November 25, 2002
"BUT WHERE IS EVERYBODY?":
Scientists Contemplate Interstellar Travel, UFOs (Guy Gugliotta, 11/25/02, The Washington Post)So: It's about 7:45 p.m. in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on a chilly, blustery December night, when this "big round thing" with flashing red lights suddenly crashes in Big Lake Park, just off North Eighth Street.Eleven witnesses, including cops and firefighters, either see the crash or rush to the scene within 15 minutes to watch the flames from the molten metal -- mostly carbon steel --that covers the ground.
It happened on Dec. 17, 1977. The "big round thing" that local resident Criss Moore saw hovering in the air 25 years ago has never been explained.
No one knows if aliens are really blowing up their starships over Council Bluffs. But if extraterrestrial life forms are visiting from time to time, somewhere some sentient beings must have figured out a way to transit interstellar space. Discussions about unidentified flying objects march hand in hand with the feasibility of interstellar space travel.
Earlier this month, George Washington University and the Sci-Fi Channel sponsored a symposium at the university where serious people took up these two topics. Scientists agreed that we won't be doing star trips anytime soon, but "soon" may not mean much in the context of the cosmos.
"The universe is 14 billion years old," said symposium panelist Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist from City University of New York. "Human civilization only began 5,000 years ago."
So give science a chance.
Interesting story, but we're believers in Fermi's Question.
Posted by Orrin Judd at November 25, 2002 8:14 PM
There is a truly awful Heinlein novel, The Book of Job
, which uses the Rapture as a plot point. One of the few decent scenes in the book is of an angel complaining bitterly about all the stupid humans who somehow got the idea that they were going to be angels in heaven.
Job
, by the way, is a reworking of themes raised in Heinlein's vastly superior short-story, The Unpleasant Profession Of Jonathan Hoag
, which I recommend whole-heartedly.
After the recent batch of evolution articles, I said to myself, "I bet an article on SETI is in the offing." Here it is!
Science does not do well at all with rare or non-repeatable events. It tries to abstract the regular features out of a large number of events. So it is with UFOs. I recently read the book by Peter Sturrock (emeritus professor of physics at Stanford) called The UFO Enigma
. Interesting book in many ways. For example, he shows that scientists, when polled in secret
accept UFOs as real and likely to be alien spacecraft. Their public persona is just the opposite. The book is worth reading just for the analysis of the Hannah McRoberts case.
Bruce:
Just wait 'til I find one on the geocentric universe...
Mr. Judd;
A geo-centric universe is merely a matter of selecting the correct spatial metric. I've lost track of it, but I've seen a paper on what the laws of physics would look like if one assumed a stationary earth at the center of the universe. It can be made to work, but like Ptomelaic astronomy, it's not pretty.
AOG:
Did I mention it's flat too?