Confessions of a Caveman

By: | October 28, 2019

A former in-law came online a few days back to call me a troglodyte, and then a caveman. And not a nice way. I’m not averse to the title. I am a bearded, trunky fellow, strong legs and back. I can carry much weight through high passes and rocky canyons. I can’t recall the number of caves I’ve slept in; there’ve been many. I’ve got caveman cred.

Imagine Homo heidelbergensis hunkered at the mouth of a natural rock shelter 700,000 years ago, pondering how to feed his children, or a Neanderthal thumbing out flower petals over the grave of a dead relative, dusting it with pollens, laying down pieces of ochre. We all have deeply rooted ancestry somewhere in the world.

Maybe she was thinking more recently, the Wisconsin Ice Age, late Pleistocene. I’d be from a clan of cave painters and valley dwellers, people working mammoth ivory into eyed sewing needles for their clothes. By the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was the last tool-making hominid on earth, anatomically modern, brains 5 percent larger than our own. For what that’s worth.

Is this the caveman she meant? An atlatl thrower, ground sloth eater? Using fox canines, I might have strung ornaments around my neck, scavenged mammoth kills on the tundra, burned bone to make fire. These were people with languages and customs. Venus figurines had already been made for tens of thousands of years. Trade routes extended hundreds of miles, sometimes thousands. Though it would be 15,000 years before metal, we did more or less what we do today: forage, sleep, eat, talk, worry, hope.

Continue reading →

You Cannot Prove A Negative. Does That Mean We’ll Search Forever?

By: | October 25, 2019
meerkat-telescope-array

The TESS telescope is a shiny little thinking metal tube, drinking the light of 20 million stars in our cosmic neighborhood. It launched last year on a voyage to identify planets that look like this one—a miraculous feat, if it succeeds. Among the panoply of planets found so far, there is positively no place like home. 

TESS is looking for other Earths, but the real goal, long-term, is to find a planet with something breathing on one of those Earths. Astronomers are careful not to say that too explicitly, though. They say TESS is merely a planet hunter; it will seek out new worlds, which will be explored in more detail later, by other, more capable telescopes.

Given that, an announcement this week caught my eye: TESS is teaming up with Breakthrough Listen, a well-heeled SETI effort that will probably be the money behind the discovery of an alien civilization.

Continue reading →

Winemaking Is Like Book Writing

By: | October 24, 2019
This year’s Malbec grapes.

I’d just filled a wine bottle with Malbec and was handing it to a neighbor who was operating the manual corking machine when it occurred to me that wine making is a lot like book writing. 

I was at the tail end of a whirlwind tour to promote my new book, and I was home just long enough to help out with some bottling at the little winery my husband has built from the ground up, with sweat, love and borrowed or bartered equipment. 

A good wine starts with good grapes, just as a good book begins with a good idea. But neither of these is enough to produce a delicious wine or unforgettable book. These things take patience, time and the right kind of effort. 

Wine begins with delectable grapes that are then crushed, pressed and fermented. (The order of the pressing and fermenting depends on whether you’re making a white or red wine.) Then the waiting begins. Nature needs to take its course.  The Malbec we were bottling today was harvested in 2016, and it spent 30 months in French oak before reaching the bottle.

That’s a lot how it went with my book, too. I began with the idea, then mushed it around, researching it from every angle while allowing the ideas I was accumulating to ferment into something enticing. There was a lot of waiting around for ideas to mature.

Continue reading →

Viewshed

By: | October 23, 2019

First must have come listening
to the wind or regarding
the movements of animals,
then monitoring the stars
and sometime after that
scrutinizing fire;
but somewhere in there belongs
watching the progress of a river…

Billy Collins, “The List of Ancient Pastimes”

Most of the last couple weeks I’ve been sleeping on the ground. I stayed in southern Utah canyons long enough to watch palaces of cottonwood trees go from green to gold. It happened fast, high desert washes flaring in a matter days.

Watching is something we’ve been doing since the beginning, one of the traits of being human. Something catches our eye, not predator or prey, but a swirl in water, a turning of stars, and we stare at it, enchanted. It is like waking up for the first time, seeing where you are. Watch for long enough and you witness change too slow for the human eye. Horsetails breeze from one side of the sky to the next as veins in leaves tighten, pigment brightening while chlorophyll dies.

Part of these couple of weeks, I was co-teaching an archaeological field program in southeast Utah, days of marching up and down canyons, reaching rock horns hundreds of feet in the air. We looked at petroglyphs dating back hundreds to many thousands of years. The co-instructor was Hopi archaeologist Lyle Balenquah, and he offered theories as to a sandstone wall with a 15-foot line of small human figures pecked into it, all going the same direction, some with hands, some with gear on their backs, some with penises, most without, one playing a flute, and, intermittently, a figure bigger than the others, with a bent-neck staff as if driving them. The line had 179 figures. Slaves on the march, migrants moving east to west, a village visiting another and commemorating the moment.

Continue reading →

Apocalypse, in costume

By: | October 22, 2019

I have what might best be classified as ‘manic costume joy.’ You’ve even heard about it here on this blog. I try to be the scariest thing I can think of for Halloween. One year, that was “Your Biological Clock.” Another year, the year humans hit 7 billion in number on October 31st, I tried to be overpopulation by burying myself in tiny homemade dolls with articulating, poseable limbs. Instead, I gave up after making just 30 and decided that “I am Being Attacked by Tiny People.”

Last week, my journalist friend Cally asked me when I was going to be the “Sixth Mass Extinction.”

Great idea, right? Really scary! But how does one dress up as a geologic-era scale event? You can’t just walk around in a onesie covered with CO2 molecules telling people that you’re the “Apotheosis of the Anthropocene,” can you?

Fortunately (but actually, quite unfortunately), the news has recently been full of inspiring headlines, so before the big day, I worked up some options:

Continue reading →

Science Writers on Twitter: Comforted By the Dying Universe

By: | October 21, 2019

@nattyover: I turn for comfort to “A Dying Universe: The Long Term Fate and Evolution of Astrophysical Objects” https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9701131.pdf

@nattyover is Natalie Wolchover, science writer and editor at Quanta.  “A Dying Universe” is a paper I love and have loved for years.  The paper’s abstract: “We consider,” it says, how planets, stars, galaxies, and the whole universe will change “over time scales which greatly exceed the current age of the universe.”  That is, take the present planets, stars, galaxies, and universe and fast-forward them into the far future, farther into the future than the Big Bang was in the past, in fact, all the way to the end. It doesn’t end well. The paper starts small, though, with stars.

@shannonmstirone Replying to @nattyover: Today is one of those days when I’m comforted by knowing that one day our sun will die and our galaxy will merge with Andromeda and there’s no escaping, this is all temporary.

@shannonmstirone is Shannon Stirone, and she is also a science writer. The sun — after it blows up like a balloon and fries the earth along with most of the solar system — will shrink back down into a barely shining cinder. Our galaxy and its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are going to collide and merge and become an entirely different galaxy. Our cosmic identities are temporary, change is inescapable.

@nattyover: Nothing more soothing than the thought of a neutron star sublimating

I read this and had to go look it up, and oh my goodness. Sublimation is when a solid goes straight to gas, no liquid melting in between; dry ice is solid carbon dioxide sublimating. Neutron stars are a stage in the deaths of stars much bigger than ours, so big they don’t shrink down to cinders but keep shrinking until their atoms are all jammed into nuclei, no atoms any more, just mostly neutrons, a billion tons in a teaspoon of degenerate solid neutron star. And then their neutrons decay, as neutrons do, into other particles, which decay farther until the stars have evaporated. They’ve sublimed.

@AnnFinkbeiner: Or the galaxies turning redder and redder until they finally blonk out. 

Stars live by burning gas and when the gas runs out, stars turn red; so when galaxies full of stars also run out of gas, they also turn red. Eventually all the gas in the universe has been used up as fuel and has pretty much dissipated, and no stars ever form again, neither do galaxies. What’s left is the black holes that had been at the centers of galaxies, and finally, via Hawking radiation, even the black holes evaporate.

@AnnFinkbeiner: Or the heat death of the universe.

Meanwhile, the universe which has always been expanding, keeps on expanding. In the end the warm, moving, shining universe is cold and still and dark.

@shannonmstirone: Deep-death-time makes me happy.

Continue reading →

Window Tree

By: | October 18, 2019

This is an update to a guest post that ran on December 12, 2018.

A few days ago, I found the following letter from my grandfather, Donald Pearce, in my parents’ bookshelves. It was tucked into a copy of Medea which he sent to me when I was a high school sophomore. ( I was precisely the kind of teenager who loved Medea.)

Grampy taught English literature at UC Santa Barbara, but always said he had more fun teaching at the local adult education center. I think he found the students a little more varied in their life experiences, and more interesting.

As you can tell from this letter — all those em dashes and exclamation points! — Grampy didn’t just read. He dove into texts headfirst and swam around in them, splashing about with glee. He spread his infectious enthusiasm right up until his death, which occurred about a year after he sent me this letter.

These days, the longing I feel for my grandparents feels less like waves, and more like a wellspring. The window tree in my backyard is showering gold again, so thought I’d repost what I wrote after my Nana died in 2017. Cheers, honey. Read on!

The Window Tree

All year long I’ve been haunted by a poem. When I sit down to work or go for a walk, it drifts into my mind: 

Tree at my window, window tree
My sash is lowered when night comes on
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

There she is, wearing the tattered yellow paisley bathrobe that used to hang on my grandfather’s broad shoulders. Her silvery bob is a little wild, static electricity from her slippers raising stray hairs into a halo.

Vague dream head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

It’s been almost exactly a year now since my grandmother died, but I still sometimes wonder if the snatches of verse in my head are a message or echo – from her, from somewhere.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

Let me explain. When I was in my twenties, I lived with my grandmother for about a year. She didn’t sleep well. One morning, after a particularly rough night, she padded into the kitchen carrying a book of verse and opened it to Robert Frost’s “Tree at my Window.”

Continue reading →

Old Art, Older Animals

By: | October 17, 2019
Dinosaur curator Matthew Carrano, paleoartist Jay Matternes, and museum director Kirk Johnson talk art, fossils, and lizard predation.

When the National Museum of Natural History, here in D.C., was planning to demolish their fossil hall and build a new one, they knew they would have to deal with something big: Six huge murals. They’re classics, painted between 1960 and 1974, showing wild assemblages of animals from different points in our planet’s history. The museum used digital photography to capture them in such detail that they could reprint them at full size, took them off the walls, rolled them up, and put them in storage.

The museum also got in touch with the artist, Jay Maternes, a very influential paleoartist. He’s in his 80s now and he still lives in the D.C. area, so earlier this week they invited him to the museum’s auditorium to talk about his art, animals, and the process of painting the murals.

Continue reading →