Morality Without Deity

So, as a self-avowed atheist, how do I justify any sense of morality? Without the fear of retribution from an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful god, either here in life or in some kind of promised afterlife, why don’t I just indulge myself? I could rob, rape, murder anyone who displeases me. I could lapse into a life of hedonism, having sex with anyone who crossed my path and drinking, smoking, or shooting up any substance that met my fancy. Whoopee!

Well, there are the rules of society, either written down or unspoken and implied. I could be taken into custody, tried in court, and put in jail for doing violence. And the people I know and supposedly love would shun me for lapsing into insensate carnality. Of course, I didn’t have to work all this out for myself, because I had parents who metaphorically boxed my toddler’s, child’s, and adolescent’s ears—that is, repeatedly—when I acted out. They were showing me the results of temper, anger, selfishness, and sloth.

So, in this case, a moral society and good parenting took the place of an absent deity. Here are the rules, and here are the results.

But what about someone raised outside of a just and temperate society, with inadequate early education in the moral imperatives? What about the children of broken homes and addicted parents who are taught only by their peers in the neighborhood gang? These are children who are essentially raised by wolves. Do they have no recourse other than rape and murder?

That is a harder question. But children are not stupid, and children raised by other children learn a different kind of morality. Usually, it relies heavily on group loyalty. And it is results-oriented: break our rules and pay the price right now. A child who makes it to young adulthood under these conditions may not be able to assimilate into the greater society, or not easily—unless that society is itself gang- and group-oriented with results enforced by fear.

But then, is there any hope for the lone individual, the person trained early to think for him- or herself and reason things through? For the critical thinking and self-aware, the basis of morality would involve both observation and a notion of reciprocity. And that is how any society learns in the first place.

If I commit robbery, rape, and murder, I then expose myself to the people around me as someone they need to watch and guard against—and, conversely, as someone they need not care for or try to protect. Indeed, I become someone they should fear and, if possible, eliminate. On the other hand, if I act with grace and charity, protecting others and helping them when I can—even doing those small acts of courtesy and gratitude that people only subliminally notice—I then invite them to treat me in in a complementary way.

If I abandon myself to a life of casual sex and substance abuse, I eventually find that any pleasures a human being indulges without restraint soon diminish. This is a matter of our human neural anatomy: acts of pleasure release a measure of dopamine into the brain. That’s the feeling of pleasure. But as this system is repeatedly engaged, the dopamine receptors multiply until either the stimulus must grow in proportion or the feeling itself declines. Our brains are not fixed entities but reactive mechanisms. Balance is everything, and any imbalance—a life without moderation—throws the whole mechanism out of kilter.

These are not the lessons imposed by any external deity but by hard reality. They may be reflected in religious teaching and scripture, as they will be reflected in social norms and legal rulings, but they exist before them, out of time. In the case of human interactions, these realities pre-exist by the nature of potential engagements between self-aware and self-actuating entities. In the case of human pleasures and other emotions, they are hard-wired into our brains by generations of that same awareness and choices.

You can’t avoid reality, which is the greatest and oldest teacher of all.

Scams Through the Ages

A recent posting on Facebook asked the hive mind what scams have been practiced so long that nobody remembers they are scams. And, in this political season, one person predictably answered, “Capitalism.”

Oh, laddie! Think bigger—and harder. Capitalism is not a hoax that rich people thought up to get more of other people’s time and money. Capitalism is the way things get done in a modern, dissociative, non-small world, and it’s been operational since ancient times. Capitalism is the cobbler taking out a loan to buy leather. It’s the shipbuilder asking his friends—and sometimes strangers—to put up the money to buy land and wood for his venture, with the promise to pay them back when he launches his first vessel and sells it.

The concept of the corporation goes back to ancient Rome, and the word comes from the Latin for “body.” The first corporations were the collegia, where for example groups of single men who had come to the city to find work pooled their money to fund and operate dining halls so they would not have to cook for themselves and would have a place to eat. In the Middle Ages, the word came to mean groups of hopeful scholars who came together to acquire space and hire teachers so they could study academic subjects.

To think of capitalism and corporate activity as a scam is like thinking agriculture and technology are scams. One would have to decide it was a delusion to plant seeds and expect them to grow, or to build machines and expect them to function as intended. These are not scams—purposeful designs by one group of people to snare the imagination and gain the cooperation of another group—but simply the way things have worked out in human history.

So, what would be a scam so old and encompassing that nobody noticed? And think big here!

Scams are created and offered by people who put together a vision, a hope, an interpretation of reality in exchange for other people’s support, allegiance, love, or money and then return to them … nothing.

One of the oldest human scams is the belief that certain classes of people are better than others, more knowledgeable, more fit to command—and born that way. These would be the kings, lords and nobles, patricians, landed gentry, old families, old wealth. They have only as much respect and political power as people will give them—which was a lot in old Europe and not so much in modern America. In this country, we’ve seen the wealthiest families—think of the Astors, Morgans, Kaisers, and Kennedys—slowly drift back into obscurity. The first generation makes the wealth, the second generation administers it, the third spends it, and the fourth remembers it. But if you can get people to believe that your name alone is worth the price of a drink, then welcome to it.

A more modern scam is the selling of various kinds of utopias. These range from the hippie communes of the Sixties back to the original communalistic theories of Karl Marx. Communalism presents itself as caring and giving and sharing—and that works in small groups operating under potentially hazardous or adverse circumstances. Think of the nuclear family that is your “hostage to fortune,” or a small tribe in the wilderness, or an Israeli kibbutz. Without the adverse circumstances, the cooperative milieu falls apart. The Transcendentalist communes of the 1830s and the hippie communes of the 1960s failed because some of the Transcendentalists thought they were contributing to the common pot just by writing bright essays instead of slopping the pigs, and some of the hippies thought they were contributing by smoking dope and selling weed instead of milking the cow.

And communism simply doesn’t work on a national scale. It can’t work as an economic theory, because it’s not really about economics. Economics, for anyone who’s ever taken a basic course, is about establishing the value of and engaging in the exchange of goods and services among strangers. There you are dealing with supply and demand, the valuation of substitute markers like money, and varying levels of effort over time. That is how groups of humans arrange their activities. Giving everything you can and getting back only what someone else determines that you need are not economics. Anyone who tries to sell you on a utopia of caring and sharing—follow our prescriptions and you will achieve nirvana—is really selling you on willing submission to the control of others. That, for most people, is both inhuman and antihuman.¹

Other political theories can also be scams. Think of the National Socialists in Germany between the wars, who sold their population on ideas of racial purity, the banishment of an ancient and evil oppressor, and the glory of a vibrant political consciousness, all for their willing submission to whatever the party decreed—which turned out to be both inhuman and antihuman. And the result was horror and global war.

Speaking of nirvana, perhaps the oldest scam in human history is what happens to us after death. Here I am revealing myself once again as an atheist. It’s not that I think I’m better than you if you are a believer. I simply lack the gene or nerve impulse to believe for myself. And as much as I value human life, I—ahem—do not believe we are either eternal or immutable. I believe that we human beings—like all other life on this planet—are the product of undirected evolution, with mutations in our genetic inheritance governing our adaptability to changes in our environment, and with the test of any genetic modification being its usefulness under current conditions. No great spirit made me, is watching out for me, or is directing my steps—except in so far as I hold notions of goodness, propriety, and wisdom in my mind and intention. And no such being stands ready at my death to welcome me home to any kind of eternal bliss, paradise, or heaven.

Nirvana was the Buddha’s response to the eternal return, the cycle of continual rebirth that was embedded in his ancestral Hindu culture. He found the constant juggling with karma—do good in this life and be reborn on a higher plane in the next life; do evil now and suffer for it next time—as oppressive. The whole point of Gautama’s original teaching was that by living as neutral a life as possible, accumulating neither good nor bad karma, you can get off this cycle. And then, when you die, you will simply go out, like a candle. That would be the Buddha’s nirvana—not a place but a release. It makes sense if your cultural tradition was an eternity of coming back to human suffering and judgment under an uncontestable and inhuman rule.

But I don’t look forward to being reborn as anything. And after twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, or even ninety years as a human being on this Earth, I don’t expect to take my mind and memory, my innate personality, and go off to an eternity in a heaven or hell, eternal bliss or eternal suffering. I think that, at the end of a useful life, making my way in the world and caring for friends and family, at my death I will simply go out, like a candle. My mind and knowledge, my personality, will dissipate in the disruption of my neural synapses. My body will cease moving, and the lysosomes embedded in each cell will begin enzymatically breaking down the cell’s chemical structure, helping the ever-present bacteria dispose of my physical being. Much as I value human life, at the end of my time on Earth I will have no more usefulness, consciousness, or awareness than a dead squirrel smashed flat on the road. That’s not a nice image, I know—but at that point, I will be beyond caring.

It may be offensive to classify the various competing visions of an afterlife as a scam. Certainly, many people fear death, cannot imagine their own sudden absence, and take comfort in thoughts of eternal bliss and reunion with their departed loved ones. The notion of an afterlife—which usually adheres to some kind of moral teaching and proposed course of thought and belief—can be considered the ultimate carrot enticing you to follow this religion or that. And certainly, the idea of a person having no moral understanding and no personal guide to thought and belief is the grim depiction of a soulless, possibly hedonistic, likely cruel and dangerous human being.²

But yes, in my terms—private and privileged as they may be—belief in any kind of existence beyond this single life is one of the oldest scams, so old that most people don’t think of it as a scam at all. Sorry about that.

1. For those who say that true communism or true socialism hasn’t been tried yet … well, true perpetual motion hasn’t been tried yet, either—because it doesn’t exist in the real world.

2. And yes, I know—and freely acknowledge—that I follow the embedded values of the Judeo-Christian civilization into which I was born and raised. I just don’t happen to believe in the supreme and eternal being who supposedly sits at the center of it.

Predicting the Future

Everyone wants to predict the future. They want to know what good things are in store, so they can anticipate them. More often, they want to know what bad things are coming, so they can prepare for them—or at least worry about them.

That’s why people take out insurance policies: so that at least they don’t have to worry, too much, about the bad things. The first policies were written in the 14th century in Genoa, a seafaring town, and presumably the policies covered cargos in transit. The business really took off in Lloyd’s coffee house¹ in London three hundred years later. Insurance was a way to get one-up on the gods of misfortune, and it worked.

Insurance as a hedge against disaster has helped make the modern world. But that will be as nothing compared to the widespread use of computers, especially once artificial intelligence gets into the game. AI isn’t exactly a genie, and it’s not smart and sensitive like a generally intelligent person—or not yet. But it is good at looking over mountains of data, far more than any one human being can absorb in a day, a week, or a lifetime, without getting bored or distracted. AI is self-programming in the sense that you don’t have to ask specific questions with known parameters about your database. You just give the machine a general prompt—say, to look for trends, or find anomalies, or spot the most likely or least likely result of a certain choice—and the genie goes to work.

Current uses of AI to write advertising copy, legal briefs, and term papers from existing language models, or to create fanciful images or amusing videos, again from existing sources—all that’s small potatoes. The real use of AI, which is still in development but peeking out at odd corners even now, is in analytics. IBM started this with their Watson platform. This was the computer that took to the air on the game show Jeopardy and became a champion. As IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna later explained, programming Watson took six months. They had to feed it on popular culture, history, sports, music, word puzzles, and a host of other likely topics. Winning at a game show was a trivial exercise, but it taught them so much. IBM now offers Watson Analytics as a business tool.

That’s where the money in AI will be: automating the back office, the customer database, factory operations, inventory and supply chains, and every other part of the business with a superhuman intelligence that doesn’t get tired or bored, doesn’t blink … and also doesn’t get greedy and embezzle from you. It’s like having an absolutely honest wizard run your business. One that will predict the future, foresee the bad times, hedge your bets, and keep everything on track. Now and forever, amen.

Oh, and if it’s good for business, imagine what an analytical engine will do for government. Turn it loose on the tax base, the economic indicators, the money supply, court records, traffic and surveillance cameras, the prison population, and the general population. Put an AI on every node in the internet, looking for trends, anomalies, and any bad thing—“bad” in terms of whoever happens to be in control of the government, of course. Ask it to offer advice, correction, and eventually coercion. The dream of social control through “credit scores,” rewards and punishments for adhering to or deviating from acceptable behavior, is just a few data centers, intelligent chips, and mouse clicks away.

Aside from the chilling notion of putting 1984 on steroids, think what this will do to people’s livelihoods. Right now, robots are taking over a lot of factories²—and that trend will grow as America “on-shores” the manufacturing that we once gave away to China and other low-cost, labor-intensive suppliers around the world. Human beings—the “blue collar” workers—are left to feed the machines and sweep up after them.³ With AI intruding on every business and government function, the need for managers and analysts—the “white collar” workers—likewise surrenders to the machines.

Where does this all end up? I don’t know, but I suspect nowhere good. Since we humans came down out of the trees and started scratching the dirt for a living, work has been a large part of people’s purpose in life. I’m not against making things easier for people, and certainly having robots and intelligences run the world, predict what every person needs, and make it for them would be easier. It would let us all relax in the sun, drink margaritas, write our poetry and paint our pictures. Except not all of us have such talents and ambitions. And lying on the beach all day, every day, forever … gets boring after a while.

And the question still remains: who will be responsible—whom will we hold accountable—for the decisions, actions, and judgments of the artificially intelligent machines? The person who authorized execution of their decisions? The person who input the prompts? The people who wrote the code or loaded the platforms with this or that piece of data? But soon enough, the machines will be executing each other’s decisions, sending each other prompts, and writing and loading their own code. When this all comes together, it will be the Singularity that John von Neumann and others have warned us about. But it won’t be Skynet deciding our fate in a microsecond and starting World War III. Instead, it will be teams of machines playing pitch and catch with people’s lives, and no one knowing who did what, or how to control or stop it.

In the Dune series, an element that doesn’t get much play in the movies is the actual basis of the far future as it’s depicted: the development of human skills instead of technology. The result is the Mentats, who are human computers conducting business operations and offering strategic insight; the Bene Tleilax, the amoral—in everyone else’s terms—and radical-thinking scientific innovators; the Bene Gesserit, who became adepts at physical and emotional manipulation and managers of the human bloodlines; and the Spacing Guild, which developed human prescience in order to find safe passage among the stars at superlight speeds. These “Great Schools” came about only after human beings almost went under because computers and robots took too good care of them, with debilitating physical and mental effects. Then an uprising against the machines, the Butlerian Jihad, saved humanity with the commandment “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

I’m thinking of starting such a movement myself.

1. My late wife Irene was a librarian at the Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley’s rare book and manuscript library. She put together the exhibits in their reading room, and one year she was showing off a collector’s rare books on the history of coffee and tea. It turns out the habit of drinking coffee and tea didn’t come to Europe until the 17th century with regular trade routed to the Far East. Before then, people drank mostly small beer and wine during the day, because the alcoholic content killed off the bacteria in their water supply. Nobody drank plain water because it made you sick—something about putting the wells too close to and downhill from the privies. So, it was sip, sip, sip all day long, from breakfast to bedtime, and this explains a lot of Shakespeare. But with coffee and tea, the water is boiled, which also kills the bacteria. And while the caffeine boosts energy and alertness, reducing everybody’s daily dose of alcohol explains a lot about the Enlightenment. This was also the time of Lloyd’s coffee house as a burgeoning center of commercial activity.

2. Just to be clear: robotics is not only the machine to make the product, but the design and manufacturability of the product itself. Remember when cars had dashboards with separate dials mounted in different holes in front of the driver? Robotics as an artform is not just having a machine drill the holes in metal and placing the gauges but redesigning the instrument system in the first place into a module that’s made and tested elsewhere, can be plugged into the driver’s position with one click and a multi-connector—and eventually will be replaced by an AI that controls all the functions of the vehicle itself. New manufacturing systems imply new design choices, and so the technology moves ahead.
    In the same way, most processed foods these days incorporate packaging into the manufacturing stream. Nobody bakes up a million Oreo cookies, joins them with the filling, and then puts them in cold storage until it’s time to sell them. No, the ingredients go from mixing to ovens to filling to tray to airtight sleeve to cardboard box to shipping carton, all in one streamlined process. Oh, and in case you wonder why the cookies don’t go bad for six months or a year, that process includes not only making the food under sterile conditions but also hitting the packaged goods with a hard dose or radiation—usually gamma rays—which kills any bacteria. What a fascinating age we live in!

3. Don’t believe me? Watch any episode of the Canadian documentary series How It’s Made.

What Works

A lot of people are not going to like this. And a lot of them are family and friends whom I respect. But so be it.

This country works. The system works. The economy works. Mirabile dictu, it functions. Not perfectly. And not in ways that you can always explain. But stuff gets done. People get fed and cared for and served with what they want and need—for the most part.¹

And we’re rich. Our gross domestic product, by any measure, is the envy of the world. We are rich enough that our best and brightest can look at the fraction of our population that is doing less well than the rest of us and believe that makes us a broken and foundering society. We are rich enough to deceive ourselves into thinking we are poor.

What makes this all work? Money. Other people can make money by feeding you, clothing you, building a house for you, and entertaining you. And that’s not to just some minimal standard that will keep you sheltered from the elements and stop you from starving but maintain you to whatever standard you aspire. You have your choice of neighborhood, clothing styles, types of foods. You can eat so well that you grow fat—or you can get special foods, tailored nutrition, and now medications—although expensive ones—that will help you become thin again.

Our medical services are the envy of the world, even for the developed world of Europe and Eastern Asia. Again money. Other people can make money by taking care of you. They can get rich by thinking up, developing, and testing new drugs to treat your illnesses, by providing new services to help in your old age or if you become disabled, and by finding new ways to treat traditionally degenerative and previously incurable conditions. The money doesn’t always come from your own pocket—or not directly—because you usually pay for insurance that covers the costs. And yes, there are some medical conditions that may not be covered, or not right away. But by and large you can get coverage for a wide range of life’s illnesses by pooling your monthly payments and deductibles with others.

Our education choices are the envy of the world, too. We provide schooling to any child who will sit down and learn. Yes, it’s usually paid for by a local tax on property—on your house or your landlord’s building, on your nearby shops and businesses—but it’s still money from your community, for the most part.² And it works because there are people who are willing to teach your child if we will offer them a living wage. At the higher levels, and with more direct contributions from the families of those who would learn, a good education in a variety of subjects—from the traditional, valuable enrichment courses that offer a good life, to the scientific and professional studies that offer a good career, along with some of the more frivolous courses that used to be just for fun—is widely available. And if you don’t mind missing out on name-brand scholars in the ivy league institutions, you can get a pretty good grounding in whatever subjects you want at local, community colleges that are almost tuition-free.

All it takes is money.

Oh, no! The profit motive! Grubbing for money! Other people getting rich! Aren’t we beyond all that? In a spiritually pure and stainless world, full of rational people, aren’t we better than that?

No, not at all. Money and its motivations—the chance of getting paid for what you do, of getting ahead by providing a good or a service that other people will buy, and maybe of becoming rich by thinking up a new good or service that will attract, inspire, or delight other people to give you some of their income—money and its exchange are the secret to a healthy economy.³ If you make it worthwhile for other people—actually, strangers—to feed, clothe, house, and entertain you, then voilà! You get choice foods, stylish clothes, and comfortable accommodations. When you are a customer, a free-to-choose consumer, a profit center in other people’s business model, then they will bend over backwards trying to figure out what you need or might want and find ways to give it to you. That is the free-market, free-enterprise, capitalist system that a lot of people today would like to change.

It's messy, of course. Not everyone gets everything that they might want or need. And sometimes things get made, services are offered, and prices are asked for which people have no interest and are not willing to pay. On the surface, that looks like waste. That looks foolish. But for the people making and offering those goods and services, if they think wrong, make bad decisions, don’t or can’t “read the market” correctly, then they lose customers, their investors lose money, they go out of business, and the waste stream gets cut off. Problem seen, problem solved.

On the other hand, if a company comes up with a new product, a new customer want or need that it can service, then its business will grow, investors will flock, and perhaps the dynamics of the marketplace will change. Think back to the—what? the mid-1980s—when the government was concerned with the regulated monopoly of the phone lines, AT&T, “Ma Bell.” One big company ran the country’s whole communications system. The government and the courts sought ways to break it up and promoted competitors to take over the regional markets. That worked. But what really took down the monopoly was challenging and ending the phone company’s single requirement that any equipment connected to its system—the telephone sitting in your office or home—be provided by Western Electric, the AT&T subsidiary. And you couldn’t buy that telephone but had to rent it for a monthly charge on your AT&T bill. Ending that restriction opened the telecommunications world to competition from third-party instrument makers, to innovation, and to a better overall communications experience. And then came the cell phones—the first one was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, marketed in 1983—and digital packets in place of continuous analog signaling, which really broke up the landline and long-distance empire.⁴

And what’s the alternative to competition? What is the choice toward which a lot of people today would like to move our country? Blandly, it’s some form of socialism, a command-and-control economy run by the supposedly smartest people. They would like a system where blind faith in the freedom and intelligence of individuals, in the ghostly hand of a marketplace that gropes towards satisfying customers and making money while doing so, where all of that supposedly magical thinking doesn’t exist. Instead, they want a rational society where the best and brightest minds work out exactly what other people will need and try to provide it for them. Not more than they need, nothing sloppy or extravagant, just the 2,000 calories a day for nutrition, one-size-fits-most clothing to cover their nakedness, and 320 square feet of clean, well-ordered living space. That’s all anyone really needs. That’s all that everyone will eventually get.⁵

And of course, this well-ordered society will pay for all this—this needful amount for each and every one of us—by taking a large fraction of everyone’s wages, the portion that would go to their nondiscretionary spending in the first place, and leaving just a bit for some art, a Sunday amusement, or alcohol and drugs. Your choice there.

In a modern, industrialized, technologically driven society, you are either a customer and potential profit center, or you are a cost and a potential liability.

Go to the countries that have ventured down the socialist path. Not all the way, of course, because those are dead places full of people too broken to even try to leave. But those countries where the bite hasn’t cut to the bone. There the food is either rationed or randomly available, the clothing is drab and in limited supply,⁶ and the housing is falling apart. When the government first takes in taxes what it thinks it will be required to feed, clothe, and house people, take care of their medical needs, and provide for their non-productive old age, and gets all that money in one big pot—then doling it out becomes an exercise in cheese paring. Command-and-control economies are cost-conscious, risk-avoidant, and allergic to change.

People are human. Even the best and brightest among us, dedicated civil servants, pledging their lives to the benefit of humanity, still aren’t smart enough or selfless enough to understand and provide for everyone’s personal needs. Decisions must be made. Costs must always be cut. But some scraps and wastage will always get left on the floor, regardless of controls. And some populations are too old, too sick, or too far away from the eye and interest of the central government to be properly served. And then, of course, there are the carpetbaggers—who are always with us—peddling their influence and stuffing their valises with the public silverware.

And even the best and brightest among the entrepreneurs and capitalists are still human. Most are trying to serve their customers honestly and still make a profit. Most know that if they produce shoddy goods and give poor service, they will be spurned and eventually go bankrupt. But they are not all geniuses, and they will sometimes cut corners just bit too deeply or skimp on quality control in the name of cost savings. And, of course, there are still the crooks—always with us—who will try to sell junk with marketing hype, produce miracle cures that are just chalk pills, and promote massive investment scams. That’s why I favor a mixed system rather than an unfettered capitalism or, yech, full-blown socialism. Let the innovators and entrepreneurs operate in a free market, but watch them through government regulation and litigation in the public interest.

But if you favor something more obvious and stringent, remember: You are either a customer and a potential profit center or a cost and a potential liability. Choose wisely.

1. Oh? What about the homeless? What about the poor? Well, what about them? The class of people we consider “poor” in this country live like middle class in many other parts of the world: usually decent housing, their own cars, television sets, cable connections, cell phones, and readily available food. These may not always be the best and most desirable versions of a good life’s artifacts, but they are generally serviceable. And our poor people have education made available to them and many paths to a better life. We are a rich and generous country.
    And the people living in tents on the street? They can get meals and other services that are generously provided for them. If they’re suffering, it’s because they have intractable addictions to alcohol or drugs, or a mental illness for which they decline to seek treatment, or they just can’t cope with the complexities of modern life within the system. The money is there to treat them—we are a rich and generous country—but they just won’t take advantage. We throw billions of dollars at them—an estimated $24 billion just here in California alone—which go into multiple service organizations to support the homeless, and still they live outside of what most of us would consider a stable situation. They have the personal freedom to reject the help being offered to them.

2. There’s a thought going around—based, I think, on a speech President Obama once gave concluding with “you didn’t build that”—which says that if you like paying taxes, sending your children to public schools, or driving on streets and roads paid for with state and federal funds, then you’re a socialist. Well, with the same logic, I could say that if you work for a private company, have your retirement account invested in the stock market, or buy your groceries at Safeway, then you’re a capitalist. Your personal situation in a large, developed country is never simplistic. Knee-jerk political positions are for morons.

3. See for comparison It Isn’t a Pie from way back in October 2010. One of my earliest blogs and still, I think, true today.

4. If the communications system had been a government monopoly—as under socialism, which is always conservative, seeks to control costs, and avoids risks—you would still be dialing a rotary phone with mechanical switching and paying extra for peak long-distance service.

5. This is Bernie Sanders’ world where you don’t need twenty-three brands of deodorant—just, I suppose, the one he prefers. This reminds me of Westerners who journeyed to Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s and found public places redolent of “Soviet scent.” One size, one smell fits all.

6. At the height of the Soviet experience, people used to shop with lists of their family’s and friends’ sizes in clothing, shoes, gloves, etc. Whenever something became available in the stores, you wanted to be able to buy it, even if not for yourself.

Dark Anything

Did I mention that I’m an atheist? Or rather, an agnostic on steroids. It’s not that I hate or despise or actively deny the existence of a god—I just don’t see or feel the need for one. But, with a gun to my head, I must admit that I just don’t know. And this state of unknowing, along with healthy dashes of doubt and skepticism, colors my tendency to disbelieve in anything I cannot prove or have logically demonstrated to me.

So, um, physics … The acceptance of and belief in what’s called “dark matter” is based on the motion of stars in a galaxy. We add up all the things we can see at galactic distances—that is, the things that shine brightly—and compare them to what we see in our own solar system and nearby detectable systems. The biggest things, the heaviest things, and the ones that shine most brightly are stars. Our Sun is about 99.9% of the mass of our local system. Not even Jupiter and Saturn compete as heavyweights. The rocky planets, the moons, the asteroids, and the icy comets are just a rounding error. That bright thing up there in the sky—the thing that can be seen from other systems in the Milky Way, if anyone is looking—is essentially the mass of our solar system. And we have no evidence that other stars, other bright things we can see, are any different.

Well and good. But add up all the bright things in visible galaxies, estimate their collective mass, and compare that mass and its computed gravitational effect to the observed motion of the galaxy’s stars—and you get an anomaly. The stars in the average galaxy, based on the mass holding them together as a system, should be rotating like wood chips swirling in a whirlpool. That is, the ones near the center should be circling faster than the ones on the periphery. But instead, we observe that they rotate like stars painted on a disk, with the outer ones keeping pace with, and so moving faster than, the inner ones. For that to happen, the galaxy must contain more mass—have a higher gravity attraction and greater bending of spacetime—than the sum of the mass of the bright things. From this is born “dark matter”—can’t see it but weighs a lot. Current candidates are “weakly interacting massive particles” (WIMPs), which would be really big subatomic particles that don’t show up in any reactions, and “massive cometary halo objects” (MACHOs), which would be big objects in the periphery of galaxies, like huge rogue planets or roving black holes, that just don’t shine.¹

The other issue in physics is the expansion rate of the universe. We know that the universe is expanding because we can use “standard candles”—certain periodically variable stars and certain types of exploding stars, both with a known brightness—to measure the distance to these galaxies. By knowing the actual brightness of these objects and comparing that with how bright they appear in our telescopes, we can estimate how far away they and their home galaxies are. In the same way, if you know that the light you see on a distant hill is from a 100-watt bulb, you can know that it’s closer than if it was from a 1,000-watt bulb, which would appear to be farther away.

But the other thing we see, aside from the apparent brightness of known stars, is that the light from all the stars in a particular galaxy, including these standard candles, is “red-shifted.” That is, instead of being, say, bluish-white—as we would expect to see in the light from a similar star in our own galaxy—the light from distant galaxies has a longer wavelength, more reddish in appearance. This is the Doppler effect. If the stars were coming toward us—and some galaxies, like Andromeda, are actually approaching the Milky Way—then the light waves would be compressed, more bluish, just as the sound waves of an approaching train’s horn are compressed and so appear higher in pitch. But stars that are going away shift redder, their light waves more stretched out, like the descending wail of a train that’s leaving you. And the farther away a galaxy is, the redder its apparent light. So from this, astronomers conclude that the universe is expanding.

Well, yes. It supposedly exploded from a single infinitely hot, infinitely dense point some 13.8 billion years ago. So, of course, it’s expanding. But based on observations of galactic red shifts at various distances, as well as from analysis of the cosmic microwave background radiation—the fading “echo” of the Big Bang—the expansion rate is apparently increasing. The momentum of the explosive expansion isn’t fading or even holding steady—it’s speeding up. Nothing in current physics explains this result, and so astronomers have proposed that the universe is influenced by something called “dark energy.” There is no good candidate for this energy, except perhaps some kind of “vacuum energy” that resides in and drives the expansion of empty space itself. But whatever it is, it’s vast.²

If you collect all the visible, bright matter we can see in the universe and compare it to our computation of the amounts of dark matter necessary to keep the galaxies spinning like they do, then dark matter makes up about 85 percent of the physical stuff in the universe—way more than the bright objects we can see and, supposedly, interact with.

And if you try to account for all that dark matter plus the dark energy necessary to create and drive the expansion of the known, observable universe, then about 69 percent of everything is dark energy, 26 percent is dark matter, and only 5 percent is the familiar, atomic matter that we can see as stars, planets, dust, gases … stuff. So, in short, we know very little, and have only vague conjectures and initial theories, about the vast majority of the universe we live in.

That’s either a shameful admission—or a vast opportunity.

In a blog last month, I mentioned a breakthrough discovery that gravity—which has long been conspicuously absent from the calculations of quantum mechanics, the science that deals with the invisible world of subatomic particles—may actually exist at and be measurable at the microscopic level. Einstein’s theories of relativity, dealing with the macro world of planets and stars, and quantum mechanics, governing the realm of the unbelievably small, were long thought to be mutually exclusive and irreconcilable. But if gravity is exerted by grains of sand and maybe by subatomic particles, then we may finally be in line to create a “Theory of Everything,” combining relativity and quantum physics—the goal of physicists since early in the twentieth century. That may eventually explain mysteries like dark matter and dark energy.

What if gravity—the bending of spacetime according to the amount of available mass—exists and could be measured not just at the level of stars and planets, but in grains of dust, atoms of dispersed gases, and subatomic particles flying through “empty” space? The effects would be small, vanishingly small. After all, the effects of gravity are subtle. It’s the weakest of the four known and fundamental forces.³ The mass of the entire Earth has such a weak gravity field—an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second squared toward its center from the planet’s surface—that you can overcome it briefly simply by jumping and more permanently by firing off a chemical rocket.

But over vast distances, the distances between galaxies? We know that the bending of spacetime caused by a gravity field creates a “time dilation.” That is, time slows down under the influence of gravity. A clock on the surface of the Earth ticks more slowly than one out in interplanetary or interstellar space. It’s not just that the clock’s mechanism is retarded by the force of gravity, but time itself as the clock measures it has slowed. And a clock positioned near the event horizon of a black hole is slowed so much that the passage of hours it records would register as years to an astronaut orbiting outside the black hole’s effective gravity well.⁴

So … If dust, gases, and subatomic particles hanging about in intergalactic space have actual gravity effects—bending spacetime for anything small enough that passes near them, like a moving photon—might not that effect the timing, the energy level, of the photons themselves? This is a conjecture, similar to but not exactly the same as the “tired light” hypothesis described in the second footnote below.

I told you I was an agnostic, and I write a kind of science fantasy—not real but hypothetical and, hopefully, barely plausible. As a skeptic, I don’t accept that our current knowledge of anything is actually final.

Sir Isaac Newton refined the observations and theories of the ancient Greek and Babylonian astronomers. Then Albert Einstein refined the observations and mathematics of Newton. And then Niels Bohr and the quantum physicists threw it all into a cocked hat at the subatomic level. Edwin Hubble observed that the light of distant galaxies was red-shifted and so moving away from us, and that the universe was expanding. Cosmologists then used this expansion to wind it back to a single point some 13.8 billion years ago, and the decay of the cosmic microwave background as measured by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson seemed to confirm that dating. Then astronomers figured that the universe is actually larger than it could have grown in that time, and so Alan Guth proposed inflation—that at the moment of the Big Bang, the universe expanded exponentially fast, faster than light speed—to finally arrive at the observable scale. Now we have dark matter and dark energy—unknown and, so far, undetectable “things” and “forces”—to explain anomalies in our observations that don’t fit our theories.

As I said before, these are exciting times. But the whole thing may eventually get tossed into a cocked hat. The Big Bang is, after all, just another creation story, like God moving across the waters and separating the light from the dark, or Great Raven dropping a wing feather upon the Earth to create everything. We yearn to know. And when we don’t, we keep piling theory on theory, until eventually we come upon a universe made up of things and forces we can’t know and can only imagine.

We ain’t done yet.

1. By now it’s generally accepted that our galaxy—and every other one we can study at close range—include a massive black hole at their center. These invisible objects have a mass on the order of a million suns, give or take. The one at the center of the Milky Way is about 4.3 million suns. So, why doesn’t that constitute “dark matter” all by itself? Well, our galaxy has over 100 billion stars; so the central black hole is not even one percent of galactic mass—kind of the situation of all the rocky planets, moons, and asteroids in the solar system.

2. An alternate theory has been proposed to this red-shifted Doppler effect—one that would discount the continuous expansion of the universe in the first place. Suppose light that travels long distances just “gets tired.” Suppose that photons traveling so far—not just between the Sun and the Earth, or from nearby stars to the Earth, but the billions of light years between galaxies—tend to lose energy, so that their wavelength becomes increasingly longer and redder. But there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism driving this effect. Nothing in the vacuum of space exists to “sap the energy” of a moving photon. And just as a body in motion tends to stay in motion—according to the first law of Sir Isaac Newton—until and unless some outside force acts upon it, so light waves should retain their energy unless they interact with something.
    It is part of the General Theory of Relativity that objects in deep gravity fields—spacetime that is bent sharply enough—experience time dilation, as described above in the main text. A physical object in the gravity field of a black hole and approaching its singularity or one moving at light speed—if it could ever attain that velocity—would experience the complete stoppage of time. So presumably a photon, which has no mass, experiences a timeless, changeless existence. But might it not also, at that speed, because it is moving through the dilation, lose just a bit of its energy, become just a little red-shifted, and more so the longer it travels? Conventional physics and cosmology say not, but our observations and theories are continually evolving.

3. The strong nuclear force, which holds quarks together to form protons and neutrons; the weak nuclear force, which holds these particles together in atomic nuclei; the electromagnetic force, which holds electrons in their atomic “orbits” or shells and accounts for the joining together of atoms into molecules, among other effects; and gravity, which bends spacetime around large masses and holds planets, stars, solar systems, and galaxies together.

4. This was one of the effects correctly described—not all of them were!—in the 2014 movie Interstellar.

Strange New Energies

It’s right on the tip of my tongue, the edge of my mind, about how we will drive to the stars. This is because I’m a science fiction reader and writer and have bathed in notions of faster-than-light travel, generation ships, warp drives, and worm holes since I was a teenager. It’s part of the mythos that human beings will one day have the energy, derived from our understanding of physics, that will let us cross the vast gulfs between the stars. Our stories abound, too, with other beings, other cultures, aliens who supposedly have cracked the secret. And while they are obviously more technically advanced than us, they are not magicians.¹

We human beings are aware of and have the potential to use three forms of energy. One is chemical, the making and breaking of atomic bonds, representing electrons donated to or shared between the energy shells of different atoms. This is every form of energy known and used up to the twentieth century. It is the energy of fire, of the chemical processes that drive reactions inside our cells, of burning hydrocarbons to make heat, and of releasing nitrogen atoms from complex molecules that then join together in ravenous diatomic bonds that drive most chemical explosions. It will also drive chemical rockets into orbit around the Earth, as far as the Moon and outer planets, and eventually, by inertia, over vast amounts of time, beyond our solar system.²

Within the last hundred years, we have learned about newer forms of energy. We discovered that heavy atoms—those with lots of protons but that have added or are missing their complementary neutrons—can be induced to break apart at a nuclear level to make smaller atoms and so create heat. This reaction is not normally found in nature in any great quantity—not enough so you would notice—although it is a suspected contributor to the heat at the cores of the rocky planets. Nuclear fission is the energy of the first atomic bombs and of reactor “piles,” and it has since been promoted—although not without opposition—to supply our electrical grid.

And then we learned, almost immediately after discovering the fission process, that the lightest atoms—those with just one or two protons and almost no neutrons—can be induced to come together to make slightly heavier atoms and also to make heat. This is the reaction that drives all the stars—at least until they burn out to become cinders, masses of pure neutronium, or black holes. We’ve been trying ever since to harness this reaction on Earth and put it into our grid, but the fusing process is trickier and more unstable than fission. And so far, although we’ve tried collapsing plasmas with powerful magnetic fields and laser pulses, the only thing that seems to work reliably is a massive gravity source—the weight that brings a star together in the first place. So, although there are a gazillion times more light atoms than heavy ones on this planet, and the newly fused atoms don’t create a waste problem, we still haven’t found a way to use the reaction to make steam and drive generators—we just use it to make bombs.

Finally, in a form of energy that we don’t actually use yet, we know that two particles of the same kind but of a different sort—divided into “matter” and its “antimatter” counterpart—will come together under the right conditions to annihilate each other in a cascade of pure energy without any waste products at all. This sort of reaction is presumed to be the ultimate release of energy, and it’s favored in the Star Trek television series to drive their “warp engines.” The only problem—Hoo-whee! “Only”!—is that while matter exists all around us in a great variety of forms, antimatter is extremely rare, actually nonexistent in our everyday life, and can only be created at great expense in particle accelerators.³ So, driving your ship or powering your grid with a matter-antimatter explosion is going to cost you an arm and a leg, repeatedly, thousands of times a second, over the course of your journey.

So, those are the kinds of energy we know: manipulating electron bonds, creating fission inside big nuclei, and creating fusion of small nuclei, as well as the potential for matter-antimatter annihilation. All the rest is just fantasy and … magic.

But there, on the tip of my tongue, the edge of my mind, are energies as yet undiscovered, that won’t be discovered until we have a different appreciation of physics.

In the short story “Waldo” by Robert A. Heinlein, a young man with myasthenia gravis—or muscle weakness due to an autoimmune disease—is taught by an Amish farmer to tap into the latent energy of the universe by drawing strange glyphs on his machines. And since that story came out in the 1950s, cosmologists have discovered that the expansion rate of the universe is mysteriously increasing—a fact they attribute to what’s called “dark energy.” Some theorists believe this is some kind of “vacuum energy” that exists in the depths of space without any interfering particulate matter around.

Dark energy poses problems, as does the actual expansion rate of the universe. By sighting known stars in distant galaxies—Cepheid variables and certain types of supernovas, whose light provides astronomers with “standard candles”—and measuring their red shift as an estimate of their distance, we can figure that the universe itself is expanding, and that the galaxies are pulling away from each other, at a rate of 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec (km/s/Mpc, an expansion rate measured over 3.26 million lightyears) with an error of plus or minus 1.0 km/s/Mps. This has been confirmed with measurements taken by both the Hubble and the James Webb space telescopes.

But this is a different expansion rate from the one derived by measuring the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. This is the “hum” of energies left over from the Big Bang—after light waves were first freed from all the precipitating particulate matter in the mix—that have been attenuated—or red shifted—from their originally high energy down to about three degrees Kelvin—almost stone cold—by the subsequent expansion of the universe. This measurement yields an expansion rate of 67.4 km/s/Mpc, with an error of plus or minus 0.5 km/s/Mpc. The expansion rate by the microwave measurement has been the standard of cosmology for decades—and it doesn’t jibe with standard-candle observations. The difference is not insignificant. So, what gives?

And now there is a breakthrough discovery that gravity—which has long been conspicuously absent from the calculations of quantum mechanics, the science that deals with the invisible world of subatomic particles—may actually exist at and be measurable at the microscopic level. Einstein’s theories of relativity, dealing with the macro world of planets and stars, and quantum mechanics, governing the realm of the unbelievably small, were long thought to be mutually exclusive and irreconcilable. But if gravity is exerted by grains of sand and maybe by subatomic particles, then we may be in line to create a “Theory of Everything,” combining relativity and quantum physics—the goal of physicists since early in the twentieth century. It may eventually explain mysteries like dark matter, which appears to drive the internal motions of stars in a galaxy, and dark energy, which appears to drive the motion of galaxies themselves and the expansion of the universe. These are exciting times.

And still, the idea haunts me: that somewhere, out between the stars, exactly where we want to go, there’s an abundance of energy that’s just waiting to be tapped—understood, captured, and used—if we only knew how. Maybe by drawing strange glyphs on our equipment?

But this is all just theoretical. And feeding my haunts is the fact that there is so much more we don’t understand about the universe. In fact, as I have suggested in the past,⁴ we really don’t understand three basic concepts in physics: the real nature of space, of time, and of gravity. But maybe, just maybe, we are beginning to …

1. Of course, as Arthur C. Clarke wrote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But magic is by its nature impenetrable and practiced on an arcane level of the mind, while technology is—with the right mental and philosophical tools—comprehensible.

2. An offshoot of this chemical energy—or maybe an entirely new form of energy, making four usable forms—is the photoelectric effect. There, a photon—a high-energy particle, as from sunlight—impacts the right kind of material and knocks loose an electron from its orbit around an atomic nucleus. With the right setup—say a semiconductor sandwich connected to a circuit—the freed electron goes one way, and the “electron hole”—the material’s atomic need to complete that electron shell—goes the other. This creates a flow of electricity. Something similar happens in a fuel cell. But it’s still energy based on movement and exchange of electrons, which is in the realm of chemistry.

3. How much would a source of antimatter cost? At CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator, they can potentially make about a billionth of a gram of antimatter per year—or, over about ten years, enough antimatter to power a sixty-watt lightbulb for an estimated four hours—but that is not the CERN equipment’s intended purpose. To make a single gram—1/28th of an ounce—of the stuff would reportedly cost a million billion euros. Yeah, whether you think in terms of euros or dollars, that’s an unreasonable amount to pay to drive your starship over, what, about ten inches?

4. See my blogs Fun With Numbers (I) and (II) from September 2010.

Getting the Fear Message

I don’t know what’s on your Facebook feed these days—or if many people actually have Facebook anymore, and not some other social media platform. But still, I’m getting a lot of what we used to call “blooper reels.” Maybe because I pause to watch them—there doesn’t seem to be any clicking involved—that the media gods decide to send me more of these. And there doesn’t seem to be any advertising, just a series of twenty or thirty of these three- to five-second clips, obviously gathered from home videos and smartphone cameras, rather than staged. A counter always clicks down to tell you how many more of them you get to—or have to—watch.

These clips are supposed to be hilarious, but most of them are just brutal. Someone is walking alongside a swimming pool at a party, missteps, and falls in—but it’s not a clean fall, and they usually smack their knee or their head on the pool’s coping. Ouch! Or some kid is skateboarding and decides to jump on a stairway’s center railing and ride down on the flat of his board—but instead he tumbles and lands on his neck. Ouch—and maybe a couple of fractured vertebrae! Or someone is swinging from a rope in a tree over the bank of a river or a lake—but he or she lets go too soon and slides face-first in the dirt before plowing into the water. Double-ouch—with a mouthful of gravel.

Being an empathetic sort, I feel an electric jolt go through my body with each of these impacts. I know the person is getting a serious injury—or at least I would if this were happening to me. The sensible thing would be to scroll on before the mayhem starts, but I just can’t look away. Maybe that’s the masochist in me. (I don’t think I’m a sadist, taking delight in these peoples’ pains. And I don’t find these bloopers at all funny. But they are … hypnotic.)

Some of these blooper reels involve motorcycles, too, where a person who is unmindful—or perhaps never learned to ride in the first place—does something stupid. He or she gives the throttle too much twist starting out, or tries to do a wheelie, or has a friend jump on the back while the machine is moving. And predictably, the bike upends or wobbles around and then falls over.

And finally, there is a variant of the blooper reel showing traffic accidents, apparently derived from dash cams. Cars swerving in front of the driver, trailers come unhitched, motorcycles get side-swiped or rear-ended. And in some cases, a car or truck up ahead has stalled on railroad tracks after the gates go down, a train barrels through, and the car is destroyed. These things are almost a repeat of the “death on the highway” films they used to show—maybe still do—in driver’s ed class.

Why do I mention all this? Because I recently sold off my motorcycles and have occasionally thought about buying another one. And seeing a sudden influx of these blooper videos with real pain in them as well as unpredictable highway crashes is having a subliminal effect. Maybe the social media gods are pointing the middle finger at me. Maybe nobody else is seeing these things and reacting. Or maybe it’s a campaign to teach us fear—or, if you find yourself laughing at these bone-crunching exercises, to make us callous and cruel.

The thing that resonates with me, especially in the automotive clips, is that the visual experience is eroding my personal confidence.

To be able to move through your day, you must be able to forget—or at least not dwell on—the possibility of falling and breaking your neck, or stepping into the street and getting sideswiped by a car, or reaching for something on a shelf and having it collapse in your face. You need to believe that you are competent, balanced, centered, and in control. If you think about all the possibilities for death and disaster all the time, you will be frozen with fear.¹

To ride a motorcycle, you must have a certain belief in your own mastery and, yes, your invulnerability. We used to call it extending your chi, your spiritual force, around yourself and the bike. You must think ahead, maintain your margins, keep your eyes on a swivel, and believe that you have the roll-on speed and swerve-avoidance, if not the braking distance, to stay out of trouble. You must adopt the mindset of the “immortal motorcyclist,” or you would never get out there and play among the cars and trucks.

But then there come these blooper reels and highway crash videos. Falling off the bike hurts, just like landing on your neck in a skateboard accident. Falling off at speed scrapes you up and then gives you blunt-force trauma as you come to a stop against a guard rail, bridge abutment, or the bumper of the car ahead. These images are a reminder to me that riding a motorcycle is being a ballistic object held in the saddle only by the force of gravity. And a fiberglass and styrofoam-padded helmet, a leather jacket with neoprene-armor inserts, sturdy jeans, and steel-reinforced boots are not going to be much protection except in the slowest, most dainty of falls.

If the Facebook gods are pointing the finger at me, I am certainly getting their messages of fear. Or maybe I’m just starting to notice them.

1. And this, of course, is a metaphor for life. Every action you take does invite risk. On top of that, we still live under a variable star in a dangerous cosmic neighborhood. And then, whatever you do, sooner or later you will die. Live a perfect life, utterly safe, avoiding all risks, and your organs and connective tissues will eventually clog up and break down anyway. This marvelous meat-covered skeleton made of stardust that you’ve been driving all along is not immortal. And the possibility exists—coming to you sometimes in the middle of the night—that the you who’s driving it might not survive the meat machine’s ultimate collapse. Maybe after life … there is no life.