Category: Big Thoughts

“But thanks to recent advances in stem cell research and the fine work of Doctors Krinski and Altschuler, Clevon should regain full reproductive function.” – Idiocracy

 

This is a picture from when The Boy and I took a ride into Denali.  You can read about that adventure here (LINK).  Spoiler!  Not killed by vampires.

Winter is coming.  And it all has to do with biology . . .

I didn’t like high school biology.  Not that I didn’t have good teachers, I had great teachers.  They were committed and passionate about biology.  I love science – don’t get me wrong, but biology seemed so . . . pointless.  It was a lot of learning the proper names for things (stamen and pistil are two vaguely naughty flower parts that I all I recall, but couldn’t distinguish) and learning how a flower worked was so much less interesting than the fusion reactor that powers our solar system (Fun Fact:  If you collected all of the solar energy falling on California every day, it would be very dark there!).  And my lab partners (two cute cheerleaders who smelled vaguely of musk) almost gleefully did the frog dissection.  There were times I think that they wished they had a dead frog, but . . .

As I’ve gotten older, I realize that there are interesting aspects to almost any subject, some of which I spend hours, weeks or even months studying until I’ve learned what I want to know.  When I was younger, my biology interests mainly involved attempts at field experimentation with cheerleaders.  Decades later biology came back up in my intellectual wanderings in settings that didn’t involve double features at the drive in.

This time my study of the convergence of biology and economics explained to me why half of the US population can’t talk to the other half – and can’t even understand the other half.

It starts with a wolf.

There is a bleak, windswept plane in Alaska.  Off in the distance, the wolf pack follows a caribou herd, as it has for the better part of a week.  The pack acts as one.  A lone wolf in the north is a dead one.

The females – smaller, quicker – herd the caribou on the sides, keeping the herd moving to the west, away from the cover of the trees.  The older males push through the center, finally selecting the small group of caribou that they will take and use their superior muscle to attack.  The young wolves and pups follow along, sometimes play-fighting among each other, but more often imitating the adults.  The play will turn to hunting as they watch and learn. 

As the caribou comes down, the males feed first.  Eventually the pups feed.  It’s been a week, and they’re hungry.  The alpha male and alpha female of this pack have been mated for life, and will stay mated until the male dies in three years from an infection due to a broken tooth, but today they have food. 

A significant amount of effort is put into raising the pups, who, when they get older will split off and join other packs.

Wolves follows what a biologist calls “K” selection.

Based on their environment, wolves face a significant pressure for resources every day.  They live in environments at the sheer edge of habitability, and have to cooperate to fight those environments daily in order to survive.  Their young, have significant parental involvement and training.  Due to the scarcity inherent in the environment they must work together to live.  They only have a few offspring, but they invest heavily in them.  And a mother wolf will fight to the death to save a pup – the pack works together, and is loyal to individual members.

Rabbits follow “r” selection.  (The “K” and the “r” originate as variables in an equation that you’ll never use, but here’s the link (LINK) if you want to stare at it.)

It’s the opposite of K selection in many ways.  r selection depends upon having significant amounts of resources available.  These resources make life easy, so strategies change.

Part of winning biologically in a resource-rich revolves around having the most number of offspring.  So, have as many as you want, as many as you can so your genes spread far and wide.  Since resources are abundant, mating for life is silly.  Mate with . . . whoever.  Whenever.  However.  As long as you have babies.  Since a rabbit has lots of babies, each gets little attention, and the idea of a rabbit protecting offspring is unknown – rabbits run away, hoping you’ll eat their offspring as long as you don’t get them.

Resources are plentiful, so there’s no real reason to work together strongly.  Not that the rabbits won’t hang together, it’s just that there’s no rabbit that will ever inconvenience themselves to help another rabbit.

Biologically, the rabbits avoid competition for resources – there’s no need.  Whereas the wolves focus on mating for life, promiscuity is required for rabbits.  And rabbits are single parents.  Rabbits are single parents who come to early sexual maturity and have children young.  And they will sell out other rabbits to save themselves.

Wolves have to take part in competition, delay sex and are (mainly) monogamous in the wild.  They have dual parents for raising their pups, longer time to sexual maturity and independence, and will fight, to the death if need be, for each other.

We see echoes of r/K selection in our society today.  When the economy tanks?  Divorce rate plummets.

As social spending goes up?  Sexual promiscuity in youth goes up.  Single parenthood increases.

The numbers of children born to unwed mothers goes from 3.8% in 1940 (before welfare) to 5.3% in 1960 to over 40% by 2008.  The numbers stayed small as long as resources were limited, but once resources were free?  Boom, many women become r-selected rabbits, which is paralleled only with the behaviors seen at the beginning of the decay of empires (which I cover better than anyone else, ever, at this link (LINK)).

But a core of society remain K selected, which was the norm prior to 1960 and the mass rollout of welfare.  So, blue state/red state?  Republican/Democrat?  Liberal/Conservative?

Or r/K?

That’s where we find ourselves today – much of our political division now having root in differing biological strategies.  When the strategy is rooted so deeply, it becomes a point of self, not something abstract.  When someone attacks an idea that supports that strategy, it’s often viewed as a personal attack, rather than a discussion.  Ever see a political discussion go from zero to yelling in under thirty seconds?  Chances are, someone attacked one of the deeply seated r/K differences.

Hot button topics like this?  Anti-nuke movement.  Anti-illegal immigrant movement.  Abortion.  I could keep going, but I think you could do it from here.

And it’s fairly insidious – we rarely examine our individual biological imperatives – more often we end up just following unexamined urges and then rationalizing them to prove that we’re smart, not animals.  We think we’re making choices, but we’re not.  I imagine an unwed mother with eight children cannot even fathom, may even look down upon, the parents with 1.2 children and a perfect lawn.  It’s a division that’s not rich/poor, but deeper.

What happens when the resources dry up, when the fields full of rabbity grass give way to the cold steppes of wolfen tundra?  Society changes – the ability to use surplus goods for r-selected people goes away.  Societal attitudes change, too.

Watch conflicts around the world and think about . . . how many of them are simply due to a difference in r/K reproduction strategy?  These conflicts inevitably move a society from abundance to scarcity.

The rabbits rule the spring, the wolves the winter.

“Winter is coming,” wrote George R. R. Martin over 20 years ago.  And I have to wait until 2019 to see the end of Game of Thrones.

I think I’m triggered.

“Everyone thought the agency was a joke, except the aliens . . . “ – Men in Black

Yes, this is gun camera footage from US Navy fighter planes.  Yes, it shows something no one can explain.  Yes, it’s the real, actual US Navy.  Not pictured – Will Smith.

It’s the end of the year, so it’s the holidays.  By holidays I mean, of course, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Penultimate Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day.

Okay, you’ve heard of most of those days, but Christmas Eve, really?  Whose idea was that . . . ?

I kid.

We actually have a Wilder Family High Holiday, called Penultimate Day.  Penultimate doesn’t mean the last (like many people do), it means . . . next to last.  That’s one of the things I love about the English language – that there’s a word for “next to last” just like there’s a word for “throwing a person out of a window” – defenestrate.

Cool!  But this isn’t a case of “Ask Mr. Language Person.”  I’ll leave that to the MUCH older Dave Berry.  This is just explaining our Wilder High Holiday.

It started (I think) in 2010 or 2011.  The Mrs. had been having problems with her cell phone – at that point an actual Blackberry™ with a real, physical keyboard.  We went shopping for a replacement on December 30.  In order to get a new one from for/from our carrier, we had to drive nearly 100 miles.  We went both to our carrier’s store and the local Best Buy®.  We were frustrated by the deals, which were fairly incomprehensible unless you were fluent in a variety of Klingonese spoken only near Sherman’s Planet.  And none of them were deals we liked.

Frustrated, we gave up and went to the local Olive Garden®, which is the closest one to our house.  Yes.  We live over 100 miles from an Olive Garden©.  But, I promise, we have indoor plumbing and flush toilets and everything.

We had a wide variety of their pasta (I think I had the one that mixed steak and fettuccini Alfredo) and joked about our frustrating search for cell phones.  It was there and then, since it was December 30, the real and actual Penultimate Day that I proposed a new holiday, Penultimate Day.  In order to observe Penultimate Day properly, one must:

1. Drive South.
2. Look At, But Not Purchase Cell Phones.
3. Eat Italian Foods.

I can see how religions schism.  The Boy is adamant that the above list is heresy, and I could hear him conspiring with Pugsley that I should be cast down since the only true way to observe Penultimate Day was to:

1. Drive Two Hours South.
2. Look At, But Not Purchase a Sprint® Cell Phone.
3. Eat At Olive Garden®.

Perhaps one day after the apocalypse there will be a Council of Sheboygan where the Sheboygan Creed will come down that will indicate that to observe Penultimate Day, one must:

1. Look Southerly.
2. Have a race where one Sprints® and finishes second (Penultimate Place).
3. Eat an Italian.

While getting ready for our Penultimate Day celebration (which, for various reasons we had to celebrate late today), I looked at The Boy.

John Wilder:  “So, with all of the crazy things this year, what’s the biggest new story of the year?”

I expected to hear something about Trump.  Russia.  Nuclear North Korea.  Star Wars® being the worst movie of the year.

Nope.

The Boy:  “Aliens.”

Yup.  He got it in one.

Here’s the story:  There were several United States senators who decided UFOs needed to be investigated.  Since they were senators, they managed to get several million dollars appropriated.  At the rate the Pentagon spends money, several million dollars would be less than they spend on attempting to milk mice with itty-bitty automatic mice milking machines to get enough mice milk to . . . well, its classified why the Pentagon needs mice milk.  Move along, citizen.

Anyhow, they put together a program to monitor UFO sightings.  In charge of this program was one Luis Elizondo.  Here are a few of his recent quotes from Luis’ interview with The Telegraph:

“It was enough where we began to see trends and similarities in incidents. There were very distinct observables. Extreme maneuverability, hypersonic velocity without a sonic boom, speeds of 7,000mph to 8,000mph, no flight surfaces on the objects. A lot of this is backed with radar signal data, gun camera footage from aircraft, multiple witnesses.”

“. . . if this was a court of law, we have reached the point of beyond reasonable doubt.”

So, we have the person in charge of the government program researching UFOs indicating that we are seeing evidence of the amount and magnitude that indicates the phenomena is real.  Not made up.  Not swamp gas.  Not little old ladies dipping too often into the cooking sherry or medical marijuana.  Not even the Canadian Air Force (I hear their plane is working again, though).

This leaves us with several possibilities:

1. The evidence is faked.
2. The US (or Russians) have propulsion technology that allows them to do what no other aircraft in the history of aviation can do and no interpretation of our current physics can explain.
3. We are being visited by entities from off of Earth (in our solar system).
4. We are being visited by entities from another star.
5. We are being visited by entities from another dimension.
6. We are being visited by entities from another time.

That’s it.

That’s the full well of possibilities.  There are no more.  (taps well of possibility) Bone dry.

Let’s hit the possibilities one at a time:

1. Fakey Fakey UFO Bakey.

So, Luis and all of the Pentagon faked all of the data.  Sadly, this is the most likely case.  There is no reason that this would have happened, and plenty of evidence that past world leaders knew something was up . . .

The following is a quote from Mikael Gorbachev:

“From the fireside house, President Reagan suddenly said to me, ‘What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’” (source: Smithsonian.com)

Gorbachev agreed to a full truce and full cooperation in the event of an alien attack.  Yes.  This is a thing that happened.

I’m not inclined to believe this is a lie, but still the highest probability merely because it’s easiest to explain – not because it fits any facts.

2. We have the tech.

Attractive.  It would be nice to think that we have this technology.  But the energy and speed involved dwarf literally all known technology by orders of magnitude . . . .

So, to believe this we’d have to believe that we can create not only speeds outside of our ability, but also control inertia so that any pilots weren’t turned into paste through inertia.  Let’s pretend that’s not the case – the structure of the craft alone would be distorted beyond all ability to fly.  After the first turn.  And if the USSR had this tech?  We would all be studying Russian now, comrade.

This, oddly improbable as it is, is the second highest probability.

3. We are being visited by entities from within our Solar System.

The Earth is about 4.5 billion year old, and could have created several sets of intelligent species during the last 250 million years.  Mars might have had a similar window, but several hundred million years earlier.

Could they have escaped doom and watch us, even now?

Not really likely.  It would get very boring – more even than watching reruns.  But it does solve one problem of the next possibility:

4. We are being visited by entities from another star.

Moving between stars is Hard.  Capital H – italicized Hard.

Stars are really far apart.  Not far apart like driving through Texas far.  But far apart like driving through Texas twice with Alaska in the middle Hard.  And there are no gas stations or rest stops and you just drank 20 Big Gulps®.

And the confines of the life spans we are familiar with aren’t compatible with interstellar travel.  Traveling 1/10^th the speed of light, (which is fast, almost 19,000 miles per second) it would take you 40 years to get to the nearest star – and we’re not sure there’s even anything interesting there.  And it would take as much energy to get you going that fast as the world’s largest nuclear bomb – ever.  Add in supplies?  At least the annual electricity consumption.  Of the world.  Just for you.

So, if you could freeze yourself (if you could figure out how to do that) and then spend thousands of years getting here.  Just so you could fly around nuclear bases and make US Navy fighter pilots nuts – “I don’t know what it is, but I want to fly one.”

Alternatively, there could be technology that would allow faster than light travel, even though there is no indication, ever, that there is any way to travel faster than light.  But we didn’t think that heavier than air flight is possible for . . . almost all of history.  Is there a physics we don’t understand?  Certainly.  Does it include faster than light travel?  Unknown.

But what doesn’t require suspended animation and won’t die on a long trip?

Machines.

Here’s a (really short) story I wrote a couple of years ago.  Enjoy.

It didn’t use radio.

No one knew how it communicated, but they couldn’t pick it up on any band that we knew. On the TV, they speculated that maybe it used some sort of “quantum” thing to communicate, but that didn’t tell me much.

It was on the moon.

At school, my teacher Miss Rachel told us that some person using their backyard telescope pointed at this crater on the moon – Aristarchus – had seen something one night. That had happened before, but this time the flashes, the glimmers, they didn’t stop.

It was moving.

It didn’t stop, either. By the time they wheeled Hubble over, they were able to see it in real time. There were clouds of dust, but that didn’t matter much. There isn’t any atmosphere on the moon, so the dust drops out real quick. Something was going on, but we had no idea what.

The rock that it launched hit Stanford.

The professor in the wheelchair used his machine voice to tell us that we were too close. Whatever it was up there was listening to us. It maybe always had been. And it was old, old as the whole solar system, maybe. It was a tiger trap, a wolf snare. Stanford was where the best AI research was, he said. Maybe they were getting too close. Can’t be too close now – Stanford is nothing but a crater, and about two million people died, according to the Internet.

It’s watching.

I guess it always was. I guess it always will be. Wonder if the dinosaurs got too close way back when? Right now, I’m wondering if this was a warning shot or a warm up.

Yeah.  Sleep easy.  Don’t worry about the Terminator under your bed.  Or on your Moon.

This has a low probability.  But . . . it’s at the same time nearly 100% certain.  Aliens could easily create AI that could travel between stars.  That tech is nearly available to us now.  If there’s intelligent life it’s high probability it will develop to our level of technology given enough time.  And if it took thousands of years?  Who cares if your iPhone takes 100 years or 100,000 years to get to a destination?  If designed well enough, it could prep and wait for  . . . whatever it was programmed to wait for.

5. We are being visited by entities from another dimension.

Well, now I just throw my hands in the air.  We do know that there are other dimensions, or at least are pretty sure that they are necessary to explain much of the physical phenomena we see around us today.  It’s possible, likely even, that there are alternate universes out there.  Maybe an infinite number.  But what if you could go to one that was next door?  That sounds really hard.  But might even be easier to move between alternate Earths than moving between stars.  We simply don’t know.

But if I could move between dimensions?  I could see wanting to keep track of the neighbors . . . .

6. We are being visited by entities from another time.

This one is way weirder, and I consider much less likely.  Why?  Moving through time is probably way harder than moving through space.  The Earth is moving around the Sun.  So, if I tried to travel back in time?  I’d also have to travel through space to the place the Earth is now, not then.

And the Sun is moving through space.  It takes about 230 million years for it to do a lap – so it’s done over 19 laps around the Milky Way galaxy since it formed.  And the galaxy is moving, too.

Sorry to disillusion you, but if Doc Brown sent Marty back 25 years in time?  He’s die gasping for air in a DeLorean off in interstellar space, since the Sun is moving 30 miles per second in its orbit around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.  He’d have been 24 billion miles from anyone who had ever heard Johnny B. Goode.

In space no one can hear your guitar solo.

This is the least likely scenario.

Regardless, it is “beyond a reasonable doubt” that something out there, came here.

Those are not my words.  The dude who ran the program to study UFOs said this.  Obviously he’s seen more than we ever will.  I just hope he celebrates Penultimate Day in a non-heretical way.

The Boy is waiting to punish heretics . . .