The signature of the creator

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase" is justly revered by Trekkies, and also by people who simply like a good story.  The gist -- giving as little in the way of spoilers as I can manage, if you've not seen it -- is that there's a message implanted in our DNA and the DNA of alien species across the galaxy.  No one species has the entire thing, so to find out what it means requires getting tissue samples from all over the place, extracting the piece of the message, then somehow putting the entire thing together to decipher what it says.

A secret code dispersed through time and space, so to speak.

While the quasi-scientific explanation behind the whole thing was a little dubious for those of us who know something about genetics and evolution, it was a hell of a good idea for a story.  A mysterious, super-powerful someone left its thumbprint on life everywhere in the universe, and there the message has sat, waiting for us to become smart enough and technologically advanced enough to find it.

"The Chase" brings up a theological question I've debated before with religious-minded friends; how, starting from outside of the framework of belief, you could tell there was a God by what you see around you.  I often hear "natural beauty" and "love and selflessness" brought up, but (unfortunately) there seems to be enough ugliness, hatred, and selfishness to more than compensate for the good stuff.  Put simply, how would a universe with a divine presence look different from one without?  I've never been able to come up with a good answer to that.  To me, the God/no God versions of the universe look pretty much alike.

Which is a large part of why I'm an atheist.  I'm perfectly okay with revising that if evidence comes my way, but at the moment, I'm not seeing any particular cause for belief in any of the various deities humans have worshipped along the way.

What brings all this up is a paper released last week in arXiv called, "Searching for a Message in the Angular Power Spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background."  The CMB is a relatively uniformly-spread (or isotropic, as the scientists put it) radiation that is the remnant of the Big Bang.  In the 13.8-odd billion years since the universe started, the searing radiation of creation has become stretched along with the space that carries it until it has an average wavelength of two millimeters, putting it in the microwave region of the spectrum, and that radiation comes at us from everywhere in the sky.

What the author, Michael Hippke of the Sonnenberg Observatory in Germany, proposed was something that is reminiscent of the central idea of "The Chase."  If there was a creator -- be it a god, or a super-intelligent alien race, or whatever -- the obvious place to put a message is in the CMB.  The minor fluctuations ("anisotropies") in the CMB would be detectable by a technological society pretty much from any vantage point in the visible universe, and so hiding a pattern in the apparent chaos would be as much as having a signature from the creator.

So Hippke digitized the most detailed map we have of the CMB, and then estimated what part of the signal would have been lost or degraded in 13.8 billion years due to quantum noise and interference with the much closer and more powerful radiation sources in our own galaxy.  After some intense statistical analysis, Hippke determined that there should be at least a one-thousand-bit remnant of sense somewhere in there, so he set about to find it.

Nothing.

"I find no meaningful message in the actual bit-stream," Hippke wrote.  "We may conclude that there is no obvious message on the CMB sky.  Yet it remains unclear whether there is (was) a Creator, whether we live in a simulation, or whether the message is printed correctly in the previous section, but we fail to understand it."

Despite how I started this post, I have to admit to being a little disappointed.  It was a clever approach, and no one would be more excited than me if he'd actually found something.  I don't honestly like the idea that we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe -- or, more accurately (and optimistically) that the only meaning is the one we create within it.  But if there's one thing I've learned in my sixty years on Earth, it's that reality is under no particular obligation to order itself in such a way that it makes me comfortable.  

But still, if there had been a message there, how cool would that be?  Even if, as the Cardassian commander Gul Ocett said in "The Chase," "it might just be a recipe for biscuits."

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

I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

When the volcano blows

If you were wondering what the final act of the 2020 fever-dream theater might be, I have a possible contender.

Geologists have just discovered another supervolcano besides Yellowstone.

Supervolcanoes -- known in scientific circles as caldera eruptions -- are insanely powerful.  The famous 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, in Indonesia, was a caldera eruption, but even that was on the small end of things; it blasted 25 cubic kilometers of ash and rock fragments into the air, while the last major eruption of Yellowstone (650,000 years ago) released forty times that much, and covered most of what is now the central United States in a meter or two of ash.

And Toba, another Indonesian volcano, released almost three times more than that, 74,000 years ago -- and some anthropologists think the resulting climate impact nearly wiped out the up-and-coming human race, by some estimates reducing the entire population of humans to only about a thousand individuals.

By comparison, the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980 was pretty much a wet firecracker.

So anyhow, why this all comes up is because we thought we knew where most of the potentially huge calderas were located, and geologists have given a great effort to calming everyone down, saying we have a handle on things and will have plenty of warning if any of them show signs of an imminent eruption.

Turns out, we didn't even know one of them was there.

A cluster of six islands in the Aleutian chain -- Carlisle, Cleveland, Herbert, Kagamil, Chagulak, and Uliaga -- have long been known to be stratovolcanoes, conical, explosive volcanoes of the same type as Mount Vesuvius.  What scientists didn't know until now is that apparently, the magma reservoirs of these six islands are not separate blobs, but one enormous blob underlying the entire island chain.

Just like the one under Yellowstone.

Mount Cleveland [Image is in the Public Domain]

The findings, which will be formally presented at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Monday, are a little alarming.  According to the press release from Science Daily:

Researchers from a variety of institutions and disciplines have been studying Mount Cleveland, the most active volcano of the group, trying to understand the nature of the Islands of the Four Mountains.  They have gathered multiple pieces of evidence showing that the islands could belong to one interconnected caldera.

Unlike stratovolcanoes, which tend to tap small- to modestly-sized reservoirs of magma, a caldera is created by tapping a huge reservoir in the Earth's crust.  When the reservoir's pressure exceeds the strength of the crust, gigantic amounts of lava and ash are released in a catastrophic episode of eruption...

If the researchers' suspicions are correct, the newfound volcanic caldera would belong to the same category of volcanoes as the Yellowstone Caldera and other volcanoes that have had super-eruptions with severe global consequences.

So yeah.  That's just marvelous.  Okay, I know, the discovery doesn't mean it's going to erupt any time soon, although it bears mention that Mount Cleveland has erupted 22 times in the past 230 years, and eight of those eruptions were in the last eleven years.  So it would totally be on-brand for 2020 if the whole thing went kablooie.

Yes, I know, I'm not supposed to be superstitious or engage in magical thinking or anything.  Given how this year's gone, I think I deserve a little slack, here.  No one will be happier than me if January 1, 2021 comes and the Aleutian Islands still exist, but at present I'm not ruling anything out. 

There we have it -- a supervolcano that we didn't even realize existed.  Just another thing to put in your Box of Anxiety.  Honestly, at the moment I'm more concerned about what Donald "Cheeto Benito" Trump and his cronies could potentially do to the United States on the way out the door.  In my experience, assholes can do more damage than ash holes.

Even the super-sized ones.

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

One of the most compellingly weird objects in the universe is the black hole -- a stellar remnant so dense that it warps space into a closed surface.  Once the edge of that sphere -- the event horizon -- is passed, there's no getting out.  Even light can't escape, which is where they get their name.

Black holes have been a staple of science fiction for years, not only for their potential to destroy whatever comes near them, but because their effects on space-time result in a relativistic slowdown of time (depicted brilliantly in the movie Interstellar).  In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, The Black Hole Survival Guide, astrophysicist Janna Levin describes for us what it would be like to have a close encounter with one of these things -- using the latest knowledge from science to explain in layperson's terms the experience of an unfortunate astronaut who strayed too close.

It's a fascinating, and often mind-blowing, topic, handled deftly by Levin, where the science itself is so strange that it seems as if it must be fiction.  But no, these things are real, and common; there's a huge one at the center of our own galaxy, and an unknown number of them elsewhere in the Milky Way.  Levin's book will give you a good picture of one of the scariest naturally-occurring objects -- all from the safety of your own home.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Becoming human

I think one of the uniting characteristics of the topics that interest me is that they all have something to do with altering our perception of the commonplace reality around us.

This capacity for (in writer Kathryn Schulz's words) "seeing the world as it isn't" led me to writing fiction, but also to the weird and counterintuitive bits of quantum physics, the expansive vision of astronomy, and the fields studying that which no longer exists -- history, archaeology, paleontology.  It's this last one that brings this whole topic up, with a pair of discoveries revealed this week that leave me kind of awestruck.

The first, which came my way from my buddy Andrew Butters over at the wonderful blog Potato Chip Math, is about the discovery in South Africa of a two-million-year-old skull of Paranthropus robustus, a hominin considered a "cousin species" that coexisted with our direct ancestor species Homo erectus.

The find is remarkable from a number of perspectives, not least that a complete skull of any hominin is pretty unusual.  "Most of the fossil record is just a single tooth here and there so to have something like this is very rare, very lucky," said Angeline Leece, who participated in the research.  She added an evocative description of what the world was like when the owner of this skull was still alive and loping around on the African savanna.  "These two vastly different species, Homo erectus with their relatively large brains and small teeth, and Paranthropus robustus with their relatively large teeth and small brains, represent divergent evolutionary experiments,"  Leece said.  "Through time, Paranthropus robustus likely evolved to generate and withstand higher forces produced during biting and chewing food that was hard or mechanically challenging to process with their jaws and teeth — such as tubers.  Future research will clarify whether environmental changes placed populations under dietary stress and how that impacted human evolution."

It's fascinating to imagine what the world was like to these creatures, during a time when there were several intelligent hominin species coexisting.  I remember my evolutionary biology professor making that point; a lot of our attitude that species are these hard-and-fast little cubbyholes comes from the fact that we have no near relatives still alive.  Much more common in the natural world are groups of closely-related species all competing and coexisting.

But it's still a little hard to picture wandering around the place and seeing other human-like, but not-quite-human, animals out there doing their thing.

It also bears keeping in mind that the other animal species they'd have been around weren't like the ones today, either.  This point was driven home by the second discovery revealed this week, of a twelve-thousand-year-old frieze of cliffside paintings in Cerro Azul, Colombia, that show not only the usual assemblage of South American animals -- snakes, alligators, turtles, bats, monkeys, porcupines -- but mastodons, giant sloths, camelids, and some sort of three-toed ungulate with a trunk.

"These really are incredible images, produced by the earliest people to live in western Amazonia," said Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, who participated in the study.  "The paintings give a vivid and exciting glimpse in to the lives of these communities.  It is unbelievable to us today to think they lived among, and hunted, giant herbivores, some which were the size of a small car."

A small part of the Cerro Azul frieze

The size, scope, and detail of the drawings is phenomenal.  The paintings were made with ochre, a yellowish or reddish mineral, and cover the cliff face not only for miles horizontally, but for almost twenty meters vertically.  Whatever the purpose of this art -- whether it was purely decorative or had some kind of magical or symbolic significance -- the artists certainly were highly motivated.  Some parts of the frieze would have required ladders or climbing equipment to create, pretty impressive for what was at the time a more or less pre-technological society.

"These rock paintings are spectacular evidence of how humans reconstructed the land, and how they hunted, farmed and fished," said archaeologist José Iriarte, also of the University of Exeter.  "It is likely art was a powerful part of culture and a way for people to connect socially.  The pictures show how people would have lived amongst giant, now extinct, animals, which they hunted."

I find it fascinating that even back then -- at the tail end of the last Ice Age, when merely surviving must have been a challenge -- people were creating art.  And the fact that much of that art was depicting animals no longer extant adds a whole other layer of mind-boggling to the find.  This, and the South African skull discovery, give us a window into understanding how we became human -- how we went from savanna-dwelling apes to intelligent beings who have art, music, literature, science, and technology.

It's a journey that took us from the East African Rift Valley to pretty much every point on the surface of the Earth -- and has driven us along the way to look with wonder into the unknown vastness of the universe.  As Carl Sagan so poignantly put it, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

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

One of the most compellingly weird objects in the universe is the black hole -- a stellar remnant so dense that it warps space into a closed surface.  Once the edge of that sphere -- the event horizon -- is passed, there's no getting out.  Even light can't escape, which is where they get their name.

Black holes have been a staple of science fiction for years, not only for their potential to destroy whatever comes near them, but because their effects on space-time result in a relativistic slowdown of time (depicted brilliantly in the movie Interstellar).  In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, The Black Hole Survival Guide, astrophysicist Janna Levin describes for us what it would be like to have a close encounter with one of these things -- using the latest knowledge from science to explain in layperson's terms the experience of an unfortunate astronaut who strayed too close.

It's a fascinating, and often mind-blowing, topic, handled deftly by Levin, where the science itself is so strange that it seems as if it must be fiction.  But no, these things are real, and common; there's a huge one at the center of our own galaxy, and an unknown number of them elsewhere in the Milky Way.  Levin's book will give you a good picture of one of the scariest naturally-occurring objects -- all from the safety of your own home.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Requiem for an old friend

My fascination for astronomy started a long time ago.  I started learning the constellations when I was about six, and received a telescope as a Christmas present from my grandmother when I was eight.  Just about any clear night it was a good bet I'd be out in my front yard looking up at the stars, wondering what it was like out there, thinking about what other planets might host life -- and if somewhere there was a little alien boy looking back my way and wondering the same thing.

It was about that time that I found out about the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.  One of the many astronomy books I had called the three-hundred-meter radio dish "our eye on the sky" -- it was my first introduction both to the idea that not all telescopes looked like the little tube with lenses on a stand that I owned, and that it was possible to "see" the sky using wavelengths of light that were invisible to human eyes.  Also, if you were to view the sky with a radio telescope (or in microwaves, or x-rays, or ultraviolet light, or whatever) you would see a very different set of features than the familiar twinkling points of light set against a black background.

In the microwave region, for example, you'd see light coming from basically all directions at once -- the "three degree microwave background radiation" which Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered -- and which is one of our most persuasive pieces of evidence of the Big Bang.  (This discovery was made not at Arecibo but at the Holmdel Horn Antenna in New Jersey.)  X-ray astronomy is how black holes were discovered, and we know about the terrifyingly powerful Wolf-Rayet stars because of telescopes sensitive to the ultraviolet region of the spectrum.

Arecibo, though, was particularly evocative, not only for its function but because of its site, in a limestone sinkhole in the jungles of northern Puerto Rico.  Add to this its role in searching for signs of extraterrestrial life, and you have a combination sure to capture the imagination.  Because of this it made a number of appearances in science fiction, such as the 1994 episode of The X Files called "Little Green Men," and most notably, the amazing 1997 movie Contact, which remains my number-one favorite movie ever, not only for the story but because of a tour de force performance by Jodie Foster as the indomitable astronomer Ellie Arroway.

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz), Arecibo radio telescope SJU 06 2019 6144, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So it was with considerable sadness that I found out a couple of weeks ago that Arecibo was being permanently dismantled.  Earlier this year, a pair of cable breaks ripped gashes in the dish, and it seemed like the venerable telescope was unrepairable.  As if to confirm that, just two days ago the nine-hundred-ton equipment platform collapsed, falling almost two hundred meters and destroying the entire center of the telescope.

"When we looked outside the control room, we started to see the eventual downfall of the observatory," observatory director Ángel Vázquez said.  "After the breakage of two cables earlier this year, strands of the remaining three cables had been unraveling in recent days, increasing the strain.  And because two of the support towers maintained tension as the collapse occurred, some of the falling equipment was yanked across the side of the dish rather than falling straight down through its focal point...  This whole process took thirty seconds, and an icon in radio astronomy was done."

Vázquez isn't the only one to feel its loss deeply.  "While life will continue, something powerful and profoundly wonderful is gone," said astronomer Seth Shostak, whose work with SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) was a good part of the inspiration for Contact.

I understand the sentiment.  The whole thing makes me feel something like grief.  Arecibo has been an inspiration to me since I was a child, and its destruction is like losing an old friend.  I know there are other, and more powerful, telescopes out there, but this one seemed to me to be a symbol of our search for something beyond ourselves, for unraveling the secrets of the universe while still right here, looking up into the skies from our home planet.

So farewell to Arecibo.  There will always be something unique and marvelous about the image of that huge telescopic eye in the Puerto Rican jungle.  As Seth Shostak pointed out, its loss won't stop our yearning for knowledge, but it's hard to imagine finding something as grand and iconic to take its place in our imaginations.

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

One of the most compellingly weird objects in the universe is the black hole -- a stellar remnant so dense that it warps space into a closed surface.  Once the edge of that sphere -- the event horizon -- is passed, there's no getting out.  Even light can't escape, which is where they get their name.

Black holes have been a staple of science fiction for years, not only for their potential to destroy whatever comes near them, but because their effects on space-time result in a relativistic slowdown of time (depicted brilliantly in the movie Interstellar).  In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, The Black Hole Survival Guide, astrophysicist Janna Levin describes for us what it would be like to have a close encounter with one of these things -- using the latest knowledge from science to explain in layperson's terms the experience of an unfortunate astronaut who strayed too close.

It's a fascinating, and often mind-blowing, topic, handled deftly by Levin, where the science itself is so strange that it seems as if it must be fiction.  But no, these things are real, and common; there's a huge one at the center of our own galaxy, and an unknown number of them elsewhere in the Milky Way.  Levin's book will give you a good picture of one of the scariest naturally-occurring objects -- all from the safety of your own home.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Music, math, and the mind

I've been interested for a long time in the connection between musical and mathematical aptitude.  Part of this is my background as an educator; part is that I personally have been fascinated both with music and mathematics for as long as I can remember.  I play three instruments -- flute, piano, and (I shit you not) bagpipes -- and am largely self-taught on all three, from a combination of parents who thought that music lessons and/or participation in band were a waste of time and a nearly irresistible compulsion to make music despite that.

People like myself who enjoy both disciplines, and who would love to see music and arts education in schools emphasized and expanded, often bring up famous figures who were both musicians and adepts in the fields that are encompassed by the acronym STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).  Albert Einstein usually comes up, and his quote "I have always considered myself first and foremost a violinist" often gets mentioned.

My favorite example of a musician/scientist, however, is Brian May, lead guitarist for the band Queen, who holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from London College.  His scientific background sometimes makes an appearance in songs he wrote for the band -- most notably the beautiful and heartbreaking "'39," which is about an astronaut leaving in search of new planets to colonize in the "year of '39," and returning with news of his discoveries, also in the year of '39 -- but because of the relativistic time dilation effect of near-light-speed travel, when he arrives home it's not a few months later, it's a hundred years later.  The chorus is devastatingly bittersweet:

Don't you hear my call, though you're many years away,
Don't you hear me calling you?
Write your letters in the sand, for the day I'll take your hand
In the land that our grandchildren knew.

You can listen to the entire thing here:

So anyhow, I've been biased for a long time to believe there's a connection between musical aptitude and mathematical and/or scientific aptitude.  But as I've point out more than once, the plural of anecdote isn't data, and it'd take more than throwing around a famous name or two to convince the powers-that-be in education of the importance of music in schools.

Which is why the paper last week in the Journal of Research in Music Education is so important.  In "Multilevel Models of the Relationship Between Music Achievement and Reading and Math Achievement," by Martin Bergee and Kevin Weingarten of the University of Kansas, we read about a study that should be a model for careful analysis and control of variables, and which demonstrates beyond doubt that the link exists -- and is almost certainly causational.

What's striking about this is that Bergee set about doing the study because he was convinced that the opposite was true -- that there was no correlation between music and math aptitude beyond what could be explained by other factors (i.e. socioeconomic status, the degree of education of the parents, the emphasis on arts and music education by the school district, and so on).  But even accounting for these factors, the correlation was unmistakable.

"Based on the findings, the point we tried to make is that there might be, and probably are, general learning processes that underlie all academic achievement, no matter what the area is," Bergee said, in an interview with Science Direct.  "Music achievement, math achievement, reading achievement -- there are probably more generalized processes of the mind that are brought to bear on any of those areas.  Therefore, if your goal is to educate the person -- to develop the person's mind -- then you need to educate the whole person.  In other words, learning may not be as modular as it is often thought to be."

The study has unequivocal implications on how school districts allocate funds -- and why the "preserve STEM at all costs, cut art/music if necessary" approach is so completely wrong-headed.  "If you want a young person's -- or any person's -- mind to develop, then you need to develop it in all ways it can be developed," Bergee said.  "You can't sacrifice some modes of learning to other modes of learning for whatever reason, be it financial or societal."

As conclusive as it was, it would be unwarrantedly optimistic to think that this research will impel school boards to rethink their budget decisions apropos of music education.  The educational establishment is notoriously prone to ignoring current research in favor of "we've always done it this way and it would be too expensive to change course."  (My favorite example is the ridiculous approach in the United States to teaching children a second language.  Such instruction usually begins in seventh or eighth grade, even though it's been known for years that the window of neural plasticity for language learning closes significantly after age six or seven.  In the words of a former student of mine, "They wait to start teaching you languages until your brain has become really bad at learning them.")

But at least we now have some rigorous data to support the claim that music education is as important as the sacrosanct STEM.  Music lessons are not (as my mom claimed) "a waste of time and money."  Teaching music and the arts in schools is critical for developing children's intellects as deeply and thoroughly as possible -- which, after all, should be the ultimate goal of education.

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

One of the most compellingly weird objects in the universe is the black hole -- a stellar remnant so dense that it warps space into a closed surface.  Once the edge of that sphere -- the event horizon -- is passed, there's no getting out.  Even light can't escape, which is where they get their name.

Black holes have been a staple of science fiction for years, not only for their potential to destroy whatever comes near them, but because their effects on space-time result in a relativistic slowdown of time (depicted brilliantly in the movie Interstellar).  In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, The Black Hole Survival Guide, astrophysicist Janna Levin describes for us what it would be like to have a close encounter with one of these things -- using the latest knowledge from science to explain in layperson's terms the experience of an unfortunate astronaut who strayed too close.

It's a fascinating, and often mind-blowing, topic, handled deftly by Levin, where the science itself is so strange that it seems as if it must be fiction.  But no, these things are real, and common; there's a huge one at the center of our own galaxy, and an unknown number of them elsewhere in the Milky Way.  Levin's book will give you a good picture of one of the scariest naturally-occurring objects -- all from the safety of your own home.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Sanitizing history

An online acquaintance of mine made an interesting statement a couple of days ago.

"The Europeans didn't just bring exploitation and disease to North America, they brought war.  The Native Americans didn't even fight wars until after the Europeans arrived."

I asked him how he knew this, and he said he'd read it in a book, and then posted a link from (of all things) a Reddit page.   I gave a verbal shrug, and sort of said, "Okay, then," and didn't push the topic any further.  But I've been thinking about it ever since.

Why do we need to have certain ethnic groups be characterized by a nearly mythical goodness?

How often have we heard that before the Europeans arrived, the Natives were "in touch with the land," that they respected the Great Spirit, asked animals' permission before hunting, never took more than their fair share of what nature had to offer?  And now, this gentleman claims that they also never made war on each other until the Europeans arrived and taught them to do so.  I've heard similar claims made for other groups -- most commonly the Celts, who have also been mythologized to a fare-thee-well, to the point that since the mid-1800s there have been quasi-religious groups of "druids" who have tried to emulate what they think the Celts were doing back then.  More recently, the Afrocentrist movement has claimed that all good things came from Africa, and the extreme wing of that school of thought calls dark-skinned people "Sun People" and light-skinned people "Ice People" -- with all of the value judgments that those terms imply.

There are a couple of problems with all of this -- one of them academic, one of them common-sense.

The academic problem is that because all three of those groups left next to no tangible records, we really don't have all that clear a picture of what they were doing before they were contacted by societies who did write things down.  And when that contact occurred, the records left weren't exactly unbiased -- it's hard to know how much to believe of (for example) what the Romans wrote about the Celts.  Trying to piece together what was going on in the years prior to such contact is decidedly non-trivial, and has to be inferred from archaeological evidence and such indirect evidence as patterns of linguistic distribution.

Queen Boudicca of the Celts by Joseph Martin Kronheim (1855) [Image is in the Public Domain]

In preparation for writing this, I tried to find out what was actually known to anthropologists about the nature of society in pre-Columbian North America, and the answer is: surprisingly little.  I'm no anthropologist myself, so am unqualified to make a firm judgment, but what did strike me about the papers I read is that they don't even necessarily agree with each other.  The tangible artifacts left behind by some groups (e.g. the Pueblo cultures of the US Southwest) seem to suggest a peaceful agricultural existence, but that, too, is a guess.  It seems fairly certain that the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tribes of the Northeastern US did a good bit of fighting with the Algonquian tribes of Eastern Canada; those groups were "traditional enemies" and apparently were happily beating each other up long before the French and English arrived and made things worse.  Certainly the Aztecs, Maya, and Incas of Central and South America were not exactly what you might call peaceful by nature -- stone carvings show Aztec priests ripping the hearts from living sacrificial victims, and at least some of those victims appear from the carvings to have been prisoners of war.

My second objection is purely common sense; while some cultural values seem to me to be better than others, I just don't believe that whole groups of people were somehow "nicer" overall.  Consider what a future anthropologist might make of our current "warlike" American culture -- in the last hundred years we have certainly fought a great many times in places around the globe, for a variety of purposes, and during that time have diverted a large percentage of our resources into weaponry and the military.  What does that mean about us as a people?  My general feeling is "not much."  If you look around you, you'll find mean people, nice people, aggressive people, gentle people, and pretty much the gamut of whatever set of traits you choose.  Sure, our militarism is connected to our citizenry -- the military decisions are made by our leaders, who are elected by us -- but a future mythologizer who came up with a concept of American People As Evil Bloodthirsty Imperialists would be missing the truth by a mile.  (As would a concept of Americans As Courageous, World-Saving Warriors.)

Please note that I am in no way trying to excuse what our, or any other culture's, militarism actually accomplished.  What the Europeans did to the Native Americans and the Africans, what the British did to the Australian Natives and the people of India and Pakistan, what the Romans (and later the English) did to the Celts, are inexcusable tragedies.  My point is that the cultures who were the victims of these atrocities were not themselves perfect, and we do no favors either to them nor to the study of history in general by pretending that's true. 

 It is easy, out of our pity for the losers, to make them into creatures of myth, as having lived in an Eden until the nasty aggressors came in and fucked it up.  As always, reality is complex and messy, and doesn't fit neatly into pigeonholes.  It might be appealing to believe that the Celts were the Mystical, Nature-Worshiping People of the Sacred Forest prior to their being beaten to a pulp by a whole succession of cultures.  But this is a myth, just like the Native American as Noble Protector of the Environment and the African cultures as warm-hearted, creative Sun People.  No culture is perfect, no ethnic group without flaws, and it is only our desire to have an ideal to espouse that makes us ascribe such characteristics to the inhabitants of the past.

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

One of the most compellingly weird objects in the universe is the black hole -- a stellar remnant so dense that it warps space into a closed surface.  Once the edge of that sphere -- the event horizon -- is passed, there's no getting out.  Even light can't escape, which is where they get their name.

Black holes have been a staple of science fiction for years, not only for their potential to destroy whatever comes near them, but because their effects on space-time result in a relativistic slowdown of time (depicted brilliantly in the movie Interstellar).  In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, The Black Hole Survival Guide, astrophysicist Janna Levin describes for us what it would be like to have a close encounter with one of these things -- using the latest knowledge from science to explain in layperson's terms the experience of an unfortunate astronaut who strayed too close.

It's a fascinating, and often mind-blowing, topic, handled deftly by Levin, where the science itself is so strange that it seems as if it must be fiction.  But no, these things are real, and common; there's a huge one at the center of our own galaxy, and an unknown number of them elsewhere in the Milky Way.  Levin's book will give you a good picture of one of the scariest naturally-occurring objects -- all from the safety of your own home.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Prediction conviction

I know it's been a tough year.  The pandemic, the final year of King Donald the Demented's reign, the fractious election and its aftermath -- it's a lot to pack into a twelve months.

So it's natural enough that a lot of us are looking forward to saying goodbye to 2020, although rationally speaking, there's no reason that going from December 31 to January 1 should mark any real delineation in world events.  The fact that the most commonly-used calendar in the industrialized world marks the year's end in the middle of winter doesn't mean it's any kind of real phenomenon.  If we went by the Jewish calendar, the Hindu calendar, the Mayan calendar, or any of a variety of other ways humans have gone about marking time, what we call New Year's Day would just be another ordinary day.

That hasn't stopped the prognosticators from doing what they do, of course.  Just in the last couple of weeks, a number of psychic types have revealed to us what 2021 is going to be like.  As you might expect, none of them agree with each other, which you'd think would give people a clue about their veracity.

But as I said earlier, there's not much of this that has to do with rationality.

Let's start with Nicolas Aujula, who warns us against getting too optimistic about any serious improvements in 2021:

I have had a couple of quite horrid visions – one of a male world leader being assassinated.  I couldn’t see who it was, but sensed it sent shockwaves through the world.  Obviously I hope that doesn’t come to fruition.  I’ve also had a vision of a world summit being plagued by a sex scandal and, a rise in far-right politics, particularly in southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and a volcanic eruption leading to major weather changes.  And I’ve had the words ‘pig flu’ come to me and seen images of mass panic.  I don’t think it will be another virus, but I can imagine the reaction will be alarmist, given what’s happened this year.

What stands out to me here is the volcanic eruption, which would seem to be a pretty striking predication if a month and a half ago there hadn't been an announcement from geologists that Grimsvötn, Iceland's most active volcano, is showing signs of another big eruption, and that it has a history of larger eruptions than nearby Eyjafjallajökull -- which had a 2010 eruption spewing so much ash into the air that it led to the cancellation of 100,000 airline flights. 

So that one just shows that Aujula knows how to read the news.  As far as the rest, when hasn't there been a political sex scandal?  And the "rise of far-right politics" isn't exactly a reach, either, since it's been going on for what, four or five years, now?

Then there's Polish psychic Adam A., who has some Poland-specific predictions whose likelihood I can't speak to with any authority, but also had two visions that are a little baffling:

• A large dark triangle soars over a city with low buildings.  There are no skyscrapers or other tall buildings here.  Cloudy water flows outside the city and it spills out.  A strong stream hits a mysterious triangle.

• Eight people are sitting at the table, debating a piece of paper crumpled into a ball.  One of the men has a mustache.  The paper ball starts to burn, and the fire takes the shape of a bird and goes to the sky.

Nope.  I got nothin'.

But when it comes to arcane predictions, no one can beat Michel de Nostredame (better known under his Latinized name of Nostradamus), the sixteenth-century mystic and astrologer who made pronouncements so weird and incomprehensible that you could interpret them to mean damn near anything.  Which, of course, is very helpful after the fact, because no matter what happens you can always go back and find something Nostradamus said that seems to fit if you squint at it in just the right way.  

Portrait of Michel de Nostradame, painted posthumously by his son César de Nostredame (ca. 1590) [Image is in the Public Domain]

He wrote in these little four-line stanzas called quatrains, and of course, there are people who are now trying to apply them to 2021.  Here are a few of their better efforts:

1) A famine

This one is supposedly predicted by this quatrain:

After great trouble for humanity, a greater one is prepared, 

The Great Mover renews the ages: 

Rain, blood, milk, famine, steel, and plague, 

Is the heavens fire seen, a long spark running.

So I think we can all agree that's clear as mud.  But predicting a famine is a good bet anyhow, especially given what we're doing to the climate.

Then we have:

2) A devastating earthquake in California

Once again, that's not a reach to predict.  Although even with stretching your interpretation, I have a hard time making this quatrain about California: 

The sloping park, great calamity, 

Through the Lands of the West and Lombardy 

The fire in the ship, plague, and captivity; 

Mercury in Sagittarius, Saturn fading.

Okay, California is in the west, at least from the perspective of those of us here in the United States, but the only connection it has to Lombardy is that they're on the same planet.  And yeah, an earthquake is a "calamity," but I don't see what it has to do with ship fires, plagues, and captivity.

And don't even get me started about the whole Mercury in Sagittarius thing.

Finally, no cataclysm would be complete without:

3) A zombie apocalypse

You think I'm making this up.  Here's the pair of quatrains that supposedly predicts it:

Few young people: half−dead to give a start.
Dead through spite, he will cause the others to shine,
And in an exalted place some great evils to occur:
Sad concepts will come to harm each one,
Temporal dignified, the Mass to succeed.
Fathers and mothers dead of infinite sorrows,
Women in mourning, the pestilent she−monster:
The Great One to be no more, all the world to end.

Right!  Sure!  I only have one question, which is, "What?"

I mean, I guess you could say that predicts zombies as much as it predicts anything, but I'm a little baffled as to why this one is scheduled for 2021.  Other than the fact that we've had pretty much everything else you can think of in 2020, so maybe a zombie apocalypse is the next logical step.

The article I linked has a bunch more of Nostradamus's predictions that supposedly apply to next year, and I encourage you to read it if you're interested in finding out more about what we're in for.  Suffice it to say that it doesn't sound like much fun.  But even with all this, I still can't help but be a little hopeful.  For one thing, it's looking like Donald Trump will finally be relegated to the Little Kids' Table of History, where he can tweet and throw a tantrum and dump his Froot Loops on the floor all he wants without bothering the rest of us.  We'll finally have a president who takes climate change seriously, although I'm under no illusions that the battle is won.

So I'm inclined to agree with the folks who are glad to see 2020 go.  At this point, my general feeling is: bring on the zombies.

 ********************************

One of the most compellingly weird objects in the universe is the black hole -- a stellar remnant so dense that it warps space into a closed surface.  Once the edge of that sphere -- the event horizon -- is passed, there's no getting out.  Even light can't escape, which is where they get their name.

Black holes have been a staple of science fiction for years, not only for their potential to destroy whatever comes near them, but because their effects on space-time result in a relativistic slowdown of time (depicted brilliantly in the movie Interstellar).  In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, The Black Hole Survival Guide, astrophysicist Janna Levin describes for us what it would be like to have a close encounter with one of these things -- using the latest knowledge from science to explain in layperson's terms the experience of an unfortunate astronaut who strayed too close.

It's a fascinating, and often mind-blowing, topic, handled deftly by Levin, where the science itself is so strange that it seems as if it must be fiction.  But no, these things are real, and common; there's a huge one at the center of our own galaxy, and an unknown number of them elsewhere in the Milky Way.  Levin's book will give you a good picture of one of the scariest naturally-occurring objects -- all from the safety of your own home.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]