jameswharris

Has the Universe Gotten Too Big for Science Fiction?

District 9 is the much talked about new science fiction movie that was released just days ago. But I have to ask: Is District 9 science fiction? Since we get so few new science fiction movies every year why should I even suggest that one isn’t science fiction? We’re always overwhelmed with comic book movies that are obviously too silly to be science fiction, and ignoring the franchise films, like Star Trek, we were gifted with what many fans would consider two uniquely classic-SF movies this summer: Moon and District 9. I enjoyed watching both, but unfortunately I don’t consider either to be science fiction, not by my picky old fart definition of science fiction.

But am I deluded, blowing smoke up my own ass, by worrying too much that science fiction has fallen asleep with alien pods in the room? I know hordes of old SF fans in their 40s, 50s, and 60s that stopped reading SF after the 1980s, or even earlier, who are all wanking nostalgic for SF from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, living in a retro science fictional paradise. This new fangled stuff might look like science fiction, it might walk like science fiction, but it doesn’t quack like science fiction.

District 9 uses outer space aliens as a metaphor for a story about immigration xenophobia and racism. And even though District 9 opens with a magnificent flying saucer orbiting perfectly over Johannesburg, South Africa, with max-gnarly alien aliens, I still don’t consider it science fiction. Why? Real science fiction is about exploring the cutting edge of reality, and District 9 uses its aliens like other movies use angels or dragons to tell a fable. More than that, District 9 models its action after video games rather than modern science fiction magazine stories – but does District 9 model the emerging post-modern SF magazine stories?

Now, I’m not saying that District 9 isn’t a very creative film, I’m just saying it’s not science fiction. It uses science fiction as a metaphor for human xenophobia, rather than being speculative fiction about first contact with a non-human intelligence. Sure it’s a fun, gripping movie, with a fascinating storyline and engaging characters, told with stomach churning hand-held camera anxiety. District 9 is gritty and realistic about human nature, but is totally unscientific, choosing to stay well within the cliché tropes of SF, which are getting moldy-oldie even for me. Even though the aliens look very different from us, they act just like us, especially at our worse, which I believe was the intention of the film’s storytellers. District 9 is an allegory about apartheid, and all other political histories where one group of human beings treat another group of human beings with zero empathy.

Then again, am I wrong? I want to define science fiction by the standards I use in my review of “The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.” I don’t think I’m the only one sniffing out changes in SF. Read Jason Sanford’s “The noticing of SciFi Strange,” and his story “The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain.”

Then read the gorgeous “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang, which just won the 2009 Hugo Award for short story. These are cutting edge stories marketed as science fiction, but are they really science fiction? I’d call them fantasy, but they aren’t even fantasy like Tolkien, L. Frank Baum, J. K. Rowling or Lewis Carroll.

We’re living in a post-modern science fiction world where science fiction has little relationship to science, or reality. In our age of tremendous science and technology, science fiction has decided to become fantasy. Why is this?

An old friend Jim called me this weekend to tell me that he and his wife were watching The Universe, a TV series about astronomy and Stacy decided the universe was too big for her mind to handle, which Jim thought was hilarious. Reality is big, and the old purpose of science fiction used to be producing sense of wonder about the vastness of space and time. Has the universe gotten to big for science fiction?

And, has the universe gotten too big for our cozy little minds? Has science fiction pulled back from the event horizon of reality, fearful of facing the black hole of science fact? As much as I want science fiction to be about science, the story from The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction edited by Allan Kaster, that had the greatest emotional impact on me was “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,” by Kij Johnson from Asimov’s Science Fiction.

26 Monkeys is a purely fantasy tale that is a post-modern science fiction story where the universe is too big, and the only way to comprehend it is with allegory. The story is scientifically fatalistic, in that the characters give up on trying to understand the sense of wonder in their lives.

This is even more explicitly stated in “The Ray Gun: A Love Story,” by James Alan Gardner, another favorite from the above collection. Read this story, but substitute the concept “science fiction” whenever you hear “ray-gun” while reading this story. This story feels like meta-fiction about giving up science fiction, at least the old modern kind.

And what about Moon, the SF film about where humans refuse to go. When did mankind decide the final frontier was not for them?

Science fiction has always been about the future, it always embraced modernism, showing absolute faith in science with the relentless belief that we will eventually comprehend reality. Ivy League intellectuals have always considered the SF genre to be a literature for dreamy adolescents, so maybe it’s just taken science fiction a bit longer than the rest of the literary world to grow up and face the post-modern world of uncertainty.

JWH – 8/18/9

Saving Money on Cable TV and Internet

We pay $163 for cable TV and high speed internet service. That bothers me, because, for every month we pay $163 now, it means one month we won’t have $163 after we retire. When my wife and I get too old to work and only have a fixed income, we will probably wish for all those frivolous dollars we once spent.

I know quite a number of young people earning little and older people, either retired, or near retirement age, earning little, that have given up cable and/or Internet access. I’ve also read it’s one of the first bills to cut when families are downsizing because of the economy. A lot of young people I know never seemed to develop the cable addition that folks my age have acquired. So they will spend big dollars on cell phones and Internet, but scrimp on TV. I also know a number of people now that have no cable TV at all. Others have given up house phones and Internet too.

If you combine the house phone bill, cell phones bills, Internet access and the cable/satellite TV bill, telecommunication becomes a huge piece of the monthly budget pie. In our household, it’s bigger than the utility bill or car notes we had in the past, second only to the mortgage. Last night I watch ABC World News, three episodes of Weeds from a Netflix disc, and recorded an old black and white movie off of TCM. We pay $4 a day for our cable. Much of what I watch could be had from over-the-air TV or Netflix.

Free TV

I have helped a number of women in their fifties set up digital TV boxes so they could watch free TV. This is the absolute cheapest way to have TV, but you only get a handful of channels. Depending on signal, indoor antennas can be easy to use or annoying. So far I haven’t met anyone wanting to spend the money on an outdoor antenna. If you’re lucky, you can get ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, FOX and several other digital stations in HD. This free option does make life much simpler. And when the antenna works well, I’m very impressed with the quality of the picture.

Free TV + Netflix

Upping the budget to $8.99 a month, you can get a Netflix subscription and see nearly all movies and a good selection of premium cable shows like Big Love, Mad Men and True Blood, but just delayed by several months. Most cable TV shows now come out on DVD, so if can wait for your favorite shows, you can watch them in order and without commercials. This offers the best selection for the least money.

Free TV + Netflix + Internet

If you’re willing to budget another $25-50 for DSL or cable Internet, you can expand your options even more. If you must have the Internet, then this option is a no-brainer. Trying to find low-cost Internet access is hard. There are $10 monthly modem services, but they require a house phone, and many people have ditched landlines to save dough. I have heard it’s possible to get low-cost DSL without local phone service but it’s a difficult option to arrange since AT&T and Baby Bells push bundled services. And if you crave the Internet, then you usually crave fast Internet, and that’s about $50 a month.

Now, if you have fast Internet, and you’re willing to be a Do-It-Yourselfer, you can buy or build a Home Theater PC. This gives you a DVR plus access to streaming TV and downloadable video, including high definition videos. Think of this as free, on-demand, Internet TV. Hundreds of thousands of people are experimenting with this now, and cable companies are getting worried. Internet video quality is constantly improving, with HD becoming common.

With free services like Boxee, Miro and Vuze and a HDMI or DVI cable from your laptop or computer to your HD TV, you can develop your own free on-demand TV library or select from a large lineup of streaming network shows.

Video is quickly becoming the new medium for communicating over the web. People have been watching video on their computer screens for years, but now people are finding ways to make their computers into set-top boxes connected to their TVs and controlled by remotes, so they can watch TV as God intended, from the comforts of their La-Z-Boy.

Cable and satellite TV providers are worried that the Internet will soon provide people with all the TV they want and they will be out of business. You’d think they’d want to offer a better service for less money to compete. Follow this link to a Google search for many articles about living without cable TV. A lot of people are doing it. I like the concept of cable TV, so I won’t be abandoning it just yet, at least not until season 2 of True Blood is finished. I just want to find ways to bring down the cost of cable, but if I can’t, I’ll consider abandoning it completely.

Cable/Satellite TV “a la carte”

People often wonder why they can’t lower their cable bill by just buying the channels they love to watch. Most people watch a handful of favorite channels but have to wade through hundreds of TV and other cable services they just don’t want. I get 200+ channels but probably watch less than 12.

There’s two obstacles to this problem. One, if people bought only what they wanted, many cable networks would go out of business, so cable providers fight this option. Second, as long as cable companies must provide analog channels, those stations you get when you plug your cable wire directly into your cable-ready TV and scan the channels, then they can’t sell channels separately. When cable companies go to 100% digital, a la carte buying will be technically possible.

Right now, a la carte channel buying is not possible, so it’s only a dream option to save money.

My Dream TV and Cable Internet Service

I don’t mind paying for what I want. I think my current $163 cable/internet bill is too high! It should be closer to $75. What I would love is a perfect convergence of TV and Internet. I want to buy a la carte just the exact TV networks I want, and I want to own my own equipment so I can customize it. I’d like a Home Theater PC that played and burned DVDs/Blu-Ray discs, was a DVR recorder for 2 terabytes of shows, played all my own digital media, including MP3 songs, JPG photographs and any collected videos I made or bought, plus streamed music and videos from the Internet. That means my entertainment system would consist of a TV, home theater PC and speakers, all controlled by one remote. That would simplify my setup greatly, and save electricity. Right now I have:

HDTV, with remote
DVR/cable box with remote
Receiver with remote
Media player with remote
Blu-ray player with remote
CD/SACD player with remote

My wife bought me a very nice Logitech programmable universal remote, but I never liked it. Life was so much easier back when I was growing up. We had one TV, three channels and no remotes. Life has gotten too complicated. I dream of living with one remote and no more than 12 fantastic high-definition TV channels with no damn commercials. Infinite variety could come from Internet TV. With fewer TV networks, the quality of TV production should go up. I would get better shows for my time and money.

JWH – 8/14/9

Where are the Wholesome TV Shows?

I’m wondering if the TV shows I watch make a statement about my personality, or even more, if they influence it. I constantly argue with my friends about the old nature versus nurture debate, with me believing biology is the stronger force, while my feminist friends holding firm to the power cultural influences. If my lady friends are right, then television programs us. If me and my males friends who side with biology are right, then television only reflects our baser instincts.

And I’m sure members of God’s flock will ask: Where do I, an atheist, get the moral authority to judge what’s wholesome about TV. Maybe I can define “wholesome TV” in a way that both the spiritual minded seeking moral goodness, and the secular wanting uplifting humanism, can agree. I’m afraid my definition will be tricky because it aims to be two things at once. Fiction is both a mirror to personality and a microscope examining culture. To question fiction’s purpose is akin to debugging one’s own programming.

My definition of “Wholesome Television Shows” are those teleplays that reflect positive cultural programming or ones that educate viewers about biology’s influence on human relations. Wholesome TV should provide inspiring role models and illuminate the weaknesses we should all seek to overcome. Wholesome fiction should constantly explore what it means to improve oneself and our species. Whether you are a fundamentalist or a humanist, the desire for wholesome entertainment is a desire to improve the whole.

TV shows from the 1950s often naively tried to do this, with each episode of “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” presenting a moral lesson, and reinforcing conservative beliefs. Creating wholesome fiction is not the goal of most TV writers, they seek to make money by entertaining. Most audiences find moralizing condescending. Uplifting is a very difficult trick to pull off.

The other night I watched an episode of Leave it to Beaver, and then rewatched my favorite science fiction movie, Gattaca. From my viewpoint, Gattaca is the perfect example of modern, adult wholesome entertainment. I wonder what Christian fundamentalists would make of my evidence? Just because I don’t see God in the universe doesn’t mean I don’t see the beauty of spiritually uplifting humanity. Vincent Freeman’s relentless drive to overcome the dictates of genetics is a uplifting spiritual quest.

The average TV viewer doesn’t want morality plays about improving their souls, they want high impact entertainment that provides fabulous escapism. In other words, Americans crave boob tube heroin, where they can kick back in their recliners and experience opium intense visions through their flat panel screens. This adult audience doesn’t want wholesome TV. Wholesome TV is primary a idealized concept that parents want for their children, and some adults want because they are tired of feeling like Romans at the Coliseum when turning on their TVs.

I’m too old to wonder what I’ll be when I grow up, but I have to wonder how kids today view their future. And if I was a proud parent, would I want my kids watching television? If my feminist friends are right, and cultural programming is the dominant influence on personality, then what kind of code are we loading into the brains of today’s rug rats? As a concession to my feminist friends, young women of 2009 are far different from young women of 1909 or 1809. I would argue they are the same because of biology, but freed of cultural repression, we are seeing more of their true instinct.

The overwhelming message to kids from modern television, is teaching them that if they aren’t extremely sexual active they are failures, losers and dorks. Following that, television illustrates that wealth is everything, that money equals sexual partners, freedom, and power. After that, the subtle message that’s constantly beaten into their heads is violence is the best solution. Is it any wonder I claim biology is the dominant influence on personality? Television constantly shows alpha males fighting for prized females, or females going to inhuman efforts to be sexual irresistible.

Don’t get me wrong, modern television does have it’s good messages about tolerance for diversity, preaching ecological education, promoting GLBT acceptance, often dealing with subtle ethical issues, while regularly championing societal underdogs, and exploring political controversial topics of the day. However, it seldom promotes hard work and discipline and usually sees the academic successful as the socially challenged. On TV, sarcasm is presented as the supreme method for demonstrating intelligence.

The television shows I like to watch reflect a deep addiction for fiction and escapism, but I can also imagine they could also represent moral failure. My top three favorite shows right now are Big Love, Dexter and True Blood, in that order. Critically I’d rate them A+, A+, A-, but none attempt to be Gattaca. None of them are wholesome, although, strangely enough, I might advocate Dexter, a sympathetic look at a serial killer, as the most wholesome of the bunch.

Dexter Morgan knows his genetic programming commands him to kill, but he constantly struggles with the ethics of being a serial killer, all the while trying to understand what it means to be a good human, because he knows he’s not. Don’t get me wrong, I would rate all my favorite shows M30. I’m not sure people under 30 should watch them. In fact, I can’t think of any primetime ABC, CBS, NBC show I’d recommend for the under 18 crowd. Over at Parents Television Council, they could only find one show they gave their Green light to, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader. Most primetime broadcast TV shows are rated Red, and a few Yellow by the stoplight metaphor coding.

The most wholesome network show I watch is The Big Bang Theory, which the above group rates Red. I love this geek fest show, especially because it’s the only show on TV about scientists, but I’m not sure if it’s a flattering portrayal, and it gives a bad message to kids: Scientists are comic book reading dweebs, nothing but silly characters who can’t get laid, or worse still, don’t even think about getting laid. What if television producers create a show about JPL scientists that was realistic, dramatic, inspirational, and encourage kids to believe science was a tremendously exciting career? Television has totally failed at presenting science to the public. Science fiction is usually fantasy escapism, and shows like CSI lamely present a silly, simplistic, and inaccurate view of science and technology. CSI makes science look like slight-of-hand, only reinforcing Arthur C. Clarke’s famous comment, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Is all of this a failure of television, or really a failure of fiction? If we consider non-fiction, then there’s a true abundance of shows worthy of young people’s viewing. Fictional television fails at presenting role models, and its efforts of cultural programming are mixed. Nor is fictional programming that educational about burden of biology places on our personality. It amply illustrates the sex drive, but never reveals it as a burden. Television only reflects a worship of sex and never deconstructs sexual impulses. We all know rubbing our genitals together is pleasurable, but why is the quest to find the right frictional partner so common in storytelling? And if fiction isn’t about sex, it’s about conflict and violence. Would the Harry Potter books been as satisfying if they lacked all the killing?

Sex and death are natural parts of life, but fiction gives the illusion that sex and death are the most common aspects of life. By not watching the local news, my crime filled city seems peaceful. In real life I never see other people having sex. Mostly I see people struggling to get ahead at their education or work, or improving their house and lawn. Is the craving for fiction the urge to see what we don’t in normal life? Is my craving for wholesome television just a craving for what I don’t see in my life?

The defining moral and ethical issue of our lives is global warming. Will we be the generation that fiddles while Rome burns? Many scientists are now saying we only have one decade to transform ourselves before our habits push the environment past the point of now return. We are a generation of Noahs, but instead of building an ark and collecting animals, we’re watching television. As far as I’m concerned fiction has totally failed to address this issue.

If I had any backbone I’d beat my addiction to fiction and throw it off completely. I crave wholesome fiction, because I feel it’s a time in our culture when we need it. However, my addiction to sensational fiction is too great. It’s beauty is to powerful to ignore. However I am cutting back on my drug of choice by reading more non-fiction. Mostly I fix my fiction habit with television and movies, and leave reading to non-fiction, but I’m starting to watch ever more documentaries. If I was a parent, I’d urge my kids to watch quality documentaries, but there is a third force in the nature-nurture debate that may even be more powerful, and that’s peer pressure.

The young will find their own art to admire. We have no choice in the matter. The young are programmed by biology and fuel by pop culture. I can’t image what they will look back to in forty years and see in this decade as their wholesome television. Two and a Half Men is no Leave it to Beaver. And what kind of role models do Britney Spears, Fergie and Lady GaGa make for young women? Read this interview with Megan Fox to see an example of a contemporary thoroughly modern Millie.

The moral majority’s demand for wholesome TV is really a tempest in a teapot. Just watch ABC Family and Disney Channel TV shows. Are they really that wholesome? They might be cleaner, but are they uplifting? And are their shows improving this generation of children? Is Disney’s Britney Spears a reasonable example of a wholesome upbringing and current role model?

NBC’s ER was a reasonably good wholesome show because it was very positive about doctors and medicine, providing gritty, but realistic role models. Compare that to Gray’s Anatomy? Is there any show on TV now that have characters you’d want for your children to admire? I hate to say it, but Dexter the serial killer is at least aspiring to be a better human. I don’t even see that in most shows.

JWH – 8/13/9

The Garden of Eden

The other night on The History Channel, I watched “Mysteries of the Garden of Eden,” an episode of their Decoding the Past series, where scholars speculated about the location of the Garden of Eden. In The Bible, Eden is a place, and the garden is located within Eden. Over the centuries some people have considered the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as just a fictional metaphor about how life began, but other folk believe The Book of Genesis is the literal word of God. I think the truth falls somewhere in the middle, in the delicious realm of speculation.

To the Christian mind, and the Jew and Muslim, the early chapters of Genesis are about the beginning of all time, the Earth and the first people. It is very hard to date The Bible, with scholars arguing between 1446-300 BCE. If you look a this timeline of the Levant, you’ll see that puts The Bible being written from the late Bronze Age throughout the Iron Age. That’s well along in the story of human history. Also, some fundamentalists like to believe that The Bible traces the origin of time to what some call Chalcolithic Age (4500 – 3300 BCE), which cuts out a whole lot of time that science knows about before then. The above mentioned TV documentary suggests Eden existed in the Stone Age during the Neolithic period.

Let’s say The Bible was written down in 1000 BCE, can those writers really know anything about a place that existed in 6000 BCE? Just how good is oral storytelling? And why is the story about Eden remembered and considered so important? By then the myth of Eden would be several times older than our myths about Atlantis. The cradles of civilization are far older than The Bible, and many of the stories in The Book of Genesis were retold from early civilizations and their religions, thousands of years older the writers of The Bible.

Anyone who wants to understand the story of The Garden of Eden needs to study ancient civilizations, which I haven’t, but wished I had the time to do. I’m fascinated by the idea of cultural memory and maybe even the woo-woo idea of the collective unconscious. Since The Bible has been written down, and especially since it’s been printed, the idea of The Garden of Eden has solidified in minds of western culture. We can never escape the power of that myth. Not only does it haunt us, but also it corrupts the very fabric of reality.

I believe one way to deprogram ourselves of the memes of the Garden of Eden, a kind of mental virus, is by achieving understanding of the original intent of the storytellers of the fable. We know that civilized mankind existed for thousands of years before the writers of The Book of Genesis. We know The Book of Genesis is the opening story to explain the foundation of a nation and religion. If some scholars are right, Eden is quite a distance from Israel, so why include it?

Eden is mentioned outside of The Bible in other texts, including travel stories with directions. Here is the Biblical quote from the extensive BibleGateway.com – using the English Standard translation of The Book of Genesis 2:10-14:

¹⁰A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. ¹¹The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of^(A) Havilah, where there is gold. ¹²And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. ¹³The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. ¹⁴And the name of the third river is the^(B) Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

If you have any love of history and archeology, these are some yummy clues. Ever since I was a young atheist kid, I wondered if the Garden of Eden story had anything to do with mankind’s shift from being a roaming hunting and gather animal to settling down and taking up farming and developing technology. Could these Genesis stories come from our deepest cultural memories? We know that The Bible is old, but not that old, but we also know that the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, and even serpent and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil come from religions a thousand years older than the people who wrote The Bible. How far back do these stories go?

Anthropologists are used to collecting stories from primitive people. They have even gone back decades later to hear the same stories told again by the same storyteller and find it repeated word for word. How old is the story of the Garden of Eden? Scientifically we know early man develop agriculture between Tigris and Euphrates long before writing. But could the farming man remember being a hunting man? And were the authors of The Book of Genesis philosophical enough to think about the change? If they were, that’s a major conceptual idea to explore.

Even more astounding is another clue that the Decoding the Past show presented that was totally new to me. I’ve always thought the story of the flood was the silliest story in The Bible. At best I thought it was an incredibly overblown account of one flooded valley. Flood stories are common in other ancient religious texts, so like the Garden of Eden, there might be some truth to it too. Here’s where the show blew me away. They proposed a theory that the Biblical flood is a description of flood waters from when the last ice age melted and greatly raised the world’s sea levels, like the Persian Gulf, and caused many valleys to be flooded by glacier melt. This was around 6,000-7,000 years ago, they reported.

Before this melt, water levels were far lower, and because of this, the scholars on the show speculated that the Garden of Eden was located under the northern most area of the Persian Gulf, where the Tigris and Euphrates did meet with two ancient rivers that no longer exist in modern times. This fits with Genesis retelling ancient religious stories from Babylon and Sumer.

Now I’m really puzzled. How did the Genesis authors get the stories of these floods. And did people then really remember and speculate about the transformation of man from hunters to farmers? If global warming really slams us, and it destroys modern civilization, will people six thousand years from now talk about a time when men went to the Moon?

We think of The Bible as the foundation of Western civilization, but it appears the beginning of The Bible is actually about one, two or more civilizations earlier, and thousands of years older. How were those stories maintained?

And does the Garden of Eden story go back even further? Were those stories even ancient to the Sumerians? If I was a scholar of ancient man and history I might know the answer to this. And if I live long enough I hope to read all this history, but for now I can speculate. If Eden was a real place, and world-wide flooding did happen, how much else of the story is real? Adam and Eve?

We know it’s silly to think of the absolute first man and woman, evolution teaches something far different that makes more sense. But could Adam and Eve be a man an woman that quit a nomadic tribe to settle down to farming? No, that’s stretching things too far too. But I can imagine early storytellers picturing a time when unclothed people lived in a garden paradise and God took care of them. Is there a chance that hunting and gather man left stories to be passed down to settled farming man, and then town building man? Or were there still plenty of people still living in nature they could observe and contrast with their new civilized life?

I can also imagine these storytellers speculating about how people learn to think for themselves and started farming. Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden – a big deal was made about that. When we were animals, we were all naked. Did Adam and Eve invent fashion, another attribute of civilization like pottery making, when they decided they needed to wear clothes? The writers of Genesis could have heard about tribes of men and women who went naked, so it wouldn’t take cultural memory back 10,000 years to invent this aspect of the story.

See, it’s so easy to imagine Adam and Eve acquiring knowledge that they were no longer animals and they had to cover themselves, had to leave the Garden of Eden to farm, herd animals, build houses, and like they say, the rest is history, because history starts after we realized we were no longer animals and started writing about it. It’s a shame those ancient storytellers didn’t remember being apes, because it would have defused the whole controversy over evolution.

I wonder if there is any cultural memory of the Neanderthal man? That would mean information had been passed down from Paleolithic times through Neolithic times into Bronze Age. That’s expecting way too much of oral communication. Or does it?

The easiest solution to imagine is the writers of Genesis wanted a beginning to their story and they just made up the creation in seven days, and then imagined God creating Adam and Eve, and then God getting mad at the couple and kicking them out of Eden because they didn’t obey the rules. The whole Old Testament is all about God constantly grumping about the Israelites not minding his commands. I can even imagine those writers thinking, “Hey, these other religions have Adam and Eve, a serpent, a Tree of Knowledge, we’d better have them too, in our story.”

Yet, wouldn’t it be wonderfully far out if the Genesis authors had known about an ancient distant land where people had decided to stop living like the animals, dress themselves, build houses, grow food, and then several generations later get wiped out by a flood. I wonder how they would have changed their story if they had also known about the concept of global warming. Or maybe that’s why so many Christians today adamantly refuse to believe in our global warming, because biblical teaching tells them God won’t flood the world twice.

For tens of thousands of years all people had to explain reality was oral storytelling. And then for several thousand years they had scrolls and priests. For the past five hundred years we’ve had books. For the last two hundred years we’ve had science. And for the last twenty, we’ve had the Internet. The communication of information is getting better all the time. The Book of Genesis is a fascinating aspect to the Bible, because it’s about information before the invention of scrolls, a time when men passed on oral stories from generation to generation. It’s a murky era to us now, hard to even believe, but can you imagine living in a time of verbal networking?

JWH – 8/6/9

The Very First Light by John C. Mather

I just finished a revised and updated version The Very First Light by John C. Mather (and John Boslough), subtitled: The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe. This makes a great book to read during the International Year of Astronomy 2009 because it shows how modern day Galileos do their work, not with handmade telescopes, but with space probes that look backwards in time, capable of finding direct evidence to when the universe was just 300,000 years old. I intentionally selected this book to be a sequel to my reading The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg. Both Mather and Weinberg won Nobel Prizes in Physics.

The Very First Light is the story of Mather’s development as a scientist, from graduate student to becoming the one of the lead scientists on the team that built the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) spacecraft, which collected data that validated basic ideas about the Big Bang theory origin of the universe. The book chronicles how Mather got involved with doing experiments with balloon launched scientific instruments, that led to proposals for NASA to launch better instruments on sounding rockets, to designing a mission for the space shuttle that had to be redesigned after the Challenger disaster, to succeeding with a vast team of scientists that successfully orbited the COBE satellite with a Delta rocket that was so old and rusty that it had patches, but in the end the COBE team made discoveries that astounded the scientific world and proved what space based astronomy laboratories can do for the field of cosmology.

In the revised edition of this book, Mather adds new information about his work on the James Webb Space Telescope, a telescope that could be more exciting than the Hubble Space Telescope. (Follow the links to official NASA sites for each telescopes.)

I found The Very First Light to be a richly rewarding read into how scientists work and think. Mather, along with his co-writer Boslough, make the story into a first person account, that quickly sketches pre-thesis discovery of the cosmic background radiation problem, to how a young scientist gets involved with NASA’s bureacacy and eventually goes to work on one of the most exciting scientific teams of the 20th century. The book was too short for me, it could have been three times as long, and still I would have hungered for more details.

I’ve always wondered how those densely packed satellite probes are designed and built, and this book only roughly describes the process. The book covers the three sensors of the COBE probe with NOVA science show level of details, but I ended up wanting a 13 part Ken Burns miniseries, the topic was so fascinating. NASA does offer Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis that has great detailed information on the COBE mission, as well as related probes that’s covered in The Very First Light for those people who want to know more.

When researching this review on the web, I noticed a lack of reviews for this book. It first came out in the early days of the web, and the version I read is a revised edition published 9/29/08. This book deserves more attention. George Smoot, Mather’s co-winner of the Pulitzer, wrote his account of the COBE story in Wrinkles in Time, which appears to be out of print, but readily available used on Amazon and ABE.

JWH – 8/2/9