Do We Know Why We Know - Part 7

In my previous posts of Do We Know Why We Know (Parts 4 and 5), I mentioned Jules Verne’s 1864 novel, Journey To The Center Of The Earth. I recently read it. I chose to read it after thinking there’s more to learn about what’s beneath our feet than we realize. In Part 4 of Do We Know Why We Know, I included three things that would be intentional in this series. We know why we know because of what we learn from the space around us, the space below us, and the space inside us (not thinking of space in the physical sense necessarily). I also believe more than ever that ancient texts like The Bible have much to tell us about, and guide us through understanding, all three categories.

The second intention, what’s beneath our feet, seems much more challenging to get to than the air and space around us. Digging is more difficult than flying it seems. As we blast off up into space, resistance and pressure become less cumbersome, where as digging becomes harder, the deeper we go. There are certainly enough stories of what we might find to persuade us to go deeper inside the planet not to mention what I read in Verne’s 1864 novel, that's not all fiction, as you’ll soon find out.

One of the things becoming glaringly obvious as I write this series is that there seems to be little in ancient texts on how space or the universe has the means to give us a better understanding of Do We Know Why We Know? We have massive rocket programs going on around the world seemingly led by Elon Musk’s SpaceX or at least our media is making us think so. But the rocket game does appear something akin to a game of who has the biggest … rocket? And to what purpose, bragging rights?

 

I was buying into the ‘multi-planetary species’ bit for a while. The theory of overpopulation seemed inevitable at some future epoch given that birth rates had always exceeded death rates. But then COVID hit with effects that have so far hardly been measurable outside of counting people who have contracted the virus and those who have been vaccinated. But surprisingly, already visible is the declining birthrate in countries around the globe. The mathematics of overpopulation was weak before but now just doesn’t work. Is “multi-planetary” even necessary outside of one man’s vision?

Space also is easy as there are no boundaries or legal obstacles to contend with like who owns what piece of space they won’t let anyone enter, visit or investigate. If space travel does become a real thing and not just something wealthy people get to do, those boundaries and legal obstacles will not be far behind. Also, according to Mr. Musk, exploring space (well, let’s call it what it is—launching rockets) is outrageously expensive. Even his company, SpaceX, the most successful one, is apparently struggling to stay solvent. Bankruptcy seems impossible though when coming from the man who is worth more money than any person who has ever lived on the planet—including Solomon. Elon knows a lot about money—and marketing.

What’s apparent to me is that if we want to know more about who we are, we need to look inward. The adage “look in the mirror” seems appropriate and in this case that’s our planet and what is buried beneath our feet. We’ve done a lot of surface archaeology but as far as going inside the sphere of the earth we’ve done the equivalent of sticking a couple of needles in a big haystack to understand what secrets lie inside. I’ve described one of these needles in Part 4, the Kola Superdeep Borehole project in Russia. There are a couple of others, which I’ll briefly describe in the next article. Yes, it’s expensive and complicated and not just from a technological perspective. There is property ownership, national boundaries, and laws to protect the dead, all part of a developed civilization where ownership and power take precedence over all else and create obstacles to digging and drilling into our planet for exploration purposes. Established academia plays a role here too, holding us to what we know, yet every week if not daily some new discovery in the ground tells us something new about ourselves.

None of this comes from blasting into space. Unfortunately, even the thought of what lies inside the earth pales to shaking the ground we stand on with eruptions of power shooting man-made projectiles out of our atmosphere and into space. Why bore when we can blast off? Maybe we’re not the first civilization to face this dilemma. Maybe we have what’s boring upside down?

And, not to forget the third intention of this series, what’s inside us—our unconscious—which Cormac McCarthy’s essay “The Kekule Problem” sheds some light on and how language may have arrived to help us understand our unconscious, which I’ve included in every article. There may seem to be very little connection with what lies beneath our feet and our unconscious or even to what the infinite universe has to offer. But our ancient texts do site us some clues:

“Sheol beneath is stirred up to meet you when you come; it rouses the shades to greet you, all who were leaders of the earth; it raises from their thrones all who were kings of the nations.” – Isaiah 14:9

 And may we not forget,

“All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?” – Ecclesiastes 3:20-21

Now this brings me back to what I started with, the classic novel Journey To The Center Of The Earth. This was kind of a whimsical book to choose largely because I had thought it something of a children’s story. I don’t know why as I knew next to nothing about the story outside of the title. The narrative is that of a teenage boy’s (Axel) adventure with his eccentric uncle, Professor Otto Lidenbrock. After deciphering a coded runic message left by the sixteenth century savant-alchemist Arne Saknussemm, they begin a quest to reach the center of the earth through a dormant volcano in Iceland, Snæfelsjökull (Mount Snafell, a real place).

As they descend on their journey into the earth, led by their Icelandic guide Hans Bjilke, many famous (and real) scientists are mentioned and what made them famous.

Sir Humphry Davy was a chemist and an inventor known for the Davy lamp, an early version of the arc lamp. Though the Davy lamp wasn’t described in Journey To The Center Of The Earth, Verne did describe it in other stories he penned. Ruhmkorff lamps, from instrument maker Heinrich Daniel Ruhmkorff, were what the adventurers used to light part of their route in this story. Joseph Paul Gaimard was a scientific leader on the French corvette La Recherche, an expedition to the Arctic Sea in 1835. Henri Milne-Edwards was a renowned zoologist of the day. Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Breau, outside of having a very long name, was a famous biologist at the time of Verne’s book. Sir James Ross discovered the Magnetic North Pole in 1831 (Ross was also a fictional character in Dan Simmons 2007 novel The Terror that was adapted into a 2018 AMC television series). Simeon Denis Poisson was a mathematician who gave his name to the famous Poisson distribution. Joseph Fourier, an Egyptologist and mathematician, was known for investigating the Fourier series. The last I’ll mention here (there are many more) is Georges Cuvier, a naturalist and zoologist and a major figure of the natural sciences in the 19^thcentury.

Though much of the novel is set in Iceland, legend has it that Mr. Verne never visited the country.

On their journey into the earth, the trio gets lost, thirsty and injured. When they run out of water, thinking their end is near, Hans taps into a granite wall. The rock wall separates them from an overhead body of water that then provides them fresh drinking water and is the source of a trickling stream that stays beside them for the next part of their journey.

“The most curious part of Iceland is not what is on the surface, but what is below.” Professor Otto Lidenbrock, Journey to the Center Of The Earth

Not long after that they come upon a vast subterranean cavern and ocean. The description of this cavernous space made me think again of The Truman Show that I described in Part 5 of Do We Know Why We Know. In that part I wrote how the Mesopotamians saw the world as a dome above a disk surrounded by seawater with freshwater beneath the disk or earth’s surface. The ocean they cross, on a log raft that Hans builds, is vast but inside the earth. Eventually they come to a place like that described in the Beatles “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” as in “you drift past the flowers/That grow so incredibly high” or “Cellophane flowers of yellow and green/Towering over your head.” The three sail by “trees of medium height, shaped like parasols, with clear geometrical outlines” where “in the midst of gusts they remained motionless, like a forest of petrified cedars.” Axel went on to describe, “but these were white mushrooms, thirty or forty feet high” and “lycopods (common in the Carboniferous period from fossils), 100 feet high; monster sigillarias (plants found in fossils from the Carboniferous period), tree-ferns as tall as the northern pines.” Through all this I was surprised by how much science Verne included in his tale.

I will not spoil the ending but the reader can guess that they do survive. I won’t tell you how they get out or whether they reach the center of the earth. Only remember from Part 4 of Do We Know How We Know the distance to the center of our planet is 20.9 million feet or almost 4,000 miles—that’s a long way to travel on foot and a log raft.

Before reaching what they think is the other side of the endless sea they pass two leviathan-size sea creatures in battle. “… muzzle of a porpoise, the head of a lizard, the teeth of a crocodile … the most formidable of all the antediluvian creatures—the ichthyosaurus” and “a serpent hidden in the carapace of a turtle … the plesiosaurus.” When they reach the shore on what they think is the other side of this vast ocean, their compass reads like it did when they started as if they’d returned to the same shore they’d launched from? It’s all explained near the end.

There’s still more to talk about but unfortunately my time is up for this round. The most startling is yet to come. Stay tuned for the next part in two weeks.

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Don’t forget to get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician while copies are still available.

You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.

Happy New Year (Or Let's Hope So)

I was all set to publish Part 7 of my Do We Know Why We Know? series when I saw a news headline pop up on my phone, “Dr. Bonnie Henry says ‘new game’ with Omicron variant could signal end of COVID-19 pandemic.” I reluctantly slid aside what I had planned—which by the way I’m quite excited about—and decided it was New Year’s Eve and what a great time to express hope, especially as we put an end to this tumultuous year of 2021.

I quickly read the interview that CBC News had conducted with Dr. Henry where she said the latest variant was spreading so quickly that “the virus will eventually become endemic.” Yes, I had to look up the word though it’s not the first time I’d read it. Essentially, it means that the pandemic will not end with the virus disappearing but that enough people will become immune to the virus either from vaccination or natural infection that there will be less transmission and much less COVID-19-related hospitalization and death, as the virus continues to circulate.

I include Dr. Henry because, as most of you know who read my blog, my wife and I moved out to British Columbia from Ontario at the beginning of the pandemic. Since honeymooning in Vancouver at Expo 86, we’d dreamed of living on the west coast. Many rolled their eyes when we told them of our plans, “you two are crazy,” but arrive we did in July of 2020. Since that time, we’ve heard often from Dr. Henry, the Provincial Health Officer of BC. Most strange to me has been the respect held for “Bonnie” by the people of the province who refer to her like she is a friend. Living in Ontario for all of my life, respect for a political office, especially one that has been so prominent and exposed as a health officer during the pandemic, was simply unheard of. But through it all, Dr. Bonnie Henry has remained consistent, making tough, and not necessarily popular, decisions when necessary while remaining a pillar of sensibility within the provincial government and of the BC community at large.

But 2021 has been nothing short of disaster for many here in BC. In the early part of the year, pandemic restrictions such as the mask requirements and the opening and closing of restaurants, theatres, gyms, and churches, played havoc on our human condition. In June, Vancouver and the lower mainland (like Abbotsford where we live), felt the highest recorded temperatures in the area’s history. An unprecedented 800 people died due to the extreme heat. The summer was hot, sunny and dry, the kind of weather we did expect though drought like conditions were imminent.

When September hit, however, it was payback time. Yes, we knew it rained here. It rains a lot as a matter of fact. Double what we were used to in Ontario. That’s the territory; but when it doesn’t stop and it’s heavy (think: monsoon and ark) that’s what late October and early November looked like. By November 14^th the Sumas Prairie area of Abbotsford had many families abandoning their homes as the Nooksack River in Washington State overflowed its banks and flowed northeast into Abbotsford. Breaches in the Sumas Dike had the floodwaters overtake the Sumas Prairie farmland devastating some 1,100 families.

And now as I write this unanticipated wrap up to 2021 here in Abbotsford, we’re in the midst of an extreme freeze for this area that started with a substantial snowfall on Christmas Day—and the snow stayed. I've not seen a snow plow. The temperature dropped to -16°C on December 27^th and hasn’t been above zero since. An indication of how extreme this is, locals in the area don’t even know how to refer to such low temperatures properly, calling them “negative 16.” Mill Lake, where we often walk and run, froze on December 28^th. Ducks and Canada geese have WTF expressions on their frozen beaks. Last year, snow fell on December 14^th, stayed for a couple of days and didn’t snow again or at least not enough to stay for any time. The lowest temperature we saw was -11°C and that for only part of a day. Mill Lake did not freeze over.

Putting pandemic and extreme weather aside, economic trends that drive the economy seem askew. The price of housing has gone berserk. Housing prices continue to skyrocket far exceeding their value—well not everyone’s, somebody’s buying. There seems to be no real precedent for price exceeding value perhaps because value is like beauty—“in the eye of the beholder.” Will this continue? That seems to be anyone’s guess. There are no experts here.

And then there’s the COVID effect on birthrates that’s changing the mathematics of demographics. In 2020, half the states in the U.S. had death rates exceeding birthrates. Deaths are exceeding births throughout much of Europe too. The theories of our planet becoming overpopulated are losing steam. COVID has encouraged us to “stay apart stay safe.” Has it made us afraid to be together? Declining birthrates seem like an obvious result don’t they? What will 2021’s numbers look like?

With such a year is there any doubt we’re glad to see 2021 end?

That’s why when I saw the CBC News report on Dr. Henry’s comments, I found them refreshing. Bonnie’s message is hopeful; good news that the end of the pandemic was in sight just as a new year begins.

Now before I end, my post wouldn’t be complete without a tidbit of history.

The earliest recorded festivities for a New Year’s arrival go back some 4,000 years to ancient Babylon. The Babylonians not only celebrated the coming New Year but the victory of their god Marduk (or Bel for those Old Testament readers) over Tiamat, the goddess of chaos and nature and her evil son, king of the monsters, Kingu. (You can read more about this in my Part 5 of my Do We Know Why We Know series.) The Babylonians called the New Year festivities Atiku that followed the vernal equinox—the date in late March when the day and night are of equal length. Part of the festivities was a ritual known as the royal negative confession. The ritual would have the high priest stand before the statue of Marduk and recite Enuma Elish (the Babylonian creation epic) to the king of Babylon to emphasize Marduk’s superiority over other gods. The priest would take the royal insignia from the king, slap his face and force him to kneel before the statue. The king (Nebuchadnezzar, for instance) would then confirm that he had not misused the power given him by Marduk nor violated the welfare of Babylon or Marduk. The priest would again slap the king, forcing him to cry, to show contrition that would then restore his authority. This ancient ritual seems like an appropriate self-evaluation for a leader; maybe one we should re-introduce.

I wonder how Dr. Bonnie Henry would fair under such a protocol.

I think she would fair very well (she’s endured several metaphorical face slaps already).

With that, Happy New Year and here’s hoping 2022 is the best year yet!

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Looking for some new reading in the New Year?

Get yourself a copy of my novels The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician. You also can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.