It’s my favorite thing about diving, my deepest joy. In an instant I’m adrift, enclosed in the purest version of my life, the one that includes only movement and science. But diving is dangerous in the Antarctic, so to stay focused I mark my depth as I drift down, ten, twenty, thirty, forty feet through the narrow cylindrical shaft we’ve melted through the ice into the world below. I ignore the butterflies of claustrophobic panic that flutter in my chest, and measure my breathing.
In.
Out.
In.
Until finally I drop out of the ice and into the water. Into comfort.
~an excerpt from Sleep of Reason

THE REAL SCIENCE:
Bivouacked in the middle of the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf—a five-hour flight from the nearest Antarctic station—nothing comes easy. The science itself was a hassle: To study the history of the floating shelf, [geologist James Smith of the British Antarctic Survey] needed seafloor sediment, which was locked under a half mile of ice.

To get to it, Smith and his colleagues had to melt 20 tons of snow to create 20,000 liters of hot water, which they then pumped through a pipe lowered down a borehole. It took them 20 hours to melt through the ice inch by inch, finally piercing through the shelf.

Later that night in his tent, Smith watched the footage … [which revealed] something the geologists hadn’t been after at all. In fact, it was something highly improbable: life.

https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-discover-strange-creatures-under-a-half-mile-of-ice/

“I’ve been thinking about following the food source to see if we find our species in other places.”

“Where are you thinking?”

“I want to look deep.”
~An excerpt from Sleep of Reason

In 2013, scientists were stunned to find microbes thriving deep inside volcanic rocks beneath the seafloor off the Pacific Northwest, buried under more than 870 feet of sediment. The rocks were on the flank of the volcanic rift where they were born, and they were still young and hot enough to drive intense chemical reactions with the seawater, from which the microbes derived their energy.
 
Now, however, another team of researchers have discovered living cells inside exceedingly old, cold oceanic crust in the middle of the South Pacific. It isn’t yet clear how these new microbes are managing to survive—and yet, there seem to more than a million times more of them, for the same volume of rock, than in the younger crust.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/life-found-thriving-in-one-of-the-least-likely-spots-on-earth

I watch for an age, until the activity around the rig changes and I realize the drilling has begun. The tone of the machine changes slightly, but it’s still a sterile mechanical sound. The drill bit is now nearly 30,000 feet below the surface and sound waves won’t travel this far, but it seems odd, almost antiseptic, that we can’t hear or feel the rock being slowly torn apart. 
~an excerpt from Sleep of Reason

THE REAL SCIENCE:
Drill beneath the sediment on the sea floor and you hit the oceanic crust. One advantage of drilling into oceanic crust is it's approximately 7 kilometers thick, while on land it is many times thicker, explained Koppers. That allows scientists to sample closer to the Earth's mantle.

"You're learning about how the world works at a planetary scale," he added. "There's a fundamental question about the origin of life on Earth, and then (by) extension, to any other planet."

www.cnn.com/2020/02/04/world/modern-explorers-ocean-drilling-iodp/index.html

The image of our consortium, its structures and shapes, the image I’m used to staring at, is now orders of magnitude larger. Like suddenly being nose-to-nose with the TV while watching your favorite program.

My mind makes the necessary shift to appreciate the import of what I’m seeing. Our tiny sickle-shaped archaea, seemingly one of the smallest forms of life, is suddenly big enough to house a smaller species. One so small, it surprises even me.
~an excerpt from Sleep of Reason

THE REAL SCIENCE:
Human eyes may be remarkable tools to view the universe, but they also restrict our perception of reality to a limited, macroscopic slice.

Fortunately, microscopes grant us access to a fantastic, beautiful, and sometimes shocking universe that hides beyond the limits of vision.

https://www.businessinsider.com/best-microscope-pictures-nikon-small-world-photography-contest-2019-10

"You are not understanding our nature."

The voice is gentle. I feel an immediate twinge of guilt, a desire to reconcile. Maybe I’m jumping at shadows. Maybe it’s telling the truth.

But maybe not. I’m dealing with a symbiote unlike any in the biological world: One with the power to persuade. To communicate with its host, make rational arguments, physically share emotions and feelings. Even now, I want to believe it’s sincere. But is that because I’m actually convinced, or because it’s so good at persuasion? Even the sensual warmth I’ve been feeling could be just another manipulation, a covert hijacking of my neurotransmitters.

I shouldn’t trust it, I think coldly, pushing away from my desk.

Anything that can talk to you can also lie to you.
~ an excerpt from Sleep of Reason

THE REAL SCIENCE:
The presence of parasites in such deep parts of pre-history, shaping the animal genome at its most basic level, is why Del Giudice feels they could be forgotten drivers of early, fundamental evolution.

“Many aspects of neurobiology are destined to remain mysterious or poorly understood until parasites—the brain’s invisible designers—are finally included in the picture,” he writes.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a28941527/brain-parasites/

At every turn, we tend to make assumptions against the possibility of life.
 
We’ve said life can’t survive boiling, clearly false. We’ve said life needs sunlight to make food, obviously wrong. We’ve believed life can’t survive freezing, then met species of Arctic flies whose larvae can survive their bodies hitting -76°F. We’ve said life needs to be part of a food chain; enter Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator which lives 2 miles deep in a South African gold mine, fixing nitrogen, eating sulfate, in utter isolation.
~An excerpt from Sleep of Reason

THE REAL SCIENCE:
Sherwood Lollar is excited not only because of the peculiar the mine’s rock-eating life seems, but also because of the growing realization that strange forms of life might not be so peculiar after all. Scientists are starting to find similar microbes in other deep spots, including boreholes, volcanic vents on the bottom of the ocean and buried sediments far beneath the seafloor.
 
“The deep microbial realm reveals a biosphere that’s more extensive, resilient, varied and strange than we had realized,” said Robert Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, and co-founder of Deep Carbon Observatory, a global project to study the deep biosphere.

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/strange-life-forms-found-deep-mine-point-vast-underground-galapagos-ncna1050906

Considering we can’t even see what’s daily under our noses and above our heads, it’s no wonder we have such a hard time seeing things that are less obvious—things like the being that is, at this very moment, 12,600 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean consuming the wreck of the Titanic.
 
Interestingly, the being is not a singular species. It’s a consortium of microbes—20 different species of bacteria, two species of fungus, and at least one species of archaea— working together in concert to carry out an endeavor that would be impossible for any one of them alone. They’ve come together, each with their own part to play, to harvest the iron out of the ship, 12,600 feet under the sea.
~An excerpt from Sleep of Reason

THE REAL SCIENCE:
The RMS Titanic was visited by divers for the first time in 14 years, and the ship that was once a picture of luxury was found in the process of being swallowed up by the ocean floor and ravaged by metal-eating bacteria.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/22/world/titanic-shipwreck-footage-decomposition-trnd/index.html

“I admit it’s a stretch. But you’ve just proved I might be on to something. We have a creature that doesn’t have a large enough methane source to be as big as it is. Maybe we’re not looking deep enough.”
~An excerpt from Sleep of Reason



THE REAL SCIENCE:
As well as helping to explain the origins of methane deep beneath Earth's surface, the study could also shed light on the presence of methane on other bodies in the solar system. For example, methane is known to exist on Mars and Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus.

https://www.newsweek.com/massive-pool-methane-hidden-deep-beneath-earths-surface-discovered-scientists-1455408

What do we know for sure, and what don’t we? If memory makes us who we are, and we don’t hold our memories—what does that make us?
~An excerpt from Sleep of Reason

THE REAL SCIENCE:
Have you wondered why you remember some things and forget others? Whether you are the sum of the memories you have created? Whether our collective memory as a society defines our humanity?

Scientists have just discovered that a protein in your brain behaves like a virus--infecting your cells with memories.

https://www.salon.com/2019/08/12/a-protein-in-your-brain-behaves-like-a-virus-infecting-your-cells-with-memories_partner/

At the time, all living things were divided into only two categories called domains. Everything was either a Eukaryote (a plant, animal, fungus, slime mold, or single celled protocist) or a Prokaryote (a bacteria). And this little microbe was neither. They had to create a third domain called Archaea, which has filled over the last 40 years with fascinating creatures like Strain 121 which uses iron instead of oxygen to help render its food into energy. Technically, it reduces ferric iron to ferrous iron, and its waste product is the mineral magnetite. So, I ask you, if there’s an organism on this earth that breathes iron and shits magnets, what else is possible? 
~an excerpt from Sleep of Reason

THE REAL SCIENCE:
They live thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface. They eat hydrogen and exhale methane. And they may shape our world more profoundly than we can imagine.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/10/meet-endoterrestrials/571939/

THE SLEEP OF REASON grapples with the question of how people can be so awful to each other, openly wondering if there are things we don’t understand about ourselves that explain man’s inhumanity to man. Our country is now mired in questions: How do parents live in a world where our children are murdered inside their schools? How do we rationalize the 307 mass shootings that occurred in the first 311 days of 2018? How do we reconcile the fact that women still make less than men, that our president can say he “grabs women by the p****” and still get elected, that when Alyssa Milano on a whim tweets "If you've been sexually harassed or assaulted write 'me too' as a reply to this tweet," she wakes in the morning to find 30,000 responses? With the #metoo movement, and the #neveragain crusade, more and more people are asking—Is there such a thing as evil, or are we broken biology? And if we are broken, how do we fix us? In this way THE SLEEP OF REASON couldn’t be more timely. We live in a world that bears more than passing resemblance to the pre-apocalyptic world LeeCee sees approaching; we would do well to consider why.

Thomas Gold’s most recent crazy theory, that life did not begin on the surface of our planet or use sunlight as its energy source, has also been either ignored or flatly rejected for 30 years. I believe he is once again correct. I believe that life began through chemosynthesis, that it began deep underground, and that it’s still there chugging away. If Gold is correct, life in this “deep hot biosphere” as he named it, likely exceeds in mass and volume all life on the surface. In simpler words, there are more of them than there are of us.
~An excerpt from Sleep of Reason

THE REAL SCIENCE:
In a surprise to scientists, cyanobacteria have been found thriving nearly 2,000 feet below the strange landscape, where sunlight, water, and nutrients are scarce. Researchers previously thought these microbes could survive only while basking in the sun's rays, although they are otherwise a versatile bunch; researchers have found them alive nearly everywhere on Earth.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/10/news-cyanobacteria-photosynthesis-mars-extraterrestrial-life/

I sit staring, my heart skipping. If I was looking for something hidden in plain sight, I’ve found it. And as tiny as it is, it could be hidden just about anywhere in the human body—finding it hasn’t really give me an answer as much as it’s given me different questions.
~An excerpt from Sleep of Reason

THE REAL SCIENCE:
New Physical Gut-Brain Connection found: A new study reveals the gut has a much more direct connection to the brain through a neural circuit that allows it to transmit signals in mere seconds. The findings could lead to new treatments for obesity, eating disorders, and even depression and autism—all of which have been linked to a malfunctioning gut.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/your-gut-directly-connected-your-brain-newly-discovered-neuron-circuit

It’s in our brain.
 
Hiding in plain view like our tiny mitochondrial guests.  Doing work we don’t fully understand, but perhaps cannot live without. I know you are wondering how it’s possible to have missed something so huge. But, really, it’s no great shock that it hasn’t been found until now as the human brain is one of the last and most dense mysteries of humankind.
~An excerpt from Sleep of Reason

THE REAL SCIENCE:
Newly Discovered Kind of Brain Cell: Scientists have learned that the newly discovered rosehip neurons in the human brain don’t closely match any previously identified cell in the mouse, suggesting they have no analog in the rodent often used as a model for humans. The discovery also raises the question of whether these neurons are key to certain brain functions that separate us from mice.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/mysterious-new-brain-cell-found-people

Thomas Jefferson helped invent modern agricultural science. Lincoln invented and patented a navigation device. Theodore Roosevelt is the father of the modern conservation movement. John F Kennedy helped us land a man on the moon. Long before Obama held SXSL, a party for inventors on the White House Lawn, Yankee Ingenuity made the impossible, possible.

But with the 2016 election, our country has taken a strong right turn. We elected a man who suggested the “concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” With that as our beginning, we have pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, begun drilling in the Arctic, disbanded the EPA Air Pollution review panel, repealed rules about methane releases, and ended NASAs Climate Monitoring Program--the list goes on and on and on.

And yet, the most recent scientific study says between 2006 and 2015, the earth has *already* warmed 0.87℃, and that we are already seeing the effects. From the people in Kiribati who are losing their islands to the rising seas, to the new kind of faster-moving, increasingly aggressive California wildfires, to the devastation of the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Michael, we are already in the middle of the apocalypse we are creating for ourselves. And even if we create the change we need tomorrow, the effects we are now seeing will persist for centuries, potentially even millennia. 

In this way, SLEEP OF REASON is a call to arms. In a reader-friendly way, it shows that the changes we carelessly wreak upon the Earth can come back to bite us in ways we don’t even begin to comprehend.