Proxima Centauri b, Looking for Life

Posted on September 2, 2016 by Brian H. Gill

Looking for extraterrestrial life is still a science in search of a subject, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to argue that there couldn’t be critters out there.

Today I’ll be talking about the search for life in the universe, a possibly-habitable planet circling the next star over, and a planet that couldn’t possibly be habitable.

Make that not habitable by life as we know it. Life using fluorine and carbon as we do hydrogen and carbon, with sulfur as a water-substitute — is a topic for another post.

  1. Looking for Alien Life
  2. Proxima Centauri b
  3. Gliese 1132 b: Still Worth Studying

Klaatu, The Thing, and Getting a Grip

Collage: promotional art for 'Plan 9 From Outer Space', 'Earth vs. The Flying Saucers', 'The Thing from Another World', 'The Day the Earth Stood Still', 'Invaders from Mars'. (1950s)I don’t ‘believe in’ space aliens, not in the sense that I believe space-alien emissaries of niceness will come to solve all our problems: sort of like Klaatu, in “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” who stopped just short of walking on water.

Putting anything where God should be in my priorities, divinizing what is not God, is a very bad idea; and I’ve said that before. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2112–2114) (August 21, 2016)

Invaders are another popular variety of space alien in the movies — like the featured creatures in “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers,” and “Invaders from Mars.”

The title character in “The Thing from Another World” acted like an invader. But the Thing’s bad attitude may have come from being shot after the humans blew up his ship, and that’s another topic.

Between Klaatu, movies like “Prometheus,” and folks who believe space aliens are angels, I’m not surprised that some Christians don’t like the idea that we may have neighbors on other planets.

Me? I’m firmly convinced that there’s life elsewhere in the universe, or that life exists only on Earth. We don’t know — yet.

Either way, it’s not my decision: and I’m certainly not going to tell the Almighty whether or not we should have neighbors. That’s up to God:

“Then Job answered the LORD and said:
“1 I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be hindered.”
(Job 42:1–2)

Creatures on Other Planets?


(From Ittiz, via deviantart.com, used w/o permission.)
(“Double Planet,” by Ittiz. (2010))

Finding any sort of life, like the alien equivalent of bacteria, would be a huge discovery; but the ‘jackpot’ would be finding neighbors, folks like us, but not human.

If we meet during the next few centuries, I think the odds are that they’ll be finding us. Either way, I’m pretty sure that reactions would be mixed; and that’s yet another topic.

I think Brother Guy Consolmagno’s opinion about extraterrestrial life makes about as much sense as anything I’ve read.

“…Frankly, if you think about it, any creatures on other planets, subject to the same laws of chemistry and physics as us, made of the same kinds of atoms, with an awareness and a will recognizably like ours would be at the very least our cousins in the cosmos. They would be so similar to us in all the essentials that I don’t think you’d even have the right to call them aliens.”
(“Brother Astronomer;” Chapter Three, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? — Brother Guy Consolmagno (2000))

1. Looking for Alien Life


(From Warner Bros, via BBC ews, used w/o permission.)
(“In the film Interstellar, astronauts leave Earth in search of other habitable planets”
(BBC News))

“Where should we look for alien life?”
Paul Rincon, BBC News (August 25, 2016)

“Astronomers have discovered a small planet around Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun. But how do astronomers decide whether a planet is hospitable to life?

“In the science fiction film Interstellar, astronauts leave a dying Earth in search of a hospitable planet for the human race to settle.

“But the first two worlds on their shortlist – deemed ‘potentially habitable’ from a distance – turn out to be nightmarishly hostile on closer inspection. The crew’s first stop is an ocean planet lashed by 1km-high tidal waves, while the second is a deep-frozen world choked by toxic ammonia.

“While Christopher Nolan’s movie is fantasy, it draws on a real-life aspect of the work done by astronomers who study exoplanets – worlds beyond our Solar System.

“The search for planets capable of supporting life could answer an age-old question: are we alone in the Universe? But what do astronomers mean when they refer to distant worlds as potentially habitable, or Earth-like?…”

“Interstellar” (Warner Bros./Paramount Pictures (2014)) is on my ‘I’d like to see this’ list. I generally like epic/space opera tales, and well-thought-out special effects.

However, it looks like someone forgot to do their homework on the film’s central conflict: “a dying Earth.”

I strongly suspect that astrobiologist David Grinspoon is right:

“…they describe this ecological disaster on Earth. I like the fact they are talking about that and raising consciousness. It’s clear that it’s climate change and we screwed up the Earth…That’s a good theme. But the specific things they say about it—they say there’s this blight [attacking all crops] that’s building up the nitrogen [in the atmosphere] and that’s going to draw down the oxygen. Anybody who knows about planetary atmosphere is going to sit there at that point and go, ‘That’s a bunch of BS.’…”
(“What’s Wrong With the Science of ‘Interstellar’?,” Mother Jones (November 12, 2014))

Like I said a few weeks back, ‘thinking green’ makes sense. Taking Paul Ehrlich and Captain Planet and seriously, not so much. (August 12, 2016)

That started me thinking of other ‘we’re all gonna die’ scenarios that could be good enough for movies.

Magnetism, Mostly

They could have had Earth’s magnetic field failing: sort of like “The Core,” only slightly more reality-based.

Headlines like “Earth’s magnetic field ‘could flip in the space of 100 years’, scientists warn” would have made that scenario more “relevant” in the months following “Interstellar’s” release.

It’s true, by the way: Earth’s magnetic field is weakening a whole lot faster than scientists expected. Our planet’s north and south magnetic poles will switch places “soon” — on the geologic time scale.

But breathless journalism notwithstanding, magnetic poles switching places isn’t anything new. Geomagnetic reversal generally happens every 100,000 to 1,000,000 years.1

Sometimes the magnetic poles stay put for much longer, sometimes they’re downright twitchy. The Laschamp event, 41,400 years back — give or take a few thousand years — lasted centuries, not millennia.

Earth’s magnetic field dropped to 5% its current strength during the transition that time, and was at 75% strength for the duration.

If it went out entirely, and stayed that way, we’d have trouble. Besides letting us use compasses for navigation, Earth’s magnetic field keeps the solar wind from blowing bits of the upper atmosphere away, and keeps many charged particles from reaching the ground.

We think Mars lost most of its air that way, although there’s more to it than that. Venus, with no magnetic field to speak of, is closer to our sun than either Mars or Earth and has a massively dense atmosphere.

We know that more radiation got through during the Laschamp event, since scientists found more than the usual Beryllium-10 in ice cores from that period.2

Earth’s current ice age was in progress at the time, and had been for over two million years. We’d been around, too, and didn’t know about Beryllium-10, magnetic fields, or geomagnetic reversals, until quite recently.

“Ice age” is a lot simpler to say than “Quaternary glaciation,” which is what scientists call most recent of the five known glaciations during Earth’s history, and that’s yet again another topic.

No, actually, it’s not. We’ve been learning that Earth’s been nowhere near as serenely unchanging as it might have seemed between, say, 1880 and 1900, or 950 to 1250.

Oxygen’s Ups and Downs


(From D.W. Miller, via Smithsonian Institution/Smithsonian Magazine, used w/o permission.)
(Cambrian animals, including Anomalocaris, Hallucigenia, Wiwaxia, and Ottoia.)

Getting back to Earth and oxygen, our home’s atmosphere hasn’t always been 20.95% oxygen by volume.

Before cyanobacteria came along, 2,400,000,000 years back — roughly, scientists are still working on the exact timeline — there wasn’t much of any oxygen at all.

Photosynthesis led to the Great Oxygenation Event, roughly 2,300,000,000 years ago. Then the Huronian glaciation happened: quite possibly because Earth’s atmosphere lost its methane.

Oxygen would have combined with methane, forming carbon dioxide and water: good for us, since we’re not suited to breathing methane; but carbon dioxide and water vapor don’t retain heat as well as methane does.

The ice eventually melted, today’s sort of critters got started 541,000,000 to 485,400,000 years back — that’s phyla of animals, a phylum being the taxonomic rank below kingdom and above class, and aren’t you glad there won’t be a test on this?

The Cambrian critters in that illustration don’t look quite like today’s animals: hardly surprising, since it’s been a half-billion years since they were around.

The closest thing we’ve got to a trilobite these days is the horseshoe crab, Hallucigenia might or might not be an early version of velvet worm, and that’s still another topic.

Earth’s atmospheric oxygen supply peaked during the Carboniferous. That was 358,900,000 to 298,900,000 years ago, and Earth’s atmosphere hasn’t been 35% oxygen since.

Still, it could have been worse. “Interstellar” could have had humanity imperiled by killer bees infected with artificial botulism. Think The Swarm meets The Satan Bug.

Besides, I’m missing the main point of that BBC article: where should we be looking for extraterrestrial life?

Life and the ‘Goldilocks Zone:’ It’s Complicated


(From NASA, via BBC ews, used w/o permission.)
(“The cooler the star, the closer in their habitable zones have to be”
(BBC News))

“…’When we say “potentially habitable” exoplanets, that’s a term that refers to measurable qualities of a planet that are necessary for habitable conditions,’ says Prof Abel Méndez, from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) at Arecibo.

“These are, then, promising targets where nothing is guaranteed. But two criteria dominate popular discussions of planetary habitability: first, whether it is within Earth’s general size range (and therefore has a chance of being rocky) and, second, whether it resides in what’s known as the habitable – or Goldilocks – zone.

“This is the range of distances around a host star where there’s just enough starlight to keep water in liquid form on a planet’s surface. Too close to the star, and the heat will cause water to boil off; too far away and any water will freeze.

“These are useful rules of thumb, but a host of factors influence how hospitable planets are. And some are excluded from the conversation because of limitations in technology….”
(Paul Rincon, BBC News)

This BBC News article assumes that life will live on or near the surface of a planet like Earth, which is a reasonable assumption; and that it’ll be ‘life as we know it:’ critters made of nucleic acid/protein in water.

There’s been serious discussions of life in Europa’s subsurface ocean, and other ‘biochemistries,’ but that’ll wait for another post.

Paul Rincon’s article also gets into how we have been finding planets circling other stars: and why so many seem to be around red dwarf stars.

The ‘wobble method,’ Dopper spectroscopy for folks who like the technical name, measures how fast the planet’s star moves towards and away from us as star and planet rotate around their center of gravity.

Measuring it is easier when the planet is heavy and the star small, which is one reason that so many of the first exoplanets spotted were so big.

Transit photometry, the method illustrated in that ‘brightness/light curve’ picture, measures how much a star’s light dims as a planet crosses in front. That method works better with smaller stars, too.

The good news about looking for habitable worlds around red dwarf stars is that there are a great many more of these smaller stars than ones like our comparatively bright sun.

The not-so-good news is that a red dwarf’s habitable zone is really small, which I think makes the number of ‘Goldilocks zone’ planets circling red dwarfs rather remarkable.

On the other hand, red dwarf stars last a really time, far longer than ours will, so life around a red dwarf’s planet would have a very long time to develop.

“Red dwarf” is a bit of a misnomer, as I said in an earlier post. Even a very cool red dwarf like TRAPPIST-1 has a surface temperature below 2,700 K/2,430 °C/4,400 °F: very roughly the temperature and color of a ‘warm’ LED or incandescent bulb. (July 29, 2016)

I put an unnecessarily-long link list of resources, mostly in Wikipedia, near the end of this post.3

2. Proxima Centauri b


(From ESO/M. Kornmesser, via BBC News, used w/o permission.)
(“Artwork: The planet’s mass would suggest it is a rocky world like Earth”
(BBC News))

“Neighbouring star Proxima Centauri has Earth-sized planet”
Jonathan Amos, BBC News (August 24, 2016)

“The nearest habitable world beyond our Solar System might be right on our doorstep – astronomically speaking.

“Scientists say their investigations of the closest star, Proxima Centauri, show it to have an Earth-sized planet orbiting about it.

“What is more, this rocky globe is moving in a zone that would make liquid water on its surface a possibility.

“Proxima is 40 trillion km away and would take a spacecraft using current technology thousands of years to reach….”

Folks at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) discovered Proxima Centauri b with Doppler spectroscopy.

One of the many things we don’t know about Proxima Centauri b yet is its orbital inclination: how much its orbit around Proxima Centauri is tipped from our viewpoint.

If we’re ‘seeing’ it edge-on, or nearly so, Proxima Centauri b’s mass is only 1.27 times Earth’s. If it’s made of the same stuff as Earth, it’ll be at least 1.1 times as wide as our planet.

That’s the least possible value for its mass and size, but 90% of the possible orientations give it a mass less than 3 times Earth’s.

There’s a good chance Proxima Centauri b is what scientists call a super-Earth, a planet with more mass than Earth’s, but substantially less than the Solar System’s ice giants Uranus and Neptune.

Let’s assume — optimistically — that we’re seeing Proxima Centauri b’s orbit edge-on, which would mean that it’s mass is 1.27 times Earth’s, or 1.27 x 5.97237 ×1024 kilograms = 7.5849099 ×1024 kg.

That’s 7,584,909,900,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms, which helps explain why folks use exponential notation so often when dealing with big numbers.

I like comparisons, so here’s Venus, Earth, and Proxima Centauri b:

  • Venus mass: 4.8675×1024 kg
  • Earth mass: 5.97237 ×1024 kg
    (1.227 x Venus)
  • Minimum Proxima Centauri b mass: 7.5849099 ×1024 kg
    (1.27 x Earth)

That doesn’t prove much, apart from the newfound planet being roughly as close to Earth’s mass as Venus, only bigger.

Proxima Centauri b’s equilibrium temperature is 234 K; or -39 °Centigrade, -38 °Fahrenheit. That’s a bit cooler than Earth’s roughly 260 K, 8.33 °Fahrenheit, but not by much.

Earth’s surface is, on average, warmer than that because we’ve got an atmosphere, and that isn’t another topic, since a big question is whether life can exist on Proxima Centauri b.

The answer depends partly on the planet’s star.

Orbiting a Flare Star

Proxima Centauri is small, cool, and dim compared to our star: with about an eighth of the Sun’s mass; roughly 3,042 K at the surface, compared to our star’s 5,772 K; and about 0.0015 times as bright.

Since most of the energy coming from its sun is down in the infrared, Proxima Centauri b gets very roughly as much heat as Earth, but only a fraction of the visible light. ‘High noon’ wouldn’t be particularly bright.

Proxima Centauri is what astronomers call a “red dwarf,” but like I said earlier — standing on Proxima Centauri b’s surface, what we’d chiefly notice is that it looks bigger than our Sun. The color is a bit ‘warmer’ than we’re used to here, but it would not look like a stop light.

Orbiting as close to its sun as it does, Proxima Centauri b may be tidally locked, with one side always facing the star: as Earth’s moon always has one side facing us.

Or it might have a more complex spin-orbit resonance, like Mercury. This may or may not affect habitability.

The bad news, as far as hoping for habitability goes, is that Proxima Centauri is a flare star. Stars like that “can undergo unpredictable dramatic increases in brightness for a few minutes.” (Wikipedia)

Bright light would be the least of life’s problems on Proxima Centauri b. Orbiting as close to its star as it does, the planet gets something like 400 times as much x-ray radiation as Earth does.

A thick atmosphere and strong magnetic field might keep x-ray levels at the surface at safe levels for life. Or maybe life on a planet like that could be fine in the ocean, but not on land.

If there is life on Proxima Centauri b, it’ll have plenty of time to grow. At the rate the star’s burning fuel, it’s good for about another four trillion years: almost 300 times the current age of the universe.

More:

3. Gliese 1132 b: Still Worth Studying


(From CfA/Dana Berry/Skyworks Digital, via Phys.org, used w/o permission.)
(“This artist’s conception shows the rocky exoplanet GJ 1132b, located 39 light-years from Earth. New research shows that it might possess a thin, oxygen atmosphere – but no life due to its extreme heat.”
(Phys.org))

“Venus-like exoplanet might have oxygen atmosphere, but not life”
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Phys.org (August 18, 2016)

“The distant planet GJ 1132b intrigued astronomers when it was discovered last year. Located just 39 light-years from Earth, it might have an atmosphere despite being baked to a temperature of around 450 degrees Fahrenheit. But would that atmosphere be thick and soupy or thin and wispy? New research suggests the latter is much more likely.

“Harvard astronomer Laura Schaefer (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, or CfA) and her colleagues examined the question of what would happen to GJ 1132b over time if it began with a steamy, water-rich atmosphere.

“Orbiting so close to its star, at a distance of just 1.4 million miles, the planet is flooded with ultraviolet or UV light. UV light breaks apart water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, both of which then can be lost into space. However, since hydrogen is lighter it escapes more readily, while oxygen lingers behind.

” ‘On cooler planets, oxygen could be a sign of alien life and habitability. But on a hot planet like GJ 1132b, it’s a sign of the exact opposite – a planet that’s being baked and sterilized,’ said Schaefer….”

Wikipedia’s page on this planet hasn’t been updated as I write this, Thursday evening, September 1. Before Proxima Centaur b’s discovery, it was the nearest known rocky/Earth-like exoplanet:

“…It has been called ‘one of the most important planets ever discovered beyond the Solar System’: Gliese 1132 b is three times closer to Earth than any other known rocky exoplanet and telescopes should be able to determine the composition of its atmosphere, the speed of its winds and the color of its sunsets….”
(Gliese 1132 b, Wikipedia)

Gliese 1132 b is still an important subject of study, particularly since it may help us understand how Venus got to be the way it is now.

Many scientists think Venus started with about as much water as Earth.

Schaefer’s team thinks that Gliese 1132 b started out with quite a bit of water, like Venus and Earth; but may still be in the process of losing that water. If that’s the case, they think some of the planet’s water is still there, as water vapor.

If that’s the case, Gliese 1132 b’s water is in the process of being lost to space; but what’s left is acting as a sort of blanket, insulating the planet and keeping a ‘magma ocean’ on its surface molten.

That magma would react with oxygen in the atmosphere, but the team figures only around 10% of the oxygen would combine with the molten rock.

If that’s the case, and it’s a lot of “ifs,” some of the oxygen may be staying in Gliese 1132 b’s atmosphere; which may be detectable from here.

A process like what’s probably happening now on Gliese 1132 b is what scientists think turned Venus from a somewhat Earth-like world into the hotter-than-an-oven place it is today.

More:

Moderately-related posts:

1 I talked about geomagnetic reversal and headlines in the ‘Blogspot.com’ version of this blog:

Here’s what got me started that time:

2 More about Earth’s ice ages and how we study them:

Even more, mostly about atmospheres, magnetic fields, and Solar wind:

3 More that you probably need or want to know about life, the universe, and all that:

Posted in Science News | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Faith, the Universe, and Wisdom

Posted on August 28, 2016 by Brian H. Gill

I think the universe is billions, not thousands, of years old; Earth isn’t flat; Adam and Eve aren’t German; poetry isn’t science; and thinking is not a sin.

If you’ve been reading my posts, you know why being a Christian doesn’t interfere with my interest in science.

Feel free to skip the rest of this post. It’s mostly about reading the Bible, the universe, and getting a grip.

I’ll be back next Friday,1 most likely talking about Proxima Centauri b, a planet orbiting the next star over from ours: in Proxima’s habitable zone.

Meanwhile, maybe you’ve got something better to do: like sorting your socks, taking a walk, or watching grass grow. Or maybe looking at my ‘science posts’ link list:

Reading the Bible, Using Our Brains

I take Sacred Scripture, the Bible, seriously. It’s a vital part of my faith. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 101–133)

The Word of God wouldn’t do me much good sitting on a shelf, though, which is why reading the Bible, often, is so important. (Catechism, 133)

“…in the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven meets His children with great love and speaks with them….”
(“Dei Verbum,” Pope Blessed Paul VI (November 18, 1965))

The idea is that we learn what we need for our salvation: and “…learn the deepest meaning and the value of all creation, as well as its role in the harmonious praise of God….” (“Lumen Gentium,”2 Pope Blessed Paul VI; Catechism, 337)

We don’t read the Bible to learn how the universe works.3 That we can work out on our own, using the brains God gave us: which is what we’re supposed to do. Use our brains, that is, and keep learning about this marvelous creation. (Catechism, 35, 50, 159, 2292–2296)

“Waters Above the Heavens”

I could follow our Lord if I believed that we live on a flat plate with nothing between us and the cosmic ocean but a solid dome that holds the stars.

But maintaining ignorance of what we’ve learned over the last two dozen or so centuries isn’t necessary.

Imagery in 1 Samuel 2:8 and Psalms 148:4 is beautiful, poetic, and consistent with Mesopotamian cosmology. No surprises there, considering where the Hebrews lived.

We’ve learned quite a bit about the universe since the days when Urukagina tried cleaning up the government in Lagash. Then Lugal-zage-si conquered Lagash, after which Sargon of Akkad came along, and that’s another topic.

Ancient Mountains, Grasshoppers, and Baron Kelvin

We’ve known the universe was big and old for a long time:

“3 Terrible and awesome are you, stronger than the ancient mountains.”
(Psalms 76:5)

“He sits enthroned above the vault of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; He stretches out the heavens like a veil, spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.”
(Isaiah 40:22)

“3 Raise your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth below; Though the heavens grow thin like smoke, the earth wears out like a garment and its inhabitants die like flies, My salvation shall remain forever and my justice shall never be dismayed.”
(Isaiah 51:6)

James Ussher wrote “Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti” around 1650: in which he pegged the day of creation as near the autumnal equinox in the year 4004 BC.

It was pretty good scholarship for its day, and some Christians still insist that Ussher must be right. I’m not one of them.

If Christianity depended on a 17th-century British cleric being right, our faith would have started unraveling in 1778, when Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon published “Les époques de la nature.”

He had carefully measured how fast iron cools, extrapolated from that data, and found that Earth was about 75,000 years old. He was wrong by several powers of ten.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, using similar methods in 1862, calculated an age of Earth at somewhere between 20,000,000 and 400,000,000 years. That was pretty good work, considering that scientists didn’t know about heat from radioactive decay, and effects of convection currents in Earth’s mantle yet.

So how come I don’t cry out “let the smiting begin?!”

Basically, it’s because I’m a Catholic: and understand my faith.

I must believe that God created, and is creating, a good and ordered physical world: one that is changing, in a state of journeying toward an ultimate perfection. (Catechism, 282–308)

Studying of this astonishing creation honestly and methodically cannot interfere with faith, because “the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God.” (Catechism, 159)

Like I’ve said before, I figure part of my job is admiring God’s creation, not telling the Almighty how it should have been made. That, I think, is pretty much the opposite of humility. (July 31, 2016)

The Last Few Billion Years, Briefly


(From Efbrazil, via Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission.)
(This universe, so far: 13,800,000,000 years mapped onto a 12-month calendar.)

About 13,799,000,000 years back, give or take 21,000,000, this universe started so abruptly that Fred Hoyle called it a big bang.4 The cosmic fireball cooled down and became transparent, some 380,000 years later.

Massive stars formed, ran out of fuel, collapsed, and exploded; adding heavy elements to this galaxy’s interstellar mix.

About 4,600,000,000 years ago a cloud of the stuff got dense enough for molecules to form. Part of it collapsed into a dusty spinning disk with a bulge in the center — which became the star we call the Sun.

Earth took shape some 4,540,000,000 years back, plus or minus 50,000,000. These numbers have changed, by the way, over the last few years: but only by a few fractions of a percent.

Our home cooled down, oceans formed, and life began here. The oldest fossilized bacteria are about 3,000,000,000 years old, and we’re still not sure exactly when the first microcritters began.

Fast-forwarding over the next two and a half billion years, Dickinsonia costata flourished from 560,000,000 to 555,00,000 years ago. Scientists think it was an animal, a fungus — or something else, a member of an “extinct kingdom.”

Something dreadful happened about 66,000,000 years back, one of Earth’s glacial epochs started some 63,000,000 years later, we appeared, and that brings me back to James Ussher, William Thomson, and Fred Hoyle.

Cosmic Scale and Wisdom

ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM, OmegaCen/Astro-WISE/Kapteyn Institute; via Wikimedia Commons; used w/o permission.The scale of this universe doesn’t bother me. Even if it did, my preferences wouldn’t count for much. As Psalms 115:3 says, “…whatever God wills is done.”

I’m quite confident that God isn’t overwhelmed by the size of this creation, and that’s yet another topic. Topics.

“4 Indeed, before you the whole universe is as a grain from a balance, or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth.

“But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things; and you overlook the sins of men that they may repent.

“For you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned.

“And how could a thing remain, unless you willed it; or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you?”
(Wisdom 11:22–25)

Somewhat-related posts:


(From NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) – ESA/Hubble Collaboration; used w/o permission.)

1 I plan to get next Friday’s post ready by Friday. But like Proverbs 19:21 says, “many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the decision of the LORD that endures.”

The August 19 ‘Friday’ post is a case in point:

2 Resources:

3 Background:

“…Know what the Bible is – and what it isn’t. The Bible is the story of God’s relationship with the people he has called to himself. It is not intended to be read as history text, a science book, or a political manifesto. In the Bible, God teaches us the truths that we need for the sake of our salvation….”
(“Understanding the Bible,” Mary Elizabeth Sperry, USCCB)

That’s from “10 points for fruitful Scripture reading:”

  1. Bible reading is for Catholics
  2. Prayer is the beginning and the end
  3. Get the whole story!
  4. The Bible isn’t a book. It’s a library
  5. Know what the Bible is – and what it isn’t
  6. The sum is greater than the parts
  7. The Old relates to the New
  8. You do not read alone
  9. What is God saying to me?
  10. Reading isn’t enough
    (From “Understanding the Bible,” Mary Elizabeth Sperry, USCCB)

4 That was 1949, after astronomers had noticed that galaxies were running away from us, but before COBE data backed up the Big Bang model.

Posted in Being Catholic | Tagged , , , , , , | 16 Comments

Brodgar, Öetzi, and Piltdown Man

Posted on August 26, 2016 by Brian H. Gill

Archeologists found a big stone structure buried under a 43-century-old garbage dump in the Orkney Islands.

Öetzi, Europe’s frozen mummy, got his wardrobe from many different critters: why, we don’t know.

Piltdown Man’s in the news again, too. Looks like Dawson was the only culprit.

  1. Buried for Millennia: Big Stones and Unanswered Questions
  2. Öetzi’s Eclectic Wardrobe
  3. Piltdown Man: Dawson Acted Alone

Ersatz Science


(From “Indigenous races of the earth,” Josiah Clark Nott, George Robbins Gliddon (1857); and “The Evolution of Man,” Ernst Haeckel (1874): via Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission.)
(Nott, Gliddon & Haeckel: ‘Proofs’ that the 19th century’s upper crust were superior to the rest of us.)

One of these days I’ll probably harangue about Marcellin Boule’s notion of what Neanderthals looked like: hairy, gorilla-like, with opposable toes.

In fairness, Boule’s Neanderthal skeleton was the first one analyzed — the remains of an old man, crippled with arthritis. We’ve learned a lot since then.

The ‘caveman‘ in the top picture is František Kupka’s ‘Neanderthal’ reconstruction, from L’Illustration & Illustrated London News (1909). The I. L. N. was the world’s first illustrated weekly news magazine: sort of like today’s Time or Newsweek.

My best guess is that Kupka’s picture is “extrapolation and invention” — mostly from Marcellin Boule’s Neanderthal reconstruction.

The other illustration, showing an “Irish Iberian” and two other folks in profile, made its way into Harper’s Weekly. It’s an example of why I don’t miss the ‘good old days:’

“The Iberians are believed to have been originally an African race, who thousands of years ago spread themselves through Spain over Western Europe. Their remains are found in the barrows, or burying places, in sundry parts of these countries. The skulls are of low prognathous type. They came to Ireland and mixed with the natives of the South and West, who themselves are supposed to have been of low type and descendants of savages of the Stone Age, who, in consequence of isolation from the rest of the world, had never been out-competed in the healthy struggle of life, and thus made way, according to the laws of nature, for superior races”
( H. Strickland Constable, via Wikimedia Commons; see “Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity,” Susan Martin-Márquez (2014) p. 47)

The motives for bigotry dressed up as science seem clear, at least to me. Having ‘proof’ that looking like me makes people superior to folks who don’t could be a dandy excuse for despising them — that’s a hypothetical situation, by the way.1

Bigotry disguised as science is out of fashion at the moment, happily. I think the more recent notion that there aren’t — or shouldn’t be — any measurable differences between folks whose ancestors are from different continents is just as silly, and that’s another topic.

Getting back to “Irish Iberians” and bias: If I thought intelligence depended on looking “Anglo-Teutonic,” I’d be in a pickle. From the side, my head’s somewhere between that English analog of das Herrenvolk and the “Irish Iberian.”

No surprises there. Before crossing the Atlantic, half my ancestors came from Ireland and Scotland; as far back as we’ve got records, anyway. The other half are from Norway.

I’ll be talking about another sort of fake science: Dawson’s Piltdown man. I don’t know why folks make fake ‘discoveries’ like the Piltdown Man, Cardiff Giant, and Archaeoraptor. I suspect hubris is involved, and I talked about that a month ago. (July 31, 2016)

Rip-Roaring Tales and Being Human


(From Wonder Stories, via DavidSZondy.com, used w/o permission.)
(Illustrations for Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved.” (1931))

“The Man Who Evolved” is science fiction, but not particularly scientific. Edmond Hamilton may or may not have known that dosing a human with heavy concentrations of cosmic rays would result in a very dead human: but scientists of the 1930s did.

Some folks, exposed to tales like “The Man Who Evolved” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” might grow up to be scientists: because of, or despite, the melodrama.

Others — sometimes I think nobody could mistake rip-roaring tales like those for serious science. But sometimes I’m not so sure: particularly when I’m feeling grim, or enduring a cold.

I introduced you to Mr. Squibbs, the intense little fellow over there, last week; and — have used that picture rather often, I see. (August 21, 2016; August 5, 2016; July 22, 2016)

Where was I? Cavemen, ersatz science, monster movies. Right.

This is not where I start ranting about “tampering with things man was not supposed to know.”

I have to believe that: God created and is creating a good and ordered universe; we’re made in the image of God, rational creatures — and stewards of the physical world. (Genesis 1:27–28, Psalms 19:2; Wisdom 7:17; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 16, 341, 373, 1730)

We’re supposed to be curious about where we came from and where we’re going. This curiosity isn’t idle. We’re “called to a personal relationship with God,” and can learn something of God by studying God’s creation. (Catechism, 282–289, 299, 301)

Learning more about this universe, and using that knowledge to develop technologies, is part of our job. Ethics apply, of course. (Catechism, 2292–2296)

It also gives us opportunities for “even greater admiration” of God’s greatness. (Catechism, 283)

And now, paraphrasing Rocket J. Squirrel’s line, here’s something I hope you’ll really like.

1. Buried for Millennia: Big Stones and Unanswered Questions


(From James Robertson/Orkneyskycam.co.uk, via BBC News, used w/o permission.)
(“Archaeologists say they can only speculate at the moment as to the reason why the structure was built”
(BBC News))

“Mystery stone structure under Neolithic dump on Orkney”
Steven McKenzie, BBC News, (August 22, 2016)

“Archaeologists have uncovered a mysterious stone structure buried under what they describe as Scotland’s ‘largest Neolithic rubbish dump’.

“The layout of the stone slabs, known as orthostats, found during a dig at Ness of Brodgar on Orkney is unlike anything previously found on the islands.

“Archaeologists are also mystified as to why the structure was covered over by a huge midden.

“They have speculated that it could possibly be a chambered tomb.

“However, the dig team, which is led by University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute, said further ‘hard work’ would be needed to properly understand the find….”

If I was an archeologist living around the year 5300, I might find a collection of Steuben crystal interesting.

But I’d likely be more interested in a well-preserved 20th-century landfill. My guess is that there isn’t much, short of disaster zones like Pompeii, that’s a better ‘snapshot’ of how folks lived and worked.

The Ness of Brodgar is between Stonehenge-style installations near Brodgar and Stenness on the Orkney Islands, off Scotland’s north shore.

Construction at the Ness of Brodgar started roughly five millennia back, around the time Merneith was running Egypt, give or take a few centuries. Folks kept building there for another millennia, until about the time Sargon started the Akkadian Empire.

Given the massive stonework and the effort involved in building and rebuilding it for a millennium; I think it’s obvious that it was very important to folks who lived in the area.

Why they built it, and then started dismantling it, is a good question.

Archeologists have found pottery, cremated animal bones, stone tools, and polished stone mace heads: which suggests that some sort of ceremonies happened there. Maybe it was a “temple:” or maybe ceremonies happened there because it was an administrative center.

Think about it: archeologists on Chesapeake Bay’s west shore in the 52nd century might find evidence of ceremonial activity around the Tomb of the Unknowns.

Only a few kilometers (or whatever units they’re using), they’d find the remains of something very much like Greek temples, but built about two dozen centuries after the Aegean prototypes.

They might speculate that the area had been a temple complex —

I recommend Robert Nathan’s “The Weans” (1960, available through Amazon.com) for a “…fascinating story of the expeditions of Kenya’s greatest scientists who discovered the civilization of the Weans.”

It’s a funny (my opinion) look at how wildly wrong archeologists could be, getting evidence and assumptions confused.

More:

2. Öetzi’s Eclectic Wardrobe


(From Institute for Mummies and the Iceman, via BBC News, used w/o permission.)
(“Researchers from Ireland and Italy studied nine samples from six items”
(BBC News))

“DNA traces origins of Iceman’s ragtag wardrobe”
Jonathan Webb, BBC News (August 18, 2016)

“DNA analysis of Oetzi the Iceman’s clothes has traced their origin to at least five different species of animal.

“Among his kit were a hat of brown bear skin and a quiver made from roe deer.

“Despite being well preserved and studied, the 5,300-year-old mummy’s various leather items had not all been identified at the species level.

“These findings, published in Scientific Reports, reveal a mix of wild-hunted animals with sheep, goat and cattle related to modern domestic breeds….”

“Oetzi’s” coat was a patchwork of sheep and goat skin; his fur cap started out on a brown bear; and his leggings were goat skin.

Maybe he was a fashionista, sporting the latest thing in menswear. Or maybe his coat was the best he could do with materials on hand. We may never know.

We also don’t know why he was in the stretch of mountains we call the Ötztal Alps — that’s where our nickname for him, Ötzi, comes from — or what he did for a living.

Copper particles and arsenic in his hair hint that he worked in or lived near a copper smelting operation, but his legs and pelvis look like he spent a lot of time walking in hilly country.

Maybe he was a high-altitude shepherd. Or maybe he worked in a copper refinery and liked to take long hikes.

We do know, from pollen, dust grains, and isotopes in his tooth enamel, that he grew up eastwards of where he was buried; near where Feldthurns is now. Later he moved to valleys around Bolzano — that’s what folks call Bauzanum these days.

His clothing, physical condition, and tech found with his body, tell us that he was an agropastoralist: someone whose daily life involved agriculture and livestock herding.

Although we’re pretty sure about when he lived, some folks put him in the Neolithic, others in the copper age, or Chalcolithic. That’s because periods overlap. In Ötzi’s day some folks had been smelting and using copper for some two millennia, while others weren’t up to speed with the new tech.

Pollen from his second-to-last meal puts Ötzi’s death in the spring. He was around 45 years old at that point; 1.65 meters, around five and a half feet, tall; and weighed about 50 kilograms, 110 pounds.

That’s about average for folks living after agriculture caught on, short and scrawny compared to the earlier hunters. It took about five millennia for us to work the bugs out of agricultural tech and social structures, and that’s yet another topic.

Arrowheads, Genes, and Respect

Ötzi apparently died fighting. There’s an arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder, a deep cut on one hand hadn’t had time to heal, and there’s evidence of a blow to his head.

His final encounter wasn’t one-sided, though. There’s blood from a total of four other folks on his gear: including some from two individuals on one of his arrowheads, and blood from another on his coat.

Ötzi may have carried one of them on his back, suggesting that he was with someone and they were both attacked. The odds are that Ötzi died near where his body was found — or maybe he’d been carried uphill after being killed. That’s another detail we don’t know.

We’ve learned a great deal about genetics in the quarter-century since Ötzi’s body turned up. Analyzing mitochondrial DNA told scientists what critters his clothes were made from. His body is very well-preserved — including intact blood cells — so we’ve got his DNA profile, too.

Ötzi has at least 19 male relatives living in Tyrol, but most of his kinfolk live elsewhere in southern Europe; particularly places like Corsica and Sardinia.

When they’re not being studied, his body and possessions are displayed at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology: established in 1998 specifically to house Europe’s famous mummy.

“…The body is held in a climate controlled chamber within the museum at a temperature of -6 Celsius and 98% humidity, replicating glacier conditions in which it was found. Along with original finds there are models, reconstructions and multimedia presentations showing Ötzi in the context of the early history of the southern Alpine region….”
(Wikiepdia)

This is a far cry from the postmortem commercial exploitation of Elmer McCurdy’s body, so I’m not overly concerned about the museum’s display.

I certainly don’t fear “Ötzi’s curse:” the notion that bad things happen to folks who disturb the mummy’s existence. True, seven of the several hundred folks involved have died during the intervening 25 years: but that’s about what you’d expect, statistically.

My concern is more a matter of respect. Ötzi didn’t stop being a person when he died. He’s not using his body at the moment, but it’s still the physical component of a human person. (Catechism, 2300–2301)

I talked about civilization, autopsies, and being human, last month. (July 15, 2016)

More:

3. Piltdown Man: Dawson Acted Alone


(From Karolyn Shindler, via BBC News, used w/o permission.)
(“CSI Piltdown: DNA analysis was conducted on the specimens (seen in the background)”
(BBC News))

“Piltdown review points decisive finger at forger Dawson”
Jonathan Webb, BBC News August 10, 2016)

“Researchers have finished an eight-year study of one of the most infamous forgeries in the history of science – the fake human ancestor Piltdown Man.

“They conclude that the forged fossils were made by one man: the prime suspect and ‘discoverer’ Charles Dawson.

“The human-like skull fragments and an ape-like jaw, complete with two teeth, shook the scientific world in 1912 but were exposed as a hoax in 1953.

“The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, was a multi-disciplinary collaboration including palaeobiologists, historians, dental experts and ancient DNA specialists….”

Not all scientist thought Piltdown Man was what Dawson claimed. In 1915, for example, Gerrit Smith Miller said the Piltdown jaw was from a fossil ape. He was right.

The jaw and a tooth were from an orangutan that most likely came from southwest Sarawak. Dawson apparently pried teeth out of the jaw, ground them down to look more ‘human,’ and stuck them back in place.

The rest of the skull was human, from the medieval era, Mr. Dawson stained the bones to make them look old, used dentist’s putty to cement the pieces together, and got his 15 minutes of fame.

This is not the sort of legacy I’d want:

“The Piltdown man forgery of 1912 was one of the most successful and wicked of all scientific frauds….”
(“Piltdown Man: The Great English Mystery Story,” Keith Stewart Thomson (1991))

Dawson’s forgery succeeded partly because he made his ersatz fossil look like the ‘missing link’ between apes and humans that some scientists figured should exist. It also made England’s East Sussex humanity’s cradle. I talked about bias disguised as science earlier.

It’s been decades since I’ve run into the Piltdown Man used as an example of how evolution is wrong, or the Scopes Monkey Trial as proof that Christians are willfully ignorant. Like I keep saying, I don’t miss the ‘good old days.’

I’m not sure what bothers me most about the Piltdown hoax: the decades of wasted effort spent studying the fake, attention that wasn’t paid to real evidence, or the brouhaha represented by the Scopes Monkey Trial.

More:

More-or-less-related posts:

1 Seriously: I should love God, love my neighbor, see everybody as my neighbor, and treat others as I’d like to be treated. (Matthew 5:43–44, 7:12, 22:36–40, Mark 12:28–31; Luke 6:31, 10:25–27, 29–37; Catechism, 1789)

If I found myself despising someone else, my job would be rooting out that attitude: not finding excuses for it.

Posted in Science News | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Why Friday’s Post Came on Sunday

Posted on August 21, 2016 by Brian H. Gill

There’s a reason for my ‘Friday’ post showing up Sunday morning; and this week’s ‘Sunday’ post, whatever it’ll be about, getting delayed until next Sunday.

It’s been ‘one of those weeks.’

Starting Monday afternoon, I’ve experienced a series of minor technical glitches and a major one, simple tasks that turned complex, swift errands that took hours – – – you get the idea. Then on Friday I discovered that I couldn’t update this blog.

On the ‘up’ side, I was getting the same “Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_raise_memory_limit…” message each time I tried logging in, right after WordPress crashed.

That gave me and my son something to talk about when he got home from work.

We agreed that something had gone wrong when I updated WordPress — before adding Friday’s ‘science’ post, not one of my better decisions — and that fixing the problem would take much less time and effort if I let him sit at my desk and work: undistributed.

That discussion started late Friday, continued in sporadic bursts through Saturday evening, and ended with my son playing a choral “ALLELUIA!” on his phone: by way of announcing that the errant software was (probably) working again.

I can’t complain. I could, actually, but it wouldn’t be reasonable or helpful.

More good news: my wife and #3 daughter got back from St. Cloud, an hour down the Interstate; and the family van is (probably) safe for in-town driving. The brakes, probably, had started smoking after they got lost. After dark. In the larger town.

I spent part of Saturday catching up on tasks that hadn’t gotten done since Monday, and expect to be doing more of the same through part of tomorrow: at least. Then I hope that I’ll be back to my usual Weekly Schedule, getting next Friday’s post ready.

That’s the plan. What actually happens: we’ll see.

Posted in Being a Writer | Tagged | 3 Comments

Polio, Zika, and Using Our Brains

Posted on August 21, 2016 by Brian H. Gill

Polio is back in Nigeria: only two cases that we know of; which isn’t particularly comforting, since most folks with polio have no symptoms.

The good news is that vaccines are available: and may get to most of those who need them before the disease does.

Zika, another viral disease, is still in the news, this time a case in Texas that affected a baby.

On a happier note, researchers are making progress on a brain-machine interface that could help folks walk again.

  1. Polio: It’s Back
  2. Zika
  3. Learning to Use a Powered Exoskeleton

Saints: Sickly and Otherwise

Dominic Savio grew up in northern Italy when Tivoli Gardens was new. He enjoyed praying, was a good student, and when he was 14 — you guessed it, got sick.

A doctor agreed with his parents that Dominic was sick: and applied an old-fashioned medical procedure1 called bloodletting.

Dominic would likely have died anyway, the symptoms sound like pleurisy, but getting his arm cut 10 times over the next four days probably speeded things up.

The doctor assured Dominic’s parents that he’d recover. But when Dominic asked for the parish priest, so he could receive the sacrament of reconciliation and the Eucharist, his parents went along with his request.

After the priest had seen him, Dominic asked his father to read him prayers for the Exercise of a Happy Death from a book of devotions.

A little later, Dominic’s last words (translated) were:

“Goodbye, Dad, goodbye . . . what was it the parish priest suggested to me … I don’t seem to remember . . . Oh, what wonderful things I see …”
(From John Bosco’s “Three Lives: The Life of Dominic Savio,” chapter 24, via Wikipedia)

Dominic Savio isn’t the youngest Saint: there’s Paulus Lang Fu, for example, who was nine when he died.2

I suspect that some “lives of the Saints” books focus on folks like Dominic Savio, Damien of Molokai, and Maximilian Kolbe because we like sentiment and drama.

However, sainthood isn’t restricted to folks who experienced a messy martyrdom, or died of some horrible disease: smiling all the way.

Some fit that profile, but the Venerable Bede and Jane Frances de Chantal died peacefully, in their 60s.

They’re Saints because they “practiced heroic virtue and lived in fidelity to God’s grace” during their lives. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 823)3

Getting and Staying Healthy: Within Reason


(From EPA, via BBC News, used w/o permission.)

I’ll be talking about polio, Zika fever, and brain-machine interface technology: but won’t claim that dealing with disease and disability offends God.

Given some traditional assumptions about faith, science, and dealing with reality; I’d better explain why I think using my brain is okay.

You saw the ardent Mr. Squibbs a couple weeks ago, although I didn’t introduce him at the time. He’s a mad scientist’s assistant whose brain had been replaced with that of a flying squirrel — and that’s another topic. (August 5, 2016)

Getting back to my brain and why using it doesn’t make me cringe with guilt and shame — I’m a Catholic, so I believe that God exists: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.4 (Catechism, 1)

I depend on God for salvation, and for my continued existence. (Catechism, 301, 1949)

But God made a world where the creatures in it, including me, play a role in making things happen. (Catechism, 41, 306-308)

Thinking, making decisions based on reason, is part of being human: but it’s option, not a requirement. I can use my brain, or decide to let whim and emotion guide me. (Catechism, 154-159, 311, 1730, 1778, 1804, 2339)

Let’s back up a little, and ask another question — “is being healthy okay?”

The short answer is yes; life and health are good things, “precious gifts entrusted to us by God:”

“Life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God. We must take reasonable care of them, taking into account the needs of others and the common good….”
(Catechism, 2288)

Taking care of my body is okay, but it’s wrong “…to sacrifice everything for it’s sake, to idolize physical perfection and success at sports…..” (Catechism, 2289)

It’s okay to help sick people get better, too, and find new ways to cure disease. It’s even okay to transplant organs, providing we don’t kill or maim one person to help another. (Catechism, 2292-2296)

Even if a disease or injury would eventually kill me, medical treatments — including painkillers — are okay: within reason. (Catechism, 2276-2279)

That seems clear enough. Being healthy is okay, staying healthy is okay: within reason.

I’m forgetting something. No, don’t tell me, let me think: Saints. Mad scientists. Guilt, shame, and getting a grip. Right.

I accept the idea that my continuing existence depends on God, and that God made a world where the creatures in it — including me — help make things happen. (Catechism, 301, 306-308)

Thinking, making decisions based on reason, is part of being human. So is deciding whether or not I let whim and emotion guide me, or use my brain, and I said that before.

That’s why I think that I’m expected to keep myself healthy: within reason. (Catechism, 2288-2289)

Fear, Facts, and “a Precious Discovery”


(From James Gillray, H. Humphrey, Anti-Vaccine Society; via Wikimedia Commons; used w/o permission.)
“The Cow-Pock—or—the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation!”

About two centuries back now, James Gillray warned the British public against a controversial medical technology: inoculation.

Vaccination against disease goes back at least five centuries, when folks in China practiced a sort of variolation — I’m putting a resource list near the end of this post5 — which involved inhaling powdered material made from the scabs of someone with mild smallpox.

Disgusting, I know, which may help explain why Martin Lister didn’t follow up on reports he’d read about the procedure.

Finally, a 1714 letter published in the Philosophical Transactions got attention in Europe and America; leading to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s experiment with prisoners on Newgate Prison’s death row.

Edward Jenner survived a variolation procedure that included bloodletting and starvation, and made the connection between cowpox and smallpox a few decades later.

Experiments like Lady Montagu’s and Jenner’s triggered strong reactions, sensible and otherwise:

“for a man to infect a family in the morning with smallpox and to pray to God in the evening against the disease is blasphemy; that the smallpox is a judgment of God on the sins of people, and that to avert it is but to provoke him more; that inoculation is an encroachment on the prerogatives of Jehovah, whose right it is to wound and smite.”
(Contemporary reaction to inoculation experiments by American physician Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, circa 1720)

“Smallpox is a visitation from God; but the cowpox is produced by presumptuous man; the former was what Heaven ordained, the latter is, perhaps, a daring violation our of holy religion.”
(A physician’s reaction to Dr. Edward Jenner’s experiments in developing a vaccine for smallpox, (1796) via Psychological Sciences, Vanderbilt University)

Fear that God will smite anyone who uses the brains God gave us may account for what looks like a copy of Nicolas Poussin’s “Adoration of the Golden Calf” on the back wall in that “Cow-Pock” cartoon.

The golden calf incident happened while Moses was on Mount Sinai. It was a major violation of the Decalogue, and they really should have known better. (Exodus 20:4–6, 32:1–35)

Idolatry, putting anything ahead of God in my priorities, divinizing what is not God, is still a very bad idea. (Catechism, 2112-2114)

Inoculation wasn’t a ‘scientists against preachers’ thing, though. Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister, teamed up with Zabdiel Boylston5; having decided that preventing disease wasn’t evil.

Let’s see what other folks said about the newfangled sort of medicine:

“…In contrast, many village priests in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and England not only urged parishioners to seek the preventative treatment, they became wholesale vaccinators themselves. Pastors in Bohemia charged parents with responsibility ‘before God for neglecting the vaccination of their children.’ In 1814, the Pope himself endorsed vaccination as ‘a precious discovery which ought to be a new motive for human gratitude to Omnipotence.’…”
(“Deliberate extinction: Whether to Destroy the Last Smallpox Virus,” pp. 19-20, David A. Koplow, Georgetown University Law Center (2004))

That would have been Pius VII who said vaccination was “a precious discovery which ought to be a new motive for human gratitude to Omnipotence.”

I’m inclined to think he was right.

1. Polio: It’s Back


(From AFP, via BBC News, used w/o permission.)
(“Polio can only be prevented through immunisation”
(BBC News))

Nigeria to start emergency polio campaign”
BBC News (August 12, 2016)

“Nigeria has announced an emergency mass polio vaccination campaign in the north-east after two new cases emerged.

“They were the first incidences of the highly infectious disease in Africa for two years.

“The government said polio paralysed two children in Borno state, a part of Nigeria where Boko Haram militants have hindered health campaigns.

“The development is seen as a major setback for Nigeria, which was on track to be declared polio free in 2017.

“The cases were confirmed exactly two years after Africa’s last previous case – in the Puntland region of Somalia, on 11 August 2014….”

Polio, poliomyelitis, infantile paralysis, hasn’t been a major problem in my country for decades. That hasn’t always been the case.

The disease goes back at least to the days when Egypt was a superpower. That’s a reasonable assumption, anyway, given the appearance of that chap, pictured on a stele made during Egypt’s 18th Dynasty, upwards of three millennia back.

Polio is caused by poliovirus, an RNA genome wrapped in a protein shell. It’s small, even for a virus, 30 nanometers across; and comes in three serotypes — a distinction that’s important to biologists and pharmaceutical researchers, but don’t bother trying to memorize the term. There will not be a test on this.

Michael Underwood identified polio as a particular disease, “a debility of the lower extremities,” in 1789.

By the 20th century, polio was probably the most-feared childhood disease in Europe and America. I’ll get back to that.

Iron Lungs and Statistics


(From CDC/GHO/Mary Hilpertshauser, CDC, and GHO; via Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission.)
(Mr. Barton Hebert of Covington, Louisiana, lived in this iron lung from the late 1950s until his death in 2003.)

Polio epidemics didn’t happen before the 20th century, and there weren’t many times when more than one person got sick.

Between eight and 10 cases of infantile paralysis got recorded in the 1841 parish of West Feliciana parish, Louisiana, outbreak. In 1893, 26 folks in Boston got polio. Rutland and Proctor, Vermont had 132 cases in 1894.

The big trouble started in 1907:

Granted, 125 deaths in New York doesn’t seem like much: but that was just the first wave. Some 27,000 Americans got polio in 1916, more than 6,000 of us died — 2,000 in New York City.

That’s scary, particularly since folks didn’t know exactly how the disease spread.

Some of the folks who didn’t die spent part or all of the rest of their lives in an iron lung, like those folks in the Rancho Los Amigos Rehab Center’s polio ward. That photo is from the 1950s, and represents yet another reason I sincerely do not yearn for the ‘good old days.’

The iron lung’s basic design goes back to theoretical work done in 1670 by John Mayow.

Various folks built working prototypes in the 1800s, a “Drinker respirator” saved an eight-year-old polio victim’s life on October 12, 1928, and I’m running late — so check out the link list at the end of this section, or not. Your choice.

In the 1930s, each iron lung cost around $1,500 — roughly the same as an average home. The Both respirators cost a lot less, good news for folks who couldn’t breathe on their own.

Life in an iron lung is arguably better than suffocating, and surviving with a withered leg is fairly manageable. Not getting polio at all would be even better, which is why so many folks studied the disease.

Karl Landsteiner spotted the poliovirus in in 1908, and Jonas Salk announced successful tests of a vaccine in 1955.

The first few polio shots I got were Salk’s polio vaccine. Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine came out in 1961, and I didn’t mind switching from injections to taking a sugar cube with vaccine in it.

We’re still studying polio. Scientists developed a type of transgenic mouse back in 1990-91 that can catch the disease. I talked about transgenic mice and ethics earlier this month. (August 5, 2016)

Most folks who catch polio wouldn’t know it unless it showed up in a blood test. The disease has no symptoms in almost three quarters of all cases.

The other 28% of folks with polio get a sore throat and fever; nausea, vomiting, and other gastric troubles; or something that acts like influenza.

Here’s what happens when folks get polio:

    • No symptoms
      72%
    • Minor illness
      24%
    • Nonparalytic aseptic meningitis
      1–5%
    • Paralytic poliomyelitis
      0.1–0.5%

      • — Spinal polio
        79% of paralytic cases
      • — Bulbospinal polio
        19% of paralytic cases
      • — Bulbar polio
        2% of paralytic cases

(Source: “Poliomyelitis” Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases (The Pink Book); Atkinson W, Hamborsky J, McIntyre L, Wolfe S, eds. (2009); Public Health Foundation; via Wikipedia)

About 1% of all polio infections get into the central nervous system. This can be bad news, really bad news, or worse: headaches, pain in assorted places, and paralysis. The virus doesn’t make its way into the brain very often, happily.

Getting back to Nigeria, I hope they get enough kids immunized to head off a major outbreak there.

I also hope that more Americans don’t decide that vaccinations either aren’t necessary or are harmful. The good news is that as of 2013, a hefty percentage of American kids age 19-35 months get immunized:

  • Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis (4+ doses DTP, DT, or DTaP)
    84.2%
  • Polio (3+ doses)
    93.3%
  • Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) (1+ doses)
    91.5%
  • Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) (primary series + booster dose)
    82.0%
  • Hepatitis B (Hep B) (3+ doses)
    91.6%
  • Chickenpox (Varicella) (1+ doses)
    91.0%
  • Pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) (4+ doses)
    82.9%
  • Combined 7-vaccine series
    71.6%
    (Source: CDC)

Like I said earlier, being healthy is okay, and so is using our brains.

More:

2. Zika


(From Getty Images, via BBC News, used w/o permission.)
(“The Zika virus can be transmitted via mosquitoes”
(BBC News))

“Texas baby dies from Zika-linked defect”
BBC News (August 9, 2016)

“A baby born in Texas with the Zika-linked birth defect microcephaly has died, health officials say.

“The baby was infected in the womb while the mother was travelling in Latin America, though state officials have not identified where.

“The defect causes abnormally small heads and other developmental damage.

“Florida Governor Rick Scott also announced four more people had contracted the Zika virus, bringing the state’s total to 21 cases.

“Harris County, where the baby was born, now has two reported cases of babies born with microcephaly.

“The case is the first Zika-related death reported in Texas.

“The Zika virus, frequently transmitted by mosquitoes, often causes no symptoms, but is particularly dangerous for pregnant women….”

Zika fever is another disease that folks can have without knowing it.

I’m a bit more personally interested in this article, since I live on the same continent, live in Minnesota, and mosquitoes spread Zika. The mosquito isn’t the state bird, that’s the loon, but we get a mess of the little bloodsuckers each summer.

The CDC says that there’s “growing evidence of a link between Zika and microcephaly.” (Medscape.com)

I’ve got more to say about this, but that will wait for another post.

More:

3. Learning to Use a Powered Exoskeleton


(From AASDAP/Lente Viva Filmes, via BBC News, used w/o permission.)
(“Patients first learned to control the legs of an avatar in virtual reality”
(BBC News))

“Brain-robot training triggers improvement in paralysis”
Jonathan Webb, BBC News (August 11, 2016)

“In a surprise result, eight paraplegic people have regained some sensation and movement after a one-year training programme that was supposed to teach them to walk inside a robotic exoskeleton.

“The regime included controlling the legs of a virtual avatar via a skull cap, and learning to manipulate the exoskeleton in the same way.

“Researchers believe the treatment is reawakening the brain’s control over surviving nerves in the spine.

“The work appears in Scientific Reports.

“The eight subjects had been paralysed for three to 13 years before the rehabilitation programme began. Chronic cases of paralysis such as these are the most resistant to treatment. …”

I was going to wax eloquent on this brain-machine interface research, but household schedules and a string of technical issues have given me — wonderful opportunities for practicing patience.

Next week may, or may not, be less interesting: so I’ll just say that this research looks promising, and let it go at that. For now.

Somewhat-related post:

1 Bloodletting was a standard medical procedure for some two millennia. The idea is that draining controlled amounts of blood will balance the humors: what folks following Hippocrates called blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm; or sanguis, kholé, melaina kholé, and phlégma.

The four humors reflected the four elements: blood, air; yellow bile, fire; black bile, earth; phlegm, fire. Folks like Theophrastus figured that having too much blood made us sanguine; folks with excess phlegm were phlegmatic; excess yellow bile, choleric; and too much black bile made us melancholic.

Medicine based on humorism, or humoralism, didn’t always result in bloodletting. Some physicians prescribed changes in diet, for example.

Bloodletting stayed popular, though, even after most researchers started looking for alternatives to humorism: maybe because doing something feels better than doing nothing. There’s the placebo effect, too.

We eventually found a connection between Leeuwenhoek’s “animalcules” and disease, developed antibiotics and fNIR, and that’s yet another topic.

More:

2Paulus Lang Fu was the youngest of at least 52 martyrs in one batch killed with Jesuit missionaries in the Militia United in Righteousness/Society for Justice and Harmony hit the Diocese of Xianxian.

3 More about Saints:

“CANONIZATION: The solemn declaration by the Pope that a deceased member of the faithful may be proposed as a model and intercessor to the Christian faithful and venerated as a saint on the basis of the fact that the person lived a life of heroic virtue or remained faithful to God through martyrdom (828; cf. 957).”

“SAINT: The ‘holy one’ who leads a life in union with God through the grace of Christ and receives the reward of eternal life. The Church is called the communion of saints, of the holy ones (823, 946; cf. 828). See Canonization.”
(Glossary, Catechism of the Catholic Church)

4 The Trinity is not like Bruce Wayne or Kal-El/Clark Kent, one person with multiple identities.

God is one. (Exodus 3:13–14; Exodus 20:3; Isaiah 45:5)

God is also three Persons, and all three were at our Lord’s baptism. (Matthew 3:16–17)

Matthew 28:19 tells us to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit.” That isn’t a grammatical error. It’s a straightforward declaration of the Trinity. (Catechism, 233)

God the Son reveals God the Father, God the Holy Spirit reveals God the Father and Son, and there’s a lot more to say about the Trinity. (Catechism, 232-260)

5 Vaccination; background:

Posted in Science News | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments