How the first space tourists will make it back to Earth alive

When SpaceX launches Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his eight travelling companions for a trip around the Moon in 2023, the company will be undertaking an unprecedented step towards the future of civilian space flight. But with being the first to attempt this feat comes a number of technical and safety challenges that less ambitious expeditions, like Blue Origin's treks to the Karman Line, won't have to face. So, just how will SpaceX ensure that its first trip to the Moon doesn't turn into a real-life Gravity?

Between an absolute vacuum that will burst your lungs just before you freeze to death, lethal doses of cosmic radiation, microgravity-induced physiological changes and the psychological stress of being isolated in such an unforgiving environment, venturing beyond Earth's gravity is not an activity for the ill-prepared or faint of heart.

Since the space agency's inception, NASA has rarely run short of adventurous spirits willing to risk their lives in the name on exploration. What's more, those folks volunteering for service in space perform beyond the physical bounds of your average pudgy American. "NASA's philosophy is 'let's just take the healthiest people and that way we can spend the least amount of resources on keeping them healthy,'" Dr. Daniel Buckland, Assistant Professor in the Duke University Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, as well as Assistant Professor of Surgery in the Duke U. Division of Emergency Medicine, told Engadget. "[NASA] just basically treats them as high-performance athletes."

However, once regular folks (albeit obscenely rich ones) start hitching rides into space for fun, more common health and safety issues are sure to emerge. Space tourists will "probably be nominally healthy," Buckland figures. "They're healthy 50-, 60-year-olds, but they have different medical problems than your 40-year-old NASA astronauts who are at that high elite athlete level of health."

In fact, the problems they might encounter could already be familiar to us."The same kind of problems you would have if you had you or me go out and try to play football," Buckland continued. "Previously you had high-performance people doing it. Now you have everyday people doing it and that's more of an emergency medicine, acute care question."

Buckland expects many space tourists will end up bringing their maladies with them. "If you're diabetic, you have a new environment and so with [the] different foods and different amounts of exertion you're doing, you would have to pay more attention to your sugar level or glucose level than you would otherwise" he explained. "If you're already susceptible to having a diabetic illness, going on this trip would probably make it more likely that you're going to have an episode."

Buckland explains that, for sub-orbital trips like Blue Origin's proposed 90-minute flights, "you would need the kind of same thing you would need at an amusement park in terms of medical capability," however for SpaceX's longer BFR trip, one would expect medical care more closely resembling what one would find on a cruise ship.

Endeavour Orbits Earth Docked To International Space Station

"Right now the International Space Station probably has the medical capability of an ambulance," he said. "It's designed for people who are overridingly healthy and who are going to have an industrial kind of problems like broken bones, the stuff you would expect to happen in an industrial environment. The way it's designed right now is to maintain your health as long as possible the same as an ambulance until you get to a higher level of care."

Since the people onboard these tourist rockets won't necessarily be the highly-trained astronauts that have conventionally headed into space, emergency protocols, as well as the medical equipment itself, will have to adapt. As Buckland points out, the five most critical design factors in building medical devices for use in space is minimizing its mass, volume, power consumption, and material consumption. Simplifying these aspects, in turn, reduces the amount of training users have to endure to before they can properly use the device.

This change also means that there will be a significant influx of easy-to-use medical devices – such as the defibrillators you find at the mall -- on commercial space flights compared to government-run missions. On NASA flights for example, where the crew has been handpicked, access to those defibrillators will not be available because "the decision has been made that this is not worth having the capability to deal with that to keep that person alive." Buckland explains Government analysts "decided it's such low risk [that a perfectly healthy NASA astronaut would suffer a heart attack] that maintaining that capability isn't worth it. However, on a commercially funded mission, keeping everybody alive for the duration is of far greater concern than scientific discovery.

Radiation exposure is among the most prevalent dangers for space travelers and comes from two primary sources: High energy protons generated by solar flares, though those are rare, and galactic cosmic rays, which are emitted from "all the stars in the galaxy," Dr. Francis Cucinotta, a professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas Department of Health Physics and Diagnostic Sciences, told Engadget.

"These tourist missions, they're talking about no more than a week, so the cosmic ray risk is relatively small," he explained. Solar flares would still be an issue but are detectable so if one does occur prior to liftoff, the flight would simply be rescheduled. But cancer affects different people in different ways.

"There's a strong dependence on age," Cucinotta continued. "If you have people -- especially under age thirty – they would have a much higher risk than the Astronauts, who are usually in their forties and fifties. Females have a higher risk because of breast and ovarian cancers," and potentially lung cancer as well.

Luckily, modern radiation shielding is sufficient for the relatively local destinations that commercial operators like SpaceX and Blue Origin are suggesting. NASA has successfully ferried crews to the moon and back without drastically increasing their chances of developing cancer later in life. Crewmembers aboard the ISS, for example, expressly accept that their residency there could translate into a three percent greater chance of developing cancer. However, once we start venturing deeper into the solar system, we'll have to develop novel new means of protecting future spacefarers.

"It's a matter if they're going to pay for [necessary additional shielding] and put it on these vehicles," Cucinotta said. "And for the galactic rays, you can't shield at all as the energies are just too high." We'd need to wrap spaceships in meters-thick layers of shielding to counter the high energies of galactic rays, Cucinotta hypothesized. "Nobody can afford to launch that much mass into space for a volume of several people."

That radiation carries a secondary danger as well. A 2016 study published in Nature suggests that the RADs NASA astronauts absorbed while walking on the moon have negatively impacted their overall cardiovascular health compared to astronauts who didn't venture beyond Low Earth Orbit. In fact, the study found that moonwalkers suffered from cardiovascular disease at a rate of 4 to 5 times that of Earthbound astronauts. The issue isn't so much that researchers still aren't entirely certain how space radiation affects the human body as much as their uncertainty to the degree by which impacts our physiology.

"These are studies and experiments. [Commercial and government space agencies] really need to get to the knowledge," Cucinotta argued. "Is this really helping? If the increased cancer risk is twenty percent [as opposed to 3 percent aboard the ISS] I don't think they can take these long-term missions. You see the leaders of NASA saying, 'We'll just accept the risk.' But the thing is, nobody knows exactly what the risk is."

The stakes are even higher for commercial carriers, Cucinotta points out. Space tourism isn't going to be a thing for very long if the first couple of batches of amateur explorers come back to Earth with raging cases of fast-onset cancers. "Leukemia... has a very short latency," Cucinotta explained. "It can be like within one to a few years after you're exposed to radiation you can have leukemia and that would be like definitive that it was caused by the radiation."

However that only really applies to acute radiation poisoning. "Probably your 30-year risk of cancer is higher [after taking a tour around the Moon], but does that matter to a 60-year-old?" Buckland asked.

The search for alien life needs a new space telescope, astronomers say

 If NASA truly wants to get serious in the search for life off of Earth, scientists argue that the space agency should launch a new, large telescope into space — one capable of directly capturing the images of planets outside our Solar System. Such technology doesn’t fully exist at the moment. But astronomers say it’s our best bet to find another Earth, one that could host biological organisms.

This mission concept is the top recommendation in a new report compiled by members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The academy was tasked by Congress to come up with the best strategy for studying and exploring exoplanets, worlds that are located outside the Solar System. And after gathering input from experts in the field, the National Academies came up with seven recommendations, with the telescope at the top of the list.

It’s an aspirational request, given the harsh realities that NASA has faced while trying to build its next big space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST. It was originally envisioned to cost $1 billion, and to launch in 2007. This past June, NASA conceded that the entire project would run $9.66 billion, and the telescope wouldn’t launch until 2021 at the earliest. And the type of telescope that this report recommends would require new technologies that haven’t been tested out in space yet, which might make the vehicle even more complex and more expensive than JWST.

Scott Gaudi

However, when creating this report, the authors didn’t think about the potential financial restraints. “We were specifically not to consider costs or schedule or any of those sorts of things,” Scott Gaudi, an astronomy professor at Ohio State University who authored the report and is also working on mission concept for a space telescope called HabEx, tells The Verge. “This is simply a consensus on what the exoplanet community feels are the most important things that need to be done to answer the science goals we have.”

Those goals are relatively simple. The first agenda the report outlines is that we need to understand how planets form. When stars are born, they usually form surrounded by a swirling disc of gas and dust, and then individual planets coalesce within these discs. So how do these discs go from simple gas to full-fledged planets?

The second goal is the one that most everyone on Earth wants to find out, too: are there other Earth-like planets out there that could host life? And that’s why the new telescope could be so important. Taking direct images of planets could tell us a lot about what they look like and what’s in their atmospheres. The gas that surrounds a planet may hold important clues about what’s on the surface below. For instance, gases associated with life, like oxygen and methane, would be a big sign that biological organisms are present on a distant world. “We could get a census of the atmospheric composition of a large sample of Earth-like planets,” Laura Kreidberg, an exoplanet astronomer at Harvard University, tells The Verge.

These days, astronomers mostly find exoplanets through clever, yet indirect, methods. Perhaps the most common way to observe distant worlds is to watch as they pass in front of their parent stars — what’s known as a transit. These crossings slightly block light from the star, causing a small dip in brightness that can be measured from Earth. NASA’s TESS spacecraft, already in orbit around Earth, looks for planets this way, as will the future James Webb Space Telescope. Another method is to observe how a planet’s gravity affects its host star. Even though they’re small, planets can cause their stars to slightly wobble — a sign of their presence.

Directly imaging an exoplanet, however, is a monumental task, especially the ones the size of Earth. These planets are super close to their parent stars, and get drowned out by nearby starlight. For instance, a distant, potentially Earth-like planet is about 10 billion times fainter than the star it orbits around. So in order to image these planets directly, scientists will need to equip future space telescopes with special tools that block or decrease a star’s light.

Fortunately, astronomers have been working on just that. One concept is known as a coronagraph, an optical instrument that can be attached to telescopes to suppress the light from a star with mirrors, making it easier to see planets that are lurking nearby. Telescopes on Earth and in space have been outfitted with coronagraphs to help study the Sun, but such a high-contrast instrument to block out light from distant stars hasn’t been fully tested out in space yet. NASA currently plans to demonstrate this technology for the first time on one of its upcoming space telescopes, WFIRST — a move that the National Academies highly recommends.

But there’s another option besides a coronagraph. Astronomers have been eager to try out something known as a starshade. It’s a large flower-shaped structure that would fly out in front of telescope, blocking the light from a star by casting a shadow. “None of the starlight ends up in your telescope, but the light from the planet would enter into your telescope,” says Gaudi.

The problem, though, is that this technology is quite complicated. A starshade would have to fly around 100,000 kilometers away from a telescope in space — very precisely — to properly block the light from a distant star. And like the coronagraph, the starshade is not a fully mature technology yet. Additionally, many of the proposed telescopes that astronomers would like to build to directly image exoplanets would be huge and weighty. For instance, one concept under study at the moment, called LUVOIR, would have a mirror much bigger than that of JWST.

Any direct-imaging telescope projects are going to cost billions of dollars to launch, and that may be difficult for Congress to swallow, especially given the delays and cost overruns of JWST. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has already proposed canceling the WFIRST telescope, which would help test out the coronagraph technology, citing cost overruns on the project. But exoplanet astronomers say they are optimistic that a big project of this nature could happen some day. “I think it’s an ambitious but achievable goal, compared to what we’ve already done, such as landing the first man on the Moon,” says Kreidberg. “This is something that’s within our grasp.”

Gaudi also understands the challenges associated with getting something like this done. But the report was merely meant to reflect what the exoplanet community hopes to achieve. Soon scientists will come together to prioritize which kinds of missions NASA should fund, as part of a huge effort known as the decadal survey. That report will consider financial realities when recommending what missions to pursue.

But Gaudi hopes that lawmakers may be able to see the significance of an ambitious mission like this. “These missions are not out of the box in terms of our fiscal capabilities,” he says. “It’s just something we have to choose to do. We think the time is very ripe for going and doing this now and we could have the answer to this very profound question in the next generation.”

How France created the metric system

It is one of the most important developments in human history, affecting everything from engineering to international trade to political systems.

One of the last remaining ‘mètre étalons’, or standard metre bars, can be found below a ground-floor window on the Ministry of Justice in Paris

On the facade of the Ministry of Justice in Paris, just below a ground-floor window, is a marble shelf engraved with a horizontal line and the word ‘MÈTRE’. It is hardly noticeable in the grand Place Vendôme: in fact, out of all the tourists in the square, I was the only person to stop and consider it. But this shelf is one of the last remaining ‘mètre étalons’ (standard metre bars) that were placed all over the city more than 200 years ago in an attempt to introduce a new, universal system of measurement. And it is just one of many sites in Paris that point to the long and fascinating history of the metric system.

“Measurement is one of the most banal and ordinary things, but it’s actually the things we take for granted that are the most interesting and have such contentious histories,” said Dr Ken Alder, history professor at Northwestern University and author of The Measure of All Things, a book about the creation of the metre.

We don’t generally notice measurement because it’s pretty much the same everywhere we go. Today, the metric system, which was created in France, is the official system of measurement for every country in the world except three: the United States, Liberia and Myanmar, also known as Burma. And even then, the metric system is still used for purposes such as global trade. But imagine a world where every time you travelled you had to use different conversions for measurements, as we do for currency. This was the case before the French Revolution in the late 18th Century, where weights and measures varied not only from nation to nation, but also within nations. In France alone, it was estimated at that time that at least 250,000 different units of weights and measures were in use during the Ancien Régime.

The French Revolution changed all that. During the volatile years between 1789 and 1799, the revolutionaries sought not only to overturn politics by taking power away from the monarchy and the church, but also to fundamentally alter society by overthrowing old traditions and habits. To this end, they introduced, among other things, the Republican Calendar in 1793, which consisted of 10-hour days, with 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute. Aside from removing religious influence from the calendar, making it difficult for Catholics to keep track of Sundays and saints’ days, this fit with the new government’s aim of introducing decimalisation to France. But while decimal time did not stick, the new decimal system of measurement, which is the basis of the metre and the kilogram, remains with us today.

Prior to the French Revolution, at least 250,000 different units of measurement were used throughout France

 The task of coming up with a new system of measurement was given to the nation’s preeminent scientific thinkers of the Enlightenment. These scientists were keen to create a new, uniform set based on reason rather than local authorities and traditions. Therefore, it was determined that the metre was to be based purely on nature. It was to be one 10-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator.

The line of longitude running from the pole to the equator that would be used to determine the length of the new standard was the Paris meridian. This line bisects the centre of the Paris Observatory building in the 14th arrondissement, and is marked by a brass strip laid into the white marble floor of its high-ceilinged Meridian Room, or Cassini Room.

Although the Paris Observatory is not currently open to the public, you can trace the meridian line through the city by looking out for small bronze disks on the ground with the word ARAGO on them, installed by Dutch artist Jan Dibbets in 1994 as a memorial to the French astronomer François Arago. This is the line that two astronomers set out from Paris to measure in 1792. Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre travelled north to Dunkirk while Pierre Méchain travelled south to Barcelona.

Using the latest equipment and the mathematical process of triangulation to measure the meridian arc between these two sea-level locations, and then extrapolating the distance between the North Pole and the equator by extending the arc to an ellipse, the two astronomers aimed to meet back in Paris to come up with the new, universal standard of measurement within one year. It ended up taking seven.

The line of longitude used to determine the length of the metre runs through the centre of the Paris Observatory

 As Dr Alder details in his book, measuring this meridian arc during a time of great political and social upheaval proved to be an epic undertaking. The two astronomers were frequently met with suspicion and animosity; they fell in and out of favour with the state; and were even injured on the job, which involved climbing to high points such as the tops of churches.

The Pantheon, which was originally commissioned by Louis XV to be a church, became the central geodetic station in Paris from whose dome Delambre triangulated all the points around the city. Today, it serves as a mausoleum to heroes of the Republic, such as Voltaire, René Descartes and Victor Hugo. But during Delambre’s time, it served as another kind of mausoleum – a warehouse for all the old weights and measures that had been sent in by towns from all over France in anticipation of the new system.

But despite all the technical mastery and labour that had gone into defining the new measurement, nobody wanted to use it. People were reluctant to give up the old ways of measuring since these were inextricably bound with local rituals, customs and economies. For example, an ell, a measure of cloth, generally equalled the width of local looms, while arable land was often measured in days, referencing the amount of land that a peasant could work during this time.

Paris’ Pantheon once stored different weights and measures sent from all across France in anticipation of the new standardised system

The Paris authorities were so exasperated at the public’s refusal to give up their old measure that they even sent police inspectors to marketplaces to enforce the new system. Eventually, in 1812, Napoleon abandoned the metric system; although it was still taught in school, he largely let people use whichever measures they liked until it was reinstated in 1840. According to Dr Alder, “It took a span of roughly 100 years before almost all French people started using it.”

This was not just due to perseverance on the part of the state. France was quickly advancing into the industrial revolution; mapping required more accuracy for military purposes; and, in 1851, the first of the great World’s Fairs took place, where nations would showcase and compare industrial and scientific knowledge. Of course, it was tricky to do this unless you had clear, standard measures, such as the metre and the kilogram. For example, the Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, and at 324m, was at that time the world’s tallest man-made structure.

The metric system was necessary to compare industrial and scientific knowledge – such as the height of the Eiffel Tower – at the World’s Fairs

 All of this came together to produce one of the world’s oldest international institutions: The International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM). Located in the quiet Paris suburb of Sèvres, the BIPM is surrounded by landscaped gardens and a park. Its lack of ostentatiousness reminded me again of the mètre étalon in the Place Vendôme; it might be tucked away, but it is fundamental to the world we live in today.

Originally established to preserve international standards, the BIPM promotes the uniformity of seven international units of measurement: the metre, the kilogram, the second, the ampere, the kelvin, the mole and the candela. It is the home of the master platinum standard metre bar that was used to carefully calibrate copies, which were then sent out to various other national capitals. In the 1960s, the BIPM redefined the metre in terms of light, making it more precise than ever. And now, defined by universal laws of physics, it was finally a measure truly based on nature.

The International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) was established to promote the uniformity of international units of measurement

 

The building in Sèvres is also home to the original kilogram, which sits under three bell jars in an underground vault and can only be accessed using three different keys, held by three different individuals. The small, cylindrical weight cast in platinum-iridium alloy is also, like the metre, due to be redefined in terms of nature – specifically the quantum-mechanical quantity known as the Planck constant – by the BIPM this November.

“Establishing a new basis for a new definition of the kilogram is a very big technological challenge. [It] was described at one point as the second most difficult experiment in the whole world, the first being discovering the Higgs Boson,” said Dr Martin Milton, director of the BIPM, who showed me the lab where the research is being conducted.

As he explained the principle of the Kibble balance and the way in which a mass is weighed against the force of a coil in a magnetic field, I marvelled at the latest scientific engineering before me, the precision and personal effort of all the people who have been working on the kilogram project since it began in 2005 and are now very close to achieving their goal.

The BIPM houses the original standard metre and the original standard kilogram

 

As with the 18th-Century meridian project, defining measurement continues to be one of our most important and difficult challenges. As I walked further up the hill of the public park that surrounds the BIPM and looked out at the view of Paris, I thought about the structure of measurement underlying the whole city. The machinery used for construction; the trade and commerce happening in the city; the exact quantities of drugs, or radiation for cancer therapy, being delivered in the hospitals.

What started with the metre formed the basis of our modern economy and led to globalisation. It enabled high-precision engineering and continues to be essential for science and research, progressing our understanding of the universo.

Raza: The strange story of Franco's "lost" film

It was the big-screen validation of his rule he wanted – then he censored it and destroyed all copies of the first version, writes Thomas Graham.

Most dictatorships end in revolution, or don’t really end at all. Spain was a rare exception.

Francisco Franco died peacefully in 1975, almost four decades after his fascist forces triumphed in the Spanish Civil War. Franco believed he was handing power over to King Juan Carlos – but Juan Carlos was sensitive to the tide of history. As soon as his mentor died, he moved to install democracy. Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy was remarkably smooth. And that meant Spain never truly reckoned with its past.

Franco left his country with a lot of baggage – and a never-ending debate over what to do with it. There’s the Valley of the Fallen, the crass basilica built to honour the dead of the civil war, where Franco is currently buried – at least at the moment, as a royal decree has just been passed the Spanish parliament directing that his body be removed from the site. There are countless streets and squares named after fascists. There’s even a prominent foundation dedicated to celebrating Franco’s life and work. But one of the stranger relics Franco left behind is a film he scripted under a pseudonym in 1942, which can still be watched online in Spain.

Raza (Race) came with a far right pedigree. Not only was it scripted by Franco, but it was directed by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, cousin of Primo de Rivera – the founder of the Falange, the fascist party Franco would later lead.

 At first, the film seems a straightforward bit of propaganda. It follows the Churrucas, a military family from the countryside. In the first act, set in 1897, the patriarchal father dies heroically in the defence of Spain’s Cuban colony against the United States, leaving his wife to raise three sons and a daughter on her own. Decades later, one son seeks money and power in politics, while the other children pursue more traditional vocations, as soldier, priest and homemaker.

When the civil war arrives, the family is split. Pedro, the wayward son, sides with the Republican government. The others are firmly on the side of Franco. In the end, however, Pedro sees the error of his ways and recants, proving himself a true vessel of the Spanish Raza — just like the rest of the Churruca stock. Ultimately, the family is reunited by the heroism of the anointed son, José, who has risen to power as a military leader for the fascists.

Raza was directed by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, cousin of Primo de Rivera – founder of fascist party the Falange

 It’s an allegory depicting Spain as a family torn apart by war but eventually reunited through the acts of a chosen son. As a film, it’s hardly original. But as propaganda shaped by Franco himself, it contains accidental depths: it reflects his intent, and betrays his vanities.

Shaping an image

The Churruca family is a rather favourably revised version of Franco’s own – and the hero José Churruca is a fictional alter ego for Franco himself. Both families are Galician. Both have a history of naval service but José, like Franco, served in the army. Both José and Franco saw action in Morocco and have a Republican brother who is eventually redeemed. Both put off marriage until they had finished their military duties. In short, Raza presents a narrative in which Franco, thinly disguised as José Churruca, portrays himself as the Spanish national family’s divinely ordained son.

But Raza was more than just a vanity project: it was an early attempt to shape public memory through film.

Franco wrote Raza in 1940, just after the end of the civil war. By some estimates half a million people had been killed. Both sides had committed atrocities as they purged their enemies; after Cambodia, Spain has the second largest number of mass graves in the world. Although Franco railed against foreign influence in Spain, he had received vital assistance from Italian and German fascists. And, crucially, he had toppled a democratically elected government. In other words, the war was complex. Franco wanted to provide a simpler narrative to serve his purposes: Raza would be the official version of the war.

Franco is currently buried in The Valley of the Fallen, a crass basilica built to honour the dead of the civil war

 Raza recasts Spanish history along the lines of Franco’s nationalist vision: God, family and the Spanish race. The fascists were for these things; the republicans were against them. This meant the fascists were not fighting for political power, but for the salvation of Spain. Meanwhile the republicans are agents of chaos: filthy and snarling, quaffing communion wine and machine gunning priests. The divide isn’t subtle, but powerful images linger in the mind. In one sequence a group of priests are led to a beach, their footprints fading in the wet sand as they pray, blessing themselves, as well as the men about to murder them.

One trick the film uses to lend its version of events the weight of truth is blending fictional and documentary images. Take the film’s concluding sequence, in which the nationalists enjoy a victory march at the end of the civil war. Close-ups of José Churruca in the parade’s place of honour are cut with shots from Franco’s own victory parade in 1939. Then another sequence shows a montage of the climactic moments of the film – the heroic deaths of the men of the Churruca family, for example – mixed in with images of the actual civil war. These editing sleights of hand blur the boundaries between José and Franco’s stories.

Prince Juan Carlos of Spain – shown with Franco in 1975 – moved quickly to transition Spain from a dictatorship to democracy

In fact, Raza was the closest thing to an autobiography that Franco produced, and he kept a close eye on its production. While it was being shot, almost every day a driver would arrive with precise instructions as to how the sequences should be. The film was also backed generously by the state, with 1,650,000 pesetas – a fortune at the time. That was, in part, spent on dozens of sets and costumes, as well as hundreds of extras and almost 45,000 metres of film, only one in 15 of which were used. Orson Welles would have smiled at such excess.

Once the shooting was finished, Franco had a private viewing. Saénz de Heredia recalled: “We watched it together, Franco and I at the front, his wife and the others behind; out of the corner of my eye, under the light from the screen, I saw he was moved, and that his eyes were moist and attentive, which made me happy, because it meant it had gone well. And once it finished he told me exactly that: very good, Saénz de Heredia — you have done it.”

Desamparats Bayona, 88, holds a portrait of her father, Vicente Bayona, one of the many executed who were buried in Franco-era mass graves

Yet Franco’s satisfaction was short-lived. He had started rewriting history to suit his needs — and, in time, his needs changed. By the end of the decade the fascists had lost World War Two, and Franco’s version of the civil war had to be rewritten to legitimise his power. So in 1950 Franco censored his own film and destroyed every old copy he could find. The title became Espíritu de una Raza (‘Spirit of a Race’). All fascist salutes were cut out. The enemy went from being republicans, masons, bourgeoisie and politicians to simply communists. And the jabs at the US were removed — they were soon to become Spain’s allies. Now, Raza was compatible with the new political contours of the Cold War.
It was a fittingly Orwellian twist. Franco’s myth building, of which Raza was just a part, smudged the historical record. Even now, more than 40 years after his death, there is no consensus on what the civil war and his dictatorship mean. The few polls carried out reveal a lingering ambivalence. One from 2008 showed a majority believed that Francoism had “both good sides and bad sides”. The same poll showed the public opposed to prosecution of former Franco officials, and lukewarm about a truth commission to assign responsibility for the civil war. Only a tiny minority now believe the Raza version of history, but it may have sowed just enough doubt and confusion to protect its architect’s legacy.

Ancient Megadrought Causes Present-Day Drama

A funerary monument from Egypt's First Intermediate Period, ca. 2050 B.C. Some researchers believe a megadrought that occurred 4,200 years ago caused the Old Kingdom to collapse, ushering in the First Intermediate Period. 

About 4,200 years ago, a catastrophic worldwide drought caused the collapse of societies all over the globe. That’s an archaeological theory linked with the newest division of geological time, dubbed the Meghalayan Age.

But in a new article in Science, Guy Middleton, a senior researcher at the Czech Institute of Egyptology at Charles University, throws cold water on the concept. According to Middleton, the new age isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Here’s what you need to know.

What’s the Meghalayan Age? 

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s no surprise: The age was only recently defined. The youngest, newest unit of the geologic time scale, it was adopted earlier this year by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), a subcommittee of the International Union of Geographic Sciences that focuses on defining the geologic time scale. With the decision, the ICS split the current geological epoch that began about 11,650 years ago—the Holocene— into three parts. The Meghalayan Age is the newest sliver of that time scale, running from 4,200 years ago until the present day.

The geologic time scale is reflected in in layers of rock, or geologic strata. After years of debate, geologists adopted the Meghalayan Age based on evidence of a climatic event occurring 4,200 years ago. The best evidence of the event—a sudden, global megadrought, (a drought that lasts two decades or longer)—can be found in chemical signatures in a stalagmite in a cave in the Indian state of Meghalaya; hence the name.

How did the megadrought affect humans?

The drought significantly impacted civilizations all over the world, says archaeologist Harvey Weiss, a professor of Near Eastern Civilizations in Yale University’s anthropology department and an author of the 2012 ICS paper that initially proposed the establishment of the Meghalayan Age. “The megadrought had profound societal effects,” says Weiss. Cities and towns were abandoned, and people transitioned from urban to rural societies.

Some of the civilizations Weiss says were severely impacted by the megadrought include Egypt’s Old Kingdom and the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, which both collapsed, as well as the Indus Valley of modern-day Pakistan and India, where large cities like Mohenjo Daro and Harappa were abandoned around this time.

Video: Scientists Declare A New 'Meghalayan Age,' And We’re Living In It Right Now (GeoBeats)

                                 

Did it really have that big of an effect?

Middleton doesn’t think so. In his reading of the archaeological evidence, societal collapses happened at different times, rendering the argument that a single, global climate event precipitated them moot. “I don’t think you have a real regional picture," he says.

In Egypt, the “collapse” of the Old Kingdom was really a slow fragmenting of centralized power, Middleton writes in his Science article. In the Indus Valley, he claims, the society did move away from urban centers, but only over a long period of time.

“The idea that the collapse of a society can be put down to one simple reason ignores people’s agency,” he says. Middleton doesn’t even like the term. “’Collapse’ is a bit of a weasel term,” he explains. “Things aren’t usually as simple as climate change equals collapse.” More often, Middleton says, societies would have reorganized.

Middleton also casts doubt on the dates relied on by the working group, noting that societies like the Akkadian Empire, whose capital has never been located, cannot be precisely dated, and therefore may have occurred during the drought itself.

What do the researchers agree on?

The only point of agreement between Weiss and Middleton seems to be the resilience that causes humans to regroup—whether they do so in response to a societal collapse or not. For Weiss, societal collapses were accompanied by a scramble away from drought and toward self-reinvention. And what Middleton sees as societal reorganizations, not collapses, were driven by human resilience, not “ancient apocalypse.”

Both men insist that their views are widely accepted. “The editors at the journal Science, strangely enough, think this is ‘scientific controversy,’” says Weiss.

“From where I sit,” says Middleton, “my views are not really controversial at all.”