I am an astrobiologist, sci-fi geek, and professor of everything groovy. I write about science, culture, math, history, space, and science fiction. Perhaps like you, I'm seeking a greater understanding of the nature of life and asking myself why all of this really matters. Come with me, and we'll ask some questions together.
In case you missed it, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ran a fantastical piece recently on how the American public tends to utterly fail at understanding scientific studies. Our own lack of critical thinking and scientific literacy has made it far more likely for people to misread and misunderstand the results and conclusions of scientific studies, not to mention the fact that there are now way too many people who will believe utter bullshit as long as someone makes it sound "sciency". For instance, I recently saw this piece of shit post going around on Facebook claiming that research had found that people with blue eyes were able to hold their alcohol better. Of course, that's not really what any researchers had claimed. The report in question was recently published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics (you can find it here: Sulovari et al. 2015). In that research, a study of a subsample of 1,263 Americans of recent European decent had shown that there was a possible correlation with lighter eye color and the predisposition for alcohol dependence. The authors of that paper themselves pointed out that replication of the study would be necessary before accepting their conclusions, even though a study of only 1,263 people is very unlikely to be too conclusive given all of the possible complexities of such a sample-size limited study. The research in question is exciting and may be an indicator that there is some relationship between the genes that cause eye color and the genes that may make us more likely to become dependent on alcohol, but it in no way implies that having blue eyes makes you a better drinker or a tougher person or anything ridiculously silly like that. I highly recommend checking out the following video from Last Week Tonight. You can trust me, I'm wearing a lab coat!
...but a lot of journalists have once again shown that they love to fall for quackery
This image of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was taken by the Rosetta spacecraft on 15 June 2015 (ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM)
Earlier this month, The Guardian posted an article which started a brief but infuriating internet fire of gossip about the possibilities for life on comets. Specifically, the article announced that Max Wallis and Chandra Wickramasinghe had claimed during a talk at the Royal Astronomical Society'sNational Astronomy Meeting that the organic-rich crust of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is best explained by the presence of microorganisms. Indeed, Wickramasinghe (whom the author of the article titled as a "maverick astronomer and astrobiologist") was quoted as saying that their finding of life on the comet was "unequivocal". As an astrobiologist and a fan of ideas about the possibilities for alien life out there, I like to wonder about whether there could be living organisms on cometary material. Based on that, you might think I would have been excited about this "news", but a quick read into the announcement and where it came from (more importantly, who it came from) quickly suggests that these findings are a bunch of bunk. Chandra Wickramasinghe has become known in the astrobiology community as someone who has a conclusion that alien microbes are everywhere and who will stop at nothing to try to prove his belief. This makes him less of a "maverick astronomer and astrobiologist" and far more of a pseudoscientist and a threat to real science.
Taken from a page of Skeptical Raptor's blog, where it's shown that debunking quackery can be fun as well as rewarding
In this announcement of "finding" alien life, Wickramasinghe and Wallis take the findings of organic-rich materials on the surface of comet 67P by the Rosetta mission and make the claim that such materials are "not easily explained in terms of prebiotic chemistry". They went further and told their audience at the National Astronomy Meeting that they have conducted simulations which suggest that microorganisms with antifreeze proteins could explain dark, organic-rich features as well as certain icy structures on the comet. Wickramasinghe was quoted as saying "...data coming from the comet seems to unequivocally, in my opinion, point to micro-organisms being involved in the formation of the icy structures, the preponderance of aromatic hydrocarbons, and the very dark surface."
You should always be cautious in trusting someone who uses statements like "unequivocally" and "in my opinion" in the same sentence. As Chris Lee pointed out recently in an Ars Technica article titled "Magic carbon layer not a sign of extraterrestrial life", the finding of organic carbon on the surface of a comet is by no means surprising from the stance of modern surface chemistry. In fact, we now know that organic compounds are abundant in the universe. We've discovered organics in meteorites, on comets, on other worlds, and in interstellar space. It's no surprise that the Philae lander discovered organic material on comet 67P, but just because there is organic material there in no way implies that there is also life. Decades ago, it might have seemed that organic material automatically implies life, but we now know that the conclusion of life does not follow simply from the presence of organic material in a sample. Such thoughtful approaches to science, however, are not in Wickramasinghe's realm of thought. It seems that Wallis and Wickramasinghe have taken the approach of dressing up their hopeful belief as a scientific certainty.
This isn't the first time that Wickramasinghe has been involved in unjustified claims that alien has been discovered. Wickramasinghe has previously claimed that viruses like SARS, the bird flu, and the 1918 flu epidemic were extraterrestrial in origin. This pseudoscientist has also been involved in "publishing" claims of finding alien microbes in meteorites and in the atmosphere through the fake science source called the Journal of Cosmology. Phil Plait, author of the Bad Astronomy book and blog, has written several articles pointing out Wickramasinghe's fallacious claims. Phil even tackled this recent claim of life on 67P with his article "Life on a Comet? I’m Gonna Go With “No.”" Dan Evon also briefly covered this non-discovery of life in an article on Snopes. It gets tiring sometimes battling against the fraudulent and the quacks, and some people might even ask why we then do it. The answer is simple: in our age of abundant information, where disinformation and misinformation run rampant and many people are illiterate in science and technology, the frauds and the quacks pose a serious danger to the future of our civilization. If we lose the scientific method, if we allow ourselves to dwell in unjustified claims, and if we forego evidence for satisfaction, then it's only a matter of time before a new dark ages befalls us and we have to start all over again. It's not always easy to determine the differences between science and pseudoscience (indeed, philosophers of science have been trying to figure out how to do that for quite some time). Claims like those made by Wickramasinghe and his fellow pseudoscientists seem legitimate to many people, especially when news sources claim these people are "experts", "maverick astronomers", or "top astrobiologists". Yet people like Max Wallis and Chandra Wickramasinghe are a threat to modern science and to the public. Their approach of accepting their preformed conclusions without significant evidence or even rational skepticism is a bane to modern science. I sincerely hope that, moving forward, we will see more scientists taking to social media and more reporters seeking input from real scientists to fight the bunk of people like Wallis and Wickramasinghe when they start to peddle their snake oil. We may one day, perhaps very soon, discover evidence for extraterrestrial life. I've dreamt of that moment since I was a child. Many of us have. Yet jumping the gun with false assertions of alien life does nothing to improve our pursuits in astrobiology. Certainly, if and when we do find actual evidence for life outside of our biosphere, you will hear the news coming from far more reliable sources than Wallis and Wickramasinghe.
I came across a video today produced by The Inspiration Journey, which sets inspirational music and video to a portion of the audio from Carl Sagan's last interview with Charlie Rose in 1996, the year of Sagan's death. This interview featured some of Sagan's most poignant as well as inspirational words about the way that science has functioned in human history and about the current issues we face in improving science literacy and understanding.
During this interview, Sagan said, "Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking." Indeed. We've developed a continually evolving understanding of our place in the cosmos through our scientific pursuits. Science is a way of thinking that has helped us to question our predispositions about ourselves and our universe. There's a special magic to science, not a magic of the supernatural kind, but rather of the awe inspiring kind. We've found that we can revel in the grandeur of the universe by better knowing the universe.
If you take stake in the idea of a better future for everyone, then I highly recommend the following video. Turn the lights down and the volume up, and enjoy:
Intelligence can be ridiculously sexy. Perhaps you've heard lately about the online smackdown that Vani Hari (who calls herself the Food Babe) received by Yvette Guinevere, a.k.a. SciBabe. The smackdown started when SciBabe posted a blog in Gawker titled The "Food Babe" Blogger is Full of Shit. Vani Hari has made a living by speaking out against the supposed "toxins" in our food, but she does so in a vein of ignorance and lacking scientific literacy that has become common amongst the yuppy crowd (her followers are much the same misinformed followers as the proponents of the antivaxxer movement). In that Gawker article, SciBabe pointed out some of the fallacious bullshit that's become common fair amongst the non-GMO, organic-only, better-than-thou crowd, but, more importantly, SciBabe woke up some of the media to the fact that Vani Hari's celebrity has nothing to do with her actual credibility.
Although I don't trust food corporations to make healthy decisions over profit-driven decisions, I also know that making rational decisions with what we eat and learning about what's in our food is far better than disavowing or fearing anything we don't understand. SciBabe's smackdown of Vani Hari is a solid reminder that intelligence is sexy because intelligence is awesome. Screw living in fear due to ignorance when you can live in strength through understanding.
With our age of the internet, we constantly have information at our fingertips. It seems like most of the information we come across is pretty much worthless and we need an educated and rational society of people to sift through the garbage to find the gold. The recent smackdown of Vani Hari gives me hope for the future of humanity, not because of Yvette Guinevere's sound logic and reason (again intelligence is pretty damned sexy) but rather because of the huge uptick of folks who have learned about Hari's bullshit fear-mongering. I look forward to reading more of SciBabe's bunk-busting of pseudoscience bullshit with reason and logic. Intelligence really is sexy.
“Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham’s Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.”
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
The History Channel's popular pseudoscience and pseudohistory show Ancient Aliens presents the astronomies and astrologies of ancient peoples as though such peoples were in communication and potential contact with extraterrestrial beings. One of these proffered connections comes from a singular piece of artwork from the tomb of the Mayan ruler Pakal, which ancient aliens proponents claim to be a depiction of Pakal sitting in a rocket which is blasting off into the heavens. It seems fairly unreasonable to think that the ancient Mayans would know what a rocket would look like, or, even worse, to assume that extraterrestrial beings that could travel through interstellar space to visit us would still have need to use chemical propulsion for rockets to leave the Earth, but it's a fascinating idea and something worth considering for those of us who are interested in the philosophy of science.
Early Man and the Cosmos
Some years ago I took an undergraduate course at the University of Colorado that dealt with the topic of archeoastronomy (Course Website). We discussed some of the various ways that people in ancient and modern times have considered their place in the cosmos through their observations of the night's sky: including the megalith constructors of ancient England, Polynesian navigators, the alignment of the Egyptian pyramids, and the mythologies of the aboriginal people from Australia. I have always found these considerations to be quite fascinating. From the mythologies built around constellations and the movements of the stars and planets to architectural alignments with the heavens, I think one of our greatest connections with our ancestors from across the planet is our awe and wonder when we ponder the cosmos through the night's sky. I recently decided to go back and fully read the text that was required for this undergraduate course. That book, Early Man and the Cosmos by Evan Hadingham, was a bit dry and somewhat dated (published in 1984, when I was only finishing my first orbit around the Sun) but I found it to be an enjoyable and fascinating read. The book focuses primarily on the megalith constructors of ancient Great Britain, the people of the American southwest (Chumash, Zuni, Hopi), and the ancient Mayans, though the author does a good job of placing these people and their understandings of the heavens within the greater context of our modern knowledge and the development of astronomies and astrologies in various forms through history. Hadingham presented the brief history of lord Pakal, a Mayan ruler from the 7th century C.E., and his decorated sarcophagus lid in a section of the book subtitled "Lords of Palenque". Although Hadingham reviewed what real archeologists and historians make of the artwork on the sarcophagus and it's context within Mayan culture, the author made mention of the claim in Erich von Däniken's 1968 book Chariots of the Gods? that the sarcophagus depicts the great Mayan ruler blasting off in a rocket.
Pakal - Mayan Ruler or The Palenque Astronaut?
K'inich Janaab' Pakal (also known as Pacal) was a ruler of the Mayan land of Palenque beginning some 1400 years ago. During Pakal's reign over Palenque, he had the Palace of Bàak' expanded and he came to be revered by his people. After his death, Pakal was deified and many of his descendants would claim their right to rule through their connection with him. Pakal was entombed in the Temple of Inscriptions, but his tomb was not discovered by modern scholars until 1948. The iconography in Pakal's tomb depicts the various connections between the great ruler and the mythological considerations of the cosmos by his people, but the iconography in the tomb that has been of the greatest interest to scholars comes from the lid of Pakal's sarcophagus:
The sarcophagus lid appears to show Pakal at center as he makes his journey into the world of the dead. Growing around him is a world tree, a common depiction in ancient Mayan art, with its roots growing down into the underworld and it's branches extending toward the heavens. Around the edges of the lid are depictions of the Sun, Moon, and stars as well as those of ancient nobles, perhaps real Mayan rulers or mythological figures. The proponents for the existence of ancient aliens see the depiction on Pakal's sarcophagus as being something different. They suggest that the lid shows Pakal sitting within a spaceship, with exhaust coming out of the back of the capsule, Pakal's hand on controls, and his foot on some kind of a pedal for controlling the ship. It sounds like a connection that could only be made once the space age began and that it exactly the case: Erich von Däniken suggested that the image depicts Pakal as a spaceman sitting in a pose similar to that of the Mercury astronauts from the early American space program. The Ancient Aliens show and the claims from proponents of those ideas are pretty easy to debunk. Indeed, Chris White has a great 3-hour film where he breaks down most of the ideas of ancient aliens. The film and relevant information for each major claim from ancient aliens can be found at White's website Ancient Aliens Debunked. White has a fantastic breakdown of the claims about Pakal's sarcophagus. Since posting this back in 2014, the video link I used to have to White's videos no longer works (but definitely check out the website). However, here is a pretty awesome video from Hoax Factor considering Pakal's tomb:
White definitely shows that the ancient aliens hypothesis in the case of lord Pakal has very little ground to stand-on. None of their claims fit within the broader context of the known mythologies, history, or artwork of the ancient Mesoamerican peoples. Indeed, this one image can be viewed as though it's a picture of Pakal in a spaceship, but that viewpoint doesn't appear to have any historical legitimacy. Why then do proponents of ancient aliens continue to proffer this bogus idea?
Seeing Faces and Hot Rods of the Gods
As many of us know, it's a natural human tendency to see what we want to see when we look at our world. We have a proclivity for seeing things like faces in burnt toast, in clouds, and in inanimate objects in our lives. When we have mental filters in place for what the world around us should look like, we are then more likely to view the world in that way. It's not too hard to see then how a fairly uneducated person like Erich von Däniken could look at Pakal's sarcophagus and see an image that reminded him of the reclined Mercury astronauts blasting off in their space capsules. The Mercury program had been widely known at the time that von Däniken wrote his first book on the subject. Erich von Däniken has long stood by his claims (he even built a theme park to present his ideas as though they are fact), but it's seems like the real problem is that von Däniken can't see past his own personal experience having spent most of his life in the 20th century. It's a good exercise in critical thinking to try to step away from the world we know and to attempt to view the cosmos through the lens of another culture at another time in history. That's part of why I enjoy learning about ancient peoples and their considerations of the heavens. As a scientist, I work within the current paradigm of scientific thought and application, but to truly appreciate what modern science is and how it works, it's good to think about all human endeavors to understand our universe. The final words from Evan Hadingham in Early Man and the Cosmos iterates this point beautifully:
"When we consider ancient astronomy, we begin to value the complexity and logic of other schemes of thought besides our own. We realize that our framework of ideas developed from only one system of thought out of many that have passed into obscurity. The perspective of other peoples, sometimes glimpsed across a gap of countless generations, reminds us of the shortcomings of our own outlook, and there are indeed many others. Such an awareness may be essential for our own survival"
Worthwhile Gobbledygook?
“Deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.”
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Many of us can sometimes be too quick to judge proponents of the ancient aliens ideas. Much like people who believe in ghosts, fairies, gods, faith healing, homeopathy, or the power of prayer, the proponents of the ancient aliens hypotheses have viewpoints about our world that they feel are justified and they are trying to make sense of the world for themselves within those viewpoints. The separation of science from pseudoscience comes in the rigor and method of acceptance and denial in science and the lack thereof in pseudoscience, yet it has been a complicated and non-trivial affair for philosophers of science and scientists to truly determine how the demarcate science and how to fully describe science. Science itself covers a range of approaches and considerations. Who's to say that the science we practice now will be anything like the science practiced by people to come centuries or millennia from now? In some ways, we scientists are also guilty of building up mental filters that control how we allow ourselves to see the universe. Although ancient aliens ideas have no legitimacy in the sense of the history they present, they are still important concepts in our modern history as they represent the growing want of many people to know what extraterrestrial life may be like and whether or not we are alone in the universe. If anything, I wonder if some of these ancient aliens ideas may be a way for some people to try to build a connection with the greater cosmos. Those of us who consider ourselves communicators and educators of science should approach such ideas as ancient aliens in that respect and show the public that we can know about our connection with the universe through science. Even though we haven't yet discovered any evidence for alien life to exist and there's most assuredly no evidence that aliens have ever visited the Earth, that doesn't mean it's not fun to think about the possibilities for other life in our universe. Here's all 3 hours of Ancient Aliens Debunked:
