Solar Car

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Ryan Dey

I drive a 2011 Honda CRZ.  My car is solar-powered.

It doesn’t have any solar panels.  It’s a regular car right off the factory floor without any special bells and whistles.

The solar power isn’t the energy that is currently hitting the Earth, but energy that hit the Earth three hundred million years ago.  After hitting the Earth, it went through some processing and was stored in the world’s largest battery.  It’s solar power, but not green technology.  It’s old school.

Roughly 300,000,000 years ago (plus 8 minutes, 20 seconds), the sun emitted some solar energy in the form of photons that traveled to Earth at the speed of light.  Once it arrived, some of it was absorbed by green plants.  These plants used that energy to power photosynthesis, converting carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and sugars (carbon-based plant bits).

Eventually, some of those plants will die.  I know, it’s sad, but a fact of life.  Others will be eaten by animals.  When these animals die, they will join the dead plants as deposits under the Earth’s surface.  Over the next three hundred million years or so, these dead plants and animals are reduced to carbon-based chemicals… coal, oil, and natural gas.

Some time later, humans discovered these organic compounds can be used to power our lives, so as humans tend to do, we started excavating coal and oil in massive quantities.  Once the oil is removed, it’s refined into gasoline.  The combustion engine in my car is able to burn this gasoline to release its energy, using that power to make my car move.

 

Here’s the killer part of this cool trick though…. humans live fast-paced lives, and the Earth lives on MUCH longer time scales.  All the oil available today took 300,000,000 years to produce.  It’s taken just 200 years for humans to dig it up, burn it, and release it’s byproduct carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  The numbers can be fudged a little to account for what we haven’t used yet, or when our fossil fuel economy really started, but any way you parse the numbers, humans have significantly affected the carbon cycle.  We are putting CO2 into the atmosphere infinitely (well, 150,000,000 times) faster than it can be reabsorbed by plants.

And that, my friends, is why my car is solar-powered, but not in a good way.

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What’s the worst that could happen?

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Ryan Dey

Global Warming.  Is it real?   I’m actually not sure.

You would think someone like myself would be able to emphatically answer “yes”.  When cornered, I probably would, but given time to think logically, I would see that Global Warming (or really, Global Climate Destabilization) is likely occurring, but could not clearly be linked to human activity.  Everyone has their opinions, some more science-based than others, but no one is, or even can be, 100% sure they know the truth about Global Warming.

The real inconvenient truth to Al Gore’s documentary is that all the facts presented are true, but aren’t enough to convict us.  Human’s impact on the climate is sort of like OJ Simpson’s impact on his wife’s life.  We did it, but there’s just enough doubt to acquit.

The thing is, though, that it doesn’t matter if Global Warming exists or not.  It doesn’t matter whether humans caused it.  The debate is moot.  It’s really freakin’ important to our continued existence, but’s it’s existence is just not what matters.

What matters in this debate is what we should do about it.

Greg Craven, a science teacher from Oregon, has created a rational, and somewhat humorously delivered argument to explain this notion. Instead of wasting time debating about whether Global Warming Exists, and whether humans caused it, we need to move to the next step. We need to take action. The risk of what might happen to us if it does exist is too great to ignore. We don’t know what’s at the other end of the train tunnel, but we have to act like it’s a train. We have to not get clobbered.

I HIGHLY urge you to watch Greg Craven’s 10-minute YouTube video explaining the situation. It may lead you to avenues of thought that hadn’t yet occurred to you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF_anaVcCXg

And if you really like what he has to say, find his seven hour “How It All Ends” series of videos that covers EVERYTHING related to Global Warming and what to do about it. It’s really great stuff.

And it’s kinda important.

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A Leaf Study

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Ryan Dey

The grandeur of the Earth doesn’t stop at the landscape scale. Even something as simple as a leaf can hold intrigue.  Did you know we can thank a bacterial infection for all green plants on Earth?

Though photosynthesis had been developing for more than three billion years, it was less than one billion years ago that a multi-cellular protist organism formed a symbiotic relationship (got infected by)  with something called cyanobacteria.  This cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, had been happily converting the Earth’s atmosphere to oxygen for 1.4 billion years already, but the multi-cellular protists found that by incorporating a bacteria into their design, they could use the sugars produced during photosynthesis to provide themselves with more energy to develop larger and more complex forms.  It is one of the first times in Earth’s history that two separate organisms worked together to create something better.  This symbiotic relation continues to this day, and all green plants are a union of cynobacteria and protist.

Algae will save the world!  In fact, it already has.

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All that is our Earth

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Ryan Dey

After all-encompassing images of Earth from the edge of the solar system and a trip the the Moon, we finally arrive back to the surface of our rocky little heaven.

I could write novels about this one image.  To an untrained eye, it shows a summer afternoon in the Columbia River Gorge.  To an observant and inquisitive eye, it reveals quite a bit of interesting information to help explain why our planet is such an awe-inspiring place to live.

Between 15,000 and 12,000 years ago, the Earth was warming and continental glaciers were in retreat.  Melt water backed up behind ice “dams”, and sporadically broke free to send massive floods  across Washington and Oregon.  These floods have been estimated to flow at 10-15 cubic MILES per hour (that’s a whole lot), and in constrained areas such as the gap through the Cascade Mountain range, the water could reach up to 80 miles per hour (that, incidently, is also a whole lot).  These floods transformed the Pacific Northwest into the place we see today: The dry, poor soils of the channeled scablands of Eastern Washington, the deep, majestic Columbia River Gorge seen here, and the rich soils of the Willamette Valley were all created during these flood events.

The primary reason the walls of the Gorge are so steep is they were formed from basaltic lava flows, which harden to a relatively solid rock.  This basalt resisted erosion (as much as it could) to constrain the flood waters and increase their powers to model the landscape.  The deep gorge with plentiful water has allowed many diverse ecosystems to develop, from wet lush forests to semi-arid grass savannas, from gentle lakes and streams to sub-alpine old growth forests.

The Earth is a wondrous place, filled with an amazing assortment of natural diversity.  This one photo from the Columbia River Gorge shows just a sampling of what the world has to offer.  I could take a million such photos, and not even come close to documenting everything I love about our home.

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Blue Marble

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Ryan Dey

Welcome to Earth.

This image, called the Blue Marble, was captured in December 1972, by the crew of Apollo 17.  Since this was the final manned mission to the moon, this is the last time humans have ever been far enough from Earth to capture such an image.  They were 28,000 miles from home (heading to the moon, 240,000 miles out).  It’s also notable as being one of the few images we have to show the entire face of Earth fully illuminated, since the Apollo module was heading almost directly towards the sun.

This image contributed to the dawn of the modern environmental movement.  The first Earth Day was held just two years earlier, and many Americans were beginning to grasp Earth’s frailty, vulnerability, and isolation in space.  It helped instill the motivation for early environmental activists to protect the Earth; to save the planet from the people on the planet.

It’s interesting to note though..  from this distance, there are no people.  Even after traveling only a few hours away, there’s no sign that this planet is inhabited by intelligent life.  I’ve often felt that humans grow on the Earth like lichen grows on a rock, but it’s actually not even that severe.  We are the very thinnest film of organic material growing across the surface of a lonely rocky world.  Despite all our accomplishments and self-appointed grandiose, in the grand scheme of the Universe, we are inconsequential.  We have learned that we can have very big impacts on the planet, such as our annoying tendency to release chlorofluorocarbons, carbon dioxide, and other chemicals into the air, but we aren’t so grand as to even be visible from a mere 28,000 miles.

This Blue Marble image is one of the most famous photographs ever created by humans.  It’s been influential in shaping our understanding of our home.  It’s inspiring.

It was also on a poster hanging on my bedroom wall for nearly my entire childhood.

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A Mote of Dust

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Ryan Dey

Pale Blue Dot

With infinite gratitude to Carl Sagan, here is the most distant view of the Earth ever recorded (by humans).

After a decade of lobbying NASA and waiting, the Viking 1 spacecraft was instructed to capture a photo of Earth from it’s vantage point, not for any scientific purpose, but to give us perspective on our species place in the Universe.  From 3.7 billion miles, we (meaning all of the Earth) appears as no more than a point of light.  A mote of dust floating in the vastness of space.

 

From Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot, published in 1994:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

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About GeoCognition

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Ryan Dey

For the past few months, I’ve been refocusing my “free time” projects to be more closely related to things that are productive and have some sort of value.  These projects include reading nonfiction, brushing up on my programming skills, and thinking up ways to save the world.

That last one’s the kicker.

GeoCognition serves as a container for my efforts.  It’s a place I can collect and present the ideas I’m thinking about, the tools and apps I want to build, and interesting visualizations I’ve put together.  Unlike most people, I tend to make maps for fun.  And sometimes they are even interesting.

GeoCognition is a word I thought up in the shower by combining various Greek and Latin roots.  I wanted something that means “You see the Earth”, or “Earth Understanding”, or “I want to have consensual intimate relations with the Earth”… or something.

This site is very much a work in progress.  I am not yet clear where it will go, though I have some ideas.  What I know is that I very much love the natural world and want to share that love with others.  It’s my hope that what comes next will be interesting enough for you and others to stick around and join me in my quest to save the world.

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About Me

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Ryan Dey

My name is Ryan Dey.  I grew up by the beach in Delaware, and earned a degree in Computer Science in 2003.  I moved to Oregon and earned a Master’s Degree in Geography in 2005.  Since then, I’ve been working in the GIS industry focusing on 3D visualizations.

I am a naturalist. I have a great love for the natural world, and all the many wonders it contains. I particularly enjoy geomorphology, understanding landscapes and environments as they are now, how they were in the past, and what they may be like in the future. I am deeply concerned about how human activity has influenced the carbon cycle and search for ways to minimize our impact on that and other natural processes. I think the natural world is far more amazing than anything humans have ever created, and seek to share that knowledge with others in hopes that they see fit to join me in preserving the world we live in.

My talent, my gift, is my technical skills, and to a lesser extent, a design aesthetic. I have the ability to use photography and various forms of technology to share my naturalistic passions. I can build tools, create beautiful pictures, and synthesize unique visualizations that help people to see, explore, and understand the natural world we live in. This is my life’s thesis. This is my mission. This is how I will do my part to preserve and protect the world I love. My name is Ryan Dey, and I am Pro Earth.

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