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The battle lines are well drawn: the microbes' genetic simplicity and evolutionary swiftness against our intellect, creativity, and collective social and political will. We cannot overwhelm the pathogens, because they so vastly outnumber and outmaneuver us. Our survival depends on outsmarting them.
Deadliest Enemy
Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker
Their proposal, derived from seismic data, recognized that the subduction of lithospheric plates was far more varied than people had supposed. Not only did ocean floor dive under continents but also—and much more commonly—it dived under other ocean floor, like two carpets overlapping. The lower slab, after melting, rose through the upper one as a volcanic-island arc. Now the island arc begins to move with the plate on which it rests. Plate motions shift. New trenches form. In back-arc basins, new ocean crust is made. Some island arcs go in one direction for a while and then reverse themselves. They choke a trench, say, and then go the other way, eating up their own crust as they go. Some of the crust might get emplaced as an ophiolite. The Marianas back-arc basin is spreading now, and so is the Lau-Havre Basin behind the Tonga-Kermadec arc, and so is the basin behind the South Sandwich Islands. Between Indonesia and the Philippines are two trenches that are eating their way toward each other and if nothing stops them will destroy each other. Some people—Moores among them—think that in similar fashion off Jurassic California two trenches were active simultaneously, the easterly one dipping to the east and the westerly one dipping west, and both were destroyed during the Smartville emplacement. In Geology for December, 1983, the volcanologist Alex McBirney, after dealing with the increasingly complicated attempts to relate igneous rocks to plate tectonics, closed with a vision of the decade to come. He said, “I predict that our present confusion about igneous rocks will rise to undreamed-of levels of sophistication.”
Assembling California
John McPhee
Henry Wallace, the former Vice President who was now Secretary of Commerce, recorded in his diary the reason for the President’s change of mind: Truman said he had given orders to stop the atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, “all those kids.”2735 The restriction came none too soon. Groves had reported to Marshall that morning that he had gained four days in manufacture and expected to ship a second Fat Man plutonium core and initiator from New Mexico to Tinian on August 12 or 13. “Provided there are no unforeseen difficulties in manufacture, in transportation to the theatre or after arrival in the theatre,” he concluded cautiously, “the bomb should be ready for delivery on the first suitable weather after 17 or 18 August.”2736 Marshall told Groves the President wanted no further atomic bombing except by his express order and Groves decided to hold up shipment, a decision in which Marshall concurred.
Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
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