Notes from the multidimensional realm

In today's episode of Missives From Insane People Who Still Somehow Get A National Platform, we have: Paul McGuire, self-styled "End Times author," who appeared last week on the Jim Bakker Show.

It bears mention that Bakker himself is nuttier than squirrel shit.  Bakker, you may remember, is the one who predicted a couple of years ago that we atheists were imminent to start publicly beheading Christians.  As of right now, my total is a shameful Zero Christians Beheaded, which either means Bakker is a fucking loon or else I'm way behind on my Decapitation Quota.

Then, last year, Bakker railed against liberals for "blaspheming against Donald Trump."  Direct quote, that, despite the fact that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English says that "blaspheme" means "to speak irreverently about God or sacred things."  Which elevates Trump just slightly beyond his station.  Oh, and if that weren't enough, Bakker's also the one who claimed that the U. S. government was being run by witches.

So it's not like Bakker himself is exactly a pinnacle of normality.  But his guest, Paul McGuire, makes Bakker look like Mr. Sane Rationality 2018 by comparison.

Although it bears mention that Bakker treated everything McGuire said as if it were revealed truth, so maybe they're not that far apart after all.

In any case, here's what McGuire had to say:

President Trump is currently engulfed in the greatest spiritual battle in the history of all mankind...   The physical battles that we see in our world and nation right now are a direct manifestation of the spiritual battles going on in the invisible realm...  There are people very high up in what is called the globalist occult or globalist Luciferian rulership system, and this rulership system consists of what used to be called the Pharaoh-God Kings, it’s what Aldous Huxley called "The Scientific Dictatorship," and these are advanced beings who know how to tap into supernatural multidimensional power and integrate it with science, technology, and economics. 

The highest level of the pyramidic organizational structure in which the highest ranking officers, if you will, of the New World Order and Mystery Babylon are ruling the earth through an organizational structure that looks like the pyramid on the back of the U.S. dollar.  And they control the world because they understand that the true control of the world is done through supernatural mechanisms.

So there you have it.

You know, I have to admit that if I were a Luciferian multidimensional being in charge of Mystery Babylon, I would definitely use my supernatural Pyramid Powers to smite the shit out of Donald Trump.  It may seem petty of me, and there are probably more worthy targets, but I'd love to use occult magic to seal his mouth shut.  Or make it so every time he tweets, no matter what he writes, it comes out "I [heart] the New World Order."  Or attach a thousand-watt LED to his forehead that lights up every time he tells a lie.

Of course, it'd be lit so often that it'd interfere with air traffic.  So that'd be bad.

Looks like Lucifer has been hitting the gym lately.  (Fallen Angel, Alexandre Cabanel, 1847) [Image is in the Public Domain]

But what strikes me about McGuire's claim is that despite all of his dire warnings... nothing is happening.  Trump is still in office, his toadies in Congress are looking like they've greased the rails for Brett "Documents Withheld" Kavanaugh to be appointed to the Supreme Court, and the administration as a whole has undone decades of progress on environmental and social issues without anyone being able to stop them, or even slow them down.  So if there really are Luciferian multidimensional beings, I would be really glad if they'd get off their asses and do something about this.  Because it's increasingly looking like we've invented time travel, and transported the entire nation back to 1830.

In any case, that's the view from the lunatic fringe for today.  Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I'm late for a meeting of the Pyramidic Organizational Structure.  I hope one of the other Invisible Realm Operatives brings donuts.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is part hard science, part the very human pursuit of truth.  In The Particle at the End of the Universe, physicist Sean Carroll writes about the studies and theoretical work that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson -- the particle Leon Lederman nicknamed "the God Particle" (which he later had cause to regret, causing him to quip that he should have named it "the goddamned particle").  The discovery required the teamwork of dozens of the best minds on Earth, and was finally vindicated when six years ago, a particle of exactly the characteristics Peter Higgs had described almost fifty years earlier was identified from data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

Carroll's book is a wonderful look at how science is done, and how we have developed the ability to peer into the deepest secrets of the universe.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Elegy for a treasure trove

I've always felt a very visceral sense of loss.  Even breaking a valued keepsake, for example, strikes me as sad by virtue of being irreversible, and triggers in me something that feels very much like mourning.

The bigger the loss, of course, the harder the gut punch.  I still have a vivid memory of finding out about the burning of the Library of Alexandria in 48 B.C.E., and carrying around with me a feeling very close to horror for several days afterward.  (Especially since many historians believe that the fire was deliberately set by soldiers sent to Egypt by Julius Caesar.)  The result of the fire was a devastating loss of cultural knowledge -- no one knows how many scrolls and books were destroyed, but even conservative estimates are in the range of forty to fifty thousand, most of which were the only copies in existence.

And some historians have said that the figure might have been closer to four hundred thousand.

The Great Library of Alexandria (1886, woodcut by Otto von Corven) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Entirely lost were the works of Hipparchus (the "father of astronomy"), and the majority of the creative output of the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.  Only one-third of the writings of Archimedes survive -- the other two-thirds were housed in the Library and were destroyed when it burned.

And that's just a few of the ones we know about.

I felt that same sense of crushing desolation two days ago when I heard about the destruction of the Brazilian National Museum in Rio de Janeiro while listening to NPR.  The fire -- whose cause is, as of the time of this writing, uncertain -- completely destroyed the museum and its contents, although there's still some hope that a few of the more fireproof items may have survived.  The impact on scholarship can't be exaggerated; several of the scientists who were interviewed were obviously trying to hold back tears while talking about it.

According to an article by National Geographic, the museum, founded in 1818, housed twenty million items relating to a wide variety of disciplines.  There was the 11,500-year-old skull of Luzia, the oldest human skeletal remains ever found in Brazil.  There were specimens of forty thousand different species of mollusks and five million species of arthropods.  The museum also had South America's most extensive collection of Egyptian artifacts -- almost certainly all destroyed.

"When I saw the news about the tragedy, I just started crying, and all my colleagues, other archaeologists I know in Brazil, they had the same reaction—that’s a loss for all the world," said Maria Ester Franklin Maia Silva, a Brazilian archaeologist and Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo.

Silva isn't alone.  Marcus Guidoti, an entomologist nearing completion of his Ph.D. at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, has witnessed the loss of the entire collection his research relied on.  And anthropologist Mariana Françozo, of Leiden University, was equally devastated. "I have no words to say how horrible this is.  The indigenous collections are a tremendous loss…we can no longer study them, we can no longer understand what our ancestors did.  It’s heartbreaking."

Fingers are already being pointed at the government for standing by and watching the Museu Nacional fall into disrepair, neglect which is almost certain to have contributed to the disaster.  The museum's fire safety precautions were nil, and there were no funds to amend it even had the directors wanted to.  Three years ago, they were forced to crowdfund money for repairing extensive termite damage -- because federal funding to repair the damage was repeatedly denied.

Brazilian president Michael Temer called the Museu Nacional's loss "incalculable to Brazil" and "a sad day for all Brazilians."  But Mariana Françozo wasn't impressed by his reaction.  "[My]... reaction is anger, because they knew the museum needed funding for years.  How do you ‘rebuild’ a 200-year-old collection that has burned to ashes?"

Whoever is at fault -- or even if the fire at the museum was entirely accidental -- reading about it leaves me feeling sick inside.  The loss to the wealth of human knowledge is enormous.  Like with the Library of Alexandria, the museum housed thousands of specimens that had yet to be studied, and whose destruction leaves a hole that can't ever be filled.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is part hard science, part the very human pursuit of truth.  In The Particle at the End of the Universe, physicist Sean Carroll writes about the studies and theoretical work that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson -- the particle Leon Lederman nicknamed "the God Particle" (which he later had cause to regret, causing him to quip that he should have named it "the goddamned particle").  The discovery required the teamwork of dozens of the best minds on Earth, and was finally vindicated when six years ago, a particle of exactly the characteristics Peter Higgs had described almost fifty years earlier was identified from data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

Carroll's book is a wonderful look at how science is done, and how we have developed the ability to peer into the deepest secrets of the universe.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The child in the cemetery

It's astonishing how little a skeptical, rational approach has insulated me from having a purely visceral reaction sometimes.

I've commented to my wife that I seem to have two brains, and they don't talk to each other.  In fact, most of the time each one seems to be bound and determined that the other doesn't exist.  One is my rational brain, that tells me things like "You've been very healthy, all things considered, and the physical you had two days ago is really unlikely to have turned up anything even remotely questionable."  The other, my emotional brain, says, "You haven't gotten the results yet, which means that they are reluctant to tell you that you're dying of a rare, incurable, and horribly painful disease."

Even with less personal things, it's curious how I can have two completely independent reactions at precisely the same time.  Take, for example, the image captured on Google Street View in the Martha Chapel Cemetery, Huntsville, Texas last week.

How anyone thought of zooming in like this, on an image of a (supposedly) empty cemetery, I don't know.  At least that's my emotional brain speaking.  My rational brain says there's a clear reason -- because it's a hoax, a digitally-altered photograph.  But without further ado, here's the image in question:

If you'll look closely, there's a very convincing image of a little girl's face peeking from around the left side of the tree.

The link I provided shows the image in a variety of angles and magnifications, and also says that there's a second "ghostly image" in the picture.  You can see it in the rectangular space framed by the sapling and the two dark tree trunks on the left side of the image.  Here it is, magnified:

This one, on the other hand, just doesn't do it for me.  If you go to the link (the YouTube video it brings you to is only a minute and a half long), you can see it in even greater magnification, and it looks to me like...

... a leaf caught on the fence.  I don't see it as creepy enough to need further explanation; even considering pareidolia, the thing just doesn't look like a "human figure," but just a dark, irregular blob.

The little girl, though.  That one is, to put not to fine a point on it, freakin' creepy.  She even has a sly expression in her eyes.  I'm relatively certain it's not a ghost; I'll admit the possibility, but the likelihood of camera anomalies or an outright hoax is, in my opinion, far greater.

But my emotional brain doesn't agree.  My emotional brain, in fact, says it does not give a rat's ass about camera anomalies and hoaxes.  My emotional brain is saying, "OH DEAR GOD THAT'S A LITTLE GIRL GHOST AND THAT REALLY IS SCARY."

I'd like to be able to say that my rational brain wins the argument every single time, but truth be told, I am primarily an emotional creature -- odd, I know, for someone who is trained in science and who has waved the flag of rationalism at every opportunity.  In fact, I've often wondered if rationalism and skepticism appealed to me because it at least gave me some protection against going around having the screaming meemies every other Tuesday.

So it seems like I have to put up with having two personalities who give every evidence of hating each other's guts.  I guess it could be worse.  At least they don't get into verbal arguments.  Because people already think I'm eccentric enough without my going around acting like this guy.  Or these guys, depending on how you look at it.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is part hard science, part the very human pursuit of truth.  In The Particle at the End of the Universe, physicist Sean Carroll writes about the studies and theoretical work that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson -- the particle Leon Lederman nicknamed "the God Particle" (which he later had cause to regret, causing him to quip that he should have named it "the goddamned particle").  The discovery required the teamwork of dozens of the best minds on Earth, and was finally vindicated when six years ago, a particle of exactly the characteristics Peter Higgs had described almost fifty years earlier was identified from data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

Carroll's book is a wonderful look at how science is done, and how we have developed the ability to peer into the deepest secrets of the universe.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Filling in the missing link

One of the chief values of science lies in its predictive power.

Once a theory has developed that accounts for all the known evidence, it then gives scientists new directions to pursue.  A classic example of this is Wolfgang Pauli's prediction in 1931 that there was a small, fast-moving particle that accounted for "lost" energy and momentum in beta decay (an example of which is the decay of carbon-14 into nitrogen-14).  Back then, they didn't have the technology to find it.  It took 28 years before Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines created a device that was able to detect it, and found a particle that had exactly the characteristics Pauli had predicted almost three decades earlier.  They named it the neutrino.

When this kind of thing happens, it's a real vindication of the theory itself.  Of course, sometimes it goes the other way -- there'll be a discovery that contradicts some part of the theory.  This forces revision of the theory to account for the new information.  Thus science's other amazing strength: its ability to self-correct.  As physicist John Baez put it, "When you do theoretical physics, sometimes you feel the high of discovering hidden truths about the physical universe.  Sometimes you feel the agony of suspecting that those "hidden truths" were probably just a bunch of baloney... or, realizing that you may never know.  Ultimately nature has the last word."

We had a nice example of that just this past week, not in physics but in evolutionary biology, with the discovery of two new species of dinosaurs at digs in Mongolia and China.  The species, named Bannykus and Xiyunykus, connected up two groups of dinosaurs in the Alvarezsauridae, which had tube-like snouts with tiny teeth, compact hands with narrow fingers and sharp claws, and (from the site of muscle attachment points on the skeleton) apparently had powerful pectoral muscles.  (You might guess, correctly, that they're thought to be allied to the earliest birds.)

The hand bones of Bannykus [photograph by Jonah Choiniere, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa]

The problem was, there were alvarezsaurids from the late Jurassic Period, 150 million years ago, and some from the late Cretaceous, 70 million years ago -- and nothing in between.  That's a pretty sizable gap.  These "missing link" situations are common enough.  Unsurprising, given how unlikely it is for a fossil to survive intact for hundreds of millions of years, not even considering how tricky fossil formation is in the first place.  The truth is that only a minuscule fraction of the species that have existed left fossils -- the lion's share of the biodiversity Earth has had is unknown and probably unknowable.

It must be said at this juncture that "missing links" do not cast evolution into doubt.  To quote Carl Sagan, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."  But because paleontology, like any good science, develops theories with predictive value, you can make some guesses about what should be there in those gaps.

And last week, we had another example of evolutionary biology and paleontology making a prediction that was spot-on.  "When we see a transition like that in the fossil record, we always want to know how it happened," said Corwin Sullivan in an interview with CBC.   Sullivan, a professor of paleontology at the University of Alberta, co-authored the paper, titled "Two Early Cretaceous Fossils Document Transitional Stages in Alvarezsaurian Dinosaur Evolution," which appeared in the journal Current Biology.  "[T]hese animals are, in a sense, missing links," Sullivan said.  "The teeth are quite a bit smaller — and in particular in the alvarezsaurids of the late Cretaceous, which are usually interpreted as specialized for insect eating, the teeth get very small, they lose their serrations on a very fine scale...  It's probably a question of exploiting a food resource that was available.  They would have been competing with other theropods and other kinds of predators."

Which is pretty cool.  It's always nice when the scientists say, "Hey, based on what we know, this must exist," and presto, someone finds exactly what they predicted.  Maybe the specifics in this case would only be of interest to serious dinosaur nerds, but the bigger picture -- that science can allow us not only to analyze what we have hard evidence of, but to infer detailed information about the missing pieces when we don't -- is pretty inspiring.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is part hard science, part the very human pursuit of truth.  In The Particle at the End of the Universe, physicist Sean Carroll writes about the studies and theoretical work that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson -- the particle Leon Lederman nicknamed "the God Particle" (which he later had cause to regret, causing him to quip that he should have named it "the goddamned particle").  The discovery required the teamwork of dozens of the best minds on Earth, and was finally vindicated when six years ago, a particle of exactly the characteristics Peter Higgs had described almost fifty years earlier was identified from data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

Carroll's book is a wonderful look at how science is done, and how we have developed the ability to peer into the deepest secrets of the universe.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The Great Filter and the three f's

In yesterday's post, we looked at how the Drake Equation predicts the number of intelligent civilizations out there in the galaxy, and that more than one of the variables has been revised upward in the last few years because of recent research in astronomy.  This suggests that life is probably super-common in the universe -- and intelligent life undoubtedly is out there, as well.

But we ended with a puzzle.  Physicist Enrico Fermi famously responded to Frank Drake with four words: "Then where is everybody?"  This was true back when it was said (1961) and is even more true now; in the intervening 57 years, we've done huge amounts of surveying of the sky, looking for any sign of an extraterrestrial intelligence, and found... nothing.

Now, to be fair, "huge amounts of surveying" still covers a minuscule fraction of the stars out there.  All that would have to happen is the radio signal saying, "Hi, y'all, here we are!" hitting Earth while our radio telescopes were aimed at a different star, or tuned to a different frequency, and we could well miss it.

Messier 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy [Image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

But there's a more sinister possibility, and that possibility goes by the nickname of "The Great Filter."

I looked at this concept in a post a while back, especially apropos of the variable "L" in the Drake Equation -- once a planet hosts intelligent life, how long does it last?  If we were to time-travel two thousand years into the future, would there still be a human civilization, or are we doomed to destroy ourselves, either by our own fondness for weaponry capable of killing large numbers of people at once, or because our rampant population growth exceeded the planet's carrying capacity, and we experienced what the ecologists somewhat euphemistically call "overshoot-and-rebound?"

But today I want to look at the Great Filter in a larger perspective.  Given that most astronomers think that the Drake Equation leads to the conclusion that life, and even intelligent life, is common out there, Fermi's quip is well taken.  And the answers to that question can be sorted into three basic categories, which have been nicknamed the "three f's":

1. We're first.
2. We're fortunate.
3. We're fucked.

Could we be the first planet in our region of the galaxy to harbor intelligent life?  It's certainly possible, especially given the time gap between our developing life (four-odd-billion years ago) and our developing the technology not only to send, but to detect, signals from other planets (about fifty years ago).  Consider, for example, that if there was a civilization on Alpha Centauri at the technological stage we had two hundred years ago, they would have a thriving society made up of individuals that are highly intelligent, but to us here on Earth, they would be completely silent (and also wouldn't know it if we were talking to them).

However, considering the number of stars with planets, even in our region of the Milky Way, I think that's unlikely.  Even if we were all on a similar time table -- a contention that is not supported by what we know of stellar evolution -- it's nearly certain that there'd be someone out there at, or ahead of, our level of technology.  Add to that the fact that there are a lot of planet-hosting stars out there that are much older than the Sun, and I think option #1 is really not that likely.

Might we just be fortunate?  There are a number of hurdles we had to overcome to get where we are, none of which were at all sure bets.  The development of complex multicellular life, the evolution of symbiosis between our cells and what would eventually become our mitochondria (allowing us not only to avoid the toxic reactiveness of atmospheric oxygen, but to hitch that to our energy production systems, an innovation that improved our energy efficiency by a factor of 18).  None of those are at all guaranteed, and although it's conceivable to have intelligent life that lacks those characteristics, it's kind of hard to imagine how it would advance this much.

Then there's the evolution of sexual reproduction, which is critical not only because it's fun, but because it allows recombination of our genetic material each generation.  This allows us to avoid the dual problems of genetically-identical individuals being susceptible to the same pathogens, and also Muller's Ratchet (a problem faced by asexual species that is best understood as a genetic game of Telephone -- at each replication, mutations build up and eventually turn the DNA into nonsense).

But no one knows how likely the evolution of sexual reproduction is -- nor, honestly, if it's really as critical as I've suggested.

The last possibility, though -- "we're fucked" -- is the most alarming.  This postulates that the Great Filter lies ahead of us.  The reasons are varied, and all rather depressing.  It could be the "L" in the Drake Equation is a small number -- on the order of decades -- because we'll destroy ourselves somehow.  It could be that there are inevitable cosmic catastrophes that eventually wipe out the life on a planet, things like Wolf-Rayet stars and gamma-ray bursters, either of which would be seriously bad news if one went boom near the Solar System.

Then there's Elon Musk's worry, that intelligent civilizations eventually develop artificial intelligence, which backfires spectacularly.  In 2017 he urged a halt, or at least a slowdown, in AI research, because there's no reason to think sentient AI would consider us all that valuable.  "With artificial intelligence," Musk said, "we are summoning the demon.  You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon?  Doesn’t work out."

But by far the most sinister idea is that we're doomed because eventually, a civilization reaches the point where they're able to send out radio signals.  We've been doing this ever since radio and television were invented, so there's an expanding bubble of our transmissions zooming out into the galaxy at the speed of light.  And the idea here is that we'll eventually attract the attention of a considerably more powerful civilization, which will respond by stomping on us.  Stephen Hawking actually thought this was fairly likely -- back in 2015, he said, "We don't know much about aliens, but we know about humans.  If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced.  A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us.  If so, they will be vastly more powerful, and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria."

Which, considering that the first traces the aliens will see of us are Leave it to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show, is an understandable reaction.

So there you have it.  If we did contact another civilization, it would be good news in one sense -- the Great Filter hasn't wiped everyone out but us -- but could be a seriously bad one in another respect.  I guess stuff like this is always a mixed bag.

Me, I still would love to live long enough to see it happen.  If an alien spaceship landed in my back yard, man, I would be thrilled.  It'd suck if it turned out to be an invasion by Daleks or Cybermen or whatnot, but man, at least for the first three minutes, it would be a hell of a rush.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from one of my favorite thinkers -- Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke has made several documentaries, including Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and After the Warming -- the last-mentioned an absolutely prescient investigation into climate change that came out in 1991 and predicted damn near everything that would happen, climate-wise, in the twenty-seven years since then.

I'm going to go back to Burke's first really popular book, the one that was the genesis of the TV series of the same name -- Connections.  In this book, he looks at how one invention, one happenstance occurrence, one accidental discovery, leads to another, and finally results in something earthshattering.  (One of my favorites is how the technology of hand-weaving led to the invention of the computer.)  It's simply great fun to watch how Burke's mind works -- each of his little filigrees is only a few pages long, but you'll learn some fascinating ins and outs of history as he takes you on these journeys.  It's an absolutely delightful read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Parsing the Drake Equation

The Drake Equation is one of those curiosities that is looked upon as valid science by some and as pointless speculation by others.  Here's what it looks like:

Math-phobes, fear not; it's not as hard as it looks.  The idea, which was dreamed up by cosmologist Frank Drake back in 1961, is that you can estimate the number of civilizations in the universe with whom communication might be possible (Nb) by multiplying the probabilities of seven other independent variables, to wit:

R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the fraction of those stars with planets whose planets are in the habitable zone
fl = the fraction of planets in the habitable zone that develop life
fi = the fraction of those planets which eventually develop intelligent life
fc = the fraction of those planets with intelligent life whose inhabitants develop the capability of communicating over interstellar distances
L = the average lifetime of those civilizations

Some of those (such as R*) are considered to be understood well enough that we can make a fairly sure estimate of its magnitude.  Others -- such as fp and ne -- were complete guesses in Drake's time.  How many stars had planets?  Could be nearly 100%, or it could be the Solar System was some incredibly fortunate fluke, and we're one of the only planetary systems in existence.  But now, with improvements in the techniques for surveying stars, we're finding planets everywhere we look -- most stars seem to have planets, and some research published just last month by a team of astronomers at the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa) has shown that planets could form stable orbits in multiple-star systems, something previously thought extremely unlikely.

That they can do so is fortunate not only for alien intelligence enthusiasts like myself -- as much as half of all stars are thought to be part of multiple-star systems -- but for this guy:

So the estimates keep being revised upward.  The one we still have no real idea about is L -- how long civilizations tend to last.  Carl Sagan, when he described the Drake Equation in his amazing series Cosmos, was pessimistic -- many civilizations, he suggested, lasted long enough to develop weapons of mass destruction, then proceed to blow themselves to smithereens.

But the fact is, we just don't know about L.  But one that was complete speculation -- fl, the fraction of planets in the habitable zone that develop life -- just got a bit of a boost from a study done at the University of Bristol (England).  The researchers, Holly C. Betts, Mark N. Puttick, James W. Clark, Tom A. Williams, Philip C. J. Donoghue, and Davide Pisani, published their results in Nature: Ecology and Evolution last week in a paper titled "Integrated Genomic and Fossil Evidence Illuminates Life's Early Evolution and Eukaryote Origin."  And one of the points the team makes is that once the Earth's surface had cooled sufficiently that water was able to exist in liquid form, life appeared in a relative flash -- while it was still being clobbered every other day by meteorites.

The authors write:

Establishing a unified timescale for the early evolution of Earth and life is challenging and mired in controversy because of the paucity of fossil evidence, the difficulty of interpreting it and dispute over the deepest branching relationships in the tree of life.  Surprisingly, it remains perhaps the only episode in the history of life where literal interpretations of the fossil record hold sway, revised with every new discovery and reinterpretation.  We derive a timescale of life, combining a reappraisal of the fossil material with new molecular clock analyses.  We find the last universal common ancestor of cellular life to have predated the end of late heavy bombardment (>3.9 billion years ago (Ga)).

Besides being of obvious interest to evolutionary geneticists, this should get astronomers' blood pumping; it implies that life originated on Earth when the conditions were still nothing short of hostile, with the corollary that once a planet has conditions that allow liquid water, life probably follows soon thereafter.

The implication being that it's likely that every planet with water that sits in its star's habitable zone has some form of life.

So understandably enough, I think this is way cool.  It doesn't give us any information about the remaining variables we have little information about, especially fi, fc, and L.  There's no particular reason to believe that intelligence is a necessary outcome of evolution; it's tempting to think that the process always drives organisms to be bigger, better, stronger, and smarter, but that's not supported by the evidence.  After all, it bears remembering that by far the dominant life-forms on Earth right now, both in terms of biodiversity and overall numbers, are... insects.

It might be that intelligence sufficient to communicate over interstellar distances is a very uncommon occurrence, which leads to the most likely scenario (in my opinion) being plentiful planets with huge diversity of life, but few that have anything like us.

Still, the galaxy is a big place, with billions of stars, so even if it's unlikely, intelligent life probably exists somewhere.  Which segues into tomorrow's post, which is about the Fermi Paradox.  When told about the Drake Equation, physicist Enrico Fermi famously shrugged his shoulders and said, "Then where is everybody?"

Tomorrow we'll look at a few possible answers -- some of which are considerably more cheerful than others.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from one of my favorite thinkers -- Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke has made several documentaries, including Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and After the Warming -- the last-mentioned an absolutely prescient investigation into climate change that came out in 1991 and predicted damn near everything that would happen, climate-wise, in the twenty-seven years since then.

I'm going to go back to Burke's first really popular book, the one that was the genesis of the TV series of the same name -- Connections.  In this book, he looks at how one invention, one happenstance occurrence, one accidental discovery, leads to another, and finally results in something earthshattering.  (One of my favorites is how the technology of hand-weaving led to the invention of the computer.)  It's simply great fun to watch how Burke's mind works -- each of his little filigrees is only a few pages long, but you'll learn some fascinating ins and outs of history as he takes you on these journeys.  It's an absolutely delightful read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Going to the source

One of the hardest things for skeptics to fight is the tendency by some people to swallow any damnfool thing they happen to see online.

I had credited this tendency to gullibility.  If you see a catchy meme implying that if you drink a liter of vinegar a day, your arthritis will be cured ("Doctors hate this!  Get well with this ONE WEIRD TRICK!"), and think it sounds plausible, it's just because you don't have the background in science (or logic) to sift fact from fiction.

It turns out, the truth is apparently more complex than this.

According to a trio of psychologists working at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the problem isn't that silly ideas sound plausible to some people; it's that their mindset causes them to weight all information sources equally -- that one guy's blog is just as reliable as a scientific paper written by experts in the field.

(And yes, I'm fully aware of the irony of One Guy writing that in his blog.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Karen Thibaut, Belmans in labo, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The paper, "Using Power as a Negative Cue: How Conspiracy Mentality Affects Epistemic Trust in Sources of Historical Knowledge," was written by Roland Imhoff, Pia Lamberty, and Olivier Klein, and appeared in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin a couple of months ago.  The authors write:

Classical theories of attitude change point to the positive effect of source expertise on perceived source credibility persuasion, but there is an ongoing societal debate on the increase in anti-elitist sentiments and conspiracy theories regarding the allegedly untrustworthy power elite.  In one correlational and three experimental studies, we tested the novel idea that people who endorse a conspiratorial mind-set (conspiracy mentality) indeed exhibit markedly different reactions to cues of epistemic authoritativeness than those who do not: Whereas the perceived credibility of powerful sources decreased with the recipients’ conspiracy mentality, that of powerless sources increased independent of and incremental to other biases, such as the need to see the ingroup in particularly positive light.  The discussion raises the question whether a certain extent of source-based bias is necessary for the social fabric of a highly complex society.

So people with a "conspiracy mentality" fall for conspiracies not because they're ignorant or gullible, but because their innate distrust of authority figures causes them to trust everyone equally -- they often frame it as being "open-minded" or "unbiased" -- regardless of what the credentials, background, expertise, or (even) sanity of the source.

In an interview in PsyPost, study co-author Roland Imhoff explained the angle they took on this perplexing social issue:

The very idea for the study was born in a joint discussion with my co-author Olivier Klein at a conference of social psychological representations of history.  We were listening to talks about all kinds of construals, biases and narratives about what happened in the ancient or not so ancient past.   Having the public debate about ‘alternative facts’ from after Trump’s inauguration still in the back of our minds, we wondered: how do we even know what we know, how do we know who to trust when it comes to events we all have not experienced in first person? 

While previous research had insisted that this is predominantly a question of trusting ingroup sources (i.e., my government, my national education institutions), we had a lingering suspicion that people who endorse conspiracy theories might have a different system of epistemic trust: not trusting those who are in power (and allegedly corrupt).

Which points out a problem I'd always found baffling -- why, to many people, is "being an intellectual elite" a bad thing?  It was one of the (many) epithets I heard hurled at Barack Obama -- that being Harvard-educated, he couldn't possibly care about, or even be aware, of the problems of ordinary middle-class America.  Conversely, this card was played the other way by George W. Bush.  He was a "regular guy," the type of fellow you could enjoy having a beer with on Saturday night and discussing the latest sports statistics.

And my thought was: don't you want our leaders to be smarter than you are?  I mean, seriously.  I know that I and the guys I have a beer with on Saturday night aren't qualified to run the country.  (And to my bar buddies, no disrespect intended.)  There's no way in hell I'm smart enough to be president.  One of the things I want in the people we elect to office is that they are smart -- smart enough to make good decisions based on actual factual knowledge.

That, apparently, is not the norm, which the election of Donald Trump -- clearly one of the least-qualified people ever to hold the highest office in the land -- illustrated with painful clarity.  But it wasn't only a flip of the middle finger at the Coastal Elites that got him there.  The study by Imhoff et al. suggests that it was because of a pervasive tendency to treat all sources of information as if they were equal.

"[T]he data consistently suggests [people with a conspiracy mentality] just ignore source characteristics," Imhoff said.  "To them a web blog is as trustworthy as an Oxford scholar.  As we have formulated, they have terminated the social contract of epistemic trust, that we should believe official sources more than unofficial ones."

I blame part of this on people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and (of course) Alex Jones, who have gone out of their way for years to convince everyone that the powers-that-be are lying to you about everything.  Now, the powers-that-be do lie sometimes.  Also, being an Oxford scholar is no guarantee against being wrong.  But if you cherry-pick your examples, and then act as if those instances of error or dishonesty are not only universal, but are deliberate attempts to hoodwink the public for nefarious purposes -- you've set up a vicious cycle where the more facts and evidence you throw at people, the less they trust you.

As I've pointed out before: if you can teach people to disbelieve the hard data, it's Game Over.  After that, you can convince them of anything.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from one of my favorite thinkers -- Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke has made several documentaries, including Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and After the Warming -- the last-mentioned an absolutely prescient investigation into climate change that came out in 1991 and predicted damn near everything that would happen, climate-wise, in the twenty-seven years since then.

I'm going to go back to Burke's first really popular book, the one that was the genesis of the TV series of the same name -- Connections.  In this book, he looks at how one invention, one happenstance occurrence, one accidental discovery, leads to another, and finally results in something earthshattering.  (One of my favorites is how the technology of hand-weaving led to the invention of the computer.)  It's simply great fun to watch how Burke's mind works -- each of his little filigrees is only a few pages long, but you'll learn some fascinating ins and outs of history as he takes you on these journeys.  It's an absolutely delightful read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]