Vindicated, Finally

Forty some years ago, when I was a budding scholar in high school,  we were assigned the task of writing a research term paper. I think this was in an English Composition class...I really don't recall.  At the time I was very much into reading some obscure scientific or historical journals. These were probably not at all obscure but they were to the typical high school student. Sometimes I would read an article and then follow up on the cited sources. This was kind of like surfing the net but there wasn't a net...everything was in print.

I was briefly interested in Thor Heyerdahl's "Kon-Tiki" voyage and his theory that people from South America sailed west to inhabit some of the islands of Polynesia. His arguments were not very convincing and he didn't get much attention until he actually set sail in a raft and happened to barely survive the voyage to a Pacific island.

The fact that he made the voyage didn't prove much but he opened the door to discussion and consideration of the idea of trans-Pacific contact between Asia and the Americas. That was the hook that caught me and I started looking into the topic.  Could people from Asia have sailed east to North or South America? It turns out that the currents are favorable for that type of voyage. Even now we are hearing about the debris from Japan's tsunami showing up on the west coast of the United States. These currents have been doing the same thing for thousands of years. Japanese fishing floats wash up on California beaches and some go farther down the western edge of the continent.

So I started digging and eventually I found an article written by three anthropologists  in 1962 (I think) who claimed that they found evidence of the arrival of living Japanese fisherman (seafarers, at least) among artifacts found at Valdivia in Ecuador. The date of that arrival was approximately 3,000 BC. The outcome of that arrival was the introduction of pottery making to the people of South America. Pottery had not been made in the Americas prior to that time and then it arrived without any precursors...no tentative trials or "beta test" models. What's intriguing is that the style of pottery that suddenly appeared was identical to pottery being manufactured by people of the Jomon culture of ancient Japan...around 3,000 BC.  I thought they made a credible argument and I put together a terrific term paper covering the topic and some of the counter arguments from people who thought this was all hog wash. In my enthusiasm I received an 'A' on the paper and became a long-term, but quiet,  advocate of the idea as well.

Most of the professional anthropologists and archaeologists  who had anything to say took a negative view of the idea. Part of their skepticism probably stemmed from the lingering negative reaction to Heyerdahl's showboat approach to proving people could have sailed long distances in primitive boats. The Ecuador - Japan connection was too foreign to the accepted rules of how people migrated and came to inhabit the Americas. They didn't have a better explanation of how pottery suddenly appeared but it couldn't have been introduced by drifting Japanese fisherman.

Fast forward forty years. Many of those old rules and ideas have been called into question so many of today's professionals are a little more cautious in condemning new ideas. The idea that Clovis people were the first to make the migration to the Americas around 12,000 years ago is crumbling and anthropologists are looking at alternative ideas. One way to look at the question is through genetics and linguistics. A recent DNA study of indigenous males  (Y-chromosome) in South America looked at a large sample of DNA donors. I don't pretend to understand genetics or even the full implication of the project but the research found (I think) that most of the original people coming into South America came (perhaps together?) at approximately the same time  but then divided into small isolated groups who remained separate for very long periods of time. This migration took place about 15,000 years ago and genetic mutations took place during the periods of isolation resulting in the variations we see in the native populations.

The DNA study had a few unexpected findings. It happens that two indigenous groups in western Ecuador have genetic DNA markers common with (wait for it......) eastern Asia....including Japan and Korea. This is found nowhere else in the Americas among indigenous people except way up north in some groups in Alaska...who were probable late arrivals from Asia. Additionally, the research shows that the Ecuador - Japan DNA connection dates from sometime less than 6,000 years ago...not far off from the supposed arrival of the Jomon fishermen around 3,000 BC.  So the genetic evidence backs up what those other anthropologists reported way back in the 1960s.

The pottery issue may still be open for debate...was it invented independently  in the Americas or was it introduced?  The image below shows some of the similarities between Jomon and Valdivia pottery styles of the same era. It's hard to deny the similarities even if there was an earlier prototype of pottery developed elsewhere in South America.

Jomon (top)
Valdivia (bottom)

Have you signed up to go to Mars yet?

I haven't, but apparently over 78,000 people have submitted their names to be among the first Mars colonists. This is a one-way trip. The mission would be to establish a permanent colony of Earthlings...sort of a beach-head for our quest to inhabit two planets.

I don't think 78,000 will be enough. There is nothing there...no infrastructure to support a colony. Mars is an extremely hostile environment. We still don't know if there is sufficient water on Mars...evidence suggests that there might be some frozen  water under ground. What air there is would not be breathable, being mostly carbon dioxide. There is only a small amount of hydrogen. Some scientists think that Mars is too small and its gravity is too weak to keep hydrogen from drifting off into space. Even if we manufactured hydrogen or imported it from Earth we might not be able to use it because it would want to drift away. The average temperature is well below zero so storing hydrogen in frozen water might keep it contained...water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen and both are in short supply on Mars.

Scientists think that lichen, that scaly stuff that grows on rocks, would survive on Mars. I don't think lichen is very tasty. I hope Monsanto is developing some genetically engineered lichen that tastes like chicken.

Given our dismal history of 16th and 17th century colonization efforts, most colonists die off the first year or two. During those early years, probably most colonies failed but they had help. There were hostile natives and hostile European raiders. The Spanish wiped out the French colony down by Florida and the Portuguese did the same thing in Brazil.  The Indians were initially somewhat friendly but the colonists soon made enemies of the Indians who wiped out some of the early colonies.

I'm hoping that they are planning on some sort of psychological evaluation and screening process. There would have been a better outcome if they did that before folks climbed aboard the Mayflower. Same is true for that bunch down in Jamestown. These people are going to be cooped up in a space transport for months on end and they will probably run out of beer early in the trip. That's what upset the Pilgrims. People will be going bonkers before they ever get to Mars.

That 78,000 crowd of people is only about twice the size of my little town. I'm thinking that it would be wise to establish more than one colony. Chances of survival might be better with several colonies going at once....lets say five separate colonies. That way a space super bug/virus will only kill off 20% if it wipes out one of the colonies. Okay, five colonies with almost 16,000 folks in each colony. Of that 16,000 there would be a huge number of people engaged in life support and infrastructure maintenance. Remember, Mars is hostile and not making life easy. There would be a bunch engaged in government services and health services...police and fire services, eventually there would be schools and medical clinics. Living in a reduced gravity environment might have some peculiar health effects.  Mars gravity is less than half of Earths but more than the Moon...remember those guys bouncing around on the Moon? Golf courses would have to be really big.

So maybe half the colonists are left to do whatever they are supposed to do once the other half has the place under control...sort of. Somebody has to do the laundry. Somebody has to cook. Somebody has to manage food production. There goes another bunch of people.

Are we going there to exploit natural resources? Mars is red because of iron oxide...it's sort of rusty so we figure we could mine iron, I guess. Maybe other stuff, too. The smart way to do this is with robots so we would need a robot factory and people to design and build robots.

Because of the lower gravity we could use Mars as a way station for exploring other planets or solar systems...blasting off Mars would be easier than Earth. Of course, the Moon would be good, too. At any rate, we would need some sort of space port for sending or receiving space travelers.

For some reason all of these Mars colony scenarios look suspiciously like prisons to me. We wouldn't want to go the penal colony route like the Brits did in Australia but we would need strict discipline and almost a prison-like adherence to rules. There would be a strong leader or a strong ruling body and everyone would be expected to follow the rules. Somebody would be in control...like Richard Branson or Bill Gates or -- a David Koresh?  This would be beyond what we  think of as normal military discipline. That takes a special kind of person...someone willing to be subservient or submissive to an absolute set of rules. Somebody who would be organized and willing to follow a schedule and never deviate from the expected performance. Somebody who would almost be a robot....hey, wait a minute. We would have humans performing like robots? That hasn't worked too well in our history. Nazi Germany had a go at it but you know how that went. Stalin tried but that didn't work. More recently, modern advertising has a lot of us behaving like robots but we are still not fully buying into it.

So why not scrap the human colony idea and send robots? Humans are not space colony material. We already have some robotic explorers on Mars running around and drilling holes and analyzing rocks. If we send fifty or sixty more with specialized skills we could make some progress without having to worry about food and breathable air.  The idea of sending humans has some romantic and science fiction value but wouldn't it be easier to send smart machines?

In Praise of Moms -- The Cavalcade of Idle Threats

Aren't Moms great. Don't you really appreciate them after you are grown up and can look back in a detached way and think..."Gee, I wonder if anyone ever got their mouth washed out with soap?"  That was one of the classic threats and it worked -- you didn't repeat that word -- at least not around her. But I don't know anyone who ever got their mouth washed out -- or who was dumb enough to test it.  


Moms always had a full arsenal of threats.


 "I'm going to wear you out!!"  Really?  Not likely. I had a 2nd grade teacher that always said that, too, and she never wore anybody out.  Quite the opposite...we had her on the ropes almost every day.


 "Wait 'til your father gets home....he's going to tan your hide!!"  Yeah, right -- sounds like a hotline call is in order. Tanning my hide? With me in it?


 "Don't you leave the table until that plate is clean!!  Eat all of it!!"  Okay, sometimes that worked...after a while. It usually worked better in the summer after daylight savings kicked in.


 "Your face is going to freeze like that!!!"  This was often said during the heat of summer. Somebody's face must have actually froze like that sometime in the dim past because there is no real logic to this and Moms wouldn't have made this up. That was probably the same kid who put his eye out.  


 "I'm going to knock you into next week!!"   Wow...she has mastered time travel! Call NASA! What will my teacher think if I don't show up for school for a week?  She's going to have some explaining to do.


 "I can always tell when you're lying."  No she couldn't....she had about an even chance. This worked both for me and against me.


 "I can't believe you can live in this mess!"   Really? Well, why not?  I've been doing it and thriving for weeks...and my immune system thanks me.


 "If I want your opinion I'll ask for it!"   Oh, right...I won't hold my breath.


 "Keep it up and I'll give you something to cry about!"  Well, why...if I was already crying, why would she do that?


 "I'm not going to ask you again."  Ha-ha-ha-ha.  Let me write that down.


 "Tie your shoes...you are going to break your neck!"  There always seemed to be a lot of neck breaking going on but I never knew any kid who broke his neck from shoe laces.  Maybe it was that half-blind kid with the frozen face.


 "You can't find it? Well, where did you leave it last?"  Well duh...if I knew that I wouldn't be asking.


 And finally... "When you have kids of your own you'll understand."  Oh yeah? That never happened.

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