Unthinkable Solutions of Fermi's Paradox

"At some point, the gluons will no longer be able to hold the quarks together, and the hadrons will decay. Which will mean the end of matter in this universe." - Albert Einstein ¹

As it seems, in our universe, nothing is made to last. Eventually, everything gets old and dies or changes or decays into something else, and I am not referring to the life forms only but to all matter in the cosmos. For all we know, this might not be true within our own macroworld alone, but also deep below, the same goes for particles in the quantum realm as well. The fact is that everything in the universe has a tendency to achieve the lowest energy state and to finally rest within a stable system, even if that means going through various changes or decays. In the quantum world, this could be true for the Higgs field as well. According to Hawking, if it becomes metastable, the vacuum decay bubble will emerge and consume everything in order to eventually reach the lowest energy state possible. For Higgs field being everywhere in the universe, this would mean instantaneous collapse of the whole universe and it's own ultimate change into a new and ultimately alien environment with a completely new set of laws of physics in the aftermath that could not be as friendly to the living beings as they are today.

But relax, this is just a theory; it might be wrong; nothing like it happened in previous 13.8 billion years (or did it?) and the quote from the beginning is not really formulated by the famous physicist. Well, fictitious Einstein did say it in Phillip P. Peterson's 'Paradox', a remarkable piece of science fiction driven by this scientific premise, but still, it might be something he would say if he were still alive today.

'Paradox' is a relatively new novel series, so I am not going to spoil the content, but to really understand how vacuum decay relates to the well-known Fermi's paradox or to better understand aliens' actions towards Earth and other star systems throughout the universe, I'd warmly recommend the read. As a science fiction fan for years and decades, I could only say that I didn't stumble to the better science fiction in relation to concepts such as Dyson spheres, quantum mechanics, fusion engines, antimatter propulsion, warp drives, the creation of the Big Bang and inflationary space, virtual reality of enormous proportions, wormholes, travel, and communication... The list is going on, and I can only speculate what is inside the third book that has just been released (unfortunately, due to my illiteracy in German, I'll have to wait for the summer and its scheduled translation in English). Anyway, this was one of the rare book series with a sequel even more interesting than the first book, with perfectly connected endings in both of them.

The idea of vacuum decay behind Peterson novels for the solution of Fermi's paradox is indeed new in scientific background, but surely there is more logic we can think of and apply to the absence of aliens, and the idea, more than half a century old, is getting renewed attention in recent years. What I am referring to is the simulation theory and/or holographic principle. It is triggered by the very research of black holes and the information paradox, which states that physical information can be lost and swallowed by black holes despite quantum mechanics postulate that nothing, including information, can ever be lost, only transferred from one form to another. One of the solutions for the paradox I discussed a while ago with the question in the post title 'Are We Holograms?' answered Fermi's paradox perfectly.

However, to get back to science fiction, on several occasions in the past, I mentioned "The Thirteenth Floor", the movie that portrays so far the best story about a simulation of everything in existence. I don't know why, but I never read the backstory about this great film, and especially for this post, I went to check where the script came from in the first place and discovered that it was loosely based on the book called "Simulacron-3", written by Daniel F. Galouye way back in 1964. Needless to say, I downloaded the copy and liked it very, very much. Considering the year and the fact that it was written at the dawn of digital computers, the details and sophistication of the story were amazing. In relation to Fermi's paradox, if we are indeed living in a simulated world created by aliens themselves and we are all nothing more than just a bunch of artificial intelligence characters in the game, then the absence of other intelligent forms becomes clear. Or we will meet them when they become programmed and inserted in the simulation. Anytime now.

Next in line of the fictitious solution for Fermi's paradox on the first glance is not something that much unthinkable. But if we reason about communications over long distances in space, calling the ET and/or receiving a message from aliens from deep space is not as easy as we might think. By using our current technology, that is. The most obvious is the SETI project, which was founded half a century ago based on only monitoring electromagnetic radiation in search of ET broadcasts. After that, many years of looking for the signal from the above failed to find anything so far.

The most interesting and one of the first works of science fiction in this realm was Carl Sagan's 'Contact', in which aliens managed to receive the Earth's earliest TV broadcast 25 light years away, decoded it, and sent it back into SETI's antennas. Unfortunately, even though this looks much more plausible than vacuum decay or giant simulation, it really is not. Engineering and the science behind it are cruel. To broadcast anything at all in the electromagnetic spectrum, the signal must be focused and powerful enough to reach the destination without dissipation of the signal, to avoid the data being embedded in too much noise on the way, or to experience path loss while spreading out over long distances. Our EM broadcasts from Earth are meant for Earth only (or for the Moon on occasion or two in the past), and they are not powerful enough to reach even the closest stars without serious signal loss. To get weak transmissions like that, aliens around Vega might need solar system-wide antennas to detect UHF broadcasts from us. The same goes for SETI on Earth; it is unlikely we will ever get anything that is not narrow, focused, and aimed directly toward us. Nevertheless, ''Contact' will always stay on my physical and digital shelves for being one of the best science fiction films in the history of the genre.

At least for this post, the last and final obstacle with life forms swarming the vast space throughout the universe(s) is ... life itself and its potential limitations. Organic life based on carbon or something else exotic to us could be fragile and short in general. One small asteroid strikes the planet in the Goldilocks zone, and poof... everything dies and resets. Billions of years of evolution go into oblivion in a cosmic second. Even if major extinction events miraculously avoid the intelligent species, they might be destined to destroy themselves at the end of the path. Even more unthinkable scenarios we are still not aware of yet can pop into the equation. One of the obstacles could be that life could exist only in networked scenarios, or, to be precise, it could only work and evolve, more or less, in the form of a giant hive mind in relation to the mother planet. If that's true, there could be a limit in distance for a small number of individuals to leave their world, where they would ultimately lose connection to the hive and die. We never sent anyone or anything to live beyond moon orbit, so if this is true, the border of life could be anywhere beyond that.

I am not sure that Arthur C. Clarke had this in mind when he wrote 'Rendezvous with Rama' back then in 1973. Probably not. However, it was not far from common sense that in this unthinkable scenario, in order to sail toward the stars, the only way that could be done is to build enormous spaceships and giant cities that could carry everybody on the one-way journey. There are countless hazards for that kind of travel, and something along the way might happen to the people who originally populated Rama in the beginning. If we add to the story ultimate laws of physics and issues with limited speed of travel, vast distances between stars, and sparse sources when it comes to little things like food and fuel, 'the hive mind' problem could be another perfect solution to the paradox to consider.

But let's stop here with imagining all potential reasons why we still haven't met ET. If I would like only to spice it up with more unthinkable reasons, it would not be that hard. Just think about the "Zoo Hypothesis", in which we are created and observed by aliens in their science fair experiment, or the theory that we are the first intelligent civilization to emerge so far, or that there is 'The Great Filter' that limits intelligent life species from reaching the potential to dive into stars.

In the end, we could all be wrong. Evolution of species throughout the universe might not be headed toward stars at all. Perhaps we have to reset our minds and look elsewhere, no matter how strange it sounds.

¹ Quote by Albert Einstein character from Phillip P. Peterson's Paradox novel series

Novels:
http://raumvektor.de/paradox/
https://www.amazon.com/Contact-Carl-Sagan-ebook/
https://www.amazon.com/Rendezvous-Rama-Arthur-C-Clarke

Image refs:
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/heres-how-universe-could-destroy-itself-horror-vacuum-decay
http://lcart3.narod.ru/image/fantasy/jim_burns/jim_burns_cylindrical_sea.jpg
http://starkovtattoo.spb.ru/titanfall-wallpapers

Refs:
http://www.bidstrup.com/seti.htm
https://briankoberlein.com/2015/02/19/e-t-phone-home/
https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000984.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_F._Galouye
https://medium.com/o-s/6-mind-bending-solutions-to-the-fermi-paradox

What is Intelligent Life?

I remember reading an article in the Guardian last year with the title "Our galaxy may contain billions of planets with the same mass as Earth". Surely, it is a valid scientific guess as it is, but if it is really true, my first thought would be that intelligent life as we know it (assuming we are intelligent species) is as rare as we can imagine. If they are not, the big question is, why are we still not able to detect any single proof of their existence, or are they still not eaten by some violent alien species? The only logical answer, that we are the first ones to walk on the edge of impossibility, is logical to me. Most likely we are missing something important—a discovery as important as fire was.

While this statement is still accurate and generally speaking plausible, let's think a little more about it. So to start with the original statement, are there really that many planets with Earth-like properties in our galaxy? Ever since I read the Drake equation for the first time (shown above), I couldn't get rid of the feeling that there was nothing spectacular I could conclude from it. Come on, really, this is just another scientific speculation at best, as we simply don't have any valuable information about star systems other than our own. Not until the recent year did we have any observations of local star clusters related to potential planets. The only scientific data coming in this regard is the one from the Kepler mission, and after two and a half years, it still didn't find a single hint of an Earth-like planet. Yes, this is just the beginning, and the Kepler spacecraft only searches for changes in brightness of the nearby stars looking for planets, but still there is nothing so far. Just giant Jupiter-sized or supermassive rocky planets. I wanted to sound optimistic, but I would expect at least one stable candidate in these 2.5 years of Kepler's. Maybe it is there in scientific data still waiting to be revealed, or maybe those giant planets harbor Pandora-like satellites? Or nothing's there? The future will tell.

Next, there is a common interpretation that life-supporting planets exist in large numbers, but intelligent life is rare, or we are, by some rare possibility, the first one. As this sounds plausible on first glance, it is not. We simply have this one-time experience with Earth, where one single cell needed almost one billion years to evolve and almost three billion for the first multicellular creatures to arrive, not to mention that the first plant evolved only half a billion years ago. So, a life-supporting planet or satellite requires many billions of years of evolution, not many times interrupted with cataclysmic events. If we take this for granted, then it seems that complex life, like us, needs a small amount of time, astronomically speaking, compared to less complex ones like trees or grass. Therefore, again astronomically speaking, if we find a greenish environment on some planet, the chances of finding intelligent life on that planet in some sort of statistical existence are pretty big.

Ok, what's next? Oh yes, intelligent life... Is that what we are? Are these Hawking's famous sayings right? "Primitive life is very common, and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth". If you ask me, it is only half right. I'd say if primitive life is common, then complex life could be common as well, but the second statement is pretty much accurate. I don't want to sound pathetic, semi-scientific, or too philosophical here, but there is a simple fact that what differs humans from animals is that big rational brain of ours. On the other end, what is pretty much similar to animal life is that still hyperactive emotional or reptilian part of our inner head. I am not sure what the next centuries will bring to us, but it will be either further development of the rational brain at the expense of the emotional one or vice versa.

I am not saying that we must completely suppress emotions like Vulcans or try to augment people to reach this goal, but I am 100% sure that all human misbehavior today, like wars, global crises, hunger there and overfilled bellies here, and cultural or religion-based animosity between people, relatives, or neighbors, is simply caused by a reptilian complex deeply hidden in the center of the human brain. Of course, I really can't imagine living a life without emotions at all, but simply put, this part of human beings should not be in charge over reason. It's been proven too dangerous so many times.

So, in a nutshell, as soon as this part of the brain evolves down under the border of no return, I guess we should not call ourselves an intelligent species. Until then, it is unwise for some interstellar species to give us technology to leave the Earth—the chances that we would use it for star wars are bigger than that we would go to the next level and use it for peaceful exploration of the solar system and beyond.

The last and probably the most important from my original statement last year was the hint that we were missing something important, like a fire-like breakthrough discovery. Is that what we are missing—some space technology or a warp drive? Sure, this is the necessity; we definitely can't populate other planets or go interstellar with today's rockets, but in today's spirit, it seems that it is definitely something that will help our rational brain to become the real boss in our heads. Only then can we step further and say that intelligent life finally emerged on Earth. Only then can we say that our railguns are only made for mining the asteroids and not for killing people because they look different.

Is this possible?

Sure, if we are spared by some major cataclysmic event within the next couple of centuries or if we don't create one ourselves. I have all my hopes in the evolutionary process but also little doubts as well. But, when the day is bright and cheerful, I also have all my hopes that tomorrow humanity will overpass this current stage of evolution and head for something more.

Image credits:
http://eugenius330.deviantart.com/art/Message-413092189

Search for habitable planets:
http://kepler.nasa.gov/

Refs:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/28/galaxy-planets-mass-earth-life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolution
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sumer_anunnaki/reptiles/reptiles14.htm
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/stephen-hawking-no-biological-life.html
http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/seti/drake_equation.html

Is Life a Zero-Player Game?

Think about it. If life really is some sort of game and we are just characters in one giant artificial intelligence play, then... Well, let's just say that we can safely recognize not very enjoyable rules we unconscionably must obey. They are simple. We must play the game. We can't quit the game. We can't win. Oh, and yes, if life really is a game, then we are only either slaves in one master-puppeteer god-like performance, or we could be just a bunch of units interacting with each other in a sort of limited free will world or a world where free will is just an illusion. Now, if life really WAS a game, what would you prefer?

Olivia Wilde & Garrett Hedlund in 'Tron: Legacy'*

It is obvious that the first option is what we easily recognize as a religious world. If you ask me, this is a simple marionette type of world in which we, being game units, have little or no influence in the game, and we must obey divine rules and please the puppeteer. From my point of view, let's just hope this is not the case. However, the second scenario is something worthwhile to give further thought to. If life is something like one large simulation with characters playing the game independently without creator influence during the game, then we are just participating in one giant zero-player environment that started eons ago in the point of history where evolution began with a predefined start pattern. And evolution is nothing more than just a set of rules in the complex game algorithm, and time is just an iteration flow in patterns changing from one state into another by following the rules.

Confused?

Ok, let's simplify the scope and check one famous zero-player game that might help understanding the basic principle. The inventor is perhaps one of the great minds in the world, John Horton Conway, a mathematician from Princeton University, who tried to simplify the original John von Neumann idea to explain evolution with the creation of a mathematical model without explosive growth over time, using just small initial patterns with unstoppable and unpredictable outcomes with a set of rules as simple as possible, which would drive the entire system forward in time. Conway came up with a brilliant two-dimensional matrix where one dot represents one living cell. Cells obey four simple rules:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies (death by underpopulation).
2. Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies (death by overpopulation).
3. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors continues to the next generation (survival).
4. Any dead cells of exactly three live neighbors will come back to life (birth).

Conway's matrix is, just like life, infinite in size, but for demonstration purposes the following example is finite matrix that. Just FYI, as a single cell is clickable, I couldn't make it mobile or any small display friendly. To try it out, you would really need to use an old-fashioned computer screen and mouse pointer. Please feel free to play and create your own pattern and see what happens. This is, of course, a zero-player game, so your godlike intervention in this game is only to create the initial organism. The Conway's game of life then operates on its own, and you can only watch.

Conway's brilliant experiment is only a two-dimensional game with a small number of simple rules, yet it opens endless fun and endless variations in the evolution of different patterns and their interactions. Now, is it possible to create, hypothetically speaking, a very complicated game on a molecular level with complicated rules within the realm of chemistry? And instead of an endless matrix, use the three-dimensional surface of a planet? Is that what the Earth is? One giant playground with molecules in endless interactions with each other, and we are today just a snapshot in the game's current evolution stage?

It surely fits the world surrounding us and the one in the past. In this game, the world before was less complex than it is today, and the world today is less complex than the one from the future. Living units in the game are evolving due to infinite interactions, and if we go to the very beginning, to the first pattern of living cells, some 3.8 billion years ago, approximately 750 million years after Earth was formed, it is clear that we indeed might be living in a complex biological game. The game is without players and puppeteers and only with living organisms with developed conscious minds. In order to neatly describe the current stage of the game, I will just quote Stephen Hawking: "We humans are highly complex biological machines behaving in accordance with the laws of nature. Our brains create and sustain our conscious minds through an extraordinary network of interacting neurons. That consciousness creates a three-dimensional model of the outside world: a best-fit model that we call reality."

Red Pill or Blue Pill?***

You might be asking now where free will fits in the game. If we are not players per se, then do we even possess such things? Are we able, being units in the game, just by following the rules, no matter how complex they are, to choose our own course of action without constraints and fate? If the game model like this one is correct, then I am pretty sure we can stop thinking about free will. There is no such thing, at least in the raw meaning of the word. Yes, we are able to control our actions and to choose certain paths, which gives us the illusion of free will, but even if we choose one path in favor of another, we are not really capable of calculating where this chosen path really leads to or where it ends. There are simply too many unknown variables on the way. Not to mention that we are completely incapable of knowing who or what we will stumble on on the chosen path and how this new interaction will play out in the game.

But the beautiful thing in this mind experiment called "Game of Life" is that even though we only have limited free will, as it seems, there is no fate as well. And even though the rules are definite and inexorable, due to the enormous size of the game level and complexity of the rules and the infinite number of organisms and molecules, it is really impossible to calculate the outcome of the game or any of the game's parts separated either in space or in time. At least from the inside of the game. And as it appears, there is no outside of the game as well. If there was, then, like in Conway's game embedded in this post above, there could be a "reset" button somewhere. "The button" that has perhaps been pressed about five times so far.****

But, like in any game, there might be glitches, lags, and bugs (like fabulously portrayed in Tron movies and series*). And I definitely had that in mind when last summer Viktor and I filmed a short movie with the same name** that exploits this very scientific thought. It's our first and only movie so far, so it's full of imperfection, but to sum it up, its plot tells a story about a young boy who's following a glitch in the system, presented in real life as a firefly, through numerous portals to the place where he meets a man with the final orb, the artifact that seems to be a way in for full understanding of life itself, its origin, and the rules it is built on. The entire movie is embedded above, and for more about all the filming and production, please find the referenced link within.

Image refs:
* http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/,
** http://www.milanzivic.com/2016/08/game-of-life.html
*** Cornell Math Explorers' Club

Code ref:
** https://codepen.io/RBSpatz/pen/rLyNLb

Refs:
**** http://www.milanzivic.com/2015/06/the-sixth-great-dying.html
http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/lexicon/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_Game_of_Life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-player_game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horton_Conway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
http://www.hawking.org.uk/videos.html
http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_life.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9841/
http://www.iep.utm.edu/freewill/

Atlanteans

If I am going to give a thought or two about ancient Atlantis, its mysterious people, and all the conspiracy theories behind it, there is no doubt that I'll first think of the origin of the story. Classical Greece and Plato. One of the most famous scholars from BC. In his own time, Plato was definitely the top Greek philosopher from ancient Athens, who lived in the fourth century before Christ and dedicated his entire scholarly life to philosophical research and development of modern society and politics. The method he used in his publications was dialogues, a very popular way of expressing scientific thoughts at the time. Plato's dialogues, in which he never took the role as one of the participants, were often the front story accompanied with narration, but in some of them he even excluded the narrator and presented his work in pure novel style, with his characters carrying the story all the way.

In regard to today's title, two dialogues are especially interesting—Timaeus and Critias. Participants in the dialogues were Socrates, Timaeus, Hermocrates, and Critias, and Plato tried to describe the perfect society time-framed way back before the old Classical Greece. In short, these two dialogues describe a tale from a man called Solon, another Athenian, who, during his travels throughout ancient Egypt, learned about mysterious people who lived and perished many generations before. Twenty years or so before these dialogues, Plato had written his masterpiece "The Republic", in which he discussed what he thought of an ideal state with a 'just man' and the meaning of justice in general from the point of view of Greek cities from the classical time. His ideal state was named 'Ancient Athens', placed in existence 9000 years before Plato's time (or 900 if the suggested error in translation is true), and governed with a superior and almost utopian society. As it seems, Atlanteans are used in Plato's books just as an example of how even the enemy that was so powerful, beyond any current comprehension, is incapable of defeating a perfectly regulated society. After that the story went wild, and Atlanteans, who tried to enslave the entire Mediterranean, were easily defeated by 'utopian' and perfectly organized Athenians. In the aftermath, their superb armada retreated to their island, and the gods in their final rage destroyed the entire Atlantean civilization, which Plato described in his famous words, "There occurred violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of misfortune, the island of Atlantis disappeared into the depths of the sea." In the second dialogue, "Critias", Plato described in more detail the origin of the 'ancient' Atlanteans, with extensive use of old Greek mythology, as Poseidon's heaven, who created a perfect society that ultimately, over time, started to fade out as soon as they started losing their divine origin and got overwhelmed in corruption.

Today, we have great knowledge about ancient Greek times, and so far there are no scientific facts in favor of "ancient of the ancient" Greek society that is older than 3 millenniums BC, who fought mighty civilizations that came from the other side of the Pillars of Hercules and both vanished without a single trace. However, there is a faint clue and tons of theories of where Plato really found inspiration for this incredible tale.

Reconstruction of a late Cycladic Ship (© 7reasons, Michael Klein)*

As for the faint clue, I would vote for the ancient Minoan civilization and their predecessors, who preceded the Greeks in the Aegean and suffered ultimate decimation from both natural disaster and human invaders. They lived on the island of Crete within the ancient settlements of Knossos and Gortyn and also on the northern Aegean island of Thera (Santorini) in the ancient site of Akrotiri, which, just like Roman Pompeii, is remarkably preserved after the tremendous volcanic eruption. Their civilization flourished in the late Bronze Age and, like in Plato's words, within a single day and night, around the year 1600 BC, disappeared into the sea in one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in the history of the entire world. What is today known as 'The Minoan eruption of Thera', seismologists tend to classify as four times more powerful than the well-known explosion of Krakatoa. If Minoans had more settlements in the neighborhood, which was likely, they were all destroyed and sunk during the natural reshaping of the archipelago. A massive eruption, no doubt, created a large tsunami wave that probably reached all the way to Crete and ultimately decimated the Minoan people in the northern part of the island. In the following years, pirates and thieves from the sea and land took the chance and made sure for Minoans to never recover to what they once were.

Well, in conclusion and after this small history glimpse, if you ask me, there is a fair chance that Plato's Atlanteans are truly based on ancient Minoans. After all, 2300+ years ago, in Plato's time, the world wasn't big, and the entire cradle of the civilization, as we popularly call Greek Classical times, was small and all about the Aegean Sea. Even the Mediterranean was too large for wooden galleys and far travels. Ancient Minoans came to the Aegean two millennia before Plato, and after their misfortune, I am sure the legends and myths about them grew slightly above the facts. Still, their language, clay tablets, art, pottery, architecture, and overall history prove they once were a very respectful and organized society.

There is no doubt that Atlanteans from Plato's 'Timaeus and Critias' served just a supporting role in this piece of philosophy, but still, ever since, the Atlantis story has had a large impact on literature, comic books, and movies. They are used in tons of novels and portrayed as an insanely advanced civilization with all the technological wonders, perfect cities, flying ships, state-of-the-art armory, etc. There is no bay or gulf in the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Caribbean that some rich adventurer or scholar didn't try to find the Atlantean ruins or at least to post a new theory of the Atlantis site or a conspiracy theory of some sort. To be honest, I am really ok with that—if you look at it from the entertainment point of view, what you get is very much fun, and if you read it on the beach, it surely adds another level to your vacation time.

This is exactly what I did this summer, and during our ten days of R&R on Thassos Island of the northern Aegean, I loaded all three books of The Origin Mystery on my Kindle and swallowed them all in record time. Honestly, from this trilogy I expected a lot, and this is exactly what I got! You have to be brave to make yet another novel about Atlanteans, and A.G. Riddle wrapped it just right. He managed to connect several sci-fi genres into one successful story. For my taste all the sciences are there and connected perfectly. Biology, virology, genetic research including junk-DNA involvement, physics and space travel, quantum entanglement, Antarctica, known history, and the use of connection and conspiracy theories like the Nazi bell (Die Glocke) or the Roswell UFO sighting. Play with time dilation and hibernation. Space battles of enormous proportion. Explanation of gods and ancient astronauts. If you add the usual 'Indiana Jones' type of adventures and romance, there was no better choice for me this July. Perhaps, using so many connected sciences in the plot is too risky, as the author faces the challenge of choosing what is more important and deserves to be explained better at the expense of other technologies or speculations, but I don't mind. All in all, Riddle's Atlanteans are perhaps the best version I've read in a long while, and I warmly recommend it.

Reconstruction of the Akrotiri Supervolcano (© 7reasons, Michael Klein)*

As for the real Atlanteans, or in this case ancient Minoans, I hope some of next summer will lead us to the southern Aegean, and then this story will earn another post in the thread. No doubt with images from ancient Akrotiri. In the meantime, don't miss the below link with incredible scientific reconstructions from before the Minoan Eruption made by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archeology (LBI ArchPro).

Image credit:
* The Akrotiri Supervolcano (© 7reasons, Michael Klein)