Bill Roper's Journal

I continue to consider the possibility that the reason that we haven't heard from aliens (yet) is that intelligent life is even rarer than most formulas would predict, largely due to the lack of suitable planets for intelligent life to even think about developing on. My most recent thought on the subject is that it may be that you can't develop intelligent life unless the planet it's developing on is actively engaged in trying to wipe you out and failing at it.

You want a planet that is geologically active enough to produce volcanos, plate tectonics, and Van Allen belts. But what if the line between "happily geologically active" and "prone to extinction events" is way too close together for comfort? See, for example, the Deccan Traps. How much bigger would that event have to have been to make the planet completely uninhabitable?

Mother Earth has occasionally been a very tough mother. Happily, not so tough as to have wiped out all life on the planet. Planets that are just tough enough may be more uncommon than we think.

(I continue to optimistically assume that we can avoid wiping ourselves out. Your mileage may vary.)

I have not posted a lot of article links recently, but this one was fascinating. I wonder how important "speech" is relative to the Great Filter.

Why Human Speech Is Special

Apparently, a very dim red dwarf and its companion buzzed the outer regions of the solar system about 70,000 years ago, passing less than a light year from the Sun and through the Oort Cloud. This is a very cool bit of information.

It turns out that it probably didn't have much impact on anything in our neighborhood. But it's still cool.

Many details here.

Some researchers have found indications that being vaccinated against smallpox makes you less likely to contract HIV. Which isn't a license for doing something stupid, but it's nice to know...

You may remember last month's post about how Lieutenant Stockwell is busily saving the timestream from the Large Hadron Collider. Well, apparently he's got the birds working for him too.

Do you know how long it takes to train a bird to drop a piece of bread in exactly the right place to disable the LHC?

At ConClave last weekend, we performed one of my favorite SpaceTime Theater bits, Time Cop. In it, I play the beleaguered Lieutenant Stockwell of the Time Patrol whose mission is to keep Sam's character -- aided and abetted by Nikola Tesla -- from destroying the time stream.

It looks like Tesla may have gotten his fingers into the Large Hadron Collider over at CERN, or so I hear via Instapundit.

But that's ok. Lieutenant Stockwell is busy keeping the time stream safe from the Higgs Boson.

Scientists used to think that the earliest part of the Earth's existence was really, really hot and inhospitable and thus named it the Hadean period.

Maybe not so much.

Ok, so let's talk about this, since several of you have brought it up. Apparently, her position on teaching creationism in the public schools is the same as mine:

It's ok to talk about it if it comes up, but you don't need to make it part of the curriculum.

Now why would I have a position like that, given that my personal belief is in a God who pretty much doesn't meddle, that is not too far away from some of the Deist beliefs in a God who created the universe and lets it run? It turns out to be really simple.

Sometimes, it is more important to teach the kids why than it is to teach them what.

If a child shows up in class and says "My parents say that God created the world and that evolution is wrong," the appropriate answer is not to say "That's not science, so we can't talk about it here." The appropriate thing to do is help the student understand why that statement isn't a matter of science, but rather a matter of faith.

The big difference between science and faith is that science produces testable predictions. (Except for string theory, which is starting to get a remarkably bad reputation in some circles because it doesn't produce testable predictions. But that would be another discussion altogether. :) ) Faith doesn't produce testable predictions, nor should it need to. That's sort of the essence of faith.

Science can't prove that God didn't create the world yesterday, complete with all of the internal evidence to indicate that it had been here for billions and billions of years. And science doesn't need to prove or disprove that. Science does need to assume that the universe is as it is based on the evidence that exists. And if you assume that God isn't a completely venal bastard (which is an assumption that I'd like to start from -- otherwise, should God exist, we're all in deep kimchee), then if God arranged all that evidence retroactively, it could only be because He wants us to look at it.

So no matter whether you believe God created the universe or not, science ought to go study the evidence that exists. And creationism, because it can't produce testable predictions, is the province of faith, and thus does not need to be discussed further in our science class.

Of course, you also need to fess up and admit that there are evolutionary mechanisms that still aren't well-understood -- because you're going to get the "irreducible complexity" argument thrown at you from time to time. But the fact that science doesn't yet have all of the answers is not one of its weaknesses -- it's one of science's strengths.

All of that is a complex lot of argument to give to kids. But kids aren't stupid. They're capable of understanding an amazing lot of things if you give them the chance to do so.

And if what you do is simply tell them that creationism isn't science without telling them why, then you're just arguing from authority.

You're asking them to take it on faith.

Via Instapundit, a Wall Street Journal article about folks who are building fusion reactors in their basement. How's that for a Berserker project?

Answer: probably requires too much voltage. :)