A call to earth
26 May 2016
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki says the next generation might just live forever (or at least a very, very long time) – so what lasting lessons can we teach our grandkids?
The science is in: your grandparents were right about so many things. Stay hungry for knowledge. Get your facts straight. Eat in moderation.
Yet over the years we’ve been overwhelmed by artificial things, like fad diets, media sound bites and yes, the internet’s blessing-and-curse of putting all the world’s information (much of it false) at our fingertips.
Known as one of Australia’s favourite scientists, Dr Karl teaches that science gives us a measured way of understanding our world, and hopefully, can reveal better ways of living, better ways of caring for the Earth.
He admits he knew from a very young age he was scientific and his description of grasping the concept of a universe sounds like an epiphany:
“I was about seven years old when someone gave me a book on astronomy, and I thought, ‘Wow! It’s bigger than Australia!’. There were all these countries I’d never heard of – and then there were these planets, I had no idea. I suddenly realised this solar system is so big and then there are all these other stars... and I knew there had to be planets around them, we just hadn’t discovered them yet.
“And at that moment, I just had this huge feeling of awe and wonder sweep over me. I always had a sense of curiosity and that’s how I became interested in trying to understand how the universe runs.”
Science vs politics
You’d expect Dr Karl to suggest science is a great life path, so it’s intriguing when he says the most powerful way to drive change is to be political.
“One of the things the readers of Active Retirees could do is encourage their kids and grandkids to go into politics,” he proposes. As a science commentator, I have influence but I’ve got zero power. The only people who have power in Australia are the politicians who can write laws. And remember: if you don’t go into politics, the bad people will.”
Dr Karl did give politics a go in 2007, running as an independent for the Senate and hoping to “do good stuff to help battle climate change”. While he didn’t score enough votes, he was pleasantly surprised to get the backing of a Sydney publication after he admitted he’d made a mistake on some of his campaign material, because, well, it’s rare for candidates to admit much at all.
He is adamant the majority of the science he’s quoted on climate change is correct, and despairs that so-called ‘deniers’ misinterpret data to “avoid having to actually deal with the issue”.
Dr Karl has addressed the science in many of his books, including in his 2014 book House of Karls, with a step-by-step rebuttal to the argument that current warming is only natural. Here’s an extract:
“Over most of the past 1400 years, the volume of the Arctic ice each September has stayed pretty constant. But something has changed recently. Since 1980, we have lost 80 per cent of that summer ice.
“Over the last 4.7 billion years, there have been many natural cycles in the climate – both heating and cooling. What’s happening today in the Arctic is not a cycle caused by nature. This more recent change is caused by humans. We’ve burnt fossil fuels and dumped slightly over one trillion tonnes of carbon over the past century...
“What we are seeing in the Arctic today... is an amazingly huge change in an amazingly short period of time. I wonder when this loss will reach 100 per cent?”
Never stop learning and thinking
Dr Karl muses humans like to connect over shared passions, rather than exchanging ‘facts’. So, his advice to any adult hoping to inspire young people about science is to find experiments and research you can enjoy together (see the ABC’s science websites for examples) – and help young people accept that it’s okay to make mistakes.
“If you don’t make a mistake, then you don’t make anything,” he says. “One thing
I notice is that as people turn older, they tend to get more eccentric, which is good, but get irrational about it and close their minds. What you learn, you learn really well; but then there are gaps in your knowledge that you don’t know exist.”
Having been online since the 1980s, Dr Karl warns many people don’t scrutinise internet sources, often clicking on the first link they find.
So the second-most important thing adults can teach young people is critical thinking. With topics such as climate change and fad diets constantly debated in the media, young people need the smarts to filter fact from fiction.
It’s not a conspiracy
“People can have their own opinions, but they can’t have their own facts [about science],” states Dr Karl bluntly, adding that without critical thinking, some people end up believing conspiracies, like claiming man-made global warming is a hoax, or that vaccines do more harm than good.
He ponders that perhaps some people enjoy being contrary, believing they have secret knowledge. But as Dr Karl notes, we can’t let personal beliefs blind us to science, which demands repeatedly demonstrated proof.
Take childhood vaccines for example: “Overwhelmingly, they work and are safe. The odds are so much better in your favour if you get the kids vaccinated than not. Yet people are against it and they keep on quoting stuff that’s factually wrong,” he says.
“Nothing humans make is perfect. Vaccines are not perfect, but they’re the best bet that we’ve got.”
Food for thought
Compared to most of our species across the centuries, we’ve been spoilt, says Dr Karl, because we’ve had fairly accessible food supplies most of our lives. Eating is wonderful and we often want seconds or thirds, but our bodies can trick us into eating too much.
“There is a 20-minute delay from when your tummy is full and your brain knows about it – it’s wired into us,” warns Dr Karl.
So eat in moderation and let food settle, he says, citing Michael Pollan in his book In Defense of Food: “‘Eat food, mostly plants, not too much’. And I mean food that your parents and your grandparents cooked,” insists Dr Karl. “Modern processed food has added salt, fat and sugar to make it hyper-palatable so you’ll want more. Exercise helps, but it can take up to three hours of hard running to burn off the calories in a muffin.”
While some diets might work in the short-term, they don’t give us a style of eating we can live with happily ever after. Some short-term weight loss can simply be due to the bacteria in your gut not dealing well with a different food source. There is no instant cure where you can cut one ‘evil’ ingredient such as sugar, protein or carbohydrates.
“It’s crazy when people who know nothing about dietetics are pushing this guide they’ve invented, like the Paleo diet.”
Older and wiser?
“If you’ve got a healthy body, then everything goes much better,” points out Dr Karl. “Things wear out, but with our current technology, we are probably in the last generation to die... today’s children could be the first to live forever.”
Now that’s quite a revelation, though according to Dr Karl and other scientists investigating DNA, technologies, such as CRISPR, could allow us to ‘edit’ genes to prevent cancers and perfect the performance or aesthetic of any body part.
“We’ve known about CRISPR for several years, and it was a contender for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2015, but instead they gave it to DNA repair,” he says.
“People worried about it because you could just use it for purely selfish things like bigger or smaller muscles, bigger or smaller breasts, whatever you want. Certainly I can see that we genetically engineer ourselves so we can live on the surface of Mars without having to wear a space suit.
“That’s where we’re heading. The body might last thousands of years and the intellect can just keep on learning. But what will the Earth be like?”
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki has been at the front line of science education for more than three decades. He is a qualified medical doctor, engineer, physicist and mathematician. He ran for the Senate in 2007 on a Climate Change ticket and learned that politics is expensive. He’s written nearly 40 popular books on science and was recently named one of Australia’s National Living Treasures.
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