Science

The visitors are our friends

Science, science fiction
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Stephen Hawking is skeptical:

Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

That quote in the title is there not by accident; Hawking’s fears bear a remarkable resemblance to a certain mid-eighties television series of friendly aliens that turned out to be carnivorous lizards wanting to steal our water (and women). Hawking’s fears are just as realistic as V ever was. Anything Earth has can be had just as well elsewhere in the universe, you don’t need to raid us for raw materials. Now add to that the problems of traveling to us, in an universe which so far seems sadly devoid of easily usable FTL travel and the likelihood that we’ll have to deal with a Columbus type situation is vanishingly small.

Which doesn’t mean any sort of genuine, unambiguous alien contact won’t create a proper out of context problem for us. To have not just life, but intelligent life confirmed to exist elsewhere in the universe means as great a setback to our unique place in history as Copernicus’ insistence that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around. It will change everything, though probably not as melodramatically as most science fiction has it…

Nicotine-Use Disorder .. Wait, what?

Reefer Madness, sciencebollocks
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Found via Unspeak, from a draft proposal to the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association: nicotine use disorder:

A maladaptive pattern of substance use leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, as manifested by 2 (or more) of the following, occurring within a 12-month period

Which is followed by a list of supposed symptoms of this, including gems like “Craving or a strong desire or urge to use a specific substance” and “there is a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control substance use”. All the symptoms are on this “well, duh” level or generic to any sort of addiction, as if the proponents of this addition have just cut and pasted a list of symptoms in under various headers, as indeed somebody has.

Does it matter, this reclassifying of various addictions as “disorders”? I think so, as it’s both offensive and misleading to suggest that somebody who is addicted to cigarettes, booze or drugs is immediately suffering from a disorder. You may have problems, sure, but are they psychiatric problems? Or do you just, engage in behaviour psychiatrists have labeled as such, like homosexuality used to be until surprisingly recent? Attempting to solve such “disorders” with psychiatric methods is liable to cause more damage than do good, while the medicalisation of societal problems does nothing to address their root causes. You can’t solve everything with a little blue pill.

Interstellar Archaeology

geekdom, Science, science fiction
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An interesting post up at Centauri Dreams about the possibilities of interstellar archaeology:

Suppose a civilization somewhere in the cosmos is approaching Kardashev type III status. In other words, it is already capable of using all the power resources of its star (4*1026 W for a star like the Sun) and is on the way to exploiting the power of its galaxy (4*1037 W). Imagine it expanding out of its galactic niche, turning stars in its stellar neighborhood into a series of Dyson spheres. If we were to observe such activity in a distant galaxy, we would presumably detect a growing void in visible light from the area of the galaxy where this activity was happening, and an upturn in the infrared. Call it a ‘Fermi bubble.’

That’s the term used by Richard Carrigan (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) in his latest work on what he calls ‘interstellar archaeology,’ the search for cosmic-scale artifacts like Dyson spheres or Kardashev civilizations. A Fermi bubble would grow as the civilization creating it diffused through space. Carrigan notes that, as Carl Sagan and others observed, the time to colonize an individual system is small compared to the travel time between stars. An expanding front of colonization might then move forward at a rate roughly comparable to the space travel velocity. A civilization could engulf its galaxy on a time scale comparable to the rotation period of the galaxy, and perhaps a good bit shorter.

We may not have gotten our jetpacks or domed cities on moon and in the oceans, but the mere fact that ideas like this are not just interesting speculations but actually testable proposals should convince anybody we’re living in the future. The only disavantage is that the more we are able to observe from Earth or Solar System based space telescopes, the less likely it will be that the old science fiction future of three men scouting rockets exploring the Galaxy will come to pass…

The Hubble Wars – Eric J. Chaisson

books and books review, Science
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Cover of The Hubble Wars


The Hubble Wars
Eric J. Chaisson
386 pages including index
published in 1994/1998

Having worked on a somewhat troubled project for the past few years, it’s a great comfort to know that even big science projects like the Hubble Space Telescope can suffer from similar problems. In Hubble’s case, bad project management and quality control meant it was only discovered after the space telescope had been launched that its main mirror had a serious flaw in its grinding which meant that it couldn’t focus properly. But that was only the most *ahem* visible of the Hubble project’s problems, as Eric J. Chaisson explains. And he should know, as he was a senior staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute when these problems occurred and hence had a first rank seat for them.

The Hubble Wars was originally published in 1994 and based on notes Chaisson made during Hubble’s commisioning period after launch, when the problems with the lens, as well as several others first cropped up. This then was largely written in the heat of the moment, without the benefit of hindsight, even if the edition I got out of the library was the updated 1998 one. This update was largely confined to a new foreword, an attempt to correct some of the misconceptions and hyberbole in the news coverage of Hubble discoveries. The rest of the book was largely left unchanged, though every now and then new developments are alluded to — and they’re not always well integrated. But that’s just a minor quibble. What remains is an important insight in how a big science project can go wrong, as it happened.

Read more.