Speaker’s corner
AS THE world gears itself to sending a manned (and possibly womanned) mission to Mars, a reader, Doug Jardine, has been wondering how it might end. Doug’s pondering resulted in some good news.
Now, even though, as a newspaperman of many summers and almost as many winters, my mission is to find bad news so that editors can cheer their readers up in the mornings with posters such as CRAZED KILLER SLAYS SIX and NEW PETROL PRICE SHOCK, I have no real problem with dispensing good news. Just as long as it’s not too often. Doug writes: “I read in the National Geographic magazine that the galaxy of which we are a part, the Milky Way, contains a few hundred billion stars. This could mean that it has hundreds of billions of planets but this is difficult to determine as planets reflect little light and are difficult to see.
“However, let’s assume there are indeed a few hundred billion planets in our galaxy and that us Earthlings, in the distant future, send a pair of representatives to each of them to introduce ourselves or even to populate these planets. With our current measly 6 billion humans we would run out of representatives long before we ran out of planets.
“Probably we could send representatives to no more than 0.5 percent of the planets.
“One solution would be to send animals such as birds and fish in place of humans. With any luck, and enough population growth, we may just be able to make up the numbers if we resort to goldfish, let’s say, for the smaller and wetter planets. We’d have to be careful sending lions and rhinoceroses as they could upset alien populations and lead to misunderstandings and intergalactic wars.
“Where the problem becomes interesting though is that should we wish to send representatives to all planets outside of our own little galaxy we would need 100 billion times more representatives. Even if we resorted to sending invertebrates (and we’d have to think hard before sending wasps and mosquitoes and, say, tapeworms) we’d still be able to visit less than 1 percent of all probable planets in the universe. This is good news for it means we could never mess up the whole universe even if we tried.”
What’s that funny noise? It’s me, thinking.
Alwyn Moerdyk, an industrial psychologist at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, e-mailed me a motto for Densa – Densa being Speaker’s Corner’s answer for those too dumb to get into Mensa the association for the highly intelligent.
Cogito ergo dum: “I think, therefore I am dumb.” I like it. I shall have it tattooed on my forehead where I can always see it.
Regarding the origins of the name Africa, Ann Byl of Helderkruin has sent me an extract from Lawrence Green’s book, These Wonders to Behold.
“Africa has its full share of strange and puzzling names, and it’s too late now to discover all the origins. But the name, ‘Africa’, as old as it is, has never been a mystery.
“First the whole continent was called Libya. Carthaginians, dwelling close to where Tunis now stands, called the hill country beyond their city walls after the tribesmen who lived there, the Awriga people of Berber stock. Awriga is pronounced ‘Avriga’.
“When the Romans took Carthage and its hinterland, they called the whole province Awriga or Africa. As the Romans made further conquests, the old title of Libya was dropped and the continent became Africa.”
Odd, is it not, how some of us, especially when singing the national anthem, sing “South Avriga”?
Ann points out, “Similarly ‘Asia’ was first a Roman province in Anatonia (now Turkey) and the name became extended to the whole continent.”