Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

by Tom Phillips

  Genghis set out for Khwarezm with his army in 1219. By 1222, the Khwarezmian Empire had been wiped off the map.

  Estimates vary wildly, but it seems likely that the Mongols had just over 100,000 troops, while the shah had twice as many or more, and was fighting on familiar terrain. Didn’t matter. Muhammad threw away his home advantage by deciding to try and wait out the Mongol forces behind well-defended city walls, in the belief that they were rubbish at sieges. In fairness, they had been rubbish at sieges, but what Muhammad didn’t appreciate was that the Mongol army were extremely quick learners. The first siege of the war (against the city of Otrar, naturally) lasted for months. After that, most of the rest lasted weeks, or days.

  The Mongol army was agile, adaptable, disciplined and intelligence-driven. Genghis split his forces up to attack from unexpected directions, cut off backup or take on multiple targets at once. They prioritized speedy communication and changed their tactics easily, assimilating strategies and weaponry from those they had conquered. And they were utterly, utterly ruthless.

  They swept through Khwarezm with terrifying speed. Every city they took was given a chance to surrender, and the ones that did were treated with relative generosity (emphasis on the “relative”): they’d be looted for everything they owned, sure, but most of the population would be allowed to live. But if they didn’t surrender, or if they tried to rebel later, then the response was brutal.

  In Omar Khayyam’s birthplace of Nishapur, where Genghis’s favorite son-in-law was killed in battle, his grieving widow was allowed to choose the city’s fate: as a result, every single person in the city (a few skilled artisans aside) was executed, their 17,000 skulls piled into enormous pyramids. The slaughter took 10 days, after which the Mongols killed every dog and cat in the city, as well, just to really emphasize the point. In Gurganj, one of the few cities that managed to hold them off for several months, they opened the dam that held back the diverted Amu Darya river, sending down a deadly wave of water that wiped out the city entirely (and reputedly changed the course of the river for several centuries, as mentioned a few chapters back). Both of these events happened in the same month of 1221, by the way, which must make it one of the more destructive months in history.

  Genghis knew the propaganda value of terror, and found that the highly literate Islamic world was a big help there: he liked to ensure that letters were sent telling tales of his conquests, as it increased the chances of the next few cities surrendering without a fight.

  At the same time, he also took care to be respectful of religion, often treating particularly holy sites more gently. For all its wild brutality, the Mongol Empire under Genghis was also surprisingly tolerant, to the point that he created possibly the world’s first ever law enshrining freedom of religion. This had pragmatic benefits, of course: it was easier for opponents to see the benefits of surrender if they knew they weren’t fighting a holy war, and it turned religious minorities everywhere into potential allies. When the city of Bukhara, a center of Muslim theology, fell in the early months of 1220, Genghis ordered that amid the destruction, the Great Mosque be left untouched. He even visited the mosque himself—the only time in his life that he’s recorded as actually entering a city he had conquered. A big fan of tents and open plains, whose own god was the Eternal Blue Sky, Genghis never really saw the point of cities, other than as things to conquer.

  And what of Muhammad, whose jaw-dropping diplomatic incompetency was the catalyst for all this? Holed up in Bukhara’s sister city of Samarkand, the shah saw that the writing was on the wall as soon as Bukhara fell. He fled the city, and spent the next year engaged in what could be generously described as “fighting a rearguard action,” or less generously as “running away.” Genghis devoted 20,000 troops to pursuing him across his crumbling empire, with orders not to return until they’d caught or killed him. They chased him as far as the shores of the Caspian Sea, where he sought refuge on a series of islands. It was on one of those islands that—by now penniless, dressed in rags and losing his mind—Muhammad died of pneumonia in January 1221.

  If Genghis had stopped his attacks once the cause of his ire was dead, then maybe Muhammad’s name would only be a historical footnote today. The trouble was, he didn’t stop. The destruction of Khwarezm continued throughout 1221, and the violence became ever more extreme. The orders to wipe out entire populations of resisting cities became explicit, as Nishapur, Gurganj, Merv and others were to find out.

  And once the Khwarezmian Empire had been obliterated, Genghis...just carried on, possibly impressed by how easy it had all been. His original lack of interest in extending his empire westward had now transformed into a very strong desire to see how much more he could conquer. Much of the Asian Islamic world was gobbled up, and the Mongols pushed on into Europe. After Genghis died in 1227, his sons and grandsons continued the expansion. At its height, the Mongol Empire was the largest land empire the world has ever seen, stretching from Poland to Korea.

  While it fractured after a couple of generations, descending into factionalism and in-fighting as empires often tend to do, its legacy continued in some areas for far longer—even into the twentieth century. In the emirate of Bukhara, the direct descendants of Genghis ruled until as recently as 1920, the last reign of the Khan dynasty finally ending only when the Bolsheviks came along. (In 1838, a British soldier named Charles Stoddart, on a diplomatic mission to win Bukhara over to the cause of Britain’s own empire, ironically managed to re-create Muhammad’s folly in microcosm: casually insulting Emir Nasrullah Khan for no apparent reason, he was thrown into a deeply unpleasant place known as the Bug Pit, where he spent several horrifying years having his flesh eaten by insects before finally being executed. Do not mess with the Khans.)

  The culture and history and writings of many of the places the Mongols conquered were completely destroyed, entire populations were displaced and the death toll runs into uncountable millions. There is an upside, sort of: the unification and stabilization of the very trade routes that kicked off the whole affair brought about a continent-spanning cultural exchange that helped jump-start the modern age across much of Eurasia. The downside to that is that they exchanged diseases as well as culture, including the bubonic plague, which killed millions more.

  And all because a man with a fragile ego decided that diplomacy was for losers, and that a simple request for a trade deal had to be some kind of nefarious plot. Ala ad-Din Muhammad, you fucked up, my son.

  4 MORE IMPRESSIVE FAILURES OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

  Atahualpa

  Inca ruler who in 1532 made a similar mistake to Moctezuma when faced with a Spanish incursion, except he improved on it by getting drunk before meeting the Spanish, and leading his troops into a really obvious trap.

  Vortigern

  Fifth-century British ruler who—lacking defenses against the Picts following Roman withdrawal—reputedly invited Saxon mercenaries to stay in Britain to fight for him. The Saxons decided to just take over instead.

  Francisco Solano López

  Paraguayan leader who managed to get his relatively small country into a war with the much larger countries of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. It’s estimated that more than half of his country’s population died.

  Zimmerman Telegram

  In 1917, Germany sent a secret telegram to Mexico offering a military alliance if the USA joined World War I—and promising them Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. When the British intercepted it, all it did was encourage the US to join the war (and Mexico wasn’t even interested).

  9

  The Shite Heat of Technology

  The human compulsion to explore and to always seek out new horizons is—as I think we’ve mentioned already—one of our defining characteristics. It was that urge to explore and to uncover new knowledge that drove NASA to launch the Mars Climate Orbiter into the vast, empty black void of space in 1998.

  A few months later, the
Mars Climate Orbiter ended up crashing onto a load of rocks, like an idiot.

  In a spectacular demonstration of humanity’s ability to make essentially the same mistakes over and over again, a little more than five centuries after Christopher Columbus messed up his units of measurement, got his sums wrong and ended up running aground on the Americas, the people behind the Orbiter messed up their units of measurement, got their sums wrong and ended up falling to the ground on Mars.

  Humanity’s next great step on our journey through history, the scientific revolution, began in the sixteenth century in the letters and books being exchanged by philosophers across Europe. To begin with, it wasn’t really so much a revolution as a catch-up session; quite a lot of it was just rediscovering knowledge that had already been worked out by previous civilizations. But hand in hand with the rise of global travel, conquest and trade—always hungry for new knowledge and new technology—over the next few centuries it produced a huge expansion in our understanding of the world. It didn’t just give us lots of science, it gave us the idea of science itself, as something that was a distinct discipline with its own methods rather than just being one variant of “having a bit of a think.”

  The pace of technological change continued to accelerate until, in towns across northern Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fueled by cheap American cotton from slave plantations, another revolution started taking place. This time it was in manufacturing methods, with the rise of the machines enabling production on a mass scale—something that would spread around the world and change forever our cities, our environment, our economies and our ability to order a foot spa off Amazon at 3:00 a.m. while drunk.

  The dawn of the scientific, technological and industrial ages have brought opportunities to humanity that our ancestors could never have dreamed of. They have also, unfortunately, offered us the chance to fail on a scale never previously anticipated. When Columbus got his units of measurement wrong, he was at least confined to making his mistakes on the surface of the earth. Now, as the unfortunate story of the Mars Climate Orbiter shows, we get to screw up in space.

  The failure of the Orbiter only started to become apparent several months into the mission, when attempts by mission control to make minute adjustments to the spacecraft’s trajectory in order to keep it on course started to not quite have the effect they were intended to. But quite how wrong it had gone only became apparent when the craft reached Mars and attempted to go into orbit, only to lose contact with ground control almost immediately.

  The investigation afterward revealed what had happened: the Orbiter was using the standard metric unit of Newton seconds to measure impulse (the total amount of thrust applied in a maneuver). But the software on the ground computer, supplied by a contractor, was using imperial measurements of pound seconds. Every time they’d fired the ship’s engines, the effect had been more than four times as much as they’d thought—with the result that the Mars Orbiter ended up over a hundred miles closer to the surface of Mars than it was supposed to. As it tried to go into orbit, it instead hit the atmosphere hard, and the cutting-edge $327 million spacecraft broke into pieces almost instantly.

  That must have been embarrassing for NASA, but maybe they were able to take comfort from the fact that they’re hardly alone in the field of scientific and technological cock-ups. Another example comes not from the space race, but an entirely different kind of race that scientists across the USA found themselves in when, in 1969, they were competing with their Soviet counterparts to uncover the mysteries of a revolutionary discovery: an entirely new form of water.

  It was the height of the Cold War, and that all-consuming ideological showdown wasn’t just playing out in geopolitical maneuvers, nuclear brinksmanship and the shadowy world of espionage. It also birthed a contest between the communist and capitalist worlds to demonstrate their scientific and engineering prowess. New discoveries and technological breakthroughs were coming at a dizzying rate, and there was a constant terror of falling too far behind the enemy; in July that year, a human would walk on the surface of the moon, put there by the American government’s shocked reaction to a series of Soviet space-faring firsts.

  Amid all these grand, cinematic breakthroughs, a novel form of water initially appeared to be little more than a minor wrinkle. First discovered in 1961 by Nikolai Fedyakin, a scientist working at a provincial Soviet laboratory far from the major centers of science, it wasn’t until his work was spotted by Boris Deryagin of the Institute for Physical Chemistry in Moscow that its potential importance was realized. Deryagin quickly replicated Fedyakin’s work and, unsurprisingly, gladly started taking credit for the discovery—but still, outside the Soviet Union, there was little interest. It was only when he presented his findings at a conference in England in 1966 that the international community sat up and began to take note. The race was on.

  At first referred to as either “anomalous water” or “offspring water,” the discovery had remarkable properties. Fedyakin and Deryagin found that the process of condensing or forcing regular water through supernarrow, ultrapure quartz capillary tubes had somehow caused it to rearrange itself, radically altering its chemical properties. Anomalous water didn’t freeze at 0ºC; instead it froze at –40ºC. Its boiling point was even more extreme, at least 150ºC or possibly more, maybe as high as 650ºC. It was more viscous than water, barely a liquid at all, thicker and greasier—some descriptions said it resembled Vaseline. If you cut into it with a blade, the mark would remain.

  First in England, and then in the USA, scientists set about replicating the Soviets’ work. It was a difficult process, as the capillaries necessary for the process also meant that only tiny amounts could be manufactured at a time: some laboratories couldn’t get the technique right at all, while others raced away, producing ever larger amounts of the anomalous water. It was from one of these labs in the US that the next big breakthrough came: enough anomalous water was synthesized that they were able to perform an infrared spectral analysis of the substance. Their results were published in the prestigious journal Science in June 1969, one month before Armstrong walked on the moon, and the paper sent the scramble for research into the substance into overdrive. Not only was it confirmation of the water’s radically different properties compared with standard water, it provided an explanation for it: the results suggested that this was a polymer version of water, the individual H2O molecules joining up in large chained lattices that made it more stable. And so “anomalous water” became known instead by the name we know it today: “polywater.”

  The discovery of polywater “is sure to revolutionize chemistry,” wrote Popular Science in December of 1969, talking at length about its possible uses in cooling systems, as a lubricant for engines or as a moderator in nuclear reactors. It explained many aspects of the natural world: polywater was found in clay, explaining why clay retains its paste-like malleability until fired at superhigh temperatures sufficient to finally remove the polywater. Polywater might be responsible for aspects of the weather, small amounts of it seeding the formation of clouds. And it was certainly present in the human body.

  The discovery would likely lead to a whole new branch of chemistry, as some labs reported that they had managed to produce polymer versions of other chemically vital liquids: polymethanol, polyacetone. Or, more sinister, there were concerns that it could have military applications, even be a weapon in its own right: its structure suggested that it existed at a lower energy state than normal water, raising the possibility that polywater coming into contact with ordinary water could potentially trigger a chain reaction, inducing the everyday water to rearrange itself, too, and adopt the polymer form. One drop of polywater added to a key strategic reservoir or river, it was theorized, had the potential to gradually convert the entire body of water, turning the whole thing into a syrup. The water supply of whole countries could be sabotaged.

  In the wake of the Science paper, the US government steppe
d in. CIA agents debriefed researchers involved in its study, keen to ensure that all breakthroughs were kept in American hands. Polywater was nervously discussed across the media from the New York Times to small-town newspapers: Was the USA falling behind the Soviets? Polywater research was prioritized, and funding set aside. Hundreds of scientific papers were published on it in the year of 1970 alone. “Good news,” a relieved Wall Street Journal wrote in 1969, in the wake of the initial funding, “the US has apparently closed the polywater gap, and the Pentagon is bankrolling efforts to push this country’s polywater technology ahead of the Soviet Union’s.”

  You’ve probably guessed by now, right? I mean, we’re quite a long way into this book; it should be fairly obvious at this point that the polywater story doesn’t end with a scientific triumph, everybody patting each other on the back and Nobels all around. But it wasn’t until the early 1970s, after years of research by the finest scientists in the very best laboratories across multiple continents, that the truth became apparent:

  There’s no such thing as polywater. It simply doesn’t exist.

  What Fedyakin and Deryagin had actually discovered, and what scientists across the world had spent years pursuing and faithfully replicating and studying every possible way, was a substance that’s more accurately described as “dirty water.” All of polywater’s allegedly miraculous properties turned out to simply be impurities that had crept into the supposedly sterile equipment.

  One skeptical American scientist, Denis Rousseau, managed to replicate the spectral analysis of polywater almost perfectly with a few drops of his own sweat, squeezed out of his T-shirt following a handball match. That’s the mysterious substance the great powers of the Cold War era had been so desperately scrambling for control of. Sweat.