But its a good idea. Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and its mostly biologic in origin. It wouldnt be much different than putting vitamin A in soy sauce. Theyve done that and saved millions of kids from rickets. How is it different?
They laughed at Bob, but he was convinced that if they acted boldly, they could alter the climate deliberately and for the good. Kenzo wasnt so sure; Edgardo didnt think so.
Just think of it as something like the Manhattan Project, Bob said. A war against disaster. Or like Apollo.
Edgardo was his usual acid bath. I wonder if you are fantasizing physically or politically.
Well we obviously can change the atmosphere, because we have.
Yes, but now weve triggered abrupt change. Global warming is a problem that could have taken centuries to fix, and now we have three years.
Maybe less! Kenzo bragged.
Well, heck, Bob said, unperturbed. Itll be a matter of making things up as we go along.
Frank liked the sound of that.
They ran in silence for a while. Fleeting consciousness of the pack; immersion in the moment. Slipping slickly in your own sweat.
Hotter than hell out here.
After these runs Frank would shower and spend the afternoons working, feeling sharper than at any other time of the day. Mornings were for talking and prepping, afternoons were for work. Even algorithm work, where the best he could do these days was try to understand Yanns papers, now growing scarcer as Small Delivery made his work confidential.
There was always more to do than there was time to get it done, so he pitched in to the items on the list and set his watchs alarm for five, a trick he had picked up from Anna, so he would not forget and work deep into the evening. Then he cranked until it beeped. These hours disappeared in a subjective flow where they felt like minutes.
More work was accomplished than there is time to tell, ranging from discussions in house to communications with other people in other organizations, to the endless Sisyphean labor of processing jackets, which is what they called the grant proposals, never mind they were all onscreen now. No matter how high in the Foundation a person got, and no matter how important his or her other tasks might be, there was always the inevitable question from above: how many jackets did you process today? And so really there was no conceivable end to the work that could be done. Given Dianes interests now, there could never be enough networking with the outside world, and this of course brought Frank news of what everyone else was doing; and sometimes in the afternoons, first listening to a proposal to genetically engineer kelp to produce bulbs filled with ready-to-burn carbohydrates, then talking for an hour with the UNEP officer in town to plan a tidal energy capture system that placed a barge on a ratcheted piling in the tidal zone, then conferring with a group of NGO science officers concerning the Antarctic microwave project, and then speaking to people in an engineering consortium of government/university/industry groups about cheap efficient photovoltaics, he would come out of it to the high beeping of his watch alarm, dizzy at the touch of the technological sublime, feeling that a good array of plans existed already that if they could enact this array, it would go a long way toward averting catastrophe. Perhaps they were already in the process of doing so. It was actually hard to tell; so much was happening at any one time that any description of the situation had some truth in it, from desperate crisis, extinction event totally ignored to minor problems robustly dealt with. It was therefore necessary to forge on in ignorance of the whole situation.
The players collapsed at the end, sat around the final hole puffing and sweating.
Forty-two minutes ten seconds, Robert read from his watch. Pretty good.
We were made to do this, Frank said. We evolved to do this.
The others merely nodded.
We dont do it, Robin said. The gods do it through us.
Robin is pre-breakdown of the bicameral mind.
Frisbee is Robins religion.
Well of course, Robin said.
Oh come on, Spencer scolded, untying his fiery dreads from their topknot. Its bigger than that.
Frank laughed with the others.
It is, Spencer insisted. Bigger and older.
Older than religion?
Older than humanity. Older than Homo sapiens.
Frank stared at Spencer, surprised by this chiming with his evolutionary musings. How do you mean?
Spencer grabbed his gold disk by its edge. Theres a prehistoric tool called the Acheulian hand axe. They were made for hundreds of thousands of years without any changes in design. Half a million years! That makes it a lot older than Homo sapiens. It was a Homo erectus tool. And the thing is, the archeologists named them hand axes without really knowing what they were. They dont actually look like they would make good hand axes.
How so? Frank said.
Theyre sharpened all the way around, so where are you going to hold the thing? There isnt a good place to hold it if you hit things with it. So it couldnt have been a hand axe. And yet there are millions of them in Africa and Europe. There are dry lakebeds in Africa where the shorelines are coated with these things.
Bifaces, Frank said, looking at his golf disk and remembering illustrations in articles he had read. But they werent round.
No, but almost. And theyre flat, thats the main thing. If you were to throw one it would fly like a frisbee.
You couldnt kill anything very big.
You could kill small things. And this guy Calvin says you could spook bigger animals.
Hobbes doesnt agree, Robert put in.
No really! Spencer cried, grinning. This is a real theory, this is what archeologists are saying now about these bifaces. They even call it the killer frisbee theory.
The others laughed.
But its true, Spencer insisted, whipping his dreads side-to-side. Its obviously true. You can feel it when you throw.
You can, Rasta man.
Everyone can! He appealed to Frank: Am I right?
You are right, Frank said, still laughing at the idea. I sort of remember that killer frisbee theory. Im not sure it ever got very far.
So? Scientists are not good at accepting new theories.
Well, they like evidence before they do that.
Sometimes things are just too obvious! You cant be throwing out a theory just because people think frisbees are some kind of hippie thing.
Which they are, Robert pointed out.
Frank said, No. Youre right. Still, he had to laugh; listening to Spencer was like seeing himself in a funhouse mirror, hearing one of his theories being parodied by an expert mimic. The wild glee in Spencers blue eyes suggested there was some truth to this interpretation. He would have to be more careful in what he said.
But the facts of the situation remained, and could not be ignored. His unconscious mind, his deep mind, was at that very moment humming happily through all its parcellations. It was a total response. Deep inside lay an ancient ability to throw things at things, waiting patiently for its moment of redeployment.
That was good, he said as he got up to leave.
Google Acheulian hand axes, Spencer said. Youll see.
The next day Frank did that, and found it was pretty much as Spencer had said. Certain anthropologists had proposed that the rapid evolutionary growth of the human brain was caused by the mentation necessary for throwing things at a target; and a subset of these considered the bifaced hand axes to be their projectiles of choice, killer frisbees, as one William Calvin indeed called them. Used to stampede animals at waterholes, he claimed, after which the hominids pounced on animals knocked over by the rush. The increase in predictive power needed to throw the flattened rocks accurately had led to the brains frontal lobe growth.
Frank still had to laugh, despite his will to believe. As one of the editors of the Journal of Sociobiology he had seen a lot of crazy theories explaining hominid evolution, and he recognized immediately that this was another specimen to add to the list. But so what? It was as plausible as most of the others, and given his recent experiences in the park, more convincing than many.
He stared at a website photo of a hand axe as he thought about his life in the park. He had written commentaries for the Journal suggesting that people would be healthier if they lived more like their paleolithic ancestors had. Not that they should starve themselves from time to time, or needed to kill all the meat they atejust that incorporating more paleolithic behaviors might increase health and well-being. After all, a fairly well-identified set of behaviors, repeated for many generations, had changed their ancestors a great deal; had created the species Homo sapiens; had blown their brains up like balloons. Surely these were behaviors most likely to lead to well-being now. And to the extent they neglected these behaviors, and sat around inside boxes as if they were nothing but brains and fingertips, the unhealthier and unhappier they would be.
Frank clicked to this commentary and its list of all the paleolithic behaviors anthropologists had ever proposed as a stimulant to the great brain expansion. How many of these behaviors was he performing now?
talking (he talked much of the day)
walking upright (he hiked a lot in the park)
running (he ran with Edgardos group and the frisbee guys)
dancing (he seldom danced, but he did sometimes skip along the park trails while vocalizing)
singing (Home-less, home-less, oooooooooop!)
stalking animals (he tracked the ferals in the park for FOG)
throwing things at things (he threw his frisbees at the baskets)
looking at fire (he looked at the bros awful fire)
having sex (well, he was trying. And Caroline had kissed him)
dealing with the opposite sex more generally (Caroline, Diane, Marta, Anna, Laveta, etc.)
cooking and eating the paleolithic diet (research this; hard to cook in his current circumstances, but not impossible)
gathering plants to eat (he did not do that; must consider)
killing animals for food (he did not want to do that, but frisbee golf was the surrogate)
experiencing terror (he did not want to do that either)
It appeared by these criteria that he was living a pretty healthy life. The paleolithic pleasures, plus modern dental care; what could be nicer? Optimodal in the best possible sense.