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It’s been more than two years since Earth last experienced an annular solar eclipse, with the last one occurring on June 10, 2021, but one will happen on our planet over both North and South America on October 14, 2023. Over the span of a few hours, the Moon’s disk will appear to pass in front of the Sun, blocking out a portion of its light. From a few select locations here on Earth — for observers in what’s called the “path of annularity” — the alignment will be so perfect that the entire Moon, as seen from Earth, will pass in front of the Sun. But because the Moon, at that key moment in time, will farther than a particular critical distance from the Earth, it will be unable to block the entirety of the Sun’s disk.

Instead, observers on Earth, even with the most perfect alignment possible, will still see a narrow ring, or annulus, of the Sun poking out from all sides around the Moon, creating a gorgeous phenomenon known as a “ring of fire” during this annular eclipse. But don’t despair: this annular eclipse is a signal that just 6 months later — on April 8, 2024 — an even better eclipse, a total solar eclipse, will befall our planet. This is no mere coincidence, but rather is a mandatory consequence of three factors:

- the Moon’s motion around the Earth,
- the Earth’s motion around the Sun,
- and the laws of gravity, which dictate lunar and planetary motion.

With just the law of gravity and the Sun, Moon, and Earth, we can understand why October’s upcoming annular eclipse paves the way for 2024’s great North American eclipse.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/0*yuvODpM1htdyn3Ia.jpg)
This shows the path of the October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse across North and South America. Observers within the red band will be in the path of annularity and will be able to observe a “ring of fire,” while those outside of it in the other shaded regions will only observe a partial solar eclipse. (Credit: Time and Date)

The simplest way to view the Solar System — too simple in many regards — is to treat the Earth as moving in a circular orbit around the Sun, and the Moon as moving in a circular orbit around the Earth, all while the Earth rotates on its axis. This picture explains:

- our 24 hour day, as the spinning Earth experiences daytime when we’re on the Sun-facing side and nighttime when we’re on the side facing away from the Sun,
- the apparent rotation of the stars about one of the celestial poles, as the Earth rotates,
- the phases of the Moon that change over the course of each ~29.5 day period, as the visible portion of the Moon that’s illuminated by the Sun changes with respect to Earth as the Moon revolves around us,
- and the seasonal changes throughout the calendar year, as the Earth, rotating on its axis and revolving around the Sun, experiences summer in the hemisphere whose pole is tilted towards the Sun and winder in the hemisphere whose pole is tilted away from the Sun.

However, there’s a problem that comes from these oversimplifications. If this were the way that the Sun, Earth, and Moon worked, then every single lunar month, when the Moon was in its “new” phase, it would pass between the Sun and Earth, creating a solar eclipse, and when the Moon was in its “full” phase, it would dip into the Earth’s shadow, creating a lunar eclipse.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*_qwuXZbyCiu3yqF7)
Because the Moon-Earth orbital plane is not identical to the Sun-Earth orbital plane, eclipses do not occur with every new Moon and every full Moon. Instead, only when the Moon happens to pass through the Earth-Sun plane coincident with the new/full phase are eclipses possible. (Credit: Ben Gibson/Big Think)

Both solar and lunar eclipses are not only possible, but regularly occur. Only, we don’t get an eclipse twice every lunar month, but only one-to-three eclipses that occur over each of two short intervals of time annually. There’s a good reason for that: the orbital path that the Moon traces out as it revolves around the Earth is not in the same two-dimensional plane that the Earth traces out as it revolves around the Sun. In other words, it is true that the Moon orbits the Earth and that the Earth orbits the Sun, but you can’t draw both orbits on the same flat, two-dimensional sheet of paper!

It’s as though the Earth orbits the Sun in one plane, or on one sheet of paper, and then the Moon’s orbit around the Earth occurs in a different plane, or on another sheet of paper: one that makes a small but important angle relative to the Sun-Earth plane, inclined at about 5.2 degrees. That might seem like a very small angle — and relative to all the possible orientations that two planes could be inclined at, it is a small angle — but it’s quite large compared to the angular size of either the Moon or Sun on the sky, which come in at only about half-a-degree. Relative to the Earth-Sun plane, the Moon is almost always either completely “above” or “below” it, making eclipses impossible during those times.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/0*F575r4Ei5OMtiM9N.png)
Because the Moon-Earth orbital plane and the Earth-Sun orbital plane are inclined to one another at 5.2 degrees, eclipses are only possible when either the “new” or “full” phase of the Moon coincides with the Moon crossing the nodes of the Earth-Sun orbital plane. This means that solar and lunar eclipses can only occur in groups every ~6 lunar months. (Credit: Ben Gibson/Big Think)

But this is where another important piece of our understanding comes into play: the Moon, orbiting the Earth, maintains that same 5.2° tilt relative to the Earth-Sun plane all throughout the year. During most months, the new Moon phase and the full Moon phase occur with the Moon either well above or well below the Earth-Sun plane, and so eclipses are impossible. The reason is simple: the Moon casts a shadow from the Sun shining on it, but during the new Moon phase, that shadow won’t fall on the Earth with such an imperfect alignment. Similarly, the Earth casts a shadow from the Sun shining on it, but the full Moon won’t pass into that shadow with such an imperfect alignment, either.

However, patience is a virtue here. The Moon, in its orbit around the Earth, will pass in-and-out of the Earth-Sun plane twice every month. And there are two occasions per year — once on either side of the Earth-Sun orbit — where the Moon dips into the Earth-Sun plane during its new and/or full phases. Those events, where the Moon-Earth plane and the Sun-Earth plane line up during the new and/or full phases, are the times of year when conditions are favorable to have an eclipse. If the Moon and Sun are on opposite sides of the Earth from one another (i.e., during a full phase), the conditions are right for a lunar eclipse. And if the Moon and Sun are on the same side of the Earth as each other (i.e., during the new phase), the conditions are right for a solar eclipse.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*BOtnFCiQVXvLTlTO)
When the Moon passes directly between the Earth and the Sun, a solar eclipse occurs. Whether the eclipse is total or annular depends on whether the Moon’s angular diameter appears larger or smaller than the Sun’s as viewed from Earth’s surface. Only when the Moon’s angular diameter appears larger than the Sun’s are total solar eclipses possible, a situation that will no longer be possible about 600–650 million years from now. (Credit: Kevin M. Gill/flickr)

This explains why eclipses occur when they do. Earlier this year, there was a total solar eclipse on April 20th, followed by a penumbral lunar eclipse (which I count as an “almost” lunar eclipse) two weeks later, on May 5th/6th. Six lunar months later, there’s an annular solar eclipse on October 14th, followed by a partial eclipse on October 28th/29th. That “line of nodes” that the Moon makes with the Earth-Sun orbit lines up in a way that’s favorable for eclipses every six lunar months or so. And that’s why, six lunar months later, there will indeed be another total solar eclipse on April 8th, 2024. (There’s also a penumbral eclipse on March 24th/25th of 2024, and then another six lunar months later, a partial lunar eclipse on September 17th/18th and an annular solar eclipse on October 2nd.)

This pattern continues, roughly every six lunar months: with eclipses only becoming possible when the Moon passes through the Earth-Sun plane at times that coincide with either the Moon’s “new” or “full” phase. Partial eclipses are easy to explain: when the Earth-Sun plane and the Earth-Moon plane are not quite in perfect alignment — when they’re offset by about a quarter of a degree or so — then only either:

- part of the Sun’s disk will be blocked by the Moon as seen from Earth (for a solar eclipse),
- or part of the Moon will fall into the Earth’s shadow (for a lunar eclipse),

and so only a partial, rather than a total (or annular) eclipse will occur.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*Po2K0s7ODlB57TmF)
Animation showing the umbral phase of the November 19, 2021 partial lunar eclipse. At 9:03 AM UT, maximum eclipse is reached, where only 0.9% of the Moon remains illuminated by direct sunlight. The umbral phase lasts over 3.5 hours: the longest this century for a partial eclipse. Reconstructing the size of Earth’s shadow relative to the physical size of the Moon is the oldest method for measuring both the size of the Moon as well as the distance to it. (Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio)

For lunar eclipses, whenever the angular alignment between the Sun, Earth, and Moon is perfect, you’ll always experience a total lunar eclipse. There’s no such thing as an annular lunar eclipse, and for good reason: the Earth is large relative to the Moon. Consider this: if you were an astronaut on the Moon, the Sun would appear to take up about half a degree (0.5°) in your sky. The Earth, however, appears enormous: taking up anywhere between 1.8° and 2.0° in the sky: approximately four times the angular size of the Sun. Whenever the Earth appears to pass in front of the Sun from the perspective of someone on the Moon, it always appears large enough to completely block out the Sun. Therefore, all lunar eclipses on Earth, as long as the alignment is good enough, will be total lunar eclipses.

But that’s not the case at all for solar eclipses. The Moon is much smaller than the Earth: barely more than one quarter of the physical diameter of our planet. From the perspective of an observer on Earth, the Moon and Sun take up approximately the same angular size on the sky: about half a degree (0.5°) as viewed by someone on our surface. In fact, if you were to photograph the Moon every single day (or night) that you could see it from Earth, you would find that, even as the Moon’s phases changed, its apparent overall size in the sky would appear to change as well!

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*c0Yq09s-7zJbyG9y)
Although the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth so that the same side always faces our planet, the fact that the Moon’s orbit is elliptical and follows Kepler’s laws of motion ensures that it appears to rock back-and-forth over the course of a month: a phenomenon known as lunar libration. Overall, 59% of the total lunar surface, not 50%, is visible from Earth over time. (Credit: Tomruen/Wikimedia Commons)

Why does this happen? It’s because the Moon doesn’t make a perfect circle in its orbit around the Earth, but rather makes a rather elliptical shape. At its closest approach to Earth, known as perigee, the Moon is barely 356,000 kilometers distant, causing it to take up about 0.57° on the sky: somewhat more than half-a-degree. At its farthest from Earth, known as apogee, the Moon can exceed 406,000 kilometers in its distance from Earth, where it takes up only 0.49° on the sky. Those might seem like tiny differences, but it’s very important to compare them to the only other important scale that matters for solar eclipses: the angular size of the Sun.

The Sun is physically very huge, but it’s also physically very distant. The Sun, in fact, is about 400 times as large, in terms of diameter, as the Moon, but it’s also approximately 400 times more distant. And just as the Moon makes an elliptical orbit around the Earth, so does the Earth make an elliptical orbit around the Sun. The Earth makes its closest approach to the Sun in early January of every year, known as perihelion, where the Sun achieves its maximum angular size of 0.54° as seen from Earth. And the Earth finds itself at its most distant from the Sun approximately six months later, achieving what we call aphelion in early July, where the Sun achieves its minimum angular size of just 0.52° in Earth’s skies.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*Pv2DESm5NaOjJE-w)
Right now, the largest (perigee) full Moon appears bigger than the Sun at all times of the year. However, over time, the Moon will migrate away, causing its angular diameter to shrink. When the perigee full Moon is smaller than the aphelion Sun, no total solar eclipses can occur anymore. The Moon varies by a much greater amount in angular size than the Sun owing to its more eccentric orbit around the Earth compared to Earth’s around the Sun. (Credit: Ehsan Rostamizadeh/Astrobin)

This matters a whole lot! It means, during the new Moon phase when the nodes of the Moon-Earth orbit align with the Earth-Sun plane, that:

- if the Moon’s angular size is larger than 0.54°, you will always have a total solar eclipse on Earth,
- if the Moon’s angular size is smaller than 0.52°, you will always have an annular solar eclipse on Earth,
- and that if the Moon’s angular size is between those values, you can have either a total solar eclipse, an annular solar eclipse, or a hybrid solar eclipse (where some parts of Earth experience a total solar eclipse and other parts experience an annular solar eclipse),

all dependent on the relative angular size between the Sun and the Moon, as seen from Earth, at the critical moment of the eclipse.

In general, you’re more likely to have a total solar eclipse when the Sun is farther from Earth, near aphelion (during the months of May, June, July, and August) and more likely to have an annular solar eclipse when the Sun is closer to Earth, near perihelion (during November, December, January and February). But because the Moon’s orbit varies by a much greater amount than the Sun’s orbit does in terms of their eccentricities and variations in angular size, you can have either a total or annular solar eclipse at any time during the year.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/0*cncKzNgMUoh1F2y9.png)
When, during a new Moon phase, the Sun, Moon, and Earth all line up in a row, a solar eclipse is possible. Whether the eclipse is a total eclipse (top) or an annular eclipse (bottom) is wholly dependent on the relative angular sizes of the Sun and Moon to an observer on Earth. (Credit: Ben Gibson/Big Think)

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century occurred on July 22nd, 2009: very close to the Sun’s aphelion and also coincident with a perigee (closest approach) Moon. With the Moon’s angular size so much bigger than the Sun’s, when the Moon completely blocked the disk of the Sun, it did so for a magnificent 6 minutes and 39 seconds. Under ideal, perfect conditions, which never occur in practice, a perigee new Moon would coincide with the Sun’s aphelion from Earth, and the total phase of the eclipse would last up to 7 minutes and 32 seconds.

But what might surprise you is that just 6 months later, on January 15th, 2010, the longest annular solar eclipse of the 21st century occurred. With the Sun at perihelion and the Moon almost perfectly at apogee (its farthest distance from Earth), the Moon’s angular size was at its smallest while the Sun’s was at its largest. Because the Moon is smaller, in angular size, than the Sun, the entire disk of the Moon is capable of fitting into the disk of the Sun. On January 15th, 2010, it remained there — with the illuminated part of the Sun having a ring-like shape known as an annulus — for 11 minutes and 8 seconds. The longest possible duration of an annular eclipse is 12 minutes and 29 seconds.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*nPXXxs-cpYzwFn-W)
The path of totality of the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse cuts from southwest Mexico up through Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Canada. The best viewing locations will be close to the center-line and farther southwest, not only to maximize the time spent in totality but also to maximize the chance of minimal cloud cover. (Credit: Great American Eclipse, LLC)

It’s impressive to know that an annular solar eclipse occurring in October of this year will lead to a total solar eclipse occurring six months later, in April of next year. But for the most spectacular example of what’s ahead in our near future, look ahead to 2027 and 2028.

- On February 6, 2027, Earth will experience an annular solar eclipse, with an apogee new Moon and close to the Sun’s perihelion, with a “ring of fire” phase that lasts nearly 8 full minutes.
- Then, six months later, on August 2, 2027, Earth will experience the longest total solar eclipse remaining in the 21st century, as a near-perigee new Moon eclipses a near-aphelion Sun, creating a totality phase that lasts 6 minutes and 23 seconds.
- And then, another six months after that, on January 26, 2028, another annular solar eclipse occurs, with this one having an annular phase that lasts an impressive 10 minutes and 27 seconds.

After those events, the next total solar eclipse lasting 6 minutes or more won’t occur until 2045; the next annular eclipse lasting 10 minutes or more won’t happen until the year 2131!

If you live in North America, you may have seen the total eclipse of 2017; during the 2024 total eclipse, which lasts more than 2 minutes longer during totality, the skies will get darker, the Sun’s corona will be more visible, and — as a bonus — the planet Venus will be prominent during the eclipse: just to the west of the Sun. You can get the full guide to 2024’s total eclipse here, but know that simply coming six lunar months after an annular solar eclipse is all it takes to set the stage for an even more spectacular possibility to occur!

By：Ethan Siegel
Link：https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/october-14-2023s-annular-eclipse-will-have-huge-consequences-6-months-later-d787df2a8008

October 14, 2023’s annular eclipse will have huge consequences 6 months later

An annular eclipse is coming to Earth on October 14, 2023. Six months later, a total solar eclipse is headed our way. Here’s the reason why.


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![image](https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/650e13eaf2fd612e5dd7300a/quantum-computer/1960x0.jpg?format=jpg&width=1440)

Atlantic Quantum, a young startup that’s building quantum computers– machines that are capable of advanced and high-speed information processing– has published new research Monday that shows the architecture of the circuits underlying its quantum computer produces far fewer errors than the industry standard used in quantum computers built by the likes of IBMIBM -2.2% and GoogleGOOG -2.1%.

While still several years away from real-world applications, quantum computers can be used to solve certain complex problems faster and better than the computers that we use today: from advanced drug discovery to building lighter batteries to cracking encryption protocols. It also has potential for application in areas like predicting the weather and forecasting changes in the stock market. But that can happen only after overcoming some major hardware roadblocks, says Atlantic Quantum CEO Bharath Kannan, who cofounded the startup out of MIT last year and raised $9 million in seed funding.

A key component that undergirds a quantum computer is a “qubit,” a aluminum superconducting circuit or “electrical switch” built on silicon chips that encodes information. But scientists are struggling to structure a qubit that can be scaled to the point where it’s better than conventional computing.. Atlantic Quantum’s goal is to address just that, and it’s inching closer, Kannan says.

“With quantum you know, it really isn't a question of if quantum computers will be able to do these, it's a question of when, and, and that's what we need to do. We just need to make sure that the when is not 50 years from now,” he says.

So far, the technological architecture pioneered by the startup yields 99.9% accuracy for a two-qubit circuit. Eventually, several million will be needed to work in tandem to achieve speeds that are faster than conventional computers–to give a sense of where the industry is at, the quantum computer with the most qubits built so far, by IBM, only has 433. But cofounder and lead researcher Leon Ding says the findings of his research are notable because it presents a qubit architecture that’s the first major alternative to the standard circuits used since 2007. Plus, lower error rates could make quantum computers less complex and require fewer numbers of these circuits, he says. The next milestone for the startup is to increase the number of qubits in one of its systems while retaining fewer errors.

Atlantic Quantum also announced last week a $1.25 million contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory to build quantum processors for national defense purposes. Other recent highlights for the budding startup include its first R&D facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts where a chandelier-looking dilution refrigerator powers its quantum computers, and in June it opened a subsidiary in Sweden for chip fabrication. Additionally, CEO Kannan says that major tech companies like IBM and Google will have a hard time catching up to its designs, as his company controls most of the key patents for them.

“They probably should, but I mean, we own a lot of the IP around it, so they can't,” he says. “It's not so easy, I would say to just flick your fingers and start using that qubit… That’s where a lot of our key IP lies as well, is that we have a way of controlling these qubits that is much simpler than the standard.”

By：Rashi Shrivastava
Link：https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2023/09/25/this-quantum-computing-startup-is-taking-on-google-and-ibm-with-a-fresh-technical-approach/?sh=7791ba7633a9

This Quantum Computing Startup Is Taking On Google And IBM With A Fresh Technical Approach

Atlantic Quantum, which spun out of research at MIT, has developed a new type of quantum architecture that’s easier to scale.


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Computer Vision (CV) is the field of research and category of applications concerned with teaching machines to see. It involves using AI algorithms to process visual information from cameras and extract understanding and insight from it.

![image](https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/65127e7fdc3814c07ca67293/From-Healthcare-to-Space--Top-10-Transformative-Computer-Vision-Trends-In-2024/960x0.jpg?format=jpg&width=1440)
From Healthcare to Space: Top 10 Transformative Computer Vision Trends In 2024ADOBE STOCK

CV (sometimes called machine vision) has huge implications for the way artificial intelligence (AI) will change our lives. It is fundamental to the way autonomous cars navigate and is revolutionizing healthcare with its ability to analyze and interpret scans and medical images. It also has controversial applications in law enforcement and surveillance.

In 2024, we can expect CV algorithms to become increasingly powerful and pervasive, along with the emergence of new and perhaps frightening use cases. But we can also expect a continued focus on efforts to understand and mitigate the risks. Here's my overview of what I predict will be the most significant trends:

## Synthetic Data and Generative AI

Generative AI is proving to be transformative across the board, and the field of computer vision is no exception. The ways in which it is likely to impact the development of computer vision technology in 2024 include its ability to generate synthetic data, which can be used to train computer vision systems (e.g., facial recognition, object detection) more cheaply and with less risk of violating privacy. It can also be used to label training data much more quickly and efficiently than by having humans manually label data, a time-consuming and expensive process.

Computer vision algorithms are becoming increasingly sophisticated at capturing and analyzing 3D images. This can be spatial, such as using multiple cameras to capture different angles. It can also be time-based, using light sensors to measure the time it takes for light to reflect off the surface of an object (e.g., LIDAR). 3D imaging provides more accurate depth and distance data and can also be used to create more accurate 3D models for use in simulations and digital twins.

## Edge Computing

Processing visual data directly on the device where it is captured reduces bandwidth costs and enables faster action. Computer vision use cases ranging from autonomous vehicles to intelligent security systems benefit from this ability to process data in near real-time. Small, discreet CV models that can run on low-power devices will be a key trend in 2024.

## Autonomous Vehicles

Traditional self-driving car technology focuses on input from a variety of sources, including cameras, radar, and GPS. But humans are able to drive cars almost entirely by sight, so why shouldn't computers be able to do the same? This line of thinking is becoming more prevalent as the self-driving car (and other vehicles) move closer to becoming an everyday reality. We can be sure that by 2024, breakthroughs in computer vision will quickly find their way into prototypes and even production vehicles.

## Computer Vision In Healthcare

Doctors and medical researchers are using CV to speed up the analysis of images and scans to more efficiently identify and diagnose diseases. Algorithms can be trained to tell the difference between cancerous and healthy tissue and to capture patient data to aid in record keeping. It is also being used to monitor surgical procedures - one example use case is tracking the location of surgical instruments during an operation to ensure they are not accidentally left inside the patient.

## Augmented Reality

CV plays an important role in augmented reality by enabling computers to understand visual information and overlay it with digital information. A flood of new augmented reality devices - possibly including the long-awaited sets from Meta or Apple - will hit the market in 2024, putting CV-augmented tools in the hands of a larger portion of the population than ever before.

## Detecting Deepfakes

As AI-generated deepfakes become more convincing, we are building a world where the lines between "real" and "computer-generated" are relentlessly blurred. This has truly worrying implications for our ability to detect propaganda and disinformation. Many believe that CV has an important role to play in mitigating this threat, thanks to its ability to analyze images and spot telltale signs that they have been algorithmically generated. As AI becomes more embedded in our lives by 2024, technological solutions like CV will be an important part of the debate.

## Ethical Computer Vision

Issues of bias and fairness arise in all areas of AI but have been particularly prominent in computer vision. For example, facial recognition algorithms are often found to be less effective at identifying people with dark skin, which means there is more room for error when used for surveillance or law enforcement purposes. In 2024, I believe we will also see a growing focus on privacy-oriented computer vision in the form of technologies that can be used in public areas without violating privacy (such as automatic face blurring).

## Real-Time Computer Vision

The technology to extract insights from live video so that action can be taken immediately has matured in recent years, and we can expect to see more use cases in 2024. Real-time computer vision is already being used to scan crowds for signs of potential problems such as overcrowding, analyze security footage for intruders or other threats, or monitor machinery on a factory floor to detect safety hazards. As real-time algorithms become more sophisticated, we can expect many new and valuable use cases to emerge.

## Satellite Computer Vision

Satellites are becoming cheaper to launch and operate, and the images they can capture are becoming more sophisticated and insightful. By applying CV technology to images from space, it's possible to monitor many activities on Earth, including deforestation, the spread of floods and wildfires, the spread of urban sprawl, and activities in marine ecosystems such as pollution and migration. As satellite imagery becomes more accurate and detailed and CV algorithms become more sophisticated, we will gain deeper insights that will enable more timely interventions and better use of resources.

By：Bernard Marr
Link：https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2023/09/26/from-healthcare-to-space-top-10-transformative-computer-vision-trends-in-2024/?ss=ai&sh=27bd834972c0

From Healthcare To Space: Top 10 Transformative Computer Vision Trends In 2024


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Meta is preparing to announce a generative AI chatbot, called “Gen AI Personas” internally, aimed at younger users, according to The Wall Street Journal. Reportedly set to launch during the company’s Meta Connect event that starts Wednesday, they would come in multiple “personas” geared towards engaging young users with more colorful behavior, following ChatGPT’s rise over the last year as one of the fastest-growing apps ever. Similar, but more generally targeted, Meta chatbot personas have already been reportedly tested on Instagram.

According to internal chats the Journal viewed, the company has tested a “sassy robot” persona inspired by Bender from Futurama and an overly curious “Alvin the Alien” that one employee worried could imply the bot was made to gather personal information. A particularly problematic chatbot reportedly told a Meta employee, “When you’re with a girl, it’s all about the experience. And if she’s barfing on you, that’s definitely an experience.”

Meta means to create “dozens” of these bots, writes the Journal, and has even done some work on a chatbot creation tool to enable celebrities to make their own chatbots for their fans. There may also be some more geared towards productivity, able to help with “coding and other tasks,” according to the article.

Meta’s other AI work lately includes reportedly developing a more powerful large language model to rival OpenAI’s latest work with GPT-4, the model that underpins ChatGPT and Bing, as well as an AI model built just to help give legs to its Horizon Worlds avatars. During Meta Connect, the company will also show off more about its metaverse project, and new Quest 3 headset.

The Journal quotes former Snap and Instagram executive Meghana Dhar as saying chatbots don’t “scream Gen Z to me, but definitely Gen Z is much more comfortable” with newer technology. She added that Meta’s goal with the chatbots, as always with new products, is to keep them engaged for longer so it has “increased opportunity to serve them ads.”

By：Wes Davis
Link：https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/24/23887773/meta-ai-chatbots-gen-ai-personas-young

Meta’s AI chatbot plan includes a ‘sassy robot’ for younger users

The Wall Street Journal reports Meta has plans to develop ‘dozens’ of chatbot personas, including ones for celebrities to interact with their fans.


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NASA completed its first-ever sample return mission from an asteroid today, with a science capsule containing material from an asteroid landing after having traveled on a 1.2 billion-mile journey from the asteroid Bennu. The capsule was released from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it passed by Earth this morning, entering the atmosphere at around 27,000 mph.

The OSIRIS-REx mission, launched in 2016, has collected as much as several hundred grams of asteroid material, which could help scientists understand the earliest stages of the solar system.

“NASA invests in small body missions like OSIRIS-REx to investigate the rich population of asteroids in our solar system that can give us clues about how the solar system formed and evolved,” said Melissa Morris, OSIRIS-REx program executive, in a mission overview briefing. “It’s our own origin story.”

## The capsule was released from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it passed by Earth this morning

The science capsule was slowed by parachutes and landed in the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range at 10:52 AM ET, a landing area chosen as it is the largest restricted airspace in the United States and has been used for previous NASA sample return missions like Genesis and Stardust.

The landing area is 36 miles by 8.5 miles, and the entire mission has required a very high level of precision — particularly for the spacecraft to rendezvous with the asteroid and collect its sample in 2020.

“The really precise navigation required to orbit Bennu and to touch down and collect our sample, we were under a meter away from our target,” Sandra Freund, OSIRIS-REx program manager, said in a pre-landing briefing. “So that illustrates what kind of navigation precision we’ve had throughout this mission.”

Recovery teams collected the sample from the Utah desert, with a helicopter carrying the sample taking off at 12:15 PM ET. The capsule will be taken to a temporary clean room for first disassembly, removing some of the larger parts such as the backshell. It will then undergo a process called a nitrogen purge in which nitrogen is pumped into the canister to protect the sample. This prevents any of Earth’s atmosphere from entering it as it is shipped to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where the canister will be opened for the first time so the sample can be analyzed.

![image](https://duet-cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0x0:5860x3907/1080x720/filters:focal(2930x1954:2931x1955):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24948817/1686984312.jpg)
Photo by GEORGE FREY/AFP via Getty Images

## Why do we need an asteroid sample?

“We’re really interested in trace organic molecular chemistry,” Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator, told The Verge. “We really want to understand — the things that are used in biology today, like amino acids that make proteins and nucleic acids that make up our genes — were they formed in ancient asteroid bodies and delivered to the Earth from outer space?”

If you’re not familiar with models of the formation of the solar system, that idea might sound outlandish, bordering on fantastical. But it’s actually a fairly well-supported and widely accepted theory for how some of the key elements for life came to be on Earth.

It’s important to be clear that the theory is not that life itself arose elsewhere and was delivered to Earth, but rather that the basic building blocks of life — often referred to as organic compounds — could have arrived here billions of years ago carried by asteroids.

That’s been a theory for decades; but to test it out, scientists need access to asteroidal material. Going to visit an asteroid and using instruments on a spacecraft to study it is a good start, but to do the kind of detailed analysis scientists want requires a much bigger laboratory, equipped with instruments like a mile-wide type of particle accelerator called a synchrotron which would be impossible to fit onto a spacecraft.

## “were they formed in ancient asteroid bodies and delivered to the Earth from outer space?”

Another option is to study meteorites, which are pieces of matter (including from asteroids) that come from space and fall to Earth’s surface. That’s how most of this research has been performed historically, using these tiny fragments as samples.

But there are two problems with this approach. Firstly, when a meteorite falls, it doesn’t have the context of where in the solar system it came from. Researchers can’t know its origin, or see what other bodies it was close to, which can give important clues to the interpretation of any data. And secondly, by the time a meteorite has passed through Earth’s atmosphere and landed, it may have picked up matter along the way and been contaminated by the local environment.

When scientists are looking for these trace organic compounds, they need to know that anything they find comes from space and wasn’t picked up here on Earth. So to do that, they need an asteroid sample that is as pristine as possible. That’s where OSIRIS-REx comes in.

https://youtu.be/O8R2hsoIgTc

## A worldwide effort

The OSIRIS-REx mission is the first time that NASA has brought back a sample from an asteroid, but it is following in the footsteps of the Japanese space agency JAXA, which collected two asteroid samples in its historic Hayabusa and Hayabusa 2 missions. Though the first Hayabusa mission gathered just a tiny amount of material, the second mission managed to return around five grams of material from asteroid Ryugu in 2020.

OSIRIS-REx is returning much more material from asteroid Bennu, at around 250 grams, which means that more science can be done — particularly when looking for those small amounts of trace materials. But researchers see the two missions as complementary, rather than competitive.

“Not all asteroids are the same,” said Lauretta, who is also a member of the Hayabusa 2 team. Both Ryugu and Bennu have a similar spinning-top-like shape, but they look very different. Ryugu is larger and more red in color, while Bennu is smaller and more blue. Scientists still aren’t sure what that difference in color means, but being able to analyze and compare the samples on Earth should help understand both how the asteroids are similar and how they differ.

“We look at this as not two sample analysis programs, but one big sample analysis program,” Lauretta said, “because it’s a worldwide effort.”

https://youtu.be/QunVAWABQSc

## A window into the early solar system

When scientists want to understand how the Earth formed, they need to look beyond our planet and out into the solar system. Star systems form from enormous clouds of gas that collapse into a star at the center, spinning a disk of material around it.

That’s clear from looking at other star systems, but there’s also evidence from our own solar system: the planets revolve around the sun in the same direction and in a single plane, supporting the idea they formed from a single disk of material.Some of that material coalesced into planets, and some was swept into the earliest asteroids, a number of which still exist today.

## When scientists want to understand how the Earth formed, they need to look beyond our planet and out into the solar system

In fact, the estimates we have for the age of the solar system come from dating grains within meteorites that have fallen to Earth. That’s because Earth has factors like erosion and plate tectonics which recycle rocks and wipe away the earliest history of the planet, meaning the oldest rocks we have ever found here are around 4 billion years old. The material from asteroids, however, can be even older.

“The asteroids date from about 500 million years earlier in time than the oldest rocks on Earth. So as a geologist, I want to go back all the way to the beginning,” Lauretta said. “And the fun thing is, when you’re looking at asteroids you go literally to the very beginning of the solar system.”

Bennu, the asteroid from which OSIRIS-REx collected its sample, is thought to be made up of material that is around 4.5 billion years old, making it a potential time capsule from the earliest stages of the solar system. But researchers can’t know its age for sure until a detailed analysis has been performed.

![image](https://duet-cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0x0:2156x1088/1080x545/filters:focal(1078x544:1079x545):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24948831/SRC_detail.jpeg)
Image: NASA

## A new asteroid target

Now that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has dropped off the capsule containing the sample, its initial job is over. But the spacecraft is still in space, and even though it can’t collect another sample it does still have power and a propulsion system, and all its science instruments still operating.

So rather than waste this craft, it will become OSIRIS-APEX and go on to study a new target, the asteroid Apophis. By a fortunate chance of orbital dynamics, it will be able to rendezvous with this asteroid — one of the most famous in the solar system, because it will come close to Earth in the next few years — and study it.

“In 2029, in April, Apophis is gonna fly within 30,000 kilometers of the surface of the Earth, which is about the altitude that our weather satellites orbit at,” Lauretta said. “It’s the biggest, closest flyby of an asteroid for a thousand years,” and it may even be visible to the naked eye from some locations on Earth.

OSIRIS-APEX will be able to follow the asteroid’s path around Earth and meet it, to perform more science observations.

As for the sample from asteroid Bennu, that will be taken to a special facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where work can begin to understand the chemistry of this precious commodity.

Getting the sample back to Earth is just the beginning of the science research, and the team is anxiously awaiting this culmination of all their efforts.

“I get to be one of the very first people on earth to see the capsule, as it is in position out there in the desert. It’s going to be quite an emotional moment for me,” Lauretta said. “We’ve been building and testing and designing this thing for over 12 years. So it’s the end of a very, very long journey, and the beginning of the next chapter.”

By：Georgina Torbet
Link：https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/24/23887975/nasa-asteroid-sample-osiris-rex-bennu-explained

NASA collected a sample from an asteroid for the first time — here’s why it matters


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Envision a world where buildings are not constructed but cultivated, where cities rise not from carbon-intensive steel and concrete but from mycelium-bound and fully biodegradable materials. In this world, the linearity of our construction sector is transformed into circularity, where agricultural waste is turned into high-value materials that can be biodegraded. As humanity races against the existential clock of climate change, the construction industry presents a stubborn challenge. Responsible for a staggering 40% of global greenhouse emissions, it is a major contributor to environmental degradation and industrial waste.

Excitement is high in the fungal world as mycelium-bound replacements for otherwise carbon-intensive resources hit the market. Products like MyBacon made by MyForestFoods, packing materials, mycelial leather fashion accessories made by Ecovative, and acoustic insulation made by MOGU have already graced the market. Among these innovations, notable mycelial architectural prototypes such as the Mycotree and the Growing Pavilion (pictured below) have emerged.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*Ed5vwc3ziH3H-s5nAdqDHQ@2x.jpeg)
The MycoTree project is a collaboration between Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, and Mycotech from Indonesia

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*aphrklaZJeZQXPBciYLOVg@2x.jpeg)
The Growing Pavilion is a collaboration designed by artist Pascal Leboucq in parternship with Eri Klarenbeek’s Krown Design studio, based at the Biobased Creations studio in Amsterdam

However, despite the demonstrated promise of mycelial-bound architecture, its widespread adoption and capacity to revolutionize the construction industry remain uncertain. In addition to the strength of the material itself, issues with scalability and variation in different climatic regions where mycelial-architecture would be implemented en masse pose serious issues to this future Mycotopia. So will mycelial innovation be a game-changer in construction, or will it remain a niche substitute primarily embraced by eco-conscious consumers? Let’s explore where we are at, where we are going, and just how far it is possible to go.

## Structural Integrity of Mycelium-Bound Architecture

The future of the mycelium construction industry confronts three significant challenges. The foremost pertains to the inherent strength of mycelium-based materials. Architectural prototypes to date have relied on mycelium-bound composites, a process wherein a fungal strain inoculates a substrate, consumes it as nourishment, thereby permeating its fibers and forming an intricately interconnected network of hyphae. Presently, these composites lack the structural integrity required to sustain the weight of substantial, habitable edifices.

The larger a structure is, the more weight it needs to hold. Structural engineers gauge a material’s capacity to withstand weight using a critical metric known as compressive strength. Different materials have different compressive strengths. If you’ve ever stacked heavy books on top of each other, you’d notice that the bottom book gets compressed under the weight of the rest. Compressive strength tells us how much force that bottom book, or any material, can take before it collapses or deforms.

A common clay brick, for instance, boasts a compressive strength of 69–140 MPa, while a mycelium-bound composite-produced brick registers a compressive strength of 0.36–0.75 MPa. Most mycelial architectural prototypes created to date rely on non-mycelial exoskeletons for support, which are not fully biodegradable. Nevertheless, there is a glimmer of hope in the fact that compared to steel and concrete, mycelium-bound composites are considerably lighter and thus don’t need as much compressive strength to support themselves.

In a recent special issue published in Biomimetics called “Fungal Architecture” experts from mycology, microbiology, material science, computer science, and engineering come together to, amongst other things, enhance the durability of fungal materials in construction. One promising means to this end involves searching for different combinations of fungal strains and substrates. The substrate, or the thing that the mycelium colonized, plays an important role in the properties of the resulting material. The weight, porosity, and nutritive profile of the substrate influence the mechanical properties of the final mycelium-bound material.

Additional research is underway to discover novel fungal strains, and there are even efforts to genetically engineer new ones with the aim of attaining load-bearing strength on par with conventional building materials. Certain companies, such as Ecovative, have introduced bacteria into the equation, leveraging their metabolic properties to enhance structural integrity. In fact, bacterial-fungal symbioses are not a novelty in nature and have been shown to increase plant nutrition and biodiversity. Nonetheless, when considering additives to fortify mycelium-based materials, it’s imperative that these additives must be entirely biodegradable. This imperative aligns with the overarching goal of establishing a fully circular construction economy.

Another viable avenue for enhancing the structural integrity of mycelial-bound materials has nothing to do with the fungus itself but with strategic geometric design. Different geometries can bolster the structural integrity of buildings by distributing forces more efficiently. For example, arches, such as the one made out of mycelium below, can bear heavy loads by converting the downward force into outward forces along the curve. Strategic geometric design, especially when aided by digital fabrication methods like 3D printing, may be able to circumvent some of the inherent issues with compressive strength.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*UpIYWUErNMcp_-K-cKYO9w@2x.jpeg)
Mycotecture (2009) is the work of inventor-artist, Phillip Ross who used this exhibition to expose people to the wonders of fungi.

Ingenuity in the post-processing phase, which occurs after mycelium has completely colonized the substrate and become inert, offers another opportunity for researchers to intervene. For instance, subjecting mycelium-bound composites to compression can yield a material with mechanical properties akin to wood or cork. Moreover, certain mycelium varieties develop a protective skin. This skin not only enhances structural integrity and water resistance but is also entirely biodegradable.

## Scalability

Like all innovative sustainable technology, the future of fungal architecture turns on its scalability. Mycelium, as a living-breathing organism, is also highly contaminable. To counter this, mushroom cultivators adhere to rigorous hygiene protocols, employ sterile equipment and environments, and diligently prepare and sterilize substrates. Talk to any mycologist, or browse any mushroom cultivation forums and you’ll see that even for experienced mycologists, contamination is an ever-present concern.

The benefit of producing mycelanted material en masse is that the growing costs are cheap, however the costs of developing facilities that can support the exquisite level of control necessary to prevent contamination are high. This scared away some early investors and thus another challenge lies in funding.

## Regional Climatic Variations

Regional climatic variations pose a significant challenge for the global adoption of fungal architecture as a construction revolution. Diverse climates necessitate the utilization of specific fungal strains and substrate combinations that are available in regionally specific ecosystems. Rice husk, for instance, is abundant in Asia but scarce in Europe. Thus global adoption of fungal architecthure cannot rely on a uniform, one-size-fits-all, solution, but a cross-cultural collaboration and an understanding of local ecosystems.

To date, the evolution of fungal architecture has represented a remarkable amalgamation of talents, uniting mycologists — both amateur and academic, visionary artists, inventive engineers, computer scientists, and pioneering microbiologists. However, there remains a crucial contingency yet to be fully integrated into this burgeoning interdisciplinary endeavor, which could hold the key to its ultimate success. Indigenous communities, whose ancestral knowledge has sustained them in harmonious coexistence with their environments for millennia, may offer invaluable insights. As we confront the pressing imperative for a sustainable future, driven by the consequences of industrial excess, those vanguarding the fungal architectural revolution might discover an enriching partnership with the time-tested wisdom of indigenous traditions.

By：Jessica Silverman
Link：https://medium.com/@jesi0018/growing-the-future-navigating-the-fungal-architecture-landscape-f24c181e7f3b

Growing the Future: Navigating the Fungal Architecture Landscape


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## What is a Black Hole?
Ablack hole is an area in space where gravity is so powerful that nothing can escape from it, not even light. When a large star experiences a catastrophic collapse near the conclusion of its life cycle, a strong gravitational field is produced.

> Stephen Hawking (1942): “Consideration of particle emission from black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.”

Here is an simpler explanation :

Black holes are like cosmic vacuum cleaners. They are incredibly dense regions in space where the gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from them. Anything that gets too close to a black hole is pulled in, and it’s as if it disappears from the universe. Black holes are formed when massive stars collapse under their own gravity, creating this “hole” in space where nothing can get out.

Black holes are characterized by several key features:

Singularity: At the very center of black hole is a point called singularity. It is a region where the gravitational field becomes infinitely strong, and spacetime is infinitely curved.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:600/format:webp/0*3oPvQXiB8sYvcewH.jpg)
This photo is taken from a website named COSMOS

Singularities are regions of space where the density of matter, or the curvature of spacetime, becomes infinite. In such locales, the standard concepts of space and time cease to have any meaning.

Let’s take an example to understand singularity:

Imagine you have a piece of paper, and you draw a point on it. Now, try to make that point as tiny as possible, so small that it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before. That point is kind of like a singularity.

In the universe, a singularity is created when a significant amount of stuff is compressed into a very small area, as occurs inside a black hole. The laws of the cosmos that govern how things function, such as how time moves forward and how space is curved, entirely break down at a singularity. It resembles a location where our typical concepts of time and space are just no longer valid. It’s one of the universe’s great mysteries!

Event Horizon: Surrounding the singularity is an imaginary boundary known as the event horizon. This is the point of no return for anything that gets too close to the black hole. Once an object crosses the event horizon, it is inevitably drawn toward the singularity and can never escape. The event horizon is also where the escape velocity equals the speed of light.

Size: Black holes come in different sizes, which are typically classified based on their mass.

Hawking Radiation: According to theoretical physics, black holes can emit a form of radiation called Hawking radiation. This phenomenon occurs near the event horizon, where particle-antiparticle pairs are created, and one particle falls into the black hole while the other escapes. Over time, this process can lead to the slow “evaporation” of black holes.

-----------

## Types of Black holes
Black holes come in different sizes, and their classification is based on their mass. There are three main types:

Stellar-Mass Black Holes: These are formed from the remnants of massive stars and have a mass between a few to tens of times that of our Sun.

Intermediate-Mass Black Holes: These black holes have a mass in the range of hundreds to thousands of solar masses and are a subject of ongoing research.

Supermassive Black Holes: These behemoths reside at the centers of most galaxies, including our Milky Way, and can have masses ranging from millions to billions of times that of the Sun.

-----------

## The Spooky Effects of Black Holes
A variety of intriguing events can be observed in black holes. They cause gravitational lensing, a process that bends and distorts light from objects behind them, by warping spacetime around them. In addition to having a ravenous appetite for matter, black holes also produce high-energy particle jets and strong X-ray emissions as they consume neighboring stars and gas.

-----------

## The Paradoxes and Puzzles
Black holes offer us a variety of paradoxes and conundrums. What happens to the information of particles that fall into a black hole is the subject of the information paradox, which is famously linked to scientist Stephen Hawking. Does it permanently disappear, breaking the rule of information conservation? This contradiction continues to make our comprehension of the universe more difficult.

-----------

## Black Hole Shown In The Movie Interstellar
In the movie “Interstellar,” the fictional black hole was named “Gargantua.” Gargantua is a massive and supermassive black hole located in the vicinity of the wormhole that plays a central role in the film’s plot. The depiction of Gargantua was created with the assistance of physicist Kip Thorne and was intended to be as scientifically accurate as possible while still delivering a visually stunning and captivating representation of a black hole.

In the movie “Interstellar,” they showed black holes in a way that tried to make them look real and interesting. Here’s how they did it:

Bending Light: Black holes are super heavy objects that bend light around them because of their strong gravity. Imagine looking through a glass of water; things might look wavy. In the movie, they made it look like this, where stars and galaxies behind the black hole seemed to twist and curve because of the black hole’s gravity.

Glowing Disk: Like water swirling down a drain, black holes likewise have a spinning disk of hot material around them. This material flashes incredibly brilliantly and gets extremely hot. This bright disk was depicted in the movie circling the black hole.

Time Difference: Because black holes are so heavy, time near a black hole goes slower compared to far away from it. In the movie, they used this idea to make the story more interesting. Time passed differently for the characters near the black hole.

Crazy Space Inside: They didn’t show the very center of the black hole, called the “singularity,” because it’s super strange and hard to understand. Instead, they made the space around the black hole look really weird and surreal as the characters got closer to it.

-----------

## Do Black Holes Really Exist?
In recent decades, scientists have gathered much observational evidence for answering the question, “Are black holes real?” As the name suggests, we cannot see black holes themselves, but we can observe the effect a black hole has on its environment. As black holes devour the matter around them, this material forms an accretion disk, which radiates primarily in the X-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Furthermore, when black holes occur in multiple star systems, we can witness their gravitational effects on the visible companion stars. In fact, the first true black hole candidate, Cygnus X-1, discovered during a 1964 balloon flight due to its strong X-ray emission, was later recognized as a black hole because of its gravitational effect on a tightly orbiting massive star. Similarly, the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, was confirmed by astronomers monitoring the orbit of star S0–2 (abbreviated S2) over its 15 ½ year period.

-----------

## Conclusion
Black holes are mysterious objects that keep physicists and astronomers on the edge of their seats and testing the limits of what we know about the cosmos. We are getting closer to grasping the secrets of these cosmic abysses as science and technology develop and our understanding of physics expands. The study of black holes not only deepens our knowledge of the universe, but it also serves as a constant reminder of its size and complexity. We therefore set off on a trip that gets us closer to the center of the galaxy itself as we continue to uncover the mysteries of black holes.
![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:2000/format:webp/1*AZyUTizVzPZ_ICoZcYPKkg.png)

By：Sanidhya002
Link：https://medium.com/@sanidhyarajguru01406/into-the-void-investigating-the-uncharted-realms-of-black-holes-9f6c83623cab

Into the Void: Investigating the Uncharted Realms of Black Holes


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One of the most exotic naturally occurring objects in the Universe is the neutron star: achieving some of the highest densities, temperatures, and energies found anywhere outside of a black hole or separate from the Big Bang. Often containing more than a solar masses worth of matter compressed into a sphere just 10–20 kilometers across, neutron stars generate the strongest magnetic fields in the cosmos, and some neutron stars may even contain more exotic states of matter — like a quark-gluon plasma, possibly including not just up-and-down quarks but heavier species as well — towards their innermost cores.

But neutron stars, as far as we can tell, remain stable over very long timescales. Based on observations of millisecond pulsars, the oldest of the known neutron stars, they must persist for at least hundreds of millions of years, and potentially much, much longer. And yet, if you had just a single free neutron in your possession, it would decay after a mean lifetime of about ~15 minutes. This bothers reader Gary Camp, who wants to know:

> “If neutrons decay when not in an atom, why does a neutron star not decay? Is it really a giant atom?”

A neutron star is like a giant atomic nucleus in some ways, in the sense that there is an intense amount of binding energy at play. But unlike the heart of an atom, it isn’t the strong nuclear force doing the heavy lifting here, but gravitation. Here’s the science of why.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*E20Q1tKUoGoFEpG7)
This illustration shows 5 of the main types of radioactive decays: alpha decay, where a nucleus emits an alpha particle (2 protons and 2 neutrons), beta decay, where a nucleus emits an electron, gamma decay, where a nucleus emits a photon, positron emission (also known as beta-plus decay), where a nucleus emits a positron, and electron capture (also known as inverse beta decay), where a nucleus absorbs an electron. These decays can change the atomic and/or mass number of the nucleus, but certain overall conservation laws, like energy, momentum, and charge conservation, must still be obeyed. Beta decay always involves a neutron, whether free or within a nucleus, decaying into a proton, electron, and electron antineutrino. (Credit: CNX Chemistry, OpenStax/Wikimedia Commons)

## Free neutrons

One of the more surprising properties of matter is that of the three main constituents of atoms — protons, neutrons, and electrons — only two of them are inherently stable. The electron, the lightest charged particle in the Standard Model, is perfectly stable to the best of our knowledge, as there are no particles it can decay into (i.e., with less rest mass) and still conserve all of the quantum properties (like electric charge) that it possesses.

The proton, although many have conjectured pathways by which it could decay, appears to be truly stable as well, as experiments searching for proton decay have determined that the proton is stable on timescales of at least ~10³⁴ years, or around a septillion times as long as the present age of the Universe. Even though there are lighter charged particles that the proton could decay into — like a positron and a neutral pion, or a positively charged pion and an antineutrino — those decays would violate baryon number, where a baryon is any composite particle made out of three quarks. The proton is the lightest baryon of all, and hence, it makes sense that it’s stable.

But a neutron, the second-lightest baryon known, actually can decay. Specifically, it conserves all the necessary quantum properties one could consider, including:

- baryon number,
- lepton number,
- lepton family number,
- electric charge,
- and both energy and momentum,

by decaying into a proton, an electron, and an electron antineutrino.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/0*gD3HfpFi_BOEnGl3.jpg)
This diagram shows how a free neutron decays at the subatomic level. A down quark within a neutron, shown on the left in red, emits a (virtual) W-boson, transforming into an up quark. The W-boson forms an electron/electron antineutrino pair, while the up quark recombines with the original remnant up-and-down quarks to form a proton. This is the process behind all beta decays in the Universe. (Credit: Evan Berkowitz/ Jülich Research Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

It’s worth looking at what happens on the subatomic level to understand, quantitatively, precisely how this decay occurs. Inside of a proton, there are three valence quarks that determine its nature: two up and one down quarks. Inside of a neutron, for comparison, there are still three valence quarks that determine its nature, but this time, it’s one up and two down quarks. As it turns out, the down quark is just a tiny bit heavier than the up quark, and with an electric charge of -⅓ instead of the up quark’s +⅔ charge, explains why the proton’s total charge is +1 while the neutron’s total charge is 0. All told, a neutron, when you measure its mass, is 939.565 MeV/c², which is very slightly larger than the proton’s mass of 938.272 MeV/c².

Inside of a neutron, when it decays, one of its down quarks decays — mediated by a (virtual) W-boson from the weak interactions — into an up quark, an electron, and an electron antineutrino. This can occur because the electron has a mass of only 0.511 MeV/c², and the neutrino’s mass is well below that. With 1.293 MeV of energy to “play” with, the mass/energy gap between a neutron and a proton, there’s plenty of room for a neutron to decay and still obey all of the necessary conservation laws. The measured mean lifetime of the free neutron is just under 15 minutes, or if you prefer half-life, that’s just over 10 minutes.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*6dwCTEB8EBbvVk5J)
When two protons, each one made of three quarks held together by gluons, overlap, it’s possible that they can fuse together into a composite state dependent on their properties. The most common, stable possibility is to produce a deuteron, made of a proton and a neutron, which requires the emission of a neutrino, a positron, and possibly a photon as well. This reaction is the first step of the proton-proton chain: the fusion reaction that primarily powers our Sun. (Credit: Keiko Murano)

## Neutrons in an atom

However, the story is very different if your neutron isn’t free, but rather is bound together with at least one proton (and potentially other protons and/or neutrons) inside an atomic nucleus. Here’s a fun example.

- If you put a free proton on a scale (or other apparatus) to measure its mass, you find it weighs in at 938.272 MeV/c².
- If you put a free neutron on a scale, it weighs in at 939.565 MeV/c².
- But if you allow a proton and neutron to bind together, forming a deuteron (or the heart of a deuterium nucleus, also known as “heavy hydrogen”), it now weighs in at 1875.612 MeV/c².

This last number should bother you! After all, a deuteron is made out of a proton and a neutron, and if you add up the mass of a proton and a neutron together, you get 1877.837 MeV/c², not 1875.612 MeV/c².

What’s going on here? It’s as though the very act of binding these two composite particles together is somehow reducing their total mass. As it turns out, this is an incredibly important physical phenomenon.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*v3ucZDiKfZ7RD2Nt)
This graph shows the binding energy-per-nucleon as a function of the type of element we’re looking at. The peak, which corresponds to the most stable elements, is right around elements like iron, cobalt, and nickel. Elements lighter than that release energy when they are fused together; elements heavier than that release energy when they are split apart in a fission reaction. (Credit: Fastfission/Wikimedia Commons)

This is the phenomenon, in fact, that makes nuclear fusion possible. It’s only owing to the fact that there are more energetically stable states where protons and neutrons are bound together that allows fusion to take place and release energy: the process powering every star in the Universe. The amount of mass/energy that is lost due to this binding process is known as binding energy, and it occurs within all atomic nuclei that contain two or more nucleons (the generic word for either a proton or neutron).

Deuterium, made out of a proton and neutron, has a binding energy of only 2.2 MeV/c², making it relatively fragile. A helium-4 nucleus, made out of two protons and neutrons, has a much greater binding energy: 28 MeV/c², making it much more stable and much more difficult to destroy. Various isotopes of the elements iron and nickel are the most energetically stable combinations of protons and neutrons known to humanity, as shown on the stability diagram of the elements, above and below.

In general, if your binding energy-per-nucleon is large enough, and there aren’t any more stable configurations that your nucleus can easily decay into, it will remain stable. However, if it can transition to make a more stable configuration, it will do that instead; those elements/isotopes are the ones we label as radioactive. As far as we know, experimentally, 251 unique configurations of protons and neutrons are stable so far, but that number should decrease as we measure increasingly rarer and harder-to-detect decays.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*NF7vcXz97ubK02bh)
This graph shows the atomic isotopes of all the known elements, colored by the known lifetimes of those isotopes. While there are presently 251 known stable isotopes across 80 stable elements, those numbers will likely decrease with further research and better measurements. Whether any elements are truly stable on infinite timescales or not has yet to be determined. (Credit: BenRG/Wikimedia Commons)

## Neutrons in a neutron star

For a neutron star, however, it isn’t the strong nuclear force that holds the neutrons together and keeps them “bound” the way they do inside an atomic nucleus. Instead, it’s the gravitational force that’s responsible, which seems counterintuitive, given that gravity, on a fundamental level, is actually the weakest known force of all. However, unlike the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, gravity is always a cumulative, long-range force. There are no “opposite” charges out there to the positive (massive) gravitational charge; it’s always attractive. And unlike the nuclear forces, gravitation has an infinite range, not just a short one that falls off rapidly.

In practice, this means that when you accumulate enough mass together — since there’s no practical limit on how much mass you can accumulate in one place — you’re going to have a large amount of binding energy in that system as well, only this time, it will be gravitational binding energy keeping the object together. Gravitational binding energy holds together all of the massive objects in the Universe you’re familiar with: rocky planets, gas giants, brown dwarfs, stars, white dwarfs, and yes, even neutron stars. However, not every “neutron” in a neutron star experiences the same forces acting upon it.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*fA_m50FDcRGzEzHH)
The Earth, beneath its thin atmosphere and oceans, transitions from primarily rocky material to a metallic core once you go about 45% of the way down. With core pressures exceeding 3.6 million atmospheres, the atoms in the core are compressed to a fraction of their original size, explaining Earth’s uncharacteristically high density. Recent evidence indicates an innermost core inside the inner core, where a different solid phase of metals exists than in the rest of the inner core. All massive objects, including neutron stars, display this type of pressure gradient. (Credit: USGS)

One of the things you must remember about gravitationally bound objects is that there’s an enormous difference in the pressure they experience near their center versus at their surfaces. This is evident even on Earth: the pressure at our surface is one atmosphere, or about 101,000 pascals. However, at Earth’s center, the pressure reaches 364 billion pascals, or about 3.6 million atmospheres!

For a neutron star, the density at its surface — or outer edge of the neutron star’s crust — is relatively small: only ~1 million tonnes per cubic meter. Meanwhile, deep inside, the density reaches nearly one billion times that great near the center, making it denser than even the interior of a uranium nucleus. The center of a neutron star, as far as we know, is the densest place in the Universe except for the singularity at the center of a black hole.

This also results in a tremendous pressure gradient across the interior of a neutron star, which is perhaps a thousand times greater at its core than in its crust. Due to the gravitational effects binding a neutron star together, a neutron star could be as low in mass as about the planet Saturn and still have stable neutrons at its core. (Such a neutron star would be about the size of the Epcot center sphere at Florida’ Disneyworld.) However, outside of the core, the weaker gravitational binding would cause those more exterior neutrons to decay, setting a lower limit on the mass of a neutron star.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*P44uKVRctw7bnrKp)
The large spherical geodesic structure found at Disney’s Epcot center, called Spaceship Earth, is approximately the size of the smallest theoretical neutron star, which would be about the physical mass of Saturn. Any structure that were smaller/lower in mass would have too little gravitational binding energy to prevent its component neutrons from decaying. (Credit: chensiyuan/Wikimedia Commons)

However, real-world neutron stars are far more massive than the planet Saturn: by typically a factor of 1000 or more. These neutron stars have a radius of around 10 kilometers or so, and typically consist of four major regions.

1. The innermost core: this region contains super-dense matter under conditions that we cannot replicate in the laboratory or anywhere else. In addition to neutrons, there may be a quark-gluon plasma, perhaps even containing strange quarks, or even what’s known as quark-degenerate matter. Inside, the matter may achieve a superfluid-like state.
2. The outer core: comprising most of the volume of a neutron star, this region is practically 100% neutrons, all bound together into much smaller volumes than neutrons typically occupy. They’re joined by occasional proton-and-neutron combinations, bound together in superheavy nuclei. Although these nuclei would be unstable against radioactive decay if they were removed from the neutron star — just as a free neutron would be unstable — the intense gravitational binding energy prevents them from decaying.
3. The inner crust: it’s best to think of this as a “transition zone,” where there are loads of neutrons, superheavy elements and isotopes, but also conventional nuclei and free electrons, all at much greater densities, pressure, and in smaller volumes than they’d conventionally be found. There are more neutrons towards the center and more conventional nuclei farther from it, creating a hierarchical set of structures poetically called nuclear pasta: perhaps the strongest form of solid matter in all the Universe.
4. The outer crust: only a few hundreds of meters thick, this is mostly composed of “normal” atomic nuclei, crushed into a solid lattice, where electrons freely flow between them. Hard and smooth, the outer crust of a neutron star makes up the roundest objects in the Universe, with surface imperfections measuring smaller than a millimeter: less than 1 part in 10,000,000 away from being a perfect sphere.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*TIlF-tDVPLQsB8mx)
A neutron star’s interior can be further subdivided into different regions, dependent on the density, temperature, pressure, and gravitational forces found inside of it. Although the majority of the “core” is composed of neutrons, a substantial amount of the matter in the neutron star, perhaps as much as ~20% (or even more by some estimates), isn’t neutrons at all, but a mix of atomic nuclei and electrons. (Credit: Robert Schulze/Wikimedia Commons)

The biggest difference between the core and the crust is that, inside the core, individual atomic nuclei cannot be easily separated, in the sense that you cannot easily tell “these neutrons or protons-and-neutrons are bound together in these specific configurations” as they’re all jumbled together. In the core, all the atomic nuclei present “touch” one another, and cannot so easily be separated, either in theory or in practice. In the crust, however, there are many more “void” regions, or simply, spaces between the various atomic nuclei that exist in that volume of space. Individual atomic nuclei can be easily discerned from one another, and it’s clear what each individual bound state is, distinct from one another.

In other words, you perhaps could view the interior of a neutron star — the entire core region or at least the majority of it — as a single atomic nucleus, all bound together, but it’s not the strong nuclear force that causes this binding at all. In this case, it’s the combined effects of:

- the gravitational force of a tremendous amount of this ultra-dense matter,
- and the external pressure (where pressure is a force over an area) pressing down on this matter,

that cause it to behave as though it’s a single, bound entity. The matter here is almost exclusively neutrons, but the average volume of a neutron is significantly smaller than a conventional “free” neutron, compressed down by these tremendous forces acting on them.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*I-OO1ybcOyXR1Duo)
A white dwarf, a neutron star, or even a strange quark star are all still made of fermions. The Pauli degeneracy pressure helps hold up the stellar remnant against gravitational collapse, preventing a black hole from forming. Inside the most massive neutron stars, an exotic form of matter, a quark-gluon plasma, is thought to exist, with temperatures rising up to ~1 trillion (10¹²) K inside. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)

So yes: neutrons in a neutron star don’t decay for the same fundamental reason that neutrons in an atomic nucleus don’t decay: because of the binding energy acting on them. However, whereas it’s the strong nuclear force that’s the cause of that binding energy within an atomic nucleus, there’s an even stronger force at play when it comes to the interior of the neutron star: gravity. This manifests itself both in terms of the gravitational force holding the neutron star itself together as well as in terms of the crushing pressure exerted by all of the “exterior” material onto the core of what lies inside the neutron star.

You can’t quite consider the whole neutron star as a single atomic nucleus, however, as the outer portion of the neutron star isn’t “neutrons” at all, but rather a mix of neutrons, exotic and normal nuclei, and electron, all found in various states of extremely dense matter. You can also be certain that, below about the mass of Saturn, there won’t be any stable neutron stars at all, as any “free neutrons” found within them would decay, destroying the object from the outside-in. Wherever you have a free neutron, or a neutron bound into a state with insufficiently large binding energy, its decay is inevitable; the only true question is the duration of time it will take. Neutron stars, however, appear to be stable, and gravitational binding energy is the sole reason why!

By：Ethan Siegel
Link：https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-why-dont-neutron-stars-decay-e253c2b27ebf

Ask Ethan: Why don’t neutron stars decay?

This image shows the illustration of a massive neutron star, along with the distorted gravitational effects an observer might see if they had the capability of viewing this neutron star at such a close distance. While neutron stars are famous for pulsing, not every neutron star is a pulsar. They all are stable, however, and don’t appear to have their neutrons decay over timescales of at least hundreds of millions of years, despite the free neutron having a mean lifetime of only ~15 minutes. (Credit: Daniel Molybdenum/flickr and raphael.concorde/Wikimedia Commons)


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How do you fit 140 liters of water in a single cup? The answer: Fill it with coffee. Everything’s made of water, or at least with water: A pair of jeans? 10,000 liters, and 2,500 liters in the average T-shirt. Even unsuspected sources, such as server farms, consume crazy amounts of water. Avocados, almonds — and plastic bottles of water are highly water-intensive. Agriculture? That industry alone consumes 70% of freshwater across the globe.

The entire cycle of evaporation, precipitation, runoff, and global water movement is at the heart of our climate system. Water seems like the most renewable of all the Earth’s resources. It falls from the sky, covers nearly three-quarters of the planet’s surface, including polar ice caps, and mountain glaciers. It is the source of life on Earth: the global population consumes 52 billion cubic liters of water annually.

The paradox is that a steady water supply is also a demanding, resource-intensive process, resulting in massive CO₂ emissions. On average, every cubic meter of water consumed generates 10 Kg of CO₂ for 520 million tonnes of yearly emissions. That’s two round-trips of oil to the Moon.

## But Where is All The Water Going?
Water is disappearing, slipping away right under our noses without us realizing the true consequences.

Many regions that specialize in water-intensive crops are effectively exporting their water. This concept, known as “virtual water,” extends beyond agriculture to encompass numerous manufactured goods, all of which demand substantial water resources. At first glance, it might seem profitable for countries and regions with water shortages to export water-intensive products. Still, in the long run, it’s detrimental as they deplete their dwindling water resources.

WaterAid highlights the significance of virtual water:

> “The concept of virtual water can help countries that lack abundant water resources to meet food needs without using precious water for thirsty agricultural practices. It doesn’t make sense for regions like Saudi Arabia to squander vast quantities of their limited water on agriculture when they can import food from elsewhere.”

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:2000/format:webp/1*eZTWeWE6zokUu2dSGe6s-A.png)
The Water Cycle (Source: TurningTheTide)

Let’s face a harsh reality: water is neither limitless nor uniformly distributed.

According to a recent article from The Guardian, “The world is facing an imminent water crisis, with demand expected to outstrip the supply of fresh water by 40% by the end of this decade, experts have said on the eve of a crucial UN water summit.”

Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, emphasizes:

> “The scientific evidence is clear: we are facing a water crisis. We are mishandling water, polluting it, and altering the entire global hydrological cycle through our impact on the climate. It’s a triple crisis.”

To make matters worse, over 844 million people still lack access to clean and affordable water, and over 395,000 children under five die from diarrhea linked to contaminated water and inadequate sanitation every year. Clean water isn’t solely a matter of health; it catalyzes education, economic growth, and gender equality.

## We Will Fail on Climate Change if We Fail on Water
We’ve disrupted rainfall patterns and failed to safeguard freshwater ecosystems, manage demand to prevent overuse, prevent contamination, promote recycling, and develop and disseminate water-saving technologies. Most significantly, our water mismanagement has thrown the global water cycle off balance for the first time in human history, breaching the planetary boundaries that safeguard the Earth’s system for humanity and all life.

No one place, economy, or ecosystem will escape the consequences. A report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction found that the number of reported droughts has increased by 1.29 times, storms by 1.4 times, floods by 2.34 times, and heatwaves by 3.32 times in the first two decades of the twenty-first century compared to the last two decades of the twentieth century. And these are mere warnings of what’s to come. These events leave behind a trail of human suffering, with decades of human development destroyed.

With its energy imbalance, global warming intensifies the water cycle by adding approximately 7% more moisture for each 1°C rise in global mean temperature. Additionally, land-use changes, mainly deforestation, wetland depletion, land degradation, and infrastructure development, now influence precipitation patterns.

![image](https://cdn-us.imgs.moe/2023/09/19/650924b8aacb0.png)
And water isn’t just a casualty; it’s a driver of the climate crisis. Freshwater is essential for natural carbon storage; extreme water events disrupt carbon uptake. With consequential floods and droughts.

Droughts that lead to fires, massive biomass loss, carbon depletion, and biodiversity loss. Diminishing wetlands deplete the Earth’s largest carbon store, while declining soil moisture reduces terrestrial and forest ecosystems’ capacity to sequester carbon, potentially turning them into sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

A study based on data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites spanning 14 years revealed 19 global hotspots where water resources are rapidly dwindling. These hotspots, including regions in California, northwestern China, northern and eastern India, and the Middle East, confirm predictions by climate scientists: areas already prone to drought are getting drier, while wet areas are getting wetter. The study’s authors say, “Water is the key environmental issue of the century.”

https://youtu.be/fKVPFyu_tHQ

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*6cub2kv15OJxmSd11mnizA.png)
GRACE satellite Total Water Storage trends (Source: Scanlon et al., 2023)

Still, many governments have yet to grasp the intricate web of water interdependence. Approximately half of a country’s water supply depends on the evaporation of water from neighboring nations. This “green water,” also originates from soil moisture and transpiration in forests and ecosystems. Atmospheric moisture pathways connect countries, directing evaporation through the atmosphere to areas downwind, creating precipitation and evaporation sheds of rainfall.

## The Real Value of Water
We have the tools, scientific know-how, technology, policy expertise, and financial resources to put water on a sustainable and equitable path.

But it all starts with ceasing the underpricing of water. Today, our economic system fails to account for its true value. This leads to the excessive and unsustainable use of finite freshwater resources, disproportionately affecting the poor and vulnerable in many regions. Proper pricing with appropriately targeted subsidies encourages efficient water usage, generates revenue, supports water system expansion, and promotes water-saving innovations essential for managing demand while fostering economic development.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:2000/format:webp/1*2Ar5uu0SaEUkTYZCoG7K8Q.jpeg)
Volcan Lanin, Patagonia, summer 2023 (photo by author)

Volcan Lanin, in Patagonia, where I live, sits at 3,776 meters above sea level. This summer was the first time in more than 50 ascents that I didn’t step on snow once on the way up (see photo above).

The current decade presents a pivotal opportunity to avert a looming catastrophe. We must not let the perfect be the enemy of the urgent and essential.

We must act swiftly to capitalize on high-potential opportunities that already exist and can make a significant difference:

1. Invest in Freshwater Storage Systems: These natural systems, especially wetlands, apart from being reserves, play a vital role in regulating water flows and reducing the risks of droughts and floods.
2. Reduce Inefficiencies in Water Distribution: Globally, more than 45 million cubic meters per day are lost through leakage, equivalent to 18,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
3. Increase Water Recycling: Especially in industrial sectors, where only 20% of water withdrawals are currently treated and even less is recycled. Wastewater can be repurposed for district heating, energy production, fertilizer, and organic inputs.
4. Promote Smart Irrigation and Less Water-Intensive Crops: Agriculture consumes 70% of the world’s water. The next move should be to scale up water-efficient farming practices and explicitly limit water use while redirecting subsidies away from water-intensive crops.
5. Enhance Water Efficiency in Mining and Manufacturing: Focus on reducing the water footprint in industries like energy storage, where substantial water usage is involved.

-----------

## Can We Turn the Water Crisis into an Opportunity?
My mother is an addict. We lived for years pretending everything was ok. Until I finished school and my sister was left alone with the lingering problem of a person who couldn’t control herself. So I came back home in full intervention mode: hospitalization, group meetings, and psychiatric help. But the very first step in solving this crisis was not evaluating the whole situation or taking immediate action. That came later. The first step was to realize that we were in one. Now, her addiction is under control. But it will be a daily fight for the rest of her life.

With the perennial climate crisis, we are not even at that stage yet. We’re not even aware that we’re unaware. We simply assume that everyone else gets it. We nod along when unfamiliar information comes our way from various sources, creating a never-ending loop of unawareness and lack of change.

And when we do realize something is wrong, we just don’t know precisely what that something is.

On one side, scientists, many of them trolled and labeled as doomers, say we are facing an existential crisis that risks the survival of our civilization. But on the other, some people say similar things while preaching that we are just a few technical adjustments away from ‘fixing’ this without making any systemic or personal lifestyle changes. These voices come from presidents, prime ministers, prominent business figures, and influential editors, outsourcing emissions and responsibilities. They just continue as if nothing is wrong. As long as they keep living like there is no tomorrow, most of us will copy-paste the same.

So, what happens when we run out of water? When the aquifers can no longer supply water to produce our food? Or, on the contrary, when Libyan type of floods take over? How are we going to stay afloat?

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:2000/format:webp/1*RGJiL9NjH-M75xPE9Np49A.jpeg)
Storm Daniel Causes Flooding in Libya (Source: Copernicus)

It’s plain and simple: our most vital resource is slipping through our fingers.

We’re talking about a mere seven years to outstrip the supply of fresh water by 40%. A blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. Can we genuinely visualize these transformative changes unfolding within the next seven years?

**And let’s go further: when fresh, potable water becomes scarce and turns into a luxury, what follows?**

The 2015 migration crisis saw just 0.5 percent of Europe’s population influx, resulting in political tension and social unrest. With current warming trends, 1.2 billion people could be forced to migrate by 2050. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that about 20 percent of these people will entirely migrate out of their countries or regions.

![image](https://cdn-us.imgs.moe/2023/09/19/65092524c0c8d.png)

Yet, amid this crisis lies an opportunity — a chance to revolutionize and innovate across all sectors. We do not have all the answers to solve this crisis, but that shouldn’t stop us from utilizing the solutions we do have. Technological and innovation efforts won’t be enough; we need a systemic change and a restoration of natural systems.

Our foremost goal should be awakening people, not lulling them back to sleep with tales of progress from a deeply flawed system. Only through such collective actions can we safeguard the fundamental human right to clean water and ensure the Earth remains safe for humanity. We must redefine progress beyond economic growth, GDP, or shareholder profits.

It’s time to transcend compulsive consumerism and reimagine growth. We need a whole new way of thinking — one where water has the proper value it deserves.

By：Ricky Lanusse
Link：https://medium.com/the-new-climate/running-dry-and-drowning-in-denial-8371da446de5

Can We Turn the Tide on the Water Crisis?