Have you ever watched one of those UFO shows on TV, the ones supposedly giving historical reports? Well, I did while I was on the treadmill today. Those reports make nice stories, but I am unconvinced, especially when the UFOs reveal themselves with lights on their underside. I’m guessing that since UFOs don’t appear to land after flying over Phoenix, for example, then there’s no reason for lights other than taunting: “Hey, we’re up here; you don’t know who or what we are; and there isn’t anything you can do about us.” Come on! Lights on the spacecraft? We didn’t even have such bright lights on the Space Shuttle or any of the capsules we’ve sent into space and back.
 
But it makes an interesting story. Surely, we have enough mysteries to solve, what with Big Foot running around appearing only as a blurry object partially off camera on videos taken at twilight. Hey, how many pixels did that camera have? I think I’ve captured a baseball coming off the bat of hitters more clearly with my cell phone than Big Foot hunters capture with theirs a lumbering hairy giant. And then there’s always the ancient monument. How did those Egyptians get those pyramids to square with an error of only an inch or so long before Euclid gave us geometry? And we’re still looking for the Grail, even if Dan Brown fans say it’s not a cup, but rather a bloodline. Yes, we are steeped in mysteries, all giving us a hint at solution, but no hint as brilliant as lights hovering in the night sky above Phoenix.
 
And that makes me wonder why, when the SARS Covid-19 virus came out of Wuhan, China, so many want to make its origin a mystery, why so many want to pursue conspiracy theories. Is it because they weren’t there to see a virus naturally mutate? Were government biologists involved? Did aliens drop the virus from their well-lighted ships?
 
Is it natural for people to seek the unnatural for explanations? To seek the exotic?
 
Nanometer-size viruses don’t take selfies and don’t make films of their transitions from animal to human infectious agents. They just change as opportunity affords, and their change is as good an argument for the effects of favorable (for the organism itself) mutations as any. This pandemic isn’t the first, and it won’t be the last. Each will occur unexpectedly like hovering lights over Phoenix, but unlike those lights that have never made an irrefutably documented human contact, each will, instead, invade as some agent alien to the human body.
 
Two kinds of humans seem to push conspiracies with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic, those who have a political agenda and those who refuse to accept evolutionary changes as natural processes. In the course of human events, there’s nothing new in this. Some people want to scapegoat; others want to deny certain realities because accepting a current reality can be difficult in the context of preconceived notions and expectations.
 
Fortunately, you don’t fall into either category. Right?  

Much of history is approximately dated; the farther back in time one goes, the less certain the date. When there are no written records, we have information through proxies like archaeological studies or radiocarbon, potassium-argon, or uranium-lead dating, these last being methods that scientists constantly refine. Those who do the refining are at it again, recalibrating the radiocarbon dates for some Mediterranean events like the eruption of Santorini.* Ah! Santorini. White buildings with blue roofs perched on the cliffs of a caldera immersed in beautiful blue water. Vacation destination. Does it matter when that setting took shape in a massive eruption? Sitting at a seaside café or by the pool of your hotel, do you have any feeling for those who tended sheep on the sides of the volcano or on the nearby islands? Any feeling for the people called the Minoans?
 
You might consider the accuracy of your own age-dating: It’s down to the minute for most of us who were born in hospitals. I know, for example, that I’m three hours older than one of my cousins. If I wanted to do the research, I could probably pin that difference down to minutes. That difference in time is an insignificant fact that is at best interesting to my cousin and me and maybe to some relatives. But what about that eruption of Santorini? One would be hard pressed to proclaim the event “insignificant.” When Thera erupted, it appears to have literally wiped out a vibrant civilization and set the stage for the rise of the ancient Greeks who gave us geometry, philosophy, and the rudiments of science.
 
Does it matter that the volcano might have erupted in the 16th rather than in the 17th century BC? Possibly. Remember that after that eruption pre-Greek culture arose. Who exactly had the most influence on ancient Greece? Was it the Minoans? The Mycenaeans? Who cares?
 
So, imagine now that you are an archaeologist or a radiocarbon scientist living 3,000 years from now trying to figure out when a pandemic affected the path of human civilization. Does it matter if it occurred in 2019, 2020, or even 2050? How refined do you want your age-dating? Of course, just as the powerful, civilization-destroying eruption of Thera was a significant event for those of the time, the pandemic of 2020 is a potentially significant civilization-altering event of this time. But the farther in time we are from this or any other event, the less we personally concern ourselves with the timing of its exact happening. How related do you feel to the people of 3,500 years ago? Not, obviously, as much as you feel related to your contemporaries.
 
Yet, that event shaped in many ways who and your contemporaries are. The rise of the ancient Greeks changed how people saw the world, and their culture has influenced even the peoples of the Far East as globalization proliferated through tentacles of trade and conquest around the world. And this pandemic event, not so localized as the eruption of Thera, is bound to have a lasting influence.
 
We could argue that in every age, we can see the rudiments of the future. Having the perspective of written history and archaeological discovery aided by radiocarbon dating, we are probably more aware of changes that big events engender than the peoples of ancient cultures could foresee. Note the numbers of TV commentators and newspaper editorialists in the midst of the SARS Covid-19 pandemic predicting the changes to come. They don’t really know the details because no one can precisely say how events will unfold beyond the obvious changes most can perceive. Cataclysms have come and gone and will continue to come and go, and their effects have dendritic patterns. Some branches of change will be temporary setbacks to the march of local civilization; others will be growths of new trends.
 
From the perspective of today’s global view of things, that eruption of Thera was rather local, though as we know, large eruptions can alter the amount of incoming sunlight and, as a consequence, lower worldwide temperatures. We saw that recently when Pinatubo erupted. No doubt some far distant groups were affected 3,500 years ago without knowing what caused their change in weather. Those who lived throughout the Northern Hemisphere millennia ago couldn’t see the spread of volcanic ejecta through the stratosphere, ringing Earth with dust and sulfur dioxide. You, by comparison, are well aware of the nature of the current world-altering event; you have watched the virus spread. And for you dating this event is not an approximation, not a range of years spanning half to whole century, not something that you note as “c. 2020” or “cir. 2020.” You mark it as January, February, March, or some other month in 2020 when you feel its direct effect.
 
For you, regardless of your acceptance of “circa” for events long past, there’s nothing approximate about the events of the present.  
*https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200319141036.htm  Accessed April 1, 2020.