h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

*The noticeboard is an enormous cork board, covering the entire wall opposite the bar.*

NOTICE FROM THE PILLOWCASE: FRESH WATER

Here at the utopia cafébar we are going to talk about solving the world's problems. One such a problem is that of water. There is no shortage of sea water, but in many places there are shortages of fresh water - especially in Africa and Asia. Humans need fresh water, and so do land-living plants and animals. Fresh water is not evenly distributed over the surface of the earth. Huge sources of fresh water include the Canadian and American Lakes, the north Eurasian lakes, especially Lake Baikal of Russia, the Amazon River in South America, the great Lakes of the African Rift Valley, the Nile, Zaire and Niger Rivers in Africa, the Indus, the Ganges, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the Yellow Rivers in Asia, and the Darling River in Australia. A big problem is that many of these rivers are being polluted, making their water less useable. Places where there are very little available water include the deserts and savannah areas of Northwest, East and Southern Africa, the near and middle East, central Asia, almost the entire Australia, central, southern and western North America, and the west and south of South America.

I propose an utopic vision where the water problems of the world have been solved. In this utopia every human has access to 1000 liters (we will use metric units for easy calculation) of perfectly fresh clean water for drinking and washing. Is this possible? Is this realistic?

First, how much fresh water does the Earth have at this moment? This includes the ice caps of Antarctica, all the rivers and lakes, and all the subterranean water. In utopia the necessary infrastructure exists to distribute all of this water where needed. The total is roughly 3.5*10^19 l (that's 35 000 000 000 000 000 000 liters. Six billion humans using 1000 l a day will use about 2*10^15 l of water a year. They will need a period of seventeen thousand years to exhaust these reserves entirely - if those resources are not ever replenished.

So the total fresh water resources of the earth are quite ample. But they are seemingly not inexhaustible: seveneen thousand years is a long, but not infinite period. But all the time, water is being recycled. This means that after water is used, by humans, it does not vanish, but goes back into circulation: it replenishes either the rivers or the lakes or the subterranean sources or the sea.

Also, the sun is continually creating fresh water. How? By evaporating sea water. This evaporated water condenses as fresh water contained in clouds and rain.

How much water can the sun desalinize in a year? Sunlight transmits 8 joules per minute to each square centimeter that it illuminates. The earth has a cross sectional area of 1.28*10^18 square centimeters. There are about 525 000 minutes in a year. Therefore the sun transmits about 5.4*10^24 joules per year to the surface of the earth. Of this energy about 30% is used to drive the hydrological cycle - the evaporation of water which condenses again as rain and returns to the rivers, lakes and seas. This is about 1.6*10^24 J. The heat of vaporisation for water is 2.256*10^6 J per l. Therefore the sun can vaporise about 7.1*10^17 l of water per year. (In practice slightly less than this because the vaporisation heat given is for water at 100°C while most water on earth is at a lower temperature. But the heat needed to raise the temperature of water from 0°C to 100°C is only one fifth of the heat of vaporisation, so the lower limit is 5.7*10^17 l.)

This means the sun can generate between 284 and 354 times more fresh water per year than six billion humans will use, if every one of them uses a 1000 liters per day.

The moral? The natural cycles of the planet earth produce HUGE amounts of fresh water every year. Also, the planet has huge STORES of fresh water in lakes, rivers and glaciers. There is more than enough water for six billion humans, and plenty left over for the trees and the animals. BUT - we must not pollute these sources, and we must not thwart these cycles. In a future posting I will talk about the ways in which natural fresh-water-producing systems work, and the way that human activity often end up harming them to the detriment of everybody and everything.

I will elaborate the calculations and quote my sources if somebody wants to know where and how I got my figures.

To solve the world's problems, we need to understand what the potential of the planet is and what its most precious resources are. The destruction of the environment that is happening at present is an incredibly wasteful and counter-productive process. It hacks at the weakest links of the chains that connect all the living and non-living things together. Stopping and reserving this process demands that we know how nature works. The more people that understand this, the better. I urge everybody who is concerned about the fate of the earth and humanity to become water-wise! If you have important info about water, or know about web-sites with info about water, post it here, and provide links! I'll do the same.

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I recommend this website. Thanks, Jenny. Yes, I know about this. What is also happening is that many of the wild populations from which crop plants have been cultivated are currently threatened. The wild populations contain many more genes than the cultivated plants - cultivation is usually a selection of a narrow range of specific genes from a much larger base.

I wonder how many people realise that in the past there was a much greater diversity of fruit and vegetables available.

Over here in SA we have a great number of edible plants. From roots and bulbs to bark to leaves to fruit. Personally I think we must utilise indigenous plants more as sources of food, and we must not cultivate them to make their fruits bigger and sweeter. Often the fruits are bigger, but contain less nutrients - they contain sugar, but sugar is just empty energy. The really valuable stuff is the minerals and vitamins and trace nutrients. The really good stuff is precisely the stuff that is underemphasised by farming methods that focus on yield and profit.

Food - something we can talk about for a long, long time!

Food where ?

Jenny has some great chocolate cake, but over at the counter, not here at the noticeboard!

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Dose 60 foot of Back garden count ?

*checking out the noticeboard*
Hey Dude, of course it counts. Particularly if you had left behind 60 feet worth in each of Hendon, Finchley, East Dulwich, Chiswick, Musswell Hill and Edgware! .

Seriously, if even just, say, one in three neighbouring gardens go wildlife friendly you create what they call wildlife corridors through urban areas. In the UK it is friendly urban areas that support some of our bird species, song thrushes in particular. Left in the countryside they'd be struggling for survival. The RSPB are now starting research into sparrow and starling populations because of their declining numbers. (For any non UK readers I think most people would say these were Britain's commonest birds. That they are declining in horrendous.)

BTW if you're a reluctant gardener you may be happy (or even happier)to know wildlife friendly includes not being too tidy. Well that's my excuse for not clearing up fallen leaves.
Wz.

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It works!

I can explain the fall in bird and mice population in the Edgeware area of London - the two cats that live at my address.

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Hello everyone,

Thanks for all the postings to this noticeboard. Over the weekend i will set up some webspace at freeserve as a link to this page, with all of the hyperlinks organised and put together into some sense of order. If you have any pictures, text or other material for the noticeboard that can't be posted to this forum, email it to [email protected] and I'll put it on the freeserve noticeboard, which I'll link to the Utopia Cafebar.

I will also be putting links to newspapers and magazines onto this webspace, and wonder if anyone has any URLs for interesting current affairs mags, sites, newspapers etc. i have a fair idea for UK media, but would be interested in international stuff. My favourite so far (just for the name ) is www.commondreams.org

peace, love and pleasant smells of food,

jen

Thanks for that rainforest link - every little bit helps, Jar! I will be putting up a link to another "save the rainforest" site a bit later. One thing that I think is important is that we have to try and increase co-operation between organisations with compatible goals. But anyways, this rainforest site is a great one, and also includes causes such as children with AIDS, world hunger, and breast cancer. Take a look!

Also you can get to Amazon.com (and other online-shopping sites) through this site. So if you want to do some shopping, do it through this link and the shopping guys will pay to help save the rainforests!

Today I want to talk about attitudes. An ultra-long post, but I believe one worth reading.

PROFOUND DISRESPECT FOR HUMAN LIFE

On the front page of yesterday's newspaper (BEELD) are photos of police dogs attacking people. It turns out that six members of the police force had arrested three illegal immigrants, put them in a van, drove them to an abandoned mining site and then set their four dogs on them. For over an hour they were being savaged by the dogs while the policemen occasionally stepped in to beat or kick them. The whole thing was videotaped. Afterwards they were made to stand in a line to be repeatedly knocked down by one of the officers. The camera zoomed in on the wounds on their arms and legs. The tape ended with the words, "That was the Charlie dog training."

In the middle of the newspaper is another item, an "opinion piece". It notes a number of interesting facts. Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, known for his quirky attitudes, said of homosexuals that they are "worse than pigs and dogs" and "an infected limb that has to be chopped off". Aside from the prejudice against pigs and dogs, note the way that human beings are being dehumanized. One of the ministers in the government of Namibia, not wanting to be outdone, said that homosexuality is comparable to murder, and ordered police officers to exterminate gays. He noted that the Namibian constitution gives no protection to the rights of gays and lesbians. Here in SA there are politicians who believe that homosexuality was imported from the "West" and is therefore UnAfrican. In townships lesbians are being targeted by gangs of rapists. Homosexuals are banished from communities if they do not want to suppress their orientations. In white communities, homosexuals are often chastised by the church and religious people who consider their sin to be the "hideous corruption of Sodom" that deserves the eternal wrath of God. They must repent, or suffer the consequences.

Both of these articles display a similar phenomenon: a profound disrespect for human life. People are seen as "things" - props used to train dogs or to amuse yourself with, or abhorrent, subhuman, unnatural creatures. What is happening here?

Consider the illegal immigrants. Conflict between black and white has a long history behind it; traditionally, police had to protect the interests of the government, and under apartheid this has set up a situation where the "enemy" was black, and being black turned someone into "the enemy". Children drank these teachings in with their mother's milk. The result is people, adults, who are utterly unable to identify with black people, unable to feel compassion for them - indeed, unable to imagine that they might be sensitive and have feelings similar to their own. "The enemy" was seen as intrinsically "evil", while "we", that is "the people" (i.e. whites) were intrinsically "good". Police officers, in their work, created the potential for violent conflicts, and when this potential became actual saw it as confirmation of their prejudices. In the violence they saw black people commit atrocious acts against their fellow officers and against other black people. Truly awful thing happened: people were mutilated, tortured, burned alive. These acts were the outward manifestation of deeper injustices, but the police had to bear the brunt of it. And this in turn has resulted in deep-seated revulsion, fear, hatred, bitterness towards black people. After apartheid, the police felt betrayed and their insecurity became greater because they were out of sympathy with the new regime. Suicides are common among policemen. Also it has happened on more than one occasion that "new" policemen shot "old" officers because of tensions, and this of course increases tensions even more. Because the political and social climates are unstable, crime is flourishing. Policemen are beleaguered, face extreme risks every day and receive meagre pay. And for what? They are ineffectual, they are losing the war, there is no future, no hope for them.

These people have lost the sense of the meaning and value of their own lives, and therefore also fail to recognise the value of the lives of other humans. And their indoctrination renders them even more incapable of having sympathetic feelings towards members of different races. What can we do about this situation? Convict the transgressors? Yes - but does that alter one iota of anybody's attitude? On the contrary, this entire affair serves to ingrain distrust, fear and hatred more deeply on all sides, irrespective of what happens next. After such an incident black people will tend to see torturers and killers whenever they look at a white face, while white people will tend to feel shame and terror when they have to face blacks. I live with this shame and this fear every day. When a black person approaches me, there is always a subcurrent of suspicion that I might be stabbed or shot as punishment for what people like me did in this country. And many black people probably experience a similar subcurrent of suspicion when they approach a white person, as this person is similar to those that exploited and humiliated and murdered so many of their friends and relatives in the past.

And what about homosexuals? In this case there is again an inability to identify with other human beings. Human sexuality is a tangled web; people form their identities by it, they structure the power relations of their societies by it. In the case of the homosexual, it is sexual identity rather than skin color that sets up the difference that is so difficult to transcend. Humans are basically insecure, and need other people to reassure them; the homosexual, by failing to conform to the expectations of the majority, does not reassure them, and this is a factor that is seen to be threatening against the majority's fragile, constructed sense of sexual identity. This is therefore seen as a threat against established power structures, and by way of identification with those structures, a threat against the very value, meaning, purpose and peace that people find in their lives. This again sets up a conflict and a stereotype. Just note that homophobia may seem to be a lesser issue than racism, but while the effects seem subtle, they are devastating. Just consider this: "ordinary" people (especially men) see their identity as being determined by their sexuality; to lose their sexuality is death - in fact many men would perhaps willingly choose death rather than lose their genitals. Therefore a threat to their sexuality is seen as a threat against their lives; therefore homosexuals are murderes. But they cannot understand that homosexuals identify to a similar extent with THEIR sexuality. To lose their own sexual preference represents death to them, as well. So forcing a homosexual to repress or alter his/her orientation can be seen as murder by the same argument. Of course almost nobody expresses this argument in clear and sober language; rather they cloak it in religious or political terms, but the underlying issue has to do with our deepest fears and suspicions, something most of us find it hard to talk about. And these deep conflicts occasionally make it to the surface, and the emotional violence and murder directed against gays manifests in open, physical violence and murder.

We are dealing with attitudes here, long-lived institutions that remain even as the people that uphold them come and go. The problem is like a many-headed monster - as soon as you cut off one head, a new one (or two or more new ones) grows in its place. What can we do? At this stage I want to propose that we must do these things: 1) Endeavour to add value to the lives of humans, in every possible way, so that those people can see and know value and recognise it and come to value their own and other people's lives as much as possible. We need a spiritual revolution, a project for people-empowerment, a driven movement for unleashing human potential. 2) We must promote compassion, understanding and sympathy that transcends all external barriers such as race, sex or sexual orientation, religion, political affiliation - in fact just about everything that makes people (and other living creatures) seem different from each other. The end goal is to be able to literally identify with EVERYBODY, without exception. Currently it is very difficult even for the most liberal humans to identify with people of extreme views such as dictators, violent religious fundamentalists, mass murderers, stinking rich and corrupt businessmen. But it is my belief that a movement geared towards greater compassion may end up moderating these extremes so that there will, in the end, in fact not be anybody left with these extreme views. Or such a small percentage that it is even possible to tolerate them and give them some scope for the indulgence of their extremism (such as a virtual reality where they can do no harm).

The practical implementation of these measures will be difficult, but I have many ideas and suggestions which I will post from time to time. And if you have any ideas, please do the same!

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