The Wishful Thinking Is Out There

The question of whether or not aliens exist is an awkward one. On the one hand, some people will answer that question with any number of bizarre answers:

“Yes, I sure hope they exist.”
“Yes, and the Loch Ness Monster too.”
“Of course. Why, my uncle Kenny’s been abducted twice in the last year alone.”

Because of this, many people who are sensible (but not particularly knowledgeable) will answer the question with an emphatic no, congratulating themselves on their sensibility. It seems to make sense: You haven’t seen aliens, and their existence seems to be far beyond anything we’ve actually experienced.

But then you’ll get a different answer from someone who is sensible and more knowledgeable. If we take someone like myself - who saw Cosmos and now thinks he’s an astronomy expert - and ask them if aliens exist, they’ll tell you that they most certainly do. After all, space is really big. So yes, even though life is surely unlikely to arise on any particular planet, there are so many possibilities, that life must exist somewhere out there. And if you ask the follow-up question, where are they (smartass)? They will refer you back to the “space is really big” principle.

But there’s a problem with that space-is-big, many-possibilities argument. See, space is not only big, it’s also old. It’s about four times older than life on earth, or 70,000 times older than modern humans. On the one hand, that fact adds to the lots-of-chances argument: not only are there lots of planets on which life could have arisen, but there’s been plenty of time for life to arise on them too.

The problem is when it begs that follow-up: Where are they? If the universe is so old, then not only must there be lots of alien races out there, but some of them must have been around for a long time. So even though space is big, they’ve had plenty of time to spread out, explore, and build lots of things. Even if we’re assuming that there’s no way to travel faster than the speed of light, and it will take years just to get to the nearest stars, a race could spread throughout our galaxy in, say, a million years. When you look at it that way, it doesn’t make sense that we haven’t seen any evidence of alien civilizations.

That’s called Fermi’s Paradox. We can’t explain why we can’t find any evidence of aliens, but we also can’t explain how there could not be aliens. There's a long list of interesting explanations for the paradox.

Why rehash this? The Kepler Space Telescope has found a star that appears to have thousands of objects orbiting it. That’s not unusual: a newly created star would have that. Over time, the matter surrounding it would accumulate into bigger and bigger chunks which would turn into planets. Anyone observing our sun five billion years ago would have seen the same thing. But this isn’t a new star, it’s “mature,” like ours. So it should only have a few planets orbiting it. No one has seen anything like this, and we aren’t sure what we’re looking at.

So if science can’t explain it, why not try some wild speculation? People have speculated that a really advanced civilization, with tremendous technology and voracious energy requirements, might build a Dyson Sphere. (Named for physicist Freeman Dyson, not the vacuum cleaner guy.) Essentially the idea is to build a shell around the star to collect all its energy, rather than just settle for the tiny little amount that falls on one planet.

In science fiction, this is often depicted as, literally, a big shell, where your people would live on the inside surface of the shell, with the star essentially above them. Yes, that’s right, there was one on a Star Trek episode once. But there’s a bunch of reasons why that probably wouldn’t work. So if an advanced civilization really wanted to make maximum use of their star’s energy, they’d more likely build something closer to what Dyson actually specified: a “swarm” of small structures of planetlets. They would all orbit the star, absorbing as much of its energy as possible.

So even though there’s probably some rational, boring explanation for this unusual star system, it does seem to resemble what we imagine a Dyson Sphere would look like. And it would provide an answer to Fermi’s Paradox, since this is the sort of thing we would expect to see, given how many really old, presumably advanced civilizations should be out there.

So please allow me to have my moment believing that this really is the sign of intelligent life we’ve always been looking for. Lots of people believe in things just because they want them to be true, and unlike them, at least I’m not voting based on it. And we could all use some good news: just when I was researching this, I found that most astrophysicists on social media were instead complaining about an astronomer given a slap on the wrist for serial sexual harassment. So let’s believe the aliens are there, and we have something better to aspire to.

We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off

It was a news story that caught just about everyone’s eye: Playboy is going to stop publishing nudity. So…

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, # 27

Playboy will voluntarily stop printing nude pictures of women. They’ll do this to try to increase circulation. Specifically, they’ll be hoping to get more younger readers.

Of course, the explanation for this new strategy was fairly obvious: porn is just too easy to get in this age of the Internet. I mean really, you’re on the Internet, why are you reading this now? You could be looking at porn. In that light, I really appreciate your readership.  Anyway, this is just another example of a new medium forcing old media to reassess what they do best. So non-nude Playboy is just like abstract art, when you think about it.

And it just might work. Playboy without nudity is essentially Maxim, which I see has about ten-times the circulation. They could position themselves as the more urbane version of the bro magazines. Strangely, Playboy would seem like the sophisticated version, and we could one day see someone reading a copy of Maxim, inside a copy of Playboy.

The lack of nudity would allow it to be sold in more places, so that would open up new markets. But perhaps more importantly, a lot of people will probably feel more comfortable buying it. That is, after all, the oddity of men’s magazines: Playboy has given up selling nude pictures of women - since you can get them for free on the Internet - yet Maxim has made a mint selling sexy but not nude pictures of women, which you can also get for free on the Internet. Essentially they are selling permission. It’s socially acceptable to look at a magazine from the local store, in a way that surfing for porn on the Internet is not. So Playboy is just looking for a little more acceptability.

How Soon Is Now?

I notice that a lot of people are focused on what kind of future we live in, and how far along we are in getting there. For instance, I’ve confronted the why-don’t-we-have-flying-cars question. And it seems as though more people are looking in amazement/frustration at how our world has changed from the world we were born into.

I'm wondering why we care so much about that. I mean, I don't remember in, say, the 80’s, people talking about whether or not they were living in the future imagined by people in the 30’s. I suppose that could be because, for people in the twentieth century, the future officially started in the year 2000.

Of course, that brings up the question of whether people in the nineteenth century looked to 1900 as "the future" and if so, how long after the turn of the century did people still think they were living in the future. They had certainly stopped by the time I was born.

It could be that 2000 was special because it was a turn of the millennium rather than just a century, but I suspect it has more to do with people's attitudes. If you remember the story of the patent officer who thought everything has already been invented, it seems people didn't really think they were living in an age of technological progress.

I just looked for a link to the story of the patent officer, and discovered that - surprise, surprise - it's a myth. Further, it turns out that the man in question was actually very optimistic about the many innovations coming in the future.  So that totally undermines my assumption.

Though I don't know if his certainty about the future of invention was shared by everyone at the time. Certainly, by my time in the late twentieth century were keenly aware of the movement of technology. In fact, we took it for granted, and were disappointed when it didn't love up to our expectations, or simply didn't go in the direction we expected. And that's exactly what happened: people of a certain age were promised flying cars, and instead got iPhones. Even someone like myself, who grew up after the period of greatest optimism about the future, still had his expectations coloured by those optimistic assumptions about the future.

Yearly reminder: unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.

— Kyle Marquis (@Moochava) July 10, 2013

I realize this is pretty far down the techno-cultural rabbit hole, even for me. But thinking about ourselves as living in “the future” is probably going to have a big effect on how we look at things. You’d think that would be good; if we think of our world as something we’ve made, perhaps we’ll take a more active and thoughtful role in crafting it well.

Cup Of Mudslinging

Here's an ad sent to me by my local Conservative candidate. 

I'm not even sure where to begin.  The first thing I noticed is the "Career Politician" label they've put on Mr. Mulcair.  So now the Tories are criticizing one of their competitors over his lack of experience, and criticizing the other for having too much experience.  And of course, Mulcair and Harper have spent about the same amount of time in elected office.

But more than anything, I keep trying to imagine the planning that went into such an ad.  For instance, you know that actual adults with a great deal of education actually had a conversation about whether the coffee stain would be over-the-top.  They asked, how can we make Mulcair look as unprofessional as possible? 

We could write it in crayon, but that would come off as mean.  Let's go with the coffee stain.

Oh, but could that hurt us, make him sound like a man of the people, someone for the Tim Hortons crowd?  

Good point, we'll have to make it look like it came from a coffee cup, not a Tim's takeout cup.

I'm not one of those naive people who believes that negative ads don't work. But I'm wondering why this is the one type of advertising where subtlety goes out the window.  Even that semi-racist Hyundai ad wasn't this vicious with its depiction of its competitors (for instance, they weren't shown wearing stained clothing.)  And that ad was about as vicious as normal advertising gets.  It could be that they have less time to get their message across.  But then, the ads the Conservatives run between elections hit just as hard. So maybe someday we'll have parties using long-term brand-building strategies.  I think it would be much easier to take elections if they were just like reliving the 1980's cola war.

Eat Locally, Rant Globally

I have a long history of trying to recycle things. I sorted through the blue boxes in our early recycling program in high school, I tried to get my roommates to recycle in university. Living on my own, I've done everything I can to divert as much waste as possible from the landfill.

So I know just how hard it is to get people to understand what is and isn't recyclable. Many don’t consider that there has to be someone somewhere who sorts everything you put in the blue box. Or they just assume that putting other stuff in there will somehow make it magically become recyclable. Or they have bizarre reasoning, like assuming that if paper is recyclable, then wood is also recyclable.

But now I find myself on the other end of things whenever I eat at a food court in a shopping mall. In a commendable effort to be responsible, they’re introducing recycling. And they’re doing the best they can in an industry - fast food - that doesn’t try to hard to minimize waste.

Having said that, whenever I try to throw things out, I feel like I’m taking a test. There’ll be several categories, like paper and plastic, but then there’s also a “garbage” category. There are pictures to give examples of each category, but the pictures of the garbage also include plastic and paper things, so I’m still confused. What about a straw? I have no idea what kind of plastic that is. And you have cardboard in the paper section, but does that include waxy paper cups? So there I am looking back and forth at the different pictures, nervously grasping my Subway cup, while people line up behind me. I’m sure they’re quietly cursing me, with the final judgement coming when I make a decision and become a terrible person for either adding to the landfill unnecessarily, or for making life harder for some sorter.

The frustrating part of all this is that there’s only so many types of waste at a food court. Waxy drink cups, sandwiches and burgers in paper or foil, paper napkins, plastic cutlery, cardboard boxes, and the segmented plates from the chinese place. So you could just have a photo of everything people are going to throw out, and it will be nice and simple. And I’m sure whoever empties the recycling will be glad to take the photos for you.

Split The Difference

There's an old statistician's joke that points out the average person has one breast and one testicle. Well, more likely it's a joke about statisticians. I'm sure the statisticians themselves hear that and go on about the difference between means and modes, and that not everything is a bell curve, do you even know what a distribution is, etc.

But the point is that we often assume that the average thing is a popular thing, when it may actually be exceptional. An example is in poor countries, where you might see the average income listed as $1000 a year. But that's because most people get by on next-to-nothing, while a small elite are millionaires, bringing up the average. In fact, there's virtually no one in the country who actually makes $1000 a year.

Elections follow a similar pattern. When you're electing a national leader or ruling party, the people are essentially finding someone whose views are the average of everyone in the country. That sounds easy enough, but you could find that, like that gender-ambiguous average person, the average politician is hard to find.

So far in the American political process, we're seeing anything but the average. From the perspective of winning the election, it seems bizarre that both parties are ignoring strong candidates and fascinating themselves with far-from-mainstream folks that wouldn't do well in a general election.

Hillary Clinton is the best-known on either side. And Republicans don't seem to have noticed that a Jeb!-Kasich ticket would have one centre-sellable candidate from each of the main swing states. Trouble is, those folks who would come close to representing all of America don't have the passionate supporters needed to get them into the White House.

That means the election would end up being an all-or-nothing choice of the candidates that have a vocal minority with passion. Some would say that’s a good thing, but I don’t like it. Sure, I’d like to see a left-leaning guy like Bernie Sanders win the election, but I wouldn’t want to bet Western Civilization on an apocalyptic election against Donald Trump. I’d rather have a boring old election between candidates nearer the centre. Such an election would also offer the more moderate majority of Americans a choice of candidates closer to their ideology. So the election system is really messed up if it’s threatening to give us candidates that no one will be happy with.

But seriously, remember: Bush-Kasich ’16, I called it.

(Accurately) In The Zone

With the Blue Jays as the hottest sports property in Canada all of a sudden, their broadcaster, Sportsnet is trying to take advantage.  Normally at this time of year, the Canadian sports media would be covering the pre-season NHL with all the seriousness and analysis usually reserved for regular season games.  But instead, Sportsnet has been showing more classic (that is, 20+ year old) Blue Jays games. 

I've mentioned in the past some of the strange things I've noticed in these old broadcasts.  But recently I've noticed another couple of things: one is the absence of the pitch-tracker, that radar-or-whatever thing that tracks where the pitch crosses the plate, relative to the strike zone.  I kept looking over to the right side of the screen expecting to see a diagram of where the last pitch was.  Then I look down to see the count, and it's not there either.  How did people even understand baseball then?

But that leads to the other thing I noticed.  It really seems like balls and strikes are called much more accurately now.  Obviously, there are still mistakes, but for the most part, when you look at the pitch tracker, you see that incorrect calls are nearly always so close you can hardly blame the umpire for getting it wrong.  That's in sharp contrast to the wild calls we used to get, like when they first installed that camera in the SkyDome roof that showed the plate from above, and you could see that some strikes were six inches out of the zone.

So I was going to write a post about how it seems like strikes are more accurate, and I wonder if the new technology has anything to do with it, I'm probably the first person to wonder about this, but just in case, I'll Google it to find out.  Sure enough, fans of the most statistically-analysed sport on earth have been discussing this, arguing about it, and going full Chicken Little on the topic.

In short, yes they are better, yes it is because they've been training with technological feedback, and of course, some people have found a reason to believe this is a bad thing.  The problem is that now that the strike zone is being called accurately, it's increased strike-outs, and making it harder for hitters.  (Pause while Blue Jays fans laugh at the idea that modern baseball is too difficult for the batters.)

This is another example of one of the strange aspect of sports: The way officials and players settle into informal understandings of what is and isn't legal, which is often different from what is in the rule book.  Hockey is surely the most extreme example of this, where the rules are only sort-of enforced, yet fans and players have very specific expectations of how they're going to be sort-of enforced.  I've never understood this whole concept; if the rules are not good, surely it makes sense to change them, rather than ignore them.

The new accuracy of the strike zone puts baseball in the position where they may have to be formally changing the rules, rather than informally.  If there are too many strikeouts, they'll have to change the size or position of the strike zone.  That's especially true if they - as some suggest - drop the umpire altogether, and have a machine call balls and strikes.  I think that would be a good thing: if sports officiating could be made completely accurate, it will force leagues to confront aspects of their sports that they've ignored for a long time.  It would be good if basketball had to consider its problem with favouritism to star players, or if football had to actually define "holding."