How many degrees of separation?

It was in the late 1960s that the psychologist, Stanley Milgram, ran his small experiment to determine how many steps it would take for 160 people living in Omaha, Nebraska to use their social acquaintances to direct a mail package to a stockbroker located in Boston, Massachusetts. On average, he found the exercise took five to six stages of social contacts to eventually result in the mail packages arriving to the stockbroker. This result led to the concept of six degrees of separation.

In an interconnnected world, now dominated by convergent technology in telecommunications and the internet, the six degrees of separation paradigm would appear to be shifting to a series of cross connections which may mean in many respects that six degrees may often be much less.

In a simple example of this new interconnected reality, I placed a simple quiz on one of the latest social networking sites, Facebook and uploaded it to the main directory of the site. The number of quizzes on Facebook runs into the hundreds and so this item could be easily lost. Without any marketing or promotion, just interconnected communities of people, over 42,000 persons undertook the quiz online spread throughout a dozen different countries over two weeks. All of this was effectively electronic word of mouth and social networking.

Eye into space

Later this month the European Space Agency will launch the Herschel Space Observatory (formerly called Far Infrared and Sub-millimetre Telescope or FIRST) into remote orbit 1.5 million kilometres from Earth (or four times the distance to the moon). The telescope has the largest single mirror ever built for a space telescope. At 3.5-metres in diameter the mirror will collect long-wavelength radiation from some of the coldest and most distant objects in the Universe. In addition, Herschel will be the only space observatory to cover a spectral range from the far infrared to sub-millimetre.

Herschel is only the latest in a list of similar heat sensing telescopes placed in orbit outside of Earth the others being IRAS (1983), ISO (1995-98), Spitzer (2003-09), Akari (2006-2007).

While admiring these efforts to boldly go where no-one has gone before, its almost axoimatic that the large funds spent on space exploration would equally be valuable being focussed on the declining environmental situation back on planet Earth. Its almost ironic that as science explores the outer reaches of space and the formation of the universe, our own home planet is heading for an atmospheric decline which may render much of this exploration as redundant.

How much money is needed?

The G20 summit in London concluded this week and the leaders of the member countries have committed to $1.1 trillion in new funds which will greatly increase the capital available to the International Monetary Fund. The goal in mind is a revival in trade, which is expected to contract this year for the first time in 30 years. Of note however the combination of loans and guarantees fell short of an injection of fresh fiscal stimuli into the world economic system — this was due to division between Continental Europe and the United States over whether to act now or wait to see whether existing spending measures took effect.

Most member countries have already committed major funding outlays and released vast sums of funds into their economies through various mechanisms - in the US this has meant buying up the bad debts and loans which their banking system had both created and then shared with the world. In Australia, the strategy is to stimulate consumer spending by providing actual cash payments to families earning under $100K per annum. The question is whether these levels of payments are sufficient to compensate for the loss of economic activity due to the mismanagement in part of the world (and US in particular) banking system. Will it be enough?

Asteroids and the threat to Earth

The question of what action to take when there is the possibility of an asteroid collision with the Earth periodically surfaces from time to time in science and astronomy circles. With impact craters clearly visible on most continents (and most recently discovered in the Yukatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico) and the theory that an asteroid strike led to the demise of the dinosaur age (at the end of the Cretaceous period), this matter is one which won't disappear. The options of how to prevent a collision are not numerous but in practical terms only a handful have any chance of success. Asteroid Ida (pictured) is 35 klms in length and is located in the asteroid belt and does not cross Earth's orbit but represents the size and scale of many of these bodies floating in relatively nearby space.

One option often canvassed is to actually destroy an asteroid through the detonation of a nuclear device below the surface however the most obvious pitfall is without knowing precisely the composition and density of the material, the only result may be to splinter the asteroid and create additional possible impacts on the Earth. More favourably considered are strategies of 'nudging' an asteroid away using nuclear explosions in near proximity or alternatively a concentrated range of laser beams using solar power from reflected rays of the sun with the same effect.

Whatever the possible solutions may be, the principal concern is to be able to actually detect an asteroid before it's too close. In that respect space surveillance programs have fallen on hard times and its more luck than intention when an asteroid is located travelling nearby.

Earth Hour 2009

Earth Hour once again comes around in its 3rd year and now 3,000 cities and towns in over 90 countries are participating with the support of the United Nations. The actual level of carbon emissions saved by switching off for 60 minutes is very small however the need for constant consciousness in order to encourage policy action should not be underestimated. The chronic need for wide agreement between nations and major polluters at the Copenhagen conference this year is essential if some possibility of mitigating the most extreme effects is to be achieved.

In the World, where to go?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted a rise of the earth's temperature of between 4 degrees C and 6.4 degrees C by 2100 - this prediction is considered to be conservative and increasingly climate change science is indicating a 4 degree C temperature rise much earlier and closer to 2050. Just what impact would a 4 degree C heat increase mean?

In reality a 4 degree C heat change would be dire for the planet and for the human population. Apart from the ice melting and a sizeable increase in sea levels, increasingly frequent large violent storms and growing acidity in the sea, many parts of the planet will be arid desolate zones without the capacity to sustain life. The United States, South America, Africa, Southern Europe, the Middle East, India, China, South-East Asia and Australia for the most part would be arid deserts. Only the most Northern and most Southern parts of the planet would be warm enough to have human habitation - Canada, Alaska, Northern Europe/Scandinavia, Russia, Greenland in the North and Antartica, New Zealand, Tasmania in the South. A few pockets would remain in Western Australia and the Southern tip of South America but little else.

In order to reduce the impact of this scenario, 70% of carbon emissions would need to be reduced over the next 20 years however the opposite is occuring with carbon increases of around 3%. Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of human domination of this planet. What will come next?

How much will the sea rise ?

New Scientist (March 14, 2009) reports that the estimates or rising sea level provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which forecast a rise of 18 to 59 centimetres by 2100 are too low. The estimates did not include water from the Greenland and Antartica ice sheets and Greenland alone has enough ice which if melted would raise sea levels by 6 metres on average, worldwide. The most recent measurements show sea level has been rising 3 millimetres a year since 1993.

This is not good news as the altered estimates would bring forward the dates by which low level land and island groups would experience permanent water inundation. The difficulty with all these estimates is the lack of clear models which encompass a rigorous methodology including all known ice sources which can melt and feed directly into sea levels.