Falling off the edge: in search of a flat Earth

It's just possible that future historians will label the 21st century as the Era of Extreme Stupidity. In addition to the 'Big Four' of climate change denial, disbelief in evolution by natural selection, young Earth creationism and the anti-vaxxers, there are groups whose oddball ideas have rather less impact on our ecosystem and ourselves. One segment of people that I place in the same camp as UFO abductees and their probing fixation are believers in a flat Earth.

Although on the surface this - admittedly tiny - percentage of people appear to be more amusing than harmful, their media visibility makes them a microcosm of the appalling state of science education and critical thinking in general. In addition, their belief in an immense, long-running, global conspiracy adds ammunition to those with similar paranoid delusions, such as the moon landing deniers. One example of how intense those beliefs can be (at times there's just a whiff of religious fanaticism), the American inventor and stuntman 'Mad' Mike Hughes was killed recently flying a self-built rocket intended to prove that the Earth is a disc.

I won't bother to describe exactly what the flat Earthers take to be true, except that their current beliefs resemble a description of the late, great Terry Pratchett's fantasy Discworld - albeit without the waterfall around the edge of the disc. For anyone who wants to test the hypothesis themselves rather than rely on authority (the mark of a true scientist) there are plenty of observational methods to try. These include:

1. Viewing the Earth's shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse
2. Noticing that a sailing ship's mast disappears/reappears on the horizon after/before the hull
3. How certain stars are only visible at particular latitudes

For anyone with a sense of adventure, you can also build a high-altitude balloon or undertake a HAHO skydive to photograph the Earth's curvature - from any point on the planet!

It's easy to suggest that perhaps our brains just aren't up to the task of deciphering the intricacies of a 13.7 billion old universe, but basic experiments and observations made several thousand years ago were enough for Greek scientists to confirm both the shape and size of our planet. So what has changed in the past century or so to turn back the clock, geophysically-speaking?

The modern take on a flat Earth seems to have begun in the late 19th century, with an attempt - similar to contemporary mid-Western creationists - to ignore scientific discoveries that disagree with a literal interpretation of the Old Testament. Indeed, the forerunners of today's flat Earthers were anti-science in many respects, also denying that prominent enemy of today's Biblical literalists, evolution by natural selection. However, many of the 21st century' s leading adherents to a disc-shaped Earth have more sympathy and interest in scientific discoveries, even supporting such politically contentious issues as rapid, human-induced, climate change.

This topic is laden with ironies, few greater than the fact that a large proportion of the evidence for global warming is supplied by space agencies such as NASA. The latter has long been claimed by the Flat Earth Society as a leading conspirator and purveyor of faked imagery in the promotion of a spherical earth (yes to all pedants, I know that strictly speaking our planet is an oblate spheroid, not purely spherical).

Today's flat Earth societies follow the typical pseudo-scientific / fringe approach, analysing the latest science theories for material they can cherry pick and cannibalise to support their ideas. In recent years they've even tackled key new developments such as dark energy; in fact, about the only area they are lagging behind in is the incorporation of elements involving quantum mechanics.

But for anyone with an understanding of parsimony or Occam's Razor, the physics for a flat Earth have about as much likelihood as Aristotle's crystalline spheres. It isn't just the special pleading for localised astrophysics (since the other planets are deemed spherical); isn't it obviously absurd that there could be a global conspiracy involving rival nations and potentially hundreds of thousands of people - with no obvious explanation of what the conspirators gain from the deception?

Even for the vast majority of the public with little interest or understanding of the physics, most people considering the flat Earth hypothesis are presumably puzzled by this apparent lack of motivation. In a nutshell, what's in it for the conspirators? Until recently, NASA (nick-named 'Never A Straight Answer,') was the main enemy, but with numerous other nations and private corporations building space vehicles, there is now a plethora of conspiracy partners. Going back half a century to the height of the Cold War why, for example, would the USA and Soviet Union have agreed to conspire? As yet, there hasn't been anything approaching a satisfactory answer; but ask Carl Sagan said: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Unlike most fringe groups, flat Earthers don't appear to favour other, popular conspiracy theories above scientific evidence. Yet somehow, their ability to support ludicrous ideas whilst denying fundamental observations and the laws of physics in the light of so much material evidence is astonishing.  Of course our species doesn't have a mental architecture geared solely towards rational, methodical thought processes, but the STEM advances that Homo sapiens has made over the millennia prove we are capable of suppressing the chaotic, emotional states we usually associate with young children.

Whether we can transform science education into a cornerstone topic, as daily-relevant as reading, writing and arithmetic, remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the quest continues for funding a voyage to find the Antarctic ice wall that prevents the oceans falling over the edge of the world. Monty Python, anyone?

Wildfires and woeful thinking: why have Australians ignored global warming?

In a curious example of serendipity, I was thinking about a quote from the end of Carl Sagan's novel Contact ("For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love") just a few minutes before discovering his daughter Sasha Sagan's book For Small Creatures Such as We. Okay, so I didn't buy the book - due to the usual post-Christmas funds shortage - and cannot provide a review, but this indication of our place in the scale of creation is something that resonates deep within me.

I've often discussed how biased we are due to our physical size, especially when compared to other species we share the planet with. However, I've never really considered that other fundamental dimension, time. Another Carl Sagan quote echoes many a poet's rumination on our comparatively brief lifespan: "We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever."

There's more to this than just fairly familiar poetic conceit. Earlier this month I was given a brief taste of what it might be like to live on Mars, thanks to high-altitude dust and ash transported across the Tasman Sea from the Australian bush fires. By three o'clock in the afternoon a New Zealand summer's day was turned into an eerie orange twilight, with birds and nocturnal insects starting their evening routine some five hours early. There was even a faint powdery, acrid taste in the air, adding to the sense of other-worldliness.

Apart from the obvious fact that this an example of how climate change in one nation can affect another, there is a more disturbing element to all this. Why is it that despite the reports and general consensus of the global climate science community Australians have shown a woeful lack of interest, or indeed, negativity, towards climate change?

Could it be that our society is now centred upon such short increments of time (competing businesses trying to out-do each other, which comes down to working at the ever-increasing speed our technology dictates) that we have replaced analysis with unthinking acceptance of the simplest and most aggressive opinions? Research shows that compared to even twenty years' ago, children read far less non-school literature and rely on the almost useless 'celebrity' shouters of social media for much of their information; there's not much chance of learning about informed, considered arguments via these sources!

After all, it's difficult for most of us to remember exact details of the weather a year ago, but understanding climate change relies on acceptance of directional trends over at least decades. How much easier is it to accept the opinions of those who preserve the status quo and claim we can maintain our current lifestyle with impunity? When combined with the Western capitalist notion of continuous growth and self-regulation, we see a not-so-subtle indoctrination that describes action to prevent climate change as disruptive to the fundamental aspects of the society that has arisen since the Industrial Revolution.

There is an old French saying that we get the government we deserve, which in Australia's case, implies a widespread desire to ignore or even deny global warming. Yet the irony is that of all developed nations, Australia has been at the receiving end of some of its worst effects, thanks to an average increase in daily temperature of several degrees over past century. It takes little cognition to understand how this can lead to the drier conditions that have caused the horrific bush fires; even though some have been deliberately started, their scale has been exacerbated by the change of climate. So what until now has prevented Australians from tying the cause to the effects?

It's not as if there isn't plenty of real-world evidence. However, with computer technology able to generate 'deep fakes', which implies a level of sophistication that only experts can detect, is the public becoming mistrustful of the multitude of videos and photographs of melting polar caps and shrinking glaciers? When combined with the decreased trust in authority figures, scientists and their technical graphs and diagrams don't stand much of a chance of acceptance without a fair amount of suspicion. As mentioned, it's difficult to understand the subtleties inherent in much of science when you are running at breakneck speed just to stand still; slogans and comforting platitudes are much more acceptable - unless of course people become caught up in the outcome themselves.

However, this doesn't explain why it is the key phrases such as 'climate change' and 'global warming' generate such negative sentiment, even from those Australian farmers who admit to hotter, drier conditions than those experienced by their parents' and grandparents' generations. Somehow, these sober terms have become tainted as political slogans rather than scientifically-derived representations of reality. That this negativity has been achieved by deniers seems incredible, when you consider that not only does it run counter to the vast majority of report data but that it comes from many with vested interests in maintaining current industrial practices and levels of fossil fuel usage.

Could it simply be a question of semantics, with much-used labels deemed unacceptable at the same time as the causes of directly-experienced effects accepted as valid? If so, it would suggest that our contemporary technological society differs little from the mindset of pre-industrial civilisation, in which leaders were believed to have at very least a divine right to rule, or even a divine bloodline. In which case, is it appalling to suggest that the terrible bush fires have occurred not a minute too soon?

If it is only by becoming victims at the tip of the impending (melted) iceberg that global warming is deemed genuine, then so be it. When scientists are mistrusted and activists labelled as everything from misguided to corrupt and scheming manipulators, this might only leaves a taste of what lies ahead to convince a majority who would otherwise rather keep doing as they always have done and trust politicians to do the thinking for them. I can think of nothing more apt to end on than another Carl Sagan quote: "For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

Our family and other animals: do we deliberately downplay other species' intelligence?

I recently heard about a project investigating canine intelligence, the results being that man's best friend can distinguish similar-sounding words, even if spoken by strangers. Yet again, it appears there is a less and less that makes our species unique: from the problem-solving skills of birds to social insects' use of farming techniques we find ourselves part of a continuum of life rather than standing alone at the apex.

Reading the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom's thought-provoking book Superintelligence, I was struck by his description of the variation of human intellect (from as he put it, Einstein to the village idiot) as being startling narrow when compared to the potential range of possible intelligences, both biological and artificial.

The complexity of animal brains has been analysed by both quantitive and qualititive methods, the former dealing with such measurements as the number of neurons while the latter looks at behaviour of members of a species, both in the wild and under laboratory conditions. However, a comparison of these two doesn't necessarily provide any neat correlation.

For example, although mammals are generally - and totally incorrectly - often described as the pinnacle of creation due to their complex behaviour and birth-to-adult learning curve, the quantitive differences in neural architecture within mammals are far greater than those between amphibians and some mammalian families. In addition, there are many birds, mostly in the Psittacidae (parrot) and Corvidae (crow) families, that are both quantitatively and qualitatively superior to most mammals with the exception of some primates.

I think it was the essays of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould that introduced me to the concept of EQ or encephalisation quotient, which is a label for the brain-mass to body-mass ratio. On these terms, the human brain is far larger than nearly all other species with a similar sized body, the exception (perhaps not surprisingly) being dolphins.

However, it's difficult to draw accurate conclusions just from examination of this general trend: both the absolute size of the brain and neuron density play a fundamental role in cognitive powers. For example, gorillas have a lower EQ that some monkeys, but being a large ape have a far greater brain mass. It could be said then, that perhaps beyond a certain mass the absolute brain size renders the EQ scale of little use. A 2009 study found that different rules for scaling come into play, with humans also having a highly optimal use of the volume available with the cranium, in addition to the economical architecture common among primates.

As historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari has pointed out, the development of farming, at least in Eurasia, went hand in hand with the evolution of sophisticated religious beliefs. This led to a change in human attitudes towards the other animals, with a downplay of the latter's emotional needs and their categorisation as inferior, vassal species in a pre-ordained (read: divinely-given) chain of being.

By directly connecting intelligence - or a lack thereof - to empathy and emotions, it is easy to claim that domesticated animal species don't mind their ruthless treatment. It isn't just industrial agriculture that makes the most of this lack of empathy today; I've seen small sharks kept in a Far Eastern jewellery store (i.e. as decoration, not as future food) in tanks barely longer than the creature's own body length.

Although the problem-solving antics of birds such as crows are starting to redress this, most people still consider animal intelligence strictly ordered by vertebrate classes, which leads to such inaccuracies as the 'three second goldfish memory'. I first noticed how incorrect this was when keeping freshwater invertebrates, namely shield shrimp A.K.A. triops, almost a decade ago. Even these tiny creatures appear to have a range of personalities, or perhaps I should say - in an effort to avoid blatant anthropomorphizing - a wide variety of behaviour.

Now on the verge of setting up a tropical aquarium for one of my children, I've been researching what is required to keep fish in fairly small tanks. I've spoken to various aquarium store owners and consulted numerous online resources, learning in the process that the tank environment needs to fulfill certain criteria. There's nothing in usual in this you might think, except that the psychological requirements need to be considered alongside the physical ones.

For example, tank keepers use words such as 'unhappy' and 'depression' to describe what happens when schooling fish are kept in too small a group, active swimmers in too little space and timid species housed in an aquarium without hiding places. We do not consider this fish infraclass - i.e. teleosts - to be Einsteins (there's that label again) of the animal kingdom, but it would appear we just haven't been observing them with enough rigour. They may have minute brains, but there is a complexity that suggests a certain level of emotional intelligence in response to their environment.

So where does all this leave us Homo sapiens, masters of all we survey? Neanderthal research is increasingly espousing the notion that in many ways these extinct cousins/partial ancestors could give us modern humans a run for our money. Perhaps our success is down to one particular component of uniqueness, namely our story-telling ability, a product of our vivid imagination.

Simply because other species lack this skill doesn't mean that they don't have any form of intellectual ability; they may indeed have a far richer sense of their universe than we would like to believe. If our greatest gift is our intelligence, don't we owe it to all other creatures we raise and hold captive to make their lives as pleasant as possible? Whether it's battery farming or keeping goldfish in a bowl, there's plenty we could do to improve things if we consider just what might be going on in the heads of our companion critters.

Ocean acidification: climate change at the sour end

A few weeks ago, I overheard a 58 year old man telling a 12 year old boy that the most dire of scientists' warnings concerning global warming over the past 30 years had failed to materialise - and that what the boy needed to learn was to be able to separate facts from propaganda.

Although it is no doubt next to impossible to be able to change such entrenched mindsets as those of this particular baby boomer, there is still extremely limited public understanding of the insidious changes currently taking place in our oceans. In addition to the rise in both sea temperature and sea level (approaching a centimetre every two-to-three years) a rapid increase in ocean acidity is now on course to profoundly disrupt marine life.

With the USA pulling out of the Paris Agreement, will the rest of world manage to pull together in order to prevent another tipping point? After all, increasing ocean acidification isn't something us non-marine scientists can directly observe. One key point that is immediately obvious is that it isn't a localised issue: as a third of atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed into the oceans, all the planet's seas will be affected. The decrease of 0.1pH unit in the past few centuries equates to an astonishing 26-29% increase in acidity. What's more, this change is predicted to have doubled by the end of this century. Clearly, the effect on marine life is set to be substantial.

So what is being done to assess the probable issues? Various projects around the world are using mesocosms - transparent cylinders up to ten metres long - to understand the effects of current and predicted near-future acidity levels on marine life. Coral bleaching is possibly the one condition people will have heard of (although there appear to be an astonishing number of people who think that coral is a plant rather than invertebrate animal) but sea temperature changes are as much a cause as increased acidity. Apart from causing stress to some marine organisms, leading to such conditions as lowered immune systems and so the spread of disease, acidification reduces the material available for shell and carapace formation, especially for juveniles and nauplii.

The problem isn't so much the change itself as the rate of change, which is far faster than normal geophysical processes. Indeed, one report states that over the past 20 million years, changes in oceanic acidification have been barely one percent of the current rate. Obviously, there is minimal chance of the non-directed mechanism of natural selection keeping pace with adaptations to the new conditions.

While many organisms will suffer, some such as jellyfish and toxic algae may benefit, with the latter leading to the poisoning of key fishing industry species. This in turn could lead to toxins entering the human food chain, on top of the economic issues from the decline in fish and shellfish stocks. Indeed, the US Pacific coast aquaculture industry is already experiencing a reduction in the shellfish populations. This will be in addition to the pollution of fresh waterways already explored in a post last year.

Of the various experiments aiming to understand the impact of the rapid increase, the largest project is the pan-European Biological Impacts of Ocean Acidification (BIOACID) scheme. Giant mesocosms sunk in a Swedish fjord have been sealed with local ocean water (and associated organisms) and half of them modified with the projected pH level.

Similar but small projects are underway in New Zealand and the Canary Islands, with preservation of edible stocks a key priority. Another problem with a decline in shellfish species destined for human consumption would be the loss of the raw material for chitosan, which may prove to be an ecologically-friendly replacement for plastic packaging.

Clearly, there could be numerous - and some as yet unknown - knock-on effects from the ocean acidification. Unlike the rise in atmospheric temperature, it is much more difficult to see the results of this fundamental change and for the public to understand the consequences. Yet again, the life forms affected are far from the cute poster species usually paraded to jump-start the public's environmental consciousness. Unfortunately, these may prove to be far more critical to the future of humanity and the wider world than say, giant pandas or Amur leopards. It's time for some serious sci-comm to spread the warning message!

Our feline friends - not so miaowvellous after all?

I've published a few posts concerning citizen science, from the active participation in conservation-orientated projects here in New Zealand to the more passive involvement in distributed computing projects that I briefly mentioned back in 2012.

A type of public involvement in scientific research half way between these examples has been developed to utilise the human ability to match up patterns, a skill which artificial intelligence is only just beginning to replicate. One early implementation of this was the Galaxy Zoo crowdsourced project, in which volunteers examining photographs taken by robotic, Earth-based telescopes to classify galaxies. Since 2009, the Zooniverse online portal has utilised more than one million volunteers to examine data on behalf of over fifty projects, many of which are within STEM disciplines.

Although initially often used for astronomy or astrophysics programmes, crowd sourcing platforms have latterly found an important role in conservation and biodiversity research. An example is the Smithsonian Institute-sponsored eMammal, which specialises in the examination of camera trap footage to identify the locations of animal species on a scale that could not obtained by other means.

In line with the outcome of the perhaps too ambitious Predator-free 2050 programme, one project that may require the assistance of the Zooniverse volunteers is analysis of feral cat DNA from New Zealand's Auckland Island. The DNA, derived partially from fecal matter (nice), is to discover what the cats on the island are eating. Although this research aims to discover the best way to remove invasive species from Auckland Island (cats are known to predate on native seabird species) there now appears to be another issue caused by cats living near coastlines.

Over the past fifteen years a body of evidence from around the world has shown that cats are directly responsible for the deaths of marine mammals. This might sound rather unlikely, but the microbial culprit, Toxoplasma gondii, is only found in the digestive system of cats. Both feral and domestic cats that catch and eat infected rodents or birds can acquire the parasite and pass it by their fecal matter into the wider environment via fresh water run-off or sewage outfalls. Eventually, it enters the marine food chain, reaching the apex in the former of cetaceans and pinnipeds among others.

Species such as sea otters, seals, and dolphins have been killed by toxoplasmosis, according to autopsies of specimens washed up on seashores as far apart as New Zealand and the USA. Increasing temperatures (thanks again, man-made climate change) and greater rainfall can spread toxoplasmosis even further. In addition to direct contamination from fecal matter, cat owners who flush cat litter down the toilet can also start the highly resilient microbes on a journey via sewer networks to the ocean. Among the New Zealand species proven to have been killed by infection are the critically endangered Maui dolphin and locally vulnerable Hector’s dolphin, so there is definitely a need for some prompt action.

It isn't just a case of the top marine predators eating infected fish or squid: sea mammals could swallow oocysts (basically, the protozoan equivalent of a fertilised egg) directly from water. Only now that Maui dolphins are falling victim to the parasite is the story of this deadly microbe becoming better known. Not incidentally, our species can also become ill with toxoplasmosis due to exposure to cat feces, with serious consequences for babies born to infected mothers and to people with compromised immune systems. In addition to the other potential dangers from the likes of Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli, the recent fad for 'raw' (i.e. unpasteurised) milk could lead to a far higher rate of toxoplasmosis in humans.

What can be done? Well, cat owners could stop flushing kitty litter down their toilets for a start. Is it a case that there are just too many cats in the world? Some recent reports claim that Homo sapiens and their domesticated species constitute 96% of the global mammal biomass. As for cat numbers, an estimate last year suggested that there are six hundred million pet cats and the same number of feral individuals worldwide.

Is this just too many? I admit that I'm fairly biased as it is: a few cat owners I know here in Auckland have pets that regularly kill skinks and it's only luck that these are invasive rainbow skinks rather than rare native species. When it comes to the likes of the last 55 Maui dolphins falling prey to a disease spread by an extremely common domesticated species, I'd rather be over-zealous than over-cautious in developing a solution. As far as I can see, the best control methods would be a vast reduction in cat numbers or the development of an innoculation for our feline friends that can kill the parasite. Somehow I doubt either course of action is likely, which means a far from purrfect method would be to educate cat owners as to how to minimise the spread of Toxoplasma gondii. So if you are a cat owner, or know of one, I guess this could be your time to shine...