Habits, Muscle Memory, and Energy Consumption

Learning to play a musical instrument involves training muscles to do things automatically that are too fast for the mind to keep track of. If the muscles learn to do many things automatically, the mind can focus on larger aspects of the music, like expression. Not everyone learns to play an instrument, but we use the same process to negotiate all we do during the day. Some of the movements we do automatically help reduce our carbon footprint, others don't.

For instance, when you go to wash your hands, which hand reaches out to turn on the faucet? Reaching with the left, to turn on the hot water, consumes more energy than the opposite. For the first minute or so, water from either faucet will be cold. Even if you turn on the hot water faucet, chances are you'll have finished washing your hands before any hot water actually comes out. But a silent chain of reactions will have been set off in the house: Hot water will leave the hot water heater and head up the pipes towards your faucet. The water heater then fills itself back up with cold water, which must be heated. Meanwhile, the hot water that got pulled up through the pipes but never made it to the faucet dissipates its heat in the walls of the house, which only makes the A/C work a little harder to keep the house cool in the summer.

Simply using a couple quick doses from the cold water faucet avoids this chain of energy-consuming events, and doesn't change the brief handwashing experience in the least. To "play" a low carbon hand-washing sonata on the faucets, then, means learning to automatically reach for the cold water, get hands wet, turn the water off, soap up, then turn the cold water back on to rinse. It sounds involved, but learn the habit and the muscles will take over while you daydream about other things. Over a lifetime, that's a lot of energy saved.

Imagine if all kids in the elementary schools learned this method, to carry with them in habit and muscle memory for the rest of their lives. It should be part of every crew member's training for a life spent on spaceship earth.