“If I can model them, they exist…” quote from a theoretical physicist, asked about unicorns.

“I never met a proxy for climate I didn’t like. It’s the real climate that won’t cooperate…” quote from a climate scientist.

“Astronomical alignment…strange coincidence,” quote from an archeologists.

“Whatever they say…” quote from a man on the street.

Views from an EU Skeptic…

I am new to the Electric Universe. Since declaring myself a science writer, of course I’m skeptical. Let me tell you why.

According to the EU theory, the ancients left messages that awhile back, Saturn bussed Earth and Mars into this crappy neighborhood to diversify with gas giants.

This does sound like archaic thinking on integration – today, if we needed to diversify with gas giants, we’d change local zoning laws and make them come to us.

Given this air of plausibility, I had to check the theory out. So, I started with the highest authority I could find. Unfortunately, Jon Stewart had just quit the job.

I called Oprah, because her guest was the world’s leading celebrity expert on being an expert. She put the super-smart astrophysics populist on the line. He said, “Electri-what – never heard of it.”

I said, it’s the thing that makes your phone work.

He said, “My phone works because time dilation in a black hole gravity-well provides a direct link via wormhole to a parallel universe where I’m speaking to an alternative version of you that split away at a past quantum decision node.” He said we were communicating “via entanglement,” but the conversation hadn’t actually happened yet.

“Your universe may be full of this electro-whatchamacallit”, he said. “There are always new universes bubbling up and trying new things.” He then insisted I look around my universe because he was missing one of his socks.

Apparently the wormhole collapsed because I heard a click, then silence.

Having failed to get information from either the celebrity expert, or the smartest man in the world*, I turned to the truest authority of all. Reality TV.

Kim and Kanye took my call with polite patience.

“Can I Rap it?” said Kanye, after I explained. Kim broke into song,

“Oo-oo-oh, electric universe

I love that name ‘cause it’s so perverse

Tickle my booty with an electric thang

Shoot your plasma in my pootey-tang!”

Kanye put his hand over the phone, I think, because I heard thumps. Then the wormhole must have collapsed.

I realized asking popular celebrities about technical matters might be the wrong tactic, since – as I now learned – celebrities live in a parallel universe. I’d always heard that, but never took it literally. So, I turned to the intellectual elite.

I could not reach Al Gore, but the Science Guy answered and gave me a lesson in real science I’ll never forget.

At that moment he and ‘The Man’ were rounding up a few dozen 747’s to fly staff, the press, any interested parties with good cameras, and a cargo of 15 million gerbils for emergency relief to the State of California.

I learned the Governor, also an elite, had declared a state of emergency after earth scientists at UC Berkeley revealed in a recent peer-voted paper (‘Blue Ribbon – Most settled new science discovery of 2015’) that California’s climate change induced drought was causing accelerated sea level rise.

Simple deductive reasoning told them if it wasn’t raining, the water had to be somewhere. The heroic earth scientists immediately formed an expedition that pedaled to the distant shores of Marin County to take measurements.

When the peloton of PhD’s arrived, they were shocked to find the Pacific Ocean actually lapping upon the beach in wave upon wave of excess water.

They immediately deduced their deduction was proof of an abruptly accelerated sea level rise, since proxy analysis of salt encrustations above water line indicative of past wave action solidly confirmed the current state could only be generated by an influx of excess water.

This finding was confirmed by scientists at JPL, who empirically demonstrated the volume of excess water in the ocean precisely correlated with their estimates of lost rainfall, which made the science double settled.

Since the Governor had already deployed the National Guard to confiscate gluten and arrest purveyors of GMO’s, he could not deploy them to bail the ocean.

He declared a state of emergency to access federal relief funds for the construction of a ten-billion dollar, ratepayer funded, loan guaranteed, tax incentivized, DOE over-funded, biomass power plant to generate 0.5 Watts of renewable energy to offset the drought causing CO2.

Algae that grow extremely fast on gerbil excrement fuels the plant, specifically designed by the UC Davis Free-Range Organic Engineering Department to offset enough CO2 to calm the waters and halt the impending floods.

California gerbils could not be used, however, because that confused the CO2 models. Al Gore generously offered to use some of the Governor’s emergency funds to bring gerbils from Tennessee, where wind power and GHG offsets had already been purchased to negate regional gerbil emissions.

The Governor needed gerbils right away. I could not interrupt this important work.

I’m left wondering. Shouldn’t these smart, powerful and admired people also be curious about a theory that explains so much with such specific evidence – a testable theory so elegant that it is actually comprehensible?

Nah! If there was anything to this Electric Universe thing, these would be the first people to say so. I have got to go now…Ancient Aliens is on.

A.D. Hall

* As of this writing there is still no ‘smartest woman’, but there is an international diversity task force studying how to revise the IQ test by replacing multiple-choice questions with multiple-choice emoticons. Actual questions were determined to be unjust micro-aggressions that skew results and often leave subjects with PTSD.