The Longitude Prize of 2014- Addressing the Elephant in the Room

The initial Longitude Prize was over 300 years ago and was a competition which offered £20,000 to anyone who could devise a method to accurately determine a ship's position at sea.  Knowing where you were and additionally knowing what time it was were two extremely important bits of information to help you circumnavigate the globe.

Now, 300 years later, again with the Astronomer Royal on the committee, the Longitude Prize is being offered, somehow in conjunction with Amazon, and this time the committee is putting the question as to what the subject should be to popular vote-if you are connected to Amazon or so it would seem.

But Amazon is not my focus today.

The public has been asked to pick between 6 offerings as to what the £20 million prize money question should be.  They are:

Antibiotics
Antibiotics have changed the face of health care for the better; they on average add 20 years to our lives. 80 years on from the discovery of penicillin, we are still unable to distinguish bacterial from viral infections, or the type of bacteria in the clinic, which has caused the overuse of antibiotics and the evolution of multidrug-resistant strains of bacteria. We need a cheap, rapid and accurate point of care test kit that allows doctors to accurately prescribe antibiotics at the right time.

Flight

The rapid growth of carbon emissions caused by air travel needs to be addressed to help tackle climate change. The potential of zero-carbon flight has been demonstrated but it has had little impact on the carbon footprint of the aviation industry, which still relies exclusively on fossil fuels. We need to bring novel technologies into the mainstream to stimulate a significant change.

Paralysis

Paralysis can emerge from a number of different injuries, conditions and disorders and the effects can be devastating. Every day can be a challenge when mobility, bowel control, sexual function and respiration are lost or impaired. We need to find a way to vastly increase the freedom of movement for people with paralysis and address some of the secondary symptoms to make life easier.

Dementia

An ageing population means more people are developing dementia and unfortunately there is currently no existing cure. This means there is a need to find ways to support a person's dignity, physical and emotional well being and extend their ability to live independently.

Water

Water is a finite resource and we must seek to find ways of producing more fresh water. Some 98 per cent of the Earth's water is too salty for drinking or agriculture and as water requirements grow and as our reserves shrink, many are turning to desalination. We require a scalable solution that demonstrates low carbon, sustainable production of water for drinking or agriculture from seawater helping bring new technology to fruition.

Food

The world's population is growing, getting richer and moving to cities. Current estimates suggest that by 2050 there will be about nine billion people on the planet; moreover our tastes will have turned to more resource-hungry foods such as meat and milk. In the face of limited resources and climate change, we must learn how to feed the world better, but more sustainably...

Of the six choices, four are designed to ensure that we can continue to increase our global population exponentially.  Two are looking for ways to make the lives of some parts of the current population better.

The four: Antibiotics; Flight; Water and Food are all important, but let's take a look at them.

Starting with Flight.  I too am guilty of flying as a means of transportation and although I prefer trains I confess to flying because it is easier although it is certainly not the green choice.  In a previous post I wrote about the sliver of atmosphere which is all that is between us and the vast void of outer space.

I haven't changed my opinion, and certainly any and every thing we can do to help protect the atmosphere we must do.  But the carbon neutral programs are essentially scams which help to salve "green" consciences, but the truth is there are far too many flights taken.  This is a as a result of the wealthy who fly halfway around the world for a weekend, and the rest of the flying public who have been seduced by the abundance of cheap flights to cheap locations, all of which comes at a severe cost to the atmosphere.

Following on with Food.  Malthus was like an economist who can't tell you when the next recession will be but knows that one is coming.  His prediction of a global famine keeps getting pushed back, but at some point we will reach the tipping point at which time all the sustainable food sources will also be pushed to the limit and the famine will hit.  Recognising that sooner or later we will be unable to feed the total population means that we also need to look at population growth.

Water comes next.  Although it is not often thought of or discussed as part of the atmosphere in these types of discussions it is only logical to recognise that the planet's water and the planet's atmosphere are essentially two states of the same substance and so just as we have been treating our atmosphere extremely poorly we have also been treating our water with the same disdain.  Providing water to an ever growing population is a laudable undertaking, but the solution has to include looking at population growth.

Then we move to antibiotics.  The goal as discussed in the option description is to be able to use antibiotics more effectively.  There is no question that there is a massive over-prescription of antibiotics for a myriad of reasons, one of which is assuredly the inability to distinguish between viral and bacterial infections.  Solving this problem; decreasing the improper use of antibiotics is surely a desirable goal.  But it is a sideshow.  If we can talk seriously about medical solutions to health issues we should also be able to have an intelligent discussion about population control.

I won't pontificate on Paralysis and Dementia.  The former is like unemployment: it primarily effects the paralysed person.  The latter is more like inflation: it effects almost all of us either directly or indirectly through our friends and relatives.

Obviously both of them are admirable.  Of course medical advancement to help re-mobilise the paralysed would be great and anything that combats or defeats the scourge of dementia would be a wonderful thing.

But these are tactical strikes.

Strategically we need a plan to manage the global population.

A solution to that Gordian Knot which begins by breaking the taboo of population control has to be worth £20 million.

View From a Spaceship

Amidst all of the noise surrounding the Ukraine and the celebrations of D-Day there was a spaceship launched which had a 3 man crew: A German; A Russian; and An American.  In interviews with the three none of them ever mentioned any of the geopolitical manoeuvring taking place on planet earth but rather focused on the tasks at hand as they flew to their space station.

And yet the German, on German TV did make a bizarrely political statement that I don't believe has been picked up by the media at large.

He spoke of how huge space was.  That it just stretched and stretched in every direction into a vast darkness.  And he spoke of how beautiful the earth was.  Full of colour in an otherwise black and white environment.  He noted that it was simply incomprehensible that the atmosphere surrounding the earth was all that separated our bright colourful planet from the emptiness of space. 

And then, in a voice that started to crack, he said how horribly thin that barrier to survival was, and that whatever our differences on earth might be, we are all in this together and there is a very thin line between all of us, and the great void of space.

70 Years On

Living in England there was a lot of coverage of this the 70th anniversary of the Invasion of Normandy.  Additionally I have just come back from a visit to a small village near Le Havre where the celebrations were also in full swing.

This year was especially poignant given that many of the survivors of the D-Day landings are no longer alive and with their passing the "living memory" of the event moves from life to history.

As I also watch German television to try and get a more balanced view of events I was struck by the lack of coverage for D-Day in the German media. I asked a friend who edits an investigative journalism program for one of the mainline (public) television channels in Germany as to why.

His blunt answer was "It's not really discussed and no one asks our opinion anyway".

This got me to thinking as to just how deep does Germany's historical retrospection regarding the Third Reich go and as to whether the blanket of collective guilt smothered the fact that there was a German resistance-it just manifested itself very differently from the resistance in occupied countries.

So first: collective guilt.  This is a two-edged sword.  On the one side it sweeps everyone up and holds them responsible regardless of where they were on the "guilty-scale".  It also allows everyone on a very different level to shrug their shoulders as if to say we were all involved and therefore the responsibility is to the nation-not to the individual. 

Secondly is the question of resistance: What about those Germans who were against Hitler?  Those that were either demoted or fired because they wouldn't join the party.  Those that were banned from writing, painting, teaching or acting because their politics were wrong.  Those that physically escaped persecution by emigrating, not to mention those that were imprisoned and/or executed.

For on June 6th, 1944, they breathed a sigh of relief.  They saw what they hoped would be the end of the war, of the dictatorship, of the nightmare.

And yet there is still a whiff of not being patriotic in voicing those thoughts, of maybe even being a traitor. 

As far as Germany has come in trying to come to terms with its National Socialist demons I think there is still work to be done. 

Putin and the Rise of the Right

I recently read an article by Robert Kaplan on the shift to the right in Europe as reflected in the European Parliament elections. 

I won't go into full detail but essentially he was proposing that the fears and distaste for the Far Right/Totalitarian Regimes such as Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Franco had done much to discredit any attempts to emulate them in Europe, but that we were entering into a new phase in Europe which was no longer hampered by the horrors of WW II combined with the perception that the current political elites were failing their constituents.

From the end of World War II Western Europe was basically run by centrist governments, some left leaning and some right leaning but never venturing to far in either direction.

The politics of the centre led to the rise of the EU and its' evolution from a trade bloc towards a financial and political union.  Parallel to this development was the virtual collapse of the ethnocentric nationalist right wing parties as well as the far left "Stalinist" parties. 

Then the financial crisis hit.  And with it came the rise of populist parties promising a return to a past which was never as rosy as they portrayed and ignoring the fact that this nostalgia for the past was incompatible with the present and certainly not a viable vision of the future given the state of Europe today.

Despite that the ethnocentric nationalist propaganda found fertile ground amongst ethnically white populations which allowed themselves to be convinced that all their problems were caused by an influx of immigrants, primarily non-white, who were "taking our jobs, our social services, our health care and were responsible for all crime".

Add to that mix the increase in Muslim immigrants and suddenly you find that these right wing parties are bizarrely aligned to Russia in general and Putin specifically whom they perceive to be the protector of the ethnic Russians and even more importantly is aggressively anti-Muslim.

So a supposedly anti-fascist Mr Putin who conjured up a fascist West once again trying to oppress Holy Mother Russia as evidenced in the Ukraine finds himself being an icon for the truly fascist right wing parties of Western Europe.

In a similarly strange twist the fiercely anti-Gay Mr Putin has become an icon for the Gay community.

Politics does make for strange bedfellows.