Updates: The First Monster and Oumuamua

But of course we do so with science as the bedrock, and science, as we frequently discussed, is perpetually in a state of change. It's that slime mold working its way through the maze of reality, and so pretty much nothing that we record is guaranteed to be evergreen. As they say in the you know, the publishing world. Well sure, it's the kind of funny irony is that science is probably it's the best tool we have for understanding reality, but it's very rarely the final word because it's all,

you know, We're always getting a better idea. That's it's one of the reasons I cringe when people talk about starting the podcast back from the beginning from ten years ago. I mean part of it is like when I when we started out, like we didn't really know what we were doing. But then also you know, it's like the science changes, like we had there's an older episode on

the Ender Tols. Uh, and I don't really recommend anyone listen to that because there's been so much there's been been so many more studies about in the Ender Toll since the publication of that episode. I just don't I don't trust the science to be uh accurate, to be the best version of of our understanding. Well, I hope the way we approach things now we we try to make episodes at least partially evergreen, baking in the idea that you know, results are tentative, that you know, the

outcome of one study is not the answer forever. You know, things in the future could upend it. Oh, absolutely, And I do think we we do that. But uh, but yeah, today's episode is going to be about doing a little upkeep on a couple of well, one is a recent episode or a pair of episodes from this year. Another is an older episode from seventeen that we also recently

re ran back in October. And of course the main thing too is that both of these are exciting topics where new findings UH can kind of change the way we understand the cosmos or understand the history of humanity. Yeah, and I guess also both of these UH findings have to do with primacy, right, So so yeah, let's go straight into the first one. And this concerns the episode that we recorded I guess it was a couple of years ago, and then re ran about the idea of

the first Monster. Yeah, back in ten we recorded an episode of Stuff to Play your Mind titled the First Monster. Again, we reran it and in this most recent October. But in the episode we discussed UH the Lionman or the Loan Ninch, which was this this figure that resembled UH was a human with a lion's head, a hybrid, a hybrid being combining animal and human likeness into a single like. Now,

this was this particular artifact. The Lowan Mench was discovered in nineteen thirty nine at a stone age cave site known as Stottlehole or Stable Cave at Hollenstein near Vogelherd in Germany. But it would be another thirty years before anyone got a chance to examine these broken pieces of

ivory due to the World Wars. But eventually, thirty years later, that's when German archaeologist Yoheim Hahn discovered that these two hundred fragments came together to form a thirty one centimeter or just over a foot long figure carbon fourteen dated to put two between thirty five and forty thousand years old. It had the body of a man in the head of a lion. In two thousand three, another lionman was

discovered in southwestern Germany. This one was carbon dated to around the same time period and by by some estimates. You know, first of all, these are amazing just for no other reason. They're just they're just fascinating figures that they give us some insight in to what ancient people were doing, what they were making. But they also seemed to be the oldest examples of figurative art. You know, we've seen the Venus of Whole Fells take the title before.

I think it's from thirty five thousand to forty thousand years ago, discovered in two thousand eight and two thousand sixteen. But you know, while the venus is the depiction of the feminine form of the loan Minch is a human fused with the beast. Yeah, and this is what we were drawing attention to in the episode, the idea that this is the earliest example that we knew about of

fantasy art. It is an imagined being. Yeah, as stated by Clive Gamble, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK, as quoted in Nature quote, they depict an animal world in a semi realistic way. It shows early man moving from his immediate world to an imaginative world. So that's just a brief breakdown of the Loan minch. Uh. Certainly go back and listen to that episode that we did if you want more on that topic. But here's the

cool thing. And imagine a number of you have have caught this news already because it was covered a number of places that I even saw it featured on Stephen Colbert's show. But in December of twenty nineteen, a new discovery was made and it might just blow the Lionman and the Venus out of the water. This is so cool. Yeah. So this story takes us to a different corner of the world. It takes us to Sulawesi, Indonesia one of the four Greater Sunda Islands, and it's actually the world's

eleventh largest island. I read so we've known about applies to scene settlements in the area for quite some time, and early Homo sapiens are known to have reached UH this area between sixty thousand and forty five thousand years ago.

Previous studies from some of the same archaeologists involved in in this particular find, which is the the arch team out of Australia UH, they've revealed prehistoric art and ornaments dating back thirty thousand to twenty two thousand years ago in this area and Homo sapiens apparently made it here again some time prior to fifty thousand years ago. So here's how this new finding came about. In a spelunker named Hamrula climbed into a previously uncharted chamber in a

Suluesti cave system known as Marrow's pun Cap. It's a limestone cave system. And while he was there, performing a government survey of the case. And if you're wondering, was Hamrula his first name or his last name? Apparently a lot of people in Indonesia just go by one name, just just just the one name. Anyway, he gets he crawls through a narrow space into this new chamber and

he discovers cave paintings. And the cave paintings were subsequently examined and written about by Aubert at All in Earliest Hunting Scene in Prehistoric Art, published December twenty nineteen in Nature. And again I believe this is the same arch team out of Australia that was involved in some previous studies

in the area. So as the title implies, uh, they used some dating technology uranium series dating on cave popcorn or mineral deposits that they're hanging over some of the motifs in the scene, and they were able to date this hunting scene back to at least forty three thousand, nine hundred years ago, So that is twenty thousand years older than the hunting scene on the walls of Francis Lasco Caves, and coming back to the Low and Minch,

that's also four thousand years before the lion Man. And I realized we're talking about such it's it's kind of ironic that we're talking about such big periods of time, such large portions of human history. That you can also make four thousand years not seem like a lot, which is which is bizarre. But obviously four thousand years is a lot of time and to to set the record back four thousand years is amazing. So uh, here's an

important caveat though there's more work to do. Is they need to date not just the work overall, you know, looking at the cave popcorn, but each figure individually before we can be certain in all of this, because there's ultimately the possibility that different portions of it have been added at different times. Yes, and now the main archaeologists were quoted saying they don't think that's the case, but yeah,

we certainly should date the different parts. I think the parts that had been that have been dated so far are just the regular animals, but the more interesting parts let's get into that. So, yes, the overall it depicts what seemed to be individuals using spears against prey animals in a hunt. And this would be on its own, would be an amazing find, right it would, as it

would predate any hunting scene we've seen before. But on top of this, some of the hunters appear to be um what the the researchers referred to as theory in thropes or animal human hybrids, much like the Loan niche as some of the humans appear to have tails or snouts, right, So if this is correct, if the uh now now again the parts that have been dated already were overlapping, just the animals that were being hunted, which were these like buffalo type creatures and HIGs, yeah, wild pigs, and

then a type of buffalo called an a noah which is also known as a midget buffalo, so like a water buffalo except smaller. Okay, But and so I think they haven't dated the other figures like the theory and thropes or the human animal hybrids yet, but it looks like they're probably from the same period. We're just not

certain about that. But if so, this would this would probably predate the Loan mention, making this the earliest evidence we have of fantastical thinking, of like magic thinking among humans, showing human animal hybrids like a human hunting a buffalo with a bird's beak. Very cool. Yeah, and it's it's when we get into it in that that episode about the first Monster, about what this means, right, like, what what ultimately does it mean to have in your mind,

a human with a beast's head. You know, on one hand, it is imagining something that does not exist in the real world, and but then on a on a deeper level, it is taking what this means? What does a bird mean? What are the ideas that that just the mere symbol of a bird summons, and then our idea too, of a human being. What happens when these, uh, this mix of symbols and meanings collide. What new ideas are born

out of that collision? Absolutely so, it basically shows that that people from this time period of you know, four thousand years earlier than we thought, may have been dealing with this kind of complex thinking, mashing up of symbols, ideas and concepts, concepts even taking on a humanoid form.

Becky Ferreira wrote an excellent piece on this for The New York Times, and you know she she points out in this that the researchers believed too, that these may have been animal spirit helpers, something that you would commonly find a shamanistic beliefs. Uh So, yeah, there's a possibility that we're dealing with, you know, animism and shamanism here, right.

It looks like it could be again This is just interpretation, but it looks like it could be a scene depicting maybe a game beam drive, where so hunters are shown driving prey animals into an ambush by other hunters, but that some of the hunters appear to be human others appear to be human animal hybrids, So that means they could be depicting yeah, like these these otherworldly spirit helpers

that come into aid the humans in the hunt, right Like. Well, even if they are depictions of humans dressed up as animals or partial animals, they would have engaged in an actual like literal right like, even that would reveal the idea. This is kind of complex thinking as possible totally now. The researchers also note that these paintings are are quite fragile and the art is fading quote at an alarming

rate and for unknown reasons. So it's gonna be interesting to see how this develops uh further, because it does seem like there's a you know, there's there's a half life in play here and uh and it's kind of a question how much can we figure out about them before the work is decreated? Yeah, And it also makes you wonder about how much other wonderful art from the prehistoric world is just already lost and we'll never see it. Tragic.

But on the optimistic side, how many how many more caverns like this are there out in the world that just haven't haven't been breached or haven't been breached in a terribly long time. Yeah, that's really exciting. All right, I think we should take a quick break, but we'll

be right back with another update. Thank thank Alright, we're back. Uh. So this update follows up on our previous podcasts about the first interstellar visitor, the first object from another star outside our Solar System, which is known as Umuamua uh and so a brief refresher on Umuma before we get into the updates on it. So, on October nineteen, the Pan Stars one telescope in Hawaii first registered a small,

previously uncataloged object zooming through the Solar System. They got other observatories to to confirm it, and due to the trajectory of the object, it was clear that this thing was not orbiting the Sun like everything else we see in the Solar System is. Instead, it was sling shotting around the Sun, coming in from outside the Sun's gravitational influence, and it seemed like it was probably a rocky object that somehow got ejected from another star system in the galaxy.

And there were a lot of reasons that this thing was very interesting. So I'll just run through a few, uh, a few of its attributes real quick. Uh. There was its speed when it made its nearest approach to the Sun around September nine, it was going a hundred and ninety six thousand miles per hour, or about eighty seven point three kilometers per second. And by the time we

we had this information, Mumua was already going. It was like going, you know, it was already headed back out of the Solar System at like seventy thousand miles per hour, already past the orbit of Jupiter. In another four years, it's going to be past the orbit of Neptune. Is just gonna be gone. It's just going off into interstellar space. The fly by had been completed and it had already passed its nearest point by the time we saw it.

Um So the trajectory was very weird. It it entered the plane of the Solar System, the ecliptic plane, at an inclination of like a hundred and twenty three degrees, so sort of coming straight down from above or up from below, however you want to think about. It passed inside the orbit of mercury, slingshot around the Sun and went back out. So you know, we are ships passing in the night. We are never going to see a Mumu again. Now. One of the things that really captured

people's attention about it was its strange shape. Mum is so small and so far away that it appears as a point like object on our telescopes, and that means we can't directly see any details about the surface or the shape of the object. But of course there are ways of analyzing it to draw some conclusions about its shape and surface features. Like we can study the variations and the flickering brightness of the object to create what's

known as a light curve analysis. Basically, this analyzes pas turns of light intensity from this point like object in order to draw conclusions about its shape and its spin and stuff. And when we did that, what what scientists found is that it appears to have something like a

ten to one length to width and depth ratio. So you can imagine a cylindrical or tube shaped object like ten times longer than it is wide um and according to uh Danassa, it could be up to about a quarter mile long, maybe like fours and only about forty meters wide. Also, its motion is not spinning the way you might expect it to be, but it's tumbling, so it's not rotating around a principal axis. It's got a chaotic tumbling pattern, tumbling once every like seven and a

half hours or so, so it's like a tumbling cigar. Yeah, they often characterized as a scar uh. And it looks like it's surface may have a red coloration, which would be consistent with objects in our solar system, like asteroids that have been bombarded with cosmic rays a lot. So that's not all that surprising. But the question is where

did it come from? We don't know for sure. It has this approach trajectory that makes it look like it's roughly coming from the star Vega in the constellation of Lira, but of course, like Vega was not there when it would have been coming from that region, so you'd have to sort of play back the movie of of stars moving around in the galaxy in order to figure out where it actually came from. So we haven't figured that out yet, and then we did a follow up episode.

Our first episode on Omumu was in December of seventeen, and we had an episode after that responding mainly to a paper by the Harvard physicist Aviy Loeb and a co author named schmool by Aali noting this weird speed boost gained by the object as it left the solar system. It seemed to be speeding up as it was speeding away, and uh Loeb and and Bali argued that this boost and speed was consistent with the object being a light sale or a solar sale, which would imply in artificial origin.

But I think our conclusion was, well, you know, you can't totally rule it out, but there's no really strong evidence yet that it's aliens. This is an interesting paper, but it did receive some criticism from people who said, you know, they're jumping to conclusions, right, and it would be an outstanding statement to say its aliens, and we really need outstanding evidence for that to be the statement

we make totally. And if it were like an alien probe, for one thing, we'd probably expect it to be emitting some kind of radio signal, right, we we had some radio observatories try to listen to it and found nothing. There no pattern radio signals at all. So there's no indication that it was aliens really, except for this interesting thing about its speeding up as it moved away, um, which could have also been due to radiation pressure if

it had certain other attributes. But they were saying it didn't have the attributes that would make it you know the kind of objects that would have been powered away by the solar radiation. Now, I remember us talking about the post ability that it was an out of control dead ship, that that if there was any kind of life force around on boarded or even though like a will or a purpose, that it had all been um, you know, eradicated a long time ago. Essentially the you know,

the ship from alien tumbling through the through the galaxy. Yeah, which should be great. But even the ship an alien was emitting a distress which we would have detected. But yeah, you know, who knows. I I like to stay in the in the realm of can't totally rule it out, but won't go there right and again we'll also never know because it's gone. Alright. On that note, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back

with the update. Than all right, we're back. So one of the weirdest things about Mumua was its apparent shape. This it was this extremely elongated cigar shape that was inferred from this light curve analysis. Obviously that figured into a lot of the speculation about alien probes and so forth. Right. You know, you see a cigar shaped object in space. That's not normal. Most objects are not shaped that way. So people wanted to say, oh, yeah, that's got to

be some kind of probe. But are we sure that that's what we're looking at? Are we sure that it is this cigar shaped rocky object like we've been assuming. I came across some interesting reports about a paper that offered a different way of interpreting the data about the geometry, and so this is a more recent development that's from a scientist. I'm sorry, I'm going to do my best to pronounce. His name is Dr Zdnnick Secondina, and Secondina is a check American astronomer who has worked with NASA

JPL for decades. A lot of his research has focused on space dust, meteors, and comments. He's actually done research on the Tunguska event, as well as Haley's comment and uh and uh the giant impact that happened on Jupiter in the nineteen nineties the shoemaker Levy comment. So what

was his take? Well, remember, humans never saw Umuma when it was on its approach right and was coming into its parahelion with the Sun. Our telescopes never picked it up until it had already slingshotted around the Sun and was on its exit trajectory to leave the Solar System. Now, of course, astrophysicists can still infer its total trajectory based on the small sliver of it that we see. You know, you can roughly tell where it came from. But uh.

Second Eina offers an interesting argument about Muamua's shape and nature. He argues that the Muamua we registered with our telescopes is not the original object, but rather it is a remnant a material cosmic race that was left behind after an interstellar commet passed its parahelion and disintegrated in the process. So second in This paper was published on the Archive preprint server in January of twenty nineteen. As always, you know, a lot of physics and astrophysics papers show up on

on archive these days. But just to remind you again, that's not a peer reviewed journal. That's just like a lot of stuff in in this realm happens in those kind of places these days, and it it just gets hashed out on the internet. Um So, that's a preprint server,

not pure viewed. But his analysis does seem to be uh interesting and from what I can tell, pretty sound like to read his words, he believes the evidence indicates quote that also surviving could be a sizeable fragment resembling a devolatilized aggregate of loosely bound dust screens that may have exotic shape, peculiar rotational properties, and extremely high porosity. So uh so weird shape tumbling being very porous and

not very dense. De volatilized of course, because as it passed close to the sun, it lost all of its volatile molecules like water and stuff, and all that stuff would get turned to gas or vaporized, gased out and released, and then what you'd have behind is this this object,

this collection of dust grains. Um So, to continue with his words, so that was all acquired quote in the course of the disintegration event, given that the brightness of Mumu's parent could not possibly equal or exceed the Bordal survival limit. I'll get back to that with with Mr Bordle, there are reasons to believe that it suffered from the

same fate as do the frail comments. The post parahelion observations, then, do not refer to the object that was entering the inner Solar System in early seventeen, as is tacitly assumed,

but to its debris. So here when he when he mentions Bordle the border limit, he's referring to existing research by the American amateur astronomer Johnny Bordle showing that faint comments with very elongated orbits that pass within one earth distance from the Sun will usually tend to shatter right before the closest part of their orbit with the Sun. UH quote the object is a desiccated comment that lost most of its water and gases when it swooped close

to the Sun. It's like a skeleton of the original body with all the ice out. A Secondina also writes that consistent with what we've seen in a couple of other frail comments that shattered like this when they passed close to the Sun. UH quote as a monstrous fluffy dust aggregate and released in the recent explosive event. Umu mua should be of strongly irregular shape, tumbling, not out gassing, and subjected to the effects of solar radiation pressure, consistent

with observation. So he's basically saying, like an object like this that came close to the Sun sort of blew apart because it was getting heated up by the Sun as it was passing around UH, suffered this disintegration event, and then continued to fly on as this remnant piece. It would match all of the stuff we've seen so far, including the stuff that that that Avy Loeb was talking about, with it being subjected to the effects of solar radiation pressure which would help its speed up as it made

its way out of the Solar system. Now there's one. So if Seconding is correct, one implication is that if such a shattering occurred, and if we don't know exactly when it occurred, this complicates our attempts to locate the

origin of the object. Right as best I can tell, like, it still looks like it probably came from outside the Solar system, but it makes it harder to pinpoint like which other star it could have come from if at some point it like shattered and exploded and started tumbling and now we the part of its path that we can see is only after that happened. Does it complicate the idea that it could have been a spaceship? Does it? Does it make does it help people out if they

really wanted to be a spaceship or is this? Uh? If Seconding is correct, I think it is definitely not a spaceship. This would pretty much completely rule that out unless it was a spaceship that was made of the stuff that comments are usually made of. So you're saying there's a chance, and so is Seconding a We're not sure yet. I love the idea of this. Objects like this tumbling spindle of dust grains held together by gravity left over after a comet kind of exploded or disintegrated

from passing close to the Sun. Uh. There's actually one more development in mummuah news that I also thought was interesting. So in the wake of the discovery of Umu Mua, some astronomers postulated that maybe it's just that interstellar objects are traveling through our Solar System all the time. They're much more common than we thought. You know, maybe that's why we're seeing this, the idea being that we were just reaching the point where we have the capabilities to

observe these things. And if that's the case, this is not going to be the just the singular uh interstellar traveler. We will start seeing more of them, not because they're suddenly occurring. They've the ideas, they've been occurring all along, but we are suddenly at a point where we can observe them, right, So it's not that it's super rare, it's just it just happened to be the first one we caught with our telescopes. Well, and now it appears that Mumua is not alone and being confirmed as an

interstellar object. I was just reading a Good Nazi article by Michael Greshko from October nineteen about the discovery of another confirmed interstellar object called Borisov. This was discovered on August nineteen by a Crimean amateur astronomer named Gennedy Borisov, and, unlike Omama, Borisov was caught before its parahelion, so there is a chance that it could answer some questions that

Omuamua left open. So far, it appears to be pretty similar to comments from within our solar system, which is interesting, so maybe a comment from another star actually looks a lot like comets from our own solar system. Early analysis revealed it was spitting out a lot of cyanide as it traveled, but apparently local comments do that as well.

It appears to have a pretty normal commentary core uh solid nucleus within a cloud of gas and dust, and the earlier estimates put the core somewhere between like half a mile and two miles wide, so like zero point eight to three point two kilometers. That was in October. Borisov actually passed its Parahelian in early December of twenty nineteen. So I was reading some of the recent reports about

these observations. There was a NASA News feature that had images created by the Hubble Space Telescope of the object as it was near the Sun. I've got these here for you, Robert. It looks suitably haunting. Yes, it's chemical composition appears to be again roughly the same as comments inside our solar system, and we we've got a better idea of exactly what its size was. Hubble came up with the accurate figure of about thirty two feet or about nine hundred and seventy five across for the nucleus,

which you know is roughly a kilometer or so. Uh so, very cool. Maybe we're gonna start seeing these things all the time. Yeah, it's it's one of the it's it's it's kind of like a revelation that is at once amazing but also maybe in some ways a little uh I'm not gonna say terrifying. I don't want to say that, but but it is like this, this this contemption, I mean, is is like space exploration in general, the perpetual understanding

of a of a larger cosmos. Uh. And the more that we understand, the more new questions we have about how everything works. Uh so um. Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see how just the next year of observation pans out. You know, will we see more interstellar objects? And if so, how many? You know? Ultimately, like what is going to be the uh you know, a realistic rate of interstellar objects passing through our solar system? Yeah? I don't know, but I can't wait to find out.

I can't wait to get some really weird ones. I guess if there's anything disappointing here, I mean, I love this discovery. But if we're seeing okay, so a comment from another star looks very much like, at least so far like comments from our own neighborhood. When do we get a super weird one? When do we get one that I don't know, you know, comes from a star

made out of mice or something, right? Right? I mean it takes me back to our recent episode discussing new Horizons and Pluto, you know, and how there's always that there's always that that risk that that the thing that you want to study will be kind of boring. But you know, oftentimes the the universe has has has has weirdness in store for us. So it'll be interesting to

see what kind of weirdness we see. I think maybe one thing we've learned from doing the show is that even if something looks maybe kind of boring at first, if you look at it deep enough, it gets weird. It does, it definitely gets weird, all right. So there you have it again, just a couple of updates on some past episodes. We may do more of these in the future. We'll see. But well, you know, I think we are in that we're recording this before the New year.

I think this is what the first episode of the new year. I'm not sure. Maybe so so if it is Happy New Year. If not, um, you know, I guess, just Happy Tuesday or Thursday. But in either In either case, we are looking forward to bringing you a lot of new episodes in we're looking forward you getting into a lot of weird topics and uh yeah, we're looking forward to the journey and we hope you'll stick with us

through that journey. In the meantime, if you had own over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that'll shoot you over to a place where you can find episodes of the show. And you can find episodes of the show wherever you get podcasts these days. Uh you know, whichever one feels like the best fit for you personally, I guess. And whatever that website happens to be, make sure that you subscribe and rate and review, because that

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