We appear to be edging ever closer to a solid statement of “We are not alone” in the universe with this week’s announcement of the detection of biosignatures in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b. The planet, which is 124 light-years away, has been the focus of much attention since it was discovered in 2015 using the Kepler space telescope because it lies in the habitable zone around its red-dwarf star. Initial observations with Hubble indicated the presence of water vapor, and follow-up investigations using the James Webb Space Telescope detected all sorts of goodies in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. But more recently, JWST saw signs of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), organic molecules which, on Earth, are strongly associated with biological processes in marine bacteria and phytoplankton.
The team analyzing the JWST data says that the data is currently pretty good, with a statistical significance of 99.7%. That’s a three-sigma result, and while it’s promising, it’s not quite good enough to seal the deal that life evolved more than once in the universe. If further JWST observations manage to firm that up to five sigma, it’ll be the most important scientific result of all time. To our way of thinking, it would be much more significant than finding evidence of ancient or even current life in our solar system, since cross-contamination is so easy in the relatively cozy confines of the Sun’s gravity well. K2-18b is far enough away from our system as to make that virtually impossible, and that would say a lot about the universality of biochemical evolution. It could also provide an answer to the Fermi Paradox, since it could indicate that the galaxy is actually teeming with life but under conditions that make it difficult to evolve into species capable of making detectable techno-signatures. It’s hard to build a radio or a rocket when you live on a high-g water world, after all.
Closer to home, there’s speculation that the famous Antikythera mechanism may not have worked at all in its heyday. According to researchers from Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata in Argentina, “the world’s first analog computer” could not have worked due to the accumulated mechanical error of its gears. They blame this on the shape of the gear teeth, which appear triangular on CT scans of the mechanism, and which they seem to attribute to manufacturing defects. Given the 20-odd centuries the brass-and-iron device spent at the bottom of the Aegean Sea and the potential for artifacts in CT scans, we’re not sure it’s safe to pin the suboptimal shape of the gear teeth on the maker of the mechanism. They also seem to call into question the ability of 1st-century BCE craftsmen to construct a mechanism with sufficient precision to serve as a useful astronomical calculator, a position that Chris from Clickspring has been putting the lie to with his ongoing effort to reproduce the Antikythera mechanism using ancient tools and materials. We’re keen to hear what he has to say about this issue.
Speaking of questionable scientific papers, have you heard about “vegetative electron microscopy”? It’s all the rage, having been mentioned in at least 22 scientific papers recently, even though no such technique exists. Or rather, it didn’t exist until around 2017, when it popped up in a couple of Iranian scientific papers. How it came into being is a bit of a mystery, but it may have started with faulty scans of a paper from the 1950s, which had the terms “vegetative” and “electron microscopy” printed in different columns but directly across from each other. That somehow led to the terms getting glued together, possibly in one of those Iranian papers because the Farsi spelling of “vegetative” is very similar to “scanning,” a much more sensible prefix to “electron microscopy.” Once the nonsense term was created, it propagated into subsequent papers of dubious scientific provenance by authors who didn’t bother to check their references, or perhaps never existed in the first place. The wonders of our AI world never cease to amaze.
And finally, from the heart of Silicon Valley comes a tale of cyber hijinks as several crosswalks were hacked to taunt everyone’s favorite billionaires. Twelve Palo Alto crosswalks were targeted by persons unknown, who somehow managed to gain access to the voice announcement system in the crosswalks and replaced the normally helpful voice messages with deep-fake audio of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg saying ridiculous but plausible things. Redwood City and Menlo Park crosswalks may have also been attacked, and soulless city officials responded by disabling the voice feature. We get why they had to do it, but as cyberattacks go, this one seems pretty harmless.
Garbage papers have remained a problem long before artificial stupidity. As long as there’s been university faculty with quotas, there’s been useless fluff papers at their least unethical, to downright fraudulent research to secure or maintain funding. If there is a system that exists, it will be exploited.
This is worse than a garbage paper though. This is decent authors with a decent study that includes a little completely bogus information that came about because they used ai to write their paper.
In 50 years students will be studying all the bogus info along with the facts because there will be nobody qualified to tell them it’s wrong.
It is always funny to me when there are people that insist something can work but never actually try it, or like this group that insists the Antikythera mechanism can’t work, while still not actually trying it. I see this all the time with students (I’m nominally a teacher sort of) that insist something will not work while I quietly just do it anyway. Typical behavior for these types of people, after the facts become plain, is to start adding qualifiers and backpeddling to their original argument so they don’t look extra stupid. Which only makes them look worse. If the clickspring interpretation of the Antikythera mechanism isn’t convincing enough (presumably functioning device, made entirely with period-possible tools and techniques… also the dude has made definitely-functioning similar devices already plus non-Chris people have made definitely functioning Antikythera replicas…) I can’t wait to see how they try to weasel of being wrong on this one.
-ok I just actually looked at what was said, for about 10 seconds, and it’s an absolute junk of an article itself. Click-baity in the extreme. Avoid.
There is mentioned by some known roman hystorian that a roman general had in his vila a machine like the Antikythera in complexity and functionality. For them was just a wonder gadget from a conquered part of today’s Greece. And it was functional. So we knew before the wrecked mechanism discovery that there existed something odd and very interesting, but the Antikythera discovery explained what it was and how it worked.
It is like the “light bulbs” present in Egypt tomb paintings. One day will find a text description of it or a remenant and will exclaim “that’s what it is” like Archimedes screamin’ “eurika” while running wet and naked on the streets.
You may say that the machine is a later copy, unfunctional because the masters passed and only third hand copy of the original was used as original for not so skilled artisans to copy them.
BUT the internals are seen in the x-rays photos as good as possible, everything that smart and passionate people rebuild on existing remains is working (g’day Cris @Clicksping & friends). Why then, making an almost perfect machine, but with wrong gears teeth, would be the scope of its builders? Were them a bunch of young learners (cannot call them school boys) that left the “how to make the tooth of the gears” lesson for a fancy Bachus party? Or the classical excuse: “tooth gears were filed by Eumachus, when not drunk, but often when he was drunk, if he was present to help us and not p1553d drunk sleeping behing the pub”. Or perhaps it was sabotaged so the romans wont fancy it and would leave that junk to the greeks (with ready flles in their hands) that were waiting for the romans to leave. But alas the ship sunk with it. Brokenhearted the greeks started the fires in furnances to build another machine, but the first tornado in Europe came and razed the shop, then a giant wave took the remains into the sea and lava flowed from nowhere over the small greek vilage erasing any trace of the first mechanics. The gods were not pleased that puny humans found and traced the celestial movements with a machine with a rotating lever. Lightings marked the now cursed place in fresh solidified lava. Two hours later another lightnings erased the marks just in case someone starts digging.
Would you prefer my story or “they laked precision” one?
P.S. were those machinists requalified dentists?
Most of the Antikythera thingy are fused/incomplete and unknown thought right? And so it’s a lot of guesswork in the first place.
In that sense can you even speaking of working or not working?
However surely it’s too complex to be ‘ornamental’ so it must have done something so I think it was a thing that once worked.
But you can’t make ‘replicas’ if most of it is guesswork and our current imagination and then claim it proves anything. You could turn it into lots of things and never get close to what it was.
Please check Clickspring YuoTube channel. 99% of what was found of the machine has been indentified as being related with antique greek calendars and events and astonomical events (eclipses).
Perhaps the exact case is not known, but the functionality is discovered.
given the extreme cost it would have taken to build the mechanism in it’s era i’d be very surprised if it didn’t work, because the builder wouldn’t have been paid.
As regards binding though if the geartrain was being used to transmit power, maybe it is an issue. but this is not a clock. i’d imagine a competent operator would turn the output and input gears at the same time to take the load off the mechanism, as well as supply it with whatever oil or fat was available to lower friction.
I was fortunate enough to travel to Athens last fall for work, to present a paper, and I visited the National Archaeological Museum in my down time. Got to see the Antikythera pieces in person. That place is amazing, I spent about 4 hours one afternoon and didn’t even get to see everything. Definitely a must for anyone visiting!