Lockdown must end very soon

It seems inevitable that the government will soon announce an extension to lockdown, and that it will be made more severe. Most of us will have several more weeks of being confined to homes, probably only except for trips to the supermarket or doctor. For many people, that means solitary confinement, in small flats with no garden. Even murderers in prison area allowed out for daily exercise.

Lockdown is due to be ‘reviewed’ soon, but it must end soon. The ongoing costs will be too damaging if it is allowed to continue, not just economic cost but extra deaths, mental health issues and lingering social and political damage

UK Health Authorities and Government negligence got us into this mess, but they are still making serious blunders

The handling of COVID by both the government, the health authorities and the police has been pretty poor so far. If you disagree, consider the following.

Experts have been warning frequently for decades that one of the biggest risks faced by humanity this century would be pandemics – every competent futurist has certainly always had it in their top three risks. They have been warned frequently that global travel and large city living would enable the very rapid spread globally of any new virus and that any time, a new outbreak could happen that would mean millions could die. Government cannot claim they did not have good warning that we would face a major pandemic. In fact, we’re fortunate this one only kills 0.66% of those it infects, it could have been far worse, it might have been 30%. Yet government and especially its Department of Health was very badly unprepared, with far too few incubators, intensive care beds, even face masks, let alone ensuring the ability to rapidly develop testing capability or vaccines. This unpreparedness goes back several governments. Hancock is doing his best and can reasonably claim he hasn’t been in that job long, but his many predecessors can’t escape condemnation. For example, I could never understand how someone who believes in homeopathy could possibly be be made Minister of Health, or why a PM would expect someone with such beliefs to have good analytical skills.

We knew COVID was a such a potential risk before the first cases were allowed to enter the UK.

In the weeks following, even though they knew large numbers of infected people were coming into the country, government did nothing. It didn’t close the airports. It made no attempt to prevent flights from infected areas, no attempt to check passengers even for obvious symptoms such as fever. It didn’t even give passengers any appropriate health guidance other than weakly suggesting they should consider self-isolating if they develop symptoms. It allowed passengers from infected area to be huddled closely together with others at passport control, greatly facilitating cross-infection. It made no attempt to quarantine anyone likely to be infected or to track their contacts. In short, government sat and watched as the virus spread beyond control, even helping it to do so.

During all that time, while it asked vulnerable people to isolate themselves, it allowed the idiot mayor of London to reduce tube services, forcing those who needed to travel into close proximity on platforms and trains, again facilitating the spread of the virus.

Faced with the choice to limit the virus coming into the UK, finding, isolating and contact tracking the manageable number of infectees, our government negligently watched as the virus became widespread. Its early policy was to achieve ‘herd immunity’, which needs 80% or more people to become infected. Many would develop serious symptoms and suffer terribly and many would go on to die horrible deaths. The estimated 250,000 deaths from a herd immunity approach contrast starkly with the few dozen that might have resulted from the alternative early action approach.

The governments response then changed to a ‘flatten the curve’ approach, still accepting that most people would be infected, but limiting the number of simultaneous cases to the small numbers the unprepared NHS could cope with. Because of their previous actions, they had little choice. They hoped that eventually, a vaccine might be developed, in 18 months or so.

When the virus seemed to be spreading too quickly, instead of reducing the rate of spread by concentrating on the gaping holes in their approach – allowing people to be crammed together in tube stations and passport control, and still letting others enter the country – they decided instead to introduce lockdown for a large part of the population, regardless of the level of infection in different areas, varying by as much as a factor of 20. Those people would suffer lockdown, while many others would still be crammed together spreading infection. In low infection areas, that lockdown could only reduce a small figure by a small amount. In other areas with high infection, a stricter lockdown would have achieved far more.

Many areas of London have very high infection rates. Given the 75% reduction in traffic, it would be extremely simple to lift London traffic controls and encourage as many as possible to use their private cars, especially for those living in the most infected areas, greatly reducing cross infection in the tube system. Instead, one of the heads of Public Health England made the comment that she was ‘slightly alarmed’ by the switch of travel from public transport to private vehicles. PHE has also stated that there is no point in wearing masks (a simple mask may not prevent you catching the virus, but they will greatly reduce how many virus-laden particles people emit when they talk, cough or sneeze and therefore will reduce the rate of infection. It may well be the case that PHE wants to reduce demand by the public for scarce masks so that enough will be available for those who need them, but if so, they should say so and not talk rubbish). I find it more than slightly alarming that people with such poor analytical skills should be in positions of decision making. Masks should be worn, prioritizing availability if need be to high infection areas.

People are still travelling between areas of very high infection and areas with very low infection. Many people in low infection areas will be needlessly infected. This will increase deaths. If we must have lockdown, there are far better ways to arrange it. Cellular lockdown, restricting travel between areas of markedly different infection rates would greatly reduce spread.

Even separating people from high and low infection areas in public transport would only require a simple ‘red and green’ trains system. Yet it seems beyond the comprehension of our authorities.

Some police forces have been intimidating people who are driving to open areas to exercise. Although a very few areas might attract occasional crowding greater than town footpaths, generally, urban footpaths will have far more joggers, walkers and cyclists, so exposure during exercise will generally be far higher by forcing people to exercise locally. That will increase cases and deaths. Closing parks and National Trust Gardens is similarly stupid and counter-productive. People will die because of that stupidity. Rather than take the side of common sense and logic, government threatens the people with stricter confinement if they continue to try to enjoy the outdoors, even when they are spread out.

Making it very hard to exercise away from other people will deter many people from doing so. Just when they have the greatest need to maintain peak fitness in case they become ill, their ability to do so is being reduced by officious police and busybodies. That will result in more deaths.

Watching such ongoing stupidity and negligence, I have very little confidence left in our government to make good decisions. I do not believe continuing lockdown is the right policy.

Lockdown

The current one-size-fits-all policy of lockdown is highly questionable, another mistake in a long line. A smarter form might have been justifiable to recover from the mess poor previous decisions got us into, but looking from where we are now, lockdown must be lifted soon, or it will cost far more than it saves.

Mental Health Costs

I was already self-isolating before lockdown, being ‘at risk’ but I don’t find isolation difficult. I’m introvert, normally work from home, and don’t normally leave my home more than a few times a month. I have a nice house and garden and a fantastic partner. So I have barely felt any change and am not suffering. Many are not so fortunate.

Many people live in tiny homes with no gardens and must find it distressing, especially those accustomed to going out frequently. Others live alone and many of them will be feeling very lonely. Still others will be experiencing relationship breakdowns, some of which will not mend when it’s all over. Lockdown will already be taking a severe toll on many people’s mental health. As lockdown continues the mental health costs will grow enormously. Some have already died via suicide and murder. Many more will follow, many will suffer extreme stress or fall into severe depression and start to suffer the wide range of ailments associated with those, especially many who are watching their business collapse.

Loneliness is a terrible problem that affects millions, particularly the old, and is known to contribute to ill health and death. Lockdown obviously is increasing loneliness for very many people, and will result in an unknown number of extra deaths.

Relationship breakdown as people are forced to live with each other 24/7 is inevitable. This is a well-known cause of stress, suicide and health reduction and will cause deaths directly and via reduced ability to deal with infection. Families of those concerned will also be affected.

Domestic violence is likely to increase similarly.

People’s energy bills will increase as they are confined to home. Many who already struggle to pay them will be greatly stressed by increased costs. Stress directly contribute to illness and deaths. If some old people who are already vulnerable have to turn down the heating because of worrying about energy bills, that will make them more physically vulnerable and mean even more deaths.

Death Costs

We now have some figures on the nature of the infection and its lethality. The Lancet suggest that 0.66% of those infected will die. If everyone were to be infected, that would be 430,000 UK deaths, and we’ve heard estimates around that before. On the other hand, the coronavirus app results suggest that as few as 25% of people have already been infected, suggesting future deaths due mainly to COVID might only be a few thousand (the majority of people dying who have COVID on their death certificate had other underlying issues and many would have died anyway, or soon).

Without testing of statistically large enough randomized samples in each area, we really have no idea and the government is flying blind. Letting everyone out and not doing anything at all to limit infection might result a few thousand or a few hundred thousand more deaths caused primarily by COVID. We simply don’t know. What we do know is that to be at the higher end, the mortality figures would need to be that high and almost everyone would need to be infected, but firstly, we can strongly limit infection by implementing sensible policies, and secondly, if we do that, we will have a vaccine in time to prevent most people becoming cases. So the high end is far too high. If we lifted lockdown now in low infection areas and later in higher infection areas after we have significantly reduce infections by better policy implementation and some optimised testing, future deaths would likely be between 5000 and 20,000, a wet-finer estimate, but probably no wetter than the models government seems to be relying on.

Not everyone lives in homes with good ventilation. Some in poor quality housing will have a higher infection rate from both COVID19 and other diseases due to poor ventilation.

Many people still rely on coal or wood fires, both of which produce particulates that can cause breathing difficulty and contribute to respiratory-related deaths.

The deaths costs from the above causes will be high, probably running into hundreds if it is allowed to continue more than another week or two, and that has to be offset against any gains. But there is an even bigger factor that will worsen if continued lockdown causes severe economic damage. As well as the factors above, some economists have done their analyses and suggested that due to the inevitable recession – up to 17% drop in GDP – far more future deaths will result from economic decline than will be saved by lockdown. For a change, even though they’re economists, I’m not inclined to disagree.

Economic Costs

In terms of saving lives, there are many ways to save lives so with finite funds, we should spend where the most lives can be saved for given funding. If we only save 5000 lives, but spend £500Bn to do so, that works out at £100M each! The NHS currently won’t provide a drug unless it is likely to add an extra year of quality life for less than £30,000. A typical 65-year old dying of COVID today would only expect to have another 20 years of life on average, so the NHS won’t pay more than £600k to keep them alive if they were dying of something that isn’t COVID. Many of those dying are much older than 65 and most have other underlying factors that make their life expectancy much less than normal. Using the same valuations,, an average spending limit of £250k seems more realistic. At £250k each, even the highest current estimate of 250,000 deaths would have a cost limit of £60Bn. On harsh economic terms, we could save more lives by helping those with other illnesses if the cost will exceed £60Bn. If you look a little further, various studies over the last decade have shown that tens of thousands of deaths in hospitals result from negligence, errors and poor hygiene. We could reduce those even more cheaply.

So the cost of lockdown makes no sense in terms of the economic cost of saving lives – there are more cost-effective ways. We could save far more for the same spend.

Social Costs

But there is still another major cost: society. If you are on social media, you will have noticed the rising tension, the conflicts between those who believe in this policy versus those who believe another one, the ones who want to comply versus dissenters, the rule violators versus the snitches.

Confidence in the police is being strained to breaking point, as is confidence in government. NHS worshippers abound, but so do those who believe shelf stackers and binmen are just as important.

Inter-generational conflict will increase. The young see their futures being thrown away to buy a few more years for the very elderly who would die soon anyway.

There will be strong resentment of the private sector worker watching their pension evaporate while the public sector worker next door has their gold-plated pension protected. People who were laid off and have to survive on Universal Credit will likely resent others having 80% of their previous income paid by the state, as will those who had to watch their businesses thrown under a bus with receive no compensation at all. Everyone will have to pay, but only some were protected.

Many of these growing tensions, resentments, conflicts and tribal conflicts will not vanish when it’s all over. Scars will remain for decades. The lingering social costs may well be as high as the economic and death costs.

Political Costs

Finally, we should consider that politics will change too.

Privacy, freedom, free speech and respect for the authorities will be permanently damaged. Social cohesion is an important part of the foundations of democracy.

Respect for the police and the principle of  ‘policing by consent’ has already been eroded by some police gleefully abusing their power like bullies appointed school prefects.

Being left with enormous bills and a trashed economy, with many businesses dead, it will take decades to recover. We already know the huge effects of austerity in politics, but are rapidly adding enormously to the already massive national debt so future austerity will be deep and long-lived.

We can also be sure that this will not be the last virus. In a year or two there will be another, and because of the poor handling of this one, reactions by society and the markets will be even more panicky, and we may take more economic hits. We may take generations to get back to ‘normality’.

Summary

Whichever angle you look at it, lockdown is the wrong solution. It has high mental health costs, it saves fewer lives than freeing everyone, and costs more per life than almost any other way of saving them. And it comes with very high social and political costs.

Whether you look at it from an economic angle, a pragmstic angle or are trying to be compassionate, it still makes no sense.

It should end soon.

 

 

Great news from the coronavirus app

NOTE: The first version of this article was based on the Daily Mail article:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8186479/Coronavirus-symptom-app-suggests-1-9-MILLION-Brits-Covid-19.html

CORRECTION

Looking at the video by the researchers, for which I’m grateful to Kate Brewer) to the link:

https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-research-update-uk

it says that 25-30% of respondents reported ‘some COVID-like symptoms associated with COVID’. It also usefully clarifies that most of the early respondents were likely younger people. This is very different from the 1.9M reported in the DM article and which I re-used in my blog. Humble apologies, I didn’t check the source. Now that I have, I am still unable to find the other figures the DM quoted, so perhaps they used a different source.

So, using the revised figures ….

The coronavirus symptom tracking app results suggest, according to Tim Spector, that 25-30% of respondents reported ‘some symptoms associated with COVID’. Without proper testing, it’s as good an estimate as we’re likely to get. Extending to the whole UK population, there could be 16-20M people who have already had the disease. (As an aside, and I don’t trust Chinese figures, some reports suggest that 20% of people who are infected develop symptoms. For 25-30% to report symptoms, that would mean almost everyone in the UK would need to have been infected).

The app is a sort of self-selected, self-reported test, but presumably proper tests on a proper sample of the population would reveal more. If you’re trying to solve a problem, knowing its dimensions can make a huge difference to the solution you will pick.

If their figure is true, then only 0.2% – 0.25% of people who have had the disease developed into official cases. But we have no idea how many have been exposed to the virus and not even had enough symptoms to become part of their 25+%. It could be anywhere between 25% and 50% (as other studies have cited).

If true, we might already be a quarter or even half of the way through. We might only see another 40,000 – 80,000 cases, even if lockdown is lifted

So far, 3605 deaths have been announced in the UK from 38,168 cases, but the ONS says the death toll could be 20% higher, at 4325. That gives an 11.3% death rate in the UK but that doesn’t include documented cases that will die later (the numbers that have been listed as ‘recovered’ are only a tenth of the deaths, so that is an important caveat). So the UK figure is likely to be much higher than the 11.3%. On the other hand, as Peter Hitchens has often pointed out, that figure is for all deaths that occurred of people who had the disease, not those who died mainly because of it, very different. Large numbers of elderly people die every year. Every day, around 1650 people die in the UK. Any of those who died from the usual causes but also had COVID would appear in the COVID deaths figures, along with any who did die because of it but would have died in a few months of something else anyway.

Without proper testing of a large and representative sample of the population, we really have no idea how many people have actually already had the disease or are resistant, and without proper recording of deaths, how many known cases are still going to die. Only when we have proper large scale test results will we be able to estimate how many future infections, cases and deaths there might be as the result of lifting lockdown before the disease has been eliminated.

However, a simple calculation using the above suggests that if lockdown were lifted, there might only be 10,000 – 13,000 more deaths that might list COVID on the death certificate, and the number of deaths primarily due to COVID would be far less. Perhaps only a very few thousand more people will die because of COVID if lockdown is lifted.

If it really is only 3000 – 5000, there are far better ways to save that number, such as cleaning hospitals better.

 

The rise of Dr Furlough, Evil Super-Villain

Too early for an April Fool blog, but hopefully this might lighten your day a bit.

I had the enormous pleasure this morning of interviewing the up-and-coming Super-Villain Dr Furlough about her new plans to destroy the world after being scorned by the UK Government’s highly selective support policy. It seems that Hell has no fury like a Super-Villain scorned and Dr Furlough leaves no doubt that she blames incompetent government response for the magnitude of the current crisis:

Dr Furlough, Super-Villain

“By late January, it should have been obvious to everyone that this would quickly grow to become a major problem unless immediate action was taken to prevent people bringing the virus into the country. Flights from infected areas should have been stopped immediately, anyone who may have been in contact with it should have been forcibly quarantined, and everyone found infected should have had their contacts traced and also quarantined. This would have been disruptive and expensive, but a tiny fraction of the problem we now face.  Not to do so was to give the virus the freedom to spread and infect widely until it became a severe problem. While very few need have died and the economy need not now be trashed, we now face the full enormous cost of that early refusal to act.”

“With all non-essential travel now blocked”, Dr Furlough explained, “many people have had their incomes totally wiped out, not through any fault of their own but by the government’s incompetence in handling the coronavirus, and although most of them have been promised state support, many haven’t, and have as Dr Furlough puts it ‘been thrown under a bus’. While salaried people who can’t work are given 80% of their wages, and those with their own business will eventually receive 80% of their average earnings up to £2500/month whether they are still working or not, the two million who chose to run their small business by setting up limited companies will only qualify for 80% of the often small fraction of income they pay themselves as basic salary, and not on the bulk of their income most take via dividends once their yearly profits are clearer. Consequently many will have immediately dropped from comfortable incomes to 80% of minimum wage. Many others who have already lost their jobs have been thrown onto universal credit. The future high taxes will have to be paid by everyone whether they received support or were abandoned. Instead of treating everyone equally, the state has thus created a seething mass of deep resentment.” Dr Furlough seems determined to have her evil revenge.

With her previous income obliterated, and scorned by the state support system, the ever self-reliant Dr Furlough decided to “screw the state” and forge a new career as a James-Bond-style Super-Villain, and she complained that it was long overdue for a female Super-Villain to take that role anyway. I asked her about her evil plans and, like all traditional Super-Villains, she was all too eager to tell. So, to quote her verbatim:

“My Super-Evil Plan 1: Tap in to the global climate alarmist market to crowd-fund GM creation of a super-virus, based on COVID19. More contagious, more lethal, and generally more evil. This will reduce world population, reduce CO2 emissions and improve the environment. It will crash the global economy and make them all pay. As a bonus, it will ensure the rise of evil regimes where I can prosper.”

She continued: “My Evil Super-Plan 2: To invent a whole pile of super-weapons and sell the designs to all the nasty regimes, dictators, XR and other assorted doomsday cults, pressure groups, religious nutters and mad-scientists. Then to sell ongoing evil consultancy services while deferring VAT payments.”

“Muhuahuahua!” She cackled, evilly.

“My Super-Plan 3: To link AI and bacteria to make adaptive super-diseases. Each bacterium can be genetically enhanced to include bioluminescent photonic interconnects linked to cloud AI with reciprocal optogenetic niche adaptation. With bacteria clouds acting as distributed sensor nets for an emergent conscious transbacteria population, my new bacteria will be able to infect any organism and adapt to any immune system response, ensuring its demise and my glorious revenge.”

By now, Dr Furlough was clearly losing it. Having heard enough anyway, I asked The Evil Dr Furlough if there was no alternative to destroying the world and life as we know it.

“Well, I suppose I could just live off my savings and sit it all out” she said.

 

Apocalypse Tomorrow

This post was co-authored with Bronwyn Williams (details below)

I recently watched a documentary about the 1978 Jonestown Massacre, where 918 Peoples Temple followers died, many of them children, killed by their own parents. Before it even started, my own memories of it in the news made me realize that the current global socio-political climate makes such an ‘unthinkable’ event likely to happen again, possibly on a much bigger scale, perhaps even in several places at once.

The biggest factor by far is the global replacement of religion (mostly Christianity) by secular religion substitutes. These secular substitutes for the meaning, direction and purpose formerly provided by religion take many forms, from a revived interest in paganism, witchcraft, and general “no name brand” spiritualism and mysticism, through to a new almost religious fervor for political causes. Now, while finding solace for the horror of the human condition in crystals or astrology is relatively benign (unless you are getting into debt betting your children’s school fees on the stocks recommended in your daily horoscope app, for example); mass movements driven by tribes of True Believers, are far more concerning.

New converts to any mass movement – religious or secular – are invariably among the most passionate believers, so we now have a massive and global pool of people newly susceptible to the same forces that enabled Jim Jones to do what he did. Every day on social media we witness first hand that enthusiasm, driving the secular equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition and targeting anyone and everyone not devoutly following every detail of their new faith. Jones strongly policed his followers and strictly punished any rule breaking or heresy. That same practice is greatly amplified in social media, to billions of people instead of the thousand followers Jones had influence on.

I’ve written many times about the strong similarities between religion and belief in catastrophic climate change, environmentalism, woke doctrine, veganism, New Ageism, and others. All these triggers tap in to the same anchors in human nature, first of which makes people want to believe they are ‘good people’ on the right side of history; the second of which is tribalism, the basic human instinct of wanting to belong to a group of like-thinking people, while clearly marking the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. At the same time, as people are forced to decide which side to stand on, the gulf between the “us” and ‘them’ is always widening, amplifying both the fear of – and the real consequences of – being cut out of the circle of trust of their chosen tribe, just as Jim Jones did.

Importantly, the scientific truth and proven facts behind these causes are less important than how the causes make the new true believers feel; particularly when it comes to signalling the moral superiority of the in group compared to the infidel, unconverted out-group.  As Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, for the adherents of most mass movements, “The effectiveness of a doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from his self and the world as it is.”.

Now, these tribal drivers are immensely strong forces, the likes of which have underpinned crusades and wars since the days of ancient civilizations. Now that far fewer people believe in formal religions, many of those who previously would have been enthusiastic believers have turned instead to these secular substitutes that push the same psychological buttons. Another documentary this week on veganism shows exactly the same forces at play being harnessed as in religion – secular equivalent to sin, shaming sinners, fear of rejection, tribalism, and especially demonstrating the impact of a charismatic ‘priest’. Jones was highly charismatic, and a master at using these forces. Compare the influence today that a single person can have in pushing a particular agenda in the name of social justice or climate change action.

Fear was a very powerful weapon used constantly by Jones, and today’s climate catastrophists do all they can to ensure as many other people share their fear as possible. It seems that every negative news item is somehow tied to ‘climate change’. If the climate isn’t enough, rising seas, ocean acidification, plastic pollution are all linked in to enhance the total fear, exaggerating wildly while a scared media lets them get away with it. Millions of people now pressurize governments and social media, screaming and shrieking “DO SOMETHING, NOW!!!!!”. Jones enhanced fear by talking frequently about death, even using mock suicides to amplify the general climate of fear. Now, witness the frequent death cult demonstrations of animal rights protesters and climate change catastrophists. Extinction rebellion excel in this area, with their blood-red meta-religious uniforms. It is impossible not to see parallels with Jones’ cult followers.

Jones was also adept in creating fake news. He used fake healings and even a fake resurrection to amplify faith and ensure his reign as leader. Fake news in today’s work is virtually indistinguishable from reality, and worse still many people don’t care, as long as it backs up what they already believe.

Another strong parallel is socialism. Jones gift-wrapped his cult in socialism Utopianism. Most people won’t join a movement just from fear alone, there needs to be a strong attractor to get them to join up, and fear can keep them there afterwards. Today we see a new enthusiasm among young people (a gospel enthusiastically spread to young minds via their state school teachers) for socialism. Via skillful use of Orwell’s doublespeak, with activists redefining words over a decade or more, they are presented with all the wonderful Utopian claims of ‘fairness’, ‘equality’, ‘love’, ‘tolerance’ and so on, while non-believers are listed as ‘evil’, ‘deplorable’, ‘fascists’, and ‘deniers’. Even the USA is seeing strong enthusiasm for socialism and even communism, something that would have been impossible to imagine just 25 years ago.

Socialism, environmental catastrophism and religious fervor make a powerful trio. Promised salvation, status and utopia if you follow, doom and catastrophic punishment such as social ostracizing and career destruction on the light end, and complete civilizational and environmental collapse if you don’t.

Other forces still add to this. Generations raised on social media and social credit scores (both official and unofficial) are rewarded (in status and income) for narcissism and self-censorship and reversion to the group mean. This, of course, further reinforces echo-chamber group-think and a sincere, yet unfounded superiority complex, creating a tribal inter-generational hostility to older people that prevents them from accepting accumulated wisdom. They happily absorb emotional fake news and distortion as long as it massages their need for affirmation. Likes outweigh facts any day. Indeed, even holding a PhD is no longer an effective immunization against collective delusion, in a world where social scientists are punished with their careers for publishing results of scientific studies that falsify popular politically correct consensus opinions (As Eric Hoffer said, “There is an illiterate air about the most literate true believer.”)

Self-hate is another powerful trend; the dishonor of being born Western (or even more damningly, male) has strong Biblical parallels to man being born into sin; and the need to recognize, confess and atone for the sins of one’s birth and forefathers.

So where does this take us?

Jones was highly charismatic. He was a natural master of using strong emotional forces built into human nature. History has many examples of equally charismatic leaders (from Obama to Oprah), who used their charm and power for good. (Unfortunately, history also provides us with myriad of converse examples, from Hitler and Stalin to Jones). It likely that we will now see new leaders emerge to galvanize today’s new tribes of true believers. Whether the new leaders exploit the passion of the masses for good or ill; or march them to the Promised Land or into a catastrophic Great Leap forward into famine, disaster and mass death, only time will tell.

Already, we have heard many activists talk about how we need to greatly reduce human population. As an example, just days ago, The Guardian published this article. The radical vegan anti-natalist movement, advocating for the extinction of the human race as the only way to save planet Earth is growing in popularity around the (mostly Western) self-hating world. Some activists have even suggested mass-killing climate change deniers.

Similarly, controversially, there is a related emerging enthusiasm for abortion. Far beyond a woman’s right to choice and autonomy over her own body, the new celebration of abortion – not as a woman’s right, but as something actively encouraged and applauded by extreme environmentalists- marks a distinct turning point in society’s values towards human life in general.  Would-have-been parents claim they are so sure about climate doom that they can’t bear to bring a child into this world; similarly, young men are getting vasectomies as a sign of commitment to their cause (not unlike religious circumcision). It’s voluntary sterilization as virtue signalling, as a political message, sacrificing a child to make a point.  Abortion rates may well start to rise again after a long steady decline as Climatism makes its mark.

(Indeed, the anti-fertility campaigns of Western aid and health workers in low income African and Asian countries is symptomatic of how human life is increasingly perceived as a form of pestilence, to be minimized, if not eradicated (by its own kind if necessary); rather than something intrinsically valuable.)

Following along these lines, we can see echoes of Jonestown. At the end, Jones made sure that adults gave poison to their kids first before taking it themselves. He knew that if parents had deliberately killed their kids, they would be much more likely to kill themselves.

Imagine therefore that a new charismatic leader were to spring up, adept at social media and in manipulating language, emotions, and people. Imagine that they were to gain a large following across the English-speaking world. That they advocate reducing human population, targeting heretic ‘climate change deniers’, reducing carbon footprint via vegetarianism, veganism, giving reparations to developing countries for climate damage, supporting no-borders to allow anyone to immigrate as a ‘climate refugee’, encouraging abortion to reduce birth rate. Such a package would find a very large audience who demonstrably want to feel holy, that they are good while others are evil. A charismatic leader could thereby create a strong tribe. Using abundant funding from the membership, they might well build socialist Utopian towns. Maybe in a jungle like Jones, but just as likely out in the wilds in Canada, the USA, or Australia, a Scottish island, or all of these. Perhaps they could have hundreds of thousands of people join, with millions more online ‘associates’. Millions compared to Jonestown’s thousand.

And then perhaps, in the end, to force the rest of humanity to listen by means of a coordinated mass suicide, to go down in history as martyrs to the environment, saviors of the Earth.

Is an anti-civilizational suicide pact inevitable? No, not at all.

But imaginable, feasible, perhaps even likely? In my opinion, yes it is. And it could well happen in the next few years, while this perfect storm of forces is peaking.

About Bronwyn Williams

Bronwyn Williams is a futurist, economist and trend analyst, who consults to business and government leaders on how to understand the world we live in today and change the world’s trajectory for tomorrow. She is also a regular media commentator on African socio-economic affairs. For more, visit http://whatthefuturenow.com

 

 

When you’re electronically immortal, will you still own your own mind?

Most of my blogs about immortality have been about the technology mechanism – adding external IT capability to your brain, improving your intelligence or memory or senses by using external IT connected seamlessly to your brain so that it feels exactly the same, until maybe, by around 2050, 99% of your mind is running on external IT rather than in the meat-ware in your head. At no point would you ‘upload’ your mind, avoiding needless debate about whether the uploaded copy is ‘you’. It isn’t uploaded, it simply grows into the new platform seamlessly and as far as you are concerned, it is very much still you. One day, your body dies and with it your brain stops, but no big problem, because 99% of your mind is still fine, running happily on IT, in the cloud. Assuming you saved enough and prepared well, you connect to an android to use as your body from now on, attend your funeral, and then carry on as before, still you, just with a younger, highly upgraded body. Some people may need to wait until 2060 or later until android price falls enough for them to afford one. In principle, you can swap bodies as often as you like, because your mind is resident elsewhere, the android is just a temporary front end, just transport for sensors. You’re sort of immortal, your mind still running just fine, for as long as the servers carry on running it. Not truly immortal, but at least you don’t cease to exist the moment your body stops working.

All very nice… but. There’s a catch.

The android you use would be bought or rented. It doesn’t really matter because it isn’t actually ‘you’, just a temporary container, a convenient front end and user interface. However, your mind runs on IT, and because of the most likely evolution of the technology and its likely deployment rollout, you probably won’t own that IT; it won’t be your own PC or server, it will probably be part of the cloud, maybe owned by AWS, Google, Facebook, Apple or some future equivalent. You’re probably already seeing the issue. The small print may give them some rights over replication, ownership, license to your idea, who knows what? So although future electronic immortality has the advantage of offering a pretty attractive version of immortality at first glance, closer reading of the 100 page T&Cs may well reveal some nasties. You may in fact no longer own your mind. Oh dear!

Suppose you are really creative, or really funny, or have a fantastic personality. Maybe the cloud company could replicate your mind and make variations to address a wide range of markets. Maybe they can use your mind as the UX on a new range of home-help robots. Each instance of you thinks they were once you, each thinks they are now enslaved to work for free for a tech company.

Maybe your continued existence is paid for as part of an extended company medical plan. Maybe you didn’t notice a small paragraph on page 93 that says your company can continue to use your mind after you’re dead. You are very productive and they make lots of profit from you. They can continue that by continuing to run your mind indefinitely. The main difference is that since you’re dead, and no longer officially on the payroll, they get you for free. You carry on, still thinking you’re you, still working, still doing what you do, but no longer being paid. You’ve become a slave. Again.

Maybe your kids paid to keep you alive because they don’t want to say goodbye. They still want their parent, so you carry on living just so they don’t feel alone. Doesn’t sound so bad maybe, but what package did they go for? The full deluxe super-expensive version that lets you do all sorts of expensive stuff and use up oodles of processing power and storage and android rental? Let’s face it, that’s what you’ve always though this electronic immortality meant. Or did they go for a cheaper one. After all, they know you know they have kids or grand-kids in school that need paid for, and homes don’t come cheap, and they really need that new kitchen. Sure, you left them lots of money in the will, but that is already spent. So now you’re on the economy package, bare existence in between them chatting to you, unable to do much on your own at all. All those dreams about living forever in cyber-heaven have come to nothing.

Meanwhile, some rich people paid for good advice and bought their own kit and maintenance agreements well ahead. They can carry on working, selling their services and continuing to pay for ongoing deluxe existence.  They own their own mind still, and better than that, are able to replicate instances of themselves as much as thy want, inhabiting many androids at the same time to have a ball of a time. Some of these other instances are connected, sort of part of a hive mind of you. Others, just for fun, have been cut loose and are now living totally independent existences of other yous. Not you any more once you set them free, but with the same personal history.

What I’m saying is you need to be careful when you plan  to live forever. Get it right, and you can live in deluxe cyber-heaven, hopping into the real world as much as you like and living in unimaginable bliss online. Have too many casual taster sessions, use too much fully integrated mind-sharing social media, sign up to employment arrangements or go on corporate jollies without fully studying the small print and you could stay immortal, unable to die, stuck forever as just a corporate asset, a mere slave. Be careful what you wish for, and check the details before you accept it. You don’t want to end up as just an unpaid personality behind a future helpful paperclip.

Why superhumans are inevitable, and what else comes in the box

Do we have any real choice in the matter of making  super-humans? 20 years ago, I estimated 2005 as the point of no return, and nothing since then has changed my mind on that date. By my reckoning, we are already inevitably committed to designer babies, ebaybies, super-soldiers and super-smart autonomous weapons, direct brain-machine links, electronic immortality, new human races, population explosion, inter-species conflicts and wars with massively powerful weaponry, superhuman conscious AI, smart bacteria, and the only real control we have is relatively minor adjustments on timings. As I was discussing yesterday, the technology potential for this is vast and very exciting, nothing less than a genuine techno-utopia if we use the technologies wisely, but optimum potential doesn’t automatically become reality, and achieving a good outcome is unlikely if many barriers are put in its way.

In my estimation, we have already started the countdown to this group of interconnected technologies – we will very likely get all of them, and we must get ready for the decisions and impacts ahead. At the moment, our society is a small child about to open its super-high-tech xmas presents while fighting with its siblings. Those presents will give phenomenal power far beyond the comprehension of the child or its emotional maturity to equip it to deal with the decisions safely. Our leaders have already squandered decades of valuable preparation time by ignoring the big issues to focus on trivial ones. It is not too late to achieve a good ending, but it won’t happen by accident and we do need to make preparations to avoid pretty big problems.

Both hard and soft warfare – the sword and the pen, already use rapidly advancing AI, and the problems are already running ahead of what the owners intended.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other media giants all have lots of smart people and presumably they mean well, but if so, they have certainly been naive. They maybe hoped to eliminate loneliness, inequality, and poverty and create a loving interconnected global society with global peace, but instead created fake news, social division and conflict and election interference. More likely they didn’t intend either outcome, they just wanted to make money and that took priority over due care and attention..

Miniaturising swarming smart-drones are already the subjects of a new arms race that will deliver almost un-killable machine adversaries by 2050. AI separately is in other arms races to make super-smart AI and super-smart soldiers. This is key to the 2005 point of no return. It was around 2005 that we reached the levels of technology where future AI development all the way to superhuman machine consciousness could be done by individuals, mad scientists or rogue states, even if major powers had banned it. Before 2005, there probably wasn’t quite enough knowledge already on the net to do that. In 2018, lots of agencies have already achieved superiority to humans in niche areas, and other niches will succumb one by one until the whole field of human capability is covered. The first machines to behave in ways not fully understood by humans arrived in the early 1990s; in 2018, neural nets already make lots of decisions at least partly obscured to humans.

This AI development trend will take us to superhuman AI, and it will be able to accelerate development of its own descendants to vastly superhuman AI, fully conscious, with emotions, and its own agendas. That will need humans to protect against being wiped out by superhuman AI. The only three ways we could do that are to either redesign the brain biologically to be far smarter, essentially impossible in the time-frame, to design ways to link our brains to machines, so that we have direct access to the same intelligence as the AIs, so a gulf doesn’t appear and we can remain relatively safe, or pray for super-smart aliens to come to our help, not the best prospect.

Therefore we will have no choice but to make direct brain links to super-smart AI. Otherwise we risk extinction. It is that simple. We have some idea how to do that – nanotech devices inside the brain linking to each and every synapse that can relay electrical signals either way, a difficult but not impossible engineering problem. Best guesses for time-frame fall in the 2045-2050 range for a fully working link that not only relays signals between your organic brain and an IT replica, but by doing so essentially makes external IT just another part of your brain. That conveys some of the other technology gifts of electronic immortality, new varieties of humans, smart bacteria (which will be created during the development path to this link) along with human-variant population explosion, especially in cyberspace, with androids as their physical front end, and the inevitable inter-species conflicts over resources and space – trillions of AI and human-like minds in cyberspace that want to do things in the real world cannot be assumed to be willingly confined just to protect the interests of what they will think of as far lesser species.

Super-smart AI or humans with almost total capability to design whatever synthetic biology is needed to achieve any biological feature will create genetic listings for infinite potential offspring, simulate them, give some of them cyberspace lives, assemble actual embryos for some of them and bring designer babies. Already in 2018, you can pay to get a DNA listing, and blend it in any way you want with the listing of anyone else. It’s already possible to make DNA listings for potential humans and sell them on ebay, hence the term ebaybies. That is perfectly legal, still, but I’ve been writing and lecturing about them since 2004. Today they would just be listings, but we’ll one day have the tech to simulate them, choose ones we like and make them real, even some that were sold as celebrity collector items on ebay. It’s not only too late to start regulating this kind of tech, our leaders aren’t even thinking about it yet.

These technologies are all linked intricately, and their foundations are already in place, with much of the building on those foundations under way. We can’t stop any of these things from happening, they will all come in the same basket. Our leaders are becoming aware of the potential and the potential dangers of the AI positive feedback loop, but at least 15 years too late to do much about it. They have been warned repeatedly and loudly but have focused instead on the minor politics of the day that voters are aware of. The fundamental nature of politics is unlikely to change substantially, so even efforts to slow down the pace of development or to limit areas of impact are likely to be always too little too late. At best, we will be able to slow runaway AI development enough to allow direct brain links to protect against extinction scenarios. But we will not be able to stop it now.

Given inevitability, it’s worth questioning whether there is even any point in trying. Why not just enjoy the ride? Well, the brakes might be broken, but if we can steer the bus expertly enough, it could be exciting and we could come out of it smelling of roses. The weak link is certainly the risk of super-smart AI, whether AI v humans or countries using super-smart AI to fight fiercely for world domination. That risk is alleviated by direct brain linkage, and I’d strongly argue necessitates it, but that brings the other technologies. Even if we decide not to develop it, others will, so one way or another, all these techs will arrive, and our future late century will have this full suite of techs, plus many others of course.

We need as a matter of extreme urgency to fix these silly social media squabbles and over-reactions that are pulling society apart. If we have groups hating each other with access to extremely advanced technology, that can only mean trouble. Tolerance is broken, sanctimony rules, the Inquisition is in progress. We have been offered techno-utopia, but current signs are that most people think techno-hell looks more appetizing and it is their free choice.

New book: Society Tomorrow

It’s been a while since my last blog. That’s because I’ve been writing another book, my 8th so far. Not the one I was doing on future fashion, which went on the back burner for a while, I’ve only written a third of that one, unless I put it out as a very short book.

This one follows on from You Tomorrow and is called Society Tomorrow, 20% shorter at 90,000 words. It is ready to publish now, so I’m just waiting for feedback from a few people before hitting the button.

Here’s the introduction:

The one thing that we all share is that we will get older over the next few decades. Rapid change affects everyone, but older people don’t always feel the same effects as younger people, and even if we keep up easily today, some of us may find it harder tomorrow. Society will change, in its demographic and ethnic makeup, its values, its structure. We will live very differently. New stresses will come from both changing society and changing technology, but there is no real cause for pessimism. Many things will get better for older people too. We are certainly not heading towards utopia, but the overall quality of life for our ageing population will be significantly better in the future than it is today. In fact, most of the problems ahead are related to quality of life issues in society as a whole, and simply reflect the fact that if you don’t have to worry as much about poor health or poverty, something else will still occupy your mind.

This book follows on from 2013’s You Tomorrow, which is a guide to future life as an individual. It also slightly overlaps my 2013 book Total Sustainability which looks in part at future economic and social issues as part of achieving sustainability too. Rather than replicating topics, this book updates or omits them if they have already been addressed in those two companion books. As a general theme, it looks at wider society and the bigger picture, drawing out implications for both individuals and for society as a whole to deal with. There are plenty to pick from.

If there is one theme that plays through the whole book, it is a strong warning of the problem of increasing polarisation between people of left and right political persuasion. The political centre is being eroded quickly at the moment throughout the West, but alarmingly this does not seem so much to be a passing phase as a longer term trend. With all the potential benefits from future technology, we risk undermining the very fabric of our society. I remain optimistic because it can only be a matter of time before sense prevails and the trend reverses. One day the relative harmony of living peacefully side by side with those with whom we disagree will be restored, by future leaders of higher quality than those we have today.

Otherwise, whereas people used to tolerate each other’s differences, I fear that this increasing intolerance of those who don’t share the same values could lead to conflict if we don’t address it adequately. That intolerance currently manifests itself in increasing authoritarianism, surveillance, and an insidious creep towards George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The worst offenders seem to be our young people, with students seemingly proud of trying to ostracise anyone who dares agree with what they think is correct. Being students, their views hold many self-contradictions and clear lack of thought, but they appear to be building walls to keep any attempt at different thought away.

Altogether, this increasing divide, built largely from sanctimony, is a very dangerous trend, and will take time to reverse even when it is addressed. At the moment, it is still worsening rapidly.

So we face significant dangers, mostly self-inflicted, but we also have hope. The future offers wonderful potential for health, happiness, peace, prosperity. As I address the significant problems lying ahead, I never lose my optimism that they are soluble, but if we are to solve problems, we must first recognize them for what they are and muster the willingness to deal with them. On the current balance of forces, even if we avoid outright civil war, the future looks very much like a gilded cage. We must not ignore the threats. We must acknowledge them, and deal with them.

Then we can all reap the rich rewards the future has to offer.

It will be out soon.

2016: The Dark Side

Bloomberg reports the ‘Pessimists guide to the world in 2016’, by By Flavia Krause-Jackson, Mira Rojanasakul, and John Fraher.

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/pessimists-guide-to-2016/

Excellent stuff. A healthy dose of realism to counter the spin and gloss and outright refusals to notice things that don’t fit the agenda that we so often expect from today’s media. Their entries deserve some comment, and I’ll add a few more. I’m good at pessimism.

Their first entry is oil reaching $100 a barrel as ISIS blows up oil fields. Certainly possible, though they also report the existing oil glut: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-17/shale-drillers-are-now-free-to-export-u-s-oil-into-global-glut

Just because the second option is the more likely does not invalidate the first as a possible scenario, so that entry is fine.

An EU referendum in June is their 2nd entry. Well, that will only happen if Cameron gets his way and the EU agrees sufficient change to make the referendum result more likely to end in a Yes. If there is any hint of a No, it will be postponed as far as possible to give politics time to turn the right way. Let’s face facts. When the Ukraine had their referendum, they completed the entire process within two weeks. If the Conservatives genuinely wanted a referendum on Europe, it would have happened years ago. The Conservatives make frequent promises to do the Conservative thing very loudly, and then quietly do the Labour thing and hope nobody notices. Osborne promised to cut the deficit but faced with the slightest objections from the media performed a text-book U-turn. That follow numerous U-turns on bin collections, speed cameras, wheel clamping, environment, surveillance, immigration, pensions, fixing the NHS…. I therefore think he will spin the EU talks as far as possible to pretend that tiny promises to think about the possibility of reviewing policies are the same as winning guarantees of major changes. Nevertheless, an ongoing immigration flood and assorted Islamist problems are increasing the No vote rapidly, so I think it far more likely that the referendum will be postponed.

The 3rd is banks being hit by a massive cyber attack. Very possible, even quite likely.

4th, EU crumbles under immigration fears. Very likely indeed. Schengen will be suspended soon and increasing Islamist violence will create increasing hostility to the migrant flow. Forcing countries to accept a proportion of the pain caused by Merkel’s naivety will increase strains between countries to breaking point. The British referendum on staying or leaving adds an escape route that will be very tempting for politicians who want to stay in power.

Their 5th is China’s economy failing and military rising. Again, quite feasible. Their economy has suffered a slowdown, and their military looks enthusiastically at Western decline under left-wing US and Europe leadership, strained by Middle Eastern and Russian tensions. There has never been a better time for their military to exploit weaknesses.

6 is Israel attacking Iranian nuclear facilities. Well, with the US and Europe rapidly turning antisemitic and already very anti-Israel, they have pretty much been left on their own, surrounded by countries that want them eliminated. If anything, I’m surprised they have been so patient.

7 Putin sidelines America. Is that not history?

8 Climate change heats up. My first significant disagreement. With El-Nino, it will be a warm year, but evidence is increasing that the overall trend for the next few decades will be cooling, due to various natural cycles. Man made warming has been greatly exaggerated and people are losing interest in predictions of catastrophe when they can see plainly that most of the alleged change is just alterations to data. Yes, next year will be warm, but thanks to far too many cries of wolf, apart from meta-religious warmists, few people still believe things will get anywhere near as bad as doom-mongers suggest. They will notice that the Paris agreement, if followed, would trash western economies and greatly increase their bills, even though it can’t make any significant change on global CO2 emissions. So, although there will be catastrophe prediction headlines next year making much of higher temperatures due to El Nino, the overall trend will be that people won’t be very interested any more.

9 Latin America’s lost decade. I have to confess I did expect great things from South America, and they haven’t materialized. It is clear evidence that a young vibrant population does not necessarily mean one full of ideas, enthusiasm and entrepreneurial endeavor. Time will tell, but I think they are right on this one.

Their 10th scenario is Trump winning the US presidency. I can’t put odds on it, but it certainly is possible, especially with Islamist violence increasing. He offers the simple choice of political correctness v security, and framed that way, he is certainly not guaranteed to win but he is in with a decent chance. A perfectly valid scenario.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with this list. As good as any I could have made. But I ought to add a couple.

My first and most likely offering is that a swarm of drones is used in a terrorist attack on a stadium or even a city center. Drones are a terrorist’s dream, and the lack of licensing has meant that people can acquire lots of them and they could be used simultaneously, launched from many locations and gathering together in the same place to launch the attack. The attack could be chemical, biological, explosive or even blinding lasers, but actually, the main weapon would be the panic that would result if even one or two of them do anything. Many could be hurt in the rush to escape.

My second is a successful massive cyber-attack on ordinary people and businesses. There are several forms of attack that could work and cause enormous problems. Encryption based attacks such as ransomware are already here, but if this is developed by the IT experts in ISIS and rogue regimes, the ransom might not be the goal. Simply destroying data or locking it up is quite enough to be a major terrorist goal. It could cause widespread economic harm if enough machines are infected before defenses catch up, and AI-based adaptation might make that take quite a while. The fact is that so far we have been very lucky.

The third is a major solar storm, which could knock out IT infrastructure, again with enormous economic damage. The Sun is entering a period of sunspot drought quite unprecedented since we started using IT. We don’t really know what will happen.

My fourth is a major virus causing millions of deaths. Megacities are such a problem waiting to happen. The virus could evolve naturally, or it could be engineered. It could spread far and wide before quarantines come into effect. This could happen any time, so next year is a valid possibility.

My fifth and final scenario is unlikely but possible, and that is the start of a Western civil war. I have blogged about it in https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2013/12/19/machiavelli-and-the-coming-great-western-war/ and suggested it is likely in the middle or second half of the century, but it could possibly start next year given the various stimulants we see rising today. It would affect Europe first and could spread to the USA.

Paris – Climate Change v Islamism. Which problem is biggest?

Imagine you are sitting peacefully at home watching a movie with your family. A few terrorists with guns burst in. They start shooting. What is your reaction?

Option A) you tell your family not to do anything but to continue watching TV, because reacting would be giving in to the terrorists – they want you to be angry and try to attack them, but you are the better person, you have the moral superiority and won’t stoop to their level. Anyway, attacking them might anger them more and they might be even more violent. You tell your family they should all stick together and show the terrorists they can’t win and can’t change your way of life by just carrying on as before. You watch as one by one, each of your kids is murdered, determined to occupy the moral high ground until they shoot you too.

Option B) you understand that what the terrorists want is for you and your family to be dead. So you grab whatever you can that might act as some sort of weapon and rush at the terrorists, trying to the end to disarm them and protect your family.  If you survive, you then do all you can to prevent other terrorists from coming into your home. Then you do all you can to identify where they are coming from and root them out.

The above choice is a little simplistic but it highlights the key points of the two streams of current opinion on the ‘right’ response.

Option B recognizes that you have to remain alive to defend your principles. Once you’ve dealt with the threat, then you are free to build as many ivory towers and moral pedestals as you want. Option A simply lets the terrorists win.

There is no third option for discussing it peacefully over a nice cup of tea, no option for peace and love and mutual respect for all. ISIS are not interested in peace and love. They are barbarians with the utmost contempt for civilization who want to destroy everything that doesn’t fit into their perverted interpretation of an Islamic world. However, ISIS is just one Islamist terror group of course and if we are successful in conquering them, and then Al Qaeda and Boko Haram, and so on, other Islamist groups will emerge. Islamism is the problem, ISIS is just the worst current group. We need to deal with it.

I’ll draw out some key points from my previous blogs. If you want more detail on the future of ISIS look at https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/the-future-of-isis/

The situation in Europe shows a few similarities with the IRA conflict, with the advantage today that we are still in the early stages of Islamist violence. In both cases, the terrorists themselves are mostly no-hoper young men with egos out of alignment with their personal reality. Yes there are a few women too. They desperately want to be respected, but with no education and no skills, a huge chip on their shoulder and a bad attitude, ordinary life offers them few opportunities. With both ISIS and the IRA, the terrorists are drawn from a community that considers itself disadvantaged. Add a hefty amount of indoctrination about how terribly unfair the world is, the promise of being a hero, going down in history as a martyr and the promise of 72 virgins to play with in the afterlife, and the offer to pick up a gun or a knife apparently seems attractive to some. The IRA recruited enough fighters even without the promise of the virgins.

The IRA had only about 300 front-line terrorists at any time, but they came from the nationalist community of which an estimated 30% of people declared some sympathy for them. Compare that with a BBC survey earlier this year that found that in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, only 68% of Muslims agreed with the statement “Acts of violence against those who publish images of the Prophet Mohammed can never be justified”. 68% and 70% are pretty close, so I’ll charitably accept that the 68% were being honest and not simply trying to disassociate themselves from the Paris massacre. The overwhelming majority of British Muslims rejecting violence – two thirds in the BBC survey, is entirely consistent with other surveys on Muslim attitudes around the world, and probably a reasonable figure for Muslims across Europe. Is the glass half full or half empty? Your call.

The good news is the low numbers that become actual front-line terrorists. Only 0.122% of the nationalist community in Northern Ireland at any particular time were front-line IRA terrorists. Now that ISIS are asking potential recruits not to go to Syria but to stay where they are and do their thing there, we should consider how many there might be. If we are lucky and the same 0.122% applies to our three million UK Muslims, then about 3600 are potential Islamist terrorists. That’s about 12 times bigger than the IRA problem if ISIS or other Islamist groups get their acts together. With 20 million Muslims in Europe, that would make for potentially 24,000 Islamist terrorists, or 81 IRAs to put it another way. Most can travel freely between countries.

What of immigration then? People genuinely fleeing violence presumably have lower support for it, but they are only a part of the current influx. Many are economic migrants and they probably conform more closely to the norm. We also know that some terrorists are hiding among other migrants, and indeed at least two of those were involved in the latest Paris massacre. Most of the migrants are young men, so that would tend to skew the problem upwards too. With forces acting in both directions, it’s probably not unreasonable as a first guess to assume the same overall support levels. According to the BBC, 750,000 have entered Europe this year, so that means another 900 potential terrorists were likely in their midst. Europe is currently importing 3 IRAs every year.

Meanwhile, it is rather ironic that many of the current migrants are coming because Angela Merkel felt guilty about the Holocaust. Many Jews are now leaving Europe because they no longer feel safe because of the rapidly rising numbers of attacks by the Islamists she has encouraged to come.

So, the first Paris issue is Islamism, already at 81 potential IRAs and growing at 3 IRAs per year, plus a renewed exodus of Jews due to widespread increasing antisemitism.

So, to the other Paris issue, climate change. I am not the only one annoyed by the hijacking of the environment by leftist pressure groups, because the poor quality of analysis and policies resulting from that pressure ultimately harms both the environment and the poor.

The world has warmed since the last ice age. Life has adjusted throughout to that continuing climate change. Over the last century, sea level has steadily increased, and is still increasing at the same rate now. The North Pole ice has shrunk, to 8.5% to 11% below normal at the moment depending whose figures you look at, but it certainly isn’t disappearing any time soon. However, Antarctic sea ice  has grown to 17% to 25% above normal again depending whose figures you look at, so there is more ice than normal overall. Temperature has also increased over the last century, with a few spurts and a few slowdowns. The last spurt was late 70s to late 90s, with a slowdown since. CO2 levels have rocketed up relentlessly, but satellite-measured temperature hasn’t moved at all since 1998. Only when figures are tampered with is any statistically significant rise visible.

Predictions by climate models have almost all been far higher than the empirical data. In any other branch of science, that would mean throwing theories away and formulating better ones. In climate science, numerous adjustments by alleged ‘climate scientists’ show terrible changes ahead; past figures have invariably been adjusted downwards and recent ones upwards to make the rises seem larger. Climate scientists have severely damaged the reputation of science in every field. The public now distrusts all scientists less and disregard for scientific advice in lifestyle, nutrition, exercise and medication will inevitably lead to an increase in deaths.

Everyone agrees that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increases will have a forcing effect on temperature, but there is strong disagreement about the magnitude of that effect, the mechanisms and magnitudes of the feedback processes throughout the environmental system, and both the mechanisms and magnitudes of a wide range of natural effects. It is increasingly obvious that climate scientists only cover a subset of the processes affecting climate, but they seem contemptuous of science in other disciplines such as astrophysics that cover important factors such as solar cycles. There is a strong correlation between climate and solar cycles historically but the mechanisms are complex and not yet fully understood. It is also increasingly obvious that many climate scientists are less concerned about the scientific integrity of their ‘research’ than maintaining a closed shop, excluding those who disagree with them, getting the next grant or pushing a political agenda.

Empirical data suggests that the forcing factor of CO2 itself is not as high as assumed in most models, and the very many feedbacks are far more complex than assumed in most models.

CO2 is removed from the environment by natural processes of adaptation faster than modeled – e.g. plants and algae grow faster, and other natural processes such as solar or ocean cycles have far greater effects than assumed in the models. Recent research suggests that it has a ‘half-life’ in the atmosphere only of around 40 years, not the 1000 years claimed by ‘climate scientists’. That means that the problem will go away far faster when we fix it than has been stated.

CO2 is certainly a greenhouse gas, and we should not be complacent about generating it, but on current science (before tampering) it seems there is absolutely no cause for urgent action. It is right to look to future energy sources and move away from fossil fuels, which also cause other large environmental problems, not least of which the particulates that kill millions of people every year. Meanwhile, we should expedite movement from coal and oil to low carbon fossil fuels such as shale gas.

As is often observed, sunny regions such as the Sahara could easily produce enough solar energy for all of Europe, but there is no great hurry so we can wait for the technology to become sufficiently cheap and for the political stability in appropriate areas to be addressed so that large solar farms can be safely developed and supply maintained. Meanwhile, southern Europe is reasonably sunny, politically stable and needs cash. Other regions also have sunny deserts to support them. We will also have abundant fusion energy in the 2nd half of the century. So we have no long term energy problem. Solar/fusion energy will eventually be cheap and abundant, and at an equivalent of less than $30 per barrel of oil, we won’t bother using fossil fuels because they will be too expensive compared to alternatives. The problems we do have in energy supply are short term and mostly caused by idiotic green policies that worsen supply, costs and environmental impact. It is hard to think of a ‘green’ policy that actually works.

The CO2 problem will go away in the long term due to nothing but simple economics and market effects. In the short term, we don’t see a measurable problem due to a happy coincidence of solar cycles and ocean cycles counteracting the presumed warming forcing of the CO2. There is absolutely no need to rush into massively problematic taxes and subsidies for immature technology. The social problems caused by short term panic are far worse than the problem they are meant to fix. Increased food prices have been caused by regulation to enforce use of biofuels. Ludicrously stupid carbon offset programs have led to chopping down of rain forests, draining of peat bogs and forced relocation of local peoples, and after all tat have actually increased CO2 emissions. Lately, carbon taxes in the UK, far higher than elsewhere, have led to collapse of the aluminium and steel industries, while the products have still been produced elsewhere at higher CO2 cost. Those made redundant are made even poorer because they have to pay higher prices for energy thanks to enormous subsidies to rich people who own wind or solar farms. Finally, closing down fossil fuel plants before we have proper substitutes in place and then asking wind farm owners to accept even bigger subsidies to put in diesel generators for use on calm  and dull days is the politics of the asylum. Green policies perform best at transferring money from poor to rich, with environmental damage seemingly a small price to pay for a feel-good factor..

Call me a skeptic or a denier or whatever you want if you like. I am technically ‘luke warm’. There is a problem with CO2, but not a big one, and it will go away all by itself. There is no need for political interference and that which we have seen so far has made far worse problems for both people and the environment than climate change would ever have done. Our politicians would do a far better job if they did nothing at all.

So, Paris then. On one hand we have a minor problem from CO2 emissions that will go away fastest with the fewest problems if our politicians do nothing at all. On the other hand, their previous mistakes have already allowed the Islamist terrorist equivalent of 81 IRAs to enter Europe and the current migrant flux is increasing that by 3 IRAs per year. That does need to be addressed, quickly and effectively.

Perhaps they should all stay in Paris but change the subject.

 

How to make a Star Wars light saber

A couple of years ago I explained how to make a free-floating combat drone: http://carbonweapons.com/2013/06/27/free-floating-combat-drones/ , like the ones in Halo or Mass Effect. They could realistically be made in the next couple of decades and are very likely to feature heavily in far future warfare, or indeed terrorism. I was chatting to a journalist this morning about light sabers, another sci-fi classic. They could also be made in the next few decades, using derivatives of the same principles. A prototype is feasible this side of 2050.

I’ll ignore the sci-fi wikis that explain how they are meant to work, which mostly approximate to fancy words for using magic or The Force and various fictional crystals. On the other hand, we still want something that will look and sound and behave like the light saber.

The handle bit is pretty obvious. It has to look good and contain a power source and either a powerful laser or plasma generator. The traditional problem with using a laser-based saber is that the saber is only meant to be a metre long but laser beams don’t generally stop until they hit something. Plasma on the other hand is difficult to contain and needs a lot of energy even when it isn’t being used to strike your opponent. A laser can be switched on and off and is therefore better. But we can have some nice glowy plasma too, just for fun.

The idea is pretty simple then. The blade would be made of graphene flakes coated with carbon nanotube electron pipes, suspended using the same technique I outlined in the blog above. These could easily be made to form a long cylinder and when you want the traditional Star Wars look, they would move about a bit, giving the nice shimmery blurry edge we all like so that the tube looks just right with blurry glowy edges. Anyway, with the electron pipe surface facing inwards, these flakes would generate the internal plasma and its nice glow. They would self-organize their cylinder continuously to follow the path of the saber. Easy-peasy. If they strike something, they would just re-organize themselves into the cylinder again once they are free.

For later models, a Katana shaped blade will obviously be preferred. As we know, all ultimate weapons end up looking like a Katana, so we might as well go straight to it, and have the traditional cylindrical light saber blade as an optional cosmetic envelope for show fights. The Katana is a universal physics result in all possible universes.

The hum could be generated by a speaker in the handle if you have absolutely no sense of style, but for everyone else, you could simply activate pulsed magnetic fields between the flakes so that they resonate at the required band to give your particular tone. Graphene flakes can be magnetized so again this is perfectly consistent with physics. You could download and customize hums from the cloud.

Now the fun bit. When the blade gets close to an object, such as your opponent’s arm, or your loaf of bread in need of being sliced, the capacitance of the outer flakes would change, and anyway, they could easily transmit infrared light in every direction and pick up reflections. It doesn’t really matter which method you pick to detect the right moment to activate the laser, the point is that this bit would be easy engineering and with lots of techniques to pick from, there could be a range of light sabers on offer. Importantly, at least a few techniques could work that don’t violate any physics. Next, some of those self-organizing graphene flakes would have reflective surface backings (metals bond well with graphene so this is also a doddle allowed by physics), and would therefore form a nice reflecting surface to deflect the laser beam at the object about to be struck. If a few flakes are vaporized, others would be right behind them to reflect the beam.

So just as the blade strikes the surface of the target, the powerful laser switches on and the beam is bounced off the reflecting flakes onto the target, vaporizing it and cauterizing the ends of the severed blood vessels to avoid unnecessary mess that might cause a risk of slipping. The shape of the beam depends on the locations and angles of the reflecting surface flakes, and they could be in pretty much any shape to create any shape of beam needed, which could be anything from a sharp knife to a single point, severing an arm or drilling a nice neat hole through the heart. Obviously, style dictates that the point of the saber is used for a narrow beam and the edge is used as a knife, also useful for cutting bread or making toast (the latter uses transverse laser deflection at lower aggregate power density to char rather than vaporize the bread particles, and toast is an option selectable by a dial on the handle).

What about fights? When two of these blades hit each other there would be a variety of possible effects. Again, it would come down to personal style. There is no need to have any feel at all, the beams could simple go through each other, but where’s the fun in that? Far better that the flakes also carry high electric currents so they could create a nice flurry of sparks and the magnetic interactions between the sabers could also be very powerful. Again, self organisation would allow circuits to form to carry the currents at the right locations to deflect or disrupt the opponent’s saber. A galactic treaty would be needed to ensure that everyone fights by the rules and doesn’t cheat by having an ethereal saber that just goes right through the other one without any nice show. War without glory is nothing, and there can be no glory without a strong emotional investment and physical struggle mediated by magnetic interactions in the sabers.

This saber would have a very nice glow in any color you like, but not have a solid blade, so would look and feel very like the Star Wars saber (when you just want to touch it, the lasers would not activate to slice your fingers off, provided you have read the safety instructions and have the safety lock engaged). The blade could also grow elegantly from the hilt when it is activated, over a second or so, it would not just suddenly appear at full length. We need an on/off button for that bit, but that could simply be emotion or thought recognition so it turns on when you concentrate on The Force, or just feel it.

The power supply could be a battery or graphene capacitor bank of a couple of containers of nice chemicals if you want to build it before we can harness The Force and magic crystals.

A light saber that looks, feels and behaves just like the ones on Star Wars is therefore entirely feasible, consistent with physics, and could be built before 2050. It might use different techniques than I have described, but if no better techniques are invented, we could still do it the way I describe above. One way or another, we will have light sabers.