Why Aim Law Toward Human Survival

Our legal system is contributing to humanity’s demise by failing to take account of our species’ situation. For example, in some cases law works against life and supports interests such as liberty or profit maximization.If we do not act, science tells us that humanity bears a significant (and growing) risk of catastrophic failure. The significant risk inherent in the status quo is unacceptable and requires a response. We must act. It is getting hotter. When we decide to act, we need to make the right choice.There is no better choice. You and all your relatives have rights. The basic ones are life, liberty, and property. These secular rights apply to each of us and to all of us equally. At least they should. In any event, life comes first, both individually and collectively—for without life, we have no other rights. A collective life failure destroys all individual rights.We need to re-aim our systems from profit and wealth maximization toward supporting a longer life for the human species. Here is why: We are killing our planetary life support system. System failure kills our unique species, life as we know it, and all other rights. We are well on our way.This paper can neither begin to provide all the troubling details, nor should it. Looking down into the abyss of failure is unlikely to help. Instead of fighting a growing multiplicity of confusing and sometimes contradictory problems, we should aim ourselves in the opposite direction, away from failure and collapse—and toward the survival of our species.One key means to do this is with law which provides systems of control and enforcement of limits. We need to use law to structure and control the human system toward success. Instead of attempting to avoid death and collapse, we need to aim humanity toward a longer duration. Doing so will help structure our thinking and our laws, better protecting the rights of all. We need to engineer and aim law toward the survival of the human species and the life support system upon which we depend.Such complex global problems we as a species create and thus face cannot possibly have a one-person solution. The enormity of the situation requires that we work together. But if we structure our work, we stand a better chance of success. How can law help with the structure to support a human future? This is a question of philosophy and law

Carnivoran Frugivory and its Effect on Seed Dispersal, Plant Community Composition, Migration, and Biotic Carbon Storage

Seed dispersal by animals is important for the ecology of plants. It is particularly important to understand which animals are involved and how they move seeds differently from one another. Some seed dispersers are understudied despite ample evidence they consume fruits and seeds. This includes animals commonly referred to as carnivores in the order Carnivora. The overall goal of my dissertation was to describe the extent and quality of seed dispersal by Carnivorans, estimate important aspects of seed dispersal for a specific Carnivoran, the coyote, and estimate how differences between a coyote and songbirds affect where plants will occur in the future and if that changes how much carbon plants store on the landscape. To achieve these goals, I first systematically reviewed existing research on frugivory and seed dispersal by Carnivorans. Then, I experimentally evaluated how long it takes for seeds to pass through a coyote, and if the consumption of seeds by coyotes negatively affects seed germination or viability. Finally, I modeled how differences in the distances that coyotes carry seeds vs. songbirds affect plant migrations. I found that Carnivoran frugivory and seed dispersal are common, involve many plant species, and occur worldwide across most ecosystems. Carnivorans also rarely damage seeds or hamper seed viability and germination when they consume and disperse seeds. Furthermore, I found that coyotes generally take between 4 and 24 hours to pass seeds from the fruits they consumed and deliver seeds to new landscapes without harming them. Given coyote travel speeds, these results suggest that coyotes regularly disperse seeds up to 5 km. This seed dispersal distance is substantially greater than songbirds and led to a 2.5 times larger expansion of where junipers grew in models extending 80 years into the future. Coyote seed dispersal would also result in 3.4 times greater conversion of grasslands and an increase total biotic carbon storage by 1.1 Pg. My findings show that understudied seed dispersers like Carnivorans can greatly impact plant ecology and ecosystem services and highlights the need for further studies on the impacts of Carnivora on seed dispersal

Why Law Now Needs to Control Rather than Follow Neo-Classical Economics

Selfish utilitarianism, neo-classical economics, the directive of short-term income maximization, and the decision tool of cost-benefit analysis fail to protect our species from the significant risks of too much consumption, pollution, or population. For a longer-term survival, humanity needs to employ more than cost-justified precaution.This article argues that, at the global level, and by extension at all levels of government, we need to replace neo-classical economics with filters for safety and feasibility to regulate against significant risk. For significant risks, especially those that are irreversible, we need decision tools that will protect humanity at all scales. This article describes both standards, their operations, and their interoperability. Further, it defends feasible risk reduction as an effective decision and regulatory tool

Preserving Life by Ranking Rights

Border walls, abortion, and the death penalty are the current battlegrounds of the right to life. We will visit each topic and more in this paper, as we consider ranking groups of constitutional rights.The enumerated rights of the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments—life, liberty, and property—merit special treatment. They have a deeper and richer history that involves ranking. Ranking life in lexical priority over liberty and property rights protects life first and maximizes safe liberty and property rights in the absence of a significant risk to life. This is not new law; aspects of it have long appeared in common law and statute. Federal implementation of ranking due process rights, an ordered substantive due process, would protect our most basic and fundamental right and make our entire legal system more humane. By using a conceptual partition between life and other rights, we can create channels of cooperation to solve problems of incommensurability and to provide a more just legal system

On the multiaxial fatigue assessment of complex three-dimensional stress concentrators

This paper assesses and quantifies the detrimental effects of complex tri-dimensional notches subjected to uniaxial and multiaxial fatigue loading. A number of experimental results taken from the technical literature and generated by testing specimens containing complex geometrical features were reanalysed using a critical distance/plane method. The investigated notched samples were tested under uniaxial and multiaxial constant amplitude load histories, considering also the effects of non-zero mean stresses as well as non-proportional loading. The common feature of the considered notched geometries was that the position of the critical location changed as the degree of multiaxiality of the applied loading varied. The relevant linear-elastic stress fields in the vicinity of the crack initiation points were calculated by the Finite Element method and subsequently post-processed using the Modified Wöhler Curve Method in conjunction with the Theory of Critical Distances (the latter theory being applied in the form of the Point Method). This validation exercise confirms the accuracy and reliability of our multiaxial fatigue life assessment technique, which can be efficiently used in situations of practical interest by directly post-processing the relevant linear-elastic stress fields calculated with commercial Finite Element software packages.Safe Technology Limite

Consolidated fuel reprossing program: The implications of force reflection for teleoperation in space

Previous research on teleoperator force feedback is reviewed and results of a testing program which assessed the impact of force reflection on teleoperator task performance are reported. Force relection is a type of force feedback in which the forces acting on the remote portion of the teleoperator are displayed to the operator by back-driving the master controller. The testing program compared three force reflection levels: 4 to 1 (four units of force on the slave produce one unit of force at the master controller), 1 to 1, and infinity to 1 (no force reflection). Time required to complete tasks, rate of occurrence of errors, the maximum force applied to tasks components, and variability in forces applied to components during completion of representative remote handling tasks were used as dependent variables. Operators exhibited lower error rates, lower peak forces, and more consistent application of forces using force relection than they did without it. These data support the hypothesis that force reflection provides useful information for teleoperator users. The earlier literature and the results of the experiment are discussed in terms of their implications for space based teleoperator systems. The discussion described the impact of force reflection on task completion performance and task strategies, as suggested by the literature. It is important to understand the trade-offs involved in using telerobotic systems with and without force reflection