Inappropriately Touched by E.T.

Someone shared this image on Facebook today, with the header "Seriously !! Still believe we are alone ?"

It looks like you can see it, and the comments, without being logged into Facebook, which is handy. (It was posted by Milky Way Scientists, apparently affiliated with NASA, who also posted this smokin' beefcake photo of Albert Einstein. Maybe they should put out a calendar along those lines?)

I'm not exactly surprised, since I know that NASA has always had a high concentration of religious nuts; see David F. Noble's The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (Knopf, 1997). It's a useful reminder that certain New Atheists' assurance that the advance of science will inevitably consign religion to the dustbin of history isn't just bogus, it's a statement of faith.

These are pretty pictures, and I've loved looking at photographs of deep space objects since I was a kid. But they have no bearing at all on the question of extraterrestrial life. Even though I recognize that a leap of faith is involved, I can't see how to get from point A to point B here. Judging from arguments I've encountered in the past, I think that the idea is that in a universe so full of galaxies and stars, there must be some other people out there somewhere! I understand the intuitive appeal of that argument, but there's this little thing called the Fermi Paradox ...

What first caught my attention was the cartoon image below the photos of the Mocker and Scoffer, who believeth not what Science hath shown him so abundantly. I was reminded immediately of a co-worker of mine, who after driving through the desert in the American Southwest was convinced by the beauty of the natural formations that there must be a "higher power." (I asked if her if she felt the same way about soil erosion in her garden, which is also God's work. I don't remember what she answered; probably she did feel the same way about it.)

Some of the comments on the image are revealing.

it would be so stupid if we were alone .....

C'mon i thought this fact makes sense to all of us! Why do u still ignore it?

Hope so. Can't wait for something to come and have a VERY stern word with you, Mankind. And I hope they are A LOT bigger that you are. Although they probably won't be as NASTY as you are.

We are not alone anymore

Well, if anyone is out there watching what is going on down here, they'll just shake their heads, leave us alone and continue searching for intelligent life.

That last one has three "like" flags so far.

These are declarations of faith, not of rationality. And while it could be argued that the comments are just stupid laymen, the tone was set by the scientists who posted the image to begin with. "Still believe we are alone?" Personally I don't have an opinion one way or the other, because no one has shown me any evidence, any reason to believe that there is life on other planets or in other star systems; but at the same time there's no clear evidence that there isn't life on other planets. It's reminiscent of the popular claim that you can't prove or disprove the existence of God, but on the subject of extraterrestrial life, many atheists are ready to make assertions they can't prove. I consider it a great occasion for agnosticism, the admission that we don't know something rather than jumping to unwarranted conclusions. Recently I saw a quotation from Richard Dawkins to the effect that the trouble with religion is that it encourages children to be comfortable with ambiguous conclusions, rather than giving them certain knowledge. (Sorry, I can't find the source; I thought I had it bookmarked.) I'd have thought it was the other way around myself, but I'm not an Oxford man.

The use of the emotionally-laden word "alone" is revealing too. I don't know about you, but I'm not alone: there are billions of other people on this planet. The Christian apologist Blaise Pascal famously wrote, "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." It's been argued that he wasn't speaking in his own voice there, but ventriloquizing an imagined atheist; I can't tell, and I don't think it matters because clearly many people, atheists as well as religious believers, are frightened by the vastness of the universe, and want to shrink it to a cozier size by populating it with guardian angels or kindly ETs. (Notice the automatic -- that is, irrational -- assumption that people on other worlds will be smarter and more "civilized" than we are, though contemptuous of terrestrial humans' stupidity and violence. When you assume ... ) It's tempting for me to guess that Milky Way Scientists are cynically selling comfort to (what they perceive as) the ignorant masses by promising to find them playmates or idealized benign teachers elsewhere in the universe; but from what I've seen, I think they believe it will work on the proles because it works on them.

Inappropriately Touched by E.T.

Someone shared this image on Facebook today, with the header "Seriously !! Still believe we are alone ?"

It looks like you can see it, and the comments, without being logged into Facebook, which is handy. (It was posted by Milky Way Scientists, apparently affiliated with NASA, who also posted this smokin' beefcake photo of Albert Einstein. Maybe they should put out a calendar along those lines?)

I'm not exactly surprised, since I know that NASA has always had a high concentration of religious nuts; see David F. Noble's The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (Knopf, 1997). It's a useful reminder that certain New Atheists' assurance that the advance of science will inevitably consign religion to the dustbin of history isn't just bogus, it's a statement of faith.

These are pretty pictures, and I've loved looking at photographs of deep space objects since I was a kid. But they have no bearing at all on the question of extraterrestrial life. Even though I recognize that a leap of faith is involved, I can't see how to get from point A to point B here. Judging from arguments I've encountered in the past, I think that the idea is that in a universe so full of galaxies and stars, there must be some other people out there somewhere! I understand the intuitive appeal of that argument, but there's this little thing called the Fermi Paradox ...

What first caught my attention was the cartoon image below the photos of the Mocker and Scoffer, who believeth not what Science hath shown him so abundantly. I was reminded immediately of a co-worker of mine, who after driving through the desert in the American Southwest was convinced by the beauty of the natural formations that there must be a "higher power." (I asked if her if she felt the same way about soil erosion in her garden, which is also God's work. I don't remember what she answered; probably she did feel the same way about it.)

Some of the comments on the image are revealing.

it would be so stupid if we were alone .....

C'mon i thought this fact makes sense to all of us! Why do u still ignore it?

Hope so. Can't wait for something to come and have a VERY stern word with you, Mankind. And I hope they are A LOT bigger that you are. Although they probably won't be as NASTY as you are.

We are not alone anymore

Well, if anyone is out there watching what is going on down here, they'll just shake their heads, leave us alone and continue searching for intelligent life.

That last one has three "like" flags so far.

These are declarations of faith, not of rationality. And while it could be argued that the comments are just stupid laymen, the tone was set by the scientists who posted the image to begin with. "Still believe we are alone?" Personally I don't have an opinion one way or the other, because no one has shown me any evidence, any reason to believe that there is life on other planets or in other star systems; but at the same time there's no clear evidence that there isn't life on other planets. It's reminiscent of the popular claim that you can't prove or disprove the existence of God, but on the subject of extraterrestrial life, many atheists are ready to make assertions they can't prove. I consider it a great occasion for agnosticism, the admission that we don't know something rather than jumping to unwarranted conclusions. Recently I saw a quotation from Richard Dawkins to the effect that the trouble with religion is that it encourages children to be comfortable with ambiguous conclusions, rather than giving them certain knowledge. (Sorry, I can't find the source; I thought I had it bookmarked.) I'd have thought it was the other way around myself, but I'm not an Oxford man.

The use of the emotionally-laden word "alone" is revealing too. I don't know about you, but I'm not alone: there are billions of other people on this planet. The Christian apologist Blaise Pascal famously wrote, "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." It's been argued that he wasn't speaking in his own voice there, but ventriloquizing an imagined atheist; I can't tell, and I don't think it matters because clearly many people, atheists as well as religious believers, are frightened by the vastness of the universe, and want to shrink it to a cozier size by populating it with guardian angels or kindly ETs. (Notice the automatic -- that is, irrational -- assumption that people on other worlds will be smarter and more "civilized" than we are, though contemptuous of terrestrial humans' stupidity and violence. When you assume ... ) It's tempting for me to guess that Milky Way Scientists are cynically selling comfort to (what they perceive as) the ignorant masses by promising to find them playmates or idealized benign teachers elsewhere in the universe; but from what I've seen, I think they believe it will work on the proles because it works on them.

Keep Telling Yourself: It's Only a Cartoon ...

I very rarely disagree with XKCD's cartoons, but this one baffled me. The explanation here doesn't help.

Yes, I know, it's a cartoon, not a philosophical or scientific argument. But the cartoonist is very serious about his math and his science. And so much here is wrong.

I'm sure that gliding in a wingsuit like the one depicted is fun; I've fantasized about free flight myself, many times. But the invention of such toys hasn't interfered with humans' determination to keep fighting until we've rendered ourselves extinct, so you can't resolve the Fermi Paradox by postulating that intelligent species on other planets just got so caught up in self-powered flight that they never bothered to build spaceships or some kind of long-distance communication.

Oh yes, the Fermi Paradox. It points to the conflict between many scientists' conviction that because the universe is so vast, there should be some other intelligent, spacefaring, radio-wave beaming species out there. If they exist, some should have been around long enough that we on earth could have picked up their transmissions, and if they've developed faster-than-light travel, they should have found us and paid us a visit by now.

I used to go to the occasional observatory / planetarium presentation where an astronomer would talk about the chances of life elsewhere in the universe. After a couple of them, I realized that the numbers they would toss out ("If one in ten thousand stars has planets, and one in ten thousand of those planets are the right distance from their star and has the right conditions for the development of life, and life develops on one in five hundred, etc.") were sheer fantasy masquerading as science because a scientist was reciting them, and lost interest. We have no basis for assigning probabilities in this area, because we have no data. We know of only one star with a planet at the right distance and with the right conditions for the emergence of life -- this one. Until we know of a good many more, we can't assign any probabilities at all.

Various attempts have been made to explain why we have found no trace of other civilizations. What XKCD calls the Corliss Resolution, after a wacko who likes to jump from high places with his wingsuit, doesn't do the job. First, if (as the explanation says) it's more fun to fly than to do calculus, then everybody would be out jumping off buildings -- only we wouldn't have any tall buildings because flying/gliding is presumably more fun than building skyscrapers too -- and calculus would never have been invented.

Maybe XKCD is postulating not the invention of self-powered flight on all planets that harbor intelligent life, but the evolution of quasi-avian species on all such planets, that such species wouldn't bother to invent space travel because they were too busy flying, and no other intelligent species would evolve there. Remember the vast numbers of stars out there, just in our galaxy let alone beyond; remember that the case for life outside our solar system rests on those numbers, which make it reasonable to speculate that there must be some other earthlike planets and other intelligent species somewhere in the universe. In order to make the Corliss Resolution plausible, someone would have come up with a reason to believe that life on every other life-bearing planet is too happy gliding to do anything else. (I think it's interesting that XKCD writes of "space colonization" rather than "space exploration." Does he want us to be colonized by kindly ETs?)

This shoots down the motive of much (if not all) scientific speculation about life on other worlds: that the emergence of life on earth is not a one-in-a-jillion fluke, that other organisms like us exist, that we are not alone in the universe. Even if the Corliss Resolution did turn out to be true (and we'll never know if it is), it would mean that the earth is unique and human beings are alone. That might be a good thing, but it would be a devastating disappointment to the many science geeks who've been inventing probabilities for the existence of extra-terrestrial life, to convince themselves and others that it's out there; it would destroy a major pillar of their faith.

Keep Telling Yourself: It's Only a Cartoon ...

I very rarely disagree with XKCD's cartoons, but this one baffled me. The explanation here doesn't help.

Yes, I know, it's a cartoon, not a philosophical or scientific argument. But the cartoonist is very serious about his math and his science. And so much here is wrong.

I'm sure that gliding in a wingsuit like the one depicted is fun; I've fantasized about free flight myself, many times. But the invention of such toys hasn't interfered with humans' determination to keep fighting until we've rendered ourselves extinct, so you can't resolve the Fermi Paradox by postulating that intelligent species on other planets just got so caught up in self-powered flight that they never bothered to build spaceships or some kind of long-distance communication.

Oh yes, the Fermi Paradox. It points to the conflict between many scientists' conviction that because the universe is so vast, there should be some other intelligent, spacefaring, radio-wave beaming species out there. If they exist, some should have been around long enough that we on earth could have picked up their transmissions, and if they've developed faster-than-light travel, they should have found us and paid us a visit by now.

I used to go to the occasional observatory / planetarium presentation where an astronomer would talk about the chances of life elsewhere in the universe. After a couple of them, I realized that the numbers they would toss out ("If one in ten thousand stars has planets, and one in ten thousand of those planets are the right distance from their star and has the right conditions for the development of life, and life develops on one in five hundred, etc.") were sheer fantasy masquerading as science because a scientist was reciting them, and lost interest. We have no basis for assigning probabilities in this area, because we have no data. We know of only one star with a planet at the right distance and with the right conditions for the emergence of life -- this one. Until we know of a good many more, we can't assign any probabilities at all.

Various attempts have been made to explain why we have found no trace of other civilizations. What XKCD calls the Corliss Resolution, after a wacko who likes to jump from high places with his wingsuit, doesn't do the job. First, if (as the explanation says) it's more fun to fly than to do calculus, then everybody would be out jumping off buildings -- only we wouldn't have any tall buildings because flying/gliding is presumably more fun than building skyscrapers too -- and calculus would never have been invented.

Maybe XKCD is postulating not the invention of self-powered flight on all planets that harbor intelligent life, but the evolution of quasi-avian species on all such planets, that such species wouldn't bother to invent space travel because they were too busy flying, and no other intelligent species would evolve there. Remember the vast numbers of stars out there, just in our galaxy let alone beyond; remember that the case for life outside our solar system rests on those numbers, which make it reasonable to speculate that there must be some other earthlike planets and other intelligent species somewhere in the universe. In order to make the Corliss Resolution plausible, someone would have come up with a reason to believe that life on every other life-bearing planet is too happy gliding to do anything else. (I think it's interesting that XKCD writes of "space colonization" rather than "space exploration." Does he want us to be colonized by kindly ETs?)

This shoots down the motive of much (if not all) scientific speculation about life on other worlds: that the emergence of life on earth is not a one-in-a-jillion fluke, that other organisms like us exist, that we are not alone in the universe. Even if the Corliss Resolution did turn out to be true (and we'll never know if it is), it would mean that the earth is unique and human beings are alone. That might be a good thing, but it would be a devastating disappointment to the many science geeks who've been inventing probabilities for the existence of extra-terrestrial life, to convince themselves and others that it's out there; it would destroy a major pillar of their faith.