A terrestrial heartbeat

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Louisiana, I took a class called Introduction to Astronomy from a fellow named Daniel Whitmire.  Dr. Whitmire made a name for himself, along with a colleague named John Matese (whom I later took a class in Quantum Mechanics from), with something that's been nicknamed the "Planet X" hypothesis.  This isn't some crazy, Nibiru-is-headed-toward-Earth claim; Whitmire and Matese were looking at an apparent periodicity in mass extinctions, which they suggested could be the effects of a massive planet far beyond the orbit of Pluto, perhaps with an eccentric orbit, which every so often passes through a dense part of the Oort Cloud and sends comets and other debris hurtling in toward the inner Solar System.

Since the time I first heard about it (in around 1980), the Planet X hypothesis has lost currency.  There's been no evidence whatsoever of a massive planet outside the orbit of Pluto, and in any case, further study has indicated that the extinctions (1) don't really show that strong a periodicity, and (2) have been pretty well explained from phenomena other than collisions (other than, obviously, the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction).

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

I found out last week, though, that Whitmire and Matese may have been on to something after all.

A curious paper that recently appeared in Geoscience Frontiers suggests that focusing solely on the extinctions may have hidden an underlying periodicity.  In "A Pulse of the Earth: A 27.5-Myr [million year] underlying cycle in coordinated geological events over the last 260 Myr," Michael Rampino and Yuhong Zhu (of New York University) and Ken Caldeira (of the Carnegie Institution for Science) did some detailed statistical analysis (the mathematics of which is beyond me) on 89 different major geological events on Earth -- marine and non-marine extinctions, major ocean-anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, global pulses of intraplate magmatism -- and found that there are striking, 27.5 million year peaks that have yet to be explained.

What jumped out at me is that the analysis isn't just some vague, it-looks-like-it-might-be-a-pattern.  The software they used found that the periodicity has a 96% confidence -- i.e. there's only a 4% chance that it's just noise that happens to look like a rhythm.  This means that they're on to something.  What, exactly, they're on to remains to be seen; the natural inclination is to look for some kind of tectonic process that for some reason is on a really slow cycle, but they did note one other curious possibility:

On the other hand, the main period of about 30 Myr is close to the Solar System’s ~ 32 ± 3 Myr vertical oscillation about the mid-plane of the Galaxy.  In the Galactic plane region, increased cosmic-ray flux might lead to significant climatic changes, whereas encounters with concentrations of disk-dark matter might trigger comet showers from the Oort Cloud, as well as thermal and geophysical disturbances in the inner Earth.  We note that a 26 to 37 Myr cycle has been reported in the ages of terrestrial impact craters, using various statistical techniques and sets of crater ages potentially connecting the terrestrial and extraterrestrial cycles.

Of course, figuring out the mechanism that causes the pattern comes after establishing that the pattern itself is real.  As I pointed out in my post on the Ganzfeld Experiment a couple of weeks ago, developing a model to explain a phenomenon has to wait until you've shown that there's a phenomenon there to explain.

But a 96% confidence level is enough to indicate that there's some underlying mechanism at work here that's worth further study.  Something, apparently, is causing a strange, regular pulse of catastrophes.  (To put your minds at ease -- I know this was one of the first things I wondered -- the last peak the analysis found occurred 12.1 million years ago, so we've got another fifteen-odd million years to go before the next one.  That is, if we don't manufacture a cataclysm ourselves first.)

For now, all we have is an odd, unexplained pattern in geological upheavals.  It will be fascinating to see what refinements are put on the analysis -- and whether the scientists can find out what's actually going on.  Until then, we're left with a mystery -- a 27.5 million year terrestrial heartbeat.

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The catastrophe clock

The human brain is a pattern-seeking machine.

We are evolved to look for correlations, probably because those correlations can be awfully useful.  Our habit of noticing patterns and cycles allowed the ancient Egyptians to figure out the timing of the Nile floods, essential for agriculture in a place that was (and is) a desert.  The people of east Africa did the same sort of thing with the monsoons.  In cool climates, knowing when the growing season was likely to start and end was absolutely critical.

The problem is, this same pattern-seeking feature can trick us into seeing illusory patterns in what are, in essence, random data.  Astrology relies on this sort of thing; a particularly common example recently is the freakout people have when Mercury goes into retrograde (an apparent backward motion of Mercury as seen from Earth because of their relative motion; obviously, Mercury doesn't actually start moving backwards).  Supposedly the whole world goes haywire when Mercury starts its retrograde motion, but believing this requires ignoring the fact that (1) Mercury goes into retrograde three or four times a year, for three or four weeks at a stretch, and (2) the world is kind of haywire all the time.  There's no reason to believe that humanity is any loonier during Mercury retrograde than it is at any other time of the year.

Sometimes those illusory patterns can be oddly convincing.  I remember when I was a kid that much was made of the strange coincidence that since William Henry Harrison was elected President of the United States in 1840, every presidential winner in a "zero year" has died in office: Harrison (1840), Lincoln (1860), Garfield (1880), McKinley (1900), Harding (1920), and Kennedy (1960).  Then Reagan (1980) and G. W. Bush (2000) stubbornly refused to die, forcing True Believers to come up with some kind of nonsense about how it was a 120-year curse and expired after JFK's assassination, or something.  Mostly, though, they just retreated in disarray, because it was a peculiar coincidence, not an actual meaningful pattern.

Fortunately, scientists have statistical methods for determining when you're looking at an actual pattern (i.e., whatever is happening occurs with a true cyclicity) and when you're just seeing random fluctuations or scatter in the data.  This can sometimes uncover odd patterns that are clearly real, but result from some as-yet unknown cause -- such as the natural disaster "heartbeat" that was the subject of a paper in Geoscience Frontiers last week.

Geologists Michael Rampino and Yuhong Zhu (of New York University) and Ken Caldeira (of the Carnegie Institution for Science) analyzed the timing of various major geologic events over the past 260 million years -- continental flood basalt eruptions, changes in the direction of plate movement, oceanic anoxia, major glaciations and changes in sea level, and mid-plate volcanism, as well as events like mass extinctions.  And they found that there was a statistically significant cyclicity to those events -- they tend to cluster every 27.5 million years, and have done so for hundreds of millions of years.

Artist's impression of the moment of the Chicxulub Impact 66 million years ago [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA and artist Donald E. Davis]

But detecting a pattern is not the same as determining what's behind it.  There is no known geological or astronomical event that occurs on a 27.5 million year cycle that might be the underlying cause of the periodic nature of catastrophes.  The authors throw out a few suggestions -- that it could be due to the motion of the Solar System relative to the rest of the Milky Way (oscillating above and below the plane of the galaxy, perhaps?), a thus-far unknown phenomenon originating in the motion of magma in the Earth's mantle, or the gravitational disturbance of the Oort Cloud by a massive, extremely distant planet orbiting the Sun.  (This latter idea has been around for a while; my college astronomy professor, Daniel Whitmire, was one of the first to treat it seriously, and he and his colleague John Matese wrote one of the first scholarly papers about the "Planet X" hypothesis.  But don't even start with me about Nibiru and the Annunaki, because I don't want to hear it.)

The upshot of it is we don't know.  But if you were worried, we're only about 7.5 million years past the last peak, so we have another twenty million or so years to go before the next one.  As optimistic as I am about my longevity, I seriously doubt I'll be around to see it.  The catastrophe clock has a lot of ticks left until the alarm goes off.

Which is a good thing.  As interesting as they are, flood basalt eruptions and oceanic anoxia and the rest are not events that would be fun to witness first-hand.

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Why do we have emotions?

It's a tougher question than it appears at first.  Emotions like joy and camaraderie can certainly act to strengthen social bonds; fear can warn us away from dangerous situations.  But how often do they get in the way?  The gray emotional vacuum of depression, the overwhelming distress of anxiety and panic disorder, and the unreasoning terror of phobias can be debilitating enough to prevent anything like normal day-to-day functioning.

In Projections: A Story of Human Emotions by Stanford University professor of bioengineering and psychiatry Karl Deisseroth, we take a look at case studies of emotions gone awry -- in Deisseroth's words, "using the broken to illuminate the unbroken."  His deeply empathetic and utterly fascinating account takes the reader through what can go wrong in our emotional systems, and the most recent, cutting-edge research in how the neurological underpinnings of our brains create our emotional world.

It is brilliant reading for anyone wanting to know more about where our feelings come from, and who seek to follow the ancient Greek maxim of γνῶθι σεαυτόν -- "know thyself."

Lunacy

Thanks to a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I now have a large bruise in the center of my forehead from doing repeated facepalms.  I mean, this is not an unusual occurrence, considering the topics I write about, but the article that spawned this post might have the highest facepalm-to-wordcount ratio of anything I've ever read.

So naturally, I want to tell you all about it, so you can share in the experience.

It's entitled, "Why Eating Food During Lunar Eclipse is Harmful," by a guy named Sadhguru.  The whole thing probably came up because of the lunar eclipse we had this morning, but of course that means all of the advice he gives is a little late.  So my apologies if you already came to grievous harm from your cornflakes, or something.

Anyhow, let's take a look at what Sadhguru has to say.  It'll be fun!  Trust me!

During lunar eclipses, what would happen in 28 days over a full lunar cycle is happening in a subtle way over the course of two to three hours of the eclipse.  In terms of energy, the earth’s energy is mistaking this eclipse as a full cycle of the moon. 

So, all of this bad shit goes down because the Earth made a mistake? You'd think the Earth would have figured out about lunar eclipses by now, since they have occurred twice a year for the past 4.5 billion years.  I mean, it's not like at this point it should be a surprise.

Certain things happen in the planet where anything that has moved away from its natural condition will deteriorate very fast.  This is why while there is no change in raw fruits and vegetables, there is a distinct change in the way cooked food is before and after the eclipse.  What was nourishing food turns into poison.

I hate it when my grilled cheese sandwich turns into poison, don't you?  Ruins my whole day.

Anyhow, Sadhguru goes on to explain what a poison is, in case you didn't already know:

Poison is something that takes away your awareness.  If it takes away to a certain minor level, that means you are dull.  If it takes away your awareness to a certain depth, that means you are asleep.  If something takes away your awareness completely, that means you are dead.  Dullness, sleep, death – this is just a progression.  So, cooked food will go through the phases of its deterioration much more rapidly in a subtle way than it does on a normal day.

So, let's see.  Cooked food will subtly but rapidly deteriorate during an eclipse, because the Earth got surprised again, and if you eat it, you'll either die, fall asleep, or "feel dull."  Got it.

But I'm sure what you're wanting to ask by this point is, "Yes, Sadhguru, but what about raw food?  Can we eat raw carrots or something without poisoning ourselves into dullness?"  Fortunately, he addresses that very point:

If there is food in your body, in two hours’ time your energies will age by approximately twenty-eight days.  Does that mean you can eat a raw food diet on such a day?  No, because the moment food goes into your body, the juices in your stomach attack and kill it.  It becomes like semi-cooked food and will still have the same impact.

Well, I sure as hell hope your stomach acid kills your food, although I do question why you're eating things that are still alive.  I mean, we're not Klingons snarfing down live gagh or something, fer cryin' in the sink.

I mean, I'm not.  No judgment here if that's what you do.

But what do we do about all of this?  I mean, I don't want to have 28-day-old live chickens in my stomach, or anything. not to mention eating poisonous banana pudding, or whatnot.

When the body is in a confused state, the best thing is to keep it as empty as possible, and as conscious as possible.  One of the simplest ways to be conscious is to not eat. Then you will constantly be conscious of at least one thing.

Yes.  Being really hungry.  But do continue.

And the moment your stomach is empty, your ability to be conscious becomes so much better.  Your body becomes more transparent and you are able to notice what is happening with your system much better.

I don't think I want my body to be transparent.  As I recall, this caused problems in the historical documentary Hollow Man, wherein Kevin Bacon turned himself invisible by stages, and it not only looked extremely painful, it was seriously puke-inducing to anyone watching.

In any case, we don't have anything to worry about, given that the lunar eclipse is already over, and we don't have to think about this stuff again until the next one on July 27.  Me, I'm going to throw caution to the wind and go fix myself some nice bacon and eggs for breakfast.  It may be subtly deteriorated lunar poison, but it's really tasty.