A pale blue-green enigma, the planet Uranus has long fascinated astronomers precisely because of its extreme distance, some 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion km) from Earth. While it is comparatively easy to gaze upon neighboring celestial bodies like the Moon and the planets Mars and Venus, Uranus is difficult to see without the most powerful telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope. As technology has advanced, it has unlocked more secrets of the strange, tilted planet (it orbits on its side compared to other planets in the solar system), from the fact that it may rain diamonds to discovering previously-unknown moons.
Now a trio of recent studies has revealed that one of its moons, Miranda, likely has a stirring ocean beneath its surface, meaning it could harbor extraterrestrial life, and that the planet’s own internal dynamics are more bizarre than we ever imagined.
In a study published in The Planetary Science Journal, University of North Dakota astronomer Caleb Strong explained that their research revealed Miranda likely has a subsurface ocean, which Strong described as “weird.”
“It was not expected based on previous estimates of its size, which means there are likely many surprises awaiting us in the Uranus system,” Strong told Salon.
He added that it is premature to assume the presence of oceans means there is life on the planet, telling Salon that “we really don’t know enough about Miranda or the Uranus system to say. While interesting, the question of life is beyond the scope of our paper.”
However, astrobiologists believe that extraterrestrial life, if it exists, would require a planet or planetary moon with water and carbon in order to form organic molecules. The Miranda paper relied on images taken from the Voyager 2 probe, the one and only spacecraft to visit the planet, to reach these conclusions. The same is true of a recent study from the journal Nature Astronomy which used those images to learn about the magnetosphere of Uranus. A magnetosphere is the region around a planet where its magnetic field is dominant, protecting the planet from the Sun’s destructive particles. According to Jamie Jasinski, a space plasma physicist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, past space voyages have provided mysterious readings about the exact nature of the Uranus magnetosphere. Their new research transforms everything.
“Our findings change the view that the Uranus system is an extreme environment pertaining to intense radiation belts and a magnetosphere (or magnetic bubble) that has no plasma from the moons,” Jasinski said. “These were two major mysteries leftover from the Voyager 2 flyby, both of which can be reasonably explained by the arrival of an intense solar wind event that compressed the magnetosphere dramatically just before the flyby started i.e. squashing the magnetosphere to about 20% of its size.”
This finding has implications for another moon with an ocean, Enceladus, which orbits Saturn. Because of the strong magnetosphere of its host planet, the water on Enceladus is ionized and gets trapped within the Uranus magnetosphere. While scientists expected to see this same ionization near the Uranus moons, they were surprised to see a “vacuum magnetosphere” with no water ions. This made them speculate that the moons are inert with no ongoing activity, but that assumption was literally smashed when they realized a solar wind event had impacted Uranus several days before Voyager 2’s flyby. The astronomers realized that this could have increased the plasma loss and emptied the magnetosphere of evidence of lunar activity, and similarly could have explained the intense electron radiation belts they observed.
“If we had arrived a week earlier with Voyager 2, then the spacecraft would have made completely different measurements, and our discoveries would have been very different. Voyager 2 arrived at just the wrong time!” Jasinski said.
The scientists who studied Miranda also used Voyager 2 to discern features they may have otherwise missed.
“Miranda may have a thin ice shell (~30 km/18 miles), which would explain why it has the weird ridge structures that would have formed in response to severe tidal stress. And of course it may have a subsurface ocean,” Strong said. “Its subsurface ocean is likely to be relatively deep (~100 km/62 miles) compared to the estimated depth, say of the ocean on Saturn’s moon Enceladus (~10 km/6 miles).”
The final recent paper was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Based on the data, also acquired from Voyager 2, researchers led by a University of California Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science speculates that the surface of Uranus is layered and, like oil and water, the two layers never mix.
“After working on this project for more than ten years, I opened my laptop one morning and could not believe my eyes,” Militzer said. “The materials in my computer simulations had formed two separate layers, a bit like oil and water. This was my ‘Eureka’ moment and became the basis of the new paper.”
As for the paper itself, it is “primarily about the interiors and the magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune, not about their atmospheres,” Militzer told Salon. “Their magnetic fields are disordered and do not have the well-defined north and south poles that we know from Earth, Jupiter and Saturn. This has been a long-standing puzzle since the Voyager 2 spacecraft detected this in 1986.”
This explains why both Uranus and its solar system neighbor, Neptune, have magnetic fields very different from the one we experience on Earth.
“Uranus and Neptune have disordered magnetic fields because they produce these fields in a thin water-rich layer in their mantles while our Earth generates its magnetic field in the core,” Militzer said.
As noted, it is extremely hard to make observations about Uranus because of its distance and the fact that we’ve only sent a probe to visit once. To make matters worse, it probably won’t be until the 2040s before anything else we send there arrives. But that doesn’t mean scientists aren’t making do with what they have, while revealing how truly weird this planet is.
2024 was an ominous year for the future of Earth. Climate scientists anticipate that it will be the first year in which the average planetary temperature was 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, a critical threshold established in 2015 during the Paris climate accord. Meanwhile a 2023 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found humans brought about as many extinctions over the previous five centuries that if our species had never existed, it would have taken 18,000 years for that same number of genera to have gone extinct on their own.
The good news for humanity is that people have the power to stop these mass extinctions and stave off the worst consequences of climate change. The bad news for our species is that we are not doing any of those things; in fact, we are led by science-denying politicians like Donald Trump in the United States, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Javier Milei in Argentina.
Julian Cribb, a British-Australian author who specializes in covering the intersections between science and politics, has published nine books on subjects related to ecocide — the practice in which humans actively destroy their environment. His latest is “How to Fix a Broken Planet: Advice for Surviving the 21st Century,” in which he warns that humanity is running out of time to fix the escalating crisis. Among other things, Cribb proposes the creation of a Global Truth Commission to help leaders separate good science and information from bad; technological innovation to wean humanity off of agriculture and create food in more sustainable ways; and strategies that will address all of the threats to humanity’s future holistically, rather than separately. Cribb discussed his thoughts on humanity’s future with Salon.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.
In the past, you have advocated for a Global Truth Commission. Can you elaborate on what that means, how it would be implemented, and what you’ll say to those who claim this violates free speech principles?
A Global Truth Commission basically is a fact-checking agency. The world has 420 fact checking agencies, which are run mostly by media organizations, like Reuters, for example. In Australia, we have one run by the ABC, a fact-checking organization that simply checks the statements of public figures. If they find them to be false or untruthful or misleading, they publish their findings. They don’t punish people in any way. They just simply expose the lies for what they are.
And we believe now that, such as the torrent of untruths and deception of lies that are pouring forth from politicians, corporate interests and others, we have to make some corrections. Otherwise, you cannot have a democracy. You cannot even have a society if nobody knows what the truth is, because everything begins to disintegrate. Every decision you take is based on false grounds if you allow untruths to rage unchecked. So a World Truth Commission is simply a fact-checking agency that would check the statements of prominent public figures and publish its findings.
How do you deal with the fact that with climate change, pesticide pollution, plastic pollution and all of these ecocidal practices, there is so much misinformation that people can’t distinguish between what is real and what is fake? How do you specifically make it easier for scientific facts to be widely distributed?
The Council for the Human Future is trying to do just that. We’re about to set up a world news website where we will only publish scientifically validated, fact-checked information about these things. People are going to have to learn that if they accept false information, they are likely to incur damage to themselves. That’s the penalty of accepting lies. People who believe them end up making bad decisions.
You can’t thrust this on 8.2 billion people, but you can offer them the truth. You can offer them validated truths. In other words, things that have been checked by experts and, and not just asserted by vested interests in business, in commerce, in politics, and so on.
Based on your research into effective political activism, what can individuals who are concerned about climate change do to empower themselves in meaningful ways?
The first thing is to understand that climate change is not the only threat. There are 10 major catastrophic threats to the human future. And they’re all working together. They’re all coming together at the one time. Climate change is only one of them. So it’s only 10% of the problem we have to understand.
The others include resource failure or insecurity — i.e., lack of water and forests and fish and things like that; lack of food; collapse of ecosystems and mass extinction; nuclear weapons, WMDs and things like that; food security/food instability in the global food supply, which is now a major issue worldwide; pandemic diseases, which are breaking out every two or three years now; overpopulation, which occurs whenever you breach environmental boundaries; new technologies, every new technology starts off benign and then becomes malignant very, very rapidly, such as coal being benign in the 1850s, and it’s become malignant. Or AI, or nanotechnology, or biotechnology — these are all in danger of becoming malignant because they’re uncontrolled. We need control over new technologies; and basically misinformation is a major threat to human survival because people are not being informed about what the real situation is.
Why do you think, when people talk about ecocide, we only discuss climate change? Why do we not talk about this more broadly?
Because climate change has had huge scientific effort put into it, and consequently, its publicity has raised its profile above the other major threats. But ecological collapse and extinction are far more dangerous to the human future in the long run. We can’t survive on a planet that cannot support life. We’re destroying life left, right and center at the moment with global poisoning and the like.
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Basically ecocide is human overpopulation. Overpopulation is scientifically defined as a state where you start destroying your living environment. Whether you are a grasshopper or a bird or a human, if you start destroying the environment in which you live, then you are overpopulated. That’s how we measure overpopulation. And the human species is way overpopulated, about four times overpopulated now. It’s not just a number, it’s not just about what is the ideal population of the planet, it’s about how many people can actually survive here in the long run on the resources which are finite and provided by the Earth. So ecocide is just a kind of a lawyer’s term for killing off the cradle of life that supports us.
Are we doomed to be poisoned by pollution or can we still clean the planet?
Every breath you take, you are inhaling toxic chemicals. Whether it’s from the rear end of a truck or a bus, or whether it’s just coming out of your sofa or all those PFAS chemicals, flame retardants and stuff. Every child born today is born with toxic chemicals in its blood. It takes it in through its mother’s milk. It gets a mouthful of pesticide. That’s World Health Organization data, not mine. We are completely surrounded by toxic chemistry.
A lot of it is man-made and a lot of it is man-generated. In other words, actions like mining development, agriculture and so on, unleash a whole lot of chemicals which impinge on us every day. We get them through our mouths, through our skin and in our bones, by breathing. Every person on the planet is being poisoned every second of the day.
It seems like the answer is yes. Are there solutions to this?
We can fix them if we understand the problem. At the moment, we’re only understanding bits of the problem. We’re obsessed with plastics over here, and we’re obsessed with hormone disruptors over there. We’re looking at little bits of the problem. We’re obsessed with PFAS chemicals. They’re tiny. There’s 350,000 manmade chemicals, right? And they all break down to make other chemicals and intermix with other chemicals.
So it’s a very complex issue, but there are things we can do to clean up the planet, yes. It’s a major problem. It’s five times larger than climate change. It kills 10 times more people than climate change, but there are solutions to it, and I’ve published them in a couple of books.
In some of your books, you made the link between climate change and these other forms of pollution, but also how they are linked to issues like famine and war.
The way most people are going to feel climate change is in the failure of the food supply, because clearly famine is spreading around the world at the moment. Food price inflation is going through the roof. It’s what destabilized America enough for the Trump regime to get in. Trump is a climate impact, believe it or not. Trump is a climate impact, an impact of climate change, because when people get nervous about food availability, the price of food, they tend to vote for authoritarian conservative or right-wing regimes. And that’s what’s happening worldwide. It’s not just in America. It’s happening in Australia, it’s happening in Austria, it’s happening in Hungary — it’s everywhere. The world is swinging to the right because of this uncertainty generated by the climate impact on food.
There are many ways that climate impacts food.It creates drought, obviously, and that cuts crop harvest yields. It produces heat waves, which often prevent the flowering of the crops, so that destroys their fertility. Rice, for example, will not grow above 42.2 degrees Celsius. The rice plant dies, so you could lose your rice harvest in a certain area. Things like that and floods will also destroy crops. It’s a big problem.
Agriculture was a beautiful technology for 7,000 years back in the Bronze Age. It is not appropriate to feed 10 billion people on a hot, climate-ravaged earth. We need new ways to produce food, and there are new ways to produce food, and they’re being experimented all around the world at the moment.
Climate change is also fueling immigration. How do you propose we handle this?
It’s very, very hard to control. I read a report from the Swiss in Zurich predicting 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050. That’s terrifying. The number’s about a hundred million at the moment. There’s about 350 million humans on the move worldwide now every year. But Zurich is talking about a tripling or a quadruple in the number of human beings on the move that is going to collapse borders. It’s going to sweep away governments completely. It’s going to utterly destroy the old nation-states as we know them.
For example, if a hundred million refugees come out of Africa and flood into Europe, you are going to lose Spain, Italy and Greece just like that. Their people in turn will flee north into the other countries. You get this displacement effect. It is actually a realistic fear. The only way to keep people in their own countries is to secure their food supply. To do that, you need renewable food and you need to recycle your water.
Can you elaborate on the technology that would provide this renewable food and clean water?
With water, it is simply a matter of recycling. You just use well-established scientific techniques to cleanse the water that you are currently flushing down the toilet or running off the city streets and you remove the bugs from it and put it back into the system with food.
There are three main ways of producing renewable food: One is regenerative farming, which is being practiced by advanced farmers around the world; the second one is recycling all of the nutrients and all the water that currently flow through our big cities, enabling cities like New York or Shanghai or Paris to feed themselves by simply recycling nutrients and growing their own food on the spot with the nutrients and water that they’ve already got using hydroponic, aquaponic and other systems; and the third one is deep ocean aquaculture, which is being pursued by scientists at Berkeley University of California at Berkeley.
It’s a very feasible technology for producing an endless supply of food from the deep oceans, not from the coast. I hasten to add, it’s not a form of farming. You use the deep water where you’re not impacting any other species around the planet. You’re not displacing anything else. You’re not cutting down the Amazon in order to feed people. These three systems will create a renewable food supply.
My next question is in one of your books, you mentioned that women would be better to lead on climate change than men. What does smashing the patriarchy, so to speak, have to do with climate change?
In all my reading of history, I’ve never found a woman who started a war. I don’t mean Helen of Troy-type mythology. Women have led countries successfully in defense of their own country, people like Golda Meir in Israel and Indira Gandhi in India and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. They’ve defended their country successfully against aggression, male aggression from elsewhere. But in the last 150 years, all wars that have been started, they’ve all been started by males, either male-dominated governments or kings, basically.Wars of conquest, which are normally fought over territory, food, land and water are things that blokes like doing.
What do you think of the results of the 2024 election in which a candidate who acknowledges science was a woman and lost to a candidate who does not acknowledge science and is a man?
That was partly the result of misinformation, which we discussed earlier, but also as I mentioned, climate is already driving up inflation and it’s making the food supply less secure. There is drought all through America at the moment. People are feeling very nervous. Now, to give you an example, in the 1930s, Germany had been through a horrendous famine and starvation in World War I, when nearly a million Germans died of hunger. That was what drove Germany into the arms of the National Socialists. Basically, this insecurity regarding food and inflation, a massive inflation under the Weimar Republic, shook people to the core. So basically that’s what makes people nervous and they tend to go for big, tough authoritarian male leaders. And I think that’s what, from my reading of all the American commentary, it was basically economic insecurity that delivered Trump the win.
But of course, he’s already appointing a cabinet of the cognitively impaired, people who simply do not understand the problem or else are hostile to objective information. You’re going to get some very bad decisions in the next four years, and America’s going to be a very unpleasant place to live for ordinary, decent human beings. A lot of the ugly aspects of authoritarian rule are probably going to become manifest. So you have my heartfelt sympathies, but it’s going to happen in a lot of other countries, not just America. It’s happening in Britain. It’s happening in Australia. It’s a pretty universal trend at the moment, and it’s not going to save us. It’s going to speed our demise.
Australian police arrested 170 climate change activists in the state of New South Wales during a protest from Friday through Sunday. Representing the group Rising Tide Australia, the protesters shut down maritime traffic in the Port of Newcastle, which is one of the world’s biggest exporters of coal and coal products. It is also the largest bulk shipping port on Australia’s highly populated east coast.
“It’s in a unique place, being the largest coal port in the world, exporting vast amounts of coal,” Dr. Peter Schofield, a doctor and activist at Rising Tide Australia, said in a statement. “If we can make a difference here and if we can demonstrate our commitment as a community and as a government to influencing things such that, you know, we minimize that, that can have worldwide implications.”
Thousands of Australians showed up on the coast to express their support for the peaceful protesters. Local law enforcement officials, on the other hand, threw the book at the newly-arrested activists while depicting them in disparaging terms. New South Wales police minister Yasmin Catley called the protest “irresponsible theatrics,” adding that the police had “done an outstanding job managing this dangerous and volatile situation.”
Although the police may issue more arrests, so far they have arrested 156 adults and 14 youths from the three days of protest. Thirty-two were only charged with not complying with a direction from an authorized officer related to safety, while another 138 were charged with disruption of a major facility. Two were refused bail to appear at Newcastle local court on Monday. The casualties from the event include one police officer suffering a fractured ankle.
When scientists discovered water and a chemical compound common in RNA on a rock from the asteroid Ryugu, astronomy fans and laypeople alike held their collective breath for the chance of extraterrestrial life. As more evidence of microorganisms emerged, experts began to wonder if humans would soon learn life exists somewhere in the universe besides Earth.
A recent study in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science threw cold water on the idea — the microbes on Ryugu almost certainly came from Earth rather than outer space. They learned this because a sample from Ryugu, retrieved by the Hayabusa 2 mission 186 million miles from Earth, sent to Matthew Genge at Imperial College London was thoroughly tested for evidence of microbial life. None were found, indicating that the organic chemicals initially discovered were Earthly contaminants rather than indigenous to Ryugu.
“The presence of terrestrial microorganism within a sample of Ryugu underlines that microorganisms are the world’s greatest colonizers and adept at circumventing contamination controls,” the authors conclude. “The presence of microorganisms within space-returned samples, even those subject to stringent contamination controls is, therefore, not necessarily evidence of an extraterrestrial origin.”
This is not the first time that scientists received false hope about proof of extraterrestrial microorganic life. In 2020 researchers publishing in the journal Nature Astronomy revealed that the atmosphere of Venus appeared to contain trace amounts of phosphine, a gas associated with anaerobic bacteria on Earth. Yet two subsequent scientific investigations failed to replicate the earlier study’s results, suggesting that there was no phosphine as previously thought.
On that occasion, the scientific error was that analysts misread the results from spectrometric readings of the Venusian atmosphere. This time the issue was much simpler — as the authors themselves wrote, “the discovery emphasizes that terrestrial biota can rapidly colonize extraterrestrial specimens even given contamination control precautions.”
Tashbulak and Tugunbulak may be largely forgotten today, but the pair of Uzbekistani cities thrived during the Medieval era. Nestled in the Tien Shan mountains, the largest east to west mountain range on Earth, merchants from all over Europe and Asia would travel to Tashbulak and Tugunbulak to hawk their wares. Located on the famous Silk Road, Tashbulak and Tugunbulak was a nexus of trade and culture.
More than a thousand years have passed since their heyday, however, and as humans continue to destroy our environment, archaeological treasures like those in these cities could be lost forever. But thanks to a powerful laser-based technology called lidar, ancient history is being illuminated like never before.
Scientists still debate whether lidar stands for “laser imaging, detection and ranging” or “light detection and ranging.” Either acronym accurately summarizes the technology, which uses lasers to measure large areas by targeting a surface or object and measuring how long it takes for light to be reflected back.But no one is debating how lidar is helping preserve humanity’s most important treasures from our species’ tendency to destroy our natural environment.
As for the lost cities of Tashbulak and Tugunbulak, anthropologist Michael Frachetti used lidar to conduct unprecedentedly detailed scans of the Medieval metropolis, which thrived approximately 2,000 meters above sea level between the 6th and 11th centuries. Their research was published in October in the journal Nature, with Frachetti marveling at how these ancient cities struggled with the same self-destructive habit of exploiting their natural resources.
“There does appear to be an environmental factor which played a role in both the establishment of the cities in high altitude — in this case areas rich in ore and other resources,” Frachetti said. “We hypothesize that the investment these populations made in producing iron metallurgy would have had significant environmental impact on local forest resources used for fuel. This remains to be demonstrated scientifically, but given the scale of smelting documented at Tugunbulak, it makes sense that there would have been consequential effects on the ecology of this highland landscape.”
Frachetti, who teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, added that “we think there is a broader lesson related to the impact of intensive exploitation of the environment and the ultimate sustainability of Urban settings, which we can extrapolate from this time in history.”
Ron Chapple agrees that lidar keeps reminding us about the importance of environmental protection. Chapple is the former CEO of GEO1, a company that specialized in utilizing lidar technology. He was an early investor in lidar technology, recognizing during his former career as an aerial cinematographer that it has the potential to transform archaeology. He regularly is consulted by scholars about how to use lidar, and today Chapple is VP Global Strategic Solutions at NV5, a multinational corporation that also specializes in lidar, imaging and analytics.
He is particularly well-known for acquiring extremely detailed images of a lost city half a world away from Uzbekistan — Ciudad Perdida (literally Spanish for “lost city”), an ancient city in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains. Ciudad Perdida is believed to have been founded about 800 A.D., which is true would make it older than Machu Picchu by more than six centuries. Archaeologists dream of discovering more locations like Ciudad Perdida, and yet Chapple has watched with anxiety as human activity endangers these delicate sites.
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Indeed, last week a 1,100-year-old pyramid in Mexico collapsed into a pile of rubble because of heavy rainfall that was preceded by record-breaking drought that evaporated entire lakes. Tariakuiri Alvarez, a living member of the P’urhépecha tribe, told Live Science his ancestors would have interpreted the crumbling of the pyramid at Ihuatzio as a “bad omen.”
Salon spoke with Chapple about the future of lidar and how, because of climate change, he believes humanity needs to start using lidar as much as possible to protect our civilization’s greatest treasures before they are lost forever.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What do we know for sure about climate change and its impact on the future of archeology? What about other human activities such as warfare or various forms of industrial, agricultural and other commercial development?
I think it’s safe to assume that climate change is going to change current human living patterns in a few different ways. For example, if the world is getting a little bit warmer where crops would say grow at a 2,000-foot elevation, now that it’s warmer, the farmers might need to go upslope to 3,000-foot elevation and start clear-cutting areas so their crops can continue to grow. By clear cutting, you have the potential to damage untouched areas where there could be sites of archeological significance.
I think that’s one of the main ones, as well as any similar type of development where there are more people moving on Earth, or if there is warfare, any human influence has the potential to expose untouched areas. If we can use lidar and survey those areas in advance, we not only may be able to preserve and record any evidence of ancient settlements, but that data could assist in better land planning.
Likewise with sea level rise. Increasing ocean heights may cause migration from the coast to higher ground. Again, you’re opening or removing forests with farming and development that could affect archeological sites.
How does lidar offer a solution to these?
We were doing archeological discovery in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in northern Colombia. During the helicopter flight, we could see clear-cutting occurring within a couple of miles of the site that we were surveying and in roughly similar terrain. Now we have no way of knowing if there was anything of historical value there or not, but it has the potential of modifying the land so that we may never know what history could have been hidden under the rainforest.
How much of the data that your company has accumulated over the years can be realistically analyzed by qualified historians, anthropologists and other scholars who can actually transform it into meaningful stories and history?
NV5 doesn’t deliver just numbers. NV5 believes in democratizing data, and we use algorithms that say, for archeologists, will highlight the contours of the ground. This visualization makes it easier for researchers to be able to look at that data and understand what they’re looking at. In many cases, we are layering that data with other information such as imagery from either airplanes or satellites to provide more context.
How do you tell a story with that data How do you make that data easy to understand? All of the storytelling takes time, and time is critical right now. We analyze and learn what’s out there. I think of Chris Fisher, an archeologist friend of mine who discovered ancient settlements in Honduras using lidar technology. Chris always says, “Is the Amazon natural, or are we looking at an overgrown garden?
In the 1500s, something like 90% of the population in South America was wiped out because of disease that came in when the Europeans settled and started to explore. For example, in 1520, when [Hernán] Cortés arrived in the densely populated Mexican city of Tenochtitlan, his soldiers brought along smallpox, which killed off 40% of the population in a single year. It harkens back to COVID-19 in an extreme sense. The more we learn about these civilizations that are now beneath the dense jungle canopy, the more we may be able to learn about our future.
I’m thinking of the recent discoveries in Brazil and Uzbekistan using lidar. As I’m sure you saw, a research team in the Brazilian state of Rondônia discovered an 18th century Portuguese colonial city. In Uzbekistan, a different research team provided great detail about a pair of 6th to 11th century cities on the Silk Road, Tashbulak and Tugunbulak, that had thrived before being lost to time. What are your thoughts about the significance of these individual discoveries and how the average news consumer should internalize them in terms of their larger relevance?
Is there something out there that’s going to change our civilization dramatically? Maybe not today, because we have better ways to fight disease, but knowing what was out there is essential. Is it possible that some of the world’s greatest cities are still lying hidden beneath the Amazon rainforest, or in other undiscovered areas around our world? While I am not a doomsayer, with a catastrophic meteor or nuclear event, large swaths of civilization could be changed forever.
What’s interesting to me about working with NV5 is that we provide data and analytics that will provide the tools for humanity to manage climate change and population growth. But back to archeology, we need to understand what was there before it’s too late and provide the history that our fellow humans and children deserve.
“Our findings change the view that the Uranus system is an extreme environment pertaining to intense radiation belts and a magnetosphere (or magnetic bubble) that has no plasma from the moons,” Jasinski said. “These were two major mysteries leftover from the Voyager 2 flyby, both of which can be reasonably explained by the arrival of an intense solar wind event that compressed the magnetosphere dramatically just before the flyby started i.e. squashing the magnetosphere to about 20% of its size.”
“Miranda may have a thin ice shell (~30 km/18 miles), which would explain why it has the weird ridge structures that would have formed in response to severe tidal stress. And of course it may have a subsurface ocean,” Strong said. “Its subsurface ocean is likely to be relatively deep (~100 km/62 miles) compared to the estimated depth, say of the ocean on Saturn’s moon Enceladus (~10 km/6 miles).”
And we believe now that, such as the torrent of untruths and deception of lies that are pouring forth from politicians, corporate interests and others, we have to make some corrections. Otherwise, you cannot have a democracy. You cannot even have a society if nobody knows what the truth is, because everything begins to disintegrate. Every decision you take is based on false grounds if you allow untruths to rage unchecked. So a World Truth Commission is simply a fact-checking agency that would check the statements of prominent public figures and publish its findings.
Why do you think, when people talk about ecocide, we only discuss climate change? Why do we not talk about this more broadly?
What do you think of the results of the 2024 election in which a candidate who acknowledges science was a woman and lost to a candidate who does not acknowledge science and is a man? 
Ron Chapple agrees that lidar keeps reminding us about the importance of environmental protection. Chapple is the former CEO of GEO1, a company that specialized in utilizing lidar technology. He was an 
How much of the data that your company has accumulated over the years can be realistically analyzed by qualified historians, anthropologists and other scholars who can actually transform it into meaningful stories and history? 
How do you tell a story with that data How do you make that data easy to understand? All of the storytelling takes time, and time is critical right now. We analyze and learn what’s out there. I think of Chris Fisher, an archeologist friend of mine who discovered ancient settlements in Honduras using lidar technology. Chris always says, “Is the Amazon natural, or are we looking at an overgrown garden?