Floating away
My own experience tells me the greater body of purported seasteaders (22 September, p 26) emanate from that particular species of libertarian (L. americanus) who decry the evils of government spending while choosing to continue living in the highest taxing, most socialist US states rather than simply upping sticks.
So the chances seem remote that a bold seafaring caste will be born of this group, whose individual engineering concerns focus disproportionately on the complexities of delivering high-speed internet connections to international waters.
Nay, seasteading’s only hope is to harness the modern heritors of the classic pioneer spirit: religious separatists who believe that dictatorial rule, inbreeding and an early death are not merely a good idea but in fact The Law.
Fortunately, they are also available in seemingly inexhaustible supply.
From Rupert Chapman
While floating cities promise a whole new living and working environment, the idea that they will provide a new social structure is a false hope. History shows that such projects have a truly abysmal record. They tend to collapse in acrimony, or turn into an Orwellian nightmare, or simply morph slowly into a mundane repeat of the parent society, whatever that may be.
Benfleet, Essex, UK
From Alan Hayward
Floating communities? Already been done, as I witnessed in the 1950s from the shores of Lake Chad, one of the largest freshwater lakes in Africa and more like an inland sea. There was a small island not far offshore, dotted with thatched huts. The next morning it had disappeared.
I learned that several such islands were built on platforms of papyrus and that they criss-crossed the lake with the wind. These floating families were entirely independent, and had all the fish they needed to hand.
Ngaparou, Senegal
Losses and gains
On the positive side, your look at the human propensity to lose technologies in the mists of time (29 September, p 30) raises the hope that the art of making guidance systems for intercontinental ballistic missiles will be lost, in the same way as the recipe for Greek fire.
On the negative side, we have lost a generation of engineers experienced in building nuclear power stations since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Of course, the idea of innovation by the introduction of errors in copying, deliberate or otherwise, is not an option in this field.
Word of God
Surgeon Hutan Ashrafian suggests “visions” during epileptic seizures may have inspired the birth of monotheism in ancient Egypt (8 September, p 10). I feel hard done by.
Having developed adult-onset temporal lobe epilepsy years ago, which went undiagnosed for a long time, I had a religious experience during what I now know was a simple partial seizure. Far from being inspiring, mine was prosaic. While in my local pub, but not drunk, I was suddenly overcome with an incredibly intense feeling that God was present, and very scary it was too. God spoke to me, saying: “Dave, why are you worrying, you know I don’t exist.”
I was somewhat freaked out – simple partial seizures in the temporal lobe tend to be scary – but in hindsight I can laugh about it. However, I now wonder if the way in which such seizures manifest themselves as religious experiences are dictated by pre-existing views on spirituality.
Amphibian hope
You suggested that research showing a regenerated lizard’s tail has an inferior anatomy to the one it replaced could weaken hopes of achieving limb regeneration in humans (15 September, p 10). But it is the salamanders, of the order Caudata, and not lizards that potentially hold the key to future human-limb regeneration.
There is progress: recent research has revealed that when a salamander loses a limb, cells in the layer where the break occurred differentiate to a stem-cell-like state and then reinstate the development sequence that generated the original.
At present a is being developed for the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) with the goal of identifying and fully sequencing the key genes involved in salamander regeneration so that comparisons can be made with genes in other vertebrates, including humans.
That's a fact
That a journal paper many years old is no longer cited may not be because of the “decay” of the truth of its findings (22 September, p 36) but because its results have become so thoroughly supported by evidence that they are properly regarded as facts.
For example, that our planet is orbiting the sun, or that Darwinian selection produced and is producing the diversity, complexity and adaptedness of life on earth are hardly propositions in need of supporting citations.
Brighter future
Your article on geoengineering was balanced and wide-ranging (22 September, p 30). We would, however like to add several points to the idea of global cooling by cloud whitening or marine cloud brightening (MCB), which involves seeding maritime clouds with seawater droplets to make them reflect more sunlight.
MCB is not ineffectual vis-à-vis polar cooling: several modelling papers, by our team and others, show that it would create more cooling in polar regions than at lower latitudes, with substantial sea-ice restoration.
Such work also shows that MCB may reduce rainfall in regions that need rain, but by modifying the site of cloud-seeding, this may be avoided. There is no doubt that if MCB works as we think, the significant cooling would cause global rainfall reduction, but calculations suggest that virtually all of it will be over the oceans.
Whether we could seed clouds effectively on the scale required is unknown. If continued research yields only positive results, we would need field tests. This could be done over an area of about 100 kilometres, too small to have a significant effect on climate.
Better than normal
Stuart Leslie suggests that infidelity may be normal for humans, as it is for albatrosses (18 August, p 33). Of course it is normal, as are racism, sexism, dishonesty and war, given that they are so widespread. In a wide range of circumstances they can further the survival and reproduction of the perpetrators.
However, our genome’s agenda is not our agenda. Reason lets us generate ideals that do not necessarily enhance our reproductive potential, such as placing value on fidelity for another’s happiness.
Maybe a future understanding of our genomes could tease out the level of fidelity that we would practise were we not intelligent beings. “Normal” does not equate to right or good, just as “natural” does not equate to beneficial.
Just like us?
In the absence of an agreed explanation for subjective experience, isn’t declaring animals to be conscious just because they have similar neural substrates to us (22 September, p 24) a bit like 19th-century phrenologists declaring that people with skulls similar to those of criminals are also criminals?
Our reasoning should surely be that human consciousness is incredibly complex, so we ought to expect less complex instances of consciousness to arise elsewhere, such as in the brains of other animals.
In this case, is it also reasonable to expect neural representations of tissue damage to give rise to unpleasant experiences in an animal’s consciousness?
From Joyce D’Silva, Compassion in World Farming
Recognising that animals are conscious beings has massive implications for us. In the case of the animals we farm for food, this surely means that outdated cage and crate factory farms must at last be consigned to the history books.
In our hearts we probably all knew that animals were conscious – we just felt more comfortable keeping the psychological distance arising from their “otherness”.
Godalming, Surrey, UK
'Ello, 'ello, 'ello
It was great to read about individuals with extraordinary powers of facial recognition (15 September, p 36). It was a skill my father shared: he could recall a face decades later.
One such case concerned a policeman whom he met once. About 20 years later their paths crossed again, but this time the policeman was in plain clothes.
My father recalled his name and where they had met, much to the officer’s astonishment.
So misguided
Further to your commentary about textbooks used under the Accelerated Christian Education programme (25 August), you should also note that the Biology 1099 edition misinforms its readers about the scientific method, claiming the only truly reliable method of scientific discovery is the “Word of God”.
Ask a pharmacist
There is nothing odd about the phrase “for extemporaneous use only” on a packet of potassium citrate, as mentioned in Feedback (8 September).
It’s just pharmaceutical talk for an ingredient used to prepare a “one-off” medicine for a particular patient or group of patients because it is not available as a licensed preparation in the form required.
For the record
• Sorry physics grads. In the online Graduate Careers Special for UK readers () your average salary six months after graduating (based on last year’s salaries) should be £23,094, not £16,255.