Got some more awesome science to share with all you lovely people today, and the fact that it happens to be Friday is a completely and total coincidence, and should not be in any way, shape, or form construed as a resumption of the Friday Science Roundup.
Because homey don’t play that “regular feature” commitment bullshit no more. That becomes, like, work after a while, and as we all know, we writers are a shiftless and lazy bunch, disinclined to toil to the point of an almost childlike lassitude.
We try to compensate for that with our enormous vocabularies, however.
Starting off, let’s talk about ancient Peruvian burial grounds.
Archaeologists have found one, and yup, they are poking around in it, as they are wont to do. And I am glad, of course, because this one is a biggie and they are going to learn so much from it.
But the sci fi slash horror part of my mind can’t help but think about how many bad, bad things I have seen happen in horror movies and X-files episodes that all started with curious archaeologists finding some kind of ancient burial ground and saying “Neato, let’s defile the fuck out of it!”
The truth, in this case, seems to be even more horrible, however. The burial ground contains the remains of 73 children and llamas, and not a single adult. And all the remains are located in a single sedimentary layer, which strongly suggests that this is no family graveyard or hallowed resting place for the bones of the ancestors… but the site of a massive human (and llama) sacrifice, possibly made in an attempt to control the weather.
Of all the things about more primitive cultures that we, as modern human beings raised in a culture where human life is the most precious thing of all, cannot understand or accept, it is the practice of human sacrifice. It is nearly impossible to put ourselves in the mindset of an advanced stone age culture, where advances in agriculture have created a massive urban population surplus, with all the problems of unrest, disease, and disorder that causes.
In such a climate, where people are dying from what, to you, are mysterious causes all the time, the idea that the gods are hungry and a deliberate sacrifice might appease them. On the other end of the motivational spectrum, everyone is miserable and, at least subconsciously, everybody knows that the cause is that there are too many damned people. The idea that the solution involves reducing that overpopulation might have a certain very dark appeal.
But even if we can accept that…. killing children? That just plain cannot be accepted by any modern human being. We presume children to be innocent of all things, and value them above all other things. The idea of someone deliberately killing any child just on the chance it will appease some invisible, imaginary deity seems the height of barbarism to us.
It is this sort of thing which makes history so very difficult to truly understand. Even the most sophisticated historian, well versed in cultural relativism, might well find themselves blinded by their own moral instincts when trying to analyze something so abhorrent.
Damn, that is depressing. We need a refresher from all that petty inhumanity and Stone Age squalor. Here, have an awesome video of a lightning storm over Africa, as seen from the International Space Station, with the Milky Way as backdrop.
The little flashes are the lightning, of course, and the sort of glowing mist you see flowing like clouds in the background is, in face, the entire Milky Way galaxy.
There, that’s better. Cleanses the palate with a little cosmic perspective so that we are ready for the star story of today’s article : ROCKS FROM MARS!
Yes, unbelievably, some meteorites that hit Morocco last year turn out to be ROCKS FROM MARS. We have actual Mars rocks to study without even having to figure out how the hell to make a vehicle that can get to Mars and back with a payload!
Now, first question : how the heck did rocks from Mars get to Earth in the first place? It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? But the answer you came up with is the one the scientists came up with, too : something hit Mars very, very, very hard, so hard that bits of Mars were thrown into space.
That means the impact was so fierce, so utterly massive, that it threw these particular igneous rocks (because Mars doesn’t do sedimentary) all the way out of Mars’ gravity well. Imagine that. WHAM! Space.
But to me, the coolest part of the discovery that bits of other planets can end up on Earth is that it adds weight to a favorite bit of high theory of the exobiological world, panspermia.
Don’t worry, it has nothing to do with satyr jizz.
Instead, it is the theory that the ingredients of life might arrive on a planet from an outside source, for example, a meteorite that gets ejected from a life-bearing planet somehow, and hence bootstrap the processes of life on the planet upon which said meteorite falls.
Obviously, no kind of complex life is going to survive whatever kind of event is cataclysmic enough to eject life bearing rocks into space. But simple life forms are remarkably hearty, and can survive some fairly harsh conditions by going dormant.
Hence the high degree of interest in space circles in extremophile organisms.
So it’s not hard to imagine that some meteorite of planetary origin might arrive on another planet with a payload of hungry micro-organisms who will awaken to a world full of their choicest nutrients, and absolutely no competition.
And just like that, the cycle of life begins anew on another planet.
Heck, for all we know, that might be the very thing that happened here. Admittedly, currently theories of the origin of life on Earth do not require an outside stimulus. But they don’t preclude one, either.
And that would be that really, we are all aliens.
And that’s something I have suspected about myself for a long, long time.
