On 12 May 2022 the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration unveiled the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. It’s a bright, slightly lumpy ring of light wrapped around a dark centre. The dark patch is the shadow cast by an object about 4 million times the mass of the Sun, sitting roughly 27,000 light-years away, and it had been there the whole time, quietly, while the picture took five years to make.

The light in the picture is old in two senses. The photons left the galactic centre tens of thousands of years ago, and the data behind the image was recorded in April 2017. The Event Horizon Telescope is not a single dish. Eight radio observatories were linked across the planet into one Earth-sized virtual telescope, each recording its slice of the same source, the slices later stitched together into a single resolving instrument.

Stitching is the slow part. More than 300 researchers at 80 institutes spent about five years turning the raw signals into the ring, including building a large library of simulated black holes to compare the data against. 

The obvious expectation is that the nearest supermassive black hole would be the easiest to photograph, and it was not. The collaboration had already imaged M87*, a black hole of about 6.5 billion solar masses, in 2019. M87* sits far further away but is vastly larger, giving it a much slower-changing appearance. In this case, stability mattered as much as closeness.

Because Sgr A* is so much smaller, gas whips around it far faster. As EHT scientist Chi-kwan Chan put it, “where gas takes days to weeks to orbit the larger M87*, in the much smaller Sgr A* it completes an orbit in mere minutes.” The innermost orbit takes roughly 30 minutes for Sgr A* against about 30 days for M87*. The source flickers and rearranges itself even as the telescopes are watching it.

That motion broke the usual assumption that the thing being imaged holds still during an exposure. As MIT Haystack’s Vincent Fish described it, “Sgr A* is changing over minutes, so the data is jumping all over the place.” Anyone who has tried to photograph a fidgeting child in low light knows the shape of the problem, scaled up by orders of magnitude. The team had to average over many possible images and reformulate the methods built for the steadier M87*.

The ring matched the prediction. EHT Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower said, “We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.” The measured diameter of the bright emission ring came in at about 51.8 microarcseconds, close to the size general relativity expects given the mass-to-distance ratio already pinned down by tracking stars that orbit the centre.

Having two black holes of wildly different size that both fit the same theory is the useful part. Sera Markoff, co-chair of the EHT Science Council, said, “This tells us that General Relativity governs these objects up close, and any differences we see further away must be due to differences in the material that surrounds the black holes.” Two objects consistent with general relativity is not the same as the theory being settled in every regime, but it narrows where any deviation could be hiding.

Not everything is closed. An independent reanalysis by Miyoshi and colleagues questioned the ring, and the collaboration has defended its methods, arguing the ring with a central depression remains the most likely model fitting the data. The variability that made Sgr A* hard to image also makes it a sharper test: Harvard-Smithsonian’s Michael Johnson had noted in 2019 that “For Sgr A*, there’s almost no wiggle room.” General relativity seems to have passed this test.

What changes with the image’s existence is concrete. Researchers now have a resolved, nearby target whose appearance shifts on a timescale of minutes, which means the next step is movies rather than stills, tracking the plasma as it moves. EHT scientist Keiichi Asada said the team can now “go a lot further in testing how gravity behaves in these extreme environments than ever before.” Until 2022, no one had a picture of the centre of our own galaxy to hold up against general relativity’s prediction; that picture now exists.

The post In 2022 the Event Horizon Telescope revealed the first image of the monster at our galaxy’s center, Sagittarius A* — a black hole 4 million times the Sun’s mass, sitting quietly 27,000 light-years away the whole time appeared first on Space Daily.

In October 2017, astronomers using the Pan-STARRS survey telescope in Hawaii detected a small object moving through the inner solar system on a hyperbolic path, too fast for the Sun to hold. It had been found on 19 October, after its closest approach to the Sun in September, so it was already on its way out when it was spotted. It was the first confirmed interstellar object detected in our solar system. They named it ʻOumuamua, a Hawaiian term NASA renders as a messenger from afar arriving first.

Its path should have been simple to read. Then, as it receded from the Sun, it sped up very slightly, by an amount gravity alone could not account for. What made that strange was the absence of the obvious cause. A comet accelerates this way when it vents gas and dust, but ʻOumuamua showed no coma and no tail. That gap, between a measured push and a missing exhaust, is where the whole argument lives.

What was actually observed

The non-gravitational acceleration was reported by Marco Micheli and colleagues in a 2018 paper in Nature. It was small, and it faded with distance from the Sun in roughly the way sunlight or outgassing would predict, which is part of why it drew attention rather than being dismissed as measurement error.

The other oddities were the shape and the silence. ʻOumuamua tumbled as it went, and its brightness varied so much as it rotated that its light curve implied an extreme shape, though whether that meant a cigar-like body or a flattened, pancake-like one depends on the model. And despite searches with large telescopes, no one detected gas or dust coming off it. Those searches set upper limits on how much material it could be shedding, and the limits were low.

The argument for technology

This is where Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard, made the case he is now known for. With his colleague Shmuel Bialy, he showed in a 2018 paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters that solar radiation pressure could in principle supply the extra acceleration, but only if the object had a very low mass-to-area ratio, equivalent to a sheet less than a millimetre thick. Since nature is not known to make objects like that, they went on to discuss a possible light-sail origin, and Loeb later argued, in follow-up work and his book Extraterrestrial, that ʻOumuamua might be the product of an extraterrestrial technology.

The shape of that argument is an inference from absence. The push was real and the usual explanation was missing, so an unusual explanation was put on the table. That is not the same as evidence of manufacture, and Loeb has generally framed it as a hypothesis worth taking seriously rather than a settled conclusion. Most astronomers have not accepted it.

The natural explanations, including the leading one

The reason most astronomers reject the technology reading is not that they find it offensive.

It is that natural explanations kept arriving, and none of them required anything new about the universe.

Several were floated early: a body made largely of hydrogen ice, whose outgassing would be nearly invisible; a fragment of nitrogen ice chipped off a Pluto-like world; an extremely porous, fluffy structure that sunlight could push. The most prominent recent natural explanation came in 2023, when Jennifer Bergner and Darryl Seligman published a model in Nature in which ʻOumuamua began as a water-rich icy body bombarded by cosmic rays during its long passage through interstellar space. That processing could split water and trap molecular hydrogen inside the ice. Warmed by the Sun, the ice could then release hydrogen, giving the object a small push without carrying off enough dust to form a visible coma.

Bergner and Seligman presented this as a natural and economical account. Seligman and colleagues have since identified, in work published in PNAS, several other small bodies in the solar system that show non-gravitational acceleration without any visible coma, now called dark comets. That does not prove ʻOumuamua was a dark comet, but it does show that small bodies can behave in this awkward middle ground between asteroid and comet.

Why it has not fully settled

The honest complication is that the leading natural explanation is itself disputed. Loeb, with Thiem Hoang, responded that the 2023 model miscalculated the object’s surface temperature, which would undercut the hydrogen mechanism. Separately, the chemist Niels Ligterink argued, in a formal response to the paper, that it is unlikely enough hydrogen could be produced to do the job unless the object had an unusual composition or was far older than assumed.

None of this means ʻOumuamua was artificial. It means the most popular natural account is strong but not airtight, which is a different and more ordinary kind of uncertainty.

The deeper problem is that the object is gone.

ʻOumuamua left the solar system within months of discovery and is now too far and too faint to study. There is no prospect of new data on it. Whatever it was, the case has to be argued from the limited observations gathered during a short window in late 2017, and limited evidence is exactly the soil in which a claim like Loeb’s stays alive.

What to watch

The way this gets resolved is not by re-litigating ʻOumuamua but by finding more of its kind. The second confirmed interstellar object, 2I/Borisov, turned up in 2019 and behaved like a perfectly ordinary comet, with an obvious tail, which told us interstellar visitors are not all strange. A third, 3I/ATLAS, was found on 1 July 2025 and showed clear cometary activity, with Hubble imaging dust coming off its icy nucleus.

More are coming. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, built for a decade-long survey of the sky, should sharply increase the rate at which these objects are found, on Seligman’s estimate something like one to three ʻOumuamua-like bodies a year, and more with visible comae. If a future object with a faint coma and a small non-gravitational push can be caught early and tracked closely, the questions left hanging by ʻOumuamua become answerable. The first interstellar visitor arrived before we were ready to study it. The next ambiguous one may not.

The post In 2017, the first confirmed visitor from another star system tumbled through the solar system on a path that should have been simple to read, then accelerated slightly as it left without showing the coma or tail of an active comet — a gap that let Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb argue it might be alien technology, a claim most astronomers reject but one that has never quite gone away. appeared first on Space Daily.

Nearly three kilometres below the surface, in a mine in northern Ontario, geologists found water that had been isolated in the rock for roughly two billion years. That is older than animals, older than plants, and older than almost everything most people picture when they think of life. When that water was last in contact with the surface, the only life on Earth was microbial. The researcher who led the work, Barbara Sherwood Lollar of the University of Toronto, tasted it.

She did so on purpose, and for a reason. First, what the water is.

Where it was found

The site is the Kidd Creek mine near Timmins, operated by Glencore at the time of the research and long described as the deepest base-metal mine in the world, worked for copper, zinc and silver. Its lowest accessible point sits about three kilometres down, which makes it one of the few places on land where anyone can reach rock this deep directly.

Sherwood Lollar first went there in 1992. The record-setting samples came much later. In 2013 her team, reporting in the journal Nature, described fracture water at a depth of about 2.4 kilometres with a minimum mean residence time of around 1.5 billion years, and noble-gas evidence pointing to a system connected to mineralisation about 2.64 billion years ago. In 2016 they went deeper, to nearly three kilometres, and found water dated at roughly two billion years, which they presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting that December.

One detail tends to surprise people. This is not a few drops squeezed from stone. The water flows out of fractures and boreholes at rates of litres per minute, in volumes much larger than anyone expected. It does not seep so much as flow, in Sherwood Lollar’s description, bubbling out of the rock at you.

How you date water that old

Two billion years is far beyond the reach of radiocarbon dating, which runs out after some tens of thousands of years. The age here is not the age of the water molecules but the length of time the water has been cut off from the surface, and it is worked out a different way.

As explained by the geoscience outreach project EarthDate, the team measured noble gases dissolved in the water, including helium, argon, neon, krypton and xenon. These gases build up in trapped fluid at slow, modelled rates as elements in the surrounding rock decay. The more that has accumulated, the longer the water has been sealed away. The figure that comes out is a minimum isolation time, which is why it is given as a range rather than a single year.

Why someone tasted it

Tasting rock and water is a normal, if unglamorous, part of fieldwork. Salinity is one of the quickest things a geologist can read off a fluid, and the tongue is a decent instrument for it. Sherwood Lollar has said she tastes these waters to judge how salty they are, and that the older the water, the saltier it tends to be.

This one was very salty.

By her account it runs up to about ten times saltier than seawater, thick, and bitter, with a sulphurous smell, and it turns a faint orange when it meets air, as dissolved iron reacts with oxygen. The profile in Maclean’s records her following the musty odour through the rock to find where the water was seeping out.

That is the part every retelling reaches for, and it is fair enough. The taste was set by chemistry that has been running, undisturbed, since long before anything with a tongue existed.

What it means for life

The age would be enough on its own, but the more consequential part is what the water contains. The chemistry of the fluid, including sulphate produced by reactions resembling those at deep-sea hydrothermal vents, points to biological activity. The water also holds dissolved hydrogen, and later studies of the Kidd Creek site have identified resident microbes, among them sulphate reducers, able to live on this kind of rock-derived chemistry, in the dark and sealed off from the sun.

This matters beyond Earth. If life can persist in isolated, rock-bound water with no light and only chemical energy, then similar settings elsewhere become worth examining: the subsurface of Mars, or the hidden oceans under the ice of moons like Europa and Enceladus. NASA researchers have visited Kidd Creek for exactly this reason, treating it as a stand-in for environments they cannot yet reach.

The careful version of the claim is not that microbes have been continuously observed there for two billion years, but that the water and the fracture system contain chemistry and microbial evidence consistent with a deep, isolated biosphere sustained by rock-water reactions.

What to watch

The Kidd Creek water is the oldest that has been dated this way, but probably not the oldest that exists. Researchers are now looking for similar ancient fluids in deep rock on other continents, comparing their chemistry, age and any signs of life. Whether older isolated water turns up, and whether any of these systems holds living organisms rather than only their chemical traces, are the open questions.

For now the finding stands as a strange kind of sample: not a fossil, not a rock, but liquid water from a world that existed long before animals, plants or anything recognisably familiar had appeared.

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Here are two things that both seem obviously true. The more you want something, the harder you will work to get it. And the harder you work to get something, the more likely you are to have it.

Put them together and this line writes itself: if you want to be happy, value happiness, aim at it, hold it up as the goal. So why does some research seem to suggest the reverse?

A quick note before we go further. I am not a psychologist or a clinician, just a curious reader trying to make sense of some findings. The studies here come from particular groups of people, mostly US samples and in one case all women, so they are patterns worth thinking about, not settled rules about you or anyone you know.

Perhaps the clearest version of this idea comes from a 2011 paper in the journal Emotion with a title that doubles as a question: “Can Seeking Happiness Make People Happy?”

The authors’ concluded that “The current findings demonstrate that under certain circumstances, valuing happiness may be self-defeating. Leading people to value happiness more made them feel less happy”. The authors are careful, and so should we be. Both studies used all-female US samples, and they explicitly do not claim that valuing happiness is always a trap. Still, the pattern is worth taking seriously.

The mechanism, as far as I can follow it, is about expectations and the gap they create. When Mauss and her collaborator Brett Ford summarized the work for a general audience in 2024, they put it plainly: “The idea is that the more we value happiness the higher expectations we set for our happiness—high expectations we are more likely to miss. When we miss them, we may become disappointed and discontented”. Aim high enough and a perfectly good feeling starts to look like a shortfall.

I recognize this from my own small purchases. I wanted a motorbike for years, and when I finally bought one here in Vietnam, I expected to happy. It sounds silly when I write it but it’s true. The day I got the bike was good. Then within a week or two it was just my bike.

We chase the thing, you reach it, and the feeling doesn’t match. Nobody handed me a fake article, but I had done a version of that to myself, building the expectation high enough that arrival could only undershoot it.

A later refinement from Mauss’s lab, a series with 1,815 US participants, sharpened the picture. As the authors summarized for Greater Good, the damage doesn’t come from aspiring to happiness but from what they call concern about happiness — the habit of judging and monitoring your own feelings. The issue isn’t how happy people are or how happy they want to be. It’s how they respond to their happiness.

So what do we do with this info? The researchers do not offer a clean fix, and they say so. Their suggested approach is almost aggressively simple: “When you’re experiencing something positive, don’t judge yourself.” They also admit it is tricky to put into practice, which I appreciate, because telling yourself to stop monitoring your feelings is itself a form of monitoring your feelings.

What I take from it is smaller and easier to actually try. Wanting to be happy is fine — it’s the grading that does the damage. The running tally of whether this moment is delivering, whether you are getting your money’s worth of joy out of the birthday, the holiday, the new bike.

There is a difference between noticing that you are happy and hunting for whether you are happy. One lets the feeling sit where it is; the other stands over it with a ruler. I keep catching myself reaching for the ruler, and the moments I don’t are usually the ones I look back on as the good ones.

If any of this is landing closer to home than it is interesting, if the checking and the flatness have settled in deeper than a flat afternoon, a good therapist is worth more than any article on the subject.

The post Many people assume the path to happiness is to want it and aim for it, but some research suggests the opposite can be the case — people who prized happiness most, or were nudged to, often felt less of it, especially when things were going well appeared first on Space Daily.

“Experiencing awe is such a simple practice, just taking a moment to look out the window or pausing to consider the technological marvels that surround us, and we now show it can have measurable effects on our emotional well-being,” said Virginia Sturm, an associate professor of in the departments of Neurology and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. 

The work in question is a 2020 study from UCSF’s Memory and Aging Center and the Global Brain Health Institute. Two groups of older adults took the same walk. One group felt measurably better afterwards. What separated them was a brief instruction.

A note before going further: we are writers and editors reading a research paper, not clinicians or psychologists. What follows is reporting on one small study, not advice. The findings are observational patterns from a particular group of participants, and population-level results are not prescriptions for any individual reader.

What an awe walk actually is

The design was deliberately plain. Healthy older adults took a weekly 15-minute outdoor walk for eight weeks. The study followed 52 older adults with a median age of 75.

Participants were split at random into two groups. One was the control group, given the walks and nothing else. The other was the awe-walk group, asked at the start of the study in a short briefing to orient their attention toward the vastness and novelty of what they were passing, the kind of attention that produces awe. The walks were identical apart from that briefing.

It helps to be specific about what “awe” means here. As Dacher Keltner defines it, the UC Berkeley emotion researcher who co-authored the study, “Awe is a positive emotion triggered by awareness of something vastly larger than the self and not immediately understandable, such as nature, art, music, or being caught up in a collective act such as a ceremony, concert or political march.” For a walker, that might be a stand of old trees, a wide view, or the small detail of light on water noticed for the first time.

What the data showed

The awe group reported significant boosts in daily prosocial positive emotions such as gratitude and compassion, and less distress, over the eight weeks.

The popular framing tends to blur a useful distinction here. During the walks themselves, the awe group reported more awe. Away from the walks, the significant group differences were in those prosocial emotions and in distress.

Then there were the selfies. Participants photographed themselves on each walk, and the researchers analysed how the images changed. Over time, the awe walkers made themselves physically smaller in the frame and smiled more broadly. Sturm did not expect it. “To be honest, we had decided to do this particular analysis of participants’ selfies on a lark, I never really expected we’d be able to document awe’s ability to create an emotionally healthy small self literally on camera!” she said. It is a striking image, but an exploratory one from a single small sample, and best read as a clue rather than proof.

The limits matter just as much as the gains. The participants were healthy older adults with limited symptoms of mental distress at the outset, and the effects the researchers describe were relatively moderate. This is one study of a few dozen people, not a settled consensus about how awe works for everyone.

Why a single instruction might do this

The team’s explanation centres on attention and proportion. Sturm describes it this way: “One of the key features of awe is that it promotes what we call ‘small self,’ a healthy sense of proportion between your own self and the bigger picture of the world around you.” That is the team’s working hypothesis, not an established law of the mind, but it fits the selfie data. People who oriented toward something vast literally drew themselves smaller.

The broader awe literature points in a similar direction. Keltner notes that “experiencing awe can contribute to a host of benefits including an expanded sense of time and enhanced feelings of generosity, well-being and humility.” 

What older adults, specifically, may gain

The choice of older participants was not incidental. Sturm noted that “negative emotions, particularly loneliness, have well-documented negative effects on the health of older adults, particularly those over age 75.” An intervention that nudges attention outward, toward the world and other people, speaks directly to that. The study does not claim awe walks reverse loneliness or its health toll, only that this group reported more gratitude and compassion and less daily distress.

There is at least one sign the reorientation effect may travel further than healthy ageing. A later small randomised study, published as a conference abstract by a separate research group, applied the awe-walk approach to people with dementia, who took biweekly 15-minute walks over four weeks. Compared with the control group’s deterioration, the awe-walk participants showed greater improvements in quality of life, attention, orientation, mood and social behaviour. One small replication is not a body of evidence, but it suggests the original finding was not a fluke of one healthy sample.

If loneliness or low mood is sitting close to home, a qualified counsellor or therapist is worth talking to. None of this is a substitute for that.

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In April 2010, a team led by Igor Grossmann published a paper in PNAS with a title that runs against the usual story we tell about getting older: “Reasoning about social conflicts improves into old age.” The researchers gave a community sample of American adults stories about conflict, asked them to predict how each would unfold, and scored the reasoning. The older participants, between 60 and 90, did better than the young in terms of social reasoning. 

A note before going further. We are writers and editors here, not psychologists, clinicians, or gerontologists. What follows is our reading of one study and the research around it, not advice about your own mind or anyone else’s. The findings below come from observational, cross-sectional work, which describes patterns across groups of people rather than forecasts for any single reader.

The assumption being rebutted

The default picture of ageing is loss. Memory slips, names go missing, new things take longer to learn. There is real evidence behind this. For instance, a study drawing on the Health and Retirement Study, with a sample of more than fourteen thousand people, found fluid cognition declining with age, more steeply after seventy.

So the assumption isn’t baseless.

The problem is treating it as the whole story. Researchers of the ageing literature note that two lay views compete: that age brings decline, and that age brings wisdom. While fluid intelligence falls, crystallised intelligence, the store of accumulated knowledge, tends to rise into the 70s. 

What Grossmann and Nisbett tested

The Grossmann team, with Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan as senior author, worked with a representative sample of 247 adults, sorted into three bands: 25 to 40, 41 to 59, and 60 and up. Everyone read short stories about social conflict, some between groups, some between individuals, and predicted what would happen next.

The responses were coded on dimensions the researchers tied to wise reasoning: recognising that other people see things differently, acknowledging the limits of one’s own knowledge, and valuing compromise over a clean win. To keep “wisdom” from being a word the team simply defined into existence, they had the coding scheme validated by professional counsellors and wisdom researchers.

The older group reasoned more wisely than the young. The authors’ own summary is direct: “Social reasoning improves with age despite a decline in fluid intelligence.” Nisbett put the result more plainly to reporters: “Independent of social class, older people are wiser, by our definition,” he said, “for group conflicts and individual conflicts. And this was true independent of their level of intelligence.”

That phrase, “by our definition,” is worth holding onto. Wisdom here is what the study’s coding scheme captures, not a verdict from on high. This is also one study, from a particular sample read through a particular lens, and shouldn’t be read as a settled law of the human lifespan.

Why wise reasoning and fluid intelligence pull apart

The striking part is the gap inside a single person. The same older adults who would, on average, be slower at a novel reasoning puzzle were better at thinking through a quarrel. How does one go up while the other goes down?

One answer is that these are simply different things. A 2021 study using a self-report wisdom scale — a different measure from the conflict-reasoning task Grossmann used — found that, in a sample of 141 healthy older adults, more than 95% of the variance in wisdom scores was unaccounted for by fluid intelligence, suggesting the two are largely distinct constructs. Fluid intelligence is about speed and novelty. Reasoning through conflict draws on something else: decades of having watched arguments play out, of having been wrong, of having seen that the person who needs to win the room often loses something else.

What it does and doesn’t licence

The finding drew real interest. Lynn Hasher of the University of Toronto, called the work “the single best demonstration of a long-held view that wisdom increases with age.” Her reason for caring about it says something about the field she works in. “What I think is most important about the paper is that it shows a major benefit that accrues with aging rather than the mostly loss-based findings reported in psychology,” she said. Of course, that is one researcher’s read of a single paper, not a field-wide verdict.

The wider literature has stayed mixed. Later studies have found positive, negative, null, and curved relationships between age and wisdom. A cross-cultural follow-up by the same group found the age gain held for Americans but not for Japanese participants. 

The authors themselves were careful about where the finding could go. They suggested, with their own hedge intact, that “it might be advisable to assign older individuals to key social roles involving legal decisions, counseling, and intergroup negotiations.” The hedge in “might be advisable” is important. These are roles where the question is rarely how fast you can solve a puzzle and almost always how well you can hold two opposed views in mind at once.

If any of this lands near something you’re carrying about your own ageing or someone you love, a qualified counsellor or clinician is the right person to talk it through with.

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In July 1969, while two of his crewmates bounced around on the Moon and most of the species watched, Michael Collins flew the command module alone around the back of it. For about forty-seven minutes of every orbit, the entire body of the Moon sat between him and every other living person. Mission Control put it plainly at the time: not since Adam had a human being known such solitude.

By the only measure physics cares about, he was the loneliest man who had ever lived. And he reported that he was not lonely in the slightest. He liked it. He called the cramped little capsule a happy home. He wrote afterwards that out there, cut off from all of us, he felt not fear or loneliness but something closer to exultation.

Which makes him an awkward sort of proof for something Carl Jung wrote years before anyone left the planet. Loneliness, Jung said, does not come from having no people about you. It comes from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you, or from holding views that others find inadmissible. Collins had no one for company and nothing he needed to say. Most of us walk around with the exact reverse, and it turns out the reverse is far worse.

We keep solving the wrong equation

We treat loneliness as arithmetic. Not enough people, so add some. More parties, more contacts, a fuller calendar, a livelier group chat. And it does not touch the ache, because the ache was never a shortage of bodies nearby.

Loneliness behaves much more like hunger. It is an alarm older than language, a signal that something specific is missing, and like hunger it does not care how crowded the table is, only whether the particular need gets met. You can starve at a banquet if none of it is food you are able to eat.

Collins had no people and no deficit. You can have three hundred followers, a packed table, a marriage, and a deficit the size of a planet.

The fullest, loneliest year of my life

The loneliest I have ever been was a year when I was almost never on my own.

I was running restaurants then, and the dining rooms were full nearly every night. Staff, suppliers, regulars who knew my name, the warm roar of a busy service that I honestly loved. From the outside it looked like the opposite of isolation. It looked like a man sitting right in the middle of things.

What none of those regulars knew was that I had privately decided I wanted out. Not a tweak, not a holiday. Out. I had built the place, it worked, people envied it, and I had woken up one morning unable to feel why I had ever wanted it.

And that is not a sentence you can hand to anyone. I tried, once or twice, carefully. The reply is always some version of the same kindness. You have made it. People would kill for this. You are just tired. All of it meant well. All of it lands like a door clicking shut, because the thought I most needed to get out of my own skull was the one thought everyone had unanimously ruled out of order.

So I stopped saying it. And that is the precise machinery Jung was describing. Not the absence of people, but the presence of something you cannot pass to a single one of them. I would stand in a full, happy restaurant, the most peopled place I owned, and feel further out than Collins ever drifted behind the Moon. He had a tape recorder and a clear conscience. I had a hundred diners and one sentence I could not say.

What actually breaks it

The fix is not the one the arithmetic keeps suggesting. Throwing more people at this kind of loneliness is like turning the radio up to fix the engine.

What broke mine was a single conversation. An old friend, not even an especially close one, asked the ordinary question over a late drink, and for some reason I gave the true answer instead of the approved one. I said I wanted to sell, that I did not fully understand why, and that I was frightened of who I would be on the other side of it. He did not tell me I had made it. He just said, “Yeah. I think I’d feel the same.”

That was the whole cure. One person, slightly drunk, declining to overrule me. The loneliness did not survive being heard the first time.

That is the part the quote holds and the parties never will. The answer to this kind of loneliness is not company. It is a witness. One person who can take the inadmissible thing off your hands without flinching and pass it back to you still intact.

Behind the Moon and in the bright rooms

Collins came home and spent much of the rest of his life mildly irritated at being called the loneliest man in history. He knew the label had it backwards. He had been alone, magnificently, with nothing he needed to confess and no one he needed to confess it to. He even pointed out, generously, that another astronaut had circled the Moon solo before him and deserved the title more.

The genuinely lonely ones were never the people behind the Moon. They were the ones in the bright, crowded places, smiling and refilling glasses, carrying a single sentence they had quietly decided no one nearby could bear to hear. I was that man for about a year, marooned further out than any astronaut while surrounded every night. It lifted not when the tables filled, they were always full, but the night one half-cut friend heard the thing I had stopped saying and told me he would have felt it too. With nobody for a quarter of a million miles, Collins felt almost exultant. In a packed restaurant I felt lost at sea. The difference was never how many people stood nearby. It was whether one of them knew what I meant.

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Whatever else changes across two thousand years, this much seems to hold: a person only ever has the moment they are standing in. Not the years already spent or the ones still owed — just this, right now.

That is roughly what Marcus Aurelius was getting at when he wrote, in the line that gives this piece its title, “no one loses any other life than this which he is living, nor lives any other than this which he is losing.”

That is A. S. L. Farquharson’s 1944 translation. Other translators reach for different words, so treat it as one good English version of the thought rather than the final one.

I am not a psychologist or a philosopher by training, just a reader who went looking. What follows is reflection on a very old idea and one modern study, and the study here is a finding from a particular group of people, not settled science or a rule about how your mind works.

The passage comes from Book 2.14 of the Meditations, and the reasoning behind it is the interesting part. Aurelius is thinking about death, and he lands somewhere counterintuitive. If all you ever truly hold is the present, then the man who dies young and the man who dies very old lose exactly the same thing when they die: the present moment, and nothing more. “Thus the longest and the shortest come to the same thing,” he writes.

The logic that gets him there is almost a riddle. “For a man could lose neither past nor future; how can one rob him of what he has not got?”

You cannot lose the past, because it is already gone. You cannot lose the future, because you do not have it yet. The only thing on the table is the present, and that is the same size for everyone. It is a strange kind of comfort, but real.

It should note that Meditations was never meant for us to read. It was a private notebook, notes Marcus wrote to himself. He probably never expected his writing to quoted, at least not in this format. 

Anyway, reading the Meditations a few years ago, the thing that struck me most was not how alien it felt but how familiar. The worries are the same ones we still carry. Reputation, mortality, what other people think, and in this case, the nagging sense that the real thing is happening somewhere we are not.

Most of the time, if I am honest, I am not in the present at all. I am rehearsing a conversation that has not happened or replaying one that has. We seem to live as though this current stretch is a rehearsal and the real performance is coming later, once a few things are sorted out.

There is a modern echo of this. In 2010, the Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert used an iPhone app to collect a quarter of a million real-time reports on what people were doing and thinking. They found that people spent close to 47 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they were doing. Their summary line was blunt: “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

What I find more interesting is what they argued mattered most. Killingsworth said the study found that “how often our minds leave the present and where they tend to go is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we are engaged.” Where you are mattered less than whether your mind was actually there with you. That rhymes with Marcus in a way I did not expect.

I came to the Stoics during a low patch, a stretch of failure and a fairly undignified search for meaning. A reading rabbit-hole with a personal motive underneath it. One of the lines that lodged itself in me and never left was Seneca’s, the idea that it is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

Set that beside Marcus and they are working the same ground. If the present is the only life you actually have, then waste is not really about hours on a clock. It is about being absent from the one stretch of time you genuinely own. You can be sitting at dinner with people you love and lose the whole evening to a worry about Thursday. The clock said you were there, but you were not.

Taking the line seriously does not mean some grand reinvention. It is smaller and harder than that. I think it means noticing, more often, that the mind has wandered off, and quietly walking it back to the room you are in. Not because the present is always pleasant, but because it is the only thing that is actually yours to lose.

If any of this is pressing on something heavier than philosophy, a low patch that is not lifting, a good counsellor or therapist is worth far more than any old book or blog post.

The post Thought of the day from Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “No one loses any other life than this which he is living, nor lives any other than this which he is losing.” appeared first on Space Daily.

Of the eight planets that orbit the Sun, seven would sink if you could somehow drop them into water. Saturn would not. Its average density is lower than that of water, the only planet in the solar system for which that is true. NASA puts the consequence in deliberately silly terms: the gas giant “could float in a bathtub if such a colossal thing existed.”

That single line, from NASA’s own Saturn facts page, is doing real work. Density is mass divided by volume, and water is the familiar yardstick: a substance denser than water sinks in it, a substance less dense floats. Saturn, the second-largest planet in the solar system and nine times wider than Earth, averages out to less than the density of the water in your kitchen tap. The largest ringed object in the sky is, on the whole, lighter than rain.

Why a planet can be lighter than water

The number that makes this possible comes from what Saturn is built out of. Like Jupiter, Saturn is, in NASA’s description, “a massive ball made mostly of hydrogen and helium,” the two lightest elements there are and the same two that make up most of the Sun. Earth is rock and iron. Saturn is mostly the stuff of stars, held together as gas and liquid rather than packed into stone.

A planet’s average density is the whole mass spread across the whole volume. Saturn has an enormous volume and, for that volume, not very much mass. Spread the hydrogen and helium across a globe more than 120,000 kilometers wide and the average works out below the density of water. The comparison is not a measurement of any single place inside the planet. It is a property of the planet taken as one object.

That distinction matters, because Saturn is not uniform. NASA describes a “dense core of metals like iron and nickel surrounded by rocky material,” wrapped in liquid metallic hydrogen, wrapped again in liquid hydrogen. The center is brutally compressed. The outer layers are something closer to thick atmosphere. The famous low density is the average of the crushing core and the airy outside, and it lands on the light side of the line.

The only one on the list

Being less dense than water is not the same as being light, and it is not common. The four inner planets, Earth among them, are made of rock and metal and sit far above water on the density scale. Earth is the densest planet in the solar system. Drop any of the rocky four into a large enough sea and they would go straight down.

The gas giants are the interesting case, because Saturn is not the only planet built mainly from hydrogen and helium. Jupiter is too. Yet Jupiter would still sink. It is so much more massive than Saturn that its own gravity squeezes its interior to a density above water’s, even though it is made of the same light ingredients. Saturn, lighter and less compressed, is the one that comes out under the line. That is why NASA singles it out: not because its recipe is unique, but because it is the only planet where that recipe and that gravity combine to beat water.

It is a clear result rather than an extreme one. Saturn’s average density is roughly two-thirds that of water, so it sits below the line with room to spare, but not the way a cork floats high and dry. The headline is true, and it is worth stating with that precision rather than turning into a stunt.

The bathtub that could never exist

The image of Saturn bobbing in a tub is a teaching tool, not a forecast. NASA reaches for it precisely because it is absurd, and the absurdity is the point: there is no bathtub, no ocean, and no container in the universe that could hold a planet 120,500 kilometers across. The thought experiment isolates one true fact, average density, and ignores everything else.

It also quietly assumes Saturn would stay in one piece, which it would not. Floating, in the everyday sense, means a solid object resting on a liquid surface. Saturn has no solid surface to rest. As a gas giant it is, in NASA’s words, “mostly swirling gases and liquids deeper down,” with no boundary a bath’s waterline could press against.

So the honest version of the claim is narrow and specific. Saturn’s average density is less than water’s. That is the verified fact, and it is genuinely strange. The buoyant planet drifting in a cosmic tub is the cartoon NASA draws to make the fact stick, and it should be read as a cartoon.

What this does and does not prove

What the density figure proves is compositional: Saturn is overwhelmingly made of light elements and is not, by mass per volume, a dense world. What it does not prove is that Saturn would behave like a rubber duck. Buoyancy as we experience it needs a stable liquid, a container, and an object that holds its shape against the push of the fluid. None of those exist at planetary scale, and Saturn supplies none of them itself.

There is a second caveat worth keeping in view. “Average” is load-bearing. Plenty of material inside Saturn is far denser than water, starting with that iron and nickel core. If you could stand at the center, you would not find anything floaty. The planet floats only as an abstraction, only when its entire mass and entire volume are reduced to one ratio.

It is also worth resisting the temptation to extend the trick. Saturn being less dense than water does not make it lightweight in any ordinary sense. The planet is 95 times the mass of Earth. It is light only in the specific accounting of mass against the very large volume it occupies, and only by comparison with a substance, water, that happens to sit just above it on the scale.

A planet that is mostly sky

Strip away the bathtub and the fact that remains is still arresting. The second-largest planet in the solar system, the one with the rings visible through a backyard telescope, is on average less substantial than a glass of water. Its grandeur is mostly volume. Its matter is mostly the lightest gases in the cosmos, pulled into a sphere by nothing more than its own gravity.

NASA keeps the joke because the joke carries the physics. A reader who pictures Saturn floating has, almost by accident, understood something accurate about what the planet is: not a heavier world than ours, but a far emptier one, vast and bright and barely there.

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The collapse is one of the most carefully documented demographic events in modern science, because Japan keeps detailed life-expectancy statistics for each of its 47 prefectures and has been doing so continuously since 1965. The records show a population trajectory that has, within sixty years, run the entire arc from world record to below national average. The same people, on the same islands, eating in many cases the same traditional foods, with the same climate and the same genes, are now producing two starkly different longevity outcomes depending on the year in which they were born.

The reason is not, on the strongest current evidence, the same factor that made the older generations long-lived. The reason is that almost everything else about their lives has changed.

How Okinawa became the longest-lived population on Earth

In the 1980s, Japanese demographers reviewing the life-expectancy data from the prefectural census system noticed an anomaly. The southernmost prefecture, Okinawa, an archipelago of small islands approximately 600 kilometres south of the Japanese mainland, was producing the longest-living people in the country, and by extension the longest-living people on Earth. The advantage was not marginal. Okinawan women in 1980 had a life expectancy of approximately 84 years, and Okinawan men approximately 79, both figures the highest ever recorded for any human population at the time.

The longevity advantage was not new in 1980. It had been measurable in the data since records began in 1965, and it persisted for approximately three decades. Okinawan women topped the Japanese prefectural longevity rankings seven times between 1975 and 2005. Okinawan men topped the rankings in 1985 and remained in the top five for the rest of the twentieth century.

The international scientific community responded with sustained interest. Belgian demographer Michel Poulain travelled to Okinawa in the late 1990s and identified it as one of his five geographic clusters of exceptional longevity. The American writer Dan Buettner, working with the National Institute on Aging and National Geographic, named these clusters the “Blue Zones” in 2005 and popularised the concept globally through a series of books and, later, a Netflix documentary. The proposed explanations for Okinawan longevity included a traditional plant-heavy diet, daily physical activity built into agricultural and fishing labour, strong community networks called moai, a cultural concept of life purpose called ikigai, and a relaxed island culture that produced lower stress than mainland Japanese life.

The explanations were plausible. The data behind them was being collected on people who had already lived most of their lives. What none of the analyses caught at the time was that the longevity advantage was already disappearing.

The collapse

In 2002, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare published the prefectural life-expectancy rankings from the 2000 census, and Okinawan male life expectancy had fallen from fourth place in 1995 to twenty-sixth place out of forty-seven prefectures. The fall was so sharp that Japanese demographers immediately gave it a name, “Shock 26”, and the Okinawa Prefectural Government launched a public health initiative aimed at reclaiming the top ranking by 2040.

The fall continued. By 2020, Okinawan men had dropped further to forty-third place out of forty-seven prefectures in average life expectancy. Okinawan women, who had topped the national rankings seven times between 1975 and 2005, had fallen to sixteenth place in 2020, the first time since records began in 1965 that they had been outside the top ten. For the working-age population, defined as ages thirty to sixty-four, Okinawan men in 2020 had the fifth-highest mortality rate in Japan.

A 2024 comprehensive demographic review by Michel Poulain, the same researcher who had originally identified the Blue Zones, was published in the Journal of Internal Medicine and analysed the entire trajectory from 1975 to the present. Poulain’s analysis identified a sharp cohort discontinuity. Okinawans born before the Second World War continued to show the exceptional longevity that had originally made the prefecture famous. Okinawans born after 1945, and especially those born after 1980, were dying at rates substantially higher than mainland Japanese of the same age. The pre-war generations were still on track to live longer than almost any other population on Earth. The post-war generations were on track to live shorter lives than their mainland counterparts.

The collapse, on the Poulain analysis, was not a population-wide decline. It was a generational discontinuity, with the same prefecture producing two starkly different cohorts.

What changed between the generations

The peer-reviewed literature has identified several factors that distinguish the pre-war and post-war cohorts. None of them, individually, fully explains the decline. Together, they describe a comprehensive transformation of Okinawan life.

The pre-war cohorts grew up under traditional Okinawan dietary patterns, which were heavily plant-based and centred on sweet potatoes, leafy vegetables, soybeans, seaweed, small amounts of pork, and locally caught fish. Daily caloric intake was modest, and physical activity was high because most adults worked in agriculture, fishing, or weaving. The traditional diet was also notable for what it did not contain. Refined sugars, processed foods, dairy, beef, and wheat-based products were largely absent.

The post-war cohorts grew up in a fundamentally different food environment. The American military presence in Okinawa, which has continued since 1945 and currently houses approximately 25,000 American military personnel, introduced American fast food, processed meats, refined carbohydrates, and high-fat dairy on a scale unmatched in any other Japanese prefecture. Okinawa today has the highest concentration of American-style fast-food restaurants per capita of any prefecture in Japan, the highest obesity rates, and the highest rates of type-two diabetes. The decline in life expectancy correlates closely, in the published data, with the decline in adherence to the traditional Okinawan diet.

A separate peer-reviewed analysis by Hideoki Mizushima and Hiroshi Miyazaki, published in 2009, examined a different cohort-level explanation for the longevity decline. The team noted that Okinawa had Japan’s highest rates of low-birthweight infants throughout the late twentieth century, and that the post-war birth cohorts had measurably reduced birthweights compared to the pre-war cohorts. Low birthweight is a known predictor of cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, and reduced life expectancy in middle age and older. The Mizushima and Miyazaki hypothesis was that the post-war Okinawans were carrying a developmental disadvantage that would not become visible in the population-level statistics until those cohorts reached the ages at which longevity is measured.

Physical activity also fell substantially across the generational transition. The pre-war cohorts walked and worked physically for most of their adult lives. The post-war cohorts have urbanised, taken sedentary jobs, and adopted car-based transport. Okinawa today has Japan’s highest rate of car ownership per capita and the lowest rate of daily walking.

The traditional community structures have also weakened. The moai, the lifelong friendship circles that had provided social support in the traditional Okinawan villages, have largely dissolved in the urbanised post-war communities. The cultural concept of ikigai, while still present in popular discourse, is reported in survey data to be less salient to young Okinawans than to their grandparents.

The Blue Zone controversy

The Okinawa decline has also intersected with a broader scientific controversy about whether the original Blue Zone designation was statistically sound. In September 2024, the Australian-British demographer Saul Justin Newman, working at University College London, received the Ig Nobel Prize for Demography for his research arguing that the data behind the Blue Zone designations contained substantial errors. Newman’s work, currently published as a preprint and undergoing peer review, identified strong correlations between the supposed Blue Zone regions and three factors that should ordinarily reduce, not extend, life expectancy. The Blue Zones tended to be regions with high poverty rates, low rates of birth certificate registration, and elevated rates of pension fraud.

The Newman analysis specifically identified the original Okinawan longevity statistics as susceptible to record-keeping errors. The Okinawan census records had been damaged by American bombing during the Second World War, and the post-war reconstruction of birth and death records introduced substantial uncertainty about the ages of the oldest Okinawans. Newman’s research suggested that some fraction of the original Okinawan longevity advantage may have reflected administrative error rather than actual lifespan.

The Newman critique does not, however, negate the Poulain 2024 finding. The post-war birth cohorts of Okinawa, whose birth records are reliable and whose mortality is measured in real time, are clearly dying younger than their mainland Japanese contemporaries. Whatever the older statistics may have contained by way of error, the more recent statistics are documenting a real demographic phenomenon.

The honest limitations

Several methodological caveats apply to the Okinawa longevity-decline literature.

The prefecture-level life expectancy data is based on cross-sectional analyses of mortality rates by age group, which is a robust methodology for population-level comparisons but does not directly track the same individuals over time. The generational interpretation, in which pre-war and post-war cohorts are compared, depends on inferences from cross-sectional data rather than longitudinal cohort studies. The Poulain 2024 analysis acknowledges this limitation explicitly.

The causal hypotheses for the decline are also not yet settled. Dietary change, physical activity decline, low birthweight cohort effects, the American military base influence, and the dissolution of traditional community structures all correlate with the longevity decline, but the relative contributions of each factor are difficult to separate statistically. The peer-reviewed literature treats the decline as a multi-causal phenomenon with no single dominant explanation.

What it means

The Okinawa longevity collapse has implications that extend well beyond a single Japanese prefecture.

The first is that the conditions that produce exceptional longevity in any population appear to be highly specific and historically contingent. The traditional Okinawan lifestyle that produced the pre-war centenarians was the product of a particular combination of diet, physical activity, community structure, and economic conditions. Removing or substantially altering any combination of those factors, even within a single generation, appears to be sufficient to eliminate the longevity advantage.

The second is that the longevity advantage of the surviving pre-war Okinawans is, by the strongest peer-reviewed reading, a real and measurable phenomenon, but it is also a closing window. The pre-war Okinawan cohorts who are still alive are now in their eighties and nineties. As they die, the population-level longevity advantage that they sustained will disappear, replaced by the post-war cohorts whose life expectancy is closer to or below the Japanese average.

The third is that the popular wellness industry’s account of Okinawan longevity, which has built a substantial commercial enterprise around the idea that diet, community, and purpose extend life, is not entirely wrong but is incomplete. The traditional Okinawan diet and lifestyle did appear to extend life for the people who lived it, but the same population, with substantial modifications to that diet and lifestyle within a single generation, has produced one of the largest reversals of a longevity advantage in modern demographic history.

The Okinawan grandparents living today are, on the available evidence, still among the longest-lived people on Earth.

The Okinawan grandchildren are not.

The question of what happens when those grandparents are gone, and only the post-war cohorts remain, is the question that the next twenty years of Okinawan demographic data will answer.

The post The grandparents of Okinawa, Japan, are among the longest-lived humans on Earth. Their grandchildren are dying younger than the rest of Japan. Within a single generation, one of the world’s most famous longevity populations has collapsed, in a peer-reviewed finding that has overturned decades of assumptions about the secret to a long life appeared first on Space Daily.