Phoebe Levin

WE SATISFY YOUR TRAVEL URGES BY EXPLORING POLITICAL ISSUES FROM AROUND THE GLOBE!

PhoeBe levin is not not a secessionist.

WA/ustralia

It has been a great year of politicontiki; we have travelled from Nepal to Paraguay, from South Korea to New Hampshire. But for this, our final voyage, we are coming home: to the great state of Western Australia.

The secessionist movement in WA has been a feature of the state’s political landscape, well, forever. Waxing and waning in favour, secessionism rotates between being a sensationalised heading in a periodical on a slow news day, to rising to prominence as a national issue, and then fading back into the depths of media obscurity. Nevertheless, it never seems to stray far from WA’s collective public consciousness, leaving me to wonder, why is this obsession with state sovereignty so pertinent on the west coast?

Developing from the sentiment that the Federal government is so far away from WA that they’ve undoubtedly forgotten about us, the secessionist movement postulates that the west should break off from the rest of the country and realise its potential as a selfgoverning dominion.

Likely being a West Australian resident yourself, you’re probably familiar with the rhetoric that our state is an underappreciated, unsupported Cinderella state — contributing

more money than it gets back from the GST, for example. And look, while this is true, it is quite a leap from this to (correctly) assuming our superiority and legally severing ties with the rest of the continent.

So let me give you a brief history of our ongoing (failing) secessionist movement.

Reluctance to be a part of the Commonwealth is in the fabric of what it means to be a West Australian. Prior to Federation, the colony which is now WA expressed deep reluctance to join the rest of the colonies. At the close of the Nineteenth Century there was a movement for the separation of the Goldfields from the rest of the Commonwealth, to be named Auralia, which the Colonial Secretary paid no credence to, altogether neglecting acknowledgement of it.

In 1933 the movement was inflated to political prominence, coming to a head in a referendum. While 68% of Western Australians voted in favour of breaking away from the rest of the country, the Nationals — the primary group lobbying to secede (really is anyone surprised?) — were voted out of office. The movement subsequently ran out of steam, with the Secession League disbanding in 1938.

However, secessionist rhetoric again infiltrated the political lexicon in 1974, espoused by Lang Hancock. An iron ore bigwig, Hancock founded the Westralian Secessionist Movement to critique trade barriers which he argued harmed the state’s export potential. Like four decades earlier, the movement was soon forgotten about, undoubtedly upstaged by more pressing issues. The resources boom experienced by the state in the early Twenty-First Century brought secessionism back into West Australians’ awareness. Residents were disgusted when it came out that the state was receiving a disproportionately smaller return of the GST which it was contributing to the federal government; giving 10% but only receiving 6% in return.

The latest upsurge in secessionist sentiment you may in fact remember, as it led to the establishment of the Western Australian Secession Movement, a precursor to ‘Waxit’, in late 2017. Even more recently, in June 2020, four “New Westralia” activists were arrested breaking into a courthouse in York to proclaim a new nation.

And just last year, the West Australian ran a poll which found a quarter of our state is in favour of leaving the Australian federation; this is speculated to be the result of the cult of Mark, nurtured by his stance on COVID and adorable hula hoop dancing. While ridiculed by other state leaders, his hard border enshrined him as WA royalty.

Now, personally, I find the continued efforts of a few to split from the place we are quite literally linguistically defined by (Western Australia), rather funny. However, these efforts do speak to a pervasive divide felt by Western Australians throughout the state’s history which will continue to ebb and flow until we either finally gain respect from the east, or follow through on our threat.

Honestly, each option is just as unlikely as the other.

No Life on a Naked Earth

JaCk logan is looking forward to finishing his thesis and doing more mundane things like solving climate change

Without Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field wrapped around the planet like a protective cloak, we’d be toast! Earth would not be able to host life without the exact conditions that those two things provide, and without them being as they are, our little planet would be relegated to the likes of Venus and Mercury – hostile, barren, and aggressively uninhabitable.

How important can such an invisible field really be? While the importance of our atmosphere is first drilled into us as primary school kids, the precise mechanisms and evolution of this essential feature of our planet eludes widespread understanding. So how did we wind up with the atmosphere we have, and what should we expect when (yes, when, not if) it vanishes completely?

The Earth’s atmosphere protects life inside of it by creating pressure, allowing for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface, absorbing deadly ultraviolet solar radiation, and reducing temperature extremes between day and night. While it currently is a mixture of 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, and a remaining 1% consisting of Carbon Dioxide, water vapour, and other gases, the atmosphere is a feature of our planet that has undergone considerable evolution over time, influenced by factors such as volcanic eruptions, weathering, and the onset and development of biological life. Recently, key factors influencing the atmosphere have been of human origin – global warming, ozone depletion, and acid deposition.

One of the atmosphere’s key roles with respect to life on Earth is warming the surface through heat retention, a phenomenon known as the greenhouse effect, which keeps the planet hotter than it would otherwise be and allows us to host oceans full of liquid water. Much like a greenhouse that retains heat from the sun within its glass walls, so too is solar heat

absorbed by the Carbon Dioxide and water vapour in the atmosphere, preventing it from escaping back into space. It’s a hell of a lot of work to be done by substances that only make up 1% of the atmosphere, and atmospheric Carbon Dioxide is a substance that has only declined in concentration over the years. During the planet’s formative years, as Carbon Dioxide fell to the surface and formed layers of sedimentary Carbonate, it gave us the building blocks for the first living cells and all subsequent life on Earth.

Therefore, as the greenhouse effect eased over time, life flourished at temperatures ideal to its survival, which can also be attributed to atmospheric smoothing of temperature differences. Looking at how little our ambient temperatures vary on Earth, compared to other cosmic bodies, gives us an insight into how a life (or rather, no life) without an atmosphere would be. Our own moon, lacking an atmosphere, is barely further from the Sun than we are, and yet its temperature soars to over 100oC during the day, and drops to -18oC at night. Here, with a blanket of air spreading heat and smoothing temperature differences, the average temperature is 15oC.

Critical to terrestrial survival, too, is Earth’s magnetic field, extending from within the core our planet to outer space. The field, like the atmosphere, serves as a protective shield around the planet, but is chiefly concerned with repelling and trapping charged particles emanating from the Sun, known as the solar wind. Without it, our precious upper atmosphere would be stripped away, leaving us exposed to ultraviolet radiation that would waste no time in burning our eyes and skin.

A whole host of other apocalyptic horrors await upon further deterioration of our atmosphere, with a naked Earth heralding the end of

terrestrial life with total silence, birds falling to the ground, a jet-black sky (lack of atmosphere explains why photos taken from the Moon look like that), and boiling oceans. Vapour pressure of bodies of water the world over would exceed the near-zero atmospheric pressure, leading to mass evaporation until an equilibrium point is reached, at which remaining water would freeze, much like the scarce water sources on Mars. Sudden drop in atmospheric pressure would have a more immediately concerning effect, however: inability to breathe. Holding your breath and waiting for your lungs to pop would be the quickest way to go (warning: painful, not recommended), but following exhalation, you would pass out in about fifteen seconds and die in around in three minutes. Not even using an oxygen mask could save you, because your diaphragm uses the pressure difference between the inside of your body and the atmosphere to inhale. Readers can take comfort that such a scenario is unlikely to come to pass since, excepting freak events such as a massive meteor strike or solar storm, our atmosphere will not be vanishing so abruptly, but rather dissipating gradually over the next billion years or so – by which time we’d already either be populating the galaxy or long dead from the effects of climate change.

These terrifying possibilities, however, are important to consider as we search for life elsewhere in the galaxy and explain how our home elsewhere in the universe could never be on a planet such as Venus or Mars. Potential human-friendly exoplanets (i.e. planets outside our solar system) are monitored by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico. Much like looking around town for a new flat, there are features of these possible Earth II candidates that we can be flexible on (for example, we’d be able to live

on a planet half as big and a tenth of the mass of our current home) and others we have to be very strict on. There must be available water and gravity must be strong enough to hold on to an atmosphere and promote life, of course, but factors such as length of orbit are also critical. A human-friendly planet must rotate quickly enough to produce a magnetic field and have a day-night cycle that is not so long as to cause pronounced temperature differences between day and night.

While teams such as the Planetary Habitability Laboratory stress the ideal distance from a star for a planet to support factors such as liquid water – dubbed the ‘habitable zone’ – as the number one key to finding a new home amongst the stars, others stress a different approach. In 2014, researchers René Heller and John Armstrong argued that it is not precisely clear why Earth should offer the most suitable conditions to living organisms, and so planets could be dissimilar to Earth, yet offer more suitable conditions for the emergence of life than Earth did or does. These ‘superhabitable worlds’ could be larger, warmer, and older than Earth, for example. Perhaps, then, combing the galaxy for a mirror image of our planet is the wrong approach.

It is a search that in any case continues, and adjacent dead worlds of Mars and Venus are stern reminders of the importance of the atmosphere to humanity’s past, present, and future. In caring for our own planet and searching for its human-friendly cousins, we must remember that any world is better than a naked one.