Rivers flow into basins. The basin can be a sea like the Gulf of Mexico or an enclosed basin with no path to the ocean, such as the one into which the Truckee River flows to create Pyramid Lake in Nevada. As they reach their ultimate destinations and enter relatively quiet water, rivers lose the energy they acquired from their down slope flow. That loss of energy results in a deposition of whatever sediments the water carried in suspension during more turbulent flow. As the sediments drop from the water, they build deltas of sands, silts, and clays (all three, by the way, are size classifications, not necessarily particular substances).
 
Deltas develop in different shapes. Some, like the Nile Delta, are triangular like the Greek letter delta (Δ) from which the Nile’s shape gets its designation. Others are more irregular, like part of the Mississippi Delta, whose farthest reach into the sea is called a bird-foot delta.
 
As sands, silts, and muds settle, they can block a channel and divert a stream. Often, the stream of water bifurcates to flow past the barrier. Now two streams, either or both of which can block their journey to the sea, can undergo further splitting. Eventually, the process makes a surface feature through which water is distributed to the sea (or lake) in numerous channels, all the result of similar bifurcations. In a sense the water is being distributed to the sea, so the new channels that extend the zone of sedimentation are called distributaries.
 
The buildup of sediments extends a delta seaward. Depending on the size of the river and the amount of sediment it carries, a delta can develop relatively fast. I know, you want a ballpark figure. Just how much sediment can a river carry? Exact measurements are difficult to achieve and river capacities vary year to year because of rainfall, but here goes: The Mississippi River annually transports about 170 million tons of sediment from Cairo, Il, to the Gulf of Mexico.*
 
In just the past six or seven thousand years the Mississippi Delta spread over 7,000 square miles, extending the continent into the Gulf of Mexico and eventually becoming the site of not only small communities, but also New Orleans. Parts of today’s bird-foot delta did not exist in the eighteenth century. That’s how fast rivers can build a landscape by transporting sediments from highlands to the sea.
 
Because the river is a continuous conveyor of sediments, living on a delta is a high-maintenance process. The entire delta has numerous distributary channels, one being the Atchafalaya River, which is, in fact, the shortest path through the delta the water could take to get to the sea. Human intervention and a large dam across the Atchafalaya keep the main flow running past New Orleans. Whenever sediments pile up in an important shipping channel, engineers bring out the dredges. Can’t have Bourbon St. dry up because of an empty channel abandoned by the river.  
 
Delta formation is a relatively good analog for the way we build the structure of our lives. Like a constantly changing delta, our lives are also ephemeral and require high maintenance. Frequently, we find our paths blocked by the very things we have carried along: The substances, ideas, and emotional responses we pick up and carry with energy can suddenly block our paths. What we pick up by way of obligations and cares during our energetic flow can also interrupt our path whenever we lose energy. We find ourselves at bifurcations, unexpectedly having to make decisions about which new path to take around obstacles composed of whatever we transported through a channel that runs from past to present. The basin into which we build a life delta is the future.
 
Turn around to look back upstream for a moment to know that whenever something you easily carried along in the past suddenly became an obstacle, you found a way around it. You cut a new channel, or you dredged a familiar one. Delta maintenance is a constant task if you want to build seaward with some control.
 
You have an ocean to fill as you build your delta with a lifetime supply of sediments.
 
*Thorne, C. R., O. P. Harmar, C. Watson, N. Clifford, D. Biedenharn, and R. measures. 2008. Current and historical sediment loads in the Lower Mississippi River. Final report, contract Number 1106-EN-01. London, England: United States Army, European Research Office of the U.S. Army. P. 3. Available online at http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a527428.pdf

We’re like photons bouncing between two funhouse mirrors, especially as we age. “Get it done,” we say to some. “Be patient,” we say to others. Depending on whether or not the mirrors are concave or convex, we see time distorted one way or another, stretched or foreshortened.
 
We can’t see time objectively, even when we look at a clock. It’s always in the context of our lives. And we really can’t imagine the long stretches of time that preceded us nor the long stretches that will follow. Living on a planet that is four and a half billion years old in a universe that began its formation 13.8 billion years ago imposes limitations on our imagination. Can you really grasp the passage of billions of years? Can you feel the passage of millions? How about millennia? Got a good grasp on the past century?
 
Take the formation and destruction of mountain ranges in eastern and southeastern North America as examples of long-term processes that exceed our ability to “feel” the passage of time. About 1.3 billion years ago part of the continent underwent a collision that produced the Grenville Orogeny. That mountain-building lasted 350 million years. Then, mountain-building generally stopped for a while, from 950 million years ago until 500 million years ago, the time when another set of mountains began to rise. Their formation, called the Taconic Orogeny, lasted until 440 million years ago. Getting time-dizzy yet? Another general mountain-building lull was followed by more building about 375 million years ago in the Acadian Orogeny. Another lull, and then the rise of mountains in the Alleghanian Orogeny (also Alleghenian). That event persisted until 260 million years ago.
 
I don’t know about you, but I find those numbers staggering. Millions of years? For any organism, the process of mountain building is overwhelmingly long. We have lifespans that are comparatively as brief as a muon. Really. Think about it. You, I hope, will live 100 years. If you do, you will have a lifespan that is 2.5 millionths of the time since the end of the Alleghanian Orogeny. A muon lasts about 2.2 millionths of a second.
 
Sorry, I’m not trying to depress you with the thought that your existence is almost as fleeting as a muon’s, but I am trying to make a point about patience and a secondary point about what we can determine about our physical world. The Great Rift Valley (really two valleys) of Africa will eventually be a narrow sea. Nevada might also become one. You can live in either place and never know that you are living in such a long-term process. Your muon-brief existence doesn’t allow you to experience the duration of a continent’s breakup. Or, you might live in a mountain-building area without experiencing the rise of the landscape.
 
Continents break apart. Continents collide. Oceans form. Oceans close. It’s not as though you can go out and put a long rock bolt in the ground to stop the movement. If that were so, then civil engineers would place such bolts along the San Andreas and North Anatolian faults.
 
Back to patience. Have you noticed that people want others to make mountains right away? That some people can’t imagine the long process you went through to build whatever you have built to make the world in which you live? That youth never comprehends the passage to age through experience? That you, yourself, might not comprehend the experience and wisdom of those now long gone, their accomplishments and thoughts having been eroded like some old mountains?
 
Patience is a relative matter because for everyone personally, time is a relative matter. Be patient with others, my little Muon.   

You might know that slight feeling of panic if after driving a long distance, you look at the gas gauge only to see the needle hovering just above “E” while a glance forward reveals no gas station. “I should have stopped when I passed that last one,” you think. That’s the trouble with a finite gas tank. But, of course, you can no more drive around with an internal combustion engine attached by a hose to a refinery than you can attached by an extension cord to your electric car. Imagine untangling the latter after you run several errands.
 
Finite resources. Yeah! They’re a problem. Just when you think you can crest the hill, you realize you might not have sufficient energy for the task. If you could only make it to the top, you can coast the rest of the way.
 
Even on a flat landscape you can even encounter the problem of finite resources. That’s the way of the world. Sometime and somewhere you will—we all will—run out of resources. But not just yet. As a fourth-grader, I heard my teacher say that we will run out of coal, oil, and natural gas before the end of the twentieth century. I wish she were still around. I’d like to take her on a tour of the Marcellus Shale gas wells in Pennsylvania and Ohio or the oil wells in the Bakken Formation of North Dakota, where a large (over 30%) percentage of the natural gas was simply “flared” in the first and into the second decade of this century. The North Dakota Geological Survey estimates the Bakken reserves at more than 200 billion barrels, with a possible recovery as high as 50%. Even if the recovery is lower, say 10% or 20 billion barrels, that quantity is far larger than my fourth-grade teacher could have imagined.
 
Colonel Edwin L. Drake (He wasn’t a colonel) drilled the first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. With the technology at hand, he hit oil at 69 feet. Lucky. Had he drilled a little distance from his find, he would have had to go deeper. The oil in the layer of rock he discovered was tapering beneath him. Within the time frame of the Civil War, Titusville and nearby Oil City looked like a city of wells, but with limited drilling technology, the recoverable reserves dwindled. Drake would probably be more amazed than my fourth-grade teacher if he could witness the current production.
 
Remember the time when you thought you were on empty only to find that you still had some gas in the tank, that your 18-gallon tank took only 16.5 gallons when you stopped to fill up? Sometimes, even geologists can underestimate the amount of gas in their tank. In Roadside Geology of Pennsylvania by Bradford B. Van Diver, you’ll find this sentence: “To be sure, much recoverable oil and gas still remain in the ground, but they will certainly run out in only a few tens of years, even with new and better recovery methods” (38).* Van Diver includes that sentence in the 2001 third printing of the original 1990 publication. In 2015 the Marcellus
Shale yielded 14.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day, and beneath Ohio lies another untapped source of natural gas and oil in the Utica Shale.**
 
You might not care, but the discovery of oil and natural gas resources is a lesson for us living our finite lives on a finite world: Your gauge isn’t always accurate when it points to “E.” I’ll make it a personal lesson. Short of taking one’s own life, very few know the moment when they will run up against their ultimate finiteness. I think of my own father, who lived to be 97.  As he said, “I never thought I would live to be 97.”
 
Yes, he ran into his ultimate finite barrier as we all will at different ages. But none of us has to give up on the potential for reserves we can discover as he found on his way to age 97 and a marriage that lasted more than 75 years (they died the same year). Like him and the gas and oil companies that still search for additional reserves, you will surprise yourself with new energy resources and will probably discover that even when the energy tank seems to be empty, there’s often still something left.
 
And now the big one. Some group just announced that we are at two-minutes to midnight on the clock of annihilation. The so-called Doomsday Clock is supposed to be a warning, one much like that of my fourth-grade teacher’s. Physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University seems to be the current authority on our finiteness: “We present the clock not so much as doom and gloom, but as an opportunity to get government and public discussing the important issues.” He also says, “We’ve mad the clear statement that we feel the world is getting more dangerous.”***
 
Well, of course. I assume that had Krauss lived in 1348, he would write that we are already past midnight, what with the plague’s spreading like wildfire. Krauss’s group says the tension between the USA and N. Korea plus greenhouse gas emissions are the reason for the “two-minute warning.” I don’t know how old Krauss is, but those of us who listened to President Kennedy explain the Cuba Missile Crisis certainly thought we were only a minute away from doom.
 
There will always be a cause for panic, such as a gas gauge needle pointing to empty, a proclamation by those in-the-know that a limitation has been reached, or a threat from either near or far. Somehow and often, the empty tank gets us to the next gas station. Will there be a time when we are stranded short of our destination? Definitely, but like my dad, that time and place might be much farther along the road than we predict.
 
*Van Diver, Bradford B. Roadside Geology of Pennsylvania. Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1990, Third Printing January 2001. This is an excellent series of paperbacks that I recommend for travelers who are unfamiliar with the landscapes of the various states.
**Geology.com online at https://geology.com/articles/marcellus-shale.shtml
***Science as Fact Staff, January 28, 2018, Keepers of the Doomsday Clock Say We’re Now Only 2 Minutes to Midnight, Science Alert online at https://www.sciencealert.com/keepers-of-doomsday-clock-put-closest-mark-midnight-since-cold-war-2-minutes

We still don’t know whether or not some of us are simply just born to be wise. Sure, we can dub ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens, but being wise? Is that a gift or the product of hard work? Take what we call ourselves, for example: “Human beings.” What’s that designation?
 
There’s that troubling word: Being. It’s been a topic of interest probably from a time long before the ancient “philosophers” who were arguably the first “wise” people. Being? Existence. Doesn’t everything everywhere exist? What’s so special? Oh! That’s right, HUMAN being, and not only that, but also a WISE, WISE (imbued with so much wisdom, it seems, that we are twice wise, sapiens sapiens) human. I feel sorry for our immediate predecessors, you recall, those we label Homo sapiens. Poor dumb predecessors, only one sapiens to their name. What? No high tech? No nuclear weapons? No tartrazine?
 
Dubious definitions of wisdom aside, we might want to focus on being, or, rather, Being. Isn’t that what we want ultimately to understand? We’re obviously not the first to ask about existing itself, about Being with that capital b. Ever spend some time trying to wade through Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (Sein and Zeit)? Want to feel a bit unwise as though you have too few crenulations on the surface of your brain? Then read through Being and Time and write a book report someone with only one sapiens behind H. could understand.
 
Being. The question of being is not a series of questions about beings. We have plenty of answers to questions about beings: questions about what they do and what characterizes them. Science does a relatively good job at providing such answers. Tartrazine? We call it Yellow No. 5 and use it to make Mountain Dew yellow. See. Answers about entities of all kinds, all provided by science.
 
But Being with a capital b. Now that’s one for sapiens sapiens to ponder. Is it a meaningless question? Not according to Heideggar. “One may…ask what purpose this question is supposed to serve. Does it simply remain—or is it at all—a mere matter for soaring speculation about the most general of generalities, or is it rather, of all questions, both the most basic and the most concrete?” (29)*
 
Why should sapiens sapiens concern himself or herself with a basic, concrete question? Isn’t there enough going on daily with which one has to be concerned? But underlying all the activities of being there (or being here) lie those nagging questions about what, where, and the big one, why. So, what does it really mean to have being? Do we have it? Or should we reword the question: What does it really mean to be being (to be)? And is there just a collection of finite beings, human or otherwise, or is there an underlying Being that is “the most basic and the most concrete”?
 
And if there is an underlying or all-encompassing Being of beings, then where do the individual beings have their existence? Without some reference, individuals who happen to “be here” might feel hopelessly lost. If directionless, then is wise, wise man incapable of determining why he or she possesses being, and is H. sapiens sapiens further incapable of understanding the relationship of being and Being? It certainly seems to be a problem for many of our kind.
 
If we don’t have the wisdom to understand the underlying nature of our individual being and of all beings, are we not like the character Chance, called Chauncey Gardiner, in Being There? Adopted by a man, the simpleton Chance grows up to tend the man’s garden. Unaware of the outside world except through TV until he is evicted after his benefactor’s death, Chance becomes famous just by “being there”—thus the name of the novel by Jerzy Kosiński and the movie starring Peter Sellers. Is it a coincidence that Heidegger’s term Dasein also means “being there”? Are we, like Chance/Chauncey, simpletons regardless of our lofty designation H. sapiens sapiens?
 
Test

1. Define being.
2. Is there (a) Being that underlies all beings?
3. Define Being.

 
Yeah. I know. I failed the same test. And every time I retake it, I fail it again.
 
I might note, however, that there are those who don’t even bother to take the test, and there are others who think the whole matter isn’t worth the effort. Some dismiss the test as the mark of foolish simpletons who want to find security in some all-encompassing Being. Some argue that What Is is because it always was or is. Others, like Stephen Hawking, argue that Nothing Itself demanded that Something Be, that the nature of nothingness is to produce something. The Math just seems to argue for it.
 
And there are those whose “acquired wisdom” says to them, “Existence is an act of will, and that implies that we are here because a Being beyond beings decided to create. The ninety-two naturally occurring elements didn’t make themselves. Same with their quarks and electrons. The Creator created, and the Creator is Being beyond beings.”
 
That begs that previous problem: What is the relationship between being and Being? Does your “being there” bear the mark of Being as John declares in his Gospel: “Nothing was made that was not made through…”?** Or, are you the product of some unconscious Hawking vacuum or some eternal set of universes called branes that the multi-universe physicists might suggest? An unconscious beginning for consciousness, for becoming twice wise? Really, we are twice wise by chance? There is wisdom in Chance? “Maybe,” you say, “that’s what seems to emanate from the mouth of Chance in the movie Being There. Even a President follows his advice.”
 
As I said, I keep failing the test. If you have the answers, I’m willing to forego some classroom ethics and cheat. I’m desperate for those answers because I want to help those for whom “being there” is meaningless, those who find “being there” so hopeless that they want to cancel their membership in the H. sapiens sapiens club. Maybe those who choose suicide just don’t realize that being wise requires repeated failure to answer the questions in an unending search for wisdom.
 
Want to be called Homo sapiens sapiens? It’s a title of merit based on an unending quest. Being Homo sapiens sapiens is a matter of becoming wise. 
 
 
*Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York. Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962.
**Choose your translation; it all amounts to the same idea. All that exists bears the mark of Existence. All that exists, exists in the image of Existence or bears the image of Existence. It is Being that finds its expression in beings; Being puts Its (His, Her) stamp on all creation. In the standard way of saying it, “made in the image of God.” For John, being there is only there because of the Word. Augustine of Hippo thought similarly. “Nothing was made that was not made through the Word.” Now, run off to page through all those old philosophy and theology books. As for me, I’m going to retake the test yet again; I’m determined to earn that second sapiens.

It’s so easy for us to misunderstand one another. We interpret others as either speaking “in tongues” or speaking elliptically as they leave some of their thoughts in their heads. “What did you say?” we ask. Or, “What do you mean?”
 
No worry, there’s now been a conference on understanding misunderstanding. The January 2018 gathering occurred at the University of Stuttgart. Organizers of this interdisciplinary workshop called “Misunderstanding” laid out the basis for the conference in this press release: “Misunderstandings are part of everyday life.”
 
Not going too fast for you, am I? Well, if I am, then let me  w  r  i  t  e        s   l   o   w   l   y.
 
Just in case you and I don’t get the picture, the conference announcement continues: “Misunderstandings trigger arguments, are the source of conversation and not uncommonly only strategically simulated.” You’re following, right?
 
At this time, you’re thinking “I wish I could have been there.” Sorry, that train left the station. But we can glean a little understanding from the press release. “In everyday communication misunderstandings can be described according to communication theory. Yet, what about misunderstanding aesthetic forms that are not in communication contexts but that can be captured in the framework of reception aesthetic?”

Ah! So, this is about what happened to you the first time you were asked to explicate T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land without reference to Sir James Frazier's The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance. English teachers. Humpf! Or, maybe it's about your first look at cubist art or Schrödinger's equation. All those struggles you suffered through until someone finally explained in precise, clear language with unmistakable meaning or until you simply abandoned the attempt to understand "in the framework of reception aesthetic."

And there you've been worrying about how to pay for bread, milk, and eggs.

Oh! Well. As Eliot concludes his famous poem, "Datta, Dayadhvamn, Damyata/ Shantih. Shantih. Shantih." You understand, don't you?

* https://www.uni-stuttgart.de/en/university/news/press-release/How-we-understand-understanding-from-misunderstandings/

“For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?” (Luke xiv, 28, King James Bible) The verse seems like a reasonable approach to reaching any goal. But in life, we don’t always have goals. We have challenges and opportunities that appear by chance, and both make counting the cost difficult.  
 
Still, “counting the cost” might be applicable even in chance circumstances. Given a problem, most of us probably favor looking for the most efficient solution even though we might not see one. We adopt an Occam’s-Razor approach unless we immediately see and understand the complexity associated with any new circumstance.
 
Most of life’s towers we construct wouldn’t win an architectural award. They are not the product of long-term planning, but are the result of our responses to unexpected problems and circumstances. We build with whatever is both immediate and useful. Look back at the structure of your life. In the words of Cedric Price, “Architecture is too slow in its realisation [sic.] to be a ‘problem solver.’”
 
When you gaze at those towers, you’ll probably say, “I think I’ve been building lean-tos. But what choice did I have other than using that which was available at the moment?”
 
Throwing together one lean-to after another, you’ve done pretty well. There’s always some learning going on, so chances are that your most recent lean-to is better than your first. You’ve learned that some materials are neither durable nor strong, and you’ve learned that certain arrangements of even weak and temporary materials afford better protection and stability than others. You—and everyone else—learned the cost and principles of architecture by building.  
 
You are always in the process of building towers even when you have only the change in your pocket to cover the cost. 

Did you know that some earthquakes have been associated with changes in well water level thousands of miles from their epicenters? No kidding. Now, who would even have thunk it?
 
Whether or not such a phenomenon has entered your thoughts is irrelevant now that you know. What’s significant here is that there are people who monitor well water levels precisely to discover their relationship to earthquakes. Why? Well, wells might serve someday as earthquake predictors. You might not have thought it, but others have.
 
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) even has a fact sheet on the subject. The three authors, Michelle Sneed, Devin L. Galloway, and William L. Cunningham, write that “Earthquakes affect our Earth’s intricate plumbing system—whether you live near the notoriously active San Andreas Fault…or far from active faults, an earthquake...can affect you and the water resources you depend on.” First, let me say that’s cute, referring to “our Earth.” Who else’s? Second, I’ll point out what the authors announce, that the “2002 M7.9 Denali Fault earthquake in Alaska caused a 2-foot water-level rise in a well in Wisconsin….”
 
In short, earthquakes affect both the solid crust and its water content. You probably knew about the former, but you might not have known about the latter unless you were directly affected by a change in water supply or quality. Some of the physical changes are highly noticeable, such as the seiches (sloshing) of Lake Pontchatrain in Louisana after that 2002 Denali Fault earthquake, seiches that lasted 30 minutes and broke lakeside moorings.
 
Why mention this? Under an increasing interconnectedness, all of us seem to undergo at least small changes when something happens elsewhere. We can’t live isolated lives without effort. Distant events and people can affect us both physically and qualitatively. Because of our ceaseless connections, we now respond emotionally to people and events we could not possibly have known about in real time. Much of what happened in the distance in the past was, for those who eventually learned, a matter of history. Not now. No. Instantaneous or near instantaneous effects make themselves both known and felt.
 
Maybe we could learn something from research into hydrogeological changes associated with earthquakes. The USGS authors write of “precursors” to earthquakes evident in water, such as the changes in chloride and sulfate content of well water measureable in Kobe, Japan, where a devastating earthquake destroyed buildings and took lives. The Japanese hope to develop predictors based on well monitoring and water quality. 
 
Seems that we need some kind of advanced warning system about human quaking. But then, am I just dreaming? If we can’t predict actual earthquakes yet, how can we predict the actions caused by human faults? Will we always be stuck just examining consequences because we fail to read the signs in our basic makeup? We are, after all, mostly water.
 
*USGS fact sheet 096-03. Earthquakes—Rattling the Earth’s Plumbing System. Online at https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-096-03/

Here’s a line from Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning”: “It belongs to them/Let’s give it back.” Heartwarming thought, isn’t it? Really socially acceptable. I assume that the members of Midnight Oil are sincere in their efforts to clean up the environment, but they do play electric guitars and use electrically charged speakers in their concerts. To what extent can anyone truly “give it back”?
 
I like the song because of its powerful beat, and I like the lyrics somewhat, even though they teeter on the edge of nonsense. The sentiment in the words is that we screwed things up with all our civilization stuff, that we took from those who owned Earth before civilization, and that somehow we members of civilizations have a debt to pay to all aboriginal peoples. We’re burning our beds without even knowing, and we’re not fair.
 
And there are many who take the song’s lyrics as a social philosophy that speaks to their sense of fairness in a world of lopsided material wealth and imbalances in resources. The idea is that somehow we don’t have the right to have. That having is in itself an evil and that having is what separates people. Some have more. Someone else has less. And you, no matter what you might have, probably have something more than someone somewhere who has less. Pretty selfish of you. I think you should, in the words of Midnight Oil, “give it back.”
 
The physicist Richard Feynman ran into the same thinking at a conference. As he listened to the pontifications of a number of professors on ethics and inequality, especially inequality in education, Feynman came to the conclusion that education was about making us unequal. As he writes, “In education, you increase differences. If someone’s good at something, you try to develop his ability, which results in differences, or inequalities. So, if education increases inequality, is this ethical?” (281)*  
 
And then in the conference Feynman listened to a keynote speaker argue that “the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and how that we have atomic weapons, any war and we’re doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure that there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we’re all even” (282).**
 
So, you turn on the TV today, and you see someone protesting because there are those who have more, and they have less. And there are those protesting because those who have, have because they took. And those who took are evil because they took from someone who had some sort of aboriginal right of ownership.
 
Let’s give it back. Way back. Back beyond Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo floresiensis, back beyond Homo sapiens neanderthalensis; beyond Homo sapiens (heidelbergensis) and Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, and Homo georgicus; back beyond Homo habilis and Paranthropus (Australopithecus boisei) and Australopithecus robustus; back to Australopoithecus aethiopicus and contemporaneous Australopithecus garbi; way, way back to Australopithicus africanus and even to Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy), and--why not?—to Australopithecus anamensis, Ardipithecus ramidus, Orrorin turenensis, and Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Sure, we should listen to Midnight Oil and redistribute everything, return everything. We might even try putting resources back in the ground (Oh! Wait. We do that in landfills).
 
I think the next time I encounter someone who wants to “give it back” or to “redistribute,” I might ask for the person to set an example for me to follow. I’ve heard the “give it back” philosophy from people who have more than one car and more than one TV and radio. From the perspective of the destitute, such people should “give it back.” Even in a world of the destitute, there’s an unevenness, an inequality. Live in a house with 20,000 square feet? There's someone who lives in one with 19,000 square feet. Live in one with 550 square feet? There's someone who lives in one with 450 square feet.
 
Is the principle of equality really a principle of ethics? Is it not based on a notion that there is limited wealth, that people can’t make more wealth? If that is so, shouldn’t the DOW be just $30, that is, a dollar for a stock in each of the 30 companies?
 
There’s an arguable ethics with regard to charity and sharing, but there’s nonsense in the principle of “giving it back.” We’ve seen what happened in Cuba and Venezuela. Envy is not going away. If Turkana Boy (H. ergaster) saw something that H. heidelbergensis had, the former would envy the latter.
 
Let’s not confuse responsible exploitation of resources with irresponsible exploitation. We occupy the planet just as the sequence of various ancestor groups occupied it. From the perspective of Homo futureensis, aren’t we aboriginals? And if we are the current aboriginals, isn’t all this stuff ours?
 
*Feynman, Richard P. as told to Ralph Leighton, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character and “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” Further Adventures of a Curious Character. New York. Quality Paperback Book Club, 1988 and 1991.
**Ibid.

Asteroids. Check.
Solar flares. Check.
Volcanoes. Check.
Earthquakes. Check.
Tsunamis. Check.
Tornadoes. Check.
Hurricanes. Check.
Lightning. Check.
Slippery icy sidewalks, roads, and bathtubs. Check.
Trips down steps. Check.
Sinkholes. Check.
Floods. Check.
Landslides and rock falls. Check.
Fires. Check.
Bacteria. Check.
Viruses. Check.
Pollution. Check.
Genetic penchants for various diseases. Check.
Lions, tigers, and bears. Oh my! Check.
Venomous organisms of all kinds. Check.
Parasites. Check.
Bad guys (and girls). Check.
Accidents of all kinds. Check.
Manmade viruses. WHAT?
Stupid people. Check.
 
Yes, now manmade viruses. Horsepox/smallpox. David Evans in Canada and Ryan Noyce not only made the smallpox-related virus, but they also published how to make it. Just what we need with all the pathological people out there with some destructive agenda. Bet you can’t wait for the next educated terrorist to peruse that research. Aren’t we thankful that the pharmaceutical company Tonix of New York spent money ($100,000) to fund the researchers?*
 
The developed nations have made some preparations against an outbreak of smallpox, a disease eliminated as a threat decades ago but kept in the wonderful germ-warfare factories of some countries. To protect its citizens, the USA, for example, has 28 million doses on hand. Of course, there are more than 300,000,000 people in the country, so 9% of unvaccinated Americans can be assured of some protection—if they get the vaccine on time.
 
We’ve had a smallpox vaccine since 1796, when Edward Jenner discovered how to make and inject it. A number of people older than 50 have been vaccinated, but since the elimination of the disease in 1980, vaccinating against smallpox gradually ceased.
 
Don’t worry. Chances are you’ll succumb to any of the non-smallpox risks before that one gets you—regardless of the efforts by some to make a defunct disease. But, should the disease become weaponized on the basis of what Evans and Noyce published, you can be assured that they will echo the words of Albert Einstein, who said, “I do not consider myself the father of the release of atomic energy. My part in it was quite indirect. I did not, in fact, foresee that it would be released in my time. I believed only that it was theoretically possible. It became practical through the accidental discovery of chain reaction, and this was not something I could have predicted” (121).**
 
Directly or indirectly, we set in motion more than we can possibly foresee.
 
*Kupferschmidt, Kai. A paper showing how to make a smallpox cousin just got published. Critics wonder why, Science, January 19, 2018. Online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/paper-showing-how-make-smallpox-cousin-just-got-published-critics-wonder-why
 
**Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. Based on Mein Weltbild, ed. Carl Seelig, translation by Sonja Bargmann, 1982, originally copyrighted in 1954. “Atomic War and Peace,” published in Atlantic Monthly, Boston, November, 1947. As told to Raymond Swing, pp. 118-131. 

I hope I’m wrong in this:
 
By convention we say an electric field points from positive to negative. By convention we use + and -. The convention helps us to imagine the invisible. We have other conventions, all arbitrary in imagery even when they are based on definitive and demonstrable science. For electric fields, we could decide to use arrows, colors, or even textures. Convention is what allows us to assume shared meaning in both physical and social realms.
 
Social conventions are both parochial and temporary; they are meaningless to outsiders and unknown to future generations after the passing of a culture. Cranial deformation caused by binding infants’ heads, for example, isn’t popular today (except possibly in Vanuatu), but it was a practice in ancient and medieval times. Bowing is preferable to handshaking in Japan. Rites of passage vary, also. 
 
Steeped in our own conventions like some teabag in a tepid cup of water, we fail to recognize how we conform and how our conformity fashions our perspectives. Even those who rebel against old conventions in boiling turmoil eventually end up in a tepid social tea.
 
By convention, you share certain metaphors with the likeminded. In shared metaphors, you find meaning. Your images of the world are largely a matter of convention.
 
Am I wrong? Just asking.