It’s always astonished me that the existence of planets around other stars was one proposition that scientists seemed hesitant to embrace; I’ve been reading astronomical texts and press-releases for the past 30 years, on-and-off, and my perception is of having experienced very little of:
Yes! The universe is a huge, enormous, unimaginably vast place, and in our galaxy alone there are more than 200,000,000,000 stars, so if you multiply that by the millions of galaxies we can see, the chances that there exist other terrestrial planets, and that upon some of them there are other forms of life that are both alike and very unlike us, are very high indeed…
…and instead quite a large amount of:
We have hypothesised that the gravitational anomaly that we have detected means there may be a large gas giant planet near [some local star] – and therefore there may be at least one planet around at least one other star, although it’s more like Jupiter than Earth and unlikely to harbour anything we’d call life.
We’re just about past that, now, we’ve moved on to the stage of proving other stars have quite complex systems of planets; but why are we still not pointing out the huge, vast enormousness of the universe, and therefore the likelihood of there being life elsewhere in the universe?
Hey, look! Something moved!
I think it’s the same problem Copernicus faced, but writ large and subtly; it’s the total perspective vortex issue; it’s the pale blue dot problem.
The problem – or part of the problem, at least – is that as soon as you take people away from being the centre of creation, the centre of the solar system, the centre of focus for one or more imaginary gods, and instead say “we’re tiny and insignificant on a cosmic scale, albeit we can be precious to one another” – they just totally freak out.[1] Apparently life is “meaningless” without our being relevant to the universe in some way; unless our existence is validated by some sense of cosmic importance then we “might as well all commit suicide”[2].
To which I respond: Well, yeah. You could do that, although that’s kinda dumb. At least if you did we might winnow-out any genetic disposition to believe in that sort of thing, which might benefit the species. Just don’t feel it incumbent to take anyone else with you, m’kay?
I think at some level my fellow astrogeeks understand this, so they conservatively only describe what they can prove, so that “the scientific method” provides a cloak to protect the forces of stupidity (TFOS) from doing a modern-day Galileo to them. Anyone who sticks their neck out and speculates (horror!) had better have the chops to cope with criticism both from TFOS and also from members of the same community who lack the nerve to do the same.
If we could only give every 10 year old in the world a telescope, and a clear night sky; but alas, some idiot would steal the telescope to use as a rangefinder.
—
[1] Oddly, many folk who are capable of accepting that we don’t need a large religion to hold a society together, are unwilling to extend the concept and admit that we don’t need a large state to do so, either. People are mostly nice, get over it.
[2] Yes, somebody has said this to me.
Leave a Reply