A subject that comes up from time to time is how old the world is–either the earth or the cosmos as a whole.
The responses to this question are typically divided into the well-known "old" and "young" camps, the former holding that the earth and the cosmos are billions of years old and the second holding that they are a few thousand or perhaps tens of thousands of years old. So, depending on just how many thousands or billions of years you posit, there are four to six orders of magnitude separating the two schools of thought.
In a short series of posts, I'd like to look at some magisterial texts that have a bearing on this question and offer a few thoughts on them.
The first thought, before I even get to the magisterial texts, is that both positions are compatible with the Catholic faith. You can be a good Catholic and hold that the universe is thousands or millions or billions or trillions or quadrillions or other numbers of years old. The Church does not teach any particular age or age-range for the earth or the cosmos. You can follow the evidence where you think it leads.
This is because the Magisterium has determined that the question of the ages of the earth and the cosmos are principally scientific questions that are not (or at least that do not appear to be) settled by the sources of faith.
This may not always have been so. I would not be at all surprised if there are past papal, curial, or conciliar texts that do indicate an age-range for the earth or the cosmos as part of ordinary magisterial teaching, perhaps in the thousands or tens of thousands of years range.
In fact, if a reader knows of such passages, I'd love to see them.
Such a prior position, at least of itself, would not pose a problem for the Church's current determination since ordinary magisterial teaching is nondefinitive and thus can be revised, as with the case of the Church removing the theological speculation of limbo from its ordinary teaching while still allowing the theory of limbo to be held (a rather striking parallel for what might be the case on the age of the world question).
However that may be, recent magisterial statements have made it clear that the age of the world is an open question and we are not limited to the thousands or tens of thousands of years age-range.
We will look at some of these texts in this series.
A second thing I'd like to point out before going to the first text is that the Magisterium's current judgment that this is primarily a scientific question puts the Magisterium in an interesting position in terms of how to articulate the position.
Of course, they could always say, "This is a scientific question; the sources of faith don't determine it," and leave it at that, but they usually aren't that concise in how they answer such questions. They want to say a little more about it, and so what they often do is express openness to the modern scientific view but without making a formal endorsement of this view as correct (i.e., "The universe is billions of years old, as modern science tells us").
It's good that they don't take that extra step because science can get things wrong and, after getting their fingers burned with Ptolemaic astronomy, they don't want to lock believers into having to accept a particular scientific account that might one day be proven wrong.
So that's all to the good.
Here is how the Catechism handles the question:
283 The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man.These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers. With Solomon they can say: "It is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements. . . for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me."
Here the Catechism takes an appreciative stance toward recent scientific studies on the question but without mentioning any particular numbers. It doesn't say anything about billions of years.
Yet surely that is what it has in mind. It could not be credibly claimed that the "many scientific studies" it refers to are ones being done at the Institution for Creation Research in El Cajon, California–or by similar young earth/young universe groups.
Surely it has in mind mainstream scientific studies which point to an old earth, and older universe, and some kind of evolutionary process working through the development of life forms and the appearance of man.
But note: None of those things are points of faith.
The results of particular scientific studies or the claims of particular scientific theories (e.g., evolution) are scientific matters, not things taught in the sources of faith.
As a result, these studies and claims cannot be binding on believers are matters of faith. And so one can be a good Catholic (good in his faith) even if he rejects all of them. If you accept the modern scientific account then you might ju
dge such a person a bad scientist (or at least badly informed on scientific matters) but not a bad Catholic.
This means that what we have in the first sentence of paragraph 283 of the Catechism is not per se a doctrine of the Church. Instead, it is a pastoral expression that seeks to appreciate and respect the findings of modern science without imposing them on the faithful as matters of faith.
That's not unusual. There are quite a number of places in the Catechism that are best classified as pastoral expressions rather than per se doctrinal or dogmatic ones.
There are also, of course, loads of doctrinal and dogmatic ones. (This is, after all, a catechism!)
It is important, when dealing with questions like this, to have an awareness of the fact that the Catechism uses different modes of expression. What particular mode is being used in a particular passage must be determined by the text itself as well as an awareness of the dynamics of the question theologically, as the above illustrates.
Some amateur astronomers have detected a dark spot on Jupiter (left, near the upper pole) that they think may be an impact mark in the atmosphere.
In other words, Jupiter may have been hit by an asteroid, comet, or comet fragment, like when it was struck by fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy back in 1994.
The difference would be that back in the '90s we saw the comet coming and this time we apparently didn't see whatever-it-was sneaking up on the big planet.
I'm just glad that Jupiter is out there taking bullets for the rest of the solar system.
It's thought–especially among rare-earth advocates–that the existence of Jupiter is one of the reasons life was able to evolve here on Earth by shielding the inner solar system from impat events (though there is doubt about that).
In any event, astronomers should figure out soon whether this was a real impact event.
It's just cool that astronomy is one science where nonprofessionals can still make valuable contributions.
And look at how the guys in their combox go into action trying to get the sighting reported and confirmed.
Some British scientists have done some research that appears to
solve one of the problems of a particular theory of RNA synthesis that
makes this theory more plausible as a possible explanation of the
origins of DNA and organic life on earth. That is all.
The three best visual illusions in the world were chosen at a
gathering last weekend of neuroscientists and psychologists at the
Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts in Florida.
The winning entry, from a Bucknell University professor, may help explain why curve balls in baseball are so tricky to hit.
There are a couple of other cool illusions shown, as well as the design of the award trophy, which is clever.
The gentleman on the left is Fr. Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest, physicist, and astronomer who happens to be "the father of the Big Bang." He was one of the first to publish in support of the idea of an expanding cosmos that took its start in a highly compressed state that Lemaitre referred to as a "primeval atom."
Einstein at first dismissed Lemaitre's hypothesis, which radically departed from the intuitions of physicists and cosmologists back then. But then Edwin Hubble's work backed up Lemaitre and Einstein reversed himself.
Partly just because I like science but also because there is an apologetic issue here.
Ever since the Big Bang theory has become widely accepted, it has been easy for Christians to point to the event as the start of everything and the moment of God's creation. It could be taken as a scientific validation of one part of the Kalaam cosmological argument for God's existence and thus as evidence for the Creator.
And maybe it is.
But maybe it's not.
For a time there was an alternative hypothesis that had a great deal of currency in scientific circles that maybe we lived in a gravitationally closed universe that oscillated between Big Bangs and Big Crunches and that the event that happened 13.5 billion years ago was just one of the cusps in an endless series of them, so that there was no ultimate beginning.
That view's stock fell precipitously a few years ago with the discovery that the universe is not just expanding but that it's expansion is accellerating due to what is now called dark energy, which actually makes up three quarters of all the mass-energy in the universe.
Because the universal rate of expansion is increasing, it does not appear that gravity can close our universe and cause a Big Crunch, without which one leg of the oscillation cycle wouldn't be there.
Since the discovery of dark energy, Christian apologists have felt on particularly safe ground pointing to the Big Bang as the plausible moment of creation.
And even in the decades before we knew about dark energy, the idea of the Big Bang had so permeated modern Christian thought that it became very easy to read Genesis 1 and identify the Big Bang with the moment that God said, "Fiat Lux"–"Let There Be Light."
Though that's not actually the way Genesis depicts the beginning.
Here's the way Genesis 1:1-3 reads:
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. 3 Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.
See what I mean?
Light gets created in verse 3, but we already have a darkened universe–complete with waters–in verse 2. Then, as part of making the world a suitable place for habitation, God turns on the lights and starts making other changes, until everything is ready for man.
Either way, we shouldn't be too quick to try to fit the Big Bang into the framework of Genesis 1. As I've written before, Genesis 1 is best taken not as a chronological account of God's work but as a topical organization of God's work that structures the different categories of what God did around the framework of a week.
I think that's what the ancient author meant the original audience to understand by the text, as a careful reading of it shows.
But if we shouldn't try to fit the Big Bang into Genesis 1, can we at least point to it as the moment of creation from a scientific point of view?
T
here has certainly been a strong inclination on the part of many to do so. Pius XII had such an inclination, which caused Lemaitre to have kittens, afraid that the pontiff would try to do too much theologically with the concept. (HERE and HERE.)
Hypothetically, we could identify the Big Bang as the moment of creation.
But hypotheses can have rival hypotheses, and we should try to test to see which hypotheses are more likely correct.
That's what the folks behind LISA are planning to do.
LISA–the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (INFO HERE)–is a set of satellites to be launched in the next decade or so. They will be placed in a massive triangular formation in space and connected by laser beams which will allow LISA to detect gravitational waves.
This will make LISA the largest gravitational wave detector in existence, powerful enough to detect events within a microscopically small fraction of a second after the Big Bang–far closer than we've been able to measure before.
In other words, LISA may allow us to "look" beyond the Big Bang and "see" something there. For example, LISA might detect signs that the Big Bang occurred when two of the branes postulated by brane cosmology collided with each other. Or it might reveal evidence of a parallel universe that our universe budded off of.
Or it might reveal nothing of the kind, leaving the appearance that the Big Bang was, itself, Event One.
If the latter is the case then the apologetic use of the Big Bang will be strengthened, just like it was strengthened when dark energy was discovered, as competing hypotheses will be made less likely.
But the opposite could happen, too. The apologetic value of the Big Bang would be diminished if evidence emerges of a pre-Big Bang universe.
That's no threat to the Christian faith. The faith holds that God created the universe in the past but it does not require that the Big Bang represent the moment of creation. Christians held that there was a moment of creation for ages before the Big Bang emerged as a scientific hypothesis, and if it is later shown that the Big Bang was not the moment of creation then we can simply infer that the moment of creation was father back in time than that.
Christian faith is more than capable of surviving any such discovery.
However, in the short run it would shake some people up, just as it shook people up when modern paleontology and biology started to provide support for the theory of evolution.
It certainly helped, at that time, to point out that some authors had been writing about the compatibility of evolution and the Christian faith for quite a while. This wasn't a threat to the faith because it didn't contradict the faith.
The same thing is true for the idea that the Big Bang is not the moment of creation.
So remember this post ten or so years from now when LISA gets launched.
Once upon a time, “locked-in”Jean-Dominique Bauby had to blink his one eyelid as a therapist pointed at letter groups in order to painstakingly spell out words and write the book that became the movieThe Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Soon patients in his condition will be able to think words onto a computer screen without any direct assistance at all.
Coming soon: Iron Man–like cerebral computer interfaces allowing humans to control robotic devices with a thought? (Note the red color of the helmet in the YouTube video above: Coincidence?)
Now, aren't you glad that the Obama administration is taking
politics out of science? That's what enables energy secretary
Steven Chu (nicknamed "Big League" by Obama) to make sober and coldly rational assessments like this;
"Lots of area in Florida will go under. New Orleans at three-meter
height is in great peril. If you look at, you know, the Bay Area, where
I came from, all three airports would be under water. So this is —
this is serious stuff. The impacts could be enormous,"
So,
everyone, run out and buy an electric car right now! Form a drumming
circle, ceremonially break all your conventional light bulbs and
replace them with fluorescents! Drink your own bathwater! Most
importantly, though, be sure not to do anything reckless and
irresponsible like having children, because they will suck up resources
that could be better spent on spotted owls and snail darters and such.
Now,
it's true that none of these actions will impact global warming at all,
but they will make you feel better – will give you a vague sense of
having contributed to something – and anyway, that's the way the herd
is going. Polls show that people are concerned about recent polling on
attitudes toward global warming. The voters have spoken!… and as we know, democracy is never wrong… just look at Palestine, and the Weimar Republic… and lemmings (an example from nature, which is also never wrong).
Unfortunately, while President Obama and his sycophantic minions
cabinet valiantly attempt to keep reason science and politics in completely
separate, hermetically sealed envelopes, there are still divisive and
radical voices trying to ruin everything;
"Secretary
Chu still seems to believe that computer model predictions decades or 100 years from now are some sort of 'evidence' of a
looming climate catastrophe, said Marc Morano, executive editor of ClimateDepot.com and former top aide to global warming
critic Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.
"Secretary Chu's assertions on sea level rise and hurricanes are quite simply
being proven wrong by the latest climate data. As the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute reported in December 12,
2008: There is 'no evidence for accelerated sea-level rise.'"
Morano
said hurricane activity levels in both hemispheres of the globe are at
30 years lows and hurricane experts like MIT's Kerry Emanuel and Tom
Knutson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "are
now backing off their previous dire predictions."
He said Chu is out of date on
the science and is promoting unverified and alarming predictions that have already been proven contrary.
Update: Hat tip to a friend for reminding me to link to this one (also added to the previous post): Why Embryonic Stem Cells Are Obsolete (U.S. News & World Report)
First, this morning The New York Times posted an editorial on “The Rules on Stem Cells” that, as First Things’s Ryan T. Anderson points out, officially endorses cloning “without calling it that.”
Second, on Friday Slate’s William Saletan posted an editorial provocatively titled “Drill Babies, Drill,” subtitled with the unavoidable question, “If harvesting embryos is OK, how about fetuses?” (Hat tips to Dreher and First Things, among others.)
I know there’s already been some coverage of this, but the full scope of the issue is bigger than most of the coverage out there indicates (hat tips and additional links below).
Within the last month, former president Bill Clinton has done two jaw-dropping interviews at CNN on the subject of embryonic stem-cell research — one with Larry King and one with Sanjay Gupta — that indicate a stunning level of confusion on the basic biological facts of what an embryo is, what stem cells are, what “fertilization” in reproductive biology refers to, and even what can be fertilized or used to fertilize something.
While attempting to reflect on the moral and ethical implications of the issue, Clinton’s apparent ignorance of the basic biological facts was so total as to make his comments incomprehensible even on the level of biology, let alone morality and ethics.
In the first interview, from the February 17 broadcast of Larry King Live, Clinton spoke, almost in the same sentence, about “stem cells” becoming “fertilized” and being used to “fertilize eggs.” And he claims to “feel strongly about this”!
But let me say, I feel very strongly about this. I think that I worked hard on the sequencing of the human genome. We finished it when I was president. Now there are all these practical applications being spun out of it. We’ve identified the genes that were high predictors of breast cancer. We’re getting close on Parkinson’s. We’re even making headway on Alzheimer’s. But this stem cell research, if the stem cells are frozen embryonic stem cells, if they are never going to be used to be fertilized, to bring a life into being, then I think making them available for medical research is the pro-life position and I honestly don’t understand — I would understand it if we were going and raiding stem cell banks, where these stem cells were going to be used to actually fertilize eggs and have babies. But it’s not going to happen. I think it’s very wrong to just throw these things in the trash can.
This excerpt alone is so bewildering as to defy explanation. In the first bolded section, Clinton talks about “stem cells” becoming (or not becoming) “fertilized” (suggesting that a “stem cell” is “unfertilized,” but could be “fertilized” at some future point). But in the second bolded section he refers to stem cells being used to “fertilize eggs!”
Which does he think it is? Are the “frozen embryonic stem cells” he thinks we’re talking about agents or subjects of fertilization? That is, do you “fertilize” stem cells, or “fertilize eggs” with them? (In reality, of course, neither is the case.)
“Raiding stem cell banks, where these stem cells were going to be used to actually fertilize eggs and have babies?” Raise your hand, please, if you have ever heard of anyone having a baby, or even trying to have a baby, by going to a “stem cell bank” to get “stem cells” to “fertilize eggs.”
This strange comment almost makes it sound as if he’s confusing “stem cell banks” with sperm banks — but the earlier comment about stem cells being (i.e., becoming) fertilized makes it sound as if he’s confusing “stem cells” with eggs, or ova.
Where does Clinton think the “stem cell bank” gets its embryonic stem cells? Does he not understand, or is he deliberately obfuscating, that the moral issue with using embryonic stem cells is not “what would happen” to them (i.e., whether they might be used to “bring a life into being”, whether by becoming “fertilized” or being “used to fertilize eggs”) in the future, but how we get them, i.e., by destroying an already existing embryonic life growing from a fertilized egg?
But that’s only the beginning, Last week, Clinton compounded the issue in a second CNN interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, in which he refers to conducting embryonic stem cell research using only “embryos” that will never become “fertilized” — six times. What’s more, Gupta let all six references pass without comment!
CLINTON: If it’s obvious that we’re not taking embryos that can — that under any conceivable scenario would be used for a process that would allow them to be fertilized and become little babies … then I think the American people will support this. …
GUPTA: Any reservations?
CLINTON: I don’t know that I have any reservations, but I was — he [Obama] has apparently decided to leave to the relevant professional committees the definition of which frozen embryos are basically going to be discarded, because they’re not going to be fertilized. I believe the American people believe it’s a pro-life decision to use an embryo that’s frozen and never going to be fertilized for embryonic stem cell research, especially since now, not withstanding some promising developments, most of the scientists in this field and the doctors will tell you they don’t know of any other source as good as embryonic stem cells for all the various things that need to be researched.
But those committees need to be really careful to make sure if they don’t want a big storm to be stirred up here, that any of the embryos that are used clearly have been placed beyond the pale of being fertilized before their use. There are a large number of embryos that we know are never going to be fertilized, where the people who are in control of them have made that clear. The research ought to be confined to those. …
But there are values involved that we all ought to feel free to discuss in all scientific research. And that is the one thing that I think these committees need to make it clear that they’re not going to fool with any embryos where there’s any possibility, even if it’s somewhat remote, that they could be fertilized and become human beings.
Once again, it’s hard to know where to begin. Almost as stunning as Clinton’s apparent radical confusion on Biology 101 is Gupta’s failure to comment on the factual misuse of a critical scientific term (from someone “who studied this” in Gupta’s own words) cropping up six times. Once or possibly even twice an interviewer might let a word go, if he thought it was just a slip of the tongue, but six times? (This — Gupta — was Obama’s pick for Surgeon General?)
In passing, I have to note the sheer condescension toward pro-lifers of Gupta’s opening salvo: “First of all, let me just ask you, as someone who studied this, is this going to always be as divisive an issue as it is now? Is this going to be the abortion of the next generation? Or are people going to come around?” Does he have any idea what he’s talking about?
If we had only this interview, one might possibly speculate that Clinton simply meant to say “implanted” rather than fertilized. Six times. Of course, even on that speculation, Clinton would still be dead wrong, on several levels.
For one thing, it is not true that “most of the scientists in this field and the doctors will tell you they don’t know of any other source as good as embryonic stem cells for all the various things that need to be researched.” Especially now that cell reprogramming no longer requires viral integration to create pluripotent stem cells — and evidence continues to mount that adult and cord-blood stem cells, not embryonic stem cells, have all the practical promise and yield the effective therapies — embryonic stem cell research is effectively obsolete.
Beyond that, the idea of frozen embryos lying around (whether in stem cell banks or elsewhere) for which there is no possibility “under any conceivable (sic!) scenario”, “even if it’s remote,” of implantation and childbirth, is dodgy at best. Frozen embryo adoption may be controversial, but the fact that it’s possible at all and does occur makes Swiss cheese of Clinton’s “under any conceivable scenario/even if it’s remote” rhetoric. (The Church is still up in the air on frozen embryo adoption, but she hasn’t rejected it, and she certainly does reject destroying innocent life.) No wonder Clinton acknowledges the question of the “definition” (always a key word with him, isn’t it?) of “which frozen embryos are basically going to be discarded.”
Going further, while it’s not impossible — especially if Americans generally are at least as ignorant on the biological facts as Clinton seems to be — that many Americans would agree that a frozen embryo with no immediate prospects of being allowed to implant and grow might acceptably be destroyed for spare parts and used for research, it is certainly not “pro-life.” (Though it is true that some who might call themselves “pro-life” on abortion, e.g., Mormons, don’t view ESCR in the same light, because they view implantation rather than fertilization as the beginning of personhood. They may even say that life begins “at conception,” but by “conception” they mean implantation, not fertilization. For this reason many pro-lifers prefer to say specifically that life begins “at fertilization” rather than “at conception.” Of course, if most people understand “fertilization” no better than Clinton, it probably doesn’t make things any clearer.)
I could go on, but it’s a moot point, since combined with the Larry King interview it’s clear that Clinton’s confusion goes way beyond mixing up fertilization and implantation. In fact, the similarities of the comments in the two interviews may even suggest that Clinton is using “frozen embryonic stem cells” (in the Larry King interview) and “frozen embryos” (in the second interview) more or less synonymously. That’s right: I suspect Clinton may not understand that an “embryo” is anything more than a collection of “embryonic stem cells,” or that you have to destroy the one to obtain the other for research purposes. He certainly doesn’t seem to understand what is being destroyed, or what stem cells once obtained might be good for (since he seems to think you can “fertilize eggs” with them).
This is a Rhodes scholar and a two-term president, a man who claims to have thought seriously about life issues — who has signed (and vetoed) legislation on life issues?
Having said all that, it must be noted that in one important respect Clinton’s thoughts on ESCR are actually superior to President Obama’s: At least Clinton realizes that ESCR raises serious moral and ethical issues. President Obama’s recent address shows a complete dearth of similar insight.
There’s been a lot of commentary on Obama’s speech. I’ll restrict myself here to a couple of excerpts from Charles Krauthammer, who says that he is “not religious” and does not believe that personhood begins “at conception”:
Obama’s address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the “false choice between sound science and moral values.” Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the “use of cloning for human reproduction.”
Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.
In conclusion:
Dr. James Thomson, the pioneer of embryonic stem cells, said “if human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.” Obama clearly has not.
SDG here. In my previous post I noted that my new review of Coraline begins with comments about something I’ve often told my children to reassure them after a bad dream. One thing I’ve said, again and again, is that the dream is all gone now and they don’t have to worry about getting back into it again — they won’t, I promise.
To this, someone commented below: “That’s a promise you can’t keep.”
Now, I’m convinced that, in fact, I’m right that they cannot and will not get back into the same dream again, for reasons I’ll explain. I would never, ever say something like that to my child unless I were convinced it was the truth. (Strictly speaking, though, it’s true that I can’t “keep” that promise, and I’m not sure the word “promise” is technically used correctly here. Properly speaking, a promise is ordinarily a commitment about future behavior; I’m not sure you can “promise” that something is true, though the word does get used that way.)
Semantics aside, I’m convinced that fears (or hopes) about getting back into a particular dream after waking up from it are either entirely misplaced, or at least almost entirely so. In fact, I’m pretty skeptical about the whole notion of recurring dreams. Either it doesn’t happen at all — whatever we may think we have experienced — or at least is much less common than people think. And I’m very skeptical that the process of waking up from a dream and then going back to sleep could ever produce a continuation of the same narrative.
Now, obviously general themes and motifs recur over time: flying, floating and fantasy dreams; anxiety dreams (being naked in a public place, missing or being unprepared for class, unable to find documents, clothing, children, parents, etc.); physiological dreams (needing to find a bathroom, standing in the cold, etc.); etc. We may also dream more than once of meeting someone who has died, etc.
In any greater specificity than that, though, I’m skeptical about the perception of recurring dreams. My belief is this. When people think they’ve had a specific dream before — not just general themes, but the same narrative — that sense of deja vu is mistaken. What really happens is that the dream itself creates a sense of deja vu, either because you really play through the same scenario more than once in a single dream, or else you play through the scenario anticipating what will happen, since of course what will happen is a function of what’s happening in your own head. (In either case the sense of recurrence may carry with it the option of revising the events.)
I used to believe that as a child I had a recurring nightmare about being sucked by rushing wind from my bed and down the stairs to the living room where there was a monster under the coffee table. Looking back, I’m willing to bet that I only had the dream once — but I anticipated the whole dream so clearly that I thought it happened to me again and again.
Even so, as skeptical as I am about recurring dreams in general, I just flat-out don’t believe at all that the process of waking up and going back to sleep can ever produce a continuation of the same narrative. If you’re anxious about something and you have an anxiety dream, you might fall asleep again and have a different anxiety dream, but not more of the same. Likewise, if you wake up from a wonderful flying dream and try to fall back asleep, you will not, alas, wind up flying again. Some other night, maybe.
Many times I’ve said to my children, “Trust me, the dream won’t come back. Let’s see if I’m right. When you wake up in the morning, tell me if the dream comes back.” So far it never has. And, Incidentally, I’ve talked this over with at least one Catholic mental health professional and a number of other people, and I’m convinced I’m onto something. So I’m willing to stake my moral certitude that I’m right for the sake of my child’s reassurance.
Now, what I would never tell a kid is that they won’t have a different nightmare — another dream just as bad as the first one. That’s obviously a live possibility, but strangely at the moment they aren’t worried about that. They’re worried about that dream: that monster, that scary scenario. In their minds, it’s out there waiting for them, like a real place they could find their way back to. I don’t believe it. Once they wake up, it’s gone. So I reassure them, and it works, and so far I’ve never, ever had a kid report that the dream came back.
Now, of course, it’s quite possible that some readers may write in the combox about their experiences with recurring dreams. Of course I can’t rebut what people feel sure has happened to them. But I remain skeptical.
The picture on the left is the planet Mars–not as it usually looks (dirty red), but as a false color image to show the presence of something very interesting on the red planet.
Or rather, something very interesting above the surface of the red planet.
The red and yellow patches represent zones of the martian atmosphere in which there is an strong presence of methane.
But there are no known mud volanoes, or active volcanoes of any sort, on Mars.
So that raises the possibility that this stuff is caused by life. Specifically: By underground microbes.
In fact, we see a phenomenon a lot like this on earth. Here on terra firma there are various places where large pockets of underground microbes that produce large plumes of methane in our atmosphere. (Which is one reason why the pluming effect seen above is significant; the stuff isn't even spread throughout the martian atmosphere. Something down on the surface–or below–is generating it.)
In fact, there's one such place not too far up the coast from me in Santa Barbara.
The pattern is also cyclical, with the methane plumes appearing in the martian spring and summer . . . just when the planet is getting warmer and life might be more active . . . and disappearing in the martian fall and winter.
So there are some NASA scientists who are really stoked and talking publicly about this as a possible sign of life.
And it's not the first we've had. In the 1990s there was that meteorite from Mars that showed (debatable) fossils of microorganisms, and back in the 1970s one of the Viking probe tests for life gave a positive result (though other tests didn't).
So . . . who knows? In the photo above you may be looking at the atmospheric signature of life on Mars . . . or not. There are geochemical processes that could produce the same thing.
We'd need to do more tests to know.
I'd love to know the answer on this, but even if there is life, I'd like to know the answer to another question: Where did it come from?
Even if Mars has life, it may not be native to Mars. It may have come from . . . Earth.
As Martian meteorites (there's more than one!) illustrate, matter can pass from one planet to another in the solar system, and here on Earth we have microorganisms that are extremophiles–able to live in very inhospitable environments.
These could be carried to other planets due to impact events that blow chunks of Earth rock into space, or (for all I know) they could be high in the Earth's atmosphere and get carried to other worlds by the solar wind (and Mars is definitely downwind from Earth).
So far as I can tell, we may find extremophile organisms from Earth all over the solar system–living ones where they find a suitable niche and the dead remains of them elsewhere.
So, I've still got questions: (1) Is there really life on Mars? and (2) If there is, where did it come from? Earth? Mars? Or somewhere else?
Thursday NASA had a presser on all this, but they don't have embeddable on-demand video of it on their web site at this point (stupid government agency!) and nobody has yet posted it to YouTube, but
