Automated transportation

One of the areas I worked on during my professional career was automation of transportation systems. In the 80s, the possibilities of introducing electronics in cars to provide situation awareness and communication were increasing. Cell phones were making it possible for connecting car drivers to the rest of the world. The Global Positioning Satellite System (GPS) developed by the military was finally available for civilian use. That allowed cars to know their locations with respect to an electronic map. Pretty soon, routing algorithms were introduced to take one from point A to point B. Heady times.

 

We predicted that the days of self-driving cars were just around the corner. Now, finally, many decades later that is becoming true. A ride in a self-driving car such as Waymo demonstrates that you don’t need a driver to navigate through streets of a city, even as complex as Los Angeles. If this technology gets widely used, the impact on individual transportation will be tremendous. 

 

One can imagine a world where private ownership of cars become history. There will be no need for parking lots and the efficiency of the overall transportation system would increase a great deal. There will be no need to have a vehicle sitting in your driveway or a parking lot for most of the day if a ride is available anytime from anywhere.

 

I mentioned this in an earlier Blog Post ((Confluence of tipping points, 1 August 2023). Although the availability of vehicles like Waymo will increase people’s confidence in self-driving cars, there will be still some barriers that will need to be overcome. 

 

One barrier is the prestige that some people assign to owning expensive cars. Cars have been status symbols for a long time. There will be fewer reasons to own a prestigious vehicle if it is not used to make people take notice and envy your wealth. Unlike a house (another way of making people jealous), a car goes everywhere, and can be seen by others. People seeing you alighting from an automated Waymo just does not create the same impact. 

 

Another argument people use for having your own car is that of flexibility. --- you to drive away at any time. This argument not sound right. Even Ubers are available within five minutes or so. If the cost differential between ownership and cost of rides is substantial, as it is likely to be, a few minutes delay will be acceptable by most people.

 

A more complicated situation arises when you want to go on a road trip. You can always rent a Waymo to take you wherever you want. However, that would mean a longer-term rental than a few minutes for within city travel. Depending on pricing, there may end up having rental non-self-driving cars available, for affordable price and perhaps fewer features. 

 

Some folks will tell you that these self-driving cars are dangerous and cite an incidence that demonstrates their fear. They neglect to tell you that human driven cars are even more dangerous. Also, these are just the early days of driverless cars. They will improve as the experience base expands and AI make a big difference. 

 

There is also fear that once self-driving cars become the norm, people will forget how to drive. This is similar to what is already happening thanks to technologies such as Google Translate and auto correction. People will slowly stop learning other languages or spell correctly. A bigger storm, called AI, is about to make humans taking pictures, writing stories, diagnose ailments, or compose music a thing of the past. Ability to drive a car will join the list. If you still insist on keeping your ability to drive intact, maybe there will be rental cars available, just as they would be for people undertaking road trips.

 

Surely, auto manufacturers and parking lot owners might resist. However, if their customers display their preference for not owning their own cars, they may eventually capitulate.

 

Like cars becoming automated, an equally game changing event would be trucks becoming driverless. Just imagine tucks thundering by, safely and efficiently, but having no drivers. This is already happening and a company called Kodiak has self-driving trucks on the road. The technology is about the same as driverless cars. When this becomes more popular, the impact would be felt most acutely by the truck drivers. The trucking companies will reduce their operating costs but the human impact would be severe at least in the short term.

 

There will be a liability issue and also that of public perception. A driverless truck having a major collision will attract news media and litigators. It is only after some time that the experience base will be sufficiently significant to quieten things down. 

 

One final transportation system that can be more fully automated is airplanes. Even now, autopilot systems are so well developed, the pilots do not have to do much, especially during the cruising phase of a flight. I agree that during take-off and landing, pilots are required but I cannot imagine that the same situation will apply in the future. 

 

Pilots are required primarily to provide comfort to the passenger. It will be many years before passengers accept that flying in a pilotless airplane is completely safe. They would point out, once again, to a situation where a pilotless airplane crashed, and forget that airplanes with pilots crash as well, many times because of pilot errors. Sometimes even because of a suicidal pilot flying the airplane. It is hard to imagine a suicidal autopilot. 

 

I think that for the for seeable future, there will be at least one pilot in the cabin, just to provide comfort factor. 

 

So, to summarize, driverless cars are already here. They will become an increasing presence in the coming future. Also around are self-driving trucks and, eventually, pilotless airplanes.

  

Proto

 One of my favorite subjects is the migration of homo sapiens from their ancestral home to the rest of the world. It is a remarkable story, and as I understand it, the number that left Africa some 60,000 years ago was small, and yet almost everyone on earth can claim lineage to that group. 

 

Equally fascinating is the story of languages spoken by human beings. A recent book I finished reading, Proto: How one ancient language went global, by Laura Spinney, satisfied my curiosity about many aspects of what most of us speak. This is a summary of that fascinating book. 

 

The speakers of Proto-Indo-European, the mother (or is it father) of almost all the languages spoken by half of humanity, were only a few dozen to begin with. They lived between Europe and Asia in the region of the Black Sea. However, their language exploded out of Black Sea cradle, spreading east and west, fragmenting as it went. Within a thousand years, its offspring could be heard from Ireland to India. It is easily the most important event of the last five thousand years. 

 

It took another three and half thousand years and the invention of ocean-going ship, but after 1492, some of these languages implanted themselves in the new world and expanded again. 

Plenty of Indo-European languages have lived and died, but over 400 are still spoken today.

 

Eight billion humans speak around seven thousand languages that fall into one hundred and forty families. Most of us, however, speak languages that belong to just five of them: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, and Austronesian. Of these, the two behemoths are the first two. Every second person on earth speaks the languages in the first family, and Mandarin (which has more native speakers than English) being the major Sino-Tibetan language. 

 

1n 1786, a British judge, Sir William Jones, asserted that Sanskrit, Latin and Greek had sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists. He added that Germanic, Celtic, and Iranian might have sprung from the same source. Since my mother tongue, Gujarati, is an offspring of Sanskrit, this is of a great deal of importance to me. 

 

There are twelve main branches of the Indo-European Language: Anatolian, Tocharian, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Indic, and Iranic. Anatolian, a dead language, was spoken on the Turkish peninsula, and Tocharian, another dead language, was spoken in the Silk Road in North-west China. The Dravidian languages of South India, as well as Uralic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian), and Basque, do not belong to the Indo-European family. 

 

The Indo-European Languages (source: Proto, by Laura Spinney)

 

 

Genetics has determined the scale and in some case speed of migrations that archeologists had only observed in freeze frames. They have confirmed beyond reasonable doubt the huge role that migration has played in the story of humanity and its languages. 

 

As we speak, we have multiple ways in which we can peer back at how human beings spread. Three most important ones are: Genetics, archeology, and linguists. However, according to Laura, they don’t speak the same language (no pun intended). Archeologists think in terms of cultures, recurring patterns of objects that define group’s identity in some way. Cultures rise and fall, albeit with dilutions and concentrations, so geneticists have a different concept of identity. Languages change through both descent and contact, but they are less intimately tied up with who we are. 

 

Fewer than hundred people may have spoken the dialect that gave rise to all extant Indo-European languages. They are called Yamnaya. Scientists even claim that the oldest sites, from where the oldest Yamnaya genomes have come from, are located between the lower reaches of the river Dnieper and Don, in the east of Ukraine. Yamnaya were typically brown haired and brown eyed, with a complexion between fair and dark. They were very tall, some six feet in case of men. 

 

Archeologists are fairly certain that the Yamnaya hunted horses but are divided over whether they rode them---and whether this is how the early Indo-European languages expanded so far, so fast. 

 

Why do experts feel that Yamnaya spoke Proto-Indo-European? It is because the language mirror’s speaker’s world. From the broken reflection of that world that the linguists have pieced together, archeologists and geneticists can tell which prehistoric people were most likely to inhabit it. 

 

Proto-Indo-European has been reconstructed based on a comparison of its offspring, an exercise that has revealed the Indo-European sound laws—those shifts in pronunciations that transformed the mother tongue into its daughters. No other proto language has received so much scholarly attention. 

 

From such analysis, the scholars believe that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European knew wheeled transportation. In 3500 BCE, according to archeologists, only the steppe dwellers who herded horses, cattle and sheep lived to the west of the Urals. Most European men alive today, and millions of their counterparts in Central and South Asia, carry Y chromosomes that came from the steppe. Recent DNA analysis shows that a group of Yamnaya had travelled the length of the Eurasian steppes in a few decades, perhaps less. 

 

When Yamnaya arrived in Hungary, the population of Europe was estimated to be seven million. The migrants might have numbered in the tens of thousands, yet within a thousand years, languages descended from theirs were spoken across the continent. The Indo-Europeans may simply have been good at having children and keeping them alive. If they kept it up over generations, steppe ancestry would have spread through the population, and Indo-European languages with it. 

 

The people in the region first became bilingual. Then they stopped speaking the old language to their children. The parents calculated that it would be better if the next generation was fluent in the language of power and wealth, or teenagers appraising the world decided this for themselves. 

 

There is another interesting fact described in the book, particularly for those born in northern India where Sanskrit (the mother of almost all north Indian languages) was spoken at one time. 

 

In the middle of the Russian steppe, at a settlement called Sintashta, the archeologists wondered if they were looking at the origin of Ashvamedha, a ritual described in the ancient Indian texts. If so, there could be links with the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. This branch is the largest in terms of both the number of speakers and the geographical range. If people of Sintashta performed rituals that their descendants carried to India and Iran then the Aryans (the name by which ancient Indians and Iranians identified themselves) must have crosse the steppe. Thirty years on, the linguists and geneticists have added their contribution to those of the archeologists, but the Aryan chapter of the Indo-European story remains the most politicized and contentious, as mentioned before.

 

The Rig Veda, the oldest Indic text, was written in the foothills of the Hindu Kush in Punjab region that straddles between India and Pakistan. Most likely it was written between 1500 and 1200 BCE. By 1600 BCE, steppe ancestry was in Pakistan’s Swat valley and from there it diffused through the entire subcontinent. This assertion remains contentious as mentioned above. Some people in India assert that the idea of Sanskrit coming from outside of India is not correct. 

 

So, there are two possibilities, either Sanskrit came to India from outside or India is the homeland of the entire family. Proponents of this latter theory have made very little effort to explain how the other Indo-European languages ended up where they did. 

 

The Indo-European speaking Aryans were not the first people to arrive in India. The archeologists have long discovered the Indus Valley Civilization, populated by the Harrapans. They, however, had no genetic connection to the steppe; for eons they had been indigenous to the subcontinent. 

 

Also, the Harrapans most likely invented agriculture independently of the development in the Near East. So, farmers and farming did not come with the speakers of the Indo-European language. Some of the mysteries can be solved if someone is able to decipher the Harrapan script. That has not been the case. It is believed that the Harrapan civilization died slowly as the monsoon failed and not due to any invasion from the Aryans. 

 

Many of the offspring of the first Indo-European language died. The ones that survived proved adaptable in their turn. They did not stay the same, nor did their languages. That was the secret of their success. 

 

The human compulsion to communication is overwhelming. It was there even before sapiens. Some argue that without language there will be no reasoning, others that there is no consciousness. People change language just by using them. Accumulation of conscious and unconscious changes causes language to split. 

 

Languages do erode. Of the roughly seven thousand languages that are spoken in the world today, nearly half are considered endangered. Keeping endangered languages alive seems to be a good thing. However, the solution isn’t simply to put ever more resources into teaching. First, they have to work out why people are abandoning the languages, then they have to address the inequalities that are causing them to do so. Language is a tool, and it lives as long as it is useful in opening doors for its speakers and improving their lives. 

 

People are moving around the Black Sea today for the same reasons they did six thousand years ago: trade, war, and climate change. The climate crisis is real and its effects are already being felt. Whatever way the crisis unfolds, the world is unlikely to stay the same, linguistically speaking. The Indo-European languages came to dominate mainly as a result of the small, temporary movement of people over time---the kind of displacements that would happen as the climate change intensifies. 

 

The new tools of archeology and genetics have opened our eyes to our past. Migration has been constant, ‘indigenous’ is relative. Ten thousand years of human displacement have shrunk the genetic distance between populations to the point where ethnic divisions are losing meaning. The desire to belong is as strong as ever, and it is harder to see the differences between ‘them and ‘us. Linguistic and cultural boundaries are being guarded more jealously. Language is becoming a battleground in the identity wars, and preserving our linguistic ‘purity’ is used as justification by those who want to raise walls. Unfortunately for them, the most successful language the world ever knew was a hybrid trafficked by migrants. 

 

It changed as it went, and when it stopped changing, it died. 

The future of space exploration

 I grew up just when space exploration was about to start. The Soviet Union sent the first satellite in the orbit around 1957, when I was still a young boy. The space race between the Soviets and the Americans then began in full earnest. First dog in space, first human, first woman, first multiple people, first space-walk, and so on. The human exploration of space reached its height with the Moon landings, some 50 years ago. 

During the last 50 years, we have had fantastic unmanned probes, the latest being the one heading to Europa to check out if conditions exist for life developing there. However, it feels like human space exploration has slowed down. Yes, we had Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, but the excitement of forming a colony on Moon or exploring planets continues to be Elusive. 

 

That may be changing. Finally, I feel that human space exploration is going to restart again. One recent course on Great Courses Plus provided me with some basis for feeling optimistic. 

 

The teacher of this twelve-part course is an American woman, Ariel Ekblaw, who founded the Space Exploration Initiative at MIT’s Media Lab in 2016. Now, she is also CEO and co-founder of a space habitat-oriented firm called Aurelia Institute.

 

She starts the course by responding to the basic question---why do we want to go to space anyway? She mentions several reasons.

 

·      Curiosity. This is along the line of the answer that a British Mountaineer gave to someone who asked him why he wanted to climb Mt Everest? “Because it is there,” was his short answer.

·      Preserve civilization. This has become even more important in the age of Climate Change. Even if Earth remains habitable, it is wise to develop alternatives—as science fiction has long postulated.

·      Expand circle of awareness. This is like going up a hill to get a sense of perspective on where you are. Perhaps an unmanned probe can do that as well, but nothing beats physically being up there. 

·      Technology applicability to earth. This argument was often used by NASA to justify billions of dollars it was spending. It still is one of the reasons why we explore space, but not the primary one.

 

In general, space exploration has been done by the government agencies, like NASA and its counterparts in the world, and by the military. Lately, commercial entities have joined this elite group. Ariel cites several commercial firms in that category:

 

·      Blue Origin (space station, landing system)

·      Space X (super heavy rockets, landing system)

·      Virgin Galactic

·      Axiom Space (space station)

·      Voyager Space

·      United Launch Alliance

·      Zero G

 

Most of us are familiar with the first three, founded by billionaires.  Space X has been particularly active, having taken astronauts to and from the space station, and launching hundreds of satellites in the near-earth orbit to create and support an international communication system called Starlink. Elon Musk, the founder, has expressed a vision for his firm playing a key role in human exploration of Mars. 

 

The advantage of having commercial firms enter space exploration is that it allows meeting the economic challenges posed by this endeavor. Now, through public-private partnerships, commercial capital can be tapped. Aided by government, industry can now take much more responsibility and the pace can become faster. This is especially important as we move beyond space exploration. 

 

There will indeed be a need to public sector money in this public-private partnership. For those who object to spending tax-payers’ money on these endeavors, I would suggest to take a look at how we are wasting money in the Defense Department. In the age of drones becoming a major fighting force, why are we spending money on expensive hardware designed for fighting the war of the past? Also, if a massive cyberattack can bring a country to its knees, what good is it to spend money on military hardware? A small fraction of this waste can easily fund any public sector involvement in space exploration, and take humanity to the next level.

 

What is beyond space exploration? Ariel lists four futures:

 

1. Exploration (where we are right now)

2. Experience

3. Exploitation

4. Expansion

 

Experience refers to a larger segment of people getting to explore what going to space or living there feels like. Currently, very few, mostly the billionaires and their family/friends, have had a chance to experience space, and that too mostly flights up and down. This has caused some concern about the billionaires taking a ride while there are lots of starving children. Fair, but the problem of starving children won’t be solved by a few people not spending their own money on what to many people looks like a waste. I believe that this is their return for making investments, and we want to have them invest as we shift to a commercial phase of space exploration.

Currently, only a select few civilians have experienced orbital flights.  However, as the cost of sending someone up there reduces (e.g., through reusable rockets) and large orbiting structures are built to rotate around the earth, additional folks will experience what travelling to space feels like. There is also, obviously, a chance for the commercial firms to make some money and get return on their investments.

 

Additional ways in which investment can provide a pay-off is when we start exploiting space. One such prospect is to mine for water on the moon. It does exist, especially in the lunar polar regions. Water thus mined will serve not only the lunar colony, when it comes into existence, but also make space travel to Mars more affordable. Acting as the way station, a lunar fill-up station will avoid bringing water from earth, which is expensive, given the gravity of our planet. It is not only water but also its constituents, Oxygen and Hydrogen, that will play key roles in space travel. Oxygen is necessary to support life, and Hydrogen can be used as fuel. 

 

Mars will be the second step (after moon) for the last phase of future space travel: Expansion. Maybe at some time point (hundred years from now?), one can envision some humans living elsewhere in our solar system. At the moment it is a science fiction territory, but so were smart phones and Internet, just a few years back. 

 

In the course on the Future of Space Exploration, Ariel describes what is being done on many technological fronts that need to be addressed as we continue of journey. For example, she talks about:

 

·      Going back to the moon: Economic and scientific potential of long-term lunar bases

·      Going to Mars: Risks involved in the mission, building structures on Mars.

·      Future habitable villages orbiting earth: Next generation of structures including those that are able to assemble themselves.

·      Next generation space suit design: Those that provide radiation protection, as well as life support systems.

·      Food in space: Beyond providing basic nutrition, food that is flavorful and supports mental well-being and social bonding.

·      Thriving in space (not just surviving): how to fight disorientation, vertigo, and nausea caused by weightlessness. 

·      Space tourism: Orbiting resorts offering sports, cuisines and entertainment that are unique to zero g. 

·      Commercial ways to benefit to life on earth: “Off worlding” opportunities to mine the moon and asteroids, generate power in space and develop material and biotechnologies possible only in microgravity.

·      Finding life in the universe: Determine habitability and signs of life on promising planets (e.g., Mars), moons of planets (e.g., Europa) and thousands of exoplanets discovered so far. 

·      Ethical problems of space: Not taking our bad habits with us, or disturbing the pristine nature of space objects we explore. 

 

Given what Ariel says (and she is from my alma mater…MIT), I feel confident that space exploration is about to take off (pun intended), and get into space experience, space exploitation, and in the future, human expansion in space.

 

It is too late for me, but my grandchildren, or even their grandchildren will become explorers themselves and will have no hesitation taking a vacation on the Moon.

 

Autocracy

 I finished reading a book written by Anne Applebaum. Titled “Autocracy, Inc: The dictators who want to run the world,” it provides a powerful perspective on what is going on in the current administration. Here are some of the important points she makes, starting from the end of World War II, when “Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.” 

She then describes Putin’s Russia as an example of what happened.  “It was not a poor dictatorship, wholly dependent on foreign donors. Instead, it represented something new: A full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leaders. The true beneficiaries of this system: Oligarchs whose fortune depend on their political connections.” 

 

“Less frequently mentioned (beneficiaries) are the legitimate Western institutions, companies, lawyers, and politicians who enabled his schemes, profited from them, or covered them up.” According to Anne, Putin was “well acquainted with the double standards of Western Democracies, which preached liberal values at home but were very happy to help build illiberal regimes everywhere else. Kleptocracy and autocracy go hand in hand.”

 

Another dictator described in the book, Chavez of Venezuela, had a message, “If you are loyal, you can steal. Like Putin, he made a different political calculation, one designed not to make his country prosperous, but to keep himself permanently in power. Like Chavez, our president lies repeatedly and blatantly, as do other modern dictators. The point is not to make believe a lie; it is to make people fear the liar.”

 

Moving on to how the modern technologies are helping these autocrats, Anne says that, “The Chinese began using new information technologies that were just then beginning to change politics and conversations around the world. Chinese algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources—travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases—to predict political resistance before it happens.”

 

Further, “Many of the propagandists of Autocracy, Inc., persuade people that our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.”

 

Along the same lines, it is interesting to see how the conversations about human rights are being distorted. “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created in 1946, the early optimistic days of postwar world. It asserted that everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. No one should be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile. These documents and treaties are collectively known as rules-based order. They describe how the world ought to work, not how it actually works. Autocracies are now leading the charge to remove that kind of language from the international arena altogether.”

 

So, what can be done? According to Anne, “Gene Sharp has written a book called “From Dictatorship to Democracy. The appendix (of this book) contains a list of 198 nonviolent, anti-authoritarian tactics.” One of the tactics involves “The display of symbols---badges, flowers, logos, colors---force people to take sides. Note the Cedar revolution in Lebanon, the Green movement in Iran, the Arab Spring.” 

 

That may not be enough to sustain a movement. The book mentions that “Sometimes the fame or notoriety of the leader can unify a movement.” For examples, Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar. “However, the modern autocratic regimes smear not just their opponents but also their ideas. Most of the times, modern autocracies prefer to silence critics without creating corpses. A martyr can inspire a political movement, while a successful smear campaign can destroy one.”

 

Cynically, “Corruption allegations against dissidents deflect attention away from the corruption of the ruling party. This reinforces public conviction that all politics is dirty. Technologies built in Silicon Valley and public relations tactics invented on Madison Avenue meshes with dictatorial behavior to create coordinated online harassment campaigns.” 

 

The book mentions, “Although autocrats work together to keep one another in power, there is no alliance of those of us who are fighting for freedom. It is important to show that we are united and we have support from the free world. We are more numerous than they are.” To that end, “In the autumn of 2022 in Vilnius, there was the first even meeting of the World Liberty Congress, a gathering of people who have fought autocracies all around the world. The argument being made was that we are not an opposition, we are an option, a better option.” 

 

It is important to note that, “Many countries don’t fit comfortably into either category, democracy or autocracy. Because autocratic alliances are largely transactional, they can shift and change, and the often do. Powerful people benefit from the existing system, want to keep it in place, and have deep connections across political spectrum.” 

 

What we need is “not a war against any specific country, such as China, but against autocratic behaviors, where ever they are found. The autocracies want to create a global system that benefits thieves, criminals, dictators, and the perpetrators of mass murder. We can stop them. We can put an end to transactional kleptocracy.” 

 

“We can fight back by understanding that we are facing an epidemic of information laundering and exposing it when we can. The social media platforms are so easy to game. Reform of these platforms is a vast topic. Fight against evidence-based conversation requires broader international coalition. Authoritarian narratives are designed to characterize dictatorships as stable and democracy as chaotic.” 

 

The book concludes by emphasizing that, “Nobody’s democracy is safe. There is no liberal world order anymore, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real. But there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do.  They can be saved but only if those of us who live in them are willing to make the effort to save them.”

 

So, it is quite clear that our country is making a transition toward becoming an autocracy as well as a kleptocracy. We have now joined the cabal of others such as Russia, China, Venezuela, Myanmar, Hungary, North Korea and Zimbabwe, among others. I am sure our support, now provided to Russia, will be extended to the others as well. A few people in our country will become even more wealthy, while a vast majority will go through agony. We will be fed with lies that our leader, even if not perfect, is much better than the others. Hopefully, the constitution will prevail and in four years we may revert to Democracy. However, I would not hold my breath. 

 

None of the countries in the cabal have made that transition. 

LIFE 1943

  

LIFE was an important news magazine that was published every week for many decades, before becoming a monthly magazine in 1972, and eventually, ceasing to publish in 2000. I grew up with LIFE magazine in our household in India, along with National Geographic, Time and Reader’s Digest. You see, my parents were quite in tune with what was happening in the US.

 

So, I picked up a copy of a LIFE magazine at a flea market in Pasadena. It was the June 14, 1943 issue, with cover story of High School graduation. This was a special graduation for many students, as almost all male (called “boys”) were drafted and went to war. Remember, World War II was still raging. None of the graduating women was drafted and many were destined to go to college.

 

This is a remarkable issue in terms of what it shows and what it does not.

 

As can be expected, the issue has many reports and photos from the battle front. The main story is on the war in North Africa, including that on bombing of Tunis. There is a story on a movie called “Five Graves to Cairo” featuring the actor who played Field Marshal Rommel. 

 

The Nazi war on Russian civilians is described using graphic drawings by an artist. What a horrible war it was!!There is a report on Attu Island of Japan. The Allied soldiers are shown fighting Japanese hiding in snow. Pearl Harbor salvage operation is described in detail. 

 

There are many other non-war related stories as well. There are photos of a monkey digging up a garden, a guy called James Byrne (known as “assistant president”) giving a speech in South Carolina, bare backs as the latest fashion (how scandalous!), a woman called “the pretzel girl” based on her remarkable aerobics, carnivorous plants, and Literary England (showing places that were selected by English authors for their books). Of course, there are photos from the afore mentioned high school graduation, in which every woman (“girl”) looks identical, and so does every man (“boy”). All white.

 

What is really interesting is to go through the advertisements occupying good deal of the magazine. Here are some observations:

 

·      At the first glance, there is not a single black, brown or Asian person in the entire magazine….not one in the stories, and none in the advertisements. The only place I found, after much searching, is an advertisement for Seaforth toiletries, where a British officer in Calcutta orders an Indian servant to bring him a jugful of something so he can shave. 

·      There is a Rube Goldberg’s contraption (remember him?) that shows how a war worker sawing off a pipe would eventually launch “Adolf, Musso and Hiro” by big guns so that “they never trouble the civilized world again”. 

·      There are several full-page advertisements by car companies (Oldsmobile, Buick, Chevrolet) building war machinery. Also, shown is a Boeing factory making bombers.

·      There were numerous types of whiskies being sold during that time, as is apparent from the advertisements. These include, Paul Jones (never heard of it), Seagram’s, VAT69, Canadian Club and Teacher’s. Also advertised are Gordon’s Gin, and Merito rum. No wines or beers. 

·      There is a cute advertisement for Easterbrook fountain pen, which allows writers to change points (nibs), also one on razor blades (remember them?)

·      Interestingly, a lot of advertisements show grooming products for men. Toiletries, shaving lotions, tie bars, cuff links, shirts, “Bill folds”, and so on. 

·      Finally, of course, there are advertisements for cigarettes and cigars. Smoking was in full bloom.

 

 

Different times, indeed. 

Far out

 I enjoy thinking about the future. So, I like to read science fiction books, especially those that are based on hard science. These books provide scenarios on how the future might evolve. 

To that end, I have enjoyed reading books written by Kim Stanley Robinson, a prolific author based in California. The last book I read, “2312” is as interesting as the previous one. 

 

As the title suggests, Kim describes the world almost 300 years from now. Several intriguing developments that have taken place by the time year 2312 arrives

 

Human beings now live on most of the planets, and many of their moons. For each planet (and moon) humans have developed a way of living appropriate for the climate condition. 

 

·      On Mercury, where a principal character lives, the problem is heat from sun. If you are in open sunlight, you will get fried in no time. So, you have to keep moving ahead of sunrise. That is not a major problem because the planet revolves very slowly. What is a particularly intriguing solution is that an entire city, called the Terminator, is built to move on rails. Of course, if there is a problem with the rails and the city cannot move, there is a huge crisis.

·      On Venus, humans have designed a solar shield, once again to protect the plane from intense heat. If the solar shield is threatened, the entire population on Venus is at risk. 

·      For the population living on Titan, a moon of Saturn, where another important character is from, the problem is reverse. It is too cold, and so the habitats are designed to allow people to survive intense cold.

 

Transportation among these planets and moons is provided on asteroids that are hollowed to provide capacity and luxury to travelers. They rotate slowly so humans are able to enjoy “gravity” in form of centrifugal force. Called terrariums, these massive spaceships come in different flavors each suited to different expectations of long travel. 

 

Space elevators, anchored at equators, are commonly used to transport people from the planet to a geosynchronous orbit. This way, they can catch ferries to spaceships without having to burn a lot of fuel to get into the orbit. Both Earth and Mars have such space elevators. 

 

There is a move to repopulate earth with animals—reanimation---that involves dropping animals using various landing technologies. Of course, this repopulating is not enthusiastically endorsed by everyone. 

In the future, humans don’t come as either male or female. There are multiple varieties, and most humans come equipped with both sex organs. That is the case with the two main characters of the book. 

 

Artificial intelligence has a firm hold on civilization. Most people have an AI device, “qube”, embedded in their heads. Some, however, prefer to wear them on wrists (like an Apple watch). These qubes provide whatever assistance their humans need. There are also humanoids, robots, walking around and they are indistinguishable from humans. One main part of the story deals with a coup engineered by the qubes against humanity. 

 

The book is a fascinating journey through an imagined future. The detail with which Kim paints the picture made this book a NY Times Bestseller and won the Nebula Award. 

 

 

It does stretch your imagination. 

When you lose everything

 While growing up, my father spent some twenty years in Myanmar, or Burma as it was known then. His father (my grandfather) worked in an insurance company and there were opportunities for someone like him in Rangoon in what was then a part of British India. As the years went by, the family expanded. My father, the oldest son, had at that time two sisters and two brothers. The large family had a good life.

Everything then changed. Japan, with its imperial ambitions, decided to invade Burma. World War II was raging after all, and the Japanese were aggressively expanding the land they had conquered. 

 

With bombs falling, my grandfather made a crucial decision to have my grandmother and five children escape Rangoon while they could. He would stay behind to take care of business. 

 

My grandmother packed up the best she could and the family (without my grandfather) headed to the port to catch one of the last passenger ships to leave Burma. My father, when telling the story, talked about bombs falling everywhere on the port and there was no certainty that they would get out alive.

 

The did get out and after some weeks on the sea, they made it back to India, as refugees. The place they could go back to was my home town where there were some relatives who could look after them. The big question was what had happened to my grandfather.

 

As, there were no means of communication, my father used to go to the train station and wait for trains to come in from the east. Perhaps my grandfather would be on one of them. Slim as the chances were, a miracle happened and one day my grandfather appeared alive and well. 

 

He had a horrific tale to tell. After his family had departed, he decided to do the same along with some friends. The port was closed for civilians and the only choice they had was to walk to India. Imphal, the closet city in India, was 340 miles away and that was by the straight road. The use of that road was not available to “natives” as the British army was pouring into Burma and using it. 

 

One can only speculate how many miles they walked each day, where they slept, or what did they eat. If you fell sick along the way, you were abandoned to die because they could not wait. Finally, they reached Imphal and my grandfather made his way back to my home town located in the Western part of India. My grandfather’s brother was not so “fortunate”. He disappeared during the war, as he did not leave Rangoon. 

 

After the family reunited, my grandfather got a job in another state and took his family there. By now they had one more child (my youngest uncle), but my father did not go with them. He got a scholarship to study medicine in Bombay (now Mumbai). He met my mother in the college, they got married, and moved to a small town as doctors. Meanwhile, my grandfather lost his job and it was up to my parents to take care of the entire family which included both my grandparents and five siblings. There were hardships, of course, but they were safe and could rebuild their lives after losing everything. 

 

This is the lesson my father imparted to his children and his younger siblings. Do not despair when everything you cherish is gone. You can always rebuild. 

 

What an important lesson for us as we contemplate what would have happened if the recent fire, which wiped out our neighboring town, had moved south and taken our house as well.

 

 “You need to move on,” is what my father would have told us citing his own example.