Plant Trees!

Writing a letter to the editor:

The climate crisis - climate change, global warming, ocean acidification - is the greatest challenge human civilization has ever faced. It is very daunting to address as an individual, particularly when our government is currently doing the completely wrong thing: continuing to subsidize fossil fuels.

Years ago I read that the #1 thing an individual could do to help fight the climate crisis was to buy a more efficient car. We bought our 1st Prius in 2005; my current 2016 Prius gets ~55 mpg driving around Lexington.

Just recently, tho, there was another idea. A July 4 Scientific American article discussed a study which concluded that planting trees everywhere possible could offset "two thirds of all the CO2 humans have generated since the industrial revolution".

Wow! Plant trees! Surely all of us love trees! Plus, planting trees near your house will eventually shade your house and cut down your summer air conditioning bills.

We should all get behind efforts like our own Reforest the Bluegrass and Branching Out programs.

Lexington housing developers are currently doing a great job of infill development; please look at adding as many trees as possible to your developments.

On July 31, I read that Ethiopia set a new record by planting 350 million trees in 1 day. How about we establish a competition, who can plant the most trees?

On bad days, I figure it's too late - greed/capitalism will trump the survival of the human race.

But, maybe not! Pitch in, plant some trees!

Chris Heinz
Lexington

Stealing Worlds

"Stealing Worlds" is the latest by Karl Schroeder, 2019, 311 pages. This is 1 of those books where I'm going "I have been waiting so long for this book." A very near future, with ideas on tech to use to escape from ever-rapacious capitalism, 80-90% of which are or could be in place nowish.

Schroeder has touched on some of these topics in his earlier works (see here for example), but this seemed to pull everything together. The infodump by one of the characters that makes up most of Chapter 14 represents that synthesis.

The only tech he uses that we are still reaching for is AI. But the AIs he described are not particularly ineffable, and may be within reach of big-data based systems.

I liked his concept of distributed autonomous corporations (DACs) - a corporation with no human employees, run completely by an AI. The owner gets all the profits - the very essence of capitalism? I also really liked his concept of a cryptocurrency that automatically redistributes from wallets that are too full to wallets that are empty - gotta love that outside-the-box thinking. And he again talks about thalience.

I really think we should get Schroeder, Cory Doctorow, & Kim Stanley Robinson together to design the future for us - the Green New Deal writ large. Can we get to a post-capitalist, post-scarcity utopia before the out-of-control paperclip-optimizing AI aka capitalism finishes turning the entire world into paperclips capital?

4 + 2

I think BookBub offered me "The Chaos Chronicles Books 1-3", by Jeffrey A. Carver, for $2.99 or some such. I remembered Carver as being a hard, galactic sci-fi kind of guy a la Gregory Benford or Greg Bear, so I went for it. The 3 novels it contains are "Neptune Crossing", 1994, 582 pages; "Strange Attractors", 1995, 352 pages; and "The Infinite Sea", 1996, 379 pages. These were fun, comic-bookish stories. An alien artifact on Triton implants an earthing with high-tech translator stones. He saves the earth, and then moves on to other galactic adventures with other translator stone holders. It kind of reminded me of Green Lanterns (DC comic). There is lots of action. The 2nd book does a good job of keeping us wondering, will the earthling hook up with the female 4-breasted humanoid empath stone holder? I did like that the main power of the translator stones was to ... translate, enabling communication with several other alien species.

I enjoyed these enough that I bought the 4th novel of the series, "Sunborn", 2011, 478 pages. Another cosmic story. Ha ha, in this one, at one point, our earthling tells 1 of the 2 smart ass robots that are part of the company, "Lead on, kemosabe." I'm immediately going, wow, is that a temporal tell, or what? And sure enough, Carver was born in 1949, so he's 2 years older than me. Ha ha, I wonder what is the youngest person who would get the reference? I queried my son born in 1976. He knew it had to do with the Lone Ranger & Tonto, but not sure exactly what. I queried my youngest daughter born in 1983. She replied with the image below, so I guess she got the reference. But I bet a 20-something would have no clue.

A 5th novel in the series is due out later this year.

I had 2 Karl Schroeder novels on my iPad, plus a Neal Stephenson. Decisions, decisions. I went with the older of the Schroeder novels, "The Million", 2018, 192 pages. I'm guessing this was actually a novella. It is set in the same universe as his "Lockstep". This is a really interesting concept - that in the absence of FTL travel, the way you could have an interstellar civilization is by slowing time way down by having entire worlds hibernate most of the time - except for The Million, who are the real-time caretakers. The novella is an interesting exploration of the ramifications of the concept, with action, plucky characters, etc. As the characters are mostly young adults, I'm guessing this is a YA story.

Then, on to the Stephenson: "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel", 2019, 892 pages. Well, it was great to see Stephenson give props to "'D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths" and "D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths". These are family favorites - I have already bought all my grandchildren copies.

But, I was a little sad that the 1st person uploaded posthumously into quantum computers builds a world strongly along the lines of genesis. It was interesting as time passes and many of the books real-world characters get uploaded and now take part in the drama in Bitworld - culiminating in a Tolkienesque quest. But I kind of agree with the story's antagonist, El (Elohim), that they maybe could have done a lot better than creating a very medieval flavored world.

There wasn't as much snappy dialog and turns of phrase as is usual for Stephenson. So, an enjoyable, sprawling read, but maybe Stephenson is showing his age slightly.