What we see isn’t always there

One of the fundamentals of applying the scientific method is the principle that conclusions are based on empirical evidence.  Scientific proof, in other words, is supposed to be based on “facts” that we can, in some way, see, touch, feel, and ideally measure.

But it’s not that simple.  The basic problem is that what we think we see isn’t always actually what is there.  Recently, Bernie Bamford, an Englishman was studying the imaging system produced by Google Ocean and identified what looks like man-made structures at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean  just off the coast of the Canary Islands.  

This is very near the Strait of Gibraltar, where Plato talked about “Atlantis,”  a legendary city which Plato wrote had disappeared with its ancient civilization about three thousand years ago.  No one has ever found it, but if it exists, most people think it probably was covered by sea in a series of earthquakes.  (Egyptian priests said it was the because the people had stopped believing in god.)

A lot of people were excited by Bamford’s discovery.  But alas, Google says it is unlikely to be Atlantis.  Google says that what looks like man-made structures on their ocean images are artifacts.  The lines reflect the path taken by the boat as it was collecting the data about the floor of the sea below.

Now hardly anybody thinks Bamford’s lines suggest he found Atlantis.

But Bamford’s lines do illustrate why science makes two important demands of evidence that it accepts as truly scientific. 

The first is that more than one person has to be able to see it.  We humans – even normal humans not suffering from mental illness or drug-induced hallucinations – experience things all the time that nobody else can experience with us.  A great idea, physical or psychological pain, or even the taste of hot pepper on our tongue might show our our face, but nobody else feels our experience directly.  Our dreams often seem terribly real at night but not in the day.  So none of these experiences are considered scientifically verifiable, because they are private.  If somebody else can’t gather the same evidence or do the same experiment, it doesn’t count as scientific. 

That doesn’t mean it isn’t real.  It just means it’s not scientific evidence.  That’s why people who claim they lived another life before this one, or that they were captured by aliens might sincerely believe what they are saying.  Who knows?  they might not even be right.  But it’s not science.

The second scientific principle Bamford’s lines illustrates is that we should accept the simplest explanation for any phenomenon.  The explanation that the lines are a result of the data collection process is simpler than that there is a city buried there.  If someone wants to convince us of the latter, some further evidence will have to be brought forth.  The most obviously convincing evidence would be from a deep sea dive.

But I think it unlikely that anyone will mount an under water expedition any time soon to find out if those Bamford lines are matched by walls on the ocean floor.

I don’t think they are.  Do you?

The disappearance of “dirty”

Mark Pagel, a professor at the University of Reading in southern England, thinks that if we could figure out time travel into the past, we might be able to exchange a few critical words with Stone Age people, and that we might actually understand each other.

He has found that in the last fifteen or twenty thousand years or so, some  words – especially numerals and pronouns – have barely changed.  The words I, We, Who, Two, Three, and Five seem to survive through multiple millenniums unaffected by time and place.  

Others words, on the other hand, evolve rapidly.  Pagel has produced a surprising list of words that probably will not be recognizable in less than ten centuries from now.

One disappearing word in “dirty.”  This surprised me because “dirty” seems such a useful word with a very broad application.  But that is just the problem.  ”Dirty” means so many different things that we often search for a different word to make it clear what we mean.

Instead of dirty, for instance, we might say unwashed, soiled, contaminated, muddy, foul-mouthed, poisonous, toxic, immoral, smelly, unfair, smutty, unclean, unhealthy, cloudy, filthy, grimy, foul, polluted, grubby,  nasty, dishonest, fraudulent, illegal, crooked, unscrupulous, stained, mucky, corroded, or possibly even disorganized.

(I’m sure the list is not exhaustive, and if another possibility occurs to you,  your additions in a comment below are most welcome.)

It seems a shame that a word so rich in content and innuendo is destined for extinction.

The American comet

65 million years ago, it was probably a meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs which had flourished on earth for 250 million years.  To put this in perspective, the Homo species has been around for about two million years, and Homo sapiens – which is us – appeared in Africa less than a quarter of a million years ago.

Now scientists have found evidence that a comet landed in America 13,000 years ago.   It probably explains the disappearance of the first settlers in North America and huge creatures like the woolly mammoth, the American lion, and the American camel.  I didn’t know America ever had lions and camels, but we did.

The settlers are called the Clovis people.  Until now, archaeologists were not sure why they disappeared, and some thought perhaps they weren’t even ever in America.  The evidence now suggests that they had come over from by boats from France via Alaska or across a land bridge from Siberia.  They did not die out because they had hunted all the megafauna (large animals) to extinction and then themselves succumbed to the increasing cold.  Instead, vegetation and animals were wiped out by a firey inferno created by a landing from outer space.  People lost their food source.

A layer of tiny nano-diamonds along with iridium and a layer of soot and charred foliage can only be explained as a result of an extraterrestrial visitor arriving with some force.

Could it happen again?  Unfortunately, it could.  In fact, it almost certainly will.  Because it has.

Several serious meteorites have landed in Siberia recently.  The meteorite in 2003 would have wiped out London or New York if it had been a little further south.

http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2009/01/diamonds-link-comets-to-Clovis.html

An awful anniversary

In 1170, 839 years ago today, as he was beginning Vespers in the cathedral, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury,was murdered by four soldiers of the English King Henry II.  Becket and the King had been close friends for years, but when Henry appointed Becket as the head of the Church in England, he was not as pliable as Henry had expected.  In fury and exasperation, Henry cried out one day to his court “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?”  

In 1890, exactly 720 years later, the Massacre at Wounded Knee took place in what is now the American west.  The last of the fighting Sious Indians had agreed to surrender to U.S. troops for transport from South Dakota to Omaha, Nebraska, but it all went horribly wrong.  An Indian who was deaf and did not understand the command given to him refused to give up his arms.  By the time the resulting mayhem subsided, more than 200 Sioux men, women, and children were dead.  25 of the 500 U.S. troops also died.

And 69 years ago, on this day in 1940, the German airforce dropped more than 10,000 incendiary bombs on London.

I find it a despairing list of anniversaries – an assurance that we as humans seem to have learned so little about how to get along with those with whom we disagree.

But perhaps there is a glimmer of hope.  Killing ones enemies leaves the evidence of bodies to confirm the atrocities.  100,000 acts of kindness, of forgiveness, of tolerance, can disappear from our history books without a trace.

But they happened too.  And perhaps their effects have been just as great as the results of the numerous murderous outrages that pepper the history of Homo sapiens.

Cities: A radical change in life style

Somewhere in the region of 10,000 years ago, some people abandoned the nomadic life style humans had been living for hundreds of thousands of years and began to build cities.  They became immensely powerful centers of trade and innovation, but the vast majority of people continued to live as nomads.  Gradually, though, more and more people spent the whole of their lives in a single place, living from the fruits of the fields they planted and the animals that they had domesticated.

 But still, although people lived in what we might call settlements, villages and small towns, most people did not live in what we would call cities.  As late even as 1800, no more than 3% of the entire human population lived in all the world’s cities combined.

Within the last 200 years, that percentage has increased to over 50%.  This represents as radical a change in our life styles as the change from a nomadic to a settled life beginning ten thousand years ago.  And it’s taken place much more rapidly.  Economists, demographers, environmentalists, politicians, business people, and social scientists have not yet fully taken on board the breadth and meaning of this change.  It changes our food production and distribution needs, our energy patterns, our communication and transportation uses, our housing and our politics.  It makes us more vulnerable to the rapid spread of disease and the attacks of terrorism.  But it also multiplies the opportunities for creativity and cooperation.

We are thinking a lot about the present and potential effects of climate change today, and rightly so.  But I suspect it’s hard to underestimate the effects that the vast proliferation of urban life is going to have on our life styles as well.

4th-generation warfare

In the early hours of this morning, police defused a car bomb parked in the heart of London.  Had it gone off, hundreds, perhaps thousands, would have been killed, hundreds more injured, the property damage to busy and historic centres beyond calculation.  At this point, analysts are suggesting that the bomb seems to bear the hallmarks of Al Qaeda, but police say the suspicious car was noticed by accident, and that they had no prior intelligence about this potentially devastating attack.

Different groups of the human specieshave fought each other for as long as the eye can see.  But the lethal calibre of our warfare has steadily increased.

• When we lived as nomads, we fought over areas where wild food was plentiful.  Weapons were handmade, and were rarely fought to the death.  The victors gathered food in the most desirable spots, while the losers sought another source of wild fruits.
•  About 4,000 years ago, the level of warfare was ratcheted up.  People had begun to live in cities surrounded by domesticated fields which were their main food source.  These lush fields were also attractive to migrating tribes in seach of food on the road.  Now, though, the sedentary communities has more to lose than a field of wild berries.  If they lost their fields, they faced starvation or slavery.  They countered attacks with fortifications and more organized warfare.
• At the same time, the weapons of war also became more deadly.  The migrating tribes began to attack on horse-drawn carriages, and both sides began to arm themselves with weapons made of the metal made first of copper, and later with far tougher copper.
• Another dramatic change came with the invention of dynamite and gunpowder in the 13th century.  Until then, defences of thick walls, wide moats, and elevated positions were often too difficult to defeat, and fortified landowners held the upper hand.  Gunpowder and cannon fire demolished them.  As weapons became increasingly sophisticated and more mobile, war became more steadily more deadly.  The culmination of their destructiveness came with the improvement of military weapons brought about by industrialization.  When the two World Wars in the 20th century finally ended, at least 65 million people were dead.
• Atomic and nuclear power brought in what contemporary analysts call “2nd-generation warfare.”  The atomic bomb was used to bring WWII to an end, followed by a peace of sorts born of mutual  terror called The Cold War.
• But atomic and nuclear weapons were not effective against guerilla tactics.  It was this ”3rd-generation warfare,” that defeated first France, and then America in VietNam.
• Today, terrorism is “4th-generation warfare.”  There is no distinction made among intended victims, between military fighters and civilians, between innocent and guilty, between male and female, adult and child.  Relatively speaking, the numbers actually murdered in a terrorist attack are small, but they are deliberately designed to increase fear, and demoralize entire nations.

War has changed in the last 10,000 years.  Globalization has given us more mobility, population increases have brought us closer together, and technological development has taught us more and terrifying ways of killing each other. 

Perhaps we will finally become an extinct species because the only way we know to resolve our differences is by killing those who disagree with us.

The ladybug and life on Mars

I lifted a ladybug out of my bathroom today and put her in the garden where I thought she had a better chance of survival.  But I wondered what it was that got her to travel so far from her native home.

Then I heard today that the European Space Agency is seeking six volunteers to spend 17 months in an isolation space the size of nine truck containers.  In reality they will be somewhere in Moscow, but the idea is to simulate a trip to Mars.  The Agency wants to study how people would respond to weightlessness, high workloads, limited supplies and communications with Earth, lack of privacy, and with various planned and possibly unplanned emergencies.

I think what impelled the ladybug into my bathroom is the basic force that will motivate those six volunteers to simulate a trip to Mars, and probably someday a real attempt to reach Mars.  I believe they are motivated by the same life force that got plants and fish out of the water and onto land half a billion years ago.  It motivated humans’ humans’ trek out of Africa perhaps 100,000 years ago, and propelled our ships to the edges of the oceans until we had at last circled the globe 500 years ago. 

Maybe it’s not all that different from what motivates us more ordinary mortals to take a trip to a new place, or maybe ski down a steeper slope, climb a higher mountain.  Or maybe just walk into a new restaurant.