March 2023

History & Culture

The Gospel of Gold

The first millennium BC witnessed the appearance of three potentially universal orders, whose devotees could for the first time imagine the entire world and the entire human race as a single unit governed by a single set of laws. Everyone was ‘us’, at least potentially. There was no longer ‘them’. The first universal order to appear was economic: the monetary order. The second universal order was political: the imperial order. The third universal order was religious: the order of universal religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.

Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the first people who managed to transcend the binary evolutionary division, ‘us vs them’, and to foresee the potential unity of humankind. For the merchants, the entire world was a single market and all humans were potential customers. They tried to establish an economic order that would apply to all, everywhere. For the conquerors, the entire world was a single empire and all humans were potential subjects, and for the prophets, the entire world held a single truth and all humans were potential believers. They too tried to establish an order that would be applicable to everyone everywhere.

During the last three millennia, people made more and more ambitious attempts to realize that global vision. Let us begin with the story of the greatest conqueror in history, a conqueror possessed of extreme tolerance and adaptability, thereby turning people into ardent disciples.

This conqueror is money.

People who do not believe in the same God or obey the same king are more than willing to use the same money. Osama Bin Laden, for all his hatred of American culture, American religion and American politics, was very fond of American dollars.

How did money succeed where gods and kings failed?

In order to understand why, consider a hypothetical case. Assume that when regular trade opened between Mali and the Mediterranean, Malians were uninterested in gold, so it was almost worthless. But in the Mediterranean, gold was a coveted status symbol, hence its value was high. What would happen next? Merchants travelling between Mali and the Mediterranean would notice the difference in the value of gold. In order to make a profit, they would buy gold cheaply in Mali and sell it dearly in the Mediterranean. Consequently, the demand for gold in Mali would skyrocket, as would its value. At the same time, the Mediterranean would experience an influx of gold, whose value would consequently drop. Within a short time, the value of gold in Mali and the Mediterranean would be quite similar. The mere fact that Mediterranean people believed in gold would cause Malians to start believing in it as well. Even if Malians still had no real use for gold, the fact that Mediterranean people wanted it would be enough to make the Malians value it.

Similarly, the fact that another person believes in cowry shells, dollars, or electronic data, is enough to strengthen our own belief in them, even if that person is otherwise hated, despised or ridiculed by us. Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief because, whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.

That’s how money works. Cowry shells and banknotes have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper?

People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

Why do I believe in the cowry shell or gold coin or dollar bill? Because my neighbours believe in them. And my neighbours believe in them because I believe in them. And we all believe in them because our king believes in them and demands them in taxes and because our priest believes in them and demands them in tithes. We accept the dollar in payment because we trust in the US secretary of the treasury. The crucial role of trust explains why our financial systems are so tightly bound up with our political, social and ideological systems, why financial crises are often triggered by political developments, and why the stock market can rise or fall depending on the way traders feel on a particular morning.

For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively.

Money is based on two universal principles:

Universal convertibility: with money as an alchemist, you can turn land into loyalty, justice into health, and violence into knowledge.
Universal trust: with money as a go-between, any two people can cooperate on any project.

These principles have enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively in trade and industry. But these seemingly benign principles have a dark side. When everything is convertible, and when trust depends on anonymous coins and cowry shells, it corrodes local traditions, intimate relations and human values, replacing them with the cold laws of supply and demand.

Human communities and families have always been based on the belief in ‘priceless’ things, such as honour, loyalty, morality and love. These things lie outside the domain of the market, and they shouldn’t be bought or sold for money. Even if the market offers a good price, certain things just aren’t done. Parents mustn’t sell their children into slavery; a devout Christian must not commit a mortal sin; a loyal knight must never betray his lord, and ancestral tribal lands shall never be sold to foreigners.

Money has always tried to break through these barriers, like water seeping through cracks in a dam. Parents have been reduced to selling some of their children into slavery in order to buy food for others. Devout Christians have murdered, stolen and cheated – and later used their spoils to buy forgiveness from the Church. Ambitious knights auctioned their allegiance to the highest bidder while securing the loyalty of their own followers by cash payments. Tribal lands were sold to foreigners from the other side of the world in order to purchase an entry ticket into the global economy.

Money has an even darker side. Although money builds universal trust between strangers, this trust is invested not in humans, communities or sacred values, but in money itself and in the impersonal systems that back it. We do not trust the stranger or the next-door neighbour – we trust the coin they hold. If they run out of coins, we run out of trust. As money brings down the dams of community, religion and state, the world is in danger of becoming one big and rather heartless marketplace. Hence the economic history of humankind is a delicate dance. People rely on money to facilitate cooperation with strangers, but they’re afraid it will corrupt human values and intimate relations. On one hand, people willingly destroy the communal dams that held at bay the movement of money and commerce for so long. Yet, on the other hand, they build new dams to protect society, religion and the environment from enslavement by market forces.

It is common nowadays to believe that the market always prevails and that the dams erected by kings, priests and communities cannot long hold back the tides of money. This is naïve. Brutal warriors, religious fanatics and concerned citizens have repeatedly managed to trounce calculating merchants, and even reshape the economy. It is therefore impossible to understand the unification of humankind as a purely economic process. In order to understand how thousands of isolated cultures coalesced over time to form the global village of today, we must take into account the role of gold and silver, but we cannot disregard the equally crucial role of steel. Enter politics . . .

March 29, 2023

History & Culture, Science & Technology

The Animal That Became a God

Seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business right here in East Africa.

In the following millennia, it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction.

Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on Earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens and usually caused immense misery to other animals.

In the last few decades we have at last made some real progress as far as the human condition is concerned, with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating more rapidly than ever before, and the improvement in a lot of humanity is too recent and fragile to be certain of.

Moreover, despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles – but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before but have very little idea of what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction.

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

Science & Technology

I like to think that black holes are full of nipples

I like to think that if I fell towards a black hole, the truth would be revealed at the event horizon and I’d scream into the intercom:

“My gawd, it’s full of nipples!”

And then relativity would dilate time such that my message would take a century to be fully decoded by the rest of humanity. And upon finally getting the last byte of info, they’d glance at each other, smack their foreheads, and say:

“Truly, he was completely cuckoo.”

But they’d be wrong because the black hole would genuinely have been full of nipples: so many that critical mass was exceeded and not only mammals but even light itself couldn’t escape nipple bondage.

Science & Technology

How would you like to dispose of your ex to the farthest reaches of the cosmos?

Ex-lovers are extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile beings. The only thing they are worthy of is rotting in the biggest prison out there. Or drinking from a cauldron of Neville Longbottom’s Shrinking Solution. Alternatively, in a proclamation of utter brilliance, you may send them back in time to battle out for survival with the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex. There are just no limits to the cruel exterminations they deserve.

And, no, Ngina. Forgiveness was never an option.

Of particular interest, you’ll need them deprived of all necessities that make up who they are, from social to atomic. Thus, alas! I present you with [drumroll please] a wormhole! A wormhole is a kind of tunnel that connects two points in spacetime. It acts as a shortcut through spacetime, connecting two points that would otherwise be far apart, like really far, billions of light-years apart even.

*A wormhole is a tunnel that connects two points in spacetime that are far apart.*

Now, here’s a simple DIY how-to on how to construct a traversable cosmic wormhole that could send that sorry excuse of a biped to the farthest reaches of space to wallow in solitary anguish (and quite possibly, die):

Take two charged black holes
Place them back to back
Thread two cosmic strings through both of the black holes
Stretch both strings to infinity

Presto! You’ve got yourself a traversable wormhole. ⁠

The barebones: a charged black hole, which is a theoretical black hole that carries an electric charge and has an oppositely charged black hole on the other end of it, will act as your wormhole.

But there’s a catch before you decide to just push that degenerate stain into that wormhole: wormholes are by nature incredibly unstable. To make sure either charged end stays fully stretched out, a pair of cosmic strings — a hypothetical, one-dimensional defect in space-time — could hold them in place. Cosmic strings can also be thought of as narrow tubes of energy stretched across the entire length of the ever-expanding universe. These thin regions, leftover from the early cosmos, are predicted to contain huge amounts of mass and therefore could warp the space-time around them. Cosmic strings are either infinite or they’re in loops, with no ends, physicists say. The approach of two such strings parallel to each other would bend space-time so vigorously and in such a particular configuration that might make space and/or time travel possible, at least in theory.

Unfortunately, cosmic strings are also not a great travelling companion. You never want to encounter one yourself, since they would slice you clean in half like a cosmic lightsabre, but you don’t have to worry much since it isn’t certain that they exist. Moreover, none has ever been seen out there in the universe, and even better, it’s your ex falling through the wormhole: so, no love lost – pun very much intended.

While wormholes — and cosmic strings — have yet to be proven to exist, you could measure their shape by looking at the ripples they leave behind in space-time. Unfortunately, these ripples or gravitational waves could sap black holes’ mass and cause them to eventually collapse in on themselves.

But the hope is that the strung-up wormhole could be stable for just enough time to send that hell of an ex on a hell of a journey.

History & Culture, Science & Technology

A Universe Not Made for Us

Our ancestors understood origins by extrapolating from their own experiences. How else could they have done it? So the Universe was hatched from a cosmic egg, or conceived in the sexual congress of a mother God and a father God, or was a kind of product of the Creator’s workshop—perhaps the latest of many flawed attempts. And the Universe was not much bigger than we see, and not much older than our written or oral records, and nowhere very different from places that we know.

We’ve tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we’ve not been very inventive. In the West, Heaven is placid and fluffy, and Hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominant hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the King of Kings. In every culture, we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe. Few found the similarity suspicious.

Then science came along and taught us that we are not the measure of all things, that there are wonders unimagined, and that the Universe is not obliged to conform to what we consider comfortable or plausible. We have learned something about the idiosyncratic nature of our common sense. Science has carried human self-consciousness to a higher level. This is surely a rite of passage, a step towards maturity. It contrasts starkly with the childishness and narcissism of our pre-Copernican notions.

And, again, if we’re not important, not central, not the apple of God’s eye, what is implied for our theologically based moral codes? The discovery of our true bearings in the Cosmos was resisted for so long and to such a degree that many traces of the debate remain, sometimes with the motives of the geocentrists laid bare.

What do we want from philosophy and religion? Palliatives? Therapy? Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances? Dismay that the Universe does not conform to our preferences seems childish. You might think that grown-ups would be ashamed to put such disappointments into print. The fashionable way of doing this is not to blame the Universe—which seems truly pointless—but rather to blame the means by which we know the Universe, namely science.

Science has taught us that, because we have a talent for deceiving ourselves, subjectivity may not freely reign. Its conclusions derive from the interrogation of nature and are not in all cases predesigned to satisfy our wants.

We recognize that even revered religious leaders, the products of their time as we are of ours, may have made mistakes. Religions contradict one another on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no Gods, one God, or many gods.

If you lived two or three millennia ago, there was no shame in holding that the Universe was made for us. It was an appealing thesis consistent with everything we knew; it was what the most learned among us taught without qualification. But we have found out much since then. Defending such a position today amounts to willful disregard of the evidence, and a flight from self-knowledge.

We long to be here for a purpose, even though, despite much self-deception, none is evident.

Our time is burdened under the cumulative weight of successive debunking of our conceits:

We’re Johnny-come-latelies
We live in the cosmic boondocks
We emerged from microbes and muck
Apes are our cousins
Our thoughts and feelings are not fully under our own control
There may be much smarter and very different beings elsewhere.
On top of all this, we’re making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves.

The trapdoor beneath our feet swings open. We find ourselves in bottomless free fall. We are lost in great darkness, and there’s no one to send out a search party. Given so harsh a reality, of course, we’re tempted to shut our eyes and pretend that we’re safe and snug at home, that the fall is only a bad dream.

Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs—in time, in space, and in potential—the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors:

We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang and plumb the fine structure of matter.
We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star.
We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth.
We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our own origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects.
We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death.
We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions.
We communicate at the speed of light and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half.
We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars.

To our ancestors, there was much in nature to be afraid of—lightning, storms, earthquakes, volcanos, plagues, drought and long winters. Religions arose in part as attempts to propitiate and control, if not much to understand, the disorderly aspect of nature.

How much more satisfying had we been placed in a garden custom-made for us, its other occupants put there for us to use as we saw fit? There is a celebrated story in the Western tradition like this, except that not quite everything was there for us. There was one particular tree of which we were not to partake, a tree of knowledge. Knowledge and understanding and wisdom were forbidden to us in this story. We were to be kept ignorant. But we couldn’t help ourselves. We were starving for knowledge—created hungry, you might say. This was the origin of all our troubles. In particular, it is why we no longer live in a garden: We found out too much. So long as we were incurious and obedient, I imagine, we could console ourselves with our importance and centrality, and tell ourselves that we were the reason the Universe was made. As we began to indulge our curiosity, though, to explore, to learn how the Universe really is, we expelled ourselves from Eden. Angels with a flaming swords were set as sentries at the gates of Paradise to bar our return. The gardeners became exiles and wanderers. Occasionally we mourn that lost world, but that, it seems to me, is maudlin and sentimental. We could not happily have remained ignorant forever.

There is in this Universe much of what seems to be designed. But instead, we repeatedly discover that natural processes—the collisional selection of worlds, say, or natural selection of gene pools, or even the convection pattern in a pot of boiling water—can extract order out of chaos, and deceive us into deducing purpose where there is none.

The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We long for a parent to care for us, to forgive us for our errors, and to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.

If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.

3 Comments

Science & Technology

I’ve Just had an Intriguing Talk With my Pet Iguana, Rupert, About Elon Musk’s Rockets

Rupert: The whole idea is ridiculous! The very assumption that a plane is more complex than Elon Musk’s rockets. That’s just absurd and objectively not the case.

Wambua: …What!?

Rupert: Part of the reason is that Elon Musk’s rockets can not only climb up the atmosphere, but they can also come down to a predesignated spot in a desert or the ocean, without falling apart and becoming scrap metal or coral-reef anchoring, respectively. By doing so, Elon can theoretically save over 99% of the total cost of launching rockets.

Wambua: No, I mean, how come you are talking? Lizards don’t talk.

Rupert: And yet we are having a conversation. A fixed-wing plane is designed to generate lift in the easiest way possible, and then stay up in the air with the bare minimum struggle. This is because its aerodynamic profile makes it work with the atmosphere, rather than against it. Stick a plane in a wind tunnel, turn up the wind, and the plane will go up, lifted by the air itself. In fact, so aerodynamic are planes, that most can glide over 150 kilometres horizontally if their engines shut down at a 10 km altitude. For most planes, engine shut-off is rarely a fatal situation. In a sense, a fixed-wing craft is like a well-balanced kite in the wind: making it stay up in the air is easy. In fact, the most complicated part of aviation in fixed-wing planes is balancing the rolls, pitches and yaws of the body to maintain a stable flight. But staying up in the air? Easy peasy. Some things are not meant to defy sense.

Wambua: A talking iguana does. You peed in my stash of pot again, didn’t you? I’m hallucinating from inhaling your pee, aren’t I?

Rupert: A rocket, is a completely different animal. First, a rocket works against the atmosphere: the bulk of its fuel at launch is burnt just to crawl through the lower atmosphere. So, while the lower atmosphere lifts up an aeroplane, it creates a massive drag for a rocket. And the fuel needed to break through this barrier is often in the hundreds of tonnes, for even modest payloads. Secondly, while an aeroplane can glide idyllically with dead engines, a rocket with dead engines drops to the ground like dead weight. Engine shut-off in a plane is an inconvenience. In a rocket, it is either part of the flight profile or the beginning of a massive clusterfuck, that ends in a guaranteed total loss of hardware plus any payload: human or otherwise.

Wambua: Oddly, you make a lot of sense. Except for the whole talking lizard thing.

Rupert: Back to SpaceX, and the inimitable magic of landing a rocket safely back on a pad. Somewhere in the huge labs of SpaceX, a certain flight engineer once stumbled across a literal epiphany. He realized that, if the fuel for SpaceX rockets could be increased by a mere 3-4% above what was then deemed enough for a one-way flight, there theoretically would be enough fuel left in the rockets to check their descent and manoeuvre them to a safe landing, instead of the traditional splash landing in the Atlantic that used to scrap everything. So, a whole new family of tech was built from the ground up. The RCS (Reaction Control System) thrusters had to be reconfigured: given enough Delta-V to flip over the entire rocket at MECO (Main Engine Cut Off), often at flight apogee, to obtain a retrograde form. That is, the bottom part of the rocket, where the thrusters are, would be turned around to face the direction of rocket propagation, while the tip of the rocket now faced the direction from which the rocket was coming.

Wambua: Look, if we are going to effectively communicate, I have to get used to this … this whole madness. Tell me what it feels like to be a lizard.

Rupert: Feels like a human being without the cojones. So, at apogee, most SpaceX rockets are moving horizontally at about 7,000 km/hr. That’s about Mach 6. Hypersonic. When the flight path curves down, back towards the earth, this speed increases even further. Left unchecked, this increasing speed would result in irreparable damage to the rocket as it transited from the stratosphere to the troposphere. So, the on-deck computers have to fire some of the engines at the base to shave off some of the velocity. This firing is sophisticated in terms of timing and the retrograde thrust created. Too early, and the rocket exhausts its fuel, guaranteeing a crash landing. Too late, and aerodynamic buffeting tears the rocket apart. Too much thrust and the rocket not only stops mid-air but also reverses and rapidly climbs upwards, again: the fuel-thrust ratio in the Merlin-D engines is simply insane. The sweet spot hence is somewhere in between, and before SpaceX engineers got it just right, they blew quite a few rockets. The last major challenge in getting the rocket on the drone ship, downrange in the Atlantic, is twofold. First, the falling rocket and the drone ship have to rendezvous at the exact same point, or the rocket falls into the water and sinks. Grid fins and extra-articulate thrust gimbles kick in here, correcting flight path at microsecond timeframes. The tech to actuate these had to be built from the ground up. Secondly, at the last moment, just before the rocket connects with the drone ship’s surface, the rocket’s main thrusters fire for one last time, in what’s known in SpaceX as a “Hoverslam manoeuvre”, or as the “Suicide burn”. This last burn kills off all remaining downward velocities in the rocket, ensuring a soft impact with the landing legs. Done wrong, the rocket crashes on the deck, incinerating everything in sight.

Wambua: WAIT, wait. You don’t have cojones?

Rupert: I don’t. Back to rockets, it goes without saying that, before all the above manoeuvres were perfected, SpaceX engineers suffered a lot of cold sweats, and straight-up horror when any of a million variables went nuts: the weather around, the tolerance of some rocket parts giving up at the wrong time, some programming code hiccupping in the thick of things, etc. And in almost every single case of such misadventures, the cost would be the same: total, fiery loss of the rocket. Millions of dollars up in literal flames. By comparison, aviation, especially fixed-wing planes, is like a walk in the park.

Wambua: But if you don’t have cojones…

Rupert: I’m female, yeah. Stop looking at me like that, you twisted being.

History & Culture

Ashoka the Great

Feeling, in mammals at least, is mainly controlled by lower, primitive, and more ancient parts of the brain. And thinking, by the higher, more recently evolved outer layers. A rudimentary ability to think was superimposed on the pre-existing programmed savage behaviours. This is the evolutionary baggage we carry with us into the schoolyard, into the marriage, into the voting booth, into the lynch mob, and onto the battlefield.

So, what does that tell us about our future? Will it be nothing more than a series of callous conquests – dreary repetitions of our past – with no escape for our children?

I know a story that gives me hope. A tale of a man whom I deem as the greatest conqueror who ever lived. To date, he remains one of, if not the only, powerful leader in world history who tried to conquer by way of morality. He’s the only person that I know of who lived on both extremes of the good-evil spectrum; From blood-thirsty to tranquil. His life’s saga means we can change:

About 2,200 years ago, much of the world was in the grip of absolute rulers. Their armies rampaged across the planet, bringing torture, rape, murder, and mass enslavement wherever they went.

A young man came out of an obscure backwater called Macedonia and, in less than a decade, carved out an empire that stretched from the Adriatic to beyond the Indus River in India. Along the way, Alexander the Great crushed the implacable Persian army.

*At about the same time, King Chandragupta conquered all of northern India*.

King Chandragupta’s son, Bindusara, assumed the throne after his death. As Bindusara’s own death approached, he intended to bequeath his empire to a favoured heir.

Legend has it that another son, one who had been rejected by Bindusara, was so ruthless in his quest for power that he murdered every one of his 99 half-brothers and in a fiery pit of coal, he burned alive the chosen successor.

Dressed in the finery that only an emperor was entitled to wear, the hated son stood before his dying father and declared contemptuously, “I am your successor now!”

This was Ashoka … and he was just getting started.

In the 2nd century BCE, the Indian emperor Ashoka initiated a reign of terror known for its new heights of sadism and cruelty. When Ashoka’s ministers baulked at his command to cut down all the fruit trees surrounding his palace, Ashoka said, “Fine, we’ll cut off your heads instead.”

His fiendishness knew no bounds.

Ashoka built a magnificent palace for his unsuspecting victims. They did not know until it was too late that deep inside the palace were torture rooms designed to inflict the five most painful ways to die. It came to be known as Ashoka’s Hell.

But that was not Ashoka’s greatest atrocity.

He now set out to complete the conquest of India that his grandfather had begun.

The nation of Kalinga, to the south, knew no peace could be made with such a madman. They courageously stood their ground as Ashoka’s army besieged the city. When they could bear no more, Ashoka sent his troops in for the kill.

As Ashoka surveyed his triumph, there was one vagabond who dared to approach him, saying “Mighty King, you who are so powerful you can take hundreds of thousands of lives at your whim,” bringing forth a toddler’s corpse from under his robes, he presented it to Ashoka, “Show me how powerful you really are. Give back but one life to this dead child.”

Who was this fearless beggar who dared to confront the vile Ashoka with his crimes? His exact identity is lost to us, but we know that he was a disciple of Buddha, a little-known philosopher who had lived almost 200 years before. Buddha preached nonviolence, awareness, and compassion. His followers renounced wealth to wander the earth spreading Buddha’s teachings by their example. This monk was one of them. And with his courage and wisdom, he found the heart in a heartless man.

Ashoka was never the same again.

He erected a pillar, one of many, on the site of his greatest crime. One of the first edicts of Ashoka was engraved on it: “All are my children. I desire for my children their welfare and happiness, and this I desire for all.”

It wasn’t that Ashoka was violating the laws of kin selection – the evolutionary strategy that favours the reproductive success of an organism’s relatives, even at a fatal cost to other distantly related species’ lives – It was that his definition of who was kin to him had expanded to include everyone.

Ashoka would govern India for another 30 years, and he used that time to:

Build schools, universities, hospitals, and even hospices.
He introduced women’s education and saw no reason why they could not be ordained as monks.
He banned the rituals of animal sacrifice and hunting for sport.
He established veterinary hospitals throughout India, and he counselled his citizens to be kind to animals.
Ashoka saw to it that wells were dug to bring water to the towns and villages.
He planted trees and built shelters along the roads of India so that the traveller would always feel welcome and animals would have the mercy of shade.
Ashoka signed peace treaties with the small neighbouring countries that had once trembled at the mention of his name.
He instituted free health care for all and made sure that the medicines of the time were available to everyone.
He decreed that all religions be honoured equally.
He ordered a judicial review of those wrongfully imprisoned or harshly treated.
Ashoka sent Buddhist emissaries to the Middle East to teach, compassion, mercy, humility, and the love of peace; transforming Buddhism from a small philosophical sect into a global religion.

The temples and palaces of Ashoka’s reign, and most of the pillars he erected throughout India, were destroyed by generations of religious fanatics, outraged by what they considered to be his godlessness. But despite their best efforts, his legacy lives on:

Buddhism became one of the world’s most influential religious philosophies.
Ashoka’s edicts were carved in stone in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, a couple of hundred years before his birth.

This is one of the few temples of Ashoka that survived the vandals, a cave in the hills of Barabar in India. It’s famous for its echo. Inside the temple, the sound waves of your voice ricochet off the walls until they’re completely absorbed by the surfaces of objects, and there’s nothing left at all.

But Ashoka’s dream is different. Its echo grows louder and louder with time.

Who are we? You tell me.