Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Time-Binding Ethics Steven Lewis writes: Alfred Korzybski produced his theory of time-binding before he produced general semantics. Many writers have viewed Korzybski's time-binding theory as stating merely that our growth of knowledge increases exponentially. But time-binding has far greater implications than merely a piling on of knowledge. Korzybski set out in "Manhood of Humanity" to dispell the notion of humans as mere brutish animals or as errant children of gods. He pointed out that human survival depends on learned reactions and their products. These learned reactions ("knowledge ...") and their products ("technologies") are handed pretty much free of charge from one generation to the next, so that the next generation doesn't have to reinvent the wheel anew. We live long and prosper at the end of the 20th century largely because we inherit virtually free-or-charge the wisdom of preceding generations. When my students complain about the cost of their textbooks I ask them to place a value on their lives. Then I asked them to consider how long it would take them, working alone or as a class, to rediscover all the knowledge summarized for them in their textbooks. Of course, they could not hope in a lifetime to rediscover all this knowledge as a class or as individuals. It took many generations of humans to produce this knowledge, which represents millions of human hours of insight and experimentation. Seventy dollars for an anatomy textbook seems in this light as a trivial price to pay for a gold-mine of information. What an incredible bargain it is when viewed from this perspective! ... We are often reminded of the "terrible burden" we pass on to our children in the form of the "national debt" or "environmental pollution." Seldom do we realize the far-greater wealth we pass on to these same children in the form of our knowledge, technologies, problem-solving skills. Our growing wealth of knowledge has made us more interdependent than ever, and that includes an interdependence with preceding and succeeding generations. Few Americans could hope to survive alone for very long in the hills of Montana. Korzybski's goal in pointing out this growing interdependence was to point the way to a natural ethics, which he eventually referred to simply as proper evaluation. In Science and Sanity Korzybski developed his theory of the mechanism of time-binding, thereby giving birth to general semantics. Through training in general semantics Korzybski hoped to develop in us greater skills of "proper evaluation," which included 'ethical' evaluation as a particular case. He wrote: "Theory and practice show that healthy, well-balanced people are naturally 'moral' and 'ethical' unless their educations have twisted their types of evaluations. In general semantics we do not 'preach' 'morality' or 'ethics' as such, but we train students in consciousness of abstracting, consciousness of the multiordinal mechanisms of evaluation, relational orientations, etc., which bring about cortico-thalamic integration, and then as a result 'morality,' 'ethics,' awareness of social responsibilities, etc. follow automatically." (11/05/03) Reversing Global Warming Kenneth Chang writes: Suppose that over the next decade or two the forecasts of global warming start to come true. Color has drained from New England's autumns as maple trees die, and the Baltimore oriole can no longer be found south of Buffalo. The Dust Bowl has returned to the Great Plains, and Arctic ice is melting into open water. Upheavals in weather, the environment and life are accelerating around the world. Then what? If global warming occurs as predicted, there will be no easy way to turn the Earth's thermostat back down. The best that most scientists would hope for would be to slow and then halt the warming, and that would require a top-to-bottom revamping of the world's energy systems, shifting from fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas to alternatives that in large part do not yet exist. "We have to face the fact this is an enormous challenge," said Dr. Martin I. Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University. But interviews with scientists, environment advocates and industry representatives show that there is no consensus in how to meet that challenge. Some look to the traditional renewable energy sources: solar and wind. Others believe use of fossil fuels will continue, but that the carbon dioxide can be captured and then stored underground. The nuclear power industry hopes concern over global warming may help spur a revival. In an article in the journal Science last November, Dr. Hoffert and 17 other experts looked at alternatives to fossil fuels and found all to have "severe deficiencies in their ability to stabilize global climate." The scientists believe that technological fixes are possible. Dr. Hoffert said the country needed to embark on an energy research program on the scale of the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb during World War II or the Apollo program that put men on the moon. "Maybe six or seven of them operating simultaneously," he said. "We should be prepared to invest several hundred billion dollars in the next 10 to 15 years. But to even have a hope of finding a solution, the effort must begin now!" (11/05/03) Changing Our World AWARDS -- Does passion for science declare itself early? If the winners of this year’s Discover Awards are a gauge, fascination with science flares in youth, and it needs only wisps of encouragement to survive. For example, a 7-year-old in Venezuela heard about Sputnik and began to build rocket ships out of cardboard boxes. Today he has flown seven shuttle missions. A 12-year-old saw Alan Shepard strapped into his space suit for blastoff. His father bought him a $3 telescope, and three decades later he helped save the Hubble Space Telescope. Another boy didn’t have enough money to buy the telescope he wanted, so he got a book of instructions and, with his dad’s help, built one in 18 months. In 1996 he and his collaborator shattered our notion that we are special when they found planets orbiting other stars. There’s a lesson here: Buy a telescope for any child you catch watching the stars. *Space Explorer: Franklin Chang-Díaz *Aerospace: Ed Weiler *Technology for Humanity: Robert Fischell *Space Scientist: Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler *Communication: Harold Rosen (11/05/03) Preview the Death of our Sun Discover Magazine -- Time, even astronomical time, is made of moments. The universe began in a moment around 13.7 billion years ago. The sun was born in a moment some 4.6 billion years ago, when hydrogen atoms began fusing into helium. At another moment, some 5 billion years from now, the sun will exhaust its fuel and begin a slow death. Somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy, a star like our sun dies roughly every month. When that happens, it briefly exhales an extraordinarily beautiful, complex puff of gas known as a planetary nebula. The term is a misnomer: Observing a number of vaguely round, cloudlike objects in the sky during the late 18th century, Sir William Herschel thought they resembled faint planets. Planetary nebulas are the inevitable fate of the run-of-the-mill stars that account for more than 90 percent of the population of the Milky Way. Stars more than eight times as massive as our sun explode as brilliant supernovas, but such events happen just a few times a century in our galaxy. Planetary nebulas are the 15 minutes of fame granted to lesser stars. The death of a sunlike star was long thought to be a gentle, orderly process, every star more or less the same. But over the past decade, the Hubble Space Telescope-along with a group of powerful new observatories on the ground-has allowed astronomers to watch this dying stage with new understanding. “With the Hubble, we’ve been able to see things we simply couldn’t see before,” says C. Robert O’Dell of Vanderbilt University, who as project scientist oversaw the construction of the space telescope and has observed many nebulas with it since. When a star runs out of hydrogen fuel in its center, the core contracts and heats up, inflating the star into a bloated red giant. The sun, in this phase, will reach past the orbit of Venus and may well engulf Earth. Meanwhile, the core becomes hot and dense enough to fuse helium, a flukier fuel. The star starts to pulse ominously. And over the next hundred thousand years, it blows most of its atmosphere off into space like so many smoke rings. What remains behind is a nearly naked core of carbon and oxygen, which collapses to form a white dwarf star, roughly the size of Earth but 100,000 times as dense. (11/05/03) Is there a limit on the Human Lifespan? Discover Magazine -- A few years back, biodemographer Jay Olshansky called his friend Steve Austad, a gerontologist, after reading an outrageous quote attributed to Austad about aging. Olshansky, at the University of Illinois, and Austad, at the University of Idaho, have long shared an interest in the human life span. But they differ on some points. Austad had been quoted as saying that someone alive today could survive to the unprecedented age of 150. “You don’t really mean that,” Olshansky told his friend. “Oh yes, I do,” Austad replied. In fact, he would bet on it. Before long he and Olshansky had agreed to put $150 each into an investment fund, to be distributed to the relatives of the winner in 2150. They agreed that, in order for Austad’s progeny to collect, the 150-year-old has to be in reasonably good health and that proof of the person’s age has to be impeccable. By adding $10 each every year, they figure that by 2150, the $300 fund will grow to be worth $500 million. Austad isn’t worried about his kin collecting: “We’ve made phenomenal progress in understanding aging in other animals in the last 10 years. I can’t believe we won’t make improvements in [human] antiaging treatments in the next hundred.” Most students of human longevity agree that exercise, antioxidants, low-fat diets, and prostate exams will join forces with a battery of new techniques to extend the lives of seniors and improve their quality of life. But that amiable projection raises a tough question: If medical science were to eliminate geriatric infirmity and disease entirely, how long would the human body last? Is there some built-in expiration date for each member of our species beyond which no one will ever survive? If so, what is it, and why does it exist? (11/05/03) 6:58:28 AM

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