What if.... the Change happened?

PP is listening to a book, Dies the Fire (spoiler alert about the book if you follow link), about a sudden event on Earth when technology suddenly drops back to bronze age level.  No electricity works, no engines, no telephones, no modern conveniences.  The cars, buildings, stoves, etc., are still there, but do not work.  What would you do to survive?

Money is worthless, but what is worth something is knowledge, things that can no longer be made (medicines, ball bearings...), and food.  Power too of course.  But you get power not from money but from brute force or access to things that others want.

The book is the first in a series about how two groups of people try to manage this change in northwestern USA, and what happens when you no longer has access to modern technology.  This has led to hour-long discussions here at home.  Would we manage?  What do we have that is useful?

We probably would be far better off with our knowledge and old hand tools than most people. Plus we have many books, including topics such as food preservation, homesteading, and old techniques.  I could tell people which plants are edible, which heal, and which ones that kill. PP actually has two long timber saws in the barn.  We might have more axes and hand tools than all our neighbors combined.  They love things like giant SUVs, leaf blowers and cordless phones, which would be pretty useless in a situation like this.

Which store would you raid first to get things you can barter with or need?  We settled on the pharmacy, hardware store and local farm co-op in our discussions, but how to get there and how to get things back?  They are miles away. We have three bikes, but that is nothing you can carry heavy things on.  We need chickens and some goats.  You need a way to get water up from the wells, without pumps that need electricity.  People would starve, people would kill for food, people would marauder...

How do you protect your food crops?  How do you protect yourself?  I realized that if you have a lot of important knowledge in your head, then you most valuable alive.  AREA's horse knowledge would be very useful.  Suddenly, in this perspective, so much of what we can do and want to do today seem so useless when it comes to the survival of the human species (sorry, race, :) see post below). Seriously, how many of us could really, really live off the land without modern technology if we have to?  Not many. Could you survive a week? A month? A year? Where would you go?  Who would you hook up with?

Only 100 years ago people knew so much more.  Just imagine - thrusting someone from the 1850s farming communities into this situation would not have been such a disastrous thing as dumping a New York stockbroker into it today.  Or a teenager from the local high school, or.... We are so far removed today from the real things (production of things, knowledge of nature).  If The Change ever happens, it will not be important if you know how to use Excel or make a great cappuccino (even if those things are perfectly important today in our technology-padded lives).

Today, many people can't tie a knot, read a map, plant a seed, or milk a cow.  In the perspective provided by this book, it seems like the survival of humans is really, really fragile.  We are up in Babel's tower, dependent on electricity, GPS, satellites, internet, gasoline and oil, telephones, and stores where you can buy food.  It might not be gone tomorrow permanently, but it sure could be gone temporarily after weather catastrophes.  What would you do?  Could you make it?  It is an interesting question, and we are still talking about it.... and I haven't even read this book yet.

Bits and pieces from the internet: species edition

There is a bird inside this pistol.  Seriously! And it sings. Seriously wonderful things from the past. 

Why do we call it the 'human race' and not the 'human species'?  Personally I think it is because people didn't want to be thought of as on the same level as other species, such as monkeys, flowers, and sheep. Humans are supposed to be bigger, better, smarter and of higher value than other species in the world.  But we really are just a species... Wikipedia is solving this by redirection human race and human species to just 'human'.

A nice little interactive guide to endangered species of different parts of North America. (New York Times)

And don't you wonder what kind of living species might be found on the exoplanet Gliese 581d?  In our lifetime, do you think we will be able to know if there is life on other planets?  And if there is life, then there are probably different species. 

The Gods must be crazy...

along with the people...

.. but I really think people must be crazier.  How is the rapture going in your part of the world?  It is supposedly to be 7000 years exactly, on the date, since Noah's flood and it is still raining in New Jersey.  But consider this - how many times have humanity changed the way we count years, months since 7000 years ago?  How can they know it will be tomorrow (= today in Australia, Asia and Europe)?

From the media:

"She and her twin, Faith, have a friend’s birthday party Saturday night, around the time their parents believe the rapture will occur. “So if the world doesn’t end, I’d really like to attend,” Grace said before adding, “Though I don’t know how emotionally able my family will be at that time.”"  

link to NY Times article - the parents believe the Rapture will occur, their three teenage kids do not)

 Q: Will the Earth end on May 21?

A: No. The Earth will stick around for a few more months of "chaos and awful suffering" before being obliterated Oct. 21.

Q: How many will be Raptured?
A: Campbell estimates 200 million. The remaining nearly 7 billion face a grisly fate - crushed in the quake, burned by sulfur, turned into pillars of salt, etc.

Q: Are exploding watermelons in China a sign?
A: Yes.

From the End-of-The-World Factsheet (yes, there is such a thing). 

I really wonder how the people that believe in this Rapture event feel when they wake up on Sunday morning.  Will they go on with their lives or seek counseling? I'd love to see their excuses on Sunday why the Rapture didn't happen.Or rather, I just wish there were many more sensible, logical people out there caring more about our planet, environment, and the people around them...

Verbal snapshot: DNA

Yesterday, after a long day's workshop on genomics and DNA, a repairman talked to me in the elevator.  When he heard that I worked with DNA, he asked me:
- How much DNA is active in humans?
- I don't really know, I said, it depends on how many genes that are turned on that very moment in your body.
- Oh, no, he said, it is 3 percent.
- 3 percent?, I said.
- Yes, he said, but you can raise it if you meditate very hard.

I didn't know if I should laugh or sigh.  I just said 'oh really' and left the elevator on my floor.  Where do these people get these facts? I mean, someone must be feeding them this fake science. 

Pandora is heaven for biologists

Over the Christmas break I saw the 3-D movie Avatar with the kids, and loved it. OK, I admit, I only saw it because I was told that Sigourney Weaver played a botanist. But, it turned out to be a really good movie.

But what surprised me most was that they must have employed some real biologists to work on the movie (see article here). Animals, fungi, and plants were based on shapes and forms that exist on Earth, just in new compositions, combinations, and colors. Take a spiral algae from the ocean and put it on a tree branch in the rain forest. Aquatic hydra colonies are becoming branched fungi. Animals are still vertebrates, but are hexapods instead of tetrapods.

Everything is connected, like a large Gaia, and luminous, like feelings and neurons showing of light. Of course, as a botanist, I can't help think about what they didn't change. Tree trunks and branches are the same, fern leaves and palm stems are just like on Earth - someone needs to do some biometric studies to see if this is likely (especially since humans can't breath the air, but everything else can). But I think it is more a fact of that it is easy to create large masses of green with palm and fern leaves, they are so easily fractalized and scaled up or down.

Seeds that swim like fluorescent jellyfishes in the air - gorgeous!







Of course there was lots of violent action, bad people vs. good people, story lines from Fern Gully, Pocahontas, Save the Earth, Greenpeace, the Iraq War crazy president we finally got rid off, and grassroot heroes. But the real take-home message was: Life is beautiful. That Sigourney Weaver is a botanist is just mentioned once ('she is famous, she write THE flora of Pandora"), but science and biodiversity is portrayed in an unusually accurate way. You can read more about this aspect in this great article in New York Times. (And here is a kind-of-stupid article as a contrast.)

The universe is in our blood

Galaxies, from the Hubble telescope (photo: NASA)

I grew up with the synth-pop band Adolphson & Falk in the 1980s in Sweden, and even if I have loved their music from the beginning I never really realized until recently how scientific and astronomic it is. After seeing the nebulas, stars and galaxies last night, this is suddenly put in some perspective. I think there is life on Mars! What do you think?

Some lyrics from the song 'Vidare' [Further] on the album 'Med rymden i blodet' [With the universe in our blood]

Vi söker efter ljus igenom teleskopen. [We look for lights through the telescopes]
Vi letar efter liv där andra solar rår. [We search for life where other suns rule]
Vi sänder ut ett rop och lyssnar efter ekon. [We send out a shout and listen for echos]
Vi sträcker ut vår tro så långt det nånsin går. [We stretch our belief, as far as possible]
Vi drivs att finna svar, att se igenom illusioner, [We are driven to find answers, see through illusions]
att sträva mot en gräns i en oändlighet, [to aim for a border in an infinity]
att lösa varje del av universums ekvationer [to solve all parts of the universe's equations]
för att stilla för en stund vår vetgirighet. [to calm for a moment our quest for knowledge]
Vi söker vidare, [We seek further,]
vi vill inte stå kvar [we don't want to be left behind]
med en syn på vår omvärld [with a view of our world]
som är begränsad och smal. [that is restricted and narrow]
Vi vill se vidare [We want to see further]
förbi kända perspektiv. [behind known perspectives.]
Vi har rymden i blodet. [We have the universe in our blood.]
Den är en del av vårt liv. [It is a part of our life.]
Likt äventyrens skepp som besegrat oceaner, [Like the explorers' ship that conquered oceans,]
sänder vi vårt hopp på en hoppfull färd. [we send our hope out on a hopeful quest.]
Vi låter tanken sväva runt i galaxernas banor [We let our thought float around in the orbit of the galaxies]
och letar kunskap om oss själva i varje främmande värld. [and look for knowledge about ourselves in every foreign world.]
För även du och jag består av stoft från en stjärna [Because even you and I, consist of dust from a star]
liksom varje planet som snurrar okänd och skymd. [like every planet swirling unknown and hidden.]
Fast vi är ljusår från varann står vi varann så nära, [Even if we are light years apart, we are so close,]
för vi är alla barn av en och samma rymd. [because we are all children of the one and same universe.]

They also made songs about standing radio waves, binary numbers, etc. ... :) I can't find this song on youtube, but there is another one, Krafter vi aldrig känner ["Powers we never feel", about gravity]. This reminds me a lot of Harry Martinsson's Aniara, written in the 1950s, a classic long poem about a starship looking for a new planet after humanity has destroyed the earth. I grew up reading science fiction (Asimov, Heinlein, etc.), and with the new data about methane on Mars and water on the moon I am starting to think we are coming full circle... Science is really an amazing thing and we are living in really interesting times.

What do you think?

Do extraterrestrial aliens exist on Earth?

Do ghosts exist and if so, what are they?

Did human civilizations make the Nazca lines and the Giza pyramid, and if so, how?

Questions inspired by conversations with LA. What do YOU think?

Planetary thoughts

Guess what this is? Yep, Saturn and the little moon Titan below it, taken from Cassini. This reminds me of the science fiction books by Heinlein, Asimov and others I used to borrow from the library as a teenager and read late at night (when my parents thought I should be asleep). There are more cool pictures at NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. Photo credit: NASA.

The Aliens Are Here!

Most of the time when you think about aliens your brain screams 'War of the Worlds! AAAAA!', but people who actually believe in extra terrestrials (ET's, UFO's, whatever the heck you want to call them) their brain gets exited and says 'Quantum jump in humanity! Yay!' or 'Non-polluting energy source! Yay!'.
Over 70% of all amercians believe that there is a government cover-up.......and they would be right. That's right, I said it. No I am not insane. Yes, I'm quite sure. The government wants to leave the public in the dark when it comes to the fact that there is really faster-than-light moving, soundless, massive objects that are flying in earth's atmosphere. Take a look at
http://www.theblackvault.com/ and you will know what I mean. It contains thousands of down loadable reports of 'Unauthorized flying in a restricted area' where, coincidentally, that object is going twice the speed of sound and is defying gravity.
But why? I mean, why us, out of probable billions of other life-forms? Two words: Nuclear Weapons. Ever since we discovered that by using decaying plutonium and uranium we would be able to create the most power full weapons in the world, the Aliens have screamed 'Oh my god! The kids have the matches!' In short, they are trying to keep us from destroying ourselves. But why not just land in Washington DC with thousands of antimatter laser cannons equipped to ships, and demand the cease of nuclear weapons? 1: It could cause intergalactic war. 2: They don't want to directly approach us for fear that either us or their fate might match that of the fabled do-do bird.
So, in total, anyone who denies the fact that Aliens have visited our planet (Whether you are a FBI agent or a common civilian), you will miss out. ALOT.

In case of an invasion...

You might need this book, found by my brother:

An Introduction to Planetary Defense - A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion

A little snippet:
"This book offers a serious look at defending the planet in the event of an extra-terrestrial invasion. Travis Taylor, et al, have written the definitive book on the defense of earth against a potential alien incursion. Whatever your beliefs on the subject, the book serves as an important primer on the potential future of warfare on every level."

"We know that at least one star system (our own) within the Milky Way Galaxy has developed intelligent life . . . that suggests statistics of at least one civilisation per galaxy . . . So, there should be billions of star systems with intelligent civilisations."

How is that for extrapolation? One sample (Earth), and here we go! Actually, is there life on other planets or not? What do you think?

And here are some comets kicking up dust in the Helix Nebula (courtesy of NASA)