back to bonobos – and sex
Canto: We’re reading Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ brilliant book, Kindred, an almost up-to-date account (published in 2020) of all the new discoveries about our close relatives the Neanderthals, and the speculations resulting from them. And of course we’re always alert to the slightest mention of bonobos in any works of anthropology…
Jacinta: Yes, we’ve been a bit timid about talking too much about bonobos and sex, but a few mentions in Kindred have emboldened us.
Canto: W’ve seen the odd photo or video of chimps or bonobos with erect penises, and it was a scary but also puzzling sight, but we’ve not really explored the difference between theirs and ours, so now is the time to do so. So here’s some interesting comments linking humans, Neanderthals and our chimp/bonobo rellies:
Anatomically, pelvic dimensions point to vaginas very similar to ours, and as penises are tailored to fit, those too were probably more like living men’s equipment than that of chimpanzees.
Luckily for all concerned, unlike chimps Neanderthal males lacked the genes for ‘penis spines’. While in apes they’re more like tiny hardened pebbles than spikes, their presence does affect copulation: marmosets have sex and orgasms that last twice as long when the spines are removed.
We should probably therefore picture Neanderthal sex as more leisurely and satisfying than chimp-style rapid thrusting bouts. Not forgetting clitorises – organs solely existing for pleasure – unluckily for Neanderthals, like us they probably lacked bonobo-like versions that make face-to-face orgasms easier. But masturbation in some form is pretty much guaranteed, whether during sexual encounters as is found among humans, or more generally for social bonding and diffusing tensions, as in bonobos where it takes place between pretty much anyone.
Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes, p 271
Jacinta: So this makes me want to know more about the bonobo penis, and ‘penis spines’. It sounds like it isn’t ‘made for pleasure’, which helps to explain why female-female sex is the most practised type among bonobos.
Canto: Then again chimps have the same penises as bonobos but they’ve evolved differently. So here we go with ‘penile spines’. First, Wikipedia:
Many mammalian species have developed keratinized penile spines along the glans and/or shaft, which may be involved in sexual selection. These spines have been described as being simple, single-pointed structures (macaques) or complex with two or three points per spine (strepsirrhines). Penile spine morphology may be related to mating system.
This is news to me, but fascinating.
Jacinta: Just up our alley, so to speak. So to elaborate on this last quote, again using Wikipedia (largely), strepsirrhines are a suborder of primates including lemurs, galagos or bushbabies, pottos and lorises. Sexual selection is, I presume, a form of mating system, which Darwin reflected upon in The Descent of Man, inter alia. Macaques are a type of Old World monkey, with 23 known species. Interestingly, they’re matriarchal and frugivorous, like bonobos.
Canto: Apparently they’re a feature of felines – penile spines, that is. In cats, it’s speculated that they may contribute to pregnancy, as they ‘rake the walls of the female’s vagina [during withdrawal], which may serve as a trigger for ovulation’. I’m wondering, though, how that might relate to sexual selection. ‘A spiny dick, nothing turns me on more.’
Jacinta:
It all works below the conscious level, mate. I mean, female bowerbirds hang out with the males with the best display, but I don’t think they’re thinking about sex, especially considering how much of a nothing bird sex generally is. But getting back to bonobos, Wragg refers in the above quote to ‘bonobo-like’ clitorises that make face-to-face orgasms easier than it was for Neanderthals and, more to the point, we H sapiens. How could we have missed this in all our explorations of the bonobo world?
Canto: Hmmm. I blame the prudery of researchers. Including ourselves. Anyway, it probably all gets back to genes and their expression. So we need to explore – but should we look at penises first or clitorises – is that the plural?
Jacinta: Not sure, I can only cope with one at a time. So here’s something we should never have missed:
Bonobo clitorises are larger and more externalized than in most mammals; while the weight of a young adolescent female bonobo “is maybe half” that of a human teenager, she has a clitoris that is “three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks”. In scientific literature, the female–female behavior of bonobos pressing genitals together is often referred to as genito-genital (GG) rubbing. This sexual activity happens within the immediate female bonobo community and sometimes outside of it. Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe stated that female bonobos rub their clitorises together rapidly for ten to twenty seconds, and this behavior, “which may be repeated in rapid succession, is usually accompanied by grinding, shrieking, and clitoral engorgement”; he added that it is estimated that they engage in this practice “about once every two hours” on average. As bonobos occasionally copulate face-to-face, evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk has suggested that the position of the clitoris in bonobos and some other primates has evolved to maximize stimulation during sexual intercourse. The position of the clitoris may alternatively permit GG-rubbings, which has been hypothesized to function as a means for female bonobos to evaluate their intrasocial relationships.
Canto: What can I say?
Jacinta: So this quote, from Wikipedia, compares the bonobo clit to the human one, but says nothing about chimps. I mean, it occurs to me that this enlarged clit, and the pleasure derived from it, would help to explain female-female sexual bonding, leading to social bonding, leading perhaps to matriarchy, if we can call it that. But if chimps have the same-size female pleasure-place, that thesis collapses.
Canto: Good point. So, googling ‘chimp clitoris’ takes me first to an essay from nearly 40 years ago on ‘The external genitalia of female pygmy chimpanzees’, an early term for bonobos. The abstract actually compares Pan paniscus (bonobos) and Pan troglodytes (chimps) as if just to resolve your dilemma:
The external genitalia of four adult female pygmy chimpanzees (Pan paniscus) were examined during a 2-year period. It was found that the labia majora are retained in adults of this species and that, when tumescent, the labia minora effectively relocate the frenulum and clitoris so that they point anteriorly between the thighs. When detumescent, the configuration of the labia minora and clitoris resembles that of immature common chimpanzees (P. troglodytes). It is suggested that the simple, structural relocation of the clitoris from the normal [sic] condition noted in adult P. troglodytes makes possible the homosexual, intergenital rubbing observed in P. paniscus, when ventroventral juxtaposition of the individuals permits eye-to-eye contact. In addition, this change probably increases sexual stimulation of the female during heterosexual, ventroventral copulations.
Jacinta: Wow. So bonobos separated from chimps between 1 and 2 million years ago. And in that time a kind of structural change took place in the positioning of the clitoris. Is that plausible? And what about the swelling?
Canto: Hard to get clear info, but the general genital swellings of chimps versus bonobos differ in one respect – in chimps, they’re indicative of fertility, or ovulation, but bonobos, like humans have ‘concealed’ ovulation. A wonder that this can occur in the relatively short time since the split. Or maybe not, I’m no primatologist.
Jacinta: Apparently bonobos and humans aren’t the only primates with concealed ovulation – it also occurs in Vervet monkeys, but the very concept of ‘concealed ovulation’ is a bit controversial – as if it’s being done deliberately, which would surely be absurd. But it certainly does mean that, in those primates that don’t exhibit clear signs of ovulation, copulation occurs through all stages of the menstrual cycle. It could be a way of preventing males from being aware of their own offspring, thus reducing the infanticidal tendencies found in male, and sometimes female, chimps. As for the position of the clitoris, its shift to a more ‘accessible’ spot for genito-genital rubbing in bonobos is often mentioned as a great development for female bonding, but I can find nothing much on how this anatomical change could’ve happened.
Canto: Well, think of Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos. Certain beak shapes were more adaptive to the particular vegetation on particular islands, and birds with those beak shapes outbred other birds and became dominant, and ultimately the outright winners. With bonobos, okay this different clitoral positioning might not have led directly to those females outbreeding other females, since it might not have made it easier for males to have sex with females (though where there’s a willie there’s a way), but it might have led indirectly to females becoming dominant through sexually stimulated female bonding, allowing the females with the most changed and, to females, most alluring clitorises to choose the most male partners and so produce the most offspring.
Jacinta: Female rather than male choice. Or even females ‘sexually assaulting’ males? Definitely sounds interesting. But as always, more research is required…
References
Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art. 2020
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3985376/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strepsirrhini
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaque
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-sex-and-society-2006-06/
we’re running out of gas on this topic
Jacinta: So we need to look at why high domestic energy costs come as a shock to Chinese arrivals here in Australia. It seems the essay we analysed last time took the view that we should be capitalising on high gas prices, getting top dollar for our gas exports, and exporting even more of the stuff, including increasing production as much as possible, and not capping the domestic price but somehow offsetting the cost to local consumers through the tax system. But it seems that Chinese consumers are getting it cheap.
Canto: Yes, it’s hard to make sense of it – how is it that gas producers/retailers are making windfall profits by selling LNG to China when the consumers there are paying much less for it than we are? Is it just the sheer quantity they’re sending offshore?
Jacinta: Well, we’re not economists, far from it, so it’s a battle for us to understand it all. But I’m reading an Aussie article from a little over a year ago that puts it bluntly:
Australia [has] gas. Loads and loads of it. Far more than we could ever possibly need. It comes out of the ground at $1GJ all across QLD and SA. But then what happens to it is beyond all hope and reason. Three-quarters of it is shipped to China as LNG at $31GJ, $4GJ cheaper than it is sold locally.
That doesn’t seem to me to be that much cheaper, but the author, David Llewellyn-Smith, seems to be claiming that the cost of bringing the gas out of the ground is $1 per gigajoule, but it’s sold, presumably after much processing, as LNG at $31 per gigajoule in China. And sold here at $35 per gigajoule. Or was. And that may not mean the cost to the household consumer. I’ve been trying to find out current domestic prices, but the economic gobbledegook is beyond me.
Canto: I’ve located our last gas bill – $344.64 for 91 days usage (i.e quarterly). The usage is measured in megajoules, and a gigajoule is 1000 megajoules. Our average daily usage for the period May through July was 52.24 MJ. That’s about 4754 MJ or, say 4.75GJ used in the period. That means we’re paying around $72.50 per gigajoule. Something very wrong here, I give up. The average quarterly gas bill in South Australia is currently $218, so we’re way over. I presume that’s per domestic household. Average daily usage over winter in SA was 21.64MJ, and we’re way over that. We have only gas hot water, and we rarely ever use the gas stove. I cook on a small electric oven we bought – not induction, sadly.
Jacinta: They may be adding other costs on to the basic usage costs, but our high usage is extremely surprising, and it won’t necessarily be less in the warmer months, because we’re only using the gas for showering and washing dishes, not for heating. That means we’re likely spending nearly $1400 annually for gas. Can we change the subject now?
Canto: Well, no, we need to change our usage, not the subject. That’s assuming this usage number is reliable, and I have to be sceptical of that. Anyway, I think we can dispense with gas usage totally, at least I can. For example, washing dishes via electricity (boiling the electric kettle), and body-washing also via electricity (same system) and doing without showering. That would reduce my gas usage to zero.
Jacinta: Okay, good luck with that. We still haven’t really worked out why the Chinese are paying less for gas, or maybe for energy in general, than we are.
Canto: Well, economics bores me witless, but here we go. In 2021 China became the world’s largest gas importer, surpassing Japan. What this means for the cost to the domestic consumer I’m not sure. There has been a decline in commodity prices, including gas, in recent months apparently, but I suspect that low prices to the consumer have little to do with that. I suspect it has to do with the deviancies of the Chinese Testosterone Party – which I blame for everything in that country.
Jacinta: Haha, but is blame the word? How have they managed to shield their people from the costs we suffer under?
Canto: Anyway, our way out is to get our electric dishwasher fixed, stop using the gas hot water system, and switch off the gas tap.
Jacinta: Yes, and then we can get back to talking about bonobos and such…. Please!
References
What is the average (MJ) cost of gas in Australia?
more on gas prices in Australia, sort of
Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.
Carl Sagan
Canto: So during an English conversation group that I’m for the moment in charge of, at our local community centre, we got onto the topic of how Australia finances itself, trade and business-wise. I made the claim that manufacturing in Australia has largely died (based on the fact that I’ve worked in or for six factories in my youth and not-so-youth, – Simpson-Pope, ATCO Structures, Wilkins Servis, Tubemakers of Australia, Ellis Wireworks and Griffin Press – none of which still exist, at least not in the same locations). I also said that our economy is now based largely on the exporting of coal, gas and other mineral resources. As always, I wasn’t sure if I was talking out of my arse, so it’s time for research… But not just about that. I went on to say, apropos of our plentiful gas resources, that we export most of the gas, which is why we pay such a high price for gas domestically. This led a Chinese member of the group to ask – how come? According to him, gas, and energy bills generally, come to much less in China than they do here. So what gives? That’s what we’re going to take a look at today.
Jacinta: Yes we’ve written about this before, in November last year, but I’m happy to revisit the issue, perhaps more thoroughly.
Canto: Well, since that piece was written, there’s been little in the news about the issue, it seems. Except that, in December:
… the Australian government passed a law imposing a price cap on domestic natural gas for 12 months, with the possibility of the cap becoming permanent after that.
Which I suppose is quite important, though it was capped at a high price, presumably compared to Chinese domestic prices.
Jacinta: Well you’ve just quoted from a piece by a writer from the Baker Institute for Public Policy, based at Rice University, a private research institute based in Houston, Texas. Rather surprising to see such a piece dealing with the Australian domestic market, from the other side of the world, so to speak. And it goes into great detail about the economics of price capping, which the author, Kelly Neill, describes as ‘poor policy’, at least in this instance.
Canto: Could they have an ideological bent? What about the poor consumer? I mean the consumer who is poor.
Jacinta: I’ve just read Neill’s bio, and she’s based in Australia:
… at the University of Sydney School of Economics. Her research has focused on competition in natural gas markets, particularly in Australia. She has studied how electricity and gas markets interact, vertical integration of gas retailing and shipping, and the consequences of restricting exports of liquefied natural gas. She is also interested in electricity reliability.
Canto: Sounds impressive. In fact I feel quite intimidated now. I mean, ‘vertical integration of gas retailing and shipping’ – what could that possibly mean?
Jacinta: It’s the opposite of horizontal integration, obviously. Pay attention mate. Seriously, it’s ‘the combination in one firm of two or more stages of production normally operated by separate firms’. Presumably gas retailing and shipping in this case. And Neill’s argument is complex, it seems – it’s a long article, and its complexity is beyond our pay grade (which is zero of course). It’s the kind of economics article that’s designed to be read by other economists, and, after a quick run-through, I see little or no mention of windfall profits by gas companies, the cost to residential consumers, or renewable energy. It does discuss future investment, and she certainly appears to believe that increased development of our gas resources is a very good thing, as if she’s never heard of ‘the Big Switch’ to electricity developed from renewables.
Canto: Yes it’s odd – we’ve mentioned how Chinese newcomers to Australia are wondering why domestic energy costs are so much higher here than in China. Neill focusses, though, on the big consumers:
the intention of the natural gas price cap is to provide relief to industrial gas users
That was news to me – I thought the government wanted to provide relief to impoverished types like you and me. But perhaps they want both. And she also expresses concern that caps will reduce the incentive to produce more fossil fuels. So she certainly has a business as usual attitude to such production, while I’m trying my darnedest to get our Housing Association to put solar panels on our roofs, and to get our gas cooker and hot water system switched to electric. And, as a consumer of science mags and podcasts, all I hear from them is how we must wean ourselves from gas, oil and coal. It seems that economists think differently.
Jacinta: She also writes things that slightly surprise me:
Australians own the country’s natural resources (through their governments), and as such are entitled to benefit from their extraction.
Which sounds good, but I thought these natural resources were owned by the companies that extracted them, via mining and such. Sort of like manufacturing. General Motors makes money from cars, BP makes money from oil. And sometimes these companies receive subsidies from government, to help maintain them, because they’re good for the economy, not only because they provide relatively cheap cars, or oil, for the country, but because that business gets to export the surplus (helped in some way by government) in exchange for goods that we need but can’t easily supply ourselves.
Canto: Yeah we’re not really very good at understanding this are we? I suppose the globalisation of the economy is why we don’t do manufacturing any more. The labour costs too much? Better to use cheap overseas labour and then import? And ratchet up the gig economy so that everybody has just enough work to not count in the unemployment stats? I’m sure the coffee and croissants market is booming. But getting back to gas, my understanding is that coal is rated the worst of the fossil fuels – not only for carbon emissions but most dangerous working conditions. And then it’s oil and then gas. So maybe Neill is right to discount the negatives, at least for the foreseeable.
Jacinta: According to the IPCC, in 2018, 89% of global CO2 emissions came from ‘fossil fuels and industry’, which is kinda vague, tacking on ‘industry’ like that. I mean, can transportation be counted as industry? And according to ClientEarth, natural gas accounts for a fifth of the world’s carbon emissions. By no means insignificant.
Canto: But I’m interested in learning a bit about economic-speak, inter alia, through analysing Neill’s essay. And after all that, we’ll try to find out why Chinese people are paying less for their domestic energy than we are. So here’s a quote from early in the essay which seems to sum up her position:
Forcing companies to sell on the domestic market at a lower price reduces the value of Australia’s gas resources — an opportunity cost that ultimately does more harm than good. Instead, it would be better to maximize the value of the resource and then choose a tax policy that does not affect investment.
The term ‘opportunity cost’ is economics jargon, meaning ‘the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen’, but this idea of maximising the value of the resource would surely be music to the ears of the multi-millionaire gas company owners. And clearly she’s in favour of investing in gas. If I found out that my super fund had been investing in gas I’d be effing furious.
Jacinta: I’m sure they are – it’s a transitional fuel dontcha know. And there’s no doubt that Neill is in favour of our exploiting this resource. Look at this key paragraph:
The influence of the export price in the domestic market has increased over time as gas supply in southern states has declined. State governments in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia share responsibility for this, with bans on new developments contributing to the decline in gas production. If produced, southern gas could be sold at a discount to the LNG export price, because southern gas would be further from the export plants and closer to demand centers. Indeed, if gas supply was large enough that LNG export plants were at capacity, the domestic price would again de-couple from the export price.
As a South Australian, taking pride in our leading the country in renewables, I’m somewhat nonplussed/gobsmacked at this slap. So I should read the whole piece to see if she has any interest in or knowledge about the existential global warming crisis that is currently enveloping us, and the contribution of LNG and other fossil fuels to this crisis. But I’m not hopeful.
Canto: So next she’s on about supply issues:
Global LNG supply is inherently inflexible, because increasing liquefaction capacity is costly and slow, and the market remains illiquid, particularly in Asia.[5] Investors know that small increases in demand can create large increases in price. (The converse is also true, small declines in demand create large price falls.)
Whatever that means.
Jacinta: Yes, I’m not sure if she means that the gas remains illiquid. Gas is gas after all, not liquid. But there’s also the term ‘liquid assets’ in economics…
Canto: Yes I hadn’t noticed that. ‘Liquid Natural Gas’ is essentially self-contradictory…
Jacinta: It’s liquified natural gas. And ‘liquefaction capacity’ means ‘the capacity of an LNG facility, measured in terajoules per day, to liquefy natural gas to produce LNG’. So Neill is pointing out, I think, that there’s a market inflexibility because it’s costly to liquify gas, especially in Asia. But saying that the market remains illiquid does create a bit of confusion. But I wonder what this economist thinks of Australia’s RenewEconomy. I notice they have an essay posted a few days ago from Giles Parkinson, an indefatigable RenewEconomy journalist, entitled ‘It’s time to get SwitchedOn and kick gas out of the system: Our future depends on it‘ – SwitchedOn referring to a series about electrification they’re publishing….
Canto: But I think, to be fair, Neill is clearly aware that our economy is currently highly reliant on our gas exports, just as Norway’s economy is highly reliant on its fossil fuel exports.
Jacinta: Good point. Could we kick gas out of the domestic system while exporting endless terajoules of the stuff? Isn’t that what Norway is doing? They get most of their domestic energy from hydro.
Canto: Seems a bit hypocritical I suppose, and here in South Australia we don’t have hydro, but we’ve worked hard to get more of our energy from renewables. We’re still reliant on gas for almost half our energy, but wind and solar together make up the rest – more than half. That’s only going to increase. I’ve now read the whole of Neill’s essay, and she’s made absolutely no mention of renewables. Maybe she’s been living under a rock for the past 30 years, but most likely it’s deliberate – which doesn’t mean she’s anti. She might just have decided to limit her focus on gas.
Jacinta: Well, maybe so, but she’s clearly in favour of more investment in gas, and encouraging more exploration of the stuff. That fact that she ‘blames’ South Australia and other states for not producing more of this fossil fuel, which the IPCC is insisting we should not be producing if we’re to avoid catastrophic global warming, is evidence enough of her contempt for the science, surely.
Canto: But I’ve seen her picture and she looks so cute…
Jacinta: […]
Canto: Anyway we didn’t get round to why energy costs more here, domestically, than in China. Next time perhaps.
References
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/why-natural-gas-price-caps-australia-are-poor-policy
It’s time to get SwitchedOn and kick gas out of the system: Our future depends on it
language origins: some reflections
smartmouth
Jacinta: So a number of readings and listenings lately have caused us to think about how the advent of language would have brought about something of a revolution in human society – or any other society, here or on any other planet out there.
Canto: Yes, we heard about orangutan kiss-squeaks on a New Scientist podcast the other day, and we’re currently reading Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ extraordinary book Kindred, a thoroughly comprehensive account of Neanderthal culture, which we’ve clearly learned so much more about in recent decades. She hasn’t really mentioned language as yet (we’re a little over halfway through), but the complexity and sophistication she describes really brings the subject to mind. And of course there are cetacean and bird communications, inter alia.
Jacinta: So how do we define a language?
Canto: Yeah, we need to define it in such a way that other creatures can’t have it, haha.
Jacinta: Obviously it evolved in a piece-meal way, hence the term proto-language. And since you mentioned orangutans, here’s a quote from a 2021 research paper on the subject:
Critically, bar humans, orangutans are the only known great ape to produce consonant-like and vowel-like calls combined into syllable-like combinations, therefore, presenting a privileged hominid model for this study.
And what was the study, you ask? Well, quoting from the abstract:
… we assessed information loss in proto-consonants and proto-vowels in human pre-linguistic ancestors as proxied by orangutan consonant-like and vowel-like calls that compose syllable-like combinations. We played back and re-recorded calls at increasing distances across a structurally complex habitat (i.e. adverse to sound transmission). Consonant-like and vowel-like calls degraded acoustically over distance, but no information loss was detected regarding three distinct classes of information (viz. individual ID, context and population ID). Our results refute prevailing mathematical predictions and herald a turning point in language evolution theory and heuristics.
Canto: So, big claim. So these were orangutan calls. I thought they were solitary creatures?
Jacinta: Well they can’t be too solitary, for ‘the world must be orangutan’d’, to paraphrase Shakespeare. And interestingly, orangutans are the most tree-dwelling of all the great apes (including us of course). And that means a ‘structurally complex habitat’, methinks.
Canto: So here’s an even more recent piece (December 2022) from ScienceDaily:
Orangutans’ tree-dwelling nature means they use their mouth, lips and jaw as a ‘fifth hand’, unlike ground-dwelling African apes. Their sophisticated use of their mouths, mean orangutans communicate using a rich variety of consonant sounds.
Which is interesting in that they’re less close to us genetically than the African apes. So this research, from the University of Warwick, focused a lot on consonants, which until recently seemed quintessentially human productions. Researchers often wondered where these consonants came from, since African apes didn’t produce them. Their ‘discovery’ in orangutans has led, among other things, to a rethinking re our arboreal past.
Jacinta: Yes, there’s been a lot of focus recently on vowel and consonant formation, and the physicality of those formations, the muscles and structures involved.
Canto: Well in this article, Dr Adriano Lameira, a professor of psychology who has long been interested in language production, and has been studying orangutans in their natural habitat for 18 years, notes that their arboreal lifestyle and feeding habits have enabled, or in a sense forced, them to use their mouths as an extra appendage or tool. Here’s how Lameira puts it:
It is because of this limitation, that orangutans have developed greater control over their lips, tongue and jaw and can use their mouths as a fifth hand to hold food and manoeuvre tools. Orangutans are known for peeling an orange with just their lips so their fine oral neuro-motoric control is far superior to that of African apes, and it has evolved to be an integral part of their biology.
Jacinta: So they might be able to make more consonantal sounds, which adds to their repertoire perhaps, but that’s a long way from what humans do, putting strings of sounds together to make meaningful ‘statements’. You know, grammar and syntax.
Canto: Yes, well, that’s definitely going to the next level. But getting back to those kiss-squeaks I mentioned at the top, before we get onto grammar, we need to understand how we can make all the sounds, consonantal and vowel, fricative, plosive and all the rest. I’ve found the research mentioned in the New Scientist podcast just the other day, which compares orangutan sounds to human beatboxing (which up till now I’ve known nothing about, but I’m learning). Dr Lameira was also involved in this research, So I’ll quote him:
“It could be possible that early human language resembled something that sounded more like beatboxing, before evolution organised language into the consonant — vowel structure that we know today.”
Jacinta: Well that’s not uninteresting, and no doubt might fit somewhere in the origins of human speech, the details of which still remain very much a mystery. Presumably it will involve the development of distinctive sounds and the instruments and the musculature required to make them, as well as genes and neural networks – though that might be a technical term. Neural developments, anyway. Apparently there are ‘continuity theories’, favouring gradual development, probably over millennia, and ‘discontinuity theories’, arguing for a sudden breakthrough – but I would certainly favour the former, though it might have been primarily gestural, or a complex mixture of gestural and oral.
Canto: You’d think that gestural, or sign language – which we know can be extremely complex – would develop after bipedalism, or with it, and both would’ve evolved gradually. And, as we’re learning with Neanderthals, the development of a more intensive sociality could’ve really jump-started language processes.
Jacinta: Or maybe H sapiens had something going in the brain, or the genes, language-wise or proto-language-wise, that gave them the competitive advantage over Neanderthals? And yet, reading Kindred, I find it hard to believe that Neanderthals didn’t have any language. Anyway, let’s reflect on JuLingo’s video on language origins, in which she argues that language was never a goal in itself (how could it be), but a product of the complexity that went along with bipedalism, hunting, tool-making and greater hominin sociality. That’s to say, social evolution, reflected in neural and genetic changes, as well as subtle anatomical changes for the wider production and reception of sounds, perhaps starting with H ergaster around 1.5 million years ago. H heidelbergensis, with a larger brain size and wider spinal canal, may have taken language or proto-language to another level, and may have been ancestral to H sapiens. It’s all very speculative.
Canto: Yes, I don’t think I’m much qualified to add anything more – and I’m not sure if anyone is, but of course there’s no harm in speculating. Sykes speculates thusly about Neanderthals in Kindred:
Complementary evidence for language comes from the fact Neanderthals seem to have had similar rates of handedness. Tooth micro-scratches and patterns of knapping on cores [for stone tool-making] confirm they were dominated by right-handers, and this is also reflected in asymmetry in one side of their brains. But when we zoom in further to genetics, things get increasingly thorny. The FOXP2 gene is a case in point: humans have a mutation that changed just two amino acids from those in other animals, whether chimps or platypi. FOXP2 is definitely involved with cognitive and physical language capacity in living people, but it isn’t ‘the’ language gene; no such thing exists. Rather it affects multiple aspects of brain and central nervous system development. When it was confirmed that Neanderthals had the same FOXP2 gene as us, it was taken as strong evidence that they could ‘talk’. But another, subtler alteration has been found that happened after we’d split from them. It’s tiny – a single protein – and though the precise anatomical effect isn’t yet known, experiments show it does change how FOXP2 itself works. Small changes like this are fascinating, but we’re far from mapping out any kind of genetic recipe where adding this, or taking away that, would make Neanderthals loquacious or laconic.
Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art, pp 248-9
Jacinta: Yes, these are good points, and could equally apply to early H sapiens, as well as H ergaster and H heidelbergensis. Again we tend to think of language as the full-blown form we learn about in ‘grammar schools’, but most languages today have no written form, and so no fixed grammar – am I right?
Canto: Not sure, but I understand what you’re getting at. The first English grammar book, more like a pamphlet, was published in 1586, when Shakespeare was just starting out as a playwright, and, as with ‘correct’ spelling and pronunciation, would’ve been politically motivated – the King’s English and all.
Jacinta: Queen at that time. Onya Elizabeth. But the grammar, and the rest, would’ve been fixed enough for high and low to enjoy Shakespeare’s plays. And to make conversation pretty fluid.
Canto: Yes, and was handed down pretty naturally, I mean without formal schooling. It’s kids who create new languages – pidgins that become creoles – when necessity necessitates. I read that in a Scientific American magazine back in the early eighties.
Jacinta: Yes, so they had the genes and the neural equipment to form new hybrid languages, more or less unconsciously. So much still to learn about all this…
Canto: And so little time….
References
Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, 2021
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8478518/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/12/221220112426.htm
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230627123117.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-heidelbergensis
nuclear fusion 3 – developing technologies
something to do with laser confinement fusion energy
Ways of producing nuclear fusion:
- High-temperature superconductors (HTS) for magnetic confinement fusion.
HTS is all about producing more powerful magnets, in order to effectively confine super-hot (100 million degrees Celsius) plasma. Traditional electrically conducting materials such as copper will lose conductivity and become resistant at high temperatures, causing them to over-heat. To eliminate electrical resistance from potential superconducting materials, they need to be cooled to -269 Celsius. I’m trying to get my head around this, so I’m following the demo in the Royal Institution lecture linked below. A small but powerful magnet was dropped into a hollow copper tube, held vertically. It finally emerged from the bottom, but not at the pace of gravity. It’s all about the peculiar relationship between magnetism and electricity. The magnet creates a moving magnetic field inside the copper tube, inducing an electrical current, which, somehow, creates its own magnetic field in opposition to the field from the magnet, pushing back… (somehow I feel I should’ve done a Canto and Jacinta on this one!)
So, as the demonstrator tells us, we can vary the electrical resistance of metals, for example by increasing or reducing their temperature, as described above. Warming the copper tube increases its resistance, cooling it will decrease its resistance. A further demonstration with the same magnet and a very much cooled copper tube (-196 Celsius) showed that the magnet took longer to move down the tube. I don’t really understand how that proves decreased resistance, but then I’m no physicist… But the demonstrator explains:
So with the reduction in the resistance of the copper, those currents are able to form and flow more easily, and therefore they have a stronger magnetic field, opposing the falling magnetic field of the magnet [my emphasis].
So that clarifies things a bit. And the aim is to remove all electrical resistance, if possible. This can’t be done with most metals, including copper. And so – superconductors. There are apparently, high-temperature superconductors and low-temperature superconductors, the latter being the ones that need to be cooled down to -269 Celsius. So the demonstrator proceeds to demonstrate the effect of a dose of liquid nitrogen on a potential HTS, described rather vaguely as a ‘ small chip of super[lux??]’. I’ve tried looking up what he meant here (the captions didn’t help), but have come up empty. I’m guessing that he’s simply doused the same ‘small but powerful’ magnet. Anyway, the doused chip sits in a polystyrene cup which is sitting on a circular magnetic track. The supercooling is designed to turn it into a HTS, presumably. The aim is to repel the field from the magnetic track ‘by setting up its own internal currents’ in balanced opposition. The chip has to be doused a couple of times with the liquid nitrogen to get it to the right temperature, but the demonstrator soon has the cup with its ‘chip’ riding on the magnetic rail like a wee whited coaltruck, back and forth with a fingerpush.
Presumably the chip will have to be kept at this temperature to maintain this internal current. It will regain its electrical resistance upon warming up to a certain point. The second demonstrator shows us a HTS tape, which, when cooled down to 20 degrees Kelvin (that’s less than -250 celsius), will carry five times its normal electric current, with no resistance. Wound into a tight coil, the material, which is super-thin, will have a much higher energy or current density, which can be used to generate a strong magnetic field. The more material in the coil, the greater the current density, until the magnetic field is strong enough to safely confine the plasma from nuclear fusion. A scaled-up version of this type of coil is used at ITER. They require far less energy to cool them down too. Tokamak Energy is using these coils, combined with a spherical ‘cored apple’ tokamak shape, which apparently makes more effective use of the magnetic field. Altogether, a more efficient design – they hope. Developed in he UK, it’s being used also by the STEP plant (ST for Spherical Tokamak).
2. Laser fusion with diode pumps
Laser fusion is the next technology Windridge discusses. So how do lasers work? From memory, LASER stands for Light Amplification through Stimulated Emission of Radiation, but that don’t tell me much. Anyway it’s all about diode pumps. Wikipedia gives this elaboration:
A diode-pumped solid-state laser (DPSSL) is a solid-state laser made by pumping a solid gain medium, for example, a ruby or a neodymium-doped YAG crystal, with a laser diode
I think I’ll stick with Windridge’s description. We see some images, first of a pink rod of ruby crystal, the ‘lasing material’, wrapped round by a coil of incandescent lighting, which sends a flash of light into the crystal, exciting its atoms and somehow generating photons, all of the same wavelength. The ruby and the coil are enclosed in a capsule, and the generated photons bounce back and forth between mirrors at either end of the capsule, triggering the release of more photons in a build-up of energy. Finally, a beam of energy emerges ‘through a partially reflective mirror at one end’. How this creates fusion energy, I’ve no idea. I vaguely get the sense of pumping but…
Here’s a useful definition of a diode from a website called Fluke:
A diode is a semiconductor device that essentially acts as a one-way switch for current. It allows current to flow easily in one direction, but severely restricts current from flowing in the opposite direction.
It seems that the key here is to produce photons of a particular wavelength. Windridge compares a diode pump with a flash lamp or incandescent bulb. While the flash lamp produces this wide range of energies or wavelengths, but a more targeted, precisely defined energy level is all that is required to excite the crystal photons, meaning it can be done with less waste of heat-energy. Diode lasers are many times more efficient than the NIF laser, for example – nearly 40 times more efficient (the NIF laser uses flash lamps). Remember, NIF (the National Ignition Facility) made headlines some months ago by getting more energy out of their fusion experiment than they put into targeting and ‘igniting’ the fusion pellet, but critics noted that the energy needed to drive the laser was orders of magnitude greater than the energy produced. The diode pump may, if found to be workable, reduce those orders of magnitude considerably.
So, although I don’t quite understand all the details, to put it mildly. I do get a strong sense that progress is being made. We seem to have gone beyond proof of concept, and are entering the engineering phase, and it looks like the next couple of decades will some exciting results. Tritium breeding and handling (it’s extremely rare and radioactive) is a big issue, and new materials science will be required to deal with high-energy neutrons and the damage they cause. Producing and testing such materials will be a high priority, but the pay-off can hardly be calculated. High-temperature superconductors are a relatively new development, and perhaps more breakthroughs can be made there. With more money being poured in, there will be more jobs for smart people – can-do problem solvers.
So, after watching this video a couple of times and trying with limited success to understand the science, but understanding enough to be aware of the viability of something that once would have seemed the most impossible of dreams – replicating the vast power of the stars – I read many of the comments, and was dismayed by the high level of negativity. An almost ferocious naysaying. I could respond with Kafka’s ‘genius doesn’t complain, but runs straight against the wind’, or ‘We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy but because it is hard’, by that Kennedy bloke. It was just a little less than a century ago that Hubble provided convincing evidence that other galaxies existed. Two centuries ago we knew nothing of atoms or genes or space-time. The progress we’ve made science since then is – well, astronomical. Of course, new breakthroughs tend to create new problems, and I can imagine science-fiction scenarios in which our play with fusion ends up in our going up in a sunburst of glory – ‘Out, brief candle!’
We shall see. I hope I can live so long…
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode-pumped_solid-state_laser
https://www.fluke.com/en-au/learn/blog/electrical/what-is-a-diode
The last of Wilde, I hope: De Profundis, etc, and why I rarely read fiction these days…
Henry James
Oscar Wilde
So I’m writing this on the day that a book group I’m a part of will be discussing The picture of Dorian Gray, which I’ve written about quite disdainfully in a couple of previous posts. Interestingly, I’ve been sorting my very messed-up library in recent days, putting stuff into categories, and fiction into alphabetical order. During this process I made the shocking discovery that I had a ‘Penguin Classics’ copy of the novel all along, leading me to wonder whether I’d read the book years ago or not. I think not. More interestingly, I discovered a copy of De Profundis, Wilde’s ‘letter’ to Lord Alfred Douglas, written from prison and clearly intended for a wider audience. The most touching thing for me about the book was the name of the original purchaser, ‘Ethel Gwmes, or Gwymer, 1913’. Not that I wasn’t affected by Wilde’s plight – the fall from grace, the plank bed, the hard labour (for a time), the injustice, the humiliation – but it soon became clear in the reading that Wilde was still Wilde. As one would expect. (NB – I’ve just read, in a brief chronology of his life, that he was received into the Roman Catholic church the day before his death, so the concept of sin, which comes up so often in Dorian Gray, was one he really took seriously, maybe. If only he’d known what we now know about that August institution, he could’ve taken Holy Orders long before, diddled as many young lads as he liked, and ended life as a fat, self-satisfied Cardinal).
In De Profundis he makes a number of self-flattering observations and comparisons:
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.
Oh dear. Never trust people’s views of themselves – we’re evolved to have an overly positive view of ourselves, after all, for our survival and thriving. Nevertheless, reading of others’ high opinions of themselves can be a fun pastime. And so let’s on:
I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation…
Interesting lines, of course, in considering Dorian Gray as an autobiography, of sorts. I certainly find it hard to see it as a moral work. The word ‘sin’ is often used – a perfunctory term that has no place in the courts or in works of moral philosophy. And for much of the novel – up to the murder of Basil – his evil-doings are a matter of ‘strange conjecture’, delineated more in ‘the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth’ of the portrait, rather than in any account of actual crimes or debaucheries. This is what makes it ‘gothic’ of course – more creepy and horror-show than in any way thought-provoking from an ethical perspective.
Now, having attended the book club’s discussion of the novel – all very lively and civilised – I want to return to a chapter discussed with some interest (chapter 18), in which James Vane, Dorian’s nemesis, is accidentally shot dead during a hunting party, while skulking in the bushes, apparently awaiting an opportunity to shoot the anti-hero. Lord Henry, one of the party, reveals himself in all his colours in this scene. Dorian, who’s recently been spooked by the sight of Vane peering into the window of some mansion that he (Dorian) is visiting, is deeply troubled by this shooting, which at this time was thought to be of one of the aristocrats’ servants, acting as a ‘beater’ to frighten the quarry into view:
Dorian looked at Lord Henry, and said, with a heavy sigh, ‘It is a bad omen, Harry, a very bad omen.’
‘What is?’ asked Lord Henry. ‘Oh! this accident, I suppose. My dear fellow, it can’t be helped. It was the man’s own fault. Why did he get in front of the guns? Besides, it is nothing to us. It is rather awkward for Geoffrey, of course. It does not do to pepper beaters. It makes one think that one is a wild shot…
These remarks occur after the man has been pronounced dead, and presents Lord Henry as something worse than a droll, loquacious layabout. The question our readers were discussing vis-a-vis this passage, I think, was whether Wilde was censuring Lord Henry in any serious way, or just gently mocking the upper classes as he does in his plays. I would tend to think the latter is true, (or more true) as he never breathes any life into his ‘lower-class’ characters, except when they’re instrumental to the plot, as is the case with the Vane siblings. But then, considering the class he wholly identified with, maybe it’s just as well that he didn’t try to.
But returning to De Profundis, Wilde’s predilection for trying to say something impressive (whether witty or wise) in a sentence works well enough in the plays and in the remarks of Lord Henry and his entourage, but when he writes them in his own voice, they come across more like Daniel Dennett’s ‘deepities’, unworthy of too much scrutiny. But I don’t necessarily consider Wilde’s comparison of himself with Christ (whom I prefer to call Jesus) as an act of vanity, since Jesus is delineated in the ‘gospels’, in my view, as a more or less kindly ‘everyman’, from a period when depth and complexity of character is hardly explored.
And then there’s the matter of class. When I were a lad I worked in factories and read about working people in the 19th century, especially through the novels of Thomas Hardy – stonemasons, farmers and milkmaids – and their emotional highs and lows. I read Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch and lived a kind of extra life through the characters in those novels. But I can feel no emotional connection to the characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and I don’t think it’s just because I’m now an old codger. My teenage obsession with Hardy caused me to buy a biography of the author, in which I read of Henry James’ disdainful opinion of him. My reaction was typical – I thought ‘what an arsehole’, and then I went out and bought one of James’ most acclaimed novels, The portrait of a lady. What I got from it, some 50 years ago now, was an intro to the same world as Wilde – the parasitic upper class – a lot of intellectual verbiage, and a vague sense of outsiderdom and resentment (James, as it turned out, was also homosexual, FWIW). Nowadays I don’t read fiction at all, except for these book club choices. I’m not quite sure why that is, I just seem to get more of a buzz from learning about Neanderthals, nuclear fusion and stuff that stretches my brain such as AI and other new technologies. Perhaps because, in doing so, I can leave class and relative poverty behind, and feel myself a part of the great wave of transcending humanity…
nuclear fusion developments 2 – replicating the stars
ITER, in southern France, while under construction
Returning to nuclear fusion, I’m focussing here on the recent Royal Institute lecture mentioned in my previous fusion post (all links below). Dr Melanie Windridge starts off with the well-known point that we’re currently failing to reach projected targets for the reduction of global warming, with current national pledges taking us to 2.4 degrees C by century’s end (the target, remember, is/was 1.5°C), with energy demand rising, and energy security issues due to political instability, among other problems.
Windridge’s pitch is that, yes, we must keep on with all the possible green solutions, but fusion is the transformational solution the world needs. It potentially produces no CO2, an abundant supply of fuel, in a safe, controlled process with no long-term radioactive waste. It would also potentially produce firm, non-intermittent, base-load power – less redundancy in the grid (I probably need to do a whole post on this) – which would be more economical in the long term. Also, decarbonisation is about much more than electricity, which apparently is only about 20% of the electricity market. The other 80% is much harder to decarbonise. Windridge lists some of them – industrial heat, aviation and shipping fuels, and desalination – which I hope to explore further in another post. There’s also the opportunity, if we could develop an effective fusion energy system, with limitless clean energy, of undoing the damage already done. Current projections show that there will still be fossil fuel-based energy in the mix in 2050. This is a challenge for those interested in pursuing the fusion solution. ‘Fusion can address the fossil fuel gap’, one of Windridge’s graphs suggests. The aim, it seems to me, is that fusion will be ‘ready’ by mid-century, at which time it will be transformative or, as Windridge says ‘we need a solution with immense potential’. But prediction is tricky, especially about the future, and as a sixty-something optimist, I can only hope that I can live and be compos mentis enough to witness this transformation.
Frankly, it’s amazing that we can be considering this type of energy, a result of relatively recent understanding of our universe. As Windridge points out, the only other form of energy that is more energy-dense is matter-anti-matter annihilation (from the first few seconds after the ‘Big Bang’) – I can well imagine future researchers and engineers trying to create a Big Bang under controlled conditions in some hyper-complex cybernetic laboratory. I wouldn’t be surprised if an SF author has already written a story…
High energy density is doubtless the holy grail of future energy technology. Windridge gives a nice historical account of this – something that Gaia Vince’s Transcendence has helped me to focus on. The industrial revolution, which began in Britain, moved us from animal energy in joules per gramme to chemical energy in kilojoules (one thousand joules per gramme). This gave Britain a fantastic edge over the rest of the world, and was the vital element in creating the British Empire. Nuclear energy, which takes us to gigajoules (billions of joules) per gramme, and which, thankfully, is being pursued internationally, and hopefully collaboratively, is a breakthrough, if it works out, comparable to the invention of fire. One kg of fusion fuel can provide as much energy as 10 million kg of coal, so it would make sense to concentrate much of our collective ingenuity on this zero-carbon form of fuel.
There are different pathways. Aneutronic fusion, as the name suggests, doesn’t rely so much on neutron energy, with its associated ionising radiation. Alpha particles or protons carry the energy. An Australian company, HB11 Energy, is using lasers to drive a low-temperature proton-boron fusion system, which is showing some promise, and deuterium-helium-3 is another combination, but currently deuterium and tritium is the easiest reaction to obtain results from. Now, considering the power of the sun, which is so energetic that, according to BBC Science Focus, ‘the Earth would become uninhabitable if its average distance from the Sun was reduced by as little as 1.5 million km – which is only about four times the Moon’s distance from Earth’, it should be pretty clear that recreating that kind of energy here on Earth’s surface is fraught with problems. The fusion ‘triple product’ for producing this energy is apparently heat, density and time. So to achieve the product in a ‘short’ time, for example, we need to tighten the other parameters – more heat and density. Safely producing temperatures much higher than those in the sun for any extended period would presumably be quite a feat of engineering. The different designs and approaches currently include tokamaks, stellarators, inertial confinement (using lasers) and magneto-inertial fusion. The inertial confinement laser model focuses lasers on a small fuel pellet, causing it to implode and produce ‘fusion conditions’.
It’s all about producing plasma of course – the so-called fourth and most energetic state of matter. Electrically-charged particles which make up over 99% of the visible universe. These charged particles spin around magnetic field lines, so allowing us to use magnetic systems to control the material. We’ve used plasma in neon lights for over a century, and its production was first demonstrated by Humphrey Davy in the early 1900s – something to explore…. Plasma is also a feature of lightning, a ‘bolt’ of which can strip electrons from the immediately surrounding air. This means that air is ionised and can be manipulated magnetically. Tokamaks and other magnetic devices operate on this principle.
Inertial confinement uses shock waves or lasers to ‘squeeze’ energy out of a pellet of fusion fuel. The point at which such energy is produced is called ignition. Think of a bicycle tyre heating up as you pump it up to a higher pressure, until the tyre explodes – sort of.
So – and I’m heavily relying on the Windridge public lecture here – fusion research really began in the fifties, generally in universities and public labs. This early work has culminated in two major public projects, ITER (the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), with its ultra-massive tokamak located in the south of France, and NIF, the National Ignition Facility, located in California. which made headlines last December for ‘the first instance of scientific breakeven controlled fusion’. This involved bombardment of a pellet ‘smaller than a peppercorn’ to produce a non-negligable energy output for a very brief period.
All of this has been at great public expense (why weren’t we told?), so in more recent times, private investment is moving things along. The last couple of years has seen quite a bit of progress, in both public and private facilities. For example, JET, in Oxfordshire, produced 59 megajoules (59,000,000 joules) of fusion energy, sustained for 5 seconds, a world record and a proof of concept for more sustainable energy production. And at NIF last year they produced ‘ignition’, the whole point of the facility, producing more fusion energy than the laser energy used to drive the process, a proof of concept for controlled fusion. And even more recently, China set a new record at their EAST tokamak (don’t you just love these territorial names), attaining steady-state ‘high performance’ plasma for about 6.5 minutes (I don’t know what high performance plasma is, but I can perhaps guess). And there is a lot of work going on in the private space too (I’ll be looking at Sabine Hossenfelder’s appraisal of the field in a future post, all in the name of education), with a really notable increase in private investment and start-ups – about half of the world’s private fusion companies today are less than 5 years old. Some $5 billion has been invested, from energy companies like Shell and Chevron, but also a variety of other organisations familiar to capitalists like me.
Why is this happening? Clearly we have a greater consensus about global warming than existed a decade ago. Also the science of fusion has reached a stage where rich people and organisations are sensing the opportunity to make even more money. Windridge also talks about ‘enabling technologies’, recent engineering and technological developments such as high-temperature superconductors, diode pumps for lasers, and various AI breakthroughs and improvements. Mastering and streamlining these developments will ultimately reduce costs, as well as expanding the range of the possible. National governments are developing regulatory frameworks and ‘fusion strategies’ – the latest coming from Japan – often involving public-private partnerships, such as the UK’s Fusion Industry Programme. The UK has also created a facility called STEP – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production – run by the Atomic Energy Authority, which is described by Windridge as the world’s first pilot nuclear energy plant.
So in the next post on this topic I’ll be trying to get my head around the developments mentioned above, FWIW. And it is definitely worth something. If we can get it all right.
References
Gaia Vince, Transcendence, 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
https://www.psfc.mit.edu/vision/what_is_plasma
https://fusionenergyinsights.com/blog
electrification, copper, water and South Australia
we shall see..
So, according to the South Australian government, ‘SA contains 69% of Australia’s… demonstrated resources of copper’, which is an essential element for the future of electrification worldwide, so we’re sitting on a copper goldmine, or a golden coppermine, and what is it with gold anyway?
A provocative article by Michael McGuire was published in the Adelaide Advertiser’s Weekend magazine, for June 17-18, highlighting prospective developments regarding mining copper in Kapunda and environs, a region that, in the 19th century, made South Australia ‘the biggest producer of copper in the British Empire’, until the copper market crashed in 1870s, and the mines were abandoned. The article also highlighted BHP’s interest in this suddenly in-demand element, and the problematic past relationship between the mining giant (in little Australia’s terms) and the SA government.
I recall some months ago conversing with a friend at a culinary gathering, and the subject turned to renewable energy and EVs. He was negative about their global uptake, and when I pressed him on why, he only had one word to say – copper. I was a bit miffed about his pouring cold water on my optimism, but it led me to writing a piece on copper here back in October 2022. The last words of that piece make for a good lead-in:
Australia, by the way, has the second largest copper reserves in the world (a long way behind Chile), and this could presumably be turned to our benefit. I’m sure a lot of magnates are magnetised by the thought.
So. As we know, EVs require about four times as much copper as ICE vehicles. Wind farms, solar panels and charging stations are also heavily reliant on copper. According to McGuire’s article:
Electric car sales increased by 60% last year to pass 10 million globally for the first time, making up about 14% of the market. Some are predicting as many as 60% of all new car sales will be electric by 2030 and close to 100% by 2050…
And some are not. But there’s no doubt that EVs are on the up and up, with Australia being shamefully behindhand, largely due to our lack of manufacturing here, and our distance from other EV manufacturers, not to mention government ‘hesitancy’.
Making copper more available here will clearly make a difference to all that. But one problem that needs to be solved is water. Mining and smelting copper requires lots of it. BHP has been tapping into the Great Artesian Basin, but this isn’t environmentally sustainable, so the company has been discussing a new initiative with the state government. The proposed Northern Water Supply Project includes the building of a desalination plant in Whyalla, and a pipeline to pump water to Olympic Dam and other sites in the state’s far north, a hugely expensive project (the required environmental impact statement alone is costed at $230 million) which the SA government is likely to provide funding for only if BHP, with which it has had a more than troubled relationship, chips in a substantial amount.
BHP’s Olympic Dam, over 500 kms north of Adelaide, is a resource centre for copper, gold and uranium, which, of course, is now being touted as a sustainable decarbonisation hub. And there are other projects and opportunities, involving state and private enterprise. As well as the water facility in Whyalla, there are plans for a $600 million hydrogen plant, and for upgrading Whyalla’s steel plant, and exploiting the region’s undeveloped iron ore resources. SA is already leading the country in its abundance of solar and wind power, so, according to McGuire,
.. the theory is, South Australia becomes a centre for green copper and green steel production at the very time the world is crying out for such products. As an aside, the cheaper energy available from hydrogen, sun and wind also attracts a whole heap of other businesses to South Australia.
Again, all of this, especially the hydrogen, will require a large volume of available water, meaning that various projects will have to come together to make the projected boom happen. One person who seems bullish about it all is BHP’s chief operating officer, who points out that though the state has 70% of Australia’s copper resources, it’s currently producing less than 30% of the country’s mined copper. Basto was previously in charge of BHP’s Escondida mine in Chile, the largest copper mine on the planet, and has headed the company’s iron ore operation in Western Australia. Currently he is working on developments from BHP’s $9.6 billion acquisition of Oz Minerals, which has successfully operated copper mines in the far north – at Carrapateena and Prominent Hill. These mines, along with Olympic Dam, and Oak Dam (a new and apparently very promising development), ‘all lie within a geological zone known as the Gawler Craton’, which Basto predicts, or hopes, will become a lucrative mining hub in the not too distant future. Australia, as he and others point out, is a ‘stable jurisdiction’ for mining, compared to other resource-rich regions in South America and Africa.
This is a real issue. Historically, locals have been worked more or less to death, in Columbian silver mines for example, as described in Gaia Vince’s Adventures in the Anthropocene. And it’s still happening. Wikipedia provides a horrific list of mining disasters over just the last 20 years in the largely impoverished Democratic Republic of the Congo, mostly from artisanal or small-scale ‘independent’ mining. Which brings us back to Kapunda, and restoring its copper reputation, with a difference. A wife and husband team, Philippa and Leon Faulkner have formed a company, EnviroCopper, based in Kapunda, which will, eventually, re-open the mine using a process called ‘in situ recovery’. To quote from McGuire’s article:
… this will not be a regular mine. No big holes. No big explosions. Just some white pipes poking out of the ground. Which, with the town of Kapunda right there, is a definite advantage.
The process, used for uranium mining further north, involves pumping an acidic solution ‘through the porous rocks, which dissolves the copper, and then the liquid is pumped back up to the surface through bores or wells, and the metal is recovered’. It is much more enviro-friendly and low impact than the old 19th century form of mine, though it may still be a pipe dream at present. The next year or so will be key to whether government, big mining and various smaller enterprising players can get it all together to take the state further down the road of green energy production and utilisation. It will be most interesting…
References
‘The next Big Thing’, by Michael McGuire, The Advertiser SA Weekend, June 17-18 2023
https://www.mining-technology.com/marketdata/ten-largest-coppers-mines/
Gaia Vince, Adventures in the Anthropocene, 2014
nuclear fusion developments 1
This post is also published on my Solutions OK blog.
As a person much addicted to reading, I’ve been impressed by a writer who’s been eloquently cataloguing global problems and solutions in the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince (I presume her parents were Lovelock fans) has written 3 books, Adventures in the Anthropocene, Transcendence and Nomad century, the first two of which I now possess, the first of which I’ve read, the second of which I’m well into, and the third of which I intend to buy. So, time to return to my own self-education notes on solutions…
Vince appears to be my opposite – adventurous, extrovert, successful, in demand, and doubtless eloquent in person as well as in print. Bitch! Sorry, lost it there for a mo. The heroes and heroines of her first book, the product of travels though Asia, South America, Africa and the WEIRD world, and the solutions they’ve created and pursued, will, I think, provide me with pabulum for many blog pieces as I sit, impoverished (but not by global standards), uneducated (in a formal sense) and unlamented in rented digs in attractive and out-of- the-way, Adelaide, Australia, once touted as the ‘Athens of the South’ (at least by Adelaideans).
What I’ve found in my research on solutions – and Vince’s explorations have generally borne this out – is that solutions to global or local problems have created more problems which have led to more solutions in a perhaps virtuous circle that’s a testament to human ingenuity. And the fact that we’re now 8 billion, with a rising population but a gradually slowing rate of rising (in spite of Elon Musk), shows that we’re successful and trying to deal with our success…
So what are our Anthropocene problems? Global warming, of course. Destruction of other-species habitats on land and sea. Damming of rivers – advantaging some groups and even nations over others. Rapid industrial change (I’ve worked – mostly briefly! – in a half-dozen factories, all of which no longer exist). Population growth – in the 20th century from less than 2 billion to over 6 billion, and over 8 billion by May 2023. Toxic waste, plastic, throwaway societies, social media addiction and polarisation, the ever-looming threat of nuclear warfare… and that’s enough for now.
But on a more personal level, there’s the problem of how to navigate the WEIRD world, a world that bases itself on individualism, that’s to say individual freedom, when you don’t believe in free will (or rather, when you’re certain that free will is bullshit). And yet… a lot of smart, productive people don’t believe in free will (Sam Harris, Robert Sapolsky, Sabine Hossenfelder), and it doesn’t seem to affect their activities and explorations one bit – and to be honest it doesn’t affect my work, such as it is, either, though it does provide me with a handy excuse for my failings. My introversion has been ingrained from earliest childhood (see the Dunedin study on personality types and their stability throughout life), my lack of academic success has been largely due to my toxic family background, bullying at school, and lack of mentoring during the crucial learning period (from 5 to 65?), and my lifelong poverty (within the context of a highly affluent society) is not entirely due to laziness, but more to do with extreme anti-authoritarianism (hatred of ‘working for the man’) and a host of other issues for which I blame my parents, my social milieu, my genes and many other determining factors which I’m determined not to think about right now.
Anyway, with no free will we humans have managed transformational things vis-à-vis the biosphere, and there will be more to come. In her epilogue to Adventures in the Anthropocene, Vince hazards some predictions, using the narrative of someone looking back on the century from the year 2100, and considering the book is already about ten years old, I might use the next few posts to look at how they’re faring.
So – nuclear fusion. Here’s Vince’s take:
In 2050, the first full-scale nuclear fusion power plant opened in Germany (after successful experiments at ITER, in France, in the 2030s), and by 2065 there were thirty around the world, supplying one-third of global electricity. Now, fusion provides more than half of the world’s power, with solar making up around 40% and hydro, wind and waste (biomass) making up the rest.
So I’m starting with a very recent video by the brilliant Matt Ferrell, as a refresher for myself. Nuclear fusion, the source of the sun and stars’ energy, involves two small atoms colliding to form a larger atom (e.g. hydrogen forming helium), with some mass being converted to energy in the process. And I mean a really large amount of energy. To quote Ferrell:
Once the fusion reaction is established in a reactor like a tokamak, a fuel is required to sustain it. There’s a few different fuels that are options: deuterium, tritium or helium-3. The first two are heavy isotopes of hydrogen… most fusion research is eyeing deuterium plus tritium because of the larger potential energy output.
The power released from fusion is much greater, potentially, than that derived from fission. And deuterium plus tritium produces neutrons, which creates a process called neutron activation, which induces relatively short-lived but problematic radioactivity. And there are a host of other challenges, but it’s clear that incremental progress is happening. People may have heard of JET (the Joint European Torus) and the unfinished ITER (the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), and of recent promising developments – for example, this:
A breakthrough in December 2022 resulted in an NIF [Nuclear Ignition Facility] experiment demonstrating the fundamental scientific basis for inertial confinement fusion energy for the first time. The experiment created fusion ignition when using 192 laser beams to deliver more than 2 MJ of ultraviolet energy to a deuterium-tritium fuel pellet.
Ferrell visited the Culham Science Centre, near Oxford in the UK, where he was shown through the RACE (Remote Applications in Challenging Environments) facility, a perfect acronym for the time. They’ve created a system there called MASCOT, which appears to be a cyborg sort of thing, but mostly mechanical – with a human operator. The aim is to incrementally develop complete automation for maintenance and upgrading of these highly sensitive and potentially dangerous components. Since everything is still at the experimental stage, with a lot of chopping and changing, flexible human minds are still required. Full automation is clearly the goal, once a reactor is up and running, which is still far from the case. Currently, it requires about a thousand hours of training to work with the machinery and the haptics in this pre-full automation stage, bearing in mind that the types of robotic and cable systems are still being worked out. Radiation tolerance is an important factor in terms of future developments. Culham uses a ‘life-size’ replica of a tokamak for training purposes.
RACE, as the acronym suggests, is not just a facility for nuclear research but for dealing with hazardous environments and materials in general. Moving on from JET, Ferrell visited the new MAST-U (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak – Upgraded!). As Ferrell points out, the long lag time between promise and results in nuclear fusion has often been the butt of jokes, but this ignores many big recent developments, described well by Dr Melanie Windridge in a Royal Institute lecture, of which more later.
In the video we see a real tokamak from the sixties, probably the first ever, sitting on a table, to indicate the progress made. MAST-U’s major focus at present is plasma exhaust and its management, essential for commercial fusion power. Its new plasma exhaust system is called Super-X, a load-reducing divertor technology vis-a-vis power and heat, so increasing component lifespans. One of the scientists described the divertor as like the handle in a hot cup of coffee:
So our plasma is the coffee that we want to drink. It’s what we want, right? We want this coffee as hot as possible, but we won’t be able to handle it with our hands, we need a handle, and the diverter has the same function, it tries to separate this hot, energetic plasma from the surface of the device. So we divert the plasma into a different region, a component specifically designed to accommodate this large excess energy.
The divertor is the key factor in the upgrade and is drawing worldwide attention, as it has supposedly improved plasma heat diversion by a factor of ten, as I understand it. And MAST-U’s spherical design is potentially more efficient and cheaper than anything that has gone before. All a step or two towards more viable power plants. And, returning to JET, you can see in the video how massive the system is compared to the table-top version of the sixties. JET came into being in the 80s, and has had to deal with and adapt to many new developments, such as the H-mode or high-confinement mode, a new way of confining and stabilising plasma at higher temperatures, which has gradually become standard, requiring engineering solutions to the torus design. It’s expected that AI will play an increasing role in new incremental modifications. Simulations to test modifications can be done much more quickly, in quicker iterations, via these advances. AI, computer modelling and advances in materials science and superconductors are all quickening the process. JET will be decommissioned in about 12 months, but much is expected to be gleaned from this too, as they look at how neutrons have affected material components.
Another issue for the future is tritium, supplies of which are currently insufficient for commercial fusion production. According to ITER, current supply is estimated at 20 kilos, but tritium can be produced, or ‘bred’ within the tokamak through the interaction of escaping neutrons with lithium. Creating a successful tritium breeding system is essential due to the lack of external sources.
So that’s enough for now, I’ve gone on too long. To be continued.
References
Gaia Vince, Adventures in the Anthropocene, 2014.
https://www.iter.org/mach/TritiumBreeding
bonobos and humans – immanence and transcendence?
the struggle against scumbaggery
Canto: So, having heard recently that Indonesia is passing laws to criminalise sex outside of marriage, and that Uganda is passing laws to criminalise anyone who identifies as homosexual, I’m feeling a touch of despair about the future bonobo society with human characteristics that I intended to impose upon the globe in the next few weeks.
Jacinta: Well it’s interesting to note that Indonesia is a predominantly Moslem country, and Uganda is overwhelmingly Christian, but there’s no doubt that religious ideology is behind both of these developments.
Canto: Yes, the WEIRD world, which neither of these countries belong to, is becoming increasingly secular, so much so that S should be fitted into the acronym – a world of WEIRDS, perhaps? So I suppose I should limit my ambition to the WEIRDS of the world. But that not’s what I want to talk about today, though it is related, sort of. Remember Ferdinand Mount’s The subversive family, an attempt to argue that the family unit, and so monogamy, has always been the norm, and has managed to subvert all attempts to replace or diminish it? I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately, and wondering about the unknown history of Homo sapiens and their antecedents, and their socio-sexual relations and child-rearing, given that our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimps, are quite different from each other in these traits.
Jacinta: Yes, and neither of them are monogamous. It’s interesting, but hardly surprising, that we’re inordinately interested in the human side of the divide between us and the so-called HC-LCA (the Human-Chimpanzee Last Common Ancestor), but not so much in the chimp-bonobo side.
Canto: Well of course, and even with that inordinate interest we’re very far from working out our human ancestry going back any more than two million years or so, let alone their socio-sexual arrangements. Anyway we’re not as monogamous as we pretend to be, and no amount of government regulation, or religious devotion, is going to change that.
Jacinta: But it’s interesting that we hold to a monogamous child-rearing ideal, and I’m wondering if that’s always been the case, or how long it has been, or whether there’s a worthwhile alternative, as arguably suggested by our bonobo heroines.
Canto: Well I know that single parent families are on the rise in Australia, and no doubt throughout the WEIRDS world, and any stigma associated with this is waning, but I’m not sure that this is exactly a movement in the direction of human bonoboism. It seems to me that the key to bonobos’ attraction is a kind of multiple-parenting system – not so compartmentalised. Sharing the love.
Jacinta: Bonobo and chimp dads likely don’t know for sure who their kids are – I just can’t imagine that being okay for humans any time soon, or even longer than soon.
Canto: Good point, though it’d be great if we could nurture and delight in kids just for being kids, rather than our kids. And I can well imagine that being the case when we lived together in caves rather than wee domestic units. It takes me back to the kibbutzim idea that I learned about as a teenager, after years of feeling trapped in my parents’ loveless marriage. Communal parenting…
Jacinta: But without the socialism? Or the Jewishness for that matter…
Canto: Well most kibbutzim today are secular, and they’re still very much with us – well not exactly with us, as they’re on the other side of the world, but I’m not sure about the socialism. Is bonobo society socialist?
Jacinta: Well, that’s the thing. Kibbutzim are, I presume, rules-based, top-down forms of communal living, whereas bonobo society just happened, a relaxed, happy-seeming culture, with females bonding and looking out for each other and their offspring in a way that the males, over time, acceded to. Nothing forced or regulated about it. I’m done, frankly, with labels like socialism and capitalism. I mean, we’re the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet, the key to our success if you like, and you can call that socialism I suppose. And we’re more thoroughly capitalist than any other species, capitalising on a massive number of other living resources to survive and thrive, not just through pure consumption but domestication and other manipulative practices.
Canto: Well said. But I still have a soft spot for the kibbutz idea, without Yom Kippur or Christmas, a thoroughly sciencey, sexy, smiley celebration of smart, sassy, sisterly communal living…
Jacinta: Not quite the bonobo world though, is it? Sounds more like dropping out. The original kibbutzim were based on land, and agriculture. And what would the bonobo world be without its forest lands and their simple resources? The world of WEIRDS wants so much more, a kind of eternal transcendence. To be more, to have more, to make more, to do more, to live more, as if it’s more satisfying to never be satisfied.
Canto: Hmmm. Thought-provoking, but I just wanted to focus on monogamy and child-rearing, and now you’ve given me a headache. I’m wondering though – because it niggles at the back of my mind, if the bonobo world would really work for us. Our success, if you want to call it that, is due to our endless ambition – caused presumably by those big brains of ours. To paraphrase Marx, those big brains have made us want to not just understand the world, but to change it. And boy have we ever fucking changed it.
Jacinta: Yeah, just ask those aurochs and quaggas and moas and dodos and passenger pigeons… oh but – we can’t.
Canto: Not to mention the millions of humans we slaughtered in wars, worked to death in mines and factories, and fucked to death for our entertainment, but then again, what a piece of work is a man, in apprehension how like a god! But a woman – maybe a woman is more than just a quintessence of dust. And if she is, maybe that little soupçon is just what humanity needs to flavour its thinking about the biosphere and its endless exploitation.
Jacinta: Yes well, don’t put all the responsibility onto us mate. And yet – we need plenty of adventurous spirit as well as a sense of ‘nobody left behind’ to navigate ourselves out of self-created disasters such as global warming, toxic work environments (both physical and mental), and species depletion. And I’m not saying this from some simplistic perspective of male traits admixed with female ones.
Canto: No because we’re already getting mixed up, in a good way. The WEIRDS are taking over the world – have taken over the world…
Jacinta: Yes, China is so western now, and so democratic…
Canto: Well, that’s actually half true. The term ‘western’ is surely the weakest link in the WEIRDS chain. I mean China’s difficult to analyse with its vast population, which means tons of poverty as well as tons of richesse. It has urbanised very rapidly, yet its rural and mostly poor population is still greater than the entire population of most countries. But if you take the rapidly educating and enriching and industrialising urban elites, you’ve got a pretty strong candidate for something equivalent to WEIRDness.
Jacinta: And then of course there’s the urban poor. But you’re right, the term ‘western’ has never made a lot of sense to me. EIRDS perhaps?
Canto: Not the most cromulent of acronyms. RIDES is at least a word, but… I think we’re stuck with WEIRD/S for the foreseeable. Anyway, I think we need to unshackle ourselves from patriarchal religion – I know the WEIRD world largely has, but I’m impatient. Doing so I think will enable more women to be part of the solutions to the problems we face, and the problems other species face because of us.
Jacinta: China and Japan are pretty secular these days, but how many female leaders have they had in the last century or so?
Canto: Yes it’s taking its time – China has now achieved female literacy and education levels that are pretty well equivalent to those of males, but perhaps education isn’t entirely equivalent to empowerment.
Jacinta: Under Xi’s dictatorship female empowerment has clearly gone backwards. Hopefully he’ll be dead soon, but he’s probably already trying to ensure another macho thug succeeds him. Women have absolutely zero power in today’s China. As for Japan, they were ranked 110th in the world for gender equality in 2019, and the sexism there is really stark, in spite of 70% of women being in the workforce. You’ll remember our semi-serious piece about bonobos not wearing stupid shoes, meaning stilettos? There was a ruckus just a few years ago (2019) about that fucked-up footwear, which went semi-viral worldwide, as reported in The Guardian:
Meanwhile, even something as apparently straightforward as being allowed to wear whatever shoes you like continues to prove tricky. In response to the #KuToo petition [the hash-tag puns on ‘shoes’ and ‘pain’], Japan’s minister of labour, Takumi Nemoto, told parliament that requiring high heels in the workplace was perfectly acceptable – sparking further outrage at the government of Shinzo Abe, whose “Womenomics” policy is supposedly attempting to bring more women into the workforce.
Canto: Presumably Mr Nemoto wasn’t wearing high heels when he said this, so WTF.
Jacinta: At least there was blowback, but not nearly enough. Sigh, the arc of progress is long, but it bends towards beating sense into blokey blokes, ou quelque chose comme ça.
Canto: Transcendence may not be imminent, but it’s eminently desirable, for the benefit and beautification of our immanent being…
References
Ferdinand Mount, The subversive family, 1982
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz
Gaia Vince, Adventures in the Anthropocene, 2014
Gaia Vince, Transcendence, 2019
Click to access shsconf_sschd2023_02001.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/22/where-are-the-women-at-the-top-of-chinese-politics
a bonobo world 33: they don’t wear stillettos