Photo: Finding Lost Lands in Donut World

They're always in the place you'd least expect. Scientists say that visions of Atlantis as a continent in the Atlantic aren't supported by what's known about plate tectonics and the geography of the ocean floor, but frak that noise - the sign for Donut World, somewhere in San Francisco along the N Judah line, tells me otherwise. Look closely at that map up there. Not only does it depict Atlantis, rising up along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, there's what look to be shavings of Lemuria or Mu joining Japan and Indonesia, and the Bering land bridge appears to exist as well. Perhaps the eponymous Donut World is a parallel Earth where plate tectonics ran just slightly differently, making possible the production of donuts far beyond anything we know on our simple, seven-continented world.

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And the Sky So Full of Clouds

Here in the Lower Mainland, clouds are an unavoidable fact of life. When there's a blue sky outside, it feels as if the roof has been peeled back from over the world. Sure, other areas get a bit more sun, but outside of the burning deserts you won't easily find a place where there's never a cloud in the sky.

Finding depictions of that sort of thing, however, is something else entirely. Artists began putting down their impressions of Earth from space long before we were able to bring back real photographic evidence of it. There's one thing a lot of them tend to have in common - no clouds. At all.

Presumably, the total absence of clouds here is why the greenhouse effect ramped up to such an extent that civilization has retreated to giant buildings on stilts.

You see it in the opening titles to The Jetsons. It's endemic in Looney Tunes shorts that go to space. Star Trek did it when the Enterprise returned to Earth. The Tintin book Explorers on the Moon consistently depicts Earth without a scrap of cloud, and I even found it in the title illustration to H.B. Fyfe's short story "Moonwalk," which appears in the November 1952 issue of Space Science Fiction.

That last story, incidentally, gave me a good break. Originally I had wondered if people honestly didn't think clouds would be visible from space - that the scale of individual clouds would make them as discernible from on high as cities in the daylight; which is to say not easily. However, while the art seems to go that direction, the actual story is explicit at several points about cloud cover being easily seen on Earth from the perspective of the moon.

The whole "cloudless Earth" thing is deprecated now, of course - the Earthrise and Blue Marble photographs took care of that pretty thoroughly, and at least for me it makes all those old cloudless depictions look almost unsettlingly wrong. But I still have to wonder about why it took hold in the first place. Was it the need for easy recognition? I don't know. I think it's safe to argue that when you're seeing Earth from space in a story, a film, or whatever, generally speaking the creators want you to know it's Earth and tend to state it explicitly.

Perhaps, in the end, it was always a stylistic choice that goes back to the issue of mainstream understanding. The average person on the street in the early and middle twentieth century would recognize Earth from maps and globes - clean depictions in which nothing gets in the way of the landforms. Maybe what started as a means to ensure that the audience knew what was going on turned into a standard that was shattered only when photographs showed us what it really looks like from up there.

A Geographic Understanding

Though the continents do float once you get right down to it - that's what plate tectonics teaches us - they don't float in a vacuum, and neither do the countries that we've drawn on top of them. Nevertheless, the knowledge of what those countries are and how they interconnect seems to be depreciated in today's world. A recent study in the United Kingdom, covered by the Telegraph, indicates that British students are "spatially naive... not able to locate countries, key mountain ranges or other features with any degree of confidence."

I can already see the responses coming... responses like "who cares?" It seems to me that society does not frown on people being geographically unaware, that it's one of those subjects that's seen as faintly irrelevant in the modern world. So you can't point to Iraq or Afghanistan on a map... is that really a strike against you?

Yeah, I think it is. Because, as I said, countries don't float in a vacuum. They interconnect, they rub up against each other, and the nature of their interactions in the past echo into the present and help determine the shape of their modern interactions. A familiarity with how these puzzle pieces fit together and of the shape they make is absolutely necessary in order to place the modern world in context. Without context, it's all a bunch of flags flying over unfathomable places. Knowing where things are is a basic skill, but it's also one of the skills that the "prosthetic memory" of the internet won't help. Knowing where the labels correctly go is only the first step to actually understanding the world as it is.

A medieval T and O map, printed in 1472, illustrating the continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa.

Personally I've never had a problem in this respect. I'll freely admit that, again, I'm a bit of a freak in this respect: when I was young I read atlases for fun, and made lists of countries and their capitals to keep my skills sharp. But for many people, even this most basic aspect of geography is difficult to grasp; if my own experiences are anything to go on, I'd imagine it's because many people did not have it taught to them well. It's the sort of subject that's easy for a student to dismiss as irrelevant.

But it's necessary, too - otherwise, you're a stranger in your own world.

The Folly of Dueling Disasters

Threats to our existence are everywhere. Sure, that's been the case for as we've existed, but unlike our ancestors we're unable to live in blissful ignorance. We know how hostile the universe is, no matter how much we try to put it out of our minds and go on with our lives. But those threats still lurk. We do what we can to address them, when we can - and some more exotic threats, like that of a gamma-ray burst, are so beyond our control that there's no point concerning ourselves with them.

We know that there are many, many swords hanging over the throne of Damocles. It's when people start arguing over which existential threat is more deserving of attention that things start to get on my nerves.

On Thursday the New York Times printed a letter entitled "Asteroids and Global Warming," a response to an earlier op-ed by Apollo 9 astronaut Russell Schweickart advocating the investment of more attention and resources into a planetary defense campaign. Defense against impact events, that is. Considering that they tend to punch hard, hard enough to bruise Jupiter, I've always known it's a worthwhile consideration. The dinosaurs probably would have as well, had they been aware of their situation.

An artist's impression of the Chicxulub asteroid impact, sixty-five million years ago

Not so our letter writer, Travis Madsen out of Santa Barbara. He seems to take umbrage at Schweickart's proposal while global warming threatens.

Anyone who's read this weblog for long enough will know that while I haven't been talking about the environment as much recently, I am not a climate change skeptic. Indeed, it's one of the big elephants in the room that will likely shape near-future culture to significant degrees, contributing to the whole "we have no idea what the future will look like" issue I kicked around a while back. I agree that we need to do what we can, while we can, to mitigate our effects on the climate - a combination of inertia, foot-dragging, and the crop of skeptics and deniers recently sewn in Washington all lead me to the conclusion that we're not going to get our act in gear until it's way too late - but the wonderful thing about a civilization is this: it can do more than one thing at the same time.

Choosing between planetary defense and climate change mitigation is not an either/or proposition - and neither is it beyond our reach, despite language that seems rather belitteling to me. We're not just "staring off into space," we're exploring vital ways to protect the planet. It won't matter if we've sworn off fossil fuels and made the whole world green if a six-kilometer bolide wants to say hello. We cannot pretend that Earth exists apart from the rest of the universe. There's nothing out there for us to hide behind.

What's more is that, to be honest, I'm damn glad that the existential threat we're dealing with is climate change. It's probably the most tolerable of the whole bunch, in that even now, we are capable of dealing with it, and for one very simple reason: it moves slowly. Sure, humanity is transforming Earth in an eyeblink of geological time, but our advantage is that we're able to adapt far faster than purely natural systems. Even as we change the environment, we can rearrange it. There's an opportunity there to salvage the situation, to pass through the eye of the needle and emerge stronger on the other side.

Not so for disasters like impact events. In all the history of Earth, the capacity to intervene in the celestial clockwork has existed for well less than half a century. Before that, all anyone could do would be to watch as the doom in the sky grew brighter, drew closer. Such disasters are immediately transformative: there's no mitigating an impact event once the crater's been dug.

Besides that, honestly, it's going to be easier to establish a true planetary defense network than it would be to kick the oil and pollution habit. Why? Well, because armageddons aren't good for the bottom line, and a program to keep asteroids from hitting Earth does not upset any huge corporation's applecart.

Mr. Madsen ends by suggesting that we take "meaningful action to reduce pollution now" and save the world. Sure, I'm all for that - but what action? Asteroid deflection would insulate Earth from one of the many dangers that confront it. We can't solve all our problems with a wave of the wand - but that's no reason we shouldn't investigate solutions when they come.

The Illusion of Isolationism

It's really no surprise that the United States has, throughout its history, held the concepts of isolationism and non-interventionism in such high esteem. The last sixty-five years are anomalous in terms of the greater sweep of history - the United States became active in the world at large in 1945 to prevent Allied victory from being swept away, and has remained active since 1991 out of inertia and self-interest. Nevertheless, the world has changed substantially in the last twenty years, and as time goes by it seems more and more believable that the world's policeman might hang up his badge.

The concept of American non-interventionism stretches back to before the Revolutionary War, though perhaps its most significant signal boost was made by Thomas Jefferson in 1801, when he called for "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." At the dawn of the nineteenth century, that was an eminently practicable philosophy. The young United States had all the resources and dynamism of a pioneer society and was poised to explode west over the Appalachians. National self-sufficiency was far simpler to manage, as the Industrial Revolution had yet to start chugging on when Jefferson took office, and the wide borderlands and vast seas gave the United States all the defense it needed.

Things have changed a bit in the last two hundred years. Thomas Jefferson never had to worry about pandemics or ICBMs or environmental disasters. But that hasn't dislodged the concepts of non-interventionism and isolationism from what seems to be a uniquely privileged place in the American world of the mind. I, personally, can't think of any country, except for Imperial China, that thought that way.

But it's not dead, IN AMERICA! Rand Paul, son of lolbertarian-favorite 2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul, is reportedly now the man to beat in today's Kentucky Senate primary. On his website he cites Jefferson's address and suggests that "allegiance to foreign institutions sacrifices our autonomy as a nation by transferring our legal authority to unelected and unaccountable leaders." Personally, if that's the case, my answer would be that the problem is with how those institutions are organized, not with the institutions in and of themselves.

Just because the other shore's too far away to see, that doesn't mean it can't affect you.

The twenty-first century has created a world in which distance is no defense; the Atlantic and Pacific may as well be puddles for all they can prevent enemies reaching North America's shores. Nor do we live in a world where countries can rely on none but themselves. Take titanium, for example: during the Cold War it was an absolutely vital for advanced aerospace construction, and the United States needed as much of it as it could get.

We're also living in a world of grander problems than those Jefferson had to deal with. Take your pick from nuclear non-proliferation, environmental remediation, international stability, global patent and intellectual property regimes, or any of dozens of other issues that cross borders as freely as the air. Modern-day problems are of global scope, and while we live in a world where collaboration across countries and continents is becoming easier, it's also becoming more and more necessary.

The future is potentially bright, but the world has grown into a state of such complexity that no one state has the resources to chart a course through the rocks and shoals on its own. The age of being "in the world, but not of it" has, I think, passed forever. Cooperation and coordination is what will let us realize the best of the futures.