Showing posts with label Planetary Society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Planetary Society. Show all posts

Tuesday 18 February 2014

Discovery FM: science programming on the radio

Considering the large amount of trash on satellite TV documentary channels (yes you, Discovery Channel and National Geographic, with your constant stream of gullible, gibbering 'experts' hunting down Bigfoot, UFOs and megalodon), I thought I'd do a bit of research into science programming on that long side-lined medium, radio.

Having grown up with BBC Radio in the UK I've always listened to a variety of documentaries, particularly on Radio Four. Although I now live in New Zealand one of the joys of the internet is the ability to listen to a large number of BBC science and natural history documentaries whenever I want. The BBC Radio website has a Science and Nature section with dozens of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) programmes from latest news shows such as Inside Science and Material World to series with specific subject matter such as the environmental-themed Costing the Earth.

A long-running live broadcast BBC series that covers an eclectic variety of both scientific and humanities subjects is novelist and history writer Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time. Over the past sixteen years distinguished scientific guests have explored numerous STEM topics in almost two hundred episodes. Although much of the science-themed material leans towards historical and biographical aspects, there has also been some interesting examination of contemporary scientific thought. The programme is always worth listening to, not least for Bragg's attempt to understand - or in the case of spectroscopy, pronounce - the complexities under discussion.

One of my other favourites is the humorous and wide-ranging The Infinite Monkey Cage, hosted by comedian Robin Ince and physicist/media star Brian Cox. Each episode features a non-scientist as well as several professionals, the former serving as a touchstone to ensure any technicalities are broken down into public-friendly phrasing. Many of the show's topics are already popular outside of science, such as SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and comparisons of science fiction to fact. The programme is well worth a listen just for the incidental humour: you can almost hear steam coming out of Brian Cox's ears whenever a guest mentions the likes of astrology. Despite having a former career as a professional pop keyboard player, the good professor is well known for his disparaging marks about philosophy and other non-scientific disciplines, cheekily referring to the humanities in one episode as 'colouring in'.

I confess that there are still many episodes I have yet to listen to, although I notice that a fair few of the programme descriptions are similar to topics I would like to discuss in this blog. In fact, an episode from December 2013 entitled "Should We Pander to Pandas?" bares a startling similarity to my post on wildlife conservation from three months earlier! Coincidence, zeitgeist or are the BBC cribbing my ideas? (It wouldn't be the first time, either...)

A final example of an excellent series is the hour-long live talk show The Naked Scientists, covering both topical stories and more general themes. In addition to the programme itself, the related website includes DIY experiments using materials from around the home and an all-embracing forum.

Although consisting of far fewer series, Radio New Zealand also broadcasts a respectable variety of science programming. There are currently thirty or so titles available in the science and factual section on line, including some interesting cross-overs. For instance, back in 2006 the late children's author Margaret Mahy discussed her interest in science and the boundaries between fact and fiction in The Catalogue of the Universe. Thanks to the internet, it isn't just radio stations that supply audio programming either: the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, releases ad-hoc Science Express podcasts. So far I've been very impressed with the range on offer and it's always good to find in-depth discussion on local science stories.

The United States has a decent range of science programmes on various internet streams and the non-profit NPR network, with the related NPR website dividing the material into obvious themes such as the environment, space, energy and health. Most the programmes are very short - as little as three minutes - and often consist of news items, usually accompanied by a good written prĂ©cis. NPR also distributes Public Radio International's weekly call-in talk show Science Friday, which is extremely popular as a podcast.  The associated website contains videos as well as individual articles from the radio show, although interestingly, the archive search by discipline combines physics and chemistry into one topic but separates nature, biology, and human brain and body, into three separate topics.

Planetary Radio is the Planetary Society's thirty-minute weekly programme related to the organisation's interests, namely astronomy, space exploration and SETI. For any fan of Carl Sagan's - and now Neil deGrasse Tyson's - Cosmos, it's pretty much unmissable.

Talking of which, various scientists now take advantage of podcasting for their own, personal audio channels. A well-known example is deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk, which as the name suggests, frequently concentrates on space-related themes. In addition to the serious stuff, there are interviews with performing artists and their opinion on science and once in a while some brilliant comedy too: the episode earlier this month in which Tyson speaks to God (who admits that amongst other divine frivolities, monkeys and apes were created as something to laugh at and that the universe really is just six thousand or so years old) is absolutely priceless.

Physicist Michio Kaku has gone one further by hosting two weekly shows: the live, three-hour Science Fantastic talk show and the hour-long Exploration. The former's website incorporates an archive of videos, some as might be expected concentrating on futurology, whilst the talk show itself often covers fruity topics verging on pseudoscience. The latter series is generally more serious but the programme is slightly spoilt by the frequent book-plugging and over-use of baroque background music.

The good news is that far from reducing radio the internet has developed a new multi-media approach to traditional broadcasting, with comprehensive archives of material available from a multitude of sources. One thing the US, UK and New Zealand programming has in common is the inclusion of celebrities, especially actors, both to enhance series profile and to keep content within the realm of comprehension by a general audience.

All in all, I'm pleasantly surprised by the variety and quality of audio programming emerging from various nations, as opposed to the pandering to new age, pseudoscientific and plain woolly thinking that frequently passes for science television broadcasting. Even book shops aren't immune: I was recently disappointed to notice that a major New Zealand chain book store had an 'Inspiration' section twice the size of its STEM material. So the next time you see a team of researchers in on a quest for a species of shark that has been extinct for over a million years, why not relax with good old-fashioned, steam-powered radio instead?

Thursday 25 February 2010

Are we alone? Wow, Little Green Men and the SETI faithful

According to the film version of Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2010: Odyssey Two, we now live in 'The Year We Make Contact'. Therefore it seems apt to take a quick look at the history of SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, just in case fact should follow fiction. The recently-discovered antics of the Australian octopi that use coconut shells as mobile homes prove that it isn't just the music-loving, film-making and now liquid-quantifying chimpanzees who erode the boundaries between Homo sapiens and other animals. The Gallup mark mirror test has shown that apes, elephants, dolphins and even some birds have a degree of self-awareness exceeding that of human babies less than several months old. When combined with research into animal tool use and the archaeological evidence for rituals conducted by our extinct Neanderthal cousins, our species' mental abilities appear less and less distinctive. So if there are varying degrees of self-aware animals down here, what are the chances of intelligent life "up there"?

New analysis of the Murchison meteorite fragments which landed in Australia in 1969 has found 14,000 carbon-based compounds, including dozens of amino acids different from those known on Earth. If anything, this evidence is more intriguing than the now infamous Martian meteorite ALH 84001 which has so far failed to provide conclusive evidence of fossilised alien nanobacteria. But the idea of life being able to survive outside our comfortable biosphere has gained credence over the past few decades with the discovery of extremophiles, including the diverse organisms that live around submarine volcanic vents and the microbes that can survive gamma radiation several thousand times the dosage lethal to humans.

Whilst there has been a growth of interest in exobiology since the NASA experiments on Mars in the mid-1970s via the two Viking landers, a good deal of today's research investigates the notion of intelligent life elsewhere, largely via radio astronomy. Notable organisations include the Planetary Society, co-founded by the late Carl Sagan, and the Seti Institute, co-founded by Jill Tarter, the real-life model for Sagan's fictional Contact protagonist Eleanor Arroway. Yet despite the lack of positive data after half a century's effort, both the pro and con lobbies maintain passionate support for their ideas. One of the best-known SETI pioneers is American astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake, whose eponymous equation has been argued by both sides despite being deemed by some, including author Michael Crichton, as scientifically worthless. This stems from the fact that most of the values in the Drake equation, aiming to establish the potential number of civilisations in the galaxy capable of interstellar communication, are as unknown as when first written in 1960. Over the decades many researchers have had a go at 'filling in the blanks' and achieved results ranging from one (us) to over a million. Clearly, it is not an equation that can be resolved utilising our current knowledge of astrophysics, biology and almost everything in between.

As might be expected the UK's involvement in SETI has been somewhat minimal, although the 76-metre diameter Lovell Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank has been used intermittently in this context since the late 1990s. Last month even saw the Royal Society host a SETI conference that included such astronomical luminaries as Martin Rees, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Frank Drake. Unfortunately the traditional British no-nonsense approach lost Jodrell Bank in particular (and the country in general) its chance for pioneering SETI research when Bernard Lovell, in a decision he apparently later regretted, turned down a request to use the very same, then-named Mark 1, radio telescope in 1959.

Although over four hundred planets have been discovered (mostly indirectly) around other stars, none are obviously in the 'Goldilocks zone' where it is believed conditions are suitable for life. Having said that, the recent discoveries of water, mostly as ice, on the Moon, Mars, and two or three other satellites, are obviously positive signs. Then again, there is an enormous difference between those who support the notion of alien microbial life as opposed to intelligent organisms able to transmit signals between solar systems. As early as 1950 physicist Enrico Fermi developed his famous paradox which states that if there are any alien societies capable of interstellar travel, or just communications technology comparable to ours, then we should have found evidence by now. Despite several false alerts such as Jocelyn Bell Burnell's 1967 discovery of pulsars (which she initially labelled as LGM or 'Little Green Men') and the never-repeated 'Wow!' signal detected at Ohio State University in 1977, there has been no unequivocal evidence from the electromagnetic spectrum. In addition, and despite the plethora of orbiting telescopes from Hubble to WISE, there is no evidence for astro-engineering artefacts such as Dyson spheres that a more advanced civilisation might be able to construct.

One international project that has shown the immense level of international grass roots support for the hypothesis is SETI@home, which over the past decade has utilised five million home computers to process radio telescope signal data. Even though such current projects do not involve public money or remove time from research with seemingly more potential of success, there is still plenty of vociferous opposition, even from the scientific community. Arguments range from the practical, such as if we are already moving to fibre optics and digital signals perhaps radio broadcasts are too rare to be detected (some groups have now started laser-based research), to intense speculation on alien motives, which is clearly more in the realm of psychology than science. One of more interesting of the latter is the idea of deliberately non-communicative aliens: since like everyone else SETI researchers have the hard-wired human instinct for exploration, how can we have knowledge of an extraterrestrial psyche until we achieve contact? We surmise at our peril!

Of course another problem facing SETI is the manner in which it has been linked to the lunatic fringe. The unfortunate interest shown in the hypothesis by everyone from New Age mystics to conspiracy theorists taints the idea as verging on pseudoscience, regardless of how scientific the investigations themselves have been. In 1993 NASA's main SETI programme, at one point renamed the High Resolution Microwave Survey in an effort to remove the 'giggle factor', was cancelled after less than one year's operation. But then is it that surprising that US Government support has frequently been withdrawn, leaving only privately funded SETI projects as per today? High-profile supporters including Steven Spielberg and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen may have boosted its status, but is SETI strictly scientific despite its methods and technology? After all, we could listen for thousands of years without receiving evidence, but as the old adage goes, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.

Certainly the zeal with which Carl Sagan, probably the best known SETI advocate from the 1970s to 1990s, approached the enterprise had an almost religious air to it. His novel Contact develops this aspect by making the heroine rely solely on faith rather than physical evidence of her meeting with an extra-terrestrial. It could be argued that by presenting the alien in the guise of the protagonist's father, Sagan replaced conventional religiosity with a paternal God-like being with astounding powers. As Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law states (and as the Aztecs and many others found to their cost): 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'.

One of Sagan's early claims from the era of Vietnam and Watergate was that receipt of a signal would not only show the possibility of surviving technological adolescence but might also provide information to help us do the same. Since scientific thought is entrenched in the historical and cultural biases of the scientists involved, not to mention the increasing use of models and metaphors at the cutting edge, how easy would it be to understand even scientific concepts from a culture probably millennia more advanced than our own? Even if we could decipher alien scientific data, the next obvious problem is might we inadvertently destroy ourselves via some form of industrial accident, or developments in the $1.2 trillion per annum arms race, brought about by precipitant use of advanced technology? This displays another danger of SETI research: the wide-ranging but pointless speculation in lieu of hard evidence. Until we receive a message, all such conjecture is only of use to acknowledge our own hopes and fears. Even the mildly optimistic notion of extra-terrestrial contact bringing wonder or enchantment to humanity could be countered by slow translation progress in this era of the 140-character Tweet. When the news reports over the ALH 84001 meteorite were at their height in the mid-1990s, I remember work colleague telling me she was heartily sick of hearing about it. Clearly one person's mysterium fascinans (as Stephen Jay Gould might have phrased it), is another's mind-numbing tedium!

How long we will keep listening for is also open to question. If after a few more decades of concerted effort we have still not found definitive evidence, one possibly positive outcome might be the increased promotion of eco-awareness via the obvious rarity of own biologically-active planet. But current estimates suggest we have so far undertaken only about one hundred-trillionth of the radio coverage deemed necessary for a thorough search. It will be at least decades before we can afford to build even robot craft capable of travelling interstellar distances in reasonable spans of time, so until then we have little choice but to rely on our various types of receiver. So why bother at all? For the comparatively small sums involved, there's not much else that could provide such an astonishing potential return. As for the pessimists out there, I can offer nothing better than Monty Python's Eric Idle: "And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space / 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!"

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