A piece of the puzzle

Given how thoroughly explored the world seems to be, it's easy to assume that we've found pretty much everything there is to be found.  Yeah, we continue to stumble across small, obscure, well-hidden stuff -- frog species living in the deep parts of the rain forest, fossils buried under meters of sedimentary rock, a cache of flint tools out in the middle of the steppe.  That sort of thing.

The fact that sometimes we find something big and flashy sitting, as it were, right under our noses should give everyone hope that we are far from understanding everything there is to understand, and that we're not yet down to the level of simply cleaning up the minuscule details.

The latest example of this continues along the archaeological path we've been following for the past week or so, and looks at the discovery of a huge intact mosaic, made over two millennia ago, in Rome.  Not just in Rome, but on Palatine Hill, surely one of the best-studied, most thoroughly excavated historical sites in the world.

The mosaic, which has been described as "a jewel" by archaeologists, is estimated to be about 2,300 years old.  It was constructed of a variety of materials, including chips of marble and travertine, shells, pearls, coral, and pieces of a rare and expensive blue-green glass paste thought to have been imported from Alexandria, Egypt.  (The latter, Egyptian blue faience, is a semi-vitrified, or sintered, opaque quartz material colored with calcium copper silicate -- the exact recipe for which was a closely-guarded secret known only to a handful of master artisans.)

So whoever commissioned the mosaic -- at this point, unknown -- had money to burn.  The design appears to commemorate land and naval victories that were probably funded (if not actively led) by the project's patron.  There are also intricate decorative motifs, and fanciful representations of mythical creatures, including sea monsters swallowing enemy ships.  The wall holding the mosaic is thought to have been part of a large, ornate banquet hall.

A detail of the Palatine Hill mosaic [Image courtesy of photographer Emanuele Antonio Minerva]

“This banquet hall, which measures 25 square meters (270 square feet), is just one space within a domus (the Latin word for house) spread on several floors," said lead researcher Alfonsina Russo, head of Rome's Colosseum Archaeological Park.  "In ancient times, when powerful noble families inhabited the Palatine Hill, it was customary to use rich decorative elements as a symbol to show-off opulence and high social rank...  We have also found lead pipes embedded within the decorated walls, built to carry water inside basins or to make fountains spout to create water games."

Further excavation into the site might not only turn up more artifacts, but could reveal who had the structure built -- likely a Roman senator.  "The person was so rich they could afford to import such precious elements from across the empire to decorate this mansion," Russo said.  "We have found nothing so far to shed light on their identity, but we believe more research might enable us to pinpoint the noble family."

It will be fascinating to see what else the researchers find out about this site, occupied by a fabulously wealthy Roman at the height of the Roman Republic.  (When this was built -- if estimates of its age are correct -- the Empire was still in the future; the first Roman Emperor, Octavian/Augustus, was born in 63 B.C.E., at which point this mosaic would already have been over two hundred years old.)

So this should provide some incentive for people to keep looking.  We are far from finding everything there is to find, even here on the Earth's surface, much less out in space.  And whatever new bits we come across -- like this mosaic, hidden beneath one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world -- will add one more piece to the puzzle of the complex and beautiful universe in which we live.

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Walkabout

A couple of days ago, a long-time reader of (and frequent contributor of topics for) Skeptophilia sent me an email saying "Time to get your Archaeo-Geek excited!", with a link to a study about archaeological finds in Australia.  I was really confused at first because I read "Geek" as "Greek" and was puzzled about how there could be an ancient Greek settlement in Australia. 

I need new glasses.

Anyhow, once I got that sorted, I found that the actual research was pretty amazing.  A team of archaeologists led by Kasih Norman of Griffith University has discovered artifacts dating back to the Late Pleistocene Epoch -- on the order of twenty thousand years ago -- indicating a large human population living in a thriving ecosystem, with rolling hills and a large freshwater lake, all of which are now at the bottom of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

The authors write:

The submerged Northwest Shelf of Sahul (the combined landmass of Australia and New Guinea at times of lower sea level) was a vast area of land in the Late Pleistocene that connected the Australian regions of the Kimberley and western Arnhem Land during times of lower sea level than today.  The shelf extends >500 km northwest from the modern-day shoreline with a now-submerged landmass of ∼400,000 km2, an area more than 1.6 times larger than the United Kingdom.  The region might have been an area of initial entry for the peopling of Sahul.  Irrespective of the precise locations people used to disperse into Sahul, the Northwest Shelf is adjacent to the oldest known archaeological sites in Australia , and might have been one of the first inhabited landscapes on the continent.  Archaeological evidence for Late Pleistocene use of the continental shelves of Sahul by the First Australians is demonstrated on multiple large islands that are remnant portions of the continental margin, including Barrow Island, Kangaroo Island, Hunter Island, and Minjiwarra (Stradbroke Island).

The distribution of artifacts, which include stone axes, flint tools, and arrowheads, indicate at east two major pulses of settlement, which is cool because it lines up with what we know about the linguistics of the region.  The majority of the indigenous languages of northern and central Australia -- 306 of the 400 recorded native languages -- belong to the Pama-Nyungan family, which is (as a group) a linguistic isolate, related to no other known language group.  The rest are scattered clusters of unrelated languages, indicative of arrivals at different times or from different places, apparently when the Gulf of Carpentaria was mostly dry land and you could walk from New Guinea to Australia without getting your feet wet.

Eventually, of course, as we were coming out of the last ice age, the sea level rose and gradually that block of lowlands filled in from both sides, isolating Australia from the islands to the north and halting the walkabout that allowed for easy settlement.  But at its height, the archaeologists believe the now-submerged region could have been home to between fifty and five hundred thousand people.

"[Sea level rise] likely caused a retreat of human populations, registering as peaks in occupational intensity at archaeological sites," the authors write.  "Those who funneled into an archipelago on the shelf would go on to become the first maritime explorers from Wallacea [what is now the islands of eastern Indonesia], creating a familiar environment for their maritime economies to adapt to the vast terrestrial continent of Sahul."

Further research into the archaeology, topography, and paleoecology of the region is sure to turn up more information about a landscape that has altered dramatically in the last fifteen-thousand-odd years.  It also spurs researchers to look at other regions flooded by sea level rise -- like Doggerland, now beneath the turbulent waters of the North Sea -- perhaps to recover more clues about where and how our distant ancestors lived.

"Now submerged continental margins clearly played an important role in early human expansions across the world," the researchers write.  "The rise in undersea archaeology in Australia will contribute to a growing worldwide picture of early human migration and the impact of climate change on Late Pleistocene human populations."

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Time lapse

Well, the first thing I need to do in today's post is to figure out if I can correct the timestamp, which is clearly wrong.  Hmmm... let's see... no, it won't let me do it.  Okay, then, I'll just have to state for the record that today you should date all of your checks, documents, and correspondence with "December 23, 1724."

What?  How can that be true, you ask?  1724... so, J. S. Bach would still be alive, King George I would just have been crowned king of England, and the USA wouldn't exist for another fifty-odd years?  To which I chuckle gently, and explain: of course that's not what I mean.  You can't just jump backwards in time, that would be ridiculous.  What I'm saying is that the calendar is wrong, not because we've leapt back to the eighteenth century, but because...

... the years between 614 and 911 C.E. did not exist.

Yes, according to the Phantom Time Hypothesis, devised by Hans-Ulrich Niemitz and Heribert Illig, time actually went from the year 613 directly to the year 912.  Any events that occurred during those years, or people who are alleged to have lived then are:

1. legends being misunderstood as reality;
2. misinterpretations of documents that refer to events or people from other time periods; or
3. deliberate fabrications by a bunch of calendar conspirators.

Some of the people who therefore didn't exist are King Harald I Fairhair of Norway, King Alfred the Great of Wessex, all the leaders of the Umayyad Caliphate of the Middle East and North Africa, the writers Alcuin, Caedmon, Li Bai, and Bede... and one of the most famous medieval rulers, Charlemagne.

Why, you might ask, do Niemitz and Illig believe this?  Apparently it's based on hiatuses in historical records (the Early Middle Ages in Europe was a chaotic time, and most of the few records that were written during that time have been lost), coupled with perceived gaps in building in Constantinople.  Niemitz and Illig also believe that the development of religious doctrine in Europe goes into a stall between the seventh and tenth centuries, as does the progress of art, language, and science.  All of these gaps, they say, can be explained if those three centuries didn't exist -- they were inventions of a conspiracy of church fathers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that originated with Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II, and has continued lo unto this very day.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Well, let me see here.  Where do I start?

Interesting, if three centuries fell out of historians' pockets somewhere along the way, that astronomical records (especially records of comets and solar eclipses kept by the Chinese) agree precisely with back-calculations done by present-day astronomers.  The Tang Dynasty -- which coincides almost perfectly with Niemitz and Illig's lost centuries, and which they consider a "Golden Age Myth" -- not only produced art and artifacts, but kept intricate records of observations of events in the sky.  It's a little hard to explain the solar eclipses that occurred during that time, and which line up perfectly with when astronomers know they occurred, if (1) those three centuries never happened, and (2) the Tang Dynasty astronomers were themselves later fabrications.

We also have the problem that this is the period during which Islam spread across the Middle East -- so we're supposed to believe that we jump right from 614 (Muhammad is still alive, but has yet to make his pilgrimage to Mecca) to 911 (the Muslims are in control of territory from southern Spain to Arabia and beyond)?  And I guess they should revoke my master's degree, because the subject of my thesis (the Viking conquest of parts of England and Scotland) occurred during those years... and so is an elaborate fiction, as is the linguistic and archaeological evidence.

Or, maybe I'm one of the conspirators.  I've been accused of that before.

Anyway, this whole hypothesis seems to be a lot of nonsense, and is yet another good example of Ockham's Razor, not to mention the ECREE Principle.  So, you can relax, and cancel any plans to go back and yell at your high school history teachers -- Charlemagne was almost certainly a real person.  As were Alfred the Great and the rest.  Me, I'm glad.  I'm going to have a hard enough time in a couple of weeks remembering to write the correct year on my checks; I don't know what I'd do if I had to remember that it was a whole different century.

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Ghost cities

It will come as no great surprise to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I have a bit of an obsession with considering what the world was like in the past.  Both the historical past and the prehistoric, extremely distant past -- thus my fascination with both archaeology and paleontology.

It's easy to fall into the error of looking around and not realizing how extensively things have changed.  And not just on geological time scales; after all, by now it's pretty much common knowledge (young-Earth creationists excepted) that if you go back far enough, even the continents have shifted their positions dramatically.  But as I found out from an article sent to me by my friend, the wonderful author Gil Miller, there's a place in Kansas where what is now an expanse of widely-separated small towns interspersed with miles of corn and wheat fields was once a thriving metropolis of the Wichita people.

And not that long ago, either.

The Wichita -- in their own language, the Kitikiti'sh -- are a tribe of the central United States related to the Caddo (who live farther south) and the Pawnee (who live farther north).  The languages they speak belong to a language family called Caddoan that is an isolate group, related to no other known languages (or, more accurately, any relationship it might have is undetermined).  All the languages in the family are critically endangered.  The Wichita language itself is effectively extinct; the last native speaker, Doris Jean Lamar-McLemore, died in 2016.

This makes the recent discovery even more staggering (and sad) -- an earthwork fifty meters across that is called a "council circle" (although its actual function is uncertain), part of a network of six such earthworks along an eight-kilometer stretch of the Little Arkansas and Smoky Hill Rivers in central Kansas.  The archaeologists studying the site, part of a team from Dartmouth College, believe that at its height, only four hundred years ago, it may have been part of a thriving group of settlements housing over twenty thousand people, meaning it rivals Cahokia as the largest settlement of First Peoples in what is now the United States.

The site has been called Etzanoa -- the name for it given by a man captured there by the Spanish in the seventeenth century -- but what that name meant, and its etymology in the languages spoken at the time, are both unknown.  

Site of the Etzanoa earthwork [Image courtesy of Jesse Casana]

Because, of course, the apparent prosperity of the inhabitants was not to last.  They were living on land valuable to White settlers for cattle ranching and growing commercial crops, and the Wichita were forced off their land, relocated more than once, and finally ended up on a reservation in Oklahoma, most of them in or near the town of Anadarko.  Like many other Indigenous people, they also fell prey in huge numbers to infectious disease.  As of the last census, there were just under three thousand people who belong to the Wichita tribe.

The current research made use of drones and remote telemetry to locate the site, which was under ranch land and (amazingly) had sustained little damage.  Excavation there is ongoing, and has turned up not only Native items but ones from the Spanish and other European settlers, including -- of course -- bullets.

It's astonishing how fast things have changed -- and in this case, there's a deep sense of tragedy.  A whole thriving society, with their own language and traditions and culture, erased because of greed, entitlement, racism, and the abuse of power.  All we have is the remnants to study, a ghostly trace of a network of cities that once dominated the Great Plains.  It's a poor trade for all the lives and knowledge lost, but at least it's something.

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Nostalgia

I was talking with a friend this past weekend, and the subject of children's television came up.

"It all sucks," he lamented.  "There's nothing around any more that's the quality of what we had when we were growing up."

I certainly see what he was talking about.  In my opinion, the adventures of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are up there in the top ten funniest comedy writing ever (not to mention brilliant animation, incredible voice-overs, and impeccable comic timing).

Classic episodes like "Duck Amuck" and "The Rabbit of Seville" and "Bully for Bugs" still make me howl with laughter even though I've seen them dozens of times.

Another winner was Bullwinkle, which combined completely offbeat, goofy humor with sharp political satire.

The problem is, this kind of nostalgia only works if you've got a really selective memory.  There were some truly horrid children's shows when I was growing up.  One that sticks in my memory, because it not only was terrible but was, to put it bluntly, really fucking weird, was H. R. Pufnstuf.

If you've never seen this show, it's the adventures of an odious little twerp named Jimmy who has a magic talking flute, and somehow ends up in a land where the mayor is a green dinosaur with a Tennessee accent, and most of the characters are wearing full-body costumes supposed to be people, animals, or... pieces of furniture.  Oh, yeah, and the villain -- I shit you not -- is named "Witchiepoo," and is played by an actress named Billie Hayes who evidently was told by the director to pretend someone had made the Wicked Witch of the West drink six cups of espresso.  It also had a really creepy fake laugh-track, so you knew when something funny had happened, because heaven knows there was no other way to tell.  To get a sense of the overall effect, imagine what would have happened if J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a script for Barney and Friends while tripping on acid.

Don't believe me? Take a look at this little excerpt:

The whole thing was dreamed up by Sid and Marty Krofft (the latter, sadly, died just a couple of weeks ago), who also came up with The Banana Splits, which was similar not only in its frenetic, seizure-inducing pacing, but in its psychedelic content:

So I'm not quite buying the "things were so much better back then" argument.  We naturally tend to look at our own past in a sentimental fashion, so a lot of our memories are colored by that.  (Although I do wonder how much of my own sense that the world is a weird and chaotic place was generated by watching shows like H. R. Pufnstuf when I was eight years old.)

On a more serious note, isn't this the same thing that drives the whole MAGA phenomenon?  "Make America Great Again," by returning to... when, exactly?  When was America so great that we'd jump in a time machine and head back there?  The prosperous Fifties -- when minorities could be legally denied their rights as citizens, and queer people couldn't be out without risking their lives?  The Roaring Twenties -- with its viciously-enforced class stratification and reckless economic policy that led directly to the Great Depression?

Even earlier?  No matter where you look, it was all a mixed bag -- as it is now.  There has never been a time that was unalloyed good, and there have been plenty of times in the past when it has been significantly worse than it is now.  Consider, for example, what it was like for your typical feudal peasant.  When we think of medieval times, we tend to picture lords and ladies in fancy dress dancing the galliard, but fail to consider that this represented maybe two percent of the population -- and the other ninety-eight percent spent their lives in backbreaking labor and lived in squalor.

So if I was offered a one-way trip in a time machine, I'd stay put, thank you very much.  If I were forced to choose, my criteria would be practical ones -- some time after the invention of indoor plumbing and general anesthesia.  Call me a stick in the mud, but I'm just fine right here.

And now, I need to take advantage of another wonderful modern invention, which is recorded music. Because if I don't do something to get that stupid fucking "Oranges Poranges" song out of my head, I'm going to lose my marbles.

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Echoes of the ancestors

I recently finished geneticist Bryan Sykes's book, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: A Genetic History of Britain and Ireland, which describes the first exhaustive study of the DNA of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.  From there, I jumped right into The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic, by Robert L. O'Connell, which looks at one of the bloodiest battles on record -- the nearly complete massacre of the Roman army by the Carthaginians at the Battle of Cannae in 216 B.C.E.  That book, like Sykes's, considers the large-scale movements of populations.  The Carthaginians, for example, were mostly displaced Phoenicians who had intermarried with Indigenous North African people, and then occupied what is now Spain, adding in a Celtic strain (the "Celtiberians").

One thing that made my ears perk up in O'Connell's book is that Hannibal, in his march toward Rome, crossed through Transalpine Gaul, picking up large numbers of Gaulish mercenaries along the way, who of course had their own grudge with Rome to settle.  And his path took him right near -- perhaps through -- the valley up in the Alps containing the capital of the Celto-Ligurian tribe called the Tricorii, a town then known as Vapincum.

The name Vapincum eventually was shortened, and morphed into its current name, Gap, a modern town of forty thousand people.

It also happens to be about ten kilometers from the little village where my great-great-grandfather was born.

My last name was, like the name of Gap, altered and shortened over time.  It was originally Ariey, and then picked up a hyphenated modifier indicating the branch of the family we belonged to, and we became Ariey-Bonnet.  When my great-great-grandfather, Jacques Esprit Ariey-Bonnet, came over to the United States, the immigration folks didn't know how to handle a hyphenated name, and told him he'd have to use Ariey as his middle name and Bonnet as his surname, so all four of his children were baptized with the last name Bonnet, despite the fact that it wasn't his actual surname.

Just one of a million stories of how immigrants were forced to alter who they were upon arrival.

In any case, about three years ago, I had my DNA analyzed, and one of the things I found out was about my Y-DNA signature.  This is passed down from father to son, so I have the same Y DNA (barring any mutations) as my paternal ancestors as far back as you can trace.  And it turns out my haplogroup -- the genetic clan my Y-DNA belongs to -- is R1b1b2a1a2d3, which for brevity's sake is sometimes called R1b-L2.  And what I learned is that this DNA signature is "characteristically Italo-Gaulish," according to Eupedia, which is a great source of information for the histories of different DNA groups.

Distribution of the larger R1b Y DNA haplogroup [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Maulucioni, Haplogrupo R1b (ADN-Y), CC BY-SA 4.0]

What's most interesting is that as far back as I've traced my paternal lineage, they hardly moved at all.  My earliest known paternal ancestor, Georges Ariey, was born in about 1560 in Ranguis, France, only about a kilometer from the village of St. Jean-St. Nicolas where my great-great-grandfather Jacques Esprit Ariey-Bonnet was born three hundred years later.  And the DNA I carry indicates they'd been there a lot longer than that.

I have to wonder if my paternal ancestors were some of the Gauls who were there to see Hannibal's army headed for their fateful meeting with the Romans -- or even if they may have joined them.  The Tricorii were apparently noted for going into battle wearing nothing but body paint, so maybe this accounts for my own tendency to run around with as little clothing as is legally permissible when the weather's warm.  What's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh, as John Heywood famously said.

So then I had to look at my mtDNA haplogroup.  The mt (mitochondrial) DNA descends only from the maternal line, so we all have mtDNA from our mother's mother's mother (etc.).  Each person's mtDNA differs from another's only by mutations that have accrued since their last common matrilineal ancestor, and this can provide an idea of how long ago that was (in other words, when the two lineages diverged from each other).  Simply put, more differences = a longer time span since the two shared a common ancestor, making both mtDNA and Y DNA something geneticists call a molecular clock.  The mtDNA from my earliest known maternal ancestor, Marie-Renée Brault, who was born in 1616 in the Loire Valley of western France, belongs to haplogroup H13a1a.  Once again according to Eupedia, this lineage goes back a very long way -- it's been traced to populations living in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, and from there spread through the mountains of Greece, across the Alps, and all the way to western France where my maternal great-great (etc.) grandmother lived.

So that genetic signature was carried in the bodies of mothers and daughters along those travels, then crossed the Atlantic to Nova Scotia, then went back across to France when the British expelled the Acadians in the Grand Dérangement, and crossed a third time to southern Louisiana in the late eighteenth century, finally landing in the little town of Raceland where my mother was born.  My dad's Y DNA took a different path -- staying put in the Celto-Ligurian populations of the high Alps for millennia, and only in the nineteenth century jumping across the Atlantic to Louisiana, eventually to meet up with my mother's DNA and produce me.

It's astonishing to me how much we now can figure out about the movement of people whose names and faces are forever lost to history, echoes of our ancestors left behind in our very genes.  However much I'd like to know more about them -- a forlorn hope at best -- at least I've gotten to find out about the shared heritage of our genetic clans, and can content myself with daydreams about what those long-ago people saw, heard, and felt.

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Apocalypse ongoing

A while back, I wrote about the strange and disheartening research by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, the upshot of which is that frequently when there is powerful evidence against a deeply-held belief, the result is that the belief gets stronger.

It's called the backfire effect.  The Festinger et al. study looked at a cult that centered around a belief that the world was going to end on a very specific date.  When the Big Day arrived, the cult members assembled at the leader's house to await the end.  Many were in severe emotional distress.  At 11:30 P.M., the leader -- perhaps sensing things weren't going the way he thought they would -- secluded himself to pray.  And at five minutes till midnight, he came out of his room with the amazing news that because of their faith and piety, God told him he'd decided to spare the world after all.

The astonishing part is that the followers didn't do what I would have done, which is to tell the leader, "You are either a liar or a complete loon, and I am done with you."  They became even more devoted to him.  Because, after all, without him instructing them to keep the vigil, God would have destroyed the world, right?

Of course right.

The peculiar fact-resistance a lot of people have can reach amazing lengths, as I found out when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link a couple of days ago having to do with the fact that people are still blathering on about the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse.  Remember that?  Supposedly the Mayan Long Count Calendar indicated that one of their long time-cycles (b'ak'tuns) was going to end on December 21, 2012, and because of that there was going to be absolute chaos.  Some people thought it would be the literal end of the world; the more hopeful types thought it would be some kind of renewal or Celestial Ascension that would mark the beginning of a new spiritual regime filled with peace, love, and harmony.

The problem was -- well, amongst the many problems was -- the fact that if you talked to actual Mayan scholars, they told you that the interpretation of the Long Count Calendar was dependent not only on translations of uncertain accuracy, but an alignment of that calendar with our own that could have been off in either direction by as much as fifty years.  Plus, there was no truth to the claim that the passage into the next b'ak'tun was anything more than a benchmark, same as going from December 31 to January 1.

Mostly what I remember about the Mayan Apocalypse is that evening, my wife and I threw an End-of-the-World-themed costume party.

Although the party was a smashing success, what ended up happening apocalypse-wise was... nothing.  December 22, 2012 dawned, and everyone just kept loping along as usual.  There were no asteroid impacts, nuclear wars, or alien invasions, and the giant tsunami that crested over the Himalayas in the catastrophically bad movie 2012 never showed up.

Which is a shame, because I have to admit that was pretty cool-looking.

So -- huge wind-up, with thousands of people weighing in, and then bupkis.  What's an apocalyptoid to do, in the face of that?

Well, according to the article my friend sent -- their response has been sort of along the lines of Senator George Aiken's solution to the Vietnam War: "Declare victory and go home."  Apparently there is a slice of true believers who think that the answer to the apocalypse not happening back in 2012 is that...

... the apocalypse did too happen.

I find this kind of puzzling.  I mean, if the world ended, you'd think someone would have noticed.  But that, they say, is part of how we know it actually happened.  Otherwise, why would we all be so oblivious?

The parallels to Festinger et al. are a little alarming.

The mechanisms of how all this worked are, unsurprisingly, a little sketchy.  Some think we dropped past the event horizon of a black hole and are now in a separate universe from the one we inhabited pre-2012.  Others think that we got folded into a Matrix-style simulation, and this is an explanation for the Mandela effect.  A common theme is that it has something to do with the discovery by CERN of the Higgs boson, which also happened in 2012 and therefore can't be a coincidence.

Some say it's significant that ever since then, time seems to be moving faster, so we're hurtling ever more quickly toward... something.  They're a little fuzzy on this part.  My question, though, is if time did speed up, how could we tell?  The only way you'd notice is if time in one place sped up by comparison to time in a different place, which is not what they're claiming.  They say that time everywhere is getting faster, to which I ask: getting faster relative to what, exactly?

In any case, the whole thing makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

So that's our dive in the deep end for the day.  No need to worry about the world ending, because it already did.  The good news is that we seem to be doing okay despite that, if you discount the possibility that we could be inside a black hole.

Me, I'm not going to fret about it.  I've had enough on my mind lately.  Besides, if the apocalypse happened eleven years ago, there's nothing more to be apprehensive about, right?

Of course right.

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