The problem of choice

I was telling a friend about my current novel work-in-progress, Nightingale, a couple of days ago, and he asked me an interesting question: to what extent is the main character... me?

On the surface, it seems like there's very little in common.  Simon de Montbard is the scion of minor French nobility in the thirteenth century, and gets himself involved in political intrigue that takes him to the king's court in Paris, then to Scotland, and finally to the Holy Land.  He was crippled as an infant by polio, with the result of partial one-sided facial paralysis and a stunted right leg.  His physical deficits result in his being continually misjudged and devalued; this was a culture where deformities of any kind were considered to be God's punishment for some kind of sin, and always to go along with mental and spiritual defects.  He has to prove himself, again and again, to every new person he meets.

Montbard, France, where Simon grew up [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Benjamin Smith, Montbard - Brenne - 2, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But internally -- yeah, there's a lot of similarity.  Simon's struggles have made him hesitant, slow to trust, taciturn.  But despite his reluctance to engage, there's a deep yearning for more from life than what he thought he'd have -- managing the family estate, leading a life of idleness and the privileges of being comfortably wealthy during a time when the vast majority of people never had enough to eat.  Because of that drive, he is impelled to take chances, almost despite himself.  Some work out well; he finds deep and abiding love in a very unexpected person.  Others -- not so much.  People he trusted take advantage of him, eventually cornering him into a situation where he has no choice but to kill someone, an event that overshadows the entire rest of his life.  All along the way, he questions whether he's made the right choices -- or, indeed, if he even could have chosen differently.

And throughout, he receives guidance from Procellus, the mysterious, quasi-angelic figure whom no one else but Simon seems to be able to see or hear.  Is he a figment of Simon's imagination, an internal guide made external -- or something more real?  In the ship on the way to the Holy Land, they have the following conversation:

“What awaits us in the Holy Land?” I asked Procellus.

“You know I cannot tell you that.”  A faint smile touched his lips, but his expression still held sadness.

“But you know.”

He shrugged.  “I know some. Other things—well, as I said, it is still up to you.  Your whole path until this very moment, every step of the way, you might have chosen differently, and the trajectory of your life would have had a very different shape.  I’ve never forced you to do anything.  It’s always been your choice.”

“It feels like fate.”

“That’s only because you’re seeing it from the perspective of right now.  From that vantage point each step you take shapes the next one, but the destination lies in deep shadow.  But it is the way of all humans, is it not?  So do not worry yourself overmuch about the possibility of getting to the end of your life and finding you did not choose perfectly every time.  If you can lie down on that last day and smile, and say, ‘I did well enough with what I knew at the time, and things worked out as they should have’ you will be far ahead of most.”

“But even so, Procellus—people will still harm each other and deceive each other and… die.”

I almost couldn’t choke out the final word.

“Yes.”

“No matter what I do.”

“Yes.  But don’t take that to mean you don’t make a difference.  Each person’s choices create what is.  There is no such thing as an insignificant choice.”

It's something I've wrestled with all my life.  What would my life have been if I'd made different choices?  What I've many times called "the worst decision I ever made" -- to live at home while I went to college, instead of venturing out and going somewhere out-of-state, a decision made purely out of fear of the unknown -- would have led to my not meeting people who have been friends ever since.  I would never have met my first wife, so my two sons wouldn't have been born.  I'd never have moved to Seattle, and might not have ended up in a 32-year career of teaching in which I touched hundreds of lives. 

Or, what if I'd come out as queer when I knew it -- age seventeen -- rather than staying in the closet until I was 54?  I could have lived life more authentically, and avoided years of fear and shame.  But -- this would have been in the 1970s in a very religious, conservative part of the country.  And I was in my early twenties at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when testing positive was still pretty much a death sentence.  I can easily imagine myself being one of those first victims.

Everything is contingent.

Or maybe -- nothing is.  Is it the way Procellus describes it, that we could all along have made different choices?  Or that choices only seem like choices with the benefit of hindsight, and we truly did the only things we could have done given who we were, and what the circumstances were, at the time? 

This gets into the whole issue of free will versus determinism, which has been debated endlessly and upon which I am dramatically unqualified to weigh in.  Interestingly, just a couple of days ago, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder commented on a paper alleging to show that quantum physics precludes the possibility of free will.  The claim hinges on the no-cloning theorem of quantum physics, which seems to forbid our making high-fidelity models of reality in our own minds, rendering us incapable of representing choices well enough to made decisions.  She was dubious that the argument holds water, and like her, I seriously doubt this will settle the matter to anyone's satisfaction.

So, like Simon, I'm stuck endlessly questioning my decisions, and wondering if I chose right, or if I even could have chosen any differently.

Anyhow, in answer to my friend's question; yeah, I guess Simon de Montbard is a lot like me, if not in the circumstantial characteristics, in the deeper, internal ones.  Maybe we authors do this all the time, though -- writing out our own victories and tragedies, joys and sorrows, through our characters.  Writing as therapy, in the hopes that others who have been through similar situations will find it as therapeutic to read.

And -- back to work on Nightingale.  I'm three-quarters of the way through, but Simon still has a long voyage yet to take.  I hope to finish it early in 2026; we'll see how it goes.  It's been an interesting story to tell, featuring a few pivotal points in history, including the beginning of the Scottish Civil War, the Siege of Acre, and the collapse of the Templars.  But I hope that when it's done, it'll be the characters who stay with you.  They seem so real to me it's almost like I know them, as if I'm witnessing what real people are doing and simply writing it down.  A story I am somehow compelled to tell, and about which I have little agency to change.

Whether that sense of compulsion is itself an illusion is beyond my ability to parse.

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Hoax repair

There's a general rule that once a baseless claim is made, getting people to disbelieve in it is nearly impossible.

This is a pattern the Trump regime has used over and over, from "they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats" to COVID conspiracies to "the libruls are comin' for your guns" to "queer people are all pedophiles" to the endless parade of migrant caravans that conveniently never seem to arrive.  None of them had any factual basis; instead, they appealed to fear and bigotry, reinforced by the perpetual tape-loop of Fox and Newsmax and hate-mongers like Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Loomer.

What always strikes me, though, is that you don't even need to hook into those basic human emotions to get the ball rolling, and once it is rolling, it's damn near impossible to stop.  What you're claiming doesn't even need to make sense.  All it takes is a single sensational claim at the right time, and it can persist for years.

Centuries, even.  Take, for example, the claim that a cave was discovered in 1909 in the Grand Canyon that contained Egyptian artifacts.

The whole thing got started with a front-page story in the Arizona Gazette on 5 April 1909, stating that an immense cave complex was being investigated by a team from the Smithsonian Institution, led by archaeologists G. E. Kincaid and S. A. Jordan.  The cave, the article said, contained "rows of dozens of male mummies," copper and bronze tools, "granaries," and statues with "Buddhist imagery."  This, the article said, provided conclusive proof that Egypt and the American southwest were historically linked.

Well, needless to say -- or maybe I do need to say it, considering what happened afterward -- none of this is true.  For one thing, why we'd expect an ancient Egyptian cave would contain "Buddhist imagery" is beyond me; maybe to your typical early-twentieth-century American, Egypt and India both just fell under the heading of "mysterious and oriental," and that was good enough.  For another, an inquiry into the Smithsonian found no employees named G. E. Kincaid or S. A. Jordan, or anything close, who could be plausibly connected with an archaeological investigation in that time or place.

But none of that mattered.  The situation only got worse when geologist Clarence Dutton was in charge of mapping and naming features of the Grand Canyon, and came up with "Isis Temple" and "Horus Temple" (as well as the Brahma and Vishnu Schists and the Zoroaster Pluton, since we're throwing all the eastern religions together for some reason).  Dutton's choices had zero to do with the Arizona Gazette article -- they were, he said, from a desire to "draw from global mythologies" in naming the features -- but of course, all this did was add fuel to the fire.

So, okay.  We have a hoax from 1909.  What is remarkable is...

... it's still going.

Park rangers, archaeologists, and geologists are still routinely asked about the "Kincaid cave" and if there's a place where tourists can see all the "Egyptian artifacts" that were found in the Grand Canyon.  There are YouTube videos about it -- not as an example of a ridiculous hoax, but of a coverup by the Smithsonian.  (This is often paired with the other thing the Smithsonian is supposedly covering up, which is the discovery of the skeletons of giant humanoids in North America, allegedly the remains of the biblical "giants among men," about which I wrote a few years ago.)

What strikes me about all this is how easy it is to promote misinformation, and that it's nearly impossible to eradicate it once it's out there.  Hell, it doesn't even have to be plausible.  It's astonishing that even back in 1909, when our knowledge of history, archaeology, and science wasn't as robust, anyone could fall for this.  But combine two things with a lot of cachet -- the Grand Canyon and ancient Egypt -- then throw in the added interest of a massive coverup by the scientists, and you have a hoax that has persisted for well over a hundred years.

Which is why it's so absolutely critical to demand the truth right from the outset -- especially in realms where it matters way more than some strange story about ancient Egyptians in Arizona.  Because once people believe a lie, getting them to let it go is remarkably difficult.

And I swear, the first journalist with the guts to say to Karoline Leavitt, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, or Donald Trump himself -- on a live mic in front of an audience -- "What you just said was a bald-faced lie," should be an immediate contender for the Pulitzer Prize.

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The advantage of simplicity

One of the most common misconceptions about evolution is that it is goal-oriented.

You hear it all the time.  Giraffes evolved longer necks so they could reach foliage higher up in tree branches -- as if some poor short-necked giraffes  were trundling about on the African savanna looking longingly up into the canopy and thinking, "Wow, that looks amazing," so their kids were born with longer necks.  It becomes even more insidious when you start talking about human evolution, because the way it's often presented is that waaaaaay back you had something like a jellyfish that evolved into something like a worm, and then into a primitive fish, into an amphibian, into a reptile, into a proto-mammal, into true mammals then primates then...

... us.  Sitting, of course, on the very top as befits the pinnacle of evolution, as if all along we're what the whole process had been aiming at.

This misses the boat in several very important ways.  One is that this linear view of evolution is simply wrong.  Evolution causes repeated branching; in fact, in our own lineage, many of the basic body plans we have today (flatworms, roundworms, jellyfish, annelids, mollusks, echinoderms, arthropods, and primitive vertebrates) all arose at around the same time, during what's called the Cambrian explosion.  During the intervening 540-million-odd years since that happened, some of the branches of the tree of life have changed a great deal more than others; but all living things on Earth have exactly the same length of evolutionary history.

A really critical way that the teleological model for evolution fails is that it misses completely how evolution actually works.  Natural selection isn't forward-looking at all; it operates by the environment selecting the forms that have the highest survival and reproductive potential now, irrespective of what the conditions might be a week from Tuesday.  It is very much the Law of Whatever Works, and what works today might not work at all if conditions change -- something we should pay attention to apropos of climate change.

A third problem is the perception that evolution always leads to higher complexity, strength, and intelligence.  None of these are true.  Consider that insects, especially beetles, are the most numerous and diverse animals on Earth by far -- both species-wise, and individual-for-individual, insects outnumber all other animals put together.  Sometimes simplicity has a higher survival advantage than complexity does, and -- to judge by the natural world, and even a significant fraction of the human part of it -- I'm not convinced that intelligence is always an advantage, either.

As a good example of the advantage of simplicity -- and the reason the topic comes up today -- consider the little plant species Balanophora fungosa.  It's found in warm, moist forests in Taiwan, Japan, and Okinawa, and on first glance it looks like a strange mushroom.  Balanophora is in the family Balanophoraceae, which comprises sixteen genera and is somewhat tentatively placed in order Santalales along with more familiar plants like sandalwood and mistletoe.  All the members of Balanophoraceae are obligate parasites, living off the roots of very specific species of trees.

Balanophora fungosa [Image credit: Petra Svetlikova]

Where it gets interesting is that Balanophora has done what superficially looks like evolution in reverse.  It's lost its ability to produce chlorophyll; it has no conventional root system.  Most of the plant kingdom have on the order of two hundred genes whose job it is to produce and operate plastids, the pigment-containing organelles that include chloroplasts; Balanophora has reduced that number to twenty.  Many species in Balanophoraceae produce seeds without fertilization, obviating the need for flowers.

What's curious is that these odd little plants have been around for a long time.  They branched off from the rest of the plant kingdom in the mid-Cretaceous period, something like a hundred million years ago, and have been quietly doing their thing ever since, gradually evolving to jettison structures (and even genes) they don't need along the way.  "Balanophora has lost much of what defines it as a plant, but retained enough to function as a parasite," said Petra Svetlikova, of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, who led the study.  "It's a fascinating example of how something so strange can evolve from an ancestor that looked like a normal plant with leaves and a normal root system."

Because of its extreme specialization, both in terms of habitat and host species, Balanophora is threatened by habitat change.  "Most known habitats of Balanophora are protected in Okinawa, but the populations face extinction by logging and unauthorized collection," Svetlikova said.  "We hope to learn as much as we can about this fantastic, ancient plant before it's too late.  It serves as a reminder of how evolution continues to surprise us."

So there you have some cool research about an evolutionary holdout from a hundred-million-year-old split in the tree of life.  Here, simplicity, not complexity, seems to have been the key to its long survival.  One can only hope that this strange little plant hasn't lasted so long only to reach the end because of us.

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A twist in the fabric

I hope y'all will indulge me one more astronomical post, because just this week in the journal Science Advances there was a very cool paper about an observational verification of the phenomenon of frame-dragging.

The whole thing depends on the the concept of "the fabric of space-time," something that got ripped so often on Star Trek that you'd swear the universe was made of cheap pantyhose.  To be fair, the idea isn't easy to wrap your brain around, something that becomes obvious when you hear some laypeople talking about the Big Bang.

I mean, I try to be tolerant, but if I hear one more person say, "It's a stupid idea -- that nothing exploded and became everything," I swear, I'm going to hurl a heavy object at 'em.

The problem hinges on trying to draw an analogy between the Big Bang (or in general, the expansion of the Universe) with a conventional explosion, where something blows up and spreads out into space that was already there.  With the Big Bang, it was space itself that was stretching -- if the idea of cosmic inflation turns out to be correct, at first it was at a rate that I can't even begin to comprehend -- so the matter in the Universe moved, and is still moving, not because something was physically pushing on it (as in the explosion of a stick of dynamite), but because the space it was embedded in was expanding.

(For what it's worth -- no, at this point we don't understand why this happened, what initiated it, or why the rate changed so suddenly after the "inflationary era" was over.  There is a lot still to figure out about this.  But one thing that's nearly certain is that it did happen, and the evidence still left behind of the Big Bang is incontrovertible.)

In any case, it's useful to change the comparison.  The Big Bang, and the expansion that followed, is much less like a conventional explosion than it is like blowing up a balloon.  Astronomer Edwin Hubble realized this when he first observed red shift, and found that everywhere he looked in the universe, objects seemed to be flying away from us -- the farther away, the faster they were moving.  It looked very much like we were the center of the Universe, the middle of the explosion, as if you were at the very point where a bomb exploded and were watching the bits and pieces rush away from you.

The truth, Hubble realized, was more subtle, but also way more interesting.  The fabric of space itself was stretching.  Picture a deflated balloon covered with dots.  You're a tiny person standing on one of the dots.  The balloon inflates -- and all the other dots appear to be rushing away from you.  But the weird thing is that it doesn't matter which dot you're standing on.  You could be on any dot, and still all the others would appear to be moving away, because the surface itself is expanding.  So an alien in a distant galaxy would also think everything was moving away from him, and he and Hubble would both be right.

There is no center of the Universe.  Or everywhere is the center.

Which amounts to the same thing.

So it's much more accurate, if you're trying to picture the whole thing, to think of space as being some kind of "stuff" capable of being deformed or stretched.

Which leads us to this week's mind-blowing discovery in astronomy.

One of the stranger predictions of the General Theory of Relativity -- and there's a lot of competition in that regard -- is that a massive spinning object would drag space-time along with it, twisting it out of shape in a phenomenon called Lense-Thirring frame dragging after the Austrian physicists who predicted it based on Einstein's theories, Josef Lense and Hans Thirring.  The problem is, like most of the phenomena associated with Relativity, the Lense-Thirring effect would only be observed in extreme conditions -- in this case a very high-mass object spinning really fast.

To give you an idea of what kind of extremes I'm talking about, here: with the Earth's mass and spin, the Lense-Thirring effect would cause an angular shift of about one degree every 100,000 years.

Not exactly something that jumps out at you.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/H. Kim et al., Celestial spiral with a twist, CC BY 4.0]

Now some scientists led by Cosimo Inserra of Cardiff University have found a remarkable pair of stellar remnants that provide the perfect laboratory for observing frame-dragging -- a star undergoing a "tidal disruption event" from a supermassive black hole (i.e. it's being messily devoured).  This is an ideal pairing to study because the star is orbiting the black hole once every twenty days, and the lighthouse-like beam of x-rays and radio waves produced as the material gets swallowed appears from our perspective to flicker on and off.  Conservation of Angular Momentum makes the flicker rate extremely constant.

But because of the Lense-Thirring effect, both the jets and the accretion disk of material swirling around the black hole have developed a wobble, which makes the entire system precess like a spinning top.  And the rate of precession...

... is exactly what is predicted from the General Theory of Relativity.

"Our study shows the most compelling evidence yet of Lense-Thirring precession -- a black hole dragging space time along with it in much the same way that a spinning top might drag the water around it in a whirlpool," Inserra said.  "This is a real gift for physicists as we confirm predictions made more than a century ago.  Not only that, but these observations also tell us more about the nature of TDEs -- when a star is shredded by the immense gravitational forces exerted by a black hole.  Unlike previous TDEs studied, which have steady radio signals, the signal for AT2020afhd showed short-term changes, which we were unable to attribute to the energy release from the black hole and its surrounding components.  This is further confirmed the dragging effect in our minds and offers scientists a new method for probing black holes."

The whole thing is staggering when you think about it.  Even the fact that we can detect such a small effect from this distance is a testimony to how far science has come.

"By showing that a black hole can drag space time and create this frame-dragging effect, we are also beginning to understand the mechanics of the process," Inserra said.  "It's a reminder to us, especially during the festive season as we gaze up at the night sky in wonder, that we have within our grasp the opportunity to identify ever more extraordinary objects in all the variations and flavors that nature has produced."

So Einstein wins again.  Pretty impressive for a guy who once said to a friend struggling in a math class, "Do not worry too much about your difficulties in mathematics.  I can assure you that mine are still greater."

So that's our mindblowing science of the day.  Spinning stars, twisting space-time, and tilted black holes.  I don't know how anyone can read about this stuff and not be both fascinated at how weird our universe is, and astonished that we've progressed to the point where we can understand at least a bit of it.  Here, several hundred quadrillion kilometers away, we've detected minuscule tilts in a whirling stellar remnant, and used it to support a theory that describes how matter and energy work throughout the Universe.

If that's not an impressive accomplishment, I don't know what is.

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Taken by the flood

Not long ago, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces by Claude Debussy, The Drowned Cathedral, and I started to wonder what legend had given rise to the piece.  After a little bit of digging, I found out that Debussy got his inspiration from the Breton legend of the mythical city of Ys, built on the coast of Brittany behind a seawall.  Princess Dahut the Wicked tempted fate by engaging in all sorts of depravity therein, despite the warnings of Saint Winwaloe that God was watching and would smite the ever-loving shit out of her if she didn't mend her ways.  (Okay, I'm paraphrasing a bit, here, but that's the gist.)  Anyhow, Dahut wouldn't listen, and one night a storm rose and broke through the seawall, and the ocean flowed in over the city.  Dahut's father, King Gradion, escaped on a magical horse with Dahut riding behind him, but Winwaloe shouted at him, "Push back the demon riding with you!"

So Gradion did what any good father would do, namely, he shoved his daughter into the sea, which "swallowed her up."  The sea also swallowed the rest of Ys, which kind of sucked for the inhabitants, given that it wasn't really their fault that the princess was a little morally challenged.  As for Princess Dahut herself, she became a mermaid, and is still hanging around to tempt sailors into jumping into the ocean to their deaths.  And according to legend, on windy days, you can still hear the bells of the drowned cathedral of Ys if you stand along the shore of Douarnenez Bay.

The Flight of King Gradion, by Évariste-Vital Luminais, 1884 (in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Brittany, France)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Kind of a cool story, in a heartless, Grimm's Fairy Tales sort of way, even if Winwaloe and Gradion, not to mention God, do come across as pro-patriarchy assholes.  And whatever else you think, you have to admit that Debussy's piece is gorgeous (go back and give a listen to the recording of it I linked above, if you haven't already done so).

What I haven't told you, yet, though, is the other thing I found out while looking up the Legend of the Drowned City of Ys...

... is that French archaeologists diving only a few kilometers away from Douarnenez Bay just found the remnants of a seawall, now underwater, dating from seven thousand years ago.

The structure, found off the Ile de Sein at Brittany's westernmost tip, is a 120 meter long, twenty meter thick, two meter high wall with large granite monoliths sticking up from it at regular intervals.  When it was built, it would have been right at the shoreline -- at that point, we were just coming out of the last ice age, and the sea level was considerably lower than it is now -- but now it's under nine meters of water.  The archaeologists are unsure of its purpose, but given the legend the likeliest answer is that it was a seawall to prevent flooding.

"It was built by a very structured society of hunter-gatherers, of a kind that became sedentary when resources permitted.  That or it was made by one of the Neolithic populations that arrived here around 5,000 B.C.E.," said archaeologist and study co-author Yvan Pailler.  "It is likely that the abandonment of a territory developed by a highly structured society has become deeply rooted in people's memories...  The submersion caused by the rapid rise in sea level, followed by the abandonment of fishing structures, protective works, and habitation sites, must have left a lasting impression."

What strikes me about all this is that building this thing took an astonishing amount of work.  The mass of the stones is estimated at 3,300 tonnes.  Putting together a wall of this size, without any heavy equipment, was not an insignificant task.

But then, neither are Stonehenge, the Mayan and Egyptian and Aztec pyramids, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, the Easter Island moai, and the Great Wall of China.  To name a few.  I guess if you have sufficient motivation and building materials, not to mention large amounts of cheap and/or slave labor, there's not much you can't do.

But the whole thing in this case is rather sad, really.  The seawall ultimately failed; as the Tenth Doctor said, in the iconic (and tragic) episode of Doctor Who "The Waters of Mars," "Water is patient, Adelaide.  Water just waits.  Wears down the cliff tops, the mountains.  The whole of the world.  Water always wins."

It certainly did in this case.  The sea level rise between fourteen and five thousand years ago flooded the entirety of Doggerland, which used to connect Britain to mainland Europe but now lies at the bottom of the North Sea, and the Gulf of Carpentaria, which now separates Australia from New Guinea.  It's unsurprising that changes of this magnitude would stick around in the cultural consciousness -- and get worked into folk tales and legends.

So while the story of the wicked Princess Dahut and virtuous (if ruthless) Saint Winwaloe and the magical horse is certainly made up, the flooding of the city of Ys might have a basis in fact.  Further indication that when indigenous people tell us what happened in the past, maybe we should pay better attention.

And to stay in the same mood, let's indulge in a little more Debussy, shall we?  How about his orchestral work, The Sea?  That seems a fitting way to end this discussion, doesn't it?

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Boldly going nowhere

To start out with the tl:dr -- no, despite what you may have heard, physicists do not have a working model of a warp drive.

Look, no one would love it more than me if we did.  I grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars, and the whole going-so-fast-the-stars-are-streaks thing is burned into my imagination.  (So, of course, is the weird trope from Lost in Space that if you go faster than light, time runs backwards.  I didn't say this stuff was all plausible.)

The reason we stargazers so desperately want a warp drive is because the distances involved in space travel are, well, astronomical.  Here's an analogy that will give you a feeling for it: imagine that the Sun (which is about 1.4 million kilometers in diameter) is shrunk down to the size of a marble, with a diameter of about 1.5 centimeters.

The Earth would be about the size of a grain of fine sand, and would be roughly a meter and a half away.  Jupiter would be eleven times larger in diameter, and over five times farther away.

You ready?  The closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, would be a somewhat smaller marble, over four hundred kilometers away.  So if the marble-Sun was located in my living room, here in upstate New York, the marble-Proxima-Centauri would be somewhere around Baltimore, Maryland.

Everything in between is empty space.

Here's another way to think about it.  Voyager 1 -- the fastest human-made spacecraft ever created -- is traveling at about seventeen kilometers per second.  Which seems really fast, until you find out that at that speed, to get to Proxima Centauri would take seventy thousand years, if it was heading that way, which it's not.

So you can see why a warp drive would be nice.  How are we supposed to have a nice chat with the aliens when they're impossibly far away?

Well, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that the universe is under no compulsion to make me happy.  And at the moment, the current research -- led by Harold White of the Advanced Propulsion Laboratory -- doesn't make me happy at all.

The dozens of headlines in popular media I've seen claiming that the new paper has proposed an actual schematic for building a working warp drive aren't just exaggerations, they're outright fabrications.  Sabine Hossenfelder had a look at the paper, and for the first time I can ever recall, she (1) said the paper should never have been published in the first place, and (2) gave it a ten out of ten on her Bullshit Meter.  (She did not, however, do what I once saw her do, which is to print out the paper and then set fire to it, so I guess it could be worse.)  What all the hype is failing to tell you about is that White et al. have not actually created a "blueprint."  Here's Hossenfelder's take on it:

The way that they construct their so-called warp drive is that they postulate some curvature of spacetime and then postulate that it moves at a certain speed.  They then calculate the required energy from that.  That's their "engineering."  They postulate a shape, which they then plot.  The problem with this procedure is that it makes it entirely meaningless to say the warped space is a solution to Einstein's equations.  You see, you can take any, and I mean literally any, spacetime with any curvature, moving or not, and put it into the equations, and then just read off the source and call that a "solution."  The problem is that in general, there is no physically possible distribution of energies that gives you that source.  And of course, their so-called warp drive still needs negative energies.  Worse, they don't even mention the biggest problem with warp drives, which is that they still need to fulfill momentum conservation.  If you accelerate something going that way, you need to throw out stuff the other way.  This means that even with a warp drive, you still need a propulsion system.  

So, much as I hate to say it, this paper doesn't even get us incrementally closer to solving the faster-than-light travel problem.  We haven't discovered dilithium crystals or built warp field generators, or better still, seen any research by Zefram Cochrane.

I hate to throw cold water on anyone's excitement, but let's keep in mind that in this case, reality would have stepped in and done it sooner or later anyhow.

So that's today's rather short and disappointing foray into space.  Like I said, it's not that I'm happy about any of this.  At the moment, if there was a warp drive invented that could take us to distant star systems, I'd be the first in line.  For one thing, it'd be thrilling to see another planetary system close up.  For another, I'd finally be far enough away from Donald Trump.  But I'm afraid for now, we're stuck here on Earth, and probably will be for the foreseeable future.

Of course, I'm the same guy who told his students "adult tissue cloning is at least ten years in the future" exactly two weeks before Dolly the Sheep made headlines.  And in this case, if I'm wrong, I'd be somewhere beyond delighted to eat my words.

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Scattered to the winds

One of the more puzzling aspects of evolutionary theory is the phenomenon of peripheral isolates.

This term refers to widely-separated populations of seemingly closely-related organisms.  One of the first times I ran into this phenomenon came to my attention because of my obsession with birdwatching.  There's a tropical family of birds called trogons, forest-dwelling fruit-eaters that are prized by birdwatchers for their brilliant colors.  There are trogons in three places in the world... Central and South America (27 species), central Africa (3 species), and southern Asia (11 species).

These are very far apart.  But take a look at three representatives from each group -- it doesn't take an ornithologist to see that they've got to be closely related:

The Elegant Trogon (Trogon elegans) of Central America [Image licensed under the Creative Commons dominic sherony, Elegant Trogon, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The Narina Trogon (Apaloderma narina) of central Africa [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Derek Keats from Johannesburg, South Africa, Narina Trogon, Apaloderma narina MALE at Lekgalameetse Provincial Reserve, Limpopo, South Africa (14654439002), CC BY 2.0]

The Red-headed Trogon (Harpactes erythrocephalus) of southeast Asia [Image licensed under the Creative Commons JJ Harrison (jjharrison89@facebook.com), Harpactes erythrocephalus - Khao Yai, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I know, I've gone on and on in previous posts about how misleading morphology/appearance can be in determining relationships, but you have to admit these are some pretty convincing similarities.

The question, of course, is how did this happen?  Where did the group originate, and how did members end up so widely separated?  To add to the puzzle, the fossil record for the group indicates that in the Eocene Epoch, fifty-ish million years ago, there were trogons in Europe -- fossils have been found in Denmark and Germany -- and the earliest fossil trogons from South America come from the Pleistocene Epoch, only two million years ago.

So are these the remnants of what was a much larger and more widespread group, whose northern members perhaps succumbed due to one of the ice ages?  Did they start in one of their homelands and move from there?

And if that's true, why are there no examples of trogons from all the places in between?

Another example of this is the order of mammals we belong to (Primata).  Primates pretty clearly originated in Africa and spread from there; the earliest clear primates were in the Paleocene Epoch, on the order of sixty million years ago, but the ancestor of all primates was probably at least twenty million years before that, preceding the Cretaceous Extinction by fourteen million years.  From their start in east Africa they seem to have spread both east and west, reaching southeast Asia around fifty million years ago.  Some of the earliest members to split were the lorises and tarsiers, along with the lemurs of Madagascar.

But the next group to diverge -- and the reason the whole topic of peripheral isolates came up -- are the "New World monkeys," the "platyrhines" of Central and South America.  It looks like this split happened during the Oligocene Epoch, around thirty million years ago... but how?

At that point, Africa was separated from South America by nine hundred miles of ocean -- narrower than the Atlantic is today, but still a formidable barrier.  But a paper in Science describes recently-discovered evidence from Peru of some fossilized primate teeth from right around the time the New World/Old World monkey split happened.

What this discovery suggests is staggering; all of the New World monkeys, from the spider monkey to the black howler monkey to the Amazonian pygmy marmoset, are descended from a single group that survived a crossing of the Atlantic, probably on a vegetation raft torn loose in a storm, only a little over thirty million years ago.

"This is a completely unique discovery," said Erik Seiffert, the study's lead author and Professor of Clinical Integrative Anatomical Sciences at Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, in an interview with Science Daily.  "We're suggesting that this group might have made it over to South America right around what we call the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary, a time period between two geological epochs, when the Antarctic ice sheet started to build up and the sea level fell.  That might have played a role in making it a bit easier for these primates to actually get across the Atlantic Ocean."

So here we have a possible explanation for one of the long-standing puzzles of evolutionary biology.  Note that these puzzles aren't a weakness of the theory; saying "we still have some things left to explain" isn't the same as saying "the theory can't explain this."  There will always be pieces to add and odd bits of data to account for, but I have one hundred percent confidence that the evolutionary model is up to the task.

Now, I wish it could just come with an explanation for the trogons, because for some reason that really bothers me.

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Real mythology

Being in the midst of the holiday season, I'm seeing a lot of people posting about various traditions and rituals and celebrations.  But inevitably, this means that there are also people denigrating other people's traditions.  Like the person I saw on social media going on an extended rant about Kwanzaa, the main gist of which was "it's completely made up."

I threw gasoline on the fire by commenting, "Boy, do I have bad news for you about every single other holiday."

Feeling like your own beliefs are the right and true and reasonable ones, and those of the other eight-billion-odd people in the world aren't, raises arrogance to the level of performance art, but a lot of people don't seem to see it that way.  Apropos of others' beliefs, I tend to fall back on the tried-and-true rule of "don't be a dick."  Because, after all, 99% of what people believe has absolutely zero effect on me personally, nor, for that matter, on anyone I care about.  You want to pray to a deity on Saturday?  Fine by me.  You choose not to eat meat on Fridays?  Okay.  You think there are dozens of different gods, and not just one?  Cool.  Or no god at all?  Equally fine.

As long as you're not demanding that other people believe the same way, trying to force them to live by your rules, or (worse) running around killing people who don't, I've got no quarrel with you.

It does create a problem for the anthropologists, however, who are trying their hardest to understand it all.  Belief is an extremely powerful motivator to behavior, and in my egalitarian, "An it harm none, do what thou wilt" approach, it's hard to see what actually constitutes a belief system.  How do you categorize something when there are eight billion different versions?

The problem comes into even sharper focus when you try to pin down whether something is even a belief or not.  There's a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to pseudomythology, which are myths that aren't real (differentiating them, apparently, from the myths that are real).  For example, this became a significant problem when anthropologists tried to study the beliefs of pre-Christians in the Slavic and Baltic regions, because prior to Christianity most of those folks had no written tradition.  Jan Łasicki, a Polish historian and theologian who in 1615 published a book with the rather self-righteous title Concerning the Gods of Samagitians and Other Sarmatians and False Christians, gave the names of seventy-eight gods supposedly worshipped in what is now Lithuania.  The consensus is now that Łasicki wrote down pretty much whatever anyone told him without question, meaning that it included deities who were the informants' personal invisible friends, and undoubtedly a few that were the result of of "There's this wingnut named Łasicki asking around, make sure to tell him the tallest tale you can think of -- he'll believe anything."  Worse, some seem to have been made up by Łasicki himself, to pad his numbers.

Mythical Creatures by Friederich Justin Bertuch (1806) [Image is in the Public Domain]

But the same sort of thing is still happening today.  In 2013, a poll found that the seventh-largest claimed religion in England is "Jediism."  Yes, Jedi, as in Star Wars.  In 2016, a guy who makes magic wands made the news because he wouldn't sell them to Harry Potter fans, because he says his wands really can cast magic spells, and he didn't want to cheapen his own reputation.  There's apparently a sizable crowd who think that The Lord of the Rings is actual history, and The Silmarillion is basically their answer to the Bible.  Don't even get me started about people like Carlos Castaneda, who fabricated an entire religion that he (falsely) claimed represented Indigenous beliefs from Mexico, and now -- almost thirty years after his death -- there are still people who teach his books as if they were real religious texts, and believe his "non-ordinary reality" is actually true.  I would be remiss in not including Scientology on the list.  Strangest of all, there are people who think that H. P. Lovecraft's books should be shelved on the non-fiction aisle, and are one hundred percent certain that Cthulhu and Tsathoggua and Yog-Sothoth and the rest of the gang are actually out there bubbling in the loathsome slime of eldritch primordial chaos, waiting for the humans to chant magic words with lots of apostrophes and zero vowels, which will let them back in.

Me, I find this last one a little hard to fathom.  I mean, at least the others I mentioned aren't actively trying to destroy the entire universe.  But having read a lot of what Lovecraft wrote, mostly what I remember is that even the people who were on the side of Azathoth et al. always ended up getting their limbs pulled off and their eyeballs melted.  I find it difficult to understand why people like Wilbur Whateley were always so eager to bring back the Elder Gods.  Me, I'd do everything I could to keep them out there in the nethermost wastes of infinite cosmic darkness where they belong.

If I actually believed in them, which brings us back to my original point.  What does it take for something to be looked upon as an "actual belief system," whatever that means?  Consider, for example, "Neo-Druidism," which took off in England, Scotland, and Wales in the eighteenth century.  People took it totally seriously (and some still do), dressing up in robes and taking part in magic rituals and whatnot, because they claimed they were resurrecting the beliefs of the ancient Celts even though we honestly have almost no idea what the ancient Celts actually believed.  Evidently even Paul Bunyan was never actually a "folk hero" that people in the upper Midwest told stories about; he was the invention of a guy named William Laughead, who wrote stories and claimed they were retellings of folklore, and bunches of people believed it.  This phenomenon is so common the anthropologists have even come up with a name for it.

They call it "fakelore."

So where do you draw the line?  Or do we even need to?  A lot of this seems to be driven by our desperate need to categorize things, the same as our artificial (and awkward) definition of the word species in science reflects not an actual reality about the biological world but an interesting facet of our own psychology.

I don't know if I have an answer to any of this.  Most of the time I tend not to worry about it.  Like I said before, my general approach is that you can believe in whatever you want.  As far as I'm concerned, you can believe that the universe is under the control of a Giant Green Bunny From The Andromeda Galaxy if you like.  As long as you don't run around swinging machetes at non-Bunnyists, or demanding that Intelligent Design Bunnyology be taught in public schools, then knock yourself out.

I guess the bottom line here is really tolerance.  It's a hard old world, full of strife and difficulty and grief, and we should be doing whatever we can not to make it harder.  If you've landed on a model for Life, the Universe, and Everything that brings you peace and comfort, that is awesome.  I've often wished I could find one.  So much of what I see of human behavior just strikes me as baffling.  I've felt, pretty much all my life -- to borrow Oliver Sacks's pithy phrase -- "like an anthropologist on Mars."  I'm still searching for something to make sense of it all.

In any case, I hope you're enjoying the holiday season, whatever form that takes for you.  As long as it doesn't involve waking Cthulhu up.  I may be tolerant, but I draw the line there.

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Return of the Gootans

Some days, I wave the banner of critical thinking proudly and boldly, confident that we humans are capable of rational thought and decision-making, of recognizing fallacious arguments, of sorting fact from fiction.

Some days I wonder why I bothered to get out of bed.

That I'm falling into the latter category today is the fault of a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  Not because of any deficiencies in his own intellectual capacity -- he's a really bright guy -- but because of what he stumbled across, and then felt duty-bound to tell me about.  The whole thing springboarded off Friday's post, about self-styled alien coverup whistleblower David Grusch, and my increasingly irritated demand that people like Grusch fish or cut bait.

"I don't know about Grusch," my friend said, in an email.  "But I think you have to admit this guy has some serious credibility."

What This Guy was claiming goes back to a story that appeared all the way back in 2012 in The Korea Times.  The article said that people at NASA and SETI and HAARP and various other acronyms had detected an alien spaceship on its way into the Solar System, and it was going to attack the Earth in November.  It quoted one "John Malley of SETI" as saying, "Three giant spaceships are heading toward Earth.  The largest one of them is two hundred miles wide.  Two others are slightly smaller.  At present, the objects are just moving past Jupiter.  Judging by their speed, they should be on Earth by the fall of 2012."

The spaceships, they said, were "from the planet Gootan."

Well, if you'll cast your mind back to 2012, what will probably stand out most in your memory is not being attacked by aliens.  In fact, January 1, 2013 dawned without either alien attacks or Mayan apocalypses, which as you may recall was also on the menu at the time.  What had happened, apparently, was that someone at The Korea Times had made a mistake that anyone might make, provided that the person in question has the IQ of a bowl of Spaghetti-Os; (s)he had found a story in another news source, thought it was factual, and reprinted it without looking into its accuracy.

That other news source, unfortunately, turned out to be The Weekly World News.

This caused a flurry of backpedaling over at The Korea Times, and a retraction saying that nothing in the claim had been real.  And, it's to be hoped, the reporter who committed the flub being demoted to cleaning toilets.

Since that time, though, the Gootans have been frequent flyers over at the WWN.  Almost as frequent as Bat Boy, who (according to a time traveler from the future) will win the 2032 U.S. presidential election.  (My favorite part is they refer to him throughout the article as "President Boy.")  My feeling about that is: Bring On Bat Boy.  He couldn't be any worse than Don Snoreleone and his evil sidekick, Cabbage Patch Satan.  In fact, why wait till 2032?  If Bat Boy runs in 2028, he's got my vote.

Make America Scream Again, amirite?

But I digress.

In any case, the Gootans have made regular appearances in the thirteen years since their debut, such as the following:

Honestly, I'm more worried about all the motorists having sex while driving.  I mean, wouldn't that be kind of distracting?  Myself, I prefer to give my full attention to whichever of those I'm engaging in at the time.  I'd think telling your partner "Hang on a moment until I get through this roundabout" might be a bit of a buzzkill.

On the other hand, if they really did make a ballet based on Plan Nine from Outer Space, I am so there.  And I don't even like ballet.

But back to the Gootans.  Apparently the whole thing was settling back down into the side alleys of lunacy until someone found a Wikipedia article on a (real) group of people called the "Gutians."  The Gutians were a tribe that gave the Sumerians some trouble in the third millennium B.C.E., and in fact swept in from somewhere and ruled the place for over a hundred years.  So far, nothing too unusual, considering the fact that in ancient times conquering and oppressing and overthrowing were their version of team sports.  But then, someone found that there's a Sumerian document called "The Curse of Akkad" that describes the Gutians thusly:

The god Enlil brought out of the mountains those who do not resemble other people, who are not reckoned as part of the Land, the Gutians, an unbridled people, with human intelligence but canine instincts and monkeys' features.  Like small birds they swooped on the ground in great flocks.  Because of Enlil, they stretched their arms out across the plain like a net for animals.  Nothing escaped their clutches, no one left their grasp.  Messengers no longer traveled the highways, the courier's boat no longer passed along the rivers.  The Gutians drove the trusty (?) goats of Enlil out of their folds and compelled their herdsmen to follow them, they drove the cows out of their pens and compelled their cowherds to follow them.  Prisoners manned the watch.  Brigands occupied the highways.  The doors of the city gates of the Land lay dislodged in mud, and all the foreign lands uttered bitter cries from the walls of their cities.  They established gardens for themselves within the cities, and not as usual on the wide plain outside.  As if it had been before the time when cities were built and founded, the large arable tracts yielded no grain, the inundated tracts yielded no fish, the irrigated orchards yielded no syrup or wine, the thick clouds (?) did not rain, the macgurum plant did not grow.

First of all, I think we can all agree that disturbing the trusty goats and preventing the macgurum plant from growing is pretty nasty business.

But more to the point, this passage made people go "Aha!"  Surely this peculiar description -- monkeys' features, swooping around like birds, etc. -- was an indication that the Gutians were, in fact, aliens.  And were, in fact, the same as the Gootans, who famously failed to mount a savage and bloodthirsty attack on humanity in 2012.  This was coupled with a few paragraphs that I can summarize as "something something something Annunaki something something Babylonians and ancient astronauts something something."

 It's a pretty airtight argument, I have to admit.

I mean, c'mon, people.  You're making David Grusch look like the pinnacle of scientific plausibility, here.

Can I start with the fact that in linguistics, you can't just take a passing similarity between two names, and say, "Hey, they sound kinda alike!  Must be the same!"  And this goes double if one of the names came from the fucking Weekly World News.

Because, if you'll recall from the beginning of this post, it was people over at The Weekly World News who made up the Gootans in the first place.

Anyhow, if anyone needs me, I'll be over here weeping softly and banging my forehead on my desk.  Maybe the Gutians and/or Gootans will take pity on me and sweep on down and pick me up in their two-hundred-mile-wide flying saucer.  At this point, I'd consider it a rescue mission.

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