The answer to the trillion-dollar question is … (1)
Of the three trillion-dollar projects described by Rowan Hooper, only one seems sensible 27 February, p 38. It is impossible to eradicate world poverty because there will always be the bottom 10 per cent and those people will be defined as “in poverty”. Curing all disease is pie in the sky: everyone has to die of something.
Spending this money 鈥� or even more 鈥� on stopping climate change (by far the most serious problem facing the planet) is the right way to go. Even then, showering scientists with money may not help much, because it is ultimately the political decisions that matter.
The answer to the trillion-dollar question is … (2)
Your recent leader (27 February, p 5) supports Hooper’s model of spending a trillion dollars to solve the world’s biggest problems, but concludes that this is limited by the availability of cash. This is an obvious but unnecessary blockage. All money is imaginary. It is created out of nothing and can be spent on any programme we want. Come on, central bankers, it is time to save the planet.
Earth may have its own plan to rescue nature (1)
What is all this talk about rescuing nature? There is no need for that 20 February, p 34. I got this! I know I have been infected by an extremely smart and super deadly parasite, but I am taking strong measures to eradicate it. I am altering my environment to make it unlivable for the parasite and I am doing this very rapidly so the vermin won’t have time to adapt and survive.
Once I have cleared this disease, rebooting nature will be a piece of cake and I will still have a couple of hundred million years or so to evolve a truly intelligent life form. I will see if I can get it right this time. Submitted by: Earth. Channelled through: me.
Earth may have its own plan to rescue nature (2)
While I agree with the sentiments of Graham Lawton’s article, I feel that labelling the natural crisis as a post-1945 one is wrong.
When I was born in 1945, none of England’s original native forest was left 鈥� and hadn’t been around for hundreds of years. North American passenger pigeons used to darken the sky with their flocks, but the last wild specimen was shot in 1901. There were around 60 million American bison in the 18th century; by 1889, just 541 remained.
In the UK, I lived near land where just a few weeds would grow, downwind of a Roman-era lead smelter. Today, there is a similar but larger area in Queensland downwind of an aluminium smelter. It would seem we have learned nothing in 2000 years.
Earth may have its own plan to rescue nature (3)
You didn’t mention microbes. The bacteria and archaea, as well as many other soil organisms, are probably key to the successful regeneration of impoverished soils, allowing the renewal of the more visible plant species.
Earth may have its own plan to rescue nature (4)
There is a glaring omission in your rescue plan for nature: without halting human population growth, it is doomed to fail. Your special report (14 November 2020, p 34) was the first time you examined in depth the connection between having too many humans and environmental devastation. Don’t let it be the last.
Online gaming raises a question of trust too
Gambling is a worry on many fronts, including how to trust online games 13 February, p 23. Visit a physical casino and you can see the cards being dealt, the dice being thrown and the roulette wheels spun.
Online, fraudsters can set up a realistic-looking gambling site and write code to make sure certain cards or numbers appear. Got a dispute? Best of luck trying to collect from your “casino” on the other side of the world.
No pain, no gain for this new breed of wearables
You report on a backpack that, as it moves, converts some of the bag’s kinetic energy into 118 microjoules of electrical energy 13 February, p 20.
In terms of electrical power (a better indicator of its usefulness), it probably amounts to very little, as is the case with any biomechanical energy-harvesting device that doesn’t impose unacceptable extra effort on the wearer. This is just a rehash of the “power your lights/phone/body heater/whatever from your footsteps” nonsense.
Cutting animal-based food can be done much sooner
I am amazed at the lack of ambition expected of individuals when addressing climate change 20 February, p 30. In your review of Bill Gates’s book, you mention UK government advisers thinking the population could reasonably be expected to cut meat and dairy consumption by a fifth by 2050. I would say that by tonight isn’t an unreasonable time frame, not 30 years hence!
Memories of these early humans may last and last
Alan Jowett wonders if Denisovans inspired tales of the Yeti Letters, 20 February. In Channel 4’s documentary Yeti: Myth, man or beast?, I and my TV colleagues asked the same thing.
One crucial point was whether folk memories could survive for so long sustained by nothing more than the oral tradition. It seemed like a stretch, until I came across reporting that various groups of Indigenous Australians all had their own stories about coastal flooding. To the authors, this implied that folk memories, in Australia at least, had persisted for perhaps 13,000 years 鈥� the time of a major meltwater pulse during postglacial sea level rise.
More tenuously, folk tales from the island of Flores about small, hobbit-like humans seem to have endured for close to 50,000 years, the widely accepted last survival date for Homo floresiensis.
Here's hoping for robo-swarms very soon
James Marshall’s “Borrowing bee brains” article caused a real buzz 20 February, p 23. It was fascinating to read that, having reverse-engineered part of the visual system and navigation and memory sensors of bees, he and his team created autonomous drones. Should sufficient numbers of these be flown together to create a viable “swarm”, the sight would doubtless be impressive.
Might we assume that the next steps will result in the creation of workers and queens? If a swarm of workers encounters a lone queen, might we then see the conditions being set for the beginnings of robotic replication?