How To Regrow A Rainforest

Here’s an excellent talk by biologist Willie Smits detailing a sucessful attempt in regrowing a rainforest in a relatively short period of time. This talk also serves as an excellent example for what kinds of approaches do work and which ones don’t.

Is CCS a Greenwashing Scam?

Today we’re talking about Carbon Capture and Storage which has been getting a bit of press lately. Personaly I’m skeptical of it, not so much because I doubt it’s usefulness as much because I’m concerned that it could be used to sell dirtier technologies with a half hearted promise that they would be cleaned up later. I paticularly didn’t like the way the phrase “Clean Coal” was tossed around like a football during the American Presidential debates.

Clean Coal reminds me of the claim made by cigarette companies that their new toasted tobacco had rendered their product safe. However there’s a lot more to CCS than just marketing hype so I’ll turn to a pair of commentators who are a bit more knowledgeable than me on the subject.

Chris Godall

We need CCS. And we need it soon. It is the only technology that can possibly hold down the emissions of the newly industrializing world. China and India will use coal for their power stations. Without CCS, their need to electricity will destroy the world’s ambitions to start reducing emissions by the middle of the next decade. Even in the UK coal burning power stations contribute about a quarter of the country’s total emissions. Because coal is now the cheapest source of fossil fuel energy, the incentive on power generators to install more coal burning plants is enormous. The only way we can make this acceptable is by rapid roll-out of carbon capture.

Chris Goodall blogs at Carbon Commentary and is the author of The Green Guide for Business.

Charles Robinson

CCS, Carbon Capture and Sequestration is a suite of technologies, some enormously problematic. Broadly speaking, it refers to any technology which can capture and keep carbon out of the atmosphere more or less permanently. This encompasses a wide range of methods, some for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (biochar schemes and the like) and some for preventing its emission in the first place, by capturing the CO₂ which woud be released by burning fossil fuels and then storing it.

It is the latter form of CCS which is controversial. The largest application of this type of CCS is likely to be the capture of emissions from coal fired power stations. Ignoring for now the exact method of capture, the CO₂ is concentrated and liquefied, and then transported, via pipeline or similar arrangement, to a suitable geological formation, where it will be injected into the ground and where it will, in theory remain. All of the stages of this process have been demonstrated as feasible from an engineering standpoint, although they have not yet been put into practice on an industrial scale or demonstrated as economically feasible. None of the large coal power stations currently under construction anywhere in the world has been designed with CCS in mind, meaning that the capture systems will have to be retrofitted at some future date, as will transportation networks from power plants to the storage formations.

It is estimated that the CC part of the systems will require 25%-40% of the electricity produced by the power station, with the sequestration element adding a further cost depending on how far away the plant is from a suitable site for storage (which, generally, will be a fair distance). The total increase in the cost of electricity produced at a plant equipped with CCS over electricity produced at a conventional coal power station is impossible to gauge particularly accurately, as the technology is still very much at the experimental stage, but is estimated at an increase of between 21% and 91%.

Since the cost of electricity generated by coal is currently comparable with the cost of electricity from wind power, the economic argument for CCS looks weak. The case is worsened by the rapid development and deployment of wind, solar and other renewable sources, and the equally rapid improvements in energy storage techniques which will iron out the intermittencies of renewable energy tech.

The practical argument, which is that coal is readily available and cheap and will therefore inevitably be used by rapidly developing nations such as China and India, is somewhat more compelling, but remember that no commercial power station under construction or on the drawing board makes any provision for CCS technologies, meaning an expensive refit at some future date in order to use prevent that CO₂ being emitted. Plus the construction of the infrastructure needed to transport and store the CO₂ produced. Plus the cost of commercialisation of all of the above.

All this without even mentioning the environmental damage caused by the mining and transportation of the millions of tonnes of coal to feed all these power stations or the damage caused by the millions of tonnes of mildly radioactive and toxic ash they produce.

So, to sum up, CCS in the form most frequently talked about is a suite of unproven, expensive, technologies whose sole purpose is to enable us as a species to continue one of the most heavily polluting activities we carry out, albeit with greatly reduced emission of CO₂ into the atmosphere. It’s not ready now, and will require a huge programme of remedial works to the worlds coal power station stock if it is ever to be of significant use.

As a ‘green’ technology most of the money for the above will probably come from a funding pool shared by genuinely benficial tech such renewables, electricity grid redesign, large scale energy storage etc.

CCS greenwashing? I’m not sure that’s entirely fair, and I’m sure there will be a role for it, simply because the situation is desperate and we’ll be obliged by inertia and the general uselessness of our leaders to do something with all those fossil fuel burning power stations or else totally destroy our beautiful biosphere, but it is on the level of giving a liver transplant to an alcoholic who refuses to stop drinking – an act of desperation which will probably deprive someone else of their chance at life.

Charles Robinson is a Meme Therapy contributor and freelance Sustainability Consultant.

Gavin Schmidt on Climate Change

Gavin A. Schmidt is a climatologist and climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). He works on the variability of the ocean circulation and climate and how changes related to varying forcings relate to variations due to intrinsic (unforced) climate variability, using general circulation models. He was kind enough to answer a few questions for us on the subject of climate change.

MT Do you think we’re going to have to change our lifestyles to adapt to or mitigate against climate change?

GS That may well be part of the mix – however, all the cycling and recycling in the world isn’t going to deal with the industrial, transportation or power generation sources of emissions. It seems to me that once the cost of emitting carbon gets included in economic decisions then people, companies and governments will try and reduce that cost as much as they can. At that point it will become clearer how emissions can be reduced most efficiently. That may involve cleaner sources of power, carbon sequestration and, yes, some lifestyle changes (taking the light rail rather than a car), but this is not a problem that can be solved solely by individual actions. Just as the ozone depletion problem was not solved by consumers choosing non-CFC aerosol cans….

MT Do you see any major changes in the way we humans move from point A to point b over the next 30 years?

GS It will be different in different places. Europe and European cities already function well using efficient public transport. In the US, there is a lot more potential for improvement. In India and China, there is the possibility of avoiding some of the worst urban planning mistakes associated with car transport, but it is inevitable that car use will increase there. I would hope that more cars will become electric/gas hybirds, but I doubt that there will be a noticeable switch to either
ethanol or hydrogen. Congestion Charges (as in London) and improvements to public transport (especially new light rail systems) may make it easier to leave the car at home.

MT There’s been reports of permafrost thawing in Siberia (link). Have the potential effects of methane being released from this region been taken into account in forecasts of global warming or are those going to have to be rethought?

GS Most of the forecasts you read about do not take this into account explicitly. But the forecasts do generally assume that methane concentrations will continue to rise. Since over recent years the methane has actually been pretty steady (albeit for unknown reasons), there is no obvious sign that permafrost clathrates are yet having a significant effect. So while it is a big unknown, it is still too uncertain or us to to be able to quantify it for the future projections. We are keeping a close eye on that though.

Related

Gavin’s profile (link)
Realclimate.org (link)

Originaly posted June 20th, 2006

Worst Case Scenarios

Todays Brain Parade features worst case scenarios and climate change. I tied myself in knots of dread when I first heard of methane venting in the artic. For a while I was dreading that the doomsday scenario James Lovelock had been advancing a few years back involving gigadeaths starting within 10 years (they haven’t started yet but I think it’s only been 8 years since he said that). I’ve been talked down recently which isn’t much of a relief. The enormity of the problem is so enormous that it’s almost easier to think apocalypticaly. So I wanted to explore the utility of worst case and doomsday scenarios and how they should be treated. Here’s the question I presented to our commentators:

Most forecasts project Global Warming as a slow motion catastrophe. However can we safely rule out worst case scenarios (ie rapid, runaway positive feedback) and if not should such scenarios inform our approach to tackling Climate Change?

I, like all our contributors. agree with this statement. However I think these worst case scenarios should be assessed dispassionately. I think it’s a much more compelling and effective argument when framed in those terms.  More compelling that economists talking about the discount rate.

Now on to our commentators:

Mark Lynas

Well, the question is really one of planetary-scale risk-management. What are the costs of acting, versus the risks of not acting? What are the probabilities of catastrophic outcomes, and costs – and likelihood of success – of acting against them. Obviously there are huge uncertainties at every stage – we simply don’t know at what point tipping points may be crossed which will lead to locked-in positive feedbacks. But it’s a pretty safe assumption that the hotter it gets, the more likelihood it is that we’ll find out the hard way. So yes, catastrophic scenarios should of course inform our approach – and personally I think we should be extremely risk-averse when it is our only planetary home and the future of the entire biosphere that will be imperilled if we throw the dice and lose.

Mark Lynas is the author of several books on climate change including Six Degrees.

Caroline Lucas

There is a wide range of predictions – though all agree the earth’s climate is heating up, rapidly. We can’t accurately predict the exact effects of climate change, and that’s part of the problem: not only does it allow room for scepticism and division amongst both scientists and politicians, it means our strategies for dealing with it have to focus on the most likely scenarios. But we can’t rule out worst-case scenarios by any means. Indeed recent scientific papers, and news from the Greenland and the North Pole, suggest warming might be happening more rapidly than predicted in any scenario. We need to be on a war footing, and urgently speed up action to cut emissions drastically – say nine per cent cuts year-on-year in industrialised countries, with those countries most responsible for the problem making the deepest cuts . We also need to prepare for the worst impacts, and give serious financial and technical support to developing countries in particular, adapting infrastructure, and creating a fairer and more resilient global society.

Carolyn Lucas is the Green MEP for the UK’s South East Region.

Charles Robinson

I’m not qualified to talk about the likelihood of abrupt climate change in the sense that it is meant here – namely the runaway positive feedback loop kinda thing that that’ll scupper any chance whatsoever the human race has of sorting its problems with the environment out. So I won’t, ‘cos much brainier people are doing that, and what’s more they’re getting paid (for example, SAP 3.4, just released by the US Geological Survey Climate Change Science Program, and available here). Suffice to say, there is a distinctly real probability of some pretty terrifyingly abrupt climate change happening. Things like, oh, the breakup of the Greenland icecap (7 or so metres added to global sea levels). Or the current ongoing droughts in Australia and the South East US being the vanguards of more widespread shifts in rainfall patterns, rendering huge swathes of the worlds agricultural land infertile.
Those are the ones which are considered likely. As in, more likely to happen than not…as in, there’s an outside chance that they might not, but…

Pretty much answers the question at the top of the page, you ask me…

Scarier possibilities for change abound – runaway emission of methane from Arctic clathrate and other deposits, shutdown of the Gulf Stream due to disturbance to the thermohaline circulation, (again, see SAP 3.4 as referenced above), super-hurricanes powerful enough to reach far inland, etc., etc.

We won’t have thought of everything, either…

So, yep, we probably should let such scenarios inform our thinking on climate change and our responses to it…after all, there’s only two ways we can meaningfully respond to climate change, and they’re 1) reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as fast as possible and 2) start drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere as fast as we can, which basically means burying as much biochar as we can, without using any fossil fuels in doing so. I mean, there’s
other things we can do, and there’s lots of ways we can do the 1) of the above, and maybe a few other ways of doing 2), though I’m pretty sceptical of non-biological methods for of extracting and concentrating a gas that (despite our best efforts) is only present in the hundreds of parts per million range…

To reiterate, yes we should worry and yes we should do something about it, because it only means doing what have to do, but with a lot more enthusiasm.

Oh, and the broad details of what we should do about it are pretty clear as well, so that question’s been answered as well. Okay, oversimplification, but it really is just a question of which of the many available options we use.

So, if it’s obvious that we should act, and it’s obvious what we ought to be doing, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that all these problems are probably worse than we think they are, the question really becomes one of why we as a species are so far pretty much doing nothing whatsoever about these problems. Well, not exactly nothing, but when the people in the know are talking about the need to mobilise global resources on a Second World War kinda scale and the people in charge are talking about the need to maybe start doing something, as long as it’s not too expensive and won’t cost them votes, you know there’s a pretty worrying disconnect between the people in charge and the people who understand things (sadly hardly ever seem to be the same people these days…).

Argh… wanted to go off on a rant about how idiot climate change deniers, aided by a media that feels obliged to make every damn thing a debate, even when the debate is long over, are responsible, but I really can’t be bothered. Suffice to say a combination of idiots and selfish bastards are (still) doing as good a job as they can preventing anything being done. Their motives, well, money, power and so on I suppose, but are they really stupid enough to want those things more than a habitable planet?.

I mean, we’re talking about the end of the fucking world here. Most people dead, and the pitiful survivors eking out a meagre existence wherever they can. And it’s started already, and all we have to do to ensure that it happens, that those alive now grow old in a collapsing world and our children never have the chance to see that life can be good, that it needn’t be a struggle every day, is do nothing, just carry on as we are…

Er…

Mainly seems to be because people just don’t really believe the problem’s as serious as it is. I mean, viscerally, in the guts, where it’ll hit us when the shit really does hit the fan, and we start looking back on these years as the peak of our civilisation…

I’d like to believe that we’re on the cusp of some kind of general step change in thinking, with the profound disconnect between the utter, deadly, imperative to act now, with more alacrity than the species has ever collectively shown on anything. Who knows?
It could actually happen. But just about the only thing people seem to do en
masse and quickly is panic, which ain’t too helpful.

When I started writing this it seemed the obvious thing to do would be to make a brilliant film, bringing home on a visceral level the awful, horrific future we are bequeathing our children and their children, children’s children, and so on…I mean, we’re either the generation which destroys the planet, or the generation which saves it.

So, that next step, brilliant film…well, thankfully it appears the effort may have already been made. ‘The Age of Stupid‘, opening weekend in the UK of the 20^th of March. See how it was made on the Guardian website here.
A retrospective look back on these years, from the perspective of an archivist (Pete Postlethwaite), living alone in a devastated 2055.

The only problem? It’s only opening in a few cinemas around the country. So, our course of action becomes clear – all of us, everyone we know, has to go, on that first weekend, and make it a hit. Buy ten tickets and give them out at the door, or better, give them to your friends and family who don’t yet appreciate what we face. Let money be made from it, let it cause a stir, and the millions of people who need to have the scales fall from their eyes might just…

At least it’s a start, it’s something you can do, and it’s now…

Charles Robinson is a co-contributor to Meme Therapy.

Manned vs Unmanned Spaceflight

This week’s question revolves around near future spaceflight, should it be manned or unmanned?

In case you’ve missed them Jose’s original piece is here and Charlie’s is here.

Ken Macleod:
In terms of immediate priorities, there’s no question that unmanned missions are far more cost-effective. At the moment Cassini is showing us yet again that every planet, moon and lump of rock in the Solar System is not only unique but has surprising features. The Mars robot explorers have shown us the same. But they’ve also raised questions that would be very easy to answer if only we had people there. In the longer term, we have to go ourselves.

Ken MacLeod is part of a new generation of British science fiction writers, who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera.

Alan Bond:
Ask an antarctic researcher if he/she could be cost effectively replaced by a robot without any loss of understanding of his findings. It is the cost of space transprtation which drives this sterile debate and it is that problemwe need to solve. Robots should always remain our assistants, not our substitutes.

Alan Bond is Managing Director of Reaction Engines Ltd [1] and associated with Project Daedalus, Blue Streak missile, HOTOL and Skylon.

Robert J. Sawyer:
Well, I agree with Charlie. Spaceflight isn’t just about economics; indeed, I decry the worldview that says that all things should be reduced to the bottom line. Space travel is an ennobling adventure; it’s part of our reason for being as a species. As the closing title card of Star Trek: The Motion Picture said, “The Human Adventure is Just Beginning.”In fact, I sum up a lot of my thoughts on this in my own novel Hybrids, which contains this speech on this topic from a fictitious US president.

Robert J Sawyer is a rockin Canadian hard SF writer

Joe Haldeman:
Being an astronomer by training, I’m prejudiced in favor of unmanned exploration — the scientific return per dollar is orders of magnitude greater than you can expect from manned spaceflight.

Add to that the near certainty that George Bush’s “return to the moon” pledge is just so much vapor. There’s no money. There wouldn’t be enough money even if he rescinded the tax cuts his wealthy pals enjoy.

Add to _that_ the fact that the shuttle has always been a dangerous juryrigged compromise vehicle, and now it’s a geriatric one. Incredibly, there’s no real successor on line; it will be at least eight years before one leaves a launch pad.

I’m greatly in favor of eventual manned flight, and I do believe that the ultimate destination of humanity is space. But the next step is a technology that will allow the transfer of large masses to Low Earth Orbit economically — perhaps the space elevator; perhaps something else — because nothing permanent is going to happen until cislunar space offers goods and services that can’t be had more cheaply on Earth.

I’d like to be proven wrong.

Joe Haldeman has been shot on three different occasions. We don’t know why, he seems nice enough to us.

Larry Niven:
You and Charles are rehashing an argument I’ve watched develop over many decades.

In the 60s I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t land on the Moon with Apollo 1. Why wait until 11? Okay, that was naive. The machines have to be developed and tested, and the men don’t get there without the machiness. What I notice is that your arguments (for the machines) are clear, precise, and rich in hindsight. Charles’s arguments (for sending astronauts) are very much based on postulates and theory, and lead way around Robin Hood’s barn.

And what I notice from my lifespan is that the machines, from magic telescopes to rovers and Voyagers, have shown us the universe in detail I could only imagine, and wrongly. Today’s plans don’t put men on Mars within my expected lifespan, and they could be cancelled at the stroke of an election.

But maybe I can hang on long enough to see Pluto. I’ve come to bet on the machines.

Larry Niven’s Science Fiction classics delayed the loss of Jose’s virginity

Greg Bear:
Robots will not have the capacity for a sense of wonder for many decades, I suspect. This aspect of human experience in space–the prospect of personal awe and discovery in the midst of infinite mystery–will propel funding far more over the long haul then robotic exploration, as marvelous as that is. People want to go and explore, not just sit and watch.

Greg Bear is a science fiction author. His work has covered themes of galactic conflict (Forge of God books), artificial universes (Eon series) and accelerated evolution (Blood Music, Darwin’s Radio, and Darwin’s Children).

John Baez:
As we speak, unmanned space missions are exploring the moons of Saturn, heading to Pluto and the dark reaches of the Kuiper belt, and finding evidence that the Universe is mostly made of stuff we don’t understand: dark matter and dark energy. Meanwhile, people aboard the International Space Station have a full-time job just keeping the thing repaired. Promised technological spinoffs like crystals grown in space aren’t really amounting to much. The crew made news recently by throwing a space suit stuffed with rags and a radio transmitter into Earth orbit, just so ham radio fans could track it: a clear sign of diminishing returns.

Why are we even bothering with manned space flight? As a character says in Charles Stross’ wonderful novel Accelerando, “NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!”. This stunt, which will cost billions if we don’t stop it, is the scientific equivalent of putting a goldfish bowl on top of Mount Everest.

It would be much smarter to spend the money creating cyborgs who don’t breathe and can stand hard radiation; these guys will actually enjoy space travel. We can do this and we can do it quicker than you might guess. In the meantime, let’s send machines into space, like the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. This project, if funded, has a decent chance of seeing gravitational ripples left over from the Big Bang. It’s the only known way to see through the wall of fire that cleared up when the Universe was 400,000 years old, back to the first microseconds of history. And it’s cheaper than sending canned primates to Mars.

John Baez is a a mathematical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity and n-categories.

Bill Gawne:
As a one-time Astronaut Applicant, and a working space scientist who
works with unmanned science missions, my opinion is that the best space policy is to embrace the power of “and” when it comes to the manned/unmanned mission question. Unfortunately, it has become customary to pit the one against the other. Right now good unmanned missions are being cancelled and delayed because the Powers that Be have decided once again that “science must bear the cost” of the manned space program. This is short sighted, and among many bad things it turns the space community upon itself. We’re being divided in order to conquer us. I’m confident that President Bush’s Moon/Mars initiative will go nowhere, but in the process of going nowhere it will cause a number of good science programs to be cancelled.

There *are* scientifically sound reasons to put people into space. As others have pointed out, there are also reasons which transcend science. All of these are legitimate reasons to expend our time and treasure on a progressive and reasonable manned space program. It would be nice if someone had such a thing. The current US manned space program suffers from a number of
accumulated problems which have origins back in the late 1940s, and which have become entrenched policy over the course of successive administrations.

Space scientists resent the long-standing practice of raiding the space science programs for money to support the manned space program. Space scientists rightly point out that the International Ultraviolet Explorer accomplished more, at lower cost, than the two ASTRO missions flown aboard Space Shuttle flights. This is but one example of misguided efforts to tie science missions which could be performed by unmanned spacecraft to the manned space program.

NASA is fundamentally an engineering establishment. Scientists have always been in a minority at NASA, and science has never been the main driver in NASA organizational decision making.

While I’m not entirely sure that transfering space science funding to the NSF would be the best solution, I think it would be better than the status quo. NOAA has a nice partnership with NASA whereby they get NOAA weather satellites launched and into orbit. The NSF and NASA could develop a similar partnership that would insure continuting integration, test, and launch
support from NASA while moving the mission operations and data analysis funding out of NASA’s budget into the NSF where it more naturally belongs. NASA would be left with manned spaceflight and its too often neglected aeronautical research mission.

Bill Gawne works for a NASA contractor in Maryland and teaches physics and astronomy at Towson University and is a top bloke

Send in the Robonauts

by Jose Garcia

The last twenty years of spaceflight have been a mix of wonder and frustration. Manned spaceflight, once an inspiring force for all mankind in the heady days of Apollo, has been taken over by white elephants like the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. Meanwhile unmanned spaceflight often seen as a bit part is now stealing the show. While astronauts on the space shuttle have been making conference calls to school children the Hubble Space Telescope has changed the way we look at the universe. And as robotics steathily advances at a breathtaking pace that disparity will grow even larger.

The main problem with manned spaceflight isn’t one of technology but of finances and politics. Manned missions require massive spending commitments that span administrations. This ensures that they become political footballs to their detriment. JFK’s famous rallying cry for a manned mission to the moon came at the height of the cold war and enjoyed broad support that transcended political factions. A manned mission to Mars enjoys no such advantage. Several american presidents have uttered their own rallying cries for a mission to Mars which have all invariably dissipated only to be co-opted by future presidents with equally vacous calls. This situation isn’t likely to change until manned spaceflight either becomes dramatically less expensive or as high a priority as a nation arming itself. I don’t see either happening any time soon.

Unmanned spacecraft on the other hand are growing in sophistication. Deep Space 1 used a novel solar electric propulsion system while manned space propulsion seems to have advanced little since 1970. The Japanese space agency, JAXA, will be constructing their Furoshiki satellite using two spider like robots. Nasa is developing a robonaut with an eerie resemblance to Boba Fett that promises a level versatility once thought the exclusive domain of humans. Meanwhile manned spaceflight has been preoccupied with spending vast amounts of resources delivering humans into orbit only for them to hit the on switch on otherwise automated experiments.

For the cost of a single manned Mars mission we can deploy an armada of robots and unmanned spacecraft throughout the solar system. While none of these missions taken on their own is as inspiring as a video of astronauts walking on another world they’ll net us much more science and trial more technologies. These unmanned missions also give us room to take risks and make mistakes that we couldn’t with missions carrying human cargo.

Robots aren’t taking the place of humans in space. Cheap spaceflight will eventualy arrive and when it does humans will eventually be leaving their footprints all over the solar system. Until then robots will be paving the way, exploring and allowing us to test new technologies. And when humans do move out into the solar system they’ll undoubtedly be accompanied by a host of indispensible robotic familiars. It won’t be a question of humans or robots but how we can make best use of both. For the next few decades though, the stage belongs to R2D2.

Why is it more important to get people into space than probes?

Why is it more important to get people into space than probes?

By Charles Robinson

Human history has, to a large extent, been the story of our expansion into new environments, and our adaptation of and to those environments. Human expansion, technological change and social change all go hand in hand, driving and drawing momentum from each other. These three interconnected, interdependent factors are, in various ways, responsible for the rise of both human intelligence and human civilisation. So, the evolutionary impetus given by the tension between expanding geographical, technological and social frontiers is what has set the human species apart from other life on this planet and is what drove the increase in intelligence and subsequent arousal of culture that has brought us to our current situation.

That position is one from which we risk losing everything that we have gained in the past hundred thousand years…but also one from which we could, as a species, change so much as to make human history up to now no more than a prelude.

Space is the critical factor in deciding which way these events will play out. Not just physical space, not even primarily physical space, but mental, cultural, idea space. The noosphere, the sphere of human thought, culture, of mind, is the space which must expand, and be expanded into.

How to expand the noosphere? Expand the possibilities available to the human species, by changing the geographical, technological or social boundaries which define the noosphere. Of course, change of the technological or social kind is happening all the time, probably faster now than at any other point in human history. However, these changes do not seem to be being reflected in changes in the underlying structure of human societies. This partially explains the continued failure of technological democratisation, the ‘rising tide’ effect touted as a justification for the growing divisions of wealth and opportunity in the world.

So, despite apparently the apparently fertile soils of technological and social change, cultural change seems to be slowing or stopped. This is because human culture exerts a kind of homeostatic force on itself; like a living creature, a successful culture evolves out of a balance between conflicting forces, to an equilibrium whose effect is, somewhat paradoxically, to stifle change. So the changes which advance a culture have to come from places where the cultural homeostatic forces are weakest. And that means the fringes of a culture, the places where the institutions which evolve to inhibit change are weakest, and also the places where a culture is coming into contact with other thoughts, ways and means of being. Contact with, or the creation of, new cultural memes result from the chaos, the changes, of the fringe, and these memes can then propagate inwards to the heart of a culture and introduce new tensions, which will, in turn, cause change and move the whole process on.

The problem that arises from this scenario, is, of course, that eventually the space, whether physical or mental, in which these changes can arise, ceases to be outside the normal mechanisms which police cultural change. Eventually a successful set of memes (a culture successful under biological terms, at least), will reach a point at which it can either stop expanding, or compete directly with another culture with the same ability to resist change. The grey areas, the gaps and cracks in which new memes could prosper or die out, have gone. The noosphere is almost full, and the energy which could take us in new directions is siphoned off into a conflict between the existing memetic organisms which populate human cultural space.
This is the state that the world is rapidly approaching, one in which every culture is pressed hard against another, a state in which cultural homeostatic mechanisms, reactionary forces, normally weaker at the fringes, instead must be as strong there as anywhere else, one in which the cultural immune systems of the world are inflamed and enraged, and in conflict with each other. A state from which change, and thus progress, becomes increasingly difficult to initiate, and a state in which all change has got to be to the disadvantage of someone.

Sound familiar at all?

That’s why we need to get people in space…the human species needs fringes, it needs places where the noosphere is thin and new, and where exotic ways of being, of living, can succeed or fail without competing with the existing monolithic, hundred thousand year old aggregates of memes that are the cultures of earth. If the fringes of a living organisms range are where speciation and diversification take place, then it is to the fringes of human experience that we must turn if we hope to change things on this planet. So, unless you believe that this planet isn’t going to the dogs, the best possible hope for a few new ideas which might change the way people see the world around them and each other, is to put people into novel situations, equip them with technologies to manipulate those situations, and give enough cultural distance and freedom to those people that new ‘ways of being’ can prosper or perish by their own merits.

We need space, not to escape from this planet, or to save it, but to save ourselves from stagnation, war, and eventual cultural, spiritual and physical starvation.

Hi Tech Democracy

With the upcoming election I thought it’d be timely to repost this article from Meme Therapy’s earlier incarnation. Rreading these comments what struck me is that these are just as true now as they were two years ago. If anything much of what was said has become even more obvious than ever before. With that said let’s take talk a little jump to the left and do the time warp:

Originaly posted Sunday, 23rd of July , 2006

We’re getting political again. We’re kicking off a week of technology and politics oriented Brain Parades and interviews with this question:

Information technology seems to have dramatic potential to revolutionize democracy. Putting aside these visions for a moment what do you see as the current bleeding edge of progress, or potential progress, in this area?

MT: As usual you’ll have to wade through my two cents first: The first step that I see happening are networked grassroot movements gaining an increasing say in the internal politics of political parties. This isn’t going to happen quickly. But it has in fact already begun with political candidates co-opting (ie paying them) bloggers for self promotion purposes. Over time internet enabled grass roots movements will become increasingly more important, but unlike network television there’s only so much influence that money can buy in this arena. In fact the reverse may be true, the wired grassroots will become important sources of funding for politicians (that’s hardly a controversial idea anymore). And that means that eventually political parties may actually have to begin courting the support of these networks by giving them a say in and access to their internal machinations, candidate selection and policy formation. Political hacks and policy wonks won’t walk down this path eagerly but they may be forced into this by evolutionary pressure in the same way that politicians in the 60s had to adapt (albiet in a less fundamental way) to network television.

Now onto our commentators:

Mark Frauenfelder:

Networked information technology has extended our eyes and ears so we can see all over the planet. Sophisticated search technology makes it possible to easily discover what’s important. Weblogs make it easy to shares ideas with potentially huge groups of people, and call them to action. That’s why China and other countries with repressive regimes don’t allow their citizens to freely use these technologies.

Mark Frauenfelder is a blogger, illustrator, and journalist. He is editor-in-chief of MAKE and co-editor of the collaborative weblog Boing Boing.

Bruce Sterling:
Gotta be Al Qaeda. As a networked and extremely violent global NGO, they’ve had a stronger effect on democracy than anybody else in the world.

Bruce Sterling is an author, journalist, editor, critic, blogger and a helluva good science ficion writer.

James Pinkerton:
For reasons having to do with my basic conservatism, I am suspicious of political innovations. Not totally against, but suspicious. So in the Brandeisian spirit of “laboratories of democracy,” let’s try Instant Runoff Voting (as advocated by my colleages at the New America Foundation, Michael Lind and Steve Hill, and the Deliberative Democracy (as advocated by James Fishkin at Stanford). Each of these thinkers say that their ideas have been tested–I say, test ‘em some more, in limited venues–these ideas should sit in the tea saucer for a long time.

And in the meantime, even as we contemplate future reforms, I think we should be reflecting further on what has been lost in our country as a result of past reforms. For example, the two-century drift away from small “r” republicanism–replaced by more direct democracy and populism–has been regrettable. The Founders warned that too much democracy, at the expense of the oligarchic and aristocratic features that they explicitly wrote into the Constitution, would lead to military demagogues. It’s hard to say that they were wrong to be worried about that martial-demotic possibility.

But at the same time, technology marches on, including biotech. If we see humans speciate, for example, in the next century or so, we won’t have to worry about the reinstallation of aristocratic and oligarchic features of society–they will come along with the New Men and New Women.

And similarly fresh developments await us with AI and robots. What sort of politics will they adhere to? Here, and in other countries, such as Japan? Those who count themselves as optimists about technology should consider such possibly prophetic short stories as Jack Williamson’s “With Folded Hands” and Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.” Not to mention Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the grand-daddy of all dystopic tech-tales.
James Pinkerton is a columnist, author, and political analyst. He served on the White House staff under both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and on each of their presidential campaigns.

Dr. James Hughes:
All communications and information technologies have the capacity to increase human self-determination, and our connections to one another, in that they make it easier to find information and collectively organize to participate in deliberative democracy. On the other hand, the corporate, cultural and political forces that want to maintain existing inequalities of power actively try to restrain those subversive capacities, and fill the channels with Paris Hilton, bombing runs and Fox News. Technology does not democratize by itself, it just changes the playing field on which democratic struggles are fought, creating openings that activist citizens can exploit. So I don’t see one hopeful tech, but just the constant effort to identify and make use of the emancipatory possibilities of new tech.

Dr. James Hughes teaches Health Policy at Trinity College, is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and its affiliated World Transhumanist Association. Dr. Hughes produces the weekly syndicated public affairs talk show Changesurfer Radio andis also the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future.

Douglas Rushkoff:
“Seems” is the operative word. The current bleeding edge of progress is metaphorical, not actual. It’s not that some piece of technology allows for better representation (so far, most of them are actually just better tools for voting fraud by the corporations who control them). But using interactive technologies and communications tools changes people’s felt relationship to public discourse. It reinventsthe commons as a participatory experience, and provokes people to think about participating in collective decision-making. This is its real value.

Douglas Rushkoff is a New York-based writer, columnist and lecturer on technology, media and popular culture. He’s also the author of Demos‘ Open Source Democracy which in large part inspired this Brain Parade.

Timothy Sandefur:
The most obvious recent advance is that blogs have been able to provide a check on the mainstream media’s most egregious abuses. What we’re seeing in the blog phenomenon is what I call a media fracturing. We’ve seen this once before recently, with the advent of cable and satellite television. In the olden days, when there were only three or four networks, TV dramas were bland, uninteresting affairs with simple plots, and almost no character development, and no major changes between episodes. Each episode ended pretty much where it left off. The reason was that networks were more interested in width than in depth—they needed to get the biggest audience for an hour. So you couldn’t risk alienating your audience by killing off a major character or making overly intellectual plots, or whathaveyou. But today, we have so many more choices that TV shows are vastly more intricate they want audience loyalty, now. And the result is a much greater quality of television. Well, blogs have the same potential. They are so highly specialized that if you want to know what’s going on in a particular area, you can often find a blog that specializes in just that one thing. The importance of this phenomenon can be pretty exaggerated, but it does have obviously healthy implications for democracy, since the spread of knowledge is good for democracy.

That being said, liberty is vastly more important than democracy. And I’m very delighted at the proliferation of libertarian weblogs.

Timothy Sandefur is a Staff Attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, where he is currently working to prevent the abuse of eminent domain, and to protect the right to earn a living under the Fourteenth Amendment. Timothy contributes to Positve Liberty and Panda’s Thumb.

Michel Bauwens:
I do not think there is one bleeding edge. Rather any technology which creates more distribution in resources, physical, informational, financial, is needed to strengthen peer production. Web 2.0 itself, as the creation of an architecture of participation, is pretty crucial and far from finished. I think we need systems that do not just rely on the wisdom of crowds, but allow for excellence and participation to flourish together, so that we do not get just lowest common denominator results. We need to insure that the new forms of social or algorhythmic selection (respectively a la Wikipedia and a la Google) do not create new entrenched elites, but remain flexible and changeable according to need. Finally, we need a lot of tools, technological and human (facilitation tools), to enhance transparent collaborative processes, and we need better institutional and legal tools. Conclusion: there is no magic wand, but continuous construction of the new participative world.

Michel Bauwens is a Belgian integral philosopher, Peer-to-Peer theorist and the driving force behind the P2P Foundation.

Steve Gilliard:
Clearly MySpace/Facebook social networking and YouTube.
Why? Because teens in LA used MySpace to organize protests to the immigration law througout the LA school system and no one had a clue it was happening.

Giving people the ability to mobilize social networks and throw up their own video which is watchable online give people a tremendous advantage in social communication. The more personalized a service can be, the easier it is to use, the more likely it is to allow people to become politically active. The desire for social change is always there, but the easier the level of commitment, the easier the organization becomes. Exchanging ideas has been the most difficult part of social activism. This personalizing technology makes it much more likely to engage people.

Steve Gilliard blogs at The News Blog and guest blogs at Daily Kos

The End is Nigh…Again

If you like me are frustrated by people moaning about the Large Hadron Collider destroying the world it might be useful to point out to the doomsayers that this whole controversy isn’t anything new. We went through this all before ten years ago just before the RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) was switched on. Well the RHIC was switched on and reliable sources tell me that the world still exists. The BBC still has an article on the RHIC hoopla which you can read here. The controversy goes back even further than that, in 1995 Fermilab was picketed over similar nonsense. This is one dumb but resilent meme.

Unfortunately for many I don’t think a rational counter argument is going to work. The reason being is that the fear of the LHC isn’t based on an objection to it’s safety in the first place. I see their fear as a Lovecraftian “things man was not meant to know” phobia. A common theme in Lovecraft’s fiction was exploration (ie read change) leads to disaster. The intrepid explorers realize far too late for their own good that they were better off in the dusty old familiar world.

That fear might seem irrational but there is an internal consistency to it. Science has undoubtedly brought about change. If you’re someone who is enthusiastic about, and comfortable with progress then you’re probably enthusiastic about the LHC. If you’re someone who waxes nostalgic for the Victorian era then being suspicious and downright hostile to the LHC is perfectly consistent with your worldview (although ironicaly the Victorians would have loved the LHC). Such people aren’t going to be reassured by arguments testifying to the LHCs safety because their objections aren’t really about the safety of particle physics experiments in the first place.

The best antidote to fear is not to attack the “false objection” but to address the real underlying objection. Since the real objection is a fear of change you’ll have your work cut out for you.  But it can’t hurt to be a good cheerleader for science and the benefits of technological progress in general. Not only is it more effective (by addressing the real objection)  than the Richard Dawkins scowleyfaced “I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong” approach it’s alot more fun. In that vein here’s a man, Brian Cox, with a serious case of infectious enthusiasm talking about the Large Hadron Collider at TED.

A Space 1999 castmember discusses LHC safety

Geoengineering’s Double Barrelled Moral Hazard

Like a lot of people I was alarmed to hear reports that methane was bubbling up in the Arctic Ocean. The initial reports were quite alarming. Boing Boing’s headline used the word “foaming” conjured up images of the arctic ocean turning into a freshly poured point of lager venting civilization ending methane. That emphasis is probably overdramatic but it’s nonetheless worrying especialy when you consider that none of this was supposed to start happening until the middle of the 21st century by many predictions just five years ago.

So when I heard news that researchers at the University of Calgary have announced a new technology for effeciently (energy wise, not financialy) extracting CO2 directly from the atmosphere I was interested. And when I heard that David Keith (who gave an excellent Ted Talk on the subject of Geogineering last year) was involved I grew more interested.  And with a cameo in a big budget upcoming Discovery Channel programme Geoengineering’s profile seems set to climb even higher.

Alot of people have debated that we shouldn’t even think or talk about Geoengineering, not an unreasonable point of view considering the moral hazard involved. And just to emphasize this point The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (think Tar Sands) just loves it when the subject of Geoenigeering gets press. It’s clearly being used as a stalking horse by skeptics who are in the process of shifting from outright denial to promoting inaction.  So I can understand why a lot of people are hostile to the idea of Geonengineering going so far as calling for tabling discussion and banning research on the subject.

I have a hard time taking this viewpoint seriously (how do you prevent people from talking about or conducting scientific research on subjects you don’t like anyway?).  Environmentalists are shooting themselves in the foot by making Geoengineering a taboo subject. They’re simply creating the impression ( often accurate in my view) that they’re overly partisan and irrational.

However the funny thing about Geonengineering is that isn’t simply used as a stalking horse for deniers. It’s also popular with the We’re All Doomed crowd.  These folks include people range from commentors on blogs mentioning that they’re stocking up on water and ammunition to respected scientists. But herein lies the second barrel of the moral hazard. According to this viewpoint there’s no point mitigating climate change ( unless you count moving to New Zealand and stocking up on guns and ammo a mitigating strategy). This too is self defeating and should be avoided.

Myself I’ve seesawed on this issue in the past but I’ve come to the conclusion that while I think it’s great that people are doing research on the subject of Geoengineering (and I’m sure that it will continue) there really isn’t any point in anyone except for a few researchers taking it into consideration at present. For starters we don’t have a viable Geoengineering technology ready to deploy and while Carbon capture sounds interesting it’s not likely to ever be less expensive than simply not emitting carbon in the first place.

The nightmare runaway feedback scenario can’t be discounted, but it’s a mistake to assume that the worst case scenario is true. You plan on the most probable case, focusing on do or die extreme measures doesn’t make for a rational response. The good thing about Climate Change is that it’s a slow motion disaster. Even in the worst case scenario we’ll have one or two decades before we go Mad Max, plenty of time for a World War Two style mobilization of resources and all kinds of desperate science fictionesque save the world gambits.

In the meantime with Solar getting foxier than ever and industry seems to be getting serious about investing in alternative energy now’s not the time to give up on rational optimism. As anyone whose run a marathon can attest it’s the last few miles that are the hardest but what gets you across the finish line is knowing that it’s there.

Related:

University of Calgary’s Research Papers relating to Direct Carbon Capture from Air

David Keith’s Ted Talk