All Alone in the Dark Forest

By Bobby Neal Winters

If there is intelligent life in the universe, where is it?

I’ll make the easy joke and then get on to business: It sure isn’t here.

That out of the way, the question is known as the Fermi Paradox.  It is attributed to the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi who believed that if there was other intelligent life in the universe, then it would have had enough time to begin spreading and would have arrived at Earth by now.

This makes the assumption that we aren’t one of the first intelligent species to arise, and that is fair. In science they try not to assume that there is anything special about us.  This strikes me as unnecessarily limiting, but let’s proceed.

My YouTube feed is filled with videos regarding the Fermi Paradox.  It looms large in my life.  It’s everywhere.  There seems to be a cottage industry among YouTube creators who make content about the Fermi Paradox.  Hairs are split and then sliced thinner and thinner. Content is recirculated.

And I eat it up.

There are a number of solutions to the Fermi Paradox. The one I am going to name now is called the Dark Forest solution.

This comes to mind because I’ve just finished a novel by Cixin Liu called “The Dark Forest.”  It is the second book in his trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past.  The first was “The Three-Body Problem.”  I liked the first book enough to read the second, but I waited because it exhausted me.  The second is even better, but I will need to rest again before I tackle the third, “Death’s End.”

Returning to the Fermi Paradox, what the Dark Forest Solution says is that an intelligent race in the universe needs to act like an unarmed person who is alone in a dark forest which might have predators hunting within it.  You don’t want to make any noise; you don’t want to light your flashlight; you don’t want to do anything to attract attention.

For an intelligent race in the universe, this means that you don’t want to do anything that shows the universe that you are intelligent.

Well.  I can’t say what we look like from stellar distances, but up close we are hiding our intelligence just fine.

All kidding aside, on one hand this looks like a pretty good argument.  It was good enough to carry the novel by that name.  On the other hand, I’ve heard convincing scientific arguments that you can’t really hide an intelligent civilization for very long.  It has to do with the products of industry and so forth.  But that gets technical really quick.  If you are interested, I suggest you go to YouTube and search “Isaac Arthur Fermi Paradox” and be prepared to spend some time.

I’ve settled down to the opinion that intelligent life is very rare.  Scientists say that life arose on earth at the very first moment it was possible for it to do so. Taking that at face value, this means that either (1) it is very easy for life to arise or (2) it arose somewhere else and arrived here beginning to grow when it was possible to.

Given either of these alternatives, it took billions of years to get from life arising to the so-called homo sapiens, man the wise.  That means that however easy life is, intelligence is hard.

We are looking out on the universe with ever more sophisticated equipment--the latest being the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)--and we are seeing no signs of intelligence. There is one indication of possible life, which they will argue about for years and years and years, but we’ve not seen the markers of intelligent life.

This argues that it’s rare.  Maybe so rare that we are it.

Given the pictures of the universe that the JWST is sending us, where untold billions of galaxies are in an area of the sky that can be hidden behind a grain of sand. Within that picture, our galaxy--not our sun, our galaxy--looks like a mote of dust in a sunbeam. 

That is absolutely terrifying.  

The Dark Forest Solution to the Fermi Hypothesis aside, there are those who’ve been looking for extraterrestrial intelligence to be the “adult in the room.” There are those who use extraterrestrial intelligence as a replacement for God.  They keep saying, “There must be life elsewhere, and some of it must be intelligent.”

Or we could be all alone in a dark forest.

It strikes me that the human race was once all alone in the dark forest.  We learned to build fires and soon taught any predators who came near to be afraid themselves.

Just a thought.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Woodturning and the Great Divide

By Bobby Neal Winters

I think it was late March, and I think it was just before spring break. I should’ve noted the date more carefully because history was a-being made, as they say.  I’ll be marking the time of my life from that trip.

I made a trip to the Grizzly Store in Springfield, Missouri.

Words won’t adequately describe it, so I won’t even try.  Let me just say that if you are someone who enjoys the practice of woodworking in any of its manifestations, then this store is a place for you.  It is to woodworking stores as Buc-ee’s is to quick-stop gas stations: The quintessence has been distilled, concentrated, and put into a water tower to the point of overflowing.

Can I compare it to Rocklers? Can I compare it to Woodcraft? Both are fine places. You might as well compare a campfire to a supernova, an M&M to the planet Jupiter made entirely of fudge.

I bought a new lathe there, and then took my wife to Buc-ee’s for lunch.  We should’ve done it the other way around because she insisted on sitting in the truck with the lathe while I fetched us a bit of brisket on a bun.  Not that I think that anyone is going to tuck a 100-pound lathe under their arm and make a run for it, but you never know.

I’ve been on a journey through the World of Wood-Working and only relatively recently have I found myself in the area of wood-turning, the Land of the Lathe.

Before coming into the Land of the Lathe, I discovered that the World of Wood-Working has many surprising divides in it, many borders that are reinforced with land mines and concertina wire.

There is the division between hand tools and power tools, for instance. There are purists on both sides of the divide.  There are those on the hand tool side that will rip boards by hand, eschewing the much more convenient table saw; they will mill up all of their boards by hand, using hand planes and the like instead of planers.  

On the power tool side, there are those, by way of contrast, who will use power tools even for those tasks that are more easily done by hand.  They will use a router to chamfer their edges when a hand plane would do the job better and more safely.

Can you imagine?

For most of us woodworkers, this boundary is like the border between Brazil and Paraguay at Ciudad del Este: As porous as all get out; folks are running back and forth and nobody is checking your passport.

And let’s not even talk about the “pocket hole” divide. Talk about land mines and concertina wire.

And each of these comes with its own hierarchy of practice.

While I do have some strong opinions on each of these, let me just ask in a child-like way, can’t we all just get along?

While I do try to straddle the fence, I do like doing as much with hand tools as can be done easily and well, but once you take up the lathe, you can’t be a hand tool purist anymore.  You are in the middle of downtown power tools.

(I say that, but there are those purists who build and use human-powered lathes. My hat is off to you, but I will give you a little distance because you are--and I mean this in the kindest possible way--crazy.)

The big divide in the world of woodturning, the Land of the Lathe, is that between gouges made of high speed steel and those that are tipped with carbide.

Your project is on your lathe turning at anywhere from 300 to 3000 revolutions per minute and you have your gouge pressed to the wood, creating sawdust at a rate that you’d never believed possible before doing it yourself.  

This works great until the gouge gets dull, but then something needs to be done.

If you use high speed steel, you need to take it over to your slow speed bench grinder and sharpen it.  By way of contrast, if you have a carbide tipped gouge, you can get away with loosening a screw, turning your tip a quarter turn, and then tightening the screw.  I should say, you can do that four times before you have to plop down twenty dollars for a new tip. While you can sharpen a carbide tip, I get the impression that most people don’t.

In case you are wondering, I’ve got both types. The carbide tips are easier to use, but you can’t do as much with them.  I am trying to learn how to use high speed steel, but there is something to be learned there.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Ye Shall Know the Truth

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are in a very confused and chaotic time. There is a lot of information and a lot more “information.”  I was about to write “but you can’t make a pattern out of it,” but, hell, you can make dozens of patterns out of it. Mutually contradictory ones. It’s all over the place.

Maybe I am just not ready to understand. 

You would think that being clear and forthright would be the best way to communicate, but there are some things you can’t just say to people outright. 

They are not ready to hear.  

After my Rotary trip to Russia, I explained in plain terms what it was like to a man who had certain preconceptions that he couldn’t overcome.  I could tell by his facial expressions that he was writing me off as an “ugly American” so I stopped talking to him about it.

Communication to those who are unprepared, or negatively prepared in his case, is sometimes so difficult as to be futile. Or worse. Sometimes people lash out.  Sometimes they will use what you say against you.

I am in a Bible Study that is going through the Gospel of Luke right now. Jesus taught in parables and then explained to his disciples what the parables meant.

They asked him why?

He quoted from the Book of Isaiah saying: “though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand.”

The truths he was sharing were meant for the in-group, the group of people that was on his side. Others might eventually pick up on it, but only after they had studied him so much they would almost be a part of the in-group anyway.  Indeed, the final insight might actually bring them in.

The process of being prepared to learn the truth can often be difficult.  It is so intertwined with the process of growing-up as to almost be inseparable from it.  This is because the truth is often unpleasant.  When it’s too bitter for our unprepared palate, we reject it.

I can hear my own voice in my head saying, “Oh, Dad, that’s not true.”

He’d just turn away.

Years, nay decades, have passed, and not only do I understand what he was saying, I know he was right, and that maybe that was only the half of it.

We ignore truths that we are not prepared for. We ignore truths that don’t fit our DisneyLand idea of reality.  We sip at the bitter medicine and spit it out, or sniff at it and don’t taste it at all.

In skillful hands, this can be used to transmit more than one message at the same time. A potent medicine can be hidden inside a sugary liquid.

I watched a movie last night.

No, I actually watched two movies. They were on at the same time, on the same screen, starring the same actors.  They were saying the same dialog, but one was there for you to pick up on the surface and the other was in the background and very subtly told.

By great writing and understated acting.

The movie was “The Family Way” with Haley Mills, but don’t dismiss this as being for kids.  While the surface story can be followed by teenagers the deep story requires you to bring something with you. It’s given in small pieces spread throughout the so-called main plot. You know those codes hidden in a book where you pick out the first letter of the word and it spells out a message.

It’s like that.

In the current tempest, I try to do more listening than talking. I am looking for pieces to the puzzle.  I am trying to make sense of it all.  Trying to put together pieces of the puzzle.

Nothing yet.

Maybe there is no puzzle.  Maybe this is just a descent into chaos.

Or maybe the Descent into Chaos is the puzzle and I just don’t want to see it.

That could be.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Vaccines in the Post-Truth World

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am going to talk about vaccines. Put a pin in that for a moment.

We are living in a troubling chaotic time. 

And I am getting old. I’ve been blessed to not to have lived in such turbulent times as did my father and his father, but I ain’t dead yet, so I’ve still got a chance.

Yea me.

Anyway, I am writing about vaccines because I was scrolling through Facebook when I came upon some posts by some people whom I know to be intelligent who were posting about vaccines as if they were pure poison.

This disturbs me.

Let’s talk about vaccines. 

We like bright, straight lines in human knowledge but often the truth is fractal. The science of vaccines is one of the places where the truth is fractal.

Vaccines have saved a lot of lives. A lot. We don’t have smallpox anymore; we’ve almost whipped polio. Almost. My buddies in Rotary and I are working on it.

In the course of writing this article, I got out of my comfort zone in terms of scientific knowledge, so I contacted a couple of experts in the field.  They are smart people because I can tell that they are; that’s my superpower.  They are not in the pay of big pharma; I can tell because they don’t drive Mercedes-Benzes.

What I distill from them is the following:

Not all vaccines are the same, but each has a lot of scientific research behind it.  The research is complicated enough that most people simply won’t understand the details.   Regardless of their efficacy, vaccines do have side effects.  Some of them have more and/or worse side effects than others. Medical judgment has to be applied in their use.  For example, the rabies vaccine is very painful, as I understand, but if you are bitten by an infected animal and don’t take it you will die an incredibly painful death.  The side-effects of the treatment have to be weighed against the benefits and vice verse. This is true for every vaccine. Though not every vaccine is so extreme.

I can tell you from personal experience that the shingles vaccine has some unpleasant side effects.  I felt like I had the flu.  Every joint in my body ached.  However, everyone who has had the shingles said, “Yeah, I know, take the shot anyway.”

The devil lies in whose judgment do you trust? 

I trust the folks that I talked to for the reasons that I said. They also say the COVID vaccine did stall the pandemic; there is little doubt of this.  Is it possible that they have been misled by disinformation from those who seek to manipulate the system for their own benefit?  I will admit that is possible if those who are against vaccines will admit the same.

My father lived in a time when there was still smallpox in the world.  We vaccinated everyone for it, and now it is gone.  There was polio abroad in the world during their time as well, and now it is almost entirely gone. Those are two cases where vaccines were exceptionally effective.  By way of contrast, we still have to vaccinate for flu every year.  It will probably be with us forever.

We live in an age that has no memory of the past. If it didn’t happen to us, it’s gone.  We are not only ignorant, we are proud of being ignorant.

And we’ve been given the “gift” of social media so that now we are free to destroy truth at an unprecedented pace.  

My poor old brain is a whirlwind of country songs and bits of the Bible.

In the whirlwind turns this from the 3rd chapter of James’ Epistle: “When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.”

You always knew where you stood with James. What would he say about Facebook?

The point I want to draw from this is that once we say something out loud in front of the crowd our egos make us stand by it.  “I was wrong” is harder to say than “Honey, I’ve been kissing the superglue.”

And as we post and repost who is pulling on the bits in our mouths?

This argues for either developing the humility to admit when you are wrong or to developing the ability to just keep your mouth shut.

I’ll be sitting over here holding my breath while the people of the world do that.

I know two things. The first is that this column will not have changed anyone’s mind.  Those against vaccination will steadfastly remain against vaccination.  The second is that I will continue to be vaccinated when my doctor tells me I should.

Welcome to the post-truth world.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.