Deducing The Existence Of Rice Pudding And Income Tax

This post will not be entirely about ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s’ Guide To The Galaxy’. And incidentally, the rest of the ingredients list includes a teaspoon of cinnamon, presumably powder, in case you were wondering, and the next bit reads as follows (and has started to transition to live-action):

(apparently it couldn’t deduce the spelling of “yields”).

Just to put this in context, this is naturally from H2G2 and regards the operation of the second greatest computer in all of space and time, Deep Thought, who started from first principles with ‘I Think, Therefore I Am’ and managed to deduce the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off. It does this without any RAM incidentally. Is it just me, or is anyone else reminded of the bomb in ‘Dark Star’?

This is the second time, to my knowledge, Douglas Adams chooses to parody Descartes in the series. The first time is with the Babel Fish proving God exists and therefore doesn’t exist. This one involves Descartes method of doubting as much as possible until all he’s left with is the Cogito, id est, “I think, therefore I am”, and then using the Cosmological and Ontological Arguments for the existence of God to fill in everything he’s just rejected as open to doubt. He could’ve gone further, but didn’t. Isaac Asimov did something similar in ‘Reason’, where a robot on an orbital solar power station deduces that there is no Universe outside the station and that humans are brought into existence in the airlock when they arrive and are killed when they re-enter the airlock to leave. Incidentally there are problems with his presentation of the Three Laws in this story because it was written before he’d fully formulated them.

In terms of the two deductions above, Adams has a version of the Universe which strongly resembles the English-speaking world of the late 1970s, perhaps even the Home Counties, and Deep Thought is therefore able to deduce the existence of rice pudding relatively easily. In fact I think income tax is a more probable deduction than rice pudding, although that still involves the existence of what may be a uniquely human institution, namely money. As a side note, the idea that cinnamon exists is reminiscent of ‘The Dune Encyclopedia’, where the spice Melange, secreted by the sandworms of Arrakis and enabling humans who take it to fold space and travel between the stars without moving, an ability known here as  קְפִיצַת הַדֶּרֶךְ or Qephitzat Ha-Derech, turns out to be similar in composition to cinnamic acid, as seen at the top of this diagram:

Molecular structure of the spice Melange. Note the copper atoms in the porphyrin ring, conferring its distinctive blue hue

Hence at least in the Dune universe, a cinnamon-like substance does exist off Earth.

As mentioned a few posts back, Fred Hoyle used the Anthropic Principle to conjecture that the bonding energy of the carbon-12 nucleus was of a certain value. Starting from the first principle that organic, carbon-based life exists, he predicted the triple-alpha process. In the early Universe, almost all atomic matter was either simple hydrogen (protium – just a proton and an electron) or helium-4, with two protons and two neutrons. If two helium-4 atoms combine, they form a beryllium-8 atom, and if that then collides with a further helium-4 atom, carbon-12 is formed. In most circumstances, the probability of this happening is very low but it so happens that the energy of three helium-4 atoms colliding is unusually close to the energy of a carbon-12 atom, meaning that they are more likely to stay together than they would be otherwise. This is an example of the so-called “fine tuning” which appears to show that either a Creator exists or that we are living in one of an innumerable number of parallel universes where the conditions happen to be exactly right. By a happy “accident”, conditions in this universe happen to favour the existence of carbon, upon which life can be built.

This is an unusual path of reasoning that turned out to lead to a successful prediction and is therefore similar to the deduction that rice pudding exists in H2G2. It goes roughly like this:

1. I think, therefore I am
2. Physical conditions in the Universe must allow thought to occur
3. For thought to occur, organic life must have existed at some stage
4. For organic life to exist, carbon must be an abundant element
5. For carbon to exist, the triple alpha process must be favoured

There’s a humungous number of steps missing from that argument of course, but it’s a fair sketch of how you get from the Cogito to the strength of the strong nuclear force and the existence of organic life. Note that Deep Thought was not an organic life form, but in order for computers to be invented, organic life forms are assumed to be necessary at some stage.

I was once very impressed indeed by an a priori idea that seems to prove that the atmosphere of any roughly spherical planet must have at least two locations where there is no wind. This sounds very much like the kind of thing which could only be demonstrated by observation. One can imagine looking at endless detailed global weather charts and finding at least two spots on each of them which are completely calm, and then making the inductive inference that it was very likely always to be the case. However, this isn’t necessary and in fact the proof can be demonstrated by means of imagining you’re trying to comb a tribble:

exhibit in the New Mexico Museum of Space History
21 August 2017, 14:59:27
Own work
Stilfehler

Each of the hairs on a tribble can be thought of as arrows indicating wind direction. No matter which way that hair is combed, there will always be at least two points on the animal’s surface from which all the hairs radiate. Of course it makes more sense to give a tribble a parting or whatever, but the fact remains that there have to be two such locations, and that’s a topological truth. Extend this to a globe showing wind direction on any approximately spherical planet or moon, and the fact remains true, except of course that the atmosphere has depth. This, however, simply means that each individual layer must also have two still spots. It doesn’t work if the world has mountains on it high enough to leave the atmosphere because then the supposed stationary spots could be lined up to be where the air would be if the mountains weren’t there, and this means that a toroidal world is exempt from this fact. It also means it doesn’t apply to ocean currents unless there’s no land on the world. Therefore it already becomes possible to conclude from the premise that there are round planets completely enveloped in atmospheres that this is so without actually going there and checking them out.

Yesterday’s post on landlocked countries led me to similar conclusions, although they’re probabilistic and rely heavily on the idea that there are other planets with territorial intelligent life forms using a money-based economy on them. In fact that’s not entirely true. There are two sets of implied facts about such worlds, one relying on the existence of beings like us in those respects, the other not. We have already divided Mars, Venus and other worlds geographically into smaller areas, which are however not that relevant to this issue because there are no open bodies of liquid on those planets, but if, for example, Venus looked like this, and the land masses were divided up geographically, they would have certain predictable features.

I made the following claims yesterday about landlocked territories. They are likely to:

• Be arid
• Have extremes of temperature
• Include high mountains, perhaps near or on their borders
• Be located on the largest continent
• Contain the point furthest from the land on that continent

The last point is not in fact true of Kazakhstan, Bolivia or Paraguay, but it is true of the Central African Republic. Except for the third, these are all consequence of the physical features of lines on a map separating bits of land, although not below a certain number. For instance, Hispaniola simply has a line drawn down the middle of it separating Haïti and the Dominican Republic and I have no knowledge concerning where the highest point on that island is, although it’s obviously more likely to be in the larger country. And to test that hypothesis without foreknowledge, the Dominican Republic is larger than Hispaniola and therefore more likely to contain the island’s highest point. And indeed the highest point on Hispaniola, and in fact in the whole of the Caribbean, is Pico Duarte. The reason for assuming that landlocked states are likely to have high mountains near their borders is that borders are often placed in inaccessible regions where there isn’t likely to be much argument over resources.

Then there are the conclusions which can be drawn about landlocked countries which do rely on the current economic system and the way humans tend to behave under it. Landlocked countries are also more likely to be:

• Neutral
• Poor
• Reliant on natural resources more than manufacturing
• Totalitarian
• Have intolerant attitudes among their population

I explained the reasoning behind these attributes yesterday. They don’t apply across the board. For instance, Switzerland is mountainous and neutral but also rich and relies on financial services fairly heavily, although of course it makes Swiss Army knives and clocks, and presumably a lot of other stuff which my ignorance and cartoonish image of the country has failed to reveal.

It’s also possible to invert and go to opposite extremes with the first list at least. For instance, the largest continent is likely to contain the highest mountain, and in fact it does in terms of height above sea level, and likewise the largest ocean is more likely to include the deepest point, which again is so. Maritime and island countries are likely to have wet weather, have relatively little variation in temperature, particularly if surrounded by a lot of ocean as with Polynesian nations, and be fairly flat. Inverting the list of human characteristics doesn’t work as well, at least with island nations, and here I have Britain in mind in particular. They are likely not to be neutral (true), rich (true), not reliant on natural resources (not true – North Sea oil and gas come to mind, also historically coal and tin), be liberal democracies (this is only marginally true in our case) and have tolerant attitudes. It seems to some extent that in fact the same things are true of Britain at least as much as they apply to landlocked countries. It is the case that we have a moderate climate which is also quite wet, and that we have no high mountains.

The economies of island nations tend to be smaller, isolated from the global economy, dependent on shipping and therefore having relatively high prices for imported goods, but this really applies more to oceanic islands such as those of Polynesia rather than those situated on continental shelves. This island I live on is hardly one of the former. Nor is its western companion. As mentioned yesterday, landlocked states are somewhat protected by violent, ocean-related events such as tsunami and hurricanes,and conversely islands aren’t. Their infrastructure is therefore vulnerable. Again, this is one of the realities of a small, exposed piece of land in the middle of an ocean, though only on a planet with a particular set of meteorological conditions. Vast expanses of ocean are generally amenable to the development of tsunami and hurricanes on this planet, and a glance at Jupiter indicates that the latter are common elsewhere, but there might be globally frozen oceans with volcanic peaks sticking out of them for example, or widespread shallow seas.

The Hairy Ball Theorem mentioned above doesn’t apply to tori. This has an interesting consequence for oceans which could be considered toroidal in the sense that they include a range of latitudes where there are only small islands impeding their flow around the planet, because it means there can and probably will be both a steady current running all the way round and also winds able to build up speed without encountering obstacles. There’s a contemporary and a prehistoric example of this. The Southern Ocean exists today in this form, and the Tethys, which was tropical and subtropical, was in place for around 200 million years and still has traces today, although it’s no longer a continuous ocean.

I’ve previously stated that landlocked countries are likely to include high mountains, but this is somewhat misleading as it ignores continental drift. In fact, both Americas have mountain ranges on the Pacific coast caused by the continents moving in that direction and encountering the Pacific Plate. On the other hand, when two continents collide, the result is a mountain range far from any ocean, as with the Himalayas. The trouble is that it looked like I was thinking of a continent as a kind of spread out mountain, which isn’t how it is.

There are forty-seven island nations. Although the largest is Indonesia, which is bigger than Mongolia, that’s distributed over a large number of islands of varying size and it’s also continental, being in Eurasia and Sahul (the technical name for Australia as a continent as opposed to a country). The “U”K is the seventh largest of these and Great Britain the ninth largest island of any kind. Again deploying the rice pudding principle, the area of island nations is likely to follow something like the 80:20 rule, in that eighty percent of the area of island nations will consist of twenty percent of the nations, or something close to that, and also eighty percent of the area of all islands will consist of twenty percent of the islands. It won’t be exactly that, but it should be close. For these forty-seven nations, that means that the nine largest ought to have four-fifths of the area. These are Indonesia, Madagascar, Japan, the Philippines, Papua, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Iceland, the “U”K and Cuba (Ireland is next on the list). It isn’t practical to do the same for physical islands because there are an indeterminate number. These islands taken together have an area of 4 460 372 square kilometres, which suggests that the remainder will have a total area close to 900 000 km². In fact their area adds up to 4 851 659 km² if I’ve calculated that correctly, which is fairly close. The same principle might be applicable to population and population density. Indonesia is again the most populous of these nations, the “U”K being fourth, and the most densely populated is Singapore, which is of course a city-state. The most sparsely peopled such nation is Iceland, although Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland is even less densely populated but doesn’t quite count as an independent state.

Island nations are of course very subject to climate change, such as the increased acidity of the oceans causing erosion of coral atolls and reefs, rises in sea level and increased occurrence of hurricanes. Some of them are at risk of disappearing entirely, but others, maybe surprisingly, are increasing in size because of it. They tend to be more politically stable than continental states but are more susceptible to invasion by them. This seems not to be true of Britain although some of our reputation for not having been invaded is due to an economic approach to the truth, since it’s also been said that England has been invaded more than six dozen times since 1066, for example the Glorious Revolution of 1688. These states are also often microstates, which means they can’t take advantage of economies of scale.

There would seem to be four different types of island states, depending on whether they’re based on archipelagos with a number of islands of similar size or consist of one larger island or a single island, and whether they’re continental or oceanic. Ireland and Britain are obviously both predominantly single island states and continental, and being continental makes quite a big difference. One perhaps surprising thing about Pacific islands is their linguistic, and therefore presumably cultural, homogeneity. It might be expected that isolation leads to difference, but in fact it seems not to, even though unique ecosystems do evolve on them.

Then there are maritime states. Technically, France and the “U”K have the most borders, most of which are maritime in both cases, because of their dependencies overseas. This is followed by Russia due to its size. Countries with single land borders tend to be on islands, such as Ireland and us, although Canada is a major exception. The characteristics of maritime states don’t seem to be as thoroughly explored as those of island and landlocked states.

Moving away from the sea and land issue brings one to the four-colour theorem. This is remarkably irrelevant to cartography, but involves the proof in the ’70s that any flat surface map or globe could be coloured with at most four colours. This might be expected to have big consequences for politics but oddly, it hasn’t. It is relevant to the number of frequencies needed to operate mobile ‘phone masts though. It doesn’t work for maps with non-contiguous territories such as Alaska and the Lower 48, or presumably the traditional counties of Wales and England, which have many enclaves and exclaves.

Ultimately, all of these kinds of considerations seem to be to do with applying mathematics to a few well-established facts, so in a way they’re all just bits of science. Two questions therefore arise. One is whether everything can be deduced from facts and principles about which it’s possible to be certain. Another is whether there’s an important distinction between the human-related aspects of these facts and the physical ones. Do we have enough control over ourselves, and do governments have sufficient flexibility, for these facts not to be inevitable? Is there something about human behaviour that just will not alter which leads, for example, to landlocked states being more likely to be totalitarian? Is there disruptive technology or other ideas which can change that?

I’ve used geography here to present this issue, but there are other areas where it applies, so to close I want to return to the issue of rice pudding and income tax. Deep Thought was able to deduce the existence of income tax from first principles. This means that money is inevitable. This is actually part of quite an oppressive ether pervading the H2G2 universe, because we know, for instance, that it’s possible (or rather impossible) to deposit a penny in one’s own era and find that at the end of time the cost of one’s meal at Milliways will have been paid for. This means that usury will always exist, and this makes capitalism as we know it a law of nature. There’s no escaping the flawedness of all lifekind for Douglas Adams. This might be connected to the certainty of death and taxes, but the taxes in question there were not income tax, which didn’t exist at the time. In a way, though, this could be seen as hopeful from a left wing perspective to some extent, because it means money will inevitably be pooled for the common good. The contrary view, of course, is that it’s theft. However, the idea that income tax can be deduced to exist from the Cogito does seem to be more feasible than the idea that rice pudding can, because income tax seems to be about numbers and science, but then so is rice pudding.

In order to exist, rice pudding needs milk and cereal. More specifically, it needs rice. According to the recipe Deep Thought came up with, it also needs demarara sugar and cinnamon. Of all these ingredients, the most likely one to be widespread in a Universe with organic life in it is sugar, although it may be glucose rather than sucrose. Milk is strictly speaking the nutrient secretion of a particular clade of Earth animals, but we are fully aware that EU nomenclature notwithstanding, “milk” needn’t mean milk, and in fact has a long tradition of use in other ways, as with almond milk and latex-containing plant sap. There’s coconut milk and a number of “cow trees”. Galactodendron of Central and South America yields a latex which is high in protein and can be used to make cheese and ice cream. We’re actually fine as far as milk is concerned, as an opaque white nutritious fluid is very common and found from all sorts of sources. It does, however, seem to depend either on the existence of seed-bearing plants or animals who secrete it.

Rice is a bit dicier. Although it happens to be a grass, there are grain-like seeds and fruits from other sources. This is important because although large areas of grassland are common today, in the fairly recent geological past grasses were just another species of plant with no particular dominance which coexisted in more diverse ecosystems, although even then they could presumably be cultivated, and there are non-gramineous cereal-like things like buckwheat and quinoa. Rice, however, is fairly distinctive. Porridge is not the same thing as rice pudding, and on the whole rice pudding is considered sweet.

Hence the dependencies of rice pudding seem to be the existence of seed plants. Although milk can be from an animal source, the animals humans actually exploit for it are grass-eaters, so it kind of depends on the existence of grass in two separate ways. Even three, if the sugar is from sugar cane. It is conceivable that rice pudding might be like gin & tonic, in the sense that according to the epic adventure in time and space it’s just called something like that everywhere but doesn’t refer to the same drink. However, this can’t be quite true because we see a list of ingredients, as specific as “pudding rice”. There’s also the issue of rice pudding being deduced if it only exists on Earth, because although Deep Thought knows that a greater computer will be built one day, it presumably doesn’t know the details or it would be able to predict that its own task would be unsuccessful. Therefore it seems likely that rice pudding does exist elsewhere in the Hitch-Hiker universe. It is also the case that variants of rice pudding exist all over the land surface of this planet, but it’s less clear to me whether it’s been invented independently on more than one occasion.

I’ll close, then, with this. Income tax seems to be a more likely candidate for deduction than rice pudding, but is it? Is it just that the use of maths-like concepts applies more easily to the idea of tax than it does to rice pudding? Is there a stereotypical gender-rôle bias here? What’s it about?

Landlocked And Double-Landlocked

Humans effectively live out our lives on a non-Euclidean plane. Although the third dimension is sometimes employed to our advantage, for example in warfare via tunnelling, air raids and submarines, the political map of this planet is projectable onto a flat surface and countries are generally two-dimensional. This has various consequences for us all as Iain M Banks once noted in depth.

We’re also terrestrial. We can’t fly on our own and to be frank the prospect of flight in vehicles from point A to point B on the surface is not terribly exciting because great vistas of discovery do not lie in that direction. Most of the land surface of the planet was known, if not thoroughly explored, by 1903 when the Wright Brothers launched their first plane. The ocean is another matter, as only five percent of it has been explored. Some time in the 1970s, the National Geographic said that the year on the Continental Shelf of North America was 1492, meaning that it had only just been discovered. A Eurocentric view to be sure, and in fact it’s more like the first time humans left Afrika. The sea is both an opportunity and a threat to us. It enables us to move heavy goods relatively easily, unfortunately messing up the planet in the process, and beyond a certain limit it doesn’t belong to anyone, meaning that there are no legal barriers to trade across it past territorial waters.

Not all countries have coastlines. Britain has been particularly fortunate historically in having shipping, a navy and a number of relatively easy routes to other lands, which probably explains the existence of the British Empire. It has little to do with national character except insofar as it’s been formed by the fact that we know we’re on an island or several and what follows from that, and a lot more to do with the fact that we’re near the centre of the Hemisphere Of Land. We’re just lucky: that’s it.

Other countries are not so lucky. Some of them have coastlines, but only along lakes. Some have no coastlines at all. Two don’t even have coastlines with countries which do: Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan. The former can hardly be seen on the above world map but the latter is a big purple blob in Eurasia. It’s notable that the continent with the most landlocked countries is Afrika. North America and Australasia have none. South America has Bolivia and Paraguay. South East Asia notably has Laos, which for most people not living in that area is perhaps one of the least-known countries in the world, quite possibly because it’s landlocked. Bolivia is also quite obscure. Bhutan and Nepal are considered remote mountain countries, which Bolivia also has a claim to be.

These look at first to be merely curioisities of geography with no real world consequences, although one might expect the countries concerned to be more likely to be arid and mountainous. Arid because they’re more likely to be far from the sea, and mountainous because the sea is low down and they’re far from the low down bits. In fact the landlocked status of a country has big economic consequences, which I’ll come back to.

It seems to me that landlocked countries tend to be less familiar to the outside world beyond their neighbours. For instance, Kazakhstan has long stuck in my mind, even before its independence from the Soviet Union, as a vast but unfamiliar country, and is in fact the largest of all landlocked territories. It’s the ninth largest country in the world, the largest country other than Russia in the former Soviet Union and eleven times larger than the “U”K including the relevant part of Ireland. It’s bigger than any country in Afrika, and contains the centre of global human population. That is, it includes the location which minimises the mean distance each person would have to travel to reach. As such, I used it as the location of the world capital in my as yet unfinished book ‘1934’. Unsurprisingly, it’s arid to semi-arid and the capital, Nursultan, is the second coldest in the world, the coldest being Ulaanbaatar in the second-largest landlocked country (Outer) Mongolia. Also unsurprisingly, both are on the largest continent, and Kazakhstan has a particularly high mountain, Khan Tengri, just short of 7 km above sea level.

Hence there are various stochastic reasoning processes which can be used to draw probable conclusions about the characteristics of landlocked states. The probabilities of the following facts about the largest are high:

• Located in Asia
• Arid
• Very cold in winter
• Extremes of temperature
• Includes a high mountain
• Contains the point farthest from the ocean in its continent

It’s almost like Deep Thought being able to deduce the existence of income tax and rice pudding from first principles, except that the last isn’t quite so, although it is near the Kazakh border with China. The only thing is, Kazahstan is also a new country. Although it has a long history as the Kazakh Khanate, it was more or less annexed by the Russian Empire around two centuries ago and therefore became part of the USSR after the Revolution, becoming the last Soviet Republic to declare independence in at the end of 1991 CE, ten days before the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Nonetheless Kazakhstan is a probable country. If there are any other planets with intelligent life and territories, there will probably be Kazakhstan-like countries on them.

It’s also possible to identify various locations in this way. For instance, the world’s highest mountain is likely to be on a border and partly in a landlocked state, and if that’s Everest then it is, on the border of Nepal and China. However, Mount Chimborazo, the point on the surface of the planet furthest from its centre, is in Ecuador, although it’s more probable that it would be near the Equator so there is a cause for it being there. Deserts are also likely to be partly in landlocked countries, and this is true of Bolivia, Kazakhstan and the double landlocked country Uzbekistan, as well as several Afrikan states in the Sahara. Liechtenstein, Austria and Switzerland are also all mountainous, as are Armenia, Lesotho and Andorra. I also have a hunch that landlocked countries are more likely to border larger numbers of other countries than those with coastlines because the latter would not be surrounded by borders. However, large countries, such as China, are also likely both to have coastlines and lots of borders, so maybe not. Another guess, which I can’t justify, is that landlocked countries are also likely to be smaller.

They have several advantages. For instance, they’re immune to damage from the sea such as tsunami and they’re less likely to suffer from hurricanes, which are fed by the sea, and it’s easier to control borders. However, landlocked countries are usually also poor, with the exception of those in Europe, because they have transportation difficulties for international trade and have to pay customs duties and the like to their neighbours and beyond unless they’re in a customs union, and in order to trade efficiently they also have to maintain good relations with countries nearby, whereof there may be many due to the longer land border. Europe is, as I say, an exception. Liechtenstein is fine even though it’s double-landlocked, and Switzerland is one of the richest countries per capita in the world. The number of landlocked countries has also increased in recent years because there are more independent countries. Ethiopia, for example, the world’s most heavily populated country of this kind, has a population of around a hundred million, and lost its coastline to Eritrea. When Czechoslovakia split, that increased the number by one, although there was a time when Bohemia had access to the sea.

In toto there are forty-nine such countries in the world, 11% of the land surface and seven percent of the world’s population, which implies of course that their population is lower than average, which considering their terrain and climate makes sense. Surprisingly, they have a right to a maritime flag and some have navies. Bolivia lost access to the Pacific after a war with Chile in the nineteenth century, but still has a navy with more than a gross of ships and five thousand sailors. It also has a national Dia del Mar, which commemorates its former coastline and focusses on regaining access to it. Since it has part of the Amazon within its borders, the navy mainly operates on that river and is involved in drug trade reinforcement. The Swiss merchant navy has a remarkable history. It has just over three dozen ships. During the War, when it was surrounded by fascists and countries occupied by fascists, it was able to continue trade with the Allies by sending ships up the Rhine and using Rotterdam as its port. Its own port is Basel. Mongolia also used to have a vast empire and reached the sea, so it too had a navy and even invaded Japan with it, but it now consists of a single ship with six sailors on Lake Khövsgöl, which just transports oil across the lake. Finally, a number of landlocked countries border the world’s biggest lake, the Caspian Sea, and therefore have a navy in connection with that body of water. Then there was the Sea of Aral, which bordered Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which has now mostly dried up, leading to the collapse of fishing and the onset of economic hardship in both countries. The Aral is also heavily polluted, and is worth considering on its own.

I first noticed the Sea Of Aral on maps as a child when I was wondering what the third largest lake in the world was. The topic of lakes, particularly the chain of Eurasian ones across the former Soviet Union, deserves a post of its own, but briefly, they’re the remnants of the Tethys Ocean along with the Mediterranean, which closed up from the mid-Oligocene into the Miocene around 23 million years ago. They also include Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake at 1600 metres, the largest freshwater lake by volume at 23 000 square kilometres and it’s also the size of Belgium and the oldest lake in the world, being a remnant of the Tethys. These inland seas are all undergoing a gradual drying upo process which even affected the Med, and will do so again in future, in a trend towards the disappearance of the final traces of the Tethys, but it’s still underway and the drying up of the Sea of Aral is more to do with the fact that it’s vulnerable to this happening due to that fact, but was exacerbated by the Soviet plan to irrigate land to grow cotton for export in the 1960s. It became two separate lakes about twenty years ago. It was also used for weapon testing and the rivers which do still drain into it are full of pesticides. Its ecosystem has basically collapsed due to human interference. This was part of the Soviet план преобразования природы – “Plan for the Transformation of Nature” – which could be linked back to the East German emphasis on plastics I mentioned the other day. There’s also pollution from industrial chemicals.

Apart from Kazakhstan, the Aral also borders the other doubly-landlocked state than Liechtenstein, Uzbekistan, and bearing in mind the problems landlocked states have in general, Uzbekistan could be expected to have them worse. It has five neighbouring countries. The climate is, as could be expected, fairly extreme, varying between 40°C in the summer and -23°C in the winter, and much of it is the Kyzylkum Desert. None of the rivers in Uzbekistan lead to the sea, so it can’t even in principle do what Switzerland does to trade, another likely consequence of being doubly landlocked. It has suffered considerably from the damage and destruction of the Sea of Aral, and unlike Kazakhstan, which is rich in mineral resources because of being very large, it has less recourse to other sources of wealth.

Turkmenistan borders both of the aforementioned states and is of course also landlocked. It’s considered a totalitarian state and is famed for renaming its months after the adopted name of the leader and the title of a book he wrote, as well as various other national symbols. These names were removed in 2008, but it’s not as extreme as it sounds when one considers that two of our months are named after Roman emperors. It’s just not the kind of thing one would expect to happen two millennia later. Turkmenistan is also a neutral state, which may be favourable to landlocked states for which good relations with their neighbours are particularly important, such as Switzerland.

Liechtenstein is the other double landlocked state and also has in common with Luxembourg, San Marino and Vatican City the distinction of being a landlocked European microstate. The imperatives other landlocked and microstates experience are very evident here, since it’s in the Schengen Area and has a monetary union with Switzerland, and like Switzerland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a distinction it shares with many other microstates.

Two other landlocked European microstates are surrounded entirely by Italy: Vatican City and San Marino. To be trainspottery for a second, these are two of the three landlocked states completely surrounded by a single country, the other being Lesotho with South Africa. Lesotho, like many other such countries, is mountainous and high enough to have a temperate climate, which makes it quite distinctive in being a developing country with a temperate climate. It may even be the only one. Eswatini is the other country of this kind bordering South Africa, and with that I’ll turn to the situation of landlocked Afrikan states.

Afrika has the highest proportion of landlocked states even though none are doubly landlocked. Out of a total of fifty-five countries (not sure about disputes so some may disagree with that number), sixteen are landlocked, and of those sixteen, fourteen have a low Human Development Index, the exceptions being Botswana and Zambia. This means life expectancy, schooling and average income (that can also be misleading, see Angola) are all low. There is a correlation between proportion of sea borders and success, although this doesn’t always apply because Madagascar, for example, is extremely poor, and it makes me wonder what would happen if Ireland became unified because then both Britain and Ireland would only have sea borders. The difficulty created for international trade makes the manufacturing sector smaller and many Afrikan landlocked economies therefore rely on mineral resources, exported without being made into products, which means they have no added value in the countries concerned. This also means they rely on relatively few commodities. Their market value tends to vary a lot. It’s also been claimed that the isolation of these countries, with relatively little contact with the outside world, tends to make the national character inward-looking, leading to a drift towards totalitarianism. It almost doesn’t need saying that the borders of these countries were usually initially drawn by the colonial powers with little regard for the needs of their inhabitants.

A country which has long bugged me, and which I have for some reason not bothered much to find out about, is Laos, which from my doubtless racist perspective as a White Westerner seems to be one of the most obscure countries in the world. It’s the only example in Southeast Asia and has five borders. It suffered a lot from the Vietnam War and is full of unexploded bombs. Since it’s on a peninsula and near the Equator, it bucks the trend of many other territories by having substantial rainforest. It is the least developed country in the region. For instance, it only has a couple of kilometres of rail leading in from Cambodia to the capital Vientiane, which is near the border, although a second line from China over four hundred kilometres in length is under construction.

The existence of these countries is a combination of our willingness to divide ourselves and identify locally, and of geography. Our planet is 71% covered in water with five inhabited continents out of six, and we live on land. There have been times in the history of this planet when there was just one supercontinent, and that time will eventually come again. In such a situation, assuming territorial claims existed, the number of landlocked nations would probably be much higher and they would be more arid, have more extreme climates and more extreme problems with trade. If, on the other hand, this planet was almost all water and largely covered in small islands, there would probably be no landlocked countries. Finally, in a situation where this planet had less water it would usually only have one landmass and therefore, once again, many landlocked nations, although since it might then have landlocked oceans there could be more countries like the US, Canada and Mexico with coastlines on two oceans. Finally, on a world like Mars with no oceans at all, if nations or other political entities ever came to exist on it, they would all be landlocked and all suffer from the disadvantages of that situation. Fuel for fiction I think.