Penn Pandemic Diary Penn Pandemic Diary, Entry #24: Pausing to Change Gears

May 8, 2020
By Jimena Nestares | Penn Pandemic Diary

Jimena Nestares is a junior majoring in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania.

It has almost been eight weeks since I returned to Philadelphia from my spring break trip to London and attempted to head to Caracas, my hometown in Venezuela, where my family and closest friends live. Venezuela today has one COVID-19 testing center, 82 ICU beds, no air-travel, a gasoline shortage, and over 80% of its 32 million inhabitants living with food insecurity. If I wanted to go to such chaos, I would have to fly to Miami, then to either Panama, the Dominican Republic or Colombia and from there, catch one of very few flights that land in Caracas. This trip usually takes about 30 hours and was thus impossible as the Venezuelan government closed its airspace minutes after I landed in the US.

Since then I have had delightful days dedicated to my work. I am working remotely on a NASA led project called TIM (Terahertz Intensity Mapper), designing and building parts for a telescope that will be launched on a hot air balloon in an attempt to gather data that has been obscured by intergalactic dust and understand unexplained cosmological characteristics. Our timeline has been significantly set back but I am so lucky we are still running the project. I am in awe at how much respect scientists have received since the crisis began. Before, we were mystified, listened to but quickly silenced by sensationalized noise. Now, we are center stage and likely near-future leaders of our society.

I look up to individuals who against all adversity have persisted in pursuing queries in the name of our species and our planet. In my home in Caracas my mother, Margarita Lampo, is meticulously breeding harlequin frogs in an attempt to save the species from extinction and its environment from biological imbalance. I have become obsessed with researching different architecture and engineering consulting firms that have engaged in projects to create sustainable buildings that have a productive element to them, such as being able to produce energy, provide environment for food growth, and collect and recycle water.

Another rabbit hole I have gone down the last couple of weeks is the idea that some of the products that we buy have an artificially limited lifespan. Knowing that there are products like the Centennial Light, a lightbulb that has been burning since 1901, makes me wonder about the way that manufacturers design products. I stumbled upon an agreement struck by the Phoebus cartel, a group of incandescent lightbulb producers (including Phillips and GE), to collectively limit the lifespans of their consumer products in the 1920s and 1930s. Is it possible that this model has been the norm since?

I really hope that this crisis changes the status quo when it comes to choosing products with shortened lifespans, or else our environment will continue to suffer from pollution. As we begin to observe a rise in air quality since the decrease of flights and manufacturing halt, I reflect on the necessity of flying home so frequently or buying effectively disposable products. I sincerely hope that this crisis is an opportunity for us to adjust our course.

The views expressed in the Penn Pandemic Diary are solely the author’s and not those of Penn or Perry World House.