November 28 (Thanksgiving Day,) 2024
Science fiction does an excellent job of naming alien races. Klingons, Ewoks, Sontarans, Terileptils, the list goes on. But for many years, the challenge for the genre was to find the right word for its more familiar characters: the members of our own species. Homo sapiens just won’t cut it outside of biology journals.
In at least one episode of 1960s Star Trek, we were called “Earthers.” Awkward, difficult to say, suggests a greater kinship with worms and moles than we normally appreciate. Another option was “terrans,” a term derived from Latin. Never caught on, perhaps because of the implied bow to ancient Rome. Tell an Asian or African or Australian that they’re terran, and their reply might be a dismissive sneer or shrug, or perhaps a well-phrased insult with culturally-appropriate hand gesture.
I’m pleased to report that science fiction worked out a useful solution for the English language. We’re called…(drumroll)…humans! Not “man,” which excludes half the population. Not “human beings,” which has a superfluous second word. No one ever talks about giraffe beings or gerbil beings.
The word “human” began as an adjective until someone offered it as a noun, and that stuck. These days you’ll find “human” used pretty much everywhere, including the science textbooks that I write and edit.
Every now and then, people solve a problem on their own, without too much conflict or fuss or undo attention.
I suspect global climate change will not provide another example of this phenomenon, but it sure would be useful.
My household burns a lot of firewood. Or to be more precise: I burn it. I’m the one who cuts and stacks the firewood in the summer, then feeds it into the wood-burning furnace on cold mornings and evenings in fall and winter. The furnace, as installed by the original owner and builder of the house, contributes to the central heating system. Using it saves on propane and heating oil. Good for us.
Nevertheless, I look at this wood and wonder what the hell I’m doing.
Have you looked closely at a hand-cut log of firewood? You can see the alternate strips of dense and loose cellulose, with a channel in the center, and the bark on the outside. It took a tree years—decades, even—to produce all that matter for itself. All of that photosynthesis, repeated continuously throughout the long summer days by leaves adapted and grown specifically for the purpose. A log of firewood is a beautiful thing. And I toss it into the furnace, where it will be transformed into gases within a couple hours, maybe a little longer if it is especially thick and dense. My house will become slightly warmer, and only temporarily. In the process, the carbon from the wood will enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, where it will contribute, albeit slightly, to the global climate change to which I profess my strong opposition.
If I instead bury this wood, or even leave it on the forest floor where I find it, the carbon might hang around the soil for a while instead of beelining into the air.
This kind of thinking is not especially useful for solving a global problem. Some experts think the battle has already been lost, but years of reading fiction—science and otherwise—have me primed to hold out hope. Someone needs to come up with an effective way of pumping out the greenhouse gases and changing them into linoleum or Tupperware or some other useful product.
Today is Thanksgiving, 2024, and I am grateful that the second Trump administration has yet to be installed. We’ve got approximately 7 weeks of the relative peace, tranquility, and sanity of Joe Biden’s America, and I want to do my best to enjoy and honor it before it is transformed into whatever comes next. Which is promised to involve higher costs for milk and Oreos, and more pollutants in the air and water, and some funky drugs and medicines, and vengeance on fellow humans, however you might care to call them.
It bothers the hell out of me that my main contributions to these Fights of Our Lives are so paltry and minimal. I write about the fights, I complain, sometimes I write postcards (which I did for the recent election, all seemingly for naught) and I share the knowledge I’ve gained as a science editor.
Some of that knowledge is relevant, but most of it isn’t.
FOR EXAMPLE, did you know that molecules do not make up all substances? A molecule is a group of atoms that are bonded together and act as a unit. Examples are molecules of carbon dioxide (see earlier paragraphs,) water, ammonia, glucose, and monster molecules like DNA and proteins. But table salt? Nooo….it doesn’t exist as molecules. Neither do other kinds of salts, nor do pure metals or metal mixtures, such as steel. Every now and then–usually as part of a lesson or essay that has nothing to do with the make-up of matter–a writer will talk about “molecules of salt” or “molecules of steel.” Utter gibberish.
Do you know the difference between velocity and speed? Velocity is a speed, such as 20 miles per hour, in combination with a direction, such as due north or due south. This difference is taught in science classes across America, and tested in assessments, and then ignored or mangled ever after. The problem is that velocity sounds so much more impressive than speed. We like to use velocity, and so we do—again and again.
“The airplane is a traveling with a velocity of 5.13 meters per second.” No, damnit, that’s the speed of the airplane. You need to include direction to state velocity properly.
Can you write the names of the planets? Of course you can: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and so on. Notice they all begin with a capital letter, as is their due. Now what’s that big bright thing that holds the planets together? Its name is…the Sun! It deserves a capital letter too! You’ll find certain publishers, generally deferring to their English departments and perhaps the Kindergarten teachers, who want this object to be called the sun, in lower case. Exactly why the planets get proper names while the Sun doesn’t, or shouldn’t, I’ve never understood.
Science writers of the past tried naming this object “Sol”, which is another name that didn’t stick. Sounds like the guy behind the deli counter.
Last question: Can you define the term energy? Look it up in science-world, and you’ll see the definition is “the ability to do work.” And what is work? Work is equal to the applied force times the distance an object moves, and is a form of energy transfer.
According to the late Richard Feynman—who was a helluva lot smarter and more accomplished than I am—we know that energy can take many forms, we know it can be transferred and changed from one form into another, and we know it is always conserved. But we have no idea what energy actually is. How’s that for a conundrum?
I have just read the suggestion that Trump supporters have one thing in common, which is that they lack empathy. They think of themselves and their immediate families or loved-ones, and that’s as far as it goes. My wife comments that their empathy is locked up by fear. They’re scared of those big, bad OTHERS out there, people with fearful names like illegal immigrants, and transgender bathroom-users, and bleeding-heart liberals.
That’s all I got for today. Time to go outside and gather more firewood. We’ve got a long winter ahead of us, even if it won’t be as cold as it should be.
