View from the North 40: Science is taking us forward, even into history

Science news this week was dominated by NASA’s DART spacecraft colliding with an asteroid on purpose and proving that mankind can deviate the course of an asteroid — while simultaneously dashing the dreams of oil-rig workers everywhere that they alone will be able to save earth, “Armageddon”-style, from a killer asteroid in the future.

That’s right, all current and prospective roughnecks in the oil and gas industry can officially stop practicing their space walk — which is an astronaut thing, not a dance move — and their vocal debuts for both “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” which were featured prominently in the “Armageddon” soundtrack.

NASA is going with after the asteroids “Deep Impact” - or maybe “Don’t Look Up” - style. We won’t know which movie plot we’re working with until the outcome.

While this technology is being developed to help us in the future, some modern technology is helping humankind discover its past.

Researchers have discovered the fossilized remains of a 380-million-year-old heart. Sciencedaily.com reported Sept. 15 that the heart, from an armored shark-like fish called an arthrodire, was embedded in some limestone in Australia. Because the heart was preserved in its 3-dimensional state, scientists were able to scan the specimen while it was still in the rock, and constructed a 3D image, using neutron beams and synchrotron X-ray.

I have no idea what that technology is, but I always find it a bit mind-bending when ultra-modern technology is used to study super old stuff.

So here’s this arthrodire 380 million years ago, just swimming around like the king of the ocean because it quite literally possessed one of the greatest anatomical advancements on the planet in its day: a jaw.

Crazy, right?

All the other living creatures, or the vast majority of them, were like amoebas and jellyfish and other squishy creatures, but the arthrodire had a jaw that was better to eat them with. Then one day — bam — this particular sharkish-fish finds itself dead, and the next day 380 million years have gone by and land-walking humans are probing the remains with tools so advanced most fellow humans don’t understand them.

It’s like how in late May general and science media outlets released news that archeologists had discovered the remains of 26 cities and villages, dating from 500 to 1400 C.E., spread across 2,800 square miles of the Bolivian Amazon forest.

What’s the weird juxtaposition between ancient and modern here?

Well, the researchers didn’t stumble upon the settlements whilst hiking through the dense rain forest, then start painstakingly discovering what it was they found by digging through the area with little hand tools and sifters, one square foot at a time.

They flew the area with helicopters that beamed lasers down at the ground, and those lasers could digitally remove the ground-covering forest while mapping the formations on the earth.

Modern humans are thinking, “Yeah, sure, sounds plausible. I’m pretty positive I saw that in a movie somewhere.” But think of how those people would’ve felt just 1,000 or 1,500 years ago seeing a helicopter fly over, bouncing laser beams off the ground and the backs of their favorite eyeballs.

I think they would be amazed, some fearful, some protective. Surely at least one person would be stomping on down to the city council to file an official complaint about the noise and privacy issues — they were only humans after all.

But what if we skip ahead a thousand years? A million? Or 380 million? Will humans even exist? Or will it be the next creatures to inherit the earth standing there looking at a fossilized human heart embedded in rock formed from volcanic ash. And that group of researchers will be staring intently at the remains, scanning them through the rock using nothing but their minds because their brains are so advanced they can de-rock-ify an object just by thinking about it.

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If I were a betting person, I would definitely put my money on aliens being earth’s future inhabitants. Although, to be fair, I’m not entirely certain humans aren’t aliens to begin with at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .