Ex-Planet Watch: He-e-e-e-re's Pluto!

This photo is part of the binge of data New Horizons sent back yesterday before it stopped chattering with earth in order to focus on its up-close observation of Pluto. It was scheduled to reach its closest point to the "dwarf planet" at 7:50 this morning ET, and to check in with home at 8:53pm ET this evening.

BREAKING NEWS: New Horizons phones home!

Clearly this post was written before that fateful moment, at 8:53pm ET this evening, when the New Horizons spacecraft was scheduled to send a short data burst signaling the end of its communications blackout during its flyby of the ex-planet, now "dwarf planet" (as it's officially designated) Pluto. At 8:55pm ET, the Washington Post's Joel Achenbach reported:

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft phoned home Tuesday night, reporting that it had made it to Pluto and beyond after crossing the solar system for 9.5 years. To the immense relief of the men and women who had built it and then flung it into deep space, the robotic probe sent a brief stream of data, received shortly before 9 p.m., confirming that it had survived the close pass of the dwarf planet.

“We have a healthy spacecraft. We’ve recorded data in the Pluto system. And we’re outbound from Pluto,” Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager, announced to her thrilled colleagues in the control room at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the home of New Horizons. In a nearby auditorium, hundreds of people who had been watching the video feed stood and gave the team a standing ovation.

by Ken

By the time you read this, the New Horizons team headquartered at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., should know whether its space probe has survived its close encounter with the defrocked planet Pluto -- "even though," as Washington Post science writer Joel Achenbach wrote yesterday ("New Horizons is just hours away from Pluto after 9½-year journey"), "the speedy spacecraft [was] on track to pass about 7,750 miles from Pluto at 7:50 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday."

The spacecraft was programmed to stop gossiping with APL in anticipation of the flyby, in order to devote all its resources to the huge amount of work it was programmed to do while within range of Pluto, not to be heard from again until 8:53pm EST tonight, "when the New Horizons team hopes to receive a bulletin from the spacecraft saying that it has survived its close encounter with Pluto and is steadily making scientific observations."

Nevertheless, at the scheduled nearest-point moment this morning, as Joel reported early this afternoon, "Cheers fom hundreds of engineers, scientists and their families broke out" at APL.

“Pluto has now been explored!” exulted team leader Alan Stern a few minutes after a countdown clock reached zero at precisely two seconds before 7:50 a.m. That signaled the moment when New Horizons came closest to the surface of Pluto.

There was ample ground for nervousness during the long wait until tonight's scheduled "short data burst" check-in." As Joel noted yesterday:

This is not an encounter without risks. The Pluto system may have a fair amount of debris, and even a small rock could disable a spacecraft going upward of 31,000 mph. Stern said computer models show that the risk of a collision is 1 in 10,000.

Meanwhile the team already knows vastly more about Pluto than we have ever known, based on the pictures and data the spacecraft sent back during its approach to Pluto, before the communications blackout, which obviously already gave us a way closer look than we've ever had.

"People talk a lot about how surreal it is that we're really here," Joel quoted Alan Stern saying yesterday. "It feels like you've been walking on an escalator for almost a decade, and then you step upon a supersonic transport."

By "almost a decade," Stern meant the time it took New Horizons to make it to the vicinity of Pluto. Here's Joel again from yesterday:

This 9½-year journey to a tiny keyhole in space some 3 billion miles from Earth is the equivalent of a golfer on the East Coast hitting a ball across the continent and making a hole-in-one in Los Angeles, said the project manager, Glen Fountain.

“Pluto is perfectly spherical, like every respectable planet,” Stern said at a public lecture Monday at APL, in a dig at the astronomers who in 2006 demoted Pluto from “planet” to “dwarf planet” status. It has also turned out to be slightly larger than previously estimated.

“I didn’t know what to expect, because [Pluto] is a point of light when seen from Earth. It’s fascinating. It’s complex. You’ve got these dark regions and this bright, heart-shaped region,” said planetary scientist Cathy Olkin, another member of the New Horizons team. “I’m thrilled by how it looks.”

While cosmologically speaking New Horizons is still comfortably in our little corner of the universe -- still within our very own little solar system, albeit at the far edge -- practically speaking that's still a long, long away, and running a mission that distance away isn't like running, say, a moon mission. Here's Joel again from yesterday:

Because Pluto is about 3 billion miles from Earth, New Horizons can’t be joysticked from mission operations at APL. The nine-hour round-trip communication time means the spacecraft has to function autonomously. Olkin said the probe must make about 600 maneuvers over a nine-day period that started last Tuesday; that will enable 433 separate observations.

The designers of this $720 million mission have built in some redundancy, with multiple observations and slight wiggle room on the timing. New Horizons, launched in 2006, has star-trackers and other guidance capabilities to orient itself correctly and turn toward Earth to transmit data. What it doesn’t have, primarily for cost reasons, according to Fountain, is the kind of robust sensing and computing power to lock onto a target — say, one of Pluto’s moons — if that target is not precisely where it had been anticipated to be.

One inevitable feature of exploring the outer solar system is that the technology is relatively ancient by the time the spacecraft gets there.

“In some ways, these are technologies from the ’90s,” Fountain told reporters Sunday.

SO WHAT HAVE WE ALREADY LEARNED ABOUT PLUTO?


The New Horizons team at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory watches incoming pictures sent back by the spacecraft yesterday. These folks are excited.

"Pluto is not a bland and featureless ball of ice, but rather a complex, variegated, mottled world with broad snowfields, structures that look like cliffs or fault lines, and a strikingly bright heart-shaped area that could be the eroded remnant of a giant impact crater."

-- Joel Achenbach, on washingtonpost.com at 6:30pm ET

Here's more from Joel this evening:

The newest photo of Pluto, obtained by New Horizons on Monday and made public Tuesday morning, thrilled the hundreds of people who showed up at APL for the encounter celebration. The most prominent feature is the “heart,” a bright, twin-lobed region with boundaries so sharp it appears to have been stamped onto the surface.

In fact that may not be far off, because one hypothesis that scientists said they’re discussing is that at least part of the heart — the left lobe — is the remnant of a huge impact long ago. It’s possible that region is a depression filled with nitrogen snow, said team member Casey Lisse.

Stern said there are indications of tectonic activity — perhaps even recently. Asked if the images show that there’s snow on Pluto, Stern said, “It sure looks that way.”

Project scientist Hal Weaver said there is a small bright spot that might be the tip of a mountain covered with snow. He said it looks “almost like a lighthouse.” Weaver cited a number of spots that bring to mind Almond Joy candy bars. “It looks like there are these great mounds — like the mounds with almonds on top,” Weaver said.

Linear features on the surface “could be scarps, or faults,” said New Horizons team member and planetary scientist Cathy Olkin.

But Stern cautioned that it’s too soon to reach any conclusions about things like mountains, faults, canyons or other kinds of dramatic topography. Scientists need to wait for stereoscopic imagery that remains stored on the spacecraft and will take time to download to Earth, he said.

That said, scientists uniformly rejoiced in the color variations and diversity of features. Pluto is not a simple and smooth snowball, which was one possibility before New Horizons got close enough to learn otherwise, NASA associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld noted in a news briefing. . . .

[Read on onsite. And stay tuned in the days, weeks, months, and years to come, as all the data sent back by New Horizons is sorted and understood. -- Ed.]

Do you get the feeling that these folks are, you know, excited? (What I love about Joel A as a science writer is his ability to enable us to both sort-of-feel and sort-of-understand what gets scientists excited. Thanks, Joel!)


AFTERTHOUGHT: COULD A PROJECT LIKE
NASA'S NEW HORIZONS BE INITIATED NOW?

In the above post I studiously avoided making the obvious point that to a lot of people the purpose of a mission like New Horizons' is incomprehensible, and probably scorned and derided. It seems to me fairly likely that the ranks of those people include the overwhelming majority of Movement Conservatives, and almost certainly most of the Republicans in that party's current majorities in both houses of Congress. To people whose brains have been ruthless purged of all curiosity about the universe and our place in it, the notion that an undertaking like this adds an important layer of understanding of the universe and our place in it is by definition preposterous.

In answer to my question, no, I can't imagine a project like this -- whose very purpose lies a decade in the future -- being authorized by the current Congress. As an exercise, look at the dozens of Republicans currently seeking the party's presidential nomination and ask if you can imagine any of them supporting such a thing. I can't. Once upon a not-so-long-ago time, one might have thought of Newt Gingrich possibly getting it. Which just goes to show anyone who thought the Newtster as intellectually hooliganish specimen of a politico as our system is capable of producing wasn't even close.

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Joel Achenbach shares some "Uplifting thoughts about Doomsday"

Um, Joel, "uplifting thoughts about Doomsday"?

"My computer is already a lot smarter than I am. Even my phone is. I didn't expect to live to the day when I wasn't as smart as a phone. . . .

"The future isn't simply something that happens, but rather it's something that we'll actively create, through hard choices, clever engineering and social progress. I believe that."

-- the Washington Post's outstanding science writer Joel
Achenbach, in "Uplifting thoughts about Doomsday"

by Ken

The other day, in writing about John McPhee's interesting New Yorker piece on "frames of reference," I noted some gentle gibes John takes at alleged frame-of-reference fails in "the wonderful book" Captured by Aliens by a former student in his Princeton writing class, Joel Achenbach, whom I referred to as "the great Washington Post science writer."

First published in 1991

Which was fine as far as it went. What I neglected to do was dig out a link for my most recent reference to that "great science writing" of Joel's, in the form of his March National Geographic cover story on "The War on Science," the subject of my February 25 post, "Is it 'good news' about science deniers that they've always been with us?" And ever since, I've been meaning to get back to the subject in connection with a jolly "Achenblog" blogpost called "Uplifting thoughts about Doomsday."

(This post, Joel explains, is actually "cross-posted from the Post's new Inspired Life blog, edited by my former Rough Draft editor Sydney Trent." Joel adds, "Please note that there is not a single reference to Hillary Clinton's emails. Well, now there's one, I guess.")

"I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the end of the world," Joel begins. "I’m on the catastrophe beat around here."

If we all faced certain doom, I know exactly what I’d be doing in my final hours of existence: Trying to file on deadline. (And then tweeting the link.)

Earthquakes, oil spills, hurricanes – that’s just for starters. I’m also tasked with thinking about low-probability, high-consequence events, such as an asteroid impact, or an eruption of the Yellowstone caldera (you know Yellowstone’s a big, bad-ass volcano, right?).

You see: "I get paid to worry about the future, and talk to other worriers." Isn't it nice to come across someone who loves his work?

HERE'S SOME OF THE FUN JOEL'S BEEN HAVING

"Recently I talked to scientists about 'synthetic biology' and whether something cooked up in a lab might escape and run amok."

The consensus is: not likely. Nature has already “invented” (if you will) an unbelievable array of organisms that invade every niche and exploit every available resource. [As recently noted here on the A-blog, there’s a name for a system that invents novel organisms, and it’s called “evolution.”]

"Then there are the very, very exotic hazards."

The other day I was working on a story about space aliens, and whether we should beam signals to them, shouting into the void, trying to make contact. A major argument against such a move is that the aliens might be unfriendly, and potentially visit us, lugging along their “To Serve Man” cookbooks (obligatory Twilight Zone reference).

I’m going to mark that down as not-gonna-happen, on account of it being way too much hassle to come all the way here from anywhere else. We live in that kind of universe – you can’t get anywhere because everything’s too spread out.

"What if we made contact with the space aliens and they informed us, gently, that everything in the universe is just a big computer simulation, and that our lives here on Earth are not actually 'real'?"

This, Joel explains, is "another crazy thought, mentioned to me by an astronomer."

One has to think, immediately, of Samuel Johnson kicking the stone and saying of Bishop Berkeley’s nothing-is-real thesis, “I refute it THUS.” Besides: If a simulated universe is exactly like a real universe then I don’t think anyone has anything to complain about. (Or is that giving up too easily?)

"My colleague Matt McFarland recently did a post on the 12 biggest existential threats facing humanity, and you'll be surprised by what's number one: Computers. Artificial intelligence. 'Skynet' from The Terminator."

At some point, computers may begin to program themselves, achieving what is known in the worrying trade as Superintelligence. Is this a rational fear? I will say this: My computer is already a lot smarter than I am. Even my phone is. I didn’t expect to live to the day when I wasn’t as smart as a phone. But I’m with Walter Isaacson, who in “The Innovators” says humans-plus-computers will always be smarter than computers alone.

"There are other threats."

Nuclear war. That’s not going away anytime soon. You also have the nanotechnology concerns that Matt wrote about: Again, hard to do risk analysis on something we know very little about.

OKAY, WE'RE GETTING TO THE "UPLIFTING"
PART (WE'RE JUST NOT QUITE THERE YET)

It would be easy to make a list of possible threats, hazards, natural disasters and cosmic catastrophes (have I mentioned solar flares that fry the grid??), and then decide to curl up in a fetal ball and start whimpering. Except go back to Matt’s post: Multiply all those existential threats together and it’s still a longshot. Chances are, the future will be different from the present, just as the present is different from the past — but we’ll probably still be here in some form, and possibly more or less recognizably so.

The biggest issues aren’t existential so much as qualitative. What kind of world will it be? Beautiful? Clean? Marked by freedom and justice? Will children grow up in societies that give them a chance to fulfill their dreams? Will girls be given access to education? Will peace and harmony be the norm, or conflict and war? Utopia, dystopia, or some complicated situation like the one we’re in right now?

ANYTIME NOW FOR THAT "UPLIFT," JOEL . . .

Aha! "I am cautiously optimistic," he says.

I believe human beings are highly adaptive creatures. I think we can create a sustainable and beautiful civilization that doesn’t destroy the planet or impose totalitarianism. Optimism, I should note, is not a fashionable attitude in some circles. Indeed there are those who would argue that optimism is counter-productive — an actual impediment to making changes and being adaptive. But optimism isn’t complacency. It has to be paired with a certain level of wariness and a general alertness. We have to find ways to look beyond our immediate horizons. The future isn’t simply something that happens, but rather it’s something that we’ll actively create, through hard choices, clever engineering and social progress. I believe that.

There you go! Consider yourself (cautiously) uplifted.


[NOTE: Joel's Why Thiings Are: Answers to Every Essential Question in Life (1991), pictured above, was followed by Why Things Are, Volume II: The Big Picture in 1993 and Why Things Are and Why Things Aren't in 1996 -- and a bunch of books since, most recently A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher (2011).]

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Is it "good news" about science deniers that they've always been with us?

"We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge -- from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change -- faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you'd think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative. . . .

"The scientific method doesn’t come naturally -- but if you think about it, neither does democracy. For most of human history neither existed. We went around killing each other to get on a throne, praying to a rain god, and for better and much worse, doing things pretty much as our ancestors did."

-- Washington Post science writer Joel Achenbach, in the
March National Geographic cover story (the reference to
"the safety of fluoride" will be become clear in a moment)

by Ken

Yes, I'm afraid the best news we're going to take away from the cover story in the March National Geographic, "Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?," is that science deniers have always been with us. Because the other major takeaway is that, it appears, they'll always be with us, and, it appears, there isn't a damned thing we can do about it, because they believe what they believe, and facts to the contrary only make them believe it harder.

And, oh yes, if you're thinking that they're more numerous, more powerful, and more dangerous than they've been before, nothing in the piece will disabuse you.

There's some good news in that the author of the piece is the Washington Post's wonderful science writer Joel Achenbach, and as anyone who has read him either in the paper or on the website knows, he's pretty much the ideal person for the job: smart, broadly knowledgeable, calm, and compassionate. I can't imagine a much better job on the subject for a general audience. It is, I think, a beautiful piece, and everyone should read it.

Which just makes the takeaways from it that much more depressing to, you know, take away.

At this point I think we could use a good laugh or two, so let's take a look at this classic scene from Dr. Strangelove, as the way-off-his-rocker Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), bunkered inside his sealed-off Air Force base while the preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union that he's engineered plays out, tries to "educate" the increasingly hysterical British RAF Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers). Trust me, this is the most fun we're going to have here.



Joel starts us off with a snatch of this gorgeous scene (beginning at about 1:41 of our clip):

RIPPER: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?
MANDRAKE: Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes, yes.
RIPPER: Well, do you know what it is?
MANDRAKE: No. No, I don’t know what it is. No.
RIPPER: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

Joel proceeds to point out that by the time Stanley Kubrick's "comic masterpiece," Dr. Strangelove, came out, in 1964, "the health benefits of fluoridation had been thoroughly established, and antifluoridation conspiracy theories could be the stuff of comedy." This, of course, is what makes General Ripper's obsession with it so funny. This, and the fact that, nevertheless, there were crazy people in 1964 who believed something not nearly far enough from what Jack D.R. did. What's more, Joel says,

you might be surprised to learn that, half a century later, fluoridation continues to incite fear and paranoia. In 2013 citizens in Portland, Oregon, one of only a few major American cities that don’t fluoridate their water, blocked a plan by local officials to do so. Opponents didn’t like the idea of the government adding “chemicals” to their water. They claimed that fluoride could be harmful to human health.

Actually fluoride is a natural mineral that, in the weak concentrations used in public drinking water systems, hardens tooth enamel and prevents tooth decay—a cheap and safe way to improve dental health for everyone, rich or poor, conscientious brusher or not. That’s the scientific and medical consensus.

To which some people in Portland, echoing antifluoridation activists around the world, reply: We don’t believe you.

It's at this point that Joel delivers the "We live in an age" lines I've quoted at the top of this post. Only now you can get the references to the safety of fluoride and to putting something in the water. Did I mention that Joel is a really gracious writer? Just a sweetheart to read.

Joel notes that the takedown of science has penetrated pop culture, as in the film Interstellar, where the schoolbooks of this "futuristic, downtrodden America" teach that "the Apollo moon landings were faked."


NO, IT'S NOT A NEW THING

[Click to enlarge (a little).]

SQUARE INTUITIONS DIE HARD: That the Earth is round has been known since antiquity -- Columbus knew he wouldn't sail off the edge of the world -- but alternative geographies persisted even after circumnavigations had become common. This 1893 map by Orlando Ferguson, a South Dakota businessman, is a loopy variation on 19th-century flat-Earth beliefs. Flat-Earthers held that the planet was centered on the North Pole and bounded by a wall of ice, with the sun, moon, and planets a few hundred miles above the surface. Science often demands that we discount our direct sensory experiences -- such as seeing the sun cross the sky as if circling the Earth -- in favor of theories that challenge our beliefs about our place in the universe. [National Geographic caption]

Looking at our worldwide epidemic of science denialism (I think it's a mistake to refer to it as "doubt," or to the people who engage in it as "doubters," when what they're about is denial), it's easy to think of it as a modern phenomenon, perhaps in reaction to what may seem to be a takeover of our lives by science.

In a sense all this is not surprising. Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before. For many of us this new world is wondrous, comfortable, and rich in rewards—but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we can’t easily analyze.

We’re asked to accept, for example, that it’s safe to eat food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) because, the experts point out, there’s no evidence that it isn’t and no reason to believe that altering genes precisely in a lab is more dangerous than altering them wholesale through traditional breeding. But to some people the very idea of transferring genes between species conjures up mad scientists running amok—and so, two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, they talk about Frankenfood.

The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t easy.

And he engages in a splendid description of the kinds of problems we face in knowing who and what to believe and about who and what. But as the reference to Frankenstein may have hinted, he's here to tell us that the "doubters" have always been with us. And it comes in good part from deep confusion about what science is and tries to do, which is, essentially, to give us the tools to make decisions about those questions of who and what to believe, who and what to fear, based on rigorous and continuously evolving investigation of real-world evidence.

Now Joel has so much to say on this subject, or rather these subjects, that I feel particularly remiss in jumping over most of it -- how many times do I have to tell you to read the damned piece> -- but instead I'm going to refer you to the caption for the "Square and Stationary Earth" map above, and in particular to that last sentence: "Science often demands that we discount our direct sensory experiences—such as seeing the sun cross the sky as if circling the Earth—in favor of theories that challenge our beliefs about our place in the universe."


YESSIR, REGULAR FOLKS TRUST THEIR EYES AND EARS


National Geographic caption: "A worker adjusts a diorama of a moon landing at the Kennedy Space Center." Aha! So this must be how they faked it!

They aren't gonna be fooled by fancypants talk that contradicts what they see and hear. Except that time and again what they think they see and hear is wrong, and as Joel carefully explains, even those of us who accept scientific precepts still tend to cling to "our intuitions -- what researchers call our naive beliefs." At the same time we don't like random or unexplained things ("our brains crave pattern and meaning"), and so we're awfully vulnerable to attempts to explain everything in terms consistent with those naive beliefs, and so we can be suckers for everything from flat-earth hogwash to the craziest of conspiracy theories, all the more so in a time that has bred distrust for smarty-pants "authority."

The conspiracies emphatically include Sen. James Inhofe's favorite one: global warming. Joel points out that the idea of a global-warming conspiracy is preposterous on its face: "The idea that hundreds of scientists from all over the world would collaborate on such a vast hoax is laughable—scientists love to debunk one another." (And it's "very clear," as he also points out, "that organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public's understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.")

What's more, Joel argues, it isn't just a "scientific communication problem." Research suggests that better-educated people not only are able to believe anti-scientific theories but tend to believe than even more strongly than less-educated people.

Because, as I think many of us have come to understand, facts don't have a lot to do with what people believe. People tend to believe what they want to believe, and that tends to be what the people they feel a shared identity with believe.

Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers. “We’re all in high school. We’ve never left high school,” says Marcia McNutt [a geophysicist "who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the prestigious journal"]. “People still have a need to fit in, and that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science. And they will continue to trump science, especially when there is no clear downside to ignoring science.”

And as long as it's who we are that conditions what each of us believes about the universe that science is trying to give us tools to understand, reasoned argument doesn't stand to help us a lot.

"If you're a rationalist," Joel says, "there's something a little dispiriting about all this." After all, he says,

evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter—and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.

Doubting science also has consequences. The people who believe vaccines cause autism—often well educated and affluent, by the way—are undermining “herd immunity” to such diseases as whooping cough and measles. The anti-vaccine movement has been going strong since the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet published a study in 1998 linking a common vaccine to autism. The journal later retracted the study, which was thoroughly discredited. But the notion of a vaccine-autism connection has been endorsed by celebrities and reinforced through the usual Internet filters. (Anti-vaccine activist and actress Jenny McCarthy famously said on the Oprah Winfrey Show, “The University of Google is where I got my degree from.”)

In the climate debate the consequences of doubt are likely global and enduring. In the U.S., climate change skeptics have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative action to combat global warming. They haven’t had to win the debate on the merits; they’ve merely had to fog the room enough to keep laws governing greenhouse gas emissions from being enacted.

Joel makes an excellent case that, contrary the hope of some environmental activists that scientists will become more engaged as policy advocates, the likely effect of this would be increase the perception that they're advocates rather than truth-seekers.

It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app. It’s the way science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else—but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research. In science it’s not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it. For some people, the tribe is more important than the truth; for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?

Joel harks back to something said to him by geophysicist Maria McNutt -- that "scientific thinking has to be taught, and sometimes it’s not taught well."

Students come away thinking of science as a collection of facts, not a method. [Occidental College's Andrew] Shtulman’s research has shown that even many college students don’t really understand what evidence is. The scientific method doesn’t come naturally—but if you think about it, neither does democracy. For most of human history neither existed. We went around killing each other to get on a throne, praying to a rain god, and for better and much worse, doing things pretty much as our ancestors did.

"Now we have incredibly rapid change," Joel writes, "and it’s scary sometimes."

It’s not all progress. Our science has made us the dominant organisms, with all due respect to ants and blue-green algae, and we’re changing the whole planet. Of course we’re right to ask questions about some of the things science and technology allow us to do. “Everybody should be questioning,” says McNutt. “That’s a hallmark of a scientist. But then they should use the scientific method, or trust people using the scientific method, to decide which way they fall on those questions.” We need to get a lot better at finding answers, because it’s certain the questions won’t be getting any simpler.

Let me say again that I really haven't done anything like justice to Joel's piece. But one thing I don't think I've overlooked is any grounds for hope. In fairness, I did warn you that this wasn't going to be a lot of fun. Maybe we should have just watched Dr. Strangelove. That wouldn't have helped with the problem, but at least we would have had a good time.

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