Cheers!

Humans have been making and consuming alcoholic drinks for a very long time.

We're hardly the only animal species to experience the psychotropic effects.  You may recall that about ten years ago a story from Sweden (Höme of the Majestic Mööse!  Extra points if you know the reference) in which one of the antlered behemoths got drunk eating fermented fallen apples, tried to climb the apple tree, and got stuck.  Not all species experience the same effects, though.  A 2008 study of pen-tailed tree shrews in Malaysia found that they habitually consume naturally-fermented nectar that raises their blood alcohol levels to well above the legal limit for humans, and show no ill effects whatsoever.  Presumably if they've evolved with that kind of diet, they've developed a mechanism for detoxifying the alcohol, or at least avoiding the psychological effects.  The jungles of Malaysia are thick with predators, and for a small furry mammal to spend all its time stumbling around dead drunk would be a good way to end up actually dead.

The earliest hard evidence of humans making wine or beer comes from near Jiahu, in the Yellow River Valley of China.  Pottery dating from about 6800 B.C.E. was found that had residues of fermented rice, honey, grapes, and hawthorn berries; around the same time, there's evidence of grape wine and barley beer being made in the Middle East.  I've often wondered what that stuff tasted like, as compared to our refined and filtered wines, beers, and spirits a lot of us enjoy today.  Back then, they were relying on wild yeasts and bacteria to do the fermenting, and that undoubtedly led to highly variable results (and a lot of spoilage).

The written records of the Greeks and Romans certainly mention wine and beer, and (especially with the Romans) we know a good bit about their winemaking techniques.  Grape juice, sometimes flavored with spices, honey, or other fruit juices, was boiled, then filtered, poured into clay amphorae, the lids sealed with beeswax, and then buried for a period that could vary from weeks to years.  The resulting liquid was then decanted and bottled.  This was when it was discovered that the soil type, climate, and grape variety had huge effects on the outcome; Roman wines ran the spectrum from surrentine (which the Emperor Tiberius sneeringly called "generous vinegar") to falernian (so expensive it was only available to the very rich but potent -- it was not only delicious, but was aged for up to twenty-five years and had an alcohol content of around fifteen percent).

[Image is in the Public Domain]

We just learned a little more about the production of vino from an archaeological find from the harbor of San Felice Circeo, ninety kilometers south of Rome.  Wine jars were unearthed in a seabed deposit that still had residues of the wines they contained.  Both red and white wines were found, along with pollen identifiable as coming from several varieties of wild grapes that grow in the area.  (Whether the vines themselves were cultivated is unknown; but those varieties are still found growing wild nearby.)  Interestingly, the amphorae were sealed not with beeswax but with pine tar, and apparently the pine tar was used not only as a sealant but to flavor the wine itself.  Maybe the result was something like Greek retsina, which people seem either to love or hate (I like the flavor, but my wife's opinion is if she wanted to chew on a pine branch, she'd go do it).

It'd be interesting if we went back to Roman times and attended a feast, where it would fall on the spectrum between delectable and revolting.  I wrote last October about a fellow named Andrew Coletti who has tried to recreate bunches of historical recipes as accurately as possible, and found that one of the Roman dishes bore an uncanny resemblance to french fries with ketchup.  But I have no doubt that some of the food and drink would taste pretty strange to us.  I'd still want to try it, though.  I don't hesitate to try local foods when I travel, and have rarely had a bad experience, although I did draw the line at the Icelandic "delicacy" hákarl, which is fermented shark meat.  It apparently has a "strong ammonia smell," and the late Anthony Bourdain said it was "the single worst, most disgusting, and terrible-tasting thing" he'd ever consumed.  Chef Ainsley Harriott was even more descriptive, describing eating it as being like "chewing on a urine-soaked mattress."

I've heard of "acquired tastes," but that's over the line.  In fact, for me, that's so far over the line that from there I wouldn't be able to see the line using a powerful telescope.

But Roman wine?  Sure, I'd give it a go, even the "generous vinegar" one.  Who knows, maybe I'd love it.  Chacun à son goût, and all that sort of thing.  But think about this if you go out for a pint or a glass of wine with friends tonight -- you're partaking in a tradition that goes back in some form or another for thousands of years.  Pretty cool, when you think about it.

Cheers!

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

The smell of friendship

A topic I covered in my intro to biology classes was the phenomenon of pheromones.

A pheromone is a chemical secreted by one individual that causes a behavioral change in another member of the same species.  There's a great variety -- sex pheromones (which causes the behavior you see in male dogs when a female dog goes into heat), alarm pheromones (such as the "attack" chemical released by killer bees that causes swarming), territorial pheromones (such as urine marking in wolves), and so on.  They're biochemical signals; much the way hormones signal between organs, pheromones signal between organisms.

This inevitably led to the question, "Do humans have pheromones?"  The answer is, "Probably, but it's hard to demonstrate conclusively."  Certainly, the "pheromonal" perfumes and colognes you've probably seen ads for are ripoffs; there is no evidence that there's anything you could add to a perfume that would act as an aphrodisiac.  (For some reason, I've mostly seen ads for this stuff in science magazines.  Maybe they think we nerds need all the help we can get in the romance department, I dunno.)

One of my AP Biology students years ago got interested in the topic of attractant pheromones, and designed a clever experiment to see if he could detect an effect in humans.  He had a bunch of volunteers agree to the following protocol: (1) shower first thing in the morning; (2) use odorless soap, shampoo, and deodorant, and don't put on any scented products; (3) don't eat any food that could change your body odor, such as garlic, curry, or asparagus; and (4) wear a plain white t-shirt (provided by the researcher) for an entire day, then seal it in a ziplock bag at the end of the day.  He then took the collected t-shirts (I think there were about twenty in all) and got a bunch of students to smell them, and rank them best-to-worst for odor.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lateiner, T-shirt-2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The results were pretty interesting.  There was a tendency for people to rank higher t-shirts that had been worn by volunteers of their preferred gender.  (There weren't any bisexuals in the test sample; maybe we think everyone smells good, I dunno.)  The most interesting part was that between the t-shirt wearing group and the t-shirt smelling group, there were a couple of pairs of siblings -- and they ranked their siblings as smelling terrible!

Curious results, which I was immediately reminded of when I stumbled on some research out of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel which showed there might be a pheromonal aspect not only of sexual attraction, but of friendship.

The procedure they followed was remarkably similar to my student's, if considerably more rigorous and technical.  They recruited twenty pairs of people who reported that they were friends, and further, had "clicked immediately" -- a phenomenon I think we can all relate to.  (It's equally common to meet someone you dislike immediately -- but that'd have been a lot harder to study.)  They then did a similar t-shirt wearing protocol, but at the end of the day, instead of having someone smell it, they used an electronic volatile chemical analyzer to determine what odor-carrying substances there might be in the shirts.

What they found was that the chemistry of the sweat left behind in the t-shirts was remarkably similar between people who were friends.  Further -- and even wilder -- they then had the volunteers pair up with same-sex strangers from the research group, eventually testing all possible same-sex pairings, and had them stand in close proximity for two minutes (in silence).  They then were asked to rank the person from 1 to 100 in terms of how comfortable they were, whether they felt a connection, and whether they'd be interested in meeting the person again.

Across the board, the more similar the pair's sweat chemistry, the higher the rankings were.  "The finding that it could predict clicking by body odor similarity alone—this was really cool," said study co-author Inval Ravreby.  "We were really excited to find this."

The researchers did admit that the effect was small (although statistically significant) and there was a lot of overlap in the data, but the fact that there's a trend at all is pretty amazing.  Human behavior is complex and multifaceted, and it's amazing how much of it is due to subliminal cues.  Despite our generally high opinions of our species, we're still animals -- and we interact with each other not only in human-specific ways but in the more instinctual ways other animals use.

Now, I'm not suggesting that you should try to find friends by walking up and sniffing people.  But maybe that feeling of an instant connection we sometimes have is more due to our sense of smell than it is any kind of cognitive assessment.

Think of that the next time you're having lunch with your best friend.

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

An open letter to straight Americans

Dear straight people:

I hope you recognize the path the United States is on, and where it leads.  Because it's easy to blind yourself to problems that don't affect you.  That is, at its heart, what minorities mean when they talk about privilege.  As a Black friend of mine put it, "White privilege doesn't mean White people's lives are easy; it just means that race isn't one of the things making them harder."

Recent developments in Florida (why the fuck is it always Florida?) should bring that into sharp focus.  Because of the state's "Don't Say Gay" law, school administrators in Orange County have now told staff that they can't display rainbow "Safe Space" stickers in their classrooms, they can't assign reading material with any LGBTQ content to their classes, they are required to tell parents if they find out a student is queer, and LGBTQ staff members cannot have photographs of their families displayed anywhere -- including on their own desks.

My first question to my straight readers is: do you have any idea what effect this has, both on staff and on students?

This kind of ugly, bigoted horseshit is why I spent forty years unable to admit that I was bisexual.  During most of that time I couldn't even admit it to myself.  I grew up thinking same-sex attraction was something to be ashamed of, or at the very least, to be fearful about.  Well, fear was justified; I want you to think, really think, about what it'd be like if you were afraid to take your significant other out to dinner because then people would realize you were together.  That you couldn't walk down the street of your own home town holding hands because you'd be jeered at, have hateful epithets thrown at you, and (in all too many places) risk actual physical violence.  That you'd been told over and over that loving who you love made you abnormal, sinful, disgusting, aberrant.

It's that hell that this law is forcing LGBTQ people back into.

We never really left it, honestly, but a lot of us felt like at least we were heading in the right direction.  In the last five years I've become more and more like the iconic character Nick Nelson from Alice Oseman's brilliant graphic novel series Heartstopper:

I'm damn lucky I'm in a situation I can do that.  I live in a pretty tolerant part of the country.  I'm married to a woman, which is fortunate in two respects; not only does it shield me from the stigma that people in same-sex relationships face every single day, my wife is a wonderful human being who accepts me for who I am.

But consider what I, and countless others like me who spent most of their lives hiding, lost in the process.  Think about what it'd be like if there was something about you that you didn't ask for and couldn't change, and now there were laws against it being out in the open.  How about... wearing glasses?  What if at work, you were told you couldn't wear glasses, and had to pretend you could see well?  If anyone asked you about it, you had to say you could see just fine.  Any visits to the optometrist had to be made in secret -- if possible, in another town where you wouldn't be recognized going into the place.  No books in your kids' school could show, or even mention, characters who didn't have 20/20 vision.  And if you did become angry enough to say "fuck it" and wore your glasses in public, you would be ridiculed or beaten up for it.

See how horrifying that sounds?

It's been years that we've known that homophobic ignorance flies in the face of the actual science, but we Americans don't exactly have a stellar record of listening to the scientists about anything.  Back in 2015, Scientific American published an article that goes into the biology of human sexuality, and the details are fascinating; but truthfully, it can be summed up as, "Sexuality is complex, and it isn't binary."  

The homophobes have responded by mischaracterizing how the medical professionals address the issue, because (unfortunately) straw man arguments are all too effective when people don't know, or don't want to know, the facts.  Just last week I saw someone post on social media, "If a five-year-old is old enough to decide what gender they are, an eighteen-year-old is old enough to own a gun."  I'm not going into the last half of it, but the first half is so abjectly ridiculous it's a wonder it generated anything more than derisive laughter.  It makes it sound like an anatomically male five-year-old says, "Hey, I'm a girl now," and the parents immediately whisk them off to get gender-reassignment surgery.  According to a statement by medical professionals who address issues of gender dysphoria, surgeries of this sort are only done if the child is anatomically intersex, and even then doctors almost always wait until the child is the age of puberty before taking any kind of irreversible action.

Unfortunately, no one I saw responded to the person who posted that with, "THAT NEVER HAPPENS."  We've become afraid even to fight the battle, or perhaps just too damn exhausted to argue.

It's understandable.  This is the third time this month (ironically, Pride Month) I've written about these issues here at Skeptophilia.  At some point we feel like, "What more can I say?  And what good is it doing anyhow?"  So that's why I'm going to ask not my queer readers, but my straight ones, to think long and hard about something: what would it take to make you stand up and say, "Hell no, this is wrong," even though it only directly affects a group you don't belong to?  If you were a straight teacher in Orange County, Florida, would you be willing to put up a rainbow flag in your classroom and say to administrators, "Bring it on"?  To say to Ron DeSantis and the hundreds of other elected officials in this country cut from the same cloth, "This is not gonna happen.  Not on my watch."?

"Tired," by the inimitable Langston Hughes

It's easy to support LGBTQ rights in ways that risk nothing.  You vote for candidates who support equal rights for all?  Great, awesome, good for you.  But we are hurtling down a tunnel into a deep, dark place that a lot of us thought we'd left back in the 1980s.  And that downward spiral won't stop until straight people stand up and say, "I'm going to do whatever it takes to halt this, even if it means putting myself in the bullseye."

That is what it means to be an ally.

Thankfully, there are straight people who do just that.  I've laughed with a dear friend of mine, who is straight as they come, because he owns (and wears publicly) more Pride gear than I do.  He's one of the ones who would not hesitate to give a big old middle finger to homophobes, and say, "What are you gonna do about it, asshole?"

But there are too damn few people like him.

So I'm asking my straight readers to stand up and make your voices heard.  It's the only way any of this is going to stop.  And keep in mind that if the bigots win this fight, it isn't going to end there, because queers aren't the only ones these people hate.  Remember the oft-quoted statement by anti-Nazi activist Martin Niemöller that ends, "Finally, they came for me -- and by then, there was no one left to speak for me."

Please, please don't wait until then.

Maybe there's a time that other-sides-ism is appropriate, but that's not now.  I am not obligated to respect your opinion if your opinion denies the rights, and even the humanity, of another group of people.  There is no morally and ethically defensible justification for what is happening in the United States right now.

Pride ends today, but don't expect me to shut up about it.  I was silent for forty years, and it doesn't work.  And maybe -- just maybe -- if enough straight allies will commit to standing in the breach with us, we won't have another generation of queer children growing up going through the hell that I and so many others did.  

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

Propriety, privacy, and prudery

I think a lot of the problems I have come about because I've never really understood people.

Yes, I know, I am a people.  But that natural, seemingly effortless ability most folks seem to have, to look at an interaction and say, "Oh, here's why they did that," or better yet, to predict what's going to happen afterward -- I think I was born without that particular brain module.

So I've no doubt that many of my difficulties come from my own inherent inabilities.  It's like the hilarious opening scene of the Doctor Who episode "The Halloween Apocalypse," which finds the Thirteenth Doctor and her companion, Yaz, suspended upside down in mid-air by their ankles over a lake of boiling-hot acid:

"You know, I can't help feeling that some of this might have been my fault."

Take, for example, the weird reaction someone had to a photograph I posted on Instagram a couple of days ago.  It was a selfie I took after going for a swim in my pond on a sweltering day.  I was happy, and my phone was right there on the dock, so I snapped a photo of myself and later that day, I posted it.

I think the problem was that in addition to some innocuous hashtags like #outdoors and #fingerlakesny, I tagged it #skinnydipping.  Our pond isn't visible from the road; unless you were actually standing in my back yard, the only way you could see it is from a low-flying aircraft.  So I never bother with swim trunks.  Not only do I prefer skinnydipping over getting out and having clammy wet fabric clinging to my skin, trunks would be another thing to wash, dry, and mess around with.  I figure it's not a problem, since the only ones who can see me when I'm swimming are my wife, who has seen me naked once or twice, and my dogs, who don't care because they also enjoy skinnydipping.

Well, furrydipping.

In any case, that prompted the following DM that evening, from someone who followed me but apparently doesn't any more:

I don't know why you have to post photos like the one you posted today.  Everyone is entitled to indulge in the lifestyle they want, but that doesn't mean the rest of us want to see it.  Posting nude selfies is offensive to a lot of us and it's just plain rude.  That's why we have laws about keeping your private parts covered.  So if you choose to post stuff like this, I choose not to follow you.

Now, before we go any further, here's the photo she objected to:

If you will examine this photo closely, you will see that there aren't any salacious body parts even close to showing.  If I had stopped before snapping the picture to put on my shorts, there'd be no way to tell.

For the record, I would never post an actual naked pic on Instagram, for two reasons: (1) it's against Instagram's Terms of Service; and (2) actual naked pics do offend people, because they're often construed (whether or not that was the person's intention) as an unwanted sexual advance, and knowing something will probably offend or upset people but doing it anyhow is synonymous with "being an asshole."

But what my ex-follower seems to be objecting to is implied nudity.  The rules of propriety, apparently, have to be applied even to what you can't see.  It reminds me of the joke the eminent biochemist, writer, and polymath Isaac Asimov used to tell to illustrate the meaning of the word prude:

A woman owns a house overlooking a river with a gravelly beach frequently used as a swimming spot, and one warm day she looks out of her window and sees some teenage boys skinnydipping, so she calls the police to complain.

The police come and give the boys a warning, telling them either to put on some swim trunks or else move farther up river and away from the woman's house.  The boys acquiesce and decide to find another spot.

An hour later, the police get another call from the woman complaining that the boys are still swimming in the river naked.

"They came back?" the policeman asks.

"No," the woman said, "but I can still see them if I lean out of my window and use binoculars."

It really does seem like there are a lot of people who look around for stuff to be offended by.  Maybe they like being offended, I dunno.  As I said, I'm flat-out mystified by people a lot of the time.

Just to be on the safe side, maybe from now on I should only post selfies that look like this:

On the other hand, and I am loath to point this out: underneath all these clothes, I'm still naked.  You can't get away from implied nudity no matter how hard you try.

So anyhow.  My apologies to the people I've offended, and I'll be a lot more careful when I post photos, not only apropos of what you can see, but of the stuff you can't see but imagine you could if the camera was pointing in a different direction.

However, I still don't think I'll ever really understand what makes some people tick.

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

Praying with captives

Maybe ten years ago I got in a protracted argument over the phone with a local man.  The subject was an online social media group he'd started, and which I initially had joined, that protested the privatization of nursing homes in our area.  The practice, the group description rightly said, has put appropriate health care for the elderly out of the reach of all but the wealthiest.

The call that evening was precipitated by the fact that I left the group.  Quietly -- I posted a quick note that the group was heading in a direction I wasn't comfortable with, and disconnected.  My reason for doing so was one member, who was (and is) stridently ultra-left, going so far as to ridicule and/or call evil anyone who didn't share his views.  The long screeds he posted were not only unpleasant, they were outside of the specific focus the group had been created to address, and as a result the group was devolving into a rant-filled political free-for-all.

The gentleman who started the group (I'll call him Steve) demanded to know what it was that I had disagreed with so vehemently that I felt the need to exit.  I was a well-known and well-respected figure, he said, a veteran teacher, and my leaving the group would be seen as a blow to its standing.

I told him that it wasn't about disagreement, it was about partisanship.  "I teach several classes which have political aspects," I said.  "If I'm seen as being publicly partisan, I will lose credibility with my students about being unbiased and open-minded."

"Don't you have opinions?" Steve shouted at me.

I sighed loudly enough that he heard me, and said, "Of course I have opinions.  But that's what they are: opinions.  I don't foist them off on my classes.  I present my students with facts, ideas, and critical thinking strategies, and let them come to their own conclusions."

"What if a kid asks you for your opinion on something like politics or religion?"

"I have one of two answers," I replied.  "If it's not germane to what we're discussing in class, I'll say so.  If it is, my usual response is, 'Why do you need to know my opinion?'  If the answer is simple curiosity, which it usually is, I just shake my head and tell them I'm not going there.  I steadfastly refuse to tell students what my religious views are and what political party I belong to.  Students are a captive audience.  It's way too easy for 'this is my opinion' to morph into 'and it should be yours, too.'"

By this time, Steve was so mad he was about to burst a blood vessel.  "But this isn't at school!  It's online!  You can't state your opinion to anyone?"

My own temper was fast rising, but I kept my voice level with an effort.  "I didn't say that.  What I'm saying is that I'm very careful.  Like it or not, I'm a public figure, and if I get involved in publicly-visible online partisan rants, it will damage my standing in the classroom."

He lost it.  "I can't believe someone as smart as you is just fine with private corporations taking over every fucking health care facility in the region!"

I snapped back, "I'm not fine with it.  I hate it.  For fuck's sake, my wife's a public health care nurse.  What the hell do you think my opinion is?"

That shut him up.  At least momentarily.

The bottom line, though, is that he never did get my point; students are required to be in school, so teachers have to be really cautious about how they use their position of power to maneuver students' opinions, even inadvertently.  Sometimes our beliefs can't help but be exposed; I never hesitated to confront racism, sexism, and homophobia in the classroom, for example.  But I always tried to be as careful as I could on most other topics.  Students look up to and trust teachers (well, most of them do most of the time), and if I used my authority to push my religious or political views, it would be a significant betrayal of that trust.

Which brings us to Monday's decision by the United States Supreme Court that a high school football coach praying with his athletes on the field was protected free speech.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The decision, unsurprisingly, was 6-3 along ideological lines.  In the majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote, "We are aware of no historically-sound understanding of the Establishment Clause that begins to (make) it necessary for government to be hostile to religion in this way."

I'm no expert in law, but I do see that saying, "You can't pray with students at an event they're required to attend" is not equivalent to "hostility to religion."  Just like teachers in the classroom, coaches are looked up to by athletes.  Gorsuch said that "students were not required nor expected to participate [in the prayer]," which is disingenuous to say the very least.  Show me one high school athlete who, at a practice or a game, would be willing to say to a well-respected coach, "I'm not going to participate in this prayer, I'll just stand here to the side and let everyone watching stare at me.  Tell me when you're done."

But it also brings up the question of why having the coach lead a prayer is a good thing.  Despite Christian alarmists screeching about God not being allowed in schools, no one stops students from praying privately.  I knew a young man who always quietly recited the Grace Before Meals prayer before eating lunch, and I never saw anyone bat an eyelash.  (And I bet there are lots of prayers wafting aloft right before final exams.)  If students want to pray, they certainly can do so.  Why does a coach or a teacher need to cross that line into leading a prayer?

It also brings to mind a particularly inconvenient quote from Jesus himself, in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter six: "And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men.  I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.  But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen."

And as an aside, I wonder what the Supreme Court vote would have been if the coach had led the players in a prayer to Allah and asked them to bow toward Mecca.  Or any of the other hundreds of religious expressions of faith that are out there in the world.

What's most infuriating about this is the same basic thing I was arguing with Steve about; saying "doing this is inappropriate" doesn't mean "I'm anti (whatever the topic is)."  I am not anti-Christian; I have lots of Christian friends and mostly we get along just fine.  The frustration I have is with the subset of Christians who equate the secular society's insistence that Christianity not drive public policy with a desire to destroy Christianity itself.

I have no problem with someone saying "my faith requires me to do this."  I have a big problem with someone saying "my faith requires you to do this."  And that includes situations where the coercion is implicit, such as what school personnel say to young people.  Monday's decision should be deeply troubling to the religious and non-religious alike.  But given the current makeup of the court, I'm worried that we're only seeing the beginnings of an attempt to reestablish the hegemony of Christianity over the lives of all American citizens, irrespective of their own beliefs or lack thereof.

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

A life-like glow

One of the problems faced by people who would dearly love to find unequivocal proof of extraterrestrial life is: space is big.

No, not big.  Really fucking huge.  Here's an analogy that may help.  Let's start out with saying the Earth has been shrunk to the size of the period at the end of this sentence.  The Sun would be the size of a pool ball, and would be located about six meters away.  The farthest decent-sized object in the Solar System we know of -- Pluto (yes, yes, I know it's not a planet, I don't want to discuss it) -- would be a dust speck 230 meters away, a bit more than twice the length of an American football field.  The nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, would be another pool ball 1,570 kilometers away, roughly the distance between where I sit now (in upstate New York) and Jacksonville, Florida.

And in between us and it is a whole lot of bugger-all.

Just seeing any kind of detail in objects that far away is tremendously difficult, and that's even considering the amazing strides we've taken in telescope design.  Not only is there the distance involved, but there's dust and debris in between us and everywhere else, blurring the image further.  There could be friendly aliens on one of the planets orbiting Proxima Centauri leaping about and waving their six arms and holding up signs saying, "HERE WE ARE!", and we wouldn't see them.

And that's the nearest star.

Things become even worse when you consider actually going there.  Voyager 1, currently the most distant human-made object from Earth, is traveling outward at a little over sixty thousand kilometers per hour.  A decent clip, right?  Well, even so, it would take ten thousand years to reach Proxima Centauri, if it were heading that way.

Which it's not.

To me, this is the strongest argument against UFOs having an extraterrestrial origin.  Every indication we have is that the laws of the Special and General Theories of Relativity, which prohibit faster-than-light travel, are enforced in every jurisdiction.  It's hard to imagine space-faring aliens crossing all this distance to come see us (only to abduct some cows and leave a crop circle in Farmer Bob's wheat field, then leaving).  We may well not be the only intelligent life in the cosmos, but the likelihood of having a face-to-face (or face-to-whatever-they've-got) visit is slim to none.

Even having a nice chat with them from a distance is gonna be tricky, not to mention boring.  Once again, using Proxima Centauri (at 4.2 light years distant) as an example, if we were to beam a focused radio wave signal toward it containing some kind of encoded message, the best-case scenario of what it'd be like in Earth's SETI Command Central would go something like this:

Us (into microphone): Hey, Proxima Centaurians, how are y'all doing?

[8.4 year silence]

PCs (voice from speaker): We're doing fine.  The weather's been nice, although we could use some rain.  How are you?

Us (into microphone): Same old, same old.  You know how it goes.

[8.4 year silence]

PCs (voice from speaker): Don't we ever.  It's the same everywhere in the universe, amirite?  LOL

So anything approaching scintillating repartee would be kind of out of the question.

Another complication is that intelligent life doesn't mean intelligent life we can communicate with.  Consider the fact that until the invention of the radio telescope (1937), there could have been extraterrestrials positively screaming at us, and we'd have had no way to know.  And it's no better with messages going the other way.  Prior to our own radio signals, the Earth itself would have appeared completely silent; there would have been little in the way of indication that there was anything alive down here, despite the fact that the Earth had already hosted life for three billion years.  

As an aside, it's an interesting question as to whether we're going silent again, given the increasing efficiency of signal transmission -- our "radio bubble" is getting weaker, not (heaven knows) because we've got less to say, but because less of the signal is leaking out into space.  This might not be a bad thing, although it's probably already too late.  Recall in the brilliant send-up of the original Star Trek, Galaxy Quest, that the aliens (the Thermians from the Klaaaaaatu Nebula) thought our early television signals were documentaries:

Lieutenant Madison: They're not all "historical documents."  Surely you don't think that Gilligan's Island...

Captain Mathazar (sadly): Oh, those poor people.

So those of us who are kind of desperate to demonstrate that we're not alone in the universe have to figure out another way to do it other than the obvious ones.

Enter the Compact Color Biofinder.  This amazing device, developed at the University of Hawaii - Manoa, uses an interesting feature of many organic compounds -- fluorescence.  Fluorescence occurs when light at one frequency is absorbed by a molecule, resulting in the electrons in its atoms bouncing to higher energy levels; when those electrons fall back into the ground state, they emit light at certain characteristic frequencies.  (An example you may, unfortunately, know about; if you shine an ultraviolet light on cat piss, it fluoresces green, which will allow you to find where you need to clean up if Mr. Fluffums decides not to use his litter box.)

Because the fluorescence spectrums of different types of organic compounds are pretty well known, this allows you to analyze the light coming from an object that contains organic residues and determine what those residues are made of.  The concept, of course, is hardly new; it's the basic idea of spectroscopy, which has been around for two hundred years.  But the Compact Color Biofinder has refined the process to unbelievable levels.  It was able to detect and identify traces of the biological compounds in a fifty-million-year-old fish fossil from which you'd think every organic trace would have disappeared long ago.

"The Biofinder is the first system of its kind," said Anupam Misra, who led the team that developed the new device.  "At present, there is no other equipment that can detect minute amounts of bio-residue on a rock during the daytime.  Additional strengths of the Biofinder are that it works from a distance of several meters, takes video and can quickly scan a large area...  If the Biofinder were mounted on a rover on Mars or another planet, we would be able to rapidly scan large areas quickly to detect evidence of past life, even if the organism was small, not easy to see with our eyes, and dead for many millions of years.  We anticipate that fluorescence imaging will be critical in future NASA missions to detect organics and the existence of life on other planetary bodies."

So we may be fast approaching the point that we'll be able to analyze the faint light reflected from a distant exoplanet and say, "Yes, that's an organic biosignature."

As much fun as it'd be actually to meet aliens -- well, most aliens, I'll take a pass on Daleks, the Sycorax, and the Vashta Nerada -- at this point, I'll happily settle for evidence that they're out there.  The Compact Color Biofinder is looking like it may be our best tool yet for doing exactly that.  Until we can find a way around Relativity, we'll have to content ourselves with looking up into the night sky and saying, "They're out there, even if we can never get to have a conversation with them."

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A ripple in space-time

I find it nothing short of mind-boggling how far we've come in creating equipment with which to explore the cosmos.

The first telescope was invented in 1608, and it was so crude (mostly with respect to the clarity, resolution, and magnification of the lenses) that it accomplished little more than make the blurry bits look bigger.  For example, Galileo used it to see Saturn's rings in 1610, but to him they looked like "handles" -- it took another half-century for the telescope to improve enough to allow Christiaan Huygens to see that they were actually full rings encircling the planet.

Not long after that, Isaac Newton invented the reflecting telescope, substituting parabolic mirrors for lenses, allowing for a much shorter tube length (and thus easier alignment).  The equipment gradually grew in power and resolution, and we were able to peer farther and farther out into space with increasing clarity.

Then, a little before 1900, things exploded.

In 1887, Albert Michelson invented the interferometer, which used a property of light to analyze the motion of the Earth through space, and which led directly to Albert Einstein's Theories of Relativity.  The idea here is that you take a beam of light, split off part of it, and reflect that split part at right angles to the original beam; then you bounce both pieces back so they recombine after traveling equal distances.  At that point you should see positive interference -- the wave crests and troughs should all still be "in phase" (i.e. lined up).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Krishnavedala, Michelson interferometer with labels, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Michelson and his colleague Edward Morley used the interferometer to test a model that had been used to explain the wave nature of light -- the "luminiferous aether."  The idea here is that if light is a wave, something had to be waving -- just as water molecules move in a water wave, air molecules move in a sound wave, and so on.  When light goes through a vacuum, what, exactly, is waving?  Because it was impossible for people to imagine how a wave could travel through a complete vacuum, it was suggested that space wasn't a complete vacuum -- that there is some kind of stuff (the aether) filling it, and it is through this medium that light propagates in space.

Because the interferometer involved beams of light traveling at right angles, Michelson and Morley surmised that this meant they were moving at different speeds through the aether because of the Earth's motion around the Sun.  To take the simplest configuration, if you place the device so that one beam is parallel to the direction of the Earth's motion and the other perpendicular to it, the parallel one would be dragged back by the aether on the way out and propelled faster on the way back (in the fashion of a boat first moving upriver, then turning around and going downriver).  The perpendicular one, on the other hand, would be deflected slightly to the side (like a boat moving cross-current).  In that case, it was possible to calculate exactly how out of phase the two beams would be with each other by the time they recombined at the detector.  You should see an interference pattern -- the two waves would partially reinforce each other and partially cancel each other out, creating a pattern of stripes.

Interference between two separate waves, the green one moving to the right and the blue one moving to the left -- the red wave is what you'd see as the waves pass through each other, with the peaks and troughs alternately adding to and subtracting from each other. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lookangmany thanks to author of original simulation = Wolfgang Christian and Francisco Esquembre author of Easy Java Simulation = Francisco Esquembre, Waventerference, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In fact, they didn't see an interference pattern -- the two beams were still completely in phase when they recombined -- which proved that the luminiferous aether didn't exist, and there was no "aether drag" phenomenon as the Earth moved through space.  It left unsolved the original question -- "what's waving when light moves through a vacuum? -- until Albert Einstein added the electromagnetic theories of James Clerk Maxwell to light apparently having an invariant speed regardless of how fast you're traveling to completely upend physics with his Special Theory of Relativity.

All this is just a lead-up to looking at how far we've come since then.  Because it's a twist on the Michelson-Morley interferometer that is currently being used to test a prediction of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity -- the existence of gravitational waves.  The General Theory, you'll recall, says that space-time is like a three-dimensional fabric that can be stretched and compressed by the presence of massive objects -- that, in fact, is what gravity is, a deformation of space-time that's a little like what happens when you put a bowling ball on a trampoline.  Objects are deflected toward a massive object not because there's a literal pull being exerted, but because they're following the lines of curved space-time they're passing through (picture rolling a marble on the aforementioned trampoline and you'll get the picture -- the marble might appear to be attracted to the bowling ball, but it's just following the curves of the trampoline it's rolling on).

So the General Theory states that if you have massive objects moving at a high velocity, they should create waves in space-time that would propagate outward at the speed of light.  Those waves would be really small, unless you're talking about very large masses moving very fast -- such as two black holes orbiting each other.  Here's a rather contrived way to picture it:  Take a barbell, and attach it at the center of the bar to a powerful motor that spins it rapidly.  Lower it into a pond so that the weights are sweeping in circles across the surface.  The rippling waves created would spread out across the pond -- those are what gravitational waves of two orbiting black holes do to the fabric of space-time.

The problem is, the waves are incredibly feeble.  Gravity, although it seems powerful, is by far the weakest force; in fact, it's about 10^40 times weaker than the next strongest force (electromagnetism).  (That's a factor of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, if you don't like scientific notation,)  Consider that a weak magnet can pick up a paperclip -- overcoming the gravitational pull on the clip exerted by the entire planet.

So how in the hell could you detect something that weak, from so far away?

Enter LIGO -- the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Observatories, in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington.  The idea here is precisely the same as the Michelson-Morley interferometer I described earlier, except instead of some mysterious aether, they're looking for gravitational waves sweeping past the Earth from a billion light years away.  What General Relativity predicts is that as those waves roll past, the tube of the device that's parallel to the wave should compress a little, while the one perpendicular would be unaffected (well, it'd shrink a little in diameter, but that wouldn't affect the experiment).  Since the two laser beams would for an instant be traveling different distances, they'd momentarily go out of phase, and you'd pick up an interference pattern.

And it worked.  In 2015, gravitational waves were detected, just as Einstein predicted.  They've now been seen over ninety times.

I've said before that just about every time I talk about astrophysics, I should just write "Einstein wins again!" and call it good.  (Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, whose wonderful YouTube channel Science Without the Gobbledygook is a must-watch, just pops a photo up on the screen of Einstein sticking his tongue out every time his name comes up, and says, "Yeah, that guy again.")  Relativity, as bizarre as some of its predictions are, has passed every single test.  And now, the physicists are using LIGO to look for another prediction of Relativity -- that as gravitational waves pass other massive objects, the waves themselves will be deflected -- just as the waves in the pond would be if there was rock protruding above the surface of the water.  That deflection should be detectable from Earth, even though it's even more feeble than the original wave.

I bet they'll find it, too.  We've come light years from the crude telescopes of the seventeenth century -- in only four hundred years, we've progressed from blurry glimpses of large objects in our own Solar System to observing the faint traces of phenomena that occurred (to borrow a phrase) long ago in a galaxy far, far away.  With the speed our equipment is improving, you have to wonder what refinements we'd see a hundred years from now -- or even a decade.

What new wonders will open up before us?  Galileo and Huygens and the rest, I think, would be thrilled to see what they started -- and where it led.

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