In case you’re curious, JE Brandenburg, the fellow who claims to have evidence of nuclear war between intelligent aliens on Mars, is commenting at length on my article criticizing his silly hypothesis. His arguments so far are 1) he’s a physicist, 2) there are radioactive deposits on Mars, 3) there was once lots of water and oxygen on Mars, 4) the mediocrity principle and the Fermi paradox, therefore…aliens.
I will agree with 1, 2, and 3 (which don’t support his specific hypothesis), but 4 is nonsense: the mediocrity principle is a philosophical position, that one shouldn’t assume that something is special until you’ve examined a sufficient sample, and you should by default assume that it is representative of an average. The Fermi paradox isn’t a paradox at all, if you don’t assume that intelligent life spawns in vast numbers all over the universe — the simpler assumption is that intelligent life is rare, which is a further strike against Brandenburg’s hypothesis.
This is stuff that could only get printed in a cheesy journal like The Journal of Cosmology. He suggests that you read his paper there, at http://journalofcosmology.com/JOC24/Brandenburg.pdf. You might want to copy and paste the link to make it work, since it seems that JoC has blocked referrals from Pharyngula.
The article is hilarious. It has a long section defending the existence of the Face on Mars, based on the work of Mark Carlotto, whose work I’ve also read — he’s an expert at making up anything he wants out of highly processed graphic images. The paper has 15 different renderings of the Cydonian Face, and also pictures of Olmec heads and the Egyptian Sphinx. It was a trip back to 1995 to see all that crap spewed out again.
By the way, here’s an article about someone who applied the Mediocrity Principle to the solar system, with even more interesting conclusions than Brandenburg’s.
Here’s what Dick figured. At the time, there were an average of 280 people per square mile in England. And because he thought every surface of our universe bears life, it would naturally occur at roughly the same population density. So from comets and asteroids to the rings of Saturn, if you knew how big something was, you could guess how many beings live there. Thus, Jupiter would be the most populated object in the solar system, with 7 trillion beings. The least populated would be Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, tallying just 64 million.
Dick, you see, was a very religious man, but also a voracious scientist, one of the last of the so-called natural theologists, who looked for signs of God’s influence in nature. For Dick, it simply did not make sense for God to have created the cosmos just to have it sit around unoccupied. There must be creatures out there capable of enjoying its beauty, because God wants all his work appreciated.
So, am I to understand that:
A) Martians collected oversized replicas of human representations of faces gathered from disparate cultures; or
B) Martians transmitted their own cultural ideal representations of uncannily human faces, but only a single example of each to disparate human civilisations separated by geography and history; or
C) These things which look like faces if you squint, look almost like some particular faces if you really, really squint.
And pyramids. And explosions. Basically, Stargate.
Shades of Thor H! Will he be sailing a wooden spaceship to Mars next?
Bach threw down his newspaper and said, “Nonsense, eh? Well, fuck you, Christian Ludwig!”
/baroque joke (barjoke?)
Also: 4) Were you there?
Haha, reply to this Professor Meyerz!!!!!!!
(Just because you can never be sure around here: the above was snark.)
Yeah, well, 5).
@#3- if it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it.
But if intelligent life is rare in the universe, then I probably won’t get to ride on the starship Enterprise to visit the Vulcans! So obviously PZ is dead wrong.
Now there’s something I miss about the old Scienceblogs site: kooks who composed every comment as a formal letter complete with salutation and closing. Mr. Old Person, your name appears at the top of every comment, I know it’s you.
forget the rest of the universe[s?], intelligent life is pretty-well non-existent down here on Earth
Actually, intelligent life need not even be all that rare. All that is necessary is that:
1)They tend to kill themselves off before gaining the ability to traverse interstellar space.
2)The interstellar space be sufficiently difficult that they are confined to their own home solar system. (Radiation by itself might explain this). Also, if you were going to try to communicate, why would you waste energy beaming toward the exurbs of the galaxy?
I don’t understand physics well enough to sort through his journalistic history (that is to say, I don’t understand physics at all). Has he always been prone to woo or is this a recent development?
I find it very surprising that any scientist would embrace such Fox-Mulder-approved “evidence” as the “face on Mars”.
Truly a sign that it’s a legitimate journal dedicated to open scientific inquiry, and not a website run by thin-skinned cranks.
Thomas Dick’s hypothesis lends support to The Little Prince‘s premise!
Surely they don’t really have a print edition, do they?
No idea. You can find dubious interviews and whatnot by what seems to be the same individual, but I haven’t paid too much attention to the dates, nor have I been able to definitively confirm it is the same person.
His use / abuse of the mediocrity principle is perhaps not too surprising? In the previous thread here at FtB, I pointed out that what may be the same individual wrote a book full of woo-woo, called Cosmic Jesus: The Metaphysics of How the God of Israel Became the God of the Cosmos (apparently published earlier this year (2014)).
What’s the difference between the Mediocrity Principal and the Copernican Principal?
Seems to me both he and Dick are badly misapplying it. There’s nothing special about my 1000 square feet on the side of a hill but it is completely and utterly different than 1000 square feet in the middle of an ocean and therefore I’m likely to have deer in my back yard but I’ll never see a deer from the deck of a sailboat. Dick knew England supports 280 people per mile but that is a result of natural pressures. One can’t assume the outcome is typical and then assume the causes most be the same. For example; if @10 prop 1. Intelligent Life exists on earth => mediocrity principal: intelligent life is common !but we haven’t found any => intelligent life self-destructs => a fundamental universal principal of intelligent life is it self-destructs. This is clearly backward reasoning. I mean we can’t toss results into these principals willy-nilly, can we?
This reminds me of way way back, Keith Cowing, who runs NASAWatch, and I both were arguing with a guy on NBC’s early website who kept claiming to have evidence of abandoned alien cities on the moon.
He said his “special secret processing techniques” were revealing straight lines and corners and edges that could only have been constructed. Vast networks of them.
It was immediately obvious that his “secret processing technique” was to apply the Photoshop sharpen filter repeatedly. Ta-da! Geometric shapes and edges!
FYI: these are “principles” not “principals.”
Saying that we’re not special, privileged observers in the universe doesn’t imply that we’re average or typical. We could be average, but the only thing we have reason to believe prior further evidence is that there might be a distribution (of something, like humans, planets, galaxies, times, etc.) and we belong somewhere in it, not necessarily a special place in it. The Doomsday argument (and other “paradoxes” or “predictions” like it) come from a confusion along these lines.
For example, he claims Earth’s history is “mediocre” (i.e., average or typical), so Mars is likely to be the same. This is a fallacy. A trivial sort of “distribution” is implied when you make inferences like this: everything everywhere is average, with little or no deviation. It’s like saying American families have 2.4 children, 0.7 dogs, etc. None of them in fact do. There is a spread, and we should believe we don’t need to fall right in the middle of it.
And this sort of anthropic reasoning can indeed be opposed to a reasonable formulation of the Copernican principle. I’ll say again that there are lots of possible distributions, and we might be anywhere in them. If we’re not special, that doesn’t mean our condition is special in that it can drive such inferences about the conditions of anything and everything else that exists. We might very well be “unlikely” according to some measure or another. We have no grounds for saying that we must always be “likely” relative to every possible measure. That would make us very special and mean we have very special and privileged ways of obtaining vast amounts of knowledge about everything else just by navel-gazing for a long time, but we’re not actually like that. Probability doesn’t work like that. Distributions don’t work like that. Epistemology doesn’t work like that. And the world itself doesn’t work like that.
I dunno, I can remember quite a few Mediocrity Principals I’ve met in my life.
D) After the aliens blew themselves up, the survivors flew to Earth, threw away all their technology, and became the first humans, because how dare you suggest we evolved from monkeys??? /s
Oh, for the love of ….! I can *not* believe I made such a stupid spelling error. I *do* know the difference but…. sheesh!
*That* is precisely what I wanted to say but absolutely could not articulate at all.
Brandenburg makes a very bad application by stating that earth might be typical of life supporting planets but then concludes that means life supporting planets are common.
It may be that life supporting planets are common (for a certain level of commonality) but that is not to say that sapient life is found on a majority of life supporting planets.
I read this the other day and they seem to be saying that it might be a reason why it is so hard to find any space faring alien life all over. Though we have not really been looking very long.
http://m.space.com/27948-gamma-ray-burst-mass-extinction.html
uncle frogy
Millions of years and several mass extinctions, and on this planet intelligent life is 1 in… billions. If with all the variety in life our kind of intelligence only showed up ONCE, why would you assume that it’s the average? If life is common in the universe, intelligent life may still well be incredibly uncommon. It only happened once after many epochs without intelligence here, so it could well be that there’s planet after planet of space cats just milling about the place without a thought in their head towards planning for the future or math or Pewdiepie. In fact, that seems very likely. Now, given that it DID at least happen once, I would expect several billion instances of several billion species on different worlds to EVENTUALLY lead to another critter that thinks like we do (or with even higher entire categories of thought we can’t even comprehend, like shmurples), but it’s probably not going to be Mars.