Category Archives: Soapbox

Global citizenship in the context of COP27

About five years ago I wrote a long piece for the Citizens of Everywhere project and also published it on this blog [see ‘We are citizens of the world‘ on April 5th, 2017].  One theme of the essay was the way in which scientists and engineers work as part of a global community contributing to, and exploiting, a shared knowledge and understanding of natural and manufactured phenomena; and in this process, as global citizens, we are relatively unaware and uninfluenced by the national boundaries drawn and fought over by politicians and leaders.  Engineers frequently draw boundaries to define a system for analysis [see ‘Drawing boundaries‘ on December 19th, 2012] but we understand that they do not exist in reality so energy and, sometimes, matter can flow across them.  Similarly, national boundaries are man-made constructs, occasionally existing in physical reality such as the Berlin Wall, but usually only on a map.  Most people would like to be able move freely around the world; however, we are often restricted from crossing borders by the location of our mother when she gave birth to us.  Gaia Vince in her book, Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval, has suggested that assigning nationality based on your birthplace is arbitrary and instead we should have a universal UN citizenship with a national affiliation.  This might be one small step towards achieving peaceful mass migrations from uninhabitable zones created by major changes in the Earth’s climate.  There could be 1.5 billion environmental migrants by 2050 according to the UN’s International Organisation for Migration – that’s one in five people!

As I have argued before [see ‘Planetary Emergency‘ on February 20th, 2019], our politicians need to stop arguing about borders and starting worrying about the whole planet not just at COP27 but in everything they do. We are all in this together and no man-made border will protect us from the impact of making the planet a hostile environment for life.

Source: Anjana Ahuja, Acclimatising to crisis, FT Weekend, 27 August/28 August 2022.

Celebrating engineering success

Today is National Engineering Day [see ‘My Engineering Day’ on November 4th, 2021] whose purpose is to highlight to society how engineers improve lives.  I would like to celebrate the success of two engineers who are amongst the seventy-two engineers elected to the fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering this year.  Chris Waldon is leading the design and delivery of a prototype fusion energy plant, targeting 2040, and a path to the commercial viability of fusion.  This is a hugely ambitious undertaking that has the potential to transform our energy supply.  He is the first chief engineer to move the delivery date to within twenty years rather than pushing it further into the future.  My other featured engineer is Elena Rodriguez-Falcon, a leading advocate of innovations in engineering education that focus on encouraging enterprising and socially-conscious approaches to designing and delivering engineering solutions.  These are important developments because we urgently need a more holistic, sustainable and liberal engineering education that produces engineers equipped to tackle the complex challenges facing society.  Of course I am biased having worked and published with both of them.  However, I am not alone in my regard for them and will be joining other Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering at a dinner in London next week to celebrate their achievements.

The world is not our oyster

We think it is all about us. The world is our oyster. We developed the current global economic structure in which the costs of environmental damage, labour exploitation, and socio-political disruption are ignored, or perhaps even celebrated, as the price of doing business. Our philosophy stumbles over the word ‘equal’ because it maintains that we have dominion over all that is nature. We struggle to imagine that others might know something we don’t, or that fish and trees have languages of their own. If such understanding was possible for us, life on earth would not becoming to an end.

The words are mine but I have borrowed very heavily from Geetanjali Shree in ‘The Tomb of Sand‘ for the first two and last two sentences. She is describing white people and the West. Also from Chandran Nair in ‘Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a post-Western World‘ in the third sentence and from Suzanne Simard in ‘Finding the Mother Tree‘.

Sources:

Chandran Nair, Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a post-Western World, Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc, 2022

Geetanjali Shree, The Tomb of Sand, Tilted Axis Press, 2021.

Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, Penguin, 2021.

 

Are we in a simulation?

Decorative photograph of trains at terminusThe concept of digital twins is gaining acceptance and our ability to generate them is advancing [see ‘Digital twins that thrive in the real-world’ on June 9th, 2021].  It is conceivable that we will be able to simulate many real-world systems in the not-too-distant future.  Perhaps not in my life-time but possibly in this century we will be able to connect these simulations together to create a computer-generated world.  This raises the possibility that other forms of life might have already reached this stage of technology development and that we are living in one of their simulations.  We cannot know for certain that we are not in a simulation but equally we cannot know for certain that we are in a simulation.  If some other life form had reached the stage of being able to simulate the universe then there is a possibility that they would do it for entertainment, so we might exist inside the equivalent of a teenager’s smart phone, or for scientific exploration in which case we might be inside one of thousands of simulations being performed simultaneously in a lab computer to gather statistical evidence on the development of universes.  It seems probable that there would be many more simulations performed for scientific research than for entertainment, so if we are in a simulation then it is more likely that the creator of the simulation is a scientist who is uninterested in this particular one in which we exist.  Of course, an alternative scenario is that humans become extinct before reaching the stage of being able to simulate the world or the universe.  If extinction occurs as a result of our inability to manage the technological advances, which would allow us to simulate the world, then it seems less likely that other life forms would have avoided this fate and so the probability that we are in a simulation should be reduced.  You could also question whether other life forms would have the same motivations or desires to create computer simulations of evolutionary history.  There are lots of reasons for doubting that we are in a computer simulation but it does not seem possible to be certain about it.

David J Chalmers explains the probability that we are in a simulation much more elegantly and comprehensively than me in his book Reality+; virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy, published by Penguin in 2022.