Nature

I was thinking about how some religions suggest people to pray facing east, Jerusalem, or Mecca. Quoting Wikipedia, "Prayer in a certain direction is characteristic of many world religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Bahá'í Faith." I couldn't help pursue the question. What happens if you're on Mars? How would you figure out the direction to one of these places from Mars? What if we achieved interstellar travel? How could someone figure out how to pray? If you have to pray and can't figure out what direction to face from a place, should you not go to that place? I thought I was exploring a frontier, but it turns out people have considered this question. According to a different Wikipedia article: The International…

Increasing efficiency forever can't reach zero waste for many physical processes, but I think people feel otherwise. Or fantasize. When you hear about airplanes being made more efficient, or electric vehicles, computers, or whatever, do you think that if we keep making them more efficient, they'll eventually not pollute? In the graph below, where the green curve approaches the horizontal line, it will lower forever but never drop below a certain amount. This pattern happens when processes have physical limits, like flying, cooking, or heating. You can make them forever more efficient but they'll never require zero energy or produce zero waste. Then if you multiply their use by an exponentially growing economy or number of people using them, their total pollution continues to increase.…

We track and report greenhouse gas emissions as one of our top measures of our impact on the environment. I propose that that measure may be a distraction. I wrote about the importance to know the 2 carbon cycles and not to confuse them: burning wood affects the environment differently than extracting fossil fuels from underground and burning them. They weren't in the biosphere so they affect it differently than burning wood, which just shuffles chemicals around the environment. Here are the products made from oil: We may like the short-term benefits we can create from any of those products, but all of them eventually become pollution. Whatever we do with them, they hurt us. Emitting greenhouse gases is only one such path. In other…

Today is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. If you're powering your electronics through solar power, as I am, you've made it through the least sunshine parts of the year, at least by angle. There may be less sun for the next few months from weather if winter means more clouds or more wind that makes panels harder to keep aligned, if you can only use portable ones as I do. It will also be colder, which makes it harder to sit with them, which I have to while I can't put them on my roof because of building construction and maintenance. The sun going lower on the horizon creates longer shadows, which forces me to find new places with sun…

People freak out when the topic of population or overpopulation come out. Some people think humans have overpopulated the earth and risk pushing us into a population collapse. Others think humans may cause problems but we solve them too, so more humans means to them more solutions. They see the first group as anti-human. The first group sees the second as not understanding science. They don't want fewer humans. They want more humans, just not right now. I've been thinking about how to measure population in a way everyone would agree on. In physics, we learn to use proper units for everything. When people say iron is heavy, we get annoyed. Weight isn't what people mean when they say it's heavy. A pound of iron…

Want to know the reason I I wrote yesterday about how relying on solar power connects me to nature and makes me humble to it? Because we're approaching the winter solstice. Despite a PhD in astrophysics that included helping build a satellite still taking data in orbit, I'm learning more about astronomy and many other parts of nature today. I'm not yet at the level of ancient Babylonians or Mayans, but over the years I'm seeing more directly the angle of the sun changing, along with the length of the day, and the patterns of where shadows fall and move. These days I'm thinking about it not out of wonder, though. I'm thinking of it because it's getting colder and windier. Shorter days also mean…

So-called Christmas trees have nothing to do with Jesus being born in Bethlehem and everything to do with pagan holidays, as I write about every year, for example in You Don’t Need a “Christmas” Tree—a pagan tradition. A reminder of the waste you can avoid, and other posts. We changed traditions to this needless one of cutting down trees and dumping them into landfills. We can change from it. Here is my first sighting of trees cut down for nothing to do with Jesus's birth. Usually I take pictures of them being put out for the sanitation department to haul to landfills, an example of a socialized cost for private benefit. This one is of them being prepared for sale, wrapped in poisonous plastic. As…

A major point of my book Sustainability Simplified is that a culture being unsustainable means it is running out of something so must Revert to sustainability, Trade something it has in surplus with another culture that has a surplus of what it is running out of (in which case I consider them jointly a larger sustainable culture), or Take what it's running out of from another culture. There is a name for taking from another culture. It's imperialism. Taking their land is colonialism. You can oppose imperialism and colonialism all you want, if you live unsustainably, you're driving them both. You can blame governments or rulers for driving them, but they do it because the home market makes it profitable. If you live unsustainably, beyond…