The fingerprint of life

Springboarding off yesterday's post, which suggested that -- from a biochemical standpoint, at least -- extraterrestrial life might be way more common than we'd thought, today we look at how we might find out where it lives.

This is a thornier problem than it might seem at first.  Despite hopeful movies like Contact, picking up an alien radio signal makes looking for a needle in a haystack seem like child's play.  Consider the difficulties; you have to have your radio telescope pointed at exactly the right place in the sky, at exactly the right time, and tuned to exactly the right frequency, to pick it up as it sweeps by the Earth at the speed of light.  Even if you posit an extremely simple message, which repeats indefinitely (like Ellie Arroway's string of prime number blips), there's the problem that any kind of electromagnetic signaling follows the inverse-square law, meaning if you double the distance between the sender and the receiver, the intensity of the received signal goes down by a factor of four.  Triple it, and it goes down by a factor of nine, and so forth.

And the fact is, the distances we're talking about here are...

... astronomical.  (*rimshot*)

So the possibility of detecting some sort of radio signal (whether or not deliberately sent to attract our attention) is not zero, but pretty damn small.  And the other downside is that if that's all we're looking for, we're going to miss a huge slice of the living creatures that could be out there -- we'd only see the ones that have a technological civilization that uses radio waves to communicate.  From that approach, Earth itself would have appeared to be barren and lifeless until the use of radio became widespread, back in the 1930s.

Is there another way?

An alternate approach -- one that avoids at least some of these pitfalls -- is to look for biosignatures, chemical traces that might indicate the presence of life on a planet even if it hasn't reached the point of being technological.  The studies done on Mars that attempted to find Martian microbes took this approach; take a sample of soil, add some likely nutrients, and look for a sign of metabolism.  But this, too, has its inherent difficulties.  How do you tell the difference between Martian microbes chowing down on the food you gave them, and some exotic but abiotic chemical reaction?

A team of astronomers and biologists from the University of Birmingham and MIT have come up with a possible answer.  According to a paper in Nature Astronomy last week, there is a pair of dead giveaways; an atmosphere depleted in carbon dioxide but enriched in ozone.

Carbon dioxide is a highly stable compound, and on lifeless, dry planets like Venus and Mars, it makes up a significant percentage of the atmosphere.  (96.5% on Venus, 95.3% on Mars.)  The fact that despite the amount of carbon on the Earth, the quantity in the air is only 0.04%, is due mostly to the fact that the water in the oceans acts as a huge carbon sink, first dissolving the carbon dioxide, then reacting it with dissolved metal ions like calcium and magnesium to form minerals like the calcite and magnesite in limestone.  Without the oceans, all of that carbon would stay in the atmosphere -- and we'd be a lot more like the inferno that is Venus than the temperate world where we reside.

As far as ozone, the real tipoff for the presence of life would be gaseous oxygen, which is a highly reactive substance that, in the absence of something producing it pretty much continuously, would all be bound up chemically.  Ozone -- a chemical relative of oxygen, O3 instead of O2 -- is expected to be present in small amounts in any atmosphere with free oxygen, but is the astronomers' choice because its spectral signature is much easier to detect than oxygen's.

Likewise, carbon dioxide's spectral fingerprint is obvious because of its strong absorption in the infrared (a property that is directly related to the greenhouse effect and carbon dioxide's warming effect on atmospheres).

So it should be possible to analyze the light reflected from the surface of exoplanets that seem to be in the right temperature range, and look for two things -- low carbon dioxide (indicating liquid water on the surface) and high ozone (indicating something, possibly life, keeping molecular oxygen in the atmosphere).  See both of those things, the team said, and you're very likely looking at a planet that is inhabited.

Like I said yesterday, of course, "inhabited" doesn't mean "inhabited by bipedal humanoids with spaceships and laser guns."  But even so, the technique is intriguing in its simplicity.  The team suggested starting with relatively nearby planetary systems like TRAPPIST-1, which has seven known exoplanets and is only a little over forty light years away from Earth.

TRAPPIST-1 and its lineup of seven planets [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

So this is all tremendously exciting -- that astronomers are now taking the possibility of extraterrestrial life seriously enough to start proposing methods for searching for it other than just scanning the skies and hoping for the best.  After all, to go back to the movie Contact -- "if we're all alone in the universe, it seems like an awful waste of space."

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The biochemical zoo

The human/alien hybrid is a common trope in science fiction.  From the angst-ridden half-Vulcan Mr. Spock, to the ultra-competent and powerful half-Klingon B'Elanna Torres, to the half-Betazoid empath Deanna Troi, the idea of having two intelligent humanoid species produce children together is responsible for dozens of plot twists in Star Trek alone.

Much as I love the idea (and the show), the likelihood of a human being able to engage in any hot bow-chicka-bow-wow with an alien, and have that union produce an offspring, is damn near zero.  Even if the two in question had all the various protrusions and indentations more or less lined up, the main issue is the compatibility of the genetic material.  I mean, consider it; it's usually impossible for two ordinary terrestrial species to hybridize -- even related ones (say, a Red-tailed Hawk and a Peregrine Falcon) are far enough apart genetically that any chance mating would produce an unviable embryo.

Now consider how likely it is to have genetic compatibility between a terrestrial species and one from the fourth planet orbiting Alpha Centauri.

Any hope you might have had for a steamy tryst with an alien was smashed even further by a study that came out of a study from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Emory University, and the German Aerospace Center.  Entitled, "One Among Millions: The Chemical Space of Nucleic Acid-Like Molecules," by Henderson James Cleaves II, Christopher Butch, Pieter Buys Burger, Jay Goodwin, and Markus Meringer, the study shows that the DNA and RNA that underlies the genetics of all life on Earth is only one of millions of possible information-encoding molecules that could be out there in the universe.

It was amazing how diverse these molecules were, even given some pretty rigid parameters.  Restricting the selection to linear polymers (so the building blocks have to have attachment points that allow for the formation of chains), and three constituent atoms -- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, like our own carbohydrates -- the researchers found 706,568 possible combinations (counting configurations and their mirror images, pairs of molecules that are called stereoisomers).  Adding nitrogen (so, hooking in chemicals like proteins and the DNA and RNA nitrogenous bases, the letters of the DNA and RNA alphabets) complicated matters some -- but they still got 454,442 possible configurations.

The results were a surprise even to the researchers.  "There are two kinds of nucleic acids in biology, and maybe twenty or thirty effective nucleic acid-binding nucleic acid analogs," said Henderson James Cleaves, who led the study, in an interview in SciTechDaily.  "We wanted to know if there is one more to be found...  The answer is, there seem to be many, many more than was expected."

Co-author Pieter Burger of Emory University is excited about the possible medical applications of this study.  "It is absolutely fascinating to think that by using modern computational techniques we might stumble upon new drugs when searching for alternative molecules to DNA and RNA that can store hereditary information," Burger said.  "It is cross-disciplinary studies such as this that make science challenging and fun yet impactful."

While I certainly can appreciate the implications of this research from an Earth-based standpoint, I was immediately struck by its application to the search for extraterrestrial life.  As I mentioned earlier, it was already nearly impossible that humans and aliens would have cross-compatible DNA, but now it appears that alien life might well not be constrained to a DNA-based genetic code at all.  I always thought that DNA, or something very close to it, would be found in any life form we run across, whether on this planet or another; but the Cleaves et al. study suggests that there are a million or more other ways that organisms might spell out their genetic code.

So this drastically increases the likelihood of life on other planets. The tighter the parameters for life, the less likely it is -- so the discovery of a vast diversity of biochemistry opens up the field in a manner that is breathtaking.

... but the chance that the aliens will look like this is, sadly, pretty low.

This raises the problem of whether we'll recognize alien life when we see it.  The typical things you look for if you're trying to figure out if something's alive -- such as a metabolism involving the familiar organic compounds all our cells contain -- might cause us to overlook something that is alive but is being carried along by a completely different chemistry.

And what an organism with that completely different chemistry might look like -- how it would move, eat, sense its environment, reproduce, and think -- well, there'd be an embarrassment of riches.  The possibilities are far beyond even the Star Trek universe, with their fanciful aliens that look basically human but with odd facial structures and funny accents.

The whole thing boggles the mind.  And it further reinforces a conclusion I've held for a very long time; I suspect that we'll find life out there pretty much everywhere we look, and even on some planets we'd have thought completely inhospitable.  The "Goldilocks Zone" -- the region surrounding a star where orbiting planets would have conditions that are "just right" for life to form -- is looking like it might be a vaster territory than we'd ever dreamed.

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The smell of time passing

We once owned a very peculiar border collie named Doolin.  Although from what I've heard, saying "very peculiar" in the same breath as "border collie" is kind of redundant.  The breed has a reputation for being extremely intelligent, hyperactive, job-oriented, and more than a little neurotic, and Doolin fit the bill in all respects.

As far as the "intelligent" part, she's the dog who learned to open the slide bolts on our fence by watching us do it only two or three times.  I wouldn't have believed it unless I'd seen it with my own eyes.  She also took her job very seriously, and by "job" I mean "life."  She had a passion for catching frisbees, but I always got the impression that it wasn't because it was fun.  It was because the Russian judge had only given her a 9.4 on the previous catch and she was determined to improve her score.

There were ways in which her intelligence was almost eerie at times.  I was away from home one time and called Carol to say hi, and apparently Doolin looked at her with question marks in her eyes.  Carol said, "Doolin, it's Daddy!"  Doolin responded by becoming extremely excited and running around the house looking in all of the likely spots -- my office, the recliner, the workshop -- as well as some somewhat less likely places like under the bed.  When the search was unsuccessful, apparently she seemed extremely worried for the rest of the evening.

Not that this was all that different from her usual expression.

One thing that always puzzled us, though, was her ability to sense when we were about to get home.  Doolin routinely went to the door and stood there on guard before Carol's car pulled into the driveway.  She did the same thing, I heard, when I was about to arrive.  In each case, there was no obvious cue that she could have relied on; we live on a fairly well-traveled stretch of rural highway and even if she heard our cars in the distance, I can't imagine they sound that different from any of the other hundreds of cars that pass by daily.  And my arrival time, especially, varied considerably from day to day, because of after-school commitments.  How, then, did she figure out we were about to get home -- or was it just dart-thrower's bias again, and we were noticing the times she got it right and ignoring all the times she didn't?

According to Alexandra Horowitz, a professor of psychology at Barnard University, there's actually something to this observation.  There are hundreds of anecdotal accounts of the same kind of behavior, enough that (although there hasn't been much in the way of a systematic study) there's almost certainly a reason behind it other than chance.  Horowitz considered the well-documented ability of dogs to follow a scent trail the right direction by sensing where the signal was weakest -- presumably the oldest part of the trail -- and heading toward where it was stronger.  The difference in intensity is minuscule, especially given that to go the right direction the dog can't directly compare the scent right here to the scent a half a kilometer away, but has to compare the scent here to the scent a couple of meters away.

What Horowitz wondered is if dogs are using scent intensity as a kind of clock -- the diminishment of a person's scent signal after they leave the house gives the dog a way of knowing how much time has elapsed.  This makes more sense than any other explanation I've heard, which include (no lie) that dogs are psychic and are telepathically sensing your approach.  Biological clocks of all kinds are only now being investigated and understood, including how they are entrained -- how the internal state is aligned to external cues.  (The most obvious examples of entrainment are the alignment of our sleep cycle to light/dark fluctuations, and seasonal behaviors in other animals like hibernation and migration in response to cues like decreasing day length.)

So it's possible that dogs are entraining this bit of their behavior using their phenomenally sensitive noses.  It'll be interesting to see what Horowitz does with her hypothesis; it's certainly worth testing.  Now, I need to wrap this up because Guinness's biological clock just went off and told him it was time to play ball.  Of course, that happens about fifty times a day, so there may not be anything particularly surprising there.

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The magnetic fingerprint

Back in 1963, Frederick Vine and Drummond Matthews came up with a groundbreaking idea (pun very much intended); that the Earth's crust is divided into a bunch of chunks called plates that are all moving relative to each other, and that this is what causes virtually all earthquakes and volcanoes.

The main evidence for this dramatic paradigm shift in our understanding of how geology works came from the discovery on the ocean floor of regions of hardened lava that have opposite magnetic signatures.  When molten rock freezes, tiny magnetic particles that were free to move when they were in a liquid become locked into place, acting like billions of little compass needles recording the direction of the Earth's magnetic field at the time.  As you undoubtedly know, the positions of the magnetic poles flip, on average every three hundred thousand years (although the actual intervals vary greatly, for reasons that are still unknown).  So the rocks Vine and Matthews studied, on either side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which showed symmetrically-arranged parallel stripes of magnetic signatures, showed that new oceanic crust was being formed all the time at the ridge, driving the plates apart and gradually widening the Atlantic Ocean.

Well, it turns out that lava isn't the only thing that can record what the magnetic field is doing.  According to a study last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, so can pottery.

When clay is fired, its chemical structure changes, fusing into ceramic.  Different clays fire to different temperatures; in our kiln we fire our work to 1220 C (2232 F), which works for the clays classified as stonewares and mid-fire porcelains.  If we were to fire a high-fire porcelain to that temperature, it would still be brittle and not water-tight; fire an earthenware clay to that temperature, and it (literally) would melt.  (The difference is in the formulation of the clay, which is a complex subject about which I am still learning.)

But when you fire any clay to the correct temperature for that type, it effectively turns to stone.  The particles fuse together, giving it strength and resistance to breaking.  And this has the effect of locking into place any magnetic particles the clay may contain -- same as with Vine and Matthews's solidified lava on the ocean floor.

White stoneware vase with a cobalt splatter glaze

The reason this topic comes up is the discovery by a research team out of University College London of the fact that some earthenware bricks dating to the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon (605-562 B.C.E.) show a magnetic particle pattern indicating a strange and sudden surge in the strength of the magnetic field -- something that has been nicknamed the Levantine Iron Age Geomagnetic Anomaly.

"It is really exciting that ancient artifacts from Mesopotamia help to explain and record key events in Earth history such as fluctuations in the magnetic field," said study co-author Mark Altaweel.  "It shows why preserving Mesopotamia’s ancient heritage is important for science and humanity more broadly."

Noting this odd magnetic fingerprint -- the cause of which is as yet unexplained -- has another added benefit; once they've identified it in items of known age (as with the bricks, that had an identifying stamp), it can be used to date ceramic items that have no such marks.

It makes me wonder what kind of record I'm creating in my own pottery.  When we have pieces with too many flaws to be worth keeping, we shatter them against the cement wall along the back of our house (there's now a pile of pottery shards at the base of the wall).  We think of it as our ongoing effort to confuse future archaeologists.  But supposing they do piece together some of our failed attempts at bowls and mugs and various sculptures, maybe they'll find out something more than our dubious skill at making pottery -- but what the Earth itself was doing in 2023.

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Lords of the air

Ever since I was a kid, my favorite group of dinosaurs has been the pterosaurs.

These are one of the six groups of animals that independently evolved flight, or at least significant capacity for gliding (the others are insects, birds, bats, flying squirrels, sugar gliders, and colugos).  They had incredible diversity at their height, during the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, from the pint-sized Sordes pilosus (with a sixty-centimeter wingspan) to the almost unimaginably huge Quetzalcoatlus northropi (with a ten-meter wingspan, as big as a light plane).

Most of them were probably clumsy on the ground -- it's hard to imagine how Quetzalcoatlus got off the ground -- but in the air, they were nimble, maneuverable, and fast.  The smaller ones were probably insect-eaters; the larger ones likely fed on fish, although a terrestrial diet of small reptiles and mammals is also possible. 

What brings all this up is the discovery of a new species of pterosaur, one of dozens that have been identified from the Jehol Biota, a stupendous fossil deposit in northeastern China near Huludao.  This fossil bed has produced not only pterosaurs but incredibly well-preserved species of prehistoric birds and other vertebrates -- it's like a tapestry of late Cretaceous animal life.

"Pterosaurs comprise an important and enigmatic group of Mesozoic flying reptiles that first evolved active flight among vertebrates, and have filled all aerial environmental niches for almost 160 million years," said Xiaolin Wang, of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who co-authored the paper describing the discovery.  "Despite being a totally extinct group, they have achieved a wide diversity of forms in a window of time spanning from the Late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous period.  Notwithstanding being found on every continent, China stands out by furnishing several new specimens that revealed not only different species, but also entire new clades."

This includes the newly-discovered Meilifeilong youhao, belonging to the family Chaoyangopteridae, which is represented at the site by two other species that have been found nowhere else.

Meilifeilong looked like something out of a nightmare, if the artist's reconstruction is accurate (and probably even if it isn't):

[Image courtesy of artist Maurilio Oliveira]

The name means "beautiful flying dragon," which I doubt is what I'd say if I saw one, but what I'd say is borderline unprintable so we'll leave it at that.

It's astonishing to think of how long these creatures ruled the skies -- from the late Triassic until the very end of the Cretaceous, a time span of around 160 million years.  Had change not come in the form of the Chicxulub Meteorite collision, they might well still be here, soaring on thermals above our forests and lakes and oceans, the undisputed lords of the air.  And even if we now know them only from fossils, they still can't help but impress.

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The train to CrazyTown

It always astonishes me how much it takes for people to say to some nonsense-spouting pseudo-pundit, "You are nuttier than squirrel shit, and I am no longer listening to anything you say."

Or, more accurately, I don't know how much it takes, because it almost never happens.  Once people have decided they like someone's views, it seems like it's damn near impossible to get them to change their minds.  Said pundit could go on national television and say, "Scientists have found that the mantle of the Earth is not made of molten magma, it's made of my Grandma Betty's Special Tasty Banana Pudding," and I swear, 95% of the followers would just nod along as if this was a revelation from the Lord Almighty Himself.

It may come as a significant surprise that for once, I'm not talking about Donald Trump.  No, this time the person who has given strong evidence that he's been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars is Tucker Carlson, disgraced ex-Fox News commentator, who despite being too obnoxiously racist even for Fox, is still somehow finding venues for his insane vitriol.  (One of them, unsurprisingly, is The Social Media Platform Formerly Known As Twitter, because Elon Musk appears to be as much of a bigot as Carlson, if arguably a bit saner.)

The latest missive from Tucker Carlson, though, amazingly has nothing to do with how brown-skinned immigrants are coming for all of us white people.  It concerns UFOs (or UAPs, as I guess we're now all supposed to call them), and springboards off the kerfuffle the last few months about government cover-ups of what David Grusch elliptically referred to as "non-human biological entities."  (Fer cryin' in the sink, if you mean the A-word, say the A-word.  And yes, I'm being deliberately ironic by not saying the A-word myself.)

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Carlson, though, has no such sense of delicacy, but he thinks they're not extraterrestrial species -- at least in the conventional sense.  Here's what he said, as part of a two-hour interview which I made it through about fifteen minutes of, before my forehead hurt so much from faceplanting that I decided discretion is the better part of valor and gave up:

It’s my personal belief based on a fair amount of evidence that they’re not aliens.  They’ve always been here, and I do think it’s spiritual,  There are forces that aren’t human that do exist in a spiritual realm of some kind, that we cannot see, and that when you think about it, will sorta make you think we live in an ant farm...  I do know that informed people have said that the U.S. government has an agreement with these entities.

The whole thing smacks of the "prison planet" hypothesis, whose most vocal supporter is Ellis Silver, about whom I wrote here at Skeptophilia a while back.  The idea is that humans evolved elsewhere in the universe, and our ancestors were transported to Earth because we're so violent, and we're stuck here until we learn our lesson.  (Given recent world events, we don't seem to be catching on very quickly.)

In any case, Carlson takes it a step further, hybridizing Silver's ideas with the Book of Enoch and various episodes of The X Files to create a new brand of batshittery all his own.  In short, he seems to have taken on a job as conductor of the Express Train to CrazyTown, and a significant slice of Americans are just thrilled to hop on board.

So I encourage you to watch the interview (linked above), if you've got the stomach for it.  Myself, I have a hard time watching Tucker Carlson even with the sound turned off, because in my opinion he's only beaten out narrowly by Ted Cruz in the contest for the World's Most Punchable Face.  But given that Carlson has been floated seriously as a contender for the vice presidential choice for whomever the Republican nominee is for president in 2024, and a possible candidate for president in his own right in 2028, it behooves us all to be aware that he appears to be a few fries short of a Happy Meal.  To quote skeptic Jason Colavito, "That a leading contender for high office and one of the most influential figures on the right believes in some variation of Nephilim Theory is depressing.  That a powerful network of advocates has infiltrated both political parties to spread ancient mythology as though it were scientific revelation, and government and media cheer them on, is terrifying."

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The forbidden light

In the early nineteenth century, two scientists -- Joseph von Fraunhofer and Charles Wheatstone -- independently observed something strange; if you heated up samples of various elements, they emitted a light spectrum that contained strong peaks at certain frequencies, showing up as bright lines instead of a continuous rainbow of colors.

It quickly became obvious that this property could be used to identify the presence of different elements in mixed samples.  In fact, helium was discovered when French astronomer Georges Rayet found emission lines in the solar spectrum that didn't correspond to any other known element, making it the only element in the periodic table first detected somewhere other than on Earth.  (The name helium comes from the Greek Ἥλιος, meaning the Sun.)

Figuring out why this phenomenon occurred, though, took almost a hundred years.  The explanation, due in large part to the work of Danish physicist Niels Bohr, has to do with the fact that the electron shells in atoms are quantized -- there are only certain allowed energy levels, so an atom has to absorb a particular frequency of light in order for one of its electrons to jump to the next level (or, conversely, to drop to a lower level, the atom has to emit a photon of a particular frequency).  This simultaneously explained the specificity of emission spectra and the odd phenomenon of absorption spectra, where broad-spectrum light passing through transparent substances shows dark lines where certain frequencies are absorbed, effectively subtracting them from the beam.

So each element has its own distinctive "fingerprint" of spectral lines, which is how researchers here on Earth can determine the chemical composition of distant stars, and even the constituents of the atmospheres of exoplanets.

The emission spectrum of iron [Image is in the Public Domain]

However -- as usual -- even this rather complex model has some unexpected twists.

Very rarely, the electrons in atoms will undergo forbidden transitions, resulting in light being emitted that should not be possible from the element in question.  (A simple analogy is if you were climbing a staircase, and somehow were able to go up by one-and-three-quarters steps.)  These transitions are highly unstable (just as your attempted ascent would be), and the electron almost instantaneously collapses back into one of the allowed energy states, but when it does so the atom emits a frequency of light you wouldn't expect.  So these aren't so much forbidden as they are extremely improbable; in ordinary situations, their contribution to the light spectrum is vanishingly small.

But in very high energy conditions, where the electrons are bouncing all over the place millions of times per second, you begin to see a significant contribution from forbidden transitions.

The reason this comes up is because of a study of a Seyfert galaxy named MCG 01-24-014.  Seyfert galaxies, named after American astronomer Carl Keenan Seyfert who studied them extensively, look superficially like ordinary spiral galaxies, but have an active galactic nucleus.  This latter name is a massive understatement, mostly because astronomers shy away from calling something "Holy Shit This Thing Is Super Bright, No Really You Have No Idea How Bright It Is."  The center bit of a Seyfert galaxy has a luminosity equal to the luminosity of all the stars of the Milky Way put together, and is thought to be the result of large quantities of material falling rapidly into a supermassive black hole.  Most of the light emitted is outside of the visible spectrum -- thus their ordinary appearance through a telescope -- but when viewed in other frequency ranges, it becomes obvious how weird they are.  

The Circinus Galaxy, one of the best-studied Seyfert galaxies [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

And MCG 01-24-014 is really peculiar -- emitting far more light from forbidden transitions than even an average Seyfert galaxy would.  So whatever is powering its galactic core is running full-throttle.

The forbidden light of Seyfert galaxies provides us with yet another example of "you think you understand, then nature throws you a curve ball."

Sometimes you hear the criticism levied at scientists that all the technical details somehow take away from the wonder of simply looking up and delighting at the beauty of the night sky.  I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, the exact opposite is true.  I can still go outside on a clear winter's night and look up at my favorite naked-eye astronomical object -- the Pleiades -- and fully appreciate how lovely it is, but my enjoyment is increased further by knowing that it's a cluster of recently-formed hot blue supergiant stars inside the wispy strands of a reflection nebula.  

Understanding and appreciation shouldn't be inversely proportional.  The more I know, the more I wonder at the beauty, complexity, and strangeness of this universe in which we live.  The only frustrating part about it all is the limitation of my mind in comprehending it all.

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