Friday, January 23, 2009
In 1972, the boundless technological optimism generated by the Apollo Moon
landing got a cold shower of Malthusian reality therapy. "The Limits to
Growth," a report prepared for the Club of Rome warned that depletion of
resources and destruction of the environment by industrialized nations
would lead to disaster unless policies of austerity and birth control were
adopted. Dennis Meadows was the research director of the project.
Business and religious leaders were horrified; growth is their measure of
success. But there was no denying that our planet is finite. In 1992,
Limits was updated by the same authors in "Beyond the Limits." World
population has grown from about 4 billion in 1972 to 6.5 billion, and
though we are still well on our way to the disaster Limits foretold,
increased use of "the pill" has brought fertility rates down to "2" and
even lower in Europe and other nations in which women have equal rights.
And then there's Afghanistan.
A Sunni Islamist movement that governed Afghanistan from 1996 – 2001, the
Taliban implemented the strictest version of Sharia Law ever seen in the
Muslim world. Now out of power the Taliban, armed with weapons the CIA
gave them when they fought the Russians, seeks to prevent girls from
learning to read by bombing schools and disfiguring school girls with
acid. The result is that the average of births per woman in Afghanistan is
almost "7". Are we pulling out of Iraq only to get in deeper in
Afghanistan?
"We will restore science to its rightful place." After eight years of
suppression, those words from President Obama's inaugural address produced
a hormone rush that lifted the spirits of every scientist. Just hours
later the President warned that, "the challenges we face are real; they
are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short
span of time," but there was no dampening the shear joy of scientists.
The President has since been busy undoing policies from stem cells to
torture.
Nature this week examined the question of where we should go next in the
solar system, Europa or Titan. We don't get many major missions to the
outer planets and their Moons, although 3 or 4 billion dollars no longer
sounds like much. It would hardly allow a banker to redecorate his
office. In an editorial, Nature came down slightly on the side of Titan.
Hey, I'm just a subscriber, but while the lakes of Titan are nice, the
search for life to which we are not related has got to be the greatest
quest in science. Is there another way evolution could have done it?
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