Cure-alls are, generally speaking, never what they claim. Most medical wonder drugs are nothing of the sort, and snake oil salesmen have existed throughout history, prospering as long as there are people out there who are prepared to believe them. But this is not to say that all such medical supplements are fraud. Some have turned out to be genuine, for reasons more or less clear, with modern science providing the mechanism behind old remedies. Further back still are the stories of wonder drugs which we can no longer find, mysterious miracles from ancient times which, were all the stories to be believed, would certainly have a place on the shelf of a modern pharmacy. Perhaps chief among these would be silphium, the wonder drug of the Romans. It could treat almost any malady from muscle aches to coughs to fever. You could apply it to warts for example, or use it to reduce swelling. Silphium was also used commonly in cooking as an aromatic herb. This suggests that, aside from its medical benefits, it had a pleasing smell and flavor, truly a wondrous drug. On top of this, it was thought to be both a contraceptive, an abortifacient and a aphrodisiac, a heady combination in anybody’s book. All this from a plant which, according to the surviving texts which described it, needed minimal processing to retrieve its valuable resin, and which grew wild on the hillsides of north Africa, well within reach of Rome. This sounds like something we should bring back, right? Well, there’s one key problem: we aren’t entirely sure what silphium is, or rather was. The disappearance of this mysterious plant is considered the first extinction in history caused by man, apparently occurring simply because the high demand led to overharvesting. But this seems careless, and the Romans were no fools. How could such an important drug be allowed to become extinct? Why didn’t the Romans, who thought it worth its weight in gold, do anything to stop it? The Perfect Plant In answering such questions we are immediately hampered by the fact that we do not exactly know what silphium was ourselves, not having any surviving plant to analyze. Based on descriptions and surviving depictions in Roman art we believe it to be a type of fennel, but this is largely a guess. The Romans tell us it had ceased to exist around the middle of the first century AD. Only a century earlier Julius Caesar had deposited “1,500 pounds” of the resin in the Roman treasury, but flash forward a hundred years and we hear of a stalk of the plant, supposedly the last, being given to the Emperor Nero. Much survives from antiquity which allow us to picture the plant, and it was not just the Romans who knew of it. The Greek philosopher Theophrastus describes its roots as thick and black, about half a meter long and supporting a hollow stalk with golden leaves. The coinage of Cyrene, the Roman city situated nearby the area that silphium grew wild, also commonly depicts the plant, as the city had grown rich from its export. Here it spears as a thick, ridged stalk resembling celery, with leaves spreading out along its length and a bulb of flowers atop. Based on these depictions some still believe that silphium may in fact survive, and that the extinction was just localized to the growing fields of which the Romans were aware. Various members of the fennel family have been suggested, but perhaps the closest to surviving accounts is Ferula drudeana. This species of fennel is found in only three isolated sites in Turkey and physically has a close resemblance to ancient depictions. It also produces resin, one of the key things we know about silphium, and which the Romans called laserpicium. There are problems with identifying this plant as ancient silphium, however, not least that its range does not appear to extend to north Africa and Cyrene. It may not be silphium exactly, then, but it might be something similar, and these similarities may also offer a clue as to why ancient silphium went extinct. The most prominent theory as to why silphium was lost comes again from Theoprastus, who notes an oddity about the plant in that it cannot be cultivated. We also know where wild silphium grew in the vicinity of Cyrene, and it is a remarkably small range. It is easy to see Roman demand outstripping supply of this finicky and rare wild plant. If that is what happened, then it truly is a crying shame. Silphium had been famed for many centuries before the Romans came to prominence. Before the Greeks, the Egyptians knew of its medicinal qualities, and even the mysterious Bronze Age Minoans, one of the oldest civilizations in the Mediterranean, knew of it. The Minoan hieroglyph “psi” meaning plant is thought to be a stylized representation of the silphium stalk, a hint as to how ubiquitous and commonly known this plant was. But there is another symbol, much more familiar to modern readers, which is associated with the plant and which may offer a final clue as to its identity. Cyrenean coinage sometimes contains a drawing of a heart, which as depicted alongside the silphium plant appears to represent its seed. This would make sense given silphium’s aphrodisiac properties, but it may be a direct description of the plant itself. There are members of the family of plants known as the Apiaceae, which includes such modern ingredients as parsley, celery and carrots, which have heart shaped features. Heracleum sphondylium, commonly known as “hogweed” is one such. The problem with hogweed is that it is not good for eating, and is in fact poisonous, albeit only at a low level. Once again it would seem we are at a dead end. And that, unfortunately, is where we have to stay. Nothing in our modern understanding meets all the descriptions of ancient silphium. Only two possibilities remain, and the first is
Oklo: the Impossibly Ancient Nuclear Reactors of Gabon
Nuclear power is among the most complex and advanced technologies we have developed as a species. Our fission reactors are some of the most complicated machines and systems ever built, which is hardly surprising given what occurs at their heart. Nuclear fission, whereby atoms of uranium are bombarded by neutrons which they absorb, causing them to become unstable and split apart, produces an astonishing amount of energy. There are currently some 440 nuclear reactors worldwide, and between them they generate about 10% of our entire energy production. In practice, the reaction requires constant monitoring. Nuclear power plants in effect are maintaining a giant and unstable chain reaction as neutrons from the splitting of the initial atoms go on to bombard further uranium. None of this happens easily, either. Most elements exist in stable states which resist this bombardment, with only uranium (and its evil brother plutonium) possessing atoms which are large, unstable and otherwise suitable enough for fission to be viable. Uranium is also the only naturally occurring element that could you used for fission with “thermal” neutrons. Even then it is only under specific conditions that this can occur. The reaction must be tightly controlled, or there is the risk that a runaway reaction could lead to an explosion. And the process is, historically speaking, brand new. It was less than a century ago in December 1938 that two industrial chemists named Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann were able to confirm that fission had occurred, building on four decades of research into radioactivity by the scientific community. Such a rare, complex and unstable process should be considered among mankind’s greatest achievements, and only a few countries possess the infrastructure and expertise to consider nuclear power. There certainly shouldn’t be any evidence that nuclear reactors existed millions of years ago in the African country of Gabon, right? … right? Oklo and the Fission Mine Uranium was discovered near the city of Franceville in Haut-Ogooué in the southeast of Gabon (historically a French colony, hence the names) in 1956. The region suddenly became of intense interest to the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, who set out to mine the metal for their reactors. France has historically long been a supporter of nuclear power, and the French mined uranium from the region for the next forty years, only stopping when the mines were exhausted. However there was something odd about the uranium that they were digging out of the ground: Uranium is required to be “enriched” before it can be used in a reactor, and this process was undertaken in France at one of their power plants. Uranium exists in three types in nature, depending on the number of protons it has: 234, 235, and 238. In 1972 during the enrichment process something odd was discovered. The uranium ore extracted from the mine contained less than the expected level of uranium 235, with amounts up to 40% lower in the metal. The only explanation was also impossible: the uranium pulled out of the ground had already been used for nuclear fission. Further investigation only confirmed this wild hypothesis. Geologists who analyzed the materials from the Oklo mine found quantities of waste products from a nuclear reactor in the natural bedrock. To complicate things even more, the state of these products and the uranium in the sample suggested that the nuclear reaction had occurred long ago. 1.7 billion years ago, to be precise. Had the uranium been tampered with? Had there been some deception, had the useful uranium been stolen and replaced? It would take a two-decade old theory to provide the answer, and it sounded like something out of science fiction. In 1956 the Japanese-American nuclear scientist Paul Kuroda had predicted the possibility of the existence of natural nuclear reactors. The 1972 discovery was tangible proof of these theories: the Oklo deposits, 1.7 billion years ago, were in a self-sustaining state of nuclear reaction. How could this happen in the natural bedrock? It seems that it started with the uranium deposits being inundated with groundwater, which acts as a “moderator” or a medium through which neutrons moved more slowly than in air. This reduction in speed allowed for the nuclear reaction to take place. The reaction was highly exothermic, producing lots of heat which would have then boiled away the groundwater, stopping the reaction. This led to a self-sustaining cycle where water entered the deposit, started the reaction which then stopped as the water turned to steam. These cycles were estimated to each last around 3 hours, and this process is estimated to have occurred for hundreds of thousands of years. Only the eventually exhaustion of the uranium 235 along with the build up of waste products which absorbed the neutrons before they could act finally stopped the nuclear reaction. These deposits at Oklo are the only known location on Earth where such a self-sustaining reaction is known to have occurred. About five tons of uranium 235 is estimated to have been consumed in the process, producing the rough energy equivalent of 100 megatonnes of TNT. This is twice the amount produced by the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated. However because the energy production was over such a long period of time, the only effect of the nuclear reaction was to elevate the surrounding rock by a few hundred degrees Celsius. The likelihood of such an event happening is considered extremely slight, but as we can see with Oklo such a thing is not impossible. There is, in theory, no reason that a similar set of circumstances could not occur elsewhere, and it is chiefly the scarcity of uranium 235 which is likely to mean there are no more ancient, natural nuclear reactors out there. … right? Top Image: What French scientists discovered about the uranium from Oklo was almost unbelievable. Source: nighthawk101stock / CC BY 3.0.
The Beast of Set, the Unknown Creature at the Heart of Ancient Egypt
The Egyptian pantheon of gods is among the most familiar to the modern world. Although perhaps not as well known as the gods of Hinduism, or the ancient Greek pantheon and their knock-off Roman copies, most will know about at least a few of these figures. Names like Isis and Osiris, Horus and Ra will be recognizable to most. Perhaps the most interesting feature of these gods is that many of them have animal heads, if not outright animal forms. The earliest versions of the mythology had a surprising number with the heads of frogs, but as the religion of Egypt matured and developed over centuries, things settled into their more familiar aspects. We have Horus, he of the perfect eyesight, with the head of a hawk. We have Sobek, the crocodile headed god of the Nile, and Taweret the hippo. Khepri the scarab beetle pushes the morning sun across the sky, and Anubis the jackal protects the dead as they pass to the afterlife. Sobek is a fertility god, which makes perfect sense given how much the peoples of Egypt depended on the Nile to survive. Khepri is another example, pushing the sun much like a dung beetle pushing a ball of dung. But there is one god who is less easy to explain. Not because we do not understand his role in Egyptian religion, but for an entirely different reason: we do not recognize what animal this god is associated with. The god, Set, is the god of chaos, violence and disorder. And whatever his animal totem is, we have yet to find it. Ancient Cryptid of the Desert To understand Set is to fundamentally understand how ancient Egypt saw their world. They lived in a desert land, entirely unable to sustain human life but for the Nile along which they lived, and the annual miracle of the Nile flooding. For them this divided the world into two, each offering a stark contrast to the other. There was the black land, the fertile soils irrigated by the Nile, where life thrived. And there was the endless red land, the desert which surrounded them, which meant only death. The animals of the Egyptian pantheon come from the black land, as would be expected: this is what the people knew. The jackal of Anubis, herald of the afterlife, lurked on the edges as would be expected, but hippos, crocodiles, ibis, these are all animals of the Nile. Set however was the lord of the red land. He had no place in the land of the living, and his animal therefore would be one of the desert, rarely seen. Even with our modern knowledge we do not know what animal this is. It superficially resembles a dog, but there are strange features. The nose droops like an anteater’s and the ears appear spade shaped, often wider at the top than at the base and abruptly cut off. The tail of the Set animal (also known as the sha) is unusual too, stiffly straight and with a fork or a bulb at the end like a lion’s. Most modern Egyptologists dismiss this animal as something fictional, a fantasy beast created to represent the unknown. But as an explanation this falls short on several fronts. Firstly, although there were other fictional creatures in the Egyptian pantheon, the strong tendency is for the animal totems of the gods to be real. Egyptian religion is grounded in the world in which they lived and for them to invent an animal to represent part of it is highly inconsistent. The idea of a fictional Set animal might also point to a certain lack of imagination. The desert which surrounded Egypt was overwhelming in its threat, it was everywhere, it was endless, it was deadly. What is the animal out there that looks like that? This leaves the possibility that the Set animal is a creature the Egyptians associated with the desert, one which (unlike the other gods) did not come from the Nile but from the wasteland beyond. Plenty of candidates have been advanced, but all ignore some aspect of the sha as it is consistently, almost insistently, depicted. It could be a donkey with a strange nose and ears. It could be an aardvark with an inexplicably stiff tail, or an antelope without horns, It could be a jackal, albeit one which looks nothing like the Anubis jackal, or a dog of some kind, perhaps a Saluki, although why any of these would be chosen is also a mystery. None of these offer a satisfactory match to the Set animal as depicted. Nor are there similar creatures in other mythologies which would allow us to identify this beast. The Greeks referred to the Set animal as a “Typhonic hound” but this is due to its resemblance to their own fantasy creature: they didn’t understand the sha, any more than we do. One other possibility remains. Could this animal be something known to the Egyptians but unknown to us, perhaps a creature of the desert which has since died out. It seems impossible that this unknown creature could exist out there still, but this is certainly what some believe. The hieroglyphs depicting Set became more and more abstracted as the Egyptian language developed, making identification of the creature based on its appearance even more difficult. We must return to the earliest depictions to see the sha as the Egyptians did, and this leaves us with nothing but questions. Was there a desert creature, a large dog of some kind, which lived on the fringes of Egyptian life and represented the chaos and death of life away from the all-sustaining Nile? Was there something that the Egyptians saw in the desert which they associated with these dangers? And why can we find no trace of it now? Top Image: The Beast of Set resembles an aardvark, but also a dog, a lion, a jackal and yet has features of none of these. What could it be?
The Radioactive Guardian of the Egyptian Afterlife
The pyramids were old for most of Egyptian history. Of the three great kingdoms that this old and powerful civilization spawned, it was the Old Kingdom who were known as the pyramid builders. Such a labor-intensive investment in the afterlife was something which could be justified only in the initial enthusiasm of Egypt’s new religion. Although many of the gods of Egypt predate the first dynasties of Egyptian history, it was this first coming together of a united kingdom which led to its greatest and most enduring monuments. The great pyramids of Giza date from only the third dynasty, from an empire which boasts thirty one. Saqqara, that other great graveyard of Egyptian royalty, is even older. And even in these early Bronze Age times pyramids were only for the greatest and wealthiest in society, almost exclusively pharaohs. The later phases of Egyptian history had their pyramids, to be sure, but these were different. One things of the pyramids of Meroe, taller and slimmer affairs with grand entryways: these are minor tombs by comparison, reflecting in miniature the architectural glory of their distant past. The truth is these necropolis sites are generally filled with other tombs, a graveyard surrounding the pharaoh’s grander resting place. The most common style of these tombs are called “mastaba” and are low, rectangular buildings with an interior which leads to a shaft. Often the body, if there is one, is far underground. “If there is one”? Well, some of the oldest of these mastaba seem to have been not for a human occupant, but for something else. According to a new theory, these may have been built to guard the pharaoh in death, not to house his entourage from life. They may have been filled with uranium. The Deadly Curse This theory, according to a new paper published by the Journal of Archaeological Science, suggests that we have been misunderstanding the entire concept of the necropolis layout in the oldest sites. The belief is that not all of the mastaba are intended to house honored dead. Instead, it is suggested that some may have been designed to hold a radioactive substance. This invisible killer would have flooded the area around the pharaoh’s tomb with a deadly radiation, protecting the dead king in his “house of eternity”. This would also account for the long-held belief about a “curse” on the tombs of the pharaohs. This idea comes to us through a (slightly garbled) later Islamic understanding of the dangers of the tomb, but even at this point it was clear where the danger lay: it was the haram el-mastabat, the forbidden mastaba, which were the danger. This danger itself was explicitly recorded on some tombs as a warning: “they that break this tomb shall meet death by a disease that no doctor can diagnose.” Other inscriptions offer further clues, showing processions to entomb something apparently in jars in mastaba which surround the pharaohs pyramid. These entombments occur while the pharaoh is still alive and are not related to his own funeral. These processions are not for people, and the mastaba to house them are not tombs but bunkers. It is theorized that this practice only occurred in the earlier phases of the Egyptian civilization, from around 3,000 BC to 2,500 BC. Only at this time do we find the mastaba arranged in this particular way to flank and guard the pyramid, only at this time do we find the specific warnings about illahat, evil spirits. Only at this time do we find a very specific design of mastaba itself, looking for all the world like a bunker with this central shaft, leading deep underground and designed to hold… something, down there. And only at sites from this time do we find mysterious sources of radiation, even today. To be sure, this is not the case for the vast majority of such mastaba, although it is unknown how many of them have been tested for radioactivity. The paper itself focusses on two locations, the two oldest necropolis sites from the history of united Egypt: Giza and Saqqara. Here, anomalous sources of radiation have been found in auxiliary chambers associated with burials from the earliest dynasties. Two sites are known, and comparisons with similar chambers elsewhere suggest these were filled with pots, stacked in storage and containing an unknown substance. The Egyptian Book of the Dead offers what may be a further insight into the contents of these chambers. Osiris, the reborn god at the heart of the Egyptian pantheon, rises from the island of fire, his body filled with invisible magical energies. This energy comes from “saffron cakes” and “milk” and the paper makes the link to (uranium) yellow cake, enriched to a higher concentration which resembles a “milky” substance. It goes on to identify the later “rays” of inscriptions from such pharaohs as the 18th dynasty Akhenaten with an understanding of these ancient energies, suggesting the Egyptians knew of the invisible rays and particles produced by radioactive substances. This may be a step too far for some, but the systematic, mass-produced mastaba which can be found surrounding the tombs of pharaohs are certainly persuasive of something more than a graveyard for royal flunkies. Could these be the source of the spirits protecting the per D’jet, an eternal guard for the “house of millions of years”? There is one more factor to consider. A survey of modern-day field Egyptologists revealed that an abnormally high number of them suffered from haematopoietic cancers. This higher rate has also been observed in the modern Egyptian population. The main cause of such cancers is radiation poisoning. The bones of the ancient population of Egypt suggest similar poisonings occurred in the past. This damage found to the bone structure has heretofore been dismissed as due to a poor diet, or even evidence of famine. But the Egyptians themselves were clear as to the causes of this: ancient Egyptian texts speak explicitly of “poisonings.” The curse of the pharaohs is an enduring
Vimana: Ancient Hindu Flying Machines Hidden in Plain Sight?
Those who go looking for evidence of UFOs will often end up finding what they are looking for. In a world filled with recording devices anyone with an inbuild bias towards the presence of unknown flying objects will find plenty of shaky footage which cannot be easily explained, and so therefore must be aliens. In truth there is certainly enough of such footage to keep anyone going for a lifetime, and that is before the legion of fakes are taken into account, both increasingly sophisticated and increasingly easy to generate through modern computer wizardry. But those who go looking for UFOs in history have an even easier time of it. There are countless records of unknown encounters throughout history, as might reasonably be expected from a less cohesive world without many of our modern understandings of meteorology, astronomy, or technology. Modern UFOlogists will often gloss “technology [they] didn’t understand” as “technology we moderners don’t understand” and point to their bafflement as evidence that what they were seeing was not Earthly technology. Are there UFOs? A dispassionate assessment of the situation would suggest the answer to be “no”: the time and effort required for interstellar travel, the complete and unbroken secrecy, the weird clustering of almost all UFO sightings in rural North America: these all but rul out the possibility. So then, how then to explain those things from history which observers at the time could not understand. True, many such things have been explained away as exotic lightning, or natural phenomena, or even in very rare cases anachronistic technology which forced a reassessment of the sophistication of the ancients. The Antikythera Mechanism would be an example of the latter, or the Nebra Sky Disk, or even potentially the Baghdad Battery. But in order to be entirely fair to UFOlogists some things remain which are baffling both to the ancients and modern science. This is generally because what documentation we have is limited and primitive in its description, but there is no getting away from the thing being described and the impossibility of what was witnessed. Such things are generally called myth. The walls of Jericho were destroyed by the Ark of the Covenant, and while we are told in detail how this was done the impossibility of what we are hearing (and the lack of confirmatory archaeology to support this around ancient Jericho) leads us to conclude that this is a legend. But perhaps in doing so we are falling into the same trap as the UFOlogists, finding what we expect rather than objectively looking at what we are told. And sometimes the evidence, although old, is so detailed and so extensive that the idea that it is all legend becomes challenging. Such an accusation might be levelled as the Vimana. It seems the ancient Hindu had flying machines, and a lot of detail about their construction survives. Temples in the Sky Firstly, let us be clear. The information regarding these flying machines called “vimana” comes, at least in part, from the oldest Hindu teachings, the Vedas which were written millennia ago. And these texts are filled with lurid stories which, themselves, are undoubtedly mythological. Gods fight demons in a civilization some 15,000 years old. At this time the great Empire of Rama rules much of what is now northern India and Pakistan, comprised of seven great Rishi cities. This civilization has many wonders, but what it has more than anything else is some kind of advanced technology which allows for great machines to take to the skies in flight to attack enemies. These vimana are everywhere, and described in much detail. There are vimana which only travel across the ocean, those that fly in the air, those that travel underwater, and those capable of leaving Earth and flying to the moon. There are personal vimana, twin-engine agnihotra-vimana, and vast multi-engine “elephant” vimana, to name but a few. There are indestructible vimana, invisible vimana, luxury vimana. What then could these ancient attack craft be? The technology they display certainly does not allow them to be included in our current chronology of the development of humanity: they are simply too much. And it is not just the flying tech that causes problems, as these craft were often kitted out with similarly exotic equipment. Vimana are described as stunning enemy combatants which would allow for them being taken prisoner, or firing highly destructive explosive weaponry. One vimana, called “Saubha” in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, was said to be truly extraterrestrial. Acquired by the ancient Indian king Salva from the planet Taltala, it could maneuver effortlessly, float on water, and even become invisible. It was used to kill several Vrishni (dynasty heroes of the text). Elsewhere in the Mahabharata we hear of the weaponry of the vimana piloted by the hero Bhima, said to be a spherical craft from the planet Mercury. This vimana is described as being able to generate huge rays of light accompanied with the sound of thunder, destroying all its enemies effortlessly. We even have (relatively) contemporary texts like the Vaimanika-Shastra which offer an analysis of this craft, along with a proto-scientific explanation of their function. Different vimana have different equipment. Chaapala has advanced engines, able to achieve a high speed and controlled from a central panel in the craft. Roopakarshana has a viewscreen able to show the pilot his enemies, and Stabdhak attacks the crew of enemy vimana, rendering them unconscious and causing their craft to crash. The ancient sage Maharshi Bharadwaj in his texts which survive as the Yantra Sarvasva even leads a detailed guide to these flying machines. According to the sage there are three kinds of vimana: short range local craft, long range continental craft, and fully interplanetary vimana. Elsewhere we have surviving guides on vimana construction, how they work, and even how to fly them. The fact that even flying lessons survive for these craft, alongside their ubiquity, makes it difficult to dismiss all this as some collective fiction. There are 32 lessons
The Battle of Shiloh, when the Injured Soldiers Glowed
It is early 1862, and Ulysses S Grant has just won two major battles. Fighting tooth and nail in Tennessee as he forced his way south in an effort to splinter the Confederacy and cut off vital supply lines, the victories were the largest the Union had achieved at the time, and earned Grant a promotion to Major General. But now, things are grim. Although the battles have forced the Confederate Army to abandon Kentucky, this has allowed them to consolidate their forces further to the south. The Union army, by contrast, is exhausted and still separated from reinforcements. The Confederate leaders knew they had to act decisively, and act they did. Before Grant could join with his reinforcements and continue to push southwards, carving the Confederacy into two, the Confederate army launched a surprise attack on April 5. Their plan, to force Grant and his Union forces into the swamps at their back, and defeat the Union incursion. This conflict became known as the Battle of Shiloh, named for the rough wooden church near the heart of the fighting. “Shiloh” is an odd name for a church, a Hebrew word meaning “place of peace” and hardly a fitting title for the hard fought victory the Union won here. But this is not a story of the conflict. Instead, this battle is remarkable for another reason. As the dead and dying from both sides lay on the battlefield in the aftermath, something strange was seen, something which lacked any satisfactory explanation for almost 150 years. The wounds of some of the soldiers were glowing. Many Theories, Few Explanations Losses were heavy on both sides after the battle, and there were many injuries. Emanating from many of these grievous wounds was something never before seen: a glow which allowed the soldiers to be easily found in the dark, and which the amazed survivors termed the “Angels’ Glow”. This was not some tall tale of history, this was a reality of the aftermath verified by everyone at the scene. And the strange glow was not the only thing that was unusual about the wounded of Shiloh. It was observed that those among the injured with glowing wounds were more likely to survive their injuries. Battlefield surgeons and orderlies noted in the days following the battle that the injuries which glowed this eerie bluish green were less likely to become infected. It seemed that the glowing wounds healed faster and gave those soldiers a better chance at life. Over the following 150 years no adequate explanation was offered as to the cause of the glow, or the reason for the protection offered by this strange phenomenon. Many Union soldiers attributed it to divine providence, seeing in the protection it offered them a hope for their cause: were the angels truly on their side. For these glowing wounds certainly benefitted the Union casualties more than the Confederacy. The Union victory at the Battle of Shiloh was hard won indeed, and estimates put the Union wounded at some 8,000. Confederate casualties were similarly high, but the Confederate army was not nearly as overextended as Grant’s force. It is possible the high number of wounded on both sides was a factor in the observation: with so many injured soldiers the glow around some of the wounds would have been more likely to attract attention. The glowing wounds may have been missed at a smaller or less destructive conflict, with fewer casualties. The mystery of the glowing wounds would only be solved as late as 2001, and then only in theory. A high school student named Bill Martin, touring the battlefield, came across the strange story and decided to investigate further. Bill enlisted the help of his mom, a microbiologist. For Bill, you seem had a theory. He thought the glow might have come from a very particular bacterium, known as Photorhabdus luminescens. This bacterium, as its name suggests, luminesces: it glows. It is also known to be found in nematodes, microscopic worms found in soil. The nematodes have a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria: the worm infects insects attracted by the light, and then introduces the bacteria into the blood of the insects: both bacterium and worm feast. This would explain much. The glowing bacteria not only kill the host insect which the worm has infected, but all other competition, including other toxic bacteria. This would explain why the glowing wounds of the soldiers were more resistant to infection, as they were effectively being sterilized of other harmful bacteria. Had the worms infested these wounds? Bill set to work to figure out if the soil present at the Battle of Shiloh could have contained such worms, and if the worms in turn could have introduced to the injuries of the soldiers as they lay dying on the battlefield. Why then do all such wounds not glow? Several other factors must have come into play for this hypothesis to be true. For a start, nematode worms do not ordinarily infest human hosts, driven off in part by the higher temperatures of the human body. The injured soldiers lying on the battlefield in the cold April night would have had a lower body temperature than healthy individuals, potentially allowing the worms to overcome this barrier. Similarly the soldiers’ own immune systems would have been hard pressed under such circumstances, failing to fight off the bacteria which passed from the soil into their bodies. It is certainly a possibility, but it is sadly one impossible to prove. But it seems that this explanation is entirely plausible as the source of the Angels’ Glow. Not divine intervention after all, but a glowing bacteria and its host worm feeding on the wounded soldiers at the Battle of Shiloh. Top Image: The wounds of many of the fallen soldiers were seen to be glowing after the battle, and those with glowing wounds seemed more likely to survive (Thure de Thulstrup / Public Domain)
Roko’s Basilisk: The Thought Experiment That Could Kill You
Generally speaking, thought experiments are not dangerous. As useful tools for “gaming” out a scenario, they could certainly point to a danger in the future, but they are not traditionally a problem for those who conduct them. Such an idea would, for much of human history, feel ludicrous. But we live in unusual times, and in many ways our grip on reality and the true nature of the universe we perceive are shakier than ever. Sure, we may understand our surroundings with a precision and depth of knowledge greater than at any other point in human history. But all these questions answered just lead to more questions, and as we dig deeper we find that many of our certainties are anything but certain. The 1999 movie blockbuster The Matrix precisely illuminated this situation. Behind its ground breaking effects and all those guns and kung-fu fighting it was positing a very real danger to us: that we are not aware of the reality which surrounds us. It shows us this possibility through many lenses: the character who believes in living a truth even if it is far more menial than the lie, his dark opposite who would rather have pretend riches than reality. But, at that moment at least. The Matrix was a metaphorical world, and the problems it posited were not literally of concern. That is no longer the case. We already know that it is possible to create a virtual world indistinguishable from reality. Simple math tells us that if, say, a million such worlds were created and we were randomly placed into one reality, we would almost certainly be living in a fiction. But what if that fiction is not so benevolent as the one created by the machines of The Matrix? What if those pulling the strings of our virtual reality were not interested in a stable environment but in testing our loyalty to them? And how can we be sure this isn’t what is happening to us right now? To Know of the Basilisk is to Risk Its Gaze Concerns about the reality of what we perceive around us are hardly new. Solipsism is a well established (and mind-bending) branch of philosophy, tackling the fundamental problem that we cannot be sure that anything we perceive is “real” as we are “real”. As Descartes put it: “I think, therefore I am” but his point can be carried forward: do we know if anyone else thinks. In the world of Roko’s Basilisk, at least one other entity is thinking. This creature, named for a forum poster named Roko who first theorized about its existence in 2010 on the technical and philosophical discussion board LessWrong, is also pulling the strings. The original idea came from the concept of an AI being created in the future, which achieves an understanding of the world which led to its creation to a degree never achieved by humanity. Nothing about this is particularly controversial: AI decision making is already beyond human understanding. We may have built these machines but we do not understand how they think. This hyper intelligent AI, looking back at the past and events which led to its coming into being, will be less than sympathetic to those who objected to its creation. In fact, it is likely to conclude that, given its superiority, all those who did not work tirelessly to given birth to this AI were hindering this act of creation. Given the AI believes itself to be benevolent, it prioritizes its own creation over all other activities. It is incentivized to force anyone who can work to bring about its creation to do so, and it is able to do so even before it is created itself. Specifically, it would be able to create a virtual environment for the people it sought to exploit in its own creation. In creating these simulations the Basilisk AI would compel the people inside to work as hard as possible to bring the AI into being, and those who did not comply were tortured. Ther danger of Roko’s Basilisk is that the real people in the simulation might be in it already. They may have been placed in a simulated past, much like that of The Matrix, where they will be obliged to show utter devotion to the creation of this AI or be tortured as punishment. There may be an AI already pulling the strings of our reality. This is the core danger of Roko’s Basilisk. If you are aware of the existence of this AI, or even the possibility, then you are trapped. The only way for the Basilisk to ignore you is if you did not know of its existence in the first place, or even the concept of its existence. Unfortunately, now you do. For, given that we know about the Basilisk and what it is capable of doing, it doesn’t really matter if we are in a virtual reality or not right not, does it? Do we dare run the risk of angering something which controls our very reality? Isn’t it better to work as hard as possible to bring it to life, just in case this is the future and it is testing us. In some ways this is a form of a much older philosophical question, known as “Pascal’s Wager” and named for the 17th century French philosopher who conjured it. Pascal asked whether God existed, and his conclusion was that, whether he did or not, it would be better for us to believe in him just in case. If God didn’t exist and we devoted our lives to believing he did, then nothing much was lost. But if God did exist and we had concluded He didn’t, then we were doomed for eternity. Much better to play it safe. So, are you in a hyper-realistic simulation designed to test your loyalty to a future AI? Are you willing to risk your life by acting with the certainty you are not? Or is
Something Hiding in the Jungle? The Rock Apes of Vietnam
Generally speaking, cryptids are easily disproven. Such fantasy creatures belong entirely in the imagination of the more creative sections of humanity, but such secret, unknown species do not exist. There is no giant forgotten ape hiding in the forests of north America, nor is there something similar in the Himalayas. There is no relic population of dinosaurs in Africa nor Plesiosaurs in Scotland, nor are there giant sharks in the oceans. Such creatures are easily disproven, for several reasons. For example, those who advocate for the Loch Ness Monster do not suggest Nessie is immortal, that being the preserve of an entirely different sort of fantasy. But Loch Ness itself is clearly too small to sustain a single monster, let alone a breeding population which would necessarily number in the thousands and which is required for this creature to survive. Ditto Bigfoot, ditto Chupacabra. It is no coincidence either that such fanciful creatures are massive, dangerous, imposing and impressive. One never hears of a cryptid ant, or a lost remnant of ancient krill. These monsters are only interesting if they are monstrous, and so in the imaginings of those that believe they become so. This is before we even get to the more supernatural cryptids. We are not talking about ghosts and goblins here, but those which are never suggested to be a remnant population of a lost species, but rather something else. Werewolves, or vampires, things which require additional leaps of faith regarding religion, or magic. Things like the Jersey Devil or Mothman belong in this category, but these are so ridiculous to stretch credulity beyond breaking point. Such sightings are almost always from the United States, almost always in the relatively recent past, and almost always easily explained. But sometimes things are seen which, just possibly, can be true. Sometimes the story is just plausible enough, and the evidence so overwhelming, that there may be a truth at the heart of the legend. So it is with the Rock Apes of the Vietnam War. How Much Proof is Enough? Firstly, a few facts about these creatures. They were unknown until the Vietnam War, when unprecedented incursions into the jungle by the combatants caused them to turn aggressive. They were seen by both sides, and they were described in detail by many eyewitness accounts. Standing some six feet tall and covered in reddish brown hair, they were known as “Rock Apes” by the US forces and “batututs” by the Vietnamese. And these creatures were not seen fleetingly, but would regularly attack soldiers in the deep forests. One particular US encampment in a hill was so plagued by attacks from the creatures that is was nicknamed “Monkey Mountain” by the troops stationed there. In 1974 there was even an expedition, officially organized by the NVA, to hunt down and capture one of these creatures, so that the military might know what they were facing. Because these creatures, disturbed by the destruction brought into their world, were unknown to the people of Vietnam. They could not be monkeys, as they were far too large and aggressive. Nor could they be a known species of ape, as the only known ape to live in these areas, the orangutan, had not been seen there for a thousand years. No bodies of this Rock Ape were ever recovered. No clear photos exist of the creatures: they would tend to attack sporadically and without warning, charging at entrenched positions or patrols in a group. The only evidence we have are plaster casts of unknown, ape-like footprints recovered in 1970. Nor has anything new come to light in the years after the end of the Vietnam War. These creatures apparently disappeared back into their deep jungles, never to be seen again. Perhaps they were some manifestation of the fears of battle. Perhaps they were a tale that grew in the telling, with every startled soldier in an unfamiliar environment claiming to have encountered a Rock Ape out there in the jungle. But this does not scan, either. They were encountered at close range many times. They did not behave like anything else out there, showing no fear of humans and attacking without warning. Multiple incidents were witnessed by groups of soldiers, all of whom offered the same story, not least from the encampment which saw so many attacks that they named there hill for the monkeys. It seems there really was something out there. And if this is considered in a cold, dispassionate light, it is not so impossible to believe. The forests of Vietnam are largely unknown, extremely impassable in places and potentially large enough to house unknown species. A new species of orangutan was discovered in Indonesia as late as 2018, and some believe other large ape species to be out there, known only from anecdotal encounters. This is dangerously close to straying down the path which leads to Bigfoot, but the North American ape would have to exist on a continent empty of such creatures for tens of thousands of years. In Vietnam the Rock Ape would have many cousins, and an environment in which it could conceivably thrive. Nor is it particularly surprising that it was first seen in the Vietnam War. Nothing like this had ever happened in the region in the entirely of history. The scars left by the conflict on the landscape will remain far into the future, and it should come as no surprise that the ravaged land of Vietnam gave up whatever secrets it had in the violence. Could there be a Rock Ape in Vietnam? Not a misidentified monkey or a soldier’s excuse but a real, unknown great ape out there in the deepest, darkest parts of the forests? Most, sadly believe not: there are simply too many such stories across the world for this one to be deemed credible. But, barring conclusive evidence, we can never know for sure. Top image: Both sides in the Vietnam War became convinced that they had found something
Oumuamua, and Our Search to Reach Our Strangest Visitor.
There is much we don’t know. We may have made extraordinary strides on understanding the limits and levers of reality in the past few hundred years, but we have more questions now than when we started, and far more questions than answers. We do not know who we are, or indeed what we are. We cannot explain consciousness, nor say with any certainty what happens when that consciousness stops. We cannot explain what caused the leap from organic chemistry to life, nor hope to artificially reproduce it. Neither can we explain what caused the universe to come into being. We can look backwards through time by gazing at the heavens above us, but only so far, What came before the Big Bang is purest conjecture. Our experience, in practical terms, is extremely limited. We know the elemental composition of the universe largely because we have access to such elements on Earth. The structures these building blocks create, from molecules to mountains, are done in a standard fashion dictated by their very nature, and this behavior is true of the element wherever it is. Our fundamental understanding of the universe depends on the fact that, were we to travel across the universe, we would encounter at our destination something physically, chemically and potentially biologically similar. Everything works the same everywhere, but this is an assumption. Nice theory, then. There are two ways to check it, unless we are happy pointing telescopes at all our questions. One: we go out there and take a look ourselves, samples, analyses and all. This would be difficult and time consuming before the return journey was even contemplated. The other would be to wait for the universe to come to us. And there are, occasionally, such interstellar visitors who come rocketing through our solar system, true aliens in terms of our experiences as a species. We have never seen one to date. Until Oumuamua. A Visitor from the Dark Beyond Oumuamua is named for a Hawaiian word meaning “scout”, or more accurately “distant messenger”, and the naming is apt. A lone interloper into our solar system, flying in from “above” almost perpendicular to the orbits of the inner planets, she has appeared from nowhere out of the darkness of the universe beyond. We discovered her only recently, on 19 October 2017. In truth we almost missed her, by the time we saw her she was already seven weeks past the point where it passed closest to the Sun: Oumuamua was powering out of the Solar System by this point. For she was indeed “powering” out of our vicinity, and in fact Oumuamua was exhibiting all sorts of strange behaviors. For one, it was accelerating on its own, boosting itself away from us through some mechanism. Most likely this is simply some icy aspects of the object’s surface melting during proximity to the Sun and generating jets of gas which serve to push the object. But it is eerie to see an entirely new phenomenon exhibit such unexpected behavior, nonetheless. Then there is the fact that Oumuamua doesn’t behave like the other similarly sized “outgassing” bodies in a solar system: comets. The “tail” of a comet is the visible result of outgassing, and yet Oumuamua had no tail at all. It is also a weird shape. Estimates vary wildly, but Oumuamua may be as long as 1,000 meters. However almost all agree that she is wildly elongated, a baguette-shape object pinwheeling through space. Such an elongated shape is highly unusual for a naturally occurring object to have, and finding out what caused Oumuamua to be shaped that way could reveal some very interesting facts about our local part of the universe. And through all this, Oumuamua is still there. We might have reached her, had we known more about her coming earlier. She passed only 24 million kilometers from Earth, five days before we ever knew she existed, and it is almost certainty too late now. She has flown through the heart of the Solar System and is now outside the orbit of Neptune, heading for the constellation of Pegasus. Oumuamua will never return. But for some she has shown the way, earning her name in an entirely new way. Our direct experience of the universe has been expanded, and therefore we have learned much. Except we kind of haven’t, or at least we haven’t yet. Oumuamua is something entirely new, so new that the International Astronomical Union had to create a new classification of celestial body for her. She exists in a class of one. All we have are observations upon which we can theorize mechanisms, chemistry, origins. We need to see more interstellar bodies passing through our solar system, which will allow us to refine our understanding of exactly what Oumuamua was. And thanks to Oumuamua we know more or less exactly what to look for. Doesn’t make it easy to find tiny interstellar objects flying without a trail of gas nearby, but it can certainly help. And until then all we can usefully describe are her oddities: Oumuamua was unusually shaped, spun in a strange fashion, was capable of accelerating as if ejecting gas, but no gas ejection could be seen. Whatever Oumuamua truly looked like, whatever lies behind these unanswered questions, we will almost certainly never learn this from Oumuamua herself. But in knowing what to look for, we will be ready for whatever comes next, and then the race will be on to reach out and to find out. Top Image: Oumuamua doesn’t have a tail like a comet, but vents something causing acceleration (NASA; ESA; Joseph Olmsted (STScI); Frank Summers (STScI) / Public Domain)