Andy McGee's Blog

The Dawn of Everything
by David Graeber and David Wengrow

A great read, championing a concept that is self-evident to many of us, but requiring further proof for the academic world. The idea is that ‘civilisations’ have come and gone over the last ten thousand years with various levels of hierarchy or egalitarianism involved; that the theory where humankind has progressed (evolved?) from our violent base nature to modern city living led by controlling rulers is flawed. Societies have always existed that are far more egalitarian than the current ones.
For me, this is hardly a controversy. My novel ‘Signs of a River’ was largely about an egalitarian, science-based society existing over 4000 years ago, now known as the Indus Valley Culture. I came across it as a geophysicist when mapping offshore NW India and discovering an ancient large river that was separate from the Indus system and what I thought to be the mystical Saraswati and became intrigued.
The authors of DoE discuss many societies across the globe in both time and space and show that they have a huge variation in their levels of hierarchical rule, with some being more inclusive systems and that history has largely concentrated on the heroes who have sought to control the world. On this, I have to agree. War stories often seem to be heroic events led by charismatic leaders, when in reality for most, they are times of horrendous violence and deprivation.
Freedom is discussed at length with many different sorts of freedom described. One appeared lacking to me and that is the freedom of thought or the freedom to think differently to the group. Organised religion is opposed to this of course and has been a huge contributor to the way that civilisations are managed. The freedom to not follow your parent’s religion is a rare freedom indeed.
That lack of freedom is critical. It is what I think of as the enforcement of groupthink, either in an overt manner or by subtle social pressures and it largely prevents any chance at progress. The changes for humanity at the end of the last Ice Age were profound, including large scale agriculture, development of cities, sanitation, medical facilities, storage, large scale mining and economics. I find it hard to believe that the warmer climate by itself gave rise to all of these as a matter of course.
I suggest a number of other factors came into play, beginning with a rapid expansion of populations. Smaller groups probably do obey something like Dunbar’s number of 150 as a maximum workable size. Groups of that size undoubtedly don’t cater for the mavericks of society. Anyone trying anything different in a small group may succeed for their own lifetime but it is unlikely they would be able to pass on their ideas to like-minded descendants. Larger groups allow for similar mavericks to get together and collate knowledge over time, leading to the advancement of sciences.
But is that enough by itself and what are mavericks anyway? Marcus Chown talks of the Magicians; those who defy popular thought and come up with new ways of seeing things. These are the Einsteins, the Leonardo Da Vincis of the world who have probably existed throughout time but largely ignored until their ideas are accepted by the masses. Seed planting and farming was most likely invented many times by many mavericks.
Most people are poor at mathematics even today. Only a few nerds find maths intriguing and fun and worth pursuing endlessly. I would guess it was similar through human history although there is a chance that this ability has come about through genetic mutations in more recent times. Simon Baron-Cohen suggests that the pattern seekers have always driven human invention; these being autistic thought patterns. Perhaps this was the mystery ingredient that found its time post the Ice Age. Pattern Seekers and Magicians are largely the same being.
Whatever the case may be, mathematics was crucial to the new age. Counting, measuring, weighing, understanding equations, patterns, shapes, astronomy and logical methods were crucial to this age of enlightenment post the recent Ice Age. For this to happen groups of like-minded people needed to create scientific disciplines and document or memorise the results, leading us all to the joys of reading, riting and rithmetic. Groupthink was largely the enemy that needed to be overcome as most people would have thought there was no need to waste energy on farming or building permanent shelters. I can imagine how they thought ‘We didn’t need it in the past so why would we need it now. It is not in our traditions; our way of doing things.’
Societies have always been a battle of political thought, with conservatives and progressives fighting things out on a regular basis. As more goods were produced in early societies, possessions became the norm and accumulating and safeguarding them became an issue. This has led to where we are today with many seeking to own as much as they can and others trying to share out these goods as equitably as possible.
Here I have trouble with the author’s conclusion that we are now unable to envision more equitable societies and are stuck in a hierarchical model. While it is probably true that we are entrenched in a capitalist economic model, many subtle changes can be made to make things more equitable and I think most people are aware of them if possibly hostile to the ideas. Universal health is a model supported by some countries but loathed by others. Taxation models, pension funds, public housing, anti sex discrimination laws are all tools used by various societies with different levels of success.
Will we ever have a truly egalitarian society? Probably not as too many people see that as bringing everyone down to a common, more basic level rather than an advance for all. Whatever the situation there will always be differences of opinion that create huge chasms between people, as we regularly see being played out today.
Have societies evolved? Certainly. Evolution is not some linear one-way street to a better place. It is essentially a random process where the most effective system survives for a period of time, only to be replaced on a regular basis. What replaces it is essentially unknown and probably random, dependent on future events. We can guess at some of them, but that is the realm of science fiction.

Serious Fiction – Top 10

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
The Tenth Muse by Catherine Cheng
The French Mathematician by Tom Petsinis
Trust by Martin Scarsden
The Secret History by Donna Tart
Tell me Lies by J P Pomare
The Survivors by Jane Harper
The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley


Light Fiction – Top 5

Bila-Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss
Tea Ladies of St Judes Hospital by Joanna Nell
Mr Rosenblum Dreams in English by Natasha Solomons
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (plus the follow up)


Non Fiction – Top 5

Blueprint by Robert Ploman
Kindred, Neanderthal Life by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
The Alchemy of Us by Ainissa Ramirez
The Magicians by Marcus Chown
The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton

Quantum:
A word filled with mystery about a recently (100 years) discovered magical domain. The world we see is the statistical outcome of quantum events. If you toss a coin a billion times you will statistically have 500 million heads and 500 million tales, or very close to. This is our “real” or macro world. In the quantum world of individual particles, the world is more like being in the middle of a single coin toss with the outcome yet to be decided.
There are a number of quantum effects that appear to be at odds with reality and we are only beginning the journey of understanding them. My advice is to not try too hard to understand quantum things in macro ways, just go with the flow and appreciate the diversity. Some of the basic fun includes – virtual particles that simply pop in and out of existence; entanglement of particles where each particle shares a quantum state whatever the distance apart; uncertainty or the problem of not being able to know everything about a particle and the Schrodinger’s cat problem where measurement affects the outcome plus the wave or particle issue.
We know all of these things are real at quantum levels as they can be demonstrated in the macro world and can be used for all sorts of interesting engineering. Entanglement, or what Einstein called ‘Spooky action at a distance”, and was somewhat of an unbeliever is perhaps the area with the most research in current times. The big question is, can we build a useful quantum computer?
If we can, and it is still a big if, then we will have another level of computing power that can probably break modern day encryption techniques, creating all sorts of problems, particularly for banks. Conventional computers, based on 0 and 1s will still lead for some processes and quantum computers based on entangled, unmeasured particles (electrons or photons or whatever) in an undefined state. Quantum computers will allow a multitude more parallel computation.
So, are we close to having quantum computers? The short answer is yes, we already have some very basic ones, even some that can solve a problem that conventional computers can’t. But it is a bit like nuclear fusion where a working, useful system is still probably 20 years away, if ever.
Today’s quantum computers are hugely expensive, run at near zero degrees temperature, have perhaps 50 entangled particles and are very error prone. To scale up to something useful they would need millions of entangled particles with quality error checking capability. The major US tech companies and a number of governments are throwing serious money at the problems and are improving day by day and are both somewhat secretive and somewhat boastful about their achievements.
Australia sits in a pretty good place, research wise, with a number of promising projects including a quantum microscope that will assist medical science studies greatly. It is good to see the government supporting this research after many years of neglect. There are many promising projects including Australia’s cyber security.
Is there an imminent security issue? Probably not, but it is a good idea to keep up with the times.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes has written a remarkable book about Neanderthals, sort of a scientific version of Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear. It is well worth a read for all geoscientists, plus any budding archeologists as geology, age dating and creating a story from snippets of information are integral to the book.  They\se processes are also critical to most of the work done by geoscientists.

Rebecca shows that Neanderthals weren’t ‘the losers of the Hominin Games’, nor were they ‘powerless and awaiting extinction.’  On the contrary they were the European branch of hominins, with a similar but competing lifestyle to H.sapiens. They wandered the Asian and European landmasses for hundreds of thousands of years and interbred with Denisovans and H.sapiens numerous times over their latter years.  Each group learned from each other and co-existed for thousands of years.  All appear to be as civilized as each other.

Their eventual demise is open to debate, but it is now known that some of their DNA is carried by most of us on the planet today.  The various hominins went through all sorts of bottlenecks (e.g. – the seven daughters of Eve theory by Bryan Sykes) throughout their history and each was probably lucky to survive the many catastrophes and calamities over the last half a million years.

I was most intrigued that the possibilities for their demise 40 000 years ago were similar to that of the Indus Valley Culture, 4000 years ago.  Massive volcanic eruptions that caused winters that lasted numerous years, climate change and the arrival of new weapons (H.sapiens propelled weapons against Neanderthals vs coming of the Iron Age against a Bronze Age Indus culture) and the changes in ideology that these would have naturally brought with them.

It may have been the volcanic eruption (Santorini), climate change, the hoarding of possessions and enslaving of others that ended the Indus Valley Culture and similar changes may have ended a depleted Neanderthal culture.

Sykes book is well worth a read as a scientific treatise.  Mine might be as a historic fiction tied together with modern science.  It is about the discovery of a lost river based on an interpretation of modern offshore Indian seismic data.

Signs of a River by Andy McGee available as an eBook on Amazon Kindle.

Ferg was itching for some real answers, and these lads were just what the doctor ordered. “So Jagadev, what is this Saraswati that I am not allowed to mention. You must know of it?”

“It is a mythical and sacred River that is the ancestral home of the Hindu. There are many stories about it in the Rigveda, our most beloved of poems.”

Hashmi was a little non-plussed and felt compelled to interject. “No, good sirs, it is from a time before the Hindu. It is from the Aryan times and it is in Pakistan, not India. Everyone knows it as another name for the mighty Indus.”

I think a thought

Is ever so wrought

By asinine explanations

An action is sought

To generate a thought

Without any complications

All that stuff about bats thinking in Time and the reality of UFOs got me thinking about thought.  What exactly is it?

Either thought starts at the very beginning of any life form or it sneaks in as part of the evolutionary process.  I am no expert, but my guess is that thoughts are initially just reactions to stimuli and that they grow in complexity over time and evolution.  The process of a cell reacting to heat or light could be considered a very basic thought.  Reaction to a trail of varying chemical concentration a little more complicated and catching a ball a little more complicated again.

We could imagine that we can create a robot to go through the process of catching a ball with all its intricacies of motion and perception.  Humans learn to do it by trial and error, although some of us never master the process.  Dogs can also learn to do it.  Is it a process that probably requires thought?  Do we think when catching a ball or is it just a complex reaction where our neurons relay information about the various stimuli involved?

Henning Beck has an interesting TED talk about thought.  For him computers output the result of an algorithm after a specific input.  A kind of basic linear thought.  Humans use a less linear process with plenty of inaccuracies with a lot of reality perturbation.  We call this creativity.  We happily react to the world we know, processes like identifying a chair but have problems with things we don’t understand, like UFOs.

People and presumably dogs also create a virtual model in their minds and can then practice the physical act of catching without actually doing anything physical.  Is this virtual model where real thought processes start, rather than simple reactions?  Humans have also created more complex systems to develop their reactions into what we consider thoughts, including verbal and mathematical models and processes.  Additionally, there are the concepts of self-awareness and metathoughts or the idea that we can think about our own thoughts to complicate matters further.

Humans are probably the best at this thinking process, or at least in our own eyes.  But do we even need a brain to think?  Dr. Suzanne Simard came up with the idea of the Wood Wide Web a few years ago in which she describes the complex interaction of trees, their roots, soil fungi as a highly complex social interaction.  Tree roots fight chemical wars with other trees and bugs, assisted by fungi, but should this process be considered as thought?

A large part of what we think of as thought is the virtual model we make in our minds and presumably many other species do the same.  The model is a framework to put our memories of the real world into.  For example, we can easily review a large mental map of our local area so that we can move around it with ease and return home again.  A complicating factor is that we can perturb that map, as it does not have to follow an accurate one to one correlation with reality.  Now we get into the realms of imagination and the possibility that is where real thought begins.

Do animals actually think or is language necessary for thought?  Again, not that I have any expertise, but I suggest that all of those reactionary processes together with memory and virtual models are thoughts, whether human, animal or plant.  Any virtual model can be considered imagination.

Human mental maps are most likely created with position and distance in mind, but kind of imprecisely.  If I asked anyone to draw a map of their local area, I doubt that many would create anything like an accurate map.  But somehow, we can always return home.  Try drawing a map of Australia for example.  Unless you are a cartographer, I imagine you are laughing at the result of your own efforts.

Bats on the other hand create their mental maps using time.  Everything to them is the time taken for a return signal to their brains from an ultrasound pulse, created using their mouths.  Their map is in two-way time in three dimensions and it is obviously good enough for them to leave home, catch prey and return home safely.  They have no way to measure distance separately and no need for it.

If their mental map is in time, I suggest that their movement is also measured in time for simplicity.  They are probably aware that their flight time to an object is some percentage less than the signal time.  Like us, they probably can’t reproduce an exact map but they update their location constantly and compare it to their memory like we would for distance.

Like us, they also do not need to calculate their velocity to make it home again.  Imagine having to calculate how fast you are moving constantly just so that you can make it home accurately.  You are obviously aware of changing velocity but take little notice of it when deciding how to get home.

Bats need pretty accurate watches though.

If, as Miss Smilla says, that the Inuit have 47 words for snow of different types perhaps we need a similar number to describe levels of thought.

And as Newton said in a different way; for every thought there is a corresponding initiating action.

The post Thinking TIME appeared first on MCGEE.id.au.

I am sitting in my backyard listening to a jet fighter somewhere overhead, easily identified by the earth-shattering noise as it breaks the speed of sound, sending air molecules flying in all directions.  At the same time, I am watching a shiny blob dancing around the foliage a few metres from me, making no sound at all.  By moving my wrist rapidly, I can make it can fly soundlessly across the landscape at astonishing speeds.  It is the light reflected from my watch.  It’s even more fun if I use a laser pointer with a batman image, but that is probably illegal.

The astonishing speed comes from something called group velocity.  Imagine an event deep within the earth that creates a signal that reaches the surface, an earthquake if you like.  The signal travels out from the source and reaches the closest point (A) the quickest, but reaches its neighbouring location (B) moments later.  An observer in the sky watches this happen and describes an event that travels amazingly quickly between point A and B, when no such actual event occurred.  The signals were coming from deep within the earth to two separate points and not travelling across the surface.

All sorts of dispersion events can create this apparent group velocity and can give the false appearance of travel faster than the speed of light.  A seismic interpreter works with seismic reflection data that has undergone an amazing amount of signal processing.  All sorts of interference issues are dealt with mathematically as geophysicists try to eliminate known sources of spurious data.  Diffraction and refraction energy needs to be eliminated as does surface noise, all without degrading the reflected energy from the earth’s layers.

Even the reflection energy that is detected needs to be dealt with. Spurious events need eliminating; like pegleg multiples between coal beds, and water bottom multiples and bottom simulating reflectors (BSRs) offshore.  All of this comes with the assumption that we have got everything completely accounted for in our processing, but interpreters working in tricky areas know for sure that they don’t and need to be constantly aware of spurious signal.  Signal lensing issues through unrecognized velocity events, for example are mostly ignored.

So, what is all this carry on about problematic signals observed by US fighter pilots?  They are flying at high speed, through disturbed air and reporting spurious signals.  Now, my first observation is that these signals (or reflections) travel at high speed, changing direction rapidly and make no sound.  Hmmm, I wonder what they could be? A digital camera image has a lot of signal processing involved.

An object moving quickly through the atmosphere will disturb air molecules and will make noise. Some advanced being may be able to create noiseless travel, but is that at all likely?  Signals like holograms can certainly do that, but not solid objects.

Next, it seems to be happening only in America and these events are only observed by fighter pilots.  Real objects travelling at immense speeds would be more likely to be spotted by the much greater number of commercial flights with their many more excellent observers.  They would also be more likely to be spotted by ground dwellers with telescopes, radar and other fancy devices.  Yes, we do have a few reported ground instances of UFOs, but none of the images look at all convincing.

So, why would fighter pilots be seeing these phenomena?  Probably something to do with the fancy signal processing they do when accounting for their own rapid, contorted movements, while observing reflections bouncing off clouds, lensing through distorted air pockets etc.  I imagine fighter pilots’ brains get a bit scrambled as well after such movements.  I know what I feel like coming off a roller coaster.

So is my best defense to suggest that aliens have fiddled with my seismic time data when I get my depth prognosis wrong, or do I accept that I just don’t understand all the ins and outs of seismic signal processing yet?

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Soft rock geophysicists map the Earth’s subsurface in Two Way Time, that is the time it takes for a seismic signal to reach a reflector from the surface and return again to a sensor.  Hard rock geophysicists use other processes like gravity and magnetics to map igneous and metamorphic rocks. 

While interpreting and mapping their data, that interpreting geophysicist thinks in Time, only vaguely aware of what differences velocity will make to their final depth maps.  It has been the bane of engineers for decades, but perhaps they can learn from bats.  Yes, bats apparently also work in time, not distance.

A pair of researchers has published a paper in PNAS explaining that they have raised bats in a helium (He) rich atmosphere and compared their locating abilities with regular bats.  In the He rich air, both sets of bats underestimated the distance to the target in a similar fashion, leading to the conclusion that bats have an innate sense of the velocity of sound in air.

I must admit, I am a bit puzzled by the conclusion.  Surely the speed of sound in air is not a constant but depends on air temperature, density and humidity.  Wind speed and dust are also likely to play with a bat’s ability to judge the time (distance?) to fly to an object. So what speed is innate?

If bats work in time, then all they need to know is the flying time that is necessary to reach the particular stationary object.  A bat probably doesn’t understand the concept of distance or velocity as they have no distance measuring instruments; as opposed to engineers who have distance measuring implements, but no concept of time.

So does a He rich atmosphere simply create a problem with a bat’s own perception of its own flying speed, or in its view, the time it will need to get to a particular object?

I reckon that there are a lot more questions to ask.

Can a bat judge the time to an object when there is a heat source in its path generating a column of hot air for example? Velocity of sound in air increases at about 1 m/sec for every degree Celsius increase.

Do arctic bats have trouble flying in the tropics?

When chasing a flying object, a bat must regularly calculate the object’s revised position in time.  Does He affect this ability?

What is the consensus?  Do bats understand velocity and have an innate knowledge of the speed of sound in the atmosphere at large?

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I was surprised to learn that Anthony Hopkins has had himself diagnosed as autistic.  Not that I should be. After all many famous people are autistic, it is just that I expect them to be from the sciences, particularly maths and physics.  Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs are all often considered autistic while Temple Grandin and Paul Dirac certainly are.  It appears numerous actors also are, including Stephen Fry, Dan Aykroyd and Daryl Hanna.

Elon Musk coming out as autistic was neither a surprise or a shock.  He is pretty typical of what I would expect, his personality giving him away almost immediately.

Reading a recent LinkedIn article someone I noticed that someone suggested that Greta Thunberg wasn’t really autistic because she was too smart.  Elon may have just put paid to that idea. Which leads us to question what it is to be autistic.

In a medical sense we now have the Autistic Spectrum Disorder or ASD, as an all-encompassing term including the old Aspergers.  Personally, I think that calling out Einstein et al as having a Disorder is pretty silly, so we should just leave that as a medical term for those with a disorder rather than it being all-encompassing.  I also think that Spectrum is an unnecessary and dehumanizing euphemism.  The word autistic is plenty.

Autistic people may have disorders like anxiety, but then so might other members of the community.  Imagine if I started talking about Gay Spectrum Disorder?  Or NeuroTypical Spectrum Disorder. Both are equally valid and I could easily argue that they both lie on a spectrum and have various disorders.  NTs are highly prone to mild dyscalculia, or a difficulty with maths for example.

These days we consider the NeuroDiverse as a community of people with various needs, including various possible diagnoses like ADHD, OCD and autism. This community includes many of our colleagues in STEM, and including myself as most likely autistic.  I suggest that these under-the-radar people are the majority of those making up the ND world, rather than the standouts.

It is hard to define exactly what this community is, but it is best thought of as a people who are a bit different, perhaps eccentric perhaps with slightly different needs.  For example, one might get overloaded with too many stimuli and may need quiet times to perform at their best.  Some might overload with empathy and isolate themselves.  NTs might read these signs as that person being introverted, unfeeling or even unemotional.  Or, the opposite may occur, including outbursts and meltdowns.

One of the main differences is that NDs are less likely to feel the groupthink.  They are less likely to be interested in fashion and quite likely don’t understand the concept.  That absent minded professor type with the unruly hair, dressed in last century clothes is likely to be autistic.  Then again masking is also a fairly typical characteristic.  It is simply learned behaviour on how to fit in and generally considered a female thing, although I have my doubts on this idea.

When I was young nobody much had any idea of the concept.  I was just considered weird and had to learn how to behave as a typical NT.  These days kids are much more likely to be diagnosed early, leading to a new set of problems and necessary solutions.

While diagnoses are interesting, we are just better off understanding that there are a range of behaviours, brain types and thought patterns throughout humanity.  Nothing much is binary.  Some people are good at sports, some at maths and a number are good at both with various levels of clumsiness and intelligence abounding.

Emotional intelligence is just a construct to show that a particular emotional state is a desirable outcome.  That state is likely to be defined as that of a calm NT.  Imagine a world without its Einsteins, Thunbergs, Musks and Hopkins’s.  It would be pretty boring.

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Sustainability, now there is a good word.  It follows on easily from optimisation and is just as complex an issue.

The easiest way to look at sustainability is to think of the world and what it might be like in a few hundred years’ time.  I know; that is pretty much an impossibility.  But we can think about what issues there might be.  Resources are going to be a big one, whatever our new and exciting technological discoveries produce during that time period.

If we keep going at our current rate of throw-away use, that future world will have some very serious issues to sort out.  One side of that dilemma is to find new resources, either deeper than previously discovered or perhaps under the oceans, or even by mining asteroids or the moon. The best chance of utilizing these new resources is to give ourselves plenty of time to be able to access them cleanly and effectively.

That sort of thinking soon gets you to think about not wasting current resources, or recycling them so that more of those materials are still available to future generations.  It would be a great thing if we can still be making long surviving plastics from hydrocarbons in, say five hundred years’ time. Not so for throwaway straws.

So, do we waste buried hydrocarbons by burning them for fuel when there are plenty of alternatives that are more sustainable?  If electricity is cheaper and more sustainable from a direct solar source, shouldn’t we embrace it whole heartedly?  That way hydrocarbons will be available to humanity for a much longer time period.

On the other hand, batteries with the current technology are not a very sustainable resource.  It would be a better option if we used them more appropriately.  Lithium-ion batteries are a great modern invention, thanks to John Goodenough and with any luck he has some more good battery ideas up his sleeve.  They are great for small, wearable items like phones and watches as they offer a great energy supply with little weight.  That means they are also great for transport and they really do reduce pollution levels within cities.

With a billion Internal Combustion Engine vehicles currently on our roads, we have a major optimisation problem in front of us.  Do we banish them all and build a billion new EVs?  I calculated once that we would need to double our aluminium output and use all the world’s known lithium and cobalt resources to do that and in twenty years’ time do the same again.

To get to something vaguely sustainable we need to use some pretty clever optimisation techniques and try to use the best option for each of our requirements. A harvester on a farm is probably not the best use for a lithium battery as it will only ever be used for a few months a year.  A liquid (or gaseous) fuel would be a better bet, perhaps hydrogen or better still, ammonia. 

Grid backup for solar electricity generation is also not a great use for lithium batteries.  Weight is not important, so let’s use some other storage, be it battery (vanadium flow) or something else (a flywheel for example).  Similarly with home power tools, lawn mowers etc. They don’t need to be battery operated.  Fair enough if you are a tradie using tools every day, but not for the rest of us.  Even tradies might find some of their tools are better being plugged in so as not to run out of battery at an inopportune time.

Yes, new technology will help out along the way in largely unknown ways.  But to help that technology along, we need to be in the game in the first place.  We need multiple battery types that are fit for purpose together with liquid energy storage and we need to be developing the technology in many different areas all at the same time.  If we go full lithium battery, then we urgently need a recycling system that does not use an inordinate amount of energy or new materials.

Are we better off keeping current vehicles on the road as long as we can, rather than replacing them all instantly?  We would need to clean up those ICE vehicles remaining, again perhaps running on a gas mix including hydrogen.

Technology that converts methane (CH4) directly into solid carbon powder and hydrogen is brilliant, but currently expensive.  Imagine if we could convert gas hydrates into usable fuel, instead of just allowing their eventual escape, creating a major global disaster.

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Someone recently suggested that we needed to remove carbon from the atmosphere, which got me thinking about the optimal CO2 level, and with it, optimal levels of all sorts of things – population, cattle, sheep, rice and materials of all kinds.  None of us want to live next to a quarry or mine but we all want the products.

With atmospheric CO2, the world has varied between about 200 ppm and 5000 ppm.  200 is probably too low, creating problems with cooling, Ice Ages and plant growth.  About 900 ppm is optimal for controlled growth of plants but in reality, this is probably for weeds rather than commercial crops.  Who wants to live on Lincoln weed? It will also most likely have massive planetary warming effects.

James Hansen has suggested 350 ppm as the optimum and there is a movement for pushing for this level.  I can’t find any science to back it up, just that is what we had about 40 years ago.  In some ways I guess it is optimal, in that plants and animals were recently acclimatised to that amount.

The world is working toward net zero by 2050 which will take us to about 450 ppm or so.  Is that the optimum, or should we then look at removing CO2 from the atmosphere (net negative)?  Would plants and animals have acclimatised to the new levels by then?  Is stability more important than an actual target number?

My guess is that 450 ppm is going to be difficult to achieve and maintain with the world as it is.  So perhaps what is achievable, is also what is optimum. By the time we got back to 350 would it still be optimum?

Oil and gas production also have an optimal level for an enjoyable world.  I know that many will say that we should go to zero immediately, but this is hardly possible.  The move to EVs and green hydrogen will sort transport over the next twenty years or so, although air transport and shipping may still be problems.  Electricity generation could also be relatively fossil fuel free by then.

Feedstock for multiple modern products will still be a major issue; everything from plastics to fertiliser and pharmaceuticals. Disposable plastic is a no brainer and we need to move on from it as soon as we can.  SA has had bottle deposits for 40 years and no plastic shopping bags for 12 years and is currently moving on from plastic straws, cutlery etc. with no disruption to lifestyles.

Other plastics are a serious part of our lifestyle; our clothing, electronics, medical and surgery supplies, synthetic rubber and many other items.  Bioplastics and biofuels are an interesting option, but the amount of land needed seriously affects our ability to grow enough food.  Increased palm oil production is already a major land use problem.

My feeling is that the use of fossil gas is going to be required well into the future.  Production will need to become net zero in the way of emissions or close to.  A plastic that lasts 1000 years is probably not too much of a problem as it is essentially locking up the carbon for that time.  Clothes made of synthetics, which break down into microplastics in the wash, are a more serious issue.

If we want to go back to natural materials for clothing, we have that optimisation issue again.  How much land and resources do we need for cotton, wool, bamboo or hemp production instead?  It seems to me that we should use more natural materials and keep those clothes for a longer time.

Rice farming is as problematic as cattle breeding in a greenhouse gas sense.  Both produce copious amounts of methane.  No one is suggesting zero rice production over the next fifty years and similarly zero beef is just as unlikely.  Optimising our beef, rice, sheep, lentil etc production is the way to go but obviously a difficult result to achieve.

Our 2050 greenhouse targets should be based on achievability, science and the tools of optimisation.  Playing politics with them is not the way to go.  Whatever we do, we need to be in step with the rest of the world.  We have no car manufacturing ability of our own and rely on others completely.  Our infrastructure, tax structure and facilities need to be in lockstep with the major car manufacturers.  Our fuels should be largely domestically produced.

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