A God I Can Believe In

I’ve said many times before that I’m an atheist.¹ That is, I do not credit the existence of any supernatural being, any intelligence or cause of action, which stands outside of time and the laws of physics, controls the birth and direction of the universe, and responds to the actions, prayers, pleadings, and moral consequences of human beings here on Earth. But that does not mean I necessarily think people who do believe in an actual, living, personal god are foolish, deluded, or less discerning. Rather, I imagine I lack some gene for the neurological mechanism which lets people perceive a spiritual world beyond their physical senses and respond to invisible beings outside themselves, whether gods, angels, devils, or some other manifestation of this spiritual world.

That also does not mean I would discredit the historical, literary, or social importance of this vision of a god or gods as having a powerful affect on people’s decisions, imaginations, and actions. Something exists that drives human belief, and as a rational, thinking animal I must react to and account for it.

I can accept a god or gods not as actual spiritual beings apart from us, but as the embodiment of humanity’s, or a society’s, or a person’s highest conception of “the good.” And by good I mean all of the things a human being can value and strive for that preserve us from chaos, evil intent, and personal futility and annihilation. Among the underpinnings of “the good,” I would place ideas of reciprocity and fairness between people; of justice and karmic retribution with regard to actions; of loving kindness and acceptance in dealing with individuals who do not happen to be our own kith and kin; of striving against and persevering in the face of adversity; and of sharing with and giving to those who are in need. Without these attributes, we are no more than wolves tearing at the stranger’s throat with our teeth while trying to disembowel him with our claws.

In this sense, a god is an ideal for the individual to strive to attain. This god is a vision, not of humanity as the big-brained, thin-skinned, opposable-thumbed animal that we physically and biologically happen to be, but as the perfectible, spiritual, inspired creatures that our expanded intellect, refined emotional sensitivity, personal sense of self-awareness, and future-oriented projective capacity promise we might become.

Concepts of godliness, of higher striving, of right and wrong action, of charity and forgiveness, and all the other attributes of “the good” are a powerful tool for breaking the wolf-spirit that lives in every human child and training that young, self-centered mental and emotional complex to become an accepting, committed, and useful member of his or her society. Perhaps other means exist to achieve this transformation—perhaps through pure rationality and observations drawn from the laws of mathematics and physics—but none is so directly applicable to the human psyche as instilling the belief in an all-powerful parent figure who exists apart from the individual’s biological and humanly fallible parents, who demands right action and good intention from each of us, and who will punish wrongdoing and bad intentions in ways beyond our immediate observation and testing. That is, a spirit in the sky whom you cannot see or question directly, who demands your obedience and, if you don’t comply, will send you to a burning place for all eternity in that unknown time after you die.

Once the individual as a child has absorbed and internalized these teachings—the precepts of right and wrong, forgiveness, charity, and all the rest that comprise “the good”—and so become a stable, contributing member of his or her society, then the mythology of the omniscient parent figure can be allowed to fade under the weight of doubts, counterarguments, and cynical observations which we acquire through comparative education, critical thinking, and emotional testing. The teachings will still exist, and the emerging adolescent and ultimately the adult will know what the “good” is without needing to be constantly reminded of an all-seeing supernatural watcher or the prospect of an eternity in burning fire.

Something similar to this idea is found in Buddhism with the concept of a person’s “Buddha nature.” This is the core person, the undefiled person, the being that lives deep in our consciousness, beneath our changing opinions, random ideas, and restless seeking after advantage. This deep being is naturally attuned to the universe and its ways. It is receptive to ideas of reciprocity, balance, acceptance, peace, loving kindness, and other elements of “the good.” This is the person we were meant to be before we became enmeshed in the chaotic disturbances and passions of life and went off to pursue vain and fanciful things. Buddha nature allows any human being to reach enlightenment.

The difference between these two conceptions—Buddha nature and the internalized godhead of “the good”—is that the internalized god is something the child has to be taught in order to separate him or her from the toddler’s demanding wolf-spirit, while Buddha nature is supposedly something every human being is born with and which exists apart from his or her socialization. I can live with this unresolved difference, although I find it hard to imagine how a child raised by wolves and retaining the wolf-spirit would ever uncover that supposedly preexisting and peaceful Buddha nature. I think the process would be much easier if one were instead raised by Buddhists.

In this view of god as internalized precepts of “the good,” what purpose does prayer then serve? Certainly, the kinds of prayer that resemble pleading and petitioning a supernatural being who stands outside time and the laws of physics have no effect. “Please send me a pony.” “Please don’t let it rain on my wedding day.” “Please help my little sister recover from fever.” All such requests, attempting to alter the chains of cause and effect, tempered by probability and random chance, which govern human affairs, are in vain. But such thoughts do serve to focus the mind on what the individual actually wants or should want, remind him or her of the things that are really important and necessary, and frame the mind to accept—through reference to those internalized notions of “the good”—what is actually going to happen.

Prayer as personal reflection, as the search for guidance during times of trouble, as the seeking after acceptance and peace—this kind of prayer is a direct reference to those internalized ideals. These prayers are the person asking to be reminded of what he or she already knows and may have temporarily forgotten. They are a reference to our higher natures and the conception of human beings as closer to gods and angels than to dumb, suffering brutes.

The god I can believe in is a reflection of the human psyche and the processes that bend it from the wild, self-centered, animal nature of the just-born human into a temperate, socialized, reflective member of an interdependent group, and then a person on the way to becoming wise. This is a god who has no extant form but exists in the imagination inside the human mind. And that is a far more powerful place from which to operate than any existence outside of time, the laws of physics, and the human frame of reference.

1. See also Believer or Seeker? from December 29, 2013, A New God for the Scientific Age from May 26, 2013, and What I Believe from March 25, 2012.

Continuing Mysteries of the Genome

I find the mechanics of life itself endlessly fascinating. Consider just DNA and its ability to turn a coded string of molecular modules into a complete and functioning physical structure.¹

Back in the early 1950s, when Watson, Crick, and Franklin were defining the DNA molecule’s helical structure through x-ray crystallography, concepts around the idea of inheritance were simple and straightforward. From the work of Gregor Mendel a century earlier, we understood that everyone has at least two sets of inheritable factors—one from the mother, another from the father—and this allowed children to turn out similar to, but not always identical with, either of their parents. And molecular biologists could readily link these factors to the two sets of chromosomes that were microscopically visible inside the nucleus of every cell. At that time the “Central Dogma” of genetics decreed that information flowed only in one direction: that DNA in the chromosomes inside the nucleus is transcribed into messenger RNA, which goes out into the cell body, where it is translated by molecular machines called ribosomes that assemble amino acids into proteins. It all seemed quite obvious.

A decade later, by the mid-1960s—and through the efforts of various researchers in universities and laboratories around the world—we had “cracked the code.” That is, we knew which DNA or RNA bases, arranged in groups of three called codons, were used to specify which of the amino acids that would go into a protein and in what order. And when that amino acid string was allowed to fold naturally, according to the arrangement of covalent charges inherent to its molecular structure, the protein would form three-dimensional bits of organic material that could build up the body’s cells, mediate its various chemical reactions, and carry signals back and forth throughout the organism.

After another decade, by the mid- to late-’70s, and again with the work of an ever-growing army of researchers, we were sequencing—that is, telling off the base pairs in order—of whole genomes. To be sure, we started small, with the microbes and simplest organisms. It would be another decade or so, up to the early ’90s, before researchers were ready to tackle the human genome laid out in some 3.2 billion base pairs along those 23 chromosomes in each human cell’s nucleus.

The original Human Genome Project was established in research facilities around the world. They were able to pull genes out of the chromosomes because the genetic sequence always included a start code (ATG) and a stop code (which could be TAA, TGA, or TAG). Find a start code and a stop code, and anything in between them was a gene. It was like hooking fish in a lake: find one, reel it in, and go look for another. But the process was expensive and took a long time. Researchers figured they would need about fifteen years to piece together the entire human genome.²

Then along came Craig Venter, a biologically oriented entrepreneur who had a unique way of looking at things. He asked why you would bother to hook those fish one at a time. Instead, why not just drain the lake and pick up all the fish at once? He approached Applied Biosystems—a company that made tools for genetic analysis, including the first protein sequencers and later several types of gene sequencers and synthesizers—about starting an effort to drain the lake. The result was a sister company to Applied Biosystems called Celera, based on the Latin root for “fast.”

Essentially, Venter and his team chopped the entire human DNA into tiny, random pieces, each about 50 bases long. Then they sequenced all these fragments to determine each string’s base pairs—that is, the A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s that make up the genetic code. Finally, they fed all those millions of tiny sequences into a super computer and let it mull over them. The computer was programmed to find all the duplicated and overlapping letter strings and put them together into longer and longer pieces. This approach worked so well that the research centers of the Human Genome Project had to adopt it or be left out of the running. Two years later—in the year 2000, when I joined Applied Biosystems—the first draft of the human genome had just been published from among five test subjects at a cost of about $4 million.³

The big surprise at the time was that not all the genome was made up of genes—if you defined a “gene” by the Central Dogma as a sequence that coded for a protein. Only about 10% of the 3.2 billion base pairs formed this kind of gene. The other 90% seemed to be nonsense or “junk.” The researchers at the time just assumed this junk was the crumbling sequences of genes from early in our evolutionary history—that is, genes left over from our microbe, fish, lizard, mouse, and primate ancestry, representing proteins that were no longer used in human biology and sequences that were slowly mutating into mush. Interestingly, if the original Human Genome Project had gone to completion with its fishing expedition using just start and stop codes, they might never have noticed this disproportion between genes and junk.

Another surprise was the ubiquitous use that the human genome makes of what’s called alternative splicing. Most genes consist of a promoter region upstream of the start code, and then after the start code comes the sequence that codes for the specified protein, followed by the stop code. But that coding sequence doesn’t always come in one piece. It often consists of an expressed part, called an exon, and a non-expressed part that intrudes between the coding parts, called an intron. At first, introns looked like just more junk interfering with the gene’s coding. But molecular biologists quickly figured out that many proteins are alike in having similar structural parts. By knitting together different patches of exons, presumably under the instruction of the introns, a single gene could be used to make many different but related proteins. Pretty damn clever. Efficient, too. Evolution—or, if you prefer, God—had invented the principle of modular construction long before human engineers ever thought of it.

But there still was the problem of all that “junk DNA” in the genome. I remember one day walking across the Applied Biosystems campus with one of our chemists, who said she flat-out didn’t believe in junk. The body spends too much energy copying those useless sequences every time a cell divides, she said. Those sequences had to mean something.⁴

Along about 2004 we began hearing about “microRNAs.” These were fragments of RNA only about 50 bases long that seemed to interfere with gene expression. A plant whose genetic code produced blue flowers might instead produce only white flowers if you added a certain microRNA sequence to its cell nucleus. So microRNAs had something to do with the regulation of genes. Researchers quickly determined that small fragments of RNA annealed to the promoter region upstream of a gene and to the introns inside the gene splices in order to tell the DNA when and how to express the messenger RNA strand that would go out into the cell body to make a protein. So the Central Dogma was stood on its head: sometimes DNA transcribes into little bits of RNA that go and tell other DNA sequences when to start making their proteins.

Not long after this, Eric Davidson at the California Institute of Technology demonstrated how the process of promoting genes functioned in differentiating cells and creating divergent tissues during the development of sea urchin embryos into complete organisms. And similar processes presumably function in all other animals and plants as well. Suddenly, it became clear that the 10% of the genome that codes for proteins is just the body’s parts list. The other 90% is the body’s interactive assembly manual.

A few years later we started to hear about the “epigenome.” DNA and RNA were not the whole story, it seems, because other chemicals—specifically, a methyl group, CH₃—could become involved with the microRNA control of gene expression. Promoter regions that became clogged with methyl groups no longer accepted their microRNAs, and the genes would become inactive. This might have seemed like an accident, some kind of environmental contamination, except that the cell also produces an enzyme, methyltransferase, which copies the pattern of methylation from one DNA strand to the next as the cell divides. If blocking the expression of a gene is an accident, it’s one the body has an interest in preserving.

Having a particular DNA sequence in your genome is no guarantee that a particular gene will be activated or a particular protein will get produced. And this makes sense because the DNA in each cell nucleus is the same, but not every protein is needed by every cell and tissue type. Liver cells need to make proteins necessary to their function, but those proteins would be useless and perhaps even toxic if they began appearing in a brain or muscle cell. So acquiring methylation and producing only certain microRNAs and not others is the way cells differentiate and stay different during fetal development and on into childhood.⁵

And now—and as part of the reason for this meditation—we have just learned that inheriting a particular genetic sequence from your parents is not the only way you can acquire a mutation. A recent article in Science magazine, “Harmful Mutations Can Fly Under the Radar,” suggests that genetic mutations which occur while the embryo is still developing and its cells are differentiating may then appear in one or more parts of the body but not in every part. This is a process called “mosaicism,” because the distribution of mutated and non-mutated cells can resemble a patchwork, mosaic design throughout the body’s tissues. Why is this important? Because a simple cheek swab of cells that researchers then sequence to show your genome or to look for a particular set of mutations may not show everything going on inside your body. Mutations that could be causing a disease condition or susceptibility somewhere else in the body might not show up in your mouth. It also means that examining the genetic profiles of parents may not indicate the susceptibilities of their children, because no one is willing to take apart each egg and sperm to sequence it before those two germ cells combine to create a zygote, which then goes on to become an embryo, which finally grows up to become you.

Life and its coding are no longer simple and straightforward. The more we learn, the more wonderfully complex the process becomes. It’s way more complicated than just the sixty-four possibilities inherent in the four base pairs forming a three-codon reading frame that’s used to select the next amino acid in order to make the next protein. We are unique individuals, and within our bodies are cells that have become unique based on how they use their share of the genetic code. And now we learn that even the coding within those cells may sometimes be unique.

It’s a wonder that we humans are able to get born, grow up, walk around, draw breath, learn algebra, think great thoughts, and achieve great things for as long as sixty or seventy years at a time. Ain’t life grand!

1. For similar blogs along these lines, see The Chemistry of Control from May 11, 2014, and The Flowering of Life from August 25, 2013, among others.

2. The U.S. Congress originally funded the Human Genome Project in 1990 with an estimated total cost of about $3 billion and a projected finish date in 2005.

3. Today faster, smaller machines can sequence an individual’s entire genome in a couple of hours for about $1,000.

4. Why does copying DNA require any energy at all? Because DNA is a polymer made up of repeating ribose sugar rings which are cross-connected from one strand of the double helix to the other by their attached structures of adenosine (A) linked to thymine (T) and cytosine (C) linked to guanine (G). But the backbone of each strand, connecting the sugar rings up and down the strand, is a phosphate group. Phosphate—a phosphorus atom bound with four oxygen atoms—is the energy source inside the cell. Making adenosine triphosphate is the business of the organelles called mitochondria, which convert the energy in your food into assembling those three phosphate groups into one molecule headed by an adenosine group. Breaking down those adenosine triphosphate molecules into adenosine diphosphate is how the rest of the cell extracts that energy. Anything that uses up phosphate groups, like copying one strand of DNA to make its complement during cell division, creates a drain on the cellular economy.

5. And figuring out how to strip that methylation and reactivate those microRNAs is one way to turn a fully developed and differentiated somatic cell back into a stem cell which keeps its options open and can be used to repair and replace many different kinds of tissues.

The Impermanence of Things

An approach to problem solving that is popular with Six Sigma¹ and regulatory mindsets says you cannot find a permanent resolution to a processing error or equipment failure until you identify its “root cause.” This mindset implies that every problem, every failure, is the result of a causality chain that leads backward and down to a single source. The presumption is that you must find and eliminate that root cause in order to put things right. Any attempted fix which does not address and include the root cause is doomed to fail and serves as only a short-term, cosmetic, feel-good, band-aid solution which will allow the problem to resurface some minutes, weeks, or years later.

This approach makes sense in terms of process analysis and error trapping, dealing with temporal and ephemeral situations, which is the true realm of Six Sigma. The difficulty begins when you try to apply that level of analysis, that particular hammer, to every problem in your life, assuming that you’ve just found a nail.

We had an experience of this recently with the parking garage at our condominium. The garage is a huge structure made of reinforced concrete, three levels deep, able to park about five hundred vehicles. It’s an old structure, built almost forty years ago. Over this time the concrete has cracked and water has entered from leaks in the roof structure, from rain trailed in by car tires in the winter, and from some historic leaks in the rooftop swimming pool which have since been fixed. The result in some areas is spalling—shallow pits—in the concrete, white salt-like deposits on its surface, some exposed rebar, and rust stains. This damage has caused concern among the homeowners for the overall integrity of the structure, and the condo association has paid a concrete expert to examine the problem areas and propose repairs.

After much probing, mapping, testing, and chemical analysis the expert reported no major issues with the structure but recommended patching the spalls, routing out and sealing the cracks, applying a surface finish to the exposed concrete, and other measures that combine damage repair with preventive maintenance. He explained that concrete naturally contracts and cracks as it sets, and that water gets into the cracks, carries salts with it, and causes the rust.

That answer satisfied most people, but not a minority who want to know the root cause of the problem. The answer that water getting into cracks was the cause of the spalling, salt deposits, and rust stains has not been good enough. They want to get down to the core of the problem and feel that any fix that doesn’t address an underlying problem is doomed to fail.

And that is why today I’m thinking—brooding actually—about root cause analysis. If you must name a root cause, then was the garage badly built from the beginning? No, because the concrete expert, who is also a structural engineer, found no fault with the original design nor with its implementation during construction. Was the concrete mix or the pouring technique faulty? No, because his testing showed the concrete’s composition and strength actually exceed specifications. Was the rebar badly designed or installed? No, because the steel is still in almost perfect shape.

If you had to find a root cause for the failures in the garage, you would have to say it was built in an area that gets rain for half the year—when California isn’t experiencing a drought—rather than on a dry, high desert plateau, and it was built of concrete and steel instead of less permeable and more lasting materials like glass and titanium. Also, the condo association has failed in recent years to provide a maintenance program that might have found and sealed new cracks as they developed, repaired the pool leaks in a timely fashion, and applied a waterproof coating to all surfaces of the exposed concrete slab.

That is, once the garage was completed forty years ago, the owners made the untested assumption that it was a permanent and imperishable structure, requiring no further work and expense, like the Pyramids at Giza. Concrete and steel are supposed to be immortal, aren’t they?

You wouldn’t make such an assumption about something small and mechanical, like your car or a bicycle. They have moving parts which need regular oiling and adjustment. They have parts subject to abrasion and wear, like tires and brake pads, which need regular replacement.² If you viewed the wear and tear of engine components and the wearing out of tires and brakes as a process failure and looked for a root cause, you would have to conclude that the source of the failure was not having made the machine out of magical, incorruptible, imperishable materials that do not yet exist in human technology.

Although a building or a structure—like our condo garage—looks solid and permanent, it is actually a type of machine. Cars driving into and out of it, bumping over expansion joints, and braking and turning, all create vibrations and stresses that move and shake the underlying fabric of concrete and steel. Water dripping off the cars, blowing in from outside, or coming through unpatched leaks in the roof will do its inexorable work of leaching chemicals out of the concrete, rusting the steel, and weakening that fabric. Heat makes the structure expand by a few millimeters or so during the summer, and cold makes it contract during the winter. And the minor temblors of a seismically active area add their own stresses. The structure is a machine that works against itself and gravity all the time.

The takeaway from all this, and the point of my musing, is that everything is subject to wear and tear, to the eroding processes of time, weather, and use. Even the Pyramids bake in the noonday sun, freeze at night, and lose a few grains of rock each year to the infrequent Egyptian rains. They have lasted 4,500 years so far,³ but one day they will all weather away to mere lumps.

We humans mentally divide up the world for ourselves: things that are perishable and those that are permanent; things we expect to replace and those we take for granted; problems we should try to solve and situations we should accept and, perhaps, merely strive to hold our own. But those mental cubbyholes are really just placeholders along the spectrum of a vast and slippery existence. We expect the car we drive to wear out and not be worth fixing after a couple of hundred thousand miles, if not sooner. We don’t expect grandma’s dining room table ever to wear out and need replacing—unless we find it too big for our current apartment or too antique for our modern lifestyle. And we want to believe that the garage structure where we park our fragile cars will last forever.

But existence is a process, trending from one state to another, and not one subject to root cause analysis and resolution. One day, even our Sun will burn out, and that will not be a design defect but a simple fact of existence.

1. “Six sigmas” is a reference in statistics to a degree of accuracy or consistency, in which a production run is defect-free or a process performs accurately 99.999% of the time. Technically, the term represents six standard deviations between the process mean and the nearest specification limit—and if I could explain that to you in English, I’d be an engineer. The initial practice of Six Sigma techniques originated at Motorola in the 1960s, was picked up by Jack Welch at General Electric, and has since become a standard in many industries to reduce process variation, increase process efficiency, and improve overall product quality. People take formal training in these techniques by proposing and completing improvement projects and are awarded with metaphorical green and black belts, much like a martial art.

2. And once, long ago, cars regularly needed new sparkplugs and contact points in their ignition systems, while bicycles and motorcycles needed new drive chains. Improving technology has gradually redesigned, toughened, or eliminated many of these fragile components until the replacement cycle is beyond the casual awareness of the general public.

3. The pyramids once were sheathed in a smooth layer of white limestone, creating a brilliant, reflecting surface. An earthquake in the 14th century loosened these casing stones, and the locals carted them away to build Cairo. That left the blocky, stepped appearance we know today.

We Need a Grand Challenge

When I was growing up, in fact all during my formative teenage years, I was conscious of a great national challenge: Put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. Yes, everyone understood—even a bright child such as I understood—that the challenge was aimed at the Russians as another aspect of the Cold War. But that’s not how it generally felt.

When I sat in my ninth-grade classroom and heard the piped-in broadcast describing Alan Shepard’s first suborbital Mercury flight, there might have been some mention of Yuri Gagarin’s previous orbit. But the first American manned space mission wasn’t presented so much as a national race and never as any kind of military operation. It was the achievement of the logical first step toward longer missions that would be represented by the Gemini and Apollo flights. It was something our country was doing voluntarily in the interests of science and exploration.

The problem was, “Put a man on the Moon” had no natural corollary. We landed, we walked around, then drove around. We gathered rocks in the interests of geology and science. We took pictures, did goofy experiments like dropping feathers and driving golf balls, and left flags. But by the time I was out of college, everyone could see there wasn’t much point to doing any more such missions. We walked on the Moon. Hooray.

NASA took all that expertise and then changed direction. Instead of huge rockets with one-time-use components to boost us into orbit and beyond, they decided to build a space truck with the potential for reuse and an operational ceiling of about 500 vertical miles. Any satellite intended for an orbit higher than that needed its own booster package, stowed along with the satellite inside the cargo bay. The Space Shuttle was designed to support a continuous orbital presence, represented by satellite fleets, space telescopes, and space stations. The problem was that, while the vehicle itself was technically reusable, it just about had to be rebuilt for every mission. Going into space became a whole lot less sexy and still remained prohibitively expensive.¹

Space and its exploration became just something we did, like building waterworks or highways. Satellites have created huge benefits for our everyday lives in communications, weather monitoring, and scientific research. Interplanetary probes are telling us more and more about the solar system. I’m not complaining, and indeed, everyone oohs and ahhs over the latest pictures from the Mars probes and the scientists’ speculations about the possibilities there of water and signs of extraterrestrial life. But the challenge is gone. Remote, automated, probe-based interplanetary exploration is no longer, in the words of President Kennedy, “something we choose to do because it is hard.” It’s interesting but not inspiring.

I grew up believing we had a future out among the stars. I wasn’t alone, because science fiction and the popular imagination have trended that way ever since the decade of the Moon launches. Television shows and movies like Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, and finally Firefly have all promised us this future. But actually going to the stars, rather than play acting on studio sets with elaborate special effects, is not only too hard but too expensive, as well as dangerous. We dream of the stars, but we make no effort to actually go out there.

I can’t imagine growing up in the current national environment and popular culture. For a young person, this is a time without vision. For my ancestors, for my great-great-grandparents and on down through the generations, the vision was “Go west”—go to America, go beyond the mountains, go to Texas, go to California. Out there to the west was where things were bigger, opportunities were greater, and futures were waiting to be made. In my youth, the vision was “Go into space”—go to orbit, go to the Moon, go to Mars, build space stations and colonies, and step off for the stars. Up there is where danger calls, where the hard things are, and where the future will be made.

Today’s vision, I guess, is “Save the planet.” Stop building stuff, stop mining for metals, stop drilling for energy, stop planting new crops, stop personally using energy, reduce your footprint, take shallow breaths. The vision is not about going someplace and discovering its uniqueness and possibilities, but about surviving on a planet that is supposedly fragile, defenseless, horribly managed, badly mangled, and turning sour with our every breath. We can only survive, can only sustain ourselves, if we draw back, turn inward, and be very, very careful. Sit quietly on the couch, play your video games, and watch actors on television pretend to explore out among the stars.

That vision won’t save us. I don’t say the Earth is running out of resources. We have abundant energy supplies, food potential, clean recycled water, and an active air-cleaning system to last us indefinitely on this planet. Clever use of our technology will make quite a nice little life for our descendants for as long as anyone now living would care. But the human psyche, which developed over a hundred thousand or a million years of endless wandering, did not evolve to settle down and take shallow breaths. We walked out of Africa. We crossed land bridges. When we came to oceans with no obvious way across, we built canoes, then boats, then ships. We became seafarers. We put our imprint on the continents. We climbed every mountain, pushed into every swamp and desert, paddled up every river, probed every cave we ever discovered. We are a restless, seeking species. We don’t live for mere survival. We want to see new places, learn new things, and take up new challenges.

Making a sustainable nest on Earth won’t save us in the long run, either. I believe the universe teams with life, and that intelligent life will eventually harness the mysteries of mathematics, the supplies of energy latent in space and time, and the mechanics of gravity to thrust itself out among the stars. When such life happens upon our little green planet with its warm skies and liquid seas, the encounter will go one of two ways. If we have bases on other Sol System planets and moons, a thriving exploratory arm, and our own starships, those intelligent visitors will likely see us as something similar to themselves. They may be friendly or hostile, but they will know they’re dealing with potential equals. But if we are living modestly on just the skin of this one planet, then despite all our protestations of intelligence and our attempts at communication, they will likely treat us as a population of bright, chittering squirrels. We might be interesting creatures, but no one to whom the space explorers would feel compelled to yield ground.

And if the extraterrestrials don’t get us, then our own solar system surely will. This planet experiences a regular rain of rocks and has endured a number of mass extinctions. Where fire from above doesn’t annihilate us, the orbital peculiarities and periodic ice ages of this planet are still a threat. People living quietly, just hoping to survive, on the skin of the planet will not be in any position to deal with these dangers. Plan small, breathe shallow—and die out in the long run. That may be what some human idealists want: to eliminate this pesky species with its untidy, rambunctious habits. But that’s not the future which a hundred thousand or a million years of wandering, wondering, and developing our huge brains and our invasive technologies have prepared for us.

We have to go on, go outward, and establish our presence in space. People talk about a mission to Mars. Well and good. But if it’s just to walk around and plant a flag, then please don’t bother. We’ll spend a few terabucks getting there, then forget it all and sink back into watching television. Mars looks like a choice because it is a whole planet and has an atmosphere, but the planet is small and hostile, the atmosphere thin and unbreathable.² We have a small, hostile world a lot closer to home for us to practice on—the Moon. I believe we should build bases there, establish a presence, create the technologies that will let us live and thrive anywhere in space, and then step off for the other potentially habitable planets and moons in this solar system.

Just as the trappers and traders who explored the western expanses of North America had to build forts and trading posts on the plains and along the rivers, we will need to build bases outside the Earth’s atmosphere: space stations in planetary orbit, on the Moon, and at the stable LaGrange points in between. These habitats will build up our knowledge and expertise about dealing with space’s radical environment and its challenges. We have learned a lot from the Moon missions, the Space Shuttle, our satellite systems, our participation in the International Space Station, and our robot probes. But our knowledge of what it means to be a spacefarer is about where our ancestors were when they faced the broad ocean and hollowed out their first log canoes. We have a long way to go.

We need to stop spending money on stunts, on flag planting and extraplanetary walkabouts, and start making a life for humanity out among the stars. It’s where we’ll be going eventually. We really ought to start getting there.

1. To say nothing about dangerous. We lost two crews—first aboard Challenger during takeoff and then with Columbia during reentry—for simple mechanical reasons that we eventually fixed. But each time we nearly lost our nerve about going into space. We also lost a complete Apollo crew in a pad fire early in the program, but that didn’t stop the Moon launches. What we didn’t have with the Space Shuttle program was any feeling of national resolve.

2. Mars’s atmosphere is made up mostly of the heavy gas carbon dioxide, because the pull of the planet’s gravity is too small to hold lighter gases like oxygen and nitrogen. Mars’s atmospheric pressure is about one percent that of Earth, which makes it a high-grade vacuum. Take an airplane up to about 70,000 feet, open a window, and you’d be breathing the equivalent Mars atmosphere—except it would still be mostly nitrogen and oxygen instead of carbon dioxide. Mars’s planetary core is dead, so it has no magnetosphere, which means the solar wind lashes the planet with hard radiation. Building a colony on Mars would not be any simpler than building one on the Moon or at the top of Mount Everest—except that either of those places is a whole lot closer with much lower logistical costs.

The Old Roman Way

I am a child of western civilization—and proud of it. I contrast this attitude with the current trend toward multiculturalism, which appears to state that all cultures and beliefs are equally valid, can only be understood by their native adherents, and cannot be judged by outsiders. To which I say, “Poppycock!”¹

The cultural tradition which I follow may have had its first glimmerings in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and in Egypt along the Nile. That’s where we humans first got the basic notion of settling down to farm the rich alluvial soil of the river valley, rather than hunt and gather, or follow herds of cows and goats from summer to winter pastures. With settlements came a common language, writing for the priestly elite, and the idea of regulated authority and kingship. But the western tradition didn’t really get under way until the Greeks.

The Greeks apparently started as invaders. Their origins are shrouded in pre-classical myth. Some accounts say the Danaoi and Achaeans of The Iliad are associated with the “sea peoples” from elsewhere in Europe who raided the Aegean region of the Mediterranean and settled to found local kingdoms. Others credit the Dorian invasion, with people coming down from the north, perhaps from the Balkans or from beyond the Black Sea. Still others think the Greek “invasions” were actually a cultural uprising in place. Whichever tale is true, the lands of Greece and western Turkey were a place of turmoil during the time that Egypt and Mesopotamia enjoyed relatively stable civilizations.

The philosophical and political world view which the Greeks developed in classical times was unique: they blended myth and storytelling with abstract mathematics and geometry and placed great value on inquiry, analysis, and appeals to logic rather than to authority. They were the first to consider the rights and obligations of the individual in relation to the state and its rulers.² They developed a form of government—democracy, or “the strength of the people”—which they may not always have practiced consistently but which was practiced nowhere else.

The Romans, who acknowledged their debt to Greece,³ apparently started as brigands making a camp on seven hills along the Tiber River. They were so poor and so ruthless that they had to raid their neighbors to find wives. To the tradition of literature, mathematics, and democracy which the Greek colonists had brought to Sicily and southern Italy, the Romans added a genius for law, military organization, and engineering. The Romans took the hypothetical and gracious imaginings of the Greeks and turned them into the functional realities of a state and army that conquered their known world, as well as systematic knowledge for building bridges, roads, ports, and waterworks which supported their imperial administration, and many of which still stand today.

For all their philosophical and political sophistication, the Greeks still got their water from local wells and rivers, bathed in a bucket, and voided their wastes in a latrine that some slave eventually had to backfill. The Romans used their engineering skills to bring sweet spring water down from the hills, across miles of open ground and intervening river valleys, and distribute it in public fountains, heat it in public baths, and use it to flush the wastes from public lavatories into closed sewers. Because of its access to fresh water, the city of Rome at its height could accommodate a million people, and many capitals in its provinces offered a level of health and cleanliness that Athens and Sparta in their prime could not match.

I admire the old Romans. They were professionals who knew their business when it came to founding a city, conquering an empire, and then running it in a practical way.⁴ They were remarkably free of fuzzy notions, too. To them, a civilized person, someone worth knowing and respecting, was someone who obeyed the law, spoke Latin, and bathed regularly. In country after country, tribe after tribe, if you adopted the Roman laws, learned the language, and followed proper hygiene, you could become a citizen of the empire, and your children might rise in the economy and government and eventually sit in the Senate at Rome.

Yes the Romans had slaves, but the institution was not based on racial or ethnic prejudice. Someone who lost a battle against Rome could be killed outright or sold into slavery, along with members of his family. But slaves had rights, could own property, could buy their freedom, and upon being freed could become citizens. It wasn’t good to be a slave by any means, but it was better to be a Roman slave than a slave, or even a common peasant, in many other cultures of the time.

The Romans brought their kind of civilization to the barbaric tribes of Spain, France, German, the Netherlands, and Britain. It didn’t always stick, but the memory was there, and after the Western Empire fell, barbaric local kings like Charlemagne tried to rekindle the Roman glory. In this they were helped by Christian missionaries who carried Latin and modified Roman values across Europe and into places Rome never invaded, like Ireland and Scandinavia.

I believe it was the Roman taste for the practicalities of engineering, combined with the Greek taste for hypothetical inquiry, that set the western tradition along the path of scientific discovery and invention. We developed technologies like the wheeled plow to tame the thick roots of European forests, masonry construction to build forts and strong points against invaders, the stirrup and heavy cavalry to do a bit of invading ourselves, and ship construction to conquer the seas and oceans and eventually explore the world. When this mechanically fertile mindset encountered Chinese inventions like block printing and gunpowder, we knew just how to improve them and use them to build a dominant civilization.

Without this heritage of valuing individual worth and a learned ability to explore, adapt, and combine ideas and technologies, the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries would never have gotten under way. The collaborative exploration of physics, chemistry, and biology as underlying principles of reality—rather than merely abstract ideas of interest only to scholars and aristocrats—and their communication through the printed word gave us the modern world.

Consider the world invented by western civilization as compared to the rest of the cultures that have grown up outside its influence. The modern world does not simply domesticate animals like cows, goats, pigs, and dogs. Through biotechnology, we now domesticate parts of animals and plants and their underlying proteins for medicines, research materials, industrial processes, and raw foodstuffs. We don’t simply cut wood in the forest, tan leather, or mine metals from the earth, but instead we now process these natural resources chemically to make synthetic materials like plastics, glass, exotic alloys, and polymers such as humankind has never seen before. We don’t just trade one set of goods for another or for gold, but we invent the economics of future-oriented finance, offer investors compound interest and shares of stock, and trade on the time value of money. We don’t just write words in ink on parchment or paper, but use the underlying physics of electricity and electromagnetic waves to carry messages across the world and out into space.

Other cultures have had their moments. The ancient Chinese were clever inventors and diligent scholars, the Mayans became remarkable mathematicians, and the Incas were amazing workers in stone and earth. But the cultures that have joined the western tradition not only learned, but learned how to learn, to concatenate knowledge, to blend disciplines, and to advance science across the entire frontier of the human unknown.

And like the old Romans, we who follow this tradition are not bound by fuzzy notions of race and culture. If a person will adapt to western culture and adopt a liberal, scientific, democratic viewpoint, he or she is welcome to join the club. If you obey the law, speak the language, and follow good hygiene, you become one of us.

This came home to me most forcefully one day as I was walking across the campus of Bayer Corporation’s Berkeley Biotechnology Center. I saw three people coming toward me on the sidewalk: an African-American, a woman of Chinese extraction, and a young man I knew to be a native of Pakistan. They were talking animatedly together, and I wondered to myself what people from such diverse backgrounds could be discussing. As they drew nearer, I overheard their conversation, and of course they were talking about bioreactor contamination and how to protect against it. The language of science, in this case biotechnology, was the bridge to a superculture that exceeded their individual racial or ethnic origins.⁵

The old Romans, ruthless as they often were, inspired this modern life by trying to bring a common culture, outlook, law, and sense of purpose to the world they knew. Most other cultures had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Roman empire. And the Roman way took better hold in the barbarian west of Europe than it did among the older Asian civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean. But still, if those Roman brigands had never left their seven hills, we would not have the world we know to day.

And for that I give a piece of my heart to the emperor and his legions.

1. First, I hold it as an article of faith that humans are one species with a common biology, brain structure, inherent mental capacity, and drive toward personal relationships and the roots of culture. A writer’s business is to cast a hypothetical net of desires, intentions, ideas, and values to capture the human mind. If people were really unintelligible to one another, or could only be understood by members of their own narrow group, then I would be out of a job.
       Second, because we are one species and share a long history in the hunter-gatherer and nomadic herder stages of development, I believe that root culture has many common elements worked out over millennia by human societies. While different cultures may have singular etiquettes about where you point the sole of your foot or when it’s appropriate to belch, any socialized person will recognize and condemn acts of robbery, slavery, genocide, and other forms of taking unfair advantage. A society may sometimes condone these evils in the name of some greater good, but wise heads and sensitive hearts will still perceive their wrongness. As human bodies and brains are the products of evolution, so human qualities of morality and justice, as well as the accumulation of knowledge and advance of technology, are subject to evolutionary forces. Humans tend to become more civilized over time, and savagery becomes less tolerable.

2. The whole story of The Iliad hinges on the struggle between King Agamemnon and his vassal lord Achilles. And the story introduces the first “common man” in western literature: Thersites, a lowly soldier who in Book II dared to speak his mind during a council of aristocrats and kings.

3. One of Rome’s founding tales—there is another, about two brothers raised by a she-wolf—is in The Aeneid, which traces the path of the defeated Trojan Aeneas, who fled Ilium and settled with his shipmates and followers in Italy.

4. Sometimes too practical. The Roman practice of decimation—lining up a group of rebels or army deserters and bludgeoning to death every tenth man—was calculatedly vicious. A later and fortuitous blending of Roman and Christian values enabled those of us who inherited western civilization to live without such bloodshed. We have become softer, wiser, and more adherent to advanced legal precepts.

5. You can see this same effect in any scientific enterprise or on any university campus. Science and discovery have become a culture all their own.

The Asymmetric Beauty of Baseball

As a child, I never cared for sports, either playing or watching them. As I’ve said elsewhere, I was a bookish lad, more interested in story lines than in pure physical—and in my juvenile view, pointless—action. When my father had a ball game on television, I would sit still and watch only because he expected it, but if given the chance I would change channels to an old movie or even a sitcom rerun—anything with characters and a plot rather than sports.

I started watching baseball games with some interest during the 2012 World Series when our local team, the San Francisco Giants, were playing. Since then, I’ve become a bit of a fan—and that perplexes me, because I can’t understand why baseball captures my imagination while I have no time for football, basketball, or other major sports.¹

What attracts me to the game, I believe, is its basic artificiality and asymmetry. Baseball did not grow up out of the clash of armies in phalanxes, like football, or from a game of keep away, like basketball. It had to be created from scratch with a stick, a ball, and a patch of grass.² It is a game of rules, of limits, of precision, and of niceties. It is a lopsided game which ends up being so balanced that its play is pure elegance.

Consider that in most field games like football, soccer, and rugby, or those played on a court like basketball, hockey, and tennis, the two teams are present at all times and are comparably equipped.³ In baseball, nine men from one team take the field for half an inning, while the other team sends individuals into the batter’s box in rotation to try their skill and luck against the whole of the other team.

In most other games, everyone plays with the same equipment and under the same set of personal rules at all times.⁴ In baseball, the batter has a stick of wood and may use only it to touch the ball, operating under a completely different set of rules from anyone else on the field. Everyone else has a specially shaped glove, designed for the position he or she plays, and may catch and throw the ball with either hand. In most games, one side may take possession of the ball from the other during play, changing the direction of the game. In baseball, the right to handle the ball is strictly limited to one team during its half of the inning.

Consider the lopsided nature of the play between pitcher and batter. The pitcher has four chances to make personal mistakes—throwing the ball somewhere outside the strike zone—before he loses to the batter and must let him proceed to first base. The batter has only three chances to hit a ball that crosses the plate inside the strike zone before he loses his turn at bat. Even then, the first two of those chances include the batter’s connecting with the ball but sending it out of play. And any of the batter’s failed chances may include swinging at and missing a ball that does not cross the plate, or declining to swing at a ball that—in the opinion of the man standing behind him, the umpire—did in fact cross the plate, despite all the subtle twists and turns the pitcher may have put on it.

Four balls for the pitcher but three strikes for the batter seems grossly unfair, but in actual play they balance precisely. And that basic play structure is supported by a fretwork of rules about things like the pitcher physically hitting the batter with the baseball, or the catcher or one of the infielders chasing down a foul ball to catch it before it hits the ground, or the batter actually connecting with the ball on a third strike but the ball’s continuing back—a foul tip—and being caught by the catcher.

Baseball is a game of specific situations and the statistics surrounding them. Not the actual probabilities, mind you—because nobody seems to care much about them—but the history! How many times has the player come to bat compared with how many times he or she has hit the ball,⁵ how many times has the ball gone out of the park for a home run, how many bases has this player managed to run while the ball was in play after a hit, how many runs did other players score on this player’s hits, how many bases has this player stolen while the ball was in play with another player at bat …? Each situation has its own definition, its set of rules, and a compilation of statistics for each player during the season and—for some major events like home runs—during the player’s career. The same goes for pitchers, who carry a season’s baggage of innings pitched, average number of runs “given up” during a game,⁶ number of strikeouts made and whether by the batter swinging or the umpire calling a strike, and—most prized of all—number of times he or she has pitched a game where the other side got no hits at all.

Back when athletes and doctors still smoked, I remember someone saying that baseball players could afford to advertise cigarettes because they weren’t much as athletes and only had to run the ninety feet between bases. Compare that with basketball or soccer players, who run all the time during a game. I actually bought into that thinking, until I started watching ball games. Yes, for half an inning most of one team sits on the bench and watches their current batter take swings. And yes, for half an inning most of the other team stands out in the field and watches their pitcher throw the ball. But as soon as the batter connects with the ball, the players burst into action: outfielders run like sprinters to get under a fly ball to catch it; infielders leap like basketball players or dive like volleyball players to catch the ball, then change hands and throw accurately to one of four bases, depending on who is running where; and the batter puts his or her head down and charges off to first base, or as far around the infield as he or she can go.

Any one of these players has about half a second to observe the state of play, make a decision, and follow through on a course of action. Missing or dropping the ball is a personal embarrassment. Throwing inaccurately or to the wrong base is an error that can count against the team. The players on the field may appear to be standing around, but they must have their minds on the game every second they are out there. That takes tremendous concentration, especially when the game is moving slowly, and tremendous athleticism and stamina to shift from standing around into that burst of action. Ball players are real athletes.

Baseball is also the only game I know of where the players do not directly, physically interact.⁷ Other than tagging a runner with a gloved hand holding the ball, the players are never supposed to touch one another. It’s a deceptively gentle—and gentlemanly—game where balls are hit and caught and bases are stepped on, conferring the magic of mutually observed and accepted actions upon the play and the mystical concepts of “safe” and “out” upon the player. In theory, a player cannot be injured unless by pulling muscles and taking damage from repetitive stress, especially among pitchers. But players often get injured by colliding at base, getting hit with the ball, and break fingers when catching it. It can be a dangerous sport, but with less intentional injury than football and fewer personal fouls than basketball.

Other games have lots of action, relatively simple rules, and almost no rituals or superstitions. Baseball has limited action, a ton of rules,⁸ and no small amount of ritual and superstition for both players and fans. Like an intricate machine full of gears and levers and balancing and opposing forces, baseball and its rules make for an elegant and sociable afternoon of play. Compared to it, football, soccer, and basketball seem overtly physical, insufficiently mental, and just … crude.

1. And I’ve tried. I can watch a baseball game all the way through and enjoy the deliberate pacing and the sudden changes of fortune. Football is too flashy, the players too anonymous behind those big helmets and shoulder pads, the action too fretfully episodic with all those short plays followed by long setups, and the coverage too distant with wide-angle cameras trying to show the entire line of scrimmage. And basketball to me is just a flurry of arms and legs in motion with the ball caught somewhere in between. I suspect my fascination with baseball is that it focuses on one player at a time, letting you look forward to your favorite player’s turns at bat and giving you a chance to think about the game while it’s still going on. Modern television coverage—with its many camera angles and closeup shots, instant replays, and color commentary—also helps you follow the action as if you were standing right down on the field.

2. Of course, baseball started out in England with country games called cricket or rounders. But aside from throwing a ball, hitting it with some kind of stick and then running to one or more bases, playing different positions on the field, and keeping score by innings, modern baseball shares little with these games. In style and play, it’s an American creation, with its own set of rules hammered out and refined over the years.

3. True, in football, one side fields the offensive specialists on the team while the other fields its defensive specialists, but both sides have comparable numbers in play at any one time.

4. True, in soccer, everyone else is limited to using feet, legs, and head to handle the ball while the goalie on either team may put hands on the ball as well, but the goalie has no other special equipment.

5. And a “hit” is not just connecting with the ball so that it doesn’t go foul. If you hit the ball fair and square but somebody catches it before it touches the ground, that’s not a hit, it’s an “out.”

6. The “earned run average”—because, of course, the pitcher is supposed to be in control of the game and able to throw the ball so that it crosses the plate inside the strike zone but twists, turns, and drops so cleverly on its way there that the batter either can’t hit it or thinks he doesn’t need to. Thinking and perceiving are a huge part of baseball.

7. Except for tennis, where the opposing players are separated by a net and get no play advantage from hitting each other with the ball. In most other games, referees may call personal fouls for hitting, tripping, holding, or gouging another player—but that doesn’t mean such offenses don’t regularly take place with calculated skill.

8. Consider the “designated hitter” rule. In baseball, everyone who takes the field defensively during an inning is also supposed to take a turn at bat. But pitchers are such specialty players that they generally are terrible hitters; so the rule was invented to give the pitcher a pass and let the manager put a better player in the batter’s box during the pitcher’s turn in the lineup. Everyone plays by this rule except the National League in American baseball and the Central League in Japan. Personally, I don’t like the rule. Pitchers should at least try to learn hitting and take their turns at bat like everyone else. An evenhanded approach to a player’s ability should count for more than scoring potential. It’s just a game.

Movie Mayhem

I watch a lot of action movies. They’re good, clean fun and usually well plotted. And I have an in-built reality sense which lets me understand that the actor who receives a theatrical gunshot, a crippling blow to the face, or decapitation isn’t really injured, that it’s all done with stop-action, fake blood, and moulage.¹ I believe most people who watch these movies have this same sense, because—given the amount blood and gore that goes up every day on big screens and small—people would otherwise not become so quiet when they encounter an actual dead body or horrific accident in real life, or watch a documentary where the soldiers fall down and are really, really, you feel it in your bones, dead.²

Still, I know a bit about real life. I studied karate at the university and have kept up with it over the years. I’ve sparred, taken the occasional and unexpected full-force blow, and also handled both cutting-edge weapons and firearms. As a writer of both science fiction and general fiction, I maintain a professional interest in physics, the laws of motion, and the consequences of real actions. So I can tell you that almost every time you watch a movie fight, you are being told a pattern of subtle lies. I don’t know where and how they started, but by now these lies have become so ingrained in the art form that, to reverse them and show the way a firefight or a fistfight really happens, would seem strange and “false” to the average moviegoer.

Machine Guns vs. Pistols

Perhaps the most obvious and unsubtle lie hides the relative accuracy and effectiveness of a machine gun versus a handgun.

The hero always has a pistol. Whether it’s a revolver or a semi-automatic, it still shoots one bullet for one trigger pull. Depending on the model or the magazine capacity, it goes empty in six, seven, or ten, or seventeen rounds, and then the hero has to reload—unless the film is such a fantasy that you’re not supposed to keep count and neither is the hero. The villain or his henchmen always have machine guns. They might be machine pistols, but the principle is the same: one trigger pull unleashes a stream of bullets. And it’s a rare break in the action that you see anyone carrying a spare magazine or inserting it into the weapon.

The choice of weapon is not the lie, because usually the hero is walking into the villain’s fortress or lair while pretending to be engaged in some other business—think of James Bond calling on Goldfinger or Blofeld. Because he’s a secret agent, the hero has to conceal his weapon somewhere under his street clothes.³ The villain’s henchpeople, however, are usually on site with ready access to the weapons locker, so they can grab a large and bulky machine gun at their leisure when the mayhem begins.

No, the lie is that, even with the ability to apply 800 or 1,000 rounds per minute to the target, the henchperson can never hit the hero. Yes, the old Thompson submachine guns, because of rotation of the mass of ammunition in the circular magazine, tended to pull to one side, and the muzzle would rise with the recoil of each round fired. But these effects are controllable in the hands of someone skilled with the weapon. Machine guns are not as accurate as a rifle, say, but they still can put most of the bullets where you want them at a range of 50 feet or so.

The other part of the lie is that the hero with a pistol can hit whatever he aims at—usually with a careless, offhand shot from the hip or shoulder. He can selectively take down the henchpeople with a dead-center shot and only “wing” the villain, so that he’s alive for later questioning and the denouement of the story.

Of course, the hero is a better person than the henchpeople. He or she is presumed to be more skilled and practiced. We want him, or her, to win. And for reasons of plotting, the movie has to show her, or him, to be in desperate trouble without inflicting serious, artery-tearing, muscle-rending, life-ending wounds to the body every five or ten minutes. That’s why the men with the machine guns tend to hit everything else in sight: the ground, the flowerpots on the balcony, the fence in the foreground, and the walls and windows in the background. Exploding scenery is proof that something’s being hit.

But still, if Angelina Jolie had a dollar for every time she was shot at without effect … Oh! Well, never mind.

There’s a good reason people reach for the machine gun, despite its weight, its comparative awkwardness, and its distressing tendency to run out of ammunition quickly if you don’t fire in short, well-controlled bursts. It’s a devastating weapon. If one bullet can put you down, five or ten arriving in the same place in the space of a second or two can tear you apart. The machine gun is not necessarily the weapon of choice in all situations, but it’s a mean choice with serious intent.

If someone ever aims one at you, best be advised to stand still and put your hands up. You might duck the first bullet, but the next five will certainly catch you.

Hand-to-Hand Fighting

The other lie you see in the movies has also become so ingrained that most people take it for granted: the actual dynamics of hand-to-hand fighting. Now, not being a frequenter of the bars in certain neighborhoods, I actually haven’t had a stand-up fistfight since the fifth grade. But as noted above, I’ve studied Isshinryu karate and have given and received my share of kicks to the body. So, without having broken my nose, I know a thing or two about fighting.⁴

The classic punch from every fight scene in the movies is the roundhouse punch. John Wayne used it a lot. “Hit ya? I’m not gonna to hit ya,” he says as he draws his right fist ’way down somewhere back behind his leg. And then, “Oh, hell …” and he lets fly a haymaker that connects with the villain’s jaw and knocks him back three paces.

In the real world, the minute that arm draws back and the shoulder goes down, an alert fighter knows to either create space by stepping back or launch a counter—a punch to the ribs, kick to the solar plexus, or whatever comes in handy—the second that shoulder starts to come back up. Don’t worry, you’ll have a whole half a second to do something useful before the roundhouse punch arrives. And since Wayne is burbling on about hitting you or not hitting you or whatever, you’d have to be sound asleep not to know that some kind of violence is about to ensue.

No real fighter telegraphs his intentions by drawing back for a punch, and yet the roundhouse has been a staple of movies and television since before I was born.

The second mistake is hitting anyone in the face with your bare knuckles. There must be some atavistic instinct to damage or destroy the personality—represented as being situated in the human face—that guides this choice. But if the purpose of a punch is to render the opponent unable to fight by knocking him unconscious, the face is the last place you want to hit.

Unconsciousness comes when the brain is accelerated against the inside of the skull by the impact of the blow, resulting in concussion. A blow to the forehead, temple, or any other part of the skull would be effective here, because the force of the blow is immediately transferred to the braincase. The face, on the other hand, is protected and cushioned by nose cartilage, eye sockets and cheekbones, sinus cavities, lots of movable and breakable little teeth, and the hinge of the jaw. All of these features act like the crumple zones of a modern sedan to absorb and redirect the shock of the blow. In addition, the hard parts—the teeth and jawbone under a thin layer of muscle and skin—will almost certainly hurt your unprotected knuckles. Proper fighting requires that you hit the opponent in places and ways that render him unable to respond. Hitting him in the face is almost always a bad idea.⁵

So far, I’ve been concentrating on untrained fighters or those using western-style techniques based on boxing. But you also see impossible bloopers when the fighting style comes from the mysterious East.

Popular in martial arts movies is the roundhouse kick, which like the roundhouse punch starts somewhere “back there” and proceeds with a full-body, 360-degree turn to land a foot somewhere near the opponent’s head. The same physics apply to the kick as to the punch: if your foot has to travel seven or eight feet in a wide, sideways arc, your opponent has time to see the attack, interpret it, prepare for it, and counter it. Such kicks are impossible to land unless your opponent is either drugged or tied to a chair.⁶

Similarly useless is the flying side kick, where you launch yourself from across the room, take two or three steps, leap into the air, and proceed with your foot stuck out in a static kick.⁷ During my karate training, our sensei showed a movie clip from the national karate championships of that year, back when Chuck Norris was in competition. Someone launched a flying side kick at Norris’s head. With all the time in the world, he took a half-step to the side and threw a short block against his opponent’s outstretched leg. The attacker spun sideways, tumbled, and fell on the mat in a heap.

If all these fighting techniques are so pointless, why are they still shown in movie fights? Because these fights are meant to be watched by a third party—you in the audience—rather than to be won or lost.

A real fight is short, sharp, and too soon over.⁸ The punches come from the level of the belt, never involve the shoulder, travel the shortest possible distance, and end in the solar plexus or ribs, too fast for the opponent to react. ’Way too fast for the audience to see what’s coming, enjoy their anticipation of the blow, and have their expectations fulfilled by the graphic result. If the studio filmed a real fight, audience members would get confused and would constantly be asking each other, “Huh? What happened? Why is that man on his knees gasping for breath?” And so, for the sake of good storytelling, the hero always telegraphs his punches and spins around in elaborate, kicks worthy of the ballet. And the henchmen always shoot up the scenery to show how the hero is in so much danger. It makes for a good action movie.

Just don’t try any of this the next time you’re on the street in a rough neighborhood.

1. Sorry, that’s a technical term, meaning horrific and realistic-looking injuries made out of molded rubber and lots of makeup.

2. And maybe this reality sense has simply grown up in me and my generation, from a childhood where fountaining blood and exploding guts were not a necessary part of the storytelling. I saw plenty of cowboys get shot, clutch their stomachs, fall forward, and roll on their backs to show not a mark or a smear of blood. It was called acting—and we let our imaginations supply the visual consequences.

3. For the purposes of discussion, we’ll assume the hero is male. Female heroes are common, too, although in these types of movies they usually have fewer clothing options for concealing a high-powered pistol or a weapon of any kind.

4. As my lapel button says: “I don’t like violence, but I’m very good at it.”

5. Not to mention the fact that the eyes are located in the center of the face. Sight is the main sense used in a fight, so it’s best to target areas where your opponent won’t immediately see the blow coming.

6. Isshinryu karate is noted for its compact, direct, in-line movements. I remember a sparring match we once had with students from another dojo, where one of theirs launched a perfectly executed roundhouse kick. Our contestant easily ducked under the flying foot and returned a straight kick that won the point. The other side claimed that their man should have won because his roundhouse kick should have landed. “Yes, except our man ducked,” we said. “Well,” they replied, “that’s only because he had no choice but to duck to avoid the kick. Otherwise, it would have gone in.” You just can’t teach some people.
       And please don’t get me started on the Brazilian martial art known as capoeira, where people dance around on their hands and perform roundhouse kicks with their feet. It’s graceful, lovely, inventive … and falls apart with one solid block and counter.

7. I guess the intention is to put all of your mass and a lot of kinetic energy behind the kick.

8. Probably the most realistic physical action—at least to my eye—was in Liam Neeson’s movie Taken: immediate response, short moves, straight lines, and not a word spoken.