Exhaust(ed)

      After a rather mild start to winter, the snow arrived along with the cold.  Nothing unusual there, at least for much of the country where winter means snow.  But in my state, heavily dependent on ski tourism, the arrival of snow, at least enough snow to turn off the snow-making machines (at one point, it wasn't even cold enough for those water-guzzling sprayers to create "snow"), brought everyone a sigh of relief...that is, if you were a skier or snowboarder or snow-shoer.  And it IS our water in the spring, once it all melts, so that alone brought another sigh of relief after nearly 20 years of drought conditions.  All that aside, the arrival of a lot of snow in one or two storms meant that it was time to use those muscles so rarely used.  Yes, I have "the beast," a monster snowblower that laughs at even the deepest, slushiest snow and clears not only my driveway and sidewalk but that of several neighbors as well (one is quite elderly and the others are parents with kids just entering school).  When the beast has finished, which is rather quickly these days, I can almost hear it mumbling in exasperation, "that's it?"  The rest of the snow --the steps, the porch, the back deck-- are all up to me.  Break out that snow shovel and start that scoop-twist-toss motion over and over; and make sure you've got your cleats on so that you don't slip.  As reported in Medical New Today: Research indicates that heavy snowfall links to a 6% higher likelihood of hospital admission for men with a heart attack and a 34% increase in dying.  Yikes!  But at the end, and especially with the snow being heavier than usual, I am exhausted.  It feels good, sort of like that first time back from a workout, but these are all movements you simply don't do for most of the year (which is likely a similar story for many of the skiers now facing both a higher altitude as well as those muscles rarely used).  But my exhaustion pales when compared to that which was encountered in the Andes.  If you haven't watched the multi-award winning The Society of Snow, then do so and be thankful.  This film from Spain (think Money Heist) depicts the true story of a rugby team from Uruguay whose plane crashed deep in the Andes mountains in 1972, so deep that rescue searchers are called off as winter weather sets in (think of crashing in a remote part of Alaska).  The snow is deep, and the cold and the lack of resources (food, warm clothes, water) is a true testament to human survival and the will --or lack thereof-- to survive.  Just watching the movie is exhausting (it is presumed to be Spain's 2024 Oscar nominee).

      And there's another exhaust hitting us, that of the tripling (and more) of rockets heading into space.  Wrote a study in the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration: Rockets are the only direct source of human-produced aerosol pollution above the troposphere, the lowest region of the atmosphere, which extends to a height of about 5 to 10 miles above the Earth’s surface.  The research team used a climate model to simulate the impact of approximately 10,000 metric tons of soot pollution injected into the stratosphere over the northern hemisphere every year for 50 years.  Currently,  an estimated 1,000 tons of rocket soot exhaust are emitted annually.  The researchers caution that the exact amounts of soot emitted by the different hydrocarbon fueled engines used around the globe are poorly understood.  The researchers found that this level of activity would increase annual temperatures in the stratosphere by 0.5 – 2° Celsius or approximately 1-4°Farenheit, which would change global circulation patterns by slowing the subtropical jet streams as much as 3.5%, and weakening the stratospheric overturning circulation.  The study then added: The scientists found ozone reductions occurred poleward of 30 degrees North, or roughly the latitude of Houston, in nearly all months of the year.  This didn't bode well for North America.  

      But no worries, this post isn't about the carbon coming from our cars or the coal burning in our power plants or whatever.  Reports say that we are the one becoming exhausted...exhausted about the wars in both Gaza and Ukraine and the record amount of deaths (25,000+ and 200,000+ respectively), exhausted about  climate change (my friends, and dare I say many of my friends, feel that our heating planet is merely part of a historical cycle and has little to do with our pollution), exhausted about Covid and RSV, and those fungal, and bacterial diseases resistant to antibiotics...and now here come the politicians.  Whatever your leanings, the spin-doctors are on the move in full force and using AI images and voices to their fullest.  Make America great?  Let's see, we just passed China as the world's largest economy; and we are now the world's largest producer of oil (who would have thought we'd surpass Saudi Arabia?) as well as the world's largest exporter of natural gas.  Even unemployment has dropped to less than half of what it was 4 years ago.  And even if all of that is true, why doesn't any of it feel accurate.  Walk out of the grocery store or the wholesale mart and you wonder what just happened?  Same stuff you always buy and yet it somehow seemed more expensive (it was).  And yet, all those baskets and carts and parking lots are full.  How does any of this make sense?  How can the restaurants be so crowded and the shopping malls so busy, all while many others feel that they can barely squeeze by with the payments to their credit cards?

Detail of discarded cell phones: Chris Jordan

      So the answers...I don't have them (do any of us, other than the spin doctors?).  But allow me to point out a few interesting stats, random notes that may give you a chance to add a few pieces to the puzzle and perhaps help you to clarify whatever it is you want to see.  But before any of that, here's a quick dose of reality about what is truly growing exhausted.  Our Earth.  We are pulling minerals and materials out of it at a record pace and replacing it with our non-disposable junk.  Fifteen years ago, photography artist Chris Jordan tried to show some of this by turning things such as water bottles and prison coveralls and cell phones into works of art, the multitudes of our usage artistically compressed into a single image.  And the numbers that went with the images were shocking: 29,000 credit cards to depict the number of bankruptcy filings each week in the U.S.; 1.2 million children's building blocks to depict the number of teens who drop out of high school in the U.S. each year; 130,000 cigarette butts discarded as litter every 15 seconds in the U.S.; 183,000 birds killed each day in the U.S. from pesticides.  Admittedly since those 15 years, many of those numbers have shifted in both directions.  Back then we threw out about 425,000 cell phones every day...today we toss away 13,500,000 each day, reported Phys/org.  Back then we used 3 million plastic cups just on our flights every day, but both Alaska and Delta have announced plans to abandon such usage; said Afar, Delta's stoppage alone would be: ...the equivalent weight of 1,300 pickup trucks or 77 Boeing 737s.).  Bird deaths from pesticides is now 67,000,000 annually said Chicago Bird Alliance.  And those cigarette butts?  Well, they're still a problem (although the popularity of nicotine "pouches" are continuing to gain in popularity, often containing 4+ times the nicotine jolt of normal chewed tobacco).  On the other hand, the number of bankruptcies has dropped by 2/3 from 2010 according to U.S. Courts; and the number of teens not completing high school has also decreased.  So that's good news...or is it, asked Timothy Snyder.

     In his book Our Malady he wrote: Our malady is peculiar to America.  We die younger than people  in twenty-three European countries; we die younger than people in Asia (Japan, South Koream Hong Kong, Singapore, Israel, Lebanon); we die younger than people in our own hemisphere (Barbados, Costa Rica, Chile); we die younger than people in other countries with histories of British settlement (Canada, Australia, New Zealand)...Our malady makes pollution deaths, opioid deaths, prison deaths, suicides, newborn babies, and now mass graves for the elderly all too familiar.  Our malady goes deeper than any statistic, deeper even than a pandemic.  There are reasons why we are living shorter, unhappier lives...Our malady leaves us isolated, uncertain where to turn when we hurt...Votes of desperation, like deaths of desperation, are understandable  Yet those who remain behind suffer.  Desperate voters close off care to themselves, their families, and everyone else by voting for politicians who traffic in pain...If we do not accept that we are part of nature, we cannot govern and we cannot live.  And in introducing Jordan's book in 2009, author Author Lucy Lippard wrote in part: This past summer [2009] NPR ran a series of street interviews asking "What is an American?"  The all-too-predictable responses ranged from patriotic cliché to self-congratulation to idiocy to (occasionally) introspection.  No one said what I was waiting to hear: An American is an overprivileged, underwater person with the attention span and immediate gratification demands of a four-year-old, who is on her/his way to ruining the world that has provided us with so much so far...Can plastic bottles and SUVs be compared to the victims of an impeachable conflict, collagen together from decontextualized and faked documents?  No, but at the heart of both is waste, and waste is what Jordan is deploring.  And while that may sound a bit harsh, it doesn't take much imagination to see how easily we discard things...our trash cans are full, our disposals grind away uneaten food, and most any fast food place will be loaded with cups and papers and plastic utensils conveniently "cleared" into a flap door that hides our waste.  Everything, from our sinks to our eateries, looks neat and tidy so that we can walk away guilt-free.  This was brought to the forefront when I re-visited my mother's assisted living facility; I had remembered them telling me that residents who had left left (likely passed away) overloaded them with walkers, wheelchairs and other mobility devices, all of which they ended up tossing into their dumpsters outside.  Shocked, I asked if they could save me a few of the better-conditioned ones so that I could take them to thrift stores and homeless shelters, and to people who perhaps couldn't afford them but could likely use them.  Within a short time, I was being called every 2 weeks or so to come pick a few items up.  A nice folding wheelchair, a walker with a seat, several heavy folding walkers.  And these would be heading to the trash, I asked?  Absolutely, they told me.  And that was just one facility (you could likely ask a facility near you to save them as well, if only to recycle them in some manner).

      And now, the numbers.  Farmed salmon sound like a terrific alternative until you find that 147 wild fish have to be caught and processed to produce a single pound of feed for those salmon, wrote Lorna Finlayson in the London Review.  What used to take 50 tons of rock to produce a ton of copper now takes 800 tons, wrote The New Yorker (added the article: ...humanity mines, drains, and blasts more stuff out  of the ground each year than it did in total during the roughly three-hundred millennia between the birth of the species and the start of the Korean War.).  And between 1950 and 2021 we produced enough plastic to equal the weight of 110,000 aircraft carriers, of which we tossed away over 70% of that, wrote The Washington Post.  An area nearly the size of Florida has now made Ukraine the most-heavily-mined country in the world, wrote TIME.  Then this came from the London Review about the war against Gaza: The war itself is a transnational effort.  Bombs manufactured in Texas are fitted with precision-guidance systems from Missouri, shipped to Europe, then flown, perhaps via British bases in Cyprus, to Israel before being dropped on Gaza.  US and European foreign policy is aligned to enable Israel to do precisely what it is doing now.  The US quickly provided an additional $14.5 billion of emergency aid to Israel for the war effort.  Military supplies include 2000 Hellfire missiles and 57,000 155mm shells.  When the IDF came close to running down its stores of 120mm tank shells the State Department approved a shipment of 14,000 more.  On 20 October the White House requested the removal of all restrictions on access to munitions it has positioned in Israel (on a side note, added The New Yorker article: The U.S. now contains more that four thousand military bases, with a combined area the size of Kentucky).  Artificial Intelligence?  Picture this wrote Dr. Feu-Fei Li* in her book, The World's I See: ...at the heart of this technology --one that routinely seems like absolute magic, even to me-- is yet another lesson in the power of data at large scales...For comparison, AlexNet debuted with a network of sixty million parameters --just enough to make reasonable sense of the ImageNet data set, at least in part-- while transformers big enough to be trained on a world of text, photos, video, and more are growing well into hundreds of billions of parameters...

     Such numbers are difficult for our meager minds to comprehend, even as we brush such thoughts away.  "What, me worry?", asked the famous Alfred E, Neuman.  But imagine if we could empathize with what is happening.  Author Carlo Rovelli in his book, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are More Important Than Kindness, wrote: We live in a universe where ignorance prevails.  We know many things, but there is a great deal more that we don't know.  We don't know who we will encounter tomorrow in the street, we don't know the causes of many illnesses, we don't know the ultimate physical laws that govern the universe, we don't know who will win the next election, we don't really know what is good for us and what is bad.  We don't know if there will be an earthquake tomorrow.  In this essentially uncertain world, it would be foolish to ask for absolute certainty.  Whoever boasts of being certain is usually the least reliable.  But this doesn't mean either that we are completely in the dark.  Between certainty and complete uncertainty there is a precious intermediate space -- and it is in this intermediate space that our lives and our thoughts unfold.  He also wrote about philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith observing the mind of an octopus and arguing: ...that consciousness is not something that does or does not exist: it is something that exists in different degrees and different forms.  It is a form taken by the relations between an organism and the world.  What interests us about "octopoid" intellectual complexity is not just the similarities with our own, it is also the differences between the two types.  The neural structure of an octopus is different from ours: instead of being concentrated in a brain, it is articulated throughout its entire body, including its arms, diffused just below the surface of its body.  It is a complex but radically alien intelligence...what must it feel like to be an octopus?  In the endless vastness of the galaxies, nature has in all probability given rise to every shape and form, making us one example among many.  Who knows how many more complex forms are out there, partly similar to and partly different from ourselves, in the immense celestial expanses?  Perhaps there is even one that swims in our seas...

     The news is not all bad, however.  The massive logging industry has had to adjust to the reduced demand for printed paper but an increased demand for packaging paper (think Amazon boxes) so in Finland, wrote The Economist a few years ago, wood frim Metsa: ...is turning waste lignin, a natural polymer which gives trees their rigidity, into textiles for clothing and furnishings.  UPM, another Finnish company, has worked out how to turn "black liquor", a gloop left over from paper manufacturing, into biofuels and other chemicals.  It will open a refinery in Germany --the first of its kind anywhere-- next year [operation is scheduled to begin in the early part of 2024].  It is already making wound dressings and a cell-culture medium from wood nanofibers to rival agar jelly.  And now comes a new process that may help plastics of different grades to be recycled together; wrote Scientific American: ...when different plastics are melted together, their various monomers tend to separate from one another like oil and water.  The new process solves this problem by adding chemicals called universal dynamic cross-linkers to the mix.  Just as soap brings together oil and water, these cross-linkers (when applied under heat) form covalent molecular bonds that tether the diverse monomers together.  It may sound, and is, confusing but then so is trying to understand how we can possibly be facing a shortage of monkeys all due to our quest to test new drugs and pharmaceuticals, wrote STAT (you don't want to know how many animals are used for testing such products).

     But there's hope.  "Care for each other," was the end message of the survivors from that plane crash in 1972.  And editor Jennifer Sahn of High Country News wrote: Caring for others is a theme in these editor's notes.  For me, it's a way of thinking, with regard to others -- I see you, respect you, recognize your right to live well, to do the best you can-- and of living in such a way as to not impair quality of life for others.  Some of us are more successful at this than others.  If one could undertake an audit of the intentional and unintentional harm caused by the choices we make, would the world be a better place?  And that wasn't just the viewpoint of editor Sahn; added author Dr. Fei-Fei Li: The future of AI remains deeply uncertain, and we have a many reasons for optimism as we do for concern.  But it's all a product of something deeper and far more consequential than mere technology: the question of what motivated us, in our hearts and our minds, as we create.  I believe the answer to that question--more, perhaps, than any other-- will shape our future... In the real world, there's one North Star -- Polaris, the brightest in the Ursa Minor constellation.  But in the mind, the navigational guides are limitless.  Each new pursuit --each new obsession-- hands in the dark over its horizon, another gleaming grace of iridescence, beckoning. 

     As an escape from some of this, I watched another movie, the sci-fi Rebel Moon, Part 1.  What struck me was the alien human-like spider was portrayed as an evil villain, but her message was simple: the mining and destruction on her home planet by humans had now made the place so toxic that her eggs wouldn't hatch.  She was angry.  And there is indeed so much toxicity in our air and soil and attitudes that I want to believe in Newton's third law, that for every action there is (will be) an equal and opposite reaction.  Perhaps we will come to our senses and begin caring, begin hanging onto things a bit longer, begin to respect each other and our planet.  I credit Genel Wokol Hodges (past winner of the Harry Bettencourt Award, and the first executive director of NAWD) for wanting to return to simpler times.  Some years ago she wrote:  I have decided I would like to accept the responsibilities of a six-year-old again...I want to return to a time when life was simple...When all you knew were colors, addition tables and simple nursery rhymes, but that didn’t bother you, because you didn’t know what you didn’t know, and you didn’t care.  When all you knew was to be happy because you didn’t know all the things that should make you worried and upset.  I want to think that the world is fair.  That everyone in it is honest and good.  I want to believe that anything is possible.  Somewhere in my youth...I matured, and I learned too much.  I learned of nuclear weapons, war, prejudice, starvation and abused children.  I learned of lies, unhappy marriages, suffering, illness, pain and death.  I learned of a world where men left their families to go and fight for our country and returned only to end up living on the streets begging for their next meal.  I learned of a world where children knew how to kill...and did!!  What happened to the time when we thought that everyone would live forever, because we didn’t grasp the concept of death?  When we thought the worst thing in the world was if someone took the jump rope from you or picked you last for kickball?  I want to be oblivious to the complexity of life and be overly excited by little things once again...I want to believe in the power of smiles, hugs, a kind word, truth, justice, peace, dreams, the imagination, mankind and making angels in the snow.  I want to be six again.  Maybe six and friends with an octopus...

Cartoonist Benjamin Schwartz: ©The New Yorker

*Dr  Fei-Fei Li is no newcomer to the field of AI and is currently the founding director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, the founder of AI4ALL, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts & Science.