SETI Reset—Part 1

I have been taking an online course on astrobiology from the University of Arizona—where robust astronomical research has been the norm. I have taken a couple of previous courses from the university's astronomy team and appreciate their teaching abilities. This course blends their preeminence in astronomy with some of the latest discoveries of thousands of Earth-like planets around other stars and the potential for these planets to harbor life in some form; maybe similar to Earth.

Here is a question that has repeatedly arisen in the human mind: Is planet Earth alone in the universe at harboring life, or might there be other life-sustaining worlds? Is life common, rare, or nonexistent elsewhere in this cosmos? Does intelligent life exist out there—say, critters as smart as we think we are?

We are getting closer and closer to finding answers to these questions. As I have posted here several times, our search is being aided and abetted by the recent discovery of thousands of planets circling local stars. Without planets, you can't have life elsewhere.

A consistent search process for extraterrestrial life was begun a few decades ago—dubbed SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Its premise is that intelligent civilizations “out there” would have reached a technological capability at some point—as we have—and would have transmitted electromagnetic signals (EM) into space; signals that could eventually arrive at Earth. If so, might we receive them and verify that we're not alone? After all, we've been inadvertently transmitting EM signals from our planet for decades. Old TV episodes of “I Love Lucy” are currently flying through interstellar space, just waiting to be captured by some alien technology; maybe to the amusement of otherworldly beings.

So SETI was established decades ago—having been designed to receive some of those alien civilizations' equivalent TV programs, or, hopefully (and more likely) signals consciously sent out to inform beings like us that we're not alone. Yet my online course professor made the point that, although we're searching for outer space life, SETI is not really designed to locate outer-space intelligent life, but to discover extraterrestrial technology that is similar to ours.

We haven’t yet detected a signal, let alone determined the presence of either intelligence or the existence of life elsewhere. At best we currently can register the presence of EM signals that would indicate some sort of advanced technological civilization. One issue in our search for ET that possibly is being dealt with inappropriately is, Would intelligence “out there” display itself anything like what on Earth has evolved?

Furthermore, there is another key question that was posed many decades ago, by a prominent physicist/astronomer: If there are other advanced civilizations in outer space, where are they? Why haven't we already heard from them? This is a troubling question for many cosmologists. Again, we're not yet able to determine if there is or is not intelligence out there—we're asking if they have evolved technologies like ours, and, if so, where are the signals?

I can imagine several reasons why we've yet to capture a signal that we can confidently say came from outer space (and maybe never will): (1) The distances are simply too vast; signals from even the closest stars take many years to reach us; so, were we to detect a more distant signal, it may have been transmitted thousands of years ago. Any signal we might receive could be from a distant past, from a civilization that is no longer even existing. Where might our technology be, in another thousand years? Would our current primitive way of interstellar communication even be useful then? 

Other possibilities next time…

Placebo Palliative—Part 2

Yet another fascinating example of the power of the placebo effect was described in the late 1880s by the famous anthropologist Franz Boaz. He wrote about an interview with an elder Kwakiutl shaman named Quesalid. (The Kwakiutl people are a tribe in the Vancouver Island region of Canada.) When Quesalid was a boy he thought that the tribe's shamans were fakers, so he plotted to expose them. He ingratiated himself with a shaman, who took him on as an apprentice.

Quesalid eventually learned the tricks of the shamanic trade—particularly one ritual in which a shaman attended to a sick member of the tribe. The ritual was to call for a ceremony, in which tribal members danced and chanted, while the shaman had secretly stuck a wad of eagle down feathers in his mouth. He would place his mouth on the body, over the “source” of the ailment, bite down on his tongue to draw blood, spit out the bloody wad, and pronounce the sick person cured, as if he had drawn out the sickness.

Quesalid realized that he had evidence of fraud he wanted. But before he could expose their hoax, he was summoned to the dwelling of a gravely sick boy. He was trapped. He decided to proceed with what he was convinced was a phony ceremony, and so he did. The boy immediately recovered. Quesalid went on to become a venerated shaman. (This episode is described in a 2011 book, Born Liars: Why We Can't Live Without Deceit, by Ian Leslie.)

Countless similar stories have been recorded by anthropologists. As in the case of Quesalid, many shamans know they engage in subterfuge, but still believe in their powers. And it works. Illusions do heal.

Decades after Quesalid’s confession to Franz Boaz, Henry Beecher discovered the power of subterfuge on the operating tables of WWII's Italy. He went on to test his hypothesis in carefully-controlled clinical trials at Harvard. And now in 2019, researchers at Dartmouth showed how anyone who believed in the potency of their treatment—even if it was phony—could cure. The human mind is a powerful organ. Belief is a powerful drive. Our bodily healing mechanisms can appear to make miracles.

Placebo Palliative—Part 1 (11/1/19)

The so-called “placebo effect” has been around, in one form or another, for millennia. In its simplest form, it is the relief that one gets from a treatment that has no medical basis. It stems from a person's expectations of the treatment, rather than from the intervention of any active medicine. The root of the word is from Latin “I shall please.” Throughout history, the placebo effect has often been derided as a fake or fraudulent type of treatment, but both the medical and psychological sciences today recognize it as real.

In fact, it is responsible for the use of double-blind medical and psychological tests, wherein neither the patient nor the personnel delivering the treatment know if the procedure is real or not. That is because subtle hints transmitted by the caregiver may give away the truth of the treatment. Of course, this is exactly what many practitioners depend on, as the examples below demonstrate.

One of the first modern experiences of the placebo effect occurred during WWII in Italy, when an American physician, Henry Beecher, who specialized in pain relief, found himself conducting surgeries on wounded American soldiers. Medical supplies ran low, just as Beecher needed to operate on a badly-wounded soldier. The usual pain reliever, morphine, was exhausted. Desperate to perform the surgery, Beecher gave the wounded man an injection of diluted salt water—lying to him that it was a powerful anesthetic. The soldier calmed himself and endured the operation with very little pain.

Beecher was forced to repeat the ruse several times in the heat of battle and with short supplies, and it worked every time. Back home after the war, Beecher and his Harvard colleagues performed several controlled studies that confirmed the efficacy of placebos. They showed that imaginary medications worked! A few years later he published a paper which argued that clinical trials on any new drug must be conducted as a double-blind test, meaning that neither the experimenter nor the patient knows if the treatment is real or just a placebo, since the experimenters could reveal the truth through subtle clues, if they knew.

The placebo effect was once again recently confirmed in a clever study at Dartmouth University, which demonstrated the power of a physician's attitude, when administering medications. The study randomly and arbitrarily assigned a group of undergraduate students, some to be patients and some doctors. The “doctors” were given a cream to be used to treat induced (but harmless) burns in the “patients.” Half of the doctors were told that the cream they had was real medicine and the rest were told they had a placebo. The kicker was that all the creams were fake—all were placebos.

Those “doctors” who administered what they thought was a legitimate treatment found that their patients got pain relief—better than those who thought they were using a placebo. Why did it work, despite the fact that all of the creams were the same and were bogus? Careful analysis of videos showed that the “doctors” who believed their salve was effective showed their confidence in their conversations and facial expressions, while those who believed their treatment was fake revealed their disbelief in a similar manner, even though they tried not to show their bias. The “patients” responded to the nonverbal positive empathy and faith of their “physician.”

More on placebos next time…

Fat Spider

This guy was over two inches (5 cm) long. Notice the sets of eyes. Click to enlarge.

One Female's Feat

A recent article in the Guardian described how a computer-savvy woman perfected an artificial intelligence (AI) program to deal with a growing problem on the internet. For some strange reason an increasing number of women are receiving what are called “dick pix.” These are photos emailed to them of a penis—supposedly that of the sender. These pix are often startling, shocking, and most often unwelcome to the women.

I won't try here to guess what's behind this trend. It's as mystifying and bizarre to me as are many practices on today's social media. The anonymity offered by the internet seems to encourage a certain type of person to say and do offensive things that they'd probably restrain from doing, face to face.

This lady decided she'd had enough of dick pix sent her way—she'd opened up her email or Instagram or Facebook account a few times too often, to see a gross photo. She was disgusted at this practice. So she sent out an invitation on the internet for anyone (presumably mostly men) to send her photos of their genitalia. She then used the many kinds of penile pictures she collected to train an AI program to recognize what they were—rather than, say, a handsome eggplant—and to immediately delete them.

In time, her AI program achieved 95% accuracy at expunging dick pix on Instagram. Wouldn't many women agreeably download such an app, which would allow them to turn on their smartphones without cringing? Those few women who enjoyed the prurient pix could simply reject the app and continue their titillating tradition.

This lady's remarkable accomplishment brings two thoughts to my mind: the first is that she refutes the common assumption that most computer geeks are male. She is evidence to the contrary.

The second thought is more a question: If a lone (female) wolf can accomplish this AI feat, what's holding back Facebook, Instagram, and Google from achieving something similar? Their computer geeks are legion and they've repeatedly demonstrated their astounding AI accomplishments. Many people who use these social media—including governmental authorities—have demanded that they do something to counter or check the various internet attacks launched by nefarious characters, with a definite lack of response on the part of the tech giants.

In what appears to be one meaningless response, Facebook has described how it formed a group of people whose job is to monitor online postings, in order to block the more offensive ones. These poor Facebook folks are known to suffer from the trauma of viewing despicable postings, day after day. Is this the best that Facebook can do—distressing and depressing a bunch of loyal employees? Where is their amazing skill at creating software algorithms? How is it that one woman can show them up? Could it be a lack of passion on their part? Their passion—and accomplishments—seem to be more aligned at making money from ads, rather than protecting their users.

Children's Challenge

We are currently witnessing an extraordinary type of activism—both in the US and around the world—on the part of young people. They are forming movements of protest against the numerous injustices of our society: for example, climate emergency, gun violence, anti-immigration sentiment, racism, inequality, and environmental pollution. The youth are fed up with inaction and the complicit behavior of their elders.

They see their future being ravaged by climate crisis and pollution. They see their lives being made dangerous and threatening by gun violence and media hostility. They see little chance of achieving a comfortable lifestyle, as the super-rich horde most all the resources. All of these injustices are being fed by our extremely polarized “adult” culture—especially in the US.

These youths are organizing mass demonstrations across the globe, trying to appeal to the consciences of political leaders to quit dithering, stop being puppets of the super-rich, and begin showing responsibility for the oaths of office that they took.

Besides the public protests, young people are also taking action in the courts of law. Their contention is that these injustices—particularly the climate emergency—are a violation of the rights of the unborn, let alone against them. Youths have filed lawsuits in at least two US states against both state or federal agencies, for their failure to take action on these disasters. In similar fashion, youths in other countries are taking legal action against their governments. This past September young people brought a legal complaint on climate crisis to the UN.

It is interesting that young people are taking the lead in clamoring for change—although not surprising. Youths have led before—in South Africa against apartheid in the mid-20^th century, and in the First Palestinian Intifada against Israeli aggression in the 1980s.

Why is it that unsophisticated and immature young people take to the streets and courts, while their elders remain complacent and compliant? The answer is both involved and multi-faceted, but I suspect three possibilities can explain much of elder inaction: (1) over time the older generation has often gradually come to accept the injustices, as the offenses have, little by little, become almost viewed as the norm; (2) some of elders have struggled in the past to acquire what fragile gains they have acquired, and are fearful of their modest progress being abruptly and capriciously terminated by authorities; and (3) they simply no longer have the energy to take a stand.

Our current, rampantly-damaging human culture needs to be challenged; to be confronted. There are many unhealthy things going on today that are fostered either by a disinclination to look to the future (often due to an overemphasis on today’s bottom line), or are encouraged by fear and polarization. 

Many adults have retreated into their isolated silos or bubbles, afraid to confront the injustices or demand change. Too many adults have bought into a top-down process, hoping to bring change; but that approach has demonstrated itself as either being too sluggish for our current crises, or is usually co-opted by the rich and powerful. There is no time left to dither or delay... a bottom-up revolution is badly needed. Let our youth lead the way!

Earth and Moon

This is a NASA photo of the Moon transiting in front of the Earth, taken from a NASA spacecraft. Click to enlarge.