Post Category → science and technology

ET Probably Isn’t Coming

In an excerpt from a book of essays by scientists discussing the search for extraterrestrial life, an astrobiologist wonders why aliens would even bother with Earth.

To make the point, he runs through a list of common sci-fi alien invasion movie plots. Like when the monsters come to Earth looking for slaves. Or lunch.

Alien races enslaving each other is a common trope of many science fiction universes. While enslavement of defeated enemies or other vulnerable populations has regrettably been a common feature of our history on Earth, it’s hard to see why a species with the capability of voyaging between the stars, and therefore having already demonstrated the mastery of a highly advanced level of machinery and of marshaling energy resources, would have any need for slaves. Constructing robots, or other forms of automation or mechanization, would be a far more effective solution for labor — people are feeble in comparison, harder to fix, and need to be fed.

Maybe they will arrive looking to steal the Earth’s water or other raw materials.

The problem with this supposition is that there are loads of far better sources of water in space… you’d have access to a far greater amount of water in the icy moons and cometary halo of the outer solar system. You’d also find it much more practical to operate in deep space, rather than trying to suck up the oceans against the gravitational pull of the planet Earth. And as with the water, it’s hard to see why aliens would bother extracting material against the gravity of the Earth when the asteroids are composed of the same basic rocky stuff.

Of course the process of just getting here in the first place is a major physics problem. Instead of sending bulky, fragile life forms, our first extraterrestrial visitors would more likely be “sentient robots as emissaries”.

Although alien invasion films like “Independence Day” often do huge box office,1 thought exercises like this that address the science (and pseudo-science) behind them are actually more fun. I even enjoy it when people like Neil deGrasse Tyson take a science poop all over big sci-fi movies.

But then, I’m strange. Possibly alien?

What To Do When ET’s Phone Call Arrives

While life continues chaotically forward (sorta) here on Earth, there are still people looking upward and outward for signs of life, intelligent or otherwise. They’re also trying to figure out what we will do when, and they do believe it’s when, not if, a message arrives.

Within the International Academy of Astronautics, a group has drawn up the “SETI2 post-detection protocol”, a set of guidelines of how scientists should address the issue.

Including, how to tell the rest of us.

My SI

It’s that part that worries them most since any message received is likely not going to come from a spaceship we can see hanging over New York City. Or say something particularly intelligible.

“In this day and age of social media, it’s almost impossible to keep anything under wraps for more than a few hours,” said Davies. “[The veracity of a signal] will take a long time to check, I don’t think you’re ever going to have an absolutely clear cut signal, but instead something that’s just on the edge of detectability. It will be a long drawn out process, and possibly take decades to resolve.”

But even if SETI scientists keep mum on the discovery until it has been verified–whether this process takes a few months or a few years–there’s no guarantee about how people will react to the news. As pointed out in a report from a NASA workshop in 1993, “reactions to a detection can range from indifference…through millennial enthusiasm or catastrophist anxiety, to full scale paranoia…a few reactions would probably be irrationally extreme or even violent.”

I would bet on that “irrationally extreme” reaction from far too many people, especially those currently running the show who wallow in rumor, paranoia, and conspiracy theories.

Anyway, I find this aspect of scientific preparation very interesting, even though I only know enough about the science to understand that direct, meaningful contact with another species is extremely unlikely at this point.

It’s not that I believe we’re alone in the universe. Only that the universe is a really, really, REALLY big place and all of us are subject to the laws of physics.

The Theory of Science

Most of the essay 5 scientific myths you probably believe about the universe is stuff only a science geek could love. However, item number five is a wonderfully concise explanation of the scientific term “theory” that anyone can understand.

The Big Bang: just a theory. Gravity: only a theory. Even the entire field of putting these ideas together is called theoretical physics. It’s not like these are facts, truths or even laws. They’re only theories.

But that completely misses the point of what a scientific theory is. Facts are the most basic elements of science. You make an observation and that’s a fact. You make a measurement and that’s a fact. A single experimental data point is a fact, and so we collect as many of them as we can, and devise setups to collect even more. When you notice that things are correlated, that relationships between various measureables/observables obey a particular form or equation, that’s a law. It’s only when you can put together an overarching framework that not only explains the facts and encompasses the laws, but also makes new predictions about things you can go out and observe that you’ve got a scientific theory. If you then go out, validate and verify your theories and push them to the absolute limits, that you’ve got a theory as good as the Big Bang or General Relativity.

In other words, science requires a very high threshold of evidence before a hypothesis rises to the level of a commonly accepted theory. Even then, it’s still not the final answer.

And it’s true: even a theory as robust and accepted as these examples will never be the final answer. There’s always more to learn, more boundaries to cross and more questions to uncover and probe. But the best accepted theories of the day are as close to the truth as science can ever get, even as we always strive to get closer. Better to understand reality, with all the nuance involved with it, as best as we actually can, than to persist in a comforting myth.

Now maybe your uncle who says “theories” the earth is 6000 years old are just as valid as that of the Big Bang can better understand the use of the word theory.

Or maybe not.

The Rising Tide

Politicians in the US have set up the topic of global climate change as a “fair and balanced” debate between two well-supported sides, with a willing assist from news media that love a good fight.

It’s nothing of the sort. You can quibble with the details but there’s just too much credible research piled up leading to the conclusion that the waste products of modern human society are changing the world’s atmosphere, and not for the better.

Rather than jumping into the findings from the 90 something percent of scientists who understand this issue, the writer of a long, and very scary, story in New Yorker Magazine starts with the very personal story from an area of the country that will be heavily impacted by the rising tide: Miami-Dade County, Florida. For them, flooding from rising seas is a matter of when, not if.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sea levels could rise by more than three feet by the end of this century. The United States Army Corps of Engineers projects that they could rise by as much as five feet; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts up to six and a half feet. According to Wanless [Hal Wanless, the chairman of the University of Miami’s geological-sciences department], all these projections are probably low. In his office, Wanless keeps a jar of meltwater he collected from the Greenland ice sheet. He likes to point out that there is plenty more where that came from.

“Many geologists, we’re looking at the possibility of a ten-to-thirty-foot range by the end of the century,” he told me.

In the Miami area “the average elevation is just six feet above sea level”. There are other cities along the American coasts in similar circumstances, not to mention a large part of the rest of the earth.

Many of the world’s largest cities sit along a coast, and all of them are, to one degree or another, threatened by rising seas. Entire countries are endangered–the Maldives, for instance, and the Marshall Islands. Globally, it’s estimated that a hundred million people live within three feet of mean high tide and another hundred million or so live within six feet of it. Hundreds of millions more live in areas likely to be affected by increasingly destructive storm surges.

Unfortunately, too many people in South Florida, and I suspect elsewhere, are counting on the rapid development of new technologies to protect coastal areas, or even reverse the impact of climate change.

“I think people are underestimating the incredible innovative imagination in the world of adaptive design,” Harvey Ruvin, the Clerk of the Courts of Miami-Dade County and the chairman of the county’s Sea Level Rise Task Force, said when I went to visit him in his office.

I’m not sure faith in an “incredible innovative imagination in the world of adaptive design” is going to be enough. Imagination will probably not spare the people of Miami and elsewhere from our incredibly short-sighted “leaders” who are more interested in the next election or next quarter’s profits.

Anyway, there is much more to this very complex issue, more than can be addressed even in a long article. But this one is a good overview and well worth your time. Maybe even send it to one of those politicians who still believe there are two sides to this issue.

The Case Against STEM

Listen to an education reformer for more than five minutes and you’re likely to hear about STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math. Students, we are told, must study more of these topics, otherwise they will be unable to compete in the world and our economy is doomed. Or something like that.

However, a columnist for the Washington Post says that our obsession with STEM education is not only based on a “fundamental misreading of the facts”, it “puts America on a dangerously narrow path for the future”.

Innovation is not simply a technical matter but rather one of understanding how people and societies work, what they need and want. America will not dominate the 21st century by making cheaper computer chips but instead by constantly reimagining how computers and other new technologies interact with human beings.

The current overemphasis on STEM is largely related to standardized tests, the core of most ed reform efforts. US students generally score behind many other countries on one particular international testing program, “trailing nations such as the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia and Estonia”. STEM advocates declare that our students must be immersed in math and science in order to return the country to the top of the world heap, where we belong.

Except that the US has never been at the top of that particular world heap.

In truth, though, the United States has never done well on international tests, and they are not good predictors of our national success. Since 1964, when the first such exam was administered to 13-year-olds in 12 countries, America has lagged behind its peers, rarely rising above the middle of the pack and doing particularly poorly in science and math. And yet over these past five decades, that same laggard country has dominated the world of science, technology, research and innovation.

Then there’s the matter that even the companies and organizations considered most innovative want their employees to come with “skills far beyond the offerings of a narrow STEM curriculum”.

Finally, the writer makes the case that a broad-based, liberal education – one that includes science and math in balance – would be better for both students and the country.

This doesn’t in any way detract from the need for training in technology, but it does suggest that as we work with computers, the most valuable skills will be the ones that are uniquely human, that computers cannot quite figure out – yet. And for those jobs, and that life, you could not do better than to follow your passion, engage with a breadth of material in both science and the humanities, and perhaps above all, study the human condition.