No guardrails

Ever since Donald Trump came on the political scene, bragging that he could shoot someone in full view on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single supporter, I and a lot of people on the leftish-side of things have wondered what it would take to get his followers to admit they'd been scammed by a career con-man who has zero moral code.

I think it was about a third of the way into the first Trump presidency that I realized he'd been, for once, telling the unvarnished truth.  I hear now and then of some Trump voter who publicly states that they've woken up and will never support him again, but I think they're very much the exception.  And I've long blamed it largely on the media; a study shortly after the election found that one of the strongest correlations to voting for Trump was lack of access to fact-based information.

So for a while, it was comforting to think that if only these people did have accurate information, they'd come to their senses.  But recently I've begun to think the situation is worse than that.

They know -- but they don't care.  There is no red line, no boundary he could cross that would make people say, "Okay, that's enough."

Since his re-election, Trump's behavior has become more and more unhinged, and instead of provoking a sense of "good lord, what have we done?", the reaction has been more, "Wheeeeee!"  In the last two weeks, the same man who said one of his top priorities was to get us out of military conflicts overseas has stated his intent to annex Greenland and Canada, invade Mexico, and retake the Panama Canal.  (And speaking of media complicity, CNN framed this story as "if he's serious, it'd be the biggest U.S. expansion since the Louisiana Purchase" rather than what any legitimate news source would say, which is, "fucking demented lunatic threatens our allies and risks international conflict with his unprovoked deranged saber-rattling.")

And the fact remains that he's still catastrophically ignorant.  He tweeted this image, apparently without having any idea that the Matterhorn isn't in Canada.

His supporters haven't batted an eyelash.  MAGA Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn said she was all in on taking back the Panama Canal, that "this is what Americans want to see."  Mini-Me, a.k.a. Eric Trump, thought it'd be a good idea to throw fuel on the fire, and posted this:

Next stop, the Sudetenland.

His supporters think Trump has some sophisticated plan here, but he's not playing three-dimensional chess.  He doesn't have the intelligence for tic-tac-toe, much less anything harder.  The Panama thing is most likely retribution, because businesses owned by Trump were recently shut down in the country after accusations of tax evasion and that they were being used as fronts for laundering drug money.  Strategy-wise, he's never progressed any further than "Thag hit me with rock, me hit Thag with rock."

It's why he's threatening to jail Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, Mark Milley, and Alexander Vindman.  They committed the cardinal sin of standing up to him, of calling him out on his lies, of demanding that he be held to the same standards of justice as anyone else in the country.  Anyone who dares to point out the Emperor Has No Clothes needs to be silenced by whatever means necessary.

But despite all this, his followers are still cheering -- and lambasting anyone who dares to contradict Dear Leader.

It's gotten so bad that even when one of Trump's favorites -- former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, once nominee for Attorney General -- was credibly shown to have paid for sex, committed statutory rape, and gone on drug-fueled binges, the response by his supposed family-values followers was not to say, "this guy should be locked up," but to circle the wagons and claim Gaetz had been framed.

Lie after lie, grift after grift.  And yet -- somehow -- it's worked, and is still working.  He scams people in broad daylight, and his followers eagerly line up to be taken advantage of.  The evangelical Christians, who are somehow still behind him one hundred percent despite the fact that he embodies all Seven Deadly Sins in one individual, are just thrilled to pieces by the fact that he's hosting a pre-inauguration prayer service and allowing supporters to attend -- for $100,000 each.

"Pay-to-pray," it's being called.  

I may be off-base, here, being an atheist and all, but isn't this the sort of thing that caused Jesus himself to get violent?  Something about using a whip on money-lenders in the Temple, if I remember correctly.

I think the bottom line is that we on the other side of things have made the mistake of thinking this behavior is rational.  That somehow, if we argue, if we just present more information, use logic and facts, people will be convinced.  The truth is, what's happening here is fundamentally irrational; it's precisely the same appeal to emotion, anger, and nationalism that happened in Germany in the 1930s.  Just like Hitler did, Trump is taking the legitimate concerns of struggling citizens -- anger and anxiety over high cost of living, poor access and high cost of health care, lack of decent-paying jobs with benefits, concerns about crime rate -- and twisting the aim to focus on the wrong causes.  Trump's biggest allies are the super-wealthy corporate leaders, so at all costs we can't have them become the targets.  Instead, get the blame pinned on minorities, immigrants, liberal Democrats, non-Christians, LGBTQ+ people.  

It's why alleged CEO-killer Luigi Mangione has them so freaked out.  For a moment, it forced the attention back on corporate billionaires as a fundamental piece of what's wrong in the United States.

But don't expect the focus to stay there.  It's back to distract, distract, distract.  I don't think we're actually going to invade Greenland, Canada, Mexico, or Panama; Trump has the attention span of a toddler who just had eight Milky Way bars for lunch.  And in any case, actually accomplishing any of that was never the goal.  The real goal is to get Americans to stop thinking, and back to treating everything Trump says as the de facto gospel truth.

He knows that if in two years he hasn't followed through on a single one of his campaign promises, much less any of his idle threats, none of his followers will care -- or even remember.

There is no red line, no guardrails, no brakes, no point where the people who back him will say "enough."  Waiting for it to happen is a fool's errand.  We have to resist, we have to continue to fight, but the war won't be won through logical argument.

It's probably crossed your mind to wonder why, if I think the Trump voters are that unreachable through reasoning, I'm bothering to write this.  It's a valid question.  Besides just processing my own anger, for me it's also a way to connect with like-minded folks, to reassure them that there still are sane people in the world.  To quote British philosopher Edmund Burke, "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Or as Benjamin Franklin put it, more succinctly and more pointedly: "We must all hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately."

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The microcontinent

One of the nice things about science is that it allows us to understand the parts of the universe that are beyond common sense.  

Don't get me wrong, common sense is often a decent guide to figuring things out, and there's some truth to the lament that it'd be nice if it were more common.  The problem is, our intuitive grasp of how stuff works evolved in the context we live in -- moderate sizes and masses, moderate speeds, and moderate time durations.  Get very far out of that context, and common sense can give you the wrong answer.  One of the first times I ran into this was in high school physics, where I learned the startling fact that an object's vertical and horizontal velocity are entirely independent of each other.  This is illustrated by the oft-quoted example that if you fire a bullet horizontally, and at the same time drop a bullet from the height of the gun's barrel, the two bullets will hit the ground at precisely the same time (assuming level terrain).  It may seem counterintuitive, but it's true -- and it took Isaac Newton to show why that was.

We run into problems not only when we deal with things moving quickly, but when they're moving slowly -- so slowly they appear not to be moving at all.  I got to thinking about this when I was sent a link by my friend, the awesome author Andrew Butters (you should follow him at the link provided, and also immediately order his phenomenal new novel Known Order Girls, which is one of the most poignant books I've ever read).  Andrew is, like me, a science nerd -- we were both drastically unsuccessful physics majors in college, who despite that experience maintained a deep fascination with how the universe works.  (Interestingly, our comeuppance as incipient scientists came in different classes.  His nemesis was Electromagnetic Theory, and mine was Classical Mechanics.  In both cases we passed the class largely because the professor didn't ever want to see our names on his roster again, and afterward we both decided that maybe a career as a physicist was not in the cards.)

In any case, this time the topic he sent me was geology -- in particular, plate tectonics, a particular interest of mine.  Researchers have just found that a part of Nunavut, Canada is actually a microcontinent -- a geologically-anomalous piece of continental crust that came loose from Greenland and welded itself to North America on the other side of the Davis Strait.  

The Davis Strait and the west coast of Greenland [Image licensed under the Creative Commons brewbooks via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)]

What's curious about this is that up until about 45 million years ago, Canada and Greenland had been moving apart.  The evidence is that there was a rift zone -- that's what formed the Davis Strait in the first place -- and that some time in the Mid-Eocene Epoch, the rift failed.  (This is not that uncommon; there's a good possibility that the Cameroon Line and the New Madrid Fault are both failed rift zones.)  In any case, after the Davis Strait Rift sealed back up, Greenland started moving in tandem with the North American Plate -- except for a piece of it that sheared off and stuck to what is now Canada.

"The reinterpretation of seismic reflection data offshore West Greenland, along with a newly compiled crustal thickness model, identifies an isolated terrane of relatively thick (19–24 km [12-15 miles]) continental crust that was separated from Greenland during a newly recognised phase of E-W extension along West Greenland’s margin," the team wrote.  "We interpret this continental block as an incompletely rifted microcontinent, which we term the Davis Strait proto-microcontinent...  As our seismic reflection interpretations indicate an extensional event in the eastern Davis Strait between 58 and 49 Myr, spatially coincident with the zone of thinnest continental crust between the continental fragment and Greenland, we infer this extensional event [rift] led to the separation of this fragment from Greenland."

When you think about it, it's unsurprising that it took so long for geologists to figure plate tectonics out.  Despite such broad hints as the puzzle-piece outlines of South America and Africa, a process this slow is not obvious.  Add to that the fact that this particular plate is in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, accessible to researchers for maybe two months a year (that's being generous.)  The entire picture is still being pieced together.  Our tectonic map is pretty good, but the new research shows us that we don't have it all parsed quite yet.

Which is the way it should be.  As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, the more we learn, the more we extend the perimeter of our ignorance.  And this, after all, is what drives science -- the fact that every question we answer brings up a dozen more.

I think we'll be working at this for quite some time to come.

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The forest primeval

A couple of days ago my friend and fellow writer Andrew Butters sent me a link about a new fossil discovery.  He hastened to point out that he'd thought of me because he knows I'm interested in paleontology, not because my name comes to mind when he thinks about antiquated relics.  There may have been a touch of local pride involved as well, because the discovery was made in his home province of New Brunswick, Canada.

There's no doubt that it was a remarkable find.  The fossil was unearthed in a quarry near the town of Norton, where there is a layer of 350-million-year-old sandstone deposited when Atlantic Canada was a tropical swamp.  This was near the beginning of the Carboniferous Period, a time when the Earth was significantly warmer and wetter than it is now.  The high temperatures and carbon dioxide levels boosted plant growth, causing the oxygen levels to rise to an estimated 35% (compared to today's 21%).  This had the effect of allowing animals that had previously been held back by their inefficient respiratory systems, especially arthropods, to become huge, leading to millipedes 2.5 meters long and dragonflies with 75-centimeter wingspans.

The plants, though, were also pretty different from what we've got around now; by far the most common ones today are flowering plants, which make their first unequivocal appearance in the fossil record about 130 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous Period.  So when the New Brunswick sandstone was being deposited, the first flowering plants were still 220 million years in the future.

The dominant plants back then were distantly related to today's ferns, horsetails, and club mosses, although as you'll see we don't have anything left that looks much like what you'd see in a typical Carboniferous forest.  But the fossil discovered in the Canadian quarry was bizarre even compared to a lot of the strange vegetation from that time -- and has drawn comparisons to something you might see in a book by Dr. Seuss.

"What it really does look like is one of those truffula trees from The Lorax," said Olivia King, of St. Mary's University in Halifax, who was part of the team that discovered the fossils.  The most remarkable thing about the fossil, though, is its amazing state of preservation.  It's thought to have been entombed in an upright position when a landslide caused part of the bank of a lake to collapse.  The entire tree was dragged down to the bottom of the lake and buried in sediment, where it's lain for 350 million years -- and now has been excavated carefully to reveal what it looked like when it was alive.  Dubbed Sanfordiacaulis densifolia, after quarry owner Laurie Sanford who has been instrumental in allowing the investigation to progress, it had a mop of spiky leaves topping a spindly trunk:

A reconstruction of Sanfordiacaulis densifolia [Image credit: artist Tim Stonesifer]

With the acceleration of plant growth during that time period, there was extreme competition to access light, leading to dramatic increases in plant height and canopy size.  Eventually, there were club mosses (genus Lepidodendron) fifty meters tall -- taller than the oaks and maples in an average hardwood forest.

A sampler of ancient trees, from Robert Gastaldo et al., Current Biology.  [Note: "Mississippian" and "Pennsylvanian" are two divisions of time usually lumped together as the Carboniferous Period.]

Of course, the good times -- at least if you were a weird club moss tree or a 2.5-meter-long millipede -- couldn't last forever.  Around 305 million years ago, the climate turned from hot and humid to cool and arid, probably because by that time the plants had locked up so much atmospheric carbon dioxide underground -- what would eventually become our coal deposits -- that the greenhouse effect decreased and the temperature fell.  In essence, the plants sowed the seeds of their own destruction, and in the Carboniferous rain forest collapse that followed, the enormous forests and many of the animals that depended upon them became extinct.

It also set the fuse for the largest mass extinction ever.  All that organic matter sequestered underground was tinder just waiting to burn, and when the Siberian Traps erupted 252 million years ago, the lava ripped through a huge chunk of the Carboniferous coal and peat, using up oxygen (dropping it to an estimated 12%) and dumping that excess carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.  The temperature spiked, the oceans became anoxic, and something like 95% of life on Earth became extinct.

But at the point that the Sanfordiacaulis tree was growing in what would become New Brunswick, that cataclysmic event was still a hundred million years in the future.  Think about what a thrill it'd be to get to wander amongst those bizarre forests, so unlike anything we have today.

Even if it meant dodging enormous dragonflies.

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Life in the shadows

In Michael Ray Taylor's brilliant1999 book Dark Life, the author looks at some of the strangest forms of life on Earth -- extremophiles, organisms (mainly bacteria) that thrive in places where nothing else does.  Surrounding hydrothermal vents under crushing pressures and temperatures over 100 C, buried underground below the deepest mines, frozen in Antarctic ice, floating in boiling, acidic hot springs.  Taylor himself is a veteran spelunker and got interested in the topic after running into the aptly-named snottites -- biofilms found in caves that hang downward from the ceiling and are the consistency of, well, snot.

The brilliant colors of Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park are due, in part, to extremophilic bacteria [Image is in the Public Domain]

Taylor's contention -- that such bizarre creatures are so numerous that they outnumber all other life forms on Earth put together -- got a boost from a piece of research published in the Journal of Geomicrobiology.  Written by a team from the University of Toronto -- Garnet S. Lollar, Oliver Warr, Jon Telling, Magdalena R. Osburn, and Barbara Sherwood Lollar -- it describes the discovery, 7,900 meters underground, of a thriving ecosystem of microbes in a mine 350 kilometers north of Toronto.

The life forms are odd in a number of respects.  The first is that they're anaerobic -- they don't need oxygen to survive.  The second is that they metabolize sulfur, primarily in the form of iron sulfate, better known as pyrite or fool's gold.  It's a food chain completely unhooked from light -- for nearly every other organism on Earth, the energy they contain and utilize can ultimately be traced back to sunlight.  Here, if you follow the energy backwards, you arrive at the geothermal heat from the mantle of the Earth producing reduced (high energy) compounds that can support a food web, similar to what you see in deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

"It's a fascinating system where the organisms are literally eating fool's gold to survive," team member Barbara Sherwood Lollar said in an interview with NBC News.  "What we are finding is so exciting — like ‘being a kid again’ level exciting."  The ecosystem is in the Laurentian Shield, one of the oldest and most geologically-stable places on Earth, so it's likely that this thriving community deep underground has been there for a billion years or more.  "The number of systems we've looked at so far really is limited, but they probably had a single origin at some point in life’s four-billion-year history."  As far as their discovery, she added, "We see only what we look for.  If we don't look for something, we miss it."

And it's a lot to miss.  The current research springboards off a 2018 report sponsored by the Deep Carbon Observatory conducted by a team led by Cara Magnabosco, a geobiologist at the Swiss technical university ETH Zurich, which estimated that some 5 x 10^29 cells live in the deep Earth.

For those you who don't like scientific notation, that's five hundred thousand trillion trillion organisms.  Put succinctly, it's a really freakin' huge number.

Considering the (to us) inhospitable conditions a lot of these organisms live under, it raises hopes of finding life in other, perhaps unexpected, places in the universe.  Astronomers talk about the "Goldilocks zone," the region around a star that has temperatures where water is a liquid, and that to host life a planet would have to have a similar mass to Earth and be orbiting a star relatively similar to the Sun.  The University of Toronto research suggests that may be placing unnecessary and inaccurate strictures on where life can exist, and that we may have to rethink our definition of what we mean by "hospitable conditions."

"We're finding we really don't understand the limits to life," Sherwood Lollar said.

Which also raises the question of whether we'd recognize alien life if we saw it.  Star Trek may have been prescient; they expanded the boundaries of what we think of as life by featuring aliens that were gaseous, crystalline, thrived at searing temperatures, could tolerate the chill dark vacuum of space, or were composed of pure energy.  While some of these -- at least at first glance -- seem pretty far-fetched, what the current research suggests is that we shouldn't be too hasty to say, "Okay, that's out of the question."

"We've literally only scratched the surface of the deep biosphere," said Robert Hazen, mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, and co-founder of Deep Carbon Observatory.  "Might there be entire domains that are not dependent on the DNA, RNA and protein basis of life as we know it?  Perhaps we just haven’t found them yet."

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The swamps of Canada

Ellesmere Island would be high on the list of the Earth's most inhospitable places.

It's huge, only slightly smaller in area than Britain, and is part of the territory of Nunavut in Canada.  It is entirely above the Arctic Circle.  The record high temperature there was 15.6 C (60 F); the average high is 7 C (45 F).  The record low, on the other hand, is -47 C (-52.6 F).  It's also exceedingly dry, averaging a little over six inches of total precipitation a year.  It's no wonder that although the Inuit use some of it as summer hunting grounds, the permanent resident population stands at 144 brave souls.

Honestly, I'm a bit mystified as to why anyone lives there.

It wasn't always that way, though.  As hard as it is to fathom, Ellesmere Island used to be a swamp, back during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period about fifty-five million years ago during which the global average temperature was about eight degrees hotter than it is now.  The reasons it occurred are still a matter of discussion amongst climatologists, but from the chemistry and deposition of sedimentary rocks, it clearly came from a massive increase in the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and was accompanied by the sea levels reaching levels between three hundred and four hundred meters higher than they are today.

If that happened now, where I'm currently sitting in upstate New York would be beachfront property.

What's most interesting about the climate of Ellesmere back then is that even though it was a warm swamp, it was pretty much located where it is today (i.e. above the Arctic Circle).  But even though for a couple of months of the year it was plunged into darkness, there were still trees -- fossils of the conifers Metasequoia and Glyptostrobus have been found in regions that now host little else besides mosses and lichens.

And a paper in PLOS-One this week showed that it isn't just subtropical trees that used to live on Ellesmere -- so did some long-lost cousins of primates.

We usually think of primates as being tropical, and for good reason; most of the primate species in the world live in areas not too far from the equator.  We originated there, too, of course; the ancestral home of Homo sapiens is Kenya and Tanzania (that's all humans -- sorry, racists).  We've since expanded our territory a little, but our relative hairlessness is a good indicator that we originally came from warmer climes.

But back during the PETM, Ellesmere was a warmer clime, and paleontologists have found in sedimentary rock strata the fossils of two proto-primates, Ignacius mckennai and Ignacius dawsonae.  The genus Ignacius is part of a much larger group called the plesiadapiforms, who are all extinct but whose closest living relatives are modern primates.  Ignacius was a genus confined to the northern half of North America, and when the temperatures warmed up and the forests spread north, Ignacius followed them.

This makes these remains the northernmost primate fossils ever found.

A reconstruction of Ignacius dawsonae [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Kristen Miller/Biodiversity Institute/University of Kansas (CC-BY 4.0)]

What is amazing to me about this is... well... everything.  That trees could flourish in a swampy environment well above the Arctic Circle.  That non-human primates ever got this far north.  And most especially, that the Earth's climate was this drastically different, only fifty-five million years ago -- a long time ago on our usual timeline, but pretty much day before yesterday on the geological scale.

Of course, this should be a cautionary tale for us cocky humans, and probably won't be.  Things can change drastically.  Have changed drastically, and will again.  What we're doing right now is spiking the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and thus the temperature, at a far faster rate than just about anything in the geological record -- perhaps even exceeding the carbon dioxide pulse that set off the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction.

And that cataclysm killed an estimated ninety percent of life on Earth.

All I can say is, we damn well better start paying attention, or else we'll find out that Santayana's famous quote about not learning from history also applies to not learning from prehistory.  Or, put more succinctly, that the best strategy is not "fuck around and find out."

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Greta of the Yukon

If you needed more evidence of how little it takes to get the woo-woos leaping about making excited squeaking noises, look no further than this photograph, which they're saying proves that Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg is a time traveler.

Okay, I'll admit there's a resemblance.  For reference, here's a photograph of the real Greta Thunberg:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons European Parliament, Greta Thunberg urges MEPs to show climate leadership (49618310531) (cropped), CC BY 2.0]

The first image is real enough; it's not a clever fake.  It's a photograph of children working at a Canadian placer gold mine, and was taken in 1898.  The original photograph resides in the archives of the University of Washington, and carries the description, "three children operating rocker at a gold mine on Dominion Creek, Yukon Territory."

This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.  Previous iterations include an 1870 photograph proving that Nicolas Cage is an undead vampire, and a self-portrait by nineteenth-century French painter Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel showing that he's the same person as Keanu Reeves.  What's simultaneously hilarious and maddening about this last claim is that okay, the painting looks a little like Reeves, but later photographs of Boutet de Monvel (which you can see at the link provided) look nothing like him at all.  Which you'd think would make the woo-woos laugh sheepishly and say, "Okay, I guess we were wrong.  What a bunch of goobers we are."  But that never happens.  I'll bet some of them think Reeves realized people were catching on to his undead-ness and arranged for pics to be taken of some other guy that then were labeled with Boutet de Monvel's name.

Because there's no claim so ridiculous that you can't change it so as to make it even more ridiculous.

Lest you think I'm exaggerating how loony these claims get, back to the non-Thunberg photo, which has generated two explanations, if I can dignify them by that term:

1. Thunberg was a child in late nineteenth-century northern Canada, was forced to work in a gold mine, and was so appalled by the environmental destruction caused by mining that she either time-traveled into the future or else figured out how to achieve immortality and eternal youth (sources differ on which), and is now bringing that first-hand knowledge to us so we can potentially do something about it.
2. Thunberg actually is a twenty-first-century Swedish person, but has figured out how to travel in time so she can go back and sabotage mining operations and save the present from the devastation done by industry in the past.  She got caught at her game by a photographer back in 1898.

What strikes me about both of these, besides the fact that to believe either one you'd have to have a pound and a half of lukewarm cream-of-wheat where most of us have a brain, is that if either of these is Thunberg's strategy, it's not working.  If she's a poor mining kid from 1898 and has come into the future to warn us, mostly what's happening is that government leaders and corporate CEOs are sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "la la la la la la la not listening," while they proceed to continue doing every damnfool destructive thing they've always done, only harder.  If, on the other hand, today's Thunberg is going back into the past to throw a spanner into the works of the mining corporations, it had zero effect, because if you'll look carefully at the history of mining for the last 120 years, you will not find lines like, "Between 1900 and 1950, thirty-seven different mining operations all over North America were shut down permanently, because a mysterious teenage girl with a long braid snuck in and dynamited the entrance to the mining shafts, then disappeared without trace."  

So okay, the girl looks a little like Thunberg.  I'll grant you that.  But the claim that she is Thunberg makes me want to weep softly while banging my forehead on my desk.  It seems like the woo-woos have espoused some kind of anti-Ockham's-Razor; given a variety of explanations for the same phenomenon, let's pick the one that is the most ridiculous and requires a metric fuckton of ad hoc assumptions.  

I'll just end by stating that if I'm wrong, and Thunberg is an immortal time-traveler, I wish she'd stop wasting her time in the hopeless task of trying to convince the money-grubbing anti-science world leaders we need to stop burning fossil fuels, and go back in time with blueprints for high-efficiency solar cell technology.  Give 'em to Nikola Tesla.  I bet he'd know what to do with them.

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I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A visit from the death reaper

In case you needed more incentive not to take a time machine back to the Cretaceous Period, paleontologists have just discovered a new species of dinosaur from Alberta and christened it Thanatotheristes -- Greek for "the reaper of death."

Add that to the fact that it looked a bit like a cross between a toucan and a Tyrannosaurus rex, and you've got some real nightmare fuel.

[Artist's concept of Thanatotheristes by Julius Csotonyi of the Royal Tyrrell Museum]

The fossils date from 79.5 million years ago, so about 14 million years (give or take) from the giant meteorite collision that would spell the end of the Age of Dinosaurs.

"It definitely would have been quite an imposing animal, roughly 2.4 meters at the hips," said study lead researcher Jared Voris, a doctoral student of paleontology at the University of Calgary in Alberta, in an interview with LiveScience.

Add to that the fact that it was eight meters from tip to tail and had seven-centimeter-long teeth that invite the inevitable comparison to steak knives, and you have a seriously badass creature.

It was found near bones of a Triceratops relative and a species of pachycephalosaurid, both herbivores, and it's a fair guess these were on the Thanatotheristes dinner menu.

It's amazing to think about what the biodiversity must have been like back then, when Alberta was a tropical forest near the equator.  For one thing, we tend to have the impression that the species we've found are all there were, so a new discovery like this is somehow a surprising addition to the menagerie.  In reality, the conditions that result in fossilization are so specific, and so rare, that it's kind of a wonder we have any fossil record at all.  Most dead animals and plants are gone with nary a trace in only a few years; the fact that these bones survived, substantially intact, for almost eighty million years is a little mindblowing.

So what that means is that the species we know about constitute only a very small percentage of the animals and plants that were alive back then.  How small a percentage is a matter of speculation.  But it's a safe bet that it's less that 0.1% -- meaning, even at a generous estimate, for every one species we have fossils of -- and therefore a sense of what it looked like -- there are 999 that we not only don't know about, we have no way of knowing about.

It is only a slight exaggeration that our current situation is like trying to draw a good picture of our current biodiversity using only the bones of a rabbit, largemouth bass, reticulated python, and hummingbird, a handful of mollusk shells, a pile of various insect exoskeletons, and some leaves.  So our ideas about the prehistoric world -- even much more recent times than the Cretaceous Period -- are no so much wrong as they are wildly, hugely incomplete.

Which they will always be, unless we develop that time machine.  And even that brings up its own set of problems, which you know all too well if you've read any science fiction.  I'm reminded of the first time I came across the idea of how fraught time travel into the past would be, when I read Ray Bradbury's brilliant, disturbing short story "The Sound of Thunder" -- where a safari into the Cretaceous Era results in catastrophe in the present despite the organizers' attempts to prevent it. 

So there are a variety of reasons that it might be prudent to remain in ignorance of what critters were around back then, even if we were somehow able to.  Changing the past has drastic consequences, and if you believe science fiction stories, they're almost always bad ones.  Then there's the more direct danger of being eaten by a Toucanosaurus rex.  You can see how that would kind of suck.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is a dark one, but absolutely gripping: the brilliant novelist Haruki Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

Most of you probably know about the sarin attack in the subways of Tokyo in 1995, perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult under the leadership of Shoko Asahara.  Asahara, acting through five Aum members, set off nerve gas containers during rush hour, killing fifty people outright and injuring over a thousand others.  All six of them were hanged in 2018 for the crimes, along with a seventh who acted as a getaway driver.

Murakami does an amazing job in recounting the events leading up to the attack, and getting into the psyches of the perpetrators.  Amazingly, most of them were from completely ordinary backgrounds and had no criminal records at all, nor any other signs of the horrors they had planned.  Murakami interviewed commuters who were injured by the poison and also a number of first responders, and draws a grim but fascinating picture of one of the darkest days in Japanese history.

You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The fluid Earth

I've always had a fascination for maps, and when I was a kid spent many happy hours perusing a huge old world atlas my parents owned.

I remember how impossibly exotic a lot of those places seemed.  Some of them, too, seemed awfully oddly-shaped.  I remember being struck, for example, by the peculiar contour of the island of Celebes (now known as Sulawesi):

Map from The Birds of Celebes and the Neighouring Islands (1898) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What on earth gave the place its strange shape?  I was years away from finding out about plate tectonics, seafloor spreading, and continental drift -- this would have been 1968 or so, and the seminal paper by Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews confirming the truth of plate tectonics had only been published five years earlier, so the idea had yet to make its way into elementary school science classes.

The first inkling I had that the current map of the world was only the latest of a myriad configurations that Earth's land masses had taken was when I found out about marine fossils on the top of Mount Everest and tropical fossils in Antarctica in a book I had on prehistoric life.  Everything was shifting around, apparently, in some mysterious fashion, and the familiar maps from my parents' atlas would have been completely incorrect in the past.  For example, India broke off from what is now Madagascar, sliding across the ocean on its piece of plate, and rammed into Asia only fifty or so million years ago -- which may seem like a long time, but at that point the dinosaurs had already been extinct for fifteen million years (as I always feel obliged to add, except for birds).

Still, I didn't know much in the way of details.  When I took two geology courses in graduate school, however, I hit the idea head-on, including the now-familiar idea of Pangaea -- that there was a time when all of the continents were joined into one enormous land mass.  Even more mindblowing was the fact that this wasn't the only time this had happened -- the accretion and disintegration had occurred at least three or four times before, each time ending when rifts formed and forced the place apart.

The traces of these repeated hookups and breakups are still with us.  In fact, one was just announced in a paper recently in Geology, by a team led by Adam Nordsvan of Curtin University, in which evidence was uncovered that a piece of Australia -- the region of Georgetown in far northeastern Queensland -- was actually geologically related not to the rocks immediately adjacent to it, but to rocks in (of all places) Canada.

The Canadian (or Laurentian) Shield is one of the oldest relatively unaltered blocks of rock on the Earth, of Precambrian age -- on the order of three and a half billion years old -- so to a geologist, they're pretty distinct from the geology of the nearby Mount Isa formation, which is only half that old.  (I realize how ridiculous it is to use the word "only" to describe something 1.8 billion years old, but I'm trying to think like a geologist, here.)

The coolest thing is that the piece of Canada left behind in Australia wasn't from the most recent continental pile-up, which occurred on the order of three hundred million years ago, nor even the one before that.  The most likely time that Canada and Australia were joined together was three supercontinents ago, when all the Earth's land masses were fused around a billion years ago into a huge clump called Rodinia:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So apparently when that rifted apart, around 750 million years ago, a chunk of Canada decided to split off and ended up (literally) on the other side of the world.

The whole thing is pretty cool.  I'm still fascinated by maps in general, and thinking about what the world was like when Antarctica was in the tropics of the Northern Hemisphere and the equator cut across what is now Labrador will never fail to spark my imagination.  Add to that the bizarre thought (to me, at least) that at that point, all living things were confined to the oceans -- there was not a bug, not a worm, not so much as a sprig of moss anywhere on land, the whole place was completely devoid of life -- well, it brings to mind the line from Contact about a universe empty of all life except for us being an "awful waste of space."

Fortunately for us, though, at that point the conquest of dry land was right around the corner.

"Only" three hundred million years later.

I'll end with the prescient lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, penned in 1849, long before continental drift was even considered:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?
There where the long road roars has been
The stillness of the central sea;
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands,
They melt like mists, the solid lands,
Like clouds, they shape themselves and go.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is brand new; Brian Clegg's wonderful Dark Matter and Dark Energy: The Hidden 95% of the Universe.  In this book, Clegg outlines "the biggest puzzle science has ever faced" -- the evidence for the substances that provide the majority of the gravitational force holding the nearby universe together, while simultaneously making the universe as a whole fly apart -- and which has (thus far) completely resisted all attempts to ascertain its nature.

Clegg also gives us some of the cutting-edge explanations physicists are now proposing, and the experiments that are being done to test them.  The science is sure to change quickly -- every week we seem to hear about new data providing information on the dark 95% of what's around us -- but if you want the most recently-crafted lens on the subject, this is it.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Life in the shadows

In Michael Ray Taylor's brilliant1999 book Dark Life, the author looks at some of the strangest forms of life on Earth -- extremophiles, organisms (mainly bacteria) that thrive in places where nothing else does.  Surrounding hydrothermal vents under crushing pressures and temperatures over 100 C, buried underground below the deepest mines, frozen in Antarctic ice, floating in boiling, acidic hot springs.  Taylor himself is a veteran spelunker and got interested in the topic after running into the aptly-named snottites -- biofilms found in caves that hang downward from the ceiling and are the consistency of, well, snot.

The brilliant colors of Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park are due, in part, to extremophilic bacteria [Image is in the Public Domain]

Taylor's contention -- that such bizarre creatures are so numerous that they outnumber all other life forms on Earth put together -- just got a boost last week from a piece of research published in the Journal of Geomicrobiology.  Written by a team from the University of Toronto -- Garnet S. Lollar, Oliver Warr, Jon Telling, Magdalena R. Osburn, and Barbara Sherwood Lollar -- it describes the discovery, 7,900 meters underground, of a thriving ecosystem of microbes in a mine 350 kilometers north of Toronto.

The life forms are odd in a number of respects.  The first is that they're anaerobic -- they don't need oxygen to survive.  The second is that they metabolize sulfur, primarily in the form of iron sulfate, better known as pyrite or fool's gold.  It's a food chain completely unhooked from light -- for nearly every other organism on Earth, the energy they contain and utilize can ultimately be traced back to sunlight.  Here, if you follow the energy backwards, you arrive at the geothermal heat from the mantle of the Earth producing reduced (high energy) compounds that can support a food web, similar to what you see in deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

"It's a fascinating system where the organisms are literally eating fool's gold to survive," team member Barbara Sherwood Lollar said in an interview with NBC News. "What we are finding is so exciting — like ‘being a kid again’ level exciting."  The ecosystem is in the Laurentian Shield, one of the oldest and most geologically-stable places on Earth, so it's likely that this thriving community deep underground has been there for a billion years or more.  "The number of systems we've looked at so far really is limited, but they probably had a single origin at some point in life’s four-billion-year history."  As far as their discovery, she added, "We see only what we look for.  If we don't look for something, we miss it."

And it's a lot to miss.  The current research springboards off a 2018 report sponsored by the Deep Carbon Observatory conducted by a team led by Cara Magnabosco, a geobiologist at the Swiss technical university ETH Zurich, which estimated that some 5 x 10^29 cells live in the deep Earth.

For those you who don't like scientific notation, that's five hundred thousand trillion trillion organisms.  Put succinctly, it's a really freakin' huge number.

Considering the (to us) inhospitable conditions a lot of these organisms live under, it raises hopes of finding life in other, perhaps unexpected, places in the universe.  Astronomers talk about the "Goldilocks zone," the region around a star that has temperatures where water is a liquid, and that to host life a planet would have to have a similar mass to Earth and be orbiting a star relatively similar to the Sun.  The University of Toronto research suggests that may be placing unnecessary and inaccurate strictures on where life can exist, and that we may have to rethink our definition of what we mean by "hospitable conditions."

"We're finding we really don't understand the limits to life," Sherwood Lollar said.

Which also raises the question of whether we'd recognize alien life if we saw it.  Star Trek may have been prescient; they expanded the boundaries of what we think of as life by featuring aliens that were gaseous, crystalline, thrived at searing temperatures, could tolerate the chill dark vacuum of space, or were composed of pure energy.  While some of these -- at least at first glance -- seem pretty far-fetched, what the current research suggests is that we shouldn't be too hasty to say, "Okay, that's out of the question."

"We've literally only scratched the surface of the deep biosphere," said Robert Hazen, mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, and co-founder of Deep Carbon Observatory.  "Might there be entire domains that are not dependent on the DNA, RNA and protein basis of life as we know it?  Perhaps we just haven’t found them yet."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: science historian James Burke's Circles: Fifty Round Trips Through History, Technology, Science, and Culture.  Burke made a name for himself with his brilliant show Connections, where he showed how one thing leads to another in discoveries, and sometimes two seemingly unconnected events can have a causal link (my favorite one is his episode about how the invention of the loom led to the invention of the computer).

In Circles, he takes us through fifty examples of connections that run in a loop -- jumping from one person or event to the next in his signature whimsical fashion, and somehow ending up in the end right back where he started.  His writing (and his films) always have an air of magic to me.  They're like watching a master conjuror create an illusion, and seeing what he's done with only the vaguest sense of how he pulled it off.

So if you're an aficionado of curiosities of the history of science, get Circles.  You won't be disappointed.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]