According to the Global Footprint Network, September 23 is Global Overshoot Day. Meaning, today is the day when humans have used up all the resources that Earth will produce this year. “Beyond Tuesday, we move into the ecological equivalent of deficit spending, utilizing resources at a rate faster than what the planet can regenerate in a calendar year,” the organization said in a press release.

This is just what you wanted to hear as America is about to incur a reported $1 trillion dollars of debt courtesy of Wall Street, right?

So what’s more of a problem: The potential collapse of the economy, or climate change, biodiversity loss, shrinking forest cover and rapidly rising food prices? Never mind, don’t answer that. I’d just like to point out that the government is racing to save Wall Street by the end of the week, but has dragged its feet about climate change since the late eighties.

Global Overshoot Day is scooting further up the calendar every year. In 2007, it fell on October 6, and it was called Ecological Debt Day. I spoke with Mathis Wackernagel, the executive director of GFN about this sad holiday last year. He said then that we need to account for our ecological assets the same way that bankers keep account of their financial assets. That analogy is not too effective this time around.

Commemorate Global Overshoot Day by listening to a Clear Voices podcast with Mathis Wackernagel. And remember, you can’t do anything about greed on Wall Street, but you can choose have a less resource-intensive lifestyle.

That means we’ve missed the opportunity for Sarah Palin to expand her views on polar bears. But Barack Obama and John McCain both agreed to answer the top 14 questions on science, honed from a list of over 3,400 submitted to Science Debate 2008.

Visit Science Debate 2008’s website to read the candidates’ answers on innovation, climate change, science education, stem cell research, priorities in space, and more. (Who knew so many hot-button issues existed under the heading of “science?” Maybe we should talk more about it?)

You can read McCain and Obama’s responses side by side, or just Obama’s, or just McCain’s.

New Scientist’s Last Word Blog picked up this question from a child and opened it up to the public. Many commentators replied with the obligatory “yucky.” A self-proclaimed 20-year picker-eater stated his belief that the practice might actually aid your immune system, because the bacteria trapped in the mucus are weakened or deactivated. So it’s kind of like administering a vaccine from nose to mouth, he claimed.

But an anonymous doctor responded, “From a Medical perspective, especially if you work or have been in a hospital recently, picking your nose and eating it is dangerous.” That’s because staph infections are inhaled and “incubated” in your nasal mucus.

It would be surprising (but welcome) to find scientific literature on the health impacts of eating your boogers. But there has been some research done on nose picking. A study of adolescent nose picking in schools found that all kids pick their nose, about 4 times a day. In a survey of 100 adults in Wisconsin, 91% admitted to picking their nose. But only 75% believed that “everyone does it.” (I infer here that the remaining 16% feel isolated and alone when they are picking their nose.)

And so while nose picking should be accepted as a universal activity, the study authors found a hidden danger. Two of the subjects spent anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours picking their noses. Such behavior can lead to a disorder called rhinotillexomania. That’s the technical term for compulsive nose picking resulting in severe nasal trauma.

That’s grosser than eating your boogers.

Meanwhile, the editor’s pick of booger answers confirmed that eating them probably isn’t the best thing, and you should keep to the Kleenex or traditional pick-and-throw techniques.

It is not for nothing that your nose hairs stop bugs and dust from landing in your lungs or gut. Blowing your nose would not stop everything, but it is better than guzzling snot.

With an incredible diversity of ecosystems, and thousands of species of interesting-looking plants and animals, Peru thrives on what’s called ecotourism. Ecotourism has a glut of definitions, but it’s generally understood to mean a more responsible way of traveling that benefits the environment and the local people. But on top of my hypocritical airplane travel (couldn’t I have gone to the botanical gardens for two weeks instead?), I had to wonder if it’s possible for ecotourism to be eco-friendly.

Even though I was surrounded by natural beauty, I was constantly polluting by default. The fuels used in Peru are far less clean than those in America - something I experienced during a biking trip when I became engulfed in a cloud of noxious fumes and dust every time a car, truck, or “Ecological tourism” bus passed. 8 - 12 hours each way in a jungle-bound van added to my carbon footprint and my fear of death, as the road clung to steep mountain edges. There was limited recycling. In certain towns, there were cans labeled “Organic” and “Inorganic”, nothing marked what that meant. In the mountain towns, banks of small streams were littered with plastic, and everywhere, sewage emptied directly into the river.

Our guide in the Manu jungle was a former park ranger who had an excellent eye and knowledge about Manu’s flora and fauna, and gave small speeches about global warming. But I couldn’t help but feel that I was exacerbating the problem. And how did I know that my activities were benefiting the local environment and community, asides from providing jobs and foreign income?

It would be great if infrastructure improvements were made and attributed to Peru’s ecotourism industry - better roads, treatment facilities, more recycling, and cleaner fuels - things that would both benefit local communities and enhance tourism.

Traveling in Peru is cheap, and I often wondered how anyone made a profit, much less provided environmental and social benefits. A new study from the environmental group Oceana found that one group of ecotourists, scuba divers, would be willing to pay on average, $55.35 to see healthy coral reefs, $39.36 for healthy sharks, and $29.63 for healthy sea turtles.

The survey shows that sharks are cooler than turtles. It also shows that people are willing to pay more to benefit what they enjoy. Certainly, my eco-guilt wouldn’t be quite so great if I knew that somehow, my visit had helped Peru.

Can we prevent a Terminator-style robot war from happening in the future?

This was not something that I used to worry about. And it’s not that I worry about it every day - I’d say robot wars are on the back burner of my brain. It’s just that the first time I watched Terminator, with its dreary yet action-packed vision of 2029, I thought the scenario was completely implausible. Now I kind of think it could happen. Because I’ve talked to futurists.

Both Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom have made careers out of speculating about the future (Kurzweil is also a productive inventor), and I’ve had the good fortune of speaking to them both. They spoke of unlimited potential of technology in the future, allowing us drastically enhance the quality of life and lengthen our lifespans, while finding sustainable solutions to all of the problems that plague us now. But they also warned of the dark side to rapid technological advancement.

“Technology has always double edged sword. And that goes back to fire, and stone tools,” said Kurzweil. “For example, these biological technologies which could cure disease, extend our longevity, could enable bioterrorist to re-engineer a biological virus and turn it from a benign one to a deadly one.”

Bostrom said that nanotechnology (which he named as one of the two technologies most likely to destroy humanity), touted as the solution to many scientific problems, could create surveillance systems that keep despotic governments in power, or make weapons of mass destruction more powerful than the world has ever seen before. He said the other major risk to humanity is superintelligent machines, or computers that equal or surpass human intelligence. Once we create a superintelligent machine, the robots will be able to improve and replicate by themselves, possibly leading to - that’s right, the Terminator.

Kind of makes you want to dig a strongly reinforced hole, doesn’t it? It won’t work. Trust me, I asked. The important question is, will we be smart enough to stop this before it starts?

Bostrom is a philosopher by training, and he believes that before we race to awesome new heights of technology, we need to think about the ethical and moral implications. “A superintelligent machine can achieve whatever desire in the world it wants to produce,” he told me, “so it’s important that its goals are human friendly. But we might fail to provide it with a goal structure to preserve friendliness to humanity.”

Kurzweil echoed this idea. “We have to develop defensives against abuse of the technology, we have to create ethical guidelines so responsible scientists won’t create accidental problems,” he said. “And I think if we do those things it will have a very positive outcome.”

A commenter on one of Bostrom’s essays (incidentally, hosted on Kurzweil’s website), wrote, “Perhaps our power to invent and create will outstrip our power to predict and ameliorate. It wouldn’t be the first time. But we’ll never know unless we try.”

Sure, but we’ll never learn if we’re extinct. So I worry about robot wars in advance.

P.S. I’m taking off for Peru for two weeks, so I’ll be absent from the blogs. But this entry is purposely long, so you can chew on it for a while.

Last year, I wrote about the Geostationary Banana Over Texas, a French-Canadian artist’s dream to launch a gigantic, blimp-like banana into the high wind streams over Texas. The banana would be visible to the naked eye, causing Texans to utter some variation of, “What the….?” when they looked up and saw a banana floating across the sky.

I thought this was really exciting.

When I told my friends about the Geostationary Banana Over Texas, and my intentions to attend the launch, the plans were met with both great interest and deep skepticism. Reactions included: “I can’t believe we’re having a conversation about a gigantic floating banana” and, “Is that legal?” and, “I heard the banana is going extinct. Will that affect the project?”

In the end, it wasn’t the possible disappearance of the Cavendish, or the engineering or legal challenges of putting a banana into airspace, but the inability to raise $1.5 million needed to support the project. A website set up for pledges had received a little over $12,000 at last count. The launch was scheduled for August 2008, and the project has been suspended.

In an email to supporters, the GBOT team claimed abstract success:”…by pioneering the first attempt [to create visual expressions in near-space altitudes], and by being the most successful in pushing forward these types of artistic interventions.”

Yeah, but when will I see a giant banana flying overhead??! I mean, come on, couldn’t this be federally funded? $1.5 million is pocket change to NASA. For less than the cost of a day in Iraq, we could launch a banana over Texas to delight and amuse us for a month. I ask, for the millionth time, where are our national priorities??!

It’s a paradox in our mostly sedentary lifestyles that when we actually exert physical energy, it’s wasted. What’s the use of visualizing your spinning class on the Tour de France if your bicycle doesn’t have wheels? I say, why don’t we hook up that iPod-wearing sweat machine to a plow, and get some work done? Unfortunately, many gym-going urban dwellers don’t own plows.

So here’s what happens when Mitchell Joachim, an innovative urban architect (featured recently on Earth & Sky) is related to a personal trainer: They create a gym that provides workout and eco-friendly transportation. It’s a gym that uses the power of treadmill-pounding, stationary bike-riding, elliptical-pedaling workout fiends to move the less-motivated around the city. And did I mention that it floats?

The “River Gym,” as it’s called, is a series of pod-like fitness islands that paddle around on 15 minute circuits around Manhattan. The idea is that the gyms would ease the load on ferries, and they’d also be outfitted with water purification devices to mitigate water pollution. Docking facilities would provide lockers, showers, healthy snacks, and the like.

So why just exercise when you can get an eco-workout? And why just take public transportation when you can ogle a bunch of sweaty people?

Sounds fantastic. But: Does this gym ship need a captain? I’m not sure what kind of traffic is on the Hudson and East Rivers, but I can imagine the tragedy when the gym hits a barge and everyone’s too tuned out on endorphins to care. And despite the high demand for exercise facilities before and after work hours, how will the gym be powered during off-times? Will everyone have to wait on the dock for someone to sign up for the elliptical in order to get across the river?

So the River Gym is good idea, that like so many innovative eco-designs, will never leave the port of the imagination. I’ll just stick to rowing a real boat for exercise, and keep developing my cutting-edge workout idea. It’s called “Lease Yourself to a Farmer.”

I must have a soft spot for balding white-haired men who write about the ethics of food, because I think this is great news. Recently, Bittman’s written two excellent articles for the Times about meat: one contemplating its energy costs, and the other encouraging people to eat much less of it, moving vegetables to the center of the plate, and using meat for flavor.

Much of what he writes echoes my own reasons for cutting my meat consumption to virtually nill. I think I got the idea from Pollan, though.

Watch Bittman’s TED Talk. He traces the evolution of the food industry decade by decade over the past hundred years, using many of arguments that Pollan shares in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. In fact, his conclusion paraphrases the sentences on the front of the latter book: “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” One commenter on the Pollan/ Bittman compatibility wrote, “Pollan may inspire a lifestyle change, but Bittman actually teaches one the mechanics of getting there.”

I like to imagine Bittman and Pollan holding hands, prancing around pastures of grassfed cattle, shouting easy recipes to each other, and liberating the world from a destructive diet. The Turtles’ song, “So Happy Together” plays in the background. At least that’s my balding white-haired men ethical food fantasy.

You can listen to my chat with Michael Pollan (in which I do not share the above information) here.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWpnehprYc0

Now, look at this ad from the perspective of the aliens, who are viewing human life for the first time. I’m afraid they might think that the Doritos are the intelligent life in the video, not the human. The Doritos are doing primitive dances (an obvious sign of civilization) and have found a clever way to reseal their own packaging (clear sign of intelligence and/or magical abilities), while the man just comes in and dumbly chomps on whatever he finds sitting in his salsa (gross). Also, the ad might cause the aliens to think we haven’t moved beyond stop-motion film. That would cast a dark shadow on their opinion of our culture.

I know there’s no precedent for this type of advertising, nor is there a way to test this on alien focus groups. But I’ve watched a few of the other contest entries, and I think they’re all completely off the mark. Ask yourself, would aliens want to see a giant talking cat begging for Doritos? Or would they laugh at two men sharing a urinal? I just don’t think they’d get it.

Regardless of artistic quality, Doritos really should be thinking about the consequences of their actions. Peter Charles, Head of the Doritos Broadcast Project, declared, “We are constantly looking to push the boundaries of advertising and this will go further than any brand has gone before… We also shouldn’t be too surprised if the first aliens start arriving on planet Earth immediately demanding a bag of Doritos.”

And after that, things get ugly. Let’s all take a moment to appreciate the naive ingenuity of advertising.

On Sunday, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander touched down on the red planet’s surface. Shortly thereafter, it began transmitting images to Earth. A few of them are in color, showing a rosy pink sky and a reddened landscape stretching out into a vast horizon. I’m not a huge enthusiast of space missions, but these photographs are awesome, in the traditional sense of the word. To have such a close-up view of a foreign planet is undeniably amazing. You can take a look for yourself on the Phoenix Mars Lander website.

Mars missions continue to inspire the long-held dream of a human settlement on Mars. But looking at these photos, I can’t help but think: Who would want to live here? Sure, there’s lots of open space, and huge opportunities for development. Of course it’s exotic and sci-fi, and as far as we can tell, the whole unfriendly Martian thing is not true.

But even if we were to figure out how to make the atmosphere not hostile and miserable, Mars looks kind of boring. Once you get over the novelty of picking up rocks and dusting Martian dust off your shoes before you come back into the house, there’s not a lot to do. Hopefully you brought some board games with you from Earth, but inevitably, those get dull, too. I guess you could conduct science experiments, or look for water. But there’s not going to be a swimming pool. I can’t imagine doing anything but going stir-crazy on Mars.

But as I said, I’m not really a space enthusiast. Perhaps someone who already has a lease on a Martian condo could tell me what they plan to do there?