The Bet by Paul Sabin - Introduction

Introduction

Paul Ehrlich, a thirty-seven-year-old biology professor at Stanford,Read more at location 109

Add a note

Ehrlich had made his name two years earlier with a blockbuster jeremiad, The Population Bomb.Read more at location 110

Add a note

Ehrlich warned in his book, predicting that hundreds of millions of people “are going to starve to death.”Read more at location 111

Add a note

a new environmentalism was dawning.Read more at location 114

Add a note

Nixon was about to create the Environmental Protection Agency.Read more at location 116

Add a note

in Urbana, Illinois, a little-known business administration professor named Julian Simon, also thirty-seven, watched Ehrlich’sRead more at location 121

Add a note

Carson asked Ehrlich about the relation between population growth and the food supply.Read more at location 122

Add a note

Ehrlich said it was “already too late to avoid famines that will kill millions.”Read more at location 123

Add a note

Yet to Julian Simon, the relation between population and food was anything but simple.Read more at location 125

Add a note

processed fish, soybeans, and algae could “produce enough protein to supply present and future needs, and at low cost.”Read more at location 126

Add a note

Simon and Ehrlich represented two poles in the bitter contest over the future that helped define the 1970s.Read more at location 131

Add a note

Simon’s increasing skepticism helped fuel a conservative backlash against federal regulatory expansion.Read more at location 133

Add a note

Ehrlich commented broadly on nuclear power and endangered species, immigration and race relations. He readily denounced “growthmanic economists and profit-hungry businessmen”Read more at location 136

Add a note

Meanwhile, Simon for years played the role of frustrated and largely ignored bystander.Read more at location 139

Add a note

in the late 1960s, Simon too had argued urgently in favor of slowing population growth.Read more at location 141

Add a note

Simon argued that more people meant more ideas,Read more at location 145

Note: il cambio di rotta Edit

Rather than sparking the world’s crises, population growth would help resolve them.Read more at location 145

Add a note

Simon titled his landmark 1981 tome, were The Ultimate Resource.Read more at location 146

Add a note

In 1980, Simon challenged Ehrlich in Social Science QuarterlyRead more at location 148

Add a note

Ehrlich agreed to bet Simon that the cost of chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten would increase in the next decade.Read more at location 150

Add a note

thousand-dollar wager:Read more at location 151

Add a note

five industrial metals, ten years, prices up or down.Read more at location 151

Add a note

Ehrlich’s conviction reflected a more general sense after the 1973 Arab oil embargoRead more at location 153

Add a note

Simon argued that markets and new technologies would drive prices down,Read more at location 154

Add a note

The outcome of the bet would either provide ammunition for Ehrlich’s campaign against population growth and environmental calamity or promote Simon’s optimism aboutRead more at location 156

Add a note

their bet resonated with the cultural clash occurring in the country as a whole.Read more at location 159

Add a note

The bet also captured the starkly different paths of Democrat Jimmy Carter and his Republican challenger Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.Read more at location 159

Add a note

Ehrlich’s widely publicized fears about population growth revived the arguments of the Reverend Thomas Malthus,Read more at location 176

Add a note

Early critics of Malthus, however, such as the English philosopher William Godwin, anticipated Julian Simon’s critique of Ehrlich, mocking Malthus’s conviction that humanity was doomed to misery.Read more at location 185

Add a note

Other nineteenth-century critics of Malthus, such as Friedrich Engels, thought that agricultural productivity could be “increased ad infinitum by the application of capital, labour and science.”Read more at location 189

Add a note

What is the purpose of humans on earth? How should we measure the success of human societies?Read more at location 197

Add a note

Simon was influenced by the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham,Read more at location 197

Add a note

Julian Simon welcomed continued population growth because it meant that more people could live productive and meaningful lives.Read more at location 199

Add a note

Simon did not speak in the elementary terms of “pain and pleasure.” But he also placed human welfare at the center of his moral universe.Read more at location 201

Add a note

Humanity, Ehrlich thought, could not serve as the measure of all things.Read more at location 204

Add a note

Humans needed to accept their proper role in a larger balance of nature on earth.Read more at location 204

Add a note

the bet epitomized the increasingly polarized rhetoric of American politics.Read more at location 208

Add a note

Underlying differences in social values and attitudes toward societal risk also often were left unacknowledged.Read more at location 212

Add a note

prominent political debates over climate change, for example, starting in the 1990s slipped into rhetorical ruts established in earlier debates over population growthRead more at location 213

Add a note

Instead of reading Paul Ehrlich’s clash with Julian Simon as a simple white hat–black hat morality tale, their story can move us beyond stereotyped portrayals of environmentalists and conservatives

IntroductionRead more at location 107

Note: ehrluch: fisso al carson show ad evocare la catastrofe diventando celebrities simon: a casina a mangiarsi le dita problema: la sovrapopolazione ci pirterá a carestie rovinose eh converte nixon che fonda l epa il legame tra cibo e demografia la controidea di simon: benvenuta la crescita di uomini: piú upmini più idee simon il convertito: temeva la bomba demogr la scommessa semplice: 5 materie 10 anni prezzi su o prezzi giù? 1000 dollari il great divide delk ambientalismo anni 70. vince simon e i conservatori prendono coraggio i precursori di eh: malthus quelli di simon: goodwin e engels reaganvs carter il dilemma filisofico: cosa conta nella vita? simob: solo l uomo e la sua felicitá. debito vs bentham eh: la natura. l uomo è solo una parte il dibattito attuale sul riscaldamento. cosa nn riproporre: la contrapposizione frontale. cosa riproporre: la passione il rigore e la chiarezza. imho: anche la scommessa come strumento epistemologico

I problemi della diseguaglianza

Tyler Cowen is asked a good question: are there any goods someone on a median income can afford which are the very best of their kind? The answer, as Tyler shows, is plenty – including some important ones such as books and recorded music. To this we might add that even where the very best goods are unaffordable, the median income earner can afford pretty decent ones, such as cars, TVs and sound systems.

Which poses the question: if someone on a median income can afford such a luxurious cornucopia, what can’t he buy?

The obvious answer, in the UK, is a decent house. The average house costs over £208,000, equivalent to 7.5 times median annual earnings. Given that the bestschools tend to be in the most expensive areas, this means that our median earner can’t afford the best education for his kids either.

However, I suspect that most of the best things that the median income-earner can’t buy are non-material goods.

One is financial security. 49% of people, and most 35-44 year-olds live in households with less than £5000 of net financial wealth (pdf). They are only a pay cheque or two away from trouble.

Another is status. Our wages are related to our sense of worth – which is one reason why most people would prefer (pdf) a lower but above-average income to a higher but below-average one. A median income, by definition doesn’t provide much status.

You might reply that this problem would be solved if we could shake off envy. Not entirely. Status is one mechanism whereby income leads to political power:

2 What Supermarkets Don’t Want You to Know

Undercover Economist’ di Tim Harford - 2 What Supermarkets Don’t Want You to Know

• The scarcity power is clearly considerable, but it is not unlimited...the Dome proved a commercial disaster because uniqueness alone wasn’t enough to persuade people to pay enough to cover the vast costs of its construction
• Businesses with scarcity power cannot force us to pay unlimited prices for their products, but they can choose from a variety of strategies to make us pay more. ... .
• They could simply double the price of a cappuccino. Some people would pay the new price, but many would not.
• Alternatively, they could cut prices and sell much more coffee.
• That’s the dilemma: higher margins per cup, but fewer cups; or lower margins on more cups....by charging 60p to people who are not willing to pay more and £5 to people who are willing to pay a lot to enjoy the coffee and the view.
• How to do it, though? Have a price list saying, ‘Cappuccino, £5, unless you’re only willing to pay 60p’?... coffee bars have to be more subtle.
• Costa Coffee, who in the early 2000s used to have an elegant strategy: Costa offered ‘Fair Trade’ coffee to anyone willing to pay an extra 10p.
• Charging an extra 10p gave the impression that that was the cost of the fair trade coffee, but a customer who reached that conclusion would have been wrong.
• But why was it profitable to charge a higher mark-up on the cost of production on fair trade coffee than on normal coffee? ... The reason has nothing to do with fair trade at all: it’s because fair trade coffee allowed Costa to find customers who are willing to pay a bit more if given a reason to do so. By ordering a fair trade cappuccino, you sent two messages to Costa. One message may or may not have interested them:..‘I think that fair trade coffee is a product that should be supported.’ The second message is the one that they were straining to hear: ‘I don’t really mind paying a bit extra.’
• Starbucks isn’t merely seeking to offer a variety of alternatives to customers. It’s also trying to give the customer every opportunity to signal that they’ve not been looking at the price.
• Does this mean that Starbucks is overcharging all of its customers? No. If so, a regular cappuccino or hot chocolate would cost £3.30,
• There’s one born every minute: two ways to find him
• There are three common strategies for finding customers who are cavalier about price.
• The first is what economists call ‘first degree price discrimination’, but we could call it the ‘unique target’ strategy: to evaluate each customer as an individual and charge according to how much he or she is willing to pay. This is the strategy of the used-car salesman ...cars and houses, of course, but also souvenirs in African street stalls, where the impoverished merchant will find it worth bargaining for some time to gain an extra pound.... companies are trying to automate the process
• For instance, supermarkets accumulate evidence of what you’re willing to pay by giving you ‘discount cards’, you allow the stores to keep records of what you buy .......internet retailers such as Amazon can identify each customer by putting a tracing device called a ‘cookie’ on her computer. In Amazon’s case, customers started to realise that if they deleted the cookies on their computers, they were offered different, often lower prices.
• it must be reasonable for coffee shops to offer a discount to people who work nearby, and for tourist attractions to let locals in for a lower rate? It often seems reasonable because people in groups who pay more are usually people who can afford more....But we shouldn’t forget that this is a convenient coincidence. Companies ...are interested in who is willing to pay more, rather than who can afford to pay more.
• when I raise the price, how much do my sales fall? ...Economists tend to call this ‘own-price elasticity’... Tourists visiting Florida are less price-sensitive than locals... Being rich is sometimes connected with being insensitive to prices, but not always.
• The AMT coffee bar in Waterloo station in London used to knock 10 per cent off the cost of your coffee if – as I did at the time – you worked locally. ...The discount reflected the fact that local workers are price-sensitive despite being rich.
• The third way: turkeys voting for Christmas
• the company has to sell products that are at least slightly different from each other. So they offer products in different quantities (a large cappuccino instead of a small one, or an offer of three for the price of two)... even in different locations,
• Because the products are different, you never quite know whether the firm is using a price-targeting trick or merely passing on added costs. ... If it looks like price-targeting, it probably is.
• How far would you walk to save 30p?
• It was harder to find examples of identical products selling for different prices, although by no means impossible. Does this mean that Sainsbury’s doesn’t price-target as much as M&S? Not at all.
• It wasn’t that these products were more expensive in Tottenham Court Road than in Dalston (only the Vittel was), it was just that in Dalston cheaper substitutes sprang into view far more readily.
• Price-gouging the natural way
• It’s also good business to offer discounts to the elderly and to students (translation: charge higher prices to people likely to have jobs).
• The favoured game at the moment has to be price-gouging the natural way, riding the bandwagon of organic food. ...The supermarkets have come to the rescue with a plentiful supply of organic products that happen to be marked up far above their additional costs
• fruit and vegetable section contains both organic and conventionally grown produce side by side … but always side by side with a completely different product. The organic bananas are next to the ‘conventional’ (that is, non-organic) apples; the organic garlic is next ...The price-comparison would be too sobering.
• My recommendation, if you are convinced of the merits of organic food, is not to let food retailers exploit your enthusiasm: vote with your wallet by supporting any retailer – or direct supplier – who brings the price of organic and non-organic food closer together.
• Bargain shopping and bargain stores
• Wholefoods ...On hearing this, people would comment on how wonderful the store is... But my acquaintances also complain about how expensive Wholefoods is. But … is it really expensive?
• Safeway just five blocks away, a store known to the locals as ‘Soviet Safeway’ because of the small range of products and the harsh decor.
• when you compare the prices for the same goods, Wholefoods is just as inexpensive as Safeway.
• That doesn’t quite fit with our common-sense belief that some places are cheap and some places are expensive. But that belief never made much sense.
• Wholefoods is more fun to shop in... Wholefoods is not expensive in the sense that it charges more for the same goods. It is expensive because of where its price-targeting policies are focused: prices for the basics may be competitive, but the selection in Wholefoods is aimed at customers with a different view of what ‘basics’ are.
• So here’s my advice: if you want a bargain, don’t try to find a cheap store. Try to shop cheaply. Similar products are, very often, priced similarly. An expensive shopping trip is the result of carelessly choosing
• Mix it up!
• Another very common pricing strategy is sale pricing. ...But why knock 30 per cent off many of your prices twice a year, when you could knock 5 per cent off year-round?
• One explanation is that sales are an effective form of self-targeting.  If some customers shop around for a good deal and some customers do not, it’s best for stores to have either high prices to prise cash from the loyal (or lazy) customers, or low prices to win business from the bargain hunters.
• if prices were stable, then surely even the most price-insensitive customers would learn where to get particular goods cheaply.
• two supermarkets ...it’s hard for one to be systematically more expensive than the other without losing a lot of business, so they will charge similar prices on average, but both will also mix up their prices.
• The price-targeting strategy only works because the supermarkets always vary the patterns of their special offers, ...is too much trouble to ....comparing the price of each good
• But this is an example of a universal truth about supermarkets: they are full of close (or not so close) substitutes, some cheap, some expensive, and with a strong random element to the pricing. The random element is there so that only shoppers who are careful to notice,
• Reality check number one: does the company really have scarcity power?
• When we talk about big companies it is easy to get carried away with notions of how they are infinitely powerful ...often that scarcity is something we give them through our own laziness.
• what is the answer to the question we posed in the previous chapter: why does popcorn cost so much at cinemas?
• Customers may be dumb, but they’re not that dumb. People expect to be charged a lot for wine in restaurants and for popcorn and sweets in cinemas before they walk in the door. Now we have a better answer: it’s likely to be a price-targeting strategy.
• one of the big costs in a restaurant business is table space. Restaurateurs would therefore like to charge customers for dawdling, but because they cannot do that, they charge higher prices for products that tend to be consumed in longer meals: not just wine but also starters and desserts.
• Reality check number two: can the company plug leaks?
• sometimes it is more difficult to prevent the price-insensitive customers from buying the cheaper one. Some of the most extreme examples come from the travel industry: travelling first class by train or air is much more expensive than buying a standard ticket, but since the fundamental effect is to get people from A to B, it may be hard to wring much money out of the wealthier passengers.
• French economist Emile Dupuit pointed to the early railways as an example: It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches … What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from travelling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich …
• The shoddy quality of most airport departure lounges across the world is surely part of the same phenomenon.
• In the supermarkets, we see the same trick: products that seem to be packaged for the express purpose of conveying awful quality. ... It wouldn’t cost much to hire a good designer and print more attractive logos.
• Starbucks offers a splendid example: the world’s most famous coffee company will serve you a better, stronger cappuccino if you want one, and they will charge you less for it. ... why does this cheaper, better drink – along with its sisters, the short latte and the short coffee – languish unadvertised? The official line from Starbucks is that there is no room on the menu board,
• Price targeting provides a far more convincing answer: while some companies make their cheap products look unattractive, Starbucks simply makes them invisible to those who don’t ask around.
• The first ‘leak’ in a price-targeting strategy, then, is that rich customers may buy cheap products, unless the products are deliberately sabotaged.
• The second ‘leak’ is ...that the customers who are being offered a discount buy the product and then resell it at a profit to the customers who are being charged a higher price. ... some products are inherently leaky: they’re expensive, easy to transport and non-perishable. The obvious examples are digital goods – music, video and software – and pharmaceuticals.
• For instance, the DVD industry agreed on a system of regional coding so that DVDs bought in the United States would not work in Europe.
• the same popular opinion that despises the DVD industry for trying to sell their products at different prices in different markets also believes that the big pharmaceutical companies should supply drugs to poor countries at discounted prices.
• When price-targeting is a good thing
• Imagine a hypothetical pharmaceutical company called PillCorp, which has developed a uniquely powerful new treatment for HIV/ AIDS. Assume that it doesn’t engage in any price-targeting and charges the same price across the globe.
• That looks like bad news. PillCorp is using its scarcity power to charge a high price for a life-saving drug. As a result, people in poor countries don’t get the drug.
• PillCorp could be making more money and serving the world better.... a taxi driver in Cameroon might be willing to pay only $50 a year for treatment;l... Because of PillCorp’s global price policy, the taxi driver loses out on the treatment, and PillCorp loses out on the chance to make some profit. But if PillCorp were able to make a onetime discount to the taxi driver ... That is what economists mean when we say a situation ‘could be better’.
• This assumes the cheap pills don’t ‘leak’ back, which in practice is a massive concern for pharmaceutical companies. .....Americans buy prescription drugs from across the border in Canada – a practice that can be illegal but is typically tolerated. Perhaps it is the Canadian policymakers who should worry: if the leakage becomes unbearable, the risk is that drug companies will simply refuse to offer discounts to Canada any more.
• When price-targeting is a bad thing
• Consider another hypothetical organisation, TrainCorp, a passenger train company. TrainCorp owns a train that always travels full. Some of the seats go at a discount of £50 to leisure travellers who booked in advance, to senior citizens, to students or to families. The other tickets cost the full price of £100
• We know at once – if we are economists – that this is inefficient. In other words, we can think of something that would make at least one person better off without making anyone else worse off. That something is to find a commuter who was willing to pay a little less than £100, say £95, and who decided to travel by car instead, and offer him a seat for £90. Where does the seat come from, since the train is full? Well, you take a student who is in no great hurry and was willing to pay a little more than £50, say £55, for the seat and politely throw him off the train. .... But of course, that’s not what happens, because if TrainCorp tried it, commuters who were willing to pay £100 would hang around for the £90 tickets,
• summary: the group price-targeting strategy is inefficient because it takes seats away from customers who are willing to pay more, and gives them to customers who are willing to pay less. .......individual price-targeting isn’t feasible.
• this book was published in hardcover at a high price, and then the paperback edition emerged later, at a lower price. The aim is to target a higher price at people impatient to hear what I have to say and at libraries. One good result is that the publisher will be able to sell paperbacks more cheaply, because some costs will be offset by the hardcover sales, and so the book will reach more people. One bad result is that the early version is much more expensive than it would be if there was only a single paperback edition, and some buyers will be put off.
• What if you had all the information you needed to never miss a sale? Would the world be a better place?...Can we say anything more generally about when private greed will serve the public interest? For the answers to all these questions, and more … read on.

continua

Behind Bars in the Land of the Free - James Wilson e John Lott

Behind Bars in the Land of the Free - James Wilson e John Lott

• Reforms that Ignore the Black Victims of Crime John R. Lott Jr
• Charges of racism flow freely in Professor Loury's recent book and this essay. 
• But Loury forgets an important fact: for violent and property crime there is always an individual victim who gets hurt —for black criminals that victim is overwhelmingly black.
• He also neglects acknowledging that we can't determine if the number of people in prison is "too high" without discussing the benefit from prison... system.  Looking at only the cost of imprisonment seems a very strange way to answer the question
• Why Focus on the Race of the Criminals and Not Also the Race of the Victims?
•  Blacks overwhelmingly commit crime against other blacks.... 90.2% of black murder victims were murdered by blacks....poor blacks commit crimes against poor blacks.
•  If we punish black criminals a lot, isn't it possible that the reason we are doing it is because we care about the black victims?
• When Are There Too Many People in Prison?
• So the United States puts more people in prison than other countries?  By itself that isn't evidence that something has gone wrong.
•  The evidence that punishment deters criminals is overwhelming.
• United States also appears to have a relatively low violent crime rate compared to most other developed countries. 
• Changes in arrest rates account for up to about 18 percent of the variation in murder rates (see Lott, 2007, Chapter 4).  Conviction rates explain up to another 12 percent.  Prison sentences another 10 percent and the death penalty another 10 percent. 
• I don't put much weight in the cross-sectional analysis apparently favored by Loury simply because it is much easier to control for differences across countries with panel data, but the United States' high prison rate is at least balanced off by a relatively low violent crime rate. 
• The International Crime Victimization Survey (ICVS) indicates that for the violent crime categories of sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault, the U.S. looks remarkably safe.
• The U.S. white murder rate is comparable to many countries in Europe, and is just a fraction of Russia's, one country that Loury compares the US to.  The difference is driven blacks. 
• Even for the death penalty the vast majority of published refereed academic work finds that the death penalty deters crime
• Why Focus on Prison as the Only Penalty?
• The fact that blacks go to prison at relatively high rates is not the same thing as saying that they disproportionately bear the lion's share of criminal penalties.  Prison represents only one part of the penalties
• The criminal justice system discriminates against higher-income criminals
• Take the case of a bank embezzler with an income one standard deviation above the mean: he or she faces a total monetary penalty that is 4.94 times greater than that for an average income embezzler.
• it isn't clear why an economist would advocate having greater penalties for a criminal simply because he has a higher income.  Economists normally view criminal penalties as making the criminal bear the harm that he is imposing on others. 
• If Loury is after more equality in society, why not instead use the income tax to redistribute wealth?
• There are at least 32 different types of collateral penalties... Overall these penalties are greater for higher-income criminals....
• Another Type of Criminal Penalty
• : The Death Penalty From 1976 to 2004, 65 percent of executions involved whites, but whites committed only 47 percent of murders.
• it is hard to look at this data and claim that the death penalty is obviously adversely applied against minorities.  
• Affirmative Action and Police
• By eliminating or reducing standards on basic intelligence tests, police departments appear to have lowered the quality of new hires across the racial spectrum and made police less effective in solving crime.  These lower quality recruits have increased crime rates,
• Addressing the Problems that Lead to Prison James Q. Wilson
• we have put into prison a large fraction of our citizens... Loury says little about why this happened
• He looks askance at those who speak about the "purported net benefits to 'society' of greater incarceration." I am one of those,
• social scientists who have worked hard to understand...Let me summarize what Daniel Nagin, David Farrington, Patrick Langan, Steven Levitt, and William Spelman have shown... a higher risk of punishment reduces crime rates.
• results of prison in America: It helps explain why this country has a lower rate of burglary than Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, and the Netherlands, and a lower rate of auto theft than Australia, Austria, Canada, England, and Sweden. On the other hand, America's homicide rate remains much higher... America is more punitive, but except for homicide, it is also safer.
• The central question is why blacks commit these crimes in such high numbers. My research, like that of Orlando Patterson and others, suggests that slavery and Reconstruction deeply harmed African American culture by making intact families rare and denying to black victims the same degree of police protection that was afforded to whites.
• many black children have grown up in father-absent families.... 70 percent of black males in prison did not grow up with a resident father.
• We can, of course, wait until men get in trouble and then try to rehabilitate...But the gains, on the average, are small: recidivism rates are reduced by about 10 percent.
• If we knew how to make street gangs less attractive to boys we could reduce dramatically
• The best approach is to invest in crime prevention programs aimed at young children... They include the Perry Pre-School program, nurse home visitations, various parent-child training programs, and certain school-based programs.
• many of the best prevention programs cost a lot of money... defining some children as "at-risk" means talking specifically about black and Hispanic children in welfare homes,
• the programs that work are typically small, intense efforts that may or may not work if they are scaled... good programs often lose out to bad ones because the latter, though equally devoted to prevention, lack supportive evidence but have political muscle.

continua

Le origini della vita - Panspermia

Le origini della vita - Panspermia

• Il caso Galileo è noto ai più per la persecuzione a cui la scienza puo' essere sottoposta da parte della chiesa cattolica, eppure le teorie professate da galileo, ovvero le teorie copernicane erano insegnate anche nelle università cattoliche. Come mai tanto accanimento da un lato e tanta tolleranza dall'altro? Mi viene un possibile parallelo contemporaneo. Alcuni scienziati hanno messo in dubbio che i meccanismi dell'evoluzione siano in grado di spiegare la vita sulla terra, alcuni di loro si sono raggruppati sotto le insegne dell' Intelligent Design e il loro scetticismo è stato combattuto aspramente. Eppure il loro stesso scetticismo è condiviso anche da chi propugna l'ipotesi della paspermia come ipotesi più probabile circa le origini della vita. Al fondo c'è la medesima considerazione: l'ipotesi evoluzionistica non è in grado di spiegare la nascita della vita sulla terra. Verso gli argomenti di costoro c'è molta più tolleranza, anzi, l'ipotesi della panspermia ormai è quasi maggioritaria nell'accademia.
• Fewer Harder Steps
• Somewhere between 1.75 billion and 3.25 billion years from now, Earth will travel out of the solar system’s habitable zone
• life appeared on Earth from 0.0 to 0.7 billion years after such life was possible
• (Earth is now 4.5 billion years old.)
• Earth being very lucky to originate intelligence life.
• “hard steps,”like inventing life, sex, multi-cellular bodies, and intelligence.
• the steps could have very different difficulties...if all these steps were hard.......the actual distribution of durations observed between the steps...
• Considerazioni
• this pushes us to give up the idea that life evolved on Earth at all, or that the origin of life was a hard step. If life evolved elsewhere, that could give a lot more time for hard steps to be achieved. After all, the universe is now 13.8 billion years old.
• this also pushes us, if a bit more weakly, to give up the idea that the evolution of intelligence was a hard step. Intelligence seems to have appeared only 0.6 billion years after the appearance of multi-cellular animals,
• there seems to be only room for one or two hard steps so far in the history of Earth.
• Panspermia Confirmed
• meteorite from Mars suggests it may show signs of life after all.   …
• The possibility that the rock contains fossilised microbes received another boost
• Two Kinds of Panspermia
• Caleb A. Scharf...argument against interstellar panspermia:
• The sequence of events involved in panspermia will weed out all but the toughest or most serendipitously suited organisms...
• Life driven by cosmic dispersal will probably end up being completely dominated by the super-hardy, spore-forming, radiation resistant, chemical-eating, and long-lived organism.
• if evolved galactic panspermia is real it’ll be capable of living just about everywhere.... So if galactic panspermia exists why haven’t we noticed it yet?
• 2 scenari possibili
• 1. Space-centered... life might mainly drift from one harsh space environment to another.... Under this scenario life must on average grow in common space environments, and so we should see a lot of life
• 2. Planet-centered – Alternatively, space life might usually die away, and only grow greatly in special rare places like planets... effetto semi del cocco: seeds die away during ocean journeys, and then multiply on islands.
• Scharf’s argument weighs against a space-centered scenario, but not a planet-centered scenario.
• Pondering Panspermia
• panspermia is no longer a marginalized view....It may not yet be the majority opinion, but it shows up often in journal articles
• Academia is often run by an old guard ensuring that its public face reflects their old views... while younger folk quietly bite their tongues waiting for their chance
• Most academic patrons just want to affiliate with the high status old guard,l....... no matter what its views,

continua