Then I thought if that’s the case why bother? The people who tend to write such posts don’t have anything interesting or positive to say apart from scowling at other people who do. Religious people can produce great works, like Handel’s Messiah which has a religious message in it somewhere. Then you get books like Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow, that show the sense of wonder you can have in the workings of the universe. Yet I cannot think of anything remotely inspirational written in the heartfelt belief that compromise is by its nature the goal. No one looks at a beautiful landscape, sighs, and says, “It’d be so much better if there was a small industrial estate in the way. Y’know to balance the environmental and economic needs of society.”

So instead I’ll just put up the video that TED made pick of the week. If you’re intent on some Sunday atheism it’s around 1h 10m in, I think. It’s only a short bit about God. That’s fair enough because it’s a big universe with lots fascinating stuff in it including his Last Chance to See project.

I went to Skeptics in the Pub last week at Nottingham to hear a talk by Doug Ellison on the exploration of Mars. One of the subjects that came up was the Gorilla. The Sun recently reported that a Mars rover had found evidence of a Silverback gorilla while rambling across the dusty and arid plains of Mars. ‘Enthusiast Nigel Cooper – who has studied thousands of photos taken by Nasa rovers and posted online – said: “It’s definitely a creature of some sort.”‘

I’m rubbish at debunking this kind of thing. Basically I get as far as a lack of bananas and rain forest before yawning. If someone seriously thinks that the governments of the world are conspiring to hide the existence of a lone, and presumably very hungry, gorilla then they have more urgent problems than a lack of basic biology or geology. What is it that makes a global conspiracy to hide evidence of an advanced civilisation on Mars, with pyramids, faces and anomalous gorillas plausible? Unambiguous evidence of life on Mars would be a key to the vaults of any government with a space programme, so why would scientists hide that? You’re not going to answer that question by confirming that what we have is a rock. Still, that’s what Doug Ellison did with the video below. What makes it worth watching isn’t the conclusion but how he got there.

The tool he used in the video is the Midnight Mars Browser, which you can download on Windows or Mac for free. I didn’t know about this. It’s a tool that takes the photos from Spirit and Opportunity and displays them as virtual panoramas. You can follow in the tracks of your favourite rover. The gorilla might be dull, it’s a rock, but the tool for examining it looks brilliant. This is why the talk was so compelling. There’s masses of information about Mars you can access. You can even follow the (delayed) blog of a Mars rover driver at Mars and Me if you want the backseat driver experience.

It’s an example of debunking done well. I doubt that he’ll have converted any die-hards, because simply examining the evidence isn’t going to address their underlying problems. For everyone else he’s not only shown that it’s a not a gorilla, he’s also shown the way to more interesting places that can take our understanding of Mars further. The rest of the talk showed similar insights into the equipment on Mars and how you can use the data coming from there. As for the rest of the solar system, he runs a forum where you can find out more at unmannedspaceflight.com.

London Bridge, Lake Havasu AZ. Photo (cc) Larry Page

It has to be London Bridge. All the other major sites of interest to tourists like the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace or the Oxford Circus branch of McDonalds, only exist because of where the bridge was built. Even somewhere like Greenwich Observatory, where the world is told what the time is, ultimately exists where it does because of the bridge.

Finding the original bridge over the Thames sounds quite difficult. There’s the usual archaeological problem that wood leaves little trace in the soil. Added to that are the problems that the soil is underwater and, in succeeding years, people have built massive bridges over the site. That’s an effective way of obliterating any earlier traces. One reason for thinking that the bridge was built at this site isn’t any remains of the bridge itself. It’s the things that people have thrown off it. Roman coins were found in the gravels under the bridge when later bridges were built. This could be wash of materials into the river from wherever they were lost, but the concentration under the bridge marks this out as a special site. The original location was chosen as a convenient site, but its revival was as a deliberately inconvenient site.

The bridge seems to have gone out of use in the 4th century AD. After this period crossing of the river would have been by ferry. This would not really have been odd. At this time rover transport was cheaper than road transport and so rivers would have been the highways of the ancient and medieval world. The river was navigable to sea-going vessels, moved by free windpower rather than expensive grain-fed animal power. That makes building a bridge across the river, blocking the movement of vessels, a very controlling act and that’s why the bridge was rebuilt in the 990s [PDF]. Building a bridge across the Thames acted as a barrier to Viking incursions upstream.

Once it was built you not only had a barrier to military vessels, it also became the end of the river for large merchant ships. The docks downstream of the bridge became the economic fulcrum of the city and its hinterland. London controlled the trader for everything travelling by river from as far away as Oxford. Wherever the lowest bridgeable point on the river was, that was where the city would be.

Other sites became important partly due to their location in London. The only exception is the bridge, which set the location for London. When McCulloch bought London bridge for his new city at Lake Havasu, and not Tower Bridge, he was buying the bridge that mattered.

This review rounds off a trilogy to go with Skywatchers, Shamans and Kings and People and the Sky. Like the other two books this could be said to be part of a World Archaeoastronomy approach, but Giulio Magli adds a twist. Some of this is down to the approach he’s taken to archaeoastronomical sites, but he also adds a bit more.

Magli’s approach is similar to what I would have done if I was writing an introduction to archaeoastronomy book. He tackles the sites around the world. So take a deep breath because in his opening section of twelve chapters – slightly over half the book – he covers. Palaeolithic Europe, Prehistoric Britain, the temples of Malta, Egypt, Babylon, East North America with the Hopewell and Cahokia, West North America with Chaco and the Anasazi, Northern Mexico and Tenochtitlan, The rest of Mesoamerica and Palenque, The Incas, Nazca and Polynesia. That leaves massive holes where you would expect to find India, China, Korea and Japan and a lack of African material. That’s more due to the state of play in academic archaeoastronomy at the moment than a fault of Magli. In general Africa has been greatly overlooked and there’s not a lot of integration between Asian astronomy and the rest of the world. It’s getting better, but it’s still under-represented compared to the Mayans and Prehistoric Europe.

If this had been the sum total of the book I wouldn’t be that enthusiastic about it. It’s not bad. It’s written from an astronomical point of view with some amusing digs against archaeologists. If you were interested in archaeoastronomy and approaching it from astronomy and not anthropology I’d recommend this over Aveni or Krupp’s book as an introduction to the field. What really marks out the book as worth reading is section 2.

This is a brief section of just three chapters, but it’s the hinge for the whole book. Magli opens it by talking about cognition. An easy trap to fall into when looking at the various astronomical practices around the world is that you end up cataloguing them against how closely they correlate to modern astronomy. You can see this in some popular History of Astronomy books. Any time you read that Aristarchus improved Greek astronomy by proposing a heliocentric system you can now imagine the sound of my teeth grinding. Because, if he did improve Greek astronomy, why did Hipparchus and Ptolemy reject it for an earth-centred system? Whatever reason Aristarchus had for saying the Sun was the centre of the universe, you can bet it wasn’t to win plaudits from astronomers over 2000 years later. Magli emphasises that people in the past thought differently about the sky and that means that a bit of thought is required if you want to interpret the sky.

The next couple of chapters go into more detail about how you can try to do that. He talks about the etic approach, which is analysing the astronomy from outside the society to look for patterns. He calls an alternative approach humanistic. I found that helpful. Usually it’s described as emic, and I always worry I’m getting etic and emic mixed up like some people confuse stalactites with stalagmites. He then goes on to look at various anthropological models for interacting with the sky. It’s this middle section that makes it so useful. It’s not just relevant to astronomers. I know one or two historians who would have benefitted from reading this section. It makes the book a lot more than Archaeoastronomy’s Greatest Hits.

Section 3 is more difficult for me to talk about, because I lack the expertise to come to a definitive conclusion. I like the idea of section 3, which is to take all the ways of thinking about astronomy in Section 1 and apply critical reasoning drawn from Section 2 – but the place where he applies it is Egypt. I don’t tend to look at Egypt in great detail, so I have some difficulty with this section. I imagine a lot of Egyptologists will have difficulty with this section too, but for very different reasons. In the remaining chapters Magli proposes that the pyramids on the plateau were built as part of a unified plan. That sets of pseudoscientific alarm bells for me. The Orion Correlation Theory does get a namecheck, but what Magli argues is much more interesting than that,

In brief, he says that what we call the pyramids of Khafre and Khufu were in fact both laid out by Khufu to reproduce the hieroglyph akhet (left), which means horizon. The Great Pyramid was known as Akhet Khufu in ancient Egypt. Magli argues that in fact akhet Khufu actually referred to the two pyramids and the symbol made when the Sun set between them. I initially have the same objection to this that I have to the Orion Correlation Theory. If that is the case then how do you explain the pyramid of Djedefre?

Djedefre was the son of Khufu. After Khufu Djedefre had his pyramid built at Abu Rawash, about five miles north of Giza. If there was a unified plan at Giza it seems that no-one told him. The next pyramid at Giza was built by Khafre later. That doesn’t sound very unified to me. Magli proposes a new date for the pyramid of Khafre and also an new owner.

He argues that the ownership of the pyramid isn’t very firm. There are certainly later testimonials that Khafre was buried there, but he could have taken the pyramid for his own after it was built. There are no contemporary sources known, as there are with Khufu’s pyramid to be certain of the owner. Instead the pyramid is assigned to Khafre based on other buildings were built as a complex and connected to the second pyramid. Are these later embellishments? It depends on the date. Dating the pyramids is difficult. This far back in Egyptian chronology the dates of pharaoh’s rules can vary by a century, so dating a pyramid to a few decades seems unlikely.

Kate Spence has a method to date the pyramids based on astronomical observations. It shows an almost perfect correlation between the errors in aligning pyramids to true north due to precession of the equinoxes and the date. The only failure is the pyramid of Khafre, but this works if the pyramid of Khafre was planned in the opposite season to all the other pyramids. Her idea is elegant, but I’m not happy with the execution. It’s like saying that if we assume the dates are all correct them astronomy shows the dates are all correct. Magli shows that if you assume the pyramid was astronomically aligned using the same method as all the others, then it is slightly earlier in date than the pyramid of Khufu. The two dates are so close that, with residual errors, it’s reasonable to argue that they were laid out at the same time – if someone was mad enough lay out two supermassive pyramids of nearly equal size at the same time.

There’s more to the idea and he lays it out referring both to astronomy and to the historical and archaeological record. Magli doesn’t have much respect for consensus among historians when the evidence is weak. My own experience of archaeology elsewhere suggests there’s a tendency for ‘the most likely explanation’ to get cited and re-cited until it becomes an established factoid. However I don’t know enough about the historical details know if he is always justified when he takes on orthodox explanations.

The only place I have a serious disagreement is when Magli argues that an intentional correlation with Orion was may have been intended by Menkaure. He says that Menkaure changed the context of the Giza plateau by adding his pyramid to the site at Giza. His reason is that the pyramid’s southeastern corner aligns with the corners of the other two, but the distance from the two other pyramids could have been chosen to make the correlation. This doesn’t work for me, because elsewhere Magli’s arguments are about the visibility about some sites and not others on the horizon. The perceived observations are all terrestrially-based parallel to the ground. The only time this seems to change is a one-off for Menkaure. It is possible that the religious perception and significance of the pyramids changed for Menkaure but, if that is the case, then you can make the same argument when Magli rejects Spence’s date for the pyramid of Khafre. If Egyptian religion was rigid enough to make Magli’s re-dating of the pyramid plausible, then it would also seem to be strong evidence against a perceived correlation between the pyramids and Orion’s Belt. Everywhere else it would seem that the Egyptians were not using a symbolic landscape that would recognise patterns on visible from high above as meaningful. Personally I find Magli’s arguments more convincing than Bauval’s. Menkaure’s pyramid remains a puzzle.

That’s only a small section of the book and hardly a critical point for the argument, but I have to find something to disagree with.

On the whole it’s a good and readable book, with the author’s personal experiences of sites enmeshed with the discussion of the different cultures. Occasionally the translation slips, like introduction of the remains of Poverty Point Culture which is associated with ‘…various, often imported materials, such as copper, magnetite and galena, as well as “microlites,” which are small geometric objects of stone, of unknown use.’ I assume this was meant to be microliths.¹ There’s some barbs aimed at Richard Atkinson and Otto Neugebauer that will alienate some academics, but Atkinson was certainly happy to dish out the same treatment to others so I don’t think it’s unfair.

It’s also changing my mind about how I want to write next. At the moment I’m concentrating on articles because I want to get stuff published, but sooner or later someone will pointedly ask me when the book is coming out. I don’t think the world needs another introduction-level book to archaeoastronomy as a whole. I have reservations about the World Archaeoastronomy approach. It has its limitations and it’s notable that even who does it really well, like Anthony Aveni, doesn’t use it for research publications. I think Magli has a prototype for writing accessible archaeoastronomy books with a research element. The accessibility is important, because if you’re writing an interdisciplinary work for an audience unfamilar with at least one of the disciplines then you have to be accessible to be understood. Even if his ideas on Giza prove to be flat-out wrong, I think Magli has written a useful book.

Google Books has a limited preview.

1. Being pedantic and spotting spelling mistakes to prove you have read the book is also a reviewing tradition.

I had a slight worry earlier today. I have an idea that I think has cross-over relevance between SETI and Ancient History about ancient speculations on extraterrestrial life. I was slightly alarmed when I read Jean Schneider’s new pre-print on arXiv, The Extraterrestrial Life debate in different cultures. In it Schneider argues that arguments about life on other worlds can be traced back to ancient Greece. It sounds like an idea I’ve been kicking around for a couple of months. It was a topic raised by the atomists like Democritus and Leucippus who said that in an infinite cosmos with an infinite number of atoms there must be infinite worlds. Plato rejected this idea, as did Aristotle who argued for a hierarchical cosmos. Schneider says debates in other cultures are derived from this and then asks why it should be only the Greeks who speculated on offworld life.

His conclusion is that the Greeks developed philosophy and that made the difference. It enabled abstract concepts and debate in way that he doesn’t see in other cultures. I’m not convinced by this argument. He puts a great deal of emphasis on Euclid as an example of abstraction, but there was debate about the nature of the cosmos long before Euclid wrote his Elements. In fact I think that there is a great change in the nature of Greek cosmology in the Hellenistic period where mathematical abstractions start to matter. They don’t seem necessary for discussion of extraterrestrials in the Classical period and earlier.

That’s something that deserves a longer reply in an article. I think his arguments are interesting but don’t quite work as they stand. Even more interesting is his statement that there’s no non-western speculation extraterrestrials. If you only accept western-style philosophical speculation as being of interest then that would be a dull claim. That would be like saying “there’s no non-western western-style philosophy on alien life”. if you have a broader view of what counts, like a simple belief in life on other worlds then it’s an interesting claim. At the moment I think he’s surprisingly right.

Schneider mentions some Chinese writings on other worlds. If we’re going to be strictly Popperian about it, that means he’s wrong. Still, two passages is nothing like the volume of material from Europe, so that think that he’s right enough to look deeper into this. What other cultures do have other inhabited worlds? I thought Africa would be a good place to start looking. Africa has a rich and diverse collection of cultures, so it’s reasonable to think something can be found there. I started searching on the internet. That’s when I remembered the internet is not a library. It’s the internet. If you want aliens you’ll find them.

The easiest African example to find is the Dogon of Mali. These are the tribe that are said to have had pre-telescopic knowledge of a companion star to Sirius. From this it’s only a short step to conclude that they genuinely have been contacted by aliens. The claim is that an unknown alien species crossed the vast reaches of space to arrive at Earth, spoke to one tribe and left no other trace other than a pretty useless bit of information about the orbit of Sirius. For some people this is much more credible than the anthropologist interviewing them mucking up the interview. I don’t know of an anthropologist who does think he’s infallible, and the Dogon seem to be a case of feeding the right answers to your informants. Their view of the cosmos was remarkably similar to the views of the time in Europe. It seems odd that they independently made exactly the same mistakes as Europeans of the same era.

The Dogon/You-cannot-be-Sirius thing almost kills the internet as a useful source for genuine African beliefs about extraterrestrials. It’s nearly all Dogon. Fortunately there are places like the Encylopaedia Mythica. From there I found out about the Sonjo of Tanzania who had creator gods Naka and his sister Nebele. Nebele created everything except humanity. This annoyed Naka so rather than do any work of his own he decided Nebele was a woman and therefore his property. This made all Nebele’s work his by default. The breaking point of the relationship came when Naka attempted to brand Nebele like an animal, so she left for a different world.

That’s all I have from Africa. There’s simply too much pseudoscience to make the internet a useful source of mythology. Searching the Americas or anywhere else using the internet is futile. I could stamp my feet and whine about fantasy pasts rendering ‘real’ myths invisible. In reality there’s a slightly comic element to the problem. Many of the sites contributing to the flood of fabricated findings also complain about scientists covering up the truth. It’s possible that they do. It’s hard to tell because pseudoarchaeology is effectively, and unintentionally, hammering many diverse African cultures into monoculture shaped by the wishes of the west. I don’t think the answer is to silence pseudoarchaeologists – if that were possible. Instead it would be better to improve the availability and accessibility of alternative views.

Hindu cosmology all seems a plausible source for extraterrestrial tales, when I can find a readable book on the subject. There are other worlds in Hindu thought, but I don’t know if these are sequential worlds, so that there’s only world at a time, or if all worlds are thought to exist at the same time. Another line of thought is shamanic trips to the moon. There are tribes in Greenland where the shaman would walk to the Moon. That’s weird but it’s because of where they lived. When you’re that far north the Moon appears to roll across the southern horizon, making walking to it feasible. As far as I remember the belief was that the Moon was divine as himself. That’s not the same as visiting people on the Moon.

One reason is I think that Jean Schneider has found something notable is because of a paper I read by Eirik Saethre on UFO beliefs in Australian aboriginal communities. They believed in UFOs, but there was a curious bolted-on aspect to the way they were integrated into native life. It was almost as if they were a white equivalent of the local warnayarra, rainbow serpents associated with waterholes. The UFOs were pretty much as described as being like the UFOs they saw on the X-Files. That sounds like a classic flying saucer phenomenon. Generalising all Aboriginal cosmology from one part of fieldwork is a Bad Idea, but it’s opened an interesting question: Does the idea of extraterrestrial life often occur in aboriginal societies?

If you know of any non-Greek or Roman myths that involve travel to other worlds, I’d love to hear them. If they can be sourced to pre-contact times then that’s even better.

Station V by Les Chatfield

Just over a week ago Sidney Perkowitz suggested that film-makers should limit themselves to one big scientific flaw in a film. All sorts of critics have had fun with this. writerJames has posted an interesting response arguing scientific accuracy can enhance a story. I’m going to go a bit further and argue that the one BIG flaw idea is a good idea, for a given definition of BIG.

It’s not a new idea. Brian Stableford made it one of the key points in Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction. He argued good SF introduced one new BIG idea, which he called a novum, and explored the consequences. That sounds limited, and it’s rare you’ll get big crowds shouting for more limits on what they can do. Yet Stableford’s reasoning isn’t that it’s good for science. It’s good for the story. Terry Pratchett came to a similar conclusion when he eventually made the map of Ankh-Morpork. Initially he was against pinning down places because it limited what he could do. He then realised that it’s the limitations that make a story. The Door You Cannot Open. The Path You Cannot Take. It’s the lack of an easy route that makes the story worth telling. Every single murder mystery could be speeded up if the lead character had an app on their iPhone that told them all the necessary details at the start of the programme, along with a GPS route to the current location of the murderer. It would certainly cut out a lot of the faffing about, but the only programme that would be improved by such a device is Murder, She Wrote.

There is a difference between a one novum rule and pedantry for drama. Take for instance David Mitchell’s complaint:

Apparently, if a ship blows up in space, it doesn’t really make a noise. How silly much of Hollywood’s sci-fi output must look to audience members with experience of inter-stellar warfare.

Personally I think it’s exciting when things go bang but it would be a ludicrous waste of the one physical impossibility that Perkowitz permits. You’d need to save that for warp speed or all of Kirk’s adventures would have to happen on the moon.

Pedantry would be pointing out that a ship blowing up around the Moon wouldn’t make a noise either, so inter-stellar warfare is not a necessity. My objection is that sound in space is one of the conventions of the genre. This and other oddities, like simultaneous light and sound for explosions, are simply part of the dramatic tool box used for science fiction. The sort of person who complains about those is the sort of person who watches a musical and asks “How come everybody knows the words?”

If we were having this discussion about Geography it’d be a non-issue. I don’t know much about American geography. I know Chicago and Detroit are in neighbouring states, but I don’t know if you could drive from one to another in three hours. That means a film where a crook picks up the guns in Chicago in the morning and delivers them in Detroit at lunchtime wouldn’t bother me. Would it be reasonable for me to mock anyone who was annoyed as a bunch of spods?¹

I don’t think one novum per film should be a rigid law. FTL travel, in one form or another is a staple of SF, even if it currently looks impossible. It works not because of warps or tachyons, but because it’s necessary for the story. Still, I do support the principle that using science as a magic wand is a bad idea. So do most of the authors that I follow and read. One of the nice things about Twitter is seeing authors asking questions because pulling an answer out of the air isn’t good enough for them. The classic wheeled space station is the result of writers not wanting to magic gravity into a setting, when they can come up with a plausible reason for it. It’s an obvious example of creativity through limitations.

Perhaps a better idea would be to count each novum as a negative mark on a story. FTL drive is a negative, but so long as the place you end up is interesting enough, the net result is positive. Similarly there’s no reason for English-speaking aliens to appear, unless the story is improved by them. Under this rule the magic wand the Doctor uses against the Cybermen in the Christmas special Dr Who vs the Cyberkittens is a bad idea because it’s a big negative and it kills the story.

It also helps if you think about what is or isn’t science fiction. Star Wars is not science-fiction. It’s set in space, but it’s fantasy. The driving motor of the story is about the people and their struggles. It’s set in space, but for the most part that’s just exotic scenery. The Core in contrast is driven by a physical disaster. The reason for the story existing is a scientific problem, which surely makes the science fair game for criticism. The science not tangential to the drama as it is in Star Wars, it is the antagonist. If the peril is as ludicrous as the Pacific Ocean levitating and dropping on the lower 48 states of the USA in the mother of all tsunamis you have a problem. If your solution is getting Bruce Willis to build a giant umbrella before the ocean drops you have a worthy sequel to The Core.

1. If Chicago and Detroit doesn’t work for this example, then replace them with NY and LA – which I know are quite far apart.

Temple Grandin is an interesting person to post regardless of anything else. I first heard of her after reading an interview in NewScientist. I put in an order for Animals in Translation when it came out, that sadly has sat on my shelf since waiting for quality free time for me to read it. Temple Grandin has a radically different view of autism to the common stereotype pushed by the press. I hadn’t realised there were many people who see Autism and Asperger’s as positive aspects to their lives. In the video below Temple Grandin reframes the autistic spectrum as a need for different kinds of minds, which quite literally requires a whole new way of thinking about the mind.

If Grandin is right then this is a major spanner in the works of Evolutionary Psychology. EP as it’s sometimes not so affectionately known, is based on the idea that the human mind is more or less unchanged from the Pleistocene era, so our actions and cognition should be understood with reference to a Palaeolithic world. The video above torpedoes that assumption. First we have to remove the idea that evolution is a linear progression from there to here.

Evolution explained by Nick D. Kim at Strange Matter

Instead we have three kinds of mind according to Temple Grandin, and a social and educational system set up to discriminate in favour of verbal minds. She’s also very clear about the idea of a spectrum, so there could be people at the extremes of all three kinds of mind, and the rest of us in the middle with plastic minds. We get shaped to develop verbal minds because of the primacy of verbal communication and the outcome is a population that develops verbal cognition to the detriment of other forms of thinking, and is unaware that it is doing so. Like she says, it’s natural to assume everyone thinks the way you do. The ability to digest milk is a relatively recent adaptation in humans, but it spread quickly. The advantages verbal cognition could mean that the modern mind is different to non-literate minds. It opens up whole minefield of educational policy that I’m completely unqualified to talk about. It also has implications for SETI because it seems we have been rubbish so far at recognising a different kind of mind in our own species.

The idea that autistic people might be more sensually aware than the average person doesn’t fit the stereotype, unless you think of cute savants. Nonetheless it makes a serious alternative cognitive model. A lot of what I’ve read in SETI is pretty inflexible. It’s still the default position that mathematics could be a universal language. It relies heavily on Platonic ideals in mathematics, and the question of whether or not you need a Plato for a Platonic philosophy. There is the question about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Sundar Sarukkai has debunked this (PDF) (in my opinion) by showing mathematics is a language. Everything in the universe can be described in English, but no one would say English is unreasonably effective. It’s possible that mathematics appears to work because of an inherent structure in our cognition and not a structure in the universe, a spandrel of a verbal mind. If that’s the case then mathematics is a sign of a kind of mind and we will need to radically rethink what we look for in intelligence to recognise intelligent extra-terrestrial life.

That’s why I think Temple Grandin has an important message for SETI, but equally she also has an important message for Earth. It’s a topic which should be of interest to anyone who’s planning to do some thinking in the future.

There’s all sorts of problems with debating cranks. The arguments can get lost in irrelevant detail, invented terms and then often the various people tend to talk past each other. What people want to know is: Is Moritz right when he says things like “As you will find out, cancer does not attempt to kill the body; to the contrary, it tries to save it.” or “Today’s conventional approaches of killing, cutting or burning cancerous cells offer a mere 7% “success” rate for cancer remission, and the majority of the few survivors are “cured” for just a period of five years or less”? Or is he a dangerous lunatic profiting from lethal advice? How can you measure success? I have the answer.

A year ago I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. I had the cut and chemo treatment and, so far I’m not dead. That’s not just a personal opinion. I had a check up recently and the oncologist confirmed that I’m not dead. So we can clear away the whole “read this book” or “read that article” palaver. We have a simple bet. I will bet $1000, and my life, against Moritz’s $1000 that I will be alive in five years time.

If you know anything about testicular cancer that sounds a bit over dramatic. In the past being diagnosed with testicular cancer was a major worry. Surgery had about a 75% success rate. Thanks to surgery and chemotherapy the survival rate for someone my age over five years is now above 95%. That might not sound brilliant, but the chances of someone my age living for another ten years is about 95% anyway. That 5% does includes people where cancer returns, but also deaths from being run over by a bus, stabbed by a jealous lover or killed by asteroid strike.

That’s what makes a bet so reasonable. If Moritz is sincere, then he should believe that the $1000 is easy money that he could keep or donate to a charity for medical education or whatever he chooses. He’s saying most conventional treatments are only successful for five years or less. On the other hand if the National Health Service with their mortality records and so on are right, then I’ve got $1000 of easy money.

So here’s the bet:

Alun Salt bets Andreas Moritz $1000 that he will be alive after five years time (20 February 2015). For the period up to this deadline the will of Alun Salt will make provision for the payment of $1000 to Andreas Moritz. If after this date Alun Salt is still alive Andreas Moritz will make a payment of $1000 to the Richard Dawkins Foundation.

In the event of there being a dispute as to whether or not Alun Salt is alive, then Andreas Moritz may nominate any alternative medicine practitioner within 50km of Alun Salt’s residence to determine whether or not the body is alive. Transportation and administrative costs will be paid for by the loser of the bet.

No need for name-calling, threats or smears. I think that chemotherapy is far from perfect, but it’s a better alternative than anything alt-med offers. I’m willing to back up the belief that I’ll be alive six years after treatment with cash. Mr Moritz will you put your money where your mouth is?

(As a note the RDF haven’t got anything to do with organising this bet. I simply pulled the name from the air as they campaign for better science education among other things.)

Which invader could steal past the Tower of London?

Heritage Key are holding a competition, asking for blog posts about “Which invaders have had the biggest impact on London?” I can’t enter for various reasons, but it’s an interesting question. In the spirit of creatively coming up with the wrong answer, I’m going to go for:

Y. pestis is without doubt the invader who has had the biggest impact, for certain definitions of invader and impact. I think it’s an invader, because it’s thought to have come from the Gobi desert originally. It’s certainly had impact, because no other invader has come close to killing half of London’s population. If you’re wondering which invader killed so many people, it’s thought that Y. pestis in one form or another was the bacterium that caused the Black Death.

It arrived in the UK in 1348. One record is the Grey Friars Chronicle, which has the best description:

In this year 1348 in Melcombe, in the county of Dorset, a little before the feast of St. John the Baptist, two ships, one of them from Bristol came alongside. One of the sailors had brought with him from Gascony the seeds of the terrible pestilence and through him the men of that town of Melcombe were the first in England to be infected.

In reality it probably came in on several ships from across the channel. News of the plague spread much faster than the plague itself, so Gloucester was able to prepare by shutting the gates of the city. As a plan this would have worked if the rats had been trained to enter the city by the commercial routes. For somewhere like London this was not a remotely plausible strategy, and so the population would have been awaiting what seemed like the judgement of a wrathful god. It arrived in London by autumn of the same year, almost certainly aboard a ship rather than from an overland route.

If you were a killer bug with a penchant for pestilence then 1300s London would have been paradise. Hitching a ride in the gut of a flea, you could have transferred to a human or one of the many millions of rats which thrived in the squalor of the city. The hygiene practices of the time, and I use the word hygiene wholly incorrectly, meant that there was a plentiful supply of fresh rats to incubate a travelling plague. It gave the disease a tremendous longevity, in sad contrast to its many victims. If you measure impact purely in terms of people dead, then it’s hard to find anything with greater impact than Y. pestis, which hung around till 1665. Yet it’s not just death that made Y. pestis London’s greatest invader.

Across Britain a third of the population died. The landscape is littered with what archaeologists call DMVs, Deserted Medieval Villages. You can still see them around today with the occasional church in the middle of nowhere, with no obvious congregation. You can’t remove that many people without something breaking, and in the Middle Ages, this was Feudalism. Before the plague serfs had been tied to their master’s estates. The massive culling of the population by the Black Death increased the value of labourers, and set in motion a series of revolts and uprisings which would eventually end Feudalism.

Another effect was the abandonment of land. This helped place more wealth in hands of the church. This wealth helped fuel the conflicts between church and state in later times. More controversially, it’s also been proposed that agricultural use of land could have affected the climate. Bill Ruddiman has argued that the plague led to reforestation of the land, reducing the carbon concentration of the atmosphere, ultimately leading to cooling in the Little Ice Age. This is not a mainstream idea, but it is taken seriously by many climate researchers and does appear in climate change journals, rather than social sciences journals.

Regardless of the climactic consequences, it’s interesting to ask if the Renaissance would have happened without the Black Death. Some of the social changes were happening before the arrival of the plague, but at the very least Y. pestis amplified them. The removal of so many people from the population wasn’t just a quantative change, it was a qualitative change, because it meant rethinking how people were valued in an economy. The Black Death fuelled social changes in the Late Middle Ages which would eventually blossom as the Renaissance. Still, this is one historical character who might not stay in the past. Y. pestis may yet have a role to play in the future.

If you’re interested in reading more about the arrival of the Black Death as an invasion, there’s a very readable chapter in Benedictow’s book The Black Death, 1346-1353: the complete history available in Google Books.

The reason I’ve pulled it up is I might want to go back and think this over again. I’m not happy with it, which is why it was left on the drive, but it might have potential.

The slide on the 1980s probes is intentionally blank, because there were hardly any probes sent in the 1980s to Mars. The reason is that the competition between the major powers has moved to Earth Orbit, with the USA building the Shuttle and the USSR building long-term space stations. Recent events have highlighted a couple of reasons why it’s worth looking at this again. One is the registration of lunar heritage by California, which is grabbing headlines for something that Alice Gorman and Beth O’Leary have been saying for a while. The other is Obama’s cancellation of the return to the Moon.

It could be a scientific re-prioritisation, but like the Mars gap in the 1980s, it could also be due to politics. The Nobel laureate already has wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to manage, and he wants to keep his options open for a war with Iran. That could turn very nasty as Iran is next door to his two other problems. It’s possible that there simply isn’t a threat on the Moon, but there is in the Middle East. Unless China develops lunar ambitions, the discovery of water on the Moon could be a scientific curiosity rather than a stepping stone to colonisation.

There’s a few reasons why I don’t like this presentation as it stands. I think the biggest problem is that one of the big factors for making it was that I needed a presentation. It wasn’t an idea that was ready, and to some extent the problem was “there’s something archaeology could say about this, but what?” Now I’m thinking about the social, political and economic effects of Mars exploration. This time around I see archaeology as a tool to finding out about these factors, rather than ‘being archaeological’ as the purpose of project.