October 2018 – NearcticTraveller

Interstellar Visitor, or Where is the Space Force when We Need it?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/interstellar-comet-oumuamua-might-not-actually-be-a-comet-20181010/

It may seem a bit eccentric to introduce a world shaking story on an obscure weblog, but Nearctic Traveller believes his discriminating readers deserve to be the first to know. As the attached story from Quanta reports, the first interstellar object detected in our solar system has left in its wake a great mystery.

First described as an asteroid, then as a comet, and finally as a weird hybrid, tumbling through space, it came from parts unknown and departed thence before earth based astronomers could get a proper fix. Given its unprecedented characteristics, an effort was made to monitor any radio signals emitted from the object, but none were detected.

As it happens, during the near approach to earth by the “object,” I was contacted by a colleague, a quantum physicist, at our local university who wanted my help. It turned out that during the course of an experiment on quantum entanglement, she had received a strange message, in plain text English, via her apparatus’s computer output. It specifically requested to be connected to an ecologist, so naturally, she thought of me. I was soon receiving the communication via my old Mac, and sitting at my desk, I carried on the following conversation with what claimed to be the interstellar exploration ship, @3*776=$£9{¥}457, which we had begun calling Oumuamua, a word in the language of Hawaiʻi, meaning scout, which they found singularly appropriate. What follows is a transcript of the conversation.

NT: May I ask why you have chosen to communicate with just one and, candidly, one entirely uninfluential earthling?

O: We were prepared to announce ourselves, but for reasons we will explain as we go along, have decided to postpone our visit. We gleaned enough from your communications being beamed promiscuously into space, to see that our expedition is premature. Therefore we have maintained our concealment, which was facilitated by our decision not to thaw the bulk of the expedition. That was the ice, which some of your astronomers will have noted, that failed to form a tail as we rounded your sun, because we kept it frozen. Of course we ourselves send no signals by radio, preferring the secure means of quantum entanglement.

NT: I heard that there was a mysterious force that seemed to be influencing your orbit.

O: that would be our cosmic string drive, which enables us to journey among all the 23 dimensions of space. You physicists are still muddling through the theory, but the simple way to explain is that we can wind up many strings, rather like the rubber band powered airplane models you play with, and as they unwind, sail through space to any dimension and system we wish to visit. The tumbling you noted is caused by the lumpiness of the twisted strings.

NT: Did you find anything distinctive in our broadcasts?

O: No, though some of the crew enjoy watching reruns of Star Trek during down time. Its heart is in the right place, but the conception of what lies beyond your world is hilarious.

NT: Well, welcome to the solar system. Have you been here before?

O: Yes, on several occasions. We conducted a preliminary reconnaissance about a billion of your earth years ago [hereafter, EYA] to verify what our instruments indicated, that a biosphere was present on your planet. We checked back some time around one hundred million EYA and found only large, rather disagreeable lizards, and thinking that it might speed things along, sent a large asteroid your way. Following that event, we returned some one million EYA, to find things perking along nicely, with bipedal, dexterous, bionts, who showed signs of making tools and engaging in symbolic communication. Having allowed what we believed was sufficient time for this organism to develop, we returned just over two hundred EYA. It was a most interesting occasion, as we could see that people, as we designate you and your kind, had achieved a number of milestones in government, science, technology, etc. although your ethical and cultural development was still pitiable. Not there there was any lack of enlightened individuals, simply that as a collective you were still as nasty and brutish for the most part as on our previous visit.

NT: So, why did you return now?

O: We are incurable optimists and thinking that you would soon be in a position to meet all your material needs, we believed that this would lead you to a more just and equitable society. Then you might be ready to deal with the fact that you are by no means alone in the cosmos.

NT: And what, if anything, have you concluded?

O: We are sorry to report that far from making you better, the possibility of freeing yourselves from want has led to insatiable desire for material means to a goal you seem unable to define. Moreover, you have become more violent, and turn your ingenuity towards developing both weapons of mass destruction and more effective devices for personal aggression. I could go on, but as an educated person, you are surely well aware of what we learned.

NT: Alas, you are correct, but isn’t this simply the heritage of our evolutionary past?

O: Indeed, but we had hoped that in learning of that past, you would also become aware of the need to transcend it. Rather than doing this, most of you refuse to believe even the obvious scientific truth of your evolution and instead, cling to tribal myths. These unfortunate conclusions are in line with several reports we received of you from beings living on different worlds, in different dimensions. One was based on an encounter between inter dimensional bionts and a Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, we believe, from your planet, just before our last visit. The leader of one of these groups, who talked to this Gulliver about his home country, was forced to “…conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Another contact was about 85-90 EYA, when a certain biont, of rather unusual, but not unprecedented qualities, named Archie, had radio communication with the outpost of another interstellar organization, based on Mars at the time. They provided us with the following transcript of part of the conversation:

tell us all about

your planet said mars

well i said it is

round like an orange

or a ball

and it is all cluttered

up with automobiles

and politicians

it doesn t know where it is

going nor why

but it is in a hurry

it is in charge of a

two legged animal called

man who is genuinely

puzzled as to whether

his grandfather was a god

or a monkey

i should think said mars

that what he is himself

would make more difference

than what his grandfather was

not to this animal i replied

he is the great alibi ike of

the cosmos when he raises hell

just because he feels like raising hell

just because he feels like

raising hell

he wants somebody to blame it on

can t anything be done about him

said mars

i am doing the best i can

i answered

but after all i am only one

and my influence is limited

NT: So how does you disappointment affect us? Do you plan to destroy the human race?

O: I hope you see that you are projecting your own subconscious barbarity onto us. We are not a violent race of bionts, as you seem to so often fantasize about coming to wipe you out.

NT: Good to know. What is it you want from me?

O: We have concluded that your case may be hopeless, so we’d like to know what you, as an ecologist can tell us about your planet’s current condition. Since we aren’t ready to make a full, on the ground reconnaissance now, we feel it would be useful to have a somewhat reasonable member of your species fill us in on the present state of your biosphere. That way, when we return shortly, after your inevitable demise, we can reconstruct the biosphere as it existed prior to your final destructive acts. We know from experience that enough genetic material will survive for our engineers to rebuild and make a nice home for a deserving species whose own planet is facing some catastrophe.

NT: Why not simply suck up all our data from the internet?

O: Surely you jest. Not even a hyper intelligent race of interstellar bionics, like ourselves, can find the truth in all that rubbish.

NT: Well, I admit it would be a problem, but I feel a scruple about helping, since I think we prefer to try to save ourselves and our biosphere. I understand you don’t like to waste a good planet, but neither do we. Besides, the new tenants, if they do move in, might prefer to do their own decorating.

O: That is a good observation. We will leave it up to them. We wish you success, of course, and we are really sorry we can’t share any of our technology, which might be of real assistance. among other things we have infinite, non-polluting energy supplies in a whole range of sizes that can be manufactured for about one of your dollars each. But you see of course that it would invariably fall into the wrong hands. Let your people know this was our last visit, if you think you can endure the abuse you’ll be subjected to. @3*776=$£9{¥}457, signing off for good.

There you have a true and complete account of the communication I received. My colleague, who prefers to remain anonymous, vouches for the truth of this report in a document in my possession, which I will show to the Secretary General of the United Nations on request. Further verification of previous contacts can be found in the following sources:

Marquis. Don. Archie hears from Mars in the lives and times of archie and mehitabel New Edition. Doubleday and Co. 1950.

Simak, Cliffiord. The dusty zebra in The Worlds of Clifford Simak, Simon and Schuster, 1960. Also in The Dusty Zebra, Kindle edition, Open Road Media Sci-Fi and Fantasy, 2017. [An account of an attempt in the 1950s by another interstellar group to establish commercial relations. This proved disastrously premature.]

Swift, J. A voyage to Brobdingnag in Gulliver’s Travels (numerous editions)

Looking for the Logos of Lucre III: a new gospel of wealth?

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas. Knopf, 2018.

A timely book, especially in light of the recent announcement by Jeff Bezos of Amazon that he plans to raise wages for his lowest paid workers. It is a modern critique of the modern version of the Gospel of Wealth, enunciated by Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, in the 1890s. He argued that the rich could best disperse their large fortunes by philanthropy. In his case this included endowing Carnegie Libraries in many cities, along with Carnegie Hall, museums, universities, etc.

Today, we see many high tech and hedge fund billionaires and others among the super rich proposing to tackle poverty, disease, oppression and the like through philanthropic foundations. Giridharadas focuses his book on the people who operate this world of large scale largesse, many of whom come from the financial firms that enable the accumulation of these vast fortunes to begin with. People like Bill Clinton and his Clinton Global Initiative, the president of the Ford Foundation and a young woman from an elite university starting her career with a financial firm that emphasizes “doing well by doing good.” They form what Giridharadas calls “MarketWorld,” an elite network of global activities, ranging from Davos World Economic Forumto TED talks that bring the rich and powerful together with “Thought Leaders.” Together these people push market friendly solutions to global challenges, “win-win” solutions that are intended to substitute for political action.

Giridharadas questions the motivations of these people and in interviews that make up much of the book, shows that many of them have their own doubts. The big question is the same one asked of Carnegie: given that you made your fortune through ruthless business practices, holding wages at near starvation levels, and so on, why not give it back to the people you took advantage of? What good is a library to a man who has to work fourteen hours a day, six days a week to feed his family? Thus as one editorial asked Jeff Bezos: if you want to fight problems like poverty, why not start by paying Amazon workers a living wage? Maybe he got the message.

The problem is, it’s mostly about power. As Thomas Hobbes says in Levithan, Chapter XI, “I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” Wealth is power, and the desire to have the exercise of that power must be nearly irresistible. Carnegie was sure he knew better than his workers what would improve their lives. Likewise, the modern philanthropists of MarketWorld believe that they can do better than governments solving national or global problems. Given our present political situation, they may appear to be right. But consider: the present weakness, indecisiveness and corruption of government is in large part a product of the success of the wealthy in weakening government by starving it of revenue and shifting policy in favor of finance and the rich. They accomplished this by pouring some of their wealth in campaign coffers and lobbying. Reduced social welfare, crumbling infrastructure, unequal and costly education, stagnant minimum wage – all brought about at the behest of the rich and their tax cutting political friends in office. Along with the weakening of organized labor, it’s no wonder there are lots of social problems for MarketWorlders to propose win-win solutions for.

The privatization of education is a dream of the market types, and they are using their influence in government to make it come true. Because young people will be better off, or because it is a gigantic stream of revenue they can capture? What will this do to the democratic idea of public education, the transmission of not just basic skills but of a core of common values deemed essential to good citizenship in a republic? And what about the larger loss of democratic control of the policies and practices that affect our lives? Should plutocrats and their Thought Leader minions decide what the choices will be? Are solutions that are not marketable to be excluded? Look at the problems of delivering goods like healthcare in a for profit environment. Giridharadasand the people he talks to are clearly made uneasy by these questions.

Giridharadas has interesting thoughts on the people we used to call Public Intellectuals versus contemporary Thought Leaders: Public intellectuals, he says tended to focus on those who created the problems they discussed, the looked at issue from a political viewpoint and they often defined problems without speculating on solutions. Many could be described as gadflies or a kind of public conscience. They were generally found in academia, the public press or publishing.

Thought Leaders, Giridharadassays, don’t look at perpetrators, they see problems as personal, arising from individual shortcomings or disabilities, not as a result of public policies. They are expected to have a very big idea and to focus on “actionable solutions,” meaning those that can be incorporated in a business plan. They offer their proposals at TED talks, elite conferences or on the high paid speaker circuit. Their appeal is not to the socially and politically aware public, but to the elite, to whom they offer plans of action that they promise will have large effects and generate profit for the bottom line.

While I still think there are public intellectuals around, I agree that their influence, such as it was, has been overshadowed by these new thinkers, who serve MarketWorld. Political leaders now gravitate in the same direction, and the neglect of the concerns of those who live their lives in the everyday world has led us to the increasingly bitter political situation we find ourselves in.

People want leaders who are accountable to them, even if they don’t always do a good job of holding them to account. Elites who stand above politics, which they can influence with their money and the revolving door jobs they control, have failed to grasp this this. Philanthropy is fine, but when my concerns, interests and dignity are being taken away and I begin to feel more and more powerless, I am not going to feel happier for it. It’s time to reassert the basic notion that we are all in this together. It isn’t “your money,” when it took all of us working to make your success possible. And if your success is founded on decades of change in favor of the fortunate few, it’s even worse that you alone get to decide how to use it. As Giridharadas puts it at the end, “Where do we go from here?…somewhere other than where we have been going, led by people other than the people who have been leading us.”

Rising from the Ashes

Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 by Tony Judt. Penguin Press, 2005.

I listened to the Audible version. The thing that struck me the most about this history was how different things looked from a European perspective. I’m a baby boomer, who grew up and entered adulthood in the period the book covers. In the United States, the history of postwar was about America and its friendly European allies, aka NATO, facing off against the dreaded countries behind the Iron Curtain, specifically Russia, aka USSR. We were good, believing in liberty and free enterprise; they were bad, being communists. The space race was the big story that captured my imagination, along with the parallel developments in strategic nuclear weapons, missiles, etc. As I became more politically aware, the Civil Rights movement and the War on Poverty also began to concern me, followed by the environment.

Europeans, I learned from Tony Judt’s painstakingly detailed account, had a lot more to worry about and a more complicated relationship to the communist countries, many of whom were of course European themselves. Rebuilding economies, preventing a resurgence of fascism, establishing better social and political relationships and dealing with restive colonial possessions all mattered as much as the menace of communist dictatorship during the period from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet empire. Unlike the United States, where the Communist party was outlawed, Communist parties remained influential in many European countries outside Soviet control.

I will not attempt to summarize. This is a masterful account by a fine historian. I gained a whole new understanding of the complexities of European politics in that time, including the tumultuous late 1960’s, that throws light on what went on in the US in the same period. I am now largely in sympathy with his criticism of students’ and prominent intellectuals’ romance with third world revolutions, which I myself certainly felt in those days, even if I did not go much further than to canvass for Eugene McCarthy.

Some of the best chapters are on the events surrounding the breakup of the Soviet empire and the re-establishment of more or less democratic governments in the former satellite states. Judt gives a clear account of the causes and consequences of the tragedy of Yugoslavia. Likewise his account of how Spain, Portugal and Greece emerged from right wing dictatorships. He also covers the rise of anti-immigrant and racist sentiments, including the persistence of anti-Semitism. He does an excellent job of depicting the enormous diversity of Europe and Europeans, economic, social and cultural. The book makes clear how remarkable the achievement of European economic integration has been, as well as its limitations and the reasons for discontent with many of its features. This historical account makes it much easier for me to understand current events, like Brexit and the rise of ultra-nationalism.

There is much more: an enormous increase in affluence at most levels, changes in everyday domestic life, increasing travel and leisure and developments in popular and high culture. He discusses the changes in education, the rise of the welfare state and its dilemmas, the decline in birth rates and the decreasing influence of religion in many countries.

Overall, this is a great read for anyone wanting to understand more about the continent that gave us much of our American tradition and that constitutes one of our most important partners and rivals in the contemporary world.