All Posts Tagged With: "philosophy"
A Leaf
Tonight I met an eighty-five year old friend of my grandfather named Oscar Plummer. Mr. Plummer served in World War II, fought at the Battle of the Bulge, and was awarded the Purple Heart. While at war, he regularly wrote poetry to his young bride who was waiting in central Illinois. Several of these poems were published in a local newspaper.
We had a wonderful conversation where he shared a story from the final days of the war. Mr. Plummer was a Sergeant on patrol when he saw three young, uniformed Germans coming out of the woods. They were unarmed, cold, hungry and offering their surrender. All involved knew the war was ending within the week. Seargeant Plummer said, “if I accepted your surrender, I’m not even sure where we would take you.” He advised them to return to the woods, find some local farmers and do their best to swap their uniforms for plain clothes and return to their homes. They took him up on it, and he said that to this day he wonders if they made it home.
During dinner, this long-retired warrior-poet recieted a short poem. It appears below with Mr. Plummer’s permission.
A Leaf
When I see a leaf upon a tree,
I believe that leaf is like you and me.
When it is young and green and strong,
the wind can blow it all day long.
And as the wind blows it, most every day,
it bends and clings to the limb to stay.
But when it gets older and becomes dry and brittle,
it falls dead to the ground when the wind blows a little.
The smoke when its burned floats up to the sky,
just like our souls whenever we die.
Tonica Days #1–NightLights
August, 1957…
The thing I most remember about being five was that everything that was man-made was drab.
The barn had not been painted in twenty years, so the bits of red paint on its sides had faded to rust color. From my four-foot high vantage point, you could not see the occasional traffic on the dirt road running past the house, but a car’s approach was announced by a cloud of grey dust. Mother’s shift had once been cheery, but years of washing it with the borax needed to soften the well water had faded it until you had to strain to make out the flowers that covered it.
By mid-morning, the black-and-white television had lost my interest. Captain Kangaroo was over, and Commander 5 wouldn’t be on until noon. I sat, playing with my black and white kitten, Muffin, moving a stick through the grass until she chased it. I looked up into the blue, blue sky and watched the white contrails of a B-52 on watch move from one horizon to another.
Mother was hanging laundry out on the line, holding a wooden clothespin in her mouth while wrestling with the bedsheets. Occasionally, there was a breeze that would lift one up with a snap, its brown pin flying back into her basket, from which she retrieved it and started the process over again.
Lunchtime came. If I went slowly and looked carefully for cars, I was allowed to cross the road to my grandmother’s house across the way. Her house was off-white, too, but was surrounded by riotous colors.
My grandmother had had a fight with the Catholic Church about twenty years before, and had never returned to Confession or Mass. Denied Communion, she spent her Sundays on her knees in her flower gardens, tending to the creations of God in a gesture of respect that she hoped Christ and His Mother would understand. If one judged by the results of her labors, God was very pleased with her.
Today, she was waiting for a mole. She sat on a kitchen chair in the shade of a two-hundred year old burr oak with a pitchfolk by her side. She held her finger to her mouth and pointed to the end of the tunnel-mound which had stopped moving at my approach. I stood like a statue waiting for the next step afraid to even breathe deeply. Suddenly, fluidly, she struck at the end of the mound and with one motion, lifted the impaled mole into the air. It described an arc of ten feet or so, landing wounded at the feet of her orange tiger cat, who made short work of the pest.
She made little sandwiches for me, cutting the slices of bread into quarters. We returned to the yard, she in her beige straw hat, me in my off-white T-shirt and brown shorts. I was amazed that everything with color had a name. The flowers were lillies and petunias and african violets. The red insects (not bugs, as she constantly reminded me) were called ladybugs and wouldn’t bite if you wanted to pick one up. The insects with the shiny wings were beetles and I must kill them when I see them, since they ate flowers. The long green ones that prayed were Praying Mantises. They ate other insects that were pests, so they needed to be left alone to do their work.
The red birds were cardinals and had four different songs. In the little birdhouse was Jenny Wren, and when Grandma spoke or whistled to her, Jenny would reply with her 10-note song. Jenny was brown like the dust, and tiny. The robins had orange bellies and would occasionally pull a worm from the ground when Grandma wet the earth in a section of the garden.
The heat of the day settled in, and we drank lemonade in the shade. The cows, black and white Holsteins, grazed on the short grass outside the fence. Soon Mother would come for them, and it would be time to go home. For now, I watched, wide-eyed, as a yellow and black bumblebee moved from one flower to another, the sacs on its legs full to overflowing with pollen stolen from the garden.
My father returned from the fields where he had cultivated beans all day. You could just make out the faded blue of his shirt under the layers of dust. Supper was shades of brown and grey also–mashed potatoes and pork cooked so thoroughly as to have little flavor left in it. Mother put together a small bowl of vegetables–early squash and cucumbers from the garden. I waited until she looked the other way, then moved mine back into the bowl from my plate. She was obviously tired, since she didn’t bother to reprimand me this time.
Dusk fell and my father finished up milking the dozen cows by hand, dumping the milk into cans that sat in the cold trough of water that served a dual purpose. It was deep enough to keep the cans cool overnight while also providing water for the cows who slept near it.
I was not tired, so I sat after sundown on the stones of the cistern cover waiting for the lightning bugs to come out to play….
And, for the first time, became aware of what was happening as the light faded. There was no moon that evening to dilute the view from our back yard. One by one, lights appeared in the sky–not the few visible from a backyard in 2007–but thousands of them, for there were no yard lights, no outside lights at all on farms then to obscure the view.
There were sweeping expanses of glory, the summer Milky Way casting a diffuse glow within the night. Not only were the lights everywhere in the sky, but they were different colors! In the very south, there was a red lantern shining among other bright stars that were arrayed in arcs. Further up the sky, there were bright orange and yellow stars standing out. Everywhere I looked, there was glory, even down to the edge of the sky near Highway 51 a mile away, where I could see the orange running lights of semis heading to their destinations.
Time passed. Occasionally, I remembered to breathe, sometimes not, for I realized that this was what my Grandmother had been talking about when she spoke of the presence of God. I learned a secret that day, one that has served me well for the rest of my life.
There are always times when life fades into the drab, when it is apparent that the vanities of mankind are impermanent. At those times, I can look upward and realize that the sky above me is the same one that I saw that day, so long ago. The house is gone, my Grandmother, too–gone like my kitten, Muffin.
The burr oak looks the same as it did that day. The fields still have corn and beans in them, but no cows low at the thought of grain for supper, and the skies will be there long after I’m gone, too.
Tom
Skateboarding Into the Singularity #3–Left Behind
Since I have written the first two articles in this series, a number of readers have asked me what I think is going to happen to the poor, the disenfranchised and the unwanted in the vastly-changed future that I’ve been talking about.
I was heading into Borders bookstore Friday night when I spotted a copy of Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry Jenkins’ The Remnant. It occurred to me that a disturbingly high number of us in the futurist community that are speaking of the Singularity right now sound like pretribulation dispensationalists, believing that the intellectually virtuous will be saved while the rest of the world suffers through the tribulation of the end times.
Humanity is, indeed, heading at a breakneck speed toward an inflection point. Since the invention of agriculture, which allowed storage of food, and iron, which made metropoli possible, it has worked its way up the food chain to become a superpredator. There is no creature on this planet capable of giving it a run for its money. Ultimately, the next twenty or thirty years is going to answer the question of where it will end up in the Universe’s grand scheme of things.
So, to answer the readers’ question: I don’t expect that the great, unwashed masses are going to do a whole lot one way or the other in this period. However, there’s a couple of points that need to be made in this regard, lest I bring the wrath of heaven (or at least the idealistic) down upon me:
Society sets the stage, “great people” are the actors.
There is always debate within the historical community as to whether or not “the man makes the times” or “the times makes the man.” I am of the opinion that neither is the case, that there have been, throughout history, both polymaths with the range of knowledge that the world needs and visionaries with the understanding of the methods of applying that knowledge. When you get someone like Jefferson (who we discussed yesterday) who is both, you have an individual who significantly alters the future of humanity.
While we can certainly have visionaries within the “outsider” groups of humanity, it is much more difficult to create polymaths there because of the inaccessibility of knowledge within those groups due either to lack of time to pursue it, cultural opposition to obtaining it or lifespans too short to fully utilize the knowledge obtained.
This is not due necessarily to any intrinsic flaw in those groups–often they are oppressed by power structures beyond their control and enslaved by those who wish to use their bodies and minds for their own profit. Nonetheless, with the exception of those few furtive individuals who have the drive for self-education, the world-shaking will not come from that quarter.
Big social and technological changes have come at times when there have been enough of a surplus of goods to allow a class with time over and above mere survival and access to enough information to self-educate. This maximizes the probability that a “great person” will arise through synergy.
Part of the reason that the Singularity is going to have such a big impact is that for the first time in history, we have enough dissemination of information combined with wealthy (historically speaking) individuals, that it is possible that all of the “great people” within a quarter of the earth’s population could be simultaneously empowered at once.
One Jefferson created our present government. One Newton created our science.
What is going to happen when we have a million of them all working at once?
A virtuous “great person” can save a multitude.
“Well”, you say, “looks like it’s really going to suck to be a postman or a taxi driver.”
Humanity has always had the disenfranchised and the poor. (After all, the disciples complained to Jesus that he wasn’t doing enough to help them.) However, for the first time, we now have the capability of making large-scale changes which will aid them powered by the efforts of a single person.
Too idealistic, perhaps?
Absolutely not. Let me give you an example of one person who saved the lives of one billion people and ended hunger for a billion more (and with late 20th Century technology):
There is some controversy over the methods that he employed. However, it is inarguable that in 1960, 60% of the population of the planet suffered from hunger at some time during the course of a year. By 2000, that percentage had dropped to 14%, despite a doubling of the Earth’s population. Anyone who has suffered from the pangs of hunger for more than a couple weeks of their lives knows that they will do anything to avoid this happening again. This great man ended this problem for most of the world.
So, there’s my answer.–While it is unlikely that a great number of the changes that are going to happen are going to be due to the efforts of the “outsiders,” it is quite possible that some of the changes, particularly the ones created by idealist polymaths, could usher in a better life for all of them. It is up to all of us to provide that idealism.
Tom
College of Law Dean Stepping Down
Today University of Illinois College of Law Dean Heidi Hurd announced to the College of Law that she will be stepping down as Dean in August.
What will Dean Hurd’s legacy be?
She was a tenacious fundraiser and an eloquent champion of the college. However, her tenure marked a dramatic change in the faculty rolls, with several of the college’s most beloved teachers taking positions elsewhere. Under Dean Hurd, the College of Law’s approach to admissions seems to have shifted from a comprehensive view of individual candidates to a more LSAT driven approach to admissions, playing to the U.S. News rubric, instead of holistically looking for the best potential lawyers and leaders.
From everything we’ve heard, Chancellor Herman considered Dean Hurd one of his most effective Dean’s. Also, it’s a safe assumption that Professor Michael Moore will be leaving with her. For some, this is an even bigger loss than the Dean.
Dean Hurd’s gracious annoucement is below:
—–Original Message—–
From: Hurd, Heidi M.
Sent: Mon 6/4/2007 8:39 AM
To: * College of Law Community
Subject: Announcement
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
I have been honored to work with you during the past five years to advance the agenda of excellence that has long characterized the University of Illinois College of Law. I am grateful for the valuable lessons I have learned as the College’s 11th dean and for the opportunities that the role has given me to partner with entrepreneurial faculty, bright students, dedicated staff, visionary university leadership, and committed alumni in building a vibrant intellectual community. However, I am writing to tell you that while Provost Katehi has very kindly encouraged me to renew the leadership pledge that I made to the College five years ago, I have decided to return to my roots and resume the projects that inspired me to become an academic in the first place. I will serve in the deanship through August 15th so as to allow the Provost time to name interim leadership and to staff a committee to seek a permanent replacement, and then I will join my colleagues on the faculty in dedicating my energies to scholarship, teaching, and public engagement. In the Fall I will teach two sections of Criminal Law as I resume work on the book project that I set aside five years ago, and in the Spring, Michael and I will seek out new adventures by returning with our children to Australia where we will spend six months as research fellows at the Australian National University in Canberra.
I am confident that the ambitious trajectory that faculty, staff, alumni, and university leaders have set for the College will be advanced by fresh leadership. I know that both the interim dean and my permanent successor will be grateful for the help of all those who are anxious to capitalize on the gains of the past years, and I urge each of you to provide unwaning support and encouragement to those who assume leadership of the College during the transitional months to come and over the years of certain growth and change that lie ahead.
My thanks to all of you for the extraordinary experience you have given me over the past five years.
Sincerely,
Heidi M. Hurd
Dean
David C. Baum Professor of Law and Philosophy
Co-Director of the Illinois Program in Law and Philosophy
University of Illinois College of Law
Heroes, Part 2
I want to renew the last topic from the beginning, since I realize that the big question that I asked the readership was not answered.
First, though, some last comments on good and evil:
I found Prescott’s analogy of alcoholism to be interesting.
[Syl, if you haven't gone back that far, go back to the very end of March and read my piece called 25 Years. I'm going to be thinking about that post while writing this.]
I don’t think that people are either good or evil by nature. Prescott’s right in that evil is easy and quickly rewarding–How many of the people you see, Syl, are tempted to the dark side because they don’t ever expect waiting to give them any positive results?
I’ve spent the last twenty-five years training myself away from the easy and evil. It’s been only a decade or so since I made the willful decision to pledge myself to the Light. I see a great deal of evil falling upon America–that was the subject of the previous post in the first place–as mentioned by Fred Reed on his blog.
The biggest problem that we have as a people, perhaps, is that for the Light to fail here, all people have to do is remain silent and go on with their lives. Evil, as promulgated by our government will slowly drain any good that’s left from our culture and civilization and let us fall into obscurity and darkness.
I guess what I’m saying, (and what I tried to elicit thirty posts ago) is that good has to be proactive, while this is not necessarily true of evil. I was surprised that so many of the replies in the previous topic were changes that the co-respondents believed that the society or government needed to do in order to save the world. What I was looking for, which almost no one answered with, were three things that YOU, the reader could do to save the world.
In a lot of ways, the Heroes analogy was even better than I thought. One of the remarkable things about the writing in that series is that the Super-powered individuals are, at the end of the day, people just like us. Even the darkest of villains do not see themselves as such with their own eyes.
At one point, a Supervillain explains how the destruction of a major city would result in a better world. He looks at a painting of a shock-wave tipping buildings and mentions that to get this, only 0.07% of the population of the world had to die, and how the result would certainly justify their sacrifice.
This is a kind of evil that we need to watch for in ourselves, as well as in those that we allow to have power over our lives–pragmatism is never worth immorality, no matter how tempting its fruit.
So, I’m going to restart the discussion with the question–”How Do You Think You Could Be a Hero?” Give me three things that you can do today, as the person you currently are, to help save the world.
Tom
Not Just Matter Set in Motion
It looks like scientists may have found a pre-condition for free will in, of all things, fruit flies.
If this is really the case, it has deep-seated implications for both religion and the philosophy of strong AI. There is an entire sub-set of atheism that believes that the concept of free-will is a misconception and that we, as very intelligent animals, merely do what we are programmed to do by our genes interacting with the chemicals in our brains.
This new discovery could possibly lead to a mathematical proof for the existence of the soul. Good first step.
Tom
Why Is This Pro-Life Argument Not More Popular?
Two recent developments in the world of prenatal science have caused me to start pondering why a less conventional argument against abortion rights has not taken on more steam.
The first is this New York Times article about the rise of prenatal testing for Down’s syndrome, which had previously been available only to women over 35 but is now available for all pregnant women. A stunning 90% of women who who are given a Down’s syndrome diagnosis choose to have an abortion. This is concerning to parents of children with Down’s syndrome, who argue that if people knew more about the realities of raising a child with Down’s syndrome, they would not so often decide to abort. These parents, faced with the decreasing population of children with Down’s syndrome, understandably worry about what will happen to their children in a world where their potential companions are aborted:
“If all these people terminate babies with Down syndrome, there won’t be programs, there won’t be acceptance or tolerance,” said Tracy Brown, 37, of Seattle, whose 2-year-old son, Maxford, has the condition. “I want opportunities for my son. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong, but I do.”
The second development is that a company called DNA Worldwide has begun offering home test kits that can determine the gender of the child at six weeks. Previous gender tests have not occurred until twenty weeks. This has spurred objections that the test will facilitate abortions for sex selection. The company has said it is not selling the test in China and India and some other areas, but ultimately argues:
The company operates in the UK, a liberal society that does not prize babies of one sex over another, a culture which also places the responsibility for the unborn baby firmly with the mother. As this is the case with most if not all Western cultures we are happy that, with education and informed debate, responsibility should lie with the individual.
Both of these stories present difficult ethical questions that we have discussed here at Urbanagora before. But they have gotten me wondering, why hasn’t the pro-life community used stories like these more effectively to argue against a woman’s right to choose? It seems to me that all this time, pro-lifers have centered their arguments on one simple assertion: abortion is murder. Obviously many Americans do not accept that argument. But I would guess most Americans – even many pro-choice Americans – are uncomfortable with anything that could lead this country down a path toward eugenics. With all of the prenatal tests that are now offered, wouldn’t an effective pro-life argument be that allowing women to get abortions means that we will be entering a brave new world in which children with characteristics parents don’t like will be aborted?
I should note, I don’t accept the argument. I’m just asking since it seems that it would be an effective tool and I’m wondering why it isn’t being employed. Ultimately, I have no real issue with pregnant women who receive a Down’s syndrome diagnosis getting an abortion. I fully understand the desire not to be burdened by that (and let’s not skirt around the issue by pretending a child with Down’s syndrome wouldn’t be a burden, at least to many parents). I do have a problem with sex selection, but I don’t perceive that as being a problem in the Western world. If I’m wrong about that, then we should regulate gender selection tests, not abortion. As I have said before, I think the most ethically sound solution is to allow parents, whether they are dealing with embryos or feti, to avoid children who possess traits that medicine considers a disorder or disease, then prohibit selection beyond that.
Prisons, Violence & Democracy
National Geographic has been airing a lot of great programs on prison life. Much of the focus is on the gangs which form along precisely drawn racial lines and the violent interactions of the gangs. While I was in the bathroom today (the place where Eddie Van Halen and I do our best thinking), I got to thinking about how I would behave if I were in jail.
I decided that I would try to revolutionize prison life by attempting to channel the violent energies of my fellow inmates into political energies. The prison life essentially mirrors human life before organized government. As Hobbes speculates, people got sick and tired of being attacked and killed by fellow humans, so they all (or most) agreed to form a “Leviathan” They saw mutual advantage in giving up their “right” to kill others in exchange for receiving the “right” not to be killed.
So this all leads to the interesting question…Why have the prison cultures not evolved into a government? Do the shot callers have too much power and thus act as a barrier to the formation of a government? Are the inmates simply accustomed to violence? Do the inmates care less about their lives than ordinary humans who have chosen to operate within society’s laws? Perhaps it is inevitable that government among inmates could not form since by definition the people in prison have chosen to shatter their “social contract” and would have been among the “bullies” in early human days who would have preferred anarchy (Tom, hahaha). Mostly I’m rambling, but I do think that the politics and culture of prison life is ripe for social science research.
(In other news, the stock market crash that all of my pals on this blog predicted and even proclaimed to have occurred, and you know who you are, is violently underway…after all, the Dow has come crashing down to the horrifying, doomsday level of…13,300.)
Fermi and Drake
The world is buzzing this week about what could be called the most important discovery of the decade in astrophysics–the discovery of a planet within the habitable zone of a red dwarf star, Gliese 581. I want to talk about this and explain why it is truly important for our understanding of our role in the universe as human beings.
Let’s start, first of all, with one of my favorite physicists, Enrico Fermi. I’ve heard a lot about him over the years, especially since the head of High-Energy Physics at the university when I began as a contractor was his graduate student on the Chicago Pile Project, Al Wattenburg. Fermi was an amazing man without whom the Manhattan Project probably would not have succeeded. He’s currently best known among astronomers, though, for a characteristic way of thinking and the question that came from it.
Fermi was the king of the back-of-the-envelope calculation. He used to ask questions in his courses like, “Calculate the number of grains of sand on all of the beaches of Earth.” These came to be known as “Fermi Questions.”
Although it seems far-fetched, it is possible to solve Fermi Questions to about an order of magnitude or so by making some logical assumptions. To solve the one above, you need an order of magnitude approximation of the following items: the volume of a grain of sand, the packing efficiency of sand grains on sand beaches, the length of all the coastlines of the planet, the percentage of such coastlines with sand beaches and the average width and depth of the sand on those beaches. I’ll leave it to you engineers out in the reading audience to come up with an answer to the question if you want a break from your study for finals. Here’s a few more.
Fermi used assumptions like this to calculate the yield of the Trinity A-bomb. He stood at a safe distance with his back to the tower. When he saw the flash, he opened his hand and allowed small pieces of paper to fall from them. By the distance that they were tossed by the shockwave, he was able to calculate the power of the weapon.
He also used this method to calculate, over lunch with his graduate students, that it would take an average of 100 million years to colonize the galaxy using self-replicating machines if they could not go faster than light. This led to the famous Fermi paradox, “if this is so, there should have been 45 alien civilizations colonizing our planet by now–where are they?”
Now, we move forward about ten years to Green Bank Radio observatory, where scientists are listening for intelligent signals from alien civilizations. An astrophysicist came up with a Fermi-type question: “How many civilizations are there in the Milky Way Galaxy with whom we can communicate?” The Fermi solution to this became known as the Drake Equation.
Over the years, information has been plugged into it, getting estimates of anywhere from 10,000 to .0000001, depending on the assumptions going into it. A range this wide in a Fermi solution means that there’s not enough knowledge to make a good guess, since a Fermi solution should be reasonable within only a factor of 10 either way.
[I want to take a moment and mention that the Drake Equation is not a scientific hypothesis. A hypothesis must be verifiable by experimentation. Since that is impossible, it falls closer to a philosophical concept than a hypothesis. Michael Crichton pointed this out years ago.]
Now we get to the center of the relevance of Gliese 581c. Until this past week, we knew of exactly four rocky worlds within the habitable zone of a star at present–Venus, Earth, the Moon and Mars (with one more, Titan, that would be at the right temperature after the Sun became a Red Giant). There was absolutely no way to tell whether or not there was something completely unique that prevented such worlds from occuring in other systems.
There were many theorists that believed just that–that gas giants spiralled into their sun destroying rocky planets as they go unless something truly unusual (like the resonances in our solar system) prevented it. There were a lot of Hot Jupiters orbiting very close to their suns that seemed to endorse this view.
Gliese 581c has a typical mass for a rocky world at 5 Earth masses (abbreviated Me henceforth.) The transition between a rocky world like Earth and a gas giant is theorized to be about 10 Mes.
It also gives a new number to plug into the Fermi Question. We had not, until now, had any example of a small planet within the habitable zone of a different star. Now we do and it’s close–only about 20.5 light-years away. I did a quick calculation yesterday and if we assume that this distance is typical (a valid assumption because even though such planets could be more rare, we have a very low sampling rate within the solar neighborhood) I come up with a total estimate of 300 million rocky planets within the habitable zone of their stars outside the central third of the galaxy where the radiation from the core’s black hole and the high frequency of supernovae would be problematic.
This new planet is important because it is circling a Red Dwarf Star. Such stars have not been targets of examination in the past because they were not seen as likely candidates for life. There are billions of them in the galaxy–80% of the stellar population are Red Dwarfs. One characteristic of such stars is their extremely long lifetimes compared to other stars. Earth will have probably 5.5 billion years total in which water-based life is possible on its surface at its present distance before stellar evolution heats it beyone the boiling point of water. Gliese 581c, with a mass half that of the Sun has 5 or 6 times as long in which life could develop. In other words, we on Earth have perhaps a billion years of viabilty remaining as an ecosphere. Our equals on 581c would have over 26 billion years left for the life lottery.
Lastly, it has a Hot Jupiter inside its orbit. This means either that Hot Jupiters do not necessarily destroy rocky planets outside of their orbits as they spiral inward or that they are formed where they are currently found and do not spiral in at all.
Now, a cautionary note before we get too excited. Red Dwarfs are very different from our sun. They are cooler and dimmer and their spectrum has much less Ultraviolet light, which forms a protective ozone layer above our planet and Gliese 581 (man, we need a better name for this star and its planets now that it’s important, it’s too damn long to type each time) is what is called a “flare star.” These stars have a tendency to have much larger versions of the solar flares that our sun exhibits. Therefore, the sunward side of the planet would have a much higher dose of X-Rays than our world receives.
Why is the discovery of this new world important in a philosophical sense? Our estimated number for possible other races and civilizations has just gotten a lot larger. This reopens the Fermi Paradox for consideration, since it is proportionally more surprising that we have no evidence of other races having reached our solar system.
I’m going to have a bit of fun here at the end. I’m going to examine the parameters of the system and see if I can describe a habitable world there and what one would experience as one of its people. I am not implying that any of my conclusions are valid, merely that the science that I am employing is current.
First of all, it is highly likely that the planet is tide-locked to its sun, much as our Moon always has one side facing the Earth. This means that it has a bright-side and a dark-side. (Where’s David Gilmore when you need him?) How high Gliese would stand in the sky would depend on how close you were to the Hot Pole–the point at which the star would be overhead all the time. Gliese would appear to be about seven times larger than our sun does.
I am going to assume that the point where our planet….let’s name it Fredville, for lack of a better name….first formed was similar to where Earth formed in our solar system and that the composition of the molecular cloud was the same. Therefore, it would have a similar amount of water in its rocks and have been hit by a similar number of comets. (See why this is speculation or science-fiction? There’s way too many unknowns.)
Because of the amount of water and minerals, it would have about 70% of its surface covered with water. However, the distribution would be very different from that of the Earth. Because of the tidal effects of being so close to its star, Fredville would have a tendency to have its oceans preferentially located at the sunrise and sunset points of the planet. This would mean that the planet would have a ring of oceans completely around it, with one large continent facing the star and another one on the farside.
It was once assumed that a tide-locked planet would have its atmosphere frozen completely on the dark side. By studying Venus, which has an extremely long rotation, scientists have discovered that the atmosphere of near-locked planet circulates anyway due to differences in temperature. Venus rotates in 243 days, but its atmosphere goes completely around the planet in only 4 days. There are winds blowing off of the hotside near the equator, but the air is returned to that side by opposing prevailing winds at different latitudes. The closer you get to the Hot Pole, the higher the temperature, perhaps reaching as high as a constant 95 degrees Fahrenheit. At the sunset/sunrise lines, it’s comfortable on Fredville, and by the time you get to the Cold Pole in the middle of Farside, you’re down to Antarctic temperatures.
Most important, there’s life on Fredville. The intelligent Freddies evolved from creatures that lived in the Ring Ocean. They breathe oxygen like us, but look a lot different. When life left the ocean and crawled onto the Hotside land, the ones without shells died from the X-radiation with which Gliese regularly bombared the planet. Freddies look a lot like Earth’s hermit crabs, except that their shells are extruded. Babies are kept inside thick manufactured shells until they’ve grown their own carapace. Since the gravity on Fredville is twice that of Earth, things fall faster and it is a lot easier to be injured, so they grow up fast and tough.
On the Farside, there are different kinds of life-forms, but they’re much more primitive due to the lack of energy from the sun. They resemble Earth-like fungi and have limited vision capability. Close to the Cold Pole, there’s no life at all and it’s eternally dark except for the stars, the other planets of the system and an occasional aurora near the magnetic poles.
The Freddies have explored their planet and discovered the stars when they crossed the Ring Ocean four hundred years ago. Now that they’ve discovered astronomy, chemistry and physics they look up at the sky at the sunset line and wonder, “Is there life out there? If so, where the hell is it?”
Tom
Psychokillers and Evil
I’ve waited a few days after the Virginia Tech shootings to write this, in order to let the dust settle a bit and allow all the windbags on the ‘Net to show how this incident proved that all of their own particular legislation was needed or that their world-view was the only possible one that could explain it. As I suspected, there was no shortage of such commentary.
[Lally, I am very pleased that your DI column did not do either of the above.]
I’m not going to make those kinds of comments. (I’m sure that each and every one of our readers is now breathing a sigh of relief.) The feeding frenzy that accompanies any shocking event now is virtually inescapable unless you disconnect completely from society. I’ll be damned if I’ll add to it.
I’m going to instead tell a couple of stories. The first one is a sad, perhaps to some, a horrific, one. The second has a happy ending, so far.
I have found myself drawn to the stories of Drs. Roy and Falco, who were the head of the English Department at VT and Cho’s instructor, respectively. They found themselves faced with a young man who allowed them insight into an alien world populated by evil individuals who interacted with each other violently. They tried to help him, to inform the authorities and to do something to fix the situation in which they found themselves. Ultimately, all of their efforts ended in tragic failure.
In the 1994-95 school year, I had a student named James. He was one of the “older students” that I occasionally get in my Freshman class. Often, these people have been in one form or another of military service, which has delayed their entry into the academic world. I had always looked forward to having these students since they displayed a greater quanity of motivation, and, possessing world-experience, were often able to almost instinctively apply theory to practice.
James did very strange things to my psyche. From the moment that I first encountered him, there was a little monkey inside my skull that was desperately pounding on the walls of his enclosure and screaming for me to do something, anything to escape from the presence of this man. He wasn’t particularly physically threatening. He was a fit, if a little thin, six-foot-three or so and had the dark complexion often possessed by South-East Europeans. He had been born in Serbia, and had moved to Canada with his parents. He was a veteran of the Canadian Navy, and was applying for US Citizenship. (He received that in December and shortened his name by about six consonants at that time.)
It was almost as if he had an alien scent to him. His lab partners avoided working with him as much as they could. Other students, especially women, would fall silent in his presence and edge further and further away from him as a conversation continued.
He wasn’t the quiet loner that is often described. He was very, very intelligent, and could carry on a normal conversation but seemed to be disdainful or contemptuous to all who spoke to him. One thing, however: Never, in two semesters, did he ever receive a point-deduction from a lab report that he felt was actually his fault.
Any error that was pointed out to him was claimed to be the result of actions of his lab partners, a mistake in the instructions in the book or due to capricious grading by a TA or instructor. Not once did he ever acknowledge responsibility for a negative result. At the same time, his demeanor became more and more disturbing without there ever being anything reportable.
Time passed. Over the summer after his Freshman year, he put up flyers announcing the creation of an Objectivist Club for the university. (This is different than the one that is currently here–that was founded four years later in 1998.) As a libertarian, I sent the organization email, then dropped the idea of joining immediately when I found that the club only consisted of him.
James got a job working for a research group. During this time, he struck up a passing acquaintance with the older woman who was the head of our computing division. He became obsessed with her, sending her inappropriate emails. Once again, nothing was done.
On Halloween afternoon, as the woman, leaving early for the day, carried the butterfly wings that she had made for her daughter’s Halloween costume, she was followed and pulled into the basement of a campus building where she was murdered by the man that so thoroughly disturbed us all.
That night, James put his feet beneath the rails of the Illinois Central railroad on the edge of campus and waited for a freight train, which spread him over about a half-mile of track. Close to 100% of those who knew both people were sure that the two incidents were related.
The campus was thrown into a week of turmoil as the police refused to announce that it was safe. After our last class of the afternoon, we sent cadres of male students to walk our co-eds home. Hour exams were moved from the evening hours to the afternoon. Finally, the evidence of his shoe-print as well as fingerprints from the duct tape were linked.
I’d love to say that great strides in campus safety resulted from this senseless killing, but I’d be lying if that was the case. What ended up happening was the installation of police call-boxes, additional streetlights and the removal of the lovely hedges that used to decorate the areas around the old buildings on the Quad. The thing is, none of these things would have done anything to prevent the murder had they been done before the fact.
The whole incident faded into the past while we shook our heads and guiltily examined our actions in detail. Over and over, I asked myself, “Was there anything at all that I could have done, any difference that I could have made, any sign that this was coming?” Of course, there aren’t any real answers to these questions available.
There was a second chance, though. In the fall of 2001, I had exactly the same feelings about a student, the same visceral reaction, the same screaming monkey in my skull. This young man was from a small town in Central Illinois, but the feeling of wrongness was simply overwhelming.
He came to class for three weeks and I watched the students move away from him as he walked by and the female students giggle nervously to hide their discomfort as they moved by his lab bench.
Fate intervened. The afternoon of 9/11, he came to class as usual, but was actually grinning. He chucked to himself as he described the workers in the Twin Towers leaping from the windows of the buildings and flying like “Peter Pan” as they fell to the ground. It was the first time I had ever seen anything but a blank expression on his face.
It was time for an intervention. Even though it would have meant my job if I had been caught, I decided that this time it was worth it. I obtained his home phone number from the student-staff directory and called his parents and told them that I believed that their son was severely disturbed and might be a danger to himself and others.
Surprisingly enough, they listened. One of them came to pull him out of school, while the other one, with some neighbors, did a search of the basement workshop where he had spend much of his time as a teen-ager. Hidden behind a section of wall was his murder kit, including the initial notes on his plans.
The student was committed to a mental institution after being diagnosed as schizophrenic. Fortunately, he turned out to be one of the fortunate ones who could be treated with medication, and, as of six months ago, was living a normal life in his home town. My gamble had paid off.
Evil in our world is a very real thing. There is the Lawful Evil that is the property of despotic governments and results in the removal of human freedom and dignity. There is the Neutral Evil that is exhibited by school bus drivers who look the other way while a half-dozen bullies tear the glasses from a thin, crying ten-year old and scrape them repeatedly against the sharp corners of his seat.
Then, there is the Chaotic Evil of those for whom we are only shadows–puppets to be manipulated for their own amusement. The times that we are allowed to view the world that they inhabit, we recoil in horror. It is entirely proper that we do so, for it is a glimpse of the hell that is uniquely theirs.
Tom