Monday, August 17, 2020

Breakthrough to end the great locust plagues on the horizon let’s remember to design processes for sustainability

Breakthrough to end the great locust plagues on the horizon let’s remember to design processes for sustainability

As a scientist in a “developing country”, I am sometimes baffled by the many scientific breakthrough and the associated technologies that the so called “developed countries” relied on to make them great. Many of the core principles are so problematic that the scientists involved should have ruffled their invention to make its implementation free from calamitous outcomes. There are many such examples that I will not spend too much space and time to elaborate on but only list three: atomic energy, opioids and weedicides. Any invention that has massive coverage area and affects a high number of people should be studied for a generation before it is applied at scale. Especially when is it a radically new invention. We need 35 years or more to ensure that the world will not be burdened with spending so much more to deal with the unforeseen dangerous effects.

We need new areas of research that look at accelerating the course of time and the natural evolution to learn the what some of these dangerous unforeseen effects can be. That is if we cannot wait for a generation to deploy our new world saving technologies. I recently read on the huge amounts that the USA government was willing to spend to deal with the opioid crisis in addition to the lives damaged and lives lost. We needed to calculate carefully what the value of opioids have compared to the price that has to be paid for its dangerous side effects.

We are at the cusp of another technological leap to deal with the great locust plagues of the world. Some scientists have just published the discovery of the swarming pheromone, called 4-Vinylanisole, that is used by locusts to create their destructive super-organism to lay waste large tracts farmlands and forests. I am sure many companies are already carrying out field tests of possible solutions to solve the problem and cash in on the current plague in East Africa. While at it, let’s pulse and think hard about the environment and save the future ahead of time. It is possible. It is possible to design an innovation system around this situation that has not been used before. One that mimics how a newborn baby reimagines the world based on new realities and not the experiences of their ancestors alone.

Let’s get out of the economic-centric innovation system that is driven by profit and senseless competition. Many companies have rushed to profit only to be liquidated to pay off the damage done by their stupid ideas and toxic products. I know I promised to cite only three examples but the examples of asbestos and radium I recently watched on TV is still too powerful to ignore. The real value of innovation is to improve life in the long haul, we should therefore pick safety over specific and narrow range results. All results must be entered into the decision-making process with equal weight. True advancement should be like music, it should leave no pain. The bullish will retort, “no pain no gain”. Yes, there is pain in every gain but here the pain should be about enduring the problems long enough for the solution to be long lasting. Since nature invented water as the medium of life, there has not been any other to replace it. We now even look for water on far away planets as a sign of life. The pain should be about designing “powerful telescope versions” of innovation systems that are able to see far into the future as the telescopes are able to see far into the past to pick up red-shifted light of star when they first formed.

I do not have answers to the sustainability questions, but I can pose a few questions to see what others think:

1. Is it possible to avoid burning the trapped locusts and release smoke back into the environment that will interact with the genome of the locust to evolve a new pheromone in record time?

2. Is it possible to ensure that the system designed to kill the locust also has a mechanism to collect them to generate more profit?

3. Is it possible to use trapping systems that do not leave the remains of killed locusts on land to generate warning signals for developing larvae to switch behavior to avoid mass entrapment?

4. Is it possible to incorporate this new 4-Vinylanisole substance into a mobile unit that is able to nicely draw in the locust swarm and gently freeze them to death and prepared the collection for other uses?

5. Is it possible to create medium sized ships to draw the locusts out to sea and freeze them into animal feed, and leave useful insects on land untouched?

6. Is it possible to ensure that the production of the 4-Vinylanisole does not include processes that leave toxic residue for the environment?

7. Is it possible to trap all volatile emissions from the processing of the trapped locusts such that they can never escape into the environment to train and evolve the sensory systems of the new locusts?

I hope we will not be inpatient to push the emergency button to unleash the next human made catastrophe on this fragile earth.

Scientific papers: