Life in the middle

I first ran into the fine-tuning argument around twenty-five years ago when I read astrophysicist Martin Rees's wonderful book Just Six Numbers, in which he looks at how a handful of fundamental constants -- the gravitational flatness of the universe, the strength of the strong nuclear force, the ratio between the strength of the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force, the number of spatial dimensions, the ratio between the rest mass energy of matter and the gravitational field energy, and the cosmological constant -- have combined to produce the universe around us.  One by one, he goes through each of them, and shows that if you changed them -- some by as little as one percent in either direction -- you would have a universe profoundly hostile to life, and (in come cases) one in which matter itself wouldn't be stable.

To a lot of people, this looks very much like someone superpowerful tweaked the dials to just the right settings, so that these constants have values that allow for stable, long-lived stars, complex chemistry, and -- ultimately -- life.  We don't yet know any underlying physics from which any of these could be derived; they seem to be, essentially, arbitrary.  For some people, this line of reasoning ends with, "ergo... God."

Well, I have two objections, and if you're a long-time reader of Skeptophilia, you probably know what they are.  First, there's that awkward little word "yet."  We don't yet know if these constants are constrained -- i.e., if their values are required to be what they are by some overarching principle.  There may be such a principle that we just haven't discovered, just as the properties of the elements seemed arbitrary until Mendeleev (and Bohr, de Broglie, Pauli, and others) came along and showed that there was an organizing scheme and an underlying set of physical mechanisms that made sense of it all.

My second objection is that of course we live in a universe that has properties that allow life.  If the universe didn't have properties that allowed life, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.  This formulation, called the Weak Anthropic Principle, more or less devolves into a tautology, a little like being puzzled about why organisms that require oxygenated air to breathe are found only in places that have oxygenated air.

The question, though, is not as facile as I'm perhaps making it sound.  There are a great many seemingly arbitrary constants in physics (physicists prefer the term free parameters), such why the fundamental particles in the Standard Model of Particle Physics have the masses they do.  

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Also unknown is why there are three "generations" of fermions and only one of bosons, why there are four fundamental forces, and why gravitation has (again, thus far) resisted all attempts to incorporate it into a Grand Unified Theory.

Some physicists have attempted to explain this messiness by saying that this is only one universe in a multiverse, and all the other universes have different properties -- in fact, all the possible combinations of parameters exist in a universe somewhere.  The problem with this is that it's an explanation that doesn't really explain anything.  We have no way of detecting those other universes, so what does it even mean to say they "exist?"  In my mind, this is no better than the "God-as-dial-twiddler" model.  In fact, it's worse; at least in the latter, there's an entity who cares enough about us to create a relatively hospitable universe for us poor slobs who are stuck inside it.

The reason this comes up is a new paper from physicist McCullen Sandora, that I found out about from Sabine Hossenfelder's physics news YouTube channel.  Called "Multiverse Predictions for Habitability: Fundamental Physics and Galactic Habitability," Sandora turns the entire discussion upside-down; instead of looking at the physical free parameters and asking why they are what they are, he asks the question, "What does the presence of life tell us about how the universe had to be?"

Sandora's intriguing conclusion is that "neat" universes -- ones with unified forces, few free parameters, and simple interactions -- are incapable of generating the complexity required for life.  Hossenfelder says:

The surprising result is that the idea that the fundamental forces are unified do badly. Well, at least I found that surprising, but the more I thought about it the more sense it made.  You see, a unified theory will in one way or another tie different parameters to each other.  Then, if you vary one parameter, you break several others at the same time.  

As a consequence, the more strongly different interactions are tied together, the more difficult it becomes to create life.  Most universes end up either short lived, empty, or chemically boring.  More flexible theories do better.  Theories where parameters can vary more independently produce a larger fraction of observer-friendly universes.  In other words, once you include the multiverse and selection effects, physics that is slightly messy beats physics that is mathematically elegant.

Hossenfelder herself has argued vehemently against using the criteria of "beauty" or "elegance" as the driver to find theoretical frameworks in physics; her excellent book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray is one long plea to go back to an empirical basis for physics research.  (An especially egregious example is the long, expensive, and fruitless quest for supersymmetry, a postulated system that argues the existence of a "supersymmetric partner" for every particle in the Standard Model; a decades-long search has turned up exactly zero of these hypothesized partners.)

We humans like things neat and tidy, though, don't we?  Look at the biologists' concerted efforts -- only recently abandoned -- to pretend that the concept of species has any actual relevance.  The biological world doesn't fit into neat little cubbyholes; maybe the physical world doesn't, either.

Perhaps we do just live in an untidy universe, caught somewhere between sterile simplicity and complete chaos.  Being here in the middle allows for complexity, interconnectedness, and its own kind of messy-haired beauty.  But maybe that's what we should expect, you know?  It reminds me of the quote from the brilliant musician and electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos: "What is full of redundancy or formula is predictable and boring.  What is free of all structure or discipline is random and boring.  In between lies art."

Maybe it's more than than just art, though.  Maybe in between lies... everything.

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Pressing reset

Although you don't tend to hear much about it, the Ordovician Period was a very peculiar time in Earth's history.

From beginning (485 million years ago) to the end (444 million years ago) it experienced two of the biggest global climatic swings the Earth has ever seen.  In the early Ordovician the climate was a sauna -- an intense greenhouse effect caused the highest temperatures the Paleozoic Era would see, and glacial ice all but vanished.  Life was abundant in the shallow seas.  One of the dominant groups were the conodonts:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Prehistorica, Panderodus unicostatus, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Those of you who know your fish might guess that conodonts like Panderodus were related to modern lampreys, and you're right.  But it took a really long time to figure that out.  Their soft bodies didn't fossilize well, so about all that we had were the cone-shaped teeth that gave them their name.  In fact, those teeth are the most common fossils in Ordovician sedimentary rocks, so we knew whatever grew them must have been abundant -- but it took a while to determine what kind of animal they came from.

So things were warm, humid, with tropical conditions virtually pole to pole.  Then... something happened.  We're still not entirely sure what.  Part of it was undoubtedly simple plate tectonics; the supercontinent of Gondwana was gradually moving toward the South Pole.  There's some evidence of a large meteorite strike, or possibly more than one.  But whatever the cause, by the end of the Ordovician, glaciers covered much of what is now Africa and South America, resulting in a drastic drop in sea level and a massive extinction that wiped out an estimated sixty percent of life on Earth.  

At this point, life was confined to the oceans. The first terrestrial plants and fungi wouldn't evolve until something like twenty million years after the beginning of the next period, the Silurian, and land animals only followed after that.  As the Ordovician progressed, and more and more ocean water became locked up in the form of glacial ice, much of what had been shallow, temperate seas dried up to form cold, barren deserts.  And that was all there was on land -- thousands of square kilometers of rock, sand, and ice, without a single living thing larger than bacteria to be found anywhere.

Then, the climate reversed again.  The seas flooded back in, and the warmer, sulfur-rich, oxygen-poor water upwelling from the bottom knocked out about twenty percent of the cold-adapted survivors.  By the time the period ended, the Earth had a seriously impoverished biosphere, with something like fifteen percent of the original biota making it through the double-whammy.

But what survived this pair of climate swings was to shape Earth's biological history forever.  Because it included primitive vertebrates with paired jaws -- the gnathostomes -- which became the ancestors of 99% of modern vertebrate animals, including ourselves.

The reason this comes up is some new research out of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology that analyzed thousands of fossils from species that made it through the Late Ordovician bottleneck -- and an equal number of those that didn't.  And they found two interesting patterns.  First, the survivors were mostly species that found their way into refugia -- small, isolated pockets of ecosystems with (slightly) more hospitable conditions that allowed them to squeak their way through the worst times.  Second, each of the major extinction pulses was followed by dramatic diversification, as the surviving populations expanded into niches vacated by the ones that weren't so fortunate.

"We pulled together two hundred years of late Ordovician and early Silurian paleontological research," said study lead author Wahei Hagiwara.  "By reconstructing the ecosystems within these refugia, we were able to measure changes in genus-level diversity over time.  Our analysis revealed a steady but striking rise in jawed vertebrate diversity following the extinction.  And the trend is clear -- the mass extinction pulses led directly to increased speciation after several millions of years."

As Ian Malcolm so accurately put it, "Life, uh, finds a way."

A couple of other things strike me about this research, though.

The first is how contingent our existence here is.  Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a provocative piece about "replaying the tape of life," coming to the conclusion if you were to start over from the beginning, so much of the path of evolution has rested on chance occurrences that the chances of it turning out exactly the same way is nearly zero.  In a situation like the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction, which assortment of species made it into the few hospitable refugia must have had as much to do with luck as with being well-adapted; had a different set of populations survived, life today almost certainly would look very different.

The second is the fact that both of the Ordovician climate swings were far slower than what we're currently doing to the environment.  Like, hundreds of times slower.  The second one, in fact -- the warm-up and subsequent melting of polar ice -- was almost certainly a very gradual rebound toward the greenhouse conditions that were to pertain by the mid-Silurian.  We're talking about something on the order of ten million years to go from cool to warm.

What we're doing now has taken only a couple of hundred.

What happened in the Late Ordovician should be a wake-up call for us.  Yet somehow, we arrogant humans think we're immune to the effects of our out-of-control fossil fuel burning.  We have a striking fossil record documenting the terrible effects of rapid climate change in prehistory; at the moment, mostly what we seem to be doing is saying, "Yeah, but it won't happen to us, 'cuz we're special."

So that's our cautionary tale for today.  The climate change deniers are fond of saying, "Earth's climate has changed many times before now," and almost never add, "... and when it did, enormous numbers of species went extinct."  And the difference, too, is that the natural fluctuations (such as those caused by plate movement, asteroid strikes, and changes in insolation) aren't something we could control even if we wanted to, but what we're doing now is entirely voluntary.

And until the people in charge realize that addressing climate change is in all of our best interest, I'm afraid our path forward is not likely to change.

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The oddest star in the galaxy

I'll start today with a quote (often misquoted) from William Shakespeare -- more specifically, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5:

Horatio:

O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

 Hamlet:

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

 Horatio and Hamlet, of course, are talking about ghosts and the supernatural, but it could equally well be applied to science.  It's tempting sometimes, when reading about new scientific discoveries, for the layperson to say, "This can't possibly be true, it's too weird."  But there are far too many truly bizarre theories that have been rigorously verified over and over -- quantum mechanics and the General Theory of Relativity jump to mind immediately -- to rule anything out based upon our common-sense ideas about how the universe works.

That was my reaction while watching a YouTube video about an astronomical object I'd never heard of -- Przybylski's Star, named after its discoverer, Polish-born Australian astronomer Antoni Przybylski.  The video comes from astronomer David Kipping's channel Cool Worlds Lab, which looks at cutting-edge science -- and tantalizing new data about the universe we live in.  (You should subscribe to it -- you won't be sorry.)  Przybylski's Star is 355 light years from Earth, in the constellation of Centaurus, and is weird in so many ways that it kind of boggles the mind.

It's classified as a Type Ap star.  Type A stars are young, compact, luminous, and very hot; the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius, is in this class.

The "p" stands for "peculiar."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Vizzualizer, Przybylski's Star, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Przybylski's Star rotates slowly.  I mean, really slowly.  Compared to the Sun, which rotates about once every 27 days, Przybylski's Star rotates once every two hundred years.  Most type A stars rotate even faster than the Sun; in fact, a lot of them rotate so quickly that the light from their receding hemisphere and that from their approaching hemisphere experience enough red-shift and blue-shift (respectively) to smear out their spectral lines, making it impossible for us to tell exactly what they're made of.

It's a good thing that didn't happen with Przybylski's Star, because the strangest thing about it is its composition.  This star has a spectral signature so anomalous that its discoverer initially thought that his measurements were crazily off.

"No star should look like that," Przybylski said.

You probably know that most ordinary stars are primarily composed of hydrogen, and of the bit that's not hydrogen, most of it is helium.  Hydrogen is the fuel for the fusion in the core of the star, and helium is the product formed by that fusion.  Late in their life, many stars undergo core collapse, in which the temperatures heat up enough to fuse helium into heavier elements like carbon and oxygen.  Most of the rest of the elements on the periodic table are generated in supernovas and in neutron stars, a topic I dealt with in detail in a post I did about six years ago.

My point here is that if you look at the emission spectra of your average star, the spectral lines you see should mostly be the familiar ones from hydrogen and helium, with minuscule traces of the spectra of other elements.  The heaviest element that should be reasonably abundant, even in the burned-out cores of stars, is iron -- it represents the turnaround point on the curve of binding energy, the point where fusion into heavier elements starts consuming more energy than it releases.

So elements that are low in abundance pretty much everywhere, such as the aptly-named rare earth elements (known to chemists as the lanthanides), should be so uncommon as to be effectively undetectable.  Short-lived radioactive elements like thorium and radium shouldn't be there at all, because they don't form in the core of your ordinary star, and therefore any traces present had to have formed prior to the star in question's formation -- almost always, enough time that they should have long since decayed away.

The composition of Przybylski's Star, on the other hand, is so skewed toward heavy elements that it elicits more in the way of frustrated shrugs than it does in viable models that could account for it.  It's ridiculously high in lanthanides like cerium, dysprosium, europium, and gadolinium -- not elements you hear about on a daily basis.  There's more praseodymium in the spectrum of its upper atmosphere than there is iron.  Even stranger is the presence of very short-lived radioactive elements such as plutonium -- and actinium, americium, and neptunium, elements for which we don't even know a naturally-occuring nuclide synthesis pathway capable of creating them.

So where did they come from?

"What we’d like to know... is how the heavy elements observed here have come about," said astronomy blogger Paul Gilster.  "A neutron star is one solution, a companion object whose outflow of particles could create heavy elements in Przybylski’s Star, and keep them replenished.  The solution seems to work theoretically, but no neutron star is found anywhere near the star."

"[T]hat star doesn’t just have weird abundance patterns; it has apparently impossible abundance patterns," said Pennsylvania State University astrophysicist Jason Wright, in his wonderful blog AstroWright.  "In 2008 Gopka et al. reported the identification of short-lived actinides in the spectrum.  This means radioactive elements with half-lives on the order of thousands of years (or in the case of actinium, decades) are in the atmosphere...  The only way that could be true is if these products of nuclear reactions are being replenished on that timescale, which means… what exactly?  What sorts of nuclear reactions could be going on near the surface of this star?"

All the explanations I've seen require so many ad-hoc assumptions that they're complete non-starters.  One possibility astrophysicists have floated is that the replenishment is because it was massively enriched by a nearby supernova, and not just with familiar heavy elements like gold and uranium, but with superheavy elements that thus far, we've only seen produced in high-energy particle accelerators -- elements like flerovium (atomic number 114) and oganesson (atomic number 118).  These elements are so unstable that they have half-lives measured in fractions of a second, but it's theorized that certain isotopes might exist in an island of stability, where they have much longer lives, long enough to build up in a star's atmosphere and then decay into the lighter, but still rare, elements seen in Przybylski's Star.

There are several problems with this idea, the first being that every attempt to find where the island of stability lies hasn't succeeded.  Physicists thought that flerovium might have the "magic number" of protons and neutrons to make it more stable, but a paper released not long ago seems to dash that hope.

The second, and worse, problem is that there's no supernova remnant anywhere near Przybylski's Star.

The third, and worst, problem is that it's hard to imagine any natural process, supernova-related or not, that could produce the enormous quantity of superheavy elements required to account for the amount of lanthanides and actinides found in this star's upper atmosphere.

Which brings me to the wildest speculation about the weird abundances of heavy elements.  You'll never guess who's responsible.

Go ahead, guess.

There is a serious suggestion out there -- and David Kipping does take it seriously -- that an advanced technological civilization might have struck on the solution for nuclear waste of dumping it into the nearest star.  This explanation (called "salting"), bizarre as it sounds, would explain not only why the elements are there, but why they're way more concentrated in the upper atmosphere of the star than in the core.

"Here on Earth... people sometimes propose to dispose of our nuclear waste by throwing it into the Sun,” Wright writes.  “Seven years before Superman thought of the idea, Whitmire & Wright (not me, I was only 3 in 1980) proposed that alien civilizations might use their stars as depositories for their fissile waste.  They even pointed out that the most likely stars we would find such pollution in would be… [type] A stars!  (And not just any A stars, late A stars, which is what Przybylski’s Star is).  In fact, back in 1966, Sagan and Shklovskii in their book Intelligent Life in the Universe proposed aliens might 'salt' their stars with obviously artificial elements to attract attention."

A curious side note is that I've met (Daniel) Whitmire, of Whitmire & Wright -- he was a professor in the physics department of the University of Louisiana when I was an undergraduate, and I took a couple of classes with him (including Astronomy).  He was known for his outside-of-the-box ideas, including that a Jupiter-sized planet beyond the orbit of Pluto was responsible for disturbing the Oort Cloud as it passed through every hundred million years or so (being so far out, it would have a super-long rate of revolution).  This would cause comets, asteroids, and other debris to rain in on the inner Solar System, resulting in a higher rate of impacts with the Earth -- and explaining the odd cyclic nature of mass extinctions.

So I'm not all that surprised about Whitmire's suggestion, although it bears mention that he was talking about the concept in the purely theoretical sense; the weird spectrum of Przybylski's Star was discovered after Whitmire & Wright's paper on the topic.

Curiouser and curiouser.

So we're left with a mystery.  The "it's aliens" explanation is hardly going to be accepted by the scientific establishment without a hell of a lot more evidence, and thus far, there is none.  The problem is, the peculiar abundance of heavy elements in this very odd star remains unaccounted for by any science we currently understand.  The fact that Kipping (and others) are saying "we can't rule out the alien salting hypothesis" is very, very significant.

I'll end with another quote, this one from eminent biologist J. B. S. Haldane: "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine."

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Who benefits?

There's an interesting idea from evolutionary theory called the cui bono principle.

Cui bono? is Latin for "who benefits?"  It started out as a legal concept; if a crime has been committed, and you're looking for the suspect, find out who benefitted.  That, very likely, will get you on the right path toward solving the mystery.

Cui bono in the evolutionary model has to do with explaining odd phenomena that seem to have no obvious underlying reason -- or which even induce organisms into self-destructive behavior.  One common example is the strange situation where certain ant species crawl up to the tops of blades of grass and basically just wait there to be eaten by herbivores.  It turns out that the bizarrely suicidal ants are infected with a parasite called a lancet worm that needs to complete its life cycle in the gut of a herbivorous mammal, so it damages the brain of the ant in just such a way as to turn its sense of direction upside down.  The parasitized ant then crawls upward instead of downward to safety, gets eaten -- and the lancet worm, of course, is the one who benefits.

Another, even creepier example, is Toxoplasma gondii, which I wrote about here at Skeptophilia a few years ago.  I encourage you to go back and read the post, but the upshot is this parasite -- which by some estimates infects half of the human population on Earth -- causes different symptoms in its three main hosts, cats, rats, and people.  Each set of symptoms is tailored to change behavior in very specific ways, with one end in mind; allowing the parasite to jump to its next host.

I just found out about another very peculiar (and convoluted) example of cui bono just yesterday, this one involving rice plants.  Many plants, it turns out, have pheromonal signaling, releasing chemicals into the air that then trigger responses in neighboring individuals, either of their own or of different species.  Acacia trees that are browsed by herbivores, for example, emit a signal that triggers nearby trees to produce bitter tannins, discouraging further snacking on the leaves.  Well, it turns out that rice plants have an even niftier strategy; attacked by insect pests, the rice plants emit a chemical called methyl salicylate (better known as oil of wintergreen), which attracts parasitoids -- insects like chalcid wasps that attack and kill the offending pests, usually by laying an egg in or on them and allowing the larvae to eat the pests for lunch.

Okay, but this has yet another layer of complexity, because there's a different set of organisms that have another take on cui bono.  Rice are subject to a group of plant viruses called tenuiviruses, which cause rice stripe disease, weakening or killing plants and severely reducing crop yield.  Tenuiviruses are spread by insect pests like planthoppers, which (much like mosquitoes with malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, and chikungunya) suck up the sap of infected plants and the virus along with it, move on to an uninfected host, and spread the disease.

Rice stripe tenuivirus [Image credit: A. M. Espinoza]

And new research has found that the tenuiviruses, once in an infected plant's tissues, suppress the plant's ability to produce methyl salicylate.  The result?  The plant can't send a signal to the parasitoids, the planthoppers multiply, and the disease spreads.

The authors write:

[R]ice viruses inhibit methyl salicylate (MeSA) emission, impairing parasitoid recruitment and promoting vector persistence.  Field experiments demonstrate that MeSA, a key herbivore-induced volatile, suppresses vector populations by attracting egg parasitoids.  Viruses counter this by targeting basic-helix-loop-helix transcription factor OsMYC2, a jasmonic acid signaling hub, thereby down-regulating OsBSMT1 and MeSA biosynthesis, responses conserved across diverse rice viruses and vector species.

So once again, we have a parasitic microorganism that is engineering a response in its host that makes it more likely to be passed on, in this case by preventing the host from calling for help.

This kind of strategy brings Tennyson's observation that "nature is red in tooth and claw" to new heights, doesn't it?  Makes you wonder how many other examples there are out there of behavior being manipulated by parasites.  Further evidence that evolution is the Law of Whatever Works -- even if Whatever Works is kind of unsettling.

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The legacy of the "good Germans"

Let me start out with the punchline.

Whatever you think "good Germans" should have done in the 1930s is exactly what you should be doing right now.

Two days ago, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, mother of a six-year-old child, was murdered, shot three times in the face by a member of ICE, who have proven themselves to be nothing less than the American Gestapo.  This was immediately followed up by a barrage of falsehoods from Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, and others, claiming that the victim -- Renée Nicole Good -- was a "professional agitator" and a "domestic terrorist," had "weaponized her car" and rammed the agent before he fired in self-defense.  The agent, Trump said, was in the hospital because of his injuries.

These are all lies.

See, the problem is, there's video footage which by now most of us have seen.  The agent wasn't struck by the car.  Good was driving the other way, apparently trying to comply with his orders to move her car.  In response, he shot her three times in the face, then fled the scene on his own feet.

It was a cold-blooded murder.

Then, when it became obvious that the video evidence showed exactly the opposite of what Trump and Noem were claiming, the deflection started.  The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, held a press conference in which he said to ICE, "get the fuck out of Minneapolis," and Fox News chastised him for "promoting violence," claiming that if he and the other Democratic leaders would just cooperate with ICE then everything would be just hunky-dory.

A few pearl-clutchers even said that it was a serious problem that he publicly used the f-word.

Like Hitler's cronies on Kristallnacht, we have a regime that actively promotes violence, sends in angry goons to stir things up, and then when the inevitable happens, blames the victims and anyone who speaks up for them.  Any attempt to hold accountable those who pulled the trigger, or (even more) those who gave the orders, is met with "the shooter felt threatened," "the victim should have complied better/faster/more quietly," and -- best of all -- "get out of our way, we're just trying to Make America Great Again."

"Thank you for your attention to this matter."

If, after watching that video, you still think what the ICE agent did was justified, then you are the person who would have sided with the Stasi in communist East Germany, with the NKVD under Stalin, with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia under Pol Pot -- and with the Nazis in pre-war Germany.  And I have nothing to say to you other than that I will fight you in every way I know how.

Oh, and a reminder that "I was just following orders" had a poor track record for success at Nuremberg.

The rest of us?  We're kind of spiraling right now.

Look, I get it.  Good people are afraid.  Hell, I'm afraid writing this, because under this kind of tyranny just speaking up can place a target on your chest.  But willingness to accept risk is absolutely critical.  If you've ever read the history of the lead-up to some of humanity's worst atrocities, and thought, "Why didn't people put a stop to it?" -- well, we're facing down that road right now.

Why don't you contribute to putting a stop to it?

Donald Trump is an ignorant, petty, vindictive malignant narcissist who will do literally anything to stay in power.  Kristi Noem is a cruel and violent woman who seems to have no conscience whatsoever, Karoline Leavitt a propaganda-spewing bald-faced liar, Stephen Miller a twisted, soulless racist, Pete Hegseth a chest-thumping, misogynistic drunkard.  I could go on and on down the list.  By all rights, Trump should never have won election in the first place, much less re-election; for that, we have the media, Elon Musk, and the corporate capitalist machine to thank.

But it happened, and here we are. 

Choosing not to speak up is itself a decision.  Silence is complicity.  Failing to hold people accountable for their criminal actions, or -- worse -- lying to help them escape accountability, is to actively support evil.

It's not like many of us didn't see this coming.  Shortly after Trump's re-election, I posted that putting him back in power had removed the guardrails, and that we would all too soon devolve into right-wing autocracy.  I've never been so horrified at being right.  But I'll predict one other thing; sitting on your hands now is not the solution.  The autocracies I mentioned earlier went way further than Trump has yet gone, so if you think this is the worst it can get, you are sadly mistaken.

We can halt this.  It's not too late -- yet.  But I can guarantee that if moral people stay silent out of fear or an overabundance of caution, we will find out just what the "good Germans" did in the 1930s; violent tyrannies never self-limit.

They have to be stopped.

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Lonely wanderer

One of the most curious unsolved problems in physics is the three-body problem, which despite its name is not about a ménage-à-trois.  It has to do with calculating the trajectory of orbits of three (or more) objects around a common center of mass, and despite many years of study, the equations it generates seem to have no general solution.

There are specific solutions for objects of a particular mass starting out with a particular set of coordinates and velocities, and lots of them result in highly unstable orbits.  But despite the fact that there are computer models that can predict the movements of three objects in a gravitational dance -- such as the members of a triple-star system -- the overarching mathematical framework has proven intractable.

How, then, can we predict the orbits of the eight planets (and countless dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets) around the Sun to such high precision?  Some of the great names of physics and astronomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -- Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton, especially -- used highly accurate data on planetary positions to conclude that the planets in the Solar System go around the Sun in elliptical orbits, all powered by the Universal Law of Gravitation.  The mathematical model they came up with worked to a high degree of accuracy, allowing earthbound astronomers to predict where the planets were in the sky, and also such phenomena as eclipses.

The reason it works, and doesn't fall prey to the three-body problem chaos, is that the Sun is so massive in comparison to the objects orbiting it.  Because the Sun is huge -- it has a thousand times more mass than the largest planet, Jupiter -- its gravitational pull is big enough that it swamps the pull the planets exert on each other.  For most purposes, you can treat each orbit as independent two-body problems; you can (for example) look at the masses, velocities, and distances between the Sun and Saturn and ignore everything else for the time being.  (Interestingly, it's the slight deviation of the orbit of Uranus from the predictions of its position using the two-body solution that led astronomers to deduce that there must be another massive planet out there pulling on it -- and in 1846 Neptune was observed for the first time, right where the deviations suggested it would be.)

I said it was "lucky" that the mass imbalance is so large, but I haven't told you how lucky.  It turns out that all you have to do is add one more object of close to the same size, and you now have the three-body problem, and the resulting orbit becomes unpredictable, chaotic, and -- very likely -- unstable.

It's what I always think about when I hear woo-woos burbling on about Nibiru, a huge extrasolar planet that has been (repeatedly) predicted to come zooming through the Solar System.  We better hope like hell this doesn't happen, and not because there could be collisions.  A huge additional mass coming near the Earth would destabilize the Earth's orbit, and could cause it to change -- very likely making it more elliptical (meaning we'd get fried at perigee and frozen at apogee).  Interestingly, this is one thing that even the writers of Lost in Space got right, at least temporarily.  The planet John Robinson et al. were on had a highly elliptical orbit, leading to wild climatic fluctuations.  The "temporarily" part, though, came about because apparently the writers found it inconvenient to have the Robinson Family deal with the alternating icebox/oven climate, and after a short but dramatic story arc where they were contending with it, it never happened again.

Or maybe the planet just decided to settle down and behave.  I dunno.

An unstable orbit can also have one other, even more dire outcome; it can cause a planet to get ejected from its star system entirely.  This would be seriously bad news if it happened here, because very quickly we'd exit the habitable zone and be frozen solid.  This is likely the origin of rogue planets -- planets that started out orbiting a star, but somehow have lost their gravitational lock, and end up floating in the vast dark of interstellar space.

This does bring up an interesting question, though; if they're out in outer space, but emit no light, how do we know they're there?  Well, they were conjectured for decades, based on the argument above, about orbital instability; but as far as detection goes, that's proven harder.  But now, we have actually detected one, and how we did it is absolutely staggering.

One of the outcomes of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is that the presence of matter warps space.  A common two-dimensional analogy is a bowling ball sitting on a trampoline, deflecting the membrane downward.  If you roll a marble on the trampoline, it'll curve around the bowling ball, not because the bowling ball is magically attracting the marble, but because its presence has changed the shape of the space the marble is moving through.  Scale that up by one dimension, and you've got the idea.

What's cool about this is that because it's the shape of spacetime that has warped, everything passing through that region is affected -- including light.  This is called gravitational lensing, and has been used to infer the positions and masses of black holes, which (duh) are black and therefore hard to see.  But by detecting the distortion of light emitted by objects behind the black hole, we can see its effects.

And now, that's been done with a rogue exoplanet.  Judging by the lensing effect it created, it's about the mass of Saturn, and the conclusion based on its mass and velocity was that it was indeed once part of a planetary system -- and then got ejected, probably because of a close encounter with another massive object, or perhaps because it was part of a multiple star system and was in an unstable orbit from the get-go.

Now, though, it's lost -- a lonely wanderer tracking its way through the vastness of interstellar space.  How many of these rogue planets there are is unknown; as you probably concluded, detection isn't easy, relying on having a powerful telescope aimed in the right direction at the moment the planet passes in front of a distant star.  But given how easy it is to destabilize an orbit, there are likely to be millions.

Which, we have to hope, will all stay the hell away from us.  Nibiru notwithstanding, having a rogue planet pass through the Solar System would make even Donald Trump drop to number two on the List Of The Biggest Current Threats To Humanity.  Fortunately, it's unlikely; space is big.  We'd also likely have a decent amount of warning, because as soon as it got near enough (right around the orbit of Pluto), it'd reflect enough of the Sun's light that it'd become visible to astronomers.

Unfortunately, though, there's probably nothing much we could do about it.  We've just begun to experiment with the possibility of deflecting small asteroids; deflecting an entire planet, especially one the size of Saturn, would be a case where the best strategy would be to stick your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.

I mean, not to end on a pessimistic note.  Let's all focus on the "unlikely" part.  And continue working on the next biggest threat, which frankly is occupying more of my anxiety at the moment.

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The printer's demon

Two days ago, I finished the draft of my historical novel Nightingale. 

I checked the document to see when I created it -- October 21, 2025.  Ten weeks and 96,600 words later, I've got a complete story, about a man in the thirteenth century who unwittingly becomes involved in treachery and double-dealing between the kings of France and Scotland, ends up cornered into committing an act that leads to chaos, and undertakes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to atone.

Oh, and there's a ghost and a curse and a guy who may or may not be an angel.

It was an interesting tale to tell, and for sure the fastest I've ever written a whole novel.  I love the main character, Simon de Montbard, because he's complex and multi-layered, and also because he's a very unlikely hero.  I'm actually sad to say goodbye to him.

I'm doubly sad, though, because this propels me into my second-least-favorite part of being a novelist, which is:

Editing.

My first-least-favorite, of course, is marketing.  Most authors dislike it as well, but I have a special loathing for it, because I have a fundamental, reflexive hatred for self-promotion, coming from a childhood where I had beaten into me that Talking About Yourself Is Conceited And That's Bad.  When I was little, any time I mentioned anything I had accomplished, or even was interested in, it was met with "No one wants to hear about that," with the result that even now I come close to being physiologically incapable of bringing up creative stuff I'm doing in conversation.  (It's a little easier to write about it, obvs.  But even the mild level of self-aggrandizement I'm doing here is kind of uncomfortable.  Childhood trauma never quite goes away.)

This is why even doing stuff like posting a link on social media to my website or to one of my books on Amazon makes me immediately afterward run and hide under a blanket.  Probably explaining why my sales figures are so low.  It's hard to sell any books when I self-promote so seldom that it's met with "Oh, I didn't know you'd written a book!" when in fact I've written twenty-four of them.

Well, twenty-five, now.

In any case, now Nightingale goes into the editing stage of things, which is not anxiety-producing so much as it is tedious and a little maddening.  As my friend, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, put it, "Editing is difficult because it's so easy to see what you meant to write and not what you actually did write."  I've had errors slip through multiple readings by multiple people -- not just simple typos or grammatical errors, but the bane of my existence, continuity errors:

Roses are red, Steve's eyes are blue
But you said they were brown back on page 52.

I can't tell you the number of times that I've caught stuff like a character opening a window that she just opened two pages earlier, or going down the stairs to the first floor when she started out in the basement.  I sincerely hope I have caught all of those sorts of things, because nothing yanks a reader out of the world of the story quite as quickly as that "... wait, what?" response when there's a problem with continuity.

However, I did learn something yesterday that should be a comfort to my fellow writers who have been reading this while nodding their heads in sympathy; errors, all the way from typos to major plot snafus, aren't your fault.  They're the fault of a demon named Titivillus who is in charge of making writers fuck things up.  Then when they do, Titivillus keeps track of all the mistakes, and when it comes time for God to judge the writers' souls, he reads out all the errors they've made so the writers will end up in hell.

Apparently people back then honestly thought Titivillus was real.  A fifteenth-century English devotional called Myroure of Oure Ladye has the lines, "I am a poure dyuel, and my name ys Tytyvyllus...  I muste eche day ... brynge my master a thousande pokes full of faylynges, and of neglygences in syllables and wordes."

Judging by the spelling, it looks like Titivillus has already racked up a few points just on that passage alone.

A fourteenth-century illustration of Titivillus trying to induce a scribe to screw up his manuscript [Image is in the Public Domain]

I must say, though, the whole thing strikes me as unfair.  If Titivillus is responsible for my errors, they're not really my fault.  Maybe the logic is that I should have concentrated harder, and not listened to him whispering, "What you mean to write is 'The man pulled on his trousers, then slipped on his shit.'"

What amazes me is how tenacious some of these errors can be.  As K. D. pointed out, our brains often see what we think is there and not what actually is there, with the result that we breeze right past goofs that you'd think would stand out like sore thumbs.  It's why all writers need good editors; you're not going to catch everything, no matter how carefully you think you're reading.  (And that's not even counting the fact that I seem to have a genetic condition that renders me incapable of using commas correctly.)

So now I need to go back through my own manuscript looking for faylynges and neglygences in syllables and wordes, before I turn it over to my actual editor, who no doubt will find plenty more.  As hard as the writing process can sometimes be, at least it's creative, whereas editing seems to me to be more like doing the laundry.  It's critical, and you can't get by without doing it, but hardly anyone would call it fun.

The whole thing reminds me of Dorothy Parker's quip.  "If you have a young friend who wants to become a writer, the second best thing you can do for them is to give them a copy of Elements of Style.  The first best, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're still happy."

Be that as it may, I still prefer editing over marketing.  So I'll just end by saying "Please buy my books, there are links to some of them in the sidebar."  Now y'all'll have to excuse me.  I'll be hiding under a blanket.

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