I Dream of Starships

 

Bells in Flight - 50 years ago

For those who enjoyed my post Bridge of a Million Starships (for Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday), you may want some music to accompany you on the trip and make it, well, more of a trip. Fifty years ago this week (25^th May 1973), just coming down from the apogee -the euphoria- of the classical ages of space flight and science fiction, Tubular Bells was released.   

It really deserved its own Space Movie, and got one in a 78min documentary film of that name for NASA to celebrate the 10^th Anniversary of the Moon Landings. But the lasting movie association is, unfortunately, ‘The Exorcist’, never a worthy movie link (atavistic mumbo-jumbo!) but good for exposure. If only Stanley Kubrick had heard a demo tape before he fixed the music for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mike Oldfield might have got the gig, but he was only ~14 at the time, bit early even for that amazing musical risk-taker. The bone flung up into the sky in 2001, turning temporarily into a spaceship, might have made another appearance as a bent bell, and perhaps landed back on Earth as the bone-on-the-beach on the album cover, or perhaps with holes in it like the Hohle Fels flute (world’s oldest musical instrument).

Anyway, and Tubular and its sequels were great as ‘the soundtrack’ to my science-fiction reading years, 11 and onwards. I have a particular association between the beginning to TB Side 2 and the return to a forsaken Earth by humans – but now the home to highly evolved cats, dogs (and rats!) – in Breed to Come, Andre Norton 1972. But the strongest sci-fi connection is with the grandeur, melancholy and desolation found in Arthur C. Clarke. There’s explicit identification here with track and album titles ‘The Sentinel’ and The Songs of Distant Earth (1994), itself with a forward by Clarke himself. Maybe if the AMiTe project ever inspires a space movie, Mike might come out of his recently announced retirement and give it a shot, if the aching loneliness appealed.

Anyone with something to say has a right to try composition, and it does give an insight into what ingredients go into making a composer. You have to absorb a lot of influences and then get stuck into the ‘problem solving’ which (spoiler alert) is the main job of being a composer. Mike is part of my compositional world; his natural feel for folk-type harmonies (sixthy, ninethy) have influenced me and would have pleased Ralph Vaughan Williams (a fellow folk enthusiast) and I’ve learnt something  from his bassist’s sense of off-rhythm. It’s been said that his true instrument is the bass-guitar, never mind that searing lead guitar sound - hey, Elgar was a bassoonist as well as a good violin player, ‘bass and lead’.

My contention in the AMiTe paper is that any aliens that can launch a spaceship that communicates by lasers will have hands, feet, fingers, toes. They may have syrinxes, like birds (that would be cool!) but they will probably have stringed instruments – guitars, violin-thingies – and woodwind/brass, and definitely percussions. They’d surely have a different history (maybe never having had a counterpoint era or a J. S. Bach) and use different combos, and may also include total silliness in the mix like, well… Mike is a bit of a  ‘Musical Alien’ who acquired his musical DNA over a different and unrepeatable personal trajectory. He’s still hard to write about even for good musicians who’ve missed out on part of that mix, eg, the whole ‘band’ experience (he is literally a one-man-band and thinks like that). He invented a whole different ensemble (to the classical orchestra), because those are the instruments he picked up. Etc, etc.

For opinions sharp enough to cut yourself on, read Colin Edwards: “He is utterly unique, ridiculously unique in fact and things of such rarity should be cherished.” “It’s not just the music but also, as mentioned above, HOW it sounds… raises the hairs on the arms”, and, on Incantations: “one of the clearest examples of Oldfield furiously pursing the ecstatic and achieving precisely that.”

He flings his soul out into the Void, and surely dreams of Starships.

Picture credit: Mike Oldfield Worldwide Discography

To See Ourselves as Others See Us

 

The Mighty Mark 1 - a place of pilgrimage

On the day of named-storm Eunice in 2022, I managed to keep my appointment with MikeGarrett, Sir Bernard Lovell chair of Astrophysics at University of Manchester and Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. Jodrell Bank, with its famous Mark 1 Telescope - made out of bits of battleships! - a name to conjure with. Many visits as a boy there; a place of pilgrimage during the Apollo program. Keeping just ahead of the storm on the M6, we were inside the Alan Turing Institute when it finally hit, and it was ‘knock-you-off-your-feet’ strong when we exited 2 hours later. It was great to meet a Radioastronomy and SETI group and to present the AMiTe idea. Lots of discussion, suggestions for references and encouragement to think further about observational consequences.

While Mike’s JBCA group of 190 people have wide ranging (multi light-year!) research interests including active galaxy nuclei and giant arrays (running  e-MERLIN, the UK's radio astronomy network), they are also active in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and Mike is currently vice-chair of the IAAs SETI Permanent Committee.

So it’s quite fun to keep tabs on his publications. Here’s one that was publicised only in the last week: What would aliens learn if they observed the Earth? This claims to be the first proper study of the Earth’s Technosignature in 50 years and takes into account all modern human sources of radiation. We currently emit a whopping 4GW of radio noise, just from mobile phone transmission. The team has analysed databases of transmitters and considered the radiation pattern, and the potential for detection at nearby stars. These were limited to nearby systems, including Alpha Centauri, out to a maximum of 8 light-years. The conclusion:

“We worked out that an alien civilisation near these locations would, however, need much better telescopes than we have to detect the Earth’s mobile radio leakage. But that would be quite probable, given most technical civilisations are expected to be much more advanced than we are.”

It would be lovely to think that the closest stars have anciently wise civilisations, just waiting for the ‘youngsters’ (us, a mere 4.5bn years after the Earth cooled) to grow up and invent smartphones. Life may be ubiquitous (C’mon NASAPerseverance) but there again, it’s been a long, hard road here. And despite the best (breeding) efforts of Elon Musk, human numbers may start to decline as early as 2050. If the closest extant technical civilisation may be “outside theMilky Way and therefore forever inaccessible” (Brian Cox musing) then we’re going to need a pretty big ‘scope on the Cheshire Plain to detect that.

But maybe there would be a chance to detect ‘we’re here’ signals from an AMiTe point. I’m still to write up the next version of the paper with suggestions from meeting Mike, but there are some clues in the 'Brian Cox' post. Happy listening!

Picture credit: Unesco

I Salute Admiral FitzRoy – for 30th April

 

FitzRoy's grave at All Saint's, Upper Norwood (nr. Crystal Palace)

I have the deepest respect for ‘Captain FitzRoy’, whose anniversary – of death by his own hand – was on 30^th April (I’m a few days late due to a big family wedding).

An absolute aristocrat (the Fitzroy name comes as being a direct descendant of the ‘Merry Monarch’ at his merriest), he cared deeply, as second Governor of New Zealand,  for the indigenous Maori during a rapacious colonial period - and was sacked as a result. In the navy from 12, he was appointed temporary commander of HMS Beagle at 23 as a result of the madness and suicide of Captain Stokes, and had another suicide, by throat-slitting, in his family. So very wise to take along a gentleman companion on Beagle’s second voyage to keep him sane, on a ship refitted at his own expense (he kept doing that). His friend Beaufort (inventor of the ‘Force 10’ scale) came up with some suggestions. He got his second choice, Charles Darwin, and – fatefully – thrust a copy of Charles Lyell’s ‘Principles of Geology’ into 22yr old Charles' hands, thereby giving Darwin a vision of Deep Time (in a way, a bit like the Deep Time I am proposing for the Amity Project, although I only need 60 Million Years).

You’d think that giving Darwin his big, lucky break (again, own expense) would be enough for fame – and indeed there’s plenty more on this aspect, including his brave, principled rejection of Darwin later (including brandishing a bible at the famed Oxford Debate of 1860), and indeed his later reconciliation with Darwin (though not with evolution). But he had to continue his noblesse-oblige-from-own-pocket by founding the Met. Office and inventing Weather Forecasting (including the very term). Perhaps inspired by Beaufort systematising wind-speeds, and with the new technology of barometers and telegraph, his can-do entrepreneurialism led to the first ever weather forecast of 31/7/1861 in his own hand, which was published in the Times. His forecasts saved the lives of many ordinary sailors.

You can tell this is going to end badly. He’d betrayed God (by being Darwin’s unwitting stooge), lost his colonial job, lost his family fortune (died effectively broke), and then the trolling started. Yes, they had trolls before the internet. We used to call such newspaper letter-writers as ‘Angry of Tunbridge Wells, but the trolls included scientists who apparently thought that no forecast was preferrable to an imprecise one. From the Met. Office site:

“The constant criticism took a severe toll on FitzRoy's health and his frequent absence from the office can be traced through the increasingly sporadic presence of his handwriting in the weather reports. His final entry was written on 20th March 1865, just a few weeks before he took his own life on 30th April 1865”.

It’s rather horrible to think of a man – such a great and principled figure - haunted by those earlier suicides and visions of razor-blades, and being inevitably driven into the depression where he would follow their example.

Here’s a small example of my musical write-up mentioning his first interaction with Darwin. I had long intended to pay my respects at his grave, which I was luckily able to do while visiting family close to St Margaret / All Saints, Norwood (near Crystal Palace) recently. The grave was apparently renovated by the Met. Office in 1981 and the strange (Fuegian?) plant has grown since then. I enjoyed popping into ‘his’ church and testing the acoustics with Fr. Antonio, vicar-in-charge, who supplied interesting chat and directed me to FitzRoy’s (very modest) end-of-terrace two hundred meters down Church Road (with a green plaque).

A bit of recitative within the fugato 'Shooting, Dogs & Rat-catching'

Picture credits:

FitzRoy's grave: David F. Gahan

Musical extract: David F .Gahan

When the Old Man Died, 19th April

 

And he had a tin ear...

You’d think by the photo above that he was never young, but a scurrilous lecture by Prof. Mark Pallen shows what he got up to when he was a beardless youth.  That was given at Mark’s ‘Darwin Day 2020’ event; I got to give a talk at this year’s event on the subject ‘Darwin, DNAand Music’. More revelations about what Darwin got up to as a youth can be seen in this excellent skit by Prof. Pavel Borodin’s wonderful students at the Centre for Cytology and Genetics, University of Novosibirsk. Wow, Charlie was young once! And get a load of the marvellous intro song by Suzi Quatro, written around the 100^th anniversary of him popping his clogs, I can almost hear him humming along.

Yes, all good things come to an end and 19^th April 1882 was the end of that particular 3 Billion year-old twig of the Tree of Life (his beautiful image of all our connection). On 10^th March I posted an extract from ‘Three Soliloquies’, an arc of extracts from his life and travels starting with ‘The Gloriesof the Vegetation of the Tropics’, from ‘Voyage of the Beagle’. That was the young Darwin. The third section is ‘A Man Looks Forwards and Backwards’ (with a slight edit-out for musical reasons) and you can listen to an extract here. I’d love to get this recorded as it’s ready-to-go and ‘approved’ by a professional singer and classical guitarist, but at present is only in rendition form. I’m on the look-out for concert promoters who fancy a bit of serious baritone/guitar combo. So in the meantime, you can be amongst the first to sing it, if you follow the words below, from ‘Autobiography’

Extract of baritone / c. guitar aria, David F. Gahan

"A man (on the other hand) looks forwards and backwards, and compares his various feelings, desires and recollections. He then finds, in accordance with the verdict of all the wisest men that the highest satisfaction is derived from following (certain impulses, namely) the social instincts..." 

This is an older Darwin, reflecting on life and what really matters. We leave him ascending the holy mountain - not of Sion, but of Science.

Picture credits:

Darwin College publicity for ‘The Darwins & Music’

Music extract copyright David. F. Gahan

Happy Easter, Librarian!

 

Mysterious Message, left by the perpetrator

A remorseful thief repented last Easter (2022) and made amends. Whatever selfish urges which prompted them to plunder Cambridge University Library, appropriating for personal pleasure part of our common historical patrimony, was expiated in an act of remorse and restitution. Wow! - one doesn’t usually get to use words like those in a blog dedicated to science. But my guess is that the perpetrator was probably steeped in such language – it was Cambridge after all, and the Easter message is a bit tell-tale.

And a great joy it was to anyone interested in the culture and history of science! (To hard scientists, it’s the idea, not the original physical manifestation in ink and paper, that’s the thing.) The story is well told here and the joy that all-manner-of-things-were-wellis communicated in a video interview by Chief Librarian Dr Jessica Gardner. The timing was also a marvel, being in the final year of the Darwin Correspondence Project, a titanic effort to put 15,000 items of correspondence on line (I used it today!).

And such was that joy that, with a little persuading and ideation with a young historian of science academic at Darwin College, Edwin Rose, that the idea of a celebratory concert was born, including my string quartet on Darwinian themes. CUL via the Darwin Correspondence Project stumped a little money which gave rise to the concert which began this blog. It is sanely difficult to get new music programmed /performed from an unusual source. Sanely? Yes, because of the vast back-catalogue, and perfectly proper (albeit mean) funding/support structures for contemporary professional composers. So, usually, no chance to get music like this performed.

The concert, superbly programmed by Francis Knights, took place on 29^th October 2022. It was a great chance to visit the exhibition of DCP at the Library – wonderful, touching examples of the correspondence, including with the fine minds in the British Public at the time such as the Stonemason’s letter (your time will be richly rewarded by clicking on this). The exhibition is now moving to the New York Public Libraries and runs through the summer.

So it is with thanks to the Repentant Thief, CUL and DCP, and Darwin College for the opportunity to visit the exhibition and to have a funded performance of Eyenigma Variations. See Darwiniana tab for photos, quotes and links to the music. I will post more music next time, related to Darwin’s examinations of coral reefs!

And Happy Easter to you; we come from many traditions and all are to be valued, examined, and celebrated.

We Forgot the Begat

 

World Population: 5 scenarios

As a follow up to my post last week about the De-Darwinization of the human race due to the development of contraception (but with a brief nod to music at the base), further confirmation this week of my “End-of-the-World-in-5,400CE” prediction.

My projection of population in that article (and in the AMiTe paper on ‘how we’ll really meet E.T.’) was based on human population peaking at 10bn by 2100, then halving every hundred years. This 10bn is now looking like an over-estimate. A new study for the Club of Rome was published this week https://www.earth4all.life/news/global-population-could-peak-below-9-billion-in-2050s suggests the global population could peak just below 9 billion people in 2050 then start falling. With a ‘Giant Leap’ in investment in economic development, education and health then global population could peak even lower and earlier.

So, how about the halving? The second "more optimistic scenario" – with governments across the world raising taxes on the wealthy to invest in education, social services and improved equality – the report estimates human numbers would hit a high of 8.5 billion as early as 2040 and then fall by about a third to about 6 billion in 2100.

This fall of 29.5% in 60 years is very close to my estimate of halving in 100yrs (in fact, it’s equivalent to 44% fall per 100 years, just exponential mathematics). And why would it stop? People tend to revolt from the idea that very low birth rates might become embedded and get dewy-eyed with visions of Little House on the Prairie, but can’t explain why the trend, already a reality in developed countries, would significantly alter. It’s OK, people/societies will be just as happy/unhappy and probably as obsessed and inward looking as they are now.

The most cogent reason for a here-to-stay trend was hinted this week by Elon Musk and his pals, re Artificial Intelligence, GPT etc in Pause Giant AI Experiments: AnOpen Letter - Future of Life Institute. The key question re human futures (and decisions on family size) was, for me, not all the tosh about A.I. being inimical or running amok. Much more significant was the socio-economic question of “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?“  This will entrench the worries of parents, on top of the global turbulence we are seeing now (and the rest…) about whether their kid(s) will find fulfilling roles; the conventional wisdom will become to be conservative on number of progeny.  But water finds its own level, so society will be just as happy/unhappy as ours, self-similar, in-fact.

It makes you yearn for the good old days, when we were “a little bit naïve” The Begat: Finian’sRainbow. How’s that for a bit of Darwin-related music (‘Ratio of increase so high…”)? We performed that at our folk-music session last week, minus dancing.  

Chuck Cooper & cast in FINIANS RAINBOW 2009 Broadway (Harburg & Lane)

Picture credit: Earth4All report (linked article), FiniansonBroadway.com

Birthday Memorial for ‘Holmes of Hanney’, Family Planning pioneer

 

Biography of Holmes, paper of Hanney History Group

I wrote on 17th January 2023, that that would have a good claim to be ‘Un-Darwin-Day’ as the date when the world’s most populous country had entered numerical decline, overturning – in a symbolic way - one of the pillars of Natural Selection: “Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life”. This may seem strange when the world only reached 8 Billion Day on 15^th November 2022. I blogged about that at the time but also that the underlying trend in birth-rate was firmly down, leading to a surprising conclusion.

The reason for the De-Darwinisation of the human race lies of course in the exercise of personal choice, and with the availability of effective contraception. As with any technology, there are always early adopters, usually the rich and well-informed. The most famous or notorious of these was, of course, Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) who enjoyed inflating them as a suggestive party trick. But these were ‘high end’ early technology and not yet ready for the mass market. Enter  Charles Goodyear and Thomas Hancock with their invention of the vulcanization of rubber (see a short history of the condom) which led to the first ‘American Tips’ being created in about 1858. ‘Full length’ had to wait until 1869.

There is lots to write about this, especially to put into its social context.  Observed effects of population pressure had been commented on well before 1800, most famously by Thomas Malthus. The North American continent provided a significant safety valve but emigration wasn’t for everyone, so pressure grew in intellectual circles to allow the matter to be discussed. A key moment in the Great Britain was the trial of freethinkers Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant (1876) for republishing an American treatise by Bostonian doctor Knowlton.

While information was easier to diffuse amongst the upper/middle classes, for the working class word was very hard to get round, and ‘channels to market’ were highly restricted by obscenity prosecutions – and certainly no clinics were available for women to get advice until one was opened by Margaret (Higgins) Sanger in NYC in 1916 (I’m pleased to note that she was born in Corning, N.Y. where I lived for three years in the nineties). No, word had to get around by post. I’m proud that the Oxfordshire village where I live was home to a young chap, James Robins Holmes, who was stirred up by the Bradlaugh/Besant trial, enough to do something about it by creating what we would call today a ‘Social Enterprise’, (he was a minor landlord and apparently a very good one at that). In 1891 he published a booklet ‘True Morality’ promoting the use of what we call family planning for married couples, and including a price list for ‘hygienic requisites’ (which could be washed after use for poor couples). This was “the greatest honour of my life”, which had him prosecuted and fined for ‘obscenity’, and he succeeded in distributing 150,000 copies the booklet in several editions. ‘Goods’ were supplied all over the Empire in little packages, sent from Hanney Post Office.

A splendid fellow, whose 164^th birthday it would be today, 17^th March.

My dog, Polly, paying her respects at J.R. Holmes memorial on his birthday

Picture credits:  Hanney History Group (Sam Green), David Gahan