Mercury Drinkers

There is a story on several news sites today about a Brazillian priest, Father Adelir de Carli, who has gone missing. Evidently he strapped himself to 1,000 helium filled party balloons, and was last seen drifting off into the lower atmosphere off the coast of Brazil. My first thought was, perhaps predictably, "what a knob head, people like this deserve to die". I still feel that way. Anyone stupid enough to do anything that dangerous deserves no sympathy when probability and the laws of physics do what they have to do. This story is interesting to me on other levels however.

Father de Carli was apparently attempting to break the world balloon flying record, which seems to stand at 19 hours. He was raising money to provide a rest stop for truckers!? It begs the question, was he more interested in the thrill of the stunt and the notoriety it could bring him, or the truck stop? Incidentally, I cannot see the point of breaking records. All you have to do is find something no one has done, and then do it. You want your name in the Guinness book, go for the new earlobe holding record.

Rescue teams have of course been out looking for this nutter (at public expense no doubt) since contact was lost. They have found his balloons, but not him or his buoyant chair. He apparently has food and water for five days, a satellite phone that doesn't appear to work, and a GPS which he reported he was having problems with before he went silent. You'd think he'd have tested these things before take-off surely. He almost certainly came down several miles out to sea. My guess is he's dead.

Several reports have inevitably brought up the subject of the Darwin awards. If this clown has managed to kill himself, I'm not sure he qualifies. Firstly, although one must be childless to qualify for the award, as a priest, he'd be celibate. It wouldn't be his lack of evolutionary advancement that hastened his death before producing offspring, it would be his faith. Then I thought, well maybe his faith is a result of his lack of evolutionary advancement and he should qualify anyway.

Then I thought of something that Arthur C. Clarke once told me. OK, that's not true, I can't lie to you. I thought of something that Arthur C. Clarke once said to someone more important than me, "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." If intelligence really has no survival value, it means that Darwinian selection was not responsible for it. In turn, that means the Darwin awards are awarded erroneously.

If Arthur C. was right, and intelligence has no survival value, and it wasn't a result of natural selection, that would give the creationists a point to argue with. I've never heard that argument from a creationist though. If intelligence isn't the result of evolution, what the hell caused it, a massive stroke of luck? That would make intelligent life very rare indeed. I think it's more likely that intelligence is a result of evolution myself.

Without drifting too far from this topic, it seems a "tame" grizzly bear has killed it's owner in California. The bear, called Rocky, apparently starred in a recent film with Will Ferrell. Why the hell does anyone play with bears? It's not like the information isn't out there. People who play with bears nearly always wind up dead. It's a simple rule, if you see a bear, run the other way. The bear understands this rule. And why is it always men that play with bears? You don't hear about women living in log cabins on mountains, trying to befriend bears. Although, come to think of it, it's always women who try to tame gorillas. Think Jayne Goddal and Dian Fossey, classic examples of women trying to anthropomorphise wild animals.

No good can come from this, you mark my words.