Firstly, thank you for sharing your thoughts and arguments on the issues we must confront. As you suggest, I advocate changing our way of living and mentality: we should consume resources sensibly and limit our demands and desires, considering the sake of humanity and the whole planet. This way, we can overcome ongoing environmental, social, and economic disasters. This is what I believe. However, one side of me says that it is hard and complicated to change human behaviors and habits. Of course, I am not a social scientist, so I cannot put forward detailed scientific statements here. But as a human being, every day I interact with our kind and observe things happening around us. Many of us believe that we deserve the "best" of everything, and our lives are much more important than others. This is the Zeitgeist of our century. I would like to quote some lines from Chuck Palahniuk's famous novel, Fight Club: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War, No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”
Moreover, I believe that there are certain limits to human ingenuity. First of all, the universe has constraints defined by thermodynamics and physics. For instance, we will never devise engines with 100% efficiency, and we will never overcome friction to diminish our energy losses. As far as I see, we have already reached boundaries in some technologies. Secondly, today's academia misleads us. On the lab scale, we can design and test solar cells with high efficiencies, or we can synthesize catalysts with high reaction rates and selectivities. And eventually, we can publish our "promising" findings in Science or Nature. However, most of these are usually impractical: expensive technologies, low long-term stability, difficult to scale up, and inapplicable under realistic conditions, etc. In my opinion, researchers should be responsible for defining and discussing "what is feasible" vs "what is practical" by performing techno-economic analyses (TEA) if they claim "saving the planet." (By the way, there will always be fundamental research to shed light on topics of which we have limited understanding and knowledge. We should keep these separate.)
I agree that change is not easy, but minimizing our waste will not necessarily contradict wanting the best for yourself or others. The point here is that we could keep the same quality of living with less impact on the environment. We waste so much energy and materials just because we can.
As for the limits to human ingenuity, we are of course constrained by the laws of nature and cannot reach 100% efficiencies. Still, what we know of theoretical limits and what we achieve in practice are not the same. There is still room for improvement.
The gap between academia and industry is something I've planned to write about; I will elaborate my thoughts in that article, so stay tuned!
Hey Jasmin!
Firstly, thank you for sharing your thoughts and arguments on the issues we must confront. As you suggest, I advocate changing our way of living and mentality: we should consume resources sensibly and limit our demands and desires, considering the sake of humanity and the whole planet. This way, we can overcome ongoing environmental, social, and economic disasters. This is what I believe. However, one side of me says that it is hard and complicated to change human behaviors and habits. Of course, I am not a social scientist, so I cannot put forward detailed scientific statements here. But as a human being, every day I interact with our kind and observe things happening around us. Many of us believe that we deserve the "best" of everything, and our lives are much more important than others. This is the Zeitgeist of our century. I would like to quote some lines from Chuck Palahniuk's famous novel, Fight Club: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War, No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”
Moreover, I believe that there are certain limits to human ingenuity. First of all, the universe has constraints defined by thermodynamics and physics. For instance, we will never devise engines with 100% efficiency, and we will never overcome friction to diminish our energy losses. As far as I see, we have already reached boundaries in some technologies. Secondly, today's academia misleads us. On the lab scale, we can design and test solar cells with high efficiencies, or we can synthesize catalysts with high reaction rates and selectivities. And eventually, we can publish our "promising" findings in Science or Nature. However, most of these are usually impractical: expensive technologies, low long-term stability, difficult to scale up, and inapplicable under realistic conditions, etc. In my opinion, researchers should be responsible for defining and discussing "what is feasible" vs "what is practical" by performing techno-economic analyses (TEA) if they claim "saving the planet." (By the way, there will always be fundamental research to shed light on topics of which we have limited understanding and knowledge. We should keep these separate.)
Mustafa Caglayan
Hi Mustafa!
I agree that change is not easy, but minimizing our waste will not necessarily contradict wanting the best for yourself or others. The point here is that we could keep the same quality of living with less impact on the environment. We waste so much energy and materials just because we can.
As for the limits to human ingenuity, we are of course constrained by the laws of nature and cannot reach 100% efficiencies. Still, what we know of theoretical limits and what we achieve in practice are not the same. There is still room for improvement.
The gap between academia and industry is something I've planned to write about; I will elaborate my thoughts in that article, so stay tuned!