The truth is in the stars?
I had to double check I was actually reading the New York Times when I saw this article: “No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public”:
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Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation’s intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was “to standardize collection and reporting” on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public within 180 days after passage of the intelligence authorization act.
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Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who is the acting chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told a CBS affiliate in Miami this month that he was primarily concerned about reports of unidentified aircraft over American military bases — and that it was in the government’s interest to find out who was responsible.
He expressed concerns that China or Russia or some other adversary had made “some technological leap” that “allows them to conduct this sort of activity.”
Mr. Rubio said some of the unidentified aerial vehicles over U.S. bases possibly exhibited technologies not in the American arsenal. But he also noted: “Maybe there is a completely, sort of, boring explanation for it. But we need to find out.”
The article gets even weirder:
Mr. Reid, the former Democratic senator from Nevada who pushed for funding the earlier U.F.O. program when he was the majority leader, said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied.
“After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports — some were substantive, some not so substantive — that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession,” Mr. Reid said in an interview.
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Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.” (…) Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
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Man, I have no idea what to make to make of all this.
The boring explanation (and still the most likely), is that there is a small number of influential people in US politics, intelligence and military circles who genuinely believe that, ‘the truth is out there’. More cynically, this group is occasionally supported by people who seem want to link the public’s interest in UFOs with a push for increased military spending (Senator Rubio: “Frankly, if it’s something outside this planet that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some sort of technological leap from the Chinese or Russians”). This oddball alliance has been successful in recent years at lobbying for attention to these issues, apparently despite reluctance and eye-rolling within the US military. It is most likely that these sightings are probably weather balloons, weird atmospheric phenomena, the parallax effect, or some sort of drone, not aliens.
Still, the more I think about it, the more weird this human desire to have a chat with other intelligent life seems.[1]
It is almost like seeking species-wide therapy: we want to talk about our problems and get some advice from wise creatures who have answers to the big questions that keep humans awake at night.
I find that desire so boring! We should talk to other humans about our problems, they will have more pertinent insights! What exactly is a creatures from light-years away going to be able to tell us about being human?
Heck, why are we obsessed with the idea of intelligent alien life, rather than the much more interesting possibility of non-intelligent alien life? On earth, we have ultra-black fish! Caterpillars that wear their heads as hats! Vast microbial networks in forests that connect trees of different species into a ‘wood wide web’. A creature from another world, even a single-celled organism, would be unimaginably different! Intelligent life is such a narrow subset of life, and I would postulate that it is far from the most interesting.[2]
I would love it if these incidents turn out to be some sort of natural phenomenon we have never seen before. Weird ocean gases! strange electrical storms! Atmospheric shenanigans! All of that is so cool! Sadly, most people would be like ‘It wasn’t aliens or Russians? Ugh. Boring.’
'Like carving a soggy M&M'
Stephanie Nolan has a great piece in the Walrus on the invasion we should be much more worried about:
Once identified, the ticks go under the knife: with a scalpel blade, Murison slices them to bits. Ticks that were found and removed before they had time for a long feed are smaller than a watermelon seed and nearly as crunchy: they resist the scalpel. But the engorged ticks, the ones that had a hearty blood meal, can be swollen up like a stewed cranberry. Cutting them is more like carving a soggy M&M. “You definitely hear the outer shell breaking,” says Murison, hacking away at a rigid American dog tick so vigorously that her blond ponytail swings back and forth. When the engorged ticks are dissected, they give off a loamy smell from the coagulated blood that has ballooned them to as much as ten times their original size. Clow and her team marinate the chopped ticks in chemical reagents then run them through a process that extracts the dna in the bug hash. There are two main types of genetic material they are looking for in blacklegged ticks: that of Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, and Anaplasma phagocytophilum, the cause of anaplasmosis, which brings fever, vomiting, and in rare cases, can cause respiratory and organ failure. Clow finds B. burgdorferi in about 25 percent of samples; A. phagocytophilum is much more rare, found in just 1 to 2 percent.
Murison shoves aside a heap of envelopes and shakes her head at the pile. “We’re not supposed to be getting this many in October,” she says. There are ticks in all seasons now. Lyme rates are surging because the ticks that spread it—I. scapularis, predominantly—are rapidly expanding their range. Climate change has made much of the most populated part of Canada an ideal habitat for many species of ticks; I. scapularis, which spreads Lyme, in particular, is rapidly expanding its range. In the early 1970s, there was just one known colony of blacklegged ticks in Canada, at Long Point, on the north shore of Lake Erie. By the 2000s, the tick was being found all over southern Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, and the Atlantic provinces. Today, they’re marching steadily west from Manitoba on their eight tiny legs.
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This reminds me of something my first-year university biology professor said: evolution is a statement of fact, not a moral distinction. It does not say anything about how ‘worthy’ an animal or species is, only that it has survived. Still, I can’t help but say ‘good job ticks!’; they seem to have taken an early lead in this figuring out how to adapt to this whole climate change thing.
Side note, bites from the Lone Star tick have been causing Americans to become allergic to red meat (Radiolab episode here). That particular tick variety was spotted in Ontario last year. So stay safe people, or else the ticks will force you to become a pollo-pescetarian.
Of rats and men
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When Combs looked closer, distinct rat subpopulations emerged. Manhattan has two genetically distinguishable groups of rats: the uptown rats and the downtown rats, separated by the geographic barrier that is midtown. It’s not that midtown is rat-free—such a notion is inconceivable—but the commercial district lacks the household trash (aka food) and backyards (aka shelter) that rats like. Since rats tend to move only a few blocks in their lifetimes, the uptown rats and downtown rats don’t mix much.
When the researchers drilled down even deeper, they found that different neighborhoods have their own distinct rats. “If you gave us a rat, we could tell whether it came from the West Village or the East Village,” says Combs. “They’re actually unique little rat neighborhoods.” And the boundaries of rat neighborhoods can fit surprisingly well with human ones.
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Left: a map showing two clusters of rats uptown (black, north of 59th Street) and downtown (white, south of 14 Street). Right: a map showing estimated migration rates of rats. (Combs et al. / Molecular Ecology)
My question: If rats can be genetically distinct after only a few centuries in the same city, why isn’t there more human genetic diversity? Human populations have been separated by vast geographic distances, and in many cases for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Despite this, all humans alive today are quite genetically close. Here is one explanation that I have come across:
Modern humans are a lot alike--at least at the genetic level--compared with other primates. If you compare any two people from far-flung corners of the globe, their genomes will be much more similar than those of any pair of chimpanzees, gorillas, or other apes from different populations. Now, evolutionary geneticists have shown that our ancestors lost much of their genetic diversity in two dramatic bottlenecks that sharply squeezed down the population of modern humans as they moved out of Africa between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago.
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Large, new genetic databases from diverse populations have given researchers new tools to study this problem, but, so far, they have produced mixed results. One model proposes that genetic diversity was lost in two distinct bottlenecks, where groups of hundreds or thousands of migrating people were quickly decimated by disease, starvation, warfare, or some other cause, dramatically reducing the number of adults who bore children that survived. Another suggests that genetic diversity was reduced in a stepwise fashion as an initial group of about 100,000 or so people moved out around the globe, gradually leaving behind more and more people in settlements along the way.
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I am not sure if this is still current given some of the recent research into human origins.[3]
Still, whether or not there were apocalyptic ‘bottlenecks’, I like that the human story is of communities migrating, then coming together, intermingling before drifting apart again. I find that beautiful. Take that rats!
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1] There is something similar at work here when it comes to our quest to develop Artificial Intelligence. Robots would have robot problems to ponder! They would be completely unsympathetic to our fleshy woes.
[2] This is why Alien is the best sci-fi movie of all time, and why Prometheus was the final nail in the coffin of the series. Also, don’t even get me started on the possibilities of new and never before seen rocks and minerals on other planets!
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3] Strong recommendation for the new season of the history podcast ‘Tides of History’ which is exploring the new research on human origins in detail.