Evidence of Prehistoric Human Activity Discovered on Falkland Islands

By UNIVERSITY OF MAINE NOVEMBER 7, 2021

Kit Hamley holds a large male sea lion skull from a bone pile at New Island. Dozens of individual sea lions were present throughout the bone pile assemblages excavated at New Island. Credit: Kit Hamley

Since its first recorded sighting by European explorers in the 1600s, scientists and historians have believed that Europeans were the first people to ever set foot on the Falkland Islands. Findings from a new University of Maine-led study, however, suggests otherwise; that human activity on the islands predates European arrival by centuries. 

Kit Hamley, National Science Foundation graduate research fellow with the UMaine Climate Change Institute, spearheaded the first-ever scientific investigation into prehistoric human presence on the Southern Atlantic archipelago. She and her team collected animal bones, charcoal records and other evidence from across the islands over multiple expeditions and examined them for indications of human activity using radiocarbon dating and other laboratory techniques.

One notable sign of pre-European human activity derived from a 8,000-year-old charcoal record collected from a column of peat on New Island, located in the southwestern edge of the territory. According to researchers, the record showed signs of a marked increase in fire activity in 150 C.E., then abrupt and significant spikes in 1410 C.E., and 1770 C.E., the latter of which corresponds with initial European settlement. 

Researchers also gathered sea lion and penguin samples on New Island near the site where a landowner discovered a stone projectile point that is consistent with the technology Indigenous South Americans have used for the past 1,000 years. The bones were heaped in discrete piles at one site. Hamley says the location, volume and type of bones indicated that the mounds were likely assembled by humans. 

Most of the evidence Hamley and her colleagues collected indicated that Indigenous South Americans likely traveled to the Falkland Islands between 1275 C.E. and 1420 C.E. Arrival dates prior to 1275 C.E., however, cannot be ruled out because some evidence dates back even earlier, according to researchers. For example, the team found a tooth from an extinct Falkland Islands fox called the warrah with a radiocarbon date of 3450 B.C.E., the oldest for the species. Regardless, all of the team’s findings indicate that people landed in the archipelago before British navigator John Strong in 1690, the first European to set foot on the archipelago. 

Indigenous people likely visited the islands for multiple short-term stays, as opposed to long-term occupation, according to the UMaine researchers. As a result, they left few cultural materials there, but enough for Hamley and her colleagues to find a discernible anthropogenic and paleoecological footprint and conduct their study. 

“These findings broaden our understanding of Indigenous movement and activity in the remote and harsh South Atlantic Ocean,” says Hamley, a UMaine Ph.D. student of ecology and environmental sciences. “This is really exciting because it opens up new doors for collaborating with descendant Indigenous communities to increase our understanding of past ecological changes throughout the region. People have long speculated that it was likely that Indigenous South Americans had reached the Falkland Islands, so it is really rewarding to get to play a role in helping bring that part of the past to life of the islands.”

UMaine researchers who participated in the study with Hamley include her adviser, Jacquelyn Gill, an associate professor of paleoecology and plant ecology; Daniel Sandweiss, a professor of anthropology; and Brenda Hall, a professor of glacial geology. 

Other investigators involved in the research include Dulcinea Groff, a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Wyoming and former UMaine Ph.D. student; Kathryn Krasinski, an assistant professor of anthropology at Adelphi University; John Southon; a researcher with the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California-Irvine; Paul Brickle, executive director of the South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute; and Thomas Lowell, a geology professor with the University of Cincinnati. 

Science Advances, a journal from the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), published a report of their findings. 

Hamley’s most recent study builds on her research into the warrah (Dusicyon australis), an extinct species of fox. The warrah was the only native and terrestrial mammal to reside on the Falkland Islands at the time of European arrival. Subsequent hunting wiped the species out in 1856, making it the first extinct canid in the historic record, Hamley says. 

For years, various scholars, including Charles Darwin, have debated the warrah’s origins and how it came to the islands. Hamley hypothesizes that humans may have introduced the species to the archipelago prior to European settlement. Many previously rejected the theory based on a prior lack of scientific evidence, but the latest findings from Hamley’s team reopens that possibility, she says. Indigenous South Americans may have domesticated warrah as they have with other foxes and canids, and brought them to the islands during their voyages and short-term stays. 

During a 2018 expedition to the islands, Hamely and her colleagues found three warrah bone samples at Spring Point Farm in West Falkland. Carbon dating and isotopic analysis revealed the warrah whose bones were analyzed “had a marine-based diet consisting primarily of apex marine predators” like sea lions and fur seals, a similar diet to seafaring Indigenious South Americans in prehistoric times, according to researchers. While these findings could reflect coastal scavenging, it may exemplify the food their potential human counterparts were procuring and eating, researchers say. 

“This study has the potential to change the trajectory of future ecological research in The Falklands,” says Hamley. “The introduction of a top predator, like the warrah, could have had profound implications for the biodiversity of the islands, which are home to ground nesting seabirds such as penguins, albatross, and cormorants. It also changes the ever-captivating story of past human-canine relationships. We know that Indigenous South Americans domesticated foxes, but this study helps show how potentially important these animals were to those communities extending back thousands of years.” 

Hamley conducted her research during three expeditions to the Falkland Islands in 2014, 2016 and 2018. During the 2016 journey, she participated in UMaine’s Follow a Researcher program, through which scientists give K–12 students a glimpse of their work through live expedition updates, Twitter chats and videos. 

The study led by Hamley contributes to the growing body of scientific investigations into the ecological, anthropological and climate history of the Falklands Islands conducted by UMaine researchers. A 2020 UMaine-led study discovered that the establishment of seabird colonies on the islands in response to an abrupt regional cooling period 5,000 years ago changed its ecosystems. 

“As the world warms, we hope our growing understanding of the pre-colonial history of the Falklands will help decision-makers balance the needs of wildlife and people, who rely on ecotourism, fisheries and other industries,” says Gill, an NSF CAREER researcher who was named a 2020 Friend of the Planet by the National Center for Science Education. “We’re only just beginning to piece together the role people played in the Falklands before European settlement. Because of centuries of colonialism on the mainland, a lot of the oral knowledge about this period was lost. Western science needs updating, and we hope future work will be done in collaboration with the modern-day Indigenous people in the region; their ancestors were the first experts here.”

Reference: “Evidence of prehistoric human activity in the Falkland Islands” by Kit M. Hamley, Jacquelyn L. Gill, Kathryn E. Krasinski, Dulcinea V. Groff, Brenda L. Hall, Daniel H. Sandweiss, John R. Southon, Paul Brickle and Thomas V. Lowell, 27 October 2021, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abh3803

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Sustainably Mining Rare Earth Elements From Fertilizer Byproduct

By PENN STATE UNIVERSITY NOVEMBER 6, 2021

Penn State engineers received a National Science Foundation grant to recover rare earth elements from phosphogypsum, a fertilizer byproduct stored indefinitely in open dumps and pumped into designated lakes, shown here.

Despite their name, rare earth elements are not actually that rare. The 17 metallic elements are ubiquitous in nature and are becoming even more common in technology, as a critical component of microchips and more. The “rare” description pertains to how difficult they are to extract into a useable form. The normal technique to pull them from composite minerals is typically energy intensive and produces significant carbon emissions, and a large portion of rare earth elements are lost in waste from other industrial processes. 

To develop a more sustainable process that can retrieve rare earth elements from phosphogypsum, a byproduct of fertilizer production, Penn State researchers were awarded a four-year, $571,658 National Science Foundation grant as part of a collaboration with Case Western Reserve University and Clemson University totaling $1.7 million in funding. Each university is independently funded to pursue a specific aspect of the project, but the project is centrally coordinated by researchers at Case Western Reserve. Lauren Greenlee, associate professor of chemical engineering, is leading the Penn State effort with co-principal investigator Rui Shi, assistant professor of chemical engineering. 

“Today, an estimated 200,000 tons of rare earth elements are trapped in unprocessed phosphogypsum waste in Florida alone,” Greenlee said, explaining that phosphogypsum is piped to ditches and ponds for indefinite storage. “This source of rare earth elements is presently untapped due to challenges associated with radioactive species and the difficulty of separating the individual elements. The vision for this project is to discover new separation mechanisms, materials and processes to recover valuable resources, including rare earth elements, fertilizers and clean water, from waste streams of the fertilizer industry, paving the way for a sustainable domestic supply of rare earth elements and a sustainable agriculture sector.”

Greenlee also noted that the United States relies largely on international sources for rare earth element supplies, and the COVID-19 pandemic has caused lengthy delays in the supply chains. 

“It’s a significant problem that’s compounded by the economic, environmental, and security complexities of obtaining and using rare earth elements internationally,” Greenlee said.  

Phosphogypsum is formed when phosphate rock is processed into fertilizer, and contains small amounts of naturally occurring radioactive elements, such as uranium and thorium. Because of this radioactivity, the byproduct is stored indefinitely, and improper storage can contaminate soil, water and the atmosphere. To harvest the rare earth elements trapped in phosphogypsum, the researchers propose a multistage process using engineered peptides capable of precisely identifying and separating out the rare earth elements through a specialized membrane. 

“Individual rare earth elements have similar sizes and identical formal charges, so traditional membrane separation mechanisms are insufficient,” Greenlee said. “A key technical goal of this research is to discover the mechanisms that underpin peptide-ion selectivity and leverage those mechanisms to design a new class of highly selective membranes.”

Case Western Reserve researchers Christine Duval, principal investigator and assistant professor of chemical engineering, and Julie Renner, co-principal investigator and assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, will develop the molecules to latch to specific rare earth elements. Their design will be guided by computational modeling work by Rachel Getman, principal investigator and associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Clemson. Once the peptides are developed, Greenlee will investigate how they work in water solutions, while Shi will use systems analysis tools, including techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment, to evaluate the environmental impacts and economic feasibility of the proposed rare earth elements-recovery system under various design and operating conditions.

“What are the overall sustainability implications of this process?” Shi asked. “We want to navigate away from the current environmental impacts to be more sustainable, and we can do that by translating the fundamental research and laboratory-scale results to systems-level environmental and economic impacts. Then, we can integrate the sustainability results back into design to guide future research targets while advancing rare earth element recovery and phosphogypsum processing.”

The proposed project will also complement other Penn State research, including work using naturally occurring protein molecules to extract grouped rare earth elements from other industrial waste sources. 

“For our project, the hypothesis is that water molecules associated with the peptides binding to the rare earth elements reorganize, and we can precisely control that reorganization to be more efficient based on the individual rare earth element,” Greenlee said, noting that her team will examine the interactions at the atomic level by using X-ray absorption spectroscopy to validate how the molecules exchange atoms as they bind. “With modeling and experimentation, we’ll continue to iterate to ensure we understand how the molecules work together.” 

 

Catastrophic Australian Fires Fueled Unprecedented Blooms in the Far South Pacific

By SARA E. PRATT, NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY NOVEMBER 6, 2021

January 6, 2020

Iron-rich aerosols from the 2019-2020 fires fertilized huge phytoplankton populations in the far South Pacific.

The catastrophic wildfires that scorched eucalyptus forests in southern and eastern Australia in the summer of 2019-2020 were unprecedented in their scale and intensity. Started in October 2019 and burning through January 2020, they scorched millions of hectares and killed or displaced an estimated 3 billion animals. The fires emitted vast amounts of carbon dioxide and lofted smoke plumes to record heights.

That smoky summer also affected marine ecosystems thousands of kilometers away, according to new research that combined satellite data and surface measurements. From December 2019 to March 2020, the deposition of aerosols emitted by the fires triggered phytoplankton blooms in the normally iron-limited waters of the South Pacific and Southern Ocean. Together the surface area of those blooms exceeded the size of Australia.

The image above, acquired on January 6, 2020, by the Japanese satellite Himawari-8, shows the plume of smoke and ash streaming away from the fires on the southeastern coast of Australia. As global climate warms, such fires are expected to increase in frequency and intensity, releasing more carbon dioxide, which further fuels climate change.

It is important to understand the effects of such fires, not just on local ecosystems but on distant ones as well, noted marine biogeochemist Weiyi Tang of Princeton and biogeochemist Nicolas Cassar of Duke University, lead authors of the study. “The fact that both the fires and the blooms were unprecedented in the satellite record initially gave us an inkling that they might be connected,” Cassar said.

To quantify the aerosols emitted by the fires, the team examined aerosol optical depth (AOD) data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), which is based partly on measurements from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. In the visible spectrum, AOD provides a measure of the amount of desert dust, sea salt, sulfate, organic matter, and black carbon in a column of air. The researchers looked specifically at black carbon AOD as a proxy for wildfire aerosols. Tang, Cassar, and colleagues found that black carbon emissions emanated mainly from wildfires in southern and eastern Australia and blew out to the broad South Pacific within a few days.

2019 – 2020

The team also examined chlorophyll concentrations recorded by the European Space Agency’s Ocean Color Climate Change Initiative. OCCI merges data from the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) on Envisat, Terra MODIS, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), and the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS).

The maps above show the monthly aerosol levels (left) and chlorophyll anomalies (right) from November 2019 to February 2020. The researchers identified two regions south and east of Australia where chlorophyll concentrations were double the normal seasonal levels—values never before observed in the 22-year satellite record. Those chlorophyll anomalies occurred within a few days to weeks after the peaks in black carbon aerosols. In those two regions, black carbon aerosol values were also 300 percent higher than normal, a level unprecedented in the 17-year aerosol record.

As the wildfire plumes streamed off the Australian continent, they passed over an air sampling station on the summit of Mount Wellington in Tasmania. Analyses of airborne aerosol samples collected there revealed the presence of iron and a saccharide molecule called levoglucosan that forms when cellulose burns—direct evidence that the aerosols came from the wildfires. Downwind, Argo floats in the ocean also detected elevated levels of chlorophyll in the bloom areas, affirming that the satellite chlorophyll signal was real.

The connection between the smoke aerosols and the bloom was also corroborated by a model that computed the trajectories of the air parcels leaving the fire. “The aerosol optical depth and the modeled air mass trajectories confirmed that the algal blooms were in the path of the aerosols from the wildfires,” Cassar said.

The team even considered whether natural variability in the ocean—such as the Indian Ocean Dipole, the Southern Annular Mode, or El Niño-Southern Oscillation—could explain the influx of nutrients fueling the bloom. “There was nothing that could explain the observations that we had,” Tang said. “It turns out that natural variability was relatively small compared to what we observed.”

January 4, 2020

In a related paper, another research team reported that the 2019-2020 fires emitted more than twice the carbon dioxide previously estimated, a magnitude exceeding Australia’s annual carbon dioxide emissions from fires and fossil fuels. The phytoplankton bloom initially took up a great deal of that carbon dioxide, but its ultimate fate—for example, whether it was respired at the surface or exported to the deep ocean—is not yet known. “For us, the holy grail is to figure out how much this bloom offset the carbon emissions associated with the Australian wildfires,” Cassar said.

Elucidating the links among wildfires, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and marine ecosystems could help improve global carbon cycle models. “We focused on the Australian wildfires because they were really unique in size, but I think it’s worth also looking at other wildfires, including in California, and other regions of the world,” Cassar noted. “And if it is important, globally, then it needs to be better represented in Earth system models.”

NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using data courtesy of Tang, W., et al. (2021) including data from the European Space Agency, and MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Himawari imagery courtesy of the Japan Meteorological Agency.

 

Animals Died in “Toxic Soup” During Earth’s Worst Mass Extinction – A Warning for Today

By UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT NOVEMBER 7, 2021

An artist’s rendering of the conditions during the End-Permian Mass Extinction, which wiped out nearly all life on earth. (Illustration by Victor Leshyk

‘The end-Permian is one of the best places to look for parallels with what’s happening now.’

The end-Permian mass extinction event of roughly 252 million years ago – the worst such event in earth’s history – has been linked to vast volcanic emissions of greenhouse gases, a major temperature increase, and the loss of almost every species in the oceans and on land.

Now, it seems that even the lakes and rivers were no safe havens. A recent study published by an international team of researchers including Professor and Head of the Department of Geosciences Tracy Frank and Professor Chris Fielding, both newly arrived at UConn, has identified a new cause of extinction during extreme warming events: toxic microbial blooms.

In a healthy ecosystem, microscopic algae and cyanobacteria provide oxygen to aquatic animals as a waste product of their photosynthesis. But when their numbers get out of control, these microbes deplete free oxygen, and even release toxins into the water. By studying the fossil, sediment, and chemical records of rocks near Sydney, Australia, the researchers discovered that several pulses of bloom events had occurred soon after the first volcanic rumblings of the end-Permian mass extinction. Once the bottom-feeder animals, or “detritivores,” were killed off, there was no one left to keep the microbes in check. The freshwater systems then seethed with algae and bacteria, delaying the recovery of animals for perhaps millions of years.

Frank and Fielding study sediment, and Frank explains their contribution to the work, which was performed while both were at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, was in gleaning details about the conditions of the environment, and the resulting toxic soup, from the layers of sediment.

“We are trying to understand what conditions these plants were living in, for instance were they lake deposits versus river deposits?” Frank says. “Then what can we determine details about the salinity and temperatures of the waters, those details come from the geochemistry.”

The three main ingredients for the toxic soup are accelerated greenhouse gas emissions, high temperatures, and abundant nutrients. The volcanic eruptions provided the first two, while sudden deforestation caused the third. When the trees were wiped out, the soils bled into the rivers and lakes, providing all the nutrients that the microbes would need. When the researchers compared the fossil records of different warming-related mass extinctions, the team found extremely similar fossil records. This implicates deadly microbial blooms as repeat offenders of freshwater extinctions during extreme warming events.

Today, humans have been following this recipe, and freshwater microbial blooms have been on the rise, illustrating how important the geosciences are in understanding the past in ways that offer crucial context for understanding contemporary changes in climate.

“We’re seeing more and more toxic algae blooms in lakes and in shallow marine environments that’s related to increases in temperature and changes in plant communities which are leading to increases in nutrient contributions to freshwater environments,” Frank says. “So, a lot of parallels to today. The volcanism was a source of CO₂ in the past but we know that the rate of CO₂ input that was seen back then was similar to the rate of CO₂ increases we’re seeing today because of anthropogenic effects.

“We can get a sense of how much climate has changed in the past, what the extremes are, how fast it can change, what the causes of climate change are and that gives us a nice backdrop for understanding what’s happening today.”

According to this year’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the influence of humans on the changing climate is “unequivocal,” creating conditions that favor the spread of these warmth-loving microbes. In combination with an influx of nutrients from water pollution, mostly from agriculture and deforestation, this has led to a sharp increase in toxic blooms. The results: mass fish die-offs, severe human and livestock health effects, and an annual cost measurable in billions of dollars.

“The end-Permian is one of the best places to look for parallels with what’s happening now,” says Fielding.

“The other big parallel is that the increase in temperature at the end of the Permian coincided with massive increases in forest fires. One of the things that that destroyed whole ecosystems was fire, and we’re seeing that right now in places like California. One wonders what the longer-term consequences of events like that as they are becoming more and more widespread.”

These are clear symptoms of an unbalanced ecosystem, and the present study indicates that the impacts of bloom events can echo for an extremely long time. However, unlike the species that suffered the mass extinctions of the past, we have the opportunity to prevent these toxic blooms by keeping our waterways clean and curbing our greenhouse gas emissions.

“The scary thing is we are used to thinking in terms of timescales of years, maybe tens of years, if we get really adventurous. The end-Permian mass extinction event took four million years to recover from. That’s sobering,” says Fielding.

 

Could our Universe be Someone’s Chemistry Project?

POSTED ONNOVEMBER 2, 2021 BY MATT WILLIAMS

It is a pivotal time for astrophysicists, cosmologists, and philosophers alike. In the coming years, next-generation space and ground-based telescopes will come online that will use cutting-edge technology and machine learning to probe the deepest depths of the cosmos. What they find there, with any luck, will allow scientists to address some of the most enduring questions about the origins of life and the Universe itself.

Alas, one question that we may never be able to answer is the most pressing of all: if the Universe was conceived in a Big Bang, what was here before that? According to a new op-ed by Prof. Abraham Loeb (which recently appeared in Scientific American), the answer may be stranger than even the most “exotic” explanations. As he argued, the cosmos as we know it may be a “baby Universe” that was created by an advanced technological civilization in a lab!

As the former chair (2011-2020) of the astronomy department at Harvard University, the founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative (BHI), the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and one of the chief researchers with the Galileo Project, Loeb is no stranger to “exotic” theories about advanced intelligence and cosmic origins.

His credentials also include chairing the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy, the advisory board for Breakthrough Starshot, and being a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is also the author of the bestselling book “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” which addressed the possibility that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua was an artificial probe.

This time around, it’s the foundations of the Universe itself (and whether or not aliens may have been involved) that have attracted Loeb’s interest. For starters, there have been many conjectures as to what might have existed before the Big Bang. Some of the more well-known examples include that the Universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation or that it is a cyclic process with repeated periods of contraction and expansion – Big Bang, Big Crunch, repeat.

There is even the notion that the Universe was born from matter collapsing inside a black hole in another Universe, which then rebounded to form the other side of the Einstein–Rosen bridge (a “wormhole”) where our Universe was conceived. A similar version of this argument states that the Big Bang could have been a supermassive “white hole” that formed from a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in our parent universe.

Yet another theory is that our Universe is a consequence of the string theory interpretation of the multiverse, where infinite Universes coexist, and every possibility plays out an infinite number of times. According to Loeb, this could take the form of our Universe being created in a laboratory by an advanced civilization. “Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.”

In the context of quantum physics, tunneling refers to a phenomenon where a wave function can propagate through a potential barrier. This plays an essential role in physical phenomena, ranging from nuclear fusion and tunneling electron microscopes to quantum computing. Unfortunately, the Standard Model of particle physics models cannot resolve how quantum mechanics and gravity interact, hence why a Theory of Everything (ToE) is still lacking.

However, a sufficiently advanced species may have already developed a ToE and the technology for creating baby Universes. In essence, this theory offers a possible origin story that appeals to the religious notion of a creator and the secular notion of quantum gravity alike. It suggests that a Universe like our own – which hosts at least one civilization (i.e., us) – is like a biological system that reproduces over generations. As Loeb explained to Universe Today via email:

“It explains the Big Bang as an infinite series of baby universes born inside each other, just like chicks hatching out of eggs and laying new eggs later in their life. If something predated this series of generations – it would have been something else, just as in the ‘chicken and egg dilemma.'”

This is reminiscent of the Kardashev Scale, which characterizes civilizations by Type (I, II, and III) based on the amount of energy they can harness. Whereas Type Is are able to harness the energy of their entire planet, Type II civilizations can harness the energy of their whole star systems, and Type IIIs can harness the energy of their entire galaxy. In this case, says Loeb, the metric is a civilization’s ability to reproduce the astrophysical conditions that led to their existence.

The Big Bang Theory: A history of the Universe starting from a singularity and expanding ever since. Credit: grandunificationtheory.com

For some, this whole Baby Universe theory might sound similar to the Zoo Hypothesis – a proposed resolution to the Fermi Paradox. But as Loeb explained, there’s a fundamental difference between the two:

“The Zoo is a place where you watch the animals, but a baby universe cannot be observed from the outside according to General Relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity. The interior of the baby universe disappears from view of the creator and snaps out of the creator’s spacetime. The situation is analogous to the formation of a black hole, where all the matter that falls into it cannot be observed once it enters the black hole horizon.

“As a result the creator of the baby universe will never know which type of civilization formed in it and will also not be able to intervene. Creating a baby universe might not consume energy because the negative gravitational energy cancels out the positive energy of matter and radiation in our universe, which is characterized by a flat geometry.

“The fate of our Universe is completely independent of the baby universe, just as the history of a person that enters the event horizon of a black hole has no influence on us. Based on everything we know, our own universe will expand forever.”

Another appealing feature of this theory is the way it’s free of anthropic reasoning, which essentially states that the Universe was selected for us to exist in. Formally known as the Anthropic Principle, this stands in opposition to the Copernican Principle (or Cosmological Principle) that asserts that there is nothing special or unique about humanity or the space we occupy in the Universe. However, the mere fact that slight variations in the laws of physics would rule out life would seem to suggest that we are fortunate.

Artist view of an active supermassive black hole. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

In recent years, it has been suggested that multiverse theory is a possible resolution for the Anthropic Principle. The Baby Universe theory is consistent with this idea, as it theorizes that the Universe gives rise to advanced civilizations that are drivers of a cosmic Darwinian selection process. At present, humanity is not advanced enough to replicate the cosmic conditions that led to our existence.

Whereas a civilization that could recreate these cosmic conditions (i.e., produce a “baby Universe” in a laboratory) would fall into class A on this proposed cosmic scale, a class B civilization could adjust the conditions in its immediate environment to be independent of its host star. Given our present situation, humanity is currently a class C or D since we cannot recreate the habitable conditions on our planet (when our Sun dies) and are carelessly destroying planet Earth through climate change.

But eventually, humanity may reach the point where we become a class A civilization and can partake in the hypothesized process of cosmic reproduction. Who knows? Maybe we will even be able to create a baby Universe that is an improvement over our own. Loeb contends that such hopes may be a tad optimistic but that the prospect for cosmic procreation presents some very inspiring possibilities:

“We are getting close to producing synthetic life in our laboratories. Once we will understand how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, we might know how to make a baby universe in the laboratory. The ethics of making another universe would be similar to making another human being...

“But ultimately, it would be flattering to our species if the abilities that past generations assigned to God, namely creating a universe and creating life in it, will be at our disposal as an advanced scientific civilization. If another civilization that predated us by a billion years had reached that goal already and we will encounter it one day, then that civilization will be a good approximation to what our past religions regarded as God.”

Further Reading: Scientific American

Pluto’s dark side revealed by moonlight in pictures from New Horizons

United News Team

After NASA’s New Horizons mission flew past Pluto in 2015, it turned around and took pictures of the dwarf planet’s back, revealing its moonlit dark side

5 November 2021

By Leah Crane

The dark side of Pluto is faintly illuminated by sunlight reflected by the moon Charon in images captured by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015

Moonlight on Pluto has revealed some of the dwarf planet’s dark side. On its way past Pluto in 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft turned around and took pictures of this world’s back, and after a lengthy cleaning-up process, the images have revealed some of the first details we have ever seen of the side that wasn’t illuminated by the sun at the time.

Taking images of Pluto from beyond its orbit is difficult because at that position, it is backlit by the sun. “When you look back at Pluto’s dark side, you turn around and look almost right at the sun, and it’s pretty damn bright,” says Tod Lauer at the US National Optical Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Arizona, who is part of the New Horizons team. “It’s like driving in a car with a dirty window, looking into the sun without a sun visor, trying to read a street sign.”

To make the pictures from New Horizons usable, Lauer and his colleagues had to rework the mission’s data processing procedure to eliminate the parts of the images that were overexposed by sunlight and therefore didn’t contain any useful data. Once those parts of the images were cleared away, the researchers could manipulate what remained to see the moonlit surface of Pluto.

While Pluto’s major moon, Charon, is much smaller than Earth’s moon, it is shinier and closer to its host world than our moon is, so it provides about half as much light to the side of Pluto that’s facing away from the sun. Under this faint illumination, the researchers found one spot that was brighter than its surroundings, which is probably a deposit of nitrogen or methane ice.

They also found that the south pole appeared to be much less bright than the north pole. “You expect the poles should be more or less the same, and this difference is intriguing – it may indicate a seasonal thing,” says Lauer. New Horizons flew by Pluto at the end of the small world’s southern summer, so this may be a hint that bright ice deposits don’t survive that relatively warm period, or that haze particles from the tenuous atmosphere are deposited on the surface in the summer.

Reference: arxiv.org/abs/2110.11976

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