Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: on this podcast we never stopped doning. So it's Dune
Speaker 1: yet again. This is part two of the Dune series
Speaker 1: that we started earlier this week. So in the last
Speaker 1: episode we talked about the Bennie Jessert and a bit
Speaker 1: about the neuroscience of pain, and today we're here to
Speaker 1: talk about what more Bennie Jesser, maybe some Spacing Guild stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. We're going to pick up where we left
Speaker 1: off with the Bennie Jesser and then we're going to
Speaker 1: move on to the Spacing Guild. Um. And I think
Speaker 1: the place I'd like to start is to come back
Speaker 1: to something we touched on in last episode, and that
Speaker 1: is the idea that the Bennie Jesser are chiefly concerned
Speaker 1: with politics right now. We offered some caveats about that
Speaker 1: in the last episode, and that we often hear the
Speaker 1: word politics and think of like electoral democratic politics. Uh,
Speaker 1: the political situation in the Done universe is is not
Speaker 1: so lucky to have democratic electoral politics. They've got some
Speaker 1: kind of weird um hybrid uh technological feudalism that has
Speaker 1: like an an emperor on top. And then there are
Speaker 1: there's like an aristocracy of of landed nobles essentially houses
Speaker 1: who control planets as their fiefdoms. And then there's also
Speaker 1: a pretty large input from trade guilds, primarily the Spacing Guild,
Speaker 1: which controls the monopoly over the the economy of interstellar travel. Yeah. So, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you need a if you need a refresh. Uh.
Speaker 1: Certainly we went over the world of Done in the
Speaker 1: last episode. Uh, so go back and listen to that
Speaker 1: one if you you didn't have a chance to. So.
Speaker 1: One of the books that I was looking at for
Speaker 1: this was that was another fun um collection of Done essays. Uh.
Speaker 1: The book titled un in Philosophy and in it philosophy
Speaker 1: professor Jeffrey Nicholas who also edited the book. He examines
Speaker 1: the topic of the benegessriate in facing the gom Jabbar Test.
Speaker 1: He touches, you know, on the point that they that
Speaker 1: they make in this you know conversation between Paul and
Speaker 1: the Reverend Mother that the Benigessa are concerned with politics.
Speaker 1: But uh, Nicholas points out that that what we're talking
Speaker 1: about here with politics is politics in Aristotle's sense of
Speaker 1: the world word um, political science one of the three
Speaker 1: sciences he outlined, alongside contemplative science, which would have included
Speaker 1: both physics and metaphysics, and practical science. So there's a
Speaker 1: lot of talk about tripods uh in you know, in
Speaker 1: the the order of things in Dune um and and
Speaker 1: so in a way that kind of matches up I
Speaker 1: guess very loosely with with Aristotle's three prompt approach to
Speaker 1: understanding the universe. Man, I have not looked at that
Speaker 1: philosophy of Dune book, but that sounds interesting. So does
Speaker 1: it get into like the what is the philosophical outlook
Speaker 1: of Baron Harconan and stuff? You know? And there's a
Speaker 1: lot of fun stuff and they there's definitely some hobbs,
Speaker 1: I know, I'll touch on some hobs here in a bet,
Speaker 1: but there's also, um, there's also one let's see what
Speaker 1: is it? Uh? I think it's something like, you know,
Speaker 1: basically like one article walks through the various houses and
Speaker 1: factions and talks about how they would have been thought
Speaker 1: off by uh say Socrates or whoever. So it's it's
Speaker 1: a fun read. So you know, one of the things
Speaker 1: about Aristotle is is that there is a there's a
Speaker 1: quote that's often attributed to him, Uh, pretty famous to
Speaker 1: the Aristotle quote, man is by nature a political animal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think this is an interesting quote, partially in
Speaker 1: how I think it is often misunderstood because I think
Speaker 1: a lot of times people take that quote to mean
Speaker 1: that that Aristotle was saying that man is the only
Speaker 1: political animal, which he does not mean. He actually mentioned
Speaker 1: other animals as political animals as well. Yeah. He he
Speaker 1: also refers to, you know, use social insects and so
Speaker 1: forth as as being political animals. Again, one of the
Speaker 1: reasons this is interesting to come back to this is
Speaker 1: because the Benegestra are big about talking about the difference
Speaker 1: between humans and animals, and given their focus on politics,
Speaker 1: we can't help it go in this direction. Okay, but
Speaker 1: so what did he mean by saying this? Then? Well,
Speaker 1: I was reading a little bit more about this, and
Speaker 1: apparently this is this is an area where you can
Speaker 1: get into some amount of debate and we're not going
Speaker 1: to go uh, there's this a certain amount of philosophical
Speaker 1: back and forth on this. But I was looking at
Speaker 1: a paper from Cheryl E. A Body, Uh and it
Speaker 1: was the article Higher and Lower Political Animals, published in
Speaker 1: the Journal of Animal Ethics in two six and she
Speaker 1: writes that that Aristotle considered man's impulse towards partnership with
Speaker 1: others to be the most important, and that it is
Speaker 1: only through these partnerships that happiness is possible. Uh So,
Speaker 1: I mean it sounds to me like you know, that
Speaker 1: means that, uh, the beneagess are all about happiness obviously,
Speaker 1: um right right right right up there out and uh,
Speaker 1: Aristotle broke this down across the different dimensions, um of
Speaker 1: of our interactions with other people, at the household level,
Speaker 1: at the village level, and then at the what he
Speaker 1: considered kind of the ultimate level. The Polish a collection
Speaker 1: of human beings who lived together through the creation of
Speaker 1: laws allowing them all to survive and flourish. And this
Speaker 1: is where we get politics. As the word politics. I
Speaker 1: think there's a pretty good case to be made that
Speaker 1: the Aristotle is onto something here about the fundamental nature
Speaker 1: of humankind that sort of um, that what makes us
Speaker 1: really special is our ability to cooperate with one another.
Speaker 1: And it's not that other animals lack the ability to
Speaker 1: cooperate with one another. I mean you might say that
Speaker 1: it is say like a youth social insect colony coordinates
Speaker 1: their activities even better than humans can. But humans have
Speaker 1: have much richer is of cooperating with one another than
Speaker 1: even say you social insects do, because we have things
Speaker 1: like language, which allows us to very very minutely coordinate
Speaker 1: our behaviors and cooperate in ways that are have levels
Speaker 1: of complexity you couldn't really imagine without something like language. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: Nick Nicholas, coming back to his paper, rights that Aristotle
Speaker 1: considered politics a place for human practical reason to flourish.
Speaker 1: So it was the ideal place not for everyone, but
Speaker 1: for the best minds to busy themselves. And um, you know,
Speaker 1: thinking thinking again to the done universe. It's easy to
Speaker 1: to focus on all the at times dystopian aspects of
Speaker 1: it and the war and the intrigue, but you know,
Speaker 1: it is a pretty cooperative interplanetary empire when you look
Speaker 1: at it from a certain perspective, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: they have managed to not annihilate each other with the
Speaker 1: tom weapons. They have this uh this you know this, this, um,
Speaker 1: this treaty in place, um even though there's a great
Speaker 1: deal of inequality in the Dune universe. Um, they're all
Speaker 1: all these factions are working more or less together. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think you can see those dualities all throughout
Speaker 1: real history as well. I mean, look at any number
Speaker 1: of empires. You can think of the Roman Empire or
Speaker 1: the British Empire. I mean, all of these are at
Speaker 1: the same time kind of marvelous achievements of cooperation and
Speaker 1: coordination at the same time that they are brutal engines
Speaker 1: of oppression. Yeah. Now, a body discusses the same thing
Speaker 1: that you mentioned that you know, some that we've discussed
Speaker 1: just a second ago. That you know, some take Aristotle
Speaker 1: to mean that non human animals cannot be political. Others
Speaker 1: see it as the view that humans are merely more
Speaker 1: political than any non human animal. But again, Aristotle puts
Speaker 1: a great deal that emphasis on language. Um and uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. Language is key to the human realm of politics.
Speaker 1: Um in in good ways and bad ways. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: a language allows for a complexity of coordination. That is,
Speaker 1: uh that that of course can serve both good and
Speaker 1: bad end. So it allows for extremely complex coordination to
Speaker 1: service of the greater good and helping one another, but
Speaker 1: also to uh, you know, ever richer layers of deception
Speaker 1: than than could be imagined by any other kind of animal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I've seen him pointed out that one of
Speaker 1: the things that our language does is it allows us
Speaker 1: to share uh, particular points of view with others, perceptions
Speaker 1: of of of what's working, what's not working, of what's
Speaker 1: bringing us pleasure and what's bringing us pain. Now, I
Speaker 1: want to come back to the benegested distinction of humans
Speaker 1: and animals again, This is, you know, they're very much
Speaker 1: of of the mindset. Don't be an animal, be a human? Uh.
Speaker 1: And the reverend mother tells uh Paul that the test
Speaker 1: is about seeing if he is human or not um
Speaker 1: and the ben adjested training seems to a larger degree
Speaker 1: revolve around the high application of reason in a way
Speaker 1: that overpowers animal instincts. Again that the example that is
Speaker 1: thrown out as the animal choose its leg off if
Speaker 1: it's cott in a trap, but the human, the political
Speaker 1: animal par excellence, plots and practices politics over the fact
Speaker 1: of it's entrapment. Well, in fact, the very example she
Speaker 1: gives is one of deception. Remember that he would feign
Speaker 1: death in order to attract the trapper and then and
Speaker 1: then strike out and kill him. Yes, and of course
Speaker 1: this is uh in a way this foreshadows what is
Speaker 1: to come UH in the novel Dune, because the trades
Speaker 1: acquisition of Aracus is widely seen as a trap. And
Speaker 1: and Paul's father um to to, not not entirely by
Speaker 1: his own choice, ends up in the position of the
Speaker 1: animal that must strike out from the trap in an
Speaker 1: attempt to punish his oppressor. Uh. It ends up not
Speaker 1: quite working, but it's It's again one of the great
Speaker 1: scenes in the book. And and I thought a wonderfully
Speaker 1: um recreated scene in the recent film adaptation. Now coming
Speaker 1: back to the philosophy of of Dune book, Nicholas uses
Speaker 1: the com Jabar awareness test to make a point about
Speaker 1: the current state of humanity in our world, the real world,
Speaker 1: in particular the environmental pair al we face. UM. He says,
Speaker 1: you know this, this is the trap. We are the trap.
Speaker 1: But we are arguably not actually human enough, not aware
Speaker 1: of our place in the world and our connections to
Speaker 1: one another. Uh to act in the best interests of
Speaker 1: the city. Uh. Quote Herbert's Philosophy of the human warns
Speaker 1: against two things being animal and being a slave. As animals,
Speaker 1: we may be enslaved by our animal desires, but there
Speaker 1: is a different slavery being a slave to the machine.
Speaker 1: The Butallerian Jahad freed humanity. It freed beings from enslavement
Speaker 1: to machines, and it freed us to devote up our
Speaker 1: human talents. Herbert isn't asking us to abandon our favorite
Speaker 1: playthings iPod, computer and game systems. He's challenging us to
Speaker 1: find out how to use those toys to live a
Speaker 1: human life. The warning is not to stagnate. Now, if
Speaker 1: we're thinking about environmental catastrophe, you know it. It may
Speaker 1: also seem counterintuitive to think of politics as the answer, obviously,
Speaker 1: but but you know, there are more than enough examples
Speaker 1: in our modern world of political barriers to environmental action.
Speaker 1: But of course it is through politics, certainly in the
Speaker 1: Aristotle sense of the word, that anything is done for
Speaker 1: the greater good of humanity. Yeah, and a very crude
Speaker 1: since I think this analogy works. Doing something about, say,
Speaker 1: environmental problems, which will eventually cause harm to do lots
Speaker 1: of people or to everyone, may require some kind of
Speaker 1: initial investment. It's it's sort of like the marshmallow test.
Speaker 1: But for you know, but for people as a whole, like,
Speaker 1: can can you actually do the thing that's going to
Speaker 1: get you a better outcome in the long run if
Speaker 1: it hurts you a little bit in the short run?
Speaker 1: A lot of times the answer is no. Now, right
Speaker 1: after I UM was looking at this material, I just
Speaker 1: happened to be watching a ted X talk for for
Speaker 1: other reasons, UM, and it's one from Jill Bolt Taylor,
Speaker 1: author of My Stroke of Insight, a brain scientists personal journey. UM.
Speaker 1: I think we've mentioned her on the show before. She
Speaker 1: had this UM this journey to recover from a stroke,
Speaker 1: and wrote about it quite interesting. But this particular talk
Speaker 1: was the nero and anatomical transformation of the teenage brain
Speaker 1: from and Taylor's main points in this concern what happens
Speaker 1: to the teenage brain, but also just the development of
Speaker 1: the brain in general. And I thought some of her
Speaker 1: points lined up with a lot of this Benedjester at
Speaker 1: thinking in the concept of Aristotle's politics, she points out
Speaker 1: that we are feeling animals that think, not thinking animals
Speaker 1: that feel, uh, and we we are all neuro circuitry.
Speaker 1: That's something that she drives home, and as such, we
Speaker 1: think thoughts. We then feel emotions based on those thoughts,
Speaker 1: and then we run physiological responses to those emotions. And
Speaker 1: for sustained or recurring psychological responses, such as anger, we
Speaker 1: wind up running the same thoughts over and over again
Speaker 1: to reproduce those same results. And she drives something that
Speaker 1: you know, we have we have an ability to pick
Speaker 1: and choose what's going on inside of our heads. Uh.
Speaker 1: And she sums it up by saying, you know again,
Speaker 1: we are we are feeling creatures who think, uh. We
Speaker 1: tend to be more concerned with the me rather than
Speaker 1: the we uh. And and in this we fall short
Speaker 1: of the idea of that polus of the of the
Speaker 1: city uh that Aristotle writes about. So I think it's
Speaker 1: interesting to think about like political action coming together, communal responses,
Speaker 1: planning towards um, you know, future problems. Is that these
Speaker 1: are things that one hand, they're difficult for individuals to
Speaker 1: do at times, but on the other hand, like this
Speaker 1: is this is something that humans do excel at. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're not We're not you know that we don't have
Speaker 1: the same level of of efficiency compared to you. Social
Speaker 1: insects certainly but um, but it is one of the
Speaker 1: strengths of humanity that that you know, virtually anything that
Speaker 1: we consider great in in human culture, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and and um and in the history of our civilizations
Speaker 1: it has been is due to people working together and
Speaker 1: bringing things out of that. But it's also interesting the
Speaker 1: way that um, the use of politics and the Benny
Speaker 1: Jesser it since I guess reflects both types of both
Speaker 1: ways of thinking about the words. So on the one hand,
Speaker 1: you have them sort of executing long term plans through
Speaker 1: massive cooperation of they're they're they're coordinating activities on a
Speaker 1: galactic scale, uh, to try to serve some goal in
Speaker 1: the end. But you could also see them, as I
Speaker 1: think quite accurately rue fless power seekers within a ruthless system,
Speaker 1: and that those are both true at the same time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're definitely you know, engaging in shadow government conspiracies.
Speaker 1: They are they're manipulating uh, pretty much anyone they come
Speaker 1: into contact with to certain degrees. But the end then
Speaker 1: then they also have these goals of creating some sort
Speaker 1: of a human supercomputer that will you know, bring about
Speaker 1: some sort of balance. Uh. And if you know, long
Speaker 1: term success for the human species. But then again, I
Speaker 1: guess that's that is often if you if you if
Speaker 1: you look at at today's politics, I mean that is
Speaker 1: often the case, right, I mean there's you'll see politics
Speaker 1: who yeah, have some sort of a a particular aim
Speaker 1: or goal that they talk about that lines up with
Speaker 1: other people's estimations of what could make the world a
Speaker 1: better place. Um, but then they've also got to play
Speaker 1: that political game. Uh. And you can, I can, you know,
Speaker 1: you can argue, well, they have to play that political
Speaker 1: game in order to to do this thing or to
Speaker 1: attempt to do this thing. But then you also wonder,
Speaker 1: like what is the actual driving force? Is it? Is
Speaker 1: it the the good thing you want to do for
Speaker 1: the world, the change you want to you want to enact,
Speaker 1: or is it that game and that that's that continual
Speaker 1: you know grasp for power. Well, you know, on on
Speaker 1: on one hand, I uh, I feel a draw towards optimism,
Speaker 1: you know, I want to be optimistic about that kind
Speaker 1: of project. But I also think that people's real motivating
Speaker 1: priorities are often determined largely by their habits, by what
Speaker 1: they do day after day. And so if you get
Speaker 1: in the mindset of, well, I got to play the
Speaker 1: game in order to achieve some lofty goal that would
Speaker 1: be for the good of humankind or something. I mean,
Speaker 1: in a way, I guess that is what people must
Speaker 1: do if they want to achieve those goals through say
Speaker 1: mass action, which has to be coordinated through politics probably,
Speaker 1: But there I think there's always a risk of by
Speaker 1: playing the game, you're real values become the playing of
Speaker 1: the game. What is in further into of playing the game,
Speaker 1: because that is what you have to do day in
Speaker 1: and day out, right, right, And so like in the
Speaker 1: doone University, you're a member of a great house. You
Speaker 1: you don't want to just be trying to assassinate your
Speaker 1: rivals just for the stake of assassination. It's just because
Speaker 1: it's just this is the way politics works. But if
Speaker 1: that is what you spend day after day doing all
Speaker 1: the time, I think that ultimately will end up defining
Speaker 1: your main priorities. You know, when when you're forced to
Speaker 1: choose between one thing and another, you'll probably choose what's
Speaker 1: in service of the projects you pursue day after day
Speaker 1: all the time. All right, well, why don't we move
Speaker 1: along to the Spacing Guild and to uh, to set
Speaker 1: the stage, I thought we might do, uh, one of
Speaker 1: these little readings here. Perhaps we can drop a little
Speaker 1: ambience into the audio bed here, and uh, we'll hear
Speaker 1: from the Spacing Guild handbook. Any path that narrows future
Speaker 1: possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans are not threading
Speaker 1: their way through a maze. They scan a vast horizon
Speaker 1: filled with unique opportunities. The narrowing viewpoint of the maze
Speaker 1: should appeal only to creatures with their noses buried in
Speaker 1: the sand. A point of order, wouldn't burying your nose
Speaker 1: in the sand actually be a good way to inhale
Speaker 1: significant amount of spice and thus broad horizons. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: why I thought this is a great quote to start with,
Speaker 1: because on one hand, that's the sand, that's where all
Speaker 1: that spices, and uh, you know, that's that's what the
Speaker 1: Guild is all about. And then on the other hand,
Speaker 1: the thing they're saying don't do is the main thing
Speaker 1: that Paul accuses the Spacing Guild of doing, of um,
Speaker 1: you know, of of not considering the vast horizon, but
Speaker 1: but considering the narrow viewpoint of how to avoid catastrophes
Speaker 1: in the near future, and of course how to maintain
Speaker 1: that spice. You know, this quote actually reminds me of
Speaker 1: something that's brought up in in an essay I'm going
Speaker 1: to get into in a bit by by a NASA
Speaker 1: JPL navigator who has written about the Guild navigators in
Speaker 1: uh in Dune, and one of the concepts he talks
Speaker 1: about in his essay is the difference between calculating a
Speaker 1: solution to a problem in a best fit fashion or
Speaker 1: in a first fit fashion. Uh. You know, these are
Speaker 1: very different approaches you can have. So one says you
Speaker 1: you keep trying to solve the problem until you find
Speaker 1: the first solution that actually works, and the other is
Speaker 1: you keep trying to solve the problem, going through all
Speaker 1: possible solutions until you have identified the optimal one. And
Speaker 1: of course people think, well, you know, going for the
Speaker 1: best fit path has got to be better, right, because
Speaker 1: some even some successful paths are better than other successful paths.
Speaker 1: But he outlines the fact that for a lot of
Speaker 1: real world types and air areos, even if you have
Speaker 1: supercomputers involved, calculating best fit pathways is sometimes such a
Speaker 1: monumental calculation task that it's functionally impossible. So you know,
Speaker 1: they're saying, we'll be aware of all possibilities. But there's
Speaker 1: also the possibility that being aware of all possibilities puts
Speaker 1: you in a paralyzing state of inaction and in decision
Speaker 1: because you can never finish doing all the calculations, and
Speaker 1: maybe you would be better to just sort of bury
Speaker 1: your nose whenever you figure out one path that works,
Speaker 1: just do that. Anyway, I guess we can keep that
Speaker 1: in mind as we talked about the Space and Guild. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Well,
Speaker 1: let's let's refresh though in the Space and Guild, um
Speaker 1: be because certainly you haven't read the book in a while,
Speaker 1: you might have forgotten some of this and the Space
Speaker 1: and Guild that they are present in Dune Part one,
Speaker 1: the movie that that just came out last month, but
Speaker 1: they're not maybe not in the forefront of things. So
Speaker 1: first of all, as we mentioned earlier, um, this is
Speaker 1: one of the great mental physical train schools, uh, the
Speaker 1: Spacing Guild, and we're told in Dune that they constituted
Speaker 1: one leg of the political tripod, maintaining the Great Convention.
Speaker 1: This is the truth among all the great houses and
Speaker 1: the imperium that bans atomic weaponry and permits these kind
Speaker 1: of formal wars of assassination against rulers and key figures,
Speaker 1: so that way, you know, it's members of great houses
Speaker 1: that get strategically murdered as opposed to whole populations and
Speaker 1: planets due to you know, a catastrophic use of weapons
Speaker 1: of mass destruction. The other legs of the tripod are
Speaker 1: the Imperial House and the Landstrade. The Landstrade is the
Speaker 1: body representing all of the great houses. Now, by the
Speaker 1: time of the of the events in the novel Dune,
Speaker 1: the Spacing Guild is immensely powerful. They control a monopoly
Speaker 1: on space travel and transport, as well as interplanetary banking
Speaker 1: and so some elements you know, you know, like everything
Speaker 1: and doing. You can easily think of parallels in history.
Speaker 1: Uh for instance, the non military are aspects of the
Speaker 1: Night Templars is there, as well as of course, the
Speaker 1: the East India Company, the Dutch East India Company, UM
Speaker 1: and and various other monopolies you can you can turn
Speaker 1: to like what happens when one group controlled something absolutely
Speaker 1: or near absolutely. So there's something interesting about the fact
Speaker 1: that the Spacing Guild has this monopoly on interstellar travel
Speaker 1: in the Dune universe, which is that, if I understand
Speaker 1: it correctly, this monopoly is handled in a way that
Speaker 1: that's different than a lot of real world monopolies, which
Speaker 1: are maintained in some cases by by force, you know,
Speaker 1: by by like military or paramilitary force, saying like no
Speaker 1: one else may may try to compete with with us,
Speaker 1: or sometimes by just like wealth inequality, by saying like,
Speaker 1: you know, we're the only kind of company that that
Speaker 1: can afford the infrastructure to do this. But in the
Speaker 1: Dune universe, it seems to be that the monopoly is
Speaker 1: maintained not by any of these conventional methods, but by
Speaker 1: having a monopoly on the navigators themselves, a monopoly on expertise,
Speaker 1: right and uh, and I guess the depending on how
Speaker 1: you look at the like the nature of the Guild Navigators,
Speaker 1: the steersman, Yeah, like the secrets and the knowledge of
Speaker 1: their creation. Um, you know, to whatever extent they are
Speaker 1: engineered or to whatever extent they are like a product
Speaker 1: of mass spice consumption. And then of course there are
Speaker 1: there are you know, elements there as well as like
Speaker 1: it's it's about access to the spice um, and the
Speaker 1: Guild definitely values its access to the Spice. But one
Speaker 1: thing I was really thinking about when putting together notes
Speaker 1: for this episode is the power of the Guild is
Speaker 1: um you know, just as everything in a sci fi
Speaker 1: futuristic world is kind of uh you know, blown into
Speaker 1: into into greater proportions and uh, you know and all
Speaker 1: like the basically, their power is such that if a
Speaker 1: great house chooses to surrender their planet in one of
Speaker 1: these these squabbles and wars of assassins, um they and
Speaker 1: they want to flee beyond the imperium, the Spacing Guild
Speaker 1: will supply that house with just such a far flung
Speaker 1: planet or you know, some territory on a far flung
Speaker 1: planet that's called a two pile. And this is actually
Speaker 1: referenced in the novel when the Trades are trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what to do about this hearkening trap that
Speaker 1: they've found themselves caught in, and one of the options
Speaker 1: which they don't really entertain, is, oh, yeah, we could
Speaker 1: buy the you know, do the rules of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: of of these various treaties. We can just go to
Speaker 1: the Spacing Guild and they will take us away to
Speaker 1: a planet that no one else can get to. Um
Speaker 1: and and I love that love this because it reminds
Speaker 1: us that for the Guild, this is a true monopoly.
Speaker 1: And they're also that their space beyond the Imperium. But
Speaker 1: since the Guild are the ones who control movement and mapping,
Speaker 1: they kind of have control over the shape of the
Speaker 1: physical universe for human beings, UH, their access to secret
Speaker 1: worlds and outside space. It almost mirror 's UM, you know,
Speaker 1: theological concepts. Yeah, that's really interesting and and I mean
Speaker 1: this would essentially be a an unprecedented state of affairs
Speaker 1: in the history of human politics because normally, you know,
Speaker 1: if you get exiled, you have to go somewhere where
Speaker 1: you could be found, and there are probably already going
Speaker 1: to be some people there anyway. But in this case,
Speaker 1: you can get exiled to a place where there's nobody
Speaker 1: there to begin with, and nobody's nobody can ever find you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's it's weird how in this case, it's like a
Speaker 1: place is not real unless the Guild permits you to
Speaker 1: go there. And and in UM having this two pile option,
Speaker 1: it allows people to to basically pass out of the
Speaker 1: world of human beings in the Imperium and UH and
Speaker 1: exist in in another state almost like they've entered into
Speaker 1: an afterlife or something that. Yeah, that's fascinating. So how
Speaker 1: did the Guild come to learn of the use of
Speaker 1: spice and navigation? Well, I was reading about this in
Speaker 1: the Dune Encyclopedia, of course, and they outline a few
Speaker 1: different stabilities, but the basics seems seemed to be that
Speaker 1: they were perhaps just casting around in the wake of
Speaker 1: the Great Revolt in the Great in the wake of
Speaker 1: the Balarian Jahad, looking for just anything that could aid
Speaker 1: them in navigation. You know, what can we do to
Speaker 1: enhance human mental capacity in order to help us handle this?
Speaker 1: And then they discovered the spice or it's also suggested
Speaker 1: that perhaps the Benegester it has something to do with
Speaker 1: this and introduced the spice to them. Um, now how
Speaker 1: do they use the spice? Well, as we come to
Speaker 1: learn in the Dune series, the steersman or Guild Navigators
Speaker 1: consumed just massive amounts of milange, so much that they
Speaker 1: have been altered into a kind of aquatic mammal that
Speaker 1: breathes and drinks milange. Now, we in the first novel
Speaker 1: don't really get a lot of insight into the Guild navigators, Like,
Speaker 1: we don't really see them up close or get their perspective.
Speaker 1: But that's not true in the sequels, right, Like I
Speaker 1: think in the second book, one of the main characters
Speaker 1: is a is a Guild navigator, Am I right? Right? Right?
Speaker 1: The the guild navigator that we we actually see in
Speaker 1: the David lynch Um adaptation. They basically pulled the Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they Edric, they pull him out of the sequel um
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, that's probably one of the most
Speaker 1: memorable sequences in that entire film, with these very very
Speaker 1: mutinty um gothy spacing Guild members bringing out this great
Speaker 1: tank in which floats this creature that is actually just
Speaker 1: a human being, but a very exotic form of human
Speaker 1: being brought on by this intense relationship with the Spice. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love I've always thought that was a great choice
Speaker 1: by Lynch. So he's like, Okay, I'm adapting one of
Speaker 1: the weirdest novels ever into a big mainstream motion picture,
Speaker 1: and uh, I think the thing I'm gonna do is
Speaker 1: insert a scene that's even weirder than anything in the
Speaker 1: book that is not in the book, and put that
Speaker 1: right at the beginning. As I love it. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's really clear in the latest adaptation that uh that
Speaker 1: the director old d V there he um, he really
Speaker 1: likes the weird uh and he he he likes to
Speaker 1: linger on on these beautiful weird moments just in the
Speaker 1: first half of the first novel. I really hope he
Speaker 1: gets to make Dune Messiah as well, um, which he
Speaker 1: has said he would like to do. Is sort of
Speaker 1: a way to round out the trilogy, because there's so
Speaker 1: much weird stuff in Messiah, because that's where you start
Speaker 1: seeing things like like a guild steersman, and um, there's
Speaker 1: also a face dancer. Uh. There, there's wonderful stuff in there. Now.
Speaker 1: I was reading about the Steersman in Um the Dune Encyclopedia,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to read this wonderful quote. Whatever faults
Speaker 1: the Spacing Guild may have had when the day of
Speaker 1: the Steersman ended, a real beauty passed from the universe.
Speaker 1: The experience of the Steersman, breathing and drinking milange, rocking
Speaker 1: to the beat of space and time, swaying with the
Speaker 1: music of the spheres, lead in their dance by the
Speaker 1: pulse of life around them, alive to every note in
Speaker 1: the Pivan, both composed and played by their quartet is
Speaker 1: beyond the power of words to describe or the imagination
Speaker 1: to conceive. And so the Dune encyclopedia I think is
Speaker 1: pretty pro Space and Guild. They take a side in
Speaker 1: the factional struggles. Well and this this, I mean, they're
Speaker 1: really like, look, you know, whatever you have to say
Speaker 1: about the Space and Guild. Those steersman they were they
Speaker 1: were doing great. They they were just uh And I
Speaker 1: guess I like the idea that it, you know it
Speaker 1: it kind of answers the question, well, why would why
Speaker 1: would it would you want to be this like, why
Speaker 1: would uh would this be an okay state? Because certainly
Speaker 1: in the Lynch film, you know, it looks kind of
Speaker 1: like a nightmare. It looks like some sort of like well,
Speaker 1: just this horrible state. But if you imagine uh, the
Speaker 1: Guild navigator just you know, feeling so alive, uh, on
Speaker 1: the spice in that tank, then I guess it it
Speaker 1: makes sense. But in the uh, the New Dune movie,
Speaker 1: the Villeneuve when so, I wasn't aware when I was
Speaker 1: watching it that there was a scene where we saw
Speaker 1: the Guild steersman, but you you identified that actually they
Speaker 1: do show up. They're the guys towards the beginning of
Speaker 1: the movie that are dressed in what looks like a
Speaker 1: combination of papal vestments and e v A suits. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And one of the big tail tale signs, of course,
Speaker 1: is that they have these orange domes over their head, orange,
Speaker 1: you know, implying the spice um. But yeah, it's easy
Speaker 1: to miss. In fact, I I had noticed that there were,
Speaker 1: you know, some people online responding to the film and
Speaker 1: they were like, where was the Space and Guild um
Speaker 1: and and yeah you can. You can watch it and
Speaker 1: think that they don't show up at all, but they
Speaker 1: they are here and uh and I think they'll they'll
Speaker 1: have a bigger role in part two. Thank thank thank
Speaker 1: All Right, well, I thought we should talk maybe a
Speaker 1: bit about the science of deep space navigation and how
Speaker 1: that would apply to the Spacing Guild. And as one
Speaker 1: of my sources here, I was looking at another essay
Speaker 1: in that book The Science of Dune we mentioned in
Speaker 1: the last episode. This one is called the Spacing Guild,
Speaker 1: and it's by a guy named John C. Smith who
Speaker 1: worked in spaceflight navigation at NASA JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Speaker 1: and his bio says that he worked on missions too.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what to make of this to Venus,
Speaker 1: Mars and Earth um and that he was part of
Speaker 1: the Cassini Huygens mission to Saturn and its moon Titan.
Speaker 1: I guess you could argue that that, like the various
Speaker 1: satellites that help us study Earth science, our missions to Earth,
Speaker 1: that we have to we have to go into orbit
Speaker 1: to gain that kind of perspective to study our own world.
Speaker 1: I wonder it might mean return missions like attempted probe
Speaker 1: is coming back. That's true, because that that too is
Speaker 1: a navigational feat. Sure. Now there's one thing that Smith
Speaker 1: actually mentions right at the end of essay that I
Speaker 1: thought was really interesting. I'd never considered this, but it's
Speaker 1: a piece of historical context that might help us understand
Speaker 1: a little bit better what was going through Frank Herbert's
Speaker 1: head when he framed deep space navigation in the way
Speaker 1: that he did in these novels. So remember that Doune
Speaker 1: was originally published in nineteen sixty five, which again is
Speaker 1: kind of it's hard to believe, like it always feels
Speaker 1: further in the future than that. Yeah, to to imagine
Speaker 1: that this this novel came out before with stock, you know,
Speaker 1: h yeah, yeah, it's strange. But Smith writes quote, during
Speaker 1: the time period Dune was written, humanity's exploration of the
Speaker 1: Moon and planets was in its infancy. The first successful
Speaker 1: fly by ever of another planet was NASA's Mariner to craft,
Speaker 1: which encountered Venus in late nineteen sixty two. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty five, Mariner four became the first craft successfully navigated
Speaker 1: to encounter Mars. But here's the thing to realize, these
Speaker 1: were not the only two missions launched at this time.
Speaker 1: Smith's count is that these two probes, the Mariner two
Speaker 1: arriving at Venus in nineteen sixty two and Mariner four
Speaker 1: reaching Mars in sixty five, were up to this point
Speaker 1: the only two fully successful interplanetary missions out of twenty
Speaker 1: that had been attempted. Wow, so that's that's that's impressive. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So because you also have to we also remind ourselves
Speaker 1: of like, why do we have Mariner one and Mariner two.
Speaker 1: It was because it was considered so risky that you
Speaker 1: we better just make two of them and send them
Speaker 1: both out because there's a high probability we're going to
Speaker 1: lose at least one of them. Right, So so at
Speaker 1: the point Herbert was writing, even navigating simply between the
Speaker 1: planets within our own solar system was a venture characterized
Speaker 1: mostly by failure. And so we today, you know, being
Speaker 1: able to look back on many decades now of of
Speaker 1: successful missions. I think in a kind of, uh, in
Speaker 1: a kind of shortsighted way, UH take interplanetary travel or
Speaker 1: at least of of unscrewed probes kind of for granted,
Speaker 1: and in a way that we really shouldn't like, not
Speaker 1: realizing how difficult this technology was to develop and how
Speaker 1: much intricate calculation has to go into uh, missions like
Speaker 1: this to make them possible. So all that to say, basically,
Speaker 1: I think there's a reason that in nineteen sixty five
Speaker 1: this would have seemed like something you know, in interstellar navigation,
Speaker 1: would have seemed like something that required an almost supernatural
Speaker 1: mechanism to explain that. Once again, that the interesting thing
Speaker 1: being that in most cases science fiction that you know
Speaker 1: that mechanism is the is the is the thrust generation
Speaker 1: or the travel technology on the ship that allows it
Speaker 1: to go so fast. I think that's sort of taken
Speaker 1: for granted in Dune, and instead the real magic seems
Speaker 1: to come in and the question of navigation. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's a situation where the spacing Guild and
Speaker 1: Steersman they don't you know, it's it's not just that
Speaker 1: they can, you know, travel through hyperspaces, that they can
Speaker 1: come out the other side, that they can do so successfully. Now,
Speaker 1: this might the the idea and the dune novels is
Speaker 1: that they travel through what they call fold space or
Speaker 1: folded space, which I think introduces its own hypothetical dangers.
Speaker 1: But even if we just stick to the problems we
Speaker 1: would expect to encounter traveling through real space. Uh. The
Speaker 1: the the problem of navigating deep space is is more
Speaker 1: complex and interesting maybe than a lot of people would
Speaker 1: have imagined, because um, it's it's fundamentally different and much
Speaker 1: more difficult a problem than navigation and say a car. Right,
Speaker 1: some of the differences are obvious. For example, if you're
Speaker 1: driving on a road, you don't really have to plot
Speaker 1: a course at all, right, the course is already determined
Speaker 1: by the road that has been built. You just have
Speaker 1: to know which roads to follow and how far to
Speaker 1: follow them. But even if there were no roads where
Speaker 1: you were going, say you were just driving a dune
Speaker 1: buggy over over desert wilderness. You would still have a
Speaker 1: much easier time because you'd be able to note the
Speaker 1: direction of your destination and more or less just drive
Speaker 1: straight to it. I guess, circumnavigating any obstacles you encounter
Speaker 1: along the way. You know, you might hit a mountain
Speaker 1: or ravine or something and you have to go find
Speaker 1: a way around it. But basically you're just traveling in
Speaker 1: a across a fixed map. And this is really a
Speaker 1: blessing with travel, right the fact that you know, if
Speaker 1: you're if you're driving from one place to another, your
Speaker 1: car is the only thing that is moving in that
Speaker 1: scenario relative to the reference frame of the surface of
Speaker 1: the Earth. It's not like your starting position and your
Speaker 1: destination are usually also moving. But when you're when you're
Speaker 1: navigating in space, everything is moving and moving within their
Speaker 1: own reference frames. So to travel to one planet or another,
Speaker 1: you can't just aim at the planet and then turn
Speaker 1: on the thrusters. Right, if we're trying to fly to Mars,
Speaker 1: you can't say where is ours? Now, Okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: aim dead center at that and then I'm gonna burn
Speaker 1: the rockets. You can't do that, of course, because by
Speaker 1: the time you got there, Mars would be gone. Mars
Speaker 1: is moving really fast, it's an orbit around the Sun,
Speaker 1: and it would be somewhere else. So instead you essentially
Speaker 1: have to plot an intercept course. It's not like sailing
Speaker 1: into a port, but like sailing to intercept another ship
Speaker 1: that is also moving. Yeah, it's not a journey to
Speaker 1: where the target planet is. It's a journey to where
Speaker 1: the target planet will be. Now, fortunately, the paths of
Speaker 1: objects like planets are strongly predictable that they follow an
Speaker 1: orbital course established mostly by gravity and inertia. And we've
Speaker 1: got good enough information about the orbital pathways of planets
Speaker 1: that we can predict with pretty high accuracy where they're
Speaker 1: going to be too arbitrary points out in the future. Though,
Speaker 1: of course, the farther you try to predict the motion
Speaker 1: of anything into the future, the the more inaccurate your
Speaker 1: predictions will get because of the you know, the the
Speaker 1: cruel of of tiny uh, tiny inaccuracies building up over time.
Speaker 1: But then there's a second problem. Okay, so you can
Speaker 1: mostly predict where a planet's going to be in the future,
Speaker 1: so you can plot a course to intercept it. You
Speaker 1: know where it's going to be you go to where
Speaker 1: it's going to be instead of where it is now.
Speaker 1: But but there comes in a second problem. Given the
Speaker 1: vast distances involved in space travel, even tiny inaccuracies in
Speaker 1: the initial calculation of a baseline trajectory can end up
Speaker 1: sending you off course. Uh. And for a crude analogy
Speaker 1: to understand this, imagine you are shooting an arrow at
Speaker 1: a target three feet away. If you're off by like
Speaker 1: one degree of difference, when you're trying to hit the
Speaker 1: target dead center, that's not going to matter very much
Speaker 1: if it's three feet away. But if you're trying to
Speaker 1: hit a target two hundred feet away, being off by
Speaker 1: a little bit is going to make a big difference.
Speaker 1: And so this is one reason that when we we
Speaker 1: send out uncrewed space probes to do a you know,
Speaker 1: inner the orbit of another planet or intercept a comet
Speaker 1: or something like that. You can't just aim them at
Speaker 1: where that planet or object is going to be and
Speaker 1: then shoot them off and let them go. You will
Speaker 1: have to perform repeated course corrections. You'll have to check
Speaker 1: the position of the probe periodically while it's on the
Speaker 1: way to the destination. Figure out, you know, figure out
Speaker 1: it's it's updated course heading based on the new information
Speaker 1: you have about where it is, and probably perform a
Speaker 1: new burn to correct the course heading because it will
Speaker 1: be slightly off, just because there's always going to be
Speaker 1: some level of inaccuracy that will build up over time.
Speaker 1: And uh and and there there's no way to be
Speaker 1: perfectly accurate when you're charting a course through space. Now,
Speaker 1: there's one other thing worth noting, which is that while
Speaker 1: real world space agencies now have plenty of experience with
Speaker 1: deep space navigation, basically all of that experience is found
Speaker 1: not in piloting ships from inside the ships, but in
Speaker 1: programming navigational instructions for uncrewed probes. So all of the
Speaker 1: space missions with with onboard human pilots have been really
Speaker 1: close to home. You know, a few trips to the
Speaker 1: Moon in the sixties and seventies, and then a bunch
Speaker 1: of runs between the surface of Earth and low Earth orbit,
Speaker 1: and as far as crude ships go, that's it. You know.
Speaker 1: We we haven't had a somebody pilot a ship from
Speaker 1: inside that ship to Mars or anywhere else. And there
Speaker 1: are some differences in this regard the steering of uncrewed
Speaker 1: robotic probes introduces additional difficulties. For example, the distance between
Speaker 1: Earth and the probe will always create time delays. These
Speaker 1: would be, you know, limited by the fact that radio
Speaker 1: signals can only travel at the speed of light. So
Speaker 1: if you're trying to land a probe on the Martian
Speaker 1: moon Phobos, it's going to take some number of minutes
Speaker 1: for the information to travel each way. So you send
Speaker 1: an instruction to the probe and it might take who knows,
Speaker 1: you know, ten minutes for it to get there, and
Speaker 1: then you gotta wait another ten minutes for it to
Speaker 1: send you feedback and for you to find out if
Speaker 1: you're maneuver worked or not. But then there's another problem,
Speaker 1: which is that Smith has a section of his essay
Speaker 1: in in the Science of Doune about the process of
Speaker 1: determining where a spacecraft actually is, which is crucial because
Speaker 1: to know how to steer, you have to calculate a trajectory,
Speaker 1: and you can't calculate an accurate to trajectory if you
Speaker 1: don't know where you are. So to establish the position
Speaker 1: of a spaceship with accuracy, you need some kind of
Speaker 1: external landmark to reference, kind of similar to how you
Speaker 1: would use landmarks to recognize where you are on a
Speaker 1: journey by car, except of course, this is over vastly
Speaker 1: greater distances without roads and with need for much greater
Speaker 1: precision because of the distances that will be covered on
Speaker 1: the journey. So Smith writes that we usually calculate the
Speaker 1: position of space probes in our solar system with reference
Speaker 1: to landmarks such as the Earth's north pole or He
Speaker 1: also mentions a reference point that is the intersection of
Speaker 1: Earth's equatorial and orbital planes on January first, two thousand,
Speaker 1: which is of course everybody's favorite landmark. Um. But then
Speaker 1: you know, uh so what you've got. You've got places
Speaker 1: like that, and you can determine uh the probe's position
Speaker 1: by say, checking the time delay on a radio transmission,
Speaker 1: and especially if you can triangulate that with multiple receiver dishes,
Speaker 1: so you've got different dishes around the world and they
Speaker 1: can check how long it takes a radio signal to
Speaker 1: reach them. You calculate the difference between the different dishes
Speaker 1: on the Earth's surface, and you can get a pretty
Speaker 1: good idea with with a pretty high level of accuracy,
Speaker 1: where the probe is, and then you can also calculate
Speaker 1: its velocity by measuring the Doppler shift in the in
Speaker 1: the radio transmissions as they as as they are received
Speaker 1: back on Earth. So again, the Doppler shift is you know.
Speaker 1: The common example is how the the pitch of an
Speaker 1: ambulance siren changes as the ambulance is moving towards you
Speaker 1: or away from you. Wave lengths of different types of
Speaker 1: waves tend to get higher pitched and become more compressed
Speaker 1: if the sources moving towards you, and then they tend
Speaker 1: to stretch out and get lower pitch as the as
Speaker 1: the sources moving away from you. And by measuring the
Speaker 1: amount of Doppler shift in the signal, you can actually
Speaker 1: tell how fast something is moving away from you. But then,
Speaker 1: so here's another thing I thought was interesting. So again,
Speaker 1: in order to calculate a spacecraft's current position and path,
Speaker 1: you need to know the last best guess of where
Speaker 1: it actually was, and then from there you need to
Speaker 1: predict forward in time using mathematical models of all the
Speaker 1: different forces acting on it. And in a way, it's
Speaker 1: a kind of dead reckoning you need to do. You say, Okay,
Speaker 1: at this time, I know the ship was here and
Speaker 1: it's been traveling in this direction this fast with these
Speaker 1: forces acting on it. And so when I read that,
Speaker 1: I was like, wait a minute, the forces acting on it?
Speaker 1: Would that include something other than inertia, other than the
Speaker 1: ship's initial velocity? And the answer is yes, absolutely, it
Speaker 1: includes other forces. Much the same way that if you're
Speaker 1: trying to predict the path of a bullet you imagine,
Speaker 1: you know, somebody shooting at a target. You can't predict
Speaker 1: the path of the bullet if you just imagine it
Speaker 1: travels forever in a perfectly straight line out of the
Speaker 1: gun barrel. You need to take into account other things
Speaker 1: like gravity pulling the bullet toward the ground, and atmospheric
Speaker 1: drags slowing the bullet down over time. Something very similar
Speaker 1: is true of spacecraft. So to get a spacecraft's position
Speaker 1: and to calculate its future trajectory, you need to know
Speaker 1: not just where it started and its initial velocity, but
Speaker 1: other forces acting on it, including things like gravity. Uh.
Speaker 1: Gravity is Smith says the most important of these forces
Speaker 1: in the familiar interplanetary missions that we have experience with,
Speaker 1: and this would be gravitational attraction exerted by the objects
Speaker 1: in our Solar system, the Sun, the planets, moons, and
Speaker 1: other objects um. But actually it doesn't even stop at
Speaker 1: the influence of gravity. The course of a spacecraft is
Speaker 1: diverted by other things, including well, one would just be
Speaker 1: variations in the way gravity is exerted even by known objects.
Speaker 1: So the the example Smith gives is that gravity is
Speaker 1: not perfectly symmetrical in the way it's exerted by objects
Speaker 1: like planets and moons, because these objects sometimes are kind
Speaker 1: of lumpy, and so they're gravitational influence is slightly asymmetrical.
Speaker 1: There might be more gravitational influence in one part of
Speaker 1: the object or in a certain direction than in other
Speaker 1: parts or in other directions. But then on top of that,
Speaker 1: you've got radiation pressure from the sun, you know, so
Speaker 1: the solar wind might be at the back of a
Speaker 1: of a probe that's traveling and that's actually throwing off
Speaker 1: its trajectory from what you would imagine just if you calculated,
Speaker 1: you know, its initial velocity from from the rocket burn
Speaker 1: and then uh, and then maybe the gravitational influence of
Speaker 1: nearby objects. You've got to take radiation pressure into account. Uh.
Speaker 1: If an atmosphere is nearby, Smith says, you need to
Speaker 1: note drag from the atmosphere and so forth, and Smith
Speaker 1: even gives a very strange and interesting example of a
Speaker 1: trajectory input that was once considered a real mystery. It
Speaker 1: was the so called Pioneer anomaly. I don't think I
Speaker 1: was familiar with this before, Rob, have you ever read
Speaker 1: about this? I don't remember. So this concerned the Pioneer probes,
Speaker 1: which you know, traveling off into deep space there, you know,
Speaker 1: on on a long interstellar trajectory now, but navigators kept
Speaker 1: finding that their predictions for the course of these Pioneer
Speaker 1: probes was a little bit off, even after accounting for
Speaker 1: all the known forces that that they could think of.
Speaker 1: So the quest and is could this be an indication
Speaker 1: of something unknown, some some unknown force or unknown property
Speaker 1: of physics that hadn't yet been discovered. And the solution
Speaker 1: to the mystery was was not that tantalizing, but but
Speaker 1: it was kind of interesting. Nonetheless, it turns out it's
Speaker 1: probably not anything spooky about physics. The deviation from expected
Speaker 1: acceleration was probably due to radiation pressure exerted by the
Speaker 1: power source on board the Pioneer probe. So inside, yeah,
Speaker 1: they've got they've got a little internal power plant, a
Speaker 1: radioisotope thermoelectric generator or RTG, and this was creating anisotropic
Speaker 1: radiation pressure that was sort of meaning so I think
Speaker 1: the pressure generated by the waist heat from this thermoelectric
Speaker 1: generator was actually exerting a pressure that changed the course
Speaker 1: of the probe as it flew through space and changed it.
Speaker 1: It didn't you know, the radiation didn't just go out
Speaker 1: in all directions. It was sort of it was anisotropic,
Speaker 1: so it was going in one direction more than the
Speaker 1: other directions. And this was creating an accelerating force. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and like like you said, when you're dealing with
Speaker 1: with long distances like this, uh, just that little nudge,
Speaker 1: especially if it's unaccounted for and unexplained, is enough to
Speaker 1: send you completely off course. Right, And then Smith writes,
Speaker 1: and as I say that interstellar travel would probably involve
Speaker 1: even more forces acting on a spaceship to cause it
Speaker 1: to deviate from its course. And these influences would have
Speaker 1: to be understood and modeled mathematically if you were going
Speaker 1: to navigate accurately. But another question would be again, you remember,
Speaker 1: you need those reference points within the environment to calculate
Speaker 1: your position if you're traveling through space. You need to
Speaker 1: know where you are in order to calculate a trajectory.
Speaker 1: So what would those external landmarks be if you are
Speaker 1: traveling between stars, if you're an interstellar space uh Well,
Speaker 1: Smith suggests the possibility of using pulsars. UM. Pulsars are
Speaker 1: highly magnetized stars that spin around very fast, shooting out
Speaker 1: beams of electromagnetic radiation out of their magnetic poles. And
Speaker 1: because they rotate so fast, and because they shoot these
Speaker 1: beams in selective directions, you know, it's not omnidirectional beaming.
Speaker 1: It's like, uh, beams just coming out of the magnetic poles.
Speaker 1: They appear from the at the external observer's perspective to
Speaker 1: pulse or blink at these regular intervals, sort of like
Speaker 1: the you know, the spinning light and the lighthouse, and
Speaker 1: the intervals of these pulses can be used to identify
Speaker 1: what pulsar you're looking at. In fact, the pioneer plaques,
Speaker 1: remember those, uh, those plaques that were designed to go
Speaker 1: on board the probes in case an alien ever looks
Speaker 1: at this and says, hey, who made this? Um, they
Speaker 1: used triangulation by pulsars of specified intervals to show the
Speaker 1: galactic location of our solar system. They're like or is
Speaker 1: where Earth is. Though I think to be fair, I
Speaker 1: recall reading at some point that the pulsar map on
Speaker 1: the plaque will no longer be accurate in the future.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure about that one though. Yeah, you got
Speaker 1: to read the fine print at a bottom the plaque
Speaker 1: limited time offer. But pulsars are not the only option.
Speaker 1: I was actually reading a piece about this question in
Speaker 1: space dot com from one by an astrophysicist named Paul
Speaker 1: Sutter who is at UH Sunny Stony Brook and the
Speaker 1: Flat Iron Institute in New York, and he was talking
Speaker 1: in this UH piece about about a paper showing that
Speaker 1: you could use pairs of stars to establish position in
Speaker 1: interstellar travel. So I think in theory it could be done.
Speaker 1: But uh, there there are a lot of challenges probably
Speaker 1: ahead if we actually do become an interstellar traveling species. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a lot we're gonna have to figure out.
Speaker 1: And we may not have spice to aid us by
Speaker 1: by creating pressuants that allows us to predict the future,
Speaker 1: but there is going to be an awful lot of
Speaker 1: of how highly precise calculation involved. So yeah, we're gonna
Speaker 1: have to we're gonna have turn to computers until you know,
Speaker 1: we decided we should. We can't use computers anymore, right,
Speaker 1: thank now, I'd like to come back to the philosophy
Speaker 1: and outlook of the Space and Guild UM. I was
Speaker 1: reading in the Philosophy of doone and there's a there's
Speaker 1: an article titled A Universe of Bastards by Matthew A.
Speaker 1: Buttkas and Um. In it, Budkas describes the Guild as
Speaker 1: um as having quote a parasitic relationship with political power.
Speaker 1: So in this what he's driving, what he's pointing out,
Speaker 1: is that the Guild wields tremendous power, even power over
Speaker 1: the emperor, but they never actually rule. They can't actually rule,
Speaker 1: They can't risk disrupting the flow of spice. They depend
Speaker 1: on it. Absolutely. You take the spice away and the
Speaker 1: Guild cannot do the thing that gives them the power.
Speaker 1: And he points out again that the Guild has no armies,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't need to because it absolutely controls transport
Speaker 1: and trade between worlds. And I found this quite interesting
Speaker 1: because it made me think about, you know, historically, what's
Speaker 1: what's one of the things that armies do. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: one huge role is disrupting trade. Um. To besiege a
Speaker 1: walled city is to cut off its trade and travel
Speaker 1: and starve it into submission. UM. I was treading about
Speaker 1: sieges a while back, and that's that's a you know,
Speaker 1: in the cinematic sense, we often think, well, the siege
Speaker 1: is about like breaking down walls, getting in there and
Speaker 1: then taking over the city. But generally it's it's more
Speaker 1: about strangling the city until the people who live there,
Speaker 1: or the and or the people who rule there give
Speaker 1: in and open the doors themselves. Yeah. And I think
Speaker 1: a lot of the same could be said about navies.
Speaker 1: A lot of the history of navies is also about
Speaker 1: interrupting trade, you know, trying to block access to ports
Speaker 1: or trying to intercept trade vessels. Yeah. And so the
Speaker 1: interesting thing about the Guild here is whether you're talking
Speaker 1: about blockades or besiegement, they have this power already, Like
Speaker 1: it's they don't need an army to do it all
Speaker 1: that because they they are the only ones who can
Speaker 1: operate movement between worlds. UM. So by its very nature,
Speaker 1: the Guild is in a constant state of besiegement or
Speaker 1: potential besiegement with every planet in the imperium. Now, Buckus
Speaker 1: goes on to compare the politics of Dune to Thomas
Speaker 1: Hobbs work Leviathan, in which the author quote establishes a
Speaker 1: theoretical state of existence in which there is no centralized authority,
Speaker 1: but rather a collection of individuals looking out for their
Speaker 1: own interests. Now, um, you know, you might say, well,
Speaker 1: isn't there an emperor in Dune. Well, yes, there is
Speaker 1: an emperor in Dune. But again, the emperor's in the
Speaker 1: Emperor's house is part of that tripod, and it's all
Speaker 1: in this this uh, this political balance. So it's not
Speaker 1: like the emperor actually does have absolute control over everything.
Speaker 1: Again talking about the the emperor that is present during
Speaker 1: during the first Dune book. Um, so when Dune, it's
Speaker 1: not individuals but factions uh that are that are the
Speaker 1: ones looking after their own interests. Uh, their fights, their feuds,
Speaker 1: and these fights and feuds ultimately can threaten the stability
Speaker 1: of everything. And that comes back to the way that
Speaker 1: the guild operates itself again, because the guild very much
Speaker 1: wants stability, at least so far as its spice goes,
Speaker 1: they don't want to do anything to threaten that supply.
Speaker 1: So another interesting aspect of the Space and Guild is
Speaker 1: to is to come back to the way it makes decisions.
Speaker 1: Um Again, we're envisioning the Steersman, these augmented and or
Speaker 1: mutated humans who literally breathe spice in order to generate
Speaker 1: the sort of of limited uh UM precedents necessary to
Speaker 1: travel through space and hyperspace, and a big part of
Speaker 1: this entails seeing what the most immediate dangers are and
Speaker 1: dodging them and so subsequently, one of Paul's biggest insights
Speaker 1: is that the Guild commands you know, such power over
Speaker 1: everything and their dependence on They depend on spice for
Speaker 1: their power, so they end up making all of their
Speaker 1: decisions in a similar fashion. They always choose the safe
Speaker 1: immediate path. And while this ensures survival in the short
Speaker 1: term and it keeps keeps the spice flowing for them,
Speaker 1: it will eventually in the long term lead to stagnation
Speaker 1: for you know, the entire human endeavor. Oh, this is
Speaker 1: back to the first fit versus best fit uh term.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting to think about this in terms of
Speaker 1: cognitive bias, to sort of reverse the Leviathan scenario and
Speaker 1: go back from the faction to the individual um as
Speaker 1: pointed out by Lauren and Grishma in the safety bias
Speaker 1: published in Behavior Change in Risk Avoidance is one possible
Speaker 1: mechanism by which personality characteristics may be linked to anxiety pathology,
Speaker 1: and we see risk perceptions factor into a number of
Speaker 1: cognitive biases, include zero risk bias, in which there's a
Speaker 1: tendency to try to eliminate eliminate a particular risk while
Speaker 1: other options would produce a greater overall risk reduction. Okay,
Speaker 1: So in a sci fi scenario, if I understand that, right,
Speaker 1: that would be saying like, Okay, we're going to design
Speaker 1: a spaceship that cannot possibly be destroyed by the biplasma
Speaker 1: canons from from another spaceship, but in fact that spaceship
Speaker 1: is very prone to uh to like toxic build up
Speaker 1: of of c O two in the you know, atmosphere
Speaker 1: processors or whatever. That you're just like overly focusing on
Speaker 1: one type of risk while ignoring others, right, Um. I
Speaker 1: think things like you know, the War on Terror are
Speaker 1: sometimes brought up as an example of this too, like
Speaker 1: laser focusing on one particular threat when some might argue
Speaker 1: that if that same amount of energy went into other things, uh,
Speaker 1: then you would have you know, it would it would
Speaker 1: result in greater safety, um and perhaps in a more
Speaker 1: meaningful sense. Right. There's also risk sensation theory, which holds
Speaker 1: that people adjust their behavior in response to perceived risk levels.
Speaker 1: If they feel protected, they tend to be less careful.
Speaker 1: The more risks they perceive, the more careful they become. Um.
Speaker 1: And I was I was reading that, like one interpretation
Speaker 1: of this has to do with um, you know, like
Speaker 1: like safety gear and things like skydiving where uh, like
Speaker 1: skydiving from a methods and material since it has become
Speaker 1: increasingly safer to do. But that means people feel safer
Speaker 1: skydiving and they're more likely to take certain risks that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. It also reminds me of insights that
Speaker 1: I've read about climbing, where like, like you know, mountain climbing,
Speaker 1: where the danger is not the part where you're you're
Speaker 1: hyper focused on every little thing you do. It's when
Speaker 1: certain actions become kind of automatic and you kind of
Speaker 1: I guess to a certain extent you feel safe, Um,
Speaker 1: you're going to be more careful if you feel the danger.
Speaker 1: But but coming back to this, this idea of a
Speaker 1: risk compensation theory. I was wondering how it might equate
Speaker 1: to the Guild. So via their abilities, they're constantly not
Speaker 1: only confronting simulations of possible doom, which of course us
Speaker 1: normal humans do all the time. You know, we engage
Speaker 1: in in um, in simulating possible outcomes uh that are positive,
Speaker 1: but also ones that are negative, and that can lead
Speaker 1: into a sort of fantasizing about potential doom. But the
Speaker 1: Guild they seem to go beyond that. They have actual
Speaker 1: visions of dooms that they have to cleverly dodge as
Speaker 1: they navigate um, either you know, through space travel or politically.
Speaker 1: So do they end up giving into these visions of
Speaker 1: doom and grow increasingly careful, or at least in some cases,
Speaker 1: do they feel safe and protected by their use of
Speaker 1: the spice? I think I think probably with the Space
Speaker 1: and Guild, we're talking about the overly careful side of
Speaker 1: things here. That seems to be in keeping with the
Speaker 1: same fist path of the Guild and so forth in
Speaker 1: the way they're characterized. But perhaps the comfort afforded by
Speaker 1: the Spice allows them to engage in some bolder maneuvers,
Speaker 1: at least so far as it doesn't threaten the supply
Speaker 1: of spice. Um, it seems to be a constant. Anything
Speaker 1: that threatens the spice that's just a no go, like
Speaker 1: like almost zero zero risk can be taken when it
Speaker 1: comes to that supply chain. Right. So it's interesting with
Speaker 1: the Beni Jester in the Space and Guild um because
Speaker 1: on a very basic level, and I think that's one
Speaker 1: of the great things about Done is that you can
Speaker 1: look at it at different levels. On one level, it's
Speaker 1: like these are just the sci fi magic versus sci
Speaker 1: fi science, right, it's which is versus um techno wizards
Speaker 1: of a sort you know. Um. But then it also
Speaker 1: it goes a lot deeper than that. It gets into
Speaker 1: like the ways they think, um, you know, short term
Speaker 1: and long term thinking, and how they engage in risk, etcetera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't think about that. So you're setting up the
Speaker 1: contrast that the Bennie Jess being concerned with politics, are
Speaker 1: very they're very much engaged in long term strategic thinking,
Speaker 1: whereas the Spacing Guild being very immediate task oriented or
Speaker 1: just like they're thinking one step ahead always. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: have the been adjustment? For instance, we're told you know
Speaker 1: that they will actually make sure that things are inserted
Speaker 1: into native religions on various worlds. Uh that give them
Speaker 1: an out that like like, oh yeah, well, in our
Speaker 1: in our traditions, it does say that if a UM,
Speaker 1: if a strange woman from another planet shows up, we're
Speaker 1: supposed to give her a spaceship, you know, um come
Speaker 1: in handy a thousand years from now. Yeah, it might
Speaker 1: come in handy a thousand years from now, So we're
Speaker 1: going to do it. Um. Whereas the Guild, they would
Speaker 1: be asking different questions. They're like, well does that what
Speaker 1: does it mean for our survival one minute from now?
Speaker 1: And what does it mean regarding our supply of the spice?
Speaker 1: And I saw some papers online. I didn't really get
Speaker 1: into these so much, but there was one I noticed
Speaker 1: that was looking at themes of addiction in Dune and
Speaker 1: or the Rings um, you know, because they both deal
Speaker 1: with I guess addiction to some extent. You say that
Speaker 1: that the ring is an addiction, the power that comes
Speaker 1: with the ring as an addiction, and of course the
Speaker 1: Guild is in a very real sense addicted to the
Speaker 1: spice Um, but um and and and makes its its
Speaker 1: choices in the way that I guess could be comparable
Speaker 1: to some sort of personal addiction level. Uh. At any rate,
Speaker 1: there's just another example of all the different levels at
Speaker 1: which you might engage with Dune. Got to engage them all.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close it
Speaker 1: out there. I think this will be it for for
Speaker 1: this journey into the Done universe. But hey, when Dune
Speaker 1: Part two comes out, maybe we'll dive back in. Maybe
Speaker 1: it'll be something else we get a hanker in to discuss. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm sure there will be more, and of course we'd
Speaker 1: love to hear from everyone out there. You have insight
Speaker 1: into any of this based on your own experience with
Speaker 1: the the Done universe, no matter which path that ends
Speaker 1: up taking. You know, the original novels, the Seek and prequels,
Speaker 1: the movies, the video games. We didn't even get into
Speaker 1: the video games. Oh yeah, there's like a Commanding Conqueror
Speaker 1: style game, but it was Dune. Yeah, various real time
Speaker 1: strategy type things. I never actually played any of them,
Speaker 1: but but I've remember looking at stuff about them and
Speaker 1: they look cool. Um. There's also big board game presence.
Speaker 1: There's of course, the classic Done board game, which I
Speaker 1: I um, I got a copy of Man and I
Speaker 1: got it during the pandemic, so it's it's never been played,
Speaker 1: and they're they're a couple of of newer doune board
Speaker 1: games that also look very exciting, especially since they both
Speaker 1: have a single player modes, which you know is certainly
Speaker 1: a little easier to achieve, if maybe not as socially engaging. Anyway,
Speaker 1: whatever your experience, if you have thoughts right in, we'd
Speaker 1: love to hear from you. In the meantime, if you'd
Speaker 1: like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind, you can find them in the Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind podcast feed You'll get that wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. We have core episodes on two season Thursdays,
Speaker 1: listener Mail on Monday's Artifact on Wednesday, and on Friday
Speaker 1: we do a little weird House Cinema. That's our time
Speaker 1: to set aside most of the serious concerns and just
Speaker 1: talk about a strange film. Huge thanks as always to
Speaker 1: our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would
Speaker 1: like to get in touch with us with feedback on
Speaker 1: this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
Speaker 1: the future, or just to sayll oh, you can email
Speaker 1: us at contact that's Stuff to Blow your Mind. Podcasts
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