Newsletter 21

Mars on my mind

Feb 08, 2021

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the new people who signed up firstly - and thank you to the subscribers who recommended this little corner of the internet too! On the 21st weekly edition we are on 496 of you tuning in each week.

There are some great reads this week - and I point to big events over on Mars this coming week also. I’ll be keeping a close eye on all three missions as they arrive.

Also the first of the podcast recommendations is well worth your time as it goes to the core of this newsletter as we try to figure out the future and build it.

As always, the newsletter is free for everyone regardless of you being paid or unpaid (thank you to the paid people though it keeps my skin in the game!). If you can’t afford to subscribe - don’t worry - a recommendation is always appreciated instead. You can click here to recommend:

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Gavin

Reading list - the best stuff to read

📱 Society - the attention economy

The NYT profiles Michael Goldhaber who talked about the attention economy as far back as the 1980s. (1,800 words/7 mins by Charlie Warzel)

Where do we start? “It’s not a question of sitting by yourself and doing nothing,” Mr. Goldhaber told me. “But instead asking, ‘How do you allocate the attention you have in more focused, intentional ways?’” Some of that is personal — thinking critically about who we amplify and re-evaluating our habits and hobbies. Another part is to think about attention societally. He argued that pressing problems like income and racial inequality are, in some part, issues of where we direct our attention and resources and what we value.
As someone who writes about online extremism, I found one line of his eerily compelling. “We struggle to attune ourselves to groups of people who feel they’re not getting the attention they deserve, and we ought to get better at sensing that feeling earlier,” he said. “Because it’s a powerful, dangerous feeling.”

🦠 COVID

We’ve looked several times before at the underlying technology behind mRNA vaccines, and here’s another look since the technology is so fascinating. (3,000 words/11 mins by Antonio Regalado)

The potency of the shots, and the ease with which they can be reprogrammed, mean researchers are already preparing to go after HIV, herpes, infant respiratory virus, and malaria—all diseases for which there’s no successful vaccine. Also on the drawing board: “universal” flu vaccines and what Weissman calls a “pan-coronavirus” shot that could offer basic protection against thousands of pathogens in that category, which have led not only to covid-19 but, before that, to the infection SARS and probably other pandemics throughout history.
“You have to assume we’re going to have more,” Weissman says. “So instead of shutting down the world for a year while you make a new vaccine, we’ll have a vaccine ready to go.”

A counterpoint to the above was Moderna receiving the Shkreli Award for greedy vaccine pricing. (500 words/1 min by Beth Mole)

Award judges cited Moderna’s pricing of its COVID-19 vaccine, which was developed with $1 billion in federal funding. Still, despite the tax-payer backing, Moderna set the estimated prices for its vaccine significantly higher than other vaccine developers.

The spread of B117 variant continues remorselessly. A good report here on Denmark’s dealing with it. (1,200 words/4 mins by Kai Kupferschmidt)

But a massive virus-sequencing effort has allowed Denmark, a country of 5.8 million, to track the rise of the new COVID-19 variant more closely than any other country. “All eyes are on Denmark right now,” says Kristian Andersen, an infectious diseases researcher at Scripps Research who is advising the Danish government. “When it comes to B.1.1.7, is there a way in which … we can prevent the kind of calamity that we have seen in the U.K. and Ireland, for example?” he asks.
The data aren’t reassuring. Danish scientists’ best guess is that B.1.1.7 spreads 1.55 times faster than previous variants, Holten Møller says. To keep it from spiraling out of control, the country will have to remain in lockdown—or even add new control measures—until a large part of the population has been vaccinated. That prospect is so unappealing that some epidemiologists say Denmark should consider an alternative: Reopen once the most vulnerable people are vaccinated, even if that means a big new surge in cases.

Ever wondered if mixing vaccines might help? Well here’s your answer. (900 words/3 mins by Heidi Ledford)

Oxford has said that it will also trial combinations of its COVID-19 vaccine with the Russian coronavirus vaccine, Sputnik V, which uses harmless viruses to shuttle components of the coronavirus into cells. Sputnik V, which this week was shown1 to have greater than 90% efficacy against COVID-19, is itself a heterologous prime-boost vaccine, consisting of different viral components in the first and second doses.

🖥 Society - hacking

The affects of the SolarWinds hack are still reverberating in the US and this is a good overview of recent attacks (and not so recent attacks like the typewriter one) (3,000 words/11 mins by Nicole Perlroth

“Gunman didn’t impact the average American where they would feel it, but SolarWinds is getting pretty darn close,” Mr. Gosler told me recently. “It’s so pervasive. It’s one step from SolarWinds into the electrical grid. If the average American can’t feel that? What is it going to take?”

👽 Space - aliens

I will never not be fascinated by Avi Loeb. He has a new book out and it’s all about Oumuamua naturally. Here’s an interview in Sciam. (3,500 words/13 mins by Lee Billings)

🚀 Space - rockets and Mars

Now that Jeff Bezos has stepped down from leading Amazon it looks like he might turn his attention to his SpaceX competitor Blue Origin. Tech Review has a piece here on it. Blue Origin has lots of work ahead of it but plans to launch its Falcon 9 competitor New Glenn this year. (1,200 words/4 mins by Neel Patel)
SpaceX has been busy too. A couple of things to note this week. First was the failed SN9 launch - after an engine misfired. Watch the test launch here but watch Scott Manley’s excellent analysis here too (13 mins):
SN10 is being prepared for its test launch which we will likely see later this month.
SpaceX has also sought FCC permission for new uses of its Starlink network currently under construction in orbit above our heads (there was another successful launch of 60 satellites this week too). This includes VOIP services via its user terminals. Of note in the filing is that Starlink now has 10,000 customers - the inferred revenues on that would be about $1m a month. (1,000 words/3 mins by Jon Brodkin)
This week is a big week for Mars. As mentioned in our preview of 2021 newsletter three Mars probes arrive this week, including the UAE’s orbiter, China’s orbiter, lander/rover and NASA’s massive rover and drone. Keep your eyes peeled for YouTube streams.
Also speaking of Mars, it might have active volcanoes - something that was not previously considered. (2,600 words/10 mins by Robin George Andrews)

A recent flurry of results from orbiting spacecraft have found that its ancient lava flows are not so ancient after all. Some of them appear to have erupted from volcanic pits or chasms within the last few million years, perhaps even within the last few tens of thousands of years.
And NASA’s InSight lander, which has been peeking inside Mars for two years now, has picked up on some curious seismic signals emanating from one such site of youthful volcanism. The results, which were presented at a conference in December, are not definitive. But they suggest that InSight could be hearing the sounds of convulsing magma — the drumbeat of volcanic warfare presumed to have fallen silent eons ago.

📰 Media - Marty Baron

The New Yorker has an interview with the departing WaPo editor Marty Baron. (5,500 words/20 mins by Isaac Chotiner)

The idea of objectivity—I should make clear—it’s not neutrality, it’s not both-sides-ism, it’s not so-called balance. It’s never been that. That’s not the idea of objectivity. But once we do our reporting, once we do a rigorous job and we’re satisfied that we’ve done the job in an appropriate way, we’re supposed to tell people what we’ve actually found. Not pretend that we didn’t learn anything definitive. Not meet all sides equally if we know that they’re not equal. It’s none of that. It’s to tell people in an unflinching way what we have learned, what we have discovered.
I think that’s a pretty good way to practice journalism, frankly. I think it’s what a lot of people who are critics of objectivity have in mind, and that is the recognition that our own backgrounds may limit what we know and what we see, and that we need to open ourselves up to listen to all people, and to hear what they have to say and to take it seriously. So I think that a lot of the debate, frankly, is the result of a complete misunderstanding of what the term “objectivity” originally meant and how it should be practiced.

🌍 Civilisation - survival

An interesting review of a new book by Toby Ord - The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. The book explores future scenarios for the death of humanity - concluding that AI poses the biggest existential risk.

Note though that this refers to the total obliteration of the human race - rather than something that would leave thousands or millions of humans alive (such as arguably climate change or nuclear war). Holt is critical of the book for philosophical reasons - and wonders what value humans should place on humans in the future who have not been born yet. (5,200 words/19 mins by Jim Holt reviewing a book by Toby Ord)

Our motivation for ensuring humanity’s survival is thus not merely moral; it is also self-interested. The value of our own lives depends on the fate of humanity after we’re gone. But how far does this dependence stretch into the future? Does it extend forever? This has been called the “Alvy Singer Problem,” after the character played by Woody Allen in the movie Annie Hall. As a young boy, Alvy has an existential crisis when he learns that the universe is expanding, and that someday everything will come to an end. So he sees no point in doing his homework, even when he is assured by the psychiatrist his mother takes him to that the end won’t happen for “billions of years.” To us, Alvy’s cosmic funk seems comical. The prospect of a temporally remote extinction ought not to undermine the value of our lives today the way imminent extinction would. Our reciprocal relations with future generations do not extend forever.

🌏 Climate change - normalisation of EVs.

GM has gone big with new EV ads including this one shown at the Super Bowl, depicting Norway as doing better than the US in EV stakes (it is). (1,000 words/3 mins by Robinson Meyer)

In an earlier edition we looked at the news that wildlife on South Georgia was threatened by a very large iceberg. They had a lucky escape:

ESA EarthObservation @ESA_EO

This map here below shows the different positions of the berg over the course of its three-year journey, since it broke off from the Larsen-C ice shelf in 2017. The map also includes historic iceberg tracks, based on data from a number of satellites.

Greek Tragedy Corner (a journey through Greek tragedy every week)

Next in our series of exploring Euripides is The Suppliants. (96 mins)

Documentary

We’re on Part 8 of Cosmos. It’s typically great.

Here is the second part of Rome: A History of the Eternal City by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Here he explores Christianity and its spread outward from Rome. (60 mins). Note the early mention of the obelisk at St Peter’s which is over 4,000 years old and was brought to Rome in 37 AD by Caligula - something worth noting next time you’re there - it previously stood in the Circus of Nero.

Podcast(s)

The Ezra Klein Show did a good long interview with Zeynep Tufekci on one of my favourite subjects: systems thinking. I tend to think of imagining the future (a common feature of this newsletter) as something like systems thinking or “applied” systems thinking merged with scenario planning. (70 mins).
I heard lots of similarities in her approaches to my own on systems thinking - one habit is diving into academic research papers that are mentioned in news articles (there’s tricks to digesting them too). It can seem intimidating to start with but it often gets you a deeper understanding of something you might never have come across before. You can use that knowledge across other adjacent (or non-adjacent) disciplines or industries.
Highly recommended listen. And here’s a related article with associated transcript.
Newsletter subscriber Peter Geoghegan was on All Out Politics with Adam Boulton, Kate McCann and Gavin Esler discussing the future of the United Kingdom. The consensus was the the Union is in serious trouble. (57 mins)
Deep Background had a good long look at the Gamestop story with Alexis Goldstein. (45 mins)
I have some additional thoughts on this that I think the podcast should have explored but didn’t - relating to how this pattern is likely to repeat again and how the mix of social media, misinformation, incentive structures, encrypted apps and cryptocurrency could combine to mess up economies. I’m adding it to my “essays coming soon on this newsletter” bucket.