Life during chaos

If there's one place and historical period I could choose to know more about, it would be England during, and immediately following, the withdrawal of the Romans in the fifth century C. E.

For one thing, this would settle once and for all the question of whether King Arthur was a real historical personage, a completely fabricated legend, or somewhere in that gray area in between.  Whoever (or whatever) he was, I doubt our picture of him was anywhere near accurate:

This one, either:

Both of which are kind of a shame, for completely different reasons.

In any case, besides finding out more about the King of the Britons, I'd love to have more knowledge about what exactly was going on back then.  There are very few written records from Britain following the withdrawal of Roman troops from the northern and western parts of the island by the (usurping) Emperor Magnus Maximus in 383.  Things stabilized a little after Magnus was deposed and executed in 387, but Roman rule in the west was definitely crumbling.  The final blow came in 410 when Roman settlers in what is now southern England -- many of whom had been born there -- pleaded for help from Rome against the "barbarian" Celts, who were not above taking advantage of the instability, and Emperor Honorius basically told them to bugger off and take care of their own problems because he had more pressing concerns, the biggest being that Rome had just been sacked by a shitload of Visigoths.

This meant that running England fell to whoever could manage to keep their head on their shoulders long enough to do so.  In some places, these were the Romano-British magistrates who chose not to decamp when the powers-that-be back on the Italian peninsula left them to their own devices; in other places, Celtic or Pictish warlords.  This period saw the beginning of the Saxon invasions from what is now Denmark and northern Germany, something that would historically and linguistically change the entire face of the country.

But the fact remains that we don't know much for certain.  The earliest record we have of the era was written at least a century after the events it chronicles -- Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) -- but it contains as much hagiography and finger-wagging about pagan sinfulness as it does history.  (For what it's worth, Gildas doesn't even mention King Arthur; the first time the Once and Future King appears in a written record is Nennius's Historia Brittonum, from around 900.  If Arthur was real, this omission seems a little curious, to say the least.)

In any case, between the withdrawal of the Romans in 410 and the unification of England under King Æthelstan of Wessex in 927, we don't have a lot of reliable sources to go on.  To be fair to the English, they had other fish to fry during those intervening centuries, what with the horrific Plague of Justinian ripping its way through Europe in the middle of the sixth century, repeated invasions by the Angles and Saxons, and then the depredations of the Vikings, starting with their destruction of the "Holy Island" of Lindisfarne in 793.  Virtually the only people who could read and write back then were monks and clerics, and you have to figure that what they'd have been writing while they were being hacked to bits would have been gruesome reading anyhow.  (Possibly, "Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea.  He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaarrrrggh.")

The topic comes up because a new study out of the University of Cambridge that found something surprising -- at least in one region, the economy didn't tank completely when the Romans jumped ship.  Pollution by heavy metals, as nasty as it can be, is a decent proxy record for the robustness of trade and industry; when things are really bad, chances are you're not going to be doing much smelting of silver, iron, and lead.  The team, led by archaeologist Martin Millett, found that in sediment cores from the River Ure in Yorkshire, the levels of metal contamination stayed fairly constant throughout the period.  This is evidence that the Roman settlement at Aldborough -- the Roman Isurium Brigantum -- continued to be a trading hub despite the chaos.

This, of course, doesn't tell you what was happening in other parts of the island.  It could be that Aldborough just happened to hang on longer, for reasons we'll probably never know.  Eventually, the plague and the repeated invasions caught up with them, too, and in the seventh and eighth centuries, there wasn't that much happening, at least not smelting-wise.  The "Dark Ages" in England are "dark" not because they were necessarily any more barbaric than any other period, but because we know so little about them -- and this gives us at least a small piece of information about one town's fate after the fall of the Roman Empire.

I'm always attracted to a mystery, and there's something compelling about this period.  Undoubtedly why there have been so many works of fiction that are set in pre-Norman England.  It's nice to have one more bit of the puzzle, even if neither the worlds of Sexy King Arthur nor Silly King Arthur are likely to come anywhere near the reality of what life was like back then.

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Looking for a signature

Finding unequivocal evidence of extraterrestrial life is not as easy as science fiction makes it sound.

The problem is, we're biased toward detecting terrestrial life -- living things that have a similar chemistry to the familiar life forms here on Earth.  It's understandable; I mean, why would we not be?  While there is a great diversity of species here on our planet (something on the order of nine million extant, at an estimate), they all share the same basic biochemistry, including:

• ATP as an energy driver
• some form of sugar-fueled cellular respiration to produce that ATP
• phospholipid bilayers as cell membranes, and (for eukaryotes) for the internal membranes that compartmentalize the cell
• proteins to facilitate structure, movement, and catalysis (the latter are called enzymes)
• nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA for information storage and retrieval
• lipids for long-term energy storage

While there are obviously different twists on how exactly these things work, those features are common to just about all life on Earth.  (Interestingly, a 2010 paper claiming a microbe had been discovered in California's Mono Lake that incorporates arsenic into the backbone of its DNA instead of phosphorus was just retracted by the journal Nature -- although the retraction is controversial, and the authors are still defending their work as valid.)

The question remains unsolved, therefore, of the extent to which the genesis and evolution of life are constrained -- by which we mean that the pathways taken by biology might be expected to repeat on other Earth-like worlds.  (Or, to use Stephen Jay Gould's pithy phrase, we might find that evolution would produce similar forms again here on Earth if we were somehow able to "replay the tape of life.")  Would living things, down to the biochemical level, be at least somewhat like terrestrial life, or would they be entirely different?

To be fair to the science fiction writers, there have been instances where they've made a significant effort to consider what life "not as we know it" might look like.  Star Trek's Horta ("The Devil in the Dark"), Crystalline Entity ("Silicon Avatar"), and Tholians ("The Tholian Web") come to mind, as well as Doctor Who's Vashta Nerada ("Silence in the Library"), Boneless ("Flatline"), Not-Things ("Wild Blue Yonder"), and Midnight Entity ("Midnight").  

Even Lost in Space gave it a creditable try with the Bubble Creatures in "The Derelict."

The problem is more complex than that, though.  Since we can't actually go to other planets and search for living things -- even going to planets and moons in our own Solar System is crazy expensive and fraught with difficulties -- we're stuck with looking for biosignatures, traces (either structural or chemical) that show unequivocal evidence of being created by living things.

The sticking point is that word unequivocal.  Two good examples of this came to light in the last couple of weeks, one of them (from the standpoint of people like me who would love nothing better than to find out we're not alone in the universe) bad news, and the other one -- at least tentatively -- good news.

Let's start with the bad news first.

Back in 2005, NASA's Cassini mission spotted something exciting -- the presence of organic molecules in water-rich plumes erupted from Saturn's icy moon Enceladus.  The surmise was that these plumes were created by pressure in the moon's interior, where water might be kept liquid by tidal deformation from the huge gas giant's gravitational pull.  Now, organic doesn't mean produced by life; it's a chemistry term meaning "containing carbon and hydrogen."  (Formaldehyde, for example, is an organic compound, and has been found by its spectral signature in interstellar gas, and no one's claiming that it was made by aliens.  At least, no one I'd want to have a conversation with.)  On the other hand, lots of organic compounds are made by living things, so their presence in Enceladus's geysers certainly seemed to raise at least the possibility that underneath the ice, there might be a watery ocean that harbored life.

Well, a study led by scientists from Italy's Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziale has found another possible explanation.  The organic molecules could be formed right there on the surface by radiation funneled in by Saturn's magnetic field, then blasted off the surface -- i.e., they didn't come from an interior ocean at all.  "While the identification of complex organic molecules in Enceladus's environment remains an important clue in assessing the moon's habitability, the results demonstrate that radiation-driven chemistry on the surface and in the plumes could also create these molecules," said Grace Richards, who led the study.  "Molecules considered prebiotic could plausibly form in situ through radiation processing, rather than necessarily originating from the subsurface ocean.  Although this doesn't rule out the possibility that Enceladus's ocean may be habitable, it does mean we need to be cautious in making that assumption just because of the composition of the plumes."

The second paper had more hopeful news.  It comes out of Stony Brook University, and is an analysis of some mudstones found in Jezero Crater on Mars by the Perseverance rover.  The analysis -- done long-distance, obviously -- found traces of organic material, along with ferrous sulfate and ferric sulfide.  Most interestingly, the organic material seems to have undergone post-deposition redox reactions; redox reactions are the mechanism by which all terrestrial life forms harvest energy for their life processes (cellular respiration is, basically, one long string of redox reactions).  The minerals, the researchers say, "challenge some aspects of a purely abiotic explanation" -- cautious science-speak for, "Life?  Yeah, could be."

Of course, this is not proof, and Sagan's principle that I mentioned in a post a few days ago -- "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" -- certainly applies here.  But it is fascinating, and if further inquiries support the biotic explanation for the odd chemistry of the Jezero mudstones, it'll be somewhere beyond exciting.  I've always thought it likely that life is common in the universe, but having a real, honest-to-Gallifrey extraterrestrial example would be amazing.

In any case, keep your eyes on the science news.  Despite the ridiculous budget cuts NASA is facing, they're still doing some wonderful science.  And hopefully, at some point, we'll actually find proof of aliens.  Wouldn't that be cool?

I hope it's not the Vashta Nerada, though.  Those mofos are scary.

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Flash in the pan

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

So wrote William Shakespeare in Hamlet, and if anything, it's a significant understatement.  If Shakespeare were writing today, considering recent discoveries in science, he might phrase it as, "Horatio, you seriously have no idea how weird it is out there.  I mean, literally," which gains in accuracy but does lose something in poetic diction.

To take just one example, consider the paper that appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters this week, about a gamma ray burst that was discovered by the amusingly-named Very Large Telescope (they're currently building a bigger one down in Chile which will be called, I shit you not, the Extremely Large Telescope).  Gamma ray bursts are already pretty astonishing; NASA describes them as "second only to the Big Bang as the most energetic and luminous phenomena known."  There are several possible causes of these enormous releases of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation -- supernovae, the catastrophic merger of neutron stars, and flares from magnetars amongst them.  (You would not want to be looking down the gun barrel of one of these when it went off.  There is some suspicion that the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction -- one of the "Big Five" mass extinctions, and second only to the Permian-Triassic "Great Dying" event in terms of magnitude -- was caused by a nearby gamma ray burst.)

Most of these events are one-offs, and considering the energy they involve (most of them release more energy in a few seconds than the Sun will in its entire lifetime) you can understand why.  After one flare-up of that size, it's unsurprising that it wouldn't do it again any time soon.  So the astrophysicists were puzzled when they found a gamma-ray burster (GRB 250702B) that seems to recur -- it produced a sequence of five flares, and did that entire sequence three times.  Weirdest still, each time, the interval between the second and third flare in the sequence was an integer multiple of the interval between the first two!

What in the hell could cause that?

The gamma-ray burst seems to be extragalactic -- to be coming from a source outside the Milky Way.  The source is near a known galaxy, but whether the burst is coming from within the galaxy, or simply from a source that happens to be lined up with it, hasn't been determined yet.  The galaxy is one of the thousands that have been located by the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes but have yet to be studied; they don't even know what its red shift is (which would tell you how far away it is).  But because the red shift of gamma ray bursts is impossible to determine -- to calculate red shift, you need identifiable spectral lines, and those don't occur in something as massive and chaotic as a burst -- this still wouldn't tell you whether the source was actually inside the galaxy or not.

In fact, there's more that's unknown than known about this phenomena.  The periodicity led the researchers to suggest one possibility, that it was some unfortunate massive star in an elliptical orbit around a massive black hole, and having pieces torn off it every time it gets to perihelion.  Another possibility is an "atypical stellar core collapse," which is astrophysics-speak for "a collapsing star where we really have no idea why it's acting like it does."  A third is that the detected periodicity is an artifact caused by "dust echoes" -- reflection of the original gamma-ray burst from concentric shells of dust surrounding the remains of an exploded star.  The final possibility -- at least of the ones the authors came up with -- is that it's an example of gravitational lensing, where light emitted by a star (or other astronomical object) travels close to a black hole, the curved space around the black hole causes the light beam to split along more than one path, and different parts of it arrive at different times.

The paths of light traveling through a gravitational lens [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The upshot is that we simply don't know what's going on here.  The authors write:

We have... new, multiwavelength observations of a superlative series of associated GRB triggers, GRB 250702B.  Our observations reveal a rapidly fading, multiwavelength counterpart likely to be embedded in a galaxy with a complex and asymmetric morphology.  We... conclude that GRB 250702B is an extragalactic event.  The relatively bright and extended host suggest the redshift is moderate (z < 1).

GRB 250702B is observationally unprecedented in its timescale, morphology, and the onset of X-ray photons prior to the initial GRB trigger.  In addition, we find a striking, near-integer time step between the GRB outbursts, suggesting (although not proving) possible periodicity in the events.

All of this is absolutely fascinating to the astronomers, because it opens up the perennial question of "Is this a phenomenon we've already seen and know how to explain, or is it actually new physics?"  At present, there's no way to answer this with any certainty.  All that's known is something really weird is going on out there, and we're going to have to do a lot more observation before we'll be able to figure out what the explanation is.

So like I said, Shakespeare was spot-on.  And the more we look out into the skies, the more we find that is Not Dreamt Of In Our Philosophy.  Only now we have astrophysicists working on actually explaining these phenomena -- so perhaps this very peculiar flash-in-the-pan won't remain a mystery forever.

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The phantoms of Jedburgh Abbey

Jedburgh Abbey is a ruined Augustinian monastery near the town of the same name in Roxburghshire, Scotland, only ten miles from the border with England.  It has quite a storied history.  It was founded in 1118 by King David I (whose father, King Malcolm III Canmore, defeated the notorious Macbeth; whether Birnam Wood ever actually came to Dunsinane is another matter entirely).  It became one of the wealthiest abbeys in the Scottish border counties, and its abbot also made the mistake of supporting William Wallace.  This was a bad combination back then.  After Wallace's tragic defeat at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298, the victorious English ransacked and pillaged the abbey. It recovered, only to be sacked several more times, and finally burned (along with nearly the entire town of Jedburgh) in 1523.

Even so -- and despite the Scottish Reformation pretty well doing away with all the Catholic monasteries in Scotland -- part of the building was still used as the parish kirk.  Finally, in 1871, it was deemed unsafe, and a new church was built; the remains of the abbey became a historical landmark, where it attracts tourists lo unto this very day.

It also is the home of a particularly terrifying pair of specters -- which, if you believe the ghost hunters, still sometimes can be seen stalking around the abbey grounds.

Jedburgh Abbey from the River by Thomas Girtin (1799) [Image is in the Public Domain]

King Alexander III of Scotland (1249-1286), whose great-great grandfather David I founded Jedburgh Abbey, had a terrible time of it even judging by medieval Scottish standards, where life was (in Thomas Hobbes's immortal words) "solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short."  He became king at age seven -- never a good way to start -- and his first years were dominated by a fight for power between two factions both determined to gain control over the young monarch.  He married Margaret Plantagenet, daughter of King Henry III of England, but this only served to give Henry incentive to demand fealty from Alexander, entangling Scotland in another of the long conflicts it had with its neighbor to the south.

Along the way, Alexander had what would turn out to be his only real victory; in 1263 the Scots defeated the invading force of King Haakon IV of Norway at the Battle of Largs, and in the treaty that ended the conflict, Scotland gained ownership of the Hebrides and the Isle of Man.

But after that, things started to fall apart.  Alexander's wife Margaret died in 1275, and all three of his children by her had followed their mother into the grave by 1284.  As was typical of the time, Alexander started casting around for a second wife.  His only heir was his grandchild, the daughter of his deceased eldest child Margaret who had married King Eric II of Norway, grandson of the defeated Haakon IV -- but the girl (also named Margaret) was an infant... and still lived in Norway.

Here's where it takes an even darker turn.  Alexander fell for a woman named Yolande de Dreux, the daughter of a French nobleman.  Yolande reciprocated his attention, but there was a snag -- she was already betrothed, to a French knight named Eranton de Blois.  There's no historical certainty about what happened next, but according to the legend, Yolande conspired with one of her father's henchmen, the Comte de Montbar, to get de Blois out of the way, and he did -- via a dagger in the back.

The Abbot of Jedburgh demanded an investigation, but (predictably) nothing came of it.  Yolande was engaged to marry King Alexander, and the ceremony took place in the abbey church on November 1, 1285.

Everything was going forward with the typical medieval pomp and solemnity until the door of the church flew open with a bang, and an uninvited guest strode up the aisle, wearing armor and a tattered and bloodstained cloak.  When he reached the front of the church, the king said in a furious voice, "Who are you?"

At this point the figured lifted its visor, to reveal the decaying visage of a corpse.

De Montbar collapsed to the floor, writhing, and Yolande recoiled -- because, of course, they both recognized the dead man's face.  The specter pointed at Yolande and said, "Ask her.  My curse be on you and on her, the curse of the assassin's victim, treacherously ambushed and foully slain.  Hear me well, unhappy king.  Before three months have passed, they will sing masses for your soul in Jedburgh Abbey and she will be left a widow.  She will suffer the hatred of her people and will forever be reminded of her crimes."

Three months turned out to be an underestimate, but not by much.  On March 19, 1286, the king rode out after dark to join his wife at Kinghorn in Fifeshire, and the next morning was found at the bottom of a steep, rocky embankment with his neck broken.  Pragmatic folks said his horse lost its footing in the dark and threw its rider to his death; the more imaginative said it was the curse being fulfilled.  However it was, the whole thing propelled Scotland into chaos.  Alexander's granddaughter, Margaret, "Maid of Norway," died on board ship during the crossing to Scotland in 1290, leaving no heir to the throne.  The following years of civil war and repeated invasions from England (including the one that ultimately led to the brutal execution of William Wallace) only ended in 1306 with the coronation of Robert the Bruce.

As far as the rest of the "curse," it kind of... didn't happen.  There's no indication that Yolande was hated; she returned to France, where she remarried to Arthur II, Duke of Brittany, had six children of whom five reached adulthood, and lived to age 67 (neither of those a bad accomplishment back then).  She had received land in Scotland as a dowry for her first marriage and continued to manage it from over the Channel, apparently untroubled by the sordid story that was attached to her name.

But as for Alexander, death didn't bring him any peace.  Both his ghost and de Blois's have been seen on the abbey grounds, despite the fact that even the harshest versions of the legend didn't attach anything blameworthy to either one, and the spirits of the two people who were the real bad guys (Yolande and her murderous co-conspirator de Montbar) are nowhere to be found.  I guess there's no justice to be had, even in the afterlife.

Anyhow, that's today's creepy story, appropriate given that I'm already seeing Halloween decorations in the stores around here.  It makes a good tale even though the great likelihood is that large parts of it were made up after the fact.  But if you ever get a chance to visit Jedburgh, keep an eye out for phantoms.  A medieval king with a broken neck and a bloodied corpse in armor.  Shouldn't be hard to spot.

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Collectibles

A couple of days ago my writer friend, Vivienne Tuffnell, posted a link to a blog called Cazadora.  Vivienne is a stunningly good writer, and her books are lovely and poignant and atmospheric, and you should all add her to your TBR list immediately.  (Seriously.  She's that good.)

Viv and I share a great many interests, and what she posts is unfailingly interesting, so I checked out the link.  The blog is owned by the writer Elsie Morales, and this particular entry is entitled "Why Do We Collect Things?"  It's a fascinating question, because collecting stuff -- everything from action figures to coins to mantelpiece tchotchkes -- is, on the face of it, the most pointless occupation imaginable.

When I was a teenager, I collected postage stamps.  I was pretty serious about it.  The ones that fascinated me the most were the old stamps, some of them from countries that no longer exist.

A 1900 overprint stamp from the Orange Free State, now part of the Republic of South Africa [Image is in the Public Domain]

I learned a great deal of history and geography from stamp collecting.  More, it must be said, than I did in most of my history classes.  There was something so tangible about it.  I could see the progression in the 1920s of stamps in Germany going from one Mark to ten to hundreds to millions to billions, as hyperinflation made the Weimar Republic's currency essentially worthless -- one of the factors that contributed to the rise of Hitler and the eventual horror of World War II.  Stamps from the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s were a mute testimony to the nationalism and militarism of the Stalin and Khrushchev years, with their colorful designs celebrating Soviet advances in space science, engineering, and agriculture (and, of course, conveniently overlooking the awful authoritarianism that was propelling it all).  During the same period, colonies in Africa became free nations, many of them changing their names (in the case of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, several times), and all of that was recorded in the stamps those countries issued.

Of course, for me, the point wasn't learning history and geography; that just came as an added benefit.  My fascination was the curious designs, and (sometimes) different languages and scripts -- even the strange words the stamp books used to describe the colors they were printed in, such as carmine and bistre and vermilion and lake and ultramarine.  The biggest draw, though, was the thought that these had been handled by people back then actually to send a letter.  I have a piece of paper that someone had affixed to an envelope in Bulgaria in 1911 to mail -- what?  A payment to a bill collector?  A newsy letter to a family member?  An official piece of correspondence to a business?  A secret romantic note to a lover?

Could have been any of the above.  The possibilities are endless.

In fact, that's connected to why I finally gave up collecting.  In the 1980s, a lot of countries realized that philately was a booming and potentially lucrative hobby, and started issuing thousands of "stamps for collectors" -- glorified stickers, honestly -- that were never intended to be used as postage.  Many, in fact, were "pre-cancelled" to prevent anyone from using them to mail stuff.  The market was flooded with pretty designs of flowers and famous people and cute animals, and the whole reality of what postage stamps are kind of evaporated.

So did my interest.

Man, capitalism sucks, sometimes.

I still have my collection, though -- the dozens of binders I have with stamps going back to the mid-1800s.  And I still find it all fascinating, even if I don't actively collect anymore.

In any case, Morales has a very cool take on where this impulse comes from.  (I really encourage you all to read her blog post -- linked above -- and also subscribe to her Substack, because it's awesome.)  She writes:

[T]he things we keep and arrange become part of our environment, identity, and how we communicate with the world, both as individuals and as societies.  Collecting is a deeply meaning-making activity: it weaves memories and longing into the everyday spaces we inhabit...  In a nutshell: Even the most mundane object (an old concert ticket, a pencil eraser) matters if it tells a story or sparks a memory.

I think this is spot-on, and it also gets at the heart of why we shouldn't be embarrassed about our fascination with strange stuff.  How often have you heard people follow up a comment like, "I collect Matchbox Cars" with something like "... I know it's pretty silly."  Well, of course it's silly.  But who cares?  That's the whole point.  The only relevant question is "Does it make you happy?"

If so, then you should happily indulge in it.  This world is already filled with enough narrow, hyper-serious ultra-practicality.  Why shouldn't we engage in pointless activities that bring us joy?  And why should we worry if someone else enjoys a different set of pointless activities?

Here's to pointlessness, my friends.  I swear, the world would be a far, far better place if more people spent their time doing stuff like trainspotting or geocaching or painting miniatures or building model train setups or making their home paneling out of old yardsticks.

Embrace your hobbies, and most importantly, don't apologize for them.  They're part of what makes us unique.  Hobbies give us a respite from the stresses of the world, and help us to find like-minded individuals.  Basically: do what makes you happy, and don't worry if others don't understand.

So maybe I should break out my stamp collection and take a look at it.  It's been at least five years since I've done so much as taking the binders off the shelf.  Maybe I should even get back into filling in some of the gaps.  It'd be a better use of my time than obsessing over the damn news, anyhow.

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Wheat from chaff

My question today is one that haunts many skeptics -- how would you know if a bizarre claim is actually true, especially in the absence of evidence?

The hardest-nosed of us would probably object to the premises of the question; if there is no evidence, they would say, then there is no basis on which to make a judgment in the first place.  While I agree with that general attitude -- and have applied it myself on numerous occasions -- it always leaves me with the worry that I'll miss something, and just through the weakness of the evidence and my preconceived notions, I won't see the grain of wheat in amongst the chaff.

I riffed on this whole idea in my novel Signal to Noise (and if you'll allow me a moment of shameless self-promotion, it is available at Amazon from the link on the right side of the page).  In the story, a skeptical wildlife biologist, who had decided that all woo-woo claims are utter bullshit, is confronted with something bizarre going on in the mountains of central Oregon -- and has to overcome his preconceived biases even to admit that it might be real.  In the story, it doesn't help that the news is delivered to him with no hard evidence whatsoever, by a total stranger who just "has a feeling that something is wrong."  (I won't tell you any more about it; you'll just have to read it yourself.  And at the risk of appearing immodest, I think it's a pretty damn good story.)

The reason I bring all of this up is a website called Little Sticky Legs: Alien Abductee Portraits, owned by Steven Hirsch.  On this website, which you should definitely take a look at, there are photographs of a number of people who claim that they were abducted by, or at least contacted by, aliens, and their first-hand accounts (and in some cases drawings) of their experiences.  I thought this was an unusually good example of the phenomenon I've described above, for a variety of reasons.

First, the accounts are weird, rambling, and disjointed, and many of them seem to have only a loose attachment to reality.  Second, the photos don't help; whether Hirsch deliberately set out to make his subjects look sketchy is a matter of conjecture, but my sense is that he was playing fair and this is the way these people actually look.  Some of them, not to put too fine a point on it, are a little scary.  And third, of course, the content of the accounts is fairly contrary to what most scientists think is realistic.  All of these things combined seem to put their stories squarely into the category of bizarre, possibly delusional, nonsense.

But reading the earnest narratives of these supposed contactees left me feeling a little uneasy.  Part of it was a sense that if their stories aren't true, then these people are either lying or else are the victims of hallucinations that could qualify as psychotic breaks.  And although I am rather free about poking fun at folks who generate strange ideas, I draw the line at including as targets people who have genuine mental illnesses.

My unease, however, had another source, and one that haunts me every time I see something like this; what if one of these stories is actually true?

A person who had been abducted, but was left with no physical trace of the experience, might well describe it in just these terms.  If the victim was someone who wasn't highly educated, there's no reason to expect that (s)he would remember the details, or explain them afterwards, in the way a trained scientist would.  The general vagueness and lack of clarity is, in fact, exactly what you'd expect if an ordinary person experienced something shockingly outside their worldview.

Now, please don't misunderstand me.  I'm not, in any sense, committing to a belief in alien abductions in general, much less to any specific one of the stories on Hirsch's website.  My hunch is that none of these stories is true, and that whatever these individuals are describing has another source than actual experience.  But it is only a hunch, and an honest skeptic would have to admit that there is no more evidence that these claims are false than there is that they are true.  My only point here is that if one of them was telling the truth, this is much the form I would expect it to take... which means that it behooves all of us, and especially the skeptics, not to discount odd claims without further inquiry.  Skeptics tend to rail against the superstitious for jumping to supernatural explanations for completely natural phenomena; we should be equally careful not to jump to prosaic explanations when an odd one might be correct.

Carl Sagan famously said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."  Which is an excellent rule of thumb, with one addition.  Accepting an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.  Investigating an extraordinary claim requires only that you keep your mind open -- and see if there's anything there which might allow you to make a rational evaluation of its truth or falsity.

The best thing, of course, is to withhold judgment completely until the facts are in, but that is pretty solidly counter to human nature, and is probably unrealistic as a general approach.  And given the ephemeral nature of some of these claims, the facts may never come in at all.  All we can do is keep thinking, keep watching and listening and investigating... and not be afraid to push the envelope of our own understanding when the time comes.

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The lure of the unknown

Carl Sagan once said, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

I think that's one of the main things that attracted me to science as a child; its capacity to astonish.  I still remember reading the kids' books on various scientific stuff and being astounded to find out things like:

• dinosaurs, far from being the "failed experiment" they're often characterized as, "ruled the Earth" (as it were) for about five hundred times longer than humans have even existed.  (I only much later found out that dinosaurs still exist; we call 'em birds.)
• when supergiant stars end their lives, they detonate in a colossal explosion called a supernova that gives off in a few seconds as much energy as the Sun will emit in its entire lifetime.  What's left is called a black hole, where the gravitational pull is so powerful even light can't escape.
• bats can hear in a frequency range far above humans, and are so sensitive to their own vocalizations that they can hear the echoes of their own voices and distinguish them from the cacophony their friends and relatives are making.
• when an object moves, its vertical and horizontal velocities are completely independent of each other.  If you shoot a gun horizontally on a level surface, and simultaneously drop a bullet from the gun's muzzle height, the shot bullet and the dropped bullet will hit the ground at the same time.

And that's all stuff we've known for years, because (not to put too fine a point on it) I'm so old that when I was a kid, the Dead Sea was just sick.  In the intervening fifty years since I found out all of the above (and lots of other similar tidbits) the scientists have discovered tons of new, and equally amazing, information about our universe and how it works.  We've even found out that some of what we thought we understood was wrong, or at least incomplete; a good example is photoperiodism, the ability of flowering plants to keep track of day length and thus flower at the right time of year.  It was initially thought that they had a system that worked a bit like a chemical teeter-totter.  A protein called phytochrome has a "dark form" and a "light form" -- the dark form changes to the light form during the day, and the reverse happens at night, so the relative amounts of the two might allow plants to keep track of day length.  But it turns out that all it takes is a flash of red light in the middle of the night to completely upend the plant's biological clock -- so whatever is going on is more complex that we'd understood.

This sudden sense of "wow, we don't know as much as we thought!", far from being upsetting, is positively thrilling to scientists.  Scientists are some of the only people in the world who love saying, "I don't understand."  Mostly because they always follow it up with "... yet."  Take, for example, the discovery announced this week by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory of a huge cloud of gas and dust in our own Milky Way Galaxy that prior to this we hadn't even known was there.

It's been named the Midpoint Cloud, and it's about two hundred light years across.  It's an enormous whirlpool centered on Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center, and seems to act like a giant funnel drawing material inward toward the accretion disk.

"One of the big discoveries of the paper was the giant molecular cloud," said Natalie Butterfield, lead author of the paper on the phenomenon, which appeared this week in The Astrophysical Journal.  "No one had any idea this cloud existed until we looked at this location in the sky and found the dense gas.  Through measurements of the size, mass, and density, we confirmed this was a giant molecular cloud.  These dust lanes are like hidden rivers of gas and dust that are carrying material into the center of our galaxy.  The Midpoint Cloud is a place where material from the galaxy's disk is transitioning into the more extreme environment of the galactic center and provides a unique opportunity to study the initial gas conditions before accumulating in the center of our galaxy."

[Image credit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/P.Vosteen]

Among the amazing features of this discovery is that it contains a maser -- an intense, focused microwave source, in this case thought to be caused by compression and turbulence in the ammonia-rich gas of the cloud.  Additionally, there are several sites that seem to be undergoing collapse; we might be witnessing the birth of new stars.

What's astonishing to me is that this cloud is (1) humongous, (2) in our own galaxy, and (3) glowing like crazy in the microwave region of the spectrum, yet no one had any idea it was there until now.  How much more are we overlooking because we haven't tuned into the right frequency or turned our telescopes to the right coordinates?

The universe is a big place.  And, I suspect, it's absolutely full of surprises.  Hell, there are enough surprises lying in wait right here on the Earth; to give just one example, I've heard it said that we know more about the near side of the Moon than we do about the deep oceans.

How could anyone not find science fascinating?

This is also why I've never understood how people think that science's progress could be turned into a criticism -- I used to hear it from students phrased as, "why do we have to learn all this stuff when it could all be proven wrong tomorrow?"  Far from being a downside, science's capacity to update and self-correct is its most powerful strength.  How is it somehow better to cling to your previous understanding in the face of evidence to the contrary?

That, I don't think I'll ever come close to comprehending.

I'll end with another quote from a scientific luminary -- the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman -- that I think sums it all up succinctly: "I'd much rather questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."

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Mind the gap

In 1869, explorer John Wesley Powell did the first systematic study of the geology of the Grand Canyon.  As impressive as it is, the Grand Canyon's not that complicated geologically; it's made of layers of sedimentary rock, most of them relatively undeformed, one on top of the other from the oldest at the bottom to the newest at the top.  A layer cake of billions of years of Earth history, and a wonderful example of the principle of superposition -- that strata form from the bottom up.

However, Powell also noted something rather peculiar.  It's called the Great Unconformity.  In geologic parlance, an unconformity is a break in the rock record, where the layer below is separated from the layer above by a gap in time when either no rocks were deposited (in that location, at least), or the rocks that were laid down were later removed by some natural process.  At that stage in the science, Powell didn't know when exactly the Great Unconformity occurred, but it was obvious that it was huge.  Something had taken away almost a billion years' worth of rocks -- and, it was later found out, that same chunk of rock was missing not only at the future site of the Grand Canyon, but across most of North America.

It was an open question as to why this happened, but one leading hypothesis was that it was massive glaciation.  Glaciers are extraordinarily good at breaking up rocks and moving them around, as I find out every time I dig in my garden and my shovel runs into the remnants of the late Pleistocene continental glaciation.  At that point, where my house is would have been under about thirty meters of ice; the southern extent is the Elmira moraine, a line of low hills fifty kilometers south of here, left behind when the glaciers, pushing piles of crushed rock and soil ahead of them like a backhoe, began to melt back and left all that debris for us gardeners to contend with ten thousand years later.

There was a time in which the Earth was -- as far as we can tell -- completely covered by ice. The Cryogenian Period, during the late Precambrian, is sometimes nicknamed the "Snowball Earth" -- and the thawing might have been one contributing factor to the development of complex animal life, an event called the "Cambrian explosion," about which I've written before.

The problem was, the better the data got, the more implausible this sounded as the cause of the Great Unconformity.  The rocks missing in the Great Unconformity seem to have preceded the beginning of the Cryogenian Period by a good three hundred million years.  And while there were probably earlier periods of worldwide glaciation -- perhaps several of them -- the fact that the Cryogenian came and went and didn't leave a second unconformity above the first led scientists away from this as an explanation.

However, a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, written by a team led by Francis Macdonald of the University of Colorado - Boulder, has come up with evidence supporting a different explanation.  Using samples of rock from Pike's Peak in Colorado, Macdonald's team used a clever technique called thermochronology to estimate how much rock had been removed.  Thermochronology uses the fact that some radioactive elements release helium-4 as a breakdown product, and helium (being a gas) diffuses out of the rock -- and the warmer it is, the faster it leaves.  So the amount of helium retained in the rock gives you a good idea of the temperature it experienced -- and thus, how deeply buried it was, as the temperature goes up the deeper down you dig.

What this told Macdonald's team is that the Pike's Peak granite, from right below the Great Unconformity, had once been buried under several kilometers of rock that then had been eroded away.  And from the timing of the removal -- on the order of a billion years ago -- it seems like what was responsible wasn't glaciation, but the formation of a supercontinent.

But not Pangaea, which is what most people think of when they hear "supercontinent."  Pangaea formed much later, something like 330 million years ago, and is probably one of the factors that contributed to the massive Permian-Triassic extinction.  This was two supercontinents earlier, specifically one called Rodinia.  What Macdonald's team proposes is that when Rodinia formed from prior separate plates colliding, this caused a huge amount of uplift, not only of the rocks of the continental chunks, but of the seafloor between them.  A similar process is what formed the Himalayas, as the Indian Plate collided with the Eurasian Plate -- and is why you can find marine fossils at the top of Mount Everest.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

When uplift occurs, erosion increases, as water and wind take those uplifted bits, grind them down, and attempt to return them to sea level.  And massive scale uplift results in a lot of rock being eroded.

Thus the missing layers in the Great Unconformity.

"These rocks have been buried and eroded multiple times through their history," study lead author Macdonald said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "These unconformities are forming again and again through tectonic processes.  What's really new is we can now access this much older history...  The basic hypothesis is that this large-scale erosion was driven by the formation and separation of supercontinents.  There are differences, and now we have the ability to perhaps resolve those differences and pull that record out."

What I find most amazing about this is how the subtle chemistry of rock layers can give us a lens into the conditions on the Earth a billion years ago.  Our capacity for discovery has expanded our view of the universe in ways that would have been unimaginable only thirty years ago.

And now, we have a theory that accounts for one of the great geological mysteries -- what happened to kilometer-thick layers of rock missing from sedimentary strata all over North America.

John Wesley Powell, I think, would have been thrilled.

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The silent battle

Today, from the "Who Could Have Predicted This Besides Everybody?" department, we have: a study by psychologist David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College et al. that found that in the United States, the mental health of young people has shown enough of a decline that it has eliminated the "unhappiness hump" -- the former pattern that younger and older people were overall the happiest, with dissatisfaction ratings peaking in middle age.

Now, the lowest levels of happiness are in those between ages thirteen and twenty-five, and show a slow but steady increase with increasing age thereafter.

I don't know about you, but this came as no surprise to me.  I've often thought that I would not want to be a teenager today.  Some things have improved markedly -- opportunities for women and acceptance of minorities and LGBTQ+ people, for example -- but so many new factors have cropped up making life riskier and more difficult that it's hardly to be wondered at that young people are anxious.  

Let's start with the fact that the current regime (1) is doing its level best to strip rights from anyone who isn't a straight white Christian male, (2) shows little regard for protecting what's left of the environment, and (3) is in the process of wrecking the economy with the ongoing tariff craziness.  (About the latter, Trump and his cronies have taken the toddler-ish approach of "I'll just lie about it and everyone will believe me!" by declaring that the deficit is gone, jobs are surging, and the economy is booming.  And don't believe the cash register; the prices of groceries and gasoline are down across the nation.  Oh, and these are not the droids you're looking for.)

I mean, I'm retired, and I find it all depressing.  A college student today facing the current job market would have to be willfully blind not to be anxious about their future.

What gets me, though, is how much you still hear the "suck it up and deal" response from the adults.  To take just one example -- why should recent graduates be asking for student loan forgiveness?  After all, we paid our student loans when we were that age, right?

Yep, we did.  There's a reason for that.  Between 1978 and 1982, my tuition to the University of Louisiana, along with all my textbooks, came to a total of about a thousand dollars a semester.  Now, the average for tuition alone is around twelve thousand dollars a semester -- four times that if you go to a private school.  Housing prices have gone up drastically as well -- in 1980, the average house sale price was seventy-five thousand dollars; now it's four hundred thousand dollars.  The truth is that purchasing a house shortly after entering the job market was a realistic goal for someone in my generation, but for the current generation, it simply isn't.  In fact, owning a home in the foreseeable future is out of reach for the majority of today's college graduates.

It's no wonder there's a "looming mental health crisis" -- to quote Blanchflower et al. -- amongst today's young people.

This crisis is exacerbated by people who seem bound and determined to paint this entire generation as "lazy" or "entitled," when in fact they are reacting the way just about any of us would when faced with impossible odds.  Just yesterday I saw someone post on social media how infuriating it was that the emergency room was "clogged" with teenagers having emotional breakdowns now that the fall semester of college has started, and that they were sick of these needy kids expecting everyone to drop everything and minister to their whims.  The truth is grimmer than that, and I can say this with some authority, as a person who has struggled with crippling anxiety and depression my entire life.  Depressed people don't fake being mentally ill to get attention; we fake being okay to avoid it.  When you see someone actually having a crisis, it is almost always because they have spent hours or days or weeks trying to suppress it, and eventually simply couldn't any more.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sander van der Wel from Netherlands, Depressed (4649749639), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Might there be people who fake an episode in order to get care they don't really need?  Sure.  It's called Munchausen syndrome.  But it's really uncommon.  And in any case, isn't it better to give unnecessary care to one person who is pretending to be ill than to deny care to a hundred who do need it because you've decided they're all malingerers?

Maybe try having a scrap of fucking compassion.

Most of us mentally ill people are struggling along, trying to find a way to cope with a world that seems increasingly engineered to drag us down, while relying on a mental health care system that is drastically inadequate -- understaffed, overworked, and in general spread far too thin for the need.  For myself, I manage most days.  Some days I don't.  On those days I lean hard into something a therapist told me -- "the biggest lie depression tells you is that the lows are permanent."

But as far as the way we treat others goes, that we can fix.  We can work toward changing our society to lower the stressors on the upcoming generation.  We can support our mental health care professionals, who are trying the best they can under extreme difficulties.  And -- most of all -- we can recall what a family friend told me when I was six years old.  I'd come home from school with my knickers in a twist over some perceived wrong by a classmate, and our wise friend blindsided me by saying, "Don't be so hard on your friend.  You should always be kinder than you think you need to be, because everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle that you know nothing about."

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