Carbon Units Infesting This Planet

 

I’m sure there are folks out there trolling the internet for items about Star Trek. They’re called Trekkies. And the title of this post is a direct quotation from Star Trek - The Motion Picture.  So, it’s reasonable to expect that they may find this post and have a look. They will be disappointed. I apologise to them if they feel that I have tricked them into looking at my blog instead of interesting facts about Star Trek.  It is not my intention to trick anyone.  

This post is about us - the carbon units currently infesting this planet.  We’ve been infesting it for quite some time now, and if reports are to be believed we may not be infesting for much longer.  Let’s face it: the end of the world is a popular topic in fiction, films and documentaries.  Imagining the end of the world or of civilization is a growth industry.  Bad news still sells newspapers.  

Why should this be so? Sorry it comes with the territory. In historical terms it's pure hubris. Homo sapiens stands head and shoulders above other species as the pinnacle of evolution. And, unless you are a religious person this is simply the result of the march of evolution. But, evolution has no end product. And however much you may wish it wasn't so we are simply the evolutionary result of many chance encounters. We are in the box without knowing so and have no idea how to imagine any other reality outside the box.  We are prisoners of this planet and this reality.

We are, if the commentariat is to be believed, at a crossroads on this planet. The resources required to keep our species going forward are either too difficult to maintain or too depleted to enable us to go forward, as we have unerringly done for the last few thousand years. I submit that voluntarily going back to some sort of sustainable pre-industrial utopia is simply not an option. 

Now, it may well be that Micawber-like something will just turn up. Possible but increasingly unlikely in my view. Society has become so dependent on technologies that the average Joe doesn't really understand much about how things work.  He just doesn't need to. 

Think I'm joking? In the dim and distant past I taught science. I loved a lesson where I asked 12 year olds to explain how some mundane and common items in the home actually worked. A light bulb or a telephone or a heating system could they explain, even briefly, how they work? Some of the answers were very entertaining. Mostly they fell back on you just flip the switch. That was the extent of their knowledge and engagement with the modern world. And, it was not necessarily their fault.  To the average Joe things just work until they don’t and then you get somebody else to make it work again.  

Think we could turn the clock back and become subsistence farmers again? Get real. 

We either find some way to share the resources or our stay here may be much shorter than we either think or wish. 

Which neatly brings me to my dream, or should I say my nightmare. Essentially we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that though as individuals we are mortal, as a species we are immortal. We go on and on and on for as far as we can imagine. All our hopes and the remorseless march of the selfish gene populate our future. 

Out in the cosmos there are problems. Despite efforts lasting a long time in human terms we are still alone and may continue to be on and on and on. There are lots of theories purporting to prove that out there life must be really quite common. Thousands of habitable planets are just waiting for contact. But, there is a chilling alternative. Habitable planets and even life itself may be as grains of sand on every beach on Earth. Intelligent life could even be common, as grains of sand in a wheelbarrow. Time and the sustainability of civilisations could be the controlling feature. Many civilizations may have existed, flourished and died before the capacity we have of detecting them has become available.  

Septics will note here that what I’m describing is not new.  Ancient Aliens visiting us is not a new idea.  What is new is that they may have thought us so primitive as to not be worthy of another visit and before it occurred to them to look us up they themselves fell victim to what I’ve described.  Overpopulated, running out of essential resources and unable to sufficiently master the technology necessary to avoid an asteroid taking them out, or some new virulent disease plunging their civilization back into the Dark Ages; they just ran out of time for a return visit.  The fourth dimension - time may be the controlling feature here, not some complicated algorithm involving mathematical probabilities.   They may have just run out of time as we may before the cosmic forces align at precisely the right moment.

The comfort of religion or philosophy only works if we can be assured that we will be noticed and remembered.  Cast ahead to a future where the Earth is just an uninteresting looking  rock orbiting a nondescript star and a passing space ship just goes cheerfully on its way not realising that a complex carbon-based civilisation once was here but destroyed the Earth.

We leave no trace. We leave no marker.  We are truly alone in the cosmos separated not so much by space as by time.  Our immortality is gone in a flicker of space-time.  

That, I contend, is a nightmare truly worthy of note.

Keep Busy to Beat Covid

Keep Busy

Private Frazer in Dad’s Army: "We’re doomed".

Trying times for us all. Mal’s best advice: keep busy if you can. The newspapers are full of advice on how to do this. So: read a newspaper – on-line if you can’t get to the shops to get one. Don’t forget, when I say newspaper I mean a real newspaper. You can get trial versions of most dailies like the Eastern Daily Press – great for local news – the Times – the Guardian – the Mail – The Mirror – The Telegraph and yes, even The Sun (better than nothing), check out the Kansas City Star!

On Sunday I always get the Sunday Times and have done for more than forty years. The 22 March edition is packed with stuff about the virus, as you may well imagine. Be sure to check out Jeremy Clarkson’s article, very obtuse yet funny and Ron Liddle just hits the spot.

Next: get out if you can. I have a large garden so I can walk about with impunity. We are building a fence for our next door neighbour. It’s only small and its only purpose is to separate our tiny front gardens, but at least we are out in the fresh air. We plan to drive to Bacton and walk along the seafront – it’s free and healthy – just avoid other people if you can.

Read a book: check out the local library to see if they have an on-line ordering system – you may not even have to physically go there. If not, sneak into you local charity shop, they will have many books for next to nothing. Locally, you can check out the Bookstore at the Bure Valley Railway – lots of books and cheap! (works for me)!

 I managed to track down one of my favourite “end-of-the-world-scenario books, Alas Babylon, which I was, with quite a bit of finagling able to get an electronic version of and download it to my tablet.  An excellent read – especially for the 12 and under age groups. - not much violence or sex. Others in the same mode might be Z for Zachariah and On the Beach, Brother in the Land, The Postman ( Kevin Costner made it into a film much maligned by the critics, but far better than his Waterworld fiasco ) and The Day After Tomorrow (a particularly poor book!).

(something called the open library has extensive ebooks in read-as-you -go versions, OK for me because I read so fast that I can usually finish one in a day – doesn’t work with War and Peace, however, believe me I have tried)

Learn something: I’m currently working on an on-line course to learn Latin.

Check on your neighbours. I have the phone numbers of my immediate neighbours so I can call them if I have to. I see them from a distance most days.

Stay in touch with your family. On Mother’s Day (here in the UK) people might be tempted to visit their mums. Don’t. Just make do with a phone call or Skype.

Write something on your blog., or start one if you haven’t already. Check mine out at: https://malkauffman.blogspot.com/

Animal Farm

Sunday Times Blunders?

Wandering around all day, mostly in a daze, I get these great ideas for a blog.

Then I forget them when I get busy doing something else.

I'm sure I had three this week and then promptly forgot them. Never mind. In these trying times I just wait for the Sunday paper to arrive and something will turn up.

Sure enough – an article about T.S. Eliot and his involvement with George Orwell's Animal Farm.

According to the Sunday Times, T.S. Eliot was once a director of Faber and Faber and wrote a scathing rejection of Orwell's Animal Farm in 1944. The book was later published by Secker and Warburg. All quite interesting in a literary, intelligentsia kind of way. Also, as I recall – quite wrong.

I fancy myself an Orwell scholar. At least in so far as I know a lot more about him and his work that the average Joe on the street. I taught English Literature for 30-odd years and taught Animal Farm for examination on many occasions.

Amongst the pile of relevant work sheets explaining Orwell's photosynthesising form of socialism, bordering on Trotskyism, I had a very useful and entertaining video featuring the cartoonist, Steve Bell, among others discussing Orwell's work in general and Animal Farm in particular.

According to the Times, Eliot wrote to Orwell in 1944 saying that he thought the books “view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing.” And Eliot wrote, “After all your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn't have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so what was needed (some-one might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

My recollection is different.

I remember quoting the above statement pointedly to children studying Animal Farm. I remember extracting it from the video presentation, because it seemed to me to sum up very nicely the difficulties Orwell encountered with the literary elite and the inherent difficulties in using a fable format to preach about communism. But, according to the Times, the letter is “one of many private papers made available for the first time by his widow Valerie for a BBC documentary.”

One of us is entirely wrong.

I'm going to find the video. I kept them all when I took early retirement. I'm sure I've got it somewhere.

The Times is going to get a very nasty letter – or I will be confirming that I need the newest drug treatment for Alzeheimers quick!!

Diss, Diss, Diss - lexia

Reading?

I compulsively sort out my papers. I find it relaxing. I take a pile of papers on my desk and go through them methodically and, maybe, find one or two I can throw away. Lest I be accused of some un-natural vice, I confess that this urge only happens occasionally.

Somehow I had mis-placed a very interesting article, “Dyslexia: a label to get you off the hook?” for about 18 months. Shame really. It's quite an interesting article and theory. Shuffling my papers reunited us.

I thought I would try to remember when I first heard the term, dyslexic. I think it might be in the 80's – maybe late 80's. I tried looking this up on Google but got nowhere. I did find that there are a lot of good folks trying to sell you aids guaranteed to help you overcome this affliction. There's clearly money to be made in dyslexia.

Not only money but also a lot of kudos. This is the main thesis of the article in question: dyslexia has become the educational lexicon replacement term for lazy, bone-idle, inattentive, gormless little nerk chiefly because it allows parents to medicalise Little Jimmy or Joanie's lack of academic progress and, therefore, gain extra advantages in the exam system.

I know this doesn't sound exactly earth-shattering and probably doesn't rival nuclear proliferation or climate change (another perhaps equally spurious label) as a threat to Western democratic society, but it does highlight an important sociological trend I have long identified and often regretted.

A few academics, St John-like, assert that dyslexia as a medical or psychological condition just doesn't exist. The insist that some children just don't read very well and for a variety of reasons, many of which are their own fault. The difficulty here is that parents believe that reading is an inherent pointer of native intelligence and, ergo, if their child is having difficulty reading they cannot be unintelligent, so they must have some medical problem.

Wrong on both counts.

Reading is not really allied to intelligence. Understanding and being able to make out what is read needs a lot of intelligence, just reading the words does not. Likewise, unless there is a problem with eyesight or some other physiological difficulty, there is no reason any child cannot learn to read adequately.

But, reading requires concentration and application. In my experience, these are what are lacking in “poor readers”. Children who have never been exposed to reading rather dislike it. Children who would rather watch television than read a book are in the majority. Children who clutch at the dyslexic straw are really quite clever.

At a stroke, they have satisfied Mum and Dad that it isn't really their fault that they are not doing very well in school, gained a life-long advantage over the rest of the population and ensured that they will be looked on with pity and sympathy for the remainder of their days. Good call.

I spent some time working for a Social Worker who was dyslexic. Most of what she wrote was gibberish, but her reading was really very good.

You figure.

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