Joseph Nicholas, Tottenham, London, U.K.
Well, this is odd. Or weird. Or, more likely, reflects my failure to pay detailed attention to your e-mails announcing the availability of recent issues of Challenger.
That is, I received an e-mail from you back in, er. I obviously noted that another issue had been posted to the web, but (on reflection) must have failed to do anything about it (such as follow the link and read the contents). But when I received another e-mail from you, more recently, and did follow the link, I ended up where I would have been had I followed the link in the previous e-mail.
I’m sure this isn’t because your links were all over the place; it’s more likely that, as I said a few lines ago, I wasn’t paying detailed attention. For one thing, I got promoted at work at the end of October/beginning of November 2005 and (although I do all my fanac at home) the upsurge in my work responsibilities inevitably meant that I had less energy over for reading and responding to fanzines (never mind doing anything else – in fact, the last two months of last year were so fantastically busy that I didn’t manage to address anything other than work). (I shall spare you a detailed resume of the reading backlog. Suffice it to say that I’m about five months behind on my history magazines.) Of course, this doesn’t quite explain how I managed to get the letter column for Challenger 22, dated August 2005, muddled up with that for Challenger 23, dated December 2005, but there was a response to me in the former, from Henry Welch, to which I certainly should have responded in turn – viz:
“If Joseph Nicholas is indeed correct that the exploration of space is dead,” said Henry, “that is indeed unfortunate, as that also represents the end of human evolution.” This is a very old-fashioned, and indeed entirely superseded (almost nineteenth century) view of evolution – firstly of evolution as something with a sense of direction and an overall purpose, and secondly of the human species as evolution’s finest achievement to date but still at some intermediate stage in its development, partway between the plains of Africa and the gulfs between the stars. Yet if the debates of the past fifty years have taught us anything, it’s that evolution is quite the opposite: not a teleological process but a dynamic response to changing environmental contingencies, with no favouritism given to any species and all equally malleable and vulnerable. Niches open, species radiate to fill them, the geology or climate changes, and species go extinct. Humanity is no exception -- not evolution’s finest achievement, but just one in a long list of the many species it’s thrown up during the past four billion years of the Earth’s history, and as likely to be replaced, in turn, as all our predecessors.
If evolution were re-run from the pre-Cambrian, there’s not only no guarantee that after four billion years it would produce us, there’s no guarantee that the vertebrate principle on which most life on Earth is organised would be the dominant one either. The only thing one can say for certain is that, drawing on the evolutionary record to date, the average lifespan of any species is ten million years – and that because this is an average, the actual lifespan of complex species such as ourselves is much less, around one million years. (Meaning that we’re just about at the end of our run.) Evolution won’t stop with our disappearance – indeed, our disappearance, and the disappearance of the biodiversity we’ve eliminated in our rise to global dominance (“the sixth extinction” which is currently in train), will clear the stage for a new wave of biological experiments which in time will repopulate the world with something else.
Whether our successor species will be as intelligent as us, or even have any intelligence at all, is questionable. Big brains helped us in the past, allowing us to overcome our environmental obstacles and alter the niches to fit ourselves rather than vice versa; but big brains could be a hindrance in the future because of the energy they consume – energy which other species devote, and which our successor species may have to devote, to the business of survival: food, shelter, procreation.
(The late Steven Jay Gould once argued that there was no evidence to
demonstrate that intelligence conferred an evolutionary benefit – we had survived so far, but the real judgment would be history’s, which could have an entirely different opinion.) But to speak of this as “the end of human evolution” is quite meaningless, because (much though it’s misused in this way) evolution is not a synonym for development. For example, there is nothing about our brains now (size, capacity, neural connections) which differs from the brains we had when our ancestors left Africa to populate south Asia 80,000 years ago, and nor is there any reason why our brains should differ – is there anything materially different about our forms of social organisation (family – social clan/tribe – work group/cadre), our political structures (parliaments – senates – royal dictatorships), our economic relationships (buyers/sellers – employers/employees), and/or our religious beliefs (apart from the replacement of one deity with another)?
The problem with evolution as a term is that it’s become enslaved to or incorporated within the now discredited and abandoned Whig view of history – that is, a view of human culture which sees it as brutish and nasty to begin with but one which has advanced through various stages to ever-higher planes of sophistication and learning: an advancement which will continue into the indefinite future. Yet Darwin himself never liked the term “evolution”, and continued to argue for the use of “descent with modification” long after the point at which “evolution” had entered common usage (in chief part because it fitted with late Victorian ideas of progress). Recapturing our understanding of the word, and breaking free of the widespread misperception of it as a synonym for progress/development, seems to me a crucial task. Whether it is possible to do this in the face of such anti-scientific assaults as “intelligent design” (a.k.a. garbage) is another matter entirely. But, to respond more directly to Henry: evolution (and the Earth) won’t notice if we don’t spread through the galaxy, and neither will the galaxy.
Meanwhile, in issue 23, Gregory Benford recalls my comments a few issues back “downplaying the chances for a manned exploration of the solar system”. “All seemingly plausible,” he continues, “until one notes that over 20 billion dollars goes into space programs already, the majority of it for manned.” But what proportion of total annual global GNP is $20 billion? Answer: bugger-all. Even if the annual expenditure was $200 billion it would still be bugger-all as a proportion of total annual global GNP. The notion that space tourism – which is highly unlikely to ever be available to other than the super-rich, as now – will make up the funding shortfall, and transform our current fiddling about in Earth orbit for a couple of months a year into a full-scale colonisation of the solar system, is just daft. Space tourism won’t even provide follow-on vehicles for the shuttle and the international space station, and why should it? Taking the super-rich for jaunts to view the curvature of the Earth is an entirely different proposition from sending a crewed mission to Mars. (Or even the Moon – although this hasn’t stopped some US start up company claiming, as recently as last autumn (fall in US terminology), that sending tourists to photograph the far side would have a scientific purpose and so justify the whole venture, even though a robot probe would obviously be far, far cheaper. And safer.)
As I’ve remarked several times previously, here and elsewhere, the real impediment to the continuation, never mind the expansion, of crewed spaceflight, is the lack of political will by governments to meet the costs involved. Space enthusiasts who wish to see the continuation – and expansion – of crewed spaceflight have no option but to address this issue directly: to explain how they propose to overcome governments’ reluctance to spend the money, and then put that explanation to work to achieve their goals. For space enthusiasts to avoid this, by falling back on patent nonsense about space tourism, is effectively to concede that they have no idea how to overcome governments’ reluctance, and prefer instead to retreat into wish fulfillment. (Not even private industry will make up the funding gap – do you see private industry lining up to help NASA out with the International Space Station, originally budgeted to cost $8 billion and be complete by 2003 but now expected to cost $100 billion and not be complete until 2017 (a “completion” which will entail dropping many of the science modules in the original plans)? No; and for the very good reason that private industry only funds projects on which it will get a guaranteed return, not bottomless what-if space-exploration-for-the-hell-of-it.) But wish-fulfillment is no substitute for rigorous argument.
[Re:] the Hurricane Katrina-related material:
Of course, none of the other commentary comes remotely close to Dennis Dolbear’s story of surviving the hurricane and its chaotic aftermath. If anyone were still publishing annual fanthologies – Corflu seems to have abandoned the exercise, possibly over a decade ago – his article would be a natural inclusion. Even though one is left with some questions at the end of it, inconsequential though they are by comparison with the events he relates – such as: what happened to his house? And his possessions? Were they insured? Come to that, how many of the inhabitants of New Orleans had the contents and buildings insurance which will allow them to rebuild and recover? Answer: probably none, if they were inhabitants of the Ninth Ward ...
A little over a week ago, as I write, we watched a programme in the Horizon series of science documentaries on BBC 2 which reviewed Katrina’s impact on New Orleans, focusing on not just what happened but (more importantly) why – the force and track of the hurricane itself, the disappearance of the coastal marshes and offshore islets which might have absorbed some of the storm surge, the damming and canalisation of the river which had reduced the silt loading which contributed to the maintenance of the islets. But perhaps the most startling piece of information was that concerning the flood defences, many of which – because they were situated on ground which had sunk since their construction, or were founded on ground where the water table was only a few inches below the surface even in the driest years – were revealed to have been incapable of withstanding even a category 1 hurricane. In other words, they could have been overwhelmed at any time before now, and it was pure luck that they weren’t. Pure bad luck, even – because if they had, they might have been rebuilt to withstand stronger forces. As it was, said one of the US Army Engineer officers overseeing the reconstruction of the flood defences, they weren’t being funded to do other than rebuild what Katrina had demolished – so vastly increasing the risk that the next hurricane will just knock them down all over again.
The wider question is whether New Orleans should be rebuilt at all. As Don Markstein (and others) remark, all major rivers have port cities on them at or about the point where they reach the sea; New Orleans and the Mississippi are no exception, and in this particular case the Mississippi is so important to US commerce that not rebuilding is not an option. But should one rebuild more than the port facilities? There’s probably an argument for keeping the French Quarter and the Garden District, both of which were on higher ground so were less affected; but what about the rest, given that much of the city sits in a bowl below sea level and will almost certainly be hit by another hurricane at some point in the future? (Echo answers: well, *I* certainly wouldn’t want to live there. And if the neocons who are salivating to turn the New Orleans Reconstruction Area into another fully privatised ultra free enterprise zone get their way – having failed in Iraq, why shouldn’t they fail at home too? – few people would either want or be able to live there.) A number of experts (geologists, flood management specialists, marshland ecologists, river engineers, and others) are saying that as much as 80 percent of the former city area should be abandoned, left to revert to wilderness and swamp to provide storm protection for the rest. This will indeed reduce the city to a tourist rump of its former self, but on the other hand it would also ensure that the next hurricane doesn’t do as much damage or kill as many people. Anyway, as history and archaeology have shown, no city lasts forever!
That is, I received an e-mail from you back in, er. I obviously noted that another issue had been posted to the web, but (on reflection) must have failed to do anything about it (such as follow the link and read the contents). But when I received another e-mail from you, more recently, and did follow the link, I ended up where I would have been had I followed the link in the previous e-mail.
I’m sure this isn’t because your links were all over the place; it’s more likely that, as I said a few lines ago, I wasn’t paying detailed attention. For one thing, I got promoted at work at the end of October/beginning of November 2005 and (although I do all my fanac at home) the upsurge in my work responsibilities inevitably meant that I had less energy over for reading and responding to fanzines (never mind doing anything else – in fact, the last two months of last year were so fantastically busy that I didn’t manage to address anything other than work). (I shall spare you a detailed resume of the reading backlog. Suffice it to say that I’m about five months behind on my history magazines.) Of course, this doesn’t quite explain how I managed to get the letter column for Challenger 22, dated August 2005, muddled up with that for Challenger 23, dated December 2005, but there was a response to me in the former, from Henry Welch, to which I certainly should have responded in turn – viz:
“If Joseph Nicholas is indeed correct that the exploration of space is dead,” said Henry, “that is indeed unfortunate, as that also represents the end of human evolution.” This is a very old-fashioned, and indeed entirely superseded (almost nineteenth century) view of evolution – firstly of evolution as something with a sense of direction and an overall purpose, and secondly of the human species as evolution’s finest achievement to date but still at some intermediate stage in its development, partway between the plains of Africa and the gulfs between the stars. Yet if the debates of the past fifty years have taught us anything, it’s that evolution is quite the opposite: not a teleological process but a dynamic response to changing environmental contingencies, with no favouritism given to any species and all equally malleable and vulnerable. Niches open, species radiate to fill them, the geology or climate changes, and species go extinct. Humanity is no exception -- not evolution’s finest achievement, but just one in a long list of the many species it’s thrown up during the past four billion years of the Earth’s history, and as likely to be replaced, in turn, as all our predecessors.
If evolution were re-run from the pre-Cambrian, there’s not only no guarantee that after four billion years it would produce us, there’s no guarantee that the vertebrate principle on which most life on Earth is organised would be the dominant one either. The only thing one can say for certain is that, drawing on the evolutionary record to date, the average lifespan of any species is ten million years – and that because this is an average, the actual lifespan of complex species such as ourselves is much less, around one million years. (Meaning that we’re just about at the end of our run.) Evolution won’t stop with our disappearance – indeed, our disappearance, and the disappearance of the biodiversity we’ve eliminated in our rise to global dominance (“the sixth extinction” which is currently in train), will clear the stage for a new wave of biological experiments which in time will repopulate the world with something else.
Whether our successor species will be as intelligent as us, or even have any intelligence at all, is questionable. Big brains helped us in the past, allowing us to overcome our environmental obstacles and alter the niches to fit ourselves rather than vice versa; but big brains could be a hindrance in the future because of the energy they consume – energy which other species devote, and which our successor species may have to devote, to the business of survival: food, shelter, procreation.
(The late Steven Jay Gould once argued that there was no evidence to
demonstrate that intelligence conferred an evolutionary benefit – we had survived so far, but the real judgment would be history’s, which could have an entirely different opinion.) But to speak of this as “the end of human evolution” is quite meaningless, because (much though it’s misused in this way) evolution is not a synonym for development. For example, there is nothing about our brains now (size, capacity, neural connections) which differs from the brains we had when our ancestors left Africa to populate south Asia 80,000 years ago, and nor is there any reason why our brains should differ – is there anything materially different about our forms of social organisation (family – social clan/tribe – work group/cadre), our political structures (parliaments – senates – royal dictatorships), our economic relationships (buyers/sellers – employers/employees), and/or our religious beliefs (apart from the replacement of one deity with another)?
The problem with evolution as a term is that it’s become enslaved to or incorporated within the now discredited and abandoned Whig view of history – that is, a view of human culture which sees it as brutish and nasty to begin with but one which has advanced through various stages to ever-higher planes of sophistication and learning: an advancement which will continue into the indefinite future. Yet Darwin himself never liked the term “evolution”, and continued to argue for the use of “descent with modification” long after the point at which “evolution” had entered common usage (in chief part because it fitted with late Victorian ideas of progress). Recapturing our understanding of the word, and breaking free of the widespread misperception of it as a synonym for progress/development, seems to me a crucial task. Whether it is possible to do this in the face of such anti-scientific assaults as “intelligent design” (a.k.a. garbage) is another matter entirely. But, to respond more directly to Henry: evolution (and the Earth) won’t notice if we don’t spread through the galaxy, and neither will the galaxy.
Meanwhile, in issue 23, Gregory Benford recalls my comments a few issues back “downplaying the chances for a manned exploration of the solar system”. “All seemingly plausible,” he continues, “until one notes that over 20 billion dollars goes into space programs already, the majority of it for manned.” But what proportion of total annual global GNP is $20 billion? Answer: bugger-all. Even if the annual expenditure was $200 billion it would still be bugger-all as a proportion of total annual global GNP. The notion that space tourism – which is highly unlikely to ever be available to other than the super-rich, as now – will make up the funding shortfall, and transform our current fiddling about in Earth orbit for a couple of months a year into a full-scale colonisation of the solar system, is just daft. Space tourism won’t even provide follow-on vehicles for the shuttle and the international space station, and why should it? Taking the super-rich for jaunts to view the curvature of the Earth is an entirely different proposition from sending a crewed mission to Mars. (Or even the Moon – although this hasn’t stopped some US start up company claiming, as recently as last autumn (fall in US terminology), that sending tourists to photograph the far side would have a scientific purpose and so justify the whole venture, even though a robot probe would obviously be far, far cheaper. And safer.)
As I’ve remarked several times previously, here and elsewhere, the real impediment to the continuation, never mind the expansion, of crewed spaceflight, is the lack of political will by governments to meet the costs involved. Space enthusiasts who wish to see the continuation – and expansion – of crewed spaceflight have no option but to address this issue directly: to explain how they propose to overcome governments’ reluctance to spend the money, and then put that explanation to work to achieve their goals. For space enthusiasts to avoid this, by falling back on patent nonsense about space tourism, is effectively to concede that they have no idea how to overcome governments’ reluctance, and prefer instead to retreat into wish fulfillment. (Not even private industry will make up the funding gap – do you see private industry lining up to help NASA out with the International Space Station, originally budgeted to cost $8 billion and be complete by 2003 but now expected to cost $100 billion and not be complete until 2017 (a “completion” which will entail dropping many of the science modules in the original plans)? No; and for the very good reason that private industry only funds projects on which it will get a guaranteed return, not bottomless what-if space-exploration-for-the-hell-of-it.) But wish-fulfillment is no substitute for rigorous argument.
[Re:] the Hurricane Katrina-related material:
Of course, none of the other commentary comes remotely close to Dennis Dolbear’s story of surviving the hurricane and its chaotic aftermath. If anyone were still publishing annual fanthologies – Corflu seems to have abandoned the exercise, possibly over a decade ago – his article would be a natural inclusion. Even though one is left with some questions at the end of it, inconsequential though they are by comparison with the events he relates – such as: what happened to his house? And his possessions? Were they insured? Come to that, how many of the inhabitants of New Orleans had the contents and buildings insurance which will allow them to rebuild and recover? Answer: probably none, if they were inhabitants of the Ninth Ward ...
Dennis and his mother are living in a FEMA trailer outside of a second house they own, which escaped flooding, and which they plan to renovate.
The wider question is whether New Orleans should be rebuilt at all. As Don Markstein (and others) remark, all major rivers have port cities on them at or about the point where they reach the sea; New Orleans and the Mississippi are no exception, and in this particular case the Mississippi is so important to US commerce that not rebuilding is not an option. But should one rebuild more than the port facilities? There’s probably an argument for keeping the French Quarter and the Garden District, both of which were on higher ground so were less affected; but what about the rest, given that much of the city sits in a bowl below sea level and will almost certainly be hit by another hurricane at some point in the future? (Echo answers: well, *I* certainly wouldn’t want to live there. And if the neocons who are salivating to turn the New Orleans Reconstruction Area into another fully privatised ultra free enterprise zone get their way – having failed in Iraq, why shouldn’t they fail at home too? – few people would either want or be able to live there.) A number of experts (geologists, flood management specialists, marshland ecologists, river engineers, and others) are saying that as much as 80 percent of the former city area should be abandoned, left to revert to wilderness and swamp to provide storm protection for the rest. This will indeed reduce the city to a tourist rump of its former self, but on the other hand it would also ensure that the next hurricane doesn’t do as much damage or kill as many people. Anyway, as history and archaeology have shown, no city lasts forever!
posted by ;-p at 3:16 PM
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