Finding Better Slaves

There’s a recent blog article by Tim Worstall which has some bearing on my post about HS2 and also the one about the circular economy; it was in response to a Guardian article by Nick Cohen about the dangers of a high-tech borderless future.

Nick Cohen:

Sensible economists worry about automated manufacturing replacing factory workers, Google’s autonomous cars replacing lorry and taxi drivers, and automatic online writing and translation services taking on tasks that only humans have been able to perform since the invention of literacy.

Tim Worstall responds:

Imagine the end state: machines do everything. Machines make the machines that repair the machines that make machines….and we don’t need to iterate any further back than that I think.

What happens to living standards here?

Clearly, no one has a job. Machines quite literally do everything. The robots act for us, the software writes the scripts and the machines make the 3D holo machines that we watch them on.

What happens to living standards here? They soar, of course.

As several commentators on Tim Worstall’s blog have pointed out, this is the scenario underpinning Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, the Culture being a future civilisation in which no-one has money but everyone nevertheless enjoys the good life, as all goods and services – from basic necessities to unimaginable luxuries – are provided by self-sustaining technology. This chimes with some old-fashioned socialist ideals (such as Sylvia Pankhurst’s “great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume”) – although, I hasten to add that the socialist reality has, to put it mildly, not exactly delivered on this. Capitalism, on the other hand, has delivered, to a certain extent, although we’re not anywhere near the promised land just yet.

Commentator IanB makes some good points:

It is also quite hard for those of us living under the tyranny of scarcity (and by this, I mean me) to think about, because one tends to bring in all sorts of scarcity-based assumptions without realising it.

… in the economy as described by Tim, there is no scarcity of raw materials either. Because a robot can always build a new robot to go fetch some more. Even from the asteroid belt.

One aspect that interests me in particular is that many people presume that demand would escalate without limit. I don’t. I think there is actually a limit to human wants. There is no use me having a hundred loaves of bread. I can only eat one. But in particular, it would presumably mean the end of demand for status goods, because if anyone can have them, there is no status to be had.

It seems to me that “the tyranny of scarcity” is a good way of describing the dominant mindset among today’s political and cultural elite (not just the greens, and not just the left.) And I think IanB is right to say that without it, there would be actually less conspicuous consumption. If everyone was well-shod, why would anyone (to use Lord Skidelsky’s example in my HS2 post) want 2000 pairs of shoes?

Clearly, capitalism has delivered in a way that state-controlled collectivist methods of production haven’t, although it has been anything but a smooth or a safe ride. And technology has, of course, been the key to capitalism’s relative success. If the ancient world was run on slave labour and the medieval world was run on serf labour (and animal labour!), today’s world is powered by a modern-day slave workforce which includes ubiquitous electrical power and the dense energy sources of fossil fuels. And, increasingly, it is not necessary to be a member of society’s elite to enjoy the fruits of this labour, such as air travel or the use of personal wheeled conveyances.

There’s a very good article about this on Graham Strouts’s SkeptEco blog, entitled “Earth Hour: We will Never Give up our Energy Slaves”. Look out for the comments and a link to another article about “turnspit dogs”, a fascinating example of how child labour and then animal labour was pressed into performing a service (turning meat on a spit) which technology now provides at the touch of a button.

Another very good article is this one by Colin McInnes on the Perpetual Motion blog.

It will be interesting to see whether the trend continues. Will the “limits to growth” people and the tyranny of scarcity prevail? Or will developments like 3D printing and molecular nanotechnology start to usher in a world where, eventually – for all of us – robots build robots and machines do everything?

I hope it will be the latter. And if something like Iain M. Banks’s Culture ever came into existence, I’d probably sign up in a heartbeat.

UPDATE

While drafting this post, I heard the extremely sad news on Wednesday that Iain Banks has terminal cancer and has only months to live. A century from now – hopefully sooner – we should have full-blown molecular nanotechnology, with fleets of tiny medical slave-machines patrolling our bodies and zapping cancer cells wherever they can be found. Roll on the day.

Moral Maze

I’ve just finished transcribing an edition of BBC Radio 4′s Moral Maze programme which was broadcast this year on 30th January, and you can read it here on my transcript site.

It is about “nimbyism” and the controversial new High Speed 2 (HS2) rail project in the UK, which is now set to go ahead and will link London to some of the more northern cities of Britain, starting with Birmingham. The discussion covers several important and interesting topics, such as the idea of progress, the economy and what should be done with the countryside.

The subject of consumerism also comes up, and I was struck by one exchange between economist Lord Robert Skidelsky and Clare Fox, who is director of the Institute of Ideas. Skidelsky has been arguing for an emphasis on “the good life” rather than economic growth, and Fox is arguing for economic dynamism.

Clare Fox: …I mean as we haven’t got very much GDP, and we’re not making very much money, I think – you can understand, for people –

Lord Robert Skidelsky: I agree.

Clare Fox: – that what we might want, at the moment, is a little bit more sense of economic dynamism, rather than trying to make excuses for not having enough. I’m only saying that because, surely, things like the “good life” – in order for us to philosophically consider our spiritual lives, we don’t want to be worried about unemployment, or having no money, or being poor, or “How are going to feed the kids?”, or any of this. Or even – wouldn’t it be nice to be a bit more ambitious and be able to think we could, you know, get to Manchester dead quick or even fly to the Moon? Wouldn’t that be good for the spirit?

Lord Robert Skidelsky: Yeah, and more and more things to buy in supermarkets -

Clare Fox: Let me tell, you I -

Lord Robert Skidelsky: – and more and more consumer goods.

Clare Fox: But that’s good, is it not? I mean, can -

Lord Robert Skidelsky: For ever and ever, like Mrs. Marcos’s shoes, 2000 pairs?

Clare Fox: I don’t think most of us have quite arrived at getting 20, never mind 2000.

Lord Robert Skidelsky: No, but then, you know, there’s 30 and then there’s 40, what else are we offering people?

What I find interesting here is Lord Skidelsky’s representation of economic growth as an ever-accumulating heap of superfluous consumer goods – 20 pairs of shoes, then 30, then 40 until we have amassed a collection to rival that of Imelda Marcos. Interesting, because it certainly does not resonate with my experience of society at all.

Now there is a bit of the hoarder in all of us, and there are a few people who do manage to collect vast amounts of stuff they don’t need. However, these are extreme cases. Like many people, I have the money to waste on more shoes than I could ever need (although 2000 pairs would be a challenge, admittedly) – but my point is, we don’t tend to do that.

What Lord Skidelsky touches on but (deliberately, perhaps) does not emphasise is the choice we enjoy, as modern consumers. I don’t need 20 or 30 pairs of shoes but I appreciate being able to choose from a range of 20 or 30 different kinds of affordable shoe in a shop.

And that’s what is valuable here – variety and the freedom to choose, not mere senseless accumulation. That’s what I would understand by “more and more” – more variety, more freedom of choice, not just more and more stuff.

I wonder – when people like Lord Skidelsky argue against “more and more things to buy in supermarkets”, do they mean that the volume and number of things we buy should be less, or that we should be allowed to exercise less choice?

Happy January!

You can tell it’s January, here in the land of Orwell’s Airstrip One. What was once a fairly harmless pastime – looking to the future, making up resolutions for the New Year and seeing how long they lasted – has become yet another fabulous opportunity for our “betters” (there’s a whole professional class of them now) to lecture the rest of us on how to live.

I’ve been struggling to come up with any this year, to be honest. As it is, I subsist mostly on wholesome foods like brown rice, broccoli and tofu and go to the gym or swimming pool several times a week. Mind you, I drive to work rather than use the train (too expensive) or cycle (no conscious death wish) so I don’t entirely live the low-carbon dream/nightmare. However, I suspect that I might be somewhat more “green” – although I wouldn’t describe myself as such – than quite a few others who would describe themselves as such.

So perhaps it’s time for some different resolutions, to get me through the next few months, anyway.

1) Alcohol. I really have neglected alcohol recently. Days or even weeks pass without touching a drop, so that definitely has to change. Especially as there is now a campaign by Alcohol Concern to get people to stop drinking altogether this January. Luckily there’s also a campaign called Drinkuary, to get people to enjoy alcohol more this month – and there’s still some cheap booze in the shops, as our ridiculous government’s minimum pricing measure hasn’t yet been wheeled out – so time to be inspired and stock up!

2) Smoking. This one’s a bit more tricky, as I’m a non-smoker and never really got started on the habit, even when I was a student. And it’s expensive. Mind you, I find the idea of those electronic cigarettes (e-cigs) rather intriguing, and sometimes toy with the idea of buying one. But they’re also a bit pricey too, especially when I could be spending the cash on cider instead, or maybe cake, so that’s one resolution bound to fail at the first hurdle.

3) Food. And talking of cake – yes, please. And all things biscuity and chocolatey, of course. I’ve been neglecting them, as well, over the festive season, so absolutely need to make up for lost time. Who could forget the exciting battle between our wonderful PM David Cameron and equally useful leader of the opposition Ed Miliband this time last year over the issue of cheap chocolate oranges for sale in the high street. Well, I remember it anyway – Dave was going to nudge us away from the wicked oranges, Ed was simply going to crack down and ban them, or something. Lovely people. In celebration of “irresponsible capitalism” and of course cheap calories, I think I’ll start my campaign with a whole Terry’s chocolate orange, purchased, naturally, at newsagent WH Smith.

That’s plenty of resolutions for now, although hopefully a few more will occur to me before the new year has started to get old. You know what’s also good about them (aside from the actual pleasure of consuming these naughty things, of course)? The fact that in a small way they go against Nanny and all her little rules and strictures. Even the thought that enjoying some fast food or a Mars bar or a bottle of cheap supermarket wine will make Nanny cross and want to stamp her feet makes these items taste all the better.

Happy January, everyone!

Great Balls of Steel

I haven’t watched all of Roland Emmerich’s movie 2012, about the end of the world, but I have seen some of the scarier highlights on YouTube, and the scariest of those, in my opinion, has to be the moment when a gigantic super-tsunami threatens to engulf the very peaks of the Himalayas. How would you ever escape from something like that? You’d need, of course, some sort of ship or ark – which is indeed what the people in the movie actually have, hoping to ride out the catastrophe in a number of strongly-built vessels, each large enough to hold many thousands of refugees.

Despite the summer’s latest doom-laden news about fires, heat waves, melting icecaps and now Hurricane Isaac, there’s nothing remotely as awful as Emmerich’s world-engulfing disaster on the horizon. Which is just as well, because no-one – to my knowledge, anyway – has built the sort of huge vessel that you would need in order to survive it.

However, people are building arks. Just – on a smaller scale. The latest of these to hit the news is a giant steel ball – 13 feet in diameter and painted bright yellow – built by Chinese inventor Yang Zongfu. It contains a year’s worth of food and water, three weeks’ worth of oxygen, and has room for up to three people (Adam And Eve, plus one spare?) Here on YouTube, you can witness the moment when the giant ball was rolled down a hill and into a small lake with the inventor inside. He survived unhurt (bar a slight mishap with a safety belt), although the ball itself appears to have picked up a rather impressive dent, on its way down.

If your budget won’t stretch that far – or if you only need to survive a modest catastrophe – the Japanese company Cosmopower has designed a much smaller and more basic capsule, called Noah. It’s – again – spherical and bright yellow in colour, with a diameter of 4 feet. You won’t be able to escape with much in the way of provisions – maybe a small bottle of water and a Snickers bar, if you’re lucky – and there’s no room for loved ones, pets, livestock, etc., or really anything else than just yourself. Basically, the Noah capsule would provide a very temporary refuge for one person during the sort of tsunami that hit Japan in 2011 or South-East Asia in 2004, but after a few hours that person would still be in urgent need of rescue.

There’s evidently a lot of room for development, then, in the field of spherical personal survival capsules. By the time I become a billionaire and establish my Bond-villain style mansion on a volcanic island somewhere, no doubt Mr Yang Zongfu will have perfected his Noah’s Ark Mk.10 and I’ll be in a position to order a dozen of them for myself and my entourage. We will then be able to weather the catastrophe in style, and perhaps repopulate the Earth later, if we feel like it.

Mind you, if the world is going to end in 2012, we’ve all clearly left it a bit too late to be planning anything like that.

Better Angels, These Days

I often listen to the radio in my car, as I shuttle back and forth every day between home and workplace – there’s often something interesting to listen to. Much of it is ephemera – it might remain on BBC’s iPlayer, for instance, for a few days but then will be gone for ever. Occasionally, however, I’ll make an effort to find it later on the internet, make an audio recording of it before it vanishes, and then perhaps write up a transcript. This is what I did after hearing a brief interview with psychologist Steven Pinker on the BBC’s PM programme last week – you can read the transcript here.

The Better Angels of Our Nature is a book I’m now intending to read. Steven Pinker’s argument (that the long-term trend is of a reduction in human violence) seems to fit in, generally, with lines of thought expressed by some others, such as Daniel Ben Ami in Ferraris for All and Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist – he is saying that despite the fact that there are places in the world where violent incidents are happening, there are many more places where such events are not happening, and that the overall incidence of violence is going down. This may be cold comfort for residents of the Syrian city of Homs, for example, in recent months, but of course there are vast expanses of the Earth where violence on that scale is not occurring and where peace largely reigns, unreported by the media.

We have become used to the idea that the world is heading for hell in a handbasket and that as humanity becomes more numerous the dangers of ecological collapse and societal breakdown loom ever closer. So it seems odd to learn that the world is actually becoming more peaceful. Just as people experience storms and floods, and look back to a mythical time of climate stability and “normal” weather, we also watch explosions and shootings on the TV news, and hark back to a slower, gentler, more peaceful era in human history – that never really was.

Things not looking too good in 3991 AD…

I heard on the radio this morning that committed computer gamer James Moore has spent the last decade playing Civilisation 2 (not continuously, it has to be said) and has now reached the virtual year of 3991 AD. Things have taken a somewhat nasty turn over the millennia – the world has been stuck in a vicious, Orwellian three-nation standoff for centuries, and has been through a generally rather tough time, what with famine, nuclear war, mass population die-off and also runaway global warming (the ice caps have somehow melted over twenty times – which is interesting in itself, as logically one would assume they’d need to grow back, in between melts.)

Daniel Knowles from the Telegraph explained, over the radio, that the game had certain assumptions build into it, which he deemed reasonable and not particularly outlandish. He mentioned nuclear war and a stop to the production of green technology as scenarios which would have certain consequences; for example, stopping green technology – in the universe of this game, at any rate – would of course lead to dangerous global warming.

What I find interesting is that James Moore has now become mired in something of an impasse – his nation (the Celts) is stuck in a permanent stalemate and nothing seems likely to change it – indeed, there’s a possibility that the game has now reached some kind of terminal state. And this, I think, speaks volumes about the limits of any kind of simulation, whether it be a humble game or the sort of computer models used to try and predict what the economy or the climate will do. There are always fixed assumptions and a finite number of possibilities. If the assumptions are incorrect, and if stuff happens that hasn’t been accounted for when the model was designed, then the simulation will be wrong, although it might be quite useful (and also entertaining, if it’s in the form of a game.) And the longer it runs, the wronger it will get.

In the real world, the unexpected can always happen. And often does! And in unexpected ways, too! And just when you thought it wouldn’t!

John D. Kasarda & Greg Lindsay: Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next

Watching Emirates Flight EK001 from Dubai approaching Heathrow one Sunday morning reminded me of a book review I’ve been meaning to post for some time now. I have a very good view of the landing path from my back garden, and the giant Airbus A380 seemed almost close enough to touch, yet was surprisingly quiet, unobtrusive even, given the plane’s size and proximity. A good omen, perhaps.

Heathrow, of course, is becoming very congested these days, with no immediate prospect of a third runway, and thus represents a potential choke point for international companies and entrepreneurs intending to do business in London. In that way, I suspect that the Greens (and their green-hued proxies currently enjoying power) are making good on their promise to turn the UK into something resembling an economic backwater.

And this thought ties in neatly with the theme of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, published last year. Greg Lindsay is a journalist specialising in business stories, while John D. Kasarda is an academic and a designer and promoter of aerotropoli, (according to Wikipedia, he is currently the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.) My feeling is that Greg Lindsay (here’s his website) did the vast majority of the writing, although both are listed as co-authors.

What is an aerotropolis? I can’t recall it being ever fully defined in the book but basically it’s an airport with a city built around it, as opposed to an existing city with an airport tacked on. Dubai (from whence came Emirates Flight EK001, that Sunday morning) is one example, and another is New Songdo, a city currently under construction (to be completed in 2015, I gather) on 1500 acres of reclaimed land in Incheon, South Korea. The airport (and thus connectivity to other airports around the globe) comes first, and the city’s business and residential districts are planned around it. Greg Lindsay has described it as “a pure node in a global network whose fast-moving packets are people and goods instead of data.”

This book is mostly a very interesting read, at times, though it does have some rather slow patches where the authors get bogged down in all the detail. What particularly amazed me was the sheer size, efficiency and complexity of businesses that rely on delivering stuff by air, from UPS and their gigantic Worldport hub in Louisville, Kentucky, to the “cool chain”, whereby fresh flowers are flown to auction in Amsterdam and then delivered to destinations across the globe, perfectly refrigerated every step of the way, to state-of-the-art hospitals in Thailand that fly their patients in from the US.

In fact, reading this book it is difficult to escape the notion that the authors are describing some sort of futuristic parallel world, and some of the touches would not be out of place in a William Gibson or Douglas Coupland novel. Take, for instance, a passage about Somalis working at the UPS Worldport, which seems like the stuff of urban legend:

UPS has so thoroughly de-skilled the Worldport that even desert nomads could work there now, and they do. Several hundred members of Somalia’s Bantu tribe have resettled in Louisville in recent years, working mostly in and around the hub. They’re part of a larger influx of immigrants recruited to meet the needs of the companies drawn here. The Bantu’s lack of English (or any form of written language) hasn’t deterred UPS from hiring them.

Or take this thoroughly odd description of an aerotropolis-type community in Reunion, Denver, where everything is new, yet some features are not so much designed to look like pre-existing traditional buildings, as they are meant to resemble the ruins or remnants of old structures that never existed there in the first place.

“We created a bit of a backstory about a ranch here, and a farm,” Marty explained, “and as you drive in the entrance of Reunion, you’re supposed to be going through a historic farmstead. The walls are supposed to represent the foundations of farmhouses no longer here, the tree plantings represent an orchard, and even the streetlights have a gooseneck that harkens back to the galvanized fixtures that were on every farmhouse in northern Colorado. We did it really because this is a blank slate.”

This rather strange fabricated backstory leads to an interesting question, though: is this the way people actually want to live – in an instant suburb appended to a new mega-airport complex? The second part of the book’s title is a confident assertion – “The Way We’ll Live Next” – and the authors depict a furiously busy world of competing aerotropoli populated by armies of migrant workers and presided over by an elite class of globe-trotting executives (or “road warriors”, to use the authors’ expression). While many people across the globe are increasingly having the sort of nomadic globalised lives the authors describe, I think there will be many who, given the chance, would baulk at it and aim for a more settled sort of existence. Few would wish to have the life of Ryan Bingham, the main character in Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air, who is a permanent resident of “Airworld”, the artificial and expansive yet, at the same time, curiously claustrophobic world of planes, terminals, lounges and club rooms.

I find myself in two minds about the aerotropolis concept. A great many people want to live in cities – this is well-attested by the fact that urban populations worldwide are fast growing. Jobs, opportunities and networks abound here. But there are cities such as London, where I’ve spent almost the last 20 years of my life, that are not only modern places but have their traditions and monuments and ancient corners, too. People value these, as well as, and often more than, the promise of new buildings, new shops, new workplaces. Without innovation, a city would become a mausoleum; where there is nothing but the new, people start to hate it and feel the need to create traditions, monuments and backstories, even if they have to cut them out of whole cloth, like the Reunion farmsteads that never were.

Undoubtedly aerotropoli, or places very similar, will spring up here and there among the fast-developing regions of the globe. Some will succeed, others will fall by the wayside, and ever-increasing quantities of goods and people will flood through this “physical internet” like blood cells through some vast circulatory system. Many people will be attracted to and will settle and work in places like Dubai, New Songdo and their future counterparts. But – as a keen but occasional visitor to Airworld, myself – I cannot help suspecting that many will not, and that the older cities, for all their awkwardness and congestion and rickety infrastructure (not to mention the danger of becoming economic backwaters), will remain popular and worthwhile places in which to make a living, for a long time to come.

Up in the Treetops

During my recent visit to Tokyo, and strolling one afternoon through a park in Koto-ku, I glimpsed something through the foliage overhead, something high in the sky, shiny and metallic. The long-distance photo I took that day (which I’ve decided not to publish here) did not do it justice, for it is, in fact, a very tall, very modern and impressive structure indeed. What I had seen, for the first time was the Tokyo Sky Tree.

Very tall structures are not unknown in the Tokyo area, which may seem paradoxical, given the restlessness of the Earth’s crust under this particular region; in fact, or so Wikipedia tells us, Tokyo has no less than 44 buildings and structures taller than 180 metres. I’m familiar with Shinjuku’s garden of skyscrapers, which includes the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building No. 1 (or Tocho), and also the orange-and-white Tokyo Tower over in Minato-ku, completed in 1958 and now the second-tallest building in the city. I never got around to visiting Tokyo Tower when living there during the late 1980s, but I did visit Yokohama Marine Tower many years ago, and, more recently, have been to the Sky Garden, an observation deck 273 metres from the ground, at the top of the Yokohama Landmark Tower (highly recommended – the view of the harbour district and the surrounding city is breathtaking.)

The secret to withstanding the sort of kaiju-grade earthquakes that rock Japan from time to time, is of course clever and sophisticated construction techniques, employing devices such as the tuned mass damper, which reduces the amplitude of the a quake’s destructive vibrations. Yokohama Landmark Tower, for example, has two of these dampers, and the Tokyo Sky Tree is built around a central shaft of reinforced concrete, which can move separately to the steel framing and acts both as a damper and as a stairwell. It also has a tuned mass damper right at the top, and pilings which spread out through the soil beneath the structure just like the roots of a mighty tree, and which also help to keep it secure.

What is the Tokyo Sky Tree, anyway? It is a tower, and currently the tallest one in the world (also the second tallest structure in the world, after Dubai’s Burj Khalifa), of lattice construction, like its forbears Tokyo Tower and the venerable Eiffel Tower. It will serve as a TV and radio broadcasting tower, being tall enough to beam terrestrial television over the surrounding high-rise cityscape, and will also have an observatory and a restaurant. They hope to finish building it in December this year and open it to the public in spring 2012, and I would very much like to visit the Sky Tree when I next come to Tokyo.

Here are a few more assorted facts about this structure. It is white with a touch of indigo (to symbolise the bluish white – aijiro – of Japanese porcelain) and will be lit up at night by arrays of LED lights, in blue and purple on alternate days. It will be precisely 634 metres tall, and this is a clever example of Japanese wordplay, as the numbers 6, 3 and 4 can be rendered in Japanese as “mu”, “sa” and “shi”, making up the word Musashi, which is the old name for the province of eastern Japan which incorporated Tokyo and its neighbouring prefectures.

My interest in these sorts of massive constructions has grown in recent years, as they represent for me the sort of high-tech, modern and aspirational world I want this to be. Some years ago I read about the plans for something even more ambitious, a 2000-metre tall, 500-floor skyscraper in the Tokyo Bay area called Aeropolis 2001, which would have been a decent first attempt at building an arcology – a vast and self-contained high-density human habitat, the like of which has existed, as yet, only in science fiction. Sadly, the bursting of Japan’s “bubble economy” in the 1990s, and the resulting slow-burning recession, meant that Aeropolis 2001 never became a reality. However, the completion of the Tokyo Sky Tree will mark, for me, the return of something like that confident, soaring and future-oriented spirit.

Sitting high above the human jungle, this is the closest one can be to outer space, without travelling in an aeroplane, rocket or balloon. When I next return to Tokyo, I’m looking forward to going up to the observatory of the Sky Tree, having a cup of coffee perhaps, and simply enjoying the magnificent view.

Are We Nearly Doomed Yet? Part 2.

While I’m at it, here’s the second instalment of a (sort of) yearly series keeping tabs on anything looming up that might just be the end of our civilisation. Since Part 1 in December 2009, there have been a number of events that, while undoubtedly calamitous for thousands of people across the globe, have fortunately not been of the sheer scale that would categorise them as threats to all of humanity.

During 2010, there were big earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, Turkey, China and Indonesia which killed almost 250,000 people, mostly in Haiti. In 2011, so far there have been over 14,000 deaths, mostly in Japan (the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami) but also in Christchurch, New Zealand, and in Burma. In 2010, there were also a number of big volcanic eruptions, including Eyjafjallajökul in Iceland, Mount Merapi in Indonesia (causing hundreds of deaths there) and various other places in the world, such as Ecuador, Guatamala and the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia.

There have also been massive floods (such as Pakistan in summer 2010, Queensland, Australia in winter 2010-11) and a heat wave in continental Europe which contributed to a series of wildfires in Russia during the summer of 2010, factors in these events being a “freezing” of the jet stream in mid-2010 and La Nina conditions towards the end of that year.

None of these events, tragic and hugely disruptive that many of them were, constituted an actual threat to civilisation.

Anyway, what’s threatening us at the moment?

1. Asteroids. A few small ones have whizzed past Earth over the past year or so, according to NASA. In November this year Asteroid 2005 YU55, which is a respectable 400 metres in size, will pass within 0.85 lunar distances, but won’t be a threat. There’s another big near-Earth asteroid – 99942 Apophis – which Russian scientists have recently suggested might actually hit us in 2036, but NASA says no. So unless something huge and unexpected appears in the firmament this year, I conclude that we’re safe from killer meteors, for the time being.

2. Supervolcanoes. There have been several articles this year, such as this one in National Geographic, about the land over the great magma bubble of Yellowstone rising by as much as 10 inches between 2007 and 2010. However, as this and other articles explain, according to current theory, the ground may rise and fall for thousands of years without actually erupting, as the molten rock shifts up and then sideways, almost as if the magma chamber is slowly breathing. It doesn’t look as though the famous National Park will blow up any time soon, which is the main thing.

3. Everything else. Seems quiet enough – no especially terrifying new viruses, rogue nanotech outbreaks, escalating nuclear arms races or incipient alien invasions have been brought to my attention recently. Unless one of these scenarios is quietly brewing, out of sight of the world’s media, or an equally scary but completely unprecedented “black swan” type event is waiting in the wings, it looks as though civilisation will make it through to 2012 unscathed.

Ah yes… 2012. A bumper edition of Are We Nearly Doomed Yet? is on the cards, when we approach the start to that famously portentous year. The Mayan calendar running out, Planet Earth likewise coming to some sort of a sticky end, and Planet Nibiru making its long-foretold flying visit to our normally uneventful little corner of the Solar System – oh my. Time to get set for some truly excellent, weapons-grade weirdness.

In the meantime, that’s quite enough doom for this year. It’s likely to be the hottest April on record here in the UK, so we’re told, and it has been a lovely Easter weekend here in west London, with the sun shining and flowers blossoming all over the place. I’m off for a nice evening stroll, while the warm weather lasts.

Just Back from Tokyo

Blogging has been non-existent for some time, and part of the reason is that I’ve been over in Japan for the last couple of weeks or so, visiting in-laws and seeing the sights in Tokyo. It has been a good trip, despite the very frequent aftershocks they are experiencing at the moment, at least one or two a day, which is an unusual situation – last time I was in Tokyo, there was only one barely perceptible jolt during my entire 10-day visit. It’s now possible to receive earthquake alerts via one’s mobile phone or over the TV, and it can be a little nerve-wracking when the warning sounds and you wait for the floor and walls to start shaking, not really knowing how big the imminent quake is going to be.

Some observations on the situation in Japan, following the recent catastrophic earthquake and tsunami:

- Firstly, I’ve been impressed, as always, by the ability of the Japanese to respond to disasters of this kind. Watching TV footage on NHK News of the clear-up operations in the coastal areas pulverised by last month’s tsunami, I’ve seen roads being cleared, ships salvaged, rubble being sorted and temporary kitchens mobilised to provide anything from hot noodles to fresh pizza. Overall, the situation remains dire, but the people are resourceful, determined and organised.

- In addition, the relief efforts are a testament to the strengths of a developed economy and to modern technology and communications. Environmentalist Bill McKibben thinks otherwise, as per this article in the Guardian, but Tim Worstall very effectively demolishes Bill’s shaky argument here. As Tim points out, “it’s multiple sources, spread across a variety of geographical regions, which provides security of supply of anything. Yes, food and power included.” Factors that make the difference include trade, modern networks and supply chains, also an abundance of electric power and fossil-fuelled vehicles.

- Despite the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant being steamrollered by a once-in-a-thousand-years monster tsunami, and although the incident has been costly and dangerous and is still ongoing, no-one there has yet died from the effects of radiation. In fact, nuclear power has killed remarkably few people, and even the Chernobyl incident directly killed less than 50 individuals. To put that into perspective, according to the World Health Organisation, nearly 3,500 people worldwide die in traffic accidents every single day of the year.

One thing I had been looking forward to, was going to Japan in one of Air France’s big new Airbus A380s and enjoying the novelty of travelling in a double-decker aeroplane. Unfortunately, with only a few days to go, the airline switched to Boeing 777-200s for their Paris-Narita route, and will resume the A380 service later this year. The twin-engined Triple Seven is a great aircraft, I should say – to date, it has been extremely reliable and safe – so I’m not exactly complaining; it also has the honour of being the first entirely computer-designed commercial aircraft (according to Wikipedia), which as a technophile I find very appealing. But I still wanted to travel in the A380!

I’ve also just finished reading George Monbiot’s 2006 book Heat, where he has something to say about “love miles”, the distances (sometimes vast) we travel to visit family and friends across the world; what he says is they have to stop! In fact the book itself is interesting and, I thought, well-written (will probably review it at some point), even if based on a catastrophist fantasy – imagine, if you will, an alternative universe where global warming caused by man-made CO2 emissions was threatening the world, and where we had to dramatically reduce said emissions for civilisation to survive. Then imagine that in this alternative world aviation had to be cut back by over 96 percent, and think about the heartache, misery and disruption this would cause – no more visits to family and friends on the other side of the globe, no more holidays in the Maldives, no more airmiles, and no more “love miles”. This would be an excellent scenario for a rather chilling SF novel.

Thankfully, I live in the real universe, where the man-made global warming terror is starting to fade, and where aviation for the masses remains a welcome reality despite the high cost of fuel and stupidities like the Air Passenger Duty. Reflecting on this fact, I raised my plastic glass of Air France white wine in an ironic but heartfelt salute, last week, somewhere over northern Siberia. To Heat – long may it remain science fiction! To airmiles and “love miles” – long may we continue to amass (and afford) them!

Next time, I might even get to ride in an Airbus A380, at last.

(For anyone wishing to donate money to those affected by the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, by the way, the Japanese Red Cross web page, with details on how to do so, is here. You might also wish to donate to ShelterBox, a UK-based disaster relief charity that has been of great help to Japan in recent weeks.)