Letters to the Editor
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Not quite right about Darwin
"Each invention only benefited the species that invented it."
Though that indeed is how the dynamic is seen to work, one of the goals of evolution is biodiversity. For a system to be successful in the long run, it needs to be stable and able to withstand shocks to the system. Thus while a benefit to a species may seem to benefit that species only, in the larger picture, it benefits everybody. Successes promote diversity.
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David Sugarman -- you need to stop distorting everything through your own prejudices
You accuse Dyson of not working for nuclear disarmament and then list a seris of things he did which you imply further nuclear armament. Almost everything you list shows you to be, well, either a gross distorter of an ignoramous.
The Orion Project -- a space-ship powered by nuclear detonations -- so? it was not a weapon.
Then you make juvenile sneer at his design of the TRIGA reactor -- do you know what the TRIGA is used for -- if you do you are dishonest and if you don't you are an ass! For the benefit of readers -- do anyone of you know someone whose life was saved by radio-isotope treatment for cancer -- chances are the short-life isotopes in question were made in a TRIGA, or indirectly by using a TRIGA. So in fact, the TRIGA has saved thousands of lives -- what can you boast Mr. Sugarman, a few thousand sophomoric sneers?
Finally, Philips term-paper was an action taken on specifically to show the world what a problem nuclear proliferation was ... Dyson, by allowing an undergraduate student to demonstrate that even he had the knowledge (as many good Physics students would) to design a nuclear device that probably would explode was demonstrating the degree of threat that nuclear weapons posed -- and the need for world action on disarmament. Not surprisingly you also distorted this act.
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Sugerman gets it wrong
"(a) a new nuclear fuel rod
(b) a used nuclear fuel rod
(c) 50g of metallic plutonium
(thanks SusanMc(from another thread), for trying to help, but blockquote didn't work; i used Jim White's suggestion of br's instead.) MacK, you intimate i should pick (b) because it's the most highly radioactive. HOWEVER, a mere *speck* of plutonium, gotten into your lungs will kill you - i'll take my chances on the radioactivity. if the plutonium were finely powdered there would be no question whatsoever. you could hold in your hand polonium 210 all day, but ask Litvinenko what happens if you swallow it. it was a snotty trick question from a snotty trick person."
Good grief, do you distort. You rant that a speck of metallic plutonium in your lungs would kill you -- maybe, actually maybe not -- in your stomach perhaps, but then quite possibly not -- plutonium is chemically highly toxic and the stomach acid would cause absorbtion --
Polonium 110 is dangerous in a different way to Plutonium -- you could hold polonium in your hand and probably suffer no ill effects, ingest it and that is another story (its an alpha emitter - alpha's have trouble going through paper or skin, but then they have a high interaction with matter/tissue, so if it was to be in your bloodstream, it would kill tissue and blood-cells rapidly.)
But the question here is what could you hold in your hand and the answer is simple Plutonium metal, at least in small quantities (bigger quantities is problematic for another reason.) The reason is that as it happens, Plutonium is not very radioactive, hence the half-life in the millions of years.
Similarly an unused, new nuclear fuel rod is not very dangerous (since it contains uranium in one form or another or plutonium), though I would not advise holding it, since the radioactivity from chain reactions in the rod would make it more dangerous than smaller quantities of material.
Finally, exposure to a used nuclear fuel rod would be extremely dangerous, since it contains a cocktail of isotopes, many with very short half lives, minutes, days, months and years, radiating like crazy for 2-5 years after it is removed from the reactor, and is a fairly dangerous item to have contact with, but is pretty well impossible to steal, since it would quickly kill the thief, unlike say weapons grade plutonium.
You describe me as snotty -- well, frankly, having seen what you say, the distortions of the truth you are willing to make, who cares what you think of me. You deserve snotty . . .
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Rosy future?
Mister Dyson paints a picture of the future where our problems will be solved and our lives enriched by advances in science. And it's baloney.
Let me tell you why.
The assumption is that the great problems posed to humanity are scientific ones. They are not. Our problems are political. And those problems are not rooted in science, but in economics and in culture, particularly perversions of culture and economics. Science cannot solve the problems Christian and Muslim religious extremism, or prevent war, or feed the hungry, or prevent ecological disaster. If it could, it would have.
Ten million people die in Asia and Africa every year from disease and starvation. And yet, we already have the means to feed these people and prevent the diseases that kill them. The science and technology are available to do so. We just don't want to.
Technology, which is based on science, is a tool, and provides means to ends. It does not tell us what our ends should be. Science can be used to kill more easily than it can be used to cure. Science and technology could be used to elevate the poor, but it is mostly used to pursue wealth and power and to exploit the poor. Science can be helpful, but it can also be abused, and it is abused to multiply our problems at least as much as it is used to solve them.
Science and technology is a two-edged sword.
Advances in food production, sanitation, and medical science can prevent premature death globally. The result is overpopulation and global resource depletion.
Advances in information technology can keep us all informed. But it can also be used to keep us disinformed and misinformed, and enables the detailed mass surveillance and mass propaganda that serves police states, and that is growing faster than the internet. You are being watched. In the future, you will be controlled, unless you take steps to prevent it.
Advances in engineering can give us more efficient transportation and home appliances, but they also give us more efficient machineries of war. Science and technology make no distinction between the two, so we have to.
Dyson's views of global warming are particularly wrongheaded. Human-induced climate change may not be bad if it's limited, but it's not. Right now there are hardly any limitations at all. And we're not talking about a little climate change, or a small amount of species extinction, or minor resource depletion. By itself, improved and expanded scientific technique isn't going to change that. It is more easily used to make it worse than to make it better.
Technology serves rapacity extremely well.
If history is any guide, the scientific and technological advances dreamed up by Dyson are likely to help a few people at the top of the economic and political chain to enrich themselves, as such advances have always done. But they will increasingly do so at the expense of everybody else on the planet, and at the expense of the planet's ability to support civilization.
A "rosy future", you say? Well, blood is red, isn't it?