Mark Byron

Is Anyone Managing the Cosmological Lottery?

Astronomy has had a busy decade or two, with one of the more interesting developments being discovering planets around other stars, exoplanets as the lingo goes. The bigger and closer a planet is to its star, the easier it is to see, so the early sample set of exoplanets has seen a lot of "hot Jupiter" gasballs up close to their stars, with smaller, Earth-like planets far enough away to not have water boil but not so far to have H₂O freeze up being few and far between so far.

However, even with that caveat that more Earth-like planets in stellar Goldilocks zones should be forthcoming as telescopes develop over time, there seems to be a shortage of Earth 2.0 candidates-

The scientists also have similar concerns about the galactic and cosmological inputs of their model but nonetheless they suspect that their final numbers are accurate to within an order of magnitude. With the estimated errors taken into account, the researchers conclude that Earth stands as a mild violation of the Copernican principle. Our pale blue dot might just be special after all. “It's not too much of a fluke that we could arise in a galaxy like the Milky Way, but nevertheless, it's just enough to make you think twice about it,” says Jay Olson from Boise State University, who was not involved in the study. Both he and [Uppsala U's Erik] Zackrisson think the Copernican principle could be saved by some unknown caveat to the findings. “Whenever you find something that sticks out…” Zackrisson says, “…that means that either we are the result of a very improbable lottery draw or we don’t understand how the lottery works.”

One of the features of modern science is that outside forces like deities are ruled out, so that cosmology and biology are left to evolve via purely natural random forces internal to the physical universe. Biological evolution by random DNA and RNA tweaks is something of a long shot and random cosmological evolution generating a livable Earth is proving to be somewhat problematic as well.

Is there a lottery at all? To mash-up Einstein, might God be playing with loaded dice in creating the Universe?

Zackrisson's musing of "how the lottery works" likely was intended to note the relative ignorance we have of comparative exoplanetology; we're just figuring out what's out there and are merely taking educated guesses of questionable value when speculating what typical and various atypical solar systems should look like. With a rather small sample set compared with the size of the Universe, we're just scratching the surface of exoplanetology, so any attempts at tweaking the parameters of the Drake Equation are using ballpark figures at best.

To the theist, Zackrisson's lottery begs the question of whether something or Someone is supervising the ping-pong balls of the galactic lottery.

Historically, folks have chalked up unknown processes to the supernatural, a "God of the gaps." As science improves, those gaps get smaller, as a lot of miracles and demonic influences of yore get explained by physical processes. However, there are still quite a few gaps left, like how did life start, how did the Big Bang start and how did the various counter-intuitive cosmological events like inflation happen, how did Earth get in a place and time for life to develop and is it a one-off, and how did macroevolution, going from one species to another with dozens of genetic changes that helped, occur.

Science is still working on those. Some might be explained by natural processes, but others might not. At some point, seeing the universe as an open system rather than a closed one (Sagan's "the cosmos is all there is") might be scientifically viable. At this point, scientists exile themselves from the tribe for saying so, but it might not stay that way if the gaps refuse to close and/or point to external sources.

Round Earth Skeptic?

There seems to be a lot of things that could go into skepticism about climate change issues beyond stereotypical flat-earther ignorance that John Kerry was trying to joke about this week. Too often, the fans of a climate deal tend to assume any critics are either ignorant boobs or in the pockets of carbon-centric robber-barons, often trotting out the pejorative "climate-denier" designed to rhyme with "Holocaust-denier" casting the critics in with folks on the SPLC's radar or a Muslim demagogue.

That doesn't help matters.

Here's an incomplete set of bullet points that seem to be worth considering for folks weighing policy.

(1) The temperature increase (the 1^oC uptick in the last century seems legit, agreeing to that fact up front) seems to have plateaued somewhat. If you're prone to be fearful, then it seems more like a momentary pause before things rise again down the line, but if you see things half-full, it argues against radical immediate action.

(2) Climate-change mavens tend to be liberal and have a higher regard for the effectiveness of government. Conservatives would tend to be skeptical about how much good expenditures will do and how much of the money will go to actually solving the problem rather than just creating more paper-pushers and rent-seeking from friends of the administration of the day.

(3) When looking at transferring big money from the developed to developing world, especially to developing-world governments, corruption looms as a factor. The bureaucratic dead-weight loss of government tends to magnify greatly when set in a third-world milieu, where the government's allies (or The Big Man's relatives) get overpaid for services.

(4) Big, showy projects tend to be under-productive, even when factoring out corruption issues. That's something the World Bank has seen up close as they've tried to help the developing world develop. Big factories, power plants and other large projects far too often come in over-budget and don't have the impact promised. One recent example of that was big solar plants in India who aren't delivering nearly as much power as advertised.

(5) The negative impact of regulations are often understated, creating an off-budget cost to implementation. Rules that look good on paper can prove problematic in the field. In addition, any taxes on offending products can be a drag on the economy, often hitting the poor harder than the better-off.

(6) Any pledges made in Paris are merely pledges. Some governments might make good on them, but others might not. The more volatile the political situation is in a country, the more variance you'll see in voluntary compliance. Countries with green-sounding delegations might not be in office down the line to deliver and more disingenuous ones may have no intention of following through on their end of the bargain. For instance, any US pledge for financial assistance to poorer countries would need to get through Congress, which would be a hard sell.

(7) To a Michigander, another degree or two of temperature rise seems more like a feature than a bug if you dislike winter and would trade a warmer winter for a warmer summer. In areas where things are already too hot or where melting polar ice could induce extra flooding, a temperature increase is a bigger deal, but quite a few voters in more temperate climes might not be all that worried for their neighborhood. Selfish, yes, but a factor nonetheless.

These are all questions outside the hard science, questions of politics, geopolitics and economics, that lend to a critical take on any climate agreements. One can accept the scientific evidence and still have questions as to if the efforts are worth taking, especially if what efforts one country (even a big one like the US) can make won't make a dent in the big picture.

 

CO2-We Brought You Into the World, We Can Take You Out

As we're seeing folks pontificate (even the pontiff himself) over the Paris climate talks, it's worth dropping back a few yards and think about how we got here.

The numbers seem to point to about a 1^oC increase in temperatures in the last decade and that they correlate well with CO₂ levels. It seems to track with the Industrial Revolution kicking into high gear in the late 1800s, where we started extracting coal and oil out of the ground to fuel transportation and electric-generation needs.

The numbers can be somewhat open to debate, but there seems to be an effect going on. There may well have been some tinkering with the data over the years, but the whole concept of a warning in the 20th century seems to be a given, barring some massive conspiracy.

That temperature rise seems to have plateaued somewhat in the 21st century, still higher than the turn of the 20th century, but with a smaller slope to the graph. We'll still see "the hottest [fill in time period] in modern history" headlines, for it it rises just a smidge it can set a new high, just like a Payton Manning two-yard flanker screen adds to his records.

2^O is the buzz-word of choice; that's the increase that would put us in territory that lead to major changes in the past. Or at least that's how it's is being portrayed.

There is one difference, the previous spikes didn't have humans that could macro-engineer changes.

Two options are available. One is to put less CO₂ in the air by either using the carbon-based fuels more efficiently or by using other sources of energy.

Another is to take CO₂ out of the system. "Carbon sequestration" is the buzzword for the latter. In a way, it's reversing the process that we've been playing out for the last couple of centuries, putting carbon back in the ground by various technical means. Nature does that on its own, as plants absorb CO2 as part of their growing process, turning H₂O, CO₂ and light into oxygen and hydrocarbons; dead plant material crunched over geologic time created the fossil fuels we're burning, so we'd just be fast-forwarding that process here.

Carbon sequestration doesn't appeal to environmentalists much. There seems to be quasi-religious element in that quarter, where the penance of cutting down our gluttonous energy usage seems proper; sequestration seems too much like buying indulgences to be a proper sacrifice to Gaea. However, if sequestration is the most cost-efficient way to solve the problem, it might be a better bet. Cap-and-trade plans have a similar reaction in some quarters, as letting evil polluters buy the right to pollute from more virtuous companies doesn't sound proper.

However, environmentalists tend not to be attuned to cost-efficiency, ignoring the economic and cultural side-effects of regulations. Thus, a third option, doing nothing, is worth considering, if the treatment for the disease is worse than the affliction.

Before Abraham Was, Starlight Is

One of the oddities of general relativity is that the faster you go, the slower time moves. That's not much of an issue for most day-to-day things, but time slows to a crawl as you approach the speed of light. Things with mass can't get to c; they get heavier as they get faster, becoming massive as they get close to c and can't quite get that fast.

Photons have no mass. Thus, they don't have that issue and can hit the universal speed limit. This Ethan Siegel Starts With a Bang post elaborates on what that implies

When you move at the speed of light, this means the following:

• You absolutely cannot have a mass; if you did, you’d carry an infinite amount of energy at the speed of light. You must be massless.
• You will not experience any of your travels through space. All the distances along your direction of motion will be contracted down to a single point.
• And you will not experience the passage of time; your entire journey will appear to you to be instantaneous.

This has some interesting theological analogies. One of Jesus' nicknames is the Light; one of the least PC passages of the Bible, is "I am the Way, the Truth and the Light; no one comes to the Father but through me."

Light doesn't experience time. God introduced Himself to Moses as I Am (Yahweh in Hebrew, which gets morphed to Jehovah), and Jesus implied His divinity with the phrase "Before Abraham was, I Am."

A photon coming from 10,000 light years away could say that, it's older than written history (and chucks a young-earth timeline out the window, but bear with me) but has been in the now that whole time. Not to say that a photon is God, but the Light and mundane light is timeless.

Let me grab a passage that came just before the except above-

All our formulas to describe what it’s like for an observer gives us answers with infinities in them when it comes to asking what happens at the speed of light. But infinities don’t always mean physics is wrong; they often mean that physics does something unintuitive.

Theology is often equally unintuitive, as God works in a seemingly infinite scale from outside the cosmos. We also have paradoxical doctrine like the Trinity, where a single God has three persons but is still one or that Jesus was both human and divine in one package.

God's timelessness is one of those counter-intuitive concepts. However, science points to such a timelessness in the photon, the elemental unit of light, which is His nickname.

Smart Luck

I like keeping tabs on science news, even though I have to put the Creation Museum folks on hold as astronomers and paleontologists talk about million and billion-year time lines. However, God does get His two cents in through the back door when scientists realize how much of a long-shot the universe is, just right to have us be here.

The trick for the old-earth scientist is that they can't give God the credit, lest they get laughed out of the faculty lounge.

Thus, the ghost (as the Get Religion folks would call it when spiritual stuff gets ignored) in this closing paragraph of a Thanksgiving piece on those convenient truths that made human life possible all but howls.

In response to this dilemma some cosmologists turn to the so-called Anthropic principle, which posits that the apparent fine-tuning for life is a selection bias: If it weren’t this way, we wouldn’t be here to observe it. Others turn to the multiverse—the idea that our cosmos is just one of many in which an infinite number of alternative laws are possible. The fact we find ourselves in this one, improbable as it is, is merely a result of the fact that we could only have come into being in such a universe as this. Regardless of how we choose to explain the apparent fine-tuning of the cosmos, it is certainly a reason to be thankful.

To remix the Church Lady, "Could it be...God?"

You can't prove the existence of multiverses as of yet, so in their own way, the scientist buying into that school of cosmology has faith in things he can't see or prove via experiment. Other scientists have pointed out that theories that can't be proven veer off into metaphysics and struggle to fit into the conventional framework of testable science.

The multiverse concept allows for this universe to be a long shot, since if we're a one-in-a-gazillion long shot and their are multiple gazillion universes, we were bound to happen somewhere. Without the multiverse, they're left with stupefying dumb luck getting us here ...or some sort of smart luck.

However, that smart luck requires something smart to guide it. That's secular scientist's inconvenient truth to go with all those convenient ones, one that points to an intelligent designer if they want avoid chalking it up to an incredible long-shot.

Too Young For Medicare and Too Old For People to Care

I'm borrowing an old Kinky Friedman line; he had himself "...too old for women to care" as the ending. It eerily fit this story I heard on NPR on Monday night.

A decades-long decline in the death rate of middle-aged white Americans has reversed in recent years, according to a surprising new analysis released Monday.

The cause of the reversal remains unclear. Researchers speculate it might be the result of the bad economy fueling a rise in suicides, plus overdoses from prescription painkillers and illegal drugs like heroin, and alcohol abuse.

...

The mortality rate among whites ages 45 to 54 had increased by a half-percent a year from 381.5 per 100,000 in 1999 to 415.4 in 2013, the most recent year for which data are available, the researchers found.

I resemble that demographic, being on the high end of it at present. That is the most un-PC demographic possible. They are men, not old enough to cater to as senior citizens nor young enough to cater to as youth fresh out of school. They're also often hard to fit into a new job if they lose theirs, as younger workers are seen as cheaper, more malleable and projecting to be with the firm longer.

Any affirmative action is going against this group, unless they have some sort of disability that gives them downtrodden status. They're the ones who are expected to check their privilege, but that privilege and $2.50 gets you a latte at McDonalds, maybe a little less if the cashier thinks you get a senior discount.

It takes older workers more time to find a new job, and not finding a job quickly makes it even harder to get one, creating a nasty feedback loop of despair that can depress folks. Obamacare might make it easier to see a psychiatrist than at the turn of the millennium, but the stagnant economy makes it more likely to need to see one.

That could well be driving this uptick in deaths. The person who's too young to retire and too old to start from scratch with a new career falls between the cracks in the marketplace and gets little extra help from Uncle Sam since they're supposed to be the ones who don't need any help.

Church-wise, there is not much in the way of tools to minister to these folks. Men's ministries seem to be targeted to questions of being a better husband and father rather than trying to find a place in the economy. Networking to get them hooked up with an employer willing to take a chance on a retread might help, but that doesn't fit an evangelistic paradigm on the right side or helping the least of these on the left side; plus, you have the issue of finding someone who is willing to help someone rather than just getting "the best person for the job" which might be a younger and less needy person.

Self medicating such problems, especially for macho types who don't want to admit to depression issues, becomes a problem. That can be doubly true for conservative Christians who are often in a worldview that emotional issues are a character flaw that should be dealt with with faith and prayer. Add a victorious-living vibe and even admitting you have issues can be problematic.

I don't see a good way to change this trend, other than making it a bit easier to ask for help both financially and culturally. From a church standpoint, it would require a person-to-person touch that falls through the programmatic cracks, more ministering to a particular person than a capital-m Ministry.

President Data?

Here's a somewhat loopy but interesting article on a wish for future computer overlords rather than the venal meatware politicians we're currently stuck with. Here's a passage that struck me with some very religious overtones-

When I asked [futurist Zoltan] Istvan, currently touring America in his Immortality Bus, what American politics would look like in 100 years, he answered that “There won’t be an America in 100 years. I’m sure of that fact. That’s why I formed the World Transhumanist Party, whose mandate is to become the first democratically [elected] political party to run a world government.” When I asked him if he would want to be replaced by an AI politician, Istvan’s response was upbeat and matter-of-fact.

"Yes, absolutely," he said. "I would love to see a truly altruistic entity running our government. Right now, all politicians, including myself, are motivated by self-interest. This is just how humans are. So wouldn’t it be nice to have something like a super-intelligent AI running things and it be entirely after our best interest?"

What would a "truly altruistic entity" look like? Sounds like God to me. However, this TAE would have to be created and programmed by mere mortals. "A just machine to make decisions, programmed by fellas with compassion and vision" went the third verse of Donald Fagen's IGY.

Fagen's had his tongue firmly in his cheek with that song, lovingly looking at the 1950's cloyingly optimistic World of the Future with a quarter-century (at the time) of cynicism. On the other hand, our futurist seems to be serious.

Who are those fellas going to be? Vision for new gadgets and new apps isn't in too short supply in the tech industry, but compassion isn't always their strong suit. Any compassion that gets programmed into our TAE is going to reflect the world-view of the programmer. That will make it only as altruistic as the programmers are.

The TAE god we make will be made in our image. Any effort to model the "better angels of our nature" will be a flawed model, only as good as the programmer's wisdom and godliness.

A super-de-duper-computer might be faster and better at math than a human brain, but that doesn't mean it will be wiser. I've seen a number of pieces worrying about self-driving cars and how it will go about dealing with no-win Kobayashi Maru situations; if the car has to choose who to mow over, what algorithms will it use to pick the person to harm?

If we're wetting our pants over the idea of having a computer figure out how to drive a car, are we anywhere near having it drive a country? We trust the generic 16-year-old with a driver's license, but are somewhat pickier (one would hope) about who is in charge in Washington.

Futurists have a concept of a Singularity, where supercomputers get to design even better computers and getting quickly to a point where they get godlike computing power that leaves humans in the dust. They might have seemingly infinite computing power, but wisdom and mercy might well be in short supply. Will that man-made god be more like Yahweh or Cthulhu (running on a platform of "why settle for the lesser evil?")?

Progress might lead us to better computers, but that doesn't mean they'll be wiser ones. However, many folks put their faith in Progress to a point that it hits the writer of the piece as religious-

The conception of progress put forward by some of the more radical transhumanists doesn’t sound merely religious—it sounds specifically Christian: history progressing toward a rupture point where man is born anew, made immortal and limitless in a time after time. Instead of asking whether transhumanism is based on good science, it might be more useful to question the rigorousness of it as a theology.

That's not an orthodox take on Christianity, although there are some on the New Agey left that see mankind growing in knowledge to become God in time, where the Singularity becomes a Omega Point of the universe becoming infinitely wise and becoming God.

Not quite. You can't make something infinitely wise from finite pieces. It also ignores human nature, which would likely be passed down to the computer offspring. Garbage in, garbage out, and the garbage of human nature goes in to the supercomputer our heroes want to take charge.

However, a lot of folks see mankind as perfectible. That was the fallacy of Communist thought and seems to be the major blind spots in transhumanist thought. In the Star Trek universe, Khan was a transhuman ruler; even with that suave Spanish accent, he's not my choice for president.

Checkups From the Neck Up

I recall liberal quips at Gerald Ford's expense, one of which was "He played too much football without his helmet on." Even four decades ago (pushing five, since the line was attributed to LBJ), folks had a handle on the idea that football could well mess with your brain, even if we didn't have the hard scientific data to back it up.

This report seems to point to that data-

Eighty-seven of 91 former NFL players who donated their brains to science after death tested positive for a brain disease that is believed to be linked with repeated head trauma and concussions, researchers said.

The former players were found to have had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, known as CTE, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University.

The one issue that I see in this one is a self-selection effect. Guys who were suffering from "having their bell rung" a few times too often, having various symptoms of CTE, are most likely to want to have their head examined after they died. Guys who didn't have those symptoms are less likely to go that route.

That's not to say that the CTE problem isn't real. It is very real, so much so that it's a good question whether we want to encourage that by spending large chunks of our weekend watching it.

However, the number implies that 95% of NFL vets have CTE. Healthy players, or ones who died of other causes (Reggie White dying of sleep apnea complications comes to mind) aren't in the mix as much. Thus, it might take a few decades for players whose conditions don't scream CTE to have their brains gone over after they pass on.

Not Your Father's Space Elevator

I remember describing the cover of White Heart's Don't Wait for the Movie as showing an "old-fashioned satellite dish."

 

The seeming oxymoron actually fit, as technology had taken us from the ten-footers of the 80s to the modern home dishes that are about two feet wide.

That came to mind as I was reading this CBC piece on a Canadian guy who is proposing an inflatable space elevator.

The patent, which has been granted in the U.K. and the U.S. so far, describes a tower with a space launch platform on top that would initially be built to a height of around 20 kilometres high, but could theoretically be built to more than 200 kilometres high, and reach into low Earth orbit.

It would be made of stacked rings of Kevlar cells inflated with hydrogen or helium to an extremely high pressure. An elevator could ride up the tower, carrying spacecraft, satellites and other goods to be launched into space – along with tourists looking for an extraordinary view.

This is the paragraph that prompted grabbing the YouTube of Maybe Today  to provide the graphics above-

Quine's invention isn't a traditional space elevator, an idea that has been kicking around since the late 19th century. The traditional concept consists of a fine cable with one end attached to weight in space, orbiting the Earth, and the other end tethered to the ground. The cable would be used as a track for attaching "climbers" carrying goods from one end to the other.

This isn't a traditional space elevator, it's a newfangled space elevator.

Pluto and the Apostles' Creed

Those aren't topics that generally go together, but they came to mind as the coverage of the New Horizons' flyby of the "dwarf" planet shed some light on the most distant of the traditional nine planets.

Occasionally, you'll get passages like this one that would give young-earthers hissy-fits

Some planetary scientists have interpreted this lack of craters to mean that the surfaces are incredibly young, geologically speaking. Frosty plains that sprawl near Pluto’s mountain ranges could be just 100 million years old — a fraction of the dwarf planet’s multibillion-year lifetime, says Jeffrey Moore, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who heads New Horizons’ geology team.

Just 100 million. That busts the 24/6 creation story wide open, since we're only dealing with less than 10,000 years in most classic Old Testament-extrapolated time-lines. Throw in the "multi-billion year lifetime" and you're seeing some serious cognitive dissonance in folks like me who both take the Bible at face value and have a strong interest in science.

Our church here in Midland has been walking through the Apostles' Creed since our old pastor moved on to take a teaching position in Kansas at the end of June, with the children's pastor and the music minister tag-teaming the sermon we saw last Sunday.

They were covering one of the latter sections in that one, on Judgment Day and the small-c catholic church, but it's worth going back to the beginning of the creed-

I believe in God the Father Almighty,

Maker of heaven and earth:

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord

Note that it doesn't obsess about the time-line here. God made it all, 'nuf said. A 20th or 21st century version might try an elaborate further in response to the longer time-lines posited by modern science, but the folks in the late 4th century (390AD is the ballpark date on it) didn't see the need to include such embellishment.

Nor do they say a word about the Bible and how to read it, including whether you can take the days of Genesis as eras or not, which would give some wiggle-room to mesh the Bible with modern science.

The Apostles' Creed says nothing about tax policy, same-sex marriage or whether the nuclear deal with Iran is a good idea.

I recall an interview a few months back with Rachel Held Evans, a noted liberal-leaning evangelical who's become Episcopalian as of late-"Every Sunday morning, I stand in my Episcopal church and join in a chorus of voices publicly affirming the Apostle’s Creed." Not that I'm going to defend Evans' stands on things like same-sex marriage and other heterodox issues, but that one can have some disagreement with orthodox thought and still "say the Apostles Creed without crossing their fingers behind their backs."

There's more than enough food for thought here to keep me writing for a while. I'm drawn to a more basic "mere Christianity" since I don't have a particular systematic theology set to call my own. However, you need to find some place to call your church home. CS Lewis himself noted that that such Apostles Creed basics are a hallway, not a room in itself, and that you have to get out of the hallway eventually and pick one more detailed set of theology.

Some of those theologies are going to be wrong. Chances are, every one of them will be wrong to one extent or another. However, there are some core issues that we dare not get wrong, which is what the early Church was trying to codify.

Silent But Deadly

"Giant Methane Storms On Uranus"

Hazy Radar, Shades of Winter

The NOAA radar feed for the Great Lakes region has an interesting feel to it today. You can see the storm that closed schools in the Lexington and Columbus areas (locales of FB friends) heading off to the east, and also see lake effect snow, as clouds shoot off of Lake Michigan onto the western side of the Lower Peninsula.

Not much at Midland's latitude, however. There seems to be a gap between a southern snow-band (Muskegon to Benton Harbor) and a northern snow band (Traverse City to Petosky) that leaves the US-10 corridor largely untouched.

We've got temperatures well below normal for mid-November, the beginnings of what may well be another very cold winter. Here, at least, climate change is changing in the cold direction with "polar vortex" becoming part of the lexicon. It doesn't disprove global warming worries, but it sure doesn't help proving them.

I'm having to gear up for a trip into the teeth of the Great Plains going out to Colorado to visit my in-laws over Christmas. This is the first full winter Eileen's folks have spent out there, and all those snow gates on the highways in Nebraska and Colorado might actually come into play rather than being a quaint conversation piece as we bop along in the spring and summer.

It's only 24 in Midland as we go to press, but it feels a lot colder, almost as cold as the political climate in Washington.

I, Not Robot

Might computerization and robotization be a bigger problem for our culture than climate change?

I noted this BBC piece on Antartic ice melting that Richard Hall blogged on this summer just now. This paragraph stuck out-

In its report to The Cryosphere journal, the AWI team does not actually calculate a sea-level rise equivalent number, but if this volume is considered to be all ice (a small part will be snow) then the contribution is likely to be on the order of just over a millimetre per year.

For those who are metric-challenged, there are 25.4 millimeters per inch. At that pace, we'll have seas rise an inch by 2040 or so. For areas that are on the verge of going under, that might tip them over the edge, but the raw numbers don't justify the nightmare scenarios of New York City turning into Venice by mid-century.

It would seem to me that managing any modest changes that do happen would be easier than to try and micro-manage the world economy in order to cut CO₂ emissions. I don't think that that's denying science, just taking it at face value.

________

Meanwhile, we have an interesting piece on HTML creator Tim Berners-Lee.

“Companies are increasingly going to be run by computers. And computers are getting smarter and we are not.” The only solution, he argues, is for people to embrace new technology, and accept that some jobs will simply disappear.

The idea of automation making more and more jobs obsolete isn't new, but we're on the verge of having robotics of varying sorts making a number of jobs go the way of the dodo. This piece of mine from 2004 (my most Googled post thanks to the title) on mundane jobs comes to mind; here was my final paragraph

Someone's going to have to pick up the trash, man the school cafeteria, drive the trucks and stock the grocery-store shelves. Hopefully, those people will move on to better things, but let's respect those who are there and the businesses who hire them. Some would like them to get a lot more respect on payday, with better wages and more health benefits; however, that's going to raise prices and may force companies out of business, which will mean zero wages and no benes for those who are laid off.

We might well see truck drivers made obsolete in a decade or two. If self-driving vehicles continue to evolve and become a reality on the roads, truck-driving might be handed over to a computerized system rather than a human driver.

"What if the computer fails?" is the common reply. We have wetware failure on a regular basis with human drivers, so if the computer is more reliable on average than an human that gets tired and distracted, it might become a safety precaution to have a computer behind the wheel. That would decimate the Teamsters and do a number on the truck stop industry, as an automated truck might need gas and tires but not food and hot showers.

The grocery-store shelves might be stocked by a robot in the not-to-distant future. I recall reading where Google's working on a prototype of such a critter; I can't quite place that via its flagship search engine, but here's a piece where that other CMU has made an inventory robot.

Automation might well be accelerated by government policy. Minimum-wage increases and mandatory health insurance are driving the cost of labor up and Moore's Law and growing expertise in robotics will drive the cost of automation down. At some point, the curves will intersect and Robbie the Robot might take the wheel or take the push-cart away from a worker.

Lower-grade automation will also cut employment; self-checkout lanes at grocery stores are a now-common example, which let one supervising worker manage a half-dozen or more lines. Some Chilis restaurants are experimenting with tablet mini-kiosks at customer tables where they can order items and pay their bills with a credit card. That will let waitresses cover more tables per person and cut on the number of staff needed.

Economic theory would suggest that other jobs will come up as folks are automated out of their old jobs. However, that would require the culture to come up with new tasks that need or want to be done that aren't being done now.

The dystopic vision of an automated future has a underemployed underclass who has next to nothing to do, since the computers and robots are doing all the basic stuff that unskilled labor used to do. The creative class will still have their outlets and people will still be needed to program and make all those computers and robotics, but grunt work will be largely phased out in that universe.

How do we create those new jobs? How do we find things that people want done that aren't being done now? Some of those things we might not even think about right now. A guy working as an on-line tutor with a hobby of writing essays on a computer-broadcast journal called a "blog" would have been science fiction in the 1980s; the Web as we know it just became able to get a drink this year, since it was codified in 1993.

The people who will be on the outside looking in as this automation trend continues aren't likely to be writing blogs or tweeting. Figuring out how to make those folks useful and fulfilled will be a small-m ministry in the years to come.

Time to Short Global Warming Stock?

Let me get this straight. We're going through one of the coldest winters on record in Michigan (this skeptic site had the UP having the coldest winter per NOAA) and the senior senator from Nevada thinks that this crazy weather is a sign of global warming?

"Every day that goes by, every week that goes, every month that goes by, every year that goes by ... there’s more evidence of the dangers of climate change," Reid said Tuesday afternoon, in response to a question from THE WEEKLY STANDARD. "The more climate changes, the more extreme the weather gets, and we’ve seen that in spades."

We have outliers on both sides of the thermometer. If we get a cold winter, the skeptics sneer at the warmists, and if we get a heat wave, the AGW mavens will give the deniers both barrels.

More outliers doesn't mean more warming, especially cold outliers like the Great Lakes region in 2014. If Sen. Reid has his way, we'd be erring on the side of making things even colder. That might make Nevada a bit more bearable in the summer when things get beastly hot in the inland southwest, but it doesn't do much for Michigan.

We've hit a plateau on the global temp graph almost two decades long. It could be a pause before things get warmer or it could be a leveling off. If global temperatures were a stock, the techies would say we're in a trading range where it's hard to be bullish or bearish on a stock.

Stretching that analogy near the breaking point, the AGW mavens are bulls. "Temperatures are near all time highs" the bull-techs are hollering, proclaiming that a breakout on the upside is just around the corner.

Or, we could be due for a correction. Hard to tell for the moment.

Related articles

Frostbite Falls, MI

Habitat for Michi-ganders

I was running errands in the mall quadrant of Midland this morning.  When I was a kid, the area was largely unused wilderness, but the Midland Mall went in in the late 80s. First, the folks in the exurban township where the mall was going in fought it and the traffic it would bring, then the environmentalists tied things up for a couple of years.

The plan that wound up placating the greens was to create replacement wetlands for the stuff that would get malled. That sounded like another does of anti-progress monkey-wrenching at the time...

...but it has its benefits. I saw a flock of geese coming overhead over the Wal-Mart parking lot in their classic V formation, then slowly descend like paratroopers landing at a stadium in a pre-game ceremony, landing in a pond across the street.

This might well have been a pit stop for the geese heading south for the winter. They'd have had to have found a new place somewhere in the increasingly suburbanized Larkin Township area north of US-10 were it not for the foresight of their wingless friends.

So, I'll give the greens a nod.... this time.

"What Do You Mean 'We', Robot?"

This was going to happen in some college town the way things were going, but UVA's home town of Charlottesville is now a drone-free zone.

The resolution, passed Monday, "calls on the United States Congress and the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to adopt legislation prohibiting information obtained from the domestic use of drones from being introduced into a Federal or State court," and "pledges to abstain from similar uses with city-owned, leased, or borrowed drones."

I guess that's full employment policy for city pilots. On the domestic level, civil-liberties groups are fearful of eyes in the sky on too regular a basis; it was a civil-liberties maven who spearheaded the Wahoo ban.

However, I don't see that much, if any, of a difference between an old-school bear-in-the-air police plane or helicopter than a drone. If the cops see something naughty going on from the air in your backyard, that doesn't strike me as an unreasonable search; that doesn't change if the aircraft in question has a pilot or not.

There does seem to be something...unsporting about drones. "Be a man and fly over yourself" seems to an underlying theme, especially when it applies to using armed drones to take out al Qaeda types.

I'm reminded of the Bill Maher quip about modern Air Force pilots dropping bad juju from 5 miles up being cowards compared to the 9/11 bombers; the latter takes more guts, even if it was badly misguided at best. Add the even more remote nature of the modern drone compared to the stealthy manned bombers of the turn of the millennium and that yeller meme is amped up a notch from that.

The rifle was sneered at when introduced; real warriors used arrows, not bullets. Rifles didn't require as much skill as a bow, which reduced the value of the warrior class as an elite. It also allowed to rain down death at a longer distance which was harder to counter at first.

Some of that might be at play here; drones seem wimpy, somehow.

However, do we want to have live pilots delivering the bad juju? Do we want the occasional death or capture of a pilot if a plane gets shot down or crashes due to malfunction or other accident? Not if we can help it.

The judge, jury and executioner nature of the "kill list" rubs our due-process sensibilities the wrong way; however, having a cruise missile or manned bomber deliver the rough justice won't change that problem. To the extent that things are dealt with from a military perspective rather than a judicial one, "taking out" an enemy combatant is legit; we're not in position to drive up to their hide-out in the back country of Yemen or Pakistan and serve them a warrant.

That warfare approach is the real issue, not the drones. Drones just add that odd, unsporting sense of detachment that will help sway public opinion against both domestic police surveillance use and international military combat use.

Marco, You've Got Company

Marco Rubio's not the only one in doubt about the age of the universe. However, the level of doubt is a bit tighter in the astrophysicsts; about 4.5 billion is the concensus, but they're working on nailing it down a bit tighter, wanting to get the next digit nailed down.

The unknown seems to be the makeup of the Earth's core. If we know what the core's made up and what the crust we're walking on is made of, the radioactive decay rates will dictate how long ago it formed. We're working on getting to the mantle at present, so the core will be largely out of reach for a long while.

Brown Dwarf... Shouldn't That be a Small Person of Color?

I like learning about astronomy, especially in this era when new discoveries are popping up on almost a daily basis. Here's the lastest of the list, where they've discovered a free-agent planet that was not orbiting a star.

Astronomers have spotted a "rogue planet" - wandering the cosmos without a star to orbit - 100 light-years away. Recent finds of such planets have suggested that they may be common, but candidates have eluded close study.

The proximity of the new rogue planet has allowed astronomers to guess its age: a comparatively young 50-120 million years old.

That last sentence makes being a Bible-totin' evangelical with a sci-fi geek inside problematic, for you need to tell the Answers in Genesis people to stuff a cork in it while you ponder the universe. Either the scientists are off with their ages, or the young-earthers are off on theirs.

One can split the difference in astronomy by making the days of Genesis eras; God's still in charge, but you can read modern science without having to flag an astrophysicist 15 yards for Time-Line Interference every time a reference to a time frame in millions of years or higher shows up. It doesn't violate inerrancy, it just violates a very literal version of it; a 24/6 creation is problematic since the sun and moon don't show up on day one.

Anyways, back to the science. The new rogue planet Palin-2012a- no, CFBDSIR2149-0403 is its designation- is big as planets go-

The team believe it has a temperature of about 400C and a mass between four and seven times that of Jupiter - well short of the mass limit that would make it a likely brown dwarf.

What remains unclear is just how the planet came to be - the tiny beginnings of a star, or planet launched from its home? Study co-author Philippe Delorme of the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble, said that the latter implied a great many planets like it.

We may find that the line between a big planet and a brown dwarf will be hard to draw. On one level, Jupiter is a brown dwarf, for it radiates more energy than it takes from the Sun; it just doesn't quite have the size to start the internal nuclear fusion that marks a star. Many systems have multiple stars; it isn't too big of a stretch to see a super-Jupiter not-quite-star get kicked out of the nest and go rogue in intersteller space.

The Jupiter-sized rogues will be harder to see at a distance, so their might be quite a few rogue planets, but since they don't radiatate much energy and don't do eclipses of their star to be detected via the changes in light, it may take far better telescopes to pick up the smaller ones.

Interesting times.

 

Marvin Orders Tandoori Chicken With a Side of Naan Bread

It looks like Curiosity might be getting some company on the Red Planet-

The Indian government has approved a mission to Mars in what would be the country's first visit to the red planet. The news comes just four years after India launched its maiden mission to the Moon – Chandrayaan-1 – and days after NASA landed the Curiosity car-sized rover on Mars.

The £70m mission will be launched in November 2013 from India's spaceport at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the island of Sriharikota using the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. The mission, which will orbit Mars and study the planet's geology and climate, has already been allocated £26m in the country's science budget.

...

"I think they look at this in a similar way [to how] the US looked at Apollo – in that they are trying to demonstrate that they are a technologically advanced country and a leader in Asia," adds [John Hopkins' scientist David] Plescia. "Space programmes are not really about science, they are about national prestige and national security. The mission would also be a source of pride and excitement to the country, much like the Curiosity mission is in the US."

With China going forward with an aggresive space program, playing 40 years of catchup with the US and Russia, India doesn't want to be left behind. It's got a heck of a tech presence and can use this as a tool to show that India can do big-power things and possibly create a space industry of their own.

Polly Wanna Puzzle... Now!

Interesting piece on parrots showing some rather high levels of IQ for an animal.

In the new study, however, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers from the University of Vienna gave six grey parrots a slightly more complex task. Instead of being shown an empty and a full canister, the researchers merely shook one of the containers, so the parrots could hear either the sound of walnuts rattling around inside or silence.

When given the chance to select a canister, the parrots consistently chose the one with the walnuts, whether they had heard the shaking of either container. They were able, therefore, to determine both that a noisy shaking meant “food is inside” and that a noiseless shaking meant “no food is inside, so it must be in the other one.”

They were African grey parrots, which brings to mind the old anti-stereotype joke where a African-American customer meets up with the pet store's smartest African grey parrot

"Polly wanna cracker.... polly wanna cracker?"

The bird replied "Leroy wanna watermellon?"

While we're in the neighborhood, what does a 800 pound parrot say? Either "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty" or "Polly wanna cracker... now!"

Vocabulary Lesson: Derecho

The DC area got hit with a bad line of thunderstorms, knocking out power to about 2M folks and doing a number on this weekend's golf tournament. Both the BBC and ESPN pieces mentioned a new word to me-derecho.

Here's an interesting 2006 piece on that style of storm; check out the video on that page for a quick primer-

Derechos are elongated, straight-lined windstorms that often have bands of rapidly moving thunderstorms associated with it. These little-known atmospheric phenomena often stretch for hundred of miles and cause multiple tornadoes. Meteorologists usually issue a severe thunderstorm watch when they see an approaching derecho.

If this Wikiepedia list of derechos is any indication, we get a few of those each year.

I've never seen or heard that used before; I'm not a meteorologist, but I picked up quite a bit and was surprised that this one showed up on my radar for the first time today.

Build-a-Burger Group

Interesting effort in Holland, where they're looking to create lab-grown hamburger by growing synthetic muscle using cow stem cells. A PETA grant is behind it, with the idea that some meat could be made without killing animals in the process down the line.

The process is far from market-ready, as the first faux-burger will have about $300K of development behind it; not exactly cost-effective. Also, the process tends to create small bits of meat that lends itself more to minced applications like hamburger or meat sauces than steaks and roasts. However, if they can scale up the process where fauxflesh might become cheaper than traditional meats, pressure will be on folks to give up the traditional slaughterhouse, so that meat doesn't have to be "tasty, tasty murder" anymore.

Such a critter would have some interesting implications. Would a fauxbeef cheeseburger be kosher? Would folks who are vegan on anti-cruelty grounds be open to fauxbeef? Would we see the left split into pro-organic, anti-genmod folks fearful of lab-grown muscle fighting with the PETA crowd? We're a few years off from that, but I recall one sci-fi millieu where fauxflesh was the norm by 2100 and traditional meat-production had the moral standing of cockfighting today.

It will have to get past the "yuck" factor, but meat production has a bit of that already. I recall a scene in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe where sentient cattle happily show off their body parts to the patrons before going out back to be freshly slaughtered, prompting a "that's just not right" feeling in the reader as they meet the meat. Contrasting that with lab-grown frankenfood might not be as hard as it seems.

 

I Want a New Drug

I've been walking wounded (or sittlng-in-comfy-chair wounded) for almost two weeks with a sinus infection that morphed into bronchitis. Early on, I took a week's worth of amoxicillin, the most common antibiotic; it was somewhat bootleg, left over from a family member who fought off an infection quickly and left the lion share of their dose for the next person to get a bug.

Needless to say, it didn't work. That means it was either a viral infection (which doctors can't do much about save treating symptoms) or a Moxy-resistant bacteria. I figured the former until today, when my bronchitis got bad enough to get into my allergist, who doubles as a GP for his allergy patients.

Turns out it was the latter. Moxy has the advantage of being cheap; some places (like the Meijer chain here in the Great Lakes region) will give it away as a loss leader. However, that means that critters have had a chance to develop a tolerance for it; according to my allergist, it only works on about half of modern-day bacterial infections. Bringing out the heavy artillery from the get go might be more expensive, but it heads off a second trip to the doctor when Moxy doesn't hunt and be a better buy over the long haul.

We'll see if the better drugs work.

Losing Jobs... to the Hearafter

The media is playing the death of Steve Jobs in a way I haven't seen since John Lennon, treating him as a sort of secular saint and calling him the modern Edison.

Not that groundbreaking, as this nice Rick Newman obit notes. He's not quite Edison, more like Tesla with a second and third act. The first act, inventing the Apple and the Mac, was a bit like Tesla, who did a lot of innovating but lost out on the really big bucks to IBM and Microsoft. Apple perfected the modern PC, but IBM put it on office desks and Microsoft's DOS running on IBM clones brought the price point down to consumer levels.

Jobs then had a decade hiatus from Apple, in which time he gave us Pixar; not bad for a second act, but the third act was a doozy, turning Apple into a mobile electronics giant. There was a bit of a role reversal for Apple; now,they were popularizing gizmos rather than inventing them.

There were smart phones before the iPhone, MP3 players before the iPod and notepad computers before the iPad. However,they popularized all three, giving a cache that was both trendy and mature at the same time. Even then, Apple wasn't able to expand its desktop and laptop sales too much, as Jobs wanted to keep Apple's OS proprietary, scrapping a plan to have Apple clones available.

I've yet to enter that universe as a user. My laptop has my MP3 stash, and I have yet to get a smartphone or a pad-computer; however, that will probably change the next time I replace my cell-phone, for the entry-level iPhones or their Android rivals are now the freebie-with-a-renewal phones these days.

Before we knew of Jobs' passing, I saw this piece on the Corner about the Wall Street protesters and their allies-

I might have told him that if he really wanted to “protest capitalism,” he could start by ditching his $2,000 MacBook Pro, which is produced by one of the largest corporations on the planet — Apple (AAPL) — currently trading at more than $370 a share, on Wall Street.

Apple has something of a near-cult following that leans a bit left but doesn't exclude the right, other than occasionally getting PC over some more pointed anti-gay aps and podcasts. The new high priest of the cult presided over a new iPhone earlier in the week, but he likely won't have Jobs' iconic status.

 

60NS Over the Speed Limit

You've probably seen the T-shirt with police officer Einstein-"186000 miles per second. It's not just a good idea, it's the law."

Well, just like you and I have likely fudged at least the 5MPH above the posted speed limit, it seems that neutrinos are a bit of a subatomic leadfoot. As best as folks from the CERN atom-smasher can figure, they were clocked at 60 nanoseconds over the speed of light. They've run as many double-checks as they know how, but the results still have the neutrinos coming in statistically significantly faster than light. Yes, they are that precise that 60NS can be significant and measurable.

Chances are there was something the folks that gave us the Web missed, since there are a lot of critics that are doing a lot of dis-CERN-ing. Messing with Einstein usually ends up like the jerks in the jerky ad messin' with Bigfoot; the scientist usually gets his research drop-kicked into the next area code.

However, might the neutrino be a smidge faster than an electron? It's a smidge lighter, if I recall my physics (a year's worth back in high school where I don't recall covering neutrinos, so take it with multiple grains of salt), so it may well be a smidge faster.

Where are the Young Marsers?

Here's an interesting piece on the prospect of plate tectonics on Mars. That doesn't seem too shocking; if that's the standard theory of Earth geology, why should Mars not have the same type of dynamics, albeit on a slightly different beat?

The many ridges and scarps on the rumpled apron of land north and west of Olympus Mons are likely signs of tectonic thrusting, according to the study. And this activity could be very recent — within the last 250,000 years or so.

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." We're starting to get some details on the heavens, and God seems to be using the same tool kit on Mars. That doesn't mean that there is or isn't life there, but that rocky planets like Earth and Mars may have similar dynamics.

Red Danube

The story out of Hungary is disturbing, where a bauxite plant's waste-water pond gave way and dumped a flood of red toxic sludge into the neighboring town and into the river system. The news of the day is that it now has made its way into the Danube, the main river of southeastern Europe.

The headline wrote itself, and does two things at once; first, it give a bad visual earwig (eyewig?) from 2001, where Blue Danube is the soundtrack while the shuttle docks at the space station orbiting Earth. Yes, I am like the aging narcissist, I'm dating myself.

Secondly, since a lot of the sludge might have been the product of the Iron Curtain days, it begs a cheap shot at the Communist's lack of environmental care during their days running Eastern Europe.

However, it is a cheap shot, for we've seen a couple of bad leakages into our waterways that didn't get as much press, even if we write off the BP case as a one-off likely not to be repeated. A similar coal-waste pond let loose in Kentucky almost a year ago, doing a number on the rivers and towns downstream. Here in Michigan, a oil pipeline leak did similar damage to the rivers southwest of Lansing earlier this year. Thankfully, both got contained before the stuff got into major waterways like the Danube.

This type of accident is the kind of environmental issue that shouldn't be a left-right fight; these are external costs to the communities that the company's making them need to do a better job of preventing. Meanwhile,the communities that get hit clean up as best they can; pray for the folks in Hungary and the rest of SE Europe as this heads downstream.

Ella Vader

We now have a second morning-after pill to head off unwanted pregnancies (and induce abortions in already existing ones). RU-486/Plan B is the one that is currently on the market, but ella (it seems to be lower case by design) was given the thumbs up the FDA. Both block progesterone, which gets the system ready to let a embryo find a home. Cutting off progesterone also tends to kick out any newly attached embryos as well. Ella is longer-lasting than RU-486, lasting a week rather than three days.

The coverage is interesting. CNN basically gives a press-release style announcement without any critical comment, while the Washington Post gives a solid look at the pro-abortion-rights slant of the Obama-era FDA and the pros and cons, including comments from pro-lifers and the prospect that pharmacists might want to pass on ella like they currently pass on proscribing Plan B.

The WaPo is slanted a bit on the pro side, but CNN ignores the cons altogether. Chew on that one for a bit.

Creation Wars: Hiding a Bigger Issue?

A bit of a flap is happening north of the border, as science minster Gary Goodyear is under fire for not whole-heartedly backing evolutionary theory. Damian Penny has some bloggage on the issue from his secular-libertarian standpoint. The general gist, which we've seen south of the border as well, is that religious conservatives are anti-science if they don't buy into evolution.

One thing that crossed my mind this afternoon is that scientists might have a different reason to shout out any doubts on evolution is that it brings the prospect of a personal God into the mix. Whether a boss goes with a literal young earth creation stance or buys into Darwin hook, line and sinker is actually secondary; it is more of a marker of whether you're going to bring a tighter set of ethical standards to the mix that will give a researcher a bit less freedom to maneuver. Interestingly, it would most likely not be in the realm of evolutionary biological research.

I've yet to hear anyone state that theologically conservative folks in authority have vetoed research on the grounds that it's advancing evolutionary theory. A creationist would probably like to see more research, for it will (if they are right) find more holes in naturalistic evolutionary theory that only a Creator can fill. It may cast doubts on young-earth creationism, that things seemed to take longer than six literal days to do, but it should settle the issue eventually.

What I think (warning-very broad brush) scientists are more worried about with a creationist is that the creationist, by definition, will generally believe in a capital G God that has moral standards. That's going to make some research problematic, if it runs afoul of a naturalistic utilitarian paradigm. Embryonic stem cell research is one area that this shows up, but it also extends to various end-of-life issues, where utilitarians are quick to want to pull the plug on negative NPV projects people.

A creationist boss will have tighter ethical standards on research than on average, at least one that buys into the idea of a hands-on God. That, rather than the debate on how life got started and came to be in its present form, seems to be what worries the naturalistic side of the aisle.

At least that's what's floating through my head at present. Is there something to that idea?

Lucky or Blessed?

I saw this MSNBC piece on alien life back during fall term, but the series got fubared when I went back to it the next day; I don't read MSNBC much at home, but since the Sullivan U computers come with IE and generic pre-set bookmarks, MSN and MSNBC is the default news site if I don't want to call up my Firefox bookmarks from my flash drive.

I came back to it yesterday, and the series is back working again. SETI's Seth Shostak is the main speaker in the piece. Here's my money graph-

Shostak notes that there is no direct proof for any life beyond Earth, but the universe is home to a lot of stars. And as research over the past decade has shown, perhaps at least 50 percent of those stars harbor planets. Shostak estimates there are 1 trillion planets in the Milky Way alone. "Surely some of them have undergone what Earth has undergone and developed life, and eventually what we call sentient life," he says. The argument, he notes, is simply one of probability. "If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, or for that matter in the universe, then we are truly a miracle," he says.

You've got that right, Dr. Shostak. Yeah, but it's from that dreaded diploma mill called Cal Tech ;-). I think the guy knows his stuff.

However, we've got one data point for life in the universe, and it's here. Lots of possible candidates, but only one proven to this point.

Given the size of the universe, we can't be that lucky. Either life should be relatively bountiful or something other than random chemical processes got us here.

Something like an intelligent designer, maybe? A Guy who's in the miracle business.

That's not to say that there may not be life elsewhere. Most of the Peanut Gallery can recite Genesis 1:1 from memory-"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Even the non-church goers in the crowd would have that down, especially after we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 8 reading of Genesis from lunar orbit last week. Genesis goes into detail on what happened on the Earth, but nada about the heavens.

SETI scientists hope to find other life in the universe. Others of us are also interested in eternal life and some of those miracles, the biggest coming back in Bethlehem and Golgotha about 2000 years ago.