According to Colwell

Yesterday I attended a short speech given by former Apollo astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell at the University of Central Florida. Mitchell presented a scholarship to a UCF Engineering student and then gave a brief description of his career as an astronaut culminating in two 5-hour sojourns on the lunar surface as part of the Apollo 14 mission. Mitchell, with a Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Aeronautics and Astronautics, then expressed his concerns and hopes for the future of humanity: concerns that we will destroy ourselves as our technological capabilities advance faster than our sensibilities, and hopes that we will survive these dangers to continue exploration of the cosmos. They are good and noble sentiments, and I appreciate him expressing them and pointing out that when the Earth is viewed from afar, as only he and a handful of other men have done, national boundaries evaporate and the precarious and unique status of the Earth as home to all life becomes painfully clear.

In response to questions, Dr. Mitchell expressed that aliens have visited the Earth, and while he wasn’t explicit, implied that they are living among us and concealed from us by a vast cover-up. He also affirmed that he had successfully communicated through ESP while on the surface of the Moon and that quantum mechanics now explained how this could happen. And this brings me to the criticism from “Object Reporter” on my post a couple of days ago in which I expressed dismay in a new call for government-funded research into UFOs. Object Reporter says I am uninformed on the topic of UFOs and accuses me of spouting nonsense. I stand by my statement that aliens are the least probable explanation for UFO sightings. While it is physically possible for aliens from another planet to visit Earth, there is no compelling evidence that that has ever happened. And compelling evidence is required for such an extraordinary claim. It is an extraordinary claim because the amount of energy needed for interstellar travel is huge, and a visit to the Earth by aliens would represent a huge investment of resources. For them to make this investment and then hide, but hide poorly, does not make sense. They hide poorly because somehow, while they escape detection by the vast network of aircraft and spacecraft tracking systems as well as the vast majority of the population including people like me who would be thrilled to meet them, they apparently occasionally make themselves plainly visible to some casual observers. Other explanations are more likely because in the vast majority of UFO sightings, ordinary terrestrial explanations for those sightings have already been demonstrated to be the case. If one hundred UFO sightings are demonstrated to be due to weather balloons, military aircraft, meteors, ball lightning, camera flares and other mundane explanations, then it’s likely something like that is the explanation for the one hundred and first. The claim of evidence for extraterrestrials carries the burden of proof. I, happily, do not have the burden to debunk each UFO sighting, anymore than if I claim that there is an underground civilization on the Moon someone else has the burden to prove me wrong. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I would be thrilled by the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, but so far there is no evidence, and the most likely evidence we’ll get would be an extraterrestrial radio signal.

The idea of a vast cover-up is also extraordinary. Forget for the moment that it is difficult to imagine a motive for a cover-up. The power of people in government is always enhanced by engendering fear in the populace, and fear is presumably one consequence of discovering aliens. NASA has as its mission to look for life elsewhere in the universe, and nothing would boost its budget more than the discovery of extraterrestrial life, even microbial in form. In short, lots of people in government have a self-interest in seeing extraterrestrial life proven, not hidden. But the biggest problem I see with the cover-up idea is how consistently miserable people are at keeping secrets. The most powerful person on the planet, the President of the United States, could not even keep a hotel break-in secret or (in a different incarnation) oral sex. The idea that, for decades, hundreds or thousands of people in the military and government could hide the existence of alien visitors defies reason. As for Dr. Mitchell’s demonstration of ESP, James Randi has a million dollars waiting for anyone who can demonstrate ESP or other paranormal phenomena. No one has succeeded, and by the way quantum mechanics, which beautifully describes the behavior of electrons and atoms, offers no explanation for ESP. Finally, in response to the comment on my previous post that “I wasn’t aware that the three doctors, half a dozen ex-military officials and a former state governor were supposed to be taken lightly…”: it is the claims of these people that aliens are on Earth I take lightly because they do not meet the burden of proof. And by the way, George W. Bush is a former state governor, and I take almost everything he says lightly. It’s the only way to avoid depression. Live long and prosper.

Seizing on a comment by Dennis Kucinich about a UFO sighting, UFO believers have renewed a call for government resources to be wasted on investigating things that people see in the sky and cannot identify. The Reuters story does not identify the members of the “international panel” other than to say they are former pilots and government officials. 9/11 is invoked (of course) as a reason why somehow now we really have to pay attention to UFOs. I’m not exactly sure how that works: are aliens going to crash into our building? Or will we misinterpret an alien spaceship as hijacked airliner or foreign bomber? Our money would be much better spent educating people about the things that are in the sky rather than investigating the least likely explanation (aliens) of all possible explanations. The Air Force sums it up concisely: “Since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred that would support a resumption of UFO investigations.”

I’m at the Cassini Project Science Group meeting in Pasadena this week, so my morning hotel routine involves motel buffet breakfast in the room in front of the morning news. At 7:00 a.m. I started with CBS’s “The Early Show”. In their lead-in to the morning’s news, they made a big deal about a picture of a fire where the shape of the flame bears a zeroth order resemblance to blob with a pointy thing at the top and a pointy thing at the side that some people have decided looks like former Pope John Paul II with a pointy hat and a pointy finger blessing someone. The anchors were quite excited at this amazing occurrence, so I promptly changed the channel to “The Today Show” on NBC where I was treated to the exact same nonsense. This is not only not news, it’s not anything. This was taken from video meaning either 30 frames of footage per second (NTSC) or 25 (Pal/SECAM), so if someone filmed this fire for even only one minute, there are over 1500 pictures of fire to choose from, and probably many more. I’m more surprised they couldn’t come up with a frame that showed a stronger resemblance to something.

I mentioned the upcoming insult to the state of the civilization with NBC’s “Phenomenon” earlier, but Lifetime apparently beat them to the punch. Check out the Skepchick’s hilarious review of their psychic show.

The warm glow I felt after watching the latest episode of my favorite TV show, The Office, was quickly extinguished by an ad for a new TV show on NBC that would, if I were a man of principle, make me boycott the network. Billed as a reality show, “Phenomenon” is co-hosted by charlatan Uri Geller who will judge contestants’ magic tricks. Not having seen the show, I will reserve judgment on just how misleading and misguided the show is. According to tvweek.com, the co-host Criss Angel, a traditional magician “will lend a more skeptical voice to the proceedings.” But also according to tvweek, NBC will both invite viewers to figure out how tricks are accomplished and figure out “whether any of the mentalists might have actual psychic talent.” Groan.

The latest sign of the decline of civilization can be seen in this humorously presented snippet from “The View” where one of the hosts proudly proclaims ignorance about whether the Earth is flat.

Last week in southern California I was shopping for sunglasses and was confronted with a choice I hadn’t anticipated: polarized lenses, or pearized lenses? I played it safe and went for the polarized lenses, so if you need some of the hard-to-find and fruity pearized glasses, they might still be there at the Glendale Galleria.

I confess to some mixed emotions (pride and envy, neither particularly virtuous, and seemingly incompatible, I admit) upon discovering from friend and fellow Cassini Ring-er John Weiss that someone has taken my two false-color renderings of Saturn’s rings from UVIS observations and used them to make custom ties. See here for my original A ring image tie, and here for (in my opinion) a much more interesting tie with the “CAT Scan” image from earlier this year. Should I buy moxieann’s creations? I suppose so. After all, the reason moxieann got those tie designs up on the internet instead of me is that I’m too lazy and completely incompetent when it comes to making money. And moxieann isn’t. She (I’m guessing) has also used other Cassini images for ties as well as mugs. I’m drowning in mugs (and I think I could make one cheaper at cafepress.com), and I almost never wear a tie, but I confess to being tempted. That purple and yellow one looks great.

My daughter just told me about blackle.com, a customized google page that uses a black background instead of a white one to reduce the amount of power consumption on computers. Of course the first thing I check is to “blackle” myself. That gave me, buried amongst the top hits, was the transcript of a telecon/powerpoint presentation I gave to media and science outreach reps on Saturn’s rings last year. I found it strange to read a transcript of my ramblings for a solid hour, complete with “you know”s and various other particularities of my spoken speech. Anyway, here it is. The PDF of the powerpoint presentation as well as the audio recording of the telecon is available from this page, along with all the other so-called CHARM presentations. Mine was in April 2006.

After the Cassini PSG in Athens the UVIS team convened in Goslar, Germany, for the semi-annual team meeting. Every fourth meeting is held in Germany, hosted by our German colleagues who supplied one of the four instrument channels on the UVIS instrument. Goslar has a very picturesque old town, with buildings dating back to the 12th century. But the last stop on our tour tonight was the shot I just had to post. Punishment for debtors in medieval Goslar were humiliatedwas humiliation by being forced to sit, with no pants, on a stone beneath this statue mounted on the corner of an administrative building in the town square. That’s a coin protruding from the statue.

After such a great week culminating in a standing-room-only crowd for my talk at StarFest, how could my IMDB STARmeter betray me? Down 58% since last week.