Here is an excellent panel discussion from the JREF TAM event, probably one of the most vigorous, interesting and entertaining debates I have seen in quite a while.

Yes JREF is the James Randi Education Foundation, one of the country’s foremost organizations of skeptics but [...]]]> Enough about religion, let’s talk about space for a change.

Here is an excellent panel discussion from the JREF TAM event, probably one of the most vigorous, interesting and entertaining debates I have seen in quite a while.

Yes JREF is the James Randi Education Foundation, one of the country’s foremost organizations of skeptics but the panel, featuring Pamela Gay, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, and Neil deGrasse Tyson and chaired by Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy website, remains focused on the future of space flight and steers clear of any comment about religion.

Highly recommend viewing for believers and skeptics alike.

TAM Panel - Our Future in Space from JREF on Vimeo.

I guess that’s the price we pay for our steady diet of scifi thrillers…

In a series for the Discovery Channel the renowned astrophysicist said it was “perfectly rational” to assume intelligent life exists elsewhere. But he warned that aliens might simply [...]]]> Stephen Hawking may be one of the greatest theoretical physicists in history, but I’m not terribly impressed by his recent warning about making contact with aliens:

In a series for the Discovery Channel the renowned astrophysicist said it was “perfectly rational” to assume intelligent life exists elsewhere. But he warned that aliens might simply raid Earth for resources, then move on.

“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said.

I certainly agree that any extra-terrestrial aliens visiting Earth within the next thousand years or more would almost certainly be light-years ahead of us in terms of technology. And rather than being like Native Americans in relation to Columbus, we could be like ants to are in relation to human beings. Given that the Sun was born more than eight billion years after the Big Bang, there has been more than enough time for alien civilizations to be millions, or even billions of years ahead of us in technological prowess.

Thus Hawking’s concerns that aliens might want to raid Earth for its resources would appear to be misplaced. What does Earth have that isn’t available in abundance elsewhere? Not water, not minerals, not energy sources—they can be all found throughout the Solar System. So there’s really no need to trash our planet to get at stuff that’s freely available in places like the asteroid belt, Mars, or Jupiter and Saturn and their moons.

Now, there is one asset that Earth has that could be of great interest to a passing alien fleet—organic life. But, again, it’s highly unlikely that they are going need to rape the planet in order to get what they want. Why collect and transport whole specimens when millions of tiny samples of DNA from each species would give them everything they need in a much more convenient form? And while slavers are a popular staple of the science fiction genre, it would seem unlikely in the extreme that highly advance aliens would be at all interested in rounding up billions of reluctant and rebellious human beings as slave labor.

Aside from life itself, we do have one other asset that might be of immense value to our passing alien fleet—information. Not scientific data—though they might find a small amount of passing interest—but cultural and historical information. If the evolution of intelligent life is rare in the galaxy, it could be our own history and culture that they prize most highly, since it will likely be the most unique thing about us and our planet.

Even to an alien civilization that has spent millions of years exploring the nature of the Universe, our literature, media, and historical records will seem new and fresh, and the most efficient way to obtain it all is by a free exchange of ideas and information, not violence. Even if they only gave us a fraction of their accumulated knowledge, I’m sure we would be more than ready to part with just about all the cultural and historical information we have.

Prof Hawking thinks that, rather than actively trying to communicate with extra-terrestrials, humans should do everything possible to avoid contact. He explained: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.

In the past probes have been sent into space with engravings of human on board and diagrams showing the location of our planet. Radio beams have been fired into space in the hope of reaching alien civilisations.

Hawking is wrong here too. First, there is nothing we can do that is likely to betray our presence more than the simple fact that we live on an planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere in the middle of our system’s habitable zone.

For example, NASA Kepler mission is expected to detect extrasolar planets with the same size and orbit of Earth up to several thousand light years away, and we are barely 50 years into our Space Age. Just imagine what a million-year-old space faring alien civilization should be able to do.

Anyone looking our way from up to a thousand light years away (at least) will immediately suspect there is life on Earth, and they might eventually detect signs of industrial activity too by analyzing Earth’s atmosphere for pollutants. Therefore, the odd stray radio signal broadcast into interstellar space is hardly going to add our chances of being discovered.

As for using our own history as a guide, I don’t believe that’s of much use either. Looking back at the worst excesses of our conquering past, we see that they were almost all about gaining control over some type of limited resource—land, people, precious metals, slaves, energy sources, even religious assets.

And as I have already mentioned, there is no reason to expect that visiting aliens will be driven by the same acquisitive desires, or that they will find Earth a particularly juicy target. So, while it is certainly possible to dream up plenty of worst-case scenarios, there is every reason to believe that our first alien encounter, should it ever happen, will be peaceful and mutually rewarding.

Prof Hawking said: “To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

The programme envisages numerous alien species including two-legged herbivores and yellow, lizard-like predators. But Prof Hawking conceded most life elsewhere in the universe is likely to consist of simple microbes.

Sadly, I agree with Professor Hawking on this last point. If intelligent life was commonplace, then unless there is some kind of real-life Prime Directive in place barring all alien life from contacting Earth, we should probably have heard from someone else by now.

While the Milky Way is a massive place, even at sub-light speeds it should still take an advanced alien civilization less than a million years to expand across the entire galaxy. Perhaps they are watching us from a safe distance—waiting for the right time to come and say “Hello!”—but I suspect not, and it may well be that we are the only intelligent life in the Milky Way right now.

Either way, Stephen Hawking’s concerns are overblown. Even in the highly unlikely event that aliens are heading in our direction and are implacably hostile, there is very little we can do about it. Maintaining radio silence isn’t going to help us remain undetected, and once they get here, they aren’t going to be stopped simply by slipping a computer virus into their mainframe while they aren’t looking.

So really, there just isn’t any point in worrying at all. Were either doomed or we’re not, and there is very little we can do change that.

Here’s to many more [...]]]> The Hubble Space Telescope was released back into the wild this morning, it’s 19 year check-up, repairs and upgrade successfully completed, and spectacularly so.  The only “failure” was the incomplete repair of the lesser-used half of the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which they only half-expected to work anyway.

Here’s to many more years of spectacular images and even more spectacular scientific results.  At one of the post-spacewalk press conferences, one of the scientists on the panel explained that Hubble now sends down 30 times more data than it did just after it launched, which is just one measure of how much more efficient and effective an instrument the newly, upgraded telescope has become.  Long after its final plunge into the Pacific Ocean (hopefully many years hence), the scientific data obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope will continue to yield results that will bring us to a greater understanding of the universe around us.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering why an atheist would used a religious expression like “God speed” on his blog, my answer is “Why not?”  There is no doubt that religious expressions, traditions, literature, and imagery pervade our culture, and I don’t see any reason why they can’t co-opted for entirely secular purposes.  After all, why invent a new secular family-oriented gift-giving winter festival when there is a perfectly good one just lying around?  The same goes for expressions like “it’s a miracle”, “bless you” and “God speed”.  There is no reason why they should be spurned simply because they have religious connotations.  Go green, and recycle!!

Perhaps if you’ve never studied [...]]]> After a passable first attempt, and a merely “bleah” follow-up (a typical misrepresentation of what scientists claim about the Big Bang), Eric Hovind really hits rock bottom (pun intended) when it comes to his third “Creation Minute” video.  See if you can spot the howler:

Perhaps if you’ve never studied high school geography you might have missed it, but Hovind’s questioning of how the Colorado River could have flowed uphill for millions of years to carve out the Grand Canyon demonstrates a profound (and wanton) ignorance of proven geological processes.

One of the first things you learn in high school about our home planet is that the Earth’s crust is always on the move.  The theory of plate tectonics—the notion that the Earth’s crust is made up of a number of individual plates that drift around and bump up against each other—was one of the triumphs of the geological sciences of the early 20th century.  Today, in this age of satellite monitoring, it is trivially easy to show that many parts of the world—most notably the Himalayas, the Alps, and the Andes—are rising as the tectonic plates they rest upon are being thrust upwards by the neighboring plates which are pushing underneath, like placing a lever below a large rock to lift it up.

This is almost certainly what happened to the Colorado Plateau before the formation of the Grand Canyon.  There is ample geological evidence to show that the Colorado River (or a predecessor) carved out the canyon as the landmass around it rose due to pressure being exerted from neighboring tectonic plates slipping below it.  Studies of canyon’s route across the plateau show that the river’s flow and direction was directly influenced by nature of the upthrust of the land going on around it.

Of course, it has taken many hundreds of person years of scientific research, and many thousands of published papers to build a good picture of how the Grand Canyon was formed, and even now some questions over the details remain.  But then Hovind comes along that dismisses all of that with a wave of the hand and cries “Inconceivable!” as he fobs people off with an argument from incredulity. 

If pressed, no doubt he will spout the usual unsupported and unresearched creationist claims about rapid deposition and erosion during the Great Flood, but that is no more than using a toothpick to attack the Himalaya-sized mountain range of scientific evidence arranged against him.  It’s worth remember that analogy when you next heard a creationist calling for an equal hearing in the science classroom.  The disparity in supporting scientific evidence between the two sides simply cannot be overstated.

This is a very cool image.  In fact, it’s hard to describe in mere words how cool this picture really is.  What you’re looking at is the first image beamed down from the Kepler space telescope, launched into orbit around the Sun (trailing Earth’s orbit) just over a month ago.  You can just [...]]]>

This is a very cool image.  In fact, it’s hard to describe in mere words how cool this picture really is.  What you’re looking at is the first image beamed down from the Kepler space telescope, launched into orbit around the Sun (trailing Earth’s orbit) just over a month ago.  You can just imagine standing on the bridge of some futuristic spaceship and looking out onto such a scene as this.  But the really cool thing about this image is that in all probability, the first ever Earth-like planet we discover outside our own Solar System is somewhere within this picture.

Kepler’s three-and-a-half-year mission is to stare unblinkingly at this one patch of the heavens and detect the slightest dimming of any of the 100,000 target stars within it.  If they detect a brief drop in a star’s brightness, and that drop is repeated two more times at regular intervals, then there is a very good chance that the dimming of the star’s light is being caused by a planet passing between us and the star (called a transit) and blocking out a small amount of the light.

Kepler’s camera is the largest ever launched into space.  The image you see above is 95 megapixels in size, and the detectors are so sensitive that they expect to be able to discover planets that are up to 1,500 light years away, which is simply astounding.

One of the first things they plan to do is to see if they can detect a planet that has already been discovered by telescopes here on Earth.  It is a “hot jupiter” which simply means that it’s a gas giant, like our own planet Jupiter, and it orbits very close to it’s parent star—much closer than Mercury, in fact.  It’s so close that it only takes 2.5 days to complete an orbit, so the planet crosses in front of the star about three times a week, each time causing a slight dip in the amount of starlight reaching Kepler’s camera.  So we should know very soon if the spacecraft can do what it was designed to do.

Once they have confirmed that they can detect hot jupiters, the mission team will be settling in for the long haul.  While the main goal of the mission is to discover as many planets as they can of any size, the holy grail would be to discover an Earth-like planet (i.e. a planet about the same size and mass as our world) orbiting at about the same distance from its star as the Earth is from the Sun.  In other words, detecting a planet that might be capable of supporting life.  Of course, that means the transits and the resulting dips in the starlight will only occur once every 12 months or so, and since they need to detect three of these transits to confirm that the dimming is being caused by a planet, it will be at least three years before any major discoveries can be announced.

There is always a chance that they don’t discover any Earth-like planets at all, and that would be a major disappointment but, as the title of this blog suggests, we can always dream!