science Archive

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For the reading

By
Ben Nolan
– April 20, 2012

Meant to post this about a week ago, but what’r ya gonna do? The piece we were all waiting for narrating the creative and charismatic tension between Jay and Kanye through the Watch the Throne tour as a redemption story for the Jackass. Read it (you too, Tom!).

The Up series should be in the core 9th-grade humanities curriculum. Even if it meant bumping, like, Lord of the Flies (which I loved), I’d still think so. It’s fucking LIFE, man! Wish I’d seen it at 14. (For the uninitiated, it’s a documentary series that has been revisiting the same cross-class group of individuals from age 7, every 7 years, and ongoing– the next one’s 56-Up — testing the “give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man” iea). Here’s an interview with one of the subjects (the one who kindof jumped class to became a scientists at UW@Madison) (ty, Kottke!). Teaser:

While committed to the project, he says confessing all in front of the camera has never been easy. “It’s always very disturbing. It’s the fact that they don’t show you the way you want to be shown – but that’s not the main thing. They ask you some really disturbing questions. They stick a camera under your nose and ask – ‘Why did you choose your wife?’ – and then it’s shown to gazillions of people. I’ve learnt that the stupider the thing I say, the more likely it is to get in. You’re asked to discuss every intimate part of your life. You feel like you’re just a specimen pinned on the board. It’s totally dehumanising.”

This excerpt from a speech to J-Street by former Palestinian politician and non-violent activist Mustafa Barghouti about nails the problem of the West Bank for Israel:

What is apartheid? Apartheid is a system where you have two laws, two different laws, for two people living in the same area. If you don’t like the word apartheid, give me an alternative to a situation where a Palestinian citizen is allowed to use no more than 50 cubic meters of water per capital year, while an Israeli illegal settler from the West Bank is allowed to use 2400. How would you classify a situation where the Israeli gdp per capita is about $30,000 while a Palestinian’s gdp per capita is less than $1400?

Yet we are obliged to pay the same prices for products as Israelis do. More than that: We are obliged to pay double the price for electricity and water that Israelis do though they make 30 times more than we do.

Segregation of roads is another issue. This is the last place on earth, actually the first place on earth where people have been segregated with roads. I’m talking about roads in the West Bank, major roads are exclusive to Israeli settlers or army or Israeli citizens.

I cannot describe to you to the level of violation of human rights.. we’ve left to see Israeli army using dogs against our nonviolent settlers in the most vicious way. Which reminds us of what happened during the Segregation system here in the United States.

So the problem is very clear. Of course it is either two states or one state. But the reality is, What we are witnessing today with the passage of time is that people will be [left] with one or two alternatives. Either it’s a segregation apartheid system, or one democratic state system,. This is the choice we will all face unless some kind of a miracle happens and I don’t know what that miracle is.

Psychology may be about to debase its credibility as a scientific discipline. Some dude at the University of Virginia’s about to try to replicate every study published in three major psychology journals back in 2008. The popcorn’s in the microwave. Opening salvo:

“Ultimately it’s a waste of everyone’s time if I can’t replicate the effects,” he says. “Otherwise, what are we working on?

I feel like everyone’s been <3ing this TNC post on the opposition to racism as a rhetorical pose versus as an actual value (DeLong, Sullivan, LG&M among others), and it’s for good reason. Read it. And at least watch James Baldwin’s section of the video that kicks it off (starts at about 13 minutes in, and runs about 20, if I remember). Right now it seems to me to be the most powerful speech I’ve ever heard.

This NYT piece about the real-time socio-cultural dynamics resulting from the commodification of African tribal practices is provocative in what’s probably a good way. Even if not, it’s interesting and the writing is vivid. Teaser:

In the West we have a particular definition of authenticity and a mania for it as a standard for art, especially art that we envision as elemental, unmodern, unspoiled. We gauge genuineness in terms of age, rarity, uniqueness, history of use, motives for creation. But in Africa, as often as not, authentic is simply what works, socially and spiritually: for example, the way each Dogon tourist dance keeps a larger dance, and Dogon identity, alive.

What accounts for the more ambiguous outcomes of decriminalizing prostitution versus the unambiguously positive outcomes of decriminalizing drugs? In the case of prostitution, the legitimated commodity can suddenly demand expensive rights, supported by the power of the state, driving up the price of doing business compared to the still illegitimate competing commodities trafficked in illegally from abroad. At the same time, if you can decouple the sale from the identifiable-as-legit-or-not body of the prostitute (using the Internet), you’re a lot safer as a trafficker in the decriminalized jurisdiction — police investigators are disempowered as they need to procure some substantive reason that a given operation isn’t legit in an information void. This makes the decriminalized market an attractive hub for illegal traffickers with whose wears the legit, empowered, and fairly-paid prostitutes have to compete and often can’t. Here’s an NYT discussion of the topic.

Still, I think it’s a progressive step in a system in flux. Thoughts?

That’s all I got for now.

Happy friday, everyone!

Here’s another comic from the archives you may not find funny:

PS – Maybe the Red Sox just aren’t very good? (H-t Matt Eckel)

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An Apple a day…makes your gray matter decay?

By
Trevor Macomber
– March 26, 2012

Let me preempt this post (ontological question: is something really preemptive if it’s the first sentence in an essay, or is it merely introductory? Oh well…) by assuring you that I’m not writing it from my front porch while lording over an ever-growing collection of kites, soccer balls, and frisbees as I yell at the neighborhood kids to get the hell off my lawn.

That said, here’s another assurance: your two-year-old needs an iPad about as much as you need a diaper. (Which is to say, sure, it might be a treat once in a while, but let’s not go all Lisa Nowak here, okay?)

From MSN Money the other day:

Three years ago, when he was just 2 years old, Max Fuller got his first iPhone. His father, Craig Fuller, the CEO of a banking technology company, said it’s been an “enormous tool” for teaching Max the basics about colors, shapes and letters, and most recently the names of all of the dinosaurs and how they lived.

Okay, yeah, sure — education, innovation, keep up with the times, Trevor the Troglodyte. Obviously, you’ve missed the trend train and are attempting to analyze the current state of affairs from the engine fumes-engulfed platform of your pump-action handcar:

According to data gathered from September to December 2011 by global strategic marketing agencyKids Industries, 20% of children ages 3 to 8 own their own iPod touch, while 24% of U.S. children in this age group own their own iPad and 8% own their own iPhone. For teens, the numbers are considerably higher. An April 2011 survey conducted by financial adviser firm Piper Jaffray found that 80% of U.S. teenagers owned a type of mp3 player, with the iPod by far the most common, 17% owned an iPhone (38% expected to buy one in the ensuing six months), and 29% owned or had access at home to a tablet device (and 22% said they expected to buy an iPad in the ensuing six months).

Which is all well and good for Apple investors, but perhaps not so keen for early (as in, pre-pre-pre-teen) adopters:

According to many experts, so much screen time can have permanent effects on the brain. The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages any media use by children younger than 2. Dr. David Hill, a member of American Association of Pediatrics’ Council on Communications and the Media and the author of the forthcoming book “Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro,” agrees and recommends that any child over the age of 2 limit screen time to two hours a day.

“Evidence suggests that viewing the sorts of rapid fire images present in videos or video games can lead to future problems in children’s ability to concentrate,” he says, adding that some research suggests a strong link between media exposure and ADHD. He says problems are likely to surface when the device is used as a substitute for communication between parent and child.

[...]

Jane M. Healy, an educational psychologist who specializes in the effect of computer technology on growing brains and the author of “Different Learners: Identifying, Preventing and Treating Your Child’s Learning Problems,” says technology offers no benefits to young children.

“All indications are that instead of increasing their intelligence, it’s going to dull it down,” she says. What’s most important for a young child’s brain development is participating in conversation, a skill that children preoccupied with an iPad, cellphone or computer fail to practice, she says. “It’s language that will later help them become physicists, scientists and imaginative computer programmers.”

Again, this isn’t a screed against a harried parent handing their screaming toddler their touchscreen-enabled smartphone to quiet him down at the mall or in a restaurant; it’s a screed against anyone who would use such technology to outright replace time that they would have otherwise spent interacting with thetreasured fruit (Apple, in most cases) of their loins. Of course, that’s only half the issue, because while it’s one thing to let your kid use your fancy-ass future gizmo once in a while, it’s another thing entirely to give him one of his own — and not because you might spoil him (though there is that), but because you might literally and permanently reconfigure his brain chemistry for the worse.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I wouldn’t have killed for the latest interactive miniaturized gadget as soon as I was old enough to start requesting Disney movies by name, but the fact that I didn’t have ready access to pre-canned digital entertainment meant that I spent most of my youth careening through the unlimited confines of that wonderously weighty buzzword, IMAGINATION.

If I’d owned an iPad, do you think I would have spent the majority of my free time running around outdoors or reading piles of books animated in proprietary HD (head-defined) ImagiVision? Shit no! I’d have been hunkered down on the couch with a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos one one side and a bottle of Cran-Raspberry juice on the other, alternating my time between the latest YouTube sensation and marathon battles spent launching  disgruntled fowl at ravenous porkers into the wee hours of the morning.

So yes, this is an “everything in moderation” rant, but I think it’s an important one. Because while it’s absolutely true that, with

an increasingly technology-focused society and economy…exposure to technology, no matter how early, will only help children develop into the tech-savvy adults the country needs[,]

it’s also true that hundreds of people die of exposure each year. (Yeah, I went there.) So, Mr. Fuller, next time you want to teach your kid about colors and letters, why not try Dr. Seuss? And if he wants to learn about dinosaurs, I bet he’d love the ones in a museum even more than the ones on the tiny screen in his hand. Because there’s always going to be time for him to get his Retina Display on, but once those vital synapses and cerebral crennelations begin to solidify, there’s literally no going back. Then it won’t matter how many apples a day you feed him.

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The YouTube Rabbit Hole

By
Tom OHare
– March 12, 2012

How did I get here? Are photons self-aware?

Space is the place, as they say.

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At least your pet has never been infested with THESE

By
Trevor Macomber
– March 1, 2012

When my wife discovered what she thought was a flea in our living room a few months back, we reached immediately for our 19-lb Maine coon cat in order to subject him to the sort of intensive examination that I can’t imagine is legal outside of a prison or airport holding room. Finding nothing, we dropped to our hands and knees and spent the next 20 minutes crawling around on the carpet searching for potential brethren. Still finding nothing but needing something a bit more conclusive to combat our newly kindled paranoia, we turned to The Science — examining the darkly colored speck through a thrift-store magnifying glass while comparing it to pictures of fleas on Google images like some sort of entymological Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings. After another 10 minutes spent arguing over whether this or that formation was an appendage, an antenna, or merely a smudge on the glass, we were finally able to feel reasonably secure in our diagnosis of non-fleadom for the tiny creature(?) and thus were not forced to sell our house the next day and/or burn it to the ground.

That said, after reading today’s SlashGear’s article on a related topic, I can heartily confirm that I will gladly live with the taxonomical uncertainty inherent to the miniscule stature of our modern flea families if it means never again having to deal with their inch-long ancestors:

Scientists have discovered fossils of several large fleas measuring about inch-long that are thought to have fed on feathered dinosaurs back in the Jurassic period. The fossils of the giant fleas were unearthed at two separate sites in China. The largest female fleas discovered measured 20.6 mm making them about 0.81-inch long.

Not actual size...but I'd still have to pluck my pet Tyrannosaur if he ever tried ducking through the dino door with these on him.

On the other hand, flea circuses would be a lot more entertaining if they featured these blood-sucking stars, so I guess you have to take the good with the bad.

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Target makes a remarkable discovery…

By
Ben Nolan
– February 17, 2012

Target apparently calculates a “pregnancy score” (likelihood a customer is pregnant) based on their purchasing patterns, and on the basis of that score, customizes their advertising. The big discovery, via Target statistician Andrew Pole who’s quoted in a recent Forbes article:

“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,”

Some craaazy people.

Anecdote from the article:

An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

(Nice customer service, Target.)

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. ”

Oy.

(Hat-tip for KL)

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Marshmallows

By
Tom OHare
– February 8, 2012

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30 actual experts respond to the WSJ’s 16 “dentists playing at cardiology”

By
Ben Nolan
– February 2, 2012

It’s delish! Teaser:

Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused. It would be an act of recklessness for any political leader to disregard the weight of evidence and ignore the enormous risks that climate change clearly poses. In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth. Just what the doctor ordered.

And here’s what a list of credible experts looks like:

Kevin Trenberth, Sc.D., Distinguished Senior Scientist, Climate Analysis Section National Center for Atmospheric Research, La Jolla, Calif.

Kevin Trenberth, Sc.D, Distinguished Senior Scientist, Climate Analysis Section, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Richard Somerville, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego

Katharine Hayhoe, Ph.D., Director, Climate Science Center, Texas Tech University

Rasmus Benestad, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, The Norwegian Meteorological Institute

Gerald Meehl, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Michael Oppenheimer, Ph.D., Professor of Geosciences; Director, Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy, Princeton University

Peter Gleick, Ph.D., co-founder and president, Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security

Michael C. MacCracken, Ph.D., Chief Scientist, Climate Institute, Washington

Michael Mann, Ph.D., Director, Earth System Science Center, Pennsylvania State University

Steven Running, Ph.D., Professor, Director, Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group, University of Montana

Robert Corell, Ph.D., Chair, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment; Principal, Global Environment Technology Foundation

Dennis Ojima, Ph.D., Professor, Senior Research Scientist, and Head of the Dept. of Interior’s Climate Science Center at Colorado State University

Josh Willis, Ph.D., Climate Scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Matthew England, Ph.D., Professor, Joint Director of the Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Australia

Ken Caldeira, Ph.D., Atmospheric Scientist, Dept. of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution

Warren Washington, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Terry L. Root, Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University

David Karoly, Ph.D., ARC Federation Fellow and Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia

Jeffrey Kiehl, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Donald Wuebbles, Ph.D., Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois

Camille Parmesan, Ph.D., Professor of Biology, University of Texas; Professor of Global Change Biology, Marine Institute, University of Plymouth, UK

Simon Donner, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Canada

Barrett N. Rock, Ph.D., Professor, Complex Systems Research Center and Department of Natural Resources, University of New Hampshire

David Griggs, Ph.D., Professor and Director, Monash Sustainability Institute, Monash University, Australia

Roger N. Jones, Ph.D., Professor, Professorial Research Fellow, Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, Australia

William L. Chameides, Ph.D., Dean and Professor, School of the Environment, Duke University

Gary Yohe, Ph.D., Professor, Economics and Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University, CT

Robert Watson, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Chair of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia

Steven Sherwood, Ph.D., Director, Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Chris Rapley, Ph.D., Professor of Climate Science, University College London, UK

Joan Kleypas, Ph.D., Scientist, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research

James J. McCarthy, Ph.D., Professor of Biological Oceanography, Harvard University

Stefan Rahmstorf, Ph.D., Professor of Physics of the Oceans, Potsdam University, Germany

Julia Cole, Ph.D., Professor, Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona

William H. Schlesinger, Ph.D., President, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Jonathan Overpeck, Ph.D., Professor of Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona

Eric Rignot, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Professor of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine

Wolfgang Cramer, Professor of Global Ecology, Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France

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Because I can’t get anyone I need to talk to on the phone, and my work software is in the middle of the longest operation known to mankind…

By
Tom OHare
– January 31, 2012

Here is a picture. Stare at the three dots on the woman’s nose for thirty seconds, and then take a piece of white paper and put it in front of your eyes and blink a bit.

From the Facebook original I stole this from: “Congratulations, you just processed a negative with your brain!”

(h/t to Patrick)

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SHOCKING NEWS: Both global warming denialists and the WSJ’s editorial page are dishonest, pt.3 / Nir Shaviv Edition

By
Ben Nolan
– January 31, 2012

Nir Shaviv was actually born after WWII (a first on this list), and has a decidedly non-white-man-sounding name, though I think Jews are considered white now, right?  Right. He’s a white man. It doesn’t really matter.

Anyhoo, Shaviv seems to actually have some climate-science cred, via astrophysics. In 2003 he published a theory accounting for global temperature variance having something to do with our solar system’s passage through the Milky Way’s galactic arms. Thing is, in the paper making this case, his object of study isn’t the current drivers of climate change, but the drivers of climate change over the past 500 million years. And while he finds that, over that period, “at least 66% of the variance in the paleotemperature trend could be attributed to CRF variations likely due to solar system passages through the spiral arms of the galaxy,” that doesn’t imply that 66%+ of every variability is attributable to a cause. Basic statistics. And he acknowledges as much:

 As a final qualification, we emphasize that our conclusion about the dominance of the CRF over climate variability is valid only on multimillion year time scales. At shorter time scales, other climatic factors may play an important role.

Even its relatively benign claim was seen as problematic by…

  • STEFAN RAHMSTORF, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany;
  • DAVID ARCHER, University of Chicago, Ill.;
  • DENTON S. EBEL, American Museum of Natural History, N.Y.;
  • OTTO EUGSTER, University of Bern, Switzerland;
  • JEAN JOUZEL, Institut Pierre Simon Laplace/LSCE, Saclay, France;
  • DOUGLAS MARAUN,Potsdam University, Germany;
  • URS NEU, Swiss Academy of Sciences,Bern;
  • GAVIN A.SCHMIDT,NASA GISS and Center for Climate Systems Research,Columbia University,N.Y.;
  • JEFF SEVERINGHAUS, Scripps Institution of Oceanography,San Diego,Calif.;
  • ANDREW J.WEAVER,University of Victoria, B.C.,Canada; and
  • JIM ZACHOS, University of California, Santa Cruz

…who published a review in Eos that concluded,

Two main conclusions result from our analysis of Shaviv and Veizer [2003].The first is that the correlation of CRF and climate over the past 520 m.y. appears to not hold up under scrutiny. Even if we accept the questionable assumption that meteorite clusters give information on CRF variations, we find that the evidence for  a link between CRF and climate amounts to little more than a similarity in the average periods of the CRF variations and a heavily smoothed temperature reconstruction. Phase agreement is poor.The authors applied several adjustments to the data to artificially enhanc the correlation.We thus find that the existence of a correlation has not been convincingly demonstrated.

Our second conclusion is independent of the first.Whether there is a link of CRF and temperature or not, the authors’ estimate of the effect of a CO2 doubling on climate is highly questionable. It is based on a simple and incomplete regression analysis that implicitly assumes that climate variations on time scales of millions of years, for different configurations of continents and ocean currents,for much higher CO2 levels than at present, and with unaccounted causes and contributing factors,can give direct quantitative information about the effect of rapid CO2 doubling from pre-industrial climate.The complexity and non-linearity of the climate system does not allow such a simple statistical derivation of climate sensitivity without a physical understanding of the key processes and feedbacks.We thus conclude that Shaviv and Veizer [2003] provide no cause for revising current estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2.

Undeterred, Shaviv has taken to the Internet, self-publishing a number of anti-anthropogenic polemics on his website (e.g.).

In the example, he argues that while there is, in fact, an impressive correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures over not only the last 400 thousand years, but over the last century, the causality is ambiguous.  Anyway, blah blah, “we don’t fully understand the aerosol effect on cloud formation!” QUESTIONS QUESTIONS QUESTIONS and then he points out that there’s ALSO been a correlation between the last century’s increase in temperatures and an increase in solar activity, to which he elsewhere attributes something like half of the century’s warming.

He’s been in a fight over this with Michael Lockwood (meteorology prof at the University of Reading) and Claus Froehlich (of the World Radiation Centre in Switzerland) who argue that solar outputs since the 80s have actually been at historic lows, while the warming effect has continued. Here’s the actual paper.  And here’s a 2010 inter-disciplinary lit. review (well cited) substantiating the conclusion that solar variation falls short of accounting for recent temperature changes.

Shaviv responded to Lockwood and Froehlich’s findings in a memo published by a self-described “conservative” science blog called “Reference Frame,” but no where else that I can find.

As for ulterior motives, he apparently wrote to SourceWatch “if you’re looking for dark secrets about my funding…you’ll find none,” and it doesn’t appear that they have.

Conclusion: This guy’s got more cred than anyone yet, but his respected work doesn’t appear hugely relevant to the current climate situation, and his work that does relate to it seems not particularly respected in the scientific community, which begs the question — is this really the best they can do?

PS – I’ve asked r/AskScience if they can comment on his credibility within the scientific community on this subject. Will update if/when I get any good responses.

Updated: From “FormerlyTurnipHunter,” who is an expert in “Quantum Information/Quantum Computing/Quantum Optics”:

Not every skeptic or denialist is an outright crackpot. Some scientists do really think they found a different mechanism to explain global warming and they should be taken seriously.

However, these skeptics’ theories usually don’t hold up to even the most cursory scrutiny. This is also the case for Shaviv’s theory on cosmic rays. He is not the only one propagating cosmic rays as the main cause for warming btw., there’s also Svensmark.

Their physics is not completely wrong, their [sic] is definitely a link between cosmic rays and cloud cover, which in turn influences the climate. The problem however is that the cosmic ray theory can’t explain the warming over the last three decades, in which solar activity was decreasing.

So why would these scientists still hold on to their theories despite a lack of evidence? I don’t know, but I’m a scientist myself and I know how hard it is to let go of your ideas sometimes. Especially when there’s a big enough lobby happy to believe you and give you money to talk about this research of yours.

According to desmogblog, a great resource on climate denialism, Shaviv at least doesn’t deny anthropogenic warming completely, he just places our contribution at roughly 1/3 (its more like 3/4).

So instead of a paid denier like many others I would say he’s simply a mediocre scientist who won’t let go of a disproven theory.

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Michio Kaku is a fundamentalist

By
Ben Nolan
– January 26, 2012

Dude’s getting a lot of Reddit love for this video:

He’s a well-credentialed physicist, which apparently means that what he has to say about the nature and future of civilization has some degree of validity. People assume so, anyway, but they shouldn’t. Couple reasons, starting with the most superficial:

He seems to think Star Trek is a fully realized and unproblematic vision of a possible human future (bear with me); a supposedly possible future he’s innovatively called “2,” presumably because numbers are impressive. Problem 1 (I can use numbers too!): The Star Trek universe is not a fully realized and unproblematic vision of a possible human future, nor is it intended to be.

In the Star Trek universe, it’s given that we’ve transcended the will to power as a species, which is attributed to a combination of a memory of the trauma of brutal eugenics wars (see that episode where Q puts humanity on trial) and a wonder and humility rooted in first contact with an alien species (see “First Contact” — the second of the Star Trek movies starring the TNG gang). …Really, Kaku? You REALLY think that’d work? How long was it after the horrors of WWII that the Cold War picked up?

And even in Trek, you needed to actually have first contact with a technologically superior alien species. It was a necessary condition. What’s dude’s plan if that deus (alienus?) ex machina doesn’t end up materialising? (Side note: I grew up loving TNG (=”The Next Generation,” or “The one with Patrick Stewart”). It was my favorite show from age, like, 6 to 12. I still nostalgically enjoy the company of those characters, and I’m sure the show defined my moral intuition to a far greater extent than I could even really say.)

The point, tho, is it’s not a very credible vision of the future of humanity. But, as I said above, it was never supposed to be. The point of Trek was to be a soap box for Gene Roddenberry to declare on contemporary problems (like racism, greed, torture, technology, etc.) abstracted from the reality of our world (in which they exist) and from an angle of absolute humanistic moral authority.

If Roddenberry was genuinely interested in laying out a full vision for how society might work, he wouldn’t have just given it to us that money has been abolished — he would have gone into far greater historical detail as to what that process looked like, and how whatever resources are still scarce are managed and distributed. The answer is quite clearly implied: a strong, central bureaucratic authoritarian body. This is clear, for example, in how prime assignments on prime starships, like the Enterprise, which were certainly scarce, were distributed. They distributed on the basis of a highly formalized system of academic testing designed to reduce you to a comparable commodity manageable by the centralized bureaucracy. Assignments come from a “Starfleet Command” whose internal dynamics and politics are only vaguely gestured towards. We’ve seen this political-economic form before. How the Federation has managed to overcome the ultimately socially dominating dynamics that we saw emerge in almost every society that adopted that model is never specified. Presumably it has something to do with the elimination of the scarcity of life essentials — food, shelter, etc.

Problem 2: It seems to me that all of the most important indicators are telling us we’re heading into a period of increased, not reduced, scarcity:

The marginal gains in food production from technological advancements in food production are diminishing just as demand is increasing at a far greater rate than just the increase in our population (thanks to ethanol and the increased demand for more resource intensive food products by the growing middle classes in countries like China, India, and Brazil), and soon we’re going to to run into a serious water shortage thanks to our widespread over-taxing of depleting aquifers (all this is summarize here).

Energy innovation will have to make incredibly dramatic and sudden leaps forward if it’s going to pick up the slack in a post-peak-oil world (I’m more optimistic here than I am about food, but not by much. Thorium is pretty exciting, but there are plenty of very good reasons to be skeptical that it’ll ever get the kind of government support it needs to get fully off the ground (various lobbies for one, and for two, its unweaponizability in a global context of scarcity in which, any realpolitician worth their salt will tell you, it’s going to be all the more important to make sure you’re the one holding the biggest club — remember, we haven’t kicked the whole will-to-power thing yet and really shouldn’t rest on assuming we’ll be able to in time, even if we can imagine we might do it eventually.)

And then there’s population growth and climate change which, according to the IEA’s latest projection, will likely bring civilization-ending temperatures before the century is out. An important point to be made about climate change is that, as a species and scientifically speaking, we know exactly what we need to do to pull ourselves back from the brink. We just can’t make ourselves do it. Why? Because our social/political/economic system is a machine run out of control.

The problem this poses isn’t a scientific one, it’s, d’uh, a sociological/political/economic one, and there was no substantial engagement with it, as such, in Kaku’s little talk whatsoever.

I pointed this out on Reddit (+5 upvotes, -4 downvotes), and got the following reply:

Pretty sure he is in a much better position to predict the future of civilization than the average sociologist. (+5 upvotes, 0 downvotes)

Okay.

But back to Kaku: All Kaku gives us, socio-politically, is a vague gesture at “fundamentalism.” But fundamentalism isn’t the problem. Fundamentalism is a symptom. It’s an irrationalist response to the less and less avoidable rational conclusion that there’s no metaphysical grounding for a universal system of values around which we can all eventually unite; the conclusion that the universe itself isn’t rich with external-to-us sources of existential meaning, which brings me to another thing the Star Trek universe allowed its characters to take for granted that we simply can’t: Almost all of the episodes derived their interest through their engagement with fundamentally humanistic (not scientific) problems — an encounter with a new and mysterious source of consciousness or system of values that’s at odds with some until-then unproblematized aspect of the system structuring the humans’ interpretations of themselves and the universe.

And even when it did focus on science, the process of scientific research was never represented realistically. Huge and dramatic problems were soft-balled to be dramatically batted out of the park in some grand deus ex machina brought to us by, more often than not, Gene Roddenberry’s Mary Sue — the transcendently genius but also handsome, unpresupposing and relatable young acting-ensign, Wesley Crusher. And the solving of these problems never only resulted in a publication and researchers light-years away labouring to come up with ways to make practical use of the discovery. Wesley’s solutions always had immediate, dramatic impacts on his life and the lives of the crew.

Sorry, but that’s just not how science works. The process of science, truth be told, is almost always pretty fucking ponderous and dull. Full of null findings (not many of those in Star Trek either).

But back to fundamentalism: Fundamentalism is a symptom of an exploitative global political-economic system that structures civilization through subordination of all qualitative values to a fundamental quantitative value (read: capital). The very same system that’s made it possible for elites around the globe to buy mass-manufactured, pseudo-luxury products like Chanel bags which — no, Kaku — are not in themselves any kind of cultural advancement over the luxury handbags of previous decades (or centuries) any more so than the global ubiquity of manufactured pop bullshit like Akon and Transformers — when I was backpacking I heard Akon fucking everywhere, and saw Transformers in a packed theatre in Seoul — represents a cultural advance from the Beatles or the Godfather or Shakespeare or Aeschylus (blockbuster artists of times past). They’re signs of the emergence of a vapid global monoculture.

And the steamrolling of the English language over something like 100 languages per year in its march to global linguistic hegemony (another encouraging sign, by Kaku)? If you know another language, you know to what degree it can let us access meanings or perspectives on things impossible or tremendously awkward in English. It really is a fucking tragedy, all the ways of seeing the universe that we’re destroying forever. Werner Herzog speaks to this here (most relevant bit begins at about 5:20):

To reiterate the point I made above, fundamentalism is a response to what Nietzsche called the death of god — the move into an era where authentic belief in metaphysical authority is constantly undermined by the very way that society demands that we function within it — the greatest values devalue themselves. This is a reality many many many scientists have responded to with their own kind of denial-driven fundamentalist belief, except theirs is in Science itself (I also like science, but I understand that it’s limited — and rational existential meaning-making lies beyond them). This church-of-Science fundamentalism is made tenable for its adherents by their self-isolation in academic worlds far removed from the reality of the larger social system and a concerted group effort at mutual idealization. Anyway, blah blah blah. Believe that he’s not full of bullshit on this topic if you want to. For now, you’ll probably be happier for it.

And the idea that it’ll all be great once we can just “Play around with” the earth? Kaku, what–the–fuck is our game gonna be? Dodgeball? Does he seriously imagine GLaDOS happy?

We’re at a point, right now, where there’s a major crisis of value — where we really have to work (whether we do so consciously or unconsciously) at not being nihilists — the recourse of many, as mentioned, being denial through fundamentalism.

What games do nihilists play? None. Because there’s no point. Inert, they’re carried by the current, biggass waterfall (read catastrophic food and energy crises and warming-caused mass extinction) on the horizon or no.

What games do fundamentalists (irrationalists) play? SCARY ONES.

Michio Kaku is a fundamentalist. The end.

/drunken doom-prophetic rant

Update: A Redditor has kindly pointed out that Kaku didn’t invent the “1, 2, 3″ typology of civilizations. Wiki:

The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring an advanced civilization’s level of technological advancement. The scale is only theoretical and in terms of an actual civilization highly speculative; however, it puts energy consumption of an entire civilization in a cosmic perspective. It was first proposed in 1964 by the SovietRussianastronomerNikolai Kardashev. The scale has three designated categories called Type I, II, and III. These are based on the amount of usable energy a civilization has at its disposal, and the degree of space colonization. In general terms, a Type I civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its home planet, Type II of its solar system, and Type III of its galaxy.[1]

Interesting, but how exactly Kaku makes the jump between the consolidation of our exploitation of all of the potential energy resources on the planet to the idea that we’ve achieved some kind of utopia, I have no idea. Presumably he’s conjecturing that if we’ve lasted long enough for technology to advance that far, we must’ve figured out how to get along. Maybe. And maybe if Aristotle had imagined a future society that had progressed to the point where it was able to harness the atom, he’d've made the same assumption. I doubt it though. Aristotle was many things, but incautiously naive wasn’t one of them.

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