Should humans be returning to the moon? (1)
Sending people to the moon always seemed misguided (17 September, p 38). Space agencies could have flooded the solar system with hundreds of probes, rather than operating expensive crewed missions to space that make only narrow discoveries.
For example, there are seven other substantial planetary atmospheres that should be utterly surrounded by weather satellites. This would increase meteorological knowledge, vital for our climate crisis. Also, the most habitable places in the solar system other than Earth are the oceans on some of the moons of the outer planets. We should already know if life is found there.
Spaceflight is hard. Small populations of isolated people sparsely scattered in nearby parts of the galaxy thousands of years from now might be plausible. But science fantasy has misled humanity and raised the perceived benefits of crewed programmes above today’s realities. Current priorities should be reversed: space science, not space engineering, has the greater return.
Should humans be returning to the moon? (2)
It is beyond belief that we are talking of sending humans back to the moon. Have we forgotten the general loss of interest in 1972? There is now increased awareness of the dilapidated state of Earth, the huge cost of sustaining settlers on other celestial bodies and the fact that returns on such huge investments are likely to be meagre. These are just vanity projects.
Should humans be returning to the moon? (3)
I propose the use of a “mooncrete”, comprising a mixture of lunar regolith 鈥� or moon dust 鈥� water and hydrogel, as a material from which to build a lunar base.
Moon dust is notoriously gritty stuff, composed of microscopic fragments of pulverised rock. The function of the hydrogel would be to lock those spiky particles into place and fill the voids between them, thereby reducing the porosity. As a building material, it would have the desirable property of being readily recyclable, should the need arise to reconfigure the layout of a base, for example.
Risk of illness puts me off swimming in wild water
“Come on in, the water’s cold” briefly raised the issue of water quality for anyone swimming wild, but needed to go further (17 September, p 25).
A report by UK group Surfers Against Sewage in May included a survey of 2000 people that found over half of those who went wild swimming last year, or tried water sports in British seas and rivers, fell ill from pollution. It sure puts me off. More than half of the respondents were clear that improvements to reduce sewage pollution should come from the water companies’ profits.
On the mystery of higher death rates in parts of UK
Your graph showed there have been more deaths than usual in England and Wales up to 5 August (10 September, p 14). The figures before 15 April were consistently low, and since then have been consistently high. My own analysis suggests that this has continued.
You proposed some reasons, such as issues in health services, but none can account for the uniform difference between the periods before and after mid-April.
There was, however, a striking change in behaviour around that time. People began to travel much more. There was a greater willingness to meet in groups indoors and a rapid decline in elementary precautions against covid-19, such as wearing masks when shopping. I haven’t seen any convincing account of the relative importance of these precautions, but the sum of them seems to have been about 1000 deaths a week.
Figuring out chronic fatigue is never easy (1)
I enjoyed your article “Figuring out fatigue” (10 September, p 42). As an academic who researches fatigue from a sport and exercise perspective, I appreciate how complex it is to conceptualise. You focused heavily on sensing of energy availability as the driver behind fatigue development, but there is copious evidence in the sport and exercise sciences of acute and chronic fatigue, though not in the clinical definition, in the presence of an abundance of cellular energy.
Figuring out chronic fatigue is never easy (2)
An anti-inflammatory strategy to tackle fatigue might be risky in some cases. Maybe the body is right and is doing its best to counter a very clever pathogen that has so far eluded discovery.
I acknowledge that short-term treatment to defuse major inflammation must sometimes be done. However, trying to negate the body’s attempt to defend itself while it faces a little-understood chronic illness, simply by relying on the presumption that it is wrong, could be a mistake.
To shift the climate needle we must rethink message
The case for “longtermism” 鈥� caring about future generations and the environment 鈥� wouldn’t need to be made if we raised all children to accept they belong to an interdependent species that is part of a global biosphere with a shared, billions-of-years-old lineage connected through DNA 鈥� and aren’t, as humans, somehow chosen or special (10 September, p 27).
In making his case, the author of the article, William MacAskill, invokes a moral argument. This approach is unhelpful because it makes it easy to attribute blame and difficult to find the root cause of behaviours, let alone win people over.
Drought and fire cast doubt on offsetting
You report an expert warning of a “cascade of tree mortality” caused by drought in Europe (17 September, p 13). The claims of many schemes to offset carbon emissions by planting trees were already controversial. These findings about the impacts of drought, plus the rise of large forest fires in many regions of the world, make it even clearer that planting trees is a palliative, not a cure, for climate change.
There is no substitute for cutting fossil fuel emissions and halting deforestation.
It is time to rethink the equation for BMI
Body mass index 鈥� weight divided by height squared 鈥� has always seemed questionable to me (10 September, p 28). Wouldn’t weight divided by height cubed, a rough measurement of density, be better?