but should remain in one piece, uncrushed, for most foreseeable events, something not true of much of the surroundings.

My spouse, beloved cats, and I should survive the initial event, be among the millions of refugees.

All these morbid thoughts have a positive side; they help me reassess what's really important. Not the latest gadgetry, not the status or money of a good job, but instead family, friends, loves, pets, life, they're really important, right now. As I once saw on a friendly bank's billboard, "The most important things in life aren't really things at all".

You reading this, this is your time; you have your circles of love - enjoy them while you may. Or as my second-favorite Star Trek put it, "Live now; make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again."...

We definitely live in interesting times.