The theism question

I posted this some weeks ago on Quora, but thought a wider audience might care to see it. I've edited some material that isn't very relevant, and fooled with the punctuation.

I did not and do not think that theism is necessarily irrational. It follows rationally enough, from premises that I regard as made-up.

<digression>

Please bear with me. I owe this observation to a perceptive former student of my father's.

The private schools in England, where I was educated, had spent the 19th century, and probably the 18th, churning out empire-builders: teaching boys to be the military officers and civilian administrators who would turn "Wider still and wider // Shall thy bounds be set" from poem into reality. After 1947, such people were no longer required, but high technology certainly was, as was culture, so the schools set themselves a new task: to churn out creative and innovative individuals. Eccentricity had long been tolerated, but now it was to be encouraged. Traditions and ancient assumptions were still important, but they could be questioned. And the questions deserved thoughtful answers.

</digression>

As a young boy, I knew I had to look both ways before crossing the street, and I knew why. I knew that it was customary, when eating, to hold the knife in the right hand, because that was the dominant hand, but since I was left-handed, I often held it in my left hand. I knew that the school began each day with a hymn and a prayer, then a few announcements by the head teacher. I didn't need to ask why the announcements were made. And I never got a serious answer about why the hymn was sung and the prayer whispered. Tradition, to be sure, and pretty-sounding tunes, but that was all. I tried to sing in tune.

When I got older and could ask better questions, there was the same shortage of answers ... of thoughtful answers. God the creator? Sorry, we more or less understand how the Earth formed from a disc of gas and dust. God the lawgiver? The school makes the rules for us boys, and Parliament makes them for grown-ups. Redeemer? My parents love me; I'm not a Sinner with a capital S, just occasionally naughty. Celestial cop? not when the other boys are getting away with X, Y, and Z every day. And so on.

I don't ask anyone to believe that my thinking on this subject was watertight, or that it is so today. But a massive weight of evidence pointed, in my mind, to theism being an excuse to sing pretty songs and occasionally threaten people with divine vengeance for doing things that, for the most part, weren't especially evil. Oh, and give comfort to the insecure by telling them that, yes, in the end the good guys will win. But my limited knowledge of history already had shown that the only way to make the good guys always win was to use a flexible definition of "good". When I was a boy, we were deep in the Cold War, whose least unlikely outcome seemed to be that a modus vivendi would solidify over generations whereby the USSR didn't actually threaten us, nor we them. There did not seem to be much that gods could do to help. Certainly they had not yet done so. (I hadn't read or heard of Judges 1:19.)

Summary: theism as a hypothesis could account for only a few things, which already had more detailed secular explanations.

There also seem[ed] to be real advantages accruing to people who "had no need of that hypothesis". If you used physics instead of Genesis 1, you not only knew why the Earth and Sun were here, but you could build aircraft. If Parliament made the laws, it could change them in response to new developments (when I was born, England had only the feeblest of laws against drunken driving, and none against advertising tobacco products. Just to be clear, on principle I believe that if a product can legally be sold, it should also legally be advertised, but that's a separate argument.) As for the good guys winning, we beat Hitler with a little help from the USA, we beat Napoleon with a little help from Russia, and the USSR could be contained if not beaten. Except in Vietnam. Yes, I supported that war, like the parents in The Free Electric Band Lyrics .  Being an atheist did not make me all-wise, nor does it now.

One more thing. My schools emphasised Latin and Greek, and those subjects brought classical mythology in their wake, which was fun. I was perhaps better acquainted with the Twelve Olympians than with the Three in One And One In Three. It did not escape my attention that the gods of Homer, with their all-too-human frailties, were now deemed worthy of a place on the fiction shelves. Clearly it had been possible for intelligent, cultured, civilised, technological people to sincerely worship deities that existed only in their imaginations. Equally clearly, people were much the same two or three millennia later as they had been in those times. QED.

Welcome your friends to the end

My grandfather was born in 1900 and got married in 1918. The great flu epidemic of that year meant that the woman he married then did not become my grandmother. He was heartbroken, but fortunately for me, he recovered and married again.

Grandpa lived to be 90 and he enjoyed his life; he did a lot of things, from painting and photographing to building experimental radios.  I saw him not long before the end.  His heart was slowing down to the point where it would no longer be able to keep him going, and he wasn’t complaining about that; he just wanted the end to come at a convenient time and place.

His doctors told him what medicines they had and what the effects would be. I know they increased his dosage once.  Then he made it clear to them that this patient didn’t want more medicine; he just wanted his friend at his side.  And that was what happened. We all missed him but we didn’t mourn him: there was nothing to be sad about.

A few years ago the father of a friend of mine was terminally ill. He asked his extended family to come and see him, and when they were all there, my friend tells me that the patient said, “If I weren’t in so much pain, this would be a blast.” It was cancer and the pain got worse and the doctors were not easily convinced that this patient did want more painkillers. So the last two weeks were rough, but the end itself was something of a relief.

What I want to reflect on here is why our culture has such a horror of death.  We used to apply it as the supreme penalty for the worst crimes, but many countries don’t even do that any more; it’s too scary. In a nutshell, the reason seems to me to be that until the 20th century, most deaths were like my grandfather’s first wife: untimely and no chance to prepare.  Many of the rest were like my friend’s father: not surprising, but painful. I’m optimistic that there will be more like my grandfather, but let’s face it, medicine will never be perfect.

Can we bring our mindset about death closer to the modern reality? One thing we could do is regard it not as a loss of life  (my grandfather didn’t lose anything), but rather as the conclusion of our life, the last page in the book, and accept that every novel should have a last page. What if we treated death as a milestone of life, in the same category as a graduation or a wedding?  Don’t just invite one friend, or the extended family, but throw a big old party -- remind the guests not to bring presents -- and say goodbye to everyone who cares about us. Then, well, there probably wouldn’t be a honeymoon as such; we might just go into seclusion, with the phrase “funeral home”  acquiring a new meaning. Or some people might choose to simply close the book that very day, but it could be a purely medical decision rather than an ethical question, because socially speaking, we’d already be gone.

Space elevator for surface transport

Two weeks ago I was at Space Access '13 and ran into Michael Laine, since when I've been thinking about novel uses for a Lunar Space Elevator.  I've come up with one for which a few minutes of searching could turn up no prior art, so I'm publishing it here lest some troll try to patent it.  I'm still trying to think of a snappy name for it, and you can help.

How it works

The easiest way to describe it is as a tetherball with the main elevator cable in place of the central post and a vehicle in place of the ball.  For the tether we'd use some more of the material we used for the main cable, and we'd need some kind of swivel at the place where the tether and post met.  The tether would be longer than for a playground tetherball, long enough to reach ground level with a bit to spare; the vehicle would contain a winch that could reel in enough tether so it (the vehicle) would hang at or slightly above ground level.  By some means of propulsion that might range from a push with a stick to a high-velocity rocket thruster, the vehicle would start itself moving away from the main cable, and would reel the tether in to lift itself up to clear any obstacles, then out again to descend to ground level and land at some distance from the main cable, if a landing were desired.  If the mission were to survey the surface near the main cable without landing, then when the vehicle had almost come to a stop, thrust would be applied at right angles to the direction of travel to send it on a circular or elliptical path around the main cable.  An elliptical path will precess, so that the vehicle could survey the interior of a circle centred at the main cable, rather than just the circumference of such a circle.

Ready for some snappy names?  The ones I've thought of aren't very snappy: lunar pendulum, Tarzanator, non-o-rail.  Suggestions welcome!

Energy and time

The equation for a pendulum with a rigid, massless rod under 0.16 of an Earth gravity gives, for a length of 10km, a period of oscillation about 490 seconds, so we could travel from the main cable to the end of the swing in 123 seconds, just over two minutes (journey time would be independent of distance traveled, up to a point -- if you don't believe me, ask Galileo).  I think the speed at the bottom of the swing is pi/2 times the average speed, so to travel 1km would require a starting speed of nearly 13 m/s; a ballistic launch at the same speed 45 degrees above the horizontal would give a parabolic flight that would last some 11 seconds and travel some 100 metres, so the pendulum travels further for the same amount of energy, and can have a softer landing with no extra fuel, but it is still subject to a square law: for a given length of tether,  twice the distance means four times the energy.  If we want to travel further without using more energy, we have to go slower. Making the tether 1,000km long gives a journey time of  roughly 1,225 seconds, so for the same starting speed we could travel 10 km, or for ten times the speed (a hundred times the energy) we could travel 100km.

I should not have used that equation, because the tether is neither rigid nor massless, though if it is made of a fibre such as Kevlar and is no thicker than it needs to be, well, OK, let's give a safety factor of 2, then a 1,000km tether will have about as much mass as the vehicle (including its payload).  But giving a sudden push to a heavy weight at the bottom of the tether would lead to a lot of energy being wasted in lateral oscillations of the tether: Twang!  Plausibly we could fix this by accelerating the vehicle over a time comparable to the time it takes the lateral wave to reach the top of the tether.   I estimate the speed of a lateral wave along the tether at 1km/s, so a cautious acceleration time for a 10km tether would be about 10s, which is small compared to the journey time; for a 1,000km tether I get 1,000s, and for longer tethers the acceleration time would exceed the journey time, so it seems that long tethers don't offer much advantage.

The tether would tug on the swivel and cause lateral oscillations in the main cable.  These are already a problem for space elevator designs, and I don't propose a solution here; I hope somebody develops one.

Economics

The pendulum could be constructed together with the main elevator cable and would need little additional technology development, so the cost should be modest.  For a young Lunar settlement it could provide occasional point-to-point transport and obviate the need to design and construct some ground vehicles and roads, which would require more tech.  As the settlement grew, a road, rail, or tunnel system would be added to provide more capacity than a pendulum.

Further applications

On Mars, where there is enough wind to provide thrust, a vehicle with a sail could travel modest distances with no input power; how it could achieve a trip upwind is left as a exercise for the reader. There are obvious applications to deploying instruments in the upper atmosphere of Mars, at altitudes below the reach of satellites but above that of balloons.

If a terrestrial space elevator were constructed, a pendulum carrying a current would be magnetically pulled eastwards or westwards from the main cable, and could mount a defence against space debris.

The ability to suspend a moving mass from a space elevator implies that launching from the elevator into a circular orbit may become possible, for a wide range of heights and inclinations, using a low-thrust engine.  A vehicle circling about the elevator cable would impose a hefty oscillating lateral load at the swivel; this could be overcome by adding a counterweight, but there may be other problems.

Harare on the Potomac

Books like Why Nations Fail make clear that many a third-world country stays poor not because its government is having difficulty thinking up policies that would help it get richer, but because the government's members or supporters would be inconvenienced if those policies were carried out.  The Harvard Business School asks companies why they prefer not to create jobs in the USA, and finds that the complexity of the tax code is an important factor (see figure 14 on page 19).  So why is the tax code so complex in the USA?  Wouldn't it be convenient for everyone, not just companies, if it were radically simplified?

Well, nearly everyone.  But it's hard to shake companies or people down for campaign contributions by threatening to take away their tax breaks, if they don't have any tax breaks for you to take away.  So now we know who is inconvenienced.

Making Corruption Work FOR The People

[from my Google+ stream]

I was going to write something about money in politics, but thought I'd better give credit to an earlier article that had provided the germ of my idea. Fortunately, I remembered enough words to search for it and find it. Turns out it contains all of what I had fondly thought to be my idea. It's even more relevant today than it was eleven years ago.

Crediting the Voters: A New Beginning for Campaign Finance

Change technology, change society?

Arthur Dobrin had this to say about Mitt Romney, well, ostensibly about him, but more about creative destruction.  The core of Dobrin's argument seems to me to be not very much about economic models, but about innovation. Selected quotes:

> Innovation is the way of capitalism.

> This is all to the good if the extent of the destruction is the replacement of one product with another (the TV for the radio).

> You cannot support both unleashed capitalism and a stable social order. Along with new products come new ways of doing things; along with new ways of doing things come new ideas.

It sounds as if Dobrin is saying that innovations in products can lead to changes in society, more profound than just exchanging one product for another or one employer for another. I suppose one obvious example is the Pill. Thus promoting innovative businesses is at odds with conserving society, and someone like Romney should not, with a straight face, claim to be a social conservative.

The question of what responsibility falls on an innovator as a result of the social changes his/her products bring about, or on the society that benefits from those products, does seem to me to be important. Gov. Romney is not the one on trial here; the whole idea of unrestrained innovation is being examined.

eating gamma rays

I would have rejected this as impossible until the day I read it in Science News. It reminds me of a ghastly blurb for one of Hal Clement's books asserting that "in science, nothing is impossible!" I still feel sure that plenty of things are impossible ... but not necessarily the things we thought were impossible.

In case you have trouble with the link, a quick summary is as follows: a fungus has been found that actually harvests energy from gamma rays, using the well-known pigment melanin. Do not try this at home.