What’s this obsession with representations of landscapes? Pictures in hotel rooms, over living room sofas, along hallways, and on the walls of restaurants, above the daily entries on calendars, and, lest we can’t see our desktop images at this time, on our monitors: Can’t we see this stuff outside? Why have we brought it inside?
 
Thank a nineteenth century group of artists for initiating the fad of virtual outdoorsiness: The Hudson River School of art, a loosely bound group of artists who took a cue from some European artists and painted humans in harmony with nature. They put this nature-landscape stuff, both dreamy and realistic, into the public consciousness and values. With the invention of cameras, other “artists” then took the business of landscape portrayal to a megapixel level. You might even be one of those so enamored of Nature’s representations that you jeopardize your safety by pointing your smart phone’s camera out the window to capture a rainbow while you are driving. Or, you might take a Selfie that features wild nature in the background, showing you to be one with Nature, or, maybe, Nature’s conqueror.   
 
Let’s sketch some questions for a moment: Has our species always been enamored of landscape? As consciousness opened human minds to the environment, did it focus on aesthetics or use? Is there intrinsic beauty in a natural scene that all minds discover just by looking? Are we drawn to draw or photograph in hopes of preserving the ever-changing shapes, colors, and lighting of the natural world? In representing place do we seek to stop time? Should we assume that those ancient cave artists had some religious purpose behind their art? What if they just liked scenes? What if in the darkness of a cave pierced by a flickering fire’s light the artist upon completing his wall art turned, exclaimed, and then asked, “What a great planet! Aren’t you glad we chose this planet to live on?”
 
Are all those hotel and motel pictures merely the continuation of nineteenth-century Romanticism’s painters? And is it possible that our desire to “save the environment” is largely a product of all those idealized and romanticized paintings of natural scenes? Or, is our desire to capture an idealized Nature a hand-me-down from the artists of Lascaux and other cave artists? Something built into our brains? Do we carry a gene that makes us appreciate Nature’s “beauty” while disdaining its harsh realities?
 
In our cities of steel and concrete, we plant trees in little parks. We fashion Nature as we can and make an artificial scene worthy in many instances of a Selfie. Having manipulated landscape for our use, we then look to reclaim its original form. Maybe that is why some of us risk a driving accident just to acquire a photo of a rainbow or spectacular view to hang on our “cave” walls or download onto our computers. And there, in the darkness interrupted by the imperceptible nanosecond-flashes of LED bulbs or a desktop image, we can turn, exclaim, and ask our civilized contemporaries who are equally removed from Nature’s sometimes beautiful and sometimes dangerous reality, “What a great planet! Aren’t you glad you chose this one to live on?”
 
*A rewrite of an earlier blog. 

In the perfected technology of a different distant galaxy a long time ago, a robot replaced the lost hand of Luke Skywalker with an artificial one. Let’s assume that that his new hand felt like a hand, that is, let’s assume Luke’s brain had the same kind of connection to his new hand that he had with his original, that the brain had mapped all the artificial hand’s “nerves” through their input.
 
We’re not there yet in our galaxy, but we might be headed there. We are demonstrably farther along than the technology that gives Captain Hook an unmovable prosthesis in Peter Pan. We might advance the link between brain and artificial limb even further through Targeted Motor and Sensory Re-innervation. TMSR, which links machine to brain through undamaged, residual nerves, is one way of achieving nearly “natural” prosthetic devices.* Getting an amputee back to “normal” would be a momentous accomplishment, probably one on a par with organ transplants. The reason to consider the accomplishment momentous? Enabling a brain to map an artificial hand the way it mapped its original hand requires understanding how the outside world gets inside our heads, runs around neurons in fragments, and reassembles as meaning on demand. But we’re not there yet.  
 
We can assume that Luke “feels” his new hand and knows its position in contrast to Hook. Although we are farther along the path to Luke’s hand, we are still just using more sophisticated “hooks.” Only when the somatosensory cortex can map the new device and connect that information to the rest of the brain will we achieve the Jedi’s touch. Our ability to make such maps is an essential part of defining our identities.   
 
Knowing where we are is intricately bound to knowing who we are. Understanding the relationship to place is a fundamental component of identity. Does full consciousness exist without proprioception? We are proprioceptive because we can reassemble all the fragmented inputs of our senses and make maps that show our relationship to the rest of the world. Your limbs are surveyors that play major roles in feedback loops that enable you to know the outside world’s heat, texture, and arrangement. The nerves in the limbs help to establish the relationship with the “Not Me.” Feeling complements the other senses, and in odorless darkness and silence, it dominates.  
 
Artificially, if only partially, determining and usurping personal identity threatens uniqueness, and we might approaching that usurpation by more than TMSR. In a study by Haiguang Wen, Zhongming Li, and Junxing Shi, the researchers coupled fMRI with an algorithm called a “convolutional neural network” in an attempt to move beyond AI recognition of static images and toward real-time readings of what a brain sees in a dynamic environment and how it sees it. Their goal? “Neuroscience is trying to map which parts of the brain are responsible for specific functionality.” That is, in the researcher’s words, “Using our technique, you may visualize the specific information represented by any brain location, and screen through all the locations in the brain’s visual cortex…you can see how the brain divides a visual scene into pieces, and re-assembles the pieces into full understanding of the visual scene.”**
 
Now imagine that the work of Wen and fellow researchers gets eventually tied to the work of Andrea Serino and colleagues in their attempt to use TMSR to tie prostheses to the brain’s somatosensory center and that researchers eventually link subjects to remote sensing or WiFi. This galaxy’s future “Luke” might walk into a store to buy one product and come out with another through the manipulations of AI or some hidden clerk sitting behind a console that sends messages to his brain. Maybe Luke once liked the taste of generic food over a brand name. Now, he is a loyal customer of whatever the manipulators want. With a tie to artificial implements that the brain maps as it now naturally maps a human hand, the “bionic” individual will be open to outside identity control.
 
Unlike Captain Hook with an inert and unfeeling prosthesis, the Luke in our future might become hooked on products through connections to the brain’s processes, hooked on a place of someone else’s choosing, or hooked on an idea or behavior. In addition, Luke’s desires might no longer be secret as his way of seeing the world becomes not only knowable but also predictable. To borrow from the quantum physics guys, imagine that all those choices and snippets of experience associated with personal identity mysteriously collapse under a watchful eye connected by WiFi. Will we have eliminated uncertainty in human thought and behavior? Will we know not only the position of the human particle but also its destination and rate of movement?
 
The good that will come out of work on TMSR and on neural encoding will manifest itself in better self-reliance for those who have suffered through nerve damage or loss. The bad will manifest itself in control by others or, worse, by machines. In their respective stories, both Hook and Luke maintain their personal identities. In contrast, those whose brains are eventually linked to any system can have their personal identities hacked and manipulated.
 
External control of an individual isn’t new. Look at whole populations under such control, such as the Germans who bought into the Nazi propaganda to their own eventual detriment. You can probably think of multiple historical examples of human manipulation. Maybe humans have some conflicting desire for uniqueness on the one hand and for security derived from outside control on the other hand.
 
You might favor the identity of Luke, a hero, over the person of Captain Hook, a villain. That’s a matter of cultural manipulation, of course. People with hooks might be a little less dexterous than people with fully functional artificial limbs, but they are, nevertheless, capable of mapping their world and their place in it. Shaped by the loss of his hand, Hook’s evil identity appears to be different from Luke’s heroic identity that was similarly shaped. That two individuals can see their relationship to the world so differently under so similar a set of circumstances is evidence of highly personal perspectives derived from unique identities. I certainly don’t want people to behave like Hook, but I also acknowledge that he represents uncontrolled individualism and unique identity.
 
You might not be linked to hardware, but you are linked to the visual and verbal influences by the technology of our time. Who or what might influence the maps you make of your world and your relationship to it? Or, having been manipulated, can you even be aware that you have mapped your relationship to the world and shaped your identity under an outside influence?          
  
* Andrea Serino, Michel Akselrod, Roy Salomon, Roberto Martuzzi, Maria Laura Blefari, Elisa Canzoneri, Giulio Rognini, Wietske van der Zwaag, Maria Iakova, François Luthi, Amedeo Amoresano, Todd Kuiken, Olaf Blanke. Upper limb cortical maps in amputees with targeted muscle and sensory reinnervation. Brain, 2017; 140 (11): 2993 DOI: 10.1093/brain/awx242 (see Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. "Advanced artificial limbs mapped in the brain: The brain re-maps motor and sensory pathways following targeted motor and sensory reinnervation (TMSR)." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 27 October 2017. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171027094417.htm)
 
** Haiguang Wen, Junxing Shi, Yizhen Zhang, Kun-Han Lu, Jiayue Cao, Zhongming Liu. Neural Encoding and Decoding with Deep Learning for Dynamic Natural Vision. Cerebral Cortex, 2017; 1 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhx268 (see Purdue University. "'Mind-reading' brain-decoding tech." ScienceDaily, 23 October 2017. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171023132019.htm ) 

Apparently, it was a small change at the time, but it has left a lasting effect. Sometime between six and ten thousand years ago, a mutation in the HERC2 gene affected its neighboring OCA2 gene’s role in producing the protein that generates melanin. The result: Blue eyes.
 
Now, I’m a brown-eyed guy who married a girl with gray/green/blue eyes (I’m not good at determining colors—all three colors seem to be in there, depending on the ambient light). Anyway, she doesn’t have brown eyes. We have one clearly blue-eyed child and two brown-eyed children, but the children of our three children have blue or light-colored eyes. That doesn’t seem to be very significant, of course, but it might yield a little lesson about our place in the Cosmos and our relationship to its nature.  
 
According to Hans Eiberg (I’m not making up his name) and other researchers, some ancestor started the whole blue-eye thing within the last ten millennia.* So, there’s a common ancestor for all blue-eyed people. I’m trying to picture that. Imagine the stir in the tribe. “She has blue eyes! She has blue eyes!” Would the tribal elders have proclaimed her “special” simply because of that slight difference in her appearance? Probably.
 
We’re like that, you know. We make big deals over little differences. Of course, ten millennia after the mother of all blue eyes (or father, we don’t know) there are millions of blue-eyed people, so that particular “difference” makes little difference. Blue-eyed people are, in spite of their recessive gene, relatively common.
 
By projecting ourselves into the deep past, we can imagine that the first blue-eyed person caused quite a stir. Why? Because regardless of our claim to open-mindedness and sophistication, we are often repelled or frightened by differences. Differences, which in themselves are indications of the complex nature of our cosmos, often frighten us, repel us, amaze us. Yet, in this cosmos, we should expect and celebrate differences as cosmic reflections.  
 
Maybe the family and neighbors treated the first blue-eyed person with respect born of fear. We know that she (he) survived; the proof lies in my wife, one of my children, and my grandchildren. I would rather think that the blue-eyed child’s survival was the product not of fear but rather of open-mindedness. Now, wouldn’t that be something if our ancient ancestors showed a bit more openness to differences than we seem to show as their descendants?
 
Is it time to see all our differences as manifestations of a complex universe? And since we all manifest some difference here or there, is it time to think of everyone as a representative of the true nature of the universe?
 
* Hans Eiberg, Jesper Troelsen, Mette Nielsen, Annemette Mikkelsen, Jonas Mengel-From, Klaus W. Kjaer, Lars Hansen. Blue eye color in humans may be caused by a perfectly associated founder mutation in a regulatory element located within the HERC2 gene inhibiting OCA2 expression. Human Genetics, 2008; 123 (2): 177 DOI: 10.1007/s00439-007-0460-x Online at https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080130170343.htm

Fitting designation for an arid place difficult to traverse on foot: Jornada del Muerto, variously translated as an idiom, “Journey of the Dead Man,” “Working Day of the Dead Man,” “Day of the Dead Man,” or even “Day of Death.” Could it vie for the scariest name of a desert with Takla Makan (“You go in but don’t come out”) or with Kalahari (“waterless land”)? It is in the vicinity of such a place that the United States tested the first nuclear bomb in 1945. Great destruction in a place with little to destroy. It is also fitting that J. Robert Oppenheimer, after witnessing the product of his work, could think of nothing other than a saying from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” It is also in this waterless place that one can find trinitite, the greenish glass we might say is the product of fusion by fission.
 
Certainly, our species has outdone anything that Homo habilis, one of the first, if not the first, primitive hominin tool-users, could have imagined. Were he alive to stumble across trinitite, H. habilis would stop, gather, and adorn with the apparent glassy gem, all the while being unaware of its radioactive nature. A product of our making, trinitite formed when the fission bomb melted and fused desert soil with the steel tower at the test site. We, better informed, would collect with trepidation: Wearing trinitite jewelry invites leukemia.
 
Not only can we make something not found in Nature, but we can also understand how we relate to its unseen properties. That’s how sophisticated we have become. We both understand and control matter and energy, the fundamental components of the universe. We know more about matter and energy than any previous hominin group and more than billions of our even more recent human predecessors of post-Medieval time knew. We fashion tools they could not foresee.
 
Is it strange that one of our most sophisticated tools is a Destroyer of Worlds?
 
Not really. In the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a bone tool evolves quickly into a weapon. That development seems probable given our current technological state and penchant to use tools to destroy. Even in the vast desolation of the Kalahari Desert, one of the oldest continuously arid places on the planet occupied by “aboriginal” peoples, the indigenous !Kung have developed weapons (as have the remotest of South American tropical rainforest peoples who until recently had no contact with technological societies). Bow, arrow, blow gun, and dart extend our ability to destroy over wider places. Of course, as we all know, a hand–axe can be used both to process food and to break a skull: A tool’s purpose depends on the individual. And all people seem to recognize that some destroy to live whereas others live to destroy. The !Kung, a technologically primitive people whose lives before the arrival of the Dutch and other Europeans were literally “Stone Age,” “call themselves zhu twa si, ‘the harmless people,’ in contrast to non-San, whom they call zosi, ‘animals without hooves,’ meaning they are as dangerous as predator animals.”* Imagine. Even in the most technologically primitive of circumstances of a waterless land with little to destroy, one people recognizes another as zosi because they pose a threat.
 
Homo habilis could not have anticipated a world in which the most sophisticated tool is an instrument of complete destruction. Yet, it was that first tool user who set us on a technological path to the bomb, not just by the invention of tools, but also by some seemingly hereditary capacity to destroy beyond necessity. Along time’s road to the present, hominins have killed billions of their own kind.
 
We can look back and forward to ask ourselves about our nature.  Proudly adorned in trinitite and other products of our technology, are we, like so many before us but with more sophisticated tools, traveling across a waterless land on the journey of a dead man toward a day of death. Are we innately Destroyers of Worlds?
 
* http://orvillejenkins.com/profiles/kung.html
And, by way of a related thought, "In the order of life there can be no real break between things as they now exist and things as they will exist in the remotest future; the future cannot contradict the present, nor falsify it; for the future must be the realisation of the full possibilities of the present" (Hamilton Wright Mabie, Books and Culture). What will be the realization of our present? 

What a contradiction we’ve become! Spread as we are over the planet and even high above the planet, we still exhibit a tribalism of ideologies. How strange in light of our past interconnections. That visiting alien we sometimes speak of would have great difficulty understanding how we can be simultaneously cosmopolitan and parochial.  
 
Where have you gone? Across a continent? Other continents? Islands? The questions are germane in a period of widespread travel by just about everyone who has a desire to pick up and go. Now Qiaomei Fu’s study of Tianyuan Man’s genome seems to indicate that picking up and going has been a longtime human habit. Tianyuan Man shared DNA with a person who lived in Belgium’s Goyet Caves, and, according to the researcher and her colleagues also with the Karitiana and Sururi peoples of Brazil and Argentina and with Boliva’s Chane people. Hey, someone did some traveling and procreating in different places. These distant relatives, however, don’t share that DNA with North America’s native populations. Puzzling. Was their separation just a matter of geographic isolation? Or, did they just not want to associate?
 
The typical explanation for the distribution of peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere is that people from northern Asia walked across the Bering Land Bridge before heading south to populate the two continents and the isthmus that connects them. A second hypothesis is that some people made the journey from Polynesia to Easter Island and beyond, all the way to the west coast of South America. Yet, those people of Brazil, Argentina, and Boliva have, instead, a connection to a European and an Asian common ancestor more so than they have to their ancient contemporaries in North America or Polynesia.
 
In their abstract, Fu and colleagues write, “Our study of the Tianyuan individual highlights the complex migration and subdivision of early human populations in Eurasia.”* The interconnections of our ancient ancestors boggle the mind. In a time without the benefits of modern transportation, the ancients didn’t have our traveling resources, so the process of connecting DNA was a long one, and in the case of Tianyuan and Goyet, separated by thousands of years. It was not a purposeful connection, of course, just as today’s biological connections are equally random—a chance meeting between a flight attendant and a passenger in an airport bar that results in a family. We gained our biological connectivity slowly. That is the context that brings us to our present state of worldwide connectivity. Since the Age of Exploration, we have become more biologically intertwined than we ever were since we left our African points of origin. The mail, the phone, and the Web have furthered the connections. So, in the context of our millennia of connections and our current unifying technological connections, why is it that a visiting alien would find us separated in a tribalism of thought?  
 
The world is our shared place more than ever, and, regardless of voices to the contrary, there is very little evidence to support the existence of a “pure race.” Someone sometime mated with someone slightly different. The reproductive processors have mixed DNA across the planet. Outside Africa, the seeming diversity of humanity is refuted by connections even more so than it is within some long-inhabited places within Africa. We have much in common biologically—thus, we are a single species, and in spite of the variety in our appearances, we are fundamentally related.  
 
The visiting alien might say, “We’ve been watching you for a millennium, and what we noticed puzzles us. You had this guy—Gutenberg, I think—invent a machine that helped you convey thoughts around the planet, making it possible for everyone to know what humans were thinking in different times and places. How is it that with that technology you haven’t come to understand different ideas sufficiently to reach compromises? Why are you still so tribal?”
 
How will you answer? Will you say, “Now, there’s obviously much good in the connection of ideas, but unlike the biological connection, the intellectual one imposes certain constraints on itself. We seem to balk at thinking alike, so we divide along simplified lines of difference. Recognizing differences seems to be tied to our desire for security. We have a tendency to see differences personally as though they are threats or actual attacks. And we are fort- and castle-builders: We have a tendency to gather into ideological tribes. That tendency simultaneously unites and isolates us. Possibly, we also divide along simplified ideological boundaries because we are lazy thinkers. It takes considerable effort to pursue all the ramifications of our ideas, and in many instances—if not all instances—we might find contradictions in the logical ends of our positions.”
 
The mesh of ideas is not as easy as the mesh of biology. Tianyuan and Goyet were chance relationships driven by wandering individuals over thousands of years. In contrast, our ideological unity is incestuous. Reinforcement of favored thought has meant building a new tribalism in an era of interconnectivity with a universality never experienced on our planet. When we meet a new ideology through any of our communication or travel technologies, we have a tendency to stay with the “locals.” Puzzling! After millennia of traveling and connecting, we find ourselves reproducing our ideas in isolation. Our ideas have become as hereditary as the Hapsburg lip.
  
 
 
* https://phys.org/news/2013-01-ancient-dna-reveals-humans-years.html#nRlv and
Fu, Qiaomei, et. al. DNA analysis of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave, China, PNAS vol 119, no. 6, 2223-2227. http://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2223.short
​

Is there really something to this concept that we all have a desire to get back into the womb? Is it one of those two-sides-of-a-coin things? Most, if not all, of us have an interest in our personal origins, and that interest sometimes morphs into a wider interest in the origin of the Cosmos. We might at times seek to re-enter the womb of our origins while we simultaneously want to understand our present relationship to the universe. We tie knowing our past to understanding our present.   
 
Ever been in a cave? Been inside a lava tube? As a child did you ever make a tent or “cave” with a blanket draped over some chairs? Did you like to play hide-and-seek? Do you sleep under a cover on a warm night, as many do, to prevent a monster from grabbing a foot? Is it so universal a desire for security that other mammals, such as orphaned baby elephants in a Nairobi asylum devoted to their care, also like sleeping under blankets? Yeah, there’s probably something to this back-to-the-womb thing. And we probably carry it with us throughout our lives to some extent. We might even carry it throughout the Solar System as we emerge from womb-like spacecraft to explore surfaces beyond Earth.
 
Now we have some substantial evidence that the moon has a large underground system of cavities that might serve as home for future astronauts—moon people, as they will eventually come to be known. Japan’s SELENE space probe (nicknamed Kaguya) used a radar sounder system to look at underground hollows that open to the surface.* Apparently, the moon has its version of Mammoth Cave.
 
As one who has visited caverns and mines on our home planet, I confess that I have no desire to live underground permanently just so I can go out occasionally to explore the airless surface of the moon. A vampire lifestyle in Hotel Moon Cave would have to have amenities too numerous to mention to motivate me to vacation there. But, of course, there are some of us that would like the opportunity. I guess if I think about it, walking out of the cave for the first time to see distant Earth hanging in the sky would charge even the most jaded person with some strong emotions and with thoughts about life’s big picture.
 
But we don’t have to go to the moon to think about our origins and to attempt a return to the womb of personal creation. We do have caves, lava tubes, and blanket tents on Earth, and they could provide us with the setting for cosmic thinking. Go underground for a time in a cave, tube, mine, or chair tent. Emerging during the daylight hours to sunshine, noisy life, and expansive sky with a hanging moon can open up that cosmic perspective.
 
Are there some of us who might prefer the shelter over such openness? Sure. Maybe you are such a person, but I hope not. One of the problems of living in a cave, however, is that all lighting is artificial. The problem with artificial light is that those who live by it see only that which they choose to light. Remember that the next time you seek to return to the womb. Cosmic thinking is open thinking. It requires light from unexpected sources and a panoramic view not blocked by a ceiling of impenetrable rock or self-constructed blanket tent. You didn’t know anything about the wider world until you emerged from the womb you sometimes might desire to revisit because you believe it shields you from all that light and confusion on the surface of your present life.  
 
At times, all of us choose to live in a personal cave or return to the perceived safety of a representative “womb.” We don’t have to live there permanently. We can emerge to see a panorama that inspires thinking about where we stand in relation to our past and how we fit into the vastness of our present.
 
*McCurry, Justin. “Discovery of 500km lunar cave raises hopes for human colonization of moon.” Tokyo, The Guardian, October 19, 2017, Online at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/19/lunar-cave-discovery-raises-hopes-for-human-colonisation-of-moon  

Human beings have been around for 200,000 to 300,000 years. No one knows exactly how long, but let’s keep that as the ballpark figure of our duration. Let’s assume, also, that we are the same species we were and that we could, given some fictional scenario, reproduce with those ancient ancestors without having to tweak some gene or two. Let’s also assume that they could, as a number of science fiction authors have proposed, figure out how to cross a busy New York street or use a TV remote. So, what do we know about them beyond their similar features and our hypotheses about how they could adapt to our world?
 
Our understanding acquired from archaeologists’ digging around in rock shelters is a bit sketchy, but we think we can describe lifestyles now long gone. We can only guess about their mental states, of course, but we can know from their tools, diets, and ability to survive that they possessed a practical knowledge of their environments. By comparison, that knowledge could not approach our own broad base of information or our command of details that includes information about chemical and physical processes unknown before the rise of modern science.
 
Those ancient ancestors had their own kind of “smarts,” however, and they passed on survival skills for many centuries. Unfortunately for me—and maybe for you—their oral tradition had temporal and spatial limitations. Their acquired knowledge was not spread eternally and ubiquitously. I don’t, for example, think I would do well in some of the circumstances that they survived. I don’t eat bugs; I spit them out if they accidently enter my mouth during outside exercise. I don’t know how to find water in a desert unless I see an alluvial fan with greenery arcing along its base. I don’t know how to read the tracks of prey or predator. And, had no one told me the dangers of eating fugu, I would probably have succumbed to death by fish. In short, I have neither the knowledge nor the skills that enabled those long-gone humans to survive. By comparison with the survival skills of people who survived 200,000 years ago, my own survival skills might make me a more “primitive human” than they. Why didn’t they think to record their knowledge for my benefit?
 
Now, let’s say I want to convey the information that I have acquired to future generations of humans. I know that electronic hardware has a lifetime and that CDs, for example, will eventually lose their information in whole or part in anywhere between 25 years and a couple of centuries. Also, technology will change so that—as is happening now—there will be fewer and fewer CD players. I could certainly bypass that temporal short-lived technology by putting in a time capsule both my CDs and a player, hoping that the wiring and components remain unaffected by physical and chemical processes until some distant descendant uncovers them, figures out what they are, and obtains the information I so desperately want to convey into humanity’s future. The time capsule might contain contents and meanings so foreign to future humans, however, that they might just as well have been placed aboard the Voyager spacecraft with that famous golden record adrift in the vastness of interstellar space.  
 
There’s another problem, one associated with our species’ longevity. How long will humans be around to dig up the information that they might, given the same level of intelligence that we now possess, consider “quaint” or “primitive.” “Was this purposefully left?” they might ask. In contrast, artifacts from 200,000 years ago don’t seem to be part of a purposeful record left for us to find and interpret. We see them as accidental accumulations. Ancient hominins sent no purposeful messages into their distant future and our present.
 
So, it’s with some doubt that I look on the practicality of sending a message a half million years into our human future. Can we survive for a period longer than we have survived? Would we not undergo some evolutionary change that alters humans so much that they neither have the ability to understand us or the empathy to care? Yet, communicating with our distant descendants half a million years hence is the purpose of a time capsule placed in a bore hole near the Polish Polar Station in Hornsund, Svalbard.* Marek Lewandowski of the Polish Academy of Sciences Institute of Geophysics in Warsaw selected various items for the capsule, including seeds, a radiation detector, a mobile phone, DNA samples from various organisms, and even tardigrades. As Lewandowski explains, “’Our own time capsule is sure to be found one distant day, and its discoverers will be able to grasp the message,’” he says. “’If they look carefully inside — like we did into the Cheops pyramid and the tombs and artefacts [sic.] inside it — they will understand who we were.’” He thinks the capsule could remain buried for 500,000 years.
 
There’s confidence. Really? Five-hundred thousand years? Twenty thousand generations? Think you differ from ancient humans? Imagine what you will appear to be to your great-to-the-fourth-power descendants. And imagine the chance of discovery of a capsule buried in the Arctic on a tectonically and climatically active planet.
 
We pride ourselves on our ability to discern the nature of those ancient lives on the bases of the junk of their lives. With billions of tons of plastic and more billions of tons of metals, our own junk is massive by comparison, and it has a wider distribution. There won’t be a shortage of stuff for future archaeologists to examine. That single time capsule is a needle in a haystack that itself is a needle. But it still comes down to this: Will those in the future be as interested in the past as we are? Will they be like us?  
 
Hope springs eternal. Right? Or, at least, Lewandowski is guessing, for half a million years.
 
*http://www.nature.com/news/time-capsule-buried-to-preserve-science-for-the-ages-1.22657 

In 1910 L. P. Jacks wrote about Snarley Bob,* a shepherd whose personality quirks included a disdain for most people, but a loyalty of feeling for some. Suspected by some of those who knew him as a madman, Snarley Bob was “mystic, star-gazer, dabbler in black or blackish arts” and lowly shepherd. Although he exuded a contempt of the human race that “was immeasurable,” he did have a fondness for a Mrs. Abel, the Rector’s wife, because she seemed to understand his nature, for his “old wife, whom he treated as part of himself, neither better nor worse,” and for L. P. Jacks himself. “With other human beings—saving only the children—his intercourse was limited as far as possible to interjectory grunts and snarls—whence his name.”
 
Get the picture? Snarley Bob snarled. As he aged, even his wife thought, “I’m a’most afraid sometimes as he may be took in a fit.” But there was another side of this man whose name was Robert Dellanow, and it evidenced itself away from humanity in a quarry on starry nights. It’s possible that there was in our modern understanding of the human psyche some slight autism at work, because Snarley Bob “was strangely sensitive to the tones of a human voice. If, as seldom happened, your voice and presence chance to strike the responsive chord, Snarley became your devoted slave on the spot; the heavy, even brutal, expression that his face often wore passed off like a cloud; you were in the Mount of Transfiguration, and it seemed that Elijah…had come back to earth.” So, what kinds of advice can this transfigured Snarley Bob impart to us some 100 plus years later?
 
Now, most of us have some quirks that only our closest friends understand—and often our relatives and strangers probably see as character flaws. Not that I’m calling you a Snarley Bob, but rather, I’m suggesting that each of us is multisided. The Rector’s wife, Mrs. Abel seemed to understand Snarley Bob in a way most others couldn’t. “Snarley Bob is the one man in the world whom I have found worth talking to,” she once said. Maybe you are, too.
 
Shortly before Snarley Bob died, Jacks met him at the quarry and then recorded these words from Snarley:
 
     “Yes, sir, there’s things about the stars that fair knocks you silly to think on. And, what’s more, you can’t think on ‘em, leastways to no good purpose, until they have knocked you silly. Why, what's the good of tellin' a man that it's ninety-three millions o' miles between the earth and the sun? There's lots o' folks as knows that; but there's not one in ten thousand as knows what it means. You gets no forrader wi' lookin' at the figures in a book. You must thin yourself out, and make your body lighter than air, and stretch and stretch at yourself until you gets the sun and planets, floatin' like, in the middle o' your mind. Then you begins to get hold on it. Or what's the good o' sayin' that Saturn has rings and nine moons? You must go to one o' them moons, and see Saturn half fillin' the sky, wi' his rings cuttin' the heavens from top to bottom, all coloured wi' crimson and gold—then you begins to stagger at it. That's why I say you can't think o' these things till they've knocked you silly.
     "And, as you were sayin', it isn't easy to get them big things the right way up. When things gets beyond a certain bigness you don't know which way up they are; and as like as not they're standin' on their heads when you think they're standin' on their heels. That's the way with the stars. They all want lookin' at t'other way up from what most people looks at 'em. And perhaps it's a good thing they looks at 'em the wrong way; becos if they looked at 'em the right way it would scare 'em out o' their wits, especially the women—same as it does my missis when she hears me and Mrs. Abel talkin'. Always exceptin' Mrs. Abel; you can't scare her; and she sees most things right way up, that she does!
     "But when it comes to the stars, you want to be a bit of a medium before you can get at 'em. Oh yes, I've been a medium in my time, more than I care to think of, and I could be a medium again to-morrow, if I wanted to. But them's the only sort of folks as can see things from both ends. Most folks only look at things from one end—and that as often as not the wrong un. Mediums looks from both ends; and, if they're good at it, they soon find out which end's right. You see, some on 'em—like me, for instance—can throw 'emselves out o' 'emselves, in a manner o' speaking, so that they can see their own bodies, just as if they was miles away, same as I can see that man walking on the Deadborough Road.”

So, what’s Snarley Bob trying to tell us? What message could a seemingly simple and strange shepherd convey to us about life and the universe?

     "Well, I've often done it, and many's the story I could tell of things I've seen by day and night; but it wasn't till I went to hear Sir Robert Ball as the grand idea came to me. 'Why not throw yerself into the stars, Bob?' I sez to myself. And, by gum, sir, I did it that very night. How I did it I don't know; I won't say as there weren't a drop o' drink in it; but the minute I'd got through, I felt as I'd stretched out wonderful and, blessed if I didn't find myself standin' wi' millions of other spirits, right in the middle o' Saturn's rings. And the things I see there I couldn't tell you, no, not if you was to give me a thousand pounds. Talk o' spirits! I tell you there was millions on 'em! And the lights and the colours—oh, but it's no good talkin'! I looked back and wanted to know where the earth was, and there I see it, dwindled to a speck o' light.
     "Now you can understand why I keeps my mouth shut. Do you think I'm going to talk of them things to a lot o' folks that's got no more sense nor swine? Not me! And what else is there that's worth talking on? Who's goin' to make a fuss and go blatherin' about this and that, when you know the whole earth's no bigger nor a pea? My eyes! if some o' these 'ere talkin' politicians knowed half o' what I know, they'd stop their blowin' pretty quick.”

​Was Bob a mystic? He certainly seemed to have some out-of-body ability in that quarry under the stars. He also seemed to say there’s another kind of knowledge that we shouldn’t discount. Yes, there are the facts of the universe, such as the distances to the sun and planets. Yes, those facts are relatively firm ways of knowing the world. But then there’s that other side, the side that only our quirky selves seem to understand: The so-called oneness with the Cosmos. Snarley then says,

     "I allus knows when folks has got things wrong end up by the amount they talks. When you get 'em the right way you don't want to talk on 'em, except it may be to one or two, like Mrs. Abel, as got 'em the same way as yourself. So when you hear folks jawin', you can allus tell what's the matter wi' 'em.
     "There's old Shoemaker Hankin at Deadborough. Know him? Well, did you ever hear such a blatherin' old fool? 'All these things you're mad on, Snarley,' he sez to me one day, 'are nowt but matter and force.' 'Matter and force,' I sez; 'what's them?' And then he lets on for half a' hour trying to tell me all about matter and force. When he'd done I sez, 'Tom Hankin, there's more sense in one o' them old shoes than there is in your silly 'ead. You've got things all wrong end up, and you're just baain' at 'em like a' old sheep!' 'How can you prove it?' he sez. 'I know it,' I sez, 'by the row you makes.' It's a sure sign, sir; you take my word for it.
     "Then there's all these parsons preaching away Sunday after Sunday. Why, doesn't it tand to sense that if they'd got things right way up, there they'd be, and that 'ud be the end on it? And it's because they're all wrong that they've got to go on jawin' to persuade people they're right. One day I was in Parson Abel's study. 'What's all them books about?' I sez. 'Religion, most on 'em,' sez he. 'Well,' I sez, 'if the folks as wrote 'em had got things right way up they wouldn't 'a needed to 'a wrote so many books.'”

Are we seeing things the right way up or the wrong way up? Inside out? Outside in?
 
     “They're two roads leadin' to the same place. Both on 'em are ways o' gettin' to the right end of things. What's wrong wi' the mediums is that they haven't got line enough. They only manage to get just outside their own skins; but what's wanted is to get right on to the edge of the world and then look back. That's what the stars teaches you to do; and when you've done it—my word! it turns yer clean inside out!”
 
Two roads. You might alternate between them, but if you are planted on either permanently, you’ll probably not completely understand your universe and your place in it. When the world of facts seems to give you knowledge without understanding, get to that secret quarry under the stars. Release yourself, thin yourself out into the stretches of space, and go beyond the mere place and narrow road that appear to limit your understanding. Snarley Bob seems to have rediscovered on his own one of the fragmentary thoughts of Heraclitus: “You can’t have understanding without facts, and you can’t have facts without understanding.”
 
*Mad Shepherds, And Other Human Studies. New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1910. Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31386/31386-h/31386-h.htm

On our changeable planet, mountains erode as they rise. Wind, water, ice, and gravity do their work to diminish all peaks. As they wear away, mountains yield sediments that blow, wash, ride, and fall into basins, where they accumulate as thickening deposits. Erosion has its counter in deposition. The stuff that wears away becomes the stuff that builds new geologic features like deltas, alluvial fans, and aprons beneath coastal waters. And because Earth is a dynamic planet undergoing tectonic crustal shifting, deposits of sediments can succumb to crushing forces that raise new mountains, as, for example, the Himalayas rise in response to India’s northward movement, forcing the ancient Tethys Sea’s deposits upward.
 
If every generation thinks the world is going to perdition, why hasn’t it? Is there a renewal analogous to these erosion-deposition-orogeny processes we see in our planet?
 
There’s little doubt that as people age, they find reason to concern themselves with the “way things are going.” No civilization remains untouched by time. What might have been considered sacred in one decade can easily be profane in the next. Those who feel attached to a past will eventually find themselves descrying its erosion or loss. Typically, they see decay of traditional values in the arts, particularly in the form of parody and satire. And, of course, as all humans seem to do, they look for identifiable forces to blame.
 
In a work called The Law of Civilization and Decay, Brooks Adams concludes that the wealthy eventually become perpetrators of a cultural downfall that threatens their own civilization. He writes, “…patrons of art are no longer even conscious of shame at profaning the most sacred of ideals” (p. 383).* Adams is pessimistic about civilization, mostly blaming its inevitable degradation on the wealthy and their centralization of power. To make his point, he recounts the negative effects of the involvement of the wealthy in moral decay from Roman times to the nineteenth century. In the rise of wealth he sees the erosion of the very civilization that produced wealth.
 
So, as Adams sees it, a plunge into the depths of depravity is inevitable as soon as the wealthy in any civilization decide that “anything goes” in art, architecture, and the sundry forms of literature. I wonder what he would think if he were to see a modern standup comedian? How would he have interpreted Lenny Bruce and his subsequent imitators? Given that standups produce nothing other than humor, would he claim that they are the product of leisure gone wild?
 
Regardless of the pervasive feeling among the old that the young and people in the arts have few or no values—that is, no similar values—generations persist one after another, all falling into the cycle of complaining about the diminution or loss of what was once sacred. Yet, somehow, we survive, re-establish old values or establish new ones that undergo the same process of favor followed by disfavor, parody, and satire. Erosion followed by deposition followed by uplift…
 
To frame one group as the primary reason for an entire civilization’s downfall places more negative credit on the wealthy than they probably deserve, but Adams might have a point if he includes lifestyle. Wealth breeds leisure, leisure breeds boredom, and boredom breeds folly, desperation, and often irreverence that attacks old values and even contemporary humans with ideological differences. With wealth comes a desire for the fads of the likeminded. Desperation for something that spikes interest and desire relies more on destroying the old for something perceived as the “new.” And even though there’s little that is really “new,” in leisure there lies a laziness that rationalizes profanation as avant-garde.
 
The cycle of establishing and de-establishing values is here to stay. You might not live to see its next full occurrence, but you can assure yourself that it will continue seemingly ad infinitum—or, in human terms, indefinitely. Someone in the next generation, maybe late in life, will wish people still had your values. That like-minded person and sympathetic contemporaries will see the inevitable erosion of the past.
 
Knowing this, you might be able to recognize the stage of the cycle in which you find yourself today. Don’t despair if you see only erosion. Mountains of values similar to your own will rise again.
 
*Adams, Brooks. The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History. New York. The Macmillan Company, 1897.  In his preface, Brooks writes, “…when a highly centralized society disintegrates, under the pressure of economic competition, it is because the energy of the race has been exhausted. Consequently, the survivors of such a community lack the power necessary for renewed concentration, and must probably remain inert until supplied with fresh energetic material by the infusion of barbarian blood” (xi).
            Isn’t that just the thought of many elderly people in any generation? The young are “barbarians” without “values.”

Tattoos have long been a part of human culture. Ötzi, the mummified “iceman” got 61 tattoos 5,300 years ago.* So, they’re nothing new, and had he not been killed, he probably would have suffered no debilitating effects from his skin art. But modern technology and the effort to remake who we are physically has given us a new version of an old tradition: Tattooing the eye. Unfortunately, the procedure is highly risky, as evidenced by Catt Gallinger’s experience. Her purple eye became at least temporarily, if not permanently, impaired.** The tattoo artist who injected the dye into her sclera, might have made a mistake in any one of several ways: Too much dye, too great of an injection depth, contaminated dye, too big a needle, too much of an unknown chemical component in the dye… Regardless of the cause of Catt’s problem, her plight begs two questions: How do we balance risk against gain? Why do we do something that might be risky?

Now, proponents of tattoos might say the risk is worth taking to achieve that “special look,” but there are levels of risk and levels of risk. Obviously, for Ötzi and untold numbers of tattooed people from ancient to modern times, tattoos don’t pose any more than a potential risk of regret. (“Why did I get an image of Mickey Mouse—or a former lover—tattooed on my forehead?”) Even if, as recently reported, tattoo ink can migrate inward to cause sepsis, sometimes, according to the FDA, years after the artist finished the skin art, the chance of any physical problem seems slight, given the number of people involved. But there is a risk, nevertheless. In 2015, the FDA issued a warning to tattoo artists about supposedly sterile and sealed bottles of ink because they contained Mycobacterium chelonae. (Amazing that Ötzi never encountered the problem of contamination! Probably his tattooist sterilized his instruments regularly) No doubt today’s reputable tattoo artists try to maintain sterile conditions, but no one tests all the sealed ink in the parlor, as evidenced by the need for an FDA recall on certain inks. And in the process of using any instrument in open-air, non-operating-room conditions with others moving about, any little critter can ride the current of ink to establish an invasive new home.
 
The question of whether or not one gets a tattoo is a personal one with many motivations, and apparently a decision involving only a slight risk. The question of value is also a personal one. And value sometimes means balancing risk against result. If I want to buy a new car, I have to weigh the cost to me vs. the gain. Is a new car worth part of my earnings? Will it put me in financial jeopardy?
 
Switch to car commercials: We all know the thrill of the ride… “Wait a minute. I thought this was going to be about tattoos.” I’ll get there, Pumpkin. Thoughts, like tattoos, can take time and lots of ink.
 
How many car commercials show fast cars moving fast—sometimes even on city streets—with a model, pleased smile upon his or her face, at the wheel? Acceleration. Remember what Einstein told us. Riding at a constant speed on a smooth highway offers no more a thrill than sitting on a couch. We don’t “feel” the movement at a constant speed. So, advertisers aware of our common knowledge about acceleration and its associated thrill show us fast cars accelerating for exhilaration with drivers risking as laws forbid them to risk. We buy under the influence of commercials that don’t associate the risk of dire consequences with high speeds. “It hugs the ground on a curvy road.”
 
Culture asks us to see risk favorably at times, but sometimes we need some convincing. Thus, the commercial world attempts to persuade us that certain risks, including traffic citation- and life-threatening speeding are worth taking. Maybe there’s a built in “I dare you” in the human psyche. Do we find some pleasure in incurring risk or suggesting it? Do we also become so inured against risk that we do not consider it much when we get an eye tattoo or buy a 400 HP car for roads posted with 35 mph—or at the most 75 mph—limits?
 
“I’m beginning to see that this isn’t about either getting a tattoo or a powerful car. It’s about our attitude toward risk. Right?”
 
Yes, it is. And it’s about how that attitude is affected by culture. In other words, regardless of our flight-freeze-fight response, we can be convinced that there’s a degree to risk. Even when risks like eye damage or injuries from driving overpowered cars pose a threat, we can be convinced that the consequences don’t apply to us personally.
 
Again, it’s a matter of weighing risk and gain. For Ötzi 5,300 years ago, there seemed to be little risk. Sixty-one tattoos didn’t kill him. There is also evidence that the ancient Egyptians tattooed their bodies at least as far back as 4,600 years ago.**** But probably most of the ancients would have balked at getting ink injected directly into the whites of their eyes. That kind of risk requires some convincing, some implanted suggestion that the risk is minimal and that the consequences are as inconsequential as buying a Porsche to drive on neighborhood streets.
 
As a result of our sense of diminished risk, we act in ways we might under rational examination consider to be potentially hazardous. We climb mountains. We take drugs for recreation. We drive fast when no one is looking. We even text and drive and drink and drive. And sometimes we get ink injected directly into the whites of our eyes.
 
We have the ability to see risks; that capability is probably built into our brains. We can learn, for example, not to touch hot stovetops. But we also have the ability to ignore risks; and that is probably built into our cultures. A risk an individual might see clearly, culture might see through a purple infected eye.
 
*http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2015/01/30/scientists-mapped-otzi-icemans-61-tattoos/#.WeNdbkyfngE Ötzi’s tattoos were not ink marks, but rather charcoal that he or his contemporaries might inserted in the belief that charcoal had a medical effect.
 
** https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/09/30/a-model-decided-to-tattoo-her-eyeball-shes-now-partially-blind-and-in-excruciating-pain/?utm_term=.4a3d0c4cd6d4
 
*** https://www.fda.gov/Food/NewsEvents/ConstituentUpdates/ucm457439.htm