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

When Did Your Time Begin?

My earliest substantial memory takes me back to when I was four.  Once, back in the 1990s, I return to the neighborhood where I lived for that memory, to my then personal big bang origin of memory time.  I stood out on the sidewalk in front of the house where I once lived and felt I was nearest to the beginning of time and space I’d ever get.  But I was wrong.  I have so far to go to find the beginning of my time.  Damn, what a rush.  Sometimes life is so intense I feel reality is a hurricane in my head, and I’ve been in real hurricanes, as well as mental ones brought on by fevers or chemicals, so I know what it’s like to have my neurons shaken up. 

At this moment, I’m jamming to my current favorite song (Howl by Florence + The Machine), drinking a beer and I’m thinking about The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, which I’ve been listening to for over a week.  I really dig that title – because Faulkner artistically succeeds at describing a hurricane in his head. 

The novel is set in 1910 and 1928, time well before my earliest memories, but now Faulkner’s story adds to my personal memory-map of time.  In recent years books by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wharton, and Dreiser fill in my awareness of America during the years of 1890-1930.  They only add to the intensity in my head.

At age four I remember discovering television and began mapping memories of America back to the 1930s.  I grew up loving black and white movies.  It wasn’t until my twenties that I got into silent movies and jazz and extended my American memories into the 1910s and 1920s.  Oh sure, I was forced to take history in school, but it never seemed as real as pop culture and art.

Reading The Sound and The Fury is like hearing a first person account of 1910, from inside Faulkner’s head, with the audio book letting me feel like I’m listening to his thoughts.  My sense of time goes back to the Big Bang, but not in a personal way.  The only time I tap into the tapestry of personal memory is when I read the words from people of the past.  My furthest reach by this kind of time travel is the early days of The Bible.  It’s very weird to be out strolling in the evening and hearing words that are thousands of years old, from ancient men living in tribal desert cultures, that existed before English or even the concept of history.

Are my real memories any better than say, those I got from watching Dead End, and experiencing a make-believe neighborhood near the river in a slum of 1930s New York City?  Or all my memories of the 1940s I got from reading Jack Kerouac?  Or the memories I find in photographs of my father’s family from Miami in the 1920s?  Tonight I caught a portion of an old Laurel and Hardy flick that used LA traffic scenes from the early 1930s.  I love that bit of realism.  I absorbed it into my own memories.

Black and white movies feel just like old memories in my head.  I can extend my sense of personal memory back as far as the photograph and film, but it’s hard to go further.  The words of the Bible do feel like hearing old people, but they don’t feel like real memories.  I love looking at art because it extends my memories back hundreds of years, but beautiful paintings only give a surreal sense of memory.  I once saw a photograph from the 1830s, and I thought that photo brought my memory as close to Jane Austen as I would ever get.

Even when I see photographs of myself which are earlier than my memories I feel they are part of my own memory.  Here I am from 1953.  I wish I could remember this day.  I wish I could remember everything.  Do you ever feel people in photos are looking back at you too?  If I stare at this photo long enough it starts looking 3D.  My grandmother here, was born in 1881, my mother 1916.  They grew up in Enid, Mississippi, next-door neighbors to Faulkner’s imaginary Mississippi.  That might be why The Sound and The Fury is so goddamn vivid, I’ve heard the voices of his characters all my life.  They sounded just like my cousins, aunts and uncles.

If there is a heaven I want it to be in the kingdom of my memories, so I can come back and explore their endless realm.  What if this life is our heaven?  Somewhere, or when, I’ll find my beginning of my time.

Jim-1953 

JWH – 7/29/9

Making SETI Chit-Chat

Humans have been playing galactic wall-flower, afraid to make first contact with our alien neighbors, but what happens when a neighborly little green alien sends us an interstellar text message, what will we type back?  Linguists aren’t even sure if interstellar communication is even possible, but let’s say we overcome the language barrier rather quickly.  What will we say?  Yeah, I know, all those pesky scientists will want to send boring mathematical messages to see if our brains are bigger than theirs, or heaven’s forbid, it’s the other way around.

No, let’s say we can get down to some intelligent species to intelligent species chit-chat, what would you want to ask our new space alien buddies?  I think the first question I’d ask is, “Do you guys know many people from around here?”  I think the first thing I’d tell them would be, “Man, it’s been very lonely in this neck of the galaxy.  Geez, I was afraid we were the only sentient beings in the universe.”

Would we have enough in common to carry on a long distant relationship?  Another question I’d be anxious to ask, “Hey, you guys got television?”  Can you imagine the The Alien Channel?  I wonder if they have a better Monday comedy lineup than “How I Met Your Mother,” “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory.”  And what would they think of the human race if they could see “True Blood,” “Big Love,” “Dexter” and “Wipeout.”

SETI gurus assume we’ll have mathematics in common, and that might be true, but what might two intelligent cultures, separated by light years, share?  Music might be a possibility.  But imagine if giant redwood trees were big brain thinkers, with IQs of 300, but only they live in a world of little activity, with long slow lives.  What would they think of us hummingbirds?

Like the geek boys in Sixteen Candles, when asked what kind of proof they would accept, I’d also have to answer:  Video!  Even if we couldn’t understand our B.E.M. friends’ Monday night TV lineup, it would be great to watch anyway, like watching nature documentaries without sound.  Can you imagine the alien porn channel – “Whoa, did ya see that egg depositor on that giant beetle babe with the gold bikini last night!”  And would aliens feel like African Americans watching old movies with racial stereotypes when watching our science fiction films?

That brings up censorship.  Should we try to put on an act and project some kind of high minded normal view of human behavior, or just let it all hang out.  And would alien cultures be as diverse, bizarre and brilliant we we are?  What if we could load up some super laser canon with petabytes per second bandwidth, and blast all the daily human culture into the sky, what would they make of us?

What if they were brilliant mathematical lizards, but mainly lazed around laying eggs and thinking big thoughts about reality, would we blow their minds?  What if our alien neighbors made us feel like a race of Mother Teresas?  What if their pop culture is so vibrant that all we can do is form a cargo cult?

We have thousands of years of far out history that our children find boring.  We have magnificent sciences and mathematics to study, but our kids prefer listening to Lady Gaga or playing Call of Duty.  Most of our pop-culture is about mating, which I doubt has much interest to other intelligent species.  Will we have much to say to each other?  I don’t speak any other languages and seldom read web pages that aren’t based in the United States.  What does that say?

Science fiction always show alien diversity, with humans boogieing with all kinds of strange looking creatures, going on adventures, smuggling cargo, and being all PC BFF.  Einstein’s speed laws will make such joy riding very unlikely, but even if we could get close, would we want to?  Homo sapiens have all kinds of bacteria and viruses living in, on and around us.  Would we want to chance Wookie cooties?  And what’s the likelihood of becoming chums with another sentient race that enjoys the same mixture of air, temperature, gravity and atmospheric pressure as we do?

Science fiction has always assumed everything would be easy, and if we weren’t trying to exterminate each other, aliens would make great friends.  But I don’t know.  That might just be overly anthropomorphic, like imagining bears will be like Winnie the Pooh.

I want to know that aliens exist.  I want to share science and mathematics.  Passing tech tips back and forth will be great too.  But how much chit-chatting can we really expect?

Reality 

If we’re lucky, and I mean really lucky, like life on Earth lucky, we’ll one day detect an intelligent message coming from a not too distant star, hopefully within a few hundred light years.  At first only scientists will understand the signal, because it will probably take a great deal of abstract knowledge to understand the unnatural patterns in the signal from the rich existing energy patterns of our universe – and probably much of public will refuse to believe our eggheads. 

Slowly the science community will build their case that will convert the unbelieving.  It will take years, decades or even centuries to partly decipher the message, and when it’s revealed,  the communiqué probably won’t be all that exciting to the average woman and man, but just knowing we’re not alone will mean a lot philosophically.  Over vast periods, that span many lifetimes, we’ll slowly development interspecies communication.  And one day we might even get video, the real proof for the unbelievers.  Eventually, the excitement will die down, because it’s doubtful we’ll ever meet our new friends, and human life being what it is now, won’t make us that broad minded across light-years, because most of us are focused on the moment, the near and now.

We might be alone in the universe.  Then again, we might not.  But if we do discover other intelligent life, it won’t take away our existential loneliness.  Humans swarm over this planet by the billions, but most of them feel very lonely, because each of us is a singular soul, living as a solitary island castaway, tossing messages in bottles onto the sea, hoping for a little communication.  When the bottles must cross the distant shores trillions of miles away, it won’t feel any different.

Song of the Moment 

JWH – 7/28/9

MAGIX Music Maker 15

Do you secretly dream of creating a hit song, but lack musical talent or singing ability, well MAGIX Music Maker 15 is for you.  Just watch the video to see what I mean:

I was impressed with this sales pitch so I downloaded the free trial version.  I’ve always wanted a Mac to play with GarageBand, but never wanted spend that much money on a computer.  This program looked like a good substitute for GarageBand on the PC.

WARNING:  This trial version has couple annoying obstacles keeping it from being a total breeze of a demo.  I’m going to pass on some tips that should reduce the frustration.  Shame on MAGIX for making such a clunky trial to such a fun program.  My first recommendation is to watch the above video because it’s a good tutorial for getting started.

The trial version of Music Maker 15 installs the shell of the program without any synths or soundpackets, but pay attention to the opening welcome screen and click on “Download soundpackets.”  Install this second download and restart the program.  It’s disappointed that MAGIX just didn’t include the second download in the original download, because this is a stumbling block that will confuse many trial users.  The other buttons on the welcome screen don’t work right unless you have this download installed, and the program itself will be empty of music to arrange.

When you get to the Welcome screen the second time, I suggest loading and play the two demo songs, especially the Chillout demo.  Once a song is loaded, hit the play button icon in the middle of the screen.  These standard cassette style control button icons are how you play, pause, stop, rewind, record, etc.  Listen to the song and watch what’s happening in the various tracks.  This is a lesson in music by itself.  Songs are composed of tracks, each of which has an instrument or vocal.  Notice how the Chillout song has tracks with blank spaces.  That’s a key to composing with this program.  Your drummer doesn’t need to play all the time, nor does your singer need to sing all the time.

After you have played the songs, it’s time to hit Start new arrangement.  This is were the fun and work begins.  I started with the Chillout style.  You’ll see the trial version now has two styles to play with, Chillout vol. 3, and Techno Trance Vol. 11.  When you buy the full version of the program you get a whole lot more.  But these two are enough to get an idea of how the program works.  By the way, if you click on the View option in the top menu, you’ll see we’re in EasyMode.  You’ll want to stay in that mode, but if you turn it off, you’ll see a lot more options.

In the Soundpools section of your screen, you’ll see Styles, Instruments and a selector box showing all the instruments.  Notice the little speaker icon by the Name of the instrument.  If you click on it you’ll hear the instrument.  Clicking the icon again stops it.  The top part of the screen is your blank canvas where you edit your song.  Just click on an instrument and drag it to a track location.  Like I said before, study the video above for visual clues on how to do things.

I started with drums to imagine my first song.  I figure the standard method is to lay down rhythm tracks first, and then solo instruments and finally vocal tracks.   Basically I followed what the guy was doing in the video tutorial above.  It’s easy to create 2, 4 and 8 bar segments of sounds, and combine other instruments on other track locations. 

Before long I had a 30 second song with 6 tracks that sounded pretty good.  After that, I just became addicted to rearranging the sound of my song.  I bet a kid who has the ability to play a video game for hours could really work and enjoy this program, and develop a talent for music.  This program makes creating songs easy enough that anyone can start, but educational enough to let users who have sticking power learn a lot about music, both composing and arranging.

Each time I added a new instrument segment I played the whole of my song so far.  Just listening gave me inspiration of what to try next.  I was now at a place where I was arranging a song with immediate results.  I bet whenever I listen to a real song, I’m going to be mentally breaking it down into tracks of instruments and vocals.  The basic version of Music Maker 15 has 64 tracks of workspace.  At one time, studios had to record songs live, with all musicians and singers performing together.  Then came 2 and 4 track recorders, and the concept has been expanding ever since.  All the egos of a rock band no longer have to work together in the same studio room.

As a user of a computer song arranger, you can assemble songs from a library of sound loops, record your own performances and vocals, or get arrangements from other computer composers and create digital collaborations.  This makes me want GarageBand all the more, because v. 5 allows you to buy music tutorials from famous musicians.  I hope the same concept will come to Music Maker.

Back to the program.  If you can get this far, where you can assemble sound loops and begin building a song, you’ll discover if you have the addiction or not.  Learn to use the scissors icon to cut off segments you don’t like.  It’s pretty easy to make a wall of sound that works, but it won’t be like real songs.  At this point you are composing.

Just playing with this program for an hour quickly taught me a lot about musical composition, and already I feel the blanks in the tracks are the key to making the song sound more like real music.  It’s extremely easy to experiment, and if you persist, the program does pay off fast.  The demo is good for 7 days, with the option for a 30 day extension.  I get the feeling I’m going to buy the full package though, which is $59.99 at the MAGIX site, but $48.99 at Amazon with free shipping.

If you go to YouTube and search on “Magix Music Maker,” you’ll find many songs budding composers have uploaded.  Most aren’t that sophisticated, but I think this one shows real promise:

 

JWH – 7/26/9