Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

“Yes.  I’ve left everything to the Flat Earth Society.  But don’t worry about it.  I’m forted up here with plenty of firepower.” – Hopscotch

A trip flying from Seattle at night to Fairbanks in the summertime.  You leave in darkness, and then arrive at 2AM in a perfect daylight.  Proof of a flat Earth!

I really enjoy a good conspiracy theory.  The very best ones make claims that are entirely consistent with agreed-upon facts, and that you can’t disprove.  The JFK assassination theories are an amazing treasure trove of paranoia, and so are a thousand others – from ancient aliens to “we knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor,” to the theory that your Mom is bigfoot (that would explain her back hair).

The conspiracy theory that’s currently ascendant is “Flat Earth Theory.”

Yes.

Flat Earth theory says the Earth is, well, flat.  And this theory has been gaining followers globally.

Did you see that, globally?  Heh.  I crack myself up.

Anyway.

And here I thought that Bugs Bunny® had solved the issue once and for all.

The idea is that the North Pole is center of a disk – and the Sun is only 32 miles in diameter, and 1,500 miles away.  Likewise, the Moon is only 32 miles in diameter and 1,500 miles away.  Seems legit!  What about the South Pole?  The South Pole isn’t.  It’s the edge of a pancake, with a 150’ ice wall that surrounds the disk of the flat Earth.  And, while vague, it sounds like there’s a dome about 700 miles up.

So how do we explain the International Space Station (ISS)?  The ISS is either a secret NASA spy plane, or maybe a secret NASA hologram projection to make us think there’s an ISS.  And satellites?  Totally fake.  There’s no way that your DirecTV© technician could possibly aim at a spot 22,000 miles away moving at 7,000 miles per hour!

Of course, that means the Moon landings were fake (its own conspiracy theory by itself).  And O.J. Simpson had to go to prison for starring in Capricorn One® (a movie that showed a fake Mars landing) because that would totally have stopped NASA.

Like I said – these theories are fascinating.  Most of them are hard to refute, but Flat Earthers are so very easy to refute, it’s like placing a kitten in a room full of velociraptors.  Not really sporting.

I’m not going to get into the energy flux that would have to be created by a 32 mile diameter Sun to warm the Earth, even if only 1500 miles away.  But we’ve been sending people to Antarctica for over 100 years.  The first people to reach it was Roald Amundsen back in 1911.

To believe in the Flat Earth, one would have to believe in a conspiracy heading back over 100 years.  To add further problems for the Flat Earthers – the differing constellations south of the equator should be visible from a flat Earth (which I can personally attest to), Polaris being at different positions in the sky based on latitude (personally verified by me during my Alaska days), and Johnny Depp having a career.  Johnny Depp would never have a career on a Flat Earth.

But NASA would also have had to flawlessly fake all of the Moon Landings, all of the satellite launches, a shuttle program, and Elon Musk’s ego.  Not possible for a group that wanted to inject water into the Yellowstone Caldera to cool the magma chamber and (probably) trigger a volcano – I wish I were making this up, but I wrote about it here (LINK).  Large swaths of NASA are hopelessly inept and stupid.  They couldn’t keep an afternoon nap secret.

Oh, and sending O.J. to prison for murder to keep him quiet about “faking the Moon landing”?  Capricorn One was a movie that had been out 18 years by the time O.J. was arrested.  If so, their punishment of James Brolin was even worse – they made him marry Barbra Streisand.

And as for a technician being able to point a dish at a satellite that’s moving at thousands of miles per hour?  Well, it has to move at thousands of miles per hour, since it’s in stationary orbit around the Earth.  It’s easy to point an antenna at something that’s not moving (relative to you).

See, they are moving fast to stay stationary!  If they want to go anywhere, they’d have to move faster still.

Francisco Esquembre, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia

The question isn’t if the Flat Earth theory is correct.  It obviously isn’t.  But the question is why would someone believe in something (and I believe that the believers in the Flat Earth are sincere) that is observably disprovable?  In today’s world, you’d have to really make an effort to ignore/come up with complicated alternative answers to data clearly visible around you daily.

(By my count, there can’t be more than a few thousand of these believers in the Western world, but they make a lot of YouTube videos.)

So, why?  In some cases faith.  The idea of a flat Earth is based on (some) interpretations of Biblical passages.  In some cases reasoning.  The main proponent of the Flat Earth Society® for decades mentioned that he felt that way from when he was young – and that his teacher in second grade was lying to him.  He reasoned that the simplest thing was a flat Earth.  Other writings (some guy who named himself Koresh – not from Waco but this time from Illinois) explicitly called for a flat Earth, such that teaching normal geography was banned in the local schools around Zion, Illinois until the 1920’s when they disbanded.

But the rumor is that bigfoot your Mom scared them away.

“The year is 1987, and NASA launches the last of America’s deep space probes. In a freak mishap, Ranger 3 and its pilot, Captain William “Buck” Rogers, are blown out of their trajectory into an orbit which freezes his life support systems, and returns Buck Rogers to Earth.  500 years later.” – Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century

No comment required.

There is a theme in legend, called “The King in the Mountain.”  In this theme, a hero from history awaits.  The hero, though wounded, or old, or with a bad case of the sniffles, waits.  Generally the hero is awaiting a future time when he will be needed to save the nation he is associated with.  One example of this is the legend of King Arthur.  Arthur is said not to have died, but to be resting in Avalon for when he is needed by Britain, and then he will emerge from his sleep, his sword Excalibur in his hand, to save Britain.  One would assume he has a good mattress for a sleep this long.  Whenever I go longer than about 8 hours my back lets me know about it . . .

Since Britain has now outlawed all weapons, up to and including dull butter knives, I’m thinking Arthur would face this fate upon his return.  The Royal Navy now has fewer ships than at any point in the last 370 years, so if he avoids arrest he might have his work cut out for him if a group of toddlers decide to take over the UK.

Arthur’s legend dates back at least to 600 A.D., but other regions have similar tales, such as the legend of Holger Danske, a big Danish guy who sleeps and will come to the aid of Denmark when it’s in peril.  Like Arthur, he’s asleep in Avalon, and also like Arthur, he’s spent some time (wink-wink) with Morgan le Fey.

Here’s Holger.  He looks like he’s pretty buff.  I bet he deadlifts like 500 pounds, bro.   CC BY SA 3.0, from Wikimedia.

So the concept of suspended animation has been with us for centuries, and most of the time the “suspended animation” has been just your garden variety of time-stopping sleep which lasts centuries and is susceptible to interruption only by current events.  Buck Rogers (who went from the 1920’s to the 2400’s fell asleep due to radioactive gas in a mine (in the original story published in 1928).

But I think that Clarence Birdseye® was the real inspiration for those that spend time dreaming about suspended animation.  Birdseye™ invented a way to quickly freeze food (in about 1924) so that it retained flavor, texture, and nutrition better.  Soon enough, the first frozen dinner was in stores.  And in 1931 a young boy named Robert Ettinger read the short story, “Jameson’s Brain” about a gentleman named Jameson that was frozen in orbit.  Jameson was frozen for about a million years, and some robots put his thawed brain into a robot.  As attractive as the whole “human brain in a robot body” goes, I mean, who wouldn’t be attracted to that?

Ettinger from that moment was fixated on a science he dubbed Cryonics.  He even wrote about it in a short science fiction story that was published in Startling Stories in 1948 (it’s pretty rough, but it’s also pretty short).  In 1962 Ettinger wrote a book called The Prospect of Immortality.  You can find it for free online.  His book was pivotal in getting attention to Cryonics, and in 1967 the first corpse patient was frozen.  That was one of Ettinger’s ideas – death should be looked at not as a final state (in some cases).  Where there was sufficient medical equipment and know-how, he reasoned, death could be considered to be a temporary condition, a setback that could be cured.  Die in the Amazon (not Jeff Bezo’s place, the actual jungle) and you’re dead.  Die in a modern city near modern medical equipment?  Maybe you and Buck Rogers can swap stories about Wilma Deering.

The basic theory is that your brain stores information in such a manner that it’s retrievable after you die.  It retains your personality and memory.  The basis for this (according to Ettinger’s book) is that rats, nearly frozen, no circulation for hours, were revived.  The rats had been taught tricks, like how to vote on a bill in Congress.  After being thawed out, the rats remembered the tricks they had been taught.  It might be a stretch to say that the personality and memory would be the same, but at least Ettinger had some evidence that it might work.

So, after thawing you might get a new cloned body to put your brain into.  That would be cool if we knew how to do any of that.  Or we could scan the brain and put your memories and personality into a computer.  If we did either of these, we wouldn’t need to store the whole body – we could just store the head.  And storing the head is one option if you’re on a budget and not wedded to the “I need my body” thought process.

Or we could fix the original body, if we had a cure for whatever killed you and you weren’t a cheapskate.

Hey, maybe you could have a robot body, too.

How could this possibly go wrong?  Peter Weller is our friend, right?

So death goes from being the end to being a temporary stop along the way to the future.  But the problem is that people really don’t like being frozen.  And their organs like it even less.  Freezing cells dehydrate.  I had thought that ice crystals formed inside the cells, but my research for this post says that the cells dehydrate, ice crystals form outside the cell walls, and then the resulting salty sludge left in the cell couldn’t support life.  Freezing is pretty destructive.  Frostbite seems to come to mind . . . .

In the 1980’s, a scientist had an idea:  inject antifreeze into the cells and cool them down in such a fashion that ice crystals don’t form and the frozen body becomes like glass:

Don’t dwell on it . . . (I think this image was originated from Alcor, a cryonics firm)

The problem is the “antifreeze” that gets pumped into the organ/body is . . . toxic, which implies that in order to freeze the organs, you have to poison them.  And getting the antifreeze into and around the brain (which is pretty dense) is rough – there’s some speculation that the amount of pumping and pressure required to get the antifreeze into the brain might just damage it to the point that it’s useless.

The bet for the future is that we’ll have “new technology” (Nanotechnology?  Better beer bongs? High Definition rubber bands?) that will solve the problems associated with freezing the corpses patients in the first place.  Also, I give Ettinger credit:  he’s frozen at -140˚C (room temperature in Canada) along with both his first wife and his second wife, which might cause all sorts of complications upon thawing.

I first learned about cryonics through science fiction.  The noted fiction author Larry Niven referred to frozen people as corpsicles, and his novel A World Out of Time is based upon a thawed corpsicle working as a slave to a totalitarian future government.  Which gives him a space ship, for some reason.  They gave the corpsicles jobs that Future Serfs won’t do.  Maybe they can give corpsicles the job that future people won’t do . . . like . . . saving Britain?

“Her actual name is:  Penelope Mountbatten Hapsburg Hohenzollern Mulan-Pocahontas.” – The Simpsons

So, if your European Dynasty is the subject of Internet memes in 2010’s?  You know you were inbred.

Last week on Monday’s post I wrote about how a massive amount of wealth that wasn’t tied to any production (New World gold) weakened Spain in every conceivable way (LINK).  A comment on that post indicated that wealth alone wasn’t the whole story.  The Hapsburgs were horrible leaders because they were rendered idiots by centuries of inbreeding and watching reality television.

That’s where we get to the Hapsburgs and genetics.

The House of Hapsburg started with the unlikely named Count Radbot.  If ever there was an argument that Europe was run by time travelling robots or the writers of the game Fallout, well, the fact that a major European dynasty was started by a person named Radbot is probably the best evidence to date.  Radbot built Hapsburg Castle in around 1020.  His grandson, Otto, took the name of the Castle and became Otto Von Hapsburg.  Eventually the family moved to Austria, and took over the country in 1276.  They only ruled Austria until 1918.

Count Radbot was also a fixture in the Sunday comics for thirty years – often he would chase a cartoon cat and fight comically with him over hamburgers.

Besides the whole, “ruling huge chunks of Europe for 650 years” thing, the other thing that the Hapsburg dynasty was really known for was . . . serious inbreeding.

For being a bunch on inbred sometime-morons, they seemed to do okay.  CC by SA 3.0, Original by Wikipedia User Alphathon

The Hapsburg family kept breeding cousins because that was a great way to not share power with outside families.  Unfortunately, cousins that have been breeding only with each other limit the gene pool pretty severely.  Charles II of Spain (shown below) had comparable genetics to a child born of a brother and sister.  He was reportedly:  “ . . . short, lame, epileptic, senile and completely bald before 35, always on the verge of death but repeatedly baffling Christendom by continuing to live.”  Charles reigned between 1665 and 1700, and when he died it plunged Europe into the War of Spanish Succession as the Hapsburgs attempted to control who would become the next King of Spain.

Charles II of Spain.  What a catch!  I think he was featured in several of the “Hills Have Eyes” movies . . . keep in mind that painters tried to make their subjects look better in their portraits than they did in real life . . . .

Evidence is fairly clear at this point that genetic difficulties led to the final problems of Spain that led to the fall of the Spanish Empire.

This is an example of genetics that are too close . . . there is no variation because there is far too small a gene pool to contend with.

A modern city is the opposite.  People are mobile, and cities are growing – there’s a great deal of movement from the countryside to the cities.  A Yale® study indicated (LINK) that by 2030, 10% of the land surface of the Earth will be covered by cities.  To get to that number, the equivalent of 20,000 football fields are being paved.

Daily.

Major cities perhaps are the opposite of diversity – they may be the greatest homogeneity.  Unique cultures and traditions are moving to the cities and destroying diversity – even within groups that are remaining distinct.  In order to avoid arguments that are outside of the point I’m making today, the metropolitan area that I’m picking to make my point is . . . Beijing, China (as opposed to Beijing, Oklahoma, population 6).

Beijing is interesting in that the ethnic makeup change appears to be zero – so I can happily avoid (at least for this blog) those questions.  But what’s changing?  The city has had a tremendous influx of people from 2000 to 2010, over eight million.  But Beijing remains a Chinese city, specifically Han Chinese.  So what’s the argument about diversity here, John Wilder?

China is a pretty big country, and there are about a million villages in China.  The average, medium sized village has about 500 people, and 7 to 10 clans.  Some of these villages have histories spanning thousands of years, with customs and families reaching far into the past.  Over time, there is genetic drift – a village in Northern China doesn’t look nearly the same as one in Southern China.  Both are Han Chinese, but differing diseases, climates, history, original genetic stock, and, well, luck play a part in allowing a diversity to flourish among the villages.  China has a history of amazing innovation.  How much a part of this does the village structure explain?  How much genius sprang up because of the stability of those villages?

From Freeman Dyson (LINK):

West does not mention another scaling law that works in the opposite direction. That is the law of genetic drift, mentioned earlier as a crucial factor in the evolution of small populations. If a small population is inbreeding, the rate of drift of the average measure of any human capability scales with the inverse square root of the population. Big fluctuations of the average happen in isolated villages far more often than in cities. On the average, people in villages are not more capable than people in cities. But if ten million people are divided into a thousand genetically isolated villages, there is a good chance that one lucky village will have a population with outstandingly high average capability, and there is a good chance that an inbreeding population with high average capability produces an occasional bunch of geniuses in a short time. The effect of genetic isolation is even stronger if the population of the village is divided by barriers of rank or caste or religion. Social snobbery can be as effective as geography in keeping people from spreading their genes widely.

A substantial fraction of the population of Europe and the Middle East in the time between 1000 BC and 1800 AD lived in genetically isolated villages, so that genetic drift may have been the most important factor making intellectual revolutions possible. Places where intellectual revolutions happened include, among many others, Jerusalem around 800 BC (the invention of monotheistic religion), Athens around 500 BC (the invention of drama and philosophy and the beginnings of science), Venice around 1300 AD (the invention of modern commerce), Florence around 1600 (the invention of modern science), and Manchester around 1750 (the invention of modern industry).

These places were all villages, with populations of a few tens of thousands, divided into tribes and social classes with even smaller populations. In each case, a small starburst of geniuses emerged from a small inbred population within a few centuries, and changed our ways of thinking irreversibly. These eruptions have many historical causes. Cultural and political accidents may provide unusual opportunities for young geniuses to exploit. But the appearance of a starburst must be to some extent a consequence of genetic drift. The examples that I mentioned all belong to Western cultures. No doubt similar starbursts of genius occurred in other cultures, but I am ignorant of the details of their history.

I suggest you read the whole thing – it’s fascinating.  And Dyson dates things properly – BC, AD.  If you’re not familiar with Dyson, he’s a physicist and scientist of renown, the Dyson sphere – an artificial sphere built around a planet – is one of his most known ideas.

From this, one could surmise that the “end of diversity” even among ethnically homogeneous societies will rob us of genetic variation that will advance the human race, perhaps even greatly.  Would places like Stanford® or Harvard® provide a place where this (intellectual) genetic diversity could flourish?  I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.  The time and relative isolation required for drift appear to be missing.

Genetics may be like water – when frozen through inbreeding, no progress is possible.  When boiling in a city, no usefully differential structures form in the chaos.  When in the right size populace for a period of time?  The lukewarm water of interesting change, complexity can form.  Like Goldilocks:  too hot, too cold, and then just right.

What do we lose if we don’t have that drift, if we don’t have those periodic bursts of genius arising out of that properly complex world?  Is it odd to think that cities, which we think of as engines of diversity are really just engines of future homogeneity?

Thankfully we don’t have to worry about that, because our new robotic overlord, Count Radbot, will come from the future to save us all!