She wrote on the board again: 42,000,000,000,000 km = 4,2 light years.
“But, if you want to stay with familiar units, a light year is around ten-trillion kilometres. Alpha Centauri is far away, and, you’ll agree that four-point-two light years is easier to work with than those endless zeroes in trillions of kilometres when talking about even our closest neighbour.”
She pointed to her freshly written number.
“The centre of the Milky Way is around twenty-six thousand light years, so its light reaching us now left the Milky Way before humans domesticated animals or planted crops. We’re about halfway from the centre. It’s enough to say that the scale is vast. Now, I’ll try to spare you many more figures, but each star within the Milky Way occupies about seventy-eight cubic light years of space, or around three comma five light years. But it varies because gravity clusters stars, so there are pockets and open expanses—like villages here in the Karroo, where each house in the village represents a whole galaxy, except, a whole lot more of them, so maybe the microbes on the dust in the houses…”
She pointed at that latest figure on the board, 42,000,000,000,000 km = 4,2 light years.
“The fastest rockets humans have ever produced have achieved speeds over sixty thousand kilometres an hour, yet they’d take eighty thousand years just to reach the nearest star, just over four light years away. Four and a half billion years, as long as the Earth has existed, to reach the Milky Way’s centre. Even eighty thousand years is a long time; it’s almost as long as humans have been recognizable as humans. Eighty thousand years is too long to sit in a spacecraft breeding generation after generation just to get there. We need something a lot faster than rockets… you can see I’m hinting at Al’s speech here.”
“Are we there yet?” someone heckled in a playful voice from the audience.
“An excellent pun,” Al agreed. “Come on Marsha, I’m itching to talk.”
The easy fun-filled atmosphere was buoyant for most, while the hardliners sat, unmoved, like cats with swishing tails. Marsha systematically continued laying down a solid foundation of established facts.
“Simmer down boys,” she quipped back. “Not much more from me. But since I’ll be testing you on this later, let’s just recap distances: If the earth was a marble, the sun would be nearly one hundred and twenty metres away. This scale is unwieldy… so let’s rather plot the sun as the size of a marble. At this scale the distance from the Sun to the Earth, which we call an Astronomical Unit or AU, would be about a meter and a third—four feet in old money. Alas, at this scale the Earth would be almost invisible because it would be barely thicker than a sheet of paper. So, for more perspective, on this scale, since it takes light eight minutes to travel those four feet, the orbit of the Moon would be about six millimetres in diameter or three millimetres from the Earth—which is about the size of a pinprick. On this scale, our closest neighbouring star, Proxima, is about three hundred and thirty-six kilometres away—two hundred and ten miles in Americanese. Call it a four-hour drive if you don’t break the speed limit. That’s the closest star. Space is big, distances are huge.”
She wrote once more on the board: 900 years, and as she wrote, she said, “Now I can see I’m losing most of you and my husband wants the floor, so I’ll wind this up as quickly as I can.”
“Let’s say you considered Methuselah from the Bible. At nine hundred years old, he was the longest living human ever claimed, so we’re using him as our astronaut. We’ll stick him on a rocket as a baby and aim it at the nearest star, maximizing speed to get him there before he dies nine centuries later. The engineering of the spaceship aside, just one of the challenges you’d face to achieve this within a millennium—his thousand year lifetime—would be the type and quantity of fuel. You’d of course also need to accelerate the fuel you’re carrying that you’d use to keep on accelerating you more. The kind of rockets we have right now in the early twenty-first century use chemical propellant. And, were all the matter in the universe nothing but chemical rocket fuel, there wouldn’t be enough of it to make that trip in such a relatively short nine-century transit. So… forget interstellar travel with our present chemical rockets. We need something else. Nuclear bomb propulsion, if we could build such a thing, would be better but you’d still need a thousand million—a billion—supertanker loads worth of nuclear bombs, so, forget that too. Using fusion rockets, a thousand supertanker loads might do it; thing is, we have no idea how to make fusion rockets. Antimatter rockets? If we could make them—and at this moment in time, total human production of anti-matter over the last several decades stands at less than a fraction of a gram—we’d need ten railway tanker loads. And when you get there, you’d need the same amount again to decelerate on the other side. And, that’s without going into how you’d accelerate up to the necessary speed without killing everyone aboard with the g-forces.”
“Star Wars made it seem a bit easier,” somebody in the second row suggested loudly, and a few laughed.
“Ahhh… Hollywood,” Marsha sighed. “Oh that it was so easy. Yet, Hollywood does actually point to something realistic—a warp drive. If you think you’ve heard of it, you’ve watched Star Trek. Digging too deeply into the reasons why light speed can’t be exceeded is a conference on its own, so I’ll spare you the details.”
“Please… and thank you!” Al chimed in again and the audience burbled agreement.
“You can’t exceed the speed of light—more properly called, the speed of causality—for fundamental reasons. However, you might be able to collapse space or expand space faster than light speed because that does not violate physics. In theory we can do it but for certain we’d need lots of energy; lots more energy than we know how to access—I’m talking energy levels far beyond nuclear fission or fusion, beyond our H-bombs—far, far, faaar beyond them. But the mathematics has been worked out, now all we need is the energy and technology. Those of you who came to my keynote speech a few weeks back will recall the Kardashev scale and the discussion about humans attaining Type One Civilization status. Well, that’s what I was referring to. In about two hundred and fifty years, give or take, we should be there if we don’t blow ourselves up first. We might well have warp drive.”
Al was tapping his watch. Much as Marsha hated giving speeches, once she started she found it hard to stop.
Most attendees were jovial, enjoying the pair interacting. Of course, some were not.
“I know… I know… Last point, I promise. A warp drive collapses space in front of you and expands space behind you. If a traveller wanted to go to say, London: Rather than traveling the ten thousand or so kilometres in whatever time it takes at a certain speed, you’d collapse the distance in front of you to a meter and expand it behind you to ten thousand kilometres and step across the one meter gulf in a second, without any acceleration issues. What happens to everything in that collapsed space is something we simply don’t yet know, but it probably won’t please the unlucky residents. The good news for you, though, is that you would effectively not have to travel at any speed, you would not have to accelerate and suffer acceleration’s problems. There are possibly civilizations out in deep space that are not just hundreds of years ahead of us—as we are hundreds of years ahead of the explorers who sailed in wooden ships to the Cape—but thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of years more advanced than us. Do they have warp drive? Possibly, yes. And, with that, I’m certain you’ll be please to know that, I conclude. Any questions?”
“Wat ‘n klomp kak,” came a lone voice from the audience. Many turned to look as the big man with a two-tone khaki and mauve shirt who’d called it a “load of shit” stood up, buttons around his belly straining against his bulk. He shuffled in his short pants and stocky powerful legs past the knees of others seated in rows and then strode to the exit.
Marsha looked in askance at the audience and somebody made the universally understood gesture to forget it. Marsha shrugged and sat down.
Al rose and came t
o the lectern, adjusting the microphone for his height. “Thank you, Marsha. Exhausting as it was, it really set my talk up beautifully. Do we need a break? Stretch the legs? Or you want to go on?”
“I think we can use fifteen minutes,” John Fiske suggested.
Al agreed. “I believe there are refreshments in the foyer.”
John confirmed it.
People gratefully took to the break.
“Wow… quite a mouthful,” JJ congratulated her.
“I barely scratched the surface,” Marsha assured him.
Like a star with a myriad satellites clustered around, Marsha now had a throng of admirers all wanting to pose private questions and shoot selfies.
“The real issue,” she was explaining, “is that this stuff is hard, it’s complex and intricate… very often it’s counter intuitive.”
“Absolutely, that’s why…” JJ added, gesturing toward two or three small groups filing out of the building toward their cars, “…so many are satisfied in the fantasy world and pettiness. Magic’s easy to claim and agree with. Children accept it unquestioningly. ‘It’s a miracle’ answers everything and absolutely nothing.”
“I’m not touching that,” Marsha insisted.
“Guess I’m still in reality’s recovery room.” JJ made room for Al who had joined them.
“I just caught the tail end of that. There’s an important realization we must grasp,” Al began to explain. “Our brains evolved on the African plains for two primary functions—to eat and to breed. Science—all those facts that Marsha just went into, without even touching quantum mechanics and relativity—asks way more of us than we’re evolved to deal with; it’s remarkable that any of us can grasp it at all,” Al pointed out.
“Why are humans different to other animals?” someone asked.
“Co-operation. As a species, we are co-operative with one another and that allowed us to organize ourselves and to create cutting edge technologies like slingshots for rocks, clubs to thump with and arrows to shoot. Other technologies all flow from co-operation.”
“A lot of people don’t cooperate…” someone in the crowd pointed out. “They exploit.”
“Quite right,” Al agreed. “I’m not talking about individuals, I’m talking about communities; we’re weak as individuals, strong as groups. If too many in a community are out for themselves and stop cooperating, the community fails. The system is self-regulating.”
“The Ten Commandments are all the cooperation we need,” came the retort.
“Hmm… but the notion of Ten Commandments belonging to any religion is peculiar, because it suggests that nobody knew murder and theft and jealousies were wrong before they were given insight from an external agent.”
“If we weren’t given it, where did it come from?”
“We’re social animals, pitifully weak as individuals—thin skin, no nails, useless teeth for defence or attack. It goes back to group co-operation and self-regulation. Codified commandments are not epiphanies, they simply document observed behaviour. Co-operation is written into our DNA and the fabric of our societies.”
A throng had collected, hands in the air to ask questions, some having only caught the tail end of the latest statement.
“You’re saying the Ten Commandments are not valid?” a gruff man challenged.
“Not at all. I’m saying that the basis of them, the ‘shall-nots’ were already operating long before they were recorded. They’re the unmentioned fabric of any viable society; per definition they have to be there for a society to begin to develop.”
“I don’t know, how you can say that?”
“Groups rely on trust. A group who thinks murder, rape and theft are okay, aren’t going to survive very long because trust breaks down. In an anarchic society, nobody has trust, nobody co-operates. They’re vulnerable to being toppled by those who do co-operate, that much must be obvious.”
“Can you give an example of an imaginary group who didn’t co-operate?” The man was unrelenting.
“Well, no, of course I can’t give an example of a group that was uncooperative and went extinct because… well, they’re extinct. You prove the point with your question. They may have arisen, but were gone in a generation. I clearly can’t give an example of something that never arose.”
“Very clever!” the man spat with sarcasm at Al, apparently unaware that he had caught himself in a trap. “You clever people always trying to fool us with word tricks.”
“It’s not a trick of words sir, it is a fact. And my apologies to you if it seems offensive.”
“Ja… everything about this presentation is offensive.”
“I… I’m sorry about that.”
“You… you so clever, hey? You tell the people here; what successful population don’t have God in their life?” He altered the angle of his thrust.
“Sweden?” Al ventured. “They do all right with maybe ninety percent secularists; atheists by another name. For that matter, most of Scandinavia and Western Europe is totally secular. I’d rather live in Scandinavia than… oh… Nigeria or Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan—all theocracies.”
“Ha! You won’t give up, will you?!”
“I will if I’m wrong.”
“Lots of scientists are God-fearing.”
“Lots? I can confirm that ninety-seven percent of the scientists who make up the Fellows of the Royal Society, and ninety-three percent of the National Academy of Sciences scientists aren’t—they’re non-theists…”
“Those scientists!” the man said, as if he’d hit pay dirt. “The ones who set off nuclear bombs.”
“In fairness sir, the Royal Fellows aren’t in the business of setting off bombs. Regrettably, yes, the bombs and all technologies available to politicians and zealots wouldn’t be possible without the help of elite scientists,” Al suggested. “But if you want an example of peaceful people who lived without commandments, most hunter gatherer groups from the Amazon to the Kalahari Bushmen right here in your own back yard are good examples.”
“You call the Bushmen successful?” he scoffed then laughed aloud.
“Measuring success requires a frame of reference. I agree… they’re not successful at making weapons and forming armies, which helps explain their poverty and present condition living on the fringes of desirable lands that we took from them.”
The heads were bobbing back and forth; another tennis match of ideas being lobbed and slammed between opponents.
“So, you must bring that up? That we took their land?”
“Well, I think the fact’s unavoidable. Nobody can deny that the Bushmen had the run of the whole of Southern Africa until the farmers arrived, killing the wildlife and putting up fences. Don’t be confused by the current situation; they didn’t choose to live in a dustbowl and eke a living from scraps. That’s only since we came.”
“You emphasize we?” the man challenged. “How can you say ‘we’?”
“I think you’re talking about my blackness. It’s clear I’m Indian. Well, my people, like your people are farmers. As a farming culture, we equally share responsibility of displacing all of the first people everywhere, the hunters. I’m part of the ‘we’—we all are. Farming made us settle, invest and want to protect our turf. We invented ownership and wiped out and legislated against the threat of anyone who didn’t recognize it.”
“Who says my ancestors killed anyone?” He took personal affront.
“Let’s stay away from intent,” Al inserted, playing aikido with the man, deflecting the thrust into a political debate. “Farmers are in much closer daily contact with livestock. In China, they live cheek by jowl with them, and that’s why we see most diseases today coming out of China where microbes jump species; bird flu… swine flu… They’re not just names, they’re pedigrees.”
“And?”
“Let’s say your ancestors never intended to or actually killed anyone, any of the Bushmen.”
“Ja, let’s say that.”
“Okay… but
your genes from Eurasia had hundreds of generations of immunity built in. We Europeans and Asians brought diseases to parts of the world that didn’t have immunity, and decimated the local populations without intending to. We also did wipe out the game for our domestic grazing.”
The man looked long and hard at Al, almost sizing him up and measuring him for his coffin. His mind was clearly duelling with itself as to how he should handle this difficult skinny little black pixie; then an argument clincher popped into his mind.
“If we did what you say, then that is God’s will,” he said emphatically to Al. “They’re no use to serve God so He gave us the ability to drive them out.”
“Sir, I don’t want to challenge you on that. I can appreciate that this is your firmly held stance and I only hope to give you some perspective that is borne out by my studies in this field.”
“So, you’re saying that these people, the Bushmen, are somehow useful?” He came in at the knees again, battle ready and uncompromising in his stance.
“All people are useful to themselves, sir. Again, it’s the frame of reference that is important; might I expand on that?” Al asked politely, not wanting to trigger a showdown.
JJ had maneuvered into a protective position close by. The man looked peeved and JJ smiled; there was chemistry here and it wasn’t good.
The man’s stance relaxed, and he nodded his permission for Al to go on.
“I’m guessing you feel that your own utility is anchored in a celestial being; the Bushmen feel that their utility is anchored in their ancestors and children. I can only say that if we as modern urban societies want to look for utility in Bushmen, we have two choices—to look at their sustainable lifestyles in terms of environmental impact, which is negligible—something I’ll conced is unrealistic for our industrialized world. Or, we can look at the very useful lessons we can learn from their social anthropology.”
A Trojan Affair Page 25
