Replacing Petrochemicals

This image has been posted on Twitter as a replacement for this older list:

Both of these are attempts to illustrate that petrochemicals are indispensible. There is a problem with the second list because it’s out of date, although how old exactly isn’t clear. I’m guessing it’s 1990s CE because it mentions DVDs. The second is actually more interesting and detailed than the first. It also overlaps with a period in my life when I spent considerable time working on a project I refer to as the “Steady State”, which has influenced a lot of my writing, including my novels ‘Replicas’, ‘Unspeakable’ and ‘1934’. This puts me in an unusually good position to respond to this list.

First some backstory. I’ve been interested in Green issues since the early to mid-’70s and consequently much of my thinking in this area is oriented around this kind of issue. Some time in the 1990s, I was gifted a large single-volume encyclopædia which covered all sorts of areas, including an extensive survey of technology and industry. This, I feel, did a good job of breaking industry at the time into categories which covered these fields very efficiently and completely without leaving many gaps. Since at the time I was training to be a herbalist, I was substantially interested in the field of pharmacology, which I was later to study as part of my course. It was also possible to extend the approach taken within herbalism applied to pharmacology to other fields. Ultimately I was able to produce a fairly rudimentary but very broad corpus of information as to how more ecologically sound practices could be introduced across the board. This was ultimately to form the basis of several of my fictional undertakings.

I call this the Steady State with reference to Fred Hoyle’s cosmology. Hoyle held the very influential mid-century view that the Universe was eternal and infinite, but also that space was constantly expanding. Since this would ultimately lead to a situation where the galaxies were so far apart that they would be invisible to each other, he posited the notion of “continuous creation”, which is the idea that a very small quantity of matter springs spontaneously into existence in practically empty space. It’s been said to amount to the equivalent of a single atom of hydrogen per volume of space equivalent to the Empire State Building. Up until that time, the Steady State Theory was the best-supported cosmological theory available. It appeals quite strongly to me, as you may have noticed from the many times I’ve mentioned Hoyle on this blog. However, it’s long since been refuted and replaced by the Big Bang theory. Hoyle himself seems to have cloven to the idea long after everyone else relinquished it, and as such it’s one of several examples of a distinguished scientist refusing to give up their heterodox views in old age. Another example is Lord Kelvin, who insisted that Earth was only a few hundred million years old because of how long it would’ve taken to cool down, ignoring the heating action of radioactive decay which allows it to be æons older than that.

Albert Einstein was an early exponent of the Steady State Theory, although he quickly rejected it. Hoyle arrived at it in 1948, very close to the middle of the twentieth century. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background in 1964 made it difficult to maintain as opposed to the Big Bang Theory, but even by the time I was reading about cosmology in the early 1970s, many scientists were still presenting it as a viable alternative. It would be fair to say that it was basically gone by ’72, which fits my narrative better so I’m going to say that.

Another influence on my view was the film ‘Pleasantville’, in which a brother and sister find themselves thrown into a black-and-white 1950s television show with the expected attitudes. The idea of ’50s America is such a stereotype nowadays I don’t need to repeat it here, but the point of interest for me in this film is that it parodies the insistence on creationism in schools through what it calls something like “the steady state theory of history”, that is, that as TV series often “press the reset button” at the end of each episode, from the perspective of their protagonists, everything stays the same.

It’s difficult to write stories set in the future because change is constant and this can make them seem dated very quickly. If, however, the author can contrive some kind of artifice rendering technological and consequent social change gradual or static, and in particular generate a retro atmosphere, this can be circumvented. This can be seen in some of Wyndham’s work and also in John Christopher’s Tripods series. Many people are also quite attached to this mythicised period of the mid-twentieth century, and literally speaking the middle third of that century was a 12 175-day period stretching from 3rd May 1934 to 2nd September 1967. In my novel ‘1934’, the dates appear to be looping between those two dates endlessly, although in fact they aren’t. There’s a reason for this based in the “Steady State project”: if you want a technology and culture to persist indefinitely, given current scientific and technical know-how you can only really maintain things at mid-century levels. As soon as you introduce something like, say, semiconductors, it complicates things and the question of sustainability arises, not because such technology is essentially unsustainable so much as because there is a lag between the development of technology for use and how to address that technology in terms of cradle-to-grave processes such as reuse, recycling and the sourcing and extraction of new materials. Ironically, this actually means that sustainable technology is easiest to imagine in the mid-century setting even though that time is associated with much poorer environmentalist consciousness. It should be noted, however, that although the kind of setting and lifestyle available does look like the 1950s, it isn’t backed up by 1950s-style processes. It’s just that the older techniques employed can only be pushed so far before they become impractical.

In any event, this long-term project of mine did result in an imaginary world where it would be much more feasible for this civilisation to continue in the long term without much technological change. Taking herbalism as an example, it’s possible not only to use herbal remedies themselves but also to extract biochemicals from plants, and in fact animals although this would present ethical problems, for the treatment of a wide variety of conditions, and although it would itself be unethical, for example, not to use antimetabolites for cancer, the consumption of petrochemicals would still be dramatically reduced by taking this approach.

Therefore, I’m able to plough through lists like the ones above and suggest alternatives, which end up whittling down the use of petrochemicals considerably. An eighth of fossil fuel use is in the form of petrochemicals, so this is far from a trivial contribution. It should also be noted, first of all, that although much petrochemical activity uses mineral oil as a raw material, the actual compounds in that oil need not be sourced from that substance itself since it’s fairly straightforward to produce aliphatic hydrocarbons from fixed vegetable oils by saturating them and removing them from the glycerol to which they are usually attached. Although they are in fact from mineral oil, they needn’t be.

Here we go then. There will now ensue a long list:

• Toothbrush: for some of my life, toothbrushes have consisted of wooden handles with replaceable wooden heads, whose bristles have been made of plastic. Although this plastic, which could of course either be recycled or made from plastic synthesised from vegetable sources. In order not to get repetitive, I’m going to talk about toothbrush bristles in some depth here.

There is first of all a glib, easy option, which is however entirely unacceptable due to not being vegan. This is in fact a recurring theme, which I will address now. Because I’m considering older technology, much of it was unfortunately based on the exploitation of other animals, and it probably doesn’t need saying that there will inevitably be many sources of bristles from various mammals. However, in order not to be absolutely monstrous we must ignore this option and instead explore the possibility of plants. Unfortunately it’s difficult to comment on the possibility of plant sources for bristles because their actual origins seem to be closely-guarded secrets. Bamboo is a common claim but it isn’t clear if this refers to the bristles themselves. I’ve found various registered trade marks referring to the bristles, meaning that I can’t give a definitive answer to the question of sources.

• Safety goggles: This is fairly general in the sense that it may not apply to all the ends to which these are applied.  However, it seems clear that they could be made from toughened glass and perhaps use rubber seals.  When I say “rubber”, I’m referring to the biological product which can be made from various sources of latex including, for instance, dandelions.  There aren’t going to be many air miles involved considering the plethora of local sources all over the land surface of this planet.  The principles involved apply to glasses of both the sun and eye varieties.
• Lipstick: One possible response to this is that lipstick is simply unnecessary, but I’d be hypocritical to say that.  It can be made from shea butter and coconut with beetroot and turmeric as colouring.  Although I haven’t tried this, doing so might not answer the question of practicality as I don’t have that particular capacity.
• Planes:  These should of course be used as little as possible in any case.  Where air travel is unavoidable, the question of airships arises.  Work is being done on electric planes.  My prejudice tells me that this is unlikely to be very successful for large planes for a very long time, if ever.  With the availability of video calls, it seems there is less reason than there used to be to travel by plane.  I have to hold my hands up here and say I have been on a plane four times, but each time it would’ve been time-consuming but possible to have made the same journey by train, were it not so expensive.  Hence this is a kind of government policy thing rather than a necessity to fly everywhere, and this raises a secondary issue or some might say the primary one: a lot of this depends on government or MNC-level infrastructure and logistics change, which is one answer to that situation when someone comes up to you and says “have you got a car?” or whatever in order to point out hypocrisy.
• Contact lenses: I  would say first of all, as a spectacle-wearer, that I dislike the idea of  contact lenses, don’t accept their necessity and point out the existence of laser eye surgery, which I admit I’m not willing to undergo because of the risks.  Glass contacts exist, of course, but the cornea can’t respire if they’re used.  To be honest, the whole idea of contact lenses is quite disturbing and also potentially dangerous as it ends up inhibiting one of the reflexes used to test for brain death.  I honestly think we can do without contacts entirely and wouldn’t miss them, although some people might want to alter the colour of their irises relatively safely.
• Smartphone: In the older list, it just says “Phone”.  There are a few issues here.  I do have a smartphone.  When I bought it, I was under the misapprehension that it was refurbished, but unfortunately it was new.  There are of course absolutely massive ethical problems with the materials used for smartphones, largely centred on the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Add to that the influence of social media and excessive screen time in general, whose latter is to be fair partly a moral panic, it seems a bit like a garnish to talk about the petrochemical side of things, but there are still ways to address the use of plastics, which I doubt is the only issue.  Even so, a smartphone case needn’t be plastic.  It could be metal, wooden or xylonite.  This last is a kind of plastic-like material of which old dial telephone cases used to be composed, and is heavily vulcanised rubber, that is, rubber (biological product) treated with sulphur.  Sulphur too is found in biological materials, so the fact that it crops up here doesn’t imply that it has to be mined.
• Laptop: Most of what applies to smartphones also applies to laptops, but on a larger scale.  Considering the exterior of this laptop as an example, the case is made of aluminium (which incidentally is not easy to produce in an environmentally-friendly way but is easy to recycle), the keyboard and screen of plastic.  Since this particular laptop display is not touch-sensitive, there’s no reason other than fragility that it shouldn’t be covered in ordinary glass.  Computer keyboards have a long and dishonourable history which includes sheets of rubber, but also much nicer ones which this device lacks, usually but not inevitably made of plastic.  Printed circuit boards, incidentally, can be made of cork or arrays of cuttable metal tracks in some kind of matrix which needn’t be plastic.
• Rubber gloves: Well, they’re rubber so. . .
• Crayons:  Very similar to lipstick.  Basically coloured wax, and by no means something needing to be made from petrochemicals.
• Helmet: I don’t know enough about helmets to comment on this.  However, even if there is a residual quantity of products which absolutely require petrochemicals for construction, as opposed to recycled materials or plant-derived hydrocarbons, the fact that the rest don’t reduces consumption drastically.
• Washing machine:  just want to point out that although labour-saving devices are good, there used to be such a thing as a “copper”, consisting of cast iron and copper, and that the motor which rotates a washing machine barrel is also made of copper wire and iron, so the question arises of where exactly the petrochemicals come in and whether there’s a way to reduce them.
• Ski jacket: This is rather general.  Presumably the issue is insulation rather than the outer fabric or lining, which can clearly be replaced.  There is an insulating material called kapok, the seed material from a couple of species of cotton relatives in the Malvaceæ, which applies very broadly to various stuffing and insulation uses in this list.
• Wind turbine: A wind turbine is a windmill, basically.  I presume this refers to strong light-weight material used in their construction, but clearly that isn’t absolutely necessary to generate wind power.
• Dentures: Xylonite and apatite (the mineral from which bones and teeth are made).
• Fitness tracker:  I’m a bit of a Luddite.  I have,so far as I can tell, no use for such a device but I suspect the answer is similar to that given for smartphones.
• Yoga outfit: This is a bit complicated.  I started doing Yoga in the early 1970s and for most of the time I have not worn anything like this to do it.  I feel there is a marketing ploy going on here.  On the other hand, there are practical benefits to compression wear for exercise connected to circulation and protecting muscles from low-level injury.  Also, there’s the psychological effect of sunk costs, a process from which the likes of Under Armour and Lululemon benefit, that if you invest that much in garments you might be more committed to continuing to exercise.  There’s also the issue of self-consciousness and exercising in a group.  This is all a bit of a mess of issues which raise social and ethical questions outside the matter of petrochemical use.
• Shampoo: There is no need at all for petrochemicals to be used in shampoo.  Saponins and saponifiable fixed oils render them completely unnecessary, and these are widely available.
• Headphones: This calls to mind early radio operators and possibly telephone operators operating in the last decade of the nineteenth century, whose headphones may not have been up to much but presumably did not include petrochemicals.  They probably did include leather though.  In turn, this indicates a long chain of decisions made where petrochemicals were routinely used or considered as an option.  Nonetheless they clearly don’t need them.  They’re basically telephone handsets, which again are made from carbon granules, xylonite and copper wiring.
• Garden hose: Made of rubber.
• Syringe: Can be made from metal, glass and ceramic.
• Running shoes: Mine are made from rubber and canvas. These are unfortunately important.  Running shoes are much more important than all other running kit put together, and running is an important form of exercise.
• Carbon-fibre bicycle: Originally made from rayon, later from polyurethane and tar.
• Toy blocks: Wood.
• Electric piano: Basically a musical laptop.
• Kayak: These were very obviously made from something else originally.

I just want to reiterate what recourse can be made in the absence of other options because it bears repeating more clearly, and also how we ended up in this situation.  It’s notable that from the other list, many of the uses are now obsolete for one reason or another, and many other uses are undesirable, for instance the golfing-related examples.  As time goes by, we may find we no longer need the uses on this list as much as we currently do, or at all.  One example is air travel.  This is becoming increasingly unimportant as the likes of Zoom take over, and 3-D printing may also mean that transportation of small components becomes less important while retaining the use of the raw materials, but the raw materials themselves could be replaced with non-mineral analogues such as polylactic acid.  It isn’t so much that we have to use these materials as that we’ve become addicted to them as a society, and that the research and development has tended to go in the direction of using them.  The mere contingent fact that we might need petrochemicals currently does not mean we necessarily cannot produce these products in any other way.  It just means the work hasn’t been done.

Clearly it would be a huge industrial upheaval to change the actual raw materials for all such products.  Fortunately this is not immediately necessary.  Because we have oceans, for example, full of plastic, we already have quite a lot of these raw materials available to us already.  We do of course have the problem of the energy input needed to recover those materials.  Besides that, we also have the ability to produce identical compounds as are currently produced by the petrochemical industry without actually using mineral oil, because we can produce long-chain aliphatic hydrocarbons from the likes of vegetable oil and wax.

To conclude, we have gotten ourselves into a mess, but we can get ourselves out of it if the will is there.

Planet Hamlet

Look here for an explanation of the post title. At least for this post I shall be calling this planet Hamlet rather than the silly name. So far as I know, nobody has ever called it that before and it may not function well as a viable official name, although I think it would. Although there may be issues of cultural imperialism, the character as portrayed in the play in question is in a sense global property. On a different note, it has an even lower population than a hamlet.

Hamlet used to fascinate me inordinately as a child, probably for two reasons. One is that it’s blue. In fact, Neptune is if anything bluer, the image above being false colour, but James Muirden the astronomer commented in his book that he definitely saw it as having a blue tinge even though everyone else seemed to see it as green. The border between green and blue seems to be more disputed than most colour differences, and it’s worth remembering that colour terms in other languages often vary, and also tend to occur in a particular order. I presume that Japanese calls the colour in question “青”, as does Mandarin (kind of). The other reason is that for whatever reason, Hamlet is the most obscure planet, being mainly used as the butt of jokes because of its name, which makes it intriguing and a target for the imagination. Hamlet is also only a little denser than water, and at the time of the 1930s (CE) encyclopædia I was getting my info from, its density seems to have been estimated as the same as water, suggesting to astronomers at the time that the planet was a globe of liquid. In 1977, I wrote a story called ‘A Holiday On Uranus’ about exactly that, set in 2177. I remember it fairly vaguely, but in it Hamlet was inhabited by intelligent fish-like beings living in its vast ocean and there was a security scanner used at the spaceport which used terahertz radiation to reveal the surface of the body in clothed people, which was eventually invented for real. Travel to the planet was at near the speed of light. I also imagined slavery in the Saturnian system and cruel and oppressive measures being taken to modify the bodies of Saturnians to make it impossible for them to rebel in an analogy to the Atlantic slave trade. I still have it somewhere I think.

At that time it was still possible to project one’s imagination onto the outer Solar System in such a way, although my view was clearly influenced by the fact that most of what I’d read about Hamlet had been written in the ’30s. Also, in one of those odd random associations one gets as a child, Bing Crosby’s ‘Little Sir Echo’, about a personified echo who was “ever so far away”, always used to make me think of someone living there, and I even went so far as to calculate how long it would take sound to travel the distance from Earth to the planet and back, which is around five and a half centuries. I also imagined a steam locomotive travelling there, which would probably take about a millennium, though that’s a guess. It strikes me that all my imaginings about Hamlet were extremely outdated even for the time I was making them.

Back in Stapledon’s day, and he was chiefly active in the 1930s as far as popular fiction was concerned, the giant planets weren’t considered to be gas giants, but extremely large rocky planets with thick and deep atmospheres. Consequently he was able to imagine Neptune in particular, and also to a limited degree Hamlet, as planets inhabited both by native life and the descendants of life from Earth, and given the increased radiation from the Sun æons in our future, Hamlet has agriculture at its poles, the equator being too hot, suggesting that at that point its peculiar rotation had yet to be discovered.

This brings me to the first real point about the planet: it “rolls around” on its side. Hamlet does not rotate “upright” like most other planets. It doesn’t even rotate at a somewhat tilted angle. Instead, each pole spends a season of the seven dozen-year long orbit pointing towards and at another time away from the Sun, as its axial tilt is 98°. This means that for most of the surface, with the exception of the equatorial region, there are forty-two years of daylight followed by another forty-two years of night. Hamlet does, however, rotate properly every seventeen hours, so at the equator it would have a normalish day with sunrise and sunset. This zone is about fourteen thousand kilometres wide. If it was much closer to the Sun, this peculiar arrangement would lead to very extreme seasons, but Hamlet is actually colder than the next planet out, Neptune, at -224°C. It has the coldest average temperature of any of the planets in the system. This anomalous situation is thought to be caused by the same incident which tilted it so extremely. It’s believed that a major impact or close encounter between a massive object and Hamlet knocked it onto its side and stirred up its atmosphere to the extent that the warmer layers nearer the centre of the planet, where the temperature is about 5000°C, ended up circulating towards the cloud tops and radiating the heat which in other gas giants is insulated from space by thousands of kilometres of not very conductive fluid. It might be thought that the reason is that half the planet is in darkness for forty-two years at a time, but this is not in fact the reason. Hamlet is so far out that it doesn’t really make as much difference to the temperature, and like many outer worlds the internal heat is a major contributor to the climate and weather. However, Hamlet is smaller than the two inner gas giants and has no significant tidal forces to generate heat, so it would in any case have a much cooler interior even without the incident which stirred it up.

When he discovered the planet, William Herschel thought it was probably a comet. It’s remarkable in being the first planet to be consciously discovered in historical times. There is a sense in which Venus was discovered when it was realised that the Morning and Evening Star were identical in the thirteenth century, which also led to it being given that name because the Morning Star was dedicated to the goddess, but an entirely new planet had never been discovered before. Remarkably, Herschel lived to the age of eighty-four, which is the same length as Hamlet’s year. Asteroids began to be discovered about twenty years later. The planet often seems to be passed over. For instance, there are relatively few works of SF which feature it. One exception is Fritz Leiber’s ‘Snowbank Orbit’, a 1962 short story in which the spaceship Prospero ejected from the inner system by an explosion in a battle attempts a slingshot orbit around Hamlet to bring it back inward. This was before such a manœuvre had been attempted for real as far as I know, but is now common, though not round the planet in question. Leiber tends to focus on Shakespeare, so his inclusion of Hamlet in that tale is probably due to its own naming theme. I haven’t read it all, but suspect that the planet only really participates in the plot as a distant “roundabout” rather than a planet in its own right. To be fair, so little was known about the place back then that it might not have had much opportunity to be anything else, although it’s all about imagination and Leiber was substantially a sword and sorcery author as much as an SF one. Cecelia Holland’s ‘Floating Worlds’ novel does have it as a proper location though. I actually owned that book for decades but never got around to reading it before I ended up giving it away, so I can’t enlighten you on its content.

The key concept here, then, seems to be that Hamlet tends to be ignored to a much greater extent than other planets, except for the obvious occasional puerile comment. Is this fair? Is it just that the silly name puts people off taking it seriously, or is there something about it, or perhaps all the other planets, which lends itself to being ignored? Is it the Basingstoke of the Solar System? Come to think of it, is Basingstoke really that boring? Am I being unfair? All that said, Hamlet as a planet, as opposed to our relationship with it, is indeed unusual because of the fact that it orbits on its side, if for no other reason. It’s also the first planet to be found with rings after Saturn, within my lifetime in fact, and its rings are notably different to Saturn’s, being darker, thinner and more widely spaced. Its moons are, uniquely in the Solar System, not marked by any outstanding features. Neptune has the kudos of being the outermost planet if Pluto isn’t counted as one, and for twenty years at a time Neptune really is the outermost due to Pluto’s peculiar orbit. Neptune also has unusual moons and the fastest winds in the system, but I’ll deal with all that when I come to it.

It is, however, worth comparing the two worlds, as they’re probably the two most similar planets in the Solar System. I’ve kind of been here before. Both are roughly the same size, very cold, the same density and have similar day lengths. They also have similar colours and compositions, and their size and density dictate that their cloud top gravity is similar. Although Hamlet is the colder, the difference is only about ten degrees, bearing in mind, however, that ten degrees is a bigger difference at such a low temperature than it is at room temperature and more like a difference of thirty degrees for us.

Here’s the picture I posted last time:

This is Hamlet as it looked to Voyager when it got there in ’86. The equinox occurred in 2007 so this is something like twenty years off from that, a quarter of a “year” or so away from that point. It’s exceedingly featureless and fuzzy looking, unlike the much clearer and more vivid Neptune:

It’s possible that the haze in the atmosphere of the closer planet is seasonal, but this rather uninspiring view is enough to make one understand why it tends to be ignored. After all, just imagine if a space probe costing millions had been dispatched all the way to the place and it had come up with nothing but for the greenish cueball image shown above. Fortunately, Voyager visited all four gas giants and is to date the only spacecraft ever to have visited either Hamlet or Neptune. It took four and a half years to travel the distance from Saturn to Hamlet and at the time it got there, January 1986, the planet was invisible to the naked eye. Hamlet dips in and out of visibility because of its distance and orientation, but is bright enough to be visible as a faint “star” some of the time to people with good eyesight who know where to look. In order to get a good look at Titan, Voyager 1 had manœuvred itself out of the plane of the Solar System and visited no planets after Saturn in late 1980, but Voyager 2 went on to cover Hamlet and Neptune. This means, of course, that the planet didn’t get as much attention as the previous two in any case. There were also imaging challenges. The rings are as dark as coal and the moons are not only dark but also dimly-lit compared to Jupiter’s and Saturn’s. Moreover, the velocity with which Voyager 2 moved through the system marred many of the images with motion blur. This brings up an important issue often raised by conspiracy theorists about NASA. Images taken by space probes are, as far as I know, always processed from the raw form in which they’re received, for this kind of reason. There may be too much or too little contrast, and in this case the problem was that the blur had to be filtered out. I have little idea regarding how this was done, as I would’ve thought that blurring would mean that some features would have obliterated others completely owing to brightness, but maybe not. I do know it seems impossible to get rid of a different kind of blur with processing in that way, namely when things are out of focus, because otherwise an out of focus image could be drawn which would appear to be in focus to someone with myopia, and that doesn’t happen, I’m guessing because of entropy. However, motion blur is not the same thing. Techniques of processing the blur have also improved since 1986, so it’s been possible to extract new information from the data received at the time. In the case of Hamlet I’m tempted to say that it hardly matters because so little detail is apparent, due not to motion blur but the basic appearance of the planet itself.

Another aspect of Hamlet’s appearance is that for human eyes the green-blue colour tends to dominate and make details hard to see. This is similar to the way a clear daytime sky on Earth, so to speak, looks bluer than it really is to many people. This sounds like nonsense, but I have to interject a personal note here that I don’t actually see the sky just as blue, and this is an issue which has come up repeatedly and I haven’t been able to resolve satisfactorily. When I look at a cloudless blue sky in broad daylight, I see large purple “splotches” all over it. These are not directly linked to my vision because they stay in the same parts of the sky when I look around, so it isn’t a question of glare creating an optical illusion due to the blood in my retinæ. It may be connected that in fact the Rayleigh scattering responsible for the bluish colour of the sky isn’t confined to blue wavelengths but actually affects indigo and violet light even more, and I suspect that what I’m seeing is uneven scattering of these higher frequencies. I don’t know why I would notice this more than other people. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I see the sky as purple or indigo, but it definitely doesn’t look merely blue to me, and for some reason nobody else has ever mentioned this, so I presume they don’t or can’t see it. Nonetheless, if the human eye were equally sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light, the sunlit sky wouldn’t look blue to anyone but more indigo.

I’ve never seen Hamlet with a telescope or anything else, but only via images processed imperfectly for human colour vision. Through violet, orange and red filters, the globe is banded in the same way as Jupiter and Saturn are, though more subtly. The green and blue colour of the atmosphere, however, drowns this out to the unaided human eye. I’ve previously mentioned conspiracy theorists in connection with the question of NASA image processing. Flat Earthers would have the same problem explaining models of Hamlet’s atmosphere as Titan’s, because of the dominance of the Coriolis Effect. Hamlet is very cold indeed, unlike Jupiter and Saturn has only a weak internal heat source, and unlike all other planets in this system orbits on its side. This means that models of its atmosphere correctly show the movements of clouds in a counterclockwise direction dominated by the Coriolis Effect. Note also that these models do not depend on the actual existence of the planet itself, since they’re merely an extrapolation of what happens in a fluid body of Hamlet’s character. The movements are dominated by the movements of the planet itself and not by heat from inside or outside, in spite of the fact that entire hemispheres are daylit for forty-two years at once while their antipodes are nocturnal for the same period, and it might be thought there would be a big temperature difference driving the winds, but there isn’t. This is difficult for flat Earthers to explain because of the rotation of weather systems in our own atmosphere being clockwise on one side of the Equator and counterclockwise on the other.

Hamlet has a number of unusual features which are difficult to explain simply. It rotates on its side, the magnetic field is neither oriented towards the poles or particularly away from them and originates from a location about a third out from the planet’s centre. It’s also colder than expected, and the moons are unusual as well. The most popular explanation is that a roughly Earth-sized body collided with the planet and still has much of its material within it, knocking Hamlet off its axis, changing its composition and causing the formation of carbon monoxide from some of the methane, in other words burning the atmosphere via incomplete combustion due to low oxygen level. Although this is also used to explain the strange magnetic field, I don’t know the connection. Maybe no-one does. This peculiarity also means that unlike any other known planet, Hamlet’s auroræ are equatorial rather than polar, although they do occur around two localised areas on opposite sides of the equator.

One thing I seem to have been right about is that Hamlet contains a vast water ocean, although it is mixed with ammonia, altering its freezing point. Of Neptune, a rather similar planet in many ways, Olaf Stapledon once said, “. . . the great planet bore a gaseous envelope thousands of miles deep. The solid globe was scarcely more than the yolk of a huge egg”. Hamlet and Neptune are by far the two most similar planets in the System, and this is equally true of both. A major fact about both which is almost completely ignored is that it rains diamonds. What happens is that methane is compressed, squeezing out the hydrogen and causing the carbon left behind to form into diamonds under the extreme pressures. These then fall through ever-hotter layers towards the core, where they vapourise, bubble up through the ocean and recrystallise at the top. This also means there may be “diamond-bergs” floating on the ocean. I used the tendency for gas giants to form diamonds in this way in my novel ‘Replicas’, where diamonds have become a monetarily worthless byproduct of the deuterium and helium-3 mining industry on those planets. ROT13’d text spoiler: Zryvffn raqf hc bjavat n qvnzbaq znqr sebz ure cneragf’ erznvaf, fuvccrq onpx ng terng rkcrafr sebz Nycun Pragnhev gb Rnegu, juvpu vf cevpryrff gb ure ohg nf n cenpgvpny bowrpg vf cenpgvpnyyl jbeguyrff. https://rot13.com/. The diamonds may also be floating in a sea of liquid carbon. If this is so, or if there’s a whole geological layer of diamond, it could explain why the magnetic field is so different.

It takes over two and a half hours for a radio signal to pass between Hamlet and Earth, and the round trip is of course twice as long. Voyager 2’s transmitter is about as powerful as the light bulb in a fridge at 23 watts. This is stronger than a mobile ‘phone signal but way weaker than most radio stations. It works over such a long distance because the dishes used are aimed directly at each other, the frequency is free of interference by other human-made signals and the antennæ are very large. This could’ve been mentioned at any point in a number of my recent posts, but it may as well be here. In the case of Hamlet, this single spacecraft is responsible for practically everything the human race knows about the planet, and it relies on that tiny gossamer thread of a radio signal sent in the mid-’80s from two light hours away by a transmitter as weak as a dim filament light bulb. The initial baud rate was about 21 kilobaud, reduced in the end to a mere one hundred and sixty bits per second. They’re pretty amazing ships.

The Voyager mission to Hamlet was overshadowed by tragedy. Its closest approach took place on 24th January 1986, when I was at the height of my arguments with the fundamentalist Christians I met at university (that is relevant, as you’ll see). The Challenger disaster occurred on 28th, and was reported some time in the afternoon. I first heard of it as I was queuing for dinner at my hall of residence, and the kind of “head honcho” Christian student responded that it was “good” because it would persuade people to focus on and spend money on more pressing things. Whereas that’s a common and valid opinion I happen not to share, there’s a time and a place, and I get the impression he was saying that for shock value, which doesn’t seem very Christian by any internal standard. That, then, is my abiding memory of the Challenger disaster, and regardless of the value or priorities of NASA’s Space Shuttle program, the fact remains that seven people lost their lives that day, and of course anyone’s death diminishes us all.

A tangential result of Challenger was that it eclipsed the news from Voyager 2. It was also intimately connected with it in that NASA was inundated with letters requesting that the newly discovered moons be named in memory of the Challenger astronauts. This didn’t happen, even through coincidental Shakespearian characters having the same names. It was a factor in this naming proposal that there was a teacher on board, as many people who were children at the time were watching the launch live on TV due to this connection. It’s also a little-known fact that NASA almost sent Big Bird of Sesame Street, in character, on this flight. In 1988, the IAU, an organisation I currently like less and less the more I hear about it but maybe I’m being unfair, and it is after all an organisation and those are usually bad in some way, voted not to adopt the names of the astronauts for moons because they weren’t international enough. This might seem to make some sense until you consider that they’re actually named after Shakespearean (sp?) characters, which are of course associated with England, so their decision didn’t actually make much sense. However, at least some craters on the far side of Cynthia got named after them.

Hamlet has rings. Although they seem quite different to Saturn’s from a distance, close up pictures are hard even for experts to distinguish between at first glance once the image’s dynamic range has been boosted, because they show the same ringlet structure and there are also at least two shepherd moons, Ophelia and Cordelia. The rings are labelled using Greek letters and numbers, apparently without particular regard to their order. From inner to outer they’re referred to as ζ, 6, 5, 4, α, β, γ, δ, λ, ε, μ and ν. I presume this anomalous order is connected to their order of discovery because the way I remember them from the early ’80s they were named from α to ε. This also seems to continue the tendency to call things to do with the planet odd names, as it seems more logical either to number them or give them letters but not mix the two. The outermost two are red and blue respectively and the rest are dark. The first five, α to ε, were discovered on 10th March 1977 when the planet crossed in front of the star SAO 158687 and it blinked on and off regularly on either side of the planetary disc. However, a ring had been reported much earlier, by William Herschel, although this may have been imaginary because they’re very dark. The ν (Nu, not “Vee”) ring is between the moons Rosalind and Portia, so they also count as shepherds. The fact that most of the rings remain very narrow but don’t have shepherds is unexplained. Before their discovery, only Saturn was thought to have rings. After Jupiter was also discovered to have a ring in 1979, the question was whether Neptune would be the odd one out in lacking them. From that point onward, I assumed Neptune had them. Nobody knows what they’re made of, except that they can’t be ice, because their colours are unusual and don’t yield definite spectra to go on. Their darkness suggests they’re carbon-rich, and in conjunction with the probable diamond-bergs and liquid carbon ocean show that Hamlet is well on its way to being a carbon planet.

Most of the light is reflected by the ε Ring, which is also the most elliptical and the one closest to the equatorial plane. It’s brighter in some areas than others due to that eccentricity and varies in width. It’s possible that this variation translates into arcs – curves – rather than rings for other planets, perhaps orbiting other stars, or maybe Neptune. I can assure you that by the time I come to Neptune I will know if this is so. This is the ring with the first discovered pair of shepherds. The next brightest rings are α and β, which also vary in width, being widest 30° from their furthest points from Hamlet and narrowest 30° from their nearest. It’s probably coincidence that these angles correspond to those of the planetary magnetic field, or if not, something to do with a similar but separate dynamic process. Both these rings are somewhat tilted and are ten kilometres wide in some places, which raises the issue that they were detectable from three milliard kilometres away even though they were smaller than the Isle of Wight. The γ Ring (I’m just going to deal with these in alphabetical order, which means mentioning the 1977 ones first) is narrow, almost opaque and thin enough to make no difference to stars crossing when it’s edge on. This also means it isn’t dusty. The inner edge particles orbit six times for five of Ophelia’s orbits, so there seems to be a relationship there. As for δ, it’s circular, slightly tilted and may contain a moonlet because it seems to have waves in it. It has a more opaque and narrower outer part and a wider and more transparent inner side, which seems to be dustier.

Before Voyager 2 got there, the team who discovered these first five rings found a further three rings by the same method. For some reason these are known as 4, 5 and 6 even though five were already known by that point and there was a Greek letter naming scheme going on from the same team. I don’t understand this, but there it is. Voyager 2 found another two, fainter, rings, the naming scheme going back to Greek letters, and in this century the Hubble Space Telescope found two more. Rings 4, 5 and 6 are up to dozens of kilometres away from the equatorial plane and are inner and fainter to the ones discovered in ’77. They’re also narrower and don’t occult starlight edge-on. The μ Ring is blue and contains the moon Mab, around which it’s also brightest so the chances are it’s made of bits of that moon. These rings are dusty. Finally there’s 1986U2R, because of course it would be called that wouldn’t it?

The rings don’t form a stable system and given what’s known about them should disperse within a million years. However the fact that all the other gas giants have rings suggests either that having rings is normal for such planets or that they’re temporary but very common. Hamlet’s system generally, including the moons, is not so dominated by ring-related factors as Saturn’s although there are several harmonies, operating between small inner moons and the rings rather than the larger classic moons observable from Earth. A moon the size of Puck would be enough to provide the material for the rings, and Mab is actually currently breaking up and forming another ring, so it isn’t that peculiar. There are probably moonlets up to ten kilometres across within each of the rings. I presume the dimness of the sunlight out there combined with the darkness of the satellites and other material makes them harder to detect optically than small moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Getting back to Hamlet itself, it’s methane which gives it that colour, but the atmosphere is in fact mainly hydrogen and helium like the other gas giants. It’s the second least dense planet and has a cloud top gravitational pull of only 89% of our sea level gravity. There are four layers of cloud corresponding to increasing temperature and atmospheric pressure. At slightly above sea level pressure, there are methane clouds. Considerably further down are the deepest clouds which have been actually observed, where the pressure is equivalent to the Earth’s ocean’s sunlit layers’, and are made of hydrogen sulphide. Appropriately for the planet’s official name, these would stink of rotten eggs. These share the layer with clouds of ammonia, which has an acrid, stinging odour. Below that is ammonium hydrosulphide, and finally, at a level where the pressure is equivalent to about four dozen times our sea level pressure, there are clouds of water vapour. The atmosphere is probably the most featureless of any solar planet’s, but does show the occasional white cloud, as can be seen in the photo at the top of this post. It’s also quite clear compared to all the other gas giants’, Titan’s and Venus’s, though not ours or the Martian one. I would expect there to be a level where one would find oneself completely surrounded by blue-green with various species of cloud. There are also traces of complex hydrocarbons as would be found in mineral oil and natural gas on Earth. Unlike other collisional atmospheres, Hamlet lacks a mesosphere, which is normally found between the stratosphere and thermosphere. There is a hydrocarbon haze in the stratosphere.

The chief distinguishing feature of Hamlet’s atmosphere is its featurelessness. Voyager 2 only detected ten clouds over the entire planet as it flew past. All the other gas giants have more stuff going on in theirs, and this is probably why it took so long to work out its rotational period of seventeen hours. There is a whiter polar cap from around half way between the equator and the poles, which swaps over between north and south as the orbit wears on. Voyager 2 was unable to observe the northern hemisphere because it was night there when it passed, so not only has Hamlet only been visited once but also half of it hasn’t been observed close up at all. In the decade or so after Voyager left, things started happening in its atmosphere but of course they couldn’t be seen as well as they would’ve if they’d taken place when it was there. I feel like there’s a kind of theme emerging here. Also, astronomy has only been advanced enough to make much meaningful sense of what’s going on since the 1950s, which is less than an entire orbit ago, so a whole cycle of seasons has yet to be observed. There has been a dark spot like the one on Neptune, and there are thunderstorms. It’s also possible that there’s a convection layer blocking the internal heat from the outer reaches of the planet.

So that’s Hamlet, such as it is. Next time I’ll be talking about its moons. I have two questions for you though. Did you feel that avoiding the name “Uranus” made you feel differently about this planet? I’m not sure about calling it “Hamlet” either, but that does at least circumvent the issue. Could you think of a better name or is it a bad idea to fixate on it so much?

The Colours Of Blood

It used to be a common misconception that oxygenated human blood is red and deoxygenated human blood blue. This probably arises from diagrams like this:

In these diagrams and in models it’s a convention to colour most veins and smaller vessels through which blood flows toward the heart as blue, and most arteries and smaller vessels through which it flows from it as red. The pulmonary circulation may be different as in that subsystem it’s the artery which carries deoxygenated blood and the vein in which it’s oxygenated. The colour of oxygenated blood is more or less accurate, but deoxygenated blood is not blue but close to Tyrian purple:

Veins do look blue. This is because of Rayleigh scattering in their surfaces and blood is not visible through the walls of larger veins, which are however proportionately thinner than arteries and therefore more likely to have visible blood. Clearly blood is visible in smaller vessels since parts of the human body are bright red, such as the palpebral conjunctivæ and the buccal mucosa, but the cause of the colour of the clear sunlit sky and most examples of blue colouring in animals is the same as that of veins: smaller opaque particles scatter shorter wavelengths of visible light more than longer ones and human colour vision is less sensitive to violet than blue. In fact I don’t really see the sunlit sky as blue for some reason, but I’m aware that people generally report it as blue and I certainly see veins and some human irises as blue.

Arterial blood is vivid red, almost unnaturally so if that made any sense, and this is of course due to the fact that it contains oxygenated hæm, an iron-rich porphyrin. Porphyrins are unusual ring-shaped molecules with metal ions at their centres. Another very common porphyrin is found at the centre of chlorophyll and contains magnesium. Likewise, cyanocobalamine, also known as B₁₂, has a cobalt atom at its centre. Cyanocobalamine is in fact the raw material for hæm itself, and is, I think, turquoise.

The porphyrins have a particular property which is very useful. They can flip between two different states, and in conjunction with three dye molecules they respond to photons as logic gates. Therefore, in theory it’s possible to build a highly compact computer with them, since they are not only logic gates in themselves as opposed to logic gates built out of transistors or their equivalents such as valves or relays, but also somewhat smaller than even the smallest miniaturisation is capable of producing today. A porphyrin ring is 840 picometres in diameter, although the dye molecules are also required, compared to the smallest transistors at one nanometre, several of which are needed to build a logic gate. It probably works out at about a third the size in two dimensions, and of course porphyrin rings are only one atom thick. The difficulty would be in assembling that kind of structure at that size.

Hæm only forms the centre of a much larger molecule of hæmoglobin, which is unsurprisingly made of several protein molecules all joined to the central porphyrin. Since it contains iron, a transition metal, it has a colour. Alkali and alkali earth metals usually form white compounds, so I don’t understand why chlorophyll is green, but blood is red because of the iron and the states it’s in. The fatal combination of carbon monoxide with hæm to form carboxyhæmoglobin is famous for being cherry red, which means that carbon monoxide poisoning often makes people look really healthy, but of course the problem is that the combination is not reversible and the days of one’s blood carrying oxygen are now gone, except to the extent that it dissolves in plasma.

The so-called bloodless fish of the Southern Ocean are a whole family of fish, the Channichthyidæ, who completely lack hæmoglobin as adults. Also known as icefish, they have a slow metabolism and live in very cold water, which enables them to survive by using their plasma alone to carry oxygen and carbon dioxide. In order to do this, they have unusually wide capillaries, four times the blood volume of other fish their size and a greater cardiac output. Their blood is transparent and colourless. They also lack myoglobin, the muscle pigment which stores oxygen for use later. It used to be thought that the lack of blood corpuscles in icefish conferred some kind of advantage, possibly based on lower blood viscosity and was a necessary adaptation to living near Antarctica, but this turns out not to be the case and they have simply evolved like that. This probably happened in the past thirty million years.

Timur I, Bunaken Island, Sulawesi, INDONESIA
Didemnum molle
Date
8 October 2009, 05:20
Source
Sea Squirt (Didemnum molle)
Author
Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE

Hæmoglobin is as far as I know universal among vertebrates apart from icefish. It is not, however, the only blood pigment in our phylum. Sea squirt blood contains a vanadium-based pigment referred to as hæmovanadin, which as can be seen from the above photo is green. It does not tranport oxygen and its function is unclear. Nobody knows why sea squirts and some other animals use this pigment, but one idea is that it makes them toxic to potential predators. All species using it are marine and it’s the only incidence of vanadium in biochemistry so far as I know.

A more common green blood pigment, which does carry oxygen, is chlorocruorin. This also uses iron and is found in four families of polychætes. These are very common segmented worms characterised by having more bristles than the oligochætes represented by earthworms (oligochætes are actually not a clade). It differs from hæmoglobin in having nearly two hundred iron atoms in the molecule and is a much larger molecule. It’s also distinctive in being green in dilute solution but red when concentrated, and consequently some worms are green where oxygen conditions are good and red when they aren’t. There are also two species of starfish who contain the porphyrin but not the pigment, and it seems it can arise very straightforwardly from a mutation of the machinery which produces hæm. Consequently the question might arise of whether there have been any green-blooded vertebrate lineages which became extinct, such as the Acanthodii, a group of fish who left no descendants when they became extinct in the Permian. It also means the presence of chlorocruorin doesn’t imply species are closely related. Hæmoglobin also appears to have arisen separately in different groups of animals, notably the annelids, which probably explains why leeches suck vertebrate blood. It’s present in one species of snail, in the protist Paramœcium and in many crustaceans. This can be seen, for example, in water fleas living in stagnant water, who often turn red. Importantly for the production of veggie burgers, it’s also found in the roots of bean plants, where its rôle is to remove the oxygen and concentrate nitrogen, which is fixed by bacteria living in their root nodules. This hæmoglobin is used to make more convincing meat substitutes, although as a vegan I’m not usually keen on eating something which resembles a bit of dead vertebrate. Also, the more recent plant-based burgers are sometimes tested on animals and are therefore not necessarily vegan anyway, which leaves me wondering what the point is.

There is a third iron-based blood pigment called hæmerythrin, which is reddish-violet when oxygenated and colourless when not. This is found in priapulids (also known as “penis worms” because of their appearance and mentioned many times on here), and peanut worms or sipunculids, who are worm-like longitudinally striped animals with a thin tentacle at one end, one of whom glories in the name Golfingia because it was discovered during a game of golf when the ball landed in a seashore pool. Brachiopods also contain hæmerythrin. These three groups are not at all closely related to each other and therefore hæmerythrin is an example of a probable pigment to some extent, although it’s actually rare and the only phylum in which it is universal is the sipunculids. Hæemerythrin is always in cœlomic fluid, i.e. the fluid filling the body cavities, but within this fluid can sometimes be found as blood corpuscles. Therefore it seems that there is some point to it apart from arbitrary mutation. In spite of it being superficially similar to hæmoglobin including its colour and the fact that it contains iron, it is not chemically similar to it and contains no porphyrins.

In science fiction and its allied trades, green blood is a very popular idea. Star Trek’s Vulcans, Romulans, Rigelians and Remans all had green blood, which I presume was based on copper. There is a copper-based respiratory pigment in nature called hæmocyanin, and this is fairly well-known. This is blue, and uses two copper atoms as prosthetic histidine groups to combine with oxygen instead of a single iron atom. It’s found exclusively in arthropods and molluscs, although insects don’t have it because they don’t use their blood for respiration except trivially because it will have atmospheric gases and oxygen dissolved in it. Notoriously, horseshoe crab blood, which is blue and contains this pigment, is used to develop vaccines. It has been claimed that the Covid-19 vaccines used in this country are vegan, so I don’t understand this apparent contradiction. They’re also endangered species. Leaving that moral quagmire aside, the fact that horseshoe crabs use hæmocyanin very probably also means trilobites had blue blood. Like hæmerythrin, it has no porphyrins and I think it’s the only respiratory pigment other than hæmoglobin which occurs in terrestrial animals such as snails, spiders and scorpions. Many charismatic species have it, such as octopodes, the aforementioned horseshoe crabs and scorpions. I’m guessing tarantulas also use this pigment. Hæmocyanin is more likely to occur in cold, low oxygen habitats.

The question at the back of my mind while I’ve been writing all this is whether there are sentient species elsewhere in the Universe who have different coloured blood. This is a long way down the road from the question of any life at all off this planet. It makes the big assumptions that there is, that it’s biochemically based, respires with the help of gases and has something analogous to blood. It’s also a chain of assumptions, appended to many more, made in ‘Star Trek’. Vulcans and the other similar humanoid species I’ve mentioned have green blood, although this doesn’t really show in their complexions. Spock is shown as having a slight green tint, but without other skin pigments he would presumably be expected to be greener than you think, so to speak, but has no plans to take over the world, even accidentally. It’s quite likely that the viewer will find out what colour a particular intelligent lifeform’s blood will be in Trek due to the considerable violence in that franchise. Notably, Klingon blood has been shown as lavender, suggesting it contains manganese, but this is rumoured to be a directorial decision made to keep ‘Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country”s PG certificate. In other situations it’s been shown as red. For a more complete breakdown see Memory Alpha.

I can certainly imagine a colder planet than this one, with a thinner atmosphere which nonetheless contains oxygen, having dominant multicellular life forms on its land surface whose blood contains hæmocyanin and is therefore blue. I can even roughly sketch this planet. It orbits a K-type dwarf (orange and slightly cooler than the Sun, and more long-lived) with a mass 90% that of the Sun and a surface temperature of 5200 K. Luminosity is fifty percent of the Sun and the planet orbits 90 million kilometres from its primary, having a year lasting 169 terrestrial days. It has three landlocked oceans, two of which are circumpolar and largely frozen, covering 35% of the planet and a surface gravity of 65% of ours. Mean surface temperature is just above freezing at 45° and partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere is 120 millibars, making it impossible for humans to survive there for more than a few minutes without supplemental oxygen. There are no seasons because of the lack of axial tilt. It has relatively large cold deserts and a diameter of nine thousand kilometres. I could go on with this but it’s easy to conjecture. The sky is turquoise and darker than ours, as are the plants, since they use slightly different wavelengths for photosynthesis. Of course it doesn’t actually follow that blood pigments even carry oxygen, or another respiratory gas, and if there were compounds which carry oxygen they may not change colour.

I don’t want to turn this into yet another SF world-building exercise. To be honest, the main thing writing this has raised in my mind is whether the UK government uses the same definition of vegan as I do, as I seem to have just discovered that vaccines are tested on horseshoe crab blood extracted by killing the animal in question, and although I still plan to get the second vaccine I am really quite angry, and also curious, about this, and want to know what alternatives are available. But anyway, pretty blood.

My Political Awakening

Up until 2002, every year seemed to bring something new in my life. My second year at university was no exception.

1986 was the last time I spent a protracted period of time in Canterbury. I came back from Leicester on 24th June and took a washing up and cleaning job at the local mental hospital, noting sadly that the cleaning services were now privatised and therefore that I’d be working for a private sector employer, which went very much against my principles. I lasted four days. I was unable to learn the layout of the hospital and made everything less efficient. I also joined the Green Party, thanks to Vicky posting their Canterbury address on the noticeboard of the Attenborough Bridge. I was quite depressed for most of that summer, feeling that most of my first year at university had been blighted thanks to the Christians and that I was never going to get that back. I was also worried that I would never have a romantic relationship. I also found myself rather worryingly developing feelings for an old school friend, but I didn’t tell anyone, including her, until they faded because I realised this was a kind of rebound from Vicky.

That autumn, of course, I went back to university and threw myself into social life and political activism. I joined the Green group, LEAF, which I was eventually to become co-chair of, and also the Hunt Sabs and the World Development Movement. I was nineteen at the time and aware of the phenomenon of rosy retrospection, which is where one looks back on one’s own past with unwarranted nostalgia. Therefore I decided to note consciously that I was happy at this point in my life, and again the question of unreliable memory is resolved. I got to know Vicky better and she recommended the ‘New Internationalist’ to me as a good source of information on progressive issues. I also went on a lot of demos and did various other things like campaigning for better vegetarian and vegan meals, watched a heck of a lot of films and gained a lot of new friends. I also decided to follow pacifism and became anarchist. In a sense I’m still anarchist. I also got involved with supporters of Greenpeace Leicester, Leicester Friends of the Earth, and the Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign. Early on in the year, I got a fair degree of hassle from a Trotskyist group called the Revolutionary Communist Party and it was interesting to note both their dishonest dealing and the similarity between such groups and small Christian denominations who believe they alone are right. This planted the seeds of a long-term thought process which is still underway regarding small far left parties, so that too is rather seminal.

Academically, I did extremely well in my second year and was heading for a First. Nor was this at the cost of my social life. I also believed temporarily that I’d made my peace with the Vicky situation. As far as I was concerned, she was nothing more than a friend although I still occasionally pined after her. This wasn’t helped by the widely acknowledged fact that she and her partner in no way appeared to be emotionally close. It was an odd relationship which some people would probably put down to the fact that it was unusually durable for a couple of that age, since they’d been going steady since she was fourteen, having got together on her fourteenth birthday. My curiosity about their relationship led me to perform a Yi Ching (易經) divination which told me that they were 60-80% of the way through their relationship, which in fact turned out to be accurate. They were together for seven years and nine months, which is within a month of when the 易經 predicted they would split up. I have used this method three times in my life and don’t plan to do so ever again. However, it does indicate that I am not and have never been naturalistic, at least since I was about seven, and in an analytical philosophy department in the 20th century this is a difficult intellectual position to be in.

’86-’87 was also the year I began to engage majorly in consumer boycotts. Many people on the Left regard these as pointless because it doesn’t fix the system, and it’s also the case that it’s largely ineffectual and tinkers around the edges. However, taking it seriously enough it broadens out into what might be called a global boycott, which amounts to self-sufficiency – not being part of the problem. However, to be self-sufficient involves owning land, and in order to own land one either has to inherit it or to be sufficiently involved in the capitalist system to derive a large enough income to acquire that land, and in doing so one is either privileged as such or doing a substantial amount of damage to avoid doing more damage in the long term. All of these things are very difficult. To some extent boycotts are about assuaging one’s feelings of guilt and powerlessness. Having said that, I’m not about to go out and buy a jar of Nescafé. This is a process which began in my second year at university.

There was also hunt sabbing, something which at one stage I was doing every week and didn’t end for good until the year after I graduated. I always had issues with this. I can see the emotional value of wanting to save foxes’ lives, and I also understand that it’s substantially class-based, but that’s what makes me uncomfortable. It’s important to recognise that there is class conflict and that countless people’s lives are blighted and even ended by that, but the symbolism of nobility and royalty being overprivileged has never been something I’ve strongly bought into. I would also say that the way we sabbed in Leicester in the mid-’80s was not aggressive, as we were quite strongly influenced by a pacifistic tendency in our group. The aggression came later and I was never comfortable with it. But in practical terms, this is the example which always occurred to me. I might go out with a van of people and sab a hunt, perhaps saving two foxes. I can’t imagine that we’d save any more. That might be eight people achieving that. On the other hand, I could staff the animal rights stall in the city centre and the two people on that might persuade one twenty year old to go vegetarian and ultimately vegan for the next sixty years, thereby saving thousands of lives. I don’t think there’s any utilitarian argument for sabbing as opposed to doing the animal rights stall. Incidentally, it’s also possible to sab anglers, but people rarely do that because it’s a more working-class form of animal abuse.

I went vegan in October ’87 as a natural progression from vegetarianism, which I’d always planned.

My second year at university probably marked the biggest shift in my life towards political activism I undertook. It was a peak in my social life. The situation with Vicky was stable. However, I also found that I was developing crushes on people, or rather that I was kind of uninformèdly stabbing in the dark at what were conceivably sexual relationships, because at the time I was trying to prove to myself that I was a man. I also began to feel very strong urges, though non-sexual, to wear feminine clothes, which I was to resist for the next four or five years. A major influence on me at the time was Janice Raymond’s ‘The Transsexual Empire’, which I’d read in summer 1986 and completely accepted, which put paid to any ideas I’d had about transitioning male to female. This probably contributed to my depression that summer, as I was feeling very boxed in by things. I then did something rather embarrassing. There was another woman in my year whom I perceived to conform to conventional notions of attractiveness and found I was becoming once again fixated on. Therefore, I rather creepily sent her a note telling her that I “loved” her but reassured her that I would do nothing about it, because by this point I had become very pessimistic about the prospect of a relationship happening at all in my life. She just generally seemed very angry with me for a long time, and this continued while she spent a year in Germany and was eventually more friendly when she returned. Sarada and I have very different interpretations of this incident. Mine is that she found this unwelcome, intrusive and insulting, but Sarada’s is that it annoyed her that I’d kind of “pre-broken up” with her. I perceive Sarada’s interpretation as excessively optimistic, and since I was there at the time and wouldn’t meet her for over a thousand days, I believe my version is the correct one.

One of the problems with what I can only really describe as the Vicky catastrophe is that it led me to distrust my intuition. It didn’t seem like wishful thinking that she was attracted to me, and that clearly had major influences on my future attitude towards relationships and also spilt over to all sorts of other areas, with the result that one of the long-term consequences has nothing to do with sex and relationships at all but is more to do with a general distrust of my own judgement.

There was great stability in the second year, and also a lot of happiness. One significant event was the 1987 General Election, which of course the Conservatives won, but I had expected nothing else. This depressed a lot of my friends but for me it was just to be expected. I was remarkably positive about many things at the time. A couple of significant events were the organisation of a Greenpeace benefit rock concert on Victoria Park and the sponsored walk on Abbey Park, again to raise money for Greenpeace. It began to bother me that we couldn’t engage in direct action under the Greenpeace banner, and we were criticised for using the Greenpeace banner (literally) on a march in London. My irritation with the organisation grew during this period. I was doing a lot with Vicky at the time and used to frequent her flat, which she shared with her man. It was of course familiar to me because of the dream. Every time I mention this it sounds insane, but what happened happened.

Early on in the year I took some careers advice. It didn’t look promising, mainly because they were very oriented towards working for multinationals or the Civil Service, neither of which I had any interest in doing. I breezed through the part 1 exams and began work on my dissertation. I actually underperformed on this in the long run because of what was about to happen.

In the final year, everyone went mad, basically. There was a lot of stress emanating from the fact that we were all going to have to graduate and move on, get jobs and so forth, or possibly become long term unemployed. This was not, however, my plan. I was heading for a First and planned to do an MPhil followed by a doctorate, and then become an academic, at another university because the department at Leicester was merging with Nottingham apart from the Logic and Scientific Method component which was to become part of Computing. I think this experience of extreme stress in the final year is quite common. A couple of my friends considered killing themselves and one of them actually attempted it, but survived for the time being. There were also a lot of parties and clubbing. I also joined the Labour Party.

In January ’88, everything came unstuck for me. I was clubbing with my friends and met Vicky’s partner, who was there with another woman. After a couple of days of emotional crisis, some friends decided we had to tell her, which we did and they then split up. The problem was that while they’d been together, my interest in her was contained and under control, but I was aware that there was no chance of us becoming an item. Because I wanted to make this certain, I manipulated her best friend into doing a character assassination on me which would put paid to any possibility. All of this was rather distracting and resulted in poor concentration on my studies and a rather disappointing dissertation which was seen as well below my usual standards. Also, one of my friends was killed in a hit and run accident. After some thought and discussion, I decided to take a year out after graduation to decide whether to do postgraduate or not, the issue being whether to go into political activism full-time as part of a pressure group or political party, which would directly influence politics (possibly), or to work on theory behind it by doing postgraduate work and becoming an academic. By that time, I had met my first girlfriend but we were not together yet. That didn’t happen until after my time at Leicester Uni. I also had a one-night stand, but my heart wasn’t in it because I was still completely obsessed with Vicky and worried about her well-being. Consequently I didn’t get a First but a 2i, and that may look like a success to someone else, but as so often before I had seriously fallen short and failed to do myself justice. Somewhere in all that I went on a kind of date with a woman who turned out to be a lesbian, but never followed it up.

Then the academic year ended, I toured Europe with a couple of school friends and I returned to Leicester to graduate, and found that one of my friends ostracised me because of what I understood to be an innocent postcard I’d sent her from Rome – we never spoke again – and another just cut me out in spite of previous closeness. I took a year out and went to Warwick to study the MA in continental philosophy.

What about those three years marked me in the long term then?

My first year was wasted. I effectively spent two rather than three years at university in terms of activism and social life and for a long time afterwards I was trying to compensate for what I’d missed. It was several years before I finally let go of university due to what felt like missing out. I just am a philosopher. It’s an important part of who I am and in that sense I was able to be myself to a much greater extent, particularly in my second year, than at any other time. Politically there was an awakening around the age of nineteen. I became Christian and in a sense have persisted with that, even though the circumstances involved emotional manipulation. I learned to live in the outside world in a gradually phased process which nowadays many young adults seem to miss out on. Owing to the complications with Vicky, I ceased to trust my intuition and my first relationship was highly unsatisfactory for both of us. I began to move into a kind of political career which, however, never got past volunteering although a few months later I was offered a job working for an anti-fluoridation pressure group which I turned down because I couldn’t convince myself it was a significant health problem (although it clearly is a civil liberties issue). I went vegetarian and then vegan.

My interest in furthering any kind of career was rather stymied by the deep ethical problems I perceived with almost any paid work and by the fact that I continued to be preoccupied with my failure to have a sexual relationship. This has had a long-term effect on my prospects from which in financial terms I never really recovered. I became very attached to Leicester, and only moved away from there recently to care for my father.

That’s it really. It feels a bit truncated as all sorts of things happened soon afterwards which are worth mentioning, but my main aim in writing this is to attempt to trace long term influences from my time as an undergraduate.

Anyone care to compare notes?