Sphere itself

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

His email said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Miracles and incredulity

I have a problem with how people use the word miracle.

The dictionary definition is "a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency."  So this would undoubtedly qualify:

The Miracle of St. Mark, by Jacopo Tintoretto (ca. 1548) [Image is in the Public Domain]

But other than claims of honest-to-goodness angels appearing and stopping someone from getting murdered, the occurrences people usually call miracles seem to fall into two categories:

1. Events that have a positive outcome where one can imagine all sorts of ways they could have gone very wrong.  An example is when I was driving down my road in the middle of winter, hit a patch of black ice, and spun out -- coming to rest in a five-meter-by-five-meter gravel patch without hitting anything, where other trajectories would have taken me into a creek, an embankment, or oncoming traffic.
2. Events that are big and impressive, and about which we don't understand the exact cause.

It's the second category that attracted the attention of one Michael Grosso, who writes over at the site Consciousness Unbound, in a post this week called "A Trio of Obvious Miracles."  I was intrigued to find out what Grosso thought qualified not only as miracles but as obvious ones, and I was a little let down to find out that they were (1) the Big Bang, (2) the appearance of life, and (3) the evolution of consciousness.

The problem with all three of these is a lack of information.  In the first case, we have a pretty good idea what happened shortly after the Big Bang -- and by "shortly after" I mean "more than 10^-35 seconds after" -- but no real idea what triggered the expansion itself, or what came before it.  (If "before the Big Bang" even has any meaning.  Stephen Hawking said the question was like asking "what is north of the North Pole?"  Roger Penrose, on the other hand, thinks that a cyclic universe is a real possibility, and there may be a way to detect the traces of iterations of previous universes left behind in our current one.  The question is, at present, still being hotly debated by cosmologists.)

As far as Grosso's second example -- the origins of life -- that's more in my wheelhouse.  The difficulty here is that even the biologists can't agree about what makes something "alive."  Freshman biology texts usually have a list of characteristics of life, which include:

• made of one or more cells
• shows high levels of organization
• capable of reproduction
• capable of growth
• has a limited life span
• responds to stimuli
• adapts through natural selection
• has some form of a genetic code
• has a metabolism/use of energy

Not only are there organisms that are clearly alive but break one or more rules (sterile hybrids are incapable of reproducing, bristlecone pines appear to have no upper bound on their life spans), there are others, such as viruses, that have a few of the characteristics (organization, reproduction, limited life span, adaptation, and genetic code) while lacking others (cells, growth, response, and independent metabolism).  We talk about something "killing viruses," but the jury's still out as to whether they were alive in the first place.  (Perhaps "inactivating" them would be more accurate.)  In any case, the search for some ineffable something that differentiates life from non-life, like Henri Bergson's élan vital, have been unsuccessful.

With the final example, consciousness, we're on even shakier ground.  Once again starting with the dictionary definition -- "an awareness of one's internal and/or external environment, allowing for introspection, imagination, and volition" -- it remains to be seen whether we're unique in having consciousness, or if it (like intelligence) exists on a spectrum.  I'd argue that my dogs are conscious, but are insects?  How about earthworms?  How about amoebas?  All of them have some awareness of their external world, as evidenced by their moving toward pleasant stimuli and away from unpleasant ones; but I doubt very much if amoebas think about it.  So is our much more complex experience of consciousness simply due to our large and highly-interconnected brains, which would suggest that consciousness arises from a purely physical substratum?  If so, would it be possible to emulate it in a machine?  Some people are arguing, from a Turing-esque "if you can't tell the difference, there is no difference" stance, that large language models such as ChatGPT are already showing signs of consciousness.  While I find that a little doubtful -- although admittedly, I'm no expert on the topic -- it seems like we're in the same boat with consciousness as we are with life; it's hard to argue about something when we can't even agree on what the definition is, especially when the characteristic in question seems not to exist on a binary, you've-got-it-or-you-don't basis.

In any case, the whole thing seems to boil down to an argument from incredulity -- "I can't explain this, so it must be a miracle."  Grosso writes:

I grant the astonishing character of the miraculous, and the rarity.  But in the parapsychological definition, the term refers to phenomena that are extraphysical; cannot be physically explained. But what is causing these deviations from physical reality?...  Of course, we generally don’t kneel in awe at the miraculous sunrise or shudder with wonder as we wolf a burger down our gullet.  We are in fact swamped by what in fact are obvious miracles, the whole of nature and life in its wild multiplicity.  But thanks to habit and routine our imagination of the marvelous is deadened.

Honestly, I'm not even all that convinced about the rarity of miracles.  He's picked three things that -- so far as we know -- only happened once, and from that deduced that they're miraculous.  I did a post here a couple of years ago about Littlewood's Law of Miracles (named after British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood), which uses some admittedly rather silly mathematical logic to demonstrate that we should, on average, expect a miracle to occur every other month or so.  So I'm not sure that our perception of something as unlikely (and therefore miraculous) means much. 

The thing is, we can't really deduce anything from a lack of information.  Myself, I'm more comfortable relying on science to elucidate what's going on; like the astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace famously said to Napoleon when the latter asked why Laplace's book on celestial mechanics made no mention of God, "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là" ("I have no need of that hypothesis.").  If you're claiming something is a miracle, you're saying it's outside the capacity of science to explain, and that seems to me to be very premature.

My stance is that in all three cases he cited, science hasn't explained them yet.  And that little word at the end is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

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