Wings, tunnels and scars: The case for responsible curiosity

When we define our future, and that of the planet, we should not fall into the technological curiosity trap ever again—sustainability should always be at the forefront of our mind.

“Daddy look, it’s a bird with four wings!” My daughter excitedly screamed on the beach. “No, it’s just a drone, my dear,” I said, crushing her excitement. But the incident also triggered another question in my head: are we giving enough thought to the coexistence of nature and technology?

To answer this question, I will use transportation for my examples to focus the discussion, but the logic is directly extendable to other industries and sectors with considerable interactions in the physical world, where sustainability and ecological and environmental balance and harmony matter the most.

Curiosity has led us to new territories, and sometimes to our biggest agonies

Excluding major natural disruptions, we have been mostly in the driving seat of writing the chapters of our history and that of our planet, through our curiosity, discoveries, inventions and choices, and we will continue to be responsible for shaping our future. There is also at least some truth, however, in claiming that many of the challenges that humanity is facing today are the result of our curiosity and the choices we made at some point in history.

Engineering and technology curiosity combined with the desire to create wealth led to the invention and commercialization of the car or ‘horseless carriage” by Karl Benz and other automotive pioneers in late 19th and early 20th centuries. Costs, risks, pollution and anxiety linked to horse carriages were among the key selling points used by car enthusiasts and merchants at the time. Ironically, cars today are the tenth leading cause of death globally, claiming nearly 1.25 million lives every year, and the number one cause of death among people aged between 15 and 29 years, according to WHO. Add to this the 20 to 50 million people who sustain non-fatal injuries or disabilities caused by car accidents every year. Motor vehicles also remain a major cause of air pollution. But our sufferings as humans remain negligible in comparison with those we share the planet with.

Other species pay a much higher price for our curiosity and innovation

When we talk sustainability, we cannot just look at matters from the impact-on-humans lens. Here are some mind-blowing figures: in the US alone, one million animals are estimated to be run over by cars and trucks every day! But wait, we are not done yet. As many as 340 million birds die in the US every year after crashing with cars and trucks. And the carnage is global— for instance, nearly half a billion animals are killed in Brazil every year after being struck by cars and trucks.

The railways do not look any prettier either. Last November a train killed over 100 reindeers in Norway; few weeks ago a train in India struck a herd of elephants killing five, and the death toll is always on the rise.

You would think the skies would be a safe haven for animals. Not entirely! In the US, over 13 thousand incidents were reported in 2015 of commercial aircrafts striking and killing at least one bird.

The worst part in all this brutality is that these animals are usually killed twice: first by stealing their lives, and second by blaming them for their deaths and portraying them as the causers of those accidents, in spite of the disruptive effect of human technology on Earth’s ecological harmony. You are far more likely to see a title worded “a bird crashed through the windshield of an aircraft” than “a bird was hit by an aircraft”.

And it does not always have to be accidental. We, as humans, will sometimes kill anything that gets in the way of our safety; anything! You probably haven’t heard of the 70 thousand birds, mostly gulls, starling and geese, that got slaughtered in the New York City area between 2009 and 2014, mostly by shooting and trapping, as a response to a 2009 accident in which a passenger aircraft was forced to land after sucking birds into its engine.

It is evident that we have not paid enough attention in the past century or so to the coexistence of technological innovations and the species that live in spaces intruded, reshaped or disturbed by those innovations. Thankfully, a number of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), set in 2015, are aiming to reverse the ecosystem damages, environmental degradations and biodiversity losses caused by humans’ technological innovations. The question is: are we focusing too much on fixing what we damaged, while letting our curiosity fail us again by taking us to yet new territories in which we will be writing a new chapter of ecological disruption and damages?

Drones, flying taxis, and who owns the skies?

Back to the “four-wing bird”. Drones and autonomous mobility are increasingly establishing themselves among the mega technological trends expected to shape our future. From photography, videography and surveillance to distribution, delivery and flying taxis, drones and unmanned aerial vehicles promise to give us eyes, arms and seats in the sky at an unprecedented scale: FAA predicts the number of commercial drones in the US to reach as many as 450 thousand units by 2022. Some analysts predict commercial drone sales to grow to 18 million units globally in 2023. While we do not today have sufficient forecasts on the number of flying taxis that might be buzzing above our heads in the future, many expect them to become a reality as early as 2020 and to be a common scene globally by the mid-2020s.

Despite the long history of airlines, we have never conquered the Troposphere, the lower layer of the Atmosphere, at the level predicted once drones and flying taxis scale and reach full commercialization. It is, therefore, still difficult to assess the full extent of their impact on flying animals, which until now enjoyed relative peace in the sky with the exception of aircraft take-offs and landings. A number of signs allude to the possibility of significant impact on natural life:

• The sheer number of drones projected to be sold in the future,
• The fast growth of commercial drones which, unlike hobbyist drones, are expected to be operational for a much longer time,
• Regulations enforcing maximum flight heights for commercial drones, which will concentrate drones in heights similar to those used typically by birds,
• The affordability of flying taxis in the future, as signaled by some industry leaders, boosting the chances of high level of adoption and scale.

These concerns by no means suggest that we should not continue innovating flying technologies, but rather that we have a responsibility to consider the sustainability and environmental/ecological impact of our technological innovations early enough by both businesses and regulators, and to put in place all required measures to reduce, or ideally avoid, any harmful consequences. Our focus, for instance, should not be on shielding solutions protecting drones and flying taxis, which will certainly pose a bigger risk to birds, but on intelligent sensor and flying techniques to detect birds and take the right actions to minimize the collision risk between drones and birds.

Boring the Earth’s deepest scars

In late December 2016, Elon Musk excited millions of fans and technology enthusiasts around the world when he revealed in a tweet his intention to start The Boring Company as a new tunnel construction venture addressing traffic jams. The company’s focus will be on constructing multi-level tunnel networks, initially prioritizing personalized mass transit needs over those of cars.

Sounds like an ingenious idea, and it is, except for one overlooked detail. Nature is amazingly powerful and patient when it comes to clearing up human “civilization” traces, even if it takes millions of years, as long as it is above the ground. Subterranean activities are very different on the other hand. According to geologist Professor Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester:

The underground realm for most of us is out of sight, out of mind, yet it is seeing significant change that in some ways is as striking as any that humans have made to the Earth's geology, and that is permanent, even geologically.

What makes underground alterations unique is their protection from natural erosion dynamics, allowing them to survive much longer compared to surface features, potentially staying forever as human-inflicted scars.

The significance of The Boring Company is that it opens the door for economical tunnels by dropping tunneling costs by at least an order of magnitude, and it is needless to describe the rest of the relationship between cost and scale.

Other alternatives, also pioneered by Musk himself, appear to be more sustainable and less likely to lead to out-of-control consequences on the Earth’s environmental and ecological balance and harmony in the future. Both the Hyperloop, a technology developed and open-sourced by Tesla and SpaceX, and the Loop, the less complex variant intended to be used in The Boring Company’s tunnels, have the right characteristics to become the backbone for super-fast long and medium-range mass transit systems. What makes them particularly interesting in this context is that the enclosure of the high-speed vehicles within an elevated tube, intelligently coordinating and collaborating with fleets of self-driving cars in urban areas ticks all the right boxes:

• The incremental footprint of the network is minimized along the routes
• The elevation will ensure pathway continuity on both sides of the tubes, avoiding fragmentation of natural habitats, as is typically the case for railways and highways
• The enclosure would practically eliminate the risk of crashing or collision between the vehicles and ground and flying animals
• With self-driving cars as a means for last-mile transportation, we have an opportunity to teach Artificial Intelligence (AI) the ethics and rules of protecting not only human lives, but also those of other species sharing our Earth.

Collaborative and open innovation for a more sustainable future

Beyond making smart, responsible choices about the technological innovations we commercialize and scale, there is a need for businesses, governments and academia to work together closely on researching and developing fundamental aspects of technology that have a direct impact on human life, sustainability and the ecological balance and harmony. For example, instead of fiercely marketing their autopilot and self-driving smarts as the best, there is a case for car manufacturers and technology developers to share all their data, knowledge, expertise and efforts to develop the smartest and safest self-driving AI as one open industry standard, while competing on less life-critical aspects. While this might sound a bit counter-intuitive in a competition-driven market economy, it is also true that a single fatal accident resulting from a less-than-perfect solution would be a major setback for the whole industry.

?Final thoughts

Curiosity defines us as humans more than any other species, and we should undoubtedly continue to strive for curiosity-driven thinking and innovation in education and business. But instead of basing our decisions to commercialize and scale technological innovations purely on the business opportunity, we should responsibly and holistically consider the consequences of those innovations on the planet, and aim to proactively minimize the price human generations and other specifies will have to pay in the future for today’s curiosity. 

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