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.
So now I’m at the
end…Dr. Grinspoon has titled this part of the book simply, “Belief” and he
patiently teases apart the rationale of the SETI. However, outside of Grinspoon’s
2003 book, we have this: https://www.space.com/39474-search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence-needs-new-name.html
Fifteen years past
the book’s publication date, and even so a year old, Dr. Jill Tartar, the
current “name” in the Human search for life beyond Earth, believes we need to
leave behind the acronym to indicate the real search that is currently underway
– the search for technological signatures that would be evidence of life off of
Earth, a rebranding of SETI into something like the Search for Extraterrestrial
Technology Signatures – SETS so to speak.
Dr. Tartar explained
that the phrase “‘…search for extraterrestrial intelligence’ generates an
incorrect perception of what scientists in this field are actually doing. A
more appropriate title for the field, she said, would be ‘the search for
technosignatures,’ or signs of technology created by intelligent alien
civilizations.”
Grinspoon tentatively
poses a sort of caveat to this idea in this part of LONELY PLANET: “The problem
of survival is not fundamentally technological. It is spiritual and moral. It
is evolutionary. Technical solutions may provide temporary Band-Aids, but they
do not save us from our nature. If we want to be one of the survivors, we must
create a global society where curiosity is tightly bonded to compassion, and
where (this is hardest to picture) not a lot of people want to do violence to others.
You’re probably not going to like this next though, but one solution would be
to just surrender to the machines.”
Another thing that
has happened in the fifteen years since the publication of the book is the call
by scientists to throw out the Drake Equation as well as its successor in 2013,
the Seager Equation (Sara Seager, MIT), which looks for BIOLOGICAL traces of
life in the atmosphere of planets. At the time of her adaptation of the Drake,
the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite was in the works. TESS launched this
year (April 18, 2018), but as I write this, there have been no real releases of
data except for a scan of Southern skies and images of comet C/2018 N1 snapped
by the craft (https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13030).
There are plans for future conferences however: (https://tess.mit.edu/news/tess-science-conference/conferences/)!
So we’ll be seeing
more data regarding the SETS or, alternately, the Search for Extraterrestrial
Biological Signs – or SEBS.
Looking for
technosigns based on the philosophy of Dr. Tatar; looking for signs of atmospheric
modification via biology based on the philosophy of Dr. Seager; or looking for
something else…
In a recent
article, “Alien Hunters, Stop Using the Drake Equation” by Paul Sutter (Astrophysicist,
Ohio State University; Chief Scientist at COSI Science Center. PhD in Physics
from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Paris Institute of
Astrophysics, research fellowship in Trieste, Italy.) (https://www.space.com/42739-stop-using-the-drake-equation.html).
He points out that “…the Drake equation's power is more as a philosophical
treatment, to help guide our thinking and help us navigate the murky waters of
a deep and fundamental existential question…huge uncertainties in the
parameters, the unknown ways those uncertainties mix, and the absolute lack of
any guidance in even choosing those parameters robs it of any predictive power.
Prediction is at the heart of science. Prediction is what makes an idea useful.
And if an idea isn’t useful, why keep it around?”
Grinspoon has an
article of faith that more or less incorporates all three of the views above: “We
calculate and speculate about finding others that are slightly spiffed up
versions of ourselves and take it as an article of faith that such a stage will
arise soon after the one that we are in now...it takes more than technology to
be a broadcasting society. It requires that you survive with high technology
for many thousands of years…they ‘must’ have solved many of the great social,
political, and spiritual problems we now face.” (p393)
I’m not confident
that ETs have “solved…the great…problems we now face.” That seems to ME to be
in the province of spiritual changes that (at least as it appears to me) God in
man in the form of Jesus Christ can cause (lectures about the Crusades, the Reformation,
the Inquisition, and Manifest Destiny are not appreciated unless they acknowledge
the POLITICAL aspect of all of the above, which, as politics always does,
coopts whatever belief system is useful to create places for the majority of
politicians to gain as much money, power, and influence. Call me whacko if you’d
like. That’s where I stand. Grinspoon points out, “We blame spreading
irrationality on scientific illiteracy. Yet, in my opinion, it is alienation
from science, not science illiteracy that is the root problem…if we want the
world to see us as wizards, not muggles, then we can’t sell our services to the
highest bidder, and we need to spread the magical (and spiritually evocative)
story of Cosmic Evolution…Technical advancement without spiritual progress creates
a dangerous and unstable condition that will be selected against.” (pp411-412).
Hmmm…
“So say we all,” (Battlestar
GALACTICA) or in Earth English,
“Amen”.
Part I: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-philosophy.html,
http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/
Part II: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-part-2-state.html
Part III: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-part-three.html
Part IV: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/12/possibly-irritating-essays-part-iv.html
Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUGOthVSNSUaxivRh0p8U5Ub4NEr0KxiZyPOIBI91G4gAPdcWmSQ-krJynDH2RQu93hHeS6EFbgOFZiDNaZ3M35LGLVbwklBZDB_dEB6symLvWTaYSgbFymOAqbFO4rVwd4qGcEBnzlDk/s1600/Unknown-4.jpeg, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen)
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