Gone is gone forever

A month ago I wrote about an alarming study that looks at the population decline amongst American bird species.  We're not talking small numbers, here.  The best overall estimate is that there has been at 25% drop in the number of birds continent-wise, a loss of a grand total of three billion birds.

What surprised me about the response to this news, both to my blog post and to the media announcements in general, is that it can be summed up as, "Oh, that's sad.  Oh, well, what can you do?"  Unfortunate that the little feathery guys at our bird feeders aren't showing up like they used to, but... well, they're just birds, right?  Primarily decorative, and most of the species they're talking about I've never heard of anyway.

The people who were the most alarmed were the ones who were already alarmed about the state of our environment.  I very much got the impression everyone else just kind of shrugged and went about their business at usual.

It brings up a question of how you get people to care.  Not the environmentalists and eco-activists and birdwatchers and Sierra Club members.  Like I said, they care already.  But how do you reach your average person, and get them to see the magnitude of what we're doing to the planet -- and how the possibility is very real that we won't avoid horrible consequences, not just to a few obscure species of animals, but to ourselves?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Drpranjit, The endangered species, CC BY-SA 4.0]

This is the topic of a study that appeared this week in Nature: Scientific Reports, by Stefan Schubert, Lucius Caviola, and Nadira S. Faber, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University.  Titled, "The Psychology of Existential Risk: Moral Judgments about Human Extinction," the study asked individuals both in the United Kingdom and United States to consider the possibility of both human and other-species extinction, and an interesting pattern emerged.

In each of the types of extinction that Schubert et al. asked their test subject to think about, they asked two questions: how bad is it?  And, why is it bad?  What they found was that people tended to think quantitatively.  No matter what species was being considered, the bigger the percent drop, the worse it was.  An 85% reduction was worse than a 60% reduction, a 60% reduction worse than a 35% reduction, and so on.  So far, nothing too shocking.

What is alarming -- to we environmental types, anyhow -- is that this "degree of harm" is scaled up in a fairly linear fashion, all the way up to 100%.  Complete extinction.

Why this is alarming is that people don't seem to recognize the qualitative difference between a 100% loss and a 99% loss.  At least theoretically, if you have even 1% of the individuals left, recovery is possible (although not likely; 1%, for most species, is probably below the minimum viable population, the point at which the natural death rate exceeds the natural birth rate, so a downward spiral is inevitable).

But complete extinction?  Gone completely is gone forever.  And the magnitude of that just doesn't seem to register with most people, even when we're talking about humans themselves as the victims.

The authors write:

Our studies show that people find that human extinction is bad, and that it is important to prevent it.  However, when presented with a scenario involving no catastrophe, a near-extinction catastrophe and an extinction catastrophe as possible outcomes, they do not see human extinction as uniquely bad compared with non-extinction.  We find that this is partly because people feel strongly for the victims of the catastrophes, and therefore focus on the immediate consequences of the catastrophes.  The immediate consequences of near-extinction are not that different from those of extinction, so this naturally leads them to find near-extinction almost as bad as extinction. Another reason is that they neglect the long-term consequences of the outcomes.  Lastly, their empirical beliefs about the quality of the future make a difference: telling them that the future will be extraordinarily good makes more people find extinction uniquely bad. 

Thus, when asked in the most straightforward and unqualified way, participants do not find human extinction uniquely bad.  This could partly explain why we currently invest relatively small resources in reducing existential risk.

Which makes sense (of a sort) of what we started with -- that dire reports on the decline in wild species don't seem to generate much beyond an "aw, that's too bad" response in your average media consumer.  It also makes it clear that if the people who write about the environmental crisis focused on the long-term consequences of our current behavior, rather than just on sad photographs of starving polar bears, we might see a bigger seismic shift in attitudes.

Of course, this doesn't take into account other factors, such as disinformation from corporations heavily invested in business as usual, and the ignorant, self-serving politicians who are in those corporations' pockets.  But since those politicians are elected by us ordinary folk, it's still worthwhile to try to create a change in attitudes that could, perhaps, avert disaster.

It is, after all, in our common interest to do so.  And the Schubert et al. gives us a possible approach to make that point clear to everyone.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a really cool one: Andrew H. Knoll's Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth.

Knoll starts out with an objection to the fact that most books on prehistoric life focus on the big, flashy, charismatic megafauna popular in children's books -- dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Allosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, and impressive mammals like Baluchitherium and Brontops.  As fascinating as those are, Knoll points out that this approach misses a huge part of evolutionary history -- so he set out to chronicle the parts that are often overlooked or relegated to a few quick sentences.  His entire book looks at the Pre-Cambrian Period, which encompasses 7/8 of Earth's history, and ends with the Cambrian Explosion, the event that generated nearly all the animal body plans we currently have, and which is still (very) incompletely understood.

Knoll's book is fun reading, requires no particular scientific background, and will be eye-opening for almost everyone who reads it.  So prepare yourself to dive into a time period that's gone largely ignored since such matters were considered -- the first three billion years.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Orange dwarf catastrophe

It's no great insight that the media likes sensationalized stories, and that a lot of them (including, sadly, some major news outlets) have the attitude that facts don't matter much as long as they can keep readers reading.

What is more frustrating is the way the readers themselves become complicit in this dissemination of bullshit.  Now that we have the interwebz, sending along ridiculous "news" stories takes only a click. And before you know it, you have people believing that humanity is going to be wiped out because the Solar System is going to be destroyed during a collision with an orange dwarf star.

The original study, by astronomer Coryn Bailer-Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, is interesting enough.  Astronomers have long known that the stars move relative to each other; this means that the constellations aren't fixed, and that millions of years from now, a time traveler from today wouldn't recognize any of the current star patterns.  (I still remember my first encounter with this idea, on Carl Sagan's Cosmos, when I was a freshman in college.  Seeing the animation of the movements of the stars in the Big Dipper was one of those moments when I realized, "I really want to know more about science!")

So it's not too surprising that some stars will get closer to the Sun over time.  And Bailer-Jones found that two orange dwarf stars are predicted to make relatively close approaches -- HIP 85605 could get as close as 0.13 light years, and GL 710 could make a pass of 0.32 light years.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Cool stuff.  But the media, unfortunately, is not content simply to report the facts.  Because that, somehow, would be boring.  This research has been picked up by a number of different online news sources, and one and all, they focus on the fact that this "close pass" might wipe us all out by gravitationally dislodging comets from the Oort Cloud, resulting in a "rain of comets," some of which could, perhaps, collide with the Earth.

Notice how many times I said "could" and "might" in the previous two paragraphs?  Bailer-Jones is up front about her study being speculative; the upper bounds for the pass distance of the two stars are 0.65 light years and 1.44 light years, respectively.  To put things in perspective; the closest estimate of HIP 85605 to the Sun was 0.13 light years, right?  Well, Pluto is 13 light hours from the Sun.  So this means that even at its closest, HIP 85605 will be 9,000 times further away than Pluto.

Next, let's consider the likelihood of a disruption of comets leading to a "rain of comets" and the certainty of a devastating Earth strike.  Let's assume that we do have a bunch of comets swooping inwards from the near pass of these stars.  What kind of target does Earth represent?

The issue here is scale, of course, and the amount of the Solar System that is (virtually) empty space. The best analogy I have run across is that if you shrank the entire Solar System down to a circle with a radius of 1,000 meters, with the orbit of Pluto as its perimeter, then the Earth would be about 7 meters from the center.

And it would be the size of a peppercorn.

So it's not exactly a huge target.  Yes, a comet or two could strike the Earth, as they have repeatedly during Earth's history.  No, it would not cause a rain of death.

But those aren't the only misrepresentations in the "news" story.  Not only has Bailer-Jones's research been sensationalized, it's had information added to it that is outright false.  In the above-linked story, which is no worse than the various other versions I've seen (i.e., I didn't pick this one because it was especially bad; they were all bad), here are some direct quotes, with commentary:

Apparently, the comets are made of rocks, dust and organic materials.

Actually, comets are mostly ice, a fact which has been known for decades and would have been immediately apparent had the author bothered to consult Wikipedia.

(T)he gravity [of the stars] can attract comets into the inner solar system and the passing comets might harshly affect Earth's atmosphere due to the powerful ultraviolet radiation that the comets might cause.

Ultraviolet radiation from what source, pray?  Comets aren't giant orbiting tanning lamps, for fuck's sake.

(A) small number of the alleged stars might explode like supernova while passing through the Oort Cloud.

Oh noes!  Not alleged stars explode like supernova!  That sound bad!

The Hip 85605 might reach the solar system in 0.13 to 0.65 light years away, while the GL 710 might take around 0.32 to 1.44 light years.

Ninth graders in Earth Science learn that a light year is a measure of distance, not time, a point that seems to have escaped the author, making me wonder how he ever got chosen to write a science story.  To be fair, unit confusion also plagued the writers of Star Wars, wherein we famously had Han Solo boasting that the Millennium Falcon had done the Kessel Run in "less than twelve parsecs," which would be like saying that your car was so fast that you went to the grocery store in less than five miles.  (Of course, there are Star Wars apologists who have talked themselves into thinking that the scriptwriters had some kind of fancy time-travel space-warp relativity thing in mind when they wrote it.  Myself, I think they just didn't know what a parsec is.)

And of course, it's only midway through the article that we find out when this catastrophe is predicted to happen:

1.3 million years from now.

So, to boil it all down:

Two small stars might, or might not, pass 9,000 times further away from the Sun than Pluto is, some millions of years in the future.  This could increase the number of comets entering the inner Solar System, generating a somewhat higher likelihood of a comet striking Earth.

But that version of the story wouldn't have induced so many people to read it and pass it along, would it?  Nope.  So they add sensationalized nonsense to it, so as to make it better clickbait.

At least it's still better than the post I saw on social media yesterday, wherein someone asked for help for a school project their child is doing regarding why the stars were created.  The responses included that god had made them "to rule the night with the moon," "to be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years," and "to declare god's glory."  The scholarly references given were the Book of Genesis and Psalm 19.

But hey, if you're going to buy into non-science, I guess you should go all the way, right?