Thursday Things: Rabbits and Wonders Edition
11 May 2023. Vol 5 No 19. By Dan McGirt. #196
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“Welcome, weary seafarer. You’re just in time for dinner…” Photo by Aswathy N on Unsplash
Welcome to Rabbit Island!
Here’s something I did not know:
In the age of European exploration, rabbits were also taken on ships on long voyages—as a food source. Some were also released on uninhabited islands en route, with the hope that they could feed shipwreck victims in the future. By the nineteenth century, sealers and whalers in the Pacific were placing rabbits on islands they used as deliberate stopping points. Lighthouse keepers also kept rabbit warrens so they could have fresh meat when supplies could not be brought over the water.
Clever foresight on the part of sailors. But if you know anything about rabbits, you know where this is going:
But rabbits’ legendary fecundity could mean they end up dominating an ecosystem. In the nineteenth century, Sir Joseph Hooker recounted a cautionary tale of Porto Santo, Madeira:
In about the year 1418 a mother rabbit and her brood were landed, and increased so rapidly, that they not only consumed the native vegetation, but the cultivated, and actually drove the settlers from the island. (‘Coney Money’, JSTOR)
On soviet Rabbit Island, rabbit eat you!
Seriously, those must have been some Monty Python murder rabbits to drive the settlers off the island.1 My advice — if you’re ever shipwrecked and drift toward an island full of rabbits, maybe keep paddling just to be safe.
“Hoje, Porto Santo! Amanhã o mundo!” Photo by Janan Lagerwall on Unsplash
One of our wonders is missing!
Can you name, off the top of your head, the names of the Seven Dwarfs of Snow White fame? What about the Seven Deadly Sins? The Seven Saintly Virtues?
How about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World?2
How’d you do? 7: Great! / 5-6: Good effort! / 3-4: Nice try. / 2-1: Seriously?/ 0: I wonder about you.
But did you know that of the Seven Wonders, we only know the location of six?
Or at least, we did. It seems the missing wonder has been found!
Experts Expose Evidence That Could Pinpoint The Location Of 'Mythical' Seventh Wonder
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World are all incredible structures from the classical era. Yet, while six of these monuments have been located, one has never been found, leading some to argue that it was a fictional creation. That wonder is the infamous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a lush paradise that would have been unlike anything else on Earth. Unfortunately, details surrounding the gardens are sparse, which has left experts stumped for centuries.
It’s indeed a mystery. Personally I’d start looking somewhere around Babylon. It’s right there in the name! But that’s why I’m not an Oxford archaeologist:
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, weren’t in Babylon at all – but were instead located 300 miles to the north in Babylon’s greatest rival Nineveh, according to a leading Oxford-based historian.
After more than 20 years of research, Dr Stephanie Dalley of Oxford University’s Oriental Institute has finally pieced together enough evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the famed gardens were built in Nineveh by the great Assyrian ruler Sennacherib – and not, as historians have always thought, by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.
Hanging Gardens of Nineveh doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?
But how did Dr. Dalley crack the case?
Detective work by Dr Dalley – due to be published as a book by Oxford University Press later this month – has yielded four key pieces of evidence. First, after studying later historical descriptions of the Hanging Gardens, she realised that a bas-relief from Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh actually portrayed trees growing on a roofed colonnade exactly as described in classical accounts of the gardens.
Read the article for the rest of the story. Or have ChatGPT summarize it for you. Or if you want all the details buy the book: The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon
Well, that’s one famous old garden found! But where’s the Garden of Eden? Get on that, Dr. Dalley!
When you find it, if you find it, I bet you’ll find it’s full of rabbits.
An almost certainly inaccurate 19th century engraving of the Hanging Gardens, with the Tower of Babel thrown in for good measure. Source: Wikimedia
Space Snake!
Well, space eel, but that lacks alliteration. And I love alliteration.
Shape-Shifting Serpent of Space: NASA’s EELS Robot Revolutionizes Extraterrestrial Exploration
How do you create a robot that can go places no one has ever seen before – on its own, without real-time human input? A team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that’s creating a snake-like robot for traversing extreme terrain is taking on the challenge with the mentality of a startup: Build quickly, test often, learn, adjust, repeat.
Called EELS (short for Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor), the self-propelled, autonomous robot was inspired by a desire to look for signs of life in the ocean hiding below the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus by descending narrow vents in the surface that spew geysers into space. Although testing and development continue, designing for such a challenging destination has resulted in a highly adaptable robot. EELS could pick a safe course through a wide variety of terrain on Earth, the Moon, and far beyond, including undulating sand and ice, cliff walls, craters too steep for rovers, underground lava tubes, and labyrinthine spaces within glaciers.
Ice planet? Lava planet? Jungle planet? Ocean planet? Space EEL can get it done!
Where can it not go? Maybe the bubblegum planet.
Of course if a rogue AI were to command a self-replicating army of these things, there would be nowhere safe to hide from them. But I’m sure that won’t happen.3
To boldly go where no slightly disturbing eel-shaped robot has gone before. Credit NASA/JPL-CalTech
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Actually the rabbits had a more insidious plan. They devoured all the local flora, leading to massive erosion, which made the island difficult to settle. People came back eventually. But the truth is less exciting than an island full of flesh-devouring death rabbits, so that’s what I’m going with.
The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus is probably the one you’re having trouble recalling.
And if those murder rabbits get out of hand, we’ll send in the space snakes.