[via LaToya Egwuekwe]

The Cold War affected science fiction during some of its most important and formative years. SF books published during the Cold War reflected that period's politics as well as its rapidly-advancing technologies. Here is a short history of the relationship between the Cold War and science fiction.

The Global Standoff

The end of one war signaled the beginning of another. The atomic bombs that were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States Air Force marked the beginnings of a massive change in the way warfare would be conducted. While the power of atomic weaponry had become a major, visible aspect of the tensions that sprang up between the US and USSR, a major development that helped to deliver those tensions was the introduction of rockets that could be used on the battlefield. Examining the issue further, one cannot help but point to the very industrial nature that warfare had undertaken. The Second World War saw numerous countries turn their economy over to continuing to fight.

One of the earliest works of fiction to predict this style of warfare was H.G. Wells' 1933 novel, The Shape of Things to Come, which the author called a 'future history'. In it, Wells not only predicted the upcoming Second World War, but also the introduction of submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and, despite a discovery that was years away, the introduction of nuclear warheads. The industrial nature of war that helped characterize World War II is an element of the Cold War. Following the collapse of the Axis forces in Europe and the Pacific, both the United States and Russia found themselves with large standing militaries, with an industrial base to help support them. Indeed, this foundation prompted American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1959, to warn against a looming military-industrial complex, as he feared that it might lead the United States into future confrontations.

While World War II did not see the widespread use of rocket warfare, (just scattered attacks against England and Allied-held European countries at the very end of the war), the use of rockets in combat was half a century old. In the late 1800s, and through to the early years of the 20th century, notable rocket pioneers such as Kontantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard and Herman Oberth, were all inspired by Jules Verne's book, From The Earth To The Moon, depicting rocket travel as a means to reach our nearest neighbor in space.

With the seeds of rocket travel, and its possibilities, planted in the minds of numerous scientists, the Second World War brought forth a favorable time for scientific endeavor, especially when it could be connected to military hardware. The German military developed the World's first ballistic missile and would later put the first jet plane into service, technologies that were later swept up into the Soviet and American arsenals in the years right after the war. In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic warhead, and the race for superior delivery systems began, beginning an age of rocket warfare and first strike scenarios.

Part of the arms race between the world's two major superpowers was the quest to develop bigger and better rockets, a pursuit which would later merge into the space agencies from both countries, accomplishing what had been up to that point, science fiction - the first human in space, the first space walk and the first man on the Moon. While this was a scenario predicted by Verne in his book, no author had captured the possibilities of space because of this race better than Arthur C. Clarke, whose short story, "The Sentinel," and later novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, showed a near future that saw space habitats, permanent lunar colonization and exploration further into the solar system. While these developments have ultimately not been accomplished in the same way that Clarke's book's title might suggest, it was a work that clearly took the space race for inspiration.

The threat of nuclear destruction was a prevalent one in science fiction, and the 1986 publication of Alan Moore's landmark comic, Watchmen, demonstrates the continued tension between the two countries. Easily, the best example of this in the book is in the character of Dr. Manhattan (who's creation is linked to the very weapon that threatens the world), and his use by the United States as a deterrent in and of himself. As military power is an extension of a nation's politics, the opposition to communism was embodied in the nuclear standoff, used by both countries as a means to further their international ambitions.

The Opposition to Communism

The global struggle that became the Cold War was not just embodied in the warheads that each country maintained; it was in the economic and philosophical makeup of both countries. From the roots of communism with Karl Marx's 1848 book, The Communist Manifesto came a new way of thinking about labor relations that in essence, threatened the capitalistic structure upon which the United States rested. The roots of communism were well established in the world by the 1940s, when Robert Heinlein wrote his short story, "The Roads Must Roll." In this short story, Heinlein presents a world where class struggle is very much a part of the life, and shows an organized workforce that rises as a result of inequalities. This is paralleled by a very real fear in the United States of such an up rise, and as a result, throughout the Cold War, there was a heightened sense of awareness of communist sympathizers within the United States.

Indeed, another author at the time, George Orwell, penned his short novel Animal Farm just a handful of years later in 1945. The book looks at another aspect of Communism, one that closely mirrored its author's own politics - one who was sympathetic towards socialist-style governments, but highly critical of the turns that some of these nations underwent, namely Soviet Russia under Joseph Stalin. Over the course of the story, two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, take over their farm by inspiring their fellow farm animals to revolt and drive away the farmer, setting up a communist style government in his place - as what happened in Soviet Russia, the leaders gain power and form a dictatorship, creating a society where "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." And obviously, Orwell's 1984 takes an even more withering view of Communism.

Another Science Fiction work that takes the opposition against communism to heart is Madeleine L'Engle's wonderful novel A Wrinkle in Time. Midway through the book, the children arrive on the planet Camazotz, where the populace is controlled by a singular intelligence. Upon their arrival, they come across a village where everybody acts in harmony, as one. Further examination shows that the society is heavily regimented and controlled by the CENTRAL Central Intelligence Center, and by IT. I remember reading this story and coming away with this chapter most relevant in my mind, and saw allegory here as a great fear of the United States - an overpowering authority that is prevalent in every part of a person's life. Indeed, Soviet Russia had put together a massive totalitarian regime that held the country in an iron grip for decades, one that seemed very reminiscent of from the scenes of this remarkable book. Indeed, this is why the threat of nuclear war had been put into place, and why the stakes were so high.

The End of the World

Possibly the most enduring memory in the American public of the Cold War is that of a lesson that many school children learned during this time. You've most likely already guessed it - duck and cover, hiding under one's desk in a sort of nuclear-attack drill that was most feared by the American public, and most likely, the Soviet public as well. With the introduction of nuclear warheads at the end of the Second World War, the lines of war had shifted beyond the front lines of any war - to the American public, and the economic policies of both the United States and Russia only encouraged a shift from conventional military forces to strategic and deterrent based weapons.

While the world's worst fears never came to pass, the idea of nuclear annihilation was certainly ripe for the science fiction genre. A particularly memorable story by Ray Bradbury demonstrates the outcome of such a way, and carries itself easily without the use of any characters whatsoever - a sure possibility in the event that humanity was wiped from the planet. The focus of this story, "There Will Come Soft Rains," part of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, demonstrates that while humanity might become technologically adept - seen through a fully automated house that carries on its duties even without its inhabitants, who seem to have been killed or driven off after a nuclear war. "There Will Come Soft Rains" acts as a cautionary tale from the 1950s, and indeed, carries with it messages relevant even through to today.

Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, is a book that was very easy to relate to current events at the time of publication - Frank talks about the Korean War in the story. Published in 1959, this book is an early post-apocalyptic take on the world, and over the course of the story, demonstrates the style of warfare that had become commonplace, one of strategy, where both opponents circle one another, looking for a weakness to exploit. The bombs fall against the United States, and the story of the survivors is the ultimate commentary, a questioning look at whether such risks to human civilization are needed or really matter in the long run, as one character notes: "We won it. We really clobbered them, not that it matters."

Another powerful tale that looks to a world after the bombs fall is Walter Miller Jr.'s A Canticle For Leibowitz, and witnesses the rebuilding of society in the aftermath of a nuclear war that devastated the world. An order of monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz take it upon themselves to preserve scientific knowledge, and the book looks to the rise and fall of society once again - a theme that is common in Science Fiction, form Isaac Asimov's Foundation to Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica (interestingly, both also look to the collapse of civilization). Certainly, with even a fraction of the weapons buildup over the course of the war able to completely destroy the planet, the idea of society's total collapse and destruction certainly was not as farfetched as some might think.

The advent, risk and fear of global destruction is one that carries with it an enormous amount of weight and certainly carries with it plenty of stories and possibilities for both science fiction writers, historians, political science junkies and philosophers. Science fiction stories such as There Will Come Soft Rains, Alas Babylon and A Canticle for Leibowitz are in a unique position to examine some of the more farfetched, but relevant themes that allowed people to look at the subject in any number of possibilities and outcomes.

The Aftermath

Still, with the threat of global destruction, there is certainly room for the stories that demonstrate what would happen in a world without the destruction of humanity. Certainly, one of the finest works to look to this is Childhood's End, by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, which sees the end of global conflict with the appearance of a number of alien ships over the skies of numerous cities around the world, frightening the world into peace, and allowing for a global age of prosperity. To some extent, this is a brilliant take on the idea of global defense, as it removes the responsibility of global destruction from humanity, yet at the same time, removes the need for offensive capabilities from them. This is still an idea borne out of science fiction, as nuclear warheads continue to make up a significant part of a deterrent based arsenal. Just because the United States and Soviet Union never went to war to end civilization, it doesn't necessarily mean that that possibility is forever banished from the realm of possibility.

Still, while that is the case, there is one final aspect of the nuclear arsenal that is examined in a 2003 short story by Charles Sheffield, (his last), The Waste Land, a detective story that centers around one of the side-effects of a nuclear arsenal, the nuclear waste that would take thousands of years to be rendered inert. In this story, the lead character, Jeff King, investigates a man who's been burned from a rapid exposure to radiation, far more than he should have. The events of the story tells of a new technology that is designed to eliminate the effects of radiation by rapidly speeding up the half-lives of the material in the area, ultimately killing the man who invented it, receiving a lethal dose of radiation, but revealing a means to rid the world of a problem that will last for lifetimes to come.

While the Cold War has effectively been over for twenty years with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the immediate geopolitical threat that came about because of it has collapsed. The world no longer struggles back and forth with an epic battle that pits communism against capitalism, democracy verses totalitarianism, but the science fiction that it inspired lives on in the pages of libraries, personal or otherwise, showing that possible conflicts and technologies that threatened the world. While one wall fell, symbolizing the end of an era, another era, one with as many dangers and influenced by the one before it, has arisen, one that will undoubtedly inspire a comparable number of stories to teach and entertain us.

Image by Andrew Liptak.

Over at Astrobiology magazine, Aaron Gronstal describes new scientific work that led to the creation of this map. What you see here is the landmass which included a land bridge over the Bering Strait - the same bridge that allowed animals and humans to wander from Northern Europe into North America without being hindered by the Arctic Sea. The timeframe here is the Pleiocene and Pleistocene Eras - between 5.3 million to 12,000 years ago - when ice sheets and glaciers covered most of the northern hemisphere. And yet at the same time, some of the iciest parts of today's warmer world were at that time ice-free and full of life. How did that happen?

Gronstal sums up the research:

Temperatures were still low in Beringia during these epochs, but a lack of moisture due to the rainshadow of the surrounding mountain ranges prevented large-scale formation of ice. As the authors [of the new study] put it, "The interior of Yukon and Alaska was cold enough to support ice sheets but too dry for extensive glaciation." Because of this, Beringia was a key location for life during the Pleistocene, when the Earth's climate fluctuated between ice ages and glaciers often covered large portions of the globe.

As the Earth's climate varied, so did sea levels. This ebb and flow of the sea exposed a land-bridge across the Bering Straight between Alaska and Siberia. Not only was this an important route for the migration of animals between the continents of Asia and North America, it also expanded the ice-free land mass of Beringia. This provided a large area that was relatively rich in food – which was a lifesaver for those struggling to survive in the Earth's frozen North. Beringia was by no means a tropical paradise for life, but the cold, wind-swept desert was an important ecological refuge for plants and animals when glaciation of the Earth was at its peak.

This map is a perfect demonstration of how complicated the results are when we see massive weather shifts on Earth. Some areas that were uninhabitable become habitable in unforeseen ways.

via Astrobiology

According to Strange Maps:

Leighton suggested that the old borough boundaries should be altered to conform to a honeycomb pattern. Within a 5-mile radius of the General Post Office all the sprawling, differently sized boroughs were to become hexagonal-shaped areas, 2 miles across. There were 19 altogether with the City in the centre of the honeycomb. Each hexagonal borough would be identified by a letter, and the letter as well as a number would be painted or cut out of tin-plate to be visible by day and night on lampposts at every street corner.

Very efficient!

More weirdness via Strange Maps

Comic-Con spokesman David Glanzer told us that from its beginnings in 1970, the Con was always a place for all kinds of pop culture, and not just comic books. This openness to many forms of media might have poised it to enter the mainstream right from the start. One of the earliest guests of the Con was literary SF author Ray Bradbury, who was a guest of honor right beside comics legend Jack Kirby.

Early incarnations of the Con attracted at most a few thousand people. As you can see from some of the art in the newsletters and booklets handed out at the Con, there was a distinctly DiY feeling to the event. Sort of like the indie days before the major labels came in and scooped up all the talent.

Variety's Brian Lowry remembers the 1970s Comic-Con as being mostly comics-focused, and he describes how the comic-dominated convention slowly became more focused on all aspects of pop culture:

Back then Comic-Con was truly about comic books and the only stars one was likely to see there were the artists and writers who created them. The confab itself was so strapped for cash that each year the artists donated work — which they dutifully sketched out on easels as a small crowd watched — that were auctioned to help support the gathering.

In those early days, the entire convention of a couple thousand people could be held in a single hotel. One large ballroom functioned as a dealers' room, where vendors displayed their wares, and an adjacent space housed panel discussions. Gradually, studios began to preview movies there, but as often as not those events were disasters, irritating fans as opposed to whetting their appetites.

Although it was more than 30 years ago, for example, I keenly recall a preview of the 1978 feature "Superman," where the studio rep described the campy villain Lex Luthor, played by Gene Hackman, as a real-estate mogul, not a master criminal. He was practically hooted off the stage.

Gradually, the studios started to wise up, hiring publicists specifically trained to handle Comic-Con's savvy but easily riled audience. When Ridley Scott's space-horror film "Alien" was showcased — using little more than a slide show of surrealist H.R. Giger's jaw-dropping conceptual art — the crowd was blown away.

As Lowry hints here, the movie biz is part of what turned the small, friendly West Coast Comics Convention into the massive media juggernaut of today's Comic-Con. George Lucas knew this early on, and brought Star Wars to the Con in 1977.

Because the Con is located very near Los Angeles, the heart of the US culture industry, it was inevitable that there would be cross-pollination between Hollywood and the Con. With movie and TV creators courting Comic-Con attendees' attention, the event was pushed further into the mainstream. The event attracted thousands in the 1980s, but then it really began to bust out of its seams in the 1990s.

As music critic Darryl Morden recalls:

As big as I thought it had become in 1993, it was even bigger when I came back in 1998 and it's seemed to be bursting at the seams every year since, with Movie and TV taking over, video games playing a part, along with card/role-playing games, giant booths for the major comics companies and major indies, plus screenings, previews, fine art, erotic art, dozens of small publishers in books and comics, fanzines, professional magazines, trinkets, toys . . .

These days, gaming is an integral part of the Con, especially with so many games functioning as crossover projects with movies and comics.

Diversity and location paved the way for the Con's monster success, but ultimately its staying power has a lot to do with its founders and organizers too. Despite the hordes of media and fancy-pants execs cruising around the massive San Diego Convention Center, the organizers have kept the Con fan-centric. There are few special privileges for press (yes, we have to wait in line with everybody else), and even the biggest stars will entertain goofy questions from average fans.

It may be that this democratic fan spirit is ultimately what has made the Con so important. Where else can average people rub shoulders with literary, cinematic and TV mega-stars? San Diego Comic-Con is one of the few public events where creators and fans come together to share the glory of escapism - and the beauty of speculative art.

Additional reporting by Stephen Goldmeier.

Comic-Con entrance, 1986. via studio_qt


The Yubba, a newsletter of the West Coast Comics Convention, in 1972. via twomets

Comic-Con Masquerade, 1987, via brengibble

Comic-Con 1992, via roadkillbuddha



Women in comics panel, 1982. via Alan Light


Ray Bradbury at a mid-1970s convention.

According to Shorpy, this photograph was taken in February 1942, in Akron, Ohio, in a Firestone Rubber facility. Accompanying the photograph is this information:

Conversion. Beverage containers to aviation oxygen cylinders. After shatterproof oxygen cylinders for high altitude flying have passed all tests in the metal division of a large Eastern rubber factory, hot air is blown through the cylinders to remove all trace of moisture. The cylinders are then sealed and stacked for painting.

It's easy to forget that recycling is hardly a new idea, even for materials like rubber. In this respect (and many others), what was futuristic in the 1940s remains futuristic now.

via Shorpy

Hailing from the Middle Eocene (about 47 million years ago), this discovery will help to shed light on the early history of a potential human ancestor. Discovered in the late 1980s, the specimen was divided into two separate parts and sold to different buyers, and wasn't reassembled until 2007.

This new species, now called Darwinius masillae, is named for Charles Darwin, and is believed to exist very close to an evolutionary branch that would eventually lead to modern primates and humans. This specimen in particular is a young female, named Ida, and is so highly preserved that soft tissues and fur impressions were preserved, along with the digestive tract that allowed researchers to discover the last meal that it ingested - fruits and leaves. She also had a broken wrist, which had since healed, and it is believed that she would have been about 9 months old. Alive, she would have weighed around two pounds, and about two feet in length.

This finding is a remarkable one, not only for the high preservation of the fossil, but for the potential implications for paleontologists. A mere twenty million years prior to this is the KT boundary, a major extinction line that saw the demise of the Dinosaurs. With their passing came the rise of the mammals, and a world that looked much like ours today. The location where Ida was discovered is known as the Grube Messel, a World Heritage Site, and 47 million years ago, it was a para-tropical rain forest.

Complete specimens are also extremely useful for scientists, to learn as much as possible about the species. This particular find is missing an arm, and is somewhat crushed, but remains the most complete primate ever discovered, which will yield an enormous amount of information on how Ida and her kind moved, what they ate and what their life cycle would likely have been. Certain changes between this and earlier fossils also helps to uncover information about the evolution of this group, and Ida seems to represent a certain amount of diversification within this group of primates. Scientists believe that this species falls at an early time in the ancestral line that would eventually lead to humans.

Source: /PLoS ONE/

R.U.R. introduced audiences to the term "robot" (from the Czech word "robota," meaning labor or servitude), and gave humanity its first glimpse of a world conquered by machines.

Ironically, given the subject matter, Capek felt betrayed by his own creation. The French author Romain Rolland sat with Capek during one of the early performances, and recalled that Capek kept apologizing for the play's poor quality and pleaded for him not to watch.

Capek needn't have worried: critics and theatergoers were enthralled. Performances of the play-a thinly veiled critique of technocracy and capitalist greed-were staged in cities throughout Europe and the United States. Roman Dyboksi, a Polish professor of literature living in London, wrote an article in the June 1923 journal, Slavonic Review Essays, which captured the mood of the audience:

That something tragic and overwhelming is about to happen is the feeling which grips you at once when, in the opening scene of R.U.R., you behold the automatic girl typist at work, with her uncanny efficiency and inhumanly expressionless white face; and when you hear her say, in even tones, to a sympathetic human girl, that she will "cease to move" after they have cut her open.

The robots in R.U.R. were not mechanical beings, but biological creations more akin to the later "replicants" of Blade Runner or the "skinjob" Cylons in Battlestar Galactica. Capek's robots were cooked-up in vats containing a chemical protoplasm and then given shape through "kneading troughs" and "stamping mills." The process was invented by a character known only as "Old Rossum," who was obsessed with one-upping God by creating artificial human beings. But the inventor's son saw moneymaking potential in the robots and created a simpler version to be mass-produced and sold as inexpensive workers. Thus, the company Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.) was born.

In the play, things take a turn for the worse when an idealistic young woman, Helena, appears on the scene. She is determined to end the exploitation of her fleshbot brethren and cajoles the chief engineer into restoring their humanity and giving them souls. But, no sooner do the robots become self-aware than they launch a war to exterminate the inferior human race. (That proves not to be such a difficult goal since human fertility is in decline-the world's drive toward mechanization has apparently made people superfluous.) The robot leader declares:

We will give birth by machine. We will build a thousand steam-powered mothers. From them will pour forth a river of life. Nothing but life! Nothing but Robots!

Not so fast, Megatron: Helena, realizing her mistake, destroys the recipe for the robot-making process-which pisses off her mechanized overlords, since they have a mere twenty-year lifespan. The robots try to manufacture new robots, but succeed only in producing "bloody chunks of meat." Just when everything seems lost for both robots and humankind, two robots display human feelings and fall in love. They ride off into the sunset as the new Adam and Eve, leaving audiences to wonder: All this has happened before, will it happen again?

R.U.R. wasn't exactly a typical night out at the theater, but it clearly struck a chord with audiences who had recently witnessed the unprecedented destruction that technology had wrought during World War I. "Great drama has arrived," declared an LA Times film critic; "one of the most notable achievements of the Copley Theatre," said the Boston Globe.

Poet Carl Sandburg was also a fan. After a New York Times columnist wrote an article citing R.U.R. as an example of subversive, anti-American propaganda, Sandburg penned a lengthy rebuke lecturing the Times on the differences between propaganda and allegory. He concluded with the observation:

In its various windings, R.U.R. is significant, important, teasing, quizzical, funny, terrible, paradoxical. It has its kinship with the strongest plays of Henrik Ibsen, who fought many years against the view that his dramas set forth propaganda, his own thought being that his plots and characters only ask big and terrible questions, leaving the answers to those who choose to fathom the depths of their minds for answers.

Another celebrity fanboy was H.G. Wells who, in 1927, wrote a scathing review of Metropolis (the "silliest film" he had ever seen) and faulted the movie for its complete lack of originality: "Capek's robots have been lifted without apology."

R.U.R. would undergo several subsequent revivals, and each generation read new meaning into the play based upon current events. In 1923, Dyboski saw the robot revolt as a reenactment of:

That ghastly real scene which had been played in exactly the same way over and over again in the houses of factory managers in the Urals and other industrial regions of Russia only a few short years ago. There the revolted automata had been Russian Bolshevik working-men of flesh and blood, as imperfectly and unsuccessfully humanized as the ‘Robots' in the play.

In the 1930s and 1940s, R.U.R. became a commentary on fascism. The New York Times observed in 1939, shortly after Capek's death:

If the late Karel Capek had lived a little longer, he would have seen the first act of his fantastic play R.U.R. come horribly true, and among his own countrymen…Germany, in taking over the Czech race, body, and soul, has already started remaking them into robots….Their only function is to work for the benefit of the Nazi state and without even the right to an opinion of their own condition.

A 1942 revival of the play at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre printed a quote from FDR in its program:

We exult in the thought that it is the young, free men and women of the United Nations, and not the wound-up robots of the slave states, who will mold the shape of the new world.

Perhaps the most peculiar revival was a 1950 production that was staged at the behest of MIT professor Norbert Wiener-the pioneering researcher who created the field of cybernetics. Wiener saw the play as an opportunity to deliver a lecture on his theories and introduce the media to his box-and-wheels robot creation, "Palomilla." Unfortunately, his message was somewhat overshadowed by the stumblings of the young MIT engineers turned thespians. The Harvard Crimson wrote:

R. U. R. suffered from the stock-in-trade faults of amateur theater. The flats fell down backstage, and the actors blew their lines. The important last act of the play was omitted for simplicity…. Professor Wiener, like Capek, has thought and written about the influence of the machine on society. In his prologue, Wiener pointed out that Capek was mistaken in postulating a society based on universal robots, that we were leaning more to specialized machines that faithfully perform specific tasks.

Then the professor turned towards one wing of the tiny stage, clapped, and commanded: "Here, Palomilla!" Palomilla nosed out from behind a curtain, a buzzing four-wheeled cart which doggedly trailed a flashlight held by Wiener's assistant. Palomilla made mistakes; it ran back into the curtain once and stalled often. But it acted with at least as much decision and far more speed than an earthworm.
When Palomilla had crept offstage, Professor Wiener pointed out that "this is a simple animal," and described some of Palomilla's more modern descendents. Then he leaned over at the audience and said the time was gone when we could afford to make machines for the sake of making machines, that to avoid a society of R. U. R. we would have to start worrying about the moral value of the machines, deciding whether they were good or bad. "The engineer must become more and more a poet," said Professor Wiener, and Palomilla buzzed once more, quietly, behind its curtain.

In the years since, the idea of a robot rebellion has been the fodder for countless sci-fi films, albeit with (mostly) better production values. But, out of all of them, I find Ron Moore's vision of Battlestar Galactica to be most reminiscent of R.U.R.: A robotic slave race that evolves and revolts-believing that the complete destruction of the human race is its divine right, yet ultimately failing to achieve true humanity through its inability to reproduce.

And both productions present the idea that human beings are ultimately destroyed not by their creations, but by their fallibilities. In one scene of R.U.R., a scientist defends the dream of manufacturing robots, saying the goal was to liberate the human race from the drudgery of labor. Another character responds:

Old Rossum thought only of his godless hocus-pocus and young Rossum of his billions. And that wasn't the dream of your R.U.R. shareholders either. They dreamed of the dividends. And on those dividends humanity will perish.

Bill Adama couldn't have said it better himself. Well, actually he did, during his speech at Battlestar Galactica's decommissioning ceremony:

Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed and spite, jealousy, and we still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept the responsibility for anything that we've done, like we did with the Cylons. We decided to play God, create life. And when that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasn't our fault, not really. You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore.

So say we all. Arguably, though, this is just a fancified way of restating Frankenstein Ethics 101: Don't play God, because we're not yet up to the task. But, R.U.R. embraces another theme, one that is unique to the mass production of robots: the ethics of creating a servile race. Sitting in a darkened theater more than 85 years ago, Roman Dyboksi was compelled to reflect:

The play makes us ponder the truth irritatingly repeated from time to time by cynics, and never pleasant to hear, that high culture always rests on a solid foundation of human slavery.

Indeed, it's a truism we still confront today. No matter how much "fair trade" coffee we try to gulp down, in the back of our minds is the uncomfortable fact that our standard of living too often depends on the exploitation of others. So, with all due respect to the late Professor Norbert Wiener, the real issue is not the morality we endow upon our machines, but the morality we endow upon ourselves. The scenario that Karl Capek dreamed up as allegory is now edging closer to reality. If we do succeed in creating truly sentient, artificial intelligence, will we see such beings as our equals or our slaves?

Mark Strauss is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine.

A staggering 5.4 million people watched the Life After People special back in January, the most in the history of, well, History (formerly the History Channel). One of a number of books and specials exploring the future of this planet if humans suddenly vanished, Life After People was successful enough to warrant an entire ten-episode series, further exploring the premise.

I wouldn't necessarily have thought there was ten hours worth of material to be had from this idea, particularly when the original documentary covered so much ground, but the series has quite a few tricks up its sleeve.

The series premiere, "The Bodies Left Behind," makes the rather unusual move of looking at what will happen to those already dead when all the living humans disappear. The episode explores everything from Egyptian mummies to cryogenically frozen bodies, comparing their potential longevity with more abstract attempts to preserve humanity for posterity, such as the Sistine Chapel or the Statue of Liberty.

"Outbreak", the next episode, does what any good second episode should do and unleashes some utter chaos. All the pets roam free, plants grow uncontrollably, and viruses that humans had conquered return with a vengeance. The third episode, "The Capital Threat", appeals to the patriotic side of our post-apocalyptic voyeurism by examining the fates of various symbols of American democracy, from the Washington Monument to the Constitution.

Throughout, Life After People will feature interview from experts in all relevant fields, including engineering, geology, and archaeology. The series will also visit sites that humans have already left, such as Japan's Hashima Island, a former coal-mining facility that was once the most densely populated place in human history before its abandonment in 1974. And the series promises to continue the original special's proud tradition of examining what happens to skyscrapers when all the humans leave (I can't help but suspect this whole enterprise is really just a serious, high-minded attempt to make The Simpsons' vision of the Fox special When Buildings Collapse into a reality).

Get ready for the return of Life After People, with this trailer for the original special. The series debuts at 10 pm on Tuesday, April 21.

The Black Mirror & Other Stories: An Anthology of Science Fiction From Germany & Austria (Wesleyan University Press, 2008) samples 25 stories spanning the history of German and Austrian SF. Editor Franz Rottensteiner has made his life's work studying and writing about science fiction. Rottensteiner's insightful, detailed commentary and biographical sketches add to your enjoyment of these stories. His brief but fascinating introduction chronicles the development of the genre and the mutual influence it had on society. Mike Mitchell's excellent translation also deserves special notice. He translates convoluted wordplay and obscure idioms, as well as imagined technical jargon seamlessly, while preserving the native voice of the authors.

Although it could be argued that it all began with the fantastical musings of Kepler about life on the Moon, the real origins of science fiction in Germany spring from the late 18th Century, on the heels of Jules Verne's voyages extraordinaires.

Without a doubt, the chief pioneer of German science fiction is Kurd Lasswitz (1848-1910), whose name was given to Germany's most prestigious science fiction prize. Lasswitz combined his extensive knowledge of physics and mathematics with a utopian philosophy influenced by Kant, Schiller, and Gustav Fechner (yeah, I never heard of him either). One of his main themes was technologically and mentally advanced races with a corresponding superior moral sense, quite unlike the übermensch proposed by Nietzsche.

One of my favorite authors, Jorge Luis Borges, cited Lasswitz as the direct inspiration for his "Library of Babel". His speculative technologies may have influenced Hugo Gernsback. He prefigured the sleep-teaching machines and extreme eugenics of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World by over fifty years. In his very first published story, included in The Black Mirror, Lasswitz imagines a global system of bulletin boards that instantly transmit news, entertainment adverts, and personal opinions on strongly-felt topics. Could this be the first depiction of a internet flame war, way back in 1871?

Kurd Lasswitz didn't skimp on the hard sciences either. His most famous novel, 1897's Two Planets (or Auf zwei Planeten,) uses realistic and accurate descriptions of orbital mechanics, with the trajectories and mid-course corrections needed to travel between Earth and Mars. It also contains one of the earliest appearances of an artificial satellite or space station. Reading Two Planets led many young boys to become interested in space travel and rocketry, including Willy Ley, Walter Hohmann and Wernher von Braun who were instrumental in our first forays out of Earth's gravity well.

Despite some of the heavy high-falutin' topics, I found Lasswitz far more accessible to the modern reader than many of his contemporaries like Verne - and his writing is darn funny in places, even. Speaking of which, check out "Jules Verne in Hell: A Letter to the Editor From the Late Writer" by the Austrian Ludwig Hevesi in 1906. This is a hysterical satire, set in the Infernal Reaches, that would not be out of place in a comic book from DC/Vertigo.

One can imagine the disgust and dismay of these early writers as Kaiser Wilhem's policies marched further and further away from the benevolent enlightened utopias of their dreams. World War I plunged Europe into madness, and paper was a valuable commodity for the war effort - certainly not to be wasted on dime-novels, or romanhefte, much less the mewlings of starry-eyed pacifists.

Science fiction returned after the War to End All Wars a changed figure, nursing deep wounds and dark thoughts. Many of the stories from this period concern futuristic wars, often against the French or British, led by heroic scientists and engineers. Rottensteiner's selections from this period are toned down in this aggressive nationalist theme flavor but the zeitgeist is clearly detectable.

When the Nazis came into power, they felt no gratitude to the Hefte SF writers for sharing their visions of power and conquest. Indeed the Third Reich heavily censored or banned the "Schmutz und Schund" (filth and trash) of the pulp novels. The genre tales that were published were mostly concerned with Aryan supermen, the raising of Atlantis, Hollow-Earth theories and similar crap. Few examples of Nazi-era science fiction survived the bombings and fires of the WWII. The editor has opted to leave these out of The Black Mirror.

In fact, there was little or no science fiction for quite some time after the war either. Certainly during reconstruction, people had other things on their minds. But it may be that it took some time for modern German and Austrian culture to find their own unique voices expunged of the warped views that had earlier permeated them.

It wasn't until the early 1960s that German science fiction began to flourish again. The book includes three fascinating pieces by Herbert W. Franke, from his 1960 collection of ultra-short stories, The Green Comet. These brief thought experiments pack a powerful punch, despite appearing rather spare and abstract. Franke was a prolific author, non-fiction science writer and early pioneer of computer graphics as art. He championed a view of science fiction as a literature of ideas, firmly based on a rigorous understanding of scientific principles, and he continues to be a major figure in the genre today.

There is a growing trend in stories about environmental concerns starting from this time. Carl Amery was a mainstream writer who wrote often in science fiction with themes of allohistory, time travel and ecological disasters. The witty and imaginative Amery was a Catholic who was deeply critical of the Church, and a founding member of the Green Party in Germany. I would really like to see some of his novels translated into English.

Meanwhile in East Germany, science fiction was developing very differently. At first, authors in the German Democratic Republic were expected to write with themes extolling the glorious socialist revolution. But by the 1960s there wasn't much pressure for them to adhere to Communist ideology, so they were free to explore new ideas and grow artistically. Being in a smaller and closed market, authors in the GDR were also able to enjoy a higher standard of living than many their colleagues in the West. Herr Rottensteiner feels that by the 1970s science fiction in the East was far superior to West German efforts.

From the three examples he provides, I have to agree. There is a more exuberant and sometimes playful feel with far more convincing characterizations with a strange mythical quality. It's a bit like my love for Corwainer Smith - there's a strangeness and difference I know I like but have a difficult time explaining. We have Johanna & Günter Braun with their satirical travelogue of a odd nation called Parsimonia. Erik Simon wrote "The Black Mirror," from which this collection gets its name. It is a reinterpretation of a story by Gustav Meyrink who wrote The Golem back in 1915. Then there is "The Eye That Never Sleeps" by another married couple, Angela & Karlheinz Steinmüller, that blends mythological imagery into a poisoned post-apocalyptic Latin American setting that parallels the Cyberpunk stories of the 80s. Very cool.

And now a few words on the Perry Rhodan series. These bewilderingly successful pulp novels began in 1961 and have continued to this day nearing 2,000 issues including spin-offs with over a billion copies sold worldwide. Many important authors have contributed to the vast Rhodanverse including some represented in The Black Mirror. The Perry Rhodan stories are incredibly trashy, but the same has been said of Star Trek or Doctor Who.

The anthology closes out with eight mostly strong stories from more recent years. I especially liked "Project 38 or The Game of Small Causes" by Thorsten Küper, about an anarchist hacker who manipulates world events through digital media and social networks, and Oliver Henkel's very clever allohistory "Hitler on the Campaign Trail in America" that shows once again how the world can change from a chance encounter and a few choice words. Also of note is the ultimate cosmological screw-up in "Planck Time" by Michael K. Iwolet and the simple yet powerful little tale "Mother's Flowers" by Andreas Eschbach.

Science Fiction in Germany and Austria has never been ever as popular as Fantasy or Horror, but there is a growing trend for the genre and some authors like Andreas Eschbach are now quite successful writing solely in the field. Eschbach's novel The Carpet Makers was published in English by Tor in 2005. The synopsis sounds very intriguing, and I'll be picking it up despite the enthusiastic recommendation by Orson Scott Card. Much of the writing in all these stories can be dense and philosophical, and took a fair amount of concentration on my part. There is great attention to scientific accuracy - with a few glaring exceptions. I also found more attention to societies as a whole rather than individuals, who are rarely warm and cuddly. The portrayals of characters are at their strongest when concerned with the interior lives of the protagonists. I hate to fall into stereotypes, but it is all very...Germanic, and that's not a bad thing. There is some really intelligent and entertaining reading The Black Mirror. It may not be a must have for every reader but should be on the shelves of any serious school or public library

This smart and very informative science fiction anthology could be looked upon as reflections of Germany and Austria themselves. Two proud nations with brilliant intellectual achievements, always reminded of the dark and ugly faces in their past but scrying into the depths of The Black Mirror to find the future for us all.

The Black Mirror via Amazon

For those of you looking for more information, Franz Rottensteiner has a review of other books about the German perspective on science fiction here.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to Die Erdbewohner as Christopher Hsiang.
We've got a whole planet of books out there, enjoy!
Special thanks to Jörg Westermann for sharing some of his thoughts on growing up German.

The sword guard you see above would have rested between the sword and the handle, and an x-ray revealed a little hole bored in it where you might hang a loop of jewelry - sort of the pirate sword equivalent of a cell phone charm.



Last week National Geographic reported on several other items recovered from the ship, including these tiny nuggets of gold that were hidden in a keg of what was once ammunition. Researchers speculate that one of the shipmen probably hid his gold in there and then it was lost when the ship sank.



Another bit of treasure recovered was this navigational instrument called a "chart divider." According to National Geographic:

Navigational instruments were favorite targets of looting pirates, because the tools could easily be sold or traded, said archaeologist David Moore of the North Carolina Maritime Museum, who is working on the wreck site.

There was also this gold apothecary weight, inlaid with the fleur de lis, a symbol of French royalty, which corroborates the story that Blackbeard stole the ship from France. Apothecary weights might have been used by a ship's doctor, or perhaps by Blackbeard himself for measuring the weight of gold he'd stolen.

You can find more cool images and back story via National Geographic

We may never be sure what our anonymous archivist really meant by that. Perhaps an engraver suddenly burst into flames, setting the whole building on fire. Or maybe the building itself suddenly caught on fire for no reason. Either way, Dave posted this intriguing image on Shorpy (above), and a commenter noticed that it looked like this (below) present-day intersection in D.C., on Raoul Wallenburg Place.

via Shorpy

Between 1630 and 1631, the plague killed one third of Venice's population, wiping out 50,000 people out of a population of 150,000 in just one year. The panicked population, trying to stop the disease from spreading, often blamed female "vampires" for infecting the living. It was believed that people who chewed or bit their shrouds might be vampires (a dead body might appear to be chewing its shroud if it had post-mortem motor movements, which is fairly common; or bloody fluid released from the mouth after death might make it seem as if the shroud had been soiled by vampire nastiness).

To stop these "vampires," grave diggers would sort through bodies in mass graves and try to find ones who had bitten their shrouds and then shove a brick in their mouths to stop the threat. Yesterday researchers on an island near Venice announced they'd excavated a mass grave and found possibly the earliest example on record of a "vampire" who'd been buried with a brick in her mouth.

via The Hindu

Photo via Matteo Borrini and National Geographic

Over at Morbid Anatomy, Joanna Ebenstein says she uncovered this striking image on the Christie's auction website - it was sold a couple of years ago. The text that goes with the auction gives you some background on the odd life of its crafter:

Although his artistic career was extremely short-lived, Gaetano Zumbo was arguably one of the finest wax modellers active in the second half of the 17th century. Born to noble parents in Syracuse, Sicily, he took up art after a long period of self-criticism and self-tuition. He made his debut as an artist in Bologna in 1691 and was soon after taken into the service of Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany. By 1695 Zumbo left Florence for Bologna, and then went on to Genoa where he entered into partnership with Guillaume Desnoues, a French surgeon, for whom he made exact models in coloured wax of the human anatomy to assist medical studies. His collaboration with Desnoues was, again, short-lived and by 1700 he had moved to Paris and obtained a royal privilege for the manufacture of anatomical preparations in coloured wax. He died in Paris in 1701.

Apparently one of Zumbo's biggest fans was the Marquis de Sade. Which makes sense when you consider that Zumbo loved to sculpt hot naked people, as well as the sick and decomposing.

via Morbid Anatomy

On the 1st of February, 2003, America's first operational space shuttle, the Columbia, broke up over the skies of Texas, leading to the deaths of the seven crew members on board. An analysis of the crash in the weeks afterward revealed that damage caused by a foam strike on the orbiter's wing allowed plasma into the internal structure of the shuttle, reducing its integrity and leading to disaster.

This disaster, much like the 1986 one that destroyed Space Shuttle Challenger during lift-off, has fueled debate as to the viability of crewed spaceflight, a debate that is sure to continue. It also revealed a number of problems within the space program, namely that the shuttle fleet is overworked and outdated. Using shuttles continuously as one of the only ways into orbit in the US can be detrimental - and that's why we're seeing so many people seeking out spaceflight alternatives in the private sector.

Currently, almost all of the United State's space flight activities are projects headed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and in their relatively short history, they have undertaken a number of incredible feats - sending people to space, landing on the moon six times, maintaining two space stations and launching satellites that have increased our knowledge of our surroundings in the galaxy. However, NASA is largely unequipped to handle the growing demand for commercial space endeavors such as satellite launches and tourism because they've focused mainly on scientific and exploration missions.

NASA's original charter, The National Aeronautics and Space Act, established NASA in 1958, just as space flight was beginning with the launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik 1. In a move to catch up with the Russians and close the perceived gap in technology and security, NASA's mission was laid out in the first sections of the bill:

DECLARATION OF POLICY AND PURPOSE
Sec. 102. (d) The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives:

(1) The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;
(2) The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles;
(3) The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies, and living organisms through space;
(4) The establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes;
(5) The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere;
(6) The making available to agencies directly concerned with national defense of discoveries that have military value or significance, and the furnishing by such agencies, to the civilian agency established to direct and control nonmilitary aeronautical and space activities, of information as to discoveries which have value or significance to that agency;
(7) Cooperation by the United States with other nations and groups of nations in work done pursuant to this Act and in the peaceful application of the results thereof;
(8) The most effective utilization of the scientific and engineering resources of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the United States in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilities, and equipment; and
(9) The preservation of the United States preeminent position in aeronautics and space through research and technology development related to associated manufacturing processes.

While NASA's charter does indicate that it should encourage commercial enterprises, the focus of the agency has largely been one of exploration. Crewed missions to space brought back a wealth of knowledge flight after flight, while missions to the moon helped to piece together some of the secrets of the solar system's origins, while even today, robotic missions to the outer planets have reported back the existence of water on Mars, and the mineral compositions of our nearest neighbors.

In the 1970s was a shift in focus from the lunar landings that heralded the birth of NASA. David Hitt, in his book Homesteading Space, notes:

Developed in the shadow of the Apollo moon missions and using hardware originally created for Apollo, the Skylab space station took the nation's astronauts from being space explorers to being space residents.

Where the Lunar landings were somewhere between politics and genuine scientific exploration, Skylab was the turning point, when it was launched in 1973. The idea of living in space would continue through the six-year lifespan of the Skylab space station to the birth of the Space Shuttle to today's International Space Station.

Trying to maintain the pace of its missions, NASA had to strain its resources to undertake commercial endeavors. From early on, private companies such as AT&T have used NASA to launch their own commercial satellites, and that is a policy that has continued through to today. While the US Military also launches a bulk of commercial satellites, there are other problems with the agency as well. As NASA's budget gets further cut down as the economy worsens, job cuts have begun to force people away from the agency, including some higher level members, such as Martin Kress, who left his position at NASA as Deputy Director of the Glenn Research Center for National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama. In his statement that was released by NASA, he noted that "The world is changing rapidly, and I see an opportunity for doing some very innovative things at the National Space Science and Technology Center" (Source)Innovation here is a key element, and is something that is difficult within such a large bureaucratic structure such as NASA. Private companies have already proven that they can accomplish much the same tasks as NASA, but at a much lower cost.

Even as the military also launches satellites, the demand has placed a burden on the launch capabilities of NASA. According to Science Fiction author Allen M. Steele, in his testimony to the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics in 2001, commercial enterprise had led to the Challenger disaster:

As stated before, NASA is ill-suited for dealing with commercial space enterprise. This was demonstrated during the early 1980s, when the demands of the satellite launch industry contributed in part ot the circumstances which led to the Challenger disaster; the Reagan administration responded by barring Commercial payloads from the space shuttle fleet. More recently, we've also seen the indecision over the purpose of the International Space Station; no one could decide whether the ISS should be a government R&D lab, a commercial space outpost, or neither or both. As a result, the ISS has been redesigned several times, causing enormous construction overruns.

In his testimony, Steele argues that the creation of a federal agency devoted to private space enterprise is needed. While NASA maintains a busy schedule of scientific missions and its own launch capabilities, this agency would encourage private space flight interests. This has yet to happen, but there has been considerable development in private space flight, most obviously with SpaceShipOne's dramatic capture of the Ansari X-Price in October of 2004.

There are many commercial alternatives to NASA which are in their early stages. These companies, and the ones that are likely to follow, will be essential in easing the burden that has been placed upon NASA's aging space fleet. They will likely do this by taking control of the more routine tasks in space: Delivering crews to their destinations, bringing up consumables and equipment to those crews, and servicing satellites in orbit. In this scenario, we would likely see NASA's duties shift to what they have traditionally been: science and exploration, rather than an all-encompassing service for ferrying everything into space.

We can see the shift towards commercialization already with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, which is considered the first spaceliner. In the four years since Virgin Galactic tickets went on sale to the general public, over two hundred have been sold, at over $100,000 each. The price is likely to drop after that, but this highlights the demand for a space tourism industry. Branson's company has the right idea, and has signed contracts with Spaceport America, the first commercial spacesport, which is currently under construction. It was recently announced that a sister spaceport, Spaceport Sweden, would also sign contracts with Branson's Virgin Galactic.

The demand for commercial spaceflight exists beyond tourism of course. Another privately owned company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (Space X), made history last year when it launched the first commercial rocket into orbit, the Falcon 1. Founded by Elon Musk, the creator of PayPal, the company has been working to create a low-cost alternative to deliver payloads to space.

According to Musk:

Satellites and spacecraft urgently need a more reliable and cost effective launch vehicle than the options available today. SpaceX is confident that our Falcon rocket will achieve that end in the near future. In only nine months we've designed, built and initiated testing of our rocket's main engine, which is a testament to the capability and determination of the SpaceX team to deliver on promised goals in record time.

After several failed launches, the first successful Space X flight was in September of 2008, with another launch scheduled for 2009. In addition to these unmanned rockets, the company has announced the plans for the Dragon, a crewed module. Additionally, NASA announced in 2006 that it was awarding a contract with the company to provide resupply missions for the International Space Station. According to the company's website, there are already twenty-five planned missions on both the Falcon and Dragon vehicles, performing duties for both public and private interests.

With the grounding of the space shuttle fleet projected for 2010, the United States will need to rely on foreign powers such as Russia or the European Space Agency to resupply the International Space Station, a costly affair that will likely draw criticism from taxpayers. Companies such as Virgin Galactic and Space X both fill a growing need for alternative launch capabilities, and will likely be at the forefront of future space exploration. After all, there are entire worlds to be explored, and numerous commercial possibilities.

In the meantime, there is certainly evidence of what haste does to a program such as NASA, when safety is inadvertently compromised in order to meet a packed schedule. NASA is essentially the sole means to get cargo into orbit, but it cannot remain so. Explorers and entrepreneurs will seek out alternative means of sending equipment and humans into space, and shifting this burden to the commercial sector makes sense. This is especially true because private companies can fund their own hardware - this takes the burden off the taxpayers, who only really see the failures of the space program, and not its enormous benefits. Eventually, the private sector will reveal the true benefits of space travel, which isn't just economic, as satellites such as Hubble continually show us.

Throughout the Paleozoic era, which began 543 million years ago, Trilobites were extraordinarily successful. As we face all sorts of planetary crises, and worry about our long-term future on Earth, perhaps we should examine these hardy organisms over their three hundred million year existence.

Trilobites are arthropods - their closest living relative is the horseshoe crab - and were so common and diverse throughout much of their existence that they are often used by geologists and paleontologists to date the rock formations in which they are found. (1) Throughout the Cambrian period, they populated the seas with over six hundred separate species, before their dominance over the seas waned during the Ordovician period.

The term Trilobite is very descriptive - they are divided longitudinally into three sections - a central lobe, and two pleural lobes. Its thorax is divided into smaller segments that allow for a range of movement - some species could even roll into a tiny ball for protection. Their heads are called cephalons, and might contain eyes and defined cheeks; their tails are called pygidiums. Under the thorax, under each segment, was a pair of legs, and some species sported a number of spikes on top. (2)

What is remarkable about trilobites is their rapid evolution and growth to adapt to the many environments presented to them in the oceans of the Paleozoic. If you compare two species, one from the early and one from the later parts of the Cambrian, the differences are numerous. Earlier trilobites are far more primitive, lacking the more advanced features such as spines and eyes. (2)

As one moves up the column and time, the earlier, more primitive trilobites are slowly replaced by more sophisticated and diverting species. They shed segments, gained eyes and spikes, all essentially tailored to an environment where the trilobites found they could survive. Richard Fortey, in his book Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution, explains "punctuated equilibrium," a term which comes from the study of trilobites in the 1960s. Put simply, the theory holds that some species change very little over long periods of time, and then experience short spurts of intense change where one species branches out into several new ones.

Trilobites follow this pattern. The changes in trilobite species occurred gradually in regions, with no major events. But once a species diverged from another, they would endure. (4) Further studies of trilobites have come up with similar findings, and to the scientific community, these ancient creatures are essentially a study of evolution in action.

By the end of the Cambrian period, roughly 490 million years ago, trilobites had lost their dominance throughout the seas. During the later stages of the Ordovician period, the Earth was gripped by a vast ice age, and geologists have found fossils of the trilobites that survived this period. With this period of climate change came real changes for the species. Trilobites that existed in open water and were adapted to warmer climates died off, as their food supplies died with the cold. Other species, not adapted to open and deep water, flourished on the continental shelves, and thrived into the Silurian. (5)

During this time, vertebrate fish species evolved. While not likely a cause of the downfall of the trilobites, these new species would have likely presented problems for the trilobites. (6) By the Permian period, 290 million years ago, trilobites were in further decline, helped along by another ice age. But most likely their final extinction was caused by an event that is thought to have eliminated almost 95% of all life from the planet.

Theories vary, but it is thought that there were two separate extinction events. The first was the formation of Pangea, a single land mass that later broke up into the continents we know today. The consolidation of the super continent cut off global currents, essentially causing a global cooling event. Second, there was a period of massive volcanic activity on an almost unbelievable scale, which resulted in extremely thick outcrops of volcanic lava flows and ash over Siberia and China. This would have likely caused another period of warming and cooling in the early Jurassic period. Other theories include meteor hits, although that is certainly up for debate. Massive amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are thought to have killed off additional marine species. (7)

The trilobites didn't survive the Permian, but we we can learn several things from their long lifespan on the planet. The first is that these arthropods were extremely adaptable, able to change to meet a number of environments present in the ocean - from the deep ocean to the continental shelves. They ruled the seas, filling every environmental niche until they were stopped by several global cooling periods.

The second thing that we can learn is that even a hardy species has an incredibly difficult time with rapid climate change. Global warming periods pumped carbon dioxide into the oceans, which is thought to have helped to reduce their numbers, but also the extreme periods of global cooling further killed species off as they could not adapt in their specific environments fast enough to survive. Examining the effects of climate change through the eyes of a geologist or a paleontologist shows that these changes have come before, and that they have had devastating effects on organisms throughout the world's environments. Is humanity next, doomed because we cannot adapt quickly enough? Possibly.

And possibly because they force us to ask that question, trilobites have captured our imaginations. James Gurney, in his fantastic world of Dinotopia, shows a Devonian world, complete with trilobites, flourishing in a part of the world that escaped the mass extinctions. While this story is impossible in the context of global climates, it is an entertaining one. But, in Ken Macleod's 2000 novel Cosmonaut Keep, we briefly see that the trilobite has been resurrected by genetic manipulation in the near future.

Will we see the trilobite once again in our oceans? I certainly hope so.

NOTES

1 – Donald R. Prothero and Robert H. Dott Jr, Evolution of the Earth, (McGraw Higher Education, Boston, MA: 2004), 197
2 - Cyril Walker and David Ward, Fossils, (Dorling Kindersley Books, London, United Kingdom: 1992), 56
3 - Fortey, Trilobite! : Eyewitness to Evolution, (Knopf Books, New York NY: 2000), 159
4 - Ibid, 163-164
5 - Ibid, 184-185
6 - Prothero, 262
7 - Ibid, 346-347

Supporting source: James R. Beerbower, Search for the Past: An Introduction to Paleontology, 2nd Edition, (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1968)

Photos from adriangonsalves, tunelko, kevinzim, and Andrew Scott trilobite art from bugmaker via flickr.

According to Strange Maps, this map "shows the UN flag flying over Moscow, with the Eastern Bloc countries, the Baltic Soviet republics and Ukraine (but not Belarus) marked as ‘occupied’."

The Colliers editors wrote that the point of the issue is:

To warn the evil masters of the Russian people that their conspiracy to enslave humanity is the dark, downhill road to World War III; to sound a powerful call for reason and understanding between the people’s of East and West — before it’s too late; to demonstrate that if the war we do not want is forced upon us, we will win.

Ah, the good old days of Cold War science fiction.

via Strange Maps

Several months before Galileo drew the moon, British professor and researcher Thomas Harriot drew this crude image of the moon as seen through the telescope he'd ordered from The Netherlands in 1608. Over the next several years he drew increasingly more detailed images like the one you see at the top of this post.

Unlike Galileo, Harriot never published any of his images. Oxford historian Allan Chapman, whose article about Harriot will appear next month in the journal Astronomy and Geophysics, believes that Harriot preferred to keep his name out of the spotlight. He was a gentleman scholar, funded by some of the wealthiest men in England.

Nevertheless, his patrons (such as Sir Walter Raleigh) often fell out of favor with the crown and found themselves in prison. Perhaps Harriot saw the problems one could face by speaking out openly in difficult political times and decided to keep his discoveries to himself. Galileo, however, didn't take that path.

According to Space.com:

[Historian] Chapman attributes this to his comfortable position as a "well-maintained philosopher to a great and wealthy nobleman" with a generous salary, said to be "several times the level of the Warden of Wadham College, Oxford." Harriot had comfortable housing and a specially provided observing chamber on top of Sion House, all of which contrasted with Galileo's financial pressures.

Galileo, interestingly, was unable to buy a telescope. So he figured out the optics of it and built his own. He also examined the moon, and then found that the Milky Way was composed of individual stars. Galileo also discovered four moons around Jupiter and spent much time observing and drawing sunspots.

Now, at last, the timid Harriot's contributions to early astronomy are coming to light.

SOURCE: Space.com

A team of archaeologists from the University of Chicago will discuss their findings at a conference this weekend. The man who created the stele was named Kuttamuwa, and he describes himself as a "servant" of King Panamuwa. Kuttamuwa's stele, in pristine condition, was found in a suburb of the walled city, far from the palace - archeologists speculate it was probably the man's own house. Though the city of Sam'al was influenced by local Semitic cultures in many ways - including their language - Kuttamuwa and Panamuwa are names that show the Indo-European cultural influence. Also, Kuttamuwa was cremated, a practice shunned by Semitic tribes of that era.

Apparently Kuttamuwa had his stele made while he was still alive, and last summer the archeological team found it, translating its inscription like this (there are question marks for translations they aren't sure of yet):

I, Kuttamuwa, servant of Panamuwa, am the one who oversaw the production of this stele for myself while still living. I placed it in an eternal chamber(?) and established a feast at this chamber(?): a bull for [the storm-god] Hadad, ... a ram for [the sun-god] Shamash, ... and a ram for my soul that is in this stele.

Written in an alphabet derived from Phoenician, the language is a West Semitic dialect similar to Aramaic and Hebrew. The stone depicts Kuttamuwa himself, eating at a table laden with food and drink.

What this reveals, according to research lead David Schloen, is that Kuttamuwa's people believed in a split between body and soul. This was a relatively novel belief at the time, and many neighboring peoples like the Israelites believed the body and soul were one. Kuttamuwa, however, planned for his soul to remain in the stele while his body was cremated. That's why he requested a "feast" in the chamber to feed his soul. Researchers found remains of food offerings in ancient bowls around the stele.

According to archeologist Schloen:

Kuttumuwa's inscription shows a fascinating mixture of non-Semitic and Semitic cultural elements, including a belief in the enduring human soul—which did not inhabit the bones of the deceased, as in traditional Semitic thought, but inhabited his stone monument, possibly because the remains of the deceased were cremated. Cremation was considered to be abhorrent in the Old Testament and in traditional West Semitic culture, but there is archaeological evidence for Indo-European-style cremation in neighboring Iron Age sites.

Funerary Monument Reveals Iron Age Belief [via University of Chicago]

Jerome McDonough, an assistant professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, notes that our society has amassed over 369 exabytes of data, which includes art, business transactions, and correspondence. McDonough fears that this reliance on digital storage will lead to a “digital dark age” in which all this data is destroyed or rendered unreadable. While the physical records of previous eras are susceptible to destruction and decay, our digital media are far more vulnerable:

Contrary to popular belief, electronic data has proven to be much more ephemeral than books, journals or pieces of plastic art. After all, when was the last time you opened a WordPerfect file or tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk?

"Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date," McDonough said.

Magnetic tape, which stores most of the world's computer backups, can degrade within a decade. According to the National Archives Web site by the mid-1970s, only two machines could read the data from the 1960 U.S. Census: One was in Japan, the other in the Smithsonian Institution. Some of the data collected from NASA's 1976 Viking landing on Mars is unreadable and lost forever.

McDonough and other digital archivists are working to find ways to preserve our cultural legacy, but there are challenges. Proprietary platforms, for example, protect intellectual property, but create a greater risk that the media will be unreadable to future generations. It may be time to consider a discipline in digital archeology to develop tools to ensure the future readability of media across all platforms.

'Digital dark age' may doom some data [Physorg via Futurismic]