Where I get my space and science news

Ordinary media (whether news papers, magazines, or news networks) are very unreliable when it comes to reporting new findings in science. They often distort the facts or give misleading information. A good example of that is the false or misleading information they put out about advances in fusion technology. Unfortunately, there are even some popular scientists who distort the facts when they're hungry for media attention. Sometimes I think the reason is just a desire to be sensational because sensationalism sells. Sometimes it's because the people reporting science news just don't understand the science.

Thankfully, we are not at the mercy of these sources anymore. There are actually competent people on YouTube who do a much better job of reporting space and science news than what you can get on TV, magazines, or news papers. I'm going to direct you to four of my favourites.

Fraser Cain (not to be confused with Frasier Crane)
This guy is not a scientist, but he is an unusually competent and knowledgable science journalist, so I recommend him.
https://www.youtube.com/@frasercain/videos

Anton Petrov
This guy is also not a scientist, but I think he used to be a science teacher.
https://www.youtube.com/@whatdamath/videos

Sabine Hossenfelder
Sabine is an actual physicist. She used to mostly talk about topics in physics, but lately she's become more of a science news channel. Besides being interesting and informative, she's also entertaining.
https://www.youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder/videos

Dr. Becky
Becky is an astrophysicist. Most of her stuff is about stars, galaxies, and astronomy. Her specialty is black holes. Becky is fun to watch becasue of how enthusiastic she is about the topics she discusses.
https://www.youtube.com/@DrBecky/videos

If you're interested in physics, cosmology, astrophysics, or astronomy, you should subscribe to all four of these people. But they do sometimes talk about other things, like other fields of science as well as technology. I highly recommend all four of them.

Crazy times and reductio ad absurdum arguments

There are things people readily believe today there were thought of not merely as incorrect in the past, but as so utterly absurd that they were used in reductio ad absurdum arguments. If you held a point of view that, when taken to its logical conclusion, led in an absurdity, then that cast doubt on the truth of that point of view. That's how ad absurdum arguments used to work.

I can't remember the context, but I remember using an ad absurdum argument in which the absurity was that I claimed to be a black woman even though I'm obviously a white man. The argument probably had to do with whether claiming to be something meant that you were that thing, like claiming to be a Christian even though you denied the existence of God or the resurrection of Jesus. That reductio probably wouldn't work today because the absurdity is no longer considered absurd.

About 24 years ago or so when I first started reading pro-life literature, I came across a reductio ad absurdum argument meant to show that the fetus was a distinct organism rather than being a part of its mother. The argument was that if the fetus were a part of the mother (like an organ or an appendage), then you could have a woman with two heads, and in the case of a male fetus, a woman with a penis. If you tried to use that argument today, people would say, "But women can have penises."

We live in crazy times, and it's getting crazier. I wonder if some day reductio ad absurdum argument will no longer be considered a valid way of reasoning. Maybe they will be moved to the "logical fallacies" part of the logic text books since nothing is absurd.

Honest and productive debate and discussion

I become increasingly frustrated listening to panel discussions, interviews, cross examinations, debates, and even just regular conversation between average every day people. It seems like nobody is really interested in what anybody else has to say. Everybody wants to interrupt and talk over the other people. One person will ask a question of another person, but they won't let them answer. Often they will interrupt just to say, "You're not answering my question." Everybody wants to steer the conversation in a certain direction, but nobody else will let them, so nothing really ever gets fleshed out in a conversation. It's all surface level jumping from one topic to another in kind of a multi-directional tug-of-war.

I got into a rabbit hole of binge watching police interrogations on YouTube a few months ago. I noticed a huge difference between the way these interrogations take place and the way TV interviews, debate cross examination, and Congressional testimony goes down. The difference is that the police give the suspects as much room to talk as they can. They do everything they can to keep them talking, hoping all the while that they don't invoke their right to remain silent. The reason is because they know that the more the person talks, the more likely they are to give up a piece of information the police can use. So they don't interrupt the suspect even when they know the suspect is lying or being evasive. If the suspect has a story to tell, the cops will let them go on and on, and the cops listen to everything they say.

Why the difference? Well, I think it's because in most cases, we aren't actually interested in what other people have to say. We're just interested in what we have to say. We want to be heard, but we don't want others to be heard, especially when they disagree with us. We're not actually interested in learning anything from anybody. We just want others to learn from us. Often we don't think others have anything to teach us, but we think we have something to teach them. There is a general lack of respect we have toward people who see things differently than we do.

The police are trying to find out the truth. They know they're going to be lied to if the person is guilty, but even lies can be useful information. If somebody is in a debate, interview, or cross examination, the object isn't to find out the truth, but to win the conversation. In the case of Congressional testimony, it's often just posturing.

Of course the police can be very manipulative. I'm not claiming they're more honest than the rest of us. I'm just attributing their tactics to the difference in goals. I think that we should be more like the police in these interrogations, not in the sense of being manipulative, but in the sense of letting others speak and listening to them with the goal of eventually revealing the truth. The police, more than politicians, the media, apologists, or just your friends, family, and neighbors, are very interested in what the other person has to say. They make it their goal to draw them out as much as possible, to get them to say as much as possible, and to think carefully about what they are saying.

That is what we should do. Sometimes, we'll ask a question that's based on our assumptions or frame of reference, but if the other person doesn't share those assumptions or frame of references, and they try to respond, it's going to sound at first like they're not asnwering our question, and we're going to be tempted to interrupt them and say, "Just answer the question!" But we shouldn't do that. Instead, we should hear them out. Let them talk. Maybe it'll turn out that we had a misunderstanding. Maybe they'll make some necessary clarification we hadn't anticipated. Maybe they'll say something that doesn't directly answer the question we're asking but still contributes meaningfully to the conversation. Maybe it will reveal more clearly where the misunderstanding lies or why it seems like you're talking past each other. At the very least, it will give us more information about what's going on in the other person's head.

And besides that, it's the polite thing to do. As I said before, we all want to be heard. That's why we interrupt and talk over people. With that being the case, you should strive to be the one that's listening. It's an act of kindness and a show of respect to hear somebody out, show curiosity, listen to them, and think about what they are saying. One of the best compliments I've ever recieved was when somebody said, "I thought about what you said."

If you're an apologist (whether for theism, atheism, capitalism, socialism, or whatever), and you really want to advance your point of view, it still behooves you to hear the other person out and let them speak as much as possible. Just as in the case of the police, that will give you information to work with. You are in a better position to reason with somebody if you know how their mind works, what they already believe, and how they think. So you should make an effort to draw people out and not get flustered when they aren't directly answering your questions the way you'd like. You should still let them finish because they might say something else you didn't know but can use. Or it might be that they just have a round-about-way of communicating, in which case you just need to be patient.

In my own case, I can tell you that I often interrupt people because they are throwing too much information at me at once, and I can't process all of it. I need it in smaller doses so I can think about it and ask questions. If somebody monologues for ten minutes, and I have all kinds of things to say while they're talking, I'm not going to remember any of it when their ten minutes is up, and they want me to respond. Sometimes straining my brain to keep track of something somebody says so I can respond to it when they're done makes it difficult for me to pay attention to the rest of what they have to say. That's not as big of a problem in a classroom setting because I expect the lecturer to monologue, and I take notes so I can ask questions about something they may have said fifteen minutes earlier. Of course conventional wisdom is that you should listen to understand rather than listening to respond, but in reality, we do both. One does not simply give up the urge to respond, and one shouldn't give up the urge to ask follow-up questions.

I suspect I'm not alone and that some of you might interrupt people for a similar reason. While this post is mainly geared toward encouraging you to be a good listener, and not to be the obnoxious interrupter, I don't want to end this post without also saying that you should strive to be patient with those who interrupt you and who seem like they aren't listening to you. Maybe they aren't, but not all interrupting is a sign of disrespect or disinterest. The case of interrupting to keep your train of thought is just one example. Another is interrupting on accident because you thought the other person was done when they were just pausing for dramatic effect.

But even when people interrupt for bad reasons, we should be patient with those people, too. Dealing with people in general requires patience because none of us are perfect. We're all sinners, we can all be selfish, and we're all a little bit self-absorbed. If you can't be patient with people, you're going to grow to dislike people more and more as you get old, and then you're going to be all alone.

Here's a link to another post I made that's related to this subject: Just Answer: Yes or No?

David Grusch is probably lying, and other thoughts on aliens and UFO's

As much as I would like to find out there are aliens among us, I don't think there are. But I'm hopeful enough that I watched the interview with David Grusch. Before watching the interview, I was suspicious of the story because of my general skepticism toward alien visitation. I didn't know whether he was deceiving or was himself deceived, though. In clips I saw before the full interview, I got the impression that he hadn't seen any evidence of aliens himself. He was getting all his information from other people. But now, having seen the full interview, I think it's more likely that he's lying than that he believes what he's saying and is just duped.

First, there's just a vibe I get from his manerisms and the way he talks that gives me a subjective feeling that he's lying. I used to put no confidence in this sort of thing until experience taught me that when my gut tells me something about somebody, it's usually right. Of course it's a stronger impression with some people than with others, and in his case, my gut wasn't screaming that he's lying. It was just elbowing me that he's lying.

Second, he engaged in a little psuedoscientific non-sense during the interview. At the 7:50 mark, he appeals to his physics background to raise the possibility that they could be interdimensional beings. He says, "I couch it as somebody who studied physics where maybe they're coming from a different physical dimension as described in quantum mechanics. We know there's extra dimensions due to high energy particle collisions, etc., and there's a theoretical framework to explain that, yeah." The theoretical framework he's probably referring to is string theory (or M theory) because that's the only viable theory in physics that involves extra dimensions. In the most current version of string theory, there are ten spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension. We only see three spatial dimensions because the others are all compactified. Individual strings can vibrate within the extra dimensions, which is what gives particles their properties, but you couldn't have a whole civilizations living in them with living beings that could travel back and forth between those dimensions and ours. That makes no sense within string theory. It treats these extra dimensions as if they are different three dimensional realms like ours that a being could living in and be separate from our three dimensions. That is the stuff of science fiction, but it has no relationship to real physics, not even string theory. But worse than that, his claim that we know there's extra dimensions due to high energy particle collisions is flat out false. There's no evidence at all that string theory is true other than its internal consistency and its prediction of gravity, and there have been no studies at CERN or any other collider showing anything at all about extra dimensions. This is all psuedoscientific nonsense, and I think the fact that he appeals to his own study of physics to make these claims shows that he's lying.

Third, he used words (or tried to use words) that are obviously not part of his usual vocabulary. This shows that he's pretentious. He's trying to come across as more intelligent, professional, and authoritative than he really is. I'm always a little suspicious when people behave that way. I'll give some examples. At one point, he talks about aliens being interested in our nuclear weapons, and he says they wanted to see how far we had advanced in our "fizzle" technology (18:50). He probably meant fission technology. Fizzle is what they call it when a nuclear bomb underperforms, so "fizzle technology" is nonsense. At another point he said, ". . .true nonprosaic UAP situation could be constrived as, you know, a provocation. . ." (32:00) Constrived isn't a word. He probably meant to say "construed," but he got it mixed up with "contrived." He came across as pretentious in his word choices throughout the interview, and the whole thing just raised my suspicions about his honesty.

Pretentiousness is something I've noticed with some Christian apologists, too. I noticed it a lot with Ravi Zacharias. It isn't just speaking intelligently or with a good vocabulary. William Lane Craig speaks intelligently, but he rarely strikes me as pretentious. It's hard to put my finger on it, but I recognize it when I hear it. It comes in unnecessary word flourishes or obscure word choices when more common words work just as well or better. People sometimes say things like "constrived" when they're trying too hard.

Pretentiousness has its place, though. If you're writing poetry or some literary masterpiece or you're trying to get published or noticed, it makes sense to be a little pretentious. In those cases, you're trying to dazzle or impress. But if you're just trying to communicate information, the object should be clarity over other considerations, and too many times I've seen people sacrifice clarity in an effort to appear intelligent, sophisticated, or authoritative. It's especially noticeable when somebody tries too hard and doesn't fully understand the words they're using.

To be fair, though, there's at least one thing that counts in favour of Grusch's honesty. Allegedly, he testified under oath about these things. So, he put himself at risk of some kind of prosecution if he's caught lying. That does count in his favour. It's not enough to convince me, though, because I don't know what he actually said under oath. I just saw the interview. He wasn't under oath during the interview. For that matter, I'm not certain he testified under oath. I only heard that he did. I suspect he probably did because he does seem eager to have Congress or somebody look into these things. At the very least, you'd think he'd be willing to testify under oath.

I'm not saying that I know, am uttelry convinced, or that I'm absolutely sure that Grusch is lying. I think he's probably lying, but I could be wrong. That's all I'm saying.

Let me say something about my skepticism that aliens are visiting us. First, I don't claim that it's impossible. I just think it's highly unlikely for a few reasons.

I used to think it was nearly impossible that aliens have visited us becasue of an argument I used to have. The only reason a civilization would go to the enormous trouble of singling out another solar system among the billions that exist in our galaxy is if there were something that set it apart, and about the only thing that would set one apart is if it had life (especially intelligent or advanced life) on it. The only way aliens could know there was intelligent life on our planet was through our radio waves. The farthest our radio transmissions could possibly have traveled by now is 100 light years. The fastest anybody could possibly travel is near light speed. So the farthest any aliens who visit us could be is 50 light years away. That gives 50 years for our radio signals to alert them that we were here, and another 50 years to travel here. But realistically, our early radio waves are too weak to be detected 50 light years away, and realistically there's probably no aliens near us that could travel at nearly the speed of light. So realistically, any aliens visiting us are probably no more than 20 light years away, which is still generous. A civilization capable of traveling that distance would surely have more radio signals than we have, and since we've searched the skies for decades and haven't detected any alien radio signals, they're probably not within 20 light years of us.

This argument isn't nearly as strong as I originally thought because there are other ways for aliens to detect us than radio waves. They could detect life on our planet through spectroscopy. We are developing telescopes that can take the light that shines from a distance star, through the atmosphere of one of its planet, to a prism or something, breaking that light into its separate wavelengths. By looking at the spectrum, we can figure out what the atmosphere of that planet is made of since different chemicals absorb specific wavelengths of light. This could, potentially, allow us to detect life on other planets since organic life can release chemicals into the atmosphere that aren't produced any other way than by organic processes. With a more powerful telescope, we could do these observations for more and more distant stars. So it's possible life was discovered on our planet as much as a billion years ago by a civilization as much as a thousand light years away. Any aliens living closer than that might have time to reach us. It could be that aliens have been visiting our planet for millions of years.

But I'm still very skeptical. I think my argument was right that aliens wouldn't attempt to come here unless they had some really compelling reason to do so and that the knowledge of life here (or at least the high probability of life here) is about the only thing that could single us out. Well, there's that and proximity. If there were life in the Proxima Centauri system, they might send probes here just because we're nearby.

One reason I'm skeptical is because I think life is probably rare in the galaxy, and intelligent advanced life comparable to our own is vanishingly rare. The reason I suspect life in general is rare is because of the difficulty scientists have had in figuring out how we got from simple organic compounds, to self-replicating RNA, to fully formed cells. I suspect the difficulty is because it was a fluke, unlikely, extremely rare series of events. Besides that, it seems to have only happened once on our planet. Or if it did happen more than once, none of the other lines of transmission have survived.

Some people say the fact that it happened so early on our planet shows that it's not an unlikely event. I used to think that was a good argument, but I don't anymore. The fact that life started very early on our planet might be an observer selection effect. It took four billion years to go from single celled organisms to intelligent human beings. If it's normal for intelligent life to take that long to develop, then life would have to start early on any planet that has intelligent life. If life started too late, then there wouldn't be enough time for intelligent beings to evolve. At the very most, we've only got about a billion more years before all life ceases to exist on this planet because our sun is getting hotter and brighter all the time. So if life started three billion years ago instead of four billion years ago, intelligent life would never have evolved on our planet. So any planet with intelligent life comparable to our own might have to be a planet where life happened to start early. The fact that life started early on our planet, then, might be due to an observer selection effect rather than because it's easy or likely for life to arise from simple compounds.

So I suspect that life in general is rare in the galaxy. If there is life all over the galaxy, the vast majority of it is probably just single celled life. It took three billion years on our planet to go from single celled life to multicellular life. The jump to multicellular life must have been an extremely unlikely event. The unlikelihood of it is bolstered by an argument I've heard from Paul Scott Pruett and others about how rare functional sequences of amino acids are compared to non-functional sequences of a given length, like the average size of a protein molecule. So I suspect that the jump from single celled organisms to multicellular life is also rare on other planets.

There are a long series of unlikely events that happened on our planet that resulted in our being here. I don't want to go into those details because this post would be too long if I did. I just want to say that given hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, it might not be impossible that it's happened more than once. Even so, I still think exo-planets containing intelligent life would be few and far between. So it is highly unlikely that there's another advanced civilization near enough to make traveling here feasible.

But let's suppose there is or has been an intelligent species within 10 light years of us. There are still a lot of filters that might prevent them from ever coming here. One is the question of how long intelligent civilizations usually last. It seems like the longer ours lasts, the more likely it starts looking like we're going to destroy ourselves through nuclear war or destroying the planet through exploitation. There's also natural disasters that cause mass extinctions. We've had several mass extinctions on our planet. So it's hard to say how long intelligent species last on average and whether any would last long enough to develop the technology needed for interstellar travel. Even if a species isn't wiped out, they could be seriously set back. Our civilization becomes more and more fragile the more we rely on electricity and satelites. If we had a coronal mass ejection like the Carrington event today, it would cause far more damage to society than it caused in the 1850's, and it seems like it's just a matter of time before that happens.

Distance is a huge obstacle to any species wanting to travel to other solar systems. Unless they can travel near the speed of light, there's not much hope of getting anywhere within one lifetime. You can imagine intergenerational ships to overcome this problem, but that has problems of its own since energy, food, and resources have to come from somewhere. Plus, it has to be worth it to the passengers, and they better hope their ship doesn't break down on the way. The technology needed for something like that isn't just a few years away. It's probably thousands of years away. It's a major undertaking.

There are obstacles in space, too. Two of the biggest are radiation and rocks. The James Webb Space Telescope was hit by a grain of sand or something shortly after it deployed. Space debris is everywhere, and it's traveling super fast. You would have to travel super fast to get to another solar system in a reasonable amount of time. A small pebble could destroy your ship at that speed. Any ship that hopes to overcome the radiation and particulate matter on a long space voyage would have to have some massive and very powerful shielding.

It is theoretically possible to overcome all these obstacles, of course, but each obstacle makes it less and less likely that aliens have ever visited earth. I'm open to the possibility of aliens being here, and a part of me really hopes they are and that we'll find out for sure because that would be extremely cool. But I'm just very skeptical.

As far as the videos and things about aliens that have come out in the last few years, I've seen Mick West's attempts at explaining them, and I find all his explanations so convincing that it's safe to say in most case he proved that they are not aliens or highly advanced aerial spaceships of some kind. I'm not a UFO junky, so I haven't looked at everything that's out there, but I suspect what I haven't seen is probably just more of the same. Maybe some of it still defies explanation, but that doesn't mean it's aliens. It just means we don't know what it is.

I want to say one more thing just to be fair. There's this argument I've been hearing from other skeptics that goes something like this: It is unbelievable that an alien civilization so advanced that they could visit our planet would crash as much as David Grusch and others say they have. I think that's a poor argument for a couple of reasons.

First, the more difficult it is to complete a mission, then more failures we should expect there to be. When we advanced to the point of being able to drive cars instead of using horses and buggies, we starting having more accidents, not fewer. Traveling to Mars requires the most advanced technology we are capable of, yet half of all Mars missions end in failure. So the failure rate seems to go up as technology advances and as we attempt more and more difficult missions. A mission to another solar system is agreed by all to be extremely difficult, so why shouldn't we expect failures on the part of anybody who tries it? If we sent a thousand probes using solar sails to Proxima Centauri, should we expect that just because we were able to get there that we should also be able to land them all safely? Of course not. We shouldn't expect to land any of them at all. We should rather be lucky that a fraction make it there just to take some pictures before crashing or ending up in orbit somewhere.

A second reason I don't think the too-advanced-to-crash argument is a good argument is because without knowing how many aliens visitors we actually have, we have no idea what the crash rate is. 12 out of 50 is a much higher crash rate than 12 out of a million. If we grant that aliens are here, then we also have to grant that they have some kind of cloaking capabilities since they are so elusive. If they have some way of hiding, there could be millions for all we know, and 12 crashes is an extremely low crash rate. I see no reason to think any degree of technological advancement would give a species an infallible flying record.

Another bad argument I've heard from more than one skeptic is that a species advanced enough to travel here would be uninterested in visiting because we are so primitive that we are like ants to them. That's a terrible argument. We are planning to send probes to Europa and Enceledus in the desperate hope to find mere microbial life. Finding anything comparable to ant life would be wildly exciting. So even if we were like ants to another species, that doesn't mean we would be uninteresting to them. Also, the fact that they were more technologically advanced than us wouldn't mean they were any more intelligent than us. If we discovered something like cave men in the Proxima Centauri system, you can bet that we'd be pouring all our scientific and engineering efforts into sending a probe there to have a closer look.

I guess that's about all I have to say about alien stuff. I also think the incident in Las Vegas was a hoax that got out of hand.