Heat Islands - An Impromptu Autobio

Global warming is seriously going on right now.  We have been talking about climate change for decades.  I was in 5th grade, reading TIME magazine, trying (in vain) to rally the other children into planting trees, anything we could do to suck up the C-O-2.  I was convinced by the figures in the article: satellite images of the north pole and photos of Kilimanjaro’s peak, presented as juxtaposed pairs 30 years apart.  The reason I cared so much was because I grew up watching Disney Channel and its wildlife programs. Eighteen years later, Jeff Corwin is still traveling the world with a camera, showcasing the amazing, often endangered critters of the world.  He has a good job, for all the shit he had to eat in the jungles.

For a while, I wanted to be a wildlife biologist. I’m not exactly sure what happened to that dream. Maybe it was crushed by the brutal reality that I could not convince a group of ten-year old kids that we had to go back to our roots, or go native, so to speak.  I sure as hell didn’t want to actually give up the luxuries of modern life.  I don’t think I had even realized yet how much I relied upon running water and electricity.  Not surprising that the only solution I could conceive was plants. Or maybe I did not become a wildlife biologist because I had internalized my family’s judgment that to survive I needed more money than a field researcher could muster.  Medicine and engineering were the only options for me.

In any case, they encouraged my participation in science fairs, where I did simple biology experiments like, “Will saltwater kill a plant?” and “Which integer pH levels kill a plant?” and “Which integer pH levels dissolve bone?”  I got sent to the city science fair for those last two! This was when I set the goal of attending Caltech. For a while in middle school, science fairs became a chore. I had other shit going on then, which I am now addressing in therapy. I got back into science as a teenager watching NOVA on PBS.  In fact, I had a few pivotal moments as a high school science aficionado. One was a new spin-off program called NOVA ScienceNow featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson as host.  Man, he inspired me! Well, much of the credit really goes into the production teams behind NOVA and Nature, two of the finest programs on American television.  One outstanding special featured dramatic reenactments of turning points in scientific history related to Einstein’s special relativity relation. It introduced me to Faraday, Maxwell, LaVoisier, Le Chatelier, and Meitner.  Around the same time, I discovered Feynman, who most of all inspired me to pursue physical sciences. More than ever, I was determined to get into Caltech. I even went to nerd camp at UCI (COSMOS) where I met grad students and took spectra of stars with their telescope.  I applied to Caltech early action and they deferred me! I was so sad, especially because two of my classmates were accepted early and one of them didn’t even want to go there but applied because Asian parents. I eventually made it in, probably due to my stellar spectra!

Upon entering the world’s playground for math and science, I immediately felt overwhelmed.  In my first week I sat at a round table dinner where the entire conversation revolved around Linux distributions, and I was a but a Windows peasant. I rotated into a house which I thought had a unique and original style, only to learn over time that it was rather uniquely unoriginal and stale. But the people I met at Tech, irrespective of house, were phenomenal.  I still can’t believe I broke bread with some of the world’s most brilliant people. The psychological weight triggered the flip of a mental switch. In high school, I participated in musical arts to a large extent--I was a bando in the parlance of those times. I thought other bandos, more skilled at music than STEM, had better odds than I did in the music business.  Besides, I was better at STEM than most bandos. In college, I participated in musical arts to some extent--I was in the jazz band, one of the best times of my life. I thought other Techers, more skilled at STEM than music, had better odds than I did in STEM industries. After all, I was better at music than most Techers, plus I barely got into this school!

A professor told me at an ARC lunch that he felt the faculty needed to cull the students more effectively, weed out the admissions mistakes.  Boy, did that shatter my confidence as a sophomore trying to reevaluate my choice of major, especially coming from a guy who researches the ultimate clean energy source that is nuclear fusion! With the last bits of my middle school dream broken, I picked up the remaining dust and decided that this quantum shit would be useful someday, so I had better take more physics classes even though I obviously could not perform to the caliber of the Caltech physics department. It had to be better than electrical engineering, where I had spent the better part of a season toiling in a sub-basement devoid of vitamin D.  For what it’s worth, Glen George is amazing. Inspired by the likes of Scherer, Atwater, Vahala, I continued down the applied physics option. Fortunately for me, some of my E.E. credits still worked and it had more quantum.  Excellent!

I enjoyed solid-state physics and statistical mechanics, above all, as I finally started to understand how every piece fit together.  My wonderful advisor Sandra Troian asked me whether I am a theorist or an experimentalist, and given my grades in theory, I answered experimentalist. I fancy myself more of a creative observationalist.  Jobless at graduation with a C-average, I turned down a decent offer in data engineering and a better offer in sales engineering so I could work at a solar startup, fabricating devices to make the world cleaner, at half the compensation I deserved.  Low efficiency, low cost, low life expectancy. My job was to increase the lifetime of the devices. I felt like a grad student, except I was making slightly more money and I was not advancing my career. So I applied to grad school! I found a professor who had accepted my Techer friends before, and he knew my old supervisor, so it seemed serendipitous.  And the research merged all the fields I genuinely loved and pretended to love: physics, biology, materials science, engineering.

I joined a brilliant team of scientists from all these disciplines and developed materials for the next-generation wearables. I learned so much from Gorodetsky, more than I can put into words and more even than I had hoped to learn.  But in my third year, I realized in multiple ways, our differing styles were not conducive to my completion of a P-H-D in that situation. So, I quit! Now, I could join up with the United States Navy, pickup non-destructive testing to help fix up fighter jets. I love national security as much as any patriotic American, and I love the idea of serving my country as an engineer instead of a fighter. Still, I wonder if this could be counterproductive to my life’s purpose.  After all, I think it’s pretty fucked up how that our Navy has a history of killing whales. And given our government’s history with the environment, this may be a great time for aerospace but a disastrous time for ecology. The tropical regions, where life is most diverse in number of species, may soon become completely uninhabitable due to rising temperatures.

As if deforestation at the expansion of human urban developments wasn’t bad enough.  I want to save those species, however possible, even though I know it may be futile. More importantly, I want to save our species, however impossible, because I know it will be worthwhile.  I believe we need to achieve a balance or harmony with our environment, rather than risk destroying it by trying to tame it.  Practically, this is a titanic challenge. As I learned in 5th grade, changing people’s minds is difficult, especially when you’re risking the comforts of modern living and economic security.  There must be a way do it.

Consider the beaver: our mascot and nature’s engineer. It modifies its environment, but in a controlled and sustainable manner, causing no detriment to its cohabitants.  Okay, the beaver may cause detriment to native flora and fauna when introduced as an invasive species, but for the most part life goes on around a beaver’s dam. Likewise, we humans used to modify our environment in controlled, sustainable manners.  But our numbers were far, far fewer then. As our societies grew, we effected change upon our environment at increasing scales. Technological advancements spared us a Malthusian catastrophe at the cost of most of life on earth. Our species achieved this by sharing knowledge through science and language throughout the ages, these media evolving alongside our civilizations.  For that is humankind’s greatest strength: the ability to teach, learn, and collaborate. With this, we have shaped much of the earth to our will, and yet we have so far to go.

I do not know how, but I do believe we will find a way to make peace with nature, to harmonize urban development with ecological preservation.  A key element, I believe, is somehow economically incentivizing sustainability in every industry.  It sounds like a no-brainer, because sustainability means less waste and less waste means saving money. I am almost frightened to say that institutions far greater than I have tipped the scales against sustainability decades before I drew breath. We need a global shift. Something at a far greater scale than banning plastic products.

Heat islands.