(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Dept. of Deja Vu: Jules Verne Asks, Why Stop at Greenland? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-01
Perhaps he thinks the name “Greenland” means it has lots of money. Glorious Leader Trump’s revived interest in frozen real estate reminded me of the last time he wanted to buy a country where he could sell Trump Brand Refrigerators. Which at the time reminded me of a time when Jules Verne explored something of a similar subject.
So let’s go back in time to a diary I posted back in 2017. Deja Vu Powers Activate!
(originally posted August 27, 2019)
Jules Verne has long been regarded as a visionary writer who predicted much about the Modern Era. Granted, some of these “prophecies” have stretches, and he didn’t always get things right; but sometimes he’s been weirdly accurate in places you wouldn’t expect. This past week, some of the public statements made by our Glorious Leader have reminded me of one of Verne’s lesser-known works, a novel which touches on Anthropogenic Climate Change, purchasing large portions of the Arctic, and even trying to alter weather patterns using Weapons of Mass Destruction.
The title of the book is Sans Dessus Dessous, and has been published in English as Topsy-Turvy , but the Ace paperback edition I have titles it: The Purchase of the North Pole
The story starts off with an audacious proposal that an auction be held to sell off the earth’s polar region. The auction would be held between the nations who either bordered that region, or had explored in the arctic: Sweden and Norway (which at the time were under a single government); Russia, Denmark (by virtue of its holdings in Greenland), Holland (by virtue of its explorations around Spitzbergen; Great Britain (because of Canada); and the United States. The winner of the auction would get territorial rights to everything north of the 84th Parallel and the proceeds would be divided up between the other participants.
The United States proposed the auction, but they are being represented not by their government, but by a private corporation, the “North Pole Practical Association”, established to exploit whatever resources might be up in the arctic. The other European nations aren’t sure what to make of it all. It seems like a farce to grab up useless territory. But nobody wants the Americans to just claim sovereignty over the arctic. The obvious thing to do for them to do would be to join forces in a cartel to out-bid the Americans; (or to just not participate and refuse to acknowledge the validity of the auction); but either course would require trusting each other.
The Americans win the auction; and it is revealed that the “North Pole Practical Association” is actually a shell corporation for the Baltimore Gun Club, the organization which fired a manned projectile around the Moon in From the Earth to the Moon. President Barbicane, the group’s CEO, believes that there must be vast reserves of coal in the arctic regions, and buying the North Pole is step one in exploiting them. Ah, but how to get at all that coal when it’s buried under ice?
This is the Baltimore Gun Club we’re talking about: a group of munitions manufacturers who believe that there is no problem that can’t be solved by building a big enough cannon. Their engineers have theorized that the recoil from an sufficiently-large gun would be forceful enough to shift the Earth’s axis of rotation to produce more moderate temperatures around the poles, melt the glaciers and pack ice and open these regions to exploration. The Club’s secretary, a brilliant mathematician named T.J. Marston, has calculated how much force, and how big a gun would be needed, and the Gun Club sets out to do just that.
At first the public is 100% behind the scheme, and the N.P.P.A. sells shares to finance the new planet-tipping cannon. But then people start asking what other consequences this plan might have. Yes, it would make the Arctic greener and more habitable, but it would also inundate large parts of Asia and cause devastation in coastal regions all over the world. But by the time this comes out, President Barbicane and Captain Nicholls, who has invented the super-explosive they intend to use in the cannon, have already left the country to an Undisclosed Location. Their friend Marston is left back home to hold the fort against the howling mobs who now want Barbicane & Co.’s heads.
In the wilds of Zanzibar, Barbicane has acquired the consent of a local sultan to construct this uber-cannon in the side of Mt. Kilimanjaro. By the time the Authorities determine his location, it is too late. Before anyone can stop them the cannon is fired and…
Nothing happens.
Well, not nothing. Actually, the shock from the blast causes a great deal of devastation locally. But no one else on the planet feels as much as a wobble, and the old Earth keeps turning just as always. It turns out that in working out his initial calculations, Marston accidentally left a few zeros off his figure for the Earth’s circumference, reckoning it at 40,000 meters instead of 40,000,000 meters.
(It wasn’t entirely his fault; his girlfriend kept interrupting him on the phone. Women. And the phone line got struck by lightning as he was trying to tell her to call him back later. And, ya know, if he had just been using Imperial measurements instead of the Metric System, he probably would have paid more attention to double-checking his figures. Damn foreign measuring systems. Ah well. These things happen)
It ends happily, with the comforting assurance that no cannon in the world could conceivably alter the Earth’s rotation and wreck the climate. But Verne did not consider that what couldn’t be achieved with one big cannon blast might happen as the result of incremental changes over time. The Earth is not too big to wreck. We are wrecking it and have done much to wreck it already.
But Marston marries his adoring lady-friend and swears he will never again make any mathematical calculations, which in his case, is probably best for the safety of the world.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/1/2294770/-Dept-of-Deja-Vu-Jules-Verne-Asks-Why-Stop-at-Greenland?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
