Astrological interior design

It's always interesting when woo-woos meld together different traditions, apparently not recognizing that if you have a ridiculous idea, it's not going to become more accurate if you combine it with several other ridiculous ideas.

And that even holds true if you somehow get your nutty claim into a major media outlet.

Someone should have explained all of this to Suzy Strutner, who wrote an article a few days ago for Huffington Post called "Your Birthday Could Say a LOT About What Happens In Your Home."  And we're not just talking about timing of birthday parties, here.  Strutner claims that we should all pay close attention to something called "local space astrology," which seems to combine regular old astrology with ley lines and feng shui to come up with an all-new amalgam that may rival the idea that the shape of your ass can predict your future for sheer idiocy.

Apparently, what you're supposed to do is to get a "local space chart" which identifies the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets at the moment of your birth.  You then lay this chart over the floor plan of your house, and see which planets are where.

Or something like that.

Because I don't see how this could work, okay?  Even if you buy the whole astrology thing, why would my "local space chart" have anything to do with my house?  I was born on a military base in Quantico, Virginia, and I currently live in upstate New York.  So at the moment of my birth, a completely different set of people lived here, who all were born in different places yet, and so on.

Plus, why should it be my "local space chart" at all?  Why not my wife's?  Or our sons'?  Or our dogs'?  Maybe Neptune being in Aquarius is why my one dog woke me up at three in the morning today.  You know, all of the business about the God of the Sea and guys pouring water out of jars made him need to pee.

But Strutner, and Kita Marie Williams, the "astrological interior designer" she consulted for this exposé, apparently don't see anything at all illogical about all this.  Strutner writes that there's a way to get around having bunches of different people in the house:

Ideally, you'd center your entire floor plan around the planets. But that's almost always impossible...  Plus, if many people live in your home, then their ideal room setup is going to be different than yours, since they have a different local space chart.  Instead, learn how the planets make each room for each person.

She gives the example of the "Mars line" being the line of "combative energy," so if your "Mars line" runs through your living room, you should watch exercise videos there, or "meditate there if you need a powerful boost."

But of course, sometimes the lines don't, um, line up so well.  Strutner tells us one example:

Of course, some planet lines may not sync well with the rooms that they intersect. This might debunk household crises like a broken computer, according to astrology expert Gloria Roca.  Roca once consulted a client whose broken computer sat near her home's Neptune line.  The machine likely broke down because Neptune represents slowness and blur, Roca says. Once her client added a photo of a serene mountain -- associated with the earthy and wise planet Saturn -- to the room, the computer started to work just fine.

Righty-o.  Someone should tell that to the people on the Geek Squad over at Best Buy.  Don't bother taking the customer's computer apart.  Just tape a photograph of a "serene mountain" to it and it'll repair itself.

Roca, Williams, and Strutner tell us that we should head off this sort of problem by decorating according to our "local space chart" right from the get-go.  A room that has a "Mars line" should have bright red walls, they tell us, to "bring forth its best energy."  Which sounds like exactly the décor I'd choose, if I was the interior designer for the Marquis de Sade.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But the rest of us might choose something a little more subdued, regardless of what planet's lines run through the room.  Bookshelves are "Jupiterian," we're told, and flower bouquets are associated with Venus.  Which raises a problem; what if a room is multi-purpose?  Many of us read, sleep, watch TV, and have sex in our bedrooms.  Do we have to change the décor every time we want to switch gears?  "I'm sorry, dear, we can make love as soon as I finish repainting the walls."

So anyway.  The whole thing strikes me as ridiculous on a number of different levels.  The astrologers really should go back to telling their clients that because the Moon is in Scorpio, they're going to meet a tall, handsome stranger some time in the next two weeks, and let the ley lines and feng shui nuts do their own thing as well.  Combining them all just leads to a messy conflict of interests, and nobody wants that.

But I probably only said that because the Mercury line under my office intersects with the fifth house of Capricorn, or something.  And also because I'm a little grumpy about being up since three AM.

Airlines and orthodoxy

There are times when my desire to be a live-and-let-live, tolerant, kind human being runs smack into my general annoyance at people whose adherence to superstitious nonsense makes them act irrationally.

The whole thing comes up because of the recent disruption of several flights (most commonly from New York to Israel) by ultra-Orthodox Jewish men who believe that that their religion forbids them to sit next to a woman they're not married to.  According to a piece on the issue in the New York Times:

“The ultra-Orthodox have increasingly seen gender separation as a kind of litmus test of Orthodoxy — it wasn’t always that way, but it has become that way,” said Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at Queens College.  “There is an ongoing culture war between these people and the rest of the modern world, and because the modern world has increasingly sought to become gender neutral, that has added to the desire to say, ‘We’re not like that.’”

While many rabbis counsel that there's nothing wrong with a man sitting next to a woman on public transportation unless he's trying to get sexual gratification out of their proximity -- and it's hard to imagine that being likely on an airplane, although people do weird things sometimes -- there are Jewish men who will make an issue of it.  And hold up the entire flight until someone accommodates their request.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, despite being an atheist, I'm generally of the opinion that you can believe whatever you like, unless that belief involves coercing other people to adopt those beliefs, or passing laws mandating that your beliefs be taught in public schools.  But increasingly, it seems that a lot of people on the more extreme fringe of various religions have been using their own peculiar worldviews to reshape what other people do, demanding that everyone around them fall into line with whatever weird thing their religion demands.

I was having a discussion with a buddy of mine about the No-Gurlz-Allowed attitude of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, and my initial thought was that demanding that the Jewish men cave in and do something that they thought was immoral might be discriminatory:

Enforcing company policies (mixed male/female seating, for example) could easily be claimed as discrimination.  Their religious practices make a demand on them that is impossible to meet unless airlines change their practices.  How is this different from saying that an evangelical Christian has to serve gays?

My friend responded thusly:

There's no discrimination.  The airline sells you a seat.  There's no guarantee if you will be seated next to a man, woman, Muslim, homosexual, transsexual, etc. If this bothers you, it is incumbent upon you to buy two seats so you can guarantee that no one who bothers you will be seated next to you.  Or, you have to hope that you can switch seats with someone else.  But you have no right to hold up a flight if you can't find anyone willing to do that.

And, of course, he's right.  You buy a plane ticket, you know ahead of time that you're going to get at most a single package of stale pretzels to eat on the entire flight, that the person next to you is going to immediately recline his seat so that his head is nearly in your lap... and that you could be seated next to anyone.  If your religion demands that you never sit next to a woman, you have to find an alternate means of transportation.

After all, you're the one who has accepted a belief system that significantly restricts what you can do. It's not the airline's fault you bought in.

An even more interesting question, though, is how far I'd go to accommodate such beliefs, should I be asked to switch seats.  My friend said the following:

Now, would I trade seats with the ultra-Orthodox Jew? If it is an even swap -- aisle for aisle or window for window -- sure. I may even do an aisle for window or vice versa. But I would not swap a window or aisle seat for a middle seat just to be nice to him.

I dunno.  I'd be a little more peevish in that situation, I think.  I'd want an upgrade.  "You want to make demands that everyone in the world meet your needs?  Fine.  You can sit in the middle seat between two space hogs who wear too much cologne and insist on claiming both armrests.  I'll take your nice window seat.  Thanks ever so."

But that's just me.  Like I said, I try to be nice, most of the time, but sometimes the Intolerant Asshole side of me comes out on top.

Dry times

Telling an outright, bald-faced lie on a major issue should exclude you from running for public office.

Yes, I know that would exclude three-quarters of the politicians we now have in office.  But consider: why do we tolerate this sort of behavior?  Instead of saying, "You are lying," we just roll our eyes and say, 'Oh, you know politicians."  As if this is somehow on the same level as a tall tale from a five-year-old, and not an utterance that might not only hoodwink naïve members of the citizenry, but potentially fuck up smart policymaking in the process.

Take, for example, California corporate leader and likely 2016 presidential contender Carly Fiorina, who just a couple of days ago blamed the unprecedented West Coast drought on "liberal environmentalists:"

That's the tragedy of California, because of liberal environmentalists' insistence - despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia, liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California's population has doubled.  There is a man-made lack of water in California - and Washington manages the water for the farmers.  President Obama goes out to California a little over a year ago, calls it a tragedy of global warming and hands out money to a food bank.  This is all about politics and policy, and it is liberal environmentalists who have brought us this tragedy.

First, let's start with the obvious.  Since I don't work as a state employee in Wisconsin or Florida, I'm allowed to utter the words "climate change," so I will.  According to a paper released three months ago in Geophysical Research Letters, authors Daniel Griffin and Kevin J. Anchukaitis state their conclusion bluntly:

(T)he current event is the most severe drought in the last 1200 years, with single year (2014) and accumulated moisture deficits worse than any previous continuous span of dry years.  Tree ring chronologies extended through the 2014 growing season reveal that precipitation during the drought has been anomalously low but not outside the range of natural variability.  The current California drought is exceptionally severe in the context of at least the last millennium and is driven by reduced though not unprecedented precipitation and record high temperatures.

But of course, accepting climate change would be right up there with accepting evolution for anyone hoping for the Republican nomination.  So it's unsurprising that Ms. Fiorina won't come right out and say that the climatic side of the drought was triggered by anthropogenic global warming.

[image courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]

Because there is another side of the drought, and that's water usage.  California Governor Jerry Brown at least gave lip service to this aspect of it last week, with an order to cut back on water use by homeowners -- making it illegal to use potable water to irrigate lawns, for example, something that in my opinion should have been done thirty years ago.  Urban water districts have been ordered to reduce water consumption by 25%, although they're not giving any particular details on how to get to that target other than the lawn sprinkler ban.

What is less well-known, though, is that the water use restriction didn't touch two of California's industries: agriculture and petroleum.  Agriculture uses 80% of the state's water supply.  A full 10% goes for almonds alone.  Another 15% goes to producing alfalfa hay, a lot of which is consumed by the dairy industry.  But a study has shown that just the portion of the hay crop that is exported to land-poor countries like Japan represents a water use of 100 billion gallons per year -- enough to supply a million families with drinking water for a year.

Explain to me again, Ms. Fiorina, how liberal environmentalists caused all of this?

Then there's the petroleum industry, that according to a recent estimate uses two million gallons of fresh water a day for oil and gas production.  Included in that are the 70 million gallons of water the state used in 2014 for hydrofracking alone, water that after use is so laden with salt and toxins that it is unsuitable for use for anything else, and is often disposed of by deep-well injection, which in 2014 was demonstrated to have contaminated agricultural and drinking water aquifers in the Central Valley with arsenic, thallium, nitrates, and salt.

Find me a liberal environmentalist who had anything to do with making this practice legal.

Go on, I'm waiting.

Look, it's not like I have solutions for this problem.  The California drought is a tangled skein of climate effects (both natural and anthropogenic), mismanagement, greed, overuse, and poor planning.    Any possible answer will require some serious rethinking of how water is used and how agriculture is managed in arid climates.  Governor Brown's lawn-watering restrictions are going to have exactly zero effect, given that the vast majority of water use in California isn't by homeowners.

And Carly Fiorina's statement that the whole thing wouldn't have happened if only the damn tree-huggers had allowed the building of a couple more reservoirs is an outright lie.

But such smokescreens feed political expediency.  Simple causes imply simple solutions, and it's in the interest of Ms. Fiorina's presidential aspirations to claim that the whole thing can be fixed if only we have a business-first, environment-last leader.  So it's unsurprising, I suspect.

But expedient doesn't mean "true," and it'd be nice if some of our political leaders would acknowledge the fact.

UPDATE:  Apparently Fiorina's statement is a lie even in a more fundamental way; there have been 21 million acre-feet of reservoirs and storage added to California's water management system in the last fifty years.  See this source for details.  Thanks for a sharp-eyed and knowledgeable reader for catching this.

Paleontological ghosts

When I was in elementary school, I developed a fascination with extinct prehistoric animals.  Not unusual, I realize; kids love big, powerful creatures with nasty pointy teeth.  But this interest has persisted for nearly fifty years.  The thought that millions of years ago, there were on the Earth strange beasts, the likes of which we will never see again, always raises in me a sense of wonder.  In the words of Charles Darwin, "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Whenever I run into someone who shares this interest, my first question is always, "What's your favorite?"  I had a student in my AP Biology class last year who is mighty fond of Anomalocaris, which in my mind has always had a rather Lovecraftian look:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Another student has actually been on paleontological digs in North Dakota, and once told me he has a soft spot in his heart for the early mammal with the euphonious name of Didelphodon:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Me, I've always had a thing for flying animals, so my favorite group is the pterodactyloids, the best of which is the impossibly wacky-looking Rhamphorhynchus:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So it was with great interest that I read an article by Nick Redfern over at Mysterious Universe that claims that these guys might still be around.

Yes, you read that right.  Pterodactyls.  Big, leathery, weird flying reptiles.  In San Antonio, Texas, in fact.  Now, how there could be a breeding population of gigantic bird-lizards in Texas without people seeing them more often -- hell, given that it's Texas, without someone shooting one -- is a question that troubles Joshua P. Warren, investigator of all sorts of odd claims and author of the book Pet Ghosts.  

And it was undoubtedly the research for his book that drove Warren to an explanation regarding why people see pterodactyloids (and other prehistoric creatures), but said cryptids never leave any hard evidence:

They're the ghosts of extinct animals.

"It seems absurd to believe that pterosaurs might still be amongst us, but never, ever get captured or killed," Redfern writes.  "Could it be that, as Joshua Warren’s research suggests, we’re dealing with the ghosts of long dead pterodactyls?  It sounds bizarre, but if people live on after physical death, then why not animals, too?"

Well, yeah.  "If."  I'm not convinced on that last account, as you no doubt know.  And of course, the convenient thing about this explanation is that this means that the lack of evidence becomes, in some bizarre way, a support for the contention itself.  "Nothing there?  No fur, footprints, anything?  There you are, then.  It's a Ghost Saber-toothed Tiger."

So I'm still figuring that we're looking at eyewitnesses who were either (1) confused, (2) lying, (3) drunk, or (4) all of the above.  But that's unlikely to convince either Redfern or Warren.

And understand that it's not that I'm happy about this.  I'd love it if there was some way to see what these magnificent animals looked like when they were alive.  And if I couldn't see a live one, I'd settle for a ghostly one.  But unfortunately, I very much doubt if either of these is possible -- although next time I'm in Texas, I'll keep an eye out.  

Maybe the rare San Antonio Rhamphorhynchus will put in an appearance just for me.

Fiction come to life

Regular readers of this blog know that besides my two hats of Skepticism Blogger and High School Science Teacher, I also wear a third one, which is Fiction Writer.  And we fiction writers are, almost without exception, a strange breed.  Discussions with other authors has turned up a commonality, a psychic quirk that I thought for a time was unique to me: our fictional characters sometimes take on a life of their own, to the point that they seem...

... real.

The result is that there are times that I feel like I'm not inventing, but recounting, stories.  The plot takes turns I never intended, the characters do things that surprise me for reasons that only later become apparent.  In my current work-in-progress, a strange, neo-mythological novel called The Fifth Day that follows Stephen King's dictum to "create sympathy for your characters, then turn the monsters loose," one of my characters has turned out to be a great deal nicer than I ever suspected he'd be.  His soft side came from a history of childhood neglect that prompts him to befriend another character, a twelve-year-old boy.  I honestly had no knowledge of this when I started the story.

Of course, that won't stop me from killing him in a few chapters.  But still, it's nice to know he's not the macho jerk he seemed to be at first.

Be that as it may, I really do (truly) know that it's me inventing the whole thing.  My books are, after all, on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore.  Which makes the claims of a few authors even more peculiar than the Who's-Driving-The-Car sensation I sometimes get; because these authors claim that they've actually met their characters.

Like, in real life, in flesh and blood.  According to a recent article in The Daily Grail, more than one writer has said that (s)he has been out and about, and there, large as life, has been someone from one of their stories.

Alan Moore, for example, author of the Hellblazer series, said that he ran into his character John Constantine in a London sandwich bar.  "All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine," Moore said in an interview.  "He looked exactly like John Constantine.  He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar."

Moore considered following him, but then decided not to.  "I thought it was the safest," he said.

Graphic novel artist Dave McKean has also met a fictional character, but not one of his own; he says he's run into the character Death from Neil Gaiman's series Sandman.  Which has to have been pretty alarming, considering.

Of course, most people, myself included, chalk this up to the overactive imagination that we writers tend to have.  We picture our characters vividly, imagine the scenes in full Technicolor and Sensurround, so it's not really that surprising that sometimes we see things that make us wonder if maybe our fictional worlds have come to life.  But some people believe that this isn't a coincidence -- some chance resemblance of a person to a character in one of our stories -- but a real, literal manifestation of a fictional being into the waking world.

The (fictional) Japanese evil spirit Oiwa [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Such fiction-become-real beings even have a name.  They're called tulpas, from a Sanskrit word meaning "conjured thing."  In the western occult tradition, the idea is that through the sheer force of will, through the power that the imagined being has in our minds, it becomes real.

And not just to its creator; believers claim that a tulpa has an independent reality.  Graphic novel writer Doug Moench, in fact, says he met one face to face.  The story is recounted in Jeffrey Kripal's book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, and is excerpted in The Daily Grail link I included above; but it suffices to say that Moench was writing a scene in one of his Planet of the Apes comics about a black-hooded bad guy holding a gun to the head of a character, and heard his wife call him -- and he went into the room to find a black-hooded intruder holding a gun to his wife's head.

Understandably shaken by this experience, Moench apparently went through a period where he was uncertain if he should continue writing -- because he was afraid that it would become real.

Predictably, I think what we have going on here isn't anything paranormal.  Moench's experience was almost certainly nothing more than a bizarre, and very upsetting, coincidence, and a fine example of dart-thrower's bias (think about all the millions of scenes writers have created that haven't come true).  But there's something about the tulpa thing that still gives me a bit of a shiver, even so.  There are plenty of characters I've created that I'd just as soon stay fictional, thank you very much.  (The old man in the interrogation room from my soon-to-be-released novel Kill Switch being a case in point; that sonofabitch was awful enough on the printed page.)

But there are a few characters from stories I've written that I wouldn't mind meeting.  Tyler Vaughan from Signal to Noise comes to mind, because more than one person has told me that Tyler is actually a younger version of me, and I'd like to apologize to him for saddling him with my various neuroses.  But the majority of 'em -- yeah, they can stay fictional.

So I'll take a pass on the whole tulpa thing.  For one thing, I see no possible way it could work.  For another, all the accounts of authors meeting their characters are way too easily explained by the fact that writers' skulls tend to be filled with things that I can only call waking dreams, so we're to be excused if sometimes we blur the edges of reality and fiction.

And third: I'd rather not have some of the scenes I've written come to life.  I had a hard enough time putting my characters through some of that stuff.  No way in the world would I want to live through it myself.

The politics of fear

In M. G. Miller's amazing book Bayou Jesus, we read about four characters on a deadly collision course in early 20th century southern Louisiana -- the young, unwed African American woman Miss Zassy, her saintly son Frank Potter, Miss Zassy's sadistic employer Samson Boudreaux, and his daughter Alice.  Throughout the book there is a sense of tragic inevitability, driven by Miller's elegant prose and his character Samson's pervasive fear of the dark-skinned race who were freed after what he calls "The War of Northern Aggression."

It's the fear that struck me, throughout my reading of this book.  What, exactly, was Samson so afraid of?  He phrases it in self-justifying platitudes: "Give them an inch, they'll take a mile."  "If you don't keep them in their place, they'll take over the whole world."  And despite my knowing that Miller's depiction is sadly accurate, and that there were people in the Deep South who believed this -- after all, Bayou Jesus is set only a stone's throw from where I spent most of the first twenty years of my life -- I couldn't help but think more than once, "how can Samson look around him, and honestly think that the poor, powerless, disadvantaged African Americans in his home town are any kind of threat?"

And yet he, and the real white supremacists who were all too common in the post-Civil-War South, did feel exactly that.  It had nothing to do with logic, facts, or even reality, and yet it drove them to harass, torture, and kill innocent people who weren't trying to do anything other than eke out a meager living in peace.

African Americans during the Civil War [photograph by Mathew Brady, 1864]

Which brings me to conservative columnist John Zmirak's claim that Christians in America are facing imminent genocide.

In an interview with radio talk show host Joe Miller, Zmirak made the following statement, which I quote here in its entirety:

When a dominant group wants to persecute a minority, the first thing they do is vilify them.  You had the dominant secularists in France before the French Revolution spend about twenty years vilifying the Christian clergy; the moment they took power in the French Revolution, they started killing the Christian clergy.  When the Turks decided that the Armenians were a dangerous minority almost 100 years ago to the day, they started out with a propaganda campaign saying that the Armenians were all traitors working for the Russian czar; within a few years, they were butchering in the streets and driving them into the desert to die of thirst.  Same thing happened in, of course, Nazi Germany, they vilified the Jews, preparing people for the Holocaust.  You saw it happen again in Rwanda, where the once-powerful Tutsi minority, they were declared on government radio stations for weeks and weeks, they were called cockroaches, ‘we must exterminate the cockroaches.’  It was repeated over and over and over again and it was followed, of course, by a genocide that in the course of a month or two, killed more than a million people. 

I think this vilification of faithful Christians could lead to violence in America.  I think the churches have been persecuted before, Christians are being persecuted all around the world by Islamists — and the U.S. government is doing nothing, of course — I could imagine Americans standing by while churches are padlocked and pastors are arrested for being hatemongers, while children are being taken away from their parents because they don’t want them to be taught their extremist views. 

It’s happened so many times before, and all the signs are there that the enemies of Christianity are seeing ‘how much can we get away with?  Can we close down a pizza parlor for even theoretically being willing to discriminate?  Can we get teachers from religious schools fired?  They’re going to keep pushing until they hit pushback.  And unless there’s powerful pushback from Christians now — not five years from now, when it will be too late, but now — we’re going to see ourselves reduced to the status of second-class citizens the way Christians are in countries like Egypt and Syria.

There are three takeaways I had from this:

1. 74% is a minority?  Even in the most secular parts of the United States, there are more Christians than any other group.  In some places, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who's not a Christian.
2. Saying that Christians (and anyone else, for that matter) can't discriminate is not "vilification."  In fact, it's kind of the opposite.  It's saying you can't use your religion to vilify someone else.
3. In Egypt and Syria, Christians comprise about 10% of the population, and the entire government, virtually all schools and public institutions, and even the legal system, is dominated by non-Christians.  How can you draw an analogy between the Middle East and the United States?  Unless... you know, you were to reverse it, to demonstrate that non-Christians might be a persecuted minority here in the United States?

But none of those facts matter.  Like the fictional Samson Boudreaux, who felt that wealthy, privileged Caucasians were in imminent danger from poor, downtrodden African Americans, John Zmirak thinks that the Christian majority -- whose members control virtually every level of government -- are about to be overthrown and oppressed by secularists.

And all because we're trying to make sure that pizza parlor owners can't refuse to serve people on the basis of their sexual orientation.  (And allow me to point out that the pizza shop owner who is the focal point of all of this is so far from an oppressed "second-class citizen" in the eyes of most Americans that she received over $840,000 in donations from like-minded Christians for her refusal to serve gays.)

It's amazing what fear will do, isn't it?  Because that's what drives the whole thing.  Fear of The Other, fear of losing your way of life, and worst of all -- fear that the people you hate will treat you the way you'd like to treat them.  When, of course, most of the members of the groups Zmirak and his ilk detest want only what everyone wants -- the freedom to live without being ridiculed, harassed, discriminated against, and (to use Zmirak's own word) vilified.

But this isn't about reality, and as has been said many times before, you can't logic yourself out of a position you didn't logic yourself into.  More to the point, I'd like to end with a quote from Ken Keyes: "A loving person lives in a loving world.  A hostile person lives in a hostile world.  Everyone you meet is your mirror."

Fermi's Paradox, fast radio bursts, and extraterrestrial intelligence

Just because I believe that science works, and that its methods are sound, doesn't mean that I have to like its conclusions.  And one of my least favorite pieces of sound scientific reasoning is Fermi's Paradox.

Named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, Fermi's Paradox originally took the form of a succinct response to all of the speculation about life in other star systems.  According to everything we know about stellar evolution, planet formation, biochemistry, and evolutionary biology, life should be common out there.  And just considering the fact that some star systems with planets are likely to be considerably older than ours, it also stands to reason that there should be civilizations out there considerably more advanced than ours.

Upon hearing this sort of argument, Fermi responded with a simple question:  "Where is everybody?"  If life, and intelligent life, is as common as all that, we should be bombarded with signals from extraterrestrials.  And in fact, despite decades of searching the skies, there has never been a single unequivocal transmission found from an intelligent life-form.  (Although the "WOW Signal" might be a contender; it's yet to be explained.)

There are a number of possible explanations for the lack of extraterrestrial communications, and most of them are depressing.  It could be that the likelihood of intelligent life developing on planets is, for some reason, a great deal less likely than we think it is (i.e. we here on Earth were just damn lucky).  It could be that most civilizations destroy themselves shortly after achieving the capacity for long-distance communication.  Some astronomers even think that there are cosmic reset switches -- natural phenomena that periodically wipe the galaxy clean of life, requiring a prolonged reboot, and preventing most life ever from achieving technology.  (For example, consider gamma-ray bursters, but only if you want to spend the next few days worrying about the entire solar system suddenly getting fried.)

Being someone who would love nothing better than to witness the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, I find the Fermi Paradox a significant downer.  I do have one possible answer that may still allow for a rich diversity of intelligent life in the galaxy, however; because we are looking for communication in the radio region of the spectrum (the fashion in which we as a species first learned to do long-distance transmission of information), it might be that such discernible, signal-producing modes of communication are quickly superseded by more sophisticated technologies that produce much less in the way of a footprint when observed from light years distant.  In other words; societies might only be detectable during the first few decades of their technological existence, when they're communicating with each other by shouting from the rooftops.  After they learn more efficient means of transmitting information, they seem to go silent.

I hope.  Because otherwise, it's mighty lonely here, you know?

All of this comes up because of a paper published just last week by Michael Hippke, Wilfried Domainko, and John Learned called "Discrete Steps in Dispersion Measures of Fast Radio Bursts."  In this interesting bit of research, an analysis was done of the dispersion measures of microseconds-long pulses in the radio region of the spectrum.  The paper is quite technical -- even with a B.S. in physics, it was over my head -- but insofar as I understand it, the curious thing about the eleven radio pulses thus far detected is that their dispersion measures are all integer multiples of 187.5 parsec/cm3 -- something that admits of no particularly obvious natural explanation.

Carl Sagan, in his wonderful novel (and later movie) Contact, used the idea of encoding a signal with some mathematical pattern as a way of broadcasting a "We're Here" signal into space -- or, conversely, looking for such a signal as a way of detecting life that's out there.  If a radio signal could be encoded with the first ten digits of pi, or (as in Contact) the first few prime numbers, that would be instantly recognizable as an unequivocal signal from an intelligence.  So the discovery of the 187.5 pattern in dispersion measures for FRBs was immediately jumped upon as evidence that the radio bursts originate from some alien civilization.  (The International Business Times, for example, was all a-quiver with the possibility.)

The astrophysicists, of course, are being more circumspect.  All that Hippke, Domainko, and Learned concluded from their research is that the pattern is currently unexplained, if suggestive:

(A)n extragalactic origin would seem unlikely, as high (random) DMs would be added by intergalactic dust.  A more likely option could be a galactic source producing quantized chirped signals, but this seems most surprising.  If both of these options could be excluded, only an artificial source (human or non-human) must be considered, particularly since most bursts have been observed in only one location (Parkes radio telescope)...  In the end we only claim interesting features which further data will verify or refute. 

They also suggest that the FRBs might actually be perytons, signals that appear to originate from space when they actually are entirely terrestrial in origin -- i.e. human-generated signals that are being misinterpreted, or simple radio telescope glitches.

Whatever the explanation is, the FRBs are an interesting phenomenon, and give me hope that there might be an eventual answer to Fermi's Paradox.  I have to be careful about letting my desire for there to be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe get in the way of my objectivity in evaluating the evidence at hand; but even so, the strange mathematical pattern that Hippke et al. have discovered might be the best contender we currently have for an alien civilization saying, "Here we are!"