What Day Of The Week Did The Dinosaurs Die On?

It’s more or less clear by now that the non-avian dinosaurs and all other large vertebrates around at the time were wiped out when a five kilometre solid object hit the Gulf of Mexico around 66 million years ago. It has also been argued that the world was in the midst of an ecological crisis at the time and that had the impact occurred in the Jurassic instead, they might have recovered and still be around today. There were also the Deccan Traps, an enormous area of volcanic activity in Laurasia which probably didn’t do life on Earth much good either. Nonetheless, the precipitating event certainly seems to have been this massive great rock or chunk of ice from space smashing into Chicxulub, at which point a whole load of terrible stuff happened, wiping out everything weighing more than twenty-five kilogrammes. This is thought to be because anything larger than that was unable to hide from the conflagration got roasted or possibly starved later.

There’s that then. However, you might be wondering why I’m talking about this now. I’ve had three ideas for a blog post today: this, blue and yellow and the fallacy of personal incredulity. I may well get to those in the end. I’ve committed myself to alternating posts about the Solar System with other topics. In the meantime there’s the looming risk of a world war. In this case, I’d say two things about that. One is that deep time is as good a way of getting things into perspective as deep space, and this provides a respite from the horror of our situation and highlights the current state of affairs as transient and fragile. There will be a time after the war. The other is that the immediate aftermath of the Chicxulub Impact was similar to the immediate aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, which is worth focussing on to highlight the risk being taken, and it edges into the subject of personal incredulity that it might be hard to believe this is really happening, but if it does come to the worst it won’t be the first time and life did go on after it. But of course that’s life rather than humans. So I’ll go on.

The title of this post sounds absurd. How could anyone possibly know what day of the week the dinosaurs were wiped out on? Well in fact there are additional problems with the very phrasing of the question, because I’m asking myself what the date was, what time of day it was and so forth, and this is hard to answer not only because palæontology cannot be that precise, at least for now, but because the day had a different length back then and the continents were in different places. Consequently the idea of time zones and calendars gets rather complicated and it’s probably necessary to reinvent the wheel even to discuss this.

Nonetheless, pinning down the probable time of day and year is surprisingly plausible. Dating in the literal sense is actually impossible because there were about 370 days in the late Cretaceous year, meaning that no calendar used today could be used then. Not even the Julian Day works. I don’t know if other people generally know about the Julian Day, but it’s the number of days which have passed since 1st January 4713 BCE, which is when several cycles coincide and is used to do things like count the number of days between events. I personally use it to help make sense of dates in my diary, which I haven’t always primarily used calendar dates for but instead number them as days elapsed since 2:17 pm GMT on 17th July 1975, which is the date and time of my first diary entry. I actually ignore the time of day in these calculations because it’s very awkward. The Julian Day is actually useful for mundane things, such as working out sell-by and best before dates, which is why, incidentally, the time of day sometimes ends up being included on the labels. The Julian Day doesn’t start at midnight but at noon UT, and UT is only noon for half the year in this time zone alone, so you end up with weird times of day being included on the labels. The entire cycle lasts 7 980 years, after which it repeats. However, it can’t be extended back or forward too far because eventually the calendar we use right now won’t work. Somewhere in this blog there’s a post called “Five and a quarter million Easter Sundays”, which is how many Easters there can ever be before the calculation for them breaks down due to the lengthening of the day.

I’m going to assume, inaccurately, that the day the dinosaurs died lasted exactly 23½ hours. It did, apparently, actually occur a round number of million years ago, at 66.0 million years before the present (BP). BP is actually dated as years before 1950 CE, not the literal present because if it was there would be a rolling timeline which would complicate things too much. This is within two thousand years, although I can’t help thinking that it isn’t really because although it might refer to an event somewhere between 66 001 000 and 65 999 000 BP, it very probably doesn’t because I can’t envisage that it would happen on an absolutely perfectly round million year date. The chances are, after all, a million to one. Hence for that figure to make sense, it probably refers to a rounded off period of time between 66 049 999 and 65 051 000 years BP. I’m going to further assume, again inaccurately, that the length of the day on 1st January 1950 CE was exactly twenty-four hours and that between those two dates the day lengthened in a linear fashion with no other variation. That is, it varied in such a manner that it increased in length by twenty-seven seconds every million years. It definitely did not do this by the way, because earthquakes also influence the length of the day and presumably also the Chicxulub Impact itself. In fact probably the Chicxulub Impact was the single event which had the most influence on the length of the day in that whole period, and we don’t know which way round that was because we don’t know if it struck from a more easterly or westerly direction.

The questions, then, are:

• How long has the Gregorian calendar been accurate?
• How long has the Julian calendar been usable?
• What kind of calendar might be appropriate to date the K-T Event?

The Gregorian calendar works by skipping leap years if the number of the year ends in two zeroes and is not divisible by four hundred. This yields a year length of 365.2425 years, unlike the actual length of the year, which is 365.2422 years, rounded up from 365.242199 (I think). It should also be pointed out that this is the tropical year, which is only one of several types of year. The sidereal year has a different length, as does the sidereal day, because the Sun doesn’t stay in the same place in the sky but gradually moves around it throughout the year, but the other stars do, almost. There is therefore a slight discrepancy every year even with the Gregorian calendar and ignoring the decelerating rotation, amounting to a mean difference of twenty-six seconds, which adds up to a day over 3 323 years, which since it was first adopted over much of Europe in 1582 gets us to the year 4 905 before anything drastic needs to be done, and in the parts of the world including the former British Empire a century and a bit later, in theory. Oddly, this seems to mean that the calendar we use in Britain is slightly different than the one in France, by just over fifty-five minutes, but this clearly isn’t so, so not only did we famously lose eleven days but also by now almost another hour.

At some point, the Julian calendar would actually be perfectly accurate, and it’s possible to work out roughly when this is. The mean length of the year is currently eleven minutes and fourteen seconds shorter than exactly 365¼ days. Hence the day is 1.8453 seconds shorter than it would need to be to allow that exact figure, which, with spurious accuracy, happened 68 348 years BP, which is near the beginning of the last Ice Age. Further back than that would be a time when leap years would have been unnecessary because the year was exactly 366 days long, which is a fifth of the way back to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, making it 13.2 million years ago, in the Serravalian Age of the mid-Miocene. Possibly our ancestors wouldn’t have had much use for such a calendar since they were living in a tropical rainforest and eating fruit, which would probably have ripened at intervals not corresponding to an astronomically-based calendar.

But this raises a problem. It means that the calendar would have been different. A minimal but sufficient difference would be simply to make every year a leap year by giving February twenty-nine days. This would’ve been fine for quite a while, and also back further into the past by intermittently lengthening the month of February, introducing and removing leap years or shortening the month by a day instead of lengthening it. However, at some point February would have had to have had 32 days, which is just unnatural, and this would happen some time in the early Cenozoic. There is, however, a solution to this: use a lunar calendar.

It is also true that Cynthia is edging very slowly away from Earth and therefore that the length of the lunar month is also gradually increasing, and in fact this is for the same reason that the length of the day is slowly increasing: tides. Consequently the length of the month would grow, and it would’ve been shorter at the time of Chicxulub. However, this doesn’t make any difference to the number of days if the year itself is ignored and a day is seen as the interval between two sunrises on the Equator, or two sunsets or whatever. Such a calendar could in fact have been useful for our simian and prosimian ancestors, since predators would have been able to see them more easily on a bright night. On the other hand, the kind of intelligence used to devise a calendar in the first place would probably have been better employed finding ways to avoid such predators in other ways. The obvious next question is how long was a lunar month 66 million years ago?

200 million years ago, Cynthia was 4 400 kilometres closer to Earth, meaning that the lunar month was 28.998 days (our days today, that is) long. However, it wasn’t, because days were shorter back then. Consequently, 66 million years ago, assuming a linear change in month length, the lunar month was 29.33305 days long, assuming a day is 86 400 seconds, which it wasn’t at the time. Assuming the exact 23½ hour length gets us to 29.95725745 days, which is usefully close to exactly thirty days. This is interesting because it means that in the late Cretaceous waxing and waning would’ve been almost in sync with intervals of exact days, meaning that there are effectively four “weeks” of 7½ days each corresponding to waxing crescent, waxing gibbous, waning gibbous and waning crescent. This is also roughly true today, except not so close due to the 29.503-day lunar month. This almost provides a calendar on its own. It also makes blue moons, the second full moons in a calendar month, even less frequent, down to about once every three years.

The names of the moons can still be used in such a calendar: Wolf, Snow, Worm, Pink, Flower, Strawberry, Buck, Sturgeon, Full Corn (presumably the same as Harvest), Hunter’s, Beaver and Cold. These are, I think, Native American names, although presumably not all over North America. The Anglo-Saxon equivalents are: Æftera Geola, Sólmónaþ, Hreðmónaþ, Eostremónaþ, Þrímilce, Ærraliða, Æfterliða, Ƿeodmónaþ, Háligmónaþ, Ƿinterfylleþ, Blótmónaþ and Ærra Geola. However, there is another version of these with Ƿolfmónaþ in the same place as in the Native American version. Several of these would not have been applicable at the time either because for example there were no bovids, wolves or in all probability strawberries. There were, however, sturgeon, and this turns out to be crucial.

Many fish scales show growth rings, one example of which is the sturgeon. Sturgeons are members of a particularly basal order of fish, the acipenseriformes, who haven’t changed much since they first appeared in the early Jurassic. It’s possible to look at fossilised sturgeon scales from the Mesozoic and work out what season they died in because their scales grow faster in spring and summer than in autumn and winter. There are a lot of dead fish in the Western Interior Seaway, an ancient stretch of shallow sea reaching into North America up to Canadian latitudes from the Gulf of Mexico, whose demise is marked by their remains’ entanglement with small specks of iridium-rich dust. Iridium is the second-heaviest element, and in any substantial planet or moon will have sunk to the core. In comets and asteroids, however, it’s still near the surface and the distribution of elements is generally more even because it hasn’t got so far to sink and the gravity is in any case negligible. Therefore, these specks, found all over the planet at this point, are associated with the Chicxulub Impact. In the case of the Western Interior Seaway, there is a direct route for the water from where the impactor hit. A very large number of the fish scales have their growth arrested in late spring. Moreover, isotopic analysis of the carbon in the scales has been used to detect the diet of the sturgeon at the time, which is in the form of insects emerging from the water during the spring and more aquatic animals in the winter. Therefore, it’s possible to say almost for sure that the dinosaurs were wiped out when the Northern Hemisphere was experiencing late spring. This is a particularly bad time of year for it to happen because it’s when juvenile organisms are just emerging and not yet able to reproduce, meaning that although the impact was globally severe, it would’ve been worse in the Northern Hemisphere. It occurs to me that all ratites, i.e. flightless or almost flightless birds such as the rhea and tinamou, are from the Southern Hemisphere and are the closest species to non-avian dinosaurs still alive today, but that’s just my speculation.

The most precise estimate for the K-T Event is currently 66 038 000 years BP, with eleven millennia leeway each way. This corresponds to the year 66 036 051 BCE, because there is no year zero – 1 BCE is followed by 1 CE. Late spring is from one eighth to two-eighths of the way through the year from the Vernal Equinox. Let’s take an average and call it 0.1875 of the way through the year. Now estimate the average length of a day between those two points in time at 23.75 hours. The number of seconds between the Chicxulub Impact and 1st January 1950 is 31 559 639.9747 multiplied by 66 038 000, which is 2084135504649238.6 seconds. The average length of a day over that time is 85 500 seconds, so that is equivalent to 24375853855.54664327485 days. Now subtract 0.1875 of a 370-day year. That gives 69.375 days less, which is 24375853786.17164327485 days. Divide that by seven and you get 3482264826.595949039265 days, which is off from an exact multiple of seven by four days. 1st January 1950 was a Sunday, so that would make it a Wednesday, nine days into the Flower Month. Proportionately, on our own calendar that would make it 28th May, bearing in mind that this is a “scaled” calendar where each day actually represents two percent longer than a day as it actually would’ve been at the time.

But maybe Wednesday 28th May, 66 036 051 BCE isn’t precise enough. There’s also the question of time of day. Although I realise I’ve been a bit silly here, it’s even possible to draw conclusions about this which make it more likely. It’ll be local time for now, because there’s another complication or two regarding time zones. This estimate is somewhat more sensible than the spurious precision of the other one. On average, the direction of a meteor impact is 45° and it’s more likely to happen in the morning of the four possibilities. Given a 24-hour day, that would make four times the maximum risk: 3 am, 9 am, 3 pm and 9 pm, with the peak at 9 am. This is because in the morning the rotation of this planet is in the same direction as its orbit, and most objects in the Solar System orbit in approximately the same direction. If it happened at midday, it would be moving directly away from the Sun, which is unlikely. In fact, statistics do bear this out and in two hour periods the most likely time is between 8 and 10 am and the least between 12 noon and 2 pm. However, these are not the right times because, as has been repeated ad nauseam in this post, the late Cretaceous day only lasted 23½ hours, so the local time of impact would be 37.5% of the way through that day, which is 31 725 seconds into the day, which is 8:48:45 am.

Only trouble is, well actually one of several, this is local time in Chicxulub. That would be fine if the continents were in the same place back then. Yucatán is six hours behind GMT but Greenwich and it were not in the relative same places back then. If I, weirdly, insist on still going on Greenwich Mean Time on a planet with a 23½-hour day whose continents are in different position and Great Britain doesn’t really exist, Chicxulub would only be four hours behind us due to North America and Eurasia, or rather the future Eurasia, being that much closer. Actually it wouldn’t be four hours but three hours and fifty-five minutes. That makes it kind of 12:43:45 pm, but taking BST into account, 1:43:45 pm. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to assume the day ends at 11:30 pm and then starts again at midnight.

So, with spurious accuracy and on the balance of probabilities, the Chicxulub Impact occurred at 1:43:45 pm BST on Wednesday 28th May 66 036 051 BCE. This is quite a messy way of working the whole thing out because the time of day is not scaled but the time of year is. Although the chances of that date and year being correct are small, they are about two million to one. The time of day, such as it is, is much more likely to be right, although the precision makes it less likely. Now I say “much more likely”, but that doesn’t actually make it probable. The chances, though, are much better than one in 84 600. There’s a twelve percent chance that it happened between 8 and 10 am using scaled-down hours and that’s higher than at any other time, and the probability does peak at 8:48 am local time.

There you go then. Rather reminiscent of Bishop Ussher’s idea that Earth was created at 9 am on Monday 23rd November 4004 BC.

Back to reality, sadly.

Mars

I’m revisiting this. A few mirs ago (I’ll tell you about that in a bit) I made a Martian calendar for the mir 214. I used the Darian calendar with the Rotterdam month naming system. This brings up the first issue: Mars cannot have real months because its moons take around eight and thirty hours to orbit, and its day lasts less than twenty-five. Therefore the subdivision of the mir – the Martian year – is fairly arbitrary although it can be more freely divided than if it had meaningful moons.

The compilation of the Martian calendar proved to be a bit nightmarish. I bought a new printer to produce the colour illustrations of the pages, and used the trusty old monochrome laser printer to do the rest. The latter did absolutely fine. The former was an inkjet, and reports of its capacity turned out to be a big overestimate. Since I’d worked out the price point based in that capacity being true, I ended up making a loss on every copy. Because of this, I ended up flinging the printer forcefully into the pantry in a fit of rage. Something has really got to be done about the scam that is the inkjet printer, but that’s another topic.

Due to the research I’d had to do to prepare the calendar, the point came when I felt probably more familiar with Mars than I am currently with Antarctica. I began to get a real feel for the planet which I don’t even have for Cynthia, and certainly more than any other planet or moon apart from Earth. It’s kind of like a cross between Cynthia and Earth. Alternatively, it could be looked at as an extreme version of Antarctica without the ice, or a dwarf version of Earth. Its terrain is divided into highlands and lowlands, with one largely monolithic example of each, meaning that unlike Venus with its several plateaux and similar size to Earth, it or Earth with its connected but somewhat separated oceans and six continents, it can be thought of as having a single continent and a single ocean, having in toto a surface area almost exactly the same as the total land surface of our own planet. However, it has a thicker crust and no plate tectonics. This is demonstrated by the area known as Tharsis, named after Tarshish, an old name for the Iberian peninsula.

As a child, I used to think Tharsis looked like someone had stuck a fork in Mars. It’s dominated and was formed by a series of volcanoes in a line with the largest volcano in the Solar System to the northwest, the famous twenty kilometre high Olympus Mons, previously known as Nix Olympica. These have contributed an enormous shield of solidified lava to the surface which on Earth would’ve become a chain of mountains or islands, as with Hawaiʻi, but because the Martian crust is stationary the rock has simply built up, and the lower gravity has allowed it to rise higher than it could’ve done here, and weigh down the crust to the extent that it’s caused a crack to form, known as Valles Marineris, a giant canyon stretching across something like a quarter of the planet. All of these structures dwarf their counterparts on Earth, and since Mars only has about half Earth’s diameter, they dominate the surface. When it’s midday at one end of Valles Marineris, the other end is in darkness and consequently winds blow along its length.

Here’s a relief map of the planet:

The lower elevations are blue, the higher ones red. Tharsis is the red blob on the right. One feature I haven’t mentioned yet is the great basin known as Hellas, which is the deepest dent on the planet and is almost deep enough to have liquid water at its bottom because of the density of the atmosphere there, although it doesn’t quite get there. This is the purple oval in the bottom right quadrant. It can be seen that if the planet was flooded there would be an ocean in the northern hemisphere plus a large lake in the southern. Maps of planets are quite confusing as the convention seems to have changed. Whereas previously south was at the top because astronomical telescopes don’t bother to turn the image the right way up (extra lens means loss of light), it seems to have changed to putting north at the top.

The regions of Mars have names like Chryse (Gold), Argyre (Silver) and Margaritifer (Mother Of Pearl). There was also a complete revolution in nomenclature due to the discovery in the mid-1960s CE that the canals were optical illusions. Before that, Mars was considered to have canals, previously considered to be “channels” but due to translation the word “canali” became “canals” in English, and its features were named according to brightness. When Mariner 4 flew by Mars in 1965, it was a huge shock to astronomers and other space scientists because of how different, and more hostile, it turned out to be compared to Earth and the presuppositions projected onto Mars and Venus more or less demonstrate that the expected panic and other impact conjectured from First Contact are perhaps overestimated. After all, for something like a century it was popularly assumed that there was complex life on both Venus and Mars and intelligent life on Mars and it didn’t cause societal breakdown. The question arises of whether society has changed in such a way that it now would.

Interestingly, the person who “discovered” the “canals” was a draughtsperson rather than an artist, and later cartographers with an artistic background didn’t produce so many of them because they were trained to draw what they saw. Giovanni Schiaparelli was in fact related to the fashion designer, in case you’re wondering, and appropriately enough canals were all the rage for decades. For old time’s sake I’ll reproduce one of those maps:

I could’ve found a better map but preferred to furnish you with the yellowing and disintegrating ’60s paperback I learnt much of my initial astronomy from, for old time’s sake. Note south is at the top, and compare with a modern map:

This is from here. This is not a very clear image but it’s hard to find a cylindrical projection of Mars. The PDF linked is much more legible. The most prominent feature of all, Syrtis Major, the “great bog”, is visible in both. Acidalia Planitia is also named in the older map as Mare Acidalium. Conspicuous by their absence are of course almost all of the canals. The closest one gets is Valle Marineris. It’s hard to imagine how utterly different things have become since the early ’60s in this respect.

The Martian atmosphere is to ours as ours is to the Venusian one, in that it’s below a hundredth of the sea level density of ours and ours is a ninetieth of the solid surface density of that of Venus. In another way, Venus and Mars have similar atmospheres as both are mainly carbon dioxide. This makes them unlike Earth’s primordial atmosphere, which was mainly nitrogen, but before the outgassing, Venus would’ve had a mainly nitrogen atmosphere and most of Mars’s atmosphere has been lost to space. The pressure at the surface of Mars is about the same as Earth’s thirty kilometres above sea level, but because it’s much thinner and the Martian surface more variable than Earth’s, the gravity being lower, the variation in pressure is much greater, but it never reaches the point where ordinary water can be liquid at all there.

Mars is the only surface as far as I know in the Solar System which has both extensive cratering and signs of water erosion. Usually the two would tend to rule the other out. It has teardrop shaped “islands” and branching river patterns leading down from the highlands to the lowlands, but some of those islands are formed by craters:

Many of the craters on Mars are quite eroded, probably by wind:

Such images were first sent back from the 1965 mission, and have no analogues on Mercury or Cynthia. The rims can be seen to be eroded or partly erased by the movement of sand or actually rubbed out by the process of sand-blasting by the wind. Winds on Mars can reach up to half the speed of sound.

I’ve described the process as sand-blasting. Like describing the Martian regolith as “soil”, this can mislead. It looks like wet sand, but is about as fine as talcum powder, is also high in iron, hence the rusty colour, and like moondust also contains substances which on Earth would have reacted with oxygen or water, which makes the scenario in ‘The Martian’ less plausible. It effectively contains bleach. A substance called perchlorate consists of a chloride ion attached to four oxygen atoms in a tetrahedron, and is negatively charged. It’s toxic to humans, causing lung damage, aplastic anæmia (where the body permanently shuts down red blood corpuscle production) and causes underactive thyroid, for which it’s used as a drug to treat overactive thyroid. However, it can also be burnt to release oxygen and finds use as an oxidant in rocket fuel. Its presence in Martian sand makes it harder to imagine what kind of life could survive there. However, this series is not about life on Mars.

The planet is periodically enveloped in a global dust storm. This actually happened while Mariner 4 was on its way there in ’65, when only the Tharsis volcanoes were visible above the clouds. Carl Sagan was very focussed on this, leading to them being referred to as “Carl’s marks”, but it would’ve been pretty disastrous if the storm hadn’t cleared by the time the spacecraft got there because nothing else of interest would’ve been visible. Maybe the idea of the planet being Earth-like would’ve continued for longer. Again, in ‘The Martian’, the dust storm is portrayed as much more destructive than it would in fact have been because although the wind is very fast, the low pressure means it isn’t very forceful. They happen about once every three mirs, although there are more localised ones in between. Like the possible “mists” on Cynthia, Martian dust particles become statically charged in the process of being blown about and rubbed against each other, leading to them sticking to every available surface, including the likes of solar panels, potentially to space suits and moving parts on landers and rovers. This blocks sunlight from reaching solar cells and makes it difficult to design rovers, which also get covered in the stuff. What happens is that the sunlight warms the ground, leading to a temperature inversion similar to the one causing tornadoes here on Earth and this causes dust devils and ultimately dust storms. They tend to be stronger in the southern hemisphere, which brings up another issue I’ll go into in a minute. A very important consequence of the study of dust storms on Mars, which would justify the Mars missions on its own and emphasises the vital rôle of space exploration, is that a model applied to the Martian atmosphere was applied to our own if it was filled with soot after a nuclear holocaust, and predicted the nuclear winter scenario as depicted in the BBC TV drama ‘Threads’. This seems to have contributed to the end of the Cold War. Whether the prediction is valid has become a controversial issue which I don’t want to cover here.

The Martian orbit varies between 1.666 and 1.381 AU (1 AU=average distance of Earth from the Sun), making it the second most eccentric planet after Mercury. Unlike Mercury, Mars has a fair axial tilt which causes seasons. Due to this eccentricity, the seasons are more extreme south of the equator since the surface is tilted away from sunlight which is already weaker in the winter and towards stronger sunlight in the summer there, and the reverse is the case in the north. From here the most obvious effect is a larger southern ice cap in the winter, which I think I’ve managed to see through binoculars. This eccentricity also makes the seasons different lengths in the different hemispheres.

Frost and “snow” makes Mars seem more Earth-like than other planets. Mariner took photos of frost in craters, which is a rare combination over most of the planet but is found in polar craters on Mercury and Cynthia. This frost, however, doesn’t fall but freezes out of the atmosphere and is dry ice, i.e. frozen carbon dioxide. For a long time it was unclear whether there was real snowfall on Mars, in a couple of respects. It wasn’t clear whether there was water ice in the snow or whether it actually fell or just appeared like frost from the atmosphere, which is almost completely carbon dioxide. It’s now thought probable that water ice snowfalls occur every night of the northern summer. Actual flakes, from high in the atmosphere. That said, much of the ice on the surface is dry ice, and just as dry ice sublimes (turns from solid to gas without melting) on Earth, so does it on Mars. The water ice snow situation is less straightforward because it tends to become dusty, allowing it to absorb heat from the Sun. At night, water ice clouds lose heat to space, causing them to cool, thereby becoming denser and falling towards the ground as snow. The temperature difference leads to winds, which blow the snow around and there are in fact blizzards. There’s also virga – precipitation which doesn’t reach the ground.

Although the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is tiny compared to Earth’s quotient, the thinness of the Martian atmosphere means it’s still almost saturated and there are therefore water-based clouds there. There are no cumulus clouds – “little fluffy clouds” – but other kinds are present such as cirrus, the ice clouds found high in our own atmosphere. There are also wave clouds, fog and hurricanes. Noctis Labyrintus, the network of gorges west of Valles Marineris, fills with fog every morning. There are also orographic clouds, which are clouds caused by mountains or high ground lifting saturated air past the point where it can still hold all the moisture. Entirely separate from the water ice clouds are the dry ice ones, which form when it’s cold enough to drop below -78°C, the freezing point of CO₂. I find this quite odd as it’s the actual atmosphere freezing and snowing. This also happens on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, where the nitrogen atmosphere freezes and precipitates onto the surface.

Mars has dunes. These have ice on them, but this isn’t always so. These particular ones are unlike Earth’s in that they have a kind of network pattern on them, thought to be due to thawing and subliming. There are also wind-blown streaks.

It’s difficult to know where to stop with this. I acquired a lot of information about Mars when I did the calendar and there’s so much I could mention but I feel this is getting somewhat delayed by me adding to it, so now I’m just going to publish it “as is”. So there you go. Lots more about Mars could be said but that’s it for now.

The Peace Movement And Me Part I – Prelude

I can’t remember when I first heard of CND, but I can remember when I first became aware of Hiroshima. It was in 1973 and I found it absolutely horrifying. I wasn’t aware at the time of the Cold War or the arms race, although I did know about Vietnam and the rivalry between the Russians and Americans, particularly in the context of the Space Race. The issue of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came up for me due to my interest in nuclear physics. I didn’t then fully understand how nuclear fission worked, but it was clear to me that the Bomb was a stupendously destructive weapon compared to any chemical explosive by many orders of magnitude.

My focus as a child, however, was not on these issues. If anything, my interest in political terms would probably have been centred on environmentalism and endangered species. At some point I will come back and look at my life as a prelude to becoming vegan in 1987, but not today. It could also be said that you don’t get a bigger threat to the environment than a nuclear holocaust, and I was concerned about nuclear power and also the possibility of fusion power, which for some reason I saw as dangerous in the same way as a fission power station was, but not particularly the Bomb.

This was in the days before the Nuclear Winter theory had emerged. That did so in part because of the Viking missions to Mars, when attempts were made to model the influence of particles in an atmosphere on surface temperature, although some evidence was noted from the early ’50s. Consequently, the threat of nuclear war seemed a little less serious in the ’70s than it would in the ’80s, and Détente in the previous decade seemed to take the pressure off. The first dated diary entry I ever wrote is from 17th July 1975, the day of the Apollo-Soyuz test project, and so at the time things seemed very hopeful. They would get a lot less so in the coming decade.

The fundamental issue about any weapon with the potential of causing human extinction which comes within easy reach of any power in the species is that once it’s been invented, it can’t be “un-invented” unless some calamity befalls us which either causes us to lose knowledge or changes the infrastructure in such a way that the technology becomes unfeasible. Since either of those things is pretty close to actually being human extinction, the existence of weapons of mass destruction requires us to re-invent how human beings as a whole relate to each other, such that the knowhow to produce the weapons might exist but it becomes psychologically unfeasible to use them. With the advent of easily available genetic engineering or nanotech and the Grey Goo Scenario (which is actually unfeasible), this gets quite a bit more dangerous because it puts such technology within the reach of the likes of moody teenagers (and I was a moody teenager – this is not ageism) or sociopaths who end up destroying the human race on a whim. Although it is possible to build a nuclear reactor in the garage, as the teenage David Hahn in Michigan did in the 1990s, this was only a local problem. I’m not about to spell out how to produce either a nuclear weapon or a deadly bacterium here, but there is an issue with the information being freely available online and it really isn’t that hard, so the rational response, unless you’re happy with the extinction of Homo sapiens, is to address the possibility of people being willing to do such a thing. You can’t just leave it and hope for the best.

Many would say that the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction is in a way an organically-developed situation which did prevent nuclear holocaust. Again, I don’t know what people know and don’t know, so just in case you don’t, the justification for the Warsaw Pact and NATO stockpiling nuclear arsenals was that in order to maintain peace, there needed to be enormous amounts of nuclear missiles aimed at the enemy on both sides so that using them would be inconceivable. This sounds to me like a rationalisation of a situation which had arisen already although perhaps surprisingly I’m not aware of its history. That is, I don’t know if we went from a situation where we had few nuclear weapons to one where both sides had many as a deliberate policy or not. This kind of organic development, from NATO’s viewpoint, is in accord with conservative politics, where the practices which have grown up without planned intervention are often seen as things which have worked okay and should therefore be kept. However, it also assumes, like many other policies, that the system will work perfectly in spite of being maintained by imperfect human beings, and that imperfection is a central part of conservative political theory, so it’s a bit odd really. It would be interesting to know how the Soviet Union saw it though, because it’s a question of conscious planning versus a situation arising through some kind of “invisible hand”-type process, so maybe the USSR actually did plan it, or maybe they saw it as an inevitable operation of the forces of history. Again, this is a gap in my knowledge.

By about 1980, I was aware of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear holocaust, but had a firm division in my mind between that threat and the use of nuclear power for peace. Not everyone maintains that position, and I didn’t, but there are people who take it much further than I and even see the likes of the LHC as a threat to peace. I think this goes too far, although I do think the LHC is probably a waste of money and resources, and in that sense a threat to peace. I was, however, very much opposed to nuclear power, although by that time I also believed that fusion power was a good solution. At this point I was unaware of the constant deferral involved in the development of fusion power because I simply hadn’t lived long enough to notice, but I definitely saw it as benign. Although it probably isn’t, the issue isn’t a live one because it seems to be unattainable.

My belief in unilateral nuclear disarmament took a lot longer to develop than my agreement with any other left-wing or Green issues. By this I mean that although I felt emotionally committed to the idea of supporting CND, which is how I saw unilateral nuclear disarmament at the time, I was also concerned that this was a merely emotional commitment rather than one I could base on rational argument, and there was also a question of mild peer pressure. The 1979 Afghanistan situation had rekindled the Cold War and brought the issue to the fore again, to the extent that one of my big worries about the Falklands/Malvinas in ’82 was that it could provoke a nuclear confrontation in some way simply because of the very delicate balance in international relations. The Greenham Common peace camp began in 1981 and there were large CND marches into central London in the early ’80s which some of my friends went on, but I didn’t and felt guilty about it. At the time, my approach to demos was that they could directly change government policy. As you will know if you read this, my approach has considerably changed since then, and in fact had done so by the end of the decade. My attitude, though, was somewhat paradoxical because although I felt like supporting the peace movement was the right thing to do, I didn’t feel their arguments were convincing. This I would attribute to the heavy governmental propagandising against it.

If you examine at the popular culture of the time, you’ll see a resurgence in songs, films and TV programmes expressing the widespread fear at the threat of nuclear war. As my adolescence wore on, this kind of merged with my general teenage angst and I can’t distinguish between them. I thought that nuclear war was inevitable at that point, an attitude which reached its peak in about 1984. Even so, and it amazes me to look back on this now, I was still not convinced that M.A.D. was the wrong policy. Although I didn’t think about it much at the time, Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’ sums up my and many other youths of my generation’s philosophy of life at the time:

The general idea was that we would never see even middle age because by then we’d’ve been killed in a nuclear war, so from our perspective we would indeed be “forever young”. This intimation may be missed by the youth of today when they hear this.

It’s also true that I got it into my head that I was going to die at twenty-seven, in fact live exactly 10 000 days, and therefore die on 19th December 1994. People who are trying to deduce my personal details will of course enjoy that I’ve just shared that date. Although I had various reasons for supposing that to be the case, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those was subconsciously the expectatio that sooner or later there’d be an apocalyptic exchange of missiles. It was not a good thing to live under the shadow of this prospect. Even now, I would expect people who were young in the early 1980s to have nightmares about this. It must also have consequences for aspiration. We were facing the prospect of unemployment or annihilation, and neither of these were very motivating for bothering to do very much academically or vocationally. On another note, Gen-Xers are known to have poorer employment prospects and underachievement in their careers due to the conditions into which they entered the job market in the ’80s. Maybe nuclear armageddon also had something of a hand in this.

Even though I was communist up until about 1984, I continued to find the arguments for unilateral disarmament unconvincing. I had peers who only voted Conservative because of the Labour Party’s unilateralism and were otherwise left wing, and they continued to do so into the late ’80s when I lost touch with them. It’s astounding how powerfully persuasive the Tory propaganda on this was. In ’84, I abandoned communism because I considered it to be too optimistic and began to gravitate towards the Green Party although I wasn’t particularly aware of doing so because at the time I thought of them as a single-issue party and didn’t realise how left wing they were. It being 1984, there’s a sense of doublethink in all this because on the one hand I feared nuclear war and wasn’t in the “better dead than red” camp, but nevertheless was unconvinced by unilateralism.

Then I left home and went to university, substantially because it was an opportunity for political activism. It wasn’t until the start of my second year that I felt comfortable enough with the policy to join CND itself, but I wasn’t active in it. Once you’ve done something like that, you become emotionally invested in it and tend to rationalise your decision by bending your opinions in that direction, and since I’d joined the Green Party, Greenpeace Supporters, Lynx and Friends of the Earth, three of which were also unilateralist, sometimes to the chagrin of some of their members, that was probably a factor in my persuasion. I also studied Game Theory as part of my degree, which is famously applicable to the M.A.D. situation.

In January 1987, I went on an anti-Sizewell B protest. This was partly organised by the local CND group as well as FoE, so by that time I was beginning to make the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. However, at that time at least a certain kind of rhetoric was used, particularly focussing on the half-lives of radioisotopes, which was not particularly scientific as it made it appear that the half-life was a measurement of the period during which it would be dangerous, which isn’t at all how it works. I am, however, still convinced that one reason nuclear fission is so popular as an energy source is that it provides material for nuclear weapons. This was also a few months after the Chernobyl disaster on 26th April 1986, which had made nuclear power exceedingly unpopular. Like M.A.D., nuclear safety’s weak point is the human factor. Fortunately, in the case of the former, we were all rescued from certain death by Colonel Stanislav Petrov on 26th September 1983 when he decided an apparent US missile launch must be a false alarm and didn’t “retaliate”. There seemed to be many other pressing issues though, so I still didn’t really engage. However, another thing that happened around that time was that I became a committed pacifist. Nowadays I’m not so convinced of that position for several reasons, mainly to do with the idea that it may be very easy for a middle class White person in the developed world to commit to pacifism, but not so much for, say, a Third World peasant. I’ve also never been convinced that the Nazis would have had any problem with a pacifist Britain, and I think it’s entirely feasible that certain despotic orders would just continue slaughtering their pacifist opponents until there were none left without that leading to any kind of effective resistance. However, it should also be said that if future Nazis had committed to pacifism the Third Reich would never have happened either, so the principle of universalisability could operate there.

In October ’87 I went vegan, which again I see as closely allied to pacifism. I also managed to set up a university CND group which unfortunately only really served as a register of those who were sympathetic to the issue. From early ’88 onwards my psyche, some might say my mental health, fell down the Vicky crevasse and it’s hard to say much meaningful about that period, except that on 22nd January 1988 I joined the Labour Party. This was also around the time of the “Labour Listens” campaign, which was of course a way of surreptitiously dumping the radical policies which had lost them the last two elections, including unilateralism. I didn’t become politically active again until the autumn of that year. The next few years involved being rather cynical about CND for a couple of reasons. One was that I was persuaded of the argument that they were pro-imperialist and I was uncomfortable with the Christian involvement in the group. Someone also claimed they were “a front for the Labour Party”, which is obviously absurd at that point in time. I was committed at this stage to rotating my activism between different groups with an aim to finding employment in a pressure group in the long term, although I was also interested in an academic career. I began to move away from the idea of direct action into a means of addressing the problem of a scarcity-based economic system via psychological means: “the revolution starts from within”, as one of my friends put it. This put much of my approach to politics on a more spiritual basis, though not by any means within any religious tradition or group.

Then came a second emotional crisis linked to the imminent first Gulf War, where I was frankly disgusted and traumatised by the apparent fact that so much of the British public were so easily manipulated into supporting a war for the fossil fuel industry. Since the most prominent group involved in opposing the outrage was CND, I became active in the anti-war movement and CND itself. This marked the start of more than two decades of intense involvement in the peace movement, mainly CND but also other things less associated with the central issue of unilateralism. But I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.

Astronauts Vs Computers

‘Rocket To The Renaissance’, written by Arthur C Clarke in about 1960 and expanded upon in his epilogue to ‘First On The Moon’, a book by Apollo astronauts, sets out many of his thoughts regarding the positive impact of human space travel on the human race. Since it was written in the mid-twentieth century by a White Englishman, though apparently a queer one, it unsurprisingly has its colonial biasses, though not fatally so. He focusses initially on White expansion across the globe, although he does also mention the views of non-White thinkers such as 胡適. That said, his point stands, and is paralleled by Arnold Toynbee, who once said:

Affiliated civilisations . . . produce their most striking early manifestations in places outside the area occupied by the “parent” civilisation, and even more when separated by sea.

I honestly can’t read this without thinking of the genocides committed by European powers, but there is a way of defusing this to some extent. There was a time when humans only lived in Afrika and slowly radiated out from that continent into the rest of the world, a process only completed in the twentieth century CE when we reached the South Pole, and not including the bottom of the ocean, which is of course most of the planet’s surface. Something I haven’t been able to track down is that there is supposed to be a genetic marker for the people who have spread furthest from East Afrika, which I presume means it’s found in Patagonia, Polynesia and Australia, although I suspect it actually refers to Aryans because there is indeed such a concentration in the so-called “Celtic Fringe”. Even this expansion may be problematic. It’s not clear what happened when Afrikan Homo sapiens left that continent and encountered other species of humans. Our genes are mixed with theirs, but they’re extinct and we don’t know how either of those things happened. It seems depressingly probable that we are all the descendants of children conceived by rape, within our own species, and this may have been the norm as we would understand it today, between or within our species. It seems more likely, though, that we simply outcompeted our relatives on the whole, and maybe the small portion of DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans reflects their relatively smaller populations.

Leaving all this aside, the imperial winners of this million-year long onslaught on the planet benefitted culturally and technologically from it. 胡適 said:

Contact with foreign civilisations brings new standards of value.

And:

It is only through contact and comparison that the relative value or worthlessness of the various cultural elements can be clearly and critically seen and understood. What is sacred among one people may be ridiculous in another; and what is despised or rejected by one cultural group, may in a different environment become the cornerstone for a great edifice of strange grandeur and beauty.

Since I don’t want this to descend into some kind of patronising Orientalism, I’ll come back to Arnold Toynbee and his law of Challenge and Response. When difficult conditions are encountered, a minority of creative people respond by coming up with far-reaching solutions which transform their society. For instance, the Sumerians responded to the swamps in their area by irrigation and ended up kind of inventing civilisation as such, and the Church, having promulgated a belief system which caused the collapse of civilisation, went on to organise Christendom and invent Europe. We can of course still see the consequences of Sumer today all around us, but as I’ve mentioned before the very human geography of these isles reflects its location through the “diagonal” arrangement of cultural and economic differences we see locally due to the radial spread of change from the Fertile Crescent.

Even human expansion from East Afrika is problematic. There are clear signs that whatever it was we did led to enormous forest fires and the extinction of charismatic megafauna such as the nine metre long lizards who used to predate in Australia and the giant tortoises and birds of oceanic islands, not to mention the possibility that we helped wipe out the mammoths and woolly rhinos. Animals today tend to be nocturnal, smaller and to run away from humans because of what we’ve done in the prehistoric past. Nonetheless, there is an environment which is not problematic in this way. Actually, I should turn this round. The environments which are problematic from the viewpoint of being easily damaged and containing other sentient beings are largely confined to the thin film of air on this tiny blue speck we call Earth.

In his ‘Spaceships Of The Mind’, Nigel Calder pointed out that if we want to develop heavy industry, there’s always an environmental cost on this planet. On the other hand, if we were to do it in space, that problem goes away completely. Nothing we can do in space is ever going to make even the slightest scratch on the Cosmos in the forseeable future. Of course, it’s worth injecting a note of caution here because that attitude led to damage to our own planet, and locally even in space, that may not be true. Nonetheless, I do believe that one response to the energy crisis is orbiting solar power stations which beam their power back to remote receiving facilities on Earth which can then relay electricity globally, obviating the need for any fossil fuels or terrestrial nuclear power stations, or for that matter wind turbines or Earthbound solar arrays.

Space exploration has already yielded very positive results. These include the discovery of the possibility of nuclear winter, the Gaia Hypothesis, the Overview Effect and technological fallout. I’ll just briefly go into three of these.

• Nuclear winter. When Mariner 9 reached Mars in 1971, there were problems imaging the surface due to a global dust storm. This was studied and it was noted that the fine particles in the atmosphere were blocking solar radiation and cooling the surface. The Soviet Mars 2 probe arrived at about the same time, sent a lander into the dust and it was destroyed. Carl Sagan then sent a telegram to the Soviet team asking them to consider the global implications of this event. This led to a 1982 paper which modelled the effect of nuclear firestorms and the consequential carbon particles in our own atmosphere which appeared to show that there would be a drastic cooling effect on this planet if that happened: the nuclear winter. Even now, with more sophisticated models, scientists recommend that global nuclear arsenals should be kept below the level where this is a significant risk during a nuclear exchange, and it’s also possible that it was a factor in ending the Cold War.
• The Gaia Hypothesis. This is the belief that Earth is a homoeostatic system governed by its life. It’s still a hypothesis because many scientists still reject it or see it as only weakly supported, and it also coëxists with the Medea Hypothesis, that multicellular life will inevitably destroy itself. The roots of the hypothesis lie in Spaceship Earth and the observation that the other planets in the inner solar system, which didn’t appear to have life on them, were much less like Earth than might be expected. Up until the 1960s, life was more or less regarded as a dead cert on Mars because of the changes in appearance caused by the dust storms, which at the time were interpreted as seasonal changes in vegetation, and of course it had become popular to suppose there were canals there. On Venus, many people expected to find a swampy tropical world or a planet-wide water ocean teeming with life. When this didn’t happen, some scientists started to wonder if life had actually influenced this planet to keep it habitable rather than there already having been a hospitable environment for life which maintained itself. Viewing our whole Earth as alive is a way to engender compassion for all life, and is of course an example of hylozoism.
• The Overview Effect. This is substantially related to the inspiration for the Gaia Hypothesis. When astronauts have seen Earth hanging in space, they have tended to gather a powerful impression of the fragility of life and the unity of the planet which has constituted a life-changing experience. The Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell set up the Institute of Noetic Sciences in response to his personal reaction, which was part of the human potential movement, and there are plans to make views of Earth from space available via virtual reality.

These are just three examples of how space exploration changes human consciousness for the better, and two out of three of them only happened because there were people in space, beyond low Earth orbit. Considering that even today only a tiny proportion of our species has ever been in space, and an even tinier proportion have left cis lunar space, this is an enormous influence relative to their number. It’s evident that the more astronauts and perhaps people living permanently off Earth there are, the more positive the effect on the human race would be.

But instead, we’ve gone the other way.

The biggest recent notable change in technology from a cultural perspective is of course information technology, mainly the internet and easy access to it via relatively cheap devices. This has led to the creation of cyberspace (I was there at the birth) and a generally inward-looking culture. I would contend that up until 1972, the human race had a spatial growing point, and that this had feedback into the rest of our cultures. And yes, it absolutely was the preserve of the rich and powerful countries, and yes, Whitey was on the “Moon”:

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the moon)I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon)The man jus’ upped my rent las’ night.
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)I wonder why he’s uppi’ me?
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon?)
I was already payin’ ‘im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin’ my whole damn check,
Junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin’ up,
An’ as if all that shit wasn’t enough

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an’ arm began to swell.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)Was all that money I made las’ year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain’t no money here?
(Hm! Whitey’s on the moon)
Y’know I jus’ ’bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I’ll sen’ these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

Gil Scot-Heron

The question here is of course of which America got the moon landing, and possibly which humankind. However, is there a reason to suppose that if enough people were to go into space it wouldn’t alter their consciousness enough for them to become, for instance, anti-racist and to recognise that we really are all in it together? To a Brit reading this, the reference to doctor’s bills brings the NHS to mind, and that kind of large-scale government-sponsored undertaking is pretty similar to NASA in many ways.

Apollo was also, of course, a propaganda coup, demonstrating what the so-called Free World could do that the “Communist” countries couldn’t. However, it wasn’t done via private enterprise or competition. It is at most an illustration of what a mixed economy can achieve, not capitalism. On the other hand, it could also be seen as an example of competition between the two power blocks dominating the world at the time, but is that capitalism?

As it stands, space probes even today have relatively low specifications, possibly due to long development times. In 1996, Pathfinder landed on Mars powered by an 8085 CPU running at 0.1 MHz. The Voyager probes run on a COSMAC 1802. There was eventually a problem with the Space Shuttle program because the craft used 8086 processors which became hard to find and had to be scavenged from antique PCs. The space program is startlingly primitive in this respect. As far as I know, there has only ever been one microcomputer based on the 1802 processor, the COMX 35, which came out in 1983. The Intel 8085 came out in March 1976, was a slightly upgraded version of the 8080, and was almost immediately eclipsed by the legendary Zilog Z80 which was released a month later. It had a longer life in control applications, which is presumably how it ended up in a Mars rover. The Shuttle program ended in 2011, which was thirty-three years after the 8086, a pretty conservative design in any case compared to the 68000 and Z8000, was mass-produced. Given all that primitive IT technology, the achievements of space probes are astonishing, and serve to illustrate the inefficiency of popular software used on modern devices on this planet. We have our priorities wrong.

I needn’t say much about the effect of social media on society. We all know it’s there, and it’s basically an ingrowing toenail, albeit one which has ingrown so far it’s started to pierce our brains. But we could’ve had a rocket to the renaissance, and instead we got Facebook and Trump. History has gone horribly wrong.