The deep sea – salvation or ruin?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, oceanography, sea life, bioluminescence, seabed mining, polemics

The red tide can be beautiful at night. The tiny animals, so toxic in large concentrations, are also luminescent, flashing when they are disturbed. In the red tide season—when it isn't safe to swim anyway—the best time to watch the surf is late at night, when the waves flash and glow with green and blue colors. That's the only kind of bioluminescent sea life I have seen.

Oceanographers and marine biologists (such as my supervising curator at the DE Museum of Nature and Science) get to see much more, at least through the video eyes of underwater robotic vehicles (ROV's), such as this one shown in an advertising image. Studies using ROV's are finding entire ecologies that nobody knew could exist, and they exist right down to the bottom of the deepest trenches in the sea floor, up to seven miles down.

But in midwater, where it is safe to do so, when they turn off the lights, it isn't all the stygian darkness of the deep ocean. They see sparks of light everywhere. It may be that bioluminescence is the rule, not a rarity, among sea creatures.

This montage of images shows some of the branches of the tree of life that include well-lit creatures. Clockwise from top left, a "firefly squid", one of many squids that light up (and other cephalopods such as cuttlefish can also do so); a jellyfish; a small shark, with lights that help it "vanish" against the light from above; and a siphonophore, of the same phylum as jellyfish but sort of like a coral colony without the rocky shell (this species gets more than 100 feet long, longer than the largest whale).

The discovery of deep water habitats and the creatures that live there are lovingly described in Part One of The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean and the Looming Threat That Imperils It, by marine biologist Helen Scales. It is interesting that species of fish and insects that become permanent inhabitants of caves have lost their eyes, yet deep in the ocean, most creatures have eyes, and in some cases, eyes that can see in not just three colors (as we can), but ten or more. In the deep ocean, they don't see by sunlight, but they see each other.

Deeper than 200m (~650 feet) in clear ocean water, there isn't enough light for our eyes to see, but some ocean creatures have eyes that see by the trickle of light that reaches as deep as a kilometer (~3,300 feet). The upper 200m includes just 7% of the oceans, and the upper kilometer contains about 30%. Yet in the deep abyss, from 1km to 11km, there are eyes everywhere, and there is plenty for them to see, including friend and foe, mates and prey. There are squid that, when threatened, squirt a blob of glowing ink, turn off their own lights, and jet away. Anglerfish bob glowing lures to draw in prey, while hatchetfish put on a variety of light shows, which some think could be communication. Some animals light their whole body and then darken smaller areas, like characters on a computer screen.

Part Two of the book describes the slow flow of ocean currents, and then discusses the possibility that cellular life arose in the deep sea, at or near places where the heat from below breaks through at the deep-ocean ridges and hot spots such as the one that has formed Hawaii and its island chain for millions of years. The author goes on to tell of medicinal uses for chemicals found in deep sea life. In the chilly depths, where food is more sparse, we find corals and other creatures that are hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years old. Living slowly, but persistently. Some have special proteins that help them resist incredible pressures that literally bend the molecules of life out of shape (and shape is what makes a protein do its job). Some have other components that heal wounds, protect tissues from decay, or fight microbes, and some of these have found pharmaceutical uses.

Part Three delves through the history of our "use" of the oceans, both extractive (fishing and whaling, for example) and as a repository for our waste. That latter isn't just the oceans; when I lived in Cleveland in 1961, the "sewage system" consisted of pipes five miles long that took raw sewage into the middle of Lake Erie! A north wind would bring turds ashore. Coastal cities worldwide used to do the same. There are areas of dumped radioactive waste. Do you fancy eating fish caught in those waters?

The third and last chapter of Part Three introduces seabed mining. Interesting "stuff", potentially valuable "stuff" has been found in three areas:

• The abyssal plains, at an average depth of several kilometers, include large areas carpeted with nodules made up of metallic oxides. The most abundant metal is manganese, which isn't particularly valuable, and iron is second in abundance, but they also contain cobalt, nickel and copper, and a little chromium. These are valuable, but make up only a few percent. A typical nodule the size of a walnut took several million years to form. Their composition varies from place to place, depending on what is available in the regional seawater.
• The "caps" of seamounts, their upper few meters, contain a similar suite of metal oxides. There may be a million or more seamounts, most of which are extinct volcanoes. Although their "caps" constitute only one or two percent of the sea floor, they are thick and would be easier to mine for minerals, compared to the abyssal plains.
• Vent communities form on and near the crests of the midocean ridges, which form a chain 40,000 miles long, or 65,000 km. The superheated, mineral-laden water that flows from "black smokers" and "white smokers" (in cooler areas) builds up "chimneys" of metal sulfides and metal oxides, which are like concentrated ores.

Each of these is being considered as mining targets for future exploitation, and some experiments have been performed. So far, the economic story isn't all that attractive, but that hasn't stopped the momentum of the undersea mining interests.

The biggest targets are the nodule fields on the abyssal plains. This area near Tonga is about average. Some places are so densely covered one can hardly see the sand between the nodules.

Just as on land, however, areas that contain desirable "stuff" are already inhabited. A careful look at this image shows whitish spots and blobs, which are some of the larger creatures that live, not just among, but rooted onto, nodules. I carefully scanned a larger version of this image, and found about 100 creatures. Many more are smaller or have a darker color. Most likely, every nodule has something living on it.

Part Four discusses the need to preserve the deep sea and all the habitats included within it. This montage, from a scientific article in ResearchGate, shows some of the creatures that live among metallic nodules in the Clipperton Fracture Zone, a prime target of mining interests.

Here the author becomes quite polemical, in a very good way. We must admit that we know only a tiny fraction of what is going on in the deep sea. We do know that it regulates global temperature, buffers the rise and fall of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and either preserves or destroys the great ice caps in north and south. Do we know enough to disrupt it with impunity?

The author points out the few very valuable pharmaceuticals that have been found in deep sea creatures, and the promise of whole new classes of antibiotics, for example. I find it a shame that the "Save them to make future drugs" argument is used so frequently, by many, many authors, not just De. Scales. Is there none other? Is there no way to persuade mining interests to hold off, besides trying to counter one financial interest with another? Is money the only bottom line that matters?

Sea bed "resources" are not renewable, not on a human scale. Vent communities take thousands or tens of thousands of years to form; a potato-sized nodule took 10-20 million years to form; the "cap" of a seamount may have grown over 100 million years. Every extractive technology grows exponentially. What is costly and difficult today gets easier and cheaper with time. People always say, "We won't take everything." It's a lie. Of course we will.

There's an apocryphal story of a Canadian chief talking with a geologist who is exploring in his tribal area. He said, "When white men first came to Canada, they shot all the big game and hauled away the meat. Later, more white men came to trap all the smaller animals, and they hauled away the furs. The next time white men came, they cut down the big trees and hauled them away for lumber. Then, other white men came to cut down the smaller trees, and hauled them away to make pulp for paper. And now here you are, coming for the rocks!"

To a scientist, the only reasonable path is study first, before mining anything. I don't expect that to happen.

Asteroids, the reality

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, astronomy, asteroids

Chances are, the word "asteroids" conjures up an image a lot like this for most people. We hear about the millions of rocks of all sizes roaming the spaces between the planets, especially between Mars and Jupiter. We think of that space as crowded with space debris.

The reality is somewhat different. Before getting into that, however, I want to recommend a book about the asteroids, about how we came to know about them and what they are like. Asteroids, by astronomer Clifford J. Cunningham, doesn't pretend to be a comprehensive survey. Rather, the author has two aims: to survey the history of our knowledge, and theories, of asteroids and "small bodies" in general; and to show how they are classified.

The telescope was invented in the early 1600's, just over 400 years ago. Galileo made it famous by seeing craters on the moon and discovering satellites around Jupiter. Although several asteroids are bright enough to be seen using small telescopes, even binoculars, you need to know where to look. Two centuries were required to gather sufficient knowledge of the skies, until the first "new planet" was seen January 1, 1801.

It took a number of years for astronomers to determine that this new planet, Ceres, was 1/11 the diameter of the Moon, and even longer to discern its mass to be 1/800 that of the Moon. By then a number of small, "new planets" had been found. Over the decades, the number grew to hundreds, then thousands, and the current number of asteroids whose orbits have been worked out is more than a million.

Astronomers also discovered that these little bodies weren't evenly spread out in the "asteroid belt", the realm between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter where more than 90% of them are. There were some gaps, which are caused by gravitational "pumping" by Jupiter either adding or removing orbital energy so that those special orbits stay clear. There are also certain "families" of asteroids, most famously a small number of Trojan asteroids that are in the L4 and L5 orbital points ahead of and behind Jupiter about 60° in (and near) its orbit. More recently, a small number of asteroids have been found to precede or follow Earth, Mars, Saturn and Uranus, so the designation "Trojan asteroid" has been expanded to include them all.

Other orbital subtypes are focused on the ones that could threaten Earth. Four classes of Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) are defined by orbital parameters. The ones of most concern are those that pass through Earth's orbit ("through" meaning anywhere within a few thousand km of the exact orbit). It's just a matter of timing before one of them winds up on a collision course. So far, though, none are known with certainty. But we only know about half of the NEAs that are there, which are big enough (more than 140m, or 460 ft), to devastate an area 100 km across or more.

Even though there are tens of thousands of NEA's, we are saved by the bigness of space. At present, I see a notice at least every month in online news about some asteroid "as big as the Empire State Building" or "school bus sized" that is going to pass "near" the Earth. It always turns out that the "near miss" will be a million miles or so. This is not to discount that some big, possibly devastating asteroids are out there, and we may not know about them yet. But the last asteroid hit to cause a "nuclear winter" happened 65 million years ago. Our portion of "asteroid space" has a low population. (At this point, I'll stray from what's in the book.)

What if Earth sat right between Mars and Jupiter? Then we'd have between 10x and 100x the chance of getting a significant collision in our lifetimes. But that chance is still low. We know that because many spacecraft have been sent to Jupiter and beyond, right through "the Belt", without mishap. Let's see why. This table lists the approximate (more approximate with smaller size) number of asteroids in the main belt, from 100m (0.1 km) and larger:

The 100m sized ones are big enough to cause plenty of trouble if they hit Earth. But what about a spacecraft, such as Voyager or New Horizons? Even a centimeter-sized pellet that hits a craft going 20 km/s can destroy it. Spacecraft can be shielded from smaller bits, so we need to know how many tiny bits of millimeter size there are. It isn't easy to extend this table to smaller sizes, because there are a few theories about the size distribution. Many publications posit a "scale free" distribution, which I think is extreme, but we'll use that for one sideboard of our estimates. The Theory of Breakage by Andrey Komolgorov predicts a lognormal distribution, which some think is too conservative, because the tail of small objects dies away so much faster. I happen to favor that hypothesis; I'll use it fo rthe other sideboard. Here is a table of the sideboards:

Diam.  Scale free N   Lognormal N
100m     25 million    25 million
 10m      4 billion     1 billion
  1m    300 billion    35 billion
100mm    22 trillion  1.1 trillion
10mm  1.7 quadrillion  33 trillion
 1mm  125 quadrillion  1 quadrillion

The volume of the main belt is about 4 billion billion cubic miles, or 10 billion billion cubic km. If the lognormal hypothesis is correct, there are a quadrillion (million billion) sand grain size bits in that volume, each has 10,000 cubic km to itself. That puts it about 25 km from its nearest neighbors, on average. On the other hand, the scale free hypothesis has 125 grains in that same 10,000 cubic km, and the average spacing is "only" 5 km. 

However, we want to sail through this mess, hoping to hit nothing. The appropriate analysis is to figure the collision cross-section, as though everything along the path were pasted to a surface the craft must pass through. This is like wrapping a big, big ribbon 40 million miles wide between Mars and Jupiter, and sticking all those sand grains to it, pulling or pushing them along radii from the Sun. This ribbon has a total area of about 80 quadrillion square miles, or 200 quadrillion square km.

This puts each sand grain "in possession" of either 200 km² or 1.6 km². Now the spacing, for the lognormal case, is 16 km, and for the scale free case it is 0.7 km.

Whichever way one analyzes the distribution, there is either a "pretty good" spacing between possible collisions, or a huge space. In any case, plenty of fragile spacecraft have passed through the main belt without incident. That crowded picture above is just not the way things are. From any particular asteroid, you can't see any others without a good telescope.

A word about "kinds" of asteroids. Most asteroids are dark colored, and some are extremely black. Some are comparatively bright, but even the metallic ones have a dusty surface, so the albedo (reflectivity) of a few asteroids may be 0.25 (25%), but most are in the 0.1 to 0.05 range, with some as dark as 0.02. That makes them hard to see, and it is harder yet to find out how big they are. Is a new body, just spotted, dark and large, or bright and smaller? Gathering observations over several days and then several weeks, we can figure out how far away they are. Size and albedo are harder.

One tool to help determine this is the reflection spectrum. The darkest asteroids are akin to the darkest meteorites (because the latter originate as the former), the carbonaceous chondrites. They not only reflect less light than other types, the distribution in the spectrum is different; they are called "red" (really a blackish brown). The brightest are metallic, with their own spectral distribution; and in between are the stony asteroids, with spectral features all their own. Although the book discusses these types and several subtypes, much is still being learned. Spacecraft that have visited asteroids, and the one or two that have brought back samples, are increasing our knowledge of them.

Finally, there is no "lost" or "exploded" planet that once resided in an orbit where the main belt is now. The pre-planetary bits didn't get organized into a planet, and Jupiter is probably mostly to blame. The empty gaps testify to Jupiter's power to eject objects from certain areas. Over time, it must have ejected a lot; the total mass of all the asteroids is thought to be less than 1/250th that of our Moon.

As we learn more about them, perhaps we'll learn enough to be able to detect and deflect any NEA that is found on a collision course with Earth. Perhaps.

I greatly enjoy books like Asteroids. I didn't know what to expect, and I learned a few things about the different kinds and different "places" of asteroids. 

The sorta-all-in-one guide

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, compendiums

Who wants to know everything? Pick me! Not many folks have four college majors (yes, it cost more than usual). Just peruse the contents of this blog's roughly 2,000 book reviews on all subjects. So I couldn't pass up the chance to read The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything*: Adventures in Math and Science [*Abridged] by Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry.

Since the book is admittedly extracts of a potentially universal encyclopedia (perhaps one for which Wikipedia is a rehearsal), the authors felt free to choose items of interest to them. The nine chapters are riffs on nine subjects. I'll touch on three of them:

Chapter 3, "The Perfect Circle" starts with an insult attributed to Fritz Zwicky, "spherical bastard." Since a sphere has perfect symmetry and looks the same from every direction, this hypothetical jerk is always and everywhere the same. But can there be a perfect sphere, or even a perfect circle? I suppose there could be if matter were continuous rather than quantized into atoms and other "elementary" particles. Just to keep things interesting, the authors get into what a 4-D sphere would look like. To us 3-D creatures, it would look like a sphere, because its intersection with our 3-D spacetime would be a spherical "cut" from its hyperspherical reality. As a hypersphere "moved through" 3-D spacetime, it would first look like a tiny sphere that grew, stabilized briefly, then shrank again to a tiny sphere that then winked out.

Fun enough. Can anything material be truly spherical or circular? Soap bubbles look like spheres, but are subtly distorted by gravity, and by even the tiniest, shifting breeze. The orb of the Earth isn't a sphere (ignoring mountains for a moment), but an oblate spheroid, the stable compromise between self-gravity and the centripetal force of its rotation. Even if it had no rotation, there are mountains and trenches, of course, but shrunk to the size of a cue ball, it would be smoother than the cue ball. The four metal spheres in a super-gyroscope in one of the satellites are considered the smoothest, most perfect spheres ever made, but a strong microscope would enable us to see ultra-tiny defects in their surfaces. If we could get rid of every defect, however, the atoms or molecules of the ball force a limit below which the smoothness cannot be reduced. Consider this printed circle:

It looks pretty good, even though I deliberately made it rather small. I instructed Blogger to display it "original size", so it matches the pixels on your computer screen. But that screen does have pixels. The "pixels" of a piece of paper are smaller, of course. Here is a 16x blowup of part of the red circle:

Somewhere in this jaggedy band of red and pink pixels would run a line that represents the ideal circle I had PowerPoint draw for me. Is it possible to make a circle that is actually perfect? Clearly not. Is it possible to place some atoms such that they are on the exact locations a circular arc would pass through? To my figuration, at most 12 atoms, plus a 13th to mark the circle's center, could be so placed, using equipment such as an atomic force microscope (AFM) to push around atoms on the surface of a perfect atomic lattice such as a surface of pure silicon, oriented in a direction such that the Si atoms are in a square array:

• Place atom #1 where you want the center to be, nestled in a pocket between four Si atoms.
• Place #2 in such a pocket, located 5 spaces to the right.
• Place #3 in a pocket 4 to the right and 3 upwards of the center; the 3-4-5 triangle has a hypotenuse 5 units long.
• Place #4 in a pocket 3 to the right and 4 upwards.
• Place #5 in a pocket 5 spaces upwards.
• Continue around the circle.

At the end, the twelve peripheral atoms are all exactly 5 units from the center atom. The first person to do this will be the first person to create a "dotted line" that traces a perfect circle (within the limits of quantum vibration of the Si atoms!). To avoid insanity, I won't think about what is entailed in creating something with atoms at some exact distance from a known center, to form such a tracery on a perfect sphere.

Chapter 5, "A Brief History of Time" centers initially on high-speed investment algorithms that take advantage of the time lags in communication between different stock exchanges. Such algorithms have caused half a dozen "flash crashes", which came and went in milliseconds, and briefly (and fortunately, reversibly) destroyed around a trillion dollars of equity in world markets. A couple pages in, the authors ask "what is a second?", and lose their way. Here is a pair of sentences to which I take strong exception:

"If you want to measure how long a second it, it should simply be a matter of pointing a telescope straight up at a star in the sky and waiting until the same star comes back around to the same spot the next night—that is, an exact day later. If you divide the time elapsed by 86,400 (the number of seconds in the day), then you should end up with precisely the length of one second."

Nope!! This will only work if the star you focus upon is the Sun; especially, some unchanging feature of the Sun such as its east or west edge. This is a confusion between solar time and sidereal time. During the day in which the Earth rotates once, to point at the same feature on the Sun's surface (or edge), one solar day passes (which is unlikely to be exactly 86,400 seconds long, as the rest of the chapter describes). During that day, the Earth moves just under one degree along its orbit, so that it has to rotate that extra most-of-a-degree to point to the same feature again. If you begin with any other star, the time that passes will be one sidereal day, which has a length of 86,164.0905 seconds.

In this chapter we find a version of this diagram, which describes the Equation of Time. This shows the cumulative effect of variations in the length of an apparent solar day, and is the expected error of a sundial at various times during the year.

Two factors create this effect. Firstly, the Earth's orbit is not a perfect circle, but an ellipse. Using slightly rounded figures, our distance from the Sun varies from 91,407,000 miles in early January to 94,510,000 miles in early July. That means that in early April and early October, the Sun is offset from the center of the ellipse, as seen from Earth, by about 1.5 million miles. Thus, the solar day varies from 86,379 seconds to 86,429 seconds. Note that the difference from 86,400 is not symmetrical. This is because of the Earth's axial tilt. 

The contribution of axial tilt to the length of the day is more complex, so I won't try to explain. Instead, we can see from this diagram that it has two cycles per year (the purple dashed line), while the variation caused by the elliptical orbit has one cycle (the blue dot-dash line). These add to the total equation of time (the red solid line). This graph is from the German language Wikipedia.

Another expression of this mess is the Analemma, the infinity-shaped symbol printed on globes. Hardly anyone pays attention to it.

This is an example. The analemma represents the subsolar point at Noon, mean solar time, at a particular longitude for every day of the year. Some globes, as this one, have some explanation about it. Others just show the figure without much explanation. Probably only one person in 1,000 knows what the odd "8" on their globe means…of those who even have one.

This is just part of what makes the definition of "one second" far from obvious!

Chapter 6, "Live Free" asks "What is free will?", proceeds to tell why some scientists think there is no such things, then describes some conditions in which the thinking and attitude of an animal or person is affected by a chemical or a parasite. And then we find the possibility that we are still, somehow, capable of making decisions that seem to be free, and perhaps they are. 

From the other side, that of predicting the fate of the universe (or any part of it), the authors discuss chaos and quantum mechanics. I find this funny, both "haha" funny and "so odd" funny: Mathematical chaos isn't actually chaotic. It is repeatable if you always start from the same point.

We read of the Lorentz Butterfly, a seemingly unpredictable figure that represents near-cyclical patterns of weather. The origin of mathematical chaos came when Lorentz ran a simulation for a while, then stopped his computer program and wrote down the values of the parameters he was tracking. Then he let the program run a while more, seeing how it would to. Later he started the program with the values he had written down partway through, and was surprised that the ensuing trajectory soon went differently from what he had seen earlier! He realized that the program was calculating things to an accuracy of 15 decimals (48 bits), but he had written down the numbers with "only" seven decimals. The seemingly tiny difference from where the program started from during the second run made all the difference.

Mathematical "chaos" is better described as "sensitivity to initial conditions". This is seen in orbital mechanics. Predicting the position of a planet over many orbits is tricky. Every time the planet makes one orbit, the numbers that were added in the first half orbit all get subtracted out again. Tiny rounding errors pile up, and after a few orbits, they add up to substantial errors in the planet's position and velocity. Actually, in most systems that rely on numerical integration, the initial position error's size is doubled with every iteration. That's why it's best to use methods that permit one to take larger steps (usually called "higher order" methods). An error that is initially one-trillionth of the starting value will, in ten steps, grow to about 1,024 trillionths, or just over one-billionth. That doesn't seem so bad. However: ten more steps, and the error is more than one-millionth; ten more and it is one-thousandth; then a further ten, and the error is as big as the initial starting value, meaning that the planet is as much as half an orbit away from where you thought it should be. Going to a higher order method is part of the solution to such issues. Astrophysicists have numerous methods to stabilize and correct their calculations so they can predict the positions of planets and moons thousands or millions of orbits later.

The situation is worse in weather forecasting, which is what Edward Lorentz was working on. The weather models that are running on the world's largest supercomputers have millions of coupled differential equations, and they are getting better and better. Weather.com and Accuweather confidently predict the weather for up to 90 days. But in most parts of the world, going beyond a 3-day forecast is still pretty chancy. The truth is, long-range forecasts are adjusted "pattern" forecasts, based on similarity of history. The weather models all fall apart in 5-10 days, and sometimes less. The atmosphere is too big, and too much happens on too big a scale, and we have too few reliable weather stations taking the atmosphere's pulse. It's a wonder that even a 3-day forecast is any good at all.

Thus, in actuality, "chaos" just means "impossible to predict because there is way, way too little good data".

The quantum situation is different. Quantum uncertainty can be stated "impossible to predict because at the smallest scales, genuinely random influences occur." That means that atoms and electrons and protons and so forth can't be pinned down; they are subject to randomizing influences. The reason we can predict where a baseball is going is that, when the system of interest is composed of a trillion trillion atoms or more, those random influences mostly cancel out, to such a degree that we can neglect them. We only care if the ball is in the strike zone, while quantum effects on a baseball's path are measured in trillionths of a trillionth of a meter.

Interestingly, quantum effects on the path of ions and electrons in our neurons, which have axons with a diameter between 1 and 10 microns, can cause variations in the timing of a signal, and sometimes quench it altogether. Also, "shot noise" is the scattered arrival times of ions, which can change when or whether a certain synapse is triggered. This is one possible mechanism behind "free will."

But I like this description better, from an researcher who studies rats in mazes and such: "Given specific conditions of light, temperature, and location of food, the rat will do what the rat wants to do." A statement like that was once the motto of the Rat Runner's Digest. So if we feel like we have free will, it's like the proverbial duck: "Does it quack like a duck? Does it walk like a duck? It must be a duck."

If you want to know everything about everything, be prepared for a long process…like forever, to be precise. However, if you can settle for an 80-20 solution, this book provides a good start.

When is a drug really a drug

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, drugs, entheogenic chemicals, plants

About 90% of the human race uses caffeinated drinks, including coffee, tea, "energy drinks", and caffeinated soft drinks. Every culture has some kind of stimulant(s) to keep intelligent people "on task" as they slog through their daily grind. Before caffeine became ubiquitous, Asia-Pacific areas had Betel, tropical South America had cocaine, and North America had tobacco (which is still the second-most-used stimulant). All of these are still in use, with caffeine thrown in for good measure.

Caffeine is the centerpiece (literally and physically) of This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan. He makes a case that Western civilization was largely enabled by its stimulation, as it replaced alcoholic drinks. Formerly, alcohol was needed to make as beverage safe to drink. Boiling water to make tea or coffee also kills germs, and the resulting drink was energizing rather than stupefying.

Personally, I don't like hot drinks and I abhor the taste of coffee (a good way to ruin a teaspoon of cream), so if I want caffeine, I use one of the more robust soft drinks such as Mountain Dew or Jolt (where it can be found). However, since I retired, I stopped using "cold caffeine", which I'd needed to keep going at work, particularly during meetings when the lights would be turned low for PowerPoint presentations. I guess even then, I wasn't ingesting as much caffeine as coffee drinkers, because I didn't suffer any withdrawal symptoms. The author did a 3-month caffeine break, and withdrawal affected him quite a lot. When he had his first cup of Espresso after the break, it was like a first hit of cocaine to him. Thanks, I'll pass.

The first third of the book is about opium. Many cultures also have their favored pain-killers (willow comes to mind), but the opium poppy spread far and wide, long ago. Much of that section dwells on his early experiments with growing poppies (which is legal!), and the kinds of trouble he could have gotten into if, at the height of the War on Drugs, he had "crossed the line" by so simple a matter as drying a few seed heads and brewing tea with them. There's much information on the history of poppies and opium.

When I was in college, you could still buy Paregoric (4% opium in alcohol, with a couple of other ingredients). It was "Grandmother's helper" with colicky or teething infants. The author mentions Laudanum, which is stronger; I never saw it in drug stores. I couldn't relate to much of what he wrote. I wasn't willing to break the drug laws, but he had fewer qualms, though he writes of having a few qualms!

The third plant is actually a family of cacti that includes Peyote ("mescal buttons"), with the active ingredient mescaline. While peyote is soon to be an endangered species—it's getting too popular and is very slow-growing—another group of cacti called San Pedro (among numerous other names) is much more common, easier to grow (Pollan had some in his garden without knowing it), and different species have varying amounts of mescaline. It made me think, just as with marijuana, if mescaline gets much more popular, growers of San Pedro will breed more potent varieties.

Peyote is legal to use only for certain religious groups of American Indians. As the author found, they have a cultural mindset that is less analytical, which helps them use the plant more appropriately, as a medicinal rather than recreational substance. The author writes of the effects of environment and attitude, on one's experience with mescaline in particular. Indians get quite huffy if peyote is called a drug. To them it is medicine for the soul. It is being called "Entheogenic", meaning it reveals (or produces: "-genic") the god within ("En-theo"). That's an attempt to remove the stigma of the "drug" designation.

The author's experiences with mescaline sound intriguing, but I think I'll pass here also, for the same reason I gave up alcohol before the age of 21: I don't like anything messing with my mind.

Michael Pollan self-experiments. We have here his record of some of those experiments. It is also an approach to a manifesto of sorts, against the war on drugs. I agree that the Federal government badly overreacted over the past 2/3 century (basically, most of my lifetime). What are the chances they will pull back? Although most US states have "decriminalized" marijuana use and possession, the Feds have not, putting the states in a curious position. The process is slow; perhaps, drug by drug, various "substances" will be removed from their "Schedule". It could take decades.