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At long last my philosophical novel is complete! A journey through space, time, and dreams, Planetary Messenger explores the social, scientific, and spiritual consequences of discovering another planet in the galaxy just like our Earth. I began this project as a NaNoWriMo entry in 2007 and continued editing and revising for a year and a half.
From the back cover:
Since the dawn of humanity we have gazed at the stars to ponder our existence. To the naked eye the skies are dark and lifeless, but what if, through a glass, we looked to the heavens and saw our mirror image, a twin Earth from afar? If we found our uniqueness shattered in the vast cosmic arena, then what, if anything, could we still hold sacred?
Planetary Messenger is now available either directly from Createspace or through Amazon. Thanks to all of you who have been part of my life so far and helped make this possible. Happy reading!
From a discussion over at No Impact Man:
Jacob: On any evolutionary timescale, 10,000 years is relatively small. Human civilization is about 10,000 years old, but the human species is much older (~2.5 million for Homo and ~200,000 for Homo sapiens); for comparison, it takes about 40,000 years for two human populations to develop unique racial traits.
Dan: Go ahead and take another look at civilization. For instance, it took us what, on the order of 9,500 years to get any form of flight, albeit lighter than air? And after that, maybe 400 years or so to get to powered flight? And then 50 to reach orbit? Look at the vast increases in technology made in the past hundred years, and then compare those increases to the increases of the previous hundred years. Exponential growth is just that–exponential. So for human civilization, 10,000 years from now will be ages and ages.
This got me thinking: is there such a thing as sustainable exponential growth? Defining sustainability as any process that can be maintained at a certain level for an indefinite period of time, it seems clear that on a planet with finite surface area exponential population growth is unsustainable, so let’s remove population–or any direct consumption of a physical resource–from the equation.
Consider a community with 50 individuals in perfect male/female ratio with each pair producing two children. If two generations exist at any given time, then the population of the community will remain constant at 100 people. Suppose that this community has access to an infinite reservoir of books. One day, they decide to expand their knowledge, so all 100 people read a different book, thereby expanding the collective knowledge of the community. The next day, they each read two books, increasing the previous day’s knowledge by a factor of three, and the following day they each read four books. The community can continue doubling the number of books each day until reaching the physical limit of no time left in the day to read additional books.
If we say that an individual can consume up to sixteen books per day, then exponential growth of knowledge will occur in the community for the first five days. Once saturation is reached, though, exponential growth ceases. The community still gains knowledge every day, but they have plateaued at a constant (sustainable) rate of 1600 books per day.
Without exponential population growth, it seems that any human system will eventually reach a plateau (or collapse). Can anyone think of a counterexample–a process that exhibits sustainable exponential growth?
Although several years old, this paper by Changnon et al. (2000) makes an excellent observation regarding our perception of the increasing severity of natural disasters. Over the past fifty years the total cost of damages due to weather related events rose from ~$100 million to ten times as much, but the cost per person has remained constant:
…the results collectively indicate that the major cause of trends in losses related to weather and climate extremes is societal factors: the growth of wealth with more valuable property at risk, increasing density of property, and demographic shifts to coastal areas and storm-prone areas that are experiencing increasing urbanization.
Our pattern of continuous growth creates the opportunity for more damaging storms as we settle into high risk regions and construct expensive structures. Perhaps the many prophets of doom throughout history simply realized the long-term consequences of unsustainable growth and therefore included meteorological catastrophe as inevitable from our lifestyle.
And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs. (Matthew 24:6-8)
A great and rich power will be subject to serious natural disasters, particularly earthquakes and flooding, and rend the nation from end to end, causing enormous conflict, despair, and misery. The wealthy power will be bankrupted attempting to deal with its disasters. (Nostradamus, Times of Trouble)
Various prophets have had different ideas of the things to come, but they all saw in our world a sign of the times.
People are basically good, evil, greedy, generous, hungry.
Aside from moments after they feast, that is.
Back in State College
As I was retrospectively thinking one day, I remembered Carol Kendall’s The Gammage Cup. I first discovered this book in the fourth grade. The storytelling was fantastic, but I also remember being intrigued by some of the messages of the book–issues such as authority, conformity, and expression. I re-read the book a year later, enjoying it as much as the first time, and then it somehow ended up in a garage sale and disappeared from sight.
I just finished reading the book for the third time in my life (which for me is rare for any book), confirming my suspicions that I took to heart some of the themes Kendall brought out in her novel. As children the simple fact that our view of the world is limited allows our imaginations to think of worlds that might be, to examine things we do not yet take for granted–and to laugh about the absurdity of it all. A brilliant piece of cultural satire, Kendall’s novel touches some profound questions of society, religion, and being alive. This book certainly helped guide my thinking and critique of the world, which I’m certain was no mistake on the part of Carol Kendall:
Children are a marvelous audience…they remember what they have read! Sometimes they remember it all their lives!
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