A Darwin Award for Greens?
Writing in the Medical Journal of Australia, obstetrician Barry Walters has proposed a $5,000 carbon tax on the birth of each baby, plus an $800 annual tax. “Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and thereby rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behavior, a baby levy in the form of a carbon tax should apply in line with the polluter pays principle,” says Walters. He also suggests that contraceptives and sterilization procedures be offered to attract carbon credits that would offset income taxes for the user.
One cannot gainsay the sincerity of Dr. Walters. He is so devoted to protecting the environment that he advocates policies likely to harm his livelihood.
Making an even more personal sacrifice, forward-thinking Toni Vernelli in Brighton, England, arranged to have herself sterilized at age 27. “Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,” says Vernelli, now 35.
The draconian birth control policies advocated by extreme environmentalists could have interesting political consequences. There is a strong correlation between genes and memes; eighty-percent of children adopt the political and religious views of their parents. Conservative pundits who compare left-wingers to dinosaurs may be more prescient than they know: there are only about two liberal babies born for every three conservative children. Like coastal cities in Vice President Gore’s apocalyptic visions, the Blue States will be inundated eventually by a Red tide. The earth will be inherited not by the environmentally devout but by proliferant non-progressives.
Environmentalism is not the first religion to proscribe procreation. Shakers also were forbidden to breed and had to rely on conversion to sustain their numbers. Note the past tense. Given current demographic trends in North America and western Europe, it is only a matter of time before liberals are declared endangered. Heroic efforts may be required to herd sufficient numbers of these scarce creatures into protected habitats to create a breeding population, lest they die out completely. Biosphere II may come in handy then.
Mother Nature tends to correct her own mistakes, but it is gratifying to see so many people eager to help. Godspeed, I say.
[The possibly cryptic title refers to the tongue-in-cheek Darwin Awards commemorating folks who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it in spectacularly stupid ways. Mark Steyn, who has often discussed the link between societal values and demographics, also noticed the two stories referred to above. You can read his take on the issue here.]
My Two UFOs
Part of the fun of being an astronomical artist is that you get asked engaging questions. A surprising percentage of people are eager to buttonhole anyone who might have some inside info on things celestial. Often, folks want some follow-up on a news story, like the man who read about an impending collision between two galaxies and was curious how it had turned out. Some people just want reassurance that the moon landing wasn’t faked. Nearly everyone is fascinated by the possibility of extraterrestrial life. This sometimes leads to a discussion about UFOs, which makes me squirm a little, because, doggone it, I’ve seen ‘em. Two, in fact. But I don’t really “believe” in them. It’s a subject that causes some personal cognitive dissonance.
My creepiest UFO sighting occurred in 1969. In those halcyon days I often loaded a homebuilt telescope into my mom’s Falcon and drove into the Mojave desert in search of clear, dark skies. I would invariably get the car stuck in a sandpit on some abandoned road and spend hours extricating it. Eventually, in a suitably god-forsaken place, I’d set up the ‘scope, toss my sleeping bag on the ground, heedlessly bed down with the scorpions and sidewinders, and gaze at the heavens. On one occasion I was adopted by a pack of coyotes, but that’s another story.
On the night in question, I was setting up the telescope an hour after sunset. The clear sky would allow a nice view of Saturn when it rose in the wee hours. I had just finished aligning the polar axis of the telescope when something caught my eye: in the southeast, just above a ridge of hills near the horizon, was a perfectly straight, luminous line. It was about half the apparent size of a full moon, absolutely horizontal, and moving slowly west. It was clearly too thin and too straight to be anything natural. Cue X Files theme.
There was a weird scintillation to the object and, in my mind’s eye, I could see the sequentially rippling running lights on the edge of a saucer cruising over the desert, its hull cooling from the plunge into earth’s atmosphere as its pilots searched for a suitable landing spot after their journey of who knew how many light years. That line from War of the Worlds about “minds vast, cool, and unsympathetic” came to mind and I could feel goosebumps sprouting. I half-expected green death rays to blast me where I stood.
Then I noticed that the object seemed to be slightly larger. It was headed my way! Mingled terror and awe. First contact. Take us to your leader, who, God help us, happened to be Nixon. I also noticed a creamy glow developing in the east, but I knew what that was: the moon, getting ready to rise. Then I noticed something else: I had a telescope! Homer Simpson wasn’t even a twinkle in Matt Groening’s eye, but this was an early “Doh!” moment. I deftly aimed the instrument toward the object, peered through the finder telescope, and was even more mystified.
The scintillation was real. There was indeed a line of lights flashing on and off, but they were not turning on sequentially. Nor were they spaced with the geometric precision one would expect. Each light was, however, flashing with a regular pulse, and the period seemed to be pretty consistent for all the lights: about three flashes a second. I centered the spacecraft (now firmly convinced that’s what it was) in the finder’s field of view and looked at it through the 60 power eyepiece of the main telescope.
The strange green sheen of the hull betrayed the alien nature of the craft. Auroral curtains shimmering at the base of the ship hinted at the power of its advanced magnetic drive. They had come. The world was about to change forever.
Well, maybe not. What I actually saw was even stranger until my brain made the right connections. I was indeed looking at alien life forms: geese, on their way to some avian resort. The underside of their wings was reflecting the light of the moon, which was still hidden by hills at my location. Distance and perspective had blended the flock into a single line. Eventually the geese got close enough that I could see their characteristic “v” formation and hear their faint, evocative honks.
Without a telescope it would have been impossible to determine the nature of this UFO, which makes me think that most of the twenty-percent as-yet unexplained UFO sightings by sane, sober, honest people could have become explicable given a bit of optical aid or a different point of view. Under the right conditions even the most prosaic things can look extraordinary: Venus; weather balloons; swamp gas — all the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me official explanations. If investigators at Project Bluebook had suggested that I had seen a flock of geese I’d be looking over my shoulder for black helicopters even today. No way that was a flock of geese! But the telescope revealed that it was.
Item Number 2 in my UFO casebook isn’t quite so easy to explain. The desert encounter occurred when I was 18, arguably well above the age of reason (which I actually didn’t reach until 35, like most of my generation, but that, too, is another story). At least I was old enough and knew enough to eventually figure out what I was seeing. My first UFO sighting, however, happened when I was a mere lad of seven, and I thought nothing of it at the time.
The sighting lasted maybe three seconds. I was sitting directly behind the driver of our school bus as it cruised through a New Jersey forest ablaze with the colors of autumn. I was looking out the window, studiously ignoring Sharon Blake, the cute little red-haired girl across the aisle. The sky was blue and early morning sun dappled the treetops. Just ahead of the bus there was a flash of light. It was the sun gleaming off a shiny metallic disk flying over the road from right to left at maybe a thirty degree angle. I watched it for a couple of seconds until it went behind the trees. I thought it was kind of cool. Some new type of airplane, maybe, but no big deal.
I’m blessed — sometimes plagued — by the ability to retain vivid images. I remember looking out through the bars of a crib and can recall the shiny varnish that coated the top of a bannister at my grandmother’s house, viewed from the perspective of a babe in arms. This is not a particularly useful talent, but it allows me to recall details about that flying saucer that suggest the sighting was not a synthetic memory based on a dream or a misapprehended conventional aircraft such as a helicopter.
The UFO was lustrous silver and perfectly circular, sufficiently oblate that it looked basically flat, but there might have been a slight convex bulge to the bottom. As it glided across the road, a dazzling sub-solar glint slid along its edge, properly obeying the laws of optics. The most amazing thing about it was that its silvery underside reflected the orange and red treetops. I was able to see the trees as if in a mirror. This brief, bird’s-eye view is what enchanted my seven-year-old mind and it is the primary detail that convinces me I saw a real, physical object that morning.
If I were filling out a UFO report I would guess the thing was about 50 feet in diameter and 200 feet up. If it were much higher or bigger the tree reflections wouldn’t have been so distinct. It was likely moving at about the same speed as the bus, maybe 30-40 miles per hour. Given the location of the sun glint and the time of day, the bus was headed west and the UFO was traveling southwest. That should be enough to pin down the location of the saucer nest, don’t you think?
Did I see an alien spacecraft? Probably not. The least-bad explanation is that it was a test device from the nearby Picatinny Arsenal, covered with the same kind of aluminized Mylar envelope used on the Echo satellite two years later. This observation happened in 1958, post Sputnik, at the dawn of the Space Age, when America was frantically trying to catch up with the Russians. We could hear test firings of the Redstone rocket every few days, so they were doing bleeding-edge work at Picatinny. Perhaps it was an exotic balloon, like the one that supposedly went down at Roswell. Aeronautical engineers were trying all sorts of weird designs then. I’ve seen footage of a wacky flying saucer-like test craft from that time, but I don’t think it ever got more than a few feet off the ground; the computers required to stabilize such a thing weren’t around yet. The object I saw flew very gracefully.
Anybody know what it might have been?
Trampling the First Amendment
Not content with having their views promoted uncritically by CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, NPR and the entire professariate, Democrats are lobbying for legislation that would require conservative talk radio programs to provide equal time to leftist advocates. The proposed “Fairness Doctrine” is a cynical attempt to undermine the most effective alternative voice besides the Internet. You can sign a petition against this effort to restrict free speech here.
It isn’t as if liberals can’t broadcast their own programs. Air America, after all, has hundreds of listeners. The fact is, few prominent liberals have the audacity to accept invitations to debate in the talk radio venue; it is uncontrolled, unscripted, and generally attracts a better-informed audience than they are used to addressing. They have little to gain and much to lose. The only effect of the proposed legislation will be to force talk radio shows to provide air time to dull, minor league, leftist spokesbeings, who will drive listeners away.
Which is, of course, the point.
Global Warming: A Human Perspective
According to most climate experts, anthropogenic greenhouse gases add about 2 watts per square-meter of radiative forcing to earth’s environment. This is roughly the power used by a small Christmas tree lamp. In more personal terms, the human body generates approximately 100 watts of power and has a surface area of around 2 square-meters. Assuming that the sole of the average foot has an area of about 200 square-centimeters, it would emit 1 watt of power. Both feet, applied to a surface, would add 2 watts to that surface. Applied to a square-meter, that would be equivalent to the anthropogenic greenhouse effect.
If we could cover every square meter of the Greenland ice cap with a barefoot human — a magical, never frostbitten human willing to stand, day after day, pumping his 2 watts into the ice — would we expect the ice to melt?
The answer is “eventually.” A back-of-the-envelope calculation* suggests that it would take about 10,000 years, assuming an average ice depth of 2 kilometers. In light of this, Al Gore’s threat to invoke the wrath of Gaia to bring about a complete meltdown in 60 years seems off by a couple of orders of magnitude — unless, of course, he is willing to acknowledge the possibility that the warming we observe is due to a so-far unmeasurable anthropogenic effect superimposed on a poorly understood natural warming process that began when Abraham Lincoln was a baby, long before carbon dioxide levels changed.
Such an admission, however, might be inconvenient.
*2 Watts = 172800 Joules/day
333700 Joules melts 1 kg of ice
Therefore 2 watts melts 172800/333700=0.52 kg/day
1 kg = 1000 cubic centimeters of ice (yes, I know its really a bit more because of expansion)
Distributed over 1 square meter, this equals a depth of 0.1 cm
But our feet can melt only 0.52 kg/day, so a hotfooted human would melt a depth of (0.52)X 0.1 cm / day = 0.05 cm/day (half a millimeter)
THUS, the heat from a person’s feet would melt (distributed over a square meter), a depth of:
0.05 cm/day
1 meter/2000 days (call it 5 years)
2000 meters in 10,000 years (This surprised even me, so I’d appreciate a check of this reasoning by more arithmetically adept readers).
NB: Junk Science has a detailed discussion of how to evaluate anthropogenic radiative forcing .
Quest for a New Earth
If our civilization survives for another decade or two, we may get our first glimpse of a planet remarkably like Earth. The red dwarf star Gliese 581 is about 20.5 light years away, practically next door. Last year, two planets were discovered orbiting it. Both are giant worlds like Jupiter, detected by the subtle wobble they produced in their “sun” as they tug it slightly to and fro with their gravitational fields. Last month, astronomers announced the discovery of a third planet, dubbed GL 581 c. Two things about it are intriguing: Its mass is only about 5 times greater than Earth’s (as opposed to Jupiter’s 300 times greater heft), making it one of the smallest extrasolar planets yet detected. If it is made of rocky material like earth, it would be only about 75 percent larger than our world. The second interesting thing is its orbit, which places it squarely in its parent star’s “Goldilocks Zone,” where it is neither too hot nor too cold to sustain liquid water. This is the first planet we’ve found that could conceivably look something like Earth, with white swirling clouds and vast oceans.
We should be reluctant to draw a graph using two data points, however, and all we know about this world is its mass and orbit. Be cautioned that all that follows is speculation. Gliese 581 shines with only 1.3 percent of the Sun’s luminosity, so a planet would have to orbit 14 times closer than Earth orbits the Sun in order to receive the same amount of heat. GL 581 c does this, in fact, giving it a “year” that is only 13 earth-days long. In such a close orbit Gliese 851c has probably become tidally locked, so that its rotation period matches its orbital period. This means that the same hemisphere would always be turned toward its star. Our own moon does this, so that we see only one side of it.
Such a situation could make for an interesting climate. Any ocean in the subsolar region of GL 581 c might simmer under a perpetual hood of steam. If the atmosphere is dense enough, convection might carry heat away to the dark side, possibly preventing it from freezing in its eternal night. The most habitable place might be the “Twilight Zone” near the boundary between night and day. Any creatures living in this temperate band would see their sun as a bloated orange orb — a dozen times larger than our sun looks to us — poised always on the horizon. Plants, questing for light, would tumble over themselves, trying to grow ever-sunward. I imagined a situation like this back in 1980, and have updated my painting of this “Marching Forest” to suit the GL 581 c scenario.
So far, no telescope has been able to photograph a planet orbiting another star, but with any luck, sophisticated satellites planned for the next decade may obtain spectrographic data that could tell us something about the compositions of the atmospheres of these distant worlds. GL 581 c is close enough that, should its atmosphere contain oxygen — almost certainly proof of life because it is so unlikely to remain unbound for long — we would have the first evidence that earthlike worlds abound.
Whether that realisation does anything to improve behavior on this planet is anyone’s guess. A sense that there is still wonder and mystery in the universe might kindle hope in those parts of the world where there currently doesn’t seem to be much, this side of Paradise.
