Dreaming the past

My novel In the Midst of Lions opens with a character named Mary Hansard -- an ordinary forty-something high school physics teacher -- suddenly realizing she can see the future.

More than that, really; she now has no reliable way of telling the future from the past.  She "remembers" both of them, and if she has no external context by which to decide, she can't tell if what's in her mind occurred in the past or will occur in the future.  Eventually, she realizes that the division of the passage of time she'd always considered real and inviolable has changed.  Instead of past, present, and future, there are now only two divisions: present and not-present.  Here's how she comes to see things:

In the past two months, it felt like the universe had changed shape.  The linear slow march of time was clean gone, and what was left was a block that was unalterable, the people and events in it frozen in place like butterflies in amber.  Her own position in it had become as observer rather than participant.  She could see a wedge of the block, extending back into her distant past and forward into her all-too-short future.  Anything outside that wedge was invisible...  She found that it completely dissolved her anxiety about what might happen next.  Being not-present, the future couldn’t hurt her.  If pain lay ahead of her, it was as removed from her as her memories of a broken arm when she was twelve.  Neither one had any impact on the present as it slowly glided along, a moving flashlight beam following her footsteps through the wrecked cityscape.

 I found myself thinking about Mary and her peculiar forwards-and-backwards perception while I was reading physicist Sean Carroll's wonderful and mind-blowing book From Eternity to Here: A Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, which looks at the puzzling conundrum of what physicists call time's arrow -- why, when virtually all physical laws are time-reversible, there is a clear directionality to our perceptions of the universe.  A classic example is the motion of billiard balls on a table.  Each ball's individual motion is completely time-reversible (at least if you discount friction with the table); if you filmed a ball rolling and bouncing off a bumper, then ran the recording backwards, it would be impossible to tell which was the original video and which was the reversed one.  The laws of motion make no differentiation between time running forward and time running backward.

But.

If you played a video of the initial break of the balls at the beginning of the game, then ran the recording backwards -- showing the balls rolling around and after a moment, assembling themselves back into a perfect triangle -- it would be blatantly obvious which was the reversed video.  The difference, Carroll explains, is entropy, which is a measure of the number of possible ways a system can exist and be indistinguishable on the macro level.  What I mean by this is that the racked balls are in a low-entropy state; there aren't that many ways you can assemble fifteen balls into a perfect equilateral triangle.  On the other hand, after the break, with the balls scattered around the table seemingly at random -- there are nearly an infinite number of ways you can have the balls arranged that would be more or less indistinguishable, in the sense that any of them would be equally likely to occur following the break.  Given photographs of thousands of different positions, not even Commander Data could determine which one was the pic taken immediately after the balls stopped moving.

Sure, it's possible you could get all the balls rolling in such a way that they would come to rest reassembled into a perfect triangle.  It's just extremely unlikely.  The increase in entropy, it seems, is based on what will probably happen.  There are so many high-entropy states and so few low-entropy states that if you start with a low-entropy arrangement, the chances are it will evolve over time into a high-entropy one.  The result is that it is (very) strongly statistically favored that entropy increases over time.  

The Arrow of Time by artist benpva16 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 license: creativecommons.org/licenses/b…]

The part of the book that I am still trying to parse is chapter nine, "Information and Life," where he ties the physical arrow of time (an example of which I described above) with the psychological arrow of time.  Why can't we all do what Mary Hansard can do -- see the past and future both -- if the only thing that keeps us knowing which way is forward and which way is backward is the probability of a state's evolution?  After all, there are plenty of cases where entropy can locally go down; a seed growing into a tree, for example.  (This only occurs because of a constant input of energy; contrary to what creationists would have you believe, the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't disprove evolution, because living things are open systems and require an energy source.  Turn off the Sun, and entropy would increase fast.)

So if entropy actually explains the psychological arrow of time, why can I remember events where entropy went down -- such as yesterday, when I took a lump of clay and fashioned it into a sculpture?

Carroll's explanation kind of made my mind blow up.  He says that our memories themselves aren't real reflections of the past; they're a state of objects in our environment and neural firings in our brain in the present that we then assemble into a picture of what we think the past was, based on our assumption that entropy was lower in the past than it is now.  He writes:

So let's imagine you have in your possession something you think of as a reliable record of the past: for example, a photograph taken of your tenth birthday party.  You might say to yourself, "I can be confident that I was wearing a red shirt at my tenth birthday party, because this photograph of that event shows me wearing a red shirt."...

[Is] the present macrostate including the photo... enough to conclude with confidence that we were really wearing a red shirt at our tenth birthday party?

Not even close.  We tend to think that [it is], without really worrying about the details too much as we get through our lives.  Roughly speaking, we figure that a photograph like that is a highly specific arrangement of its constituent molecules.  (Likewise for a memory in our brain of the same event.)  It's not as if those molecules are just going to randomly assemble themselves into the form of that particular photo -- that's astronomically unlikely.  If, however, there really was an event in the past corresponding to the image portrayed in the photo, and someone was there with a camera, then the existence of the photo becomes relatively likely.  It's therefore very reasonable to conclude that the birthday party really did happen in the way seen in the photo.

All of those statements are reasonable, but the problem is that they are not nearly enough to justify the final conclusion...  Yes, the photograph is a very specific and unlikely arrangement of molecules.  However, the story we are telling to "explain" it -- an elaborate reconstruction of the past, involving birthday parties and cameras and photographs surviving essentially undisturbed to the present day -- is even less likely than the photo all by itself...

Think of it this way: You would never think to appeal to some elaborate story in the future to explain the existence of a particular artifact in the present.  If we ask about the future of our birthday photo, we might have some plans to frame it or whatnot, but we'll have to admit to a great deal of uncertainty -- we could lose it, it could fall into a puddle and decay, or it could burn in a fire.  Those are all perfectly plausible extrapolations of the present state into the future, even with the specific anchor point provided by the photo here in the present.  So why are we so confident about what the photo implies concerning the past?

The answer, he says, is that we're relying on probability and the likelihood that the past had lower entropy -- in other words, that the photo didn't come from some random collision of molecules, just as our surmise about the billiard balls' past came from the fact that a perfect triangular arrangement is way less likely than a random one.  All we have, Carroll says, is our knowledge of the present; everything else is an inference.  In every present moment, our reconstruction of the past is a dream, pieced together using whatever we're experiencing at the time.

So maybe we're not as different from Mary Hansard, with her moving flashlight beam gliding along and spotlighting the present, as I'd thought.

Mind = blown.

I'm still not completely convinced I'm understanding all the subtleties in Carroll's arguments, but I get enough of it that I've been thinking about it ever since I put the book down.  But in any case, I'd better wrap this up, because...

... I'm running short on time.

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The phantom touch illusion

It seems like every time researchers look further into our sensory-perceptive systems, we have another hole punched in our certainty that what we think we're perceiving is actually real.

We've looked at optical illusions -- and the fact that dogs fall for 'em, too.  We've considered two kinds of auditory illusions, the postdictive effect and the McGurk effect.  Sometimes we see patterns of motion in still objects -- and illusory "impossible" motion that our brains just can't figure out.  A rather simple protocol convinced test subjects their hands had turned to stone.  Stimulating a particular clump of neurons in the brain made patients see the doctor's face as melting.  We can even be tricked into feeling like we're controlling a second body, that just happens to be invisible.

As eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "The human brain is rife with ways of getting it wrong."  Honestly, at this point it's a wonder we trust anything we perceive -- and yet you still hear people say "I saw it with my own eyes" as if that somehow carried any weight at all.  Add to that all the problems with the reliability of memory, and you have to ask why eyewitness accounts are still considered the gold standard of evidence.

If you needed more proof of this, take a look at some research that came out last week from Ruhr-Universität Bochum into what happens when a person watches a virtual-reality avatar of their own body.  Participants were suited up in VR gear, and after a period of acclimation -- during which they got used to their avatar's arms and hands moving as their own did -- they were instructed to use a virtual representation of a stick to touch their avatar's hand.  Nearly all of the subjects reported feeling a sensation of touch, or at least a tingling, at the spot the virtual stick appeared to touch.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Samuel Zeller samuelzeller, VR (Unsplash VK284NKoAVU), CC0 1.0]

The researchers decided to check and see if the sensation occurred simply by drawing awareness to the hand, so they did the same thing only using a virtual laser pointer -- and no feeling of touch occurred.

Apparently all it took was convincing the subjects they were being touched to stimulate the sensation itself.

"The phantom touch illusion also occurs when the subjects touched parts of their bodies that were not visible in virtual reality," said study co-author Marita Metzler.  "This suggests that human perception and body sensation are not only based on vision, but on a complex combination of many sensory perceptions and the internal representation of our body."

The whole thing brings to mind a conversation I had with an acquaintance, a Ph.D. in philosophy, some years ago about the impossibility of proving materialism.  I'd always considered myself a hard-nosed materialist, but her stance was that no one could prove the external world was real.  I shot back with a snarky, "Well, that works until someone throws a rock at your head.  Hard to deny the rock isn't real after that."  She patiently responded, "No.  What is real are the sensations you experience -- the shock, the pain, the adrenaline rush.  Possibly a period of loss of consciousness.  You're still locked inside your own skull, and the only thing you have access to are your own thoughts and feelings.  Those are all you can be certain are real experiences -- and even those might well be false or misleading."

Well, it was a fair knockout (pun intended), and I still haven't really come up with a rejoinder.  Not that this is surprising; philosophers have been discussing the whole materialism vs. idealism thing for centuries, and haven't really settled it to anyone's satisfaction.  And since the time of that argument, I've found more and more evidence that we experience through our sensory-perceptive apparatus only the barest fraction of what's out there -- what neuroscientist David Eagleman calls our umwelt -- and even that part, we see inaccurately.

Kind of humbling, isn't it?  Think about that next time someone starts acting so all-fired certain about their own perceptions, memories, experiences, and opinions.  The more you know, they more you should realize that none of us should be sure of anything.

But after all, doubt isn't a bad place to start.  I'll end as I did yesterday, with a quote from the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself; and you are the easiest person to fool."

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A light into shadow

I think my love of science comes from the joy of unlocking one at a time the pieces of the universe that were mysteries.  It's why I'm such a dilettante -- someone who, as an acquaintance once described me, has knowledge a light year across and an inch deep.  I find it all fascinating.  I was never able to focus on one thing long enough to really become an expert.  I'd start in one direction, but in short order I'd say, "Oh, look, something shiny!" and take off on some unrelated tangent.

I may not have much in the way of academic credentials, but it makes me a force to be reckoned with when playing Trivial Pursuit.

It's okay, really.  I enjoy the fact that my brain makes up for in breadth what it lacks in depth.  Which is why last week we had posts about astronomy, geology, glaciology, paleontology, and cosmology, and today we're on to archaeology.

Because of my love of mysteries, I've always been drawn to trying to understand civilizations whose relics are scanty or poorly-understood.  The Incas, Aztecs, and Mayas.  The ancestors of the First Nations of North America.  The Songhai Empire and the kingdoms of Benin, Congo, and Aksum in Africa.  The ancient history of Southeast Asia and Australia.  And while European history is generally considered to be well-studied and accessible, that's because most of the focus is on the Romans, Greeks, and Norse, who left extensive written records.  The Celts, Slavs, and the southern Germanic tribes, for whom we have far fewer extant records (and many of those were penned by conquering cultures which took few pains to represent them fairly or accurately), have an ancient history that is largely lost to the shadows of time.

Or... maybe not entirely lost.

Archaeologists are now using sophisticated technological tools to discern traces of long-gone settlements, recovering traces of civilizations that have been up till now complete ciphers.  The reason this comes up is a study by a team from University College Dublin, working with colleagues in Serbia and Slovenia, which used aerial photography to piece together the remnants of 3,500 year old settlements in the southern Carpathian Basin -- and found that the area was as thickly-settled as many of the far better known cultures who were at their height around the same time.

"Some of the largest sites, we call these mega-forts, have been known for a few years now, such as Gradište Iđoš, Csanádpalota, Sântana or the mind-blowing Corneşti Iarcuri enclosed by thirty-three kilometers of ditches and eclipsing in size the contemporary citadels and fortifications of the Hittites, Mycenaeans or Egyptians,” said UCD archaeologist Barry Molloy, who led the study.  "What is new, however, is finding that these massive sites did not stand alone, they were part of a dense network of closely related and codependent communities.  At their peak, the people living within this lower Pannonian network of sites must have numbered into the tens of thousands...  Uniquely for prehistoric Europe, we are able to do more than identify the location of a few sites using satellite imagery but have been able to define an entire settled landscape, complete with maps of the size and layout of sites, even down to the locations of people’s homes within them. This really gives an unprecedented view of how these Bronze Age people lived with each other and their many neighbors."

One of the circular hill-forts discovered through analysis of aerial photographs

Of course, this sets the imagination running.  Like the Australian fossilized bird footprints we looked at yesterday, these remnants only tell you so much, in this case tantalizing clues about how their cities were laid out, coupled with hypothesizing the purposes of buildings for which we only have traces of foundations.  But deeper information about the societies who lived there, their political and social structure, religious beliefs, and languages -- the relics we have are silent on all of that.  Who these people were, we can only speculate.

Still, it's a remarkable achievement.  "1200 BC was a striking turning point in Old World prehistory, with kingdoms, empires, cities, and whole societies collapsing within a few decades throughout a vast area of southwest Asia, north Africa, and southern Europe," Molloy said.  "It is fascinating to discover these new polities and to see how they were related to well-known influential societies yet sobering to see how they ultimately suffered a similar fate in wave of crises that struck this wider region."

And for me, looking at it from the outside, it's wonderful to cast some light into the shadows of a culture that heretofore was completely mysterious.  Knowing them, even if only a little, is thrilling.  I'll end with a quote from the inimitable Richard Feynman, from his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out:

Fall in love with some activity, and do it!  Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.  Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best.  Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do.

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Birds down under

I've been an avid birdwatcher for many years, and have been fortunate enough to travel to some amazingly cool places in search of avifauna.  Besides exploring my own country, I've been to Canada (several times), Belize (twice), Ecuador (twice), Iceland (twice), England (twice), Scotland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Malaysia.

One place I've never been, though, is Australia, which is a shame because it's got some incredible animals.  And despite a pretty well-deserved reputation for having far more than their fair share of wildlife that's actively trying to kill you, most tourists come back from trips to Australia alive and with all their limbs still attached in the right places.

The main reason for Australia's unique ecosystems is that it's been isolated for a very long time.  During the breakup of Pangaea, the northern part (Laurasia, made up of what is now Europe, North America, and most of Asia) separated from the southern part (Gondwanaland, made up of what is now Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia, and India), something on the order of 180 million years ago.  The other pieces gradually pulled apart as rifting occured, but Australia remained attached to Antarctica until around thirty million years ago.  At that point, the whole thing had a fairly temperate climate, but when the Tasman Gateway opened up during the Oligocene Period, it allowed the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, isolating and cooling Antarctica and resulting in the extinction of nearly all of its native species.  Australia, now separate, began to drift northward, gradually warming as it went, and carrying with it a completely unique suite of animals and plants.

The reason all this comes up is a sharp-eyed Australian loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link to a news story about a recent discovery by a dedicated amateur fossil hunter and birdwatcher, Melissa Lowery, who was looking for fossils on the Bass Coast of Victoria and stumbled upon something extraordinary -- some 125 million year old bird footprints.

Lowery's bird footprints [Image by photographer Rob French, Museums Victoria]

At that point, the separation of Australia and Antarctica was some 65 million years in the future, the sauropod dinosaurs were still the dominant animal group, and Victoria itself was somewhere near the South Pole.  Lowery's find led to a full-scale scientific investigation of the area, and uncovered a great many more bird tracks, including some with ten-centimeter-long toes.  Also in the area were the footprints of dozens of kinds of non-avian dinosaurs.

"Most of the bird tracks and body fossils dating back to the Early Cretaceous are from the Northern Hemisphere, particularly from Asia," said Anthony Martin, of Emory University, who led the study.  "Our discovery shows that there were many birds, and a variety of them, near the South Pole about 125 million years ago."

Of course, being a birdwatcher, I'm intensely curious as to what these birds looked like, but there's only so much you can tell from a footprint, or even fossilized bones.  It's simultaneously intriguing and frustrating to think about the fact that these animals -- and all the other animals and plants that lived alongside them -- had every bit of the diversity, all the curious and wonderful and beautiful adaptations and behaviors, that our modern wildlife does.

Imagine what it would be like to transport yourself back to Australia in the early Cretaceous, and witness all of that with your own eyes and ears.  (With, of course, a guarantee of coming back alive and with all your limbs still attached in the right places.  Back then, Australia was a rougher place than it is now.)

So thanks to the reader who sent me the link -- it's renewed my desire to visit Australia.  If I can't see the amazing birds they had 125 million years ago, at least I can have a look through my binoculars at some of the ones they have today.

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Strange new worlds

Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in January of 1992, astronomers have identified over 5,500 of them, with nearly a thousand of the systems analyzed having more than one detected planet.  It now appears that at least one of the variables in the Drake equation -- f_p, the fraction of stars that have planets -- is far higher than anyone might have expected. 

What has come as an additional surprise is how varied these worlds are.  Having grown up on a steady diet of Lost in Space, Star Trek, and Star Wars, I kind of had exoplanets pictured as mostly Earth-like, with lots of big rocks and maybe an odd-colored sky:

The truth is, every new one we find holds some sort of surprise.  Some of the odder ones are:

• TrES-2b, which holds the record as the least-reflective planet yet discovered.  It's darker than a charcoal briquet.  This led some people to conclude that it's made of dark matter, something I dealt with here at Skeptophilia a while back.  (tl:dr -- it's not.)
• CoRoT-7b, one of the hottest exoplanets known.  Its composition and size are thought to be fairly Earth-like, but it orbits its star so closely that it has a twenty-day orbital period and surface temperatures around 3000 C.  This means that it is likely to be completely liquid, and experience rain made of molten iron and magnesium.
• 55 Cancri e, nicknamed the "diamond planet."  Another "hot super-Earth," this one is thought to be carbon rich, and that because of the heat and pressure, much of the carbon could be in the form of diamonds.  (Don't tell Dr. Smith.)
• PSR J1719−1438, a planet orbiting a pulsar (the collapsed, rapidly rotating core of a giant star).  It has one of the fastest rates of revolution of any orbiting object known, circling its host star in only 2.17 hours.
• V1400 Centauri, a planet with rings that are two hundred times wider than the rings of Saturn.  In fact, they dwarf the planet itself -- the whole thing looks a bit like a pea in the middle of a dinner plate.

The reason all this comes up is that we just had a new addition to the "weird exoplanet" list thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope.  It's called WASP-107b, and it has a number of bizarre characteristics.  First, it is "fluffy" -- that's actually how the astronomers describe it -- having one of the lowest overall densities of any exoplanet known.  It has about the mass of Neptune, but a diameter closer to that of Jupiter.

Second, it has a retrograde orbit -- it moves the opposite direction from the rotation of its host star and the revolution of the rest of the planets in the system.  Its orbit is highly eccentric (elliptical), and is actually tipped 118 degrees away from the ecliptic (the plane of revolution of the rest of the system).  Astrophysicists believe that it got this way because of interaction with the much more massive WASP-107c, but the truth is, they've never seen anything like it, so that's a surmise.

The atmosphere has high quantities of water vapor -- kept gaseous by the high temperatures (the upper atmosphere has an average temperature of 500 C) -- and sulfur dioxide.  A bigger surprise was that the "highly dynamic atmosphere" (scientist-speak for "wind speeds that would blow your ass into the middle of next week") creates clouds of superheated silicate sand.  The overall result is that being on WASP-107b would be like living inside a permanent pyroclastic flow.

"The fact that we see these sand clouds high up in the atmosphere must mean that the sand rain droplets evaporate in deeper, very hot layers and the resulting silicate vapor is efficiently moved back up, where they recondense to form silicate clouds once more," said study co-author Michiel Min.  "This is very similar to the water vapor and cloud cycle on our own Earth but with droplets made of sand."

"JWST enables a deep atmospheric characterization of an exoplanet that does not have any counterpart in our Solar System," added study lead author Achrène Dyrek.  "We are unravelling new worlds."

What's shocking is how bizarre some of these new worlds are.  It was natural enough to look at the planets in our own Solar System and assume that they kind of ran the gamut of planetary types -- thus the predominance of rocky worlds and gas giants with zillions of moons that you find in early science fiction.  What continues to astonish is just how wrong that was.  Wherever we look, we see an incredible variety of planets and star systems, and the great likelihood is that despite how many we've found, we've only scratched the surface.

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The non-mystery of the Dendera Light

One of the things that has always struck me about woo-woo types is how little it takes to get them going.  I suppose when you've already decided what you believe, the amount of evidence you require to support that belief can asymptotically approach zero without changing your stance one iota.

I ran into a particularly good example of that yesterday -- the Dendera Light.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Olaf Tausch, Dendera Krypta 48 (cropped), CC BY 3.0]

The Dendera Light is a motif found in the carvings in the Temple of Hathor in Dendera, Egypt.  The design is of a giant snake emerging from a lotus flower.  It appears in at least six different places, accompanied by texts that are all rather similar -- so its meaning is fairly well understood.  It is part of the creation myth, showing the god Harsomtus (an incarnation of Horus, in the form of a snake) being born and going out into the world.  This is supported by the inscriptions, one version of which reads:

Speaking the words of Harsomtus, the great God, who dwells in Dendera, who is in the arms of the first in the night-barge, sublime snake, whose Chentj-statue carries Heh [the personification of eternity], whose crew carries in holiness his perfection, whose Ba [spirit] caused Hathor to appear in the sky, whose figure is revered by his followers, who is unique, encircled by his forehead-snake, with countless names on the top of Chui-en-hesen, the symbol of power of Ra in the land of Atum, the father of the Gods, who created everything.

The Dendera Light motif almost always appears on lists with names like "Ten Unexplained Mysteries From Ancient Egypt" despite the fact that except insofar as we still have a fairly fragmentary understanding of Egyptian mythology, beliefs, and practices, it's not very mysterious at all.

Why?

First, someone noticed that the oval container (or halo) surrounding the snake was the same basic shape as a Crookes tube, an early version of the cathode-ray tube invented by British physicist William Crookes in 1870:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons D-Kuru, Crookes tube two views, CC BY-SA 3.0 AT]

The second thing was a passing comment by British astronomer and polymath Joseph Norman Lockyer, who had gone to Egypt to investigate the alignment of ancient temples and monuments with astronomical objects.  He and a colleague noticed the absence of soot deposits in the interior of some of the temples -- something you'd expect with the use of torches or oil lamps -- and the colleague jokingly said that this could be explained if the ancient Egyptians had electric lights.  Lockyer, clearly recognizing that it was a joke, mentioned it to a friend, and that was all it took.

In a classic example of adding two and two and getting 318, we have "vaguely oval shape in a religious motif" plus "humorous comment about the lack of soot in Egyptian temples" equaling "the ancient Egyptians had high technology, including electricity and who-the-hell-knows what else."

Therefore, of course, you-know-who had to be involved:

Needless to say, this claim has actual archaeologists tearing their hair out.  Kenneth Feder, professor of archaeology at Central Connecticut State University, who is a vocal debunker of ancient aliens claims and the like (he is the author of The Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology) points out correctly that if the ancient Egyptians had electricity and light bulbs, it's a little odd that we've never found a single trace of a wire, socket, filament, generator, or battery -- not so much as a glass shard from a broken bulb.

I get that the ancient Egyptian culture is fascinating and, in one sense, mysterious.  As I mentioned earlier, our understanding of how these people lived and what they believed is incomplete at best.  The monuments and temples and relics we still have today are beautiful and evocative.

But none of that is an excuse for making shit up.

So let's keep a sense of perspective, here.  The inscriptions and designs we don't yet understand do not imply that ancient aliens had anything to do with it.  "We don't yet understand" means only one thing; "we don't yet understand."

And as far as the Dendera Light, I'm afraid that's where we have to leave it.

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When the volcano blows

It's a point I've made here more than once; if you're trying to convince someone of something, your argument is not made stronger by lying about it.

The reason this comes up today is the horrible situation in Iceland, where (at the time of this writing) the people of the little village of Grindavík on the south coast of the Reykjanes Peninsula, due south of the capital city of Reykjavík, have been evacuated and are waiting for a volcanic eruption that stands a good chance of destroying the town completely.  The buildings and roads in the town have already sustained heavy damage from nearly continuous earthquakes, and the latest estimate is that there are places where the magma is only five hundred meters below the surface.  An eruption is nearly certain -- how extensive it will be is unknown.  (The village is only a few kilometers away from Fagradallsfjall, the volcano I got to see erupting when I visited Iceland in 2022.)

A photograph I took in August 2022

This is certainly awful.  But the whole situation is made worse because every time there's a volcanic eruption, it brings the climate change deniers howling from the dark corners where they hide, claiming that (as one of them put it) "the Climate Scammers conveniently ignore that a single volcanic eruption puts hundreds of times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than cars do.  Climate ups and downs happen all the time, and natural processes account for nearly all of it.  Wake up!"

Which would be a good argument if anything about it was true.

The "hundreds of times more" statistic is about the right factor -- but the inequality points the other direction.  Here's the actual situation, as per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

You might not spot the volcanic carbon dioxide output on this graph right away, because it's the light blue line hugging the x-axis.  In fact, as Mark Gongloff points out, writing for Bloomberg, the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens spewed ten million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which seems like a lot until you find out that our burning of fossil fuels does that every two and a half hours.  Geologists estimate that even a cataclysmic eruption like the Yellowstone Supervolcano emitted on the order of thirty gigatons of carbon dioxide -- about what our fossil fuel use accomplishes every single year.

So not only are the climate change deniers coldly and callously capitalizing on the horrible situation unfolding in Iceland, they're doing so by crafting outrageous lies about it.

The fact that this claim is wildly wrong has not stopped it from being circulated all over the place by people who would very much like it if we didn't have to face head-on what we're currently doing to the planet we live on.  I get it; it's a hard conversation to have.  I have an electric car and solar panels and solar hot water, but even so, I very much live an affluent First-World lifestyle, with all that comes along with it.  I'm better situated than most if it came to a serious cutback in fossil fuel use, and it still would force me and my family into some difficult changes.

But we can't keep going as we are.  If this past year's insane weather didn't convince you of that fact, you're being willfully blind.

And the whole thing is not helped by circulating wildly wrong information whose sole intent is to lull everyone into further inaction.  I have no doubt that at least some of the people who are posting this stuff don't know it's wrong, and are guilty of the rather common sin of neglecting to fact-check.  But the ones who write these posts and create these memes -- they know it's a lie, and they do it anyway.

Which is somewhere beyond reprehensible.

So please, please, please... if you see someone posting this claim, tell them they're wrong.  Link this blog post if you like, or (better still) send them to the NOAA and USGS sites that lay the data out in unarguable form.  Because this is a falsehood with serious repercussions -- like endangering the long-term habitability of our own home world.

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