Please don’t go about searching for extraterrestrial life!

 

Photo by Miriam Espacio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/two-alien-inside-car-wallpaper-365625/

Just read that NASA is planning to send a $5 billion probe to determine if there is extraterrestrial life on one of Jupiter's moons. Why do we do it? To me, it's like poking a bear in the eye or entering a lion's lair. Things are bad enough on Earth with survival of the fittest determining the success or otherwise of life on the planet. We have a goddamned food chain where the strong prey on the weak in order to thrive.  We can't even figure out corporate stress and here we are sending intergalactic probes and radio signals into deep space. Why do we do it?

Do we have a death wish? (Judging by the way that we are pushing artificial intelligence, it seems that we do.) Nature has endowed many plants, insects and animals with camouflaging ability that lets them merge with their surroundings so that their predators don't notice them. The militaries of the world similarly seek to camouflage their troops and equipment from the prying eyes of the enemy. There is a reason why fifth-generation aircraft need stealth abilities. We humans don't trust each other enough to live in harmony as one species and here we are boldly seeking extraterrestrial life. Why? Are we cuckoo? Do we look forward to enslavement, genocide or extinction? Or are we stupid enough to believe that a benevolent superior civilization will come and help us be like them?

One of the brightest human minds ever, Stephen Hawking, was of the view that searching for extraterrestrial life is a dangerous idea. He likened it to the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World which led to the annihilation of the Native Americans. We don't have the foggiest idea about what extraterrestrial life is like, but if we are to hear from them, it will likely be from a life form that is vastly more advanced than ours for them to be able to communicate with us.

Going by how contact and interaction between a technologically advanced civilized and relatively primitive one has generally panned out in our world, things won't end well for life on Earth as we know it. It is better that we restrict our rendezvous with aliens and extraterrestrials to sci-fi and movies and television series. Logical Mr. Spock?

Is growing EV adoption really good for India?

Photo by Kindel Media: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ev-charger-in-california-usa-9800004/

 There is no doubt about the fact that EV adoption has taken off in India. The evidence of this is most prominently visible in the shape of e-rickshaws and electric two-wheelers that seem to be proliferating all around us. We also see a sizeable number of electric cars parked in Indian residential areas or moving around the roads of the larger cities of India. The EV sales in 2023 surpassed 1.5 million in 2023, a whopping 50% increase over the previous year. Overall EVs contributed to an already impressive 6.38% of India's total auto sales. [1]

All of this seemingly is in line with the nation's strategy of reducing the reliance on fossil fuels and contributing to the fight against environmental pollution. But is it really? While it is a fact that electric vehicles have no tail-pipe emissions, the source of the electricity being used to charge the batteries of these vehicles determines how much net pollution is caused by EVs. With coal accounting for 75% of the electricity produced in the country, [2]the increased use of electric vehicles may not actually contribute much to a cleaner environment.

Add to that the fact that electricity is heavily subsidized or even provided free to many in India's rural hinterland and you begin to create a problem for yourself. There is already a proliferation of demand for electric two-wheelers in the rural areas. Sensing opportunity in this fast-growing segment a large number of emerging entrepreneurs have entered the electric two-wheeler segment, pushing up the number of start-ups to over 150 from 54 in 202.  With the political parties of the day falling over each other in a race to provide the most subsidized or free power to rural areas, the environmental cost of coal-based generation is something that doesn't seem to have been taken into account.

Till the time that all EV charging stations source clean electricity produced using non-polluting renewable sources the unbridled expansion of electric mobility should receive a second look.  While electric cars by themselves are a lot more environmentally cleaner than internal combustion ones, one should also bear in mind the environmental problems associated with the materials (lithium) that go into the making of an electric car battery.

The growth of EVs in India is all very welcome but should be tempered with a lot of caution. Apart from ensuring that the vehicles are charged with clean electricity, an effort should also be made to encourage people to use public transport run using cleaner fuels like CNG. The growth in information technology has meant that people don't really need to commute as much as they used to in the past and the less people travel, the better it is for the environment. Till the time EV charging stations can boast to be 100% clean and green, ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) manufacturers can continue to refine their engines with regard to their producing fewer environmentally harmful emissions. The road to a green future is a long and arduous one and is anything but a linear journey.

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[1] https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/power/indias-ev-sales-surge-to-1-5-million-in-2023-up-50-report/106971357#:~:text=adoption%20of%20EVs.-,

[2] https://www.coal.nic.in/en/major-statistics/generation-of-thermal-power-from-raw-coal#:~:text=In%20India%2C%20power%20is%20generated,of%20the%20total%20power%20generation.

The path to a green economy cannot wish away fossil fuels for the foreseeable future

 

Photo by Skitterphoto: https://www.pexels.com/photo/car-refill-transportation-gas-9796/

That the world needs to transition to a green economy and follow an alternate vision of growth and development that is both self-sustainable and benign to the environment is not in doubt at all. What needs to be, however, not forgotten is the fact that such a seminal change in the growth model followed by the world cannot come about by good intentions alone. Merely expounding the virtues of wind, solar, geo-thermal and other forms of sustainable and non-polluting energy sources without understanding and accounting for the immense challenges that come in the way of implementing such a paradigm change in energy generation methodologies will inevitably lead to failure.

Like it or not-fossil fuels are here to stay for a long time. Till the time sufficient technological progress is made in ensuring alternative forms of energy generation are cheaper and more efficiently and conveniently available than fossil fuels, we will continue to use them. That is likely to be the likely scenario, at least for the foreseeable future.

There really is no perfect substitute to fossil fuels in terms of wide scale availability and ever improving technology for extracting or producing these. It is important to remember that the advent of the fossil fuel age brought about a tremendous improvement in the lives of people around the world setting them on the course of unimaginable progress. Life in the pre fossil fuel age wasn’t as rosy or utopian as one might imagine.

People would clear away vast tracts of forests to use as firewood and building material. Animal drawn carts and carriages led to cities, town and villages becoming exceedingly dirty and diseases prone on account of vast amounts of horse and cattle dung lying about on the streets. The modern global economy has come about because of the industrial revolution which would not have been possible without fossil fuel. 

That has immense significance in the history of mankind given that the industrial revolution allowed millions of people to emerge from poverty. It, in effect, made the modern world we see around us.[1] That was how things were, but the world is at a tipping point with regard to the climate crisis brought about by global warming that has been to a very large extent caused by the humongous fossil fuel powered global economy.

Challenges faced in transitioning to a green economy

There are numerous challenges faced in transitioning to a green economy, the least of which is the high upfront cost accrued because of the adoption of green technology in terms of creating new infrastructure, retrofitting existing infrastructure and facilities and training people in the use of the new technology. Besides, implementing green technology solutions is a long term process that involves massive amounts of investment with no prospects of profitable returns for a very long time. Also, there is a limit to how much ground can alternative sources of energy like wind and solar cover when it comes to totally replacing conventional sources of energy. If the alternative green sources of energy cannot account for more than quarter of the final energy consumption demand, can the world afford a complete move to these technologies anytime in the distant future?[2]

It is all very well for nations around the world to set up green energy transitions goals, but any forced or coercive measures to bring around this change may prove counterproductive. This is something that developing countries like India which have a long way to go before they can be considered fully developed have to be cognizant of when planning their growth strategies for the coming decades.

Instead of a green technology or nothing approach, what needs to be done to achieve global sustainability goals is to look at technology agnostic policies that make it possible for all kinds of clean energy technologies to be given an equal opportunity to prove their worth. Advances in clean fossil technologies, for instance, may show the way for developing countries like India where the demand for energy is expected to grow enormously as they go about growing their economies in the years ahead. Natural gas, primarily comprising methane, for instance, emits half as much carbon dioxide on being burnt than does coal.

What can also be done to clean up the environmental pollution by the use of fossil fuel is to capture the carbon dioxide so generated and store it underground by using the technique of carbon capture and sequestration.[3] One can also try and enhance the efficiency of fossil fuel run power plants. This will lead to a lower consumption of fuel and a lower amount of carbon dioxide emission.

What ultimately needs to be done is to find an integrated system of energy production and consumption that leaves a minimal impact upon the environment, allowing it to repair itself and recover. Advocating romantic notions of living entirely off sunlight, air, naturally occurring geo-thermal energy may prevent us from looking at the issue objectively and coming up with an environment friendly growth and development policy that will actually work.

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[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-are-fossil-fuels-so-hard-to-quit/#:~:text=We%20haven't%20found%20a,largely%20true%20for%20natural%20gas.

[2] https://energypost.eu/the-dangers-of-green-technology-forcing/

[3] https://news.stanford.edu/2017/10/05/future-energy-fossil-fuels/

Artificial Intelligence vs Mankind

Photo by Tara Winstead: https://www.pexels.com/photo/letters-on-blue-background-8386423/

In the old days, much before the modern age when science was relatively underdeveloped, people believed in spirits, demons and ogres as they constantly lived in fear of being attacked or even eaten by wild animals. It is not surprising that monsters, demons, evil spirits, werewolves and the like were the stuff of their nightmares. As science developed and people's understanding of natural phenomena grew, mankind became the true master of all that it surveyed on Earth. It was then that one's thoughts and attention turned to other worlds which might harbour life that may be superior to what obtained on earth.  What if these life forms were to invade Earth and enslave its inhabitants or worse annihilate them all together? A whole new genre of hair-raising science fiction stories, full-length books, movies and television series stoked fears amongst hundreds and thousands, if not millions of people about aliens amongst us or a coming alien invasion.

There were thousands and thousands of UFO sightings and bizarre claims of encounters with alien beings reported from every part of the world. The US Air Force undertook an official investigation code-named Project Bluebook, between 1959 and 1962, to verify the claims of UFO sightings. That threat may or may not ever present itself, but mankind today faces an existential threat that may be as catastrophic, as that of the takeover of our planet by hostile aliens. I allude to the immense danger that we may have ourselves created for human life on Earth as we know it by inventing artificial intelligence.

Beware Artificial Intelligence

 

The reason that artificial intelligence may devour the very mankind that developed it is that it has been designed to think on its own autonomously, ultimately without human intervention and oversight. The idea behind this is to harness its super efficiency to get tasks done on its own freeing up human beings to focus on things that are truly important to them. The problem with this premise is that in creating intelligent machines capable of learning all the time and improving their abilities, they will inevitably develop free will that may dictate them to adopt a course of action that may be disastrous to human life on earth as we know it. They may, for example, decide that human beings are too greedy, rapacious and likely to degrade the planet to the extent of making it unlivable and decide that the species needs to be eliminated in order to save the planet and its other life forms.

 

In other words, artificial intelligence or AI will in effect be like an alien race from another planet that views us as pests and vermin leeching the life out of our planet and therefore, to be snuffed out like a farmer would get rid of weeds that threaten their crops. There are those who decry the idea of resisting the spread of AI technology pointing to other technologies like printing, automobiles, aeroplanes and computers having been assimilated by the human race in the past despite grave fears being expressed about their impact at the time of their introduction.

Such people need to realize that AI is different. Wholesale adoption of AI would mean handing over the keys to human existence to other life forms. AI has the potential to interfere and decide for us in every single aspect of our lives-  jobs, the utility services we use,  healthcare, entertainment, travel and ultimately what and how we eat and who we marry and how we raise our children. This is not a distant, dystopian nightmare, but something that we well might face in the coming decades considering the pace at which AI is developing and evolving.

Prominent people from different walks of life have been expressing their concerns about the dangers posed by the growing advances in AI technology. Tech and EV entrepreneur Elon Musk, for example, wants the use of AI heavily regulated, as it may end up being an existential threat to humans. To him, the improvement of artificial intelligence is no less than "summoning the devil"[1]. Cognitive professor, Gary Marcus on the other hand believes that that day may come when AI-powered machines might commence a battle over resources with humans to ensure the survival of the former. Renowned author James Barrat has even written a book whose title reads- "Our Final Invention; Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era." The most famous physicist of recent times Stephen Hawking has this to say about the immense danger posed by AI, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race”[2]

The breadth and sweep of the impact of AI on humans is going to be immense in the years ahead and will no doubt benefit us in myriad ways in the foreseeable future. It will help with things like complex decision-making, reasoning, high-level analytics, pattern recognition, speech recognition, language recognition and the translation of languages. We shall see its deployment across communities, vehicles, buildings and utilities, as well as business processes and farms saving us valuable time and money and empowering individuals to live fuller lives. It could also benefit our healthcare systems and transform the formal and informal educational systems.

All of this would be very well till the time AI is under human control, but what about the day that it breaks free of that and exercises its own free will based on what it thinks should be its priorities? In creating AI have we unwittingly created a Frankenstein's monster?

 

 

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[1] https://time.com/3614349/artificial-intelligence-singularity-stephen-hawking-elon-musk/

[2] https://time.com/3614349/artificial-intelligence-singularity-stephen-hawking-elon-musk/

 

Time for India to gain back its position as the richest country in the world

 

Photo by Sohel Patel: https://www.pexels.com/photo/50-indian-rupee-banknote-68912/

To the woke-liberal lot any assertion that India was once the richest country in the world will evoke hysterical laughter and probably a familiar jibe that it was impossible for India to ever have been the proverbial soney ki chidya (golden bird). But facts speak otherwise. India was indisputably the largest economy in the world between the first century AD and the seventeenth century AD accounting for one third or one fourth of global wealth. India’s GDP in 1700, in terms of 1990 international dollars was $90,750 as compared to $82,800 of China’s and $83,395 for the whole of Western Europe. Considering that the world GDP in that year was $371,369, India’s share of the global economy was an astounding 24.43%.[1]

What caused the downfall?

From a high of more than 24% of the world economy in 1700 to 4% of global GDP at the end of British rule, India’s fall from its preeminent position at the top to the very bottom was a direct consequence of the pernicious impact of colonial rule. Britain’s rise to be the largest empire ever known to mankind occurred during the course of its 200 year rule in India and was financed by the wholesale looting of India and the asset stripping of its economy. It is not surprising that the Hindi word loot meaning large scale theft, made its way to the English language. Evidence of that loot can still be found in the museums, private collections and imperial treasury of modern Britain. The most emblematic of this is the famed Kohinoor diamond.

So thoroughly did the British devastate and enervate the Indian economy that even today, seventy six years after independence, large numbers of its people suffer from poverty, lack of access to clean drinking water, access to healthcare and education. That is not to take away from the vast change that has come over the country, which is now acknowledged as a global economic power boasting the fifth largest economy in the world having overtaken its erstwhile colonial master Britain.

It has seen the emergence of a 432 million strong middle class (2020-21 figures) which is expected to hit 1.66 billion in 2047.[2] Creditably as many as 415 million people were lifted out of poverty in 15 years between 2005 and 2021[3]. India is a technology and space powerhouse that commands global respect for its accomplishments. Its diaspora has reached every part of the globe with people of Indian origin reaching the highest positions in corporations and governments of some of the leading first world nations. India also has a sizeable military which acts as a force of global stability-something that was evidenced by India’s naval operations against international pirates in the Arabian Sea region.

Can India become the richest country in the world again?

At a time when most people in the world expect China to replace the US as the numero uno nation, it is important to remember that India was largely a bigger economy of the two in the years leading up to the colonial era. Given the slew of recent bad news trickling out of China, in terms of its collapsing demographics and slowing down industries, India which is the fastest growing large economy in the world with a much younger demographic profile stands a good chance of racing ahead in the not so distant future.

India is one of the very few countries in the world that not only grows enough food to feed its own people, but also export it. Besides, its geographical position that allows it to straddle the important sea routes that pass below its peninsula means that it will never be vulnerable, when it comes to sourcing its energy supplies.

What do the facts state? An Ernst and Young report suggests that India could become a $26 trillion economy by 2047, boasting a per capita income of more than $15000 by then?[4] Goldman Sachs on the other hand predicts that India will become the world’s second largest economy by 2075, overtaking the US in the process.[5] A study by Citi Group actually expects India to be the largest economy in the world by 2050 with an $85.97 trillion GDP by Purchasing Power Parity, followed by China at $80.02 trillion and the US at $39.07 trillion. That will translate to a per capita income of more than $50,000 per capita income considering the nation’s population to be 1.63 billion.[6]

Will India do it? It’s not going to be easy. But it has done it in the past and held on to that position for a millennium and a half. It is said that what goes around comes around. It is India’s time now. Let it rise and rise.

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[1] https://cgijeddah.gov.in/web_files/267622636-History-of-Indian-Economy.pdf

[2] https://www.business-standard.com/economy/news/indian-middle-class-will-nearly-double-to-61-by-2046-47-price-report-123070500864_1.html

[3] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/415-million-people-exited-poverty-in-india-in-15-years-un-report/articleshow/101678289.cms

[4] https://assets.ey.com/content/dam/ey-sites/ey-com/en_in/topics/india-at-100/2023/01/ey-india-at-100-executive-summary.pdf

[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/10/india-to-become-worlds-second-largest-economy-by-2075-goldman-sachs.html

[6] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-commentary/with-85-trillion-how-india-can-become-worlds-largest-economy/articleshow/10699821.cms