2041 - re-negotiation of moratorium on mining in Antarctica

2041 was founded by polar explorer, environmental leader and public speaker Robert Swan ( Rober Swan's Biography )
, OBE, the first person in history to walk to both the North and South poles. Swan has dedicated his life to the preservation of Antarctica by the promotion of recycling, renewable energy and sustainability to combat the effects of climate change.

Mission

In three years, at the third ‘World Summit for Sustainable Development’ in 2012, the existing Kyoto Protocol for the Environment will expire. Around the world the threat of climate change has become apparent to us all.



It is our mission to build on this by informing, engaging and inspiring the next generation of leaders to take responsibility, be sustainable, and know that now is the time for action in policy development, sustainable business generation and future technologies.

2041?

In the year 2041 the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty could potentially be modified or amended. Our aim is to work towards the continuing protection of the Antarctic Treaty so that the last great wilderness on earth is never exploited.

Voyage for Cleaner Energy

2041 and the Voyage for Cleaner Energy is at the COP 15 7-18 December 2009

Starting on the west coast of the USA in April 2008 and powered by clean technology, our sailboat ‘2041’ embarked on a global ‘Voyage for Cleaner Energy’.
The Voyage has so far taken us from the west coast of the USA, through the Panama Canal to the east coast. In 2009, ‘2041′ will continue the Voyage to Europe, Russia, India, China, and will end at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in 2012.
Voyage for Cleaner Energy Phase I
In each nation Robert Swan will motivate individuals, companies and communities to take decisive action and affect positive change to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At each port of call we will demonstrate the use and benefits of renewable energy as an affordable alternative to carbon-based fuels. There will be a focus on engaging young people through presentations at schools, colleges and universities.
Our call to action will be to inspire and connect young upcoming leaders from universities together with established leaders from corporations and industry. This International Alumni will work closely with local and global communities to affect personal change and influence government policy.

Phase three – Europe

September – December 2009
Locations TBA

Phase two – East Coast USA

June – December 2008
Nantucket, MA > Washington DC > New York > Boston

Phase one – West Coast USA

In April 2008, the Voyage for Cleaner Energy launched in San Francisco, USA where the global search for our international alumni began.





source: http://www.2041.com

A brand new science for the planet

“When the problem gets complicated, networking is the solution”. This is nothing new in principle but what Bob Bishop has in mind is one of those novelties that have the potential to change the course of history. He proposes to start networking sciences to create new knowledge. All this for the benefit – and the survival – of the planet.

At the end of the fifteenth and the start of the sixteenth centuries, Leonardo da Vinci was not only an engineer but also a painter, a mathematician and an architect. But in more recent years the sciences have evolved more towards specialization. “We have been treating the sciences as separate stovepipes and silos for over 200 years”, says Bob Bishop, former CEO at Silicon Graphics and a physicist with more than 40 years’ experience in scientific, technical and engineering computing.

On 29 January, Bob Bishop visited CERN and gave a seminar on the role of computing in climate science. He is the President of the newly formed International Centre for Earth Simulation (ICES) Foundation, whose ultimate goal is to build a supercomputer capable of modeling the whole Earth and thus simulating its behaviour. This would allow us to predict the occurrence of natural disasters such as tsunamis or hurricanes. “In current science one has theory and experimentation. Modeling and simulation is the third branch of knowledge generation. In order to build a model with some prediction ability, one has to understand all the various processes involved and then bring in the mathematics that best represents those processes”, he says.

The goal of setting up a worldwide organization for climate science is to allow the construction of a new large-scale, high performance supercomputer capable of computing all the different parameters, linkages and input data and producing sensible predictions from them. “In order for a model to be validated, one has to compare the output production with reality”, explains Bob Bishop. “If you cannot get the validation, you have to come back and go through the whole circle again. You can do that rather fast with a powerful supercomputer”.

Bishop’s supercomputer will have to process about one million billion floating point operations (i.e. one petaflop), and deal with exabytes (billion billions of bytes) of data. At full operation intensity, the LHC will produce roughly 15 petabytes of data annually, which will ultimately also accumulate to the exabyte level. The strategy adopted by CERN to deal with such a large quantity of data has been the Grid, the network of thousands of “ordinary” computers distributed across the world and hierarchically arranged in tiers. “In the case of Earth sciences the option of building a single supercomputer has to be preferred because a speed of about 1000 times real time is needed to get ahead of the problem. If you break and scatter the problem across the Grid, the latency of the connection between each machine will be enough to slow down the speed of the calculation and make it unusable”, explains Bob.

At this scale, gathering money to support the project is difficult, yet on the other hand, taken in perspective, nothing is more expensive than natural disasters that cause human losses. If such a supercomputer could indeed simulate the Earth’s behaviour so well that we could predict or even prevent dangerous natural phenomena from occurring, that would certainly be one of the best deals of human history. “Nature works by integration rather than disintegration”, continues Bishop. “We have spent 200 years achieving a very deep understanding of single phenomena. Today we have a high degree of specialization everywhere throughout science. In the case of the Earth sciences and climate sciences, one can find 50 or 60 specialised areas of overlap. Geology, but also geography, atmospheric physics, clouds physics, solar physics and cosmology are all involved, and these areas need to be integrated. I think the 21st century will be a century of reintegration – making the pieces talk to each other again, as they do in Nature”.

source: www.cern.ch

Banking on mobile money A cellphone-based cash transfer system has changed the way Kenyans handle their finances. But what does it mean for Kenya's economy — and the developing world?

Many technologists and entrepreneurs have argued that mobile phones can empower people in the developing world by providing civic and commercial resources where traditional infrastructure is lacking. But what actually happens when people start using such technologies? An MIT economist's detailed new study from Kenya sheds light on the impact of a mobile phone-based money system in a developing economy. 

Kenya's new mobile-money system, called M-PESA, really is changing the way Kenyans manage their money, by letting them borrow, save and pay for services more easily, according to Tavneet Suri, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who along with Georgetown University economist William Jack is leading a major research project on the subject.

"I don't think anybody thought it would take off quite as fast as it did or be as popular as it's been," says Suri. "The adoption has been very quick compared to almost any other technology we've seen."

Since its introduction in 2007, the researchers found, 38 percent of Kenyan households have at least one M-PESA user in them; by contrast, only 22 percent of adults have bank accounts. "In these sorts of economies, there's not much of a bank presence, but money transfers are still important," notes Suri. "People do them all the time."

Kenya's rapid adoption of mobile money is occurring with a larger global trend of increased cellphone use. There are now over 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide, compared to 1 billion in 2002, according to a 2009 report by the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations agency. Of those subscriptions, about two-thirds are in developing countries.

Saving your savings

The M-PESA system, introduced by phone provider Safaricom, lets users deposit, transfer and withdraw funds via text message. M-PESA is not technically considered to be a bank, and does not pay interest on savings. It does, however, charge fees for withdrawals and transfers.

In a 2008 survey of 3,000 households in areas representing 92 percent of Kenya's population, Suri and Jack found that despite M-PESA's fees, large numbers of Kenyans are using it for basic banking functions. About 38 percent of money transfers originated in rural areas. According to Suri, farmers are one group that employs the technology to lend each other money in lean times.

"Many of these people work in agriculture where you have highly variable incomes because of the weather," explains Suri. "That means banks also don't want to lend to them because of the risk is much higher. So people insure risk, by making informal agreements: 'I'm going to lend you money if you need it.' And if you were not able to feed your family, you would receive transfers from people in your network. This happens in a lot of developing countries."

The researchers' data also shows that 41 percent of M-PESA money transfers are sent to parents, and only 8 percent to children, which also strongly suggests that M-PESA fills a classic role in a developing economy; children who leave home to work may be sending money back to help their parents.

The physical separation of people has always made money transfers difficult in developing countries, however, notes Suri, a Kenya native whose family lives outside Nairobi, the capital. Sending money from one place to another has often been "hard to do, costly, not very safe. You might send money with a bus driver and it wouldn't get there, because he might get robbed. Now it gets there within five seconds, as soon as it takes a text message to arrive."

And despite their inability to earn interest, Kenyans appear to use M-PESA as a savings tool. In a current working paper summarizing their results, "Mobile Money: The Economics of M-PESA," Suri and Jack note that 77 percent of Kenyans say they keep money "under the mattress" at home, so to speak. About 11 percent of households say they have had savings stolen or become lost, though, meaning that tucking cash away is a money-losing strategy. By contrast, under 2 percent of M-PESA users believe they have lost money through the system (by sending it to an unintended recipient). That means Kenyans without access to banks should, on aggregate, retain more of their savings through M-PESA.

Technology entrepreneurs who have worked in Kenya say they are unsurprised by the rapid spread of M-PESA "Kenyans certainly want to do additional things on their phones, including mobile banking," says Ting Shih, executive vice-president and co-founder of Click Diagnostics, a health-care firm that has developed applications for clinicians in developing countries, including Kenya. "I think it's a matter of educating people, telling them what a service entails."

But does it help the economy?

Still, questions about the effects of M-PESA remain. For one: Can it help Kenya's economy become more productive and grow? In theory, it could do so by allowing routine transactions to be processed more quickly and reliably. Moreover, by making lending easier, M-PESA could allow capital to move around Kenya more efficiently, allowing economic activity to take place which might not otherwise occur.

Whether that is happening is something Suri and Jack intend to analyze in future studies. "If M-PESA is increasing transactions that much, we should see it in the data," says Suri. They would also like to quantify in more detail how much M-PESA lets Kenyans "smooth out" stretches of time when their incomes are uneven. The researchers are currently analyzing a second wave of survey data, and are planning two additional surveys, to be conducted later in 2010, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (the first survey was commissioned by the Central Bank of Kenya; M-PESA was initially funded by the Department for International Development, a British government agency).

"Technologies such as mobile phones are one way to overcome some of the obstacles that block the poor from having access to financial services," says Ignacio Mas, deputy director of the Financial Services for the Poor Initiative at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In the course of backing research and development of new technologies meant to expand financial services, Mas adds, the foundation is "focusing on savings because it addresses a crucial need that has been previously overlooked, and unmet."

M-PESA has also been introduced into neighboring Tanzania and could expand to other African countries, including South Africa. Observers may thus have more opportunities to find out if there is a "revealed preference" for the service as economists say. That means, as Suri says, "People wouldn't do it if it weren't particularly useful."

source: http://web.mit.edu

Life beyond our universe MIT physicists explore the possibility of life in universes with laws different from our own.

Whether life exists elsewhere in our universe is a longstanding mystery. But for some scientists, there’s another interesting question: could there be life in a universe significantly different from our own?

A definitive answer is impossible, since we have no way of directly studying other universes. But cosmologists speculate that a multitude of other universes exist, each with its own laws of physics. Recently physicists at MIT have shown that in theory, alternate universes could be quite congenial to life, even if their physical laws are very different from our own.

In work recently featured in a cover story in Scientific American, MIT physics professor Robert Jaffe, former MIT postdoc, Alejandro Jenkins, and recent MIT graduate Itamar Kimchi showed that universes quite different from ours still have elements similar to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and could therefore evolve life forms quite similar to us. Even when the masses of the elementary particles are dramatically altered, life may find a way.

“You could change them by significant amounts without eliminating the possibility of organic chemistry in the universe,” says Jenkins.

Pocket universes

Modern cosmology theory holds that our universe may be just one in a vast collection of universes known as the multiverse. MIT physicist Alan Guth has suggested that new universes (known as “pocket universes”) are constantly being created, but they cannot be seen from our universe.

In this view, “nature gets a lot of tries — the universe is an experiment that’s repeated over and over again, each time with slightly different physical laws, or even vastly different physical laws,” says Jaffe.

Some of these universes would collapse instants after forming; in others, the forces between particles would be so weak they could not give rise to atoms or molecules. However, if conditions were suitable, matter would coalesce into galaxies and planets, and if the right elements were present in those worlds, intelligent life could evolve.

Some physicists have theorized that only universes in which the laws of physics are “just so” could support life, and that if things were even a little bit different from our world, intelligent life would be impossible. In that case, our physical laws might be explained “anthropically,” meaning that they are as they are because if they were otherwise, no one would be around to notice them.

Jaffe and his collaborators felt that this proposed anthropic explanation should be subjected to more careful scrutiny, and decided to explore whether universes with different physical laws could support life.

This is a daunting question to answer in general, so as a start they decided to specialize to universes with nuclear and electromagnetic forces similar enough to ours that atoms exist. Although bizarre life forms might exist in universes different from ours, Jaffe and his collaborators decided to focus on life based on carbon chemistry. They defined as “congenial to life” those universes in which stable forms of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen would exist.

“If you don’t have a stable entity with the chemistry of hydrogen, you’re not going to have hydrocarbons, or complex carbohydrates, and you’re not going to have life,” says Jaffe. “The same goes for carbon and oxygen. Beyond those three we felt the rest is detail."

They set out to see what might happen to those elements if they altered the masses of elementary particles called quarks. There are six types of quarks, which are the building blocks of protons, neutrons and electrons. The MIT team focused on “up”, “down” and “strange” quarks, the most common and lightest quarks, which join together to form protons and neutrons and closely related particles called “hyperons.”

In our universe, the down quark is about twice as heavy as the up quark, resulting in neutrons that are 0.1 percent heavier than protons. Jaffe and his colleagues modeled one family of universes in which the down quark was lighter than the up quark, and protons were up to a percent heavier than neutrons. In this scenario, hydrogen would no longer be stable, but its slightly heavier isotopes deuterium or tritium could be. An isotope of carbon known as carbon-14 would also be stable, as would a form of oxygen, so the organic reactions necessary for life would be possible.

The team found a few other congenial universes, including a family where the up and strange quarks have roughly the same mass (in our universe, strange quarks are much heavier and can only be produced in high-energy collisions), while the down quark would be much lighter. In such a universe, atomic nuclei would be made of neutrons and a hyperon called the “sigma minus,” which would replace protons. They published their findings in the journal Physical Review D last year.

Fundamental forces

Jaffe and his collaborators focused on quarks because they know enough about quark interactions to predict what will happen when their masses change. However, “any attempt to address the problem in a broader context is going to be very difficult,” says Jaffe, because physicists are limited in their ability to predict the consequences of changing most other physical laws and constants.

A group of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has done related studies examining whether congenial universes could arise even while lacking one of the four fundamental forces of our universe — the weak nuclear force, which enables the reactions that turn neutrons into protons, and vice versa. The researchers showed that tweaking the other three fundamental forces could compensate for the missing weak nuclear force and still allow stable elements to be formed.

That study and the MIT work are different from most other studies in this area in that they examined more than one constant. “Usually people vary one constant and look at the results, which is different than if you vary multiple constants,” says Mark Wise, professor of physics at Caltech, who was not involved in the research. Varying only one constant usually produces an inhospitable universe, which can lead to the erroneous conclusion that any other congenial universes are impossible.

One physical parameter that does appear to be extremely finely tuned is the cosmological constant — a measure of the pressure exerted by empty space, which causes the universe to expand or contract. When the constant is positive, space expands, when negative, the universe collapses on itself. In our universe, the cosmological constant is positive but very small — any larger value would cause the universe to expand too rapidly for galaxies to form. However, Wise and his colleagues have shown that it is theoretically possible that changes in primordial cosmological density perturbations could compensate at least for small changes to the value of the cosmological constant.

In the end, there is no way to know for sure what other universes are out there, or what life they may hold. But that will likely not stop physicists from exploring the possibilities, and in the process learning more about our own universe.

source :  http://web.mit.edu