meet the cure

when the truth has a liberal bias, who you gonna call?

if only the shadow knew ...

... a little more about physics. can you spot the errors?

(story and art by howard chaykin, colors by jesus aburto)

where lamont cranston a.k.a the shadow a.k.a. author/artist howard chaykin talks about density, he clearly should be referring to mass. shrinking an object in the manner deduced by the shadow would actually increase its density, since the same number of atoms would now occupy a smaller volume. what would remain unchanged is the object's mass and gravity's effect on it. the ingots would weight exactly the same as they always have, which means the shadow and his cohorts shouldn't be able to handle them with just their fingers and pass them around like peanuts.

on the other hand, the shrinking machine has yet to be revealed. it's possible back in 1949 some fugitive evil nazi genius actually discovered how to warp space itself, which would allow him to shrink an object by shrinking the space between its atoms, instead of merely moving them closer together in normal space. voila! smaller ingots, same density. (same mass and weight, however.)

in any case, one wouldn't use a spectrometer to measure density. (but one can use a mass spectrometer to analyze an object's mass.) in order to measure density, one need only weight it on a scale and divide by its total volume.

from the shadow: midnight in moscow #1, may 2014.

"better than science"

after forty long hours in the desert and forty long hours on the mountaintop, indefatigable texas birther rudy davis descends unto youTube to deliver the gospel:

... i probably spent about eighty hours, maybe more, so far researching this, reading books, going to various websites, using the knowledge that i've gained in my physics class — lemmee share a little bit about my background and this isn't me like braggin' on my background, there's nothin' to brag about. y'know, when you ask me about my credentials are, i know how to use a shovel and, uh, i can clean a pretty good litter box, but i did go through four years of college and obtained a electrical engineering degree, with a minor in mechanical engineering, and, um, i passed my calculus classes. i loved calculus, i love math. i, uh, passed my trigonometry, geometry, analytical geometry, um, y'know, physics, uh, thermodynamics — i loved all that stuff. i love, y'know, mathematics and science since it was one of my favorite topics.

i'm not, um, completely ... uneducated. but i'm not the smartest guy in the world either. i'm not here saying i'm smarter than anybody — i think, for these things, the lord has to lead you into this, sort of, belief, uh, and you have to have a biblical perspective in order to understand what i'm about to say ...

and after a short digression into 9-11 trutherism:

... so i want you to think back, y'know, when somebody first told you that, t—, your reaction. 'cause what i'm about to say, i'm not sayin' for shock value. i couldn't care less if you like me or you din't like me, i could care less about, uh, how many subscribers i have. what i'm about to say i'm telling you because i believe it's the truth and i know 99.99 percent of you are going to reject it. i rejected it when i first heard it, until i started lookin' into it more, 'til i started reading my bible, 'til i started, uh, understanding, uh, a little bit more about the things that we've been told, and, uh, i would just ask you to look into it before you jump to the conclusion that i'm an absolute nut. and, again i'm just telling you this because there are — there's gonna be point-zero-zero-zero-one percent of you that, uh, is gonna receive it, just like, just like i received it and just like, y'know, there, there's a few, there's a few that can weed through all the BS that we've been told in this world and see what's goin' on.

but i wanna declare, uh, that i am a geocentrist. and uh, what a geocentrist is, is someone who believes that the earth is the center of the universe and does not move. lemmee say that again. the earth does not move, it does not rotate, it does not revolve, it does not, uh, go around the sun and it does not wobble. the bible says the earth cannot be moved. and, uh, that's what i'm goin' with.

and, y'know, when it comes to copernicus, galileo, uh, kepler, uh, carl sagan and einstein, all of 'em are flim-fam— flam artists. i believe they're all con artists and they're basically in a satanic deception that put forth satan's very, very first blue-ribbon lie. y'know — well, uh, you could go all the way back to the garden of eden, so i wouldn't say it's his first, but, uh, satan's blue-ribbon lie, at least one of them, is that the, uh, earth moves around the sun. okay? that absolutely is not true and i believe it with all my heart.

... now do i believe that carl sagan, einstein, kepler, uh ... uh ... copernicus and galileo were in some, y'know, plot where they communicated with each other? no, i don't believe they were communicatin' with each other through the centuries but what i do believe is, uh, that satan allows certain people to be puffed up with pride an' this world promotes, uh people and they get too smart for their, for their own good an' they just put out absolute BS. i mean we've just been lied to upon lied to.

... some people say that y'know, uh "the bible does, does not say how the heavens go, but the bible tells us how to go to heaven." in other words, they're tryin' to say that the bible is not a sci— is not a science book. but i would say that the bible is better than a science book. the bible is better [chuckling] than any science book ever written. and if it says the earth doesn't move, then it doesn't freakin' move. and uh, that's one thing you need to know about me. and, and you may be a christian watching this thinkin' i'm an absolute kook, but know this: when i read that bible, the difference between me and other christians is when i read that bible i believe what it says. i don't try to fit into my little, uh, box of how i think god should be or how the universe should be. if the bible says it, that's the way that it is. and i don't believe the king james bible has any errors.

that's right, folks, a hardcore wingnut conspiracy theorist who never doubted a rumor found in his yahoo inbox is calling a satanic hoax on the last 500 years of scientific discovery. eighty hours of what passes as deep thought in rudy's mind and the bible (king james version only, accept no imitations!) is all any right-thinking patriot needs.

to supply the perfect counterpoint to rudy's admitted defiant anti-intellectualism, enter working physicist sean carroll, someone who's certainly spent more than eighty hours on the subject. sean casually explains what real scientists and real mathematicians already know — the "known knowns", so to speak, wherein neither god nor satan nor any other strange supernatural, metaphysical or paranormal beings, forces or powers are anywhere to be found:

so, the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood. the reason why i emphasize this is because scientists, and skeptics for that matter, love to go right to the unknown things. there are many, many things that are unknown, from dark matter to quantum gravity to finance, okay? but there are also things that are known. and among the things that are known are how the matter around us in our everyday life actually works. and it's not just "we have a theory that works." it's better than that. we know that there are no new parts of nature that we haven't found yet that could exert a substantial influence over our everyday lives. there are no new particles or forces that could be relevant to your everyday life that science hasn't found yet.

... so we've looked. there could be plenty of new particles of nature, but they must be either weakly interacting, too heavy to create or too short-lived to detect. what that means is that they can't possibly be very relevant to your everyday life. they cannot affect your consciousness, you cannot blame them for being in a bad mood. you and everyone you know is made up of the standard model of particle physics and nothing else.

... we've ruled out every possible force that is both long range and strong enough to notice.

... the conclusion is that as far as the immediate world of experience is concerned, as far as what you see and touch and taste and feel as you go through your everyday life, we have the theory. we're done. that does not mean that we understand everything, but the underlying laws that describe what baseballs are made out of, or tables or living beings, we understand that. it's electrons and quarks with masses from the higgs field interacting via those forces. that's the everyday world.

... when it comes to the everyday world, we have figured out what the pieces are and what direction they can move in. that does not make us good world players or chess players. it does constrain the kind of games you can play. if someone has come up with a new chess strategy that involves the rook moving diagonally, you know that you can rule that out without listening to their elaborate presentation on it. likewise, if someone has a great new theory of living their lives that involves homeopathy or astrology, you can tune them out without listening to the details. because just knowing the fact that the standard model of particle physics is the right theory of the matter that makes up the everyday world is immediately enough to rule out a whole host of possible phenomena. anything you can't do with electrons, protons, neutrons, gravity and electromagnetism, you can't do in your basement.

... you cannot bend spoons with your mind — unless your mind tells your other arm to go out and bend the spoon. but you can't just do it with a new force emanating from your cortex because there are no such forces. you cannot predict the future, see around corners, the position of saturn when you were born sadly irrelevant to the rest of your life, blah-blah-blah ...

and in fact we known there is no life after death. sometimes even atheists and skeptics like to be open-minded about this because we haven't done all the right double-blind experiments, blah-blah-blah ... forget it! if you believe in life after death, tell me what particles contain the information that moves your soul from place to place. is it electrons? 'cause those would be easy to notice cause electrons are electrically charged and it's actually quite a lot of charge. is it atoms? but the atoms don't move very much when you die. if you believe that there's some way that you have an immortal soul that travels from place to place, then you're not just saying we don't know how it works, you are saying that our current knowledge of the laws of physics is wrong. which means you better give me a good reason to believe that our current knowledge of the laws of physics is wrong, because it's not, and i'm going to move on to more interesting things.

most of science's work, certainly that part which concerns everday human experience, has been done. science can explain through natural causes everything we do and everything that effects us between waking and sleeping, including waking and sleeping. whatever important unknowns remain lie beyond john q. public's quotidian concerns.

sean argues that even gravity, one of the universe's most ubiquitous, constant and far-reaching forces, can be ignored as "utterly, utterly irrelevant" to our lives since it is also one of the weakest. air travelers might quibble, but his point is that the activity of any purported forces or beings that supposedly affect or manipulate human lives on any regular and significant level would have to be stronger than gravity — and therefore, like gravity, noticable and provable. so we would have already noticed by now if any undiscovered entities were regularly intervening in the world by stopping bullets from hitting people or picking sides at sporting events. and we certainly know enough to ignore out-of-hand rudy's entreaties for us to "educate ourselves" by following up on his so-called research since it defies everything real scientists have discovered.

to justify itself, every religion claims to be not just relevant but inseparable and indispensible to the human experience — all while hiding just beyond reach in the supernatural. but science has yet to find any human activity that can't be explained by some combination of the natural forces we've thus far discovered. despite or because of the worst abuses of religion, the history of science has been the inexorable balkanization of gods and ghosts onto smaller and smaller islands of possibility. sorry rudy, but as of today, atlantis is sunk — even the king james version.

there is a cult of ignorance in the united states, and there has always been. the strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge".
— issac asimov

stuff i don't believe in

1. religion and the supernatural
   • gods and deities
   • angels, demons and the semi-devine
   • heaven, hell and the afterlife
   • ghosts and poltergeists
   • souls, reincarnation and past lives
   • etc
2. prophecy and fortune-telling
3. witchcraft, magic and talismans
4. monsters and weird creatures
   • vampires
   • zombies
   • werewolves
   • fairies and elves
   • big foot, yetis and sasquatch
   • etc
5. pseudoscience and superstition
   • astrology
   • numerology
   • palmistry
   • dowsing
   • deepak chopra
   • etc
6. the paranormal
   • psychic powers
   • clairvoyance
   • telepathy
   • telekenisis
   • astral projection
   • etc
7. science fantasy
   • ufos and alien visitations
   • time travel
   • faster-than-light travel
   • etc
8. conspiracy theory
   • too numerous to list


9. etc

or in other words, just about anything left on the history channel.

while i enjoy speculation as well as anyone, ultimately i believe only in reason, the power of logic and the empirical method of acquiring facts and knowledge through the gathering and testing of evidence. if you come to me professing a belief in ghosts or ufos, don't expect me to take you seriously and do expect me to be skeptical of everything else you say.

who wants to live forever?

while i for one have no hesitation in answering that question with an "ooh-ooh-ooooh! me, me, me! pick me!" and an enthusiasm that would embarrass arnold horshack, quite a number of people roll their eyes and "pshaw!" the very notion, as if their contemptuous dismissal of the question were based on principle rather than sour grapes. truthfully, as long as the fantasy lies far beyond the furthest demonstrated capabilities of our best doctors and scientists, it's a sane response. still, one need only pick up the news on any given day to conclude that the instinct for self-preservation handily trumps the instinct for sanity-preservation and i would even argue that the will to survive — or more fundamentally, resistance to entropy — is intrinsic to the very nature of life itself.

immortality through licensing: not everyone's first choice.curiously though, many of the same folks who look down their wrinkled nostrils at what appears to be a selfish and unseemly desire also fail to see the hypocrisy in adopting a religion, every example of which, without exception, dangles the promise of everlasting life as the ultimate door prize for membership. immortality of course resurfaces again and again as a favorite literary trope in science fiction and fantasy, and would merit inclusion among my "great fictions of science fiction" were even the most credulous trekwars fanboy actually taken in by any of sci-fi's most seductive claims. clearly, religion continues to win this contest.

why most popular conceptions of technology-conferred immortality remain so wanting was recently summarized by commenter cerberus at pz myers' science blog pharyngula, in a conversation originally catapulted from futurist ray kurzweil's claim that within ten years we could "reverse-engineer" the human brain, which would allow us, in myers' words, "to write software that simulates all the functions of the human brain":

creating a robotic brain to "download your consciousnes" into or the "i'll make a clone version of myself with all my memories" sci-fi fiction immortality ideas are kinda false immortalities. it's at best, assuming a complete successful procedure a process of ending one's consciousness so that a puppet version of yourself can emulate your life possibly for all eternity. great, but what does that do for [the] real you? real you is just as dead and gone and unable to be a part of and appreciate what your puppet is doing in its absence. i'm sure this has been repeatedly addressed in the various thread wars during my absence, but it seems kind of stupid. i'd love to extend lifespans, i'd love to live forever if that was possible, but as long as we're talking fantasies, asking for the power to fart sparkly flying unicorns seems less stupid than asking for a robot facsimile to live forever on your behalf. i mean, if you're going to be all cult about this, pick something that wouldn't be completely contrary to your intended desire if you got it.

the problem is that neither of these techniques provides any continuity between the real, original you — the unique, dynamic but amorphous energy pattern that emerges as a product of your brain activity — and whatever it is that will emerge from your shiny new robot body or your baby-fresh clone body, even if it seems identical. this is the component that must be bodily transferred (pun intended), and not merely copied or "downloaded", to its new host, in order for the real you to live past your expiration date. otherwise, if all you're accomplishing is creating a vanity being as a monument to yourself, there's still nothing more simple, more efficient, more tried and tested, more mundane and less controversial than finding a partner and just having a child.

however ... since we're already vacationing here on futurist fantasy island with a white-suited ray kurzweil, where we already have his schematics for building an entire artificial brain right in front of us, it's suddenly possible to provide the continuity we need in order to engineer our transference into everlasting life. the means is in fact quite simple: by replacing the brain, in a series of discrete, stepwise procedures, with kurzweil's robot circuitry, we can preserve the continuity of consciousness by progressively swapping out sections of the original organic substrate (ie, the gray matter) with new artificial upgrades until we've completely replaced it, right from under the still actively running pattern! by conducting each procedure without rendering the subject unconscious for even a moment, but instead continuously maintaining communication with and monitoring feedback from the subject and assessing our progress after each procedure, we can assure ourselves that the same person who laid down on our operating table is the same person getting back up.

let's say that kurzweil's brain can be broken down into 100 discrete modules, and let's say that the first step is replacing the area that processes smell. so we open up our patient, reroute her smell center to the new robot smell module, turn it on, then shut down the corresponding area of her gray matter, excise it, and pop the module into place, all the while maintaining a continuous stream of realtime communication with her. now, if we were to end the operation right here with just this one module, with our patient's brain now 1% artificial and sporting a new (and perhaps even improved) smell center, no one would credibly question whether she was in fact still the same person who woke up that morning instead of some soulless android changeling. she'd certainly be no more android than anyone else who's ever received any other kind of artificial limb or organ.

and if we fast-forward to the end of the hundredth and final procedure, in which, let's say, we've replaced her libido, making her brain now 100% artificial, could anyone credibly argue that this individual was not the same person who successfully emerged from the 99th procedure, and who successfully emerged from the 98 procedures before it? it would be very difficult to make that argument without being able to pinpoint any moment or period when our patient, or more precisely, when her uninterrupted brain pattern changed in such a way that would no longer allow us to still call it "the real her". it is precisely because that pattern was not allowed to be interrupted that "the real her" was preserved as we built its new chassis under it. so, in geekspeak, instead of attempting to "download" our nebulous and intangible consciousness into a new machine, we've merely installed a live upgrade or "sidegrade" of its existing hardware and firmware as a series of modular patches, without turning off or rebooting the system. voilà — immortality v1.0! or at the very least a new lease on life until her android body is finished, but considering what we've already accomplished, the rest is just child's play.

---

afterword: of course, immortality does become somewhat problematic in about five billion years from now, when our friend the sun finally implodes. we'd most certainly want a ticket out of town, preferably on a ship capable of faster-than-light travel (not bloody likely) with lots of dvds on board for the tens — perhaps hundreds — of thousands of years ahead of us in the tractless void before we arrive anywhere interesting. of course, we need not be awake for the whole adventure: i know my android body will definitely have a "sleep" mode installed.

tempus fuggedabbouddit

welcome to part three of a little screed originally provoked by this admittedly tongue-in-cheek new york times article blaming snafus plaguing our expensive new large hadron collider on gremlins from the future. all cheekiness aside, stories like this serve as fodder for the public's mindless love of the three great fictions of science fiction. part one raided the star wars' intergalactic cantina. part two pulled the plug on star trek's warp drive. today we take a time-out on time-honored time travel.

actually, "trek wars" fans get a bit of good news this time: time travel is possible. but that's good news only if you're looking for a one-way ticket into the future, because there ain't nothing else on the itinerary.

as pointed out in part two, gravity warps space, and since space and time are initmately bound (whence the term "space-time"), gravity also warps time. this has been demonstrated with atomic clocks, which run slower under gravity's influence. take this idea to its conclusion and you can "time-travel" by simply parking a spaceship next to any gravitationally intense object. neutron stars, white dwarfs and black holes are perfect. as you bask in the glow of the gamma ray death scream of interstellar matter spiraling past you into oblivion, events on earth will appear to flit by, but to those on earth monitoring your ship, you'll have entered a state of essentially suspended animation.

but wait — what if there are no black holes in the neighborhood? don't worry, einstein's theory of special relativity demonstrates that the effects of high-speed motion (acceleration) can simulate the effects of gravity for the traveler. we all experience this anytime we ride in a vehicle. when we speed up, we're pulled into our seat; when we cruise, we feel nothing (other than the normal pull of gravity, which we typically ignore), as we do when standing still; when we slow down, we're pulled out of our seat. so in lieu of finding a black hole, you can "time-travel" by simply stepping on the gas and not letting up. as you eventually approach the speed of light, you'll seem suspended in time to those left behind as your existence is extended thanks to relativity.

still, neither of these scenarios represent the sexy type of time-travel that "trek wars" fans love dreaming about: where they get to undo or avoid some remorseful event in the past, play the ultimate stock tip or become a b-movie actor:

sorry to disappoint again, but there ain't no going home. (and obviously not in 2004!) not only are there just as many practical theories about time-travel as there are about warp drives — that is, exactly bupkis — there's no evidence that time can travel backwards or that we can travel into the past. time's arrows fly in only one direction.

consider the definition of time: the interval between two events. if correct, in order to reverse time, we must reverse the events. consider a glass bottle, tossed from your hand to the trash bin. it hits the rim and shatters on the floor, sending pieces big and small everywhere. reversing time is therefore a humpty dumpty act; a time machine would have to retrace the trajectory of every shard as well as the trajectory of the intact bottle as well as the trajectory of your hand — that's a bit of a workout, isn't it?

actually, more than you can imagine, considering that your hand, the glass, the trash bin, the floor and the air surrounding them are all composed of a ginormous (you just knew that word was coming, didn't you?) menagerie of subatomic particles, all in constant motion and interaction. suddenly, the workload on our time machine just went up exponentially: it has to retrace the changes in the spin, vector, orbit, charge, vibration, etc., etc. — that is, every characteristic we can name, including those we have yet to discover — of every particle in that ginormous cloud of particles making up every object we're sending back in time. the machine would also need to isolate the cloud of particles comprising you the operator from its effects (it wouldn't do you any good to go back to 1976 and not remember that leisure suits actually sucked!), no small task if we have to account for the air moving in and out of your lungs, the hair and dandruff falling from your scalp, and the dust mites in your eyelashes!

now that's a workout! imagine trying to send a city or the entire planet back in time. and i suppose it would be just rubbing it in to point out that you wouldn't be able to send anything back before the date you first turned on your machine. (you wouldn't have any data!)

needless to say, no one has a clue how to reverse the order of events in our universe. relativistic physics allows us to play games with our perception of events, because our perception changes as we change our frame of reference, which affects when the light that originally captured the events finally reaches us:

changing our frame of reference changes the apparent distance (time) between the dots (events) on the timeline without affecting their order.

but just changing our frame of reference is like playing games with a film projector. speeding the film up, slowing it down or trying to run it backwards just ain't the same as manipulating the actual events it portrays — no more than photoshopping a image of yourself will get you back your hairline. that's voodoo. the two have nothing to do with each other. we might be able to play with the projector, but time's arrows fly on, unperturbed.

the li'l engine that couldn't

welcome back, "trek wars" fans! i trust that my last rant, the first of three on science fiction's three biggest fictions (intergalactic relations, space travel and time travel), didn't leave you too demoralized, despite my sincere efforts to do exactly that. after all, we live among a potentially exciting galactic club with 100 million potential members, so it's a little shocking that nobody can actually get in the door. talk about "talk to the hand!"

the problem, of course, is that everyone's too damn far away, nobody's got wheels and half the hood's underage anyway. sending out the invites alone, traveling at the speed of light, would take 15,000 years just to get to our first date. if we're lucky. forget about rsvps.

but what about faster-than-light travel? what about "warp drive"? after all, everyone knows nobody walks in l.a.!

well, it's certainly the most popular and most seriously considered way to roll: all you have to do is create a "warp bubble" around your ship that allows it to compress space ahead of it and expand space behind it, exactly the way it's shown in the "next generation" intro.

so ... just exactly how does one create a warp bubble?

... crickets ...

or in more clinical terms:

no scheme that may allow travel at warp velocity has yet been devised that has also been accepted by mainstream science.... they give no knowledge as to how a warp bubble might actually be established.

an approach that may be facilitated by our present level of technological advancement has yet to be proposed.

but figuring it out is just a matter of time, amirite?

*if only* ...

by manipulating the extra spatial dimensions of string theory around a spaceship with an extremely large [translation: ginormous] amount of energy, it would create a "bubble" that could cause the ship to travel faster than the speed of light.

the energy requirements for some warp drives may be absurdly gigantic, e.g. the energy equivalent of 1067 grams might be required to transport a small spaceship across the milky way galaxy. this is orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the universe.

we know gravity warps space, as demonstrated by the bending of light around our sun. unfortunately, even the sun, whose gravitational binding energy is measured (in joules) by a six-comma-whatever-whatever followed by 39 zeroes, manages to deflect light only one quarter of a thousandth of a degree, which should give everybody a gobsmacking clue to the scale of the ginormous (there's that word again!) additional forces needed to generate the amount of warping needed to make our "warp bubble", a bubble powerful enough to compress 15,000 light years of space into a weekend jaunt! all we need is a warp engine capable of doing the work of a ginormous number of suns!

but hey, we'll have the most powerful fuel available in the universe — antimatter — feeding the engines, amirite?

again, sorry to disappoint; antimatter's powerful, no doubt ... but it should be obvious by now that it just doesn't have the bang we need. it's the law of diminishing returns, folks. we got the biggest bang for our buck sixty years ago when we figured out fission and fusion. compared to chemical energy, nuclear energy outperforms it by up to six orders of magnitude. but antimatter outperforms nuclear energy by only four orders of magnitude, not nearly ginormous enough to turn a one megaton ship into the gravitational energy-equivalent of a thousand suns. that's like an ant producing the power of a freight train!

and to the suffering bowels of the budget-conscious, antimatter does tend to give the bean counters indigestion:

antimatter is said to be the most costly substance in existence, with an estimated cost of $25 billion per gram for positrons, and $62.5 trillion per gram for antihydrogen. this is because production is difficult (only a few antiprotons are produced in reactions in particle accelerators), and because there is higher demand for the other uses of particle accelerators. according to CERN, it has cost a few hundred million swiss francs to produce about 1 billionth of a gram (the amount used so far for particle/antiparticle collisions).

... which, with no way to store it, tends to make it a little hard to come by:

assuming an optimal conversion of antiprotons to antihydrogen, it would take two billion years to produce 1 gram or 1 mole of antihydrogen ...

but "trek wars" fanboys and fangirls needn't succumb to dispair. the situation is actually quite encouraging if we can apply moore's law to problem: by doubling the production rate every two years, we'll have our first gram in only 60 years. in just another twenty years after that, we'll finally have our first kilo of the most expensive fuel ever pumped, and just in time for the machines to wipe us out.

next rant: time travel.

size matters

ok, i'm calling bullshit on this story about spoilsports from the future screwing with our expensive new supercollider ... because production delays never happen to big projects. riiiight. talk about your lame excuses for failure!

now, i don't really need to call bs on this story in particular, since the reporter, who describes the storytellers as "otherwise distinguished physicists", sounds like he's already serving up his article on a platter of tongue, stuffed delicately in cheek.

still, it's shameless headline-grabbing stories like these, often the bastard child of some scientist's impish poke-in-the-eye and some journalist's laziness and gullibility, that continue to warp john and jane q. walmart's already rudimentary understanding of just what is and isn't possible in this universe. they've been left fat, lazy and loopy by a steady diet of star trek and star wars.

now don't get me wrong: i'm a huge fan of "trek wars" and science fiction in general (you should see my library) and i wouldn't be the armchair geek i am without their inspiration. on the other hand, i'm also a big fan of superhero comics. but the same folks who can generally grok that humans can't fly or deflect bullets or shoot lasers from their eyes, will tell you with no effort of thought that they believe the three great fictions of modern sci-fi: that aliens have or will visit the earth; that we'll return the courtesy after figuring out faster-than-light travel; that time-travel into the past is possible.

each of these fictions has already consumed more ink than i can practically devote to them, so i'm going to keep things short and sweet. today's rant covers alien races. there'll be no messy details, math, no greek and no quiz. i just want certain hard realities to sink in for once.

in the colorful dramasphere "trek wars" inhabits, the universe is as crowded as calcutta with intelligent races. here's a poem i once read in the philly weekly many years ago:

the only aliens we like are the ones on star trek 'cause they all speak english — martin espada, "gov. wilson of ca talks in his sleep"

ok, it's obvious that's a joke, but still, it's a big universe, right? we can't be the only ones here, can we?

most likely not. the ginormous size of the universe, its ginormous age and the ginormous number of stars in it make it pretty hard to argue against the universe performing multiple encores. in our own galaxy, one among 100 billion galaxies, people paid to study these things estimate 100 million suns like our own, which is considered pretty run-of-the-mill in size and age. that's 100 million rolls of the dice, which we know already hit the jackpot at least once. we're likely surrounded by extraterrestrials.

but there's a catch. (you knew there'd be a catch, didn't you?)

alas, the very same factors which make alien neighbors a virtual certainty — the ginormous size and age of the universe — make it impossible for any of us to ever meet. most folks hear the numbers and dumbly acknowledge them without attempting to truly appreciate their ginormous scale. others, like young earth creationists, simply refuse to accept them. the numbers are stupefying and, like a curt cabbie, they simply drop our tiny brains off with a terse "end o' the line, mac". creationists jumped out the ride after only 6,000 years.

in our own galaxy, those 100 million candidate suns are on average about 15,000 light years apart. we're about one million light years from our nearest neighboring galaxies and everybody's moving even further apart due to the continued expansion of the universe. these distances are inconceivably vast, beyond even the paid imaginations of the writers of "trek wars", who would have viewers believe that texting between the stars will be no more inconvenient than picking up your communicator and that traveling between them no more inconvenient than shuttling from boston to burbank.

but it's not so much a problem that the universe is "too big" per se: the real problem is that our lives are waaay too short! to appreciate the dilemma from a different perspective, consider the lowly housefly. it lives only a few weeks — what's the likelihood that a boston fly will ever meet a burbank fly, especially if neither knows the other exists or quite where to look? it's the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack — times gazillion! and even if both knew where to go, they'd be dead long before they could meet even halfway.

oh, and did i point out the ginormous age of the universe? 14 billions years and counting makes it unlikely that the lifespans of different alien civilizations will overlap during a period when they might be capable of communicating with each other. with your nearest neighbor just 15,000 light years away, you'll have to wait only 30,000 years for a reply. talk about a dull conversation!

remember, in the 4 billion years that life has thrived on earth, 3 billion of that stretch of time was dominated by mute, deaf and blind one-celled microbes, and of the last billion, over 99.99% had to elapse before we became capable of sending signals, much less leaving the planet. if earthlings are typical of the intelligent races in the galaxy, the law of averages eliminates half our prospective neighbors as too young to join the "trek wars" fan club, since they're still too busy pulling themselves out of the ooze. and the other half, sadly, may already be dead.

next rant: space travel