The Secret Sun: CRISPRs from the Black Lagoon

I saw a funny story the other day. Apparently a bunch of scientists at Oxford declared that not only is Earth life unique in the galaxy, it's unique in the Universe.

I'm guessing they know this because they've been there themselves.

I got a chuckle out of this because not only do these types not know what's in our solar system (never mind the universe) they don't even know what's in our oceans.

Or for that matter, our lakes.

Mind you, I don't go much for cryptozoology. It's interesting but not really my ballywick. Even so, Loch Ness stories often do catch my eye because of the whole Boleskine thing. Plus, "Synchronicity II."

I mean, it's not really one of my favorite tunes but it does connect back to a good time in my life (when I was 17, no less). So there's that. Plus, when I first learned what Synchronicity meant. So there's that, too.

And I did note that this new Nessie video just happens to coincide with a major project to catalog marine life in the Loch. You can take that anyway you like, depending on whichever way you tend to look at the world. Still, interesting timing.

There was another Nessie-type spotted in Lake Michigan around Christmas time of last year, or so the story goes. I haven't kept up with it so I'm not quite sure if this has been branded a hoax yet.

Wait; of course it's been branded a hoax. These types of things are always branded hoaxes until overwhelming evidence says otherwise. And even then they're still hoaxes.

Now, I'm not sure what is driving this phenomenon here--and I'm hoping it's not some coming seismic catastrophe-- but we've been seeing all kinds of crazy shit washing up on beaches around the Pacific.

In case you didn't hear, there was a massive 8.2 quake in the waters near Fiji the other day. To get a sense how serious that is, the quake that leveled much of Mexico City in 1985 was only 8.0. The Great Earthquake of 1906 was a 7.9 and that essentially razed San Francisco.

And now we're starting to see the high average of Ring of Fire quakes inch into the mid 6's. Just in case you're not familiar with the Richter scale, that's not good.

So it could well be these animals' acute senses are driving them from the deepest waters towards coastal areas.

And the stuff we're seeing coming ashore--dead or alive-- has been major nightmare fuel.

We're not hearing much about this from marine biologists, probably because their tendency to spitball these things as dead or mutated versions of this or that more familiar creature has diminished their credibility.

Or at least made them sound all like major buzzkills.

A lot of what we're seeing may in fact be simply unfamiliar but known specimens but no way all of them.

For instance, I can't identify these little charmers off the top of my head but it seems to me they've been catalogued. I believe the chap on the right guest-starred in a recent X-Files episode.

And then we have horrors like this. This poor creature is probably some kind of conjoined twin but one never knows these days, does one?

Anyone starting to grok why I said I'd have enjoyed Annihilation a little more if it weren't actually a docudrama? And all this is just a small sampling of the stories I've been collecting.

But just to show how credibility-destroying it is for scientists to dismiss Nessie's existence out of hand, I should point out that we've seen a number of animals that were unanimously believed to be long-extinct, including a handful in recent months.

Not only Jurassic-type specimens, but new breeds heretofore unknown like the Sunfish on the right. Sunfish are not what you'd call petite, so for one like this to escape detection all these years is a major story under any circumstances.

Now tell me again why Nessie can't exist?

And then you have these horrors, beaching in the UK and Mexico respectively. Now, I never claimed to be a marine biologist or anything but goddamn if that thing on the left doesn't look like something that broke out of Jurassic World.

So is Nessie really all that impossible? It is if you're an asshole, I guess.

And whatever happened to the dictum that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?

And since we're stuck in this never-ending 70s tape-loop, we're even seeing the return of "we scientists, we're the supreme beings of the entire universe" drivel again.

And so these mooks have declared there is no biological life of any kind anywhere in the entire universe, because again, they've been there. They did the circuit in their gap year.

Now I'm sure astrophysics is all wonderful and predictive and all the rest of it but it still boils down to just a bunch of nerds sitting in comfortable, well-appointed observatories sifting through telescopy data.

I guarantee you that something will come along in our lifetimes that will entirely scuttle most of the assumptions made about the Cosmos and show that what they've been doing all these years is the equivalent of me sitting here studying the light pollution on the horizon and telling you who the Giants are playing at the Meadowlands. Plus, the score.

I have to say it reminds me quite a bit of old illustrations you'd see of whales or lions drawn by very capable, intelligent artists and cartographers who'd read descriptions of lions in books but had never actually seen one for themselves.

But even astrophysicists don't agree with astrophysics. You get all kinds of theories all the time contradicting all the other theories. It gets rather tedious rather quickly. It's why most people don't even bother to pay attention anymore.

Plus, there's that little spot of bother with science being riddled with outright fraud and deceit on a vastly criminal scale.

Oh, I'm sorry; I meant "riddled with a replication crisis."

It's such a crisis that 70% of scientists surveyed reported they were unable to replicate at least one study or experiment. Seventy-effing-percent is what I like to call "pretty much everyone" since I'm willing to bet there were scientists who weren't willing to go on the record about it for one reason or other.

Despite what a lot of people think the peer-review process is not some kind of cosmically-infallible gift from above. In fact, there are no small number of peer-reviewed papers that were read by nobody except the author, and a scandalously large of studies that are irreplicable.

From what I'm hearing the replication crisis isn't going away any time soon, and in fact the trendlines seem to point to it it getting much worse. And don't count on AI to fix the problem, it's in the midst of its own replication crisis.

So maybe Nessie isn't all that hard to conceive given some of the other Michael Crichton nightmares washing ashore lately.

Most people have zero idea how minuscule the human footprint is on dry land, which is only 29% of this world's surface anyway. And we barely cover a scrap of it. The oceans are this planet, and humans have never seen most of it. I don't have the figures in front of me but I'm willing to bet the overwhelming majority of this planet hasn't been foot-surveyed either.

Reminds me of the time my family were driving up the New York thruway one fine day and I was amazed to see how much of the area immediately surrounding was unsettled.

In fact, I pointed out a particularly long stretch of highway to my wife in which the guardrails bumped up a wall of brush that looked totally impenetrable. I told her that I would be any amount of money no human ever set foot in that thicket.

We're talking thousands of acres in New York, in the heavily-populated northeast corridor. Squatchie could be chillin' with his homeys on the other side of that overgrowth for all we know.

Of course, there's an alternate explanation for some of these Mezozoic refugees. It's a far-fetched one, certainly, but far-fetched explanations are what this blog is all about.

And that's our old friend CRIS.

If Michael Crichton was writing about this stuff 25 years ago you can be certain the science was being bounced around faculty lounges and may have made significant progress since.

And apparently it has. We're now in the De-extinction Age, as genetic engineers work to revive extinct animals. I wonder how involved that bastard Cosmo-Demonic AI is involved in this process. Actually I don't wonder.

Should we just change D::Wave's name to "the Shimmer" now? A bit snazzier, I think. Plus, more descriptive.

It looks like the science is far along enough for geneticists to work up wish lists like the Tasmanian Tiger and the Wooly Mammoth.

And most probably some horrific old virii.

I'm sticking with the story that these demons from the depths are the real McCoy, but I'm not so sure about some of these other horrors, like the old Montauk Monster here.

Yes yes, I've heard the attempts at mundane explanations like it's a raccoon and so on and so forth. And if it were just this thing I wouldn't give it a second thought...

...unfortunately there's this poor fella, who was found by a couple kids in Panama...

And this horror, found near the Brooklyn Bridge of all places. Scientists-- y'know, those folks who can't replicate even the overwhelming majority of their work-- claimed it was a dead rat.mDespite the fact that it was more than twice as large as the biggest rat ever recorded.

But hey; don't bother scientists with facts. They got some important data that needs faking.

So anyway: that's happenstance, coincidence and consequently, enemy action.

I can't speak for the poor Panamanian unfortunate, but I will mention here that the Montauk and Brooklyn monsters were found in waters not all that far from Plum Island, home of the mysterious animal disease installation.

Which is a story for another day. Weird ol' Uncle Howie gets the last word...

They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious surrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them.

But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by.