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

I was going to post this over at the bacteriophages entry but most of it seemed unrelated to the entry and some of it relates to your post over at Wazungu's thread. Hope you don't mind.

Your last post to me:
"How do we educate the apathetic and lethargic general public about the important issues that they need to understand in order to respond effectively to the problems mankind faces/will soon face? You're writing entries here about fairly specialized subjects, and that helps - but how can we make more people read and understand them?

"For that matter, how can we make scientists smarter and/or more ethical?"

I don't know the answer. When I was younger I used to get very angry about all the injustice in the world, go on marches, shout and wave banners. Pursuing one cause or another related to social justice and the environment took all my spare time and energy. Now I'm a bit of a (let us just say physically limited) old dodderer and all I really do is write letters. It sometimes seems to me that nothing I ever did made a blind bit of difference to anything. I'm sorry I sometime seem so negative. I don't mean to be. In reality, the kind of problems that vex you have vexed me too and now I haven't the physical capacity to do the things I used to, I'm saddled with thinking about what a mess we (our species, our governments and powerful businesses) are making and how powerless we seem to be to stop it happening.

It's very hard to get the public to listen to what they don't want to hear, or deal with anything that causes them inconvenience. I don't know what it's like where you live but over here a lot of people (a significant minority I would guess) seem to be obsessed with their rights and entitlements. Duties and obligations are perceived as resting with other people - the government, the welfare state, charities and so on.

Ideally all the individuals who make up a society - the scientists and the public - should be taught from a very early age about ethics, caring and compassion. But how do you get through to adults who have already learned not to care or learned that the best way to deal with an unpleasant reality is to pretend it doesn't exist?

You said over at Wazungu's that everybody is going to be affected by global warming. It's true. I'd like to know what draconian measures are going to be taken too. The draconian measures I had in mind were just the usual ones that governments won't deal with, like cutting back on the burning of fossil fuels, halting the decimation of forests (which would inevitably entail compensating the poorer countries who are having to sell their forests in order to survive), preventing pollution and the dumping of toxic waste on land and into rivers and seas. Also, I'm not advocating this as a draconian measure but I feel the human population is going to grow to an unsustainable size and if people in countries where the population is increasing were well fed and well educated, they might feel less inclined to have so many children and concentrate their resources into caring for just a couple.

Solutions, if they are suggested at all by governments, seem so parochial. The problems are pressing and they're global. So then the various governments' representatives meet in Kyoto or the Hague and just bicker about all the things they refuse to do. It's horrifying - talk about fiddling while Rome burns!

Even if they take all the necessary steps to stop the activities that are leading to global warming right now, it could take tens or even hundreds of years for global warming to slow down and stop. They know so little about what drives global climate changes, they really have no idea how long it might take to get back to what we've come to regard as normal. If the United Nations Climate Change Group (that's the organisation whose name I couldn't remember) are correct, a lot of low lying land like Bangladesh and islands like the Maldives will soon be under water. Where are all those people going to go?

I don't know what steps would need to be taken to introduce the phages that attack cholera into South African rivers. It seems surprising they aren't already present in huge quantities. I would imagine one of the laboratories where they study bacteriophages could supply the necessary samples but, as I said over at the other thread - it may not be that straight forward and I could be oversimplifying. I'm no expert - I just read everything I could find on bacteriophages to write the article, which just means I know a bit more about the subject than the people around me who also aren't scientists.

Sorry Case. I'm not much use, am I?

Sal

No, you're helping a lot. Personally I have a lot of hope for humanity and for the world. I think writing can help. Suppose some guy or bunch of guys who are all at least as talented as Dr. Seuss and Richard Scarry got together wrote a whole lot of books for kids illustrated nicely and going into ecology and ethics and all this stuff in great detail, and suppose these books are more popular than Pokémon and Harry Potter combined, and kids read them worldwide - that might make a difference.

I think people underestimate education. I think the current system we have is a result of the education the people who currently run it have received. This education includes formal schooling but also a huge amount of television. I believe the mainstream values are simply the values that have been/are presented to people as being valuable. If we can recognise the flaws in the foundation of our civilisation, there's a chance that we can correct them.

The people who run our civilisation are like little kids. They are stuck at a very low point on their potential intellectual, ethical and emotional growth curves. That is a direct result of their development not being supported, nurtured and encouraged. What we have to learn is 'you reap what you sow' and we are reaping apathy because we sow indifference. We don't care about people enough, we don't value human life enough, we don't understand what people really need. We need a super human-potential-encouragement boost throughout the world, and if we do that we'll sow a transformed, caring, considerate, intelligent, responsible society. I am wondering how difficult THIS would be. The problem I have with much environmental or social activism is that it is negative and derogatory, and it does nothing to nurture and encourage and empower individual human beings. The only movement I can see succeeding would have an incredibly strong people-empowerment directive.