Camouflage by Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman wrote one of my most favorite books, The Forever War. This was one of the books that I borrowed from my Dad's stack of paperbacks when I was in Junior High or High School. He was a big science fiction fan, subscribing to Analog magazine in addition to reading lots of paperbacks. The Forever War was one of those books that really sticks in your mind.

When I saw the book Camouflage in the library, I picked it up without considering anything beyond the author's name. I started to read it and kept thinking that it was familiar. After the second chapter, I knew I had read it before, but it was vaguely different. I stopped worrying about the deja vu feeling and just enjoyed the reading.

The book is about two aliens that have been on earth for thousands of years. They were both shapeshifters. They could change their shape and appearance. The main character was followed from his background. Haldeman painted an image of a portion of a small cluster galaxy where the stars were close and orbits of planets were continuously disrupted. His speculation was that anything that survived and evolved in this environment would have to be supremely adaptable. They would have to be almost impervious to damage, able to survive on almost any kind of food, able to regenerate their bodies, and as such, immortal. In addition to all that, they would have to be able to go dormant for long periods of time. The main character had travelled through space for millenia and crashed into the earth a couple of million years ago. His ship was embedded under a volcanic flow on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and he had assumed the shape of a Great White Shark for most of that time. He emerged onto land right before WWII and took the shape of a man that he killed on the beach. While learning to be human, he acted very un-human. Eventually, he learned how to mimic human behavior and had some adventures, including being beheaded on the Baatan Death March.

While all this is going on, there is another shapeshifter who has been playing at being human much longer. He perpetually picks a bloodthirsty and powerful character to become, like a death camp guard in WWII. He suspects that there must be another being like him somewhere and sets out to find him so he can kill the competition.

The story comes to a strange climax, and I won't spoil it more than I already have. I liked the whole concept of how to sneak through society with the increasing use of fingerprints and retinal scans. It was also interesting how the main character had to follow to a certain extent the principle of conservation of mass. To be something bigger than he was, he had to absorb mass. To be something smaller, he had to shed mass.

Where did his consciousness reside? How do you retain memories over such a long period of time? These were questions that were not answered by the novel, but the fact that I am questioning the novel as if it was an actual account tells you something about the completeness of the worlds Joe Haldeman creates.

Taliban Office

Here's my idea for a new movie or TV show.

What would it look like if the terrorists were plagued with as much incompetence as an American Corporation.

Every time they tried to set up a hit, they'd end up in the wrong place without any bombs or explosives. There would be a leader that everyone secretly despised and a boot-licking jackass that everyone could barely put up with.

When their plots failed, they would put graffiti on a wall or something minimally destructive and equally lame and call it a major victory.

Feel free to use the idea, I just want to see it in video.

Paul of Dune

I read Dune by Frank Herbert sometime around the 7th grade. This classic science fiction is about a galactic empire in the far future, when man has long since stopped using computers, but has the ability to jump from planetary system to planetary system in the blink of an eye with huge Guild ships. The empire is brought to its knees by a young man that is the product of a 30 generation long breeding program that culminates in his ability to see the future. He comes to power from a desert planet named Dune, where the people are oppressed and the planet provides The Spice, a unique substance that extends life, helps Reverend Mother's connect with their past lives and sense the truth, and allows Guild Navigators to see through spacetime and move their massive ships into safe destinations in the blink of an eye. It also transforms the main character, Paul Atreides, into his full potential of being able to see the future.

Frank Herbert wrote the original series, which followed the life of Paul, and then his son and his favorite swordmaster Duncan Idaho (actually, a series of clones of Duncan, with memories of his past life) up to an confusing and incomplete fate.

After Frank Herbert died, his son Brian in a collaboration with Kevin Anderson, started writing more to the series. He completed prequels and a conclusion to the original series, as well as fill-in novels of the various main characters.

This book fills in a time gap between the original book Dune and the second book Dune Messiah. It answers questions about what he was thinking, how much of the future he saw, and how did he consolidate his power and direct his empire. Each backfilling novel answers more of the mysteries the original series was almost proud to leave behind.

As a young boy, I found Paul a compelling main character, because he was about my age, yet superior to most of the people around him in intellect and ability. As an older man, I still find the character compelling, as a conflicted man struggling to do what is right in a world that compromises his morals as well as his hopes and desires.

Oral History and The Lost City of Z

I just finished reading a book called Lost City of Z. This is a fascinating tale about an explorer named Percy Fawcett that disappeared into the Amazon in the late 1920s looking for a lost city that he believed was in the unexplored regions of the upper Amazon River.

The author attempts to find the trail and determine what happened to Fawcett. In the course of tracking his last known locations, he talked to an Indian that remembered a story about the explorer travelling through their village. His story was from three generations before and he remembered it because his parents and grandparents had come up with a story that sounded like a poem or a song.

In another part of the book, there is an account of another explorer's story of his travels. This story changed with each retelling. It makes you wonder how accurate stories are. We are conditioned to believe that true human history started when man started writing things down. Before that time, there was only oral history, which was subject to change and erosion as the generations passed.

However, it occurs to me that oral history must be good for some learning and provide a measure of continuity. Otherwise we'd all be stupid, inexperienced primitives trying to figure out basic survival skills with each new generation.

If you think about how older people tell their stories over and over, you realize that eventually you remember them yourselves. How many times have you heard the same story from your parents or grandparents until you think you could tell it yourself? This must be an ingrained way that humans pass on their history.

Religious history is the same way. It starts as an oral tradition, changing over time with each generation retelling the story. Still, something of the original story remains, only the exact details and origin of the story fade into history until the story becomes purely mythical, with it's factual origins lost in obscurity. The trick is to see if you can figure out what kernel of truth remains in the story after so many retellings, and what you can really learn from it.

The book had an interesting ending. Our poor lost explorer remained a mystery, but what he was looking for was found by a modern explorer that the author found in the jungle. The cities may not have been the huge sprawling metropolises that Fawcett imagined, and they were not from the 1600s or 1700s, as he hoped, but the true solved mystery is even more important and fascinating than what he imagined.

Historical Outlook

I recently completed listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episodes called Ghosts of the Ostfront. This was a series of stories about the little known battles on the German Eastern Front against the Russians during WWII. I highly recommend the episodes, which depict brutal atrocities, describe unimaginable devastation, and fill in a whole previously unheard of chapter of an already colossal war.

While I was thinking about this and wondering what it would have been like to live through it. While talking about what it would have been like to be there with a friend, I made the comment that when you study history, you have the advantage of knowing how it is going to turn out. We often critize people in historical situations for not knowing better. You forget that they were living in their time and had no idea what their future was going to bring.

That is true for this time. We divide up our society along idealogical lines, convinced that we know what the future holds. We make decisions about climate change, the economy, politics, all controlled by people in the current time that think they can figure the future out.

I recently was surprised to learn that the saying "Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" was made by Santayana. OK, wait, I was surprised to learn that it was the Mexican General Santa Anna who captured the Alamo. When I found out that it was actually George Santayana, who I've never heard of, I was no longer surprised, just prized.

Fallen Founder

I just finished a book about Aaron Burr called Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg

I remembered that Aaron Burr had been Thomas Jefferson's Vice President, had run for President, and that he was discredited for trying to break off the Western U.S. to start a new nation. This was before I read the book, just the remnants of school and who knows where else we learn the little details that are in our head.

What really happened? Isenberg's book is written around the premise that there were different stories going around about Burr. The book is a staunch defense of Aaron Burr as a misunderstood figure from history who was smeared in the press by his opponents. Isenberg contends that this misrepresentation of the facts spread by Burr's enemy's has persisted until today.

Isenberg paints many of the politicians of the founders era as self interested, self promoting, and brutal at infighting. She describes the Federalist/Republican politicians attacking each other through the press and with backroom deals. She spends a great deal of time going over research she turned up that paints a completely different story.

For one thing, the common story about Alexander Hamilton is that he fought in a duel against Aaron Burr, who shot and killed him, thus ruining Burr's reputation. Isenberg's version is that Hamilton had some kind of obsession about Burr and would not leave him alone. She makes it sound as if Burr tried to avoid the confrontation as long as he could, but finally couldn't put it off. The other commonly held belief is that Hamilton honorably shot in the air, while Burr deliberately took aim. She claims that Hamilton couldn't see well and had the wrong eye glasses, which is why he missed. Another aspect she brings out is that both parties had written letters prior to the duel that would have been released had they lost. Burr's was supposedly noble and gracious and expressed regret about the disagreement with Hamilton and respect for Hamilton. Hamilton's supposedly continued to cast dispersions about Burr, basically continuing his taunts from beyond the grave.

Isenberg says that they continued to try to prosecute Burr, even though the duel took place in New Jersey, and there was no law against dueling in New Jersey, just in New York. They supposedly took row boats across the Hudson just to have the duel in a location where it was legal.

The next chapter in the history that is turned around and debunked in this book is the events leading up to and surrounding his treason trial. In this version of history, Burr is duped by a double agent named General James Wilkinson and painted as the force behind a movement to secede the western Louisiana territory away from the U.S. and set himself up as King. I'm still confused after reading the book exactly what happened. It sounds to me that Burr was interested in trying to get parts of Mexico to break off and form an independent territory (which later happened with Texas, and also is reminiscent of how the U.S. got into the Mexican-American War). It seems that Wilkinson was trying to frame Burr on the Louisiana conspiracy and was not able to make this charge stick.

However, while not convicted of treason, Burr was thoroughly discredited in the public eye. Thomas Jefferson apparently wanted to find some way of prosecuting Burr, to the point that he eventually left the country.

Sadly, Burr never did regain his reputation, and lost his family as well. It's a tragic story that paints a sympathetic picture of the man. The subtitle of the book could have been, "Why could they not just leave this man alone!?"

There were some other details in the book that I found interesting. Burr apparently was an advocate for women's rights and equality about a hundred years early. He also fought in the American Revolution, but was not on the Washington side of the Army and therefore, did not prevail politically when Washington later came to power. He supposedly assured that Jefferson won the 1800 election by stepping down and giving the election to Jefferson, even though he had as many electoral votes (supposedly, by the rules of that time, the Federalists would have been able to appoint their own man as President in the event of a tie). The last detail that I found to be very interesting is that Burr owned an estate called Richmond Hill in Manhattan that he was forced to sell to John Jacob Aster for $32,000. This was divided up into lots and became Greenwich Village in New York City, making Aster incredibly rich in the process.

I suppose that Isenberg did not convince me that everything said about Burr was false, but she did make me wonder how much of what we've been taught is history being written by the victors.

Magic Repair

I was walking down the road the other day, having just heard about people with heavy metal contamination, and thinking about how it would be great if you could figure out a way to remove the metals embedded deep in the flesh. I was thinking about how there were Star Trek next generation scenes where they used a medical tricorder to cure broken bones or heal scars.

If you're a Star Trek fanatic, you know how the original series showed people using transporters, and then the Next Generation series explained how transporter technology would be used in other ways. The transporter is supposed to break down matter and reassemble it in an identical pattern in another place. Replicator technology takes a lump of matter (I envision this would be the crew members waste products - you never hear them talking about going to the bathroom, but you figure they must) and reassembling it, but not in the same shape or configuration, but in a new configuration - say a cheeseburger. The holodeck supposedly creates scenes and characters using transporter technology. They had a group of small robots that used this trick to make whatever tool or gripping device they needed to perform maintenance tasks. What I am talking about mainly is the little devices that the doctor used to heal things. This is like a little wand, and you point it toward something on the body that's wrong and you rearrange the matter so that it's right.

I want on of these.

I was thinking about the scene in Star Man where Jeff Bridges plays an alien that brings a dead deer back to life on the hood of the hunter's car. That would be a huge job, because you'd have to reverse the decay that had set in as well as repair all the damage, restore the blood volume, and restart the heart and respiration. I was thinking about the limping deer and turkeys we have around our yard. With the special medical matter rearranging device, it would not be that hard to reach in and repair the bones and sinews to make them whole again. I saw a turtle that was hit by a car, and I thought that would be a nice project, too, putting the shell back together, closing all the ruptured blood vessels and reconnecting them and repairing all the muscles. I was also thinking about pollution contamination, how easy it would be to extract them or convert them. I also thought it would be good to remove mites, viruses, and bacteria that are infecting an animal (like a honeybee, for example).

While I was looking at the turtle with the crushed shell, I saw some eggs inside it. They were bright yellow. I remembered that you see yellow eggs in fish and grasshoppers, too. Why are eggs yellow? Maybe the yellow substance can be made into just about anything the organism needs, like the lump of matter they use in the Star Trek replicator as a base stock for whatever they need. Really, when you think about it, nature already does this transporter magic repair, it just does it really slowly. That's man for you, trying to hurry up a good thing.

40 Years Later

Since I discovered that the complete 60's Star Trek is available for free on YouTube, I've been watching them in order from the first season. I used to watch them in reruns at various times in my life and assumed I had seen them all. I discovered that around 17 (I didn't go back and do an exact count) of the 29 episodes of the first season were ones I had never seen before. By the way, for a real laugh at the strange psychedelic flavor that was available, see "The Alternative Factor." It was pure mindless psychedelic 60's.

Watching these old episodes has been a lot of fun, not just because of the campiness of the acting or the poor quality of some of the sets and special effects, but the interesting concept of what life would be like in the future from the standpoint of the 60's proves to be a reflection of what the 60's were like.

I was thinking about that time, which was after the birth control pill was introduced and before AIDS struck. This was a brief period when sexuality could be expressed without the consequences of unwanted pregnancy or incurable disease. Star Trek kind of reflects that, at least the hemlines and some of the sexual innuendo does. They expected that people of the future would have been more sexually active with less fuss about it. It's also strange that women and all races and cultures are fully integrated into the rank structure of the Federation, but they still show women only in lower ranks, mostly subservient to men.

Then this week, there was all the media coverage and reminiscences over the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing. I was 6 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon and I watched it live on TV. I didn't realize that the work up to the moon missions were the societal backdrop when Star Trek was being shown on the air.

It makes perfect sense now. If you look at Star Trek, it captures the hope and drive that Kennedy expressed setting us on the path to the moon. If you look at some of the episodes, there is plenty of commentary on the cold war and our Russian adversaries.

It seems so recent and at the same time so long ago.

Human Oleo

I recently listened to a recording of the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead on the program This I Believe. She was ahead of her time, and very open minded for a woman of her era when she went out and visited the remote tribes and backwoods cultures during the 50s. She believed that while people are individuals, they are also a product of their society. To a certain degree, individualism gets buried under the blending together of people to make a common culture. On one hand, it's distressing to think that you might be a puppet of the greater culture, on the other hand, it's comforting to know that you are nestled firmly within that society and culture.

I read a novel called Time Pressure by Spider Robinson a long time ago. The thing I remember about the novel is that one of the main characters had come back in time to capture individuals' minds to add to a future group mind of all humanity. She described a particularly quirky and offbeat man as a unique spice in the mixture of humanity. I always thought this was cool, the concept that you could be both a unique individual and a part of greater society.

In all, when you think about it diversity isn't just a buzz word that most people have a vague agreement is a good thing. Diversity is essential because it makes us strong by providing unique individuals with special contributions. We hear stories about how the Nazis were stupid for driving out or killing the Jews when they lost such amazing people as Albert Einstein. There are few examples that extreme, but everyone that is different or not accepted has something to contribute to humanity.

Japanese Princess falls to the moon

This is a cool video of the Japanese Spacecraft hitting the moon.

Consumption

I've often thought about overpopulation, since I was little. That was during the time of the first energy crisis and people were seriously concerned about whether we would be able to feed and provide energy for everyone. Part of the equation, besides the fact that there is this much oil reserves and this many tons of coal mined annually, and this many kilowatts used every year, is that there are x number of people in the world doing this consumption. On top of all projections was a factor of increased use due to an increasing number of people using. That is sometimes multiplied by the fact that each person uses more than their parents do, in fact more than they themselves did earlier in their life.

The projections showed that this was not sustainable. Those projections that I remember were centered around energy use, but they could have been food used or trash produced.

The problem is that people have a certain degree of greed, selfishness, gluttony, and entitlement. They want, they want for themselves, they want a lot, and they feel that no one can tell them no.

Conservation is never discussed when we talk about energy use. Over consumption is not regulated at all. You have the right to use as much as you want to.

Energy is not the only commodity that is overused. People habitually eat more food, smoke more cigarettes, drink more alcohol, or take more drugs than what is good for you, and they don't want to be told by anyone to stop. Thing about if you lived on a space station and you got a kick out of venting the atmosphere a little bit at a time through an interesting device out into space. You're on the station with other astronauts and they all agree that this is a bad thing and that the space station is going to be in deep trouble if you continue to do this, but they have no right to tell you not to. Since you are too short sighted to realize that you have to forego the pleasure you get from venting the atmosphere in order to survive indefinitely, you will quickly vent enough atmosphere to start hurting or killing the people on the space station. Can you imagine a situation where the other people in the space station would not stop the idiot from venting their air?

We often talk about the fact that a new health care plan would not be truly useful in cutting costs without a preventative component that would encourage and monitor people to lose weight, stop smoking, and reduce their consumption of drugs and alcohol. People would scream about the violation of their basic rights, and I must admit that I feel that way, too. However, if you could successfully limit people's self destructive behavior, there would be great savings in the amount of car you would have to provide for people. Consume less vices and you could manage to consume less resources in providing health care for all.

This over consumption is mainly noticed in things like oil, minerals and metals, plastics, wood, and other natural resources. Many things, some simple things, like glass, could easily be recycled at a fraction of the price it takes to mine new materials and create them from scratch. On a global scale on a long enough time scale, everything is recycled. It makes sense to think of the things that we use as needing to be recycled and reused. We should not be using land for landfills, ever. The thought of locking things up under the earth in order to dispose of them makes no sense in the long run. I like the way they do it in Star Trek Next Generation where everything is ran through a replicator, which is basically no different than a transporter that rearranges the molecules as it reconstructs them.

We even consume information at an all time high rate, although I would argue that we consume more worthless information than useful information. Look at the media frenzy surrounding Michael Jackson. Before that it was OJ Simpson, Anna Nicole Smith, Jean Benet Ramsey, the college student that disappeared while in Aruba for spring break, or the arrest of a black college professor by a white cop. None of these circus events matter in the long run to society, but we suck up precious air time and people's short attentions and scarce personal time absorbed in these non-events.

I think that if you want to consume something without limits, you should consume knowledge. We should encourage people to go to their public libraries and read as many books as they want. We should encourage people to utilize their public parks. They can go out and run or walk as much as they want. It's an unrealistic dream, but who knows, maybe people will come around, eventually.

Sliding Out

Watching the news lately, I am developing even less respect for former Bush administration officials, but most of all for former Vice President Cheney.

All during the previous administration, he did nothing but hide information from the public. From the energy task force, WMD searches in Iraq and the outing of Valerie Plame, memos on torture, to the firing of attorneys for political reasons, the administration had an impenetrable wall that they tried to erect to keep information from leaking out.

Now that they are out of power, many would love to see them prosecuted for their crimes, or at least have their actions and misdeeds exposed to the public. While these former officials wouldn't dare want to go through the ordeal of an actual trial, they are more than eager for a trial of opinion on their doings during the Bush Era. Hardly a new cycle goes by where we don't have to listen to them spinning their actions and trying to politicize the decisions of the current administration. Their cowardly approach means that they don't have to be questioned officially or present actual evidence proving their assertions, they just have to cast doubt in the public's mind.

I have no respect for this approach. I would say to them to submit themselves to a real trial if they really want to be validated by history. Since I believe they are criminals, I don't expect them to ever actually take this course.

Irrational Decisions

There was a story I was listening to about how people do not usually make decisions with a rational process. They specifically sited that people often put a great deal of emphasis on very rare events. This sensitivity toward uncommon occurrences can be seen in everything from the response to 9/11 to the fact that many parents do not want to inoculate their children because they think it could cause autism. The problem with human decision making is that we often choose based on erroneous perceptions and exaggerated concerns. We often make decisions that are not rational.

It is easy to see this behavior in others, but not so easy to recognize it in ourselves. While they were talking about financial decisions effecting retirement and diet decisions effecting your health and weight, the decisions we make run the gambit from trivial to vital. We are often not aware of this short-circuit in our decision making process, meaning that it can go unchecked and can quickly get out of control. The effect they were describing almost made me think that you could say that people are not even able to exercise free will in making their own choices.

Sometimes, when I listen to the debates about health care in this country, I think about how free will sometimes leads to individual and societal excesses and self-destructive behavior. How do you balance a desire to exercise the right of free will versus trying to make people do what you know is "right" or better for their long term health and happiness.

Can you even imagine a life where you made all the right decisions? Always ate exactly what your body needed, only spent money in a way that was not wasteful and maximized your future gains? Never hooked up with the wrong person or treated the right person in a way to drive them away? Took every route when driving that avoided accidents and delays? Stayed home instead of going out and getting into trouble? It's so strange, because I think the average person would like the benefit of having made every decision correctly, but not the boredom of having to be so disciplined. Spontaneity and impulsiveness are treasured by us, even when they lead to missteps, antics, or tragedies.

Around Father's Day I thought about and how you try to keep your children safe and healthy by restricting their impulses and protecting them from an incompletely formed decision making process. I was thinking about how much older I am than the usual father, and the probability that I would not live long enough to see my son get very old. I wonder what my son's feelings would be if he ever considers that I might die early. Would he think that it was his job to keep me healthy? Why not? I remember thinking that I should try to get my parents to quit smoking. Maybe we could form some kind of mutual pact to stay in good health. He needs to learn to hike and run and exercise, and I need to learn to eat right and do the same so I can stay healthy.

Easy to declare such things. Hard to decide to actually do it on a day to day basis.

Cleaning Yourself Out

I was listening to a Naked Scientist Podcast where they were doing an demonstration about bilirubin. This is a compound that the body makes when it breaks down old red blood cells. Normally, this compound is fat soluble, and your body produces and enzyme that makes it water soluble so that you can get rid of it by excreting it through your urine. Newborns never had to do this before, it was taken care of in the womb by the mother. So sometimes it's a problem for newborns, who build up bilirubin and turn yellow, or jaundiced. A nurse serving in a maternity ward found out years ago that exposing babies to sunlight cures this problem. The sunlight makes the molecule flip around into a different configuration, a water soluble one, just like what the enzyme does. The naked scientists did an experiment where they showed how the yellow bilirubin got converted and could be expelled with a transparent baby doll with the liquids inside.

This made me think about how these kinds of problems would be handled by future space travellers. What if the men on the first Mars or Lunar colonies get contaminated by the mining operations they will be working on? How would they get lead or other contaminants out of the bodies of astronauts. I thought about the line in Black Sabbath/Ozzy Osborne's Iron Man. I guess he was turned to steel and only had boots of lead, but you can see that they are clearly referring to an industrial accident that caused contamination. Will we learn tricks similar to the sunlight trick where toxic chemicals like lead and mercury will bind to something and be expelled from the body?

Scientists have a name for the process, it's called kelation, also spelled chelation. This is defined as the process where a molecule binds to and surrounds a metal to remove it from tissue. We currently already use this therapy on earth for mercury, lead, and arsenic. This is different from the use of activated charcoal to remove poisons, those are adsorbed by the charcoal, not chemically bound to it.

In another podcast I was listening to, they were studying a cinnamon tea that a native tribe had used for centuries to relieve back pain. The scientists examining the tea were initially mystified, because they found that the cinnamon had toxins in it that should be poisoning the natives. They discovered that it was converted to a non-toxic form by the gentle heating used in brewing it into a tea. In fact, the non-toxic form had medicinal properties that the tribe had stumbled onto years ago.

How much of the technology to cure, treat, or maintain the health of people will come from ancient practices and how many treatments will have to come from future developments?

Baseline Creep

It occurred to me while listening to people argue about climate change that the basic assumptions accepted by people can change over time.

Everyone has heard the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants." I always understood it to mean that our scientists can make great discoveries because they build on the discoveries of the scientists that come before them.

In thinking about politics, societal rules, infrastructure, culture, and science recently, it occurred to me that this baseline of knowledge, rules, and expectations is not fixed, but moves with time. You could call it baseline creep.

When I was a kid, the air and water were so polluted that people finally got fed up with it and started cleaning it up and limiting what you could dump into nature. I remember the foamy streams, littered roadsides, and smokey skies. I remember the tailpipes and the smokestacks belching out smoke, the acrid smell, and the constant warnings not to swim in lakes and streams and certainly not to eat the fish caught there. In those days, it was expected that you could pollute without cost or penalties. Now, the expectation is that you can do whatever you want as long as you don't cause pollution.

Leadership and power have a same way of creeping. Look at the U.S. Congress and the corrupting power of lobbyists. This is something that slowly became institutionalized because politicians that accepted the donations of large interests had the money to get re-elected and those that refused them did not. Now it's entrenched.

This baseline creep is not always a moving of standards, but sometimes a moving of conditions. Take population, for example. When I was born, there were around 3 billion people on the planet. Now there is over 6 billion. There were large tracts of land just outside of the city that were fields and pastures, possibly farmed or grazed, but otherwise sparsely inhabited. Today, land is seen as a commodity to be divided up and built on. The thought of leaving some of it in agriculture or unused doesn't seem to occur to anyone anymore.

The amount of energy an individual uses is a baseline that has quickly crept into an unsustainable region. We cannot expect that the burgoining population will be able to waste energy at the same rate, this is reaching the point where that is no longer sustainable.

It begs the question of what happens when the baseline has moved too far. If you're born with the baseline in a certain place, you don't expect to retreat from that point. It's very difficult to tell people that they have to lower their standard of living and use less energy in the future.

Some baselines creep in the wrong direction. Look at species extinction. The rate of extinction is so high right now that they are calling it the 6th great extinction. The other extinctions happened because of catastrophic events like meteor impacts, supervolcano eruptions, or massive climate changes. We're managing to make this one happen just from the way we go about our normal lives. The baseline has definitely shifted out from under us, and it was shifted by us. It's as if we climbed out on a limb and turned around and started sawing away at it.

I've always wondered how many generations of modern men, taken at birth and put on a desert island without any knowledge of the outside world, would it take to get language or writing or any kind of a society.

Many of the fundamental changes in human development took centuries. Now these changes take months. As we work diligently to change the baseline of the world we live in, it would do us well to question why that baseline is where it is and where it really should be.

Only then do we have any hope of stabilizing the situation and controlling what direction our baseline creeps. Hopefully, we can take control and point ourselves toward progress rather than self-annihilation.