21. How when life stops, some sciences flourish and where are we headed with sustainable development goals?

As SARS-CoV-2 wreaks havoc around the world, killing millions and destroying lives of many more, scientific research takes its own hit as well. Lockdowns and safety measures mean reduced access to labs, necessity to focus on pandemic topics and, often forgotten, putting lots of stress on researchers minds, just like all of us. While many people would find this comparison somewhat offensive (“Who cares about science, people are dying!”), we should remember that science is humanity’s best shot at saving ourselves; research literally leads to saving lives. There is a silver lining for the story of science in these challenging times. In some places, improved collaboration has flourished from finally embracing electronic tools and methods we have available. Rapid collaboration via chat services like Slack and video conferences like Teams became the norm because of movement limitations, speeding up important results, validations and experiments themselves. Many conferences moved entirely online with great success (I had a pleasure to attend QCTiP earlier this year, fully online, and it was an awesome experience.) For some scientific fields, however, the improvement did not stop there. For seismologists the pandemic (and it’s impact on slowing the daily lives of most of us) enabled an entirely new class of research.

Global quieting of high-frequency seismic noise due to COVID-19 pandemic lockdown measures — medium-easy read. Lecocq et al. analyzed signals from seismic stations from all over the globe and observed how a persistent noise, present since the beginning of records, has diminished or, in many cases, disappeared from the measurements. As different cities and regions went into lockdowns, all different vibrations caused by human activity — cars, ships, walking crowds, oil drills, heavy industries — came to a pause, and seismographs all around the planet recorded much quieter patterns than usual. This is huge news for two reasons. First, seismography can be used to determine and track various human activity levels with a decent accuracy. Second, we now know the noise pattern introduced by humans in various parts of the world. Now, does this matter? Yes, a lot! In places prone to tsunamis, earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, it can be very hard for seismologists to give early warnings, partially because the continuous vibration noise conceals small patterns that may betray an upcoming catastrophe. If we understand the pattern of such noise, we can attempt to remove it from the overall signal and sense those subtle vibrations earlier, understanding the phenomena better ant potentially saving lives. The text is very well written and reasonably easy to understand, even for a lay reader like me. The figures showing dips in recorded vibration level across various cities are quite fascinating, and I found myself trying to observe how life in those places got affected by the virus — through the needle of a seismograph. Great read.

Now, as you may know, dear reader, I am rather interested in sustainability and concerned by human inaction in the topic. The United Nations set a list of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) less than a decade ago, outlining what should we strive to achieve as human race to make life on our planet bearable for ourselves. The goals sound ambitious and broad, but are very reasonable: end poverty, end hunger, don’t destroy the environment, among others in a similar direction. Their non-specificity brings accountability problems, though; it’s hard to gauge if a country is tracking towards a goal or not, because it is hard to determine achievable goals to measure progress. At the same time, certain parts are, sadly, clear — plenty of countries are not doing virtually anything to improve. And with governments diverging further from collaboration in political ways over the past 5 years, we are losing one of the most important ingredients required for success — global agreement.

Heading towards an unsustainable world: some of the implications of not achieving the SDGs — medium-easy read. In this article, published in the first issue of a new open access journal Discover Sustainability from Springer, Filho et al. do a good job of educating us what SDGs are, what is required to get to the end goals and how the world is tracking towards them. I learned a lot from this short read, including some useful thoughts about obstacles in implementing necessary policies, as well as random useful facts (did you know that the global GDP is decreasing?) I do, however, disagree with certain statements, especially in the introductory part. Authors write that “as a result of the low carbon policy, developing countries can leverage renewable forms of energy to compete with the developed countries and to power up their economies”, which is a catastrophically idealistic and wrong statement. Unfortunately access to clean energy still requires high investment, and unless richer countries lead the way, the carbon free policies are seen as an unfair stifling of poorer countries’ growth. Yes — in principle this should be an opportunity, and we desperately need it to be, but the capitalist reality means that for plenty of countries around the world coal is still the most economically viable source of energy. Another statement that struck me as particularly missed was explaining one of the obstacles towards achieving SDGs: “some cultures prohibit people from being open to new ideas and development. This seen significantly with indigenous groups which hampers the implementation of strategies.” The statement points to indigenous groups that can be afraid or reluctant to adopt new policies, while completely omitting the failure of so called “developed” societies to use science as a guiding principle! The United States, for example, are a country or origin of a huge number of highest quality research publications in pretty much all directions of science. Yet, the society struggles with accepting vaccines as lifesaving, often disagree with clean energy investments or shift to electric vehicles and denies climate change. Similar things can be said about most countries in Europe. Let’s be honest — if we cannot convince our fellow folks living on 16+ dollars a day that certain policies are critical to sustain life on our planet, then we cannot hope to sound serious in the eyes of any other societies. Having said all this, the paper is very informative, obviously though provoking and can be a great starting point for a discussion — which is more than I could ask for to recommend this read to everyone.