The bone wars

Non-scientists often have a mental image of scientists, and the scientific process, as being dispassionate and emotionless.  Think about how scientists are often depicted in movies -- cool, methodical, and impassive, sometimes to the point of seeming inhuman.  (Other than those characters who are mad scientists, of course, but I wouldn't argue that those characterizations are any more accurate.)

In reality, scientists are human, and therefore subject to the same range of emotions we all are.  It's to be hoped that their rational faculties are better developed than the rest of us; certainly, their specialist knowledge had better be.  But otherwise, the personalities of scientists run the same gamut as any random sample of humanity -- to take an example from the field of genetics, compare the humble, self-effacing, genial Svante Pääbo to the bombastic wild child Kary Mullis.

The result is that inevitably, scientists' personalities come through in their work -- and, sometimes, get in the way, especially when you have two incompatible types working on the same goal.  And the best example of this I can think of is the long-running feud between nineteenth-century paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.

Marsh and Cope were working in a fruitful time and place for fossil hunters; the late 1800s in the North American Midwest, particularly Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming, which have rich sedimentary deposits from the Jurassic, Cretaceous Periods, and early Paleogene Periods.  They started out -- well, if not friends, at least on reasonably amicable terms, but they were set up to fall out.  Marsh was from a working-class family in Lockport, New York, not far from where I live now.  Cope, on the other hand, was solidly upper crust, from a family that had been in Philadelphia for two hundred years.  "The patrician Edward considered Marsh not quite a gentleman," observed a mutual friend.  "The academic Othniel regarded Cope as not quite a professional."

They did share one set of characteristics, though, and that was being pugnacious, quarrelsome, and distrustful.

Othniel Charles Marsh (left) and Edward Drinker Cope (right), ca. 1880 [Image is in the Public Domain]

The first salvo in what were to become known as the Bone Wars happened before they left the east.  Cope had been working a marl deposit (a calcareous clay often associated with freshwater deposition), and Marsh found out that he'd discovered some decent fossils -- so Marsh went to the pit excavators and bribed them to send any future finds to him rather than to Cope.  Cope retaliated with a similar incursion into sites Marsh had laid claim to.  But things really went downhill when Marsh published a sarcasm-laden response to a paper Cope had written on the recently-discovered plesiosaur Elasmosaurus, in which he'd reconstructed the skeleton with the head on the wrong end.  

Cope tried to buy up every copy of the journal that had the error he could find, as well as the one with the rebuttal.  You can guess how well that worked.  Marsh responded by laughingly doing everything he could do to publicize it further.  Cope had blundered, there was no doubt about it, but Marsh's sneering riposte effectively detonated any remaining friendship the two had.

Things got worse in 1872 when both men went to Wyoming to prospect in some Eocene-age fossil beds that proved to have a variety of then-unknown species of mammals, including Uintatherium, Loxolophodon, Eobasileus, Dinoceras, and Tinoceras.  Not only did they each trick the other into hiring workers who were loyal to the rival, they engaged in the biggest slap in the face you can give a taxonomist; renaming a species that had already been found and described by someone else.  Marsh accused Cope of deliberately and knowingly misidentifying fossils as being new discoveries when they weren't, but backdating their discovery dates to make it look like he had precedence.

In the naming issue, at least, it seems like Marsh had a point.  Once the dust settled, a lot of Marsh's identifications have stuck, and only a few of Cope's have.  For example, Marsh gave names to four of the most iconic dinosaur species known -- Triceratops, Allosaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus.

Things really went downhill when Marsh started paying locals to prospect for him -- by 1877 he had not only hired dozens of people, but was paying them to keep their finds (and the locales) secret so Cope's spies wouldn't get wind of them.  Cope retaliated with similar tactics, which led to a number of attempts by workmen to feed partial or inaccurate information to their bosses because the other team had bribed them to hamper efforts in any way they could.

In one case, this devolved into an actual fight, with the rival teams throwing rocks at each other.

Ultimately, though, this kind of behavior is never sustainable.  Other scientists, such as Alexander Emmanuel Agassiz, decided that someone had to be the adult in the room, and got their own teams together to go investigate the fossil sites on their own.  The Bone Wars had produced a huge amount of fossil material, much of which is still in museums today; but in the process it destroyed both men's reputations, and financially ruined them.  Cope and Marsh died virtually penniless in 1897 and 1899, respectively, and hated each other right to the bitter end.

What strikes me about all this is that what you had was two men who were both motivated by a fascination for, and a love of, paleontology, but they let their rivalry rob thirty years of work of every last scrap of joy.  It may seem like a quaint story, a century and a half later, but really, it's more a tragedy than a comedy.  Scientists are frequently competitive; in fact, in today's publish-or-perish environment, it's nearly a necessity.  But Marsh and Cope turned a competition into an all-out war, and in the end, both of them lost.

So scientists are capable of the same range of behaviors we all are -- from nobility all the way down to toddlerish pettiness.  They don't leave their personalities behind when they go into research.  Sometimes this can be a good thing; the puckish senses of humor found in brilliant researchers like Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are legendary.

But in the case of the Bone Wars, it resulted in three decades of misery that could so easily have been avoided had they just been able to set aside their desperation to be in first place every single time.

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Thus sayeth the prophecy

I've wondered for years why people fall for conspiracy theories.

My surmise -- and admittedly, that's all it is -- is that when bad things happen, any explanation is better than there being no explanation other than the universe being a chaotic and capricious place.  Blaming the latest tornado outbreak on weather manipulation by the Bad Guys at least means there's a reason why communities were destroyed and lives were lost; otherwise it just appears that shit happens because shit happens, and nice people sometimes die and the world can be dangerous and unfair.

Which brings us to the death of Pope Francis, who died three days ago at the age of 88.

Even for many non-Catholics, Pope Francis seemed like a pretty cool guy.  He embodied tolerance, gentleness, humility, and a deep concern for our environment.  I didn't agree with his theology (obviously) but I did have a lot of respect for him as a person and a spiritual leader.

Now, it's not like his death was unexpected.  He'd been ailing and in a slow decline for months, and recently came out of a long hospital stay for double pneumonia.  Even so, the world's Catholics are in mourning -- and understandably anxious, in our current volatile world situation, about who will be chosen next to lead the world's 1.4 billion Roman Catholics.

And... also not unexpected... almost as soon as he died, the conspiracy theories started.

The first was that his death had something to do with a visit from Vice President J. D. Vance, who is nominally Catholic himself but embodies the exact opposite list of characteristics from those I listed for Pope Francis: intolerance, viciousness, arrogance, and a complete disregard for the environment.  I've seen a number of claims -- some tongue-in-cheek, others apparently quite serious -- that Vance did something to hasten the Pope's death because of Francis's condemnation of many of the Trump administration's policies.

I'm a little dubious, but I think we should deport Vance to El Salvador just in case.  He recently said he's fine with the "inevitable errors" that will come with eliminating due process, so he should have no problem with it, right?

Even more out there are the people who are now leaping about making excited little squeaking noises about the Prophecy of St. Malachi.  This curious document is a series of 112 phrases in Latin, each of which is supposed to refer to one of the Popes, in order, starting with Celestine II (who led the church from 1143 to 1144).  It was published in 1595 by Flemish Benedictine monk Arnold Wion, but Wion said it was actually from Malachi of Armagh, a twelfth-century Irish saint.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Andreas F. Borchert, Malaquías de Armagh (cropped), CC BY-SA 4.0]

Most modern scholars, however, think the whole thing was made up, if not by Wion, by someone in the late sixteenth century.  So any accurate passages that apply to the Popes from prior to 1595 or so shouldn't be looked upon as anything even close to miraculous.  It is, after all, easy to prophesy something after it's already happened.

Aficionados of the prophecy, though, have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to make the lines referring to events after 1595 fit to the Popes they allegedly are about.  #83, for example, which would correspond with Pope Alexander VII, translates to "Guardian of the Mountains," and Alexander's papal arms had a design of six hills.  Pope Clement X, whose line is "From a Great River," was allegedly born during a flood of the Tiber.  

When you get into the eighteenth century, however, things become dicier, because by that time the Prophecy of St. Malachi had become widely popular, so some of the Popes apparently did stuff to fit the prophecy rather than the other way around.  Pope Clement XI, for example, corresponds to the line "Surrounded by Flowers," and Clement had a medal created with the line "Flores circumdati," which is a pretty blatant attempt to make sure the Prophecy applies to him.

The reason the conspiracy theorists are getting all excited is that there are a total of 112 passages in the Prophecy, and -- you guessed it -- Pope Francis is the 112th Pope since Celestine II.  So, without further ado, here's the passage that's supposed to apply to Pope Francis:

Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations, and when these things are finished, the City of Seven Hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people.  The End.

It's hard even for the most devoted conspiracy theorist to see how Pope Francis could be "Peter the Roman."  He's not Roman, he's Argentine; neither his chosen papal name nor his birth name (Jorge Mario Bergoglio) contains any form of the name Peter.  The best they've been able to do is to say that his chosen name (Francis) is after St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Francis's father was named Pietro, but even for a lot of woo-woos this is stretching credulity to the breaking point.

Be that as it may, there are still a lot of people who think the Prophecy is serious business, and they are especially focusing on "the City of Seven Hills will be destroyed" part.  Because now that Pope Francis is dead, that means the rest of the prediction is imminent, so Rome is about to be hit by a massive earthquake or something.

I'm thinking it's probably not worth worrying about.  I mean, for cryin' in the sink, this is worse than Nostradamus.  Plus, it's not like we don't have enough real stuff to lose sleep over.  I'm not going to fret over a prophecy that couldn't even get the name and origin of the Pope right.

But for some reason, this kind of stuff thrills a lot of people, and I really don't see the appeal.  I guess it gives some mystical gloss to day-to-day events, rather than things happening because the world is just kind of weird and random.  In any case, to any of my Catholic readers, my condolences for the loss of your spiritual leader.  He did seem like a pretty cool guy, and I hope they can find a suitable replacement to step into his shoes.

But for those of you who live in Rome, no worries about the city burning down or anything. 

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The cracked mirror

Why is there something rather than nothing?

It's the Mother of All Existential Questions, and has been batted around for as long as there've been philosophers there to ask it.  Some attribute the universe's something-ness to God, or some other uncreated Creator; predictably, this doesn't satisfy everyone, and others have looked for a more scientific explanation of why a universe filled with stuff somehow took precedence over one that was completely empty.

Probably the most thought-provoking scientific answer to the "something versus nothing" debate I came across in Jim Holt's intriguing book Why Does the World Exist?, in which he interviews dozens of scientists, philosophers, and deep thinkers about how they explain the plenitude of our own universe.  You've probably run across the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- the bizarre, but extensively tested, rule that in the quantum realm there are pairs of measurable quantities called canonically conjugate variables that cannot be measured to a high degree of precision at the same time.  The best-known pair of canonically conjugate variables is position and momentum; the more accurately you know a particle's position, the less you can even theoretically know about its momentum, and vice-versa.  And this is not just a problem with our measuring devices -- that balance between exactitude and fuzziness is built into the fabric of the universe.

A less widely-known pair that exists in the same relationship is energy and time duration.  If you know the energy content of a region of space to an extremely high degree of accuracy, the time during which that energy measurement can apply is correspondingly extremely short.

The question Holt asks is: what would happen if you had a universe with nothing in it -- no matter, no energy, no fields, nothing?

Well, that would mean that you know its energy content exactly (zero), and the time duration over which that zero-energy state applies (infinitely long).  And according to Heisenberg, those two things can't be true at the same time.

The upshot: nothingness is unstable.  It's like a ball balanced at the top of a steep hill; a tiny nudge is all it takes to change its state.  If there had been a moment when the universe was completely Without Form And Void (to borrow a phrase), the Uncertainty Principle predicts that the emptiness would very quickly decay into a more stable state -- i.e., one filled with stuff.

There's another layer to this question, however, which has to do not with why there's something rather than nothing, but why the "something" includes matter at all.  I'm sure you know that for every subatomic particle, there is an antimatter version; one whose properties such as charge and spin are equal and opposite.  And every Star Trek fan knows that if matter and antimatter come into contact with each other, they mutually annihilate, with all of that mass turned into energy according to Einstein's famous mass/energy equation.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dirk Hünniger, Joel Holdsworth, ElectronPositronAnnihilation, CC BY-SA 3.0]

[Nota bene: don't be thrown off by the fact that the arrows on the electrons and positrons appear to indicate one is moving toward, and the other away from, their collision point.  On a Feynman diagram -- of which the above is an example -- the horizontal axis is time, not position.  Matter and antimatter have all of their properties reversed, including motion through time; an electron moving forward through time is equivalent to a positron moving backward through time.  Thus the seemingly odd orientation of the arrows.]

More relevant to our discussion, note in the above diagram, the photon produced by the electron/positron pair annihilation (the wavy line labeled γ) is also capable of producing another electron/positron pair; the reaction works both ways.  Matter and antimatter can collide and produce energy; the photons' energy can be converted back to matter and antimatter.

But here's where it gets interesting.  Because of charge and spin conservation, the matter and antimatter should always be produced in exactly equal amounts.  So if the universe did begin with an unstable state of nothingness decaying into a rapidly-expanding cloud of matter, antimatter, and energy, why hasn't all of the matter and antimatter mutually annihilated by now?

Why isn't the universe -- if not nothing, simply space filled only with photons?

One possible answer was that perhaps some of what we see when we look out into space is antimatter; that there are antimatter worlds and galaxies.  Since antimatter's chemical properties are identical to matter's, we wouldn't be able to tell if a star was made of antimatter by its spectroscopic signature.  The only way to tell would be to go there, at which point you and your spaceship (and a corresponding chunk of the antimatter planet) would explode in a burst of gamma rays, which would be a hell of a way to confirm a discovery.

But there's a pretty good argument that everything we see is matter, not antimatter.  Suppose some galaxy was made entirely of antimatter.  Well, between that galaxy and the next (matter) galaxy would be a region where the antimatter and matter blown away from their respective sources would come into contact.  We'd see what amounts to a glowing wall between the two, where the mutual annihilation of the material would release gamma rays and x rays.  This has never been observed; the inference is that all of the astronomical objects we're seeing are made of ordinary matter.

I'm pretty sure the two would not connected by a weird, foggy celestial bridge, either.

So at the creation of the universe, there must have been a slight excess of matter particles produced, so when all the mutual annihilation was done, some matter was left over.  That leftover matter is everything we see around us.  But why?  None of the current models suggest a reason why there should have been an imbalance, even a small one.

Well -- just possibly -- until now.  A press release from CERN a couple of weeks ago found that there is an asymmetry between matter and antimatter, something called a charge-parity violation, that indicates our previous understanding that matter and antimatter are perfect reversals might have to be revised.  And it's possible this slight crack in the mirror might explain why just after the Big Bang, matter prevailed over antimatter.

“The more systems in which we observe CP violations and the more precise the measurements are, the more opportunities we have to test the Standard Model and to look for physics beyond it,” said Vincenzo Vagnoni, spokesperson for the Large Hadron Collider.  “The first ever observation of CP violation in a baryon decay paves the way for further theoretical and experimental investigations of the nature of CP violation, potentially offering new constraints for physics beyond the Standard Model.”

So that's our mind-blowing excursion into the quantum realm for today. A slight asymmetry in the world of the extremely small that may have far-reaching consequences for everything there is.  And -- perhaps -- explain the deepest question of them all; why the universe as we see it exists.

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Mushballs

I first ran into the concept that not all planets had hard, rocky surfaces -- like Earth, and the ones I was all too familiar with from scientific documentaries like Lost in Space -- when I was about eight.

It was in one of those kids' books about astronomy, and I found the whole thing absolutely fascinating.  Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars were small, solid, and made mostly of silicate rocks.  Certainly, the four have their dramatic differences -- airless, scorched Mercury; Venus with its brutally hot, carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere and clouds of sulfuric acid; temperate, lovely Earth; and chilly, windswept, dusty Mars.  But all four, at least to some extent, fit the picture I'd had of what a planet should look like.

But then the outer four -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune -- confounded that completely.

All four are gas giants, massive planets with no solid surface (or, if there is one, it's buried so deep as to be all but inaccessible).  The atmospheres are largely hydrogen, helium, carbon monoxide and dioxide, ammonia, and methane.  They rotate fast -- Jupiter, the largest planet, rotates once on its axis every ten hours -- and this, combined with some serious convection currents, creates enormous storms, the most famous of which is Jupiter's Great Red Spot, which is large enough to swallow the Earth entirely and has wind speeds over four hundred kilometers per hour.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Even the gas giants' cores aren't like the Earth's; ours is predominantly iron and nickel, while Jupiter -- and, it is surmised, the other three -- have a core largely composed of hydrogen compressed to the point that its electrons delocalize and it begins to act like a metal.  (This metallic hydrogen core is thought to be the source of Jupiter's enormous magnetic field.)

So my picture of the outer four planets was forever changed.  They were huge, churning blobs of gas, not solid at all.  Saturn, in fact, has such a low overall density that if you could find a swimming pool big enough, it'd float.  Then, my mind was further blown when I was twenty and first saw Carl Sagan's Cosmos, where he suggested that such a planet might still host life -- floating or flying creatures that could ride the wild thermal updrafts, and somehow metabolize the anoxic stew of gases they live in.

What's coolest of all, though, is that our understanding of the gas giants is still being refined.  A study out of the University of California - Berkeley found that certain areas of Jupiter's atmosphere are strangely ammonia-depleted.  This is unexpected -- the constant turbulence, you'd think, would result in uniform mixing, just like stirring a cup of coffee distributes the cream and sugar evenly throughout.  If there are areas low in ammonia, what is keeping them that way?

The researchers found a mechanism that might be responsible.  Updrafts in low-pressure zones might, just as they do on Earth, create hailstorms.  But everything's bigger on Jupiter -- bigger than Texas, even -- and these enormous updrafts allow the formation of huge "mushballs" composed primarily of frozen ammonia and water that, once they are too heavy to keep aloft any more, fall down into the lower layers of the atmosphere, leaving upper regions depleted.

So unlike on Earth, where a three-centimeter hailstone is considered pretty huge, these would be between the size of a softball and a basketball.

"The mushball journey essentially starts about fifty to sixty kilometers below the cloud deck as water droplets," said Chris Moeckel, lead author of the paper on the phenomenon, which appeared in Science Advances this week.  "The water droplets get rapidly lofted all the way to the top of the cloud deck, where they freeze out and then fall over a hundred kilometers into the planet, where they start to evaporate and deposit material down there.  And so you have, essentially, this weird system that gets triggered far below the cloud deck, goes all the way to the top of the atmosphere and then sinks deep into the planet...  Imke [de Pater, Moeckel's advisor] and I both were like, 'There's no way in the world this is true.'  So many things have to come together to actually explain this, it seems so exotic.  I basically spent three years trying to prove this wrong.  And I couldn't prove it wrong."

So Sagan's floaters and flyers would not only have to deal with Jupiter's screaming winds and monstrous lightning storms, they'd have to dodge volleyball-sized hailstones.

Not the most hospitable place in the world.

It's pretty cool that even our own Solar System still has the capacity to amaze us.  The more we learn, the more questions we have.  It's like Neil deGrasse Tyson said; "As our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance."  And sometimes it's a simple, innocuous-seeming question -- like, "why are some parts of Jupiter's atmosphere low in ammonia?" -- that leads to a huge shift in our picture of how some part of the universe works.

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Strange bedfellows

There's a Senegalese expression that goes, "There are forty kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense."

The outcome of this general principle is that trying to support pseudoscientific claims sometimes forces alliances between groups you'd never think would have anything in common -- such as the cryptozoologists and the young-Earth creationists teaming up to find evidence of the "Mokèlé-Mbèmbé," a water-dwelling beastie that supposedly lives in the Congo River Basin.

The first written account of the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé seems to be from science writer (and cryptozoology buff) Willy Ley in his 1941 book The Lungfish and the Unicorn, but his description was (he said) taken from an unpublished report written by German military officer and explorer Ludwig Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz, who was summarizing sightings by natives he'd spoken to in Cameroon.  Here's what Ley had to say:

The animal is said to be of a brownish-gray color with a smooth skin, its size is approximately that of an elephant; at least that of a hippopotamus.  It is said to have a long and very flexible neck and only one tooth but a very long one; some say it is a horn.  A few spoke about a long, muscular tail like that of an alligator.  Canoes coming near it are said to be doomed; the animal is said to attack the vessels at once and to kill the crews but without eating the bodies.  The creature is said to live in the caves that have been washed out by the river in the clay of its shores at sharp bends.  It is said to climb the shores even at daytime in search of food; its diet is said to be entirely vegetable.  This feature disagrees with a possible explanation as a myth.  The preferred plant was shown to me, it is a kind of liana with large white blossoms, with a milky sap and apple-like fruits.  At the Ssombo River I was shown a path said to have been made by this animal in order to get at its food.  The path was fresh and there were plants of the described type nearby.  But since there were too many tracks of elephants, hippos, and other large mammals it was impossible to make out a particular spoor with any amount of certainty.

So already we're talking about a third-hand account; Ley recounting what he'd read that von Stein had written about what natives told him.  Ley also quotes one Lieutenant Paul Gratz, who is not a lot more convincing:

The crocodile is found only in very isolated specimens in Lake Bangweulu, except in the mouths of the large rivers at the north.  In the swamp lives the Nsanga, much feared by the natives, a degenerate saurian which one might well confuse with the crocodile were it not that its skin has no scales and its toes are armed with claws.  I did not succeed in shooting a Nsanga, but on the island of Mbawala I came by some strips of its skin.

Ley says that the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé and the Nsanga are the same, which I guess is true because it's very likely that neither one is real.  Skeptic Donald Prothero dismisses alleged sightings of the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé as being either crocodiles, black rhinos, or simply overactive imaginations, and I'm inclined to agree with him.  The only alleged photograph of the beast, taken by explorer Rory Nugent in 1985, is almost certainly a distant snapshot of a floating log.

A sketch of a Mokèlé-Mbèmbé, which I have to admit looks nothing like either a crocodile or a rhino, but does appear to have been heavily influenced by watching The Land Before Time [Image is in the Public Domain]

So the whole thing would be in the same category as Bigfoot and Nessie and Mothman et al. -- but then the creationists got involved.

Scottish explorer and young-Earth creationist William Gibson funded and led two expeditions into the Congo River Basin to try to prove the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé exists, although how this would support creationism is beyond me.  Maybe it's because the creationists have asserted for years that humans coexisted with dinosaurs, and that the dinosaurs went extinct because they all missed getting on the Ark or something, so having one around today would mean we still coexist.  Q.E.D.

Hey, don't yell at me.  I'm not claiming it makes sense, I'm just telling you about it.

A highly scientific artist's conception of prehistory, as per the Creation Museum

In general, it's hard to see how the existence of "living fossils," organisms long thought to be extinct that have proven to be very much alive -- the coelacanth inevitably comes to mind -- is any kind of cogent argument against evolution, but the sad fact is that your average creationist wouldn't know a logical train of thought if it came up and bit them on the ass.  Be that as it may, the creationists are all in on the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé, with the general consensus being if one is discovered, all the evolutionary biologists will retreat in disarray and immediately join evangelical Christian churches.

So we have here a case of strange bedfellows -- the cryptozoologists, who are generally well-meaning even if they have a different standard for what constitutes reliable evidence than I do, are on the same team as the young-Earth creationists, who by and large want to turn the entire world into an autocratic Christian theocracy.

Me, I think it'd be cool if Mokèlé-Mbèmbé existed, but purely because it'd be a fascinating new area of biological study.  Sadly, the fact that there's exactly zero evidence other than hearsay (which, after all, isn't really evidence at all) argues against it.  For those of you who were hoping for confirmation of a Brachiosaurus lumbering around in the Congo Basin, I'm afraid it's kind of a non-starter.

And that goes double for those of you who think Adam and Eve had a pet velociraptor.

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The signature

As much as I love the movie Contact, trying to find extraterrestrial life isn't just a matter of tuning in to the right radio frequency.

There's no guarantee that even intelligent life would use radio waves to communicate, and if they did, that they'd do it in such a way that we could decipher the message.  I must admit, though, that the whole "sequence of prime numbers" thing as a beacon was a pretty cool idea; it's hard to imagine a natural phenomenon that would result in blips in a pattern of prime numbers.

Even besides the issue with how exactly a technological species would choose to communicate, there's the problem that this method would miss the vast majority of life that's potentially out there.  Consider the fact that there's been life on Earth for 3.8 billion years, give or take a day or two, and until about a hundred years ago, we weren't producing any radio waves ourselves.  To a civilization two hundred light years away -- so, seeing us as we were two hundred years ago -- Earth would be, to borrow C. S. Lewis's pithy phrase, a completely silent planet, even though there was a thriving biosphere that included at least one intelligent, soon-to-be-technological species.

So except for those presumably few planets that host intelligent beings who communicate kind of like we do, detecting extraterrestrial life is a tricky question.  The most promising approach has been to look for biosignatures -- chemical traces that (as far as we know) can only be produced by living things.  One example on Earth is the fact that our atmosphere contains both oxygen and methane.  Both are highly reactive (especially with each other); to keep stable levels of these gases in the atmosphere requires that something is continuously producing them, because they're constantly being removed by oxidation/reduction reactions.  In this case, photosynthesis and bacterial methanogenesis, respectively, pump them into the atmosphere as fast as they're being destroyed, so the levels remain relatively stable over time.

Two other chemicals that, on the Earth at least, are entirely biological in origin are dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide.  You've undoubtedly encountered these before; they're partly responsible for the unpleasant smell when you cook cabbage.  They're produced by a variety of living things, including bacteria, plants, and fungi -- dimethyl sulfide is what truffle-hunting pigs are homing in on when they're after truffles. 

Well, data from the James Webb Space Telescope showed that an exoplanet called K2-18b has measurable quantities of both dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide -- to the point that even the astronomers, who ordinarily have zero patience with the "It's aliens!" crowd, are saying "this is the strongest hint yet of biological life on another planet."

So far, the spectroscopic data that found the chemicals is at a significance level of "3-sigma" -- meaning there's a 0.3% chance that the signal was a statistical fluke (or, put another way, a 99.7% chance that it's the real deal).  It's exciting, but we've seen 3-sigma data do a faceplant before, so I'm trying to restrain myself.  Generally 5-sigma -- a 0.00006% chance of it being a fluke -- is the standard for busting out the champagne.  But even so, this is pretty amazing.

K2-18b is 124 light years away, and is thought to be a "Hycean world" -- an ocean-covered world with a thick, hydrogen-rich atmosphere.  So whatever life is there is very likely to be marine.  But even if we're not talking about your typical Star Trek-style planet with lots of rocks and an orange sky and aliens that look like humans but with rubber facial appendages, the levels of DMS and DMDS suggest a thriving biosphere.

"Earlier theoretical work had predicted that high levels of sulfur-based gases like DMS and DMDS are possible on Hycean worlds," said Nikku Madhusudhan of Cambridge University, who co-authored the study, which appeared this week in Astrophysical Journal Letters.  "And now we've observed it, in line with what was predicted. Given everything we know about this planet, a Hycean world with an ocean that is teeming with life is the scenario that best fits the data we have."

The issue, of course, is not just the statistical significance; 99.7% seems pretty good to me, even if it doesn't satisfy the scientists.  The problem is that sneaky little phrase that was in my description of biosignatures earlier; "as far as we know."  We don't know of a way to produce DMS and DMDS in significant quantities except by biological processes, but that doesn't mean one doesn't exist.  It could be that in the weird chemical soup on an planet in another star system, there's an abiotic way to produce a stable amount of these two compounds, and we just haven't figured it out yet.

Be that as it may, it's still pretty damn exciting.  It's certainly the closest we've gotten to "there's life out there."  And being only 124 light years away -- in our stellar neighborhood, really -- it's right there for us to study more intensively.  Which the astronomers will definitely be doing.

So that's our cool news for today.  I don't know about you, but now I'm daydreaming about what kind of life there might be on a world entirely covered by water.  I'm sure that whatever they are, they'll be "forms most beautiful and most wonderful" beyond Charles Darwin's wildest dreams.

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The tapestry of lies

In my novel Sephirot, the main character, an ordinary guy named Duncan Kyle, finds himself lost in an interlocking maze of worlds, each of which seems to be doing its best to trap him permanently.  The first character he meets, the enigmatic Sphinx, gives him a warning about what he's about to face.  "The first thing you should learn here," she says, "is that everything you see and hear is a lie."

Duncan quickly comes to the obvious question, which is if everything here is a lie, is the Sphinx's own statement a lie as well?

The Sphinx cocks a sardonic eyebrow and says, "Oh, of course not.  I wouldn't lie about something that important."

When later, he meets the gruff rogue Jack Holland, he's once again confronted with whether anything he's seeing is the truth.  "Do you believe it?" Holland asks him.  "All this?"

Duncan responds with a question.  How can he not believe what's right in front of him?

"Then you're choosing to believe a lie," Holland responds.  "You're more'n half gone already."

Lie to people often enough, and they lose their ability to tell the difference.  Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, knew that principle well, and used it to astonishing success.  He put it succinctly: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.  The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and military consequences of the lie.  It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

It's a lesson the Trump administration has also learned well.  Consider the following:

They said they'd never overturn Roe v. Wade; it's "established law."

They said they were all for a healthy environment, including clean water and air.

They said grocery prices would come down and the stock market would surge "on day one."

They said the war in Ukraine would be peacefully resolved within three days of Trump's inauguration.

They said there'd be no instigation of, or participation in, more military actions overseas; the focus would be on helping Americans.

They said they'd never make cuts to Medicaid and Medicare.

They said they'd never touch Social Security.

They said of course they were supportive of equal rights for LGBTQ+ people, that Trump is a "real friend of the gay community."

They said they aren't after legal immigrants, only illegal ones.

They said well, okay, they are after legal immigrants, too, but they'd never go after American citizens.

And... surprise!... just two days ago Trump said that his pal Nayib Bukele, dictator of El Salvador, had better build five more concentration camps, because the "homegrowns are next."

Trump supporters, look long and hard at this photograph.  This is not a terrorist or a criminal or a gang member.  This is  Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist, weeping as his head is shorn in the CECOT concentration camp.  He was in the United States seeking asylum from his native Venezuela.  He committed no crime, received no constitutionally-guaranteed due process.  Go ahead, try to defend this, I dare you.

Every single time, they're hoping that enough people will say, "Well, even if they lied, it doesn't affect me" that their supporters will not think to add the obvious word "... yet."  But each lie further erodes our freedoms -- and further dulls our ability to recognize it for what it is.

Part of the problem, of course, is the media.  That we even had to invent the word "sanewash" to describe Trump's handling by the media is telling.  But beyond that, they've downplayed the lies, calling them "evasions" or "partial truths" or "alternative views" or even "opinions."  Outlets like Fox News and OANN are the most egregious, but even supposedly centrist media like CNN and The New York Times routinely soft-pedal stories highlighting the barrage of falsehoods coming from this administration.  The result is that unless you put in a concerted effort to find the truth, you're being given watered-down half-truths at best, and at worst deliberate omissions and outright glaring lies.

I've found myself wondering how many of the Republican officials know these things are lies.  Some, like Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Tom Homan, are clearly True Believers, and are every bit as culpable as Trump himself.  Some, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, are probably too stupid to tell the difference.  But the others?

Doesn't matter in the end, of course.  Someone might want to remind Marco Rubio, for example, that "I was following orders from higher up" was not considered an acceptable defense at Nuremberg.

My one (small) consolation is Stephen King's observation that "The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short."  The flipside of this, though, is that even in a short time, the victims of regimes like this one will suffer horrible harm.  Some will die.  Our standing as a world leader, as a light for freedom and equality under the law, has already been irrevocably damaged.  I don't know how likely it is that the legal system will save us; Trump already received one 9-0 (even freakin' Clarence Thomas!) Supreme Court vote demanding he bring back Kilmar Ábrego García, another innocent man sent to a concentration camp without due process, and Trump's response basically was "I don't hafta, who's gonna make me?"

And so far, no one has.  If the president defies the Supreme Court, we have no checks and balances.

I wish I had something more positive to say.  Like Duncan's predicament in Sephirot, simply realizing you can't believe anything you're seeing or hearing only gets you so far.  Disbelieving what they're saying is just the first step.

The second -- the one we've yet to take as a nation -- is to demand truth, fairness, and justice in a voice loud enough that it cannot be ignored.

Keep in mind that the one advantage we've got is numbers.  Once the tapestry of lies is torn to shreds, once the men and women who created it have been deposed, we've got the power to rebuild what we once had.  But that means getting enough people to recognize what's happening that they're willing to act.

Otherwise, as Jack Holland put it, we're "more'n half gone already."

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