Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
Nuclear Holocaust
Nuclear Holocaust: No one person can be credited with producing the world’s first atomic bomb but two men (figure above) had outsize achievements in that effort: physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and Army Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves. _ The movement of survivors of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as hibakusha, receives the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world without nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through personal testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again. “So long as any state has nuclear weapons, others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain, there is a risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. And any such use would be catastrophic.” —Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission _____ Section-1 Prologue: Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the machine gun, declared, “Only a general who was a barbarian would send […]
Solar Technologies
Solar Technologies: Solar is the only renewable energy source which could, in principle, easily meet all the world’s energy needs. _ “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” Thomas Edison in 1931 ____ Section-1 Prologue: Currently, our civilization consumes around 17.7 Terawatts (17.7 terajoules/second) of power taken from all sources of energy, namely oil, coal, natural gas and alternative energies such as solar, wind, hydropower and others. Fossil fuels—including coal, oil, and natural gas—have been powering economies for over 150 years, and currently supply about 80 percent of the world’s energy. The environmental ramifications of using fossil fuels, combined with their expected remaining abundance on earth places limits on how much longer we as a species can rely on them as an energy source. If […]
Desalination
Desalination: _ The history of water is equivalent to the history of the world and the history of water quality is equivalent to the history of life. —Andreas N. Angelakis _ Section-1 Prologue: All early civilizations were built on the banks of rivers. Whether it was the Euphrates in the Fertile Crescent or the Tiber in Rome, rivers gave early settlements easy access to abundant streams of fresh water, essential not only for drinking but also for irrigating crops. The availability of water was one of the biggest constraints on the growth of settlement and population size. The layout of Ancient Egypt reflected this. It stretched out like a long snake, hugging the banks of the Nile River. The invention of aqueducts by the Romans first enabled water to be carried long distances, providing the crucial utility to remote stretches of its sprawling empire and allowing populations to […]
Extraterrestrial Life (Life Beyond Earth)
Extraterrestrial Life (Life Beyond Earth): _ Figure above shows Earth, as seen by NASA’s Voyager 1. In this image, taken from 4 billion miles away 33 years ago, Earth appears as a “pale blue dot” representing less than a pixel’s worth of light. Would this light reveal Earth as a habitable and inhabited world? Our search for life on exoplanets will depend on an ability to extract information about life from the faint light of faraway worlds. _ “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” -Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction author and former Planetary Society board member _____ Section-1 Prologue: Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different worlds and asking the same kind of question? Are there civilizations more advanced than ours, civilizations that […]
Is artificial intelligence (AI) an existential threat?
Is artificial intelligence (AI) an existential threat? _ _ Section-1 Prologue: On September 26, 2022, without most of us noticing, humanity’s long-term odds of survival became ever so slightly better. Some 11,000,000 km away, a NASA spacecraft was deliberately smashed into the minor planet-moon, Dimorphos, and successfully changed its direction of travel. It was an important proof of concept that showed that if we’re ever in danger of being wiped out by an asteroid, we might be able to stop it from hitting the Earth. But what if the existential threat we need to worry about isn’t Deep Impact but Terminator? Despite years of efforts from professionals and researchers to quash any and all comparisons with apocalyptic science fiction and real-world artificial intelligence (AI), the threat of this technology going rogue and posing a serious threat to survival isn’t just for Hollywood movies. As crazy as it sounds, […]
