A biological time bomb is ticking away.
Nevertheless, I plead for the continuation of clone research in order to perfect the process and I want the rules for manipulations to be strictly guarded in special vaults. Faultless male and female cell nuclei, together with the surrogates necessary for bearing a child, should be stored in suitable substances and at life-maintaining temperatures. In case of catastrophe. This might be a cosmic catastrophe unleashed by a meteor passing too close to earth and emitting poisonous gases into the atmosphere. It might also be an atomic strike destroying a large part of the earth and causing radioactive emissions which would gradually damage human hereditary material. Then the human race could be fostered again by cloning—just like on the first day.
But should mankind be faced by such catastrophes for the first time, cloning could not be discovered and tried out ad hoc. Therefore the process should be immediately usable and tested in advance.
Cloning would not simply produce uniform types in a single large brood. Even though created after a pattern, there would be individuals, like their fellowmen produced in vivo in the tried and true tradition. They would resemble each other externally, they would also have the layout of the cell nucleus, but they would think and act independently, and like us they would be formed by upbringing and environment. The cloned men would receive new hereditary information and hand it on to a new generation. They would mutate and after a dozen generations the clones would no longer look as alike as peas.
Cloning is vital to our very existence in case of catastrophe, but it is also essential for the conquest of space. So I think the physiologist Lord Rothschild is right when he advocates the establishment of an international ‘Commission for Genetic Control’, so that research and practice keep in step. It is most devoutly to be wished that such a commission will be more effective than international organisations have been up to the present.
The German word for life (Leben) spelt backwards means fog or mist (Nebel). We should raise the mystical veil of mist with caution so that we can comprehend the reality of our existence.
* * *
Communiqué
THE intelligent robot is on the way!
It will think independently and have an intelligence quotient far exceeding man’s. It will be equipped with sensors which ‘see’ better than the human eye, for they will also see in the infrared and ultraviolet range. It will ‘feel’ more intensely, because its sensors function more sensitively than the human tactile sense. Its feelers—supersonic waves, radar, X rays—will ‘feel’ through walls.
The American scientist Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, says:
‘The machine will be able to tell a joke and win a boxing match. Once this stage is reached, the machine will develop at fantastic speed. In a few months it will reach the intelligence level of a genius and a few months later its power will be incalculable.’
Dr George Lawrence, scientific director at the Stanford Research Institute, California, has already linked human brains in direct contact with computers. The power of thought alone is sufficient to give the computers orders. The body which commissioned this Utopian-sounding series of experiments was the Pentagon!
The branch of research in the USA which has set itself the goal of creating an intelligent robot is called AI (Artificial Intelligence). The ultimate target is a robot which can carry out civil, military and scientific tasks in space and the depths of the sea quite independently.
Did intelligent robots exist in antiquity? The Sumerologist S. N. Kramer translated this passage from a cuneiform tablet:
‘Those who accompanied the Goddess Inanna were beings who know no food, who know no water; they eat no scattered meal, they drink no sacrificial water . . .’
In the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu describes the guardian of the precinct of the gods:
‘Not until I have slain this man, if he be a man, not until I have killed this god, if he be a god, will I direct my steps to the city . . . O Lord, who hast not seen this thing . . . thou art not stricken with horror, I, who have seen this thing, am stricken with horror. His teeth are like dragons’ teeth, his face is like a lion’s face . . .’
Sources:
United Press International—S. N. Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, London, 1958
James Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, Princeton, 1950.
3: Malta—a Paradise of Unsolved Puzzles
IN the jet age the Maltese islands, 95 kilometers south of Sicily, are virtually outside my front door.
I wanted to take a second look at something that every tourist stumbles over sooner or later, those strange ‘ruts’ in the stony ground with which all the Maltese islands are covered. In the 1975 Lexikon der Archaeologie,30 the entry under Malta reads as follows:
‘More emigrants from Sicily came to the island around 3200 B.C. An astonishing number of megalithic temples were constructed between 2800-1900 B.C. The still extant temples, some thirty in number, exhibit a highly developed plan and superstructure . . . This population possibly followed warlike immigrants from western Greece . . . The strange “cart-ruts” belong to the same period.’
Even after detailed study of this odd phenomenon, no better word than rut has occurred to me.
Malta, the largest of the islands, with the capital Valletta, is some 25 kilometers long by 12 kilometers wide. The small islands of Gozo and Comino have their special attractions, yet Malta beats its lesser opponents not only by its size, but more especially by its unsolved puzzles: the ruts and the megalithic temples.
Sun, sea and weather have left their mark on the people and landscape of this group of Mediterranean islands. When you fly into Valletta you think you are landing in a sandstone cubist world. The squared buildings with their flat roofs lining the grid system streets lead into delightful pastel-coloured fields which might have been divided up by a ruler.
During the drive to the Malta Hilton in an ancient Ford, vintage 1954, the taxi-driver was lavish in his praise of the new Socialist government. ‘We’re going to throw out the English and everyone else who’s no use to us!’ Whether I was interested or not, I was also told that Dr Dom Mintoff was a superman who would ensure that the people of Malta made constant progress.
I could not see many signs of this. Since my first visit eleven years ago, the holiday paradise with its fine hotels, beautiful streets, enticing shops and well-kept beaches had lost much of its glamour. In December 1974 the island became an independent republic and now it was advancing under the leadership of superman into the grey boredom of socialism. I could find little of the unique quality that travel guides and novels had once attributed to this ‘paradise’. In a few days’ time I knew that I would never come here for a holiday again. However, the Maltese fishermen still paint their boats all colours of the rainbow. For a moment I was reminded of Hongkong, although there are no junks in Malta.
Of course, the ‘ruts’ are just as well-known to the islanders as the Knights of Malta who turned the island into a European centre of culture at the end of the sixteenth century. But the natives consider these ‘cart-ruts’ of little importance, as does the Maltese government, which does nothing to protect this unique feature. New building ignores the cart-ruts which are exposed defencelessly to wind and weather.
At some time or other every visitor will come across a rut or pair of ruts and as he steps over them, he may think fleetingly that they are unused stretches of an old railway line from which the rails were removed to melt down the valuable iron for other purposes. Perhaps the observer may even think that the markings in the ground are ruts made by carts. I do not know how many interpretations there are, I only know that none of them can be right.
The Maltese ruts are a unique prehistoric puzzle. Today there are still some hundreds of them on Malta and Gozo, but thousands of years ago the two islands were covered with them. When you look at these furrows impressed in the ground, most of them parallel as they should be, the natural r
eaction is to think of ruts. But closer examination of these mysterious traces shows that they cannot have been ruts in the normal sense of the word.
The tracks of the two parallel furrows are not only different from rut to rut, but also vary in the course of a single stretch. This is very obvious near Dingli, south-west of the old capital of Mdina, where the ruts mass together as if they were in a large shunting-yard.
They really are ‘strange ruts’—even the archaeologists are astonished by them. They run through valleys, clamber over hills, frequently several side by side, then they surprisingly unite into a two-track stretch, only to take sudden and incalculable curves or run straight into the depths of the Mediterranean. Others again end abruptly at sheer cliff edges. In these places the rocks and the ruts must have crashed into the water together.
There is a wealth of different tracks. They are from 65 to 123 cm wide. The furrows are frequently over 70 cm deep. Near Mensija one rut runs in a curve over the spur of a hill and cuts 72 cm deep into the limestone ground.
To deal with the cart-rut theory: if a cart ever covered this ground, it could not have taken a curve because of the great depth of the ruts. Either the axle-tree would have vanished in the deep imprint or the axle must have been at least 72 cm high, in other words the wheel must have had a diameter of nearly 1.5 m. But such a giant wheel could not have been coaxed round the curves; it would have got stuck or broken down. The independent suspension of our modern cars was unknown in those days, quite apart from the fact that the 1.5 metre-high wheels, which must have been like the wheels on an excavator, could not have manoeuvred in the relatively narrow ruts.
A sand-box game shows how ridiculous the idea of carts using the Maltese ruts is. Depth of rut . . . 72 cm, width at deepest point . . . 6 cm. The curvature of the arc would correspond to a closed circle with a diameter of 84 m (!). Put one cartwheel, the axle of which must be over 72 cm high, in a rut and move it in arcs, without sand crumbling off the sides! It is impossible for the wheel to run under these conditions. This game would be quite inconceivable if the edges were made not of sand, but hard stone! As every single-axled cart has two wheels which must run absolutely parallel in the furrows, we can bury this theory for ever in some deep archaeological hole.
But if, for the sake of amusement, we postulate a twin-axled cart, the game becomes even more impossible. For inescapable technical reasons, the rear axle and the rear wheels would have to trace a narrower track, with a smaller radius, than the wheels of the front axle. That is why lorries take a wide swing on tight curves. As there is no narrower second track on the curves, we can rule twin-axled carts out of the prehistoric car pool.
Near San Pawl-Tat-Targa four pairs of ruts join up into one rut, although they have different ‘gauges’ when they meet. Hocus-pocus. Not far from there, one rut crosses another, but they are of different depths. Near Mensija, the ‘railwaymen’s’ work was slovenly. The rut is fully hollowed out and up to 60 cm deep, with a width of only 11 cm at the deepest point and of 20 cm at the highest point.
On many sections of the coast, e.g. at Saint George’s Bay and south of Dingli, the ruts run straight into the blue waters of the Mediterranean. Until recently it was assumed that the ruts would end underwater a few metres from the coast and so have originated at a time when the sea level of the Mediterranean was lower. Wrong! Divers corrected this misguided theory and told scholars about their latest findings. The ruts continue in the stone to great depths below sea level. Surprising, but true!
Archaeologists, too, think that such a large network of ruts must have served a purpose. They looked for one. When the remains of a Roman temple were found near Tas Silg in 1970 and excavated, the spades struck the walls of an older Greek temple at a lower level. The archaeologists thought that was all, but the ground held another surprise for them. Massive monoliths were found at the next level. When they were excavated, the semi-circular façade of a megalithic temple was revealed.
As there is a lot of talk nowadays about monoliths and megalithic buildings, I shall describe them briefly. Monolith is the name given to individual artificially dressed stone blocks, such as the Egyptian obelisks or the free-standing menhirs (Celtic ‘long stones’) near Carnac in France. Megalithic buildings (Greek ‘graves made of large stones’) were erected with large blocks or slabs, or sunk into the ground. They also include domed graves.
Monoliths have also been called in to explain the ruts. The ruins near Hagar Qim were made of monoliths 5 m high and 1.05 m thick. Here there is another stone slab with these gigantic measurements: length 7 m, width 3.12 meters, thickness 64 cm. A real monster!
With hindsight the archaeologists explained that the ruts originated when the monoliths were transported to the building site—grooves cut into the ground by cartwheels!
Even a superficial knowledge of technology shows that this theory is a non-starter. For:
The ruts have different ‘gauges’. When there is a change of direction carts could not adapt to the new width.
Gauges also alter in the course of a single stretch. Are the constructors of those days supposed to have had rubber axles at their disposal?
Cross-sections of the ruts show that they do not cut into the ground at right angles, but narrow as they get deeper. If cartwheels made the grooves, the cross-section should be horizontal at the base. If anyone tells me that the wheels had pointed wedge-shaped extremities, I should simply retort that heavy loads such as monoliths could not have been carried. The grooves would have been cut deeper into the ground with every delivery. Finally, how large must the diameters of the wheels have been for the axles to clear the ground level? Such explanations are just weak evasions or stupid jokes. So how were the ruts made?
Let us try another version.
Did the builders of the megalithic layouts use animal-drawn sledges to transport their material over hill and dale? If the prehistoric inhabitants of Malta did, at some point in time, use this means of transport, which is ill-suited to the landscape, the ruts were not caused by these vehicles, for the same thing applies to sledge runners as to wheels, only more so. Sledge runners are fastened even more rigidly at the axle. They would have been useless in the bewildering confusion of rut widths and abrupt curves.
Another version:
To solve the difficult problem of transporting their material, the primitive inhabitants constructed a wooden ‘fork’, the two prongs of which scraped over the ground, while the narrow leading part was hung on an animal. They then fastened the monoliths on to the prongs. Excuse my mirth!
The ‘fork’ would have been rigid. The width between its prongs could not have been altered. Moreover we should still want to know what kind of wood could bear such burdens and what species of animal could stand the weights. The Maltese would have had to harness dinosaurs to ‘forks’ made of tempered steel. There was no steel, so it must have been wood that was as hard as steel. But neither the carrying capacity of the forks nor the cross-section of their wooden prongs can solve the puzzle of the narrow, pointed ruts.
There is yet another fact to refute the idea of transport by carts, sledges or ‘forks’ drawn by animals. If animals had covered the same stretches for years and years, dragging a load behind them, they would have left their own tracks in the ground. In other words, the paths of the animals which pulled the heavy loads would be as evident in the limestone as the ruts themselves. There are no hoof marks in between any of the Maltese ruts.
The Maltese used balls for their transport! In fact, hundreds of balls have been found in Malta. They are of soft limestone and come in different sizes. The biggest are 60 cm in diameter, the smallest 7 cm. Did the prehistoric Maltese invent vehicles which moved on ballbearings? Brilliant! Did they put the balls in the ruts and load the monoliths on to them? That would explain everything. Why the ‘gauges’ vary. Why the ruts take such bold curves. Why the ruts could intersect each other. Balls follow a track traced in the ground, no matter how wide it is.
Are balls the an
swer to the mystery?
Unfortunately not. All the Maltese islands consist of sandstone, limestone and clay, so the stone available is soft. And the balls are made of limestone. A weight of only one ton would squash them flat as a pancake or crumble them up like a snowball. Besides, balls regardless of size, cannot make pointed ruts; they always leave a curved channel. The ruts would be enlarged sideways, not downwards. But if balls burrowed 70 cm deep into the stone, they must have been gigantic, with a diameter of some 1.5 m, apart from the fact that they were loaded with an enormous weight. On top of that they would have had to overcome tremendous friction. What tremendous tractive power, what a monstrous thrust would have been needed! Discussion of this theory is pointless, as no balls with a diameter of more than 60 cm have been found so far.
No pictures of reliefs of carts or carriages have yet been found on Malta. But if the temple builders had used this kind of transport, they would surely have been portrayed, for there are other very ancient wall drawings and pictures on the island.
Signs of the Gods? Page 8
