The blink of an eye

A while back I wrote about the rather terrifying idea of the "Great Filter" -- that life, especially sentient life, might be rare in the universe because there are hurdles of varying difficulties (those are the "filters") that have to be overcome in order to get there.  These include:

• abiotic synthesis of organic molecules
• assembly of those molecules into cells
• development of cells of sufficient complexity to segregate competing biochemical reactions (eukaryotic cells)
• multicellularity
• the evolution of intelligence
• the development of technology

The first two of these seem -- at least insofar as our models currently predict -- to be fairly straightforward, so most biologists expect that Earth-like planets in the habitable zone probably have lots of single-celled organisms.  The rest?  Uncertain.  After all, we have a sample size of one to analyze, so it's a little hard to make any inferences based on that.

All of this, of course, is by way of explaining the Fermi paradox -- that despite years of searching, we've found no good evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations.  But an even more alarming possibility is that the Great Filter lies ahead of us.  Perhaps all of those steps are surmountable, so stable rocky planets with atmospheres in their star's habitable zone ultimately do evolve intelligent life, but then it inevitably self-destructs.

I'm thinking about this today because yesterday I watched a short talk by the brilliant physicist Brian Cox about the topic, and while most of what he covered was information (and theorizing) I'd heard before, there was one piece of it that I honestly hadn't considered.  Suppose the Great Filter really does lie in the future, and technological civilizations always eventually come to naught.  Perhaps it's through nuclear annihilation, or biological warfare, or the catastrophic backfire of AI -- certainly at the moment, I don't think any well-informed person would argue that these are far-fetched possibilities -- but whatever the cause, intelligent species aren't intelligent enough to save themselves indefinitely, and their brief, fitful candle flames just as quickly wink out.

What that means is that at any given time, there might only be one or two civilizations in the entire galaxy, because their lifetimes are so short.  Cox describes visiting Frank Drake, the brilliant astronomer who gave his name to the Drake Equation.  Drake's hobby was raising orchids, and Cox said that on the day of his visit, he got to see one of the rare plants in Drake's greenhouse flowering.  Drake told him that this particular species only flowers once a year, and the flower is only open for a day or two; after that, the plant goes back into its previous quiescence.  Cox had simply lucked out and visited on the right day.

Could civilizations, Cox wonders, be like this orchid -- rising and falling so fast that you only have a moment's chance of seeing them before they collapse?

If this is true, then the galaxy's planets could be littered with the debris of dead civilizations.  Imagine it... planet after planet with archaeological sites as the only evidence that an intelligent species had once lived there.

It reminds me of the brilliant Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase," in which Captain Picard (himself an erstwhile archaeology student) is given a priceless, twelve-thousand-year-old ceramic piece made by the Kurlan sculptor called "the Master of Tarquin Hill" -- the product of an extinct culture now known only from the artifacts they left behind.

Of course, even artifacts don't last forever.  A few years ago, a couple of researchers considered the "Silurian Hypothesis" -- the idea that there may have been earlier, non-human civilizations right here on Earth.  (Named, I feel obliged to point out, after the reptilian Silurian race from Doctor Who.)  The question they asked was, if there had been such a civilization -- say, a hundred million years ago -- would there be any traces left?

And the answer they came up with was "No."  Likewise, the chances of any human-made artifacts from today lasting a hundred million years into the future is vanishingly small.  Consider that there's damn little left from humans who lived ten thousand years ago.  Nothing we make is likely to last a hundred million -- however rock-solid and permanent our creations may feel to us.

Understand that they're not saying there was such a civilization; only that if there had been, we'd probably have no way to know about it.  So even if there have been many intelligent species rising and falling throughout the galaxy, the marks they left on their planets would be nearly as ephemeral.

It's kind of a bleak prospect, isn't it?  All of our strutting and fretting is, for better or worse, over in the blink of an eye.  It reminds me of Percy Shelley's haunting poem "Ozymandias," which feels like a good way to conclude:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'"
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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Toxic waste

If there's one word related to health issues that makes me want to scream obscenities, it's the word "toxin."

This term gets thrown around all the time.  I was given a gift card for a massage for my last birthday (which was wonderful, by the way), and afterwards, the masseuse told me that I needed to drink lots of water that day because the massage had "loosened up toxins" and the extra water would "flush them from my system."  A while back, I was buying some fresh turmeric root at a local organic grocery, and a lady smiled at me in a friendly sort of way, and said, "Oooh, turmeric!  It's wonderful at detoxifying the body!"

What torques me about the use of "toxin" and "detoxify" is that the people who use those terms almost never have any idea about what particular toxins they're talking about.  If I was just a wee bit more obnoxious than I am -- an eventuality no one should wish for -- I would have said to the masseuse and the lady in the grocery, "Can you name one specific chemical that massage and/or turmeric releases in my body that I need to be concerned about?"

Chances are, of course, they would not have been able to; even in supposedly informative articles in health magazines, they're just lumped together as "toxins."  The word has become a stand-in for unspecified "really bad stuff" that we need to fret about even though no one seems all that sure what it is.

And then buy whatever silly detox remedy the writer of the article suggests.

This all comes up because of an article I read in Science-Based Medicine called "Activated Charcoal: The Latest Detox Fad in an Obsessive Food Culture," by Scott Gavura.  In it, we hear about people dosing themselves with activated charcoal as a "detox" or "cleanse," because evidently our liver and kidneys -- evolved over millions of years to deal with all sorts of unpleasant metabolic wastes -- are insufficient to protect us.

No, you need "activated charcoal lemonade."

I wish I was making this up, but no.  People actually are adding gritty, pitch-black charcoal to their lemonade, in order to make it "soak up toxins."

The problem here, as Gavura points out, is that activated charcoal is used in detoxification, so there's that kernel of truth in all of the nonsense.  Actual detoxification, I mean, not this pseudoscientific fad-medicine horseshit; detoxification of the sort done in cases of poisoning.  I know this first hand, because of an unfortunate incident involving a border collie named Doolin that we once had. My wife and I had visited northern California, and dropped by the wonderful Mendocino Chocolate Company, makers of what are objectively the best chocolate truffles in the entire world.  We bought a dozen truffles of various sorts and brought them home with us, babying them through our travels during high summer.  We got them home successfully, and on the first day back...

... Doolin pulled the box off the counter and ate all twelve chocolate truffles.

As you undoubtedly know, chocolate is highly poisonous to dogs, so off Doolin went to the vet to get a (real) detoxification.  One of the things they did was feed her activated charcoal.  We found this out because on the way back home from the vet, Doolin puked up charcoal all over the back seat of my wife's brand-new Mini Cooper.

Doolin survived the chocolate incident, although she almost didn't survive our reaction to (1) the thousand-dollar vet bill, (2) black doggie puke all over the new car upholstery, and worst of all, (3) not getting our chocolates.  Despite all that, she went on to live another six healthy years, thanks to modern veterinary science and the fact that she was cute enough that we decided not to strangle her.

But I digress.

So charcoal does have its uses.  But you're not accomplishing anything by adding it to lemonade, except perhaps (as Gavura writes) having the charcoal absorb nutrients from your digestive tract, making whatever food you're eating less nutritious.  Because charcoal, of course, isn't selective about what it absorbs -- it'll absorb damn near anything, including vitamins and other essential nutrients.

Oh, and any medications you may be taking, too.  Real ones, I mean.

Facts don't seem to matter much to the alt-med crowd, however, and now there's charcoal everywhere. Over at the webzine Into the Gloss, writer Victoria Lewis tells us about taste-testing a bunch of different charcoal drinks, and her analysis includes the following insightful paragraph about "Juice Generation Activated Greens":

I decided to drink this ultra-vegetable-filled (kale, spinach, celery, parsley, romaine, and cucumber) juice for breakfast. It tasted exactly like a super green juice—a little salty but otherwise, totally normal.  I did end up eating some granola afterwards (juice diets have never been for me), but this one felt good and extremely healthy.

Which, right there, sums up the whole approach.  Screw medical research; if consuming some weird new supplement "feels good and extremely healthy," then it must be getting rid of all those bad old toxins, or something, even if it tastes like vaguely lemon-flavored fireplace scrapings.  It's all about the buzzwords, the hype, and the feelings -- not about anything remotely related to hard evidence or science.

But of course, since now we have renowned nutritionists like Gwyneth Paltrow getting on board, the whole "charcoal juice cleanse" thing is going to take off amongst people with more money than sense.

Makes me feel like I need to go eat some bacon and eggs, just to restore order to the universe.

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The war of choice

Back in the fifth century C. E., things had been looking pretty hopeless for the Jewish people in the Middle East for nearly three centuries.

The Bar Kokhba Revolt, which started in 132 and lasted four years, marked the beginning of the downward spiral.  A Judaean military leader, Simon bar Kokhba, launched a fierce rebellion against their repressive Roman overlords, with the immediate cause being Emperor Hadrian's intent to rebuild the damaged city of Jerusalem as an overtly Roman city, dedicated to the worship of Jupiter, and renamed Aelia Capitolina.  Bar Kokhba and his followers started a series of ultimately doomed guerrilla actions, and gained some ground for a while, but inevitably the far better armed and trained Roman legions were victorious.  The Jewish people in Judaea were destroyed almost completely, with the survivors fleeing to anywhere they could manage to get to.

Even after the devastating aftermath of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, however, the hope still remained that the Jews might eventually win back their lost territory.  By the middle of the fifth century, repeated invasions by the Goths, Huns, Alans, and Franks had weakened the Roman Empire to the point that some Jews thought the time was ripe.  Add to that the prediction that -- according to one interpretation of the Talmud -- the Messiah would arrive in the year 440, and you have a dangerous confluence of desperation, hope, and prophecy.

This is when a guy named Moses of Crete showed up.  According to a writing from the seventh century, the Chronicle of John of Nikiû, his name was originally Fiskis, but that doesn't sound nearly as impressive, so history remembers him as Moses.  Also uncertain is whether he actually believed what he preached, or if he was simply a charlatan.

Whatever the truth is, he amassed a huge following amongst the Jewish refugees in Crete, and convinced them he was anointed by God to lead them back to Judaea, where after a Holy War they would re-establish a Jewish kingdom.  Further, he said that he -- like his namesake -- would lead them, dry-shod, across the sea and back to the Holy Land.  Astonishingly, people believed him.  Many left behind everything they owned, followed Moses to a promontory on the southeastern coast of Crete, and walked off the edge.

The predictable happened.

The Chronicle says no one knows what happened to Moses after this debacle, in which hundreds perished.  Some say he died with them; others, that he panicked when he saw what was happening, and fled, assuming a different identity somewhere else.  Which it was, I suppose, depends primarily on which version you went for earlier -- whether he was a con artist or a True Believer.

I was reminded of the story of Moses of Crete when I saw a post yesterday over at Joe My God that combat unit commanders in charge of the soldiers tasked with carrying out Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth Kegbreath's ill-advised war against Iran have told their troops that the war is part of "God's divine plan" and that Donald Trump was "appointed by Jesus" to carry it out -- with the ultimate aim of triggering Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.

Nicholas Roerich, Armageddon (1936)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

This attempt to turn the attacks into a Holy War has already resulted in over a hundred complaints by servicemen and women, who (rightly) claim that framing this as some sort of Christian jihad is, to put it bluntly, insane.  The last thing we need is the End Times fanatics getting behind this because they've decided that Trump and Whiskey Pete are carrying God's authority to open the Seven Seals.

Don't get me wrong; the regime in Iran in general, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in particular, are a bunch of murderous thugs (well, was in Khamenei's case).  But Trump and his cronies started a war, ostensibly to eliminate a nuclear threat that Trump himself said had been "obliterated" only eight months ago, but the obvious goal was distracting everyone from doing anything about the fact that there's credible evidence he and about a hundred other rich white guys were engaging in decades of horrifying and vicious pedophilia.  He has no plan beyond that, no strategy, no end game.  The entire thing is smoke and mirrors -- except that it has already cost lives, including those of six servicemen and over a hundred Iranian children at a girls' school bombed "accidentally."

Oh, but this is a Holy War!  Really it is!  Here, American soldiers, follow me right off this cliff!  The waters will part and God will grant you victory, I promise!  

Hegseth, of course, wants war; it's significant -- although it was widely ridiculed at the time -- that he changed the name of the department he leads from the Department of Defense to the Department of War.  He, and people like him, are happiest when they're thumping their chests and telling everyone what Big Bad Tough Guys they are, and there's nothing like bombing the shit out of a country to prove that to the world.

The only hopeful things I can draw from all of this are that (1) the complaints of religious proselytization are being taken seriously enough that an investigation is being launched, and (2) the Epstein files aren't going anywhere.  Yeah, the war in Iran has bumped them from the headlines for the moment, but nobody is forgetting about them.

It's pretty clear Trump doesn't have a religious bone in his body, and never has; as far as Hegseth, he appears to be a devout, if frighteningly fanatical, Christian.  Ultimately, of course, it doesn't matter, just as it didn't for Moses of Crete and his unfortunate followers.  Walking off the edge of a precipice, whether a real one or a metaphorical one, isn't going to result in some kind of miracle; it'll end up producing a pile of mangled bodies.

Not that Trump appears to care.  "There'll likely be more [casualties] before it ends," he said at a press conference a couple of days ago.  "That's the way it is.  Likely be more."

The whole thing reminds me of the trenchant words of Susan B. Anthony: "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

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Guilt by association

I've played English country dance music for years.  It's a lovely repertoire, and playing for dances creates a wonderful synergy of sound and movement.  My previous band, Crooked Sixpence, featured a fiddler who is an exceptionally talented musician.  She hails from England, and is married to an Irishman from west Cork, so she is deeply familiar with the music of both the UK and Ireland.

One day, the dance caller we worked with sent us the set list for the next gig, and on it was a tune called "Lilliburlero."  I played through it, and it's a sprightly little thing, but I didn't know it by that name; I'd heard it as the tune to a bawdy seventeenth-century song called "My Thing is My Own."  I'll leave to your imagination what the "thing" was the singer is laying claim to, but... it's meant to be sung by a woman, and here's one verse as a clue:

A master musician came with intent
To give me a lesson on my instrument;
I thanked him for nothing, and bid him be gone,
For my little fiddle must not be played on.

The tune, I found out, is often attributed to Henry Purcell, but apparently predates him by at least three decades.  (The link is to a lovely performance of the song by Ann and Nancy Wilson, of Heart fame, if you want to hear the whole thing.)

So I was surprised when Kathy, our fiddler, told the caller, "I'm not playing that."

Upon inquiry, it turned out that "Lilliburlero" also goes to a different set of words, lyrics that were written during the invasion of Ireland by the troops of William of Orange and which are meant to ridicule Irish language, culture, and religion.  Read through the lens of history, you can easily see why they're deeply offensive, and remain so to many people 350 years later -- to the point that just playing the tune can raise hackles, even though it existed as a dance tune, and then a (non-bigoted) bawdy song long before the ugly anti-Irish lyrics became attached to it.

Songs and tunes can be powerfully evocative, both positively and negatively.  In fact, the topic comes up because a few days ago was the birthday of late nineteenth, early twentieth century British composer and musician Hubert Parry, most famous for writing a gorgeous musical setting of William Blake's poem "Jerusalem."  I heard a performance of it on the satellite radio classical station on my way home from my volunteer gig (sorting books for the Friends of the Library used book sale), and later that day saw it posted more than once on social media:

The commenters on the posts seemed evenly split between "I love that piece" and "I hate it."  This by itself isn't that unusual, considering how variable musical tastes are, but it got interesting when I read why some of the latter disliked the piece so intensely.  I kind of figured it out when one person wrote, "Yes!  England's second national anthem!" and another responded, "Goddammit no it isn't, it's jingoistic trash, and people need to STOP SAYING THAT."

Parry wrote the music at the height of the British Empire and English colonialism, and for many, it has become associated with that spirit -- "the sun never sets on the Empire," "the White Man's Burden," and the exploitation of indigenous people and their land to serve the power-hungry and the bigoted.  What's interesting is that Blake's poem was written in 1808, and if you read the lyrics, it's not clear -- to me, at least -- that it's at all celebratory of any desire for the English to run out and conquer everything and everyone:

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire;
Bring me my spear, O clouds unfold,
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green and pleasant land.

To my reading, the lyrics are not saying that the English are The Chosen People 2.0, but that they have a long way to go before God would find the place worthy of building a new Jerusalem there.  After all, it's pretty clear that Blake's answer to the four questions in the first two stanzas was a resounding "no."

William Blake, Ancient of Days (1794) [Image is in the Public Domain]

And it bears mention that Blake himself was more of a mystic than a politician.  In fact, he was arrested (later acquitted) of uttering "treasonous and seditious statements against the king," and was notable for being anti-war and critical of the damaging effects of the Industrial Revolution on both the natural environment and public health.  (Thus the line about England's "dark Satanic mills.")  I find a lot of his writing kind of obscure at times, and certainly evocative -- but hardly jingoistic, like much of the work of Rudyard Kipling.

What seems to have happened here is guilt by association.  A mystical poem is set to music, and then becomes famous during a time when that pro-Empire sentiment was at its height.  It became used as a recessional on Saint George's Day.  It's a staple of the choral repertoire, meant to stir the hearts of loyal Brits the world over.  The 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, about the 1924 Olympic Games, got its title from the lyrics, and the song is played at the end of the film.  In fact, it was played at the opening of the London 2012 Summer Olympics -- as well as at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.  In 2019, it was voted "Britain's favorite hymn," although if you read the lyrics, it's debatable whether it even qualifies as a hymn in the traditional sense.

Music has a tremendous capacity to evoke emotion, and when lyrics are attached, even more so.  This causes the music itself to gain an additional layer of meaning that persists even when it's performed as an instrumental.  The interplay between music, words, meaning, and emotional response is complex and highly individual -- as I described in a post a few months ago, creativity is a dialogue, and each person brings to the experience their own background, opinions, worldviews, and tastes.  So it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that the same piece of music can set the heart pounding in one person, anger the absolute hell out of another, and leave a third unmoved either way.

Like with other matters of the creative relationship, chacun à son goût -- and the checkered history of some pieces of music make the matter even more complicated.

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Divine meddling

In Paul McCaw's musical comedy The Trumpets of Glory, angels back various causes on Earth as a kind of competitive contest.  Anything from a soccer game to a war is open for angelic intervention -- and there are no rules about what kind of messing about the angels are allowed to do. Anything is fair, up to and including deceit, malice, and trickery.  The stakes are high; the angel whose side wins goes up in rank, and the other one goes down.

It's an idea of the divine you don't run into often.  The heavenly host as competitors in what amounts to a huge fantasy football game.

While McCaw's play is meant to be comedy, it's not so far off from what a lot of people believe -- that some divine agent, be it God or an angel or something else, takes such an interest in the minutiae of life down here on Earth that (s)he intercedes on our behalf.  As an example, take Paula White -- the "White House Spiritual Advisor" -- leading a prayer service in which she called on "angelic reinforcements" to make sure that Donald Trump keeps getting celestial support.

While this may seem kind of loony to a lot of us, it's a remarkably common attitude.  How often do you hear someone say things like, "I found my car keys!  Thank you Lord Jesus!"?  The problem for me, aside from the more obvious one of not believing that any of these invisible beings exist, is why Lord Jesus or the Heavenly Host would care more about whether you find your keys than, for example, all of the ill and starving children in the world.

You'd think if interference in human affairs is allowable, up there in heaven, that helping innocent people who are dying in misery would be the first priority.

The reason the topic comes up is a link from The Epoch Times that a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me in response to Saturday's post about finding meaning in apparently random and coincidental patterns.  It's called, "When Freak Storms Win Battles,  Is It Divine Intervention or Just Coincidence?"  The article goes into several famous instances when weather affected the outcome of a war, to wit:

• A tornado killing a bunch of British soldiers in Washington D. C. during the War of 1812
• The storm that contributed to England's crushing defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588
• A massive windstorm that smashed the Persian fleet as it sailed against Athens in 492 B.C.E.
• A prolonged spell of warm, wet weather, which fostered the rise of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century, followed by a pair of typhoons that destroyed Kublai Khan's ships when they were attacking Japan in 1274

What immediately struck me about this list was that each time, the winners attributed the event to divine intervention, but no one stops to consider how the losers viewed it.  This isn't uncommon, of course; "History is written by the victors," and all that sort of thing.  But what's especially funny about the first two is that they're supposed to be events in which God meddled and made sure the right side won -- when, in fact, in both cases, both sides were made up of staunch Christians.

And I'm sorry, I refuse to believe that a divine being would be pro-British in the sixteenth century, and suddenly become virulently anti-British two hundred years later.

Although that's kind of the sticking point with the last example as well, isn't it?  First God (or the angels or whatever) manipulate the weather to encourage the Mongols, then kicks the shit out of them when they try to attack Japan.  It's almost as if... hang on a moment, here... what caused all of this wasn't an intelligent agent at all, but the result of purely natural phenomena that don't give a rat's ass about our petty little squabbles.

Fancy that.

But for some reason, this idea repels a lot of people.  They are much more comfortable with a deity that fools around directly with our fates down here on Earth, whether it be to make sure that I win ten dollars on my lottery scratch-off ticket or to smite the hell out of the Bad Guys.

I think this kind of worldview attracts people because somehow it's more appealing than a universe that is fundamentally chaotic.  A paper out of Flinders University last month suggests it's the same reason we fall for conspiracy theories; any explanation, even a horrific one, is preferable to shrugging your shoulders and saying, "Well, sometimes bad things happen, and there's no real reason."  "People often assume conspiracy beliefs form because someone isn't thinking critically," said study lead author Neophytos Georgiou.  "But our findings show that for those who prefer systematic structure, conspiracy theories can feel like a highly organized way to understand confusing or unpredictable events."

If I ever became a theist -- not a likely eventuality, I'll admit -- I can't imagine that I'd go for the God-as-micromanager model.  It just doesn't seem like anyone whose job was overseeing the entire universe would find it useful to control things on that level, notwithstanding the line from Matthew 10:29 about God's hand having a role in the fall of every sparrow.

I more find myself identifying with the character of Vertue in C. S. Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress -- not the character we're supposed to like best, I realize -- when he recognized that nothing he did had any ultimate reason, or was the part of some grand plan:

"I believe that I am mad," said Vertue presently.  "The world cannot be as it seems to me.  If there is something to go to, it is a bribe, and I cannot go to it; if I can go, then there is nothing to go to." 

"Vertue," said John, "give in.  For once yield to desire.  Have done with your choosing.  Want something."

"I cannot," said Vertue.  "I must choose because I choose because I choose: and it goes on for ever, and in the whole world I cannot find a reason for rising from this stone."

So those are my philosophical musings for this morning.  Seeing the divine hand in everything here on Earth, without any particular indication of why a deity would care, or (more specifically) why (s)he would come down on one side or the other.  Me, I'll stick with the scientific explanation.  The religious one is, honestly, far less satisfying, and opens up some troubling questions that don't admit to any answers I can see.

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Patterns and meaning

I remember a few years ago noticing something odd.  While eating breakfast on work days, I'd finish, and always give a quick glance up at the digital clock that sits on the counter.  Three times in a row, the clock said 6:19.

I know there's a perfectly rational explanation; I'm a total creature of habit, and I did the same series of actions in the same order every single work morning, so the fact that I finished breakfast three days in a row at exactly the same time only points up the fact that I need to relax a little.  But once I noticed the (seeming) pattern, I kept checking each morning.  And there were other days when I finished at exactly 6:19.  After a few weeks of this, it was becoming a bit of an obsession.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mk2010, LED digital wall clock (Seiko), CC BY-SA 3.0]

So being a rationalist, as well as needing a hobby, I started to keep track.  And very quickly a few things became obvious:

• I almost always finished breakfast (and checked the clock) between 6:16 and 6:22.
• 6:19 is the exact middle of that range, so it would be understandable if that time occurred more often.
• Even considering #2, 6:19 turned out to be no more likely than other times.  The distribution was, within that six minute range, fairly random.

So I had fallen for dart-thrower's bias, the perfectly natural human tendency to notice the unusual, and to give it more weight in our attention and memory.  The point is, once you start noticing this stuff, you're more likely to notice it again, and to overestimate the number of times such coincidences occur.

The whole thing comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia called, "Angel Numbers Guide: Why You Keep Seeing Angel Number Sequences."  I'm not going to recommend your going to the site, because it's pretty obviously clickbait, but I thought the content was interesting from the standpoint of our determination that the patterns we notice mean something.

The site is an attempt to convince us that when we see certain numbers over and over, it's an angel attempting to give us a message.  If you notice the number 1212, for example, this is an angel encouraging us to "release our fears and apprehensions, and get on with pursuing our passions and purpose... [asking you to] stay on a positive path and to use your natural skills, talents, and abilities to their utmost for the benefit of yourself and others."

Which is good advice without all of the woo-woo trappings.

Some numbers apparently appeal not only to our desire for meaningful patterns, but for being special.  If you see 999 everywhere, "you are amongst an elite few... 999 is sometimes confrontative, and literally means, 'Get to work on your priorities.  Now.  No more procrastinating, no more excuses or worries.  Get to work now."

The angels, apparently, don't mind getting a little bossy sometimes.

Since a lot of the "angel numbers" involve repeated digits, I had to check to see what 666 means.  I was hoping it would say something like, "If you see 666, you are about to be dragged screaming into the maw of hell."

But no.  666 apparently is "a sign from the angels that it's time to wake up to your higher spiritual truth."  Which is not only boring, but sounds like it could come from a talk by Deepak Chopra.

So the whole thing turns out to be interesting mostly from the standpoint of our desperation to impose some sense on the chaos of life.  Because face it; a lot of what does happen is simply random noise, a conclusion that is a bit of a downer.  I suspect that many religions give solace precisely because they ascribe meaning to everything; the Bible, after all, says that even a sparrow doesn't fall from the sky without the hand of God being involved.

Me, I think it's more likely that a lot of stuff (including birds dying) happens for no particularly identifiable or relevant reason.  Science can explain at least some of the proximal causes, but as far as ultimate causes?  I think we're thrown back on the not very satisfying non-explanation of the universe simply being a chaotic place.  I understand the appeal of it all having meaning and purpose, but it seems to me that most of what occurs is no more interesting than my finishing breakfast at 6:19.

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The shifting sands

In H. P. Lovecraft's wildly creepy story "The Shadow Out of Time," we meet a superintelligent alien race called the Yith who have a unique way of gathering information.

The Yith, who lived in what is now Australia's Great Sandy Desert some 250 million years ago, are capable of temporarily switching personalities with other intelligent beings throughout the cosmos and from any time period.  While the consciousness of the kidnapped individual is residing in its temporary Yith body, it enjoys the freedom to learn anything it wants from the extensive library of information the Yith have gleaned -- as long as the individual is willing to contribute his/her own knowledge to the library.  The main character, early twentieth century professor Nathaniel Peaslee, is switched, and while he is living with the Yith he meets a number of luminaries whose personalities have also been swiped, including:

• Titus Sempronius Blaesus: a Roman official from 80 B.C.E.
• Bartolomeo Corsi: a twelfth-century Florentine monk
• Crom-Ya: a Cimmerian chief who lived circa 15,000 B.C.E.
• Khephnes: a Fourteenth Dynasty (circa 1700 B.C.E.) Egyptian pharaoh
• Nevil Kingston-Brown: an Australian physicist who would die in 2518 C.E.
• Pierre-Louis Montagny: an elderly Frenchman from the time of Louis XIII (early seventeenth century)
• Nug-Soth: a magician from a race of conquerors in16,000 C.E,
• S'gg'ha: a member of the star-headed "Great Race" of Antarctica, from a hundred million years ago
• Theodotides: a Greco-Bactrian official of 200 B.C.E.
• James Woodville: a Suffolk gentleman from the mid-seventeenth century
• Yiang-Li: a philosopher from the empire of Tsan-Chan, circa 5000 C.E.

Compared to most of the gory dismemberments other Lovecraftians entities were fond of, the Yith are remarkably genteel in their approach.  Of course, it's not without its downside for the kidnapped individual; not only do they lose control over their own bodies for a period up to a couple of years, they experience serious disorientation (bordering on insanity in some cases) upon their return to their own bodies.

Nevertheless, it's a fantastic concept for a story, and I remember when I first read it (at about age sixteen) how taken I was with the idea of being able to meet and talk with individuals from both past and future, not to mention other species. But what struck me most viscerally when I read it was when Peaslee, in the Yith's body, describes what he sees surrounding the library.

It's a tropical rain forest.  What now is a barren desert, with barely a scrap of vegetation, was a lush jungle:

The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would witness tremendous rains.  Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the Sun -- which looked abnormally large -- and the Moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could never fathom.  When -- very rarely -- the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition.  Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could recognize, I felt I must be in the Earth's southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn.

The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown tree ferns, Calamites, Lepidodendron, and Sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic fronds waving mockingly in the shifting vapors...  I saw constructions of black or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark I could tell but little of their towering, moist vegetation.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carl Malamud, Cretaceous Diorama 2, CC BY 2.0]

I think it's the first time I'd really gotten hit square between the eyes with how different the Earth is now than it had been, and that those changes haven't halted. In the time of Lovecraft's Yith, 250 million years ago, where I am now (upstate New York) was underneath a shallow saltwater ocean.  Only a hundred thousand years ago, where my house stands was covered with a thick layer of ice, near the southern terminus of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet.  (In fact, the long, narrow lakes that give the Finger Lakes Region its name were carved out by that very glacier.)

I was immediately reminded of that moment of realization when I read a paper in Nature called "Temperate Rainforests Near the South Pole During Peak Cretaceous Warmth," by a huge team led by Johann Klages of the Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar und Meeresforschung, of Bremerhaven, Germany.  Klages's team made a spectacular find that demonstrates that a hundred million years ago, Antarctica wasn't the windswept polar desert it currently is, but something more like Lovecraft's vision of the site of the prehistoric library of Yith.  The authors write:

The mid-Cretaceous period was one of the warmest intervals of the past 140 million years, driven by atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of around 1,000 parts per million by volume.  In the near absence of proximal geological records from south of the Antarctic Circle, it is disputed whether polar ice could exist under such environmental conditions.  Here we use a sedimentary sequence recovered from the West Antarctic shelf—the southernmost Cretaceous record reported so far—and show that a temperate lowland rainforest environment existed at a palaeolatitude of about 82° S during the Turonian–Santonian age (92 to 83 million years ago).  This record contains an intact 3-metre-long network of in situ fossil roots embedded in a mudstone matrix containing diverse pollen and spores.  A climate model simulation shows that the reconstructed temperate climate at this high latitude requires a combination of both atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 1,120–1,680 parts per million by volume and a vegetated land surface without major Antarctic glaciation, highlighting the important cooling effect exerted by ice albedo under high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

It's a stunning discovery from a number of perspectives.  First, just the wonderment of realizing that the climate could change so drastically.  Note that this wasn't, or at least wasn't entirely, because of tectonic movement; the site of the find was still only eight degrees shy of the South Pole even back then.  Despite that, the warmth supported a tremendous assemblage of life, including hypsilophodontid dinosaurs, labyrinthodontid amphibians, and a diverse flora including conifers, cycads, and ferns.  (And given that at this point Antarctica and Australia were still connected, Lovecraft's vision of the home of the Yith was remarkably accurate.)

So, if it wasn't latitude that caused the warm climate, what was it?  The other thing that jumps out at me is the high carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere back then -- 1,000 parts per million.  Our current levels are 410 parts per million, and going up a steady 2.5 ppm per year.  I know I've rung the changes on this topic often enough, but I'll say again -- this is not a natural warm-up, like the Earth experienced during the mid-Cretaceous.  This is due to our out-of-control fossil fuel use, returning to the atmosphere carbon dioxide that has been locked up underground for hundreds of millions of years.  When the tipping point will occur, when we can no longer stop the warm up from continuing, is still a matter of debate.  Some scientists think we may already have passed it, that a catastrophic increase in temperature is inevitable, leading to a complete melting of the polar ice caps and a consequent rise in sea level of ten meters or more.

What no informed and responsible person doubts any more is that the warm-up is happening, and that we are the cause.  People who are still "global warming doubters" (I'm not going to dignify them by calling them skeptics; a skeptic respects facts and evidence) are either woefully uninformed or else in the pockets of the fossil fuel interests.

I don't mean to end on a depressing note.  The Klages et al. paper is wonderful, and gives us a vision of an Earth that was a very different place than the one we now inhabit, and highlights that what we have now is different yet from what the Earth will look like a hundred million years in the future.  It brings home the evocative lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's wonderful poem "In Memoriam:"

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?
There where the long road roars hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds, they shape themselves and go.

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