If Man Evolved From Apes, Why Are There Still Apes

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Evolution is not a religious issue. It isn’t. If you make it a religious issue by pitting your religion against science, your religion looses. Period. That’s not an atheistic science conspiracy, it’s just a predictable byproduct of mistaking for divine revelation, what are actually stories passed down from people living in the iron age. Maybe the authors of genesis were inspired by God, but they clearly weren’t taking shorthand.

Maybe God made us in his image, but he took 4.6 billion years to do it and by “his image” is probably meant something other than “an old guy up in the clouds”. God or no God, evolution is how we got to be what we are, and if that seems to contradict some of the stories in scripture, that’s okay. God may have inspired the scripture, but he MADE the world, and this is it, right here holding up all these fossils.

Still, evolution is a vast and fascinating field, and there are a few things that are understandably confusing to the layman. This question, though, shouldn’t be one of them.

Australia was colonized by the British. Why are there still British? Because Australia was a penile colony, and most of the Brits stayed home and worked on bits for what would one day become Monty Python. Get it? Notice how Australians have a new dialect that is quite distinct from their ancestors? And yet, the Queen’s English is alive and well. Get it now?

No? I know, I know, you weren’t paying attention. The dog is chewing on the table leg, and somebody called you a monkey’s uncle, and you just have one question: If we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?

Because the apes that were living 6-8 million years ago didn’t all line up and march through the mouth of Vol (Star Trek reference) and come out human. There were thousands of these apes, you see. Tens of thousands, in fact, and lots of different groups and kinds—far more than today, partially because we weren’t around with our Land Rovers and our taste for bush-meat and penchant for taking away everything from everyone all the time except in church when we remember that the Big Man is watching. But I digress.

There were all these apes see, and some of them lived over there under those trees and they were just okay. And some of them lived yonder in the valley and they were cool with that. And a lot of them lived way over through the mountains and they don’t ever call or write. But this other group here, let’s call them the Skins, they kept rubbing elbows with those ugly bad-tempered dudes at the edge of the jungle who ate all the bananas, the Shirts.

The Shirts really stunk. No really, they smelled of bananas and Old Spice, and between you and me, they were bullies anyway. So the Skins, they started foraging out into the savanna a bit. Now, the African savanna was as dangerous then as it is today. They have lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Well, they have lions. And stuff. Lions loved eating them some Skins, but like every other mammal, lions have to chill through the heat of the day or they—oh what is the technical term? Oh yeah—die.

So the Skins did okay. They weren’t exactly sprinters, but if you keep following an animal through the heat of the day—keep making him run—eventually he’ll keel over (there are modern humans who still hunt this way today). This worked pretty well, though the hairier guys couldn’t take the heat. Those guys would pass out and get eaten, or they would go off and join the Shirts bowling league. After a while, no one with much fur was left among the Skins. Life on the savanna worked out pretty well, because it was getting hotter all the time and the savanna was getting larger and larger. Also, tracking prey and pacing yourself is not the easiest work. The groups with the best planning and tracking skills got more food and less, um, eaten. So, by the time the sea level dropped enough to create a pathway up into Europe and Asia, the Skins were much smarter and taller and faster and sweatier than the Shirts, who still got together Thursdays to shake down the bananas, and if anything were even bigger bullies than they had been.

“But,” I hear you asking, “if the Skins evolved from the Shirts, why were there still Shirts?”

Put down the bananas and pay attention will you? The Skins didn’t evolve from the Shirts, they both evolved alongside each other. After a while, none of the lady Shirts wanted to hang with those sweaty Skins, and the Skins hated the way the Shirts beat the crap out of them for showing off their times in the 200 meter sprint, so they just sort of left each other alone. They had become separate species—though not by much.

Migration and isolation are key parts of evolution. Forget about Gorillas and Chimps for a moment. Look at our more immediate ancestors. Homo erectus migrated out of Africa 1.8 million years ago, eventually migrating up into Europe and evolving (over more than a million years) into the Neanderthals. Meanwhile, the original population of H. erectus still existed in Africa, continuing to evolve into H. sapiens. When Sapiens migrated out of Africa 200,000 years ago, they out-competed Neanderthals and spread around the world. But Sapiens still existed in Africa–and still exist there today.

If that’s all too much to wrap your brain around, here are some simpler examples: Branches can grow from a tomato plant while the plant is still there sending off more branches in other directions. We humans bred domesticated corn from a bushy grass called teosinte, but teosinte still grows wild. Televangelists evolved from the Catholic scholars of medieval Europe, but there are still smart people in Europe. Okay, that’s not really an example; that’s cultural evolution.

There are still other apes (besides us) because we evolved alongside them, from the same ancestral stock as they come from. But we know for a fact that we evolved together.primate-hands-family-tree

And no, we did not descend from Monkeys. We descended from an ancestral population of early apes that lived 6-8 million years ago. Our last common ancestor with the monkeys was around 70 million years ago and wasn’t even a primate yet. I think they still wore tunics or something like that.

The Certain Fool

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It is a peculiar form of arrogance that leads from “I don’t know” to “those who claim to know are liars, conspirators, and scoundrels.” I once knew a fellow who believed that the transistor was (and could only be) the product of alien intervention. It’s unclear why he found this explanation more reasonable than simple human inventiveness, but I suspect it’s because in some primordial way, he placed aliens in the metaphysical realm of myths and Gods with dominion over the unknown (and suspiciously complex). God couldn’t have done it because transistors brought rock & roll to America and millionaires to silicon valley, and there is nothing less godly (apparently) than a machine that gets people tapping their toes and buying things, so it must have been the aliens.
Miraculous as its impact has been, though, the origin of the transistor is quite down to earth. It was the product of a very human team of scientists (led by William Shockley at Belledisoneffect Labs) who set out to find a faster, more reliable alternative to the triode tube used in war-time radar sets. The triode (and other tubes) had evolved from attempts during the 1880’s to extend the operating life of Edison’s new light bulb. Edison, in turn, was building on earlier work by Humphrey Davy, Warren De la Rue, and James Bowman Lindsay, whose own efforts derived from simple experiments with electricity and magnetism, including the observation that lightning strikes cause a magnetic compass needle to jump (God did it after all, he just takes his sweet time). All of this is known and well documented. But none of it mattered to my acquaintance. He seemed to believe that what he didn’t understand couldn’t be understood, and that attempts to explain it could only be the work of tricksters, out to conceal the real and simple truth: the government is conspiring to hide little green men! One wonders what he would think of the idea that God (or at least the author of the bible) is necessarily in on the ruse? A healthy skepticism is vital, but the key to skepticism is diligent, objective study, not paranoia and infantile rationalization.
Everything we humans do develops in this way, step by step, one generation building on the shoulders of the last. It has taken millennia to build the modern world, and it is natural that we sometimes find it as overwhelming and inexplicable, as our ancestors must have found the elements of nature. But we have more than technology: we have the way of thinking that swept us, wave after wave and revolution after revolution, from beast to astronaut in less time than it took wolves to become pekingese.
Our problem, of course, is that we are all doomed to live and die within Plato’s allegorical cave. We know of the world only by the shadows on the walls—that is, through our imperfect senses. Empirical study may not reveal all that we would like, but it provides the only answers in which we can justify any confidence. Science cannot tell us why the earth exists, but it can tell us how it formed and how long it has been here. We are free to believe as we like, but only within the constraints set by what we can see and test. When we speculate (or accept the speculation of others) in the absence of evidence, we are literally “taking leave of our senses.” When we accept it in the presence of contradictory evidence, we are mad.
Of course, we can’t investigate everything for ourselves, so we are forced to rely on the testimony of experts. This presents a problem. How can we evaluate the expertise of someone who knows what we don’t? More to the point, what do we believe when our doctors, priests, administrators and scientists are at odds? Sadly, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”, is not something any of us will ever have access to. We have facts, but we can only measure them against the ruler of reality, and since we must measure the ruler as well, we must accept a degree of uncertainty.
Not all possibilities are equally likely, though. We can approximate truth like an archer zeroing in on the bullseye. By testing what we can test, we can sort our beliefs until we develop confidence as to which are closest to the truth. This is the key insight behind the scientific method, and it is the key to assessing the claims that clutter our modern world. If science is a game of archery, our individual quest is more like pyramid building, where facts form a broad and shifting base, people who make claims about fact hold up the middle, and the truth, distant and precarious, balances somewhere at the apex. This is a difficult and imperfect way to understand our world, but it works.
Millions of Americans believe that the Apollo program was a hoax. They are all wrong, and I am about as confident of that as I am that those millions of people (most of whom I have not personally met) exist. This is possible because I know enough about science and engineering and human fallibility to recognize the veracity of the evidence supporting the landings, and at the same time, the laughable ignorance behind “moon hoax” arguments. When a “hoaxer” shows a flag waving as it could only wave in a vacuum and then claims this as evidence for a breezy sound stage, I naturally grow suspicious. When his arguments reveal ignorance of how dust falls in a vacuum, of optical photographic artifacts, and of basic physics; when he reveals omissions, flaws, and shortcuts in his reasoning and research and then responds to correction with anger and appeals to authority instead of gratitude and reconsideration, I can hurl his bricks away with confidence.
Consider claims that the earth is only six thousand years old and that its surface was once covered in a single flood event. Many accept these claims based on their understanding of Christian scripture. But in fact, neither claim is explicitly made in the Bible, and neither can be true based on dozens of overlapping lines of evidence and thousands of physical observations. Some of these observations are simple for even the layman to understand. Dendrochronology (tens of thousands of overlapping living and fossil tree rings) and geo-stratigraphy (millions of layers of sedimentary rock) have complex names, but are easy to understand and to see. If we assert (as some do) that God simply popped everything into existence just as it is, with the ancient sediments, the tree rings, and photons sailing in from the spaces between the stars—just to test our faith—then we are in philosophically deep water indeed. If we can’t accept basic measurements of parallax collected through telescopes, then neither can we accept anything else gleaned by our senses, including the stories in the bible. This sort of solipsism leads nowhere, which is why even the Catholic Church, having burned itself before, has acknowledged the antiquity of the earth. Besides, if the entire universe is a fraud, what does that make its creator?
Anyone can sell magazines and books making bold claims. Here are a just a few that are bouncing around our world right now: 1) Conspirators tell us the World Trade Center towers were brought down in a controlled demolition because “no building could ever fall into its own footprint on its own” They do, of course, as happened in January of this year, when one did exactly that in Rio de Janeiro after a structural failure. 2) “Psychics” offer “readings” on late night radio, even though precognition violates the laws of physics as we know them, and anyway would presumably have given the cold war to the Soviet Union (which invested heavily and consistently in occult research). If for three dollars, a gypsy woman with a pack of cards and a creepy disposition can foresee the woman you are destined to marry, surely for a Château on the Baltic she will give you a schedule of spy-plane overflights so you can disguise your missile launchers as a Cuban bazaar! 3) The local pharmacy has an extensive selection of pricey Homeopathic remedies, even though these are just highly distilled waterxi—often with real medicine added as “inactive ingredients”. Homeopathic medicine would also violate the laws of physics (or at least everything we know about chemistry and life—which is quite a lot). 4) A casino paid $28,000 for a partially eaten cheese sandwich bearing an image claimed to resemble the Virgin Mary, (though in fact, no one knows what she looked like and for a short time afterward, the Internet was abuzz with images of foods and nature scenes depicting (with sufficient credulity) various rude acts and anatomical parts).
We are all entitled to our opinions, but none of these claims is worthy of serious contemplation by anyone with a command of our shared facts. Not everything can be observed directly, but we must never be too sure of anything that can’t. When forget this, we can fall for anything—literally. One consequence is religious fanaticism; it is just that sort of certainty that leads people to strap explosives to their bodies before visiting the local market. But such misplaced certainty does more than justify extremist violence; it subverts the ability of people and cultures to manage the resources upon which their survival depends. Children can learn much from the beautiful story of Genesis, but combat disease, they need genetics, and with it, the knowledge that our last common male and female ancestors lived at least 60,000 years apart.
History shows us to be an adaptable and clever race. In an age in which we alone among God’s creation have ventured beyond our world, we must add nuclear war, pandemic, overpopulation, climate change, genocide and eugenics to an already long list of known challenges. If ever a being had the tools to face these challenges, that being is man. But how will we face our future? One possibility is to throw up our hands in prayer and hope we are delivered from this world before it comes crashing down around us. A more intelligent, and frankly, a more spiritually responsible approach, is to learn to govern ourselves as our ancient advisers could not, and use our greatest gift—reasoning—to its fullest.
We don’t have to choose between faith and science; we can reconcile the one to the other. We don’t need to seek the fantastic; the real world is fantastic enough. We don’t need to pretend to certainty, a well-founded approximation of truth is more valuable. Thomas Painex warned us ‘The word of God is the creation we behold, and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaks universally to man.” More than ever before, perhaps, we are assaulted today by claims (counterfeit and otherwise) from those who would manipulate us or lighten our purse. We don’t have to give in to these claims, but neither should we see conspiracy and alien intervention in every unknown. Our nation is the fruit of the age of reason. It will survive only so long as science and clever human investigation are permitted to outstrip the darkness that came before it. Empirical thinking, if we will but trust it, will sweep us yet to new heights, whatever those may be.

Dear Moon Hoax Conspiracy Nuts

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Dear Moon Hoax Conspiracy Nuts:

Here is how you know when a moon landing is faked: In “Transformers: Dark of the Moon, they didn’t properly account for lunar gravity or for the vacuum and so they animated all the dust wrong. In every single image recorded by NASA on the moon, the dust behaves as it only could on the moon.

The spaceship impact at the beginning of the movie is WRONG. First, a ship traveling at that speed would have rebounded in the weak lunar gravity, and would almost certainly have cartwheeled as it plowed through the lunar soil.

Second, dust CAN NOT BILLOW in a vacuum. On Earth, dust billows (that is, roils out in overlapping spherical clouds) because it is running into and dragging against the air. Likewise, dust lingers in the air because there IS air to linger in. On the moon, every dropped object, from a spaceship to a mote of talcum power, travels along a ballistic trajectory with zero resistance. (This is actually one of the classic arguments through which conspiracy advocates shoot themselves in the foot. The Apollo lander didn’t create a dust cloud BECAUSE IT WAS ON THE MOON, WHERE DUST CLOUDS ARE IMPOSSIBLE!)

When a ship plows up dust in a vacuum, the dust grains travel out in flattened arcs and are gone. A dust cloud cannot rise, because there is no air to push against and suspend the particles. Dust clouds CAN NOT HAPPEN in a vacuum (except in orbit, where there is no gravity, but that’s a very different type of cloud). In the Apollo landing footage, ejecta from the engine can clearly be seen through the window flying out in rays, just as it should, and leaving no cloud.

When an astronaut kicks up dust on the moon, the dust DOES NOT linger around his foot as it does in the movie—it immediately falls to the ground as it does in all the NASA footage of the Apollo landings. There are only two ways this footage could have been produced in 1969: 1) on the moon, 2) on a sound stage built into a cargo plane that can simulate lunar gravity during a dive.

Finally, when the astronauts in the movie investigate the lunr crash site, they disturb dust which falls down through openings producing a slick reveal. Trouble is, it was shot on a sound stage and the dust accelerates under normal Earth gravity.

So there you go. NASA: Real deal. Transformers:Phony baloney. If you still can’t tell the difference, go back to third grade and spend more time in science class, In the meantime DON’T VOTE, because if you aren’t scientifically literate, your aren’t any kind of literate.

Colorblind

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I’m left handed. This is not a choice.

Like many lefties, I am actually mixed-dominant, which means that I bat and eat with the left, but fast-pitch and shoot with my right. These are not choices. Although I can train myself to perform adequately with the wrong hand, it requires constant, exhausting effort. Unlike you strong dominants, I have had to stop for a moment before beginning each and every manual task I have ever learned and ask myself “okay, which side does this?”

For a long time, lefties were tormented, forced to write with the wrong hand, even killed by people who saw us as an abomination. I watched my naturally left-handed friends at school trying to write with their right hands hooked into an unnatural position. My mother’s teachers would smack the left hand with a ruler until the child was forced to relent. However well intentioned, this was abusive; in fact, it was torture.

I live in a world in which certain people think that certain other people have chosen a sinful path simply for seeing the world as they see it. They tell themselves that these sinners could walk the righteous path if only they would accept the will of God. I have no dog in this fight, but it occurs to me that when a man says a lifestyle is a choice, he must see it as so. I wouldn’t know about that, for I could no more choose to be gay than I can choose not to perceive the bands of the rainbow. But wherever you fall on the spectrum, ask yourself for a moment, what if the leader of some foreign church declared that you could be gay if only you accepted the loving will of his God into your heart. Imagine if you lived in fear that your tricolor vision would be discovered, and the ignorant color-blind bastards around you, convinced of your demon wickedness, would deny you employment, human dignity, even life? Imagine if you feared having a left handed child, lest he be denied opportunity.

If God made me at all, he made me left handed. If he made you, he made you with your sexual orientation. If this is so, then HOW DARE YOU PRESUME TO PLACE YOUR VIEWS ABOVE THE WORKS OF GOD? How dare anyone rationalize the ignorant notions of iron age men into the justification for prejudice and discrimination in the name of God? We ate from the tree of knowledge and knew shame for our nakedness. Now, as we pick apart the very tree of life, we should understand the shame of ignorance, and that we will never again see the garden unless we build it ourselves, together.

 

Customer Service: Key to Conservation

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This article was published in the Region IV newsletter of the National Association of Interpreters, then picked up by the west coast region. “Interpreters”, in this context, refers to park naturalists and museum curators. Edward Abbey was one of the most famous of all such interpreters and is well-known for his book “Desert Solitaire” about his time as a ranger at Arches National Monument.

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I am not a naturalist but I married one. My training is in management, but because I often join my wife when she travels on business, I enjoy unique opportunities to observe various presentational styles, activities, and programs from a perspective that lies somewhere between that of interpreter and visitor.

I recently had the chance to visit a park in Arkansas at which my wife was assisting in a program for boy scouts. As she had a busy schedule during the day, I availed myself of the opportunity to take a solo morning hike through the hills and beaver dams near the park and returned deeply entrenched in the role of observer. I spent the rest of the day visiting the various stations and observing interpretive programs by people of disparate backgrounds but similar passions. After dinner and the last of the orienteers recovered, we circled the picnic tables for the traditional bonfire and story telling. The park’s chief interpreter, who had just finished an exhausting day as policeman, coordinator, and teacher, rose and called the gathering to order. After introductory remarks, announcements, and jokes, he was prodded into telling The Story of the Purple Gorilla.

You are probably familiar with this tale, as were your grandparents and theirs before them. Some of the boys might not have heard it told, but we adults certainly had. Yet, this particular interpreter was not content merely to tell a story. He performed it; pacing about, modulating his voice, inflecting, gesticulating wildly, and weaving doors, cellars, airplanes and apes out of the very smoke and darkness around us.

Exhausted at last, the man yielded his stage to the riotous laughter of the scouts, who were then to exchange their own stories in competition. Since I had no other official duties this weekend, I ws drafted as one of the judges and watched as the first competitor drew near the fire, clearly enlightened and perhaps a bit intimidated by the performance he had just seen. He told another venerable story, probably the only one he knew, but he told it with all the soul and creativity of a young mind just awakened to new possibilities. He sold it, and in the end he left the park with top honors (a book of stories for future nights of revelry) and, I think, a little more self-esteem and a truer appreciation for the whole scouting experience. When, in twenty years time, he is telling those stories to his own troop in the same park, it may well be because one tired man wove apparitions out of thin air when he really would rather have been safely in bed.

Management consultant and author Tom Peters once pointed out a difference in attitude between contract and full-time employees which, I believe, makes my point well. The contract worker, he said, cannot afford to merely meet the stated needs of his employer. More than just doing his job, he must ensure that his efforts are noted so that he is invited back to work another day. He must market himself to those who write the checks.

This is very important. It is easy for a naturalist or curator to fall prey to the illusion that his lot in life is to preserve the wilderness, study God’s creature, protect ancient artifacts, and generally pursue loftier aspirations than merely entertaining the tourists. The truth is, though, that wherever you are, whatever you have lined out for this week’s programs — however important the studies and work that your visitors never see or appreciate — you are, first and foremost, paid to meet the needs of other human beings. How well you meet those needs not only determines how long you may expect to be paid, but how well the underlying resources you value will be preserved as well. Though Edward Abbey might not have liked to think about it, he could not have lived in the wilderness without the tourists, and as destructive and mindless as development can be, human beings are the dominant force on this planet for better or worse. As Jim Fowler said while speaking at my wife’s park, “wild animals will only survive if they are worth money”. If people aren’t hiking the wilderness, they’ll be building on top of it.

No one would like to retire to the wilds for a life of academic solitude more than I, but the reality is that naturalists have a responsibility that goes beyond greeting visitors and clearing trails. Through interpretation, creative marketing, and a business-minded outlook, MAI members hold the key to imbuing future generations with a love of nature and the dedication to save it. As humanity moves further from its organic roots and more children grow up in cyberspace, getting them into out parks and museums in increasingly important to showing them the value of the things and places we work so hard to preserve.

The key to preserving the resources we love lies in learning to manage and market them as a business. If we can study natural resource management, we can study marketing and business management. Only with marketing and service excellence sufficient to keep the voters coming back to stoke the campfires, can we keep the funds flowing and the resources protected. It is a balancing act to be sure, for with the money comes garbage, noise, and stress, but the alternative is unacceptable. Neither governments nor corporate sponsors exist to preserve our wild places, and when public interest is gone, so will the places themselves fade away as even the best tales do, when spoken into an empty darkness.

The Tale of Apollo 13

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Apollo

The Apollo 13 mission became perhaps the greatest real-life drama of the technical age when an oxygen tank exploded after the tiny ship was already half-way to the moon. In one brief moment, a billion dollar triumph of engineering and technology was transformed into a desperate struggle to bring three brave explorers back safely from the brink of doom. With the primary oxygen supply lost, the command Module’s fuel cells could not produce power, so it had to be quickly shut down to conserve its batteries. Without them, it would not be able to separate from the massive service module, fire its retro rockets, or maintain a survivable trajectory during reentry.

In the days that followed, three men would huddle in a tiny, half-frozen lunar module built for two, while engineers and technicians, not just here in Houston but in factories and facilities throughout the county, struggled to squeeze enough oxygen and electricity out of the beleaguered ship to bring them back home. NASA’s handling of this emergency is truly one of the great triumphs of engineering and management, but the events that led up to the crisis are an abject warning, of how the most mundane human failings can undermine even the best laid plans.

The explosion was caused by a damaged heater coil in the number two oxygen tank. This tank was more than just a metal can. It was a complex and fairly delicate cryogenics system that had to maintain oxygen in a semi-frozen state in which gaseous oxygen was always available at an acceptable pressure, and it had to be able to do this on the ground, in space, in zero gravity, and under the pounding of lift-off. This required a number of internal components, including a heater (to keep pressure up), a mixer (to keep the slushy oxygen flowing) and a thermostatic switch—a safety switch to keep the tank from overheating.

The Apollo spacecraft electrical system was designed to run on 28 volts, the voltage supplied by the fuel cells. The generators on the launch pad, however, produced 65 volts, and the spacecraft would have to run on this voltage during the weeks of tests leading up to the launch. This was not a problem for most components, but North American, the prime contractor, became concerned and ordered its subcontractor (Beech) to redesign the heater element inside the tank. Beech did so, but somehow overlooked the thermostatic safety switch. This omission, by itself, would almost certainly have causes no problems.

The tank that ultimately ruptured on Apollo 13 was originally installed in Apollo 10 but because a number of improvements had been made to the tank design, it was removed so that it could be upgraded and used on a later flight. During removal, a bolt had not been properly removed, caught, and caused the tank to fall a short distance back into its cradle. The jolt was slight, and the tank was inspected and found to be undamaged, so it was sent off for upgrade. This accident, alone, was no cause for concern.

Two years later, the upgraded tank was part of Apollo 13 as it sat atop the massive, fuming Saturn V booster for a critical test. In this test, the rocket, crew, and ground staff were all readied for launch, right up to the point of ignition. As part of the test, the oxygen tanks were filled with liquid oxygen just as they would be on launch day. The test was completed successfully, but trouble occurred as service technicians worked to shut down the spacecraft afterwards. All of the cryogenic systems had to be purged prior to shut down, and this was accomplished for each tank by pumping warm gas in one valve and forcing the refrigerated liquid out through another. On this day, oxygen tank number two became balky, releasing less than 30 of its 320 pounds of oxygen.

Engineers examined the design and the manufacturing history of the tank. They concluded that a vent tube had been bent slightly when the unit was dropped two years previously. Because of the misalignment, the purge gas was going in one valve and out the other instead of pushing the frozen slush out through the vent tube. This should have raised the alarm, but the vent tube would not be used in flight, it was only used on the ground, so they ignored the fact that a critical component of a precisely engineered system on which billions of dollars and human lives depended, was not working as designed.

Instead, they decided to turn on the heater inside the tank, and just let it boil off the frozen oxygen. This would take several hours, and was far outside the operational design of the heater, but the engineers saw no problem with the procedure. They knew that the safety switch would keep the tank from overheating. They also knew that a technician monitoring the tank could keep an eye on the temperature. What they didn’t know was that the safety switch had never been upgraded, and fused shut the instant the 65 volt test current started flowing through its 28 volt contacts. So as the heater ran in the super insulated tank, the oxygen boiled off and the temperature started to rise. The technician monitoring the tank saw the temperature stabilize at eighty degrees, because the sensor inside the tank was only designed to measure up to the maximum temperature expected to be encountered—eighty degrees. In fact, the temperature rose hour after hour to nearly one thousand degrees, and burned most of the Teflon insulation off the wiring inside the tank.

Weeks later and 200,000 miles from Earth, one of those wires sparked during a stir of the tank, igniting the remaining insulation and blowing off the neck of the tank. Exposed to the vacuum of space, the 300 pounds of Oxygen slush flashed into gas and blew out part of the service module, ripping apart the plumbing and wiring of the other tank, and crippling the spacecraft. It might have been far worse. Had the tank ruptured on the ground, the oxygen might have had time to burn what fuel was around it. The astronauts might have been killed before they ever left the pad.

So, what lessons does this twisted chain of events have for the rest of us? Apollo was built in “encapsulated” modules. It was well engineered. It was thoroughly tested. It had backups and fail-safes and redundant components. And yet it failed. It failed because human beings made predictable mistakes, indeed, mistakes that a mammoth bureaucracy was specifically set up to prevent. Jim Lovell, in his book “Lost Moon” recounted that at the time of the countdown demonstration test, he had asked the engineers how long it would take to pull the rack containing the balky tank. In retrospect, this was clearly the right thing to do. But of course, in the real world, we all make trade-offs all the time. Replacing the tank might have cost the launch window. But weighed against this tangible risk, was the unknowable risk that not replacing it could cost the mission–and lives.

I am not criticizing Jim Lovell, or NASA or engineers at North American or Beech Aircraft. I am merely pointing out something about human nature. We see what we want to see, but we have the mental capacity to defeat our imposed delusions – this is what the scientific method was created for. Fundamentally, Apollo 13 failed because NASA did not recognize that when an oxygen tank is in any way not operating to spec. this is a problem to be respected. Years later, different NASA engineers ignored the fact that solid rocket booster seals were not operating as designed, and as a result, the Space Shuttle Challenger blew itself into a billion pieces on national television. Another decade passed, and engineers ignored the fact that external tank insulation was not performing as designed, and my four and six year old daughters spent a morning searching the roadsides or north west Louisiana for pieces of another Shuttle.

We aren’t all trying to go to the moon. And I would not presume to judge any of these decisions where tax money and lives must be weighed in light of risks that just cannot be known. We all take risks all the time, whether running a red light, or voting with our party without researching their policy claims. Failure does not always lead to icy death or fiery cataclysm, but it can, over time, lead to unexpected consequences. The scientific method is how we test our assumptions and illusions. It got us to the moon and back. It can take us where faith never will.

A Bolt From Her Quiver

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It is said that early experiments in electromagnetism were inspired by hikes in the Austrian countryside, where rough terrain made the magnetic compass indispensable, and where sudden thundershowers are common. Soon it was noticed that when lightning flashed nearby, the compass needle would jump, which led naturally the experiments that changed our world forever.

I once had a similar experience. I was walking across the open campus of my university when the persistent mist that had besieged our weekend suddenly resolved into rain. The campus was large and sudden storms not uncommon, and though I had brought along my faithful umbrella, I could not take much pride in the provision as the electrical ferocity of the storm blossomed overhead. Within a minute, the afternoon glow still warming the dripping foliage around me was transformed by stroboscopic lashes from above. I hurried, but before I could reach the stairs leading down to the street and the safety of the nearest building, I felt a jolt through my hand and was shaken, bodily, by a massive concussion of palpable thunder.

“This is it,” I thought as the giant plate glass windows rattled in the nearby natatorium, “I have stepped into a charge leader and am about to be struck by lightning.”

As a dedicated geek, you see, I was well aware of research, recent at that time, of the stroke-counterstroke nature of the lightning strike–which begins with an invisible trace of airborne current snaking between the cloud and ground. I reckoned the metal rod of the umbrella had contacted such a current, conducting a high-voltage pulse through the plastic handle and into my hand.

“But,” I thought next, “I should already be dead.”

I knew, after all, that any conscious realization forms in the brain much more slowly than a lightning bolt. My heart raced ahead of my feet as I hurried under cover, but I soon realized my mistake. The bolt had never come near the ground. It, like all of the impressive discharges around me that afternoon, had been from one cloud to the next. What I had felt was but a tiny side current, an eddy, induced into the metal rod of the umbrella by the enormous MAGNETIC FIELD moving perpendicular to the bolt.

As far as I know, not a single bolt struck the ground that day, so it would be fatuous to say I was lucky to survive. I was lucky though, just a bit, to catch nature flexing her muscle.

Deep Space Radar?

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An old Internet story is making the rounds again, that the Aricebo antenna picked up 47 year old TV broadcasts bouncing back from some mystery object “or more likely, field of objects” some 25 light years away.

IT ISN’T TRUE.

Some versions of the story are well written, others make absurd claims such as that the BBC has recovered lost Dr. Who episodes (not a chance in hell, for a number of reasons).

But the idea is intriguing. Could we not, in fact, create a deep space radar system to map the Oort cloud and once and for all detect every object within the solar system that might one day come to call?

Now this would be a very odd radar. It might, for example, be fixed to point always out away from the sun (or at least rotate very, very slowly), because it is looking for objects hundreds and thousands of light minutes away.

Further, might there be some value in some sort of deep space radar as an exploration tool? Well, it would require patience on a scale of which, frankly, I lack the patience to contemplate. And it might require an inconveniently star-sized power plant to power the thing. So maybe not. But then. . .

Another Earth?

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The team supporting the Kepler Space Telescope has announced confirmation of a planet only twice the size of Earth and smack in the middle of the local habitable zone. It is entirely possible that this planet could harbor life or even a civilization. Of course, it could also be as barren as the moon.

The new planet is 600 light years away, close enough to be the planet in my novel. Too bad we don’t actually have jump transport.

Seriously though, this is close enough to make a long range probe feasible, at least in principle, with current technology. I would have to be able to operate for a century of more, but it might not be a bad idea. Kepler is currently studying 2,326 other possible planets in similarly favorable orbits. Many are closer and will eventually pan out.

The universe is getting smaller.

Biology Students “Boycotting” Darwin???

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I read an article today about the growing number of Muslim biology students in the UK who try to “boycott” lessons on “Darwinism” because they think it contradicts the Quran. And here I thought only Americans were dumb enough to pay for an education and then try not to get it.

I am quite prepared to respect people with diverse beliefs. My mother, after all, was a Methodist who believed in reincarnation and Edger Caysey, and I have broken the Ramadan fast with Muslim friends on more than one occasion,

But let us be clear. You are a great ape. You evolved from a population of apes that lived about 6 millions years ago. This is not a matter of opinion. It’s not “only a theory”, or (as science puts it) “merely a hypothesis”. It’s not up for debate. It’s a fact, based not only on scientific inference bout the past, but on direct empirical observation in the present. There will always be scientific debate over the particulars of how evolution works in general and how it proceeded in any particular detail, but there is no controversy at all about the fact that it happened–and continues to happen.

If you don’t accept evolution you are wrong, or perhaps your understanding of evolution is wrong. If evolution contradicts your scripture, then your scripture is wrong—or perhaps your understanding of scripture is wrong.

There is no shame in being wrong, but there could hardly be more shame than remaining wrong when the truth is laid before you, you have PAID for the privilege, and then refuse to learn.

I have no idea if evolution truly contradicts Islam. My Muslim friends don’t think so, and are as devout as anyone I know. Perhaps they just posses a tad more courage than some others of their faith.