Science Ain't So Bad » SO Alone In The Universe.

EXTRATERRESTRIAL CONTACT: PUT A SOCK IN IT

MISTER Science Ain't So Bad — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:32:26 +0000

Shh!

SEARCH FOR INTELLIGENCE: An Agreement

THEM

Hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. Hundreds of billions of galaxies. Lots of stars and lots of planets.

Lots .

How many restless alien souls are looking this way, wondering what’s over here?

Meanwhile, we’re looking for planets; we’re listening to signals; and we’re trying to figure out how to tell if a planet has life on it from a long, long distance away.

If we keep at it long enough, won’t we come up with something?

IMAGINE

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad knows it’s been a while since we started “the search” (in the 1980′s). One of our first readers, BlaseBoy14 says: “If it were out there, we’d a heard by now. If it was gonna happen, it woulda happened.”

Well, yeah, MISTER ScienceAintSoBad‘ll fall of his chair about the same time you do if we do hear from the pickle brains in the Andromeda Cluster. But stay with me here. You knew the Red Sox would never win the World Series, didn’t you? You knew an African American would never become President of the United States, right? And you knew those electronic book things would never catch on and replace real books. So let’s SAY you’re wrong this time. Let’s just SAY we get “pinged”. What do we do?

“We’re HERE! We’re HERE! We’re HERE! Whoopee! Oh BOY!

Right?

No reason not. They’re gonna be too far away to hurt us. Plus they’ll be wise and kindly. Maybe they’ll tell us how to end wars.

Nuh uh. We have an agreement. I’m sure you never heard about this, but there’s to be NO talkin’. At least not till we’ve checked around with all concerned parties (which would be, more-or-less, the occupants of this particular rock).

A paper by Michael Michaud, written back in 1991, talks about what’s to be done before answering a signal received from ANY non-Earthians but, basically, it consists of some careful checking around to make sure us Earthians are on the same page about accepting the tiny risk that off-Earthers we’re chatting with, turn out to be the North Koreans of Andromeda.

THE COST OF LOOKING

ROAD SIGN (NEVADA)

Then there this:

We’re wasting money looking for intelligent life “out there” when we should be spending it on our own people right here on earth. At 10 billion dollars a month, this stupid diversion of funds is more expensive than a major war. And what good is it? How’s it going to help us to hear the a-m-a-z-i-n-g opinions of some slithery space creatures? I say close down the programs and concentrate on poverty in this country. - Proud2BeLiberal14

Aw Proud. You should be ashamed. Here’s the cost of war . And, anyway, your numbers are all wrong. Searching for intelligent signals is cheap, cheap, cheap and the funding is private.

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science ain’t so bad’s t-shirts and mug’s and such

The Scientific Work Of Amy Bishop

MISTER Science Ain't So Bad — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:28:43 +0000

Shoot! No Tenure.

“It didn’t happen. There’s no way … they are still alive.” – Amy Bishop, being taken to jail.

THE DARK SIDE

Amy Bishop (Assistant Professor Of Biology at the University of Alabama) figured out that her colleagues weren’t gonna give her tenure.

So she shot them.

TOO assertive, we think. They say she also shot and killed her brother in 1986, was a suspect in a bombing, may have assaulted someone in a restaurant and, supposedly, had a long history of hinkey behavior.

WHAT KIND OF SCIENTIST WAS SHE?

You, the readers of Science Ain’t So Bad, aren’t the SORT to be titillated by violence.

Or sex, for that matter.

If you’re here, you’re here to read about science and technology and, I’m sure your questions about Dr. Bishop are more about her scientific work.

Proud OF you!

Well, as a published author, Bishop isn’t prolific. R Douglas Fields (Psychology Today) took a look and says the list is short.

Her newest stuff is about nitric oxide, a compound that has multiple and important uses in human (and nonhuman) biology. Her research leads her to a radical view of the causes of MS – a view which is still considered pretty “iffy”. Shooting her colleagues, obviously, might not add weight to her arguments, although, strictly speaking, scientific ideas should be evaluated on their own merits.

Still..

An article in the Boston Herald says Bishop included her minor kids on at least one of her papers.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad thinks that’s nice. If she hadn’t done such awful things and if her contributions were solid, the “kids on the research paper” thing wouldn’t get counted as a foul here.

The article by Fields also describes a system for maintaining neurons in cell culture – an “automated Petri Dish” – for which Bishop had obtained a patent. If the device was getting lost in the noise of all the other patents, that should change now. (No such thing as bad news? Do I believe this?). But Fields sounds dubious about the prospects for the invention.

STUDENT REVIEWS

As far as Bishop’s teaching is concerned, her student reviews didn’t seem bad. Look for yourself.

Nobody’s heartless enough to give a ScienceAintsoBadRating on this one. Instead, we offer our sincere condolences to those who have suffered, including Bishop’s own family and we mourn the almost certain loss of her potential contributions to the scientific world and to the community at large.

Harvard, Ice Cream, and Quantum Mechanics

MISTER Science Ain't So Bad — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:42:52 +0000

DEFINING THE ELECTRON

MY PUBLIC

A long, long time ago, Joel, Doug, and MISTER ScienceAintSoBad were in line for an ice cream cone in Harvard Square.

I can’t remember, exactly, why, but Joel said (not for the first time) that “People are morons.”

Mister (not at that time) ScienceAintSoBad sturdily defended you.

“Not all of them.”

“That’s what YOU think. They don’t know crap!”

“You do?”

Three guys in line for ice cream.. You don’t want the whole transcript. However, it led to a “test” (we were young, remember). We decided to ask people in the line about electrons.

We would be easy graders. The interviewee didn’t have to know a lot. The answer could be “part of an atom”, “a tiny something that’s part of stuff”, “a particle”, “some small shmatta from physics” – just some indication that he.she knew what we were talking about.

So we did the survey. We asked ten customers, one by one. And this is what happened.

Nobody knew the answer.

One person – a high school girl, I think – knew it was “something in science” so she got a passing grade.

Everybody else was stumped. Most of them shrugged their shoulders or looked confused or were afraid that they were on Candid Camera.

Why bring this up?

Not because Joel was right about people being stupid. THEY weren’t making idiots out of themselves in an ice cream shop. But if this shop, which was a few hundred yards from Harvard (gasp!) University was even a little representative of the intelligent beings that inhabit our planet, then they (those intelligent beings) certainly didn’t give a lime sherbert’s damn about physics. Or abstract theories. Or natural philosophy. Or what-have-you.

You’re gonna say you have some issues with my methodology. That is wasn’t scientific.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that the “deeper” more abstract things are a hard sell with the average person. It’s just not what people think about.

WHAT I WRITE. WHAT YOU TOLERATE.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad can tell when you’re interested.

You know that little shmagegge on the upper right of the screen? It counts the visitors.

When we do an article about PRACTICAL things like the effects of salt on your health or a new cancer drug or a new breakthrough in hypnotic suggestion that turns teenagers into sweet, docile, uncomplaining saints, that thing GOES! The individual numbers get blurry and it goes whirr, whirr, whirr.

BUT when we do something really INTERESTING, something of PROFOUND SCIENTIFIC IMPORT such as the continuing effort to understand dark matter or dark energy or research into the true nature of the universe (quantum mechanics or string theory, for example), it stutters, hesitates, shivers, and staggers like it’s developed a case of frozen neuron disease.

This tells me that if I want lots of customers (and, by the way, the readership of Science Ain’t So Bad has been growing and thank you) I should stay away from deep science.

Unfortunately, because of a contract I have with myself, that’s not gonna happen so you can either go away with something new or (more likely) just skip the good stuff.

I hope you’ll, at least, give me a chance on the esoterica. It’ll make you a better person.

And, how can you be sure it won’t come up in a job interview?

You’ll be SO happy to learn that I’m adding book reviews to Science Ain’t So Bad and the first review – not finished yet – is going to be Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe.

Which doesn’t have a THING in it that’ll relieve the symptoms of a cold.

Disgruntled Burglars Quitting The Trade. Can’t Compete.

MISTER Science Ain't So Bad — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:31:48 +0000

What NEXT?

Criminology: Economics Of Burglary.

According to James Treadwell’s research (University of Leicester), global price pressures – particularly “cheap labor in China” – are RUINING it for decent burglars in the UK.

Commodity pricing in consumer goods such as DVD players has gotten so crappy that you can’t even fence a good home entertainment system anymore and embittered former second story guys are turning to a life of street crime.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 6 (Good entertainment value. Not so sure about the science).

Behaving Robotically

MISTER Science Ain't So Bad — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:36:21 +0000

Employee Killer (uh.. EmployMENT Killer)

Jobs Jobs Jobs

We need more jobs, right? Maybe General Motors and NASA are a little “off message” here.

They’re creating “Robonaut 2“, a humanoid robot worker that any productivity – hungry, greedy corporation would LOVE to get its mitts around.

See, workplace robots aren’t easily mistaken for somebody you went out with last year. They tend to have wrenches for arms and stuff.

Hmm.. I take it back.

Anyway, the philosophy behind workplace robots is “form follows function”. In fact, it’s kinda reassuring when they look like machines. Easier to tell the difference between a robot and a me.

But at the Johnson Space Center, they attacked the problem quite differently because they need human assistants to work beside their astronauts. If you want a robot working beside you, it needs to be compatible with its human partners who do not HAVE little sockets to accept various special purpose tools. So Robonaut 2 (the familiar form of its name seems to be R2) can swap tools with its partners and is less likely to accidentally sideswipe a hapless spaceman (or woman) and send him.her spinning into space.

As far as gender is concerned, Robonaut 2 seems less likely to get tossed out of the men’s room than the ladies room with its current chestal configuration but I don’t see anything in the specs on the subject. Maybe its humanoid features aren’t THAT specific.

You may find it reassuring to note that he.she.it doesn’t look cheap to make.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 7 and we’ll watch this development.

Stick Figures Have Lives Too

MISTER Science Ain't So Bad — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:29:05 +0000

A follow up to my recent article on comic books as literature:

Randall Munroe studied physics at Christopher Newport University and has worked for NASA. He also writes a sparse but very funny “webcomic” with sardonic observations on life as lived in the technobulb.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 10

Scientists: Dolphins Are Persons

MISTER Science Ain't So Bad — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:31:05 +0000

Image from Creative Commons:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikonvscanon/ / CC BY 2.0

Human - like

Biology: Dolphins are non-human persons.

A scientific consensus seems to be emerging that Dolphin’s are “non-human persons”. This very surprising article in the UK’s Times Online summarizes things.

Smarter than Chimpanzees. Lots of culture. Very communicative. And studies of their brains support the idea that they’re not quite us but WAY up on Golden Retrievers.

Sorry Dick.

A zoologist named Lori Marino and a psychologist, Diana Reiss, will be presenting at a conference in San Diego next month, making the argument that dolphins are “non human persons” and REALLY deserve a little better treatment from their supposedly more developed land bound buddies.

They’re not the only ones. Numerous researchers and others who have worked with these intelligent marine mammals seem to share this opinion.

Taking a lesson from global warming and not wanting to wind up “chopped meat” MISTER ScienceAintSoBad won’t describe this as a scientific consensus, but I will say there seems to be a lot of support for the dolphin/person view.

However.

Sam Starlbhurst of Needham, Massachusetts, isn’t on board with this.

“They’re FISH!,” he said to Science Ain’t So Bad. “They really are just fish. They haven’t figured out ANYTHING significant.Have they discovered the wheel? Do they have fire? This is liberal CRAP!”

Sam, however, is an idiot. Just ignore him.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 9

BIG FAT ARROWS POINT TO PLANETS (ALMOST)

MISTER Science Ain't So Bad — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:10:40 +0000

A Planet-happy Star

SpaceScience: Stars Give Themselves Away

How do you know if a star has planets?

Tediously.

In fact, it wasn’t until 1995 that we nailed the first such planet (I’m not counting the one we’re standing around on, or its neighbors, of course).

Even “neighboring” stars are so far away and so bright that you can’t really make out their planets with a ‘scope. So two indirect methods are used to find out if a planet’s present: We look for a slight reduction in starlight as a planet passes in front of its star. Or we try to observe the miniscule wobble of the star due to the orbiting planet.

We’ve been, it seems, doing it the hard way.

An article in Nature (lead author, Garik Israelian) says that stars with planets seem to use up more lithium than stars that don’t. The authors figured this out using the European Southern Observatory’s ability to analyze starlight as well as to detect (the hard way) planets.

This is amazingly fantastic news as it will greatly speed the time that we can say, for certain, that the only Republicans in the entire universe are on this planet.*

Very, very nifty piece of work.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 10

* I’ll make fun of liberals in my next post, OK?

… THE COMPANY THAT NEVER CAME ….

MISTER Science Ain't So Bad — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:45:00 +0000

A cigar chomping alien, romping outside of its spacecraft

The only ones in the WHOLE universe..

This might not be my best post. But what’s the point of HAVING a blog if you can’t rant about intelligent life in the universe. No need to indulge me. If it’s boring, you can tune out. It’s OK.

Even MY cynical friends will have tears in their eyes when the day finally arrives and – amid plumes of smoke and dust – large ships, perhaps scraped and dented from too many light years of interplanetary traveling, start settling down by the Super Stop & Shop, displaying emblems from their own culture, intended (I hope, I hope) to assure us of their peaceful intentions. Earth has yearned for that day for a long time and, when I was a young earthling, we didn’t think it would take long. In fact, we thought they were already here. The tabloids were totally hot for UFO’s. Sausages, saucers, and all kinda’ lights, flying in formation, decorated the National Enquirer and the Star, crowding out everything but Elizabeth Taylor. Lots of ships came from Mars or Venus.

After we got ourselves into orbit and had had a look around, we realized that any intelligent civilizations in our solar system must be very shy. If they’re here, they’re hidden in planetary cores and have pulled the antennas in after them. So, pragmatists that we are, we turned the search for company outward and started a systematic radio search (called SETI) of other solar systems . This has continued for decades and has been completely fruitless; it is, frankly, discouraging.

Some time ago, Enrico Fermi asked a question. Pointing to the large number of solar systems much older than our own where civilizations should be much more advanced than ours, he asked why we haven’t had a single contact. After all, they’ve had time to send radio signals over galactic distances or to even travel great distances themselves. So why no aliens? Could it be that we are truly alone?

You betcha.

The more we study our plight here on earth, the more we understand how lucky we have been. The parade of life-snuffers is amazing. Rocks and ice (asteroids and comets) rain down. Some of this debris is larger than a mountain and would explode with enough energy to cleans all surface life. We are quite sure this has happened before. Add gamma rays, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, planetary wobble, and other threats that are much too numerous to list, and “miracle” isn’t too strong a word to describe the fact that we’ve had a more-or-less continuous civilization hereto. Is this the hand of God? Or luck? If it’s luck, it could run out any time.

So, generalizing from our own planet (always iffy), though there’s reasonable evidence that life can get started spontaneously and with some ease there’s also good evidence that evolution is frequently “reset” by unwelcome events. Could be lots of bugs out there in the universe. Not so many smarties.

Unless such luck is widespread in the universe, our rivals may not have made it past the last surface cleansing blast. It may be rarer than we ever imagined to survive till you figure out rockets.

Still. As we look for planets, we’re finding out they’re SO very common that at least a few of them should have some lucky survivors like us. So what’s the deal then? Where’re or buddies? Here are some thoughts on this matter that could explain “Fermi’s Paradox”:

1. We want to know if we’re alone. It’s an obsession with us. Alone, alone, alone. Where IS everybody???? But maybe other civilizations don’t think about it this way? Maybe a “normal” civilization doesn’t FEEL so lonely. Although we romanticize the concrete benefits of contacting another civilization, imagining that they will teach us about perpetual life and the meaning of existence, our first encounter’ll probably be a big fat disappointment. Could be another government boondoggle. And..

2. we might actually regret the contact. We ( again, romanticizing), think that they, being old and wise, are probably gentle and loving. But they might want to eat us. Or, at least, steal our food. Perhaps a “normal” civilization is more cautious about putting its address out all over the galactic Internet the way we do; they may not fall all over themselves to answer our signals.

3. Here’s a good one. Our progress toward becoming a technical civilization, capable of communicating with others, seems tied to our mastery of science. We tend to assume that other smarties would share this cultural feature. But science seems to have been “discovered” just once on our planet. It was “lost” for many (dark) generations and then, eventually, rediscovered (as opposed to reinvented). Is science really inevitable? Maybe smart civilizations focus on art, poetry, or philosophy. THAT’LL cut down the competition for rocket fuel. Technical civilizations may be very, very rare.

4. Maybe space travel between stars isn’t realistic – even for advanced civilizations. While there’s a common perception (Star Trek, Asimov, etc) that you need some kinda “warp drive” to scoot around the universe at great speeds, this is really a misunderstanding of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. As a matter of fact, you CAN keep your foot on the throttle all right, going faster and faster, and faster. While it would look to an observer on the planet from which you departed as though you can’t quite reach light speed, you could, in fact, reach speeds that would propel you across galaxies. Just don’t plan on going back . The clock on your planet of departure will have raced into the future while you’re gone and all your contemporaries will pass away before you finish breakfast. THAT’S the impact of “The Special Theory”.

So why not then? If they’re willing to cut the ties with their home planets, why wouldn’t they have shown up here?

Some reasons. 1) I don’t know what THEIR politicians are like, but imagine getting ours to fund a big, expensive expedition that has ABSOLUTELY no payback for the home planet because we vanish and are never heard from again. They pay, we play. I don’t THINK so. 2) I said relativity wouldn’t prevent the trip. I didn’t say there are no obstacles. As a matter of fact, once you boost up your speed relative to the debris you are passing by, you are in terrible danger. The collision energy is a square of the collision speed. We don’t see too many objects going by us at faster than about 100,000 mph. I wonder why? Could it be that very fast objects, inevitably, hit SOME li’l fragment of rock and get blowed up? That would be my guess. Add to this, gamma radiation and God knows what else, and intergallatic travel may be more romance than realism – even for very advanced civilizations.

As far as communications go, maybe, once again, advanced civilizations don’t see much POINT in “communications” that take hundreds or thousands of years. Could you blame them? The more I think about it, our own desperation for confirmation that we’re not alone, may very well not be common. If it isn’t, don’t look for “them” to be appropriating large funds for “radio beacons”.

There’s also the “zoo” theory – that they want to protect us from ourselves till we’re “ready”. But the zoo theory implies coordinated behavior and shared goals by beings thousands of light years away from one another – tough to believe in this. Much easier to believe, however, is the self-preservation theory. Assuming that most beings got that way by some form of natural selection, they, like us, may have some degree of surviving predatory behavior. A wise civilization might be more intent on HIDING it’s presence than advertising it.