When can we visit Perelandra?

On a warm evening the other day, I was watering the tomatoes on the hill behind our house.  A hummingbird drifted in front of me.  He seemed to hesitate for a second, then flew right through the spray of water, and on to his other business for the evening.  "Ah!  That hit the spot!"  He doubtless said in hummingbird-ese.

I read many books for pleasure, which tend to find their way to the floor beside my bed: Dickens, Journey to the West, Tang poems, lately Bunyan.  But there are probably no writers to whom I return as often for refreshment of soul and mind, that spray of cool water on a hot summer day, as to C. S. Lewis and his friend, J. R. R. Tolkien.  Recently I began reading Lewis' Space Trilogy for the, oh, tenth time?

I won't say much about Out of the Silent Planet today.  The science is, of course, embarrassing.  Ransom can't figure out he's going to Mars, even though the space ship is moving away from the sun?  The space ship is massive enough to create its own gravity, so how did it get into space?  It doesn't use jets to stop its fall towards Mars?  Their fuel is solar radiation -- and they get up to 50,000 miles an hour?  There are no germs on Mars, and the Martians aren't concerned among human germs?  Ransom mistakes Earth for the Moon?   

Once one arrives at Mars, though, Lewis' fertile imagination takes over, along with his rich talent at mimicry and psychological insight, and the story never lets up after that. 

For his journey to Venus, the hero Ransom is carried by angels in a coffin-like object.  Lewis explains why he made the switch elsewhere.  He realized even pretending to be "scientific" was just not his thing.  He wanted to write moralistic fantasy, not science fiction in the technical sense, like Arthur C. Clarke.  So you might as well go all-out with frankly magical means of conveyance.  (Of course he does the same in his Narnia tales -- so this proves a useful dry run.) 

This means there is less stupid science to swallow in Perelandra.  Lewis' imagination, though, goes to town on the Planet of Love, projecting all his own dreams of paradise.  (In his autobiographical allegory, Pilgrim's Regress, the hero John longs all his life for an island of paradise, which once discovered, turns out to be the same as the mountain of orthodoxy that he learned to fear growing up in Northern Ireland, I mean in Puritania.  So I think Lewis' invention here is especially close to his heart.)

For those who have not read Perelandra yet, but have seen Avatar, a few words of comparison might be helpful.  Avator is the most gorgeously crafted alien world I have seen on film.  Some of the science is just as bad as in Out of This Silent Planet, especially the mountains that float above the earth, even though made out of rock. 

Perelandra is perhaps even more rich in invention, and mostly avoids that kind of error, unlike Out of the Silent Planet.  (Though one

wonders why mountain-sized waves allow plants to grow low down on the fixed lands.  Also, Ransom sees no death on Venus until the Unman arrives.  Why do the flowers bloom, then?  And why does the lady -- beautifully portrayed -- expect to have children, as the animals do?  There wouldn't be much room to reproduce if the world were full of things that never died!  Here we touch on an interesting theological and philosophical question, which Lewis' wonderful imagination fails to find an answer to.) 

The chief invention of Perelandra are floating islands, where bubble trees and sweet gourds grow, along with nuts and other fruits that make the mouth water.  I can not only imagine those islands, Lewis makes me greatly wish to visit them.  Lewis also imagines underwater, subterranean, and fixed-land ecosystems, in less detail but with some creatures just as fetching, such as the singing beast, and the banner forest.  He makes creation good without being banal, and mysterious, without being evil.  It's a remarkable work of invention, in some ways among the best I know of in science fiction.  (And certainly more attractive than Venus' actual surface conditions of 800+ degrees and carbon dioxide!  Though apparently there may be a breathable atmosphere above the planet at a certain height.)

Still, evil does come into Perelandra, in the form of a devil-possessed physicist.  (The Unman has to be a physicist, because otherwise he couldn't have invented a space ship.  Lewis is not dissing the physical sciences, which I think he rather likes, from a distance.  I wonder if he ever chatted with Schrodinger, who was also at Magdalene College?) 

In the context of so much beauty, the cleverness and realistic horror with which Lewis describes his Unman, makes this book something of a masterpiece, in my opinion.  (Though the philosophical hymns at the end take some patience to endure -- I don't think they quite succeed.)  Good and evil set one another out more clearly.  Ransom's internal dialogues are subtle and true to life, and also among the virtues of the novel.   

So when will someone make movies out of this series?  What director could pull it off?  You'd need someone with real talent, and also some philosophical and theological imagination.  But I hope they do it: I'd love to see this world, especially, on the Silver Screen. 

Genuine refreshment of the soul, after all, may also come through movies, though that seems to be an even rarer accomplishment. 

Creation Ex Nihilo? Moses vs. Lawrence Krauss

COBE on faith.

In a small land on the eastern fringe of the Roman Empire, an unknown late 1st Century Jew wrote about the origin of the universe:

By faith we understand that the universe was created at God's command, so that what we now see was made out of what cannot be seen.

Much has changed about how we understand the cosmos, since then.  We now know that the ancient Greeks were right in surmising that Earth is roughly spherical, and about 24,000 miles in circumference.  We also know it is one of eight (not five, not nine) planets that circle the sun.  We know the sun itself is one of perhaps 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and that the larget quantity of mass in our galaxy is made up of things "not seen," but that can be deduced.  We know that the Milky Way is one of perhaps 200 billion galaxies in the visible universe alone, and that much more may be permanently out of our sight, because light travels at a fixed velocity, and it even if more galaxies are out there, the light from them can't have gotten here yet.  We know that the universe is some 13.7 billion years old. 

And we also now "know," that indeed, the universe was made of things that cannot be seen -- a singularity, or something like a singularity, first, then a universe expanding for some 300,000 years in an invisible plasmic state before photons were released, some of which (now stretched out into the microwave region of the spectrum) still cross our television screens as static when we flip to the wrong channel.    

How do we "know" these things?  Has the epistemological basis of our "knowledge" much changed, since the ancient author of Hebrews penned these words? 

I think the change is less than one might suppose.  We still know these things -- by faith, "the conviction of unseen realities," as our anonymous author put it. 

First, of course, we believe the scientists who tell us these things.  How did they find them out?  By reading measurements from a radiometer, then telescopes on board Soviet and American satellites.  But they didn't build those instruments themselves, so they needed to trust other people, in large part, for their results.  In fact  Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, made a key discovery by accident, studying the stars, when they noticed their antenna was heating up more than it should have.  They then consulted Princeton cosmologists including Robert Dicke, who explained the data they had discovered as being caused by background radiation from the Big Bang. 

All that involved a lot of faith in other professionals.  It also depended on the researchers' faith in their own eyes and sense of touch, and in their own rationality and memory, which is of course is fallible as well. 

In other words, all three mundane levels of faith, by which we navigate the world around us, were involved in reaffirming the truth, long since announced in the Bible, and believed by faith all these years, that the universe began in a definite point of origination. 

Recently, physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote a popular and controversial book (which I have not read yet), arguing in effect that the universe created itself.  Theologians and other believers in God have lost their last excuse: stuff comes from nothing, end of story.  This kicked off quite a bit of commentary, including from Richard Dawkins, with his usual magniloquence:

Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to super­naturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is ­devastating.

Don Page, an eminent physicist who is contributing to our new book, posted a review on Amazon taking eloquent issue with such appraisals of Krauss' book. 

And, in the New York Times of all places, from philosopher David Albert (no wonder these guys don't like philosophers!), these wonderful lines:

But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about a hundred years ago? We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now. And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place.

Both men are right, no doubt.  But notice, not 100 years ago, but 2000 years ago, the author of Hebrews didn't quite say God made all things out of nothing, but:

By faith we understand that the universe was created at God's command, so that what we now see was made out of what cannot be seen.


A fact that Krauss, in his usual, shoot-from-the-hip way, is echoing, too.  Whatever God's role in creation -- still, as ever, controversial -- reasoned faith has now again confirmed what reasoned faith taught that ancient Roman Jew: that all we now see, what made out of what cannot be seen. 

And we still add, now as then:

Somehow. 

Alaskans on Mars!

Comet West apparently
broke into four fragments
in 1976.

My aim in this blog is to "map the universe, one blog at a time."  But so far, my blogs have been a tad parochial -- about events on that one planet that most of my readers seem to inhabit.  (And yes, there are readers, and their numbers appear to be increasing.) 

So let me take a first, tentative, if nascently imperial, step beyond our world. 

How about turning Mars into a summer home for Alaskans?

Here is how we would do it.  First, develop one of the larger spacecraft considered for "Project Orion," which use nuclear bombs as propulsion.

Second, capture several dozen large comets with a lot of ice, and force them to crash on the surface of Mars.  (The mass of Earth's oceans is about 5 million times the mass of Halley's comet, which is a small comet.  We would need at least 1/500th as much water to make a viable ocean on Mars, whose surface area is one third that of Earth -- a thousand feet deep might be a good start.)

Third, if needed, add a smaller, more salt-rich comet or two.  Shake well to mix. 

Fourth, wait for the energy of the crash to melt the ice -- this might take some careful calibration, we'll put our best Chinese and Indian engineers on the job.  Before the oceans evaporate into space, they should provide an atmosphere for a few thousand years, which we can tweak, once we have enough practice with our own.  (Perhaps tax credits for Humvees on the Red Planet?) 

Fifth, stock the new oceans with halibut, king crab and the better species of salmon. 

Then open Mars up as a winter resort for Alaskans who can't book a flight to Hawaii, or in case we have to sell Hawaii to China to pay off our debt.

The sun does not shine very brightly on Mars, admittedly.  But Alaskans are used to that.  And it's sunny every day.  We could, perhaps, also import a few seals, polar bears, and other animals that enjoy that sort of weather, once we've got the planetary thermostat down.  There's a fair amount of CO2 in the Martian atmosphere already, so that should warm things up. 

If Sarah Palin buys a summer home on Mars, she can reign as governor, if not goddess of the sea (a position that may not tax her powers of patience for too long.)  Then, as Earth increasingly resembles its greenhouse-gas befogged sunward neighbor, the saying will come true, "Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus."

Fish the Red Planet!



And if we mess up our own planet badly enough, we'll have some off-world relatives to get things going, again.  (Since chat lines will take at least 16 minutes for communication at the speed of light, this may also bring back some of the old romance of letter-writing.  Imagine what it will do for stories of tragic lost love, as well.)