The gates of heaven and hell

Like many people my age, I recall vividly when Carl Sagan's series Cosmos first aired.  I was in my late teens, and I and my friends eagerly gathered each week to discuss the details of the latest episode. 

There was a lot to talk about.  The exquisite choices for accompanying music, the stunning visuals (which have held up amazingly well, despite being almost fifty years old), and most of all, the mind-bending science.  But one episode took a darker turn, and to this day I recall the impact it had on me.

It was called "Heaven and Hell," and focused on the contrast between the Earth (heaven) and neighboring Venus (hell).  It opens, though, with a sequence about something that happened in June 1908 -- the "Tunguska event," in which either a fragment of a comet or a small asteroid hit the Earth near the Tungus River in Siberia, flattening trees radially outward for miles around and creating a shock wave that registered on seismographs in London.  Back then, there were no bombs capable of such an enormous blast, so no one doubted that it was an amazingly powerful, but natural, event.

However, by 1980, when Cosmos aired, nuclear proliferation was a dark cloud that hung over the entire world.  Sagan had the following to say:

There was no warning until [the Tunguska impactor] plunged into the atmosphere.  If such an explosion happened today, it might be thought, in the panic of the moment, to be produced by a nuclear weapon.  Such a cometary impact and fireball simulates all the effects of a fifteen-megaton nuclear burst, including the mushroom cloud, with one exception: there would be no radiation.  So could a rare but natural event, the impact of a comet with Earth, trigger a nuclear war?

It's a strange scenario: a small comet hits the Earth, as millions have during Earth's history, and the response of our civilization is promptly to self-destruct.

That kind of unthinking, irrational reactiveness seems to be hardwired into our brains.

It is horrifying to think about, but the awful truth is that when something terrible happens, something over which we have no control, the immediate impulse many have is to look around for someone to blame -- and then to strike back.  Consider, for example, the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, an 8.0-magnitude megathrust quake that struck the southeastern coast of the island of Honshu.  It killed an estimated 105,000 people, most of them due to tsunamis and the enormous fires that broke out following the initial quake.  (Even so, it doesn't make the top ten list of the deadliest earthquakes on record.)  Half of Tokyo and nearly all of Yokohama were destroyed, and over two million people were left homeless.

Ruins of the Nihonbashi District of Tokyo following the earthquake [Image is in the Public Domain]

The astonishing thing about the Kantō Earthquake, though, is what happened afterward.

The dust had hardly settled, the last fires put out, when rumors began to circulate that looters, especially ethnic Korean and Chinese residents, had taken advantage of the chaos to rob survivors and pillage the wreckage of homes and businesses.  Nationalist, pro-Japanese fervor soared.  With the tacit approval of the government, military, and police, vigilantes launched attacks on majority Korean and Chinese neighborhoods in what was framed as retaliation.

In what is now known as the Kantō Massacre, an estimated six thousand more people were killed, including some ethnic Japanese victims who either tried to defend their Korean and Chinese neighbors, or who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Ultimately, seven hundred people were arrested for the murders, but the majority of them received light sentences or were acquitted.

We can look at this through the lens of a hundred years of time, but those same impulses are still with us.  When something goes wrong in our own lives -- either something pervasive like economic hardship, job insecurity, or medical problems, or something sudden and acute like a natural disaster -- we look around for someone to blame.  We're not doing well?  Must be the immigrants, the brown-skinned people, the people who belong to another religion (or no religion at all), the LGBTQ+ people, the poor people on the dole.  The real social issues that caused the problem (or in the case of natural disasters, worsened their impact) -- staggering wealth inequity, corrupt and authoritarian governments that line the pockets of the ultra-rich, loud-mouthed "influencers" who manipulate their listeners by inflaming hatred, intolerance, and bigotry -- seldom get much attention.

It's easier to target a scapegoat than it is to effect real change.

So it doesn't take a comet impact to make humanity do its damndest to self-destruct.  All it takes is a crisis.

We're in precarious times now, when the powers-that-be are pulling out all the stops to keep our focus away from the actual issues.  I've been scared and discouraged by a lot of what has happened in the last six months, but at the same time heartened by the steadfastness and bold courage of a great many who have refused to be cowed.  I hope we can continue to speak up for what is right, and that the darkness many of us see ahead turns out to be only a passing shadow, a door into brighter, more peaceful times.

Still, I want to end with one more quote from Sagan, which it would be good for all of us to keep in mind as a cautionary note.  "The gates of heaven and hell are adjacent... and unmarked."

****************************************

Death cauldrons and aerial dogfights

There are certain pieces of terrain that are just peculiar.  We tend to give them evocative names, because they are evocative; and this often leads people to attribute their formation to some seriously crazy causes.

Take the Mima Mounds, in Thurston County, Washington.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

They're a little creepy-looking, no?  The mounds average about twenty to thirty feet across, and are roughly circular -- and there are hundreds of them.  It's a seriously atmospheric place, conducive to all sorts of woo-woo explanations -- particularly since the geologists themselves aren't certain how they were formed.  And there's nothing like the lack of a scientific explanation to give people license to come up with all sorts of loony claims.  For example, that the Mima Prairie, where the mounds are located, is haunted, presumably by the ghosts of obsessive-compulsive groundhogs.

There are other features which seem too regular to be natural -- take the glacial feature called a cirque, which takes the form of an often perfectly-circular lake:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Cirques form because they are at the origins of glaciers, so experience pressure and consequent erosive forces radiating out from a central point - if the contour of the land will allow it, it results in a nearly perfectly circular depression.

Arches, pinnacles, balancing rocks, channeled scablands... natural forces can result in some amazingly cool, and sometimes bafflingly symmetrical, structures.  No need to conjure up any kind of woo-woo explanation.

Of course, this doesn't mean that humans can't be involved, too.  When I was in Iceland, I visited a place called "Viti."  Viti is a beautiful, circular blue lake, which would have been peaceful had it not been for the jet-engine roar of a steam vent nearby.  The vent was surrounded by a high fence, and had a sign on it, in various languages, which said (as near as I can recall the wording):

Get the hell away from this vent, you stupid tourist.  This vent produces superheated steam, and if for some reason the machinery controlling its release were to fail, you would be cooked by a jet of steam before you could even turn to your wife and say, "Hey, Blanche, come take a picture of me next to this sign!"

The reason for all the caution was, I discovered, because the machinery had failed, about ten years before we went there, and the resulting explosion had thrown a piece of the rigging with such force that it landed a kilometer away.  Apparently the crater left behind by the explosion of the vent machinery was a circular hole in the ground, out of which came water vapor at about 3,000 C.  At that point, Icelandic geologists decided to leave well enough alone, and simply put a diverter over the hole, so that the steam is vented high enough in the air that it won't cook the tourists.

I bring all this up because of an article I ran into recently about the Siberian "death cauldrons."  Speaking of evocative names.  It turns out that there are circular depressions in the ground in many places in Siberia, and legends about those places being "evil," and various stories about people going there and dying horrible deaths.  There is talk of metal debris and mysterious underground bunkers.

What, pray tell, is the cause of all of this mayhem?  We have the following proposals:

1)  It was an area used for nuclear testing during the Soviet era.

2)  They are sinkholes in the tundra, resulting from purely natural phenomena, and all of the associated scary stuff is made up.

3)  It is the pock-marked battlefield left behind when two hostile alien species had an aerial battle in spaceships.

Well.  I know it's hard for me to decide, given the fact that all of these theories are pretty darned persuasive.  The proponents of the alien theory have going for them that the natives of the area claim that they've seen powerful, fire-wielding beings coming from the sky for centuries, and as I was mentioning to Thor just yesterday, you know how accurate the such myths and legends tend to be.  The other thing they point out is that it has to be aliens, because it was right next door in the province of Krasnoyarsk Krai that they had the Tunguska Event, where an alien spacecraft blew up in 1908 and flattened trees radially for miles around.

Well, okay, technically it's only "right next door" if by that phrase you mean "1,500 km away," and almost everyone who's studied the Tunguska Event thinks that it was a small fragment of a comet that hit the Earth.  But still!  Alien spacecraft!  Aerial dogfights!  Crash landings, leaving circular depressions in the ground, and scattered radioactive debris that poisons the landscape and anyone foolish enough to visit!  C'mon, don't you think so?  Don't you?

Okay, maybe not.  But you have to admit that as an explanation, it does have more panache than either "the Soviets blew up some nuclear bombs there, and never cleaned up their mess or even admitted that they'd done it" or "sinkholes sometimes form, and people make shit up."

Farts, craters, Mick Jagger, and the problem with lousy science reporting

One of the reasons that it is critical that we all be science-literate is because it is becoming increasingly apparent that the popular media either (1) hires reporters that aren't, or (2) values getting people to click links over accurate reporting.

I suspect it's (2), honestly.  The most recent examples of this phenomenon smack of "I don't care" far more than they do of "I don't know."  Just in the last week, we've had three examples of truly terrible reporting in media outlets that should have higher standards (i.e., I'm not even considering stuff from The Daily Mail).

And, for the record, this doesn't include the recent hysterical reporting that melting roads in Yellowstone National Park mean that the supervolcano is going to erupt and we're all going to die.

The first one, courtesy of the Australian news outlet News.Com.Au, pisses me off right from the outset, with the title, "A Mysterious Crater in Siberia Has Scientists Seeking Answers."  Because seeking answers isn't what scientists do all the time, or anything.  Then, right in the first line, we find out that they're not up to the task, poor things:  "Scientists baffled by giant crater... over northern Siberia -- a region notorious for devastating events."

"Baffled."  Yup, that's the best they can do, those poor, hapless scientists.  A big hole in the ground appears, and they just throw their hands up in wonderment.

Before we're given any real information, we hear some bizarre theories (if I can dignify them by that name) about what could have caused the hole.  UFOs are connected, or maybe it's the Gates of Hell, or perhaps the entry to "the hollow Earth."  Then they bring up the Tunguska event, a meteor collision that happened in 1908, and suggest that the two might be connected because the impact happened "in the region."

Despite the fact that the new crater is over a thousand miles from the Tunguska site.  This, for reference, is about the distance between New Orleans, Louisiana and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Only after some time are we told that the Siberian crater site is also the site of a natural gas field in which explosions have taken place before.  In fact, the whole place is pocked with circular craters, probably caused by methane explosions from the permafrost -- i.e., it's a completely natural phenomenon that any competent geologist would have been able to explain without even breaking a sweat.


But this is world-class journalism as compared to ABC News Online, which just reported that Brazil got knocked out of the FIFA World Cup because of Mick Jagger's support.

To be fair, ABC News wasn't intending this as science reporting, but from all evidence, they did take it seriously.  Here's an excerpt:

It seems the Rolling Stone frontman has developed a reputation for jinxing whatever team he supports. Some Brazilian fans are even blaming Jagger for their team’s 7-1 thrashing by Germany in Tuesday’s semifinal game. 

The 70-year-old singer turned up at the game with his 15-year-old son by Luciana Giminez, a Brazilian model and celebrity. Though he wore an England cap, his son was clad in Brazil jersey and they were surrounded by Brazil supporters. 

The legend of the “Jagger Curse” dates back to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where he sat next to Bill Clinton for the USA-Ghana match, only to see the U.S. lose 2-1. When he attended the England-Germany game the next day, wearing an England scarf, his home country lost. But it wasn’t until the Dutch defeated Brazil during the quarterfinal round, where Jagger turned up in a Brazil shirt, that the Brazilians first blamed him for the loss.

Seriously?  It couldn't be that the winning team played better, could it?  You know, put the ball into the net more times?

It has to be Mick Jagger's fault?  Because of a magical jinx?


So I'm just going to leave that one sitting there, and move on to the worst example, which has been posted about five million times already on Facebook, to the point that if I see it one more time, I'm going to punch a wall.  I'm referring, of course, to the earthshatteringly abysmal science reporting that was the genesis of The Week's story "Study: Smelling Farts May Be Good For Your Health."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm hoping beyond hope that most of the people who posted this did so not because they believed it, but because most of us still don't mind a good har-de-har over flatulence.  But the story itself is idiotic.  Here's the first paragraph:

The next time someone at your office lets out a "silent but deadly" emission, maybe you should thank them. A new study at the University of Exeter in England suggests that exposure to hydrogen sulfide — a.k.a. what your body produces as bacteria breaks down food, causing gas — could prevent mitochondria damage. Yep, the implication is what you're thinking: People are taking the research to mean that smelling farts could prevent disease and even cancer.

Well, at the risk of sounding snarky, any people who "take this research" this way have the IQ of cheese, because two paragraphs later in the same article the writer says what the research actually showed:

Dr. Matt Whiteman, a University of Exeter professor who worked on the study, said in a statement that researchers are even replicating the natural gas in a new compound, AP39, to reap its health benefits. The scientists are delivering "very small amounts" of AP39 directly into mitochondrial cells to repair damage, which "could hold the key to future therapies," the university's statement reveals.

There is a difference between smelling a fart and having small amounts of dissolved hydrogen sulfide enter the mitochondria of your cells.  It is like saying that because sodium ions are necessary for proper firing of the nerves, that you'll have faster reflexes if you put more salt on your t-bone steak.  Worse than that; it's like saying that you'll have faster reflexes if you snort salt up your nose.

I know that media outlets are in business to make money, and that readers = sponsors = money.  I get that.  But why do we have a culture where people are so much more interested in spurious nonsense (or science that gets reported that way) than they are in the actual science itself?  Has science been portrayed as so unutterably dull that real science stories are skipped in favor of glitzy, sensationalized foolishness?

Or is it that we science teachers are guilty of teaching it that way, and convincing generations of children that science is boring?

Whatever the answer is to that question, I firmly believe that it's based on a misapprehension.  Properly understood, the science itself is cool, awe-inspiring, and fascinating.  Okay, it takes a little more work to understand mitochondria than it does to fall for "sniffing farts prevents cancer," but once you do understand what's really going on, it's a hell of a lot more interesting.

Oh, and it has one other advantage over all this other stuff: it's true.