Weighty Matters

Yesterday I was sitting outside with my elderly father enjoying the sunshine when movement across the sky caught my attention. It was just a plane passing in front of a cloud, but I watched it for several minutes. The plane was dwarfed by the massive puffy expanse of a cumulus cloud, causing me to wonder just how big clouds are.

I wish I could say that I did some quick mathematical calculations considering the size of large passenger jets, their average speed, and so forth, but I didn’t. I came inside and googled it.

Then this morning I read one of those lengthy stories on Facebook that turn out to be advertisements in disguise. This one was advertising a book for young readers designed to spark their intellectual curiosity with hundreds of questions, many of which started with why.

Any parent will tell you that children are relentless with the “Why?” questions between three and five as their little brains develop rapidly trying to make sense of the world and connect to those around them. They sometimes stop asking for fear of being wrong, but also because of structural changes in the brain such as synaptic pruning. If it’s not deemed necessary knowledge, out it goes.

Both the advertisement/article and a google search suggest formal schooling and an emphasis on “the right answer for the test” are largely to blame for a growing lack of intellectual curiosity. I would suggest rapid access to “all the answers” shares in that blame. Why figure it out when we can look it up?

Now some might say google and/or AI searches free up our brains for other work, or that we should be using our brains for important tasks, not idly “strolling a primrose path.” Some states, including my own, seem to be actively courting AI Data Center companies, which led me to another google search—this time about the environmental effect of AI.

According to “The Uneven Distribution of AI’s Environmental Impacts” from the Harvard Business Review (hbr.org), the training process for a single AI model, can consume thousands of megawatt hours of electricity and emit tons of carbon. It can also lead to the evaporation of “an astonishing amount of freshwater” into the atmosphere significantly impacting our limited freshwater resources.

We may be courting disaster by blindly embracing this technology. It seems to me we should be curious enough to study some prediction models.

As for the clouds, a typical cumulus cloud is roughly 0.6 miles wide and tall, but weighs 1.1 million pounds (about as much as a fully loaded cargo plane) from all the stored water droplets. A thunderstorm cloud can be 33,000 feet high (taller than Mount Everest), over sixty miles wide, and weigh over 100 million pounds.

Weighty matters, indeed.