Mermaids - or not?

Well. Mermaids, eh? Where will it all end? They should leave science fiction to science fiction writers.

Two hours ago I was asked if I should like to cosy up with the missus and watch a documentary on ‘Discovery’ channel.

I have some respect for ‘Discovery’ as I do for ‘National Geographic’ and ‘Animal Planet’. What I do not have, as a general rule, is time to watch these channels.

Still, tonight an offer of a cuddle and a mug of hot tea was too much to resist and, after all, ‘Discovery’ funded the BBC’s Natural History Unit in making all those wonderful documentaries—mostly involving Sir David Attenborough.

The settee was suitably adorned with pillows, hot tea was delivered as promised and so we settled down to watch the show.

Oh, dear.

The ‘mockumentary’ was so full of holes, the film clips were adorned endlessly with assumptions and false premises about apes leaping from the trees and into the water followed by false conclusions—guesses, about mermaids following whales around the planet on migratory routes. There was even an interview with a hoary old German trawlerman called ‘Bauer’ (of course – any relation to Jack?) who operates, purportedly, a boat out of Bremerhaven.

Bremerhaven is real. It is a Hanseatic Port in Bremen who, in Werder Bremen, have a pretty fair football (soccer) team in the Bundesliga.

The rest was a fairy story.

What can be deduced from this?

Firstly, that ‘Discovery’ channel assumed that everyone is a dunce and would swallow it hook, line and sinker? (Sorry, couldn’t resist that!) Maybe they thought that everyone would immediately realise it to be fiction and laugh at it.

If it is fiction from end to end, why was it on ‘Discovery’? Why not put it on ‘SyFy’ channel which is known World-wide for its awful home made programmes.

What else? Well, for a fact, there is an awful lot of sea out there. They said that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the sea. That is true.

The ocean deeps are a mystery to us. Who knows what lurks down there?

Only a short time ago we thought that the Coelacanth was extinct and yet now, we are told, it is relatively common. Common as opposed to extinct.

In the Pacific Ocean there are thousands of miles of drift nets floating around. These nets are ‘lost’. The people that set them lost track of them and now they patrol the ocean snaring all sorts of things that we know nothing about, very likely. Certainly they catch dolphins, sharks and sundry other creatures that die uselessly as a result of the loss of these nets.

Containers. There are thousands of containers that float around the World’s oceans being a hazard to shipping of all sizes. They have fallen off, or been pushed off, container ships that see them as dangerous to their own well being in the event of a storm. Who knows what poisons these things contain?

If we don’t know where these nets and containers are then how do we know what is living in the oceans?

The likelihood of there being mermaids swimming about, cooperating with dolphins and whales is too far fetched to contemplate but, who knows, maybe there are oceanic chimpanzees who have adapted somewhere out there.

In spite of our considerable knowledge there are still huge gaps in our catalogue of wild things. Not least because there are creatures out there that are evolving on almost a daily basis—viruses and bacteria, for example. If they can then so can other, higher, organisms.

Now we enter the realm of the science fiction writer. We are good at imagining things like this, it is what we do best.

‘Discovery’ channel should stick to what it does best and show us real discoveries, factual ones.

Not all science is fiction and not all fiction is fact.

Let’s keep the two separate and save ‘snopes’, ‘wikipaedia’ and ‘Google’ a lot of trouble.