“Time period can be a bird permanently along the mentoring.”

Beautiful gibberish!

The way this works is of course by attacking science in the same way creationists do: by starting out with the proposition that science and religion are equally valid viewpoints on the same subject matter. Says Jon Steward: “I’ve always been fascinated that the more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith.” Oh boy, I think I need to put the whole thing on here, it’s just mind-bogglingly full of #fail. So this is how the interview went:

JS: “…and tell me if this is the case: The crux of it is, there’s science and there’s religion. And the idea is that they’re somehow exclusive and at odds. And you’re suggesting that perhaps it’s not as clean-cut…”

MR: “Yes, I think that what has happened in the way the conversation has developed is that people on one side of the argument have claimed the authority of science. But they have not construed an argument that actually satisfies the standards of science.”

I shudder to think what the actual argument is supposed to be, one can only assume that it’s about the perceived denial of religion by science. And here, we’re already at the point where the truth is distorted for the sake of creating controversy where there was none before: science makes no statement about religious concepts. Science is not denying god, because it doesn’t have to. The “attack” on religion, if you will, is merely that supernatural entities are not needed to explain the universe. It’s not that scientists somehow hate god and want him to be gone, deities don’t even show up in scientific theories in the first place. So, from the viewpoint of science, this “back and forth” is not happening. Only religious people think there should be a discussion to begin with. The same tactics were used by creationists to successfully convince a whole nation that religion should be taught in biology class and that both points of view supposedly have merit. They don’t.

MR: “You know, it tends to be part of the history of a certain kind of thinking, that since early in the 20th century, that science for some reason minimized the complexity and the importance of the human mind. And so, for the sake of good atheism, for the sake of good religion…”

JS: “Hrhrhrhr. ‘For the sake of good atheism’ you don’t hear that enough.”

The human brain is only one of the most active areas of ongoing biomedical and informatics research, but hey, feel free to misrepresent that as “minimizing the complexity and importance”. Ah, and a witty oneliner about atheism. Here we go again, same as the paragraph before, only this time the word science is replaced by atheism and then pitted in a faux competition against religion. It might be easier to paint atheism as just another religion instead of doing the same rhetorical trick to the word science, but it’s still a logical fallacy. Atheism does not require belief, in fact it does not have anything to do with belief at all. Atheism is
- not a belief system
- not a moral code
- not a worldview
- not a political statement
- not a movement
- not something you do in your rebellious phase in college to protest against god.
Being an atheist is like being a “non-Mercedes driver”. It wouldn’t even occur to most people to identify themselves as “not driving a Mercedes”. As a method of self-declaration the label only emerges when all other people continually pester everyone who shows up on the street without a German car.

JS: “Tell me about, you know, when you say that it doesn’t take into mind that science is making an argument that discounts religion or faith and that faith may exist in the mind… Science doesn’t take into account magic. The soul. Is that the suggestion?”

I feel a glimmer of intelligence coming on here. Oh no, wait, it’s just nausea. Science is not a tool to destroy religion. It’s a tool to understand the universe. Understanding, by its nature, contradicts faith. That’s why most religions consider knowledge to be the work of the devil.

MR: “Not so much. I don’t think, frankly, that it’s scientific to proceed from the study of ants to a conclusion about the nature of the cosmos.”

Hey, let’s play Logical Fallacy Bingo! I’m gonna go ahead and check off the “Straw Man Argument” box, where a concept is not attacked directly, but first a completely false representation of the concept is created, and then that gets attacked. Needless to point out, that ants are not used in Astronomy nor do they play any role in Astrophysics.

MR: “I don’t think that the argument that is being made is leveraged against anything that actually appropriately ought to be called science. I love science. I think that the new cosmology and so on are amongst the most beautiful things people have conceived. They don’t need to be interpreted as religious or anti-religious. They’re beautiful in their own right.”

While that last part there is more or less correct (discounting for a minute the fact that Astrophysics directly contradicts the creation story of any known religion), Robinson wants us to gloss over the fact that she attacked cosmology just one sentence before! What’s even more fascinating though: she gently slips in that cosmological science is somehow “conceived”, instead of being researched. It’s a subtle hint to let you know that physicists are somehow inventing stuff freely as they go along, or at least she implies here that scientific results are revealed to researchers in the same way religious content is revealed to prophets.

MR: (still referring to the concepts of cosmology) “Another demonstration of what the human mind is, you know.”

Let me make it abundantly clear: the human mind is not in any capacity a component in cosmology. Granted, there was a time when quack scientists invoked the concept of consciousness as a phenomenon necessary for the occurrence of a quantum waveform collapse, but that time has passed and hopefully will never be spoken of again. Neither did the human mind somehow invent the cosmos. The cosmos doesn’t have the capacity to care about or even recognize a mind.

The universe is made up of different layers of complexity. While each layer exhibits behavior imparted on it by the layers below, that doesn’t mean the lower layer “knows” anything about the things happening above it. Such is the beauty of complex systems theory. For example, quarks are below atoms are below molecules are below organisms. The nature of the quarks does have an impact on the existence and nature of the organisms, but that does not mean they are directly and purposefully interacting. Their connection is causal, not semantic – and what’s more, their connection is hierarchical. Quarks do not require organisms in order to exist, nor is the nature of organisms somehow encoded on the subatomic level.

JS: “Who do you think is more afraid. Do you think science fears religion more than religion fears science? Or is there equal mistrust to go around?”

Nice one. I cannot think of one reason why science should be afraid of religion. Again, this is falsely represented as some kind of struggle between equal opponents. Other than perhaps witch trials and terrorism possibly having a direct impact on the lifespan of researchers, science simply does not care what religion does. It’s not as if religion will one day yield a fundamental insight that is going to nullify science. It cannot, by its very nature, ever do that. On the other hand, religion continues to be encroached by the results of scientific research, because the areas of the universe where science cannot reach are getting smaller and god is simply running out of places to hide.

MR: “I’m really not sure about the nature of the controversy. Because I know lots of religious people who love science. And I know lots of scientists who are completely at ease with religion. It’s the quality of science and the quality of religion that determines the nature of the conversation.”

Sigh, there is no conversation. Like a Cantonese speaker trying to explain the finer points of Peruvian pottery culture to an Eskimo from Greenland, they don’t have the same language. And even if they had, they would not be interested in the same concepts. Also, “religious people who love science” are either ignorant when it comes to their own belief system or don’t have a clue about the nature of science (quite possibly both). And “scientists at ease with religion” are very special people who choose to ignore religion when it comes to their specific areas of expertise, and then choose to ignore science in all other aspects of life.

JS: “I’ve always been fascinated that the more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith.”

No, it doesn’t.

JS: “When they start to speak of the universe, it’s ‘well, most of the universe is antimatter‘…”

Most of the universe is, in fact, not antimatter.

JS: “Oh really? Where is that? – ‘Well, you can’t see it.‘ – Well, where is it? – ‘It’s there.‘”

Another gross misrepresentation, nice job Jon. The truth is, nobody in the science community is actually taking the stance he parodied there. The universe is not mostly antimatter. Science is not about blind faith in things that you cannot see. I can only guess that this poor ignorant man actually meant to talk about Dark Matter, because it really is a “substance” that makes up most of the universe and you technically cannot see it.

The argument that humans only know what they can see with the naked eye is also a logical fallacy most often used by religious fundamentalists and the people they already indoctrinated. Meanwhile, in the real world, we accept how we cannot directly see most things that are in fact really there. Electricity, micro organisms, thermodynamics, Newton’s mechanical laws, relativity, far galaxies, they all have one thing in common: while they are observable, they cannot be seen with the naked eye. We need tools and observations to recognize them. The same is true for Dark Matter. While you cannot see it when looking out of the window, you can perceive its existence by looking at the movement of galaxies through a telescope. Just as you cannot see the wind blowing, but you can observe it by looking at how it blows over a cornfield.

I have to stop obsessing about this now. Let me just close with the statement that I expect stupidity like this from Fox. Or talk radio. But never from you guys, I didn’t see that coming.

The otherwise cool movie Sunshine is a particularly egregious example of this, but also the otherwise admirably science-compatible Stargate Universe suffers from the same misconception. Seems like every second episode the ship suddenly runs out of air. So, what would the breathing situation on board the Destiny really look like? Time for the Obsessive Compulsive Nerd Squad to take action and do some calculations!

Total air volume
Let’s assume (for the sake of argument), Destiny is basically a very flat pyramid shape of about 300 x 500 x 40 meters, that would result in a volume of roughly 2,000,000 cubic meters for the ship in total. Let’s assume that half of that is taken up by machines and structures, which leaves us with 1 million cubic meters of air inside the ship.

Lung throughput
The people on the Destiny lead quite an active lifestyle, so they will breathe about 10 liters of air in one minute, bringing us to 14.4 cubic meters per person per day. Air on earth typically has about 20% oxygen content, and because only a fraction of this is absorbed by the lungs with each breath, it is possible to breathe the same air multiple times. However, discharged carbon dioxide is poisonous if it’s not removed from the atmosphere. Let’s assume that a given volume of air can only be breathed once, just to be on the safe side. This leaves us with a theoretical 70,000 person-days of air inside the Destiny.

There are about a hundred people on board, resulting about 700 days of fresh air for everyone, almost two years! At this point in the story, only 20% of the ship is pressurized due to large breaches of the hull. If the remaining parts of the ship are occupied by the crew, they will “only” have about 140 days of fresh air within the habitable zones:

Total oxygen supply
Now we all know an estimate that assumes the entire volume of air can only be breathed once is wildly pessimistic. How much oxygen is actually in Destiny’s atmosphere? Again, taking Earth-like air as a reference, Destiny’s habitable zones contain a total of 40,000 cubic meters of O2. Assuming a need for 600 liters of oxygen per person-day, the crew of destiny consumes 60 cubic meters per day, taking us to a total oxygen supply of about 660 days:

CO2 buildup
However, this is calculation is also not the entire truth, since we would not be able to use every last ounce of O2 present in the air, and more importantly: CO2 poisoning will become an issue if it is not scrubbed from the atmosphere. For a more realistic calculation on what the situation without any kind of air treatment capability looks like, let’s have a look at the CO2 buildup over time:

Even though mild symptoms of CO2 poisoning set in at about 1%, only a carbon dioxide content of 5% or more will seriously begin to incapacitate the crew. If the average human puts out 500 liters of CO2 per day, putting the output of the entire crew at 50 cubic meters per day, it will take them about 40 days to achieve 1% saturation and 200 days to generate enough CO2 until it becomes hazardous given the total air volume of their habitat.

So where does this leave us?
In theory, there is enough oxygen for almost two years in the accessible compartments, but we now know that without CO2 scrubbers, the air inside a ship like the Destiny would last for about half a year assuming a crew size of 100 people. Mild CO2 poisoning symptoms would set in after one month. However, these time spans are not even close to the instant Hypercapnia and suffocation symptoms found in most SciFi scripts.

Becoming even more obsessive
For proper life support to work, Destiny would have to have liquid air storage units in order to re-pressurize its compartments. We are not told how large they are, but this reserve will likely add a sizable portion to the air that makes up the ship’s atmosphere.

Since stars contain pretty much every element, and considering the enormous lifespan of the spacecraft, we can assume that Destiny replenishes its chemical resources whenever it passes through a star. This would most likely encompass the uptake of gaseous components for life support as well, including new oxygen.

So once again, we’re left with a show that could have used better science advisors. Or any science advisors for that matter.

Chapter I – why the fuck am I here?

Every culture has a creation story. As the name hopefully implies, it details how and why the world was made. Because understanding how something came into existence means understanding its nature. And people are curious about nature. This seems to be the fundamental building block of every society, because as the first order of business, everybody has to agree on the answer to “how and why the fuck am I here”.

Early civilizations didn’t know much about anything, so people just improvised to make the others shut the hell up.

Ancient child: Dad, what’s that giant disc of fire in the sky?

Ancient dad: That’s just some dude carrying his magic fireball across the sky

Ancient child: Neat. Um… why’s he doing it? And so punctual, too…

Ancient dad: Well, some other dude made him do it at the dawn’a'time

Ancient child: Why? And who is that other dude anyway?

Ancient dad: *sighs* You know, he’s the Boss Dude and he did that and everything else when he created the world.

Ancient child: Awesome!

And thus, everyone was satisfied and could, finally, shut the hell up to go back to whatever they were doing at the time. The Boss Dude and His Little Helpers made the universe run seamlessly in the background and nobody had to worry about it.

Chapter II – synergy and conflict management
Predictably, after a while the first problems arose:

Child #1: …and that’s because the Boss Dude made the Sun Dude carry his magic fireball across the sky every day…

Child #2: uhm, hang on a second, that’s just wrong. My dad told me the sun is the fart of the Fire Dude when he’s done digesting his evening meal!

Child #1: Listen up, this is plainly nuts! I have it from a reliable source and my entire world view is hinged on the Sun Dude and all that!

Child #2: There is no Sun Dude, just farts! And I guess Boss Dude is really pissed at you for getting it wrong!

If you know anything about human nature, you can infer the only logical course of action available to these children. Clearly, the unbeliever must die. It’s the only way. After all, they can’t both be right. And because Boss Dude would understandably be angry with at least one of them for getting it so wrong, the surviving child gets to claim he was right. Boss Dude is not an asshole, you know. He wouldn’t let the wrong one win now, would he?

Chapter III – world domination
And so, the lively discussion about the nature of Boss Dude and his universe continued for a few millennia. Like any successul TV show, the portfolio of Boss Dude was being expanded continously for the benefit of all mankind:

Some Bloke: Dude, my friend just died. How could Boss Dude let that happen?

Other Bloke: Aw, man, don’t worry. Boss Dude has it all taken care of.

Some Bloke: How can he take care of dead people?

Other Bloke: They’re not really gone. Boss Dude just teleported them to his Magic Kingdom.

Some Bloke: That doesn’t sound so bad. Can I go there, too?

Other Bloke: Sure, don’t worry. Well, as long as you Don’t Do Anything Wrong.

Some Bloke: Whaddayamean wrong?

Other Bloke: If the Boss Dude is pissed at you, you can’t go to the Magic Kingdom.

Some Bloke: What happens instead?

Other Bloke: You get thrown out with the Cosmic Trash!

Some Bloke: Wow, that sucks. But how can I make sure Boss Dude is happy with my performance?

Other Bloke: You know, I happen to talk to him quite often. Just do what I say, I’ll make sure everything’s hunkydory.

Some Bloke: Sweet!

After this, Boss Dude – with his newly added functionality – continued to serve usefully for many aeons. Actually, there was a huge multitude of different boss dudes, since every town had invented their own. But because the different BDs are not really compatible with each other, their numbers decreased proportionally with the growth of civilization. For details on how this was pulled off, refer to Chapter II in which a default conflict resolution mechanism is described that works quite well.

Chapter IV – religion 2.0
For most of humankind’s history, Boss Dude and His Little Helpers were all that was needed to both control people and explain everything to them. From time to time, some guys suspected the whole Boss Dude saga was nothing more than the cumulation of what countless generations had pulled out of their collective asses. For more information about the fate of these people, refer to Chapter II.

However, knowledge about the world increased greatly over time. Explanations starting with “some magic Dude is doing it” were starting to get a bit impractical, because people wanted to predict and manipulate natural events and resources. Soon they were constructing not only calendars and simple arithmetics but entire mathematical models on how things interact with other things. At first, it wasn’t a big problem for Boss Dude’s existence. As long as you could say “Boss Dude created this thing and he made these interfaces available to you so you could calculate some stuff he wanted you to deal with” everything was still borderline OK.

Again, very predictably, things were starting to go downhill as the scope of these models and explanations grew uncontrollably beyond the well-accepted boundaries that were supposed to designate Boss-Dude-only entrances to the back stage of the world.

Some Scientist: Guesswhatnow, turns out the sun isn’t a magic fireball carried by the Sun Dude after all.

Some Guy: Wait a second, that can’t be right. Prepare to d-

Some Scientist: -Actually, I can prove it. Here, look at my formulas and here’s a telescope, too.

Some Guy, after a while: Ooops, well. It was all kind of metaphorical anyway. See, when Boss Dude created the universe-

Some Scientist: Yeah. Funny thing, see, because technically the universe was created quite spectacularly in a huge explosion a few billion years ago.

Some Guy: Now that is just heretical. Prepare to d-

Some Scientist: -Actually, I can prove it. Here, my calculations and look, I took a picture of the early universe, too. Cute, isn’t it?

Some Guy: Right. Like I said: you can’t take the Book of Boss Dude too literally. It’s more like a metaphor for everything.

Some Scientist: But that’s just a collection of half-remembered stories some people collected a few thousand years ago?

Some Guy, fighting with rage: Sure. But, you know, they were, like, inspired. Yeah, the Boss Dude, like, possessed them to write those. If there are limitations in the Book, that’s because the possessed people made some mistakes. It’s just human.

Some Scientist: Sure, why not.

Some Guy: So, a big explosion, eh? Why’d that happen, anyway?

Some Scientist: I have no idea.

Some Guy: Ah, but I know! See, that’s because Boss Dude blew it up at the dawn’a'time! *awkward pause* If, you know, it’s alright with you.

Some Scientist: Sure, as long as I can’t prove that it wasn’t so.

Some Guy: Excellent! I hereby accept this lack of proof… as proof for the existence of …Hidden Boss Dude and his life’s work!

And so, he became Hidden Nice Boss Dude and his biography was saved again. Sort of. Whenever scientists arrived at the barrier of the unknown, that territory was declared to be the domain of Hidden Nice Boss Dude. Of course, that domain had to be rescaled a few times as the barriers of what science could prove shifted. But as long as you’re a flexible Hidden-Nice-Boss-Dude-guy, this method would work indefinitely as long as you are willing to shift the borders of the Domain of Hidden Nice Boss Dude continously to those areas where there currently was lots of unknown stuff.

Chapter V – it’s, like, all way too complicated
Before too long, people were growing restless with the concept of Hidden Nice Boss Dude. After all, we’re talking about the Boss Dude here! If he’s the Boss Dude, then how come he’s constantly running for cover? Why does he have to hide in dark, uncharted places? And what’s all that wussy talk about religion co-existing with science? Isn’t science by its very nature infringing on the copyright of Boss Dude? Somebody should send these heretics the DMCA notice they so richly deserve! Will the real Boss Dude please stand up!

Some priest: You know what, I’ve changed my mind about this whole science thing. It’s getting out of hand. Cats mating with dogs and all that. Boss Dude will be sending us the Cosmic Eviction Notice real soon. And then what!?

Some heretic: Come on, we went over this already… I showed you all the proof and stuff…

Some priest: Yeah. Turns out, that was all fabricated by Bad Dude. He’s Boss Dude’s evil twin. Bad Dude doesn’t want us to enter Boss Dude’s Magic Kingdom.

Some heretic: Hang on, didn’t you say Boss Dude was all-powerful? Why is he letting Bad Dude mess everything up?

Some priest: Let’s not get into that right now. Anyway, quit your evil ways now, while you still can.

And like that, just because Boss Dude’s followers had somehow re-grown the cochones they lost a few hundred years back after that silly incident with the Spanish inquisition, Boss Dude was on the road to victory once more! There was just one little problem. By that time, not that many people still believed in the original Boss Dude. Worse yet, there were countless factions that all believed in a slightly different Boss Dude.

As shown in Chapter II, it is really difficult to integrate all those completely different beliefs about how Boss Dude wants the world to work. There were numerous cultural differences that separated all the remaining believers. For example, while they were all quite sure about the worthlessless of women, the actual degree to which Boss Dude despised females remained a point of contention. Likewise, how should unbelievers be punished? Was it mandatory to behead them yourself right on the spot where you found them? Or should you wait for Boss Dude to sort them out after you bombed the crap out of them?

Obviously, a resolution had to be found for all of these fundamentally different approaches, and after a lot of soul-searching the head priests all sat together to draft some marketing material they all could use. That’s what computer science calles a template. It’s a piece of text with general one-size-fits-all statements and <insert your deity here> placeholders.

Priest #3: Alright people, listen up. The Cosmic Eviction Notice is near, so let’s get cracking!

Priest #1: Well spoken. First order of business: we need a new version of the creation story.

Priest #2: What’s wrong with the old ones?

Priest #3: For starters, we all have different stories and the believers are getting confused.

Priest #1: Besides, they’re tragically out of date and nobody actually believes in them anymore!

Priest #3: But how in Boss Dude’s name can we ever converge on a single one?!?

Priest #2: Excuse me, but in our religion we call him the Mighty Boss Dude, could we please stop using the other forms, ’cause they’re all heretical and technically I’d have to blow you all up for it…

Priest #1: I have an idea! We just omit specifics alltogether. It worked for the cosmetics industry, why not for us?

Priest #2: Brilliant, and we’re calling it… “Mighty Boss Dude’s Smiting-The-Infidels Creation Story”!

Priest #3: No way, it’s gonna be “Boss Dude Playdoh’d The Universe With His Bare Hands In 6 Days” or nothing!

Priest #1: You two clearly don’t get the concept. No specifics! Let’s see, what do all of our Boss Dudes have in common?

Priest #2: They’re almighty! And angry, too.

Priest #1: No, we actually did polling on that. It doesn’t play so well with moderates. And in California, for some reason.

Priest #2: Mighty Boss Dude is pretty smart. He knows everything!

Priest #1: That’s it! Instead of “Boss Dude” we’re using “Intelligence”. Sounds modern, doesn’t it.

Priest #3: I dunno. Sounds like an X Files episode or somethin’.

Priest #1: That’s one more demographic we’re reaching, then. We can’t be too picky, you know.

Priest #3: So… “How a Divine Intelligence Made Everything In 6 Days”, good name.

Priest #1: Dude, that’s a non-starter. It’s way too long and not modern enough. Besides, we can’t keep that “Divine” in there, ’cause we need to get that sucker past the spam filter of all those undecideds.

Priest #3: Spam… what?

Priest #2: Ever heard of email?

Priest #3: Isn’t that something the Bad Dude invented to make people stray from Boss Dude’s path?

Priest #2: You can be so dense!

Priest #3: Don’t use the tools of evil!!!! Don’t you know they’re invented by science and used by liberals?

Priest #2: Really? Tell me, how do you coordinate your suicide bombers then? With smoke signals?!?

Priest #3: We don’t blow ourselves up, stupid. It’s called surgical strike, you should try it some time. Also, you really don’t have to kill yourself to smite those filthy whores on their way to their abortion clinics, that would be such a waste…

Priest #2: If you guys didn’t think about sex all the time, you wouldn’t need abortion clinics to begin with! Your culture is rotten at the core!

Priest #1: Guys, we’re getting sidetracked here. What’s a more neutral word for “making something where nothing existed before”?

Priest #2: How about “design”? I read that in a particle physics book, once.

Priest #3: Why do you read particle physics books? Aren’t they based on, how shall I call it, science?

Priest #2: Yes, but we really needed to figure out how this whole plutonium enrichment works, you know…

Priest #1: Design! I like it. Sounds… scientific! Great!

Priest #3: “Intelligent Design”, yes. Because Boss Dude is very smart.

** several hours of intense discussion later **

Priest #1: Gentlemen, Boss Dude will be quite pleased with our new marketing material, I believe.

Priest #3: Now we must make everyone read and believe it.

Priest #2: We could threaten to kill everyone who doesn’t.

Priest #1: Way too old-school. How about children?

Priest #3: Yeah, they’re pretty dumb, they’ll believe anything.

Priest #1: I believe the politically correct word is “open-minded”. Anyway, let’s get this brochure into our classrooms. And in a few years, we’ll have our first new generation of Boss Dude-fearing-

Priest #3: -abstinent-

Priest #2: -stop talking about sex!-

Priest #1: …young people. Truly modeled in Boss Dude’s image.

Finally, the unifying Theory of Everything was born. Explaining everything by explaining nothing, the potential of a timeless classic. A version of Boss Dude that was immune to any advances in science as well as any form of reasoning at all!

And like this, the world was saved from cold, heartless materialism and once again laid to rest comfortably in a state of ignorant bliss and united in the divine enlightenment only Boss Dude can provide. A world, where the value of life has once again decreased to the cost of a one-way trip to the Magic Kingdom. A world, where we can finally stop all this senseless wondering and prodding at the universe. Because, remember, the only kind of productivity Boss Dude had in mind when he created us was the production of many Boss-fearing children, by means of targeted and strictly pleasure-less unions executed by lawfully married couples that support traditional family values.

As we can see, the history of the world is actually quite simple. Why is everyone still arguing?

The Fermi Paradox, of course, concerns itself with the mathematical probability of life and finds that, even when using very conservative numbers, the universe is teeming with it. More importantly though, Fermi asks the question: if the universe is full of life, why isn’t the sky full of flying saucers? Why isn’t our radio spectrum totally polluted with extrasolar transmissions? Why are there no artifacts on earth suggesting somebody was here before us?

CRN and many others conclude from this that all intelligent life is doomed and thus a colonialization or even exploration of the galaxy a scientific impossibility. Since CRN concerns itself with nanotechnology, they think about how maybe the development of nanotech could be the final nail in the coffin of all intelligent beings.

Using statistics to make “definite” assumptions about singular instances (a.k.a. humanity’s existence in this case), Mike Treder allows for 3, and only three, possible scenarios:

We are the first intelligent beings capable of expanding into the cosmos and making our presence known. There have been no others.

There have been others before us, but all of them, without exception, have chosen — or somehow been forced — to expand in such a way that they are presently undetectable by our most sophisticated instruments.

There have been others, but all of them, without exception, have run into a cosmic roadblock that either destroys them or prevents their expansion beyond a small radius.

If nothing else, this example beautifully illustrates the dangers of applying statistics to single events. I’m sure, everyone of us can think of dozens of reasons for the status quo and none of them requires the scientifically improbable conclusion that every single intelligent race wiped itself out with nanotechnology (or bio warfare, or climate change, or whatever).

Just a few of them might include or be any combination of:

• We might be living in the galactic equivalent of a national park.
• Evidence is there, but it’s being covered up.
• Our part of space has not been colonized yet or it was “recently” sterilized by a cosmic event.
• Our patch of space was colonized, but so long ago that the evidence is gone now.
• Only primitive civilizations use radio waves (because they’re very impractical at long distances).
• The Singularity already happened and/or we’re living in a simulation.
• The advancement of virtual reality makes space exploration unattractive.
• Space is vast.

Diclaimer: These are in no particular order, by no means complete, I’m not believing in any particular one of them. These are just more theoretical possibilities.

I am just trying to show that the Fermi Death Sentence argument attempts use misguidedly applied mathematics to elevate a point that would otherwise be merely one more theoretical possibility among many. As they say in reality TV: you decide.

The Good
Despite its slow, deliberate pacing the episode was compelling. The actors, cinematography, dialogue – everything was done very nicely and competently. Caprica takes place about 60 years before the extinction of humankind, and we finally get a peek into the larger history that lead up to the holocaust. Apart from the fact that we get another set of tales from the BSG universe, Caprica interestingly also depicts a society very much like our own and offers a glimpse at some of the problems we may face in the next few decades. Wrapped inside a SciFi opera we witness the birth of the first true AI, which is always cool.

The Not-So-Good
I loved the fact that Caprican society is technologically pretty much like ours (maybe 10 years ahead at most and except for the space travel thing) and as such we get to see many familiar gadgets in a slightly different format. However, at times the producers and set designers took the easy way out. I know, it’s so geeky of me, but: was it really necessary to have them use actual USB ports and other gadgets that are so specific to Earth? That was just not believable.

Another point: Some of the special effects were really bad, for example the robot fight at the end looked like it was screen-captured off an outdated FPS with very unconvincing graphics.

Downright Ugly
It annoys me that people in the movies never back up their hard drives. It’s a dramatic plot device, but it’s also really unrealistic that computer systems of the future can somehow just move and not copy data. In Caprica, it doesn’t occur to Greystone to make a frakking backup of the hard drive where his dead daughter’s brain is stored! It’s like he’s doing it to squeeze some drama out of the very predictable event when the only copy gets destroyed during an experiment. Yawn. Not good.

Next: The religious angle has already been annoying me to no end in BSG, and the finale made it worse because it first verified the Cylons’ absurd belief system, and then hammered it into the viewers’ brains with a blunt instrument, just to make sure. Somehow they took it to a whole new level of badness in Caprica, because pretty much everything the characters do is somehow connected to religion. From the traditional hell-like V-Club at the opening (very American: sex, drugs and violence are apparently all the same thing), to the extremist suicide bombing at the center of the story, down to the very end when Adama and Greystone have their tired discussion about the divinity of the human soul. Like BSG, Caprica fails to acknowledge the existence of any kind of morality independent of a very literal concept of God(s). Double Yawn.

Now, buy it
Despite all that, I enjoyed Caprica. It’s captivating and nicely paced, with at times stunning imagery. Following the sad cancellation of Dollhouse and Terminator SCC, I look forward to a new series about artificial intelligence and trans-humanism.

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Brought to you by the Science Channel, the production value is simply amazing. I don’t know how that happened but for about five years now pretty much every documentary I saw had awesome special effects and pretty decent musical scores. All episodes of Physics of the Impossible have the same format: first, a staple of SciFi concept is defined by showing interviews with dorky science fiction nerds at some convention. Then Dr Kaku establishes a set of goals and starts to explore possible technologies that might do the job. All episodes close with… ah, we’ll get to that later. Trust me.

In this episode, we’re looking for methods to completely obliterate the Earth, if at all possible using a Death Star or something. Like any SciFi concept, this one has been examined on the web in greater depth than any watered-down documentary could possibly cover, but Kaku is giving it a try anyway. First order of the day: cooking the Earth with a massive gamma ray burst (GRB), a method that depends on aiming the energy released by the implosion of a neutron star exactly at our planet. This is as easy as altering the orbits of a binary star system and neatly illustrates one major problem with Physics of the Impossible: highly impractical methods are examined with a high preference compared to things that may actually work. I suspect this may be due to the interdisciplinary nature of most SciFi tech, observing it through the eyes of theoretical physics alone is certainly not enough. To come up with practical solutions, you also need a mix of chemistry, biology, (complex) systems theory, informatics and, for lack of a better term, common sense. But I digress…

After a bit of meandering through variations of different death lasers, the need for a potent re-usable power source is identified. We’ll just use a Tokamak fusion reactor to deliver the energy needed to obliterate a planet. To deliver this raw destructive power, a fleet of giant fusion-powered laserguns will enter the planet’s orbit and X-ray it to death from a safe distance. Kaku surmised that the pressure delivered through the energized atmosphere would first collapse the celestial body and before the energy is released outward in a huge and final explosion. There you have it, this planet is dead. It’s an ex-planet. Though the implosion bit seems a bit doubtful, the overall design sounds like it might do the job.

This is where the shows gets kinda weird: at the end of each episode, Dr Kaku presents his design to a group of SciFi nerds for “approval”. While he performs his demonstration, drooling fans watch on in awe and anxiously hold their breath. Afterwards, the show closes with adoring statements of wonder and amazement by the participants. It’s not only weird because Kaku clearly celebrates his own genius here, it’s also strange because those supposed SciFi fans, who really ought to have heard this all before somewhere, routinely express such surprise at concepts that were not uncommon to begin with. Make no mistake, the designs are pretty cool and usually well thought through, but not as fundamentally new as those people think.

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