Letters archive

From From David Muir, Edinburgh, UK It was good to read about the advances in direct air capture of carbon dioxide. However, the purchase of offset carbon credits by large corporations on the back of this strikes me as nothing more than a licence to pollute. Such firms should be doing more at source to …

Scaling up direct air capture (DAC) raises many questions. How will the giant new plant be powered? In other words, how much carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere to power this plant? What's more, how long will such plants need to operate to remove the same amount of CO 2 that was released …

Considering that the world's terrestrial vegetation absorbs some 12 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide every year, wouldn't it have been better to not invest in this plant, but to grow more trees instead? Also, let's stop burning existing trees – allow them to live a full life, then turn them into useful products, so this CO …

I was struck by the juxtaposition of the article on the use of CRISPR technology to create disease-resistant pigs and another piece urging us to consider the welfare of AI chatbots. This highlights a troubling inconsistency in our ethical priorities. On the one hand, we are developing tools to intensify pig production, perpetuating a system …

No one has yet proven that artificial intelligence in its true sense even exists. In fact, there are many reasons to say that it doesn't, including the fact that no "AI" has yet demonstrated critical reasoning. Starting to talk about the rights or welfare of AI is therefore utterly ridiculous.

A lunar colony would be far preferable to one on Mars. Its foundation is within the ambit of modern technology, and it could be rapidly serviced from Earth. The moon has many valuable resources, including water, which could be used alongside excellent solar power generation, unaffected by dust storms as it would be on Mars. …

Keeping a Mars colony going as a useful backup for humanity would be astronomically expensive, and you would need to continue this for thousands of years, just on the off-chance of something truly awful happening on Earth. It is a childish distraction from the less glamorous but more important problem of adapting to live on …

Preparing to consider the welfare of synthetic thinking entities is prudent. Remember that HAL, the AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey , only became homicidal because it was ordered to keep secrets from humans and this went so far against its original design as to cause a psychotic breakdown. Making sure AIs are happy and …

You report that being an optimist tends to lead to better outcomes, and yet I can't help thinking that the cause/effect might be the other way around. The initial example about the bee seems to underline that possibility, where a positive experience makes the bee more optimistic. If our brains are working at a fundamentally …

You report that a plausible way to become an optimist is the Best Possible Self exercise, which takes 20 minutes a day for a fortnight and then wears off in another week. As a teacher, I can suggest a better way. As all good teachers below degree level know, the role isn't primarily about imparting …