Real vs. fake water

In further adventures of friends and loyal readers of Skeptophilia trying to induce me to do a skull-fracture-inducing faceplant, today we have: "Real Water."

I bet you thought you were fine drinking regular old tap water.  I know that's what I thought.  But little did I know that tap water (and other sorts of water) are "damaged."  Here's a direct quote from their website:

Most of the drinking water is stripped of valuable electrons, making the water acidic and creating free radicals. 

Free radicals steal electrons from the body’s cells.  This is called Free Radical Damage and it is the cause of many serious health conditions.  They operate much like rust on a car, zapping people from their life force.

So the claim, apparently, is, "the more electrons, the better."  This comes as a bit of a surprise, because when large amounts of electrons are contributed to someone's body all at once, this is called "being struck by lightning."  The result is called "electrocution," and frequently, "death."

But that doesn't stop the "Real Water" people, who tell us that they somehow put the missing electrons back in:

E2: Electron Energized Technology adds trillions and trillions of electrons.  Thus producing stable negative ionization.  Negative ions along with antioxidants act to neutralize free radicals.  They are more accepted by the body’s aquaporins.  Channels the usher in water and cellular nutrients for increased cellular hydration.

Like many woo-woo claims, this one has a few grains of truth.  Antioxidants do exist, and they do neutralize free radicals that (left unchecked) would oxidize organic compounds.  One of the most common free radicals in living systems is the peroxide ion (O2-), and we actually make three enzymes to deal with it -- catalase, superoxide dismutase, and glutathione peroxidase.  Given that peroxide ions and other free radicals would build up and kill us without them, it's a little unlikely that we'd have evolved just to sit around until the Real Water company came along to provide us with "alkalinized water" to deal with the problem.

We also get antioxidants in our food, especially vitamins C and E, and selenium.  However -- and this is important -- extensive studies have shown that taking supplements of any or all of these has no effect on the incidence of either cancer (often attributed to free radical damage) or degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.  So the whole antioxidant craze is a conglomeration of small amounts of actual science mixed with a heaping helping of hype and outright falsehood.

Don't be fooled by how harmless this looks.  It could be hosting free radicals.  Or evil spirits.  Or something.  [Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then there's the aquaporin thing.  Those do exist, and in fact are critical for moving water into and out of cells (water can pass through cell membranes, but slowly).  However, there is absolutely no evidence that creating "stable negative ionization," or (as the site also claims) "structuring water," makes a difference with regards to how the body uses it.  If you don't believe me, humble biology teacher that I am, maybe you'll accept the word of Stephen Lower, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Simon Fraser University:

Any uncertainty that the chemistry community may have about the nature and existence of water clusters is not apparently shared by the various "inventors" who have not only "discovered" these elusive creatures, but who claim findings that science has never even dreamed of!  These promoters have spun their half-baked crackpot chemistry into various watery nostrums that they say are essential to your health and able to cure whatever-ails-you.  These benificences are hawked to the more gullible of the general public, usually in the form of a "concentrate" that you can add to your drinking water— all for a $20-$50 charge on your credit card. 

Some of these hucksters claim to make the water into "clusters" that are larger, smaller, or hexagonal-shaped, allowing them to more readily promote "cellular hydration" and remove "toxins" from your body.

The fact is that none of these views has any significant support in the scientific communities of chemistry, biochemistry, or physiology, nor are they even considered worthy of debate.  The only places you are likely to see these views advocated are in literature (and on websites) intended to promote the sale of these products to consumers in the notoriously credulous "alternative" health and "dietary supplement" market.

And one last thing: "acid" doesn't mean "bad" and "alkaline," "good."  In fact, one of the major functions of your kidneys is to maintain your blood pH, and if that didn't work, you'd drop dead of blood acidosis every time you drank a glass of lemonade, which (at a pH of around 3) has 10,000 times the number of hydrogen ions per milliliter as tap water does.  If you are in any doubt as to how tightly this system is controlled, let me elaborate:

blood pH = 7.6: dead
blood pH = 7.5: blood alkalinosis -- lethargy, confusion, coma
blood pH = 7.4: healthy and happy
blood pH = 7.3: blood acidosis -- gasping for breath, rapid heartbeat, headache, nausea
blood pH = 7.2: dead

So even if "Real Water" could alkalinize your blood, the result would not be better health, or protecting you from rusting, or whatever the fuck it is they're claiming.

And at $36 (plus shipping and handling) for a twelve-pack of one-liter bottles, it's not cheap.  The bottom line: "Real Water" is primarily aimed at people with more money than sense.

Anyhow.  That's today's helping of pseudoscience.  Me, I'm going to go get a cup of plain old tap water, heated up, to which has been added ground up toxin-free all-natural free-radical-busting aura-protecting seeds from the sacred plant Coffea arabica.

Better known as coffee.

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NEW FEATURE ON SKEPTOPHILIA!

Each week (more often if I find something really cool) I'll post a link to a book that should be required reading for all skeptics.  This week I'll start with a classic: Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  If you haven't read this one, you should rectify that error immediately!

The turning of the tides

It's tempting to think that conditions on Earth have always been like they are now.

On one level, we know they weren't.  When people picture the time of the dinosaurs, it usually comes along with images of swamps and ferns and rain forests.  (And volcanoes.  Most of the kids' books about dinosaurs illustrate them as living near erupting volcanoes, which seems like a poor choice of habitat.)

But the basics -- the air, water, soil, and so on -- we picture as static.  It's been the basis of hundreds of science fiction stories; people go back into the distant past, and although there are (depending on when exactly they went to) often giant animals who want to eat you, you have no problem breathing or finding food.

I had a neat hole punched in that perception last week when I read Peter D. Ward's book Out of Thin Air.

 

Ward is a paleontologist at the University of Washington, and his contention -- which is well-argued and supported by a wealth of evidence -- is that the oxygen content of the atmosphere has varied.  A lot.  It's at about 21% at sea level now, but hit a staggering low of 13% immediately after the Permian-Triassic extinction, comparable on today's Earth to being at an altitude of 12,500 feet (think the High Andes).  Humans time-traveling back then would have a seriously difficult time breathing, and life was probably confined to areas that were near sea level -- and those areas would be completely isolated from each other by higher ground in between where there was not enough oxygen to survive.

There were times when it was much higher, too.  Ward says in the late Carboniferous Era, the oxygen content suddenly spiked to around 30%, which explains why coal formation stopped; at 30% oxygen, dead plant matter will combust with little encouragement, resulting in little left behind to form coal seams.

If you'd like to find out more, I highly recommend Ward's book, which is not only an argument for the fluctuating-atmosphere model, but is a good overview of the major events in Earth's history.

Parasaurolophus skeleton [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I had another blow delivered to the static-Earth perception from a study that was published last week in Geophysical Research Letters, called "Is There a Tectonically Driven Super‐Tidal Cycle?", by Mattias Green, J. L. Molloy, H. S. Davies, and J. C. Duarte, which considered the possibility that even the tides haven't always been as they are today.

What their study did was to look at a model of the dispersal of tidal energy, and they found that when all the continents were joined into a single land mass (Pangaea), which last happened at the end of the Permian Era a little over 250 million years ago, it represented a tidal energy minimum.  This meant that the tides were smaller than today, and that the majority of the (single) ocean was effectively a stagnant pool of water, with little vertical mixing of nutrients.  Stagnant, low-nutrient, low-oxygen water generally has little biodiversity -- a few species that can tolerate such conditions do exceptionally well, but the rest die out.  So this could be yet another reason that the cataclysmic Permian-Triassic Extinction happened, in which (by some estimates) 90% of the species on Earth became extinct.

What the Green et al. study suggests is that we're near a tidal maximum.  As the press release about the study put it:

In the new study, scientists simulated the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates and changes in the resonance of ocean basins over millions of years. 

The new research suggests the Atlantic Ocean is currently resonant, causing the ocean’s tides to approach maximum energy levels.  Over the next 50 million years, tides in the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans will come closer to resonance and grow stronger.  In that time, Asia will split, creating a new ocean basin... 

In 100 million years, the Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean and a newly formed Pan-Asian Ocean will see higher resonance and stronger tides as well.  Australia will move north to join the lower half of Asia, as all the continents slowly begin to coalesce into a single landmass in the northern hemisphere... 

After 150 million years, tidal energy begins to decline as Earth’s landmasses form the next supercontinent and resonance declines.  In 250 million years, the new supercontinent will have formed, bringing in an age of low resonance, leading to low tidal energy and a largely quiet sea, according to the new research.

It's a little humbling to think about, isn't it?  The processes that shape the continents, drive the tides, control the chemistry of the atmosphere, will keep chugging along long after we're a paleontological footnote in the textbooks of our far distant descendants.  It's not that what we're doing now isn't critical; in the short term, the out-of-control fossil fuel burning is doing things to our atmosphere that will certainly cause us grievous harm, not to mention the short-sighted pollution of the very resources we depend on.

But if we do succeed in wiping ourselves out, which lately has seemed increasingly likely, the processes that govern the Earth will keep on going without us.  So will natural selection; the survivors of the current mass extinction will evolve into other "forms most beautiful and most wonderful," as Darwin put it in The Origin of Species.

Not that this will be much consolation to us, of course.  But I do find it comforting, in a strange way.  However important we think we are, on the scale of the natural world, we're pretty tiny.  Whatever damage we do, eventually the Earth will recover, with or without us.  And the atmospheric, geological, and tidal ups and downs will continue -- world without end, amen.

Vitriol in the mailbox

Whenever I write a post that's critical of Donald Trump, I always cringe a little as my finger is poised above the "Publish" button.

Because it never fails to result in hate mail, which runs the gamut from implications that I'm hopelessly stupid to spittle-flecked, obscenity-laden screeds, many of which make suggestions that would not have been anatomically possible even when I was in my twenties and was a great deal more flexible.

I've never seen anything quite like this.  I've written this blog for going on eight years, and during that time I have been critical of a large number of public figures.  Those public figures represent a reasonably good cross-section of political and philosophical ideologies; I try my best to be even-handed and criticize faulty thinking wherever I see it, regardless of whether the person in question belongs to the political party I favor.

So, as you might expect, people often take exception to what I say, and pretty frequently will come back at me with some kind of response, question, or rebuttal.  This is fine.  I have no problem being challenged; if I did, I wouldn't be a blogger, I would stay home and talk to my dog, who no matter what I say looks at me with this adoring expression that says, "Good heavens!  I would never have thought of that!  That's absolutely brilliant!"

But I have never seen anything like the vitriol that gets thrown at me over Donald Trump.  There's something about him that seems to incite either blazing hatred or defend-till-death loyalty.  I find this a little puzzling, but it played out again apropos of my post from two days ago, wherein I described the peculiar evidence-resistance I've seen in Trump and his spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, wherein they will not admit to being wrong even when the facts are incontrovertible.  Here are just a few of the responses I got within twenty-four hours of the post.  I'm leaving out the ones that were pure vulgarity, because you can only write "go fuck yourself" so many times.

You liberals are doomed.  You know that, right?  We threw away the elephant and the donkey, and elected a lion.  You're [sic] days are numbered.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the polls aren't really bearing this out.  Support for Trump dwindled into the low 30s by mid-2017 and have pretty much stayed there, and most pundits are predicting that the Democrats are poised to have a good shot at taking back both the House and the Senate.  Now, I'm well aware that a lot can happen between now and November.  Hell, given the last week's headlines, a lot can happen between now and next Thursday.  But even so, the "lion" seems to be in some serious jeopardy of ending up in a very, very small cage.

What part of Trump is in the WH do you not understand?

I understand who the president is all too well, thanks.  My primary concern at the moment is not wishing someone else had won, it's wishing he wouldn't lie every time he opens his damn mouth, not to mention do something idiotic that gets us into yet another war.  And if you don't see him as  increasingly erratic, you're not paying attention.  To take one example (of many), consider his calling out Obama for making public a plan to send the military into Syria, then posting a tweet that... made public a plan to send the military into Syria.  The only difference was that this one came along with a slam against Russia for supporting Assad.  Then -- twenty minutes later -- he backpedaled and said our relationship with Russia is just fine.  And followed it up with saying that he didn't really say he was going to bomb Syria, and if he did, he didn't tell them the actual launch date, so it was all cool.

The man is a petulant, moody, ignorant toddler, whose response to everything is to call people names, lie, and sulk.  And I'd feel this way regardless of which political party he belonged to.  He could agree with me on damn near every political stance there is, and he'd still be completely unfit to run the country.

Finally we have someone whose [sic] doing something about stopping the immigrants from taking over, and people like you can't handle it.  Let's see how you feel when sharea [sic] law is declared in your home town.

Let me quote from my own post: "I'm not here to discuss immigration policy per se.  It's a complex issue and one on which I am hardly qualified to weigh in."  I never once said, either in that post or in any other, whether I'm for tightening or loosening immigration laws, whether I support DACA, whether there should be amnesty for illegals living in the United States, and so on.  (And I'm not going to.  When I don't feel qualified to comment on a topic, I don't comment on it.)  What I did comment upon was that both Trump and Sanders have said that illegal immigration is increasing now, and increased steadily throughout the Obama presidency, both of which are simply false.  I'm not so much concerned with the specific topic of immigration as I am with the fact that the president seems to be incapable of telling truth from fiction.

There has never been a president who has been so abused, so criticized, and had so many roadblocks placed in his way.  People criticize him for not accomplishing his agenda, but he's spending so much of his time defending himself against unfair attacks and criticism that it's no wonder.

First, allow me to point out that if a Republican president with a Republican Senate, Republican House, and Supreme Court dominated by conservatives can't achieve his agenda, it's hardly the fault of the Democrats. But about the abuse -- geez, how short a memory do you have?  Every president gets a dose of criticism (fair and unfair), ridicule, and so on, but have you forgotten what happened when Obama was elected?  The man couldn't wear a tan suit without Fox News having a complete meltdown.  He had a Supreme Court nomination stalled for nine months (an act that Mitch McConnell said was "the proudest moment of [his] political life"), resulting in the nomination never coming to a vote, something that was completely unprecedented.  And as far as how he was treated by the voters, do you remember this photograph?

Oh, wait, maybe you didn't see it, because it was never mentioned by Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, or Sean Hannity.  And it's only one of many.  If you do a Google image search for "Obama lynched in effigy," you'll see what kind of shit he and his family had to face on a daily basis.

So anyway.  I've probably just opened myself up to another waterfall of vitriol, which is fine.  Like I said, I'm used to it; it's an occupational hazard of what I do.  But the point I made in my original post still stands; if you hold a stance, and you are presented with hard, unassailable facts that the opposite is true, the only honest thing to do is to admit you were wrong, not to claim that you "still feel you're right" or that there are "alternate facts."

And sending the person who pointed it out anatomically impossible suggestions really doesn't help your case much.

Order out of chaos

One of the consistent criticisms I hear of the evolutionary model, as embodied in the principle of natural selection, is that it claims that order has appeared out of an essentially random process.

"You admit that mutations are random," the critic says.  "And then in the same breath, you say that these random mutations have driven evolution to create all of the complexity of life around us.  How is that possible?  Chaos can only create more chaos, never order.  For order, there must be a Designer."

Professor Armand Leroi and Bob McAllen, of the Imperial College of London, have teamed up with musician Brian Eno to demonstrate that this view is profoundly incorrect, because it misses 2/3 of what is necessary for evolution to occur.  Not only do you need mutations -- random changes in the code -- you also need two other things: a replication mechanism, and something external acting as a selecting agent.

In order to show how quickly order can come from chaos, Leroi, McAllen, and Eno created a piece of electronic "music" that was just a jumble of random notes and chords (i.e., noise).  They then allowed 7,000 internet volunteers to rate various bits of the string of notes for how pleasant they sounded.  The sum total of these votes was used by a computer program to create a second generation of the tune (replication), making a few changes each time (mutation), and then choosing to retain segments that were the most popular (selection).  The successful loops were allowed to recombine (to "have sex," in McAllen's words), creating the next generation of loops.  Then the whole process was repeated.

After 3,000 generations, a pleasant, and relatively complex, melodic riff was created -- with interlocking phrases and an interesting and steady rhythm.  It's not exactly what the rather hyperbolic headline in Why Evolution is True says it is -- "the perfect pop song" -- but for something that bootstrapped itself upwards out of chaos, it's not bad.  (McAllen created an audio clip that outlines the progression of the piece from random notes to listenable music, along with some fascinating narration of the alterations that occurred in the music over time.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The analogy to evolution isn't perfect, in that human judges with an end product in mind (modern western music) were picking the sound combinations that matched that goal the best.  In that respect, it more closely resembles artificial selection -- in which naturally-occurring mutations result in changes to a population, and humans act to select the ones they think are the most useful.  It is in this way that virtually every breed of domestic animal has been created, most of them in the past thousand years.

But still, as a first-order approximation, it's not bad, and certainly gives a nice answer to people who think that chaos can never give rise to order without the hand of a Designer.  It turns out that no Designer is necessary, as long as you have something acting as a selecting mechanism -- even if that something is as simple as 7,000 people on the internet giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to tiny fragments of a musical passage.  In the natural world, with the powerful dual selectors of survival and reproduction, and two billion years to work, it suddenly ceases to be surprising that the Earth has millions of different and diverse life forms -- although that fact is, and always will be, a source of wonderment and awe for me even so.

Fact avoidance

I've learned through the years that my feelings are an unreliable guide to evaluating reality.

Part of this, I suppose, comes from having fought depression for forty years.  I know that what I'm thinking is influenced by my neurotransmitters, and given the fact that they spend a lot of the time out of whack, my sense that five different mutually-exclusive worst-case scenarios can all happen simultaneously is probably not accurate.  It could be that this was in part what drove me to skepticism, and to my understanding that my best bet for making good decisions is to rely not on feelings, but on evidence.

It surprises me how many people don't get that.  I saw two really good examples of this in the news last week, both of them centered around embattled President Donald Trump.  In the first, he was questioned about why he was putting so much emphasis on securing the border with Mexico -- to the extent of sending in the National Guard -- when in fact, illegal border crossings are at a 46-year low.  (You could argue that current levels are still too high; but the fact is, attempted border crossings have steadily dropped from a high of 1.8 million all the way back in 2000; the level now is about a quarter of that.)

I'm not here to discuss immigration policy per se.  It's a complex issue and one on which I am hardly qualified to weigh in.  What strikes me about this is that the powers-that-be are saying, "I don't care about the data, facts, and figures, the number of illegal migrants is increasing because I feel like it is."

An even more blatant example of trust-your-feelings-not-the-facts came from presidential spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has the unenviable and overwhelming job of doing damage control every time Trump lies about something.  This time, it was at a roundtable discussion on taxes in West Virginia, where he veered off script and started railing about voter fraud.  "In many places, like California, the same person votes many times — you've probably heard about that," he said.  "They always like to say 'oh, that's a conspiracy theory' — not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people."

Of course, the states he likes to claim were sites of rampant voter fraud are always states in which he lost, because the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote still keeps him up at night.  But the fact is, he's simply wrong.  A fourteen-year study by Loyola law professor Justin Levitt found that a "specific, credible allegation existed that someone pretended to be someone else at the polls" accounted for 31 instances out of a billion votes analyzed.

To make it clear: 31 does not equal "millions and millions."  And a fraud rate of 0.0000031% does not constitute "many times."

So, Trump lied.  At this point, that's hardly news.  It'd be more surprising if you turned on the news and found out Trump had told the truth about something.  But when asked about this actual data, in juxtaposition to what Trump said, Sarah Sanders said, "The president still feels there was a large amount of voter fraud."

Wait, what?

What Trump or Sanders, or (for that matter) you or I, "feel" about something is completely irrelevant.  If there's hard data available -- which there is, both on the border crossings and on allegations of voter fraud -- that is what should be listened to.  And when you say something, and are confronted by someone who has facts demonstrating the opposite, the appropriate response is, "Whoa, okay.  I guess I was wrong."

But that's if you're not Donald Trump.  Trump never admits to being wrong.  He doesn't have to, because he's surrounded himself with a Greek chorus of people like Sanders (and his sounding boards over at Fox News) who, no matter what Trump says or does, respond, "Exactly right, sir.  You're amazing.  A genius.  Your brain is YUUUGE."

Hell, he said a couple of years ago that he could kill someone in full view on 5th Avenue and not lose a single supporter, and we had a rather alarming proof of that this week when a fire broke out at Trump Tower on, actually, 5th Avenue -- which, contrary to the law, had no fire alarms or sprinkler system installed -- killing one man and injuring six.

The response?  One Trump supporter said that the man who died had deliberately set the fire to make Trump look bad, and then didn't get out in time.

Facts don't matter.  "I feel like Trump is a great leader and a staunch Christian" wins over "take a look at the hard data" every time.

I'd like to say I have a solution to this, but this kind of fact-resistance is so self-insulating that there's no way in.  It's like living inside a circular argument.  "Trump is brilliant because I feel like he's brilliant, so anything to the contrary must be a lie."  And when you have Fox News pushing this attitude hard -- ignoring any information to the contrary -- you can't escape.

If you doubt that, take a look at what Tucker Carlson was talking about while every other news agency in the world was covering the raid on Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's office: a piece on how "pandas are aggressive and sex-crazed."  (No, I'm not making this up.  An actual quote: "You know the official story about pandas — they’re cute but adorably helpless, which is why they are almost extinct.  But like a lot of what we hear, that is a lie...  The real panda is a secret stud with a thirst for flesh and a fearsome bite.")

That's some cutting-edge reporting, right there.  No wonder Fox News viewers were found in a 2012 study to be the worst-informed of all thirty media sources studied, only exceeded by people who didn't watch the news at all.

So sorry to end on a rather dismal note, but it seems like until people decide to start valuing facts above feelings, we're kind of stuck.  Honestly, the only answer I can come up with is educating children to be critical thinkers, but in the current environment of attacking teachers and public schools, I'm not sure that's feasible either.

In the interim, though, I'm gonna avoid pandas.  Because they sound a lot sketchier than I'd realized.

You say goodbye, and I say dratzo

Whilst casting about for a topic for today's post, I stumbled upon an article in Medium from June of last year entitled, "Is the Galactic Federation Real?"

Well, I don't want to leave you in suspense as to the answer, so therefore:

Short answer: No.

Long answer: NOOOOOOOOOOO.

But boy, does the author, one Lisa Galarneau, think it is.  Or, more accurately, the alien intelligence she's channeling, one "Artemis Pax," thinks so.

Yes, I know Artemis is the name of a Greek goddess, i.e., a human-created mythological figure from right here on Earth, and "Pax" is Latin, not Alienese, for "peace."  So this is a little like the episode of the abysmal 1960s science fiction show Lost in Space which featured an alien named, I shit you not, "Princess Alpha of the planet Beta."

Anyhow, Galarneau/Pax blather on a bit about the whole idea, featuring paragraphs like the following:

What we would like to assure you is that ascension into a 5D reality will be more glorious than any of you can imagine. You will all, for instance, experience positive changes to your bodies. Your reality will be flooded with divine love, which will make everyone feel amazing. Your galactic neighbors will also be involved in lifting you up even further, and you will see a technological, spiritual, societal and cultural transformation of your civilization like nothing you have ever contemplated or imagined.

Which sounds pretty hopeful, especially given some of the scary stuff that's been going down lately.  I think we could all use a nice infusion of divine love, frankly.

She goes on to explain the whole thing via a bizarre analogy to The Wizard of Oz, which she calls "a metaphor from your popular culture," further proof that she's actually an alien.  But after reading all this, I decided I needed to dig a little deeper.  Was this just one article about one wingnut claiming to be a spiritually-ascended five-dimensional alien, or was this belief more widespread?

And all I can say is: whoa.

I found the site Galactic Federation of Light, which put to rest any thought that Galarneau/Pax was one isolated nut.  Feel free to take a look at it, but please be forewarned that this site is very slow to load, and in fact resulted in my having to restart my browser twice -- perhaps because the Galactic Federation Overlords were aware that I was accessing their site in order to poke fun at them.

Be that as it may, this site explains everything you might want to know about the Galactic Federation, and features a YouTube channel and Twitter feed that has thousands of followers.

To save you the time and effort, and potential damage to your computer's hard drive, I sifted through the site and pulled out a few highlights.  It's largely composed of a series of dated posts, each stating who said it and some including which Galactic Federation Master (s)he was channeling at the time.  Here is a sampling:

Your planet is literally surrounded with craft from all corners of the universe as all beings vie for ringside seats to the greatest show in the galaxy.  Your world has long been highly regarded as one of the finest spiritual schools in the universe and entry into this University has been highly sought after.  Now, you are on the precipice of a school-wide graduation, and you are center stage for the family that has come from all parts of the universe to attend the graduation ceremonies.  (Galactic Federation through Wanderer From The Skies, July 14, 2016)

Seriously?  Humanity is "highly regarded" and the Earth is "one of the finest spiritual schools in the galaxy?"  Judging from recent events, this doesn't say much about the educational system elsewhere in the universe.  As far as the fact that we're graduating, I suppose that's good, although I hope the speeches are better than the ones at most of the graduation ceremonies I've been to.  And if someone decides to read the names of all seven billion graduates, I'm leaving.

The next three or four months are destined to be eye opening, and you will know for sure that the big changes are on the way...  So get ready to button up your safety belts and enjoy the ride. It can be seen as good or bad as you want it to be, so see the goal that is being aimed for and not the manner in which it is to be reached.  All you need know is that it results in all you have been promised.  It will be an unbelievable time with one surprise after another, and celebrations will be taking place. 

I am SaLuSa from Sirius, and tell you that our ships are gathering for the grand announcement that will allow us to land on your Earth by invitation. (SaLuSa / through Mike Quinsey, 20th July 2016)

Well, given that this was posted a year ago last summer, and I don't remember Autumn 2016 as being all that eye-opening, I guess SaLuSa from Sirius might have gotten his wires crossed somehow.

Sirius, home of SaLuSa [image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Since the posts were in chronological order, I decided that like the Brothers of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, I needed to skip a bit, so I scrolled down to more current posts.  From April of 2017 I found the following:

Dratzo!  We return!  The great shift that your world is undergoing was first predicted by the Ancients over 13,000 years ago.  It is part of what they called 'the great galactic year.'  Heaven is to honor this time by establishing a great Light, which will wash away the dark and all its minions.  We were asked, over 20 of your years ago, to come here and be ready at an appointed time to carry out a mass landing of our personnel on your precious shores.  And so we came, and then saw that Heaven's dates for this undertaking were somewhat unclear.  So we adapted, and proceeded to use these moments to get to know you better.  Since our arrival here, we have become part of a sacred movement to prepare Gaia's surface humans for the requirements of the divine decrees for this planet.  One of them specifies the need to resolve the issue of the dark minions' labyrinth of control on your planet through sacred cleansing.  In the main this will start with a formal, immense change in the way your societies operate and in the way you perceive the nature of your reality.  (Washta, Sirius Star-Nation, Galactic Federation of Light & Ascended Masters, 17th April 2017)

"Dratzo?"  Is this some kind of greeting from Sirius, or something?  I think we should all begin to greet each other in this fashion from now on, so that "Washta" and his buddies feel at home when they arrive.  Maybe it also comes along with a cool hand sign, sort of like the Vulcan "Live Long and Prosper" thing, only way more ridiculous.

"Washta" had a further missive that he delivered late last year:

Dratzo!  We return!  We have been informed that several major banks worldwide are nearly ready to transfer ownership and management.  This is part of the massive shift of financial power out of the hands of the dark into those of the Light, and is the result of recent maneuvers by the Ascended Masters.

Furthermore, the time has come to consolidate the funds that were first posited by Saint Germaine in the early 18th century, and by Quan Yin in the 7th century.  These large reserves of gold and silver are the basis for shifting wealth on your world away from a select few over to those who are fully committed to the creation of universal prosperity for the planet.  Accompanying this transfer is the new banking system which will be completely transparent in its varied transactions.  The new banking is rooted in the unprecedented injunction that banks be the divine instruments of the Light.  They are to be used to manage various corporations (special partnerships) charged with specific and temporary mandates: to distribute technologies and related services to benefit the health and well being of your global populations.  (Washta, Sirius Star-Nation, Galactic Federation of Light & Ascended Masters, 24th April 2017)

Well, that sounds hopeful enough. I wouldn't mind it if the banks, and corporations in general, started being more concerned with the health and well-being of global populations, instead of what they mostly seem to be doing lately, which is buying congresspersons and kissing Donald Trump's ass.  But at this point, I stopped reading, because I was afraid my browser would crash again, and also because my prefrontal cortex was beginning to make alarming little whimpering noises.

What strikes me about this is that the people who believe this stuff (and there seem to be quite a few, judging from the posts and the comments that followed) go way beyond wishful thinking into that more rarefied air of delusion.  I mean, it'd be nice if there were some Galactic Good Guys who were ready to Storm The Beaches and reorganize world governments so that they Played Nice, but there's just this teensy little problem, which is that there's no evidence whatsoever that any of it is true.  And this brings up a troubling question, to wit: what is it that makes someone swallow something like this?  I mean, beyond the rather sad answer that the person in question is mentally ill.  And I just can't believe that mental illness accounts for all of the believers in conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, cults, superstitions... and Galactic Federations.

I actually know people who are seemingly quite rational, who hold down jobs and raise families and interact socially, and yet who have some pretty bizarre beliefs on a single topic -- astrology, homeopathy, HAARP, the Illuminati, psychic contact with animals.  What in the human brain can become so untethered, in an otherwise intact mind, that a person loses the ability in that instance (and that instance only) to decide if something is real, has supporting evidence, makes sense?

I don't know the answer, but I do think the whole thing is a little scary.  So I'll end on that note.  Well, I do have one more thing to say: Dratzo!

Dodging the Great Filter

There's a cheery idea called "The Great Filter," have you heard of it?

The whole concept came up when considering the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, especially vis-à-vis the Fermi Paradox, which can be summed up as, "If intelligent aliens are common in the universe, where is everyone?"  Despite fifty-odd years of intensive searching, there has never been incontrovertible evidence of someone out there.  I maintain hope, however; the universe is a big, big place, and even the naysayers admit we've only surveyed the barest fraction of it.

The Arecibo Radio Telescope [image courtesy of photographer David Broad and the Wikimedia Commons]

"The Great Filter" is an attempt to parse why this may be, assuming it's not because alien civilizations are communicating with each other (and/or sending signals to us) using a technology we don't understand yet and can't detect.  You can think of the Great Filter as being a roadblock -- where, along the way, do circumstances prevent life forming on other planets, then achieving intelligence?

There are a few candidates for the Great Filter, to wit:

• the abiotic synthesis of complex organic molecules.  This seems unlikely, as organic molecule synthesis appears to be easy, as long as there's no nasty chemical like molecular oxygen around to rip them apart as fast as they form.  In an anoxic atmosphere -- such as the one the Earth almost certainly had five billion years ago -- organic molecules of all sorts can form with wild abandon.
• assembly of those organic molecules into cells.  Again, this has been demonstrated in the lab to be easy.  Hydrophobic interactions make lipids (or other amphipathic molecules, ones with a polar end and a nonpolar end) form structures that look convincingly like cells with little more encouragement than occasional agitation.
• the evolution of those cells into a complex life form.  Now we're on shakier ground; no one knows how common this may be.  Although natural selection seems to be universal, all this would do is cause the cells that are the best/most efficient at replicating themselves to become more common.  There's no particular reason that complex life forms would necessarily result from that process.  As eminent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins put it, "Evolution is the law of whatever works."
• the development of intelligence.  Again, there's no reason to expect this to occur everywhere.  Intelligent life forms aren't even the most common living things on Earth -- far from it.  We are vastly outnumbered not only by insects, but bacteria -- methanogens, a group of bacteria species that live in anaerobic sediment on the ocean floor, are thought to outnumber all other living organisms on Earth put together.
• an intelligent species surviving long enough to stand a chance of sending an identifiable signal.  That the Great Filter consists of intelligent life evolving and then proceeding to do something stupid and destroying itself has been nicknamed the "We're Fucked" model.  If all of the preceding scenarios turn out not to be serious issues -- and at least the first two seem that way -- then it could be that intelligence pops up all over the place, but only lasts a few decades before spontaneously combusting.

Most biologists think that if a Great Filter does exist, #5 is probably the best candidate.  There's nothing we know about biology that precludes any of the others; even if (for example) the evolution of intelligence is slow and arduous, given the size of the universe, there are probably millions of planets that host, or have hosted, intelligent life.

On the other hand, if they only host that life for a few years before it commits suicide en masse, it could explain why we're not getting a lot of "Hey, We're Here!" signals from the cosmos.

When people consider what could trigger an intelligent civilization to self-destruct, most people think of the development of advanced weaponry.  It's like a planet-wide application of the Principle of Chekhov's Gun (from 19th century Russian author Anton Chekhov): "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.  If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."  If we develop weapons of mass destruction, eventually we'll use them -- destroying ourselves in the process.

It reminds me of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Arsenal of Freedom," in which a civilization becomes the salespeople of increasingly advanced weapon systems -- until they develop one so powerful that once activated, it can't be stopped, and it proceeds to wipe out the people who made it.

Of course, there's another possibility (because one way of self-destructing isn't enough...).  This was just brought up by inventor and futurist Elon Musk, who last week declared that he wants us to put the brakes on artificial intelligence development.  Musk says that if we develop a true artificial intelligence, it will not only inevitably take over, it will eventually look at humanity as "in the way" -- and destroy us:

[I]f we’re building a road, and an anthill happens to be in the way, we destroy it.  We don’t hate ants, we’re just building a road.  So, goodbye, anthill.  

If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it.  No hard feelings...  By the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’ll be too late.  Normally the way regulations are set up is when a bunch of bad things happen, there’s a public outcry, and after many years a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry.  It takes forever.  That, in the past, has been bad but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization...  

At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die.  But for an AI there would be no death.  It would live forever, and then you’d have an immortal dictator, from which we could never escape.

It's possible that we could fall prey not to our weapon systems, but to something few of us have considered dangerous -- a created artificial intelligence.  (Although you'd think that anyone who has watched either I, Robot or any of the Terminator movies would understand the risk.)

So do advanced civilizations inevitably develop AI systems, that then turn on them?  It would certainly explain why we're not receiving greetings from the stars.  It's possible that the Great Filter lies ahead of us -- a prospect that I consider a little terrifying.

Anyhow, sorry for being a downer.  Besides Musk's recent pronouncements, the idea has been floating around in my head given all of the idiotic things our leaders have been doing recently.  I guess if we can survive for the next few years, we might break through the suspicion and violence and parochialism that has characterized our species pretty much forever.  I'm going to try to remain optimistic -- as my dad used to say, "I'd rather be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right."

On the other hand, I think I'll end with a quote from theologian and Orthodox Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: "Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be.  Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes."

So maybe Elon Musk's adjuration to caution is well advised.