Museum on the moon
Looking into the next 100,000 years of humanity, Bob Holmes asks what our descendants will know about us (3 March, p 48). He points to natural processes such as tectonic plate movement, mountain-building and decay as factors in degrading and diminishing our legacy to those in the remote future.
However, if objects and artefacts were removed into space or even to the moon, the absence of these natural processes acting on them would preserve our heritage. After all, the remains of the lunar landings will endure for millions of years, if they don’t get looted by future souvenir hunters. There could be a museum on the moon to preserve elements of our culture for millennia to come.
Fonnetik fyoocher
A complementary question to your future-gazing article “What will we speak?” (3 March, p 39) is “How will we write?” If current trends in student writing are a reliable indication, future humans will write phonetically and with text-speak words.
For example, in recent student papers I have seen “come pair” for compare and “suddle” for subtle. Text words like “u” are also increasingly seen in formal student writing and, of course, in emails.
How this may affect spoken language remains to be seen, but it seems possible that “lol” might someday be the only known written form for “laugh out loud”. This may be how future humans react to today’s long and complicated writing style.
Year zero
Your special on “The deep future” (3 March, p 34) is accompanied by a timeline featuring the year zero. When Christians superimposed their BC-AD count on the Romans’ Julian calendar, they began with year 1 of Our Lord and declared the year before as 1 BC. The concept of zero was rejected by the Ancient Greeks and introduced to Europe by Leonardo Fibonacci in 1202.
Eruption odds
I greatly enjoyed your deep future special, but was surprised to read that the chance of a supervolcano erupting in the next 100,000 years is between 10 and 20 per cent (3 March, p 36). The same article, “Why we’ll still be here”, states one such eruption occurs every 50,000 years or so.
Assuming random distribution and an average period of 50,000 years, I calculate, using the binomial theorem, the chance of one or more eruptions in 100,000 years is about 85 per cent.
The editor writes:
• We should have said that one super-eruption every 50,000 years is the upper limit. In the past 6 million years there have been an average of two supervolcano events per million years, as far as we can tell. The upper limit is 22 events per million years (). Overall, the likely figure is between 0.14 and 0.2 events per 100,000 years.
Collateral damage
Your editorial statement that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown has “so far killed no one” is undoubtedly untrue (10 March, p 3). Some 200,000 people have been moved suddenly from their homes to emergency accommodation. Many will have been ill or infirm, and it is inconceivable that no deaths occurred among them.
We may not have coroners’ statements that their deaths were due to the evacuation: what you can say is that no human deaths can yet be unambiguously attributed to the meltdown.
Teach science
You rightly inveigh against the polluting of science teaching with falsehoods such as climate scepticism, intelligent design and creationism (25 February, p 3). But isn’t the problem that schools often teach belief, doctrine and dogma where they should be teaching the scientific method?
Science should be taught as a core of method, with a body of partly-tested hypotheses and theories that are under constant review, and that have to meet adequate standards if they are to be admitted to the fold.
Climate scepticism, intelligent design and creationism would not stand up for a moment against a class of 13-year-olds well-versed in scientific method. The subject is not difficult, in essence. But this will only happen if science is taught inspiringly.
Underground nukes
Fred Pearce brings home the sheer complexity of decommissioning nuclear reactors (10 March, p 46). With 138 shut down and many more to come, it is quite a legacy.
Yet there is a solution for future generations of nuclear plants: build all reactors and their primary cooling circuits underground. Decommissioning would then involve little more than sealing the entrance and walking away. The non-radioactive surface plant could be removed like any other obsolete building or industrial structure.
If decommissioning costs were truly factored in to the lifetime cost of a plant, the higher initial outlay would be fully justified. Pearce talks of costs of half a billion dollars to decommission one reactor, and a decommissioning by-product of half a million tonnes of radioactive waste from a German plant.
Seeds of doom
You report that visitors to the Antarctic carry, on average, 10 plant seeds (10 March, p 5). Do all tourists do the same to wilderness areas around the world?
Ultimately, what damage could such seeds do to, say, the Australian outback? Should all tourists’ luggage and clothes be fumigated before they are allowed into a country?
The beauty of books
I make my living from the digital industry, but nothing angers me more than the berating of paper as an outmoded medium. David Weinberger lent voice to the fundamentally flawed arguments of digital evangelists everywhere (11 February, p 30).
Among the things he overlooks is the “serenity principle”: when one is immersed in a book it holds the attention. The sheer number of wanton links peppered through digital texts make a glittering trove of diversions.
He says that printed books are disconnected from the discussions that appropriate them into the culture – and that correct them. But books do acknowledge other works and authors, use citations and have references.
He regrets the “limits to what can be published”. Indeed, the current utopia of digital publishing means that practically anyone can publish. But many shouldn’t. A heaving microbial mass of mediocrity risks works of legitimate quality being lost.
Wolf diet
Sharon Levy wrote that before 2001, wolves in Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada, “would seldom take down a moose”, using this statement to support her central premise that before 2001, young wolves in exploited populations lacked learning opportunities for packs to be efficient predators (12 June 2010, p 40).
The switch to moose actually occurred during years of heavy exploitation before 2001. From 1988 to 2000, we radio-collared 150 wolves and published the monograph (University of Waterloo, Ontario, 2004). Analysis of wolf droppings showed that adult moose constituted 58 per cent of diet biomass in summer and 77 per cent in winter. Predation rather than scavenging was documented for 42 per cent of moose carcasses.
Between 1958 and 1964, moose constituted only 9 per cent of wolf diets: white-tailed deer made up almost all the rest. Then the deer population fell to one-sixth of their former numbers and moose numbers increased threefold.
The subsequent reversal in wolf diets simply tracked this change in prey. Wolves are adaptable.
Nevertheless, we don’t deny Levy’s central premise that exploited populations can lose adaptive traits if wolf social units are repeatedly broken.
I, rapper robot
I recently wrote to argue that a robot is capable of creativity (4 February, p 31). So it is possible that cognitive dissonance is deterring me from criticising the YossarianLives “metaphorical search engine” (25 February, p 24).
But I want to get annoyed. I want to say that no search engine for metaphors could ever link ideas or concepts together like a creative human mind can; perhaps because my passion is writing and creating metaphors, and I feel I do it quite well.
But can these unknown rules, which my mind may be adhering to, be programmed into software? I would have to say “yes”, but also to agree with Jacob Aron that the human is doing most of the work here through interpretation of the search engine’s results.
Really, all the software needs to do is generate a random word for every one you type in: then you make the metaphorical connection yourself.
However, I think it is fair to say that when it comes to the creation of vivid metaphors, rappers reign supreme. Let’s see this software create an intricate and brilliant verse or two of rap lyrics. Then I will truly be impressed. Will MCs one day be having rap battles with computers? I sort of hope not, and I realise that, sadly, this makes me a bit of a hypocrite.
Polar p-p-p-pick up
Neil Padley suggests relocating polar bears to Antarctica, and wonders how many penguins a bear could eat (18 February, p 33).
The answer, as any British child knows, is none. Their paws are too clumsy to get the wrappers off.
The editor writes:
• For non-UK readers, a Penguin is a chocolate-coated biscuit bar.
For the record
• We should have said there is no chance of electrocution by the “Splash Controller” because “just 5 volts drive current through the water” (10 March, p 26). Volts do not “pass through” a conductor, as we said.
• Stefan Rahmstorf was aware that in Bermuda 400,000 years ago there was a high local sea level estimate, but he did not think it could be representative of global sea level at the time, as we incorrectly stated in our story (17 March, p 8).