Historical Inaccuracies

“See, look, I . . . I know I’m homophobic, but not about gay guys. They don’t bother me at all. It’s straight guys who don’t know they’re gay. They %&*# my $#!@ right up.”


       - King Missile, Gay or Not Gay

The Battle at Thermopylae, when 300 Spartans led 5,000 Greeks against a Persian army 2.6 million strong, is considered by many the first great clash between Western and Eastern cultures. Some historians argue that if the Persians had successfully invaded Greece it would have changed the face of Western civilization forever, possibly even erasing the concept of Democracy.

What a shame then that Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300 had me wondering so early on, When are the Persians gonna hurry up and kill these guys?

Firstly, I have to take a critical eye to the film’s alleged historical accuracy. Putting aside the trolls, trollocs, giants, zombies, and other fantasy fiction staples comprising the Persian army in the film, or transforming Ephialtes of Trachis into a deformed hunchback, the film still has a great deal of historical accuracy in its depiction of… well… very little of substance in the film is true to history.

While true that Spartan boys were indoctrinated into military life at a very young age, the Hoplites, or Spartan warriors, initiation rites did not involve killing wolves, but Helots, who were the Spartans slaves, doing all the menial labor so the Spartans could enjoy their warrior-class lifestyles.

Spartan Hoplite

Secondly, I submit the following historically-accurate picture of a Hoplite for comparison to the red-caped, bikini-clad heroes from 300. The Spartans actually wore armor. They didn’t dress like Chippendale dancers like this film portrays them. I kept waiting for the King Leonidas and the other Spartan warriors to fling off their capes and start gyrating their hips so the Persian army could stick dollar bills in their leather Speedos, but I suppose the slow-motion “warnography.” as one critic put it, came close enough to make a few overly-excited fanboys wet their pants.

But the film warns us not to apply any homoeroticism to the Spartans’ many six-pack abs, swollen pectorals, and bulging packages. King Leonidas asserts his heterosexuality by making love to his queen and calling their allies, the Athenians, “Boy lovers.” However Anton Powell’s book “Athens and Sparta” states, “references to particular homosexual attachments of Spartans are conspicuous even by Greek standards (source)” The Athenians term for sodomy was to “Spartanize” someone.

But this confuses homosexuality with pedophilia and stereotypes homosexuals as lacking masculinity, and one thing neither history nor this film can deny is that the Spartans were definitely macho. In the film, when King Leonidas leaves his wife to go North into battle, he does not say anything, and the narrator makes sure we the audience understand that Spartans don’t say goodbye. They’re too tough for that, and Sparta is a hard land, where you can’t be soft in any way, and that means being hard, and being hard means not saying goodbye to your wife when you go away to battle. In case this extrapolation is too subtle for you, the point is that Spartans are tough.

Now compare this with what historians think he actually did say:

Plutarch mentions in his Sayings of Spartan Women that, after encouraging him, Leonidas’ wife Gorgo asked what she should do on his departure. He replied, “Marry a good man, and have good children.” (source)

How friggin’ cool is that? Why leave out this brilliantly poetic statement? This single sentence says so much more than Miller’s overly-verbose narration, which violates the show don’t tell principle of storytelling. The actual history is so much more fantastic than Miller’s silly comic book drama-kings.

To let the movie tell it, the Spartans completely went it alone. Sure, a small band of Greeks showed up, but they were just a bunch of farmers, not warriors, plus they only fought in one scene in the film and they quickly broke ranks and ran away. The Spartans also had a little bit of luck on their side, when storms sank part of the Persian navy–but mostly it was just those 300 incredibly brave nearly super-human Spartans who fought almost continuously for three days against wave after wave of the Persian army. They even named the film 300 to emphasize how utterly independent and all alone and strong and courageous these Spartans were and stuff.

In the actual battle, the 300 Spartans led an army of over 5,000 Greeks, who fought in rotating shifts throughout the battle, 700 of whom remained with the Spartans to fight in the final assault after the rest of the army decided to flee. Their valiance held off the Persian army long enough for the Athenean-led Greek naval forces to destroy the Persian navy in the Battle of Salamis.

The historical poppycock bothers me because I know I’m now going to get into an argument with some fanboy any day now about Spartan homosexuality, apartheid, or valor where the geek is going to reply, “Yeah, but in the movie 300 it showed blah blah blah…” Or some kid’s going to tell his younger brother the film as though it were historical truth. It’s historical disinformation, which brings people down, while historical veracity uplifts.

Ethical Problems

Leonidas at Thermopylae

One could argue that there are timeless themes in 300 and those are what’s important, just like in the Lord of the Rings. It’s just fantasy, and we should view the film as a romantic idealization of the Spartan battle, that removing the Spartan’s armor and portraying the Persians as monsters were purely artistic choices made for dramatic effect. But even putting all of these historical innaccuracies aside, the film remains offensive for its internal logic, or lack thereof.

In the movie, as in real life, the Spartans abandon their newborns to die on Mt. Taygetos if they were deemed lacking in vitality. The film gives Ephialtes, who betrayed the Greeks, the backstory of being a deformed infant who’s parents refused to kill him. Leonidas refuses Ephialtes’ request to fight alongside the Spartans because he is too deformed to raise his shield. How convenient this explanation for the Spartan policy of eugenics. Instead of admitting the Spartans had some serious cultural flaws, the film actually tries to rationalize infanticide rather than admit some gray areas that might cloud its tale of ultimate good versus ultimate evil.

And what evil. The Persians come in horrific waves. First there’s the fat monstrous black men with eyes that appear disembodied in the night. Then come the Asian hordes, dressed in Oriental garb and weilding samurai swords. These are followed by burka-wearing arabian wizards. To top it all off is big gay Xerxes, who’s tent is filled with lesbian amputees.
So by “Persian” the film really means blacks, asians, arabians, and homosexuals. The Persians are the evils of multiculturalism come to overthrow the valiant, scantily-clad white guys. But our bare-chested warriors are ready for them.

“Freedom is not free,” queen Gorgo observes. The small band of Spartans are fighting all by their lonesome in the mountains for their “freedom.” They are fighting Persian tyranny and slavery. They are fighting for their right to live their own way, to own slaves, to commit infanticide on children born imperfect, to forcibly rip children from their mothers arms and indoctrinate them militarily by forcing them into violent combat with one another. Every time the Spartans would cry “Freedom!” I was reminded of Inigo Montoya’s statement from The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

300 embodies all that is wrong in the disconnect between thought and action when we talk about freedom and democracy. That these aren’t just words you scream at the top of your lungs that somehow make you a better person, you must live these concepts, understand what they mean and strive to make them part of your daily life.

Many reviewers, historians, and bloggers have wondered what Western civilization would look like today were it not for the battle at Thermopylae. What would have happened if Greek democratic ideals had been conquered by Persian imperialism, replacing the Senate with a Monarchy?

We already know because history shows us what did happen. When Christianity conquered Western civilization, the Catholic Church imposed god-appointed kings and abolished all the philosophies and discoveries of Ancient Greece. It was called the Dark Ages, when myth and supersition overruled facts and rationality. Anyone who sees the myths portrayed in the film 300 has a responsibility to learn the reality and context of the Battle of Thermopylae.

There would be other battles, both military and ideological, equally important to the survival of Western civilization, and its concepts of democracy and egalitarianism. Many times throughout history Democracy would be ursurped whether from barbarians sacking Rome or Christian kings vanquishing it for centuries. Every time it comes back more powerful than before. That’s because democracy is a meme that works, not some mythological flag to wave thoughtlessly.

In Summary: Our Clanking Replicator must have an incredible power source, a means of propulsion to get it between planets, solar systems, and galaxies, it must have the potential to adapt to any possible environment the universe can throw at it, the intelligence to foresee potential problems and avoid hazards, and the ability to replicate itself perfectly out of common materials found everywhere in the Universe.

No big deal, right? Ha! Ha!

This brings us to the sixth criteria for our Universal Replicator: a civilization advanced enough to construct such a fantastic device. They would need to have fantastic technological powers and a scientific understanding of our universe far beyond our muddled view of reality. They would have to be absurdly, ridiculously, nonsensically, mind-bafflingly and mind-bogglingly advanced. I mean really really really really really advanced. Got it?

So with all that, why would they want to make a wind up toy to colonize the Universe? What would they have to gain from such an unimaginable investment of energy and resources?

Suppose they did build this infinitely-adaptable and nigh-invincible machine with a superior intelligence for getting around the universe. Why would the VNM want to pursue colonization? If it’s that smart, wouldn’t it quickly come to the same conclusion as its inventors and say, “Screw this colonization stuff, I’m gonna build a telescope so I don’t have to make the trip (or build a probe to explore remotely, ponder my navel, or play Nintendo (or Zorktendo, as the VNM may have)).”???

Maybe the AAEC (Absurdly Advanced Extraterrestrial Civilization) actually did build VNMs. Maybe we find these Universal Constructors all around us and we just don’t know it because we lack the ability to prove their origins.

Is it possible that Viruses, Archaea, Bacteria and Eukaryotes are Replicating Probes?

Bacterial Morphology

They are found in every environment on Earth, even the most extreme. They employ a variety of methods to obtain energy from their environment–Oh heck, Wikipedia says it better:

Bacteria are ubiquitous in every habitat on Earth, growing in soil, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste, seawater, and deep in the earth’s crust. Some bacteria can even survive in the extreme cold and vacuum of outer space (source).

The simple microscopic are the most ultimately adaptable organism. They appeared on Earth and immediately began evolving into higher life forms.

Not bacteria precisely, but Eukaryotes evolved into the plant and animal kingdoms. Although the two exist on different branches of the evolutionary web of life, evidence suggests they both originated from Protobionts for which we are still reverse-engineering the process of how inanimate molecules formed replicating molecules.

DNA is digital replication. Mutations occur very rarely, preserving the biological models that emerge, but apparently mutate with enough frequency to introduce novel biological models that test and challenge the preceding models.

These simple models adapt successfully to the planet they land on, evolving to consume whatever materials they can turn into energy and reproduce themselves. They fill every niche on the planet, and eventually evolve intelligence, the most adaptable trait of all.

The only factor missing is the propulsion, but they might hypothetically use the natural flow of our galaxy to migrate between worlds. Found in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, they are regularly blown away into space, catching a ride on the solar winds to the outer planets. They could also possibly hitch a ride on a comet to land with life-sustaining water on another planet in another solar system.

Or maybe it would just hitch a ride with it’s younger, however more evolved siblings. A human astronaut landing on Europa leaves a dusting of microscopic organisms and one of them manages to survive. This interstellar panspermia eventually becomes a colony that is the foundation for evolving more Universal Constructors to fill the Universe.

“Hey guys! Remember that rest stop we made on the third planet from that star on the edge of the galaxy when we were vacationing 3 billion years ago? Guess what it turned into!”

For further speculations on Von Neuman Machines, I recommend an essay forwarded by one of my readers, Alexander Popoff, “The Hidden Alpha,” which got my mind wrestling with the topic.

I also recommend Greg Bear’s The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars books, which chronicle a fictional invasion of Universal Constructors that attack Earth.

“Extraterrestrial Intelligent Beings Do Not Exist.”
      - Frank Tipler

Von Neumann Machines… Clanking Replicators… Universal Constructors… They are one of the many fascinating dimensions of speculation concerning Fermi’s Paradox, which posits the question: If there is life in the Universe, then why don’t we see it?

The Nobili-Pesavento 29-state approximation ofvon Neumann’s universal constructor, with a tape of instructions extending to the right.

Named after John von Neumann, who established the mathematical laws of self-replicating systems, the concept of Von Neumann Machines (VNM’s) is meant to reinforce this paradox. A VNM is a theoretical replicating probe that, given the age of our Universe, should populate all the solar systems in our galaxy. The idea is that, even using the worse case scenarios calculable through the Drake Equation, thousands if not millions of advanced civilizations should have come and gone by now in just our own galaxy. In the interest of colonization, one of them should have invented a self-replicating probe that can migrate from solar system to system, multiply, and inhabit every suitable planet in the galaxy.

This makes sense if we look at our own planet and its species. The human race has multiplied and migrated to every corner of our planet and even the local space. We have sent probes to the edge of our solar system and beyond, we have a bubble of television transmissions with a radius of nearly 60 light-years expanding from our planet, and we have accomplished this within just a few millennia of forming civilization and just 50,000 years of migrating out of Africa.

If the dinosaurs were not driven to extinction, it would not be unreasonable to think their evolutionary progeny would have evolved tool use, intelligence, civilizations, and space travel too–65 million years before the present. Take this thinking further, to the Permian-Triassic mass extinction 251 million years ago, and we can imagine their ancestors accomplishing the same. Take this thinking to other systems, where Earth-like worlds formed 1,000 million years before our own, and we quickly realize how plentiful advanced life should be in our galaxy and wonder why we are not seeing it.

In the case of Von Neumann Machines, we wonder why we are not seeing the byproduct of advanced civilizations. With the apparent mathematical probability of advanced extraterrestrial life in just our galaxy alone, there must be some reason why we don’t see evidence of their existence, which would cause a revolutionary iconoclasm of thought in our planetary civilization.

This speculative exercise is useful for providing insight into the nature of our reality, if lacking any practical application to it. So I wonder, how difficult would it be to build a von Neumann probe?

These are the requirements I could think up. I’m sure in a Universe as complex as ours, there are a bazillion other criteria I can’t imagine. I tried to keep them simple; however the answers can become incredibly complex.

1. A Power Source.

VNM’s, like everything else that gets around intentionally, require energy to do so. Unless our Advanced Ancient Aliens have found a way around Newtonian Physics (or Zorkonian Physics, as they may have known them), and have equipped their VNM’s with a perpetual motion engine, they’re VNMs are going to need a fuel source. Solar and gravitational energy sources don’t appear ideal because starlight and gravity are vary throughout the galaxy, waning down to a miniscule resource in the vast empty spaces between stars.

So the VNMs must process a fuel source that they can carry with them: hydrogen, Uranium, or some other heretofore unknown form of matter that can be converted into energy. But not just any form of matter. It must be a form of matter found in abundance throughout the galaxy, especially on whatever planet our VNM lands on and decides to call home.

2. A Means of Propulsion.

Our VNM must be able to get off world, and it must be able to push in the direction of the next world. It needs a means of hurtling itself through space to the next system. If it has enough time, it can ride solar winds to the next star system, but it will still need a means to lift itself out of a planet’s gravitational pull.

Actually, our VNM will need many different means of propulsion. It must be able to walk on land, fly in the air, and swim in the seas in addition to jumping from planet to planet and solar system to system. It needs legs, wings, fins, and rocket boosters to make it truly effective as a Universal Constructor. It must be the deluxe Swiss army knife off replicating machines.

3. Adaptability

Allow me to further clarify my last point: Our VNM must be able to walk on many different types of land, fly in many different types of atmospheres, and swim in many different ocean consistencies. We all know and love Earth’s atmosphere, ocean, and landscapes, but our VNM must be able to work on Saturn’s moon Titan’s thick atmosphere and methane oceans as well as Venus’ acidic atmosphere and semi-liquid landmass.

The universe is filled with wondrous diversity. No single life form/robot could hope to survive on all types of planets. A robot that could roam Europa’s ice sheets would sink through Venus’ semi-liquid surface. If it could glide through Jupiter’s atmosphere, it would fall flat to the surface of winter-time Pluto’s atmosphereless environment.

That’s just in our solar system, which lies at the edge of our galaxy. Moving towards the center of our spiral disk, the Clanking Replicator would encounter an environment saturated with heat and radiation. Look at how much difficulty we have keeping satellites functioning in orbit around our planet? Solar radiation, temperature extremes, and orbital debris are constantly wiping out our network of machines serving us from space. Our VNM must be nigh invincible, or have some other trick up its sleeve, to populate such an unfathomable variety of environments.

4. Intelligence.

Even being stupendously-invulnerable and stupefyingly-adaptable, our VNM would need to be able to identify nearby planets/hostile environments to some degree. It would at least need to be able to look up into the night sky and figure out where to send its offspring. If happened to be residing on a planet with perpetual cloud-cover, it would need to have a databank profiling potential destinations. Since our galaxy is so complex as to be chaotic system lacking predictability, the VNM would need the intelligence to perpetually update that catalogue.

Our VNM would need the intelligence to circumvent black holes, predict and avoid super-novas, identify planets with the natural resources to reproduce and power its functions, and use its adaptability and various propulsion systems at the appropriate times and circumstances. In other words, it would have to be pretty damn smart.

5. Digital Replication.

Finally, because the purpose of a VNM is to colonize the Universe, it must reproduce. Everywhere a VNM probe sets down, it must take the raw materials it finds there and produce more VNM probes. It must build these new probes perfectly. If a flaw entered one of the VNMs, it might replicate to successive generations and the whole colonization process would stop. The VNM must have a flawless means of reproducing the vast complexity we have outlined in the preceding requirements.

Mind you, all of this is pure speculation. I’m totally mentally masturbating here. Woo Hoo! Feels good! So let’s keep running with it on Wednesday.

Imagine No Religion

“Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible mand–living in the sky–who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time… But he loves you!

     - George Carlin

Despite how American politicians try to spin the World Trade Center attacks for their own ends. The 9/11 terrorists were not going to war against American’s “freedom,” they were attacking our secularism. America and other Western countries tend toward pluralism and naturalism. Our governments were founded on a mostly pragmatic and evolving empirical understanding of the world.

When the “jihadists” flew passenger jets into the Twin Towers, they were attacking what the Middle East saw as the icon of the West’s materialism. They were attacking our empiricism, and assaulting a culture not founded on Abrahimic religious laws. They were attacking our disbelief.

Richard Dawkin’s book The God Delusion, does not appear to have much to add to the debate on theism versus atheism, and that is the book’s great strength. Instead, Dawkins draws upon the great world history of atheist thinkers and religious skeptics from icons such as Thomas Jefferson to modern comedians such as Julia Sweeney. By focusing and promoting the ideas of other great skeptics, Dawkins puts the emphasis of his book on the truth of these ideas and their broad support across a diverse collection of educational and historical backgrounds.

Dawkin’s takes critical aim of Stephen J. Gould’s concept of ‘non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA),’ used to draw a strict dichotomy between the realms of science and religion. Gould argued that natural laws were the realm of science, while deriving meaning and purpose to the world were the realm of religion.

As we have seen with the Creationists assault on public school ciriculums, religion has no intention of respecting the borders between the Empirical and Spiritual. As we saw on 9/11, religionists are outraged to the point of commiting spectacular acts of violence against our secular Western civilization. Religion has no intention of honoring NOMA; therefore, it’s the responsibility of secularists to argue Empiricism’s superiority over the unprovable.

Dawkins wonderfully takes apart the modern notion that, without religion, we would have no reason to act morally toward one another. By surveying the litany of atrocities commited god and his chosen prophets in the Old Testament, and Jesus’ lack of family values in the New Testament, Dawkins banishes this illogical argument:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully (Dawkins).

We are more moral than the prophets of the Old Testament, which tells the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, for god, when god stays his hand. Today, Abraham would be locked up for child abuse. When criminals claim god compeled them to commit their crimes, we don’t excuse the offense because our law is not Biblical. The Old Testament is so foul, Dawkins observes, that if it were not a sacred text, people would not leave it lying out for children to stumble upon.

While it is true that history holds examples of atheists who were monsters, such as Stalin and, possibly, Hitler. They did not commit their atrocities in the name of atheism. No one has ever blown up a clinic or shot a doctor in the cause of disbelieving in god. Scientists don’t strap bombs to themselves and detonate them in crowded public places because that culture doesn’t accept the theory of evolution. The difference between the existence of good and bad people within atheist circles and those of religious circles, is that the religionists are the ones who use their gods as a justification for their inhumane behaviors.

Dawkins also puts yet another fact on the mountain of arguments crushing creationist ideology, when he refutes their argument that evolution is a random process and that complexity cannot rise from chaos. Natural Selection, Dawkins points out, is not random at all. In fact, it is just the opposite; it is a clearly defined process that naturally brings order out of disorder.

Dawkins most original observation comes when he looks at teaching religion as child abuse. He uses the example of a woman raised in the Catholic church who was sexually abused, but who also found the memory of that abuse nowhere near as scarring as the psychological abuse the church inflicted on her with the threat of Hell and the nightmares of her dead loved ones in spending eternity in torment.

Dawkins also points out the evangelical Hell House, where parents are encouraged to bring children as young as 12 years to see the most horrifying depictions of eternal damnation. The difference between these and a Halloween haunted house is that children are taught that what they are seeing is real and awaits them if they don’t believe in Jesus.

Jill Mytton, a psychologist, runs a support group for survivors of abusive religious upbringings like the ones mentioned above. To this day, she still has difficulty talking about the images of eternal damnation with which she was raised, and now seeks to rehabilitate similarly affected children.

Richard Dawkins notes that Douglas Adams converted from Agnosticism to Atheism through their interactions, so Dawkins knows of at least one successful convert through his work. I would like to add myself to the list of converts as well. Formerly a believer that there was something, I see now how unproductive such belief is and how unnecessary.

Douglas Adams once said, “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” We live in a spectacular world that only gets more interesting the more we explore it. Isn’t that enough?