Sunday, June 21, 2015

Getting Real About Water

So California—where I live—is in its fourth year of drought. Snowpack in the Sierra has been meager to naught this past winter, with the high meadows where the official hydrologists take their readings showing fields of brown grass. The system of dams and reservoirs that provide both storage of the annual runoff and hydroelectric power to our utilities is depleted, with water levels down to about 43 percent of available capacity.1 The aquifers from which farmers and communities draw their water locally are also being depleted.2

We’ve been here before, of course. We had severe droughts in 1929-34, 1976-77, and 1987-92. Weather is cyclical and California has always had a Mediterranean, semi-arid climate. It’s just that, since the Great Depression and World War II, and with the boom time/dream time of the 1960s, we’ve been packing in many more people and expanding our agriculture and industry. More people, more farmers, and more businesses are now sucking at straws that occasionally run dry.

The state government’s solution boils down to encouraging and enforcing cutbacks in water use, perhaps leading to outright rationing. This is the simplest and least costly—for the government—approach to a solution. Frame the people and their choices as the source of the problem, require them to make sacrifices, tell them to figure out for themselves how to do with less, and then use your enforcement power to back this approach.

Cutbacks and rationing are, in my opinion, a temporary fix. They will hold us until the rains come again, as they always do. Then we can all forget about the problem and water our lawns and wash our cars again. Cutbacks and rationing will get us past this—forgive the pun—dry spell until things can even out again, as they always do.

But the trouble is, California is still growing. We keep adding people and businesses. We keep expanding agriculture into dry, sandy areas of the southern San Joaquin Valley which, without that artificial irrigation, most strongly resemble desert. The next cyclical drought will be worse than this one, and the one to come after that will be biblical—all without one bit of change in our historic weather patterns. Of course, in the long run, this is a self-solving problem: when living conditions resemble those in war-torn Beirut, where you take your five-gallon jerry can down to the water truck on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays to get your family’s allotment, people will start to leave the state for wetter places. Farmers who can’t make the desert bloom will give up and sell out. Businesses that can’t get a basic resource they need to operate will relocate out of state. When the opportunists and drifters have left, the state’s water will easily serve the very rich and the very poor who remain.3

In the long run, we Californians have some hard choices to make. Sitting here and hoping for rain is not a solution. Relaxing and enjoying the bounty when the rain does come, then being surprised, shocked, and aggrieved when the next drought arrives is a form or either madness or stupidity—a bit like being surprised by your taxes being due on April 15, or having Christmas suddenly come up and you’ve still not done your shopping.

Personally, I believe in providing people with abundance, not scarcity and rationing. I want them to have more living space, more and varied foodstuffs, more water, more transportation options, more health and fitness options, more entertainments and connectivity, more of everything that makes life good. I’m not in favor of waste or excess, but when someone puts out his or her hand to obtain something, then that something should be made available, in variety, and with options. If it costs money to do this—and if someone gets to make a profit by providing the service—then so be it. That is one aspect of personal freedom, and one consequence of allowing free markets. As Henry Kaiser used to say, “Find a need and fill it.” And where need exists, entrepreneurs will find a way to serve it at a mutually agreeable price.

So I believe that we in California must stop thinking of water as something that comes from the sky, is freely available for every need, and that the only costs or charges involved should be those associated with the utility that gathers and delivers the stuff. When you start treating water as a commodity like steel or wheat rather than a natural resource, you open up the prospects for long-term solutions.

One such solution is to diversify our water systems. Right now, in most of the United States and certainly in California, we deliver clean, drinkable water to residences, commercial buildings, and industrial sites to be used for all purposes. We drink it, cook with it, wash with it, and flush with it. The same water, or near enough in purity, is used to grow crops, cool power plants, and support other industrial processes. And once we’ve made that one-time use of this drinkably pure water, we pour it into the sewer, where all the water is treated as toxic bio-sludge and cleaned up to a level where we can then dump it into the river or the bay and send it out to sea. So one approach might be to separate these uses.

We can perform this separation on a county, community, site, or household basis. Drinking water that doesn’t make it into the glass or for cooking can be captured and recycled for washing. Wash water can be filtered to remove dirt particles and chemically treated to remove soaps and detergents, then used for irrigation. Or it can be sent straight to flushing. Sewer water can, with the application of much infrastructure and energy, be brought back up to drinkable levels, or certainly to the level needed for washing, irrigating, and flushing.

The upside of this approach is that the water we have would cycle two or three times through our homes, plants, and communities before going out to sea—if we didn’t capture it at the sewage plant and close the loop entirely. The downside is that we would have to install double piping, traps, surge tanks, and processing units on both the supply side and sewer side in our homes, office buildings, and plants. We would also need to educate all users in drinking only from certain taps and being responsible for what they put into the kitchen sink, bathtub, washing machine, and toilet. For example, in the kitchen, we’ll have to stop disposing of food wastes by macerating them to puree with the InSinkErator®; in the bathroom, we’ll stop using the drain pipe to dispose of excess medicines, toiletries, and hairballs. The plumbing work—both at the site level and throughout the community’s infrastructure—is going to be expensive, but not as costly in terms of economic health and the tax base as seeing our property values dive and our towns fold up for lack of water. The personal retraining is going to be annoying and tiresome, but less work than hauling your jerry can to the water truck three times a week.

Another solution is desalination to increase the basic water supply. After all, we live right next to the Pacific Ocean, a huge amount of water that is only rendered non-drinkable because it contains 3.5 percent salt content. We know how to remove that salt relatively easily and in large volumes, either through various forms of osmosis to manipulate the chemical concentration or through distillation to directly remove the water from the salt and other impurities.4 Such plants require a large capital cost to build and significant operating costs in terms of energy to run.

In my mind, it’s purely a question of engineering and cost whether we process sewage or desalinate seawater in order to obtain our drinking and all-purpose water. In the end, I suppose, we will do some of both, along with the inter-stage recycling steps described above.

The biggest obstacle to these approaches right now—after questions of planning, lead time, and cost—is personal delicacy. We have a mindset in this country that whatever comes out of any tap should be good to drink. That’s been the case for most of the developed world, but not so much in certain parts of Asia and Africa. We in the West wouldn’t mind drinking desalinated seawater, as long as it was served in a crystal goblet so that we could forget it once was a place where fish poop. We recoil at the notion of drinking our own processed sewage, even if it could be rendered chemically pure and shown to contain only H2 and O.

We have to get over that. We must trust chemistry to clean up the water we have on hand. And then we must get over the idea that water is a free resource, like clean air. When I lived in central Pennsylvania, the groundwater was “hard” with chemicals like lime and other natural deposits. You could drink it, but it had a taste. You could wash with it, but it didn’t support much of a lather. Families in town had a water softener unit attached to their domestic water pipes, and we paid the “Culligan Man” to come in regularly to change out the filter cartridge for a monthly fee. So our water, though it came from the ground, wasn’t exactly free.

Clean water, whether by desalination of seawater or chemical processing of sewage, ends up being an energy issue. Both approaches require large amounts of energy to operate. That’s one of the reasons the Saudis are the world leaders in desalination: they have the energy for it. However, even with all their oil, they are rapidly turning to solar energy for this purpose.

My own long-term solution, for countries with their own seashore and lots of sunshine, is solar photovoltaic fields that would drive electrolytic cells to separate hydrogen and oxygen from seawater. You could then choose to capture and compress the two gases—using more solar energy to drive the pumps and compressors—as fuel and oxidizer for sale to fuel transportation or generation needs. Or you could recombine the gases on site in a turbine or fuel cell to make readily available electricity, with the only waste product being huge amounts of pure, drinkable water.5 The plant would have almost no moving parts, other than pumps to handle and compress the gases and move the water, the turbine shaft itself—if you go that route—and the little robots who would go out to clean the surface of the solar cells and collect salt residue from the electrodes. The plant would only run during the daytime, of course, but it would run for free on the sun’s energy. It’s a solution that requires only money and land to plan and build the plant.

Water in California is not a resource problem. It’s an engineering problem. And it’s high time we stopped wishing and hoping and got down to the business of solving it.

1. See, for example, The California Drought, a research project of the Pacific Institute in Oakland California; and Water Conditions from the California Department of Water Resources.

2. See the ground water elevation (GWE) maps from Groundwater Data and Monitoring by the California Department of Water Resources.

3. And no, I’m not going to get into the argument about diverting water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers for ecological purposes under the code name “Delta Smelt.” That’s always going to be a debate about more or less water, rather than absolute amounts. It will never be practical to draw off the entire river flow for communities, agriculture, and businesses and then let California’s interior waterways go brackish up to Sacramento and down to Stockton. For one thing, it would really mess up San Francisco Bay, which would become stagnant without that flow from the interior.

4. See, for example, the International Desalination Association, which encourages and disseminates information on research, development, and appropriate use of desalination technology.

5. As a scientific colleague of mine once observed, burning hydrogen in an environment of pure oxygen creates “a remarkably energetic exothermic reaction.” If you doubt this, ask NASA how they got the Apollo missions to the Moon or the Space Shuttle into orbit.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Politics and Personal Honor

Our country’s political system—a representative government operated and maintained by citizens who are selected through regular elections that are open to all other qualified citizens—was designed by men of the 18th-century Enlightenment. These men held many views in common: the importance of personal freedom, the necessity of personal rights and responsibilities, the tyranny of an unchecked majority, and the private nature of a person’s religious beliefs. One idea which would seem to underlie and bind all of these others, and yet is not much discussed, is that of personal honor.1

Personal honor is an old idea. Today, in movies and books, it is most often portrayed as a febrile touchiness, usually associated with the phrase “impugned my honor.” With that phrase, one gentleman asserts that another has said something scurrilous and implied that he is not of good character—having supposedly cheated at cards, insulted a lady, or committed some other social offense—and to relieve this stain upon his honor, the first gentleman challenges the second to a duel, at dawn, with swords or pistols, which will leave one of them dead and the other either exonerated or avenged.2 Personal honor in this sense implies bad temper, ill feeling, and a wasteful spillage of blood.

My understanding of personal honor is much simpler: it is the collection of actions and courses to which a person has, either consciously or upon reflection, committed him- or herself. A person determines that he or she will always speak the truth, deal fairly with others, defend the young and the weak, pay off debts, keep honest books, offer courtesy to those who deserve it, or undertake some other commitment the person deems proper. Likewise, he or she will not lie, steal, break laws, pass rumors and idle gossip, damage another’s character or property through malice or carelessness, or—yes—cheat at cards or other games. Personal honor is the set of promises we make to ourselves. It is the watch our conscience sets upon our actions.

Essential to this definition of personal honor is the notion of integrity. Related to the word “integral,” integrity implies a personal wholeness. One is a complete person, the same in all situations3 and guided by the same commitments and restraints, regardless of circumstances. A person who presents one face to the outside world, such as honest businessman and civic supporter, but acts differently in private, such as cheating on his wife and falsifying his tax returns, cannot be said to have integrity. New Age psychology and sociology aside, a person is not made up of independent cubbyholes which may be filled with whatever seems right in the current situation. We each of us have one face and one soul, if you will, and we need to keep it intact and clean.

That face and that soul are what polite society considers to be a man’s or a woman’s character. Character is the reflection of personal honor in the eyes of others. Character is what leads one person to say of another such things as, “I know John [or Jane], and he [or she] would never …” and fill in your own selection of misdeeds. Character is the peek we have past the eyes, through the skin, and into the soul. Character is the internal image we carry of that other person, the map by which we project his or her actions and responses. Character is what we expect him or her to do or not do under any and all circumstances.

In my view—and, I believe, in the view of those 18th-century gentlemen who designed it—in order to work, a representative democracy requires the participation of people who understand and possess a sense of personal honor. And they are needed not just for democracy to work well, but for it to work at all.

Consider the people who run for office. All they can offer the electorate is their platform and their promises. These are nothing but words, written on paper and spoken on the wind, unless they are backed up by the candidate’s personal honor and sense of integrity. Voters may like what they see in the platform and what they hear of the promises, but they will always filter such words through their perceptions of the candidate’s character.

A candidate who has lied in the past, who has participated in fraud, who says one thing to his or her supporters and another to the inner circle of the campaign—and then been found out in the lie, fraud, or deception—has nothing left to offer the public. He or she may give the people an ironical wink, may suggest that everyone lies and cheats, that all of this belongs to some notion of “the real world,” and that no one is guilty because we are all guilty at some undefined level of original sin. But it won’t wash—or it shouldn’t. And voters who care so much about the platform and the promises that they will ignore the character of the politician who mouths them will eventually be disappointed.

The 20th century4 gave us the politics of the Big Lie. Deception became, in the words of Frank Herbert’s Dune, “a tool of statecraft.” Madison Avenue and the manipulation of public perceptions became a practiced art. Say something often enough, and people will come to believe it. They will slowly but inevitably replace what they know with the sometimes comforting, but more often angering or frightening, images and suggestions upon which the politician, the marketer, or the political party insists. This will all work for a while. A pleasing lie can usually beat out a hard-edged or uncomfortable truth—but only for a while. In the long run, a platform and promises founded on deception and lies will fall apart. In the long run, people’s common sense and the wisdom of crowds—containing the principles and truths your grandmother told you, founded upon her long and eventful life—will come back around to top dead center.

And then, consider the people who actually win the election and intend to run the government. To be effective, they must believe in something greater than themselves, their personal careers, and their perceived advantages. Specifically, those charged with the public trust must believe in the supremacy of the rule of law and the constitution. They must hold to the truth in what they say and do, mindful of the faith that others have invested in them. They must swear to uphold the law. A person without honor or integrity is unlikely to keep these commitments.

Next, consider the character of the voter. If the actions of government and the laws passed by its deliberative body—Congress, Parliament, or Duma—and executed by its leader and his or her associated bureaucracy—President or Prime Minister, administration or cabinet—matter at all, then the voter must take seriously the choices offered in a free election. The individual voter needs to weigh personal preference and perceived advantage against the public good and the rights of others who may have different preferences and advantages. The voter needs to weigh the pleasing platform and the pretty promises against the character of the politician and make the best choices, guided by sober reflection and the voter’s best sense of how the world actually works and where his or her nation and society are currently headed.

One of the tragedies of the Big Lie mentality is its power to render voters eventually immune to truth. They come to feel that truth and the actual nature of things are either unimportant or indecipherable. That all politicians are liars and cheats, or they are indebted to forces external to the polity—Big Business, Big Oil, the United Nations, or the Illuminati—and therefore not to be trusted. That the system is irretrievably corrupt. And worse, that one’s vote does not count. With such a mindset, the voter will shrug, cast the ballot for a pretty promise, and hope for the best.

The voter must also make certain commitments based on personal honor. These include voting according to the rules and not stuffing the ballot box by reappearing in a different precinct under a new identity. A jaded voter who believes in the Big Lie or doubts the integrity of the system has no reason to follow the rules but may manipulate them for private or ideological ends.

And then, once his or her ballot is dropped in the box, the voter must agree to a abide by the results, live with the consequences, and not harbor thoughts of revolution or political action by other means. For a representative democracy to work, the populace must believe in and support its operation, without reservations or contingencies. Democracy is a fragile system. It works because people agree that it works. When they no longer give that agreement, for whatever reason, then more robust systems enforced by the muzzles of guns will take over.

And finally, consider the people who hold the elections and manage the voting process. They are usually volunteers, not politicians nor affiliated with any party or branch of the government. They undertake a duty to manage the polling place, sign in the voters, oversee the casting of ballots, and stand behind the results. The system of representative democracy requires these workers to demonstrate the integrity of the process and expose rule breakers and unfair practices in order to eliminate them. We require their integrity and personal honor to uphold a commitment even higher than that of the people who would run the government in the name of the voters.

These are the many examples of how we depend on private honor to function in the public space. The 18th-century gentlemen believed it could be made to work. Here in the 21st century, we need to reacquaint ourselves with these principles, or the result will be chaos and eventually tyranny.

1. Although the Declaration of Independence does conclude with a mutual pledge of “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

2. Note that it is almost impossible to talk about this kind of honor except in such brittle and antique phrasings.

3. True, people have different roles in life. A man will have different responsibilities and meet different necessities as a business executive than he encounters as a father or a player on the company softball team. Yet the duties and requirements of personal honor lie so close to the core of his character that they govern all situations. A man tells the truth to—and does not steal from—his business partners, his children, or his teammates.

4. In retrospect, a really bad time for the human race.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

The Wages of Immortality

Fact is, all of us humans—as well as every other living thing on this planet—will eventually die. Actually, death could be considered one of the defining factors of this strange condition we call life: that it can end. For life is not simply a state of being or a gift of special, magical power, such as implied by the phrase “the spark of life,” or the animating spirit that Rabbi Loeb instilled in the inert clay of the Golem of Prague. Instead, life is a process. Life is a series of relationships fitting together various electrochemical energy potentials, actions and reactions, and feedback loops in a moment-to-moment, cell-by-cell succession that will exist for as long as the organism receives the necessary inputs and will end when those inputs stop or the series breaks down.

I’m sorry to be so mechanistic about this, but whether you are an amoeba, nematode, lobster, llama, cat, dog, or human being, this is what it means to be alive. And the part that you most cherish as “you”—your mind, your memories, hopes and fears, aspirations and achievements—simply refers to the moment-by-moment, cell-by-cell variations in energy potentials, actions and reactions, and feedback loops located in your central nervous system and occupied with processing the visual, aural, chemical, and tactile sensations which your body’s sense organs send into that nerve nexus.

Perhaps, when the brain and those sense organs die, those potentials, actions, and loops will continue processing in some other dimension, driven by some other form of energy. But that’s a matter for speculative physics and metaphysics. What we actually know about biology and the physical self is that it arises from the conjunction of egg and sperm, each of which possesses embedded chemical instructions. The organism develops and differentiates by following those instructions, as well as by gathering nutrients from and experiencing changes in the surrounding environment, and by exercising the decision-making potential of the nervous system to change and improve its relationship with the environment. The body eventually slows and decays through continued contact with that external environment and its insults. And finally, that series of life-sustaining events breaks down, and the organism stops.

We all have this to look forward to. For some of us it’s a terror, because life is so sweet. For others it’s a comfort, because life has become bitter. For all of us it’s a reminder that life is short—perhaps destined to end by accident or misadventure within the next day or two—and our time is not to be wasted.

But how would human life be different if we lived forever?

To know this, of course, we would first have to determine the terms and conditions of this magical gift of immortality. Is it proposed that we might go on indefinitely—no slowing down, no internal decay, no ultimate breakdown written into our genes, with no lysosomes standing ready to hydrolyze our cellular materials1—unless we meet with an unforeseeable accident? That is, we would live a full and complete life until we were actively taken out and killed? Or is the proposal that we would become not only immortal but also invulnerable, that any injuries might heal immediately, that cumulative injuries would heal even faster, and that the dissolutions of major, decapitating, dismembering, dissolving, disrupting, and destroying attacks and accidents would flash by us or bounce off us like bullets grazing Superman?

In the first case, of immortality without invulnerability, we might become as fragile as Ming vases. If a long and healthy life can be preserved by avoiding accidents, confrontations, and bodily damage, then we would live as prudently as monks.

It is commonly understood that teenagers and young people are risk-takers and death-defiers precisely because they secretly believe or ignorantly presume they are immortal. And who can blame them? With forty, fifty, or sixty healthy years stretching ahead of a person, whose experience is based on a mere fifteen or twenty years of boundless health and vitality, then one can be forgiven for thinking life will go on forever. By comparison with all that one knows, the precious gift of three score and ten more of the same represents an unimaginably long time, approximating an eternity.

But a person who has some experience of living and fully realizes the nature of the magical gift of immortality—an undated lifespan, barring accidents and misadventure—would become cautious. When you have a chance at the gold ring, why waste it on a moment’s excitement in the rush of adrenaline? By the same token, what could be so valuable that you would give your life in exchange for it? Would you trade your everlasting life, this precious gift, for the sake of personal honor? To redeem a loved one? To defend your tribe’s or nation’s power, prestige, and prerogatives? To defend the planet? To save all humankind?

We can perform acts of personal heroism because we all know, deep down, that someday we are going to die anyway. If you are only going to live another ten, twenty, or thirty years—years destined to pass in a boring job, residing on a narrow street, taking care of a strip of lawn, and raising a sometimes quarrelsome and ungrateful family—then to sacrifice that life for love, honor, or all of humanity might be worth it. But to trade immortality? You would have to think long and hard about that. And the longer and harder you thought, the less likely you would be to take action. In the end, a person with an immortal but not invulnerable lifespan could be bought and owned for a whispered threat and the flash of a knife blade. Such a person would choose to live forever on his or her knees, at the behest of a stronger or more ruthless human being, rather than resist and bring it all to an end in a day.

On the other hand, if one could have both immortality and invulnerability, a person would become as a god. You would not only be careless of your own life and limb but of everyone and everything else you might hold dear—if indeed you cared seriously about anything at all. Think of the gods and goddesses in The Iliad. They play at war as if it were a game of football or poker, with no real consequences. They participate in the human war for fun, or motivated by the kind of loyalty you might show to a pet dog, or for spite and jealousy. And when, say, Diomedes wounds Aphrodite in the arm with his spear, she drops her wounded son Aeneas and flies back to Olympus. The immortal gods are fickle because, in a long life where nothing much matters, they can afford to be.

But when a person lives forever—whether by avoiding all accidents or despite suffering any imaginable number of decapitating accidents—he or she still must deal with the nature of time and experience.

Like that teenager or twenty-year-old, for whom the promise of another fifty or sixty years looks like eternity, our sense of time is proportional. When a six-year-old experiences the passing of an hour or a day, it seems like a long time, practically an eternity. This is because his experience and memory includes only a limited number of such days—just 2,190 of them to be exact, if he even can remember them all—with a proportionally limited number of hours. When that same boy grows to be a man of sixty, the years will seem to be flying by, because each one represents a smaller and smaller portion of his time on Earth. Time telescopes, and an hour is never long enough to perform any task in a really thorough fashion, while each day disappears in the three tasks you wanted to finish after breakfast.2

Imagine then, how immortality would further warp this sense of proportion. After a thousand years of life, what would an hour represent? A day? A year? And if we are talking about an immortality that truly approached eternity, and not just some minor doubling or tripling of the traditional three score and ten, what then would ten thousand, a million, or a billion years of experience do to a person’s sense of time? Unlike Einstein’s imagined light wave rider, for whom relativistic time slows down, the immortal mind’s experience of time would speed up, until interaction with other human beings would become nearly impossible. The people around such an immortal human—especially if they were not immortal themselves or of a comparable age—would disappear into a blur of associated memories.

An immortal human, whether by longevity or invulnerability, would be a significantly different creature than the life we know and experience. His or her perceptions, intentions, expectations, and desires would differ markedly from those of mortal men and women. Such a person would be another order of being and, for the rest of us, practically unintelligible and incomprehensible.

1. See the definition in The Cell: A Molecular Approach by Geoffrey M. Cooper (National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2000).

2. See The Years Rush By from January 5, 2014.