James' World 2

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Last month, government officials in the island nation of the Maldives officially unveiled plans to build the first fully floating island city of its kind. Could the ambitious experiment be a blueprint for how we’ll live in the future as climate change continues to raise the global sea level?

As “arguably the lowest-lying country in the world,” according to NASA—the average elevation is just 3.3 feet above sea level—the Maldives, an island republic in the northern Indian Ocean, will soon have to rely on sustainable housing. In virtually any simulation of the near future, the over 1,000 individual islands that make up the Maldives will be some of the first to disappear below the rising sea level.

Enter the floating city, appropriately called Maldives Floating City (MFC), which will be built in a lagoon just minutes from Male, the capital of the Maldives. MFC’s designers—the Netherlands-based Dutch Docklands, the global leader in floating infrastructure—say the floating city’s shape, a series of honeycomb-like hexagonal maze rows is supposed to resemble coral.

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Maldives Floating City/Handout

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Suppose aliens existed, and imagine that some of them had been watching our planet for its entire four and a half billion years. What would they have seen? Over most of that vast timespan, Earth’s appearance altered slowly and gradually. Continents drifted; ice cover waxed and waned; successive species emerged, evolved, with many of them becoming extinct.

But in just a tiny sliver of Earth’s history—the last hundred centuries—the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signaled the start of agriculture—and later urbanization. The changes accelerated as the human population increased.

Then came even faster changes. Within just a century, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to rise dangerously fast. Radio emissions that couldn’t be explained by natural processes appeared and something else unprecedented happened: Rockets launched from the planet’s surface escaped the biosphere completely. Some spacecraft were propelled into orbits around the Earth; others journeyed to the moon, Mars, Jupiter, and even Pluto.

If those hypothetical aliens continued to keep watch, what would they witness in the next century? Will a final spasm of activity be followed by silence due to climate change? Or will the planet’s ecology stabilize? Will there be massive terraforming? Will an armada of spacecraft launched from Earth spawn new oases of life elsewhere?

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Search for Aliens

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“WHO ORDERED that?” This was the reaction, famous in particle-physics circles, of Isidor Isaac Rabi to the discovery of the muon. Rabi, a Nobel laureate who helped America develop the atom bomb, was reflecting physicists’ general surprise that muons, which are, to all intents and purposes, just heavy and unstable versions of electrons, actually exist. To an orderly physicist’s mind, they somehow seemed superfluous to Nature’s requirements.

Establishing the muon’s nature was, though, an important part of the creation of what is known as the Standard Model of particle physics. This, along with Einstein’s general theory of relativity (actually a theory of gravity), is one of the two foundation stones on which modern physics is built. Yet the Standard Model is known to be incomplete for several reasons, one of which is precisely the fact that it does not yet embrace gravity.

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Cindy Arnold Fermilab

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