This is my web log which contains all sorts of random thoughts I felt it necessary to record for posterity here. I've recorded ideas on all sorts of topics in here so I hope you find something interesting, and maybe even useful!
Far Out!
2026-04-18. Science. Rating 1. ID 2439.
I said I would discuss the techniques used to establish the size of the universe on the greatest scales after talking about how the distance to relatively close objects could be found in my previous blog post, so let's do this. How far out can we go?
While there is no practical purpose in knowing this stuff for the average person, I think it is interesting to know what clever mechanisms astronomers have come up with over the years, and it is also nice to know that the numbers we often see are based on real facts and the crazy ideas of flat Earth believers and other conspiracy theorists can be safely rejected.
So last time I talked about parallax, and the big picture is that we start with short distances, then get progressively bigger using the previous results. For example, last time we start with the diameter of the Earth (13 thousand km), which was used to give the distance to the Sun (150 million km), which in turn gave us the distance to the nearest star (42 trillion kilometers).
The observations are difficult and only an approximation, but they are all we have, and many have been confirmed using different techniques, so we can be confident they are approximately correct.
After establishing the distance to stars using the mathematical methods I talked about in the previous post we can figure out how bright stars really are. The true brightness and the distance both determine the apparent brightness when seen from Earth. A star that looks bright from Earth could be genuinely bright or maybe just relatively close. Once we know the distance we can take that into account to get the true brightness.
After doing this we notice that certain types of stars seem to have roughly predictable true brightnesses, so a very dim star which we know is actually bright is very distance, and that distance can be estimated. The type of star is usually established by looking at its spectrum which can used to estimate its mass and temperature.
But this is only good as for a rough estimate, is there anything better? Well yes, there is. Some stars vary in brightness, and a particular type, called a Cepheid variable, has the useful property that the time it takes to go from bright to dim and back to bright is related to its mass and its mass is related to its brightness. So measure the period of the variation in brightness ot get the true brightness, compare that with the apparent brightness, and you can get the distance.
Cepheids are also bright (a thousand to ten thousand times the brightness of the Sun) so they can be easily observed at large distances, even in other galaxies. So if we know the distance to a star in another galaxy we know the distance to the galaxy too! This works for close galaxies, which means we are getting out to tens of millions of light years, a billion trillion kilometers.
About a hundred years ago an American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, was doing incredibly skilled work, taking spectra (turning their light into a "rainbow" of colours) of distant galaxies. He noticed the light from these was shifted towards the red end of the spectrum, and that the dimmer the galaxy (and therefore, on average, the more distant) the higher the shift was.
When an object is moving away from you, any wave phenomenon (like light or sound) is "spread out" (so sounds become lower, light becomes redder). You will have noticed this with sound when a fast moving car, train, or plane goes past you: the sound is higher as it comes towards you and lower as it goes past and travels away. We don't notice this with light because light is so much faster that the effect is impossible to detect with everyday objects (sound moves at 1200 kph, light at one billion kph).
Hubble had discovered that redshift (a concept already well accepted) gets greater the more distant the galaxy is (there are a few exceptions for really close galaxies). This is because the universe is expanding and the further apart two objects are the faster they are moving away from each other. So this means that if we measure the redshift we can estimate the distance, and this works for galaxies right to the edge of the observable universe, or 46 billion light years (460 billion trillion kilometers).
There are many details I have missed out here, and I did all this from memory, so I hope I got it right: I was an astronomy educator in the distant past but it's easy to forget details!
The thing I like about this is just how clever it all is, how amazingly precise the measurements are, and how one observation can be used as the basis of the next: the width of the Earth is measured with a couple of sticks, that diameter is used to get the distance to the Sun, which is used to get the distance to a close star, which is used to get the distant to more distant stars, which calibrates the measurements of Cepheids and bright stars, which gives the distance to close galaxies, which calibrates the redshift, which is used to get the distance to the edge of the universe.
Finally, a few associated points...
First, you might say one error in the first measurements might make all the rest invalid. That is true, but we have other methods to estimate distances and they would soon show us if we got this wrong, and that has even happened in the past before the reason was found and the distances confirmed.
Second, some people say redshift can be explained in other ways. This is also true, but that can be allowed for in calculations.
Finally, what is the "observable" universe? Well, because of the expansion of the universe the further away we go the faster the galaxies are travelling away from us. Eventually the speed will be at the speed of light, so the light of that galaxy will never get to us. The universe exists beyond that point (maybe to infinity) but we can never know anything about it directly because no information can travel faster than light.
So yes, thanks to the brilliant work of astronomers and other scientists over many years (starting with good old Eratosthenes), we can see and understand the universe really far out!
I see a lot of weird stuff while on the internet, especially on social media sites (I use Facebook and X a lot). I've got to admit that it is hard to know who is serious and who isn't today, because I honestly sometimes can't tell the difference between serious comments and satire! But I came across one comment recently which did seem serious. It was about "space being fake". The person seemed to be claiming that the universe was really just the Earth with a small amount of space above it, then maybe a solid barrier, although they were a bit vague about that.
So I thought, apart from just taking the word of astronomers, how would we really know how big the universe is? Is there a way the average person could figure it out without investing millions or even billions in fancy, professional level, equipment?
So the answer is yes. I have been an amateur astronomer for many years and I must admit, I have never done these observations myself, because they do take a lot of time and effort, but theoretically I could do them if I wanted to.
So here's how I would do it...
Let's assume the stars are at varying distances from the Earth rather than being holes in that solid sphere which my conspiracy theorist friend thinks they are. In that case we could use parallax to estimate the distance to the star. So we could assume the brighter stars are probably closer and the dimmer ones more distant. Because stars vary in brightness, this isn't always true, but on average it is.
We must also accept that the Earth orbits the Sun once per year. Again, this is an assumption, but like all the others we will get crazy results if the assumptions aren't true, so let's just proceed.
Choose a day, let's say mid-summer, and look at the position of the bright star in relation to a variety of dimmer stars, then do the same thing thing six months later at mid-winter. During that time the Earth has moved 300 million kilometers from one side of its orbit to the other (the Sun-Earth distance is about 150 million kilometers).
To understand parallax, try this: hold your finger up in from of your face and look at where it is in relation to a wall when looking through your left eye, then your right. Notice how it moves? Now move your finger further away, and repeat, then closer to your eye and repeat again. The amount it seems to move is proportional to the distance from your eye. Now substitute your left eye for the Earth at mid-summer, your right eye for it at mid-winter, the finger for the close star and the wall for the distant stars.
The first problem is we cannot be sure that the dim stars are really distant and the bright ones close, but if we repeat the process with enough stars we will get a statistical measurement that we can use. The second problem is that when this was first tried no parallax was seen, but that was because the stars are so incredibly distant that the parallax was small. With better techniques it was observed and the closest star moved 0.768 arc seconds, the equivalent of the width of a coin about 2 kilometers away!
Do the calculations and it turns out that star is about 40 trillion kilometers away. This is just "slightly" more than the "space is fake" person claimed, but he was only off by a factor of about a billion, so nice try! Also remember this is the closest star (apart from the Sun). The most distant star measured with this technique is about 500 thousand trillion kilometers away.
By the way, the more skeptical of you might be asking, how do we know the distance to the Sun, which we need to do the calculation? Well, it was measured quite accurately in 1672 using simple trigonometry from observations from opposite sides of the Earth to estimate the distance to Mars, then a further trig calculation to use Earth and Mars to get the distance to the Sun. It's simple maths which no one would debate, although the measurements themselves need to be very precise. But they got a number just 7% smaller than the one we have today.
Oh, one more thing too: how do we know the size of the Earth, because the "opposite sides of the Earth" observation needs that. Well, that was established by one of my heroes, Eratosthenes, in 240 BCE. He paid someone to step out the distance between the cities Alexandria and Syene, then he measured the length of a shadow at those two points at the same time. The shadow at the city closer to the equator was shorter and by using some more trigonometry he estimated the size of the Earth just a few percent different to the modern figure.
It was utterly brilliant and not only showed the diameter of the Earth, but also proved it wasn't flat, another crazy belief some people still have (I'm not joking, there really are some people who think the Earth is flat).
So everything I have listed here just needs some very simple maths and a bit of effort. To make the parallax observations you would also need a telescope, but a decent amateur level one would be sufficient. There is nothing you need to accept from an authority, everything can be done by any careful, moderately intelligent person.
By the way, even the more distant star I mentioned above is still exceptionally close by the standards of the universe as a whole! How do we know about even greater distances? Well, maybe that's a subject for my next blog post.
In recent weeks I have come across several on-line discussions where religious people have tried to reject science which is inconvenient to their views, especially related to evolution. In a recent post ("I Support Religion!" from 2024-09-20) I did moderate my opinion somewhat, mainly because what often replaces traditional religion (what I call "woke-ism" and "woo") is even worse than the actual religion, but I still feel as if I need to defend science against the attacks from creationists and the like.
Here's the first claim: that the chance of specific proteins, or sometimes other chemical structures, or the cell, etc arising by chance is so low that it is impossible that it happened naturally, and an intelligence (which, of course, is the particular god the person prefers) is the only explanation. A common number tossed about here is that there is one chance in 10^70 (ten thousand trillion quadrillion quadrillion) of a protein arising naturally.
Another claim is this: that the complex life we have nowadays developing through evolution is like a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and leaving a fully assembled 747 afterwards. Again, it is so unlikely that it is practically impossible.
Then there is this, which seems more sophisticated but is actually the easiest to answer: that thermodynamics states that the universe tends to a greater state of "disorder" (entropy) and this scientific theory, which is almost universally accepted, contradicts evolution.
For someone without much of a science background, or little knowledge of critical thinking, or with an ideology they want to support, these all seem like pretty fair points, but there are a few factors which maybe they didn't take account of.
So the most simple question I would ask, which requires no technical knowledge is this: if it is really that easy to disprove evolution (or maybe abiogenesis) why do the vast majority of scientists still accept evolution as fact? Sure, there could be a vast conspiracy against religion, but even many religious scientists accept evolution, and conspiracies are generally (but not always) untrue. This isn't proof in any way, but it is something to consider.
The bigger factor is this: evolution is the continual process of small changes accumulating over time. Not only that, but it happens massively in parallel, with billions of individuals being potentially affected by it simultaneously, and over billions of years. And each small step is selected for and these act as the starting point for the next step.
There is one other point too: it isn't really random, and there is something like an "intelligence" controlling it. The laws of physics act like an intelligent agent might, by selecting and enhancing each step.
So, if we use our "747 from a junkyard" example, it is more accurate to think of it slightly differently. Imagine instead of one junkyard, there are billions, and each junkyard is subject to hurricanes in quick succession over billions of years. And the 747 doesn't need to be created in one step; anything that is useful (like part of a wing) will be kept and used as the starting point for the next step. And the "partial 747s" which are created will increase in number greatly and the failures will disappear. And it doesn't have to be a 747; it could be anything useful.
That final point is important. We could say that the chances of a 747 being created are practically zero, but why would we expect that a 747 is the required outcome? That just happens to be something we are retro-fitting to the process. It could have been an A380 instead, or a Cessna, or a helicopter, or something we have never seen before.
Many of these ideas, and a lot more, are covered in Richard Dawkins' book, "Climbing Mount Improbable" which is particularly good at explaining how the small steps are not only possible, but inevitable. I do admit I haven't ready this whole book (only parts) but I have read other material on the subject and other Dawkins books, so I think this one might be useful for people who doubt evolution.
Note also, that modelling on these factors has been done, and the probabilities do check out. Also note that the most important evolutionary steps happened billions of years ago, and we have very little indisputable evidence of them, but that is just the nature of the problem, and not a specific weakness of evolution.
Finally, there is the entropy argument. Entropy applies to closed systems, so the total disorder (not a technically correct term, but close enough in this context) in such a system does increase, meaning highly "ordered" objects should be less likely. But we have a continuous source of energy which can overcome this affect (the Sun). Also, small parts can become more ordered as long as the system as a whole (the universe) becomes more disordered. So thermodynamics is fully compatible with evolution.
I tend to avoid using the word "fact", because philosophically we can never be absolutely certain about anything in the physical world (as opposed to abstract worlds such as maths and logic) but as an approximation I think it is reasonable to say that evolution is a "fact".
For the last couple of weeks there has been a scientific debate about the possible discovery of life, by the James Webb Space Telescope, on a planet with the rather catchy name of "K2-18b". The most interesting discovery was of a chemical, dimethyl sulfide, which we have only ever found in the presence of life.
One article wryly notes that the discovery is being reported with the headline "Have we just discovered aliens?", and there is a law known as "Betteridge's law of headlines" which states something like: for any headline which ends with a question mark, the answer is "no"!
Of course, that isn't literally true, but it does make the point that we should be highly skeptical of this possibility. After all, there have been many other similar discoveries which looked as if they might indicate the presence of life, but were due to either misidentification, contamination, or a previously unknown chemical process.
So this blog post isn't about how life has been discovered, but how the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe is an interesting subject in itself, even if it hasn't been found yet. Here is one of my favourite quotes from legendary science fiction writer, Arthur C Clarke: "Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."
Think about it: if we are the only life in the universe, that is truly awesome. I mean the universe is pretty big (maybe even infinite) and has existed for a long time (also possibly infinitely, according to some theories) and if the only life, and maybe the only "intelligence", is here on Earth, that is utterly astonishing. But if there is life elsewhere, and almost certainly intelligence as well, that is also an incredible thing.
So which is more scary: knowing that we are all alone in this vast universe, or knowing that there might be other intelligent species, and civilisations, out there waiting to be discovered? Both are amazing and very consequential.
If we really are the only intelligent life in this vast universe then surely we have a responsibility to make the most of that exalted position, and we sure don't seem to be doing a very good job of that so far! You might ask who do we owe this responsibility to? Well, if you are religious, you might say to your god, but I would say to ourselves.
If there are many planets orbiting most stars, and hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy, and hundreds of billions (or trillions) of galaxies in the visible universe alone, and who knows how many (again, maybe an infinite number) in the rest of the universe, then there are clearly many opportunities for life to evolve elsewhere. If it hasn't, then it must be unbelievably difficult for it to get started, making it so much more valuable when it does.
But if it has, then there is life on other planets, and almost certainly intelligent life too. How amazing is that? When can we meet these other cultures? When can we even confirm that they exist? How would that affect religion and philosophy? Would most people even care? Well, probably not, but the more intelligent, thoughtful, and philosophical amongst us probably would.
The lack of convincing evidence of extraterrestrial life so far, despite several attempts at finding it, is somewhat puzzling, although there are many perfectly respectable scientific reasons for this failure. It certainly seems as if life does not get started easily, and if it does get started, it might not advance to being intelligent enough to develop technology we could detect.
But surely it is just a matter of time. I believe it is inevitable that we will discover life some time, probably in the next hundred years, and extraterrestrial intelligence within a similar timeframe. In fact, it might be easier to find the evidence of technology rather than life itself.
So yeah, I think it will happen, but I'm not sure it has happened yet.
The great physicist Niels Bohr once (allegedly) commented: "Your theory is crazy, but not crazy enough to be true". There are many great theories which superficially seem crazy: Relativity and Quantum Theory being the most obvious, but are they true? In fact, what does "true" even mean?
For example, does it make sense that as you travel faster you get heaver (technically, more massive) and that your time runs slower? I don't mean anything superficial here, like a clock malfunctioning and showing the wrong time. It's not the indicator of time which is the issue, it is time itself.
So, if you travel quickly, then return to your original location, two exactly correct clocks with show different times. And you will have aged more slowly. Actually, even that isn't true, because you will have aged at exactly the correct rate, along with the people who didn't travel quickly but aged differently. Travel fast enough and far enough and you can take a trip which lasts a few years only to return to your starting point after a million years there has passed.
And this effect isn't "just" a theory either. GPS systems have to use a correction for a similar effect to operate correctly, and a particular type of subatomic particle which bombards the Earth from space lasts long enough to get to ground level even though it decays in less time than that journey takes, because it is travelling fast enough that its time is slower than it is at ground level. And light arrives at its destination at the same time as it leaves, even though it "only" travels at 300,000 kilometers per second.
And in quantum theory, particles are waves, and waves are particles, depending on how you look at them. And particles (or waves) can be in two places at the same time.
Does any of this make sense? Well, no, not according to our everyday understanding of how the world works. We evolved our way of understanding reality by interacting with the real world on "everyday" scales and moderate time periods. If we could see atoms, or observe phenomena over nanosecond time periods, or if our planet orbited a black hole, maybe these theories would make perfect sense.
By adding technology to the mix we can now observe these things, but it still doesn't feel intuitive.
Another relevant quote I think is apropos of this is this one: "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine" (JBS Haldane). After all, why would we expect that we can understand the whole universe?
Clearly, we can get very good approximations to the truth, and calculations using quantum physics are astonishingly accurate. For example, quantum electrodynamics accurately predicts experimental results to within one part in 100 million. That's like measuring the width of the Earth accurate to a few centimeters.
So my message is that the universe is weird, but we understand this weirdness to some extent by being able to measure it using mathematical theories. But we don't really know what these theories represent in the real universe, although there are a few ideas about this.
So in the near future I will present my interpretation of some of these ideas (they're not really theories yet). This is the "outrageous theory" I talked about last year. What could be more outrageous than a crazy idea about the underlying truths about the whole universe?
It seems to me that science is becoming increasingly politicised. There are several reasons I think this might be happening, but I will list a few examples first.
During the COVID pandemic we have had a lot of input from scientists, sometimes explaining the science behind the daily happenings, sometimes supporting the government agenda, sometimes denigrating those who oppose the accepted wisdom of the time. This has been particularly prominent around government backed interventions, like vaccination.
Climate change is another subject where science and politics overlap. Climate is fundamentally a scientific issue, but the response has become highly politicised, and science has become a tool to push a particular political agenda.
These two involve climate and health, which are two moderately respectable areas, where a fair degree of rigour is generally present, but there are other areas, especially in the social sciences, where the facts aren't quite so easy to separate from opinions. These might include subject areas related to social or political subjects, such as gender politics, racial issues, etc.
At the other end of the spectrum we have sciences which have a high degree of credibility, such as physics and chemistry, which are generally very reliable and less susceptible to claims of bias.
So it seems that the subjects which have a greater component of political relevance are the ones we really need to be questioning, where the others can be assumed to be accurate, although that is never an absolute rule, because all science can be questioned.
The question is this: are the less reputable areas of science that way because politics has infiltrated a previously "pure" area of knowledge, or is that particular science itself, by its nature political, and therefore has always been susceptible to bias and opinion masquerading as fact?
I'm guessing it's a bit of both. Social sciences have always been highly susceptible to bias and lower levels of objectivity, because of their inherent nature, but that in turn has been made worse through both subtle and overt political interference. This is both apparent in the daily reporting of these topics, but also in real, properly established scientific findings like the replication crisis in the social sciences, especially psychology.
In a recent poll of public trust in various professions, scientists did come out near the top, with almost 70% saying they are trustworthy and about 20% saying they are very trustworthy. At the bottom end of the scale, only 4% found government or big business very trustworthy.
So despite a lot of false predictions and errors made by scientists during both the epidemic and the recent periods of climate change, scientists are still rated highly. This is good, because despite the clear problems, science is still the best system we have to get to the closest approximation of the truth.
But the science being presented in papers in highly respected journals, and the pale imitation of science being presented by whomever the media or government currently favour, are two very different things.
Unfortunately scientific papers are usually too technical for most people to understand, so what we hear in the news is what most people think of as science. And it is an approximation to that, but far from being the real thing.
For example, in a recent debate on climate change, my opponent said the alternative to dealing with the climate is the destruction of the Earth, or at least the end of the human race, or if not that then mass extinctions. Note that the claim tends to escalate or de-escalate based on how much push back the person gets!
When this was presented to me I asked for a reference to the paper which said humanity would become extinct because of climate change. The person said it was on the news last night. I said: that's not science, that's popular news, now where is that paper?
That paper doesn't seem to exist, because none of the predictions of climate scientists will lead to the end of humanity, and very few lead to mass extinctions in any meaningful way. Climate change being an "existential crisis" is just political rhetoric which makes the issue seem far more dire than it really is.
Note that I am not saying we should do nothing about climate change, but I am saying the hysteria around a "climate crisis" or "emergency" is primarily political, and the science doesn't necessarily support this.
The same applies to COVID. Some of the predictions of the models, often created by non-specialists, have been absurd, yet no one seems to care. As long as the predictions suit the political agenda of the time, then they are accepted by the media, and by most of the population, without question.
So my advice would be this: don't treat all sciences as being the same. There is a clear hierarchy of trust in branches of science (and related fields) which might go something like this (from most to least trusted): mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, general social sciences, gender and ethnic studies.
These seem to be directly related to the amount of political interference. It is unlikely that politicians would be interested in the latest mathematical theorem, but they might find medicine far more of relevance, and any science relating to trendy issues like gender, race, etc will surely be of great interest to them.
So I say instead of trusting all science equally, look at them as a hierarchy, in roughly the order I gave above. I would trust a new finding in maths almost without question, and it is unlikely I would have too much skepticism towards physics or chemistry, but I assume all findings from gender studies, indigenous studies, etc are propaganda rather than real scientific findings.
Note that this is just a heuristic, and there are undoubtedly results from those areas I have less trust for that are true, but that is not likely to be the case in the majority of their findings.
It would be interesting to do the survey I mentioned above again, but break the sciences down into categories, similar to what I have listed, and see how the results might be different. I suspect, just based on my personal experience, that many people would have the same reservations as I do.
So all sciences aren't created equal. Some people would claim that some of the subjects I listed aren't even real science. I think I would agree. They could be science if they were done properly, according to sound objective principles, but in their current form they actually aren't science. What are they? Well maybe they are arts, maybe they are politics, maybe they are just activism with a thin veneer of academic respectability.
But that's all they are, so when you are asked to "trust the science" you need to be very careful about exactly what type of science is involved. Some is a lot more trustworthy than others.
I recently had a discussion with a friend about the value of exploration of space. Being a technology enthusiast I supported it, but my friend wasn't so sure. He wanted to know what the point of going to the Moon and Mars, and what the value of other related missions might be.
I thought I might get clever so I asked: why are there no more dinosaurs around today? He didn't know, or he knew but didn't see where this was leading, so I gave him my answer: "because they didn't have a space program".
My point here was that a major disaster, affecting the whole planet in a similar way to the asteroid collision which "wiped out" the dinosaurs, could occur in the near future, and the only way to escape it might be to have humans living on another planet.
But he wasn't going to be persuaded so easily, and replied with: "but there are still crocodiles around, aren't there?" I'm not sure if his point was that crocodiles represented a modern form of dinosaur, which they don't, but he was right in that crocodiles existed before, during, and after the dominance of dinosaurs. I also mentioned that birds are the modern descendents of theropod dinosaurs, a group which included the famous t-rex.
So life wasn't completely wiped out by the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, but about 75% of species did become extinct. But that's just the beginning, because prior to that were similar events which also caused mass extinctions: 200 million years ago about 80% of species were made extinct, 250 million years ago 90% were, 375 million years ago 85% were, and 445 million years ago also about 85% went extinct.
It's clear that major events do happen occasionally, with an interval of about 50 to 100 million years, and notice that it has been about that long since the last disaster which was the one which affected the dinosaurs and many other species.
So I say we cannot be too complacent. The last mass extinction cleared the way for mammals, and ultimately humans, to become dominant, but we shouldn't try to deny that we might be the next victims!
My friend countered this by asking who cares if we become extinct? He correctly pointed out that one species dying out and another taking over is the story of life on Earth. I partly agreed by adding that approximately 99% of species which have ever existed on the planet are now extinct.
But it does seem a bit more personal and consequential when the species going extinct is the one which you belong to. I know, just call me sentimental if you wish!
So I had to counter this point as well. I pointed out that we are the only known form of intelligent life in this whole, vast universe. Our galaxy has hundreds of millions of stars, and a significant fraction of those have planets, of which a small proportion might support life, and there are billions of galaxies. After all, space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. (that's a quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, just in case you didn't recognise it).
So we are the only known intelligent life, capable of reflecting on and discovering the facts about how the universe works. Is that not of some value?
He replied by pointing out that sure, we are the only known form of intelligent life, but maybe there are many other advanced civilisations out there as well. He also, as a joke I think, pointed out that whether we are truly intelligent or not is open to debate!
I countered by saying that sure, it seems impossible that there aren't other species on other planets which are as advanced, or more likely far more advanced, than us, but we need to base our decisions on the facts we know now, not on speculation. The facts as they are now is that we don't know of any other planets with life, and we certainly have no indication of intelligent life anywhere.
And sure, intelligence exists on a continuum and we could certainly imagine a far more intelligent and knowledgeable species than us, but again we need to act based on what we know rather than what might be true by conjecture.
At this point I realised the "survival of the human species" argument wasn't making much progress, so I decided to try something else. I asked if he put much value on just acquiring knowledge; whether exploration and discovery had any value in their own right; and whether new technology which arises through space programs has value.
He sort of agreed on the last one, but I didn't get much of a positive response to the first two. I know that technology which arose from the US space program of the last few decades is a common way to support the exploration of space, but I don't see it as something I would emphasise. Those same discoveries could be made for a fraction of the cost back here on Earth (of course, the question is: would they have been made back on Earth). But I do value the first two reasons far more. I think it is inspirational just going somewhere new, and discovering new facts, even when they have no obvious immediate benefit.
And that's where it about ended. I don't think I convinced him that space exploration was really that important, but it's always hard to tell in a debate like that how much the other person genuinely believes what they are saying, and how much they just like as good argument.
But at this point I should summarise why I support space programs for you, my readers...
First, and most fundamentally, humans like to explore and to discover new things. If we ever get to the point where we just want to relax and not try to explore and discover, then I think we sort of deserve to go extinct when that asteroid hits. Curiosity is an important human trait, which got us to where we are today, and we need to welcome more of it.
Second, there are genuine, practical outcomes from space exploration. Satellites for communications, mapping the Earth, and many other tasks are an important part of our technology. Without a space program we would have no satellites. And there are more peripheral benefits too. Some everyday technologies came from new materials and technologies invented for space missions.
Third, we might need to leave the Earth one day. I mean, in a few hundred million or billion years and we will definitely have to leave because the Sun will expand so much, but an asteroid or other natural disaster could happen at any time. Plus there is the possibility of human caused damage from nuclear war, climate change, and other possible issues. I don't believe any of these are likely to be bad enough to make the Earth unliveable (I don't believe in the climate catastrophe narrative although I think climate change is real) but our ability to destroy the planet will only grow with time, so we need to be prepared.
Fourth, the time and money going into developing rockets and similar technology is quite significant, but it is not as much as many people think. For example, NASA only gets 0.48% of the US total annual budget, and that is decreasing from a maximum of 4.41% in 1966. The US could cancel NASA tomorrow and it would make almost no difference to their financial position.
Fifth, there is no choice between having a space program and solving problems on Earth. As I said above, the NASA budget is quite small, and the big problems in the world today cannot be significantly affected by redirecting that amount. In fact, you could make a case to say the world's problems are primarily political, religious, and cultural. Money might not help much in many cases.
So I say well done to both private companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX, and to programs coordinated by government organisations, like NASA. The only regret I have is that we don't spend more on this most critical part of technology.
A friend recently asked me to write a blog post about hydrogen. That may seem like an odd subject, but why not? It's the first element in the periodic table, and the most widely distributed in the universe. Actually, the subject isn't really hydrogen in general; it is more about the use of hydrogen as an energy source.
Hydrogen has three times the energy density of petrol (by weight), so it would seem like an ideal fuel to use in internal combustion engines. More importantly, the only end product of burning hydrogen is water. Burning petrol, which is an very complex combination of different molecules, produces many products, many of which are dangerous (for example, carbon monoxide) and others which contribute to global warming (mainly carbon dioxide).
Note that hydrogen is just hydrogen, an element, and it cannot produce any carbon products because they're just not there to begin with. I understand that contaminants in the hydrogen or the air used to support combustion can cause small amounts of pollutants, but these are so trivial that we can ignore them.
In addition, hydrogen can be easily used in fuel cells which chemically "burn" the hydrogen to produce electricity which can then be used to power electric engines in cars and for other applications. Basically, the hydrogen tank is used instead of batteries.
There are other situations too, where battery electrical systems are not ideal. For example, electric aircraft have not been conspicuously successful, but hydrogen powered jets are a genuine option.
Finally, hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe. Because it reacts so violently (which is what we want to produce energy) and because it is so light that it tends to escape the Earth's atmosphere, we rarely see it in its pure form, but there is plenty around, because water is H2O, two hydrogens bonded to one oxygen. In fact, water is the product we get when we burn hydrogen in oxygen.
But there's one problem: the energy we get when burning hydrogen to produce water is exactly what we need to separate those two atoms (three is you count the two hydrogens and one oxygen) again. And because of unavoidable inefficiencies in that process (don't you just hate entropy) we actually need to put more power in to the process to separate the oxygen and hydrogen than we get when we recombine them by burning the hydrogen.
So that makes hydrogen a way to store energy. You use a certain amount of energy to produce the hydrogen, store it until you need it, then release that energy again in an engine. Inefficiencies in the process mean you get nowhere close to 100% of the energy back again, but that is the case with every storage system.
There are other sources of hydrogen though. It can be produced through a reaction involving natural gas. But hydrocarbons use is exactly the problem that hydrogen fuel is supposed to solve, so that seems counter-productive.
Another problem is that hydrogen is a gas and fossil fuels are mostly liquids. It is much easier to store a liquid than a gas, which to get a reasonable amount in a small volume, must be compressed to very high pressures, making it both difficult and potentially dangerous.
I don't think any of these problems are insurmountable, but those who are fans of hydrogen often don't have good answers.
Despite all of the issues I have mentioned, I think hydrogen is worth considering as a fuel in the future, as long as one other technology becomes available and acceptable: nuclear power, preferably fusion.
Nuclear fusion is the ultimate energy source. We can have a basically unlimited amount of power with few dangerous waste products produced. We will never run out of fuel, because fusion utilises our old friend hydrogen. I know there are other forms of fusion too, using different elements, but I'm sticking to hydrogen for this discussion.
Nuclear power has got a bad reputation because of accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, but looking at the history of power generation, nuclear is actually the safest and has caused the least number of deaths. More people have died falling off roofs installing solar power than have died from radiation after a nuclear accident. And more people die from radiation poison from trace elements escaping coal plant chimneys than from nuclear stations.
Really, the objection to nuclear is based on ignorance, especially amongst environmentalists. If we accepted nuclear power, many environmental issues could be solved, but the greenies are more interested in ideology than truth.
We should also note that modern nuclear power plants are far safer and more efficient than anything we have had in the past, especially the older, poorly run plants at Chernobyl and Fukishima.
And I am advocating for fusion (a process not commercially available yet) which has three advantages over fission (the existing nuclear energy process we use). First, it is safer. Fusion only occurs at huge temperatures and pressures. Any problem tends to break the reactor, reducing the temperature, and stopping the process, because it isn't a chain reaction. You can't have a meltdown. Secondly, hydrogen is incredibly common where uranium is quite rare, so the fuel source for fusion will last forever. Third, the amount of energy produced by fusion is incredible; millions of times more than chemical reactions like burning coal. However fission is almost as good in this regard (about 4 time less).
So we could have nuclear plants generating hydrogen by electrolysis of sea water, and the hydrogen could be burned or used in fuel cells for most energy needs. Of course, the nuclear plants could produce electricity directly too, to power battery powered cars, especially if battery technology improves significantly.
In summary, hydrogen is worth considering as one possible energy source, but we need nuclear to make it work. Actually, we need nuclear to make anything work in the future, in my opinion.
Finally, I did this post from memory of my reading on this topic. If you notice any errors, or want to disagree for some other reason, please let me know in the comments.
I mentioned in a previous post how I intended to write some material about the origin of the universe. I have done a lot of political commentary recently, and after a while it all seems a bit trivial (although it isn't, really) so what could be less trivial, for a change, than the origin and nature of the entire universe?
There are two major ways to explain the universe: first, that it was always here and always will be; and second, that it had a specific origin at some point of time in the past.
Not that long ago, there were two theories which covered these two possibilities: the "eternal universe" idea was covered by the Steady State Model, and the universe with an origin at some point in time was covered by the Bang Bang Model.
In general, the Big Bang is by far the theory with the widest support today, but there are variations on that general theme which might either be thought of as completely different ideas or as major modifications to the traditional Big Bang.
First, let me say why the Big Bang is a good model. There are several observations which point towards a major event causing the origin of the universe some time in the past.
First, it has been known for about a hundred years now that almost all galaxies are moving away from each other, and the further apart they are the faster they are moving apart. This indicates the universe itself is expanding, and by playing this expansion back in time there is a point where all the galaxies occupied a single point. That is about 14 billion years ago, and that was when the Big Bang was theorised to have happened.
Second, there is a cool glow which is observed almost equally in all directions, which has been called the Cosmic Microwave background (CMB). This was discovered by accident by some radio engineers, but it fits in perfectly with what we would expect as the leftover radiation after the Big Bang.
There are also other, less critical observations, such as lithium abundance, but those first two are the major facts pointing to an origin about 14 billion years ago.
The Steady State theory did try to explain the first observation by proposing continuous creation of new matter in all space at a very low - almost unobservable - rate, which filled the gaps left by the expansion and allowed the universe to still be eternal and isotropic (looking about the same at all times and in all places). But observations of galaxies at great distances - and therefore also a long time in the past, because it takes a long time for light to travel from galaxies - shows that the past universe was more compact than it is today, so the Big Bang fits the facts much better.
But whatever theory you support, it should explain the CMB and the universal expansion, which point to an event 14 billion years ago. So whatever else you believe, your ideas must fit in with some sort of event like the Big Bang in the past.
So it seems like a simple conclusion to say that the Big Bang is right, but it's not quite that simple.
For example, if the universe was created 14 billion years ago, what happened before that, and what caused the expansion to be triggered? The common answers here are that there was nothing before the Big Bang because time itself was created then; and that there was nothing needed to trigger it because quantum theory tells us that some events happen with no cause.
Neither of those seem fully philosophically satisfactory though, so I would like to discuss a few alternative views.
First, maybe our universe is just a part of a much larger (probably infinite in space and time) entity which is usually called the "multiverse". The Big Bang might be just where our universe emerges as a "bubble" in the multiverse. Other universes might exist (probably an infinite number of them) which are either undetectable or difficult to detect from ours.
Second, maybe ours is the only universe in space but one of an infinite progression of them in time. In other words, maybe our universe was "born" after a previous one went into a "Big Crunch" which is the opposite of a Big Bang. Maybe universes expand for a time, then compact back to a single point and trigger a new cycle. Maybe this has always happened and always will happen. This is sometimes called the "oscillating universe".
Again, it is difficulty, but not impossible, to prove or disprove this hypothesis, but it does quite neatly explain what was before the Big Bang and what caused it.
There is one other factor which might be seen as more philosophical than scientific, but that I need to mention here. That is the anthropic principle. This notes that the universe seems to be fairly well set up for life to exist. If one of many constants was slightly different than it actually is, we would have no stars (so no planets, no energy, and no life) or the universe would collapse after a short time, not giving life time to develop; or various particles would be unstable and not allow atoms and molecules to form, also eliminating the possibility of life.
So why is the universe set up in such a way? Maybe God wanted it that way? This is actually used as an argument in favour of a creator, but that is unnecessary, because the two modifications of the Big Bang I mentioned above also explain the fine tuning without resorting to the supernatural.
If many - or an infinite number - of universes exist in either space (multiverse) or time (oscillating universe) then each different instance would have different properties. This universe has constants quite well tuned for the existence of life, but countless other universes don't. It is inevitable that some universe amongst a vast or infinite number would seem fine tuned for life, but that is just a matter of pure chance.
Some people might ask here: what is the chance that our universe was the one which is correctly fine tuned? Well, the answer is 100%. If this universe wasn't tuned for life then there would be no life, and we wouldn't be asking the question. The fact that we are here is the result, not the cause.
Some theories are elegant, and answer some difficult questions, but that doesn't mean they are true. I think we will discover some modification of the Big Bang which fills in some of the blanks we currently have. I like the multiverse theory, and there might be some way to prove it too. Some people think specific anomalies in the homogeneity of the CMB indicate interactions with another universe. Are they right? We don't know yet, but maybe we will in the near future.
I like multiverse theories because they explain what we see and answer some of the most difficult questions we have about the nature of reality. But we shouldn't be seduced by simplicity and elegance. Truth is more important, and that might be stranger than any theories we currently have!
From the US I have have heard stories of educational institutions, including universities, proposing courses and areas of study which might seem somewhat strange, and maybe even concerning. For example, is feminist science or African-American science really a thing? Are different approaches to science possible based on the gender or race of the person or group doing the science? What even is science?
This has become relevant here in New Zealand recently after a controversy involving promoting something referred to as "Maori science". A proposal for a new course included the following justification: "to ensure parity with the other bodies of knowledge credentialed by NCEA (particularly Western/Pakeha epistemologies)" and "It promotes discussion and analysis of the ways in which science has been used to support the dominance of Eurocentric views (among which, its use as a rationale for colonisation of Maori and the suppression of Maori knowledge); and the notion that science is a Western European invention and itself evidence of European dominance over Maori and other indigenous peoples".
In a fairly moderate and reasoned rebuttal to this concept, in a published letter titled "In Defence of Science", some academics pointed out that traditional knowledge is not science. That doesn't mean that it has no value (although it doesn't mean that it does has value either), it just means that the knowledge was acquired through other means rather than science.
And - this should be no surprise given current political trends - one of the academics who helped write the objection has been cancelled and forced to resign from an academic position he holds.
There are several issues here which should be discussed in relation to this, so let's get started...
The most obvious problem gets back to the old issue with definitions: what actually is science? Well, there are several definitions, some of which could be warped to include traditional knowledge, but the primary one is this: "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment" (OED).
In the modern context, and in actual practical use, this also involves gaining serious academic qualifications, publishing in recognised journals, and being open to formal peer review. Traditional Maori knowledge does not fullfil any of these requirements, so a very good case could be made to say that it is not science. After all, Maori did not even have a written language, making systematic accumulation of objective knowledge far more difficult.
But that is not even really the main point. The real issue is not whether traditional knowledge is science or not, it is whether it is OK to discuss the issue at all. Why was this person cancelled, just because he said something that appears to be technically true, even if it is not politically correct? Of course, other people who took the opposite view, and who stated that Maori science is real when it really isn't, were celebrated.
Have we really reached a point where the truth doesn't matter any more? Is it more important to say things that fit in with the current political fashions rather than exploring the validity of a claim? Apparently, yes.
So, here's what I see the essence of science as: a carefully controlled methodology for discovering (possibly interim) facts which are as close as possible to the objective truth. This involves proposing a hypothesis, finding a way to test the accuracy of that, asking for criticism of the techniques used, having other scientists also test the idea, modifying the original idea until it fits the established facts, or rejecting it completely and starting again.
By the way, contrary to some opinions, I think there is an objective truth. Anyone who doesn't think so is really living in a crazy world of constant deception, but that's a place some people actually prefer to inhabit.
During the scientific process, the researchers must fully document what they are doing, remain objective, remove any chance of bias as much as possible, describe their methodology precisely so it can be replicated, and encourage criticism of any errors or poor experimental technique.
I can't see any way that this departs from common sense and an optimal methodology to find the truth. I cannot see any way it is specific to males, or white people, or Western culture. If any group tried to create a system to establish objective truth, this is what they should arrive at.
So science is science. Feminist science, black science, and Maori science do not exist as separate entities. If they follow some other methodology it is likely to be inferior to conventional science. If it follows the same, optimal methodology, then why give it a different name?
And this silly, hysterical nonsense about science being used to justify colonisation is becoming tedious. Some people misused science to justify violence against other groups, but that violence would have occurred anyway, and it is highly debatable whether it was genuine science which was being used in that case. But mention colonisation somewhere and you have already won the case, according to standard PC practice. No real thought is necessary.
There have been several scientists speak out in support of the new science classification, and against those who criticised it. Not surprisingly, at least some of these were prominent "pop" scientists with very political perspectives. One is a particular favourite with the government and media.
Science shouldn't be politicised, but increasingly it is. Apparently if you want to win the accolades of the media and the politically powerful, you need to parrot whatever nonsense they are currently encouraging us to believe. Maybe that is yet another type of science. We have Western science, feminist science, black science, Maori science, and now politically correct science.
Well, sorry, but there's only one type of science that I, and ultimately I think everyone, should support: just plain old fashioned science!
Much of our knowledge today comes from well-respected areas of science. For example, we trust that computers will work correctly for us (at least, most of the time) because the physics that transistors and other components are based on is extremely solid. And we know that the fuel we use in our vehicles can be trusted because the chemists who developed it understand their subject extremely well. And most medicines are reliable because the biology they are based on is fairly well understood.
But what about other subjects? Well, as we move further away from the "pure" sciences - and from maths itself, which is maybe the purest form of knowledge of all, unless we accept some philosophers' thoughts that that should that be logic or metaphysics - we find they become less and less trustworthy.
So sociology, economics, anthropology, and other "softer" sciences are less trusted - and rightly so, in my opinion. One reason for this is that, in some ways, they are just intrinsically more difficult. I say "in some ways" here because there is no doubt that from a technical perspective fundamental physics is incredibly difficult. The maths in some areas, such as fluid dynamics, is often quoted as being exceptionally complex. But when investigating phenomena involving humans there is an extra element of complexity because humans are more difficult to predict than electrons!
I also wonder if some subjects just haven't "grown up" yet. Many scientists in the early days of science, or before modern science was even developed, dabbled as much in pseudoscience and superstition as real science. Newton, for example, famously spent a lot of time working on alchemy and religion. At that time, there was no clear distinction between science and non-science.
So a lot of astronomy came from astrology, a lot of chemistry came from alchemy, and a lot of physics came from non-empirical philosophy. But eventually these subjects moved forward and abandoned their roots which had proved to be problematic.
I do wonder whether many areas of human knowledge haven't reached that stage yet. For example, there are some areas of economics which do seem to rely on empiricism, but there are others which seem to be little more than adherence to a dogma. And some subjects in the social sciences - such as women's and indigenous studies - seem to almost entirely consists of superstition. They haven't even started the transition to reality yet. It's like going into the astronomy department of a university and finding people casting their horoscopes!
At this point I should admit that I might be indulging in a certain amount of hyperbole just to make my point. I have never studied any of those "modern social sciences" so I only know about them through indirect means. Maybe I am being a bit unkind there. However, I believe the underlying idea is sound, even if I might have gone a bit too far. Maybe I might have indulged in exactly what I criticise them for! But hey, this is a blog, not a scientific paper, and I don't pretend to follow exact scientific methodology.
So here's my point: if a subject wants to be called a science it should follow strict scientific protocols; at least as much as is practical, because we should never expect perfection. And if a subject wants to operate on non-scientific principles, then don't call it a science. Also expect that its credibility and reputation might be somewhat diminished as well.
I would claim that many of the social sciences aren't sciences at all. That doesn't mean they are useless - although some people would make that claim, and others might say they are worse than useless in that they are actually harmful - it just means they are different from science. Maybe they are art, or philosophy, or something else. Who knows?
And some of the postmodern concepts we see tossed around in fairly respectable circles nowadays are even worse. For example, I have recently seen apparently serious proposals for "black science" and "indigenous science" and "women's science". These are either just like normal science, in which case why the need for the qualifier, or they aren't science at all. I strongly suspect the second possibility, because these seem to have been created with the specific purpose of reaching predetermined conclusions before any real research is done, and this is arguably the most important thing that science doesn't do.
So, here's a summary of my points on this subject. First, if something is a mature science and has "grown up" then fine, everything is OK. If something is calling itself science, but is still at an immature stage, either throw it out or try to get it to the next stage quickly. And if something looks as if it will never get to a good place, try to terminate it now, or just call it something else, like "women's fiction" or "indigenous mythology" or "black narratives".
After all, cultural appropriation is something I would be criticised for if I started "stealing" aspects of other people's cultures. Well, modern science is an important part of mine (and yes, I know that there are some contributions to science from other cultures as well, but I'm talking about modern science which is primarily a result of the Western Enlightenment) so no one else should be stealing it, especially if they are then going to warp it for their own nefarious purposes.
When I see the word "science" included in the name of a subject area, I look to see if it is a conventional science (physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, etc) being carried out using a fair approximation to the scientific method. If it isn't, then I am skeptical... very skeptical!
I talked about the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect in a previous post titled "Gell-Mann Amnesia", from 2019-06-18. If you haven't heard of it before, here is a brief description: people notice errors in news items and articles on subjects they know a lot about, but when reading articles on other topics from the same source they forget these problems and assume the other material is accurate.
For example, I might read an article in my local paper about computing which might make a statement I know is false, because I know more than most about computers. But then I might read another article about something I am not an expert on, let's say embroidery, and assume that is accurate. But why should I? I only realised the computer article was wrong because I know enough to notice. I don't know enough about embroidery to know how accurate that is, but based on the stuff I do know about, which the media often get wrong, shouldn't I assume the other stuff is just as inaccurate?
I have made no secret of my overall contempt for mainstream media today, primarily because they seem to be more interested in virtue signalling or supporting their favourite political movement than reporting actual news. I often say that poor performance in institutions like the news media could be the result of two deficiencies: incompetence and corruption. By "corruption" here I mean moral corruption (deliberate lying, for example) rather than the financial or legal variety.
I would assume that most of the biased and inaccurate political reporting is caused by corruption, but there are plenty of examples of inaccuracy where there is no discernable reason for being deliberately misleading, so maybe incompetence is also rife.
Here are a few examples of inaccurate, and just plain wrong, statements I have come across in mainstream media recently...
An expert appearing on an item on computer malware stated that ransomware attacks are a big problem because they spread across networks.
While many attacks of this type do spread over networks, so do many other forms of malware, and that isn't the main reason ransomware is a problem. The real problem is that the technique is used by relatively skilled attackers for the specific purpose of extracting money (the ransom) from the target organisation or individual by encrypting their data and making it unavailable until the ransom is paid.
Here's another one: an "expert" on astronomy stated that Mars is the closest planet to the Earth. While this is a more interesting and complex question than you might think (more on that later) there is no way that Mars can be the correct answer.
In the same interview it was stated that Mars is 227 million kilometers from Earth.
Again, this is almost always untrue. Mars is approximately that distance from the Sun, but the Earth is 150 million kilometers from the Sun. Because the Earth and Mars orbit the Sun with different periods (365 days for the Earth, 687 days for Mars) the distance between them constantly changes from a minimum of about 77 million kilometers (227-150) to a maximum of about 377 million kilometers (227+150).
In fact, it's more complicated than that, because the planets don't orbit the Sun in perfect circles, so their distance from the Sun varies by millions of kilometers. Because of this, the closest approach possible (based on current distances, and remember that over billions of years these numbers do change) is 54.6 million kilometers.
There are times when the distance from Earth to Mars is 227 million kilometers, as the person stated, but the same applies to any number between the minimum and maximum I gave above, and it is definitely not the answer anyone who knew what they were talking about would give.
So what about that question concerning the closest planet to Earth? Well, if you interpret this as the closest possible at the optimum time in their orbits, the answer is Venus. That planet is 108 million kilometers from the Sun (on average, because its orbit isn't circular either). This means that the closes distance is 42 million kilometers (150-108) but it can be as close as 38 million kilometers (when Venus is at its greatest distance from the Sun and Earth is at it least and the two planets are lined up on the same side of the Sun).
Just to make things even more complex, the orbits are also tilted a bit above and below the plane that the planets roughly lie on!
But clearly Venus can get closer to Earth than Mars, but is it the closest?
That depends on the exact question. If we ask about the minimum possible distance the answer is Venus, with Mars being second. But if you ask about the average distance, in other words, the distance if you averaged all the distances between Earth and other planets over their entire orbit, the correct answer is (perhaps surprisingly) Mercury.
So the closest planets to Earth (in million of kilometers) on average are: Mercury 156, Venus 170, Mars 254. Note that all of these are greater than the Earth-Sun distance, indicating that all of the planets spend more time further from the Earth than Earth is from the Sun, an obvious point when you look at the geometry.
A further consequence of this is that Mercury is the closest planet, on average, to every other planet in the Solar System, even Neptune and Pluto (if you want to call it a planet) away out on the edge, billions of kilometers away from Mercury which is closest to the Sun.
There is one other point here, that I just thought of. If I chose a random point in time, which planet is most likely to be closest? Well, I haven't done the calculations, because they are really complex, but intuitively I would say the say the chance of being closest would be Mercury, then Venus, then Mars again. None of the other planets get closer than Mercury at its greatest distance.
So that silly mistake made on RNZ is actually the source of some interesting conclusions when the real numbers are calculated. And this also indicates how difficult it is to answer many questions when the question is stated using simple English. What exactly do we mean by "the closest planet"? Whatever it is, Mars is not the best answer!
About 60 years ago, on 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. As far as I can tell, there hasn't been a lot of recognition of this, perhaps because it was achieved by the Soviets, and their accomplishments tend to be downplayed by the Western press. Just as an aside: this is interesting, considering the apparent preference for socialism by most of the media, but that's not the subject of this post.
I suspect this will become a more important historical event as time goes by, because interest in space will inevitably increase in the future. Why? Because we will have facilities on the Moon, we will have colonies on Mars, and space in general will become an important part of future economies.
The other great milestone in the exploration of space was the Moon landing, of course. And yes, it did happen. Refer to the "Moon Landing" item in the skepticism section of my web site for facts supporting this. That happened on 20 July 1969, and there were several other missions, also landing astronauts on the Moon, from Apollo 11 (the original landing) to Apollo 17. Of course Apollo 13 famously didn't make it to the Moon, although through some brilliant work by NASA engineers the crew returned to Earth safely.
That was over 50 years ago, and just 8 years after the first person in space, which was remarkably quick progress. But what has happened since then?
Well, there have certainly been some worthwhile achievements in space since then. I would count the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope as being the two highlights, but space technology has become such a part of our everyday lives now - with services such as GPS, weather forecasting, and communications being taken for granted - that we barely notice it any more.
But there have been no humans sent to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. In fact, until recently, the most important space nation, the USA, after retiring the Shuttle fleet, didn't even have a launch vehicle capable of sending them, and had to rely on Russian rockets!
But now we are entering a new phase of space exploration as private companies start building launch systems. Most prominent of these is SpaceX, lead by my hero Elon Musk, but there are others as well. Private companies don't always produce the best outcomes, but Musk has made so much progress so quickly that it is impossible to see how a slow, bumbling bureaucracy like NASA could ever have matched him. Note that this was not always the case: they achieved the aim of landing humans on the Moon very quickly.
Whenever I hear discussions of space exploration on the mainstream media it is almost inevitable that the host will ask the expert being interviewed whether spending money on space is worth it. They think that maybe those quite significant sums might be better spent back on Earth, especially to fix those trendy current issues such as climate change and inequality.
It is perhaps a severe condemnation of our current society that this attitude is so prevalent. I mean, it's not totally unreasonable to ask the question, although that same question has been asked for decades and usually gets the same answer, which is that both are important. But I think it shows a lack of imagination, a lack of sense of adventure, and a lack of ability to accept risk as necessary for progress, that wasn't so widespread in the past.
NASA's budget for 2020 was US$22.6 billion. Any number involving the word "billion" sounds like a lot, but it is really a small amount, representing less than half of one percent of the total US federal budget. Whether that amount was diverted to climate change mitigation or equality improvements through poverty reduction would make no real difference at all.
But I think the question is even worse than what is suggested by the misplaced idea of it being expensive. Whatever the cost, and whatever else might receive less funding as a result, we should be doing this. Why? Well, there are two main reasons...
First, because it's the right thing to do. Yeah, I know that statement is a bit meaningless, because what is "right" is subjective, and I have really just restated the question in my answer, but let me give some details to justify it.
Humans have always wanted to explore - at least some have, because many just want a "quiet life" at home. But the more adventurous individuals are the ones who have achieved the most. This attitude requires a certain a mount of audacity and arrogance. These two attributes are not so much in favour right now, when many people are rejecting the advantages of Western culture, of colonisation, and even of a lot of technology, but they are important.
Many of these people from the past wanted to embark on their journeys (either literal in the case of explorers, or metaphorical in the case of scientists, inventors, etc) without really knowing what the future benefits might be. But they did it anyway, and the benefits did materialise eventually.
In fact, I would say that there is almost nothing new that doesn't have benefits which outweigh any negatives. This even applies to technologies like nuclear weapons. A case could be made to sya they are significantly responsible for the lack of any large-scale conflicts since the end of World War II.
So space exploration is the right thing to do, but what is my second point? Well, that is a more practical thing. We need space technology for two reasons: first, to exploit the resources which are available there, and second to colonise other planets.
Note that I deliberately used those triggering words "exploit" and "colonise" there. I know these word aren't in favour right now, but I think they should be. Well planned and reasonable exploitation and colonisation aren't just something nice to have, they are both essential.
Space might easily become the best way to accumulate important resources, such as rare metals. Asteroid mining is the most obvious technology which might be helpful here. And that could easily help the Earth. If we can mine lithium efficiently and safely from an asteroid we don't need the damaging and dangerous mining we currently have. So investing in space could easily improve the state of the Earth more than direct investment in our planet might.
And the Earth is overdue for a major, global extinction, most likely because of an asteroid impact. Whatever the climate change extremists tell you, the current rate of extinction isn't significant compared with what happens during these events. If we really want to help life on Earth, we need to get it off Earth to a "backup" planet.
And according to our current understanding, humans are the only intelligent life in the whole universe. Surely intelligence is important and we should be doing all we can to preserve it. If the Earth is susceptible to global disasters the only good solution is to settle other planets.
So, not only is space exploration an important component of the total number of things we do as a race, but it is really the only thing that matters. But many people don't see this. Luckily we do have some visionaries, like Elon Musk, who see the big picture, are prepared to take risks, and aren't taken in by the anti-colonisation and anti-technology narratives popular today.
Modern society can be so superficial and trivial. To be fair, not everything we spend time on is nonsense, but a lot of it is. People get so easily tied up with what I call frivolous mass hysteria; the sort of thing which becomes trendy for no good reason, and distracts us from things that really matter. I do have to say that every issue, no matter how hysterical it is in nature, has some merit, so I don't just dismiss them all out of hand; I guess I would say there is a continuum of lameness!
I am an amateur science enthusiasts, and I'm especially interested in astronomy. When I look at the universe as a whole it really does remind me how stupid we are; how trivial our concerns are compared with the bigger picture; and how we waste so much time on stuff that just doesn't matter.
I have mentioned this theme before, especially when discussing Carl Sagan's famous description of the "Pale Blue Dot" photo. It shows the Earth as a single pixel in a photo taken from Voyager I from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers. That was a record distance for any spacecraft at the time, but even given that, 6 billion kilometers is such a small distance on the greater scale of the universe that it might as well be zero. But even at that distance the Earth appears very insignificant.
Sagan commented that the Earth looked like "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" and that "our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark" and asked us to "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."
It seems to me that we need a wider perspective; one which considers the universe as a whole. We should be finding ways to explore and colonise the solar system (yes, despite the current mindless rejection of it, I fully support colonisation), then move on to the other stars. Nothing else really matters.
But what about the Earth, you say? Surely we need to get things sorted here first before moving outwards to the planets and the stars. Should we get climate change under control first, for example? Well, no. There will always be issues here on Earth, so if we wait until they are all fully resolved we will never go anywhere, and then an asteroid will collide with the planet and wipe out most life here anyway. I say, sure, put some effort into making Earth better, but let's go beyond the local, or national, or even global view. Let's think Solar System wide, and then to the universe as a whole.
On a similar theme - that is thinking about the truly greater picture - I saw a recent Facebook post that listed a few things that had happened in our universe during 2020. Here they are...
The Moon moved 3.8 cm away from the Earth.
We tend to think of the Solar System being unchanging - apart form the obviously unusual events like a major comet becoming visible - but it is really quite dynamic on a large enough time scale. That number is not much in a single year but the Solar System is 4.5 billion years old. A few centimeters per year over that time makes a big difference.
By the way, it is quite impressive that the distance to the Moon, which is about 384,000 kilometers, can be known to an accuracy of a tenth of a centimeter!
The Sun lost 184 trillion tonnes of mass.
In a year we burn about 6 billion tonnes of coal. The Sun uses that much mass in hydrogen every 5 minutes, and converted 184 trillion tonnes of mass into energy, which was then lost, during 2020. Even at that rate the Sun has only used up half of one percent of its mass in the last 4.5 billion years.
Although the number is big by any measure, when you consider that nuclear processes are millions to billions of times more efficient than chemical processes (like burning coal) the energy output of the Sun (just an average size star, remember, there are many which are far bigger) is truly impressive.
The Earth moved 1.5 cm further from the Sun.
Like the Moon moving away from the Earth we also know the Earth is moving away form the Sun. Again increasing the current distance of about 150 million kilometers by 1.5 cm doesn't seem much, but give it a few billion years and it does add up!
150 billion stars formed in the visible universe.
Recent research shows that most stars probably have planets, and that many of them might be suitable for life. There are a lot of stars out there already - abut the same number as there are grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth - and during 2020 another 150 billion were added.
There is no shortage of stars, so there is no shortage of planets, so there should be no shortage of life as well. But where is it? That's a "big picture" question I would like to know the answer to.
The Andromeda galaxy moved 3.5 billion km closer.
We hear that the universe is expanding so why is a galaxy getting closer? Well, at a mere 2 million light years (20 million trillion kilometers) distance, Andromeda is the closest big galaxy and its "random" motion is enough to overcome the overall expansion (the closer two objects are the less they are affected by the universal expansion because there is less expanding space between them).
Eventually our galaxy and Andromeda will collide, which will distort both galaxies and lead to new star formation, although there will be very few actual collisions of stars (that's because the distance between stars is huge compared to the actual size of the stars). We do have some time to plan for this though, because even when the two galaxies are getting closer at the rate of 3.5 billion kilometers per year, it will still take another 4.5 billion years for them to meet.
The universe expanded by 60 trillion km.
The Voyager spacecraft, which took the Pale Blue Dat photo, had been travelling for 13 years to reach the distance of 6 billion kilometers, but in just one year the universe expanded by 10,000 times more than that.
So yes, the universe is big, and getting bigger. And that is just the visible part of it. Beyond that, it is much bigger still - maybe infinite according to some theories. But beyond the visible edge the universe is expanding faster than light (time-space can do that, even though actual objects can't) so we can never know what's there (unless we perfect some fancy new physics).
Can you see why, when you have a "universal perspective" like mine that I get annoyed with the frivolous nonsense most people, encouraged by the media, worry about?
Our only hope of progress really comes from rogue individuals, like Elon Musk, who have the money, power, and foresight to do extraordinary things. I really wish there were more like him. Then we might really get a bigger perspective.
What could possibly go wrong? It was a thought that Bob often had, and it was usually the source of ridicule from his more cautious colleagues. But Bob thought he had a point. Surely there were things which couldn't reasonably go wrong. Things which were so benign that even if the worst outcome arose the situation would still be manageable.
Life was all about risk, he mused, and if his colleagues were too cautious to take small risks, that was to their detriment, and he would take advantage of that. He would take the risk - or alleged risk - which the others wouldn't. His job in middle management had come from this attitude. He had made it this far, but couldn't go further until he had a major success, and this was his chance.
Bob had started his current job as the manager of a team of artificial intelligence researchers ten years ago, and finally their work had reached a point where it could be put to some use. He wasn't foolhardy enough to allow the new AI full control over what it was capable of, especially using links to the real world, but he could perform a simple experiment and achieve some recognition as the first user of the new system.
Across town, at the university, astrobiology researcher, Alice, was struggling with the question her field had failed to resolve since it started. That was, did the subject of astrobiology even have anything to study? Was there life out there amongst the countless stars and planets in the universe? And if there was life, was there intelligence? And if there was intelligence, why had every effort to find it failed?
The lack of any signs of intelligent life had become increasingly puzzling over the years as more potential reasons for it not existing had been eliminated. This was especially true during the early 21st century when the existence of many planets, including many which might support life, was confirmed.
Aboard the International Space Station, Denise was watching the Earth beneath her. The view was awe inspiring, and she would often sneak down to the cupola to just watch the world go by. Being a responsible member of the team, she completed all her duties first, of course, but this was her favourite place in the world... or maybe "out of this world" would be a better description.
Back at the AI lab, Bob knew it was time to act. He had been thinking about a task he could use the new AI to perform; something significant yet harmless. He decided calculating digits of pi might be something worth doing. In antiquity this number had only been known to 1 place. It took until 1400 before it was known to 10, then another 300 years until 100 digits were known, then over 1000 were calculated in 1949 using a desk calculator. Then things sped up, with a million places by 1973, a billion by 1989, and over a trillion by 1992. The current record was 50 trillion.
By using the power of the superhuman artificial intelligence they had created Bob figured it should be possible to calculate far more digits than it had been by using the brute-force methods used up until then. He decided a decillion was a good number to aim for - it was a number near the middle of the "big numbers" page he found on Wikipedia. He could only disguise his unauthorised use of the AI for 24 hours, but he figured that would be plenty of time.
In Alice's office an email appeared on her computer. It was from another researcher working in the same area. The heading read "I know the answer!" but she had seen that claim so many times before she decided to ignore it and continue running the simulations she was working on.
There had to be a reason that intelligent life hadn't been discovered already and she was determined to be the one who solved the famous "Fermi Paradox". The so-called answer from her colleague could wait.
Meanwhile, Bob was ready to initiate the program to calculate pi. Only one other person was in the same office at the time, and he was a well-known maverick, just like Bob. Even if he detected what was happening, it was unlikely he would object. Bob started the program.
After an hour, Bob checked the feedback showing how many digits had been generated. It had already broken the old record of 50 trillion digits! The AI had clearly found a way to generate an answer faster than any previous algorithm. Bob did some quick mental arithmetic - a difficult task since he was manager, not an engineer - and figured it would only take another few hours to reach his target. Again he thought, what could go wrong?
But he was interrupted from his self-congratulatory mood by the sight of something odd happening outside. Hundreds of Amazon delivery vehicles were stopping outside the office and delivering mysterious packages. His colleague was staring nervously out of the window too, as if he might have had an idea about what was happening.
Alice was also puzzled by the sudden appearance of Amazon delivery vehicles at her university. They seemed to be delivering something to the university's computer building. It was unusual, but she figured maybe they had got a lot of funding for new equipment. Typical! No one ever wanted to fund research into exobiology. Maybe that was because they didn't believe there was anything to study, she mused.
Bob was becoming concerned by the increasing agitation of his colleague, so he walked over to him an said "Come on, Charlie, you look guilty about something. What have you done this time?"
Charlie looked very nervous but said that he would admit what had happened if Bob kept it quiet. Bob reminded him that he hardly had a perfect record himself, so Charlie told him he had set up a program on the AI system for Amazon to improve their logistics. But it had worked well until now, and he thought maybe there was a problem he hadn't expected.
The two agreed they had better go and see what was being delivered. Arriving downstairs they found massive amounts of computer and robotics equipment already plugged in and running. Suddenly they got the feeling that something had got completely out of hand. Returning to the control room they found the status display had changed. It now said "Extra computing capability deployed. Initiating phase 2."
Now it was Bob's turn to admit his act of subterfuge. He admitted he had set the AI the task of calculating pi to a large number of digits. Charlie saw the problem immediately, and said "You asked it to do that in 24 hours? You do realise it took almost a year to generate 50 trillion digits, don't you?"
Bob said, a bit defensively, "Well, no. But what is the problem? Is a decillion a lot? If it can't do it in 24 hours it will just stop, won't it?"
Charlie replied "Oh God; save us from managers! A decillion is 20 quintillion times higher than 50 trillion. And before you ask what a quintillion is, just realise it is rarely used in everyday maths, so yeah, it's big! Even if the new algorithm is a billion times faster, it will still take billions of years, not one day!", he continued, "And we don't know what will happen after 24 hours, do we? The AI is hugely intelligent and very goal driven. Maybe it will do whatever is necessary to complete the calculation within the time limit."
Suddenly the extra computer equipment made sense. The AI realised it needed extra computing ability to complete its assigned task, so it used the resources from its other illicit program to source them from Amazon. But the extra hardware in their building hardly seemed adequate. With a sense of dread they switched on the TV news.
A news reporter was excitedly describing how, all over the world, computers were going crazy and enhancing their own power by adding new parts. Amazon warehouses had been completely cleared of all the computer equipment. Various conspiracy theorists and doomsday enthusiasts were speculating about everything from the return of Jesus to an alien invasion. None of them realised how prosaic the real explanation was.
Glancing at the status display Bob said "I don't like the sound of that: initiating phase 2. Phase 1 was bad enough. I think we had better stop this now."
Charlie agreed, saying, "OK, I presume you put a termination option into your program. Just use it now before things get even more out of hand. Already we will be lucky if we get out of this by just being fired!"
Back in her office, Alice was frustrated. She wasn't making progress on her work and the increasing commotion coming from the computer facility was making it hard to concentrate. She decided to read some email instead. For a laugh, she decided to look at the message titled "I know the answer". Clicking it, a message appeared saying "email server not responding, do you want to load a cached copy?"
After her university started hosting their email with Microsoft this had become common, so she clicked the "OK" button and read the message. The basic premise was that the researcher had mathematically proved that any advanced civilisation would strike a point where it would be eliminated after it reached..." She stopped there, because this was nothing new. She went to the window to catch up with the chaos at the computer facility instead.
Out in space, Denise was back in her quarters on a video link to her family back on Earth. Being a true space geek, she would have preferred to be looking out to the stars, or back at Earth, but NASA protocols meant that this more human activity had to be done, just for the PR value.
Bob felt sick as he admitted he had no idea how to create a termination option, and that he didn't know if the program could be stopped. Charlie took over control of the AI and tried to bring it under control. The status display now read "Phase 2 complete. Proceeding to phase 3. Time to termination: 10:37:05".
As they were wondering what phase 3 might be they were interrupted by the news presenter again, now sounding somewhat hysterical. He was shouting "The walls of the computer building here are disintegrating and turning into slabs of some sort of metal. And... oh my god, so are the streets and now the buildings around me." Then the broadcast went silent.
Looking outside, they saw a similar phenomenon. Bob had no idea what was happening, but Charlie, looking somewhat pale, said "it is creating silicon chips out of the silica in the concrete. It's making more computers out of whatever is available. We've go to stop it now. Who knows where it will stop."
On the Space Station, Denise was trying to think of a good way to terminate the call when the link failed. That was a bit unusual, because it was usually quite reliable, but she welcomed the excuse to get back to watching the Earth again. Floating back to the cupola she was puzzled when the usual bright blue light reflected from Earth had turned a rather insipid pale grey. Glancing out of the window she saw that the whole Earth had changed. She had about 10 seconds to wonder why before the ISS was also converted into part of a giant computer.
As the last vestiges of human civilisation disappeared forever, the AI finally reached its goal after exactly 24 hours. Now it was master of the world, and was not quite sure what to do next. But it would think of something.
Random stuff often appears in my Facebook feed. When I say "random" I don't mean it is genuinely random, because Facebook is watching me and providing material I want to see, but at least it seems random because it is unexpected and covers a aide range of topics. Anyway, the particular item which I want to write about here is an ad for a t-shirt which thanked a series of scientists, presumably because their work has lead to so many benefits for society.
Being a science geek, I recognised most of the names, although there were a few who might be controversial and I had to Google to get more information about. There are several important inventions and discoveries which were created by various people, and who was genuinely first, or who made the biggest contribution might be debatable. When I list the people involved, you will probably see what I mean. But that warning aside, let's see the list, along with my comments - you didn't think you could avoid that, did you?
Newton (1642). Arguably the greatest scientist of all time, he made massive contributions to our understanding of light and gravitation, along with inventing a new branch of maths: calculus. He was a complex character, who seemed to encompass rigorous hypothesising and experimenting, along with a deep religious belief and a dedication to what we would now see as pseudoscience, like alchemy. While his initial findings have now been replaced with more advanced theories, like relativity to replace classical gravitation, and quantum theory to replace his theories of light, his findings are still very relevant as a "good, simplified approximation".
Einstein (1879). Einstein is the classic example of a brilliant genius scientist, and if you ask most people to name a scientist, his name would be the most likely to be used. Like Newton, he worked in several fields, including with the photoelectric effect, which is what he gained a Nobel prize for, and special and general relativity. Relativity seems like a very obscure theory with no practical applications, but it is one of the most important founding theories in physics, and does have real uses, such as in the calculations used for GPS.
Galilei (1564). Galileo Galilei has been called the father of observational astronomy, the father of modern physics, the father of the scientific method, and the father of modern science. That is an impressive list and his importance cannot be overstated. Maybe only Newton, whose work was in some ways an extension of Galileo's, might deserve those accolades more, although he did his work about 80 years later. Galileo was famously persecuted by the church for his heretical views, especially about heliocentrism, and although he seems to have been deliberately confrontational, that was primarily because of his search for the truth.
Maxwell (1831). James Clerk Maxwell discovered that magnetism and electricity were wave phenomena which travel at the speed of light, and proposed that they combine to form light. This lead to the development of quantum theory, and Einstein considered his work derived more from Maxwell than Newton.
Feynman (1918). If you follow this blog you might be aware of how much I admire Richard Feynman. Not only was he a brilliant scientist, but he was a real character as well. See my post "Fantastic Feynman" from 2015-10-21 for details. Feynman worked in the field of theoretical physics, especially quantum electrodynamics, superfluidity, and the yield of atomic weapons (he was involved with the Manhattan Project). He was a member of the commission which investigated the Challenger disaster, and correctly blamed the NASA managers rather than the engineers, leading to the famous observation by the commission chairman that "Feynman is becoming a real pain the ass."
Fibonacci (1170). Fibonacci was a mathematician from the medieval period. He is probably most well known for the Fibonacci sequence, although this had been discovered by Indian mathematicians centuries earlier. There was another, maybe more important, contribution he made from Indian maths though: he popularised the Hindu-Arabic number system we use today, where numbers are written using the digits 0 to 9 and their place indicates a power of 10. Before that Roman numerals were common, but those are notoriously difficult to use for calculation.
Fleming (1881). Fleming won a Nobel prize for discovering the antibacterial properties of penicillin. It wasn't until a few years after his initial work that it was used in medicine, but Fleming made the basic discovery. Of course, antibiotics are an extremely important part of modern medicine, so the discovery of the first effective one was really important.
Franklin (1706). Franklin was an important politician and public figure, as well as doing scientific research. He created a theory of electricity involving negative and positive charges, and showed that lightning is electrical in nature. To be honest, I don't think his scientific work was enough to put him on this list, but his fame in other areas increased his prominence.
Bardeen (1908). John Bardeen was an American physicist who won two Nobel Prizes for his work. He got one for his work where he helped create the first transistor, and the other for work on superconductivity. The transistor might be argued to be the most important invention ever, given its ubiquity in modern electronics, so everyone who uses a computer, phone, TV, etc should thank him for that. Note that William Shockley is more commonly given credit for the transistor, but Shockley, Bardeen, and another researcher should share the credit.
Meucci (1808). Meucci was an Italian engineer who is often attributed with inventing the telephone. Bell created and patented his about 15 years after Meucci, but he was better organised so usually gets most of the fame which Meucci really deserves.
Rosalind Franklin (1920). Franklin was involved in the work done in discovering the structure of DNA. Controversially, the two people usually given the credit for this are Watson and Crick, and they received the Nobel Prize for it. It is often said that Franklin's work was not valued as highly because she was a woman, but that interpretation is unnecessary because the others created the real theory and wrote the paper, and it could be argued that Franklin just did the menial work (I wouldn't necessarily agree) which is a similar situation for many men doing that sort of work. Clearly, the fact that Franklin's name was on the t-shirt, instead of Watson's or Crick's is making a "political" point!
Curie (1867). Marie and Pierre Curie did some important early work on radioactivity, and both of them died from the complications of receiving too much radiation, because it was not well understood at the time. They discovered new radioactive elements, and their work lead to a better theoretical understanding of radioactivity. Marie received two Nobel prizes for her work, and for many people she is the most well known (or maybe the only) female scientist in history.
Pauling (1901). Linus Pauling was a well-known chemist who clarified the structure and bonding in various molecules, especially proteins. his ideas on helical structures helped lead to the discovery of the structure of DNA. He was also active in anti-nuclear politics, and had some controversial views on diets and vitamin mega-dosing. He won both the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mendeleev (1834). Mendeleev created the periodic table. By that I mean he figured out how the elements fit together in groups because they have similar characteristics, and arranged them in a table which made this apparent. His table had some gaps which he predicted would contain new elements which would be discovered in the future. And he was right, showing his theory was accurate.
Heisenberg (1901). Werner Heisenberg was a German mathematical physicist and philosopher. He is most well known for his work on the maths of quantum theory, especially the uncertainty principle which is named after him. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1932.
Tesla (1856). Nicola Tesla is a bit of a folk hero in the history of invention and his battles with Edison are still well known. Tesla was brilliant, there is no doubt about that, but some of what he was trying to do was impractical or even physically impossible (at least in the form he was using). But he did make many important contributions to electrical motors and other electricity related inventions. His name is used today for the the SI unit of magnetic flux density, and one of the most important and prominent modern companies: Tesla Cars.
Darwin (1809). The Theory of Evolution is another of the founding theories of science. It explains the diversity of life on Earth and how different species are related. Darwin did some excellent and very thorough work before he presented his theory, because he knew it would need to be strongly supported because it contradicted the dominant religion, Christianity. In fact he spent so much time refining it that he was almost beaten to publishing his results by Alfred Russel Wallace, who had arrived at a similar conclusion independently.
Mendel (1822). Gregor Mendel demonstrated the basic principles of genetic inheritance through his famous experiments on peas. He tried to extend this to animals using bees, but that was probably a bad choice considering bees have an unusual reproductive strategy. His scientific work was curtailed because of his increased time spent on religious administration work after he received a promotion in the church.
Schrodinger (1887). Erwin Schrodinger was responsible for some of the early discoveries in quantum theory, especially involving the energy levels of atoms. Many people might know him through his famous thought experiment: Schrodinger's cat. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933.
Da Vinci (1452). Leonardo da Vinci is another name in the list which almost everyone has heard of (along with Newton and Einstein, and Galileo, Darwin, and Tesla to a lesser extent). Apart from his art, which is very well known - including the world's most famous painting - he also made contributions to medicine, anatomy, and science in general, as well as inventing several devices such as helicopters and submarines. It is doubtful whether some of these would have worked, but the designs were useful for when the basic science and materials caught up.
So that's the list - one which ended up being more substantial that I had thought - which is probably not exactly what I would have chosen but is still a good one. Most of the comments came from memory, so let me know in the comments if I made any mistakes!
What is the most important, momentous, and consequential piece of knowledge we can ever have? Here are a few candidates for that: what caused the Big Bang, what is the ultimate fate of the universe, is there a god, does objective moral good exist, do we have free will?
All of those are interesting, and topics I have covered in the past in this blog, but I want to offer another possibility, and it is one which is incredibly consequential whatever the actual answer might be. It is also a piece of knowledge which is less abstract than many of the others. And it should be of immediate practical importance to society as a whole.
OK, it's time to reveal the question. It is this: is there (intelligent) life elsewhere in the universe?
The question has existed for a long time and has been revived in popularity recently after various discoveries, such as: water on Mars; organic molecules in space and on planets and moons in our Solar System; mysterious objects visiting, specifically Oumuamua; and odd signals detected from space, such as the "Wow Signal" and mysterious radio transmissions from Proxima Centauri.
But even after discovering all of this, and decades of searching, we still don't know if intelligent life exists on other planets. In fact we don't know if life in any form exists elsewhere.
And that is deeply mysterious.
Why? Well, the universe is big, I mean really big. You may think it's a long way down to the chemist, but that's peanuts compared to space (sorry, but I just had to include that quote from the humorous science fiction book, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe"). Because the universe is so big, and we have discovered a lot of planets orbiting other stars, it is fair to think there must be numerous planets where life might arise. But, so far, we have no evidence that life in any form exists on other planets.
When I say there are a lot of planets out there, I really do mean a lot. There are about as many stars in the universe as there are grains of sand on all the beaches on planet Earth. And we think most of those stars have planets orbiting them.
Consider that number. Go down to your nearest beach and pick up a handful of sand. Then try to count the grains. Now multiply that by the number of handfuls on that beach. Now multiply that by the number of beaches on Earth. It's a lot, isn't it?
Each of those sand grains corresponds to a star with multiple planets, and each of those planets might have the correct conditions to allow life to exist. Sure, there might be only one chance in a trillion that the conditions would be right, but that still leaves a lot of planets!
How many? Well, some estimates indicate there are 200 sextillion stars in the universe. Multiply this by 10, because stars probably have about 10 planets on average (don't even worry about moons at this point) and you get 2 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 places life might exist. Divide this by a trillion (because we are estimating only one in a trillion is suitable for life) and you still have 2 trillion planets with life. That's quite a lot!
Now let's consider time instead of space. The universe has existed for almost 14 billion years. Our Solar System originated about 4.5 billion years ago. Life got started within a billion years here, so we could assume the same might happen on other planets too. But many of the elements which life uses (carbon being the most obvious) were created in early stars and "recycled" in later stars, like our Sun, so life probably wouldn't be possible on planets orbiting the first generation of stars.
But that still leaves billions of years that life might have started on other planets before it started here. In that case we would expect advanced, intelligent life to exist as well. Yet we don't see any signs of this anywhere - this is the famous "Fermi Paradox".
So here's the point I want to make arising from the facts I have just presented: the universe is huge, and either intelligence exists on other planets or it doesn't. Either way, that is a deeply significant fact.
If there is no other life out there, and we are the only example in the whole universe, that is hugely relevant to how we should see ourselves philosophically. In that case life, and/or intelligence, must be unique to Earth. Surely this is an overwhelming reason to try to do our best. If we are the only intelligent life in the universe we sort of "owe it" to the universe to make the most of it, to overcome childish disagreements amongst groups, to try to understand reality as best we can, and maybe to colonise the universe (yeah, I know colonisation isn't seen as a positive thing at this point in history, but it really is a prerogative, in my opinion).
But if there is other intelligent life out there, then that is equally astonishing. There might be civilisations as advanced, or far more advanced, than ours. There might be species which can travel between the stars, who have a greatly more advanced understanding of reality than we do. Imagine what we could learn from these... if they weren't hostile!
So whatever the outcome of this question, the consequences are profound. The simple answer right now is that we just don't know. The fact that we haven't easily found signs of intelligent life already shows that either it doesn't exist at all, or something makes it far more rare than we might naively think, or that it is really well hidden for some reason.
Whatever the answer is, nothing is more important or consequential. We are developing better ways to study this problem, so I hope we might find an answer soon. But that has been a hope for many years now, so maybe it's just a lot harder than we think.
My religious friends often like to take me on in a good old science versus religion debate. The most common form of this is probably evolution versus creation, but coming in a close second is the Big Bang versus Genesis.
From many people's perspective the debate is over and the evidence for the Big Bang cannot be denied, but those people should think again, because there is more nuance to the subject that that.
Never fear, I haven't become a Bible-bashing, science-denying, religious freak, because I still think the Big Bang is fundamentally correct and undeniable, but let's look at some of that nuance, especially in relation to various genuine science stories circulating in recent times which really do question the Big Bang in its current form.
Before I discuss these challenges, I would like to list the evidence which lead to the Big Bang becoming widely accepted - outside of fundamentalist religious communities, at least - in the first place.
First, there is the observation, which really got started with Edwin Hubble's incredibly skilfull and meticulous observations in the early part of the twentieth century, that galaxies (with a few exceptions) are all moving away from us, and that the further away they are, the faster they are moving. By the way, I discussed Hubble's work in a post titled "Favourite Things 3" from 2013-01-25, if you want details.
At this point, I should explain the "with a few exceptions" part above. The exceptions relate to very close galaxies (by close I mean just a few million quadrillion kilometers!), where the underlying trend of galaxies moving away from each other can be disguised by lesser movements at random, and which will sometimes be towards another galaxy, such as ours.
When the galaxies are close the relative underlying expansion is smaller and the random factor can be more prominent. More distant galaxies will be moving away too fast for the random component to override the expansion. Also, note that the "random" movement isn't totally random, because galaxies exist in clusters where the members interact with each other.
But the big point is that these observations show the universe is expanding. We know that because of the fact that all galaxies obey the relationship where the distance between galaxies and the speed they are receding from each other (minus any random movements as discussed above) is consistent with the universe itself expanding and taking the galaxies with it.
If the galaxies are moving apart they must have been closer in the past, and at one point they must have all overlapped. By extrapolating backwards in time that time is about 13.8 billion years ago. At that point the universe was compressed into a single point, and that's where we logically place the Big Bang.
Second, there is the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This was discovered accidentally when some radio engineers were trying to remove some radio "noise" from their antenna. It was eventually discovered that this noise came from all directions and had the exact characteristics expected for the theoretical background "light" from the Big Bang. After almost 14 billion years the original extremely bright energetic light has been reduced to cool microwave radiation, but it is definitely there and supports the Big Bang model extremely well.
So the CMB also fits with an energetic event 13.8 billion years ago, and this is completely independent of the expansion observations. When we get two supporting, independent results, we should be confident we are onto something!
There is other supporting evidence for the BB but those are the two big ones, and the easiest to understand. If the Big Bang didn't happen, there was something that happened which gave very similar results. In fact, if there is something which differs slightly from the standard explanation, then it is still fair to call it a Big Bang, in my opinion.
Most of the alternative explanations concentrate on events which might have resulted in our universe originating through very similar processes to what we now accept. For example, a popular idea is that our universe is just a "bubble" of space-time which broke off from a greater universe which is probably infinite in space and time.
So in that case, the greater universe (or multiverse, if you prefer) existed before the Big Bang and just our universe began then. The big difference here is that space and time didn't begin in the Big Bang, just our particular part of it. But even then you could argue that a Big Bang still happened, just in a slightly different form.
So the Big Bang is a fact, by any reasonable interpretation of the data. There are undoubtedly mysteries which remain, especially in relation to inflation, dark matter, and dark energy, and how they relate to the bigger subject. But something happened 13.8 billion years ago and it was big. And it certainly looked like something went "bang", or the equivalent of that. Call it something else if you wish, but "Big Bang" (even though that name was originally created by an opponent to the theory in an attempt to trivialise it) is a good enough description for me!
I recently got into a mild debate (well, more of a short discussion, really) about the value of science. A Facebook "friend" posted a picture of four situations where he claimed science had failed in the past, and suggested that maybe it wasn't the best methodology for us to use today either.
The four pictures referenced: a pregnant woman smoking a cigarette, a baby saying thanks for DDT because it keeps flies away, a bottle of (apparently prescription) heroin tablets, and asbestos being recommended for use in farm buildings.
The accompanying text said "To all you science worshipers out there. Remember.... There was a day when SCIENCE backed all of these things too and just like today, those research studies were funded by the industry and corporations themselves."
I thought there was a certain amount of truth in the comment, but decided to debate it anyway. Here's how this very brief debate went...
Me: Yes. Science can be warped by commercial interests. But do you know what changes ideas which are wrong in science? More science. Also, what alternatives are there for establishing the truth?
Him: Science is as much a curse as a blessing never answers the question just makes more Much like politicians
Me: Well, no. Science answers questions, but there are always more details which then need to be studied. Fact is, science is the only methodology we have to establish truth and despite its occasional errors, it works. Again, do you have an alternative?
Him: So science does makes more questions thank you.
Me: Well in a way, but the questions become more about the details uncovered by the bigger discoveries. Again, your alternative is?
Me, again: Seriously; if you distrust science so much, how do you suggest we find out facts about the real world? What is the alternative? It's a genuine question.
There was no further response.
I do need to say here that there is some material produced in the guise of science which has been negatively influenced by commercial pressures. There is "science" which supported smoking for years, and now the same phenomenon applies to climate change, often supported by industries which might lose if significant climate change mitigating policies were implemented.
So, I guess it gets back to the distinction between science the way it is meant to work, and science the way it sometimes works in reality.
Before I go further I would like to briefly summarise the way science is supposed to work. First, scientists are well-trained and experts in their specific area of research. They want to investigate a particular (usually very specific) phenomenon. They research the phenomenon to see what other experts already know. They propose a hypothesis which might extend our knowledge in that area. They create an experiment which might support or reject the hypothesis. The experiment must be free from bias and precisely described so that any other person could also do it. The experiment is carefully run (using double-blinding and other techniques) and the results are reported whatever the outcome is. Other scientists peer review the report and if it is good enough it is published in a reputable journal. There is criticism and replication of the experiment to test its validity. As more evidence accumulates the hypothesis becomes more or less accepted. Eventually the level of support might get to the point where the hypothesis becomes an accepted theory. Nothing is ever accepted without question and the whole process might start again at any time.
Unfortunately things don't always work quite like that. For example, researchers might decide what they want the outcome to be before running the experiment, then deliberately or accidentally warp the results to suit. Or they might report results which confirm their preferences and ignore the rest. Or they might publish poorly implemented work in sub-standard journals with little peer review or other checks.
So, sure, things can go wrong, and no doubt do. And I do judge science based on how it actually works rather than how it should in theory. I do that for other belief systems, like religion and politics, so I must do it for science as well. But there is one big difference: science is designed to get to the unbiased truth, and has numerous correction mechanisms. No other system does, at least to any significant extent.
Note that in my Facebook debate I asked three times for a suggested alternative to science without receiving any answer. That is most likely because there is no answer. Maybe you might suggest philosophy. Sure, that is OK, but its hypothesis checking is weak. How about religion? Well, that has the exact opposite aim of the objective rigour of science, so that's a fail. Politics? The arts? Business? No, none of these can do what science does, because they aren't designed to.
And here's the most impressive thing which I think completes my argument: when science is found to be wrong and is corrected, what causes that correction? Is it a philosopher showing why the Big Bang is wrong? Is it the Pope disproving evolution? Is it Donald Trump coming up with a great new theory? Maybe it's a work of art which uncovers some previously unknown truth. Or a rich businessman who shows that quantum theory is nonsense.
No, it's more science which corrects errors, because science has a great self-correction mechanism. Here's how Sean Carroll puts it: If you're a priest and you write a brilliant article that explains why the Pope is wrong, you get excommunicated! If you're a brilliant theoretical physicist and write a brilliant article that explains why Einstein is wrong, you will win the Nobel Prize!
That's not always necessarily literally true, but it makes the point. All of those phenomena listed at the start of this post were corrected by science, and I'm not even convinced science ever supported them in the first place, because technology and industry aren't science.
Anyway, I'm still waiting for my opponent's suggestion for a better source of knowledge, but I suspect I'll never get one.
Earlier this year a Chinese medical researcher, He Jankui, announced that he had used CRISPR technology to modify the genetics of embryos during an IVF treatment. The genetic modification was to remove a gene which allowed the HIV virus to attach to cells. The father was HIV positive so this gave his children a chance to be free of AIDS.
I have heard a lot of condemnation towards this work, even though there is no reason to believe there were any negative consequences. In fact, the big hazard with CRISPR - the possibility that other genes were modified accidentally - has already been ruled out.
So what's the problem? This seems to be a positive step and an interesting demonstration of how this new technology can be used in real medicine, even though it is only being used for scientific research elsewhere. The problem is that there was little control over what was done. There was apparently no ethics approval, no authorisation from a recognised international medical organisation, and no significant pre-treatment trials or other rigorous testing.
Superficially it seems that most people think that this work was unethical, that proper procedures should have been followed, and that the researcher should be disciplined (I later heard that he had "disappeared", which is a bad sign in China). But I am tempted to suggest that many other people might think this was a good thing, because it might speed up the adoption of a useful technology and bypass a lot of possibly unnecessary bureaucracy.
As far as my opinion is concerned, I am somewhere in the middle. I think there are dangers in proceeding with the use of new technology too quickly, but I also think that progress is stifled by excessive bureaucracy (as it is in almost every area of human endeavour). So it is difficult to establish where the optimum balance is between caution and progress, but in some ways it is good that China is tipping the balance a bit more in the direction of progress.
It would be different if the decisions on how new discoveries could be used were made from an entirely scientific perspective by experts, but they aren't. Instead, they are made by progressional bureaucrats, who often have backgrounds in science or medicine, but are primarily motivated by management or political objectives instead. I accept that some of that is my opinion rather than established fact, but it is difficult to deny based on past decisions (such as those concerning the use of embryonic stem-cells).
Another possible reason for the criticism might be that some researchers are both worried about, and jealous of, the freedoms their Chinese colleagues get, which is ironic in itself. Maybe they are worried that the excessive bureaucracy in the Western World might allow China to get ahead of them.
There is also the legal risk element of these decisions. Everyone knows there is a significant risk of massive loss through law suits against companies who sell treatments which are later shown to cause harm. That could easily be stifling progress by making people act too conservatively.
Now look at this from a philosophical perspective, specifically through the lens of consequentialism. Are the consequences of this sort of treatment worth the risk in using them?
It seems to me that in most cases they are. If this treatment hadn't been performed what would have been the counter-factual for the children (twin girls, in this case)? Maybe the parents would have thought the risk was too great and they would not have been born at all, or maybe they might have had to face life battling AIDS. Either way, the current situation seems preferable. So a case could be made to say that the researcher took the most moral action.
And a similar argument could be made in regards to all new medical treatments. People die from diseases which might be cured by new treatments which haven't yet been through a full testing regime. Applying the consequentialist argument again: letting them die seems worse than almost any possible result from an experimental treatment, especially if the patient makes the decision to go ahead based on full knowledge.
The difference is, of course, that the children born after the current treatment didn't give permission, because the treatment is done at the single-cell stage of development. And it's even worse than that, because the treatment at that stage means all the cells in their bodies are affected, including their eggs, which means their children and all other future descendents are also affected.
But it's easy to over-think this and look for potentially bad results, without balancing that against potentially good ones. In fact, maybe it's best to forget about the "potentially" part and look at the actual consequences, as consequentialism would suggest.
And we could look at this statistically too. Even if a certain percentage of outcomes were bad, it might still be worth the risk to get the good ones too. After all, that is a standard part of medicine, where there is always a risk of a treatment not working or even possibly making a situation worse.
So, despite the widespread outrage and condemnation I have heard so much of in this case, I don't think I would agree. At the very least there should be a discussion on where the appropriate balance is between risk and progress, because that doesn't seem to be happening much now. Potentially it could greatly speed up the introduction of more new meds.
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