I’ve seen several articles commenting the fact that for the last 5 MY or so, the solar system has been traversing the so called “local bubble“:The obvious explanation of this structure is a supernova remnant, something similar to the Crab nebula, only bigger; orders of magnitude bigger, in fact:

The thing I personally find puzzling is that absolutely nobody mentioned the first thing that crossed my mind when I found out about this. You see, when you see a structure that has a stellar nursery on its gaseous outer perimeter, and empty space inside the perimeter, the first thing that comes to mind is to expect at least one black hole somewhere in the center of this structure; more precisely, there have probably been several supernovae of the population 2 stars in the center of this, and considering how big the structure is, I would expect them to have produced black holes, rather than neutron stars, and we are going right through this area.

Is this a danger? That’s hard to tell, but a black hole is not more dangerous than an ordinary star of its mass; it doesn’t just go around and suck things in. You need to get fairly close, and then the most likely outcome would be the disruption of the Oort cloud, with the likely result of multiple intrusions of comets into the inner solar system, and in the worst case, if we pass really close, it can disrupt the solar system, or cause the Sun to start misbehaving quite dramatically due to tidal effects, which could create extreme coronal mass ejections. As I said, it’s hard to tell – it all depends on how close we are to something we won’t necessarily even see unless we get dangerously close; if you can see it producing relativistic distortions of space on the night sky, you are basically fucked. It’s a very old black hole, and probably not of the kind that advertises itself by chewing up new matter and producing lots of radiation along its axis of rotation, or we would have seen it on a radio telescope by now. What is basically certain is that there is at least one, it is expected to be around the center of the local bubble, and we are basically there.

However, considering how big this structure is, we could miss it by a parsec or so, which is the distance to Alpha Centauri, and relative to this structure’s size I would still say we’re basically right on top of it, and it wouldn’t affect us at all, so it is what it is.

There’s one thing people obsess over with some regularity: aliens. By “aliens” I don’t mean existence of extraterrestrial life in general, but, specifically, flying saucers or UFOs being alien spacecraft secretly monitoring us, and, as a step further, American government having access to alien technology, either by having recovered wrecked alien craft, or by secretly cooperating with aliens in secret facilities. As “evidence” for that, American stealth aircraft are usually presented – originally, the fighter jets looked nothing like that, and then “something” happened and the Americans suddenly started developing “invisible” aeroplanes. It is strongly hinted that this happened because they gained access to alien technology, and incorporated it into their new weapons designs.

Well, “something” happened alright; a Soviet scientist by the name of Pyotr Yakovlevich Ufimtsev developed the theory behind it and published it in a Soviet scientific journal, but the Soviet military saw no utility in it, unlike the Americans, who promptly translated his work and developed upon it further. To quote Wikipedia:

“Pyotr Yakovlevich Ufimtsev (sometimes also Petr; Russian: Пётр Яковлевич Уфимцев) (born 1931 in Ust-Charyshskaya Pristan, West Siberian Krai, now Altai Krai) is a Soviet/Russian physicist and mathematician, considered the seminal force behind modern stealth aircraft technology. In the 1960s he began developing equations for predicting the reflection of electromagnetic waves from simple two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects.
Much of Ufimtsev’s work was translated into English, and in the 1970s American Lockheed engineers began to expand upon some of his theories to create the concept of aircraft with reduced radar signatures.”

Basically, attributing obscure technology to aliens seems to be a popular thing among the fake sources, but it’s also something that makes it quite easy to debunk said fakes once you learn the truth. It’s similar to claiming to have learned some secret shit in Tibet or India from a secret guru or in a secret monastery. It worked best while those places were unknown by most and thought to be the end of the Earth, but less so today.

This brings us to the reason why I don’t care about the aliens: they don’t matter. If the aliens did in fact influence technological development in some country on Earth, and this changed the geopolitical situation here to their advantage, that would be a serious matter and I would change my opinion, but from what I can see, nothing of the sort exists. Furthermore, if the aliens indeed are behind the flying saucer phenomenon, and they monitor us for the better part of a century, and they never revealed themselves to us, this is not very different from the situation we would have if the aliens didn’t exist at all – they have zero effect on us. If something doesn’t have any effect on anything, I honestly couldn’t care about it. It’s like bacteria found in core samples from some extremely deep bore hole; yes, they exist, but they don’t influence absolutely anything I care about, and as a result I don’t care about them. They exist, they don’t do anything important, and I don’t care. Likewise, the aliens might not exist, or they exist and they don’t influence anything I care about. In both cases, I don’t care. If they revealed themselves and started influencing things I care about, my position might change, but until then, I don’t really give even a slightest bit of fuck.

Now someone will start about the Drake equation and the immensely low probability that we’re alone in the Universe, and I’ll just roll my eyes and ask what that has to do with anything. Furthermore, when I was younger I firmly believed in the existence of alien visits to Earth, based mostly on what seemed to be ancient cargo cults influenced by the aliens. My position changed with time, mostly due to my better understanding of the evolution of life. I used to think that the main problem with life was the development of DNA and cellular replication, and that this took billions of years, and after that point, everything was easy. It turned out that life on Earth started merrily replicating while the core wasn’t even properly solidified. It took basically no time to develop, which means it came here on comets or other interstellar debris, and complex molecules that form the basis of life were indeed found there, so it’s more of a case of “mix this with water and wait five minutes”, rather than waiting for electric discharge, chemistry in the primordial oceans and what not causing random combinations of molecules. The problem is, the life that was originally created was much simpler that what we have today; basically, you had single-cell replication, but it took enormously huge amounts of time, and a very few singular cases of what appears to be incredible luck, in order for life to get past the phase of self-replicating molecules, and into the phase where a eukaryote cell has a separate core, mitochondria, ribosomes and chloroplasts. Basically, the earliest fossils are 4 billion years old, right at the upper edge of Hadean epoch, when the Earth’s crust was still smoking orange. It took two billion years of vibrant evolution of life to create the first multicellular life, and only after that the things start conforming to my expectations of what evolution looked like – basically, it took another billion and a half years for life to develop to the point of the Cambrian explosion, and that’s the part of the history of life everybody seems to be familiar with.

So, the issue isn’t whether there’s life somewhere. I expect there to be some kind of life on at least five solar system bodies; basically, if life could develop on the early Earth, which was by all accounts the most terrible hellhole one can imagine, it can develop almost anywhere. However, I expect it to be of the kind we had during the first two billion of years of development of life on Earth, because it still would have been there if not for several very lucky events one wouldn’t have the time for if, for instance, his planet lost its magnetic field and its oceans evaporated into space. Life on such a planet would have quite an opportunity to continue developing underground, like it does deep in the Earth’s crust, and evolve into very resistant extremophiles, but you would never have anything like the Cambrian explosion, or even the eukaryotes. But let’s imagine you indeed get multi-cellular life somewhere, but there’s no ozone layer, or the land is for some reason perfectly hostile to life; for instance, life develops around the hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean, on some cold moon of Saturn. Let’s imagine life developing to the point of some octopus, which is quite intelligent, but remains an evolutionary dead end forever. This is not at all a far-fetched conclusion; in fact, this is how most successful Earth animals exist; they become very successful in their evolutionary niche, and change very little for millions or even hundreds of millions of years. In fact, some single-celled organisms probably didn’t change for billions of years, and I don’t really see why they would, if they are extremely successful in their environment. Furthermore, the more stable the environment, the less reason and opportunity one would have to evolve, for the evolutionary niches are inhabited by super-successful organisms that make it impossible for anything new to evolve, because evolution implies half-assed attempts stumbling along for long enough to eventually mutate into something that can resist even the slightest bit of pressure, which precludes functional competition, and this explains why new forms of life on Earth flourished only when some disaster wiped out the masters of the previously established evolutionary niches. We had human evolution in the Pleistocene, where the climate is so chaotic that it routinely wiped out anything static, and started disproportionally favouring adaptability and intelligence. Basically, the birds had to evolve seasonal migration, the mammals needed to evolve hibernation, and the humans needed to evolve enough of a brain to start using tools, making fire, wearing clothes and building shelters in order to survive the seasonal extremes. However, when we add the incredible length of time necessary for life to evolve from replicating RNA to eukaryotes, and I mean incredible as in “enough time for a star to grow old”, and that’s with Universe giving you a head start by providing the almost-living chemicals on comets, probably created in the aftermath of a supernova, it is not unreasonable to assume that in most places where life managed to take hold, it either found the conditions too unfavourable to continue, it evolved at a slower pace because of the conditions (for instance, being limited to a narrow space around a hydrothermal vent on Europa, and then having the hydrothermal vent move and everything freeze every now and then, or oceans on Mars evaporating, or soil containing reactive chemicals that inhibit life past the extremophile phase, or radiation inhibiting complexity past the tardigrade phase), or it just died out, or reached one of a billion possible dead ends. When you combine the likelihood of bad luck, such as having an asteroid wipe everything out every now and then, or having a very active star that produces a CMA of great power every now and then and sterilizes the planets around it, with necessity of having several instances of extremely good luck that were necessary to create the Earth as we know it, for instance the Theia impact that created the Moon, which is responsible for Earth’s incredibly strong magnetic shield, and also for stability of its axis of rotation and probably several other important things, or hundreds of other things that could’ve gone the slightest bit of a margin differently and we wouldn’t be here, the fact that our star has been incredibly well behaved for immense percentage of its life, and so on; earlier, I thought that the Universe was just too big for us to be the only intelligent species, but with everything I now know, it might be that the Universe is too small for this to be repeated anywhere else. I don’t know if that is indeed the case, but for all we know, Jupiter, Venus and Mars might be the rule for how the planets turn out. Basically, they either don’t develop a magnetic field, or they lose it, and then it’s all over; or they have a significant magnetic field, but they are gas giants, and maybe the conditions on their moons are more favourable for the development of life than on the inner planets, because of the tidal forces influencing the moons’ cores and creating geothermal activity that favours life – maybe, but we have no evidence yet, and we especially have no evidence that this life isn’t permanently stunted by its environment. In any case, the Universe outside Earth looks like a barren wasteland, incredibly hostile to life. The conditions on Earth look like something that required too much luck for it to be a normal or expected thing, and perhaps too much luck not to have been created backwards, by setting the desired outcome and then creating the conditions that allow that to work, which is basically what I think happened.

In any case, my current opinion about the existence of aliens, in the sense of an intelligent space-faring extraterrestrial species that visited Earth in the past and does so in the present, without revealing themselves to our public, is that something that doesn’t reveal itself and doesn’t influence anything for all intents and purposes doesn’t matter, and might as well not exist for the degree of importance it has to all the things that matter to me in any way or form. Will aliens help me in any way? No. Will they hinder my plans in any way? No. In any case, I already spent an inordinate amount of time and effort thinking about the implications and probabilities, and there’s obviously a limit as to what resources I will dedicate to completely impractical matters.

Sure, you can define aliens in ways that include non-physical beings, such as God, angels and demons, and re-define “other worlds” to mean non-physical realms, but that’s not what most people mean by aliens – beings that occupy and have originated in this physical Universe, only on places other than Earth. If you need to enter the sphere of theology and redefine aliens in order to make them relevant, you basically accept my reasoning as to why aliens don’t matter, you just phrase it as “physical aliens don’t matter”.

I just had an idea half an hour ago and I’m still in shock and trying to process it and figure out whether it is true.

First, I need to explain the conventional model of the ice ages.

Basically, as the planet became dryer (since circa 65My ago) and the amount of buffers (CO₂ and others) in the atmosphere was reduced, the seasonality of the climate became more extreme, and the temperature gradient between the equator and the poles more extreme. This part is not questionable. At one point in time, the planet got so cool that ice remained on the poles around the year, and this is formally known as the ice age. This, too, is not questionable.

According to the conventional model, in the ice age the climate became so sensitive to small variations in Earth orbit and tilt, due to the critical lack of climate buffers in the atmosphere, that those small variations became sufficient to throw the planet into a glacial maximum, also known as the “ice age” in common understanding. The geological epoch defined by alterations between glacial minimums and maximums is known as the Pleistocene, and it began circa 2.5My ago. It is usually, but wrongly claimed that it ended 17Ky ago, but this is merely the time when we entered the current glacial minimum. There is no reason to assume any change in the geological and astronomical underlying causes of the Pleistocene climate alterations.

Also, according to the conventional model, the ice age is a northern-hemisphere phenomenon; not much changes in the South. In the North, however, the entire North America is covered by glaciers, Europe is covered by glaciers, and, paradoxically, Siberia was warm enough to be the pasture of the vast megafauna. At some point, however, things very suddenly changed, and the mammoths in Siberia were frozen so instantly, the enzymes in their digestion couldn’t cause the meat to spoil, which means it happened within hours, and to temperatures of around -70°C, which is about the worst weather that happens in Siberia to this day. In Europe and especially in North America, the vast glaciers melted during this transitional period, which eventually caused the global water levels to rise by about 80 meters. This seems to be remembered worldwide by mankind as the great flood, since this massive sea rise took place in the timeframe of less than a year. Discovery of the suddenness of the global melt was quite a shock in the scientific circles, but I don’t know why they were so surprised; I watched the snow and ice melt in the spring, and it’s always a very sudden thing, regardless of the amount of snow. Simply, when it gets warm enough, the snow just collapses, regardless of the fact that it appeared to be an eternal constant of nature only yesterday.

What shocked me today is an idea – I can’t say how true it is – that there might actually be no glacial minimum or maximum, and that it’s merely an artefact of sea and air currents in the northern hemisphere. In one configuration, the one we have today, the polar vortex destabilizes in such a way that it allows the cold arctic air to flow all the way across the Northern America, and for some reason, probably due to a weakened gulf stream, the north of Europe freezes as well, and the glaciers form all the way down to Slovenia. However, this change of polar vortex configuration means that the cold air stops freezing the plains of Northern Asia in the winter, and the climate there becomes quite moderate, which would normally be expected since Vladivostok is at the same geographic latitude as Madrid, and would be expected to have similar climate. For some reason, the cold air flooding North America is combined with great humidity, probably due to to warm sea currents in the Pacific north-west, which creates enormous amounts of snowfall, sufficient to gradually shift lots of water from the ocean to the extended northern ice caps and glaciers. There is no analogous phenomenon in Siberia, which makes the difference in the amount of continental glaciation (wet cold vs. dry cold). This continental glaciation increases the Earth’s albedo, and thus promotes reflection of sunlight into space, creating a global cooling feedback that allows the ice and snow to remain across the year. If the process is significant enough, and perhaps combined with other factors, it promotes absorption of CO₂ in sea water, which is accelerated at low temperatures. If this process is significant enough, it reduces the amount of buffers in the atmosphere. If this reaches a critical point, you get a stable glacial maximum, which persists until something changes significantly enough to start the sudden global melt and initiate the glacial minimum.

So, the question might be what those initial conditions are, with the sea and air currents, that allow the polar vortex to destabilize over North America in the first place? The second question is, what are the conditions that make this a consistent enough phenomenon, and the third question is what are the conditions that make it a permanent state in the 100Ky range?

I don’t see any obvious errors in my analysis, and I would welcome feedback.

I am quite amazed at the fact that the stuff that I write is almost always and universally seen as controversial, because the way I see it, it’s the common sense interpretation of the available fact pool. I’m not making stuff up, I’m not making low-probability leaps of faith and logic. The fact that I’m seen as controversial means you’re all smoking the wrong shit, I would say.

If anything, I would say that my ability to see what the facts actually are, and what follows from them is controversial only in the sense that everybody else lags behind because they have some kind of emotional or intellectual resistance to accepting the available facts; it’s not that I’m making wild guesses or working with fringe theories. I’m working with the same dataset everybody else can access. I’m not even that smart; if you IQ-test the statistical sample of some demanding science-based university, a percentage of students would match my raw cognitive power, or exceed it. So, if I’m not using an alternative dataset, and I don’t possess alien brainpower, how is it that I’m routinely ahead of the “main stream” to the point where people look at me as if I have two heads when I make a statement, and then months, years or decades later it’s “fuck, how did he know that”. It’s actually very simple. I don’t care what people think. I don’t care what they believe. I don’t care what they consider to be “main stream”. I don’t care if something will be accepted as true by others. I basically don’t care, I just take in the widest available pool of data, I do several attempts at normalizing the dataset (for instance, when thinking about bone shapes of hominid fossils, I ignore those obviously suffering from arthritis; when analysing the political picture, I eliminate obvious wishful thinking), and basically let the data speak to me with as little coloration as I can manage. I’m letting the raw data speak to me, so to say, and tell me about the world it lives in. Then I try to imagine the world the data lives in, and I try to predict stuff, and as I gather more data, I check whether it confirms or rejects my predictions, and so I iteratively refine my simulation until it fits all the available facts, and I allow for paradoxes; things don’t have to be neatly arranged and they don’t have to make sense. I don’t reject a Platipus just because it appears to make no sense. I don’t reject evidence of an extinction event just because it’s a one-off thing. I don’t reject the possibility of rare events just because they don’t happen in anyone’s living memory that introduces the kind of recency bias that allows people to build cities and farms in close proximity of active volcanos that just happened not to erupt in recent memory, or participate in economic bubble hysterias just because the last bubble-popping disaster was decades ago.

Basically, I’m doing science the way people used to do it, before it got so formal and rigid. I’m gathering data, using it to make a model, and then I test the predictive ability of the model with new data, and I either revise it or abandon it, depending on whether it works or not. And I don’t care whether it works or not; I don’t care about my reputation, or other people’s opinion, or about sunk investment in the existing model. I just want to find out how stuff works, and as far as my understanding improves, I don’t care whether I was right or wrong, as long as I get better understanding in the next iteration.

Let me demonstrate this with a few examples.

There used to be a controversy about whether the Neanderthals could speak, because in order to conclude that they could speak there should be a fossil finding that confirms both sufficient tongue mobility (hyoid bone) and brain capability (Broca’s region). My logic was that the common ancestor (Turkana boy) of both modern man and the Neanderthal man had a developed Broca’s region and this had to be present in the evolutionary successors, basically assuming that stuff that didn’t change much across the evolutionary tree was developed early on and then inherited in the perfected form. What follows from this logic is that speech was developed quite early on in the hominid evolutionary tree and it is actually the driving force behind the later brain development, because once you have speech, you can communicate complex ideas, and therefore more complex ideas can actually be an evolutionary advantage, and lack of complex ideas can be an evolutionary pressure. Basically, you can communicate complex things, such as storing food for the winter season, or migrating to where the salmon will be, or ambushing a herd of bisons in order to drive them off a cliff, or tell an educational story to the next generation in order to expand the level of inherited knowledge compared to the baseline of personal experience. Basically, my model of hominid brain development assumes that speech was developed quite early on, and that it created a positive feedback loop that both motivated and rewarded brain development.

Another example is the relationship between climate and the K-T extinction. I started by looking a graph of all known great extinctions in the history of life on Earth:

The shape of the graph surprised me, because I expected the mass extinctions to be independent, Poisson-distributed events, something akin to the background radiation. What I found useful is the ability to look at the graph and ignore all the scientific labelling that concentrates only on a few spikes, naming them the P-T extinction, K-T extinction etc. In fact, the extinctions follow a pattern of an elevated baseline of extinctions, followed by a spike, which means that some evolutionary pressure was in the environment for quite a bit of time, usually millions of years, and then either the pressures exceeded the survivability threshold for a huge number of species and caused a supermassive extinction all at once, or a discrete event aggravated the situation to the same effect. I also had to ignore human ways of perceiving time, because humans are a very short-lived species of even more short-lived beings, and our perception of time and change is inherently flawed. If something doesn’t change for 10 KY, we think it’s forever. If something stays the same for longer than our species has been around, we think it was designed in this perfect and static form by God. This is the motivation behind thinking of great extinctions in terms of discrete events – a supernova explosion, a giant asteroid strike, a supervolcanic eruption and so on. We don’t think in terms of continental drift that takes hundreds of millions of years to change the configuration of continents relative to sea currents, and when a radically fatal configuration is established, it takes 60-70 MY for the effect to manifest itself fully. We also don’t connect the events intuitively across such vast chasms of time, observing the long-term trends and ignoring the very visible spikes, but that’s exactly what I did with the data. I made an assumption that is opposite to every other analysis I’ve seen, and said “what if the spikes don’t actually matter?”, because the dinosaurs were in a process of mass extinction due to the slow process of reduction of global temperature, increased aridity and increase in seasonal climate variances. By “normalizing the data” I mean ignoring the biggest elephants in the room in order to see whatever is left when the distractions are removed, and then I saw that the climate has been cooling for more than 65MY, and a few MY ago it reached the point so extreme it started throwing the planet into ice ages, alternating between glacial and interglacial cycles, where the interesting fact is that it conforms to the Milankovich’s cycles, but only within Pleistocene, only after something cooled down so much it started throwing the climate off balance, and I decided that the amount of buffers in the atmosphere must have gone below the critical level, which allows for the extremes; most likely, the atmospheric CO2 was extracted into the oceans due to greater solubility of the gas in cold water, which put the climate into its death-throes, with the anticipated stable condition of a global glaciation that might last until the continental drift gradually changes the position of continents relative to the sea currents away from the current configuration that promotes cooling. My analysis is that the anthropogenic increase in CO2 emission actually helped stabilize the situation a bit, increasing the buffer levels to a more long-term sustainable value, but the long-term prognosis is unchanged. The problem with human thinking is that, due to our short life span, we assume that the Earth was perfect “the way we found it”, while in fact it was in a configuration that is fatal for life in the long-term, because of the cooling trend, and that we are in the last, terminal phase of this transition, and this terminal phase is called “Pleistocene”, the phase in which even the extremely small variances in orbital parameters can introduce an ice age, or pull the planet out of it. The next phase, I could call it Cryocene (in order not to repeat the “Cryogenian” label), would take place when the buffer levels in the atmosphere fall below the amount necessary for the orbital variances to thaw the planet out of the glacial phase, instead allowing for the progressive increase in glaciation until it reaches the “snowball Earth” phase again. How long until then? It’s hard to tell, but my intuitive interpretation of the graph says that the error of 5MY is acceptable. Translated to human language, the next ice age might be the one we never get out of, or we might have 5MY until that point, because the industrial CO2 emissions introduced so much unexpected buffer it’s hard to anticipate the consequences, to the point where it might delay the onset of the new ice age by several MY, or it might actually destabilize the system, create an unexpected Dansgaard-Oeschger event and pull us into an ice-age sooner. The margin of “I don’t know” is the size of 5MY, which is double the size of Pleistocene. One of the instability-modes that my model predicts is that the plants are normally restricted by the scarcity factors, such as CO2 or Phosphorus in the environment, and when you remove the restrictions, their growth suddenly expands exponentially to the point where they suck up and “bury” all those factors from the environment, basically turning atmospheric CO2 into coal deposits. This means that human-induced CO2 spike can produce a plant-induced CO2 drop which can, in some kind of a perfect storm of conditions, trigger a glaciation. However, the number of unknowns is so vast that my simulation has no predictive abilities within the stated margin of uncertainty. What is quite certain is that my model of a long-term cooling trend, driven by continental distribution that allows for a Coriolis-powered circumantarctic sea current, essentially “liquid cooling” the planet more efficiently than the Sun can warm it up, and promoting gradual buffer-extraction that destabilizes the global climate, is valid, and long-term predictive. The “problem” is that the process started more than 65MY ago, and that the Chicxulub asteroid produced a very visible extinction-spike that masked the actual problem. Or, we could say that human psychological attraction to discrete spikes is the actual problem. I think it has something to do with predatory genetics, where a lion or some other animal is perceived as a significant event, and grass growing is perceived as background noise that is ignored. Well, in my attempt to become less blinded by human biases, I started ignoring the lions and zebras and paying attention to the grass. This is why my analyses start by ignoring the things “everybody knows”, and going back to the raw data, normalizing it against distractions, and letting it tell its own story.

This article is too long already so I’ll stop here, although I could cite a dozen or so additional examples. In any case, you can see the outlines of my method – absorb the raw data, ignore biases and distractions, trust the known-to-be-valid mechanisms, such as thermodynamics, inertia and so on.

But, that’s also how I model politics – it’s not that much different. See who has better debt-to-GDP ratio, who has foreign trade sufficit, who has cheaper energy and more of it, who has better access to the basic natural resources, who is less sensitive to isolation from the global economic and political systems, who has more robust and reliable basic technological systems, and who has population that has a healthier attitude towards reality, and then model interactions and time-graphs. When you do that, not only do my assessments no longer look like some fringe conspiracy theory, but you start asking yourself why is nobody else following such common-sensical principles?

Good question, I guess.