Most readers know I’m a cross disciplinary, translational researcher.

What…you didn’t know that?

Well…let me give you an idea of what it means…

I read in and study a very wide variety of sciences. I’ve studied and taught mathematics, history, linguistics, anthropology, physics, religion, ethics, virology… the list is pretty long. That’s the “cross disciplinary” part.

Almost everything I study and read in goes into my research and that research often moshes some collection of unrelated sciences, synthesizes them into a working whole then “translates” the working whole into something productizable. That’s the “translational” part.

So sometimes in my research I come across something that cross lots of disciplinary boundaries.

Like something that links a declining or at least stabilized birth rate to a decrease in pollution

And it makes complete sense.

It’s amazingly simple, really. An ongoing and static planetary population equals a static pollution production level (technologic changes aside). This means the amount of pollution may rise and that the rate of the rise in pollution levels remains constant rather than rising. “We’ll still be killing ourselves, simply not as quickly” is one way to look at it.

Fewer births per million people — a decreasing population — equals a decrease in the production of pollution. This can be a very good thing if we haven’t reached a climatic tipping point, not a good thing if we have because one could then say “We’ll still be killing ourselves, it’s just going to take a lot longer.”

What few people seem to recognize is that it really doesn’t matter where one gets their energy, any technology that produces power — nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, solar, wind, geothermal, petroleum-based, fossil-based, … — is going to have some kind of pollution associated with it. Some will show up relatively quickly (see something coming out of a smoke stack or exhaust pipe? That “quick”) and some over millenia (nuclear half-lives, that kind of thing).

But right now humankind is literally at a point where it can pick its poison.

Me? Speaking translationally and cross-disciplinarily, I’m going to stop screwing around and save the planet. I may be stupid enough to ruin my life, I sure in heck don’t want to ruin some one else’s.

You?

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Have you read my latest book, Reading Virtual Minds Volume I: Science and History? It’s a whoppin’ good read.