Chasing Goldilocks

Given my fascination with the possibilities of life in other star systems, I was thrilled to read two papers that came out last week detailing our efforts to narrow down where to look.

After all, that's the problem, isn't it?  There are billions of stars in our galaxy alone, and it's impossible to study all of them with any kind of thoroughness.  It seems pretty certain that most stars have some kind of planetary system, but trying to find Earth-like planets is another thing entirely.  Most of the exoplanets that have been identified are gas giants, and a good many of those are very close to their parent star (and so are extremely hot).  The reason these were identified first is not necessarily because they're more common; being more massive, and (for the close-in ones) having a stronger gravitational pull on their stars because of their proximity, makes them easier to see by both of the common methods used -- occlusion (seeing them pass in front of their stars) and Doppler spectroscopy (massive planets cause a wobble in the position of their stars as they orbit).

But there's no reason to believe that Earth-sized planets are uncommon, and indeed, we're now finding that they're plentiful.  The trick, of course, is not only locating one that's the right size, but one in the "Goldilocks zone" -- the distance from the star that is neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.  (Since we're concentrating on "life as we know it, Jim," we're most interested in planets where water can be in liquid form during at least part of its orbit.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESO/L. Calçada, Artist’s impression of the exoplanet Tau Bootis b, CC BY 4.0]

The first paper, called "Habitable Zones and How to Predict Them," by a team led by Ramses M. Ramirez of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, takes a purely practical approach of not only estimating habitability based upon a planet's size and distance from its star, but looks at composition -- quantity of water, presence of carbonate and silicate minerals, percentage of the atmosphere that is carbon dioxide or methane (both greenhouse gases that considerably raise the heat-trapping ability of the air), and the presence of tectonic activity.  The authors conclude with a cautionary note, however, about not concluding too much based upon partial evidence:

[W]e should be careful about using our Earth to extrapolate about life on other planets, particularly those around other stars.  The future of habitability studies will require first principles approaches where the temporal, spatial, geological, astronomical, atmospheric, and biological aspects of a planet’s evolution are dynamically coupled.  This, together with improved observations, is the key to making more informed assessments.  In turn, only through better observations can we improve such theoretical models.

The second paper, published last week in Astrophysical Journal Letters, describes a study by a team of astronomers from Cornell University, Lehigh University, and Vanderbilt University, in which TESS -- the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite -- will examine 400,000 stars considered good candidates for hosting planets in the habitable zone.

"Life could exist on all sorts of worlds, but the kind we know can support life is our own, so it makes sense to first look for Earth-like planets," said Cornell astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, who was the study's lead author.  "This catalog is important for TESS because anyone working with the data wants to know around which stars we can find the closest Earth-analogs."

Even the scientists who study this stuff on a daily basis recognize what a leap forward this is.  TESS has already identified over 1,800 stars that have planets up to 1.4 times the mass of the Earth -- considered an upper limit for habitability -- and 408 for which TESS could recognize a planet as small as, or a little smaller than, the Earth from one transit alone.

"I have 408 new favorite stars," Kaltenegger said.  "It is amazing that I don't have to pick just one; I now get to search hundreds of stars."

Unlike the old look-everywhere-and-hope-for-the-best approach, this study starts out by examining the most likely candidates, making the hopes for positive results much stronger.  "We don't know how many planets TESS will find around the hundreds of stars in our catalog or whether they will be habitable," Kaltenegger said, "but the odds are in our favor.  Some studies indicate that there are many rocky planets in the habitable zone of cool stars, like the ones in our catalog.  We're excited to see what worlds we'll find."

So am I.  It's long been my dearest hope to have unequivocal proof of extraterrestrial life in my lifetime.  (Intelligent life would be even better, but I'm trying to keep a modest goal, here.)  The idea that we are now devoting significant time and effort into locating good candidates for hosting life is tremendously exciting.  While it's still not likely that we'll find neighbors to talk to, at least knowing they're out there is cool enough for now.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation combines science with biography and high drama.  It's the story of the discovery of oxygen, through the work of the sometimes friends, sometimes bitter rivals Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier.   A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen is a fascinating read, both for the science and for the very different personalities of the two men involved.  Priestley was determined, serious, and a bit of a recluse; Lavoisier a pampered nobleman who was as often making the rounds of the social upper-crust in 18th century Paris as he was in his laboratory.  But despite their differences, their contributions were both essential -- and each of them ended up running afoul of the conventional powers-that-be, with tragic results.

The story of how their combined efforts led to a complete overturning of our understanding of that most ubiquitous of substances -- air -- will keep you engaged until the very last page.

[Note:  If you purchase this book by clicking on the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Ghost galaxies

I love a mystery.

I think part of it is that a truly unsolved question is a blow to our complacent attitude that we know all we need to know about the universe.  It's all too easy to walk around thinking we understand everything around us, to be fooled into the misapprehension that the cosmos is simple and obvious.

Anyone with a science background already has a significant dent in this notion, but it runs far deeper than that.  I think the hardest punch to my own certainty came when I started looking into the concepts of dark matter and dark energy, something like thirty years ago.  The presence of dark matter was first discovered back in the 1970s by Vera Rubin, Kent Ford and Ken Freeman, when they found that the rotational speed of every galaxy they looked at was impossible given the amount of visible matter present.  The discovery of dark energy came from a different source -- data from telescopes studying the cosmic microwave background radiation found that the universe was expanding at a far greater rate than it "should" have been given the measured mass/energy we knew about.  As peculiar as it sounds, the expansion could be explained if there was an invisible sort of energy -- later christened "dark energy" -- that exerted a repulsive force.

What I haven't told you is that by the most recent measurements, dark energy comprises 68% of the total mass/energy density in the observable universe, and dark matter 27%.  If you're wondering if that means what you think it means, you're right.

Ordinary ("baryonic") matter only makes up 5% of the mass and energy of the universe.

Worse still, that 95% has thus far been undetectable except by indirect measurements -- a bit like seeing the footprint of the bear but not the bear itself.  Every attempt to observe either dark matter or dark energy directly has been an abject failure.  So although there is speculation about the nature of this ubiquitous stuff, at present what we know for certain about it is exactly zero, other than the fact that it exists.

Of course, some people even doubt the latter bit, and remind us of the "aether" -- a substance proposed in the 19th century to explain peculiarities about the propagation of light.  Like dark matter and dark energy, the aether resisted all attempts to elucidate its nature.  We now know why that is -- it doesn't exist.  It took a clever experiment by Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley to show that its existence was impossible, and no less than Albert Einstein to explain how light could propagate in the absence of a medium.  I've heard more than one scientist compare dark matter and dark energy to the aether -- and suggest that we're still waiting for this century's Einstein to blow us all away with an elegant explanation of the data we have, with no need for mysterious undetectable substances permeating the universe.

Messier 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

But at the moment, we're still stuck with them, and the bizarre observations keep rolling in to further deepen the mystery.  Just last week, a study was published in Astrophysical Journal Letters about some highly peculiar galaxies that seem to be entirely devoid of dark matter.  Called ultradiffuse galaxies, they are as large as an ordinary galaxy, but have such a low matter density that you can see right through them.  Measurements of rotational rates and matter distributions support the conjecture that they have the characteristics they do because -- for some unknown reason -- they have almost no dark matter at all.

"I spent an hour just staring at the Hubble image," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University, who was part of the study that discovered ultradiffuse galaxies.  "It's so rare, particularly these days after so many years of Hubble, that you get an image of something and you say, 'I've never seen that before.'  This thing is astonishing: a gigantic blob that you can look through.  It's so sparse that you see all of the galaxies behind it."

"We hope to next find out how common these galaxies are and whether they exist in other areas of the universe," said the paper's lead author Shany Danieli, also of Yale.  "We want to find more evidence that will help us understand how the properties of these galaxies work with our current theories.  Our hope is that this will take us one step further in understanding one of the biggest mysteries in our universe — the nature of dark matter."

Which is certainly a laudable goal.  The idea that the lion's share of the stuff of the universe has up till now resisted every attempt to learn about its characteristics is frustrating, to say the least.  But it does fascinate me, despite the frustration.  It illustrates to me how much more we have to learn about the universe we live in, and that when it comes to our understanding of science, we're still at the starting line.  Perhaps Socrates put it best when he said, "The more I know, the more I realize how little I know."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation combines science with biography and high drama.  It's the story of the discovery of oxygen, through the work of the sometimes friends, sometimes bitter rivals Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier.   A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen is a fascinating read, both for the science and for the very different personalities of the two men involved.  Priestley was determined, serious, and a bit of a recluse; Lavoisier a pampered nobleman who was as often making the rounds of the social upper-crust in 18th century Paris as he was in his laboratory.  But despite their differences, their contributions were both essential -- and each of them ended up running afoul of the conventional powers-that-be, with tragic results.

The story of how their combined efforts led to a complete overturning of our understanding of that most ubiquitous of substances -- air -- will keep you engaged until the very last page.

[Note:  If you purchase this book by clicking on the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

The outrage machine

I had a puzzling, and frustrating, exchange on social media a couple of days ago.

An acquaintance of mine posted the following, without comment:

I found this annoying enough that I responded something to the effect that I teach in a public school, where I have (1) seen students saying grace before eating lunch and no one has batted an eyelash, (2) we recite the Pledge of Allegiance every single day, as do all public school students in the entire United States, and (3) before December break, I hear both students and staff wishing each other "Merry Christmas."

Now me, if I made a statement and a person who should know demonstrated conclusively I was wrong, I would admit it and retreat in disarray.  Predictably, that's not what happened here.  She responded -- and this is a direct quote -- "I was not saying this was necessarily true, it just feels that like the majority of our schools have gotten so far away from God and Country that one can feel persecuted for the above things."

So let me get this straight.  It's not true, but you feel like it's true, and you're feeling persecuted for being a patriotic Christian despite the fact that  75% of Americans identify as Christian and it's still damn near a prerequisite for winning an election in the United States.

What this implies is that your feelings about something are more important than whether it's actually true.  Which I find more than a little troubling.  Even more troubling is the way the media have capitalized on this tendency, avoiding facts wherever possible in favor of whipping people into a frenzy with emotional appeals.  Lately, it seems like the main church people belong to in the United States is the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage.

The part of this I find the most baffling is how people seem to want to feel outraged.  I mean, think about it.  Suppose I was fearful that there was a rabies outbreak in my neighborhood.  Maybe there was even the allegation that someone had deliberately introduced rabies into wild animals nearby.  Then, it turns out that it's not true -- there are no cases of rabies, and the rumors of a deliberately-created epidemic are false, and everything is safe.  The whole thing was a hoax.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't feel more fearful, I'd feel relieved.  I'd probably be angry at the person who started the hoax, but what it wouldn't do is make me double down on how dangerous everything was and how everyone needed to be scared of the horrifying rabies epidemic.

Here, though, my assurance that what this person feared -- that public schools were actively suppressing patriotism and Christianity -- was false had exactly the opposite effect.  "Okay, it's not true," she seemed to be saying, "but we still need to act like it is!"  And the people who are perpetuating the falsehoods aren't looked upon as liars or hoaxers, they're seen as heroic mavericks who are rallying the troops for a desperate last stand defending all that's sacred.

Which I don't understand at all.  I, personally, don't like liars, and I hate feeling outraged.  I much prefer it when my fellow humans turn out to be more kind and caring and tolerant and understanding than I thought they were.  It's hard for me to understand someone who apparently feels the opposite.

All of which highlights the fact that I don't really understand people at all.  Especially, I don't get the appeal of tribalism, but it's clearly a powerful force -- and relies as much on teaming up against a common enemy (even a perceived one) than it does on finding commonalities within the group.  So all in all, my online exchange was a fruitless exercise, as these things so often are -- but it does explain a lot about the current state of things in the United States.

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

I've been a bit of a geology buff since I was a kid.  My dad was a skilled lapidary artist, and made beautiful jewelry from agates, jaspers, and turquoise, so every summer he and I would go on a two-week trip to southern Arizona to find cool rocks.  It was truly the high point of my year, and ever since I have always given rock outcroppings and road cuts more than just the typical passing glance.

So I absolutely loved John McPhee's four-part look at the geology of the United States -- Basin and Range, Rising From the Plains, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.  Told in his signature lucid style, McPhee doesn't just geek out over the science, but gets to know the people involved -- the scientists, the researchers, the miners, the oil-well drillers -- who are vitally interested in how North America was put together.  In the process, you're taken on a cross-country trip to learn about what's underneath the surface of our country.  And if, like me, you're curious about rocks, it will keep you reading until the last page.

Note: the link below is to the first in the series, Basin and Range.  If you want to purchase it, click on the link, and part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia.  And if you like it, you'll no doubt easily find the others!

Elaborate nonsense

As harsh as I sometimes am about woo-woo beliefs, I understand how fear and lack of knowledge can induce you to accept counterfactual nonsense.  I also get how wishful thinking could draw you in to a set of beliefs, if they line up with the way you would like the universe to work, even though, as my grandma used to say, "Wishin' don't make it so."

This combination of desire for the world to be other than it is, and fear of what the world actually is, probably drives most superstition.  All, as I said, understandable, given human nature.

But what continually baffles me is how byzantine some of those beliefs become.  I can accept that it might be an attractive model for some people that the position of the stars and planets somehow guides your life; but I start really wondering once you start coming up with stuff like the following (from Susan Miller's astrology site, on a page devoted to predictions for this month for my astrological sign, Scorpio):

Sometimes, in about 20 percent of the cases, an eclipse will deliver news a month to the day later plus or minus five days.  More rarely, an eclipse will introduce news one month to the day before it occurs, but only in about 5 percent of the cases.  In most cases, 75 percent of the time, an eclipse will deliver some sort of news that things are about to change almost instantly.

This eclipse will be in Scorpio, 11 degrees, and will come conjunct Saturn.  This alone says that the decision you make now will be a big one, and that you will commit all your energy to this decision.  You will be in a serious mode, and it appears a promise you make now will last a very long time, possibly forever.  Mars and Pluto are your two ruling planets (Scorpio is one of the few signs that have two rulers), and remarkably both will be supportive by tight mathematical angles to this eclipse.  This tells me that the final outcome of this eclipse will be very positive.  Every eclipse has two acts, so see how events unfold in coming weeks.

Yes, it's bullshit; but it's really elaborate bullshit.  You might criticize these people for pushing fiction as reality, but you have to admit that they spend a lot of time crafting their fiction.

I ran across an unusually good example of this a while back on the Skeptic subreddit, which is a wonderful place to go for articles debunking pseudoscience.  The site I found posted there is called "TCM - the 24-hour Organ Qi Cycle," which immediately should raise red flags -- "TCM" is traditional Chinese medicine, much of which has been double-blind tested and found to be worthless; and "qi" is a pattern for "energy flow" through the body that basically is non-existent, making "qi" only useful as an easy way of getting rid of the "Q" tile in a game of Scrabble.

What this site purports to do is to get you to "balance your body" using information about when during the day you feel most ill-at-ease.  This then tells you what organ in your body is "out of balance" and which of the "elements" you should pay attention to.  And no, I'm not talking about anything off the periodic table; we're back to a medieval "Earth," "Fire," "Water," "Metal," "Wood," and "Ministerial Fire" model, although the last-mentioned sounds like what they used back in the Dark Ages to burn people at the stake for heresy.

So, naturally, I had to check out what my own out-of-balance part was.  I'm frequently awake, and restless, at 3 AM - 5 AM, so I rolled the cursor over the "color wheel" and found that this means my lungs are out of balance.  "The emotions connected to the lungs are Grief and Sadness," I was told, which makes sense for the time of day because if I'm awake then it means I won't be able to get back to sleep before my alarm goes off.  It goes on to ask me some questions, to wit: "Have you buried your grief?  Are you sad?  Are you always sighing?  It is most healthy to express your emotions as you feel them.  You may need to express your emotions by crying, writing and/or talking to a friend."

Well, thanks for caring, and everything, but I'm actually doing okay, and don't sigh all that much, except at faculty meetings.

Oh, but I am told that if I can get my lungs in balance, I'll have "lustrous skin."  And who could resist that?

On it goes.  If your small intestine is out of balance, you should eat only "vital foods chock full of enzymes."  If you have diarrhea, you need to "strengthen your spleen qi."  If your "kidneys are deficient," you won't have much in the way of sex drive, but you can bring them back into balance by eating black sesame seeds, celery, duck, grapes, kidney beans, lamb, millet, oysters, plums, sweet potatoes, raspberries, salt, seaweed, strawberries, string beans, tangerines, walnuts, and yams.

The entire time I was looking at this site, I kept shaking my head and saying, "How do you know any of this?"  The stuff on this website seems to fall into two categories -- blatantly obvious (e.g. "crying if you're sad helps you to feel better") and bizarrely abstruse (e.g. "engaging in loving sex keeps your pericardium healthy").

I suppose the elaborateness is understandable from one angle; if you want people to believe what you're saying, you'll probably have better success if you make your sales pitch sound fancy.   Convoluted details convince people, especially people who don't know much in the way of science and logic.  So the intricacy of some pseudoscientific models is explainable from the standpoint that the purveyors of this kind of foolishness will sound like scientists, and therefore be persuasive, only if they couch their message in terms that make it appear they've tapped into a realm of knowledge unavailable to the rest of us slobs.

Or, as my dad used to put it: "If you can't wow 'em with your brilliance, baffle 'em with your bullshit."

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

I've been a bit of a geology buff since I was a kid.  My dad was a skilled lapidary artist, and made beautiful jewelry from agates, jaspers, and turquoise, so every summer he and I would go on a two-week trip to southern Arizona to find cool rocks.  It was truly the high point of my year, and ever since I have always given rock outcroppings and road cuts more than just the typical passing glance.

So I absolutely loved John McPhee's four-part look at the geology of the United States -- Basin and Range, Rising From the Plains, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.  Told in his signature lucid style, McPhee doesn't just geek out over the science, but gets to know the people involved -- the scientists, the researchers, the miners, the oil-well drillers -- who are vitally interested in how North America was put together.  In the process, you're taken on a cross-country trip to learn about what's underneath the surface of our country.  And if, like me, you're curious about rocks, it will keep you reading until the last page.

Note: the link below is to the first in the series, Basin and Range.  If you want to purchase it, click on the link, and part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia.  And if you like it, you'll no doubt easily find the others!

Clone war

The idea of human clones has been a staple of science fiction for decades.  Whenever the topic comes up, the question is always whether it's even theoretically possible to clone a person.

The answer seems to be "yes, but."  Embryonic cloning -- splitting a blastula (an early stage of embryonic development) into pieces, and allowing the pieces to regrow into a full embryo -- is relatively straightforward.  There's no scientific reason that someone couldn't take a human blastula, cut it into twenty pieces, and when they've regrown sufficiently implant them in the uteruses of twenty different surrogate women -- and nine months later, if all goes well, you'd have identical twenty-tuplets, all born to different women.

Much trickier is adult-tissue cloning, which is the more common one to see in science fiction; taking a sample of tissue from an adult, and somehow transforming it into a zygote, and ultimately, an embryo. The reasons why this is hard are not fully understood, but seem to have something to do with the switching on and off of developmental genes, something that has to happen with great precision in order to generate a fully functional, anatomically normal child.  So to make this work, you have to be able to reset all those switches back to their (so to speak) factory specifications -- return them to where they were when the embryo was still an undifferentiated ball of cells.

For reasons still not known, this appears to be more easily doable in some organisms than others.  The first adult-tissue clone was the famous Dolly the Sheep, who was born back in 1996.  Dolly died at age six -- about half the age of a normal sheep -- which scientists initially thought was because of accelerated aging (that her cells retained a "memory" of the age of the sheep from which they were taken).  Later experiments called this into question, and the jury's still out on whether clones would age faster, and presumably, die younger.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons (Photograph courtesy of Emma Whitelaw, University of Sydney, Australia.), Cloned mice with different DNA methylation, CC BY 2.5]

So far, the list of animals that have been adult-tissue cloned is a curious one.  You can take a look at the complete list as of the time of this writing, but it includes a bunch of not-very-closely-related species -- frogs, rabbits, rats, monkeys (two species, in fact), mules, coyotes, both cats and dogs, and camels.

Note that humans aren't on the list.

Which makes it doubly odd that a rapper who goes by the moniker "Lil Buu" claims not only to be a clone, but a "second-generation clone," whatever that means.  On a television interview, Lil Buu said:

I was cloned by clonaid in Canada, my model number is 0112568…  A lot of the memories from Clonaid were erased so that way the new gen can move forward with whatever new programming was made….  They can remove a fragment of bone that’s located here [points to forehead, in between his eyes], and in this fragment of bone it stores all of your memories and consciousness, and with that, they can make a sufficient replica of yourself, a reproductive version of you including your memories, and you can be selective as to which ones you keep and don’t keep.  This process has been around for quite some time.

Immediately I read about Clonaid, that made my eyebrows rise even further.   I don't know if that name is familiar to you, but it certainly was to me; this is the group that back in 2002 claimed they'd overseen the production of the first human clone (a girl nicknamed "Eve"), but then refused to provide scientists with any proof, or in fact any evidence at all.  Then it turned out that the spokesperson for Clonaid who was said to be the chief scientist in charge of the project, Brigitte Boisselier, is a high-ranking Raëlian -- a French-based religion, founded by ex-race-car-driver turned prophet Claude Maurice Marcel Vorilhon, that believes humans were created by a race of extraterrestrials called Elohim, and to gain enlightenment we need to run around having lots of sex with any willing individuals, and wear no clothes whenever possible.

I'm not making any of this up.

Oh, and they have a temple in Japan called "Korindo," are working on establishing an "Embassy for Extraterrestrials," and their symbol is a swastika superimposed on a Star of David.

For the record, I didn't make that up, either.

So I'm perhaps to be forgiven for being dubious about Lil Buu (or model #0112568, as the case may be) and his claim to be a cloned from a memory-containing bone fragment, who was produced by a company whose leaders believe we're actually the creation of super-intelligent aliens, which was dreamed up by a guy whose primary other claim to fame is knowing a lot about race cars.

In fact, I'm dubious in general about the potential for human cloning.  It raises some serious ethical issues, and (after all) we haven't even resolved the ethical issues surrounding stem cell research and cloning non-human animals, so it's premature to leap headlong into this.

It also brings up the question about why anyone would want to clone themselves.  It's not like the clone would have your memories (whatever Lil Buu says to the contrary); our personalities are shaped not only by our genes but by our environment, so while you'd expect some similarities, they would be no more alike than ordinary identical twins -- who are, after all, natural clones themselves.

Plus, I just think it'd be creepy for there to be another me walking around, one who would be (if he was created as an embryo today) 59 years younger than I am by the time he's born.  I'm perfectly happy being a one-off.  My general feeling is that one of me is plenty.

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

I've been a bit of a geology buff since I was a kid.  My dad was a skilled lapidary artist, and made beautiful jewelry from agates, jaspers, and turquoise, so every summer he and I would go on a two-week trip to southern Arizona to find cool rocks.  It was truly the high point of my year, and ever since I have always given rock outcroppings and road cuts more than just the typical passing glance.

So I absolutely loved John McPhee's four-part look at the geology of the United States -- Basin and Range, Rising From the Plains, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.  Told in his signature lucid style, McPhee doesn't just geek out over the science, but gets to know the people involved -- the scientists, the researchers, the miners, the oil-well drillers -- who are vitally interested in how North America was put together.  In the process, you're taken on a cross-country trip to learn about what's underneath the surface of our country.  And if, like me, you're curious about rocks, it will keep you reading until the last page.

Note: the link below is to the first in the series, Basin and Range.  If you want to purchase it, click on the link, and part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia.  And if you like it, you'll no doubt easily find the others!

The cosmic zoo

In yesterday's post, we looked at a gentleman who decided that founding his own church was the best approach to finding out if we're all in a giant computer simulation, and (if so) getting ourselves out of it.  Today, we hear about some people who think that the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that we're in an intergalactic petting zoo.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia may recall that last year, I wrote a post on the Fermi Paradox, which can be summarized as the following question: if life is common in the universe, where is everyone?  The upshot of it is that the likeliest answers are summarized as the "Three Fs":

1. We're first.  (We're the first star system in our near vicinity to develop a technological society.)
2. We're fortunate.  (There are various hurdles to the evolution of intelligent life, and we're one of the few that have gotten past all of them.)
3. We're fucked.  (All technological societies ultimately destroy themselves one way or the other, and we just haven't gotten there yet.)

In 1973, astronomer John Ball of MIT proposed a fourth solution, which unfortunately admits of no easy moniker starting with "F" -- that we haven't been contacted by an ultra-advanced civilization because they're protecting us for some reason.

This was nicknamed the "Cosmic Zoo Hypothesis," and not much was done with it because it was pretty clearly an untestable claim, thus falling into what physicist Wolfgang Pauli labeled as "not even wrong."  But now, a group of astronomers have met at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris, attending a conference called METI -- Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- and are considering the implications of Ball's idea, and how we might figure out if it's the truth.

"Perhaps extraterrestrials are watching humans on Earth, much like we watch animals in a zoo," said Douglas Vakoch, president of METI.  "How can we get the galactic zookeepers to reveal themselves?...  If we went to a zoo and suddenly a zebra turned toward us, looked us in the eye, and started pounding out a series of prime numbers with its hoof, that would establish a radically different relationship between us and the zebra, and we would feel compelled to respond."

At least after we checked to make sure that no one slipped some acid into our morning coffee.

Vakoch, however, is completely serious.  "We can do the same with extraterrestrials by transmitting powerful, intentional, information-rich radio signals to nearby stars."

What this implies is that the super-intelligent aliens are benevolently watching over us and letting us evolve in our own way, reminiscent of the aliens in 2001: A Space Odyssey and, more prosaically, the Prime Directive in Star Trek, which was strictly enforced except for when Captain Kirk got horny and had a quick shag with any green-skinned alien women who happened to be nearby.  "It seems likely that extraterrestrials are imposing a ‘galactic quarantine’ because they realize it would be culturally disruptive for us to learn about them," said Jean-Pierre Rospars, the honorary research director at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique.  "Cognitive evolution on Earth shows random features while also following predictable paths... we can expect the repeated, independent emergence of intelligent species in the universe, and we should expect to see more or less similar forms of intelligence everywhere, under favorable conditions."

Which, if true, is pretty cool.  I love the idea that there are kindly aliens out there who have our best interests in mind, even if I would appear to them to be pretty primitive.  "There’s no reason to think that humans have reached the highest cognitive level possible," Rospars added, which I also find encouraging.  If Donald Trump represents the pinnacle of humanity, IQ-wise, I think I'm ready to give up now.

Of course, there's no guarantee that if there are benevolent alien overlords, they have anything biologically in common with Homo sapiens, or, indeed, any terrestrial life form.  "The environment on an exoplanet will impose its own rules," said Roland Lehoucq, an astrophysicist who works at the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA).  "There is no trend in biological evolution: the huge range of various morphologies observed on Earth renders any exobiological speculation improbable, at least for macroscopic ‘complex’ life."

Which also makes it unlikely that Captain Kirk will be successful in his hookup attempts.  The chance that any alien he runs into will have orifices even close to aligned with what he's looking for is nearly zero.  And even less likely is the possibility of hybridization, so Spock, Deanna Troi, and B'Elanna Torres are kind of out of the question.

In any case, it's certainly a more cheerful solution to the Fermi Paradox than the Three Fs, especially the third one.  And given how much bad news we've been bombarded with lately, I'll take it.  So if our cosmic zookeepers are readers of Skeptophilia, allow me to say: Thanks.  I appreciate your concern.  But if you could beam up Trump, and while you're at it Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham, I know a lot of Americans who would be willing to overlook the fact that it breaks the Intergalactic Non-Interference Treaty.

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

I've been a bit of a geology buff since I was a kid.  My dad was a skilled lapidary artist, and made beautiful jewelry from agates, jaspers, and turquoise, so every summer he and I would go on a two-week trip to southern Arizona to find cool rocks.  It was truly the high point of my year, and ever since I have always given rock outcroppings and road cuts more than just the typical passing glance.

So I absolutely loved John McPhee's four-part look at the geology of the United States -- Basin and Range, Rising From the Plains, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.  Told in his signature lucid style, McPhee doesn't just geek out over the science, but gets to know the people involved -- the scientists, the researchers, the miners, the oil-well drillers -- who are vitally interested in how North America was put together.  In the process, you're taken on a cross-country trip to learn about what's underneath the surface of our country.  And if, like me, you're curious about rocks, it will keep you reading until the last page.

Note: the link below is to the first in the series, Basin and Range.  If you want to purchase it, click on the link, and part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia.  And if you like it, you'll no doubt easily find the others!

Escaping the simulation

It's undeniable that things have been a little weird lately.

To cite one example, just look at the revelations -- if I can use that word -- from the report on the Mueller investigation this past weekend.  At the time of this writing, outside of Mueller and his team, no one has seen the actual report except for Attorney General William Barr.  But this hasn't stopped everyone from having an opinion about what it says.  Democrats are livid because they're assuming Barr's statement -- that the report exonerates Trump from collusion and obstruction of justice -- accurately reflects the report itself.  Republicans are crowing for the same reason.  And Trump, who has been squawking "No collusion!  No collusion!" like some kind of demented, brain-damaged parrot for months, immediately responded via (of course) Twitter that he was now completely off the hook.

I'm feeling dazed enough by the whole thing that I'm planning on avoiding the news for a couple of weeks.  At this point, my desire to stay well-informed is at odds with my desire to stay sane.

But it's the surreal aspect that I'm thinking about.  As a friend of mine put it, "It's like we've been living in a computer simulation being run by aliens.  And the aliens have gotten bored with their experiments, and now they're just fucking with us to see how we'll react."

Apparently he's not the only one thinking this way.  Because according to a guy who spoke at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas, we're not only in a simulation, but he's founding a church dedicated to getting us out of the matrix.

His name is George Hotz, and he's a 29-year-old hacker and founder of the self-driving car startup company Comma.ai.  The talk was entitled "Jailbreaking the Simulation," and here's a bit of it to give you the flavor of his claim:

We are in a simulation.  Has it occurred to you that means God is real?  By drawing parallels to worlds we have created, we ask, from inside our simulator, what actions do we have available?  Can we get out?  Meet God?  Kill him?

Well, that escalated quickly.

There’s no evidence this is not true.  It’s easy to imagine things that are so much smarter than you and they could build a cage you wouldn’t even recognize.

There's no evidence that the universe is not being controlled by a Giant Green Bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy, either.  Because that's not how evidence works.  And I'm a fiction writer, so trust me that I can easily imagine things that would blow your mind, or at least make you wonder if I was dropped on my head as an infant.  But my ability to imagine them is no indicator that any of them are real, which is why all of my books have the word "fiction" on the spine.

I’m thinking about starting a church. There are a lot of structural problems with companies — there’s no real way to win...  With companies, you only really lose.  I think churches might be much more aligned toward these goals, and the goal of the church would be realigning society’s efforts toward getting out [of the simulation].

I don't know about you, but I'm not getting the chain of reasoning, here.  "Companies aren't as lucrative as churches, so we need a church to figure out how to escape from the computer simulation we're trapped in" seems like a leap, logic-wise.

He finished up with a bit of a head-scratcher:

Do I actually believe it?  Some days yes.  Sometimes I don’t know how I feel about something until I say it out loud.

Which isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

So I'm of two minds about all this.  The idea of being in a computer simulation has some appeal, because then it would mean that the last two years has been the result of some super-intelligent beings creating bizarre scenarios for experimental purposes, or at least for their own amusement.  I don't know about you, but I'd be much more comfortable in a universe where Donald Trump was fictional, although I must say that even my own imagination is insufficient to dream up a scenario where a grandstanding narcissistic reality-show host not only became president, but was treated by Christian evangelicals as the Second Coming of Christ despite being a walking encyclopedia of sins.

On the other hand, if we are in a simulation, it's a little alarming to consider the repercussions.  In The Matrix it didn't seem like it was all that great a choice for Neo to take the red pill, because the real reality kind of sucked.  You know, giant tentacled monsters trying to destroy your ship, multiple copies of Agent Smith gunning for you every where you go, and creepy albino twins zooming around destroying cars.  My opinion is that he might have been better off, all things considered, to wake up in his own bed and believe whatever he wanted to believe.

So offered the choice, I don't know what I'd do.  I guess it'd boil down to which was worse, carnivorous metallic squid trying to eat you for lunch, or having to put up with Donald Trump.  I guess I'll make that choice when and if it arises.

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

I've been a bit of a geology buff since I was a kid.  My dad was a skilled lapidary artist, and made beautiful jewelry from agates, jaspers, and turquoise, so every summer he and I would go on a two-week trip to southern Arizona to find cool rocks.  It was truly the high point of my year, and ever since I have always given rock outcroppings and road cuts more than just the typical passing glance.

So I absolutely loved John McPhee's four-part look at the geology of the United States -- Basin and Range, Rising From the Plains, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.  Told in his signature lucid style, McPhee doesn't just geek out over the science, but gets to know the people involved -- the scientists, the researchers, the miners, the oil-well drillers -- who are vitally interested in how North America was put together.  In the process, you're taken on a cross-country trip to learn about what's underneath the surface of our country.  And if, like me, you're curious about rocks, it will keep you reading until the last page.

Note: the link below is to the first in the series, Basin and Range.  If you want to purchase it, click on the link, and part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia.  And if you like it, you'll no doubt easily find the others!