6 ms

This roller coaster is speeding up. Usually it doesn't work that way because we are always losing energy. You have to burn a lot to keep going faster. Alas, the waste heat goes somewhere...

Substack Notes — I took a break from posting to understand the dynamics of Substack Notes (Social Media 3.0 for me).

VERY Good — I have been taking a class and enjoying it. It is time to figure out how to apply what I’ve learned. So today it’s the history of the earth in a day.

WHAT’S NEW — A NEW HOMEPAGE AND NAVIGATION TO FIND STORIES OF ALL SORTS

What Did I Learn?

I love an experiment despite the pit in my stomach — afraid of what I might find. I received a lot of kind comments from the writers of my prior Subscriptions. You meet the nicest people on Substack. A large number of them advised “I don’t use Notes” or “I never open it”. Those were the more interesting comments in my experience. The funny thing is all of them managed to end up with all sorts of messages on Notes — I wonder how that works? It may be the algorithm places all sorts of content to peruse regardless of individual actions — or maybe it is just addiction or FOMO. So what does it mean? I don’t subscribe to Newsletters unless I enjoy the reading. That does not mean I want to also partake in their SM banter.

After unsubscribing from all of my Newsletters, I found that Substack (on a much smaller scale than Twitter) had no difficulty filling the hopper with stuff EVEN AFTER I STOPPED WRITING and UNSUBSCRIBED FROM EVERYTHING. My conclusion is there is a volume you get as the price of entry now. This is the price of entry and I liken it to the Substack Notes tax. I was disappointed to find out that muting someone on Notes meant they are muted everywhere. What this means is if you have a Newsletter you LOVE, whatever other interests that writer might pursue on Notes comes along for the ride (even if they “don’t use it”
haha). The calculation of the value of subscribing changes, at least for me.

If I were to try to describe how I choose my Subscriptions, I often return to the word their writing is authentic. I think authentic describes the Substack I am describing quite well and the general driver for my Subscriptions.

Upon getting ready to write again for now, I resubscribed to all of my previous subscriptions AND added subscriptions to all the other Substacks I try to read as time avails. I also deleted the application from my phone and Chromebook as it seems to behave differently than the website. Less moving parts. All in all, I am ready to go and give it another try. I plan to think carefully about the Newsletters I read. I will now pay close attention to how much noise comes along for the ride on Notes and perhaps respond accordingly. For a guy like me, having a plan helps a lot. My BIGGEST disappointment was I attempted to use URL blocking to PREVENT https://substack.com/notes FROM OPENING on my tablet. Substack makes that IMPOSSIBLE as they have automatically rerouted their main website https://substack.com to Notes by default — so convenient! Quitting smoking is hard.

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What Time Is It?

Most of my work career was spent in the “real world”. We focused on what happened yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, and sometimes hourly. However, in my early career, our focus was on stuff that happens fast! The sort of times that your watch cannot help you with. We would work with equipment that was accurate to about 100 microseconds. The application is not important but 100 microseconds is 0.1 ms. Milliseconds are thousandths of a second. Sometimes, we see ms if we are watching Olympic swimming events I guess.

Silly Examples

• 300-400 ms — a blink of an eye

• 100 ms — human reaction time

• 5 ms — honeybee wing flag (200x per second)

• 1 ms — a normal camera flash

I fear that MIGHT HAVE BEEN BORING but there is a method to my madness. Today I am trying to point out why humankind no longer has the luxury of delaying its big decisions. We’ve sped up progress on such a ridiculous scale, that milliseconds finally matter!

Earth is about 4.6B years old. We started cranking out some oxygen after 600M years. The ocean absorbed it into iron for over a billion years till there was no free iron left. Finally the creation of a breathable atmosphere could start. It was about 2.4B years ago when we think photosynthesis, a wonderful process, emerged that made life of all sorts eventually possible on this planet. This is the one “can’t get along without” process on this planet. When I wrote the post titled “Biomass”, I stressed everything alive on this planet has a ‘little engine that could’ named DNA. This is why nerds like me get to remind everyone how much DNA they have in common with a cauliflower. It’s all one big tree, you see. In today’s comments, is anyone happy they have some commonality with brassicas (cauliflower)?

Set a Timer for 6 Milliseconds

So our day in life starts when our planet developed the process of photosynthesis (CO2 to free O2) about 2.4B years ago. I like this starting point because it lends a sense of how slow evolution is. Another way to how long stuff takes is to consider 300,000 years of human history and we didn’t even pick up the scent until Charles Darwin less than 200 years ago! Photosynthesis is important today because we’ve figured out a way to overwhelm it. Life on the planet doesn’t work without it so the human hack is not so good. In a previous post, I pointed out there are 7500 pounds of plants for every pound of us. Lowly us has figured out how to make so much CO2 WASTE that we overwhelm the plants. Ugh. It will also help us see when humans started to disrupt the natural cycles. This is where 6 milliseconds come in. Start the clock at 2.4B years ago. It took us until 11:59:59.994 PM on your newfangled watch to start burning lots of stuff. About 3 milliseconds later (11:59:59.997) we started manipulating the growth of things with fertilizer. For math nerds, this is a procrastination story. Do nothing all day till the last second is all but over. Let’s start burning everything we can for energy — what could go wrong? There is no shortage of coverage whether print, radio, or television of the impending consequences of climate change. I think a lot of us have just blocked it out. The progress of humanity on the planet has been amazing and continues to amaze us. I hope that by seeing it as the analogy of one day, we can realize how out of kilter and how recent all of this troublesome action is. We have distorted our planet to serve us and we’ve done a masterful job. All of this progress has brought us to a point in history we may not be equipped for.

I think we are very likely to blow this next big decision. Photosynthesis is cool. It took about half of Earth's history for it to start. A way to make oxygen from CO2 is finally available. A little too much CO2 and things get dicey. A little too much oxygen and the animals get BIG. It is the engine that has made so much of life possible. Calibrate your watch for this one day in time (starting with photosynthesis). It is kinda interesting:

• At the stroke of midnight (2.4B years ago) life of all sorts becomes possible. Oxygen gets absorbed in the bottom of the ocean by iron until there is no more free iron left.

• At 09:00 AM (1.5B years ago) oxygen starts accumulating in the atmosphere. I’m glad we ran out of iron! It is the age of plants and trees.

• At 05:00 PM (700M years ago) the first animals appear!

• At 06:42 PM (530M years ago) the first fish appear!

• At 08:00 PM (400M years ago) the first four-legged animals appear

• At 11:20 PM (60M years ago) an asteroid arrives and the dinosaurs are gone thereafter

• Earth goes into a slow recovery process

• At 11:54 PM (10M years ago) mammals appear

• At 11:59:51 PM an upright walking ape emerges (about 300,000 years ago)

• At 11:59:59.856 the creature invents alphabets. That is about 4000 years ago and boy do we start telling stories!

• At 11:59:59.994 it starts burning everything it can to make energy to do stuff (about 175 years ago)

• At 11:59:59.997, after growing its population, humanity starts making nitrogen fertilizer to feed everyone. Shortly thereafter, we begin making stuff from everything we burn — we call it plastic.

In this silly thought experiment, 1/1000 of a second is about 25 years. When scientists say things could get bad by 2050 (25 years), we probably shouldn’t waste this precious millisecond.

What’s So Special About Now

Why was this a hard post for me to pursue? I am at the front of the line when it comes to being aware of recency bias. What is so special about now? Why does it matter so much? Am I just leaning into the human tendency to believe the period they live in is extra important?

The Human Tendency (THT)

I constantly point back to my title “Why Living Today Rocks”. I also insist I am an optimist. I profess today doesn’t sound so optimistic at times. We are the greatest thing that ever emerged on this planet but we are also the most dangerous. We have wrested control of the evolution of life on the planet from the planet. We introduce change at speeds evolution is not built for. We’ve only been doing this for 6 milliseconds (175 years). We’ve only been broadly aware of our influence for perhaps 2 milliseconds (50 years). Finally, we’ve accelerated to less than a human lifetime. It is time to examine human tendencies — THT for short. We are our greatest risk and best hope. Here are some human tendencies that concern me

• THT to wait until there is a crisis to act (let’s meet at 11:45 PM to extend the debt limit)

• THT toward corruption (why don’t we market clean coal)

• THT to accept bribes (Camels are the favorite cigarettes of Doctors)

• THT to try to listen to ‘both sides’ even when one side is delusional (that little needle is injecting a microchip into your body to control you)

• THT to wait until there is a crisis to act (This latest hurricane is due in an hour. We should start thinking about eliminating insurance coverage for future buildings on the coast)

• THT toward “out of sight, out of mind” (I’ve never seen a single fishing boat in my life [amongst the 3.5M] — there will always be enough salmon to eat)

• THT to ignore reality (Biden and Trump aren’t THAT old, they both seem to be sharp and stable and maybe even geniuses)

• THT to procrastinate (Class starts in 15 minutes, I better get out of bed in case I don’t have clean underwear)

• THT toward group think to ignore reality (Lots of NASA Engineers knew of the failure patterns of O-Rings in the cold before the Challenger launch —speaking up is hard)

What Can We Do About It?

All of these human tendencies are things we can all recognize if we try. I think they all make sense to all of us deep down. They are the warning signs that stand in the way of sound and timely decision-making. Maybe it is as SIMPLE as rewarding those people who try to avoid these human tendencies. More importantly, we should be cautious and likely reject any “leaders” who embrace these actions. We hire people to make decisions in our best interests. The qualities above are easy to accept as things we should all avoid. Let’s all try to stick with it for the next millisecond.

So What Are The Facts

We are living between 11:59:59:999 PM and midnight. The clock will not fall off the wall in 2050 (probably). However, we KNOW we will increase our unsustainable use of all sorts of things in the next 25 years. Whether CO2 in the atmosphere, ice at the poles, fish in the sea, or plastic waste in the food chain, all of these challenges will be GREATER rather than lesser. Changing the direction of these trends must occur with our help OR nature, once overwhelmed will simply reset the clock. There have been 5 mass extinctions in the last 440 million years. We are the first and only stewards this planet has ever had. We have, within our power, the means to change. The sooner we commit to the effort the better. We’ve been faking it and kicking the can down the road. We will likely get to a 1.5C temperature increase in 3-4 years. Lots of people pretending we will prevent it by 2050. The train has left the station. None of us know how much is too much. What we do know is that some amount is too much and we are racing ahead faster than any time in human history. I believe we are now gambling on everyone’s future.

The Poll And Music

I chose today’s song because of the quote from Steven Biko that is highlighted. What is worth standing up for?

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