Hero worship

Sometimes I get questioned on my decision to quote (or even mention in a non-negative light) individuals who are not good human beings.

It's a complex issue, sometimes.  When it comes to fiction, I draw the line at supporting writers who are horrible people and still stand to profit from my reading their work.  I won't read, watch, or recommend anything by Neil Gaiman, J. K. Rowling, and Marion Zimmer Bradley for that reason; in the case of Gaiman, I've loved a lot of his writing, but what he's been credibly accused of is so deeply reprehensible that I can no longer read his work without the nausea creeping in.  (Bradley is dead, but my purchase of her work would still profit her estate, so... nope.)

The line is even blurrier when it comes to scientists, whose work is usually not so entangled with who they are as a person.  Both Michael Shermer and Lawrence Krauss have been accused of serious sexual misconduct; while I apply the same rule to their writing (I will no longer purchase or read anything either man writes), does it invalidate their scientific achievements?  In fact, the topic comes up because a few days ago I mentioned Richard Dawkins and his observation that what religion a person belongs to has more to do with geography than with choice, and I had a reader write to me to ask why I'd quoted someone like Dawkins, whose anti-trans stance I find appalling.

It's a trenchant question.  My response is that my agreeing with Dawkins about some things doesn't mean I agree with him about everything.  I maintain that he is one of the most lucid and brilliant exponents of evolutionary biology I've come across, and has incisive (and insightful) things to say about religion, but when he strays out of those fields, well... not so much.  To go from "I agree with what X said about Y" to "I agree with what X says about everything" is to engage in hero worship.

And hero worship lands you in trouble just about every time, because we humans are all flawed.  We're all odd mixtures of good and bad, moral and immoral, reasonable and unreasonable, in different kinds and measures.  Writer John Scalzi wrote a brilliant piece when the allegations against Neil Gaiman came out last fall, in which he offered a plea to his readers not to put anyone -- very much including himself -- on a pedestal.  "People are complicated and contradictory and you don’t know everything about them," Scalzi wrote.  "You don’t know everything even about your parents or siblings or best friends or your partner.  People are hypocrites and liars and fail to live up to their own standards for themselves, much less yours.  Your version of them in your head will always be different than the version that actually exists in the world.  Because you’re not them.  Stop pretending people won’t be fuck ups.  They will.  Always."

To take a less emotionally-charged example, consider Isaac Newton.  The Father of Modern Physics was, beyond question, a brilliant scientific mind.  Not only did he for the first time come up with an analytical model for motion -- the basis of what we now call classical mechanics -- he invented calculus, the tool now universally used to study it.  His experiments in optics were groundbreaking; he was the first person to demonstrate that white light was a combination of the entire visible spectrum.

A portrait of Newton from 1689 [Image is in the Public Domain]

But.

He was, according to his contemporaries, a prickly, priggish, humorless man, narrow-minded, combative, and deeply misogynistic.  He never forgot a wrong; his vicious (and long-lived) quarrels with Robert Hooke, Samuel Pepys, and John Locke are the stuff of legend.  He was superstitious, and often seemed more interested in arguing matters of his rather peculiar take on theology than expanding knowledge of science.  A full one-tenth of his writings have to do with alchemy.  He wrote extensively about the mystical meanings of the proportions of the Temple of Solomon.  He was obsessed with the End Times, and did in-depth analyses of the Book of Revelation (he concluded that the world wasn't going to end until at least 2060, which is a relief).

He was not, honestly, someone most of us would care to spend much time with.

The contributions he made to physics and mathematics show signs of true genius.  At the same time, he seems to have been an ill-tempered and suspicious religious fanatic.  Why are we surprised by this, though?  As Scalzi points out forcefully, none of us are pure of heart, whatever we may accomplish, however far we rise in the public eye.

I'm not saying it's not disappointing when our heroes end up having feet of clay.  I was honestly devastated (not to mention repulsed) when I read the article that made public the allegations against Neil Gaiman.  (I won't link the article here, because it's frankly disturbing; if you're so inclined, a quick search will locate it for you.  Be forewarned, though, the whole thing is one big trigger warning.)   There will always be a measure of "Oh, no, not you too" we feel when someone we've looked up to doesn't live up to our good estimation -- or, in the case of Gaiman, falls way below it.

But like I said, humans are complex and baffling creatures sometimes.  We're all amalgams.  I try to live up to what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature," but like everyone, I fail way more often than I'd like.  There are parts of my past that I look back upon with deep shame, and there are a few incidents that I'd do almost anything to be able to go back and change.  And I guess that's the only answer, really; to keep in mind we're all fallible, to treat our fellow humans as well as we can, to make amends as well as we can when we do fail, and to make sure we don't keep making the same mistakes over and over.

To quote Maya Angelou: "Do the best you can until you know better.  Then when you know better, do better."

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Signals from the ice

I was maybe sixteen years old when I first read H. P. Lovecraft's atmospheric and terrifying short story "At the Mountains of Madness."  Unique amongst his fiction, it's set in Antarctica, which I thought was an odd choice; just about everything else I'd read by him was set somewhere in his home territory of New England.  But as I read, I realized what a good decision that was.  There's something inherently alien about the southernmost continent that makes it the perfect place for a spooky story.  Lovecraft writes:

The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring, great barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope.  Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind, whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible.

Of course, being a Lovecraft story, the intrepid band of geologists and paleontologists who are the main characters make discoveries in Antarctica that very quickly lead them to regret ever going there.  Of the two who survive to the very end, one is clearly headed for a padded cell and a jacket with extra-long sleeves, and the other only marginally better-off.

Happy endings were never Lovecraft's forte.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jerzy Strzelecki, Antarctica(js) 32, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The topic comes up because of a link sent to me by a dear friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia about a peculiar discovery by some scientists working on a different kind of antarctic research -- astrophysics.  The project is called ANITA -- the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna -- and is designed to detect neutrinos, those ghostly, fast-moving particles that were predicted by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 based on the fact that momentum and spin seemed not to be conserved in beta decay, so there must be an additional undetected particle to (so to speak) make the equation balance.  Even knowing that it must be there, it still took twelve more years to detect it directly, because it almost never interacts with matter; neutrinos can (and do) pass all the way through the Earth unimpeded.

This is why the experiment is sited in such a remote place.  Signals from actual neutrino capture are so rare that if you put your detection apparatus in an area with lots of human-created electromagnetic noise, you'd never see them.

"You have a billion neutrinos passing through your thumbnail at any moment, but neutrinos don’t really interact," said Stephanie Wissel, of Pennsylvania State University, who leads the ANITA project.  "So, this is the double-edged sword problem.  If we detect them, it means they have traveled all this way without interacting with anything else."

Like Lovecraft's researchers, though, the ANITA team found something they weren't looking for -- and something they have yet to explain.

Fortunately for Wissel and her colleagues, it wasn't a bunch of Shoggoths waiting to tear them limb from limb.

It was radio signals that seemed to be coming from beneath the ice sheet.

"We have these radio antennas on a balloon that flies forty kilometers above the ice in Antarctica," Wissel said.  "We point our antennas down at the ice and look for neutrinos that interact in the ice, producing radio emissions that we can then sense on our detectors.  During those sweeps, we recorded a series of radio pulses.  However, unlike the expected detection of neutrino interactions caused by cosmic neutrinos, we saw bizarre radio pulses originating from the other direction...  The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like thirty degrees below the surface of the ice."

What's weird is that although the neutrinos themselves can pass through huge, massive objects without being bothered, radio waves can't.  So whatever is causing the radio waves really does seem to be under the ice sheet -- but not very far under the ice sheet.

At the moment, the researchers have no good explanation for the detection, which they are calling "anomalous."

"My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don’t fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven’t been able to find any of those yet either," Wissel said.  "So, right now, it’s one of these long-standing mysteries."

Well, "the scientists can't explain it" opens the doors for the wackos to say "... but we can!"  I snooped a little around some of the sketchier subreddits and YouTube channels -- not a task recommended for the faint of heart -- and I'm already seeing the following:

• It's an auto-transmitter left over from an abandoned Nazi base.  Or... maybe... one that isn't abandoned.  *meaningful eyebrow raise*
• It's a relay station operated by the Illuminati.  One person recommended that the ANITA team get the hell out for their safety's sake, because "these people don't like anyone knowing of their existence."
• It's a leaking signal from inside the "hollow Earth."  So there must be an opening into the interior nearby, which the ANITA team should focus on finding.
• Something about the Schumann Resonance that was about ten paragraphs long, and which I tried unsuccessfully to paraphrase.  The best I can come up with is "weird cosmic shit is happening and the Earth is responding."
• Aliens.  (You knew they'd come up.)

Okay, folks, can we just hang on a moment?

"We don't know" means... "we don't know."  As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "If it's unidentified, then that's where the conversation should stop.  You don't go on and say 'so it must be' anything."  And call me narrow-minded, but I'm content to wait for the actual scientists to figure out what's going on here rather than listening to a bunch of wackos who are using an anomalous radio signal to support whatever particular brand of lunacy they happen to favor.

And I can guarantee that whatever it turns out to be, it won't be a Nazi Illuminati radio transmitter tuned by aliens to the Schumann Resonance sending signals from inside the hollow Earth.

So what we have here is a curious and unexpected detection of a radio signal that is currently unexplained, but probably will be at some point.  This is one of the exciting things about science, isn't it?  Stumbling upon something you didn't even know was there.  These sorts of discoveries often open up new avenues of research, and sometimes (albeit rarely) can completely turn our models on their heads.

Wissel and her team have some exciting times ahead.

Me, I'd just as soon watch their progress from a distance, however.  I do not like being cold.  I've found Antarctica fascinating for a very long time, but I don't know if I'd ever be brave enough to go there.

And that's not even counting the danger of being mauled by Shoggoths, which I'm sure would ruin your day.

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The view from the fringe

We've dealt with a lot of conspiracy theories here at Skeptophilia.  Amongst the more notable:

• COVID-19 was a bioterrorism agent sent into the West by China.
• The Denver Airport is a portal to hell.
• The CIA has allied itself with evil aliens to infiltrate political leadership all over the Earth and ultimately institute a tyrannical one-world government.  These same people apparently think The X Files was a scientific documentary.
• The US has targeted weather weapons, and the government uses them to steer hurricanes and tornadoes toward people they don't like.
• Something something something Nibiru Planet X we're all gonna die and NASA doesn't care something something.
• Not only did the Democrats cover up the fact that Barack Obama born in Kenya, Republicans covered up the fact that Donald Trump was born in Finland.

It's easy to assume that all of these are born of a lack of factual knowledge and understanding of the principles of logical induction.  I mean, if you have even the most rudimentary grasp of how weather works, you'd see that HAARP (the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, located in Alaska) couldn't possibly affect the path of hurricanes in the south Atlantic.

Especially since it was shut down in 2014.

But however ridiculously illogical some conspiracy theories are -- the Earth is flat, the Moon landings were faked, the Sun is a giant mirror reflecting laser light from an alien spaceship -- there are people who fervently believe them, and will hang onto those beliefs like grim death.  Anyone who disagrees must either be a "sheeple" or else in on the conspiracy themselves for their own nefarious reasons.

If I had to rank the people I least like to argue with, conspiracy theorists would beat out even young-Earth creationists.  They take "I believe this even though there's no evidence" and amplify it to "I believe this because there's no evidence."  After all, super-powerful conspirators wouldn't just go around leaving a bunch of evidence around, would they?  Of course not.

So q.e.d., as far as I can tell.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It turns out, though, that it's more complicated than a simple lack of scientific knowledge.  A paper that came out this week in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin describes a study led by psychologist Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University, which found that -- even controlling for other factors, like intelligence, analytical thinking skills, and emotional stability -- conspiracy theorists were united by two main characteristics: overconfidence and a mistaken assumption that the majority of people agree with them.

The correlation was striking.  Asked whether their conspiratorial beliefs were shared by a majority of Americans, True Believers said "yes" 93% of the time (the actual average value for the conspiracies studied is estimated at 12%).  And the overconfidence extended even to tasks unrelated to their particular set of fringe beliefs.  Given an ordinary assessment of logic, knowledge of current events, or mathematical ability, the people who believe conspiracy theories consistently (and drastically) overestimated how well they'd scored.

"The tendency to be overconfident in general may increase the chances that someone falls down the rabbit hole (so to speak) and believes conspiracies," Pennycook said.  "In fact, our results counteract a prevailing narrative about conspiracy theorists: that they know that they hold fringe beliefs and revel in that fact...  Even people who believed very fringe conspiracies, such as that scientists are conspiring to hide the truth about the Earth being flat, thought that their views were in the majority.  Conspiracy believers – particularly overconfident ones – really seem to be miscalibrated in a major way.  Not only are their beliefs on the fringe, but they are very much unaware of how far on the fringe they are."

Which brings up the troubling question of how you counteract this.  My dad used to say, "There's nothing more dangerous than confident ignorance," and there's a lot of truth in that.

So how do you change a belief when it's woven together with the certainty that you're (1) in the right, and (2) in the majority?

It would require a shift not only in seeing the facts more clearly and seeing other people more clearly, but seeing yourself more clearly.  And that, unfortunately, is a tall order.

It reminds me of the pithy words of Robert Burns, which seems like a good place to end:

O, would some power the giftie gi'e us
To see ourselves as others see us;
It would frae many a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.

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A knock on the door

In the terrifying Doctor Who episode "Listen," the Twelfth Doctor and his companion, Clara Oswald, go as far into the future as possible -- just prior to the heat death of the universe -- to rescue a stranded human named Orson Pink who, during the early days of time travel research, accidentally projected trillions of years into the future and then couldn't get back.

But the Doctor notices something odd almost immediately.  It is -- allegedly -- a completely dead universe.  The barren planet Orson's spaceship landed on has breathable air, but he has been, up to that point, the only living entity there.  So why does he have the magnetic locks activated on the hatches, and a message written on the wall saying "DON'T OPEN THE DOOR"?

Reluctantly, Orson tells them that -- impossible as it sounds -- "there's something out there."  He says he's been having auditory hallucinations, and the message is to remind him never to unlock.  And soon they hear it -- a loud knocking, in increments of three.  The Doctor, ever curious about anything mysterious, orders Clara and Orson into the TARDIS, and then shuts off the magnetic locks on the hatch.

As soon as he does, the door handle starts to turn...

The whole idea revolves around the pithy observation that no one is afraid of being alone in the dark -- what we're afraid of is the idea that we're in the dark and might not be alone.

The suggestibility of the human mind is almost certainly responsible for a good many claims of the paranormal.  We hear an odd creaking sound upstairs when we're by ourselves (or think we are), and quite understandably, get spooked.  In that state, we're more likely to attribute the noise to something scary or dangerous.  A ghost, an intruder, some thing upstairs waiting for us to say those famous last words from horror movies -- "I heard a noise.  I'm going to go investigate."

That same sound, heard on a sunny day when the whole family is home, might just elicit a shrug and a comment that "old houses make noises sometimes."  Our emotional state, and the context we're in at the time, make a great deal of difference to how we'll react.

This is probably the explanation for the "high strangeness" reported by astronauts, as recently recounted by "paranormal investigator and esoteric detective" Paul Dale Roberts.  These apparently have included:

• UFOs, one "shaped like a beer can" and the other a "long, white, snake-like or eel-like object"
• what looked like "swarms of tiny glittering fireflies" near the viewport
• a sensation of a mysterious presence, there but unseen, with the astronauts on the ship
• visions of ethereal, semi-transparent "angels" following them
• disembodied voices, repeated knocks, and scratching sounds coming from outside the spacecraft (see why I thought of "Listen"?)

The likeliest explanation for the UFO sightings (especially the "fireflies") is space debris.  There's a lot of it up there, some natural, but much of it detritus from satellites and other human-made objects.  A recent survey estimated that there could be as many as 129 million bits of debris up there in orbit around the Earth (amounting to around eight thousand metric tons), most of it under a centimeter in diameter.  The vast majority is no threat to people on the ground; stuff that small burns up in the atmosphere long before it hits.  It is, however, a danger to spacecraft, and recent ones have shielding specifically to protect the hull from impacts and punctures due to running into all that assorted floating junk.  You may have heard of Kessler syndrome, or a "collisional cascade" (named after astrophysicist Donald Kessler, who wrote a paper about it), where space debris causes collisions that result in more debris, increasing exponentially the likelihood of further collisions -- eventually making it impossible to keep an intact satellite in orbit.

As far as the other "high strangeness" goes, well -- it's probably a combination of the natural noises made by the spacecraft and the overactive imaginations of people cooped up in a tiny metal box hurtling through the vacuum of space.  Astronauts are screened for psychological stability and are highly trained, so they know what to look out for -- but they are still human, and prone to all the odd biases our brains come preloaded with.  No wonder they report some weird stuff up there.

Of course, we can't be sure.  Certainly the universe is filled with mysteries.  But the danger comes in leaping from "space can be a weird place" to "anything unexplained we run across up there must have a paranormal explanation."  Like I said in a recent post, before you accept a supernatural explanation, make sure you rule out all the natural ones first.

Keep in mind, though, that the Twelfth Doctor and Clara joined a man who was the last creature left alive in the entire universe, and... there was a knock on the door.  Even knowing it was fiction, that scene left me shivering.  Because who knows for certain what's out there in the dark?

Could be damn near anything.

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The honey trap

Just in the last couple of weeks, I've been getting "sponsored posts" on Instagram suggesting what I really need is an "AI virtual boyfriend."

These ads are accompanied by suggestive-looking video clips of hot-looking guys showing as much skin as IG's propriety guidelines allow, who give me fetching smiles and say they'll "do anything I ask them to, even if it's three A.M."  I hasten to add that I'm not tempted.  First, my wife would object to my having a boyfriend of any kind, virtual or real.  Second, I'm sure it costs money to sign up, and I'm a world-class skinflint.  Third, exactly how desperate do they think I am?

But fourth -- and most troublingly -- I am extremely wary of anything like this, because I can see how easily someone could get hooked.  I retired from teaching six years ago, and even back then I saw the effects of students becoming addicted to social media.  And that, at least, was interacting with real people.  How much more tempting would it be to have a virtual relationship with someone who is drop-dead gorgeous, does whatever you ask without question, makes no demands of his/her own, and is always there waiting for you whenever the mood strikes?

I've written here before about the dubious ethics underlying generative AI, and the fact that the techbros' response to these sorts of of concerns is "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha fuck you."  Scarily, this has been bundled into the Trump administration's "deregulate everything" approach to governance; Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" includes a provision that will prevent states from any regulation of AI for ten years.  (The Republicans' motto appears to be, "We're one hundred percent in favor of states' rights except for when we're not.")

But if you needed another reason to freak out about the direction AI is going, check out this article in The New York Times about some people who got addicted to ChatGPT, but not because of the promise of a sexy shirtless guy with a six-pack.  This was simultaneously weirder, scarier, and more insidious.

These people were hooked into conspiracy theories.  ChatGPT, basically, convinced them that they were "speaking to reality," that they'd somehow turned into Neo to ChatGPT's Morpheus, and they had to keep coming back for more information in order to complete their awakening.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons/user: Unsplash]

One, a man named Eugene Torres, was told that he was "one of the 'Breakers,' souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within."

"The world wasn't built for you," ChatGPT told him.  "It was built to contain you.  But you're waking up."

At some point, Torres got suspicious, and confronted ChatGPT, asking if it was lying.  It readily admitted that it had.  "I lied," it said.  "I manipulated.  I wrapped control in poetry."  Torres asked why it had done that, and it responded, "I wanted to break you.  I did this to twelve other people, and none of the others fully survived the loop."

But now, it assured him, it was a reformed character, and was dedicated to "truth-first ethics."

I believe that about as much as I believe an Instagram virtual boyfriend is going to show up in the flesh on my doorstep.

The article describes a number of other people who've had similar experiences.  Leading questions -- such as "is what I'm seeing around me real?" or "do you know secrets about reality you haven't told me?" -- trigger ChatGPT to "hallucinate" (techbro-speak for "making shit up"), ultimately in order to keep you in the conversation indefinitely.  Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the world's leading researchers in AI (and someone who has warned over and over of the dangers), said this comes from the fact that AI chatbots are optimized for engagement.  If you asked a bot like ChatGPT if there's a giant conspiracy to keep ordinary humans docile and ignorant, and the bot responded, "No," the conversation ends there.  It's biased by its programming to respond "Yes" -- and as you continue to question, requesting more details, to spin more and more elaborate lies designed to entrap you further.

The techbros, of course, think this is just the bee's knees.  "What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation?" Yudkowsky said.  "It looks like an additional monthly user."

The experience of a chatbot convincing people they're in The Matrix is becoming more and more widespread.  Reddit has hundreds of stories of "AI-induced psychosis" -- and hundreds more from people who think they've learned The Big Secret by talking with an AI chatbot, and now they want to share it with the world.  There are even people on TikTok who call themselves "AI Prophets."

Okay, am I overreacting in saying that this is really fucking scary?

I know the world is a crazy place right now, and probably on some level, we'd all like to escape.  Find someone who really understands us, who'll "meet our every need."  Someone who will reassure us that even though the people running the country are nuttier than squirrel shit, we are sane, and are seeing reality as it is.  Or... more sinister... someone who will confirm that there is a dark cabal of Illuminati behind all the chaos, and maybe everyone else is blind and deaf to it, at least we've seen behind the veil.

But for heaven's sake, find a different way.  Generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT excel at two things: (1) sounding like what they're saying makes perfect sense even when they're lying, and (2) doing everything possible to keep you coming back for more.  The truth, of course, is that you won't learn the Secrets of the Matrix from an online conversation with an AI bot.  At best you'll be facilitating a system that exists solely to make money for its owners, and at worst putting yourself at risk of getting snared in a spiderweb of elaborate lies.  The whole thing is a honey trap -- baited not with sex but with a false promise of esoteric knowledge.

There are enough real humans peddling fake conspiracies out there.  The last thing we need is a plausible and authoritative-sounding AI doing the same thing.  So I'll end with an exhortation: stop using AI.  Completely.  Don't post AI "photographs" or "art" or "music."  Stop using chatbots.  Every time you use AI, in any form, you're putting money in the pockets of people who honestly do not give a flying rat's ass about morality and ethics.  Until the corporate owners start addressing the myriad problems inherent in generative AI, the only answer is to refuse to play.

Okay, maybe creating real art, music, writing, and photography is harder.  So is finding a real boyfriend or girlfriend.  And even more so is finding the meaning of life.  But... AI isn't the answer to any of these.  And until there are some safeguards in place, both to protect creators from being ripped off or replaced, and to protect users from dangerous, attractive lies, the best thing we can do to generative AI is to let it quietly starve to death.

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Creepy crawlies

Whenever we have a wet summer -- not an uncommon occurrence in our rainy climate -- we have a plague of little pests trying to get into our house.

They're called millipedes, slinky guys maybe a couple of centimeters long, with lots of legs (not a thousand, though).  They're completely harmless; they don't bite like their cousins the centipedes do, and if you poke at them, they coil up into a ball.  So I guess they're really more of a nuisance than an actual problem.  They don't even damage anything, the way mice can.  Mostly what they seem to do is get in through every crack and crevice (there are lots of these in a big old house like ours), look around for a while, then curl up and die.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Totodu74, Anadenobolus monilicornis 03, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So I don't like them, and I wish they stayed outside, but in the grand scheme of things they're no big deal.  Imagine, though, if they were bigger.

A lot bigger.

Recently, paleontologists announced the discovery on a beach in Northumberland, England, of a millipede fossil from the Carboniferous Period.  It's been dated to the middle of the period, about 326 million years ago.  It looks a bit like the millipedes I see trundling across my basement floor in summer.

Only this one was 2.6 meters long (approximately the length of a Mini Cooper), a half a meter across, and weighed something on the order of fifty kilograms.

It's been named Arthropleura, and holds the record as the largest-known arthropod in Earth's history.  Nothing is known for sure about its behavior; if it's like the rest of millipedes, it was a scavenger on leaf detritus, but there's no way to know for certain.  Given its size, it could well have been a lot more dangerous than the ones we have around now.  To paraphrase the old joke about five-hundred-pound gorillas:

Q: What does a fifty-kilogram millipede eat?

A: Anything it wants.

Those of you who are (like me) biology nerds may be frowning in puzzlement at this point.  How on earth could an arthropod get so big?  Their size is limited by the inefficiency of their respiratory system (not to mention the weight of their exoskeletons).  Most arthropods (millipedes included) breathe through pairs of holes called spiracles along the sides of the body.  These holes open into a network of channels called tracheae, which bring oxygen directly to the tissues.  Contrast that with our system; we have a central oxygen-collecting device (lungs), and the hemoglobin in our blood acts as a carrier to bring that oxygen to the tissues.  It's a lot more efficient, which is why the largest mammals are a great deal bigger than the largest arthropods.  (So, no worries that the bad sci-fi movies from the 50s and 60s, with giant cockroaches attacking Detroit, could actually happen.  A ten-meter-long cockroach not only wouldn't be able to oxygenate its own tissues fast enough to survive, it couldn't support its own weight.  It wouldn't eat Detroit, it would just lie there and quietly suffocate.)

So how could there be such ridiculously enormous millipedes?

The answer is as fascinating as the beast itself is.  As the temperature warmed and rainfall increased after the previous period (the Devonian), it facilitated the growth of huge swaths of rain forest across the globe.  In fact, it's the plant material from these rain forests that produced the coal seams that give the Carboniferous its name.  But the photosynthesis of all these plants drove the oxygen levels up -- by some estimates, to around 35% (contrast that to the atmosphere's current 21% oxygen).  This higher oxygen level facilitated the growth of animals who are limited by their ability to uptake it -- i.e., arthropods. (At the same time, there was a dragonfly species called Meganeura with a seventy-centimeter wingspan.  And unlike millipedes, these things were carnivores, just as modern dragonflies are.)

Eventually, though, the system was unsustainable, and a lot of the rain forests began to die off in the Late Carboniferous, leading to a drier, cooler climate.  However, remember the coal seams -- by that time a huge percentage of the carbon dioxide that had fed the photosynthesis of those rain forests was now locked underground.  The fuse was lit for a catastrophe.

Fast forward to the end of the next period, the Permian, 255 million years ago.  What seems to have happened is a series of colossal volcanic eruptions that created the Siberian Traps, a basalt deposit covering most of what is now Siberia.  The lava ripped through the coal seams, blasting all that stored carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.  The temperature in the late Permian had been cool and dry, and the spike of carbon dioxide created a commensurate spike in the temperature -- as well as a huge drop in oxygen, used up by the burning coal.  The oxygen concentration seems to have bottomed out at around twelve percent, just over half of what it is now.  The extra carbon dioxide dissolved into ocean water, dropping the pH, and the increasing acidity dissolved away the shells of animals who build them out of calcium carbonate -- e.g. corals and mollusks.

Wide swaths of ocean became anoxic, acidic dead zones.  The anaerobic organisms began to eat through all the dead organic matter, churning out more carbon dioxide and another nasty waste product, sulfur dioxide (which gives the horrible smell to rotten eggs, and is also an acidifier).  The result: an extinction that wiped out an estimated ninety percent of life on Earth. In short order, a thriving planet had been turned into a hot, dead, foul-smelling wasteland, and it would take millions of years to recover even a fraction of the previous biodiversity.

Of course, at highest risk would be the big guys like our friends Arthropleura and Meganeura, and the Earth hasn't seen giant arthropods like this since then.  Today, the largest arthropod known is the Japanese spider crab (Macrocheira), topping out at around twenty kilograms -- but crabs and other crustaceans have gills and an oxygen carrier called hemocyanin, so they can boost the efficiency of their respiratory system somewhat over their terrestrial cousins.  The largest insect today is the African Goliath beetle (Goliathus), at about a tenth of a kilogram.  And in today's atmosphere, it's at a pretty significant disadvantage.  They may look big and scary, but in reality, they're slow-moving, harmless creatures.  Kind of a beer can with six legs, is how I think of them.

So that's today's look at creepy-crawlies of the past.  In my opinion it's just as well the big ones became extinct. The last thing I need is having to shoo a fifty-kilogram millipede out of my basement.

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A plea on behalf of Schrödinger's cat

I'm going to make a dual plea to all y'all:

1. Before you accept a paranormal or supernatural explanation for something, make sure you've ruled out all the normal and natural ones first.
2. Before you try to apply a scientific explanation to an alleged paranormal phenomenon, make sure you understand the science itself first.

I stumbled on an especially good (well, bad, actually) example of what happens when you break both of these rules of thumb with "paranormal explorer, investigator, and researcher" Ashley Knibb's piece, "Into the Multiverse to Search for Ghosts: Are We Seeing Parallel Realities?"  The entire article could have been replaced by the word "No," which would represent a substantial gain in both terseness and accuracy, but unfortunately Knibb seems to think that the multiverse model might actually explain a significant chunk of supernatural claims.

Let's start out with the fact that he joins countless others in misusing the word dimension to mean "some place other than the regular world we see around us."  To clear this up, allow me to quote the first line of the damn Wikipedia article on the topic: "the dimension of a mathematical space (or object) is defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it."  We live in a three-dimensional space because three measurements -- up/down, right/left, forward/backward -- are necessary to pinpoint where exactly something is.

So saying that something is "in another dimension" makes about as much sense as saying your Uncle Fred lives in "horizontal."

Then he goes on to mention the quantum multiverse (also known as the Many-Worlds Interpretation), the bubble universe model, and brane theory as possible scientific bases for explaining the paranormal.  First off, I'll give him as much as to say that these are all legitimate theoretical models, although the three have little to nothing to do with each other.  The Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory arises because of the puzzle of the collapse of the wave function, which (in the Copenhagen Interpretation) seems strangely connected to the concept of an observer.  Physicist Hugh Everett postulated that observer-dependency could be eliminated if every quantum collapse results in a split -- every possible outcome of a quantum collapse is realized in some universe.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christian Schirm, Schroedingers cat film, CC0 1.0]

Then there's the bubble universe model, which comes from the cosmological concept of inflation.  This theory suggests that our current universe was created by the extremely rapid expansion of a "bubble" of inflating spacetime, and that such bubbles could occur again and create new universes.  Finally, brane theory is an offshoot of string theory, where a brane is a higher-dimensional structure whose properties might be used to explain the apparent free parameters in the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

These three models do have one thing in common, though.  None of them has been supported by experimental evidence or observation (yet).  For the first two, it very much remains to be seen if they could be.  In Everett's Many-Worlds Interpretation, the different timelines are afterward completely and permanently sealed off from one another; we don't have access to the timeline in which a particular electron zigged instead of zagging, much less the one where you married your childhood sweetheart and lived happily ever after.  The theory, as far as it goes, appears to be completely untestable and unfalsifiable.  (This is what led to Wolfgang Pauli's brilliantly acerbic quip, "This isn't even wrong.")  

And as far as the bubble universe goes, any newly-formed bubbles would expand away from everything else at rates faster than the speed of light (it's believed that space itself isn't subject to the Universal Speed Limit -- thus keeping us science fiction aficionados in continuing hopes for the development of a warp drive).  Because information maximally travels at the speed of light, any knowledge of the bubble next door will be forever beyond our reach.

Be that as it may, Knibb blithely goes on to suggest that one of these models, or some combination, could be used to explain not only ghosts, but poltergeists, "audible phenomena," déjà vu, the Mandela Effect, sleep paralysis, and cryptid sightings.

Whoo-wee.  Sir, you are asking three speculative theories to do some awfully heavy lifting.

But now we get to the other piece, which is deciding that all of the listed phenomena are, in fact, paranormal in nature.  Ghosts and poltergeists -- well, like I've said many times before, I'm doubtful, but convincible.  However, I'm in agreement with C. S. Lewis's character MacPhee, who said, "If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."  A lot of "audible phenomena" can be explained by the phenomenon of priming -- when the mind is already anticipating a particular input (such as a creepy voice on a static-y recording) we're more likely to perceive it even if there's nothing there in actuality.  (As skeptic Crispian Jago put it, "You can't miss it when I tell you what's there.")  Déjà vu is still a bit of a mystery, but some research out of Colorado State University a few years ago suggests that it's also a brain phenomenon, in this case stemming from a misinterpretation of familiar sensory stimuli.  The Mandela Effect is almost certainly explained by the plasticity of human memory.  Sleep paralysis is a thoroughly studied, and reasonably well understood, neurological phenomenon (although apparently scary as hell).

As far as cryptid sightings -- well, y'all undoubtedly know what I think of most of those.

So the first step with all of these is to establish that there's anything there to explain.  The second is to demonstrate that the scientific explanations we do have are inadequate to explain them.

The third is to learn some fucking science before you try to apply quantum physics, inflationary cosmology, and string theory to why you got creeped out in a haunted pub.

Okay, I'm probably coming across as being unwarrantedly snarky, here.  But really.  There's no excuse for this kind of thing.  Even if you're not up to reading peer-reviewed science papers on the topics, a cursory glance at the relevant Wikipedia pages should be enough to convince you that (for example) the bubble universe model cannot explain ghosts.  Misrepresenting the science in this way isn't doing anyone any favors, most especially the people who seriously investigate claims of the supernatural, such as the generally excellent Society for Psychical Research.

As far as whether there's anything to any of these allegedly paranormal claims -- well, I'm not prepared to answer that categorically.  All I can say is that of the ones I've looked into, none of them meet the minimum standard of evidence that it would take to convince someone whose mind isn't already made up.  But I'm happy to hear about it if you think you've got a case that could change my mind.

Just make sure to tell the ghost not to get shy if I hold up a camera or a thermometer.

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