England-2011-ivan

First response

Overpopulation is not only the fact that there will be more people on the earth, behind that word lies is a huge consequence of earth not being able to produce enough resources. Because by increasing number of people on the earth we will still have the same amount of resources since it is a fixed factor that can go only down (example: fossil oil) Final consequence can be population collapse. This problem is more evident in developing countries because they do not have access to good “updated” education that will teach them how to conserve resources. Since they are also suffering economically they do not have access to birth controls. Most of them work in agriculture and have huge families because they think that one more mouth is acceptable to feed because two more hand swill be helping with the labor. It is approximated that on the earth are 6,896,700,000 people at this moment. And that every second ten people die while another thirty are born. Which means that every second we have 20 people more than second ago. In my opinion, the problem of overpopulation is still underestimate (and that is exactly why we are facing the problem) and majority of people do not believe that it is happening (same scenario happened with the problem of global warming – it was predicted many years ago but got significant attention recently). So I think that we should use science and technology in order to stress the importance of this problem on a global level. Scientists from different fields (Computer scientists, Sociologists...) can produce a great models of overpopulation that will be able to present their horrible consequence as well. And noways technology can contribute by handling those models (complex models with huge number of arguments).

Renewable energy is in my opinion very important and serious issue. At this moment, 85% of energy that we use is coming from fossil fuels that are fixed factor on earth and wont last forever. We can be free and say that nowadays world literally works and is dependent of fossil fuels. It is also well known that use of fossil fuels as another consequence will have creation of serious pollution. This is a great example where science and technology work together in order to produce something better, something called renewable energy sources. In my opinion green energy is consider as a serious problem and is getting significant attention. This problem will be solved when price of energy that is produced by renewable technology reach the price of energy that is produced by non renewable energy. This is a great challenge for science.

Clean water is a huge problem for some places at this moment. And the number of those places is getting bigger as time is passing. It is very scary and terrifying to know that ancient Romans had better water quality than a half of our population now. And that half of the world's hospitalization is caused by water diseases which results in 3,575 million deaths. This problem is in my opinion not getting the significant amount of attention because the people who control money are not affected with this issues at all. However, in my opinion this is a great task for scientists to produce technology capable of handling this problem. It is very sad to know that water covers 70.9% of the Earth's surface but some people are still having troubles to have it. By making technology that is very efficient in taking water out of air (and for that use renewable energy source like sun) we would help to many people. Another goal would be efficient and reliable transforming of see water to drinking and usable water should be another step closer to solving this problem.

I think that by fixing one problem we are creating another because in my opinion other reason why we are facing a problem like overpopulation is because some time ago we improved our medication treatment (which use to be issue before). By doing that we lover child mortality and increased life expectant. With overpopulation we will increase pollution...

Second response

The “designers of atmosphere” did a great job and on a very clever way managed to successfully (through interactive technology tools) show how atmosphere works, what might happen and what are our options in the future. I have learned many details but one that took my attention is the fact that the mixture of gases in the atmosphere has taken over 4.5 billion years to evolve. How hard and long it takes to create something but how short and little takes to destroy something. The most engaging kiosk for me was related to the section of “what we can do” and to be more specific it was a “green car” with “open source” technology that showed success so far (at least with software) :) I think that all kiosks were very engaging and I enjoyed spending time in all of them.

Greenland Review

I definitely enjoyed in this play especially because of great incorporation of actors and special effects. Personally I was very surprised that somewhere out in the world exists play like this, play about global warming. People who care about these issues are trying to approach to general public trough many different ways, starting from documentaries, newspapers, movies, web-pages, interactive games, radio shows... But I never before heard of approaching trough play. I was personally surprised by the number of people that visited the play and I was happy to see that this way of approaching and shaping public opinion really works. I learned some new things and after checking proved to me that they used very accurate facts in the pay. Hope that there will be more plays on this topic and personally think that this is a great idea especially because stressing the importance of global warming trough this media is very new and attractive to people.

Reflections on Climate Change

Many researches showed that a regular person is more likely to remember some facts after seeing it in a visual form (movie, and nowadays tether) than by reading it from the written form (books, journals, research papers...). That is the reason why tether and the museum were a bit more effective for me than the assigned reading. I also believe that interaction will attract more people because it is proven that people like to watch more than to read. I am glad to see that more and more people are starting to realize that global warming and the climate changes are happening more rapidly than they should and that people are actually the main reason for this. I am very sad to say that in my country, most of the population do not realize at all what is a global warming and what consequences is it bringing. It is because government is not spending any money on this very important issue. The reason for this is money and education lack. But at the same time I am glad that developed countries like United States and international organizations like United Nations care much more about this issue. I remember that Barrack Obama said in his State of the Union that United States aspiration is to take the leading position in the green energy production and stimulation.

Science at Kew Gardens

I was pleasantly surprised with our visit to the Kew. Honestly I could not even dream that I will enjoy that much. Beautiful weather contributed and placed that day to my top 10 London days. Kew Gardens has more than 500 employed scientists. With the budget of more than 50 million dollars they do different branches of science. Ranging from sequencing plants genes to discovering potentials of plants. In my opinion, the reason for success of this organization is in their internationalism (sending their scientists all over the world). Society already supports Kew Gardens work but I think that it should get even more support because this part of science is still not well researched (~10% is known to us) and I am sure that there are many good things buried inside of those, to us still, unknown plants. I see a near-term principle as a learning part because everyone can benefit from information that are presented and researched my Kew scientists. Also public can enjoy in many plants samples at one place. As a long term benefit I see it as a cure for many diseases and bank of plants. It can also be very beneficial to our successors especially if present population do nothing about global warming.

I found Fibonacci sequence very interesting. At the Kew I saw a few examples of it. In one of the water aquarium I saw a shell (mussels) that was a pure example of Fibonacci sequence. Other example of it at the garden would be pine cones and flowers. And of course the bridge :)

Technology and Sustainability Talk.

I definitely enjoyed in the presentation and really like the way you managed to incorporate and successfully connect and present “how did we get here”, “how serious is here” and “what to do in order to get out of here”. I personally think that it is an art to talk about those three things in such a short time period and make people understand everything and allow them to create their opinion (even if they haven’t had one before). I personally think that this presentation should be done at Earlham as one of the Earlham’s convocations. The only thing that I would suggest is more interaction with audience and try to encourage them to ask more questions. Great job :)