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C00002 00002	catast[f84,jmc]		Catastrophes, disasters, extinctions
C00021 00003	{\title THE REPRIEVE}
C00022 00004	Energy	
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catast[f84,jmc]		Catastrophes, disasters, extinctions

Thinking about potential disasters is popular among journalists
and scientists.

Thinking correctly requires understanding that the normal course
of history and evolution is a catalog of population explosions
followed by disasters and extinctions.

Eskimoes, Cambodia, Ice ages,

We must get control of nature if we want to achieve some measure of safety.

	``Critics'' of our technological society ``question'' whether
our increasing reliance on technology isn't running an increasing risk
of technological disaster --- nuclear meltdowns, epidemics resulting
from genetic engineering experimentation, epidemics resulting from
anti-biotic resistant organisms that evolve to resist anti-biotics
fed to cattle, failures of the green revolution, ...
They compare, usually implicitly, our present reliance on complicated
technologies with simpler ages when man was more ``in tune with nature''
and was part of ``the delicate balance of nature''.
They advocate delays in the introduction of new technologies while we
``assess'' their consequences.  They have had considerable political
success and have succeeded in imposing major delays on many technological
advances.

	The purpose of this article is to refute these ``critics''
and argue that they have done much more harm than good.  Their
net effect has been to reduce the prosperity of all classes of society
and to make catastrophes more rather than less likely.

	I begin with a few admissions contrary to to my case.  Obviously
there are disasters involved in the application of technology.  Ships
sink, dams break, airplanes crash, cities burn, tankers spill and
chemical plants emit noxious and even poisonous substances.

	However, consider the disaster at the Union Carbide pesticide plant
in India in which 1600 to 2000 people died.  I'm writing at a time
when the exact causes aren't known, but clearly there needs to be
a better system for storing methyl isocyanate so that a cooling
failure coupled with a failure of the scrubber can't cause a
large scale release of the gas.  (It now (1984 Dec 26) appears that
it would have been sufficient for the Indian managers of the plant
to have obeyed the rules they had established and not operate the
plant while the safety measures are disabled).
  It is also clear that such a system
is possible.  No system can assure against disasters completely, but
it is surely possible to make them 1,000 times less likely.  If we
suppose that there are five plants storing methyl isocyanate in the
world and that the disaster occurred after ten years, that suggests
that the present methods produce a substantial release every fifty
plant years.  A factor 1,000 improvement will make it every 50,000
plant years.  This is more than satisfactory in the following sense.

	The plant makes pesticides, which are used to increase
India's agricultural production.  India increased its wheat production
between 1961 and 1981 from 50 million tons per year to 150 million
tons per year.  At the earlier level of production deaths from
starvation and malnutrition were in the hundreds of thousands per
year.  In 1966 the U.S. had to send one fifth of its wheat production
to India to avert famine.  In the early 1980s there was another failure
of the monsoon in India, but there was no famine and no large scale
import of food.  One cannot attribute a very large fraction of the
improvement to the use of pesticides, but clearly they played an
important role.  I will bet that if a careful computation were made,
it would be discoverd that the Union Carbide plant saved many times
as many lives as were lost in the Bhopal disaster.
Since such plants can be made even 1,000 times safer, it is clear
that modern technology, even when mistakes are made, saves lives.

DISASTER IS NORMAL

	There is strong and increasing evidence for repeated disasters
and mass extinctions on the earth.  Here are some items.

	1. There is evidence that about every 30 million years, some
kind of astronomically induced catastrophe, perhaps comets hitting
the earth, occurs.  It results in the extinction of a substantial
fraction of the species existing at the time.

	2. There is evidence that ice ages recur and cause mass
extinctions.

	3. There is evidence for repeated famines wiping out the
northernmost Greenland Eskimoes.  In good centuries, the population
expands to the north as the number of seals and fish grows in northern
waters.  Then, for presently unknown reasons, a ``little ice age''
occurs and the northernmost Eskimoes die off.

	4. The New England forests seem to have an approximately
600 year cycle of destruction from fire and renewal.

	Many more examples can be cited to show that catastrophes
occur naturally.  The idea of a ``delicate balance of nature'' is
an illusion caused by jumping to the conclusion
that conditions observed to persist for one or
several human lifetimes are permanent.  Reality is different in two ways.
  First, every natural system is subject
to perturbations all the time.  Such constancy as is observed is
due to an ability to resist perturbation.  In other words the
equilibria aren't delicate.  Second, every so often a perturbation
occurs of sufficient magnitude to destroy the system.  It may
rebuild itself, taking years or hundreds of years or even tens
of thousands of years, or something quite diffent may supersede
it.

	The existence and comfort of humanity faces many threats
from nature or from our own activities.  Some of them seem to
be a few tens of years away like the exhaustion of oil or the
greenhouse effect caused by the increasing carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere caused by burning fossil fuels.  Some of them
are longer term like the next ice age, which is perhaps 10,000
years away.

	We need to sort out the short term threats from the long
term ones and develop technology to deal with them on the
appropriate time scale.  Very long term threats require no
specific measures --- only the development of science and
technology.  To take an extreme example, we cannot fault
Abraham Lincoln for not starting to develop a plan to deal
with the next ice age even though the evidence that ice ages
occur became strong during his time in office.  Technology
is so much more powerful today that any 1865 plan would
today be regarded as irrelevant.  In fact the same applies
to any plan made today --- our descendants would regard such
plans as a mere curiosities.

	There is one reason for sketching such a plan ---
our own peace of mind.  Ice ages appear to be caused by
the so-called Milankovich cycle through which the orbit
of the earth around the sun goes.  At a certain part of
this cycle the Northern Hemisphere gets less sunlight and
an ice age occurs.  The reduction in sunlight is small
but enough to cause an ice age in a few tens of thousands of years.
For some reason the ice ages tend to end more suddenly.
Very likely we can prevent the next ice age by repeatedly
sprinkling coal dust on the northern hemisphere ice and
snow which will make it absorb more sunlight.  Another
possibility is a controlled atmospheric greenhouse effect.
In a few thousand years, if technological civilization
survives, this will be well understood.  In fact the
progress of climatology fast enough so that it is likely
to be well enough understood in ten to twenty years.  Indeed
it may be well enough understood today so that a workable,
though laughable to our descendants, plan could be devised.

	Even much shorter term dangers are better faced by
research than by action.  The greenhouse effect is a case
in point.  While the increase in carbon dioxide over the
value 100 years ago is clearly substantial, the effects on
temperature are still masked by fluctuations with other
causes.  There is perhaps some consensus that measurable
temperature increases will occur in 50 years and that they
will have substantial effects on climate in another hundred years.
We don't yet know whether these effects will be good or bad.

	If it turns out that we have to stop putting so much
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we can use nuclear fission
energy on a much larger scale including replacing gasoline
powered cars recharged with nuclear produced electricity.
This would be quite traumatic today, because good enough
batteries are taking a long time to develop.  My guess is
that a prompt move to electric cars would cost between ten
and twenty percent of our GNP.  Later it will be cheaper.

	There is, however, one catastrophe we have no
idea how to avoid.  This is the ultimate dissipation of
the energy of the universe.  Our sun is only good for
about another ten billion years.  We can move to other
suns and perhaps we can get energy by dropping mass into
black holes.  Nevertheless it is hard to see how humanity
can survive more than another 10↑60 years.  Most likely
our species will ultimately have to take the same view of its death
that an individual person takes of his own.  Death is
inevitable, but there is much to be experienced and
enjoyed in the meantime.

	Let me summarize.  Catastrophes are natural, but
technology can avoid them or mitigate them.  Catastrophes
caused by technology are minuscule compared to those which
technology helps us avoid.  Moreover, the technological
catastrophes can be prevented from recurring, and most of
them are prevented from occurring in the first place.
For example, even the first microwave ovens had interlocked doors
which seems, as far as anyone can tell, to have made them
perfectly safe.  Such good results cannot be expected in general,
and there may after all be some way of being injured by microwave
ovens other than dropping one on one's foot.  All that is
necessary is that new technologies be substantially safer
than the one's they displace, and it is often possible to
do very much better.

	The best way to avoid future catastrophes is to
develop science and technology as rapidly as possible.

	In following sections of this paper will treat various
proposed catastrophes and discuss how they might be dealt with.
It is important to distinguish the few whose treatment will
benefit from prompt action from those which should be left
to future generations.  Of course, there will be many problems
for which prompt action is desirable, but where humanity's
political capacity is presently inadequate to get the action.
For these, it is important to understand that the pressure for
action will increase if and when the problems become more acute.
I can think of no problem for which prompt action is required
to avoid a major danger to human survival but which is not
regarded as important by our society.  This doesn't prove it
can't happen.

	Remark: It is common to regard future generations as if they
were children for whose welfare we are responsible.  This is true
only in the extremely limited sense that anything we destroy,
such as objects of culture or the gene pools of species,
they can't have.  In every other way
we are the children; they will be more mature.

A BUDGET OF PROBLEMS

food, energy, pollution, 

Now that I have persuaded you to be complacent about the problems
facing humanity, perhaps I can arouse your enthusiasm for the
opportunities that science and technology offers to make human life
better.

Now that I have given you a reprieve from the many sentences of death
that the doomsayers have pronounced, perhaps I can arouse your
enthusiasm for some of the opportunities science and technology
offer to make human life better.
{\title THE REPRIEVE}

Energy	

	As far as I can see, the present oil glut is temporary ---
a product of recession, conservation, and turning technology (at
considerable cost to other uses) towards greater energy efficiency.
Oil is running out.  The only big unknown source is the Soviet
Union.  Since it has two and a half times the territory of the
United States, maybe it has two and a half times the total oil
and natural gas.  It seems hard to see how we can continue as
we are much beyond the year 2000.

	Fortunately, there is a way out.  This is nuclear fission
energy --- the energy that is having so much trouble in the
United States.  In my opinion the main cause of its trouble is
the harmful environmental movement.  Besides its legal guerrilla
warfare, it has made nuclear engineering unfashionable so that
it no longer gets its share of the best engineers.

	At this point you might expect a harangue stating that
we must get busy on nuclear energy or we'll freeze in the dark,
as some of us deserve to do.  Instead I wish to express a certain
complacency.  Other countries, e.g. France, Japan and Taiwan and the Soviet
Union, are developing nuclear energy at a satisfactory rate.  Already
France gets more than half its electricity from nuclear energy.
This means that when the oil crisis gets permanent, the example
will be available and the technology will be available, no matter
how incompetent and neurotic the U.S. behaves.  According to
an official of one of the nuclear power plant makers, a plant
can be built in two and a half years if the regulatory delays
are eliminated as will happen if there is a severe enough
emergency.  This was without the urgency with which plants
were built in World War II.  I'll guess that with that urgency,
plants can be built in one year.

	Of course, we'll pay for our folly in standard of living.
The U.S. has depended for its standard of living on its advanced
technology.  Workers making $2.00 per hour in Taiwan get their
electricity from nuclear plants bought from the U.S. where workers
make $15.00 per hour.  This advantage depends on the fact that
it is cheaper for them to pay our workers $15.00 per hour than
to develop the technology themselves.  Every advanced technology
we abandon reduces these favorable terms of trade.  When we have
to import nuclear technology from France, which now imports
the technology (though not the plants any more) from us, they
will get the favorable terms of trade, and our standard of
living will go down.

	To validate the claim that fission can solve our problems,
it is necessary to go beyond the generation of electricity and
also to extend the use of electricity to applications presently
dominated by combustion.  Home heating is an easy example,
because electric home heating is already well developed.
Until the environmentalists got their way there were quite
sound plans to use nuclear energy for industrial process heat,
and less advance plans for using it to convert coal to methane,
i.e. to natural gas.  With nuclear process heat one gets two
and a half times as much gas per ton of coals as is obtained
when coal has to be burned for the energy.  However, the main
energy problem that has to be solved is transportation.

	The temporizing solution is again synthetic fuel  ---
this time synthetic gasoline.  Again nuclear process heat
will make the coal go further.  However, not all countries
have convenient coal, and there are the acid rain and
CO2 greenhouse problems, neither of which is well understood
yet but which might require great curtailment of combustion.

	The long term solution is the electric automobile, and
this depends on battery development.  There are many possibilities,
but my bets are placed on the aluminum-air battery.
It can potentially give cars the same performance as they
have at present, but it will take much time and money to make
work well.  Another solution that can probably be made to work
is liquid hydrogen produced by electrolyzing water with nuclear
electricity.

	I dismiss the possibility of reverting to mass transportation.
The experience of the 1970s when it was being heavily pushed shows
that it is far less satisfactory to the individual than having the
freedom of his own car.  Every actually developing country is
building an automotive transportation system similar to ours ---
even the most crowded countries like Taiwan.  We could live with
mass transportation, but since the problem of keeping individual
transportation is solvable and we prefer it, we'll do it.

	I have omitted to argue about the safety and cost
of nuclear energy, because there are many excellent books
making the same points that I would make.  Look in the
bibliography for some of them.  Some of the earlier books
are better on the technology, because they don't spend
so much time refuting nonsense.