Baby Please Don't Go

In an NPR interview this morning, the singer-songwriter Dar Williams recalled that in 1987 she took a class that introduced her to the concept of "global warming."  "And we were like, Noooo," she chuckled.  Was this because she and her fellow students thought of a world that stays forever the same and never changes?  I get the impression that many people think so, even environmentalists, and that is weird to me. As a fifth-grader in the early 1960s I read books on science that told me about the Ice Ages, among other things, how the glaciers had come and gone, and were still receding right now.  Not long afterward I read that the length of the day and the year had changed over time; I also read about the long geological and evolutionary timelines, not to mention continental drift: changes in the environment that happens over thousands, even millions of years.

None of this made me anxious.  I was an unusual child, of course.  But I found those books in the school library, in a small three-room rural school, and as I remember they had clearly been read before.  So maybe I'm not all that unusual after all.

Imagine my bafflement, then, when an algorithm led me to this article in The Atlantic, a classy magazine for smart people.  "The Moon Is Leaving Us," says the headline, "and we can't stop it."  You can't blame writers for the headlines their editors come up with, but the author of this piece, Marina Koren, set the overwrought tone herself.

Each year, our moon moves distinctly, inexorably farther from Earth—just a tiny bit, about an inch and a half, a nearly imperceptible change. There is no stopping this slow ebbing, no way to turn back the clock. The forces of gravity are invisible and unshakable, and no matter what we do or how we feel about them, they will keep nudging the moon along. Over many millions of years, we’ll continue to grow apart.

She's a bit defensive.

Given this rather melodramatic description, you might wonder: Don’t you have better things to think about than the moon? Well no, not really, because I’m a space reporter and it’s my job to contemplate celestial bodies and write about them. And also because a representation of this phenomenon recently played out in China during festivities for the Mid-Autumn Festival, which marks the full moon closest to the fall equinox. A giant balloon designed to resemble the moon, craters and all, broke free and rolled into the street. Video footage of the unscripted moment shows two people running after the massive moon as it tumbles away. Bye!

I don't think I'm being too harsh to say that this is magical thinking: the Chinese balloon is an omen of the heartless moon abandoning us.  It isn't a space reporter's job, I would have thought, to anthropomorphize natural phenomena and celestial objects: "'lunar retreat'—a delightful term, as I’d prefer to imagine the moon enjoying itself at a relaxing getaway, bending its rocky body into various yoga poses, rather than slowly ghosting Earth." But maybe that's why Marina Koren is a staff writer for a prestigious magazine and I'm not.

Of course scientists love to attack science writing for the ignorant masses, but they also love to try to frighten us, as they frighten themselves, about the runaway moon, the sneakiness of Mother Nature, the heat death of the universe, and the yawning depths of infinite time.  Koren warns her readers:

Someday, about 600 million years from now, the moon will orbit far enough away that humankind will lose one of its oldest cosmic sights: total solar eclipses. The moon won’t be able to block the sun’s light and cast its own shadow onto Earth.

OMFG, like really? What am I going to do for excitement on a Saturday night when there are no more total solar eclipses?  It's highly unlikely, to the point of certainty, that "humankind" will still be around in six hundred million years anyway.  But that doesn't mean we can't work ourselves into a snit about the existential loss.

Koren concludes her piece by telling about the first time she ever looked through a telescope, thanks to a neighbor who set one up on their building's roof -- "this weekend."  Okay, she's probably a city kid, never had the chance before, maybe she lived in a city with no planetarium or observatory or school astronomy clubs or any other public resources.  But still: a science writer, a "space reporter," never sought out an opportunity to look through a telescope until the past few weeks?  (I shouldn't overgeneralize from myself, but by junior high school I'd managed to beg a small, relatively cheap reflector telescope from my parents for Christmas or my birthday, and read books about grinding a mirror for a bigger one.  Which I never managed to do, but my opportunities were limited and I managed to use them.  Kids these days...)

Human-accelerated climate change is real, as is the incrementally growing distance between the moon and the earth.  But reading stuff like Koren's article makes me wonder how much of many people's concern about global warming comes not from the evidence but an apocalyptic panic generated from within.  The time is fulfilled, and the end of the world is only 600 million years away -- repent while there's still time!

Much Ado About Nothing

The Jupiter-Saturn conjunction coming up on December 21 continued to bug me, so I browsed around some more.  This video clip from the Astrophysics Group at the University of Exeter in the UK is one of the best things I found, especially for its information about binoculars and telescopes generally. 

If you're really interested, the University of Exeter Astrophysics Group will attempt to livestream the conjunction through their telescope, but as the narrator says, it's winter in the UK, and there's no telling whether weather will permit a viewing.  You can send them your email address through their website, and they'll notify you when the livestream will be tried.

But the video still doesn't explain, to my satisfaction anyway, why this conjunction is so significant.  The closest it comes is to note that "the aim is to see both Jupiter and Saturn together in the same field of view."  That doesn't seem like a big deal to me; nor does it explain why such conjunctions would have caused excitement for most of human history, before the telescope was invented.  I understand the fascination of eclipses, comets, meteor showers -- events which cause changes in the sky in real time, and which make a more distinct spectacle.  The narrator, Professor Matthew Bate, says that the livestream will include a commentary, which indicates that without a knowledgeable guide a layperson would not see much of interest even through a telescope.

The DQ, or Dementia Quotient, of the comments, isn't extremely high.  Bate responds kindly to the most explicit one:

Wow!   Very excited about this Great Conjunction, heralding in the very earliest stages of the birth of the New Age.  Your video is wonderful and explains everything so easily and so clearly. At last somebody,  somewhere is showing us what to look for in the sky.
Thank you so very much for this.  Will be watching it again and again.  xx

Of course this conjunction heralds in nothing of the kind.  Similar, even closer alignments have happened numerous times for millennia without initiating new epochs or anything else.  (I suddenly remembered that a great Reset, as some other commenters call it, was supposed to happen in, I think, the 1980s.  New Age groups were very excited about it, but nothing happened and it sank into oblivion as most failed predictions do.  The Village Voice published a big article in the aftermath; I'll try to remember what the event was called, maybe I can track it down.

I point this out because it confirms my suspicion that the real "significance" of conjunctions belongs to astrology, not astronomy.  That astronomers are talking it up indicates that the field hasn't entirely left its astrological history behind.  As I looked for more reasons to take the Great Conjunction seriously, more and more astrological sites turned up in my search.  This one, for example, bills itself as Science Frontiers Online.  The post acknowledges that past conjunctions have stirred up a lot of anticipation, but brought forth zilch.  Nevertheless:

This does not mean that historical upheavals are never correlated with planetary conjunctions. If a society believes strongly enough in the power of the stars and planets to shape human destiny, events may be correlated with the heavens. Such was the case in ancient China.

    In China, the "Mandate of Heaven" concept has been used since ancient times as both a framework for history and a guide to future actions. The basic idea is that Heaven awards ruling power to a sage-king because of his virtue. His descendants remain as Earthly deputies until they become corrupted, whereupon outraged Heaven gives signs in the sky that the Mandate has passed on to a different sage-king to continue the cycle.

Three transfers of the Heavenly Man-date marked the beginnings of the Hsu, Shang, and Chou Dynasties. In fact, the tightest grouping of the five visible planets in the period from 3,000 B.C. to 5,000 A.D. (8,020 years!), occurred, on February 26, 1953 B.C., when they were aligned in a 4.33° arc. This was seen by the Chinese power brokers as a celestial command to begin a new social order. Thus was born the Hsu Dynasty. Similar, but looser, conjunctions ushered in the Shang Dynasty (December 20, L576 B.C.) and Chou Dynasty (May 28. L059 B.C.).

So, astrology can influence human destiny, if humans believe in it strongly enough. 

If you believe that the novel coronavirus is a hoax, that belief may affect your behavior, but that doesn't prove your belief true, as numerous people have learned to their sorrow.

The Astronomy Domine blog also turns out to be an astrological site, and its discussion of conjunctions relies on astrological assumptions.  It has charts and lots of numbers, which is a handy reminder that numbers and calculations may not prove anything or have any meaning, no matter how impressive they look.  This article, which has some historical interest, is from an astronomical journal, but it refers to astrological interpretations of conjunctions.  It seems, then, that fascination with the Great Conjunction is at best a hangover from astronomy's astrological roots.

The Old Farmer's Almanac has a nice post on the Great Conjunction by astronomer Bob Berman, noting that some say that "the two giant planets will seemingly merge into a single star or rare double planet."

The truth? Well, if you skipped your last optometrist appointment, you might indeed perceive the two planets as a single brilliant object.

But those with normal vision should see them extremely close together, but as separate-looking “stars,” with Jupiter brilliant and Saturn as merely bright. Let’s call it a “double planet.” No matter...

The writer stresses that the two planets will be visible in the same telescopic field, so that seems to be the main if not only payoff to the event.

But remember, this is not an occurrence that’s threatening in any way. They seem close together, but Saturn is actually far behind Jupiter—twice as distant, in fact—so those giant worlds are actually nowhere near each other.

This is so much better than prattle about the two gas giants sidling up for "a close slow dance."  Aside from the fact that they won't move visibly, that bit implies that there is some interaction between them, as between the members of a slow-dancing couple. Part of the problem might be that many working scientists have no idea how to talk to laypeople about their highly abstract or rarefied subjects, so they just talk down to us.  Bob Berman and Matthew Bate show that it's not necessary; go, O scientists, and do likewise.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnd ... I Dunno!

It appears to me that science journalism is getting worse.  Everything is turning into sports punditry, because everything is sports.  And everything must be liveblogged, and there must be explanations and we have to know everything right now.  There's no room for uncertainty, because science is knowledge.

So, like, this comet, see, it approached the sun, and went around it.  And the sun is totally hot, see, so like nobody knew whether it would melt, or what.  In fact I totally thought it like fell in!  But then finally it showed up again, and what happened?  Search me!

At some point after perihelion I made a decision. I drew a line in the sand, saying I thought this was an ex-comet. But then, not long after, like Lazarus or a zombie, ISON came back from the dead...

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Comets and cats are equally predictable. It’s a losing game to be firm with them; your best move is to watch, wait, and enjoy the show while it happens. That’s my plan, for sure.

Okay, I admit I'm being a bit unfair.  If this science blogger had been more dogmatic and sure of himself, I'd have jumped him for that.  But this rambling seems so similar to the kind of coverage we get of elections, sports, OJ Simpson's white Ford Bronco, and other processes: somebody trying to fill up time (or bandwidth) when he doesn't really have anything that intelligent to say, and it's really too soon to say anything.  But somebody has to have coverage, and it's better to say something than to say nothing.  Because the whole world is watching.

This is why I stopped watching election night coverage sometime in the 1970s: it just seemed pointless to listen to these mediocrities bloviate all evening. Phil Plait may know his science, but he's a lousy writer, or like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, he's trying to sound hep and accessible, the fighting radical scientist who's not afraid to talk to the Kids in their own language.  This is supposed to get young people excited about science so they'll major in science in college and build space ships to take us to the stars, or something.

I like your science; I do not like your science writers.