tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20364403098920764182024-03-05T06:16:04.637-05:00Sagan's BrainSkeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.comBlogger168125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-57660835348243612732016-12-08T00:10:00.000-05:002016-12-08T00:16:23.504-05:00Our HomeTo my conservative friends and family,<br /><br /> I know we disagree on most everything, and these days virtually every one of us, whether we're liberal and conservative, feels like the other side has either 1) been grossly misled by our respective, biased media outlets, or 2) harbors deep antipathy towards the country or to some of the people in it who are not like us. So we have this vast political chasm between us, and it seems hopeless to bridge the gap. We all acknowledge that this is a sorry state of affairs but we just can't fix it. Even so, we remain friends and family, we love each other and we respect each other. We're not going to give up most of our firmly held political views, but we can attempt to listen to each other, trust that our friends and family aren't bad people or stupid people, and every now and then consider that our side maybe has it wrong on something. I certainly do that.<br /><br />There are many political debates upon which there can be reasonable disagreement. But there can no longer be any rational defense of the position denying that the Earth is warming and that we are causing it. We can debate what is to be done about this situation, but that fact is simply undeniable. Anyone in public office or in the media who says otherwise is either willfully ignorant of the facts or is misleading the public in a way that I believe is truly criminal. And the motive for this could not be more clear: they are either shills for the corporations who fund their campaigns / television programs, or they are pandering to their constituents whose lives currently depend on the fossil fuel industry. While the latter is at least somewhat in line with their duties, the former is simply reprehensible. <br /><br />We can and should debate the best way to go about mitigating the problem, to do it in a way that strengthens the economy and supports those who must transition to a new line of work. But that requires we all first acknowledge that there is a real problem that must be solved. And once we've done that, we have to keep our eyes on the big picture; transitioning to a clean fuel economy will take some adjustment, no doubt. But so much is at stake. Mass extinctions, permanently flooded cities here and around the world, enormously destructive storms, severe drought and wildfires, radical ecological transformations, major economic upheaval. It's all happening right now. <br /><br />Under the two party system there can be any number of policy issues on which a partisan can disagree with his or her party. And so there must be Republicans out there who believe global warming is a real threat and want their politicians to stop denying science. Republicans now hold all the power in Washington, so it's up to those inside the party to stand up and do what's right. If you are a Republican who knows the party is wrong on this issue, I beg you to work from within to end this dreary charade. <br /><br />And to those of you who do not yet believe in global warming -- because it will become even more apparent in the years to come -- I humbly ask that you look again at the weight of the evidence and reconsider your position. Just consider the possibility that it isn't a vast left wing conspiracy, that there are real people (scientists) who do their job diligently and faithfully follow the data wherever it leads. Consider the possibility that Sean Hannity and Jim Inhofe and Scott Pruitt have more to gain from lying to you than The Weather Channel does. Consider the possibility that we are perpetuating an environmental disaster that will make us all pariahs in the eyes of our children and grandchildren. <div>
<br />We have just one planet to call home, to cherish from now until the extinction of our species. I pray that we have an ocean of time ahead for us. Let us be good stewards of this lovely world while it is ours to protect. Please.</div>
Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-52143141788853695552016-04-06T11:55:00.001-04:002016-04-07T16:15:06.570-04:00Regarding our paper, "A Cloaking Device for Transiting Planets"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd8EISdu8aPGO4mSyvK5nmB69PFAaAe3KJtN1TUIIxMx4gUxFeeUhaqL8VKn0IbiJaPCvPVbsmmZG_HSQfmuZS9rTx5LxZNGqo9jzrrpTBKaK-v99YYqsaAijvWY5_hJYUnyiTDs1VlnGd/s1600/VLT_Laser_Guide_Star.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd8EISdu8aPGO4mSyvK5nmB69PFAaAe3KJtN1TUIIxMx4gUxFeeUhaqL8VKn0IbiJaPCvPVbsmmZG_HSQfmuZS9rTx5LxZNGqo9jzrrpTBKaK-v99YYqsaAijvWY5_hJYUnyiTDs1VlnGd/s320/VLT_Laser_Guide_Star.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This week you may have seen articles about a paper Professor David Kipping and I wrote called "<a href="http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/03/30/mnras.stw672.full.pdf+html" target="_blank">A Cloaking Device for Transiting Planets.</a>" If you feel so inclined I would encourage you to read the paper itself (rather than the somewhat accurate but largely incomplete coverage it's gotten in the press). As far as scientific papers go I think it's quite readable for a scientifically literate public audience. It was decidedly outside our main research foci but we whipped it up in very little time while we continued working on other projects. We had a lot of fun with it and I believe it is a worthwhile addition to the SETI literature.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">On the whole I have been thrilled with the response that we've gotten. The paper has been discussed on </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.space.com/32423-laser-cloak-could-hide-earth-from-aliens.html?cmpid=514648" target="_blank">Space.com</a></span>, <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35938886" target="_blank">the BBC</a>, <a href="http://www.popsci.com/lasers-could-help-us-hide-from-aliens?src=SOC&dom=tw" target="_blank">Popular Science</a>, <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/03/31/hostile-alien-protection-plan/#.VwAtATYrKoh" target="_blank">Discover Magazine</a>, <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/lasers-could-hide-earth-from-prying-aliens/" target="_blank">Scientific American</a>, and <a href="http://gizmodo.com/this-is-how-we-could-hide-our-planet-from-bloodthirsty-1768223112" target="_blank">Gizmodo</a>, to name just a few. The story blew up on Twitter, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1Pqqf_6J9w" target="_blank">our explanation video</a> has garnered more than ten thousand views so far. We've reached readers all over the world, and for myself I think it is an unambiguously positive thing to get a non-scientific audience thinking about exoplanetary science, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and whether we ought to try to make contact or, by contrast, try to hide ourselves. For many people it takes something a little provocative to make them pay attention to science and I'm delighted our work got their attention.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Our paper explored the energy requirements of using lasers to distort a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_%28astronomy%29" target="_blank">transit signal</a> for the purpose of communicating with or cloaking one's presence from an observer in another star system. Crucially, we suggested that other civilizations could be doing this to their transit signal right now. We found the energy requirements to do this for the Earth were remarkably low, within the capabilities of today's technology, and we therefore made the case that an artificial transit profile is very easily achieved by other civilizations and could thus be detected in transit data. Importantly we made no statement about whether we ought to cloak or ought to broadcast our own presence, though many media outlets seemed to think we were advocating for the construction of such a device. We simply ran the numbers and put it out into the world for others to chew on.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Of course we knew that the most provocative aspect of our paper was the notion that we could build a cloaking device for our own planet, and the paper uses the Earth as a concrete example of how one might achieve a transit cloak. We opted to title the paper "A Cloaking Device for Transiting Planets" in part because we knew this aspect would get the most attention and that meant more readers. I suppose we could have called it "A Cloaking and/or Broadcasting Device for Our Planet or Other Planets", but I think the title we went with is the strongest.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I think in retrospect we could have stressed to journalists a greater emphasis on the idea that this is something <i>other</i> civilizations might be doing right now, that we might be able to see signals in the data that could tip us off to other intelligences out there. (Interesting to note: once we realized the main thrust of our paper was getting lost in the mix we doubled down on emphasizing it, but those quotes were routinely left out of the coverage). We see the paper as essentially a SETI paper, but clearly (and understandably) public attention has largely focused on building a cloaking device for the Earth. And while we as science fiction geeks share a kind of enthusiasm for futuristic concepts like a cloaking device for the Earth, I think it's safe to say that as scientists we share the skepticism about the necessity for building such a device on the Earth, at least right now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Nasty comments about us and our work in the comments sections of the various articles were inevitable, and I certainly don't take them to heart because I stand behind our paper and I know that they've gotten an incomplete picture of our work. Many people lamented the waste of money, though we haven't spent a public dime on this paper. We haven't built anything and there are no plans to do so, and we are both paid through a private institution where we work on a variety of projects. Others suggested we had "a lot of time on our hands", but the truth is David thought up and wrote the core of the paper over the course of a single weekend (when most people are catching up on Netflix), and I'd estimate I spent maybe 10 hours on my part of the paper. We spend the vast majority of our time working on "serious" scientific projects that get much less attention. In any case I suspect that many people making these comments about our paper hold similarly dim views towards other high-profile science projects like the detection of gravitational waves with LIGO or the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN -- both "serious" science projects that come with very hefty price tags.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I have been more surprised by the negative response from some astronomers, particularly SETI astronomers. I understand that astrophysicists roughly fall into two camps: those who think the search for life elsewhere is a major motivator behind our investigations of the Universe, and those who are really just interested in understanding the <i>physics</i> of the Universe. I of course fall into the first group, but to each their own. Even so I am puzzled by the negative response from those astronomers who actually work on SETI topics. You'd think they would share our enthusiasm for a new potential signal in the data. But I am almost certain that none of them actually read our paper before commenting on it. They may have read an article or two about it, and maybe got a skewed take on it from a journalist calling for a quote. (I've learned that the propagation of information in the media can sometimes be like a game of telephone... the second article borrows from the first, the third from the second, and so on... in the end the information can be wildly distorted). </span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps those critical astronomers think that our paper is less science and more science fiction, but that same criticism is often levied at SETI projects. Or perhaps they think that a paper like ours detracts from "serious" science in the eyes of the public. But again, those in the public who might think our work is a waste of time would probably also balk at the money and time that goes into, say, studying the structure of the Cosmic Microwave Background, and we don't shy away from those investigations for fear of those who don't share our enthusiasm for learning about the cosmos.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The criticism has not be universal, thankfully; our paper has received support from a number of astronomers in the community, including some high profile scientists. I think Professor Avi Loeb at Harvard said it best in the Space.com article:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"If there is a literature of ideas like this one, ideas that people proposed for potential signals that are artificial -- the richer the literature is, the better it is. [...] The moment we find something artificial, it will change everything. It's good to have the imagination at work prior to seeing something unusual, so we are aware that there are possibilities beyond what we expect." </span></blockquote>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">From the beginning we have believed that
the question </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">of how we might detect extraterrestrial civilizations, as well as the question </span>about broadcasting or hiding our presence, is a
worthwhile question to explore and is something we want the public and scientists alike to
think about. Insomuch as our work has sparked that conversation around
the world I think we have achieved our objective and then some. And I'll
argue as much to any scientist or member of the public who thinks our
work lacks merit. Public engagement with science is critical, and papers like ours engage the public imagination in a way many esoteric studies simply cannot. It's also imperative that we not shy away from exploring big questions even if some people fail
to see the value. And as for the question of finding extraterrestrial
intelligence out there, I continue to believe that such a discovery
would be one of the most important of all time. If our work means we're
playing even a small role in that process of discovery, I'll be very
happy indeed.</span></div>
<div id="stcpDiv" style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"If
there is a literature of ideas like this one, ideas that people
proposed for potential signals that are artificial — the richer the
literature is, the better it is," Loeb said. "The moment we find
something artificial, it will change everything. It's good to have the
imagination at work prior to seeing something unusual, so we are aware
that there are possibilities beyond what we expect." - See more at:
http://www.space.com/32423-laser-cloak-could-hide-earth-from-aliens.html?cmpid=514648#sthash.OkDcQDgN.dpuf</span></div>
<div id="stcpDiv" style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"If
there is a literature of ideas like this one, ideas that people
proposed for potential signals that are artificial — the richer the
literature is, the better it is," Loeb said. "The moment we find
something artificial, it will change everything. It's good to have the
imagination at work prior to seeing something unusual, so we are aware
that there are possibilities beyond what we expect." - See more at:
http://www.space.com/32423-laser-cloak-could-hide-earth-from-aliens.html?cmpid=514648#sthash.OkDcQDgN.dpuf</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div id="stcpDiv" style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"If
there is a literature of ideas like this one, ideas that people
proposed for potential signals that are artificial — the richer the
literature is, the better it is," Loeb said. "The moment we find
something artificial, it will change everything. It's good to have the
imagination at work prior to seeing something unusual, so we are aware
that there are possibilities beyond what we expect." - See more at:
http://www.space.com/32423-laser-cloak-could-hide-earth-from-aliens.html?cmpid=514648#sthash.OkDcQDgN.dpufFrom the beginning we have believed that the question about broadcasting or hiding our presence, as well as the question of how we might detect extraterrestrial civilizations, is a worthwhile question to explore and is something we want the public to think about. Insomuch as our work has sparked that conversation around the world I think we have achieved our objective and then some. And I'll argue as much to any scientist or member of the public who thinks our work lacks merit. Public engagement with science is critical and we shouldn't be shy about exploring big questions even if some people fail to see the value. And as for the question of finding extraterrestrial intelligence out there, I continue to believe that such a discovery would be one of the most important of all time. If our work means we're playing even a small role in that process of discovery, I'll be very happy.</span></div>
</blockquote>
Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-47882230256045737922015-07-09T23:07:00.002-04:002015-07-10T09:51:13.695-04:00On the Occasion of New Horizons' Historic Rendezvous with Pluto<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/PIA19702_modest.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/PIA19702_modest.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image of Pluto captured by <i>New Horizons </i>on July 7th, 2015 at a distance<br />
of ~5 million miles.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In a few short days the <i>New Horizons</i> spacecraft will arrive at Pluto. After a nine year voyage, traveling faster than any vehicle before it, the spacecraft's rendezvous understandably has the internet and the scientific community buzzing. Pluto has been a source of fascination since it was first discovered in 1930; the last outpost before you reach interstellar space, Pluto has been the doleful guardian at the edge of the solar system. Until very recently it was nothing more than a <a href="http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-2006-09-b-full_jpg.jpg" target="_blank">point of light in our most powerful telescopes</a>, but in the last several months we have seen tantalizing images of the binary planetary system, and we are almost certainly in for some big surprises when we finally arrive. I can't wait to see the surface up close.<br />
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000003783764/fast-and-light-to-pluto.html?action=click&contentCollection=science&module=lede&region=caption&pgtype=article" target="_blank">A great video</a> was posted on the <i>New York Times</i> website a few days ago, highlighting the <i>New Horizons </i>mission and interviewing astronomers and planetary scientists about the meaning of the Pluto encounter. In the video the mission is framed as the end of an era, the final voyage to complete our 50-year reconnaissance of the Solar System. And in a sense it's true; we have visited all the major worlds, as well as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)" target="_blank">few minor ones</a>, and Pluto is the last stop on the traditional tour.<br />
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All the same that felt funny to me saying we've completed our reconnaissance of the Solar System. I have always defended the 2006 IAU decision to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet... not because the definition isn't problematic, but because the classification begs the question, "why <i>is</i> Pluto a dwarf planet?" The answer of course is that there is a whole host of other worlds out there, equally real and equally exciting, that you just didn't get the chance to learn about in fourth grade because no one knew they were there! There is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_(dwarf_planet)" target="_blank">Eris</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/90482_Orcus" target="_blank">Orcus</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50000_Quaoar" target="_blank">Quaoar</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haumea" target="_blank">Haumea</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makemake" target="_blank">Makemake</a>, and distant <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/90377_Sedna" target="_blank">Sedna</a> on its highly elliptical orbit-- to name just a few of the more prominent <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt" target="_blank">Kuiper Belt</a> objects. Why should Pluto get all the glory? It seems to me that for many people nostalgia for the wonder they felt as a kid trumps the wonder of what is to come, the wonder of the unknown. But these worlds await our exploration! There is so much left for us to discover. And lest you think that if you've seen one, you've seen them all, consider the curious array of moons that orbit Jupiter and Saturn. There is an astonishing variety of worlds in our Solar System, and there is good reason to think that what we will find in the coming years in the depths of Trans-Neptunian space will be startlingly different than what's come before.<br />
<br />
Still, even if this isn't really the end of our forays into deep space exploration, it is indeed the end of an era. This will be the last time for a very long time that we see a mission to the outer solar system. There was a thirty year gap between the launch of <i>New Horizons</i> and the launch of <i>Voyager</i>, the last spacecraft to venture out beyond Saturn, and there are no real plans in the works for anything to follow along these lines. Will it be another thirty years until we take another shot at exploring the vast depths of our own Solar System? If so we cannot expect any more close-up images of these worlds until about 2050 or so. So better soak it up while you can. Of course we can hope that next-generation telescopes, ones currently under construction or in the planning phases, will yield in the years to come imaging of the distant dwarf planet retinue spectacularly better than present technology, but even then we'll have to wait at least a decade or so for those to come online, and we cannot expect anything like the breathtaking detail that's in store for us with the Pluto flyby in a few days.<br />
<br />
Astronomy tends to be that way: we're always looking at what's coming next, but we usually have to wait an awfully long time for it to come. It's the combination of budgetary restrictions, the limited supply of expertise, and the extensive planning involved that makes space missions and revolutionary telescope projects take so long. In science it often happens that scientists work for many years on a single project, and in some cases a scientist will die before he or she see the fruits of that labor. In a sense that's true of every scientist, as the work always outlives the man or woman behind it, and proves useful to the next generation long after they've gone. You might feel a bit sad to think about those scientists never getting to see what wonders may be wrought from their work, but for myself I find it to be humbling, and invigorating. We are all just a small piece of this puzzle, but we are part of a collective enterprise that will be making remarkable discoveries and improving our understanding the universe long after we've turned to dust. So long as we humans can preserve our way of life, the body of scientific knowledge will be ever increasing, and each little contribution lives on.<br />
<br />
I will always be impatient for the next mission. I can't wait to see probes sent to Europa and Titan and Enceladus. I can't wait to see a manned mission to Mars. But the anticipation is also thrilling. It spurs the imagination and generates wonder in a new generation of scientists. We have to leave some mysteries for the future, after all.<br />
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For now, Pluto is the present we get to open in a few days. It's been a long time coming, and it's going to be spectacular.<br />
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<i>Thanks for reading, and staying with me during this rather long hiatus. I'm rarely moved to write much these days, but <a href="https://twitter.com/sagansbrain" target="_blank">I remain active on Twitter</a> (a much less demanding medium) so please follow me there if you feel so inclined. In any case, I hope to get back to writing more regularly, one of these days.</i><br />
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<br />Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-41824954697949126202014-03-10T19:10:00.001-04:002014-03-10T19:10:07.913-04:00Mentors in Science -- Carl Sagan's Lingering Influence Check out my appearance on WNYC's <i>The Takeaway </i>with John Hockenberry. Loads of fun. I was pleased to share the radio with Emily Rice (Astrophysicist at College of Staten Island and the American Museum of Natural History) and Seth Redfield (Professor of Astronomy at Wesleyan):<br />
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Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-3080422079108592422014-02-05T13:43:00.002-05:002014-02-14T22:20:39.111-05:00Answers for Creationists<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/2014-02/enhanced/webdr02/5/0/enhanced-15285-1391576908-9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/2014-02/enhanced/webdr02/5/0/enhanced-15285-1391576908-9.jpg" height="245" width="320" /></a></div>
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Last night Bill Nye faced off with Ken Ham (of Answers in Genesis fame) in a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kgvhG3AkI">lengthy debate over creationism and science.</a> I caught only the last half hour or so, and unfortunately I found it to be less-than-illuminating. Perhaps it was the sheer exhaustion of such a long debate, but by the time I tuned in I found Nye's answers to be a bit rambling and failing to adequately address the implications of the questions (he gave an admirable explanation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, for instance, but he failed to point out the fallacy of the question's crux). Nevertheless, I admire Nye for his willingness to go into the lion's den and speak science to those who would ordinarily have no interest in it. </div>
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This morning BuzzFeed provided a <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/messages-from-creationists-to-people-who-believe-in-evolutio?bffb">photo series of creationists with their questions for Bill Nye.</a> Obviously I am not Bill Nye, but as a scientist I thought I could try to answer them. It's interesting looking at these photographs... none of these people strike you as unintelligent, back woods people with their heads in the sand. They appear perfectly capable of listening to rational arguments, so it isn't necessarily a fool's errand trying to answer their questions. Anyway, here goes:</div>
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1. Bill Nye, are you influencing the minds of children in a positive way?</b><br />
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Science education is unambiguously positive for children, even in cases where the science curriculum may be at odds with your personal beliefs. We live in a complicated world, where people hold a wide variety of views, and it is no service at all to shield children from such disagreements. As Carl Sagan once said, "science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking." The idea is, we look at the world and question it, try to make sense of it, refuse to take things at face value or blindly follow authority. The great thing about science is, it's open to everyone. If you think a scientific theory is in error, you have every right to test it and try to overturn it. But for your work to be accepted by the scientific community, it must be rigorously tested, independently verified, and shown to be in good accordance with the facts.</div>
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Science is not about indoctrination. Quite the opposite, in fact. Skepticism is crucial for the process, so there is absolutely no problem at all with students who do not fully trust a science teacher simply because he or she says something is true. The key is, though, this sort of skepticism must be brought equally to every assertion about the origin of our Universe, or the origin of species. It is not good science to be skeptical of what is taught in the science classroom and then to turn around and not show equal skepticism of what is taught in the church. If you are truly interested in finding the answers, you must question boldly even your most cherished beliefs. <br />
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<b>2. Are you afraid of a Divine Creator?</b></div>
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It's a little difficult to be afraid of something for which you see no evidence. But if you're an agnostic, perhaps you leave open the door for the possibility of a deity, even if you think the typical Judeo-Christian version of such a deity is likely to be grossly inaccurate. What then? Well, this really just boils down to a fear of death, doesn't it? A fear of the unknown. It's easy enough to fear some sort of Divine Retribution maybe waiting for us on the other side, but is this any more likely than Divine Forgiveness? Can the Bible offer any assurances on this matter one way or another? Not really. Like so many issues addressed in the Bible, there are no clear answers. <br />
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I think we all have felt the fear of death at some point in our lives, and perhaps we would be tempted to go along with Pascal's Wager (might as well bet on the existence of a God, because if he does exist you're in good shape, and if he doesn't it won't make much difference). Well, fine. But if you see no evidence for a creator, how can you know what he or she or it desires? The Bible could contain the answers, but it has major internal inconsistencies. In terms of governing one's own behavior, the best bet is to go with what you personally believe to be morally correct, but then, how is this any different from adhering to a moral code outside of a belief in a God?</div>
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<b>3. Is it completely illogical that earth was created mature? i.e. trees created with rings... Adam created as an adult...</b></div>
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Is it illogical that God would create trees fully mature, complete with rings? Well yes, a little. Why would God plant so much evidence of an old Earth if it weren't really an old Earth? It seems to me very illogical indeed. It clearly implies that he is trying to trick us all into deducing the wrong answer. You may say, "well, God is mysterious, we don't know why he does what he does," but that's really a cop out, don't you think? This little explanation may be fine with your belief system, but it certainly has no real explanatory power. <br />
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Of course, we're not really worried about trees older than six thousand years old, we're worried about <i>rocks </i>that are much older than that. Radiometric dating is a fabulous tool, and by calibrating a number of different metrics (including tree rings) we really can tell how old something is within a small margin of error. But this question goes beyond tree rings; for instance, was the light from distant galaxies (or even stars in our own galaxy) already en route when God created the Universe six thousand years ago? There again I must ask, why should God want us to find so much evidence against a young Earth? This seems to be at odds with the Christian understanding of God as a loving father.</div>
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<b>4. Does not the second law of thermodynamics disprove Evolution?</b></div>
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No, it does not. This question refers to the supposed contradiction that we see an increase in order (or a decrease in entropy) on the Earth, while the second law of thermodynamics calls for an increase of entropy in a closed system. The problem here is that the Earth is not a closed system... it enjoys a ceaseless supply of energy from the Sun. Furthermore there is absolutely no requirement that entropy increases everywhere... rather, the <i>overall</i> entropy must increase in a closed system, but again, our planet is not a closed system. Clearly there are ordered things all around us, so it sounds like the beef here is with the second law of thermodynamics, not with its implications for evolution. Frankly, the 2nd law of thermodynamics doesn't have anything to do with evolution.<br />
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<b>5. How do you explain a sunset if their [sic] is no God?</b></div>
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The Earth rotates on its axis and the Sun crosses the sky, eventually setting in the west. As the light passes through more atmosphere at the end of the day than it does at midday, the light becomes redder and dimmer. As we all know, these rather simple mechanisms are capable of producing some breathtaking vistas. </div>
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But the question isn't really asking about mechanics. It's asking about beauty in our world. But why is God the only explanation for beauty? Can we not appreciate a sunset, or a waterfall, or a dandelion, on our own? Do we need God to appreciate a piece of music, or an exquisite sculpture? I don't see how this adds anything to our appreciation of these things. Perhaps this interpretation adds to your admiration of <i>God</i>, but this seems to me a different matter entirely. </div>
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<b>6. If the Big Bang Theory is true and taught as science along with evolution, why do the laws of thermodynamics debunk said theories?</b></div>
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The laws of thermodynamics do not debunk the Big Bang Theory. I would refer the reader to <a href="http://machineslikeus.com/news/big-bang-beginners-14-does-big-bang-theory-violate-second-law-thermodynamics">these excellent discussions of the issue. </a> </div>
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<b>7. What about noetics?</b></div>
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I'm having difficulty answering this question because it is so vague. Is the question about whether consciousness is proof of a creator? I would have to say that it hardly constitutes any proof at all. We cannot just be amazed by things in our world and ascribe it to a creator, and then say, "well, there's no way it could be that way without a creator." The brain, which is the seat of our consciousness and our intelligence, is certainly a remarkable organ, and science has yet to fully grasp the scope of its mechanisms. But is it not just a extremely complex computer, receiving input from the world and selecting bodily actions based on that input? We <i>feel </i>like we are individuals, with unique gifts and thoughts, but our past experiences are also unique to us, as are our genetics, so why can't we have unique reactions based on an incredibly complicated and personalized behavioral algorithm? And does it not say something about the material (rather than spiritual) aspect of the brain, that so much of our behavior is wrapped up in chemistry? Add a little alcohol, or THC, or Xanax, and we feel very different indeed. This points to underlying physical mechanisms. The key is, could our brains have evolved from less sophisticated brains, brains that were capable of a great deal but not quite as much as our own? The evidence suggests that the answer is yes. </div>
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<b>8. Where do you derive <u>objective</u> meaning in life?</b></div>
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No scientist claims to have an <i>objective </i>meaning of life in mind. We may all have <i>subjective </i>ideas about why we're here, or whether there is any reason at all that we're here. But science is not after an objective meaning of life. </div>
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<b>9. If God did not create everything, how did the first single-celled organism originate? By chance?</b></div>
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Scientists are currently engaged in trying to answer the question of how life arose on the Earth. There are some exciting hypotheses out there, yet to be proved, but the key here is that single-celled organisms did not by any means fall together by chance. The first stirrings of life would have been much more simple than a single-celled organism... it was probably some very basic organic chemistry, a rather simple molecule that eventually was able to make crude copies of itself from the other molecules in a primordial ocean or in nutrient-rich clays. Remember that the DNA molecules in every cell of your body are constantly making copies of themselves, and this is just chemistry guiding these processes. The first self-replicating molecules would not have been nearly so complex as the modern DNA strand, but if they could reproduce themselves and be subject to natural selection, that's enough to get things going. </div>
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<b>10. I believe in the Big Bang Theory... <u>God</u> said it and BANG it happened!</b></div>
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Ah, I see what you did there. Very clever. </div>
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<b>11. Why do evolutionists / secularists / humanists / non-God believing people reject the idea of their [sic] being a creator God but embrace the concept of intelligent design from aliens or other extra-terrestrial sources?</b></div>
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Someone may be watching a little too much H2. Most scientists do not believe in the so-called "ancient aliens" hypothesis. Some scientists do believe the seeds of life could have been brought to Earth from elsewhere via comet or asteroid (from another part of the solar system, perhaps, or even another star system), but these hypotheses are ultimately consistent with the idea of abiogenesis. The question is only where the origin of life first occurred, here or elsewhere (I tend to think the former is by far the more likely). </div>
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<b>12. There is no in-between... the only one found has been Lucy and there are only a few pieces of the hundreds for an "official proof."</b></div>
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There are many more early hominid fossils besides Lucy. Scientists have learned a great deal about our origin by studying these fossils, but there are still some questions to be answered. Since DNA breaks down very quickly after the death of an organism, it can be difficult to construct a family tree for human beings based on DNA analysis alone. Older techniques, like studying skeletal morphology, have to be employed. These techniques are quite rigorous themselves, but may leave some ambiguity. Nevertheless, it's clear that all these fossils, which show evidence of bipedalism and a trend toward modern human features (larger brain case, flatter face, etc), are hundreds of thousands or millions of years old. The evidence is in the rocks, and in the bones themselves, measurable by radiometric dating. </div>
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<b>13. Does metamorphosis help support evolution?</b></div>
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I had to look this one up. There are really two ideas behind this question. One is that, historically, metamorphosis was linked to the concept of evolution. But the two processes are really quite different, so this pre-Darwin understanding about change in organisms should have nothing to do with our modern version of the theory. Second, the metamorphosis that some animals undergo (for example, the caterpillar's metamorphosis into a butterfly) is supposedly an example of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity">irreducible complexity.</a> Irreducible complexity has been shown to be wrong time and time again, but this will never satisfy those who seek to prove creationism or intelligent design. So long as there is any organism displaying a yet-poorly-understood characteristic, it is likely to be seized upon as evidence of irreducible complexity. Suffice it to say, the track record of irreducible complexity under scrutiny is not good, and should give pause to anyone advancing such ideas. </div>
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<b>14. If Evolution is a theory (like creationism or the Bible) why then is Evolution taught as fact.</b></div>
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The evidence for evolution is overwhelming. One need only go to any natural history museum and examine the wealth of skeletons of creatures from many different epochs. The evolution of fish, reptiles, mammals, birds -- the relationships between modern organisms and their early ancestors are unmistakable. And the mechanism for evolution -- natural selection -- is also demonstrably true. The rise of so-called superbugs (antibiotic-resistant bacteria) makes it clear that organisms undergo evolution. For example, suppose a given antibiotic can kill 99% of bacteria in a population. That leaves just 1% of the original population, but all of these surviving bacteria will have something in common: antibiotic resistance. When they reproduce, all of their progeny will receive this trait as well, and presto, we have a new population of bacteria fundamentally different from their ancestors, a population forged from the pressures of survival. <br />
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Well ok, but what about morphological differences? These bacteria might be marginally different from their parents, but you can't make big changes can you? Well of course you can. Just look at the enormous variety of dogs that we humans have produced over the last few hundred years. Different breeds of dog can look astonishingly different from one another, and all we had to do was encourage the breeding of some varieties and discourage the breeding of others. Given the changes we can make in only a hundred years or so, just imagine what nature is capable of given a billion years. </div>
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<b>15. Because science by definition is a "theory" -- not testable, observable nor repeatable -- why do you object to creationism or intelligent design being taught in school?</b></div>
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This is incorrect. Science requires testability, observability and repeatability. Anything that does not fit these requirements is not good science, and that includes creationism. </div>
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<b>16. What mechanism has science discovered that evidences an <u>increase</u> of genetic information seen in any genetic mutation or evolutionary process?</b></div>
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Have you ever invented a new word to describe something? Or can you recall a word you learned that was only recently created? Language is a dynamic process, and new words are created all the time that carry new meanings. We have a standard library of letters or sounds from which to construct new words, just as the DNA molecule has base-pair "letters" in which new genetic information can be encoded.</div>
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But this is only an analogy. The DNA molecule is the carrier of genetic information. It is a spectacularly sophisticated little molecule, but it is just a molecule, made up of atoms and subject to the laws of chemistry and physics. But these laws have amazing consequences. The extraordinary diversity of chemistry's manifestations should speak to the stupefyingly large potential of DNA. </div>
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Consider just one example from chemistry. Nitrogen gas makes up 78% percent of the air we breathe. Carbon is the basis of all living creatures on this planet. Clearly neither of these atoms are harmful to human beings. But put carbon and nitrogen together and you get cyanide, a deadly poison. Why should this pairing of two innocuous substances be so different from the sum of its parts? Because that's how chemistry works. All around us we see that different arrangements of atoms can have astonishingly different results.<br />
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More to the point, we see that the DNA molecule is capable of coding for an incredible array of characteristics in organisms. But clearly there had to be some time at which these characteristics were not present in Earth's biodiversity... for example, there were no wings, no feathers, no eyes, no bones, in the early days of the Earth when there was nothing but single-celled organisms. The information for these things had to arise at some point after the beginning of life on Earth. But none of these characteristics arose spontaneously. They would have evolved, like any other feature, very gradually, and based on survival pressures. </div>
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<b>17. What purpose do you think you are here for if you do not believe in Salvation?</b></div>
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Again, science does not purport to provide an objective meaning of life. Even so, scientists all certainly have their own ideas about what they should do with their lives. It seems clear that most of them have committed themselves to understanding the secrets of nature, and enriching the world with those discoveries. To me this is as high a calling as any. But we need not believe that we were "put" here for any particular reason. We happen to be here, and it's up to each of us to figure out how best we can spend our brief time walking the Earth. </div>
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<b>18. Why have we found only one "Lucy", when we have found more than 1 of everything else?</b></div>
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Well, if you mean we only found one early hominid called Lucy, that's correct. Lucy is a single fossil skeleton. But we have found many early hominids from different periods in our past, and put together they paint a clear picture of the evolution of human beings, over the course of a few million years. </div>
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<b>19. Can you believe in "the big bang" without "faith"?</b></div>
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If there is one thing all scientists have "faith" in, it is the scientific process. It is self-correcting, and has proved to be extraordinarily powerful in unlocking the mysteries of our world. This faith, then, leads to a general willingness to accept ideas that are shown after painstaking work to be in best accordance with the facts. In the case of the Big Bang, we have a few independent lines of evidence. We have the expansion of the Universe as discovered by Hubble. If you run the clock back, at some point some 13.7 billion years ago all the matter of the Universe is compressed into a tiny space. Then we have the Cosmic Microwave Background... leftover radiation from the early Universe, rippling down the corridors of space-time. If there is another interpretation of these facts, I'm open to hearing them, but so far the Big Bang is the best explanation available to science. </div>
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<b>20. How can you look at the world and not believe someone created / thought of it? It's <u>Amazing!!!</u></b></div>
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Yes indeed, the world is amazing. But scientists need not rely on belief of an omnipotent creator in order to appreciate our world's beauty. In fact, many scientists would say that the evolution of our Universe, from the primordial fires of the Big Bang to the present, is all the more astonishing in that it was not directed or preordained, but arose simply from natural processes. How amazing is that?!</div>
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<b>21. Relating to the big bang theory ... where did the exploding star come from?</b></div>
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Well there was no "exploding star" per se, but the question is really asking about the Universe before the Universe. Cosmologists are still wrestling with these questions, and a number of hypotheses have been advanced. But did there <i>have </i>to be something before the Universe? And what is the meaning of a location in space, or an object / singularity / deity / whatever existing outside the Universe? These are not easy questions. But we must be cautious when dealing with these fantastic ideas of physics. Consider the famous double-slit experiment, where photons (which we sometimes think of as particles) behave like waves. Even when a single photon is fired into the apparatus, it displays constructive and destructive interference. What do we make of this? It's certainly mind-bending stuff, to think of something simultaneously as a wave and as a particle. Or consider time-dilation, a proven side effect of traveling at speeds that are a significant fraction of the speed of light. Why should time slow down because we're moving? It hardly makes any sense from our low-velocity experiences here on Earth. The point is, in the quantum world or the cosmological world, there can be phenomena that utterly defy our everyday instincts of what is and isn't possible. But we simply cannot trust our everyday experiences in these realms, as they are so very different. </div>
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<b>22. If we came from monkeys then why are there still monkeys?</b></div>
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We did not come from monkeys. We share a distant ancestor with monkeys, but we evolved alongside and are more closely related to other hominids, like gorillas and chimpanzees. Just like a family tree, the tree of life branches so that two species can be descended from a single ancestor species. But evolution can be more dynamic than this, because of its driving mechanism. When two populations become isolated for an extended period, they will no longer interbreed and may experience different survival pressures based on their respective habitats. After many generations, they may be distinctly different from each other in appearance and genetic makeup. But this does not require that both species have drifted by equal amounts from the ancestor population. One population may resemble the ancestor very closely while the other may have drifted away considerably. We may say that our ancient ancestors (Homo habilis, say) looked a lot like modern gorillas or chimpanzees (low forehead, protruding jaw, etc). So we look quite different from Homo habilis, while other primates still share many of these traits. But again, these characteristics are dictated by the survival pressures exerted on every species, and this in no way causes a problem for evolution by natural selection.</div>
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Well, that's it. I hope it's been helpful.</div>
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Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-63049583707933938792012-04-22T20:51:00.000-04:002013-05-15T17:54:59.850-04:00Our Choice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It's common these days to hear global warming skeptics admit that climate change is real, but doubt humanity's impact on it. The advocates of the do-nothing approach are these days no longer able to deny the fact of climate change, so they are forced instead to spin the remaining uncertainties. In so doing they have set upon a classic bait-and-switch that aims to confuse those who are not well versed in the physics of the environment. To admit global warming is real, and then to turn around and question the scientific consensus on its cause, is for some people a kind of reasonable middle ground, a halfway point that is appealing because it's conciliatory. Unfortunately, it's just wrong.<br />
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Sometimes you will hear it said that the evidence is ambiguous. It is not. More than one hundred years of study, on perhaps the most pressing issue in science, points to a clear correlation between rising CO2 levels, rising temperatures, and the explosion of the human population in the last 150 years or so, coinciding with the industrial revolution. For the entire history of humanity -- hundreds of thousands of years or so since the dawn of what we typically call a human -- the population was very low. It was not until the mid-19th century that the population reached 1 billion people. Today, it is more than 7 billion. <br />
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This exponential rise in the human populations begins at the beginning of the industrial revolution. And as our lives improve, our population swells, and our technology enjoys an exponential growth. In short order we are able to produce millions upon millions of machines that spew obscene amounts of carbon into the air. This carbon remained below the Earth's surface for millions of years -- deposited over millions of years -- but today we are devouring it at an insatiable rate, dumping our waste products into the air and into the ocean. There is no natural mechanism that could have released such enormous amounts of carbon into the environment all at once. It required the human catalyst for rapid change.<br />
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It's clear by now that the explosion of the human population feeds, and feeds on, the growth of technology, and this technology is almost entirely fueled by these ancient deposits. It is the lifeblood of our modern society. How could it not be a major signature of our impact on this planet? <br />
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The connection between humans and climate change, then, could not be any clearer. In the physical sciences, most of the time, you can trace a causality back through a sequence of events, piecing together where something came from. In this case, we measure increasing levels of carbon in the air, and we must explain where it's coming from. There has been no uptick in volcanism, no rapid change on the Earth other than the explosion of the human presence. Humans must be responsible for the rising carbon in the atmosphere. But where is it coming from? There is only one possible source: the vehicles and power plants that burn ancient carbon deposits. Ever wonder what's coming out of the exhaust pipe in your car? Well, it can be measured, and the verdict is unambiguous: carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. It all goes up in the air.<br />
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Does it just evaporate into space? There's no way that's possible; the molecules would have to be incredibly energetic to reach escape velocity. No, they simply settle into the air for a long, stable existence. The measurements reflect this, and the way this change to our atmosphere affects the situation is clear. More carbon dioxide results in higher temperatures. This correlation between more greenhouse gases and higher temperatures is well demonstrated, and it is clearly reflected in the history of past climates. It's just physics and chemistry.<br />
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So, it's not any better to say you believe in global warming but doubt its cause. In both cases, you're ignoring the evidence. <br />
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But there are real consequences. There is an economic impact that looms very close on the horizon. There is the very real possibility that we consume our resources to such a gross extent that we do long-term damage to the world we depend on. There is the chance that we set up an unforeseen, climatic feedback loop which we are unable to reverse. We may interrupt the food chain in unexpected ways, setting off massive extinctions. This is the cost of our luxurious lives.<br />
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But the long-term solution is not austerity. We cannot well standby and say that we are the generation for which human progress stops. We humans could never abide by such a nonsensical idea. It could not be implemented even if anyone wanted to. The ultimate goal is not that we should enjoy fewer lights, fewer drives, fewer comforts. No, we want all of these things; we always have and we always will. That's why the choice now is clear: we must harness clean and renewable energy. It is abundant, affordable, sustainable, and dependable. It's the right thing to do.<br />
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It means honoring the mantle that has been bestowed on us by our ancestors, and is owed to our progeny, to guard well the Earth we call home. It means living free of air pollution, free of dangerous changes to our environment, and free to live in harmony alongside the other creatures of the Earth, evolved, as we were, over billions of years. They are far too lovely for us to be so cavalier about their existence. Any extinction caused by humans is a rueful and dreary event. It ought not happen.<br />
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Just imagine a world free of the drug of nations, fueling global tensions and wars. Free to grow without guilt, empowered to protect the world and pursue our own interests at the same time. It is achievable.Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-78297816287895445502012-03-15T12:11:00.023-04:002013-03-21T00:50:43.429-04:00Kicking the Gasoline Addiction<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Even as the US economy seems to be turning a corner, gas prices are on the rise, and as Americans feel the pain at the pump President Obama's approval numbers are sinking. Both sides have used gas prices as a political football in the past, blaming opponents for high prices and taking credit when prices are low. In 2008, we'll recall, there was much talk about gas prices, and of course President Bush, supreme master of failure in the eyes of Democrats, was chiefly to blame. Now it's Obama's turn to face the wrath of the gas-addicted public, and round and round we go.<br />
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The truth, as most economists will tell you, is that the president has little real control over gas prices. Sure, he can tap the strategic oil reserve, and if we had a President Gingrich, we could open every square mile of offshore and wildlife preserves for drilling. But such efforts would still have a small, and quite delayed effect, and of course they are short-sighted solutions to persistent, long-term problems. The true fallacy of "drill baby drill" was that increased drilling could have precisely zero influence on the gas prices of 2008, or 2012 for that matter. In reality, gas prices are controlled by the price of oil, and as this is an international market, the president has virtually no say in the matter.</div>
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<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-only-reason-gas-is-5-a-gallon-is-oil-companies-have-convinced-us-prices-are-out-of-their-control-2012-3">In an excellent article at <i>Business Insider,</i> </a> USC marketing professor Ira Kalb argues that oil companies have been ingenious in their ability to hike prices to record levels, even in the midst of a struggling economy, all while raking in record profits, enjoying enormous tax breaks, and skirting their promises to invest in alternative energy sources. The oil companies have convinced us, Kalb says, that they need subsidies from the government to help keep gas prices down, when in reality the price of oil is solely under their own control. In essence, they invariably maintain an illusory shortage of their product to keep prices high, so that the money will keep rolling in and they can keep funding politicians who will protect their tax breaks.</div>
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But what can we do? According to a 2007 study from the Department of Transportation there are approximately 254 million passenger vehicles in the United States. The vast majority of these cars burn that sweet unleaded fuel. And here in the US, much to the chagrin of utopians, public transportation is largely not a viable option to reduce gasoline consumption. Sure, the big cities like New York get along quite well with a robust metro transit system, and of course public transportation seems to work well in Europe. But we are not nearly as densely populated as Europe (for comparison, if the United States had the population density of Germany, we would have about 2.2 billion people living here instead of 313 million). So while there are some places for which public transportation is effective, there are vast expanses of land where building trains or running buses is just not workable.</div>
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As the population expands we will need more energy. This energy demand, short of some unimaginable global catastrophe, will never go away. It's clear that fossil fuels, though still fairly abundant at present, are finite resources that will ultimately give out. These resources can never be replenished on any reasonable timescale, and we are burning through millions of years' worth of carbon over the course of just a few decades. The Earth is large, but just as a microscopic virus is capable of taking down very macroscopic creatures, so too can we have an outsized influence on the fate, and resources, of our planet. There's no question that we are well on our way to depleting Earth of its fossil fuels. </div>
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So why are we so reluctant to ween ourselves off this addiction that we all know has to be kicked? We can blame myopia, inertia, vested interests in the status quo, and the comfort of the familiar. We are like children who fail to understand that sucking a thumb, while perfectly normal as a toddler, will be totally unacceptable as an adult. Just as children are incapable of fully understanding the world of adulthood that awaits them, so we are trapped by our own inability to see what the world will look like, say, 100 years from now. Most of us have a rosy vision of the future, and perhaps we think it will simply appear without any effort by us or our children. But the truth is, we build our future, and we have to start laying the foundation now. The alternative is stark: perpetual reliance on OPEC and the like. </div>
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You'll notice we've not even addressed the obscene effects on the environment caused by burning fossil fuels. The tragic neglect of our planet is among the most pressing of human problems, and it must be addressed. But a sizable portion of this country thinks climate change is a hoax. So what will convince them it's time to get off gas? Maybe the pain at the pump will do it. We are slaves to the manipulated markets of oil. Only by diversifying our energy sources can we hope to end the monopoly that eats into our pocketbook at a time when so many are struggling. But of course you can't put a wind turbine on your car! What's the solution?</div>
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We have to make a serious transition to electric cars. At this stage, the plug-in hybrid, like the Volt, is probably the right way to go, because the reality is, people rely on cars for both short and long trips, and few are going to buy a car that they can only drive for 50 miles before needing several hours of charging. Indeed, gasoline has its advantages: it's comparatively cheap for its energy content, and it takes just a couple minutes to refuel a gas-powered car. There will probably be a place for gasoline on our energy menu for a long time. But ultimately, if we're driving electric cars (that use gas only sporadically), we can diversify our energy resources, taking advantage of any number of alternatives. Costs drop across the board, because we can shop around for the best technology and oil companies no longer enjoy a monopoly on the consumer's driving habits.</div>
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But we may not be able to rely on the consumer alone to make this choice. Sure, the record of hybrid vehicles is certainly encouraging; since their wide release in 2000 with the Toyota Prius, they are somewhat commonplace today. Nevertheless their sales make up only around 3 percent of the total market for new cars. That number could be much higher if the government took a more active role in encouraging more fuel efficiency. Rather than providing subsidies to oil companies -- technologies of the past -- these same subsidies could be redirected to the technologies of the future, helping consumers and car companies to make a major shift toward hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles. This shift would benefit the public enormously.<br />
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Very few of us really need high performance vehicles capable of towing an airplane or reaching 200 miles per hour. For those who do, those vehicles can stay on the market; there is no need to ban them. But most regular commuter vehicles could be equipped with new technologies to use far less gasoline, and when people see how much less they're paying to power their vehicle, they'll be unlikely to go back. Right now, the extra cost of hybrid or plug-in hybrid vehicles will hold back all but the socially conscious from taking the plunge; but if fuel efficiency is the standard, prices will inevitably fall. There's nothing inherently expensive about hybrid or electric car technology; its cost is just a function of its rarity.</div>
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Gasoline is a drug to which the entire country, indeed the entire world, is addicted. Like other drugs, its effect can be felt in the wallet, and it has demonstrably negative consequences for its users. Like other drugs, it can be very difficult to give up. People's whole lives may be geared around access to it. But like other drugs, it can be kicked with enough determination. The choice is clear: either we persist in the notion that we are at the mercy of oil pushers abroad, or we can seize the opportunity to choose our own destiny. </div>
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Many on the right like to say that the government is too powerful, and that any government involvement with the market is dangerous. But a democratic government like ours is in the hands of the people, and it is one of the only tools the people have to counterbalance the exploitive, runaway profit engineering of the modern corporation. Just as we need checks and balances in our government -- a system that is much celebrated, for good reason -- we need checks and balances in the economy, and that means government must be able to influence the direction of business (it's clear that business already has a great deal of influence on the direction of politics). We should rely on experts to craft legislation that steers, and not stifles, the market, but we must dispose of the notion that the market is a magical place that collapses as soon as you shine a light on it. The market is just an extension of human psychology, and it carries all the foibles of the human mind along with it.</div>
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We cannot rely on corporations to change their ways out of the goodness of their heart; contrary to that familiar Romneyan trope, corporations are not people, and they don't have hearts. We'll have to steer the change we need ourselves, and use the power of government as a means to that end. Change may be tough, but the alternative is far worse. The longer we drag our feet, the longer our energy supply will be subject to the whims of foreign moguls and events in hostile regions of the world. It's time to kick the gas addiction.</div>
Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-26933132736479028522011-12-02T11:53:00.019-05:002012-02-09T13:46:23.122-05:00God and the Science Classroom<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/csp/cms/sites/dt.common.streams.StreamServer.cls?STREAMOID=APWCu0g4ITNMKrsq$mjTac$daE2N3K4ZzOUsqbU5sYuvCAkVa3mYddpzIgsjHaDuWCsjLu883Ygn4B49Lvm9bPe2QeMKQdVeZmXF$9l$4uCZ8QDXhaHEp3rvzXRJFdy0KqPHLoMevcTLo3h8xh70Y6N_U_CryOsw6FTOdKL_jpQ-&CONTENTTYPE=image/jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="234" src="http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/csp/cms/sites/dt.common.streams.StreamServer.cls?STREAMOID=APWCu0g4ITNMKrsq$mjTac$daE2N3K4ZzOUsqbU5sYuvCAkVa3mYddpzIgsjHaDuWCsjLu883Ygn4B49Lvm9bPe2QeMKQdVeZmXF$9l$4uCZ8QDXhaHEp3rvzXRJFdy0KqPHLoMevcTLo3h8xh70Y6N_U_CryOsw6FTOdKL_jpQ-&CONTENTTYPE=image/jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/santorum-calls-public-schools-undermine-teaching-evolution">In a recent interview with the <i>Nashua Telegraph</i></a>, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum was asked about teaching creationism in schools. In a familiar tone, Santorum claimed that there is a fear, on the left and in the scientific community, of talking about God in the science classroom because of a kind of political correctness, and a sense that, in spite of its awesome explanatory power, the notion of a creator has been arbitrarily considered off-limits to inquiry. Here's his exact quote:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">There are many on the left and in the "scientific community," so to speak, who are afraid of that discussion because oh my goodness you might mention the word, God-forbid, “God” in the classroom, or “Creator,” or that there may be some things that are inexplainable by nature where there may be, where it’s better explained by a Creator, of course we can’t have that discussion. It’s very interesting that you have a situation that science will only allow things in the classroom that are consistent with a non-Creator idea of how we got here, as if somehow or another that’s scientific. Well maybe the science points to the fact that maybe science doesn’t explain all these things. And if it does point to that, why don’t you pursue that? But you can’t because it’s not science, but if science is pointing you there how can you say it’s not science? It’s worth the debate.</span></blockquote>There is, of course, nothing surprising about Santorum's argument, he's made it many times before. Science curricula are probably not terribly threatened by his candidacy -- he's polling in single digits at present -- but still, his views reflect those of a large section of our country, and the question is often posed. Why, exactly, can't God be a part of the equation when it comes to science classes?<br />
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Separation of church and state is where the conversation usually begins. And for good reason: it's a guiding principle we would probably be well advised to follow. As the founding fathers realized, governments will work better if they are decoupled from religion, because religion introduces a whole series of complications which are best avoided. We need only look at the regime in Iran to see the perils of mixing religion and government. In spite of the fact that Christian theology is largely built around peace and harmony ("Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth," says Jesus on the mount), and other religions similarly advocate such values, terrible wars have been fought in the name of religion, and religious zealotry remains a serious threat in the world. That is not to say that religion is inherently violent... such a statement would be itself too zealous. But it is worth noting... no war has ever been fought over science, by contrast. That's because science is not an ideology, any more than math is an ideology. It has its rules and regulations, but it is a tool more than it is a system of beliefs. <br />
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What's so terribly ironic about the separation of church and state debate is that many of the people who advocate so strongly for introducing God to the science classroom are some of the same people who are so terrified of that imaginary threat of Sharia Law, which is supposedly spreading across the nation like a virus. Perhaps ironic is not the right word. Those who attack the Sharia Law straw man fail to see the connection between their desire to bring their God into the law of the land, and the (imagined) desire of their Muslim counterparts to do the same. Of course, they would counter by saying that Islam is a violent religion, one that seeks to sanction <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing">honor killings</a> in the United States. There are obviously significant cultural differences throughout the world when it comes to what constitutes moral behavior, but there can be no doubt in this case: there is certainly no place for such brutality in a civilized society. Even so, when it comes to violence, Christianity doesn't exactly have a spotless record, either, and there's a slippery slope when it comes to theocracies. What starts as a benign attempt to create a faith-based utopia can easily become a government that demonizes, harasses, imprisons, tortures or even executes dissenters. Such things have happened many times in the history of humanity, and indeed, such things continue today in some parts of the world. <br />
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But the church and state debate is a political argument, not a scientific one. Why God really can't be in the science classroom is because the God hypothesis is wholly antithetical to the way science is performed*. Science relies on the notion that experiments can be designed, claims can be substantiated, hypotheses can be tested; and regardless of your opinions about religion, it's clear that these rules simply cannot be applied. There is no way to test the God hypothesis. There is no experiment that can be tried that will either prove or refute the existence of God, and no formula that can describe the probability of God's existence (creationists sometimes try to go the other way, calculating, for instance, the probability of a DNA molecule spontaneously falling together on its own, thereby supposing to calculate the improbability of life's genesis without divine intervention. Unfortunately for these clever apologists, these calculations are founded on a number of flawed assumptions I won't go into here). <br />
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In short, God has to be left out of the equation because God is not a variable that can be considered in any meaningful way. God, as he is usually imagined, has no mass, no length, no density or energy or anything else you might wish to measure. There's no way to quantify the God variable. But why can't we simply say that God is a sort of catch-all variable, that factors in whenever we can't get the numbers to work? Well, if we did that, we just wouldn't get anything done.<br />
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There was a time, not very long ago, when we imagined that the gods were in charge of the motions of the planets. Not in a way that we might think of it today, of course; today you might hear someone say that God created the universe and set the planets on their orbits around the Sun. But to the ancients, the planets were moving across the sky under the direct control of the gods. In some cultures, the Sun was considered a real deity, crossing the sky in a boat or a chariot. The universe was then a mystery to us, and there seemed to be no way that these objects could move amongst the stars unless there was some sort of divine hand steering them. It's not that our ancestors were stupid to come up with these explanations, it's just that humanity was groping around in the darkness for millennia, struggling desperately to make sense of a world that operates with hidden mechanisms. Indeed, modern humans have walked the Earth for many thousands of years, but it's only in the last 500 years or so that scientists like Copernicus, Newton, Galileo, and Kepler (among many others) have been able to grasp the true nature of our solar system, and by extension, the wider universe.<br />
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But suppose we had been content with our original explanation, that the gods were directly involved with the motions of the celestial sphere. Suppose we were content to say that the laws of physics simply could not be deduced, that it was beyond us, that it was simply the realm of the gods. Without a systematic way of describing the natural world, it might've been argued that the god hypothesis offers a better explanation to the question of why objects fall. Before we know the answer to that question, it's much easier to simply say, "that's the way the gods want it to work," or, "the gods made it fall." Then, as now, the intentions of the gods would have been opaque to us, and we might have been satisfied to keep it that way. After all, the planets never seem to come down out of the sky to intervene in our affairs, so what does it really matter anyway?<br />
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Well, had we not pushed ourselves beyond these mystical interpretations of natural phenomena, we would be, essentially, stuck in the Bronze Age. We would be unable to understand the mechanism behind the changing of seasons, for instance. The ancients experienced the oscillation of the warm and cold months, and figured out they could predict the seasons by observing the sky, but you need a model of the solar system to understand why it happens. Had we not given up the planet-god hypothesis, we might still run away in terror during an eclipse of the Sun or Moon. We would have no weather satellites, no communications satellites, no space telescopes, no spacecraft examining the planets up close. The window into our origins, opened for us by modern astronomy, would be forever closed to us. Without physics -- a system of describing the mechanics once thought to be the realm of the gods -- we would be incapable of these marvelous things. But the laws of physics were not handed down from on high; they were deduced with painstaking work and an unyielding devotion to the facts. Our modern world enjoys the fruits of that bold rejection of mysticism.<br />
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It can be hard, sometimes, to imagine the world that existed in the time of Galileo, when something like a heliocentric model of the solar system could be seen as a major threat to Church doctrine. The structure of the solar system seems to us today a trivial matter, hardly threatening to prove God doesn't exist. But do we not still have those who doubt, beyond all reasonableness, the discoveries of modern physics? Consider the mental gymnastics performed by creationists who simply cannot accept the central revelation of modern cosmology, namely, that our universe is billions of years old. Elaborate alternative explanations have been imagined to explain why we can see the light from galaxies billions of light years away, even though we live in a universe that is, they say, only six to ten thousand years old. Their rigid theology of Biblical literalism requires them to discount the major discoveries of physics, astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, geology, biology, genetics, and paleontology. They would rather deny the great achievements of humanity's quest for knowledge than accept that their prized book may not have all the answers.<br />
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It's true that science doesn't have all the answers, either. But with the cosmos as vast as it is, there can be no such thing as an unabridged encyclopedia of the universe. We are incapable of knowing <i>everything</i>, but we've certainly learned a lot, and we're learning more all the time. Science has been the key to our success, and our survival, and we do a grave disservice to our children, and those who will follow them, when we trample on the central guidelines of this precious tool. Some of our discoveries may make us uncomfortable -- as Galileo's work made the Vatican uncomfortable -- but we gain nothing by burying our heads in the sand. Better to face the world as it is than to persist in delusion.<br />
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Those who dream of injecting theology into the science classroom believe that science is just another kind of religion, eager to stifle debate and indoctrinate susceptible minds with scientific dogma. But on the contrary, science depends on debate, it thrives on it. Some of the greatest discoveries have overturned what were once considered fundamental laws of nature. But not all debates are created equal: you can debate whether the tau neutrino can really travel faster than light, for example, but you can't really debate whether the Earth goes around the Sun. We've sort of figured that second one out, and if we had to constantly re-litigate every discovery we've ever made, there would be no time for new discoveries. Individuals are welcome to challenge any theory they like, but it takes a compelling argument to be taken seriously by the community.<br />
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The evidence for an old universe, or for evolution by natural selection, is far more abundant than can possibly be described here. But the problem is, the opponents of science do not believe in its methods, so there is a fundamental disconnect. Theirs is a faith-based worldview, and it cannot be tested; therefore they imagine that science is the same thing. They imagine that scientists are just clerics of a different sort. The situation is almost certainly made worse by the epistemic closure that is especially prevalent among those who feel there is some kind of mainstream conspiracy to silence them. When we can watch our polarized news, and attend schools that teach us what we want to hear, the gap between science and religion becomes wider and more difficult to bridge. It is a troubling state of affairs.<br />
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Those who support teaching the decidedly unscientific alternative to evolution known as intelligent design often say they want to "<a href="http://sagansbrain.blogspot.com/2010/10/teach-controversy-treacherous-lingo-of.html">teach the controversy.</a>" It's become something of a joke for those on the other side, an easy punchline. But it's about as good a line as any that could be market tested. It begs the question, why can't we teach the controversy? And why are scientists so frustrated if they know they're right?<br />
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Richard Dawkins, the perennial wit, has imagined a perfect analogy. It's as though you have a crowd of people who sit in a Latin class and claim the Romans never existed. Of course none of us were around to see any Romans walking around speaking Latin, but we have great ruins of their once magnificent empire, we have paintings, statues, texts, and of course, the Romance languages which survive as the descendants of Latin. It's easy to see the parallels between this and the case for evolution. The evidence is abundant, so even if none of us have ever seen these ancient people alive, the evidence that they were <i>once</i> alive is overwhelming. No matter, the opponents of Latin education are unmoved, and by the way, they want you to teach the controversy, so that the kids will have all the facts: some people say the Romans existed, others say they didn't. No problem!<br />
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It's clear that science and religion just cannot exist in the same classroom, any more than math and philosophy can be combined in the same classroom ("Pythagoras tells us that A squared plus B squared equals C squared... but does the triangle really exist at all? How do we know?"). Science and religion need not be diametrically opposed to each other, but they are fundamentally different things. It will take more education, not just of scientific concepts, but of the nature of science as an endeavor, if we're to break through this dreary conflict.<br />
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<i>Footnote:</i><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">*Note, the God hypothesis is antithetical to the way science is<i> performed</i>. That's not to say that religion and science must be mutually exclusive. Many theologians would argue that science and religion are perfectly compatible, and that the breathtaking discoveries of science reveal the true magnificence of God. The point here is that God is typically conceived as a supernatural being outside the boundaries of physical laws, so he/she/it is <i>by definition</i> beyond the scope of scientific proof or disproof.</span>Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-17548794193017782752011-10-19T16:46:00.007-04:002012-02-01T10:03:49.329-05:00Why Search For Life?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0912/ngc6217_hst.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="284" src="http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0912/ngc6217_hst.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div>The search for life elsewhere in the universe is among the most awesome of scientific endeavors. For the first time in the 4.5 billion year history of our planet, creatures from the Earth are now plumbing the depths of space in search of our neighbors. It is a daunting and frustrating job: the vast distances between our solar system and others, the sheer number of stars that must be surveyed, and the complicated set of circumstances required just to allow for the possibility of life on another world, make the work exceedingly difficult. Even as we have become accustomed to the idea of extraterrestrials through the science fiction of our time, and have made the most breathtaking discoveries about the cosmos, there are those who deride the search for life as mere fantasy, a waste of taxpayer dollars. Meanwhile, there are some enthusiasts who persist in the delusion that intelligent extraterrestrials are probably close-by; hiding on the Moon, perhaps, or on Mars. Such 19th-century thinking may be responsible for some disillusionment when it comes to genuine searches for extraterrestrial life, slow and painstaking as they are. In light of the fact that interstellar travel will almost certainly not happen in our lifetime, there is a kind of exploration defeatism. If the aliens are not reachable in our time, so the thinking goes, is it even worth trying to contact them?</div><div><br />
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</div><div>When we truly grasp the profound void that is the ocean of space, we begin to understand the Herculean task that is the search for extraterrestrial life. The universe is far grander in scale than anyone before the 20th century ever imagined. We now know that even our fastest spacecraft, traveling at several kilometers per second, would take many thousands of years to reach the nearest star, just a few light years away. The technology to reach the stars in any reasonable amount of time is unlikely to be within our grasp for at least another century, so our best bet for the moment is long range reconnaissance. We have made some remarkable strides in this vein over the last few decades, but we still have much work to do. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Less than two decades ago we had not yet discovered even a single planet around another star, so the search for life outside our solar system seemed, in a sense, to be putting the cart before the horse. But today, through several elegant techniques, we have now cataloged hundreds of exoplanets. Exquisitely sensitive equipment has been employed to detect the minute wobbling of stars, tugged by the gravity of their planetary companions; and the Kepler spacecraft, staring at one patch of sky, has discovered almost 1800 planetary candidates by observing tiny, periodic dips in starlight intensity -- the telltale sign of transiting planets. From tens, hundreds and even thousands of light-years away, we have discovered the faint signature of alien worlds... gas giants whipping around their parent stars in a few days, and enormous rocky planets, a few of which might just have the right characteristics to support life as we know it. The results are tantalizing, the planets as exotic as they are diverse. Some scientists suggest the Milky Way alone could be home to at least 50 billion planets, and something on the order of 500 million habitable planets.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The discovery of life elsewhere in the Universe would be a defining moment in the history of our planet, a truly revolutionary breakthrough. Never again would we wonder whether we are alone; we would wonder, instead, how many others are out there. The discovery of even a microorganism on a planet or moon in our solar system, living or fossilized, would fundamentally de-provincialize biology, giving us invaluable insight into the origin of life, still one of the most compelling and contentious questions in modern science.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The signature of life in another star system, meanwhile, would prove at last that we are not alone in the galaxy, that there must be countless inhabited worlds in our universe. We might find life by detecting a planet's biogenic atmosphere, though it would be anyone's guess as to what might be there... recall that only in the last century have humans left traces of technology that could be detected from far away, meaning that biological signatures in the atmosphere of an exoplanet -- molecular oxygen, for instance -- could be alien algae, or little green men living on the cusp of their own industrial revolution. </div><div><br />
</div><div>A radio signal, of course, would be an unambiguous sign of advanced civilization. After a few billion years of isolated development, our groping in the darkness would finally begin to subside. In time we would come to know our brothers and sisters in the galaxy, and begin to bridge the great gulf between us. The vast distances between the stars preclude the likelihood of two-way communications, but we could learn much from one-way transmissions. There's no telling how much more advanced our neighbors might be. They could be hundreds or thousands of years ahead of us; indeed, there may be some civilizations out there that are so advanced that we are not even capable of detecting their means of communication -- as though we are an isolated tribe in the jungle with no telephone and someone is trying to send us an e-mail. What magnificent achievements must have been made by these advanced beings of another star, we can only guess. What mysteries of the universe have they solved? How did they survive technological adolescence? Have they found a purpose for existence? The lessons we could learn from an extraterrestrial civilization are incalculable. </div><div><br />
</div><div>But so far, there is only silence. Our galaxy is so immense -- 100,000 light years across, comprised of hundreds of billion of stars -- that there is a good explanation for having not yet found our neighbors; we are listening for the whispers of a needle in a haystack. But could there be no one out there to find? There is always the possibility, however remote, that we are the first of our kind, the first intelligent beings sending our voice out into space. But if this turns out to be true, it is also a profoundly important discovery. Instead of joining the multitude of galactic civilizations, we will have found that we are true cosmic pioneers, far more alone than we ever imagined. Where once we thought we were only carrying the torch of life on Earth, we would now be carrying the torch of life in the galaxy. A more serious responsibility is hard to imagine.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Either way, the question is clearly worth answering, and it can be answered at a reasonable cost. The excitement surrounding exoplanet discoveries, the crowd-sourcing of data analysis, and the grassroots funding for the Allen Telescope Array (a collection of radio telescopes built expressly for the purpose of searching for extraterrestrial life), all suggest that more people are taking SETI seriously. We may still have years ahead of us before we find, or don't find, what we're looking for. But things are looking up.</div><div><br />
</div>Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-89040333749419678352011-08-31T11:03:00.014-04:002011-08-31T11:34:04.164-04:00Juno sends us another Pale Blue Dot<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://blogs.discovery.com/.a/6a00d8341bf67c53ef014e8b1b6db5970d-pi" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="420" src="http://blogs.discovery.com/.a/6a00d8341bf67c53ef014e8b1b6db5970d-pi" width="560" /></a></div><br />
The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_spacecraft"><i>Juno</i> spacecraft</a>, recently launched on its 5-year voyage to Jupiter, <a href="http://news.discovery.com/space/juno-looks-back-snaps-earth-moon-system-110830.html#mkcpgn=twsci1">just snapped this picture of the Earth-Moon system from a distance of 6 million miles.</a> What a lovely and vulnerable pair.<br />
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<a href="http://youtu.be/2pfwY2TNehw">It's worth quoting Carl Sagan:</a><br />
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"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.<br />
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The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.<br />
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Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.<br />
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The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.<br />
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It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>You may have noticed a dearth of postings recently. I'm afraid it's been a busy summer, and will likely be a busy fall. In light of this, some postings will be shorter than has been typical of late, but hopefully I'll be able to write a little more often this way. I hope you will continue to find the content satisfactory. In the meantime, be sure to follow me on <a href="http://www.twitter.com/sagansbrain">twitter</a>.</i></span>Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-63408466487675372612011-07-08T11:58:00.010-04:002014-02-01T00:20:04.931-05:00Farewell to the Shuttle<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Today the space shuttle launched on its 135th and final mission. When the four astronaut crew of <i>Atlantis</i> arrive back on Earth just two weeks from now, a complicated chapter in human spaceflight will draw to a close, and then, for better or for worse, we will have plenty of time to ponder its place in history.<br />
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For the next several years, American astronauts will have to hitch a ride aboard Russian Soyuz rockets to visit the space station largely funded by US taxpayers. In just two weeks, Russia will become the only nation on Earth in the business of launching humans into space on a regular basis. But after a few more years, hopefully, Americans will be flying into orbit atop commercial spacecraft, and NASA will be well on its way toward the goal of sending human beings far beyond low-Earth orbit, to an asteroid, and eventually to Mars and its moons.<br />
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But the future of manned spaceflight is by no means written, and the legacy of the space shuttle's successes and shortcomings looms large. Conceived during the Apollo era, finally launched for the first time in 1981, the space shuttle never quite lived up to its promise of routine spaceflight. It was a technological triumph -- an elegant, reusable space plane capable of delivering large payloads and even retrieving spacecraft to bring back to Earth. But in a way, the seemingly unadventurous nature of its work sapped the energy out of America's appetite for space exploration. The higher-than-expected costs, and the tragic loss of two crews in 1986 and 2003, made us question whether the whole endeavor was really worth it. Even as the shuttle's unique capabilities allowed us to service the Hubble Space Telescope five times in Earth orbit, and delivered many sections of the now magnificent International Space Station, the shuttle program came to be seen by many observers as a waste of time, a holding pattern of sorts. We had made some daring ventures into the abyss, landing 12 men on the Moon, and then we spent 30 years orbiting the Earth, again and again and again and again.<br />
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To say that flying the shuttle was not a daring enterprise is a step too far. Spaceflight of any kind is an extraordinarily complicated venture, where the slightest malfunction can result in catastrophic failure. The <i>Challenger</i> and <i>Columbia </i>disasters are a testament to the true hazards of human spaceflight. But with the advent of the shuttle program, NASA's mission slowly diverged from the dreams of its financiers, and in failing to hold the imagination of the public, what was arguably the main driving force behind human spaceflight -- the itching desire to explore the frontiers first hand -- withered with each successive flight.<br />
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By and large, in the 1960s America was not terribly interested in geological discoveries on the Moon. The Apollo program was not really about science, and for most people, the science was probably of tertiary concern. Politically it was about beating the Soviets, for sport and for security, but viscerally, we recognized its deeper meaning. To walk on the Moon, that rock that has circled serenely above us for billions of years, never once lighted upon by creatures from the Earth, was truly a moment for the ages. Never again would it be an untouched world, forever would it bear the footprints of humans. It was arguably the crowning achievement of human technology. But after only 6 successful landings, we pulled back to plan our next move. The Russians were working on space stations, so we had to get into that game, too. In a sense, the very thing that had driven us to such great heights in the age of Apollo -- competition with the Russians -- drew us back to spend the next three and half decades orbiting the Earth. Meanwhile, dreams of a rapid expansion of space exploration, with moon bases and Mars landings, largely evaporated.<br />
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Still, the space shuttle was and is the greatest vehicle ever built for low-Earth orbit operations. But perhaps it was always doomed to live in the shadow of Apollo. The splendid optimism of space exploration in the 1960s, the breathtaking speed at which we achieved our goals, the seemingly limitless possibilities, gave way to the static pessimism and cutbacks of the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps Apollo was just the high that we could never hope to achieve again.<br />
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In spite of all this, I will miss the space shuttle. It has served us well, and the 355 brave astronauts who have flown on the shuttle have done important work -- conducting a host a valuable zero-gravity experiments, launching interplanetary spacecraft, repairing satellites, and ushering in a new age of international cooperation in space with the Mir and ISS programs. But the shuttle's retirement is a necessary part of moving on to the next mission. If there is something to lament, it should not be the end of a program that by any standard has gone on a bit too long; rather, it is the wide gap between STS-135 and the launch of the next manned American space vehicle. That remains four or five years away, and the way forward is a little murky. Funding for manned space flight is in limbo, though it always seems to be. But as Congress wrestles with the White House over the money and the mission, we will cool our heels while Russia takes our astronauts up at $63 million a ride. Perhaps we will feel the itch again in the meantime.<br />
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The so-called Commercial Crew program seems to be the right way forward. If we are to make manned orbital flights truly routine, as we should hope they will be one day, commercial operations are the next logical step. The resources at NASA are to be refocused on missions beyond the Moon, to an asteroid in 2025 and to Mars in 2035. There's good reason to suspect those dates may slip, as firm deadlines don't seem to mean quite as much as they did in the 1960s. We have set our sights on new horizons, but it will take sustained effort to meet those goals. Spending the next four or five years languishing without a manned space program of our own may frustrate the public just enough to renew our desire to explore.<br />
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At first glance, the time frames involved with going to an asteroid and eventually Mars may seem terribly timid. But we should not forget that going to an asteroid, let alone Mars, will be a spectacularly difficult exercise, for which we are just beginning to design serious plans. The Mars landing, recently described by <i>The Economist</i> as the "El Dorado of space exploration," will require preparation and design of unprecedented sophistication. We have not yet even managed a robotic sample return mission from Mars. Sending astronauts across the interplanetary gulf separating Earth and Mars will be far more dangerous than crossing the mere quarter-million miles from the Earth to the Moon. In fairness to NASA and the shuttle program, dreams of a Mars landing very shortly after Apollo were probably far too optimistic.<br />
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So, here we are. Will we press on to greater voyages, sending out at long last our cosmic argonauts to plumb the depths of interplanetary space? Or will we wait for the next generation to pick up the mantle we have borne just a little way from where we started? <br />
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Time will tell. In the meantime, we say farewell to the space shuttle. Good luck, <i>Atlantis.</i>Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-48013158935011046862011-05-23T12:15:00.008-04:002011-07-08T13:05:10.264-04:00Still Here<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.eurweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/may-21-2011.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="235" src="http://www.eurweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/may-21-2011.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>Well, good news. We survived the rapture. Or rather, we survived saturday.<br />
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It turned out to be a pretty nice day, actually. I was invited to three rapture-themed parties, and we all had a good laugh about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_end_times_prediction">May 21st doomsday prophecy</a> of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Camping">Harold Camping</a>, the 89 year old charismatic responsible for the apocalyptic prediction. Between the throng of Camping's followers spreading the word around the globe, and the habitual jokesters of social media reveling in the absurdity of the prophecy, it made for quite a phenomenon. <br />
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But in the wake of this mirthful saturday, Camping's followers face a brutal reality. Some have alienated their families, others have left their jobs, still others have liquidated their assets to warn the world of their imagined catastrophe. Many of us have wondered what we might do if we knew the world were coming to an end. In Camping's followers, we have some experimental evidence. And the question now is, what's next for these disappointed followers? Will they lose their faith in Camping? Will they lose their faith in God? Or will they delude themselves into thinking that somehow the events of saturday (or more accurately, the non-events of saturday) are some kind of confirmation for their worldview? No doubt reactions will be diverse, but it will be interesting to watch. There have been many religious leaders who have predicted the end of the world, but few have gained so much traction as this one. Where many apocalyptic groups have lived on secluded compounds, Camping has managed to foster a global following. <br />
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But how could such a prophecy capture so many minds? Why are people so willing to trust in these sorts of far-fetched scenarios, when the same people are so dubious about scientific findings backed up by massive amounts of evidence? That question may be too large to answer here, but we can tease out some explanations.<br />
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The most obvious explanation is fear. The end of the world is a very scary idea, especially when we imagine it to be at the hands of God. There is no escape from God's wrath, and the certitude of the True Believers is enough to give anyone pause. But of course, the doomsday prophecy also offers salvation. If you pray hard enough, do enough good, tell everyone you know to repent, you might be chosen to ascend to Heaven while the rest of the Earth is consumed in unimaginable turmoil. Sounds like a no-brainer. Even if you have some doubts, you might as well take <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager">Pascal's Wager,</a> and try your best to be one of the chosen.<br />
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Undoubtedly, Camping's followers are somewhat in the dark about the history of doomsday predictions. There have been many over the years, and so far the doomsday soothsayers are batting zero. Camping, as you might imagine, has dismissed all the other attempts to predict the end of the world, deriding their methods as bogus. But <i>his </i>so-called calculations are the ones we should really follow (and never mind his own failed doomsday prediction back in 1994). Perhaps Camping's followers are bamboozled by these supposed "calculations." They may not have believed Camping was actually conversing with God, but if you arbitrarily assign numbers and values to cherry-picked events in the Bible, tie them together with esoteric numerology, all of a sudden that sounds like science. And who can doubt a science-based reading of the Bible? Interestingly, these True Believers are likely skeptical of real science (Camping himself is a young-Earth creationist), but they are perfectly happy to use scientific-sounding arguments to back up their own beliefs about the Bible.<br />
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It's difficult to determine just how many people took Camping's prediction seriously, but there must have been several thousand at least. Camping's organization is worth as much as $80 million by some estimates, funded by the contributions of his fervent supporters. We can feel sure that they represent a tiny percentage of the American population, but what sets them apart is not an obsession with the apocalypse, but merely the idea that the date of the apocalypse can be discerned from Biblical numerology. Consider this astonishing statistic: according to a recent Pew Research Poll, 41 percent of Americans believe Jesus will return to Earth by 2050. You read that right. <br />
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A number of questions arise from this astounding figure. What does that say about the percentage of American Christians who have embraced End Times theology? It turns out about 54% of American Christians subscribe to this worldview. What are the political views of this group? How do they feel about nuking Iran? Are they concerned about global warming? Do they think gays are evil? Do they believe in science? And why will Jesus return by 2050? What evidence is there that He will come in this lifetime, versus say, 2075, or 2100? Or 3100?<br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Many End Times believers will cite a foreboding sense that things are really starting to fall apart now. All the floods, earthquakes, wars, etc. Well, maybe they're on to something. It's strictly anecdotal evidence, but perhaps we really are seeing an uptick in natural meteorological disasters. After all, increasingly violent storms are a predicted result of climate change. But are things really worse than they've ever been? I wasn't around in the 1960s, but I would guess those were some pretty scary times. We faced a real apocalypse during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Let's also not forget the threat of Germany and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. The fate of the world really did hang in the balance during World War II. So why do people think things are falling apart <i>now</i>? Well, it's a safe bet that we're more scared by the things that actually threaten us than the things that threatened our ancestors. Hitler threatened to take over the world, and succeeded in conquering most of Europe, but he's not too scary to me here on the other end of 66 years.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Even so, we do face significant challenges in the 21st century. Climate change is real, and it has yet to be addressed adequately. Nuclear weapons remain a serious threat to the survival of humanity, and it's clear that the obsession with nuclear weapons as a national status symbol has yet to subside. We are facing energy and food shortages as the population continues to expand. But for those who expect to be magically lifted into Heaven at some date in the not-so-distant future, these problems may not be of much concern. Today the Middle East is a hotbed of violence, and tensions over Israel remain high. But for 41 percent of Americans, that may be good news... according to the prophecy, this is all leading up to the return of Christ. Maybe we should help these developments along.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">So, maybe Camping's followers were just a fringe element, and we shouldn't pick on them too much. But End Times theology remains a major force in the United States, and it has some disquieting implications. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">In spite of a certain satisfaction that comes with failed prophecies, and the relief of having a regular day on May 21st, I feel badly for Camping's supporters. In blindly following their teacher, they have turned their lives upside down. It seems likely that they have been poorly educated. As for Camping, it's hard to know whether he really believes what he's been preaching, or if he is just the latest in a long line of charismatic con artists. But his followers just longed for salvation, and feared for the lives of their loved ones. They may have been misguided, but their intentions were good. And in 2011, it is not difficult for people to consume bad information. The polarized news channels, the niche media outlets, the proliferation of the internet, and irresponsible programming from seemingly trustworthy sources, all make it very easy. Pseudoscience is everywhere, and it can spread like wildfire.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Anyway, I'm glad we're all still here. </div>Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-31489043708284448282011-04-22T09:51:00.014-04:002011-05-04T13:28:40.695-04:00On Earth Day, Dreaming About The Future<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.uncg.edu/bae/people/palvia/earth2-browse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="290" src="http://www.uncg.edu/bae/people/palvia/earth2-browse.jpg" width="290" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo from the <i>Galileo</i> spacecraft, 1990.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>I grew up with dreams of a dazzling future. As children of the 20th century, I'm sure most of us did. The future of my imagination had computers you could talk to, fabulous portable electronics, video phones, virtual reality, and people living in space. Indeed, some of those dreams have become a reality. In our time we have seen some remarkable technological advances -- the explosion of the internet, the dizzying leaps in computing power, the ubiquity of powerful personal electronics, and breathtaking discoveries in medicine, astronomy, and cosmology, for instance. In spite of recent economic stagnation, there is the persistent sense that our best days are yet to come. The future of our dreams holds untold technological wonders.<br />
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This future, of course, is predicated on the consumption of power. Lots of power. The technologically sophisticated lifestyles we have come to enjoy will require an unending supply of energy, on an enormous scale. In 2005, the United States alone consumed about 100 quadrillion BTUs, roughly the energy contained in 800 billion gallons of gasoline or 3.6 billion tonnes of coal. Annual world consumption is on the order of 450 quadrillion BTUs, and with the world population climbing ever upward, it's easy to see that the demand for energy will continue to swell. <br />
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But there's a problem. Our power consumption is responsible for an obscene level of carbon emissions which threaten to alter the climate of the Earth, causing violent storms, coastal flooding, the destruction of ecosystems, the acidification of the oceans, and the widespread extinction of many species, which may have a profound impact on the food chain. Fueled mainly by coal, oil and natural gas, this level of consumption is unsustainable at best, and extraordinarily reckless at worst. <br />
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On Earth Day, much is made about the need for conservation. Not only should we recycle and do what we can to minimize pollution, but we should also cut down on our energy consumption. That's a great idea, and in 2011, that's what you must do if you're serious about saving the planet. At a time when there is heartbreakingly little political will to make big changes in our energy economy, the only way to reduce our environmental impact is individual responsibility. Earth Day is an important part of spreading that message, making sure people know what they can do to make a difference, but it may do little toward convincing the millions of Americans who are decidedly hostile toward environmentalism. And so, even if every environmentalist in America were to minimize their carbon footprint, half of the population might persist in unchecked consumption. <br />
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What is troubling about the energy conservation message, and what is understandably so unattractive to those on the right, is the austerity. <br />
<a name='more'></a>We are told to turn off our lights when we leave a room. We should unplug everything when not in use. But for myself, I don't want to turn off the lights! I would prefer to have every light on when I'm at home in the evening. But if I'm going to be serious about the environment, I have to knock it off. Adding to the frustration is the sense -- familiar to any voter -- that the actions of one single person cannot have much of an impact. If I'm extremely responsible about my energy consumption, it still doesn't feel like I'm changing anything... the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues to tick upward. And of course the opposite is also true: If I'm terribly irresponsible when it comes to the environment, it doesn't really feel like I'm doing much damage. After all, I'm just one person, and the world is very large. But the reality is, you're either a small part of the problem, or a small part of the solution.<br />
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But austerity is not how I imagined the future. None of us dreamed of a future in which we have all learned to be extraordinarily frugal with our energy resources. We have dreamed of flying cars, faster airplanes, bigger televisions... but that future will require lots of energy. We might imagine a world where recycling is as routine as brushing your teeth, where saving energy is as natural to us as closing the window on a cold day. But the inhabitants of the future will not be super-beings, miraculously trained in the ways of environmentalism at some unknown time between now and then. No, they will be us, and they will be our equally fallible progeny. We would be foolish to count on a sea change in personal responsibility.<br />
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That's why I believe the government has to intervene in some way. We just can't hope to get all the way there with personal responsibility, and austerity is just not a long-term solution. But with an energy economy based on clean, renewable sources, we would not have to worry nearly so much about our carbon emissions. We could consume energy more-or-less unselfconsciously, and I suspect that's an idea America could get behind.<br />
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Undoubtedly, the biggest investment would be the energy production itself. We should not waste much time with technology that seeks to convert corn into fuel; the process simply consumes too much energy to start with. The yield is too low, and the carbon emissions of production ultimately make the technology insufficient for our needs. On the other hand, we have a collection of simple, elegant solutions available to us: harness the power of the wind, the power of the Sun, the power of the waves. None of these on their own are a perfect solution, but together they represent the best answer to solving our energy crisis. There is an infinite amount of power available from these sources... we are only limited by the number of generators we can build. There is no need to mine, drill, or grow; we can simply harvest the abundant energy of nature. Some of the technology is not yet cost competitive, but it could be, given a leg up.<br />
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There's a funny thing about technology: as it ages, it becomes much cheaper, but it is obviously no less sophisticated. A typical VCR in 1986 might have set you back about $300; adjusting for inflation, that's almost $600 in 2010. But a VCR/DVD combo, purchased in 2010, might cost you as little as $60. It's not that VCRs are 10 times easier to produce now than they were 25 years ago. Instead, market forces have dictated the price. The point is, there is nothing inherently expensive about most of our clean energy alternatives. Rather, they are simply not quite as cheap as they could be, because they are still comparatively rare. The one exception to this is solar power... most photovoltaic cells are made from rare Earth materials, so they cannot be made much cheaper. But we can feel sure that in time, given enough support and demand, wonderfully imaginative ways will be found to create these materials synthetically, or something far less expensive will be found to work almost as well.<br />
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Of course, it would be difficult for entrepreneurs to start clean energy companies on their own. But since it is in the best interest of the nation, the government would be well advised to invest. We can imagine an arrangement whereby the government fronts much of the initial cost to install a network of clean energy production sites, and then the coal, oil and natural gas companies could buy the government out over time... not unlike the very successful rehabilitation of American car companies in 2009. In this way, these corporations would not be put out of business by the government. Rather than stifling growth and passing unfunded mandates, the government would be able to steer the energy economy in a direction that benefits all parties, and allow the private sector to take over gradually. A partnership between government and business, benefiting the public at large, is essentially what both parties want anyway. The companies could remain the nation's chief energy suppliers, and the historical opposition to their product would fade away. And it would make good sense for these companies to take the deal... as time goes on, fossil fuels will be more difficult to access, and as the effects of climate change become more apparent, public opinion could force them out of business altogether. Other nations are now moving to get in on the clean energy revolution, so the United States would be wise to get ahead of the market while it can. The time is now to start moving on building a clean energy economy. The plan I've outlined may be flawed in some way, as the situation is far more complex than can be summed up in a few paragraphs. But the point here is not to advance a particular idea, so much as to emphasize the need for novel approaches to the problem. We need a lot more people thinking boldly. We need imaginative solutions.<br />
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Reducing energy consumption in the short-term remains critical. The transition to a clean energy economy won't happen over night, so we will still rely on fossil fuels to bridge the gap. But beyond personal responsibility, higher efficiency standards can play a big role here. The solution would seem to require little in the way of government spending. We need only be brave enough to tell the corporations that their products will have to be a little more efficient if they want to sell them in the United States. Efficient windows, light-bulbs, appliances, automobiles... these changes need not put too much strain on the market. If every company has to play by the same rules, there should be no major fluctuation in the market dynamics. Besides, the American demand is not going away. So long as there are Americans, there will be companies itching to sell to them. And if efficient products are the only ones available, that's all that will be used. I can no longer choose to purchase leaded gasoline. It was taken off the market, and we are all better for it. Any tremors in the market caused by higher efficiency standards should dissipate quickly, and they would be a small price to pay for securing the energy future. Instead of fearing the economic consequences of doing the right thing, we should focus on finding ways to make sure doing the right thing is economically productive.<br />
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President Obama has proposed that 80% of our energy come from clean energy sources by 2050. That's a step in the right direction, but if history is any guide, this goal will be adjusted, watered down, or downright abandoned in the coming years. It will take sustained effort to see all of the necessary changes through to completion. There are powerful interests that would like to maintain the status quo. But these powerful interests are more concerned with short-term profits than long-term viability, and it is the job of the government to temper the needs of business with the needs of the people. In a time of economic downturn, there will be those who say we cannot afford to make big investments. But some people will never be on the side of government solutions. And I, for one, have a hard time imagining a better investment.<br />
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Earth Day is about spreading awareness, and that is crucial in 2011. There can be no serious plan put into place until there is the political will to do so, and we know that the political will follows sluggishly behind mainstream opinion. We will have to evangelize for science. We will have to educate people on the real dangers of climate change. In the 21st century, we are used to having pills to take for any ailment. We are vigilant when it comes to our own health. But there are no magic pills to maintain the health of the Earth, and we have ignored the symptoms for too long. We've got to save the planet if we're to see the future of our dreams.Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-54796983769168638802011-04-08T09:39:00.011-04:002011-04-22T09:51:59.862-04:00The Clarity of Embarrassment.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEZM4V0MZqyqZ4DfUIJIR0ERT1rGHREq6nF7-FeIctUoAmU6cOcYL_KJEiHaL7uAwd3uLIqe-kGp3QSRFHgM-mk8eU4_F5IkKZxJZRuE6nR8w0agZuFKtivSCzS-YzmYhlfm8HltqSucxz/s1600/fail-whale.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEZM4V0MZqyqZ4DfUIJIR0ERT1rGHREq6nF7-FeIctUoAmU6cOcYL_KJEiHaL7uAwd3uLIqe-kGp3QSRFHgM-mk8eU4_F5IkKZxJZRuE6nR8w0agZuFKtivSCzS-YzmYhlfm8HltqSucxz/s320/fail-whale.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>Yesterday I sort of embarrassed myself in front of thousands of people in the<a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/SagansBrain"> twitterverse. </a> It might not have been such a big deal, but it was a lapse in critical thinking, and since this blog puts a lot of emphasis on skepticism, I couldn't help but feel like a fool.<br />
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Let me explain. Yesterday, Richard Wiseman, author of <a href="http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/">an excellent blog</a> featuring fantastic optical illusions and puzzles, posted a irresistible magic trick on his twitter page. He invited readers to select one of five cards -- as he labeled them: 9C, 2H, 5C, 7D, and 10S -- and then he asked you to click on <a href="http://yfrog.com/h7f8wiwj">this link</a> to see if he guessed it correctly. Try it now... did it work for you?<br />
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Well, it worked for me. Just like any other magic trick, I knew there was nothing supernatural about it, but I assumed that there was some kind of trick that allowed him to make the prediction. After all, he got <i>my</i> card right, and I've seen plenty of other tricks in a similar vein -- number tricks, and various other word games that almost always get the right answer. Perhaps it was some kind of statistical phenomenon, I thought, whereby people almost always select the 2nd of five options. Or maybe it was that people tended to prefer its placement on the page, which he must have chosen strategically, or maybe people tend to like the letter "H" more than the others. I couldn't see how it was possible, but as with many other things in this world, that didn't mean there wasn't an explanation. I felt that there was one. On his twitter page, Wiseman said he was getting an excellent response from the twitter card trick, and he was going to share a few of them. Perhaps eager to expand my own readership, I responded with an enthusiastic endorsement of the trick, and to my surprise, he shared it with his 75,000 followers just a minute later. <br />
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Within a minute of my first message, I qualified it with another: there is, I said, a built-in 20% chance that he'll get the card right by coincidence, but I thought that there had to be more to it than that. Well, in just a few more minutes, a number of clever folks were taking shots at my intelligence. I immediately realized my oversight.<br />
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I hadn't questioned my assumptions. Why would there <i>have</i> to be more to it than a 20% chance of getting the answer right? He's not performing in front of an audience, so he's under no pressure to get the answer right, and there's a certain opaqueness about twitter that allows one to highlight messages you like and keep invisible the ones you don't. So all he needed to do was bamboozle a few people, and share their testimonials. I hadn't seen the comments of the 80% of people who tried it and did not have their card predicted correctly. It was a classic experiment: between me and many other tricked readers, it demonstrated our willingness to be fooled, our talent for imagining elaborate explanations, and our tendency to record the hits and ignore the misses.<br />
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This is, of course, a well known phenomenon. When I play roulette, my odds of winning are just about the same every time I play. But if I'm feeling lucky while I'm playing, I may take more notice of my wins than my losses. And just the opposite is also true; if I'm feeling unlucky, I may take more notice of my losses... and of course in either case, my suspicions are confirmed, and I seem to have some evidence that the universe is on my side, or is conspiring against me. Indeed, this sort of thinking is pervasive, and it's hard to set aside. Some people are chronically at the mercy of an insidious cosmos. When we harbor ill feelings toward another group of people -- another ethnicity, nationality, political party, etc -- we have a tendency to catalog in our minds all of the evidence that supports our prejudice, and forget about all the evidence that contradicts us. When we adhere closely to a particular theology, we may call good things that happen "blessings," but we may be unable or unwilling to attribute the bad things to the benevolent deity we imagine God to be.<br />
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We can all be fooled sometimes. As much as you might strive to think critically about the world, sometimes it doesn't take much to make you throw your skepticism right out the window. It doesn't matter that I knew it wasn't "magic." I realized quickly enough that there was a 1-in-5 chance of success regardless of whether there was anything else at play, but it took longer to accept the fact that the trick was perfectly ordinary, that there was nothing special about it except that I happened to be in that 20% of people who just by accident saw evidence that it was more than just chance. We are often unable to see beyond our own narrow frame of reference, so that with just a single trial (your experience), you might deduce that there is a complex system at play, rather than simply a high probability of having that experience as the result of pure chance.<br />
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Our interpretation of the world can be similar in just about any circumstance. We see the Earth and the universe as perfectly suited for harboring lifeforms like us, so we may conclude that it was designed with us in mind. Of course, many cosmologists think there could be any number of other universes, and any number of different properties for the physical laws of nature. But it's easy to see that beings capable of contemplating the universe are only going to exist in a universe where those beings are permitted by the laws of nature. It's a bit like speculating on your purpose for being alive at this moment. You might wish to think that there was a special, predetermined chain of events that led to your conception and birth, but what about all of your potential brothers and sisters that never made it through the barriers of birth control? They cannot attest to any special purpose, because they never existed. We may feel like there has to be some spiritual director of the great cosmic drama, but the universe is under no obligation to adhere to our preferences. The universe is a place rich in mystery and wonder, but in terms of any alleged purpose or design, the truth could be more ordinary than we want to think, or more ordinary than it feels. We are prone to deducing design where there may be none.<br />
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Insomuch as this was an embarrassing moment for me, I would love to just delete my tweets and not highlight this little incident. But science has got to be bigger than that. We have to be brave enough to admit when we are wrong. And in any case, embarrassment is not all bad. We need it to learn valuable lessons. I've learned to be careful about what I say, largely due to the countless times I've gotten egg on my face for not doing so. Those lessons go a long way toward making you a better person, but as we saw yesterday, it's no guarantee against making mistakes in the future. The lesson here, of course, is that skepticism has a marvelous way of helping you to not make a fool of yourself. If you can approach the world with a critical eye, you're more likely to avoid a twitter pile-on. And believe me, it smarts.<br />
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<a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/SagansBrain"><i>Follow on twitter.</i></a>Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-23654448714445469632011-04-02T15:22:00.000-04:002011-04-02T15:22:50.763-04:00Skepticism!In case you were wondering, yesterday's post, "The Awesome Implications of Narwhal Telekinesis," was just an April Fool's joke. I hope you enjoyed it.Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-31985762466906564392011-04-01T10:27:00.011-04:002011-04-02T15:25:40.810-04:00The Awesome Implications of Narwhal Telekinesis.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAQxYpR2fsQG2ZPun3sl1-aWUsH5sovbaLT7rK7Hz62M3vvTb8FIC32VLuJuQTuLHn4jB9C7_o7vcpl0Z9AIT-pWzZQUeBVhPwcI1bwisCrSjOHgUEj-LCJqSoiFBRvsGIF77gHK1VAvKP/s1600/narwhal1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAQxYpR2fsQG2ZPun3sl1-aWUsH5sovbaLT7rK7Hz62M3vvTb8FIC32VLuJuQTuLHn4jB9C7_o7vcpl0Z9AIT-pWzZQUeBVhPwcI1bwisCrSjOHgUEj-LCJqSoiFBRvsGIF77gHK1VAvKP/s320/narwhal1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>In case you missed it, there's BIG news in the world of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetology">cetology</a>. Dr. Sven Sorensen of the Danish Research Institute for Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises, has just announced a finding that will fundamentally alter our perception of our mammalian cousins in the sea. NOAA is providing updates as they become available, be sure to follow them <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/usoceangov">here.</a><br />
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Since 1988, Dr. Sorensen has been the world's leading expert on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narwhal">narwhal,</a> a tusked whale native to arctic waters, resembling something like a beluga crossed with a unicorn. These fascinating creatures have remained somewhat of a mystery until recently, when Dr. Sorensen made a startling discovery. You see, we've always known that whales are smart. As mammals, they teach their young as we humans do, they engage in play and even problem-solving. But no one could have expected what Dr. Sorensen has just discovered.<br />
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It turns out that narwhals have a kind of telekinesis, seated within the R-complex of their brains! It sounds like science fiction, but some scientists have long suspected that there might be some sort of biological connection to the quantum world around us. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lanza">Dr. Robert Lanza</a>, author of the incomparably illuminating book <i>Biocentrism</i>, argues that life controls the Universe, that the Universe could not even exist without a biological medium, something that could give it some kind of purpose. Many skeptics have shunned Dr. Lanza's work, but now it seems he may have been right all along.<br />
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To understand the nature of the narwhal's telekinetic abilities, we would want to examine what it is the whales might need it for. For many years, narwhals were thought to use their giant tusks as a kind of ice breaker, for making holes in the arctic ice sheet so that they can breathe. Well, Dr. Sorensen has now discovered that narwhals actually manipulate the ice sheet <i>with their minds</i>, moving them about by sheer thought, and contrary to the prevailing hypothesis, the tusks may simply be used to boast to other whales about their mental faculties. New research suggests that narwhals can sometimes exhibit jealous behavior, and in a violent conflict between two males, one might actually toss the other onto the ice above, where the whale might die of extreme cold and inability to return to the water. Indeed, several narwhal carcasses have been discovered on the ice in recent years with no apparent means of getting there. It now seems clear that in the midst of whale combat, fighting over a female perhaps, they might actually be tossed around by their opponent's telekinesis, sometimes up to 20 or even 30 meters.<br />
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But perhaps more important than what this new discovery tells us about the narwhal are the incredible implications for our own brain power. It's just in the preliminary stages, but Dr. Sorensen and his team at the DRIWDP are working on finding a way to isolate the functions of the narwhal brain and see how we might apply it to our own brains. In other words, if they can figure out how the telekinesis works, they could extrapolate that knowledge to figure out how we might employ this little trick for our own benefit. Think of the possibilities! With just a little tinkering in the deepest recesses of our brains, where our inner crocodile lurks, we might be able to control our computers with our minds, do our yardwork without leaving the porch, and just maybe, hug our loved ones from far away. It's too soon to say for sure, but we may be on the cusp of a new revolution in brain power.<br />
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Of course, this power will come with awesome new responsibilities. What might we do on the subway, with people jostling about and tempers flaring? Could our newfound faculties give us superhuman strength that we might use to combat our irritating neighbors? And who will get the technology? As it is a Danish state organization, the DRIWDP is under no obligation to share its findings in detail outside of the country. This could turn out to be a blessing and a curse. You see, we're getting into a realm of what you might call "dangerous knowledge." What if our enemies figure out how to crush our tanks with their minds? What if they get the technology before we do? Could there be entire battles fought with just the force of our brains? And just how much power could we attain with just a little tweak in the wiring of our brains? It's easy to see how such a situation could lead to a new kind of brain-power arms race. If the Danes keep the knowledge to themselves, the world might be a little bit safer, but then again, they alone might possess the technology and become a fearsome force in 21st century Europe.<br />
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It will be critical that we begin our own investigations of the narwhal's uncanny abilities, and we can be sure the United States will be undertaking this major project in short order. But we must be careful about what we let out of the box... once this sort of power is unleashed on the world, there will be no going back. The narwhals have lived more-or-less peacefully, because whales are gentle creatures, far more intelligent than we give them credit. I'm not so sure we humans are ready to handle the responsibility.Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-49107937323390115362011-03-18T17:05:00.027-04:002013-03-21T01:04:38.485-04:00The MESSENGER Mission<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Last night, as much of America was no doubt tuned in to the drama of NCAA basketball, I was pleased to be engaged otherwise. I just couldn't miss the big event. At 8 o'clock eastern time, NASA television carried live coverage of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESSENGER_spacecraft">MESSENGER</a> orbit insertion maneuver (OIM), which was to be the first time any spacecraft has ever orbited the planet Mercury. It was a critical moment for the mission -- perhaps the most critical of its 6 1/2 years in flight -- and there was only one chance to get it right. Had the OIM burn failed, the spacecraft would have whizzed by Mercury, perhaps never to return. Fortunately, the maneuver seems to have been a total success.<br />
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NASA television is pretty cool, really. Their budget is clearly not incredibly high, but there are no commercials at all, and you get to enjoy an unfiltered look at our space operations. There was, of course, no live television images broadcast from MESSENGER, so the coverage consisted of interviews, animations, slide shows, and a live feed from mission control. It was all I needed to be content for the evening. <br />
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The last time Mercury was visited by any spacecraft was in 1975, when the Mariner 10 spacecraft made the last of its 3 flybys. Mercury is too close to the Sun to be observed by the Hubble telescope, so if we want to get a good look at it, we have to send a spacecraft. But because it orbits in such a hostile region of space, any spacecraft bound for Mercury must be engineered to deal with extreme temperature fluctuations; there is an almost 1100 degree Fahrenheit difference between light and shadow. Mariner 10 provided us with a lot of great science... among other things, it discovered that Mercury has a magnetosphere, totally unexpected amongst astronomers. But due to the timing of its flybys, and the nature of Mercury's slow axial rotation, it was only able to photograph about 45% percent of the surface of Mercury. The rest would remain a mystery. There would have to be another mission -- an orbital mission -- to map the rest of the planet, and answer some of the questions that were raised by the tantalizing results of Mariner 10.<br />
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For many years, another Mercury mission was not reasonable. It just cost too much, and there were lots of other places we wanted to go. Part of the problem with going to Mercury is that, contrary to what you might think, it takes a lot of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-V">delta-v</a> to get there. Unlike missions to the outer planets, which have to muster up enough speed to climb away from the Sun, a trip to Venus or Mercury is falling toward the Sun, so you might expect that this requires relatively little propulsion capability. But remember, gravity is an accelerating force, so if you fly straight toward the Sun, you're going to pick up a lot of speed, and you would need an obscene amount of propellant to slow the spacecraft down to go into orbit. Mariner 10 was able to rendezvous with Mercury using a gravitational assist at Venus to slow it down and alter its trajectory to intercept Mercury (in fact, Mariner 10 was the first interplanetary spacecraft to use gravitational assists). But even then, Mariner 10 was incapable of orbiting Mercury.<br />
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MESSENGER's orbit maneuver was made possible by <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/MESSENGER_trajectory.svg">a complex series of gravity assists.</a> The distance between the orbits of Mercury and Earth is only about 57 million miles on average. But as of yesterday, MESSENGER had traveled a total of 4.9 billion miles! That's almost 53 astronomical units... much farther than the distance to the orbit of Pluto. This is because MESSENGER spent 6 1/2 years traveling to Mercury, making almost 15 laps around the Sun: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mdis_depart_anot.ogv">1 flyby of Earth</a>, 2 flybys of Venus, and 3 flybys of Mercury before finally approaching at such a speed that it could rendezvous and insert itself into orbit around Mercury. And even then, the insertion maneuver consumed 31% of the propellant carried at liftoff, leaving just 9% in the tank.<br />
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MESSENGER is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Program">Discovery-class mission</a>, which means it was made as cheaply as possible. But the gravity assists were just one way of saving money. To save additional propellant, the spacecraft also used its solar panels to make fine adjustments to its attitude and trajectory by using the radiation pressure of the Sun. Just like a solar sail, MESSENGER's solar array pivoted this way and that to use the winds of space to conserve energy. The spacecraft also needed a sunshade to keep its sensitive equipment cool, so the engineers gave it a heat shield made of ceramic cloth!<br />
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Sometimes, I think, we forget about Mercury. It is the innermost planet, and it is a scorching place, but it has no moons and no complicated atmosphere. It looks a lot like our own Moon, so maybe we feel like we've already sort of gotten all the information that we need. It certainly doesn't have the violent, morbid appeal of Venus, nor does it seem nearly as inviting as Mars, and compared with the giants of the outer Solar System, it may be a bit of an afterthought. But in spite of its relative proximity to Earth, we know so little about Mercury! Mariner 10 was just an appetizer... it began to show us what we don't know. Now it's time to find some of those answers. The 3 MESSENGER flybys have already given us breathtaking new images of the planet, far more detailed, and far more lovely, than anything sent back by Mariner 10. And there is much more to come.<br />
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We can hardly expect that the general public is going to get revved up about every peculiarity of Mercury. Mariner 10's results were a surprise, so now NASA hopes to answer key questions about the nature of Mercury's enormous, iron-rich core, its surface features, its magnetic field, and volatiles at the poles which may turn out to be water ice. But that may not be something you're going to go nuts about. What's important about planetary science is not always the little details that are revealed, but what those little details tell us about the bigger picture. When we are surprised in science, it means whatever model we have constructed is somehow incomplete or imperfect, so we go back and revise it. Sometimes they are little changes, but sometimes there are major implications for the field. In our search for exoplanets, for instance, we have learned that the structure of our Solar System -- terrestrials close in, gas giants farther out, with orbits more or less circular -- can hardly be considered typical, or the way it has to be. Rather, we have discovered gas giants with highly elliptical orbits, and enormous planets orbiting extremely close to their parent stars. So we have to revise our notion of how star systems may form. Similarly, the results from Mariner 10 and now MESSENGER reveal some gaps in our understanding of Mercury's formation, so we have to re-examine our assumptions.<br />
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Does the public care about that? Well, I think so. In spite of America's alleged apathy towards space science, there remains great enthusiasm for the latest discoveries. Though it seems clear that a large portion of the population is often in the dark about many of the latest astonishing breakthroughs, news of the most exciting discoveries tends to reverberate in all corners. It's rare that I meet someone wholly disinterested in the mechanics of the universe. In this case, the more we can learn about the formation of our solar system, the more we might come to understand how other star systems form, and that could perhaps give us some insight into where other life might exist, and what that life might be like. That alone is an awesome prospect, and it has profound implications for our understanding of who we are as a species, and as a planet. But we might also gain new insight into the nature of our Sun's formation, or the formation of the solar nebula, and that, in turn, could perhaps give us some clues as to what was going on in our region of the galaxy 4.5 billion years ago. As we connect these dots back in time, we are tracing our origins back, incrementally, to the beginning of the Universe. The MESSENGER mission will of course not be able to answer all of these questions, but it could help to answer some. And for 0.02% of your tax dollar, that's not bad. <br />
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The science begins April 4th. I can't wait.Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-84920052587090924892011-03-04T16:48:00.021-05:002011-03-23T14:38:35.980-04:00Examining Alternative Theories<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://apps.carleton.edu/reason_package/reason_4.0/www/images/60759_tn.jpg?cb=1155925043" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://apps.carleton.edu/reason_package/reason_4.0/www/images/60759_tn.jpg?cb=1155925043" width="240" /></a></div>The last several years have seen a shift in opposition to mainstream climate change theory. For a long time, global warming was regarded by the skeptics as just a hoax... in the words of Senator Jim Inhofe back in 2003, "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." The skeptics said there was no evidence that the Earth was warming, that scientists were simply fear-mongering for the sake of fundraising, and sometimes they pointed to local phenomena, like frigid winter temperatures and brutal snowstorms, to back up their claims. To be sure, this school of thought remains a major force in the anti-science community; Sean Hannity seems to have a particular affinity for using winter storms as evidence global warming isn't happening. But increasingly there has been another argument advanced by the right -- that is, global warming <i>is</i> happening, but we humans are not causing it. Instead, they say, there is any number of other factors causing global warming, and as such, we need not worry about it. <br />
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There are a variety of alternative theories put forth by the skeptics in this camp. Sunspots and sun cycles have been blamed for global warming, as have volcanic eruptions, cosmic rays, and various other astronomical causes (variations in Earth's axial tilt, the fluctuating eccentricity of Earth's orbit and the precession of equinoxes as relates to perihelion and aphelion, for instance). Now, there is no question that these various factors do affect Earth's climate, and that can be seen clearly in the record of ancient climates. We know that the Earth has seen periods of natural warming and cooling, and there is no doubt that these sorts of changes will happen again. Nevertheless, these variables cannot explain the warming trend over the last 100 years or so nearly as well as anthropogenic factors, like the emission of enormous levels of carbon dioxide corresponding to the industrial revolution.<br />
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Skeptics of mainstream climate change theory may take to these other hypotheses in part because there is a sense that we humans are not capable of making big changes in our ecosystem. Of course, history tells us otherwise. Human beings have driven many species to extinction or to the brink of extinction by over-hunting and habitat destruction, and in the 20th century, with the advent of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), we put an enormous hole in our ozone layer. Meanwhile, we continue to possess the power to cause a global nuclear winter.<br />
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To understand how humans are capable of making such profound changes to the climate, we have to understand the two main elements behind our increased impact on the environment: the industrial revolution and recent population expansion. <br />
<a name='more'></a>Beginning in the 1700s and increasing throughout the next few hundred years, the industrial revolution was responsible for an unprecedented level of fossil fuel burning and deforestation. The natural carbon cycle of the Earth, whereby carbon dioxide is emitted by natural processes like respiration and absorbed by natural processes like photosynthesis, was upset for the first time by the artificial emission of CO2. There is no natural process on the Earth that is capable of taking the carbon trapped deep below the surface and spewing it into the atmosphere at the rate of human capacity. Second, coinciding with the industrial revolution was the staggering growth of the human population. Since 1800, it is estimated that the human population has grown from about 1 billion people to almost 7 billion people. For almost the entire history of humanity the population was under 1 billion, but just in the last two hundred years we have increased our numbers 600%. That's a lot of people, and each one of us is responsible for contributing a small portion of the world's CO2 output, natural and artificial. But just think of how many cars, trucks, trains, planes, ships and power plants there are involved with sustaining such an enormous population, and think of how much exhaust these machines dump into the air in a single year.<br />
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But of course, we're not just dealing with the carbon emissions of a single year. As the balance of CO2 emission and absorption is upset, more carbon dioxide is retained in the atmosphere, and over time this builds up. It's a bit like an overwhelmed bilge pump on a ship. Even if the pump continues to function at full power, the ship will eventually sink if the water comes in faster than it can be removed. Similarly, we are dealing with all of the excess CO2 built up since the beginning of the imbalance, so we're really facing the combined force of many years' worth of excess carbon. There is some uncertainty as to how long the carbon dioxide will remain in the atmosphere, but there is no question that the system is saturated. And by the way, we haven't stopped the activities that are causing the problem.<br />
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We know how greenhouses work. We have put them to use growing tropical plants in the winter months. But of course, our atmosphere is not made of glass, but of various gases. Carbon dioxide is one constituent of the atmosphere, and it is considered a greenhouse gas. A little bit is a good thing: the greenhouse effect is responsible for keeping the Earth warm, by trapping some of the Sun's radiation in our atmosphere. But if we are to increase the level of greenhouse gases in the air, more heat is trapped. This is just basic chemistry and physics. There can be no doubt that the greenhouse effect is responsible for keeping the Sun's heat inside, and there should be no doubt that altering the chemistry of our atmosphere will alter the behavior of the system.<br />
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What is so mystifying about the alternative global warming theories is that they are comparatively far-fetched. Just think about it. Is it more likely that the well-documented increase in global temperatures is related to the well-documented increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which correlates well to the increase in fossil fuel burning and human population growth? Or is it more likely that a number of other factors, which have historically caused changes to the Earth's climate on the scale of <i>thousands</i> of years, have suddenly cropped up inconveniently to raise global temperatures at a drastic rate? It is not enough simply to say that the Earth has experienced natural climate changes before, and therefore the changes we're seeing now are natural. Climate change doesn't just happen on its own, there must be some kind of forcing, and while the correlation between CO2 and temperature increase is clear, the data on other proposed factors (<a href="http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/glob-warm.html">solar activity</a> and <a href="http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptic_arguments/the-sun-is-the-problem.html">cosmic rays</a>, for example) shows no such correlation. The choice is between a theory that hinges on a straightforward mechanism with straightforward results, and a theory that relies on coincidences, uncertainty, and unpredicted phenomena. Tellingly, there is no consistent hypothesis among the climate change skeptics. A brief search on the internet will yield an abundance of alternative explanations, but there is a reason no single idea is embraced by all the opponents of the mainstream theory: none of the rebuttals are iron-clad, and most try to isolate one aspect of the evidence for global warming and tear it apart, utterly ignoring the fact that there are several independent lines of evidence that corroborate each other in support of anthropogenic climate change. <br />
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But this begs a larger question: why have opponents of mainstream climate change theory been so desperate to latch on to alternative theories? What is it about the carbon emissions hypothesis that they find so unacceptable? Is their opposition strictly based on its economic implications? Considering the issue's partisan divide, it's difficult not to conclude that the politicians on the right have criticized mainstream climate science, not so much because of flawed evidence, but because of the problems it causes for their corporate contributors. Combine this with a powerful <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32VgYHuj_mk">public relations campaign on the part of oil companies</a>, and fears in the Rust Belt of a collapse in coal demand, and we can start to understand how the truth can be obscured. There is much interest in maintaining the status quo.<br />
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We may feel sympathetic for those working class folks whose jobs are threatened by the transition to a clean energy economy. But if that is the case, we as a nation should invest in jump-starting the transition process, and making sure these hardworking Americans are trained to work in the new energy sector. No one wants to deprive these people of a job, and it's certainly not their fault that we need to give up our dependence on fossil fuels. But we also cannot continue to destroy the planet because there are jobs at stake. It will be up to the politicians to help ease the transition. And as for the overall economic impact of a clean energy revolution, it should be a net positive. The sooner we embrace reality, the sooner we can get working on making sure the United States is on the cutting edge of low-cost, high-efficiency products. As the world makes the transition to clean, renewable energy, they'll need the technology, and we should be ready to sell it.<br />
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To be clear, the Earth itself is not in great danger. The Earth is resilient, and it has seen substantial changes to its climate over the ages. We are not yet close to effecting such change. But if the rate of warming in our time is very fast, other species may not be able to adapt. Some kinds of life will survive these changes, but we may be responsible for the end of many hereditary lines in the biological world. Even so, new species will take their place. Life goes on. But we are also threatening the climate to which we humans are accustomed, and we are flirting with a global catastrophe with severe consequences for the future of humanity. Considering how much difficulty we have with sporadic flooding, droughts, powerful hurricanes, and mass population displacements, it's apparent that we are nowhere near ready to deal with these events on a larger scale. We must think seriously about our preparedness for such an eventuality, and we should ponder the tragedy of premature extinction.<br />
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It should be noted that skepticism is a very important part of the scientific endeavor. Skepticism has liberated us from mystical explanations for natural phenomena, and it helps us avoid taking assertions at face value. It is essential the we interrogate the world around us with an open mind, and it does us no good to swallow climate science, or any other science, as fact, without investigating it more deeply. It is crucial that any finding be tested and confirmed by other scientists. But that has already occurred. Global warming has been predicted and tested by science for more than 100 years. It is true that some of the most important scientific findings of ages past have challenged the conventional wisdom; the controversial heliocentric model of the universe advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus comes to mind. But not every scientific finding is erroneous, and not every fringe scientist is Copernicus. We must always be open to having our minds changed, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-2666364880007552932011-02-23T16:01:00.023-05:002011-03-23T14:39:30.309-04:00Who Can You Trust on Climate Change?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibPIQUXkuObIarRIyZYHxoMAc1coAT1PRk55JFJBVFUA9zAojfVVvwE7LUoDDz7IDkC2RG-tM8kpjEpsk4rJyN8iFHO1IbHv_aRbaYqf1Ikld2ypqZ5Hfvph9mPTy25LxJxRqKnofPPHJM/s1600/china_pollution.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibPIQUXkuObIarRIyZYHxoMAc1coAT1PRk55JFJBVFUA9zAojfVVvwE7LUoDDz7IDkC2RG-tM8kpjEpsk4rJyN8iFHO1IbHv_aRbaYqf1Ikld2ypqZ5Hfvph9mPTy25LxJxRqKnofPPHJM/s320/china_pollution.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Today's <i>New York Times</i> examines Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli's one-man crusade against climate science. Take a look at it<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/science/earth/23virginia.html"> here.</a><br />
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The ongoing battle over climate change highlights a central problem in a population that is under-educated in science. The question is, who can you trust? For those who have not gone to the trouble of educating themselves on climate science, you just have to trust what you're being told. But for a subject as contentious as climate change, you're being told two radically different things. One the one hand, you have <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus-intermediate.htm">a large majority of scientists</a>, who have reached a consensus. They tell us that climate change is real, and that human activity is the primary agent of global warming. Some of the details remain to be nailed down (for instance, how fast is it happening, how extensive will the damage be, how high will seas rise, etc), but the main storyline is clear. On the other hand, you have some politicians, media personalities, and a small minority of scientists, who cast doubt on the whole affair. This group can be broken up into two main varieties: those who don't believe climate change is happening, and those who do believe it is happening but think we humans are not responsible for its creation or its resolution.<br />
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The population is left to decide who is right. Who do you choose?<br />
<a name='more'></a> Since many of us identify with a political party, we sometimes have the luxury of going along with the party line even when we don't fully grasp or care much about every single issue in that party's platform. In other words, you may not know anything about climate science, but if you identify as a Democrat, you'll probably go along with the Democrats, and vice versa. But this is a troubling state of affairs, because it means that public opinion is largely under the influence of politicians, who may be misinformed or guided by ulterior motives.<br />
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When it comes to educating ourselves, we must be careful not to conflate partisan and scientific literature. Let's take Ken Cuccinelli, for instance. In the aforementioned article, he admits that he didn't know much about climate science until recently when he did "basic reading" on the subject and, in the wake of the fake scandal known as "<a href="http://sagansbrain.blogspot.com/search/label/Climategate">Climategate</a>," decided that these climate scientists were up to no good. Well, this is a problem. It's unclear what exactly he read, since most non-partisan and scientific periodicals accept climate change as established science. But if his "basic reading" on the subject consisted of articles from Andrew Breitbart and The Drudge Report -- champions of the now-debunked Climategate controversy -- he's not really getting all the facts. He's getting a partisan slant. Not all reading is created equal.<br />
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But who's actually reading the scientific literature? The academic papers are really just for scientists. The general population doesn't really know what's an acceptable level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Is 390 parts per million a lot? It doesn't sound like it, but who knows? And what constitutes a big increase? A few parts per million? It's hard to imagine such small quantities having such a profound impact on global temperatures (but of course, this is a misleading number. There is really a huge amount of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere every year: the United States alone is responsible for adding about 6 billion metric tons of CO2 each year). And then we get into all sorts of other complicated science problems: how exactly can we determine the global temperature of past epochs from a column of ice? How do sunspots affect global climate? How much do seismological events contribute to the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? These are the subjects of much research, but this work rarely reaches the public in raw form. Instead, it is left to journalists to interpret the findings and spell it out in plain English for the rest of us. <br />
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Anyway, the problem remains: since most people are not going to be climatologists, we just have to leave it to the climate scientists to figure it out. This may sound unsatisfying, but every field of science operates the same way. Few of us have done the math to calculate the expansion of the Universe. Few of us have looked at the spectrum of Neptune's atmosphere to determine its composition. Few of us have studied quantum mechanics. Most of us are not geneticists, or computer scientists, or chemists. Consequently, we just have to trust that the Universe is expanding, that Neptune is made mostly of hydrogen and helium with a bit of methane, that atoms are made up of all kinds of exotic particles that exhibit incredible behaviors. We have to trust that there is such a thing called DNA, that microchips are the driving force behind millions of unseen processes, that water is two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen stuck together. It's easy to trust these scientists, though, because these questions are basically uncontroversial. We trust they are not manipulating their data. But it's a whole different ballgame when the scientists say something we don't like. <br />
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People in the anti-science community often accuse scientists of treating their work like a kind of religion. It's a particularly effective tactic: as much as scientists rail against dogmatic religion, they say, they seem to be equally dogmatic about science. To them, scientists are saying, "you have to believe it all, without questioning it." It's important that scientists draw a distinction here. The reality is, debate is encouraged in science, not stifled. Debate is essential for progress. But a dissenting opinion has to be backed up by a compelling alternative theory if it is to be given much credence, and this is where the opponents of science typically fall short. Whether we're talking about climate science or evolution (the other most popular subject for science skeptics), simply finding little gaps in the data is not enough to disprove the theory. You need to advance another theory that is equally or better supported by the facts, and this theory cannot be based on ideological or theological feelings.<br />
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Manipulating data to reach a predetermined conclusion is just bad science, and it should never be tolerated. But climate change skeptics have accused scientists of doing just that, on an enormous scale. The accusation calls into question the ethics of literally thousands of scientists. According to the skeptics, there is a worldwide conspiracy to falsify data, but the evidence for this is dreadfully thin. Scientists have little to gain by participating in such a massive fraud. It may be that some scientists with opposing views are afraid to speak out, but this alone is not proof of a conspiracy. The truth is, we would all love for global warming to be a figment of our imaginations, but the numbers are unmoved.<br />
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Perhaps the skeptics think the scientists are simply making up facts. This is easy enough to imagine; if we don't understand how conclusions are derived, we're tempted to think it was all just cooked up out of thin air. But just because you haven't heard about all the evidence, doesn't mean it's not there. Innumerable scientists have devoted their lives to investigating the world around us, and sometimes the correct conclusions are drawn from arcane observations. The correct conclusions can also be counter-intuitive. Strange effects are predicted and have been observed at relativistic speeds, but you need exquisitely precise time keeping to detect it. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser">Variations of the double-slit experiment</a> demonstrate a bizarre, paradoxical behavior of light, but you need a sophisticated apparatus to investigate it. We may not be able to fully grasp the nature of these phenomena, but they really happen. Similarly, in our day-to-day lives, we cannot experience climate change. The changes are too small, and our perspective is too local. But the data tells the story.<br />
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Education is the key. The only way to be sure who is right is to study the facts and draw your own conclusions. But if you're not able to do that, you'd be well advised to follow the scientists. There are dissenting voices, but the consensus is clear. We've got a real problem on our hands, and we've got to figure it out soon.Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-49380449922068962832011-02-04T16:24:00.022-05:002011-03-23T14:41:00.086-04:00Why Should We Go to Space?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://moonpans.com/prints/Apollo_11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="280" src="http://moonpans.com/prints/Apollo_11.jpg" width="350" /></a></div>Sometimes I ask myself, "why should we go to space?" It's a question I think many of us have probably asked ourselves. I can tell you all sorts of reasons why our exploits in space are extraordinary, but that doesn't really answer the question. It's a question that needs to be answered, though, and any advocate of space exploration should have an adequate response. <br />
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Every year, as the United States has to draw up its budget, there are lots of considerations. How much do we spend on defense? How much can we afford to take care of the poor, the elderly, the children? How much do we send abroad for humanitarian purposes? And how much do we invest in education, and technological advancements here at home? Each of these are very important, but when money is tight, we have to make some difficult decisions. We have to get our priorities in order, and the composition of the government determines those priorities, sometimes but not always along party lines.<br />
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When it comes to making cuts, space exploration sometimes finds itself on shaky ground. It can feel like a luxury item, like that cable sports package we like but don't really need. Looking at the billions of dollars spent on manned space flight or space telescopes, for instance, it's easy to wonder how many children that might feed, or how many teachers that could pay (but of course, it's an equally valid question to ask how many fighter jets and warheads we could stand to do without). No expenditure exists in a vacuum, though, so while we can easily imagine all the good that an extra 10 billion dollars might do for any single program, we have lots of commitments and we have to figure out how to spread the money around to cover all our bases.<br />
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Our ventures in space began with a decidedly defensive purpose. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, it became clear that we were vulnerable to an unprecedented threat: intercontinental ballistic missiles. As was typical of the Cold War, we set about the task of demonstrating our technological prowess. It was a matter of national security, after all; the best way to deter the Russians from destroying us with ICBMs was to make sure everyone knew we could do the same thing to them. But as a lovely side effect of that scary time, the United States began a preliminary reconnaissance of the solar system. In a breathtaking achievement, the US landed a man on the Moon just 12 years after the first satellite was launched, and only 66 years after the Wright Brothers' first powered flight. Since the beginning of the space age, we Earthlings have sent robotic emissaries to all of the major planets; investigated the myriad moons of the outer solar system; landed robotic spacecraft on Mars, Venus, and Saturn's moon Titan, with a few rovers exploring the Martian landscape; built an enormous space station in Earth orbit; connected the world through a dazzling array of communications satellites; and stared into the vast depths of space, peering 13 billion years into our remote past, and accumulating data that is impossible to collect from Earth's surface.<br />
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We are so incredibly fortunate to live in this age of great discovery. The human species has spent its entire modern existence -- many thousands of years -- looking up at the stars and wondering what they are. But it's only in the last 2 or 3 percent of that history that we have been able to work out some of the answers.<br />
<a name='more'></a> Our ancestors of antiquity cataloged the skies, investigating the structure and mechanics of the universe as it was then known, studying the motions of the planets and drawing some remarkable conclusions. In just the last 500 years or so, we have made the most astonishing breakthroughs in our understanding of the cosmos: discovering at last the heliocentric structure of the solar system, the elliptical orbits of the planets, the nature of gravity, the existence of new planets, the galaxies, the extraordinary properties of light, the theory of relativity, and the Big Bang. All of these spectacular discoveries were made by humans before we ever had a chance to go up in the sky and take a closer look.<br />
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This is our heritage. The thousands of generations before us lived and died with only a vague understanding of the immeasurable universe beyond our atmosphere, but their collective contributions have brought us to this pivotal moment. It's up to us now to make our contribution. If we do not, the next generation will have to do it for us, but we owe it to them to go as far as we can, so that they can go even farther.<br />
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As inspiring as astronomy can be, though, it will always be tempered by terrestrial concerns. But for the practical mind, there are tangible reasons why we must continue our work in space. We know that the universe is not static. It is a dynamic, perilous and indifferent place, and our survival depends on how well we understand our cosmic neighborhood. Earth is the only planet so far as we know where we humans can reside comfortably, but there is no guarantee that our home world will always be perfectly hospitable, and we do not yet possess the technology to escape in the event of catastrophe. It's not very likely that we'll see something like it in our lifetimes, but there is always the chance that a yet-undiscovered asteroid or comet could slam into us and end humanity's brief reign on the Earth. For the first time, we have the capacity to avoid such a calamity, but we should take appropriate steps now. Meanwhile, we know that our mighty Sun is capable of doing tremendous damage to our technological infrastructure, so it's worth continued study. Global climate change remains a serious threat, and satellites have provided us an abundance of meteorological data. At the same time, our investigations of the Martian and Venusian climates have provided real examples of what Earth might look like with a runaway greenhouse effect, or without an ozone layer.<br />
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But history tells us something else about the value of science. In many instances, scientific discoveries have had applications far beyond the imaginations of the people living at the time. When magnetism was first investigated in Ancient Greece, the navigational compass was still 1500 years in the future, and certainly no one could have imagined something like magnetic tape, which was critical to audio, video, and data recording for most of the 20th century. The importance of genetics and its promise for medicine could not have been fully grasped at the time Gregor Mendel was working with his peas. When Benjamin Franklin performed his famous kite experiment, it's unlikely that anyone could have predicted something like the television or the internet. And the pioneers of chemistry in the early 1800s could not possibly have suspected the awesome power contained within the atom.<br />
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When we look at the countless discoveries of the last few thousand years, time and time again we see a pattern of marvelous and unexpected scientific breakthroughs which could not have been possible without the work of those who came before. And such is the case today. Sometimes we just don't know what we'll find around the next corner, and we can't possibly know what that discovery will mean for the future. Scientific studies can sometimes appear to have little application for everyday society, but it's impossible to know when the next unexpected, world-changing discovery might come. We just have to keep working.<br />
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In any case, it would be a mistake to minimize space exploration's visceral appeal. There remains great enthusiasm for the latest scientific discoveries, whether we're talking about finding new exoplanets or a tantalizing astrobiological discovery. The general public is enamored with the future, and science is the means to get there. But more than that, exploration is a part of us. We have always been explorers, and when the Earth was finally mapped in its entirety, we craved a new mission. The next frontier is space, and it holds enough mystery to occupy thousands of generations to come. So far, space exploration is too expensive for most private interests, so it's up to the government to do it. But in time we can expect more private involvement in space. We are seeing the start of it now. <br />
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Space travel is the crowning achievement of human technology. Just as funding for the arts can be difficult to justify in concrete terms, it can be hard to quantify the value of our work in space. We cannot put a price tag on the expansion of human knowledge. But our space endeavors represent the pinnacle of human potential. At long last, we are spacefarers. It is our future, and we would be well advised to embrace it.Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-9411989948438881392011-01-14T18:34:00.005-05:002011-03-23T14:41:58.753-04:00Ophiuchus! What now?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.solarnavigator.net/history/astrology/astrology_images/Zodiac_Wheel_sixth_century_mosaic_Beit_Alpha.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="356" src="http://www.solarnavigator.net/history/astrology/astrology_images/Zodiac_Wheel_sixth_century_mosaic_Beit_Alpha.jpg" width="350" /></a></div>I woke up yesterday thinking I was an Aries, and went to bed thinking I was a Pisces. Oh brother. I guess it means that I'm "<a href="http://www.suite101.com/content/pisces-personality-profile-a60947">compassionate, gentle, artistic, mystical and highly intuitive.</a>" All this time I thought I was "<a href="http://www.suite101.com/content/aries-personality-profile-a58145">optimistic, independent, impulsive, playful, competitive, courageous, sometimes combative and always adventurous</a>." Gee, I'm sort of all those things sometimes. <br />
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I really couldn't care less, you understand, but the big news yesterday in the twitterverse and elsewhere was the addition of a 13th sign to the zodiac, called Ophiuchus. Of course, it's not really a new addition to the zodiac... The constellation of Ophiuchus has always been there along the ecliptic, we've just traditionally left it off the list of the big 12 astrological signs. But it was widely reported that not only is Ophiuchus a new sign that we'll all have to learn to live with, but that the precession of the Earth's axial rotation has, over a few millennia, shifted our view of the sky so that the Sun is no longer in the same apparent position along the zodiac as it was thousands of years ago, when this version of astrology was concocted. In other words, people with birthdays in late March have traditionally been considered Aries, but today the Sun is really in Pisces at that time of year. <br />
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This story is just so silly in a variety of ways. For one thing, it wasn't actually news. The Earth's axial precession doesn't happen overnight, and astronomers haven't just discovered it (read <a href="http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/zodiac.html">this discussion of the problem by Phil Plait way back in 2008</a>).. In the words of Sam Cooke, it's been a long time coming. Then there was the panic and irritation that the traditional signs are all wrong (today HuffingtonPost cleverly examined <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/14/new-astrological-signs-_n_808635.html#s223568&title=You_May_No">the Earth-shattering consequences of this shift</a>). If you've got a tattoo of your astrological sign, tough luck buddy. And then there was the inevitable backlash from those unlucky souls born in late November and early December, suddenly thrust into a brand new personality profile. How would you feel to grow up thinking you're a Scorpio, and suddenly find out you're really an Ophiuchus? The name sounds like a disease. What's my birth stone? And how am I supposed to know what kind of person I am? No one has published my new attributes yet.<br />
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Then today, the astrologers came to the rescue. Nothing to fear, they said. The Ophiuchus shift only applies to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_astrology">Sidereal Astrology</a>, not <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Astrology">Tropical Astrology</a>. Most believers probably don't know the difference, but don't worry, we westerners typically believe in Tropical Astrology, which is unaffected. On twitter I saw several people commenting in a similar, but tellingly inconsistent vein: "<b style="font-weight: normal;">Ophiuchus</b> only affects those who were born 2009 onwards. If you're born before 2009, the sign stays the same." That's a relief.<br />
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It remains to be seen whether <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/14/AR2011011403094.html">the new dates for the 12-sign zodiac</a> will be adopted, whether we'll keep the dates as we have come to know them, or whether we'll switch over to <a href="http://www.kionrightnow.com/Global/story.asp?S=13844777">the new 13-sign zodiac.</a> In other times, the astrologers might have ignored this story, let everyone just forget about it. But if this story reached a critical mass of attention, they might have a real problem on their hands. You see, this little incident has highlighted just how pointless the whole thing is. Since it has taken so long for the Sun's apparent position in the sky to change, reassurances that Ophiuchus only matters for people born now aren't very convincing. That there are two schools of thought when it comes to astrology is also a troubling revelation. If you're a casual horoscope reader, you probably have little reason to think Tropical Astrology is any more valid that Sidereal Astrology. But you'll probably just go along with whatever is easiest, or whatever your newspaper decides to use. You'd like to stay an Aries, and one of these astrologies lets you stay that way. Good enough.<br />
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But if we can just arbitrarily decide how we wish to interpret the position of the Sun and the planets along the zodiac, if we can decide that it doesn't really matter that the Sun is not really in the place astrology pretends it is, then did it really mean anything in the first place? What is the point of reading signs in the sky if we get to ignore the signs? The ease with which we can ignore these little problems, like the precession of equinoxes, is indicative of astrology's fallacy. It's easy to make things up as you go along when that's what your entire business has always been about.<br />
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Skeptics get a bad wrap sometimes. People think skeptics are just out to spoil all the fun, but that's not really what it's about. It can be fun to pretend that we are somehow tied to the motions of the planets, that there is something concrete yet ethereal steering our lives. I still enjoy fortune cookies. Maybe astrology is just a harmless pastime, but maybe not. For people who can enjoy it the way most of us enjoy a magic show -- suspending our disbelief to be amused for a few moments -- that's fine. But if anyone out there is making decisions based on horoscopes, that's a problem. If we go into it not knowing on some level that it's just an illusion, not thinking critically about what we're being told, we become susceptible to fraud and deception. But more troubling than that, this way of thinking extends beyond astrology. If we can't think critically about astrology, how can we expect to accurately evaluate the intentions of our politicians, or our clergy? We've got to ask skeptical questions if we're not to be bamboozled by charismatic charlatans. <br />
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The thing is, there are many questions with which science must continue to grapple, but astrology is not one of them. Astrology is inconsistent, and falsifiable. Just enjoy responsibly, and don't throw your money away.Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-51968296611815582352011-01-11T12:17:00.011-05:002011-02-28T17:49:09.071-05:00Thoughts After a TragedyTake a look at this great new video, narrated by Carl Sagan:<br />
<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/oY59wZdCDo0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
In the wake of horrific tragedies like the shooting in Tuscon this past weekend, we are reminded that human beings are sometimes capable of terrible things. But the events of the weekend also show that for one act of brutality, there are several acts of heroism. Such is, I believe, the nature of humanity. For all our shortcomings, and the violence that perpetuates around the globe, we remain a hopeful and curious species. Our intentions are heroic, and we long for peace. We are not born with hatred in our hearts. Our brains retain the vestiges of more violent epochs, but we have the capacity to temper our reptilian impulses of aggression, and triumph over all adversity. We have evolved for cooperation.<br />
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One of my favorites lines from <i>Contact </i>sums it up well:<br />
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<i>"You're an interesting species, an interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone. Only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable... is each other."</i><br />
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It is too early to know the true motive of the shooter. It may turn out that his mental instability is chiefly to blame, that a toxic political discourse is only peripheral, and that there was little that could have been done to prevent his rampage. Maybe he's just insane. But every mass murderer could be considered insane compared with <i>"</i>normal" human beings. Some atrocities, like this one, may be driven by incoherent beliefs, but many others are perpetrated in pursuit of very common political objectives. Whether we are talking about suicide bombs or genocide, these actions have been carried out with at least tacit approval from a larger group of people. The line between "normal" and "insane" is sometimes blurry.<br />
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But we humans have it within us to conquer hatred. It is possible to knock down the barriers that stand to divide us. We can do it, and we must do it. We have traveled a long way to get here, and we have a long way to go. We'll have to work together. The world is just too wonderful.Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-13180975598943569102011-01-10T15:39:00.022-05:002011-03-02T15:55:00.647-05:00The First Interstellar Missions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0801/M31_hallas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0801/M31_hallas.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Check out this excellent paper from Marc G. Millis, arguing that <a href="http://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.1066v1">interstellar space travel could be possible in as little as 200 years. </a> The paper calculates the amount of energy required for two types of interstellar missions, and uses estimates of world energy output growth to determine when the required energy might be available to such missions. Millis bases his calculations on the fraction of energy made available to current space missions, accounting for various technological innovations and broader considerations that might accelerate or delay serious consideration of interstellar missions. The math suggests that an interstellar spacecraft colony could be achievable in approximately 200 years, and a probe to Alpha Centauri could be launched within 500 years. <br />
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Millis' estimate is both exciting and disappointing. Space enthusiasts want desperately to see an interstellar mission in our lifetime, but of course most of us realize that's probably not in the cards. At the same time, some scientists have said it may be a thousand years or more before we are capable of interstellar space travel (that is, <i>fast</i> interstellar space travel), so a few hundred years is actually good news. The world is likely to be a far different place in a thousand years, but 200 years is only 10 generations or so. The English we speak today will probably remain intelligible to those lucky people in 2211. We are just barely missing the wonders that may be in store for the future, just as the great scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries barely missed the extraordinary breakthroughs that would come in the 20th century. They laid the groundwork for our world, though, and now it is up to us to lay the groundwork for tomorrow.<br />
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But where are we going, and why? Will we be diversifying our interests, spreading the seed of humanity beyond the solar system? Or are we simply going to investigate our nearest stellar neighbor and radio back the results? <br />
<a name='more'></a>Millis explores both of these options -- an interstellar probe bound for Alpha Centauri, and a 500-passenger colony ship, destination unknown, with a mission only to take a piece of humanity far beyond the domain of our Sun. It is here that Millis approaches the practical considerations, but doesn't quite explore the implications fully (though, to be fair, it is really beyond the scope of his paper... his purpose is to speculate on when interstellar travel <i>could be </i>possible, not to predict when it will actually be achieved). In a few hundred years, we can expect the capabilities of our space telescopes to have expanded considerably, so a mere flyby or rendezvous with the Alpha Centauri system may tell us little; it would be of great academic interest to send a probe there, but what will we learn that we could not learn from observations with our telescopes? Of course, that is the great question! But if there are any <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri#Possibility_of_planets">planets</a> to be found there, we should be able to detect them long before such a mission is possible. It remains to be seen, but the existence of planets in the Alpha Centauri system would immediately make this mission more appealing.<br />
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If we are considering the colony ship for the purpose of placing our eggs in other baskets, a whole mess of other questions come to mind. Why not simply send our colonists to other planets or moons in our own solar system? Well, we may have already done that. Interestingly, though, Millis' calculations indicate that the colony ship will actually be feasible long before the interstellar probe to Alpha Centauri, about 260 years earlier. This is based on the required <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v">delta-v</a> for the probe to rendezvous with Alpha Centauri, and the requirement to reach a speed consistent with tolerable limits on mission duration (Millis selects 75 years). But what good does it do setting 500 people on a course to nowhere? What do they do if they need to slow down, or land somewhere? (There is no built-in delta-v to slow down this craft in Millis' calculation). Will we really be able to build a spacecraft large enough to carry 500 people, indefinitely, in the next 200 years? Again, these questions are beyond the scope of Millis' paper, but they are relevant to the question of when we will achieve human interstellar travel. A self-sustaining human colony floating endlessly in space, set adrift from the rest of humanity, is a somewhat unappealing notion, and besides, we can hardly assume a spacecraft launched in 2211 will be able to house human beings safely for centuries or longer in the vast depths of space. There are bound to be minor malfunctions, electronic failures, and occasional hull damage, but spare parts will be hard to come by. And eventually, one would think that they'd want to settle on another world.<br />
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With these considerations, and taking into account the anemic funding afforded space travel these days, it's easy to see that Millis' estimates for achieving these goals, while perfectly reasonable, may represent an exceedingly optimistic time frame. In other words, Millis has shown us what is <i>possible</i>, but it's far from assured that we will meet the mark. We will need to see some remarkable advances in propulsion technology if the interstellar probe is to be realistic anytime soon, and though the energy may be available to launch a colony ship in the next two hundred years, from a practical standpoint it is beyond the pale. In 200 years we may be sending many humans to live on Mars or elsewhere, but I doubt we will be sending any to drift in interstellar space forever. In fact, the only reason we would <i>have</i> to escape the Solar System, rather than simply take refuge on another planet or moon in our vicinity, would be the death of our Sun. But that's not going to happen for another 5 billion years or so. <br />
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While Millis' estimates and their implications may be disappointing, a realistic evaluation of these time scales is useful. When we fully appreciate the great distances between our solar system and others, we begin to understand just how important it is to learn about our own planetary neighborhood, where travel time is relatively short, and where we may one day set up human colonies. There are lots of places left to explore, and it is still a good idea to put our eggs in other baskets. But this ultimately brings us back to the most basic concern: our own survival on this planet. The Earth is the only place in the Universe, so far as we know, where we can live perfectly comfortably. We have been sculpted over billions of years of evolution to be perfectly tuned to our environment -- we are accustomed to the pressure, temperature and content of our atmosphere, and the nutrients of the soil are passed on to us through the food chain. Here on Earth, we have all the water we could ever need, and the Sun banishes the cold and darkness of space. It is truly a paradise. But this paradise is by no means promised to us, and today natural and man-made terrors threaten to destroy the planet, or at least extinguish the human species. Whether we are talking about nuclear war, global warming, or a cosmic collision, we must do everything in our power to avoid these calamities. We owe it to our ancestors and descendants alike. For those who dreamed of visiting the stars, and for those who may one day reach them, it's up to us to get there.Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-56239885912332144392010-12-07T16:28:00.053-05:002011-03-23T14:42:46.651-04:00Questions for Young-Earth Creationists<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.firstpr.com.au/astrophysics/hubble-deep-field/hubble-deep-field-northern-detail-rw.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="http://www.firstpr.com.au/astrophysics/hubble-deep-field/hubble-deep-field-northern-detail-rw.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>Last Wednesday, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/us/06ark.html">Kentucky Governor Steven Beshear announced that millions of dollars in taxpayer funds will be going to <i>Ark Encounter</i></a>, a planned Christian creationist attraction similar in theme to the infamous <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_museum">Creation Museum</a></i> (also in Kentucky). Both attractions are sponsored by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answers_in_Genesis">Answers in Genesis</a>, a particularly zealous creationist group that adheres to a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_earth_creationism">Young-Earth cosmology</a> as part of their belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible. According to their beliefs, the Earth and the heavens are somewhere in the vicinity of 6,000 years old.<br />
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As you would imagine, this has sparked the usual debate over separation of church and state, and of course I'm inclined to agree with those who really don't want their money going towards such things. But the Governor seems to have mostly diffused the controversy on economic grounds, noting that the attraction will generate millions in tax revenue and create hundreds of jobs.<br />
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In light of this rejuvenated debate, I thought it might be a great time to present my <b><u>Questions for Young-Earth Creationists</u>,</b> <a href="http://sagansbrain.blogspot.com/2010/05/questions-for-climate-change-skeptics.html">which I promised several months ago.</a> Here goes:<br />
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<i><b>1. <u>Do you believe that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light">the speed of light</a> is approximately 300,000 kilometers per second? If you don't, how fast is it? And how do you know that?</u></b></i><br />
The actual speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second, we just round it off to make basic calculations easier. But we need to know exactly how fast it is for a variety of reasons. For instance, our <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS">GPS systems</a> wouldn't work if we didn't know precisely how fast light travels, since the technology requires very exact calculations of signal transmission times to determine your position. Our understanding of light is essential to our use of radios, computers, and communications satellites (to name just a few). The speed of light was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B8mer%27s_determination_of_the_speed_of_light">first measured in the 1600s</a>, and by the 20th century we were able to measure it with astonishing accuracy. Meanwhile, independent evidence supporting our calculation of light speed is abundant. The communications delay with the Apollo astronauts, and our robotic interplanetary spacecraft, is consistent with our understanding of the speed of light, and we have even used it to measure the precise distance to the Moon using a laser and a mirror left on the surface in 1969.<br />
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<i></i><i><b>2. <u>If you believe in the speed of light, then, do you believe that the stars and galaxies are very far away, or are they much closer than scientists maintain?</u></b></i><br />
Measuring the distances to the stars is a complicated problem, but astronomers have come up with <a href="http://www.sky-watch.com/articles/howfar2.html">a number of clever ways to do it.</a> The stars have been found to be many light years away, and observations have demonstrated that our Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter. But if we are to believe in the Young-Earth cosmology, we would only be able to see a small number of nearby stars. For anything farther than 6,000 light years, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlight_problem">there would not have been enough time in the age of the Universe for the light to reach us.</a> We would not be able to see even a single galaxy outside of our own (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canis_Major_Dwarf_Galaxy">the closest of which is 25,000 light years away</a>). As it turns out, though, we can see <a href="http://www.sciencemusings.com/blog/uploaded_images/HUDF-777866.jpg">very many galaxies.</a> Most of them are millions or even billions of light years away.<br />
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<i><b>3. <u>If you believe the stars and galaxies are much closer, do you believe in gravity?</u></b></i><br />
Let's imagine for a moment our calculations of the distances to the stars are way off, so that they are much closer than typical estimates. What are the implications? Well, the Universe would be a much more crowded place. Let's say the Milky Way galaxy is a mere 5,000 light years across, instead of 100,000 light years as we have said. Astronomers have calculated the number of stars in the Milky Way to be in the hundreds of billions. With a hypothetical Milky Way 1/20th the size, the volume is only about 0.0124% that of the original, meaning the stars would have to be a whole lot closer together. And such a crowded galaxy would certainly complicate things as the mutual gravity of the stars would be much stronger. In this model, using the current star count, stars are on average only 0.2 light years apart, so we could say that Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to the Sun at 4.37 light years away, might now only be about 1/5th of a light year away, much closer to the Sun than the theoretical <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud">Oort Cloud of Comets.</a>* It's easy to see how such a situation would radically alter the dynamics of our otherwise peaceful solar system. But it could not be reconciled with observation. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax">Parallax</a> would show that Alpha Centauri is clearly not this close, and the same would go for all of the other nearby stars, so we would have to say that the stars in our immediate vicinity are far apart as we have observed, but they are incredibly bunched up everywhere else. Of course, there is no good reason why this should be the case. The observed stellar motions about the galactic center just cannot be squared with this cosmology. Our current star count would have to be wildly inaccurate, or our measurement of stellar masses would have to be way off. But based on what we know about stellar mechanics, we cannot just reduce the masses of the stars without <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_sequence">noticeable consequences,</a> so this doesn't explain it. Otherwise, we would have to be living in an incredibly dense little galaxy. But this just does not match observations. In addition, this sort of hypothesis cannot come close to accounting for the enormous number of galaxies we have observed, which would all have to be within our 6,000 year light horizon if we are to see them. If everything we see beyond the Milky Way is within 6,000 light years, the galaxies would have to be incredibly small (much too small to be considered galaxies), dangerously close together, and their measured <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift">redshift</a> could not be explained.++<br />
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<i><b></b></i><b><i>4. <u>Do you believe in radioactive decay? If not, why not?</u> </i></b><br />
One key way scientists have been able to determine the age of the Earth is through the use of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating">radiometric dating.</a> Remarkably, every elemental isotope has a predictable rate of radioactive decay, which means we can look at any material and determine its age based on the decay of its constituent nuclides. Using this method, scientists have found the oldest rocks on Earth to be over 4 billion years old. Radiometric dating has also been used on rocks from the Moon, and meteorites recovered on Earth, and the results have consistently pointed to a Solar System in the vicinity of 4.5 billion years old. Studies of orbital mechanics and the evolution of our Sun also corroborate this estimate. Meanwhile, our understanding of radioactivity is central to modern chemistry and critical to the production of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, so it's unlikely that we would be able to pull off such complex feats without a clear sense of radioactivity's basic mechanism. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><i><b>5. <u>In short, do you believe in science?</u> </b></i><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/12/06/us/ARK-1/ARK-1-articleLarge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="252" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/12/06/us/ARK-1/ARK-1-articleLarge.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>After just a brief exploration of some of the problems with a Young-Earth cosmology, it's easy to see just how many backflips are required to square such assertions with the facts. In order to prove a Young-Earth hypothesis, we couldn't just disprove one of the aforementioned scientific findings; we'd really have to disprove them all. And unfortunately for the creationists, this is really a tall order (you'll notice, I haven't even addressed perhaps the most elegant evidence of Earth's ancient history -- <a href="http://sagansbrain.blogspot.com/search/label/Evolution">evolution</a> -- which they dismiss out of hand). What science deniers don't seem to understand is that every single assertion in science has to be tested if it is to be counted as fact. We didn't simply take Newton's word on it that gravity works the way he said it does. It was tested, and it has been demonstrated to be correct. The same is true of Einstein's mind-boggling prediction that time dilates at relativistic speeds: it's been demonstrated. And down the line we go... every minor scientific detail, down to the most esoteric and obscure, has been worked out -- proposed, tested, and critiqued. And there is extra scrutiny reserved for the explanations of phenomena that we cannot actually see with our own eyes, whether we're talking about quantum mechanics, astronomy, cosmology or geology. Creationists like to insinuate that scientists are just making up their facts as they go along, but that accusation really betrays them; they are the ones with the unsubstantiated claims, and they are clearly unaware of the rigor with which ideas must be tested before they become mainstream theory. Scientists don't have the luxury of simply inventing their own version of history, so it has taken centuries, and the life's work of countless scientists, to reach our present understanding of the world. <br />
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In watching <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFjoEgYOgRo">Richard Dawkins' fascinating interview with creationist Wendy Wright</a>, one gets the sense that perhaps creationists may really just lack a clear notion of what "scientific evidence" means. They are apparently unconvinced by the massive amount of empirical evidence to support our modern understanding of the Universe, but they are perfectly willing to take a single text written thousands of years ago as an infallible history of the world, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creationist_cosmologies">manipulate their science</a> to match a predetermined cosmology. Unfortunately, it seems clear that there is a major misinformation campaign underway, whereby legitimate science education is stifled or questioned, and a nonsensical alternative is presented as fact. The Creation Museum and now Ark Encounter are tools in this vein, and insomuch as they undermine science education and poison the minds of the next generation, they are undeserving of public funding.<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>*Let's use <a href="http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_distance_between_stars">this math </a>as a jumping off point... Using a crude calculation (volume of a cylinder = Pi * r^2 * h), we estimate the volume of the real Milky Way to be about 23.6 trillion cubic light years (radius is 50,000 light years, average height is 3000 light years). Estimates place the number of stars in the Milky Way somewhere between 200 and 400 billion, so taking the average (300 billion), we divide that into the total volume and get the average volume surrounding each individual star, equaling 78.7 cubic light years. Taking the cube root, we get 4.3 light years as our average distance between the stars (remarkably close to the actual distance from our Sun to Alpha Centauri). But now we calculate the volume of our hypothetical Milky Way galaxy with a diameter of 5,000 light years and an average height of 150 light years (1/20th the size of the real thing). With these values, the volume comes out to be 2.95 x 10^9 cubic light years (0.0124% of the real thing). Dividing this by 300 billion, we get a average volume surrounding each star of only 0.0098 cubic light years, and the cube root of that is about 0.2 light years. </i></b></span><br />
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</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>++ </i></b></span><span id="internal-source-marker_0.4348781467293883" style="background-color: transparent; font-size: x-small; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Note: This hypothetically miniature Milky Way is not part of creationist doctrine, so far as I know. I’ve just discussed it here as a thought experiment, to explore how the galaxy might have to appear to us if we are to take some ideas to their logical, if absurd, conclusions. A number of alternative theories have been put forth by Young-Earth creationists, however: They have placed the Milky Way at the center of the Universe, to explain the apparent redshift of distant galaxies; they have proposed that our section of the Universe is under the influence of a white hole, so that time has been distorted in such a way that what has been experienced as 6,000 years here on Earth has been equivalent to billions of years elsewhere in the Universe; and they have suggested that perhaps the starlight we see in the sky was actually already in motion when the Universe was created, so even phenomena we witness in our own time, like a supernova we saw last week that is estimated by astronomers to have exploded 100,000 years ago, were actually set in motion by God 6,000 years ago, and they have just been designed to </i>seem</span><i><span style="font-size: small;"> like ancient events (this last one is a particularly troubling and altogether ironic theory, since it means that God is deliberately deceiving us here on Earth to make us think that the Universe is old, when really it’s young. What a trickster!). These theories are put together by fringe scientists, in the employ of creationist organizations, and clearly they are designed to support a particular ideological conclusion. But they are a clever bunch; by talking about white holes, redshifts, and the speed of light, their arguments sound very scientific, a</span>nd to a casual or pious audience, that’s good enough. </i></b></span></div><i> </i><br />
<i> </i>Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036440309892076418.post-72833966109929365142010-11-25T17:20:00.001-05:002010-11-25T17:21:23.708-05:00Happy Thanksgiving!<script src="http://cdn-akm.vmixcore.com/vmixcore/js?auto_play=0&cc_default_off=1&player_name=uvp&width=512&height=332&player_id=1aa0b90d7d31305a75d7fa03bc403f5a&t=4c0537a5f12578ffb7bd89d49a7ced37" type="text/javascript">
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Here's wishing you and yours a very happy, safe and relaxing Thanksgiving. We are truly fortunate to live in this time, when we as a species are coming to know the wonders of the universe for the first time in the history of our planet. <br />
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<em>Above, a special greeting from crew members aboard the ISS.</em>Alex Teacheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13488465519009151117noreply@blogger.com1