|
[Previous entry: "Is there something in the water at the Pentagon?"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Breaking news"] 09 January 2004: "The Grey (alien) and the Blue (whale)"
A few days ago, my attention was directed to last year's Caltech Michelin Lecture, held by Michael Crichton and titled "Aliens Cause Global Warming," which someone over on 3WA described as "a great read" (I must admit my gut response was "well, I suppose Crichton had to produce something worth reading sooner or later."). It is a thought-provoking read, and I suggest you read it before continuing.
Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:Wrong. We know N ≥ 1, because we exist and emit detectable electromagnetic emissions. Moreover, it's an overstatement to say "none of the terms can be known"; they are not, and cannot, be known at present, but that is not to say they cannot be(come) known in future. Oh, and Carl Sagan never actually said "billions and billions" (Having received the boxed set of Cosmos on DVD a year ago, I can confirm this). I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science.The Drake equation is also not a hypothesis; it consists of a collection of currently unknown variables which, hopefully, may be defined as a result of empirical findings at some point in the future. I don't know what the exact hypothesis is upon which SETI is founded, but given the contents of the SETI website's overview page, it would be something along these lines: Our current understanding of life’s origin on Earth suggests that given a suitable environment and sufficient time, life will develop on other planets. While uncertain it seems possible that intelligent, technological civilisations will develop. If they do, they will very likely (physics being what it is) develop communications technology based on electromagnetic emissions. Such emissions would be detectable, and distinguishable from natural electromagnetic emissions by displaying some discernable degree of order. Therefore, if we detect such emissions, we may conclude that there are other intelligent, technological civilisations aside from our own.The obvious problem with such a hypothesis is that it's currently impossible to falsify. You can't prove there is no other intelligent life in the galaxy (let alone the universe) without inspecting every single star system and coming up empty-handed; I hardly need point out humanity does not currently possess the means to do so. As a result of this restriction, SETI has a hard time measuring up to scientific standards applied to questions which can be answered on Earth alone. Nevertheless, Crichton then rather overdoes it: SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith.This is sophistry at best. Many—probably most—people who think SETI is worthwhile do not firmly believe in intelligent extra-terrestrial life; they consider it possible, even likely, that such life exists, but that is not the same as having faith that it does. Conversely, it may be argued that faith involves holding on to a belief even in the face of contrary indications. There is a story of how one of Muhammed's scribes (Muhammed, being illiterate, needed scribes to write down the supposed word of God for him) decided to see what would happen if he wrote down something quite different from what Muhammed was telling him; contrary to his expectations, he was not struck by lightning. Another story relates how one of Muhammed's wives remarked how many of his revelations appeared at suspiciously opportune moments, i.e. to grant divine approval to a course of action which more mundane considerations had already dictated he should take. One can also cite such phrases as "if Islam is the One True Faith, how come geopolitical dominance is in the hands of infidels?" and ask why the skies did not darken over Auschwitz. Faith means maintaining a belief even in the face of such objections. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered.Oh, come on! What's forty years in a universe where it takes light 30,000 years to get from galactic central point to us (and vice-versa)? If we accept the most optimistic set of estimates run through the Drake equation (resulting in a value of N of several million), and assume that these civilisations are more or less evenly spread out, the closest would still be 200 light years away. If there were a civilisation that close (comparatively speaking), and their level of technological development was roughly equal to ours, they still wouldn't receive the Arecibo broadcast for another 170 years. This is basically an argumentum ad ignorantiam. And at the risk of committing an ad hominem myself, this coming from a guy who expects me to suspend my disbelief that it's possible to clone dinosaurs from DNA extracted from the blood of a fossilised mosquito (how many mosquitoes? just the one?) and fill in the missing strands by substituting frog DNA? It's rather rich, Fermi's Paradox notwithstanding. The real pity of this digression is that it draws away attention from the more apt examples, such as second-hand smoke and global warming. I spent Christmas at the house of my brother-in-law Larry, who has a TiVo, on which he had several episodes of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! One of these episodes dealt with the topic of second-hand smoke, and made clear in no uncertain terms that both the EPA's and the WHO's claims regarding the dangers of environmental tobacco smoke were not actually supported by any research data, including that of studies cited to support the claims. It all pretty much matches what Crichton has to say on the issue. The similarities with the controversy surrounding Bjørn Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist are remarkable. A prime example is a criticism made by Lomborg regarding claims made by the Worldwatch Institute. Based on data gathered by the FAO, Worldwatch claimed that Canada was losing 200,000 hectares of forest a year. Lomborg pointed out that the FAO data actually indicated that Canada was gaining 174,000 hectares of forest a year. Worldwatch's response (on a page that since has been pulled, probably because they realised that titling it "skeptical-mediasheep.html" wasn't going to win them any friends) was that the FAO data were never meant to measure forest cover, and was therefore not reliable. But that was beside the point! Lomborg's point was that Worldwatch cited the FAO data—the same data Worldwatch later dismissed as unreliable—and claimed it said something which almost entirely contradicted what it actually did say. In short, Worldwatch lied through their teeth. Crichton quotes Victor Weisskopf as saying about the nuclear winter doctrine, "The science is terrible but---perhaps the psychology is good." A look into the psychology may be gleaned from something said by Dr. Stephen Schneider, which was quoted in the article "Our Fragile Earth" by Jonathan Schell in the October 1989 issue of Discover (sorry, no link; Discover's online archive only goes back to 1992). [We] are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place [...] To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. [...] Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.Crichton's implication that SETI was the first example of science being subverted to support a predetermined doctrine strikes me as hooey. That sort of thing has been around since Ptolemaeus "proved" that the Earth was the centre of the universe. Nevertheless, the attitude described by Schneider seems to be gaining popularity. Remarkably, the sentiment of "the ends justifies the means" since it's all done out of good intentions (but remember what the road to Hell is reportedly paved with) is one that resonates with many of the same people who have "Bush lied!" bumper stickers on their cars. In the meantime, I get the increasing feeling I can't trust anyone. This was not helped by an article I read in last week's Economist on whaling ("A bloody war," probably premium content), particularly this passage: Britain opposes whaling, explains Mr Cowan, “because that is what the public expects us to do.” But opinion surveys suggest that most Britons (as well as Australians, Americans and others opposed to whaling) believe wrongly that all whales are endangered, which happens to be the impression given by both Greenpeace and the British government. Research by the Japanese government leads it to believe that most Australians think there is only one species of whale—“the whale”—and that it is endangered.The fact is that there are 13 different species of whale, of which seven are indeed endangered. However, there are three species which are not; fin and Bryde's whales are abundant in certain waters, and minke whales are abundant almost everywhere, and increasing at 2-3% a year. Now, I grew up to believe that Whaling Is Bad, and that all species of whale were faced with extinction if those awful Japanese and Norwegians didn't stop their despicable practice. It was the last bastion of, if you will, Moral Clarity. And now my nose is pressed onto the facts, to use a Dutch term, that there are certain species of whale of which you can kill a couple a thousand a year without any discernible long-term consequences. The auxiliary argument was that whaling was somehow cruel, because whales were special. Now I'm not so sure. What makes them more special than, say, moose? American hunters blast several hundred of those every year, and nobody seems to give a damn. Pigs seem to be relatively intelligent critters, but that doesn't stop us from consuming god only knows how much pork globally. What makes whales any different, as long as we're talking species that aren't endangered? And, even more curiously, why does Greenpeace support the Makah tribe's demands to be allowed to hunt grey whales, a species which is endangered? May SETI will make contact with someone who can explain it all to me. Let's hope it's soon. UPDATE: via Harry's Place, more on global warming from Melanie Phillips, including links to even more. |
Navigation: home archives backgrounder Blogs:
au currant Miscellanea:
Care to contribute |
