Crawling from the Wreckage by Gwynne Dyer

neither too hot nor too cold to permit liquid water on the surface.
    Gliese 581 c is not another Earth. The gravity is much higher; it is very close to its sun (which is smaller, dimmer and cooler than our own); and it whips around its sun every 13 days compared to our 365 days. But it could potentially support our kind of life—which makes it, for the moment, the second most interesting object in the universe after our own planet.
    We still cannot see if it has an atmosphere, and if so, whether it contains the telltale gases that indicate the presence of life, but a new generation of orbiting observatories planned for the next decade— NASA ‘s Terrestrial Planet Finder and the European Space Agency’s Darwin project—could give us the answers. Darwin, for example, is going to survey one thousand of the closest stars, looking for small, rocky planets and seeking signs of life on them.
    Two big consequences are going to come out of all this. One is a long and tempting list of Earth-like planets in our own stellar neighbourhood, with, quite likely, evidence of life on many of them.
    Unless we can discover some loophole in the laws of physics, we may never reach them—the distances involved are immense—but they will always be there, beckoning us to come and visit, even to come andsettle them. The knowledge that there is a destination worth going to can be a powerful spur to innovation.
    The other consequence is a huge question about intelligent life in the universe. If planets capable of supporting life are so commonplace—last month Dr. Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago that there could be a hundred billion such planets in this galaxy alone—then where is everybody?
    Is intelligence a rare accident in the evolutionary process, or such a self-destructive attribute that intelligent species don’t usually survive more than a couple of centuries after they industrialize? Are they all observing radio silence because there is something dreadful out there? Or have we just not figured out yet how mature galactic civilizations communicate?
    I enjoyed writing that paragraph, too.
    I feel compelled to write a piece about the “war on drugs” every year or so because it’s the stupidest war of all and by far the easiest one to end. Doing so would also save more lives than any other war we might end, but writing about it usually feels like shouting down a well
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    Occasionally, however, a little bit of hope breaks through
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September 4, 2009

THE LONGEST WAR
    It’s too early to say that there is a general revolt against the “war on drugs” the United States has been waging for the past thirty-nine years, but something significant is happening. European countries have been quietly defecting from the war for years, decriminalizing personal consumption of many of the banned drugs in order to minimize harm to their own people, but it’s different when countries like Argentina and Mexico do it.
    Latin American countries are much more in the firing line. The U.S. can hurt them a lot if it is angered by their actions, and it has a long history of doing just that. But from Argentina to Mexico, they are fed up to the back teeth with the violent and dogmatic U.S. policy on drugs, and they are starting to do something about it.
    In mid-August, the Mexican government declared that it will no longer be a punishable offence to possess up to half a gram of cocaine (about four lines), five grams of marijuana (around four joints), fifty milligrams of heroin or forty milligrams of methamphetamine.
    At the end of August, Argentina’s Supreme Court did something even bolder: it ruled that, under the Argentine constitution, “Each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state,” and dismissed a case against youths who had been arrested for possessing a few joints.
    In an ideal world, this ruling