As I wrangle more conversations into a shareable format for our sci-fi film festival (thanks for your patience), let’s return to a sci-fi topic encroaching on our reality: extraterrestrial life. Many of us have space travel on the mind, especially this week as we celebrate the first all-female space walk. (I suppose once upon a time that might have seemed purely sci-fi itself.) We have plans to return humans to the Moon, and a vision to set foot on Mars as well. Yet we need to be wary of stowaways, particularly bacteria and other microbes. They get everywhere and can be quite challenging to get rid of. Nevertheless, if we want any future claims about life on Mars to be taken seriously, we need to make sure it was there before us.
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Science Book Review: Vessel
I finished Vessel by Lisa Nichols in just under 48 hours, partly because it is concise and briskly paced, and partly because the plot was that engaging. I’ll do my best not to give away the twists and turns of the plot, as their discovery is one of the book’s pleasures. The setup is that astronaut Catherine Wells has returned to Earth after a nine year absence, the sole survivor of a interstellar mission written off as a complete loss years earlier. She has no recollection of the critical portions of her journey, and thus cannot explain where her crewmates are, why she was gone for so long, and how she got back. Naturally, more is revealed over the course of the book, and while I enjoyed the steady pulling back of the curtain on the cosmic mystery, some of the very human observations stood out to me the most.
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Science Corner: Arithmophobia & Other Language Barriers
For everyone who blanches at binomials, cringes at coefficients or detests derivatives: you’re not alone! Even scientists may avoid math if they can, according to a study on the effect of equation density on the likelihood a scientific publication will be cited by other scientists. (Original paper here) The effect is small; for every additional equation per page, a paper is 5% less likely to be referenced. Still, the result is notable because it was observed in the physics literature, a discipline generally associated with mathematical sophistication. A similar finding has been observed for biology papers, but for some reason there was less surprise that biologists avoided mathematics.
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Who’s Afraid of Angels and Aliens, Alienation and Etcetera?
Socially speaking, as opposed to orations in solipsism, it can be quite alienating to bring up the promises and perils of alien life, especially in the middle of a serious conversation.  By aliens, I do not mean our fellow human beings who rarely ever garner the support of rabid nationalists anywhere. Imagine the late Jean Marie Le-Pen breaking a baguette with a North African immigrant, not for the sake of a photoâ€shoot but out of a genuine sense of ubi caritas et amor. It is nearly impossible to persuade an increasingly hostile sub-culture to replace a pejorative term such as ‘breeding’ with a personably proper, more germane, and humane term such as ‘child-birth.’ Instead, I am referring to extra-terrestrial beings whose putative existence is debated in hushed corners for fear of social ostracism and a commensurate fear of mischief mongering.
Crop circles, after all, were not created by alien spacecrafts but by nocturnal practical jokesters or bona fide experimenters in social psychology privileged with a large pot of research money to advance imaginary agendas of perceived good.  The loss of face that comes with having a cherished theory falsified by a frowning fact can be disheartening to those who cultivate their religiosity around visitations by Extra-Terrestrials. Proponents of ancient astronaut theory suggest that prophetic visions, be it Ezekiel’s or those of John of Patmos, revolve around alien spacecraft. For aesthetic reasons, the angels in heaven themselves might prefer to be conceived as celestial beings blessed with warp drives and complex forms of space ships rather than be depicted as chimerical creatures who look half-bird and half-human. Humor aside, the point for those of us who believe in angels as the side kicks in God’s redemptive story is not to turn them into the focus of our faith. Thus, we can agree with the author of Hebrews that Christology is far important than angelology or to render that epistle with a modern ring, Christology is even more important than the quest for intelligent alien life.  It is precarious to our faith if we think too much of angels and aliens, but it is treacherous to our imagination if we think too little of them. After allaying the fears of the alarmed, these topics can nonetheless be useful in enlarging our understanding of God’s sovereignty if approached with percipience and a gently tethered imagination. [Read more…] about Who’s Afraid of Angels and Aliens, Alienation and Etcetera?