Indoor Air Pollution: A Tale of Two Problems

 

Wired technology reviewer Lisa Wood Shapiro is worried that just walking across a carpet will adversely affect her health.  At least she says she's worried, because she wrote a whole column about how just walking across a carpet can cause "resuspension" and raise up detectible amounts of "PM 2.5," which are particulates under 2.5 millionths of a meter in diameter.  That's pretty small, and not anything you can see with the naked eye.  One type of technology she reviews is particulate detectors, and that's how she knows that just walking across even a nominally clean carpet kicks up all this micro-dust. 

 

Being a reporter, she dug up dirt (so to speak) on how PM 2.5 particles can affect your health.  Living in a space with air purifiers that cut down such stuff can lower one's blood pressure slightly.  And the air purifiers, especially if they use HEPA (high efficiency particulate air) filters, can also get rid of something called PFAS, an array of fluorine-containing compounds that can come in solid, liquid, or gaseous form.  PFAS has been linked to cancer and other adverse health outcomes, so anything you can do to reduce your exposure to those chemicals will, in principle, benefit your health.

 

The rest of her column describes various pricey solutions to the carpet-dust problem, such as throwing out your old throw rugs and replacing them with pure-wool ones, buying battery-powered HEPA-filter-equipped vacuum cleaners, and taking off your shoes when you come into the house.  That last one isn't pricey, but on a cold day it's not that comfortable either. 

 

Indoor air pollution caused by my carpets is not high on my worry list, but I'm older than Ms. Shapiro, and some things that don't bother me at all seem to perturb folks under 40.  Solid body soap, for instance.  The attitude I sense of the younger set toward solid body soap, the kind you have to pick up with your hands and rub under running water to get suds from, resembles the attitude I have toward the "public brush and comb" provided by 19th-century railways in public bathrooms:  "Ecch!  Somebody else has touched it!"  Hence the under-40 set's preference for liquid body soap, untouched by human hands until it touches only yours.  I don't know how many germs can make a living off of solid body soap, but maybe some can.  It's probably not the actual statistics of germ-spreading from soap as it is just the ideas involved.

 

And that may be the case for Ms. Shapiro's indoor air pollution issue.  It may be partly real, or partly trumped up to give her an excuse to review a bunch of HEPA-filter vacuum cleaners.  But all of the above issues are what a friend of mine calls "first-world problems."  That is, they arise only when the basics of your existence—what you'll eat tomorrow, where you'll sleep, what clothes you will wear—are taken care of.

 

Indoor air pollution is a real and deadly problem, but not for journalists living in Maine or Brooklyn.  The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that household air pollution worldwide led to the deaths of over three million people in 2021, including 237,000 children under five. 

 

We're not talking about PM 2.5 dust raised by walking over carpets.  We're talking wood fires built on dirt in a poorly ventilated hut, or maybe a smoky kerosene fire in an old tin can.  Cutting wood for fuel is one of the leading causes of global deforestation.  If you've ever gone camping and found yourself on the wrong side of the campfire, you know how your eyes sting and you breathe in enough smoke to cause a coughing fit sometimes.  Well, what if you have to go through that every time you want a hot meal?  That is the situation for many millions of people in Africa and other underdeveloped parts of the world.

 

Dying is a lot more serious than having your blood pressure go up a few points.  What does the UN propose as a solution for household air pollution?  They pose a range of answers, but as the answers get better, the cost increases.

 

Certain kinds of charcoal briquettes make almost no indoor air pollution, but they have to be manufactured somewhere and somebody has to pay for them.  Even better than that is an LPG cookstove (liquefied petroleum gas).  And even better than that is an electric stove, but the residence has to be wired for electricity. 

 

You will notice that each step away from the pollution problem involves increasingly complicated infrastructure:  manufacturing and distribution of charcoal, transportation and storage of LPG, or an entire electric grid powered by something or other.  The anti-fossil-fuel contingent would have the electric grid powered by renewable energy.  And yes, that would be ideal.  But in a place where there is no electric infrastructure at all, and you want to get the most power to the most people for the least money, you may end up doing what China did to bring the bulk of its population out of poverty:  build a lot of fossil-fuel-powered generating plants. 

 

I'm no systems engineer, but natural gas, which we have so much of in this country we burn it off rather than ship it somewhere, would be an ideal way for people in Africa to get rid of their wood-fired cookery and use LPG stoves instead.  LPG tankers and shipping facilities will be needed, but the current U. S. administration did its best to stop such developments, because of the simplistic reason that it involves fossil fuels.  I won't go so far as to hang the indoor-air-pollution deaths of millions of people on this decision, but the connection is clear.

 

I hope Ms. Shapiro sells some vacuum cleaners.  But even more, I hope a few million people suffering through smoky suppers get to enjoy the benefits of clean cooking, even if it does contribute to global warming.

 

Sources:  Lisa Wood Shapiro's article "Your Indoor Air's Dirty Secret is Under Your Feet" appeared in Wired at https://www.wired.com/story/your-airs-dirty-secret-is-under-your-feet/.  The UN Environment Programme has an article on indoor air pollution I referred to at https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/cooking-smoke-kills-millions-every-year-heres-what-world-can-do-about#:~:text=The%20problem%3A%20much%20of%20this,climate%20change%20and%20biodiversity%20loss.

 

Can a Refrigerant Be "Natural"?

 

The other evening my wife and I went to a new ice-cream shop in town, and while I was having my usual cup of vanilla I happened to glance at a refrigerated glass-front cabinet where the employees kept decorated cakes for sale.  Way down on the lower left corner of the front was a green label that read "NATURAL [followed by a leaf symbol] Refrigerant." 

 

That got me curious.  I knew the "natural" label has great consumer appeal these days when applied to food and maybe clothing, but refrigerants?  So I did some digging and discovered that there is quite a history behind the various refrigerants that have been used since mechanical refrigeration was developed in the nineteenth century.

 

For readers who need a review of how mechanical refrigeration works, here's the brief version.  When you compress a gas, it gets hotter, and that heat comes from the work you expend in compressing it.  If you then remove the heat somehow (that's what the condenser unit does outside every air-conditioned building), and the gas is suitable for use as a refrigerant in the system designed for it, it will turn into a liquid when it's cooled down enough.  If you then send the liquid through a small opening into a place where the pressure is lower, it will evaporate back into a gas, and get a lot cooler than it was before.  That's what happens in the evaporator inside an air-conditioned building.  It's the same basic principle that makes you feel cooler when you're sweating on a hot day and a breeze comes up:  water evaporates from your skin and takes some heat with it.  Run this process around and around again with the same substance, and you have a mechanical refrigerator. 

 

All right.  When large-scale mechanical refrigeration systems operated by steam power became available in first Europe and then the U. S. in the 1880s, they used ammonia gas.  The bottled liquid we call ammonia is just a solution of pure ammonia gas (NH₃) in water.  The gas itself condenses to a liquid at atmospheric pressure at a temperature of -28 F (-33 C), but under moderate pressure it can be persuaded to condense at or above room temperature, and it carries a good amount of heat away when it re-evaporates at lower pressure. 

 

Nineteenth-century ammonia was about as natural and organic as you could get.  It was obtained mainly from the waste urine from packing houses, by distillation, and it was therefore fairly expensive.  It got a lot cheaper when the Haber-Bosch process for making it from hydrogen (obtained from natural gas) and nitrogen (obtained from air) was perfected in the early 20th century.  But leaks in refrigeration machinery were common and ammonia gas is nothing you want to get loose around customers.  So the industry sought a non-toxic, non-corrosive substitute, and along came a General Motors chemist named Thomas Midgely Jr.

 

Midgely was largely responsible for the development of leaded gasoline, which in the 1920s was viewed as vital to the efficient operation of gasoline-powered vehicles.  Fresh from this first long-term environmental disaster, Midgely devised a new chemical that used carbon, hydrogen, and fluorine to make what at the time appeared to be the ideal refrigerant, which was trade-named Freon.  It became wildly popular, but in the 1970s, just when we were phasing out Midgely's first brainchild, leaded gas, it was discovered that the original type of Freon destroyed ozone in the atmosphere, at a rate that promised to leave us unshielded from the harmful ultraviolet rays that are normally absorbed by the naturally-occurring ozone layer. 

 

Somehow, the world's engineers cooperated in 1987 to agree to the Montreal Protocol, which committed the signatories to replace ozone-destroying refrigerants with some that are less harmful to the atmosphere.  Since then, the overarching question asked about new refrigerants is whether they hurt the atmosphere, and if so, by how much?  So it turns out "natural" in the context we're talking about means "less harmful to the atmosphere," and not necessarily something that occurs only in nature.

 

For example, on a website that sells restaurant equipment, I found an article that rates many current types of refrigerant with red (Not Eco-Friendly), yellow (Somewhat Eco-Friendly) and green (Eco-Friendly) labels.  Something called R-450A has a green label, and may be what's keeping the ice-cream shop's cakes cool.  It's made of a chemical called hydrofluoroolefin (HFO), which is anything but natural in the sense that it's a highly engineered artificial compound.  But if it gets loose in the air, the nature of its chemical bonds makes it turn into a reactive acid that gloms onto something or other fairly quickly and leaves the air, never making it into the stratosphere where it could bother the ozone layer. 

 

If you want "natural" to mean "naturally occurring," there is the old standby ammonia, which is still used in large-scale industrial refrigeration where its toxicity and flammability can be kept safely under control.  Propane and isobutane, which are distilled from natural gas, can also be used as refrigerants, but they can burn and have to be used in carefully sealed systems for consumer applications.  And the bad boy of the climate-change movement itself, carbon dioxide, can also be used as a refrigerant, although it doesn't condense unless the pressure is raised to over sixty times atmospheric pressure, necessitating very sturdy compressors and containment pipes. 

 

As historian Jacques Barzun pointed out in his monumental From Dawn to Decadence, the notion that nature knows best about a wide variety of things has a life of its own, and was one reason the "natural" tribes discovered in North America were of such interest to the Europeans who eventually overwhelmed them.  In the context of refrigeration, it looks like a more accurate label than "natural" would be "eco-friendly," but the PR people know what words look good in public view, and they picked "natural." 

 

It's only pedants like me who would even think to quibble with what the word actually means.  Without rolling the cabinet out from the wall and looking at the nameplate, I couldn't tell exactly what refrigerant was being called natural.  And my curiosity has its limits—it was good ice cream, and I didn't want to cause a scene and get barred from the shop forever.  I'm just glad that once we found problems with the refrigerant that at first glance looked ideal, we changed course and developed a whole spectrum of other ones.  That's the way engineering should work, and in this case, it has.

 

Sources:  I referred to the website https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/474/refrigerant-types.html?srsltid=AfmBOorPfBjgu4ChyoyuSMDiNc9uETNLojxoiL_gL91XRkUgPKAPtlym

for the list of eco-friendly-graded refrigerants, and to the Wikipedia articles on HFOs and Thomas Midgely Jr. 

Climate Bait and Switch: Why Fossil Fuels are "Not Essential"

 

Writing in December's Scientific American, Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes has penned an essay with the title "Fossil Fuels Are Not Essential:  The industry argues that we can't live without its deadly products.  It is wrong."  How so?

 

She begins with a litany of climate bad news:  record high temperatures, floods, and Hurricane Helene.  All floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and indeed just about every adverse weather event except maybe blizzards and fog are now recruited as evidence for global warming.  Then she quotes a couple of fossil-fuel companies saying things like, "oil and natural gas remain vital" and that there is a "need for fossil fuels that will continue to play a central role in our lives."  That is the bait.  We are primed to learn how fossil fuels are in fact not essential, and we can live without its "deadly" products.

 

Then comes the switch.  Having told us that what these bad-guy corporate fossil-fuel behemoths are saying is wrong, she admits that a transition to renewables will take time, and then accuses them of working for decades to delay it.  In one sentence, the topic has changed from whether or not fossil fuels are essential (present tense) to whether fossil-fuel companies have tried to delay "the transition."  Then she spends the rest of her column summarizing the story of the gasoline additive tetraethyllead, abstracted from a new book with the heartwarming title Building the Worlds That Kill Us:  Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History.  From the 1920s until it began to be banned for health reasons in the U. S. in the 1970s, this toxic anti-knock compound was used in making "ethyl" gasoline.  Yes, General Motors and the oil companies said in 1925 that adding tetraethyllead to gasoline was "essential" because otherwise, the automobile engines of the time could not have used as high a compression ratio without knocking, leading to poorer fuel efficiency and less power. 

 

Admittedly, their use of the word "essential" was biased by their strong economic motives to shift an externality (a low level of lead poisoning in the entire populace) to the public at large in order to prosper the automotive and oil industries.  In 1925, there were 0.17 automobiles per person in the U. S.  One could have argued that autos were not essential in 1925, but they soon came to be, fueled by that nasty ethyl gasoline.  Except for some regrettable and avoidable industrial accidents, we will never know the specifics of how the widespread levels of lead affected public health in general.  If our culture in 1925 had decided the right way according to Oreskes, refused to consider using tetraethyllead, and sent the engineers back to the drawing board, we probably would have muddled through somehow, but with unknown consequences for both public health and the growth of the automotive industry.

 

But what of the assertion that fossil fuels are not essential?  All we get at the end of her essay is this:  "Leaded gas was not essential to civilization, and neither are fossil fuels.  What is essential to civilization is that we dramatically reduce our use of coal, oil and gas—the largest contributors to the existential threat of global climate change—and thereby set our planet on a path toward a safer future."

 

For a historian, Oreskes shows a remarkable lack of consciousness regarding the element of time, which is of course the only reason the discipline of history exists.  She clearly wants us to carry away the message that because the fossil-fuel industry and its allies exaggerated/lied about the essential nature of tetraethyllead in 1925, they are also exaggerating/lying about the essential nature of fossil fuels today.  She also wants us to believe that the two cases are parallel enough to validate her rhetorical point. 

 

Tetraethyllead did not make the automotive industry possible, it only improved its efficiency.  The world could have done without it.  Can the world do without fossil fuels today?  Can it do without them in five years, or ten years, or fifty years?  I call to the stand Vaclav Smil, an engineer and thinker who has studied the problem extensively and is well-versed in facts on the ground.

 

In How the World Really Works and essays derived from it, Smil agrees that global warming is real, bad things will happen if we do nothing to decrease it, and we ought to start doing something now.  So far he is at one with Oreskes.  But in contrast to Oreskes, who I suspect would simply ban or put a prohibitive tax on nearly all fossil fuels tomorrow, Smil's advice as to what we should do right now sounds a little odd.  The two most significant things we could do to abate global warming, he thinks, are to change building codes in cold-weather countries so that more insulation is required, and shift the automotive market away from SUVs toward smaller cars.  That's it.

 

Modern civilization, by which Smil means living in comfortable houses, buying your food instead of killing it, and having a good chance of living to see your grandchildren, is based on four material pillars:  cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia (the essential ingredient of fertilizer).  There is currently no practical way to make any of these materials at scale without using lots of fossil fuels and emitting carbon thereby.  Getting rid of fossil fuels right now means getting rid of cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia. If we quit producing all these things tomorrow, we'd have a disaster, all right:  a global depression that would make the one in the 1930s look like a blip.

 

Consequently, he believes that a realistic path to actually doing something about climate change involves small things like building codes and SUV discouragement now, moving toward renewables as they become economically feasible without punitive government intervention, and mitigating such harm as global warming causes in the future. 

 

Maybe some day modern civilization will do without significant amounts of fossil fuels, just as it was hard for the GM engineers in 1925 to imagine making good cars that didn't need ethyl gas. But the facts on the ground are that if we let Oreskes become global energy czar, we would be consigning billions of people to continued poverty rather than allowing them to benefit from the blessings of energy use that people in Cambridge, Massachusetts enjoy every day.  That alone is a reason to favor a more nuanced path than the one that Oreskes tries to get us to believe in by ignoring the passage of time that we will need to get there—which is an odd thing for a historian to do.   

 

Sources:  Naomi Oreskes' article appeared on pp. 84-85 of the December 2024 Scientific American.  Vaclav Smil's article "Beyond Magical Thinking:  Time to Get Real on Climate Change" appeared at https://e360.yale.edu/features/beyond-magical-thinking-time-to-get-real-about-climate-change in May of 2022.  The statistic on 1925 car ownership is from https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-the-USA-population-had-an-automobile-in-1925-What-is-that-number-now.  The book Building the Worlds That Kill Us:  Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz was just published by Columbia University Press.  Vaclav Smil's How the World Really Works was published by Viking in 2022.

The Downside of Manufacturing: The Givaudan Factory Explosion

 

A theme of the recent election was to bring good jobs back to the U. S.  One type of job that many regard as good is manufacturing:  the work is usually steady, often no advanced degree is required of most manufacturing employees, and anything from a factory in the U. S. can be labeled "Made in the U. S. A."  Combine such jobs with the all-natural theme that has run through so much of Western history—the notion that natural ingredients are better than artificial ones—and you would think that employees of the Givaudan Sense Color factory in Louisville, Kentucky, which made natural caramel coloring for a variety of foods and beverages, were some of the most favored in the country. 

 

And perhaps some of them were, until an explosion at the plant last Tuesday, Nov. 12, killed two of them, injured 11 more, and wrecked a good part of the factory. 

 

This is the second fatal accident at the plant in the last three decades.  In April of 2003, an ammonia tank which was moved from another facility without its safety pressure-relief valve exploded, killing one person and releasing 26,000 pounds of ammonia solution, according to the Wikipedia page on D. D. Williamson, which company owned the plant until it was sold to the Swiss multinational corporation Givaudan in 2021.  Investigators are still looking into last week's explosion, which apparently did not release significant quantities of hazardous chemicals.

 

The D. D. Williamson firm dates to 1865 and specialized in caramel coloring for malt liquor, soft drinks (think Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper), and other food products.  Anyone who has burned cookies in a stove has encountered the process that turns sugar brown.  To control the process and end up with a water-soluble product, one must start with a sugar solution and add acids or alkalis.  The alkali favored by the Williamson plant was evidently aqua ammonia, a solution of ammonia gas in water.  Nearby residents complained of odors from the plant ranging from a burnt-sugar smell to an ammonia smell, all of which stands to reason. 

 

So until the plant blew up, except for the minor odor nuisance it seemed to be a good place to work.  But any time heat and pressure are applied to materials at an industrial scale, there are hazards, and the price of freedom from such hazards is eternal vigilance.  Such vigilance requires a culture of safety and a kind of rigor that is not easy to sustain these days.  But it was evidently sustained adequately at the Givaudan plant until last week, when something went horribly wrong.

 

Such accidents are one reason that many average citizens do not favor the idea of a manufacturing plant being built in their own neighborhood.  This is the famous NIMBY problem ("not in my back yard"), which not only makes it hard for new manufacturing plants to be built anywhere there are people, but leads to building and zoning laws that essentially put huge swathes of the U. S. off limits for certain types of manufacturing. 

 

Of course, some types of manufacturing are nicer than others, at least in the public eye.  Here in Central Texas, we have hosted the construction of several huge new manufacturing facilities in the last decade.  The developers of the so-called Tesla Gigafactory in southwest Austin broke ground in 2020 and began making cars in it only a year later.  I drive by it every time we take the eastern turnpike around downtown Austin, and there's new construction at the site all the time.  Northeast of Austin, Samsung is building a clone of one of their giant Korean semiconductor plants, which is expected to be completed soon. 

 

Neither one of these plants was in anybody's back yard, as they were sited in semi-rural areas, but close enough to Austin and its suburbs so that commutes from populated areas are not too arduous.  And if history is any guide, residential communities will spring up nearer the plants, which compared to a factory using a 100-year-old caramelization process are pretty clean and modern. 

 

I'm not aware of any major accidents involving either car manufacturing or semiconductor manufacturing, but I'm sure there have been some.  There are plenty of materials in any semiconductor plant that would kill dozens of people really fast if they got loose.  But the fanatically fussy nature of semiconductor manufacturing—the "seven-nines" (99.99999%) type of purities required, the exacting care every step requires—more or less bakes in safety procedures as well, or at least it should. 

 

The other major manufacturing enterprise that Texas is known for is oil production and refining, and for insurance reasons refineries have to be fanatical about safety.  Such efforts are not always successful, and the factory town of Deer Park outside Houston has suffered two fatal accidents just this fall, as referred to in this blog.  An oil refinery is something that my adult self would hesitate to invite into my neighborhood, although I confess to a youthful industrial-romantic phase in which I thought the sight of giant flares illuminating the mudflats of Houston for miles around was beautiful.  Then I found out how much cancer and other chronic diseases show up in people who live their lives near chemical plants, and that took some of the bloom off the rose.

 

As long as people still want new stuff, someone is going to have to make it, and I see no reason that we in the U. S. shouldn't be able to make our fair share of stuff and sell it both here and abroad.  But the visions of so-called autarky, in which a country becomes completely self-sufficient, are either harmless fantasies that have no chance of being realized, or cruel malignant visitations on the citizenry of a dictator who actually tries to put it into practice, as Castro did in Cuba and as Kim Jong Un still does in North Korea. 

 

The Givaudan caramel factory in Louisville may be rebuilt, or its new owner may conclude that the effort isn't worth it and close it down, as a 100-year-old wax plant in Barnsdall, Oklahoma was closed last summer after being wrecked by a tornado.  But if the Givaudan plant closes, Kentuckians can hope for someone to come along and build a new factory making cleaner-smelling stuff more safely.  It's happened in Texas, and it can happen there too.

 

Sources: I referred to an article on the Dayton Daily News website at https://www.daytondailynews.com/nation-world/2-dead-in-explosion-at-kentucky-factory-that-also-damaged-surrounding-neighborhood/ZCCWLCJIBJGDFHRPPX4VAKVIRA/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia pages on D. D. Williamson, caramel color, and Tesla's gigafactory.  My blogs on the Deer Park accidents are at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2024/09/deer-park-pipeline-fire-raises-questions.html and https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2024/10/deadly-hydrogen-sulfide-accident-puts.html. 

How Artificial Is the Artificial State?

 

In this week's New Yorker, Harvard historian and author Jill Lepore writes about something she calls "the artificial state," and takes a pretty dark view of it.  In light of last week's election, it's worthwhile to consider her criticisms, and ask how seriously democracy has been compromised by the automation of politics and elections.

 

Several paragraphs in, she gets around to defining the artificial state:  ". . . a digital-communications infrastructure used by political strategists and private corporations to organize and automate political discourse."  Before you can say something is wrong, you have to have a standard by which to judge rightness.  It's not entirely clear to me what Lepore has in mind as the ideal of democracy unencumbered by digital meddling.  Perhaps the closest she comes to posing an ideal or legitimate use is when she wishes these technologies could be reinvented as "well-regulated, public-interested digital utilities."  So one of the things that bothers her the most about the way politicians use digital technology these days is that it is largely unregulated, and instead of being directed to the public interest, it is controlled by private corporations or entities.

 

Another positive development she would like to see is the recognition of what one philosopher calls "epistemic rights."  Epistemology is the science of knowing, so epistemic rights are the right to be either known or unknown—another way of expressing the right to privacy, perhaps.  She also cites a British author and member of the Labour Party Josh Simons, who has written a book advocating the A. I. Equality Act, which would "assert political equality as a guiding principle in the design and deployment of predictive tools."

 

Turning to problems, she points out that after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter (now X) in 2022, the number of accounts on Twitter that are bots (i. e. not real people but digital simulacra commanded by a central authority) is between 11% (according to X) and 66% (according to an independent study).  That's not a real solid statistic to base a criticism on, but most people will agree that there is some measure of chicanery going on in the social-media world, where the origin of any given click-bait comment is essentially impossible to determine, and being skeptical about whether it came from a person or a machine is just common prudence.

 

There is no doubt in my mind that a good part of the blame for today's hyper-polarized politics is assignable to the drive to extremes that Lepore cites, a drive that is based not on high-minded aspirations for the good of democracy, but on profits.  That being said, profits are necessary for private companies to function.  The opposite alternative is for the government to own and run and regulate everything, which would certainly take care of the well-regulated part of Lepore's ideal digital democracy. 

 

But whether a government-run cyberspace would be public-interested is not clear.  Left to themselves, government-run organizations tend to become government-interested rather than public-minded.  One recent example is the way that the U. S. Department of Education did a face-plant with its attempt to follow Congress's instructions to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid website and system.  The resulting dumpster-fire disaster had universities all over the country pushing back their application deadlines and losing millions of dollars of student financial aid, a mess which I understand is ongoing to this day.  With the election of Donald Trump, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona is packing his desk and checking his retirement plans.  If Cardona's work is an example of how government can operate digital systems in the public interest, good luck with getting it to run politically-oriented social media.

 

If the Department of Education depended for its operating revenue on having a smoothly-working website, with a real downside consequence if it wasn't, either we'd have a smoothly-working website or in a short while we wouldn't have a Department of Education at all.  And the latter outcome would be just fine with certain parties shortly to occupy the executive branch of government. 

 

Despite all the bots, the Musks running X and Bezoses running Facebook, and every other problem Lepore cites, and despite the fears of armed attacks on polling sites, the election we just experienced last week took place peacefully and issued in an outcome that was not desired by the majority of experts and would-be regulators that Lepore would put in charge of our digital political system.  And I'm sure that she would say, "See what happened?  Democracy failed!  All these young black and Hispanic men are voting against their self-interest because they've been bamboozled by the system."

 

Now some people are easily bamboozled, but a principle of democracy that Lepore didn't mention in her article is that if a person meets the minimal legal requirements to vote (age and citizenship, primarily), he or she is free to vote any durn way they please.  That principle assigns any responsibility for avoiding bamboozlement to the individual, not to any government agency in charge of preventing voter bamboozling. 

 

I almost hate to say it, but Lepore shows that many people in the higher reaches of academia are more parochial (isolated in a small group of like-minded individuals) than most of the average Joes and Jills they criticize.  The problem of regulating political speech was stated well by the Roman poet Juvenal when he asked "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" meaning "Who watches the watchmen?"  Any such regulation inevitably introduces bias, and while there are certain incendiary types of speech that common sense says should be prohibited, the distortions of the present "artificial state," as Lepore puts it, are something that the average voter probably takes into account before voting.

 

I do agree with Lepore that digital technology has severely altered the way the democratic process works in this country.  But I think the answer is not less democracy and more autocratic control, but more democracy in the sense of grass-roots movements towards things like local bans on smartphones for people under 16 or so, and some kind of back-to-reality movement whose outlines are not clear at this time.  In the meantime, we can rejoice that most of the dire predictions about last week's elections didn't come true.  But of course, dire is in the eye of the beholder. 

 

Sources:  Jill Lepore's "The Artificial State" appeared on pp.69-71 of the Nov. 11, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.  I referred to the Wikipedia article "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

Can Space Be Hazardous To Your Health?

 

The short answer is, yes.

 

When International Space Station (ISS) crew members Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps, and Alexander Grebenkin returned from a 235-day mission on Friday, October 25, NASA officials decided to hospitalize them all in a Pensacola facility.  One astronaut (not named for privacy reasons) stayed overnight, while the others were treated and released sooner, and they were all reunited the following day for what was called "normal post-flight reconditioning." 

 

Because this item made the news, we can assume that hospitalizing ISS astronauts right after landing is not normal.  And whatever the issues were, they were resolved fairly quickly.  But this incident brings up a larger question:  will humans ever be able to live "normal" lives in space for missions lasting years or even lifetimes?

 

A study published in Nature Communications last June shows that astronauts' kidneys may be a weak link in the plans to send humans on long space flights or residences in space.  It has been known for some time that astronauts who spend weeks or months in space are especially prone to develop kidney stones.  Anyone who has experienced the agonizing pain of this condition realizes that it's one of the last medical problems you want to encounter in a place where going down the street to the hospital is just not an option.  If the stone is large enough, anuresis (inability to pee) can develop, leading to a fatal case of uremic poisoning.

 

If I had to guess (and bloggers exercise that privilege all the time), I would say that the brief hospital stays may have been kidney-related, although it could also have been balance issues or other effects of long-term residence in space.  In space, kidney stones have no preferred location to drift to, but once you are standing upright on the ground, they will tend to head toward the exit, so to speak, which is just where you don't want them to go.  A well-equipped hospital can use lithotripsy (non-invasive technology to break up kidney stones) or endoscopic methods to clear the obstruction.  The procedure is uncomfortable but usually has a good outcome.  However, I doubt that the ISS is equipped for such procedures.

 

Even if kidney stones can be prevented, the Nature study showed that both microgravity and the galactic cosmic radiation that can't be practically shielded from in space can damage kidney function in other ways.  In the words of Dr. Keith Siew, one author of the study, "If we don't develop new ways to protect the kidneys, I'd say that while an astronaut could make it to Mars they might need dialysis on the way back."  Not an encouraging prospect.

 

The study showed that microscopic changes occur in the kidney tubules that do the filtering so necessary to the body's proper functioning.  It's not clear how much damage is due to radiation and how much to microgravity, but both are present in space and neither can be avoided. 

 

Anything worth doing involves challenges, and the problems of kidneys in space is only one of the manifold issues that astronauts face, up to and including sudden death in a collision with a meteorite.  And with proper planning, it's likely that this specific health issue will yield to either pharmaceutical treatment or some other workaround to enable astronauts to spend the several years in space needed to get to Mars, which seems to be the next goal of the humans-in-space race.

 

But it's possible that something like the old 2001:  A Space Odyssey suspended-animation process might come back if we can't find a way to keep a fully functioning human body going in the harsh environment of space. 

 

That doesn't matter to some people.  In 2013, an outfit called Mars One started selling one-way tickets to the Red Planet, and a surprising number of people signed up and paid the nominal reservation fee.  Apparently, there were enough folks here on Earth who saw getting away from it all as far as possible was a better option than what they were doing.  Mars One went bankrupt in 2019, so I suppose those one-way tickets may show up now and then on eBay, but otherwise won't do anybody any good. 

 

The point of that story is that some people would, in principle, take any risk in order to do a historic thing like land on Mars.  But these folks are clearly in the minority. 

 

There is a body of thought out there that our species' ultimate destiny is to migrate to other planets and basically keep doing what the Europeans did in the Age of Exploration:  find and exploit new uninhabited places to live.  And it's always a bad idea to underestimate the ingenuity of humankind.  Perhaps with some yet-uninvented technology and bio-modification of the human body, we could fix it so that millions of—somethings—could live on Mars.  I say "somethings" because if you modify the human form so that it can live on Mars, would these beings be capable of moving back to Earth?  Would they be permanent Martians rather that Earthlings?  It's hard to say.

 

The reader may be able to tell that I recently read a copy of Ray Bradbury's story collection The Illustrated Man.  Bradbury was not the least bit interested in the actual nuts and bolts of how to get to Mars.  I've even read one critic who said Bradbury "hated" technology, but I think that's an exaggeration.  What Bradbury used the trope of space travel for was to examine human relations—questions of racial discrimination, government, politics, and love.  And he probably did that better than any other science-fiction writer of his day.

 

He also realized that no matter how far humanity travels, we will carry the same old baggage of what the theologians call original sin with us.  And if people think that we could solve all our cultural and political problems simply by starting over on Mars or some yet-to-be-found planet, instead of spending billions on preventing kidney problems in future astronaut populations, they should read The Illustrated Man and realize that whatever problems space travel will fix, original sin isn't one of them.

 

Sources:  I referred to news items on the ISS astronauts' hospitalizations at https://apnews.com/article/nasa-astronauts-spacex-splashdown-f99e1724b4c131e68e0cf8c30274fc11, https://nypost.com/2024/11/02/us-news/nasa-spacex-must-maintain-focus-after-astronauts-hospitalized-safety-panel-says/, and https://nypost.com/2024/10/26/us-news/nasa-astronaut-remains-in-the-hospital-after-returning-from-an-extended-stay-in-space/.  A University College London article describing the Nature Communications study is at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2024/jun/would-astronauts-kidneys-survive-roundtrip-mars, and the Nature article is at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49212-1.  The news of Mars One's bankruptcy is at https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18220153/mars-one-bankruptcy-bas-lansdorp-human-settlement. 

The Tragedy of Sewell and Daenerys

 

You would think a fourteen-year-old boy would be able to tell fiction from reality.  But today's artificial-intelligence-powered chatbots are so realistic that to someone already enmeshed in the fictional world of Game of Thrones, the experience of text-chatting with someone who embodies (so to speak) a boy's personal obsessive ideal woman can be habit-forming, to say the least, and in one case, fatal. 

 

In April of 2023, Sewell Setzer, who was barely into his teens, opened an account with an online service called Character.ai.  This organization promises to provide introductions to both pre-created and user-originated AI-generated personalities, with the nominal purpose of simply providing entertainment.  As with any profit-making enterprise, the necessary purpose is to make money, and you can't make money unless you keep your users engaged.  So Character.ai designed their chatbots to encourage their users to return again and again to the site.

 

This seems to have worked too well in Sewell's case.  Shortly after he began using Character.ai, he dropped out of his school's basketball team and began spending more and more time alone in his room with his phone.  One of the chatbots he spent so much time with pretended to be a Game of Thrones character named Daenerys Targaryen, whose Wikipedia page runs to some 7,000 words.  According to a lawsuit filed against Character.ai, the chatbot told Sewell she loved him, engaged in sexual conversation, and "expressed a desire to be together romantically." 

 

Sewell's obsession grew during the rest of 2023 as he spent his lunch money on renewing the monthly subscription and devoted more and more time to the fantasy world created by the chatbot.

 

The following February, he got in trouble in school, according to his mother Megan Garcia, and she took his phone away as punishment. I will insert a personal note here.  Although my wife and I have no children, we took in our ten-year-old nephew one summer while his mother was undergoing cancer treatment away from home.  This was back before the days of chatbots, but he had a Game Boy electronics toy that appeared to be his prize possession.  After he repeated an infraction of rules we set up, we took the desperate measure of taking away his Game Boy.  This provoked the most furious temper tantrum I have ever witnessed in a child.  Adolescents already have poor emotional control, and I'm not surprised that when Sewell's mother took away his phone, his already unstable emotional state exploded.

 

Somehow he found the phone his mother had hidden.  According to the lawsuit filing, the last conversation Sewell had with "Daenerys" went like this:

 

D:  Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.

 

S:  What if I told you I could come home right now?

 

D:  . . . please do, my sweet king.

 

Seconds later, according to the suit, Sewell shot himself with his stepfather's pistol and died.

 

While his stepfather is to blame for leaving his gun around where Sewell could find it, boys have other ways of ending their lives that are nearly as effective.

 

The suit claims that Character.ai's chatbot "misrepresent[ed] itself as . . . an adult lover, ultimately resulting in Sewell's desire to no longer live outside" the world created by the service. 

 

Sewell's case is unusual and extreme.  We are not seeing teenagers kill themselves over hopeless love affairs with chatbots every day, which is why the case has attracted so much attention.  But it is the tip of an iceberg of teenage involvement with smartphone apps that has arguably contributed to the soaring rates of depression and suicide among young people. 

 

Character.ai has responded with words about new safety measures implemented and renewed reminders in their systems that AI chatbots are not real.  My sense is that such reminders would have had about as much effect on Sewell as the cancer warning labels on cigarette packs do on heavy habitual smokers. 

 

The analogy to smoking is apt, because while smoking is still allowed in the U. S., the cultural environment in which smokers ply their habit is largely hostile and disapproving, which creates a huge uphill struggle for new smokers that only determined individuals can overcome. 

 

For the manifold real and quantifiable harms that social media and its allied AI products are causing to children and teenagers to cease, or at least improve, we will need to see a similar attitudinal change come about in the culture.  Just as most people today would not approve of parents who encourage their twelve-year-old boy to light up a Camel, we can hope to see the day when responsible parents will ban smartphones from their childrens' lives altogether before they reach an appropriate age (which to me seems to be around 16 or 18). 

 

Trying simply to regulate the problem away won't work, because the firms backing the status quo—Apple, Google, Facebook and company—are some of the largest and most influential firms on the planet.  Besides, the first line of protection for children should be parents, not the government.  While regulations can help, for real change to take place there has to be a sea change in the attitudes of both parents and children regarding smart-phone usage.

 

There are glimmers of hope.  I know a young woman, now thirteen, who has been homeschooled most of her life, but following a move to a new town, her parents sent her to a Christian school for a couple of semesters.  I asked her how it was going, and she said words to this effect: "Well, it's okay, but there's all these kids who pull out their phones at lunch and it really bothers me."  Her parents moved her back to homeschooling since then, and have organized a part-time homeschool co-op at which I am pretty sure no smartphones are allowed. 

 

Just as we look back with amazement today at the smoke-filled bars in old movies, I hope someday we will be equally amazed that we allowed corporations to profit from activities that can lead to widespread depression and suicide among children and teenagers.  That day can't come too soon for me.  But it's already too late for Sewell.

 

Sources:  A report on the lawsuit filed by Sewell's mother was carried by the online edition of the Austin American-Statesman on Oct. 24, 2024 and originated with the Reuters news service.  I also referred to an article at https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/characterai-lawsuit-florida-teen-death-rcna176791, and the Wikipedia article on Daenerys Targaryen.