1: Pastland
Chapter Summary: The chapter describes a scenario where a group of conference attendees on a cruise ship are transported back in time by a nuclear experiment gone wrong. They find themselves 4 million years in the past, becoming the first humans on Earth. The survivors, numbering 1,000, are stranded in a location they dub "Pastland."
The narrative explores the practical aspects of their survival and the unique opportunity they have to build a society from scratch. They utilize the damaged ship for shelter and create basic infrastructure for power and water. The land they inhabit is a bountiful wild rice marsh, providing ample food for all.
The chapter introduces key characters and concepts, including Kathy, an experienced rice farmer who recognizes the land and can guide the harvesting process. It touches on the potential for creating a new economic system, as Kathy suggests the need for some form of currency to organize labor for the rice harvest.
The text sets the stage for exploring how a society might be built without the constraints of existing political, economic, and social structures, presenting a "blank slate" for utopian thinking.
1: Pastland
Imagine that a friend calls you one day and says she has a ticket to a conference that you are very interested in. The conference will be held on a luxury cruise ship. She won a competition and has an all expenses paid ticket, but she can’t go. She wants to know if you could attend in her place. I am attending the same conference. It has attracted people (in whatever field you are interested in) from all over the world.
The ship leaves from Tampa, Florida and heads southwest toward Cozumel, Mexico.
We board and travel for a day. We are in open water when a giant bright white cloud appears. It surrounds us like a tornado and lifts us up. It carries us along, faster and faster, eventually moving us so fast that light itself starts to bend. The process then starts to reverse, and light straightens out. We go slower and slower. Then we start to bang against something hard: the water is now so shallow we are hitting the ground below the water. The water starts to move as it travels down over what is normally dry land and heads toward the distant ocean. We are carried along on the receding water for several horrifying hours with no idea what is happening to us.
Finally, we come to a stop.
None of us on the ship realize this yet, but the realities of human existence have changed. A government somewhere was testing a new type of nuclear bomb. The military of that nation was trying to build a device that would send out a special kind of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) to destroy electronic devices. Many of these bombs were tested in history, starting in the 1950s. But this one had some components that had never been tested before. Sometimes, materials act differently than scientists predict in the intense heat, pressure, and gamma radiation at the center of a nuclear explosion. The scientists had hoped that the new materials would lead to an EMP they could ‘tune’ so it would destroy the enemy’s electronics but not those of their own armies. But they made a tiny, tiny, mistake in their calculations. The materials didn’t act as they expected; instead, they created a momentary vibration in the space-time field.
This was unfortunate for the majority of the people on the planet Earth back in the 21st century: the vibration led to an ‘unsyncing’ of the motion of the electrons the in atoms that make up their world. They were only out of sync for a tiny fraction of a microsecond. But when the distortion ended, the electrons couldn’t find their way back into orbit around their nuclei. All of the atoms of the great majority of the planet Earth disintegrated into bosons, quarks, and mesons that will never again be atoms—let alone a planet people can live on—for the rest of time.
The people on the cruise ship were lucky, however.
The space-time distortion field was shaped like a tornado. It had powerful forces at the edges but included a calm eye at the center where almost nothing happened. We were in the exact right place to catch the calm eye in the center of the distortion. The space-time distortion sent our people, our ship, and several thousand cubic miles of ocean water back a little more than 4 million years in time. We are now in the remote past.
We have gone back to before the first humans arrived on this world.
This makes us the world’s first humans.
The First Human Societies
Since no humans have existed, no human societies have existed either.
This means that the people in our group don’t have to follow anyone’s rules about how societies are supposed to work.
We haven’t inherited a legacy of ‘national debts’ that we must repay. We don’t have to accept that we have traditional enemies anymore, and tax our people so we can build militaries to attack them and defend ourselves against their country’s attacks. We don’t have to make sure that the nations, corporations, and individuals who ‘own’ parts of the world are able to keep people who don’t ‘own’ from benefiting from the existence of the part of the world that belongs to them, because there are no owners. We don’t have to make sure that the imaginary lines called ‘borders’ that determine the limits of ‘nations’ are respected, because there are no borders and no nations. We don’t have to pay taxes to cover the cost of police to enforce the existing order, because there is no existing order to enforce.
We have complete freedom as to what kind of society to form. We can determine what ‘modes of existence’ we want. We can make our own rules.
Practical Matters
The space-time wave moved us hundreds of miles from our previous location and washed us up, along with several thousand cubic miles of ocean water, deep into the interior of a continent. When the water receded, it dragged the ship several miles and tore the bottom of the ship to pieces, leaving the upper part lodged in a muddy swamp. The trauma killed more than a thousand of the people on the ship.
As soon as the ship comes to a stop, the people who were physically able to do so began working to rescue the trapped and save any who could be saved. A few of our people had medical experience. These people set up a triage center and makeshift emergency hospital on an upper deck.
People who find injured people bring them there.
A minister locates a parcel of land to use as a cemetery so we can bury the dead to prevent an outbreak of disease. For several days, all able-bodied people help with the rescue attempts and burial parties to make sure the dead are buried.
Finally, we get to a stopping point and have a meeting so we can take stock of our situation.
The social director of the cruise ship opens the meeting. She does this in part because she knows many of us—having organized the welcome party and some drinking games right after we left—and in part because no one who is in any position of authority is left alive. The ship’s captain and everyone who might claim to have authority perished in the wreck. She wants to make sure we realize she isn’t claiming to be in charge of anything: she has just come forward because no one else came forward first.
Like the rest of us, she has been digging through the rubble to try to find and help survivors. She hasn’t slept for days, she is filthy, and her clothing is torn and covered with dirt and dried blood. She thanks everyone who pitched in to help and says that this has saved many lives. She tells us she has counted and there are 1,000 survivors, including people who are injured but are expected to recover.
She says she has no idea where we are or how long it will take to get us rescued. (She has no idea we are in the past. She has been working so hard to save lives she hasn’t had time to worry about such relatively unimportant things.) She asks if anyone can shed some light on this and another woman comes to the front.
The other woman is an electronic expert who has been trying to get the ship’s electronic systems working. She has gotten everything going but hasn’t been able to reach anyone on the standard rescue channels. The GPS, satellite TV and satellite phone appear to be working but she can’t pick up any satellite signals. She had a simple battery-powered satellite finder in her luggage. She has been scanning the sky to try to find satellites, but her device hasn’t picked up any of them. She finds this very strange: there are supposed to be thousands of satellites in the sky. They seem to have all disappeared.
She is about ready to step down when she pauses to tell us something else: all of the clocks on the instruments have a reading that she can’t figure out: they read the year as ‘-4,000,000.’ She says that this might mean ‘4,000,000 BC.’ This seemed so strange that she didn’t want to mention it, but she says it is possible we are all in the remote past. She will keep trying to reach someone and get us rescued, but in the meantime, she suggests we try to make the best of our situation. We may have to stay here a long time.
Another woman comes up to the front. She is an astronomer. She tells us that the stars all appear to be out of position from where they should be. We are in an outer spiral arm of a galaxy and are orbiting the center of the galaxy at a speed of about one million miles per day. This causes the view we get of certain stars and galaxies to shift. She has calculated that the stars are where they would have been 4,002,024 years before we started on this trip. This seems to confirm the information on the clocks. It is possible we are in the remote past.
Someone jokingly says, ‘Welcome to Pastland.’ The name sticks. People start to call our new home ‘Pastland.’
How and Where We Will Live
First, I want to go over some practical realities of our existence like where and how we will live and where we will get food and other necessities of life, so you can see what we have to work with in forming societies:
We will live in our cabins on the ship for the time being. Although the extreme bottom decks of the ship were destroyed, we can still use most of the rest. The ship is sitting on land that is more or less level. People need to sleep somewhere, and people have moved back into their cabins to have places to sleep.
We ended up next to a large river with plenty of flow to turn turbines. Some of the passengers are handy with tools. They salvage the ship’s propellers and some other parts and use them to make a power plant to turn the ship’s electricity generators. Many people volunteer to help build the power plant because we really want electricity: it is hot and muggy where we are, and we want our air conditioners back on.
The ship has freshwater piping to all cabins. Some people rig up a piping system to move water from a clear spring and pump it into the freshwater distribution system. The ship’s waste treatment plant still works so, once we have water, we can use our toilets. Since we have both electricity and fresh water, we can take showers, do laundry, and even fill the ship’s swimming pools so we can swim.
The ship that went back in time with us gives us a place to live. We have water and sanitary facilities. We only need one thing that we don’t have now to sustain us: food.
The Bounty of the Planet Earth
We are very lucky to have ended up where we are. Although some people call our landing place a ‘swamp,’ some use an alternate term and call it a ‘freshwater marsh.’ Wild rice grows in this marsh in great abundance. For thousands of years before we got here, this land has had a stable and productive ecosystem, producing large amounts of rice for the benefit of its (non-human) residents.
In the spring, runoff from snowmelt on lands upriver causes the river to swell. When this happens, the water level rises above the level of the land to a depth of about a foot. This creates the perfect conditions for rice to grow. Wild rice has grown here every year for thousands of years.
Qqq wild rice here.
Late in the summer, the river flows ease and the water table falls. By early fall the water table has fallen below the level of the land and the land becomes dry. The rice ripens to a golden brown and the kernels fall off of the stalks onto the ground.
This has been happening for many thousands of years before we got here.
The wild rice never went to waste. Each year, giant flocks of ducks, geese, cranes, passenger pigeons, and other migratory birds arrived to feast on nature’s bounty. When winter came and the birds had moved on, possums, raccoons, beaver, otters, minks, muskrats, weasels, deer, elk, and other animals came to share the rice that the birds missed. In the spring when the water rose, schools of fish—sturgeon, cavefish, shiners, darters, paddlefish, sunfishes, bream, catfish, crappies, and black basses, to name a few—moved in to feast on whatever was left.
The animals didn’t always thoroughly chew the rice kernels, however, and many kernels passed through their digestive systems intact. This provided seeds for next year’s crop.
The next year, everything happened again.
This land is bountiful and produces large amounts of rice without any need for human effort. For all of history so far, this bounty has gone to other animals.
But this is going to change.
Humans have abilities that other animals don’t: we can collect the rice at the exact right time of the year and put it into granaries so other animals can’t get it. We can take the bounty the land produces for ourselves if we want. Other animals will only get any of this rice if we let them have it, either by giving it to them or by deciding not to take it ourselves.
Some Numbers
Some people are curious about whether the land will produce enough to support us and have made some calculations.
Two of them measured the rice-growing area and determined its size: it is 1,500 acres. They have decided to call this area Pastland Farm. One person carefully measured out one square foot of land, cut the stalks on that land, removed the kernels and weighed them to get just under 1/20th of one pound per square foot, which works out to 2,100 pounds per acre, or 3.15 million pounds for the entire marsh/farm. We have 1,000 people so if we divide this rice evenly, we will have 3,150 pounds for each of us per year, or just over 8 pounds for each of us per day.
The figures for rice yields come from two sources. One is ‘Travels And Adventures in The Indian
Territories Between The Years 1760 And 1776,’ by Alexander Henry. Henry was put into circumstances (described
in the book) where he found himself the
very first European living among natives in parts of North America where wild
rice was a staple food. He discusses
the methods of collecting rice, the amounts of rice obtained from the land, and
the trade value of rice in American communities before there was any
significant influence from European invaders.
The other is a scholarly work
about the same issue: Alfred Jenks: ‘The Wild Rice Gatherers Of The Upper
Lakes, A Study in American Primitive Economics.’ This book goes over the
realities of existence for the people who lived in the lake areas of what is
now Wisconsin and Minnesota, before the conquest of these lands began. It provides detailed figures for the rice
yields they actually obtained.
You can find the full text of
both books on the PossibleSocieties.com website.
Each person needs about 2 pounds of rice per day, as a minimum, to stay alive, so we will clearly have much more than we need.
Kathy and The Pastland Farm
I want to introduce someone who will be involved in some key decisions in this book:
Kathy, a passenger on this ship, is an experienced rice farmer. She was seriously injured in the wreck and has been in a coma since it happened.
When she wakes up, lying in a cot set up in our makeshift infirmary on the top deck of our ship, she thinks she is dreaming. She is imagining she is back in her childhood home. Before she even opens her eyes in this dream she is having, she knows where she is from the smell and feel of the air.
The wild rice-producing marshes of Texas have native bacteria that ‘fixes’ nitrogen, taking it from the air (which is 69% nitrogen) and turning it into a form growing plants can use. The bacteria evolved with the rice, millions of years ago, and the two living organisms depend on each other for survival. The bacteria provide nitrogen that the plant needs, and the plant’s waste sustains the bacteria.
The bacteria impart an unmistakable smell into the air. Kathy was raised in Texas rice country and grew up with this smell. To her, this is the smell of home. Before she even opens her eyes, she knows where she is.
Not only does she know where she is, she knows what time of year it is and roughly what time of day. She can feel that the air is heavy with moisture with a powerful sun trying to bore through the mist, just as she remembers from her childhood home before a summer thundershower. She is afraid to open her eyes for fear that she will find it is just a dream.
When she summons the courage, she looks out to see the silhouette of the distant hills against the horizon she remembers from her childhood. This is the same view she got from her bedroom window on the farmhouse that used to stand on this very spot when she was growing up.
She knows this land. She can tell you what the dirt looks like and what it feels like if you take off your shoes and walk barefoot through the shallow marshes, as she did in her childhood. (She will warn you that you can’t wear shoes, because they will stick in the muck and you will lose them.) She can tell you how to locate good spots to fish in the big river and how to find the best spots for wild berries, grapes, fruits, mushrooms, sunflower seeds and other nuts in the surrounding forests. She can tell you how to find straight softwood trees for poles and very strong hickory for working into tools and other products.
She was practically raised here. Her aunt and uncle had owned the farm that had stood on this very land and her family had spent a great deal of time here. When she was very young, before her aunt and uncle had switched to hybrid rice that requires chemicals to grow, the farm raised the exact same kind of rice that grows wild here now. She helped with many tasks and knows how to raise it.
When Kathy recovers enough to attend group meetings, the rice is ready to harvest. She tells us that we have to harvest it quickly because if it gets too dry it will fall onto the ground and be impossible to collect. Some people are pretty handy with tools and have drawn up plans to build a harvesting machine with a gasoline motor and some other parts found on the ship. We don’t have any gasoline, but we did find some tanks with ethanol and we can use this for fuel (for next year, people will make more ethanol out of rice, as you will see).
Kathy says she can put the entire operation together for us because she has harvested rice before. However, she will need to ask some people with specialized skills to help her and she doesn’t feel right asking them to work for nothing. She wants the ability to pay them somehow. She knows how to make this work if we have some kind of money. She knows that the rice this land produced was ‘worth’ about $1 per pound in the future we came from. She says it would be nice if we had some kind of money so that she could ‘sell’ the rice (trade it for money) and then use the money to pay her workers.
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