Out of line

Astrophysicists have a fairly clear idea about how planetary systems form.

The whole thing starts with a nebula -- a cloud of interstellar gas and dust,  mostly made of hydrogen and helium -- that begins to contract under the influence of gravity.  Assuming it's large enough, that compaction raises its temperature; and because almost always, the cloud as a whole had some angular momentum to start with (i.e. it had a net spin around the nebula's center of mass, even if a small one) its rotational rate increases as the collapse proceeds.  That increase in spin rate flattens the cloud out -- think of a whirling blob of pizza dough in the hands of someone who knows how to make the perfect pizza crust -- resulting in a concentrated mass in the center (the future star) and a "protoplanetary disk."

The disk is never perfectly uniform, so the higher gravitational pull of the denser parts draws in more material, making them denser still -- a classic example of positive feedback.  Those lumpy bits form the planets, ultimately gaining sufficient mass to gravitationally clear the regions around their orbits.  When the star becomes dense and hot enough to initiate fusion, the light and heat blow away lighter elements (hydrogen and helium), leaving the inner regions enriched in heavier elements like carbon, silicon, magnesium, nickel, aluminum, and iron.

This model explains two things; why the planets in the Solar System all have relatively circular orbits that are aligned with each other and with the spin plane of the Sun, and why the inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) are dense and rocky, while the outer ones (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) are gas giants.

But.

When we get too confident, nature has this awkward way of saying, "You think you understand everything?  Ha.  A lot you know."  Back in the 1990s people looking for exoplanets started finding what are now nicknamed "hot Jupiters," which are gas giants locked in a tight orbit around their host stars.  Hot Jupiters seem to be pretty common; on the other hand, it may just be that they're simple to spot.  Given their size and mass, they are going to be easier to pick up both by the transit method (the dip in a star's brightness as its planet crosses in front of it) and the wobble method (stars having a slight back-and-forth "wobble" as the star and its planet orbit their common center of gravity; this effect is more pronounced for larger exoplanets and ones with closer orbits).  

So how does a gas giant form, and remain stable, so near to its host star?  Wouldn't the light and heat of the star blow away the lightweight gases, as they seem to have done in our own Solar System?

The answer is "we're not sure."

Another spanner in the works comes from planets that are misaligned -- that have rotational axes or orbital planes skewed with respect to the rotational plane of the star.  There are two examples in our own Solar System; Venus (which actually rotates backwards as compared to the other planets; its day is longer than its year) and Uranus (which lies on its side -- its rotational axis is tilted 82 degrees with respect to its orbital plane).

Neither of these has been explained, either.

But weirdest of all is when a planet's orbital plane is out of alignment with both the star's rotation and the orbits of other planets in the system.  This, in fact, is why the topic comes up; a paper this week in the journal Astrophysics presents some strange new data on the system AU Microscopii, suggesting that the planet AU Microscopii c has its orbital plane tilted by 67 degrees with respect to everything else in the system.  So as the other two planets, and the star itself, are all moving in a nicely aligned fashion, AU Microscopii c is describing these wild loops above and below the system's orbital plane.

You might be wondering how they figured out the orientation of the rotational axis of the star, since most stars look like points of light even in large telescopes.  And this part is really cool.  It's called the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect.  As a star rotates, from our perspective half of the star's disk is heading toward us while the other half is heading away.  So the light from the part that's coming toward us gets slightly blue-shifted, and the light from the other half is simultaneously red-shifted.  Now, imagine a large planet crossing in front of the star, orbiting in the same direction as the star is rotating.  First the blue-shifted part of the light will be partially blocked, then the red-shifted part, resulting in a spectrum alteration that will look like this:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Amitchell125, Animation of the Rossiter-Mclaughlin (RM) effect, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So we know the rotational plane of the star from the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect, and the orbital planes of the planets from the direction of the star's wobble.

And they don't line up.  At all.

This completely confounds our models of how planetary systems form.  Did a close pass by another heavy object yank one of the planets out of alignment?  Or an actual collision with something?  (That's one guess about why Uranus's axis is tilted.)  The answer is still "we don't know."  What seems certain is that the configuration is gravitationally unstable.  AU Microscopii is thought to be a young star, on the order of 24 million years old; the Solar System is over five hundred times older than that.  As I described in a post a couple of years ago, long-term stability usually requires some kind of orbital resonance, where the gravitational pull of planets acts to reinforce their trajectories, keeping them all locked in a tight celestial dance.  So it seems like the weird loop-the-loop described by AU Microscopii c is unlikely to last long.

But it's also an orbit that, based on what we know, shouldn't have happened in the first place.  So maybe it's not a good idea to place bets on what it's going to do in the future.

In any case, it's yet another example of how far we have to go in our understanding of the universe we live in.  That's okay, of course; it'd be boring if we had it all figured out.  Science is like some benevolent version of the Hydra from Greek mythology; for every one question we answer, we create nine more.

I think the scientists are going to be busy for a very long time to come.

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Ignoring Cassandra

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), sometimes nicknamed "the Atlantic Conveyor," is an enormous oceanic current that not only encircles the entire Atlantic Ocean, it links up with other circulation patterns in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

It's called a "thermohaline" circulation because it's driven by two things; temperature and salinity.  Cold water is denser than warm water; salty water is denser than fresher water.  Alterations in these factors determine where the water goes, setting up convection (the movement of a fluid because of gradients in density).  Specifically, as the warm Gulf Stream (the red line along the eastern coast of North America on the above map) moves northward, it cools down and evaporates.  Those both act to increase its density, to the point that just south of Iceland, it sinks.

That sinking mechanism is what drives the entire thing.  Slow that down, and the whole system fails.

Which is exactly what is happening.  A paper last week in Nature found that the AMOC has diminished dramatically because of anthropogenic climate change; the warming oceans, along with fresh meltwater from Greenland, has made large parts of the north loop of the circulation too buoyant to sink.  Since 1950, the flow rate has gone down by 0.46 sverdrups.  Before you say, "Well, that doesn't sound like very much," allow me to point out that one sverdrup is a million cubic meters a second.  The combined flow of all the rivers in the world is only about 1.2 sverdrups.

So 0.46 is huge.

Current models indicate that this change is going to have enormous effects on local climates.  Western and northern Europe are likely to get colder; the surface loop of the AMOC is why Iceland, Scotland, and Scandinavia are way warmer than you'd expect given their latitudes.  The southeastern United States and eastern South America will probably become much warmer; the heat energy doesn't just go away because it's not being transported northward and dissipated.  Rainfall patterns, and storm paths and intensity, will certainly change, but how is unknown.

The truth is, we don't know enough to predict exactly what the outcome will be, at least not with any certainty.  We're perturbing a complex global system with about as much caution as a toddler playing in the mud.  But what seems certain is that we have now entered the "Find Out" phase of "Fuck Around and Find Out."

What kills me is we've been warning about this for decades.  British science historian James Burke's prescient documentary After the Warming described the collapse of the AMOC as an outcome of anthropogenic climate change all the way back in 1991.  But instead of listening to the scientists, and brilliant advocates like Burke who bring science to the public notice, more people were swayed by idiots like former Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who brought a snowball onto the floor of the United States Senate and basically said, "Hey, it's snowing, so climate change isn't real, hurr hurr hurr durr."

Of course, listening to Inhofe and his ilk is easy.  If you believe him, you don't have to make any changes to your lifestyle.  And we haven't gotten any further in the intervening decades; President-elect Trump has nominated Lee Zeldin for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency and Doug Burgum for Secretary of the Interior, both thoroughgoing climate change deniers who are deep in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.  (And please, for the love of all that's holy, stop calling them "climate skeptics."  A skeptic respects the evidence.  These people reject a body of evidence that's as high as Mount Everest in the name of profit and short-term expediency.)

Politicians Discussing Global Warming by Isaac Cordal (2011)

I read a serious analysis of Donald Trump's win claiming that one factor was that Americans have a "suspicion of expertise."  That is something that will never, ever make sense to me.  How is it reasonable to say, essentially, "These people know more than I do, so I don't believe them"?  The result is that we now have one of the most powerful countries in the world being run by a cabal of people who are united by two things -- (1) devotion to Donald Trump, and (2) a complete lack of qualifications.  So this distrust of evidence, science, and rationality is only going to get worse -- and will become the motive force in driving policy.

The problem is, though, if you ignore the truth, sooner or later it catches up with you.  And from the recent paper, it appears it's going to be sooner.  Sea level rise is already threatening coastal communities, and there are island nations that will simply cease to exist if if gets much worse.  Extreme weather events are likely to become commonplace.  We're sure to see alterations in climate that will affect agriculture, and in some places, habitability.

As usual, the people creating the problem aren't the ones who are going to get hurt by it -- at least not at first.  But this is an issue that will, ultimately, affect us all.

And lord have mercy, I am tired.  Tired of shouting warnings, tired of citing study after study, tired of arguing from the standpoint of facts and evidence with people determined not to listen to any of it.  I'm not even an actual scientist, just a retired science teacher and blogger, and I feel like I've been sounding the call about this stuff forever; I can't imagine how the actual researchers feel.  It makes me sympathize with Cassandra, from Greek mythology -- who was blessed with the ability to see the future, but cursed to have no one believe her.

I wish I had some sort of hopeful message to end on, but I don't.  I'm not naturally a pessimist, but given the fact that the country I live in just voted in an anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-academic administration whose motto seems to be "Corporate Profit Über Alles," I don't think we're going to make any progress here for the next four years.  By then, how much more damage will have been done?

As journalist Sheri Fink put it: "Soon after a disaster passes, we tend to turn our eyes away and focus our resources on the day-to-day, rather than on preparing for the rare, but foreseeable and potentially catastrophic disaster.  It's another form of triage, how much we invest in preparing for that, a very important question for public policy.  But... we are such a short-sighted species."

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Accents and accuracy

When I was in eighth grade, a movie aired called The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.  We were encouraged by our English teacher to watch it, and it turned out to be well worth the time, even to a fourteen-year-old who at that point didn't care much about history.  It was based on a novel by Ernest J. Gaines, and starred the amazing Cicely Tyson, who played a woman born into slavery, who lives to age 110 and sees the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in 1962.  (And yes, Tyson plays the title character the entire way through -- not only is the makeup incredible, but so is her ability to portray ages between 20 and 110 absolutely convincingly.)

There was only one thing that struck a sour note, and I was far from the only one in my class who noticed it.  One of the characters was the villainous Albert Cluveau, who was identified as "a Cajun."  And this guy had the worst Cajun accent ever.  My mom was 100% pure Cajun, so I know whereof I speak; most of my classmates were Cajun as well, given that I grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, "the heart of Cajun Country."  Cluveau was portrayed by Will Hare, who wasn't even from Louisiana, and I still remember one of my friends saying, "Why didn't they just hire an actual Cajun?  There are plenty of 'em around."

Given how long ago this happened, I don't recall exactly what it was that pinpointed his accent as fake; certainly he was trying his best to make it sound right, but it simply didn't work.  There was something about the pronunciation, but also the cadence -- the "swing" of the language -- that was way off.  And to anyone who grew up in southern Louisiana, it did exactly what movie directors never want to happen; it took the watcher right out of the scene, made them say, "Okay, that's an actor trying to play a role and not doing it all that well."

Sometimes actors can pull it off, of course.  David Tennant is Scottish, but does a convincing English accent as the Tenth Doctor in Doctor Who.  And in the episode "Tooth and Claw," there's a scene where he's pretending to be Scottish -- so he's a Scottish guy playing an English guy who's trying to do a Scottish accent badly. 

Strangely enough, it works.

The reason the topic comes up is a study out of Cambridge University that appeared last week in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, which tested various groups of people in the British Isles to see how good they are at detecting fake accents.  And it turns out that people from Glasgow, Dublin, Belfast, and Durham are way better at picking it up when someone's faking their regional accent than folks from the southeastern parts of England (including London), and also the area around the city of Bristol.

Glaswegians scored in the high seventies to around eighty percent accurate; people from Essex did the worst, averaging only a little better than chance.  The surmise is that the areas where the scores were lowest tended to be more cosmopolitan, where there's a greater likelihood that residents have moved there recently from somewhere else.  Hearing lots of different variations on an English accent, it appears, might make you less aware of when someone's faking your own.  Another factor is that some of the places that score the highest -- Glasgow and Belfast, especially -- have high amounts of regional pride, and value the local accent as a marker of belonging.

"The UK is a really interesting place to study," said linguist Jonathan Goodman, who led the study.  "The linguistic diversity and cultural history is so rich and you have so many cultural groups that have been roughly in the same location for a really long time.  Very specific differences in language, dialect and accents have emerged over time, and that's a fascinating side of language evolution...  Cultural, political, or even violent conflict are likely to encourage people to strengthen their accents as they try to maintain social cohesion through cultural homogeneity.  Even relatively mild tension, for example the intrusion of tourists in the summer, could have this effect...  I'm interested in the role played by trust in society and how trust forms.  One of the first judgments a person will make about another person, and when deciding whether to trust them, is how they speak.  How humans learn to trust another person who may be an interloper has been incredibly important over our evolutionary history and it remains critical today."

Which explains why Scottish people roll their eyes when they hear this guy say he's "an old Aberdeen pub-crawler."

James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, wasn't Scottish, he was Canadian -- the son of immigrants from Northern Ireland.

I know the whole "cultural marker" thing is why I picked up on Will Hare's terrible Cajun accent so quickly.  Cajuns were for many years a poor and marginalized community, ridiculed as being less intelligent and less cultured than the rich (mostly Anglo) landowners, so it was pretty common for Cajuns to try to unlearn their own accent in an attempt to blend in.  (My mom was painfully aware of her own accent, and in something a little like the Cambridge study turned on its head, adopted a stilted "King's English" accent when she had company -- I don't think anyone was fooled by it, and in any event, it's kind of sad she felt like she had to do that.)

What's interesting is that like the Glaswegians' pride in their own accent, in the last fifty years there's been a resurgence of Cajun pride in southern Louisiana, largely spearheaded by the late Jimmy Domengeaux, who founded CODOFIL, the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana.  Domengeaux was instrumental in repopularizing Cajun music and in preserving the Cajun French dialect.  They've even appropriated an insult; "coonass" was a derogatory epithet for Cajuns, of uncertain origin but thought to be from an old French slang word for prostitute, and I can remember when I was in high school starting to see bumper stickers saying "Proud To Be A Coonass."  (Nota bene: some southern Louisianans still consider it derogatory, and most people would never use it in polite conversation; and like most words of this type, it comes off completely differently when used by someone who is not Cajun themselves.  So it's still a word to be careful with.)

So that's our excursion into linguistics for today.  The upshot is not to try to fake an accent when you're in Great Britain or Ireland.  Or anywhere else, really.  People will usually figure you out, and it's not a good look.  Just enjoy the richness of variety in human speech -- and talk like you normally do.  They're probably as curious about your accent as you are about theirs.

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Rock of ages

One of the most amazing strides that's been made in science in the last hundred years is our ability to figure out how old stuff is.

Geologists have known for a long time that the Earth is old; how old, on the other hand, was a matter of serious debate.  Scottish geologist James Hutton, who pioneered the idea of uniformitarianism -- that the same slow, steady processes we see going on today have proceeded at essentially the same rate throughout Earth's history -- guessed that our planet was at least tens of millions of years old, and a far cry from the six-thousand-odd years the creationists of both his day and ours believe.  In fact, because the rocks he studied seemed to have been melted, eroded, remodeled, and remelted over and over, he thought it was entirely possible that the Earth was infinitely old; "The result of our present enquiry," he wrote, in his 1738 book Theory of the Earth, "is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end."

It was undeniable, though, that things had changed over time.  A century later, English geologist William Smith went all over the British Isles tracking similarities in rock outcroppings, and used index fossils -- fossil organisms characteristic of only short geological timespans, and therefore useful in dating strata -- to create a map of the country by geological age.  (That map has stood the test of time; in the nearly two centuries since he created it, there have been very few changes needed.)

But still, Hutton and Smith could only speculate as to how old particular rock outcrops were.  There might be Jurassic fossils to be found in Lyme Regis (on the Dorset coast) and in Cleveland (in Yorkshire), suggesting they're close to the same age, but what is their actual age?  It wasn't until American chemist Bertram Boltwood had a major brainstorm in 1907, realizing that the steady breakdown of radioisotopes in rock samples could act like a natural clock, that geologists had a tool to determine exactly how old various rock strata are.

Still, it's not easy.  Radioisotope dating rests on the assumption that the rock in question hasn't been significantly altered since formation.  If something has changed the amount of the radioisotope you're using (or its decay product), it will throw off your estimate of the age.  (That's why there's still argument over the Shroud of Turin; although radiocarbon dating has pretty conclusively shown that it's from the Middle Ages, there was a fire in the church where it was housed that deposited soot in the cloth, potentially altering the amount of carbon-14 in the fibers.  Almost all scientists, however, are of the opinion that this doesn't affect the calculation enough to increase its age by the twelve hundred years required to buy its divine origin.)

So radioisotope dating is a cool idea, but rests on some serious assumptions.  How do you make it more accurate?

Enter the humble zircon.

Zircons -- mostly made of zirconium silicate -- are crystalline minerals found kind of everywhere.  When big enough, they're decent semiprecious gemstones, but geologists love them for a different reason; they are amazingly good for geochronology.  They crystallize in many kinds of igneous rocks, and once they form, they are incredibly durable, resisting both physical and chemical weathering.  They contain trace amounts of radioactive elements, and when those decay, the decay products stay put, allowing zircons to act as extremely accurate radiochemical clocks.  They also trap the gases that were in the atmosphere at the time of formation, and the ratio of two oxygen isotopes (oxygen-16 and oxygen-18) gives a good idea of what the environment was doing at the time of formation.

This is how zircons from the Jack Hills Formation in Australia have been found to date from over four billion years ago -- and to show that even at that time, the Earth was cool enough to have a liquid water ocean.

The reason all this comes up, though, is not because of a terrestrial rock, but a Martian one.  The meteorite NWA 7034, found in Western Sahara in 2011, was blasted out of the surface of Mars by a (different) meteorite impact, ultimately landing on Earth; we know it's from Mars because of gas bubble inclusions that have a gas composition matching what we know of the Martian atmosphere.  And NWA 7034 contains zircon crystals that not only date back to 4.45 billion years ago...

... they show that they were formed in the presence of hot water.

A slice of zircon crystal from NWA 7034 [Image credit: Aaron Cavosie and Jack Gillespie]

The banding pattern shows alterations in iron, aluminum, and sodium concentration indicating that it formed in contact with high-temperature water, perhaps a hydrothermal vent system.

So amazing as it sounds, considering the Red Planet's current dry, dusty, windswept surface, four billion years ago it had liquid water, maybe even oceans of it.  Its lower gravitational pull meant that its atmosphere gradually leaked away to space, lowering the pressure and evaporating away the water it had.  But for a time, Mars was a wet planet.

And given how ecosystems flourish around Earth's hydrothermal vents, it may even have had life.

Even fervent aficionados of extraterrestrial life like myself doubt that Mars had time to evolve life of any great complexity; so I'm afraid C. S. Lewis's vision of the intelligent Hrossa and Séroni and Pfifltriggi in Out of the Silent Planet are going to remain forever in the realm of fiction.

A Malacandrian Hross [Image by artist Deimos Remus, licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA]

But it's entirely possible that it might, at some point, have had microbial life.  There's a slim (but nonzero) chance it still exists somewhere underground; what's more likely is that it left microfossils that could potentially be detected with more careful study of Martian rocks.  At this point, we don't know for sure, but the new study of the Western Sahara Martian meteorite certainly seems to support the possibility.

Whether or not that pans out, it's still pretty incredible that in only a little over a hundred years we've gone from "okay, this rock is probably about the same age as that rock" to being able to say "this tiny crystal formed on Mars near a hydrothermal vent 4.45 billion years ago, then got blasted into space and landed here."  Science will always have a capacity to astonish us.  

And if you're curious about the universe around you, the one certain thing is that you'll never be bored.

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Genetic walkabouts

Today's topic comes to us from the One Thing Leads To Another department.

I got launched into this particular rabbit hole by a notice from 23 & Me that they'd refined their analysis of their test subjects' DNA, and now had a bigger database to extract from, allowing them to make a better guess at "percent composition" not only by general region, but by specific sub-region.

So I took a look at my results.  My DNA came out 63.5% French, 25.3% Scottish and English, 6.4% Ashkenazi, and the remaining 4.8% a miscellany.  This works out to be pretty much what I'd expect from what I know of my family tree.  My mom was close to 100% French, but a great-grandfather of hers, one Solomon Meyer-Lévy, was a French Jew from Alsace and is the origin of the Ashkenazic DNA.  My dad was a bit of a hodgepodge in which French, Scottish, and English predominate.

So like I said, no surprises.  I'm a white guy of western European descent, which if you look at my profile photo, is probably not going to come as any sort of shock.

What I thought was more interesting was the regional breakdown.  The Scottish and English bits were especially interesting because I only have a handful of records documenting where exactly my British Isles forebears were from.  Apparently I have a cluster of genetic relatives around Glasgow, the London area, and Yorkshire.  Other than my dad's paternal family (which was from the French Alps, near Mont Blanc and the border of Italy) and my Alsatian great-great-grandfather, my French ancestry is all in western France; this lines up with what I know of my mom's family, which came from Bordeaux, Poitou, the Loire Valley, and Brittany.

So all of this shores up their claims to accuracy, because this was ascertained purely by my DNA -- I didn't send them my family tree, or anything.  But then this got combined with another random thing, which is that I've been reading a book called The Ancient Celts by anthropologist Barry Cunliffe, and I was kind of surprised at how much of Europe the Celts once ruled -- not only the British Isles and all of France (then called Gaul), but what is now Switzerland, southern Germany, Austria, the northern half of Italy, the eastern half of Spain, and down into a big chunk of the Balkans.  They seem to have been nothing if not inveterate wanderers, and their walkabouts took them just about everywhere in Europe but Scandinavia.  They were there for a long while, too; it was only when the Romans got their act together and started to push back that the Celts retreated; they were shoved farther west when first the Germanic tribes, and then the Slavs, moved in from the east and kind of kept moving.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This all got me thinking, "Okay, when I say my ancestry is on the order of 2/3 French, what exactly am I saying?"  So I started doing some research into "the ethnic origin of the French," and I found out that it's not simple.  The western parts of France (whence my mom's family originated) are mostly of Celtic (Gaulish) ancestry.  People in the southeast, especially the lowlands near Marseilles, have a lot of Roman and Etruscan forebears.  When you get over into Languedoc -- the southwestern part of France, near the border of Spain -- there's an admixture not only from the Moors of North Africa, but from the Basques, who seem to be the remnants of the earliest settlers of Europe, and are the only ones in western Europe who don't speak an Indo-European language.  In Normandy there's a good admixture of Scandinavian blood, from Vikings who settled there a thousand years ago -- in fact, "Normandy" means "North-man-land."  Despite the fact that the name of the country and its people comes from a Germanic tribe (the Franks), the only place there's a significant amount of Germanic ancestry in France is in the east -- from Burgundy north into Alsace, Lorraine, and Picardy.

Apparently the only reason the French are Frankish is because the Franks ruled the place for a few hundred years, a bit the way the Normans did in England.  The common people, your average seventeenth-century peasants in Bordeaux, probably were nearly 100% Gaulish Celt.

So when I say my mom's family is French, and a guy from Lille and a woman from Marseilles say the same thing, what exactly do we mean?

And there's nothing unusual about the French in that regard; I just use them as an example because I happen to know more about them.  The same is true pretty much anywhere you look except for truly insular cultures like Japan, which have had very little migration in or out for millennia.  We're almost all composites, and ultimately, all cousins.  I remember when I first ran into this idea; that the further back you go, the more our family trees all coalesce, and at some point in the past every human on Earth could be sorted into one of two categories -- people who were the ancestors of every one of us, and people who left no living descendants.

That point, most anthropologists believe, is way more recent than most of us would suspect.  I've heard -- to be fair, I've never seen it rigorously proven, but it sounds about right -- that the two-category split for those of us with western European ancestry happened in around 1,200 C.E.  So pick out anyone from thirteenth century western Europe, and (s)he's either my ancestor, or (s)he has no descendants at all.

This brings up a couple of things.  First, "royal blood" is an idiotic concept from just about whichever angle you choose.  Not only does royal ancestry not confer fitness for leading a country -- let's face it, a lot of those kings were absolute loonies -- I can pretty much guarantee that I descend from Charlemagne, and if you have European ancestry, so do you.  My wife actually descends from an illegitimate child of King Edward IV of England (something she likes to remind me about whenever I get uppity), but the truth is, all of us have royal blood and peasant blood pretty well mixed indiscriminately.

Second, racism, ethnicism, and xenophobia are all equally ridiculous, since (1) we're virtually all genetic mixtures, (2) regardless of our ethnicity, our genetic similarities far outweigh our differences, and (3) we're all cousins anyhow.  I find that rather cool, honestly -- that a Zulu woman living in Botswana and I have common ancestry if you go back far enough.  Race is a cultural construct, not a genetic one, which you can see with extraordinary vividness if you take a DNA test, or if you read anything about the migration patterns humanity has taken since first leaving the East African savanna something like 250,000 years ago.

Anyhow, those are my musings about ethnicity, DNA, ancestry, and so on.  It all goes to show that we're wonderfully complex creatures, and the determination of some of us to see the world as if it was straightforward black-and-white is not only inaccurate, it misses a great deal of the most interesting parts of it.  As the brilliant science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anybody who found life simple.  I think a life or a time looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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Celestial smashup

Just about everyone with even a passing interest in astronomy knows that the universe is expanding.

Ever since Edwin Hubble realized back in 1929 that almost everything outside of our own galaxy is redshifted (moving away from us), and that the degree of a galaxy's redshift is proportional to its distance from us -- something that has since been named Hubble's Law -- we've known that space is getting larger.  So, Hubble and others reasoned, if you run the clock backwards, there must have been a time when everything was collapsed together into one colossally dense point, that then for some reason that is still unknown, began to rush outward.

In other words, the Big Bang, which seems to have happened about 13.8 billion years or so ago, give or take a day or two.

However, that doesn't mean that everything is moving apart.  Within our own galaxy, there's enough mutual gravitational pull from all the massive objects therein to overcome the expansion, at least for now.  (Whether that'll continue forever remains to be seen; hold that thought, I'll get back to it.)  Even outside of our own galaxy, the members of the Local Group are gravitationally bound, and in fact, the nearest galaxy to us, Andromeda, is moving toward us at the impressive speed of 110 kilometers per second, so the Milky Way and Andromeda will eventually collide.

There are two reasons you shouldn't fret about this.  The first is that it's not going to happen for something like three billion years.  The other is that usually when two galaxies collide, shifts in the gravitational field fling stuff around, but very few collisions are expected to occur between individual stars.  Galaxies are, in fact, mostly empty space; if the Sun was the size of a typical orange and was sitting in the middle of downtown Washington D.C., the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) would be a slightly smaller orange... in San Francisco.

So while the alterations in mass distribution during a collision might throw stuff around a bit, and certainly change the shape of both galaxies, it's unlikely that any intelligent civilizations in the new combined Andromilkyway would be otherwise perturbed by it.

Note, however, I said that this is the case when two galaxies collide usually.

A paper last week in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society describes a collision that occurred in a cluster of galaxies called "Stephan's Quintet," located (fortunately) about 290 million light years from here.  Recall my saying that the Andromeda Galaxy and Milky Way are moving toward each other at 110 kilometers per second; this enormous wreck happened eight times faster than that, with a speed that has generated a tremendous shock wave akin to a sonic boom in space.

Stephan's Quintet, showing the region affected by the collision [Image credit: Arnaudova et al., University of Hertfordshire]

"Since its discovery in 1877, Stephan's Quintet has captivated astronomers, because it represents a galactic crossroad where past collisions between galaxies have left behind a complex field of debris," said Marina Arnaudova of the University of Hertfordshire, who led the research.  "Dynamical activity in this galaxy group has now been reawakened by a galaxy smashing through it at an incredible speed of over 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h), leading to an immensely powerful shock, much like a sonic boom from a jet fighter.  As the shock moves through pockets of cold gas, it travels at hypersonic speeds – several times the speed of sound in the intergalactic medium of Stephan’s Quintet – powerful enough to rip apart electrons from atoms, leaving behind a glowing trail of charged gas, as seen with WEAVE [the William Herschel Telescope Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer]."

Which actually spells "WHTEAVE," but the discovery is cool enough that we'll let that slide.

The shock wave also compresses that interstellar gas and causes it to emit radio waves, which confirmed Arnaudova's team's discovery.

So locally, stuff can certainly move together, sometimes violently, even though the overall trend of the universe is to expand.

But.

According to a recent study by the Dark Energy Survey Project, there's a possibility that the amount of dark energy has changed over the life of the universe -- and is changing in such a way that it will affect the universe's ultimate fate.  If the amount of dark energy per unit volume of space were constant, it would mean that its effects on expansion would increase over time (since matter is thinning out, and the gravitational pull of matter is what's holding things together).  Thus, its outward pressure would proportionally increase, eventually overcoming all other attractive forces and ripping everything apart down to the constituent atoms.

This has always seemed to me to be a rather dismal prospect, not that I'll be around to see it.  Everything spread out in a thin soup of subatomic particles, and that's that.

But the new data suggests that the amount of dark energy is actually decreasing over time, meaning that its effects will gradually diminish -- and gravity will win, resulting in a "Big Crunch."  Everything turning around, falling inward, and ultimately colliding in a colossal smashup that might perhaps rebound in another Big Bang, and a new universe that resets the dials and starts it all over.

I first ran into this "oscillating universe" model when I took an astronomy class in college, and I thought it was a pretty cool idea; certainly better than the "Big Rip" that's predicted if the amount of dark energy per unit volume of space is a constant.  The point is still being debated, and (much) more data is needed to determine which is correct; but I, for one, would love it if the laws of nature were such that the universe might go through an unlimited number of bounces, and the whole game would begin again.

Maybe, just maybe, with any sentient life forms that evolve in Universe v. 2.0 getting a shot at doing it better next time.

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Deus in machina

Inevitably when I post something to the effect of "ha-ha, isn't this the weirdest thing you've ever heard?", my readers take this as some kind of challenge and respond with, "Oh, yeah?  Well, wait'll you get a load of this."

Take, for example, yesterday's post, about some "Etsy witches" who for a low-low-low payment of $7.99 will put a curse on Elon Musk (or, presumably, anyone else you want), which prompted a loyal reader of Skeptophilia to send me a link with a message saying "this should significantly raise the bar on your standards for what qualifies as bizarre."  The link turned out to be to an article in The Guardian about St. Peter's Chapel in Lucerne, Switzerland, where they've set up a confessional booth -- but instead of a priest, it's equipped with a computer and an AI interface intended to be a proxy for Jesus Christ himself.

The program is called -- I shit you not -- "Deus in Machina."

You can have a chat with Our Digital Lord and Savior in any of a hundred different languages, and get answers to whatever questions you want, from the doctrinal to the personal.  Although, says theologian Marco Schmid, who is running the whole thing, "People are advised not to disclose any personal information and confirm that they knew they were engaging with the avatar at their own risk.  It’s not a confession.  We are not intending to imitate a confession."

Which reminds me of the disclaimers on alt-med ads saying "This is not meant to address, treat, or cure any ailment, condition, or disease," when everything else in the advertisement is clearly saying that it'll address, treat, or cure an ailment, condition, or disease.

Schmid said that the church leaders had been discussing doing this for a while, and were wondering how to approach it, then settled on the "Go Big Or Go Home" model.  "It was really an experiment," Schmid said.  "We wanted to see and understand how people react to an AI...  What would they talk with him about?  Would there be interest in talking to him?  We’re probably pioneers in this...  We had a discussion about what kind of avatar it would be – a theologian, a person or a saint?  But then we realized the best figure would be Jesus himself."

[Image credit: artist Peter Diem, Lukasgesellschaft]

So far, over a thousand people have had a heart-to-heart with AI Jesus, and almost a quarter of them ranked it as a "spiritual experience."  Not all of them were impressed, however.  A local reporter covering the story tried it out, and said that the results were "trite, repetitive, and exuding a wisdom reminiscent of calendar clichés."

Given how notorious AI has become for dispensing false or downright dangerous information -- the worst example I know of being a mushroom-identification program that identified deadly Amanita mushrooms as "edible and delicious," and even provided recipes for how to cook them -- Schmid and the others involved in the AI Jesus project knew they were taking a serious chance with regards to what the digital deity might say.  "It was always a risk that the AI might dole out responses that were illegal, explicit, or offer up interpretations or spiritual advice that clashed with church teachings," Schmid said.  "We never had the impression he was saying strange things.  But of course we could never guarantee that he wouldn’t say anything strange."

This, plus the predictable backlash they've gotten from more conservative members of the Catholic Church, has convinced Schmid to pull the plug on AI Jesus for now.  "To put a Jesus like that permanently, I wouldn’t do that," Schmid said.  "Because the responsibility would be too great."

I suppose so, but to me, it opens up a whole bizarre rabbit hole of theological questions.  Do the two-hundred-some-odd people who had "spiritual experiences" really think they were talking to Jesus?  Or, more accurately, getting answers back from Jesus?  (As James Randi put it, "It's easy to talk to the dead; anyone can do it.  It's getting the dead to talk back that's the difficult part.")  I guess if you think that whatever deity you favor is all-powerful, he/she/it could presumably work through a computer to dispense some divinely-inspired wisdom upon you.  After all, every cultural practice (religious or not) has to have started somewhere, so maybe the people who object to AI Jesus are just freaking out because it's new and unfamiliar.

On the other hand, as regular readers of Skeptophilia know, I'm no great fan of AI in general, not only because of the potential for "hallucinations" (a sanitized techbro term meaning "outputting bizarre bullshit"), but because the way it's currently being developed and trained is by stealing the creativity, time, and skill of thousands of artists, musicians, and writers who never get a penny's worth of compensation.  So personally, I'm glad to wave goodbye to AI Jesus for a variety of reasons.

But given humanity's propensity for doing weird stuff, I can nearly guarantee this won't be the end of it.  Just this summer I saw a sign out in our village that a local church was doing "drive-through blessings," for your busy sinner who would like to save his immortal soul but can't be bothered to get out of his car.  Stuff like Schmid's divine interface will surely appeal to the type who wants to make religious experiences more efficient.  No need to schedule a confession with the priest; just switch on AI Jesus, and you're good to go.

I bet the next thing is that you'll be able to download an AI Jesus app, and then you don't even have to go to church.  You can whip out your phone and be granted absolution on your coffee break.

I know I'm not a religious type, but this is even giving me the heebie-jeebies.  I can't help but think that the Spiritual Experiences While-U-Wait Express Mart approach isn't going to connect you with any higher truths about the universe, and in fact isn't really benefiting anyone except the programmers who are marketing the software.

Until, like Gary Larson foresaw in The Far Side, someone thinks of equipping the Heavenly Computer with a "Smite" key.  Then we're all fucked.

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Curses! Foiled again!

Never say "How much weirder can things get?"

Ordinarily I'm the least superstitious person in the room, but I make an exception in this case.  When you say this kind of shit -- like I did when I was working out with my athletic trainer yesterday -- the universe is listening.

What spurred me to open my big mouth was, of course, all of the bizarre cabinet appointments by President-elect Donald Trump.  We had accused pedophile and sex trafficker Matt Gaetz for Attorney General; I say "had" with a smile on my face because he just withdrew, apparently sensing correctly that his accusers have the goods on him and he would be fucked sideways if he did his usual chest-thumping, I'm So Tough And Belligerent Act.  (What's amusing is that he's already resigned from Congress; I wonder if he's going to try to tell them, "Oh, wait, never mind about my resignation"?  The majority of his colleagues hate him, so my guess is they'll say "Sorry, buddy, no takesy-backsies," resulting in Gaetz doing something my grandma used to call "falling between two chairs.")  We have a WWE executive for Education Secretary and a Fox News host for Defense; both of them have also been implicated in sex scandals, which is more and more seeming like a qualification for being a Trump nominee rather than a disqualification.  We have a dangerously wacko anti-vaxxer for Health and Human Services Secretary and a loony alt-med personality to run Medicare and Medicaid.

So in an unguarded moment, I said to my trainer, "Well, at least the world can't get much weirder than it already is."

Ha.  A lot I know.

I got home from training, showered and dressed, then got a snack and sat down for a quick check of the interwebz.  And the very first thing I saw was that there is now a service on Etsy where you can pay $7.99 to have a witch put a curse on Elon Musk.

The whole thing became internet-famous because of a woman named Riley Wenckus, who apparently found out about "Etsy Witches" who will do spells for you, and she hired one of them to curse Musk -- then went on TikTok and bragged about it.  "Elon motherfucking Musk!" she shouted.  "I just paid an Etsy witch $7.99 to make your life a living hell!"

This video has been viewed five million times.

"The Three Witches from Macbeth" by Morton Cavendish (1909) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Wenckus explained her actions by saying "I was feeling really existential about what I can do," to which I respond, "Um... yay?  I think?  Or maybe 'I'm so sorry?'"  Because I have no idea what she means by "feeling existential."  But I'm happy that she's taken a concrete step toward feeling either more or less existential by cursing Musk, depending on whether she thinks it's a good or a bad thing.

I dunno.  I'm as confused as you are.

In any case, we also learn that the recipe for an anti-Musk curse involves a white candle, cayenne pepper, lavender, salt, and bay leaves.  So at least it'll make your house smell nice.

Wenckus herself says she's not sure it'll work, but is hopeful that if she's started a trend, maybe it'll accomplish something.  "I am a person grounded in reality who believes in science," she said.  "But I still think there's something to be said for having millions upon millions of people wishing for your downfall."

Now, mind you, I'm not saying that ill-wishing a horrible human being like Elon Musk isn't completely understandable.  He is one of the most genuinely loathsome people I can think of, and deserves every last one of the hexes that are thrown his way.  I'm just doubtful that it'll work.  But by all means, if you want to follow suit and add your own curse to Wenckus's (and, I'm sure, many others), knock yourself out.  You can find out how in the link provided.

As for me, I'm gonna save my $7.99, but I'm also formally announcing my abandonment of any expectations that the world will undergo some sort of normalizing regression to the mean.  Whatever the cause of how insane things have been lately -- if, for example, my suspicion is correct, and the aliens who are running the computer simulation we're all trapped in have gotten drunk and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us -- I give up.  Y'all win.  I'm embracing the weirdness.

I guess this is what they mean by "living in interesting times."

So go ahead, universe.  I'm ready.  Have at it.  If things are going to be terrible, at least keep making them entertaining.

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Tying God's hands

Today, for the umpteenth time, I saw the following image posted on social media:

The people who posted it apparently think that it's entirely appropriate to use the deaths of innocent people in school shootings to lob some snark at the atheists, secularists, and others who believe in the separation of church and state.  But what I want to address here is the toxicity of the mindset behind the message -- apart from what would spur someone to think that it was ever a reasonable thing to post.

First, I thought y'all were the ones who believed that God is everywhere, is omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient and omni-what-have-you.  What you're implying here is that a handful of people who think religion has no place in a public, taxpayer-funded institution have somehow overpowered an all-powerful God's ability to do anything to stop a crazed gunman.  Probably explaining why both Oklahoma and Texas are currently poised to approve and implement new laws requiring public school teachers to work lessons from the Bible into their curricula; it's easier than doing anything to actually improve education and keep children safe, and leaves the powers-that-be with a nice smug feeling of holiness afterward. 

It's basically "Thoughts & Prayers" v. 2.0, with a side order of Showing All The Other Religions Who's Boss.

So we're already on some shaky theological grounds, but it gets worse.  What the above message suggests is that somehow, God's attitude is, "if you won't pray in schools, innocent children deserve to die."  That given the choice of using his Miraculous God Powers to stop a massacre, he just stands there smirking, and afterwards says, "See?  Told you something like this would happen if you didn't worship me all the time and everywhere.  Sorry, but my hands were tied."

Me, I think any deity that acts like this is a monster, not an all-loving beneficent creator.  That said, it's entirely consistent with the depiction of the Lord of Hosts in the Old Testament.  The Old Testament God was constantly smiting people left and right for such heinous crimes as gathering firewood on the sabbath, and when the Chosen People of Israel conquered a place, the word from above was "kill everyone, including children."

Don't believe me?  There are plenty of instances, but my favorite is 1 Samuel 15:

This is what the Lord Almighty says: "I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.  Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them.  Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."  So Saul summoned the men and mustered them at Telaim—two hundred thousand foot soldiers and ten thousand from Judah.

Long story short, Saul did as told, killing everyone up to and including the donkeys, but the Lord was still pissed off for some reason, and the Prophet Samuel told Saul so.  Apparently it had to do with the fact that Saul had spared the Amalekite King, Agag (like I said before, to hell with the children).  So Saul executed Agag, but the Lord still wasn't happy with him.

There's no impressing all-powerful deities, some days.

Anyhow, what this shows is that people who post bullshit like the above image are simply describing how the Old Testament God does, in fact, behave.

The whole thing brings to memory a quote from Richard Dawkins.  I know his very name justifiably raises pretty much everyone's hackles, but it's so germane to this topic that I would be remiss in not including it:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

To which I can only say: touché.

The deepest problem, though, is the one that the people who post this nonsense would be the least likely to admit; when they advocate tearing down the wall between church and state, they're absolutely adamant that it can only be for the benefit of one particular church.  Start talking about having Jewish prayers or quotes from the Qu'ran or some of the Ten Thousand Sayings of Buddha festooned about the walls of classrooms, and you'll have these same people screaming bloody murder.  Hell, I bet they'd even get their knickers in a twist over which flavor of Christianity you're allowed to promote.

Hey, teachers in Oklahoma or Texas: maybe you should try posting quotes and sermons and whatnot from the Patriarch Bartholomew of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and see what happens.  Maybe even insist that the children put up Christmas decorations on January 7, when the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas.

Could be an interesting experiment to run.

So as usual, what we're talking about is a combination of ugly theology and smug hypocrisy.  And it would be hardly worth commenting on if it weren't for the power that these attitudes still have, and the increasing degree to which they still influence policy in the United States -- something that is only going to extend further with the incoming administration, especially if more Christofascists like Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee get confirmed in high-level positions.

Other than railing about it here on Skeptophilia, though, I'm not sure what to do.  Anyone who really believes this -- anyone, in other words, who wasn't just trying to score some points off the nonbelievers -- has subscribed to a belief system that is very close to the definition of moral bankruptcy, so trying to reach them via argument is probably a forlorn hope.

And people talk about us atheists being amoral.

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