The Third Promised Land: outer spaces and the star-colonizing project
“We have to colonize Mars to ensure humanity’s seed will survive if something happens on earth, like a nuclearthird world war or asteroid strike that could end human life.” — Elon Musk, owner, SpaceX
“Elon Musk says he plans to send 1 million people to Mars by 2050 by launching 3 Starship rockets every day and creating ‘a lot of jobs’ on the red planet.” — headline, Business Insider, January, 2020
“The solar system can support a trillion humans… we do have to go out into the system. …That’s the kind of future I want for my grandchildren’s grandchildren.” — Jeff Bezos, owner, Blue Origin
I am simply going to assume, not without cause, that my readership is a typical Canadian audience conversant with the future projected by our scientists, our cultural and political elites, our science-fiction literature: humanity will become capable with our technologies to put homo sapiens on the moon and on our near planetary neighbours, Mars, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, Venus. The solar system is rightfully and naturally ours to inhabit. We will colonize the system. On whatever planet we settle, we will alter the ecology there out of recognition from its original condition.
We will do this in the name of our rights as conscious beings who somehow must survive and expand because we mean something to the universe. Or, if the word “mean” makes you uncomfortable, we can do it, so because we can, it is natural, realistic, scientific. SETI is on the only course possible for a species like ours.
A list of sci-fi books: sampling the flavour of human ambition in space/time
For those who dislike science fiction novels and film, this section might be skipped over. But these novels and films are, for good or ill, the cultural foundation for how we imagine life on Mars and other planets. I am quite sure most readers will know of the Star Trek andStar Wars imaginary landscapes, but the novels I list here are less likely to be known. The common point made by all this fiction is the point of my former section. The human condition is a colonizing, expanding condition.
The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury.
The Foundation and Empire series, a trilogy and additional volumes, by Isaac Asimov
Floating Worlds, by Cecilia Holland.
Red Mars; Green Mars; Blue Mars, a trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.
The Expanse, A series of nine novels by James S. A. Corey.
Thin Air, by Richard Morgan.
The last three works cited are the best because they are recently published and therefore their authors were more conversant with the time we live in, 2021. I particularly recommend them for how they conceptualize politics on the planet earth when the colonies on Mars are established. The authors seem to fully comprehend that the competition for power among the great nations of earth do not cease when humanity reaches its new planetary colony; the rivalry of the USA, China, Islam, Brazil, and Europe continue, and play out in effects on Mars.
At time of writing this, humans have been very active in sending technological extensions of ourselves to Mars; the USA, China, and the United Arab Emirates [UAE, the fabulously-wealthy oil states of the Persian Gulf, neighbour of the Saudis, Iran, and Israel] — all have sent missions there that are active now. Competition is a word the media try to avoid, but the history of our species is being replicated off our planet, and the states of Earth with the power and wealth to send such missions, will do so, and will carry their political and cultural differences there. America, China, Islam, India, Europe, are at present in the race, and more will likely follow.
There are significant feature films one ought also to see to as part of one’s cultural education in the matter of humanity’s future as a colonizing species in space. They are Avatar and Blade Runner, Aliens [a series of five films] and The Martian.
I personally found the first Alien film brilliant in one small detail. The writer of the story had foreseen, in 1979, that corporations would be sending spaceships to mine distant worlds, when most of us then believed only government agencies would be in charge of space missions. NASA was known to us all; the writer foresaw the power of private capital in a company like Elon Musk’s SpaceX to take on private missions.
Who sets the questions for the Human Condition? Who has prior “rights”?
“We are hydrogen and helium that has evolved for so long we have begun to ask ourselves, ‘Where did we come from?’ ” — Jill Tarter, Astronomer, SETI scientist
What are the rights our species asserts for our claim to land that we take? Who determines what questions we have to answer before we feel at peace with our consciences? Are the questions of religion manifestly inferior to those of science?
What strikes me as I listen to scientists working in the space-exploration industries of human invention is their lacklustre capacity for philosophy — I mean, for saying something with deep feeling for the immensity of this moment when a terrestrial species is able to leave its home planet and put the species on another.
I have used some quotes from Bezos, Sagan, Musk and Asimov as epigraphs for this column. The sentiments are bland and lack a sense of history, a sense that we have to ask harder questions about our right to the solar system, to the galaxy, that we intend to claim. Yet these men are supposed to be worth listening to.
SETI is trying to find extraterrestrial intelligence, with the best tools humans have. We have not yet. Jill Tarter at SETI talks about why that might be. We may not have found an e.t. sign because we do not know what to look for, other than what our kind of intelligence produces.
There may evidence but we have only studied one tiny sample of information from the universe; in its immensity, the universe is a space as big as earth’s oceans relative to a teacup.
We might never find the e.t. civilizations that have existed because, before we find them, they have already become extinct. They rose to a peak of power but then failed to survive the challenge of that power, and have ruined their home planet, and disappeared. This is one hypothesis for why SETI cannot find other intelligence.
If there are no other intelligent life forms and no other civilizations out there in the universe, despite strong mathematical evidence in probability theory – the Fermi Paradox — that supports the existence of thousands of such star civilizations, what does that signify for our species? What does it mean, if we are alone?
Jill Tarter was asked this. Her reply was to me pretty unimpressive. “Then, every human on earth, every one of us, must be aware of the responsibility humans have, as the only intelligent life. Each of us, wherever we are on earth, share the responsibility to ensure that human life will continue because we are the only ones here.” Well, Dr. Tarter, do you know the record of our species? Who is this “we” you believe in? Is there really, and realistically, one voice to speak for humanity as it now acts and conducts itself and its common affairs upon our common home planet? If not, stop using that pronoun “we”.
It is one of the great qualities of the Tao Teh Ching that the pronouns used in its scant 5,000 Chinese characters are I, they, and it, but never you or we. “It” when used in the text refers to the Tao most often, and the Tao is not God — and not anything like Gods in religious teachings. This classic Chinese teaching nowhere assumes it can refer to humans as “we.” There are “the people” and various powerful types among them such as nobles or the emperor, but the writer never presumes to speak for humanity. I think this is a sign of a very penetrating intelligence in the teaching. The “person of Tao” or “wise soul” is described, but hard to grasp.
And, if you read chapter 80, you will see that the mind(s) behind this book has absolutely no respect for expanding human dominion. Rather, the writer is always inclined to making humans less-sophisticated and less-numerous. The text was compiled at a dark time in China, a time of many wars; that chaos is its origin.
The Tao offers the imagery of water as a kind of model for human behaviour that will bring peace to the soul. Water is soft and yielding, conforms to whatever shape it flows into, always finds its way to the lowest places, not the high – and water benefits all. It overcomes the hardest stone, in time. Water is a model of how Tao operates. Without water on Mars, or the means to make it, colonies are doomed.
Conclusions: hoorah for us? The dismal side of critical judgement
“Wow. We have come such a long way. Our technlogy is so awesome… Yay human race! Thumbs up, human race!” — DJ on Castlegar radio, Feb. 21/20, referencing NASA on Mars
“When I was in middle school and watchin Star Trek, I imagined we were moving closer toward the show’s version of the future: egalitarian, democratic, creative. Now when I watch the show, I vacillate between hope and escapism. I want to believe that “Star Trek” is predictive of how things will turn out for humanity. I want us to wander the universe … I hope we will find our way to peace. But if that’s not what the future holds, if it’s more war and injustice and greed that we’re headed for then all I want is to watch Captain Picard hold court on the bridge one more time.” — Patrick Stewart, who plays Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek
The history humans have made thus far, featuring war and greed and injustice as Patrick Stewart says in the quote above, seems to predict the future better than the utopian galaxies in Captain Kirk’s imaginary scenario.
As Kokanee salmon lay millions of eggs so that mere hundreds of fully-grown adult fish return to spawn annually, humans produce a plethora of individuals on our planet so that a minority flourish – that is one way to interpret the imbalance between the lives of the few in the wealthiest nations of earth and the lives of the many elsewhere (saying nothing about the miserable people living in those wealthy nations who never rise to the social-class level of the educated, profitably-employed few.) No one I have ever heard or read understands this imbalance that history has bequeathed to us; The Wheel of Fortune, the karmic theory, etc. all attempt to do so.
I can clearly recall, though I cannot find the source, reading that Patrick Stewart unequivocally declared himself opposed to the vast economic and material cost of sending humans to another planet while on this planet there are so many hundreds of millions of people living lives stunted by lack of access to some of the basics of life. The injustice he describes is simply the same one that already exists between the kind of lives some tens of millions of people enjoy in the most-advanced rich economies and democracies of Earth and the hundreds of millions who do not.
I live among the former, privileged and advantaged Canadian middle-class citizens, beyond understanding why the world I was born is so arranged.
Some humans get to Mars. Human DNA survives because we do, and that is the objective, scientific statement, requiring no other observation, and certainly no moral judgement. I want more, but there is no more. Thinking about human life on other planets is not something I have to do, there is plenty to think about for the humans I know on this one. That is likely true for my readers.
The crux of this essay’s concern is simple. I ponder the injustice of a few of the greatest powers on earth, governments, individuals, corporations, and whomever they choose to employ in the space-colonization project, leaving so many behind, and on a planet plundered by our capitalist economic structures that build the materials for the project. It is impossible to apply a standard of justice to the question, is it not? It is not just, but it is reality, and seems to be the future.
Once again, Shakespeare has the apt phrase: “And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”
This conclusion is not what I want to write. But I am not going to use the default way out, the “solution” to leaving readers depressed that I see in all the writing on political, economic, social and environmental issues in the magazines and newspapers I most often read. I mean, I am not going to write a paragraph full of exhortations for “us” to do this or that, and what “we” must do to improve whatever condition is under study.
I address myself to individuals, and I offer no advice. You’re wise enough to find your own answers to the challenges of your particular life, I trust.
Wisdom alone is not enough; you and I know that too. Not good intention, not prayer, not intangibles of any sort. Acting, behaving, is what will make your life feel … however it feels to you. It works for me. That is the best I can offer. After all, I am an historian, not the Dalai Lama or the Pope, who are supposed to guide you.
So, all else failing me, I will end with a quote from the Dalai Lama:
“Spirituality is water, religion is tea. Tea is stimulating and tasty, yes. You can live without tea, but you cannot live without water.”
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
