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Suzy’s Space: 2011

May

27/5: Nature bites back

“China Admits Problems With Three Gorges Dam,” NYT, 19/5 (also at The Age). Technologically-advanced societies are often under the delusion that Nature can be subdued and conquered, and massive engineering projects such as the huge Three Gorges Dam are an example of such hubris. But the “Revenge of Unintended Consequences” (phrase from a book title) ensures that things will eventually go wrong, and sure enough, environmental problems are emerging: the backed-up river lake is polluted, there is a possible link to recent earthquakes from the sheer weight of water, and the 1.4 million people displaced are not all resettled. Dams disrupt the ecological cycle of rivers (see Wikipedia article) and, like intensive agriculture, are a characteristic of a society living beyond its limits.

A mindset I find particularly loathsome is that of Nature merely being a resource; something to be conquered and exploited and built over. It is, or should be, an archaic way of viewing the world, but one that is still held by certain men (mostly men), and mainly businessmen at that (though businesswomen such as Gina Rinehart, who would use slave labour if she could, can also be included). Certain space enthusiasts (“Space Cadets”) also share that mindset, though they extend such exploitation to the rest of the Solar System and beyond. It’s a view emblematic of agricultural and industrialized societies, but not of humanity generally: hunter-gatherer cultures, in contrast, lived (and still, with increasing difficulty, live) lightly upon the land, changing it little.

Edit, 18/4/2012: another article about dam problems: “Landslide Risk at Reservoir Cited in China.”

July

11/7: Damned if they do

Last night the Australian 60 Minutes featured a report on a controversial series of dams – up to 60! – that the Brazilian government wants to build along the Amazon river to provide hydroelectric power for its growing cities (an overpopulation issue). This will displace thousands of indigenous tribes who rely on the rainforest for their survival, not to mention flood hundreds of acres of forest. The scheme is an environmental disaster in the making, yet the government is blindly determined to proceed with this massive engineering project, perhaps in the mistaken belief that such things demonstrate its technological sophistication as a developing nation – the same hubris the Chinese government showed in building its Three Gorges Dam, as I noted in my previous entry. They have a chance to look at the history of Europe and other developed nations, and not make the same mistakes these cultures did in destroying indigenous tribes and the environment – yet they appear to not want to learn from these, and resent foreigners telling them so. It is incredibly frustrating to see yet another preventable social tragedy unfolding.

The documentary mentioned James Cameron’s Avatar movie and the assistance he and some oHollywood actors (such as Sigourney Weaver) were giving to the campaign. One hopes that the real-world indigenous people will be able to win their battle also – if they don’t, their culture will be destroyed and the reporter notes their likely fate:

People who for thousands of years have remained independent and self sufficient will be forced into cities, where they’ll become beggars – and live in poverty. They don’t have the skills or the language to survive outside their own world.

It’s the same sorry tale repeated over and over again when indigenous peoples meet industrialized technological cultures.

August

6/8: Financial madness

There currently is much fuss and bother concerning the stockmarket, as well as the USA’s credit rating being downgraded due to its having ridiculous amounts of debt. Anything involving economics tends to make my eyes glaze over with boredom, so this latest has me bemused (yes, I suppose I am naïve). The stockmarket, and the financial system generally, involves trading ephemeral electronic bits of data and is therefore ultimately meaningless. It is more like a quasi-cult that has governments in thrall to it; the system almost has a life of its own and is arguably insane. It is a sorry indictment upon humanity that this utter mundanity seems to be the focus of this current civilization. There is no beauty or grandiosity in it.

I believe French President Sarkozy recently criticized financial speculators for producing nothing useful, but I can’t recall his exact words – a quick search shows that he called for a crackdown on the commodity speculators he blames for spiraling food and energy prices, likening them to the Mafia; something I would agree with, as these speculators are nothing but parasites whose morally dubious trade brings misery to millions.

I can only see total collapse changing this dysfunctional civilization; humans are too chained to the status quo otherwise, and are too afraid to change. It would take a truly courageous political leader to reject the current system and set his or her country out on a new path – and I see no such courage in any politician.

Whatever happens, the sun will still shine, the other (perhaps more sensible) creatures of the Earth will go about their usual daily lives and the natural world continue as it has for billions of years. In other words, none of this financial nonsense ultimately matters, despite the media hysteria.

September

5/9: Cultural relativism

Last night I watched a short documentary, “Amazon’s lost tribe,” that featured a reporter meeting one of the Amazonian tribes in Brazil who still live their traditional way of life and have little contact with the outside world (I don’t know if the videos in the link will play outside Australia). The documentary was produced by a commercial channel, so it was breathlessly hyped up with emotive descriptions of an adventurous reporter daring to delve deep into the heart of the Amazon to encounter a “lost” Stone-Age tribe, the Suruwahá, who practise human sacrifice! Well, as it turned out, they occasionally practice infanticide on defective infants by leaving them in the jungle to perish, a tradition certainly not exclusive to them. They would not have the resources to care for such infants. Also mentioned was their “cult” of committing suicide in their 30s to join their already-deceased relatives. But a little delving on the Internet brought up this page and information:

Finally, let me mention the saddest story I know. The Suruwahás (soo-doo-wa-HA) illustrate the worst kind of tragedy that strikes when one’s language and culture are threatened. The Suruwahá people, like the Banawá, to which they are linguistically and culturally related, make poison for blowgun darts.

However, in the years following their first contact with the outside world, in the early 80s, they have begun to commit suicide, drinking their own curare. Out of a population of only a couple of hundred, just this past summer eight adults and teenagers committed suicide in the same day. No one fully understands why this people is beginning to kill itself. But the answer seems to be related to their sense of fragility and smallness as a people, the idea that their language, culture, and values cannot compete with those from the outside. It is as though they take the death of their community literally.

For many people, like these Amazonian groups, the loss of language brings loss of identity and sense of community, loss of traditional spirituality, and even loss of the will to live.

So, not exactly a “suicide cult” as the reporter inferred, but more an expression of despair, one brought on by contact with the outside modern world.

Comments from many viewers were more scathing about the reporters:

Paul Raffaele, described as an “adventurer,” has a blog entry about the visit. He becomes very judgmental and hyperbolic when discussing the infanticide:

Even more disturbing was evidence that the Suruwaha may still practice the killing in the most gruesome way of disabled babies and babies born to single mothers because they believe them to be evil spirits. They bury the babies in graves while they are still alive or abandon them in the jungle to be eaten alive by wild beasts including jaguars. About twenty isolated tribes in the Amazon still practice this barbaric human sacrifice. […]

I was astonished to learn that the Brazilian federal government implicitly condones this ritual killing of babies by several Amazon isolated tribes. It has ruled that within Indian territory, Brazilian law does not apply, only Indian law and if that involves burying babies alive or abandoning them to be eaten by wild beasts in the jungle then so be it.

So, the Brazilian government clearly has the blood of countless innocent babies on its hands. Many Brazilian federal parliamentarians want to go into the territory of the isolated Indians, including the Suruwaha, to investigate these horrifying murders but the Brazilian government refuses them permission. No one believes ending the killing will be easy, but the Brazilian government should at least condemn the practice in principle and attempt to devise ways to bring the tribes into the 21st century.

Who are we to judge other cultures, though? I am sure there is much in my own culture that those in others might find strange or abhorrent. There is an exasperatingly mawkish sentimentality in our society when it comes to infants; something that’s carried to an unhealthy extreme. It could be argued that we go too far in the opposite direction by keeping alive those who perhaps should be let to mercifully die. Coincidentally, I earlier found this article from 2007: “Anthropology Professor says Tribal Killing of Disabled Babies Should be Respected.” “Dr. Erwin Frank, an anthropology professor at the Federal University of Roraima, Brazil, is quoted in the Telegraph as having defended the violent practice, saying, ‘This is their way of life and we should not judge them on the basis of our values. The difference between the cultures should be respected.’”

The Na’vi in Avatar are idealized versions of various tribal cultures, including those in the Amazon. If their culture is developed any further in the films and possible books, I wonder if they will have some practices that we might similarly find strange.

October

1/10: A stupid ritual

That dreaded time of the year again begins tonight … Daylight Savings. An archaic and unnecessary disruption imposed on the population just for an extra hour of evening daylight. In a country with a high rate of skin cancer, more exposure to strong afternoon sunlight is definitely not needed. DS is a real annoyance for those who rise early as the mornings become dark, and having to get up earlier results in feeling continually jetlagged. It is also disruptive to domestic animals – they can’t be told why everything is suddenly happening an hour earlier. Even worse, in Victoria DS is now extended over 6 months of the year (October to early April). This thread on the topic at the Whirlpool forum gives an example of some of the inane comments by those who think they are being funny (the “faded curtains” joke stopped being humorous a long time ago, and anyone posting “LOL” deserves a punch in the face – the older I get, the less tolerance for stupid comments I have). If I were in charge I would have DS abolished permanently, and those who objected would just have to suck it up.

Ideally societies would just follow the natural rhythm of the seasons, getting up at dawn and going to bed at sunset (humans are diurnal), but modern life with its clocks and artificial lighting have long disrupted that.

21/10: The cult of spaceflight

Author Charles Stross linked to a blog entry, “Why Not Space?” by astrophysicist Tom Murphy, about why space colonization is not going to happen anytime soon, perhaps not ever – a bit of a “reality check.” This civilization is using up its readily-available energy resources (namely petroleum and derivatives) at a tremendous rate, an obvious concern because of the deleterious effects on the environment we depend upon, and because our society depends on these fuels to function (alternative fuels are nowhere near as easy to develop or use).

I want to caution against harboring illusions of space as the answer to our collision course of growth on a finite planet. We live at a special time. We have enjoyed spending our inheritance of fossil fuels, and are feeling rather heady about our technological prowess. For many generations now, we have ridden an exponential growth track, conditioning ourselves to believe that our upward trajectory is an eternal constant of our existence. We’ll see. When we cross to the down-slope of fossil fuel availability – beginning with oil – we’ll see how timeless the growth phase seems to be, and whether we can afford a continued presence in space. We should be mature enough to admit that we have no context in which to evaluate how successfully the human race will navigate this unprecedented transition.

He also says in reply to some of the comments that it – the idea of moving into space – has become something of a quasi-religion or cult, which I tend to agree with (I have noted this before in previous entries) – a pithy comment from Stross’s entry: “Space occupies for some the same mental real estate as Heaven does for Christians.” The proponents are obsessed with the idea of The Frontier, a relic from the days of colonizing America. The colonists of then, though, still had easy access to air, water, food and so on – little of which can be found in space.

Okay, I am starting to decline more comments than I accept on account of redundancy. The prevailing message is that I have offended a deep religious belief in our space future. Note that I never say such a future is impossible. The responders assure us that it will happen. Don’t trust people who claim to know our future path: especially at this turning point in history when the energy inheritance that made our current lifestyle possible will begin its decline this century. How we manage that is an open question, but our presupposition that it’s in the bag may prevent our success.

There is a disturbing mentality among some of the Earth being disposable – that if humans stuff up the environment here, well, no worries, we’ll just move onto other worlds! But with that attitude, those worlds (assuming there are any and that people could get to them) would eventually get trashed too. There’s a mention of this mentality in the novel The Killing Star: “Isak’s people had realized – miraculously, it often seemed to him – that even as ascents to orbit finally became cheap, new worlds must never be viewed as relief valves for expanding, ravenous hordes who had overrun and exhausted their home. The deadly temptation to think of Earth as a disposable planet had been squelched with barely a decade to spare.” (That 1995 novel proved overly-optimistic in its timeline of progress and technology development, though.)

There’s a blind optimism in some that private industry can achieve what governments can’t, as this commenter cheerily asserts:

The solution to colonizing space is to take the “power of control” of space away from NASA, this is happening right now! This is great news and will usher in a new renaissance of space endeavors over the coming decades. Christopher Columbus was a government sponsored program. Sure he gets the credit with the discovery of the “New World,” however it was private industry, private funds, and private individuals that took the greater risk to their lives and livelihoods to take the risks to make the voyage to colonize. The same will be true of colonization.

If they have a few billion dollars and decades to spare! I can’t imagine many (if any) current billionaires with that level of commitment. Indeed, there was a recent article saying “Space tourism dreams are fading as the years pass by” as progress in private spaceflight is proving to be much slower than predicted – and this is just for short parabolic hops out of the atmosphere! That being said, I could envision billionaire enthusiasts eventually funding their own small private space stations, but these would likely orbit Earth, or the Moon at most, and with no advancement in technology they would likely be cramped and uncomfortable like previous space stations.

The disappointing reality is that:

Given those factors, the idea of humans “conquering” space seems hopelessly naïve.

21/10: Akashic records

I recently read a book I ordered, Heaven’s Shadow. Somewhat annoyingly, it is the first of a trilogy, though this seems to be the trend these days, presumably to make more money. The book was a reasonably entertaining read, though the characters were a little caricaturish and clichéd at times, mainly in the way they spoke (lots of U.S.-centric slang – is that the way people speak in reality?). There were some interesting ideas, which is a major purpose of science fiction (in my view). An unexpected plot point involved the Akashic Records – a Hindu concept where all consciousness and thoughts of living beings are stored in the fabric of the Universe, and the technology of the aliens (who are not encountered in the first novel) can access this to resurrect the minds and bodies of dead people; some of the characters in the book lived again via this method. Below are some extracts explaining this (spoilers if you haven’t read it):

“There is, in my tradition, a version of what might be happening here. The Vedas, our sacred Sanskrit texts, mention the akashic records – a library of all human experience. What if that exists? What if the universe is nothing more than a giant akashic record … and these aliens somehow access it.”

There was so much more … concepts that lurked at the borders of memory, like lessons in computer science studied twenty years back: the idea that entities, organic or not, had a greater footprint in the universe than suggested by visual borders or physical limits, that they left quantum “wakes” or “clouds” that could be detected – and manipulated – years after death or destruction.

“Oh, we’ve got a model for your Revenants and such. The idea is, just as there is no true physical separation between your body and the universe – even when your core organism ceases to function, there are still atoms of moisture and skin and exhalation that linger, float off, whatever – the same thing applies to your mind, your soul, your life force. There is also some kind of physical connection between the electrical field that is you, Harley Drake, and the universe.

“Your carrier might be shut off. That is, you die. But the information lingers … like cloud computing, it’s all around us … accessible.”

“So our souls are some new kind of matter, is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s one way to look at it. I mean, hell, the universe is largely made up of dark matter and energy, and we still don’t have a terrific handle on what that is or does. Why not some other kind of energy or information? It’s probably affected by gravity, too. The cloud of souls travels with the Sun.”

“Sounds like the opening line of your next novel.”

“Those days are gone, my friend. But the image is elegant, is it not?” He let the contents of the bottle slosh. “Everything that ever lived on Earth – or in the solar system – is still with us, in some fashion. It’s all information … the folks who built Keanu just know how to access it and repackage it.”

“They must have a pretty impressive search engine to pull Zack Stewart’s wife out of a library like that.”

“We suspect they got some clues or information from the arriving astronauts. We think the, ah, markers help. Scanned them, I think. Then they’re retrieved the same way the National Security Agency plucks a single cell phone conversation out of an entire city’s signals. Random frequency tracking, amped up a bit.”

“Yeah, a bit,” Harley said. “Then, of course, there’s the whole business of growing new bodies.”

“That’s just twenty-second-century Earth biotech, don’t you think? If we live long enough, we could have new carcasses, too.” Williams wheezed, tipped his bottle toward Harley. “We both could certainly use one.”

Megan Doyle Stewart was not at all sure she approved of her newly reborn state. Yes, she’d been given a second chance at life, but why? What for? She had gone almost directly from car crash in Florida to the Beehive on Keanu.

Yes, something of “Megan Stewart” had existed for those two years in between … bodiless, blind, deaf, a state that would have terrified the living Megan, taking her buried-alive fear to a horrific extreme.

Yet she hadn’t felt fear. Instead she had … well, soared, flown, skipped from memory to memory. She had become unstuck in time and space, recalling and reliving her first kiss with Sean Peerali and meeting Zack at that party in Berkeley and late nights editing and dragging her tricycle across Main Street …

But whereas dreams were mixed-up, twisted replays of a day’s activities, these moments seemed real, a record of what she had seen and heard and felt at the time.

She had even experienced “memories” from different points of view … other people in those same scenes. And in at least one instance – that she could recall now; it might have been a dozen or a hundred – she lived a moment from some other person’s life altogether.

The more she thought about it, the more fascinating it was … right up to the inevitable instant when she realized that unless her luck changed radically, and soon, she was going to be right back in that … postlife environment, a matrix of memories, a file in some cloud computing system.

She took a breath, then closed her eyes and said: “Okay, trying my best: life is hard to find in the universe. Intelligent life is … incredibly rare. We’ve found more dead civilizations than living ones, and we haven’t found many of those.”

“You said we.”

“Yes, we. I’m Megan. But I’m beginning to share some of their consciousness, too. This vessel … he’s really old, on the order of ten thousand years. And our solar system isn’t its first stop. There have been a dozen others.”

“Does it really have the ability to reengineer its environment to suit whatever creatures it encounters?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“For some of these other races, like the Sentries?”

“Other candidates, we call them.” She blinked, as if listening.

Zack was about to seize on the term candidates – for what? But he had a more vital question. “And this vessel can magically access specific ‘souls’ of the dead of … any race?”

“Yes. Don’t think of it as magic. It’s technology humans don’t possess. We know how consciousness and personality connect to bodies.”

“But you found a handful of souls out of millions!”

“It was accessing data stored in … the closest I can come is morphogenetic fields. The universe is filled with it … with bioelectric data, all kinds of data. Information.”

“Like the akashic records from the Vedas, the ‘library’ of all experiences and memories of human minds through their physical lifetimes.”

“They’re not using those terms.”

“Neither am I, really. They were Taj’s.”

“And I keep thinking of Jung. I guess we all reach for the words and concepts we already know.” She smiled. “This is like trying to explain the Internet to Benjamin Franklin. You know electricity, but you’re a long way from computers and networks.”

Zack looked up at the Architect, who seemed almost indifferent to his presence. “I feel like I’m standing outside the biggest library in the world, only it’s closed.”

“I’m doing my best.”

“Oh, God, honey, it’s not about you. It’s just … look at this!” He gestured at the Temple interior. “Okay, why did your friends send this vessel?”

“We’ve found a … presence, a challenge, another entity, and it’s been a threat to us. We came here looking for help. We think you might fill that role.”

“Against another race?”

“Another type of being, the Reivers.”

“The what? Sounds Irish.”

“I’m sure it’s Irish, Scots, Gaelic, whatever. It’s the word in my head, and it means bad guys. It’s not just that they’re enemies, they are enemies bent on exterminating us, and all memory of us. We can’t coexist.”

Zack took her by the shoulders. “But, still, it’s thousands of years in the past, hundreds of light-years from here, right? Does that threat still exist?”

“Yes. The Reivers don’t live on the same time scale humans do. They’ll be a threat for a million years.”

It’s an interesting alternative to the transhumanist idea of uploading one’s consciousness into a computer (which some believe won’t be biologically possible anyway, as mind and body are inextricably linked). You do get “uploaded,” but after death! And who would want to be stuck in an Earthly computer when you could have the whole Universe and other minds or essences to explore.

How plausible the idea is, I don’t know – it is verging close to quantum mysticism. It would be reassuring to think that some of our essence survives after physical death.

December

24/12: Cooking fetish

I couldn’t agree more with this letter from The Age, 13/12:

20 days of excess

I CANNOT attend the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival when I know of the droughts and starvation in eastern Africa, the rising rates of obesity in Australia, and the families in my community who struggle to keep food on the table.

The conundrums and contradictions make me feel queasy, yet alone the thought of all those leftovers going to waste. We don’t need 20 days of excesses.

When it comes to food and wine, keep it simple, grow as much of your own as possible and buy local produce. Food is for sharing with family and friends, not for public display of one’s gastronomic prowess. I am no wowser. Slow and humble eating gets my juices going.

– Deborah Wardle, Castlemaine

I like eating but dislike cooking, which is just a mundane chore to me (in the same category as vacuuming). The amount of cooking shows on Australian TV channels has reached ridiculous levels; at least 10 on the main 5 channels during one week! I really can’t understand the fascination with these.

27/12: Natural play

I have been increasingly of the opinion that organized sports are generally bad for children in terms of health, both physical and mental. The children who are put though intensive training regimes at a young age can suffer in their older years from injuries incurred earlier on, and participation in such hyper-competitive sports is regrettably becoming more common. (“… an increasing number of children and young adults are playing serious sports and getting seriously injured – all factors that contribute to osteoarthritis.” – “Caring for Hips and Knees to Avoid Artificial Joints”) A lot of these sports involve highly unnatural, repetitive activity. Unfortunately this trend is a reflection of the similarly hyper-competitive society we live in. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors got their daily exercise thousands of years ago – though walking, running, digging, lifting and so on – without having to consciously think about it and would probably have regarded spending deliberate exercise time in a gym as bizarre.

This blog entry (reproduced below) by Matt Metzgar has an interesting observation on how children play when left to their own devices:

As has been noted elsewhere, children naturally enage in play activities that would have prepared them for adulthood in hunter-gatherer societies. Given that, I wanted to list the high frequency physical activities I see in my children. The most frequent activity is walking, though that is obvious.

The second most frequent activity would probably be running/sprinting in shorts burts. This happens dozens and dozens of times on a daily basis.

Next up would be body weight squats to pick up something light or to move under something.

The next activity would be some sort of climbing, over objects (or people).

Deadlifts happen on a daily basis, but it is always to pick up light weight objects. I don’t really see a strong drive in either gender to pick up objects that weigh even a quarter as much as bodyweight.

So to summarize, the most frequent activities are:

You could extend this line of thinking and say that there is a biological basis for performing these activities, no matter what the age. If adults engaged in these particular activities, I think it would make a very nice fitness program.

Something to note from all this is that the activities are primarily geared towards mobility and locomotion, and not as much towards strength. Though there is a desire to pick up light objects in children, the frequency is relatively low compared to the movement activities.

I found another blog with an entry, “Can your child get too much exercise?,” which has similar criticisms of excessive organized sport. (The blog has many other interesting entries concerning evolutionary psychology.)

I know I never liked organized sports at school, being more inclined toward solitary activity. In previous years I wished I had been; now I am more inclined to be relieved I was not, given the injury issues involved. I did, however, go through a period of intensive exercise for a few years in my early 20s due to having an eating disorder; I hope that did not injure me permanently. My main exercise now is much gentler, being some daily walking, stretching and bodyweight exercises like pushups.