Impact

New from the "Well, I Guess That's A Silver Lining?" department, we have: a massive meteorite collision 3.26 billion years ago that may have jump-started the evolution of life on Earth.

And I do mean massive.  This particular meteorite, given the unprepossessing name "S2," is estimated to have been a hundred times heavier than the Chicxulub Impactor that wrote finis on the Age of the Dinosaurs around 66 million years ago.  The S2 impact in effect took a chunk of rock four times the size of Mount Everest and slung it toward Earth at the muzzle velocity of a bullet fired from a gun.

The evidence for this impact was found in one of the oldest exposed rock formations on Earth -- the Barberton Greenstone, on the eastern edge of the Kaapvaal Craton in northeastern South Africa.  Geologists found tiny spherules -- microscopic glassy beads that result from molten rock being flung upward and aerosolized.  The impact not only blasted and melted millions of tons of rock, it generated so much heat that it boiled off the upper layer of the ocean, and the liquid water left behind was turned into the mother of all tsunamis.

"Picture yourself standing off the coast of Cape Cod, in a shelf of shallow water," said Nadja Drabon of Harvard University, who led the study.  "It’s a low-energy environment, without strong currents.  Then all of a sudden, you have a giant tsunami, sweeping by and ripping up the seafloor."

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of artist Donald Davis]

But this was a very different Earth from the one we currently live on; it's unlikely there was any multicellular life yet, and possibly not even any eukaryotic organisms.

"No complex life had formed yet, and only single-celled life was present in the form of bacteria and archaea," Drabon said.  "The oceans likely contained some life, but not as much as today in part due to a lack of nutrients.  Some people even describe the Archean oceans as ‘biological deserts.’  The Archean Earth was a water world with few islands sticking out.  It would have been a curious sight, as the oceans were probably green in color from iron-rich deep waters...  Before the impact, there was some, but not much, life in the oceans due to the lack of nutrients and electron donors such as iron in the shallow water.  The impact released essential nutrients, such as phosphorus, on a global scale.  A student aptly called this impact a ‘fertilizer bomb.’  Overall, this is very good news for the evolution of early life on Earth, as impacts would have been much more frequent during the early stages of life’s evolution than they are today."

Well, "very good news" for the survivors, I guess, but the life forms caught in the boiling-hot tsunami or the ones that got bombarded by a rain of molten rock spherules might have disagreed.

But being bacteria, their sky-high reproductive rate certainly allowed them to rebound rapidly, especially given that the impact had basically blenderized the oceans, churning up vast amounts of iron- and phosphorus-rich sediments.  This triggered a planet-wide bacterial bloom, and it's likely that once the dust settled, the Archean oceans were once again thriving.  Even though the first eukaryotes were still over a billion years in the future, the stage had been set for the slow progression that would ultimately lead to the tremendous diversification the ended the Precambrian Era.

So even a collision from a piece of rock four times bigger than Everest didn't wipe out all life, which -- as I said earlier -- is, I suppose, the silver lining to all this.  As Ian Malcolm so famously put it, "Life, uh, finds a way."

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The moral of the story

I was asked an interesting question yesterday: does a good fictional story always have a moral?

My contention is even stories that are purely for entertainment still often do have morals.  Consider Dave Barry's novel Big Trouble, a lunatic romp in south Florida that for me would be in the running for the funniest book ever written.  Without stretching credulity too much, you could claim that Big Trouble has the theme "love, loyalty, and kindness are always worth it."  Certainly the humor is more the point, but the end of the story (no spoilers) is so damn sweet that the first time I read it, it made me choke up a little.

Another favorite genre, murder mysteries, could usually be summed up as "murdering people is bad."

But that's not what most people mean by "a moral to the story."  Generally, a story with a moral is one where the moral is the main point -- not something circumstantial to the setting or plot.

The moral is the reason the story was written.

I'm a little ambivalent about overt morals in stories.  I've seen it done exceptionally well; Thornton Wilder's amazing The Bridge of San Luis Rey is explicitly about a man trying to find out if things happen for a reason, or if the universe is simply chaotic.  His conclusion -- that either there is no reason, or else the mind of God is so subtle that we could never parse the reason -- is absolutely devastating in the context of the story.  The impact on me when I first read it, as an eleventh grader in a Modern American Literature class in high school, turned my whole worldview upside down.  In a lot of ways, that one novel was the first step in shaping the approach to life I now have, forty-seven-odd years later.

If I can be excused for detouring into my favorite television show, Doctor Who, you can find there a number of examples of episodes where the moral gave the story incredible impact.  A few that come to mind immediately are "Midnight," which looks at the ugly side of tribalism and the human need to team up against a perceived common enemy, "Demons of the Punjab," about the inevitability of death and grief, "Dot and Bubble," which deals with issues of institutionalized racism, and "Silence in the Library," with a subtext of the terrible necessity of self-sacrifice.

But if you want examples of bad moralistic stories, you don't have to look any further.  The episode "Orphan 55," from the Thirteenth Doctor's run, pissed off just about everyone -- not only because of the rather silly cast of characters, but because at the end the Doctor delivers a monologue that amounts to, "Now, children, let me explain to you how all this bad stuff happened because humans are idiots and didn't address climate change."

So what's the difference?

In my mind, it all has to do with subtlety -- and respect for the reader's (or watcher's) intelligence.  A well-done moral-based story has a deep complexity; it tells the story and then leaves us to figure out what the lesson was. Haruki Murakami's brilliant and heartbreaking novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is about what happens when people are in a lose-lose situation -- and that sometimes a terrible decision is still preferable when the other option is even worse.  But Murakami never comes out and says that explicitly.  He lets his characters tell their tales, and trusts that we readers will get to the punchline on our own.

Bad moral fiction -- often characterized as "preachy" -- doesn't give the reader credit for having the intelligence to get what's going on without being walloped over the head repeatedly by it.  One that immediately comes to mind is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which is so explicitly about Big Government Is Bad and Individualism Is Good and Smart Creative People Need To Fight The Man that she might as well have written just that and saved herself a hundred thousand words.

I think what happens is that we authors have an idea of what our stories mean, and we want to make sure the readers "get it."  The problem is, every reader is going to bring something different to the reading of a story, so what they "get" will differ from person to person.  If that weren't the case, why would there be any difference in our individual preferences?  But authors need to trust that our message (whatever it is) is clear enough to shine through without our needing to preach a sermon in a fictional setting.  Stories like "Orphan 55" don't work because they insult the watcher's intelligence.  "You're probably too dumb to figure out what we're getting at, here," they seem to say.  "So let me hold up a great big sign in front of your face to make sure you see it."

A lot of my own work has an underlying theme that I'm exploring using the characters and the plot, but I hope I don't fall into the trap of preachiness.  Probably my most explicitly moral-centered tale, The Communion of Shadows, is about the fragility of life, the importance of taking emotional risks, and the absolute necessity of looking after the people we love, because we never know how long we have -- but I think the moral comes out of the characters' interactions organically, not because I jumped up and down and screamed it at you.

But it can be a fine line, sometimes.  Like I said, we all have different attitudes and backgrounds, so our relationship to the stories we read is bound to differ.  There are undoubtedly people who loved "Orphan 55" and The Fountainhead, so remember that all this is just my own opinion.

And maybe that's the overarching moral of this whole topic; that everyone is going to take away something different.  After all, if everyone hated explicitly moralistic stories, the Hallmark Channel would be out of business by next week.

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Tooth and claw

The earliest living things, way back in the Precambrian Era, were almost certainly either autotrophs (those that could produce their own nutrients from inorganic chemicals) or else scavengers.  One of the reasons for this inference is that these early life forms had few in the way of hard, fossilizable parts, of the kind you might use to protect yourself from predators.  Most of the fossils from that era are casts and impressions, and suggest soft-bodied organisms that, all things considered, had life fairly easy.

But the Cambrian Explosion saw the rather sudden evolution of exoskeletons, scales, spines... and big, nasty, pointy teeth.  There's credible evidence that one of the main reasons behind that rapid diversification was the evolution of carnivory.  Rather than waiting for your neighbor to die before you can have a snack, you hasten the process yourself -- and create strong selection for adaptations involving self-defense and speed.

After that, life became a much dicier business.  I was discussing this just a couple of days ago with the amazing paleontologist and writer Riley Black (you should definitely check out her books at the link provided).  She'd posted on Bluesky about the terrifying Cretaceous mosasaur Tylosaurus proriger, which got to be a mind-blowing twelve meters long (around the length of a school bus).  This species lived in the Western Interior Seaway, which back then covered the entire middle of the North American continent.  I commented to her what a difficult place that must have been even to survive in.  "We always describe the Western Interior Seaway as 'a warm, shallow sea,'" Riley responded.  "Ahh, soothing -- and not like 'holy shit these waters are full of TEETH!'"

What's interesting, though, is that even though we think of predators as mostly being macroscopic carnivores, this practice goes all the way down to the microscopic.  The topic comes up because of a paper this week in Science about some research at ETH Zürich about a species of predatory marine bacteria called Aureispira.  These little things are downright terrifying.  They slither about on the ocean floor looking for prey -- other bacteria, especially those of the genus Vibrio -- and when they encounter one, they throw out structures that look like grappling hooks.  The hooks get tangled in the victim's flagella, and at that point it's game over.  The prey is pulled toward the predator, and when it's close enough, it shoots the prey with a microscopic bolt gun, and then chows down.

Aureispira isn't a one-off.  The soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus forms what have been called "wolf packs" -- biofilms of millions of bacteria that can be up to several centimeters wide, that glide along soil particles, digesting any other bacteria or fungi they happen to run across. 

A "wolf pack" of Myxococcus xanthus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Trance Gemini, M. xanthus development, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This one immediately put me in mind of one of the most terrifying episodes of The X Files; "Field Trip."  In this freaky story, people are put into a series of powerful hallucinations after inhaling spores of a microorganism.  The hallucinations keep the victim quiet -- while (s)he is then slowly digested.

Of course, the microbe in "Field Trip" isn't real (thank heaven), but there are plenty of little horrors in the world of the tiny that are just as scary.  Take, for example, the aptly-named Vampirococcus, which is an anaerobic aquatic genus that latches onto other bacterial cells and sucks out their cytoplasm.

But the weirdest one of all is the bizarre Bdellovibrio, which is a free-swimming aquatic bacterium that launches itself at other single-celled organisms, moving at about a hundred times its own body length per second, then uses its flagella to spin at an unimaginable one hundred revolutions per second, turning itself into a living drill.  The prey's cell membrane is punctured in short order, and the Bdellovibrio burrows inside to feast on the innards.

So.  Yeah.  When Alfred, Lord Tennyson said that nature is "red in tooth and claw," I doubt he was thinking of bacteria.  But some of them are as scary as the mosasaurs I was discussing with Riley Black.  The world is a dangerous place -- even on the scale of the very, very small.

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Bibbity bobbity bullshit

This weekend, I stumbled upon one of those websites that is such a distilled bottle of crazy that I just have to tell you about it.  It involves the BBC, Walt Disney, Satan, Madonna, the Illuminati, the Jews, J. Edgar Hoover, the Hapsburg dynasty, O. J. Simpson, Donny Osmond, and the Mouseketeers.

Among other things.  If I listed everything these people tried to connect, that'd be my whole post.  The site, called This Present Crisis, brings not only "wingnuttery" but "wall of text" to new heights.  So let me see if I can summarize, here:

First, let's start by saying that Walt Disney was a bad, bad man.  This is in part because his family name really shouldn't be Disney, but d'Isgny, which is what it was when the first Disney came over from Normandy in 1066 with William the Conqueror.  The name was anglicized to "Disney" and the family has been traveling under an assumed name ever since, which is evil since apparently they're the only ones who ever did this.  As evidence, we're told that Walt's cousin, Wesley Ernest Disney, was a lawyer in Muskogee County, Oklahoma, a county which is controlled by Satan.  Wesley was also a Freemason, and later lived in Tulsa, which is "a powerful city of the Illuminati hierarchy."  And I think we can all agree that being an evil Illuminati mind-control agent is the only possible explanation for someone choosing to live in both Muskogee and Tulsa.

Yes.  Apparently, they is.

But back to Cousin Walt.  Walt Disney, the site says, started off bad and got worse.  He was an "occult sadistic porn king," evidently, and if that wasn't bad enough, he went on to make the movie Bambi:

The Hapsburgs of the 13th Illuminati bloodline had a sex salon in Vienna where a porn photographer named Felix Salten worked.  Felix… wrote a book Bambi which was then translated into English by the infamous communist Whittaker Chambers.  The elite were just beginning to form the roots for today’s environmental movement.  The book appealed to Disney because Disney liked animals better than people.  In the book, tame animals view humans as gods; while the wild and free animals see humans as demons…  The book begins with both free and tame animals viewing humans as rightly having dominion over them.  In the end, the animals view all humans as simply being on the same level as animals, a vicious animal only fit to be killed…

Well, I'm not sure that's exactly the message of the movie, frankly.  I will admit that I was amongst the children traumatized by the death of Bambi's mommy, but now with the wisdom of age and the experience of having collided with four deer in one six-month period, resulting in a total of $20,000 of damage to our various cars, I'm finding myself siding with the hunter.  The hunter probably would have been doing humanity a service by offing Bambi as well, and maybe Thumper, too.

But anyway.  Disney somehow connects to the BBC, which was also inspired by Satan, because if you take a BBC jingle from the 1930s and play it backwards, it says, "Live in sin.  Lucifer is nice.  Lucifer exploit them."  The BBC is controlled by Freemasons, who were also influencing Disney to do more bad stuff, like putting subliminal sexual messages in movies like The Little Mermaid.

So finally things got so bad that J. Edgar Hoover got involved.  (Yes, I know that Hoover died seventeen years before The Little Mermaid was released.  Just bear with me, here.)  Hoover found out that Disney had no birth certificate, and apparently, didn't know who his parents were.  So he provided Disney with a fake birth certificate, which Disney then showed to his parents.  (Yes, I know that one sentence ago I said that he didn't have parents.  I'm as confused as you are).  His father committed suicide and his mother lived the rest of her life as his maid.  Hoover did all of this so he could blackmail Disney.

Anyhow, Disney was in trouble after all of that, so he appealed to the Rothschild family, which is bankrolled by Jews (you knew they'd be involved) and (more) Freemasons.  The Rothschilds were the ones who helped lawyer Johnnie Cochran to win his case and free O. J. Simpson, all of which was somehow orchestrated by Walt Disney.  (Yes, I know that Disney died in 1966 and the O. J. trial was in 1995.  Stop asking questions.)  By this time (whenever the fuck time it actually is), Disney was a multimillionaire, and had mind-control child slaves called Mouseketeers to do his every bidding.

Then Donny and Marie Osmond get involved.  The Osmonds are actually "programmed multiples," meaning that there are dozens of identical Donnies and Maries, as if one of each wasn't enough, because this is the only way that they could have done two hundred shows a year without dropping dead of exhaustion.  Because their dad is a member of the Mormon Illuminati or something, although the site isn't clear on this point.

The author also ties in Madonna, Michael Jackson, George Lucas, and the Mafia.  (Of course the Mafia are involved.  Being bad guys, they'd have to be.)  But by this time, the neurons in my prefrontal cortex were beginning to scream for mercy, so I'm just going to leave you to take a look at the site yourself, if you dare.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm no great fan of Disney myself.  I think their movies are largely stereotypical schlock, and their "planned community" of Celebration, Florida, where everything is owned by Disney, is downright creepy.  Hating crowds and noise the way I do, if I was offered the choice of a visit to Disneyland or having my prostate examined by Edward Scissorhands, I'd have to think about it.  And whenever I hear the song "It's a Small World After All" I want to stick any available objects in my ears, even if those objects are fondue forks.

But I'm doubtful that any of the Illuminati conspiracy stuff is real.  If it were, don't you think more Americans would be brainless zombies?  (Although considering how many people still support Donald Trump...)  Anyhow, I'm sorry, but "bibbity bobbity boo" is not some kind of coded message from the Freemasons.  Most of us have seen many Disney movies and come out none the worse for wear.  Even I sat through The Little Mermaid, under some conditions of duress, and I wasn't aware of any subtle sexual messages, although as a biologist it did bother me no end that the character "Flounder" was clearly not a flounder.

So this entire website strikes me as lunacy.  Entertaining, in a bizarre sort of way, but lunacy.

Except for the the thing about the Mouseketeers.  Anyone who is willing to dance around while wearing those ear-hats is definitely being controlled by an evil power of some kind.

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The illusion of balance

I got an interesting email, undoubtedly prompted by one of my recent anti-Trump posts.  Here's the salient part:

People like you calling yourself skeptics make me laugh.  One look at what you write and anyone can see you're biased.  You're constantly going on about left-wing liberal crap, and calling ideas you don't like words like nonsense and stupid and ridiculous.  You don't even give the opposite side a fair hearing.  You dismiss stuff without even giving it good consideration, and call it "skepticism."  At least you could be honest enough to admit you're not fair and unbiased.

Okay, there's a lot to unpack here, so let's start with the easy stuff first.  

I'm not unbiased, and have never claimed I am, for the very good reason that everyone is biased.  No exceptions.  

Skepticism doesn't mean eliminating all biases -- that's almost certainly impossible.  As British science historian James Burke points out, in his mindblowing series The Day the Universe Changed, the whole enterprise of knowledge is biased right down to its roots, because your preconceived notions about how the world works will determine what tools you use to study it, how you will analyze the data once you've got it, and even what you consider to be reliable evidence.

So sure, as skeptics we should try to expunge all the biases we can, and for the rest, keep them well in mind.  A bias can't hurt you if it's right in front of your eyes.  As an example, my post yesterday -- about a claim that Breakthrough Listen has found incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence -- revealed my clear bias to doubt the person who made the claim.  However, the important thing is that (1) I stated it up front, and (2) at the end of the post, I admitted explicitly that I could be wrong.  (And in this case, would be thrilled if I were.)  In the end, the evidence decides the outcome.  If the aliens have been talking to us, I'll have no choice but to admit that my bias led me astray, and to change my mind.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What the guy who emailed me seems to want, though, is always to have some sort of "fair hearing" for the talking points of the other side(s).  Which in some cases is a reasonable request, I suppose, but we need to make sure we understand what "fair and balanced" means.  In the realm of science, it's not "fair and balanced" to have a geology textbook give equal time to plate tectonics and the claim of somebody who thinks the mantle of the Earth is filled with banana pudding.  There are some ideas that can be dismissed out of hand, based on the available evidence; young-Earth creationism, alchemy, homeopathy, and the geocentric model are obvious examples.

There's more to it than this, though, because he touched on the subject of politics, which for a lot of people skates out over very thin ice.  And sure, here as well I have my biases, but I'm perfectly open about them.  I do lean left; no question about it.  I hope I don't do so thoughtlessly, and with no chance of having my mind changed if I'm wrong, but I've been a liberal all my life and probably always will be.

But my attempting to be fair doesn't mean I'm any more required to give credence to absurd or dangerous ideas in politics than I am in any other realm.  "Balance" doesn't mean pretending that people promoting democracy and those promoting fascism are morally equivalent.  It doesn't mean we should give equal weight to >99.5% of climatologists and to the <0.5% who think that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening.  It doesn't mean we have to give the same respect to those campaigning for equal rights and those who think that people of other races are inferior or that queer people should be lined up and shot.

So okay, we should listen to both sides.  And then give our support to the one that is moral, just, and in line with the facts and evidence.

In summary, I'm obligated to treat all humans with equal respect, but that doesn't mean all ideas are worthy of equal respect.  You may not like it, but sometimes the fair, balanced, appropriate, and -- dare I say it -- skeptical response is to say, "That idea is wrong/immoral/dangerous/flat-out idiotic."

In any case, I'm not going to apologize for my biases, although I will try to keep my eyes on them at all times.  And if knowing that I'm (1) liberal, (2) understand and trust science, (3) support democracy and human rights, and (4) champion LGBTQ+ people ('cuz I am one) bothers you, you're not going to have much fun while visiting my blog. 

But after all this -- well, if you really do get your jollies from reading stuff that pisses you off, then knock yourself out.  

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What Listen heard

Regular readers of Skeptophilia -- and, heaven knows, my friends and family -- are well aware that one of my obsessions is the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and perhaps even extraterrestrial intelligence.

I grew up watching Lost in Space and The Invaders and the original Star Trek, and later The X Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation and Doctor Who.  But while those classic shows piqued my budding interest in exobiology, my training in actual biology taught me that whatever the aliens look like, they will almost certainly not be humans with odd facial protuberances and strange accents.  How evolution plays out on other planets is impossible to say, but it's likely to be vastly different from the pathways taken by life on Earth.  I still remember reading Stephen Jay Gould's essay "Replaying the Tape" from his excellent book on the Cambrian-age Burgess Shale fauna, Wonderful Life, and being blown away by the following passage:

You press the rewind button and, making sure you thoroughly erase everything that actually happened, go back to any time and place in the past -– say, to the seas of the Burgess Shale.  Then let the tape run again and see if the repetition looks at all like the original.  If each replay strongly resembles life’s actual pathway, then we must conclude that what really happened pretty much had to occur.  But suppose that the experimental versions all yield sensible results strikingly different from the actual history of life?  What could we then say about the predictability of self-conscious intelligence? or of mammals?

His point was that a great deal of evolution is contingent -- dependent on events and occurrences that would be unlikely to repeat in exactly the same way.  And while there's no way to re-run the tape on the Earth, this has profound implications regarding what we're likely to find elsewhere in the universe.

If we do find intelligent aliens, chances are they won't be Klingons or Romulans or Andorians.  To be fair, the aforementioned shows did make some attempts to represent what truly different life might be like; the Horta from the original Star Trek and the Vashta Nerada and the Midnight Entity from Doctor Who come to mind.  Most likely, though, whatever we find out there will be -- to pilfer a phrase from J. B. S. Haldane -- "queerer than we can imagine."

All of this is just a preface to my telling you about an article I read today, that should have had me excited, but ended up leaving me looking like this:

The link I'm referring to was sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, and I've now seen the story in a number of different news sources.  This particular iteration has the title, "Huge Alien Announcement 'Could Happen Within Weeks' as Professor Says 'We've Found It'."  "It," in this case, is apparently definitive proof of extraterrestrial intelligence.  The guy claiming this is one Simon Holland; two different scientific teams, he says, are "in a race to publish the first confirmed evidence."

And not just evidence, but actual transmissions of some kind, bringing to mind the movie Contact and the breathtaking moment astronomer Ellie Arroway finds a radio signal from another planet.  Like the one in Contact, the signal Holland tells us about is some kind of narrow-band radio message, and was apparently discovered by Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Listen program.

"It’s a single point source, not just noise," he said.  "The signal, instead of being the giant buzz of everything in the universe that we hear through all radio telescopes, was a narrow electromagnetic spectrum."

Which sounds awesome, right?

But.

First, Simon Holland isn't a professor, he's a YouTuber and filmmaker.  He says he "taught at a major UK university" -- no name given -- and his nickname is "Prof."  And here are a few of his recent YouTube videos:

• "Cattle Mutilation -- a Horrible 'Big Picture'"
• "Nuclear Explosions Over the Atlantic"
• "The Science Film YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE"
• "Antigravity Machine Finished"
• "Faster Than Light: CIA and the UFO"

Not exactly a testimony to scientific rigor, right there.  So how would this guy know about some find at Breakthrough Listen, especially one that is being kept hush-hush so the scientific teams themselves don't get scooped?

The other thing, though, is that we've been down this road before.  Last year, we had all the hoopla over military whistleblower David Grusch, alleging that the United States had hard evidence not only of alien technology but of "biological material not of earthly origin" -- there were even extensive hearings in Congress over the matter.  And the whole thing came to nothing.  The upshot was, "Okay, yeah, if there are actual UFOs from another world zipping around on Earth, it would be a matter of national security," but when asked to present the actual evidence itself, all we got was a shoulder shrug.  

So forgive me for being dubious about Simon Holland's claims.  I'll say what I've said before; if there is proof of alien intelligence, stop acting coy and show us the goods.  Until then, I'm perhaps to be forgiven for being dubious.

I'll end, however, by saying that this is one case where I devoutly hope I'm wrong.  If in "a few weeks" we have publication of a paper in a peer-reviewed science journal about a radio transmission from an intelligent civilization on another planet, I will be beyond thrilled to eat my words.

But I'm not holding my breath.

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A door in the ice

In H. P. Lovecraft's seminal horror short story "At the Mountains of Madness," some scientists are sent on an expedition to Antarctica to drill down through the ice and see what they can find out about the geology and paleontology of that largely-unexplored continent, and -- unsurprisingly, if you've ever read any Lovecraft -- they should have declined to participate.  First they discover fossil evidence of advanced forms of life dating back to the Precambrian Era; then, carved stones showing that some of those creatures had culture and tool-making capabilities; and finally, in an icy cave, they come across the frozen remains of life forms unlike anything known from Earth's prehistory.  Ultimately, they find that these life forms were intelligent -- far more intelligent than humans -- and in the interior of Antarctica, the scientific team discovers the remains of an ancient city:

Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause...  This cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge.  It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality...  For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low, gradual foothills which separated it from the actual mountain rim we decided we could see no thinning at all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through which we had come.  We had merely struck, at random, a limited part of something of incalculable extent.

So, of course, they decide to land their plane and investigate.  And of course find out that not all the monsters are frozen.  And of course a number of them end up getting eaten by Shoggoths.  Which kind of sucked for them, but is also no more than you should expect if you're a character in a Lovecraft story.

The reason all this comes up is that the conspiracy theorists are currently having multiple orgasms over the discovery on Google Earth of what looks like a giant door in the ice in Antarctica, southeast of the Japanese-run Showa Station.  This has sparked a huge amount of buzz, despite the fact that the image itself is... um... underwhelming, to put it mildly:

So it's far from "a cyclopean maze" spreading for "boundless miles in every direction," and light years from anything that "only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause."  It is, in fact, a vaguely rectangular block of ice that probably slid down the slope and got hung up on a projection in the rock. 

Once this explanation was presented to the conspiracy theorists, they all frowned, scratched their heads, laughed in an embarrassed sort of way, and said, "Oh, all right, then!  What goobers we were!"

Ha!  I made that up.  If you know anything about conspiracy theorists, you surely know that the obvious, rational explanation just made them conspiracy even harder.  Besides the "OMFG Lovecraft was rightI!!!!!" responses, here are a few of the reactions I saw, before my prefrontal cortex started whimpering for mercy and I had to stop reading:

• It's the door to Agartha.  Agartha is a kingdom located on the inner surface of the Earth.
• I bet it's a clone reptile base.
• Bunker entrance?  It's too regular to be natural.  Could be an old Nazi base.
• Didn't someone found entrance on Mars same like this one?  [sic]
• It's a secret doorway to another dimension. 

Then someone had the audacity to point out the obvious.  "Wouldn't they make sure Google Earth DIDN'T photograph it if it was secret?"  Which has, all along, been one of my main objections to conspiracy theorists; they're asking you to believe that major world events are being engineered by a cabal of brilliant but devious malevolent supergeniuses, who are so intelligent they can do things like modify the weather and build secret bases on Mars and engineer spacecraft with faster-than-light capability and use 5G technology to manipulate our minds, but this same cabal is simultaneously so stupid that some neckbeard can figure out everything they're doing without ever leaving his mom's basement.

But that kind of argument is a non-starter with these people, so of course the guy who wondered why Google Earth would slip up and photograph the secret door if it was a secret door was immediately shouted down.

Anyhow, it's wryly amusing how little it takes to get the conspiracy theorists going.  If there really is some kind of bizarre structure on Antarctica, I'll wait for better evidence.  Boundless miles of eldritch, blasphemous, cyclopean architecture would do it for me.  Although don't ask me to be the one to go down there and investigate.  For one thing, I'm not fond of the cold.  For another, I'd rather not get eaten by a Shoggoth.  I'll stay here in my comfortable house and see what I can find out on Google Earth.

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