The HBO Max TV show "The Hunt for Planet B" is one that starts out with a scientist spouting bad reasoning right at its beginning. Around the 3:20 mark we see an MIT scientist named Sara Seager saying this in some congressional hearing:
"Well let me just say that in our own Milky Way galaxy there are a hundred billion stars and we now believe in our universe we have more than a hundred billion galaxies. So if you just do the math, the chance that there's a planet like earth out there with life on it is very high."
This is fallacious reasoning. You do not "do the math" by merely computing the total number of chances for an unlikely event to occur. That's not "doing the math," but doing only half of the math. Unless you have also estimated the chance of success on any one trial, you have only done half the math.
The argument Seager gave is the "many chances equals some successes" argument. When this argument occurs, someone reasons that the chance of at least one success must be high, because there were many chances for success. The argument is fallacious. If the chance of success on any one trial is sufficiently low, then many chances will probably equal zero successes. For example, if you spend every Sunday afternoon throwing a deck of cards into the air, there will be many chances for the full deck of cards to accidentally form into a triangular house of cards consisting of multiple rows of cards. But you will never, ever see such a house of cards resulting from your tosses.
In the TV show Seager follows her junk reasoning with the extremely false claim (at the 4:00 mark) that "scientists never like to speculate."
At the 11:12 mark in the TV show some scientist says this: "I think people want us to build this telescope because they want to know how we got here." That's a silly statement to make. Telescopes cannot tell us how mankind got here.
Around the 14:19 mark Seager escalates her fallacious "many chances equals some successes" reasoning, in a way that makes her sound like a True Believer. She goes from "highly likely" to "certain," saying nothing to justify her claims. She says this, using the phrase "another Earth" to mean another planet with life:
"Another Earth is undoubtedly out there. In our Milky Way galaxy we have hundreds of billions of stars. Our own universe has hundreds of billions of galaxies. To me personally it is definitely there. "
Here unscientific and unphilosophical. The correct way to reason on this topic is to make a sound estimate of the chance of success on each trial, taking into proper account the very high organization of the simplest living things, and to compare that estimate to the number of trials (the number of planets in the observable universe), rather than to just mindlessly refer to a high number of trials as proof that one of the trials must have succeeded at something vastly improbable, like some person senselessly reasoning that he must have won the Powerball lottery because he bought lots of tickets.
Around the 16:37 mark astrochemist Clara Sousa-Silva claims that "some molecules, like phosphine, only life sends out into the atmosphere." At the 16:53 mark she says phosphine is "an unequivocal sign of life." This is not correct. Referring to lifeless planets and a type of star called T-dwarfs, a scientific paper claims that we should expect to find phosphine in the atmospheres of large planets and "hotter objects": "Disequilibrium abundances of phosphine (PH3) approximately representative of the total atmospheric phosphorus inventory are expected to be mixed upward into the observable atmospheres of giant planets and T dwarfs. In hotter objects, several P-bearing gases (e.g., P2, PH3, PH2, PH, HCP) become increasingly important at high temperatures."
A study in 2025 reported finding phosphine in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf star, which helps show that you do not require life for phosphine to be produced. Another paper suggests that volcanoes can explain phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus.
At the 16:59 mark we get more groundless optimism from Seager, who attempts to justify a dubious belief by using an ad populum argument in which she claims that her opinion is that of "my generation." She says this:
"My generation, we're betting on the fact that nature delivers. That life can originate and evolve anywhere given the chance and we're planning on finding it. There's no question."
There's nothing scientific going on in such silly talk, which has a "True Believer dogmatist" sound to it. All attempts to produce life in experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have been dismal failures. They failed to produce life; they failed to produce any of the main building components of life (functional protein molecules); and they did not even produce any of the building components (amino acids) of the building components of life. There was a famed experiment that produced some amino acids (the Miller-Urey experiment), but it was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions, requiring a special glass gizmo unlike anything that would have existed on the early Earth, and involving a very prolonged high degree of electricity exposure that no place on Earth would have naturally received.
The fact that Seager says "we're betting...that life can originate and evolve anywhere given the chance" shows what an act of faith is going on here. Seager here is like some fundamentalist betting that the Rapture will occur in her lifetime. Various observation developments make Seager's faith in blind chance unreasonable. The first is what we've learned about the complexity and organization in even the simplest living things, that even the simplest one-celled life requires hundreds of types of protein molecules, each its own separate complex invention involving hundreds of specially arranged amino acid parts. Faith that chance can produce such results is like believing in the power of accidental ink splashes to produce 100-page technical manuals. Another is the complete failure to discover radio messages from extraterrestrial civilizations, despite many years of well-funded searches. If "life can originate and evolve anywhere given the chance," we would expect that such searches for extraterrestrial radio signals would have succeeded long ago.
Around the 26:31 mark SETI astronomer Jill Tarter is asked about the failure of searches for radio signals from extraterrestrials, searches which have now gone on without success for more than 60 years. She gives an answer that is not candid. A sensible and candid answer would be, "Yes, we have not found anything yet, and this may suggest that extraterrestrial civilizations are much more rare than we had thought." But Tarter instead gives us a misleading answer, saying, "We just haven't looked far enough." She then gives some analogy trying to persuade us that very little of space has been checked for radio signals from extraterrestrials. Her language is extremely misleading.
Below are some of the SETI searches that have occurred over the past 65 years (some of the observation time figures are taken from the source here):
The SERENDIP I project, which from 1979 to 1982 surveyed a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 4 of the paper here, a project which a Sky and Telescope article tells us surveyed "many billions of Milky Way stars."
The Southern SERENDIP project lasting 1998 and 2005, which surveyed for some 60,000 hours a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.
The SERENDIP II project from 1986 to 1988, involving some 17,000 hours of observations.
The All-Sky Search at Ohio State University from 1989 to 1996 (Childers, Dixon and Bolinger), involving 60,000 hours of observations,
The Astropulse and Fly's Eye SETI projects surveying a significant portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.
The SETI@Home project, which according to the source here covered 20% of the full celestial sphere, and 67% of the sky area observable from the Arecibo observatory.
The Harvard BETA all-sky SETI survey discussed here, which operated continuously for more than four years (1995-1999), scanning the whole part of the sky observable from Massachusetts, USA, and doing 35,000 hours of observations.
Years of SETI searches using the Allen Telescope Array, involving 12 hours a day of SETI searches, 7 days a week, for years (such as 2007 to 2010), resulting in 95,000 hours of observations (discussed here).
An optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence, searching 577 nearby stars that might have habitable planets, looking for laser signals.
All of the optical searches for extraterrestrial intelligence listed on the three pages you can view here, including three searches each involving more than 7000 hours of telescope time, and one search involving 200,000 objects and other searches involving thousands of stars.
The two-year southern sky SETI search discussed here, which observed for 9000 hours and "covered the sky almost two times."
The five-year META SETI project discussed here, which between 1988 and 1993 spent about 80,000 hours of telescope time searching for extraterrestrials.
A META II SETI project between 1990 and 2010, involving 9000 hours of observations of the southern sky.
All of the radio telescopes searches listed on the seven pages of search results you can review at the link here, including a Dixon, Ehman and Raub search from 1973 to 1986 involving 100,000 hours of telescope time,
A failed search of 10 million stars using what in 2009 was the latest and greatest technology.
A SERENDIP III project from 1992 to 1997, involving 40,000 hours of observations, and surveying 30% of the sky.
Extensive SETI searches carried out by the 500-meter FAST radio telescope in China.
The ASTROPULSE project discussed here, involving 21,000 hours of observations from 2006 to 2010.
The SETI-Italia project discussed here, involving 30,000 hours of observation from 2006 to 2010.
The Breakthrough Listen project described here, which began in 2015, and has run for 10 years with 100 million dollars in funding, involving thousands of hours each year of dedicated SETI searching, on two of the world's largest radio telescopes.
A failed search of 1300 galaxies, reported in 2024, using low frequencies and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).
At the 27:23 mark we have someone named Matt saying "Ultimately science is about observation. Because it's only observation which actually gives you the truth." To the contrary, while observation is the most important source of truth, there are other things that can give you the truth, such as mathematics, logic, analysis and deduction.
At the 30:35 mark we hear some scientist driving a car, praising the James Webb Telescope, while strangely saying, "So you know, I mean I don't know: what else would you want to do with your life?" An answer might be: "Any of a million jobs more useful than astronomy." At around the 32:07 mark, we hear some authority say, "I've learned one does not argue with Nobel Prize winners." It sound like an authority-kneeling sentiment contrary to the true spirit of science, and contrary to the motto of the Royal Society, which translates to English as "Take no man's word for it."
Around the 35:49 mark we hear Sarah Seager boasting "we've made a giant accelerated leap forward in the search for habitable worlds," followed by another scientist making the false claim that the discovery of planets at Trappist-1 "gives us a hint that finding a second Earth is not just a matter of if, but when." No, a second Earth would be a planet containing life, and all attempts to find such a thing have failed. So it very much is a matter of "if" rather than just "when."
Around the 50:50 mark we have chemist Nick Lane saying this, after referring to hydrothermal vents and the origin of life.
"There's a particular type of mineral. It's called olivine. You find it as dust throughout interstellar space. This is a really common mineral. And the thing is it will react with water bubbling hydrogen gas out. And that's basically an environment that's giving rise to life."
What utter BS, baloney and hogwash that statement is. Even the simplest living thing is an extremely high level of organization, component interdependence and information richness; and the origin of such a thing is utterly beyond any explanation of hydrogen bubbling in water. No one has ever observed life or any of the building components of life arising from nonlife because of a mere action of minerals and hydrogen bubbling in water. We have here more biological origins nonsense from Nick Lane, who has sometimes misspoken on this topic, as I document here and here.
Around the 54:07 mark we see a scientist named Maggie talking to a retail clerk, and saying that she is working on the search for life in outer space. Asked whether she has found such life yet, she gives the misleading answer, "No, but we're getting ever closer." Asked whether she believes that life exists in outer space, she gives some more of the bad "many chances equals some successes" reasoning discussed above. She says, "Surely life arises when the conditions are right." That does not make any sense, given the failure of all experiments realistically simulating the early Earth to produce either life or any of the building components of life (protein molecules). Scientists have never observed life arising from non-life whenever they tried to create ideal sterile conditions for such a thing to happen.
Around the 1:02:57 mark in the show, we see chemist Nick Lane staring at skulls in a glass museum case. One or more of the skulls are fake. If you pause exactly at the 1:03:12 mark, you can see that the skull closest to Nick is an Australopithecus afarenis "skull" that is labeled as a "skull model," which means a fake. That skull is not an actual skull from an organism that once lived.
Posing a question presuming Darwinist dogmas, someone asks Lane what he thinks when he contemplates "our cousins and our ancestors?" At the 1:02:54 mark Lane says, "It's more and more clear that you know, looking at these skulls, that there have been numerous human species and they've all gone extinct apart from us, usually because of us, usually after interbreeding with us." Lane is using the long-running language abuse of Darwinists in which non-human species with shapes rather like human shapes are misleadingly called "human." One of the defining characteristics of humans is their use of symbols. The word "human" should never be used for any species that did not use symbols. The "skull" closest to Lane when he makes this statement is a fake skull of Australopithecus afarenis, which did not use symbols, and is not correctly described as "human."
The attempt here to promote Darwinist ideas is a bungling one. Instead of having a tale of an ancestry from human ancestors to humanity we have a story of species going extinct because they interbred with us. At the 1:03:17 mark Lane asks the ludicrous question "Do you feel some guilt when you look into those eye sockets?" (a reference to the extinction of species who died out before recorded history). Lane gives the equally ludicrous answer "I do."
At the 1:04:45 mark a scientist named Matt Mountain gives this vacuous hand-waving explanation, "Physically, evolution made us, biology made us." Not being a theory of organization but a mere theory of the accumulation of random mutations, Darwinist ideas of evolution offer no credible account for the origin of the first human bodies or the first human minds. And if you are talking about "us" in the sense of you and me, you are not giving any credible explanation of the origin of you and me by referring to evolution (something happening before we existed) or by the hand-waving vagueness of appealing to "biology." You might have a credible explanation for you and me if you had (1) a credible theory explaining how a speck-sized zygote existing just after impregnation progresses to become the vast organization of a human body; (2) a credible theory of how a human mind can arise from a human body. Scientists utterly luck both of these things. The idea that brains give rise to human minds is not credible, for a host of reasons explained at my site here.
While giving this hand-waving explanation, Mountain literally waves his hands.
Around the 1:08:19 mark Seager refers to her search for a second Earth and says, "I have to do something that has some importance as seen by myself because otherwise I have nothing. Does that make sense?" No, it doesn't make sense, because a bit earlier Seager said that she had kids, and a person lucky enough to have children has the most wonderful treasure, the exact opposite of having nothing. And even a single average person has a body that is the wonderful marvel of organization, and a mind that is the most glorious marvel of cognitive functionality. Such things are the opposite of "nothing."
The TV show discussed above ("The Hunt for Planet B") was made in 2021. The James Webb Telescope was launched near the end of 2021. The telescope has run for four full years, and has failed to produce any evidence of a planet with life. Scientist Nikku Madhusudhan claimed to have found a biosignature on planet K2-18 b, but the claim was unfounded, for reasons discussed here.
If they made a movie about astronomy failure
No comments:
Post a Comment