In brief:
1: A subculture of nonaggressive horn usage, using distinctive cars.
2: An efficient system of recycling on the elemental level.
3: A universal and comprehensive educational campaign about health and food for all children at a young age.
4: A science education curriculum to emphasize practical, actionable information.
5: A clearer framework of principles and ethics for my life
6: TBA
Proposal 1:
Create a subculture of nonaggressive horn usage, using distinctive cars.
How could one distinguish between aggressive horn usage and its usage to alert drivers to danger/shake them from potentially dangerous inattentiveness? A bumper sticker wouldn’t do it – too small and subtle. It would need to be a decal the entire size of the car, perhaps in conjunction with a specific color. Heck, why not make an entire car model? Imagine 10% of the population deciding to drive bright yellow, smiley-faced cars of an as-yet nonexistent but perfectly realizable compact electric vehicle. Sure, it’d be the butt of tons of jokes, but that’s not the point. The point is to engineer a small but critical mass of people who will advertise, and more importantly, practice, a different mode of behavior.
Inspiration:
This is inspired by an article I read years ago about a Colombian mayor who used innovative approaches to improve happiness in his city. He distributed signs – one with a smiley face and one with a frown – that let people communicate with others in situations that would otherwise escalate (say, car accidents or traffic). There were other measures that I don’t remember, and unfortunately a few Google searches haven’t quite turned up what I was looking for. But the idea is that something that seems gimmicky can actually change the way people communicate, and consequently, the way they feel about others.
Reasons why it’s "impossible":
The cultural pushback and heavy levels of cynicism might be too much for a significant portion of idealists to handle. In addition, the “movement” might be undercut by the possibility that, like Prius owners, they might achieve a reputation – perhaps deserved – of cultural elitism or superficial consciousness.
I’ve also considered whether there might be good engineering reasons for the current sharp, abrasive bark of modern horns. After all, if they weren’t jarring, they wouldn’t be serving their purpose.
Proposal 2:
An efficient system of recycling on the elemental level.
One of the challenges associated with recycling is that it often seems to have a negative expected financial return, (barring, of course, psychological and environmental externalities). A few commodities – scrap metals in particular – have a viable secondary market. Aluminum, in particular, is an important recyclable because of the high energy intensity required to process the original ore. Other items, like paper, are often recycled, but are frequently done so at a loss, either to the individual or the local municipalities. Plastics are also challenging, given the different recycling codes and chemical compositions, and its relative inexpensiveness to produce from raw materials.
In a world with safe, secure breeder reactors, or better yet, nuclear fusion, it would be possible to send all disposables to a central processing plant that would use high-energy processors to break the waste down to its elements. A process of regulated cooling and gas diffusion would separate the constituent elements.
Inspiration:
Sadly, Brave New World. That book had crematoria that processed dead bodies into base chemical elements. The historical baggage is tremendous when it involves people and corpses, but the idea is workable at least with waste.
Reasons why it’s "impossible":
The proposed solution is “impossible” because it requires perhaps an even more challenging problem – massive amounts of inexpensive and clean energy – to be solved first. Even if that were possible, it would also require either a change in the scarcity/value of chemicals and elements or a complete revamping of our cultural and economic system to value recycling to such a degree.
Proposal 3:
A universal and comprehensive educational campaign about health and food for all children at a young age.
I was originally going to suggest something along the lines of protein resequencing that permits the creation of food from base amino acids, but I think it’d be too easy to copy an idea whole cloth from Star Trek: Enterprise.
It’s a no-brainer that today’s America is a bit unusual in the history of the world in that our poor are fat. The reasons, studied and repeated until they become conventional wisdom, appears to be a combination of education, the accessibility and inexpensiveness of fast food, self-medication, the biochemistry of stress, and agricultural interests. (Have I missed some other factors, other than that Taco Bell just tastes good?)
Everyone has a stake in education, and plenty have a stake in bemoaning the current system. We point to its structure as deficient, a product of a time when the US was primarily an agrarian economy. We argue about content, either about evolution or the evisceration of the arts, or about the discrimination/opportunity double-edged sword associated with vocational education. I could go on, but I think I’ve already gone off track.
My health class in high school was a joke – a half-semester course taught by a kind but untrained PE instructor. That’s what I got. I’m learning more about nutrition and health – isn’t it odd how I never looked at that section of the newspaper when I was young and presumably invincible? – and sites like WebMD. But I still eat terribly, and haven’t been particularly motivated to learn.
So, what if it becomes mandatory? I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s more important than algebra (though exercises in scaling recipes might be a way to have your unsaturated fat cake and eat it too). If most of us ate more healthily, we’d cut energy usage in the US, improve physical health (and save assloads of money), reduce depression (again, assloads of money and, I suppose, well-being), live longer, and look better. Then the damn Europeans would stop calling us ugly, at least until the next muscular foreign policy endeavor. (I take the attractiveness deficit as granted, and attribute it to more than culture and fitted clothes.)
Of course gluttony and poor food choices would still be a choice, just as smoking is. But it would help if the default was “healthy” instead of “McWendBox”.
Inspiration:
My unhealthiness, past readings and work in poverty (notably, Still Hungry in America, and movies like Fast Food Nation/Supersize Me.
Reasons why it’s “impossible”:
Huge upfront investment in completely restructuring early childhood education, combined with large cultural fights about food. Everyone has a stake in food education, which is why it’s so damn hard to talk about. Don’t forget the economic interests. An open, frank discussion and policy action on food would turn into, well, a real food fight. It would likely make evolution appear properly as a phony war. (Maybe that’s a positive unintended consequence.)
Proposal 4:
Restructuring of K-12 science education to emphasize practical, actionable information.
I’ve been thinking about teaching high school math or science. I think I could do an okay job – my background is decent, and I do have a fair amount of experience both as a teaching assistant in grad school and as a private tutor. (Before I get yelled at by my teacher friends, I know it’s not easy. My mom was exhausted every day after work, and tagging along a few days, I understood why. I’m also sure that I’ll find the first couple years bruising – my vision for what I think is necessary won’t scale to 200 students every day.)
But if I were a secondary school teacher, I’d want to develop a physics/engineering curriculum that would take a semester and focus almost entirely on a car. I’d like to team up with the shop class instructors – there seemed to be zero overlap between college-prep science courses and shop courses at my high school – and work out a class, plus lab, covering electrical and mechanical concepts. We spent way too much time doing damn inclined planes and balls on rope. From my tiny car knowledge, I think there’s plenty that could be done to teach angular momentum, fluid mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics and gas laws. Plus, at the end of the semester, a student might actually know how the hell a car works, how to tell if something’s wrong, and, if we’re lucky, how to fix some things.
Another idea would be to create a semester course involving power plants – ideally one that would cover the physics and engineering, as well as the business aspects. I remember one particular thermodynamics problem at Harvey Mudd that modeled energy production in coal plants – and by solving it, I actually got to understand why a coal plant would operate at 40% Carnot efficiency. (If I recall, it maximizes power, rather than energy, which is the important quantity in the real world, assuming the cost of coal is relatively negligible.)
Inspiration:
My past car problems, a horrible high school physics class, and a growing, possibly irrational fear that I don’t know how to really do anything technically useful.
Reasons why it’s “impossible”:
This probably isn’t, but I’m sure it would feel like it. See, I know almost nothing about cars. Rack and pinion? Carburetor? (Did I even spell that correctly?) I’ve got a lot of impractical knowledge that might be applicable if I wanted to describe an ideal plasma, but if that’s applicable in your daily life, I would recommend you seek a less dangerous profession. But it might be worth it – maybe it’s time I became a gearhead.
Proposal 5:
Develop a clearer framework of principles and ethics for my life
This one is a bit different from the others – more personal and perhaps more impossible than the rest, since it’s something that I, and only I, must do.
I’ve decided I need this, something organized, with a tiered structure that takes into account subordinate and superordinate principles. (For example, working hard is good, but working so hard one undermines one’s long-term ability to function and contribute is bad.)
Note: I said “clearer”, not “clear”. From what I understand of Napoleon, his genius as a strategist was his willingness and ability to consider all data and all possible outcomes. He was a game theorist and a computer programmer before either game theory or computers. To apply that level of detail, with that energy of ruthlessness, combined with that much legitimate faith in flexibility and reliability of constituent elements, borne from prior consideration would be an impressive undertaking for any individual.
Inspiration:
Life, my contributions to poor outcomes, and the small uncertainty about whether my decision to not have children will someday change.
Reasons why this is "impossible":
I’m struggling with more basic functions now, like, well, eating and working and not being a self-destructive ass. It’s times like this that I think a strict adherence to a religious system – any religious system – might be preferable to the current state. So, for now, I think the best option is to fall back on that, and worry about the detail work over the course of, well, a lifetime.
In other words, I’m not ready. Too much self-doubt and inconsistency – I must develop a measure of willpower and organization that just isn’t there at the moment. The one piece of wisdom I’ve garnered over the last few years is that my capacity has not scaled to my ambitions, partly because I’ve been blind about both capacity and ambition. So that will be the first and most important step in the process of rebuilding.
Epilogue:
I was only able to come up with five before I went to sleep. I wish, or perhaps in my own way, pray for only a couple things nowadays, things that seem impossible. I hope that, either in sleep or in dull morning’s somnambulant shambling that I’ll find a sixth. Then again, maybe the sixth is the wisdom in knowing the value of an exercise in it of itself, even if specific details are not quite satisfied.
Also, in my heart, when I am at my best, I know that none of these are impossible, not even the last. Perhaps the only prayer that matters now is the strength to see these and other impossible things through, and to let trial by fire, and not presupposed ignorance, govern an assessment of what can and cannot be done.
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