Most people would probably say they have a good idea of what time is. A minute passes, an hour, today becomes yesterday as we move to tomorrow. The past is behind us, the future is ahead of us, the now is the now. It seems as if this is immutable and that surely everyone is aware of this without saying. Many Westerners see time as linear. That is, we move through time in a straight line from point A to point B, with one moment moving in a straight progression on to the next, and a clear progressions between today, tomorrow, and yesterday. Yet, while to experience time this way was once thought to be a universal trait among human beings, this seems to be far from the case, and indeed there are some rather profound difference in how different cultures view the basic concept of how time passes and works. Here we will look at some isolated peoples who live away from our world of clocks and calendars, and who have some rather unique and often baffling concepts of time.

In the remote wilds of the Finisterre mountain range of north-east Papua New Guinea there is an isolated village by the name of Gua. Here there are no roads, no cars, no modern technology, and it is about as removed from civilization as you can get. This is the home of the mysterious and little-known Yupno people, who largely shy away from the outside world, with only infrequent contact with outsiders such as missionaries or government workers. For these people their lifestyle has not changed much over time, and indeed time itself has a rather unique perception here.

For the Yupno, time is very closely intertwined with the very landscape itself, namely the river that dominates the area. Researchers who have studied these people have found that their timeline and perception of time followed the river’s course very closely, with time winding uphill to the rivers source as it follows the curvature of the waterway and even a kink in the river. When asked about future and past events, the Yupno consider the past to lie downhill towards the mouth of the river and the future to lie uphill towards the source, and tribespeople will always gesture downhill when talking about the past and uphill when talking about the future. the two are inextricable. Essentially, time for them flows uphill. Even if the Yupno is facing downhill, they will point behind them if mentioning the future and vice versa. Time is also nonlinear for them, following the curvature of the river, meaning that time only goes in a straight line when the river is straight, and that their timeline has a kink in it where the river actually kinks. Interestingly, when indoors the Yupno will point towards the doorway when talking about the past and away from the door when talking about the future, regardless of the orientation of the house, partly because the doorways are raised and so they have to climb down to leave the premises, and so the doorway is perceived as facing or going downhill towards the past. One researcher has said of this unique perception of time:

This is the first time ever that a culture has been documented to have everyday notions of time anchored in topographic properties. This study is an important landmark. It demonstrates both universality of cognitive processes and a fascinating cultural difference. Each one of these discoveries isn’t just telling us something about other people, it’s telling us something about us. A lot of English speakers think that it’s natural to think of time as a straight line. But that’s an illusion. It doesn’t have to be that way.

The tribe has not been thoroughly studied, and there is still much we do not understand, but it does show us that people from different cultures can have fundamentally different views on time and how it works. For the Yupno time flows uphill and in accordance with the geography, and interestingly there are other cultures that tie time to a sense of spatial or directional awareness. In the remote wilderness of the western side of the Cape York peninsula in Queensland, northern Australia, we have the Australian Aboriginal community of Pormpuraaw. Here, the people see time not as going forward or backward or uphill or downhill, but rather in a unique way all their own. For the Pormpuraaw, relative spatial relationships such as up, down, front, and back, are not used at all, but rather absolute directions such as north, south, east, west, etc.

This tendency to use directions infuses all aspects of life here. For instance, if a Pormpuraaw wanted you to hand them a utensil, they might ask you to pass the one to the west of the plate, and so on. This of course extends to how they view time, as in their culture time always flows from east to west, no matter which direction they happen to be facing at the moment, for instance it flows from left to right when one is facing south, from right to left when one is facing north, toward the body when one is facing east, and away from the body when one is facing west. Researchers have found that when given cards depicting a temporal order, a Pormpuraaw will always arrange them in order from east to west, no matter how the table is rotated, whereas a typical westerner will typically just arrange them from left to right, only arranging them east to west by pure chance. Similarly, when shown a dot and told it is “today” and asked where tomorrow would lie, the Pormpuraaw will place a second dot to the west of the first. Someone with a linear sense of time will just place it to the right. Interestingly, such is their innate dependency on absolute directions that the Pormpuraaw were found to be uncannily accurate with knowing the directions relative to their location, even without a compass, down to within 10º in either direction, every time almost without fail.

If all of this isn’t weird enough as it is, how about a culture that has no real concept of time as we know it at all? Deep within the Amazon rainforest of Brazil is the Amondawa tribe, which is so isolated that they were only first contacted by the outside world in 1986. For the Amondawa, time is a nebulous concept. They do not have words in their language for “hour,” “day,” “month” or “year,” or even a word for “time” for that matter. They do not have ages in the way we think of them, but rather names that change as they progress in their society, and indeed their counting system only goes up to four. They don’t have calendars and nothing like a clock in any sense of the word. The years pass through “dry season” and “rainy season” rather than months or years, and in fact they have no concept of what a year even is. There seems to be no “mapping” between the concepts of time passage and movement through space. That is to say, they don’t have a concept that an event has “passed” or that one is “coming up,” or that an event was “long” or “short.” Indeed, there are no words of any kind related to the measurement of the passage of time in any metaphorical sense.

In a sense, they seem to almost live in a continuous “now,” have no linguistic structures that relate time and space, and the use of language to denote specific points in time is limited to something like meeting “the next daytime” rather than “tomorrow.” It does seem that the Amondawa are capable of cognitively recognizing the passage of time, they are vaguely aware of it, they just don’t operate as a part of it. One Chris Sinha, a professor of psychology of language at the University of Portsmouth, has said of this:

We’re really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time.’ Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events. What we don’t find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occurring; they don’t have a notion of time which is something the events occur in. None of this implies that such mappings are beyond the cognitive capacities of the people. It’s just that it doesn’t happen in everyday life.

It is somewhat amazing that such a seemingly simple concept of moving through time from the past to the future has so many permutations among us, but it is perhaps on reflection not so surprising. After all, time is a concept that our brain has very little outside stimulus on which to gage it. Sure we have clocks, calendars, the sense that one day ends and another begins, but what is time really? How does our mind really have anyway to gage it and objectively measure it? It seems that it is a very malleable concept, and that those who live apart from mainstream civilization should naturally develop a different perception of time in the absence of our ways of trying to measure it. Looking at how these perceptions change show us the true uniqueness that each culture possesses and the various ways they interpret the reality they are presented with. It is a fascinating glimpse into the workings of our psyche and what it means to be human, and well as a humbling look at how we try to find a place within this vast universe of ours, full of things we have yet to understand and some which may lie forever beyond us.

The most powerful nuclear bomb in history was dropped by the Soviet Union above a remote island in October of 1961 that was felt hundreds of miles away. The bomb, which was called RDS-220 or “Tsar Bomba”, was detonated about 2.5 miles above the Novaya Zemlya islands, north of the Arctic Circle.

An aerial bomber brought the 27-ton, 26-foot-long weapon over the islands before dropping it by a parachute. When the bomb detonated, the explosion was so strong that it caused the plane to drop 3,000 feet before the pilot could steady it.

Even though it was detonated a couple of miles above the ground, the island was still left flat and bare. The flash from the bomb was seen for over 600 miles and its massive heat was felt up to 160 miles away, capable of causing third degree burns as far as 62 miles from the detonation site.

(Not Tsar Bomba)

Even the huge mushroom cloud stretched so high up that it almost reached the edge of space (it reached an altitude of 210,000 feet). Incredibly, nobody died from the detonation.

In July of 1961, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ordered the construction of the bomb. He had initially ordered a 100-megaton nuclear weapon, but the engineers gave him a 50-megaton weapon instead. To put this into better perspective, the “Tsar Bomba” was thousands of times more powerful than the nukes that were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Another jaw-dropping comparison was that the United States’ extremely powerful nuclear weapon that was tested in 1954 called “Castle Bravo” was 15 megatons.

No bomb even close to being as powerful as “Tsar Bomba” has ever been tested again. Although, a lot of that probably has to do with the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that the Soviet  Union, Great Britain, and United States all signed in August of 1963. According to the treaty, nuclear weapons were not allowed to be tested in outer space, in the atmosphere, or underwater.

(Not Tsar Bomba)

There have, however, been several atomic tests that have occurred underground with one example being North Korea who conducted such a powerful test in 2018 that a mountain near the testing site (Mount Mantap) actually moved and compressed after the explosion.

Now, getting back to the Soviet Union’s “Tsar Bomba”, Russia’s state atomic agency called Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation declassified a 40-minute video of the bomb – from the manufacturing process, to being dropped via a parachute and the gigantic mushroom cloud. The video can be seen here on YouTube with the countdown to the bomb being detonated starting at around the 22:20 mark.

In 2000, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet premier, said:  “In the 1980s, you warned about the unprecedented dangers of nuclear weapons and took very daring steps to reverse the arms race. Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on Earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act in that situation.” So, what, exactly, is a nuclear winter Let’s see. We’ll begin with the aforementioned decade of the 1980s, which was when the concept – and the doom-filled implications – of a nuclear winter really began to take shape on a large scale. Today’s nuclear weapons have the ability to obliterate entire cities and millions of people in seconds. Compared to nuclear weapons of the 21^st century, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were mere toys. Bringing worldwide civilization to an end is something that is all too easily within our grasp, should we be so foolish to one day go down that nightmarish path. But, it’s not just the immediate effects of a  nuclear war that we have to be concerned about. There are the long-term effects, too. Yes, trying to protect oneself from both the initial blast and the soon-to-be-everywhere deadly radiation would be absolutely paramount to one’s survival. There is, however, something else to be aware of.

Such would be the massive scale of destruction in a nuclear war, millions upon millions of tons of dust, dirt, soot, and the ash-like remains of probably five or six billion people, buildings and more would be sucked into the huge firestorms erupting all across the quickly-shattering globe. In no time at all, the dense, cloudy, worldwide masses would quickly reach the stratosphere, which is situated around six to eight miles above the planet’s surface. And that’s when the poor, irradiated and burned survivors of the war would have something else to deal with. As if billions dead and killer-radiation weren’t enough to have on one’s plate. Such would be the almost unfathomable amount of sooty materials quickly overwhelming the planet’s entire stratosphere, we would see a sudden and devastating change in temperatures. We’re not talking about the temperature merely dropping. We’re talking about it plummeting. As in almost off the scale, as the rays and heat of the sun become systematically blocked out, all as a result of our stupidity and recklessness.

We also have this from the committee: “The consequences of any such changes in atmospheric state would have to be added to the already sobering list of relatively well-understood consequences of nuclear war…Long-term atmospheric consequences imply additional problems that are not easily mitigated by prior preparedness and that are not in harmony with any notion of rapid postwar restoration of social structure. They also create an entirely new threat to populations far removed from target areas, and suggest the possibility of additional major risks for any nation that itself initiates use of nuclear weapons, even if nuclear retaliation should somehow be limited.”

In light of all the above, to what extent would the Earth’s temperature be lowered? A chilling – no pun intended – statement comes from Dr. Alan Robock, a professor of climatology in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University. An expert in this field, Dr. Robock says: “A minor nuclear war (such as between India and Pakistan or in the Middle East), with each country using 50 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs as airbursts on urban areas, could produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history. This is only 0.03% of the explosive power of the current global arsenal.” Consider carefully, Dr. Robock’s words. He makes it very clear the survivors of a nuclear war would experience, “…climate change unprecedented in recorded human history.” And all this with only 0.03% of the world’s nuclear weapons being used. Imagine, then, the effects if all of the remaining, massive percentage was used – and not just in the India-Pakistan area, or in the Middle East, but just about everywhere. It’s not at all inconceivable that we would see our world plunged into nothing less than a full Ice Age, never mind just a nuclear winter.

Today’s Jeopardy category is “Portals to Hell.” Remember, your answer must be in the form of a question. For $500, this Gateway to Hell is growing at a frightening rate of 30 meters (98 feet) per year.

“Washington D.C.!”

Sorry, that wasn’t a question.

“What is the Batagaika crater, located in the ice-covered Chersky Range in northeastern Siberia?”

Correct! It’s summer in Siberia, a season which has actually become more noticeable due to climate change. It means that Siberians are shedding clothing and the ground is shedding permafrost. In some areas, the end result is exploding pingos – ice-and-dirt-covered methane pockets whose heat-induced blasts leave large sinkholes behind. However, the Batagaika crater, about 660 km (410 miles) northeast of the city of Yakutsk, has been around for some time – long enough to grow to 1 km (.652) in length and 100 meters (328 feet) deep, and acquire the name “Gateway to Hell.”

Batagaika crater NASA image)

The Batagaika crater began forming in the 1960 when forests near the Batagaika river were cleared and permafrost began melting faster than normal. While paleontologists loved its massive exposure of Ice Age animal fossils, the steep cliffs and landslides make erosion occur even faster and land is dragged into the Gateway to Hell at an accelerated and dangerous pace, threatening everything in its path, including the homes, livestock and scenery of the local Yakutians, who first named this creation of invading resource-stealers the “Gateway to Hell.”

“The catch with Batagai is that although it survived multiple episodes of warming in the past, where the warming has been natural – in the last 50 or 60 years human disturbances have destabilised this ancient permafrost. 

“So, I guess the message is that we need to be very careful.”

Geology professor Julian Murton of the University of Sussex told the BBC that a mere 60 years of warming has exposed permafrost from 650,000 years ago — the oldest of its kind in Eurasia and the second oldest in the world. Needless to say, that’s not good.

Growth of the Batagaika crater NASA image)

“Though this may sound so far away from our daily concerns and daily life, actually it’s not just curiosity that drives the Batagai research. It’s also the applicability of the results to the ongoing environmental changes – because the past is the key to the future. And by understanding the processes that occurred in the past and their aftermath, we can adapt to the ongoing future.”

Is it too late to close the Gateway to Hell? Verkhoyansk in northeastern Siberian recorded the Arctic’s highest ever temperature this summer — 100 F (38C) – the temperature of hell to Siberians. Is having wood for your fireplace or end tables worth widening the mouth of hell?

This story continues to appear every summer, and never gets better … only bigger. How long will it be before the Batagaika crater reaches big cities … Moscow … China … India … Europe … beyond? Does humanity stop it with sandbags … or climate change reversal?

Please give your answer in the form of a question.

The coronavirus pandemic has had a huge impact on the world thus far with more than 16.5 million people affected and over 650,000 deaths. It’s been reported that the virus was transmitted to humans from bats and a new study has revealed an even more incredible fact about COVID-19. Apparently the virus has been circulating in bats for up to 70 years.

In a new research project where experts looked into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, they found that it evolved in bats (specifically the horseshoe bat) all the way back to 1948. Scientists that were led by the Pennsylvania State University compared SARS-CoV-2 to its closest relative in bats called RaTG13 (they are 96% similar to each other) and they found that both viruses have the same ancestor although it’s still unclear as to when SARS-CoV-2 split away from the other types of coronaviruses.

According to their studies, the scientists came up with three separate dates as to when the virus split from their ancestor called sarbecoviruses – 1948, 1969 and 1982 which indicates “that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed in bats for decades,” the researchers stated.

Horseshoe bat

The experts mentioned that since the virus has been circulating in bats for between 40 and 70 years, there may be other coronaviruses out there that could potentially infect humans. As a matter of fact, I wrote an article back in April of this year that detailed six new coronaviruses that had been identified in bats. (The article can be read here.)

COVID-19 enters the human body by its receptor-binding domain (RBD) grabbing a hold of the ACE2 receptor in human cells which allows it to attack the body’s defensive mechanisms that would normally fight off the virus. In fact, SARS-CoV-2 is a thousand times more powerful than the RaTG13 virus at latching onto ACE2 receptors in humans. Interestingly, other sarbecoviruses haven’t had RBD and the closest thing they have found resided in pangolins although it isn’t believed that they were the ones that transmitted it to humans.

David L. Robertson, who is a professor of computational virology at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research as well as an author of the study, explained, “SARS-CoV-2’s receptor-binding domain sequence has so far only been found in a few pangolin viruses,” adding, “While it is possible that pangolins may have acted as an intermediate host facilitating transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to humans, no evidence exists to suggest that pangolin infection is a requirement for bat viruses to cross into humans.” “Instead, our research suggests that SARS-CoV-2 likely evolved the ability to replicate in the upper respiratory tract of both humans and pangolins.”

While bats are immune to coronavirus, it is still highly infectious to humans and has proved to be incredibly deadly. Maciej Boni, who is an associate professor of biology at Penn State and another author of the study, revealed that this pandemic “will not be our last”, adding that “Coronaviruses have genetic material that is highly recombinant, meaning different regions of the virus’s genome can be derived from multiple sources.”

Four “sister” species of the horseshoe bat have been discovered in Africa and researchers are hoping that by studying them and the viruses they carry, they will be able to help experts properly prepare for any other possible coronavirus pandemics in the future.