I finally managed to catch my friend Maude's show The Webcamming Chronicles tonight at the Cockpit – tickets for the second showing on the 13th here! – and thoroughly recommend it, but haven't time if I want to get any sleep now to explain why. So here as a placeholder is Carl Sagan's first attempt, as far as I know, to send a drawing of a naked man to aliens. I drop us straight into the explanation below, but the whole video, being a video of Carl Sagan talking, is typically superb.
"I felt very bad that at the end the Wookie didn't get a medal. All the people got a medal and the Wookie, who'd been in there fighting all the time, he didn't get any medal."
"Han Solo talked about getting to a certain place in only so many parsecs of time or speed, when it's a unit of distance. It's like me saying from here to San Diego is thirty miles an hour."
Carl Sagan
Having only recently learnt of his brilliant contribution to the depiction of alien intelligences in 2001, I now find Carl Sagan was also responsible for this. Oh well... I mean, he's not wrong. These just wouldn't necessarily be top of my list of wishes to grant Sagan eternal rest forty years on.
Following on from those portraits of Saint Jerome working from home, I feel the absence of books acutely in Dr. Dave Bowman's isolation. I read here that Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke – wondering how best to depict a superintelligent extraterrestrial onscreen – decided to ask Carl Sagan. They're clearly no fools. Nor of course is Sagan, who advised them to not even attempt such a thing, but instead merely "suggest" the alien. The appropriately unfathomable abstractness which resulted did not stop Kubrick trying to take out insurance against actual extraterrestrials contacting Earth before his film could be released, and thereby showing him up. Lloyds of London refused, however, and according to Sagan they "missed a good bet", which begs the question: "Why did they refuse? Why? WHAT DID THEY KNOW?"
This evening was the first time I'd been to the South Bank since lockdown, and dumb as it might sound, the first time the reality of these closed spaces really sunk in, taking me with it. I didn't often go to the National Theatre or the BFI, and I hardly ever went to the Hayward or Royal Festival Hall, but I went here all the time. Just to be here. A public space made possible by things that are no longer happening. The space is still there, but not the public, and I felt a bit awful. Speaking of awe, in this week's Ships, Sea & The Stars I got to read some Carl Sagan. Absolutely no one delivers Carl Sagan better than Carl Sagan, but it was still a joy. Ed Bloomer makes a beautiful point in the video about Sagan's writing that's often overlooked: "It's quite kind." I once looked up the derivation of "kind". Like "like", it means both how we'd prefer to be treated, and also "our type". We like our kind, and we are kind to those like us. Sagan welcomes us. Aw man, so did the South Bank Centre. I really look forward to the welcome resuming.
Hot on the heels of Carl Sagan's take-down of Plato, Natalie
Haynes Stands Up For The Classics has a wonderful episode on Western Philosphy's first poet, inventor of Atlantis, founder of an Academy that lasted nine-hundred years, and preserver of the Socratic dialogues, here just for balance. Being less familiar with the Socratic dialogues than the show's contributors I have maybe a happier and certainly a more ignorant take on the old guy's hair-splitting. "That's just like your opinion, man" can be a valid contribution I think. Socrates doesn't seem like a nihilist to me, more like Lebowski. And I was never attracted to "Fatso"'s idea of abstract perfection, but listening to this I realise how priviliged that makes me: When the talk turned to advertising I immediately thought, no that's not right, there's no Platonic subtext in advertising, ads aren't selling an idea of perfection, if anything - like politics - they're selling us an identity. But then I suddenly remembered the perfect Mitchell and Webb sketch below (I think written by Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley) and recalled that advertising treats men very differently to women.
Men are spared the Platonic ideal. There's toxic masulinity and machismo, sure, but there are so many other options too. We still get to be the default. The fact a priviliged layabout like me can find Platonism - the idea that reality's just an imperfect imitation - so alien a concept perhaps gives ammunition to Sagan's argument that it was always an inherently oppression-friendly philosophy. And I adore Edith Hall's theory it all came from Plato just being very short-sighted.
The video I wanted to post on Saturday for the Solstice would also have made a good Father's Day post, but I still can't upload it so here instead is more classical revisionism. The tone of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" is so placid and harmonious throughout that when our host suddenly goes on the attack, you listen, especially when the subject of that attack are two of the most revered minds in history.
"In the recognition by Pythagoras and Plato that the Cosmos is knowable, that there is a mathematical underpinning to nature, they greatly advanced the cause of science. But in the suppression of disqueting facts, the sense that science should be kept for a small elite, the distaste for experiment, the embrace of mysticism and the easy acceptance of slave societies, their influence has significantly set back the human endeavour."
The "but" Sagan sounds here rings like a bell. He also suggests Plato tried to burn the works of Democritus and even Homer, which shows how little I know. But then again all of this was two and a half thousand years ago, so how much can we know? Here for example is a drawing of the Pythagorean philosopher Hippasus, made two thousand years after his death by drowning. Who knows if he looked like this?
Some write that Hippasus was drowned as a punishment, either for propogating the knowledge that the square root of two could not be expressed as a ratio of two whole numbers (the original meaning of "irrational") or else for teaching the existence of the dodecahedron, and Sagan explains in the clip above why both might have been considered heretical. Documentary-maker Errol Morris investigates the circumstances surrounding Hippasus' death further here, as far as it's possible to investigate such a thing, and it seems likely he actually just fell in the sea and was martyred after the event, and that his "forbidden" knowledge wasn't suppressed so much as simply extinguished by its own unpopularity. After all the Platonists could never have kept the dodecahedron a secret for ever.
Sometimes iron pyrite just gets lucky.
(Africa's actually much bigger in real life. How many more mistakes can you spot?)
Below is a terribly on-brand TED talk (painful intro, but good meat), delivering a potted literary history of some of the lunar fantasies that might have inspired space flight. Namechecked are Cyrano De Bergerac and the Baltimore Gun Club, both of whom can be seen above, toasting a cosmonaut alongside Baron Munchausen in one of my favourite films of all time. I'm a sucker for this kind of cataloguing – I love finding out where ideas come from, especially if the results involve illustrations of Jacobeans borne over a pointy island by a rig of geese – and, as long term readers of this blog will know, the historical symbiosis of stark pottiness and scientific innovation was a big influence on me finally rolling up my sleeves and writing a whole two episodes of "Time Spanner".
But. There must have been a reason I made the narrator of that show a dead dog, and located its traditional scifi tropes not in outer space, but in "Heaven" – a dimension of things that don't exist. And with Extinction Rebellion taking so well to the streets, I've been growing more honest with myself about exactly what it is I expect
humanity to be able to pull off, as well as reconsidering just how very big space is, and now I reckon Alex McDonald's talk misses something very big – that Carl Sagan, who was right about so much, might not have been right about this. Guys... I don't think we're going into Space.
Sorry, but even if we survive for another million years, I just don't think there's anything out there worth the intergalactic faff. I mean, it's really far away, and those tales we told ourselves of other worlds were hangovers from sea-faring days, the hopes of encountering higher intelligences a hangover from angels, and so the idea that these exciting space adventures might have inspired billions upon billions' worth of scientific research seems more hilarious to me now than wonderful. Wasn't "flight" once synonymous with fleeing – hence "fight or flight"?* But we're never leaving home, not really. Earth is our home, and what's out there isn't Heaven. It's, at best, a well. And however deep we lower into it, if there is such a thing as human destiny, I'm pretty convinced now, that it will be played out on this pale blue dot. We need something else to explore then, which is good news, I think. I don't know what NASA should be doing in the meantime though, apart from splashing out on a few more lady space suits. Drugs?
You're welcome.
Actual size of Africa (from back when BBC1 was the whole world.)
* I also found out recently that "cope" comes from the French
"coup", so it's not a synonym for bearing at all, in fact, but for fighting. Like I say, I love finding out where ideas come from.
Here's the talk I gave at Science Showoff in September, in lieu of an interview, about a show that doesn't exist, recycling old blog posts. Pathetic. Since it looks like there may be as many as twenty acts performing on Thursday I'll probably go for something shorter than this now. I apologise that it starts with "so".
So as advertised I'm going to give a talk about how I managed to stave off a growing interest in science long enough to write a science fiction pilot.
The reason I wanted to write a sitcom about Space/Time Travel was...
Well, 1) I'd never tried to write a whole series before. I had written sketches, many of which took place in the past, and if I set a series in all of Time and Space then I might be able to recycle some.
But 2) I liked the idea that the best sitcoms take place in a form of prison, a trap from which the "hero" wishes to escape (trenches in Blackadder Goes Forth... in Father Ted it's Craggy Island... in Porridge it's a prison, it's a prison!) I'm not sure I actually agree with it but I thought, wouldn't it be great, just metaphysically, if the setting from which you longed to escape was All of Time and Space?
So I thought great, but now I'd chosen "The Universe" as my setting I had to work out what that actually looked like, the "sit" of my "com". So I started researching -
Actually, before I started researching I think I had already decided on two rules that this universe had to obey. First, in keeping with the idea of being trapped, it had to be finite. This is best explained by the image of someone looking through a powerful enough telescope long enough to see the back of their own head. Well that was how it was explained to me.
The second rule: There had to be just one universe, so no timelines - I was pretty strict about this, in spite of quantum theory. If you went back in time, you didn't get to change the past like in Back To The Future, you simply risked becoming more responsible for it. This cured any compulsion to go back and rescue Jesus or kill Hitler, or buy his paintings or - You could keep things light.
So, not this. Sorry, dude. (Update: this video has been removed. I can't now for the life of me remember what it was.)
In fact, according to this rule, if you did try to kill Hitler, then History and Dumb Luck dictated you would fail, so all you'd do is end up making him angry. Maybe it was all your fault. Aha.
Anyway, these rules decided (unscientifically), I began to research the Universe.
I watched Carl Sagan's Cosmos, which I'd bought on amazon, and I thought about nostalgia, because he's dead and I only found that out after, and because I'd originally seen the show when I was eight, with my Dad, and watching it again Space itself now seemed like quite an old idea, something I had grown up with but something, say, our hero's twenty-year-old sidekick might not have. And watching Cosmos I also started, really for the first time, learning Science... and the history of science, which is Science... and History. But when I was growing up I hadn't learnt either. "History" was battles and numbers, and "Science" was... also numbers I suppose - no one spoke about ideas the way I watched Carl Sagan doing now, not quite looking at the camera, poetically, and... simply the voice,
which was wonderful and I found myself trying to do it. I'd find myself
narrating my life, running a bath, say: "Thuh simpul ackt uv...
turningonna tah pp... thuh wwwwater falling, theb ath fffffilling." It was lovely. I was hooked.
Speaking of Hooke, I spent three years of school studying Science in something
called The Robert Hooke Building, yet in all those three years nobody told me who Robert Hooke actually was. That's what I mean.
So I was hooked on Science now, and History, and Reality. Which was a bit annoying, because I was getting further away from... well, Doctor Who and B-movies and umbrella-headed aliens and robots, and what I thought I'd wanted to write about: the flip-side to this research. The daffy conspiracy theories on youtube on which I'd hoped to base the mythology for this universe: Illuminati, aliens, the Philadelphia Project, Tesla conspiracies, Osiris, esoteric anti-science, Alchemy, John Dee, that kind of thing...
"Jim Carrey is an Osiris Resonator." Prometheus was basically made for this man.
Doctor Dee: very interesting historically, and pertinent. Queen Elizabeth the First's Court Mathematician. Prospero was based on him. An alchemist, he was called the Queen's Conjuror. What he actually was though was very good at reading maps. Map-reading was a technology in its infancy. When Dee brought one of the first globes back to England, it was like Project X, an invaluable technological advantage that ensured his country's position as a Global Super Power. Shakespeare named a theatre after it, of course. And yet. in spite of his learning, what Dee really wanted was to be able to scry, which means communicate with angels through use of a mirrored surface. Yes, they have a word for that, and it's "scry". And he couldn't scry - I think for pretty obvious reasons.
This never happened.
Angels don't exist. But... for the purposes of this sitcom I thought it might be useful to have an angel exist, if only to give my hero the ability to travel through Time and Space in the first place. After all Magic is simply Science that... can't be bothered. And Science is the study of reality. And Art is the study of everything else.
Except the "reality" component of this research was actually killing my interest in Time Travel now because I no longer believed in it... I was watching a home video of life in the year 2000, and there we were in our twenties pissing around in a garden that was still viewable from my window, but I live next door now, and a family have moved in with a staffy that barks, and a massive trampoline. The garden in the video is gone, and watching what was going on behind me ten years ago, it was suddenly clear to me that the past was gone. Just gone. It's there in our heads and in what we own, but there's no reaching it. And I know we talk about wormholes, and four dimensions, but Time's a dimension we can only move forward in and it takes no energy to do so and it requires no force, so it's really not the same. Which is fine. Everything's closed and cosy in this finite universe, fine... Except I didn't believe in the central concept of what I had to write any more. Not being able to visit the past seemed far more interesting than visiting it, because it was true. I didn't know what there was to explore in an idea I'd dismissed unless, unless I could find a way to stop dismissing that idea by somehow working out a practicable method for our hero to travel anywhere in Time without cheating. I... Basically I had to work out how to travel through time. Backwards. Because we're obviously traveling through it forwards already. Or perhaps more accurately, downwards. It's called Waiting. And then... hanging out the washing in the stairwell I remembered the telescope, and the back of the head, and it suddenly occurred to me how you might be able to visit the past without having to travel backwards. All it would require is for Time to be cyclical as Space is, patience, and a Big-Bounce-proof container. In other words, the longest journey anything could make was a second into the past, because you had to go the long way round.
So it's looped. Here's Space/Time:
Here's Now - Zero - here's the line of numbers meeting round the back, positive and negative, future and past. That's what the universe - reality - looks like, let's say. Every answer to "How?" lies on that axis. Now where do we put the angels?
Well I was reading too. It wasn't all box sets. And in Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh, I learnt that while Dr. Dee was furiously trying to scry, another mathematician over in Italy - Rafael Bombelli - was inventing the number "i"... in italics... which is the square root of minus one... which is imaginary... which doesn't exist, but crucially is "necessary for completeness". Bombelli literally brought a whole new dimension to Maths. One that went up and down.
It met reality at Zero, which by definition doesn't exist. And everything from that point crept into some definition of being.
So here then was the Universe.
Along the x-axis: Time and Space and everything else that exists, carbon, eggs, the shops - I could go on.
And along the "imaginary" axis, and Maths calls it that so... everything else: Angels, God, and numbers of course, and Love. Which is necessary for completeness. And which of course is why scientists sound religious when they talk about Science.
Not because Science is an Act of Faith, but because Love is. And scientists love science.
And so do I. Thank you.
Carl Sagan's Cosmos is the best, by the way, and here.
