Chilled on the Antarctic
I would like to reassure readers that the Antarctic Treaty, which regulates activities on the frozen continent, is not under imminent threat as Andrew Donaldson declares (22 September, p 24). The situation is the complete opposite.
The Antarctic Treaty is one of the most successful international agreements ever signed. It has preserved the region as a natural reserve devoted to peace and science for almost 50 years and goes from strength to strength. The original dozen signatories, including the UK, have now been joined by a further 34, the latest being Belarus in 2006. The treaty will not expire in 2009, it will continue indefinitely.
Donaldson accuses the UK of being involved in the rapid development of tourism in Antarctica. This is not the case. Rather, the UK has been at the forefront of developing ways of better regulating and controlling the tourist industry in Antarctica.
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is a world leader in research into global science in an Antarctic context. An important part of our mission is to provide the science that underpins the continued environmental protection of Antarctica for the UK government and the Antarctic Treaty nations. For example, we have helped the treaty nations to develop Antarctic shipping guidelines and conservation plans for the most frequently visited tourist sites.
The portrayal of Antarctica given in your editorial (1 September, p 5) was correct and one we fully support.
Super-liars
Psychologist Paul Ekman asserted that about 4 to 5 per cent of the population can lie without giving any sign of doing so (15 September, p 54). Can the true figure really be so low?
Can he be sure that there does not exist a breed of super-liars so skilled that they have successfully concealed their gift from researchers? After all, if you are a natural-born liar, why devalue the currency and tell the world?
The 4 or 5 per cent may reflect only that proportion of natural-born liars who have chosen to disclose their talents. The rest remain cunningly concealed.
I hope my theory may go some way towards reconciling Ekman’s findings with the alarmingly high and expanding proportion of the observable universe known to be populated by lawyers, politicians and estate agents.
Whose good life?
Your report on the failure of traditional approaches to saving endangered species comes as no surprise (15 September, p 6). In my department we long ago abandoned the hope that by simply appealing to aesthetics and morality we would protect biodiversity, especially if this is done in an ethnocentric manner.
We are also sceptical of the appeal of demonstrations of long-term economic benefit, which have been proposed more recently as a solution to the problem.
Rather, the fundamental premise of successful conservation lies in first understanding that protective measures must be embedded in policies which are fully aware of the social and economic circumstances of the area.
Conservationists and anthropologists therefore need to work closely together. In most biodiversity hotspots there is little point in explaining to, or even convincing, central and regional governments that deforestation and uncontrolled development are going to have deleterious consequences for the environment. The essential work needs to be carried on at a local level, implementing and monitoring effective measures and identifying very precisely how the local is connected to the national and the international.
What is required is a long-term engagement with communities, working with local counterparts, learning the necessary languages and understanding religious views and deeply held values. We also need to identify how moral visions, aesthetic principles and economic preferences 鈥� in short, notions of the good life 鈥� differ from place to place. Appeals to material economic benefit alone are simply not working, not least because it is never clear whose benefit one is talking about, and nor are desktop technical solutions.
Save us!
Emma Young’s feature on fertilising the oceans to sequester carbon from the atmosphere reflects a flaw in the way the proposal to use iron for this is discussed (15 September, p 42).
As she explains, although iron seeding will allow plankton to take up extra carbon dioxide, much of the resulting organic carbon will soon be re-emitted when the plankton are gobbled up, respired and excreted.
But not all of it is lost. The iron in waste products formed near the surface will be absorbed by further generations of plankton, creating an iron cycle. Oceanic plankton eagerly take up available iron and little is wasted. Only when organic material sinks below the lowest level reached by living plankton does the iron it contains drop out of the cycle.
As it falls, much of the plankton debris will be oxidised, releasing the iron at depths where it is not usable. But the carbon dioxide produced will stay down long enough to ease the urgent problems of global warming.
At present, critical scientific opinion on iron fertilisation of the oceans is dominated by conservationists, who complain of humankind’s environmental recklessness, using guilt to persuade us to reduce our environmental impact. We marvel at how blue our planet looks from space, not appreciating that oceanic blueness is a lasting effect of life’s ancient irresponsibility in oxygenating the planet and locking iron up in insoluble oxides. Within decades we could tint the globe green once more. Or is it already too late to save our planet from the conservationists?
Why boldly go?
In arguing that we must leave Earth to ensure human survival, Richard Gott ignores important moral questions (8 September, p 51). He assumes that it is morally justifiable to expend a large share of global financial and technical resources to ensure the genetic survival of a few human specimens and their descendants.
He assumes that European imperial colonisation provides a supportive analogy for the colonisation of space. Many people, not only in non-European nations, do not see European colonisation as benign or beneficial to the colonised.
Gott argues that the first human on the moon spoke English because of England’s earlier successful colonisation of America. This colonisation also decimated indigenous populations, provided a market for slaves from other colonised populations and destroyed natural environments. European colonists travelled to environments intrinsically supportive of human life and still suffered loss of life that would be morally unacceptable now.
At present, we seem to be engaged in an unplanned experiment to test the limits of our planet’s homeostasis.
We would do better to learn more about how the natural terrestrial biosphere sustains itself and how we can work with our own planet to protect what we have.
Richard Gott suggests that a Mars colony starting with just eight people could double in size every 30 years. This is hopelessly optimistic; larger colonies have failed on Earth, where they could at least breathe the air.
Unless we develop some “magic box”, such as a matter duplicator, a colony must either be large enough to make and repair equipment like spacesuits, or depend on imports from Earth.
I suspect that, counting everyone including the janitors in the factory where they make the machines that make the machines, it takes millions of people to make a single microchip 鈥� but we don’t notice because scale makes them cheap and ubiquitous. Going low-tech on Mars would be impossible 鈥� mud huts aren’t airtight. I am not saying we should give up: we shouldn’t. We just need to prepare properly.
Out-of-what experience
I’m not convinced that Henrik Ehrsson’s simulation of an out-of-body experience proves what he says it proves (1 September, p 20). He shows that someone can be fooled into thinking that their self is somewhere else.
He seems to be assuming that the mind is in the body, then saying he has proved that if you think the mind is somewhere else, you’re wrong. Unfortunately, his conclusion is based on his assumption, therefore proving nothing except you can perceive yourself as being somewhere other than where your body is.
Experiences of floating near one’s own body make up only a small fraction of out-of-body cases. Many involve more distant travel in which the physical body is not seen at all.
Spooky socks
Nick Webb asks whether a pair of identical twins, one with a red wallet, one with a green, is a working analogy for quantum entanglement (22 September, p 25). The editor’s response was “it’s exactly right” 鈥� but in fact it’s exactly wrong. This is the fallacy described by John Bell in his paper “Bertlmann’s socks and the nature of reality” (Journal de Physique, vol 42, p 41).
Doctor Bertlmann always wore socks of different colours so, seeing that one foot was dressed in, say, pink, you could immediately predict the other was a different colour. In both cases, the information is already in the system. However, quantum wallets, or socks, would be in a superposed state of both red and green. It is only at the point that one is examined and collapses into, say, the red state that the other instantly becomes green, wherever it’s located. That’s the spooky connection.
The wallet analogy presupposes the redness of one wallet and the greenness of the other to be wholly determined at the outset 鈥� that the colour of each is an intrinsic property that is simply revealed upon observation. However, the unique and truly bizarre claim of mainstream quantum mechanics is that each wallet has no “actual-though-hidden-from-view” colour until the moment that either is observed. The wave function then collapses, or the universe splits in two, according to your quantum fancy. Only thereafter does the wallet “really” possess a colour.
If we grant this interpretation for a moment, then we are forced to concede that when one of the wallets is observed, a “spooky” superluminal communication must take place to prompt its equally indeterminate partner to adopt the alternate state. This may sound like an unnecessary overcomplication that seemingly creates a problem from nowhere, but it can be tested. The classic experiments by Alain Aspect in the 1980s were devised to ascertain whether the quantum or the classic interpretation is correct. The results fell in favour of the quantum interpretation.
To be fair, the “local hidden variable” theory beloved of the late David Bohm supports the wallet analogy. However, this is not the majority view among physicists.
Petersfield, Hampshire, UK
What is extinction?
In his article on the demise of the Yangtze river dolphin, Mark Carwardine states that the baiji is the first cetacean species to become extinct due to human activities (15 September, p 50). I believe the Atlantic grey whale was hunted to extinction by European and American whalers.
鈥� It depends at whether you look at the level of species, subspecies or population. Most scientists regard the Pacific and Atlantic grey whales as the same species (Eschrichtius robustus), and while the Atlantic population of the grey whale was driven to extinction, two Pacific populations survived.
Fission impossible
Ben Crystall describes a scheme “to initiate nuclear fission in… say, deuterium and tritium” (8 September, p 62).
You won’t get those to undergo fission, at least not with any energy gain.
鈥� The scheme we mentioned starts out with fission to generate energy to trigger fusion. One reaction involves antiprotons, uranium, deuterium and tritium, but there are a number of different ideas.
For the record
鈥� We quoted Philip Boyd describing “multiple research trips with aircraft and helicopters and up to 50 scientists involved…” (15 September, p 44). That should have been “ships”, not “trips”.
Breed half saved
In your article on endangered livestock, I was interested to see that you name the N’Dama as one breed that needs saving (8 September, p 18). Readers may be interested to know that the genes of the N’Dama are indeed being saved and multiplied by the growth of the Senepol breed, which contains at least 50 per cent N’Dama genes. The breed is growing rapidly in Australia, South America and the US.
A hundred years ago N’Dama cattle on the island of Saint Croix in the West Indies were crossed with Red Poll bulls and a selection process begun to marry the best characteristics 鈥� in particular the N’Dama characteristics of heat and parasite tolerance. The success of this can be demonstrated by the results of a trial done in Australia’s Northern Territory to compare Brahman cattle, long acclaimed for their hardiness and survivability, with a Senepol-Brahman cross. Under the same tough conditions, the crossbreeds recorded better growth rates, double the pregnancy rate in yearling heifers and double the rate of second pregnancies in two-year-olds. Thus the influence of the rare genes of the N’Dama is crucial in cattle breeding in harsh environments, or indeed any environment.
Touch the sky
In a piece on perfect pitch, you write “Mozart had it; Leonard Bernstein had it; even Jimi Hendrix reportedly had perfect pitch…” (1 September, p 20). What did you mean by “even” Jimi Hendrix? It seems an oddly derogatory remark about a musician widely regarded as one of the most talented guitar players of the 20th century.