The blink of an eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Toxic waste

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, you need "activated charcoal lemonade."

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

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

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

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

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

But I digress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The war of choice

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

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

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

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

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

The predictable happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Guilt by association

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Divine meddling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fancy that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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