To bring you up to date, we left the Enterprise in California and flew back to the East Coast, just in time for Hurricane Sandy -- perfect timing! Our power was out for four days, but the good news was that after innumerable power outages over the past four years in our present house, we installed a natural gas-powered generator last year and it came through with flying colors. We had heat, some light, and a functioning refrigerator.
And I'm still traveling with Cherie, but now we're in Europe for two weeks. First stop was Venice, pictured above. Venice took me completely by surprise. Sure, I had heard all about the canals, but lots of cities have canals. Such as Birmingham, England for example, where I was stranded for the better part of a week by 9/11. So what's the big deal with Venice? The big deal is that Venice has only canals. No roads. Ergo no cars, no trucks, no buses, no motorcycles, no streetcars, no subways. You either take a boat or walk. But what about the ubiquitous Italian motorscooters? They don't work either, because every 50 yards or so you have to cross one of the 177 canals. And all of the 409 bridges were built centuries ago, and they all have steps. Okay, I'm exaggerating slightly. There is a causeway from the mainland to one of the 118 small islands on which the city is built. But from there, it's all waterway.
Here is another amazing thing. The foundations of all the buildings rest on wooden pilings made from millions (literally) of small trees which were driven through the mud and into the underlying clay. Some of these buildings are pretty big -- we're talking about a lot of weight here. So how is this possible? Why haven't the pilings rotted out over the centuries? Well, it seems that the bacteria that actually do the rotting are aerobic, and the pilings are not exposed to the air. So instead of rotting, they have actually petrified. As our walking tour guide put it, Venice rests on the world's largest petrified forest. As you might imagine, building in this environment presents some issues, so maybe this is why in addition to being saved from vehicles, the city has also been spared a lot of new construction. Most of the buildings are old, and some are quite old. All of this results in a unique, amazingly quaint, and very beautiful place. Here are some additional photos.
But why go to all the trouble of building a city in the middle of a lagoon? For the same reason that people went to all the trouble of building towns with high walls on top of very steep hills. All those large stones were hauled up those steep hills without the aid of any modern machinery -- essentially by hand. That's a mind-boggling amount of extra work compared with building that hill town down in the valley, or building Venice on dry land. And they didn't do all that extra work just for the bragging rights. They did it to defend themselves. Which leads us to our next commercial break.
So, what were they defending against? Wild boar? Bull elephants? No, unfortunately it was just other people. People who wanted to rob and kill them. We humans are unique among the inhabitants of the Earth in many ways, and one of the more prominent of those ways is our predilection for killing each other. This is the ultimate manifestation of a human characteristic which, as far as I can see, seems to be universal. I call it the "us vs. them" syndrome, or UVT for short. The essence of UVT was captured some years ago by Tom Lehrer in his famous song, National Brotherhood Week.
I touched on UVT in a previous post, but perhaps a small elaboration is in order here. Because of its universality across cultures as Tom so brilliantly points out, the suspicion arises that UVT is genetic, just like its cousin, PTB. But if it is, it should confer some evolutionary advantage. So what could possibly be advantageous about disliking other people, often to the point of wanting to kill them? Well, in the first place, UVT promotes war, and war has provided the stimulus for a vast amount of scientific and technological innovation, from gunpowder to atomic energy to the internet (created by DARPA -- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
But that's really just the tip of the iceberg. Evolution is all about the survival of the fittest. Here's a typical scenario: One of our distant ancestors happens to be born with a genetic mutation which makes him a bit bigger and stronger than normal. After some generations have passed, his descendants who have inherited this gene manage to survive some natural disaster which has killed most of the nearby tribe who don't have it. Fine, but notice that the human race had to wait around for the appropriate natural events to occur in order for this gene to become widespread. However with UVT, there's no need to wait. The bigger and stronger guys can proceed immediately to kill their weaker neighbors. So the real value of UVT is that it accelerates the process of natural selection.
There are other advantages as well. Such as population control. No need to wait for a plague, flood, or drought. But there's a problem here. As is the case with many good things, too much is no longer good and may sometimes be catastrophically bad. If UVT succeeds in starting World War III, the population problem could be permanently solved. Forever.
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