You fiddle with the DNA or RNA in a virus, trying to understand how the genetics works by transposing chunks from somewhere else that you think might create a new "function" (biological activity) for the virus. For example, let's say Virus A has a chunk of RNA that you think gives it the ability to bind to a receptor on a human lung cell and gain admission. You transpose that chunk into the RNA of Virus B, which has no such ability, and then see what happens. Maybe it all works the way you think it should, and Virus B can now infect human lung cells. More often, genetics being the incredibly complex thing it is, it doesn't work, or at least doesn't work cleanly: maybe Virus B doesn't gain any ability at all, or maybe it binds to the receptor but mysteriously fails to gain entry, or maybe it gains entry but loses some other ability it had, et cetera. (This can happen because a lot of complex stuff happens after genetic material gets into a cell, it interacts with the cellular machinery in a large number of ways that we don't fully understand.) Anyway, you look at what actually happened, and then try to figure out what the mechanism was -- how the RNA interacted with the cellular machinery, what proteins were produced, not produced, or modified, and how that affected the behavior of the new viruses. Hopefully you get a clue about what is going on when that virus gets inside a cell.
Incidentally, "gain" of function research also includes loss of function research, which is where you delete some chunk of RNA that you think gives a virus some ability and see what happens. And, again, maybe it loses just the ability you thought it would lose -- or maybe it doesn't lose the ability, or it gets modified, or it loses something else, or it loses the ability but gains something else. It's another mess.
In the pure research area, it's all just monkeying around with RNA to try to figure out what chunks provide what abilities, and how they do so. You're focused on trying to add or subtract whole abilities ("functions"), often by tranposing distinct chunks of RNA from one virus to another, because if you just randomly mutated the RNA of a virus -- even a small virus usually has ~1000 possible places to mutate its genetic material, so just imagine how many combinations of mutations you could construct, trillions and trillions -- a random mutation would almost always just produce a nonfunctional virus, and any progress would be glacial, depending on exceedingly rare cases where a random mutation actually did something. The goal from the pure research point of view is just to understand the fiendishly complex interaction of viruses with the cells they invade -- which has obviously useful applications.*
Of course, it's perfectly possible for actors with malign motives to undertake this kind of work not for pure research but for specific and evil applications, e.g. "let's see if we can make this virus much more transmissable or much more lethal because Dear Leader will pay us handsomely for a nasty new weapon."
Whether the research is inherently dangerous or not, even setting aside evil practitioners, is very hard to know, principally because viruses *already* exchange genetic material all the time in the wild. (Basically, whenever a cell is infected witrh two or more viruses at once, new viruses can be formed which incorporate RNA, or DNA, from both.) It's one of the ways viruses naturally evolve. So if humans start doing the same thing in the lab, are we significantly increasing the danger of the emergence of new and nastier viruses? By enough to compensate for any new insight we might more quickly gain into how viruses work if we do the research? I don't think anyone has much of a clue, mostly because we don't really know much about the natural evolution of viruses.
Since nobody has a objectively-based clear answer, only one theory or another that seems convincing to its author, reasonable minds can differ, often quite strongly, on whether "gain of function" research should be aggressively pursued, pursued with caution, pursued only under the strictest of regulation, or prohibited entirely.
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* And not just in terms of defeating viral infections: understanding how to "reprogram" cells with extrinsic genetic material of our choosing could be the key to solving any number of genetic diseases, or chronic diseases where we think cell programming has gone awry and needs some kind of correction. The stakes, in both directions, are high.
Good piece. I haven’t read Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Childhood’s End’ for maybe forty years, but I remember that some humans, when confronted with the invading “Overlords” choose to not have children and commit mass suicide. It was a case of the most extreme culture shock, being occupied by an advanced and proscriptive extraterrestrial civilization.
Mr. Rudersdorf slightly misremembers "Childhoods End" - the children evolve beyond the adults, and leave for the Cosmos, leaving the now childless adults bereft and suicidal. Short and very good book about first contact, with other surprises.
I also read Glenn's Substacks, and I posted a comment about this one. But on the matter of interstellar communications, I agree with C. S. Lewis: we are effectively quarantined from all other possible civilizations by distance. He expressed that concept in his science fiction trilogy. And while those books are very dated--we know now that there is no intelligent life on Venus and Mars--the concept may still stand. I grew up reading science fiction--Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov and more--but I know it's one thing for an author to postulate some kind of "warp drive" or other method to cross the vast distances of the universe. But actually producing such a thing is nowhere near as easy for a real scientist as for a fiction writer to use it in a story.
Here on earth, civilizations do decline, sometimes rather rapidly. When Rome began expanding, the leadership was mainly from Rome itself. Over time, that shifted to more and more leadership by Italians, while the actual Romans sat back. Then it shifted until the real leadership was coming from the provinces; Trajan, who was emperor from 98 AD to 117, grew up in Spain. The situation got worse over the years. By the fifth century, most of the military leadership was of barbarian descent.
How the current scene will play out, I do not know. Some of us have tried to keep things going. I have three grown kids and ten grandchildren. And even that is less than some in the past. I started researching my ancestry last year, and I was struck by the size of the families in the 1800s. One of my great-great grandmothers lived from 1814 to 1889, and she had seventeen babies in thirty-one years; eleven lived to adulthood. But she lived in a farming region in Clermont County, Ohio, just east of Cincinnati, Ohio; and in that time and place children were an asset on a farm, not a liability. Now that neighborhood is just suburbs of Cincinnati. But there is an old saying..."The future belongs to those who show up."
The quarantine imposed by the speed of light may well hold. But still, one could imagine radio transmissions reaching Earth or other worlds. Years back, I read, “The Physics of Star Trek,” written by a physics professor. He said that most people assume that warp drive is the least likely technology of Star Trek but that, in fact, the least probably tech is the transporter. Of course, they did that because Roddenberry and crew decided that repeated landings by a different Enterprise would be too expensive to film and too time-consuming in watch-time.
Jim Webb, my former senator in Virginia, wrote a splendid book, “Born Fighting,” about the Scots-Irish in America. One of his themes was that these societal outcasts from the UK, exiled into the Appalachians, came to dominate the hierarchy of the U.S. military.
Good luck with your family, and interesting history!
I have read Senator Webb's book. And yes, I have Scots-Irish heritage on both sides of my family. That tough old biddy who had the 17 babies was descended from a man born in Ulster in 1720. She was on my father's side. My mother was a coal miner's daughter born near Hazard, KY, and her mother was a Webb from east TN. I haven't found any connection to Senator Webb's family yet.
I’m not so sure about the Speed of Light barrier. One of Arthur C. Clarke’s “rules” was “any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic”.
We have enough observations of “unidentified flying things” making “infinite-g” very high-speed turns and linear accelerations. These observations are numerous enough that it must be rather easy for these objects to get from somewhere far, far from here with relative ease, and in great numbers. (I would expect that only a very small fraction are observed and reported.) Otherwise without some sort of super-c drive mechanism, there would be but one (probably not observed) every many-thousand years.
If these things are not from here, how can they be closer than many, many light years? Their very number suggests a facile way of traversing vast, vast distances in very little time.
General relativity offers ways around the Speed of Light barrier. A couple of times, I sat down to work out the math or geometry to comprehend the loopholes. I would gain a modicum of comprehension--sufficient that I could explain a crude version to someone else. Then, my comprehension would deteriorate. I'd forget the specifics. At this point, I couldn't begin to explain them.
General relativity tells us it's possible to stretch or squeeze space. So rather than go through space faster you can in principle just squeeze the space in the direction you want to go so that the distance you have to travel is much, much shorter. The hang-up is that the energy required to stretch or squeeze space like this is unbelievably huge. At the least, you'd have to be in the position of thinking that creating or destroying black holes the size of the Sun is pretty easy-peasy.
Jul 22, 2023·edited Jul 22, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes
The sheer size of the Universe is daunting. Suppose the origin of intelligent life is probable enough that there are 1 trillion species just like us scattered throughout the observable Universe, which on the face of it makes intelligent life amazingly common indeed.
But with a diameter of 92 billion light years this density would still imply the nearest intelligent species is ~5 million light-years away, meaning not only not within our galaxy, but not even within the nearest galaxies -- instead lying in some galaxy beyond our local group, one which is a mere smudge of light in our most powerful telescopes. We can barely imagine having radio communications with the nearest stars, where each exchange would take a dozen years or more. Communication over a light-speed gap of millions of years, and at a distance where only supernovas create individual signals bright enough for detection, seems like something we might never achieve.
Superb example of a Fermi estimate. Of course, your numbers beg a follow-up question. In a Universe that expansive, is it even conceivable that the number of radio-capable civilizations is as unfathomably low as a mere one trillion? :)
I don't know. The numbers either way defy my ability to grok them. What a pity we don't live in the Burroughs or Lewis universe of circa 1910, in which every planet is of course habitable and inhabited, and we can have a lively intercourse with our friends the dry thoughtful Martians or our other friends the voluptuous stormy-browed Venerians.
Sometime, I'll post an engraving from a mid-century astronomy book that I had as a child. It purports to be Venus, with a permanent cloud cover, a few spiky mountains jutting through the clouds, and a lush, tropical, prehistoric-looking rain forest of ferns and cycads below. I would guess that the book was published in the 1950s. Maybe the 1940s.
A human body has roughly 30 trillion cells and 1 octillion atoms. Lord knows how many subatomic particles. You don't have to look beyond the quasars to get to ungrokable numbers.
This is an example of an essay done with superlative skill, weaving together two seemingly different threads into a tight cord of insight. This is Substack as it should be - bouncing ideas taken from another well done essay (thanks, Professor) and scoring even more. The points driven home in the last two paragraphs are worth a bit of reflection by all. I’m seeing this self loathing creeping in among those I know and love and want to find the means to reverse the corrosive mindset, but it is daunting. But reverse it we must.
Your point about Atticus Finch echoes what Disney has been doing to the heroes of our childhood.
Han Solo? Murdered by his own son. Luke Skywalker? Bitter old man who tried to murder his nephew before losing all religion and getting upstaged by his arch enemy’s granddaughter. Indiana Jones? Bitter old man who is upstaged by his goddaughter.
It’s all about undermining anything that we looked up to and used as a source of inspiration. Those must be taken down and replaced by… the State? Properly progressive heroes with properly progressive opinions, until they’re made unfashionable when the improper opinions or actions are uncovered?
I’d love to believe they’ve put any thought into where this goes, beyond utopian dreams.
You have the pleasure of knowing that they're losing gobs of money on this stuff. Someone wrote this morning that the strike might just be the most profitable Hollywood endeavor this year.
I do take grim satisfaction in the idea that what can’t go on forever, won’t. But my seven-year-old son has been watching Lightyear repeatedly, where Buzz ends up as the villain in his own movie because he’s too regressive. What sort of developmental pathway does that put a kid on? Instead of St. George going off to fight the dragon, he’s either the bad guy for not “getting with it”, or taking a backseat to those around him.
I truly fear that the last decade of ideologically-focused content is setting up a generation with the wrong mental programming, and I don’t know as a culture where that takes us. And that gets back to the civilizational confidence point. When a generation is loaded mentally with software that gives them the wrong understanding of what life - a good life, in the sense of happiness, fulfillment, and reproductive potential - truly is, then where does that leave us? Not going to the stars, figuratively or literally.
Perhaps a civilisation collapse might be caused by a lack of need for people to do anything useful rather than widespread wars.
In the 1970s John B Calhoun created an experiment called Universe 25 which took four breeding pairs of mice and placed them inside a "utopia" designed to eliminate problems that would lead to mortality in the wild. They could access limitless food, had no enemies, etc.
The population peaked at 2,200 – short of the actual 3,000-mouse capacity of the "universe" – and from there came the decline. Many of the mice weren't interested in breeding and retired to the upper decks of the enclosure, while others formed into violent gangs which would attack and cannibalise others. The low birth rate and high infant mortality combined with the violence, and soon the entire colony was extinct. Food remained ample, and their every need completely met.
Calhoun termed what he saw as the cause of the collapse "behavioural sink".
"For an animal so simple as a mouse, the most complex behaviours involve the interrelated set of courtship, maternal care, territorial defence and hierarchical intragroup and intergroup social organisation," he concluded in his study. "When behaviours related to these functions fail to mature, there is no development of social organisation and no reproduction. As in the case of my study reported above, all members of the population will age and eventually die. The species will die out."
He believed that the mouse experiment may also apply to humans, and warned of a day where – god forbid – all our needs are met. "For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events should not also lead to species extinction. If opportunities for role fulfilment fall far short of the demand by those capable of filling roles, and having an expectancy to do so, only violence and disruption of social organisation can follow."
Fodder for a future column. Consider this reply to be an outline/rough draft.
In "The True Believer"--of the best books I ever read--Eric Hoffer described the ingredients that must be present for a mass movement (especially a fanatical one). "[T]hey must be intensely discontented yet not destitute." ... "a mass movement ... appeals not to those intent on blostering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self." ... "A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business." ... "Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than then we have nothing and want some." ... "There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom."
In a college sociology course in the mid-70s, we played a game called "SimSoc" (Simulated Society). People were randomly assigned roles, with factories producing and selling things, a newspaper, a national treasury, a police force, etc. etc. Three of us decided to be anarcho-terrorists--which was not a regular part of the game. We went to a local print shop to make counterfeit money, with which we bought the newspaper which, among other things, was required to publish the contents of the national treasury each morning. People were explosively angry about the counterfeit money and complained to the professor. He shrugged and said, "I told you how to authenticate the bills, and you ignored my warnings. We did other troubling things--including overstating the Treasury data so the others would spend capriciously--and the class hated us. They pooled their resources to pay the police to kill us off--which they assumed would bother us. The next day, we brought beer, pizza, and a deck of cards and had a party in the classroom. Society was calm and peaceful, and their little factories were busy with their tedious tasks, and everyone was nice. (We terrorists were dead and harmless ghosts, uninvolved in earthly affairs.) The game was scheduled to continue for another week or so, but after one day of peaceful productivity, the other students were bored out of their minds and begged the professor to end the game. After another day, he did so--noting how awful they found life when there were no problems to solve.
As Harry Lime (Orson Welles) says in "The Third Man," ... ... "Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly." (P.S.: The cuckoo clock is really Bavarian, but we'll let that slide.)
A perhaps related idea is the Social Hygiene Hypothesis[1], which argues that if we have no genuine serious social problems to trigger our social "immune system," we just invent them, e.g. if there isn't *real* and deadly racism, sexism, oppression by an aristocracy, secret police, election fraud, or conspiracies derailing the will o' the people -- why then, we will imagine we see them in the noise of random everyday events, and be just as outraged as if they really were there.
I don’t understand how Harper Lee could betray her wonderful character. Did she still have her faculties, was she persuaded by others to write such a depressing denunciation of a genuine hero of the South, or what?
It would be as if Margaret Mitchell had Scarlet running for the Atlanta chapter of the A.C.L.U.!
Bob, great, great post. I think about this a great deal. My wife and I have four children and mourn that we didn't have more. I frequently hear medical personnel advise young professionals not to have too many children, not to use their money for that but to enjoy life. And yet, I don't know what greater joy I could have had. Furthermore, the aged and childless now find themselves in dire straits without help and without advocacy as they become ill and infirm. I believe you're correct. The self-loathing is a powerful factor. Also, solid references to Idiocracy and Deteriorata. I had the latter on a National Lampoon album in college. An album which, for various reasons, could never be released today. Thank you for all you do!
We have one much beloved son and tried for another. Glad you like the video and audio. :) Funny thing about Idiocracy -- the comic premise of that clip was the deadly serious fear of the eugenicists that you and I have discussed previously.
I'm not a big fan of Deuteronomy, but its exhortation to choose live over death sprung to mind ... I am grateful that I have not only survived but been blest with contentment.
An interesting followup question is whether the societies that are plummeting the most in growth are particularly self-loathing. I don't feel that Korea is, though it underwent the fastest transformation in the world from agrarian to developed economy, perhaps leaving its self-conception uncertain. Japan definitely seems to believe in itself (but maybe that's why, despite doing poorly, it's still doing better than the rest of East Asia?).
Bob,
Enlighten me, please. What is “gain of function research”?
Thanks, Lola
Turbo-charging viruses for various uses, including biological warfare research. This was an activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Bob,
Please explain further. Am still in the dark.
Lola
I just texted you.
You fiddle with the DNA or RNA in a virus, trying to understand how the genetics works by transposing chunks from somewhere else that you think might create a new "function" (biological activity) for the virus. For example, let's say Virus A has a chunk of RNA that you think gives it the ability to bind to a receptor on a human lung cell and gain admission. You transpose that chunk into the RNA of Virus B, which has no such ability, and then see what happens. Maybe it all works the way you think it should, and Virus B can now infect human lung cells. More often, genetics being the incredibly complex thing it is, it doesn't work, or at least doesn't work cleanly: maybe Virus B doesn't gain any ability at all, or maybe it binds to the receptor but mysteriously fails to gain entry, or maybe it gains entry but loses some other ability it had, et cetera. (This can happen because a lot of complex stuff happens after genetic material gets into a cell, it interacts with the cellular machinery in a large number of ways that we don't fully understand.) Anyway, you look at what actually happened, and then try to figure out what the mechanism was -- how the RNA interacted with the cellular machinery, what proteins were produced, not produced, or modified, and how that affected the behavior of the new viruses. Hopefully you get a clue about what is going on when that virus gets inside a cell.
Incidentally, "gain" of function research also includes loss of function research, which is where you delete some chunk of RNA that you think gives a virus some ability and see what happens. And, again, maybe it loses just the ability you thought it would lose -- or maybe it doesn't lose the ability, or it gets modified, or it loses something else, or it loses the ability but gains something else. It's another mess.
In the pure research area, it's all just monkeying around with RNA to try to figure out what chunks provide what abilities, and how they do so. You're focused on trying to add or subtract whole abilities ("functions"), often by tranposing distinct chunks of RNA from one virus to another, because if you just randomly mutated the RNA of a virus -- even a small virus usually has ~1000 possible places to mutate its genetic material, so just imagine how many combinations of mutations you could construct, trillions and trillions -- a random mutation would almost always just produce a nonfunctional virus, and any progress would be glacial, depending on exceedingly rare cases where a random mutation actually did something. The goal from the pure research point of view is just to understand the fiendishly complex interaction of viruses with the cells they invade -- which has obviously useful applications.*
Of course, it's perfectly possible for actors with malign motives to undertake this kind of work not for pure research but for specific and evil applications, e.g. "let's see if we can make this virus much more transmissable or much more lethal because Dear Leader will pay us handsomely for a nasty new weapon."
Whether the research is inherently dangerous or not, even setting aside evil practitioners, is very hard to know, principally because viruses *already* exchange genetic material all the time in the wild. (Basically, whenever a cell is infected witrh two or more viruses at once, new viruses can be formed which incorporate RNA, or DNA, from both.) It's one of the ways viruses naturally evolve. So if humans start doing the same thing in the lab, are we significantly increasing the danger of the emergence of new and nastier viruses? By enough to compensate for any new insight we might more quickly gain into how viruses work if we do the research? I don't think anyone has much of a clue, mostly because we don't really know much about the natural evolution of viruses.
Since nobody has a objectively-based clear answer, only one theory or another that seems convincing to its author, reasonable minds can differ, often quite strongly, on whether "gain of function" research should be aggressively pursued, pursued with caution, pursued only under the strictest of regulation, or prohibited entirely.
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* And not just in terms of defeating viral infections: understanding how to "reprogram" cells with extrinsic genetic material of our choosing could be the key to solving any number of genetic diseases, or chronic diseases where we think cell programming has gone awry and needs some kind of correction. The stakes, in both directions, are high.
Best explanation I’ve ever read!
Good piece. I haven’t read Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Childhood’s End’ for maybe forty years, but I remember that some humans, when confronted with the invading “Overlords” choose to not have children and commit mass suicide. It was a case of the most extreme culture shock, being occupied by an advanced and proscriptive extraterrestrial civilization.
Thanks! I haven’t read that, but it kind of echoes the story of Masada, 72-73 CE. Also mocked long ago on “The Simpsons.” https://youtu.be/8lcUHQYhPTE
Mr. Rudersdorf slightly misremembers "Childhoods End" - the children evolve beyond the adults, and leave for the Cosmos, leaving the now childless adults bereft and suicidal. Short and very good book about first contact, with other surprises.
I also read Glenn's Substacks, and I posted a comment about this one. But on the matter of interstellar communications, I agree with C. S. Lewis: we are effectively quarantined from all other possible civilizations by distance. He expressed that concept in his science fiction trilogy. And while those books are very dated--we know now that there is no intelligent life on Venus and Mars--the concept may still stand. I grew up reading science fiction--Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov and more--but I know it's one thing for an author to postulate some kind of "warp drive" or other method to cross the vast distances of the universe. But actually producing such a thing is nowhere near as easy for a real scientist as for a fiction writer to use it in a story.
Here on earth, civilizations do decline, sometimes rather rapidly. When Rome began expanding, the leadership was mainly from Rome itself. Over time, that shifted to more and more leadership by Italians, while the actual Romans sat back. Then it shifted until the real leadership was coming from the provinces; Trajan, who was emperor from 98 AD to 117, grew up in Spain. The situation got worse over the years. By the fifth century, most of the military leadership was of barbarian descent.
How the current scene will play out, I do not know. Some of us have tried to keep things going. I have three grown kids and ten grandchildren. And even that is less than some in the past. I started researching my ancestry last year, and I was struck by the size of the families in the 1800s. One of my great-great grandmothers lived from 1814 to 1889, and she had seventeen babies in thirty-one years; eleven lived to adulthood. But she lived in a farming region in Clermont County, Ohio, just east of Cincinnati, Ohio; and in that time and place children were an asset on a farm, not a liability. Now that neighborhood is just suburbs of Cincinnati. But there is an old saying..."The future belongs to those who show up."
A bit more from C.S. Lewis, I think from The Abolition of Man: we castrate, then bid the geldings be fruitful.
The castration may be psychological rather than physical, but effective just the same.
Interesting!
The quarantine imposed by the speed of light may well hold. But still, one could imagine radio transmissions reaching Earth or other worlds. Years back, I read, “The Physics of Star Trek,” written by a physics professor. He said that most people assume that warp drive is the least likely technology of Star Trek but that, in fact, the least probably tech is the transporter. Of course, they did that because Roddenberry and crew decided that repeated landings by a different Enterprise would be too expensive to film and too time-consuming in watch-time.
Jim Webb, my former senator in Virginia, wrote a splendid book, “Born Fighting,” about the Scots-Irish in America. One of his themes was that these societal outcasts from the UK, exiled into the Appalachians, came to dominate the hierarchy of the U.S. military.
Good luck with your family, and interesting history!
I have read Senator Webb's book. And yes, I have Scots-Irish heritage on both sides of my family. That tough old biddy who had the 17 babies was descended from a man born in Ulster in 1720. She was on my father's side. My mother was a coal miner's daughter born near Hazard, KY, and her mother was a Webb from east TN. I haven't found any connection to Senator Webb's family yet.
I’m not so sure about the Speed of Light barrier. One of Arthur C. Clarke’s “rules” was “any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic”.
We have enough observations of “unidentified flying things” making “infinite-g” very high-speed turns and linear accelerations. These observations are numerous enough that it must be rather easy for these objects to get from somewhere far, far from here with relative ease, and in great numbers. (I would expect that only a very small fraction are observed and reported.) Otherwise without some sort of super-c drive mechanism, there would be but one (probably not observed) every many-thousand years.
If these things are not from here, how can they be closer than many, many light years? Their very number suggests a facile way of traversing vast, vast distances in very little time.
General relativity offers ways around the Speed of Light barrier. A couple of times, I sat down to work out the math or geometry to comprehend the loopholes. I would gain a modicum of comprehension--sufficient that I could explain a crude version to someone else. Then, my comprehension would deteriorate. I'd forget the specifics. At this point, I couldn't begin to explain them.
General relativity tells us it's possible to stretch or squeeze space. So rather than go through space faster you can in principle just squeeze the space in the direction you want to go so that the distance you have to travel is much, much shorter. The hang-up is that the energy required to stretch or squeeze space like this is unbelievably huge. At the least, you'd have to be in the position of thinking that creating or destroying black holes the size of the Sun is pretty easy-peasy.
Working on it as we speak. :)
The sheer size of the Universe is daunting. Suppose the origin of intelligent life is probable enough that there are 1 trillion species just like us scattered throughout the observable Universe, which on the face of it makes intelligent life amazingly common indeed.
But with a diameter of 92 billion light years this density would still imply the nearest intelligent species is ~5 million light-years away, meaning not only not within our galaxy, but not even within the nearest galaxies -- instead lying in some galaxy beyond our local group, one which is a mere smudge of light in our most powerful telescopes. We can barely imagine having radio communications with the nearest stars, where each exchange would take a dozen years or more. Communication over a light-speed gap of millions of years, and at a distance where only supernovas create individual signals bright enough for detection, seems like something we might never achieve.
Superb example of a Fermi estimate. Of course, your numbers beg a follow-up question. In a Universe that expansive, is it even conceivable that the number of radio-capable civilizations is as unfathomably low as a mere one trillion? :)
I don't know. The numbers either way defy my ability to grok them. What a pity we don't live in the Burroughs or Lewis universe of circa 1910, in which every planet is of course habitable and inhabited, and we can have a lively intercourse with our friends the dry thoughtful Martians or our other friends the voluptuous stormy-browed Venerians.
Sometime, I'll post an engraving from a mid-century astronomy book that I had as a child. It purports to be Venus, with a permanent cloud cover, a few spiky mountains jutting through the clouds, and a lush, tropical, prehistoric-looking rain forest of ferns and cycads below. I would guess that the book was published in the 1950s. Maybe the 1940s.
A human body has roughly 30 trillion cells and 1 octillion atoms. Lord knows how many subatomic particles. You don't have to look beyond the quasars to get to ungrokable numbers.
This is an example of an essay done with superlative skill, weaving together two seemingly different threads into a tight cord of insight. This is Substack as it should be - bouncing ideas taken from another well done essay (thanks, Professor) and scoring even more. The points driven home in the last two paragraphs are worth a bit of reflection by all. I’m seeing this self loathing creeping in among those I know and love and want to find the means to reverse the corrosive mindset, but it is daunting. But reverse it we must.
I am humbled and appreciative.
Keep up the great work!
Your point about Atticus Finch echoes what Disney has been doing to the heroes of our childhood.
Han Solo? Murdered by his own son. Luke Skywalker? Bitter old man who tried to murder his nephew before losing all religion and getting upstaged by his arch enemy’s granddaughter. Indiana Jones? Bitter old man who is upstaged by his goddaughter.
It’s all about undermining anything that we looked up to and used as a source of inspiration. Those must be taken down and replaced by… the State? Properly progressive heroes with properly progressive opinions, until they’re made unfashionable when the improper opinions or actions are uncovered?
I’d love to believe they’ve put any thought into where this goes, beyond utopian dreams.
You have the pleasure of knowing that they're losing gobs of money on this stuff. Someone wrote this morning that the strike might just be the most profitable Hollywood endeavor this year.
I do take grim satisfaction in the idea that what can’t go on forever, won’t. But my seven-year-old son has been watching Lightyear repeatedly, where Buzz ends up as the villain in his own movie because he’s too regressive. What sort of developmental pathway does that put a kid on? Instead of St. George going off to fight the dragon, he’s either the bad guy for not “getting with it”, or taking a backseat to those around him.
I truly fear that the last decade of ideologically-focused content is setting up a generation with the wrong mental programming, and I don’t know as a culture where that takes us. And that gets back to the civilizational confidence point. When a generation is loaded mentally with software that gives them the wrong understanding of what life - a good life, in the sense of happiness, fulfillment, and reproductive potential - truly is, then where does that leave us? Not going to the stars, figuratively or literally.
Thanks for the piece. Love your work.
We shall see, won’t we? it’s hard to see a happy ending for the story, but we’ll see. Thanks for the thumbs-up!
Perhaps a civilisation collapse might be caused by a lack of need for people to do anything useful rather than widespread wars.
In the 1970s John B Calhoun created an experiment called Universe 25 which took four breeding pairs of mice and placed them inside a "utopia" designed to eliminate problems that would lead to mortality in the wild. They could access limitless food, had no enemies, etc.
The population peaked at 2,200 – short of the actual 3,000-mouse capacity of the "universe" – and from there came the decline. Many of the mice weren't interested in breeding and retired to the upper decks of the enclosure, while others formed into violent gangs which would attack and cannibalise others. The low birth rate and high infant mortality combined with the violence, and soon the entire colony was extinct. Food remained ample, and their every need completely met.
Calhoun termed what he saw as the cause of the collapse "behavioural sink".
"For an animal so simple as a mouse, the most complex behaviours involve the interrelated set of courtship, maternal care, territorial defence and hierarchical intragroup and intergroup social organisation," he concluded in his study. "When behaviours related to these functions fail to mature, there is no development of social organisation and no reproduction. As in the case of my study reported above, all members of the population will age and eventually die. The species will die out."
He believed that the mouse experiment may also apply to humans, and warned of a day where – god forbid – all our needs are met. "For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events should not also lead to species extinction. If opportunities for role fulfilment fall far short of the demand by those capable of filling roles, and having an expectancy to do so, only violence and disruption of social organisation can follow."
(This is an extract from https://www.iflscience.com/universe-25-the-mouse-utopia-experiment-that-turned-into-an-apocalypse-60407)
Fodder for a future column. Consider this reply to be an outline/rough draft.
In "The True Believer"--of the best books I ever read--Eric Hoffer described the ingredients that must be present for a mass movement (especially a fanatical one). "[T]hey must be intensely discontented yet not destitute." ... "a mass movement ... appeals not to those intent on blostering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self." ... "A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business." ... "Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than then we have nothing and want some." ... "There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom."
In a college sociology course in the mid-70s, we played a game called "SimSoc" (Simulated Society). People were randomly assigned roles, with factories producing and selling things, a newspaper, a national treasury, a police force, etc. etc. Three of us decided to be anarcho-terrorists--which was not a regular part of the game. We went to a local print shop to make counterfeit money, with which we bought the newspaper which, among other things, was required to publish the contents of the national treasury each morning. People were explosively angry about the counterfeit money and complained to the professor. He shrugged and said, "I told you how to authenticate the bills, and you ignored my warnings. We did other troubling things--including overstating the Treasury data so the others would spend capriciously--and the class hated us. They pooled their resources to pay the police to kill us off--which they assumed would bother us. The next day, we brought beer, pizza, and a deck of cards and had a party in the classroom. Society was calm and peaceful, and their little factories were busy with their tedious tasks, and everyone was nice. (We terrorists were dead and harmless ghosts, uninvolved in earthly affairs.) The game was scheduled to continue for another week or so, but after one day of peaceful productivity, the other students were bored out of their minds and begged the professor to end the game. After another day, he did so--noting how awful they found life when there were no problems to solve.
As Harry Lime (Orson Welles) says in "The Third Man," ... ... "Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly." (P.S.: The cuckoo clock is really Bavarian, but we'll let that slide.)
A perhaps related idea is the Social Hygiene Hypothesis[1], which argues that if we have no genuine serious social problems to trigger our social "immune system," we just invent them, e.g. if there isn't *real* and deadly racism, sexism, oppression by an aristocracy, secret police, election fraud, or conspiracies derailing the will o' the people -- why then, we will imagine we see them in the noise of random everyday events, and be just as outraged as if they really were there.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
The Instapundit site has a recurring caption: "When the demand for racism exceeds the supply of racism."
I don’t understand how Harper Lee could betray her wonderful character. Did she still have her faculties, was she persuaded by others to write such a depressing denunciation of a genuine hero of the South, or what?
It would be as if Margaret Mitchell had Scarlet running for the Atlanta chapter of the A.C.L.U.!
Lola Murray
It is very much disputed whether she was of sound mind at that point. My bet is on "no." We'll never know, however.
Bob, great, great post. I think about this a great deal. My wife and I have four children and mourn that we didn't have more. I frequently hear medical personnel advise young professionals not to have too many children, not to use their money for that but to enjoy life. And yet, I don't know what greater joy I could have had. Furthermore, the aged and childless now find themselves in dire straits without help and without advocacy as they become ill and infirm. I believe you're correct. The self-loathing is a powerful factor. Also, solid references to Idiocracy and Deteriorata. I had the latter on a National Lampoon album in college. An album which, for various reasons, could never be released today. Thank you for all you do!
We have one much beloved son and tried for another. Glad you like the video and audio. :) Funny thing about Idiocracy -- the comic premise of that clip was the deadly serious fear of the eugenicists that you and I have discussed previously.
Real Clear Investigations had an excellent article on how AI fits into a rising anti-humanism: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/07/19/oh_the_humanity_anti-humanism_rising_and_now_along_comes_artificial_intelligence_966474.html
I'm not a big fan of Deuteronomy, but its exhortation to choose live over death sprung to mind ... I am grateful that I have not only survived but been blest with contentment.
An interesting followup question is whether the societies that are plummeting the most in growth are particularly self-loathing. I don't feel that Korea is, though it underwent the fastest transformation in the world from agrarian to developed economy, perhaps leaving its self-conception uncertain. Japan definitely seems to believe in itself (but maybe that's why, despite doing poorly, it's still doing better than the rest of East Asia?).
An esteemed writer emailed to ask me the same question. I don’t know enough about Korean and Japanese societies. Interesting point, though.