I’m just going to write this hell for leather without doing much research and so forth. It’s going to be quite stream-of-consciousness. I’ll start with our cabin in the woods.
Once upon a time, in 2005 CE, we bought a cabin in the woods, kind of. It was actually a chalet in Swithland, next to Swithland Wood. Incidentally, Swithland Wood was weird. For my fortieth birthday I cycled up to the chalet to spend the day meditating on my former and future life. I arrived the evening before, went to bed, then woke up the next morning and decided to go to a shop in the nearby Anstey, get some breakfast and come back to spend the day doing that. In fact, I got lost in the woods on the way to the shop and on the way back, only getting back in the evening. I ended up spending most of my time going through my accounts and trying to work out a pattern, and it was in fact quite useful because I was able to ascertain my busiest and quietest months and worked out a strategy to structure my activity accordingly. A few years later, we sold the chalet.
However, this is not the main point of this post. At the time, much of the home ed community in Leicester and some other people had access to a pottery studio, and we still have much of the ceramics made by Sarada there. One significant item, made by our friend who is, like me, from Kent, was a leafy green glazed “old man of the woods” mask, which Sarada hung on the outside wall of the chalet. It’s hard to locate an actual image of this mask, but it looks something like this:
This absolutely does not do justice to the appearance of the mask but does give a basic impression of how it looked. It was darker, glazed, followed the outline of a face and was leafy. I mean, what can you do?
As I said, our friend is from Kent, although unlike me she’s from the Medway area which makes her a “furrener”. Kent is divided into “Of Kent” people and “Kentish” people and she is from the Other Side. Nonetheless, it’s notable that she made this excellent mask because it corresponds to a folk figure we have in Kent: the “Woodwose”.
When you grow up with something it often takes you a while to realise that not everyone does things the way you and the people around you do. For instance, I didn’t learn that the word “strig” was not part of standard English. Nonetheless, the Home Counties are mainly part of a hegemonic culture and most of what’s standard there is standard everywhere in the sense that the élite effortlessly assume that’s how things ought to be and is somehow best. This appears to make things harder to perceive when they are not part of this, and due to my stratospheric privilege, I find it more difficult to see these things even when they aren’t part of “how things are”. Even so, the Woodwose is one of those things, and it seems to be a Kent thing, although I shall say more about that later because actually it isn’t that simple.
First of all, the term “woodwose” originates at the latest from the thirteenth Christian century. The “wood” bit is obvious, the “wose” less so, but it basically means “being”, from the Old English verb “ƿeſan” or “wesan”, which is “be”. There were actually two verbs for “be” in Old English, like many of its relatives such as the Sanskrit “asti” and “bhavati”, but let’s not get sidetracked. A woodwose is a mysterious hermit-like person living in the woods, usually assumed to be a man. He’s frightening and doesn’t like to be disturbed, preparing to keep himself to himself. He is hairy all over and has long, matted scalp and facial hair. There are carvings of the woodwose in Canterbury Cathedral.
Apparently the woodwose is also known elsewhere in England, such as in Suffolk, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was known under other names all over Britain. I don’t think legends of his existence are likely to have survived to the present day in Kent but when I was a child, in about 1974, my friends used to talk about a rumour that there was just such a man living in the woods behind our house who occasionally came into the village and of whom everyone was frightened. It might serve some social function for children to be afraid of people they don’t know, so maybe to some extent this is to do with “stranger danger”, which actually focusses on the wrong issue since people children know are usually more dangerous to them than people they don’t. Nevertheless, maybe there’s an element of that in there.
Even so, I would personally like it to go further back. I learnt that this folk figure was called the “woodwose” in 1981, and that was the last I heard of him. But there are other stories about such people. One of them is Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which may date back to separate stories told by 2100 BCE. I’m just going to do a quick survey of some others:
The Ancient Greeks used to talk about “primitive” barbarians who, if I remember rightly, lived in caves and dressed in animal skins. I don’t know if this idea is just a thing that’s out there with no particular significance, a reference to a real people who weren’t unusually primitive but just lived that way, an insulting reference to barbarians considered inferior or the origin of our own popular idea of prehistoric cave people, and since I’m doing stream of consciousness-type writing here I won’t be looking it up.
There are two sets of people called the Kaptar and the Alma told of by the Azeris and the Mongols respectively. They’re covered in ginger hair, have sloping foreheads, prominent eyebrows and large jaws. A group of them was said to have been found warming themselves by a camp fire in 1927.
The Greeks, again, talk of Pan and satyrs, one of whom is said to have been found in 86 BCE and brought before the Roman general Sulla and to have had a voice sounding halfway between a neigh and a bleat. Pausanias, the Greek geographer, mentions the grave of the satyr Silenus in the second century CE. Lucretius described the early state of the human race as based on foraging, subject to predation, tending to die of starvation but never excess, immune from the vagaries of state-initiated violence and devoid of the urge to kill oneself. I suppose this is quite a straightforward thing to guess but it’s still interesting that for some reason the Ancient Greeks and Romans in particular seemed to have quite a firm grasp of what prehistoric life was like for humans, and even what prehistoric humans were like. Then again, prehistory was more recent for them than it is for us.
About a thousand years ago, the Arabs wrote about the Nasnas, wild people found in the Pamir mountains and Kashmir, completely covered in hair except for the faces.
A serious Tibetan zoology textbook from about two hundred years ago records a hairy half-human being along with other fauna widely agreed to exist. Then again, bestiaries are full of such things.
A boy captured in the woods and formerly living in them near Kronstadt in 1784 was described as having a very hairy body, a sloping forehead and prominent brow ridges. He never learnt to speak. This is of course similar to accounts of feral children.
The Kazakhs had stories of wild people with pointed ears, small noses, sloping foreheads, prominent eyebrows and massive jaws.
There are many others, and they tend to have descriptions of features in common. Apart from the hairiness, which judging by various evolutionary clues was probably not a feature of the people in question, these do really sound like Neanderthals, even to the extent of the description of their voices, which have recently, long after these accounts, been described as high-pitched. The persistence of these stories is odd at first, since Neanderthals are thought to have gone by 40 000 years ago. However, the “hobbits” were also said to have died out in Palaeolithic times but there seem to be persistent legends of their existence in Southeast Asia and there are likewise stories in some places which seem oddly reminiscent of Irish Elks, who became extinct almost eight thousand years ago. I think maybe what we’re missing is that literacy may have had a negative impact on how well we can remember things and hand down knowledge and skills, and we don’t appreciate that actually prehistoric tales may be both more accurate and more persistent than we’re used to. Maybe memories just used to be better than they are now.
Back to rural Kent. The area of land which has now become the British Isles was formerly a peninsula of the European mainland stretching out into the Atlantic because sea level was about two hundred metres lower during the ice ages. Earlier on, during the Pliocene, the British Isles were indeed islands, though not necessarily with the same shape or number as they have today. Each ice age seems to have been less severe than the previous one. As I understand it, and I am doing this from memory, there have been five ice ages in the past million years, namely the Donau, Günz, Mindel, Riss and Würm. Of these, the first was mildest and for Britain the ice sheets were each time further north than before. Prior to, and possibly between, these ice ages the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine and had hippos living in it. It also marked the southern limit of the glaciers during the severest cold periods. Consequently the area south of the Thames is unusual in that it was never completely covered with ice, although the Devil’s Kneading Trough in Wye suggests that there were some small glaciers. To me, this suggests that Kent and what’s now the South Coast may have had a mixture of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals at that time, and I want to believe, unscientifically but perhaps intuitively, that the woodwose was in fact partly an old story with a basis in fact: there used to be Neanderthals living in Kent remembered in folklore, and the idea was preserved up until at least 1974 and handed down to me. They may also have been persecuted unfairly, with just a few of them living isolated lives in the woods, unsurprisingly hostile to the rest of us who had wiped them all out.
While I’m at it, I want to make another point about apes more generally. When Hanno the Navigator explored Afrika two and a half millennia ago, he reported the existence of an island peopled by fierce and hairy people, whose men were impossible to capture but whose women he took back to Carthage. According to Pliny the Elder, their skins were still present in a temple there when the Romans destroyed it in 146 BCE. These were referred to as Gorillai, which is obviously the origin of the word “gorilla”. Similarly, the word “orangutan” translates into English as “wild human”. The significant thing to note about these two references is that both are examples of ancient humans referring to other species of ape as human and not as non-human animals. Maybe this allows us to conclude that the current popular understanding of the human race as separate is not only inaccurate but a fairly recent invention, and therefore that the woodwose was not previously othered but considered part of a much larger human family including all great apes.
There’s a time-worn philosophical problem in certain circles which has a recent iteration through the medium of video games. Although they have changed considerably since, Space Invaders illustrates this. Computer game protagonists are either player characters, PCs, ornon-player characters, NPCs. In Space Invaders, the PC is the base shooty thing you move about at the bottom of the screen. NPCs are the aliens and flying saucers. You can’t play Space Invaders as one of those – they’re NPCs.
Nowadays, games are much more convincing and imagination has become less important, so gamers have more immersive experiences in 3-D simulations, but there are still PCs and NPCs. There are still characters whom one can play as and characters one cannot play as.
Some people extend that to meatspace. There are people who roleplay as NPCs, for example. Some people also now truly believe there are NPCs in the physical world, or at least in the simulation which some of them hold reality to be. That is, there are people who see themselves as real and another set of figures around them as not having minds or consciousness at all. Not a very healthy development, but it has significant implications. However, there is nothing new under the Sun, and this is just today’s solipsism. In analytical philosophy, this is the problem of other minds: since we only have access to our own consciousness, for all we know everyone else we meet could be a robot or a zombie with no inner life at all.
I’ll get back to that, because for now I want to mention Edwina Currie. I was once at a protest against Edwina Currie in the mid-’80s, and it was like the Five Minutes Hate. I was at the front of the crowd, and she stepped out of her car right in front of me. This immediate face-to-face meeting completely disarmed me as I realised that, far from a hate figure, she was a fellow human being with her own subjectivity and consciousness. Right then, I couldn’t conceive of her any other way.
Sartre might have sympathised with the notion of an NPC. He was acutely aware of how some people act out a particular role rather too strongly, but I want to dwell not on that right now but on his take on the problem of other minds. Sartre saw the very idea that the problem could be taken seriously as scandalous and symptomatic of what was wrong with Western philosophy. Showing how this was a pseudo-problem, he imagined the following scenario, referred to as ‘The Look’. Suppose you’re at the end of a long corridor spying on someone in a room through a keyhole when you hear footsteps behind you, making you ashamed or guilty, and self-conscious. None of that could happen without you assuming other minds. The apparent issue of their existence or otherwise is a kind of abstract, cold-blooded issue which Sartre sees as irrelevant to properly engaged philosophy.
This can be used to introduce the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, a French-Lithuanian Jewish philosopher. Levinas is significant and worth reading for all sorts of reasons, not least his views on the nature of Jewish thought separate from its involvement with Hellenisation which might be helpful for Bible study, but for now I just want to consider his ethics of the face, and ethics as first philosophy.
Modify Sartre’s Look slightly. Imagine you are driving along a deserted road in a remote area and you come across someone whose car has broken down at the side of the road. That meeting makes an original demand on you before you consider anything else about the situation: this person needs help, and you can provide it. In fact, if you can, you should provide it. These are the “ethics of the face”. The face-to-face encounter makes an immediate ethical demand, and everything else can be built from that. Clear parallels can also be drawn with the Good Samaritan.
English is unusual in having only one word for “you”. We rarely contrast “you” and “thou”. When I chose my name, this was partly an attempt to overcome this, because if there are formal and informal versions of names, it gives one a clue as to the nature of one’s relationship, but it doesn’t work very well because the T-V distinction is a little different. Even German speakers can be unsure, doing things like using the plural familiar form when they only know one member of a couple well. There and in Hungary, they have a ceremony for thouing.
For Buber, pronouns occur in pairs: I-It and I-Thou. Each implies the existence of the other member of the pair. Sie, and for that matter “a senhora” and “Usted”, are third person, and therefore correspond to I-It. “It” here stands in for the other singular third person pronouns. God is the eternal “Thou” and we are also each “thou” to God. Being omniscient, God knows us intimately. God asks for a face-to-face relationship, and demands we have face-to-face relationships with each other. We must be “I-Thou”, although we must begin from “I-It” in order to reach “I-Thou”.
Sacred argument: The Talmud comprises a series of nested commentaries on each page centred on the oral Torah, also known as the Mishnah, consisting of fewer than a hundred words per page. Around this are Rashi’s commentary, around twice as long, the Gemara, a record of intricate debates on matters arising, written around the time of the Fall of Rome, and the Tofasot, Mediaeval European attempts to resolve conflicts between the other commentaries. The Mishnah is about a tenth of the content. The discussion is where the action is. It’s the point of the whole activity and when the Talmud is studied, further discussion occurs around all of these. There is a seven year daily cycle of Talmudic teaching which is considered inadequate by many Jews.
The I cannot exist without the Other. This is true in practical terms: we had to learn to speak and take care of ourselves, serve the community and so forth from others, often our parents. Babies and children are of course vulnerable and dependent, although the point at which they begin to contribute varies according to culture and family ethos.
There must be sacred argument: authentic presentation and mutual respect with proper dialogue and without over-simplification. In fact, it could be pursued by trying to construct and strengthen one’s opponent’s position and possibly by swapping positions, arguing for the opposite to your own opinion. Loving and sacred argument.
The issue of first philosophy:
Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ is an attempt at epistemology as first philosophy. A metaphysical foundation might be another option, where the likes of the nature of reality might be considered to be its basis. Levinas took a different view, suggesting that philosophy should be based on ethics, and this is in fact also my position although I don’t know how similar it is as I might be reading my own views into his.
It’s very easy to build a self-serving system if you aren’t careful. There’s a myth that male scholastic philosophers claimed women had no souls whereas men had. This is a misrepresentation of what was actually said. The Council of Macon in 585, despite claims to the contrary, did not claim that women had no souls. This would have made no sense given the acceptance of, for example, martyrdom, female saints and of course Mary the mother of Christ. Even so, it is very often the case that self-serving claims are made, and these are set into the presumed structure of reality. I would posit such claims can dominate what we imagine are neutral, innocent world views.
To illustrate this, I want to talk about Jean Baudrillard. who claimed that the 1991 Gulf War would not take place because it was sufficient that the media hype and representation of the imminent conflict occur and could replace any purported “reality” of the situation. Then, of course, the Gulf War happened, but Baudrillard said it didn’t happen for the same reasons. The reality of the war, whatever your view of the rights and wrongs of the situation politically, is that people suffered and died in countless numbers. I would say that he’s wrong because his assertion is unethical, which also means the past is real. You could say the world was created just now or the past is less real than the present. Responding to these ideas is a possible philosophical exercise, but more importantly, they would allow, for example, Holocaust denial. Hence it’s more important that it’s unethical to make such claims.
But there’s a problem. If you are in a position of privilege, it may be salutary and magnanimous to examine what assumptions you might be making about the world. However, how do you know you’re in that position? Also, if you’re not, and you make concessions to others on the strength of assuming that you are, you could end up distorting your view of reality just as much as someone in that privileged position might without examining their assumptions.
Finally, I want to mention politics. This is an ethical position. Is it feasible to extend this into a political position which in some way transcends the likes of the left-right division? I encountered Edwina Currie and was unable to demonise her. What would the world look like if nobody demonised anyone? What does this look like in view of the imperfection of the world and our tendency to sin?
I’ve just heard an excellent podcast episode called ‘The 3 Body Problem Problem’, which you can listen to here. It’s very wide-ranging, and be warned, rather despair-inducing. I’m not going to go into too much depth about it, but I am going to talk about the Dark Forest Hypothesis in its social and political, and maybe psychological, setting, which is what that podcast already did.
The new Netflix series ‘The 3-Body Problem’ is an eight-part adaptation of 刘慈欣 (Liú Cíxīn)’s famous and award-winning novel, 三体, the first of a trilogy called ‘地球往事’, translated as ‘Remembrance of Earth’s Past’. In order to engage with this series in sufficient context, I feel like I’m going to have to zoom out so far that the actual trilogy itself is going to end up looking like an invisibly small dot on an invisibly small dot, and I don’t want that to happen so I’m going to have to break it down a bit. I am deliberately posting names and titles in 汉字 (Hanzi) because of the issues it raises. Two things about this: I am more used to Wade-Giles than pinyin romanisation and I prefer traditional Hanzi to simplified because the latter is trickier to associate with the ideas it represents. Looking at simplified Hanzi, which is what this is, is like having a migraine because there are bits missing from the characters which one really could do with being able to see. Yes this makes me a dinosaur, but non-avian dinosaurs would still be around today were it not for their “left hand down a bit” mishap 66 million years ago and there was basically nothing wrong with them.
I’ve read the first book of the trilogy. I didn’t so much not want to read the rest as find it an unnecessary financial outlay, so it ended there. Netflix too might end it there because they apparently haven’t had as much success out of this extremely expensive series as they’d hoped, so like several other series they may well cancel it way before time, while in the meantime adding lots of fluff to stories which were supposed to end like ’13 Reasons Why’, and while I’m at it, that book and series is interesting because it’s basically ‘An Inspector Calls’ for the twenty-first century and yet manages to be quite unfortunate in its implications regarding bereavement of people who have killed themselves (I don’t use the S-word because it’s not a crime). Anyway, before I get irredeemably off-topic I shall post a
Spoiler Warning!
and be done with it. So if you want to enjoy ‘The 3-Body Problem’, don’t read past here.
Before I get into the broader issues with the Netflix series and the book, I thought I’d explain what the Three Body Problem itself is. First of all, it’s fairly easy to work out where Cynthia (“the Moon”) and Earth are going to be at a given time, so for example we can easily work out when the phases happen, when it rises and sets, how far away they are from each other, when eclipses happen and how long lunar months are, and by extension the times of the tides. A lot of these things are also linked to Earth’s rotation, but the mathematics are fairly straightforward, although because both Earth and Cynthia move in ellipses relative to each other and the centre of mass (the “baycentre”) about which both orbit is not at Earth’s centre, and it would really help to know calculus, which I don’t, to make these calculations. Likewise with the Sun and Earth we know when the equinoctes and solstices are and how far away the barycentre of the two bodies is at any given moment to a high degree of accuracy. This is because Earth, Cynthia and the Sun and Earth are two bodies each when considered in that way. The fact that we can work out all this stuff in both cases also shows something else: that there are some straightforward pretty much accurate solutions for three bodies provided they’re in certain arrangements with each other. There are actually a lot of situations when the movement of three bodies fairly close to each other like the three mentioned here can be determined quite accurately. The case described here is simplified by the fact that Cynthia is both close to and much less massive than Earth and the Sun is much further away and more massive than either. Another very useful case is that of the Lagrange Points, where the balance between the gravity of two of the bodies is equal, leading to a stable point associated with them. Examples of this are sixty degrees behind or ahead of a planet or satellite in the same orbit, some cislunar point between a planet and its star or a planet and its satellite where the gravitational pulls are equal and cancel out, and some translunar point where the pull of Cynthia and Earth are again equal. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, these points form a kind of “rapid transit system” around the Solar System which minimise the energy required to get between the various asteroids, moons and planets. There are other situations too. However, the Universe isn’t usually that neat and the majority of interactions between three bodies in fairly close proximity to each other are chaotic.
You really do need to look away now if you want to avoid spoilers.
The 三体 (Sān tǐ) are technologically competent aliens native to the Alpha Centauri system in the story. The Centauri system is in reality a ternary star system. Two Sun-like stars, one somewhat more massive and warmer than the other, orbit each other at a distance of between eleven and thirty-six times Earth’s distance from the Sun, whereas eleven thousand times the Earth-Sun distance, known as an AU (astronomical unit) from the barycentre orbits a much less massive red dwarf, Proxima, famously the closest star to the Sun except that since it takes half a million years to orbit the system so for some of the time it’s further from us than the other two, ignoring the fact that the entire system and the Solar System are both in their own orbits around the Galaxy. Right now, though, as its name suggests, its the closest. This situation, where two stars orbit each other much more closely than a third, is very common in the Universe and seems to be the most stable arrangement: the stars arrived in these positions after some chaotic behaviour and have now settled down. However, in 刘慈欣’s book, he imagines that a planet situated near these stars would have a chaotic orbit, some of the time getting too hot for complex life, sometimes getting too cold, sometimes being seriously perturbed by their gravity and sometimes almost being ripped apart by it and suffering severe volcanic eruptions. Life on such a planet could be imagined to be very difficult. It’s worth noting that this is not the real situation for most possible orbits of planets in the Centauri system, although it would be so for certain positions, such as for a planet halfway between the Sun-like pair or orbiting the Proxima far enough away to be strongly influenced by that pair’s gravity.
Due to the chaos of their home world, the 三体 decide to travel to Earth, and while doing so they also decide to harness the power of human intelligence by getting us to solve their world’s three-body problem through a VR video game where the player is put on the world in question, represented in a way humans can relate to, and has to find a solution to their predicament.
The first book, ‘三体’, begins in the 1960s during 毛泽东’s (Máo Zédōng’s) Cultural Revolution, where a scientist, 叶哲泰, is being denounced in a Struggle Session for his teaching of Einsteins Theories of Relativity. He is in fact killed in the process and his daughter, 叶文洁, is sentenced to hard labour followed by prison. This leads to her becoming very cynical about the human condition and our ability to improve things ourselves. Later on, she is employed as an indentured servant practicing science at a military base attempting to send and receive messages from any alien civilisations which might exist in other star systems, apparently focussing on the Centauri system. One day, she receives a message from an individual altruistic alien telling her that humans must at all costs cease to attempt broadcasting their existence and attempting to message aliens because it puts us all in danger. Because she now believes there is no way humans can sort out their own problems, 叶文洁 does the opposite, sending an enthusiastic message of welcome to the 三体, i.e. the aliens, and they proceed to plan to invade Earth, a process which will take four centuries because they can only travel at one percent of the speed of light.
There’s plenty more to both the series and the original trilogy, but this is enough to be going on with in terms of the details of the first book, and there is a particularly crucial point which is named after the middle novel of the trilogy: “黑暗森林”, or “The Dark Forest”. 刘慈欣 is not actually the first person to propose this idea.
Anyone who has read much of my blog will know that I think about the Fermi Paradox more than occasionally, but just in case you haven’t come across this, the Fermi Paradox, mentioned by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 CE but not originally his idea, is this: the Universe is vast and there are innumerable Sun-like stars and planets orbiting them, and also æons old, so that life could have evolved from microbes to humans almost three times over or more given its age, and yet we hear nothing from intelligent aliens, are unaware even of the existence of life anywhere else in the Universe and have never been visited by them. In other words, “where is everybody?”. I’ve mentioned a few of the more interesting attempts at solving this problem in this blog. For instance, it might simply be that everyone else is really bad at maths and therefore there’s no rocket science on alien worlds, or it could be that the element phosphorus is always essential to life but is too scarce for it to happen very often, and when there are intelligent life forms, they can’t get out of their little oasis of phosphorus to reach other star systems, where in any case they’d have to take phosphorus with them to establish an outpost. One simple solution is that there’s no life anywhere else in the Universe at all. One I was keen on for a very long time was that other civilisations have something like the ‘Star Trek’ Prime Directive, that they can’t interfere with developing civilisations until they reach a certain stage of development. It could also be that there are plenty of civilisations which reach something like a twentieth century level of technological development but then end up wiping themselves out in a nuclear war, destroying themselves through climate change or developing artificial intelligence which then decides they’re a threat and kills them all. Note that I say “twentieth century level”: we could be living on borrowed time here.
Quite a lot of this is not at all reassuring. Perhaps even less reassuring is 黑暗森林, which is as I say not actually an original idea although it was 刘慈欣 who actually named it that. The exact metaphor was used by Greg Bear in the 1980s. The idea is this. There is silence out there because aliens elsewhere in the Universe are aware that broadcasting their presence would threaten their existence due to potentially hostile threats from other star systems, and humans are simply too naïve to realise what a bad idea it is to tell all and sundry we’re here. We don’t know any of them from Eve, and they could be really dangerous. They could just go, “ooh juicy, another race to enslave and another nice planet to conquer” and do something horrible to everyone. Another way of putting it: “it’s quiet. Too quiet.” It’s like the silence that falls over the clichéed hostile bar when someone from the Other Side enters.
Now I do not like this solution, to say the least. Obviously in saying that I could just be all weird about it and say, “well I don’t like this any more than you do, but facts is facts and it is what it is,” but that’s not what I’m saying. I might not like the course of a fatal disease or the policies of a particular political party, but it’s still possible to find that particular pathology interesting or the implementation of a particular set of policies fiendishly clever or elegant in a Machiavellian way. In this case, however, I see the solution itself as pathological, and apparently I’m not alone in that as you will find if you listen to that podcast. But I already had these misgivings before I heard it. The problem is that it’s very negative and cynical, which doesn’t necessarily make it unappealing, but more than that, it seems to be a reflection of the current state of the society, or perhaps world, in which it was written.
Because the thing is, ‘地球往事’ is horribly, horribly grim and oppressive feeling. Suppose you look up at the skies and you see stars, an infinite horizon, endless hope and possibility and most of all for me the feeling that the atrocities and Hell we’ve made for ourselves on this small blue dot is as nothing compared to the hope the splendour of this unknown Universe around us shows. Even if it’s devoid of life entirely, it’s still magnificent and majestic, and moreover in spite of the actual Three Body Problem as opposed to the book, most of it works for pretty much of the time in one way or another. And if it isn’t devoid of life, there’s the optimism and awesomeness of a Cosmos replete with possibilities of friendship and fascinating variety. “Infinite variety in infinite combinations” as the Vulcans say.
There’s hardly any point in saying this, but just because something is appealing doesn’t make it plausible. I might be looking up at the sky with foolish, immature and groundless optimism. Absolutely, that could be so, and it’s very hard to decide whatbecause of the silence we all experience from the vast emptiness that surrounds us. So I don’t like it, but more importantly, what do the myths we make up say about us? What does it mean that 刘慈欣, in the 中华人民共和国 (People’s Republic of China) of the twenty-first century CE, is able to get this idea out to popular culture in the West via Netflix? Were there obstacles placed in front of him by the 中国共产党 (CCP) difficult to overcome, or were they not placed there in the first place because he perhaps has a knack of saying what they want him to say? Is he an establishment or an anti-establishment figure, and what does it mean that Netflix are apparently happy to stream what might be 中国共产党 propaganda? Or is it universal in some way, and if so is that universality a good thing or a bad thing?
‘ 三体’ has also been adapted by 腾讯 (Tencent) into a very different version. I know about 腾讯 on a personal level because someone close to me worked in 中国 (the Central State, i.e. China) for some time and the only way we could send messages to each other was through their app, QQ. Now I didn’t trust QQ very much at all and I was careful what I said on it, and I believe that was justified. One way of looking at this is that I’ve been duped by Western anti-Chinese propaganda, but it’s not that simple. QQ is their social media. Our social media are about as trustworthy, and this is not at all to say that 中国共产党 is better than the global megacorps. It’s more that they’re equally bad. It’s not about not trusting 中国. It’s about not trusting any big faceless organisation of any kind, because they simply will not have the interests of the ninety-nine percent at heart. We all know this.
Getting back to the actual Three Body Problem as understood in physics, it seems fairly clear that 刘慈欣 uses it as a metaphor for how unrestricted social systems are chaotic and unpredictable. A laissez-faire economic or social system, or a liberal or social democracy is just such a chaotic system, but it can be simplified by totalitarianism. If the likes of 中国共产党 and 腾讯, i.e. a few large organisations with a high degree of control over society, exist, we no longer have a chaotic Three-Body Problem but at least a special case of the problem like that of the Lagrangian Points or the Sun and Earth. Society can be made sense of and predicted. Likewise, in the West we have something like the social media firms, able to socially manipulate us all, and the US Republican Party, greatly simplifying the West through that extreme degree of control and gaslighting. So Netflix will be fine with streaming ‘The 3-Body Problem’ and by clamouring for a second season, which I must admit I personally want, we’re actually saying yes please, let’s have some more of that tasty propaganda.
There’s more than this though. ‘Star Trek’, and even more so Iain M Banks’s ‘Culture’ series and Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘The Dispossessed’, all provide a hopeful mythos for the nature of the wider Galaxy and optimism for the future. To quote from Banks’s ‘State Of The Art’:
Here we are with our fabulous GCU, our supreme machine; capable of outgenerating their entire civilization and taking in Proxima Centauri on a day trip…here we are with our ship and our modules and platforms, satellites and scooters and drones and bugs, sieving their planet for its most precious art, its most sensitive secrets, its finest thoughts and greatest achievements…and for all that, for all our power and our superiority in scale, science, technology, thought and behaviour, here was this poor sucker, besotted with them when they didn’t even know he existed, spellbound with them, adoring them; and powerless. An immoral victory for the barbarians.
Not that I was in a much better position myself. I may have wanted the exact opposite of Dervley Linter, but I very much doubted I was going to get my way, either. I didn’t want to leave, I didn’t want to keep them safe from us and let them devour themselves; I wanted maximum interference…I wanted to see the junta generals fill their pants when they realized that the future is––in Earth terms––bright, bright red.
Instead of such a myth, we are now asked to adopt 黑暗森林 as the explanation for the silence of the heavens, and maybe beyond that to accept that that silence justifies fear of the Other, and through that fear, as occurs later in the trilogy, that totalitarianism is the only answer. Does that sound at all familiar? Does it perhaps sound like certain members of the Republican Party rejecting democracy and freedom of the press in favour of Project 2025? And yes, it most definitely sounds like something coming out of 中国, but it’s equally at home in the West, and I happen to be mentioning the US Republican Party here but it applies just as much to many other Western countries, including Britain.
You may have struggled with my incessant use of 汉字 in this post but all that really is, most of the time, is a way of transcribing ideas into ideograms like our &’s and @’s. Just as we might look over at that country and think that the Central State has essentially foreign ideas based on the thoughts of “Chairman” Mao, we might also imagine that the capitalist West is free from such things. But it isn’t. It suits the West just fine actually. Nor is the Central State in any wise Communist, because by definition any economy with a stock market isn’t Communist. It’s just as capitalist as we are and it’s actually better at it, to the extent that certain people could learn from them how to be even more capitalist than they are already. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
We are aware that encounters between White people from Western Europe and racialised people elsewhere, such as in Afrika, the Americas and Oceania, have not generally ended well for the latter, and this has often been associated with a mismatch in technology. We might attempt to deduce that this is also what would happen if another species from elsewhere in the Universe with superior technology encountered humanity. However, that makes the rather major and unwarranted assumption that aliens are like us. This is unlikely, partly because they’re alien but also because in this scenario they’ve reached another star system. It also assumes that the greed and materialism dictated by the European-derived economic system is a law of nature and that there’s no other way things can proceed.
This, though, is how I see things going. Here we are on Earth with increasing threats to our civilisation, mostly self-inflicted, such as the use of weapons of mass destruction, anthropogenic climate change and artificial intelligence, among other more prosaic problems. In the meantime, we haven’t been back to Cynthia for over fifty years and there’s no sign of us building large space colonies or going to Mars. Hence we’re missing out on the Overview Effect, or Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Rocket To The Renaissance’, both of which could stand a good chance of changing global consciousness, we have no orbital solar power stations which could satisfy all of our energy needs and enrich Third World nations around the Equator, and various calamities could, and probably will, befall us which space exploration and settlement would’ve prevented. On the other hand, suppose a civilisation out there somewhere has thriven and got past this, or hasn’t got itself into such a pickle in the first place. Those are the kinds of civilisation which we’re likely to end up contacting, because the others simply aren’t viable. Which kind of civilisation we are remains to be seen to some extent, although I know which one I think we are. Or maybe every species of this kind just ends up annihilating itself.
The attempt to contact aliens depicted early on in this series and book is an act of hope, of optimism, which is depicted as bringing down utter catastrophe upon the world. Well no, I’m not going to adopt that view, particularly when it seems to suit certain social forces exceedingly well. I prefer the other. Hence if technological cultures exist elsewhere, they would be of the following kinds: unable or unwilling to leave their planet and perhaps quite healthily uninterested in doing so, in which case they’re not a threat; capable of space travel but also wiping themselves out before leaving their solar system, and yes those would be hostile but are not a threat; able to leave their systems but unwilling to contact us for various reasons; able to leave their systems, peaceful, coöperative and friendly. Or, there could just not be any intelligent life anywhere else. Any of these options has nothing to do with the Dark Forest, is more inspiring than that and is less likely to be useful for political oppression. So there!
Back when I used to do a lot of stuff in the peace movement, during the first Gulf War in fact, this guy came up to us and said that Saddam Hussein burning oil fields should convince us that he was a madman and that the war was therefore a good thing. This struck me as totally weird because at that very moment I was thinking that that very incident was a big reason why the war was so wrong. It’s astonishing, sometimes, how the very same “evidence” can seem to convince two people to draw exactly opposite conclusions.
My understanding of rhetoric is extremely primitive and outdated, but I’m aware of the classic division into three factors: pathos, ethos and logos. I didn’t know this division at the time, but did think in this way. Logos is the use of rational arguments, ethos the reputation of the speaker and pathos the evocation of emotion. It’s actually slightly different from that if I remember correctly, such as eliciting sympathy in the audience. Ethos sounds similar to the argument from authority and ad hominem fallacies, but this is not so much about rational argument as how people are persuaded. Because rhetoric has been used so much for negative ends, this sounds like a nefarious approach, but it need not be so. For instance, it could be used to address someone’s anxieties or downheartedness and it needn’t be deceptive.
I think we all know this stuff is out there even if we don’t identify it, and we use it all the time, but naming things helps us notice and think about them. I was at this point, in 1991, naïve of them, but it occurred to me that arguments for the retention of nuclear weapons, the justification for the Gulf War and so forth at least aspired to be rational, and I didn’t want to play their game, because it seemed to me that this way of portraying things was an important part of patriarchal discourse, so I decided it would be more effective to argue emotionally. By that, I don’t at all mean crying, screaming and shouting. I did enough of that, mainly in the privacy of my own bedroom, but not in conversations with the general public or acquaintances. I should point out here that the 1991 Gulf War constituted a pivotal moment in my adult life, moving me in a direction I’m still pursuing now in 2023. Although I am talking about pathos here, Immanuel Kant and the Categorical Imperative were also important in my strategy.
Our children got really sick of hearing the Categorical Imperative from me, but I’ll repeat it here:
Act on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law of nature.
– Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten
(„Der kategorische Imperativ ist also nur ein einziger, und zwar dieser: handle nur nach derjenigen Maxime, durch die du zugleich wollen kannst, dass sie ein allgemeines Gesetz werde.“).
This has several formulations in his work, and although I often quoted it, I don’t actually agree with it because it varies according to how an act is described. For instance, someone steals a loaf of bread from a bakery (24601?). Is that person depriving someone of a means of earning a living or are they trying to save their loved ones’ lives by preventing them from starving to death? Which universalisation is more appropriate. It can also be used disturbingly effectively as an argument against abortion: one cannot will that one’s life as a foetus be terminated, since one wouldn’t exist to do the willing. Since I view the ethics of abortion as the single central issue from which all ethics is derived, there must be a flaw in this argument and therefore probably in the Categorical Imperative itself. Nonetheless, it works well as a rhetorical device and appeal to the emotions.
One example of the kind of thing I used to say was, “if your mother was in Baghdad right now, would you feel okay about the city being bombed?”. This is a naked appeal to the emotions, but seeing as each person has infinite value (should be treated as an end rather than a means, as Kant would put it), it’s a fair one. I’m not saying this is an effective way of arguing. It’s particularly questionable if the person one’s talking to has a particularly bad relationship with their mother or is an orphan, and it feels kind of sneaky. I’m currently less persuaded that it’s the right approach, but maybe someone could come up with an emotive argument which will help me convince myself that it is.
Another area in which Kant comes into how I think about ego defences. Kant believed that the blizzard of sense impressions with which we are constantly assaulted is structured into a world as we understand it through things called categories. These include the likes of existence, non-existence, negation and plurality, to choose a few arbitrary examples. I noted at the time that the ego defences, such as rationalisation, projection, transference and so forth, were remarkably similar to categories, and drew from this the conclusion that we actually don’t use reason at all, or rather, we do, but it has an emotional “mould” to it. It isn’t a case of reason being one thing and emotion another, but reason at all times being dictated to and dependent upon emotion. This is because, to use a stereotype, we’re human. We’re not calculators or computers.
This is of course very consequential. For instance, it means that NVC is fundamentally misconceived and involves being in denial about the ineradicably emotional element of all thought. This is more significant to me than most people though. Another aspect of this is that we only ever fancifully imagine that we believe the things we do merely because of cold reasoning, because there is no such thing. What may happen, much of the time, is that we have an opinion and proceed to rationalise it by finding a reason to believe it. It’s only ever what we want to believe, not something we’ve concluded through logic. Another example: people who eat meat are highly motivated to reject veganism as an ethical position, meaning that they may want to believe that the species they eat are incapable of suffering, not conscious, unable to feel pain or perhaps feel less acutely than humans. They may then find reasons for this which skew their world view in other ways. For instance, Christine Battersby once argued to me that a non-language user was incapable of consciousness. This is highly convenient as such beings are almost literally voiceless, so it’s tantamount to saying that if you can’t speak, not only are you not entitled to an opinion but that you can’t even have one and don’t have interests to consider. You may understand why I feel rather strongly about this.
I may have moderated my position on this somewhat, because it’s potentially problematic. There seems to be such a thing as reality “out there” somewhere and emotional arguments seem to be persuasive in the face of evidence and to have major political consequences, and therefore consequences which affect people. It’s also very much the position of a privileged person. It’s substantially an attempt to compensate for one’s unconscious bias, as it might be put today, and the problem with that is that if it’s adopted by a member of a marginalised group it may cause further marginalisation, and possibly even get murdered or something as a result.
Therefore, we do unfortunately probably need good and apparently rational, evidence-based arguments, probably in all political and social arguments, or at least most. The use of emotive arguments seems to have led us to a position where people feel entitled to their own facts, and hence a lack of dialogue or mutual understanding. Another problem is that you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, and while we pursue emotional means of persuasion, we’re doing that if we succeed, and if we later turn out to be wrong, what are we supposed to do? Are we then supposed to use emotive arguments again? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Actually, I wanted to talk about climate change myths in this post, so that’s what I’ll do. Well, not so much myths as statements which are often made about the situation we find ourselves in. Partly to help myself, I’m going to make some bullet points:
Cold weather refutes climate change
Water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is
The current change is due to fluctuations which would’ve occurred anyway
Some glaciers are growing
Climate change is good for the environment
Renewable power generation is bad
Renewable power generation is too expensive
The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is from volcanoes, not human sources
Sunlike stars fluctuate like the Sun
It is true that the phrase “global warming” was swapped out for “(anthropogenic) climate change” a while back. This is because the latter describes what’s happening more precisely, and such changes are part of how science works. All conclusions in science are provisional and the model has shifted from a straightforward idea of trapped heat warming the whole surface of the planet indiscriminatedly to the idea of more energy from the Sun staying near Earth’s surface. Before I state that more clearly, I want to describe what happens.
This is what I went running and did Yoga in yesterday. Some of the yellow bits are notably washed out in the photo because they are giving off more light than the visible light falling on them from the Sun. This is fluorescence: some substances absorb ultraviolet light and re-emit it in the visible range, at a different wavelength. Greenhouse gases do something similar. They absorb shorter wavelengths of light and re-emit them as infrared, including the wavelengths which constitute radiant heat. This causes more energy to stay in the lower part of the atmosphere than would otherwise happen. This is actually essential to life as we know it. Without greenhouse gases, the equator would be below freezing. Incidentally, I read this piece of information in ‘Everybody’s Book Of Facts’, published in 1939. That’s how long this has been known about, at least. The chief greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are water vapour and carbon dioxide, the former being much more powerful than the latter.
Trapping solar heat in the troposphere, the turbulent layer of atmosphere closest to the surface, is trapping solar energy. This increases the turbulence after which this layer is named, changing the fluctuation of the jet stream, boosting hurricanes and other storms. Although mean global temperature is rising because of this, it can mean colder weather in some places because of effects like evaporation increasing and making air more humid, thereby increasing rainful which takes heat out of the atmosphere, and causing masses of air to expand as they warm, pushing colder masses of air into other parts of the world which don’t usually have them. It supercharges climate rather than simply warming it.
As I’ve said, water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Venus used to have an ocean. This evaporated gradually, making its atmosphere very humid, and that trapped solar energy close to the surface. That heat then baked the carbon dioxide out of the rocks, ultimately leading to today’s scorching hellscape hot enough to melt lead. This fact is sometimes used to suggest that the relatively small amount of carbon dioxide released in industrial processes is insignificant next to the much larger amount of water vapour in the atmosphere. This is wrong, because released carbon dioxide increases water evaporation which exacerbates the greenhouse effect.
Climate fluctuates constantly over geological time scales. It’s sometimes stated that global temperatures today are higher than at any time since the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. This is completely false. The highest temperatures since then were 41 million years ago during the Eocene. It’s hard to believe this because the axial tilt was the same as today, meaning that the lands of the midnight Sun were subtropical even during months of darkness. Nonetheless this was so. It is true that it’s the hottest it’s been since humans evolved, and that’s more significant because we’re used to living on a cooler planet than we currently have. The rate of change is also important.
The current cycle of ice ages and warmer intervals is due to Milankovitch cycles. When I Googled that, “Milankovitch cycles GCSE” popped up, so I’m not going to bother to talk about them specifically because I presume it’s part of a general secondary education, but I will say that we’re supposed to be due for another ice age and the fact that it’s hotter on average than it has been for many centuries merely means the ice age we would’ve had otherwise is actually mitigating climate change, and this is far from the usual cycle.
Some glaciers are growing. This is pointed to by a few climate change deniers as evidence against global warming. However, the glaciers which are growing are unusual. This illustration shows Sermeq Kujalleq, the Jakobshavn Glacier in Kalaalit Nunaat (Greenland), which is fed by a cyclical cold water current which varies, so it grows and shrinks over several years. This current has been altered by climate change, which as I’ve said involves the capture of more energy from the Sun in our global systems rather than simple temperature increase. The question to be answered here is how to ensure that something like this doesn’t look like an excuse or cherry-picking to an outsider, and unfortunately the answer is probably that people need to know, for their own sake and the sake of making political decisions, how science ideally works. It may not be enough to know why one particular glacier is growing. There are others, but the overall trend is shrinkage.
How do we know that the source of the increasing mean global temperature is not from the Sun? This one is quite straightforward: the troposphere is warming and the stratosphere cooling. The turbulent portion of Earth’s atmosphere, where most of what we would generally think of as weather is happening, ends where it stops getting colder with height, at the tropopause. Above this, air currents move horizontally, hence the name “stratosphere”. This layer shows a cooling trend, and is, like the rest of the atmosphere, exposed to the Sun. This is happening because greenhouse gases trap heat lower down, preventing light and heat which would otherwise reflect off the surface from warming the stratosphere. If global warming were due to the Sun warming the planet as part of some kind of cycle or warming trend, the stratosphere would be warming, but it’s cooling, so the simplest explanation, i.e. the most scientific one, is that climate change is not due to fluctuations in solar activity.
The influence of solar radiation on a body is referred to as “radiative forcing”, which is the rate of change of energy through a surface caused by climate change factors, measured in watts per square metre. Due to the peculiar nature of the troposphere, with its turbulent winds, cloud cover and precipitation, it only makes sense to measure this outside that layer of atmosphere, at the tropopause and the top of the stratosphere. This does vary, due to Earth having an elliptical orbit around the Sun and therefore receiving less radiation from it in the northern summer than the northern winter. This seems to many people to be the wrong way round, incidentally. It also varies because the Sun has a sunspot cycle as mentioned on my post on that star. This lasts eleven years, and involves a build-up of sunspots, which are cooler and therefore emit less light than the general photosphere of the Sun, which then wanes again, making the Sun slightly variable. These fluctuations are not reflected in the trend towards global warming, and therefore changes in solar activity are not responsible for the current change in climate.
One response to the arguments against anthropogenic climate change being lost is to say that climate change is a good thing. This can be made in several ways. In recent decades, a vineyard has been established in my birth village in Kent, and it produces very nice white wine. This has been made possible by climate change, and it presumably benefits the economy of the South of England. Norwegian wine now exists too. Wildlife moves away from the Equator. There are little egrets in the local bourne here in the East Midlands who have only arrived in the last few years. Because plants need carbon dioxide, the increase in the atmosphere is said to promote their growth, making arable farming more productive. However, this increased productivity is not accompanied by any increase in soil minerals or vitamins in the crops, so the result is a watered-down version of these crops, and other food plants, with more carbs without more vitamins and minerals. Some of the species moving away from the Equator bring infectious diseases with them, for instance ticks. Summer 2023 has brought an increase in insect bites in Britain. Moreover, the species which can move, which can be to higher altitudes or in the sea greater depths as well as towards the poles, can do so, but some can’t. This increases the risk of further pandemics. Beavers moving north have caused problems for the Inuit, that is, competition between humans and beavers. To some extent, humans are intellectually resourceful and adaptable, but competition with other species is not necessarily going to benefit any of them. Invasive species are more difficult to manage if they originated from warmer climates. Also, in the very hottest parts of the planet’s surface, the climate can become completely uninhabitable for some species, as can be seen with the deaths of Australian fruit bats. This translates, as usual, into problems for the poorest communities in the world, as they tend to live in its hottest regions.
Michael Moore is known for producing critically-acclaimed documentaries which oppose establishment views. Sadly though, this did not apply to his ‘Planet Of The Humans’, for which he’s executive producer, which focusses on the environmental damage caused by renewable power sources. There is a lot to be said about this film, but if I said it all it would turn this post into a debunking of the film as opposed to a survey of climate change denial arguments, so I’m going to provide a short summary. Clips from the early part of the documentary showed a solar-powered festival from the 1990s before renewable technology had improved to the point where the issues shown, where the electricity ended up having to come from the grid, are no longer important. Likewise the clip about the electric car which is recharged using mainly coal-fired power stations dates from 2010 and the situation has improved a lot since then. Comparisons are made between the open cast mining of coal which removes entire mountain tops with the siting of wind turbines on mountains when in fact this is far less destructive and the shots of the deforestation ignored the fact that whereas an open cast coal mine is pretty permanent damage, the trees would grow back in a few years for the wind turbine site. There were then some contentious comments about ethanol and hydrogen power, which are probably true but also accepted by environmentalists, who don’t recommend their use. I’m going to have to find out more about the hydrogen power issue as it seems to have changed recently, but my possibly obsolete understanding is that hydrogen works as a way of storing power rather than being a specific fuel in itself. That is, although it’s a fuel, it’s generated by electrolysis and the source of electricity for that is what matters. Solar panels are now very efficient. They bring in twenty times the cost of manufacture in power over their working lives, and their decline in efficiency is gradual, so it isn’t like they suddenly stop working after that period. Hence even if they are manufactured using only fossil fuels, this is because those fuels were what happened to provide that energy and not because that’s the only way that energy could ever be provided. The documentary also ignores the possibility of roof-based solar power rather than power plants taking up a lot of unoccupied land elsewhere. The intermittent nature of solar and wind power can now be addressed using the more efficient batteries which are now on the market, as found for example in power walls. The investment of one unit of fossil fuel generated energy into producing solar panels and installing them is likely to produce twenty times that in clean energy. Wind power, it’s twice as efficient as that. The film also blames the problem on overpopulation, but the issue here is that the communities whose population is growing fastest are those using the least energy. Moreover, consumption is growing twice as fast as the population. This is basically about blaming Black people, as it’s White Westerners who are the biggest part of the problem.
There are two issues related to this which I want to look into but can’t comment upon yet as I’m mainly doing this off the top of my head. One is the source of materials for batteries and the other is environmental damage caused by wind turbines. However, I will say this: I have long advocated for orbital solar power as the solution, which would involve materials taken from lunar sources rather than terrestrial ones and completely circumvent any problems arising from ground-based solar and wind power while allowing microwave receiving stations to be sited in areas which are less economically developed, making those countries wealthier.
Getting back to a more general point, increases in carbon dioxide are often blamed on the gas coming out of volcanoes. However, this is relatively constant, barring mass extinction events and various uncommon calamities, and it’s the extra emissions which are important. The planet and its biosphere is used to the vast amounts of CO₂ which maintain its surface temperatures at habitable levels. It’s the extra which constitutes the problem, which is many times as much annually as volcanic carbon dioxide emissions. And this extra is sometimes said not to be from fossil fuels. In fact, the excess CO₂ can be traced definitively to fossil fuels because the isotope profile in that gas is the same as in fossil fuels and not at all the same as in volcanic emissions. This also means that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide can be firmly laid at the door of human activity.
I’m just going to explain how this works. Each chemical element has the same number of protons in its nuclei, but the number of neutrons varies. For instance, carbon always has six protons but may have six, seven or eight neutrons. Elements exposed to certain forms of radiation can also become other elements or different isotopes of the same elements. It’s probably too obvious to state, but this is the basis of carbon dating because when carbon dioxide is exposed to the atmosphere, cosmic rays change a certain fraction of its carbon from carbon 12 to carbon 14 or convert nitrogen and oxygen to carbon at a known rate, leading to a known proportion in a living organism which changes when it dies at a known rate, allowing its age to be estimated. It has many other uses. For instance, oxygen 16 and 18 are used to measure water temperatures in ice core samples and calcium isotopes can be used as evidence for the source of food being marine or terrestrial when human bones are recovered from ancient sites.
Living matter very much prefers carbon 12 to carbon 13, and this was so for the organisms who became coal and oil. This is not so for volcanic emissions, which just emit what the expected profile of carbon isotopes would be in the form expected from sources without biological involvement. This can also be used to demonstrate that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is not simply incorporated in a larger biomasse. Hence even if carbon emissions fluctuate from year to year due to volcanic eruptions, it’s still possible to separate the volcanic and industrial sources, and the emissions cannot therefore be blamed on volcanoes.
I realise that I’ve stirred up quite a few questions as well as answering some, so I plan to address those too. These include the ethics of battery manufacture and supply chains, the “U”K government’s approach to energy policy, the issue of hydrogen and various other things. However, that’ll do for now. Please do correct me if I’m wrong and let me know what you think.
This post tries to do the same for evolution as this did for the Earth being a globe, but with an additional bit on the nature of sacred texts in general, focussing on the Bible. It isn’t supposed to be a thoroughgoing survey of evidence for evolution so much as just a couple of tests which can be done fairly easily which demonstrate that it’s fantastically improbable that evolution didn’t happen. I’m also going to mention a couple of other things supporting evolution. This is A-level biology stuff. It isn’t so sophisticated as to be hard to understand for a lay person. I’m also repeating myself here but it’s worth it for the sake of a more targetted post.
Immunological Studies
I should point out first of all that there is a major ethical issue with this one, and possibly also with the other one depending on the organisms on which it’s carried out. Most vertebrates have an immune response somewhat similar to memory. When we’re exposed to certain substances, our bodies come to recognise them and deploy defences against them. This is often more harmful than helpful, but the way it’s done is for the immune system to manufacture large molecules called antibodies whose surfaces match the molecular structure of the surfaces of the molecules they neutralise, like jigsaw pieces fitting together. They also match other molecules with sufficiently similar shapes. There’s an example of this in vaccination. The BCG vaccine, used against tuberculosis bacteria, also works against the leprosy pathogen because the two are closely related and have similar compounds on their surfaces. Both are in the genus Mycobacterium and are about as closely related as horses and donkeys.
In fact you can even use horses and donkeys to demonstrate this. If you take a blood sample from a horse and inoculate a rabbit with it, not only have you done something extremely unethical but you’ve also caused the rabbit’s immune response to recognise a particular set of molecular patterns as found in the blood of a horse. If you then take a blood sample from the rabbit and combine it with the blood of a donkey or zebra, it will similarly show an immune response but not as strong as it would to a horse. It would show a weaker response to the blood of a tapir or rhino and a much weaker response to a more distantly related animal such as a human. Incidentally, you could do this with any set of mammals. The rabbit is not crucial here. Inoculating a human with horse blood in the same way would produce an immune response which would be steadily weaker with more distantly related animals.
This happens because the proteins found in animals tend to vary in detail from species to species, but these variations are usually not directly related to their function, which means that random mutations in their DNA often result in different amino acids in the chains. I should probably explain this a bit better.
DNA codes for proteins. That’s what genes are: instructions for building proteins from amino acids. Amino acids have small molecules with groups at either end which can bond to each other quite easily. These form chains known as polypeptides. Some amino acids can also bond at their sides using sulphur atoms, which enable the chains to fold into particular shapes. If one of these changes, it’s unlikely to preserve the function of the protein, but it often doesn’t matter much what the chain of amino acids other than the ones which link is made of in detail. Consequently there is no pressure for them to conform, and organisms simply will tend to become more chemically different from each other if they don’t form part of a single breeding population. This means that these immune responses are effectively using an animal’s immune system to measure how closely related to each other two organisms are, and the variations are not normally anything to do with how the organisms have been “designed”. They’re simply random differences.
DNA Strand Bonding And Temperature
This can be carried out more ethically than the immune system, although it’s practiced differently. This one basically looks at the code for making the proteins rather than the proteins themselves, but has the advantage of including an organism’s entire genome rather than just the proteins produced by its genes. Most DNA is non-coding. Actually, you know what? I’m going to introduce the nature of DNA here.
DNA is the molecule which stores genetic information in most organisms. The exceptions are certain viruses which use RNA instead. DNA is arranged like a ladder, with the sides consisting of a sugar called deoxyribose and a phosphate group. These are linked to the half-rungs, consisting of four compounds, two with a pair of rings and two with single rings. These are cytosine, guanine, thymine and adenine, known as bases. Each can only bond with one of the others, cytosine with guanine and adenine with thymine. The whole assemblage twists in a double helix like a spiral staircase. On a larger scale, the DNA molecule coils again like a telephone handset cable, and several times again, packing the whole molecule into a small space. There are also globules of protein which help it stay in this arrangement. On a higher level the molecules are organised into two larger systems visible under a light microscope. These are chromosomes and plasmids. Plasmids are loops of DNA not found in the nuclei of cells but found in the likes of bacteria, mitochondria and chloroplasts. Chromosomes are usually paired in most organisms, or at least animals, but they can also either be single or in groups of several such as threes or sixes. Humans usually have forty-six chromosomes. Most of the time they’re invisible because they’re packed away but sometimes there are giant chromosomes, as in the salivary glands of fruit flies, and they become discernible when cells divide.
DNA encodes genes in the “rungs”. Every amino acid has a three-base code, or several codes, and there is also a “stop” codon which ends protein transcription. Every gene codes for a protein, but further down the line these proteins are responsible for the manufacture of other chemicals and structures, or for their acquisition and movement from the external environment, so living things are not just made of protein.
Most DNA is non-coding. That isn’t the same as non-functional. For instance, the centromere some way through the chromosome has a certain pattern of bases which makes it easier for the spindles to pull on the chromosome during cell division and the telomeres at the ends of the chromosomes stop the genes towards those ends becoming deleted or damaged when cells divide. Much of it has no clear function, which is of course not the same as it having no actual function. In a way, non-coding DNA is like dark matter is supposed to be, in that it constitutes the majority of the genome but is “invisible” in that it doesn’t turn into proteins. This means that whereas it could constitute the design of an organism if you’re going to go all teleological on us, it probably doesn’t. It could be anything most of the time. Something like 99% of the human genome is thought to be non-coding. Some other organisms have much more coding DNA than humans. For instance, there’s a species of seaweed with only three percent.
Protein transcription occurs when the strand is unravelled by a protein (the purple blob in this clip, which shows replication rather than transcription). It’s possible to use these enzymes to separate DNA into single strands. If you did this with a human sample and put it into solution, the corresponding bases in the DNA would tend to align and recombine. If that solution were then heated sufficiently, it would separate again. However, if single-stranded DNA samples were to be made from a chimpanzee and a human, they would combine to a certain extent but maybe about one percent of them would not bond, and when heated in solution will separate at a lower temperature. This trend continues with increasingly distant relatives, such as humans and cats, humans and kangaroos, humans (let’s just stick with ourselves for now) and cobras, humans and fruit flies, humans and bananas and so on. Each of these will separate at lower temperatures than its predecessor. This is because they have fewer and fewer bases in common.
Now, it’s possible to imagine that organisms that occupy similar ecological niches will be genetically similarly “designed”, so you might expect, for example, that an aardvark and an anteater would, if designed, have a lot of genes in common, such as genes for a long snout, powerful claws and digestive enzymes for breaking down insect cuticles. This would make sense if the animals in question were designed. However, studies such as this and the immunological technique mentioned before show that aardvarks are not closely related to any other mammals although they are somewhat related to manatees and elephants, that is, that they have more DNA and genes in common with them than anteaters. By contrast, anteaters can be shown by the same methods to be quite closely related to armadillos and sloths, and as a group these three clades are only very distantly related to all other mammals. It has nothing to do with design. The non-coding DNA underlines this as there is no reason for it to be faithfully copied if it has no function. All it does is indicate how closely related organisms are.
My own genome shows that I am mainly Scottish and Irish (i.e. I’m ethnically a Gael) with some apparently Mestiço ancestry originating in West Afrika or the nearby islands. This corresponds with what I know about my family history and health and isn’t even slightly surprising. Established genome sequencing techniques confirm what I already knew or strongly suspected. It’s just a way of tracing family history, among other things, and it works beyond our own species to establish common ancestry all the way back to LUCA – the Last Universal Common Ancestor, thought to have lived somewhere between 3 480 and 4 280 million years ago. I imagine it wouldn’t work on viruses to link them to other organisms usefully, as they might have RNA genomes or genes which have been transcribed into the genomes of hosts. But there is no qualitative difference between me discovering I have West Afrikan relatives and a scientist discovering armadillos and pangolins are not closely related but armadillos and anteaters are.
A Couple Of Miscellaneous Points
There used to be a sea urchin whose madreporite (the orifice urchins and their relatives use to ferry sea water in and out of their bodies) started off in the centre of its shell and it gradually moved towards the edge. There are plentiful fossils of this sea urchin in chalk cliffs, and the further up you climb from the beach in, say, Dover, the closer the madreporites on these fossils are towards their edges. This is clear visual evidence for evolution, although it uses fossils, which leads some people to doubt. Therefore here’s another. Mammals have a nerve supplying their larynxes called the recurrent laryngeal nerve. This travels down the neck, loops round the collar bone and then comes up towards the larynx. In most mammals this is fine and a slightly odd but functional arrangement. It’s also true of giraffes with their almost two metre long necks. They have a nerve whose only function is to move the larynx which is three and a half metres long, when it need only be well under a metre in length. This may actually be one reason giraffes are so quiet. They can make a low grunting noise and that’s it. This may or may not be useful. One thing which is clear, though, is that this is not a sensible way to design an animal. The only reason giraffes’ recurrent laryngeal nerves are this way is that they’re descended from okapi-like animals with much shorter necks. I find this to be one of the best pieces of easily stated evidence available to support evolution.
The Bible
This came up twice recently, once in connection with flat Earthers and once with young Earth creationists. It’s notable that historically, young Earth creationists have tended not to believe Earth is flat, although more recently more of them seem to. Before that, for a long period there was only a tiny minority of Christians who were flat Earthers, although more seemed to have a problem with evolution. To an extent it’s a waste of time to engage with them, for a couple of reasons. One is that there are more pressing concerns in most people’s lives, and another is that they don’t seem to be willing to listen. It’s also very difficult to determine if they’re in earnest, but there are people who spend a lot of money and resources into promoting the idea that Earth is flat, suggesting that they really do believe that.
The Bible, and here I’m including both the Tanakh and the New Testament as I get the impression that Christians proportionately outweigh faithful Jews among flat Earthers, is a collection of disparate texts. If you are a faithful follower of either or both parts, the chances are that the main reason you take it seriously is that you regard it as a guide to living righteously. Because it’s so varied, it can’t be categorically said that none of it is a science textbook, particularly Torah. Torah has what appear to some to be instructions on hygiene, for instance with respect to infectious diseases, and dietary prohibitions which it’s often been argued are linked to avoiding parasites. That may or may not be what they’re about. Jewish traditions often seem to involve disputations about the true import of a text and as a Goy I probably shouldn’t comment. I am, however, aware that that view exists, and consequently it isn’t entirely true to say that the Tanakh is never supposed to be taken to refer to something like science, accurately or otherwise. All that said, the chances are that such a wide-ranging and enormous corpus as the Tanakh and the New Testament would end up revealing something about the human writers’ views on the nature of the physical Universe. Jewish cosmology seems to look something like this:
By Tom-L – Own work Based on File:Early Hebrew Conception of the Universe.png and several other depictions, including Understanding the Bible, Stephen L. Harris, 2003., CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99817773
That’s all entirely clear, or rather can be gleaned from various parts of the text. The New Testament view seems to be somewhat different, as from Paul’s comments about the Seventh Heaven it seems to have incorporated the Greek view of a cosmos consisting of nested spheres, each bearing a planet or the fixed stars. At that time, the Jews were largely Hellenised, some of the authors, such as Luke, were well-educated and it seems that such ideas as those of Eratosthenes and Aristarchus had filtered through. However, the gospels refer to Satan taking Jesus to a high place where all the nations of the world could be seen, and the risen Jesus ascends into Heaven, which strongly suggests a “sandwich”-type cosmology of a flat Earth and heaven. Even Luke mentions these, and they seem to imply Earth’s flatness. However, what’s more important about the incidents? What do they communicate? Surely that Satan tempted Jesus with great Earthly power in return for submission to him, which Jesus rejected, isn’t it? The Ascension is harder to account for, and to me at least the suggestion that it’s an “acted parable” is not convincing. Even so, the idea communicated is that Jesus Christ is God. Focussing on Earth’s shape because scientifically ignorant people, which basically everyone was at the time anyway by the way, is utterly beside the point.
This can be seen elsewhere in the Bible. For instance, there’s a passage which refers to plants forming a barrier which have either stings or thorns. The details are not important. Torah refers to insects using a word translatable as “quadruped”, as it contains the Hebrew term for “four”. I’ve seen Christians attempt to argue that it refers to locusts because their hind legs are for hopping and don’t count as legs, which I find silly and pointless.
Conclusion
Not only is it unnecessary to be creationist or a flat Earther to be a faithful member of the Christian or Jewish faith, but in the case of the former it’s actually questionable to be due to the fact that unlike Judaism, Christianity is an evangelising faith, and to insist on creationism or belief in a flat Earth is both a barrier to evangelism and a refusal to use the divine gift of reason. Anti-theists would possibly be very happy with Christian flat Earthers because they give Christianity such a bad image. However, it just isn’t necessary to believe either absurdity to be Christian.
Spelling the fruit that way makes me twitchy, but apparently that’s how it’s spelt, rather than “litchi”. Of course, ultimately it’s spelt “荔枝”. I could go all herbal on you here but instead I’ll just sum up my issue with it. Lychees are ultimately disappointing and hard work. They have massive stones in the middle and fiddly peel on the outside plus a really thin layer of pulp. The stone is poisonous, causing encephalopathy, so you don’t get any benefit from that and there’s just rather annoying in the end.
If a particular planet was a fruit, what fruit would it be? I suppose, and it may surprise you that I haven’t thought much about this, that the rocky inner planets would mostly be like nuts, being hard and woody, and the gas giants more like succulent fruits with maybe a small stone in the middle. There is a memory palace including planetary associations with herbs and sometimes fruit, so for example orange is a solar fruit and bananas, being crescent-shaped, are lunar, but this is not quite what I mean. The Chinese names for the planets use the five element system, so they too have a kind of taxonomy. In this system, Venus is “金星”, which literally means “gold star” or “metal star”, metal being one of the elements. Jupiter is “木星”, meaning “wood star”, making it sound more like a nut, so my view of lychees is not backed up by traditional Chinese cosmology. Oh dear.
On the whole, the major solar planets are presented as falling into two main types: terrestrial and gas giants. Terrestrial planets are mainly rocky and occupy the inner system. They’re denser, smaller and warmer than the other local planets, known as gas giants. Gas giants are mainly gas, although further inside this may be compressed to liquid or metallic form, and are much larger, colder and less dense. A further subdivision is sometimes made distinguishing Uranus and Neptune, the “ice giants”, from the two “gas giants” Jupiter and Saturn. The two classes are separated by an asteroid belt. The markèd division therebetwixt may be somewhat blurred in other star systems, since the most widespread type of planet in the Galaxy seems to be one which is almost halfway between the size of Earth and Neptune, which seems to have no analogue orbiting the Sun, so the separation may be artificial and based on local experience rather than them being natural kinds (if natural kinds exist).
For most of the inner planets, this division works fairly well. Mercury, Cynthia (I’m not going to keep explaining) and Mars are all solid planets made largely of rock with thin or almost non-existent atmospheres. Earth is a slight deviation from this pattern. It’s a dense rocky planet with a fairly dense atmosphere and is unique among such planets in having large persistent bodies of water and exposed solid surfaces.
Then there’s Venus. This is usually understood as a rocky planet with a very dense atmosphere, and a hellishly hot solid surface. That’s fine in terms of what it can be described as, but in context this may be slightly different. Back in the day, it used to be thought that the gas giants all had very large rocky cores, and they do have rocky cores, but they were seen as essentially solid planets with deep atmospheres shrouded in cloud. This is a rather “Gaiacentric” way of looking at them. Even back then it was considered a tall order to send any kind of lander onto the purported rocky surface of the “real” Jupiter or whitherever, but nowadays that’s recognised as such a feat of engineering as to be basically impossible. Hence we do have planets in our solar system which are mainly gas and on which few people would contemplate actually landing. At the same time, even the terrestrial planets are very hot on the inside and we haven’t even succeeded in penetrating far into Earth’s surface. It might be dangerous to do so, creating a new active volcano at the site where the tunnel was dug. Jupiter is similar, only more so, with its internal temperature rising far above that of the Sun’s photosphere.
My contention is that we’ve got Venus all wrong. To an extent this is just playing with ideas, but there are sound reasons for thinking of the planet differently. The Soviet Union’s record for sending landers to the surface of Venus was impressive. However, were they really sending them to the surface? Jupiter’s “surface” is effectively the cloud tops. Another way of putting this is that the surface of a planet is where it becomes opaque from space. This is only provisional as it leaves Earth’s oceans in an ambiguous position. Considering Venus in those terms, its surface is the cloud tops and the landers are actually penetrating into the interior of the planet. Unsurprisingly, just as a probe sent into the magma under our crust would meet with a swift demise, so do the landers on Venus, just as Cassini undoubtedly did when it fell into Saturn’s atmosphere, also known as Saturn. Hence Venus is a lychee. It has a big stone in the middle and a thin pulp, by contrast with the thick pulps of the gas giants. I imagine the name has already been taken, but I think of Venus as a “gas dwarf”.
This is not mere tinkering with ideas. Considered as a planet with a gaseous surface, Venus immediately starts to look a lot nicer than the usual hellscape it’s portrayed as. It’s probably well-known that there’s a level in its atmosphere where temperature and pressure are both close to what they are at sea level on Earth. The clouds start seventy kilometres above the solid surface, although there’s a haze extending for another fifteen kilometres or so. Both Venus and Earth happen to be at the same temperature at that level, although the pressure on Venus there is similar to that on the surface of Mars. The layer in which all the weather happens is known as the troposphere on most worlds, and this level is thoroughly within its troposphere, unlike Earth’s which has a ceiling averaging at thirteen kilometres (like Earth itself, out troposphere is squashed at the poles and protrudes at the equator, so the height varies). The altitude where it matches Earth’s surface is towards the base of the clouds at fifty kilometres up. There is then another haze layer down to thirty kilometres, meaning that the clouds in the Venusian atmosphere actually start above the level of our own cloud tops, with a few anomalous exceptions. The pressure of the atmosphere at the mean solid surface level is about the same as the water pressure a kilometre down in Earth’s oceans. Here again is the theme of the bottom of the ocean, like the bottom of Venus’s atmosphere, being more akin to the interior of the planet than its surface.
The atmosphere of Venus is almost all carbon dioxide, which is why it has such an extreme greenhouse effect, having the hottest solid surface in the inner system, including Mercury. Various processes could have contributed to this outcome, although it serves as an awful warning to us of what could go wrong. There was probably a time in the past when Venus had liquid water on its surface. It would have been below boiling point at that time, but there still would’ve been a lot of evaporation, and water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas, far more so than carbon dioxide. Another cause may have been the exposure of carbonate rocks to long periods of sunlight, which baked the carbon dioxide out of them into the atmosphere. All of this was triggered by the gradually climbing heat of the Sun in the early history of the planet, and the presence of water on a planet which at that time was very similar indeed to Earth at the same time suggests that life may have been present. However, I’m resisting the urge to turn everything here into stuff about the likelihood of life in various ways, so I won’t be discussing that. Although Brian Cox’s ‘The Planets’ was fun, one of the irritating things about it was that he tended to focus very much on the issue of liquid water and the possibility of life emerging throughout the Solar System, and I’m not going to do that. It gets a bit repetitive. Therefore, with respect to Venus I’m just going to say: carbonyl sulphide, clouds absorbing ultraviolet life, phosphine. There, all done.
Venus has three times our atmospheric nitrogen. If much of Earth’s nitrogen wasn’t fixed and/or in living things, we would also have two or three times the amount we have, except that if it wasn’t there wouldn’t be a “we”, so “we” probably started out with about the same amounts. The other gases in its atmosphere are carbon monoxide, hydrogen chloride and hydrogen fluoride, although in quite small amounts in the last two cases. Nonetheless it might make a quite good toilet cleaner. There’s a fair bit of water vapour, at about one percent, bearing in mind that that’s one percent of an atmosphere ninety times thicker than ours, so it’s more like the equivalent of the whole of our atmosphere in just water, which is about a gigatonne.
The clouds in the Venusian atmosphere rotate around the planet about once every four days. Since its day is supposed to last 243 days, once again this raises the issue of which bit is the surface, and again it makes a lot more sense to have a planet rotating every four days than nearly nine months. This makes the atmosphere the fastest rotating compared to its planet in the Solar System.
The solid surface of the planet is worth comparing to Earth’s. Our own surface is a series of plateaux with fold mountain ranges, is shaped by water erosion and plate tectonics, and is largely abyssal plains with central ridges and trenches near the continents. Venus is not entirely similar, but it does have plateaux which could be thought of as continents. This is a map of how its terrain would look like with water:
A decision must be made in such maps regarding where to put sea level. This seems to be Venus with the same areal water cover as Earth, but that’s neither necessarily the same as all the actual water vapour in its atmosphere condensing out or the scaled amount of surface water on Earth, because the topography of Venus is very different from ours. It’s also Venus with water but no water erosion, and the colour scheme indicates the likes of mountains with snow, vegetation and more barren ground, which presumes to know the climatic profile of the planet. It’s also difficult to be objective about this, in that it may or may not be a typical Earth-like world. My impression is that it has many more islands than Earth would have, although the part of our planet which constitutes a single large plate, the Pacific, is also studded with islands in a somewhat similar way.
Without water, i.e. as it actually is, the solid surface of Venus looks like this:
Thinking in terrestrial terms, the two major continents are Ishtar and Aphrodite, with a smaller group arrayed north-south to the “west”. I should point out here that compass directions on Venus are a little confusing because the planet rotates backwards compared to all the other inner planets, and I have to confess I don’t actually know which way up this map is compared to Earth maps with North at the top. On that subject, Venus lacks a global magnetic field of its own, although it does have the bow shock and limited magnetosphere resulting from the solar wind. It isn’t known why Venus lacks a magnetic field, but it may be because its mantle doesn’t convect much, and unlike us, it lacks any companion to raise tides in its core. This is a striking difference between the two planets which doesn’t seem to be easily explained in the other ways.
Before the ’60s, Venus beneath the clouds was utterly unknown and people, including scientists, made all sorts of projections onto it. Carl Sagan once joked about proceeding from the premise of not being able to see the solid surface to the conclusion that it was covered in steamy jungles and dinosaurs, which was a fairly popular view. This is partly influenced by the idea that the closer planets are to the Sun, the younger they are, which is not in fact so. Various views have been taken regarding the nature of Venus historically, all of which are much more interesting than the reality. It was thought to be an ocean planet with soda water seas (I kid you not) at one point, prior to which it had been considered to be a more Earth-like ocean planet as with Asimov’s ‘The Oceans Of Venus’. People often talk about the shock to society which would ensue if life was incontrovertibly discovered elsewhere, particularly intelligent life but still just life, as in the smallest, simplest bacterium, but this could be overestimated because there was a time when life on Venus and Mars was practically assumed, and it had no major impact on humanity. Have we maybe changed in this respect?
Seventy percent of Venus’s solid surface is a low, rolling plain. There are a few basins but they’re quite rare, although depressions are common at about twenty percent. Ten percent are highlands, which can be thought of as continents although there is no continental drift on Venus. Height of topography is defined as deviation from mean radius, which is easier on Venus than Earth. Earth is squashed at the poles and bulges at the Equator, but Venus, uniquely among solar planets, is almost exactly spherical. This regular tendency is reflected in its orbit, which is also the most circular of the lot. In a way this can be considered appropriately beautiful.
Ishtar is about the same size as Australia and averages three kilometres above the mean radius. It’s a volcanic region. Aphrodite is Afrika-sized and has mountains at the eastern and western ends with a low-lying area between them. It lies along the equator. The third upland area is called Beta and has two large shield volcanoes, and finally there’s Alpha, which is somewhat similar to the Martian area Tharsis.
There is also a pair of rift valleys, Diana and Dalí. The former is up to 280 kilometres wide and somewhat like the Valles Marineris on Mars. I understand that structure to result from the crust fracturing due to the weight of the Tharsis shield volcanoes, because Mars has no continental drift, which leads to more and more lava building up and solidifying until it weighs the crust down. I don’t know if Venus also has this phenomenon.
Ishtar has a plateau referred to as the Maxwell Mountains. This has a mountain called Skadi which is 10.7 kilometres high, the highest point on Venusian land. This makes it higher than any terrestrial mountain although it should be borne in mind that those are measured from sea level and the difference between the bottom of the Marianas Trench and Mount Everest is over twenty kilometres. However, Diana is the lowest point on Venus and is only 2.9 kilometres below the mean, so Skadi can still be thought of as higher than any earthly peak, although the difference between the average depth of our ocean floors and the highest mountains is about the same. This suggests that the material from which our crusts are made is similar, as it will tend to collapse at about the same height, bearing in mind the slightly lower gravity on the inner planet.
At ground level, the temperature of Venus doesn’t vary with latitude or day and night because the atmosphere is so dense that it carries heat all over the planet equally. Polar regions are nothing other than that. There are no magnetic poles and the temperature is no lower than anywhere else. That said, the temperature of the atmosphere does vary and is very cold at the poles. It reaches -157°C and there are atmospheric waves. No, I don’t know what that means but apparently there are.
The Venusian clouds themselves are largely composed of sulphuric acid droplets. No mountains are able to reach anywhere near even the bottoms of the haze below the clouds. However, there is sulphide frost at the top of some of the mountains, namely sulphides of bismuth, lead and iron – bismuthinitem galena and fool’s gold. This can be detected by RADAR from Earth as it reflects like a metallic surface. There seems to be lightning, but it isn’t clear if it’s to do with volcanoes or clouds. The Soviet Venera 11 lander which landed on Christmas Day 1978 had something akin to a microphone on board and detected an eighty-two decibel noise after landing, which may have been thunder. The density of the atmosphere would have made the noise a lot louder than thunder on Earth. There’s also a phenomenon called “virga” – I don’t know how well-known this word is. This also happens on Earth, but on Venus it’s the only form of precipitation unless you count the frost. Virga is rain which evaporates before it reaches the ground, although on Venus it’s sulphuric acid rather than water. This happens because the temperatures get way past boiling point high above the ground. The sulphuric acid forms when ultraviolet light from the Sun separates carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and monatomic oxygen, the latter whereof then combines with sulphur dioxide, to become sulphur trioxide, and water vapour.
There is said to be a glow on the night side, referred to as “ashen light”. It isn’t even known to exist, and was initially attributed to phosphorescent organisms in the ocean which was thought to cover the planet, and I think to aurora. Various suggestions have been made. Because Venus has no real magnetosphere, it could be solar radiation directly stimulating the atmosphere, since it’s able to reach cloud level at least. Alternatively, it might be lightning leaping between clouds. Although it’s been spotted since the seventeenth century by astronomers as eminent as Patrick Moore, it isn’t universally accepted to exist as no spacecraft have ever detected it despite some having instruments for that purpose. It used to be thought that the “black drop effect” seen when Venus crosses the Sun’s disc, where the planet starts off with a narrowing tail towards the limb of the star, was due to the presence of a substantial atmosphere, but it’s now been seen with Mercury too, so it seems to be some kind of optical illusion instead.
There are some relatively famous pictures of Venus taken in the ultraviolet. This one was taken by Mariner 10 in February 1974. Since ultraviolet can’t really be considered visible to people with normal vision (there are circumstances in which it is but let’s not split hairs), this is of necessity false colour, and making the more absorbent regions blue makes Venus look more like Earth. Nonetheless, someone who could see ultraviolet would probably see the two planets as more alike than most people can. In the visible range, Venus is the most reflective planet and can actually cast shadows of its own in some circumstances. In any event, the swirls of cloud seen in this image are typical of Venus in their general global distribution. There are cloud belts a little like Jupiter’s. The relatively homogenous nature of the terrain beneath them and their height means that there are neither chains of clouds as formed here by peaks and islands nor the variation due different conditions over sea and land. On Venus the most distinctive feature is probably the “sideways” V-shape with its point near the equator although the brightness of the poles is notable too. There is a C-shaped cloud centred on the north pole rising up to fifteen kilometres above the other cloud tops. A figure-of-eight-shaped pair of hurricanes was thought to be another permanent feature of the north pole but a similar one disappeared from the south pole, and since the planet is highly symmetrical this suggests the same could happen in the north.
There are east to west winds whose speed gradually increases with height. At ground level they’re at about one metre a second and at the cloud tops around a hundred times faster. This is tantamount to the planet’s atmosphere rotating much faster than the solid surface. The density of the atmosphere further down makes it less penetrable to sunlight than might be expected, as it’s about a tenth that of water and is almost a liquid in a sense. For instance, it’s very buoyant and has waves as well as winds.
Since it was discovered that Venus is as harsh as it is below the clouds, suggestions have been made as to how it might be made more clement for life as we know it. This process is known as terraforming. An early suggestion was to seed the clouds with algæ. Recent suspicions that there might be life in those clouds already raise a major ethical question, as this could, for all we know, be the only other life in the Universe, and clearly such algæ would have to be genetically modified. Another possibility is to place a shield over the Sun at the L1 point with the Sun, ultimately causing the atmosphere to freeze, but that would then require the removal of a prodigious amount of dry ice. The same suggestion has been made regarding Earth to counteract global warming, and I included it in my novel ‘1934’. A further possibility is to steer some of the countless icy asteroids and comets to crash into Venus, where they will melt and provide water for oceans. The lower estimate for how long it would take has been two centuries, although I got the impression that was creeping up.
Since I don’t believe we will ever do it, to me it’s an abstract ethical question, which first seems to have been considered by Olaf Stapledon in 1930. This, actually, is interesting because of his connections with C S Lewis. In the scenario he described, in ‘Last And First Men’, Earth was threatened, and ultimately rendered uninhabitable, by our satellite crashing into us, which he portrayed as connected to human spiritual enlightenment, possibly Humanity discovers Venus to be inhabited by intelligent life whose expectations, however, are limited due to the fact that their metabolism depends on radioactive isotopes whose supply is limited. Humankind ultimately decides that they are carrying the torch for sentience furthest in the solar system and make an apparently rational decision to terraform Venus, which wipes out the native life. The inner life of the Venerians is too alien for humans to empathise or understand, but they’re confronted with this problem, as he states it: “what right had man [sic] to interfere in a world already possessed by beings who were obviously intelligent, even though their mental life was incomprehensible to man?” As a result of their genocide, humanity ultimately falls from intellectual grace and becomes eclipsed for millions of years in total despair.
Here comes the interesting part! C S Lewis was persuaded, apparently by this passage, that Stapledon was basically evil and a “devil worshipper” (his words, not mine). In a letter to Arthur C Clarke, he said:
a race devoted to the increase of it own forces & technology with complete indifference to either does seem to me a cancer in the universe.
This is in reference to ‘Star Maker’ but seems to me to be clearly influenced by the attitude he read Stapledon as taking towards the Venerians. He is also said to have based a major human antagonist in ‘That Hideous Strength’ on Stapledon. I have to confess that I didn’t get very far with ‘That Hideous Strength’. That said, Lewis also acknowledges Stapledon’s influence on the novel in a positive way, saying:
Mr. Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can well afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow.
I don’t want to turn this into a discussion of the relative merits of Stapledon’s and Lewis’s philosophies of life, but this does vivify the ethical question of the terraforming of Venus. It’s unlikely in the extreme that there is in fact intelligent life there, and arguable whether there’s life there at all. If there isn’t, there’s still the question of whether it would constitute a form of vandalism to do this to the planet. The motives are relevant here. For instance, is the idea to create some kind of utopia, and is that even doable? Would it be anarchistic, governmental or corporate-based, or perhaps something else we can’t currently envisage? Would the presence of a better world influence ours au Guin’s Anarres and Urras might impinge on each other? Do we perhaps even have the duty to do it given the way we treat our own planet in order to increase the chances that life will go on after us? As I said, though, the chances are it’ll never happen.
I’m aware that I haven’t mentioned ‘Perelandra’ here. Nor have I read it, so I think I’ll leave it at that.
Shamelessly nicked from here, and will be removed on request, but I regard this as an ad for the OU course this is taken from
I generally resist medicalisation, and I’ve previously written on ADHD, so this isn’t primarily going to be about that issue in spite of the illustration. Nonetheless it’s there, and it means that like many other people, perhaps even everyone, the cog that represents me doesn’t fit well into the social machine, which is a problem for both society and myself. I would also say that my ADHD is just something which came to the attention of educational psychologists and medical professionals in the ’70s, when it was called hyperactivity, and is an aspect of my personality among several which entails a poor fit with society. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a problematic work per se but maybe somewhat salvageable, there’s often a category at the end of each set of disorders labelled “not otherwise specified”, which is the wastebasket taxon as it were, a “diagnosis of elimination”. As a healthcare professional, I’m aware that the textbook cases are the exception, and most of the time people have an array of signs and symptoms which can’t be easily pigeonholed, and the real puzzle is why anyone at all actually has the same condition. Leaving that aside, it’s also unclear if it’s appropriate to view mental health analogously to physical health at all, and there’s the social model of disability. Hence I will assert myself, controversially, as being “neurodiverse, not otherwise specified” and leave it at that. Strictly speaking this is a neurodevelopmental condition rather than a mental health one, but let’s not get even more bogged down.
All that notwithstanding, a few days ago someone asked me what my plans were. I misunderstood the question, thinking I was being asked about how I planned to generate an income in the long term while it was really about our relationship, which of course I won’t go into here, except to say that a plan to generate an income can be very important to a relationship because it’s nice to be in a position to take care of someone well and have enough money to help others, and there is of course the psychological benefit of being gainfully employed, such as it is, and also occupied in something which connects to the common good in some way. It’s partly about good mental health and social obligation. That said, I completely reject the work ethic because most paid work is probably harmful in the long run to society and the person doing it, and the problem is finding work that doesn’t do more harm than good, and that’s rare. Even so, I do sometimes succeed in getting people to give me money for what I do. In particular, I currently have a couple of ideas for medium-term projects, which I’m going to outline here. In doing so, I’m going to yank this blog post in the direction of another blog of mine (which I hardly ever write), but these things happen.
I’ll use headings again, I think. At some point I might even work out how to do hyperlinks within the post, but that’ll probably involve tinkering with the HTML. I don’t think it can be done with the WordPress block editor (grr).
1. The Ethical Periodic Table
Right now I’m not sure what form this will take, but it seems to lend itself much more to something online, or perhaps an app, than a physical book. Like my second idea, this has been kicking around a while, and this is the thing. I’m pathologically procrastinative. In case you’re wondering about the wording of that last sentence, I’m trying to avoid using a noun to describe myself because I think that fixes one’s identity mentally in an unhelpful way. Anyway, it goes like this. The Periodic Table may be the most iconic symbol of science. Right now I’m hard pressed to think of another one, although the spurious “evolution” parade purporting to show constant progress and the chart of the “nine” planets come to mind, these however being very much popularisations. As well as having chemical and physical profiles, each element also has an ethical, social and political profile connected to how it interacts with human society. For instance, arsenic is very high in drinking water in Bangladesh, tantalum has been associated with civil war in the Congo and there is an issue with phosphorus and algal blooms, among many other things per element. My “vision” is to provide a clickable periodic table with links to information, which I hope will be regularly updated, to balanced social profiles of each element, and I’m also curious as to whether there’s a pattern here: do some groups of elements present bigger problems than others and are there possible substitutions? This clearly lends itself much more to a computer device treatment than a book of pages, although one of those books with tabs might work. This suggests it could be an app as well as a website.
2. Corner Shop Herbalism
I detest the tendency for certain exotic herbs to become pushed and regarded as miracle cures and the answer to everything. I think this distorts research and is often environmentally unsustainable. I also think there’s a lot of gatekeeping in my profession which does not serve the public interest, but at the same time I’m aware that many people lack the necessary knowledge to deal with their own health problems easily, particularly in the realm of diagnosis. Consequently, for decades now I’ve had the idea of producing a book called ‘Corner Shop Herbalism’, which is about using herbal remedies which can easily be obtained over the counter or as invasive weeds or other common species in a foraging style, while maintaining their sustainable use. I’ve already planned this book to some extent and it covers a surprisingly large number of species, probably totalling more than a gross. This would be accompanied by various other chapters about when to seek professional help and details of why herbal medicine is a rational, vegan and useful approach to health. This could also be a website, but it lends itself also to being a physical book because that makes it a field guide useable with no electronic adjunct, and who knows when that might become necessary? We all know of the Carrington Event, after all.
Publicity And Marketing
This is the difficult, possibly insurmountable, obstacle. Self-publishing nowadays is easy. You just organise your manuscript into printable form, get a cover together and have people order it. People have different sets of skills, and the ability to publish without approaching a publisher replaces the problem of getting yourself published with the problem of publicity and marketing. This works fine for some people if they also have an aptitude in those areas, but it usually fails. I have a Kindle Fire, and I do recognise the considerable ethical issues with Amazon of course, but one thing I see a lot is a very large number of ebook adverts and recommendations. I have never followed up on any of these. Although I’ve advertised my business profusely myself, my usual response to an advert is to wonder what’s wrong with the product that it needs to be pushed. You don’t see ads for potatoes or petrol because people recognise the importance of those in their lives and they sell themselves.
Advertising is ethically and practically complicated. The German “Anzeige” translates both as “advertisement” and “announcement”, and I find this enlightening as to the nature of advertising. At its best, if you believe in the fruits of your labour as enhancing to potential customers’ quality of life, you still need to make them known to the public, and this is absolutely fine. However, the quality of goods and services often seems to be in inverse proportion of how heavily something is advertised, which supports my tendency to become suspicious of a product. There was a fairly prominent advert for the British Oxygen Corporation in the 1980s CE which depicted a lake full of flamingos which they claimed had previously been lifeless and that they had managed to restore to a healthy state. This immediately provoked the question in me whether they had done something dodgy more generally and were trying to boost their image. It isn’t relevant whether they actually did this, but if this kind of suspicion is often raised, it can make publicity counter-productive. On the other hand, maybe few people think like this. Regardless, there’s a tension between the contrariness of people generally and getting your product out there, and I don’t know how to resolve this.
I never pay for advertising now because of my history with it. The only advertising which ever worked was the Yellow Pages and by that I mean that no other form of paid advertising got me a single client. With the Yellow Pages, it worked to a limited extent and then, oddly, about half way through one year of advertising it suddenly cut off completely and I never got another customer (for want of a better word). I am still mystified by this. It’s clear that online advertising and other such activity killed the Yellow Pages, but there was no gradual decline in my case. It just stopped dead with no period of tapering off. After that, I cancelled the advertising and relied on word of mouth, which is of course very useful.
How to apply this to books though? Is the kind of marketing and publicity applicable to a herbal practice, and apparently not very, comparable to that of a book? It would seem to involve other aspects of publicity such as talks, walks, courses and signings, the first two of which I’ve done often and fairly successfully in terms of raising the general profile of herbalism but not clients. Would this work for a book? Is it possible to put together a course based on the ethical periodic table idea?
Many people worry about their image on the internet, and their data being used for nefarious purposes. Whereas these are legitimate concerns, mine are not in this area. From the start, I’ve thought of behaviour online as consisting of postcards. Everyone can see what you’re doing, but there are so many of them the chances of being noticed are minute. It’s like the lottery – the odds of winning are insignificant. In some places the odds are stacked against you, as for example with YouTube. As far as reading is concerned, there’s the issue of what might compete with the time which could be spent reading your own writing, and it’s notable that many people don’t even venture forth from social media to bother reading the content. I am guilty of that to some extent myself, but also watch myself so that I do it as little as possible. There’s much to be said about social media and personal data, but I won’t say it here because most of it is only relevant to my writing in terms of constituting a distraction from it. Consequently, I will do some promotion of the work on Facebook and Twitter, but don’t anticipate much response. How one would actually succeed in getting a response is another question, and I have no answers. I do know that my own efforts at search engine optimisation haven’t yielded much.
It’s easy to imagine a conspiracy or malice here, but in fact the answer is far more likely to be the impersonality and volume of the internet which causes this. Therefore, anything one does in this respect needs to be done for its own sake, and not to get an income or make a living. What one actually does to make a living is unknown, and as far as I can tell impossible. I’m always overawed by people who manage to have a full-time paid job because it is so far beyond my capabilities and I have no insight into how people do it. Consequently, I just do things which I consider worthwhile, and I definitely consider these two projects to be valuable, so I’ll be doing them with no expectation of a significant response. This is galling, but I’m used to it. I still don’t know how I’m going to survive though.
I don’t know if any of you blog using WordPress, but one of the things you get after a while of using tags (I only started doing that fairly recently) is a list of the ones you use most often. Probably because of the decimal bias of our cultural hegemony, it lists the ten. In my case, this is probably not a good guide to getting more readers but then I’m not particularly interested in doing that, except maybe as a kind of game in which I hope I wouldn’t become emotionally invested. It makes me want to draw a diagram, or rather a pattern:
Apparently this is called a “complete graph” and is described as a simple undirected graph in which each pair of distinct vertices is connected by a distinct edge. The above image shows a K12 , apparently. Because of the decimal bias, my ten tags can be linked up in a similar diagram with rather fewer edges. I used to have hours of “fun” getting computers to draw ever more complicated complete graphs. The distinction also ought to be made between undirected and directed complete graphs of this kind.
There is bound to be an equation which tells you how many edges are needed for a given number of vertices, and in fact there is. It’s:
wn+2=n!en
. . . where “e” is Euler’s constant. No, hang on a minute, that isn’t it apparently as it isn’t necessarily an integer and these obviously will be, so it’s:
(n(n-1))/2
Okay, so plugging in my ten tags gets me (10(10-1))/2, which is forty-five. So much for my title then! I’d worked it out at a hundred and ten but it seems it’s smaller. So then: ninety blog posts.
Here’s what I’m thinking. I have ten tags listed. A fairly crude way of generating blog post ideas would be to combine pairs of them, perhaps in both directions. They are: Philosophy, Ethics, Christianity, Judaism, Veganism, Racism, Evolution, History, Star Trek, Politics. Most of the time, if I blog on one subject on that list it’s likely to involve more than one of the others, which adds to the number of possible combinations in the graph, but it would also be interesting to see what I’ve missed, using those as major foci for a post. For instance, veganism and racism is something I’ve written about before, but not in a “pure”, more focussed sense, and there’s also racism and veganism, which could be something quite different. In pursuit of that combination, there is a lot to be said. For instance, veganism is perceived as a very White project even though, for example, I-Tal diet in its most complete form is RastafarIan and there’s also the question of the growth of supposèdly vegan products in the Third World as cash crops for export and forcing up the prices of something like quinoa, putting it out of reach of the communities which have traditionally eaten it. All very fruitful subjects. There are apparently forty-five pairs of tags in one direction and another forty-five in reverse. Judaism and Christianity is another interesting subject which it would be very easy to write something about, but writing something original and respectful might be a lot harder.
Thinking about writing in this way links mathematics and composition, but as a fairly naïve mathematician I may not be the person to do that. I often find that when I try to connect mathematical activity to something usually considered non-mathematically, I come up with a lot of mind game-type ideas but not much which is particularly applicable, or sometimes something which fits quite well into a particular mathematical activity but is also amenable to common sense. The question in my mind right now is, how useful is it to think of pairs of blog tags as a complete digraph? Is “evolution and Star Trek” a different topic to “Star Trek and evolution”?
Incidentally, the reason “Star Trek” crops up in that list is that I’ve reviewed every episode of “Star Trek TOS” and written several other more general posts on the series. It’s the kind of thing you might expect to generate a lot of views, or maybe not because so many people must be writing about it. I feel, unfortunately, that although it’s a major cultural phenomenon it’s also quite naff to write too much about it.
The above graph apparently also forms the net of an eleven-dimensional simplex, because every complete graph is a projection (the way it’s represented here, in two dimensions) of a simplex of Kn-1 dimensions. Hence this image:
is the net of a tetrahedron. And it clearly is: you can see the faces at the front and back, paired off and seemingly at right angles to each other. Each vertex connects to each other by three edges, and that gives the essence of the simplex in a way. My K10 graph would presumably have each vertex joined to the other nine, each edge forming a polygon enclosing a face, each such polygon enclosing a tetrahedral cell, each tetrahedral cell forming the solid limiting a four-dimensional simplex, and so on. Each one of these encloses a possible combination of tags, more than one this time, and we’re in the realm of factorials and the possibility of more than three and a half million possible blog posts which can be appropriately tagged in various ways from that list, and will be found in the depths, if that’s the right word (it isn’t). This, then, is the hyperspatial approach to blogging. Each tag is located at a precise location relative to the others in hyperspace and since the links between them need not be mere edges but triangles, each blog post can be considered to be written on one of the faces of this nine dimensional simplex, either tapering towards the bottom or getting longer and longer lines as it goes on. You can hold this cluster of blog posts in your nine-dimensional hand-things and turn it this way and that to read each one of the ninety posts, all of which are on the surface of the polytope. If you happen to be a nine-dimensional entity, that is. Some of these are probably already written but I don’t know what they are.
This suggests a way of viewing blog posts via a virtual tesseract, merely four-dimensional and with each face of each of the eight cubes having a post written on both sides, four dozen in all, manipulable via one’s viewing device while wearing 3-D glasses or a VR headset. But all of this is fanciful and it isn’t clear how it would help one blog.
Leaving all that aside, it’s also possible to use the same old AI as I’ve been using for a lot of other things to finish my list of tags with others. It’s quite interesting what happens when I do this, because it fills my list in with the subjects I deliberately avoid on this blog, such as gender identity and trans stuff. InferKit just now gave me this:
Harry Potter Animals Politics Military Religion Science Food Smart People Animals and Animals Writings David Icke Family Values Hot Car Deaths Holocaust Asian-American
“Animals and Animals” is a little like “Vulcan And Vulcan” even though it hasn’t seen it. I don’t really want to blog about Harry Potter, although “Hot Car Deaths” is a depressing but possible subject. “Asian-American” strikes me as something you really should be in order to write about it, except that it is interesting how America sometimes seems like the extreme Far East even beyond Asia, so that has possibilities. DeepAI gives me “Science, Education, Welfare, Vacation, Innocent and Damn Law,”, then it seems to turn into a government form of some kind with things like “Pregnancy”, “Birth Year” and the like. This is not very useful and probably reveals the kind of text it thinks I’m writing.
I’ve done all this before, of course.
This blog is naturally a meandering mess of brain dumps, and consequently these two methods vaguely reveal some topics I might want to write about but they’re unlikely to get much readership, and that’s fine. However, I would say this. I suspect that if you’re serious about blogging and already have a blog which has a direction, a focus and a significant readership, you could do worse than to use these techniques. Maybe you’ve written about every combination of tag pairs. Finding out which ones you have and haven’t and colouring in the edges on the resultant complete graph would probably reveal where the large gaps are in your coverage, although some might be nonsensical. I don’t think any of mine would be though, so I suspect yours wouldn’t be either. Just two tags is rather limited, and if you open it up to all combinations, unless you’ve automated the process in some way you just will not have written hundreds of thousands of blog posts, meaning that some of the combinations will be stimulating and novel. As far as predicting tags is concerned, I found it tended to fill in things that I was genuinely interested in but hadn’t blogged about. This would also seem useful. You could also take all the AI-completed tags and build your own complete graph from those. It seems to me that there are likely to be other applications of graph theory to blogging which I have yet to become aware of. Worth investigating maybe?
It’s very common to do two things when veganism is discussed. One is to associate it strongly with soya. The other is to criticise it on that basis as environmentally unsustainable. Further down the line is a common equation between soya and phytoëstrogens (how do you spell that?), leading to a whole gender politics thing about “soyboys” which is a load of b0ll0x. Today, or whenever this sees the light, I’ll be talking about this stuff.
In a way, I should be saying “plant-based”. The reason I didn’t is that veganism is not the pursuit of a plant-based diet. Rather, it’s an ethical position akin to pacifism with practical consequences. A plant-based diet is merely one which eliminates the intentional consumption of animal products, and as such the term is a misnomer as it may include fungi. It’s arguable that a plant-based diet including soya is optimally vegan, although I personally eat soya products and I am going to defend their use as well as criticise them. This is somewhat similar to the palm oil situation, which was declared non-vegan by some although it seems to me that a whole load of other foods could be equally seen in that way.
I’m going to start with a similar kind of botanical breakdown of what soya plants are. Soya, 大豆, Glycine max, is a member of the Leguminosæ along with lentils, peas, clover and so on. This family is “green manures” because they contain nodules in their roots with symbiotic bacteria which can fix nitrogen. Hence they are extremely useful in agriculture and horticulture. Some of them are also high in hæm, which is the porphyrin found in hæmoglobin, which they use to bind to oxygen, I think increasing the nitrogen concentration around the roots and therefore the efficiency of this process, and as an aside this hæm is used to make more convincing veggie burgers, which may however not be vegan because they have been safety-tested on animals, although don’t quote me on that – do your own research. Soya is unusual among plant protein sources because it contains large amounts of all essential amino acids. In general the sources of bulk protein in a plant-based diet are either low in sulphur-containing amino acids or low in others, but soya has an unusually high quality. That said, the idea of quality in amino acid content is now somewhat passé for reasons I don’t fully understand, although it is true that you needn’t combine protein sources in a single meal and also, I haven’t investigated this but it’s long seemed likely that digestive enzymes from further up in the gastrointestinal tract would end up being digested and absorbed further down, so I’ve long had my doubts about that idea. Soya is also the source of a fixed oil used in cooking and to make margarine, and in the manufacture of soap (which I have done incidentally), plastics, paint and biofuel. This last in particular is ecologically significant and I’ll be returning to it. The Latin name seems to be the origin of the name of the amino acid glycine, which is the only non-chiral and simplest of that family of compounds and is found in the interstellar medium, unlike all other amino acids as far as I know. Glycine is also a neurotransmitter, like some other amino acids. Maybe the name is just a coincidence. Soya sauces are also derived from it. It seems to have originated from southwestern Asia, although its traditional use has been greatest in the Far East. However, today something like four-fifths of the world’s production is in the Americas, including North America. It cannot be grown in the British Isles because it’s susceptible to frost, although climate change might mean it will be possible at some point. It grows from four dozen centimetres to two metres high and produces pods containing three or four seeds each up to around seven centimetres in length.
Like Cannabis, soya is one of those species which tends to get focussed on in a biassed manner due to its social position, and information on it can therefore be seen as fairly obfuscated. There are two main sources of criticism. One regards environmental impact and the other influence on the reproductive function. This of course edges yet again into herbalism, but I’ll cover it here anyway. Soya is œstrogenic on account of its isoflavones, genistein and daidzein, and has been blamed for increasing the risk of breast cancer and reducing male fertility. This is potentially part of a narrative where plants are problematised rather than seen as nutritious and beneficial, which is also rife in anti-herbalist rhetoric. In fact, considering that soya has been high in diets in east Asia for centuries, this is almost certainly baseless unless the processing of soya as an ingredient in more Westernised diets does something significant. There are also elements of sexism in this, because it portrays œstrogen as something foreign to the human body which is likely to cause problems. In fact I can testify that there are much stronger œstrogens elsewhere in the plant kingdom and that soya is extremely weak in this respect, and that xenoestrogens, that is, compounds organisms have not encountered until recently, are far more significant in this respect because the liver is less able to deal with them and they are lipid-soluble. Having said this, it is true that the processing of biological matter can change its profile and action, so it really depends on whether there’s a significant difference between industrial and pre-industrial treatment of soya.
For a long time. soya didn’t constitute a significant part of my diet, even as a vegan, because I tried to source my food as locally as possible and I simply had no need for it. Whereas there certainly are hidden ingredients in processed food, very little of my diet was in this form. Probably the main heavily-processed item would’ve been pasta. There is an issue with abrogating responsibility when you hand over the preparation of food to strangers, particularly if they are part of large organisations. I have generally tried not to do this, though not so much recently. I also didn’t take the approach of substituting æsthetically similar products for animal products, so for example when I gave up milk and cheese I didn’t replace it with anything that seemed similar although I did research the nutritional value and replaced it in that sense. Hence soya milk hasn’t played much of a rôle in my life, for example. Tofu and tempeh, however, have, so it has had an indirect rôle in that way since both are involved in the production of soya milk. It is, incidentally, possible to prepare a similar food from peanuts, since like soya beans, peanuts are pulses. I’ve never done this though. All that said, nowadays I do eat a fair bit of tofu, for my sins, which is an æsthetic choice rather than a nutritional one. Therefore in the following, I am as culpable as anyone else, but probably less culpable than carnists who eat farmed meat.
Since 1970 CE, soya production has increased four dozenfold. Almost one and a quarter megaäres of land is devoted to soya farming, much of it in the Americas. Brazil, Argentina and the US are the leaders here, the Argentine being a distant third compared to the equal production of the other two. It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that one of these countries is known for a certain biome. Therefore, unsurprisingly, soya farming is associated with deforestation. Soya plants are annuals, so the ground needed for them constantly increases. It is true that the conditions for soya are better in savannah areas than rain forests, but the area of Brazil used for the plant is still special and unique in terms of biodiversity. Farming it has resulted in soil erosion, as it often does.
Although it’s true that soya farming is environmentally destructive, this cannot be used as an argument against vegetarianism and veganism for two important reasons. One is that five-sixths of global soya production goes to feed farm animals. This is where the bulk of Brazilian soya bean exports go. The other is biofuel. Soya can be used to make both biodiesel and ethanol, so it’s actually a source for two different fuels. The biodiesel produces a by-product which can be used for farm animal feed. The oil itself is reacted with methanol and the glycerol is extracted and fed to farm animals along with the beans themselves. Most American biodiesel is from soya oil. China imposed a 25% tax on American soya for this reason, which will have driven up the cost of soya as food generally. Hence much of the world’s soya production goes either to feed farm animals or to produce biodiesel and by-products thereof, including farm animal feed, and since tropic levels mean that soya for meat production is hugely inefficient, carnists are in no position to point at non-carnist consumption of soya unless they also intentionally avoid meat which comes from animals who have been fed on it. That said, soya doesn’t deserve a halo and it is better to avoid it, not least because you’re supporting an industry that profits from animal farming, although I’m not sure what you could do to avoid that, bearing in mind that self-sufficiency involves having enough money to own land and where did that money come from?
To conclude, then, although soya is by no means wonderful, it isn’t riskier to the health than most foods and carnists can’t use consumption of it as a stick to beat vegans and vegetarians unless they too make efforts to avoid meat fed on it. And to be fair, some of them do, and ecologically there is a difference between eating road kill, for example, and having a Big Mac. But on the whole the argument is invalid for the vast majority of carnists. At the same time, we should all probably be making some effort to reduce our consumption of soya, directly or indirectly.
Hindsight is not always 20/20 because of Whig history. Whig history, or Whig historiography strictly speaking, tells the story as one of progress from a terrible past to a wonderful present, heading in the direction of current affairs. It isn’t true. For instance, just to pluck a random example out of the air, before the imperial period, the republic of Rome was more democratic and only achieved its expansion by dispensing with the “fairer” characteristics of its polity, and it almost goes without saying that after 1979 CE everything went to shit and has been doing so fairly steadily ever since. Therefore, I’m telling this story from the position of how my diet is now and how it changed in October 1987. Although it seems unlikely that I’ll ever deliberately eat meat again, you never know, and if I do I may be able to tell another story about how I got there which, nonetheless, I manage to make look like steady progress. Also, you could probably look into the past of a lot of people who are still carnist and could tell of the same kinds of things in their childhood and early adulthood as I would, and also people who temporarily went plant-based or vegetarian before returning to eating meat. Maybe, then, these are not the real causes of my veganism, but have nothing to do with them and I’ve just rationalised them into a narrative.
I want to say one more thing before I launch into this. Although I consider veganism to be both a good thing and inevitable if the species is going to survive, or rather a plant-based diet is, I absolutely don’t judge others for not being vegan. If you think of veganism as not intentionally causing suffering or death to members of other species, the vast majority of individual organisms’ injury or death, when caused by other organisms, dwarfs the number inflicted on behalf of humans, and therefore from a utilitarian perspective it makes no sense to judge anyone for the proportionately minute part they play in contributing to this. It’s about my will and not being part of causing that pain. Other people have their own perspectives and stories to tell. I absolutely do not judge them. This is my own story. Also, although I’m talking about veganism here, for the purposes of this post I’m defining it more narrowly than I usually do because I’m only really thinking about being a party to the avoidable intentional killing and inevitable causation of suffering in non-human animals, which is not what veganism really is. I do think the wider definition of veganism is relevant, but I don’t want to define it out of existence.
In fact I will start with something wider. Going back to quite early childhood, I was very concerned about conservation, endangered species and environmental damage. One story which stuck in my mind was the treatment of American Buffalo by White settlers, officially but confusingly known as American bison. There are also Eurasian bison of course, and they interested me but I didn’t know much about them. My understanding, and I’m doing this from memory, was that in the nineteenth century CE, White people used to travel out to the Plains by train, shoot them, take their hides and tongues and leave the rest to rot. In the books I read about this, this was contrasted with the Native American attitudes towards them, where all of the carcasse was used for something and they were treated with great reverence. This issue of treating prey animals with reverence – I also remember Inuit with seals – made a lasting impression on me.
Another notable aspect of my childhood was my choice of reading matter. I used to read a lot of books on the subject of such animals as skunks, dogs and cats. For instance, I devoured ‘A Skunk In The Family’, ‘Incredible Journey’, ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘The Travels of Oggy’, ‘Charlotte’s Web’, ‘All Creatures Great And Small’ and its sequels, and ‘Watership Down’. A couple of these are probably less well-known than the others. ‘A Skunk In The Family’ by Constance Taber Colby is an entertaining non-fiction book about a skunk whose scent glands were removed kept as a pet by a New York family, published in 1973 and sufficiently obscure that it has no reviews on Goodreads. ‘The Travels Of Oggy’, a 1976 book by Ann Lawrence, is surely better-known but again I can find no reviews there. It’s about a hedgehog and is fictional. I haven’t read ‘Plague Dogs’, ‘Shardik’, ‘Tarka The Otter’ or ‘Vet In A State’, which I suspect is just an attempt to cash in on James Herriot’s success. I don’t know if I’m unusual in focussing on “animal” books as a child, but basically my reading matter apart from the likes of popular science books before I got into science fiction consisted very substantially of stories about animals aimed at older children, so far as I can tell. There was never a point at which I was into fantasy or mainstream fiction, and I find it a huge struggle to read most of that. If this is unusual, it might indicate a kind of proto-vegan approach.
Another couple of incidents I remember as a child included watching a show where someone attempted to drown puppies – you probably know this, but as far as I’m aware it used to be normal to drown kittens and puppies, and in the former case just keep one, because they were surplus to requirements. Another phenomenon which seems to have disappeared is that nobody would dream of actually buying a cat because there were just so many kittens around that they couldn’t be given away. I presume this didn’t apply to purebred cats or any dogs. Anyway, I found it extremely distressing that anyone would simply drown puppies and kittens. Another companion animal related incident which stuck with me was of a man who took a dog to be put down because it’d be cheaper to buy another one than put him in kennels while he was on holiday in Spain. This probably would appal most people though.
As for members of other vertebrate species who passed through our house, these would include four cats, a rabbit, two mice and three hamsters who were regular residents, a canary after I left home, and a number of others of whom we took care while people were away, including a parakeet, two gerbils and a dog. I remember getting very upset when the first cat developed a kidney problem and had to be put down, and missing that cat terribly until my parents relented and acquired another one plus a hamster. Most of the time there were two cats. And yes, my mother did indeed tell me the cat who was put down had “gone to live on a farm in Wales”. I think children remember these things and find it hard to trust their parents later. I also took some flatworms and leeches from the river and kept them for about six months, which distressed my mother because she thought they needed feeding. Flatworms actually benefit from fasting as it causes them to rejuvenate, but I used to feed them on scraps of meat. There was also a series of fish from the river, including minnows and a bullhead. There’s a possibly quite formative incident connected to the last. With some friends, I took the bullhead from a faster-flowing part of the Great Stour along with some loaches and took care of the former in a washing up bowl. This was also, incidentally, the last time I saw my elder brother, who happened to visit on that day. I still remember his Afro and attempt to bond with me over the fish, which that last time was rather successful. The next day, my “friends” poured the bowl containing the loaches off a high bridge into the river, which would’ve killed them, and threw the bullhead as far as they could up the river off the same bridge. They seemed completely oblivious of the animals’ suffering, and this along with several other incidents is the reason I don’t believe that cruelty to “animals” during childhood is a reliable marker of a psychopath or sociopath because it was just so very widespread. I lost my temper with them and tried to ‘phone the RSPCA, although my adult self realises that the RSPCA wouldn’t have cared one jot about it as they were, at least at that time, excessively focussed on mammals and to a lesser extent birds. I gained some notoriety at my school for losing my temper at their cruelty. I had another friend who used to take fish out of the water and leave them to suffocate, and on one occasion I put them all back when he wasn’t looking. He became a keen angler and proceeded to kill fish humanely after he’d caught them. It always mystified me, even back then, that people just seemed to accept angling as if it was a perfectly acceptable thing to do.
I wasn’t above capturing animals myself. I did this with water boatmen and backswimmers, and also freshwater shrimp. On two occasions I kept frogspawn and waited for it to mature. The newly-hatched tadpoles reminded me of human embryos. Most of them died but it isn’t clear to me even now whether this was due to a high mortality rate or the conditions I kept them in. They tended to fall prey to leeches, not the kind I was keeping, since they were very separate, but ones which had already been present in the water. Looking back on this now, I wonder if they were in fact nematodes. I also used to look at stream and river water through a microscope, in which there were protists such as Vorticella and Amœba. I don’t know what to tell you about this phase of my life. It shows a burgeoning interest in wildlife, biassed against mammals and birds which persisted for quite a while, but there’s also a sense of entitlement there, that I simply assumed I could take animals from their habitats and keep them captive. I also did this with a number of privet hawk moth caterpillars and one other species of butterfly whose name escapes me, and also earthworms and snails. Come to think of it, there was a long sequence of animals I caught out of interest and simply observed. The only tetrapod I remember doing this with was a slow worm. On another occasion, my mother rescued an injured house martin who died after a few hours, possibly an RTC or a victim of a cat.
This is a rather ambivalent set of activities from my now-vegan perspective, and I think it also opens up a wider issue about the ethics of childhood and parenting. Thinking about the natures of the various nervous systems involved, and the nature of the environments they’re accustomed to living in, some of these seem entirely acceptable and others don’t. For instance, the flatworms and leeches would have been accustomed to living in stagnant, low-oxygen water and that’s how they lived when they were in my jam jars. I don’t have an ethical problem there. The water boatmen and backswimmers simply flew away, which is fine. I captured them and they escaped. The shrimp died, and that’s not good. So did all of the fish, and I think this may have been because the water wasn’t suitable for them and hadn’t been left to stand to reduce dissolved air, which may have formed into bubbles in their gills and suffocated them. This is not good. The slow worm also escaped. The hawk moth flew away but I was planning to release her into the wild near some privet, which didn’t come together because she escaped into the house and ended up mating and laying eggs on the double glazing, which hatched out and then I was unable to care for the caterpillars of the next generation because they were nowhere near any vegetation and too fragile to move without killing them. My mother found the lives of the hawk moths depressing since they seemed to consist simply of reproducing and eating, and at the time I thought the adults didn’t eat, which for her made it worse. I sometimes wonder if this reflects on her perception of her own life.
I was of course also surrounded by cattle (nameless beasts) and sheep, whom I saw shorn and giving birth. My secondary school had its own sheep on which we were supposed to practice various things like inspecting for parasites. I never actually did this. I would also say that there’s a link between gender rôles and cruelty to animals or indifference to their suffering, so the fact that I wasn’t may be significant. There also seemed to be a markèd change at secondary school age in a number of ways which I would characterise as a layer of bigotry and intolerance which is maintained among boys of that age. Broadly, this issue belongs on another blog of mine, but with respect to cruelty this was also encouraged by my peers and I had the mickey taken out of me for not wanting to cause them suffering. There was also quite a lot of attachment to gore, with many boys looking forward to dissections.
At some point during my childhood, and I really cannot place this, I asked my mother if I could become vegetarian. I may have been motivated by my interest in Yoga, which would probably date it to about 1980, when I was twelve to thirteen. I remember thinking that the problem would be difficulty giving up bacon and bizarrely my mother assured me that I wouldn’t have to give up bacon to be vegetarian, an assertion I really don’t understand to this day. However, nothing came of this while I was still a child. Apart from bacon, I actually didn’t like meat and only ate it out of a sense of moral obligation, because I believed that it was better for the animals concerned to exist than not to do so. You can probably see that I was very oriented towards the idea of the interests of entire species rather than individual organisms.
As was normal for someone of my generation who did O- and A-level Biology, I dissected various animals including mice and frogs. I didn’t feel even slightly squeamish about this and didn’t consider it problematic that the animals had been killed. I may, however, have been less involved than average in doing this kind of thing because many years after I’d left school I learned that one of my Biology teachers was vegetarian for ethical reasons, and tried to minimise the use of animals in his lessons. I also became aware that there was an opt-out available for pupils who had ethical objections to dissection on some syllabi, but had no interest in pursuing this. Generally then, in my late childhood my interest in vegetarianism could have been just a phase.
At a point which is difficult to date, I read an article in, of all places, the ‘Reader’s Digest’ which discussed how to reduce one’s risk of cancer, and pointed out that vegetarianism would make a major difference. In fact I no longer think this is strictly true but only if one gets one’s meat from wild animals and eats the offal, which few people do. At the time, the idea of going veggie seemed a massive and undesirable step I was unwilling to take. I think I was twelve at the time, so the period between this and taking up Yoga more seriously must have been quite brief.
I became aware of veganism when I was twelve but believed it to be largely fatal because that’s how it had been presented to me. Therefore I ruled it out for many years to come. I was probably about ten when I learned of the Draize Test, which led to a long-term hostility to cosmetics and a sense of outrage that this was done. I’m not sure when I became aware of LD50, although I knew about drug testing on other species in general. The fact that I didn’t use cosmetics at a time when they were quite popular, for instance among punks, goths and New Romantics, is probably connected to my opposition to the way they were tested and not due to gender stereotyping pressures, although I also disapproved of women wearing makeup because I considered it to be an excessive focus on personal appearance rather than character. Remember, these are the views of an adolescent and there is an element of envy in them too.
It wasn’t until I left home and went to university that I began to think seriously about becoming vegetarian. This went through two phases. In my first term, a school friend at another university decided to go veggie because of tropic levels, i.e. that it’s inefficient to produce food in this manner. Oddly, although I’d been aware of tropic levels since the age of seven, I hadn’t made the connection with animal farming before. He exhorted me to do the same but I persisted in eating meat, and crucially made the point that it isn’t in the animals’ interests that they exist given the nature of their farming. I accepted the tropic levels argument on an intellectual level but it didn’t change my diet. In the second term, I began to study animal liberation in philosophy, particularly the works of Peter Singer, Tom Regan and Mary Midgley, and was persuaded that there were pressing ethical reasons for giving up meat, and also that veganism was a necessary step in the long run. I was just about pescetarian after that, in that i ate fish on one occasion and scampi on another, my justification being the phosphorus bottleneck as popularised by Isaac Asimov, but this only persisted for a few months. I actually went veggie on 9th March 1986, when I was eighteen, and regarded it as a transitional phase into veganism. Personally, I never saw lacto-ovo-vegetarianism as a justifiable permanent state. My actual precipitating event was to annoy a friend when we were about to eat out. I went vegan in October of the next year, when I accidentally ate some chilli con carne and wanted to get something positive out of my mistake.
I suppose I would describe myself as an animal lover as a child. I don’t know think of myself in that way because I simply see it as morally incumbent upon me not to be involved in their suffering and death, and I can watch a film like ‘The Animals Film’ or ‘Earthlings’ and it completely leaves me cold. This probably makes me unusual among vegans and animal rights activists, as nowadays I completely lack passion about it. I simply see it as wrong and therefore something I need to avoid doing. But the purpose of today’s post is not to examine the rights and wrongs of the position, but to look at my past and try to work out whether the events of my childhood have any link with later becoming vegetarian and vegan. It’s hard to say really. I certainly think my rage at discovering animal cosmetic testing and the behaviour of my friends towards fish are quite unusual and didn’t seem to be anticipated by others. It was enough to get me ridiculed, which strongly suggests it was abnormal, and there may also have been some gender politics involved there.
So, in yet another attempt to get some kind of reponse from my readers, I have a question to ask you, bearing in mind that this isn’t really a post about the ethics of veganism so much as the relationship between childhood and adulthood. If you eat meat, and I’m not judging here, can you recall events in your childhood which were particularly similar or unlike mine? If you chose to become vegan or veggie at some point, can you see aspects of your life as a child which pushed you in that direction or prefigured it? Are there other aspects to your value-based decisions whose seeds you can see in your childhood?
A Box Of Chocolates 