On the Fundamental Interconnectedness of Science

Scientifically illiterate people tend to make wild claims about new discoveries after reading third-hand articles on CNN.com or in the Fortean Times. Creationists have been doing this with every tiny bit of contradictory biological evidence since Darwin. New Agers do it with quantum mechanics. Regular people do it with tiny advances in technology or overblown predictions from hack journalists.

A stark example was the big scare at CERN over faster-than-light neutrinos.When the results were publicly announced last year, a chorus arose in indignation of the clearly malicious lie the academy had been spreading for the last century, that the speed of light was a fundamental speed limit in our universe, and all the physical effects this implied. Short-sighted people, believing themselves, at their Dunning-Krugeriest, to be incredibly farsighted, proclaimed a new age of physical theories and hyperdrive travel. They scoffed at the closed-mindedness of science in making such outrageously doctrinaire claims as that there were limits on the movement of objects in space! There were certainly no limits to the human spirit! ...or some such.

What these breathless blowhards don't understand is that no one seriously considered the possibility that said neutrinos were traveling faster than light. A few theoretical physicists came up with some pet models that might allow a special variety of neutrino to do something weird, but that's because they have nothing better to do. The uproar in the physics community was not about the possibility of faster-than-light travel (many people make claims about discovering such things all the time), but rather about how a huge, extremely carefully set up, and thoroughly verified experiment could produce such results! What sorts of error could be the cause, and could that error populate other results in other experiments? As it turns out, it was a loose fiber optic cable, a simple human error, but one incredibly hard to catch on practical grounds. Nothing was traveling faster than light.

Here is the salient point, however: all of those people hailing the new age of faster-than-light physics failed to understand that if it were possible for something to travel faster than light, the universe would not look the way it in fact does. Distant galaxies would not appear as they do. Our computers would not work how we expect them to. Science is an intricate machine: one cannot simply remove a component and expect the thing to keep on working.

Creationists do the same thing. By claiming on the one hand that evolution does not occur, or that the Earth has only existed for six or ten thousand years, and on the other hand continuing to drive cars and use cell phones and watch television, they fail to understand that the same natural phenomenon that allows new medical treatments to be developed allows dinosaurs to evolve into ducks. They don't understand that the science which tells us how old early hominid remains are is the same which allowed us to build an atomic bomb. And of course they do not deny the existence of genetic therapy or nuclear weapons. But they do deny evolution. (Of course, creationists do not really hold a principled position at all — they pick and choose their beliefs based on authority rather than reason.)

New discoveries in science certainly can obviate old theories. The connection between germs and diseases completely destroyed older theories of disease. But not all discoveries are like that. While it's certainly true that Einstein's general theory of relativity was a vast improvement upon Newtonian mechanics, it was not a wholesale usurpation of it. For measurements below the astronomical scale, Newton's laws were and are still perfectly valid. That is, the level of description at which they work, while inadequate for measuring the orbit of Mercury, is just fine for balls and ramps, or even bridges and skyscrapers.

The mistake many people make, though, is in seeing the universe in the opposite way. They assume Newtonian mechanics is more fundamental, because it is more intuitive. They think that their ingenious "racecar headlight on a moving train" thought experiment demonstrates that you can travel faster than the speed of light. But they still use the GPS on their phone, which would not need careful timing corrections if relativity didn't work as Einstein described.

When science throws something we don't like at us, like quantum indeterminism, special relativity, or Darwinian evolution, we cannot simply choose to ignore it while accepting all the parts we don't dislike. All the various scientific fields and theories are deeply interconnected and interdependent. This does not entail that they are all correct, of course, but one cannot simply decide that something "must be wrong" without independent, scientific reasons for thinking so. Doing that rather puts you in the position, to quote Tom Lehrer, of "a Christian Scientist with appendicitis."

My Solution to the Fermi Paradox

I think that the most likely solution to the Fermi Paradox is that, while life is exceedingly common in the universe, intelligent life is incredibly rare. In the four and a half billion year lifespan of this planet, life has existed on it from almost the very first moments. However, not until the Cambrian explosion about 530 million years ago did complex multicellular life exist. That means that for nearly four billion years, and starting from nine billion years after the birth of the universe, Earth contained nothing but single-celled organisms and colonies of such. And it is not until about 2 million years ago, 0.04% of the history of life on Earth, that the first technological intelligence emerged. And even that was simply monkeys hitting rocks against each other in a clever way! Anything more complicated than a stone arrowhead was invented in the last ten thousand years!

And let's look at how unlikely it is that humans (or any other hominid) ever even achieved technology. We had access to wheat, barley, and rice, easily domesticable plants that produced high yields and had good nutritional content. We had access to large animals with very particular internal dominance hierarchies which were not so recently evolved alongside us to attack us on sight, but not so distantly separate from us to be completely unwary at the sight of hunters with spears. (Here by "we" I am referring to any subset of humans who had such access — Jared Diamond goes into great detail as to who in fact had access to what.) We had access to workable stone, copious woodlands, and various ore deposits. We had an abundance of fresh water on a planet with an atmosphere suitable for lighting fires. Our luck in the development of our culture and eventual civilization was astounding. We were never subject to an extinction-level impact or eruption (although it seems that we came damn close).

I think that such luck is not only astounding, but is in fact astronomical. While life seems to have no trouble at all finding a place on a planet like the Earth (and perhaps on many other types of planets as well), technological civilization seems like and absolutely ludicrously unlikely event. It has happened exactly once in four and a half billion years (for 0.0002% of that time), or in 530 million years in which complex life has existed on Earth (or 0.0019% of that time). So I would imagine that life is in fact very common in the universe, although almost exclusively in the form of single-celled creatures living on rocks and in oceans. Very, very, very rarely one would find a planet with some sort of multicellular life on it — simple plant-like creatures, or molds of some sort. And once in an unimaginably huge while, one might expect to find a planet where technologically intelligent life once existed. Finding a planet where technologically intelligent life exists concurrently with us seems depressingly close to a fantasy.

[Edit: My percentages were two orders of magnitude off! They were simple ratios, not percentages. Thanks to Scott for pointing this out.]