From the Vault: The Spacing Guild of Dune

This one, of course, was a lot of fun to put together and these I should also point out this is also mentioned in these episodes, but there were a pair of older episodes that we've done many years before about the science of doone, where we talked about things like still suits and sand worms. So this was kind of a return to that series. And who knows when Done Part two comes out in theaters eventually, maybe we'll we'll find a good excuse to dive back into the

Done universe. Hey, maybe your listeners out there have ideas about what we could tackle. Listen to these episodes and let us know. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, the production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And on this podcast we never stopped doning, so it's done yet again. This is part two of

the Dune series that we started earlier this week. So in the last episode we talked about the Bennie Jessert and a bit about the neuroscience of pain, and today we're here to talk about what more Bennie Jesser. Maybe some spacing Guild stuff. Yeah, that's right. We're going to pick up where we left off with the Bennie Jesser and then we're going to move on to the Spacing

Guild um. And I think the place I'd like to start is to come back to something we touched on in last episode, and that is the idea that the Bennie Jesser are chiefly concerned with politics right now. We offered some caveats about that in the last episode, and that we often hear the word politics and think of like electoral democratic politics. Uh. The political situation in the Done universe is is not so lucky to have democratic

electoral politics. They've got some kind of weird um hybrid uh technological feudalism that has like an an emperor on top, and then there are there's like an aristocracy of of landed nobles, essentially houses who control planets as their fiefdoms. And then there's also a pretty large input from trade guilds, primarily the Spacing Guild, which controls the monopoly over the the economy of interstellar travel. Yeah. So, um, yeah, if you need a if you need a refresh. Uh, certainly

we went over the world of Doune in the last episode. Uh, so go back and listen to that one if you you didn't have a chance to. So. One of the books that I was looking at for this was that was another fun um collection of done essays. Uh. The book titled Dune in Philosophy, and in it philosophy professor Jeffrey Nicholas who also edited the book. He examines the topic of the benegessriate in facing the gom Jabbar test.

He touches, you know, on the point that they that they make in this you know conversation between Paul and the Reverend mother that the Benigessa are concerned with politics. But uh, Nicholas points out that that what we're talking about here with politics is politics in Aristotle's sense of the world. Word um. Political science one of the three sciences he outlined alongside contemplative science, which would have included

both physics and metaphysics and practical science. So there's a lot of talk about tripods uh in you know, in the the order of things in Dune um and and so in a way that kind of matches up, I guess very loosely with with Aristotle's three prompt approach to understanding the universe. Man, I have not looked at that philosophy of Dune book, but that sounds interesting. So does it get into like the what is the philosophic fickle

outlook of Baron Harconan and stuff? You know, And there's a lot of fun stuff, and there's definitely some hobbs. I know, I'll touch on some hobs here in a bit, but there's also, um, there's also one let's see what is it? Uh? I think it's something like, you know, basically like one article walks through the various houses and factions and talks about how they would have been thought off by uh, say Socrates or whoever. So it's it's

a fun read. So, you know, one of the things about Aristotle is is that there is a there's a quote that's often attributed to him, uh, pretty famous to the Aristotle quote man is by nature a political animal. Yeah, And I think this is an interesting quote, partially in how I think it is often misunderstood because I think a lot of times people take that quote to mean that that Aristotle was saying that man is the only political animal, which he does not mean. He actually mentions

other animals as political animals as well. Yeah. He he also refers to, you know, use social insects and so forth as as being political animals. Again, one of the reasons this is interesting to come back to this is because the benegestent that are big about talking about the difference between humans and animals, and given their focus on politics, we can't help it go in this direction. Okay, But

so what did he mean by saying this? Then? Well, I was reading a little bit more about this, and apparently this is this is an area where you can get into some amount of debate and we're not going to go, uh, there's this a certain amount of philosophical

back and forth on this. But I was looking at a paper from Cheryl E. A Body, Uh, And it was the article Higher and Lower Political Animals published in the Journal of Animal Ethics in two six and she writes that that Aristotle considered man's impulse towards partnership with others to be the most important, and that it is

only through these partnerships that happiness is possible. Uh So, I mean it sounds to me like, you know, that means that the benegestion are all about happiness obviously, um right right right right up there out And uh Aristotle broke this down across the different dimensions um of of our interactions with other people, at the household level, at the village level, and then at the what he considered

kind of the ultimate level. The Polish a collection of human beings who lived together through the creation of laws allowing them all to survive and flourish. And this is where we get politics. As the word politics. I think there's a pretty good case to be made that the Aristotle is onto something here about the fundamental nature of humankind, that sort of um that what makes us really special

is our ability to cooperate with one another. And it's not that other animals lack the ability to cooperate with one another. I mean you might say that is say, like a youth social insect colony coordinates their activities even

better than humans can. But humans have have much richer ways of cooperating with one another than even say, you social insects do, because we have things like language, which allows us to very very minutely coordinate our behaviors and cooperate in ways that are have levels of complexity you couldn't really imagine without something like language. Yeah. So, Nick Nicholas, coming back to his paper, rights that Aristotle considered politics

a place for human practical reason to flourish. So it is the ideal place, not for everyone, but for the best minds to busy themselves. And um, you know, thinking thinking again to the Done universe. It's easy to to focus on all the uh at times dystopian aspects of it, and the war and the intrigue, but you know, it is a pretty cooperative interplanetary empire when you look at it from a certain perspective. You know, I mean, they have managed to not annihilate each other with atomic weapons.

They have this uh this, you know, this this, um, this treaty in place. Um. Even though there's a great deal of inequality in the Dune universe. Um, they're all all these factions are working more or less together. Well yeah, and I think you can see those dualities all throughout real history as well. I mean, look at any number of empires you can think of the Roman Empire or

the British Empire. I mean, all of these are at the same time kind of marvelous achievements of cooperation and coordination at the same time that they are brutal engines of oppression. Yeah. Now, a body discusses the same thing that you mentioned that you know, some that we've discussed just a second ago. That you know, some take Aristotle to mean that non human animals cannot be political. Others see it as the view that humans are merely more

political than any non human animal. But again, Aristotle puts a great deal that emphasis on language. Um and uh yeah it is. Language is key to the human realm of politics. Um in in good ways and bad ways. Well, yeah, a language allows for a complexity of coordination. That is, uh that that of course can serve both good and bad end. So it allows for extremely complex coordination to service of the greater good and helping one another, but also to uh, you know, ever richer layers of deception

than than could be imagined by any other kind of animal. Yeah, I mean I've seen him pointed out that one of the things that our language does is it allows us to share uh particular points of view with others, perceptions of of of what's working, what's not working, of what's bringing us pleasure and what's bringing us pain. Now, I want to come back to the Benigested distinction of humans and animals again. This is you know, they're very much

of of the mindset. Don't be an animal, be a human? Uh. And the reverend mother tells Uh Paul that the test is about seeing if he is human or not UM and the Beniegestor training seems to a larger degree revolve around the high application of reason in a way that overpowers animal instincts. Again that the example that has thrown out as the animal choose its leg off if it's cotton a trap, but the human, the political animal par excellence,

plots and practices politics over the fact of it's entrapment. Well, in fact, the very example she gives is one of deception. Remember that he would feign death in order to attract the trapper and then and then strike out and kill him. Yes, and of course this is uh in a way this

foreshadows what is to come. Uh. In the novel Dune, because the trades acquisition of Aracus is widely seen as a trap, and and Paul's father um to To as not not entirely by his own choice, ends up in the position of the animal that must strike out from the trap in an attempt to punish his oppressor. Uh. It ends up not quite working, but it's it's again one of the great scenes in the book. And and I thought a wonderfully um recreated scene in the recent

film adaptation. Now coming back to the philosophy of of Dune book, Nicholas uses the com Jabar awareness test to make a point about the current state of humanity in our world, the real world, in particular the environmental pair al we face. Um. He says, you know this, this is the trap. We are the trap, but we are arguably not actually human enough, not aware of our place in the world and our connections to one another. Uh to act in the best interests of the city. Uh. Quote.

Herbert's philosophy of the human warns against two things, being animal and being a slave. As animals, we may be enslaved by our animal desires, but there is a different slavery being a slave to the machine. The Butalerrian Jahad freed humanity. It freed beings from enslavement to machines, and it freed us to develop our human talents. Herbert isn't asking to abandon our favorite playthings iPod, computer and game systems. He's challenging us to find out how to use those

toys to live a human life. The warning is not to stagnate. Now, if we're thinking about environmental catastrophe, you know it. It may also seem counterintuitive to think of politics as the answer, obviously, but but you know, there are more than enough examples in our modern world of political barriers to environmental action. But of course it is through politics, certainly in the Aristotle sense of the word,

that anything has done for the greater good of humanity. Yeah, and a very crude since I think this analogy works. Doing something about, say, environmental problems which will eventually cause harm to do lots of people or to everyone may require some kind of initial investment. It's it's sort of like the marshmallow test, but for you know, but for people as a whole, like, can can you actually do the thing that's going to get you a better outcome

in the long run? If it hurts you a little bit in the short run, A lot of times the answer is no. Now, right after I UM was looking at this material, I just happened to be watching a ted X talk for for other reasons, UM, and it's one from Jill Bolt Taylor, author of My Stroke of Insight, a brain scientists personal journey. UM. I think we've mentioned her on the show before. She had this UM this journey to recover from a stroke and wrote about it

quite interesting. But this particular talk was the nero and anatomical Transformation of the teenage brain from and Taylor's main points in this concern what happens to the teenage brain, but also just the development of the brain in general, and I thought some of her points lined up with a lot of this Benedjester at thinking in the concept of Aristotle's politics. She points out that we are feeling animals that think, not thinking animals that feel uh, and

we are we are all neuro circuitry. That's something that she drives home. And as such, we think thoughts, we then feel emotions based on those thoughts, and then we run physiological responses to those emotions and for sustained or recurring psychological responses such as anger. We wind up running the same thoughts over and over again to reproduce those same results. And she drives something that you know, we have we have an ability to pick and choose what's

going on inside of our heads. Uh. And she sums it up by saying, you know, again, we are we are feeling creatures who think, uh, we tend to be more concerned with the me rather than the we. Uh. And and in this we fall short of the idea of that polus of the of the city uh that Aristotle writes about. So I think it's interesting to think about like political action coming together, communal responses, planning towards um,

you know, future problems. Is that these are things that on one hand, they're difficult for individuals to do at times, but on the other hand, like this is this is something that humans do excel at. I mean, we're not we're not, you know, we don't have the same level of efficiency compared to you social insects certainly, but um.

But it is one of the strengths of humanity that that you know, virtually anything that we consider great in in human culture, uh, you know, and and um and in the history of our civilizations, it has been is due to people working together and bringing things out of that. But it's also interesting the way that um, the use of politics and the Benny Jesser it since I guess reflects both types of both ways of thinking about the words.

So on the one hand, you have them sort of executing long term plans through massive cooperation of they're they're they're coordinating activities on a galactic scale, uh, to try to serve some goal in the end. But you could also see them as I think quite accurately, ruthless power seekers within a ruthless system, and that those are both true at the same time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, they're

they're definitely you know, engaging in shadow government conspiracies. They are they're manipulating uh, pretty much anyone they come into contact with to certain degrees. But then then they also have these goals of creating some sort of a human supercomputer that will you know, bring about some sort of balance, uh and if you know, long term success for the

human species. But then again, I guess that's that is often if you if you if you look at at today's politics, I mean that is often the case, right, I mean, there's you'll see politics who yeah, have some sort of a particular aim or goal that they talk about that lines up with other people's estimations of what could make the world a better place. Um, but then

they've also got to play that political game. Uh. And you can, I can, you know, you can argue, well, they have to play that political game in order to to do this thing or to attempt to do this thing. But then you also wonder, like, what is the actual driving force is it? Is it the the good thing you want to do for the world, the change you want to you want to enact, or is it that game and that that's that continual you know grasp for power. Well,

you know. On on on one hand, I uh, I feel a draw towards optimism, you know, I want to be optimistic about that kind of project. But I also think that people's real motivating priorities are often determined largely by their habits, by what they do day after day. And so if you get in the mindset of well, I gotta play the game in order to achieve some lofty goal that would be for the good of humankind

or something. I mean, in a way, I guess that is what people must do if they want to achieve those goals through say, mass action, which has to be coordinated through politics probably, But there I think there's always a risk of by playing the game, your real values become the playing of the game. What is in furtherance of playing the game, because that is what you have to do day in and day out, right, right, And so like in the doone University, you're a member of

a great house. You you you don't want to just be trying to assassinate your rivals just for the sake of assassination. It's just because it's just this is the way politics works. But if that is what you spend day after day doing all the time, I think that ultimately will end up defining your main priorities. You know, when when you're forced to choose between one thing and another, you'll probably choose what's in service of the projects you pursue day

after day all the time. All right, well, why don't we move along to the Spacing Guild and to uh to set the stage, I thought we might do uh one of these little readings here. Perhaps we can drop a little ambience into the audio bed here, and uh we'll hear from the Spacing Guild Handbook. Any path that narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans are not threading their way through a maze. They scan a

vast horizon filled with unique opportunities. The narrowing viewpoint of the maze should appeal only to creatures with their noses buried in the sand. A point of order, wouldn't burying your nose in the sand actually be a good way to inhale significant amount of spice and thus proud horizons. Yeah, that's why I thought this is a great quote to start with, because on one hand, that's the sand, that's where all that spices, and uh, you know, that's that's

what the Guild is all about. And then on the other hand, the thing they're saying don't do is the main thing that Paul accuses the Spacing Guild of doing of you know, of of not considering the vast horizon, but but considering the narrow viewpoint of how to avoid catastrophes in the near future, and of course, how to

maintain that spice. You know, this quote actually reminds me of something that's brought up in in an essay I'm going to get into in a bit by by a NASA JPL navigator who has written about the Guild navigators in UH in Dune, and one of the concepts he talks about in his essay is the difference between UH calculating a solution to a problem in a best fit fashion or in a first fit fashion. UH. You know,

these are very different approaches you can have. So one says you you keep trying to solve the problem until you find the first solution that actually works, and the other is you keep trying to solve the problem, going through all possible solutions until you have identified the optimal one. And of course people think, well, you know, going for the best fit path has got to be better, right, because some even some successful paths are better than other

successful paths. But he outlines the fact that for a lot of real world type scenarios, even if you have supercomputers involved, calculator best fit pathways is sometimes such a

monumental calculation task that it's functionally impossible. So you know, they're saying, we'll be aware of all possibilities, but there's also the possibility that being aware of all possibilities puts you in a paralyzing state of inaction and in decision, because you can never finish doing all the calculations, and maybe you would be better to just sort of bury your nose whenever you figure out one path that works, just do that. Anyway, I guess we can keep that

in mind as we talked about the Spacing Guild. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Well, let's let's refresh though in the Space and Guild, um be because certainly you haven't read the book in a while, you might have forgotten some of this and the Spacing Guild that they are present in Dune Part one, the movie that that just came out last month, but they're

not maybe not in the forefront of things. So first of all, as we mentioned earlier, um, this is one of the great mental physical training schools, uh, the Spacing Guild, and we're told in Dune that they constituted one leg of the political tripod, maintaining the Great Convention. This is the truth among all the great Houses and the Imperium that banns atomic weaponry and permits these kind of formal

wars of assassination against rulers and key figures. So that way, you know, it's members of great Houses that get strategically murdered as opposed to whole populations and planets due to you know, a catastrophic use of weapons of mass destruction. The other legs of the tripod are the Imperial House and the Landstrade. The Landstrade is the body representing all of the great houses. Now, by the time of the of the events in the novel Dune, the Spacing Guild

is immensely powerful. They control a monopoly on space travel and transport, as well as interplanetary banking and so some elements you know, you know, like everything and doing. You can easily think of parallels in history. Uh for instance, the non military aspects of the Night Templars is there, as well as of course that the East India Company, the Dutch East India Company, um and and various other monopolies you can you can turn to like what happens

when one group controlled something absolutely or near absolutely. So there's something interesting about the fact that the Spacing Guild has this monopoly on interstellar travel in the Dune universe, which is that, if I understand it correctly, this monopoly is handled in a way that that's different than a lot of real world monopolies which are maintained in some cases by by force, you know, by by like military or paramilitary force, saying like no one else may may

try to compete with with us, or sometimes by just like wealth inequality, by saying like, you know, we're the only kind of company that that can afford the infrastructure

to do this. But in the Done universe, it seems to be that the monopoly is maintained not by any of these conventional methods, but by having a monopoly on the Navigators themselves, a monopoly on expertise, right and uh, and I guess the depending on how you look at the like the nature of the Guild Navigators the Steersman, Yeah, like the secrets and the knowledge of their creation, um, you know, to whatever extent they are engineered, or to

whatever extent they are like a product of mass spice consumption. And then of course there are there are you know, elements there as well as like it's it's about access to the spice, um, and the Guild definitely values its

access to the spice. But one thing I was really thinking about when putting together notes for this episode is the power of the Guild is um, you know, just as everything in a sci fi futuristic world is kind of uh you know, blown into into into greater proportions and uh, you know, and all like the basically, their power is such that if a great house chooses to surrender their planet in one of these these squabbles and wars of assassins, um they and they want to flee

beyond the imperium, the Spacing Guild will supply that house with just such a far flung planet or you know, some territory on a far flung planet that's called a two pile. And this is actually referenced in the novel when the Trades are trying to figure out what to do about this hearkening trap that they've found themselves caught in, and one of the options, which they don't really entertain, is oh, yeah, we could buy the you know, do the rules of uh you know, of of these various treaties.

We can just go to the Spacing Guild and they will take us away to a planet that no one else can get to. Um And and I love that love this because it reminds us that for the Guild, this is a true monopoly. And they're also that their space beyond the imperium. But since the Guild are the ones who control movement and mapping. They kind of have control over the shape of the physical universe for human beings, uh, their access to secret worlds and outside space. It almost mirrors,

you know, theological concepts. That's really interesting and and I mean this would essentially be a an unprecedented state of affairs in the history of human politics because normally, you know, if you get exiled, you have to go somewhere where you could be found, and there are probably already going to be some people there anyway. But in this case, you can get exiled to a place where there's nobody

there to begin with, and nobody's nobody can ever find you. Yeah, it's it's weird how in this case it's like a place is not real unless the Guild permits you to go there. And and in having this two pile option, it allows people to to basically pass out of the world of human beings in the imperium and UH and exist in in another state, almost like they've entered into an afterlife or something. That. Yeah, that's fascinating. So how did the Guild come to learn of the use of

spice and navigation? Well, I was reading about this in the Dune Encyclopedia, of course, and they outline a few different possibilities, but the basics seems seemed to be that they were perhaps just casting around in the wake of the Great Revolt in the Great in the wake of the Balarian Jahad, looking for just anything that could aid them in navigation. You know, what can we do to enhance human mental capacity in order to help us handle this?

And then they discovered the spice or it's also suggested that perhaps the Benegester it has something to do with this and introduced the spice to them. Um, now, how do they use the spice? Well? As we come to learn in the Dune series, the steersman or Guild Navigators consumed just massive amounts of milange, so much that they have been altered into a kind of aquatic mammal that

breathes and drinks milange. Now, we in the first novel don't really get a lot of insight into the Guild navigators, Like we don't really see them up close or get

their perspective. But that's not true in the sequels, right, Like I think in the second book, one of the main characters is a is a guild navigator am I right right right, the the Guild Navigator that we we actually see in David lynch Um adaptation, they basically pulled the Yeah yeah, they Edric, they pull him out of the sequel um and uh, you know, that's probably one of the most memorable sequences in that entire film, with these very very mutinty um gothy spacing Guild members bringing

out this great tank in which floats this creature that is actually just a human being, but a very exotic form of human being brought on by this intense relationship with the Spice. Yeah. I love I've always thought that was a great choice by Lynch. So he's like, Okay, I'm adapting one of the weirdest novels ever into a big mainstream motion picture, and uh, I think the thing I'm gonna do is insert a scene that's even weirder than anything in the book, that is not in the book,

and put that right at the beginning. As I love it. Yeah, I mean it's really clear here in the latest adaptation that uh that the director old d V there he um, he really likes the weird uh and he he he likes to linger on on these beautiful weird moments just in the first half of the first novel. I really hope he gets to make Dune Messiah as well. Um,

which he has said he would like to do. Is sort of a way to round out the trilogy because there's so much weird stuff and in Messiah, because that's where you start seeing things like like a guild steersman, and um, there's also a face dancer. Uh. There, there's wonderful stuff in there. Now. I was reading about the Steersman in Um, the Dune Encyclopedia, and I wanted to read this wonderful quote. Whatever faults the Spacing Guild may have had when the day of the Steersman ended, a

real beauty passed from the universe. The experience of the Steersman, breathing and drinking milange, rocking to the beat of space and time, swaying with the music of the spheres, lad in their dance by the pulse of life around them, alive to every note in the pivan, both composed and played by their quartet, is beyond the power of words to describe or the imagination to conceive. And so the Dune Encyclopedia I think is pretty pro space and Guild

they take a side in the factional struggles. Well and this this, I mean, they're really like, look, you know, whatever you have to say about the Space and Guild. Those Steersman they were they were doing great. They they were just uh And I guess I like the idea that it you know it It kind of answers the question, well, why would why would it would you want to be this? Like, why would uh would this be an okay state? Because certainly in the Lynch film, you know, it looks kind

of like a nightmare. It looks like some sort of like well, just this horrible state. But if you imagine uh, the Guild navigator just you know, feeling so alive on the spice in that tank, then I guess it makes sense. But in the uh, the New Dune movie, the Villeneuve when so, I wasn't aware when I was watching it that there was a scene where we saw the Guild steersman, but you you identified that actually they do show up.

They're the guys towards the beginning of the movie that are dressed in what looks like a combination of papal vestments and e v A suits. Yeah, and one of the big Tail Tale signs, of course, is that they have these orange domes over their head, orange, you know, implying the spice UM. But yeah, it's easy to miss. In fact, I I had noticed that there were, you know, some people online responding to the film and they were like, where was the Space and Guild um and and yeah

you can. You can watch it and think that they don't show up at all, but they they are here and uh and I think they'll they'll have a bigger role in part two. Thank thank thank All Right, well, I thought we should talk maybe a bit about the science of deep space now vacation and how that would apply to the Spacing Guild. And as one of my sources here, I was looking at another essay in that book, the Science of Dune we mentioned in the last episode.

This one is called the Spacing Guild, and it's by a guy named John C. Smith who worked in spaceflight navigation at NASA JPL the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and his bio says that he worked on missions too. I'm not sure what to make of this to Venus, Mars and Earth um and that he was part of the Cassini

Huygens mission to Saturn and its Moon Titan. I guess you could argue that that, like the various satellites that help us study Earth science, our missions to Earth, that we have to we have to go into orbit to gain that kind of perspective to study our own world. I wonder it might mean return missions like attempted probe is coming back. That's true, because that that too is a navigational feat. Sure. Now there's one thing that Smith actually mentions right at the end of his essay that

I thought was really interesting. I'd never consider heard this, but it's a piece of historical context that might help us understand a little bit better what was going through Frank Herbert's head when he framed deep space navigation in the way that he did in these novels. So remember that Doune was originally published in nineteen sixty five, which again is kind of it's hard to believe, like it

always feels further in the future than that. Yeah, to imagine that this this novel came out before with stock you know, h yeah, Yeah, it's strange. But Smith writes quote, during the time period Dune was written, humanity's exploration of the moon and planets was in its infancy The first successful fly by ever of another planet was NASA's Mariner too craft, which encountered Venus in late nineteen sixty two. In nineteen sixty five, Mariner four became the first craft

successfully navigated to encounter Mars. But here's the thing to realize, these were not the only two missions launched at this time. Smith discount is that these two probes, the Mariner two arriving at Venus in nineteen sixty two and Mariner four reaching Mars in sixty five, were up to this point the only two fully successful interplanetary missions out of twenty

that had been attempted. Wow, so that's that's that's impressive. Yeah, So because you also have to we also remind ourselves of like, why do we have Mariner one and Mariner two. It was because it was considered so risky that you we better just make two of them and send them both out because there's a high probability we're going to

lose at least one of them. Right. So, so, at the point Herbert was writing, even navigating simply between the planets within our own Solar system was a venture characterized mostly by failure. And so we today, you know, being able to look back on many decades now of of

successful missions. I think in a kind of uh, in a kind of shortsighted way, take interplanetary travel at least of of unscrewed probes kind of for granted, and in a way that we really shouldn't like, not realizing how difficult this technology was to develop and how much intricate calculation has to go into uh missions like this to

make them possible. So all that to say, basically, I think there's a reason that in nineteen sixty five this would have seemed like something you know, in interstellar navigation, would have seemed like something that required an almost supernatural mechanism to explain that. Once again, that the interesting thing being that in most cases science fiction that you know that mechanism is the is the is the thrust generation or the travel technology on the ship that allows it

to go so fast. I think that's sort of taken for granted in Dune, and instead the real magic seems to come in and the question of navigation. Yeah, I mean, it's it's a situation where the spacing Guild and the steersman they don't you know, it's it's just that they can you know, travel through hyperspaces, that they can come

out the other side, that they can do so successfully. Now, this might the the idea and the dune novels is that they travel through what they call fold space or folded space, which I think introduces its own hypothetical dangers. But even if we just stick to the problems we

would expect to encounter traveling through real space. The the the problem of navigating deep space is is more complex and interesting, maybe than a lot of people would have imagined, because um, it's it's fundamentally different and much more difficult a problem than navigation and say a car. Right, some of the differences are obvious. For example, if you're driving on a road, you don't really have to plot a course at all, right, the course is already determined by

the road that has been built. You just have to know which roads to follow and how far to follow them. But even if there were no roads where you were going, so you were just driving a dune buggy over over desert wilderness, you would still have a much easier time because you'd be able to note the direction of your destination and more or less just drive straight to it. I guess circumnavigating any obstacles you encounter along the way.

You know, you might hit a mountain or ravine or something and you have to go find a way around it. But basically you're just traveling in a across a fixed map. And this is really a blessing with travel, right the fact that you know, if you're if you're driving from one place to another, your car is the only thing that is moving in that scenario relative to the reference frame of the surface of the Earth. It's not like your starting position and your destination are usually also moving.

But when you're when you're navigating in space, everything is moving and moving within their own reference frames. So to travel to one planet or another, you can't just aim at the planet and then turn on the thrusters. Right, if we're trying to fly to Mars, you can't say where is Mars now, Okay, I'm gonna aim dead center at that and and I'm going to burn the rockets. You can't do that, of course, because by the time

you got there, Mars would be gone. Mars is moving really fast, it's an orbit around the Sun, and it would be somewhere else. So instead you essentially have to plot an intercept course it's not like sailing into a port, but like sailing to intercept another ship that is also moving. Yeah, it's not a journey to where the target planet is.

It's a journey to where the target planet will be. Now, Fortunately, the paths of objects like planets are strongly predictable that they follow an orbital course established mostly by gravity and inertia. And we've got good enough information about the orbital pathways of planets that we can predict with pretty high accuracy where they're going to be too arbitrary points out in

the future. Though, of course, the farther you try to predict the motion of anything into the future, the the more inaccurate your predictions will get because of the you know, the the cruel of of tiny, tiny inaccuracies building up over time. But then there's a second problem. Okay, so you can mostly predict where a planet's going to be in the future, so you can plot a course to intercept it. You know where it's going to be, you go to where it's going to be instead of where

it is now. But but there comes in a second problem. Given the vast distances involved in space travel, even tiny inaccuracies in the initial calculation of a baseline trajectory can end up sending you off course. Uh. And for a crude analogy to understand this, imagine you are shooting an

arrow at a target three feet away. If you're off by like one degree of difference, when you're trying to hit the target dead center, that's not going to matter very much if it's three feet away, But if you're trying to hit a target two hundred feet away, being off by a little bit is going to make a

big difference. And so this is one reason that when we we send out uncrewed space probes to do a you know, inner the orbit of another planet or intercept a comet or something like that, you can't just aim them at where that planet or object is going to be and then shoot them off and let them go.

You will have to perform repeated course corrections. You'll have to check the position of the probe periodically while it's on the way to the destination, figure out, you know, figure out it's it's updated course heading based on the new information you have about where it is, and probably perform a new burn to correct the course heading because it will be slightly off just because there's always going to be some level of inaccuracy that will build up

over time, and uh and and there there's no way to be perfectly accurate when you're charting a course through space. Now, there's one other thing worth noting, which is that while real world space agencies now have plenty of experience with deep space navigation, basically all of that experience is found not in piloting ships from inside the ships, but in

programming navigational instructions for uncrude probes. So all of the space missions with with onboard human pilots have been really close to home, you know, a few trips to the Moon in the sixties and seventies, and then a bunch of runs between the surface of Earth and low Earth orbit. And as far as crude ships go, that's it, you know. We we haven't had a somebody pilot a ship from inside that ship to Mars or anywhere else. And there

are some differences in this regard. The steering of uncrewed robotic probes introduces additional difficulties. For example, the distance between Earth and the probe will always create time delays. These would be you know, limited by the fact that radio signals can only travel at the speed of light. So if you're trying to land a probe on the Martian moon Phobos, it's going to take some number of minutes

for the information to travel each way. So you send an instruction to the probe and it might take who knows, you know, ten minutes for it to get there, and then you gotta wait another ten minutes for it to send you feedback and for you to find out if

your maneuver worked or not. But then there's another problem, which is that Smith has a section of his essay in in the Science of Dune about the process of determining where a spacecraft actually is, which is crucial because to know how to steer, you have to calculate a trajectory, and you can't calculate an accurate to trajectory if you

don't know where you are. So to establish the position of a spaceship with accuracy, you need some kind of external landmark to reference, kind of similar to how you would use landmarks to recognize where you are on a journey by car, except of course, this is over vastly greater distances without roads, and with need for much greater precision because of the distances that will be covered on

the journey. So Smith writes that we usually calculate the position of space probes in our solar system with reference to landmarks such as the Earth's north pole or He also mentions a reference point that is the intersection of Earth's equatorial and orbital planes on January first, two thousand,

which is of course everybody's favorite landmark. Um. But then you know, uh, so what you've got, You've got places like that, and you can determine uh, the probe's position by say, checking the time delay on a radio transmission. Uh and especially if you can triangulate that with multiple receiver dishes, so you've got different dishes around the world, and they can check how long it takes a radio

signal to reach them. You calculate the difference between the different dishes on the Earth's surface, and you can get a pretty good idea with with a pretty high level of accuracy, where the probe is. And then you can also calculate its velocity by measuring the Doppler shift in the in the radio transmissions as they as as they are received back on Earth. So again the Doppler shift is you know. The common example is how the the pitch of an ambulance siren changes as the ambulance is

moving towards you or away from you. Wave lengths of different types of waves tend to get higher pitched and become more compressed if the sources moving towards you, and then they tend to stretch out and get lower pitch as the as the sources moving away from you. And by measuring the amount of Doppler shift in the signal, you can actually tell how fast something is moving away from you. But then, so here's another thing I thought

was interesting. So again, in order to calculate a spacecraft's current position and path, you need to know the last best guess of where it actually was, and then from there you need to predict forward in time using mathematical models of all the different forces acting on it. And in a way, it's a kind of dead reckoning you need to do. You say, Okay, at this time, I know the ship was here, and it's been traveling in this direction this fast with these forces acting on it.

And so when I read that, I was like, wait a minute, the forces acting on it? Would that include something other than inertia, other than the ship's initial velocity and the answer is yes, absolutely. It includes other forces much the same way that if you're trying to predict the path of a bullet you imagine, you know, somebody shooting at a target. You can't predict the path of the bullet if you just imagine it travels forever in

a perfectly straight line out of the gun barrel. You need to take into account other things like gravity pulling the bullet toward the ground, and atmospheric drags slowing the bullet down over time. Something very similar is true of spacecraft. So to get a spacecraft's position and to calculate its future trajectory, you need to know not just where it started and its initial velocity, but other forces acting on it,

including things like gravity. Uh. Gravity is Smith says the most important of these forces in the familiar interplanetary missions that we have experience with, and this would be gravitational attraction exerted the objects in our solar system, the Sun, the planets, moons, and other objects um. But actually it doesn't even stop at the influence of gravity. The course of a spacecraft is diverted by other things, including well, one would just be variations in the way gravity is

exerted even by known objects. So the the example Smith gives is that gravity is not perfectly symmetrical in the way it's exerted by objects like planets and moons, because these objects sometimes are kind of lumpy and so they're gravitational influence is slightly asymmetrical. There might be more gravitational influence in one part of the object or in a certain direction than in other parts or in other directions.

But then on top of that, you've got radiation pressure from the sun, you know, so the solar wind might be at the back of a of a probe that's traveling and that's actually throwing off its trajectory from what you would imagine just if you calculated, you know, it's initial velocity from from the rocket burn and then uh, and then maybe the gravitational influence of nearby objects. You've

got to take radiation pressure into account. Uh, if an atmosphere is nearby, Smith says, you need to note drag from the atmosphere and so forth. And Smith even gives a very strange and interesting example of a trajectory input that was once considered a real mystery. It was the so called Pioneer anomaly. I don't think I was familiar with this before, Rob, have you ever read about this?

I don't remember. So this concerned the Pioneer probes, which you know, traveling off into deep space there, you know, on on a long interstellar trajectory now, but navigators kept finding that their predictions for the course of these Pioneer probes was a little bit off, even after accounting for all the known forces that that they could think of. So the question is could this be an indication of something unknown, some some unknown force or unknown property of

physics that hadn't yet been discovered. And the solution to the mystery was was not that tantalizing, but but it was kind of interesting. Nonetheless, it turns out it's probably not anything spooky about physics. The deviation from expected acceleration was probably due to radiation pressure exerted by the power

source on board the Pioneer probe. So inside, yeah, they've got they've got a little internal power plant, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator or RTG, and this was creating anisotropic radiation pressure that was sort of meaning So I think the pressure generated by the waist heat from this thermoelectric generator was actually exerting a pressure that changed the course of the probe as it flew through space and changed it. It didn't you know, the radiation didn't just go out

in all directions. It was sort of uh, it was anisotropic, so it was going in one direction more than the other directions. And this was creating an accelerating force. Yeah. And and like like you said, when you're dealing with with long distances like this, uh, just that little nudge, especially if it's unaccounted for and unexplained, is enough to

send you completely off course. Right, And then Smith writes, and as I say that interstellar travel would probably involve even more forces acting on a spaceship to cause it to deviate from its course. And these influences would have to be understood and modeled mathematically if you were going to navigate accurately. But another question would be again, you remember, you need those reference points within the environment to calculate

your position. If you're traveling through space, you need to know where you are in order to calculate a trajectory. So what would those external landmarks be if you are traveling between stars, if you're an interstellar space well Smith suggests the possibility of using pulsar um. Pulsars are highly magnetized stars that spin around very fast, shooting out beams of electromagnetic radiation out of their magnetic poles. And because they rotate so fast, and because they shoot these beams

in selective directions, you know, it's not omnidirectional beaming. It's like, uh, beams just coming out of the magnetic poles. They appear from the at the external observer's perspective to pulse or blink at these regular intervals, sort of like the you know, the spinning light in the lighthouse, and the intervals of these pulses can be used to identify what pulsar you're

looking at. In fact, the pioneer plaques, remember those, uh, those plaques that were designed to go on board the probes in case an alien ever looks at this and says, hey, who made this? Um? They used triangulation by pulsars of specified intervals to show the galactic location of our solar system. They're like, here's where Earth is. Though, I think to be fair, I recall reading at some point that the pulsar map on the plaque will no longer be accurate

in the future. I'm not sure about that one though. Yeah, you got to read the fine print at about on the plaque limited time offer. But pulsars are not the only option. I was actually reading a piece about this question in space dot com from one by an astrophysicist named Paul Sutter who is at UH Sunny Stony Brook and the Flat Iron Institute in New York, and he was talking in this UH piece about about a paper showing that you could use pairs of stars to establish

position in interstellar travel. So I think in theory it could be done. But uh, there there are a lot of challenges probably ahead if we actually do become an interstellar traveling species. Uh, you know, there's a lot we're gonna have to figure out, and we may not have spice to aid us by by creating pressunts that allows us to predict the future, but there is going to be an awful lot of of highly precise calculation involved. So yeah, we're gonna have to We're gonna have turn

to computers until you know, we decided we should. We can't use computers anymore right than now. I'd like to come back to the philosophy and outlook of the space and Guild. UM. I was reading in the Philosophy of doone and there's a there's an article titled A Universe of Bastards by Matthew A. Bkas and Um. In it, Budkas describes the Guild as um as having quote a

parasitic relationship with political power. So in this what he's driving, what he's pointing out, is that the Guild wields tremendous power, even power over the emperor, but they never actually rule. They can't actually rule, they can't risk disrupting the flow of spice. They depend on it absolutely. You take the spice away and the Guild cannot do the thing that

gives them the power. And he yeah, he points out again that the Guild has no armies, but it doesn't need to because it absolutely controls transport and trade between worlds. And I found this quite interesting because it made me think about, you know, historically, what's what's one of the things that armies do. Um. You know, one huge role is disrupting trade. Um. To besiege a walled city is to cut off its trade and travel and starve it

into submission. UM. I was treading about sieges a while back, and that's that's a you know, in the cinematic sense, we often think, well, the siege is about like breaking down walls, getting in there and then taking over the city, But generally it's it's more about strangling the city until the people who live there, or the and or the people who rule there give in and open the doors themselves. Yeah, and I think a lot of the same could be

said about navies. A lot of the history of navies is also about interrupting trade, you know, trying to block access to ports or trying to intercept trade vessels. Yeah, and so the interesting thing about the Guild here is whether you're talking about blockades or besiegement, they have this power already, like it's they don't need an army to do it all that because they they are the only ones who can operate movement between worlds. Um So by its very nature, the Guild is in a constant state

of besiegement or potential besiegement with every planet in the imperium. Now, Buckus goes on to compare the politics of Dune to Thomas Hobbs work Leviathan, in which the author quote establishes a theoretical state of existence in which there is no centralized authority, but rather a collection of individuals looking out for their own interests. Now, um, you know, you might say, well, isn't there an emperor in Dune. Well, yes, there is

an emperor in Dune. But again the Emperor's in the Emperor's house is part of that tripod and it's all in this this uh, this political balance. So it's not like the emperor actually does have absolute control over everything. Again talking about the the emperor that is present during during the first Dune book. Um, So when Dune, it's not individuals but factions uh that are that are the

ones looking after their own interests. Uh, their fights, their feuds, and these fights and feuds ultimately can threaten the stability of everything. And that comes back to the way that the Guild operates itself again, because the Guild very much wants stability, at least so far as its spice goes, they don't want to do anything to threaten that supply. So another interesting aspect of the Space and Guild is

to is to come back to the way it makes decisions. Um. Again, we're envisioning the Steersman, these augmented and or mutated humans who literally breathe spice in order to generate the sort of of limited uh UM precedents necessary to travel through space and hyperspace, and a big part of this entails seeing what the most immediate dangers are and dodging them and so subsequently, one of Paul's biggest insights is that the Guild commands you know, such power over everything and

their dependence on They depend on spice for their power, so they end up making all of their decisions in a similar fashion. They always choose the safe immediate path. And while this ensures survival in the short term and it keeps keeps the spice flowing for them, it will eventually in the long term lead to stagnation for you know, the entire human endeavor. Oh, this is back to the

first fit versus best fit uh time. So it's interesting to think about this in terms of cognitive bias to sort of reverse the Leviathan scenario and go back from the faction to the individual um. As pointed out by Lauren and Grishma in the safety bias published in Behavior Change in Risk Avoidance, is one possible mechanism by which

personality characteristics may be linked to anxiety pathology. And we see risk perceptions factor into a number of cognitive biases, including zero risk bias, in which there's a tendency to try do eliminate eliminate a particular risk while other options

would produce a greater overall risk reduction. Okay, So in a sci fi scenario, if I understand that, right, that would be saying like, Okay, we're going to design a spaceship that cannot possibly be destroyed by the biplasma canons from from another spaceship, but in fact that spaceship is very prone to uh to like toxic build up of of c O two in the you know, atmosphere processors or whatever. That you're just like overly focusing on one

type of risk while ignoring others, right. Um. I think things like you know, the War on Terror are sometimes brought up as an example of this too, like laser focusing on one particular threat, when some might argue that if that same amount of energy went into other things, then you would have you know, it would it would result in greater safety. Um, and perhaps in a more

meaningful sense. Right. There's also risk compensation theory, which holds that people adjust their behavior your in response to perceived risk levels. If they feel protected, they tend to be less careful. The more risks they perceive, the more careful they become. Um, And I was I was reading that, like one interpretation of this has to do with um, you know, like like safety gear and things like skydiving where uh like skydiving from a methods and material since

it has become increasingly safer to do. But that means people feel safer skydiving and they're more likely to take certain risks that sort of thing. It also reminds me of insights that I've read about climbing, where like, like you know, mountain climbing, where the danger is not the part where you're you're hyper focused on every little thing you do. It's when certain actions become kind of automatic and you kind of I guess to a certain extent you feel safe. Um, you know you're going to be

more careful if you feel the danger. But but coming back to this, this idea of a risk compensation theory, I was wondering how it might equate to the guild. So via their abilities, they're constantly not only confronting simulations of possible doom, which of course us normal humans do all the time. You know, we engage in in um in simulating possible outcomes uh that are positive, but also ones that are negative, and that can lead into a

sort of fantasizing about potential doom. But the Guild they seem to go beyond that. They have actual visions of dooms that they have to cleverly dodge as they navigate um, either you know, through space travel or politically. So do they end up giving into these visions of doom and grow increasingly careful, or at least in some cases, do they feel safe and protected by their use of the spice?

I think I think probably with the Space and Guild, we're talking about the overly careful side of things here. That seems to be in keeping with the safest path of the Guild and so forth in the way they're characterized. But perhaps the comfort afforded by the spice allows them to engage in some bolder maneuvers, at least so far as it doesn't threaten the supply of spice um. It seems to be a constant. Anything that threatens the spice, that's just a no go, like like almost zero zero

risk can be taken when it comes to that supply chain. Right. So it's interesting with the Beni Jester in the Space and Guild um because on a very basic level, and I think that's one of the great things about done is that you can look at it at different levels. On one level, it's like these are just the sci fi magic versus sci fi science, right, it's which is versus um techno wizards of a sort you know, um. But then it also it goes a lot deeper than that.

It gets into like the ways they think, um, you know, short term and long term thinking and how they engage in risk, etcetera. Yeah, I didn't think about that. So you're setting up the contrast that the Beni Jess being concerned with politics, are very they're very much engaged in long term strategic thinking, whereas the Spacing Guild being very immediate task oriented or just like they're thinking one step

ahead always. Yeah, like the Been Adjustment, for instance, we're told, you know that they will actually make sure that things are inserted into native religions on various worlds. Uh. That give them an out that like like oh yeah, well, in our in our traditions, it does say that if a um, if a strange woman from another planet shows up, we're supposed to give her a spaceship. You know, um come in handy a thousand years from now. Yeah, it might come in handy a thousand years from now. So

we're going to do it. Um. Whereas the Guild, they would be asking different questions. They're like, well does that what does it mean for our survival one minute from now? And what does it mean regarding our supply of the spice? And I saw some papers online. I didn't really get into these so much, but there was one I noticed that was looking at themes of addiction in Dune and Lord of the Rings. Um. You know, because they both

deal with I guess addiction to some extent. You say that that the Ring is an addiction, the power that comes with the Ring as an addiction. And of course the Guild is in a very real sense addicted to the spice. Um but um and and and makes its its choices in the way that I guess could be comparable to some sort of personal addiction level. Uh. Any rate, there's just another example of all the different levels at

which you might engage with Dune. Got to engage them all, all right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close it out there. I think this will be it for for this journey into the Done universe. But hey, when Dune Part two comes out, maybe we'll dive back in. Maybe it'll be something else we get a hanker in to discuss. Oh, I'm sure there will be more, and of course we'd

love to hear from everyone out there. You have insight into any of this based on your own experience with the the Done universe, no matter which path that ends up taking. You know, the original novels, the sequels and prequels, the movies, the video games. It didn't even into the video games. Oh yeah, there's like a Commanding Conqueror style game, but it was Dune. Yeah, various real time strategy type things. I never actually played any of them, but but I've

remember looking at stuff about them and they look cool. Um. There's also a big board game presence. There's, of course, the classic Done board game, which I I Um, I got a copy of Man and I got it during the pandemic, so it's it's never been played, and they're they're a couple of of newer Doune board games that also look very exciting, especially since they both have a single player modes, which you know is certainly a little

easier to achieve, if maybe not as socially engaging. Anyway, whatever your experience, if you have thoughts right in, we'd love to hear from you. In the meantimes. You'd like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed You'll get that wherever you get your podcasts. We have core episodes on two season, Thursday's Listener, Mail on Monday's Artifact on Wednesday, and on Friday we do

a little weird house cinema. That's our time to set aside most of the serious concerns and just talk about a strange film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say ooh, you can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your Mind podcasts. Stuff to Blow

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