Red Light, Stop Sign, Go!

Few things in modern life are as frustrating to me as a red light when nothing is coming from the other three directions. I try to behave with patience and courtesy when driving around, but I struggle because of my proximity to traffic lights. Or, I struggled. In the last few months, something incredible happened to eliminate most stop lights from my immediate commute and it has brought considerable relief and joy.

It may seem rather unimportant to talk about stoplights, but only from the perspective of a person who didn't have to fuss with two fairly pesky lights multiple times per day. From the point of view of that person, traffic lights could be enough of a disruption of daily affairs to get the blood pressure dangerously elevated. Anytime things come to that level of emotion, it is worth talking about. 

Most traffic lights are operated by the state department of transportation and have mechanisms in place that prevent them from staying stuck on one color for eons. Sometimes there is a weight sensor built into the street or some other contraption designed to make the transition from one side of traffic to another clean and fair. The two lights I am writing about were owned and operated by the city and have cycled through their three colors arbitrarily, facing the cardinal directions, uninterrupted and forgotten for decades.

These two sets of stoplights were a bane to those of us on our street and the intersecting roads, though, and here's why: there has never been enough traffic to justify a stoplight. Not ever. This fact affected me every day. Taking a left out of our driveway, I come to the first stoplight at a crossroad of our street, running north/south, and the intersecting street, running east/west. At this intersection, I turn left and head up the hill to the next four-way light, at which, depending on traffic, I take a right before turning left again at the back entrance to the library's parking lot.

You might say (and I would agree with you) how lucky I am to live so close to work. It has its benefits. A seven-minute, thirty-second amble on foot up to work or down the hill toward home at the end of a long day is a lovely thing. But I have been driving a lot recently because I have been concerned that our elderly pug has some incontinence issues. He does pretty well most days, but when he has to go, he has to go. I like to get home at or just past 11 and let him and our beagle, Lily, step outside while I pack some human kibble to take back with me. If the lights are in my favor, I can get home and back in less than 20 minutes, but only if the lights were in my favor. They never were.

Taking a right out of the back lot, the light is usually green, but by the time I get there, it has invariably switched to red. On the way back to work, pulling out of our driveway, the light at our corner is also almost always green. By the time I get there though, it has switched to red. It stays red for 4 minutes before it turns green again. Since I must make a left turn to go up the intersecting street, I have to wait. And guess what? There is rarely any traffic coming from the other way; nary a car in sight. 

At the top of the hill, I can make a right on red easily enough and have done so several billion times, but coming back the other way, it was ever the same scenario. I had to wait out a long light with no other traffic in sight. If, in either case, I somehow miraculously made the green, invariably there would be a car or two coming the other direction that would prevent me from making my left before the light went red again. It happened regularly. The universe did not want me to sail through either of those lights.

You may ask why these lights were so bizarre and seemingly aware of my comings and goings and why they seemed to have it in for me. I have spent many hours at these red lights wondering the same. My only theory is that, since these are city-run lights, they developed something akin to sentience and decided that they really did not like me. The feeling was mutual.

The corner of our property makes up two sides of the south and west streets quadrant. In the time we have lived here, I have witnessed all kinds of stoplight-induced calamities and “near misses”. Police cruisers were the most frequent offenders, running red lights while rushing to the scenes of crimes and accidents. I was horrified on many occasions as cruisers nearly hit an oncoming vehicle while blowing through the light. During downpours or icy conditions, vehicles unable to stop careened through the lights causing fender benders and other hair-raising automotive nightmares. At the intersection up the hill, I have nearly been hit countless times by drivers from either direction who simply blow through the light while gazing at comments on their witty social media posts. One gets tired of almost dying as well as always being held up. So, I devoutly hoped that the council would eventually decide to remove the stoplights and install stop signs and make both intersections all-way stops. 

It might be odd to wish for such things. I don't believe in prayer, even to the lesser traffic deities, but somehow my prayers were answered and I didn’t even have to make use of the public comment period at the council meeting. 

In terms of major miracles, of which all ancient scriptures are full, Lazarus's walking out of the grave takes the cake as the big one. Modern-day miracles are nonexistent, but the Miracle of the Stoplights, as it will come to be called, is right up there with raising the dead. Nothing anyone says will change my mind about that.

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It all started about a year ago when a series of storms wreaked havoc across North Carolina and cut power to hundreds of thousands of residents. The power was out for about sixteen hours, in total for us. When the power came back on, the lights at both intersections were obviously messed up. It was a few weeks before the problem was addressed. In the meantime, the city put up temporary stop signs. At the closest intersection to us, the problem was resolved more quickly, and so it was business as usual for me every morning. However, the other intersection by the library briefly lost its ability to stop me on my way home. There was a slight learning curve for other drivers. They had grown used to not paying attention at a stoplight. Now, they had to learn how to not pay attention at a four-way stop. They eventually glommed on, but for me, it was utter joy. I actually found myself looking forward to getting to the intersection.

At about this time, my neighbor, who lives at the top of the hill by the other intersection, came to the library on some personal business and we were chatting about this and that when he casually dropped the news that the city was considering making the change permanent at both of our intersections. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I have often imagined the look on Mrs. Lazarus's face when hubby obediently came forth from his grave. I know exactly how she felt. Here was my long-awaited hope. If true, my life was about to be made, at least in terms of my commute to and from work.

But patience is one of those tough things for me. Like a parched wanderer in the desert, I had glimpsed an oasis. These things take time. The wheels of local government do not move quickly. Our small town has a relatively civil approach to politics, and being that we live in the South, there is a good deal more courtesy in these processes than at the state or national levels. Even something as small and meaningless as a brace of stoplights, speaking comparatively, eventually gets brought up and a motion made and seconded. The news that it was going to happen made the political machinations seem to take an eternity to me. By the time Yule rolled around I gave into the strong temptation to lose hope. In ill moods I muttered that maybe the neighbor's rumor had been just that. At each corner at the upper four-way, the lights had been fixed, meanwhile and the four temporary stop signs lay in the easements rusting and killing the city's grass. My hopes were seemingly dashed.

My mother’s habit of making me memorize Bible verses has filled my brain with Psalms and Proverbs and snippets of verse for daily situations. During this time, “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life,” rattled around in my otherwise empty cranium. It has a nice ring and it rang true, at least for my hope for stop signs. But I have grown cynical of late. My trust in elected individuals has paled. Voices of insanity, hysterical, power-hungry and mistakenly assuming that their way is the only way, have made things difficult for much progress at any level. I weighed going to a council meeting and putting in my “two pennies worth”, but knew that I would be just one more “resounding gong” or “clanging cymbal”.

The tenets of stoicism, as set down by Caesar Marcus Aurelius and Epicurus and others, suggest that I bear all with patience. The good emperor once asked, “Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.” There was nothing for it. I would have to grin and bear it, just like I bore the agonizingly slow red lights while cussing quietly under my breath and feeling fit for a brawl. I was pretty sure that these were the slings and arrows Hamlet was talking about.

Several weeks after Christmas, our local newspaper—the good one—had a small headline below the fold that proclaimed news about certain town traffic lights had been discussed at a council meeting, with more on page 8A. I hurriedly paged to 8A hoping to find good news. I didn’t, because it was actually printed on 7A, but, I finally found the small section. I’m not sure “more” was the right term to use, but there was some news. 

The council had decided to save some cash by removing its own stoplights, agreeing that the intersections in question no longer needed lights to break up traffic. The sparse article clearly stated that the plan encompassed doing one intersection at a time and allowing several weeks between for drivers to adapt. Imagine my joy, when, within a few weeks, covered stop signs had been erected at all four points at both quadrants. It was the equivalent of wrapped presents under the Christmas tree with my name on them. Here were the first clues that what I had dearly hoped for would finally come true. Now, I had to muster patience for the day when they could be enjoyed.

Of course, the first intersection to be made a four-way stop was the furthest from our house. Well, that figured. I had to take a small victory and be grateful. But it was a qualified win. To not startle the local drivers, the city kept the red lights flashing, as per their notice in the paper. However, the flashing was somewhat frenetic, more like a strobe and it caused some issues.

Actually, chaos ensued. The fast blink confused so many people that on several occasions I had to swing my car alongside someone just sitting at the intersection, roll down my passenger side window and explain the situation to deeply confused and frightened drivers. After three near accidents, two squabbles where drivers left their cars to yell at other drivers and one situation where an elderly chap was just weeping copiously, I called the city. I figured my proximity and residence on the block in question gave me some authority to call and share the news.

The person at the city engineer's office heard my gripe and within a few days, they had adjusted the light to a more steady and evenly paced flash. I also used the opportunity to ask about when the other light (the one closest to our house) might get switched to flashing, but I got a cagey response. I hung up and hung my head. The terse reply from the engineering department was that it would be “a while”. Interestingly, though, the next day, as I came home to let the pups out, the city workers were out removing the covered stop signs and walking around in the road looking important and busy. It took real effort to restrain my urge to run up and hug every one of them.

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Lazarus had probably gotten used to the idea of being dead. He'd been in the grave for some little time when the call came through for him to ‘come forth’. Once he was up and moving groggily toward the crowd gathered outside, he may have had to recollect a few things before he got used to being alive again. I empathize with him. After years of dealing with the stoplights and being used to the traffic rules that they represent, it can be hard to adapt to new skills.

For the first few weeks I blew through the lights—after stopping for an appropriate period, of course—and it was glorious. Like all new things, though, the joy wore off quickly. The flashing lights now feel like training wheels. I am ready for them to be switched off and removed. After all, most people who use the intersections regularly are up to speed (so to speak) on the changes. Having stop signs and flashing lights is silly. How long do people need to get used to the idea? It’s not like the folks who use these intersections regularly haven’t figured it out by now.

My own problem has been somewhat less explainable. Now, every time I arrive at a red stoplight, I stop, look both ways, and then get ready to go, before hurriedly stamping on the brakes again as I remember that I have to wait until it changes to green. This has happened several times. Luckily, there was no representative of the police present to see my stupidity.

Even with the blinking lights, though, the sheer luxury of being able to move quickly through a quiet crossroad is very nice. I would have assumed that most people locally felt the same way. That changed when Micki read me some words of frustration from one of our local leaders who was extremely exorcized by the new situation. This man and his family live in our neighborhood, too, but not close enough to call neighbors, not that I would employ the term even if he lived next door. He was very unhappy about the new four-way stops and was using his power, such as it is, to try to undo the council's changes. I cautiously admit that the online screaming done by this person enhanced my joy of stop signs tenfold.

And, it turns out that schadenfreude was exactly the condiment I needed to more fully savor our neighborhood’s new traffic freedoms. My commute time has been reduced considerably and it gives me no end of joy to know that the local “Right Honorable” is in misery, too. Few things can be as enlivening as knowing that a scoundrel is having a bad day, unless you add stop signs where stop lights once were to the menu.

So there's the saga. While seemingly trivial, it serves as a testament to the small victories that can bring unexpected joy. What began as a daily source of frustration transformed into a symbol of triumph, a tangible representation of bureaucratic change working in favor of the common person. The removal of the lights not only streamlined my commute but also provided a much-needed antidote to the cynicism that often creeps into daily life. More than just a traffic issue, this experience underscored the power of patience, the occasional absurdity of local politics (and politicians), and the simple pleasure of seeing a long-held desire fulfilled. It's a reminder that even in the face of modern frustrations, a little bit of change, even something as silly as changing stoplights to stop signs, can make a world of difference.

Are you there, Planet X?

There was some stir about twenty years ago, when an international board of space scientists—including Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City—demoted Pluto from its accepted role as a full-fledged planet, reducing the number of official orbs in our system from nine to eight. This upset a lot of people, myself included, but the decision was based on scientific principles and not done on a whim, or so they claimed. For years, as technology became increasingly sophisticated, we learned more and more about the former 9th world and the data did not support its continuing in the position. Disappointing as this might have been (and it certainly rankled) Pluto's journey from theory to discovery to its current status as a ‘dwarf planet’ has helped to fertilize the scientific community's imagination about another tantalizing possibility way out there in the outskirts of our solar system.

The scuttlebutt around the astronomer’s water fountain has been that there may be a potential ninth planet that fits all the standards of planethood lurking just beyond our ability to prove its existence. However fantastic that seems, I find the concept a fascinating distraction from the lasting frustration of Pluto's change from when I was a lad.

I admit, when the news reached me, I was sad and not a little concerned about the audacity of modern science. It made me feel like a well-known support structure had been removed and that science as I knew it would topple into pseudoscientific malarky. If they could remove a planet, what was next; declaring that only two of Newton's laws were up to scratch? The change was a lot to get used to.

Eastern Lebanon County (ELCO) Middle School had a planetarium and our space science teacher, Mr. Philips, drilled us on star names, the planets and constellations and rudimentary astrophysics during my seventh-grade year. It was the only class in my entire school career that I passed with no effort through sheer love of the subject matter. Within the parameters of the curriculum was the well-established fact that Pluto was the last little world out there at the border of our cozy star system. I always imagined a hand-painted sign affixed to a stake hammered into Pluto that read, “NOW LEAVING THE SOLAR SYSTEM. Y'ALL COME BACK!”

But Pluto no longer plays in the big leagues and sadly, there will be no chance for the tiny sphere to get called back up to the majors. By the standards of the other eight players in the system, Pluto is more akin to a very large asteroid or moon or a tiny remnant of the intervening chaos of the early formation of our star’s history than a planet. This reality is the price of scientific discovery. As we learn new things, we have to update our understanding.

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Aside from a handful of numbskulls that believe that the earth is flat or that the moon landing was faked, most people know that we live on a planet in the solar system named after our local home star, called Sol. The inner four terrestrial planets are rocky and small and only one has water and life (Earth). The others are not just hostile to Earth life, but barren of their own. While Mars appears to have supported life at some point in the distant past, it has since lost that ability.  Mercury and Venus, on the other hand, have never been able to sustain life—Mercury due to its proximity to the sun and Venus due to its sultry atmosphere containing too much methane and ammonia.

Next come the massive gas giants, the first of which is the largest in our system, Jupiter. Between Mars and Jupiter, though, spins a huge ring of asteroids called the Main Belt. Astronomers have speculated about what this ring of asteroids may once have been. There are millions or even billions of asteroids whirling here, ranging in size from dust to the largest-known chunk, Ceres, which is about a quarter the size of our moon and half as big as Pluto. The asteroid belt might be leftover junk from the formation of the other planets, or it might be the remnants of a destroyed world.

Just past the Main Belt comes monstrous Jupiter. This Jovian behemoth is one-tenth the size of our sun and has upwards of seventy-nine moons, the four largest of which, Io, Ganymede, Europa and Calisto, were picked out by Galileo Galilei before he was put in prison for thinking too much about the planets and the star they orbit. Jupiter’s atmosphere is mainly hydrogen, helium and ammonia, but it is so thick that we cannot see what may be at its core. Jupiter is known for The Great Red Spot, a gargantuan storm that has thundered on for millennia. 

Next is the second-largest gas giant, Saturn. Named after the Roman god of agriculture, this gigantic planet is known for its rings of rock and ice, which Galileo also discovered. Saturn has many moons, but Titan, the second-largest in the solar system, is the only moon with a thick atmosphere and, like Earth, the only planet with stable oceans, though they are liquid hydrocarbons (like oil). Both Saturn and Jupiter are the furthest planets in our system that are visible with the naked eye.

Beyond Saturn is Uranus, an ice giant with nine small rings. Uranus is pitched, so that its axis is horizontal and its rings seem to orbit vertically. Out beyond Uranus, is the last planet in the system, Neptune, a dark blue ice giant and the only current planet that was not discovered by empirical observation. Interestingly, Neptune has an almost perfectly circular orbit, unlike the elliptical orbits of the other planets and is therefore almost always the same distance from the sun at any time in its 164.8 year orbit. Neptune has sixteen moons, but only one, Triton, is spheroidal.

Beyond Neptune is the Kuiper Belt, named after the Dutch astronomer, Gerard Kuiper, who accurately predicted its existence. Dwarf planets, like Pluto, and “planetesimals” and asteroids and dust and remnants of methane, ammonia and ice revolve here in an ever-moving chaotic merry-go-round of space debris in a circumstellar ring. These Trans Neptunian Objects have wild and wooly orbits that cause them to careen around like unhinged rodeo clowns, swinging this way and that and bashing into one another. Beyond these whirling dwarf planets and large asteroids are the Extreme Trans Neptunian Objects (ETNOs) which reside at the farthest edge of our ability to know and observe.

The ETNos behave similarly to their nearer cousins, but sometimes they jut and wangle almost as if they are influenced by gravity beyond their own. They hunker and wobble and spin in strange clumps and arrays, almost exactly as they might if they were pulled on by a gas giant. This has caused speculation that they are actually being perturbed by massive gravity other than their own or Neptune’s. The ETNOs are, according to some theories, swarming and swirling because of the gravity of a giant planet out beyond them. A planet so far away that we cannot see it, but that is, essentially, still part of our solar system and just waiting to be discovered by more powerful instruments and sharper minds.

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In the late 19th Century, Percival Lowell, a somewhat misunderstood and ridiculed astronomer, echoed centuries of speculation when he claimed that there was a planet in the depths of the solar system, beyond Neptune. Well before the tools necessary to make such discoveries were developed, Lowell postulated that the gravitational behavior of Neptune and Uranus showed that there must be another planet out there. He called it Planet X. Lowell became obsessed with proving the existence of Planet X, motivated by his famously bad theory that had black balled him within the scientific community of his era. Lowell's other idea—that the lines on Mars were canals created by Martians—was heartlessly mocked. Both H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs made use of this “pseudo theory” to enhance their fictional representations of Mars and Martians in their science fiction adventure novels, The War of the Worlds and the John Carter of Mars series, respectively. Desperate to live down the ridicule, Lowell worked tirelessly to prove Planet X was out there. 

Lowell died suddenly in 1916 with Planet X unproven, but most of the work he left to prove that the mystery planet was there led to the discovery of Pluto in 1930. After his death, Lowell’s brother donated money to refit the telescope at the Lowell observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona with more powerful lenses. Over the next fifteen years, continuous photography of the night sky in the region where Lowell had suggested Planet X might be, led to the discovery of an object large enough to match the weird “perturbed” orbits of Uranus and especially Neptune. Planet X became Pluto.

That Lowell never lived to see his Planet X theory even partially vindicated is only half the tragedy. When the dwarf planet was originally assumed to be there, there was no way to truly measure its size or know much about it at all. For the next seventy years, though, with the advent of more powerful telescopes and more sophisticated technology, Pluto was almost continuously downgraded from Lowell’s original idea of Planet X to its modern reality. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) fired Pluto in 2006, 90 years after Lowell worked himself to death trying to find it. However the discovery of the tiny planet is very impressive considering the era and lack of technology.

Not only can we now see Pluto, thanks to powerful telescopes and modern computing, we can see its moons. The miniscule world has five, the largest of which, Charon, is just a little less than half Pluto’s size. The other four, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra (note the underworld theme) are merely chunks of rock caught in orbit around their dark father. We didn’t know about them until 2015 when the New Horizons spacecraft was able to fly by and take measurements and photographs. In 1992, it was discovered that Pluto was the largest of a massive number of other objects in the Kuiper Belt.

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Hard work, initiative and dedication to a theory discovered Pluto. It is hard not to think that a similar discipline will lead us to find the planet that could be causing gravitational upheaval beyond the ETNOs. The scientists suggesting a gas giant past the Kuiper Belt are using the same logic that Lowell used when postulating Planet X. The problem is that, despite modern technology, it is just so darned far away. 

Units for big distances in space were, until recently, based on the distance between Earth and the sun, averaging our furthest and closest orbital distances. This was called an Astronomical Unit (AU) and was used to measure the distances of the other planets in the solar system. The problem is, this metric was not precise enough for measuring really vast distances, like those out to and past Pluto. In 2012, the precise measurement of one AU was set at just under 150 billion meters. The distance to Pluto is about 36.08 (depending on its orbit) AUs away or about 5 million kilometers. Assuming Pluto is at apogee (the furthest part of its orbit), it is just shy of 7.5 trillion meters (with a t) or just over 4 billion miles away. It took the New Horizons spacecraft about nine years to get to Pluto hauling the mail at 58,000 mph. These are truly forbidding distances.

The James Webb space telescope can see about 13.5 billion lightyears into space, which is incredibly far, but it is not the equivalent of taking farseers from the back room and gazing at the moon with them. If there is a dark gas giant in the depths out past the Kuiper belt, there is almost no chance that we could see it. First, the sun’s light would barely illuminate it. We might be able to see it using other spectrums, including infrared (IR) light, depending on what its atmosphere (if any) is composed of but that would mean that we would have to know exactly where to look. At such distances, it is incredibly difficult to precisely localize the sources of the gravitational forces that cause the ETNOs to behave like it’s Old Home Week in the depths of the system. If we cannot see it, it is nearly impossible to know where to look to start the process except where objects are perturbed by odd gravitational disturbances.

The other difficulty is that, unlike mountains or trees or tall buildings, planets move. They orbit the sun at varying speeds so that at any given moment in time there is roughly 360° field where the planet could be. Add to this rather perplexing problem the fact that Earth is also moving and that objects between Earth and the Kuiper Belt could obscure deeper objects, and you get a problem too jangly to consider. Even with the impressive capability of the James Webb Space Telescope.

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If there is a ninth planet roving about in the darkness beyond the Kuiper Belt—incidentally, not a terribly unreasonable theory—it is so far away that we have to sharpen some of our tools to get the data necessary to prove the theory. Of course, nothing depends on whether there is a planet out there or not—well, not really.

Scientists have long assumed that something out there has enough gravity to drag objects passing in the night close enough to make contact with the objects in the Kuiper Belt. Large asteroids are forever being flung out of their own erratic orbits, and getting swatted sunward by a comet or other larger chunk of something. These big space boulders become “planet killers”, hurtling toward the terrestrial planets at fearsome speeds. 

If a comet is drawn close to the orbit of an unknown gas or ice giant, possibly larger than Jupiter, and is sent straying into the Kuiper Belt as a result, the chances of it careening into other asteroid-like objects or planetesimals are very high. Frighteningly so. This very scenario may be what caused the Chicxulub asteroid to crater the planet and kill off the dinosaurs. The Trans Neptunian Objects and ETNOs out there in the wastes of our solar system are forever getting lobbed homeward. In June of last year, the asteroid named 2024 MK passed by Earth close enough to make anyone frantic. It missed us by a smaller margin than we would like to consider, given that all the bodies in the local system are moving like proverbial targets at a police urban crime simulation shooting range. Considering the vast distances in space, even just in our local system, for an asteroid to be spotted coming that close to our home ought to wake us to the need to figure out what is going on out there in the borderlands beyond Lowell’s Planet X. If we could get a fix on the possible ninth planet, we might also be able to see big chunks of space rock hurtling at us much sooner.

Until we know for sure, I, like Lowell, will continue to hope there is a dark giant in the deep beyond Pluto, just waiting to be discovered. If so, I hope it happens in my lifetime. I hope they name it Planet X to honor Percival Lowell, who is remembered for his inability to keep his speculations quiet.

The Uncle Dan Approach

Author’s Note: The following essay is dedicated to my late Uncle Dan Swavely, teacher, friend, family and role model. 

1937-2016. “Always Be Prepared”.

I am a lifelong learner. My boundless curiosity was primed by my maternal uncle, Dan, who poured as much knowledge into my hungry brain as possible from when I was a small person. He taught me everything from survival in the woods to the scientific method, which were all part of his extended syllabus. Uncle Dan was a born teacher, though he never worked in school. For his entire life, he ceaselessly educated people, and I’m lucky to say that I was one of his students.

Uncle Dan possessed a rare gift for igniting curiosity about the mundane, effortlessly revealing the scientific wonders hidden in the everyday. His insatiable thirst for knowledge fueled an equally passionate desire to share it, inspiring others to embark on their own learning journeys. This characteristic became his hallmark; a quality so recognized that at his funeral, several people testified that he gave them the gift of learning, too. Throughout his life, he was never without a book and taught himself enough about geology (his true passion) that when, in retirement, he volunteered at a college-run museum, the PhD geologists there recognized and respected his knowledge and skill. These venerable retired professors referred to him cordially as a non-academic “field” scientist. This so tickled him that he shared his variant of the definition of PhD with them. “Pile (it) high and Deep”. For all his wry and good-natured ribbing, though, he found esteem and camaraderie among the academicians, which pleased him.

Dan felt a deeper sense of duty for his sister's children, though. He introduced us to the works of Carl Sagan; to the PBS shows NOVA and Nature and to a host of aphorisms and simple precepts that have remained useful to both of us. One of these: “It is better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it” will be with me in the last hour. His lessons were practical and carefully formulated. He believed that—short of reading—experience was the best teacher and in this vein, he brought my brother and me white-water rafting, rock climbing, camping, bird-watching, hiking and spelunking (cave exploring) and much else. I know how to build a fire outside without matches because he made me do it over and over until I got it lit. I also know how to keep my knives sharp and clean because Uncle Dan’s maxim about knives was drummed into me from the time I was small. I know and believe the doctrine that “a dull knife is a dangerous knife” and live by it. I share his fondness for pocket knives and always carry one. I feel quite undressed without it.

Uncle Dan instilled in me a healthy skepticism toward authority. He held those in power to a high standard, emphasizing their duty to disseminate knowledge rather than exploit their positions for gain. This resonated deeply, shaping my own views. His homemade maxim, displayed proudly in his basement lab—“An expert is someone who would if they could, but can’t so they tell someone who already knows how, how they should”—encapsulated this perfectly. While he didn't plant the seed of my religious unbelief, he certainly nurtured my inherent skepticism toward figures of authority, whether behind a podium, a pulpit, or a television screen.

Dan could be a little much sometimes, as all extremely intelligent people tend to be. He was not a misanthrope by any stretch, but his distrust of others was a primary ore of his character and he preferred the safety of his familiar spaces and the people who regularly convened there. He may have been somewhat reclusive, but what he lacked in social grace, he made up for with his love of learning and his physical and moral courage.

It is impossible to quantify exactly how his avuncular instruction influenced the men that we are today. I have tried to emulate Uncle Dan by maintaining that list of his maxims and trying to ‘always be prepared’. I am not as excited to share my knowledge with just anyone as he was and I have had less than pleasant results trying to inspire others to dig into their curiosity. 

For Uncle Dan, knowledge wasn't just power; it was the essential antidote to the fear and uncertainty inherent in the human condition. I sometimes wonder if I've strayed too far from his optimism, becoming overly cynical about what I perceive as a widespread decline in critical thinking. 

At a Rotary Club luncheon, an invitation to discuss library resources became an unintended experiment in tone. My goal was to subtly weave in concerns about online misinformation. While I did highlight the library's digital offerings, the feedback afterward—a gentle "you became a bit stern"—made me wince. Reviewing the recording, I cringed. Thirty minutes, a microphone, and a captive audience transformed my presentation into something resembling a crisp homily on the perils of credulity, complete with a slightly shocked audience. It was a stark reminder of how Uncle Dan would have used the opportunity to help people understand why library resources were a solution to credulity. It was a missed opportunity to follow in his footsteps, as I once did on long hikes. 

I don’t mean to get preachy. Even on this blog, my essays are sometimes a little too pontifical. My coworkers stop me rather than just glazing over while I lecture on this or that topic. My family must put up with it, I guess.

Fearing that I have been sententious in all my writing, I delved back into the file of newspaper articles I wrote years ago. Fortunately, none of them seemed imperious or grandiose to me, though several got close. In one column, in which I reviewed Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil, I composed a calm but pointed warning about the nature of evil as Arendt described it in her book. “The lesson we can learn from [Hannah Arendt’s reporting of] Eichmann’s trial is twofold,” I wrote. “In one way it is a testament [to] the need to maintain a clear and watchful eye on the political movements and leaders we support. In another way it is a reaffirmation of an ancient truth: evil isn’t supernatural or preternatural. Evil is part of human affairs and as regular and common as those from whom it originates. If we remain blind or obstinate to that fact, the consequences we reap will not easily be countenanced.” Pretty easygoing Dave, you may say, and I might agree with you. 

In-person discussions that I had with people while sitting around a fire or hanging out at someone’s barbecue were perhaps civil, but now I wonder if I was any less abrasive. My tune hasn’t changed much over the years, but my tone has. I have grown increasingly dubious about the general public’s ability to think and be rational. This isn’t a new problem, but it has experienced a pronounced metastasis. I think part of my need to lecture comes from a sense of time running out; like if we don’t get a handle on these social problems, our society will be dashed on the rocks of ignorance and hate. 

My desire to share ideas, to put them down on paper, perhaps stems partly from a concept introduced by Phillip Ferriera, one of my philosophy professors and the man who introduced me to Immanuel Kant and Soren Kierkegaard. He suggested that we only remember the great minds who took the time to record their ideas and that many other potentially significant thinkers throughout history remain forgotten. His implication was clear. Regular people have the power to change the world if they will, but only if they put their thoughts down for posterity. It is probably impossible to count how many total people there have been since humans first walked erect and started building things. And yet, many of them could have had life-altering thoughts or realizations (I will not say revelations) that perished with them, either because they couldn’t write or because the thought was as fleeting as their lives were. Some, certainly, were persecuted, tortured and eventually killed because of their ideas.

When near-universal public literacy was achieved (after the Industrial Revolution, especially) and public schooling became a norm, enough people were ‘lettered’ to make significant changes in human history and culture, sharing their thoughts and ideas in a way that could benefit humanity. For a brief but glorious time, likely beginning during the Enlightenment and lasting until the end of the 20th Century, almost anyone could make a difference (as Uncle Dan did) merely by sharing ideas.

Today, the opposite seems true. So many people put nonsense ideas out into the ether that they merely add to the deafening roar of background noise. Those of us who do write our ideas down have no real ability to swing the tide of human events or make a dent for good because what we share immediately fades into the static. 

That ceaseless influx of information is too much for us to handle and is the reason why humanity is so stressed and reactive. News that does make it through the barrage is never good. This is intentional. Bad news tends to make stressed and fearful people even more anxious. Whenever a friend or colleague says to me, “Have you heard the latest?”I feel a pit in my stomach, not always because of the specific events they describe but because it is one more example of ideas being used to keep us feeling helpless and stops us from engaging our critical faculties. If you keep a fox on a tether by your chicken coop, the chickens will never settle down. For this reason, most of us go through life stunned into believing we cannot do anything to help or change the tide of human affairs for good.

The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure in the temporal lobe of the brain, is responsible for processing emotions like anxiety and fear. This small but powerful part of the cerebral cortex evolved to aid human survival in the ancient savannah and veldt, where social and emotional interactions were crucial. When information upsets, angers or scares us, it is the amygdala that responds first. The prevailing structure of social interaction has been altered by the internet. That change leaves us vulnerable to ideas specifically designed to circumvent rational thought,  and so we miss the social cues that typically inform our understanding of behavioral norms.

Unfortunately, the market of ideas has been compromised. Even if we could break through the noise, our screen-addicted, information-addled culture has been easily conditioned to have knee-jerk emotional reactions rather than rational responses to the worst ideas. This makes it easy for bad ideas to be repackaged in a way that appeals to lazy thinking and emotional manipulation and is why so many of us have been duped into looking at truly bad people as if they are heroes. 

Without intervention, people in our society will become nothing more than automatons, consuming only the information fed to them, lambs to the slaughter with no sense that they have the power to change things. This was one of the key concepts in Orwell’s representation of the lowest class, or proletariat, as described in his novel 1984. Yet there has to be a balance, a way to break people’s addiction to the flood of false data and inspire them with a love of learning as Uncle Dan did. 

He knew and taught me that knowledge drives out fear. He repeatedly demonstrated this by teaching me to respond to my fear with a desire to learn more about what scared me. Eventually, this trick became a habit for me, stimulating the rational parts of my cognition and helping me feel better about the world. This habit eventually made me distrustful of the increasing depth of terrible ideas and confirmation bias, mental gymnastics and self-delusion around me, which were driven by fear and anxiety. 

I recognize that my passion for knowledge and distaste for stupidity and credulity can lead to a harsh and critical tone. I know that it is not the most effective way to promote curiosity. Instead, I need to emulate Uncle Dan's passionate, enthusiastic and patient approach to inspiring a lifelong love of learning. By encouraging intellectual Inquisitiveness and fostering my love of learning, I can better help others to develop crucial thinking skills and re-engage their critical faculties. Everyone learns differently, so being patient and understanding and creating a safe space for questions and mistakes must be my goal. I’m not here to win arguments but to inspire curiosity and foster a community of critical thinkers.

Uncle Dan taught a lot of people how to get excited about science. My passion is helping people to think a little more critically and to avoid (where possible) bad ideas and the people who promote them, regardless of how they appear to be helpful. The best way to do this is to write my ideas down and share them, of course, but there is a right and appropriate tone to use, too. Derision and haughty contempt won’t cut the ice and it sounds too much like what’s clogging up the works.

Thinking about this reminded me of Max Ehrman’s popular poem from the 1920s, which grew to great popularity in the middle part of the last century. Called Desiderata, the second line of the poem clearly states, “Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.” Strangely fitting. 

Uncle Dan has been gone since 2016. It takes time to adjust to life without loved ones, but those who've impacted us live on in our memories. Even after his passing, Uncle Dan's wisdom stayed with me. Yet, ironically, I forgot the most valuable lesson he taught me. Because of his example, I have the power to be less preachy and when in doubt, to speak or write quietly about the challenges of thinking and the rational mind, and do it using The Uncle Dan Approach.

Wooly (Re)awakenings

Michael Crichton, the great speculative science fiction author, asked what might happen if scientists decided to use available technology to bring dinosaurs back from extinction and put them in an amusement park on an equatorial island. Two novels, a blockbuster movie trilogy and a pair of follow-up sequels have all made an impression on the modern consciousness about the consequences of awakening primordial beasts from extinction. The philosophical point of Crichton's novels is simple: just because we might have the technology to bring back tyrannosaurs, brontosaurs, and velociraptors does not mean we should do it. His premise opened a series of essential ethical questions about extinction, habitat and genetics worth considering.

The main thrust of these questions—in the movies, at least—is obscured by the cinematic standard of a handful of sweaty humans running away from Mesozoic-era dinos that have escaped their exhibits and reverted fully to their bellowing predatory behavior. By the end of each book and subsequent film, a few survive to escape—humans, I mean. The dinosaurs take over their island abode and wait for producers to realize how much money can be made from sequels. Thematically, this concept is excellent. The Jurassic Park films and books will go down in history as extremely popular money-makers. Audiences will always tune in or show up to watch someone else get chased by big, toothy lizards. Development is easy, too. It seems to be an infinitely recyclable series of tropes based on the classic film menace of big monsters and somewhat plausible scientific motifs.

Since the debut of the first film, which made excellent use of computer-generated imaging and believable animatronics, the available technology to produce realistic dinosaurs has become more sophisticated and believable. As long as the thunder lizards remain on-screen and do not cross over into our reality, everything is fine. Especially since humans and dinosaurs from the Cretaceous, Triassic, and Jurassic periods within the Mesozoic Era cannot and never coexisted. 

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Despite the convincing nature of Crichton’s books and movies, dinosaurs could never be brought back from extinction. Too many factors prevent it; size not least among them. The square-cube law states that as an object grows, its volume increases faster than its surface area. This affects organisms (like a T. Rex) because the surface area is vital for exchange processes with the environment (like respiration and nutrient absorption). As organisms get larger, their surface area-to-volume ratio decreases, which can limit these processes. Larger organisms also need more structural support because their weight increases faster than their cross-sectional area. 

Like modern birds—which are the genetic descendants of their dino ancestors—many dinosaurs during the Mesozoic Era had hollow bones. An evolutionary adaptation, it allowed the big proto-bird dinosaurs to grow far larger despite the problem of the square-cube law, but that isn’t the only barrier to dinosaurs living today. The atmosphere of the early Earth contained much more carbon dioxide than today, which meant that there was also more oxygen available for respiration. As a result, large animals, like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, could thrive despite their size. Their respiratory and cardiovascular systems were adapted to process oxygen at a much higher rate than animals today. In the modern world, lower oxygen levels mean that large animals are either proportionally slower, like elephants and rhinos, or like whales, live in the water where their weight is supported.

Since the world of the dinosaurs was cataclysmically destroyed when the Chicxulub asteroid hit Earth and eliminated almost all life on the planet (and instigating the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event) there is no way that scientists could ever manage anything like the plot of Jurassic Park.

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Just three years after Jurassic Park hit theaters, scientists terrified humanity by cloning a sheep called Dolly. The ensuing public lamentation, especially in religious circles, about how such power belonged only to God flooded TV and newspapers and AM radio talk shows. Those of us who had read Crichton's novel or watched the movie were also a little spooked. A sheep was not likely to pursue humans and kill them like dinosaurs, but the cloning of Dolly meant that humanity had harnessed the scientific abilities necessary to move on to cloning humans and dinosaurs and whatever else they wanted. At least, that’s how it seemed.

The process that “created” Dolly was frighteningly simple, though unlike in horror tales, she was made in the full light of science. Despite hysterical criticism and fearful sermons from Rubes who had never read a single book other than the Bible, Dolly's was an experiment as enlightening as anything that science had uncovered so far. There was no intent to profit from her cloning, nor did the geneticists promote any kind of heinous eugenic motives. For decades, the discovery of the tools necessary to clone Dolly were gradually accumulated via careful and vetted processes. The human genome wouldn’t be sequenced for another ten years. Most of the public fears were based in ignorance and dread of science, as usual.

For well over a century, scientists had known that the “blueprints” of a living creature's genetic makeup were locked within its DNA. First discovered in the 1860s and referred to as a nuclien by the German biologist Friedrich Miescher, DNA was understood to reside in every cell of an organism. In the 1950s, James Watson and Francis Crick figured out the double helix structure of DNA. When the project that led to Dolly was first undertaken, there was nothing scary or nefarious about it. Cows have been cloned for decades before Dolly, but this was the first time it would be attempted with non-embryonic cells. 

The scientists took DNA from the mammary gland cell of a Finn Dorsett sheep and ‘reprogrammed’ it. They inserted it into the egg of another sheep that had had the nucleus removed. They stimulated the new egg using low-level electric pulses to begin the process of mitosis. They implanted the egg into a surrogate ewe who gestated an exact clone of the original Finn Dorsett. They named her Dolly. Dolly was not just a one-and-done experiment. The scientists had tried upwards of 277 times before they managed to successfully clone Dolly. She lived a normal (though pampered) sheep life and was able to give birth to normal offspring. Nothing terrifying ever happened.

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The success of Dolly’s cloning opened huge vistas of possibility in genetics and biotechnology. It also burned a series of brush fire-like questions through the scientific community, ranging from the careful and thoughtful philosophical queries about responsibility and necessity, to the ramped-up, panicky and shrill squeakings of the fearful. All along this spectrum, though, echoed Crichton's foundational premise: just because we can harness the power of genetics to clone doesn’t mean that we should.

If, for instance, Victor Frankensteinesque materials and processes were discovered after the success of Dolly’s cloning that allowed us to reanimate deceased humans, we might wish to spend a little time reflecting on whether it was a good idea to try. Here was a chance for philosophy, with its long contemplation on the ethical conundrums raised by scientific discovery, to show its worth. Mary Shelley—and much later, H.P. Lovecraft—toyed with the infernal implications of this (fictional) power in the safe confines of literature. Both of their mad main characters were motivated by apparent scientific discovery but likely lured to it by a power they had rightly assumed was beyond their grasp. In both cases, though, the consequences were grotesque and served as warnings of the danger of unfettered and unreflective discovery.

In Shelley’s short epistolary novel, Victor Frankenstein is immediately repulsed by his creature, understanding that he had stepped beyond a forbidden threshold into regions of divine power not meant to be meddled with by humans. In stealing forth Promethean secrets to revive his recombined monster, Frankenstein finds his mind tipped to the breaking point. Inadvertently setting loose a new creation on the world, neither human nor god, but somewhere in between and beholden to neither, Victor Frankenstein changes the face of humanity and science. Mary Shelley’s popular classic was a castigation of the forbidding patriarchal society which saw her and all women as nothing more than chattel and vessels for birthing male heirs and the potential of breaking those barriers forever, but the literal warnings are also relevant today.

The other (and more chilling) tale is Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator. Although not Lovecraft’s only story on this topic, Reanimator is the most memorable. Told from the point of view of West’s assistant, it tells of West’s hubris in the manic endeavor to prove that the human organism is merely an “organic machine” that can be restarted. He creates a serum that eventually does bring several corpses back to life across the story with devastating consequences for West and the small fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts. The reanimated “zombies” seek West out and eventually disembowel him for his audacity in fiddling with powers beyond his comprehension. Lovecraft’s personal feelings on this will never be known, as he never wrote or shared an analogy for the story, though it can be assumed that his New England “sensibilities” had at their foundation a deep mistrust of the unbridled arrogance of scientific discovery.

Frankenstein has been made into countless movies and Lovecraft’s terror got a movie rendition that resembled the tale in name only. Both stories highlight a normal human preoccupation with death and the potential of science to slow or reverse the problem of subjective, individual extinction. We may be tortured by dreams from these terrifying tales, but when we wake up, we know that organisms that have ceased to live cannot have the spark reignited within them. This is true for our loved ones and also for the millions of living creatures that may have once roamed, squirmed, crawled or flown across the planet. 

That is, until recently.

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Not far from the Chicxulub asteroid crater off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, scientists in Dallas, Texas are currently attempting to bring back a different extinct creature. Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnological company (anyone thinking of Crichton’s fictional InGen may feel chills) is making significant steps at bringing back an organism that is from this side of the planet-killing asteroid that vaporized the dinosaurs. Using gene editing similar to what allowed Dolly, and DNA from a preserved wooly mammoth carcass discovered in 1904, the scientists at Colossal intend to use “de-extinction” processes to bring the wooly mammoth back to life.

The technology already exists. Using massive supercomputers to calculate the genome and genetic similarities of modern creatures, scientists will likely achieve their goal of resurrecting the wooly mammoth within the decade. The Colossal scientists, similar to the fearless lab coats in the fictional Jurassic Park, have reflected upon the philosophical questions and are fairly certain that bringing back these fuzzy pachyderms will benefit their former ecosystem and our planet.

Using the DNA from the preserved mammoth artifact, and filling gaps in the genome with edited Asian elephant DNA (which, like ourselves and Bonobo chimps has about a 99.6% similarity) scientists can easily edit the strands to create an almost perfect copy of the extinct mammoths. CRISPR, a minuscule RNA strand that recognizes where edits are needed, can precisely cut DNA at any location with incredible accuracy. This groundbreaking genetic technology can insert, remove, or modify the strands using Cas9 proteins, thereby simplifying the gene editing process from thousands or millions of years of evolution to just a few weeks in some cases.

If Colossal is successful, the resultant revived wooly mammoth-like creature will be similar in almost every way to its ancient extinct ancestors, but with some pesky problems built in. The main question that arises is how to train a de-extinct organism to remember its biological imperatives after so long a time. Another issue stumbles around how many wooly mammoths are enough to safely reintroduce without causing catastrophic ecological mishaps on the scale of what happens when invasive species are inadvertently introduced.

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Unforeseen consequences—not quite on the scale as those described in Crichton, Shelley or Lovecraft—nevertheless present a sticky quagmire for the scientists at Colossal. Despite the surface-level view of their experiments, there are almost too many unknowns to predict outcomes. Even with the benefit of those aforementioned supercomputers.

Elephantidae, within the family of which are the modern African and Asian elephants, as well as the extinct wooly mammoth and mastodon, are social creatures that ‘raise’ their offspring and instruct them in a way similar to other mammalian fauna. If resurrected, a woolly mammoth would lack crucial inherited knowledge and learned adaptive behaviors tempered over millennia. These include foraging strategies, predator avoidance, social dynamics, migration patterns, environmental adaptation and disease resistance. Without these instincts, the mammoth would struggle to survive, highlighting the importance of considering not only genetic but also ecological and behavioral aspects of de-extinction. The world is never static, and each generation of mammoth likely faced different, unknown challenges. Things have changed significantly between the extinction of the mammoths and the present day.

The benefits of mammoth de-extinction may outweigh the challenges. Wooly mammoths were an important link in the food chain and they were a plentiful food source for larger predators, like polar bears and arctic wolves, both species that have suffered in their shrinking natural habitat. They also helped to keep greenhouse gasses to a minimum. The immense weight of mammoth herds compacted the snow, limiting its ability to insulate the ground. This exposed the permafrost beneath the snow to colder temperatures, which kept it from thawing too early each year, preventing the release of methane and carbon into the atmosphere. Additionally, mammoths played a crucial role in creating grasslands by toppling trees and uprooting shrubs. These grasslands, known as “mammoth steppes” were once Earth’s most extensive biome and were able to store carbon more efficiently than forests.

The herbivorous mammoth was once a keystone organism that promoted a far wider range of biodiversity in the Arctic before its extinction. Like bison on the North American prairies, wooly mammoths were once plentiful on the tundra, flourishing and reproducing without interruption. Climate warming after the last ice age may have caused a “natural” culling of the species as well as its competitors and predators over time. Ancient humans hunting mammoths for meat and pelts likely pushed the wobbly species into extinction. 

It took eons for the wooly mammoth to evolve and thrive, decline and eventually fall into the abyss of extinction. The de-extinction of woolly mammoths would take only a tiny fraction of time. No one can know if that power is a viable or safe option. It seems too risky to rush. In the meantime, movie producers might exploit the scientific reality for profit, creating horror films about rogue mammoths terrorizing groups of horny young drug and alcohol-addled graduate students at remote research outposts on the tundra. These films would undoubtedly instill fear in the public, who would once again fill the media with panic-inducing stories of science gone wrong and claims of "playing God”, only this time, the horror will be based on reality and somewhere in the tundra, a genetically reconstituted wooly mammoth might be browsing through the naturally occurring grasses, herbs and short shrubs. 

Everyone will have an opinion, and like all such click-bait-fed knee-jerk responses, most will be ill-informed and inane. That will not help us answer the question Crichton first posed in his speculative literature and it won’t help us solve those puzzles even after the speculation becomes a wooly reality.