What Is the Most Preposterous Device in Science Fiction?

The world of science fiction is a world of strange and wonderful devices. Some of these machines are somewhat plausible, and others are very far-fetched. Let's look at some of these devices, moving from the fairly plausible towards the more unbelievable, ending up with the most unbelievable machine in the annals of science fiction.

A fairly plausible device is the hand-held energy-shooting device. In the Star Trek set of TV shows and movies, this takes the form of the phaser, a little ray gun. In the Star Wars movies the favorite hand-held energy device is the light saber. Given the progress man is making in developing high-energy lasers, both phasers and light sabers seem like something we may well see within a few centuries. Another type of very plausible device is the palm-sized communicator used in the original Star Trek series. We basically already have such a thing in the form of a cell phone.

Then there is the walking robot. In the Star Trek universe we see an example in the android named Data. In the Star Wars universe we see an example in the form of the walking android robot C-3PO. Neither are terribly implausible. It is very questionable whether we ever will have robots or computers that ever rival humans in intelligence. But we probably will one day have pretty good chat-bot software that could be hooked up with a robot body, resulting in something that allows a robot to talk in a way resembling human conversation. Since neither Data nor C-3PO really show any superhuman intelligence, such robots are not much of a strain on our credulity.

In the Star Wars universe, we have the large orbiting satellite called the Death Star, capable of destroying an entire planet. Such a device is not at all preposterous. A nation today could build a similar device, creating a huge satellite filled with nuclear weapons rather than some energy death ray. It is not much of a stretch to imagine a planet-destroying device that used a huge laser or pulsed-energy weapon.

In both Star Wars and Star Trek, we have hologram devices capable of projecting three-dimensional images that resemble human figures. In the Star Wars universe, this technology doesn't seem very sophisticated. But in the Star Trek universe, hologram technology is pushed to the max. Crew members of a space ship can enjoy something called a holodeck, which provides holographic simulations that include a surrounding landscape and three-dimensional figures that look just like real people. So if you're on a starship, you can walk into the holodeck, request a particular simulation, and then poof, it may suddenly be just as if you are on the beach on Tahiti, complete with scantily clad women surrounding you.

The basic idea isn't particularly unbelievable. If you were in a holograph room that included both holographic projectors on the floor, holographic projectors on the ceiling, and holographic projectors on the walls, we can imagine that this might create an illusion that made it appear just like you were in some entirely different place. The same technology could produce holograms resembling human figures. But in the Star Trek series, the holodeck users also seem to engage in tactile interactions with the holographic projections. A character may sit down on a holographic table, lie down on a holographic bed, or kiss and hug a holographic figure. I have no idea how such tactile interactions could occur using holographic technology. So we might put down Star Trek's holodeck device as something that is merely semi-plausible. 

A Star Trek gadget that seems increasingly plausible is the replicator device, capable of almost instantly producing any equipment or food.  The more 3D printing technology advances, the more plausible such a device seems. 

One staple of science fiction is the faster-than-light spaceship. In the Star Trek universe, we have something called a warp drive, that supposedly allows a spaceship to travel faster than the speed of light, by warping the space in front of the spaceship. In the Star Wars universe, spaceships travel faster-than-light by doing something called “jumping through hyperspace.” Although not totally preposterous, such devices are not very plausible. We know of no physics that would allow a spaceship to travel faster than light by warping space in front of it, nor do we know of any such thing as “hyperspace” that might allow spaceships to travel from star to star instantaneously. About the best you can say is that there conceivably could exist undiscovered physics that might allow such things to occur.

Both Star Wars and Star Trek seem to rely on a type of device that is never discussed: an artificial gravity generator. For example, in the Star Trek universe, characters walk around on a spaceship on which there is normal gravity just like we have on Earth. We know of a very simple method that will reliably generate artificial gravity in a spaceship. The spaceship can have a spinning component that generates artificial gravity by centrifugal force, like the Jupiter-bound spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

 You can get artificial gravity with a design like this

But the spaceships in Star Wars and Star Trek seem to have no design that would generate artificial gravity by centrifugal force. Maybe the assumption is that the ships are using some type of artificial gravity generator. But we know of no way in which a device could ever generate artificial gravity without using centrifugal force. This seems an area in which our science fiction falls short in the credibility department.

But what is the most ridiculous device in any major science fiction series? Here the booby prize must be given not to anything in the Star Wars universe, but instead to something in the Star Trek universe. The most preposterous device in any major science fiction show is the transporter device used on the starship Enterprise.

In Star Trek the transporter supposedly works by doing three things:

1. A scan is made that reveals the exact position of all molecules in the person being transported.
2. Over the course of a few seconds, that person's body is then dematerialized.
3. Over the course of a few seconds, the person's body is then rematerialized or reconstructed at some distant location.

This is basically a “destroy and reconstruct” algorithm. The scan part of the process seems unrealistic. How could some machine possibly determine the exact state of all of the particles inside your brain? We can get a blurry look inside someone's brain by doing an X-ray, although there is radiation exposure whenever that is done. The radiation exposure of some type of “precisely scan all particles inside the body” would probably be prohibitive. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells us that you cannot determine both the position and velocity of any particle, casting the greatest doubt on the possibility of doing a scan giving you the exact particle information corresponding to a body.

In Star Trek someone can be transported or “beamed” from the transporter room of one spaceship to the transporter room of another spaceship. That's not the most laughable absurdity, because at least in that case you have a transporter machine on each end of the transport, one machine doing the scanning and de-materialization, and the other transporter machine doing the reassembly of the body. But in Star Trek people are also transported from a transporter room to the surface of a planet (where there is no transporter device), and from the surface of a planet (where there is no transporter device) back to the transporter room. But how could the process needed for the “from the surface of the planet” transport possibly occur from the surface of a planet, where there is no machine there to do the scanning of the person's molecular state? And how could the process needed for the “to the planet surface” transport possibly occur on the surface of a planet, where there is no machine there to do the reassembly of the body from the scanned molecular state? It's like imagining that you are taking a train to the middle of some country that has no trains or train tracks.

Any transporter device like that in Star Trek would also be a body duplication device. For once someone's molecular state had been scanned and kept in a machine, there would be no need to discard that information. The same information could be used to recreate a new copy of someone who had died – or any number of copies of someone. The result would be ridiculous scenes like this:

Mr. Scott: Bad news, Captain Kirk. A monster on the planet attacked and devoured Mr. Spock.

Captain Kirk: Why do you think that's bad news? Use your head, Scotty! When we transported him down to the planet, we scanned his exact molecular state. Just use that stored state to reassemble him in the transporter room. He'll be as good as new, and have no memory of what happened.

Mr. Scott: How silly of me not to think of that!

When creating the Star Trek series, Gene Roddenberry could have avoided the nonsensical idea of transporting people by disassembling all their atoms and reassembling them. He could have come up with the idea of a “wormhole transporter” that would have achieved teleportation by having people move through a time-space wormhole. The idea would be that some machine would generate a spacetime wormhole between the transporter and some distant location, and that your body is propelled through the wormhole to end up in some distant spot, without your body ever getting disassembled and resassembled. Although relying on undiscovered physics, such a teleportation system would have avoided the most absurd aspects of Star Trek's transporter mechanism, such as the idea that a body could be reassembled on some distant planet without there even being an assembly device on that planet.

Why You Won't Ever See a Flesh-and-Blood Dinosaur

The Jurassic Park series of movies has been wildly successful. When such a movie series is seen by so many people, its underlying premise can work its way into our minds as a settled fact. In this case that's a shame, because there are very strong reasons for suspecting that the underlying premise of the Jurassic Park movies is not correct. There are very strong reasons for believing that we will never be able to recreate protoplasmic dinosaurs by discovering some bit of dinosaur DNA, and then leveraging that to create dinosaurs.

The basis premise of Jurassic Park was presented in a cute little animation near the beginning of the first movie. The animation depicted an insect that bit a dinosaur, and then got stuck in gooey amber, while a drop of dinosaur blood was still in its body. The amber then solidified to rock-like hardness, preserving the drop of dinosaur blood. The idea was that scientists then extracted the dinosaur's DNA, which they then used to create a flesh-and-blood dinosaur.

Such a scenario has an underlying assumption that was never explicitly stated in any of the movies: the assumption that the body plan of an organism is specified in the organism's DNA. Under this assumption, if we can find the DNA of a dinosaur, then we have all the information we need to recreate the dinosaur.

The idea that the body plan of an organism is stored in the DNA of its cells is a widespread assumption. But there is no proof that this assumption is correct, and there are very good reasons for believing that it is not correct.

The first reason is that the “language” used by DNA is a minimalist feature-poor language lacking any grammar or capability for expressing anything like a blueprint, a recipe, a program or an algorithm for making an organism. The language used by DNA is pretty much the poorest, most “bare bones” type of language you can imagine. It's a language unsuitable for purposes other than stating lists of chemicals.

For DNA to be able to specify a body plan, the language used by DNA would have to support either one of these two things: (1) a three-dimensional specification similar to a blueprint, specifying how particular parts fit together and are related to each other from a positional standpoint, or (2) a set of sequential instructions specifying how to build a three-dimensional structure, something similar to the complicated assembly instructions that come with do-it-yourself unit of furniture. To the best of our knowledge the simplistic little “bare bones” language used by DNA is utterly incapable of such sophisticated forms of expression.

MINIATURE LANGUAGES
NAME	LIST OF WORDS IN LANGUAGE	WHAT CAN BE SPECIFIED BY LANGUAGE	WHAT CANNOT BE SPECIFIED BY LANGUAGE
Sandwich Language	Bread, Turkey, Ham, Cheese, Lettuce, Tomato, Onion, Bacon	Various types of sandwiches	Anything that is not a sandwich
Exercise Language	Jump, Crouch, Stretch, Punch, Lift, Bend, Squat, Spin	Various types of exercises	Anything that is not an exercise
DNA Language	Alanine, Asparagine, Aspartic acid, Arginine, Cysteine, Glutamine, Glycine, Glutamic acid, Histidine, Isoleucine, Lysine,Leucine, Phenylalanine, Methionine, Serine, Proline, Tryptophan,Threonine, Tyrosine, Valine	Polypeptide sequences – a linear sequence of amino acids	Anything that is not a polypeptide sequence, including the 3D shape of a protein, the shape of any body part, the body plan of any organism, or a behavior or instinct.

One of the simplest data structures you learn about in computer science is a stack. A stack is like a stack of cards in which each card has one particular piece of information. Complex hierarchical data cannot be represented with so simple an arrangement.

To get an idea of why DNA cannot store body plans, imagine you  have twenty boxes on a table. Each box has a particular type of card, and on each card is printed some part of a house. So there's a box full of cards each showing a single glass pane, and another box full of cards each showing a brick, and another box full cards each showing a wood beam, and another box full of cards each showing a tile, and so forth.

Now imagine you are trying to create a specification of a very complicated mansion. But you cannot lay the cards out on the floor. All you can do is put the cards in a single stack. You would quickly realize the impossibility of such a task. A one-dimensional thing such as a stack cannot represent complex three-dimensional information. For the same reasons, the stack that is the DNA molecule cannot be storing three-dimensional body plans.

The second reason for thinking that body plans are not stored in DNA is that even if DNA somehow did contain the extremely sophisticated instructions necessary for expressing body plans, there would be nothing in the human body capable of interpreting such instructions. It is never sufficient merely to have instructions capable of specifying some complicated output. You also need to have an instruction interpreter sophisticated enough to read those instructions and produce the complicated output. We know of nothing in the body that could be capable of creating three dimensional body outputs using any three-dimensional body plans if they happened to exist in DNA.

The third reason for thinking that body plans are not stored in DNA is that we have not discovered evidence that DNA stores either algorithmic information for constructing a human body, or any type of three-dimensional blueprint specifying the structure of a human body. For example, we have particular parts of DNA storing proteins used by the eye, but no part of DNA that lays out the very complicated three-dimensional structure of an eye.

A fourth reason for doubting that body plans are stored in DNA is that if body plans were stored in DNA, we should expect that the size of an organism's DNA should be proportional to the size and complexity of an organism. For the same reasons that the blueprints of a skyscraper use much more paper than the blueprints for a house, under a “DNA has the body plan” assumption we should think that the human DNA is much bigger than the size of, say, any flowering plant. But astonishingly, the opposite is true. The chart here shows the relative size of the DNA in different organisms. We see that the size of the DNA (in base pairs) in mammals is much smaller than the size of the DNA of many amphibians and flowering plants. We see on this logarithmic chart that the DNA of some amphibians and flowerings plants holds ten times more information than the DNA of humans. This discrepancy is know as the C-Value Paradox.

A related comparison is the number of genes in the DNA. According to this link, rice has between 32,000 and 50,000 genes, while humans have only about 20,000 genes. That's the opposite of what we would expect if DNA stored body plans.

These reasons powerfully argue that DNA does not store the body plan of a complex organism such as a human or a dinosaur. On page 26 of the recent book The Developing Genome, Professor David S. Moore states, "The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds -- things that are analogous to "blueprints" or "recipes" -- is undoubtedly false." Biologist Rupert Sheldrake says this about this issue:

DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth. There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body.

''A gene makes a protein and that's about it,'' states biologist Brian Goodwin. ''It doesn't tell you how proteins interact, how cells and tissues communicate, how organs come into being, how an immune system forms, or how evolution works.'' 

In a 2016 scientific paper, three scientists state the following:

It is now clear that the genome does not directly program the organism; the computer program metaphor has misled us...The genome does not function as a master plan or computer program for controlling the organism; the genome is the organism's servant, not its master. 

The myth that DNA stores a complete blueprint of an organism is actually six levels removed from reality. To show that DNA stores a complete blueprint for an organism, you would have to establish this chain of assertions:

1. You would need to establish that DNA actually specifies the three-dimensional shapes of proteins.
2. You would need to establish that DNA specifies a blueprint for particular cells.
3. You need need to establish that DNA specifies a blueprint for particular tissues.
4. You would need to establish that DNA specifies a blueprint for particular organs.
5. You would need to establish that DNA specifies a blueprint for particular organ systems.
6. You would need to establish that DNA specifies a blueprint for particular organisms.

None of these things have been done – not even the simplest one, the first of these six. Scientists have been trying for decades to solve what is called the protein folding problem, the problem of how proteins get their 3D shapes. It has still not been proven that such shapes are determined solely by the linear sequence of amino acids in the proteins. DNA does not even seem to specify the 3D shapes of a protein molecule. How could it, when the impoverished DNA language doesn't have any capability for stating three-dimensional positions?

If DNA does not store the body plan of an organism, we will never be able to resurrect dinosaurs by using some recovered dinosaur DNA. Nor will it be possible to ever create a flesh-and-blood dinosaur through any possible artificial manipulations of DNA. We may have great fun in parks filled with robotic dinosaurs, but they won't be flesh-and-blood organisms like us. 

If you see this, you'll know it's a robot

Whether we will be able to resurrect dinosaurs isn't all that interesting a question. A far more interesting question raised by these questions is the fundamental question: where are the body plans of organisms stored?

The answer we must give to this question is: we don't know. We have every reason to suspect that the secrets of life are far deeper than the average biologist suspects, and that we are far very indeed from uncovering such secrets.

Imagine a little child who is given a palm-sized digital device. The child may make simplistic assumptions about the device, such as the idea that all of its functionality is contained inside it, and that the device stores every item that the child sees when she uses the device. But the truth is vastly more complex. The device is connecting with a grand mysterious external infrastructure that the child knows nothing about : the Internet.

Similarly, life itself may involve a mysterious connection with some grand cosmic information infrastructure utterly beyond our current understanding. Somewhere within such an infrastructure may be stored the body plans of organisms that cannot be expressed by the poor man's language of DNA, with its impoverished vocabulary of 20 nouns (all chemicals).

The absurdity of calling DNA “the secret of life” (as if it had all the information needed to explain an organism) becomes clear when we consider that an organism is something vastly more than just a body plan. Every organism is a continuous symphony of operations needed to maintain the organism. Just as you don't explain the music coming from the performance of a symphony by just giving a physical specification of the musical instruments and an orchestral seating plan, a body plan would never explain the biology going on inside an organism. DNA not have the body plan of the organism, nor does it have the information for the fantastically complicated interactions needed for the organism to keep living.

Rather than being "the secret of life,"  DNA must be only one of many secrets of life.  Some of the most important of those secrets have not been discovered.  We still have not discovered the secret of life that might explain where body plans come from and how they are stored.

Any Radio Signal from the Stars Would Probably Be Permanently Controversial

For more than 60 years astronomers have been drawing a rough sketch of a great future event that will transform the world: a day when astronomers with their radio telescopes will receive a radio message from extraterrestrials on some planet revolving around a distant star. Based on the way such an event is imagined, you might think of it as some kind of revelation of great clarity in which suddenly our place on the cosmic totem pole is made crystal clear.

But it is all but certain that we will never receive any message anything like this:

Greetings, cosmic brothers! We speak to you from a distant planet 10,500 light-years away. We are members of a technical civilization 2,460,000 years more advanced than yours. Let us show you some of our dazzling accomplishments, which will probably cause your puny race to become sick with envy.

The reason we will almost certainly never receive a message like that is because it is written in English. We could get a message in English only under a very improbable scenario. It could be that there was some extraterrestrial civilization relatively close to ours – say, 25 light-years away. Such a civilization might have picked up a radio signal transmitted from Earth after 1950. From such a signal, that civilization might have figured out the rules of English; and it might then have sent a radio message back to our planet.

But this scenario is very unlikely. For one thing, radio signals from Earth would be so weakened after traveling light-years that it would be doubtful that any other civilization could pick them up. For another thing, if intelligent life in our galaxy was so common that there are civilizations only about 25 light-years away, we probably would have already received radio signals from extraterrestrials; but we have not. For another thing, it is very doubtful that anyone could figure out how to write a message in English merely from receiving some radio signals in English.

So in all likelihood if we get a radio signal from extraterrestrials, it will not be in English. There's another possibility often considered: we will get a radio message in some extraterrestrial language; then scientists will figure out how to translate that message into English, and the message will become crystal clear. But it seems most unlikely that we could ever figure out the meaning of some message written in some language that originated on another planet. Such a language might have linguistic rules and semantic complications that totally baffled us.

Another idea often discussed is that an extraterrestrial radio message would not be written in the native language of its authors, but would instead be a kind of pictogram. A pictogram can be transmitted by radio, using a system in which an instant of non-transmission represents a white pixel, and an instant of transmission represents a dark pixel. For an example of such a pictogram, we can look at the plaque that was put on the Pioneer space probe:

The image here attempts to transmit three main items of information: a visual showing what humans look like, a depiction of the solar system, and an indication of the position of Earth in our galaxy. The method used to depict Earth's position in the galaxy is a rather dubious one, involving listing relative distances from pulsars and the position of the Earth. There would be a large chance that anyone analyzing this message would fail to interpret this part of the message correctly. One reason is that there are more than a billion pulsars in our galaxy, so it would be hard to figure out which pulsars the message was referring to.

Another example of a pictogram message is shown here. The message is supposed to show a DNA molecule, a depiction of a human, a depiction of some important chemicals, and a depiction of the transmitting telescope.

Let us assume that an extraterrestrial radio message would be some type of pictogram. Once the message had been received, would any of these things be crystal clear:

1. Would we know for sure the exact location where the message had come from?
2. Would we know that the message had actually come from extraterrestrial life forms?
3. Would we know how much older than us such extraterrestrial life forms were?

It seems that these things would be very much in dispute, even after such a message had been received. For one thing, there is the very general fact that a radio signal resembling a signal from extraterrestrials can very easily be faked. One way to do that would be to have a satellite or space probe transmit a radio signal that was designed to look like an extraterrestrial radio signal. The possibility of such mischief can hardly be dismissed in light of the Russian interference in the United States 2016 election.

We know that Russia spent millions of dollars in an influence campaign that often resorted to misinformation. Given that reality, there would always be the possibility that a radio signal that we thought was coming from another planet was actually coming from somewhere else in our solar system, perhaps from one of the satellites or probes of China or Russia or some other nation. There might be any number of reasons why a nation might resort to such a trick. One reason is that such a ruse might be used to create a distraction diverting public attention from some scandal involving that nation. Or if a nation were planning on launching a surprise attack or doing a military buildup, it might create illusory “radio messages from extraterrestrials” to get the world's attention focused on such a matter, and away from threatening troop movements or weapons deployments the nation was starting to make.

Another reason for doubting the source of a message claimed as coming from extraterrestrials is that such a message might crop up as a result of computer hacking. The radio telescopes scanning for extraterrestrial signals are linked up to computers and software needed to analyze the signals. Such computers and software might be subject to computer hacking. Hackers might download a fake signal fooling astronomers into thinking they had received a message from the stars. If this sounds too far-fetched, consider all the shenanigans that went on during the 2016 election, in which quite a few supposedly secure systems were broken into and tampered with.

Then there is the fact that religious theorists might interpret any unnatural radio signal as a message from a divine source, not a message from beings on some other planet. It is interesting that the first movie made about the reception of non-human radio signals was not the 1997 Jodie Foster movie Contact, about the reception of extraterrestrial radio signals. It was instead the 1950 movie The Next Voice You Hear, about humans getting radio messages from God. If some apparently non-human radio signal was received by astronomers, religious theorists would probably jump in with speculations that this message was some kind of revelation from some divine being. It would be hard to rule out such a possibility, given the difficulty of determining exactly who sent some message, particularly if such a message was some kind of abstract or baffling pictogram.

Even if the message had some type of indication of a particular location in the galaxy, this would not prove that the message had been transmitted by extraterrestrials from such a location. Religious theorists might speculate that the depicted location was a special planet, and that the message was a message about that planet – perhaps something telling us to search at that location, or a message telling us about some special blessed location that was particularly sacred or important.

There would also be theorists who might speculate that the message was coming not from extraterrestrials but from some other dimension – perhaps some kind of Other Side that is an afterlife realm. If you object that no one would ever try to link a mysterious radio signal with life after death, I may note that people have already being making such a link for decades. For decades there has been a phenomenon called Electronic Voice Phenomenon, in which people report getting mysterious electronic messages, which may be either radio signals or words that appear unaccountably while recording in a quiet place. The people getting these messages often claim that they are messages from some afterlife realm. There is an Italian researcher named Marcello Bacci who claimed to have received radio messages from some afterlife realm for many years. People supportive of these claims might claim that any new radio message of a non-human origin was another radio message from some spiritual realm.

There might also be multiverse theorists who might speculate that the mysterious radio message was not a message from extraterrestrials but a message from some other universe.  Conspiracy theorists might claim that the radio message was faked by some group of scientists looking for glory or more government funding. If the radio message was a one-shot affair, and not a repeating message, it would be hard to prove otherwise. 

It seems hard to imagine any way that a pictogram message could convey some of the basic facts about senders of a message, such as how much more advanced than us the sender was. Such a message might include a number listing how many years passed since the civilization had started to develop technology. But we wouldn't know what that number meant. The “year” used to state the age of the civilization would presumably be the time it took the home planet to revolve around its star, but that might be anywhere between one tenth of a year and 100 years, leaving the age of the radio-transmitting civilization very uncertain.

If the radio message was some type of pictogram, there would probably be multiple ways to interpret each of the representations in the message.  The multiple possibilities for interpretation would help lead to a long or permanent controversy.  If the message was written in an alien language, there would be endless debates over whether a particular translation was correct.

A radio message of apparently artificial origin would be comparable to a message in the clouds, in that it would be interpreted by people in different ways, according to their philosophical inclinations. For example, let us imagine that clouds were to form a message  in the sky, one stating: you are being watched, so do not act badly. Such a message would be the start of a great controversy. Theists would say that it was a message from God. The non-religious would claim that it was a message from visiting extraterrestrials, and that “do not act badly” was referring to things such as “fighting too many wars” or “creating too much global warming pollution.” Others would say the message had been produced by humans. If only one such message was received, the controversy would probably never end. 

Similarly, a single radio message from a non-human source would probably be the start of an interpretation controversy which might never end, with an endless debate about whether the message was from extraterrestrials, hackers, a foreign disinformation squad, a divine being, an afterlife realm, or transmitters in another dimension or another universe.

Astronomers Strangely Weep Because They're Only Getting One Multi-Billion Dollar Gift

Astronomers are howling over the fact that the government has announced that it will not be funding an infrared space telescope called WFIRST, which stands for Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope. Engaging in some pretty ridiculous hyperbole, cosmologist Ethan Siegel tells us that “canceling WFIRST will permanently ruin NASA.”

Based on how loud they are howling, you would think that the cancellation of the WFIRST telescope means that there will be no more government-funded telescopes for astronomers to make use of. But that is not true. In 2019 the government will deliver a gigantic gift to our astronomers: the James Webb Space Telescope. It will have a price tag of about 10 billion dollars.

Astronomers weeping about the cancellation of WFIRST are therefore like the daughter in the conversation below:

Daughter: You mean I'm not getting a Mercedes on my seventeenth birthday? You're so cruel!

Mother: But sweetie, next year it will be your sixteenth birthday, and on that birthday I will give you a shiny red Ferrari sports car.

Daughter: But I want the Ferrari and the Mercedes!

Part of the reason a telescope like the Hubble telescope was worthwhile is that it produced so many images showing what objects in distant space look like. But an infrared telescope won't show what distant objects in space look like. Such a telescope will show the infrared radiation from such an object. So the photos from WFIRST would look like those weird images that ghost hunters get when they photograph things with an infrared camera. Such a telescope is intrinsically less valuable than a project like the Hubble telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. 

Infrared image of the Andromeda galaxy

 

Is there some lack of data for astronomers to analyze? Certainly not. Scientists in fields such as astronomy are already flooded with far too much data for them to ever fully analyze. Once the James Webb Space Telescope launches next year, astronomers will be double-drowning in data. Do they really need an additional space telescope so that they can be triple-drowning in data?

When I look at some of the statements astronomers have made protesting the cancellation of WFIRST, I see some pretty thin reasoning. Some of the astronomers are pointing out the WFIRST was on the “decadal survey” list of recommended projects. They're reasoning: “you can't cancel something on our decadal survey list!” But what is the decadal survey list? It's just a wish list. Putting an item on your wish list does not mean that someone else is obligated to give you that thing. A daughter or son is not entitled to receive all the things they list on their Christmas list.

Let us consider the average amount of money that an astronomer gets from the government, in money spent on space telescopes and grants. There are only about 10,000 professional astronomers in the United States. If you consider only the cost of the James Webb Space Telescope, and divide its cost over ten years, you get funding of about a billion dollars per year. That amounts to about $100,000 per astronomer per year.

It's hard to imagine how anyone blessed by such largess could complain. By comparison, the average Joe is lucky to get $5000 or $10000 in benefits from the government, from programs such as the SNAP program (“Food Stamps”) or Medicaid.