Sci-Fi time travel: Where the popular imagination meets theoretical science and pseudoscience

Applied research often has the clarifying effect of disabusing one of preconceived notions. Except perhaps for debates about religion where all bets are off for everyone on all sides at all times. But that’s another story.

Every now and then I will post an article or a link to one on social media from some at least marginally reputable science site on some new wrinkle in theoretical time travel. I have three friends, in particular, located in British Columbia, Nunavut and Manitoba, who are sci-fi fans, but also science rationalists, who can be quickly counted on to let me know two things: what a fun idea the new theory is; how completely implausible it is on the science. Thanks, guys.

As a kid, while I enjoyed reading some science fiction – Ursula K. Le Guin‘s Lathe of Heaven from 1971, and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 book Childhood’s End, come immediately to mind – I was also fond of other genres, including Greek mythology (I remember taking a mighty tome home on the subject from my school library and reading it from start to finish one Sunday in Oshawa, where I learned a bit about the Hippoi Athanatoi). Time travel was just one topic within one genre of my reading interests back then.

But aside from my reading interests, in terms of my later popular culture viewing, on both the big and small screens, as well as my own writing from time-to-time, time has never been too far from my remote view, if I think broadly about it.

Both The Time Tunnel on ABC and Star Trek on NBC television series originally debuted within a day of each other in September 1966. I was nine. The Time Tunnel (https://www.tvyesteryear.com/shows/the-time-tunnel/), largely forgotten today, was about Project Tic-Toc, a top-secret U.S. government effort to build an experimental time machine, known as “The Time Tunnel” due to its appearance as a cylindrical hallway. The base for Project Tic-Toc is a huge, hidden underground complex in Arizona, 800 floors deep and employing more than 12,000 specialized personnel. Star Trek made its debut on Sept. 8, 1966, one day earlier then The Time Tunnel, and is far from forgotten.

Manu Saadia, a contributor for The New Yorker, wrote back in 2016 in “The Enduring Lessons of ‘Star Trek,”‘ a 50th anniversary piece to mark the debut of the franchise, that “the original series was at its best when its cast engaged in good, old-fashioned time travel. ‘The City on the Edge of Forever,’ penned by Harlan Ellison, threw the dynamic trio of Kirk, Bones, and Spock into nineteen-thirties New York. They were familiar characters dropped into a familiar setting, tasked with a familiar, if daunting, mission: save the world. (By a series of unlucky coincidences, their arrival in New York had altered the future, leading to Nazi Germany winning the Second World War. This had to be corrected.)” Joseph Walter of Screen Rant in his piece today, “Star Trek: The 10 All Time Best (And 10 Worst) Episodes, Officially Ranked” rates “The City on the Edge of Forever” as the sixth-best Star Trek episode from the entire franchise, which includes all the series that followed the original, which aired on NBC from September 1966 to June 1969.

Star Trek, and its many successors, both television series and movies, not surprisingly have continued to explore the idea of time travel and alternate timelines in all kinds of manifestations. I like many of them, but have a particular fondness for Dr. Beverly Picard, who in a briefly existing alternate timeline in “All Good Things,” the aptly-named May 23, 1994 final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is the captain of the U.S.S. Pasteur (NCC-58925), as her ex-husband, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, inexplicably finds his mind jumping between the present stardate 47988 and the past just prior to the U.S.S. Enterprise-D‘s first mission seven years earlier at Farpoint Station and then flash-forward 25 years into the future, where he has retired to the Picard family vineyard in Labarre, France.

In The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, published and set in 1962, events takes place 15 years after a different end to the Second World War, and depict intrigues between the victorious Axis Powers – primarily, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany – as they rule over the former United States, as well as daily life under totalitarian rule. A television series was loosely adapted from the book and ran for four seasons from January 2015 until last November.

In a similar vein, The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternate history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. Adapted for television as a six-part miniseries that aired in March and April, The Plot Against America imagined an alternate American history told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, as they watch the political rise of Lindbergh, an aviator-hero and xenophobic populist.

Wormholes and parallel universes are pretty much de rigueur for this genre, and Sliders, a television series which aired between 1995 and 2000, understood that, as it was premised on a group of travelers, led by Quinn Mallory, using a wormhole to “slide” between different parallel universes. Alternate timelines are altered versions of our timeline. Unlike parallel universes, alternate timelines do not seem to diverge from the universe, but instead rewrite history to the point of wiping out the original timeline.

For its first two seasons, Sliders was produced in Vancouver. It was filmed primarily in Los Angeles in the last three seasons.

In Quantum Leap, which aired on NBC for five seasons from March 1989 through May 1993, Scott Bakula stars as Dr. Sam Beckett, a physicist who leaps through spacetime during an experiment in time travel, by temporarily taking the place of other people to correct historical mistakes. Dean Stockwell co-stars as Admiral Al Calavicci, Sam’s womanizing, cigar-smoking companion and best friend, who appears to him as a hologram.

Time Changer is an independent science fiction Christian seriocomic film written and directed by Rich Christiano, and released by Five & Two Pictures in 2002. The screenplay concerns Dr. Norris Anderson (Gavin MacLeod), who uses his late father’s time machine to send his colleague, Bible professor Russell Carlisle (D. David Morin), from 1890 into the early 21st century.

The fascination with alternate timelines is not limited to science fiction writers. Historians have been known to wonder if the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in ending Camelot, changed the course of history for the worse? It’s a popular, if not almost universal view, that it did. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, warns of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. Had Kennedy lived would the United States have exited Vietnam closer to 1964 than 1975? Would Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed so soon under JFK? We can only wonder.

In 1983, Ohio State University historian Stephen Kern wrote The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, a book which talked about the sweeping changes in technology and culture that reshaped life, including the theory of relativity and introduction of Sir Sandford Fleming’s worldwide Standard Time – and an onrush of technics, including telephone, electric lighting, steamships, skyscrapers, bicycles, cinema, airplanes, X-rays, machine guns, as well as cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought, such as the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneous poetry. All of these things created new ways of understanding and experiencing time and space during that almost 40-year period ending with the end of the First World War. Kern’s argument is that in the modern preoccupation with speed, especially with the fast and impersonal telegraph, international diplomacy broke down in July 1914, leading to the outbreak of the First World War the following month.

In physics, according to Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity (SR), motion in space alters the flow of time, creating a time dilation, speeding up or slowing down time, because as you move through space, time itself is measured differently for the moving object than the unmoving object. This, in theory, would allow time travel within the known laws of physics into the future, not into the past (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/12/time-dilation-daylight-saving-time-and-other-mysteries-of-time/).

Standard Time, of course, with its standardized times zones, is a Canadian invention, courtesy of Sir Sandford Fleming, who conveniently divided time into hourly segments, dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead.

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Fleming’s genius was to create 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/just-remember-you-are-about-to-pass-briefly-through-the-twilight-zone-nothing-can-happen-tomorrow-between-201-a-m-and-259-a-m-because-those-59-minutes-do-not-exist-on-march-8/). Like many things, there are, of course, exceptions. Samoa uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC+13:00) as standard time and UTC+14:00 as daylight saving time, which it observes during summer in the southern hemisphere. The U.S. territory of American Samoa, as well as the Midway Islands and the uninhabited islands of Jarvis, Palmyra, and Kingman Reef, use the Samoa Time Zone, which observes standard time by subtracting eleven hours from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-11). The zone is one hour behind the Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone, one hour ahead of Howland and Baker islands, and 23 hours behind Wake Island Time Zone.

Samoa happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, east of the International Date Line, an imaginary line at the 180º line of longitude that runs from the South Pole to the North Pole separating two consecutive calendar days. Immediately to the left of the International Date Line the date in the Eastern Hemisphere is always one day ahead of the date (or day) immediately to the right of the International Date Line in the Western Hemisphere (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/skip-a-day-why-not-samoa-did/).

It is not a perfectly straight line, however, and has been moved slightly over the years to accommodate needs of varied countries in the Pacific Ocean. Kiribati, north of Samoa and near the equator, south of Hawaii, previously straddled the dateline. The eastern part of Kiribati was a whole day and two hours behind the western part of the country where its capital is located and a time difference of 23 hours between neighbouring islands. There were nine islands on the eastern side of the international date line, and 20 per cent of the population. On Jan. 1, 1995 it added an eastward extension to its section of the dateline so all 33 of its islands would have the same date and all of Kiribati would be in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Since 1892, when Samoa had two Monday, July 4ths, it had been east of the International Date Line until Dec. 29, 2011, after switching sides to coincide its days better with trading partners in the United States and Europe. Now, Samoa does a lot more business with New Zealand, Australia, China and Pacific Rim countries such as Singapore, so it switched back to the western side of the International Date Line.

China, which has just one time zone – Beijing Standard Time – making the time zone uncommonly wide. In Kashgar, in the extreme western part of China, the sun is at its highest point at 3 p.m. and in the extreme eastern part at 11 a.m.  In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China had created five time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that all of China use Beijing time.

Historians aren’t the only academics to ponder these sort of things.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)  professor of philosophy Bradford Skow suggests a “box” universe theory, as describes “now” as an arbitrary place in time and states that the past, the future and the present all exist simultaneously, suggesting that if we “look down” on the universe, as if we were looking at a piece of paper, we would see time spanning all directions, exactly the same way that we see space at some point. I believe my three friends unanimously concluded this was rather bunk, but good fun.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Killer comets, killer asteroids: Make my day, planet-killers

Nudge it, nuke it, tug it with a gravity tractor, or slow it down with some concentrated sunlight. Make my day, planet-killers.

Those are your choices if a planet-killing comet or asteroid is en route to rather imminently collide with Planet Earth. Asteroid PZ39 shot by the Earth from a distance of more than 3.58 million miles (5.77 million kilometres) earlier this month. It flew towards us at speeds of more than 35,500 mph (57,240 km/h), approaching  just after 11 a.m. GMT two weeks ago on Saturday, Feb 15.

A near-miss? “A little over 9x the distance of the earth to the moon,” Ron Graham helpfully explained. “A near miss is, in fact, an impact,” Kevin Hopton added

Both asteroids and comets are bad to have coming toward you, but comets are worse apparently simply because they can be travelling up to three times faster than Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) relative to Earth at the time of impact. The energy released by a cosmic collision increases as the square of the incoming object’s speed, so a comet could pack nine times more destructive power than an asteroid of the same mass. But both are considered to be a potentially hazardous object (PHO).

“It would be a much bigger explosion, a much bigger crater, much more damage,” (https://www.space.com/26264-asteroids-comets-earth-impact-risks.html) impact expert Mark Boslough, of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, said in June 2104.

If Boslough says it is so, that’s good enough for me. After all he is the author of this now famous account, dated Dec. 25, 1998, which I wrote approvingly of in a post on Nov. 9, 2014 headlined “‘Edward Baker:’ Thompson, Manitoba’s microwaved telephone company night watchman 1998 urban legend owes its fame to real-life American scientist and a Denver newsman” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/edward-baker-thompson-manitoba-s-microwaved-telephone-company-night-watchman-1998-urban-legend-owes-its-fame-to-real-life-american-scientist-and-a-denver-newsman/)

Wrote Boslough back in 1998:

“Telephone relay company night watchman Edward Baker, 31, was killed early Christmas morning by excessive microwave radiation exposure. He was apparently attempting to keep warm next to a telecommunications feedhorn.

“Baker had been suspended on a safety violation once last year, according to Northern Manitoba Signal Relay spokesperson Tanya Cooke. She noted that Baker’s earlier infraction was for defeating a safety shutoff switch and entering a restricted maintenance catwalk in order to stand in front of the microwave dish. He had told coworkers that it was the only way he could stay warm during his twelve-hour shift at the station, where winter temperatures often dip to forty below zero.

“Microwaves can heat water molecules within human tissue in the same way that they heat food in microwave ovens. For his Christmas shift, Baker reportedly brought a twelve pack of beer and a plastic lawn chair, which he positioned directly in line with the strongest microwave beam. Baker had not been told about a tenfold boost in microwave power planned that night to handle the anticipated increase in holiday long-distance calling traffic.

“Baker’s body was discovered by the daytime watchman, John Burns, who was greeted by an odor he mistook for a Christmas roast he thought Baker must have prepared as a surprise. Burns also reported to NMSR company officials that Baker’s unfinished beers had exploded.”

The clues, of course, to the fabricated nature of the story are contained in the names of the participants: the victim, “Baker”; his discoverer, “Burns”; and the spokeswoman, “Cooke.”

Boslough attached his microwaved worker offering to a then-current list of Darwin Award stories for 1998, declared his entry to be that year’s winner, sent it out to a few friends and sat back and watched the inevitable unfold, as veteran Denver Post editor and columnist Dick Kreck was taken in by the hoax, publishing it as the authentic 1998 Darwin Award winner. It seems, at some level, we all want to believe.

Certainly, Kreck, who retired from the paper in June 2007, was no rookie. Born in San Francisco in 1941, Kreck grew up in Glendale, California. After earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Francisco State College, he worked as a reporter and copy editor at the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times. He joined The Denver Post in 1968 and held various jobs, writing a city column for 18 years and covering television and radio. His books include Colorado’s Scenic Railroads; Denver in Flames; Murder at the Brown Palace; Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer ; and Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family.

Boslough wrote to Kreck in 1999:

“Dear Mr. Kreck:

“Thank you so much for reprinting my Darwin Award hoax in the Denver Post.

“Like you, I am a skeptic and have always very suspicious of these stories. However, I am also a scientist so I decided to do a little experiment. I made up the most outrageous and twisted death-by-stupidity tale I could imagine. I made sure that all the characters in the story had names (Mr. Baker, Mr. Burns, Ms. Cooke) that would give my joke away to any wary reader. I set the story in a location that allowed the company “Northern Manitoba Signal Relay” to have the same acronym as New Mexicans for Science and Reason, our local version of Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Skeptics.

“I took a list of Darwin Awards that somebody sent me and attached my own creation, which I also declared to be this year’s winner. I turned it loose by e-mailing it to a few out-of-state friends on New Year’s Day. Seeing it this week in the Post is a bit like getting a response to a note in a bottle eight months after throwing it into the ocean. It is also a good lesson in why we should all be skeptical of what we see on the Internet … not to mention what we read in the newspaper!

“By the way, NMSR president Dave Thomas – a recent guest speaker at Rocky Mountain Skeptics – is the only person who discovered the hoax and correctly attributed it to me. He had searched for “NMSR” under Deja News and recognized my brand of humor when his search turned up my story.

“Best regards,

“Mark Boslough”

There are, of course, lot of people besides Boslough whose job it is to think about such things on both a theoretical and practical basis. I’m not one of them.

Rafi Letzter, a staff writer for New York-based Live Science wrote earlier this month:

“If a giant object looks like it’s going to slam into Earth, humanity has a few options: Hammer it with a spacecraft hard enough to knock it off course, blast it with nuclear weapons, tug on it with a gravity tractor, or even slow it down using concentrated sunlight ” (https://www.livescience.com/how-to-stop-asteroid-from-hitting-earth.html)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have come up with an 18-page guide titled “Optimization and decision-making framework for multi-staged asteroid deflection campaigns under epistemic uncertainties” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576519313700?via%3Dihub), also published earlier this month, in the journal Acta Astronautica, to help, in Letzter’s words, “future asteroid deflectors.”

For those taking the longish catastrophic view, rather than the shortish catastrophic view, here’s something to consider:

“If an approaching asteroid were detected early enough,” the  National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) says, “it could be possible to divert its path using the gravity of a spacecraft (https://www.nasa.gov/content/asteroid-grand-challenge/mitigate/gravity-tractor). “Instead of sending an impactor to ram into an approaching object, a gravity tractor device would fly alongside the asteroid for a long period of time (years to decades) and slowly pull it out of Earth’s path.

Gravity tractors would be most likely to work on any shape or composition of approaching asteroid, even if it were just a pile of rubble. However, gravity tractors might not be effective for the largest asteroids of over 500 meters in diameter which might be the greatest threat to Earth. Gravity tractors offer the greatest control and could perhaps even divert an approaching asteroid to other locations in space where people could theoretically use them for research or commercial purposes. However, these techniques have never been tried and would require decades for building, launching, and carrying out a mitigation mission.”

On March 26, 1997, police in Rancho Santa Fe, California discovered the bodies of 39 members of Heaven’s Gate, an American UFO religious millenarian celibate cult based in San Diego, founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles. The 39 cult members who died almost 23 years ago took phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce and washed it all down with vodka. Additionally, they secured plastic bags around their heads after ingesting the mix to induce asphyxiation. Authorities found the dead lying neatly in their own bunk beds, faces and torsos covered by a square purple cloth. Each member carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets: the five dollar bill was to cover vagrancy fines while members were out on jobs, while the quarters were to make phone calls. All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of actress Nichelle Nichols,  best known for her role as Uhura in the original Star Trek television series.

They had participated in the mass suicide in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale-Bopp, as it approached Earth. They believed an alien spaceship hiding in the tail of a speeding comet was coming to collect their souls.

Earth-threatening asteroids might well be movie or book genres of their own. On the movie side, there are such classics as American science fiction disaster film classic Armageddon from 1998, depicting Bruce Willis et al. saving the Earth. The movie has Harry Stamper (Willis) and his oil rig crew (who are mostly losers who have done time in jail) being hired by NASA as astronauts. Their goal is to drill into an asteroid the size of Texas and deploy a bomb to break it into pieces, before the asteroid hits the Earth.

One of my favourite cover versions of the many that have been done over the years of the song Leaving on a Jet Plane is by Winnipeg’s Chantal Kreviazuk from Armageddon, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and featuring a heartfelt, if somewhat off-key, opening rendition to the song by Ben Affleck from the movie, leading to the delightful mission control quip: “So, Truman, this is who you found to save the planet.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbt2G71uT1M&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1KgfVHJxTwyayZ-pLStZ2H0RSeinmKhRqhPPGxR3L2HcIFj6j8vXbdj5s).

On the book side, I’m partial to Lucifer’s Hammer by Jerry Pournrelle and Larry Niven. I read the novel an early paperback edition shortly after it was published in 1977, while I was a student at Trent University on a late fall three-hour one-way trip on and old Voyageur Colonial Bus down Highway 7 and back from Peterborough to Ottawa and back on weekend trip. A great page-tuner for a cold late autumn bus ride.

This is also around the time Pournelle, an American polymath: scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, as well as noted science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers (https://io9.gizmodo.com/rip-jerry-pournelle-a-tireless-ambassador-for-the-futu-1803143871) became perhaps the first writer from any genre to sit and compose at a typewriter connected to a television screen, forerunner of today’s desktop computer, to compose, edit, and revise there, and then to send copy to his publisher.  Jerry Pournelle, early adopter, died in September 2017 at the age of 84.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity….’

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Apologies to Charles Dickens for the posthumous appropriation of the immortal opening line in his 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. There were simply no better words, surely not mine anyway, to describe our present age, an age perhaps not so different than Dickens writes about here, or similarly one 28 years after Dickens’ novel appeared, and which New York Sun editor Francis Pharcellus Church described in an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897 as being an age where even children are “affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.”

Robert Fulford, the noted 87-year-old Canadian journalist, magazine editor, and essayist, had an interesting piece in the National Post last March 19 (https://nationalpost.com/opinion/robert-fulford-the-worlds-a-lot-better-off-than-you-think?fbclid=IwAR1ouh4RiaSGeSe9VTzICtKe8GkzUnPcQVvlc_FBWoZMxw2ALmjQZm9ahKQ) that wound up being headlined, “The world’s a lot better off than you think.” While Fulford may or not have written the headline, I think he is right in the body of the article when he says we often don’t see this because at “the core of this difficulty is journalism’s professional obsession. We who read the papers (or write them) know that news is, more often than not, bad news. An editor I worked for used to say, ‘Every day a newspaper tells the public what went wrong in the world yesterday.’ (He wasn’t bragging.) Thousands of decisions following that pattern accrue into an attitude, which eventually becomes a reader’s habit.”

Mathematician and complexity scientist John Casti’s 2012 book, X-Events: The Collapse of Everything looked at scientific modelling and prediction computer simulation as to how social “mood” can affect future trends and extreme events, sounds a clarion warning as to how easy it would be to slip suddenly into a new Dark Ages, and how the global food supply system could collapse (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/what-if-the-22nd-century-means-staying-at-home-with-long-distance-travel-a-thing-of-the-past/). Or the “digital darkness” that would come from a widespread and prolonged failure of the internet. Or what a continent-wide electromagnetic pulse (EMG) would do to electronics, and how we may have reached peak oil in 2000, and how any of those scenarios leave us vulnerable in overly complex technological societies to an “X-event” that would send us back to a pre-modern world – and again, a world without air or other long-distance travel – virtually overnight.

Of course, the probability of improbable events occurring in situations where one outcome is greatly favored over the other, is not necessarily a bad thing, as Malcolm Gladwell illustrated in his 2013 non-fiction book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. The book contains stories of underdogs who wind up beating the odds, the most famous, of course, being the story of David and Goliath. While I suspect someone like John Casti is also largely right that today’s advanced, overly complex societies have grown highly vulnerable to extreme events that could ultimately topple civilization like a house of cards, I don’t share his certainty they will. That perhaps sets me apart from the more apocalyptically-minded, even if it’s true I have never met a premillennial dispensational-driven Rapture movie I can resist watching. I think that Montréal-born Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, is right when he persuasively argues the modern world is driven by pessimism, but it’s actually the best moment in time to be alive.(https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-march-29-2018-1.4597367/why-you-should-be-happy-you-re-alive-right-now-1.4597457?fbclid=IwAR0IrFO4GE8Q-Tv0tG1vz15HsIs_J3FcFJn8ChYYrlkCC4PFHF-Y676RCUg) and (https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/hating-pinker?fbclid=IwAR2xdjk8EAAmPb2bq1BB8ulBAkWufKaFQARpUJn1wzkiuzoeb7ZxcSRPd3E)

Now I have to admit Donald Trump seriously challenges that optimism at times. Actually, pretty much all of the time. But I learned long ago as an editorial writer that prognostication is a tricky and for the most part ill-advised business. If it doesn’t make a fool of you all of the time, it will much of the time. Trump is certainly testing that thesis when it comes to my own writing. Usually, I simply write a piece and stand by it, come what may. On July 17, 2016, less than four months before he was elected president, I wrote a blog post headlined, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage,” where I noted, “We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s,” which sadly still resonates some 3½ years later.

I also wrote right after the sentence above:

“But the American republic can survive this difficult historical moment. Right-wing populism is not centralized authoritarian Fascism.

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to terms who served two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/)

While I still stand by those words, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge a Trump presidency has been far worse and more dangerous than I imagined at the time. I still believe we’ll make it through it, but it’s going to be a closer thing than I foresaw 3½ years ago. So much for prognostication. Mea culpa.

Also by way of postscript, it is perhaps also worth noting that Arnold Schwarzenegger, since he left the governor’s office almost nine years ago now, has continued rightly to grow in public stature. Writing a decade after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1978 in his book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/1968-bobby-kennedy-described-by-arthur-schlesinger-as-one-of-ralph-waldo-emersons-representative-men-for-his-times/). While Arnold Schwarzenegger is no Bobby Kennedy, I think some of what Schlesinger said about the former might be applied to the latter.

In reality, editorial writers get paid to reflect and prognosticate for posterity’s sake, especially as years, decades, centuries or millenniums come to an end or advance to new ones.  As managing editor of The Independent in Brighton, Ontario, I ended my Jan. 5, 2005 editorial, headlined, “A world that is divided” with the equally cheery closing paragraph, “Disconnectedness is another word for feelings of ennui, angst, malaise and nihilism. It is corrosive and poisonous to the human spirit … a feeling of disconnectedness and marginalization – economic or otherwise – sows the seeds for despair and violence.”(http://www.eastnorthumberland.com/news/news2005/January/editorial050105.html)

“Calendars – like decades – are fairly arbitrary constructions in any event,” I wrote at the Thompson Citizen on Dec. 30, 2009. “If nothing else, Jan. 1 has the distinction of being an important psychological marker as the first day of the year in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars, the former promulgated by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C., the latter by Pope Gregory XIII in A.D. 1582.

“As for decades, they may or may not coincide with a chronological 10-year period. Few would mark the start of Sixties as Jan. 1, 1960, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president of the United States. Many historians will tell you the Sixties arrived during that brief interval between the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 and the British Invasion of the Beatles for their first North American tour three months later in February 1964.

As for the first sign of the Sixties, many of those same historians will tell you it was the disappearance of men’s fedoras – almost overnight – with the inauguration of the bareheaded Kennedy as president in January 1961. As for the end of the Sixties, well, let’s place that between Woodstock’s peace, love and music in the mud in August 1969 and the Rolling Stones Altamont Speedway Free Festival and Hells Angels concert security violence of Dec. 6, 1969. The death of 18-year-old Meredith Hunter pretty much ended the 1960s, in this case both psychically and chronologically.”

Still, I noted that even among editorial writers who consider themselves gifted prognosticators, “the wiser ones have the good sense the following December not to look back and see how many came true.”

Much, I think, is a matter of perspective about whether things are getting better or worse. And that means weighing trade-offs, which usually means at the individual level a gain in convenience  at the expense of a loss in privacy and the associated risks that come with that in an online world. We make those trade-offs every day. I grew up in a world of Monday to Friday banking where you approached a teller at a metal bar wicket with a passbook and went about your business. Long lines were not uncommon. Saturday bank hours were unheard of.  John Shepherd-Barron got the idea for a cash-dispensing Automated Teller Machine in 1965 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2019/10/05/how-many-guys-does-it-take-to-build-an-automated-teller-machine-atm-two/) while taking a bath after finding his bank closed. It was his habit to withdraw money on a Saturday, but on this particular weekend he had arrived one minute late and found the bank doors locked. He was inspired by chocolate vending machines: “It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash,” Shepherd-Barron later said. He sold his idea to London-based Barclays Bank. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) unveiled its first Canadian automated teller machine called a “24 hour cash dispenser,” on Dec. 1, 1969.

Without being Pollyannish about it, none of us, short of either a John Casti-like X–event, or A Canticle for Leibowitz scenario, as envisioned in American writer Walter M. Miller Jr.’s post-apocalyptic 1959 science fiction novel, are going back to pre-ATM days.  Nor are we giving up being paid electronically by our employers, paying our own bills online, shopping online, as well as booking airline tickets and hotel rooms online. It isn’t going to happen. Hence the trade-off: Hacking and identity theft will remain part of our vocabulary, and part of our reality, for the foreseeable future. That’s the bargain.

Likewise, we will continue to debate supply chains and carbon footprints, while eating an abundance of fresh foods our parents couldn’t have dreamed about much less envisioned.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” paraphrasing and quoting others before him, wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in 1958 in The Gospel Messenger, the official organ of the Church of the Brethren. I think Gene Rodenberry, the Southern Baptist-turned humanist, who died in 1991, might well have agreed. A perfect illustration of this is “Lower Decks,” the 167th episode of the Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the 15th episode of the seventh and final season, which originally aired on Feb. 7, 1994, as I wrote in a Sept. 24, 2018 post headlined, “Church of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the moral arc of the universe”(https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2018/09/24/church-of-star-trek-the-next-generation-and-the-moral-arc-of-the-universe/)

Ensign Sito Jaxa is a Bajoran Starfleet officer serving aboard the USS Enterprise. Two years earlier while in Starfleet Academy in 2368, she was a member of Nova Squadron, along with Wesley Crusher. Under the direction of Cadet Nicholas Locarno, Nova Squadron attempted the dangerous Kolvoord Starburst maneuver during a flight exercise – an action that resulted in a collision and death of fellow cadet Joshua Albert. Jaxa and her fellow cadets lied about their flying of the illegal maneuver to a board of inquiry.

Character, courage and redemption.

Now serving on the USS Enterprise, after being handpicked by Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Jaxa was to assist a Cardassian defector, Joret Dal, return to Cardassia Prime by posing as a Bajoran prisoner captured as part of a bounty hunt, which would allow Dal to cross the border without difficulty. She would then be returned to Federation space in an escape pod, after Dal reached Cardassian territory.

Jaxa freely volunteered for the mission, and was surgically altered to appear as if Dal had abused her in his custody Dal was shocked that she was so young, but was grateful that she risked her life in order for the mission to succeed. The Enterprise-D waited more than 32 hours for her to return before Picard orders a probe to be launched into Cardassian space, despite being warned that doing so could be considered a treaty violation, but the probe only detected debris 200,000 kilometres inside Cardassian space consistent with that of a destroyed escape pod. Eventually, a Cardassian communique was intercepted indicating that the escape pod was detected and destroyed after escaping.

And then with remarkable simplicity and brevity, these five sentences from Picard in a ship-wide address from the captain’s ready room off the bridge:

“To all Starfleet personnel, this is the captain. It is my sad duty to inform you that a member of the crew, Ensign Sito Jaxa, has been lost in the line of duty. She was the finest example of a Starfleet officer, and a young woman of remarkable courage and strength of character. Her loss will be deeply felt by all who knew her. Picard out.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40XUt1HU5H8&feature=share)

Matt Ridley, the British journalist and businessman best known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics, writes in a Dec. 21 piece in The Spectator (https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/weve-just-had-the-best-decade-in-human-history-seriously/) headlined, “We’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously: Little of this made the news, because good news is no news” argues:

“Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.”

Ridley goes onto write, “Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.”

He also notes, “Perhaps the most surprising statistic is that Britain is using steadily less energy. John Constable of the Global Warming Policy Forum points out that although the UK’s economy has almost trebled in size since 1970, and our population is up by 20 per cent, total primary inland energy consumption has actually fallen by almost 10 per cent. Much of that decline has happened in recent years.”

“Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010,” Ridley says, “I’ve been faced with ‘what about…’ questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.”

A New Year’s Eve toast, as the 20s are about to dawn, to the irrepressible Mr. Ridley’s optimism, and the hope he is indeed right enough on the epoch.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22