Okay, say we make it back to the moon and decide to build a permanent colony. Going to need structures, right. But transporting stuff to the moon is expensive. Why not just use moon stuff to build structures? Well, now we know we can, and thanks to scientists from four countries and the European Space Agency, there’s a solution. All we need is thirsty astronauts and enough for them to drink. Yep. Who’da thunk it?
 
So, the story is that Shima Pilehvar and others figured out that astronauts could use urine to make cement.* Yes, like you, I’m wondering, “Who thought first that this was a problem and second that pee was the solution?” Anyway, Shima and friends, probably after drinking too much beer, decided that sending urine down the toilet was probably wasteful. I’m surmising that they took buckets to the pub to have something to carry back to the lab. Or, maybe they just drank beer in the lab.
 
In their abstract, the authors write, “We have…explored the possibility of utilizing urea as a chemical admixture for lunar geopolymers [geo? Doesn’t that mean “earth”? How about moonopolymers?]…[as a superplasticizer]” Their argument, beyond the chemistry and the material involved, lies in the estimated $10,000 per pound to get stuff just into orbit around Earth, forget the expense of getting it to the moon.
 
Having once had a job assisting stone masons, I recall having to use abundant water to mix the mortar and also concrete for the masons. No matter how much beer I might drink, I don’t think I could produce that quantity. I don’t think a small number of astronauts could produce that much urine. But if they could, their urine production, and thus their urea production, would require transporting the beer to the moon. Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m totally opposed to astronauts bouncing around drunk in diminished gravity. No doubt, as societies move to other worlds, they’ll carry their rules with them, and among those will be rules against bouncing under the influence. But, if it costs $10,000 to get a pound of stuff into Earth orbit, wouldn’t getting all that beer to the moon offset the savings of not transporting construction materials? Even if the beer is purchased at happy-hour or beer-distributor prices, it still weighs about eight pounds per gallon. Eight pounds times $10,000 is $80,000 in transportation costs. And, how much cement can astronauts make with each gallon? Also, how much time do they want to spend gathering moon-surface polymers to mix with urea? Will it be dangerous to mine under the influence of beer, even moon-surface mine? And, big question: Are there suits that allow both male and female astronauts to pee on moon dust?
 
Gosh, then there’s the problem of where to pee. The moon has no rest stops and no trees. Making cement with urea is going to be a very public process. And how many astronauts will have to devote their time to peeing and separating urea? Will there be work shifts? And what if an astronaut prefers scotch or, moon-forbid (didn’t want to say “heaven forbid” though from my earthbound perspective, the moon is in the “heavens”), the astronaut is a celiac? Would NASA or the ESA send gluten-free beer? Isn’t beer just liquid bread?
 
The quantity problem is really THE problem. The report by Pilehvar and friends contains pictures of little cement structures with weights to demonstrate their capacity to resist deformation under stresses (like their own weight and freeze-thaw cycles). Unless the ESA intends to use the pee-cement to build little houses for moon-hamsters, no human astronaut is going to construct on the moon a large enough place of refuge to shield a human from all that solar radiation, cosmic rays, and micrometeorites that can’t burn up in a non-existing atmosphere. In short, who wants to live in the primitive conditions of a cement yurt in an age of technology so advanced that people can actually get to the moon? Kind of ironic isn’t it? We have on Earth a protective atmosphere, abundant limestone and diatomaceous earth from which to make cement. We can build wooden or steel or cement or stone houses, all with as much elaboration as we wish or can afford, and none of it costing $10,000 per pound unless we decide to construct houses from rare or precious metals. We have air to breathe, places where weather is rather pleasant, where no one has to wear a spacesuit or, indeed, anything. But here we are, discussing how to put humans in the harshest of conditions and asking them to pee just to provide what is easily made on Earth at relatively low cost and effort. Can anyone say, “I ordered ten yards of cement today for my new sidewalk”?
 
Humans. Two to three hundred thousand years of evolution to get to an age of technology only to fly to a place where nothing of human existence, save a few pieces of junk left from a half dozen moon landings, is available. And for what? To go to planets or moons farther away? Planets and moons that are even harsher environments than the moon? Even more primitive environments? Trying to remember. What was one of those basic needs in Maslow’s hierarchy? Oh! Yeah. Safety, aka shelter.*** I think I would rather live in a cave on Earth than in a pee-hut on the moon.
 
Humans. Spent 200 to 300 millennia discovering how to make life easy, and they turn around and head toward the past. Go figure.
 
*Pilehvar, Shima, et al. Utilization of urea as an accessible superplasticizer on the moon for lunar geopolymer mixtures. Journal of Cleaner Production. Volume 247, 20 Feb 2020, 119177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.119177  Online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652619340478?via%3Dihub#!  Accessed on May 10, 2020.

***Letzler, Rafi. These lava tubes could be the safest place for explorers to live on Mars. 11 May 2020; Online athttps://www.livescience.com/radiation-mars-safe-lava-tubes.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9160&utm_content=LVS_newsletter+&utm_term=2816625&m_i=3GhBzUpX75iIVSO3Gxk0xQ0U2GCWWAOYehhmDTOb6Lhnk75OGtHf9HzoBuvGnoaXY7hd16E75SrYIVXBn36DQ_mUWVq1xhEfvotI2jh33P  .  Accessed May 12, 2020. This is an update reference for this blog. So, we want to go to Mars, and maybe going there could produce some benefit for humans over the next centuries, but not for those humans who go to Mars. they will be living in danger, and might have to revert to what our very ancient ancestors did for shelter, that is, live in caves, or, on Mars, lava tubes. You can imagine the lifestyle (or you can watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie). I love the sentence by Letzler in this article that reads, "Every part of Mars could kill you." What a great travel ad. Makes me want to sign up for the trip. How about you?

Sure, Earth has its dangers, but at least it has oxygen, a protective atmosphere, and food. And if I want to live a more primitive life, I can always find a lava tube in New Mexico or Hawaii for a home.  

What could be more majestic than a mountain chain that rises more than 10,000 feet with views to the ocean? Encompassing views that provide new perspectives. And the volcanoes! Oh! the volcanoes. Thousands: Extinct, dormant, active, many, like Aconcagua, awe-inspiring. And in those high elevations, walks a mountain camel that provides some of the best wool and possibly a cure for coronaviruses. It is the llama toward which the attention of scientists at Belgium’s VIB-UGent Center for Medical Biotechnology has now turned for nanobodies, really tiny antibodies that might protect us from Covid-19.* Oh! the lengths—and heights—to which we will go when we are desperate. Oh! the ideas we will pursue.
 
And, if we read all the newspapers and listen to all the reports during this 2020 pandemic, we are desperate. We see the numbers. We can’t avoid seeing the numbers. Scary numbers. So, why shouldn’t we look at llama blood? Who knows? Maybe something will come of the research. Maybe the researchers will discover a cure that works for all of us.
 
But like a trip into the Andes, the journey is uphill, and like the new disease, it takes away the breath. Nevertheless, when we are desperate, we humans will often pursue every path, explore every option. That’s often how we progress, through multiple working hypotheses. Run through enough of them, we believe inductively, and we’re bound to hit on an answer to any problem.
 
Take the formation of the Andes themselves. Why are they there? Charles Darwin climbed them in the 1830s, long before anyone thought of moving crustal plates, Plate Tectonics, and seafloor spreading. Long before anyone knew about subduction zones and why the Ring of Fire exists. Darwin, climbing above 10,000 feet, saw fossils of marine animals in the rocks and posited two working hypotheses. The first was the standard of his time, that the Deluge had inundated the world, with only Noah and family left to repopulate. The second was that the seafloor had somehow been raised to great elevations. Darwin, looking out from the heights, thought, “Wait a minute. If the water covered the planet to the elevation at which I currently stand, where did all the excess water go?” The consequence of having questioned the Great Flood hypothesis and finding it wanting, was his decision to run with the other hypothesis, that the mountains had been formed by uplifting. Rocks once on the sea floor had been elevated thousands of feet. Sure, Darwin didn’t really know what was going on tectonically, but his hypothesis looked pretty good; it seemed certainly truer than the accepted truth. And when Darwin descended from lofty elevations, he found that the sea level location where he started his upward journey had undergone an earthquake in his absence and that a promontory of rock had suddenly appeared in the water offshore. Rocks were being pushed up. His second hypothesis seemed surer than sure. And those who pursued Darwin’s kind of thinking over the ensuing century established a new way of looking at orogeny and volcanism.
 
And so it might be with llama blood, or with any camel-species blood. Someone in Belgium, just on a hunch, might test an hypothesis that changes how the medical profession develops a vaccine against a deadly pandemic.
Multiple working hypotheses free us from narrow inhibitive thinking. And they don’t have to apply to scientific endeavors only. They can be used to discern what is true—or truer—in all our endeavors, even, believe it or not, in psychology, sociology, and political science.
 
While scientists pursue their multiple working hypotheses on coronavirus, each of us might consider which hypotheses we pursue in our daily life. We might ask ourselves whether or not we are locked onto a single hypothesis or are open to multiple hypotheses. Much of the opposition to Darwin’s work derived from those who supported a single hypothesis, that Noah’s Flood had remade the world and laid the marine fossils high in the Andes and other mountains. That opposition to Darwin still exists, as you know, in spite of almost two centuries of information that supports the tectonic processes that build great mountain chains and cause volcanic activity.
 
As you know, much of what you perceive to be opposition to your way of thinking comes from those locked onto single hypotheses about psychology, sociology, and politics. That begs a question for you to ask yourself: “Am I locked into a single hypothesis?” And another question: “Why are so many people inclined to stick with a single hypothesis?”
 
Very few, if any, of Darwin’s opponents over the past century and a half have ever pursued his working hypotheses with objective thinking and research. After all, if accepting Noah’s Flood explains marine fossils in mountain rocks, why pursue any other mechanism? Don’t most of us cling to one hypothesis to explain beliefs either because we are too lazy to pursue refinements and question anomalies to those beliefs or because we find security in a nostalgic adherence to our beliefs?
 
Probably, each of us adheres to some hypothesis without testing and without pursuing multiple other working hypotheses. It’s only when we open ourselves to re-examining our hypotheses or to examining the hypotheses of others objectively that we can establish a better degree of truth, if not THE TRUTH.
 
Maybe the constituents of llama blood will have no relevance to curing or preventing Covid-19 in humans, but I applaud those who try to discover a new kind of medical approach to a pandemic. The beauty of multiple working hypotheses is that on occasion one of those hypotheses or two or three of them in conjunction will provide a solution to a problem. Who really cares about the source of a cure if the cure works? Who will, after the fact of a cure, deride those who took a different path toward truth?
 
And if you consider multiple working hypotheses to explain your life and the lives of those around you, I applaud you. Like Darwin in the Andes, you have a perspective that others either miss or ignore because they never ventured to the heights that provide sweeping perspectives. Whereas it is possible that pursuing multiple working hypotheses might never yield a final “answer,” it does provide a better chance of finding a truer truth and a cure for what ails not just individuals and groups, but also much of humanity. 
 
*Reuters. Belgian, U.S. scientists look to llama in search for COVID-19 treatment. Science News. 5 May 2020. Online at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-antibodies-llamas/belgian-u-s-scientists-look-to-llama-in-search-for-covid-19-treatment-idUSKBN22H2QA
Accessed May 8, 2020.

“I like visiting you. Your neighborhood is cool.”
 
“I hadn’t thought of it that way. It’s home, so I guess I took our lifestyle for granted.”
 
“No, not ‘cool’ as in ‘chic’; ‘cool’ as in temperature. Maybe it’s the occasional tree near the sidewalks.”
 
“Oh! There’s a takedown. And here I thought you were envying my way of life. The “cool”? Look down, man, look down.”
 
“What?”
 
“Look at the road. It’s been painted white to reflect sunlight. No more hot asphalt. The city of Los Angeles has an experiment running, painting reflective paint over streets. Supposed to diminish the heat island effect that makes cities warmer than the countryside. It’s like living on a farm with traffic. And to think, painting those streets white costs only $40,000 per mile. A bargain at any price, right? We’re fighting climate change at the ground level.”
 
“So, does the jogger or walker absorb the heat energy reflected from the road?”
 
Blank stare.
 
“Well, the energy has to go somewhere. If it reflects off the street and a person is walking along the street, wouldn’t some of that energy go into the person? And then, wouldn’t that person have to radiate that excess heat into the surrounding atmosphere to keep the body cool? Maybe it would be better to paint the roofs of all the houses and shops. The radiated energy would then start at a level higher than pedestrian traffic.”
 
“I’m sure there’s a reason for the street covering over roof painting. People in my neighborhood are pretty independent. I don’t remember when the street painting started, but it didn’t seem to generate much conversation. My neighbors and I just said we didn’t object to white streets. Heck, they’re more visible at night. They reflect street lights. I think the neighbors might object to the city coming in to paint their roofs. Some might object on the basis of property ownership; some might say white just doesn’t match the style and color of the house. Some might just not like white roofs, and some might say for no apparent reason, ‘Get lost.’ But painting roofs white does make sense. Aren’t most, if not all, roofs in Bermuda white?”
 
“Yes, Bermuda is a largely white-roofed island. And those roofs not only reflect sunlight, but they also are used to collect rain. But I just thought of another potential problem with painting whole street surfaces. What’s the composition of the reflective paint? Does it have those millions of microscopic glass beads in it. Those eventually get washed into the non-street environment. Does it have terpene phenolic resins, titanium oxides, any lead-chromate? How about barium sulfate, silica, mica, or other ‘extenders’? Alkyd resins? Chlorinated-rubber alkyd resins? Hydrocarbon resins? Polyester? Acrylic water borne emulsions? I’m just asking on behalf of the environment, both land and marine. LA is near the ocean.”
 
“I’m sure the city planners have taken into account all the ramifications of paint chemistry. Californians are known for their environmental awareness. So, painting the streets white isn’t going to harm the environment. It’s just an experiment, anyway.”
 
“Back in the 1990s I did a policy analysis for the Commonwealth of PA’s Department of Energy, and one of my recommendations was increasing the number of reflective roofs. Seems I was ahead of my time because I just read a 2019 study by Macintyre and Heaviside called “Potential benefits of cool roofs in reducing heat-related mortality during heatwaves in a European city” they published in Elsevier’s Environmental International.* Want a cooler neighborhood, paint your roof white. Of course, reflecting light off roofs doesn’t diminish the atmosphere’s greenhouse gases from absorbing it. So, there might be a cooling of the lowest level in the atmosphere in a city, but that has nothing to do with a general raising of temperature in the atmosphere. Painting streets doesn’t diminish the greenhouse effect. And if the atmosphere gets warmer, then warmer air settles over those ‘cooled’ neighborhoods. Painting streets might change the local temperature, but reflected energy has to go somewhere.”
 
“So, what’s your point? Just that my neighborhood is ‘cool’?”
 
“Actually, it’s a twofold point. First, no matter what we do, we cannot foresee all the consequences of our actions. Second, when we rely on bureaucracies to solve problems, we open ourselves up to impositions on personal freedom. I’m sure I can think of other points if you give me time. You might come up with a few of your own. What do you think?”
 
 
 
*Fedschun, Travis. Los Angeles painting city streets white in bid to combat climate change. https://www.foxnews.com/us/los-angeles-painting-city-streets-white-in-bid-to-combat-climate-change  Accessed May 6, 2020.  In fact, the article should more properly be titled “…in a bid to combat the local effects of climate change.”
 
**Volume 127. June 2019. Pp. 430-441. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2019.02.065Get   Article online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412018319627?via%3Dihub
Accessed May 6, 2020.

I’m not a Schopenhauer fan. Too bleak. Too down-on-the-world-as-is. But the guy used a term that captures the mood of our times: “Hopeful uncertainty.” He also wrote that humans have “an unshakeable certainty that we are the doers of our deeds.” Now the question for you is this: In this time of hopeful uncertainty as a virus stalks like a lion on the Serengeti while the herd of Wildebeest trudges by, do you think or even feel you are in control? Are you the lion or the Wildebeest?
 
And if your answer concerning control is “no,” “somewhat,” or “yes,” is it an answer you wish to further qualify?
 
NO: I’m unavoidably part of a human herd incapable of seeing the lion in the grass. Viruses are too small to see; they remain viable in places I cannot identify by my senses; and they operate 24/7. Only luck prevents me from being the lion’s victim.
 
SOMEWHAT: I’m aware of the dangers and have taken precautions that are reasonable, but life must go on, and I must go across my personal Serengeti in necessary daily migrations for food and water. I’m driven by the circumstances of my environment, by my subjective needs, and by my personal history of choices, but I can choose to walk a different path to avoid the potential attack by the lion. All of us can only hope that reason is a guide to certainty.
 
YES: I have total free will to act and to take responsibility for my actions. I am not dependent upon my previous life choices. I can also risk as I choose because I can reason about my alternatives. When one action seems better than another, I can take it; when necessity is worth encountering danger, I can choose that necessity. And if I choose, I can disregard reason entirely and act on feeling.
 
Yet, in each of the three, you can’t escape the fundamental hopeful uncertainty (or uncertain hope) of the times. Hope is always uncertain; certainty is always “hopeful.”
 
Have you noticed, however, that some act as though hope is a certainty?  

It’s a planet-wide phenomenon. Magnets stick to the sheet steel doors of refrigerators in Japan and the United States. Solar System-wide, too. If you had a refrigerator on the Mars rover, your magnet would work the same. Galaxy-wide, also. You could even affix preschoolers’ finger paintings all over a refrigerator door on Proxima b some four light-years away. Wouldn’t you be surprised if magnets adhered to sheet steel at one place and not at another? And what would that mean?
 
Why should we assume that magnets work the same everywhere? No. Let me rephrase that. Are the local physical laws universal as Einstein and so many others have said? Apparently, and contrary to what we have all come to accept as Law, the cosmos has something called “directionality.” Electromagnetism, claim Michael R. Wilczynska et al., appears to be slightly different in different parts of the universe.* That is, the Big Everything isn’t—or might not be—isotropic. The rules of the game aren’t universal. The fundamental force that makes Us possible might not allow other Us-es to exist elsewhere. The universe might be fine-tuned for our existence only if we live in this part of the universe. Sure, we can say the universe is a special place, but in this place it seems to be, at least for us, more special than it is in other places.
 
It’s a point of great importance to those who support the anthropic principle, the idea that the universe is fine-tuned for us to exist. Not that we’ll inevitably ever know for sure. However, when Wilczynska and colleagues looked at the redshift of a quasar’s light from just 800,000 years after the Big Bang, they found that the “weighted mean electromagnetic force in this location in the universe deviates from the terrestrial value.” Is that a significant finding?
 
We take for granted our ability to touch and know. After touching, you can say, “This knife is sharper than that knife. Your skin feels very smooth. The pineapple’s exterior is pinchy.” That sense of touch brings us knowledge, and it is dependent on the electromagnetic force just as our vision is likewise dependent on it. We’re largely electromagnetic beings as far as our daily lives go. Even at the level of our thinking, we seem to be electromagnetic as neurons operate in electromagnetic fields and signals course through our nerves. Look, for example, at what an electric shock from a taser does to muscles.**
 
Try going without sight or touch, both senses driven by electromagnetism; as photons carry the electromagnetic force, try changing the speed of light without affecting everything, particularly all those formulae that use “c-squared”; and try eliminating from the modern world that dependence on anything electric or magnetic. What if your refrigerator magnet didn’t stick? Certainly, your new Tesla electric car wouldn’t run.
 
I’m reminded of the fine-tuning argument made by John Leslie when he writes of “the strength of the coupling between charged particles and electromagnetic fields…The need for electromagnetism to be fine-tuned if stars are not to be all of them red, or all of them blue…”*** He also writes, “The electromagnetic fine structure constant gives the strength of the coupling between charged particles and electromagnetic fields. Increasing it to above 1/85 (from its present 1/137) could result in too many proton decays for there to be long-lived stars, let alone living beings who were not killed by their own radioactivity” (5). And changing the strength of electromagnetism would make all those chemical/biochemical processes we depend upon for life take less time or more time to occur; if less, then decaying faster; if more, then possibly postponing our existence by billions of years. If electromagnetism were ever so slightly stronger, “quarks would transform in to leptons or else repel one another strongly enough to prevent the existence of atoms even as light as…helium.” (4). You realize what that means? No more oxygen, carbon nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous, the elements that with hydrogen serve as the fundamental chemical components of life. No more ATP at work in your cells. No more cells!
 
Now, with this finding by Wilczynska’s group, it seems possible that the physics we know here won’t work everywhere, dashing to bits the most avid UFO researchers’ hope that somewhere in those two trillion distant galaxies there’s life like ours. We then stand alone in a universe with “directionality.” Of course, the differences in fine-tuning are small, and maybe don’t equate to those numbers offered by Leslie, but they indicate that the current fine-tuning isn’t as fine as we might think. And thinking is the heart of this because in our existence the universe is conscious of itself.
 
But what’s the point of this? Is it just to say that we are refining measurements and discovering that those we relied on for understanding might not have led to the wisdom we believe we now possess? Is it just a lesson in physics? Not really. I can think of applying it to our understanding of one another and to the nature of cultural differences. Within any culture standard social measurements work. All the social forces are fine-tuned as a result of a shared history going back to a cultural “big bang.” But once we travel to a distant culture, we find the social physics don’t necessarily apply, that the fine tuning of our personal and group world isn’t the same elsewhere, and that across we might even perceive the world differently, even if in very fine-tuned ways. At least, that is the conclusion of Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan after they looked differences between Asians and members of WEIRD societies, that is societies defined as “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.” The universe it seems, isn’t really “universal.” What applies locally might not—and in certain instances, definitely not—apply at a distance. Yet, as Henrich et al. argue, psychology “Researchers often assume their findings are universal,” even though real evidence seems to exist that suggests occidentals are more likely to see the world egocentrically, whereas people in the oft-cited Guugu Yimithirr culture perceive matters allocentrically.
 
That there are so many differences among people here on this little planet isn’t so surprising when one considers that underlying differences might exist in one of the four fundamental forces in the physical universe. Fine-tuning, whether for a universe permitting life or for a culture permitting ways of living, is local.
 
Get used to it. You are a “local.” All those around you are “locals.” Elsewhere, different rules apply, and it doesn’t matter how one tries to homogenize because the differences lie in the “fine structure,” in the fine-tuning.
 
Yet, almost every culture has its advocates for universal rules. Empires have formed under such thinking, and they have fallen as they have expanded into different parts of the human universe. The process is ineluctable. Think of how Sumerians gave way to Babylonians, Babylonians to Assyrians, Assyrians to Persians, Persians to Greeks, Greeks to Romans, Romans to “barbarians,” all in a process that keeps demonstrating the “directionality” of the social universe just as the physical one appears to have different principles for fine-tuning.
 
It isn’t a lesson easily learned. Think of contemporary politicians who wish to homogenize their societies under an ever-refining bureaucracy. Think, for example, of the rising trend toward socialism. Think, too, of the imposition of “universal” rules and laws sought by those in one-world movements. They believe their social magnets will stick everywhere with the same force. But as history has shown, such magnets lose force and slide off the cultural sheet metal. Some don’t even stick initially, in which case the solution to sticking is to destroy the “refrigerators” in genocides or enslavement.
 
I know. You’re never going to look at a refrigerator magnet in the same way. You’ll see it more than you’ll see what it holds against the refrigerator door. Sorry for that.
 
 
 
*Michael R. Wilczynska et al. 2020. Four direct measurements of the fine-structure constant 13 billion years ago. Science Advances 6 (17): eaay9672; doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aay9672. Online at https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/17/eaay9672.full
 
**Svitil, Kathy. Neurobiologists Find that Weak Electrical Fields in the Brain Help Neurons Fire Together. Caltech. 2 Feb 2011. Online at https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/neurobiologists-find-weak-electrical-fields-brain-help-neurons-fire-together-1671  Accessed May 1, 2020.
 
***Universes. London. Routledge. 1989.
 
****Henrich, J., S.J. Heine, and A. Norenzayan. The weirdest people in the world? Behav Brain Sci. 2010 Jun;33(2-3):61-83; discussion 83-135. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X0999152X. Epub 2010 Jun 15. Online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20550733   Accessed May 1, 2020. Full article at. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/weirdest-people-in-the-world/BF84F7517D56AFF7B7EB58411A554C17/core-reader  This is, for me, an interesting article on numerous levels. It certainly calls into question all those psychological studies that derive “universals” from WEIRD people, particularly university students recruited for those studies. As the authors point out about psychological research, American researchers obtained 68% of their subjects from their universities. In Europe, the representation has been even higher (80%).

​

You know the old joke—I think it was an original by Bob Newhart—about putting an indefinite number of monkeys in a room with an indefinite number of typewriters (For you young’uns, that’s a mechanical device that worked much like a computer keyboard, but made more noise and printed directly on paper with piano-like hammers with raised letters), anyway, as I was saying, if those monkeys were given the freedom to type whatever their fingers—less the thumbs, of course, because they aren’t opposable—that eventually, meaning about the time it will take for the universe to expand to nothingness, those critters will reproduce every great literary work. In Bob Newhart’s version, the guy in the white lab coat with a clipboard, says something like, “Wait! I think we have something here. This one typed 'To be or not to be; that is the gazorninplatz'" (I’m winging the memory part here).
 
So, anyway, the point is that with an indefinite number of monkeys with the same number of typewriters—okay, keyboards and Word—you would get the great literary works and probably a bunch of writing that either made no sense or that made only partial sense. Anyway, again, that’s how I feel about the indefinite number of reporters given an indefinite number of keyboards or an equal number of microphones writing or talking about the 2020 pandemic. Is there any aspect of this pandemic that hasn’t been covered ad infinitum? And what is the latest reporting done under the prospect that finding a cure might be very difficult? It’s about the “herd immunity.”
 
I don’t know about you, but I would find little comfort in the herd immunity because the herd is never the individual. One of those monkeys is going to type “gozorninplatz.” Many of them won’t even come that close. Much of the herd can fail, leaving only a few to continue typing either nonsense or partial stories.
 
But maybe I shouldn’t fault them, the reporters, that is. Each day they get bombarded with sickness and death statistics, some of which are questionable, others of which are a day behind the current realities, and some of which might be fudged to help an agenda, like hospital funding. Certainly, it’s well known by now and through all the reporting that the CDC wants “Covid” on part one of death cause, and only on part two does it want other contributing factors like heart problems, COPD, or diabetes. That puts current death data in question.  
 
So, desperate either for a story or for a sign of hope, reporters talk about “herd immunity” as though that in itself will save individuals. Or they talk about it because every other aspect of the pandemic has been covered by their indefinite number of competing reporters. Possibly, “herd immunity” is the bright spot in the eyes of those who are being worn down by the daily dealings of death data.
 
I’m wondering whether or not there isn’t another kind of herding. One that puts a single mindset in the brains of the human herd. The pandemic is wearing people down. It has crushed the world’s economies. Many went from prosperous to desperate in a matter of weeks. For example, with the closure of restaurants came a decrease in demand for products like pork, a decrease that, when coupled with ailing meat packers, shut down about 25% of the demand and, thus, the supply. Under the continuous bad news, many people look for some sign of hope.
 
Individuals—you?—might now be thinking in a herd mentality that the economy will open again and that the disease will fade to the significance of a yearly flu. But that’s a desperate thought, sad to say, at least for the short term (a year? 18 months?). Is there a herd immunity against the flu? Is that helpful? Remember that the flu leads to hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and hospital visits annually. Is it better to have something like the flu, which, according the CDC results in an annual death toll between 12,000 and 61,000 in the USA? Let me give you other numbers from the CDC. Some 9 million to 45 million illnesses and between 140,000 and 810,000 hospitalizations can be attributed to influenza. And that’s with the so-called herd immunity. So, those 12,000 to 61,000 people who died from the flu found no solace in being part of the herd.
 
And guess what? Herd immunity is not something we do consciously. It happens, or it doesn’t happen. It’s not like making an antiviral medicine or some vaccine. No one has control over herd immunity. It’s not a beacon of hope, not a great work wrought by a great mind. It’s a bunch of monkeys running helter-skelter and either unknowingly becoming immune or not and the same bunch trying to type explanations that appease even when they don’t make much sense. There’s no conscious typing of a coherent story, however. The tale of herd immunity, for example, is merely a hope based on random words that might, like “gazorninplatzes,” indicate that such immunity is essentially a meaningless chance event.
 
Yet, you will hear some say or write “We just need to wait to see whether or not we get herd immunity.”