The hidden history of life, viruses, covid, y-chromosome bottlenecks and more...

Ah well, no advice that I offer* to obstinate politicos, pundits or AI-inventors ever gets past the Cliché Protection Barrier that's established to firmly keep out any ideas (and I got a million of em) that are Not-Invented-Here. Should I take a hint and stay in my lane?

Naw. But one way to keep defending this incredible, miraculously creative, anomalous Enlightenment Civilization is to keep pointing out how wonderful science truly is! And hence...

== The Wonderful World of Nature and Biology! ==

First... some great sites:

Anton Petrov's science podcast is a favorite. (Though I occasionally catch some small error; it's half the fun!) This time: using micro black holes for energy purposes on Earth. Izat familiar? Tis, if you read my eponymous novel Earth. And this happens almost exactly on the timeline I projected, for that story's dramatic arc. 

My friend - and 25-year host of the Closer to Truth sci-philosophy TV series - Robert Lawrence Kuhn - just published a comprehensive survey of theories of consciousness — A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications. A balanced survey of the core philosophical issue of our time. 

Drinking water directly from the air? A concept predicted in one of the Out of Time novels… Boondoggle by Tom Easton and Torion Oey, which will soon be published by Amazing Stories. Now a real life product!  

== Tracing the hidden history of life ==

Pretty big (though interpolative) news: “By studying the genomes of organisms that are alive today, scientists have determined that the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), the first organism that spawned all the life that exists today on Earth, emerged as early as 4.2 billion years ago.  Earth, for context, is around 4.5 billion years old. That means life first emerged when the planet was still practically a newborn.” 

Now, this assumes several things, like a reliably constant rate of mutation divergence in life’s genetic heritage. If verified, it suggests that Life pops up quickly when conditions permit, rendering that factor in the Drake Equation (still speculatively) close to “1”.

Moreover – "But what is really interesting is that it's clear it possessed an early immune system, showing that even by 4.2 billion years ago, our ancestor was engaging in an arms race with viruses."

How much of the evolution of biochemistry is lost to time? "We might never know exactly, but our research yielded an important piece of evidence: only eight new reactions, all reminiscent of common biochemical reactions, are needed to bridge geochemistry and biochemistry.”  

And yes, I expect the Drake factor f(L) to prove trivially large, as did f(P). Planets and life, everywhere... but f(i) very small and f(c) - true civilizations that escape the male reproductive strategy called feudalism, in order to become creative and civilized enough to reach the stars? Vanishingly small.

== But let's cheer up! ==

Much later… a stress event in the early Jurassic may have driven many bird-hipped and two-legged dinosaurs to higher latitudes where they had to develop feathers and warm-bloodedness to survive, while the poor lizard-hipper giants had to make do in more arid lands.  Yay bird-hippers! (And the furry little mammals who followed them into the hills.)

A hilarious and insightfully informative video - How Cats Broke the Game - that explores the biology and anthropology of humanity's partnership with cats... told entirely in GAMER PLAY terms, e.g. build-points and skill-sets and power-ups, terminology that winds up making surprisingly solid sense. In fact, it's new-gen speak that actually rather impressed me.  

(Though humans bred terriers and other dog types who are also great ratters. And much more loyal.)

And in news from deeper time… This particular posting by Anton Petrov is especially interesting, re the impudent proposal that complex (multicellular) life forms had a brief start during an oxygenization event around 2.1 billion years ago, only to die off, leaving only single celled life till at least a billion years later, when it got rolling again. Naturally, it seems slim... though without any killer refutations, so far. And... well... interesting!

 == Peering at human bottlenecks ==

New evidence indicates that humans left Africa earlier than thought.... "The Neanderthal Y chromosome, for example, is more similar to the Y chromosome found in living humans than it is to the rest of the Neanderthal genome. In 2020, researchers offered an explanation: Neanderthal males inherited a new Y chromosome from humans between 370,000 and 100,000 years ago. But that would have made sense only if a wave of Africans had expanded out of the continent much earlier than scientists had thought."

"But why do the early migrations out of Africa seem to have fizzled away? Was there something different about the people in the last wave?"

Well, yeah, I talk about it in Existence.

A more recent bio mystery that’s been discussed a lot right here, in this blog’s lively comment community (below) has been the Great Big Y-Chromosome Bottleneck, from about 7000 to 5000 years ago, which appears to have started – and ended – rather suddenly, especially From Europe to South Asia. This article describes it pretty well. 

But how do you get a situation in which nearly all healthy females got to breed, but only one male in 17? And why would it happen (and stop) all across Eurasia with such brutal suddenness?

My own theory. It began with the arrival of larger farming villages, in which old tribal democracy could no longer function. No longer hold local 'lordly' bullies in check. Not when those top bullies could gather an 'army' of 20+ pals, call themselves demigods and simply take the widows of any men they killed. (That era also coincides with the arrival of large scale beer brewing; ponder that.) 

And the Y-Chromosome Bottleneck ended just as quickly! Pretty much as soon as some of those large villages gathered into even larger town- and city-based kingdoms. Those bigger-scale kings -- from Ur to the Indus to the Nile -- needed law and order! They also needed men for their armies, in struggles against other big kings. And hence they would have commanded local lords to stop wholesale slaughter of other local men! 

Those events would fit the order and sequence of the chromosomal evidence perfectly! Though... yes... that is a long way from proof.

And further DNA sleuthing opens such a window into a Scandinavian village 5000 years ago, tracing seven generations of 100 related individuals, 17% of whom had… the Plague. Which may have accounted for population declines. Which leads us to…

== Preparing for the next pandemic? ==

I have yet to see a single person, even one, point out the real, topmost effect of the Covid-19 epidemic.  That it was a spectacularly effective and relatively mild wakeup call and training exercise, for when we must deal with the real thing. A real ‘pandemic.’

All of what I just said may offend those of you who lost one or more people to that nasty disease… or if you claim that both government and society bungled the response. True enough. Still, I am not deterred from calling em as I see em. 

For example, while millions died, when you factor in remaining lifespan (most fatalities were elderly), the number of lost human years doesn’t rank anywhere in the top rank of plagues. 

For example, when compared to the 1918 flu calamity. As related by Evan Anderson in a recent Strategic News Service report: “(The 1918 flu) was by far the worst thing that has ever happened to humankind; not even the Black Death of the Middle Ages comes close in the number of lives it took. A 1994 report by the World Health Organization pulled no punches. The 1918 pandemic, it said, "killed more people in less time than any other disease before or since." It was the "most deadly disease event in the history of humanity." - Albert Marrin, Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918.

(Well… worst in total deaths, sure. Though not as a fraction of the population or in seismic effects upon civilization. But sure. way-way worse than anything we the living have seen.)

This is small comfort to those who lost loved ones, or who still suffer from Long Covid. (I know several and it’s a nasty syndrome that must be fought with science!) And I am well aware how consensus is shifting, re: the disease’s origins -- toward a verdict that this was no ‘accident.’ At least not completely. 

Still, I expect future generations will deem the whole episode to have been ‘innoculatory’… leaving us much better prepared for something truly worse. 

Like (perhaps) the H5N1 Bird Flu that’s now spreading among mammals, killing (for example) thousands of elephant seals and spreading through dairy and beef cattle*. With signs of seeping into pigs and thence maybe human-to-human… though let's emphasize that experts still rank it as ‘low risk.’

== More blessings from Covid-19? ==

A few – very few – have openly marveled over the incredible speed with which RNA-based vaccines arrived, saving millions and leading to even better/quicker skills. Stockpiles of medical supplies and apparatus are far improved and bureaucracies finer tuned. Even the mistakes that were made in the initial covid-panic led to better understanding. 

For example, next time we’ll likely know within mere days whether a pathogen can be transmitted by ‘fomites’, by non-living surfaces. So, no bleaching your store packages or produce, or microwaving your mail. Though hand washing proved-out as a very, very good thing.** And fer gosh sakes stay home with your sniffles and coughs!

Surveillance and detection, while at 1% of what experts say we should be funding, are at least a hundred-fold better than before, e.g. sampling viral loads in city waste water ‘sewersheds.’

Of course, none of this is helped by anti-science manias like the new U.S. Defense Secretary appointee, who proudly declared: "I don't believe in germs and I haven't washed my hands in a decade!" 

... or vaccine denialism by loons, who romanticize the 1950s as some whitebread paradise era, while ignoring the myriad ways that things were far more wretched then – and reasons why – during that decade, as I well recall – the most-adored person in America was named Jonas Salk. 

If science-haters truly carry out their open plans, we could be in big trouble (as described chillingly in these few paragraphs by Robert Heinlein). Or even if they remain the raving impediments that they currently are. 

None of this is meant to minimize. In fact, my job is to look ahead at possibilities, both bright and dark. And both future-view and history suggest 'pandemics' can get far, far worse than Covid-19. And while we are certainly unprepared, we are definitely less unprepared than we were.

(* Thorough cooking does kill the virus, so maybe rare steaks should be off the menu, for a while. Pasteurized milk seems to be fine.)

Then there’s this on the history of vaccines. 

== Final tidbits ==

‘Researchers have uncovered what might be the world’s oldest solar calendar at Göbekli Tepe, a 12,000-year-old archaeological site in southern Turkey.’  The implications of very pre-literate sophistication are so interesting.

Does putting Neosporin in your nose help fend off covid? Surprisingly, there’s preliminary evidence that it does. 

And finally this bit of genuine wisdom to cancel your incel rage junkie.... 

 

"He's just mad because he was abandoned by wolves and raised by his parents."                         

                          -- Robin Williams

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* Though again, Joe Biden has two weeks to do one thing. 

One thing easily within his power, that might shatter the worst madness, infection and treason among the US political and aristocratic castes. 

He could do this. He could... though his factotums will ensure that he won't.

Are we about to corner Fermi? The Paradox explained?

== Recent excitement ==

The best year for human space exploration since 1972 only keeps getting better.  For example…

Pluto is getting weirder. Smooth craterless plains. Regions cracked like drying mud on a giant scale. Atmosphere extends over 1000 miles from the surface. Visible wind-streaks on the surface, which may sites of current active cryo-venting.  And it's losing it's atmosphere to space at 500 tonnes/hr. Forming a dense ion tail trailing away from the sun.  Uh oh. Pluto may be demoted from Dwarf to Comet. (Thanks Pau451:)

And another coolness: The “Gore Sat” – a scientific spaceprobe proposed originally by Vice President Al Gore – is now positioned in a gravitationally metastable orbit about a million miles from Earth, closer to the Sun, allowing it to send home stunning images of the entire lit face of our planet, every single day or hour. Of course the money was spent for science. Discovr was launched in February of this year on a mission to monitor solar winds. Keeping tabs on space weather helps scientists issue accurate warnings ahead of solar storms that can potentially disrupt telecommunications or power infrastructure. But Gore (whose Senate bill around 1990 freed the internet into the wild and open thing we know) also dreamed that the perfect images of our world might inspire us.  Make it so.

= Your “Fermi” theory of the month ==

I’ve been asked to rebuild my catalogue of possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox… or the mystery of why we see no signs of technological civilization out there, despite extensive searches. Well well. I’ve been in this field for more than 30 years, both as an astronomer and an author of sf’nal thought experiments about alien life. (See a compilation of my writings here. Also see this animated introduction to the Fermi Paradox. A bit simplistic and off by a few factors. But interesting.)

That catalogue? Well, I started building it in 1981. I estimate close to a hundred hypotheses that are at least “not impossible,” with two dozen or so qualifying as “plausible” contributors to the observed scarcity of high-tech ETs… and maybe five or six that seem rather compelling. But let’s start with one that sits squarely in the mid-range.

They are out there, but sparse enough that we just haven’t spotted them yet!  We simply need to look a little harder.

And indeed.  It seems that is what we are about to do.

== SETI goes big in 2015 ==

Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking have just announced a $100 Million Breakthrough Initiative to reinvigorate the search for intelligent life in the universe over the next ten years. “Also present at the Royal Society in London for the project's announcement earlier today were Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, SETI Pioneer and UCSC Professor Emeritus Frank Drake, UC Berkeley Professor Geoff Marcy, Breakthrough Prize Foundation Chair Pete Worden, renowned author and producer Ann Druyan, and UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Andrew Siemion.” 

Notable, several of the members of this initiative, Geoff Marcy, Dan Werthimer and Andrew Siemion, have worked with me in endeavors to prevent METI or rash message beaming outward -- yoohoo shouting for attention from extraterrestrials.  

This new B.I. endeavor will include public engagement about messages! But there is no intent to actually send any, before the extensive discussions and examination-of-issues that many of us have long requested. I hope they will hold true to this promise.

This will be the biggest scientific search yet for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. The Breakthrough Initiative includes significant access to two powerful radio telescopes – the 100-meter diameter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and the 64-meter Parkes Telescope in Australia. There will also be significant efforts in Optical SETI.  Lick Observatory's Automated Planet Finder (APF) Telescope above San Jose CA will undertake a new deep and broad search for optical laser transmissions from nearby civilizations, if any exist.

You can tell they want to move vigorously on this from the fact that they hired Pete Worden to run the enterprise. The funds provider is Yuri Milner, a Russian entrepreneur and investor who has made a fortune in Silicon Valley. The program will include a survey of the 1,000,000 closest stars to Earth. It will be 50 times more sensitive than previous SETI research, will cover 10 times more of the sky, and will scan at least 5 times more of the radio spectrum – and 100 times faster. I’m hoping they will collaboratively make use of lessons learned by Jill Tarter and others at California’s SETI Institute.  Here is a well-written appraisal in the Economist.

Happy hunting guys. Just follow the protocols, please.

== Another “Fermi” for the catalogue? ==

I keep hearing this one… that we see no evidence of alien civilizations because they are indifferent to us.  Their technologies and communication methods are so far beyond us that we mistake them for natural phenomena, and they have as little interest in us as we might have in a hive of termites.

It has a nice, round smoothness to it, and aggressive humbleness is very much in vogue, these days. Still, the indifference explanation strikes me as much less likely than it at first seems.  Might we be "like ants" to some super species?  Sure! 

But we assign experts to study ants with passionate interest.

The response to that? "There are millions of ant nests for every ant scientist. Hence we aren’t likely to be one of the nests getting attention!"

Clever. But that response fails on two counts:

1) Even if you crank every Drake Equation factor to maximum, the very highest number of new tech-races to emerge in the galaxy would be maybe one per year. One… per year… across the whole Milky Way. Hence, such each new tech race is a noteworthy event when it happens. It’s not comparable to the zillions of ant nests per human. The scaling is entirely different.

2) Super beings will be able to create and deputize sub-agents at any level of intelligence or programmed interest.  It would be both reasonable and very cheap for them to assign such deputies to investigate and communicate with each newborn "ant" tech race, like ourselves. 

Oh, you can pose dozens of reasons why they might not choose to do that! But now you are talking cultural motivations and notice this: that you assume all the super-duper advanced races will be similarly incurious and indifferent! That, in turn, relies upon the number of uber-civilizations being very small!  Because if such civilizations are both numerous and diverse, then one or another or many will be interested, after all, in "ants."

Can you see why this field is actually a whole lot more subtle than our surface impulses imply?  The temptation seems natural to shout "of course THIS is the answer!"... but it can be silly, when confronting a vast and complex/mysterious cosmos.

Indeed, it is the surest sign of an immature and intemperate mind, to declare that, based on almost not evidence: "I know the answer!"

And now... some cool space-related miscellany.

== We need rapid advancement in space… to save Earth! ==

Many people are aware that the Sun has an eleven (actually 22) year cycle of sunspot and magnetic field activity.  There appear also to be longer cycles having to do with deeper convection layers. Now an interesting hypothesis with a new model that “predicts that the pair of waves become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022. During Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch and this will cause a significant reduction in solar activity.” And “When they are out of phase, we have solar minimums. When there is full phase separation, we have the conditions last seen during the Maunder minimum, 370 years ago."

Suggesting that the 2030s might feature an activity dip that could counter a bit of global warming. We had better have IQ boost pills by then, or the Fox-denialist cultists will have a field day. Oh, but by then the vested interest oligarchs will be Big Sustainables.

So how to verify any of this? Fund research back at levels almost a quarter as high as they were in the 1950s and 1960s, that’s how!

Alas, at present , scientists do not have any way to view the sun that is not facing earth. This capacity existing across some years in the past. (Especially when the denizens of Counter-Earth were willing to cooperate.) Now? Well, we make our other robots take on even greater workloads. Lately, the Curiosity rover’s Mastcam has captured images of the sunspots of the side of the sun that is pointed away from earth, offering more continuity of record for major suspot regions.  "One sunspot or cluster that rotated out of Curiosity's view over the July 4 weekend showed up by July 7 as a source area of a solar eruption observed by NASA's Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory", said NASA.  

== Space Miscellany! ==

What If We Can Never Travel Faster than the Speed of Light? I don’t credit every part of this scenario but it is vivid and fun.  And it demonstrates a basic truth… that the speed of light only makes interstellar colonization difficult, not impossible.  

This article on alien planetary systems misses the selection effect… that the Kepler probe’s method for discovering distant systems is extremely biased toward discovering planets orbiting close to their suns.  But bear that in mind and read it anyway.

One analysis shows the planet HIP11915b to be a close match to Jupiter both in mass and orbital period, and its host star is extraordinarily similar to the Sun. Beyond having fundamental physical properties close to the Sun, initial spectroscopic analysis suggests that HIP11915 is also a solar twin in the sense that its detailed abundance pattern matches the solar pattern (Melendez et al. 2015, in prep). The presence of a Jupiter twin and a solar-like composition both make HIP11915 an excellent prospect for future terrestrial planet searches."  

                                                                           

For those of you who still think we should make it a goal to “go back to the Moon,” instead of sensibly mining asteroids, this clear cartoon from SMBC.

The “dust” that is causing most of the absorption in interstellar space may be largely C60 buckeyballs.  Wow.