Sahara Desert, Wobbly Basketballs, And Annoying Politics

Change is simply a fact. It’s neither good nor bad.

I don’t fear change. If change is good, I enjoy it. If it’s bad, I adapt as much as possible. I don’t let it ruin my attitude; why would I?

Roll with it as best you can and you’ll probably do alright. Anything else is counterproductive. To piss and moan about change is to scream at the sky because you hate the color blue. That way lies madness.

I’ve come to believe being mellow about change is uncommon. There’s a great mass of folks who have been trained to fear change. (Perhaps they inherently crave stasis from birth and never learned the difference between what you wish and what you get?)

It goes off the rails once one of these dweebs finds their way to power. They piss and moan that things have changed (or might change). They expend energies trying to stop the world’s turning. They commandeer my resources and mess with my life trying to return to or preserve that which is ever fleeting.

Rather than descend into recent politics (which is rationality free in this age), I’m going to talk about change that happened long ago. What I’m relating are facts from before folks lost their shit and started seeing Trump (or Hillary) lurking under their bed.

Remember, this is all ancient history. There is nobody to blame. It simply… is.

One of my favorite toys was a gyroscope. (Yes, I’m a nerd.) As a gyroscope spins down it begins to wobble. Like this random image I grabbed off the internet:

That’s the “wobbly basketball” from my title. (I never could spin a basketball on my finger. I’m poor material for a “Globe Trotter”.)

You know what else is spinning down? The earth.

You heard me, the earth is not powered by magic. It’s spinning down; though on a scale humans couldn’t recognize with their senses. It’s only detectable through careful math and measurement.

The earth wobbles just like the top in the image. At times the axial tilt is one way. At times it is the other. It’s a cycle. That’s one part of the various eccentricities of the earth’s orbit which are collectively called Milankovitch cycles.

So this is all on massive epic planetary scales that relates to moon formation and stuff right? Wrong. It has (and does) affect humans (on a timescale scale that’s invisible to the uninformed).

About 5,000 years ago, depending on which source you’re reading, the world’s axial tilt cycled from more optimal for the Saharan environment to less optimal. (Optimal in this case as defined by how well it supports human life.)

The big giant dead space on earth we call the Sahara is here now, but it wasn’t the same back then. This overlaps human history. There were paleolithic humans running around a big open savanna that is now totally destroyed.

Let me repeat that. An area the size of the continental US, home to the evolution of our species, was totally, utterly, completely, unreservedly, deeply, and powerfully… destroyed. It no longer supports humans.

It happened just before the Egyptians got into the early dynastic period. The Sahara changed from savanna & steppe to “so inhospitable it’s like it was nuked from space”. (Ironically, the causality of the nuking was orbital situations… the stuff we associate with space.)

Roughly 6,000 years ago about half of what we call the Sahara desert was savanna:

The drier portion of what we now call the Sahara desert was steppe:

Due to orbital eccentricities it turned to dunes:

Compare those photos. The savanna has life. There’s grass, birds, antelope, trees, bushes, etc… It’s not a lush paradise but it’s able to support humanity. It’s not much different than what you might find in Wyoming. The steppe is also habitable. Lots of grass; a good place to raise a horse or a cow or a buffalo. It’s not much different than eastern Montana. Montana and Wyoming are perfectly fine places to live.

Look at the last photo. Dunes. Essentially, bereft of life. I see one bush and a couple tourists… just enough life to snap a photo and then hustle back to the truck and get the back to a place where it rains. The place in that last photo cannot support humans.

Humans lost a big ass piece of habitable earth.

(Source for the map is the NOAA.)

My point isn’t to bore you with talk of orbital mechanics or the prehistory of what existed before the Egyptian empire. My point is that people talk of right now as if we currently live in “the perfect environment”. They seize upon the climate they’re familiar with, the geography they’re comfortable with, the ecology that was outside their window when they were growing up. (I theorize most humans think the right climate is the one they experienced around age 9 to 13. Grow up in a drought and you’ll fret over “too much rain” the rest of your life.)

The planet is not specifically and perfectly optimized for humans. Yet folks imagine our world as some sort of perfect magic incubator meant to support us. It’s not.

If you were building the perfect place for humans you wouldn’t cover 3/4 of it with water. You wouldn’t make most of the water undrinkable with salt. You wouldn’t lock up the poles in ice. (Polar ice wasn’t present throughout the earth’s existence.) Closer in time, you wouldn’t put a giant dead spot right where the species evolved.

Good thing all humans don’t spend their time bitching about what ought to be. If they did, we’d be dead. Many humans adapt, they grow, they live where they can, using what they’ve got, to do the best they can. The rest form a committee to complain about change. Recently they’ve taken to bullying the ones who’re adapting.

There’s a deep fear underlying it all; and a missing sense of scale. The fear is that all change is bad. The lack of scale is that the tiniest change is appalling.

Consider the scale of sea levels. Folks piss and moan about potential sea level changes measured in millimeters. It’s as if you could stand there with a ruler and a change the thickness of a pencil will doom us all. Even the biggest baddest climate change doom predictions ‘aint shit compared to what’s already happened.

Here’s a map of the sunken lost territory of Doggerland:

Roughly a thousand years before the Sahara became incompatible with humans, an area the size of England sank beneath the waves. Humans lived there. We have evidence of that (as we do of pre-desert Sahara). Another big chunk of fertile human habitat that was there in the past and gone in the present. It sure as hell ‘aint a sunk just few millimeters in depth.

It’s part of my thesis that how the world is today is simply one way it can be. It’s not inherently “perfect” or “the best”. It’s just what we’re used to. And the change isn’t measured in millimeters or tenths of a degree.

I think of this sometime when people are publicly emoting over changes in a glacier. If there was no power and prestige attached to fretting over glaciers as they are right now would people be bitching at me that the way they are right now is the perfect condition? Maybe they’d be happy they’re melting. Maybe they’d be bored thinking about it? Glaciers are completely bereft of human habitability. We hate that they’re retreating (at least politically). Would we be happy if they were advancing? Chicago was once under 3,000 feet of impenetrable ice and most of what we call Canada was dead and frozen. Only the remnants remain.

Would we once have desperately wanted to preserve the beautiful glorious natural ice over a dead and uninhabitable Chicago? Does a person in the Sahara right now prefer endless dunes to a past of grasslands and antelope? Do either’s wishes actually matter?

Hard to say. But knowing about past change does calm the fever doesn’t it? Predicted theoretical modeled change somehow emerges as a regulation to limit my choice in dishwasher design and it just seems silly; or at least it doesn’t seem so urgent. Whether we’re pawns to ice ages, Milankovitch cycles, or our tragic insistence on owning cars… change will happen.