NOT using the
panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in San
Jose, CA in August 2018 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from
education)), I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with
the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not
today. This explanation is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes
reviewing movies, sometimes reviewing books, and other times taking up the
spirit of a blog an old friend of mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…
I know I’m a few years behind, but I just checked out a copy of LONELY
PLANETS: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life (2003) by David Grinspoon. He
does, of course, have a “doctor” in front of his name, but it appears that he
doesn’t use it very often. He also has the endorsement of Neil deGrasse Tyson –
the quintessential new face of astronomy and the immediate successor to Carl
Sagan.
Tyson said of Grinspoon’s book “…brings together what has never before
been synthesized…he is a planetary scientist as well as dreamer, born of the
space age.”
As is apparent to anyone who reads my blog, I LOVE aliens! I write
about aliens! I do (guardedly) believe that there is intelligent life “out
there, somewhere” – HOWEVER, I don’t believe that we have any real proof yet
and that it is, at this point, an intellectual and philosophical exercise.
Be that as it may, I’m approaching the end of Grinspoon’s book and have
skimmed his website (http://funkyscience.net/)
several times. While it’s been “frozen” on his newest Pluto/Horizon book, I find
myself looking forward to following this guy for some time to come!
I’m well into the
book now (page 229) and I got my own copy on Wednesday through a Half-Price
Books near me. After (*gasp*) dog-earing my Library copy, I transferred the
noted pages to my own book.
And…I haven’t
finished the book yet, partly because I got a book from the library (THE TEA
MASTER AND THE DETECTIVE by Aliette de Bodard). If you like Sherlock Holmes
homages (and I do!), and you liked Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw (and I did!), then
is a masterful book for you! Anyway, onward.
51 Pegasi – the fifty-first
brightest star in the constellation Pegasus, the Winged Horse – is a Sun-like
star that has an entire suite of planets and has long been in the “exoplanet
limelight”.
We’ve even gone
and named one of the planets Dimidium (from the Latin, dimidius, which means
half or halved, because it appeared to be about half of Jupiter’s mass…), and
it’s the first of a now long-line of planet types we have called “hot Jupiters”.
This is because it orbits very close to its sun every four days and has an
average orbital distance of one one hundredth of an AU (Earth is 1 AU from the
Sun, 157,000,000 km (or more familiarly to us Americans, 93 million miles)).
It’s kind of
funny, because when I teach a summer school class called Alien Worlds, I insist
on students NOT naming the planets of their star system until their intelligent
aliens evolve both language and a knowledge of the planets in their star system
– in other words, not until Thursday. But here we have Humans naming the worlds
of someone else’s (conceivably) star system. Don’t you think there’s a certain amount
of hubris there? Hmmm…
At any rate, when
Grinspoon wrote his book, there were some 100 or so planets discovered orbiting
fewer than a hundred stars. Many of the stars were NOT Sun-like, 51 Peg was the
first. Today, there are literally THOUSANDS of exoplanets and hundreds of
stars. That leads to this statement: “What if we live in a completely deviant
star system, and our presence here indicates that such an unusual location is required
for something like us to come along…From this we are tempted to conclude that
ours is not a garden-variety solar system, but we don’t know this…We won’t know
definitively how typical our own planetary system is until we take a more
thorough consensus of the planets in our stellar neighborhood.” (p 215)
Today, “As of 1
November 2018, there are 3,874 confirmed planets in 2,892 systems, with 638
systems having more than one planet…About 1 in 5 Sun-like stars have an ‘Earth-sized’
planet in the habitable zone. Assuming there are 200 billion stars in the Milky
Way, one can hypothesize that there are 11 billion potentially habitable
Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way, rising to 40 billion if planets orbiting
the numerous red dwarfs are included.”1
Space is an
exceedingly strange place and the question STILL comes back to something called
The Fermi Question and can be stated most simply as “Where is everyone?”
The Fermi Question has been made into a "mathematical formula" of sorts called the Drake Equation. It has also been amended recently with the Seager Equation: (both are included here: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2013/05/seager-equation-based-on-detected.html
)
Most recently: “The Drake equation has been used by both optimists and pessimists, with wildly differing results. The first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which had 10 attendees including Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, speculated that the number of civilizations was roughly equal to the lifetime[non sequitur] in years, and there were probably between 1,000 and 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. Conversely, Frank Tipler and John D. Barrow used pessimistic numbers and speculated that the average number of civilizations in a galaxy is much less than one. Almost all arguments involving the Drake equation suffer from the overconfidence effect, a common error of probabilistic reasoning about low-probability events, by guessing specific numbers for likelihoods of events whose mechanism is not yet understood, such as the likelihood of abiogenesis on an Earth-like planet, with current likelihood estimates varying over many hundreds of orders of magnitude. An analysis that takes into account some of the uncertainty associated with this lack of understanding has been carried out by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord, and suggests that with very high probability, either intelligent civilizations are plentiful in our galaxy or humanity is alone in the observable universe, with the lack of observation of intelligent civilizations pointing towards the latter option.”
)
Most recently: “The Drake equation has been used by both optimists and pessimists, with wildly differing results. The first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which had 10 attendees including Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, speculated that the number of civilizations was roughly equal to the lifetime[non sequitur] in years, and there were probably between 1,000 and 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. Conversely, Frank Tipler and John D. Barrow used pessimistic numbers and speculated that the average number of civilizations in a galaxy is much less than one. Almost all arguments involving the Drake equation suffer from the overconfidence effect, a common error of probabilistic reasoning about low-probability events, by guessing specific numbers for likelihoods of events whose mechanism is not yet understood, such as the likelihood of abiogenesis on an Earth-like planet, with current likelihood estimates varying over many hundreds of orders of magnitude. An analysis that takes into account some of the uncertainty associated with this lack of understanding has been carried out by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord, and suggests that with very high probability, either intelligent civilizations are plentiful in our galaxy or humanity is alone in the observable universe, with the lack of observation of intelligent civilizations pointing towards the latter option.”
Wow. Really. Wow.
If that’s not a “religious”
statement, I don’t know what is. It’s like saying, “Either Christianity is true
or it’s not.” It’s not particularly profound and in fact, might be considered a
sort of…woo woo statement, that is, “descriptive of an event or person…[that/who
espouses] authentic religious tradition[s] such as Hinduism or Zen Buddhism,
but now practices an Eastern-influenced yet severely watered-down and
Westernized pseudo-mysticism…” In other words, it’s always a safe bet to say
something that sounds definitive but is carefully designed to not take ANY kind
of stand.
Despite the fact
that we have 2892 star systems that have confirmed planets, there is still no
evidence whatever that there is anything approaching a Human level of
intelligence – at least none that is leaking coherent energy of any sort. That then
always leads back to the suspicion that we are alone in the universe. Unique or
not, it just doesn’t seem likely at this point (without doing teleological [the philosophical idea that things have goals or causes -- like how Dr. Eleanor Arroway responds to the question from a child about if she thinks there's intelligent life "out there" and she responds saying that if there ISN'T, it would seem to be an awful waste of space...] or mental gymnastics that include STAR TREK’s Prime Directive (that intelligenes higher than ours are keeping their hands off so that they don't interfere with our development) that there's nothing but wishful thinking that there's anyone out
there for us to talk to…
Resources:
Part One: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-philosophy.html,
http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/
Part Two: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-part-2-state.html
Exoplanets
Defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet
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