QUESTION: Why are there no Eskimos in Antarctica?
ANSWER: When we asked this question of a top Antarctica scientist, he said, "Because the Eskimos live in the Arctic." Which is the exact scientific answer! We felt momentarily ashamed for using "Eskimo" as though it were the generic name for "someone who lives in an insanely cold place." So, to rephrase: Why aren't there native Antarcticans?We figured there are two possible answers:
1. Humans couldn't get there.
2. They got there but it was too cold and nasty.
The first one, we learned, is correct - though the second answer explains why no one has set up homesteads down there in recent years despite the abundance of free land.
A look at a globe reveals that Antarctica is extremely isolated, surrounded by a vast ocean. The closet Antarctica comes to the extreme tip of South America is about 600 miles, and the waters in those latitudes (the "roaring 60s") are notoriously treacherous. Most importantly, Antarctica has a buffer of sea ice. The floating ice pack made Antarctica undiscoverable during the Age of Discovery.
The existence of Antarctica was predicted as far back as the time of the Ancient Greeks. But the people with the best chance to find it were probably the Polynesians, masterful navigators of the South Pacific. One Polynesian explorer, Ui-te-Rangiora, led an expedition by canoe into the southern seas in about 650 A.D., according to island legends.
The first person known to penetrate the Antarctic Circle was the famed British sailor Capt. James Cook, but he managed to circumnavigate the entire continent in 1774 without seeing land, leading many to conclude that it just wasn't there.
Sealers (you know, people who kill seals) were the next wave of explorers. It's debatable who first saw or landed on Antarctica itself; there are several claimants in the years 1819 and 1820.
But it's not a place you'd want to set up housekeeping. It's much nastier than the Arctic. The main problem is that it's covered with a massive ice sheet that's more than two miles thick in places. Air slides down off the high elevations of the ice pack, pulled by gravity, and creates hurricane-force winds along the coast. There is only one plant native to the entire place, plus some lichens, fungi and algae. No caribou. No polar bears.
Nanook of the North would have taken one look at the place and said, "Live here? And give up the comforts of home?"
QUESTION: Why doesn't a "busy" signal on the phone cease and desist the moment the person you are calling gets off the line?
ANSWER: There's both a technical reason and a business reason that you can't just stick on the line and wait for the busy signal to stop. The technical reason is that the sound isn't coming from your friend over there on the other side of town, it's coming from the central switching office of the phone company. (The tone is generated by a gadget sensibly called a "tone generator.")
That said, the main reason you can't stick on the line is that the phone company doesn't want you to. You're tying up a line. So get off the phone. Live with the pain.
One last bonus fact: A busy signal is 60 tones per minute and a "circuit failure" signal is 120 tones per minute. You probably get these confused. Don't let it happen again.
The Mailbag:
Thomas E. of Washington, D.C. writes to say we were too sanguine about the possibility that humanlike intelligent beings exist elsewhere in the universe.
"Life on our own planet existed as bacteria and blue-green algae for at least 21/2 billion years before nucleated cells even made their appearance," he writes. "It is not at all obvious that this step was inevitable."
He speculates that if the history of the Earth were repeated with minor variations we might end up with only bacteria and blue-green algae, and more sophisticated life might never appear. Moreover, humans have been an evolutionary quirk: "humanlike intelligence only arose in one small branch of one group of aberrant apes under very specific circumstances unlikely to be repeated."
Dear Tom: We agree that Earth is special. Life is special. Mammals and primates and humans are special. But are they unique? It's an awfully big universe. We know that life did arise on this planet and that it did evolve into diverse species, including humans, so it's fair to assume that this could happen elsewhere given the right conditions.
There is a popular notion going around that evolution isn't progressive, that the concept of slime gradually and inexorably evolving into mammals and then primates and then humans is just an old-fashioned human conceit. But we protest. It's true that life hit a rut for about 21/2 billion years - some very slow news days in there - but the bigger picture shows that over time, intelligence has emerged as a useful survival strategy; more precisely, there have appeared creatures with greater and greater quantities of central nervous system tissue in ratio to body weight.
Sure, you could replay the Earth experiment over again and life might never evolve beyond the bacteria and blue-green algae stage. It may be that life does not inevitably evolve into creatures who think about whether life inevitably evolves into creatures like them - but for the moment this will have to remain mere conjecture.
Washington Post Writers Group