Oil And Water

Scarcity of oil and rising petroleum prices, and climate change driven drought, are a big deal. But there are fairly clear paths by which our society can adapt to both. Neither would be apocalyptic, even though it would drive significant, visible changes in our day to day material culture.

These matters are particularly worth thinking about on Earth Day, which is today.

Oil

A very large share of all petroleum consumption is for transportation, mostly cars, trucks, construction vehicles, boats, ships, and trains. Advances in battery technology, and EV manufacturing and infrastructure are making electric vehicle alternatives to all of those technologically viable. And, advances in renewable energy and nuclear power can replace almost all of the fossil fuels in the electrical power grid. Coal is well on its way to be phased out in the United States and much of the developed world. Alaska and Hawaii are the only U.S. states where a significant share of electricity is generated from petroleum. Heat pumps are paving the way as an alternative to heating buildings that were historically heated with heating oil in the U.S. (mostly in the Northeast). 

Heat pumps and evaporative coolers (together with better insulation) also dramatically more energy efficient than conventional air conditioning, and renewables like solar and wind combined with modern batteries are particularly well suited to meet the demand for electricity to provide cooling.

Lots of fertilizers that are petroleum based could also become unaffordable, as they have as global petroleum supplies have been interrupted by U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, and its counterattacks. But organic farming techniques are now well established enough that these methods pose an obvious alternative path for agriculture is petroleum based fertilizers cease to become economically viable. Dutch models of intensive hydroponic agriculture suggests another off ramp from what is now considered conventional agriculture.

There are some applications where there aren't good alternatives to petroleum, like plastics and jet fuel. But these are such a small share of total petroleum consumption that these uses could be sustained, even if they become more expensive, even if petroleum prices soar and the supplies contract greatly. 

Of course, plastics and petroleum based fabrics like nylon, have only been in wide use for about sixty years. If plastic becomes too expensive, we can revert to using metal, glass, wood, and plant and animal fiber alternatives for applications like kitchen ware and trash bins that aren't uniquely suited to plastic, as traditional alternatives becomes more affordable relative to plastic with rising petroleum prices.

The changes wouldn't be geographically neutral. A collapse in demand for petroleum driving by electric vehicles and organic farming would crush the economies of petrostates in the Middle East, in Brunei, in Nigeria, in Venezuela, and in select states within the United States. West Virginia has already seen its coal based economy collapse, as have many historically coal mining economy based regions in Europe. Wyoming will follow suit. 

On the other hand, rare earth rich areas who supply key components of modern batteries and electronics, may see mineral economy booms.

Water

In most of the arid west, marginal agricultural activity consumes 80%-90% of all fresh water, while landscaping and golf courses consume about half of the rest of the fresh water. If water becomes scarce, entire regions can eliminate their water hungry landscaping, golf courses can close or become much more expensive or use artificial grass, and marginal agricultural operations can close.

In places like the Arabian Peninsula, Greece, Utah, and California, desalination technology might become more prominent as a water source, at least for high value municipal waters uses like drinking, cooking, and bathing, and gray water systems would use non-potable water (such as salt water from the ocean or salt water lakes) in applications where drinkability wasn't important, like flushing toilets.

Climate change that produces global warming ultimately both gives and takes away arable land. It renders much of the arid West unsuitable for farming and ranching, but makes places that were too cold for farming in the past, more suitable for it. Even when climate change doesn't actually change the total amount of arable land somewhere, it may change the kind of agriculture that is appropriate in that place.

Places that used to support subtropical orange groves may freeze more often and get dryer and become more suitable for cotton and the soft wheat varieties currently grown in places north of Florida in the American South. Crops now grown in the South might start to be grown in the Midwest. The abundant corn and wheat fields of the Great Plains and Midwest might move north to Canada. The Great Plains might transition from grain farming to cattle grazing.

I'm not a climate scientist. I don't have exact models of exactly when and where climate zones that are suitable for particular crops and livestock will relocate. But that's the basic concept.

The ongoing wars across the Sahel of Africa illustrate how ugly the process of having herders ecologically forced into historically horticultural land can be without strong geographically large states to force the transition to be made with money instead of violence can look. But with strong states that remove violence as a viable option, the transition, while still massively disruptive, could be less tragic in places like North America and Western Europe.

Similarly, the skiing industry might relocate from places like Colorado and Vermont to places like the Yukon and Alaska, in North American, and from places like the Alps in Europe to the northern Urals and the Himalayas in Eurasia.

Many Sunbelt communities in places like Arizona and Texas and Florida may see the waves of migration to avoid the cold winters of the north replaced by migration north to avoid the months of hundred degree plus water in the Sunbelt which are already commonplace in cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, while the rust belt, with its winters made milder due to global warming and abundant fresh water, may start to look more attractive, and may attract mass return migrations.

One of these days, people in the Sunbelt may return to the traditional solution of having midday siestas, inside cooler, shaded adobe insulated homes, and becoming more active once the sun goes down and the air cools late into the evening.

Coastal communities will have to build dikes or lose land area as sea levels rise, and many will have to remake their architectural landscape in the face of increasingly severe storms, something that will hit the U.S. states of Florida and Louisiana and some islands in Oceania particularly hard.

Species limited to narrow microenvironment ranges will go extinct en masse, as human encroachment upon their habitats, ecological disruption, and human predation have already done to many species already.

How fast will it happen?

We are, in 2026, at about the place on this path that we thought we'd be in the year 2006, back in 1986. Events like the transitions to EVs and heat pumps and renewables and industrial scale organic farming happened, but it took about twice as long as futurists at the time thought that it would.

Climate change, on the other hand, is happening faster than expected by a decade or three. The changes that were initially looking like they would take a century to run their course are now looking like they will occur in half of that time.

Certainly, these transitions are medium to long run trends. They will probably takes decades more to run their course. These transitions probably won't be complete in my lifetime, although they probably will run their course in the lives of my children, or at least, in the lives of my future grandchildren. Less poetically, this time frame is about 30-90 years.

But these trends are both massive and inexorable, like plate tectonics but much, much faster. Fast enough that it will be visible in future tree ring records.

Conclusion

These are huge, traumatic changes that will force mass migrations and fundamental changes in people's day to day culture. But they don't mean the end of modern life as we know it either. And falling birthrates will eventually lead to smaller global and regional populations that put less strain on scarce water and fossil fuel resources.

Matter Is Binary

 

For those of you who are literal minded, this is a metaphor.

What Is New Under The Sun?

Some things in our era have genuinely never happened before in human history.

1. There have been few times in history where a smaller percentage of the global population has been subject to rule by hereditary monarchs and aristocrats with actual power.

2. Big cities are bigger than they have ever been. And, there are far more cities of any given size than there were not so long ago.

3. Science has never been so advanced, we have never understood the universe and our world better.

4. Technology is at an all time peak.

5. The world, measured in the time it takes to communicate to distant places and to travel there, has never been smaller.

6. We have been to space and still have people in space, something that is very recent indeed.

7. It hasn't been all that long that we have lived in an era where no one knows how everything works, and indeed, no one knows how everything the deal with in their daily lives works.

8. It hasn't been very long that almost all children live to become adults.

9. It has only been quite recently that large shares of the global population are not religious.

10. It has not been very long that many many millions of people, are familiar with the foods and music found almost everywhere in the world.

11. Computers and artificial intelligence have only been remotely so powerful very briefly.

12. The percentage of the global population that lives in slavery is near an all time low.

13. Average global temperatures are the highest that they have been, at least, since modern humans left Africa, and everyone was a hunter-gatherer.

14. We have more control over our reproduction in the last eighty years than in any era that preceded us.

15. We are the most educated people, on average, that have ever lived.

16. We have for a brief time, been the only people who have the power to destroy the world and end our species.

17. We have consumed energy so abundantly only briefly.

18. The population of the world is the highest it has ever been, and close to the highest it is likely to ever be.

19. Our power to health with medical knowledge and technology has never been greater.

20. We are continuing a brief period in which we are the source of unprecedented rapid mass extinctions.

Bingo Cards

What unusual or exceptional events could happen in this administration (i.e. "what's on my Bingo Card")?

1. The Trump Administration could decide to deliberately default on the federal debt (perhaps only if owed to selective perceived enemies).

2. The U.S. Supreme Court could adopt the President's fringe unitary executive theory.

3. The U.S. Supreme Court could affirm the validity of the President's Alien Enemy Act declaration, perhaps by holding that it is non-justiciable.

4. The U.S. Supreme Court could affirm a contemplated Insurrection Act declaration, perhaps by holding that it is non-justiciable.

5. The U.S. Supreme Court could hold that the impoundment act in unconstitutional.

6. Congress could repeal Trump's authority to impose tariffs.

7. Trump could die of natural causes.

8. Trump could be assassinated.

9. Other leading Trump administration officials could be assassinated.

10. The U.S. Supreme Court could declare Trump's tariffs to be illegal or invalid under a variety of legal theories.

11. The Republican Party could suffer a crushing defeat in the 2026 elections.

12. The 2026 elections could be cancelled or postponed.

13. Elon Musk could lose his billionaire status after having been the richest man in the world this year.

14. China could invade Taiwan.

15. China could start providing arms to Russia (it already seems to have provided 150 mercenaries).

16. Volcanos and earthquakes could enter a sustained period of high activity.

17. Martial law could be declared.

18. There could be a military coup attempt in the U.S.

19. There could be an unprecedented wave of farm bankruptcies.

20. A trade war with China and/or an invasion of Taiwan could bankrupt Apple.

21. A serious Ebola-class foreign pathogen could lead to a U.S. outbreak.

22. There is a Kent State-like incident of anti-Trump protesters being killed.

23. The U.S. Supreme Court upholds state laws making it illegal to be transgender.

24. Southern Florida experiences Hurricane Katrina-class flooding that leads to permanent large population reductions in some areas.

25. The U.S. invades Mexico militarily over Mexican objections leading to military clashes with Mexico.

26. The U.S. invades Greenland triggering a NATO response.

27. There is a terrorist attack on Trump's proposed military parade in D.C.

28. Marsupial tigers are revived.

29. Insider trading in Trump's inner circle is definitively established and not prosecuted.

30. Trump gets divorced again.

31. Trump declares (falsely) on national TV that aliens are real and that the U.S. government has been in contact with them.

32. The Smithsonian Museum is mostly shut down and its collections are destroyed.

33. Trump sponsors new Confederate monuments in Washington D.C.

34. The U.S. leaves NATO.

35. The 2028 election is cancelled.

A Clean Slate For Property Rights, Entities, Federalism, And Related Matters

There are some economic and legal reforms which are hard to make now, but starting with a clean slate would have been better to have made differently, or which are just structural reforms.

Mineral Rights And Water Rights

* All mineral rights should be owned by the government and merely leased by firms exploiting them.

* The rights of surface owners of land over mineral rights leased by the government should follow the Colorado rule (which requires underground mining that preserves the rights to support of the surface owners) and not the Wyoming rule (which permits strip mining).

* All water rights should be owned by the government and leased annually to water users. All water users in the same watershed would pay the same lease rate based upon an auction. Market failures and transaction costs cause inefficient overallocation of water at very cheap prices to agricultural users to the detriment of fishing, recreational use, and municipal water use.

* Grazing land would be primarily publicly owned with the right to graze cattle on open ranges leased.

Wildlife Management

* To the extent possible, management of wildlife populations with natural predators, like bears, wolves, and mountain lions, would be preferred to hunting.

Real Property Rights

* Legal life estates and other present and future interests in real property should not be permitted. Someone wishing to create the equivalent to a life estate could establish a trust in which some beneficiaries had equitable life estates and others had equitable remainder interests. Existing legal life estates could be deemed to be trusts in which the present interest holder is the trustee for the benefit of themselves and all future interest holders.

* The race-notice statute should be modified so that a person with an interest in real property created by a written instrument could only benefit from the notice provisions for up to four months from the date of the instrument to gain priority over a recorded instrument creating rights in land. Written instruments creating an interest in real property that are more than four years old would be subordinate to the rights of the owners and encumbrances of record.

* Judgment liens would be possible to record against all real property in the state owned by a debtor in a single state filing.

* Ancillary probate of real estate would be replaced with a requirement to give full faith and credit to an executor, personal representative, or administrator appointed in the place of domicile, subject only to state homestead exemptions.

Property Taxes

* Education would be funded through state income, sales, and gifts and estate taxes, not through local property taxes.

* Non-profits, including churches and state government property, would not be exempt from property taxes, but state government property would be assessed at the state level rather than at the local level.

* Property tax assessors, and state and county treasurers, would be civil service appointments, not elected.

Limited Liability Entities and Judgment Liens

* Ownership interests in entities would have to be recorded with a state registrar, although this information would only be available to interested parties. 

* Trusts would be registered with the state registrar rather than with courts of probate jurisdiction.

* Trusts and estates would be treated as entities for state law purposes.

* Judgment liens should be possible to record against all interests in entities in a state with a single state filing.

* All limited liability entities would be required to be bonded against the claims of trade creditors and insured to standards established by regulation, with the bonding agent and insurers made a matter of public record. The directors, officers, managers, and partners of the entity would have joint and several personal liability for any failure to do so, guaranteed by the owners if they, collectively, were unable to satisfy any debts of the company that should have been bonded or insured.

Local v. State Authority

* Occupational licensing in the construction trades, and building codes, should be regulated at the state level, rather than the local level.

* Local governments should not be permitted to have their own courts and instead would enforce their rights, including ordinance violations, in the appropriate state courts.

* Local governments should not be permitted to enact ordinances for which incarceration is a penalty, other than contempt of court punishments for violations of injunctions previously imposed against a particular defendant in a state court proceeding brought by the local government against that particular defendant.

* Zoning and use regulation by local governments would be limited at the state level.

Copyrights and Intellectual Property

* Copyrights should have a much shorter term, such as the pre-1976 rule of 26 years from publication and an additional 26 years if a copyright registration is renewed, which a separate regime protecting the exclusive right of the authors to publish and register unpublished works. Works not published within 26 years of the death of the author would be in the public domain. This might be accomplished with a one time buyout of existing copyrights more than 52 years old at fair market value or a nominal amount for unmarketed and unappraised copyrights.

* There would be mandatory licensing of copyrighted works, handled by one or more non-profits for performances of all musical works, all orphan works, translations of works for which had not been translated into a particular language pursuant to a license within some designated period of time after the publication of the work in its original language, and almost all other derivative works.

* The scope of the derivative work right for copyrights would be greatly narrowed.

* Statutory damages for copyright violations would be abolished. Economic damages for copyright violations would be limited to unjust enrichment relative to licensing the work, or lost profits relative to licensing the work, whichever was greater.

* Common law trademark rights in trademarks not registered in the principal register under the Lanham Act (including rights under state trademark filings) would be exclusively a matter of federal law.

* Rights of publicity would be exclusively a matter of federal law.

* Royalty income from intellectual property would be taxable where the sale giving rise to the transfer takes place, not where the owner of the intellectual property is domiciled.

Federal Court Jurisdiction

* Federal court diversity jurisdiction not involving international diversity would be abolished.

* Federal question jurisdiction in cases between private parties not involving other specific grants of federal court jurisdiction (e.g. in the cases of intellectual property, civil rights, certain class actions, and election law cases) would be abolished.

* Federal crimes for matters that can be prosecuted under state law, like bank robbery, intrastate controlled substances violations, and most murders, would be repealed.

* Felonies committed in Indian Country would be governed by new Indian Country District Courts and a U.S. Court of Appeals for Indian Country, and a related Indian Country law enforcement agency, rather than by the relevant U.S. attorney's office and the FBI.

* The lowest level immigration offense of illegal entry would be made a civil offense governed primarily by the immigration courts, and decriminalized (this makes up a significant share of the total criminal docket in many U.S. District Courts).

* The immigration courts would be reformed and made Article III courts. A right to an attorney at public expense would be established in the immigration courts.

Sunday Musings

 * The United States is deeply politically and culturally divided, and it has had a few political dynasties. But, ultimately, the U.S. has at least largely resisted the hereditary principle and clan politics. We have oligarchies of big corporations, but those big successful corporations, while not entirely free of it, are not hotbeds of nepotism either. Father to son CEO succession happens, but it is rare, and tends to happen second tier businesses not in big national S&P 500 companies.

* We are approaching a point where it may make sense to declare war on both Iran and its proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq. The Houthis have directed piracy and missiles at commercial ships in the Red Sea and their insurgency has led to one of the worst famines in the world in Southern Yemen which has historically been the bread belt of Arabia. (It is worth nothing that both sides of the civil war in Yemen are united in their hate for the United States.) Hamas carried out the October 7 attack and has continued a suicidal response by Gazans to Israeli retaliation. Hezbollah in Lebanon has been lobbing artillery and missiles as Israel for decades. Iranian missiles recently killed a detachment of U.S. troops in Jordan. Iran has fired several hundred missiles at Israel in the last few days, has been in multiple skirmishes with U.S. Navy forces in the Persian Gulf, and has terrorized commercial traffic in the Persian Gulf.

* The U.S., admittedly, plays an important part in Iran's ascendancy. U.S. support for the Shah in Iran played an important rule in the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran that put the current regime in place. Sanctions the U.S. pushed for caused Iran to develop its own domestic military production (something similar happened as a result of sanctions in Israel, in South Africa, and in Turkey), and also pushed Iran into Russia and North Korea's circle of allies. U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan defanged Iran's neighbors who were among its greatest military adversaries. Dislodging the neo-Communist dictatorship in Iraq opened the door to Iranian backed Shiite party political gains there. Encouraging Arab Spring revolutions in Syria contributed to the Syrian Civil War that still isn't over and has created a vacuum for Iranian backed militias there.

* Golf courses are a waste of water in the arid west:

About 1% of total Colorado water consumption goes toward golf courses (this is about 5% of non-agricultural water use):

In its 2021 economic and environmental impact report, the Colorado Golf Coalition, a collection of state organizations, reported that the industry’s water consumption represents less than 1% of the state’s 2018 total — 41,213 acre-feet, compared with 4.7 million acre-feet for agriculture, the largest consumer.

It also touts the positive environmental impact of its more than 33,000 acres of greenspace statewide, of which a little more than 16,000 acres constitute irrigated turfgrass, species like bluegrass that can endure high traffic and low mowing heights ideal for golf. That’s more than 17% less irrigated acreage than in 2002.

By region, the courses in the Denver metropolitan area account for more than 43% of the irrigated acreage. Since the 2002 measurements, Colorado courses have increased use of reclaimed water and significantly reduced use of municipal sources.

Still, golf courses have joined lawns as targets for restrictions in places like Aurora, where Mayor Mike Coffman invoked the “new reality” of water scarcity in Colorado in support of a proposed ban on new courses — unless they employ the buffalo and blue grama long a staple on the Eastern Plains — as the city looks at limiting grass yards, medians and decorative office park areas.

In fairness, golf courses in the arid west have made very significant efforts to reduce their water consumption; far more significant efforts than agricultural users have.

* Agriculture and evaporation consume all but 18% of water in the Colorado River basin (and that 18% includes a significant portion for lawns and golf courses). About 70% of agricultural water is used for cattle feed, mostly alfalfa and to a lesser extent hay, according to a Denver Post analysis:

* Despite its immense water use, agriculture is almost economically irrelevant in Colorado.

* According to Denver Water, household water used breaks down as follows:

54% landscaping

13% toilets

11% laundry

10% showers and baths

6% faucets

5% leaks

1% dishwashers

* The Southwest is, however, a naturally ideal place for solar energy (and it doesn't hurt that a lot of the electricity demand there is for air conditioning which coincides with solar energy availability):

* This week I learned that there are both role playing games and video games in which the protagonist that you play is a bird.

* It turns out that a certain part of Poland is the heartland of ketchup production (a widely used product there):

The Polish Ketchup Belt is a narrow lane between the 51.5N and 52.5N parallels where almost all ketchup production in Poland is concentrated. (Source)

* Ukraine has made strikes deep into Russian territory:

It is 755 kilometers from Ukraine to Moscow and there are numerous Russian refineries and oil storage sites to attack along the way. Ukraine has been attacking those oil facilities and . . . the damage to oil facilities and other targets has been so great that Russia has had to ration how much fuel civilian and military users can get. It is estimated that the Ukrainian attacks destroyed twelve percent of Russia’s oil refining capability.

* Bible reading has recently fallen dramatically in the U.S.:

 * Coal use is up globally, despite falling in the U.S., the U.K., and a number of European countries, due predominantly to new coal fired power plants in Asia:

Greece's failure to tap into its abundant wind power capacity and its near ideal geography for electric cars, baffles me. The same can be said for Hawaii.

* Turkish people drink a lot of tea.

* According to data cited the Economist magazine, South Korea has an intense "glass-ceiling" for women in the workplace, which surprises me. I had thought that the situation for South Korean women who didn't marry or had kids was pretty good.

* Early 19th century grave robbing was driven by incentives you wouldn't expect:

At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. Plowing and construction are usually the culprits behind missing historical remains, but they can’t explain the loss here. How did so many bones up and vanish?

In a new book, an international team of historians and archaeologists argues the bones were depleted by industrial-scale grave robbing. The introduction of phosphates for fertilizer and bone char as an ingredient in beet sugar processing at the beginning of the 19th century transformed bones into a hot commodity. Skyrocketing prices prompted raids on mass graves across Europe—and beyond.

* In the Netherlands, the interest rate on a particular mortgage fall over time to reflect the reduced risk of loss to lenders as the debt to equity ratio falls as principal is paid off and real estate appreciates in value. But, this also disincentivizes selling one home to move to another, or refinancing.

* Average hourly wages vary greatly across Europe:

* In Ray Bradbury's short story "All Summer In A Day": "The children let Margot out of the locked closet at the end of "All Summer in a Day." They had locked her inside while the teacher was elsewhere, making Margot miss the sun, which only comes out every seven years." It was a story the affected me greatly as a child and still does.

* Skunks are an American thing. The skunk family (Mephitidae) consists of 13 species, and almost all are restricted to the Western Hemisphere, reaching from Southern Canada to the Strait of Magellan in South America. The exception is the Stink Badger which can be found in Indonesia.

* Gasoline prices, adjusted for inflation, are similar or lower now than they were in 2006. U.S. mortgage interest rates are middling by historical standards and historically low rate until recently may have helped drive up real estate prices:

* High rise office buildings are plummeting in value.

* There were once more than 9,000 Blockbuster video stores. There is now one, in Bend, Oregon.

* What's better with Jalapeños?

1. Pizza.
2. Beer.
3. Lemonaide.

* Humans are basically fish in flesh suits and our blood is a decent approximation of sea water. An image gets across the concept:

*  There ought to be a law disqualifying judges from deciding cases involving the person who appointed them as a party (in the appointing person's personal, as opposed to their official, capacity).

* Trump does not have legitimate defenses in the classified documents criminal case against him, despite the fact that a judge he appointed seemed to be "confused" about this point.

Potential Approaches To Genetic Engineering

We are fast approaching the point where the transhumanist goal of intentionally modifying humans to further our own objectives with tools that include genetic engineering is possible.

There are several approaches that could be taken to doing this that are easier and less sophisticated than simply synthesizing whole genomes, or large parts of them from scratch. And, these are the approaches the would probably dominate the early days of transhumanist genetic engineering that seeks to improve the human genome. 

Of course, each approach also comes with its own particular risks. The risks mostly flow from the fact that biological systems are highly interrelated and tweaking any one part of them can have unintended consequences if we don't perfectly understand those interrelationships (which will probably won't for the foreseeable future).

Fixing Existing Simple Genetic Disorders

The first wave of genetic engineering, which is just starting to be utilized medically, is to change single genes that cause Medellin genetic disorders like sickle cell anemia or achromatopsia, to cure these disorders.

This is among the lowest risk forms of genetic engineering. A known harm is alleviated. But it isn't completely without side effects. The sickle cell anemia gene also creates resistance to malaria when only one rather than two copies of it are present. But removing this benefit from someone's descendants is a small price to pay in someone who had sickle cell anemia and doesn't live in a place where malaria is a problem (or when someone who can be protected from malaria by other means such as a malaria vaccine).

Purging Recessive Genetic Disorder Genes

Everyone has some recessive genes for genetic disorders. And, as long as you don't have children with someone else who has the same recessive genes, this is basically harmless.

The main reason that inbreeding is fitness reducing is that it increases that likelihood that a couple's children will end up with both copies of recessive genes for genetic disorders.

But, in addition to genetic engineering to remove genes that cause genetic disorders from people who already have genetic disorders, essentially the same approach could be used to remove recessive genes that cause genetic disorders from people who are merely carriers for those genetic disorders.

This might be particularly attractive for participants in a space colonization mission that would have a low effective population size and, necessarily, a higher inbreeding coefficient.

This kind of genetic engineering is particularly low risk, because we would be replacing the recessive gene known to present a risk of a genetic disorder, with genes found in the vast majority of the population that are known to be harmless.

Genetic Engineering With Existing Human Coding Genes

It is elementary that there is genetic diversity among humans. Some people have genes that make you tall or smart. Other people have genes that make you short or stupid. People have different blood types, different skin and eye and hair colors, different skin and hair textures, different ability to tolerate high altitudes, etc.

One fairly straightforward, if not necessarily technically easy, form of genetic engineering is to take genes from people who have a desirable genetic trait and place them in people who do not have that trait (often replacing a gene that codes an alternative to that trait).

In other words, basically doing that same thing that could be accomplished with selective breeding, but much more rapidly, directly, and precisely.

This is higher risk than simply removing recessive genes that cause genetic mutations (and even the example of sickle cell anemia which also confers malaria resistance illustrates the trade offs of that), because it could be that a known desirable gene interacts with other genes in an important unknown way that is disrupted when the known desirable gene is transplanted. But it is still lower risk than giving someone a gene that isn't found in humans at all.

Tweaking Top Level Designs That Utilize Existing Coding Genes

Our DNA devotes lots of its coding genes to the blueprints for a mix of proteins, and how to combine those proteins into particular kinds of tissues, and how to combine those tissues into particular organs and structures in the human body. By comparison, our DNA devotes a far smaller share of our genome to specifying which organs and structures go where, and how many of those structures we have.

A genetic modification that hacks this small portion of our DNA governing which organs and structures go where and how many of them we have could create noticeable macroscopically observable changes with comparatively minor tweaks to our DNA and with less risk of adverse side effects on the complex, multifaceted biochemical interrelationships of other parts of our bodies.

For example, a tweak to our DNA that gave us four figures or six, instead of five, would be much easier to accomplish than a tweak to our DNA that gave humans the organ that electric eels use to create electromagnetic shocks which we don't have the blueprints for in our genome.

Similarly, tweaks to our DNA to give us an extra pair of eyes in the sides of our heads, or an extra pair of kidneys, or to rearrange the location of the internal organs in our torsos, ought to be possible with a fairly modest amount of DNA modification.

Genetic Engineering With Pseudo-Genes

Pseudo-genes are genes in our DNA that are no longer part of our coding DNA and have been deactivated by mutations.

At this point, their main practical use is that they allow us to trace historically what genes organisms have lost due to mutations, approximately when that happened, and what those genes looked like immediately prior to being deactivated.

For example, one deactivated gene allowed predecessors to primates to produce their own Vitamin C, which was no longer critical since fruit supplied it. Another allowed us to better break down uric acid in our blood, which has bad aspects since this can cause gout, but also helps us turn fructose into fat which helps us weather fruit scarcity in the winter. We've also lost taste receptors for bitter tastes, in part, because we've learned to distinguish safe and unsafe plants culturally so we don't need the receptors as much.

The thing about pseudo-genes, though, is that often a single slight mutation can undo the mutation that deactivated them in the first place, can reactivate the ability of the pseudo-gene to make the very complex molecule that was genetic fitness enhancing at some point in our evolutionary history.

Mutations that reactive pseudo-genes are extremely rare as a matter of random chance. But if one is engaged in intentional genetic engineering in order to do a transhuman biohack because you believe that the pseudo-gene might be fitness enhancing at our current level of technology and in current environmental conditions, it would often be easier to reactivate a pseudo-gene than it would be to insert all of the genetic code necessary to code a molecule into someone's DNA with a much more complex custom designed retrovirus.

A catalog of pseudo-genes in humans is basically a menu of biological functions that could easily be added to people with a simple biohack.

The risk here is that pseudo-genes were usually purged from the genome to the point of fixation for a fitness enhancing reason. Sometimes the circumstance that enhanced fitness at the time is no longer present, but sometimes it is and we just don't understand it well enough.

Another possibility to consider is that if much of the 90% of the human genome that is non-coding really is literally "junk DNA" that doesn't serve any fitness enhancing function, there might be some form of benefit to simply purging it from our genomes.

The risk of purging junk DNA, of course, is that some of it might have purposes that we just don't understand yet that are still important. So far as we know, simply having junk that does nothing in our DNA isn't a big problem.

Genetic Engineering With Exogenes

Another categories of genes that code molecules which are out there are genes that aren't present in either the coding or non-coding DNA of humans, but are present as coding DNA in other organisms. I don't actually know what the proper scientific name for them is, but I'll call them for convenience in this post, "exogenes."

Suppose, for example, that a honey bee produces a pheromone not found in human genes or pseudo-genes that it would be nice for humans to have. You could cut that gene out of the honey bee genome, splice it onto a retrovirus, infect a human with that retrovirus, and then that human and that human's descendants could produce that pheromone too.

Of course, inserting exogenes into a human could potentially be harmful in all sorts of hard to see ways, because we have no good way of knowing if the exogenes are incompatible with our existing genome until we try it.

Genetic Engineering With Derived Genes

There are some genes in humans that share a common ancestor with different genes in another species, even though the human genes now code for a different molecule with a different purpose than the non-human gene with which it shares a common ancestor.

For example, some of the biochemicals in human saliva are derived from the same ancestral biochemicals that evolved in some snakes into a kink of snake venom.

If you wanted to make it possible for humans to produce that venom, it might be easier to genetically modify human DNA that makes those biochemicals in saliva into DNA that produces snake venom, than it would be to insert the entire snake venom exogene into a human through a much larger retrovirus than one that would merely tweak our existing salvia biochemical gene.

This is less risky that a straight out exogene, because humans already have something similar, but it is still far from risk free.

For example, maybe snakes have genes that give them immunity from their own venom, in addition to the genes that create the venom, that a human with a tweaked salvia gene that creates the same venom would not have.

Small Tweaks To Create Chemically Similar Molecules

Similar to genetic engineering of genes with a common origin is genetic engineering of genes that produce a molecule that is chemically similar to another molecule, even if the genes that produce the two different biochemicals do not share a recent common origin.

For example, the caffein molecule and the chocolate molecule differ by only a single atom. So, it probably wouldn't be too hard to engineer a cocoa bean that was caffeinated instead of chocolaty, or a coffee bean that was chocolaty instead of caffeinated.

The general concern about unintended consequences that is present throughout genetic engineering is present here, but to the extent that tweak is small, and we understand what the purpose of the molecule being tweaked is in the original organism, the risk can be fairly modest.

Alternate Food History

A great many useful domesticated food plants come from a small number of source wild types that have been bioengineered through selective breeding and hybridization to produce the variety we see today. Many of the wild types involved in this process actually have a quite narrow geographic range in nature.

This post is a reminder to myself to follow up further to consider what other species of plants might have had similar domestication histories if these wild type plants had not been available.

One historical example is the alternate set of domesticates, now largely unknown to the general public, that developed in what is now the Southeast United States before it came into contact with the Meso-American domesticate package of maize, beans, and squash.

The family Rosaceae includes herbs, shrubs, and trees. Most species are deciduous, but some are evergreen. They have a worldwide range but are most diverse in the Northern Hemisphere.

Many economically important products come from the Rosaceae, including various edible fruits, such as apples, pears, quinces, apricots, plums, cherries, peaches, raspberries, blackberries, loquats, strawberries, rose hips, hawthorns, and almonds. The family also includes popular ornamental trees and shrubs, such as roses, meadowsweets, rowans, firethorns, and photinias.

From Wikipedia.

Brassica oleracea is a plant species from family Brassicaceae that includes many common cultivars used as vegetables, such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, Savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan.

Its uncultivated form, wild cabbage, native to coastal southern and western Europe, is a hardy plant with high tolerance for salt and lime. However, its intolerance of competition from other plants typically restricts its natural occurrence to limestone sea cliffs, like the chalk cliffs on both sides of the English Channel.

From Wikipedia. 

Citrus plants are native to subtropical and tropical regions of Asia, Island Southeast Asia, Near Oceania, and northeastern Australia. Domestication of citrus species involved much hybridization and introgression, leaving much uncertainty about when and where domestication first happened.  

A genomic, phylogenic, and biogeographical analysis by Wu et al. (2018) has shown that the center of origin of the genus Citrus is likely the southeast foothills of the Himalayas, in a region stretching from eastern Assam, northern Myanmar, to western Yunnan. . . .

Ancestral species:

Citrus maxima – Pomelo

Citrus medica – Citron

Citrus reticulata – Mandarin orange

Citrus micrantha – a papeda

Citrus hystrix – Kaffir lime

Citrus cavaleriei – Ichang papeda

Citrus japonica – Kumquat

Important hybrids:

Citrus × aurantiifolia – Key lime

Citrus × aurantium – Bitter orange

Citrus × latifolia – Persian lime

Citrus × limon – Lemon

Citrus × limonia – Rangpur

Citrus × paradisi – Grapefruit

Citrus × sinensis – Sweet orange

Citrus × tangerina – Tangerine

See also below for other species and hybrids. 

From Wikipedia. 

Dog IQ

Everything you wanted to know, but were afraid to ask, about dog IQ.

Researchers from the University of Helsinki assessed the cognitive abilities of over 1,000 dogs from 13 breeds with ten tests. Border Collies scored at or near the top in social cognition, inhibitory control, and spatial problem-solving ability, while Labrador Retrievers scored near the bottom. While prior research has shown that a dog's breed isn't as predictive of its personality and behavior as many think, the present study suggests that there are noteworthy differences in certain cognitive abilities.

Researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland put over 1,000 dogs from 13 distinct breeds through a battery of cognitive tests in perhaps the largest laboratory study of canine intelligence ever conducted.

Their findings were recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

(Source) 

The paper and its abstract are as follows:

The extraordinary genetic and behavioural diversity of dog breeds provides a unique opportunity for investigating the heritability of cognitive traits, such as problem-solving ability, social cognition, inhibitory control, and memory. Previous studies have mainly investigated cognitive differences between breed groups, and information on individual dog breeds is scarce. As a result, findings are often contradictory and inconsistent. The aim of this study was to provide more clarity on between-breed differences of cognitive traits in dogs. 

We examined the performance of 13 dog breeds (N = 1002 dogs) in a standardized test battery. Significant breed differences were found for understanding of human communicative gestures, following a human’s misleading gesture, spatial problem-solving ability in a V-detour task, inhibitory control in a cylinder test, and persistence and human-directed behaviour during an unsolvable task. Breeds also differed significantly in their behaviour towards an unfamiliar person, activity level, and exploration of a novel environment. No significant differences were identified in tasks measuring memory or logical reasoning. 

Breed differences thus emerged mainly in tasks measuring social cognition, problem-solving, and inhibitory control. Our results suggest that these traits may have come under diversifying artificial selection in different breeds. These results provide a deeper understanding on breed-specific traits in dogs.

Saara Junttila, et al., "Breed differences in social cognition, inhibitory control, and spatial problem-solving ability in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris)" 12 Sci Rep 22529 (December 29, 2022) (Open access). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26991-5

Preventing Our Extinction From Extraterrestrial Impacts Is Now Possible

Humanity finally has the proven technology, not so long ago limited to science fiction movies, to defend Earth from asteroids and comets on collision courses with us. 

We know from archaeology and astrophysics that this could lead to the extinction of our species, like the extraterrestrial impact in the Gulf of Mexico that killed the dinosaurs about 60 million years ago, or still devastating disasters that fall short of that worst case scenario, like the Younger Dryas climate event about fourteen thousand years ago (which was probably caused by an extraterrestrial impact somewhere in what is now Canada), that ended the Clovis culture of North America, led to widespread megafauna extinctions in the Americas, and postponed the Neolithic revolution globally by several thousands years.

This technology can defend us from genuinely existential threats to our species, and to life on Earth more generally.

While no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth for at least the next century, the catalog of near-Earth asteroids is incomplete for objects whose impacts would produce regional devastation. 

Several approaches have been proposed to potentially prevent an asteroid impact with Earth by deflecting or disrupting an asteroid. A test of kinetic impact technology was identified as the highest priority space mission related to asteroid mitigation. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is the first full-scale test of kinetic impact technology. The mission's target asteroid was Dimorphos, the secondary member of the S-type binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos. This binary asteroid system was chosen to enable ground-based telescopes to quantify the asteroid deflection caused by DART's impact. 

While past missions have utilized impactors to investigate the properties of small bodies those earlier missions were not intended to deflect their targets and did not achieve measurable deflections. Here we report the DART spacecraft's autonomous kinetic impact into Dimorphos and reconstruct the impact event, including the timeline leading to impact, the location and nature of the DART impact site, and the size and shape of Dimorphos. The successful impact of the DART spacecraft with Dimorphos and the resulting change in Dimorphos's orbit demonstrates that kinetic impactor technology is a viable technique to potentially defend Earth if necessary.

R. Terik Daly, et al., "Successful Kinetic Impact into an Asteroid for Planetary Defense" arXiv:2303.02248 (March 3, 2023) (Accepted by Nature).

The other part of planetary defense is locating threats in time to do something about them now that we are capable of taking action. 

Telescope research programs like the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) which will begin in the year 2025, are dramatically improving our database of small solar system objects that can hep us better identify objects that could be existential threats to Earth and require active intervention: 

This multi-band wide-field synoptic survey will transform our view of the solar system, with the discovery and monitoring of over 5 million small bodies. The final survey strategy chosen for LSST has direct implications on the discoverability and characterization of solar system minor planets and passing interstellar objects.

And, when an object and its trajectory are discovered once, our understanding of gravitational dynamics at the solar system scale, and our computational capacity to apply on this knowledge of the relevant laws of physics to calculate the trajectories of these objections, means that we can know almost exactly where that object will be at every moment in time for thousands of years to come.

Another effort to identify solar system objects is using that reality to mine old data in order to leverage the information we already have about these objects.

We haven't yet marshaled the resources to put a full fledge planetary defense system with the capacity to identify all potential threats and neutralize them in place yet, however. And, doing so is pointless if we can't prevent ourself from causing our own extinction with the other main existential threats to the survival of our species in the form of pollution, weapons of mass destruction, and more speculatively, catastrophic missteps in developing biotechnologies or an artificial intelligence singularity.

But, planetary defense shouldn't be controversial, aside from the not small price tag required to address this "Black Swan" risk to humanity's survival. 

Not investing in planetary defense is the species level equivalent of cancelling your health insurance to save money - a pennywise, but pound foolish choice unless you are so poor that you have no other options. 

But, in a classic tragedy of the commons problem, the world's lack of fiscally strong global governmental institutions makes it hard to finance. So far, we are just relying on wealthy nations to foot 100% of the bill to develop it, even though it benefits everyone (even non-human animals and plants) on Earth.

Previous analysis of Planetary Defense issues can be found in this post at this blog.

Another Bat Virus Coming Soon

A COVID-like bat virus could be ready to emerge from Russia.

An ACE2-dependent Sarbecovirus in Russian bats is resistant to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines

Spillover of sarbecoviruses from animals to humans has resulted in outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome SARS-CoVs and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Efforts to identify the origins of SARS-CoV-1 and -2 has resulted in the discovery of numerous animal sarbecoviruses–the majority of which are only distantly related to known human pathogens and do not infect human cells. The receptor binding domain (RBD) on sarbecoviruses engages receptor molecules on the host cell and mediates cell invasion. 

Here, we tested the receptor tropism and serological cross reactivity for RBDs from two sarbecoviruses found in Russian horseshoe bats. While these two viruses are in a viral lineage distinct from SARS-CoV-1 and -2, the RBD from one virus, Khosta 2, was capable of using human ACE2 to facilitate cell entry. Viral pseudotypes with a recombinant, SARS-CoV-2 spike encoding for the Khosta 2 RBD were resistant to both SARS-CoV-2 monoclonal antibodies and serum from individuals vaccinated for SARS-CoV-2. Our findings further demonstrate that sarbecoviruses circulating in wildlife outside of Asia also pose a threat to global health and ongoing vaccine campaigns against SARS-CoV-2

From Euronews: "Khosta-2: Scientists warn Russian bat virus could infect humans and resist COVID vaccines." It cites to PLOS Pathogens. 

Via The Volokh Conspiracy.

Quote Of The Day

Whales often mate in threes, so while one male is having intercourse with the female whale, the other male whale will swim and have its penis rise out of the water while patiently waiting for his turn for intercourse.

From here. 

Another Path For Transhumanism: Design Improvements

When one thinks about the prospects of genetic engineering and other ways of improving the human body and mind, which is basically what "transhumanism" is about, cosmetic improvements and functional improvements come to mind. (The engineering challenges of actually writing and not merely reading a genome are not insubstantial but they are not entirely insurmountable either.)

But many people fail to appreciate the many design flaws in the human body from wisdom teeth, to tail bones, to the appendix, to the design flaws in the human eye, to immune system gaps that have to be addressed with vaccines. Improving these flaws is one obvious and not very ethically troubling task for genetic engineering.

The human eye is marvelous but also very poorly designed. The poor design is evidence against intelligent design and in favor of the “unguided, unplanned, messy, quirky, and historically contingent” process of evolutionary design. A short piece from 2008, Suboptimal Optics: Vision Problems as Scars of Evolutionary History, does a nice job explaining.

Most well known is that the wiring is backwards.

The most obvious design flaw of the retina is that the cellular layers are backwards. Light has to travel through multiple layers in order to get to the rods and cones that act as the photoreceptors. There is no functional reason for this arrangement—it is purely quirky and contingent.

Even in a healthy and normally functioning eye, this arrangement causes problems. Because the nerve fibers coming from the rods and cones need to come together as the optic nerve, which then has to travel back to the brain, there needs to be a hole in the retina through which the optic nerve can travel. This hole creates a blind spot in each eye. Our brains compensate for this blind spot so that we normally do not perceive it—but it is there.

From a practical point of view, this is a minor compromise to visual function, but it is completely unnecessary. If the rods and cones were simply turned around so that their cell bodies and axons were behind them (oriented to the direction of light), then there would be no need for a blind spot at all.

Cephalopod’s like octopuses took a slightly different evolutionary path and have a better design:

But the reversal of the wiring isn’t the only design flaw.

The arrangement of the extraocular muscles—the muscles that move the eyes—is also difficult to explain without appealing to evolutionary contingency. There are more muscles than are minimally necessary and yet there is no functional redundancy. In order to move a sphere in any direction, only three muscles would be necessary, evenly spaced like the legs of a tripod. The human eye has six—the superior, inferior, lateral, and medial rectus, and the superior and inferior oblique. And yet, despite the extra three muscles, the loss of function of any one muscle causes an impairment of eye movement and results in double vision or displaced vision. A more frugal design with only three muscles would be more efficient and less prone to malfunction, as there are fewer components to break down.

If the eye were to be designed with more than the minimal three muscles, then it would make sense to arrange the muscles so that the loss of one or even more would not impair eye movement.

From here via Marginal Revolution which also has some interesting comments.