A close look at Stephan’s Quintet from the Webb space telescope.

As the countdown clock reached zero and the scientific community held their collective breaths on the early morning of December 25th, 2021, the European Space Agency in collaboration with NASA, launched a massive Ariane 5 rocket from the tropical rainforests of Kourou, French Guiana. Riding atop that rocket, along with the hopes, dreams, blood, sweat, and tears of thousands of engineers, scientists, and astronomers worldwide was the most lavishly expensive scientific instrument ever built, the James Webb Space Telescope, known simply as JWST or Webb. After a successful launch and an orbital insertion, the telescope was rocketed out to a far-away point in space known as the second Lagrange point (L2) almost a million miles from Earth where the telescope is gravitationally tethered to the Earth as it orbits the sun. Once there, Webb entered into a halo orbit around L2 and scientists began calibrating its finicky components, unfurling its gigantic sunshade, and preparing the multitude of scientific instruments for their new life searching the farthest reaches of the universe. The James Webb Space Telescope is like no other, a long-awaited replacement for the aging Hubble telescope which is entering the twilight years of its useful life. Unlike its predecessor whose primary mission was to view the universe in the ultraviolet and visible light spectrum, Webb will primarily scan the cosmos gathering light in the far-infrared spectrum. This will allow it to view objects that are much further away than those that Hubble is able to see. The universe is expanding, and the earliest galaxies to form after the Big Bang are all moving away from us at tremendous speeds. This causes their light to be stretched and shifted to the infrared, an effect known as “Doppler red-shift.” The expansion of space contributes to this phenomenon, and with more light-collecting area than its predecessors, along with several infrared-optimized instruments, Webb will be able to observe objects farther away and further back in time than ever before. The light from these galaxies, many of which were among the first to ever form more than thirteen billion years ago has been traveling toward us for that entire time, and Webb will be the first telescope humanity has built that is capable of imaging that early light.

Now, the long wait is over. Yesterday, NASA publicly released the first few of these much anticipated images.

The images they released are astounding and groundbreaking in their clarity and resolution. When you first stare at these images, they’re objectively amazing, but when you spend a little bit of time actually exploring the full depth of what’s incorporated in them, that amazement turns to utter astonishment. I’ll take a look at just one of these images in this article, and then an in-depth look at a second image in an upcoming one.

The first image I want to explore is a composite image from the near-infrared camera (NIRcam) and mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) incorporated into James Webb. The result of this composite is a beautiful view of one of the most destructive and chaotic areas of the nearby universe, a group of five galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet.

Stephan’s quintet was discovered in 1877, but it wasn’t until the Hubble Telescope imaged it in 2009 that astronomers began to see some of the chaotic turbulence that was happening as the galaxy on the bottom right of the two center twins (NGC 7318b) smashes into the others at millions of miles per hour. The galaxy that’s on the left of the group is NGC 7320, and although it seems to belong in the group of five, it’s actually a foreground galaxy, completely unrelated to the other four. That galaxy is much closer to us, only 40 million light years away, compared to the other four which are about 280 million light years distant, in the direction of Pegasus. I’ll get back to NGC 7320 in a moment, but I want to focus on the main architect of anarchy in this group of four, the disruptive NGC 7318b. If we zoom in a little bit, we get a good look at one of the most interesting features of the high-speed collision that’s happening. The gas shock-wave that is spreading outward from the colliding galaxies.

As NGC 7318b collides with the other three, its collective gravity shoves all of the hydrogen gas clouds that fill the vast vacuum of all four galaxies into a compressed arc that spreads outward at the top of the photo. This arc is a shockwave of hydrogen gas and dust, and it’s huge.

The arc of the shockwave is longer than the entire diameter of the Milky Way galaxy, more than 100,000 light years across. Not only is this shockwave pushing the gas outward in this gargantuan, speeding arc, it’s compressing it, heating it up to a temperature of millions of degrees in some areas, and causing the compressed gas to form its own gravity and start to collapse into new stars. If we zoom in further, we can see an incredible array of thousands of young, hot, bright stars that have all formed in the few million years that has passed since the collision began. Here’s a zoomed look at one small area—a few thousand light years across—where hundreds if not thousands of brand-new stars have been born.

One thing to note is that these dense star clusters only appear yellowish-orange because this is an infrared image. In a true-color visual light photo, the majority of these star would be blue in color, denoting their young age and high temperature, however, the dense gas clouds block a lot of visual light, which makes these stars only truly visible in the infrared. We can see a bit through the hydrogen haze by looking at only the near-infrared image from the NIRcam. While still hazy from the gas, you can clearly see dense blue stars, along with a scattering of older red giants and young but relatively cool red dwarves.

At the same zoom, and moving up to NGC 7319 above the two entwined galaxies, we can easily see the gravitational effect of the shock-turbulence that’s affecting the entire group of four galaxies in the expanding arms of hydrogen gas and dust that have blown outward from the main body of the galaxy. Vast fields of gas thrusting outward in massive fingers that are tens of thousands of light years in size. From a planet inside this galaxy, these hydrogen clouds would light up the sky in dazzling arrays of color that would be absolutely magnificent. Barring, of course, the shockwave that’s causing the incredible turbulence ripping apart your planet, something that would certainly hinder your enjoyment of the spectacle.

Before I leave Stephan’s Quintet, I want to take a look at the galaxy that doesn’t actually belong in the group, NGC 7320. Because this galaxy, which is considered a dwarf galaxy due to its size of only about 30,000 light years across, less than one-third the size of the Milky Way, is so much closer than the other four, this image from Webb shows very clearly the individual stars that make up it’s outer rings. Hubble was able to take images of this galaxy that showed thousands of individual stars and small star clusters but Webb takes this to another level altogether. Take a look at this shot I captured by zooming in on one small part of the galaxy in the high-resolution Webb image.

Although hazy and slightly obscured by gas, hundreds of thousands of individual stars are clearly discernable. I’m just constantly amazed at the number of stars in even a galaxy considered to be a “dwarf.” The Milky Way consists of an estimated 200-400 billion stars, and approximately half of them are estimated to contain planets. We have eight planets around our star, so there may be as many as a trillion planets just in our galaxy. Expand that out to the estimated two trillion other galaxies in the observable universe, and it starts to seem like we’re absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of such an unimaginable vast arena of potential life.

Now, for one last thing. It’s obvious that in a picture like this, 99.99% of people who look at it are going to look at the main focal point, the five galaxies of the quintet. I like to be in the .01% though, and I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time zooming in around the other areas of this photo, where hundreds, if not thousands of additional galaxies can be seen. So, since we’re involved in a stupefying thought-bubble that can lead to an existential crisis. Let’s go back out to the full view. What about this galaxy over here?

Let’s zoom in on that beauty.

This shows a very nice, uniform, fully-facing, barred spiral galaxy. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that we’ve given it no name or designation, I doubt it’s been examined in any sort of definition, and I doubt anybody in the world has spent more than a few seconds looking at it. Besides me, of course. I want to know what’s happening in this galaxy. How many hundreds of billions of stars are there? How old are they? How many planets are there? How far away is this, and how many life-forms have risen from the galactic soup of this obscure, uncharted, cast aside by the scientific community, lost in the vast quagmire of a universal field that contains trillions like it, galaxy?

Okay, one last thing on this incredible picture. How many galaxies are actually imaged in this photo of what most people think to be just five distinct galaxies? Take a look at just a random area that I decided to zoom in on, specifically from the lower-left of the main photo.

How many galaxies are present in just this small portion of a very large photo? Every single point of light in this small snip from the main photo, save for what I think are probably eight stars, identifiable by the six-point spikes radiating from them–something unique to JWST photos that I may get into in the next blog–every single speckle of color you can see is an entire galaxy, consisting of hundreds of millions, if not billions, if not a trillion or more stars, most so far away that they’re almost invisible even in this photo. The great thing though, is that Webb is capable of imaging all of them! It’s just a matter of dedicating the time to point the instruments in that desired direction and let them sit. Oh, one last thing. There’s a small, red speck just to the left and slightly above center of this last photo. I think that bears some exploration. Now, Stephan’s Quintet is obviously not the only group of colliding galaxies in the universe, and during my exploration of this photo, I found another one. Let’s zoom in a bit more on that speck.

This shows what seems to be six distant galaxies in a horizontal line, and at least the middle two are clearly colliding. These galaxies are so far away, and so small, that they can’t even be seen in the full un-zoomed image released by NASA, which gives you a sense of just how many galaxies there are in the background of this photo, and just how great the resolution of the James Webb Space Telescope is. You can see the shockwave from the collision spreading out to the left of the two central galaxies, while to the right and left of it are two additional galaxies that may or may not actually be involved. All of these galaxies are red-shifted, even beyond the apparent red color of the IR cameras that took the shot, meaning that they are moving away from us at tremendous speeds, and that the light from them is reaching us after billions of years of travel. Since this is what they looked like when the light first left them billions of years ago, what must they look like now? Do they even exist anymore? How many civilizations may have risen and fallen in that distant space during the billions of years these galaxies existed while the Milky Way was still in its infancy, while our sun was nothing more than a cool, swirling cloud of hydrogen and helium? We’ll never know the answers to these questions, and that leaves me in a saddened state of existential melancholy.

I’ll ponder a little more of that in the next blog when I examine the James Webb deep-field, the most fascinating photo of yesterday’s release. In the meantime, if you want to download the full resolution image and do your own exploring, you can find it here: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/034/01G7DA5ADA2WDSK1JJPQ0PTG4A Please let me know if you find anything of interest!

*All photos courtesy of NASA and used in the public domain, zooms and screenshots are my known from the public domain photos.

International Travel in a Covid World (part two)

The first sign that something was amiss was when we pulled into the train station at the border crossing between Denmark and Germany. Danish soldiers dressed in urban camouflage and wearing snappy berets took positions on the platform at each of the doors and stopped travelers from either entering or exiting the train, their faces set in firm expressions of totalitarian authority. Other officers dressed in traditional police garb boarded the train, their faces serious and attentive, their hands staying close to their sidearms as they went seat-to-seat demanding papers, perusing the passports handed over by the wary passengers.

Wait. Firm expressions? Serious faces?

Yes, that’s right. I could see their faces. Those facial features were on full display. Because none of them, neither the soldiers guarding the doors, nor the police officers passing through the train were wearing masks. NO MASKS!

Viva la liberation de masks!

I waited until the officers had made their passport checks and left the train, and then asked an embarking passenger. “No mask requirements in Denmark?” “No,” he replied with a smile, his teeth flashing brilliantly in a display I’d missed over the last week. “No masks required on public transport, or anywhere really.”

What a magnificent sentence to hear.

Tracy and I stripped off our masks and wadded them into a ball, tossing them in the trash. We were free at last. Free of the scourge of idiocy that insisted mask wearing was useful in any way, shape, or form. Free of the performative regulation of clownish government leaders. Finally in a country that believed in science and followed logic in its laws and regulation. The passengers on this train ride were to be the last of the mask wearers that we would see for the next six days. All through our time in Copenhagen we saw next to zero masks. Everywhere we went we were greeted by smiling faces. Smiles. It’s hard to overstate how sucky it is to miss seeing smiles from people.

Far fewer than one in a hundred Danish citizens and visitors wear masks in public. Sure, you still see the occasional mask on someone in the hotel lobby, or in the subway station, or even walking down the street. But it is an anomaly. A curiosity really, something that draws your attention for the simple fact that it’s out of place, and the fact that it’s out of place and unusual is what makes it so divine. And that rare mask is in Copenhagen, the capitol city. I’m sure in smaller communities the number of masks is actually zero. After a couple of days, it actually becomes easy to forget that Covid is even a thing that the rest of the world is suffering. Everything in Copenhagen is just wide open, and the city is thriving.

This undoubtedly has to do with their vaccination status. A very strong 74.1% of the population is fully vaccinated, a number that puts them well into herd immunity status. As we were there, they were reporting only 7600 cases in the entire country, and only 30 people in serious condition in the hospital. The seven-day rolling average number of deaths was somewhere between one and two.

Between one and two deaths per day due to Covid. In the entire country of Denmark. Blissful.

There was some real concern that we wouldn’t be able to go to Sweden. Shortly before we arrived in Copenhagen, the Swedish government announced they were closing the country to all travelers from America. I was reasonably sure that though we were American, we were not considered “travelers from America” as we were certainly travelers from Denmark or possibly travelers from Germany by this point. There was nothing to fear though, as the announcement only applied to travelers arriving into Sweden by air. Our train from Copenhagen to Stockholm stopped for a brief moment at the border, and then continued on with nary an officer in sight checking documents or vaccination cards. Lovely.

We arrived in Stockholm and were once more welcomed by a country with no restrictions regarding masks, or vaccinations, or quarantines. Other than the air travel restrictions against Americans, which seems to be some sort of political gamesmanship as opposed to a serious health-related decision, Sweden was wide-open and welcoming. Sweden has a vaccination rate of 60%, far less than their neighbors to the southwest, but apparently still high enough that they aren’t worried about infections. They currently have 28,900 cases, of which 58 are serious enough to require hospitalization. Despite the higher numbers, their seven-day moving average number of deaths is just as low as Denmark, somewhere around two deaths per day. Again, a lovely number that allows the Swedish people to almost completely ignore the pandemic that is ravaging other parts of the world, the United States in particular.

With no restrictions on travel besides the ban on U.S. air travelers, there’s not much to talk about with regard to things to consider when traveling to the Nordic countries. There just isn’t anything to consider. It’s wide open.

Eventually, it was time to go, and we flew from Stockholm back to Berlin. There was a mask requirement at the airport in Stockholm, however, most travelers were completely ignoring the mandate, and nobody was enforcing it. When we boarded the plane, the flight attendants did request that everyone wear a mask, and they were handing them out to passengers who didn’t have one, a surprisingly high number of them.

For this flight to Berlin, we once again had to meet the entry requirements of Germany, which simply meant showing our proof of vaccination to the agent at the check-in counter. There was no border control, no official exit from Sweden, and no official entry into Germany upon landing at Berlin Brandenburg airport. We were, however, back in the land of masks, and our irritation at them had grown in the week of freedom we’d experienced.

The next day we were flying home, which meant another trip on British Airways through London, and all of the hassle of the UK’s travel restrictions, including proof of vaccination, a negative test, and the filling out of the Passenger Locator Form. We got Covid tested on our last day in Stockholm just to make sure we would have a negative result back in plenty of time for the flight to London, though we needn’t have worried. Our negative results were in our emails within an hour of testing, along with a signed travel certificate stating that we were safe to fly. Their program for providing these certificates was very easy and very smooth. It actually turned out that we didn’t even need to have gone through the very minor hassle of testing in Stockholm. At the Berlin airport, Covid testing was being conducted right in the check-in area, with results in fifteen minutes, a clear and simple path to the required testing for London.

The United States also requires a negative test for all returning travelers by air, so even if we hadn’t been transiting London on our return, we would still have needed the negative test to board any flight headed to the United States. Just prior to boarding our flight from Berlin, we also had to complete a U.S. declaration that stated that we “attest” that we’ve either had a negative Covid test within the preceding three calendar days, or that we’ve recovered from Covid after testing positive within the preceding three months, and that we have documentation to the above. The boarding agent in Berlin collected these attestations from us, so I have no idea of what use they are, or what happens to them. When we landed back in the United States, we both used Global Entry, which simply scans our faces and sends us through. No questions about anything, Covid related or otherwise.

I do so attest, random nonsense government paper creator person.

Covid has undoubtedly made travel tricky, but with a little effort, a lot of research, and a ton of patience, the regulations can be worked out and it is possible to once again enjoy a European vacation.

Now, where did I park my bike?

International Travel in a Covid World (part one)

That vagaries of international travel in a Covid world creates quite a few opportunities for either upside or downside. The upside is that fewer people are traveling, and with fewer travelers come the perks of lighter crowds, better seats, cheaper hotel rooms, and a more pleasant experience in every attraction, museum, restaurant, or historical site. The downside is that the stress and effort of travel has become much more arduous, the planning much more daunting. The real fear that you’ll be turned away at the airport before you even board your flight because your travel documents are not in order, or you’re missing some key piece of required paperwork adds an element of stress to a vacation that hasn’t really existed since the time of the Iron Curtain. Restrictions and requirements are changing constantly, and much of the literature and regulations are confusing and poorly written, very hard to understand and interpret.

For travelers from the United States, things are even more daunting. We aren’t exactly the role-model for the world when it comes to vaccination status, and coronavirus cases here are on the rise as the Delta variant flames its way through our population. This has caused the U.S. to be added to precisely zero “green lists” for international travel, and quite a few “red lists.” Luckily, most countries have U.S. travelers on a “yellow” or “amber list” currently, and the restrictions, while numerous, are manageable with a bit of time, effort, and patience in your planning.

Our trip involved flying to Berlin, Germany, on British Air, with a very quick layover in London. After a few days in Berlin, we would be taking a train to Copenhagen, Denmark, and staying there for a few days, before taking another train to Stockholm, Sweden and staying there a few days. We would then fly back to Berlin for a day or two, and then return to the United States with another layover in London. Save for the roundtrip flights in and out of Berlin, none of this was pre-booked and all subject to change based on our enjoyment of the various cities and the ever-changing regulations around Covid that could cause us to have to cancel or adjust certain legs. Luckily, this is how I prefer to travel anyway, so the uncertain nature of our trip was one I am well-accustomed to and enjoy immensely.

Because our entry-point to Europe was Berlin, I carefully navigated the often-confusing requirements for travel to Germany from the United States, and discovered, much to my delight, that we wouldn’t need a negative Covid test to enter Germany. The requirements for entry were:

1. Full vaccination for at least 14 days, or

2. A negative PCR or Antigen test taken within 72 and 48 hours respectively prior to arrival, or

3. Proof from a doctor of recovery from Covid within the preceding six months.

The “or” on these requirements was a welcome word, and since Tracy and I were both fully vaccinated, we didn’t need to do anything more than remember to bring our vaccination cards to the airport.

Or, so I thought.

It wasn’t until just a few days before our travel that I had a sudden thought that perhaps I should confirm that even though we were only stopping over in London, not leaving the airport or even clearing customs, which meant no official entry into the country, I should probably check to make sure there weren’t any odd rules to be aware of. It was a good thing I checked.

The rules for actually entering Great Britain are arduous and involve things like prescheduling Covid tests on day 2 and again on day 8, quarantines for many travelers, and other nonsense. It turned out, as I dug deeper, that even though we were only laying over, the Brits are quite protective of even their unofficial air, and we would be required to get a Covid test before we would be allowed access to the hallowed aisles of the British Airways 787-10.

The requirements for the specific nature of the test involved immersion rates and accuracy rates and a bunch of other numbers and percentages that nothing in the literature of the various testing sites allows you to confirm. I finally ended up just booking a rapid antigen test because it was the only one where the results would be available within 48 hours. All the testing sites around me were reporting results times of 72 hours or longer, and that wouldn’t work for the flight requirements, so I lied and said I was suffering Covid symptoms just so I could get a rapid test that I wasn’t even sure met the requirements for entry into a country that I wasn’t even officially entering. In addition to the proof of vaccination and negative Covid test, Britain also requires all travelers—even those just passing through—to complete a Passenger Locator Form. This form compiles every bit of information about you, your travel plans—right down to your seat number on all flights—your vaccination and test status, home address, telephone number, passport information, and shoe size.

What a complete pain in the ass.

Anyway, the results of my rapid Covid test came back in about fifteen minutes and were negative, and, shockingly, somehow when I got to the airport, the agent at the ticket counter wasn’t trained to know the difference between an antigen test with soluble rates of 98.7% at a diffusion of 300 grams per milliliter, a PCR test with sensitivity of 91.4% and specificity of 99.6%, and a picture of a cozy rabbit burrow stuffed with cute baby bunnies. It turned out that all she really cared about was the large, bold NEGATIVE stamped halfway down the results page, the vaccination dates on our cards, and that our U.S. passports were valid.

Whew.

On the flight, despite the fact that literally every person is fully vaccinated AND has tested negative within the previous couple of days, masks are still required, which, when you think about it even a little bit, is completely ludicrous. That little self-contained tube in the sky was probably the safest, most Covid-free piece of real estate in the entire world, and yet masks were required to be worn the entire flight. Luckily, we were flying in business class, which has private little cabins where you can’t even see another passenger, and so most of the flight attendants were quite lenient when it came to enforcing the mask mandate. I actually took mine off completely when I laid out my bed and went to sleep for a few hours, and nobody woke me to demand I put a completely useless piece of cloth over my mouth. When we arrived in Berlin, the customs agents wanted to see our passports and our vaccination cards, and that was it, a very simple entry into Germany, and our vacation was underway.

Germany does have some quite strict Covid protocols in place. It’s not just that masks are required everywhere indoors, but they specifically are required to be “medical masks,” which most people in Germany take to mean N95s. Nobody is wearing a bandanna, or a gator, or a scarf over their face like I see all over the U.S. The citizenry are religious maskers in Germany, and every person wears a medical mask, with at least 50% of them of the N95 variety. I rarely saw anybody (other than myself) openly flouting the law and not wearing their masks, and they do apparently levy fines of 50 Euros or more if you are caught willfully violating the mask mandate. It was quite clear that the Germans have received their marching orders from their leaders, and they have fallen in line to snap their heels together, salute, and obey. Hmmm.

I should say here, if my opinion isn’t already clear, mask mandates are stupid. They are performative in nature, designed to make people feel like they’re making a difference and taking steps to be safe while ignoring the science that says that masks, especially the non-N95 variety, are almost entirely useless. In particular, in areas where everybody is required to be vaccinated and test negative, as on the flights, requiring masks in addition to those rules is nothing more than willful disdain for common sense. That being said, N95 masks likely do actually provide some small amount of protection and help to stop the spread of Covid, and if you were going to require a mask mandate in your country the percentage of people wearing the N95 variety is at least encouraging even if it is still ridiculous.

Not only does Germany require and mandate mask wearing indoors, they also require proof of vaccination or a negative test everywhere. I mean everywhere. The hotel requires it at check-in. Many restaurants require it when you go to dinner. Museums, attractions, and tours, all require you to show proof that you are vaccinated or don’t currently have Covid. It’s absolutely nuts to have to show that proof to your maître d’, and then have him also demand you pull your mask up over your nose before he shows you to your table. It’s utter lunacy.

Luckily, all of this idiocy was going to soon come to an end as we boarded a high-speed train for Copenhagen, Denmark, and the start of the Nordic leg of our journey.

The Man Who Sowed Irrational Fear and Created MORAL PANIC

On August 12, 1958, Congress passed Public Law 85-623, an “act to prohibit the introduction…into interstate commerce of switchblade knives…” This law became commonly known as the “Federal Switchblade Act,” and it was the culmination of a concerted effort by lawmakers backed by an outpouring of public support that can all be traced back to an article published in Woman’s Home Companion in November, 1950. The author of this article, titled, “The Toy that Kills,” was Jack Harrison Pollack, and he was well-known for his overtly inflammatory articles that preyed on the emotions of his readers, mostly women, tugging at their maternal instincts and unashamedly feeding their base fears.

Jack Harrison Pollack wrote and published more than a thousand articles for numerous magazines and periodicals in the 1950s and 1960s, many of them with inflaming titles like “They’ll Steal Your Vote,” “The Shame of our Local Health Departments,” “Six Ways Your Vote Can Be Stolen,” “Do Drinking Fountains Spread Disease?” and “Too Many Babies Die.”

The Toy that Kills was not written to espouse the dangers of children carrying knives. In fact, Pollack doesn’t seem to have a problem with kids carrying knives in general. He only has an issue with the “threat to our children’s safety,” the switchblade knife. He acknowledges that knives have utility and that society shouldn’t try to stop kids from carrying them. He writes, “(Authorities) don’t want to deny boys their pocket knives. They know that a knife to a growing boy is as important as a lipstick to a young lady.” In just one of the many quotes in the article that are attributed to some vague, unidentified figure, such as this one that he says is from “one of the nation’s top law-enforcement officers,” (whatever that means) he writes, “In a person’s pocket, a switchblade knife is a deadly concealed weapon—as dangerous as a dagger and at close quarters as lethal as a loaded revolver.” The article, which is filled with unsourced, vaguely attributed, unidentifiable quotes like the one above, was clearly meant to inflame its readers and to drive them to action.

In one paragraph Pollack claims to have witnessed an actual switchblade murder on the mean streets of Philly:

“I had no idea myself until I saw a youth stabbed with one on a Philadelphia street. Two young men were fighting with their fists. Suddenly one of them reached into his pocket. A second later his hand held an open knife. He jabbed the gleaming blade into his opponent’s chest. As the blood flowed, women onlookers screamed.”

In another, he has a direct quote from a deceased victim of knife violence:

“Recently—in more innocent spirits—two teen-age boys at a high school dance in a Newark, New Jersey, suburb were playfully showing off with a three-inch switchblade. Accidentally one was shoved against the tip of the knife, which pierced his heart. “You punctured me, Jim, please take me to a drugstore,” the wounded youth moaned and collapsed. His seventeen-year-old companion was aghast. But his sorrow couldn’t bring his best friend back to life.”

The article is filled with anecdotal stories from all over the country that are completely unsourced with no names attached and no references listed. Stories that have direct quotes from one subject to another as if the author witnessed the interaction first-hand. Stories that are quite obviously completely fabricated by Pollack who knows there is no way for his 1950s readers to verify or dispute these stories.

“At almost the same time, in Newark, New Jersey, a thirty-five-year-old woman accused her husband of being unfaithful. Before he had a chance to explain, she angrily yanked a switchblade from her stocking and stabbed her husband in the heart. The next day he died. “If she had only hit her husband with a dish or a rolling pin instead!” mused a police official. “A switchblade isn’t something for anybody with a temper to have.””

Immediately after publication of the article, with nobody of intelligence able to discern the obvious lies and fabrications throughout it, U.S. states began to take action, with New York becoming the first to ban these dangerous weapons. Other states followed suit, and after the federal ban against importation in 1958, the mass hysteria spread around the globe, with countries all through Europe, Asia, and the Americas taking their own steps to pass laws banning switchblade knives. And none of it was based on any sort of reality, data, science, or even logic.

In case you haven’t seen an actual switchblade knife before, I happen to own one. Here is a regular, modern pocket knife, completely legal throughout the country, side-by-side with a dangerous and scary switchblade knife:

And here is a video where I show the difference in the way these knives open:

Warning: Graphic content not suitable to the faint of heart!

As you can see, these two knives are nearly indistinguishable. Why did Pollack feel the need to fabricate his way through a story attempting to rouse his readers to take action against switchblade knives? It’s hard to say. Perhaps he was simply inspired to grow his readership in any way possible, or maybe the editors of Woman’s Home Companion preferred sensationalism to journalism. It’s quite obvious from this article that there was a clear and shocking lack of journalistic integrity in those days, at least in the magazines where Pollack’s articles flourished, his audience apparently enraptured by his histrionic prose. Whatever his intent, the article worked. After its publication, and with the release of films like Rebel Without a Cause, 12 Angry Men, and the musical, Westside Story, the public had seen enough of switchblade knives to know that they were a menace to society. Driven with fear by Pollack’s closing statement, “…don’t wait, either, until a youngster—it could be yours—is murdered with a “toy” pocketknife” the entire world went crazy.

Representative Sidney R. Yates, speaking to Congress before passing the switchblade act, was clearly taken in by the national hysteria surrounding the “deadly” knives:

“Vicious fantasies of omnipotence, idolatry… barbaric and sadistic atrocities, and monstrous violations of the accepted values spring from the cult of the weapon, and the switchblade knife is included in this. Minus switchblade knives and distorted feeling of power they beget – power that is swaggering, reckless, and itching to express itself in violence – our delinquent adolescents would be shorn of one of their most potent means of incitement to crime.” 

There’s no doubt that youth violence was a problem in the fifties, however, the switchblade knife was nothing more than a symbolism of that violence, a simple tool embodied in bloodshed by the media, and as such, it was targeted by activists who reacted on emotion rather than common sense.

When considering the Moral Panic created by Pollack against switchblade knives, it’s rather difficult to not draw comparisons to the current state of affairs with society’s Moral Panic about AR-15s. The AR-15 has become the weapon of choice for many of the most heinous mass shootings our country has witnessed in the last couple of decades, and as such, it has become bastardized by society. And yet, the AR-15 is nothing more than a symbol of gun violence. It’s not even the best choice of weapon if you want to create the most bloodshed, death, fear, and violence. A typical AR-15 shoots a tiny .223 round that, in many of its iterations, causes little damage when it strikes a human body. However, because the AR-15 has been used by so many shooters, it has become the target of activists and politicians who think that the murder problem of our country will disappear if the AR-15 is banned. They seem to have lost sight of the same logic missing in society in the 1950s. Banning switchblades didn’t curb youth violence, youths just continued to carry what were now illegal knives, or they just switched to similar knives that were legal. Banning AR-15s will just mean that shooters will choose a different type of weapon for their killing sprees. If I was writing this article sixty years in the future, I might write the previous paragraph this way:

There’s no doubt that gun violence was a problem during the turn of the century, however, the AR-15 was nothing more than a symbolism of that violence, a simple tool embodied in bloodshed by the media, and as such, it was targeted by activists who reacted on emotion rather than common sense.

Gersh Kuntzman is today’s version of Jack Harrison Pollack. In an article in the New York Daily News a few years ago titled, What is it like to fire an AR-15? It’s horrifying, menacing, and very, very loud, he writes the following lines:

The recoil bruised my shoulder, which can happen if you don’t know what you’re doing. The brass shell casings disoriented me as they flew past my face. The smell of sulfur and destruction made me sick. The explosions — loud like a bomb — gave me a temporary form of PTSD. For at least an hour after firing the gun just a few times, I was anxious and irritable.

Even in semi-automatic mode, it is very simple to squeeze off two dozen rounds before you even know what has happened. If illegally modified to fully automatic mode, it doesn’t take any imagination to see dozens of bodies falling in front of your barrel.

If you’ve ever fired an AR-15 you know what complete and utter nonsense this is. Squeezing off two dozen rounds requires a high-capacity magazine and 24 distinct and separate trigger pulls along with the corresponding “bruising” shoulder kicks, “disorienting” brass casings “flying past your face,” and “bomb-like” explosions. I’m pretty sure you can’t accomplish that “before you even know what has happened.” The AR-15 has one of the lightest kicks—a gentle tap to the shoulder—of any rifle you’ll ever fire. Youtube is full of videos of girls and boys under the age of 10 firing AR-15s with smiles on their faces, apparently unperturbed by this alleged bruising this full-grown man suffered from. The AR-15 is almost certainly quieter than every one of the handguns he claims to have fired, (loud like a bomb???) and definitely quieter than most other rifles, and his theatrical, melodramatic claim that he suffered PTSD after firing the weapon…let’s just say that did not sit well with members of our armed forces who took some issue with that, as seen in his retraction statement that was added to the bottom of the article.

Kuntzman’s attempt to summon the spirit of Pollack’s malicious writings through his hammy, histrionically contrived description of his experience firing the AR-15 have only one goal…to raise the ire of the ignorant readers of the New York Daily News by creating an emotionally distorted Moral Panic that will drive them to take action to ban these types of weapons that he sees as unnecessary and dangerous. His efforts to instill the image of “dozens of bodies falling in front of your barrel” should be completely transparent, yet a constant flow of disinformation and fear mongering about AR-15s by journalists and politicians alike would seem to indicate that it is not.

Magazines that publish articles like those by Pollack in the 1950s and Kuntzman today are blurring the lines between established and respected periodicals and sensationalist tabloids by their lack of editorial oversight or journalistic integrity. They care about nothing more than readership, and sensationalism-driven clicks and sales.

Moral Panic has reared its ugly head in numerous examples of legislation since Pollack started the trend. In the 1950s, Dr. Frederic Wertham went on a crusade to warn America about the dangers of comic book violence. He penned numerous articles, including “Seduction of the Innocent,” and “What Parents Don’t Know about Comic Books” in Ladies Home Journal. His completely unbased and unscientific, speculative assertions that comic books were a corrupting influence on youth, a public health problem, and a leading cause of juvenile delinquency created a Moral Panic that spread across the country. The Senate convened a special subcommittee to explore the matter, and legislation was enacted that forced government comic book censorship and “approval” stickers before they could be legally sold. At no time were any serious, scientific studies conducted; the subcommittee members relied almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence and “expert” testimony before coming to their conclusions.

In recent times, the media narrative that police kill minorities, particularly black men, at a higher rate than others, even that they have set out to intentionally murder black men as part of a racist crusade, has created a massive Moral Panic that is currently inflaming the public and dividing the country. This is a narrative that has been thoroughly and completely debunked by numerous scientific studies, and yet groups like Black Lives Matter and far-left media outlets continue to spew it, intentionally keeping America in internal strife as a means of forwarding their own nefarious agenda.  

Most of the Moral Panic in society today seems driven by the political left, however, the right is just as guilty. After the 1 October shooting at the Route 91 festival in Las Vegas, bump stocks became the new Moral Panic of society. A device designed to help disabled veterans and target shooters enjoy their passion was bastardized by a murderer and society reacted in sadly typical fashion. President Trump quickly blamed Obama for the legalization of such a deadly and dangerous device, and ordered the Department of Justice to ban them. This ban was issued in 2018 and went into effect in 2019, requiring owners to destroy them or turn them in to the ATF under penalty of ten years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. And why? Because one person misusing something that was designed to be simply a tool created a nation-wide hysterical Moral Panic and politicians reacted. This ban was only struck down as unconstitutional a few months ago by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the legal battle is still ongoing.

Is there a difference between a spring-assisted-opening knife and a switchblade? Sure. The blade on a switchblade deploys a small fraction of a second quicker. The switchblade requires a very slightly less dexterous movement to open. And, it makes a slightly louder and scarier “snap” when it opens. (I get a form of PTSD every time I open mine, as well as visions of dozens of bodies falling under my deftly slashing hand as I cut my way through a crowd while the song, “Gee, Officer Krupke” plays in my head.) But are these differences great enough to justify one of the knives being completely legal while possessing the other one gets you sent to jail? That is quite hard to fathom yet that is our reality, thanks to the moral panic riled up by Jack Pollack’s article.

It’s really not until recently, more than 60 years later, that this fugue of nonsensical hysteria has finally begun to unravel. Although switchblades are still federally illegal to import or sell over state lines, most states have now repealed laws against them and made them completely legal to own and carry. I believe they are still illegal to own in 11 states (including Washington) with a couple others having some restrictions on blade length or concealed carry.

Moral Panic causes our society to react emotionally rather than logically to problems our nation faces. It causes us to legislate by fear, to act impetuously and impulsively when confronted with real, germane and critical issues. Whenever we make hasty, impassioned decisions based on an emotional reaction rather than a well-thought-out, logical, data-driven response to an issue, we are much more likely to get the solution wrong, and quite possibly to exacerbate the problem. So, what can we do about the detrimental effects of our emotional reaction to Moral Panic? The first step is recognizing and crushing the driving force behind this plague, namely the media and their incessant drive to generate clicks at any cost. By calling out and demanding an end to the nonsense of histrionic articles like the ones by Pollack and Kuntzman, we can calm the fear they’re attempting to inseminate in our psyche.

The second step is by electing more logical, intelligent leaders to Congress and the Presidency. Political media whores like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Marjorie Taylor Green, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump who thrive on bombastic speech and the susceptibility of their audience to Moral Panic need to be soundly defeated. We need a Congress that passes laws and reacts to situations by using logic, data, and a careful evaluation of facts rather than legislating through Moral Panic. Emotional reactiveness has been a massive detriment to our society and our country. It is the malevolent fiend that has fatefully led us through things like the Red Scare, wars on drugs and in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the implication of a stolen election and widespread voter fraud, and uncountable examples of unnecessary and detrimental Congressional legislation.

It’s time we defeated the sixty-year-old demon known as Moral Panic that was summoned by Pollack and nourished by panicky, emotional simpletons through the decades. It’s time we moved on from the era of reactionary politics and to an era of logic, science, and data helping us drive all of our laws and our decisions.

Pollack, Jack, “The Toy that Kills,” Woman’s Home Companion, November, 1950. https://docplayer.net/209786811-The-toy-that-kills-woman-s-home-companion-november-1950.html 

The New York Times, Obituaries, October 2, 1984 https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/02/obituaries/jack-h-pollack-69-author-of-books-and-1000-articles.html

Whitmore, Zac, “Why are Switchblades Illegal?” Blade Magazine. https://blademag.com/knife-history/why-are-switchblades-illegal

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ncr.4110450704

Kuntzman, Gersh, “What is it like to fire an AR-15? It’s horrifying, menacing, and very very loud.” New York Daily News July 14, 2016 https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/firing-ar-15-horrifying-dangerous-loud-article-1.2673201

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_stock

History of Comics Censorship, Part 1

An exciting week for Space Exploration!

This morning, the first of three spacecraft that have been headed from Earth to Mars in a cosmic convoy for the last seven months, successfully entered into orbit around the red planet. This flight, one which will become quite common over the next several decades as we see rockets firing off all over the globe every twenty-six months in preparation for a manned mission later this decade, was the first for the United Arab Emirates. Their orbiter, Al Amal, which means, “Hope” in English, successfully fired its six thrusters for a full 27-minutes in order to slow enough to enter orbit around Mars. Eleven minutes after the rockets shut down—the time it takes for a signal to reach Earth from Mars’ current position—NASA’s Deep Space Satellite Network received confirmation that the insertion burn was successful, no doubt to the great relief of the flight crew at Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai. Historically, these types of missions succeed only about 50% of the time, a number that will necessarily have to be improved on for manned spaceflight to Mars to commence. The UAE becomes only the second nation in history to successfully achieve orbit around Mars on its first attempt, after India achieved that in 2014.

Al Amal orbiter

In their treks around the Sun, Mars and Earth reach their closest points—known as near opposition—every time Earth laps Mars, which happens every 780 days, a timeframe known as the synodic period of Mars. Although rockets could technologically launch for Mars any time, it wouldn’t be very economically efficient to try to send a spacecraft to meet Mars when it’s on the other side of the Sun, which is why we ended up with three spacecraft all enroute to Mars at the same time. It takes about seven months to get there using minimal fuel, so nations tend to launch their rockets about three-and-a-half months before closest approach, and the spacecraft arrive about three-and-a-half months after closest approach.

While Al Amal is an orbiter only, whose mission is mostly that of a weather satellite, the next spacecraft to reach Mars will be both an orbiter and a lander/rover. Tianwen-1, China’s first independent interplanetary mission, is expected to arrive at Mars sometime tomorrow. It will enter into a polar orbit where it will use subsurface exploration radar to measure surface soil conditions and look for water ice under the ground. Three months from now, in May, the lander will detach from the orbiter and attempt to descend to the surface where it will dispatch a rover to explore a crater known as Utopia Planitia, an area that some scientists think may hold sub-surface ice deposits containing as much water as Lake Superior!

A selfie taken by Tianwen-1 on its long journey through space

Finally, on February 18th, NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover, launched from Cape Canaveral on July 30th, will arrive. This is a truly exciting mission with a number of firsts that, if successful, will prove our ability to send astronauts to Mars. The spacecraft will first enter Mars’ thin atmosphere using heat shields to protect it as it streaks through the sky. A parachute will then deploy to slow it further. The air pressure on Mars is less than 1% of Earth’s, so it’s impossible to slow a landing craft enough to prevent damage using just parachutes. NASA’s solution is to drop a sky crane carrying Perseverance from the belly of the sub-orbiter, and then fire rockets to slow the sky crane down to a hover where it will lower Perseverance to the surface on cables. Because any signal would take more than 22 minutes to complete the round-trip journey from Mars to Earth, there is no way for NASA engineers to take control of the mission should something go wrong, so the entire landing sequence is automated. Perseverance is the size of a small car, and its mission is to scour Jezero crater for signs of ancient Mars life while it collects and caches scores of samples for hopefully a return trip to Earth after the first manned mission sometime later this decade. Perseverance is also carrying a small drone which it will attempt to launch in the thin air to give us all some nice overhead shots of our newest rover exploring the only planet known to be inhabited solely by robots.

It’s an exciting week for spaceflight for sure, and I’ll be following it closely! You can read more about the Perseverance rover and its mission at this link: https://www.space.com/mars-rover-perseverance-landing-one-month

Check out this video animation of the full Perseverance landing sequence. It’s pretty cool! https://videos.space.com/m/WaNbcAAk/see-perseverance-land-on-mars-in-this-new-nasa-trailer?list=9wzCTV4g

The Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter theory – part one

If you live in a city, you might only rarely see a sight like this. But if you ever get away from the lights, into the darkness of the countryside, you’ve likely looked up and marveled at the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. You’ve maybe even tried to count them, wondering at just how many there are. Which is a great question. Just how many stars can you see out there?

If you’re in the darkest area on the planet, devoid of all light from the city, on a moonless night, with clear air and an unobstructed 360-degree view of the horizon, the answer is right around 4500 stars. That’s under the most ideal conditions. In places out in the countryside, the places where many people get out of the city to marvel at the blanket of stars, places where it’s dark enough to just begin to see the stripe of white that makes up an arm of the Milky Way, the answer is between 2000 and 2500 stars.

That’s still a lot of stars, and if you’ve stared up at the sight of all those glimmering points of light and considered that each of them represents a solar system, with many, if not most, having planets that orbit them, you’ve probably wondered about the possibility of alien life. Once you realize that for every star you see, there are approximately 100,000 stars you can’t see, just in the Milky Way galaxy alone, you realize how impossible it must be for us to be alone in the universe.

Think about the numbers here for a minute. Just in the Milky Way galaxy alone there are an estimated 200 billion stars. When we look up at the sky on those dark nights and marvel at all of the stars, we are seeing only a fraction of a percentage of our own galaxy. Like, one hundred-millionth of the stars in our galaxy alone. For every star we can see on a dark, clear, moonless night, there are around one hundred million stars we can’t see, just in the Milky Way galaxy. Think about that the next time you’re looking up at all those stars.

The furthest stars we can see with the naked eye are about 1000 light years away. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across, which means we can only see around 1% (with regard to distance, not quantity) of it with the naked eye. All the stars we can see with the naked eye from Earth are the brightest stars within the little red circle in the picture below.

All of those stars in our galaxy, and we’re just one galaxy out of many in the universe. How many? Take a look at this picture taken a few years ago by Nasa using two different telescopes.

Every one of the points of light in this picture is a GALAXY. All different sizes, all different shapes, ranging from an estimated 50 million stars, to 100 trillion stars in size. There are approximately 10,000 visible galaxies in this photo, the most distant, nearly 13 billion light years away. And here’s the most amazing thing:

This picture represents an area of space the width of about 1/10 that of the full moon. A tiny, minuscule, fractional, sliver of space in our view plane and it contains at least 10,000 galaxies! The reason astronomers chose this area of space to train the telescopes, letting them gather all available light for days to get the image, was because it was the darkest area of space visible from Earth, where nothing could be seen with normal telescopes. And they found 10,000 galaxies hiding there. It’s hard to fathom that, and when you extrapolate those figures to the remainder of the universe, which is symmetrical and consistent in all directions, it’s estimated that there are somewhere between 200 billion and 500 billion galaxies in the observable universe. (Some scientists think it might even be as high as 1 trillion galaxies)

How many stars is that?

It’s typically estimated at between 1022 and 1024 stars. 1024 is this number:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That’s 1 septillion stars. A trillion-trillion stars.

To put that in another perspective, the estimated number of grains of sand on every beach on planet Earth is 1021.

That means for every grain of sand on every beach on Earth, there are 1000 stars in the universe. Think about that the next time you’re laying on the beach and decide to wipe the sand off your feet.

Even if we take the lower number of the total star estimate, 1022 stars, that’s still 10 stars for every grain of sand on every beach on Earth. 10 sextillion stars in the universe. That’s not a septillion by any means, but still kind of a lot.

Astronomers’ opinions about the number of Earth-like planets that might orbit these stars varies, with some saying it’s as low as 20% of stars that contain an Earth-like planet, and some saying it could be as high as 50%. In addition, not all stars are even capable of nurturing life as we know it—white dwarfs are small and hot, red giants are huge and cool. Astronomers estimate that the number of stars that are sun-like, with regard to size, temperature, and luminosity, might only be 10%-20% of all stars.

If we take a middle of the road approach…actually, let’s take a low-end approach, we’ll look at the bottom of the range of estimates for all three figures. We’ll say there are 1022 stars and 10% of them (1021) are sun-like, and 20% of those (2×1020) contain planets that are Earth-like, in the habitable zone, or “Goldilocks Zone” as it’s known, (not too hot, not too cold, juuust right!). That leaves the possibility of 200,000,000,000,000,000,000 – 200 quintillion – or 200 billion-billion Earth-like planets in the universe.

Okay, let’s put this in more reasonable numbers by getting rid of all the other hundreds of billions of galaxies and just focusing on our own Milky Way galaxy.

We’ll take the low-end numbers again and we’ll give an estimate of 100 billion stars in our galaxy, which is the lowest estimate I’ve been able to find. (The high range is 400 billion.) If 10% of those are sun-like, that’s 10 billion suns in the Milky Way. If only 20% of those contain Earth-like planets, that’s 2 billion Earths in our galaxy.

How many of those 2 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way might support life? Now we have to move from educated estimates to speculation. There is an equation for determining the number of intelligent civilizations that exist in the galaxy, known as the Drake equation, conceived by Dr. Frank Drake. The problem with the equation is it requires a number of pure guesses and speculation to solve, things like the fraction of planets on which life appears, and the fraction of those systems which become intelligent life. These are things we can’t really know, so we have to speculate. We can take some pretty careful and conservative numbers and input them into the equation, but in the end, it’s still nothing but a guess.

So, let’s guess. Of those 2 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, let’s say that only 1% of those planets form any kind of life whatsoever, from single-celled organisms, to simple life forms, to tool-using mammals with big brains, all the way on up to super-intelligent beings. That would be 20 million planets with some type of life on them. Now let’s say that only 1% of those have more than single cellular life-forms, those that have evolved to intelligent, multi-celled life like fish and even dinosaurs or Neanderthals and other tool-users. That would be 200,000 planets like that. And let’s say just 1% of those advance to a civilization that’s at least as powerful and knowledgeable as human-kind, communicating and sending radio signals out into space. That would be 2,000 super-advanced civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And remember, this is speculating with tiny numbers. Tim Urban over at my favorite website, Waitbutwhy.com, used rather conservative extrapolation that actually came up with an estimate of 100,000 advanced civilizations in the Milky Way.

So where is everybody?

Welcome to the Fermi Paradox.

In the 1950s, while on a lunch break with several other scientists involved in the nuclear program, physicist Enrique Fermi postulated that question. If the math says there should be thousands (maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands) of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, then where are they all? Because there has never been one single instance of provable contact or signal from an alien civilization.

When you realize that our sun is very young, it gets even stranger. There are stars in our galaxy that should support Earth-like planets that are hundreds of millions, even billions of years older than the sun. Our sun is about 4.5 billion years old, but the Milky Way is about 13.4 billion years old. For 9 billion years before our sun was even formed, stars and Earth-like planets were galivanting about in our galaxy!

In theory, some of those stars and planets should have created life millions or even billions of years before our planet was even born, while our sun was still a cloud of hydrogen gas floating around in space. There should have been hundreds of intelligent civilizations out there when Earth was just beginning to cool, and then millions of years later, when single-celled organisms were just forming in the primordial soup. By now, hundreds of millions of years later, those civilizations should be so advanced that we might not even be able to fathom their intelligence. They should be advanced enough that they’ve spread throughout the galaxy, colonizing other planets, exploring other stars.

Even if you say, “well, okay, but you’re guessing on those numbers. Life might not evolve at anything near the rate you think it does”, remember that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. Maybe as many as a trillion galaxies. We can see galaxies out to a distance around 13 billion light years. That means the light from these galaxies has been traveling to us for 13 billion years. Radio signals travel at light speed. Even if you think my speculation is off by a thousand-fold, that would mean there were 2 intelligent civilizations in all the vastness of the Milky Way, but still hundreds of billions of those civilizations in the universe, many that should have been in existence for billions of years longer than humans have been around. Billions of years for those hypothetical radio signals to travel across the vast distances between the galaxies. Where are those signals? We’ve trained our radio telescopes at many of the galaxies nearest to the Milky Way and we’ve heard nothing.

So where are they all?

In the 1970s, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), a collective of scientific searches for intelligent life was formed to search for radio signals using deep-space radio telescopes like the Very Large Array shown here.

These types of arrays have been searching over the universe for decades and they’ve heard nothing. Not a peep from anything that couldn’t be explained as natural. (Other than this one mysterious signal known as the Wow! signal that we heard in 1977. It’s still unexplained.) In addition, we’ve sent signals out into space, broadcasting to all who might listen that we’re here and we’re looking for our neighbors. Nothing.

Incidentally, many scientists look at these intentional broadcasts into space as the equivalent of standing on the edge of a dark, unknown, and mysterious forest, and shouting loudly into it, (IS ANYTHING IN THERE? I’M RIGHT HERE AND I’M UNARMED!) They think it’s a pretty dangerous thing to do with the lack of knowledge we have, and, as the new kids on the block with regard to interstellar communications and technology, we should probably listen quietly for a while until we understand what might be out there. Of course, these messages will take hundreds or thousands of years to reach the systems they’re aimed toward, so unless a passing alien spacecraft happens to pick them up, we should be okay. Anyway, no response has ever been received to any message.

So again, where is everybody?

Science has a number of possible explanations for this lack of alien evidence. Some are very scary, such as there is one super-predator species out there that waits until a civilization advances to the ability to travel to other stars and then wipes them out, or assimilates them ala the Borg from Star Trek TNG.

Another theory is that advanced civilizations might have a Star Trek-like Prime Directive that enables them to observe us, but not to make contact or let us know in any way that they exist. (Known as the Zoo Hypothesis. We’re all just animals in a giant galactic zoo, folks.) A civilization that has the technology to travel the hundreds or thousands of light years between their home and ours would almost certainly have the ability to hide their presence from us. As an example, when you walk by an anthill, do the ants know you’re there? Do they have the ability to conceive of your presence, your purpose, your technology and intelligence? Civilizations that are millions or billions of years more advanced than humans might very well look at us the same way we look at ants. Their technology might be so advanced that we can’t even conceive of its purpose or its meaning, much like an ant could never conceive of what a car is, or what an iPhone can do, even if the ant was crawling right over it.

Another theorized solution to the Fermi Paradox is that super-advanced civilizations may have trapped all the energy of their home star in a type of hypothetical megastructure called a Dyson sphere

and that we can’t pick up their radio signals because they’re all trapped within this sphere. This theory, as outlandish and sci-fi in appearance as it might seem, could actually have some merit. Scientists have determined that there’s enough mass within the core of the planet Jupiter to build a sort of modified Dyson sphere, called a Dyson swarm, around the orbit of Mars. If we advanced far enough to develop the ability to dismantle Jupiter, we could build this Dyson swarm. Lining it with solar panels would give us the ability to harvest all the energy of the sun – unlimited free energy, allowing us to create a sort of inner solar system that would be completely controlled by us. If we broke up Mercury too, and built a full Dyson sphere, our sun and our radio signals would be completely undetectable to other civilizations that didn’t already know we were here.

There’s been some speculation that astronomers may have actually detected emissions from stars where Dyson spheres are currently under construction. (Or, more accurately, were under construction whenever the light we’re seeing was emitted from the stars, thousands of years ago most likely.) These stars are acting strangely, their brightness dimming periodically in similar fashion to the dimming that occurs when a planet in orbit passes between them and us, but to an extent that the object causing the dimming is way larger than a planet could actually be. You can read more about this interesting mystery here and here.

However, even if a civilization is advanced enough to build a Dyson sphere and hide all evidence of their presence, we still should be able to pick up signs of their civilization. Humans, for example, have been creating radio transmissions and projectile spewing them out into space for decades. Even if we advanced enough in the next hundred years to create a Dyson sphere (an unlikely rate of advancement), we would still have broadcast signals, both intentional and unintentional, for the previous 200 years. Those signals are traveling at the speed of light out into space, and, much like a bullet and a drunken comment, once it’s out there, it’s out there. You can’t retract it.

So, if a star suddenly disappears from our view because an advanced civilization closes up a Dyson sphere, we still should expect to have received some kind of radio signal from them over the last few decades we’ve been listening for them.

There are other theories and hypotheses that attempt to explain the Fermi Paradox, but the most popular one is The Great Filter Theory.

The Great Filter Theory basically states that at some point in the evolution of life, a filter is encountered, a filter that wipes out the advancing civilization, and that the filter is one that occurs for most, if not all civilizations at the same point in their evolution. Some may get through the filter, but most are destroyed by it. If just 1% of civilizations get through the Great Filter, that would mean there might only be 20 advanced civilizations out there, scattered throughout the 100,000 light-year-wide Milky Way, making it much more likely we wouldn’t have encountered any sign of their presence.

Now, the Great Filter is the leading theory at the moment, and many scientists think if there is such a thing, it must be behind us. We must have been one of the rare civilizations that managed to make it through the filter. They point to the asteroid or comet impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, and they say that that type of event could be the filter, that many civilizations may have been destroyed in that way, never recovering. Our planet did recover from that event, pushing us through the Great Filter.

Others, like renowned British professor and director of the Future of Humanity Institute, Nick Bostrom, think the Great Filter might be Nuclear weapons, that many civilizations, once they achieve the ability to harness the power of the atom, basically destroy themselves in war, something we actually came very close to doing in the 1960s. He thinks we might have made it through the Great Filter when we survived the Cold War.

Others think the Great Filter might be the challenge of life itself. That life doesn’t form as easily as we think it does, or that life only rarely passes beyond the zygote stage. Some think cosmic radiation, or chance, or some other factor stops life in the early, pre-intelligence stage, and that Earth, for some reason…luck, chance, or standard variance, faded that early death. As a gambler, I can appreciate the idea that we dodged the variance bullet, but the thought that Earth and our entire solar system might otherwise be as empty and barren as Mercury is a little disturbing.

Whatever the Great Filter is, we obviously have to hope it’s in our past and not in our future. When Viking 1 landed on Mars on July 20th, 1976, many scientists familiar with the Great Filter concept dreaded the idea that we might find signs of life on the red planet. If life had managed to form on two separate planets in this solar system alone, that would imply that the formation of life in the universe was easy and common, which would make the Great Filter theory the most likely explanation for the Fermi Paradox. If there had been signs of an advanced civilization on Mars – for example, the suspected canals that were big news in 1877, that might have indicated that the Great Filter lay in our future somewhere, a foretelling of our impending doom.

There are many people who believe the Great Filter is indeed in our future, and if that’s the case, it’s scary to contemplate, because it would mean we most likely have less than a .1% chance of avoiding the complete extinction of mankind.

I, unfortunately, am one of those.

Of course, I want to hope that’s not the case, and the optimist in me, and in many who write about this, wants to believe the filter lies in our past. After all, nobody wants to really contemplate the worst-case scenario, and it’s easy to believe we’re special, that we’re the chosen species who won the evolutionary Powerball jackpot, and that we’ll be the ones to eventually colonize and rule the universe.

But there’s certainly no evidence to support that hypothesis. It’s mostly wishful thinking.

Now, I certainly wouldn’t state that the Great Filter lies in our future if I didn’t have an idea of what I thought the Great Filter might be. And I’ll also state that the fact we’ve never found evidence of radio emissions from another civilization is pretty compelling evidence that the Great Filter, if it exists, is indeed in the past. However, that doesn’t mean that there can’t be two Great Filters, or even more than two. There may not be one Great Filter, there may be many Medium Filters. Maybe life is subject to extinction at multiple times throughout its evolution, and we’ve managed to dodge the bullets on several filters already. It’s possible that other civilizations have mostly fallen to one filter or another, with only relatively few surviving to where humans are today. Remember, alien civilizations with human levels of intelligence and evolution as advanced as we were in the 1800s for example, would not have thrown off any sign of their presence into the universe.

If there are many filters, then it’s possible that several of them lie in our future, and it might be worth examining what they could be, and when we’re likely to encounter them.

I think there’s a good chance that one of those filters could be Artificial Super Intelligence, and in part two, I’ll be taking an in-depth look into ASI, including exactly what it is, how far we are from achieving it (it’s almost certainly closer than you think it is), and why achieving ASI could be incredibly dangerous to the human race – dangerous enough even to result in our extinction.