Surf's up

One thing that never fails to leave me feeling awestruck is when I consider that astronomers figured out the shape and size of the Milky Way Galaxy while residing inside it.

I mean, think about it.  Imagine you're a tiny being (with a telescope) sitting on a raindrop near one edge of a huge cloud, and your task is to try to measure the distances and positions of enough other raindrops to make a good guess about the size and shape of the entire cloud.  That's what the astronomers have accomplished -- enough to state with reasonable confidence that we're in one of the arms of a barred spiral galaxy.

If ever there was an image you need to study in detail, this is it.  Take a look at the original, close up.  The Solar System is in the Orion Arm, directly down from the center of the galaxy.  The thing that blew me away is the circle marked "Naked Eye Limit" -- literally every star you have ever seen without the use of a telescope is in that little circle.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Pablo Carlos Budassi, Milky Way map, CC BY-SA 4.0]

What's even more astonishing is that the stars making up the Milky Way (and every other galaxy) are moving.  Not fast enough, on that kind of a size scale, that the map will be inaccurate any time soon; but fast enough to be measurable from here on Earth.  In fact, it was anomalies in galactic rotation curves -- the plot of the orbital speed of stars around the center of the galaxy, as a function of their distance from the center -- that clued in the brilliant astrophysicist Vera Rubin that there was (far) more matter in galaxies than could be seen, leading to the bizarre discovery that there is five times more dark matter (matter that only interacts via gravity) than there is the ordinary matter that makes up you, me, the Earth, the Sun, and the stars.

All of this makes the new study out of the European Space Agency even more incredible.  New data from the Gaia Telescope has found that the entire Milky Way is rippling as it rotates, a little like the fluttering of a Spanish dancer's frilly skirt.  The period of this wave-like motion is on the order of ten thousand light years, and it appears to affect the entire galaxy.

The astrophysicists are still trying to figure out what's causing it.

"What makes this even more compelling is our ability, thanks to Gaia, to also measure the motions of stars within the galactic disc," said lead author Eloisa Poggio, an astronomer at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Italy.  "The intriguing part is not only the visual appearance of the wave structure in 3D space, but also its wave-like behavior when we analyze the motions of the stars within it."

The discovery hinged on the use of standard candles, something you may be familiar with if you've read any cosmology.  Calculating distances of astronomical objects is tricky, for the same reason that it's difficult to tell how far away a single light is at night.  If the light seems bright, is it intrinsically bright (and perhaps quite distant), or are you looking at something that is dimmer, but close to you?  The only way to calculate astronomical distances is to use the small number of objects for which we know the intrinsic brightness.  The two most common are Cepheid variables, stars for which the oscillation period of luminosity is directly related to their brightness, and type 1a supernovas, which always have about the same peak luminosity.  Between these two, astrophysicists have been able to measure the changing positions of stars as the ripple of the wave passes them.

So the stars in our galaxy are riding the cosmic surf, and at the moment no one knows why.  One possibility is that this is a leftover gravitational effect from a collision with a dwarf galaxy some time in the distant past -- a little like the ripples from dropping a pebble into a pond lasting long after the pebble has come to rest on the bottom.  But the truth is, it will take further study to figure out for sure what's causing the wave.

Me, I find the whole thing staggering.  To think that only a little over a hundred years ago, there were still astronomers arguing (vehemently) that the only galaxy in the universe was the Milky Way, and all of the other galaxies were merely small local nebulae.  The last century has placed us into a universe vaster than the ancients could ever have conceived -- and I have no doubt that the next century will astonish us further, and in ways we never could have imagined.

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Best laid plans

Let me start out by saying that what you're about to read is in no way meant to be critical of scientists in general, nor the entire scientific endeavor.

What I want to emphasize right from the beginning, though, is that however supportive I am of science, it is inherently incomplete.  We fill in pieces, and move toward a more thorough understanding of the universe -- it's undeniable that we know more now than we did five hundred, or a hundred, or even fifty years ago -- but there are still edges of our knowledge, and entire realms that are only partly understood.  Nearly all scientists are themselves aware of this, and consider the "perimeter of our ignorance" (to use Neil deGrasse Tyson's pithy term) not to be a problem, but an impetus to further inquiry.

That said, the familiar student's complaint of "why do we have to learn this stuff when it could all be disproven tomorrow?" is nothing more than an excuse for laziness; at this point, the overturning of entire disciplines in the fashion that Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton did for physics and astronomy, Mendel (and many others) did for genetics, and Darwin did for evolutionary biology, is vastly unlikely.  About the only area of science that still has enough odd and contradictory data (with dozens of competing models vying for acceptance) to qualify as a candidate for a major overhaul is astrophysics, with its dark energy and dark matter and cosmic inflation and cosmological constants, none of which have come together into a coherent whole.  (Yet.)

But.  It bears keeping in mind that the systems scientists study are complex, and the models they use to make predictions are often based on qualifications, assumptions, and idealizations.  That doesn't mean they're worthless or unrealistic; just that they need to be used with caution.

This is why I was horror-struck by the recent suggestion of using stratospheric aerosol injection to combat anthropogenic climate change.

Because apparently the obvious solution -- investing in conversion to renewable energy sources, and phasing out fossil fuels -- is a pill too bitter to swallow for our political leaders, people are casting about for other ways to combat the warm-up while continuing to burn our way through the Earth's sequestered carbon.  And one of the ideas was to copy what volcanic eruptions do, and blow huge clouds of fine particulates into the upper atmosphere, which would block sunlight and cool the Earth's surface.

There's no doubt that the idea has some factual basis.  You probably know that the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, generated so much ejecta that the following year was called "the Year Without a Summer," and temperatures dropped enough that crops failed across the globe (and here in my home of upstate New York they had snow falling in July).

The problem, though, is that climate is a complex, multi-variable system, which is why meteorologists still have difficulty making long-range forecasts.  They're vastly better than they used to be; the deadliest natural disaster in the history of the United States, the 1900 Galveston hurricane, struck with almost no warning, leaving tens of thousands of people without enough time to get to high ground.  But even considering how much the science has improved, using something like stratospheric aerosol injection to cool the globe is basically a climatological game of Jenga.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Guma89, Jenga distorted, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Fortunately, the scientists themselves are sounding the alarm.  A study just released from Columbia University has shown in no uncertain terms that tweaking the climate by injecting aerosols into the stratosphere would be likely to have drastic and unpredictable effects.  "Even when simulations of SAI in climate models are sophisticated, they're necessarily going to be idealized," said Faye McNeill, who co-authored the paper.  "Researchers model the perfect particles that are the perfect size.  And in the simulation, they put exactly how much of them they want, where they want them.  But when you start to consider where we actually are, compared to that idealized situation, it reveals a lot of the uncertainty in those predictions.  There are a range of things that might happen if you try to do this -- and we're arguing that the range of possible outcomes is a lot wider than anybody has appreciated until now."

The climate shows sensitive dependence on initial conditions -- a phrase that will be familiar to anyone who has read about chaos theory.  The one thing that is almost certain is that something like SAI wouldn't cool the planet smoothly and uniformly, leaving other factors (like rainfall patterns) unchanged.  Models showed a chaotic response to injection, often resulting in effects like disruption of tropical monsoons, alteration in the position of jet streams (thus changing storm track patterns), and uneven and rapidly-fluctuating shifts in temperature.

Not good.  As Robert Burns said, "The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley."

Basically: we do not understand climate well enough to do this with confidence.  After all, we're in the current mess because we ignored the scientists (starting with Svante Arrhenius in 1896) who said that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were directly correlated with global average temperature, and that therefore we were going to warm the planet by burning fossil fuels.  Let's not ignore the ones now who are saying, correctly, that blowing aerosols up into the stratosphere and hoping for the best is a bad, bad idea.

My fear, though, is that the current regime here in the United States has the motto "quick fixes and short-term expediency FTW," so they'll think this is just a nifty idea.

To return to my original point, despite the best work of scientists, our knowledge is still incomplete, and that applies especially to complex, chaotic systems like the climate.  The climatologists themselves know this, and thank heaven a group of them have published a paper urging us to (extreme) caution.  

Let's hope the people in power are, for once, listening.

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Sphere itself

A loyal reader of Skeptophilia asked me what I knew about a strange geological oddity called "Klerksdorp spheres," which are round-ish objects with a metallic sheen, often with two or three parallel grooves at the equator, most commonly found near Ottosdal, South Africa.  They're a prominent feature in the arguments of the Ancient Astronauts crowd, where they're often claimed to have been dropped here on Earth during an alien visitation billions of years ago, only to be unearthed today.

His email said:

I'm not saying I agree with them -- in general I don't just accept far-fetched explanations -- but I've seen lots of photos of these things and they're peculiar.  It's hard for me to imagine how they could form naturally.  They're all over the place on webpages about "out of place artifacts," and a lot of people think they're evidence that we were visited by aliens in the distant past, or at least that early civilizations had a lot better technology than we thought was possible.  At least I thought I'd ask you what you think, and whether there's any chance these things aren't natural.

Well, first of all, thanks for asking.  To me, even if you lean toward weird or paranormal or non-scientific explanations, you can go a long way toward avoiding drowning in the Great Swamp of Woo simply by admitting that you don't know for sure.

The thing is, though, the paragraph from the email is basically the argument from incredulity -- "I can't imagine how this could happen" = "it must be aliens/magic/the supernatural/God."  (Intelligent design creationism is really nothing more than a religious version of the argument from incredulity.)  The proper response to "I can't imagine how this could happen" should be one of two things: (1) "... so I simply don't know the answer," or (2) "... so I'll try to find out more scientifically credible evidence about it."

As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it -- in this case, referring to UFOs -- "Remember what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for.  It stands for 'unidentified.'  Well, if something is unidentified, it means you don't know what it is.  If you don't know what it is, that's where the conversation should end.  You don't then go on to say that 'therefore it must be' anything."

Anyhow, I chose option #2 and did a bit of looking into the question posed by the writer.  I won't argue that the Klerksdorp spheres are odd-looking:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of photographer Robert Huggett]

If I found something like this, my first thought would certainly be to wonder if it was some sort of human-made artifact.  The thing is, they've been found in a three-billion-year-old pyrophyllite deposit in South Africa -- not somewhere you'd expect to find modern ball-bearings.

Here's the problem, though.  Rather than doing any kind of sober analysis, the Alien Manufacture cadre has perpetually misrepresented the actual facts about the spheres.  One of the worst is the "Vedic creationist" Michael Cremo, author of the book Forbidden Archaeology, who believes (amongst other things) that humans in more or less their present form have been around for millions, possibly billions, of years.  Here are a few of the verifiable facts that Cremo and others get wrong:

• The objects are "perfect spheres."  Anyone with intact vision can see from the example shown that they're relatively symmetrical oblate spheroids, but are far from perfect spheres.
• They're made of a nickel-steel alloy "only known from human manufacture."  In fact, detailed analysis found them to be composed of a combination of hematite (Fe2O3) and wollastonite (CaSiO3).
• The objects, once placed on a shelf in a "vibration-free case" in a museum in Klerksdorp, "rotated by themselves."  This seems to have been a misquotation of the museum curator, Roelf Marx, who stated that the spheres had been jostled by tremors caused by underground blasting in gold mines, and that maybe the cases weren't as vibration-free as they needed to be.
• They're "far harder than tempered steel."  In fact, the ones tested are around 5.0 on the Mohs scale of hardness.  For reference, that's a bit softer than window glass.
• They even get the nature of the mine wrong; the Wonderstone Mine, where most of the Klerksdorp spheres were found, has been repeatedly called a "silver mine" even though silver has never been mined there.  It's a pyrophyllite mine -- a silicate mineral with a multitude of industrial uses, including as an additive to clay in brick-making.

I've nothing against speculating; sometimes shrewd guesses lead to productive lines of scientific inquiry.  But fer cryin' in the sink, at least don't lie about the facts.  Nothing is gained by misrepresenting the actual verifiable data, except possibly to destroy every vestige of credibility you had.

In fact, the Klerksdorp spheres -- odd-looking though they admittedly are -- are almost certainly concretions, sedimentary rocks that start out with a grain of something (probably in this case wollastonite), and then have repeated deposits of additional minerals, creating concentric layers in exactly the same way pearls form in oysters.  (In fact, Klerksdorp spheres that have been cut in half show the internal onion-like layers you'd expect in a concretion.)  The grooves seem to be the external manifestation of lamina, parallel internal sheets that are indicative of the objects' orientation when they formed.

In other words: they're entirely natural.  They're not alien ball bearings or artifacts from a three-billion-year-old human civilization.  They are not "out-of-place artifacts;" they are, in fact, found exactly where they should be.

So to the original reader who emailed me; honestly, thanks for asking, and keep asking questions like that.  There's nothing wrong with being puzzled, and even (for a time) wondering if something strange is going on.  As long as you don't stop there, you're on the right path.  The argument from incredulity isn't a problem until it becomes a solid wall.

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Resurrection

The environmentalists tell us "extinction is forever," and that certainly seems unarguable.  Once a species is lost, evolution will never recreate it.  You may get something that looks like it; there are numerous examples of Elvis taxa, species that evolved to fit vacated niches and underwent convergent evolution resulting in a similarity to some extinct form.  (The name comes from the huge numbers of Elvis impersonators that have popped up since the original's death in 1977.)  But the sad truth is that the original is gone forever.

The issue, though, can be making certain the species actually is extinct.  There are ongoing efforts to find relic populations of a number of presumed-extinct species (two of the best known are the ivory-billed woodpecker and the thylacine).  Naysayers have criticized the efforts to find these species as nothing more than wishful thinking, but it bears keeping in mind that there is a long list of organisms thought to be extinct that have turned out to be very much alive.

They're called Lazarus taxa, after the biblical character Jesus raised from the dead.  Some of them are astonishing.  The one that always comes to mind for most people is the coelacanth, a crossopterygian fish that was only known from fossils preceding the Cretaceous Extinction sixty-six million years ago, which was discovered living in the Indian Ocean in 1938.  But that's only one of many.  Here's a sampler of Lazarus taxa:

• The South American bush dog (now split into three separate species in the genus Speothos) was only known from some Pleistocene-age bones found in a Brazilian cave, but is now known to have a range from southern Central America all the way to northern Paraguay.  Its reclusive habits and rarity still make it the least-studied canid in the world.

A Brazilian bush dog [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Xerini, Waldhund, CC BY-SA 3.0]

• The nightcap oak (Eidothea hardeniana and E. zoexylocarya), which aren't oaks at all but a member of the Protea family (Proteaceae), were known only from fifteen-million-year-old fossils -- and then a stand of them were discovered growing in a remote part of Australia.  The Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney has a cultivation program for the two species, which are threatened because the seeds are frequently eaten by introduced mice.

Eidothea hardeniana [Image is in the Public Domain]

• The monito del monte, or colocolo opossum (Dromiciops gliroides), was not only thought to have gone extinct eleven million years ago, it was believed that its entire order (Microbiotheria) was gone as well.  It was found -- alive -- in the temperate bamboo forests of the southern Andes Mountains in 1894, and has no near relatives anywhere in the world.  (The closest are the Australian marsupials, but even those are very distant cousins.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons José Luis Bartheld from Valdivia, Chile, Monito del Monte ps6, CC BY 2.0]

• In 1898 a fish was discovered that was a near perfect match to Oligocene-age fossils on the order of twenty-eight million years old.  It's Lignobrycon myersi, and is only known from the Rio Braço and Rio Contas in east-central Brazil.  Somehow, it alone of its genus survived through all of those years and made it down to the present day.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Alexandre dos Santos Rodrigues et. al., Lignobrycon myersi specimens (9382613) (cropped), CC BY 4.0]

• The monoplacophorans were a group of mollusks common during the Silurian and Devonian Periods, but were last seen in the fossil record in the mid- to late-Devonian, around 375 million years ago.  After that -- nothing.  Reasonably, biologists thought they'd gone extinct, until live monoplacophorans were discovered in deep water off the west coast of Costa Rica.  Further surveys have found no fewer than thirty-seven different species in deep water across the Pacific.

A live specimen of Neopilina filmed off the coast of Samoa by the 2017 Okeanos Explorer mission [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NOAA]

• Even the monoplacophorans don't hold the survival record, though.  That honor goes to Rhabdopleura, which is a graptolite -- a (very) distant relative of chordates known mainly through Cambrian-age fossils.  The last Rhabodopleura was thought to have gone extinct in the mid-Cambrian, five hundred million years ago (and the rest of the group didn't make it past the mid-Carboniferous).  In 1869 they were discovered living in the deep water of the Pacific, and since that time nine living species have been identified.

A drawing of Rhabdopleura normani [Image is in the Public Domain]

While the general rule still applies -- extinction is forever -- it's worth keeping in mind that sometimes we find ourselves in a situation a little like Mark Twain did, resulting in his quip, "Rumors of my death were great exaggerations."  The Earth is a big place, and there are still plenty of poorly-explored regions where we might well have lots of surprises in store.

All of which should be encouraging to the folks out there chasing the ivory-billed woodpecker and thylacine.  Don't give up hope.  If Rhabdopleura could survive for five hundred million years unobserved, surely these two could manage a century or so.

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In with the bad

A post I did a couple of weeks ago, about my view that creativity is a relationship (and thus inherently subjective, in the sense that each person will contribute something different), prompted an interesting discussion with a friend that centered around the question of whether there is actually such a thing as bad writing, art, or music.

My initial response was that the answer had to be no.  The most we can say with confidence is that there is "writing, art, and music I don't happen to like."  What comprises that list will differ for everyone, so there's no such thing as "objectively bad" creativity.  I had an experience a few days ago of exactly this; I had picked up a copy of French composer Olivier Messiaen's opera Saint François d'Assise, considered by many to be his finest work, and I found it to be so discordant it was virtually unlistenable.  I would never jump from there to saying "it's bad"; it's merely not something I enjoyed.

But my friend's question went further than that.  Setting aside simple matters of taste and preference, are there works that just about everyone can agree are bad?  What about considerations of execution -- skill and craftsmanship -- such that we can look at a work and say, "Okay, that's poorly done?"  The problem is, even that may not be so easy.  Loyal readers of Skeptophilia may recall that a few months ago, I did a piece on a fellow named Paul Jordan who decided to poke some fun at the art establishment by producing paintings that were made to be deliberately bad, and found that they were taken seriously -- and received glowing reviews from major art critics, and multiple offers for being featured in solo art exhibits.

It's wryly amusing that there's actually a Museum of Bad Art, in Dedham, Massachusetts, devoted to artistic works that are (in their words) "too bad to be ignored."  I have to wonder what the artists whose works are featured there think of their inclusion.  Maybe it's like a scientist winning the IgNobel Prize; perhaps, as writer Brendan Behan famously said, there's no such thing as bad publicity, and it's better to be known for doing something dramatically awful than it is simply to be ignored.

What's curious, though, is that the people running the Museum of Bad Art themselves seem to have a hard time explaining the criteria they use to determine whether a piece qualifies.  Marie Jackson, the Museum's Director of Aesthetic Interpretation, said, "Nine out of ten pieces don't get in because they're not bad enough.  What an artist considers to be bad doesn't always meet our low standards."  Kitsch doesn't qualify, nor does anything that is judged to have been a deliberate attempt to produce bad art.  (One has to wonder what they'd have done with Paul Jordan's paintings.)  MOBA curator Michael Frank explained, "We collect things made in earnest, where people attempted to make art and something went wrong, either in the execution or in the original premise."

But what does it mean that "something went wrong"?  Simple lack of skill isn't enough; according to honorary curator Ollie Hallowell, it has to have an "Oh my God" aspect to it.  But even that suggests something curious.  The fact that MOBA only accepts art that's "so bad it's good" implies there's a category below that, of art that is "simply bad."

Imagine being an artist, and having your work rejected from the Museum of Bad Art on the basis of not being good enough.  It recalls Dorothy Parker's quip about a book she was reviewing: "This book was not just plain terrible.  This was fancy terrible.  This was terrible with raisins in it."

Bone-Juggling Dog in Hula Skirt by Mari Newman, one of the pieces that did make it into the Museum's permanent collection

So we're back to there being an inherently subjective aspect to all this.  There's clearly a difference between someone who lacks skill -- someone attempting to play the piano who makes mistake after mistake, for example -- and someone who has technical competency on the instrument but who doesn't play expressively.  Likewise, having basic technical writing skill (using grammar and punctuation correctly, for example) doesn't guarantee good storytelling.  But beyond simple considerations of mechanics, how do you even begin to determine objectively the quality of a particular work?  Could bad storytelling, for example, be couched in perfect grammar?  If so, what makes it bad?  I thought the Twilight books were positively dreadful, but if you thought reading them was a life-altering experience, I'm not nearly arrogant enough to tell you that you're wrong.

What's bad, apparently, is as subjective as what's good.  Exactly as we should expect.  So this is a further illustration that you should simply enjoy what you enjoy, and continue to create fearlessly.  Marie Jackson of MOBA says that her Museum shouldn't be looked at as simple ridicule, but an impetus for us creative types to continue to put ourselves out there.  "I think it's a great encouragement to people... who want to create [and] are held back by fear," Jackson said.  "When they see these pieces, they realize there's nothing to be afraid of—just go for it."

Maybe.  I don't know.  If I were an artist, I'd have to work to wrap my brain around being included in the Museum of Bad Art.  As a writer, I certainly don't enjoy feedback like I got from a "friend" a long time ago about the first three chapters of a novel I was working on: "This is somewhere between a computer crash and a train wreck."  (The chapters eventually got worked into my novel The Hand of the Hunter -- if you read it, I can only hope you won't agree with her.)  But I have to be realistic about the fact that my writing won't resonate with everyone.  

After all, that's the nature of creativity.  You win, you lose.  Some things work and others don't, or (more commonly) work for some consumers and not for others.

Even if there's no real objective standard for creative quality, to that point I agree with Marie Jackson: the critical thing is not to get caught up in whether or not you're "good enough," but to keep creating.

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The vanishing island

Ready for a strange story, that has a curious connection to yesterday's post, about doorways and liminal spaces?

Let's start with H. P. Lovecraft's famous short story "The Call of Cthulhu," written in 1926, which sets up the tale with the discovery on a small island in an archipelago in the South Pacific of a small stone statue that looks like some kind of octopus/human hybrid.  Then, when anthropologists go to the island chain to try and find its origins, the natives not only deny knowing anything about the idol, they say the island where it was allegedly found is uninhabited and always has been.  Sure enough, when they go to that particular island, it's empty -- but there are some "suspicious traces" that certainly look like there'd been people living there, but who were all mysteriously done away with in the not too recent past.  Inquiries are launched, but the people who know something about the idol and where it was discovered all seem to have the unfortunate habit of dying before they can tell anyone about it.  The last part of the story describes the landing of a ship called the Emma on an island that had surfaced temporarily "in the open ocean south of the Cook Islands" due to an earthquake.  Second Mate Gustaf Johansen and six others go ashore looking for a supply of fresh water and other provisions, and soon enough regret their decision:

Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase.  The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarizing miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity.

It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found.  The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now-familiar squid-dragon bas-relief.  It was, Johansen said, like a great barn door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap door or slantwise like an outside cellar door...  [T]he geometry of the place was all wrong.  One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

Then, because any reader with a scrap of common sense is by this time screaming at the characters "DO NOT OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!", of course one of them opens the fucking door:

Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal.  In this fantasy of prismatic distortion, it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.

The result is that Cthulhu wakes up, most of the sailors are messily devoured, and the survivors are left with some seriously eldritch PTSD.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dominique Signoret (signodom.club.fr), Cthulhu and R'lyeh, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Despite Lovecraft's regrettable tendency toward purple prose and the fact that he never met an adverb he didn't like, you have to admit the whole thing is pretty damn atmospheric.

What you may not know is that it's based on a true story.

Well, not the evil octopus monster part, at least so far as I know.  In 1916, the Polynesian Society of Honolulu printed an account from a sailor who claimed to have years earlier visited an island called Tuanaki, where he lived with the natives for six days.  It was, he said, south of Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands; in fact, the Tuanakians ultimately left their home (for unknown reasons, but there were hints of it being something bad) and resettled in Rarotonga, where some of them still lived.

So... explorers set out to find Tuanaki.  When they arrived at the point where the island allegedly was, there was nothing there but open ocean.

Off to Rarotonga to interview any Tuanakians who still lived there.  You guessed it -- the Rarotongans not only said that no one had emigrated there from other islands within living memory, no one they talked to had ever heard of Tuanaki.

Or so they claimed.

More prosaically, maybe (the explorers suggested) Tuanaki had sunk beneath the waves, either due to an earthquake or erosion or both.  One of them recalled that in 1862, some seafarers traveling from Auckland to Rarotonga had hit a submerged shoal near the coordinates supposedly corresponding to Tuanaki's location.  The shoal had been named Haymet Rocks in honor of the ship's owner, J. E. Haymet.

But further exploration couldn't find those, either.  If the Haymet Rocks were the remnants of Tuanaki, they seemed to have vanished as well.

And just to add an extra weird twist to the whole story, explorer Ernest Shackleton launched an expedition in 1921 with the express purpose of relocating Tuanaki -- then died of an apparent heart attack on South Georgia Island before he could go there.

The upshot of it all is that we still don't know where, or if, Tuanaki existed.  Considering the dicey state of navigation in the mid-nineteenth century, it's likely the initial account from the sailor had misidentified the location of the island where he stayed and/or misremembered the name of it.

But the fact remains that it's a very odd story, and you can see why it would have inspired Lovecraft.  Even without the oozing cyclopean architecture with impossible geometry, the whole tale is curious, and leaves more questions than answers.  After all, even with our modern mapping tools, the Pacific Ocean is a big place; the latitude and longitude Lovecraft quotes as the location of R'lyeh is not far from Point Nemo, the "oceanic pole of inaccessibility" -- the place in the Earth's oceans that is the farthest from any possible landfall.

So not a place anyone is likely to visit.  But if you do, and there's an uncharted island there, just remember the cardinal rule:

DO.  NOT.  OPEN.  THE.  FUCKING.  DOOR.

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Doorways

There's something about doors that is magical.

They're portals from one room to another or from the inside of a house to the outside -- and sometimes stand between imprisonment and freedom.  As such, they belong to neither realm.  They're boundaries, edges, passageways.

I'm not the only one who finds the "middle ground" doors occupy to be evocative.  How many stories have the word in the title?  A Wind in the Door, The Door in the Wall, The Doors of Perception, The Door into Summer, and The Door to December -- that's without even thinking hard.  Stories that feature doors as portals from one realm to another are even more commonplace; I've done it myself (in Sephirot and The Accidental Magician).

Maybe you've even seen the following meme that was going around on social media a while back:

My immediate answer was that if I could bring along my puppy, then hell yes.  (I rather shamefacedly added that I should probably bring along my wife, too.)  I mean, chances are that rather like the Bear That Went Over The Mountain, where I'd end up after walking through is merely the other side of the doorway.  But hell, I've read books with way more interesting options.  If there was even a chance I'd find myself in Earthsea or Narnia or Prydain or the Dreamlands or Middle Earth, it'd be worth the risk of disappointment.

It's that sense of doorways as liminal spaces that probably explains the current hoopla over the discovery of what appears to be a giant oval doorway in the Dzungarian Alatau Mountains of Kazakhstan.  To be fair to the hooplites, it's pretty odd-looking:

Its dimensions (about 12 meters tall and wide) and shape immediately brought up comparisons to the Gates of Moria from The Lord of the Rings and the doorway into Jabba the Hutt's palace in Return of the Jedi.  Then the Ancient Aliens crowd got involved (because of course they did) with claims that it's the entryway to an alien base.

Maybe even one that's still occupied.  *cue scary music*

The likeliest explanation, of course, is much more prosaic; this is simply a weathering pattern in the rock face.  All you have to do is visit Arches National Park in Utah to see dozens of examples of rock formations eroded into arches (thus the name).  Geology, in fact, can do some really freakin' weird stuff.  The Giant's Causeway, a hexagonal basalt formation in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, is so peculiar-looking it seems like it couldn't be natural (until, of course, you understand the mechanism of how it formed).

That hasn't slowed down the speculation any.  It doesn't help that some early twentieth century Spiritualist writers speculated that Hyperborea, one of the mythical lands invented by the ancient Greeks, was located in the mountains of central Asia.  Gary Manners, who wrote the article linked above, concludes with the following equivocal passage:

Despite scientific explanations, the Kazakhstan doorway continues generating intense interest and debate online.  Social media users propose theories ranging from concealed alien bases to entrances to underground civilizations...  The formation's remarkable symmetry and positioning challenge even skeptical observers to consider alternative explanations beyond conventional geology.

Let's clear one thing up right away; these are not theories.  What the social media users are proposing are what we skeptics call WAGs (wild-ass guesses).  A theory is a well-tested model that explains a set of data -- i.e., a framework backed up by actual hard evidence.  All the social media users are doing is looking at a single photograph and saying, "Hey, that looks like..."  As such, these guesses are nearly worthless -- only valuable in bringing attention to an interesting site, and perhaps prompting some actual geologists to go over there and see what we've got.

So me, I'm waiting for the scientists to weigh in.  If they get to Kazakhstan, and have to say the Sindarin word for "friend" to get the doorway to open, or if they hear a gurgly voice behind it saying, "Bo shuda!  Huh huh huh huh huh," or if (best of all) they pry it open and find an underground alien base, then we can talk.

Until that time, I'm gonna Ockham's Razor the shit out of this and stick with "it's an odd-looking rock formation."

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Dark matters

A point I've made here at Skeptophilia more than once is that I don't automatically disbelieve in anyone's claim of having a paranormal or religious experience, it's just that I'm doubtful.  The reason for my doubt is that having a decent background in neurobiology, I know for a fact that our brains are (in astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's pithy phrase) "poor data-taking devices."  We are swayed by our own biases -- put simply, what we expect to see or hear -- and are often overwhelmed by our own emotions, especially when they're powerful ones like fear or excitement.

What's alarming about this is that it doesn't honestly matter whether you're a skeptic or not; we're all prone to this.  I heard a loud noise downstairs one evening -- it was, unfortunately, shortly after I'd been watching an episode of The X Files -- and as the Man of the House bravely volunteered to go investigate.  I looked around for something with which to arm myself, and picked up a pair of fireplace tongs (prompting my wife to ask, "What're you gonna do, pinch the monster's belly fat?")  By the time I actually went downstairs, I had worked myself up into a lather imagining what fearful denizens of the netherworld might have invaded our basement.

Turned out our cat had jumped up on the counter and knocked a ceramic mug onto the floor.  I did not, for the record, pinch her belly fat with the tongs, although I certainly felt like she deserved it.

The thing is, we're all suggestible, and our imaginations make us prone both to seeing things that aren't there and misinterpreting the things that are there.  It's why we have science; scientific tools don't get freaked out and imagine they've seen a ghost.

When I taught Critical Thinking, one of my assignments was for students to use PhotoShop (or an equivalent software) to create the best fake ghost, cryptid, or UFO photo they could.  This was that year's winner.  Pretty good, isn't it?  [Image credit: Nathan Brewer, used with permission]

The reason this topic comes up is a pair of unrelated links I happened across within minutes of each other, that are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.

The first one is by "paranormal explorer, investigator, and researcher" Ashley Knibb.  Knibb is a UK-based writer and ghost hunter who spends his time visiting sites of alleged hauntings with his team, then writing up their experiences.  The one I stumbled across yesterday was about their recent investigation of Royal Gunpowder Mills, Waltham Abbey, Essex.  The building, now a "Historical Site of Special Interest" maintained by the government, was (as you might guess from the name) originally an industrial complex for the manufacture of explosives.  "Hundreds of lives had passed through these grounds; some of them cut short by the very materials that gave Britain its military edge," Knibb writes.  "It’s no wonder the place has a reputation for being haunted...  Nothing stirred, but there was an eerie sense that the building’s history had left an imprint.  This was a place where weapons of war had been made, where accidents had claimed lives.  Sometimes you don’t need voices; the atmosphere says enough."

The rest of the article, which is evocative and creepy, describes what Knibb and his assistants felt, saw, and heard during the night they spent in the Mills.  One of them heard the name "Cooper" being spoken; another heard a faint "hello."  They saw the sparkle of flashing lights that, upon arrival in the room where they seemed to originate, had no material source.  More prosaic, one of their videocamera lights itself began to strobe.  There were areas where the visitors experienced chills, and one of them had a profound experience of vertigo and nausea at one point.  (To Knibb's credit, he recounts hearing a loud thud, which turned out to be the movement of a very-much-living staff member retrieving something from an upper room.  "Ruling out," Knibb observes correctly, "is as important as ruling in.")

The second link is a paper in The Journal of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion, and is called "Sensing the Darkness: Dark Therapy, Authority, and Spiritual Experience."  The gist of the paper is that there is a new trend called "Dark Therapy" where volunteers agree to spend a given amount of time in complete darkness, in search of numinous or otherwise enlightening experiences.  Other senses are allowed; in fact, one of the purposes of being in the dark, proponents say, is to heighten your other sensory experiences.  Some of these episodes are guided, and others not.  The paper recounts the experiences of twelve participants who agreed to spend a block of time between seven and fourteen days in a well-furnished room that was completely dark.

Their responses are intriguing.  The researchers (to their credit) do not weigh in on whether the experiences of the participants reflected an external truth, or were simply artifacts of the sensory deprivation and the workings of their minds.  I would encourage you to read the original paper, but just to give you the flavor, here's what one person said after her stay in the dark room:

For the first time [in the dark] there was a lot of fear.  Somehow like manifestation of fear that was coming, well, differently and sometimes it was like... sometimes sounds, sometimes some images, (. . .) some demonic visions (. . .) were appearing and finally I understood that this is all me, my projection, but that you have to go through it, but it was such realistic experiences, very realistic. (. . .) sometimes I heard something, or I had the feeling that somebody is there with me, and I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all.

What strikes me here is that like with ghost hunting, how much of what you experience is what you expected to experience?  I don't doubt that Dark Therapy might be an interesting way to learn about your own mind, and how you cope with being deprived of one of your senses, and might even result in profound enlightenment.  But there's a real danger with someone crossing over into believing that something like the "demonic visions" the volunteer experienced are manifestations of an external physical reality.  We all come primed with our preconceived notions of what's out there; when in an unfamiliar situation where our emotions are ramped up, it'd be all to easy for those mental models to magnify into something that seems convincingly real.

Like I said, it's not that I'm saying I'm certain that Ashley Knibb's scary night at Royal Gunpowder Mills, or anyone else's experiences of the holy or the demonic or the supernatural, are one hundred percent imaginary.  It's just that my generally skeptical outlook, and (especially) my training in neuroscience, makes me hesitant to accept personal anecdote as reality without any hard evidence.  I'm convincible, but it takes more than "I saw it" (or, in the dark room, "I heard/felt it").

I might find your personal anecdote intriguing, or suggestive, or even worthy of further investigation.  But to move from there into believing that some odd claim is true, I need more than that.  The human mind is simply too frail, biased, and suggestible to trust without something more to back it up.

I'll end with a quote from John Adams, then a lawyer, later President of the United States: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

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The ladder of credibility

When I taught Critical Thinking in high school, one of the principles I harped on was "check your sources."

The difficulty is, I don't just mean "see where the claim is mentioned."  You also need to do the work of seeing if the source that mentions it is itself reputable.  But there's an additional complication that makes our job as skeptics way harder, and that's the handoff that occurs, one source to another, sometimes leaving a story light years from where it started.

Let's look at an example of this phenomenon, which is the strange claim that appeared in a 2023 paper in The Journal of World Science.  The paper was entitled "Concept of Time Travel and the Different Theories Making it Possible and the Implications of Time Travel," and was by three authors, one from Pakistan and two from a university in Indonesia.

The paper opens with a bang:

In March 2003, the FBI arrested 44-year-old Andrew Carlssin.  Newspapers reported that this man was so fortunate in the history of the Stock Market.  He invested $800, and within two weeks, it turned into $350 million.  The FBI suspected that he was running a scam.  That he was an inside trader.  When Andrew was questioned, he answered that he was a time traveler.  He claimed that he was a traveler from 250 years in the future and that he knew how the stocks would perform, so he invested in them and got the extraordinary result.  The FBI was convinced that he was lying, and when they investigated some more, they found that Before December 2002, there was no record of Carlssin.  Even more surprising was that on 3rd April, Carlssin had to appear in court for his bail hearing, but he had disappeared, never to be found again.  Was he a time traveler?

Well, first off, the odd diction, sentence fragments, and random capitalization should be a hint that something is amiss; reputable journals are usually pretty careful about this kind of thing.  It could be that (given the fact that none of the authors come from a predominantly English-speaking country) that was the fault of the translator(s), however, so we'll let that slide for now.

But if you read a little further, you find that the weirdness only intensifies:

The first way is to get a glimpse of the past by Teleporting from one place of the universe to another distant place in the universe with instant travel and then; through any strong Telescope and then look back on the Earth through it then, we can able to see how many lights year before our earth looks like, how much in the past we can see is dependent on our distance from Earth the far we are the far we can see in the Past (Rabounski & Borissova, 2022).  Because it takes a significant time for light to travel from one place to another, even with how fast light travels, if we talk about distance in light-years, it takes years for light to travel to some places.  So, if we could get somewhere before the light reaches there and then look back at the approaching light, the light would be from the past.  That is how we can see the past.

Simple!  Get to a distant planet faster than light, and look back at Earth through a telescope!  How come I didn't think of that?

But hey, it's in a scientific journal, right?  With source citations and everything! 

Someone shoulda told the Doctor.  He could have ditched the TARDIS altogether.

There's a wee problem, here, though.  The Andrew Carlssin story that started the paper, and which is repeatedly referred to throughout, ended up in The Journal of World Science after repeated handoffs wherein the claim incrementally worked its way up the ladder of credibility (and in fact, along the way showed up in a number of reasonably reliable news services, albeit usually in their "Odd Stories" or "Unsolved Mysteries" features).  But if you trace the thread from its appearance in a science journal in 2023 all the way back to its origins in 2003, you find out that the whole thing started...

... in The Weekly World News.

Yes, The Weekly World News, that wonderful tabloid famous for features about Taylor Swift secretly giving birth to Bigfoot's baby, and that a creature called Bat Boy is going to win the U. S. presidential election in 2032.  (My feeling at the moment is President Boy wouldn't be any worse than our current excuse for a leader.)

My conclusion from this is that there should be some kind of skeptic's version of "All Roads Lead to Rome" that goes, "All Bullshit Ultimately Leads Back to The Weekly World News."

Despite its antecedents, since then, the Carlssin story has appeared all over the place, usually with no mention of its absurd roots.  An example is a story in Medium that treats it as if it were one hundred percent real, and which along the way suggests that Greta Thunberg is also a time traveler.  "Many [people] wonder," the author says, "if she possesses the power to bend time itself."

What I wonder is who those "many people" are.  My thought is it's a little like how Trump says "I've heard from dozens of reputable sources..." immediately before he says something that amounts to "... this idiotic lie that I just now pulled out of my ass, and that you'd have to have the IQ of a bar of soap to believe."

To illustrate how this handoff can occur, I deliberately chose a ridiculous example that (I dearly hope) none of you would have believed regardless where you read it.  But the same thing happens with more serious claims.  You hear some statistic -- such as the claim that in the last eight months, U.S. policies have spurred seventeen trillion dollars of foreign investment into our country's industry -- and find it's quoted all over the place, including in reputable news services.  In this case, if you're reasonably savvy you might pick up on the red flag that the claim is more than a little bit implausible; seventeen trillion dollars is around one-fifth of the total gross national product of every nation on Earth combined.

But then you start tracking it backward, and you find out that it traces its origins to yet another instance of Donald Trump plucking a random number out of thin air to make himself look good, and the few news sources who are willing to challenge him on anything have identified it as a flat-out unadulterated lie.  The rest just passed it off as fact -- and then the handoff began, until the figure became so well-publicized that if you google "seventeen trillion dollars" the entire first page of hits is about the amazing windfall American businesses are receiving because of Trump's policies.

So it's not sufficient any more to say "I read it in The Wall Street Journal."  To be honest, it probably never was.  If you want to be certain of something, you have to figure out where the claim originated -- which can be difficult work.  But the alternative is trusting the knowledge and good intentions of the media source you use.

These days, that is seriously thin ice.

If you want to be informed, which I hope all of you do, watch your sources.  Find out where they got the information, and make sure the sort of twenty-year-long Game of Telephone that landed a time travel story from The Weekly World News in The Journal of World Science hasn't tempted you to believe something ludicrous.

Even if "many people" are saying it.

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