Jul 17 2010

The Next Great Awakening part 14: Brains, branes, and the multi-verse

Category: God,science — harmonicminer @ 8:13 am

The previous post in this series is here.

Jeff Zweerink at Reasons has been doing a series on the putative multiverse, and the effect that the truth or falsity of a multiverse approach to physics has on Christian belief, called Multiverse Musings.

I think it’s well worth reading, and a useful counter to all the Discovery Channel specials where important sounding scientists are interviewed to try to convince viewers that the multiverse hypothesis undoes any reason to believe in a Creator who caused the Big Bang.  There is no mention, of course, of Who caused the multiverse.  Somehow, it is assumed to have been uncaused and to be eternal.  Reminds me of the smug way 19th-century and early 20th-century atheistic physicists were certain science had proved that the universe we know is eternal, with no beginning and no end.  How little they knew.

Some of them think the Big Bang was just a “collision of branes“.

I think some brains may be colliding all right.

Something about the whole multiverse concept smells quite a bit to me like the 19th century physics theory of the ether.  It really was a grand idea, and thinking that way explained quite a lot that was difficult to explain otherwise.  And it gave a great way to relate the wave structure of light to the wave structure of sound in air, or waves on water, because it provided a “medium” or “ether” for light to move in.

The problem, of course, is that it was wrong.

Convenient theories that appear to explain things we see (or to rescue us from having to explain things we’d just as soon ignore), but which do not make any successful predictions about what we will see in future research, are often quite wrong.

We’d have to pay careful attention to a theory of the multiverse that makes specific predictions about events we can observe in this universe, events we have not seen yet, and which, if we did see them, could not be easily explained any other way.  That would be a scientific theory which could rise or fall based on some conceivable future set of observations.

Is one of the currently competing theories of the multiverse such a theory, with predictive, explanatory power?  I suppose time will tell.  Some are making claims that the LHC could find evidence for multiple universes.

Maybe.

(Update for 2023: The Large Hadron Collider has in fact not provided support for multi-verse theory, 13 years after the original article here was written.)

But as I read what a layman can about the competing theories and claims, it all seems awfully, awfully tenuous.  It seems based on “special pleading” at times, and it seems to ignore any discussion of how the multiverse began, basically assuming that it was “always there.”  You’d think the physicists would learn from experience.  In any case, I know of no prediction of “multiverse” theory that is in principle detectable, and which has no alternate explanation.  (Don’t confuse the notion of multiple dimensions with the multiverse.  They are distinct ideas, though related in some theories.)

At some point, will the physicists finally stop claiming that they’re just around the corner from the REAL explanation for EVERYTHING?  They’ve been making that claim for over a century (some 19th century physicists, good ones, thought physics had learned about all there was to know).  They don’t have much of a clue about what either “dark matter” or “dark energy” are, or what they’re made of, or if they really exist.  All they really know is that assuming such things makes some things easier to explain (like why the galaxies don’t fly apart). Pretty funny.

They seem to think they’re eating an avocado (which has a definite center) instead of an onion.

I suspect some of them may have been sniffing ether.  But God is patient while they keep peeling back layers of the onion, looking for the Center of everything, even if they’re looking in the wrong place.  The point is that there is an onion, not what’s at the center of it.

All that fine tuning to make it possible for us to live here is making some scientists nervous, and some of them will pursue just about any explanation that might remove the necessity of acknowledging a Creator.

Good luck with that.

The next post in this series is here.

Jul 08 2010

Just in case they didn’t notice our candles, let’s turn on the searchlight? Or maybe not

Category: humor,illegal alien,Intelligent Design,science,space — harmonicminer @ 4:43 pm

A scientist who makes his living in SETI, searching for alien societies who might be communicating with us, says that It’s too late to worry that the aliens will find us

STEPHEN HAWKING is worried about aliens. The famous physicist recently suggested that we should be wary of contact with extraterrestrials, citing what happened to Native Americans when Europeans landed on their shores. Since any species that could visit us would be far beyond our own technological level, meeting them could be bad news.

Hawking was extrapolating the possible consequences of my day job: a small but durable exercise known as SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Although we have yet to detect an alien ping, improvements in technology have encouraged us to think that, if transmitting extraterrestrials are out there, we might soon find them. That would be revolutionary. But some people, Hawking included, sense a catastrophe.

Consider what happens if we succeed. Should we respond? Any broadcast could blow Earth’s cover, inviting the possibility of attack by a society advanced enough to pick up our signals.

On the face of it, that sounds like a scenario straight out of cheap science fiction. But even if the odds of calamity are small, why gamble?

For three years, this issue has been exercising a group of SETI scientists in the International Academy of Astronautics. The crux of the dispute was an initiative by a few members to proscribe any broadcasts to aliens, whether or not we receive a signal first.

In truth, banning broadcasts would be impractical – and manifestly too late. We have been inadvertently betraying our presence for 60 years with our television, radio and radar transmissions. The earliest episodes of I Love Lucy have washed over 6000 or so star systems, and are reaching new audiences at the rate of one solar system a day. If there are sentient beings out there, the signals will reach them.

Detecting this leakage radiation won’t be that difficult. Its intensity decreases with the square of the distance, but even if the nearest aliens were 1000 light years away, they would still be able to detect it as long as their antenna technology was a century or two ahead of ours.

This makes it specious to suggest that we should ban deliberate messages on the grounds that they would be more powerful than our leaked signals. Only a society close to our level of development would be able to pick up an intentional broadcast while failing to notice TV and radar. And a society at our level is no threat.

The flip side is that for any alien society that could be dangerous, a deliberate message makes no difference. Such a society could use its own star as a gravitational lens, and even see the glow from our street lamps. Hawking’s warning is irrelevant.

Such considerations motivated the SETI group at the International Academy of Astronautics to reject a proscription of transmissions to the sky. It was the right decision. The extraterrestrials may be out there, and we might learn much by discovering them, but it is paranoia of a rare sort that would shutter the Earth out of fear that they might discover us.

Not everyone agrees.

Then there’s this, from a scientist who has written science fiction about nice aliens who “uplift” less than sentient species into full sophont status.  Maybe one of them would try to “uplift” humanity…

I’m not deeply worried that ET wants to come to Earth and eat us or something.  But if ET is out there, and can get here, and wants to get here, I really doubt that it would be out of a sense of altruism.  What if ET is at the same moral level as the Aztecs?  Maybe they believe in sacrificing low-level cultures (that would be us) to appease the Dark Energy God.

I mean, they could always just send a nice note, if all they want is to be pen pals.  And everyone knows it isn’t a good idea to meet in person with people you just met on Facebook….  let alone give them your home address.

Jun 29 2010

International Space Station Sex Ban

Category: science,space — amuzikman @ 8:55 am

From the London Telegraph:

Commanders do not allow sexual intercourse on the International Space Station. “We are a group of professionals,” said Alan Poindexter, a NASA commander, during a visit to Tokyo, when asked about the consequences if astronauts boldly went where no others have been. “We treat each other with respect and we have a great working relationship. Personal relationships are not … an issue,” said a serious-faced Mr. Poindexter. “We don’t have them and we won’t.”Mr. Poindexter and his six crew members, including the first Japanese mother in space Naoko Yamazaki, were in Tokyo to talk about their two-week resupply mission to the International Space Station. The April voyage broke new ground by putting four women in orbit for the first time, with three female crew joining one woman already on the station.Sexual intercourse in space may appear out of bounds, but astronauts have been known to succumb to earthly passions. In 2007 former NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak allegedly wore adult diapers when driving hundreds of miles across the United States without bathroom breaks to confront a suspected rival in a romance with a fellow astronaut.

Given the sheer number and magnitude of problems facing us at home and abroad I can only say how relieved I am that this issue has been dealt with decisively.  I will now proceed to check it off my list of concerns.

Jun 14 2010

Changing the rules?

Category: science — harmonicminer @ 8:25 am

Distant gas blob threatens to shake nature’s constants

The basic constants of nature aren’t called constants for nothing. Physics is supposed to work the same way across the universe and over all of time. Now measurements of the radio spectra of a distant gas cloud hint that some fundamental quantities might not be fixed after all, raising the possibility that a radical rethink of the standard model of particle physics may one day be needed.

The evidence comes from observations of a dense gas cloud some 2.9 billion light years away which has a radio source, the active supermassive black hole PKS 1413+135, right behind it. Hydroxyl radicals in the gas cloud absorb the galaxy’s radio energy at certain wavelengths and emit it again at different wavelengths. This results in so-called “conjugate” features in the radio spectrum of the gas, with a dip in intensity corresponding to absorption and an accompanying spike corresponding to emission.

The dip and spike have the same shape, which shows that they arise from the same gas. But Nissim Kanekar of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics in Pune, India, and colleagues found that the gap in frequency between the two was smaller than the properties of hydroxyl radicals would lead us to expect.

The gap depends on three fundamental constants: the ratio of the mass of the proton to the mass of the electron, the ratio that measures a proton’s response to a magnetic field, and the fine-structure constant, alpha, which governs the strength of the electromagnetic force. The discrepancy in the size of the gap thus amounts to “tentative evidence” that one or more of these constants may once have been different in this region of space, Kanekar says.

The change in these constants, if genuine, is tiny. For example, if a change in alpha were solely responsible for the discrepancy, the measurements suggest alpha would have been just 0.00031 per cent smaller 3 billion years ago than today (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol 716, p L23). But even such a small effect would require “a new, more fundamental theory of particle physics” to explain it, says Michael Murphy of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Measurements by Murphy and colleagues of visible light from distant quasars absorbed by intervening gas clouds have also hinted alpha was smaller in the past. But it was never certain that the light measured all came from the same region. “That’s a critical assumption,” says Murphy.

“Radio measurements currently appear to be the most promising avenue for a secure detection of fine-structure constant evolution,” says Jeffrey Newman of the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “I wouldn’t call this more than a hint, though. It’s the first application of a new technique.”

The subtle discrepancy found by Kanekar’s team might be caused by “contamination” from light from another patch of gas. Last month, the team began using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to rule this out.

Maybe there’s a Supreme Court for physical constants of the universe, and maybe recent appointments haven’t included enough originalists…. so they’re just changing the rules.

Or not.

Seriously, all the basic determinations of physics and astronomy depend on the assumption that the rules haven’t changed.  So let’s all be watching this one with great interest.  Of course, if the changes over time have been as tiny as suggested here, it may turn out that the universe is only 13.72222 billion years old, instead of 13.73 billions years old.

May 06 2010

Time travel into the future?

Category: science,space,theology — harmonicminer @ 8:04 am

Time Travel Is Possible, Says Stephen Hawking

Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking believes humans are capable of time travel — and he’s not afraid to let everyone know.

Claiming he is not as concerned about being labelled crazy as he once was, Hawking has publicly aired his second startling theory in two weeks, after last week claiming it was “entirely reasonable” to assume aliens existed.

Preparing for the debut of his Discovery documentary, Stephen Hawking’s Universe, which screens next week, Hawking said he believed humans could travel millions of years into the future and repopulate their devastated planet.

Hawking said once spaceships were built that could fly faster than the speed of light, a day on board would be equivalent to a year on Earth. That’s because — according to Einstein — as objects accelerate through space, time slows down around them.

Which also means that Hawking’s theory only applies to moving forwards through time.

Moving backwards is impossible, Hawking says, because it “violates a fundamental rule that cause comes before effect.”

If moving backwards through time was possible, a person could shoot their former selves.

“I believe things cannot make themselves impossible,” Hawking said.

However, once spaceships approached the speed of light, their crew would start skipping through Earth years on a daily basis, giving the human race a chance to start again.

“It would take six years at full power just to reach these speeds,” Hawking said. “After the first two years, it would reach half light speed and be far outside the solar system. After another two years, it would be traveling at 90 per cent of the speed of light.”

“After another two years of full thrust, the ship would reach full speed, 98 per cent of the speed of light, and each day on the ship would be a year on Earth. At such speeds, a trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years for those on board.”

Manchester University professor Brian Cox told The Times that Hawking’s theory had already found some basis in experiments carried out by the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.

“When we accelerate tiny particles to 99.99 per cent of the sped of light in the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Geneva, the time they experience passes at one-seventhousandth of the rate it does for us,” Prof Cox said.

Hawking admits he is obsessed with time travel — he told the Daily Mail if he could go backwards he’d visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo — but said as he got older, he cared less about what people thought of his theories.

“Time travel was once considered scientific heresy, and I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank,” he said in Stephen Hawking’s Universe.

“These days I’m not so cautious.”

We are all time travelers heading into the future, of course, just somewhat more slowly.

I’d love to know what kind of space-drive Hawking has in mind to achieve 98% of the speed of light.  Whatever it is, I doubt Al Gore will approve…  unless, of course, a galactic warming conference is being held in the Large Magellanic Cloud, in which case he’ll be sure to attend in his private light-speed yacht.

.

Apr 07 2010

Hanging on to the Shuttle?

Category: national security,Obama,Russia,science,shuttle,space — harmonicminer @ 8:03 am

Could moon rocket demise bring space shuttle reprieve?

The demise of NASA’s Constellation moon rockets is bringing faint hopes of a reprieve for the space shuttle.

NASA’s decades-old shuttle fleet has been headed for retirement since 2004, and only four more flights are scheduled. Now the White House’s plan to scrap the Constellation programme, a pair of rockets capable of taking astronauts back to the moon, has prompted renewed efforts to keep the shuttles running until new vehicles can replace them.

Two bills have been introduced in the US Congress to keep the shuttle flying while NASA works to develop replacements. The hope is that a modest extension, involving just a couple flights a year, could help retain jobs and maintain access to the International Space Station without relying on foreign launchers.

“If the space shuttle programme is terminated, Russia and China will be the only nations in the world with the capability to launch humans into space,” says Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who introduced the first of the two bills this month. “This is unacceptable.”

An extension to shuttle flights may struggle to win approval. Safety has been a concern, but a bigger hurdle may be money. The cost of a modest programme could exceed $2 billion per year, according to agency officials. “Where that money comes from is the big question,” shuttle programme manager John Shannon told reporters last week.

They seem to be able to find plenty of money in Washington for things that they think actually matter.  Does this matter?  Only if you think it’s fine for the USA to be dependent on Russia to get people into and out of orbit.

Obama obviously does.  Maybe he, too, has looked into Putin’s eyes and seen a man he can work with.

Or maybe Obama just doesn’t think it matters.

Apr 03 2010

Time to go to war?

Category: global warming,government,media,science — harmonicminer @ 8:15 am

The world according to James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.

It follows a tumultuous few months in which public opinion on efforts to tackle climate change has been undermined by events such as the climate scientists’ emails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit.

“I don’t think we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change,” said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview since the theft of the UEA emails last November. “The inertia of humans is so huge that you can’t really do anything meaningful.”

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is “modern democracy”, he added. “Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”

After all, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. And Woodrow Wilson had at least 150,000 people arrested during WW I for “sedition.” So I guess Mr. Lovelock is in favor of incarcerating SUVs. And wood fireplaces.

Personally, I’m in favor of incarcerating fraudulent scientists… but that’s just me.  From reading the rest of the article, it sounds like Lovelock might agree.  However, his notion that so-called experts should rule over the benighted masses, who are just too dim to understand the elevated mental process of the elite, is reminiscent of the Progressive era that gave us Margaret Sanger, Mussolini, and eugenics, or in a slightly earlier time the notion that the interior shape of the skull was determinative for intelligence.

…………

Lovelock, who 40 years ago originated the idea that the planet is a giant, self-regulating organism, the so-called Gaia theory, added that he has little sympathy for the climate scientists caught up in the UEA email scandal. He said he had not read the original emails, “I felt reluctant to pry”, but that their reported content had left him feeling “utterly disgusted”.

“Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science,” he said. “I’m not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It’s the one thing you do not ever do. You’ve got to have standards.”

Lovelock’s continuing touching faith in the underlying science of global warming is probably forgivable in a man of his years, who does not want the last two decades of his life to have been wasted time.  But whether or not HIS data is good, and fairly recorded and interpreted, is irrelevant.  The fact is that the case for global warming was made up mostly of computer models and attempts to draw huge conclusions from subtle data changes flowing from the interplay of enormously complex variables, by a thousand different scientists who understood that the fix was in, and career advancement was in that direction.  Does Lovelock think that the recent revelations represent the only fudged data, the only special pleading, the only career enhancing favorable interpretation (or, in this case, unfavorable)?

In any case, Lovelock’s comment on the desirability of discarding democracy in favor of rule by the elites is exactly what many on the Right have been saying for some time, namely that the new home of international socialism is the environmental movement (a thing quite distinct from mere “conservation”, clean water, clean air, and the like).

Based on who their fellow travelers are, I can’t disagree.

Mar 31 2010

Get ready to duck… but don’t bother to cover

Category: science,space — harmonicminer @ 8:43 am

Dark, dangerous asteroids found lurking near Earth

An infrared space telescope has spotted several very dark asteroids that have been lurking unseen near Earth’s orbit. Their obscurity and tilted orbits have kept them hidden from surveys designed to detect things that might hit our planet.

Called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the new NASA telescope launched on 14 December on a mission to map the entire sky at infrared wavelengths. It began its survey in mid-January.

In its first six weeks of observations, it has discovered 16 previously unknown asteroids with orbits close to Earth’s. Of these, 55 per cent reflect less than one-tenth of the sunlight that falls on them, which makes them difficult to spot with visible-light telescopes. One of these objects is as dark as fresh asphalt, reflecting less than 5 per cent of the light it receives.

Many of these dark asteroids have orbits that are steeply tilted relative to the plane in which all the planets and most asteroids orbit. This means telescopes surveying for asteroids may be missing many other objects with tilted orbits, because they spend most of their time looking in this plane.

Fortunately, the new objects are bright in infrared radiation, because they absorb a lot of sunlight and heat up. This makes them relatively easy for WISE to spot.

“It’s really good at finding the darkest asteroids and comets,” said mission team member Amy Mainzer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, on Thursday.

WISE is expected to discover as many as 200 near-Earth objects, but astronomers estimate that the number of unknown objects with masses great enough to cause ground damage in an impact runs into the tens of thousands.

Richard Binzel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says the dark asteroids may be former comets that have long since had all the ice vaporised from their exteriors, leaving them with inactive surfaces that no longer shed dust to produce tails. He points out that many comets have very tilted orbits, and comets visited by spacecraft have been observed to have very dark surfaces.

I think I’ve met some people with tilted orbits lately.  Hey, ease up, it’s a joke.  But you can only seem to spot some of them with infra-red…

I’m glad there is Somebody watching over us.

Feb 23 2010

It is very sad

Category: energy,Obama,Russia,science,space,technology — harmonicminer @ 9:43 am

Charles Krauthammer – Closing the new frontier

“We have an agreement until 2012 that Russia will be responsible for this,” says Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian space agency, about ferrying astronauts from other countries into low-Earth orbit. “But after that? Excuse me, but the prices should be absolutely different then!”

The Russians may be new at capitalism, but they know how it works. When you have a monopoly, you charge monopoly prices. Within months, Russia will have a monopoly on rides into space.

By the end of this year, there will be no shuttle, no U.S. manned space program, no way for us to get into space. We’re not talking about Mars or the moon here. We’re talking about low-Earth orbit, which the United States has dominated for nearly half a century and from which it is now retiring with nary a whimper.

Our absence from low-Earth orbit was meant to last a few years, the interval between the retirement of the fatally fragile space shuttle and its replacement with the Constellation program (Ares booster, Orion capsule, Altair lunar lander) to take astronauts more cheaply and safely back to space.

But the Obama 2011 budget kills Constellation. Instead, we shall have nothing. For the first time since John Glenn flew in 1962, the United States will have no access of its own for humans into space — and no prospect of getting there in the foreseeable future.

Of course, the administration presents the abdication as a great leap forward: Launching humans will be turned over to the private sector, while NASA’s efforts will be directed toward landing on Mars.

This is nonsense. It would be swell for private companies to take over launching astronauts. But they cannot do it. It’s too expensive. It’s too experimental. And the safety standards for getting people up and down reliably are just unreachably high.

Sure, decades from now there will be a robust private space-travel industry. But that is a long time. In the interim, space will be owned by Russia and then China. The president waxes seriously nationalist at the thought of China or India surpassing us in speculative “clean energy.” Yet he is quite prepared to gratuitously give up our spectacular lead in human space exploration.

As for Mars, more nonsense. Mars is just too far away. And how do you get there without the stepping stones of Ares and Orion? If we can’t afford an Ares rocket to get us into orbit and to the moon, how long will it take to develop a revolutionary new propulsion system that will take us not a quarter-million miles but 35 million miles?

To say nothing of the effects of long-term weightlessness, of long-term cosmic ray exposure, and of the intolerable risk to astronaut safety involved in any Mars trip — six months of contingencies vs. three days for a moon trip.

Of course, the whole Mars project as substitute for the moon is simply a ruse. It’s like the classic bait-and-switch for high-tech military spending: Kill the doable in the name of some distant sophisticated alternative, which either never gets developed or is simply killed later in the name of yet another, even more sophisticated alternative of the further future. A classic example is the B-1 bomber, which was canceled in the 1970s in favor of the over-the-horizon B-2 stealth bomber, which was then killed in the 1990s after a production run of only 21 (instead of 132) in the name of post-Cold War obsolescence.

Moreover, there is the question of seriousness. When John F. Kennedy pledged to go to the moon, he meant it. He had an intense personal commitment to the enterprise. He delivered speeches remembered to this day. He dedicated astronomical sums to make it happen.

At the peak of the Apollo program, NASA was consuming almost 4 percent of the federal budget, which in terms of the 2011 budget is about $150 billion. Today the manned space program will die for want of $3 billion a year — 1/300th of last year’s stimulus package with its endless make-work projects that will leave not a trace on the national consciousness.

As for President Obama’s commitment to beyond-lunar space: Has he given a single speech, devoted an iota of political capital to it?

Obama’s NASA budget perfectly captures the difference in spirit between Kennedy’s liberalism and Obama’s. Kennedy’s was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons. Obama’s is a constricted, inward-looking call to retreat.

Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it.

Jan 03 2010

the Impossible dream?

Category: science,Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 9:43 am

For 50 years we’ve been Waiting for ET to phone us.

West Virginia. It is 6 am on an April morning in 1960 and Frank Drake is freezing cold. He peers up towards the focal point of the radio telescope. He mounts a flimsy ladder to the top and climbs into a space about the size of a garbage can. For the next 45 minutes, he tunes the receiver inside, which feels like starting an old car. He climbs back down and begins to listen.

Drake and colleagues were conducting a seminal experiment: the first modern search for extraterrestrial life. For four months, the researchers used the Tatel Telescope in Green Bank to listen for any intelligent signals from the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani that might be hidden on the same wavelength as radiation emitted naturally by hydrogen. Drake named the effort Project Ozma after the princess in the 0z books by Frank Baum, who wrote that he used a radio to learn of events there.

April 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of the start of Project Ozma, and those involved in the search for extraterrestrial life, or SETI, will be raising a glass. Not only did the experiment inspire countless people to continue the search, it brought alien-hunting into the mainstream and arguably seeded the science of astrobiology.

Other famous searchers for things that were never found:

Albert Einstein and Unified Field Theory.

Don Quixote and defeatable windmills

Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth

Isaac Newton and a way to turn lead into gold

AI researchers and actual machine intelligence

Modern physics and cold fusion

You get the idea.  Some things just SOUND plausible, even likely.  The argument that “the universe is just so big that there has to be intelligent life out there” is like that.  It just instinctively sounds right.

That doesn’t make it right.

And even if they are there, the aliens are almost certainly far, far ahead of us, so far that we wouldn’t recognize one of their artifacts or communications methods if we saw it.  Or, they are so far behind us that they’re still working on inventing the bow and arrow, or controlling fire.  The odds of intelligent aliens in a detectable state of technological development anywhere near us (i.e., in detectable range) are so small as to be risible.

The notion that there is a “science of astrobiology” is especially humorous.  How can there be a science of something with no data?  Without a single example of its presumed subject?  Medieval alchemists were closer to turning lead into gold.  At least that turned out to be possible, albeit very difficult, using nuclear transmutation.  So I suppose we could be said to have a science of alchemy now, though it is nothing like what the ancients thought it would be.

We know more about mental telepathy in human beings than we know about alien life.  See what reaction you get from most scientists when you discuss the “science of telepathy.”

Since we have no useful theory about how terrestrial life began, we have no useful theory about whether there is or can be alien life, other than a philosophical commitment to “non-exceptionalism” regarding Earth-life.  That may or may not be true….  but philosophy is not science, and a priori commitments are not data.

The only data that “astrobiology” provides are observations about what conditions would make terrestrial-style life impossible.  While that is an exceedingly long list, it doesn’t automatically follow that there is extra-terrestrial life anywhere that terrestrial life could survive.  The funniest part, to me, though “astrobiologists” don’t get the joke, is that they develop “arguments from plausibility,” not data, exactly as they accuse believers in Intelligent Design of doing, whose perspectives they mostly despise.  Somehow, theories of essentially infinite numbers of universes are still considered science, although they aren’t really testable, either.  It’s very simple, of course; any theory is “scientific” if it doesn’t involve God the Creator, regardless of how many ridiculous assertions and intellectual back-flips it contains, or how many just-so stories upon which it depends.

Astrobiology could be seen as a sort of “science of the gaps,” except that that there aren’t any gaps for it to breach.   There isn’t anything for it to explain, yet, and there may never be.  So rather than “science of the gaps,” it is the science of hope, rather like theories of the multi-verse.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ll all for funding more SETI, though I’m not acquiescent about more active approaches.  ET may not be nice, if he/she/it is there at all.

But I don’t expect much to be found.

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