Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (40 page)

The Great Leap Forward

The carving of a woman known as the Venus of Hohle Fels (Venus of the Hollow Rock, discovered in 2008) comes from this period. At forty thousand years old, it’s the most ancient representation of a human being currently known.

The Bekenstein bound

Is nature ultimately grainy or smooth? Is it made of indivisible units, or is it smooth and infinitely divisible? This may be the most profound question in science, and it’s been debated since at least 500 BCE, when the philosopher Leucippus, and his student Democritus of Abdera, invented the idea that everything was constructed from elementary particles that were
atomos
—indivisible.

The modern “atom,” first conceived of by John Dalton around 1803, was supposed to be
atomos
, and then it turned out not to be. But quantum mechanics is a return to Democritus in that it too claims there’s a very, very tiny “smallest possible thing”—an indivisible ultimate unit of space itself, the Planck length.

If that size really is an
absolute minimum
, then there’s a huge but finite number of ways to arrange the contents of space. Think of a cube-shaped “toy universe” consisting of eight dice, seven of which are red and one of which is yellow; there are only eight possible ways for this universe to be. If quantum mechanics is right about graininess, then any volume of space—including both the whole universe, the visible universe, and the much smaller bit of the universe that has the special honor of being the inside of your head—is subject to the same principle.

Physicist Jacob Bekenstein’s interest was in entropy and black holes. But his quantum-based idea—that any region of space contains a finite amount of information—seems to have implications for the debate over consciousness and the physical basis of the mind. If I can create an exact copy of my brain down to the last Planck unit, then everything about that copy will be identical too:
that
brain (that I?) will also dislike loud noise, love the taste of figs, remember falling out of a tree on a summer afternoon in England decades ago, and wish it were smart enough to understand quantum mechanics; it will be me, in fact—or, at least, it will be wholly convinced that it’s me.

Notice the very big
if
, way back there at the beginning of that last overpacked sentence. And, if you don’t have anything more pressing to do right now, look up “Boltzmann brain.”

P
ART
III: A
N
A
LTERNATIVE TO
G
OD

Linear B

The scripts known as Linear A and Linear B were discovered on Crete at the beginning of the twentieth century, shortly before the Phaistos Disk was found. They’re closely related syllabaries—which is to say, they’re physically similar, and, as in much of Egyptian hieroglyphic script, each symbol represents one syllable. But think of English and Finnish: despite the visual similarity, which makes it clear the
scripts
are related, Linear A and B encode two entirely unrelated languages.

Linear A is believed to be the written form of a pre-Greek indigenous Cretan language, but any other knowledge of it is lost. It was used only for a relatively short time, between about 1750 BCE and 1450 BCE, and apparently only for routine bureaucratic purposes, which suggests that we see in it the first emergence of a writing system—a way of keeping lists, for instance—in an otherwise preliterate culture.

Linear B was used for several centuries, beginning just before the end of the Linear A period. Finally cracked in 1952, it should really be called “Mycenaean Linear B,” because what it encodes is not a Cretan language but the earliest written form of Greek.

The Mycenaean Greeks (from the Peloponnese, the big peninsula in southern Greece) brought their language across the Mediterranean to Crete when they invaded the island around 1550 BCE, in the wake of the Thera eruption. Presumably they also had no writing at that time and adapted the recently invented local system, Linear A, as a vehicle for their own language.

Centuries later, after the fall of Mycenaean influence during the Bronze Age Collapse, Greeks adopted from the Phoenicians the completely different alphabetical writing system (alpha, beta . . .) we’re familiar with.

The whole story of how the truth about Linear B was recovered, mainly by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris, is told brilliantly by Margalit Fox in
The Riddle of the Labyrinth
.

“Kraist . . . someone he’s never even met”

I cribbed the Tainu’s response to Kurtz from a real tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, the Pirahã (pronounced PIR-aha). I admit that, being inclined to atheism, I find it an initially plausible and tempting response—but on second thoughts it’s far from persuasive.

Linguist and former missionary Dan Everett has lived among the Pirahã for decades. He says that he lost his Christian faith partly because he found their skepticism about his own beliefs compelling. (“Wait—you’ve been going on and on about Jesus, and you want us to believe all this stuff about him, and yet now you admit that you never even
met
the guy?”)

For Everett’s own account, search “Daniel Everett losing religion” on YouTube, or read the last sections of his fascinating and moving book about his fieldwork,
Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes
. But, before you walk away with the idea that the Pirahã have a knockdown argument for the silliness of religious belief, consider an obvious response. Wouldn’t their reasons for being skeptical about Everett’s Jesus
also
force them to be skeptical about my claiming to know that Henry VIII had six wives, or that Abraham Lincoln was once president of the United States? And yet, in any sane view of what knowledge is, I do know these things. As Everett himself attests, the Pirahã have no records of their own past, and thus little sense of history. So maybe they were right not to believe what Everett said about Jesus or maybe they weren’t, but the mere fact that Everett hadn’t walked with him by the Sea of Galilee seems to be a poor basis for that skepticism.

Smoked ancestors

This is (or was) true of the Angu (or Anga) people, who live in the Morobe Highlands of far western Papua New Guinea. The practice has been frowned upon by missionaries, who have attempted to ban it. For some vitriolic commentary on the damage that banning traditional burial rites does to indigenous people, see Norman Lewis,
The Missionaries
. By the way, Lewis’s revulsion at the influence missionaries were having on indigenous people led to the creation of the organization Survival International.

Ghostly ancestors and first contact

The last truly uncontacted New Guineans were Highlanders who encountered early Australian prospectors in the 1930s. They had been cut off from the outside world for millennia, and had invented farming at roughly the same time as it arose in Mesopotamia.

There are remarkable photos and film clips online of what happened when these dark-skinned Melanesians first encountered bizarre white-skinned beings with knee socks and rifles—particularly from Dan Leahy’s first expeditions. The appearance of the Caucasians was terrifying, partly because pale skin fit right into their existing stories: many of them believed that the dead retained their bodies but that their skin turned white. One historic (and disturbing) clip shows Leahy shooting a tethered pig to convince the villagers of his power; see
http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/first-contact
. In her book about New Guinea,
Four Corners
, travel writer Kira Salak describes seeing this clip:

“It is like the fall of Eden in that moment, recorded for posterity on grainy black and white. When I first saw it, I was riveted. It is actually possible to sit down and watch on a television screen an abbreviated version of foreign encroachment and destruction, a chilling glimpse of what has happened to nearly every native group “discovered” in the world. It is almost as if I were watching the arrival of Judgment Day. Thirty years later in the western half of New Guinea, the Indonesians would already have their foothold and begin the massive deforestation and genocide of the tribes. Thirty years from beginning to the arrival of the end.”

For more on Indonesia and “the arrival of the end,” see the note “Giant mines (and a short polemic on the relationship between wealth, government, colonialism, racism, and terrorism).”

“Paint their bodies with clay . . . a tribe near Goroka does that”

Morag’s referring to the “Asaro mudmen.” It’s the masks that are really wild—look them up!

“Homer was a blind storyteller . . .”

There are many legends about Homer, but we know virtually nothing about him for sure. He may or may not have been blind, and may or may not have been illiterate; he probably lived on the coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) around 750 BCE, or up to a couple of centuries earlier. But it’s also possible that he’s just a legend, and that the great epics under his name were the work of many people.

“Five miles high on peyote”

Peyote, a cactus native to Mexico, contains powerful psychoactive alkaloids, including mescaline. The spiritual significance of their effects is nicely captured in the descriptive noun
entheogen
, which was invented for these substances in the 1970s to replace the earlier
hallucinogen
and
psychedelic
.
Entheogenic
literally means “producing a sense of the divine.”

Nuxalk, and what Raven did

The Pacific Northwest is one of the world’s five top hot spots for language extinction, with over two hundred critically endangered languages, including Nuxalk, Kutenai, Klallam, Yakama, Snohomish, Spokane, Quileute, Siletz Dee-ni, and Straits Salish. (The other four major hot spots are Central and South America; Northern Australia, especially the Cape York Peninsula; the American Southwest; and East Siberia.) Nuxalk is spoken only in one village at the mouth of the Bella Coola River in British Columbia. Its strange phonemes, and its distaste for vowels, make it especially difficult for anyone who starts out with a European language. You can hear it spoken here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkk-8Ti057U.

Here I have altered slightly the version of the Raven story I found at firstvoices.com—a great site for learning about Native American language and culture.

Physicists . . . three big theories
 . . .
junk

The attempt to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics into a coherent theory of quantum gravity has already sucked up many whole careers with no end in sight; string theory, which many thought would elegantly solve the impasse, can’t offer any testable predictions at all, according to its critics, and seems to come in up to 10
⁵⁰⁰
equally plausible versions, which is a few too many.

“A thousand years of human habitation”

Scientists disagree about when Polynesians from the southwest first arrived in the Hawaiian Islands; around 1000 CE is probable.

Gilgamesh and the lion

To see the original, search “Louvre Gilgamesh.”

“A trapdoor function . . . even our best computers will gag on it”

Modern cryptography (and therefore the entire Internet, the world banking system, and a whole lot else) depends on trapdoor functions, mathematical operations that are intrinsically harder to compute in one direction than another. Even simple addition is a sort of trapdoor function: you can solve “123 + 789 =
x
” quicker than “123 +
x
= 912.” But some functions are (or they become, when the numbers are large)
much much much
harder one way than the other.

The key example is prime factors. “What’s 13 × 17?” is easy: 221. But “Here’s a number, 221; what are its two prime factors?” is significantly harder. What if, instead of two-digit primes, I start with a pair of
two-hundred-digit
primes? Your computer can still multiply them together in a flash. But the reverse process, finding the primes with nothing but the result to go on, isn’t merely more difficult: it’s practically impossible, even with all the computing power in the world.

This fact makes it possible to use systems in which you publish a “public key” that anyone can use to encode a message to you; only you own, and never need to transmit, the “private key” capable of decoding those messages.

The idea of public keys based on trapdoor functions was the biggest advance in cryptography since hiding things under rocks, and goes back to publications by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in 1976.

Archimedes

See my note on him in
The Fire Seekers
. The newest research makes a good case that the Antikythera Mechanism was manufactured in about 205 BCE, which makes it slightly too recent for Archimedes—he had his terminal encounter with a Roman soldier during the sacking of Syracuse in 211 BCE—but it could have been based on his design.

Socrates and knowing how ignorant you are

The point was also made by the great Chinese sage Lao-tzu, or Laozi. Speaking of ignorance, I’ve always thought it fascinating that Socrates and Lao had so many things in common, and were near contemporaries, but had no idea that each other’s entire civilizations existed.

The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich is easily the oddest and most beautiful of all the great “mystery” texts, in my opinion—take a look at the many pages reproduced online. It is, contrary to my fictional history, still in the Beinecke Library at Yale. “Solutions” to the mystery are legion; good luck.

“Let there be light”: What’s involved in creating a universe?