E.T. called. Your lunch is ready.

It's okay to be ignorant, as long as it doesn't become a way of life.

Even the best educated of us don't know stuff.  Lots of stuff.  Socrates, after all, had a point when he gave his famous answer to followers who asked him, "How can you be so wise?"  "If I am wise," he said, "it is because I alone of men realize how little I know."

It is our response to ignorance that counts.  And it seems to me that when people are asked for information about which they are ignorant, they generally have one of two reactions:

1. They act like it's perfectly okay to be lazy enough not to want to know the answer.  This is the "oh, well, I'm not good at science" thing I sometimes hear from students.  (My usual answer -- "Work harder, then" -- seldom has any result except their looking at me like I have three heads.)
2. They start making stuff up.  This often happens when the person in question is one of those types who has to know everything, or when the answer that's being sought is so critical or so interesting that (s)he just can't bear saying, "I don't know, and we may never know."

As an example of the latter, consider the recent odd astronomical discovery that the dwarf planet Ceres has two mysterious bright spots that show up intermittently on NASA photographs.  

[image courtesy of NASA]

The writer of the news article linked above, Mariette LeRoux, seems a little put out that scientists aren't explaining the spots.  All we know, she said, is that the spots "behave differently," as if they are not being caused by the same phenomenon.  Federico Tosi, who analyzes data from the Dawn probe's Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, said, "For sure, we have bright spots on the surface of Ceres which, at least from a thermal perspective, seem to behave in different ways."

Which summarizes the observations, and tells us exactly nothing beyond that.  And that is what scientists should do, given that this is all they have at the moment.  They're still trying to find out more, or come up with a model of what could explain the spots, so they're not falling upon one horn of the dilemma.  But they're also not just inventing wild ideas when they have almost nothing to go on, and thus are avoiding the other horn of the dilemma as well.

Which is more than I can say for the woo-woos, who are having a field day with this.  Here are a few of the "explanations" (if I can dignify them by that word) I've seen on such sites, since the observation was made a month ago:

• The spots are a signaling device that was placed on the surface of Ceres to keep an eye on us and relay information to our Alien Overlords to let them know when we were getting too uppity.  Prepare for an imminent invasion of the Earth.
• Ceres is a hollow artificial sphere, inside which is a fantastically old civilization.  This enormous spacecraft has been battered over the eons by meteorite impacts (see all the craters?) and finally the external hull has cracked, and we're seeing light leaking out.
• This is an Illuminati base to which our leaders periodically teleport.  Why any Illuminatus would want to go to Ceres -- which, last I checked, was cold, colder even than upstate New York -- is beyond me.  You'd think if they were having a convention, they'd choose Hawaii or Costa Rica or somewhere like that.
• Ceres is a giant weapon that is heading for the Earth, and these are the targeting lasers.  Yes, I know that Ceres has been in a completely stable, nearly circular orbit since its discovery in 1801, but silly things like "facts" never discourage these people.

So anyhow.  We start with "there are two mysterious spots on Ceres" and end with alien superweapons.  All of which makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

But on a happier note, there's a second story this week that reinforces science's stance that it's always better to be patient in our ignorance, and look for natural answers, than to jump to ridiculous and outlandish ones.  Some aberrant signals that have been picked up by the Parkes Radio Telescope, and that were being considered by the UFOs-and-Aliens crowd as possible candidates for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence, were shown to be...

... coming from the microwave oven in the observatory's staff break room.

(Note: these are not the Fast Radio Bursts I described in my post last week; but some completely natural, earthly source may be the explanation for those, too.)

To demonstrate this, astronomer Emily Petroff ran the microwave oven three times, each time opening it before the timer went off.  And each time, the radio telescope recorded a peryton -- an odd, narrow-band signal.  Petroff writes:

The two ovens responsible for most or all of the observed perytons are from the same manufacturer (Matsushita/National) and are both in excess of 27 years of age though still working reliably.  Our tests point clearly to the magnetron itself as the source of the perytons since these are not detected unless the oven door is opened. 

Further, our analysis of the peryton cluster of 23rd June 1998 implies the perytons are a transient phenomenon that occurs only when the magnetron is switched off.  That we have observed perytons from at least two ovens over 17 years suggests that they are not the product of an unusual failure or fault but are inherent to, and long-lived in, at least some common types of oven.

So there you have it.  How to steer between a state of lazy ignorance and a state of absolute certainty. Navigating your way past these obstacles is critical if you want to know the real answer -- and neither make up loony ideas, nor simply shrug your shoulders and accept being permanently ignorant.

Because, after all, isn't accepting your ignorance, and ceasing your efforts to find out answers, that much more awful state called "being stupid?"

Fermi's Paradox, fast radio bursts, and extraterrestrial intelligence

Just because I believe that science works, and that its methods are sound, doesn't mean that I have to like its conclusions.  And one of my least favorite pieces of sound scientific reasoning is Fermi's Paradox.

Named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, Fermi's Paradox originally took the form of a succinct response to all of the speculation about life in other star systems.  According to everything we know about stellar evolution, planet formation, biochemistry, and evolutionary biology, life should be common out there.  And just considering the fact that some star systems with planets are likely to be considerably older than ours, it also stands to reason that there should be civilizations out there considerably more advanced than ours.

Upon hearing this sort of argument, Fermi responded with a simple question:  "Where is everybody?"  If life, and intelligent life, is as common as all that, we should be bombarded with signals from extraterrestrials.  And in fact, despite decades of searching the skies, there has never been a single unequivocal transmission found from an intelligent life-form.  (Although the "WOW Signal" might be a contender; it's yet to be explained.)

There are a number of possible explanations for the lack of extraterrestrial communications, and most of them are depressing.  It could be that the likelihood of intelligent life developing on planets is, for some reason, a great deal less likely than we think it is (i.e. we here on Earth were just damn lucky).  It could be that most civilizations destroy themselves shortly after achieving the capacity for long-distance communication.  Some astronomers even think that there are cosmic reset switches -- natural phenomena that periodically wipe the galaxy clean of life, requiring a prolonged reboot, and preventing most life ever from achieving technology.  (For example, consider gamma-ray bursters, but only if you want to spend the next few days worrying about the entire solar system suddenly getting fried.)

Being someone who would love nothing better than to witness the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, I find the Fermi Paradox a significant downer.  I do have one possible answer that may still allow for a rich diversity of intelligent life in the galaxy, however; because we are looking for communication in the radio region of the spectrum (the fashion in which we as a species first learned to do long-distance transmission of information), it might be that such discernible, signal-producing modes of communication are quickly superseded by more sophisticated technologies that produce much less in the way of a footprint when observed from light years distant.  In other words; societies might only be detectable during the first few decades of their technological existence, when they're communicating with each other by shouting from the rooftops.  After they learn more efficient means of transmitting information, they seem to go silent.

I hope.  Because otherwise, it's mighty lonely here, you know?

All of this comes up because of a paper published just last week by Michael Hippke, Wilfried Domainko, and John Learned called "Discrete Steps in Dispersion Measures of Fast Radio Bursts."  In this interesting bit of research, an analysis was done of the dispersion measures of microseconds-long pulses in the radio region of the spectrum.  The paper is quite technical -- even with a B.S. in physics, it was over my head -- but insofar as I understand it, the curious thing about the eleven radio pulses thus far detected is that their dispersion measures are all integer multiples of 187.5 parsec/cm3 -- something that admits of no particularly obvious natural explanation.

Carl Sagan, in his wonderful novel (and later movie) Contact, used the idea of encoding a signal with some mathematical pattern as a way of broadcasting a "We're Here" signal into space -- or, conversely, looking for such a signal as a way of detecting life that's out there.  If a radio signal could be encoded with the first ten digits of pi, or (as in Contact) the first few prime numbers, that would be instantly recognizable as an unequivocal signal from an intelligence.  So the discovery of the 187.5 pattern in dispersion measures for FRBs was immediately jumped upon as evidence that the radio bursts originate from some alien civilization.  (The International Business Times, for example, was all a-quiver with the possibility.)

The astrophysicists, of course, are being more circumspect.  All that Hippke, Domainko, and Learned concluded from their research is that the pattern is currently unexplained, if suggestive:

(A)n extragalactic origin would seem unlikely, as high (random) DMs would be added by intergalactic dust.  A more likely option could be a galactic source producing quantized chirped signals, but this seems most surprising.  If both of these options could be excluded, only an artificial source (human or non-human) must be considered, particularly since most bursts have been observed in only one location (Parkes radio telescope)...  In the end we only claim interesting features which further data will verify or refute. 

They also suggest that the FRBs might actually be perytons, signals that appear to originate from space when they actually are entirely terrestrial in origin -- i.e. human-generated signals that are being misinterpreted, or simple radio telescope glitches.

Whatever the explanation is, the FRBs are an interesting phenomenon, and give me hope that there might be an eventual answer to Fermi's Paradox.  I have to be careful about letting my desire for there to be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe get in the way of my objectivity in evaluating the evidence at hand; but even so, the strange mathematical pattern that Hippke et al. have discovered might be the best contender we currently have for an alien civilization saying, "Here we are!"