Armies of the night · 2:23am Nov 13th, 2019
My dad had an old vacuum-tube radio that he bought before any of us kids were born. It was small enough to keep on the kitchen counter so that’s where it stayed. I remember how its innards would glow like a candelabra, and about as hot.
He’d bought it in the fifties in the last flowering of radio shows. It only got AM so by the seventies there wasn’t a lot for him to listen to except classical stations and broadcast sports (you used to be able to listen to major-league games for free—no, really!). But then he learned how to employ it to entertain us kids by using it as a sort of magic box, to show us wonders.
We’d listen to it during thunderstorms and wonder what all the pops and bangs were. “That’s lightning” he’d say, and explain how lightning didn’t just give off visible light: it gave off radio waves too, and the radio picked them up. In the spaces on the dial between stations we’d hear a hissing like pouring sand or rushing water. He’d tell us “that’s static,” and we’d hear how it was radio energy given off by the stars—mainly the sun (“the sun is a star too”) but also by stars way off in space, all the ones we could see and all the ones that we couldn’t.
We’d pick up signals from afar—all-night trucker stations, the BBC—and he’d tell us about the ionosphere, a layer of charged particles that surrounds the earth, and how it reflected radio waves like a blanket reflects warmth. “And you can hear stations farther way at night, because the reflecting layer is higher up then.”
I remember the night he was able to tune it to station WWV, the U.S. National Institute of Standards’ time signal. This was in the days before GPS and the most accurate time-hack in the world was a metronome tick, a beep every minute and a recorded voice saying “At the tone—One. Hours. Twenty. Two. Minutes--Coordinated Universal Time.”
And he explained how this was used everywhere by all sorts of people—sailors, pilots, astronomers and astronauts—(“cool people” says the young boy’s mind) to navigate, to make observations, to control railroad signals, to do what they purposed all day and all night, even when everyone else was sleeping.
And I remember feeling utterly taken out of myself and seized on high to see all these toiling argonauts. They were sailing the seas, spanning the skies, searching the heavens and whirling through them, all connected by this great invisible artery of a signal whose beating heart my father knew just where to find and could put his finger on at the touch of a dial.
Then the moment passed and so had our bedtime, and we were only children shivering off to bed with no words to say what we’d just felt. Only later would I find them in an unremarkable poem about love that had become, accidentally, a remarkable poem about astronomy:
The night’s mysterious wings pulsed through the dark
The night’s mysterious noises cracked and shivered
And where their fingers met, a visible spark
Seemed to leap forth at them, and pulsed and quivered:
Their thickened tongues were dumb
The pretty words of star-lore undelivered
The pretty words that found no breath would come.
When I hear people say that looking at the night sky makes them feel small and insignificant, I can't quite understand. How can being filled with wonder and the joy of wonder make you feel small?
And how can being that part of the universe which wonders at itself—be insignificant?
I have my father to thank for that.
Foals today are surrounded by so many wonders, I suspect the miracles don't seem very special, even though they're leagues beyond where we were fifty years ago...
Counterpoint: Feeling small isn't always such a bad thing.
5154476
So very true. I grew up with no cable tv, no cell phone, a single line rotary phone in our house with no answering machine on a nine person party line.
In a very rural part of the southwest, where at night the view of the stars and the crackle of my am radio brought me the entire world. At times I felt small and so far from the rest of everything and everyone else. But most of the time, I was in awe and felt closer to life than I know it now.
A part of something more than myself, more special.
The same way I feel when I'm somewhere with all of my pony friends.
Very nice. :)
And also, looking up at the night sky? Even if you're not religious at all, our current pure science understanding of the universe has gravitational and electromagnetic forces only falling to zero at infinity. All of those stars, those gigantic suns hundreds or thousands of lightyears away? You are, in some tiny, imperceptible, but present way, touching them, the forces connecting you no different in kind than the gravitational and electromagnetic forces between you and the ground and air around you, or between the molecules of your own body.
5154477
I mean, it's accurate. What am I, next to even so small a speck in the universe as Sol?
But I'm the particular bit of the universe I see the rest of the universe through, and those around me, equally tiny, are conveniently around the same size as me. :)
5154483
Rural SW? Me too! One of my fondest memories from my childhood is lying in my bed with a Bakelite earphone the size of a hockey puck pressed to my ear, hearing what tinny far-off stations I could manage to pick up on my crystal radio kit.
5154483 What he said.
We had a big console radio/record player that had like twenty things on the dial from AM/FM to all kinds of shortwave numbers. I never really heard anything in English that got my fancy, but it was fun at night to poke the buttons at random and turn the dial until I heard somebody chattering away in Italian or Japanese and wonder what they were saying.
5154495
I lived my middle and high school years in very small and out of the way community in central Texas. I often picked up stations in Dallas and once in a while Chicago. And quite a few Spainish stations which I enjoyed just because it sounded so enthusiastic and lively!
5154502
I liked seeing how far a station I could find, too! I lived in the middle of Texas but I caught a station in Canada once and one in New Mexico.
5154561
I was in Arizona right on the border, so I got a couple Mexican stations very strongly. (Better than the ones in Phoenix.) At night, the ionosphere would bounce all sorts of far-away stations, and I once heard one from Chicago.
5154502
My uncle had a set like that. It took about ten minutes to "warm up." You could start listening before then, but stations would drift and the volume would alter as it got hotter.
5154601
I hear the talkin'
Of the DJ
Can't understand just what does she say--
i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/005/272/dje1401200.jpg
I'm on Equestrian
Radio...
5155069
Thank you for saying that.
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Point of order: Humans aren't small. The number of identifiable things inside you, personally--from organs down to atoms--is greater than the number of identifiable things in the entire universe that are larger than you. A human, seen as a collection of atoms, has orders of magnitude more components than the universe seen as a collection of suns and planets, and even more orders of magnitude more complexity. Humans are REALLY, REALLY BIG, SLOW, AND ANCIENT relative to the unimaginably large number of things they're made of.
5155764
Counterpoint x2 The Counterpointening: Sometimes it can be nice to feel things that aren't literally true.
5155764
I suppose it does depend on how one considers size, yes? It personally feels to me like constituent atoms vs. constituent stars-and-planets is somewhat unfair, though; after all, those stars and planets are made of their own atoms, just to start with.
Do you have other thoughts on the matter? Just a bit confused here.
5155768
One justifcation for constituent atoms vs. constituent stars-and-planets is that all these people who look out on the universe and feel dwarfed by it are not seeing or envisioning the universe in terms of its constituent atoms. They're thinking how much bigger the universe is than them. Realizing that they are (very very roughly) as much bigger than the atoms they're made of, as the universe is bigger than them, should make those people not feel that way.
Now, I am impressed not by physical size. I don't feel awe for Mount Everest; it's just a rock. I'm impressed by complexity. Humans are collections of atoms put together in such a complicated way that they can move around, play chess, and reason about the stars. This is critical to appreciate because so much bad human philosophy--so much that demeans and devalues human life--is based on not seeing that we are mechanisms, but not "mere" mechanisms--we are mind-boggling, we are unimaginably vast and slow. People assume that intelligence, creativity, love, and friendship can't be produced by a machine, because the complexity of the human machine is much farther beyond their capacity to grasp than is a description of the movements of all the stars. They assume, instead, that meaning, feelings, and purpose must come from somewhere else, some transcendent realm--and then the trouble begins.
Then the theologians and academics spend centuries constructing elaborate ontologies, epistemologies, and metaphysics, a circular logic of mutually-reinforcing lies which combine to prevent any person, once trapped in their cycle, from ever escaping them. They pervert and cripple human reason enough that the truth can't be thought, so their simple explanations will be the best still-imaginable option, and they won't have to do the work of trying to grasp what they are.
But the attribution of life and meaning and purpose to somewhere else necessarily devalues our lives in this world, and robs it of its wonder.
Imagine understanding EVERYTHING--the entire universe & everything in it. Well, unless there's a lot more life out there, it appears that having a complete understanding of just yourself, from top to bottom, would take you more than halfway to understanding the entire universe. The body of knowledge it would take to predict the motions and activities throughout the entire lifespan of the universe of its of stars and galaxies would be infinitesimal compared to the body of knowledge it would take to predict, without prior experience, what a human was likely to do during its lifespan. A single human is more interesting than the entire universe visible outside our Earth.
5155788
I'm still confused how 10000>100 (not to scale) is supposed to show that 10000/<1000000? That looks to me like what you're saying in that first paragraph, though we also, I think, are approaching this from different perspectives, or something of the sort? It still feels a bit to me like I'm missing something not in what you're saying but in the structure into which what you're saying is supposed to fit.
And as for complexity, yes, I may be much more complex that a rock, even if the rock is much bigger and more massive than me, but the rest of the universe doesn't include just big rocks; at minimum, it includes all the rest of the life on Earth, including billions of other humans presumably more or less as complex as I am. I also expect that there is a lot more life out there; the probability that, in a universe the size of ours and in which the Earth demonstrates life can come into being, there is only one single planet on which life exists seems immensely low to me.
And as for the entire universe visible outside Earth, well, there's a lot we can deduce the existence of without having seen it yet (and places where the line between seeing and deducing grows blurred), and a lot we formerly couldn't see but now can (I mean, it's not been that long since we were purely in the realm of deduction where exoplanets were concerned, and not that long since we had neither telescopes at all nor microscopes.).
5155813
I'm confused by what you wrote, but 10000 > 100 does indeed prove that 10000 < 1000000, since it proves that 100 * 10,000 = 1,000,000 > 100 * 100 = 10,000.
Yes, but when people look at the stars and feel like the universe is huge, they aren't looking at all the rest of the life on earth. Lots of people have written lots about having these feelings, and it is the relative bigness of the Universe to one human which impresses them.
Re. complexity, most of the knowledge needed to understand a billion humans is also needed to understand one human, so complexity of {all humans} / complexity {you} < 2. (Here we run into a semantic problem that I don't want to bother with: when we ask how much info it takes to understand one person, do we mean also to understand all their relationships, their economic roles, their history, and all those other issues? I say yes, but it probably doesn't affect my general argument much either way.)
Knowing about humans also provides a lot of the information needed to understand all other life on earth, because the genes in animals are built out of components that evolved in bacteria. Big creatures reproduce too slowly to evolve proteins, so animal proteins are mostly pieces of bacterial proteins patched together. I checked this myself, but never published my results, so I guess no one else knows that.
If there are other types of life out there, then there would be a lot of additional complexity. I don't think there is, or at least not intelligent life, because intelligent life would quickly develop the ability to engineer on a solar scale, and the first logical thing any of them would do would be to shut off all the stars they could so they could tap their energy in a more controlled manner. Astronomical observation suggests that has never happened anywhere. At least, not unless dark matter is synthetic.
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5155764
I wrote a thing because I thought my point was important and because it was important I tried to be subtle and because I was subtle everybody missed the point.
I feel like I'm finally in the club.
"Ah do believe ah'm a genius!"
5157434 Subtle? I don't believe I know that word. (Although I am a fan of R. Crumb)
5157434
What did I miss? I thought it was a wonderful reminiscence of thoughts and ways of looking at things and life from your father.
5157452
That was truly fantastic!
5157470 Grabbed a copy for Thoughtletts too. Occasionally, I get muse-mugged, only instead of waking up in a ditch and missing my wallet, I wake up behind the keyboard saying to myself, "Ye gads, that's beautiful. I wonder who wrote it, and how they signed my name."
5157452
"But Oosh, what is this grandma which has been run over by a reindeer?"
5157434
Welcome to Death of the Author. Find a space for your coat.
5157452 5157470 I don't recognize the source, but I believe "the Sacrifice of our One who proclaimed their own One" refers to the sacrifice of a star, going supernova, to proclaim the birth of Christ. "The One" specifically refers to Plato's God, which Christian theology was based on, and it's used to refer to Jesus when the speaker wishes to secretly wink at any listening fellow Platonists.
5157502
It was POSTMODERNISM in the IVORY TOWER with a LEAD PIPE.
5157520
"That guy just winked at me--oh God, is he a Platonist? IS THIS A PLATONIST BAR?"
"Dude, did you not see all those guys tied up with their backs to the fire?"
5157413
"I'm confused by what you wrote, but 10000 > 100 does indeed prove that 10000 < 1000000, since it proves that 100 * 10,000 = 1,000,000 > 100 * 100 = 10,000."
Ah, sorry; the "/<" was meant to be a quick way to type ≮, not less than.
I was referring to "They're thinking how much bigger the universe is than them. Realizing that they are (very very roughly) as much bigger than the atoms they're made of, as the universe is bigger than them, should make those people not feel that way."; basically, why should them being much bigger than the atoms they're made of mean they're not much smaller than the whole of the universe?
"Yes, but when people look at the stars and feel like the universe is huge, they aren't looking at all the rest of the life on earth. Lots of people have written lots about having these feelings, and it is the relative bigness of the Universe to one human which impresses them."
Point, yes; I think I was getting off track there.
"Re. complexity, most of the knowledge needed to understand a billion humans is also needed to understand one human, so complexity of {all humans} / complexity {you} < 2."
Not sure I'm following what you're saying here, sorry, particularly the ratio and how this ties into the discussion.
"I checked this myself, but never published my results, so I guess no one else knows that."
Oh, neat, though!
re intelligent life and rapid (relatively speaking, presumably) development of solar scale engineering:
Hm. I'd call that far from a given, though (though I realize that sort of view is controversial these days).
(Also wondering how this ties into The Myth of Accelerating Change, which I kept meaning to write you back about but not getting around to.)
To me the prospect of intelligent life arising in our universe once but only once seems far less likely than solar scale engineering simply being practical in so few if any circumstances that it has not yet been done to our ability to detect. We have, after all, firm proof that intelligent life can arise, but only theories that it can undertake solar scale engineering.
5157434
Ah. Um. Sorry. Afraid I don't know what I missed, though.
5157632
For the purpose of estimating the probability that there is other intelligent life out there, "rapid" development of solar engineering means something like "within N years of developing arithmetic", where you think that intelligent life couldn't have arisen anywhere in the universe more than 2N 1 years ago. So if you think that a 10.8-billion year-old universe is about as promising a place for life to develop as an 11 billion year-old universe, N would be at least 100 million years.
5157713
Thank you for the expanded definition, but that doesn't really change my assessment of the situation. There are so many ways for an intelligent species to not develop solar-scale engineering, including persistent factors (ex: blind aquatic life in an ice moon that never even realizes there's anything beyond the ceiling) and things permanently closing off the possibility (ex: the classic "blowing themselves up first"), and if solar-scale engineering and/or mass interstellar colonization were highly probable, we should, given intelligent life not being vanishingly rare, see them by now, as you say. And looking at the data we have and conclusions of others, my personal conclusion is that the most likely situation is that the Great Filter sits between intelligent life and the sorts of mass developments and expansions we'd have observed, and while it does include things like annihilating themselves in nuclear war, mostly is just those sorts of efforts being so vanishingly unlikely to be practical that they'll not significantly occur even with hundreds of millions of years of rolling dice.
We still only had AM radio out in the sticks of Aus when I listened to the 'warm' sounds of an old 50's valve radio in my bedroom the 70s and 80s and they did not get an FM station there until '96. I still have my old valve radio up in the old home in the lounge room and I fire it up once in a while when I am up there. I always picture Da and I sitting on the verandah late at night listening to the family portable Bakelite valve radio. It was often the ABC regional stations who usually played country music or the BBC World Service and we'd sit there looking at the night sky and talking or just listening to the music or news readers fade in and out.
Your father sounds like a great bloke and a real inspiration to your outlook on life. My father and I sort of did this but a bit reversed, he inspired my practical 'hands on' skills side and I inspired him to learn more technical and scientific things. As he'd left school by 13 his education had been far more centred around physical work and experience. I learnt about electronics and radio waves and I was the one who explained how the radio he had been listing to since he was a lad worked. He was always interested to know what bit of science and trivia I had found about something on the farm or in the world we observed and I always enjoyed learning about his life and how he'd grown up and the practical things he'd learnt. Later it continued as we travelled together 4WDing around the country and I taught him to use HF radio for the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the 4WD HF Radio Network. Even with him being gone for a couple of years now, I still read something new and think "I've got to share this with Da, he'll like this."
When I get away and 4WD out into the middle of remote central Australia, I still sit there at night and look up at the sky and marvel about how amazing it is. I also know no matter how far I travel, the radio can reconnect me to the rest of the world no matter how remote I am. I can choose to talk or listen to someone a thousand kilometres away if I want or I can just sit back and watch the stars wheel overhead and contemplate.
5164673
This.