It’s Cicada season in Chicago. For those who don’t know, according to Wikipedia, Cicadas are large locust-type insects that have odd lifecycles - ours are on a 17 year cycle. Every 17 years, they come out from underground, mate, then slit into the bark of a twig and deposits eggs - up to several hundred. When the eggs hatch, the newborn nymphs drop to the ground, where they burrow and start another cycle.
The 17 year long life cycle is an adaptation to predators such as the cicada killer wasp and praying mantis, which could not regularly fall into synchrony with the cicadas. Both 13 and 17 are prime numbers, so while a cicada with a 15-year life cycle could be preyed upon by a predator with a 3- or 5-year life cycle, the 13- and 17-year cycles allow them to stop the predators falling into step.
Fascinating, no? And occasionally gross. Cicadas swarm (loudly) and they are quite blind and dumb, so despite the fact they can apparently do the math to understand prime numbers, they cannot necessarily tell the difference between a human leg and a tree, and therefore have a tendency to climb both.
So our cicadas have been asleep since 1990. In Czechoslovakia over the weekend, a man awoke from a 19 year coma. Imagine, he fell into a coma in 1988, when the country was still under Communist rule, and has woken up to an entirely new world.
Which leads me to a question - 17 years from now, what sorts of change would you like to see? If you were to awake in 2024 after a long hibernation, what progress would you expect?
Me, I’m looking for process innovations to have wiped out hunger and poverty. I want to see innovation in alternative, clean energies turn back the clock on the negative impacts we’ve made on our planet. I want to increase the speed of to reduce the amount of time we all spend in limbo. And I want all the fat and calories removed from my favorite foods.
Let me know what you’d like to see in 2024.
