Holy Shit, the Toba Catastrophe!

I believe we've established by now that supervolcanic eruptions would suck harder than the vacuum of space. In case you needed a little extra evidence of that, let's take a look at the eruption of the Lake Toba supervolcano. It happened around 70,000 years ago, and was terrifying.

The Toba Supervolcano Eruption may have been the single largest volcanic event in the known history of the planet. It spewed so much ash into the air that all of South Asia was covered with about six inches of it. Six inches of ash. Over an entire sub-continent. That's about 800 cubic kilometers of volcano vomit.

Why, yes, I am an adult. Why do you ask?

Even bigger were the long term effects. All that ash and sulphur dioxide is not so great for the global climate, as it turns out. There is some debate on the issue, but it has been suggested that the Earth's most recent ice age was either ushered in by, or a direct result of the Toba Catastrophe. For six years after the eruption, the planet was consumed by a volcanic winter. The following 1,000 years were a period of global cooling.

Which was just murder for the poor tauntauns

Right now, some of you are thinking, "Hey neat! A solution to global warming! Maybe a supervolcano eruption wouldn't be so bad after all!"

To you I say, "Nay." For there is a minor detail I left out before. Human beings were around before the Toba eruption. Afterward (or so goes the theory), we very, very nearly weren't. By some accounts, humanity sank into a genetic bottleneck in the aftermath of Toba. In fact, the human population of Earth may have dropped to around 10,000 people. By comparison, there are seven billion people today. That difference in population is literally too large to meaningfully display on a computer monitor.

10,000 is about one person per twenty square miles. It's not enough people to make up a city in some parts of the world. You'll find significantly more people per day in any one of the parks of Disney World than there were people in existence after the Toba Event.

And the rides in the apocalypse weren't nearly as fun.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Chemosynthesis!

There are two basic elements that every ecosystem needs (sort of): water and light. Water is the obvious one because, as my high school biology teacher put it, "Life is juicy." Light is the other one, and it's the foundation of the food chain. Plants use light to sustain themselves, herbivores eat plants, carnivores eat herbivores, and humanity makes everything its bitch.

Om nom nom

But like I said: sort of.

Let's talk about the ocean floor for a second. For almost all of human history, we've had no idea whatsoever what the hell was down there (other than water). It was, we assumed, dark, flat, and utterly devoid of life. After all, light only penetrates about 3,500 feet down, and the ocean floor is around ten times deeper than that at best.

Light reaches the second line, or "almost nothing."

Then in 1977, scientists sent DSV Alvin, a deep sea diving vessel, to the bottom of the Marianas Trench to see what was up down there. Instead of finding an area devoid of life, they found a flourishing ecosystem, filled to the brim with never-before-seen creatures.

Oh hi! Make yourself at home.

To be fair, researches probably wouldn't have gotten the grant money to explore the ocean floor if they hadn't already predicted that deep sea life was possible. At that point, plate tectonics was finally thoroughly accepted by the scientific community. That means scientists were aware that the ocean floor actually had some pretty bitching terrain. Of particular interest: deep sea hydrothermal vents.

It's like the Earth let one rip and it never stopped.

Vents on the ocean floor that leak extreme heat from underneath the Earth's crust. The theory was that light is only one form of energy, so who's to say heat can't also sustain life? In its trip to the ocean floor, Alvin proved this theory of chemosynthesis (as opposed to photosynthesis) to be right on the money. Instead of plants, there were bacteria and terrifying animals that used heat to sustain themselves.

But wait, there's more! I didn't just choose this topic arbitrarily. Chemosynthesis is considered one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time. Life on Earth began in the oceans. Chemosynthesis may have actually been the original pillar of the worldwide ecosystem.

If you find the origin of life dull, then first of all, shame on you. What the hell impresses you if not the origin of life as we know it? That's some fascinating shit. But second, how about this: If life as we know it can exist without light, then it can exist anywhere with liquid water and heat. Like, say, another planet.

Or moon.

Liquid water, as it turns out, is not super rare. In fact, ever since chemosynthesis was discovered, potential xenobiologists have been giving Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, the "come hither" look. It is downright reasonable to assume that under the thick layers of ice on Europa, there are thermal vents creating a gourmet primordial bisque. If that's the case, it's downright reasonable to assume there may be extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, The Most Astounding Fact!

I'm just going to let Neil deGrasse Tyson take this one, because I'm lazy and he puts it more eloquently than I could ever hope to.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Geologic Time!

The Earth is old. Very old. About 4.54 billion years old. That's 4,540,000,000. The number of years the Earth has been around is about an inch long on my screen. It can be hard to grasp just how very, very old the Earth is, so geologists developed what they call the Geologic Time Scale, or Deep Time, which is like a calendar with much bigger intervals.It measures time between major periods of the Earth's formative years. It starts off in the Precambrian Period, which is literally 86% of our planet's history, and we know little to nothing about it. The Earth went from a ball of molten rock to a life-sustaining planet with its very own moon in the roughly four billion years of the Precambrian.

It's subdivided, of course, and we do know some of the history. We know, for example, that the earliest evidence of primordial life crops up in the fossil record around 4 billion years ago, and the oldest definitive proof of said primordial life comes from about 3.6 billion years ago. We know that photosynthetic organisms started producing oxygen (you know, that stuff we breathe?) in large amounts about 3.5 billion years ago, which eventually caused an ecological catastrophe when it changed the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. More on that in a later post, because damn.

Then this thing happened on our planet.

The Precambrian Era ended, appropriately enough, with the Cambrian Explosion, in which animals suddenly evolved out of nowhere and started taking over the food chain. And inventing the food chain, because it really wasn't much of a thing yet. From there, stuff happened. A lot of stuff, but I'm not here to give you a rundown of everything that has ever happened on Earth. I'm here to give you a sense of perspective.

To that end, let's imagine that everything that has ever happened, happened within one year. The formation of the Earth happened at midnight on January 1. Today, at this moment, it is midnight on January 1 of the following year. On this scale:

• The earliest stages of life didn't come around until February 25th. 
• Oxygen appeared in the atmosphere on June 13th, almost halfway through the year. 
• Animals didn't come around until November 15th. 
• Dinosaurs appeared on December 9th and were completely snuffed out by December 24th after only two weeks of existence, if you don't account for different species. Which is irresponsible.

As for humans? We just showed up four minutes ago as a species, and for most of that time we've been sitting around and scratching out heads. It wasn't until four seconds ago that anyone figured out we could write something. On the grand scale of geologic time, all of human history has been recorded in the last four seconds.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Dogs!

I grew up in a household that had, at one point, 4 cats. We had a dog once, but she had major health problems that resulted in big bald patches, not much energy, and a short life. For those reasons, I've always thought of a cat as a much more suitable companion than a dog. It turns out my domestic animal worldview was lacking an important piece of information, which is that holy shit, dogs are awesome.

Exhibit A

It's not that dogs are smarter or nicer. It's that dogs and humans go way back. So far back, in fact, that we've adapted to communicate with each other. A study of animal interactions with humans (specifically dogs and chimps) showed how water, as it turns out, is sometimes thicker than blood. Keep in mind, chimpanzees are widely regarded as one of the most intelligent species on the planet. Genetically, they are nearly human themselves.

Here's how the study went down: researches would show the animal a treat, then hide it under one of several upturned cups. They would then point to where the treat was. Chimps, for all their intelligence and genetic similarity to us, just don't understand what the hell we're doing when we're putting our fingers out there like that. "Maybe he touched some poo and would like me to smell it," they wonder, sniffing cautiously at the outstretched digit.

Big deal, mine always smells like that.

Dogs, despite being decidedly non-primate, know exactly what we mean when we point somewhere. They follow the cues and get their treat right away. And pointing isn't the only thing they understand. They innately understand human behavior in the same way we do.

When you first meet someone, your eyes usually drift slightly to the left. It's a subconscious behavior, and it helps you to read emotions - that half of your face is more emotive. The only time we ever do that is when we're looking at another person's face, and no other animal does the same with each other. Guess what happens when researches flash images of human faces to dogs? Even though they don't have the same emotive asymmetry, dogs viewing human faces will almost always tilt their eyes to the left.

It doesn't seem like much, but think of the implications. It happens too often to be a coincidence, and no other animal does it. The unavoidable conclusion is that dogs can almost definitely read and understand human emotions. They can tell at a glance how we're feeling and adjust their behavior as a result. Crazy, right? It gets better.

That understanding goes both ways. Humans, especially dog owners, can actually, certifiably, understand what dogs are saying. To prove this, researches recorded dogs in various situations - being taunted with a toy, barking at a squirrel, needing to go outside, being reunited with a loved one after a long absence - and played their vocalizations for people who were familiar with dogs. The people listening were able to describe almost exactly what was happening to the dogs.

After learning all of this, I had to rethink the camp I had chosen. Don't get me wrong, cats are terrific. They're playful, sometimes cuddly, and always good for popularity on the Internet. But dogs are integrally linked to the development of humanity. They aren't our closest genetic relatives by far, but no other species is so closely connected to our own experience. More than anything else on Earth, dogs understand us.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the universe is big!

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

I went to the local observatory this weekend, where they have what they call the Planet Walk. The yard surrounding the buildings has 9 inscribed bricks that represent the Sun and the planets of our Solar System (and Pluto). The Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are pretty close to the center of the grounds, but the rest of the planets are so far out they're tricky to find. It's impossible to make that model to scale in terms of size, because if they did, the Sun would be about the size of a light bulb and some of the planets would be smaller than a grain of sand. You can find some fully scaled models of the solar system online if you want to get a sense of the perspective they're going for.

 

Our Solar System is enormous. That's my point. So big that it's possible to lose track of the entire asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. That's the most densely packed cluster of objects in our solar system, and astronomers came close to losing track of the whole thing shortly after WWII. The trouble is, "densely packed" means something entirely different on the scale of the Solar System. Because the Solar System is huge.

 

 

 

Then we have our galaxy. The image to the left shows you roughly how big the Milky Way Galaxy is. The Sun is not even a single pixel in that image. The Sun is 1.3 million times the size of the Earth, which means the Earth is less than one millionth of one pixel in this image. If the Solar System is big, the Milky Way Galaxy is mind-numbingly massive. But it's almost literally nothing compared to the rest of the universe.

 

 

In 1995, the Hubble Deep Space Telescope took a picture of a single degree of the sky. The area it was looking at is just a tiny portion of the night sky. It's the little L shape in the picture below on the left. What you see is a fraction of a fraction of the observable sky. What it returned was this:

Those aren't stars. They're galaxies. Some of them much, much bigger than ours. There are literally billions and billions of stars in every single one of those specks of light. All of this is contained in a tiny little fleck of the sky. I don't think any other topic could make me "HOLY SHIT" with more sincerity than that image. Now, here's where it gets really crazy.

We're not entirely sure just how big the universe is, because we can't see the whole thing. It's not that we can't build a powerful enough telescope. We probably could, given time and determination. It's just that we can only see things where there is light. Because light has to travel to reach us, we see really goddamn far away things as they existed a really goddamn long time ago. When you get to a certain distance, we'd be looking so far back in time that there was nothing there yet. There is a spherical border you can draw around the Earth that shows exactly how far away we could possibly see anything with the most powerful telescope that will ever exist, because that telescope would show us what the universe looked like before the beginning of time.

I mean, seriously, holy shit.

Something made me swear, so I started a blog.

Sometimes I learn something that makes me say, "Holy shit, that's interesting!" One such thing happened today, so I took to the Internet and decided to shout impotently at the masses in the hopes that someone else will be similarly impressed by the shit.

So, holy shit, scientists can use lice to determine when humans started wearing clothing. I've been lucky enough to only personally know lice as a mysterious head-related ailment that made me leave class in elementary school once in a while to have my head fondled by a nurse. As it turns out, head lice can only live on human scalps and subsist entirely on human blood. They can't exist without us.

Body lice are the same way, but even more interesting. They live exclusively in human clothing. Their evolution was based on a synthetic factor, which in itself deserves a fresh "Holy shit!" Using what they call "molecular-clock dating," biologists are able to estimate the origin of body lice at about 107,000 years ago. That's apparently right around the time certain packs of humans decided that Africa was too goddamn hot and started colonizing the rest of the globe. They may have tried before, but guess what they had this time to keep them from freezing to death?

Clothing.

And body lice.

Holy shit.