Arthur C. Clarke: 1917–2008

Well, damn.

I guess part of me thought he’d live forever, or at least long enough to see all the marvels he imagined or predicted. Hell, he saw geostationary satellites and global telecommunications become reality, why not space elevators or Martian colonies or deep-space travel as well?

Well, damn.

I guess part of me thought he’d live forever, or at least long enough to see all the marvels he imagined or predicted. Hell, he saw geostationary satellites and global telecommunications become reality, why not space elevators or Martian colonies or deep-space travel as well?

As a young nerd I read a number of his books: Dolphin Island was first, I think, way back in high school English class, though I haven’t picked it up since. There were also some of the classics, like 2001, Childhood’s End, The Sands of Mars, Rendezvous With Rama (never got into the sequels), The Fountains of Paradise. I loved them all, but my favourite was and still is The Songs of Distant Earth. Almost every page is gold, from the arrival of the Magellans to Thalassa to Moses Kaldor’s discussion of God (a theme Clarke picks up every now and then in his fiction), the conflicts, the heartbreaks, the dramas big and small, as well as the scorps’ evolution to semi-sentience. Like much of his work before and since, Songs shows us a very optimistic future. It’s a future where humanity has grown up, and mostly left aggression and bigotry behind; where we can find peace without sacrificing progress, and without losing our essential nature. A future where race, religion, gender and sexuality are just not that big a deal, and the boundaries of love and family are wider and more flexible.

Lieutenant Horton was an amusing companion, but Loren was glad to get rid of him as soon as the electrofusion currents had welded his broken bones. As Loren discovered in somewhat wearisome detail, the young engineer had fallen in with a gang of hairy hunks whose second main interest in life appeared to be riding microjet surfboards up vertical waves. Horton had found, the hard way, that it was even more dangerous than it looked.

“I’m quite surprised,” Loren had interjected at one point in a rather seamy narrative. “I’d have sworn you were ninety percent hetero.”

“Ninety-two, according to my profile,” Horton said cheerfully. “But I like to check my calibration from time to time.”

The lieutenant was only half joking. Somewhere he had heard that hundred percenters were so rare that they were classed as pathological.

Heh. Yes, it’s completely gratuitous, but Clarke pulls it off, and I can’t tell you what that kind of writing meant to my still-closeted teen self. I like to think it eventually helped me come out to myself, or at least made the way smoother by defusing any internalised homophobia I may have had.

More recently I bought his Collected Stories, a massive sampling of his short stories from 1937 to 1997. Though it’s hard to pick a favourite amongst all these gems, I’m very fond of the “White Hart” stories. Written in the 40’s and 50’s, these take place in the (probably partly real) London pub “White Hart,” a hangout of writers and engineering geeks. These loosely connected tales of university life and improbable inventions, full of dry, low-key British humour, remind me of P.G. Wodehouse’s stories—though with nutty professors and eccentric inventors instead of useless upper-class twits.

I also have to give a special nod to The Wire Continuum, the last one in the collection. Co-written with Stephen Baxter (another fave author of mine), this is a sequel to the very first story in the book, entitled Travel by Wire! A cute but unremarkable story of matter transmission through power lines is re-explored sixty years later as these two stupendously smart and talented minds play at finding applications to this technology. We’re treated to surgical teleportation, faster-than-light communication, instantaneous extrasolar travel and finally, the direct linking of minds leading to an evolutionary quantum leap for humankind. Some of these ideas are further fleshed out in The Light of Other Days, another Baxter/Clarke collaboration.

Finally, there’s an essay of his I reread regularly: “Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Credo'”, appearing in the September/October 2001 issue of Skeptical Inquirer (one of several specials they did on science and religion). I found it a bit rambling and unfocussed, which I guess is understandable when you’re trying to talk about God and what others have said about God. But the grand vision, gentle humour and warm optimism are pure Clarke.

I began this essay by saying that men have debated the problems of existence for thousands of years—and that is precisely why I am skeptical about most of the answers. One of the great lessons of modern science is that millennia are only moments. It is not likely that ultimate questions will be settled in such short periods of time, or that we will really know much about the universe while we are still crawling around in the playpen of the Solar System.

He concludes by quoting form his earlier book Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. I get chills every time I read this passage.

Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the somber hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of color and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

Fog, Fish and Old-Time Photos

This has been a pretty interesting weekend. On Leap Friday I almost went skiing. A couple of friends and I had planned it in advance, but the weather turned out to be too warm. It was raining in the city, and even on top of Seymour it wasn’t much more than heavy, wet snow. But that was nothing compared to the killer fog. Seriously, the drive up (and back down) was harrowing; without those little reflector thingies in the middle of the road, I’m sure we would have either crashed or plunged to our deaths a dozen times.

This has been a pretty interesting weekend. On Leap Friday I almost went skiing. A couple of friends and I had planned it in advance, but the weather turned out to be too warm. It was raining in the city, and even on top of Seymour it wasn’t much more than heavy, wet snow. But that was nothing compared to the killer fog. Seriously, the drive up (and back down) was harrowing; without those little reflector thingies in the middle of the road, I’m sure we would have either crashed or plunged to our deaths a dozen times. And yes, it was very pretty, but there ain’t no way you can ski in that.

So we just went back to hang out at their place and watch anime.

Saturday was my first Taiji class in over a month. What with one thing and another, either the class was canceled or I couldn’t make it. It felt good to practice again and (bonus!) work on the staff form.

Sunday? Five hours of volleyball. And a special challenge as I got to play Setter for the first time in… well, ever. I wasn’t very good at it, sad to say, as I kept drifting back to the Middle position. But after a few games I got a little better; and I also got newfound respect for that position. I knew it was the hardest to play, but damn.

Monday, I had off. And I had a choice to make: should I sleep in, then veg around all day? It was tempting, especially since I’d recently bought the Little Britain DVD set. But no, I was going to enrich my mind. So I took the train as usual, and spent the rest of the morning at the Aquarium. I hadn’t been in ages, and it was great to get reacquainted with the froggies and the fishies and the anemones and the alligator and the sea otters (OMG SO CUTE!!!) and the belugas and the dolphins.

First you were like, whoa! And then we were like, WHOA!

Anemones

Clothed Crab

Panamanian Golden Frog

Sea Otters

Finale

The bad weather put the kibosh to my plan to walk along the seawall, so I came back downtown and visited the Art Gallery. Did you know, the place isn’t just for political rallies? That they use it to actually display art? It’s true! Seriously, though, this first ever visit to the gallery was wonderful. I especially enjoyed TruthBeauty, an exhibition on the Pictorialist movement. I think what captivated me was the Pictorialists’ exploration of this brand-new medium, experimenting with mood and composition—just as I am myself doing, though part of me feels like a rank amateur compared to these past masters.

No, don’t mind me. This is just something that’s been percolating for a while; I’m looking for… inspiration, I guess, different directions, in my photography, but I don’t know where to look. Maybe the Pictorialists will give me a clue. In the meantime, I’ll just keep my eyes open and my camera ready.

I’m cultured, y’all

Last Friday I went to the Eastside Culture Crawl. And I haven’t blogged about it not because I didn’t enjoy it or it didn’t make an impression me, but because I just didn’t know what to say. It’s… art. I don’t know much about art. Like the saying goes, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” And I feel the same applies here. Still, let’s give it a go.

Last Friday I went to the Eastside Culture Crawl. And I haven’t blogged about it not because I didn’t enjoy it or it didn’t make an impression me, but because I just didn’t know what to say. It’s… art. I don’t know much about art. Like the saying goes, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” And I feel the same applies here. Still, let’s give it a go.

Wooden

For starters, it really wasn’t what I expected. I’d imagined big art galleries and showrooms, but the two studios I visited (the Mergatroid Building and Parker Street Studios) were very utilitarian warehousey buildings each housing many independent little studios. Which I should have known just from looking at the Web site, but there you go. And you know what? It was a lot better that way. It brought the exhibits down to a more human scale; looking around the small studios, I could see half-finished work (especially in furniture shops) and the tools of the trade. They felt like very productive spaces, and I could easily imagine the creative process going on.

Painting, Rubber Gloves and Dirty Sink

Mind you, it didn’t bring the artwork’s prices down to a human scale, but hey; artists gotta eat too. I won’t go the “Why pay $1.8M for three coloured stripes?” route.

Various Paintings

Crowds were fierce, and didn’t let up even when we left shortly before the exhibition was supposed to close. Not bad for studios set square in the middle of an industrial park, where parking was definitely not easy to find.

At first I took photos of the studios (including the studio names) but quickly stopped. I’d tried that before, when I went whale watching in Tofino and it just didn’t go anywhere. So instead of taking photos, I got up close and personal with a lot of the art. It was purely unconscious; didn’t even notice I was doing it until it was pointed out to me, which is even more interesting since I never thought of myself as a very tactile person. But there I was feeling and running my hands over the smooth ceramics, warm carved woods, cool plastics and cold metals. (Not the paintings hanging on the walls, of course. That’d be silly.) Neat. I’ve never tried building anything with my hands except IKEA™ furniture, but now I can totally see the appeal.

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions

I recently bought Bruce Springsteen’s We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a collection of American folk and gospel songs. Frankly, I’d never paid much attention to Springsteen; but one day on the train, I was listening to Dancing in the Dark and a coworker asked me if I had any other Springsteen songs on my iPod. I didn’t, so I went online, and found this album. What actually caught my eye was the title of one of the tracks: the famous gospel hymn O Mary Don’t You Weep.

I recently bought Bruce Springsteen’s We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a collection of American folk and gospel songs. Frankly, I’d never paid much attention to Springsteen; but one day on the train, I was listening to Dancing in the Dark and a coworker asked me if I had any other Springsteen songs on my iPod. I didn’t, so I went online, and found this album. What actually caught my eye was the title of one of the tracks: the famous gospel hymn O Mary Don’t You Weep.

Well if I could I surely would
Stand on the rock where Moses stood
Pharaoh’s army got drownded
O Mary don’t you weep

I’d never heard the song before… but it was familiar. They sung the two lines of the chorus in episode #6 of Dykes To Watch Out For (that’s the Seder episode, collected in More Dykes To Watch Out For). I didn’t know then what kind of song it was, only that the lyrics did seem appropriate for Passover, what with the Red Sea crossing and all. And while I originally thought the “Mary” was Miriam, Aaron’s sister who sang when Pharaoh’s army got drownded (c.f.: Exodus 15:20–21), it’s really Mary Madgalene grieving for Jesus—which I thought was interesting since most of the images are from the Old Testament. More on that later.

God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water, but fire next time
Pharaoh’s army got drownded
O Mary don’t you weep

The song is fantastically catchy, with a boisterous jazzy sound that maybe isn’t historically correct, but I won’t complain. I’m not that much of a purist, and I trust The Boss to respect his sources.

I’d heard previous versions of two of the songs on this album: How Can I Keep From Singing? was recorded by Enya on Shepherd Moons. I’m not sure which I prefer; Enya’s style is perfectly suited to this quiet, low-key hymn, but Springsteen’s version has many people singing together, which gives it a very different feel—that of a community united in song. The second familiar song is Jesse James, already covered by The Pogues on Rum, Sodomy & The Lash. Springsteen’s version is far better, without the annoying pistol-shot sound effects and that banjo bit at the very end. I don’t know, it feels like The Pogues were to make it self-consciously “American,” which is just irritating for those of us from this side of the pond. Plus, Bruce’s voice was better, and so was his music.

Speaking of folk heroes, I adored his rendition of John Henry, the steel-driving man. A man who probably didn’t exist but whose story has been raised to the status of myth over the last century and a half. They sure don’t make ’em like that anymore.

I totally misunderstood My Oklahoma Home the first few times I listened to it. It sounded like one man’s love for his homeland (“Well I’m a roam’n Oklahoman/But I’m always close to home/I’ll never get homesick until I die”); with the farm and wife being “blown away” as sort of humorous episodes to explain his freedom of movement. But the song is not about freedom, it’s about loss, about the Dust Bowl: the man’s farm is destroyed by the drought and wind, leaving him poor (“Everything except my mortgage blown away”), alone, homeless and drifting.

So I took off down the road
Yeah when the South wind blowed
I traveled with the wind upon my back

Yet wherever he roams his farm is always near, and he keeps hearing his animals and wife on the wind, so… it’s not all negative? Maybe I’m still not getting the song. As a city boy born and raised, I’ve never felt the pull of the “American Dream,” the need to settle down and own a piece of land.

Fun little factoid: the song mentions a race to stake out land. This probably refers to one of the several Oklahoma land runs, the first of which took place on April 22nd, 1889. I learned about that one in particular from reading Lucky Luke (issue #12, La Ruée sur l’Oklahoma). Ah, memories.

Buffalo Gals is a bouncy little song about prostitutes. The gals in question were in Buffalo, NY, the western end of the Erie Canal. Shippers who’d traveled 300 miles from the Hudson River to Lake Erie could dance with the dollies by the light of the moon—for a price.

Froggie Went A-Courtin’ is a cute little song about a frog marrying a mouse. It reminds me a lot of Pinci-Pincette, a traditional French-Canadian song covered by La Bottine Souriante. In both songs there’s a wedding, lots of animal guests bringing food and entertainment, and hilarious mayhem when those guests are attacked by a nasty predator (a big black snake in Froggie, the house cat in Pinci-Pincette). The liner notes say earlier versions of the song date back to 16th century Scotland. I guess funny animal antics are a common denominator in many cultures.

Eyes on the Prize is another soft and quiet gospel hymn. At first I just listened to the melody without paying much attention to the words. The chorus (“Keep your eyes on the prize/Hold on”) seemed just another exhortation to focus on your Heavenly reward at the expense of your life on Earth. As an atheist, of course, that sort of thing rubs me the wrong way. But then I read the lyrics and the liner notes, and my perspective changed.

Only chain that a man can stand
Is that chain of hand on hand
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on

I’m gonna board that big Greyhound
Carry the love from town to town
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on

The line about the big Greyhound has to refer to the Freedom Rides and so can’t be older than 1961. (That’s perfectly fine; folk songs are not set in stone, but evolve over time, according to the needs of the singer and their audience. In fact, the liner notes say Eyes on the Prize was rewritten in 1956 by Alice Wine, a civil rights activist.) Once I made that connection, I listened to the other gospel songs on the album with fresh ears, over and over… and over and over. I’d known, intellectually, that Christian abolitionist and civil rights activists were inspired by their religion but I hadn’t really understood how. Scriptures and hymns never inspired my activism; I saw them at best as quaint distractions and at worst as tools of oppression when thrown out by bigoted Christians. But here were all these Biblical images of hope and renewal and liberation: the rainbow after the Flood, Jacob’s Ladder, the Israelites leaving Egypt, Jesus returning from the dead, prison doors opening before Paul and Silas (c.f.: Acts 16:16–25). No preaching or dogma, just inspiration for love, brotherhood, and changing things for the better. And for the first time in a long while, I felt Christian hymns spoke to me. Wow. Maybe all I needed was the right singer?

Maybe all I needed was the right message in those hymns. It’s a tricky thing, religion, because what you get out of it is exactly what you bring in. You could read the Flood story and focus on the rainbow sign and renewal of the Earth… or take the story literally and spend your whole life searching for Noah’s Ark. You could read Exodus and be inspired by the Israelites’ march from slavery and bondage into a better Promised Land… or start dreaming of conquest and Manifest Destiny when reading what they did to said Promised Land when they got there. I guess it’s natural that images that inspire activists would also touch me.

You could say O Mary Don’t You Weep, Jacob’s Ladder and Eyes on the Prize are the counterpoint to those old-time missionary tracts I blogged about a while ago. They are part of the same religion, nominally, but otherwise are complete opposites, inspiring action instead of empty prayers, hope instead of fatalism, human dignity instead of servility, a loving God instead of a wrathful God.

The Seeger Sessions is an amazing album, full of songs that made me giggle, made me bounce, made me reflect… sometimes all three at the same time. That’s the thing I love about folk music: it’s a glimpse into different cultures, perhaps different languages or different times. And even for the slower songs, there’s an energy, a vitality that I don’t hear in most modern music. During the recording sessions included on the DVD side (all live, with no rehearsals) you can see the musicians not only having a blast, but also showing off their skills: improvising, jamming, playing with the melodies. It was totally awesome.

Around The World In Eight Minutes

I just finished reading Jules Verne’s 1886 novel Robur-le-Conquérant. Quite an enjoyable little book, though not really Verne’s best. I did appreciate all his exploration of the science behind the Albatross, Robur’s wondrous flying craft—Verne’s work is meant to educate as well as entertain, and I’m a sucker for a good science history lesson.

I just finished reading Jules Verne’s 1886 novel Robur-le-Conquérant. Quite an enjoyable little book, though not really Verne’s best. I did appreciate all his exploration of the science behind the Albatross, Robur’s wondrous flying craft—Verne’s work is meant to educate as well as entertain, and I’m a sucker for a good science history lesson. And I’m no engineer, so I can’t say how far-fetched it really is, with the seventy-four counter-rotating propellors to provide lift and the two large propellors at fore and aft for horizontal movement, but it’s clear Verne’s done his homework: he spends a couple of pages describing in great detail past research into heavier-than-air flight. There wasn’t any practical success by 1886 (and wouldn’t be for quite a few years), though certainly not for lack of trying.

I won’t nitpick the Albatross’ fantastically sturdy materials, nigh-indestructible parts and impossibly efficient batteries; that’s just hand-waved away by reason of Robur being a brilliant engineer. Which is okay: this was a time when scientific knowledge and engineering moxie were basically super-powers in their own right. Likewise, I’ll just sigh and try to ignore Verne’s chauvinism and racism: non-Europeans are almost all depicted as savage brutes or, at best, ignorant bumpkins: Prudent’s Black servant, Frycollins, is a stereotypical Coon character, contributing nothing to the story except a bit of tiresome comic relief. Again, sign of the times. I guess that stuff was funnier a hundred years ago.

The plot is nothing to write home about, and has a few gaping holes. We never find out what makes Robur (you know, the title character) tick, or why on Earth he’d kidnap Prudent and Evans—revenge? pride? to increase the numbers on his island hideaway?—and take them on a trip around the world. But whatever the reason we’re glad he did, because we the readers get to go along for the ride.

And what a ride it is. Here we have a flying machine that can go up to 200 km/h, more than twice as fast as the fastest trains of the day and, as Verne notes, fast enough to go around the world in just eight days, cross oceans and wilderness with the greatest of ease, and carry a small crew in perfect comfort. It’s hard to imagine now just how mind-blowing that must have been: back then there were no flying machines except balloons, which weren’t much good for long-distance transportation. Trains were pretty fast but not always terribly safe, and of course were limited by rails.

I think this is what science-fiction is all about: to see how technology and science can make possible whole new kinds of stories. Forget the plot: stories like this helped make the world a lot smaller to Victorian readers. And it’s hard to imagine just how big the world was back then. In those days it would have taken me days instead of hours to travel from, let’s say, Vancouver to Ottawa, and that’s if I could afford a train ticket. To communicate with my family in Ottawa I could have sent a telegram, or used one of those newfangled telephone machines—assuming the infrastructure reached to the West Coast, which is doubtful. If I was curious about some faraway place, I could go to the library or bookstore (or, if I were rich enough, my own books). If I were really lucky, there’d be photographs. Nowadays I have at my fingertips a vast information network undreamed of by even the most delirious futurologists of the 19th century. I can easily look up any information on the places the Albatross visits and follow its path on Google Earth™.

The journey begins in Philadelphia. On to Quebec City (which Verne calls «la capitale du Canada»—though that was only true for a few years), then Montreal with the Victoria Bridge, and Ottawa with its Parliament. Next is Niagara Falls, then Chicago and Omaha, Nebraska—just a few decades old then, and rightly called “The Gateway to the West,” being the point of origin of the developing railway system linking the eastern States with California.

We see Yellowstone Park, whose mountains, lakes, wildlife and famous geysers Verne describes in loving detail—despite never having seen them. He also notes (remember, educate as well as entertain!) that it was the first U.S. national park. On to Salt Lake City with the brand-new Mormon Tabernacle. We then cut straight across Nevada and northern California into the Pacific.

At this point Robur takes us straight north to Alaska (with a bit of gruesome and gratuitous whale-hunting in the North Pacific), across to Kamchatka in far eastern Siberia, south to Tokyo—formerly called “Edo”—followed by a quick hop over Korea and the Yellow Sea to Beijing. Then, southwest over the Himalayas, passing by Srinagar before heading west into «Caboulistan»—probably referring to Afghanistan, whose capital is Kabul. Herat (now an Afghan province, but then an independent kingdom) is also mentioned. Verne calls it «la clef de l’Asie centrale,» and alludes to the struggles between Great Britain and Russia for control of the region. I thought it was an interesting look at long-ago politics, until I remembered that region is still being fought over. The USSR invaded in 1979, then the US in 2001. Plus ça change…

Tehran comes and goes, followed by a jaunt north across the length of the Caspian Sea, passing by Astrakhan, then north to Moscow and St-Petersburg. We cut straight across the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia in a line joining Stockholm and Oslo (then called “Christiania” after its founder King Christian IV). South to Paris, further south to Provence, Rome and Naples, and then we leave Europe.

Tunisia (a French protectorate at the time) is the first stop on the North African coast. We travel west to Philippeville (founded in 1838 and probably named after the reigning French monarch of the time, Louis-Philippe; it’s now called “Skikda” since Algeria gained its independence in 1962). Algiers follows, then Oran.

Southeast into the Sahara, with notable milestones the towns of Laghouat and Ouargla, and south to Timbuktu. The novel mentions «le Soudan;» this doesn’t refer to present-day Sudan, but to a French colony which formed present-day Mali in 1960. Our exploration of the African continent ends in Dahomey where Robur and his crew kill a lot of evil Africans. That part reminded me of the scene in Verne’s earlier novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, where Dr. Fergusson’s team witness a battle between two cannibal tribes. One of the explorers, revolted by the goriness of the fight and the gratuitous snacking on still-warm flesh, shoots one of the cannibals dead before the balloon flies out of range. Both of these scenes, in two novels a quarter-century apart, similarly exaggerate the evilness of “Darkest Africa” and implicitly assert the rights of Westerners to swoop in (literally, in both cases) and act as judge, jury and executioner to people or kingdoms they don’t like. Plus ça change…

After leaving Africa, the Albatross heads straight to Tierra del Fuego, passing between the islands of St-Helena (where Napoleon I died in exile) and Ascension; it flies along the Strait of Magellan to Puerto Hambre (French: «Port-Famine») in Chile, then briefly turns south towards Antarctica, which was then mostly unexplored. Verne repeats various hypotheses about what’s really at the South Pole: is it a continent, an archipelago, or a sea of ice like the Arctic? Nobody knew, back then. Since it’s July and therefore winter in the southern hemisphere, the Albatross turns back up the coast of Chile until the Chonos Archipelago. They are then driven south again by a hurricane, pass over the south magnetic pole near the 78th parallel, almost get killed by an erupting Mount Erebus, but eventually regain control and end up in the Chatham Islands where the kidnappees manage to blow up the airship. And then they go home, assuming Robur to be dead.

There. Wasn’t that fun? Personally, I had a hell of a time looking up all these interesting factoids—and finding out Verne may have been wrong or out of date in a couple of spots: Ottawa, not Quebec City, was Canada’s capital in 1886—but maybe Verne was being patriotic, since Québec is French and Ottawa isn’t. Edo was renamed Tokyo in 1868—but maybe he used its old name to heighten the drama. I do suspect he made up the location of the south magnetic pole. As far as I know it was never measured directly in his lifetime, though the north magnetic pole was pinpointed in 1831 (around 70º N 97º W). Then again, I don’t know what theories were floating about regarding Earth’s poles and their movement. And to be fair, most of his other facts, calculations and trivia are very precise and up to date. Even if Verne didn’t add to the store of human knowledge, at least he fed the fires of imagination in many hearts and minds. Though I take the internet and rapid travel for granted, and have flown back and forth across Canada many times, there’s still so much of the world I haven’t seen.

Robur may have given me a few ideas.

DNA Songs

I’d put the Journey of Man DVD on my Xmas list, but it seems Santa didn’t think I was good enough last year. So I ordered it for myself and finally got around to watching it this cold, rainy Easter weekend.

In brief, this documentary describes an attempt to reconstruct the human family tree and trace the migrations of human populations as they left Africa fifty thousand years ago, using cutting-edge genetics—specifically, analyzing markers on the Y chromosome, taken from many thousands of men all over the planet, hence the title.

I’d put the Journey of Man DVD on my Xmas list, but it seems Santa didn’t think I was good enough last year. So I ordered it for myself and finally got around to watching it this cold, rainy Easter weekend.

In brief, this documentary describes an attempt to reconstruct the human family tree and trace the migrations of human populations as they left Africa fifty thousand years ago, using cutting-edge genetics—specifically, analyzing markers on the Y chromosome, taken from many thousands of men all over the planet, hence the title. This is ambitious. I mean, I’ve got a couple of relatives who studied the family tree, but their research only went back about three and a half centuries. But geneticist Dr. Spencer Wells (whose research this partly is, and who wrote and hosted the documentary) did more than relate a lot of facts and theories. He actually followed the paths of these migrations, enabling him, and us, to connect with these long-ago humans and understand how they were able to make this journey.

His first stop was with the San Bushmen, the oldest human branch his research has found. They’re hunter-gatherers and have been for thousands of years, using tools and skills probably not too different from their ancestors’ (though now with some metal knives and pots). Wells mentioned a quantum leap in culture between fifty and sixty thousand years ago, a relatively sudden flowering of technology, art and possibly language, that may have been one factor in some people choosing to leave Africa. But I’m guessing the droughts caused by the then-current ice age, leading to population crashes and migrations in our ancestors’ prey (and our ancestors themselves), were probably a bigger factor. Then again, what do I know? Either way, it’s almost certain that humankind’s hunting and communication skills, curiosity and adaptability, was a big factor in their survival once they left their homeland.

The first wave of migrants eventually ended up in Australia. This is where Journey of Man took us next, and we pondered the question of why they left no archeological evidence of their journey. Dr. Wells tried, and failed, to find any mention of the journey from Africa in Australian Aboriginal oral history or art (more on this later). The next stage in the journey was Central Asia. Wells and his team visited a man living in Kazakhstan, whose blood they’d sampled some years before, to tell him he’s the direct male-line descendant of the first people to move into the region 40,000 years ago. And that the genetic markers he carries in his DNA are shared with people in Europe, most of Asia, and the Americas. He looked a bit… overwhelmed. Or maybe it all went over his head. Hard to tell, really. I mean, how are you supposed to react to news like that?

After a brief trip to Pech Merle with accompanying discussion on Cro-Magnons, we were off to visit the Chukchi, nomadic reindeer herders living in northeastern Siberia. It’s a harshly beautiful land of bare snow and ice and pitiless blue sky; hard to believe people have been living there for maybe 20,000 years. But they have; the Chukchi’s survival is due not just to their amazing survival skills but also to their physical adaptations. In a cold environment, there’s evolutionary pressure to have a stouter body, with shorter limbs and extremities, to reduce surface area and limit heat loss—just as the Bushmen’s Kalahari Desert home led to tall and slim body proportions, with bare skin for efficient sweating. Evolution also explains why my European ancestors lost most of the melanin in their skin. In the higher latitudes, with Europe’s then very cold climate, having large amounts of this natural sunblock wasn’t the survival trait it used to be in Africa: with early Europeans bundled up against the cold for most of the year and the sun lower in the sky, there was less risk of skin damage but also less vitamin D being produced in their bodies. Lighter skin meant more UV rays being absorbed by the skin, which meant more vitamin D. How fascinating is that?

But beyond the science, I found Journey of Man deeply moving, because it is a story of survival against terrible odds. And humankind did more than survive: it triumphed and prospered, creating a stunning diversity of cultures and technologies with skill, courage, and probably a lot of luck. I found my perspective broadened: for example, Wells and his team had trouble crossing the border into Kazakhstan because of the war in nearby Afghanistan (the documentary was filmed in 2002). But don’t wars and borders seem terribly arbitrary and pointless when placed against a history measured in tens of thousands of years? Sounds a bit trite, maybe, but there it is. The same could be said for racial categories. I was moved almost to tears by the ending montages of smiling faces of all the people we saw in the documentary. All of them different, all of them beautifully human. All of them, you, me, and every human currently living, cousins separated by only a couple of thousand generations.

Not everybody agrees, though. As I mentioned earlier, while in Australia, Dr. Wells tried to find out if the Aborigines had any oral history mentioning the journey from Africa. One Aboriginal artist he talked to said no, that Aborigines believe they were created right here in Australia. He was quite firm in his convictions, too, saying (in so many words) that he would always believe this. Wells was diplomatic and respectful—a lot more than I would have been, in his place.

In a way, what I’d like you to think about the DNA stories we’re telling is that they are that, DNA stories. That’s our version as Europeans of how the world was populated, and where we all trace back to. That’s our songline. We use science to tell us about that because we don’t have this sense of direct continuity. Our ancestors didn’t pass down those stories. We’ve lost them, and we have to go out and find them. And we use science, which is a European way of looking at the world, to do that. You guys don’t need that.

Kudos, Spencer. I doubt I could have said that with a straight face. As much as I respect people’s rights to their faiths and traditions, I won’t play along and pretend that any culture’s mythology is as valid and useful as science in making sense of the world. Also, I’m doing pretty well without my ancestors’ songlines, thanks very much.

Near the end of the documentary Dr. Wells visited a Navajo community in Arizona, to share his research as he’d done many times before, and ran into a similar stubborn faith. What’s interesting here is that these people were clearly educated enough to understand the science—one of them said he’d already heard of Wells, which puts him one up on me… but they had their stories and were sticking to them. Even though they noticed the faces of the Central Asian people Wells visited were a mix of almost every race on the planet—a bit of African, a bit of Caucasian, a bit of East Asian—they still wouldn’t even consider that Dr. Wells’ research was correct, that maybe the Navajo’s ancestors were originally from Africa. Their only compromise (and it was a pretty smug one) was to suggest that the journey uncovered by Wells’ research and the journey described in the Navajo creation story are in fact the same event. That science was finally discovering what the Navajo people had known all along.

Which… is a bit sad. I’ve seen this kind of thing before: when faced with science, it’s tradition that has to adapt, claim common ground, back off from literalism, perform all sorts of intellectual gymnastics. But that’s a pointless struggle, because science and faith are not equivalent. They don’t speak the same language, they don’t work the same way. As the very diplomatic Dr. Wells said, “My bias as a scientist is that I like to see evidence for things.” But I don’t have to be diplomatic, so let me say that the scientific method is not a bias, it’s a tool to prevent bias. Without it, you end up with a lot of conflicting, baseless tales that stroke the listener’s ego and make one culture the centre of the universe.

With it, you get the “DNA stories.” They don’t necessarily give you comfort, a sense of purpose, or a connection with your ancestors. They don’t come with simple narratives, clear beginnings and endings; no satisfying morals or commandments from on high. But these stories describe worlds and histories far richer and more complex than any cultural myth has ever done, and can fire the imagination like nothing else. Best of all, being based on ongoing scientific research and evidence-gathering—which beats faith (no matter how sincere) and tradition (no matter how ancient)—they constantly strive towards truth. Ideally, they’ll also cause us to strive towards truth ourselves, by questioning our own biases and convictions. To quote Dr. Wells again:

Old-fashioned concepts of race are not only socially divisive, but scientifically wrong. It’s only when we’ve fully taken this on board that we can say with any conviction that the journey our ancestors launched all those years ago is complete.