A look back at our origins

We are the first human civilization to remove our envisioned "golden age" from an imagined-nostalgic past and instead plant that better-than-the-present era (tentatively) in a potential future.

The irony? We can only achieve that great accomplishment if we learn as much as possible, about where we came from.  How we (species, society, individual) came about. What parts of our heritage must be overcome, and what hidden, potential gifts have yet to be realized, or even discovered.

Exploring all of this is exciting stuff. And so, in honor of a newly minted Physical Anthropologist we happen to know, let's start as deep in time as possible.....

...like how about a newly discovered missing link between prokaryotes and eukaryotes? Amazing. Of the three major super-domains of cellular life on Earth – bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes (which include metazoan, multi-celled organisms, like us), it now appears that we are more closely related to the archaea, which were discovered as a separate clade not so long ago and were at-first thought to be a relic corner of life’s diversity. This sure puts Greg Bear’s weird novel VITALS in a new light. 

== Galaxies and deadly rhythms! ==

Did Dark Matter Doom the Dinosaurs? “We know there’s a lot of dark matter in the Milky Way, and it’s possible dark matter isn’t evenly distributed but occurs in dense clumps. Maybe our solar system passes through clumps of it periodically." If those clumps are dense enough to wreak havoc, they could knock comets loose and cause collisions...

... or else maybe heat Earth’s interior and cause massive volcanic eruptions?  Or somehow set loose all sorts of other species-obliterating disasters. That’s the premise behind a recent paper by New York University geologist Michael R. Rampino.

Back in 1984 I had an article in ANALOG that calculated a different hypothesis to explain a 26 to 30 million year extinction cycle . What if such a recurring pattern were caused not by the Earth passing through the galactic disk, but by something  'lapping" us, as it orbits, farther in toward Galactic center?  The article was "The Deadly Thing at 2.4 Kiloparsecs," Analog's most popular science bit, that year. Almost any extinction cycle  might correlate with some Lapping Object, which might sear a swathe of devastation on its way around the galaxy, wreaking some degree of havoc, each time it sweeps past our solar system.

I mention this to suggest that there are many potential ways to get galactic time scales in cycles of extinctions.

Speaking of mass extinction events… O-o-okay... folks at CERN now say they might make micro-black holes after all.  And there's nothing to worry about!  In fact, my logical side is not worried.  

But still... I described one potential outcome... in EARTH.

== Becoming Human ==

Do tools make man? Pushing our origins back even further...the world's oldest stone tools have been found in Kenya: stone flakes and anvils found off the shores of Lake Turkana date back more than 3.3 million years ago -- half a million years before the appearance of our genus Homo.

Another re-assessment of our ancient family tree comes from a partial jawbone discovered in Ethiopia, radiometrically dating to nearly 2.8 million years ago -- which makes it the oldest known fossil of our genus Homo. 

How has biology shaped humanity? How did humans rise to dominance on planet earth? In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, historian Yuval Noah Harari tracks the evolution of homo sapiens from the Paleolithic to modern-day, charting three major upheavals...

the cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution and most recently, the scientific revolution, that shaped the trajectory of humanity and human civilization -- covering some of the same ideas as Jared Diamond's 1999 classic book, Guns, Germs and Steel. See an extensive review of Sapiens in the Wall Street Journal.

== Bottlenecks of Evolution ==

Indeed, genetics has shed light on what may have been “bottlenecks” in human evolution.  One of them, purported to have been 70,000 years ago, might have reduced the population of human ancestors under 10,000 and threatened extinction. 

Now, another bottleneck is proposed that might have occurred as recently at 8,000 years ago, while early agriculturalists were preparing to leap into urban life. By studying Y-chromosome DNA and mitochondrial DNA, scientists are able to deduce the numbers of female and male ancestors a population has. It's always more female, which is consistent also with mammals, in general. Not all males get to breed.  But the normal human ratio is about 1.3 female breeders-to-one male. Apparently is was much bigger disparity, during a period around 8000 years ago. Explanations range from a sudden advantage to certain kinds of males to some sort of weird virus that only affected males across the whole globe, just before large villages formed towns.

Or did agriculture itself, often requiring brutally hard physical labor, play a role? Might the "taming" of human males, making them suitable for denser living, have had some weird side effects? Will we ever know? See: A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture.

Another look at a leap for human evolution: Did humans -- and their dogs -- help drive Neanderthals to extinction? See this explored in The Invaders: How Humans and their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction, by Pat Shipman. 

More evidence for 'recent' human interbreeding with Neanderthals: Genetic analysis 40,000-year old jaw from Romania revealed that 5 to 11% of this ancient European man's DNA was Neanderthal -- indicating that he must have had a Neanderthal ancestor in the previous four to six generations. 

Insight into the darker side of the human past: Paleolithic remains show cannibalistic habits of our ancestors -- at sites in England dating back about 15,000 years ago.

== even weirder ==

Marshall Brain’s new book “The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches” wins a prize for telegraphing its point in the title, alone!  

It explores how the future will unfold as the second intelligent species – Artificial Intelligence (AI) -- emerges.  Well, well.  

We are getting plenty of folks taking up extreme apocalyptic or utopian views of all this.  But I just don’t think that way.

Where are we headed? Looking ahead: The Atlantic Council has reprinted my brief future projection: The Avalon Missions: Race for the Stars.

== Mickey points the way? ==

Disney is “betting a billion dollars on a magical wrist band.” A new ticketing method that will let each member of your family get personalized treatment from the instant you enter the park, always welcomed into the correct line, walking out of stores with merchandise paid for without visiting a cashier, ordering food before arriving at a restaurant and sitting at any table, knowing the food will arrive….

…And if someone doesn’t add this to my predictions registry wiki, then I don’t have fans anymore! 

Read this chapter from EXISTENCE --- The Shelter of Tradition -- set at the Shanghai World of Disney and the Monkey King, in the year 2045.  And tell me Disney shouldn’t at least give me a nice family pass. Only the date was wrong.  

Stuff catches up with science fiction faster and faster.

Robert Heinlein and looking Beyond This Horizon

Robert A. Heinlein was a question-asker. And much less "political" in any classic terms, than most later critics would perceive and/or be willing to admit. Sure, he expressed countless political opinions!  But these often contradicted musings that he offered in other novels. While it's true he had a general "libertarian" bent, that leaning was in directions so diametrically different than today's dominant "libertarian cult" of selfish solipsism that I deem it likely he would have - by now - returned to the Party that he worked for, most of his life -- the Democratic Party.

But hold that thought.  In honor of the imminent release of Part Two of the Heinlein biography, I want to offer up some much more general observations about this truly remarkable character, who changed many lives and transformed science fiction forever.

Fist-off: I consider Robert Heinlein’s most fascinating novel to be his prescriptive utopia Beyond This Horizon. (A "prescriptive utopia" is a tome wherein an author “prescribes” what he or she believes a better civilization would look like.) 

While Heinlein did opine about society in many books, from Starship Troopers to Glory Road, (and, as I said, in many cases each contradicting the other), it is in Beyond This Horizon that you’ll find him clearly stating ... This Is The Way I Think Things Ought To Be. And it turns out to be a fascinating, surprisingly nuanced view of our potential future.

Like most Heinlein novels, Beyond This Horizon divides pretty evenly into two parts -- one vigorous and active, followed by a lazily conversational part. It is only the second half of this book that I hold in high regard. Heinlein wrote the first half at behest of the famed editor of Astounding Magazine, John W. Campbell, who was then holding forth on one of his favorite themes . . . that “an armed society is a polite society.”

In pushing this strange notion, Campbell was behaving very much like his arch-nemesis, Karl Marx. A few anecdotes and a good just-so story outweigh a hundred historical counter-examples. 

But no matter. Heinlein did as good a job of conveying Campbell’s weirdly counterfactual idea* in fiction as anyone could. So much so that the first half of Beyond This Horizon has been cited by state legislators in both Texas and Florida, proposing that all citizens go around armed! Naturally, this leads (paradoxically) to exactly what you'd expect, the opposite of Campbell's forecast, a wild shoot-em-up, in the first half of Beyond This Horizon.  An irony which RAH suddenly veers away from, at the midway point.

This division between halves is typical of Heinlein novels and it makes reading them an interesting, multi-phase experience. Generally, RAH was a master at starting his tales–in fact, I recommend that all neo writers study carefully the first few pages of any Heinlein book, for his spectacularly effective scene-setting and establishment of point-of-view. (The opening scene of The Star Beast is the best example of show-don’t-tell that anyone can find.) Alas, most of his novels reach a vigorous climax, concluding part one… and then peter out disappointingly in the last half, amid a morass of garrulous, often contradictory finger-wagging and speculative-blather.

This is where Beyond This Horizon reverses all expectations. Sure, part one is action and part two is talk, as usual. Only in this case, the action is tediously silly... and the talk-talk is riveting! In fact, this is where Robert Heinlein displays how broad his intellectual reach can take us.

Here - rather than in his novels Starship Troopers or Stranger in a Strange Land, we see the clearest ever expression of his political philosophy, which is demonstrably neither “fascist” nor anywhere near as conservative as some simple-minded critics might have us think.

== Heinlein's Visions of the Future ==

Indeed, Heinlein's famed libertarianism had limits, moderated and enriched by compassion, pragmatism and a profound faith that human beings can improve themselves, gradually, by their own diligence and goodwill. A libertarianism of the compassionately practical variety preached by Adam Smith and the American Founders, not by psychopathic lunatics like Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand.

I was amazed by many other aspects of this wonderful book-within-a-book, especially by Heinlein’s startlingly simple suggestion for how to deal with the moral quandaries of genetic engineering — what’s now called the “Heinlein Solution” — allowing couples to select which naturally produced sperm and ova they want to combine into a child, but forbidding them to actually alter the natural human genome.

Consider the elegance of this proposed compromise. Thus, the resulting child, while “best” in many ways (free of any disease genes, etc), will still be one that the couple might have had naturally. Gradual human improvement, without any of the outrageously hubristic meddling that wise people rightfully fear. (No fashionable feathers or lizard tails, just kids who are the healthiest and smartest and strongest the parents might have had, anyway.) It is a notion so insightful that biologists 40 years later have only recently started to discuss what may turn out to be Heinlein’s principal source of fame, centuries from now.

When it comes to politics, his future society (in the prescriptive Beyond This Horizon) is, naturally, a descendant of the America Heinlein loved above all things. But it has evolved in two directions at once. Anything having to do with human creativity, ambition or enterprise is wildly competitive and nearly unregulated -- though with no feudal meddling, inherited status or presumptions based on race or gender or class. 

But where it comes to human needs, the situation is wholly socialistic! One character even says, in a shocked tone of voice: “Naturally, food and shelter and education are free! What kind of people do you take us for?”

Are you surprised? None of this fits into the dogma of Ayn Rand, whose followers have taken over the libertarian movement. If Robert Heinlein was a libertarian, it was clearly of a more subtle kind, less historically or anthropologically naive, more compassionate… and more interesting.

But here’s the crux. For the most part, with Robert Heinlein, you felt he wasn’t so much lecturing or preaching as offering to argue with you! His books let you fume and mutter and debate with this bright, cantankerous, truly American soul, long after his body expired. 

Indeed, this is why I seem to be far, far more forgiving of Paul Veerhoeven's Starship Troopers flick, than almost anyone else. Veerhoeven and screenwriter Edward Neumeier put more actual lines of dialogue from the book into characters' mouths than almost any other novelization you could name! The characters speak to every value that RAH (experimentally) mused in the novel... to which Veerhoeven answered with twists of irony and discomforting symbolism, as if saying to Heinlein "all right, sir, you get the words -- and the characters believe them all! But I still find it worrisome, and my camera will show a darker side."

To which I imagine RAH answering: "Fair enough... that is, if I had been around to offer a counter-rebuttal!" 

That's the part I wanted. And maybe I'll put it in a story. 

But it is this joy in argument – in posing and chewing over thought experiments – that I want to conclude with.  It is the very soul of what it means to be a writer or reader of genuine science fiction.  For SF is supposed to be humanity's Department of Advanced Exploration, Thought Experimentation, and Argumentation About The Future!

(Amid a plague of simplistic dystopias and apocalypses that poke at no new failure modes but simply offer cheap, lazy ways to put cliched "chosen ones" in peril...that mission of sci fi appears to have been forgotten by all but a few, alas. One way to tell?  Is the hero(ine) a "chosen one"? Are the great masses of surrounding citizens nothing more than bleating-useless sheep?  See more on this.) 

That is why it's dismally unfair to take a true sci fi artist like Heinlein and dismiss him as all one-thing or another. The "fascist" appellation might feel good to you, when you compare Starship Troopers to Farnham's Freehold, but it it is stupidly simplistic when you contrast with Double Star and Stranger in a Strange Land. 

True science fiction seeks a positive sum game. The gedankenexperiment aims to probe a section of possibility space. The writer's next exploration may go to a completely different part of the frontier... beyond this horizon.

== Heinlein: In Dialogue with his century ==

Finally, for more about Heinlein, see the extensive new two-volume biography - from Tor Books - by William H. Patterson, Jr.:

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Vol. 1 (1907 - 1948): Learning Curve., 
followed by volume two:

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Vol. 2: The Man Who Learned Better, 1948 to 1988.

Patterson (who lamentably passed away recently) is off-target or a bit clumsy in places. But he did us all a service by elucidating this uniquely American life.

To honor Heinlein's forward vision: Pay it forward! Consider supporting The Heinlein Society -- which provides scholarships to students, educational materials to schools, and books to the military.

== addendum on guns as enforcers of a "polite society" ==

* The basic notion of Beyond This Horizon and even Campbell is that the best protection for freedom and rights must be rooted in the individual feeling confidently empowered to defend those rights herself or himself.  That notion underlies reciprocal accountability which is the underlying force within our enlightenment arenas... markets, democracy, science, courts and sports.  As I demonstrate in The Transparent Society.

But it is simple-minded to the extreme, to actually believe that can happen... via guns.  Just slapping arms on every hip will not make a "polite society"... not overnight.  We are still an impulsive, emotion-drenched species and far too many of us (indeed a whole lot of young males) respond to emotional challenge by grabbing up the nearest weapon. This experiment ran, in the Wild West, and the death rate was prodigious. 

Sure, if we did this, we would become more polite!  After a thousand years of blazing away at each other, the courteous and slow-to-anger would have lots more kids, passing on those traits! But till then? Sorry, our accountability arenas -- markets, democracy, science, courts and sports -- use more subtle means. But not all is loast for Campbell and Heinlein!  Because we can do this!  We can go around "armed" and hold each other instantly accountable and enforce politeness...

...with cameras.  It is happening already. The violent (even cops) and bullies and even the noxiously rude are getting comeuppance... only with this major difference from guns: that the quickest draw doesn't win. And if you "shoot" unfairly, there is a later chance to apologize.  

Try doing that with a pistola, Tex. 

Oh... see my rational suggestion of an actual, feasible compromise on gun laws.  Won't happen, of course.  Too much crazy. And RAH has joined Barry Goldwater spinning in his grave.